Ep 12 - Andy Schneider - The Educator’s Guide to Money, College, and Real-World Finance

Hello friends, this is Tyler Gardner welcoming you to another episode of your Money Guide on the Side, where it is my job to simplify what seems complex, add nuance to what seems simple, and learn from and alongside some of the brightest minds in money, finance, and investing.

So let's get started and get you one step closer to where you need to be.

My guest today is a good friend of mine, Andrew Schneider, who I first met at Camp Billings, a non-profit summer camp in Fairleigh, Vermont, where, little-known fact, we both learned how to plunge toilets, set tables, and generally just be better people than we were at 9 or 10 years old.

Andy is a lifelong educator.

He began his career teaching English and coaching crew at the high school and university level.

After attending business school, he spent several years consulting in corporate America, but ultimately, and thankfully, found his way back to independent schools, where he has now served as CFO for the past 10 years.

Father of three, self-proclaimed, highly mediocre triathlete, Yankees season ticket holder, recovering New York Giants fan, and firm believer that everyone has a responsibility to educate themselves on the basics of personal finance.

I could not agree with him more on this last point.

And one of the primary reasons I wanted to have Andy on the show is he has the ability and the desire to work with people to get them to understand more about why finance matters in business, but also in their personal lives.

Throughout this conversation, we touch on why he left education, why he ultimately came back to education, what college may or may not look like in 20 years, what college tuition may or may not look like in 20 years, and some of the thinkers and texts that have impacted both of us.

And in this episode, you even get to hear what my two bloodhounds have to think about the increasing costs of college tuition because they would not let me edit out their thoughts.

So without further ado, a nuanced and comprehensive conversation with Andy Schneider.

You were an English major in college and you started teaching right after school, but you pivoted over to PWC, right?

Price Waterhouse Cooper.

Could you tell me a little bit about that pivot and what gave you the desire to leave teaching that quickly?

My first job out of college was teaching 11th grade English at a New England boarding school.

And I think one of the reasons I got into teaching, it was one of the only careers that I sort of, I knew what it looked like.

A lot of jobs, it's hard to imagine what it looks like when you're in college, but any kid who's been in a classroom knows what teaching looks like.

And it's sort of easy to envision yourself as a teacher.

That was something that felt natural for me.

So I got into teaching right out of undergrad and I liked it.

I loved it.

I would say I loved it my first year.

I liked it my second year.

And I started to get a little bit tired my third year.

And by the fourth year, I hated the kids.

The majority of mid-career to veteran teachers to whom I speak always say that they actually end up disliking their colleagues, but the kids are what keeps them in it.

What made it so you all of a sudden did not enjoy working with our youth?

Somehow, I was 21 when I started teaching.

So by the end of four, I was 25.

And I was somehow I was 25, but I was like this get off my lawn old man at 25.

I don't know how it happened.

Very quickly, you start noticing the same patterns in kids, just in terms of behavior.

And it's amazing the stories and similarities across kids.

And I found myself becoming very impatient in a way that I didn't like myself the way I was reacting in a lot of self-reflection and ways that at that point, four years, thinking about other opportunities and other things, you sort of get to a point where, is this what I'm going to do for the rest of my life?

Or is it not?

And if it's not, well then what?

One of the things that's interesting about boarding schools, you're not just a teacher, especially when you're right out of, right out of college, they throw you in.

And this is actually one of the best things about boarding schools.

You live in a dorm, you coach three sports, I worked in the admissions office, I helped a little bit with fundraising.

You wind up getting a ton of different job experience.

For me, business was always something that was super intimidating.

My father was in business, was a finance guy by trade, and I always was intimidated by it.

But my last year in this school, I was working in the admissions office, sort of a light bulb on the office.

Is this what business is?

Is this marketing and doing financial aid work?

I said, this is not as scary as I thought it was.

And it opened a door for me.

I think in some ways demystified the idea of business and made me a little bit more interested in kind of walking through that door and seeing what it had to offer me.

I took the GMAT for the first time and really started thinking about business school.

And I think if I were...

I can go back, it's still on my hard drive somewhere, but if I were to dust off all of my business school essays and what I thought I wanted to do, they were actually all about academic administration.

