Angela Lin 0:14
Today we are having a follow up to kind of like many of our past episodes, but I would say more directly Money, Honey, we are talking today with a very special guest, Keith Koo, about personal finance and estate planning and a bunch of other stuff in between. But before we get started, I think we need to introduce you to our listeners. And one of the starting bases we’d like to start with is, but where are you really from?
Full Transcript (Note: Transcribed via AI, may contain errors)
Keith Koo 0:43
I think the question, where are you really from and something that especially in the United States, we get a lot, and it’s a question I got growing up in a predominantly Caucasian city, and I never really fazed me. So I would say, well, of course I’m from Alameda, California and they would say no, no, but where are you really from? Like, what does that mean? I’m from Alameda. So this is one of those really innocent kind of clueless things when you’re when you’re young growing up in a community where most of the faces are not Asian, certainly even back then. So, as I got older, like I see the differences where people were asking me like, where are you really from? And I’m like, I would then realize why they’re asking. I’d be very purposeful – I’m from Alameda, California. Where are you really from? And I would say, well, I think you’re trying to find out where my family’s from. My family’s from, is my family they were born in China. But then I go into very long descriptions that you know, for many generations of my family, my new my grandfather went to university in the United States before going back to China and then finding out more of my great grandmother went to seminary was one of the first women to graduate with a US medical degree in China. And then after my mom just passed away this February, doing some my own research, I realized that my great great grandmother through adoption is a Caucasian missionary from Michigan. So I can honestly say what I normally respond with. I know why you ask the question. I’m 100% American, I’m 100% Chinese, my family’s originally from China, but for many generations, they went to school here. And then I normally ask them, like, where are you really from? And they usually, usually, uh, you know, Caucasian Americans, they can’t exactly pinpoint that because their ethnicity is a blend of multiple ethnicities.
Jesse Lin 2:29
are your family story is like really interesting. Usually the immigrant trajectory is not so back and forth, at least, our conversations with other friends and stuff. So
Keith Koo 2:39
It’s a complex question, and I studied a lot of Asian American history in university. And so understanding the immigration waves. So you’ve got the 1850 diaspora where people were coming to work on the railroads during the gold rush and then the 1882 Exclusion Act until then the Japanese came up in 1906 gentleman’s agreement. Just on down these immigration patterns we don’t fit my parents technically fit into the 1965 Immigration Act, but they were here in the 50s and 60s. So they’re the beneficiaries of the Act, but they weren’t there because of the Act. Right? And then there’s the more recent immigration pattern for Asians in particular, as students in the 90s. And you see that particularly with mainlanders from China and then South Asians or Indians.
Angela Lin 3:24
Well, you are a man of many, many passions and works and things that you’re involved in. So why don’t you give the listeners a little bit of an overview of like, you know, your background, what do you do. You do stuff officially, but you have a lot of like side things that you do. You’re involved in the community. Give us a little overview.
Keith Koo 3:44
Well, thanks. I do do a lot of things. I think that the biggest thing is I lived an entirely corporate life I did the got out of university got into a big company got to another big company and another big company and another big company and made it to a corporate executive when I decided I finally wanted to follow my passion, start a consulting firm. So the consulting firm Guardian Insight Group does exactly what I’ve done in corporate. But now I do it for myself and I have clients. About four years ago, startup started coming out of the woodwork for help. And so helping these companies navigate a lot of things that people usually don’t even care about around regulatory questions and concerns. And so I really love getting into these projects that I don’t have to worry so much. I’m not really trying to necessarily make near term money off of it. It’s more of the investment of a startup and seeing where it goes. I do have a radio show and a podcast called Silicon Valley Insider. In San Francisco in Silicon Valley. The addressable market of radio listeners is 9 million people. The business networks that my radio shows are on happen to be over 50% Asian, including South Asian or Indian, and there were zero Asian radio hosts. And so they were working on me for about six months, and I was like I don’t want to do a show and he said no, no, we think you should represent and that really got to me. Well, what I told them was, well, your show is an Asian American show. I wanted to be able to do a show and happen to be an Asian American, but my show is not an Asian American. But most of my guests, two thirds of my guests, startup founders, C level executives, investors, VCs, they are women and minorities.
