Christmas came early, let's go through some finance TikToks together.

My name's Richard Coffin, I'm an investment analyst with my Chartered Financial Analyst and Certified Financial Planner designations, registered with the Ontario Securities Commission as a portfolio manager.

If you'd like to support the channel, you can do so at Patreon.com/ThePlainBagel :)

DISCLAIMER:
This channel is for education purposes only and is not affiliated with any financial institution, although Richard does work as an employee for an investment manager. Richard Coffin does not provide recommendations on The Plain Bagel - those looking for investment advice should seek out a registered professional. Richard is not responsible for investment actions taken by viewers

Edited by Carol Boeira

🎵 It felt like a better idea on paper.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the plain bagel.

As we approach Christmas, I've been making a list of all the good boys and girls to receive presents this year.

And I've noticed that some of you have been naughty, giving out bad financial advice on TikTok.

So once again, we are here to review some finance TikToks to see who's been good this year and who deserves a big lump of coal.

Now, fun fact, your boy Santa Claus is a investment professional.

I know it might not look like it, but as always, the goal here is to learn something, to go through and correct any misinformation we might come across, and otherwise just give some input into this content.

So without further ado, let's hop into it.

If I don't make 8 figures in crypto in the next couple of years.

The big problem that I had in the last bull run was that I wasn't prepared.

And then now that I have like almost 8 years of, you know, experience and I'm like, OK, dude, this next 1, I'm gonna kill it.

Crypto is the middle class's answer to be able to compete on a playing field that they don't have any other chance of ever competing.

The middle class is never going to get rich from stocks.

But I can really confidently say that if somebody buys Bitcoin today, within the next 18 months, you're going to be able to sell that for 3 times as much money.

We are so back I do agree that stocks don't really make people rich if you define rich as being like fast cars and yachts and stuff like that.

It's still incredibly helpful and definitely something people should strive to do, but it's not a miracle worker.

It can only work with what you put into it.

Even still, that doesn't mean that Bitcoin or crypto is the answer to getting rich.

It's really fallacy to use the historical growth rates of stuff like crypto and Bitcoin, when they've gone from obscurity to more mainstream adoption, that that to some degree is going to repeat itself into the future, to a point where it's going to elevate an entire middle-class to the kind of wealth that these people are probably alluding to.

And you should never treat a single investment that you're say holding in a brokerage account as your lottery ticket.

The moment you start treating investments like that, you're just gambling and you're really setting yourself up for failure.

I'm looking for a call entry point right now.

From what it looks like, the technicals look like the chart is going to go to the moon.

Yeah, from what I can see here, definitely set up for a rocket ship emoji straight to Mars.

Wait, wait, I think that's what we needed.

Come on a bit more fuck Come on, come on.

All right right now We're up 50% all right.

And we're out, we're out, we're out of this f**king trade.

Did everyone in the discord catch that good shit Wow

Straight to the naughty list Nothing, but a colon you're stocking this year.

This is like the dystopian future of finance content on social media.

I do like the cheeky discord shout out slipping in a quick advertisement there, but I hope it's clear that outside of this probably being very much fabricated, this is really just structured gambling.

It feels like you're doing analysis, but this level of kind of simplified technical analysis, there's really no merit to it.

It's just a focus of people trying to sell a course or discord groups or whatever, because it feels like a very simple, get a sophisticated way to make money with stocks when it really isn't.

Which is pretty obvious when you see how traders on social media will react to making a bit of money.

It's not like, oh, that was a expected outcome.

The e-cigarette and vape market is projected to grow by an astonishing 30% from now to 2030.

That means it's projected to be 1 of the fastest growing markets along with AI, microchips and solar power.

The stock we're talking about today is a penny stock out of Florida and if you don't like sin stocks then This one's not for you.

But if you're here to make money, the stock is Kaival Brands, ticker symbol KAVL.

They're already working with giant retailers such as Circle K, etc.

They have over $12 million in assets and only 2.6 million in liabilities, meaning the chances of them going bankrupt anytime soon is nearly 0.

