IRAs and 401(k)s hold over $30 trillion — but most investors have no idea what’s actually inside them.
In this episode, Rocket Dollar CEO Henry Yoshida reveals how retirement accounts are being misused, why traditional 60/40 portfolios are breaking down, and how alternative assets like gold, real estate, and private deals are reshaping the future of retirement.
We also dive into how billionaires like Peter Thiel and Mitt Romney used retirement structures to build massive tax-free fortunes — and how everyday investors can follow a similar playbook.
If you’re still thinking about your IRA or 401(k) like it’s 1995, this conversation is your wake-up call.
Learn how to modernize your retirement portfolio and get ahead of the curve — watch the full episode now.
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Transcript
Monetary Metals:
Welcome back to the Gold Exchange podcast. My name is Ben Nadelstein. I’m joined by my good friend, Henry Yoshida. Henry Yoshida is the co founder of Rocket Dollar and is an expert on all things retirement-related. Henry is also a certified financial planner and speaks frequently on gold, retirement, investing, and more. And today, he joins the Gold Exchange podcast. Henry, welcome to the show.
Henry Yoshida:
Thank you very much, Ben. Thanks for having me.
Monetary Metals:
So, Henry, for those who don’t know you, maybe because they don’t read any articles related to retirement, give us a little bit about you. How did you get into the retirement in the investing world?
Henry Yoshida:
It was by accident. So I started my career in the year 2000. I live in Austin, Texas. It was a very tech-heavy town then, still is a pretty tech-heavy town today. And I was at Merrill Lynch. And when I was working there, the Internet bubble was bursting and the stock market wasn’t doing well, particularly tech stocks at the time. So I made a pivot in the early days of my Merrill Lynch career to servicing small business retirement plans. And as the market got better, I fell in love I was very passionate about it, and I just never left that space.
I did that for 10 years at Merrill, created a registered investment advisory firm, and grew that to a pretty large size, two and a half billion dollars in assets under management. Sold that. I built a robo-advisor that was a Roth IRA mobile app. We sold that to Goldman Sachs, and now I’ve been doing RocketDollar. I’ve been working with retirement accounts, not retired myself, but since the year 2000, and I fell into that niche by accident, and I love the space.
Monetary Metals:
Let’s talk about these retirement accounts. So why is there so much wealth held in these retirement accounts? What makes them so special compared to a brokerage account or just even a savings account at the bank? Why are people so interested in these retirement accounts?
Henry Yoshida:
Retirement accounts, they are a form of a forced savings account. So that’s what actually helps them. They have a couple of advantages. Most retirement accounts are typically ceded by people putting away a percentage of their salary into a corporate 401(k) plan. And as They move from job to job. They have the ability to move that 401(k) into an IRA. People accumulate a lot because, quite frankly, they can get automatically enrolled into these company plans. The companies sometimes offer a match, and they can grow without any taxes.
Those factors combined actually have put retirement accounts, 401(k)s, IRAs in a position to just be this massively large asset pool that really has no purpose except to sit there, grow with great tax advantages, and be used for retirement in the future. In other words, we can’t use it to spend money and buy things like a Tesla or a house or a vacation today. And by virtue of human nature, because we can’t do those things, they end up becoming larger than our bank accounts, our taxable brokerage accounts, and our cash savings accounts. That’s why they’re gigantic.
Monetary Metals:
What are some of those main differences? You mentioned 401(k), you mentioned IRAs. What are the main differences between these accounts, and how much does it matter if people know where their money is split between these different types of accounts?
Henry Yoshida:
Sure. And these accounts all started in the 1970s. So just to put this in perspective for people that are listening to the podcast, they’re older than you’ve been, almost the same age as me. But retirement accounts were started in 1974, so they’re right at being 50, 51 years old.
So it seems like they’ve been around forever, but not really that long. And the IRS also does not have a marketing department, so the names of these particular accounts are just after…
They’re named after literally the section of a code in the IRS database, and that’s why it’s called 401k, because it’s literally section 401 subsection k, and that’s what they decide to name it. But the difference there is that those plans are actually sponsored by a company, and they’re offered to their employees. Their employees are called participants at this point, and it allows the employee to choose a percentage or a dollar amount of their paychecks to put away into this account. Now, you get tax advantages. You do not have to pay tax on the money you have to put in there. So there’s an incentive in the present for an employee to do so.
And then as they go from job to job, they may decide that, I’m no longer with company, and the plan stays and belongs to the company.
The individual may choose to roll to an IRA, and the I actually stands for individual, so that becomes a personal account, at which point, then you have the flexibility.
And that’s where we get into where a Monetary Metals or precious metals or real estate or crypto can come into IRAs because there’s a subset of people who use their IRA money to go into those types of investments. But it’s very small relative to people who just do the same stocks and bonds that they might have had in their 401k. But money accumulates there.
And I think you were going to maybe touch on this later. But because it’s the catch-all, the IRA, once people leave their jobs in 401(k)s and move them into the accounts, the IRAs actually are roughly two and a half times as much in assets as compared to 401(k)s currently in the United States.
Monetary Metals:
What’s something that people are missing when they talk about these self-directed IRAs? Because a lot of people have a 401(k), and in a lot of ways, it’s automatic. But the IRA, sometimes these are self-directed, meaning that people have to actually decide what stocks they want to own, decide if they want to have bonds, decide if they want alternatives. So what are some of those disadvantages or advantages to doing an IRA yourself?