Jesse Lin 5:24
So I mean, we can just get started with the first time topic, which is the tie in with one of our most recent episodes regarding money and financial literacy. Our consensus is that most of our peers have lots of gaps in knowledge in terms of how to manage their own money and grow it for like their own use later down the line. It’s not something that’s really taught in the education system, or really by our parents, your background seems to suggest that you had a very different experience.
Keith Koo 6:21
I’ll start off with the Western education system, for whatever reason, we don’t teach personal finance. It’s actually quite a shame. And I was actually shocked. I didn’t realize that we didn’t really learn it until college when my friends are getting into 15,000-$20,000 in credit card debt. I said, how is that even possible? Here’s my story. My dad went to UC Berkeley for his MBA was one of the first Chinese people to get an MBA from Berkeley and then had lifelong employment at Kaiser Permanente, the stereotypical Asian thing. You’re either a doctor, lawyer, engineer, accountant, so my dad’s an accountant. Actually managed Kaiser’s his retirement funds from the early 80s till when he retired in the mid 90s. And my dad actually grew the fund from $250 million to $8 billion. It was in the mid 90s so like that’s wild. My dad was very – he was a tiger dad. But he was very good about injecting life lessons about personal finance to my sister, my older sister and I like for instance, I’ve been doing my own taxes since I was in eighth grade. My dad went to my room one day, and he’s like your sister already does this but the IRS tax code is written for an eighth grade level, you’re an eighth grader, here’s a tax return. It’s a 1048. I’m going to be back in about four hours. I’m going to check in on how you’re doing. And so I’ve been doing my own taxes ever since those days still do my own taxes. My dad instilled in my sister and I this understanding of personal finance that we assumed everybody got. I do a lot of mentoring so there’s a really well known free coding school in Silicon Valley college level. It’s an alternative education program and through one of my nonprofits, Asian Business League, we’ve been doing personal finance training for high schoolers for years and years and years. And in doing a career day for the high schoolers, I had this group From the coding academy come to speak about alternative ways of getting a software education. And when they heard our personal finance pitch like, can you teach our students this and these are adults, I believe there’s a weakness in not teaching personal finance in high school or as young people. And then in the college imagine you came from very humble means or alternative education. So either your family didn’t have a lot of resources, you don’t have that education at all, or a family how the resources have been sticking alternative path, alternative education track, right, you don’t have those skills. So imagine that you suddenly come out of one of these degree programs and you’re making 100-$150,000 a year. You think it’s great that you have access to this money but if you don’t know how to handle money, it’s actually more of a burden. Back before the dot com era MC Hammer built a very fancy house in the Fremont hills and that house cost $13 million. In the downturn in the mid 90s that house went for 3 million. Vanilla Ice was the opening act MC Hammer. I loved rap in the 90s right and he quit MC Hammer’s tour because Vanilla Ice had his entire career in 18 months right? MC Hammer made more money than Vanilla Ice but MC Hammer blew it because his dad wanted to get into horse racing. And so he went bankrupt. The funny story about Vanilla Ice for anyone listening his manager was from UC Berkeley. I was at its final $10,000 concert the week before Ice Ice Baby took off. He’s doing an Asian Business Association dance party. For 10 grand his, his manager was either Vietnamese or Chinese American, but that manager turned Vanilla Ice’s money into basically a generational legacy. He kept all that money, and he got all kinds of other stuff, but he never lost his money. So even though he had drugs and all the other things, he still had a money manager who knew exactly what he was doing. So you can compare the life between MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice, right? And that’s what I want to let people know is that that can be you, you can either take the path of education or the path of ignorance and it will really affect the outcome of your life.
Angela Lin 9:52
To that point, since you do these training programs, and you’re like teaching the youth about this. I’m curious in your mind, like what are the key most important building blocks that a lot of people are missing right now?
