151. Avoiding Financial Scams and Fraud with Robert Persichitte

Hey, welcome back to the Average Joe Finances podcast. I'm your host Mike Cavaggioni, and today's guest is Robert Persichitte. So Robert, I'm super excited to have you on the show. Thank you for teaching me how to pronounce your name before we got started off camera. I appreciate that. And it's not as hard as it looks people, I'm telling you that right now, robert. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here.

Yeah, absolutely. Hey, I wanna start this off the same way I start every podcast episode off, and we wanna know more about you. So if you could share a little bit about yourself, tell us your story. Who is Robert Persichitte?

I work with clients really to help them keep their money. And I do that with a company that I founded, Delagify Financial. And it comes from a huge background of not seeing the skill, not really seeing the critical thinking, and I get so mad when people lose their money. And a lot of this comes from my background. I came from the world of fraud. I had my first job out to college working for the adult probation for Boulder County, Colorado, for the economic crimes unit. And I always would have to smack my head talking to not only the people who were convicted of crimes, so everybody that I worked with had already been convicted of a crime. But also talking to some of the victims of the crimes, talking to some of the other people that were roped into these schemes and finding out they're normal people. They're just regular people walking down the street like my parents, like people in my family, and it got me As I progressed through my career, I worked in audit. I've been an auditor for over 10 years. I worked in finance. I started to see a lot of the same things and people getting ripped off by something that's maybe legal, but not a great deal, not something that's in their best interest. So I went out and set that mission statement of I'm gonna help people keep their money, and the way that I'm gonna do that is by helping them avoid and. From Ripoffs fraud mistakes and taxes in general. So that's how I got to where I am today. A unique mishmash of different experiences.

Yeah, that's some background too, especially when it comes to your experience in this industry, like when it comes to fraud and some of these scams that you've seen. So like what are some of the fraud cases that you've actually worked?

So I worked on a lot. There is a very broad statute in Colorado for fraud and they really get prosecuted really just as theft. And so I've worked with a lot of elder abuse cases. I've worked with cases where a family member is stealing from an elderly family member. I've worked in investment cases, one of my favorites. My favorite examples of this is gentleman said he was prospecting for oil and got all this money to prospect for oil, and he knew that there was nothing there. He knew he already had it tested. He already was guaranteed to lose money. But getting these investor funds in I've had people who were overbilling the government. I've had people who were. Good old fashioned embezzlement when they were writing checks from their employer. It really runs the broad gamut of pretty much any type of economic crime gets thrown into that bucket. And then it became my job to help oversee that case and make sure that they were paying back their victims.

Yeah that's great. The service you provide is really helping a lot of people. And the first one that you mentioned there when you were talking about some of the cases against elderly people, right? You see a lot of that especially with emerging technology and everything else like that. Like as soon as people had smartphone, You start seeing older people on smartphones and trying to figure things out like the scams just started immediately. Like people trying to take advantage of somebody just not being knowledgeable about either their phone or their computer. You see those all the time, on YouTube or other areas where people are, exposing some of these scammers that are trying to say, Hey, you got a virus on your computer and I just need you to buy this program. And this and that, and all they're doing is stealing your credit card information. I'm really glad that you you pointed stuff like that out and, a lot of people don't really think about the actual family members that scam elderly family members, right? Because they feel oh, I could take advantage of this situation and get a little extra cash and no one's gonna ever really know. And stuff like that is just to me, like the lowest of the low. cause now you're hurting the matriarch and patriarch of your family. . For what? For these ill-gotten gains. Yeah. That's pretty wild. Now what are some of the investment cases that you've seen in the past?