Henry Yoshida:
The advantages are that you could diversify out. So there’s one thing that since 401(k)s are sponsored by a company, they have a very rigid menu. So they look the exact same, no matter whether you’re Microsoft or Tesla, a very large company, or whether you might be some local heating and air conditioning repair company where you are in Southern California, where I’m at in in central Texas, the menus actually look the same, and they typically are only made up of 20 to 30 mutual funds. They hit certain asset classes, and that’s it.
And the reason why that’s that way is because if the company only offers a set menu that meets certain guidelines, then they’re not liable for any investment losses incurred by those participants. The participants, when they have the ability to do their own thing in an IRA, certain ones may choose to diversify further outside of these 20 or 30 mutual funds and go their own stocks or their own bonds, or maybe their own mutual funds that weren’t a part of that 20 or 30 mutual fund menu. And in our case, you touched on this. A self-directed IRA, technically, would be a IRA account that goes into things that are not public investments.
So think like your private real estate investing in a private company, investing in a private fund, or near and dear to your heart, in my heart, is precious metals inside of an IRA.
Monetary Metals:
And please do talk about some of those different alternatives, because a lot of people think, well, it’s just stocks and bonds, and that’s what you can invest in. But the power of these IRAs is that you can invest in these alternative assets. So what are some of these alternative assets? And obviously, recently, there’s been some regulatory changes around what assets these type of investment accounts can hold. So give us an idea of where this stands now.
Henry Yoshida:
Sure. Well, how about I go backwards, since you mentioned the regulatory changes, and it’s pretty apropos right now, but we’re sitting here in late August. On August eighth, Trump signed an executive order to officially allow the the inclusion of alternative and private investments inside of 401(k) plans. It’s always been allowed in IRA, so I’ll get to that in a second.
But that was a big, big thing, and that’s caused a lot of inquiries into companies, to myself, to give comments on that. What has ended up happening is these asset classes, I think it was just a thought on behalf of Americans that you weren’t allowed to own things other than stocks and bonds in your investment particularly if it’s a tax-advantaged IRA or a 401(k).
Now, the reality is going back to that same rule 51 years ago, now in 1974, the IRS, technically, even in the 1970s, did not actually restrict the ability to own things outside of stocks and bonds. They actually only listed a couple of things that you can’t own inside of IRAs, which by inference means that everything that’s not on that list of what you cannot own is something you can I’ll start with what you can’t own, and that’s been in place since 1974, is the IRS said that you cannot own life insurance or collectibles.
I’ll define collectibles as a show me asset. Think like a baseball card or a high-end piece of art in a painting, something where you can just showcase in your house or in a glass case and show off to other people a classic car, things like that. They cannot be owned in IRAs.
But that means, and I’ll get to your asset classes here, that means that technically since 1974, although the The industry is not as well developed for holding these, but that’s the part we work in here at Rocket Dollar, is that you could own everything from a single family rental property to you can invest in a real estate syndication that’s privately registered, not publicly registered. You can become a limited partner in a fund. You can own precious metals, gold, silver, you name it.
You can own private investments that are tied to gold. In your case, you offer a gold yield product, and you can even own cryptocurrency. I like to think of it as a spectrum that maybe if you look at one side of the risk spectrum today, it might be digital assets and cryptocurrency as a very volatile high risk.
Then maybe on the other side, you got the more tangible things like precious metals, actual gold bars, and real estate that you can actually go see and stand on and go walk into if it’s a house, for example, and everything in between that’s not publicly registered. Those asset classes are actually allowed as long as it does not happen to be life insurance or collectibles or a show me type asset.
Monetary Metals:
Why don’t you talk about gold, specifically? Why do you think it is that gold tends to be under-owned? Because a lot of people say, maybe 5 % in a portfolio is this general wisdom, whether that’s right or wrong. But why do you think gold tends to be so are owned, where other asset classes, like stocks and bonds, are seen as just general or expected, where alternatives, whether it’s real estate and hard assets like gold, or even all the way to crypto, are seen as these risk assets. Is it mainly the volatility? What is it that makes people go, Well, I’m not that interested in alternatives.
Henry Yoshida:
Sure. I think I have a different take on why gold is not typically a major asset class that’s held in retirement accounts. I’ll start at the top top. Let’s say central banks and sovereign wealth funds and folks like that, so your large institutional players. If you really think about it, you actually know the reason why they may buy gold. They buy gold and hold it because it’s a hedge.
It ends up becoming a safety asset for them. Now, if you trickle to individuals, and I speak as the children of immigrants. I’m a natural born United States citizen, but I’m the first person in my entire family who’s born in the United States. My history of growing up with people who hold gold is that it was actually never meant to be held in an investment account. In other words, gold was a tangible asset that was passed down from generations or actually smuggled out of the countries that they immigrated from to the United States. So it’s never actually been physically held inside of an account.
So I think that for the same reason that a central bank would purchase gold and keep it in their vaults and depository as a hedge, as a safety play, it actually, from a cultural standpoint, gold, it fits that mold for a lot of people globally as an individual, not even an investor, I would say, just as an individual.
And because of that, it’s sometimes been hard to make that leap in that chasm to understand that it could be held as an investment as well. They think of it as a holding.
So I can tell you right now that I have many, many friends I’ve grown up with, also children of immigrants, and they have upwards of a five-figure to a six-figure, and sometimes seven-figure amount of physical gold that’s literally just sitting somewhere in their house right now.
And the thought is that they don’t know how to put that into an investment account. But it’s there. And it’s just culturally, that’s why they’ve held it. So I think that because of that understanding or that history, that sometimes it’s hard for them to think about putting that into an investment account, like an IRA.