Keith Koo 10:04
I think even before we get into what people need to sign up and learn, I think it’s a mindset. And I think it’s really difficult in the current climate we’re living in. And there’s a lot of people out of work and a lot of people that are living off government support. The very first thing and I think that this would be in any community is to have a plan to live within your means. I think Western culture especially gives you the thought that debt is good. I think oftentimes, when we talk about Asians in particular, education is highly valued to give access to education, do everything we can to get our children through the best education they can possibly afford. So the shifting conversation that says, hey, I might encourage my kid to go to junior college, but if they got into Berkeley, or Harvard or Stanford, they’re going. Whether people express or not, especially in Asian culture, there is a payback that’s in somewhat someone’s back of their mind. It might not be payback in terms of directly into the family, but whether this investment in my child is going to actually equate to what they come out with. Back to the concept of live within your means. Whether you’re a 10 year old, an 18 year old post college, always have that in the back of your mind that you need to live within your means. And then if you’re going to use debt, use that wisely. There’s a reason why when you are freshmen, they’re gonna offer you credit cards at the university, they still do that. But that once you start your career and you didn’t have a credit card, it’s almost impossible to get right? There’s a reason for that. They want to get you while you’re young, while you’re young, you still might be attached to your parents, you can’t do that much damage, but you get used to having that access to credit when you become a quote unquote, working adult, everything changes. So that would be like my first advice.
Jesse Lin 11:37
Piggybacking off of that from your trainings with younger people. What do you think are like the most common financial mistakes that people make?
Keith Koo 11:43
Well, I think it’s goes back to the mindset of instant gratification. We live in a digital world where I can get something off of Amazon and it might be delivered today. I think the thought of like, I can always just buy it now. I don’t have to worry about it till it’s later and I think that debt can be crushing. The mindset shift is different, when I speak to a very young person like still in high school, you can kind of help them see the value. You can do things like even to your child’s like I can give you one M&M now or I can give you three M&Ms a half an hour from now. Initially, most times I would say the child’s going to want that M&M right now, but when they realize they get more by waiting, you would hope that they would start to alter the behavior and have delayed gratification. So there’s a lot of discussion around like, do you really need that? Is that going to really help? Some of the high schoolers I work with, they already do like their own clothing resale, which I didn’t know was a thing. Yeah, they figured out that in order for them to stay current and fashionable, they will resell their clothing to somebody else who’s before the fashions over and that would give them money that can continue to expand and buy a new wardrobe. So I think those are pretty easy concepts to get ahold of when you’re young. One of the things back to the example is getting into my Intuit days, this is like still struggling post 2008 financial crisis. They didn’t seem to have financial goals. So for me it was very typical to get a job and then save up for a house and buy a house. I have folks that say I want to save for travel, I want to go to Europe, I want to go to Asia. I know that too right now is on hold because of COVID-19, but have a financial goal in mind. And it could be retirement, I want to be able to retire at a certain age, I don’t want to work till I’m 70 years or whatever. Having that mindset, then you can put a plan together of how you’re going to get there. I think the biggest thing I see is when people first start out, they don’t have a plan. And I admit my first plan when I graduated college was I was willing to blow like my first year on a car. I had that on my mind. Like, I’m gonna go I’m willing to spend up to my first year salary on a car.
Jesse Lin 13:34
That’s fair, I think because you have a goal, you want something personally and you’re saving towards it, which I think for maybe a lot of our listeners, though, goal setting is hard because people think that you have to save for something that’s like responsible or like has to bring you value in the future. And that’s not always the case like you can be saving for things like vacation, as you mentioned, or a car, at least from my perspective it’s not necessarily that you always have to be saving for something that has like future financial gains.
Keith Koo 13:59
Yes. And then also if you’re going to spend money spend money on things that you enjoy. I don’t remember the guys’ name off the top my head but one of the like financial gurus, he said that normally I’m very very cheap but when it came to outfitting my house for home theater, I spent a lot of money cuz I spent all my time worthwhile investment.
Jesse Lin 14:17
Do you have like an opinion or perspective on how people should be managing their finances now, especially people who might be like out of work, or having a really hard time finding an income stream because of the pandemic?