So a lot of the investment cases simply came down very straightforward. Where I'm promising you something, I have some type of promise and I have no way of fulfilling that promise. That oil one was one of my favorites. He went to members of his. and he said, Hey, if I find this oil well, I'm gonna turn your thousand dollars into a hundred thousand dollars. Knowing full well, he already explored it. He already did the tests. He knew. He knew factually, they proved in court, he knew factually they're never gonna get that return on investment. And they all have that every case that I've worked on had that element in common of promising someone something that was completely undeliverable. and it scales all the way up. So when you look at things like Elizabeth Holmes with Theranos, I'm promising something that can't happen. They make these excuses of, I'm just overly optimistic. I'm overly ambitious. But what it comes down to in the end is, Something that's not there, not adequately understanding, disclosing the risks that are involved. Every single investment has risks. So if you have somebody promising you, I guarantee you, you're gonna make a ton of money, that should be a huge red flag because every investment, and I don't care what investment it is, every single investment carries some form of risk. Putting cash in the bank has a risk associated with. It's just understanding those risks and understanding how they fit into your investment. And really the common thread for the investments is failure to disclose that risk or lying and saying that the risk isn't there.

Yeah, that's huge. I Even investing in government bonds is a risk. And people are like, oh it's guaranteed. It's from the government. Hey, you never know. We can get invaded and the government get toppled over and that's it. And the stuff that you thought you had is gone. Or, we can get into World War III and, now they need to cash out these bonds that they have and you're not getting your money back. Things happen, life happens and e everything. I've said it several times on this podcast, no matter what, especially because the people that listen to the show are, your everyday average Joe's and Janes, right? And they can't afford to just put all their money away and squander it and lose it all. But as long as you understand that there is risk in whatever investment platform you go into. You'll have, just give yourself a better understanding and educate yourself on what those risks are and if you're willing to take that risk. And then different ways to mitigate those risks, right? Anytime you go to somebody and they throw that g word at you guarantee it, it's a red flag to, to run for the hills and, or question them like, okay, what's this guarantee? How can you guarantee this? Show me how you're gonna guarantee this. And most of the time, nine times out to 10 they can't show you how they're gonna guarantee anything. So no that's a great point. And it's a scary word guarantee. And it shouldn't be, but it's a scary word because it gets used in such bad light so many times.

I think the other piece is smart investors acknowledge that there's some uncertainty, and like you said, government bonds. Very comparatively compared to the whole universe of investments, very safe. But at least we're going to acknowledge that risk your bank. There is a possibility that your bank will go out of business and there will be steps that you have to take to recover your funds. Again, relatively a very safe investment, but at least acknowledging what could happen. And a lot of these scams, what it came down to is they had something very risky. The oil well is a great example. That's a, even for regular non scam investors, it's a risky investment because you're either gonna find oil or you're not. There's a possibility that if you're paying to prospect for oil, you put all in the money, you prospect for it, and just by coincidence, there's nothing there. By saying, I guarantee you're gonna be rich. You have to ignore all of that other risk and just try to think critically about it of how can this person guarantee that, how can this person possibly know what's going to happen in the future?

Yeah, optimism one thing, but , reality's another no, I appreciate that. Okay, so how does fraud work help you deal with your clients?

I have worked on a lot of cases where clients came to me and said, I'm thinking about doing this right. They have an idea in their head already, and sometimes I can look at that and say, yep, that fits your situation, that makes sense for your financial plan, and we consider different things. Like Liquidity, are you gonna need to pull money out of there? We consider things like the risk involved. What are the chances that this investment will decline in value? We think about things like, what do you need it for? Sometimes things aren't necessarily scams, they're just mistakes where it doesn't fit what the client needs. In other cases, it's either a scam or a huge ripoff. And so one of the clients that I was dealing with recently came to me and said, Hey, I found this company and they want to, I'm gonna sign over my house to them. They're gonna manage it for me. And I'm in a pool of investments, so I am getting some of the rents from other people's houses and they're getting it from mine now. Just saying which company I worked with specifically. Some examples of companies out there, or flock or Hughes Capital and they can be legitimate companies. I'm just talking about one specific example that I saw looking at the contract, the overall fees and expenses charged to the client were 12%. That's 12% of a house. That's a $300,000 in. $36,000 of that is going to this company. That's a huge number. And the reason that they were able to slip that through is because they disclosed it. Everything they did technically was legal. It was just embedded deeply in the contract. Now this client was really excited to get this, new innovative investment and I called them. I had a three-way call with a client and. Investor, the investment company. And I said, Hey, I was looking over your contract and I'm confirm, and I'm very concerned about the fees. I see a lot of fees in here. You have fees for advertising expenses, you have fees for commissions. There's a 3% commission that's on there. You have a fee just for the privilege of being in the program. That was 1%. And then you have up to 6% in property management fees. So if they want to redo that. They can, so I listed all these out and I say, yeah, your fees add up to 12%. And they said, no, you're absolutely wrong. Our fees are 1%. And I say what about this fee? What, what about your advertising fee? Oh we don't consider that a fee. Does the client have to pay it? It's in the contract that the client has to pay it. Yeah, they have to pay it, but it's not a fee. It's an expense and so this tricky language I am really helping people get through it, decode it, and I'll tell you probably nine times out of 10 when someone comes to me and they say I'm asking you this question because this feels too good to be true. Nine times out of 10, I look at it and say it's a scam. And here, and it might be per a perfectly legal scam. There's a lot of legal rip-offs out there that, this company trying to buy homes is one example. You have a lot of multi-level marketing companies, and so I just work with my clients to answer the question, Hey, am I getting ripped off here? And seeing con artis, seeing frauds happening firsthand. Knowing what the attorneys are untangling after the fact. What little hooks are in there and what little mistakes are in there, is how I really help deliver that value to my clients.