Don't get me wrong, holding all else constant, the less debt you have and the less liabilities, the better in terms of risk of bankruptcy.

But that doesn't mean that this company can't still go under because you can still lose money on your operations.

If you don't have enough cash or profit coming in to cover your employee salaries, then eventually you're still going to fail.

In fact, yeah, if you pull up the company's financial statements, you can see that this firm actually has falling revenues, negative operating cashflow, and they have a retained earnings deficit.

Meaning over their lifetime, they've lost a good chunk of the money that investors have put into them.

The only reason they still have a positive net asset balance where they haven't been outweighed by liabilities is because investors have been bailing out their operations with additional paid-in capital.

If it wasn't for that extra injection of cash from new investors, this company would have a negative book value.

So yeah, even before getting into the fundamentals of what this company even does, some really big red flags here.

And it's why it's really important if you're going to take the step of doing stock analysis, you have to do a comprehensive financial analysis.

You can't just rely on individual metrics or indicators because they're not going to tell you the whole story.

And you really do have to look at everything in tandem.

Not to mention it's a really flawed approach to just pick a company based on it operating in an attractive high growth area.

Because it really doesn't guarantee success.

There's no better example of that than the dot-com crash.

Really just a handful of companies came out of that profitable versus the thousands of other startups that seem very promising at times in that space.

So you know maybe e-cigarettes or whatever this industry is does do well.

Still some regulatory uncertainty there but even if that's the case it doesn't mean that an individual position is going to be a big win for you.

I'd take a hundred million that I have and I'd go to a big institution and say, hey, 10X my 100.

A billion dollars, I'll buy 3 or 4000000000 dollars worth of real estate.

I don't understand why you're thinking so small.

Curious why you play so small when you have it.

We just went from 100 million to 3, 4000000000 by just saying higher numbers.

That's actually a good representation of what like 90% of finance TikTok is.

There is good content out there and I'll always highlight that there are good creators putting out helpful information that can really benefit people.

A lot of it is just people kind of full chested saying really big numbers.

What's a piece of information that you learned that feels illegal to know?

Instead of paying the 18 to 20 percent interest on that credit card debt what you do is you put your money into a whole life insurance policy and you borrow against the cash value and you pay the credit card off and you pay off all your debt now You are going to pay the 18% anyways So instead of paying the 18% to a credit card company key the 18% back to yourself And now what you're doing is you're paying yourself the interest versus a bank.

But meanwhile that cash value is Uninterrupted which means it keeps growing.

It's as if you never took the money out why you didn't take it out You just borrowed against that amount from yourself.

This is what some of the wealthiest people on the planet do, including banks.

It's 1 of the smartest ways for you to grow your wealth, for you to become your own bank and be dependent on only yourself.

Insurance agents have been popping off on TikTok about insurance products, really sharing a lot of misinformation.

And if you aren't familiar, Infinite Banking, Whole Life, IUL, all kind of the same family of products.

And all it is, to be blunt, is expensive life insurance.

The premiums are like 10 times out of a term life policy.

You know, I don't know how you go about paying off a credit card debt by entering a life insurance policy.

If you're in a credit card debt, you probably don't have the money for that premium.

Now, if you're unfamiliar with how whole life insurance works, the basic idea is that you pay a premium to the insurance company, again, for life insurance coverage.

It's a permanent policy, meaning that unless you have a different term, you'll be paying premiums for your life up until the day you die, at which point the death benefit will be paid.

But part of your premium, outside of covering the fees charged by the insurance company, will go towards what's called the cash value, which you can borrow against, you can technically withdraw it, although there's a big caveat to that.

And while it's in the account, yes, you can gather dividends or otherwise have an investment product.

And while it's in the account, it grows tax-free.

But there are a lot of things that make this really inappropriate for a lot of people.

You see a lot of agents will tout the benefits of that cash value aspect and the idea that you can borrow against it and that's all tax-free, whatever have you.