Keith Koo 14:29
I think my biggest advice would be one, don’t get down on yourself. This is a we hope a once in a lifetime economic event and that getting through the event in the near term might seem daunting, but getting past it people generally come out stronger. I think also that I think people get tied to what they’re used to. I’m not saying you should move, but there are different living situations. So I think people get really fed up about, hey, I’m in Silicon Valley or New York, right or these expensive locations, Washington. Seattle, there are alternatives to being where you’re at. But it will cause other considerations like can I live in another city kind of another state. If you think about where you could live and what you could do, especially with work, hey, Facebook just announced that they’re going to hire 50% outside of California, and 50% remote. So that opens up a lot more possibilities. So that would be the advice is don’t get stuck. My show I have a segment after every show called the pivot and it could be a transformation of a company, it can be a transformation of an individual, their story. I worry about Asians in general, especially those that have Tiger parents life was very prescriptive. And when you don’t have that happen anymore, what do you do next? I think the biggest transition I would just talk about in general between east meets west, I help a lot of career minded folks and east meets west or West meets east and there’s two parallel paths. The traditional east meets west if you go back to how a company in China operates. It’s really hard to get into university, the top university, you get out of the cohort 10 to 20 people in a working group and you work for a supervisor, and every few years as your supervisors rise up the ladder, they pick the few people to be their backfill replacements. And that happens all the way up to you reach the top. And so people tend to really just wait in a call to corner like my father. They do a job, they do a great job, but they wait for that promotion, they wait for that promotion. The western mindset of leadership good or bad, as we call it, the shooting star mentality. It’s a personality driven culture, you might be a really talented executive with no charisma, or you might be a really charismatic executive with no content. And you might be let go or transition down within a year but we call it the shooting star because it doesn’t matter because once you land and you hit it big at one place, then you know your career is kind of set that is antithetical to the way that most Asians are raised. So tying this all together in terms of early, mid and late career. In early career discussion, having the self awareness that whether you believe that there’s institutional glass ceiling or not that you’re entering the environment that you are in essence a minority. It’s harder here in Silicon Valley in San Francisco or 60% of professionals are Asian but only 10% make executive and above. We talked about a study done by two former Cisco executives that I know very well. They’ve been tracking this for now almost 12 years and they do it for all ethnicities. We talked about a leadership parity index. Systemically it says that Caucasian males executives used to be almost at 2.0 like 12 years ago and they’ve gone down and Caucasian women have improved but all other ethnicities black, Latinx and Asian have either remained stable or in the case of Asians, we’ve actually gotten down in leadership. With Asian male executive, I think it’s 0.6 an Asian female like at 0.4 or 0.5. And so be aware that the reason why there’s only 10% executives to 60% population of workers, it has a lot to do with I believe with cultural upbringing and the way we’re trained, you will get very discouraged if you’re going to wait around. I think that’s the biggest difference. I think about what my dad wanted for me and what I did, I was definitely more of the take control and be active in my career. And so for me it was when the opportunity arose and I felt that I had enough job content to take the role, I took the calculated risk, and I stepped into it. And that’s a very different mindset than most Asian Americans.
Angela Lin 18:12
So can you talk a little bit more about that? Because as you described your career like you have climbed quite a bit and like you hit that executive level and then now you’re doing your own thing. I’m curious, like, how did you navigate breaking from the way that your dad brought you up to to think about the corporate world what you were seeing the other Asian people doing? What was it in you that was like, I’m not going to follow this norm, and I’m gonna do things my own way.
Keith Koo 18:38
I think there’s two parts of that. The first part is my dad wanted me to either become an accountant or study finance. My dad’s plan was you’re going to do this, this and this. Well, I’ll be very, very frank. I’m not the typical Asian where I’m going to, you know, basically nail the CFA exams. So then I had to think about well, what career paths do I want that’s not doctor, lawyer, engineer or accountant. I actually intentionally picked more roles related to soft skills. And that’s with relationship management, and then operations and deals, you don’t find actually many Asians in these roles. Once you pick a career where they actually value for your domain expertise and you’re unique, then you kind of have a better way of setting your path, because you’re going to be sought out for that skill set. And that’s what becomes a differentiator.
Angela Lin 19:25
So on your show, because you mentioned that you have been able to bring on guests that are largely minority and women, which is amazing. But we also have that juxtaposed against this, like very small percentage of minorities and women in the management level. So we’re curious, like, do you find it difficult at all to book these guests? Or is it that the Asians and the other minorities like yourself that have like chosen to go against the norm have this like magnetic connection to each other and start gravitating towards each other, and you just have this network already of people that are like minded.