Yeah, that's insane. Just the way that you described that one. How they worded it, that, oh, they're not fees, they're expenses. It's that little change of language that, someone will think, oh, okay, this, something, it's an expense, got to pay it. Whatever. I'm only paying a 1% fee. If they're not like reading the fine print and really diving deep into that, Especially in the real estate world, when you start looking at these contracts, they're 36 pages plus, right? And you're trying to get through everything. You're excited about the deal and you're just signing away and yeah. I've done this before. I've bought a house, whatever. Just signing away. Something new like this. You got to read that fine print and ask questions. I don't go into any investment without asking questions and making sure I have a really good understanding of what I'm getting involved in. The first time I did a real estate syndication, I was like chewing my nails and freaking out because I was like, ah, I don't feel like I know enough. And I had gone to so many different presentations. I've read so many different contracts and just all the stuff that gets sent out to us. And I'm like, I have a really good understanding of this, but I'm still freaking out, right? . And so if you're not looking at your investments that way, like the hairs on the back of your neck don't stand up when you're looking. You got to be really careful because. There's even some real estate syndications out there that are not great deals. A lot of people are starting to get ripped off with those just because people are trying to close deals and get that assignment fee. And then the deals are flopping. Be careful who you invest with. That's the first thing. Just be careful who you invest with no matter what it is. But anyway that's, a legal way of doing it, which is unfortunate, right? Because the information was disclosed. So they.

You signed the contract.

Yeah. You signed the contract that said A, B, C, and D. You agreed to that, right? This, it was all out there in the it was all open kimono, even though you didn't know it was there. But besides that, there's a lot of like unregulated investments that are on the rise. So what, why is that happening right now?

First let me talk a little bit about where unregulated investments used to operate in the market space. Sure. And then why that's changing. So first, unregulated investments are nothing new and you probably use them all the time. So like a restaurant is very common where they are not huge, like just one restaurant location is not huge. big enough to pay for audited financial statements, s e c, registration, those types of things. You're gonna be looking at least $50,000 to be a registered investment, but they still needed investors and they still got them. So the way the law works is there's certain carve outs that allow certain people to invest in things that are not regulated. These numbers were originally published in 1934, and they were not adjusted for inflation. So you become one of these accredited investors in your household income exceeds $300,000 a year, or your investible assets exceed a million dollars. That used to be very rare. That used to be, what we would consider today, a multimillionaire. Some guy had a mansion on a hill. That's getting increasingly common that people can meet these criteria, and so that's one of the loopholes that allows companies to start selling investments that are not registered. The other loophole is very common, digital assets like cryptocurrencies where they say, this is not a security. And what they mean by that is you are not getting paid based on future income. You're getting paid on future investors only. Therefore, it is not a security, it's something else. And the SEC says we can only regulate securities. We can't do anything. SEC security is an exchange commission. It's right in the name. We can't regulate something that's not a security that doesn't meet this definition. And so as long as you're not tying the value of that asset to a business or something that generates income, you can sell it without the oversight from the government and people lose a lot of protection.