I thought I wanted to be an academic administrator.

To me, the dream job was to be athletic director at a Big Ten school or something like that.

So that's what I was writing about in my business school essays.

And I thought that would have been, that was the route.

If you wanted to be an administrator, you really needed to know.

business.

And then when you get to business school, everybody wants to be a banker or a consultant.

It wasn't all that exciting, but I was lucky enough to find an opportunity as a consultant with PwC.

Did you find that your experience at PwC lived into this idea you had created in your mind of this is business, this is what consulting is, and what did you think of it?

It's so funny because when I think about how intimidated I was by the idea of business, just to sort of paint the picture of what this was and more importantly, when this was.

I went to business school.

I started in the fall of 2009.

So this is when layman had just gone under and the financial crisis was really, really in the dregs of it at that point.

And everyone was still kind of unpacking what had happened, but I kind of thought that I was copping out.

And when I got to PwC, I just assumed that I was selfish and therefore everybody around me was going to be selfish and we were all going to be stepping on each other's throats in order to further our own careers.

And it just could not have been further from the truth.

There is an amazing teaching culture at PwC from when you start as an intern.

You have a buddy who's an associate or a senior associate.

You have a coach who's at the manager level.

And then you have a relationship partner who's a partner in the firm.

Were those three different people, three different roles?

Partners are sort of the top of the hierarchy, whereas managers are middle management in the firm.

And then associates or senior associates are really only a year or two into their experience at the firm.

And they're all meant to connect you with sort of different opportunities at different points and support you based on where you are.

But I had a big revelation when I interned and ultimately then when I came back to PwC as an associate and it served me really well since then, which is

you don't need to be a teacher in order to teach.

Teaching is really kind of everywhere.

I've really taken that with me, particularly now that I'm a manager and I oversee a number of employees.

If you help bring others along with you and teach them and coach them, and these people who are successful are successful because they're good at teaching, it was something that I really appreciated.

And it's one of the reasons that I wanted to work there and spent several years there.

Once you shifted away from PWC and back to education, one of your jobs, and correct me if I'm wrong, became kind of the formal and informal teacher to other faculty and to other constituents about money part of your role as a cfo is to teach and help educate all constituents about money did you find that to be the case and if so how did you take on that role of being the the money teacher the finance teacher if you will The past two jobs, I've been the CFO at independent schools.

And again, you and I have been on the other side of this where we've been on the faculty at independent schools.

People who chose careers that have nothing to do with money, actively had no interest in learning about money.

And I don't think when I was choosing what to major in in college, I didn't necessarily have an appreciation for how I was going to need to understand that stuff, regardless of whether I wanted to or not.

And then when you get to adulthood, you're sort of forced to and you realize, oh, perhaps I should have studied some of that stuff.

as the CFO of an independent school often do become a resource for faculty members.

Obviously, I'm not a financial advisor and I...

It's okay, neither am I.

People come to me all the time like, hey, what do you think of the stock?

I'm like, hey, I can't do that.

I think you should talk to your financial advisor.

But simpler example, I'm in charge of setting the health insurance benefits that we offer through our school, which is one of the most important, certainly the biggest benefit when we set our budget every year.

Hugely expensive part of our operating budget.

hugely expensive part of running any small business is health insurance premiums.

And it's a big choice for people and it's hard and it's complicated and it changes every year and understanding how do I think about deductibles?

How do I think about premiums?

How do I think about HSAs?

There's all this nuance.

And it's my job to understand this stuff and it's still hard.

So people come to me often and I have to be a teacher.

The first thing when I started at my previous job school said, what do you need in your office?

First thing I said is I need a whiteboard.

I have to have a whiteboard in my office because so often a huge part of what I have to do is employee education.

What were some of the other most common questions that you would get?

And I ask because I'm shocked that more faculty didn't utilize and take advantage of the CFO because there are so few outlets in this world to talk about money, to talk about investing.

So do they use you as that resource?

No, they don't.

I joke that my door is always open, but it's, I mean, it's not.

It's closed right now.

I think you know this really well.

It's probably why you're doing what you do.

