Episode Takeaways
Key Takeaways:
What happens to your mindset about money after you’ve achieved career success? In this conversation, retired global biotech executive Tony Bower, PhD, shares how ambition, family, and financial clarity reshape the way we think about spending and purpose in retirement.
This episode explores the psychology of spending after success. Tony reflects on growing up in a family shaped by Depression-era frugality, building a career in economics and the pharmaceutical industry, and navigating the transition into retirement. Together, Tony, Danton, and Kyle discuss how early money beliefs shape our financial habits, why retirement requires emotional preparation as well as financial planning, and how parents can pass meaningful financial lessons to the next generation. The conversation highlights the balance between enjoying financial success today and remaining thoughtful about long-term goals, family, and what truly matters most.
Key Takeaways:
- Early money habits often reflect family history and can shape how we spend and save throughout life.
- Retirement decisions involve both numbers and emotions, and financial planning tools can help bring clarity and confidence.
- Teaching children about money early, through jobs, responsibility, and transparency about costs, builds long-term financial awareness.
- Ambition can be a powerful tool early in life, but purpose and relationships often take center stage later.
- Financial success creates opportunities to focus on what truly matters most, including family, faith, relationships, and meaningful experiences.
- And more!
Resources:
Connect With Danton Troyer:
- GFT Team
- Moneta Group
- LinkedIn: Danton Troyer
- dtroyer@monetagroup.com
- (314) 735-9087
Connect with Kyle Luetters:
- GFT Team
- Moneta Group
- LinkedIn: Kyle Luetters
- kluetters@monetagroup.com
- (314) 536-8297
Connect with Tony Bower, PhD:
About Our Guest:
Tony Bower, PhD, is a retired global biotech executive with a background in applied mathematics and economics from Stanford University. Over the course of his career, Tony worked in consulting, research economics at the RAND Corporation, and held leadership roles in the global pharmaceutical industry, including work in market access, health economics, and pricing for rare disease treatments. After decades of professional success, Tony now focuses on family, mentorship, and thoughtful financial decision-making in retirement. His perspective blends academic insight, real-world leadership experience, and a reflective approach to what matters most in life after a demanding career.
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Voiceover: Welcome to Wit, Wisdom, and What Matters Most with Danton Troyer and Kyle Lueters from Moneta Wealth Management. In this podcast, we help corporate executives and business leaders navigate the real life uncertainty around new financial life stages from complex benefits and career changes to retirement and legacy planning.
[00:00:21] Voiceover: Join us as we explore these career and life-shaping moments with our guests, helping listeners find clarity so they can focus on what matters most to them.
[00:00:33] Kyle Luetters: And welcome to another edition of Wit, Wisdom, and What Matters Most. It’s a podcast with Moneta’s Gast Freeman Troyer team, my name is Kyle Lutter, joined by Danton Troyer and Danton a, a super extra special guest today. Do you wanna go ahead and let everybody know who we’re talking to?
[00:00:51] Danton Troyer: We have Tony Bower.
[00:00:52] Danton Troyer: Tony and I have known each other for close to 10 years I think it’s going on now. And I don’t wanna steal all the thunder. That was gonna be one of the first questions I was gonna ask you is maybe just walk us through your background, because there’s some pretty good nuggets and interest that people probably don’t know about you.
[00:01:08] Tony Bower: Okay, sure. Thanks. Hi, Danton and Kyle. I’m retired now. I’m 63 years old. Family, wife, and daughter who’s 17. And born up in Palo Alto, actually Stanford campus. My father was a professor of psychology up there. My mom was at home. They had three kids, so myself and two sisters, one younger, one older.
[00:01:33] Tony Bower: Both of them are now in healthcare. So we went to public school up in Palo Alto. It was fantastic. I went on to Stanford University, graduated in Applied Mathematics, and then went on to a consulting, a short stint in consulting, then on to get a doctorate from Stanford Business School in Economics.
[00:01:56] Tony Bower: Then I went on to the Rand Corporation and worked as a research economist. It was a fantastic place. It was now in the early nineties. And then eventually went on to something sort of my, where I call my career being, which is the drug industry. So I was in the US and global drug industry, starting at SmithKline Beecham in Philadelphia, just sharing some anecdotes about driving in the snow, which I had no clue about back then.
[00:02:23] Danton Troyer: Growing up in California makes it a little tough.
[00:02:24] Tony Bower: Yeah. Uh, some back and forth. I won’t give you the blow by blow, but if you’re trying to do well in corporate life, you’re gonna move some, so sometimes I felt like we were in the Army. Back to Mountain View. and then back to Southern California, eventually to Zurich.