Keith Koo 20:04
It’s a combination. So I said earlier that my shows had like two thirds women and minorities. But I’m not intentional about that. What I focus on are stories. And so what happens is my corporate life, I was doing lots of technology deals. And so I’ve done deals with almost every major technology company. And what happens is you develop a good network. And so a lot of those people then become startup founders. So what I think happens is, we all get on our routines. And I think when you think about normal stereotypes of even startup founders, there’s a term called the blue flame. So the blue flame is a stereotype in Silicon Valley. If you Google it, it’ll say it’s two Caucasian male founders single after college dropped out of the PhD program. This is like the Google founders, the Facebook founders, the Yahoo founders, right. And then sometimes it’s a Caucasian male and an Asian male. And this is really not politically correct now, especially what’s going on with the current climate but up until February like people celebrate this, that this is like the perfect startup combo right? Back to my shows guests it’s more of the latter part of what you said, which is like people with like mindedness that I’m trying to highlight stories. But really the startup world, while investors might be identifying with this blue flame concept there are startup stories everywhere. And that’s what I’m trying to highlight. The issue that I have with Asian Americans, and it’s the issue in society in general with the whole George Floyd incident, there’s that term white adjacency. I think Asians automatically got lumped into white adjacency. And if you think about comparing it to the startup ecosystem, there are definitely startup founders of color, definitely start founders of black indigenous people of color, and I work with them, but there’s not a lot of them. And so the key is, how do we get more people are comfortable with starting their own thing to actually take that risk. And as they have good products and concepts, they interact with people who are colorblind in the situation, they will then get access to the funds and everything else, because people get really used to their routines. And so if you’re a venture capitalist and you’re used to funding a certain profile company, you’re good to keep funding that profile company, you have to actually get disrupted to feel like you can go beyond that.
Angela Lin 22:04
So break the mold people, it’s time to take those risks. That’s the takeaway here.
Jesse Lin 22:10
And related to the ideas of like soft skills, and being more vocal for yourself, what do you think has helped to really build those skills and become an advocate for yourself? Because I think at least for myself, when I first started out, I had that mentality that I was just kind of gonna put the pedal to the metal like put the hours in and then like, have a soft conversation about the amount of output that I was making to try and pivot that into like the next thing but I think as I’ve grown in my career, I found that that’s like not enough. You have to be like very, very loud, about, like, what you’re doing the results that you’re achieving. So do you have any advice for our listeners about how they should go about trying to do that for themselves?
Keith Koo 22:49
This is a double edged sword for Asians and for women too. Western leadership style – it’s almost expected to be bold and brash, kind of go guns blazing. I think for Asians, you kind of got to build up to that notoriety. So for me, I’m not the guns blazing person. That’s not my brand. But I am known as extremely blunt in business, we joke about it in the startup world. Sometimes I come across a little bit of Simon Cowell, because I might be smiling. If you ask me to tell you exactly what I think about your business idea, I will tell you exactly what I think. The difference with Asians you can’t start off like that. You got to build up into that brand. And so I’m going to switch it around. I don’t think it’s so much what the soft skills is. I think it’s how are you going to develop your persona and your influence? And what are you going to be known as. Through our nonprofits – we did three nonprofits, Asian Business League, Asian Leadership Alliance, which is a collection of Asian employee resource groups from companies and NAP San Francisco, we had a personal branding event with Karen Kang. She’s talking about personal branding. So along these lines of soft skills, it’s develop your consistent brand of what you want to be known for. And through that, develop your strategy and how you’re gonna get promoted.
Angela Lin 23:55
Keith, I think you’re my spirit animal because I love what you said it definitely echoes the way that I’ve kind of built up my own persona at work. Personal branding is a like fascinating topic. My last job, I was in a position where I didn’t like directly manage people, but because I worked in consulting as well. So I did projects where I was like, informally managing groups, and a lot of those folks were younger, like the first job out of college, they don’t really know how to navigate the corporate world. And what I found was that they don’t often think about the concept of personal branding and what reputation they’re trying to build in order to influence or direct, their career path a certain way. And that’s understandable, given that it’s their first job, but it’s just like very interesting because a lot of the conversations I would have with them is they would see the way that I carry myself in the way that I was able to influence like my managers, for example, and they’re like, how do I get to that kind of level because they haven’t thought through like, what do I need to do to craft that for myself?
