Transcript
Intro
Stephan Shipe: Welcome back to the Scholar Wealth Podcast. This week we begin by walking through what a business owner should be doing in the lead up to a formal sale process as we look at the case of a regional physical therapy group that has begun fielding interest from private equity. Next, we look at the foreign account reporting obligations that can catch returning expats off guard and what the path back into compliance looks like for families who may have left assets abroad. Finally, we’re joined by Trent Abbott, Vice President of Global Development at Hagerty, for a conversation on how families think about insuring and protecting significant vehicle collections. Let’s start with our first question.
Question 1 – Preparing a Business for Sale Before Hiring a Banker
Stephan Shipe: I own 80% of a regional physical therapy group with 14 locations across the Southeast. We’re doing about $6 million in EBITDA and I’ve had two PE firms reach out in the past 18 months. I would like to exit within three years and move on to other projects. I’ve never run a formal sale process. What should I be doing now before I hire a banker to make sure I’m not leaving money on the table?
Great question, great timing for that three year window. It’s typically what I recommend is the timeline to really start being serious about creating a business for sale as opposed to creating a business that you’re growing. And sometimes it can compete against each other, especially when it comes to how you’re allocating capital. So the first thing to point out, you’ve had interest from two PE firms in the past 18 months, that’s common, especially when you start getting to this level of EBITDA, you’re probably going to start fielding one or two of these a month at a certain point of just constantly getting interest. The good thing about that is there’s going to be interest. The bad thing about that is you do have to start narrowing down what they’re looking for, how serious these groups are. Ideally, you’re looking for as much synergy as you can get. So synergistic relationships always lead to, or should always lead to, higher valuations for the business because there’s added benefits to the buyer that they don’t have to pay for. In other words, if I own a construction company and I’m looking at your physical therapy practice and you have $6 million in EBITDA, maybe I go throw a multiple of four times EBITDA on this and try to get this done with a $24 million deal. However, if I own some other physical therapy group that already has locations, I’m going to be able to consolidate billing or I’m going to be able to consolidate staffing or have some sort of benefits that come with this. Maybe I’m willing to give you 4.5 times or five times EBITDA because I know there’s other benefits that I’m going to get that are still in my favor. So anytime we can deal with those strategic arrangements, that’s always best. So when you start fielding all these different PE calls, I want you to start looking at them and saying, are these businesses or are these funds that would be willing to pay more for me than somebody off the street just randomly giving me an EBITDA multiple.
So that’s going to be first. And then the ones that are, start building that relationship, start having the conversation with them. You may not be willing to sell right now, but in the next few years, that’s something you’d like to keep in mind. They’re going to love to keep you on their Rolodex because they want to keep checking in with you. They want to keep the process moving. They want to be able to have this. Because you’ve got to think from their perspective, they’re looking for deal flow. They have money that they need to allocate to these types of businesses. And clearly they’ve identified yours as one of those types of businesses. Whether or not you make it through their thresholds is why you start to have those conversations. So if you build that up, now you have four or five different firms that you’re looking at that you’ve already talked to, that you’ve somewhat vetted and said, they might be good buyers for me. That makes sense. You can understand their argument for why you make sense in their portfolio.
And then you start going on the value side. So you start looking at what are the things that increase the value of any business. And the things that increase the value of any business, especially at the under $10 million in EBITDA level, is what is the owner’s value to the company? That’s always one of the biggest risks. Key man risk is one of the biggest concerns when you’re buying into a smaller business like this. And you have an issue that if they buy this and they hand you $24 million and you go and retire, that’s a problem for them, especially if you’re running everything. And you’re the one keeping all 14 locations together. If there’s a good team in place and everything else, that’s a true business, right? You have something that’s valuable there. Anytime where you’re able to cut costs and have healthy margins, consistent margins, growth that’s consistent. What they’re going to look for is not only where you’re at now, but where you’ve been for the past two to three years. That’s why I always say those three year timelines are so important in these types of scenarios, because you want to be able to go back and start now looking at this as if you were a buyer to stress test this for different scenarios, start looking at what the mix of who you’re getting paid by, what do those contracts look like. We want to have a variety of payments. We don’t want to be stuck with one contract that’s funding all of your different operations. You want to have a variety of customer base. You want to have a variety of income coming in. You want to have expenses that you’ve negotiated. You want to have the ability for ongoing revenue so that way the buyer can come in and say, I like what you’re doing now. I like what you’ve done over the past three years. The risk to them is they buy it, and then everything stops. So you have to remove or reduce that risk to them. Because the more you reduce that risk, the lower the discount rate is going to be on future cash flow and the higher the valuation of your business.