People are so uncomfortable talking about money.

It's impolite.

Everybody assumes they should know more than they do.

They don't want to ask a dumb question.

So, no, they really don't.

There's a handful of kids at my school.

They're go-getters and they like to come in and show me their stock picks.

And I remind them that they really shouldn't be doing that.

There are these stock picking competitions that are going on in high schools.

And I'm like, how in the world is this helpful to say, hey, let's start a stock picking competition.

in September that ends in November.

What are we teaching kids?

Super incredibly unsexy to do long-term investing.

And yet they all want to come in and say, hey, we bought Tesla and we bought this and we bought that.

The stock market is incredibly, it's this mystical, misunderstood thing.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a really fun chance to teach a week-long class with kids about the stock market.

And most of the class was spent reminding them that the stock market is a collection of businesses.

It's not a collection of stocks.

It is a collection of businesses.

pointing to all these examples of why the stocks were successful because the the businesses were successful, and it's really easy for kids to forget because they just get so focused on the stock and the stock price.

Oh, it's easy for adults to forget.

Yeah, well, actually, well, there's a direct correlation there, too, because so many of them are getting their information from parents and all that.

One thing that has intrigued me about your work is you've had the privilege and the opportunity to sit with whether it was boards of directors or investment committees, right, who are managing money for, we'll call it the ultra long term, right?

So kind of more of an endowment philosophy.

What have you taken from any of your interactions with investment committees?

It's been some of the best professional development I've had.

My background, particularly the work I did at PWC, was way more on the financial operations side of things, process improvement, accounts payable, accounts receivable.

So it really wasn't on the investment side of things.

So just being able to sit in on investment committee meetings has been really valuable.

There's so many personalities and people who usually it's people who manage money for a living.

So much of it comes down to leadership of the committee, but as long as it's a person who can remind everybody what it is that they're trying to do, because if the leadership is not there, then you start getting into these conversations of where do we think the market's going over the next six to nine months.

And you need a leader who can remind them, hey, that's not what we do.

You don't have to worry nearly as much about liquidity risk.

Depending on the size of the portfolio, you can start to get into more alternative investments and have certain lock-up periods because there just aren't as many concerns about

what happens if it goes up, what happens if it goes down for a year or two years.

Most schools have a 70-30 portfolio, 70% equities, 30% fixed income, or maybe it'll be 70% equities, 20% fixed income, 10% alternatives.

It winds up being pretty straightforward.

I want to get back, Andy, to also to what you said about how few people talk about money and investing.

And even here, we've kind of remained arm's length from personal personal finance.

I think it's easy for you in your role to talk about professional finance, but I wonder who do you talk to about money?

It's kind of the idea, you know, when I used to watch The Sopranos, I always loved the scene where Dr.

Malfi, who was the therapist for Tony Soprano, when she would go and see a therapist herself.

And it's kind of this, like, we get this vision sometimes that once someone's in a role, they have it all figured out.

and that you as a CFO have all money sorted out.

Your investing is obviously great.

You're obviously very wealthy.

You know what long-term investing is.

What outlets do you find to talk about money yourself?

Talk to you, Tyler.

I think

you're a phenomenal resource.

We've had this conversation years ago.

I mentioned earlier, I was on the crew team for four years in college, and my coach always used to say, sculling the one person in a single boat or a marathon or

simpler example.

Even the best marathoner in the world, the single fastest guy who nobody can run faster than him for 26.2 miles still has a coach.

It doesn't matter if there's nobody who can do it better than you can.

Yes.

And still needs to have a coach because part of it is objectivity.

Even if you're the best at what you do, it doesn't mean that somebody looking at you objectively can't offer you some value.

For me, it's always been my dad.

Money is so

personal.

And because my dad knows who I am in terms of my values, anytime we're talking about money, it always starts with, well, what are you trying to do?

What's the point?

My dad gets very philosophical.

It's his way to remind me that I'm asking the wrong questions because sometimes when it comes to money, we're getting so focused on the what that we forget the why.

And coming back to education, a lot of it just had to do with family.

I was traveling four or five days a week and my wife and I had our first child and

I took my paternity leave and PWC said, great news, we're putting you back on this project in Chicago.

