DAVID ALLEN | How to Buy Your Happiness

David Allen is working hard trying to figure out how to avoid the need to work hard later in life. He has learned many lessons that he now wants to share. He is primarily a Shares and Real Estate Investor, but he has insights on Bonds and Crypto Currency as well.

As a FIFO firefighter, David likes to approach investing from a workplace health and safety point of view.

Planning with these situations in mind and budgeting towards goals take practice. Instead of diving in head-first and creating unrealistic goals, David suggests a different approach:

TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS AFTER THIS BRIEF MESSAGE

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

David (5s):

With the COVID crash, as we all remember, I think the market lost about 35, 40%. And I remember when that was happening. And also a big fan of the dollar cost averaging strategy and for those listeners who don't know what dollar cost averaging is, that basically means that instead of spending your money, once a year, you invest it, say, 10 or 12 times per year just to level out the risk. And so to me, like, when the market's booming or when it's like, "Oh, hurray, my portfolio is going up in value." And then when the market goes down, it's a "Hurray, I can get shares at a discounted price."

Phil (31s):

G'day and welcome back to Shares for Beginners. I'm Phil Muscatello. How can you buy happiness? Is it something that can be bought? In the immortal words of Van Halen's David Lee Roth, money can't buy you happiness, but it can buy you a boat big enough to sail right up next to it. To discuss money and happiness, I'm joined by my guest, David Allen. Hi David.

David (51s):

Hi Phil, it's great to be here.

Phil (53s):

That's good. And how's the money situation?

David (56s):

Yeah, I can't complain.

Phil (58s):

Is it getting to David Lee Roth level yet? Have you got the boat yet?

David (1m 1s):

Not quite that level and I think I still have quite a long way to go. And I have to say, it's quite an honour to be on your show. And I see that it's almost been three years. You might have to have a birthday podcast soon for your podcast.

Phil (1m 14s):

Well, yeah, it's just another year gone as far as I'm concerned. Dave is a Brisbane-based author who's working hard so he doesn't have to work hard later in life. He's primarily a shares and real estate investor, but he has insights on bonds and cryptocurrency as well. He released the books "How To Buy Your Happiness" at the end of 2021 and "A Noob's Guide To Riches" in early 2019. So, seeing this as the first fresh episode of the new year, I thought we'd hear about one man's journey to financial independence, which you're on the path of at the moment, aren't you?

David (1m 47s):

Yes, that is correct. So I have to say this path to financial independence or this path to trying to find the way to buy your own happiness, this journey actually started two years before I was born. And so in 1981, there's this guy in Michigan, his name was Angus Campbell, and he basically did a nationwide survey and what actually makes people happy. And the way they usual predictable things like a positive attitude, having great family and friends and you know, all the obvious ones. But one thing that was by far the biggest factor though, was having autonomy of your life or control of one's own destiny or to live a life that is self-endorsed. And so I asked myself, how do you live a life that is self endorsed? And to me, a big stepping stone to get there is to actually achieve financial freedom.

David (2m 29s):

So as an example, if you could pick a job that you love to do, and it doesn't quite pay the mortgage, or you can pick a job that pays very well, but you don't like it, but it does pay the mortgage. And unfortunately, most of us are in a situation where we need to do the job that pays the mortgage. And so as far as the path and how to achieve happiness, to me, it's all about achieving financial freedom first. And then you actually have the freedom to live a life that you've self-endorsed or self-chosen. And that's basically the first big stepping stone.

Phil (2m 55s):

Does that mean that you should be doing the job that you're not quite happy doing just because it pays the mortgage?

David (3m 0s):

There's two ways to approach this. There could be a job that you love, well then you've already living the life that yourself endorsed. But in reality, it is actually pretty hard to find the job that you would love for your entire career. And so with that, it is an individual choice, but for me, there is a lot of merit in picking employment that you may not necessarily love and just having that focus of having a long-term picture. And that is what a lot of the FIRE movement is about. The financial independence retire early.