Yeah I don't think people really looked at it that way or like when you think about cryptocurrencies, right? And how a lot of them are, like you just said, it's the value of it is based off of the future investors. Not any type of income that's gonna be coming into that now. How does that work when it comes to something like a larger cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and Ethereum, right? Which are now being tied to assets, right? So you can buy things with those, like as actual currency, right? So now it has a monetary value to that. So now does that make it become considered a security.

That's a great question that the SEC needs to figure out.

I think they're actively working on that, but Yeah.

Yeah.

So what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, so things like Bitcoin the answer is Bitcoin's a little bit easier. The answer is no. And the reason being there is no revenue generation for Bitcoin. Somebody using it as a currency is not revenue. That is them using it and. , you could do that with literally any object that exists. If you're a store and you want to start accepting payment in pencils, you could do that as long as there was a common understanding of how many pencils did you need to pay for this? Would it be convenient? No. Is paying in Bitcoin convenient? Not really. You have to wait 30 minutes for that transaction to go through, but there's no business. There's no bitcoin central. There's no office building dedicated. Inventing something or changing something that is tied to Bitcoin itself. It gets a little bit hazier when you move to some of these pegged cryptocurrencies. So if there are investments underneath and you are earning interest from those investments.

Yes.

Big question right now, does staking your Ethereum. . It doesn't, it probably doesn't count if you are doing it, if you're paying somebody to do it. Is that a security, is that an investment advisor? We need to find out, in my opinion. I don't know, I guess in my opinion, I think it probably should be regulated like a security. I don't think the law gives us a clear answer on whether or not it can.

Now. Okay, so what about, with Bitcoin being used as a currency, comparing that to let's say the foreign exchange, right? As when you exchange, u the US dollar for the Euro or the Japanese yen, right? And people do that as an investment, right? Because actually if you look at the value of the dollar right now, Versus some of the other foreign currencies. It's very strong. Like I'm actually thinking about buying a bunch of yen and a bunch of Euro honestly, that's why I use those two examples because this is in my lifetime, probably the closest the dollar in the Euro have ever been. Which is insane if you ask me. cause I remember so I spent 20 years in the Navy, right? And I remember spending a lot of time in Europe and I. Something I would spend a dollar on in the States was a dollar 75 or one Euro and 75 cents right in in Greece or wherever I was at the time. And it's man, what a big difference. I go pull money out to the at t m and I pull out a hundred bucks, but I look at my bank account and I pull out 175 US dollars. I'm like, oh man, this hurts. It's crazy. So I'm looking at it from that perspective now with Bitcoin being a currency now and people exchanging their US dollar to buy this Bitcoin and use that as currency, would it not be treated the same way as the foreign exchange?

Foreign exchanges also aren't securities and think about it in terms.

But does, can't the SEC get involved in that?

No. cause.

Okay, maybe.

The FTC can.

FTC Okay.

They're different.

Which but then again, then they can't touch crypto cause it's not a foreign currency. Yeah. But it's can be used in all countries. So it's kind ah, it's weird, man.

I think what, here's my speculation. We have everybody scratching their heads in the government right now. Yeah. Who's gonna regulate this? SEC, we can regulate some of them. Sometimes if they meet specific criteria, then we can regulate it and they have gone the furthest, in my opinion, the s e c has gone the furthest. I think what we're gonna see happen, and we're already starting to see the first steps in it. People are gonna get ripped off. And we're already seeing it. It's already happening. And if you have crypto assets that got locked up in a bankruptcy because you thought it was like a bank, but it wasn't, we're already seeing that happening. Once the public outcry gets loud enough, they're gonna pass some type of law. And that law's gonna say, who's in charge of this? Who's supposed to be looking at it? And my guess is it's gonna go to the SEC. It makes the most sense. It's the most similar to what they're already doing.

Maybe they'll change the name to the SECC. The securities An exchange Crypto Commission.