[00:02:45] Tony Bower: And in probably the best position I had that I loved the most was working for Synageva outside of Boston in Lexington, Massachusetts, where I headed up US and global reimbursement. So market access, health, economics, and pricing for a rare disease drug company. I guess to where we, maybe I’ll stop there.
[00:03:07] Tony Bower: We’d talk about a bit how I met Danton and where sort of the wealth side of it as well, the, the management side of that we’ll talk about in a bit.
[00:03:14] Danton Troyer: Yeah, and I think what we’re talking about today is the psychology of spending after success, and PhD in economics, obviously a little bit unique background there.
[00:03:22] And then growing up in the corporate world as far as the drug industry, as you said, and moving around. So you’ve obviously had some success throughout your career and so that’s kinda what we’ll gonna dive into a little bit deeper. Now that you’ve retired, take a step back and look, maybe reflect on it a little bit more.
[00:03:38] Tony Bower: I will. I’ve had some success in my career and then stumbles, too
[00:03:42] Kyle Luetters: Yeah, of course. That
[00:03:43] Tony Bower: I feel
[00:03:43] Kyle Luetters: exactly.
[00:03:45] Tony Bower: I’m going this way. Oops. It didn’t work.
Danton Troyer: Detour to Switzerland.
Tony Bower: Persistence. I’ll own that quality. But it was eventually, things did well. As far as the, I think your question was about, you’ve had some success and then now how does your psychology, how did my psychology shift?
[00:04:08] Danton Troyer: Yeah,
[00:04:08] Tony Bower: a bit. There’s where I grew up, which it affects how you think about money, and then the things I’ve learned including from you, Danton, and from Moneta and how I’ve applied them. So I grew up, I’d say middle class. So the dad’s a professor at Stanford. It’s a different kind of world. Like his first job in 1959 at Stanford, he made $5,000.
Danton Troyer: Wow.
[00:04:34] Tony Bower: And he showed up at the department chair the first day at work in September of ‘59. He said, hi, Gordon, how you doing? Great. I just ha , we had a baby. He said, okay, we’re gonna pay you $5,500.
[00:04:47] Kyle Luetters: Ooh,
[00:04:48] Danton Troyer: That’s a big raise there.
[00:04:49] Kyle Luetters: Yeah. All right.
[00:04:50] Tony Bower: That’s the world that we lived back then.
[00:04:52] Kyle Luetters: How many more years in a row when fall semester started did your dad have a kid?
[00:04:57] Tony Bower: Did what? Pardon me?
[00:04:58] Kyle Luetters: How many more years in the fall semester did he go back and say, oh, we had another kid, just to get the extra $500 every year?
[00:05:04] Tony Bower: Oh, yeah, exactly. That’s right. My sister, I showed up and then my sister showed up right after that so, yeah. It was a wonderful time for them.
[00:05:15] Tony Bower: It was California in 1959. Stanford was going from a good regional university into a behemoth. And really the Stanford it is today, we’re all very proud of it. So, as far as my take on spending, it’s different than my parents’, my father and my mother. Especially my father grew up in the Depression in southeast Ohio.
[00:05:41] Tony Bower: Now, they always did have enough food on the table, but he carried his habit of saving, saving, saving throughout his life. Wonderful man. But even when he was 80, it’s like he couldn’t enjoy a restaurant meal if the entree was over $15. [00:06:00]
[00:06:00] Danton Troyer: Yeah, I see that all the time.
[00:06:02] Tony Bower: Yeah, it’s not, and we would go travel in the seventies in our big station wagon, and the thought was it’s gotta be $30 or less a night to stay in a motel.
[00:06:15] Tony Bower: Yeah. Otherwise we’re camping. So I laugh now because I don’t have that same perspective. But a roofer was trying to overcharge me recently and I said, I’m a child of the middle-class. I don’t want to pay that kind of money.
[00:06:30] Danton Troyer: Yeah.
[00:06:31] Tony Bower: Tens of thousands of dollars for this. So I don’t lose all of that, but I did grow up.
[00:06:38] Tony Bower: There was more money. And then I think with my training, my background in economics and finance, I had the opportunity to learn capital asset pricing model from Bill Sharpe who won the Nobel Prize for that. Okay, I get this. And so other ideas are allowed to enter my brain, which is, okay, this is how much we have and yes, we’re comfortable, but how do we spend it now?
[00:07:03] Tony Bower: And the numbers, fortunately more than $15 for an entree.
[00:07:07] Danton Troyer: Oh gosh. Yeah.
[00:07:08] Tony Bower: But you need to have, I like to say everybody needs to have a budget, including the Bower family. If you’re a billionaire, maybe it’s does every kid need their own private jet? That’s the kind of question. We’re not in that group.