Phil (3m 24s):

Who was that person that you were talking about before? What was his name?

David (3m 27s):

So his name is Angus Campbell.

Phil (3m 29s):

Is he kind of a pioneer of the FIRE movement?

David (3m 32s):

Actually. No, he's basically not in the money circles at all. He's more in a psychology circles. And so he's basically purely a psychologist, but then he's work has been interpreted by other authors, such as Morgan Housel and a few other ones. And then they subsequently after him made the money link.

Phil (3m 48s):

Yeah, I guess it's also the thought about freedom, Isn't it? It's looking for, what's going to bring you freedom in life.

David (3m 54s):

Absolutely. And there's a lot of people that, sort of, criticise the whole FIRE movement or the whole attempting to retire early movement. And they sort of have this image to say that, "Oh, if you could retire by 45, well then your life's going to get very boring and you're going to get bored. But the reality is though, is that 80% of millionaires actually still choose to work, even though they don't need to. And to me that just screams happiness. Like they don't need to work, but that actively happily choose to get up to work every morning, just because they love what they do.

Phil (4m 19s):

It's also that you have freedom to choose things as well. So you might not even want to be retired, but you might be able to do that job that you like doing, but it's not going to pay as much, because the mortgage is covered or paid or paid off or whatever the idea of freedom is.

David (4m 33s):

And another way to look at it too, is that not only are you, sort of, buying happiness, but you can sort of buy to prevent certain types of sadness. For example, if you're struggling to pay your bills, that is the biggest stress inducer. So even if you can shut down the arguments for not being able to buy happiness, you can definitely argue that it does prevent many types of sadness.

Phil (4m 52s):

Yeah, that's right. So you're a FIFO fiery: a fly in, fly out fiery. Has this given you a lot of time to ponder budgets and money?

David (5m 0s):

Yes, absolutely. So a lot of the approach to take to my investing is actually out of a workplace health and safety point of view.

Phil (5m 7s):

Tell us about that.

David (5m 7s):

Yeah. So think about any office that you've ever been to and you'll see that there'll be first aid kits everywhere, there'll be defibrillators everywhere and there'll be fire extinguishers everywhere. But when you actually sit down and think about it, you think, "Well, but how often does a fire or a heart attack happen in an office?" And the answer to that is that it's extremely rare. But it is because the consequence of that event happening being so severe, even though it is unlikely, that officers have risk mitigation strategies in place for that. And I think the same strategy needs to be applied for our portfolios as well. So when we bind to an investment, whether it be crypto, shares, real estate, whatever it is, every investor has a bit of think to themselves like, "What's the likely good case scenario and what's the likely bad case scenario?"

David (5m 44s):

But I think one extra question that we need to ask is that "What is the extremely unlikely, possible worst-case scenario?" And then two, "If that happens, is this going to be a financial death sentence for me? Or is this going to be a financial apocalypse?" And then if so, we need to put risk mitigation factors with that. And so probably nine out of 10 investment cases, this risk mitigation can be achieved by simply lowering your debt levels. But then if you're going to other investment classes, it gets a bit more complicated. Like say in real estate, for example, you have to make sure that you're on top of your compliances and that you're adequately insured and things like that. But yeah, the principle is those that think about the possible, but very unlikely worst extreme case scenario and just make sure that isn't going to be a personal financial Armageddon.

David (6m 24s):

I also remember that Warren Buffet had this quite, is rule number one, never lose money. And rule number two is don't forget rule number one. And when I first started investing, I thought that was actually a bit of a silly quote. I mean, it's just like, if you want to be the best baseballer in the world, always strike home runs. If you want to be the best soccer player in the world, always score goals. And so I always used to think that was a bit of a silly quote. And in my later years, I now understand that what he's actually trying to say is that you need to be a conservative investor and you need to basically hedge your investments and structure your investments. So that way, even if something really bad does happen in the markets, you're not going to take a massive loss. And then on top of that as well, there's the mathematics of it as well. So some investors are familiar with this but some aren't, but if you say, take a 10% loss, you need the market to grow by 11% in order to get back to exactly where you were.