And I said, that's not great news.

And that was ultimately why I quit.

And fortunately, I found the CFO position at a school that was down the street from where we lived and sort of thought like, schools, finance, how did you not think of this before?

This is perfect.

It was all about finding

this sweet spot of what's interesting to me, what pays well enough to do what I want to do, and what allows me to kind of have the family that I want to have.

And it's hard to kind of find that sweet spot.

And my dad's always centered me in those conversations and talking about money and family

and life and a very different path.

He He was a plugger for a really long time.

He was a CPA and started at Pete Marwick way back when.

Pete Marwick was the PM in KPMG

and

worked his way up and

wound up getting a pretty big break when he was the CFO of a company that got acquired, made a good amount of money.

And he always said, you know, I could have been a much better dad.

I could have been a much better CFO.

I could have been a much better husband.

If it's a Venn diagram, I tried to find the sweet spot where I was pretty good at all of them as opposed to being amazing at one of them.

I think I've tried to find that similar sweet spot with all three.

That probably didn't answer your question.

I rambled a little bit.

Rambling is fine.

And one of the things that you just touched upon is it seems like part of your why

for having a job is paying for college.

And you have three children at this point, and college is becoming increasingly burdensome.

I'm sure a lot of the folks that get in touch with you, it's the biggest concern.

I think about it all the time.

How much of my emotional capacity is spent worrying about saving for college, which is

pretty frustrating when I think about it.

The irony that that's my industry and I'm part of the problem of driving up the cost of the industry is kind of funny given how much time I spent worrying about just for my own kids.

I know it's a stressful point of saving for college and worrying about it.

And people talk about it a lot that college tuition is a bubble and it's going to pop and it's not.

If you want to send your kid to a great school, it's, you know, it's $80,000 a year, whatever it is now.

And if your kid was just born 20 years from now, it's going to be $115,000.

And it's absolutely one of the first questions I always get when I meet with anybody who has kids or is foreseeing having kids: is how the heck do we A, start saving for college, B, afford college?

I'd like to even go to the why and just ask you flat out as an administrator who works in education, why college?

And I'm not trying to bias this too much, although I clearly am, but the more more I

think about the future of tuition payments and where they're going and how increasingly burdensome it is, not just to families who are planning for this, but also the students themselves.

Can you make a case for college?

And can you make a case for that type of investment?

into an undergraduate degree in this era where we have AI and endless free resources and free free marketing cultures where some ding-dong like me can literally hop onto social media and become a marketer within a couple months.

I'm not quite sure how that story ends yet in terms of education in America and what that means for everybody.

Harvard 30 years from now is going to look like Harvard today.

I'm sure they'll be teaching different things, but the dorms will still be the dorms.

The dining hall will still be the dining hall.

The opportunities will still be the opportunity.

It'll look fairly similar.

A lot of schools that are struggling today will be out of business 30 years from now.

The costs are just too high and they don't have the pricing power that Harvard, Princeton, Yale do.

And that's because of exactly what you're saying.

It's still a pricing exercise.

Is this worth it?

The same way we, you know, is this computer worth it?

Is this iPhone worth it?

And price go up for very specific reasons.

And eventually for a lot of these schools, it's not going to be worth it.

What universities have sold versus what they have provided, in some ways, I think there's a huge disconnect.

It's, you know, especially big universities, they have sold themselves as

these hotbeds of academic activity where there's cutting-edge research and you can work with these professors that are doing this really important research.

I went to a big research university.

I went to Rutgers, a big state school, where all this stuff was happening.

And yet that had nothing to do with my college experience.

I was an English major.

That's not what I did.

The value for me was independence and being away from home and learning how to be a part of a classroom discussion that was a little bit more advanced than high school because we were older and we could talk about more complicated things.

You ask a really important question because a lot of that stuff doesn't necessarily have to happen paying $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 a year of tuition.

There's an opportunity for disruption,

and yet

nobody's even really come close to disrupting it so far.

I'm not really sure what the answer is.

I could see a world where

dogs are upset.

Not happy about education.

They're ticked off that they're not going to get to go to Harvard and they got to go to Pennsylvania University now.