So that’s how we would start looking at this. You need to start looking at it now as if you’re selling and then put in place a plan for if you are truly wanting to sell in the next three years, what are the things you should do for the next three years to increase margins, reduce the dependency on you, create as much ongoing income as possible and healthy margins that show a sustainable path for growth and consistency after the buyer comes in. Now, when you have all of that in place, you’re going to be in a much better position to call back those five PE firms that you’ve been talking to over the past few years and say, all right, I’m ready to sell. And they say, great, send us your financials, send us some information about your firm. And you’re ready to go with clean financial statements because you’ve been cleaning them up over the past few years. Accurate information about future growth plans, all of this together. So they can take that and say, this is exactly what we’re looking for. We are willing to pay top dollar for your business. And that’s how you don’t leave money on the table in these types of scenarios.
Question 2 – Foreign Account Reporting Obligations for Returning Expats
Stephan Shipe: My wife and I both worked in the energy sector in the UAE for about 11 years before returning to the U.S. in 2019. We have roughly $900,000 sitting in an HSBC account in Dubai that we never fully repatriated. It’s a mix of cash and some bond funds. We’re not sure what our obligations are, whether we’re already out of compliance, and what the cleanest path forward looks like.
So if you’ve listened to the podcast enough, you know that my go-to answer in this case is you absolutely need a CPA that is familiar, or some sort of tax attorney, likely in your case, that is familiar with international law, specifically with Dubai. Is it going to be expensive? Probably, because you have almost a million dollars sitting in Dubai that you’re going to have to get back to the United States. And there are really strict reporting requirements for foreign accounts. So because of the different filing requirements, you have different ones, you have the FBARs, the FATCA, different reporting obligations that are there. Those start fairly low. So at $10,000, you have to start reporting that you have this foreign account and pay tax on that income. So even though Dubai may not have any personal income tax, the fact that you’re in the U.S., you’re going to have requirements to pay tax on any income you’re generating on that money.
The odds of you being out of compliance, I’ll be pretty frank here, are going to be pretty high because you’ve had income for the past seven years. Because you have the bond funds in here, that doesn’t sound like you’ve paid tax on, and you likely haven’t reported any of the income you’ve been generating. So that also is a problem. So there’s two things, and that’s what throws people off. There’s, I have income, I need to pay tax on it. That’s one. But there’s also, I have a foreign bank account, so that’s going to require me to also have reporting. Those are the two components and it looks like you’re missing both of those. So talking to a tax attorney is going to be extremely important, especially because those penalties can be large on you not reporting foreign bank accounts or foreign income.
So you want to be able to do that quickly, especially because you may fall into these different windows of whether or not you have willful or non-willful non-compliance. So in other words, if you didn’t know you needed to report and you could prove that in court, which again is why you start looking at that tax attorney scenario, then the penalties for you would end up being lower. If you were willful, you knew that you needed to report and you knew that you needed to pay the tax and you still were out of compliance, then that’s going to get pretty strict. The U.S. is not a fan of people holding foreign bank accounts without them knowing, which we can all imagine why that would be the case. So they have pretty large penalties on not reporting that, plus the tax that would be owed and any penalties on that tax being delayed. So very important that you take care of this. I would start talking to tax attorneys. Even if you don’t find a tax attorney locally to you, I’d start asking around for who would be able to handle this. And I guarantee you a couple of phone calls around, somebody, some attorney is going to know some attorney who can help you on the tax side for this issue, especially without the issues of Dubai taxes being owed. They’re really focused mostly on the U.S. side of how we handle this. And then I would really start looking at repatriating that money back to the U.S., paying whatever taxes you need to pay, and not getting you into this mess again of having foreign accounts with foreign income and having to handle it all. Because at $900,000, the amount of income you’re earning on that cash and bonds is likely not enough to be worth the legal and tax bills that you’re going to have from that income going into the future.
From the Field – Insuring and Protecting Significant Vehicle Collections
In our From the Field segment, we explore what collectors may overlook when it comes to protecting the vehicles they love. We’re joined by Trent Abbott, Vice President of Global Development at Hagerty. With more than 25 years of experience working across investment, insurance, and the collectibles markets, Trent specializes in helping families manage the risks that come with significant vehicle collections.