[00:07:24] Tony Bower: It’s more, do you need a big house in high-price California to live well, or there are other options as well.
[00:07:35] Kyle Luetters: As you think back now, you mentioned you were growing up as one of three, you have a daughter. Talk to me a little bit, talk to us a little bit about how that family of origin, how did some of those lessons about money and those attitudes about money pass from your parents through you, and then how did that inform what you taught your kid about money? And kind of how did that shape the way that you tried to bring her up?
[00:08:00] Tony Bower: My father and my mother were different in that it wasn’t go get a job, okay. It was you have to go get good gradesy and go be like, my father would say straight up, Tony, I don’t want you to go work in the cafeteria at university to make a little bit of money, pay for it. Go to the world, the intellectual world’s amazing,
[00:08:24] Tony Bower: it’s incredible. I want you to spend your time and effort on that. And I did. And I did well in college. I was good, good at books and things like that, but in your upbringing, you never get everything right. So when I went to Stanford, I hear about dislocation that kids have when they go into any university,
[00:08:47] Tony Bower: I had none. It was just, it’s around the dinner table. It’s talked about that you’re gonna go to college, it’s gonna go reasonably well. And then it did. What I didn’t have was any business background and because they weren’t in business – my mother eventually was a successful consultant and she helped impress upon me like, sales is real.
[00:09:09] Tony Bower: The real thing.
[00:09:10] Kyle Luetters:: It’s true.
[00:09:11] Tony Bower: Unlike in academia, they’re not thinking like that.
[00:09:14] Danton Troyer: Yeah.
[00:09:14] Tony Bower: So my father didn’t have that background, but my mother did and I tried to learn from it. But It did affect me, ’cause you think, well, I’m just gonna apply school and I did so well in school, I’m gonna do well in my business career.
[00:09:29] Tony Bower: And I wasn’t particularly great, particularly at the start I was okay. And then when there were organizational issues that as you try to move from director to VP, you’re expected to try to master, I was probably below the curve, not above the curve on that stuff. So the way I talked to Esme about it, who’s 17,
[00:09:51] Tony Bower: Who might be heading into business… She’s very extroverted, her papa thinks she’s a natural leader… But it’s not gonna matter whether you can regurgitate Green’s theorem from calculus.
[00:10:05] Kyle Luetters: Yeah.
[00:10:05] Tony Bower: It’s gonna matter whether you can manage down, sideways, up while keeping the organizational objectives in mind and maintaining some emotional equilibrium while you do it.
[00:10:17] Tony Bower: As far as the math, being numerate, you wanna be able to look at a P and L and go, that doesn’t look right. What’s that number? How does that tie to there?
[00:10:27] Danton Troyer: Yeah.
[00:10:28] Tony Bower: That’s being numerate, rather than acing your statistics test. So I just try to take what I learned now as far as imparting it to the new generation is, you know, first she does have a job.
[00:10:40] Danton Troyer: Yeah.
[00:10:40] Tony Bower: Unlike most of her prep school classmates. Second is, and we’re imperfect on this, it’s not just whatever you want to spend, go ahead and spend. No, I really try not to do that.
[00:10:56] Danton Troyer: So how did the job conversation go with her? Was she excited to get a job or was she more like, why?
[00:11:04] Tony Bower: She was excited.
Danton Troyer: Good.
[00:11:05] Tony Bower: And it took a long time and there it was. It was not her resume that got it. It was that a friend already worked at the yogurt shop she was at.
[00:11:15] Danton Troyer: yeah.
[00:11:16] Tony Bower: I go, there’s a little lesson right there.
[00:11:18] Danton Troyer: That’s very true
[00:11:18] Tony Bower: Because actually it was hard to get a job as a 16-year-old, at least in this market, in this place where we are.
[00:11:26] Danton Troyer: Yeah. I’m dealing with my daughter now; she just turned 16, so she’s not…We always talk about it, my daughter’s just maybe a year behind yours, so I try to take some of those same lessons, as well. And she’s similar. I think she’s excited to get a job and kind of learn those skills. She also has not gotten a whole lot of applications out there either.
[00:11:42] Danton Troyer: But talking to friends, she has kind of identified some opportunities. But yeah, I think
[00:11:46] Tony Bower: that’s right.
[00:11:47] Danton Troyer: Teaching ’em that it’s, you have to have that social network as well. Your resume’s not gonna do everything for you. And I mean companies, some companies don’t even look at resumes anymore, it feels like.
[00:11:55] Tony Bower: No, see,
[00:11:55] Danton Troyer: The world’s changing, for sure.