One of the things that drives up costs is that a lot of universities are trying to be all things to all people.

We want to be a school where...

you can study English or you can be an engineer or you can be an accountant or go to a football game and then go to the a cappella performance and

schools would probably be a little bit better at keeping their costs down if they were more specialized nobody ever said i'm not going to go to juilliard because they don't have a good football team right juilliard is one of the most prestigious schools in the country and you pick it for a specific reason so basketball

yeah yeah

juilliard march madness that's my sleeper i could see schools maybe going a little bit more in that direction where they try to really, they say, we're going to be an engineering school, as opposed to really trying to offer everything.

And that might be a way for more schools to survive and then thrive.

And then the market might make more sense in ways that for certain people, if you really don't know where you want to go, you don't know what you want to study.

You sort of also have to disentangle education from college.

Do you need a college degree to be successful?

No, but you still need an education.

You still have to be able to read, write, work with other people, collaborate, communicate.

Just right now, school is the mechanism that we learn those things.

Most good businesses, in my mind, and you know this too, do one or two things very well, right?

The best restaurants I go to have one or two things on the menu that are exceptional.

The worst restaurants I go to have a novel for your menu and don't do anything well.

And so I'm wondering what would be the skill set that you would predominantly want to teach a group of 17 to 22 year olds about what they will need heading into the next 10 to 20 years of this space, whether it's a specific major or a specific skill, but what would be your focal points for developing something that you think could either disrupt college or at the very least specialize in something and give it way more added value?

It's a great question.

I never really thought about it.

Yeah, me neither.

That's why I'm asking you.

So much more today with project-based learning and more learning by doing.

It's much less what we call sage on the stage.

It used to be a teacher in front of a classroom teaching kids stuff, which works for some kids.

For me, it was really difficult.

I was an okay student.

I wasn't a great student because I was the sort of kid whose mind would wander.

And if it was just a teacher talking for a little while, three or four minutes would go by and I would sort of be like, how long was I out?

School today, it's much more engaging, and there's a lot more hands-on type work and projects and

a lot more doing that leads to longer-term learning that kids really do retain.

My MBA program was the same halfway between the first and second year.

Everybody does an international residency where you work with an international company and you actually do a consulting project for them.

So for us, we went overseas and we consulted for Mahindra, which is an automotive company.

We were researching one of their...

cars and we went over and we pitched them what we thought their rollout strategy should be.

So by the time we graduated, everybody had international consulting experience and it was legitimately helpful.

There's just no substitute for it.

So if I were designing a program from scratch, it would probably be something that was much less textbook oriented.

One of the reasons I became an English major is because the best way for me to learn was to write.

I remember almost every paper I wrote, even in freshman, sophomore year, I still remember those papers.

And I remember the stuff that I read because I had to write about it, but I remember tests I took.

I don't remember textbooks I read, but if I had to write about something, I remember it.

For me, certainly, that's always been true.

The debt I owe right now to college is the ability to write a compelling five paragraph essay, because even though my short form video is about money, it is in the form of a five paragraph essay.

And I try to tell people none of this is new.

And so I find myself torn when I suggest that college might not be worth a quarter of a million dollars.

I also think, obviously, of the potential catch-22 there of, but would I be thinking that way?

Or would I be able to process thoughts that way had I not gone through that system?

Is there a certain book that you would teach?

What's a book that you would say, this is one where I just want to start, whether it's something that your father had thought about with the philosophical meanderings or what would be the most important way for you to start a class with a certain text and what might that text look like?

One of the only books that I've read.

multiple times is Morgan Hause's Psychology of Money.

It's one of the only books that I've wanted to revisit multiple times.

And every time I read it, I connect with it in different ways.

It gets to the root of misconception about finance, particularly about personal finance, that it demystifies it in a way.

This gets sort of back to where we started our conversation about how, for me, I was so afraid of business because I just assumed it wasn't for me.

I was afraid of the language.

I was afraid of the lingo.

So I should go do something that feels more comfortable, like reading books.

And that should be my job.