David (7m 6s):

Or if you take a 50% loss, you have to grow by 100%. Or if you take a 90% loss, you have to grow by 1000%. And so to paraphrase that in a non-mathematical way, losses hurt more than gains gain. And so that sort of backs up to needing to think about the worst case scenario when setting up your investment allocation.

Phil (7m 27s):

Do you find, or have you met people who don't think about that worst case scenario when they're investing? I mean, obviously there's a lot of people who just sort of go in and think "Oh, I'm going to go make lots of money on the stock market." And then they make all these rookie errors or they don't study or they don't even know what they're doing. And then they get burned and then lose the opportunity of using the market to make money in a sensible, conservative way as Warren Buffett would say .

David (7m 52s):

Yes, absolutely. And to answer that question, I have seen that and I mostly see it from investors who went around during the GFC. For those of us who weathered through the GFC, we either had proper structures in place and were fine, or we learned that lesson and have now adapted to it. And I see actually a lot of us in the crypto market where there is a lot of optimism about what could possibly go right, but there's very little protection on what could possibly go wrong. And actually speaking to the crypto market as well, you recently had an interview with Justin Arzadon and he was talking about ETF for cryptocurrency. And I personally bought shares. I'm a big fan of ETFs because I just love how it automatically diversifies the risk. And so I found that very interesting and I loved the idea that, that yeah, you can sort of diversify risk and protect yourself.

David (8m 37s):

Because the way I see cryptocurrency today is that it's very similar to what tech was in the late 90s, or it's similar to what motoring was in the 1900s, where yes, there are going to be some super multi-millionaires out of this, but the problem is we don't know which 5 or 10 companies or currencies they're going to be out of the thousands of start-ups that exist right now. And there's no way to know which five in a thousand it'll be. And that's why I'm very much likely to diversify in investments.

Phil (9m 4s):

Is that how you address risk? Diversification, is that the main way, the main tool that you would use?

David (9m 9s):

Yes, absolutely. And also with a long-term mindset. And so with the COVID crash, as we all remember, I think the market lost about 35, 40%. And I remember when that was happening and almost a big fan of the dollar cost averaging strategy. And for those listeners who don't know what dollar cost averaging is, that basically means that instead of spending all your money once a year, you invest it say 10 or 12 times per year, just to level out the risk. And so to me, like when the market's booming or when it's like, "Oh hooray, my portfolio's gone up in a value." And then when the market goes down, it's a "Hooray. I can get shares at a discounted price." And with that as well, even before I even put any money into shares though, I'm a big fan of having a big emergency cash fund. And the emergency cash fund, to me, it's double purposed. And so for one, it's what it's designed for.

David (9m 50s):

Like if you got an unexpected vet bill, which I've gotten a lot of those recently for my dog, for Smokey. And then two, if you do get that black swan event and the market does have a massive crash, well then you do have a bit of money aside where you can actually snap up those bargains and then also still have enough leftover to keep you fed while you're looking for another job. So, yeah, going back to the whole safety first thing, before even thinking about investing in shares, I'm a big fan of having an emergency fund. And how much should be in that emergency fund, that is very much based on an individual case by case situation. So say for example, what you're single you're in your twenties and you don't really have any responsibilities. It probably, it could be as low as having 5k, but say if you've got pets or kids or financial expenses, well then they need to be a lot higher.

Phil (10m 40s):

Okay. So we've raced a little ahead at the moment because we're talking about investing, but you've got to get to the stage where you've got some money to invest. What do people need to put in place so that they can start having a bit of excess money that can be put into investments that will grow in the future?

David (10m 56s):

Okay, well, to answer that, I'd say two words, good habits. And so the real point that I want to get across is that if you want to be successful in anything, not only investing, but whether it be for fitness, learning a new skill or even running a business, it's not about having an odd great moment here or there, it's about what you do every single day and what results you get, little results that you get every single day. And there's a great example, actually, that it's not about money but I thought it illustrates this point perfectly. So I was reading the book "Shoe Dog", it's written by Phil Knight, he's the founder of Nike shoes. And basically it's talking about his business partner, Bill Bowerman. And he had this approach that what he needs to do is he used to actually tinker and tailor his own athletes' running shoes. And he had this obsession with being able to slice ounces or milligrams off the weight of the running shoes.