[00:11:58] Tony Bower: It is. But, and yet some of the, you’re right, dad, and yet some of the eternal truths are still here. Which is that relationships matter. She’s close to her boss, who’s the owner of the yogurt shop, and because Esme acts interested and the owner shares a fair amount about the business and what’s going on, so then she learns about how a yogurt small business is run.
[00:12:21] Danton Troyer: Yeah.
[00:12:22] Tony Bower: Okay. Other things like I am gonna share with her pretty soon how much it costs to run this house that we live in.
[00:12:29] Kyle Luetters: That’s a very good thing to share.
[00:12:31] Tony Bower: Here’s what it costs, here’s the pretax income one would need to be here.
[00:12:38] Kyle Luetters: Correct
[00:12:39] Tony Bower: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:12:41] Kyle Luetters: Especially if you look at what costs have done even in the last five to six years, just for running and maintaining a household from your utility costs, property taxes, all of those things that go into it, it’s like even still to this day, my wife, who admittedly is not the most financial savvy person, she married into that field, it still surprises her even.
[00:13:05] Kyle Luetters: And her name’s on everything, like what this takes to run it. So kudos there, that is a wonderful thing to teach someone that’s getting ready to go out into the world as an adult. Just to have kind of the weight on the shoulders; a little bit of understanding that number.
[00:13:21] Tony Bower: Yeah. Thanks. I think that’s helped and I will share that with, I’ve shared it with my wife as well who listens to it, but it’s,
[00:13:30] Tony Bower: she’s trying to organize our debut of our daughter, so there’s, okay, you handle this. But if California real estate’s gonna keep going up in price, there is this thing called the substitution effect. Maybe we won’t buy quite as much California real estate. The other thing I’ve done, and this may be relevant to parents who have kids, if you’re in this position, I structured, her college is paid for, but I’ve structured a fair amount of the money.
[00:13:59] Tony Bower: that it’s her money. So she’s expected to get a four year degree. If you get a scholarship, if you want to go someplace a little less expensive, that money is yours for your early twenties. Now, you should, by all means, spend all of it if you need to and if you want to. So it’s the first; now there’ll be guardrails,
[00:14:18] Tony Bower: I’ll be there and I’m gonna be helping. I’m gonna be advising, and Danton, you and your team will help to advise that. So that’s one thing that we’re gonna do. I can see there’s a little bit of stress around that for her, but some excitement that she’s getting some ownership around here. A second thing about the wage growth is doing some Roth conversions where if the child makes money, you say, okay, when you make money, I’m gonna support your Roth account.
Kyle Luetters: Mm-hmm. Get it going.
[00:14:46] Tony Bower: And that’s estate planning in a small scale way, but it’s, oh, okay. I make money and then I can grow things in the future.
[00:14:54] Danton Troyer: How did, so you know, obviously now you’re retired.
[00:14:57] Tony Bower: Mm-hmm.
[00:14:58] Danton Troyer: Is there any thought or maybe just trying to think, because you are on a limited budget now, and I say limited budget, but now you’re giving money to your daughter and there’s always the psychology of
[00:15:09] Danton Troyer: What if I need that later? What if I run out? Especially people that did grow up with parents through the depression and there was many folks that were running out back then and still today, obviously, but has that really affected that decision or have you, I’m sure you thought through that, but how has that really played out in your mind?
[00:15:25] Tony Bower: I don’t have that deep down fear ’cause I didn’t grow up with it that we might run out.
[00:15:30] Danton Troyer: Yeah.
[00:15:31] Tony Bower: And what has really helped is the tool that you guys have, the financial planning tool that does all the different scenarios, like a thousand Monte Carlo simulations. If I spend this and we have these types of categories, expenses, what’s gonna be our terminal wealth after inflation doing different things.
[00:15:49] Tony Bower: And I’ve run those tools a lot, sometimes just with you, Danton or Conor, and then I do it myself.
[00:15:54] Danton Troyer: Yeah.
[00:15:55] Tony Bower: That lowers my stress level. And so I’m using it constantly. Constantly, I’m aware of it.
[00:16:04] Danton Troyer: Yeah.
[00:16:04] Tony Bower: And it’s really helped, as far as I know, we’re, no, be careful with that word. I think with very high probability, we’re not gonna run outta money and
[00:16:17] Tony Bower: I can watch also videos on YouTube with some sensible people, usually financial planners about my age who are retired, and they know that people adjust their spending to what they have, and people with a lot less don’t run outta money. Social Security is very helpful in that regard for some.
[00:16:34] Danton Troyer: : Mm-hmm.