Monetary Metals:
And do you think that could potentially change in In the future, obviously, in monetary metals, we have gold yield products, and that is a way for people to leverage their gold or use their gold in a way to generate a yield instead of having it set at the house. But do you think that all these different, whether it’s tokenization, whether it’s yield, whether it’s all these different ways to now access assets that used to be not thought of in investing spheres, but just as financial assets or buy and hold assets, do you see these becoming broader parts of the financial landscape for most people? Do you think that that’s changing now?
Henry Yoshida:
It has changed. So that’s another reason why the price of gold has gone up so much. It’s because there’s people who are creating, I guess you could say, tangential investment products that relate to the price of gold. So that could be ETFs, or in your case, a monetary metals of product where it’s backed by gold and there’s a yield that’s provided on that. Those kinds of products are becoming accessible.
They’re accessible inside of brokerage accounts and IRAs, in particular, where we work at Rocket Dollar. So as that both awareness on one end and then availability of both the direct asset holding, and the tangible and the tangential ones that come off of that, as more and more people get to know about that, I think that the holdings of gold will increase. And it’s a nice self-fulfilling prophecy in the cycle, too, because as more purchases happen, as people realize these products exist, it’s actually helping the price of gold. It’s increasing the demand. It’s a physically limited property. So any uptick in demand actually directly results in an increase in price.
Monetary Metals:
I want to ask you about this narrative or shift happening between older generations who potentially are liquidating their retirement accounts and either bequeathing them or giving them to younger investors. Do you think there will be a shift in what assets younger investors own compared to the older generations? Or do you think that these assets that have been in the family or have been in retirement accounts for years are basically going to stay the same?
Henry Yoshida:
Well, I think there will be a big shift, but the shift that I’m not so certain, will be all the time from the, let’s say, precious metal standpoint. I think that you have a big multi-generational wealth transfer that’s happening right now. If you were to look at the number of different investments that the older generations held, let’s just say, line item by line item, if you were to list them on a spreadsheet, you’re not going to be in the numbers of hundreds of thousands of different assets that are going to be passed down.
They’re very concentrated in structured products like mutual funds or certain S&P 500 large cap stocks and so forth. As these monies get passed down to younger generations bequeaths, and I’ll qualify this, when I say younger generations, if you’re inheriting an account as a younger generation, you’re probably still 40 to 60 years old, but you’re inheriting it from your 70 to 90-year-old generation ahead of you type folks.
Even as that happens, and as that shift from, let’s say, the 60 to 40-year-olds of today, 10 years from now, start bequeathing or giving control those assets to what will then become their now 25 to 40-year-olds who will become 35 to 50, they’ll be much have access to different asset classes, and they’ll go into a larger number.
So whereas you might have had, let’s say, 10,000 different investments held by an older generation, that number is probably 15. That number is going to go to 25. And that’s going to include a lot of these private and Registered investments. It’s going to include a lot of tangential created ones off of existing old-school asset classes. I don’t think it’s going to be limited to gold, and they’re going to hold more of it. I just think they’re going to hold more of a lot of different things, including cryptocurrencies, which which, quite frankly, didn’t even exist.
Monetary Metals:
And I do want to ask you about this wealth transfer. What is it that right now, people who are in these different stages, whether they’re about to retire, whether they’ve already retired and looking to hand down these assets, what’s something that a lot of people are missing when it comes to these retirement accounts? Because I think certain generations think of retirement, Oh, that’s 60 years away. I don’t need to worry about it. Other people are already in retirement. So what are some pieces of advice or heuristics you can give to people about thinking of how to save towards this retirement moment?
Henry Yoshida:
What’s funny is that we’re talking about a very fortunate few. So everything we’ve talked about in the last two minutes right now are people that ended up saving enough money, and they made either astute enough investment decisions to where they’re in a position to where they actually are going to they’re not going to outlive their money. So they’re thinking about bequeathing it down to generations. So that’s not everybody. That’s a very privileged state to be in.
IRAs, for example, dollar for dollar, you typically end up getting 20 to 40% better annual returns than owning the same investment outside of that IRA account, because you don’t have to pay taxes on an ongoing basis until if and when you choose to actually take a distribution and pay some taxes on the amount of money that you may take out, but the rest of it gets to grow and keep growing, and then you start to pass it down. I just tell people that if they’re consistent over time and they start to look at investments with the time horizon that may extend beyond their lifetime.
In other words, people invest too much to a particular age that’s in their own lifespan, so they start investing at 30. Their financial advisor sets them on a plan to keep investing until they’re 65, and then they hit the brakes, go way too conservative, and all of a sudden, it’s supposed to be designed to be drawn down.
Well, the idea is if they actually kept a balanced portfolio past 65 all the way through to the end of their life, they probably will still, from a risk-adjusted standpoint, be able to fulfill their retirement income needs and actually have the same account balance from 65 while spending off of it for 20 years to still bequeathed to a younger generation.
That amount of capital actually is good for the overall economy. That’s one thing. But the second one that’s changing how I think people look at these inherited IRAs was that there was a rule that was passed where now IRAs can’t just be accumulating money for decades and decades and decades, that now you’re required to liquidate the accounts. If you When you have an IRA in an inheritance, you actually have to take distributions and liquidate that account down to zero.
In other words, it loses that overall tax show. People used to keep it in there for decades or generations, but you can’t do that now. The rules were changed several years ago to where you have to liquidate that account down. I think that is going to change the way people invest because now they can’t think about just leaving it in what it’s in and just not touching it again.
But having to actually liquidate it out, remove the tax of an IRA, and reinvest those dollars if they don’t need it for their own personal living will actually create a situation where people go into maybe higher risk assets, even if they’re the same risk tolerance as generations prior.