But what they don't highlight is that, yes, you can borrow that money.

Technically, you're just borrowing from the insurance company.

That's still likely going to be a net cost for effectively using your own money because you're not paying the interest rate to yourself, you're paying it to the insurance company.

It'd be like buying a house so that you can get a home equity line of credit.

Also anything withdrawal without surrendering the policy will reduce your death benefit.

So you don't get your cake and eat it too.

You either get the cash value or the death benefit in many cases.

Instead of all this, if you need to use your own money, you could just not buy a life policy, invest the money and then use it.

Now there can be a tax benefit for really wealthy people, which is why, you know, these insurance agents will highlight, oh, this is something the richer doing and the wealthier doing.

That tax benefit means a lot more for a really wealthy person than it does for someone with credit card debt or someone who is just starting off with investing.

At the end of the day, whole life is insurance.

And while there might be an application for very wealthy people, it is not a method for the average person to build their wealth.

For most people, it's going to make a lot more sense to take out a term insurance policy that's going to cover your needs if you were to pass away.

It's going to save you a lot more money and then you can invest the difference into your own cash value account, your own brokerage account or whatever that there aren't any terms about accessing.

Better yet you can utilize tax advantaged accounts to also gain a tax benefit using this money.

If you ever have an agent trying to sell you 1 of these policies, just ask them how much money they're making in commission from it, because you'll see why it's such an expensive contract.

So what is the easiest way to make $10,000 per month every single month with Forex Trade?

All you need to do is get funded $200,000.

Just a small loan of $200,000 from mom and dad for your Forex day trading.

In order to do this, you're gonna need some help.

So this is where you can get something like our EA, which will help you do this automatically.

After that, once you're funded, all you really need to do is keep getting 5% every single month, and that would equate to $10,000 per month.

So 1 thing I've noticed is that anyone who's selling a course or EA programs, anything that is a sort of supplemental way to sell you a secret as opposed to just making that money themselves is they'll always focus on what sounds like a reasonable return figure.

So in this case, he's seeing 5% a month, which doesn't sound like a ridiculous amount.

But it's worth keeping in mind that that equates to an annual return of 80% a year, which would outperform the best hedge fund track records we've ever seen.

And in 15 years, you'll be joining the billionaire club.

You'll get to rub shoulders with Bill Gates and Taylor Swift.

These gurus will distill returns down to more fathomable figures, like again, 1% a day or 5% a month, but it's just a sales tactic.

As I've said many times before, if they had a method for earning these ridiculous returns, they won't be on TikTok trying to peddle it to you.

They would just be doing that thing and becoming a billionaire.

It's not only the 100K in debt that you're going to be in.

It's the 4 years that you're behind the current.

The people who don't go to college or 4 years ahead of you.

They have 4 years in the real world They have 4 years of experience.

They're gonna be more successful than you.

Don't go to college Follow me for more tips like this.

I feel like that's just rage bait or something.

I'd be willing to bet that his dad or someone is encouraging him to make these videos.

I don't feel like yelling at a kid dressed up like Santa Claus.

You're 18 years old and you invest $300 a month for 8 years and then at 8 years you no longer invest again.

You'll be financially free by the time you retire.

People are like, what the heck are you talking about?

Well, at 8 years you would have invested $28,800 And if it was invested in the stock market, which has earned about 10% each year for the last 30 years, and because of compound interest, at, you know, retirement age, which is mid 60s, you'd have $1.8 million.

So yeah, that's not necessarily a bad or wrong TikTok.

That's actually an example I've highlighted in the past.

It really shows the benefit of starting investing early on.

I will say there are 2 kind of big considerations here that is likely going to reduce how much you actually get at the end of, you know, when you retire at 65.

Anytime you grow your money, you're gonna have to pay a percentage to the government.

Now, thankfully there are accounts like in the US you have your Roth IRA and in Canada we have the TFSA.

So I think with the example given you could technically keep the full amount tax exempt as you're growing it.