[00:16:34] Kyle Luetters: Right.
[00:16:36] Tony Bower: But with Kyle, you mentioned all the inflation going on and it’s never ending across the country, especially in California, our insurance has doubled in eight or nine years. And now the water bill’s gonna go up 50% to fill the pool and the rest of it. So these are high quality problems, right? Yeah. It’s something to watch.
[00:16:57] Kyle Luetters: It is something to watch and that’s where teaching that next generation about all of this sooner rather than later so that they can go on and adapt and continue on the family legacy, so to speak, of lessons that have been imparted is very important.
[00:17:10] Tony Bower: Yeah.
[00:17:12] Kyle Luetters: As you have continued to work your way into retirement, you worked in the back half of your career,
[00:17:19] Kyle Luetters: Has there been any guilt or fear that has showed up in the enjoyment of your spending? Has there been like one thing that you looked at and you just went, I don’t know if I should have done that, but I did it and I’m not necessarily… because I do have a funny story about this from this past weekend.
Tony Bower: Oh yeah.
[00:17:36] Kyle Luetters: But is there one thing that’s just, or maybe a couple of things, you just kinda went and looked at like, I don’t know if I should have done it, but it feels good and I’m glad I did it.
[00:17:46] Tony Bower: I think on the spending side, not so much. On the income generation side, I left Boston and the drug industry there to run consulting here, and I worked at it and it went pretty well.
[00:17:59] Tony Bower: But come on, in the big picture, staying as an executive in the Boston ecosystem would have been higher.
[00:18:11] Tony Bower: I have seen very distinguished people say, no regrets. Hard to have an optimization framework and then also have no regrets.
Kyle Luetters: True. Yeah.
Tony Bower: And, but you make peace with it. That we’ve had, even my retirement, I’ve really become very, I retired at 59, now I’m 63 and declared victory into part of the field.
[00:18:34] Tony Bower: Yes. But there’s always, oh, you could’ve done more. You could’ve worked longer. And my parents, my dad worked into his seventies ’cause he had tenure and he loved it and all that. Private sector’s a little different. So I have become very comfortable how connected I am to Esme and to Natty, my wife. And you go from one big goal of whatever career you’re doing,
[00:18:59] Tony Bower: I [00:19:00] like I wanna be the best strong industry guy I can be, and there’s plenty of airplanes and lots of stuff going on, it’s very absorbing. To now there’s three or four or five different things I’m doing and it’s fine. It’s really great.
[00:19:15] Danton Troyer: Tony, as you’ve, one of the things that we talked about as you transitioned to retirement, you did make some kind of stops along the way it seemed like.
[00:19:23] Danton Troyer: So talk about maybe just that thought process when you were heading into retirement, and was it going to be enough, and did you do enough? Those are some of the things you were talking about and everyone, we see it all the time where someone says, I’m gonna retire at 60, and then 60 comes. But it’s just , it’s a difficult decision of, is this the right time?
[00:19:41] Tony Bower: I’ve been, first I did all the work and did it with you guys.
[00:19:45] Tony Bower: Do I have enough? The answer is yes. Probably after I left, we had a liquidity event in 2015, and I came back here and we got the tax and tax stuff done and all this. It was 2016, I knew intellectually I could retire, but emotionally I had not done enough. I hadn’t tried enough, I hadn’t gone hard enough, and I wanna see how it goes as an individual consultant who maybe grows a business.
[00:20:09] Tony Bower: And I did for a while. So it’s a mixture of the hard logic and the numbers, but I think you’re also getting out the emotions of it. And I’ve always had other interests besides just my career, so literature, or my family, some travel as well. And even in consulting when you’re like, maybe you’re not busy for a few weeks, and you realize this is
[00:20:39] Tony Bower: how it’s going to be later until I fill my life up with other things. And I think for some people, particularly some men, like the abyss opens up underneath and they start looking at what’s the meaning, who am I? And I just went through this in stages. I never had a crisis in that way. But so you can jump in, the water’s warm and you can have good life.
[00:21:04] Tony Bower: Of course, this is almost cliche, you can see this all over YouTube. I’m gonna go to the beach and drink margaritas. Not for more than a few months.
[00:21:13] Danton Troyer: Think it gets old.
[00:21:13] Tony Bower: lot. You’ll be bored or you’ll end up in a AA meeting, maybe
[00:21:18] Danton Troyer: One of the two.
[00:21:18]
[00:21:21] Kyle Luetters: That’s I’m worried about Danton, if he plays this much golf now, if he retires, he’s gonna get bored of golf.
[00:21:29] Danton Troyer: I don’t know if that would be the case, but I’m willing to give it
[00:21:32]a shot someday.