Monetary Metals:
What do you think about this idea, the 4% draw-down rule. This is the idea that you touched on where you keep your capital the same, but every year, if you draw around 4%, ideally, in a lot of scenarios, you keep that capital without it being touched while continuing to draw 4% every year. Do you buy that argument? Do you think it’s still valid in 2025?
Henry Yoshida:
It’s a good rule of thumb is what it is. And that 4% rule, it’s been tested over and over again. I actually used to read a lot of the research from a gentleman named Wade Pfau, so a very famous researcher who’s researched this. I’ve known Wade since the early parts of his career before he was the Wade that we all know today, and that’s P-F-A-U. But I just think that it’s a rule of thumb for people to think about that, that if they take the amount of money they have, multiply it by 0. 04, and that’s the amount they could live off of, then they’d be okay to draw that down.
I think that’s just a way to help you decide if you’re in a position to completely hang up and retire fully for most people. But again, I would argue that it’s probably 80% accurate, which sounds pretty good. But across, let’s say, 30 million Americans are going to retire every decade for the next several decades. I mean, 80%, you’re missing 5 million people. You got to take that with a grain of salt. It’s It’s a big roll of thumb to get people started.
I think it gives people an idea on whether they can actually go into retirement or not. But I think it’s great for purposes of just being able to quickly explain the concept and give people an idea of whether they can retire or maybe take their foot off of the gas from a risk standpoint. But again, it can’t be completely relied upon because a 20 % error rate across a large sample population means that you’re going to be drastically wrong for several million people.
Monetary Metals:
And what do you think about this idea of saving 10% of your paycheck? A lot of old folk wisdom was that, Oh, just save 10% of your paycheck, put in the savings account. By the time you retire, you’ll be a millionaire. Do you still think that’s true with the inflationary environment, with the low interest rate environment? Just everything we’ve seen in the financial economy. Do you still think these ideas, all the way down from the Richest Man in Babylon, still hold true? Or do you think, No, it’s a different time, and you have to think about saving for retirement differently?
Henry Yoshida:
Well, you probably do need to maybe save for retirement differently. But the 10 %, the Richest Man in Babylon rules. So it’s a very famous parable that was written about just basically putting away one-tenth of every dollar that you earn or whatever currency they use back in the olden days in Babylon.
And if you put that aside and let it grow compounded, you’ll be able to sustain yourself in retirement. Now, I think the thing is, again, it’s a great rule of thumb, but the real breakdown is that saving something is better than saving nothing. It’s the same thing, let’s say, if I were trying to get in shape. If I were, let’s say, doing some exercise, that’s better than doing no exercise.
Now, if I really wanted to get in shape, a personal trainer may tell me that I need to go do cardio and strength train three to four times per week. Let’s just say that that’s the equivalent of the 10% putting away for retirement. Well, maybe I don’t do that. But I work out and I strength train and I do cardio two days a week. That’s better than doing zero, just like saving 5% is better than saving 10.
But the reality is, depending on when you are investing and over what period of time. 10% could be sustainable, 10% could not. You just got to constantly monitor that. But The Richest Man in Babylon is a simple book that takes even a pre-tean person, maybe 45 minutes to read, and it works for most people.
It’s a good way. I think I told you off camera that I’m literally in the process of driving my 14-year-old daughter right now to read that book and go have dinner with me, just to explain that concept. 10%. By the way, the better concept that comes out of The Richest Man in Babylon is actually at the beginning of the story, where they talk about that instead of you saving 10 % so you could live this glamorous, luxurious retirement, it actually also espouses the concept of maybe not living beyond your means.
I think that’s the more important part than the saving one 10 cents of every dollar that you make or whatever currency they use then. I think the better concept that’s come out of that book is actually just making sure that you’re always living below your means, which by default means you have money to actually save.
Monetary Metals:
What are some of the biggest mistakes that you see when it comes to retirement investing? Things that maybe you would help people avoid if you could go back in time or if you can get them in early, for example, hey, try to live within your means? What are some mistakes that you think people should try to avoid, specifically for this retirement account?
Henry Yoshida:
So just be consistent with what you put in. Train yourself to do it. So if you pick a percentage and you are able to gradually increase that over time, just view that as not money that you’re actually putting away for retirement.
Just view the net that you have left as actually what you are allowed to live off of. In other words, whenever we buy a product, for example, if it’s a big ticket item, we usually factor in that, well, my If I want to buy this car or something like that, I’m going to have to pay taxes on it. If I want to buy this $2,000 item, well, with taxes, it’s going to be $2,200.
Well, it’s the same thing when you’re saving for retirement or your paycheck. If you land a new job and you say, Hey, I’m going to get this $100,000 salary, most people know to say that I’m probably only going to take home $75,000 of it. I would say that retirement investing is the same thing. So one of the things you need to think about is that your take home pay is your take home pay, but it should be net of what you put away into a retirement account, and that is your pay.
Not that you made the higher amount. You put 10 % into the retirement account of that paycheck, and life sucks because you did that, and this is what you have left. I think you need to understand that what you have left after you make a contribution, whether that’s 3 %, 5 %, 7, 10, or more, is what you actually have. And it’s just psychologically more healthy to think about it that way.
Monetary Metals:
What’s a simple fix that you think you could tell investors today who are thinking about retirement maybe already use an IRA or a 401k? What’s something that you could just say, Hey, you might want to check this. For example, I looked in one of my retirement accounts and I had cash accumulating and realized, Oh, my gosh, I should invest this. So what are some things maybe a little higher on the tree instead of low hanging fruit for people who maybe have a retirement account or are interested in getting a retirement account that they could do right after this podcast, once they like and subscribe, that could potentially help their financial future?
