Topic today that we have Mike Kaeding on about, and that is affordable housing. I grew up very close to it. My father was involved in affordable housing. So I am excited to have Mike on. We have never had a guest on that hit such a social specific part of our society. So without further ado, Mike, welcome. Why don't you start with your background and your

Mike Kaeding:
0:22

business? Yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm CEO of a company called Norhart and we're focused on driving down housing costs by solving construction costs. That's really the core of what goes into housing. And right now we're achieving typically about a 20 to 30 percent reduction. We believe we can achieve a 50 percent reduction. But imagine what that means. Someday your rent or your mortgage payment could be half. And that's our dream. That's the kind of impact that we're hoping to make in our lifetime. I got started in this because it was a family business. My parents started the business when I was very young and we lost everything. And in fact, my dad even got kidnapped in Peru, crazy story. And we slowly grew from there. And I remember growing up where we built these small apartment buildings, which were a great experience. And then I went off to college and I wanted nothing to do with the family business, right? I don't want people to think it was given to me. So I really wrestled with my own ego on that. But what I realized deep down is that I just wanted to make a meaningful, positive impact in the world. And I realized I could take this opportunity of the small business. Use the business to have that level of impact. And after getting past my own ego, my dad and I worked together for the first couple of years, we doubled the size of the company and then he suddenly passed away and overnight, pretty young, I became the CEO of still small company which is terrifying. And, but what's exciting is we took it from there. Cause the magic really is I didn't know what I didn't know much, right? I could start asking questions. I could start challenging things like, why are we doing it a certain way? We started to change the industry. We started to change the way things were done. And now we're starting to achieve those kinds of cost savings. So the dream. It's to eventually as we grow to pass those on to customers.

Stoy Hall, CFP®, Host:
2:22

And I've lost a parent, so I know how that is. Imagine being it also your business owner and your mentor and all of that at once. So applaud you for sticking with it and getting through it, but you're right. Ultimately, you were able to go. Why are we doing these things and what can we do to improve and as a business owner, and obviously you can attest to this more is being able to step back and take the time to ask those questions. I feel like a lot of businesses fail or plateau or lose grip of what their original vision is because they don't take that time to just go. Okay. Why are we doing it this way? Are we doing it this way? Just because we've always done it right. That answer to me is it's terrible. We've all been

Mike Kaeding:
3:06

nuts.

Stoy Hall, CFP®, Host:
3:07

Come on, that's not how this goes. So what could you say to business owners who maybe feel stuck or haven't reviewed themselves in a way besides losing their father or their business partner? Of course. What are some steps there? Someone could step back and re envision or re asked themselves. Why are we doing that?

Mike Kaeding:
3:25

Such a good question. I think the first step to do is you've got to understand where you're headed as an organization. And this can change and morph. But really codifying that, like for us, it's about building and managing awesome apartments to solve housing affordability, like to know what that is, to nail that down is the important kind of first step. We are Northstar has, cause if you're just wandering aimlessly, like what are you optimizing for a comfortable life for. For just less pain, right? Or more vacations or something. But if you really want to make an impact, you need to know what that impact is and the challenge with creating that impact or creating that statement is that you don't quite know what it is. You've got to bump into the world a little bit. Explore, try things out, explore some more and just experiment. But as far as taking steps to change things, to take a step back and what can I do differently in our business? Honestly, I think a big chunk of it is mindset. If your mindset is such that I just want to live a comfortable life, minimize pain, and just do my thing, go home at four 30 every day. You're going to have a hard time because your mindsets in a way of optimizing, I would say the wrong thing, but if instead you're focused on making that wider impact, that can give you enough of a spark energy to start asking the deeper questions. I think the next thing though is it is terrifying. And the reality is anytime we do something new, we are terrible at it. That's normal, right? As kids, because we're talking before the show, we've got, I've got a young kids. And as kids, like we don't, we're not afraid of that. Like we can't walk, we can't talk. We can't we can't read. We can't write. My daughter's is doing somersaults and gymnastics kinds of things. And she goes into it with like such bravery, like I'm awesome. And she's working to get better. But something happens as we get older. We start to think ah, man, I need to be good out of the gate, right? If I'm not good out of the gate, what are people going to think of me? I don't think I'm not as good. I'm not a good person or what have you. Now the reality is people don't think about you nearly as much as you think about yourself but there's an interesting study out there where there was two groups of people That were their team was split into two groups The first group was in charge of making the very best clay pot that they could the second group Was in charge of making as many clay pots as they could Well, as you'd expect, the first group had the best first pot, but the interesting thing is, over time, the group that focused on just making as many as they could ended up making far superior pots in the end. And I think that's the lesson that we have to take away is be okay with being bad. Get out there, screw things up, try new things. Recognize you're going to fail. And that's part of the process. I feel all the time, but it's because we've been brave to do get it into that. It's made us successful in the end.