Phil (11m 40s):

Kind of like the way cyclists are shaving off little bits of their bikes to just gain a little bit of extra speed.

David (11m 46s):

Actually. Yeah. That is another field that that's applied for. But basically what he worked out though, was that if he could take one ounce of the weight of per shoe over a 1.6 kilometre race, or one mile race, and with the two or three steps per meter, that is the equivalent of a runner carrying an extra 25 kilograms after a one mile race. And when you consider that these races, they come down to seconds in some cases, even milliseconds. And then if you've got a heavy shoe, you have a 25 kilogram disadvantage. And I thought that was incredible. And so I'll circle this back around to money. And let's just say that you found some creative way to save $10 per day. Well guess what? That's like three and a half thousand dollars per year. And a few people can probably see where I'm heading of this.

David (12m 29s):

I'm going to talk about the coffee every day.

Phil (12m 32s):

The smashed avocado.

David (12m 33s):

Yeah. The smashed avocado and the daily coffees. But before your listeners tune out, all I ask is that the hear me out. And so we've probably all heard the argument before that a $5 coffee per day and that's roughly $1,800. And a lot of people happy knowing that that's the cost to just fully enjoyment that that brings them. But what I'm proposing though is not actually to actually cut out the daily coffees, I'm proposing a third solution. So if you invest, say as little as $500 into a coffee machine, you can actually just make your own coffees and then the coffee machine will pay for itself in what you save within about six months. And furthermore, for making a coffee for anyone else, I'm a horrible barista, I make horrible coffees. But for the way that I like coffees, I'm the best barista in the world. And so it sort of becomes a bit of a fun thing too, that you sort of can make the perfect coffee to adapt to your own taste buds.

David (13m 18s):

And so sometimes like, finding ways to say money isn't always a negative. Sometimes you can actually find a bit of enjoyment and finding creative ways to save money and also develop new hobbies in the meantime. Sorry, I'm rambling off a little bit.

Phil (13m 30s):

You're doing my job for me. It's okay. It's all right. It's early in the new year. I'm still in holiday mode.

David (13m 36s):

That's all right. Well, for the new year's resolution, I'll just say that

Phil (13m 39s):

Oh, that was exactly my next question. What about the new year's resolution? If someone's come into this and they've made some new year's resolutions, where do they start?

David (13m 46s):

Okay. Yeah. Well, the best way to actually start, I believe is actually to have a budget. And before you tune out and say "I don't do budgets" or "I've tried it before", I believe that the way most of us are encouraged to do budgets is actually incorrect because the way most of us are encouraged to do budgets is that we have to do all this boring sort of accounting style work. And then we have to set all these standards for ourselves.

Phil (14m 7s):

It's a spreadsheet

David (14m 8s):

It's a spreadsheet, yes. And also because we're sort of guessing how much things actually cost and how much I our lifestyles actually costs, we put in these unrealistic goals for us lowering expenses and then we fail it in the first month because you've got no data points. And then guess what, you fail in the second month and then you get frustrated with it and then you give up on it. So when I say start a budget, I'm actually talking about a totally different approach. Instead of looking at it as some arbitrary rule book that you must follow, I'm saying treat a budget purely as a gauge or a radar or just something that's recording what's actually going on. So don't even set yourself any rules or any standards of what you must do, just purely count what's coming in, what's going out and what your net worth is. And then after about six months or probably even a year realistically, only then do you have enough actual data points to then actually set yourself realistic goals that you can actually realistically achieve.

David (14m 55s):

And then it might be frustrating as well.

Phil (14m 57s):

Yeah. That's one of the things about budgets. It's really hard to work out because, you know, you kind of worked it out and then suddenly you go, oh, the rego's due.