[00:21:34] Kyle Luetters: Give it the old college try, right?
[00:21:35] Danton Troyer: Yeah, exactly.
[00:21:37] Tony Bower: We’re all gonna have to do something else. Unless you’re gonna work till the day you die, you’re gonna have to figure out some other things to do. And it helps Natty gets us all out, so we get out,
[00:21:47] Tony Bower: and she very good at networking and socializing, and gets me off of the couch and out we go, and it’s good.
[00:21:53] Danton Troyer: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:21:54] Kyle Luetters: I think that’s one of the biggest things, like as we sit down and have conversations with folks. It’s there’s two aspects like you mentioned, Tony. There’s the number where I intellectually know that I can do this.
[00:22:06] Kyle Luetters: Like the math will hold, can’t be guaranteed, but the math will, generally speaking, hold. But then I have to emotionally and mentally be ready for that separation. Because if you think about this, you’ve talked about your 17-year-old daughter who’s working a job at the yogurt stand right now. From that period of time all the way to, let’s say, your late fifties, early sixties, you have this purpose of getting up and doing a thing.
Tony Bower: Mm-hmm.
[00:22:32] Kyle Luetters: And whatever that thing looks like. But you’re out there building a life. You’re out there like basically storing the acorns if we use the squirrel analogy in the tree. And then we all like to say, yeah, it’s just real simple. Just retire, just flip the switch off that has been on for several decades in a row and it’s just, there’s way more to it than just that.
[00:22:54] Tony Bower: There is, and I’m gonna get a little deeper here. I’m 15 years old, I’m trying to, floundering around, I’ve just grown 10 inches in two years.
[00:23:07] Kyle Luetters: So you grew into the rest of yourself. Kinda what my son is doing right now. You just kind of grew into all of the feet and the head and everything.
[00:23:13] Tony Bower: And there’s lots, right?
[00:23:15] Tony Bower: And there’s lots of different ways one can go at 15 and I decided I’m gonna be, I’m ambitious, I am going to be a great basketball – best I can be – and go to a very good school; I’m going and get my grades up and all the rest of this. And it worked beautifully. We were, and you get, I got rewarded for that. And then you have, I have a belief that ambition is part of my core personality.
[00:23:40] Tony Bower: I would suggest a different view in life, which is ambition is a tool to help you get to where I want to go. I know the feeling inside and the competitiveness and I’m watching my daughter’s volleyball games. Some of that’s, I’m born with it. Some of it is you better be careful about [00:24:00] ambition
[00:24:01] Tony Bower: ’cause also what are you ambitious for when you’re 55 and you’ve done it. Either you’ve done great,
[00:24:08] Kyle Luetters: Yep.
[00:24:08] Tony Bower: or you’ve done pretty well and you know it’s not going anymore towards a traditional success. So what is there then? And I have found there’s a lot of different things. You also don’t have to worry so much about who you are when you’re 40 or you’re 20,
[00:24:24] Tony Bower: you’re worried about that. At 60, you’re not. It’s not becoming of a man that age.
Kyle Luetters: It’s good to hear. All right.
Tony Bower: Not worried about that. And a little bit deeper into faith, for many. For me, that’s a work in progress, being close to my daughter. In the last four years, not on airplanes, where otherwise on a lot of airplanes and doing a lot, and I haven’t had to do that.
[00:24:49] Tony Bower: So I talk to her and we have a lot to talk about and she says it’s helpful. It’s helpful to me. I know that. [00:25:00] And then I’m the one in the marriage who thinks about the longer term. Okay, what are we gonna be doing in five years or 10 years? Then I can bounce some of these ideas off of Danton.
[00:25:12] Tony Bower: For example, there’s the go-go years that we’re in with a modification, we have a daughter in high school, so that costs money. But in 10 years or 15 years, we hope there’s maybe a grandchild. And then I know my wife and me, we’ll be within 10 minutes away, of course. So don’t go build a dream house somewhere on a lake because you’re, and also there’s your health.
[00:25:34] Kyle Luetters: This long range plan
[00:25:36] Tony Bower: You can’t take that for granted. We’re in great health now, but we’ll have to see.
[00:25:41] Danton Troyer: I guess that’s the next question is, what does your healthy enjoyment of your financial success look like? You, it’s always hard to predict to what things will look like, but if you could paint a picture of that, what would that look like for you and your family?
[00:25:54] Tony Bower: Spend money on what you like, cut out the stuff that you don’t care about that much. [00:26:00] If you started out, you made more money as you went along, keep some of those habits you had when you were making less so then you don’t go crazy about it. One of the things that I’ve read this book Die With Zero, many of have done this, which makes sense as an economist, right?