Stoy Hall, CFP®, Host:
6:30

Yeah you hit it on the nail right there. Whatever analogy you want to use there, because ultimately. We all suck at first, we all suck. And we're all sucking at something currently too that we're trying to figure out and get better at. And once you recognize that really we're all in that same boat, you start to go, Oh, life isn't really that hard. There really is no. And I always say there's no experts at anything because you're always continuing to learn the ones that say they're experts and Are in that tier are ones that are probably just starting to plateau and have some self issues because you're continuing to learn You never can perfect anything in life in my opinion. There's not one thing we can perfect you always can work to get harder. Great point

Mike Kaeding:
7:14

on that. I love that. And I can give a tangible example because right now my daughter wanted to start a YouTube channel, which I thought she was a little crazy.

Stoy Hall, CFP®, Host:
7:22

My nine and six year old also want to start a YouTube channel. So yes,

Mike Kaeding:
7:27

very heavily. So yeah, I thought there, she was a little crazy. I wasn't sure where she was going to follow through on it, but she. Persisted, she wouldn't stop bringing it up. And okay, I said, fine, we'll start this. We started recording videos. They were terrible. And what's interesting is when you first put those videos out, they don't get many views. They don't get a lot of engagement. They are bad. That's part of the process. And if you start reading comments and there's a lot of haters out there, especially in that early stage, you can get emotionally down and that's tough. You got to get past that. And this is just one stage in the process. But what's really interesting is we've been at it for two or three months now. And just the video we recorded last week, we now got on the news on TV news, we're on the radio live. Just a few days ago, we were in the newspaper, like it's crazy what can happen if you're willing to get past all the haters in the beginning.

Stoy Hall, CFP®, Host:
8:18

It's awesome. And kids in YouTube now, that's a, we didn't have that growing up, right? That was not in our purview to even think about. So I think that's great that kids are finding ways to be entrepreneurs and express themselves in any which way possible. Applaud you on that. How many employees are you up to now?

Mike Kaeding:
8:36

Yeah, we're like 220.

Stoy Hall, CFP®, Host:
8:39

So that's not a small number. No. That's not a mom and pop shop. That's, there's a lot of layers and tiers to that. As the CEO who does speaking and has such a good, great passion and the whole firm is designed around, the housing crisis essentially, how do you keep 220 people pushing forward for the similar goal?

Mike Kaeding:
9:01

You just hit the nail on the head of what I think is the most important thing that any business leader can focus on. And for us, that's building the right culture and having the right people. I think step one in that whole process is hiring the very best. Best and I'll get to why that impacts retention a little bit later, but to give some perspective on this, we fight literally to find the best people in the world. We'll hire people. We have about 15 percent of our staff is international. We have people in different States that we fly in to work during the week and we fly them home on the weekend. One of our staff members in 2007. Steve Jobs announces the iPhone this member or Steve Jobs walks off stage and our employee walks on that same stage Following Steve Jobs presentation. It's that Caliber of people now. I know what most business leaders think At this point, and I certainly did is that sounds expensive and it's true. It is because in order to have that kind of people, you need to pay them top of market, right? But what most business leaders fail to understand is that the best people outperform the average by two to five to 10 times as much. And I have literally seen that over and over again. And so instead of looking at it as a cost per person, if you look at it, As a cost per unit produced, those people are actually the least expensive because they're producing so much more than the average. And if you want to change an industry, you need people of that kind of caliber to do it. But there's some magic that happens as a result of that. And so one is the culture you start creating. When you have people at that level, it is so much fun coming into work because everyone's so fricking good, right? And they're challenging each other or pushing each other. We can, we'll deal with tough times, but we're all in there together to solve the issues in front of us. And so one of the magic. Elements of keeping the best people is having the best people around. In fact, a few weeks ago, I was in a team meeting. This was actually with some of the lower level staff members. And they were talking about the issues we face. Cause we went from wood to steel, a lot of pain in our construction processes right now. And he stood up in this team meeting. It was maybe 15 people there. And he said, Mike, it is really a struggle right now, given all the problems we're dealing with. But honestly, I never want to leave this company. And don't get a big ego because it's not you. The reason I never want to leave this company. He looked around at the people next to him. He said, it's because of my coworkers. I have never worked at a team with so many amazing, incredible people. And yeah, that's, that I think is one of the key secrets to keeping the best people.

