This is the interview with the Founder and Lead Advisor at Hoskin Capital, Nate Hoskin. Nate is a new breed of Advisor helping all types of clients, but specifically the H.E.N.R.Y.’s. Never heard of that? Read on because you might be one. We talk about the beginning to his investing journey, how he shares his passions of personal finance, and his HOT TAKE on personal finance.
If you’d like to listen to the interview go here and watch it here.
Josh: Happy Friday, everybody. Welcome back to TIC Talk where we make cents of personal finance.
Today, I’m fortunate enough to have Nate Hoskin, the Founder and Lead Advisor at Hoskin Capital. And to kick things off, as we always do,Nate, can you give a quick introduction on why you’re here today and what your real story is on how you got into personal finance.
Nate: Absolutely, Josh. Thank you so much for having me. I really got into personal finance when I was really young. I think I was thirteen or fourteen when I started to get an idea of how much of an impact money would have on my life, whether I wanted to focus on it or not, I knew that it was going to play a role. And so just like with fitness and relationships, finance is just one of those ineffable truths. I realized that I was like, this is what I wanna learn about. This is what I want to figure out.
I originally went into asset management, and I wanted to work for a hedge fund or work for an ETF or a large asset manager and realized very quickly that I wanted to work with people and that I wanted to work face to face and see the impact that I was having on someone’s finances in real time. So I went ahead and became a financial advisor instead. I started working with multimillionaires and billionaires doing the typical financial advisory route and realized that they aren’t the people who need help. I very quickly got sick of helping millionaires make another million and realized that I wanted to help younger people really create wealth instead of just manage wealth. So that’s really where I got started.
Josh: I love that. Create Wealth versus Manage Wealth. I have to say thirteen and fourteen years old is, I would say pretty young to start thinking about personal finance. I know I was barely figuring out what W2 job I was gonna have. So what set that fire at thirteen or fourteen?
What was something that got you interested in it and got you going down that path?
Nate: Yeah. Pretty much right when I stopped having job aspirations of, like, a knight in shining armor or, like, a cowboy and started to think about jobs that I might actually do in the real world. My uncle, Galen, my middle name is actually Galen. So he was a huge part of my life, and he was an asset manager for a capital group. So I knew very quickly that I wanted to do what he did. When I was thirteen and fourteen, I mean, I saw the Porsche and the tennis court and the large house and that sort of thing. I was like, wow. I want what he has, but the thing that really pushed me onto my journey was the way that he talked about money. He always described it as stored energy. And it was the thing that really allows you to do whatever you want with your existence. It’s the thing that fuels you. And, I mean, I’m from Colorado. I love to go up into the mountains and go skiing, and that’s sort of thing. I’m not deifying the gas that’s in my car. That stored energy that’s going to get me from point a to point b, but without that fuel, I mean, the driveway is the limit. And so that was really what got me started was hearing him talk about that stored energy and being a steward of that stored energy.
Josh: Yeah. That’s an interesting point. I almost would say that’s a different way of classifying money in a sense. I think some people demonize money. I think some people look at it and say this is not the best tool versus others. I think some of the wealthier people will look at it and say,
This is really just a tool to get to a certain point. Did, as you progressed in your career, did you see more of the latter where people were maybe not understanding that money is technically a tool, even though that’s what you grew up and understood that that language to be.
Nate: Yeah. I think I understood that language, but I very quickly realized that there were two camps of people. There were the people who wanted nothing to do with money and the people who thought that money was everything. And neither camp seemed very happy And I was sort of stuck in the middle where I was like, wait. I’m lucky enough to have a very positive relationship with money. Are you guys okay? Like, can I help?
Josh: Got it. Okay. That’s good. So there is still a message for both sides, both camps, really. And it’s your job to actually communicate that. So that’s a perfect segue into the next question for you. And that’s how you actually share your personal passion with everybody every single day, especially because you have more of a target audience, right, like you said, create wealth versus just managing wealth. So how do you reach the ‘create wealth’ people every single day?
Nate: It happens totally by accident, but it’s all social media. Because the “create wealth” camp are not necessarily the people who are looking for financial advisors, and they’re certainly not people who would pick up a cold call or answer a cold email. But they are people who are very curious and very passionate about learning about money and learning about the ways that they can be more responsible stewards of that stored energy. So I just started educating. And at the time, I was studying for my CFP, the Certified Financial Planner designation, and I was learning so much,and I was so blown away by the inner workings and the mechanisms of money. That I was like, I have to tell people about this. Somehow, I have to get this out there. I have to communicate it. And at the time, I was locked down in COVID, so I just started making TikToks, and I was so excited and so fired up that I started making nine or ten TikToks a day for six months. I just had so much to say and so much to teach, and the response was amazing. So very quickly, I had hundreds of thousands of followers.
