Ex-Advisor Running for Governor Says 'Economic Torpedo' Headed for His State

Our current governor [Gretchen Whitmer] didn’t work with the other side of the aisle at all. She says she’s a bipartisan, but she legislated everything through executive orders, which is 100% non-bipartisan.

I absolutely dislike executive orders on all levels of government because they take away the balance of power. [Whitmer has] overused executive orders.

When we went through COVID, we didn’t have everyone working together. It’s not entirely her fault by any means, but it all starts with the top leadership.

What do you think about the way Gov. Whitmer handled the schools issue during the pandemic?

She shut down the schools [in March 2020 through the end of the school year]. There’s no better way to create haves and have-nots than to shut down schools.

Now there’s a whole group of kids that are fundamentally behind their peers. I don’t think they’ll make up that gap completely.

A lot of issues we face right now aren’t race issues — they’re class issues. One of the best ways to start minimizing differences between classes is education.

But I applaud that, during the shutdown, she closed parts of major retailers, like Home Depot, to only the essential departments so that smaller, local businesses that didn’t have both essential and non-essential products weren’t harmed as much.

As governor, what would you initiate to benefit retail investors?

I’d like to work with our legislators to see if we can get people coalesced around the idea that everyone should have an optional “digital wipe” once a year — all the tracking that Amazon, Facebook, eBay has on you for the year would be wiped out.

The search engines and [those types of] platforms are free, but that means they aren’t the product — you are. Facebook isn’t selling you a product — you are the product they’re selling.

With a digital wipe, you’d start to see that people wouldn’t get pigeonholed as much in [terms of receiving] news content.

Those algorithms put you into a funnel like a lane on a 10-lane freeway. It’s unlikely you’ll ever get on another lane. So all you know is what’s in that one lane.

You wrote a book, “Fireproof Your Retirement: It’s Your Money. Learn How to Make Your Advisor Work for You” (2014). What was a main thrust?

I used an analogy about the [sinking of] the Titanic, and then I started talking about that to clients:

There are icebergs in the water. We’re going to try our best to avoid them, but it’s inevitable that sometimes one of them will come up in the middle of the night, and we’ll collide.

So, to prepare [financially], we’ll have lifeboats and life rafts. 

That’s what we do in financial planning. We don’t assume we’re going to be able to avoid the iceberg. Instead, our assumption is there’s going to be an iceberg that will come out of nowhere. 

But we’ll have enough safety and trained staff so that when it happens, you’ll be OK.

What do you think of the way most retirement planning is done today?

The idea that we’re giving consumers more transparency by giving them more disclosures is just having more overwhelming paperwork.

And we need to come up with a different word for “fiduciary” because there are two levels of fiduciary now: a watered-down fiduciary and [the legal definition of] fiduciary.

It’s unfair to mislead consumers. 

You use prayer to help make important decisions. Did you pray in deciding to run for governor?

Yes. I often pray for the answers. I don’t always get them; maybe I get more of a nudge. But I made a lot of big decisions in my life through prayer.

We opened the doors of the advisory at the end of 2009, when everybody was saying you don’t open a business at that time. 

But it felt right. I prayed about it, and I felt being led in that direction.

I also try to lean on family and friends to debate pros and cons.

Throughout college, you played baseball as catcher for the Eastern Michigan Eagles. Do baseball and finance have anything in common?

There’s a great analogy between baseball and financial planning. 

Before a pitch, after the catcher gives a sign, the shortstop will put his hands behind his back and tell what kind of pitch is coming.

For instance, if it’s a fastball, the outfield is going to shade a certain way.

If there’s a hit up the middle, the shortstop is going to be the one who goes to get it.

The second baseman will come behind him, and then you’ll have the center fielder running as hard as he can.

The right fielder will run as hard as he can to get behind first [base] in case of a bad throw. 

So, you’ve got all this communication going on and contingency plans: If it’s not B, then it’s C.

A sound financial plan should be [created in] the same way.

It will assume there’ll be errors. And when those errors happen, what do we already have in place that responds to them?