Oh, I'm sure they'd love that. a hundred year old organization. Nearly 190 year old organization. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. That's, I don't know, I feel like, I don't know enough about crypto and I've even had people come on the podcast and talk to me about crypto and blockchain and everything, and it, and blockchain is great, right? Because, I definitely like the way that it's set up because there, there's no way of Trying to fake it, right? You can't fake having a Bitcoin, right? You can't fake having Ethereum. It is locked in on the blockchain, right? So I think that technology is fantastic. NFTs still don't know too much about them, but. I do believe that a lot of that stuff can be in the future something significant, especially when it comes to something like real estate. You hear a lot of people like Ryan Pineda and them talk about how in the future they believe that. Titles and deeds and everything for real estate assets are going to be NFTs. And it's going to be locked in on the blockchain and title companies gonna go out to business. So it's, is that possible? Absolutely. Is it starting to happen in some places? Yes. That's why I wanna learn more about that. Yeah.

And I do just wanna clarify something. I agree a hundred percent. And I think that blockchain technology is going to make a significant difference in the financial world within the next 10 years.

Yeah.

I think it's gonna have almost a significant of an of a change as something that we know about, which is spreadsheet software. And so I like to use this as an analogy for my clients because it's. We don't know how it's going to be used, and people tend to overestimate the impact of a technology in the short term and underestimate the impact of that technology in the long term. So if you were sitting in the early eighties with computers, you probably wouldn't think that a regular file clerk. just on the front lines is going to be using a computer because they're so expensive and there's so much here. It was hard to envision us getting to the point where you can walk into an Apple store and somebody has a phone that, they ring you up on, right? We could not have imagined that 30 years ago. So I want to go through a thought experiment with you, Mike, of let's go back in time. We have perfect foresight. We know exactly what happened here. And spreadsheet technology is ubiquitous. Everybody knows what Excel is. Let's imagine you are in the year 1983 and you have an opportunity to invest. Now you have three options. I'm gonna give you those three options here. Option number one, you can invest in the industry leader in spreadsheet software. Option number two, you can invest in a company that is well established. They've been around. Few years. They have other revenue streams, but they are brand new to the spreadsheet technology. Option three, you can pay an accountant a hundred dollars and he'll write your name down in a spreadsheet. Okay. Which option would you choose?

I'm gonna go with the industry leader.

Industry leader. Oh no, you invested in Lotus . How terrible for you. Yeah. They did not end up taking the market share.

Hey, listen to be fair, in 1983, I was negative one years old, so probably not really thinking straight.

That, we'll leave that excuse to it now. The new up and comer, they were Microsoft. They had just released the Excel product and owned almost when they launched it. They had no market share. Lotus 1, 2, 3 was the prevailing program. Now, it would not have benefited you in any way to just simply participate in this with no investment in the people who are creating it or building the infrastructure around it. And that's what I think a lot of crypto investors fail to see. Just owning a piece of Bitcoin. Yes, your name is on the blockchain. That does not mean you own the blockchain. In my mind that is the same as paying an accountant to write your name down in an Excel spreadsheet. And is it going to be saved in that Excel spreadsheet 30 years later? Yes, it still will be saved. Will anyone pay you for the privilege of having that name saved in there? Probably not. And it comes down to the usefulness of the individual cryptocurrency, individual asset that you're buying. And so if we think ethereum will be used for all smart contracts, which some analysts do think, then you're getting a piece of it there. But in order for you to make your money back, you got to be right. And there's a tremendous amount of risk that goes along with that. And there's a lot more out there where the analysts know. I mean I think a fantastic example is Dogecoin. Does anyone think Dogecoin is gonna replace USD. I haven't seen anyone taking that seriously. Does anyone think Dogecoin is going to be able to execute smart contracts? No. It's written on a very inefficient blockchain as a joke. So we got to think critically about this stuff, where anytime you're giving your money to somebody, how am I getting my money back? How am I gonna get paid back from doing this? What's it gonna come from? And I think. Crypto, especially when you just throw the term around blockchain, when you throw around these new technologies. Just because that person said tech blockchain doesn't mean they even fundamentally understand it or how to implement it in a profitable sense long term. They might just be saying that to get your money.