Keith Koo 24:59
Yeah, I think you’re usually brought up in a structure my own family included where you don’t question authority. You can’t question decisions that are being made and you don’t have a voice. And then you get into the western corporate world and inherently embedded they know that about Asians. But at the same time, in order to thrive in the Western world, you have to bring up ideas, and you have to show how you’re adding value, but you can’t do it in a boastful or bragging sort of way. But here’s my suggestion on that. If you have the opportunity, especially in your early career, before focusing on money, figure out what leaders you align to, you can find leaders that like you. So that’s kind of what happened to me as I look back is I had a career path and then I impressed certain leaders in other divisions. So that’s why I don’t have I don’t have a linear career path. They’d asked, hey, do you want to work for me? And so I learned way more from the people that wanted me to come over and took me under their wing, and that was probably worth more than any near term financial opportunity.
Angela Lin 25:55
So I think our conversation has naturally flowed in a bit of a like chronological sense of your path along life now we’re going to transition into a further phase in life, which is another area that you have like some passion for helping people with, which is estate planning, right? This is also something that you’ve been mentoring and coaching some folks about. The closer reality for us to think about is our parents, right? Because they’re, they’re older and thinking about the eventual time that we have to say goodbye, which is very sad, but we need your advice. My dad literally will not write a will, like he’s just gonna verbally tell me all the things I’m gonna have to remember all of them somehow. So, like, we want to hear more about what you do there and how you would advise us to approach our parents with being a little bit more strategic with how they’re thinking about this topic.
Keith Koo 26:46
Yeah, this is great. I don’t have any work around estate planning. The passion around it is my parents just passed away and we realized that our dad being the way he is as a planner, he wanted to plan everything always. So funeral arrangements he planned everything already. My sister, I really had nothing to do. So this passion of ours is we know, especially in Asian culture, the passion is getting people to understand and educated on these options. What normally happens is you should at least have a trust, no matter what your parents should have a trust. I’ve developed all these connections in especially here in Silicon Valley in the Bay Area, and then I have reach nationally. If you need help with this, just come hit me up and ask me for help because we like empowering people. A trust does a few things a trust protects your financial assets from probate. Probate is this process when you don’t have a will or a trust that will eat up a certain percentage of your estate just because of the administration and it’s going to lock up your family’s funds. So like if they needed to make a mortgage payment on their existing property that might be at risk because you can’t make a mortgage payment anymore. So a living trust a trust or revocable living trust, all these terms, that is a minimum is something that everybody should consider. And then when you do your living trust, if you have an attorney that incorporates everything that that also gives you which is equally important durable power of attorney so that you can actually make decisions on behalf of your parents, if that’s what they want you to do. Your parents can actually decide what level of treatment they want. In the medical universe, there’s always this distinction between life saving measures and quality of life measures. So you could be resuscitated but you might be a vegetable, but because you didn’t express your wishes, the medical team that find you in whatever condition you’re at, they’ll do everything they can to keep you alive. Now, arguably in a vegetative state, and you’re 80 something years old and 90 something years old, my personal decision would not to live in a vegetative state. So durable power of attorney, is this financial decisions, medical decisions. Advanced Directive is how do you want to be resuscitated or not resuscitated. And then if you have children, there’s guardianship so you can see designate who you want. Now, I’m not an attorney. And again, I’m not saying I do any of these services. I just think it’s really important for the community, any community, especially Asians that they are aware of these things. The premise of most Asian families is that we don’t want to be a burden to our kids.
Angela Lin 28:55
Do you have any go to Chinese speaking people who could help?
Keith Koo 29:01
So this is good, this is really good. As a passion project, my sister and I are actually thinking of putting together some type of community platform together that really focuses on the questions that you’ve asked. Because like when you think about attorneys they’re like McDonald’s, they want to get you in, get out, get your documents and gone. Talk about financial planners, they want to be there to take on the assets. They don’t want to get into the messiness of this. So we’re actually going to come up with something that’s going to serve the community and it will most likely have language options. So I’m assuming that you and your family would like this service.