David (15m 6s):

Yeah, exactly.

Phil (15m 7s):

And you haven't factored that in. Yeah.

David (15m 9s):

Yeah. And in my opinion, it does take about a full year to be able to set fully realistic targets. But if you're very motivated and you want to get into it a little bit early, you probably can start experimenting with goals after about six months. But you probably will find you'll still have some teething issues, like your rego for example, because that's once a year as opposed to once every six months.

Phil (15m 30s):

Or the vet bills.

David (15m 31s):

Yeah. The vet bills. Oh, holy cow. Yes. Yep. Yeah. Actually that's another thing with the budgets too that I found pretty interesting that you actually learned some little interesting quirky things about finance. For example, pet insurance is the only insurance that I've actually made more money back than what I've actually paid. And so that's not related to any goal or any endeavour or anything like that but I just thought it's a little bit of an interesting fact. And it was also interesting, I'm a big fan of electric cars but I still have a diesel engine, but I basically know the price point that I need to get to for electrical cars to be worth it so I can justify financially because I know exactly how much I'm spending on fuel and car servicing every year. And so, yeah, it's just good to answer these sort of questions that you have floating around in your head every now and then.

Phil (16m 12s):

Yeah. I guess, working out how the wheels turn in this. But speaking of cars, you're not a fan of car loans?

David (16m 16s):

No, not at all. And don't get me wrong, I'm not against people buying brand new cars as there needs to be some qualities of life and so on and so forth. But unfortunately I think the car loan is basically the vehicle that gets people in the middle lower class and it traps them there. And I'll provide a mathematical example. Yeah, I'm talking about forbidden maths so sorry, I'll try not to make this too boring for you. So let's just say hypothetically, that you had $10,000 in savings, but you wanted a $60,000 car. And so in that situation, obviously you could put down the $10,000, but then you need a $50,000 car loan. And last time I checked the websites, the interest rates, approximately 7.5%.

Phil (16m 52s):

I know, it's outrageous, isn't it? I just saw that last night, I think. How they still charging those kind of rates?

David (16m 58s):

Yeah. Especially when mortgages and everything else is so low. So let's just say we play this out. And so all up, you get the car financed, but you'll find after seven years you would have spent 74 and a half thousand dollars. And so you're essentially paying $14,500 for nothing. So in seven years, you're going to have a seven year old car that's depreciated a lot. And you're going to have basically $0 to your name, or you might have some money from money saved from other avenues, not getting coffees for example. But let's just say instead that you said, "Okay, I've got this $10,000 but I can buy a car for $10,000. So I'll just buy that." And then instead of doing this car payments, if you actually invested in some market index ETF fund and assumed the 100 year moving average historical growth rate of roughly 10% after seven years, you'd have $94,000 in shares.

David (17m 44s):

And so let's just say you go to bed tonight and then you wake up tomorrow. Would you prefer to have a seven year old car and no money to your name? Or would you rather have a really, really old car, but then $94,000 in shares. And then with that too, I mean, you can either choose to keep investing that or you could choose to, you could probably even buy brand new Tesla or some other car that you particularly want even a lot more.

Phil (18m 7s):

Or let it compound for another 20 years.

David (18m 8s):

Absolutely. Yeah. And so to me, it just opens up so many better options. And just to repeat, I'm not actually against people buying nice cars. I mean, they need to be some quality of life and cars kind of are fun. But the only thing I'm sort of against is just borrowing money for something that depreciates. So although we're talking about cars here, it also applies to jet skis, yes I'm talking to you coal mine workers, and boats and just things like that.

Phil (18m 32s):

Where would you suggest listeners starting to invest their money? I know we're talking ETFs in general, but you really do need to have at least $500 to start investing in the share market. And even if you're going to invest in property, you'll need a lot more. What are the kinds of little baby steps that get you between basically having no savings at all into starting to get a portfolio that's going to mean something in your life?