Josh: That’s really cool. And do you feel that you see business growth from social media channels, especially on LinkedIn too. So I know you mentioned TikTok, but us being connected on LinkedIn I’ve seen some of your posts there, and I find them fascinating, and you obviously get a lot of engagement. Do you see some business growth from both?
Nate: Yes. I’ve built my entire business off of organic traffic. I have never made a single cold call. I’ve never run a paid advertisement. I have exclusively done social media and organic outreach and that sort of thing, and it has created this wonderful snowball of referrals, but in the early days, I was getting a lot of business, but none of it was working.
There was something very clearly broken in the way that I was providing help to the people who were very curious and who had built a lot of trust with me. The reason was because I was a copy paste financial advisor. I was charging a management fee. My fee was 0.9%. And I was saying, hey, I will manage your investments and I will outperform the stock market. And that was it. That was my sell.
And I realized very, very quickly that that was not what people needed. That was not what was actually going to help them become wealthy. It was really just one star in the galaxy of their finances.
Josh: Yeah. What about that message do you think caught the attention of your new target audience, your “create wealth” side? If we wanna create a different name for that, we can. I think there is one, but I’ll, yeah, I don’t wanna jump ahead.
Nate: Okay. Yeah. We’ll hold off on the name just for now so that we can talk about it when it comes up. But to make sure I understand your question, like, how did me changing my business model work better? Is that what you’re asking about?
Josh: Yeah. Why do you think that actually caught the attention of that particular target audience?
Nate: Okay. I mean, because it’s not something that’s currently available. Financial planning nowadays is pretty much always wrapped into that management fee. And so the assumption is that you need to walk into the door with $200,000 to $500,000 and as a little bonus for being able to manage your money, they would also do some financial planning with you. Maybe they would write a financial plan, maybe they would do that at the beginning of the relationship, but that was never really the forefront of what they were providing.
So to say, hey, I will sit down with you for three weeks, and we will put all of your finances on paper, and I will show you how you can do them better. And then we will look ahead thirty or forty years and talk about what the results might be. That’s a very new thing for a lot of people, and I think new tends to catch attention.
Josh: Yeah. I was excited to talk with you today too. I think because you are different. Me being 34, I’ve been through different advisors and different experiences. I didn’t start investing until, I believe, 2011 when I first graduated college. Do you feel that there are a lot of people like you in the advising space? I have a personal answer where the answer is no, but I’m curious to get your perspective.
Nate: I’m pleasantly surprised. I think it is a little bit of confirmation bias where when I take a very clear stance on the industry, other people who are taking a similar stance will say, hey, I like this guy. Let me connect with him on LinkedIn. Let me give him a call and set up a meeting. Let’s have a conversation. And so I have been lucky enough to meet a lot of incredible financial planners and a lot of incredible wealth advisors too. Particularly in that FIRE space or that fat FIRE space because there are people who are my age who have exited businesses for six, seven million dollars. And those people, maybe they do need a full service wealth management firm because they do need the dedicated investment team and they need the estate planning attorney and CPA and that full holistic service. And the people who really specialize in working with those younger, ultra wealthy people. That’s been an incredible community that I’m lucky enough to be a part of.
Josh: That’s impressive. I think this is a good call, podcast, video for people that are not just interested in advising, but the people that are actually the CFPs and the CFAs out there to pay attention and say, you’re doing something different, and it’s working very well. And I think some people are maybe hesitant to get into something like this where you dove right in, someone probably listening to clients and seeing some kind of feedback, and then you just started to post, and it worked really well. I think I could be wrong here, but I feel the industry has been shifting for some time. And it just kinda takes people at the spearhead like yourself to actually start doing it and showing that it works.
Nate: Oh, absolutely. My colleague Nick Meyer as well, who’s also very, very successful on social media, We have very much been on the forefront of CFPs using social media. I think he is the most followed CFP on social media, and I’m the third most followed CFP on social media. And so together, we’ve been looking at our industry and saying, Why are people not doing this? What are the problems? And, really, it boils down to compliance and apathy. Because with compliance, if you are with a broker dealer, if you are with a large RIA, the answer to you posting on social media is just no. They’re not gonna let you. They’re not going to allow that. And so even for the advisors who are chomping at the bit and they’re saying I wanna do this. I see the value of this. I wanna make it happen. There are these very restraining compliance rules that are still in place and are frankly outdated. I’ve been in and out of the SEC and the FINRA compliance rules because I understand that it’s a huge risk to my business if I do something wrong there.