Henry Yoshida:
Well, if they go through the process of setting up an account and make sure it’s automated. So automated contributions are going in, and in your case, make sure that it’s automatically going into some investment so there’s no cash drag in the account because that’d be pointless in a retirement account.
And then, quite frankly, after that point, maybe make it to where it’s something you don’t keep the app on your phone, that you don’t keep the username and password handy because you’ll be pleasantly surprised. And the less you look at it, the less likely you are to fidget with things, like either change the investment or get tempted to take the money out early. It’s not quite a set it and forget it. It’s actually a maybe make sure it’s set up and optimized and literally forget about the account.
Monetary Metals:
Yeah, there was a story. I’m assuming it’s apocryphal, but I think it was maybe Fidelity or someone who did this research on who had the best accounts. And it turns out it was either people who were dead or forgot their passwords. So hopefully no one listening to this has either of those fates, but we can act in that way. Okay, Henry, as we come towards the end of the interview, I want to do a rapid fire round with you. So I’m going to ask you questions from all around the map.
Henry Yoshida:
It’s been happening fast so far.
Monetary Metals:
Yeah, and you can answer these as long as you want or as short as you want. But first, I want to ask you about our friend Peter Thiel. He used these retirement accounts to build a crazy tax-free wealth. And for him, I think he maybe has one of the best stories. I think it was through an IRA. So can you just tell our audience? Maybe they won’t have the exact same story, but if we want to copy this Peter Thiel strategy, what did he do?
Henry Yoshida:
So Peter Thiel, back in the day, used a alternatives-capable IRA like we offer at Rocket Dollar. An IRA account that can allow you to do private and alternative investments. And he bought early shares in Facebook and PayPal. So when I say early, he was like an early investor in Facebook, and then he was the actual co founder of PayPal. A lot of people don’t know, but actually, so was Elon Musk. Elon Musk started as the co founder of PayPal along with Peter Thiel.
And what’s funny is if you actually want to see the check that he did, go back and watch that old movie, The Social Network, the exact last scene, the check that he’s giving, that’s the one that was actually written to Mark Zuckerberg from an IRA. And the Facebook investment alone was a, I think, right at a six-figure check, ended up becoming worth $5 billion.
And if you’re not into, let’s say, the tech gurus and the Peter Thiel and the Elon Musk type people doing that, Mitt Romany actually also did the same thing doing early private investments. He was the co-founder of Bain Capital. They put some of their early deals inside of what was structured as a Roth IRA that was enabled to do private investments, and he made nine-figure amounts using IRA accounts.
Monetary Metals:
I love this strategy. Okay, next one for you. So obviously, inflation is always in the news, and for gold investors, they’re constantly are thinking about the threats of inflation. So do you think this idea that we’ve had so much inflation, that fiat currencies continue to lose value, that basically we’re going to be forced to save whether we like it or not, because all those benefits of deflation and a gold standard, those are basically gone.
We need to think about saving and investing and growing our money because we got to get off that inflation treadmill. Do you think that’s just basically true as a heuristic from here on in? Or do you think that because of AI, we might see all this technological innovation, and people don’t They don’t need to go out on the risk curve. They don’t need to save as much? Which do you think is more true?
Henry Yoshida:
Well, I think people do need to save. And the value of a dollar or the perceived value of a dollar is very different than what it used to be. I just bought a dozen eggs for $9. 89 yesterday, so they’re still pretty high. But if I were to compare that to even five years ago, that number was more like $3. 50 for the type of eggs I was buying. So that’s happened in the course of five years.
These kinds of things will keep increasing. But that just means that the amount of money you save, and that’s why we’ve talked about it a lot, the amount you save should be based on percentages of what you earn as opposed to flat dollar amounts. Because if you get stuck to a fixed dollar amount, you’re going to be investing in a fixed linear way. But you need to be able to keep up with a more curved progression of money, value, currency, and so forth. So that’s why percentages keep you honest.
Monetary Metals:
So we’ve seen some regulatory regulatory changes coming out of the current administration. Are there certain changes that you would like to see above and beyond what we’ve seen out of this administration? What are some future regulatory changes that you would like to see for these retirement accounts?
Henry Yoshida:
So for the retirement accounts, I want the ability for true private investments. I think that when they say that they’re going to allow private investments into retirement type plans, the regulatory bodies, and I think even the people in practice, especially traditional incumbent financial services companies who create the current products that are publicly registered, they have an incentive to basically overlay their structure and their protocol and the way they register a public investment and overlay that onto a private and say, Well, now private investments are allowed.
I actually think that a lot of the premium of returns inside of a private investment has to do with not being registered the way that traditional public investments are. So if you start to overlay this protocol structure on it, you’re just going to basically negate the effects from a liquidity premium standpoint. I would hope the regulatory bodies understand that they should allow more pure form private investments. I’ll caveat that by saying that right now, it’s still difficult to track. It’s not appropriate for every person, every investor out there. But if they try to overlay an existing architecture, infrastructure, and protocol methodology onto the private investments, it’ll negate what actually makes private investments work.
Now, the reason why I also think that the administration, this one and ongoing ones, will actually keep perpetuating the inclusion of private investments is there’s just too much capital out there. On the private investment side, they’re always looking for people. They’re always raising funds. Everyone’s always raising funds. They’ve tapped into this institutional ecosystem.