Yeah, I mean, just make themselves sound smarter. I could say blockchain all day and like I even said earlier, like I still don't fully understand it. I know blockchain, blockchain technology is good, right? Because. You can't fake it. And that's what I like about it. So in certain aspects it's gonna be very useful in the future, like you said, probably within the next 10 years. It's gonna be very useful. It might not necessarily be useful for crypto. It might be useful for other things like contracts, deeds and titles. Yeah that's that's a good way to look at it. And a lot of those other, like you said, a lot of analysts are saying right now that they believe Ethereum's gonna be the way to go, but right now it's all speculation, right? So anybody that's getting into these things just make sure you have a better understanding than I do when it comes to crypto.

Keep your eye on the market too. Yeah. Because again, looking back to what we know happened in the past, Amazon in the early nineties was a tiny bookstore. Nobody could have possibly, if you looked at the whole lineup of every possible online retailer, I really doubt that you could look and pick Amazon out to that lineup and say them they're gonna own the future, not. Grocery delivery company, not the pet food delivery company, not the online distributor. How would you have known? What information would you have used? That's the secret sauce in these highly speculative investments, and most of 'em are probably not gonna be worth anything if they cannot deliver profits to their investors.

Yeah, you just got to follow the numbers, right? You got to look at what makes sense and, that's why for the folks that are listening to this show, one of the reasons why we talk about what we talk about is to help you stay informed and make better decisions, right? So you're not just going into the next dogecoin that comes out. I know a lot of people that invested in that said they thought it was an actual investment. They said, oh, I bought it at this price and now it's up to 62 cents. And I'm like, oh, okay. What are you gonna do with it? He's, oh, I'm holding onto it until, whatever. And it dropped back down and I have a family member too who lost pretty much everything that they put into it. So I said I'm glad I didn't put any money in that. So yeah, it's just just have a good understanding of what you're getting yourself into. Just make yourself familiar with the product that you're gonna invest in. Now I wanna go back to the unregulated investments now. How does that cause you. Obviously, you've dealt with a lot of this with your clients, right? So how does that impact your clients? Like what are some of the things that you've seen impact them when it comes to unregulate unregulated investments?

So a lot of the protections that you have as an investor go out the window with unregulated investments. And so for most things we have. A lot of safeguards in place and I went through I went through state registration and not federal registration, but I had hour long meetings with the regulator over every single word that I sent out to my clients, telling them what I do. The reason being is they wanna make sure that what I'm doing matches what I'm saying. They're checking that before I'm even allowed to get any clients. They're gonna look at it first, and before I'm allowed to even start my operations, I'm gonna get their sign off and they're gonna say it's okay. That's being in the regulated world. I also have audits that I have to comply with. I'm getting audited. I have to make sure that people's money is safeguarded in certain ways. I have to take all these steps and every single one of those steps is designed to help protect the consumers. And it gets annoying sometimes as a business. It gets really annoying of why do I have to send in this report? and what one of my friends reminded me, he's a regulator, he reminded me the reason you have to send in that report is because one time somebody didn't, and that meant somebody lost their life saving, their whole life savings was gone, and that's why these regulations exist. There was a problem at least once, and that's why the new rules are there. If you're in an unregulated security, all those protections are gone. Really in the area of buyer, beware of you better know what you're getting into because once you sign that contract, even if the contract is really bad for you, that's the only protection that you have. It's literally the only protection that you have for these unregulated securities. And so they don't have to have their advertisements reviewed by a regulator. They can put out whatever they want and then it's on you to be smart enough to look at these contracts, to look at what's going on there.

Yeah, no that's a great point. I really appreciate that, Robert. Great advice, and I appreciate what you do for your clients, right? And I appreciate the information that you're sharing with me and my listeners today, cause it, it's a message that needs to get out there for people to understand. That, no matter what you're taking a risk. No matter what you get into, you're taking even more of a risk if you're getting involved in something that's unregulated, cause that protection, like you said, is not there. Again, by or beware, make sure you understand what you're getting yourself into. All right, Robert, I wanna transition this into something now that I call the final round. That's why I'm gonna ask you four questions, same four questions that come for everybody that comes on the show. So if you're ready to go, we'll get this party started.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right, let's do it. So the first question is, what's the biggest mistake you've ever made in investing?