And the only thing I’ve discovered, the only thing I’ve heard from conversations with state regulators is that they’re like, yeah, go do it. Just don’t lie. Don’t mislead people. Don’t make false statements. Be a fiduciary. Don’t bend things. Don’t lie by omission. Like, do all of these things that we as fiduciaries naturally do. Just do that on social media, and that seems very doable to me.
Josh: Yeah. That’s an interesting point because I feel YouTube and social media have also gone the route of, like, the Graham Stephan and Andrei Jikh the people who aren’t really financial advisors and kind of explain and bounce around the rules versus you who are actually advising people all day long and yet you’re still getting into social and providing real feedback and advice from a different point of view. So I feel that’s also kind of blended too. People, I think, almost scare anybody else trying to share any kind of financial advice because of the disclaimers and following all the rules. So it’s interesting to hear you say that versus seeing all the disclaimers on YouTube and podcasts.
Nate: Right? Well, it’s counterintuitive because you would think that for me as a financial adviser, I would be subject to more rules or more risk, but I’m actually not because I took the first most important step, which is that I am registered with all of the governing bodies. They know me. They have my fingerprints. They can hold me to a standard. For the people who are not registered, for the people that you mentioned who are giving financial advice blatantly on social media, but have no such claim to being a registered financial advisor or anything like that. Those are the ones who are at risk. Those are the people who are really in danger of running afoul with the SEC, not financial advisors.
Josh: That makes a lot of sense, actually. So it’s again,a good note for the advisors listening and paying attention and worried about putting some useful information out there. That will also help grow your business. So thank you for that one. You mentioned FIRE, and I’m curious to know what FIRE camp you sit in? Do you sit in the retire early or the recreational employment side of a FIRE? I know you mentioned fat FIRE. So there’s a couple of different ways, but I just break into those two.
Nate: Yeah. I am definitely in the recreational employment FIRE camp. I love to work. I love building businesses. I will always do that. And what I will do over the course of my life is I will work in my lifestyle. I will work around my lifestyle because right now while I’m young and while I’m pushing really hard to grow wealth and really put my time and sweat equity in, my lifestyle takes a back seat. And as I age and as I consider starting a family or just get a little bit tired of working, I will shift those priorities and I will begin to delegate more and put more on the people who are still really fired up and who are excited about providing an amazing service. And then I will have more time to do the things that I love, but I simply cannot imagine not working. I just am constantly running. I’m constantly thinking. I’m up at six in the morning just like dreaming and wondering. And if that went away, I don’t know that I would enjoy life as much as I do right now.
Josh: Yeah. That’s a really interesting point. I feel I’m in the same camp as you are with recreational employment, get into a certain point where you get to choose how to spend your time, but you’re not gonna retire. I would feel that a lot of the people that you’re targeting and starting to work with are in that camp and that’s the because, we’re gonna dive into this HENRY, which I’d love to get your perspective on what a HENRY is and how that falls into things. But I feel HENRYs or your target clientele would be, I would say, more on the recreational employment camp, just with the way that life has kind of shifted over the last couple of years.
Nate:I think so, and I see a little bit of a split. So,HENRY is a High Earner, Not Rich Yet. And they are the people who are really starting to create wealth. So when I sit down and I do a financial plan with a HENRY because that’s the exact target audience that I work with, and I do my absolute best work for, I give them two options, and I show them two different ways that someone might retire. One is the asset based retirement. That’s more your FIRE your traditional FIRE approach, which is saving up enough money that you never need to work again and showing them what that would look like.
And the other option that I always present to them is the income coverage model, where rather than just working and working and saving and saving and eating beans and rice, instead you work on finding other ways to make income. Whether that be real estate, investing in businesses, entrepreneurship, through acquisition, you name it. There are so many interesting ways to make money online and in the world nowadays that do not involve anywhere near as much time commitment as a nine to five. And the point at which those other income streams replace the income from your nine to five, you are technically retired.
I always tell people that I quit my job in August of this year. And so I’ve retired. Because every single day, I just wake up super excited to do what I do, and I now have control to do that whenever I want to. So I hit that income coverage. Am I still working? Absolutely. But I will find that it’s a pretty even split. Some people want that traditional retirement as early as humanly possible, and other people think they’ll work forever. And it’s really interesting to see those two sort of interplay with each other because I, yeah, I would say most of them are actually in the more traditional retirement. But it’s a pretty even split.
Josh: So if you had to actually have a conversation with somebody that’s particularly overwhelmed by everything when it comes to retirement, budgeting, investing. There’s a lot of stuff to talk through. If somebody’s overwhelmed by that in the HENRY class, what would you do? What would you tell them? Where would you tell them to start?