Stephan Shipe: Trent, welcome to the Scholar Wealth Podcast. Why don’t we start off with giving us a little bit about your background and what drew you to this area of the insurance world?
Trent Abbott: Yeah, well, I’d like to start out with a thanks. It’s a Monday morning and to be invited into a podcast like this is going to be a lot of fun. I certainly enjoy getting to talk about the work that I get to do and for insurance, it’s actually kind of exciting stuff. So again, I appreciate it and we’ll try not to make a commercial out of this by any stretch, but it’ll be fun to share a few examples.
I’ve been with Hagerty now for six and a half years. I’ve been with the private client group here the entire time. It’s been a really fun journey for me, getting to know the clients that I get to work with, their brokers. It’s a complex thing in a lot of these families’ lives. Typically, it starts out as a hobby and becomes a little bit more work as time goes on, but it’s enjoyable work.
My background prior to Hagerty was 22 years in the investment industry. So my background was very heavily involved as an investment advisor and an investment dealer. I was very heavily focused in the municipal bond space, keeping people rich slowly for a long, long time. And that was a great career. I learned so much being involved, you know, between working in the equity markets, working in the bond markets and estate planning, it was a lot of joy. And I got to meet a lot of very interesting and wonderfully nice people through that career. So that’s a 10-second snippet on an almost 30-year career at this point, but I’ve always worked in the space and I love it. And every day is a new education. And obviously with the folks that we get to talk to today, they have complex lives with complex investments and assets. And we just want to be here to help them protect, enjoy, and buy where we can from our seat here at Hagerty. And maybe we can give a little education today while we’re at it.
How Collector Car Insurance Differs From Standard Coverage
Stephan Shipe: Perfect. Yeah, that sounds great. I’m really excited about this because I feel like there’s multiple segments, obviously, of any type of insurance market. But in the auto industry, I can hop online. If I’ve got a normal daily driver, I can find out pretty closely what the insurance is going to be. And it’s, I think, easy for the insurance company to determine, relatively easy for those types of vehicles, what that insurance is going to cost. But then you go into this other market where as soon as you start talking about more rare cars or collectible cars, there’s a lot more work that goes into it, which is fascinating to me because I can’t imagine trying to figure out how to price insurance for, you could have two cars the exact same year, have different model specs, and be very different by hundreds of thousands of dollars at least in value because of the condition, matching numbers and all of these different things. So can you talk a little bit about what that looks like from a differentiation perspective and how you go about pricing that type of risk on the car side. Then we can start talking about how those cars are used and everything else.
Trent Abbott: So I’m going to digest that back to you, yes, complicated. Because to your point, you look at a collector vehicle, what creates a collector vehicle, right? So is it something that’s truly like a fine piece of art, absolutely a collectible vehicle, to somebody that has a couple of Porsches in their garage and they’ll drive them sparingly, that’s also in our consideration a collectible or a fun vehicle. So when we’re talking about bifurcating and trifurcating specific vehicles, yeah, it’s complex. I’m fortunate here at Hagerty that we have our own valuation team. We kind of literally wrote the book on automotive valuations. So if you have a Model A all the way to a McLaren F1, the Model A is probably trading hands today at 20 grand, a McLaren F1 LM at 55 million. There’s a lot of balancing to figure out.
And valuing these vehicles and how they are priced for insurance is something again totally different. So with a daily driver, so somebody has a Range Rover that they’re driving every day, the insurance company that’s providing that insurance coverage for them understands that that car is probably being commuted. It’s going to the grocery store. It’s driving in foul weather. It’s doing all of these things and they have to price that insurance very appropriately knowing the risk that they’re taking. At Hagerty, we also know that we’re taking a risk in the collector car insurance space. We all understand that there’s risk in having these cars either being stored or being put on the road. But we all understand that if this passion asset, this vehicle, is truly that, they’re probably not going to get caught out in a snowstorm with it to the best of their ability. They’re probably not driving it on rainy days if they can help it. And most importantly for us, especially with the demographics that you’re talking to, if they have one or multiple assets that they’re trying to insure and keep, we’re very concerned with storage location and that will drive a lot of what the pricing comes out to be with a collector car.