[00:26:19] Tony Bower: You enjoy the money, get utility out of it. Even give your heirs money when they can use it, things like that. Butwe’ve talked about the old style, which is I always have to make money, I have to have income. I don’t have that issue. My little thing is I always want my portfolio to go up, including adjusted for inflation.
[00:26:41] Tony Bower: But actually rationally in the go-go years, you really probably don’t. You wanna be spending some of that down. So is it travel? Is it luxury real estate in California? Or other things that we want to do, but a lot [00:27:00] of stuff that’s actually the most fun – relationships or faith – is meaningful, and doesn’t cost anything.
[00:27:08] Tony Bower: Usually a gym membership, oh, I’m sorry,
[00:27:10] Danton Troyer: the gym membership.
[00:27:12] Tony Bower: You know where you want to go and the instructors are high energy and really good. That is a great investment.
[00:27:21] Danton Troyer: Yeah, I have to agree there.
[00:27:23] Tony Bower: Yeah.
[00:27:25] Kyle Luetters: I really kind of like the way that you answer that question. It steals the thunder from one of the final questions we usually have, is that the name of the show is Wit, Wisdom, and What Matters Most.
[00:27:35] Kyle Luetters: Obviously you’re a very witty guy. We’ve had a great time laughing, and you’ve thrown a lot of wisdom our way. We’ve talked about what matters most. So before we light on outta here, Tony, is there anything else if you were talking to that 15-year-old version of yourself that is going to be a basketball legend…
[00:28:00] Kyle Luetters: What would you share? Is there any real simple tips, tricks that you haven’t already covered?
[00:28:05] Tony Bower: I’ve done it; I’ve shared it with my daughter. Honey, there are no shortcuts. Life can be wonderful. You’ve got all the tools you need. It’s worth trying hard and achieving something. Don’t buy any into any of the modern stuff about we’re a corrupt society, things don’t matter.
[00:28:31] Tony Bower: It will matter and it’s good to raise a family and your papa’s a little older. Go hard and enjoy me, enjoy your career, ’cause your life after 50 will be different. And I’m gonna be helping you make sure it’s whatever your dreams are realized, before 50 and after.
[00:28:51] Kyle Luetters: I can’t think of a more beautiful way to end our time today than that right there.
[00:28:55] Kyle Luetters: Yeah. So Tony, thank you very much.
[00:28:58] Danton Troyer: Thank you, Tony.
[00:28:59] Tony Bower: Thank you.
[00:29:00] Kyle Luetters: Wow. Gave me goosebumps. Well done. Well done. As a guy with two little kids right now, that was worth its weight in gold, palladium, whatever precious earth metal you…
Danton Troyer: Bitcoin nowadays
Kyle Luetters: Careful with that.
[00:29:16] Tony Bower: Yeah. That surprised me.
[00:29:18] Danton Troyer: I think people don’t think about that.
[00:29:21] Danton Troyer: Especially, I think about my daughter too, and I think Kyle’s with the same thing. It’s like you get distracted and it’s like, why do I try? What’s the point? Like I just keep That’s an incredible lesson.
[00:29:31] Kyle Luetters: It is, it’s, it’s what I’m gonna remember tonight when it seems like for the 700th night in a row, I have to remind my kids of the nighttime routine.
[00:29:42] Kyle Luetters: But each time.
[00:29:43] Danton Troyer: Every time.
[00:29:44] Kyle Luetters: But each time though, it’s worth trying because somebody had pointed out the other day that the trips and the memories you have with your parents, when you become an adult are tiebacks to comfort and security for the rest of your [00:30:00] life and the time you spend with your parents and those little nuggets and like you talked about the station wagon and taking the trips and whether or not where we get to stay at a hotel versus where we gotta camp.
[00:30:11] Kyle Luetters: They make us chuckle now, but they tie us back to a time where there, there’s something that happens very deep inside and then it just, it gives us a sense of comfort and that’s why we remember it and we share those stories.
[00:30:25] Tony Bower: That’s right.
[00:30:26] Kyle Luetters: I’m glad you went there.
[00:30:26] Tony Bower: It’s sharing a way of being, my father and my mother really affected.
[00:30:33] Kyle Luetters: Yes.
[00:30:34] Tony Bower: And I remember. I know if you guys gotta go, that’s okay. I understand. But my father died in 2020, and a colleague of mine was suggesting a consulting arrangement, which I thought was a pretty gray area. How treating the client, et cetera. And he was pushing me a little bit, why don’t you want to do this?