Nate: For me, the thing that I always recommend is just writing it down because we as humans tend to blow things up in our brains and make it seem so insurmountable, so challenging. And so, really, that’s so possible to do on your own, just writing down what your goals are, what are the things that are stressing you out. And that’s also the role a financial planner plays because that’s just your entire finances on paper. To say, this is what’s going on. These are the rules that you should follow and to get to that point that you would like to achieve. And so I always recommend writing it down and then doing a little bit of an audit. Going through your budget, going through your income, getting a feel for when you’re not actively controlling your money, where is it going? What’s happening to it? Because once you understand your now and you understand where you would like to go and sort of what those moving pieces are, you start to realize that there are a lot of levers that you can pull to improve your financial future without really sacrificing your lifestyle. Those become apparent if you do it yourself. You don’t necessarily need a financial planner to make that happen.
Josh: Yeah. That’s a really good point as well. I think just listening to you and kinda talking through everything, I think this next question is gonna be a really fun one, and that’s your hot take on personal finance. I think you’ve already shared a couple of really solid points that I think are different from other people I’ve talked with, other advisors I’ve been with and talked with before. So I’m really excited. What’s your one hot take on personal finance that you would, I think, share with people, whether that’s social media or for the first time here.
Nate: My hot take for personal finance will have pretty much my entire industry cringing in their shoes because I believe that every single person is capable of being financially independent without help. You can absolutely do it yourself. It is not hard. Building a portfolio is not hard. Saving money is not hard. It’s not fun. Often, it takes a lot of mental load, and what people will find is that they have a huge amount of mental load already particularly if they have a family and a demanding job. And so finding that additional bandwidth to go and do these things, that is the challenge, not the actual things.
And so someone should go to a financial advisor or should go to a financial planner the same way they would go to a cleaning service. The same way they would go to a valet service. Can you park your own car? Of course. It is not that hard to park your own car, but you’re gonna have to drive around the block five times to find that spot, and then you’re gonna have to walk. And so for some people, particularly people who are making a lot of money and have created a lot of value associated with their time. It might be so worth their while to pull up in front of the hotel or the venue, pay that twenty dollars for valet and walk in and go and do the thing that they were there to do. That’s what a financial advisor should be. They are not a doctor.They are not someone who’s going to go in and do, like, open heart surgery that you could just never possibly do. They’re someone who’s making your life easier.
Josh: Yeah. That’s really helpful. And I think that’s quite the hot take, even though I feel some people maybe our age are starting to get more to that point, but they still don’t have the answer. They don’t see a lot of people that are offering what you’re offering. I could also feel that what you’re doing is probably upsetting a much larger, very rich industry, and your methodology really I don’t wanna say takes money out of other people’s pockets, but really it’s shifting the way that they should be doing business for the betterment of that actual end retail investor. So it’s interesting to hear that. I hope people listen to this message, and they’re like, wow, I probably should change the way that I do a couple of my things.
Nate: Yeah. I hope so too. And I also think that I’m lucky enough to be a speaker for the RIA Institute and those sorts of things. I am very well entrenched in the more traditional financial advising and wealth management industry, and they love it because frankly, they don’t want my clients. They would so much rather work with someone who has fifty million dollars that they have to meet with once a year and they can collect their massive paycheck, and they can serve that one person better than anyone else in the world.
And they don’t have to worry about people who currently have thirty five thousand dollars to invest, but maybe that person is making three hundred thousand dollars. Maybe that person is going to receive an inheritance from their parents or their grandparents to the tune of millions and millions of dollars. I’m, like, the mascot. They’re, like, oh, look at this young guy. He’s a go-getter. Like, we’re so proud of him, that sort of thing. And when I start taking market share because their clients start giving money to kids who no longer want wanna work with them, that’s where there might be a little more blood in the water.
Josh: Got it. Yeah. That’s good! Tto close things out, what is the best way for people watching and listening today to find you?
Nate: I think the easiest way is to find me on TikTok. My tag is just Nate Hoskin. That’s going to be where you’ll find more information than you could possibly devour in one sitting. And hopefully, someone will learn something from that TikTok. And then for anyone who wants to learn a little bit more about me, I’m absolutely around on LinkedIn. That’s probably the easiest way to DM me and actually get in touch with me. And then my website, Hoskin Capital is the easiest way to learn about what I’m on.
Josh: Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that. Everybody else, Thank you for listening today. If you got any questions, comments, especially for Nate, go ahead and leave a comment in the comment section below. And then as Nate just mentioned, he’s got plenty of places to reach out directly to him. Nate, thanks again for jumping on. And I hope you have a really good rest of your Friday.
Nate: Thanks, Josh. Same to you.
Josh: Thanks, Nate.
You can connect with Nate at…
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@natehoskin
Hoskin Capital site: https://www.hoskincapital.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hoskincapital/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nghoskin