Angela Lin 29:30
Yeah, well, I’m gonna push it on them when it’s available.
Keith Koo 29:34
Along with that, then when you think about estate planning estate has to deal with when you die. I think there’s so many other areas that is almost taboo to talk about in Asian culture. You don’t talk about money, which is why you don’t have personal finance education, because your parents want to talk about money. It’s bad luck, or it’s not polite, or we don’t tell people about our financial situation, even people that we pay to manage our finances. And then you talk to you about death that’s taboo because there’s bad spirits, there’s bad omens, bad luck. Or it’s also impolite and disrespectful because you’re waiting for me to die. It’s kind of like, I get it. I have all these conflicting cultures in me, right? What are you gonna do when we talk about elder care senior care, the Asian model is to go live with you in your house and you’re gonna take care of them. But when you have a two income earner and you’ve got your own kids, that doesn’t become practical. So what are the options out there for you? Right. And so we’ve talked a lot about senior care, elder care as well. I know we said it’s estate planning, but it’s really about this concept in the Western world that we spent 18 years raising our kids, we spent 19 years taking care of our parents on average. That’s a statistic. That’s a real statistic. Yeah, that’s a that’s a measurement.
Jesse Lin 30:40
When do you think it’s critical for a younger person to start thinking about estate planning and setting these administrative things up?
Keith Koo 30:47
Certainly, if you’re getting married, you should be thinking about it. When you do a living trust, you can actually plan ahead for when you have kids, or if you have multiple kids, like you can actually set like I’m gonna split this 50/50 between my children. If you have any assets, if you buy a house, for instance, you should definitely think about it at that point in time because you don’t want all the things you worked for in life to suddenly be getting extra taken out of it just because only because you didn’t have a will or trust the government gets an extra percentage of your estate when you’re gone, because you didn’t have anything set up.
Angela Lin 31:16
Okay. Yes, Dad, please.
First of all, thank you. This has been amazing. I think, since you’ve heard some of our other episodes, I think this is maybe the most informative so we’ve ever had. So thank you very much for joining us. We forgot to mention that the way that Keith and us got connected is that we are all part of this Asian Podcast Network so shout out to Jerry for bringing us all together. To close out we are now moving into our Fortune Cookie closing section because we like to end on a sweet treat with something fun and to share with people our biggest flops that we’ve had with working on our podcast. So one time we had a guest on and we talked for like an hour and a half. It was a really wonderful conversation. And we had her drop off before we stopped the recording. And we only found out after that happened that that deleted her entire recording for an hour and a half. And we were able to recover it but there was a huge panic. But that for sure is our biggest flaw because we had a mild heart attack thinking about the time and energy lost.
Keith Koo 32:30
I see. So I’m a little bit spoiled because I have a radio show and my radio show is – my radio show results in a podcast and my radio show’s recorded. And so I have a professional sound engineer that fixes everything. So I would say that my normal flops would be where I mis-track when the guest is going to air kind of like what I was doing earlier in your show. So I lose track of when the show’s going to air and it’s not usually in sequential order. So I might mix up like who’s up next or – so I’ve done stuff like that where like oh, my next show will be so and so and it’s not so and so because of that. So that’s most often what I screw up.
Angela Lin 33:07
Thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you?
Keith Koo 33:09
The easiest way to get ahold of me is just email me at Keith@svin.biz. My radio show Silicon Valley Insider, you can subscribe to it on any major podcast platform. You can also go to svin.biz to find out more about me and it’s been great to be here. So I thank you, Angela and Jesse. And I hope we get to do it again sometime.
Angela Lin 33:30
Looking forward to it. Thank you. So if you guys enjoyed this episode, please write us in because as we mentioned, this is a very different type of episode. And I think if you’re interested in us bringing on more guests like this, definitely tell us because this is the type of stuff we’re trying to work into the way that we’re thinking about future topics and future episodes. So email us your feedback at telluswhereyourefrom@gmail.com the YOURE is Y-O-U-R-E.