So to come back around to your question, compared to your daily driver, typically collector car insurance, especially if you have a large collection of vehicles, tends to be surprisingly reasonably priced. So as we look at a hundred million dollar collection of vehicles, and you were to come to me and say, Trent, this collection sits in Cleveland, Ohio, we don’t have major catastrophic risk for fire or flood, which many of your listeners, I’m sure have coastal properties, they’ll understand this. We’re able to offer some really exceptional pricing. If you are in a heavy flood zone or heavy fire zone, we have to take that into account. To us, that’s almost more important than the usage, knowing how the cars are stored. And that really drives what it’s going to cost for insuring a vehicle or a collection. So yes, there’s conditionality of the vehicle. How do we know that what you have is a million dollar car, not a hundred thousand dollar car? Well, we have levels of conditionality reporting that we can do. We’re pretty good at understanding most all cars in the market, and if they’re very, very significant vehicles, we probably know it by either chassis or VIN number and can drill down pretty quickly on a value.
We also rely heavily on what the client tells us. We want them to share with us what they believe their vehicle is worth. Maybe it’s what they paid for it. And as we know, these assets have tended to steadily increase in value over time. So we will agree upon a value when we insure a vehicle here at Hagerty upfront. And as time moves on, we can have the conversation with the client to raise or potentially lower the value of that car, depending on what the market bears.
Stephan Shipe: So if that’s the case, the repricing of the car then is not as frequent because we wouldn’t expect the market to move as much, but the location of the car could change pretty quickly, especially if you get into a situation where the car is being brought to shows or on tour. How closely are you watching the location of those cars or is there a threshold of value where you need to know whether or not that car that’s normally at a hangar in Ohio is actually going to be down in Florida during hurricane season and for show.
Trent Abbott: So we’ll ask in underwriting. Again, there’s only so much that we can control. We have to ultimately trust the client. You know, if it’s heavy hurricane season and you’re bringing a $35 million Ferrari GTO to Florida in a known weather situation, you know, we would, we don’t have that conversation, but we know our client probably isn’t going to do that. Your question really begs though, what happens if you live in, again, Ohio or the Midwest, and you also own a property in Florida and you want to keep a handful of cars in Florida throughout the year, so you have something fun to drive while you’re there. We’ll go through all of that in underwriting. So as somebody comes to us, we’ll have the conversation about the collection. We’ll have a conversation about where the primary collection is stored and are there any other locations where they’re going to keep or title vehicles, and we’ll underwrite to those locations.
Stephan Shipe: So for larger collections, are you taking into account which cars are being shifted to which properties throughout the year? Because I imagine there’s a difference if I’m keeping my McLaren in Ohio and I say, Trent, it’s going to stay in that corner of the hangar for the next year and a half, versus the McLaren’s coming with me to Miami or to Los Angeles for this year. I imagine there’s communication that’s going on about that, or is it more of a, because I look at that as more of like a rotating insurance coverage almost, or based on usage and patterns there? Or is it more of a standard, you could grab one of these cars and take it with you to that location?
Trent Abbott: Right. There’s a lot of good faith there. Obviously, the more we know as an insurance company, the better, but we believe that our insureds tend to be pretty benevolent. They’re going to let us know anytime that there’s a vehicle going someplace for a long duration. Now, when you ask the question about taking it to a show in LA or Florida, part of our insurance package here is we don’t require people to inform us when the vehicles are being moved. We don’t require them to let us know if they’re going overseas. With our coverage here, we allow for global physical damage coverage on vehicles. A lot of our clients will reach out to us and say, I’m moving a vehicle overseas. And we say, are you shipping by air or sea? And are you planning on driving it while you’re on the ground in Italy or wherever it might be. As a company, we need to know if they’re going to drive overseas because they’ll need to acquire some liability coverage outside the United States, which we can’t typically provide in a lot of the European nations at this point, but we have a company that we use very heavily for that. But typically, if cars are just being moved for shows, if they’re being used for a driving tour, our clients don’t need to inform us. We know how they’re going to use their vehicle with a pretty good degree of accuracy. But if they’re going to go long-term somewhere, we should at least know about the location where it’s potentially going to live. And in today’s world of risk, we have seen so much catastrophic risk over the course of the last 10 years really developing in these coastal and mountain communities for fire and flood. Hurricanes are a bad word. Fire’s a bad word and nobody talks about earthquakes anymore, but that’s a pretty bad word too.
Coverage Gaps New Collectors Should Know About
Stephan Shipe: And so what we’ve been talking about a lot has been more focused on bigger collections, somebody who’s experienced in it, they have, they’re moving cars regularly. Let’s say someone starting out a collection and they have two or three cars in mind, and they haven’t been in this world, their experience has been with the normal kind of retail insurance for their daily drivers. They go to Hagerty, you have a great reputation in the area of specializing in these types of cars. What are the common gaps that you see in coverage that they should be taking into account, but they would have never thought about because they’re used to just worrying about insuring their daily driver.