So sovereign wealth funds, central banks, college endowment funds, municipal retirement systems, and so forth, institutional accounts. Well, if they want to keep raising funds, and we didn’t touch on this earlier, but I’d mentioned that IRAs were two and a half times the amount of 401(k)s. I didn’t give the numbers behind that. The amount of money in 401(k)s right now is roughly $8-$9 trillion.
IRAs are pushing close to $20 trillion. If you’re a private fund issuer or raising funds or money like monetary metals, wouldn’t you want to make sure that you have the ability to tap into and exist a new $30 trillion pool of capital with great tax advantages, no capital gains treatment, you’re going to keep lobbying for the ability to tap into that investor base. And that part alone is going to ensure that private investments will become a big powerhouse and will start to get in and start to cross over into the retirement space.
Monetary Metals:
What do you think about this argument between private companies and public companies? This argument that the argument for going public as a private company is actually weakened because of this new influx of capital. There’s less reporting requirements. There’s less hassle. The CEO is not getting badgered on live TV 24/7. So what do you think about this idea that maybe private companies will just continue to stay private either for longer or indefinitely?
Henry Yoshida:
They can, and that’s their choice. Now, there’s a different game in town. So there’s private equity, there’s venture capitalists that can keep these companies private for longer. So I don’t know the numbers off the top of my head because it is private.
But I got to think that companies like SpaceX, Starlink, OpenAI, if we were to just put a It’s a rough guess on the valuations and someone can comment when they see the podcast, but I’d venture to guess that they’re all $200 billion or more value companies, which would squarely put them in the top 50 in the S&P 500 if they were public today. I also know that we talked about IRAs and 401(k)s are 50 to 51 years old.
Amazon is half of that age, so closer to your age, Ben, at 25, 26. And when they went public, they were doing $30 million in revenue. So To see a company with the absolute overall long term horizon growth potential of an Amazon be available in the public markets for me to purchase at fidelity. Com at 30 million in revenue, it’s not going to happen anymore. I think that the ecosystem has changed.
Companies can grow large with just institutional private money, and they don’t need to go into the public markets for all the reasons that you just said. It’s an additional cost, it’s an additional hassle, and maybe they don’t want to have thousands shareholders when they can have one big shareholder backing them for billions and billions of dollars. So in OpenAI’s case, why not take a $50 billion check from Microsoft and other investors versus having to deal with quarterly conference calls and maintaining an entire investor relations and finance department just to make sure that you can report your numbers every 90 days. It’s not going to happen anymore.
Monetary Metals:
And what do you think this means for the broader economy as well as investors? Because in a lot of ways, investors used to be locked out of these different types of investments. And like you mentioned, they only got Amazon when it was already big. So do you think that this will unlock some gains for investors who otherwise would have been locked out? Do you see this as a democratization of these gains that otherwise would be going to a small group of private investors?
Henry Yoshida:
It could be, but people still have to have the stomach. We use that example of Amazon. In hindsight, it would have been an amazing investment to own it at $30 million in revenue when it first IPO. But the reality is that they’ve had probably no less than a dozen extinction-level events at the company that ultimately ended up not killing But multiple times in the history of the company, the stock went back below $5 per share.
Another book that I’m also bribing my daughter to read because it’s more funny, but I bought her The Motley Full Guide to Investing, and it was published in the year 2001. They do a case study, and the book predicts that eBay was going to kill Amazon and it recommended buying eBay because they didn’t hold inventory and so forth. But look how that turned out.
I mean, it’s got great investment concepts, but that particular chapter was about as as wrong as wrong can be in hindsight, if you think about it. But the democratization of this and giving access to people to come into this world is one thing. But again, it’s going to take a lot of gumption for people to really go and stay into these companies right now for the long haul.
But I do think that as long as individual investors start to get access to some of these private companies, it’s going to be helpful overall because they’re no longer able to invest in this microcap or smallcap world. I would almost venture to get and argue that a microcap stock market actually publicly doesn’t really exist anymore because any of the great players in that space wouldn’t be in that market to begin with. They would have had access to institutional capital in the form of a private equity firm to not have to deal with the same reporting requirements of a large sophisticated company in the S&P 500.
Monetary Metals:
What do you think in the future, whether it’s five years, 10 years or 20 years, what do you think this retirement portfolio is going to look like? Because Because I think we mentioned in the beginning, 60, 40 portfolio. Everyone knows about it. That’s the baseline. There’s target date funds, which hold stocks and bonds. But what do you think the future retirement portfolio is going to look like? Is it going to be NFTs and crypto? Is it going to be precious metals? What do you think is going to be in this future retirement account if you had to take a guess?
Henry Yoshida:
If I had to take a guess, and I like this question because I think about this a lot, that I think that in the near term, so let’s say between now and the year 2030, I think people will start to reference as we get closer to 2030, Hey, Ben, what type of retirement account do you have? Do you do the regular stuff or do you have one that does all?
They’ll distinguish between one or the other, the way that we started distinguishing between, did you drive here or did you take an Uber? So that was a conversation that started in about 2012 for younger, hip people like you, and then maybe a little bit later for older people like me. But now it’s just this ubiquitous conversation that, No, you don’t have to pick me up. I’ll just take an Uber. I’ll meet you there, type of thing. It’s one or the other. I think in five years, you’re going to be talking about retirement accounts as like, Do you own traditional.
Do you own some public stuff inside, or do you own some alts? Whether that be crypto, whether that be gold yield products, whether that be gold itself, whether that be real estate and so forth.