Stoy Hall, CFP®, Host:
12:03

Absolutely. Culture, right? Culture is it. People love people. We, as humans, want to be around others. Yeah. As long as we're taken care of, we're taking care of others. That's it. That's all we want. In this whole attitude of… I guess salaries and paying people and in office, not in office to me is usually greed ultimately comes down to it, right? The CEO making 25 to a hundred X what the bottom line person is. And to me, that's all about money and that's not what it should be about. Now, obviously your company, your firm is. Totally designed around something that's above, bigger than all of us, but I believe all businesses should think that way and operate that way. And if you do, the problems that occur are very simple to not simple to solve, but are simple mentally and culturally to get through, right? We're gonna get to more of specifics of your business, but switching from a wood to steel is not a small feat. Ultimately. And that's a change of logistics. Supply chain, name it, there's issues, but when your team comes together and says, yeah, this sucks, but together, we'll figure it out when you get to that point. Then you're not even really the business owner. You're not even the CEO. You're just like another staff along for the ride, watching this thing grow. And yeah, you might have to make a couple of big decisions, but ultimately the business is running, you're just kind

Mike Kaeding:
13:30

of there. You nailed it. A lot of leaders say it's lonely at the top and I've never really felt that way. And the reason that is, is because I feel like more like I'm a part of an amazing team rather than some independent leader with a bunch of minions underneath me. And it's a way better way, I think, to live life. Yeah, I

Stoy Hall, CFP®, Host:
13:51

agree. One last question on the business front. Okay. Work from home in office. What's your standpoint on it and where do you see the future to be?

Mike Kaeding:
14:01

Yeah. So for us, we provide maximum flexibility. So anything that can be flexible is allowed to be flexible. I want. To enable you to do the best work you can. And I trust you to make incredible decisions to support that work in the end. Any job that can be done remotely is allowed to be done remotely. In fact we've got fairly sizable offices here and there's probably only two or three of us in the office at any given time because a lot of people work from home, totally. Okay. And they'll come in when they need to for different engagements and things of that nature. Within the construction side, it's a little tough to work remotely. Although I have put the challenge out to the team, if they can create a robot that they can control via computer, they can work remotely. But even so within our construction teams, again, this philosophy of empowering them to make their own decisions, each team sets their own hours. So some teams work eight hour days. They get up really early. Some teams like later afternoon, they're working. Some teams work for 10 hour days. And so all of that decision making, we try to push as low as possible. The only requirement is that we're doing things that make sense for the work. But other than that, everything is fair game for you to make the decision that's best for your life.

Stoy Hall, CFP®, Host:
15:18

I think that allows people to take work out of it, right? They're not working. They're just living a lifestyle. Yeah. It's that part. They're just living. This is how they make money, but they're living life as opposed to like clock in clock out the grind. Oh, this is work. And that does two things for us on the financial side. One, it puts people at ease and takes off the stress, which makes financial planning drastically easier. And two, they end up working longer and healthier lives, which ultimately is good for the business, but it's also really good for them because they can then do what they want to do as opposed to this, media driven. Age 65, 67, completely retire, work as hard as you can until then, and then live life. You're doing something that allows them to just live life to the fullest all the time in a back to your culture. That's why they love the hell out of it and they love their life. They love their life. They're going to do great things for you and it doesn't limit their mentality.

Mike Kaeding:
16:18

Exactly. And you get better work out of that. Because if they're dreading coming to work, if that's where their headspace is, guess what their output is not going to be where it could be. But if they're fully engaged, they're excited about coming to work. They're way more creative. They come up with awesome ideas to drive things forward. And you as a business leader are better off for giving them as much what.

Stoy Hall, CFP®, Host:
16:44

What the hell does your business do and how are you attacking affordable housing?