And what I love about the psychology of money is that it reminds me that that personal finance is not a math problem no matter how much we want to make it a math problem it's not spreadsheets it's not the study of finance it's the study of how people behave with money and that's really hard to teach because everybody's different that's a book that i would recommend really to anybody certainly to young people who are who are interested in learning about personal finance.

It's a book that I recommended to my CFO father as well, who's in his 70s, and I know he really enjoyed it.

That's a book you recommended to me.

It's a book that I recommended to you.

I am currently working on a book myself and my editor is getting increasingly frustrated that I keep saying that all I want to do is write the sequel to the psychology of money because I have yet to come across a text that is both as thoughtful, as universally applicable, but as accessible.

I think that's the big one for me is that I have behind me probably 60 personal finance books, all of varying degrees of difficulty, if you will, right?

Of different levels of jargon and different types of assumed knowledge.

And one of the things that Hausel continues to impress me with is his accessibility.

And I wonder if that's something that really does separate some of the great writers and thinkers is the ability to grant access to the information to as wide of an audience as possible, right?

He's a storyteller.

This is, I mean, somewhat along those lines.

I would certainly recommend it to anybody.

One of the reasons I got to know Morgan Hausel is when I was in business school, he started a Motley Fool years ago, and that continues to be a DC-based company.

So when I was in business school, it was part of an applied portfolio management class, and we would do research and post on the Motley Fool.

And right after I graduated, I started listening to a podcast, Motley Fool.

At the time, I think it was called Motley Fool Money.

It's been fun to kind of watch him evolve.

They always joked all of our dozens of listeners, but when I was commuting to the city, that was one of my favorite podcasts to listen to.

He was on that podcast, and he wrote for the Motley Fool and eventually went to Wall Street Journal.

It's been fun to watch him kind of blow up and evolve as a writer and as a speaker.

Just surrounding yourself with podcasts is like a podcast.

And I'm aware of the fact that we're doing this on a podcast, but podcast and audiobook is such an underrated form of content and media.

It's so accessible.

We spend so much time either on a treadmill or in the car or where it's really easy to consume this stuff and you really do retain a lot of it.

You don't know what you're going to retain over time, but the more you're surrounding yourself with it and just kind of through osmosis, a lot of the stuff that I spout out now is as gospel.

It's just stuff that I've been listening to for over a decade now.

To the extent you can just pop in headphones and listen to whatever you can, consume whatever you can.

It's why I started a podcast.

I'm

optimistic that there are many people out there who do appreciate long form conversation, that we're not in this three-second soundbite culture and we're able to actually process things in longer form.

But also the biggest danger to me of our current short form video infatuations, whether it's YouTube shorts or TikTok or Instagram reels, et cetera, is that we're...

we're not adding nuance to any of this.

And every time someone says that one of my clips is misleading or that I left something out, it takes every ounce of me not to respond.

Of course, of course,

I left everything out.

I left 99.

There's nothing I actually even got to in this.

A one minute sound clip, you can't do anything with.

And so I appreciate

just the opportunity to be able to connect with somebody like you.

to chat through some of these things in a way that hopefully allows people to see again some more of the nuance beyond the the one minute clips and i appreciate too, that the podcast have had as much of an impact on you, you know, as I hope they will going forward, even though it's a completely inundated sphere now with over a million podcasts.

And as I was even looking up a name for this podcast, I stumbled upon 10 that I wanted and they were all already taken.

So yeah,

it didn't matter what iteration of money and mentality and psychology you used, they were taken.

So you're left with money guide on the side.

Well, good.

Well, thank you so much for joining me.

I appreciate the work, obviously, you do with educating not just students, but faculty and all constituents within your sphere about money.

We need more of it, and we need more of it coming from a place of people who actually want to teach, but also understand the underlying idea that at the end of the day, you're correct.

This is not about money.

It's about so much more.

So thanks for what you do and appreciate your taking time to join me for this conversation.

Hey, you too, Tyler.

Don't forget, you don't need to be a teacher to teach.

So keep on teaching.

Well, too.

Thanks for tuning in to your money guide on the side.

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Until next time, I'm Tyler Gardner, your money guide on the side, and I truly hope this episode got you one step closer to where you need to be.