And then beyond that, who knows? Maybe they’re just all melded together. But I can really see that in the near term, when I say near term, three to five years, people will talk about… They’ll distinguish between these two types of retirement accounts. You got a regular retirement account, or do you do one that you do like alts in and so forth? And people will have one of each.
Monetary Metals:
Well, what I find interesting just thinking through the theoretical concepts is, maybe Maybe this gives us a more diversified and stronger economy, and as Naseem Taleb, maybe it would be a little more antifragile, because if there’s a problem with the stock market, well, maybe not everyone’s in the stock market, right? If there’s a problem at Microsoft or Mortgage Back Securities, well, Maybe I don’t hold any mortgage-backed securities. I get my yield or my gains somewhere else. And in a way, this makes systemic risk not go away, but there will be a lot less opportunity for everyone to all be in the same boat. Do you think that that is a possible argument or plausible?
Henry Yoshida:
It is. And we’re in that situation now. I’ve used the term no less than five or seven times so far in this recording about using the S&P500.
But at the end of the day, it’s really the SMB 7 right now. The SMB 7 has really driven the returns of the overall S&P500 now for the last five to seven years. And so that’s an over concentration. The last time I saw this much of a concentration in top, let’s say five to seven stocks of the overall market cap of the country was back when I started my career at Merrill Lynch. And you had stocks stocks in China.
So you look at the public stock market in China and their base index, the equivalent of their Dow Jones industrial average, the top five companies actually made up roughly 30 to 45 % of the entire market cap of the country. And we’re not getting too, too far off of that right now, and that concentration is dangerous.
Monetary Metals:
Do you think that in the future, if there is something like a market correction, whether it’s a market crash or just a correction, that people will say, You know what? Now is the time to start looking at alternatives. Maybe I do want to get my yield from outside the Fed funds rate, or maybe I do want to have some alternative assets rather than just NVIDIA and NFTs. Do you think that there needs to be a crisis for people to wake up and say, Hey, maybe I should check out alternatives? Or do you think that just over time, people are going to get more sophisticated with their investments?
Henry Yoshida:
I think as access becomes more available, I think people will start to naturally diversify. I mean, right now, it’s just very easy to go into the top most known stocks right now. Robinhood didn’t create this. At the end of the day, with the touch of a button, even while you and I off camera, we could technically be trading stocks and probably even options while still actually talking and looking at the screen and recording and having a cogent conversation. It’s just too easy right now.
Right now, it’s not as easy to fill out a subscription agreement to go into a private deal or open up an IRA that can do alternatives or maybe properly research a monetary metals gold yield product and so forth and execute a transaction to be inside of your IRA. But As technology, as access, as sophistication improves, and it becomes easier, you’re going to naturally see the money spread beyond what’s just super easy right now.
Monetary Metals:
I want to ask you, as someone who’s in this retirement space, what is something you’re most excited about in the future? Is it that technological change? Is it that people will have more education about these different alternatives? What is it that you’re most excited to see in the retirement accounts?
Henry Yoshida:
I think that as this money, as a retirement account money, right now, it’s a lot of We’re talking over $30 trillion. But I think what I’m most excited about is thinking about a time when the money actually starts to be spent and consumed for other things. I think that’s just going to be a big boom.
I think that there’s going to be a point where the top gross amount that are in retirement accounts will not continue to increase, even though the markets may continue to increase, and that money will start to be distributed out and actually spent and used and consumed. I think that’s actually going to be a big win for the overall economy, because people use that money.
If they know that they can do alternatives, they may be able to use it to invest in businesses, new businesses get started. So I actually think that it’ll be a good cycle to help the overall economy and overall will become stronger. I hate to say it this way, but if there’s $30 trillion in retirement accounts, and yes, I get that they’re invested in a lot of particular deals, a lot of particular companies right now, but they’re concentrated in the very large companies that actually don’t need our capital to grow their business, if that were redistributed out more broadly, then it would create more economic production than we see right now.
It’s an underutilized asset, our $34 trillion dollars in retirement accounts. It’s not utilized to the maximum ability that it could be.
Monetary Metals:
Hey, I hear you for the guys who are trying to utilize the 30 trillion dollar gold market. We hear you for sure. Okay, so, Henry, as we come towards the end of the interview, I do want to ask you about gold, specifically, and touch on gold.
So where do you see gold as a In a mainstream investor’s portfolio, right now, it’s usually a pretty small allocation, if at all. How do you think about gold in an investment portfolio?
Do you see it as a diversifying asset? Do you see it as something that’s just uncorrelated to stocks and bonds? Do you see it as basically a hedge against inflation or monetary debasement? How do you look at gold as an investment?
Henry Yoshida:
Well, I deal in the IRA space. So for me, it’s not as much a hedge against inflation. I think it’s a diversifier. So it sits as a diversifier for people. And Since most of our people, they hold it in an account structure that’s really designed for just buy and hold, it’s really just a way to diversify.
Adding a allocation to it will, even though as an absolute investment, it may have a lower return, let’s say on an average basis in public stocks or private companies, that when layered into a portfolio, it could show that it actually helps adjust the returns higher when adjusted for risk. I think that’s how it will continue to play. And now, whether that number is 5% or 6%, again, I think it’s easy for advisors or people who perpetuate gold investments to just give this one out of 20 number and so forth.
But I think it’s personal preference. I mean, some people could probably do well by holding a 10 % allocation or more. Some people could actually be appropriately holding zero of it, depending on what their goals are.
Monetary Metals:
And then obviously, at Monetary Metals, we are all about putting a yield on gold and silver as well. And now there’s, of course, strategies for getting this yield on gold, paid in gold through IRAs.