Mike Kaeding:
16:49

Yeah. So the key we believe to affordable housing is solving construction costs. Traditionally affordable housing is housing that the government gives you a chunk of money so that your rents are capped. That's good and I appreciate where people are coming out with that, but the problem is housing is such a major sector of the economy. That you can't take enough money out of the rest of the economy and shift it in the housing to artificially reduce housing prices. And so you won't solve the problem that way. What you have to do is you have to solve the inputs to that problem. And what's interesting is if you look at areas like manufacturing over the past 60 years, they've improved labor productivity. By 760 percent air culture is improved by 1500%. Do you have an idea of what construction has done? Negative well, 10%, but basically nothing, right? It's awful. And so the basic idea is we want to take the lessons learned. From these other industries and apply it to our own. They give you some sense of that. We have a traditionally in construction, it's very segmented. You've got a different company. That's your plumber, your different company. That's your general contractor, coordinating everything different company, that's your owner. You have dozens of companies, if not hundreds of companies that come together to work on one project and then they leave. The world of manufacturing looks at that and says, dude, you guys are crazy. Why? Why in the world do you do that? So we brought all the work under one roof, but now that's under one roof, we can start doing some clever things or some interesting things. I shouldn't call it clever because it's so basic in manufacturing. One technique is the assembly line, right? Take a product. You move it down a line. But how in the world could you do that with construction? You can't take a building and move it down a line. No, but what you can do is you can take the person and move them. Through the building. So we break our building down into smaller chunks. We call batches. You can think of them like units and every five or six hours right now, each team shifts by one unit through the building. And so if you look at the end of our building where the units are getting completed, that means every five or six hours, there's a brand new apartment unit completed. If you look at the other end of our building, it's just dirt. We haven't even dug the foundation yet. And that one technique alone can take a project that might be 12 or 15 months and drive it down to nine months. But there are dozens and probably, a little hundreds of techniques like that we're stealing from manufacturing and applying it to construction.

Stoy Hall, CFP®, Host:
19:39

Acquiring, not stealing, acquiring.

Mike Kaeding:
19:41

Yeah, there we go.

Stoy Hall, CFP®, Host:
19:44

No that's phenomenal. And I want to. Hit a point. I guess the main point before I dive into holy hell, that's, a fantastic idea is we're talking about affordable housing. We're not talking about the government, right? I'm glad you brought that up. We're not talking about, all of the section eights and stuff like that. We're talking about making housing affordable general not necessarily what Backed by the government. And so with that, though, everyone's going to ask this question, right? But won't that reduce the value of my home if you continue to do this? And what does that do to me personally, right now, as a homeowner?

Mike Kaeding:
20:20

That's a fantastic question. I think the transition is going to be slow over time. And so what it may end up being is that housing valuations don't climb as much as they have in the past. But yeah, I think it will have a meaningful impact. I think you look at industry or countries like Japan right now, some of their housing is as cheap as a dollar because of the way the demographics and everything is going on. That housing actually does depreciate over time. We're 50, 60, 70 years, your house actually may go down in value. Like cars do here in America that might have an impact. So it's a really interesting point of view. I think another interesting perspective is a lot of times people will go onto our website and they say, Mike, you're talking about driving the cost of housing down, but the rents on your website and your prices, they're consistent with everyone in the market. What the bleep, like you're lying to us. And my response is this. If we had a lower rent today, not only would it have a negative impact on houses, but we would solve housing affordability only for a few thousand people. Our goal is to solve it for everyone nationwide. And the way we do that is we're taking the profits that we're earning. And putting it into the system that builds housing, we're focused primarily on apartments. And as you ramp up that system, we're scaling that system. Our goal of the next 10 years is 192, 000 units. As we scale up that system, we're now providing enough new housing on the market where supply is abundant and prices start coming down naturally. But here's the kicker. It's not just for our own residents. Our goal ultimately is to do it for everyone nationwide.

Stoy Hall, CFP®, Host:
22:08

Yeah. And it's it's a Econ 101, right? Supply. Right now they're, the demand's huge and there's no supply. So artificially reducing something is going to cause a ripple and not the long term game and talk to a lot of our clients and everyone about things are long term. There is no fixed almost anything in life and you got to think about that and what you're doing and what he's saying, ultimately, what Mike saying is the fact of he needs to have enough units into the system across the United States in order to start to shift supply and demand. Once that happens, you will start to see probably rents. Plateau and not rise and then start to slowly decrease over time into a point where it's going to get into a rate, a little bit of a up and down range. But that range is a lot lower than what we're seeing right now, but it's going to take time and it's going to take people's investments and understanding of that. To do that. So how do we get more supply into the system? Obviously you're doing it, but how can others help? What are you looking at from an investment perspective? Are there other firms like you are you just a unicorn? How can we do more?