Trent Abbott: Yeah, I think the first things first with that conversation is, again, if you’re getting into the hobby or collecting vehicles, I think there’s a lot of unknown when you’re new coming in to really what’s at your fingertips by way of insurance. And there’s nothing wrong with your normal lines insurance companies out there, but they’re not specialists in the space. They’re having a normal, standard auto policy where you’re going to get standard coverages and it’s a depreciating asset on your daily driver. And they’re going to go to Kelly Blue Book or whoever the insurance company is going to use to say this is the value of your vehicle. They’re going to take into account depreciation every year you have it. And at the end of the day, if that car gets totaled, you’re going to get whatever the replacement cost of that vehicle is. With Hagerty or a collector car policy, we’re agreed value. And I think if there’s a nail to drive home, that’s it. And if you’re just getting into the hobby and you’ve purchased your first collectible vehicle, you really want to make sure that if something were to happen to that vehicle, you’re getting out of it what it’s actually worth. And in the case of a new buyer that says, I really want to go get a Porsche 356, it’s a $200,000 vehicle. NADA or Kelly Blue Book doesn’t really understand what that vehicle is. And a standard insurance carrier wouldn’t differentiate that from any other vehicle on your policy. With a collector car policy, you have a conversation with Hagerty, for example, you come to us and you say, hey, listen, I’ve recently acquired this Porsche 356, it’s a $300,000 vehicle or $200,000 vehicle. We’ll talk to you about how you acquired it, where you bought it. We’re going to want to know a little bit about the vehicle. We’re going to need to do a little bit of underwriting, but at the end of the day, we’re going to agree that the value of that vehicle is probably close to what they paid for it, or it might be worth more. Maybe the person got it at a great discount in the market. And we say, geez, you know, this car’s not a $200,000 car, it’s a $300,000 car. And when that person has an issue with the vehicle, a claim even, to have a specialist that understands what it takes to get a car like that repaired, to understand that if it’s an original paint car that’s never been taken apart and a front fender’s been clipped in an accident, that there’s some diminished value to that vehicle because that car was a number one example vehicle, fresh, never taken apart. And after it’s been hit, it’s been repainted. It looks perfect. But the reality is the car’s not the same as it was before that accident. Standard insurance doesn’t tend to understand that very well, but a collector car policy will. A collector car policy will take that into account and say, okay, so we have an endorsement that will allow diminution of value. So that car has gone from a $300,000 vehicle with $60,000 worth of paint work, and it’s now a $200,000 vehicle. We’ll help bridge that gap in value in that insurance claim too. So that’s the things that people don’t think about when they’re getting into it.
The other thing that we see very regularly is that these new collectors are buying a lot of really heavy hitter cars. They’re buying them from overseas. A standard insurance policy isn’t going to cover that car when it’s purchased overseas, let alone in the transport home. And at Hagerty, we do that. So if you purchase a car overseas and say, geez, you know, we’re going to buy the car in Italy, we’re going to drive it for a week. We’ll help you find that liability while you’re there. And then we’ll cover the car for insurance as it comes back home to its new home. And it’s pretty painless, but not every insurance carrier is built the same. And those are things that tend to get our clients a little nervous when they don’t know about that. So does that work for you? Is that kind of what you’re looking for? All right.
Stephan Shipe: Absolutely. Absolutely. No, that works. That works. Perfect. I think that’s one of the things that I constantly hear when I’m talking to people about adding cars to a collection or it’s just an unknown world or they don’t even know that the world exists completely or even how to navigate it. They’re calling their local agent trying to figure out insurance for a $300,000 356 and it doesn’t make sense, and they’re hearing agreed value and they have no idea what’s going on. So I think this was extremely helpful in demystifying some of that and also allowing some opportunity to know that there are solutions out there for those types of situations. So thank you so much.