So as more options become available for holding gold, for growing gold, obviously all these different types of accounts, whether it’s IRAs or 401(k), so in terms of these developments in the gold space, do you think that there will be more developments in the real estate space or the crypto space?
What are some developments that you think in these alternative assets that could be compelling for investors in the future? Obviously, yield on gold is one that we’re quite excited about, but what are some other things? Is it tokenization? Is it crypto and taking loans from crypto? What do you see as the next step for these alternative assets?
Henry Yoshida:
I think that it could be fractionalization. Now, that could come in the form of tokenization. That I’m not 100 % sure of. But I think if you could take, remember, the assets that you just named, they’re typically very large ticket items. So the problem is that you can only purchase. It’s an all or none purchase. And if it’s a large ticket item, well, not everyone can make a large purchase.
So by virtue, it locks a lot of people out. It’s the same thing with the stock market right now. You got shares of a Berkshire Hathaway that trade for six-figure amount. Well, not a lot of people had access to that. They had to create this Class B share, which is still several thousand dollars per share.
But really what opened up the markets to a lot of people is when they started doing fractionalizations, and you can buy a minimum of $1. So when that equivalent of a fractionalization, whether that takes the form of tokenization or not, starts to come into play in the private markets, then you’re going to see an explosion of influx of capital. Because if a lot If some people previously were locked out because of price tags, and that goes away, then you’ll see a lot of investors coming in.
And to be fair, that’s actually been very helpful for just broader stock and mutual fund ownership by average individual retail investors globally. Was, access points were removed from the actual price of a share and down to the lowest denomination, which might have been a dollar.
Monetary Metals:
Henry, now I want to ask you the question I ask all of our guests, which is, what’s a question I should be asking all future guests of the Gold Exchange podcast?
Henry Yoshida:
So maybe one is that, separate out investments for a second. What’s a big trend? What’s a big prediction that you have for the near or intermediate future? So that’d be a good question to ask.
Monetary Metals:
All right, Henry, I’ll turn it around on you. What’s a big trend? What’s a big prediction for the future, maybe outside of investments that you see coming.
Henry Yoshida:
So I have two daughters, about to be 15 and nine. So we’re literally going through learners’ permit stuff right now. My big prediction is that by the time both of those kids are 30, being able to manually drive a car will be the equivalent of someone who is 40 years old today, whether they maybe know how to drive a stick shift or not.
I just think that I think the next big technological innovation, just this confluence of AI and robotics, is going to turn into autonomous vehicles.
People will get back that time because that’s another thing that if we are able to give productive time back to a large portion of the population, again, also very good for the overall economic population, and they may have to physically take their body somewhere, but if they no longer actually have to be engaged in paying attention to drive a vehicle, that time becomes productive again.
Monetary Metals:
Yeah. If anyone’s ever been on a train and not just looking out the window, boy, you can be really productive. You can get a lot of work done, especially if the train has WiFi, right?
Henry Yoshida:
That may be good, actually, for your mindfulness. So trains, going back to that, might be better. But I live in a town with a bunch of autonomous waymos, and and so forth. And I just think to myself that that’s a big change. So the prediction for me is that you won’t have to drive a car in the intermediate terms. So I would probably put that at like 2035. And the result of that is not that cool.
We no longer will have less accidents. I just think that people will be more productive. And if we’re more productive, we produce more economic output. And if we produce more economic output, everyone has more money and wealth.
Monetary Metals:
All right, Henry, here’s a fun one for you. What’s a question that you wanted to answer today, but I didn’t ask you?
Henry Yoshida:
Let’s see. So I’m the University of Texas alum, so maybe who’s my preseason number one? So big game. Ohio State is hosting the University of Texas. We both have new quarterback starting. I think the winner of that game maybe is set up to have a very good season. The other one is set up to have a disappointing season because the psychological backlash from losing this first game will be tough to recover from.
Monetary Metals:
Andrew, one more for you. You were always super cheery when I get you on on the phone. How do you keep your mental clarity, your smiles, outside of obviously all this craziness, whether it’s in the financial world or anywhere else? What’s a way to keep cheery through it all?
Henry Yoshida:
I think eat well, move, exercise, and sleep well. So I always tell people that three non-negotiables for me are just try to sleep seven to nine hours a night. I don’t do that. I track myself, but I’m really working towards it and take steps to do it. Take 10,000 steps a day and then exercise four times a week or more. You do those three things. You tend to be better in a lot of other aspects of your life, including business and work.
Monetary Metals:
For those interested earning a yield on gold paid in gold, they can check out monetary-metals.com
Henry, where can people find more of you and more of your work?
Henry Yoshida:
Sure. For us, pretty simple. Our domain is rocketdollarar. Com. So R-O-C-K-E-T, Dollar-D-O-L-L-A-R. Com. There’s a lot of articles, a lot of information We posted a lot of content there.
Actually, if you are using it, ChatGPT seems to like us as a resource for self-directed IRAs more than most of our competitors out there. So you could just search that way and ask it as well, and you’ll get an answer probably sourced from one of our articles that we’ve written over the last six and a half years.
But actually, even in a modern age of 2025, we have a phone number, too, so you’re more than welcome to call us at 1-855-ROCKETD. And that could just be to ask general questions about a self-directed IRA in general. But, yeah, 855-762-5383. And for those that still see letters across those numbers, it’s Rocket D, 855 Rocket D.
Monetary Metals:
Henry, it has been such a pleasure speaking with you, and we’ll share it sure to have you back on. Thanks so much.
Henry Yoshida:
Thank you. Thanks, Ben.