David (18m 56s):

Okay. Yeah. Well, the first step is to start a budget. And when I say budget, I mean the type of budget I was talking about earlier, not a set of standards budget. And then the second thing is just to be mindful of your little habits and things. Try to be creative about little things that you can do every day that you can sort of save money on without actually necessarily affecting your quality of life. And then step two I'd say is to wipe away all your non-mortgage debts. So even if that means downgrading your car and also having this mentality that you may need to rough it for about seven to 10 years just to be able to kickstart your portfolio. And one thing a lot of people don't realise about these multi-million-dollar portfolios is that they say, "Oh, there's a multi-million-dollar portfolio. You need money to make money and blah, blah, blah." But every single one of these multi-million-dollar portfolios started off as a $1,000 portfolio and then a 3000 and then a 5,000 and so on.

David (19m 41s):

So the important thing is just actually to start. So that's a big thing, just your habits and actually get started. And then also build an emergency fund. So at least 5k, but if you have pets or family members or kids or what have you, definitely a bit more. And then after you've got your emergency fund, after you've got your good habits and you find yourself having a little bit of fat leftover after every time you get paid from your employer, start investing money every month. And so if you actually want to buy into individual shares, the four best brokers I recommend would be Self-Wealth, Superhero, and if you want it to be attached to a major bank, NAB's the cheapest and COMSEC isn't too far behind them so they're pretty reasonable as well. And there's also, you can go down the micro investor route. If you want to be investing a little bit more frequently and sort of, as soon as you get $200 you want to invest it straight away.

David (20m 25s):

Well maybe going down the micro investing route would be a good way too. And the three big players that are Raiz, Commsec pocket and Spaceship. And for them, unlike normal brokers out of the market investors, all three of them were pretty reasonable in their fees. And yeah, so I'd say that. And so after you're there, basically just repeat every month. So update your budget, see what fat's left from your paycheck and put it into whatever investment you choose.

Phil (20m 48s):

It's still getting over that psychological hurdle though, isn't it, that you're going to start off. It's going to be 10 cents here and 20 cents there and a dollar here and then $2 there. It's going to be a long time before it's a meaningful amount. How do you think about this to help keep your eye on the long-term goal?

David (21m 5s):

Something that really helps personally with this is that talking to people that are further along than you in the journey. And quite often you hear stories about how people say, oh, my first 100,000 took me about 10 years to make. And my second 100,000, I took three years and my third 100,000 took six months and so on and so forth.

Phil (21m 22s):

It's a rolling stone gathering moss is it?

David (21m 23s):

That's the metaphor I was trying to find. And Charlie Munger, he's the very famous investor, he even said that exact same quote, except he uploaded it to the first million. Yeah. And so every great thing in life, even outside of investing, every great thing that exists in the world right now started off small.

Phil (21m 40s):

Have you spoken to people who've read your book and taken on board some of the lessons that you've been teaching and any of these stories that you can share with us?

David (21m 49s):

I've spoken to a few readers but unfortunately I've only released the book very recently and so it's too soon to talk about results from it. But the big takeaway that a lot of people are surprised about is in Australia, all we hear about is property and property. And then after we'd done hearing about property, we hear some more about property. And many readers are actually very surprised to learn that the share market actually grows faster than property, not only in Australia, but also in the United States. And of course, this is talking about 100 year moving averages, this isn't just talking about a single year. And so on a long-term basis, shares do appreciate faster than property. And I know there is going to be the contrasting argument though, to say that, "Oh yes, but property is leveraged and you might have 20% new properties. So you actually fivefolding your money from a 20% return instead of just making 20%.

David (22m 30s):

But then my counter argument to that though is just to say, well, you can also leverage shares, although I don't recommend doing that. I think the biggest takeaway a lot of people are getting away from the book is that shares is quite often overlooked. And also even a lot of the new money, a lot of people are getting interested in crypto. And a lot of the old money is interested in real estate. And it's sort of just seems that shares are sort of been not completely, but semi forgotten about. That's on the offense side of money. And then for the defence side of money, it's a bit of an observation that was, it's obvious once it's pointed out, but it's not obvious until it's pointed out. And so is this quote that often used that now a dollar saved is the equivalent of a dollar 32 earned. And so to explain what that means, let's just look at a typical Australian worker.