So in this case you could maybe avoid taxes, but the other factor that you can't avoid unfortunately is inflation.

If you assume an inflation rate of 2.5%, which is a bit more than the central bank's targets, but you know, they've missed those sometimes.

After accounting for 2.5% inflation, your return in real terms is 7.3%.

And using this in our calculation would show that that $1.8 million you get by the time you're 65 would only be worth about $600,000 in today's dollars.

And that's if you increase your $300 monthly contribution in step with inflation for the first 8 years.

So again, not about TikTok, but just worth keeping in mind those figures.

$600,000 is nothing to scoff at to have at 65.

But again, investing is not a miracle worker.

Even that 10% figure might not repeat into the future indefinitely.

And if you have a different asset allocation where you have more fixed income and less stocks, you're gonna have a lower return.

We'll still put it on the nice list for Christmas.

This outfit's turning into a sauna, but thank you for joining me today.

I hope you were able to learn something as we went through some finance TikToks.

As always, again, I do wanna highlight that there are people putting out very constructive and helpful TikToks out there that give important finance details.

But unfortunately, it tends to be a lot of people flexing their wealth and enjoying off fast cars and the like to try and sell you something.

So you have to be very careful taking really anything you hear in the space at face value.

If you found it did, please do make sure to like, subscribe, all that good stuff.

And let me know your thoughts in the comments down below on any of the TikToks we watched today.


Speaker 0: 🎵 It felt like a better idea on paper. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the plain bagel. I'm your host, Santa Claus. As we approach Christmas, I've been making a list of all the good boys and girls to receive presents this year. And I've noticed that some of you have been naughty, giving out bad financial advice on TikTok.

What do we say about that? Stop it. So once again, we are here to review some finance TikToks to see who's been good this year and who deserves a big lump of coal. Now, fun fact, your boy Santa Claus is a investment professional. I know it might not look like it, but as always, the goal here is to learn something, to go through and correct any misinformation we might come across, and otherwise just give some input into this content.

So without further ado, let's hop into it.

Speaker 1: If I don't make 8 figures in crypto in the next couple of years. There's a problem. The big problem that I had in the last bull run was that I wasn't prepared. And then now that I have like almost 8 years of, you know, experience and I'm like, OK, dude, this next 1, I'm gonna kill it.

Speaker 2: Crypto is the middle class's answer to be able to compete on a playing field that they don't have any other chance of ever competing.

Speaker 1: The middle class is never going to get rich from stocks.

Speaker 2: No, they're never. It's absolutely impossible. But I can really confidently say that if somebody buys Bitcoin today, within the next 18 months, you're going to be able to sell that for 3 times as much money.

Speaker 3: I agree

Speaker 0: We are so back I do agree that stocks don't really make people rich if you define rich as being like fast cars and yachts and stuff like that. It's still incredibly helpful and definitely something people should strive to do, but it's not a miracle worker. It can only work with what you put into it. Even still, that doesn't mean that Bitcoin or crypto is the answer to getting rich. It's really fallacy to use the historical growth rates of stuff like crypto and Bitcoin, when they've gone from obscurity to more mainstream adoption, that that to some degree is going to repeat itself into the future, to a point where it's going to elevate an entire middle-class to the kind of wealth that these people are probably alluding to.

And you should never treat a single investment that you're say holding in a brokerage account as your lottery ticket. The moment you start treating investments like that, you're just gambling and you're really setting yourself up for failure. So just something to keep in mind. I'm sorry. I have to take this off.

Speaker 3: Yo, all right. I'm looking for a call entry point right now. From what it looks like, the technicals look like the chart is going to go to the moon. And...

Speaker 0: Yeah, from what I can see here, definitely set up for a rocket ship emoji straight to Mars.

Speaker 3: I am going to entering calls right now. All right, we're entered in. Okay, see where this shit goes. Why won't you move? Move?

Wait, wait, I think that's what we needed. I think we're up. I think we're up good. Hold on. Oh, let's go All right.