Mike Kaeding:
23:25

Yeah. Part of it is I'm open. I share all these ideas and things out there. Cause I want to help others do this too. All right. My goal. My very sincerely, like I don't really care about wealth, right? I live comfortable middle, middle income kind of lifestyle. I'm happy with that, right? I got a comfortable bed and I, a decent house and a great family. It, to me, it's not about money. Cause my grave what are you going to do with it? You're going to shovel a hundred dollar bills on my grave. My goal, my dream is impact. How do we leave a meaningful and positive impact on the world? And so sharing this information openly, I'm I do all the time on these podcasts. The second thing is how do we actually solve this? And so part of it's helping others do it. But another big part of it is just expanding ourselves, right? Because I think the harder issue isn't the ideas. It's the execution. And we've got such a strong team and we're growing that we want to do more, right? It's expand our operations even further. And so we actually now have an investment opportunity for people if they're interested to go into our website, norhub. com forward slash invest where we are actually open this up in a way that anyone in America can invest. We actually went the harder route where sec regulated. We've got we have audits and stuff that they have to do on us. It's quite extensive but it's a very easy to use online platform where you can actually lock your money in for six to 24 months, get your money back out of that. And you get a higher rate of return that you can probably get most anywhere else from these kinds of investments. And then then out of that you're also helping us make this impact on society.

Stoy Hall, CFP®, Host:
25:04

That's phenomenal. I just got the chills because I have my own fund as well. And as you see regulations and audits every year, just be jeebies, but it's phenomenal. You're doing it that route. I bring. And probably what I'll do is I'll do a clip and go onto your website and walk people through it all. As I've had it through one for my own clients, but just for people in general, we have an alternative investment series that we talk about different types of investments, not your stocks and bonds, because vomit, right? We were over those we need something else and. Industry society is turning towards wanting to invest what they're passionate about that can do good for others. Returns matter, but they don't matter as much as the media. And we all think, I can go ahead and get 10 percent from something, but I don't feel good about it, but I can go ahead and get 5 percent over here. And I feel like it's really doing impactful work. That 5 percent is going to win because they, it matters more than just some number, because the majority of people really don't care about. Being rich. Let's be real. It's those narcissistic CEOs and everything up, up in the top that all they care about is money. We, most of us are like you, where it's I, if I'm good. Let's do more for others. So more people can be good. Yeah. So I applaud you for that. And yes we'll definitely do, I'll do a short little Video that I'll post out there on walking through your process. So everyone can see it and get involved that way. But that's phenomenal. When did you come up with the idea to do the invest part?

Mike Kaeding:
26:34

Yeah. So what's interesting for us is because our costs are so low, we've actually never needed to raise money from investors before because the bank financing. 25 percent less. Typically banks will fund up to 75 percent of a project. And so if our costs are only 75 percent to die, we've got what we needed, which is pretty rare. I don't know anyone who's ever been able to do that in our industry. The problem is that we've run into in the last few years, last year is rising interest rates. And so what happens is that as interest rates rise. Banks give you less money, what they call us proceeds. And so if we have a hundred million dollar project, they were giving us 75. Now they're only giving us 55. And so there's lots of equity there, but how do we raise capital so that we can bridge that gap from 55 to 75. And so Norhart Invest or this online platform was our first avenue into that. And this product is really targeted at the kind of retail investor. It's super easy to use. And then we're now, we're also working on more of the accredited institutional kind of investor avenue as well, which is aside from Norhart Invest. Yeah, that, that's what sparked it all is realizing that. Hey, we've got a change in the market and we just have to pivot so that we can continue to grow.

Stoy Hall, CFP®, Host:
27:56

I love that you start with retail. I really do that. That one it's what you're about, your passion, exactly what your whole firm's about. So I'm so glad you didn't start institutional accredited side, like everyone else in the world does. I am. So glad you took the hard route, the more expensive route of going the retail route. And when we mean retail, we mean individual every day people is what we're talking about here. Accredited you have a net worth of over a million and make 300, 000 institutional. It just a giant conglomerates of people who have money, right? Like the big company. So that's institutional. I just wanted to make sure everyone knew that, but I love how you start with retail. And getting others involved. Ultimately that is the smartest and best route because now as a planner, I can get more people involved who want to help. And really that's what it is. They're wanting to help. Yes. You get a return. That's fantastic. But there's so many people who just want to help someone who's doing something like this. That it's almost like a donation, except for they're getting their money back. Plus some, how is that not a win across the