The Collector Car Market as an Asset Class
Trent Abbott: Yeah. Stefan, you had made a comment a couple of minutes ago. I’d like to circle back and touch on that, about valuation. And I think that the collector car market, very much like any other market out there, the equities or bonds or whatever it might be, there’s blue chip and there’s not blue chip and there’s upcoming and there is volatility. And I don’t think people really realize that when they get into the hobby either. And I’ll just give an example. Recently, really since January, we have seen the hypercar market, specifically like Ferrari SP3s and F40s, F50s, Enzos, just skyrocketing over the course of the last three months. I think the first big sale that we saw was a public auction and a lot of people were sitting scratching their heads, trying to figure out what the heck just happened. There was speculation, there was all sorts of rumor and innuendo about what had just happened. And then when there was a second sale and we saw the same results on the same cars, and then we just had a sale at Hagerty through our Broad Arrow Auctions company and the trend continued. Well, when we’re seeing private transactions also mirroring the public transactions that we’re seeing, we have just seen a seismic shift in values on these cars, Carrera GTs, all these supercars of the 2000s to present, big, big moves. I don’t know how long it lasts. I don’t have that crystal ball. But when it comes to insurance, all of a sudden we have a lot of clients on our books that own a lot of these vehicles and the market has just totally moved. Just totally moved. Double, triple what they had the car insured for on the books.
Stephan Shipe: Yeah, that’s been a really interesting shift. I’ve been following this as well. It’s breaking away from the classic pattern that you see. If you look back in time at values of vehicles, it tends to match the cars that you couldn’t buy in high school, right? It was like, so you had this lag that showed up. So that’s why the past 20 years, like the 60s, 50s, 60s, not even really into the 70s yet, were really big, the muscle car era, right? Because you had a lot of that generation move through it. But we seem to have jumped the 70s and 80s a little bit, and maybe that’s the, I think there are some missing design elements there in those years. But then you’re starting to see the 90s really taking off now, the early 2000s are really moving. But then it seems to have shifted. And not maybe, I guess maybe not even a shift because I think they’re both happening at the same time, but the hypercar market is going crazy with all these valuations. And that’s actually what led to that question because I imagine the repricing, talk about a mark to market consideration when you have, especially with all the online auctions that are happening now, it’s got to be at least a little bit easier to see where vehicles are actually trading from a valuation perspective and to spot these trends. I’m glad you were able to confirm that because that seems to be, from a finance person who’s always looking at illiquid markets, you see all these markets moving and say, well, this is neat, because you can actually look up the value of a vehicle on all these different sites and see what the actual bid is, but also the conversations around where that trend is headed. So really interesting.
Trent Abbott: Absolutely. We’re very fortunate here that from our chair, we get to see obviously all of the public transactions that happen like anybody else can, online or in-person sales. But also we get to see a lot of cars that transact between our clients. So that helps us really understand what’s going on in the market and drive value.
And anyway, to put a couple of bows on that conversation, we’re doing a lot of outreach right now to our clients that own these hypercars and saying, just be aware the market has moved. We look up the vehicle by VIN number and say, we believe your car is now valued at X. If you’re interested, give us a call back or shoot us an email and let us know that you’d like to adjust the value, because we want to make sure that client’s asset is protected to the best of our ability. Ultimately it’s a conversation with the client if they want to do it or not. But we didn’t want our clients to get left in the dust on this. And I think also, to your point, this big jump that we’re seeing right now in more modern hypercars, supercars, really is following that great transition of wealth happening right now. I think you’re seeing a lot of younger players coming in and really hitting the market hard. There is a great wealth transition happening and you know, the automobile, the collector car, whatever you want to call it, has really kind of defined itself in its own space as an asset class. Things we didn’t talk about 25 years ago, they were fun collectibles, they were a fungible asset, but in today’s world, it’s really become very much like art in that people are looking at it, banks are looking at it as a stronger asset class than we’d ever seen before. So I think that helps maybe alleviate the pressure on some people trying to build collections and justify, too, the money that they’re spending. We see so much ability now, to your point, where you can transact to get in and out of an asset, right? It’s not like the stock exchange, it’s not like the bond exchange, but there are more outlets now than there ever were. There are more public outlets, ease of doing business in this space is much, much more attainable than it was 30, 40 years ago for sure.
Stephan Shipe: Yeah. Great times to be investing in cars.
Trent Abbott: I’ll take whatever excuse I can get to go do it. Absolutely.
Stephan Shipe: I agree. Thank you so much, Trent, for coming on today. This has been a great conversation.
Trent Abbott: Yeah, I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. Thank you so much.
Outro
Stephan Shipe: And that’s our show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week!
Disclaimer: The information provided in this podcast is for general informational and educational purposes only, and is not intended to constitute financial, investment, or other professional advice. The opinions expressed are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of any affiliated organizations. Investing in financial markets involves risk, including the potential loss of principal. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Before making any investment decisions, you should consult with a qualified financial advisor who can assess your individual financial situation, objectives, and risk tolerance.