All right. Come on a bit more fuck Come on, come on. Just another pump. Let's go. That's what we needed.

That's what we need a baby. All right right now We're up 50% all right. I'm scaling out. Holy shit. All right, scaling out right now.

I'm gonna alert this to my Discord. Scaling out 75% of my contracts. Holy, all right. I'm gonna leave a few runners right now. And we're out, we're out, we're out of this f**king trade.

Holy! $1,200. 5 minutes. Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1: Did everyone in the discord catch that good shit Wow

Speaker 0: Straight to the naughty list Nothing, but a colon you're stocking this year. This is like the dystopian future of finance content on social media. I do like the cheeky discord shout out slipping in a quick advertisement there, but I hope it's clear that outside of this probably being very much fabricated, this is really just structured gambling. It feels like you're doing analysis, but this level of kind of simplified technical analysis, there's really no merit to it. It's just a focus of people trying to sell a course or discord groups or whatever, because it feels like a very simple, get a sophisticated way to make money with stocks when it really isn't.

Which is pretty obvious when you see how traders on social media will react to making a bit of money. It's not like, oh, that was a expected outcome. It's, oh, thank God.

Speaker 4: The e-cigarette and vape market is projected to grow by an astonishing 30% from now to 2030. That means it's projected to be 1 of the fastest growing markets along with AI, microchips and solar power. The stock we're talking about today is a penny stock out of Florida and if you don't like sin stocks then This one's not for you. But if you're here to make money, the stock is Kaival Brands, ticker symbol KAVL. They're already working with giant retailers such as Circle K, etc.

They have over $12 million in assets and only 2.6 million in liabilities, meaning the chances of them going bankrupt anytime soon is nearly 0.

Speaker 0: That's not really true. Don't get me wrong, holding all else constant, the less debt you have and the less liabilities, the better in terms of risk of bankruptcy. But that doesn't mean that this company can't still go under because you can still lose money on your operations. If you don't have enough cash or profit coming in to cover your employee salaries, then eventually you're still going to fail. In fact, yeah, if you pull up the company's financial statements, you can see that this firm actually has falling revenues, negative operating cashflow, and they have a retained earnings deficit.

Meaning over their lifetime, they've lost a good chunk of the money that investors have put into them. The only reason they still have a positive net asset balance where they haven't been outweighed by liabilities is because investors have been bailing out their operations with additional paid-in capital. If it wasn't for that extra injection of cash from new investors, this company would have a negative book value. It could be worthless. So yeah, even before getting into the fundamentals of what this company even does, some really big red flags here.

And it's why it's really important if you're going to take the step of doing stock analysis, you have to do a comprehensive financial analysis. You can't just rely on individual metrics or indicators because they're not going to tell you the whole story. And you really do have to look at everything in tandem. Not to mention it's a really flawed approach to just pick a company based on it operating in an attractive high growth area. Because it really doesn't guarantee success.

There's no better example of that than the dot-com crash. Really just a handful of companies came out of that profitable versus the thousands of other startups that seem very promising at times in that space. So you know maybe e-cigarettes or whatever this industry is does do well. Still some regulatory uncertainty there but even if that's the case it doesn't mean that an individual position is going to be a big win for you.

Speaker 5: What would it take for you to

Speaker 6: get 3000000000 within 6 months?

Speaker 5: I'd take a hundred million that I have and I'd go to a big institution and say, hey, 10X my 100. That'd be a bill. Don't do that. 100%. I'd take the bill, go buy 3000000000.

A billion dollars, I'll buy 3 or 4000000000 dollars worth of real estate. We could do 4000000000 this year.

Speaker 6: I don't understand why you're thinking so small. Curious why you play so small when you have it.

Speaker 0: What's happening? We just went from 100 million to 3, 4000000000 by just saying higher numbers. That's actually a good representation of what like 90% of finance TikTok is. There is good content out there and I'll always highlight that there are good creators putting out helpful information that can really benefit people. A lot of it is just people kind of full chested saying really big numbers.