Mike Kaeding:
29:01

board? Yeah, exactly. And there's so many people, the vast majority of people tell me that I'm crazy for having gone retail first. Very expensive. Hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get through all the approvals. But I don't know, like it just feels, it's always felt wrong because the vast majority of people can't invest in stuff like this because of the SEC rules. And it's 99 percent of people can't, and I just thought, I'd much rather do something that can hopefully have a positive impact in people's lives and an investment standpoint as well. So that's what we took and hopefully your audience and others prove us right that was the right route to go, but we'll see.

Stoy Hall, CFP®, Host:
29:43

Yeah, we'll see. We'll blast it for sure. And I have. A couple hot takes about the accredited investor rule that I've put out there. And I think, and it always leads with, I think accredited investor rules shit rule. And the reason for that is because it takes out 90, I think it's 95 percent of people immediately don't qualify based upon just income alone. And then another two or two, one to 2 percent are knocked out because of the net worth side, because it does include your primary residence. So I think it's terrible because it gives. People no chance, like you're telling me I'm not good enough because I don't have enough money and I know a lot of specifically young people who are very intelligent, who understand the risks, they understand what they're doing, but they can't invest into these that actually build your wealth. So everyone out there, if you really wanted to become rich, quote unquote, and really have more money, you need to invest into these things, not. Stocks and bonds and mutual funds only that is really good for your base That is not good for getting the returns that you can see outside of those and all the wealthy people in the world ultra wealthy The billionaires, except for the Saudis who are trillionaires with their oil They all do all of these other things. And so that's what you need to do So I love that you had a retail I'm gonna hit it I'm going to blow that one up. I don't care outside of the podcast because that's what I'm really passionate about is finding others who think like you and want to actually do what you do. So I love the hell out of that. Thank you. Love

Mike Kaeding:
31:13

that. Thanks as well. So

Stoy Hall, CFP®, Host:
31:15

we've nailed a lot of things today. What do you want to leave people with when they're thinking about affordable housing, right? And they're thinking about this, whether it's other companies who are doing this others who may want to start doing this, what do you want to leave them with?

Mike Kaeding:
31:31

For the last few decades, incomes have risen slower than the cost of housing. In fact, I looked at one study recently that showed in the 60s, the cost of a house was about double your annual income. And today it's something like seven times your annual income. It doesn't have to be that way, right? We can work together. If we can find great people, bring people together, bring the right money together. We can solve this. It's a lot of work. It's going to be a lot of years, but we can solve this. And I think that's a legacy worth living with or with executing on in our lifetime. I agree.

Stoy Hall, CFP®, Host:
32:09

Okay. I appreciate your time, everyone. We're going to have him back on. Don't worry. There's a lot of changes coming down with interest rates. Cost of materials. We're going to go through a presidential election and I'm very interested in keen on seeing how that affects what Mike's doing in his firm, as well as this new invest portal idea and blasting that. So appreciate your time love the hell out of what you're doing. And I can't wait to dig into that in the future.

Mike Kaeding:
32:36

Awesome. Thanks for having me. The proceeding program was sponsored by Black Mammoth. Any awards, rankings, or recognition by unaffiliated third parties or publications are in no way indicative of the advisor's future performance or any individual client's investment success. No award ranking or recognition should be construed as a current or past endorsement of black mammoth. Information regarding specific awards, rankings, or recognitions is available on the Black Mammoth website, www.black mammoth.com. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. Investment strategies such as asset allocation, diversification, or rebalancing do not assure or guarantee better performance and cannot eliminate the risk of investment losses. There are no guarantees that a portfolio employing these or any other strategy will outperform a portfolio that does not engage in such strategies. This broadcast should not be construed by any client or prospective client as a solicitation to affect or attempt to affect transactions and securities or the rendering of personalized investment advice due to various factors including changing market conditions. The information discussed in this broadcast may no longer be reflective of current positions or recommendations. While information presented is believed to be factual and up to date, Black Mammoth do not guarantee its accuracy, and it should not be regarded as a complete analysis of the subjects discussed. The tax and the state planning information discussed is general in nature and is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as legal or tax advice. Listeners should consult an attorney or tax professional regarding their specific legal or tax situation. Past performance is not indicative of future results.