David (23m 11s):

So they might be on $50,000 per year or $60,000 or whatever and let's just assume that's a base wage. And so if they found ways to make extra money, whether it be a second job or a passive income investment, every dollar that they make, they're going to lose one third of it in taxes. However, if they found ways to save money, they'll keep 100% of it. And so any extra money is great and I absolutely encourage that. But if you're trying to find extra money to squeeze out extra money to invest, one thing that I really want to point out, and this isn't even a call to action, it's more just pointing out a concept, is that you're actually 33% more efficient if you can find ways to save money, then what you'd be if you'd find ways to make money.

Phil (23m 51s):

So you've got the books, you've got a website and now our YouTube channel. Tell us about that and David Allen world.

David (23m 56s):

Yeah. So basically it's the modern world and if you don't adapt to it, you'll be left behind. And so at first I was more just interested in being an author because I actually love investing. I'll find it very interesting. Something about trying to find maximum efficiencies. It's not even so much about the money it's more just trying to find how you can put in as little input to get as maximum output and long-term basis and you can apply that to electricity use or whatever medium. Sorry I'm going all politician on you. I'm sort of

Phil (24m 21s):

Are you kind of obsessive about saving money?

David (24m 25s):

Yeah. Well, I would say obsessive efficiency and money just happens to be one of those avenues where I am obsessed with efficiency. So to go back to your original question, sorry, I was more interested in just delivering that message into a book and now of trying to be more efficient, I'm actually finding that the message actually gets out a lot faster and wider if I can actually deliver it across a lot of social media platforms. And each one presents their own challenges too. Like for example of Instagram, it's all about doing the still little images and small little quotes, with YouTube you do have a little bit of license to explain concepts properly and with TikTok you have to try and cram everything in as much little time as possible and just hope that they don't scroll up and tune out after 20 seconds. And so each of the social media channels, as I'm sure that you find for yourself, they will present the unique opportunities and challenges.

David (25m 8s):

So yeah, basically I'm just using the social media and the book to try and spread this message of the learnings that I have of how to be efficient with your money.

Phil (25m 16s):

So if listeners want to find out more about you, where can they find you on these many social media channels?

David (25m 24s):

Yes. So the website is howtobuyyourhappiness.com and unfortunately howtobuyhappiness.com was already taken so I had to put in the "your" word in there. And for TikTok it's howtobuyyourhappiness and for YouTube it's just David Allen. But if you put in the search how to buy your happiness David Allen on the YouTube search, I'm pretty confident it'll show up as well.

Phil (25m 43s):

Fantastic. Dave Allen. Thank you very much for joining me.

David (25m 45s):

No worries, Phil. And yeah, I've got to say, been a long-time listener and a long-time fan so it's actually a huge honour to be interviewed by you and I very much appreciate you having me on and I feel very privileged.

Phil (25m 55s):

Oh, no problems. It was great to have you on and just talking to an ordinary bloke trying to do good and make a life for himself. That's great.

David (26m 4s):

Thank you.

Phil (26m 4s):

If you found this podcast helpful, please tell a friend. Especially if it's someone who needs to start thinking about investing for their future. You'll be helping them and helping me to keep this show on the road.

Chloe (26m 16s):

Shares for Beginners is for information and educational purposes only. It isn't financial advice and you shouldn't buy or sell any investments based on what you've heard here. Any opinion or commentary is the view of the speaker only, not Shares for Beginners. This podcast doesn't replace professional advice regarding your personal financial needs, circumstances or current situation.

Shares for Beginners is for information and educational purposes only. It isn’t financial advice, and you shouldn’t buy or sell any investments based on what you’ve heard here. Any opinion or commentary is the view of the speaker only not Shares for Beginners. This podcast doesn’t replace professional advice regarding your personal financial needs, circumstances or current situation