Speaker 7: What's a piece of information that you learned that feels illegal to know?

Speaker 8: The infinite banking system. Credit card debt, for example. Instead of paying the 18 to 20 percent interest on that credit card debt what you do is you put your money into a whole life insurance policy and you borrow against the cash value and you pay the credit card off and you pay off all your debt now You are going to pay the 18% anyways So instead of paying the 18% to a credit card company key the 18% back to yourself And now what you're doing is you're paying yourself the interest versus a bank. But meanwhile that cash value is Uninterrupted which means it keeps growing. It's as if you never took the money out why you didn't take it out You just borrowed against that amount from yourself.

This is what some of the wealthiest people on the planet do, including banks. It's 1 of the smartest ways for you to grow your wealth, for you to become your own bank and be dependent on only yourself.

Speaker 0: That's definitely not true. Insurance agents have been popping off on TikTok about insurance products, really sharing a lot of misinformation. And if you aren't familiar, Infinite Banking, Whole Life, IUL, all kind of the same family of products. And all it is, to be blunt, is expensive life insurance. The premiums are like 10 times out of a term life policy.

You know, I don't know how you go about paying off a credit card debt by entering a life insurance policy. If you're in a credit card debt, you probably don't have the money for that premium. Now, if you're unfamiliar with how whole life insurance works, the basic idea is that you pay a premium to the insurance company, again, for life insurance coverage. It's a permanent policy, meaning that unless you have a different term, you'll be paying premiums for your life up until the day you die, at which point the death benefit will be paid. But part of your premium, outside of covering the fees charged by the insurance company, will go towards what's called the cash value, which you can borrow against, you can technically withdraw it, although there's a big caveat to that.

And while it's in the account, yes, you can gather dividends or otherwise have an investment product. And while it's in the account, it grows tax-free. So it's not being taxed on that growth. But there are a lot of things that make this really inappropriate for a lot of people. You see a lot of agents will tout the benefits of that cash value aspect and the idea that you can borrow against it and that's all tax-free, whatever have you.

But what they don't highlight is that, yes, you can borrow that money. Technically, you're just borrowing from the insurance company. That's still likely going to be a net cost for effectively using your own money because you're not paying the interest rate to yourself, you're paying it to the insurance company. It'd be like buying a house so that you can get a home equity line of credit. Also anything withdrawal without surrendering the policy will reduce your death benefit.

So you don't get your cake and eat it too. You either get the cash value or the death benefit in many cases. Instead of all this, if you need to use your own money, you could just not buy a life policy, invest the money and then use it. Now there can be a tax benefit for really wealthy people, which is why, you know, these insurance agents will highlight, oh, this is something the richer doing and the wealthier doing. Yeah, because they're rich and wealthy.

That tax benefit means a lot more for a really wealthy person than it does for someone with credit card debt or someone who is just starting off with investing. At the end of the day, whole life is insurance. And while there might be an application for very wealthy people, it is not a method for the average person to build their wealth. For most people, it's going to make a lot more sense to take out a term insurance policy that's going to cover your needs if you were to pass away. It's going to save you a lot more money and then you can invest the difference into your own cash value account, your own brokerage account or whatever that there aren't any terms about accessing.

Better yet you can utilize tax advantaged accounts to also gain a tax benefit using this money. If you ever have an agent trying to sell you 1 of these policies, just ask them how much money they're making in commission from it, because you'll see why it's such an expensive contract.

Speaker 6: So what is the easiest way to make $10,000 per month every single month with Forex Trade? Really simple. All you need to do is get funded $200,000. So...

Speaker 0: First step, easy. Just a small loan of $200,000 from mom and dad for your Forex day trading.

Speaker 6: In order to do this, you're gonna need some help. So this is where you can get something like our EA, which will help you do this automatically. After that, once you're funded, all you really need to do is keep getting 5% every single month, and that would equate to $10,000 per month. Sounds easy? Because it is.