Biggest mistake was trusting the wrong people. And this was back, I was in college and there was a guy I thought he knew everything. He got better grades than me. We were both in the same program. He got better grades than me. And I say, you know what? His name was Tony. Tony, look at my investments and go ahead and. Give it a little tuneup tell me what you think. And he went ahead and sold. I can tell you the specifics of the stock. It was Toshiba and it was before they were about to get a contract for a brand new nuclear plant. And so I lost a lot of gains because I sold a more let's say speculative in. Without really a goal or strategy in mind. And so whenever you do something, make sure that you do it for a reason and make sure that it fits into your plan and it bit me. Fortunately, I was like 20 so I had lots of time to recover and it was just some lost profits. But that was a lot of lost profits.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, ha have a reason for doing what you're doing, not just, oh, on a whim, I'm just gonna go and move this stuff around just because today's Thursday, so that's what I'm gonna do, so . No that's great. So appreciate that, Robert. Now the next question I have ties into all this stuff, but what is something that you've learned that you wish you knew when you first started.

Really, it's the skepticism. And I think 10 years of an auditor really beats it into you and don't just take things at face value. And I think we want to trust people. We wanna like people, and a lot of people, including myself when I was younger, made decisions based on how well we like somebody or how well we get along with somebody, not how good their ideas are. And don't be afraid to ask those follow up questions and not take everything at its face value.

No, that's great. Yeah, just because something's shiny and it involves somebody that you think's a really good person doesn't necessarily mean it's it's the best thing to get involved in, awesome. All right. Next question, again, follows up to this to this last one is do you have any tips or tricks that you would recommend to someone that is just getting started today?

Ask questions. Ask questions, and we like that. Ask as many questions until you know what you're talking about and until you understand it, ask these questions and go through hypothetical questions. There are no dumb questions. Ask the questions. Anybody who is legitimate. They have their time to consider, but they can answer these and it might seem trivial or easy to them, but they can answer these. And when you get people brushing off your questions, that's when you really have to start being concerned because they should be able to answer it. Anybody who wants your money should be able to answer any of your questions.

Yeah. And answer them rather quickly, not let me get back to you . No, I definitely appreciate that. Okay, Robert final question in the final round, and that is, do you have a favorite business investing or real estate related book or podcast or both?

Favorite book, losing My Virginity by Richard Branson. He is my hero and he really embodi and explains well, finance theory, and a lot of people get this mistake in their head that finance is a zero sum game. Meaning for somebody to make money, somebody else has to lose money. But there are a ton of win-wins in the investing world. When we can go out there, invest in legitimate businesses, our investment, our capital, helps them build their profits, build their business. And it can be a win-win. They can have higher profits and we can get a return on our investment. And nobody explains that. As well as Richard Branson he is my business hero.

All right. Right on. I have to add that book to my list, so thank you for that. Okay, so that is it for the final round, Robert, but I do have one more question for you, and it is the most important question of all because the stuff that we've been talking about today I feel like you've really given us some really great information and some great examples of real world scenarios that you've seen and dealt with when it comes to fraud and scammers and things like that. So I really appreciate that. So my listeners are probably like, Hey, I wanna know more about what Robert's doing and more about just Robert in general and the services he provides. So where can people find that? Do you have a website, social media, anything like that people can follow and check you out?

Yeah, the best place to go is gonna be delagify.com. That's D E L A G I F Y .com. You can sign up for our newsletter, get posts about prevailing issues, prevailing topics related to investing related to taxes, and learn more about not getting ripped off. Let learn more about keeping your.

Awesome, Robert, thank you so much for that. So everybody that's listening, I will have his links and the show notes for you. So you can just go copy and paste and click away. Again, don't do it while you're driving but, make it easy for you to find Robert and and see what he's all about. So again, Robert, thank you so much for taking time out to your day to come chat with us today.

Happy to here.

Absolutely and hey, to my listeners, thank you so much for joining me and our special guest, Robert Persichitte, on the Average Joe Finances Podcast. Go leave us a five star review and tell us what you liked about this episode with Robert. Aloha from Hawaii and have a great rest of your day.