Speaker 0: So 1 thing I've noticed is that anyone who's selling a course or EA programs, anything that is a sort of supplemental way to sell you a secret as opposed to just making that money themselves is they'll always focus on what sounds like a reasonable return figure. So in this case, he's seeing 5% a month, which doesn't sound like a ridiculous amount. But it's worth keeping in mind that that equates to an annual return of 80% a year, which would outperform the best hedge fund track records we've ever seen. And in 15 years, you'll be joining the billionaire club. So That's awesome.

You'll get to rub shoulders with Bill Gates and Taylor Swift. So clearly that's not realistic. These gurus will distill returns down to more fathomable figures, like again, 1% a day or 5% a month, but it's just a sales tactic. As I've said many times before, if they had a method for earning these ridiculous returns, they won't be on TikTok trying to peddle it to you. They would just be doing that thing and becoming a billionaire.

Speaker 7: College is useless. It's not only the 100K in debt that you're going to be in. It's the 4 years that you're behind the current. The people who don't go to college or 4 years ahead of you. They have 4 years in the real world They have 4 years of experience.

They're gonna be more successful than you. It's simple math. Don't go to college Follow me for more tips like this.

Speaker 0: No That's not real. I feel like that's just rage bait or something. I'd be willing to bet that his dad or someone is encouraging him to make these videos. I've got no comment. I don't feel like yelling at a kid dressed up like Santa Claus.

Speaker 9: You're 18 years old and you invest $300 a month for 8 years and then at 8 years you no longer invest again. You'll be financially free by the time you retire. You have $1.8 million. People are like, what the heck are you talking about? Well, at 8 years you would have invested $28,800 And if it was invested in the stock market, which has earned about 10% each year for the last 30 years, and because of compound interest, at, you know, retirement age, which is mid 60s, you'd have $1.8 million.

It's psycho.

Speaker 0: So yeah, that's not necessarily a bad or wrong TikTok. That's actually an example I've highlighted in the past. It really shows the benefit of starting investing early on. I will say there are 2 kind of big considerations here that is likely going to reduce how much you actually get at the end of, you know, when you retire at 65. For 1, there's taxes.

Anytime you grow your money, you're gonna have to pay a percentage to the government. Now, thankfully there are accounts like in the US you have your Roth IRA and in Canada we have the TFSA. So I think with the example given you could technically keep the full amount tax exempt as you're growing it. So in this case you could maybe avoid taxes, but the other factor that you can't avoid unfortunately is inflation. If you assume an inflation rate of 2.5%, which is a bit more than the central bank's targets, but you know, they've missed those sometimes.

After accounting for 2.5% inflation, your return in real terms is 7.3%. And using this in our calculation would show that that $1.8 million you get by the time you're 65 would only be worth about $600,000 in today's dollars. And that's if you increase your $300 monthly contribution in step with inflation for the first 8 years. So again, not about TikTok, but just worth keeping in mind those figures. $600,000 is nothing to scoff at to have at 65.

But again, investing is not a miracle worker. Even that 10% figure might not repeat into the future indefinitely. And if you have a different asset allocation where you have more fixed income and less stocks, you're gonna have a lower return. But overall, good video. We'll still put it on the nice list for Christmas.

Anyway, I'm gonna stop there. This outfit's turning into a sauna, but thank you for joining me today. I hope you were able to learn something as we went through some finance TikToks. As always, again, I do wanna highlight that there are people putting out very constructive and helpful TikToks out there that give important finance details. But unfortunately, it tends to be a lot of people flexing their wealth and enjoying off fast cars and the like to try and sell you something.

So you have to be very careful taking really anything you hear in the space at face value. But hopefully this video helped a bit. If you found it did, please do make sure to like, subscribe, all that good stuff. It does help the channel tremendously. And let me know your thoughts in the comments down below on any of the TikToks we watched today.

That's everything for me today. And until next time, Merry Christmas. Such a weird idea.

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Investment Analyst Reacts to Investing TikToks - Holiday Special