[00:30:58] Tony Bower: And I finally said, ’cause I’m the [00:31:00] son of Gordon Bower, it’s not gonna happen. Good. I’m just trying to pass that along. Yeah. They’re gonna watch you guys, right? Your kids are watching you.
[00:31:12] Danton Troyer: Yeah, I don’t think on a daily basis it’s hard to remember that because you just do your thing. You go to work, come home, and, if you don’t stop and take the time to like reset and think through that, this is, he only gets from, I get up and leave before he does, at the gym and lI might see him in passing on the way out, but it’s really only a couple hours a night that I actually get to see my son, who’s eight.
[00:31:31] Danton Troyer: I don’t even spend as much time with my daughter now. She got her keys and she’s gone. I’m obviously a little too young to retire, to spend as much time as you do, but the time you get is priceless, which is, you already know that, and it sounds like obviously you spend the time, and because you don’t have to.
[00:31:48] Danton Troyer: You really don’t. And I think that’s, most parents probably don’t spend that much time teaching those lessons.
[00:31:55] Tony Bower: I don’t understand fathers who don’t wanna be involved.
[00:31:56] Danton Troyer: No.
[00:31:58] Tony Bower: What? It’s [00:32:00] amazing.
[00:32:03] Tony Bower: Kyle that was, yeah. You’re in there with the bedtime routines and that’s very detailed. Do you have to come in and be the heavy, or maybe wait.
[00:32:11] Tony Bower: Oh,
[00:32:11] Kyle Luetters: it, Tony, you just hit the nail on the head. We had a situation here a couple weeks ago. My wife stays at home with the kids and she is tremendous at it. I love it that she does it, but we were having a deal where we were late onto the bu,s and my wife was just like going throughout the house morning after morning, getting after these kids.
[00:32:32] Kyle Luetters: And I don’t like doing it; it’s not fun.
[00:32:35] Danton Troyer: Yeah.
[00:32:36] Kyle Luetters: But we had to have a little bit of daddy drill sergeant of looking up at the clock and saying, look, if you’re not ready, by this time your dad is driving you to school because for whatever reason these kids just jazz up about riding a bus; that is not punishment to them.
[00:32:50] Kyle Luetters: That is their social club on wheels. So one day of dad driving him to school completely fixed all of that. But the problem with it is now when I come into the kitchen in the morning, like everybody, like their backbone straightens a little bit and this and that, and it’s like
Tony Bower: It’s necessary.
Kyle Luetters: It is. It’s not always the fun job, but it’s the role that dad has in the household.
[00:33:15] Danton Troyer: That’s true.
[00:33:15] Kyle Luetters: Like it’s a role that mom’s not, I don’t think, naturally bent towards. My wife always says there’s something about a father’s tone with his kids. And this is even true back to my childhood, if I heard my dad’s voice, the little hairs on the back of my neck
[00:33:33] Tony Bower: Yeah.
[00:33:34] Kyle Luetters: Would always stick up.
[00:33:35] Tony Bower: And yeah, my best friend when we were seven had a six foot, four inch big Scottish dad who rarely would get mad, but when he did get mad, he’d go three, two, one in the kids group, whatever was next. And I had to lay down the law about a week ago. It was rare that I could do that with Esme [00:34:00] and my wife appreciated it.
[00:34:03] Kyle Luetters: They do.
[00:34:03] Tony Bower: It’s just a, it’s a different thing.
[00:34:07] Kyle Luetters: It’s not fun when you do it, but it’s in their best interest.
[00:34:09] Tony Bower: Everything’s fine.
[00:34:12] Kyle Luetters: Hmm. Man, this has been great
[00:34:16] Tony Bower: voice. Kyle. You’ve got, I can see that radio background. I can hear
[00:34:19] Danton Troyer: it. He definitely had to like get me going. Like I, when I first did this, I had no idea. But it, it’s not terrible though.
[00:34:25] Kyle Luetters: He has done a phenomenal job at getting up to speed and doing this and really to. Getting in sync with each other because when you do this and you work with different broadcasting partners, you have to develop a rhythm and who’s doing what ’cause the first couple of episodes that we did together, we were like,
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© 2025 Advisory services offered by Moneta Group Investment Advisors, LLC, 100 South Brentwood Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63105 (“MGIA”), an investment adviser registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”). MGIA is a wholly owned subsidiary of Moneta Group, LLC. Registration as an investment adviser does not imply a certain level of skill or training. This is an advertisement. The information contained herein is for informational purposes only, is not intended to be comprehensive or exclusive, and is based on materials deemed reliable, but the accuracy of which has not been verified. Examples contained herein are for illustrative purposes only based on generic assumptions. Given the dynamic nature of the subject matter and the environment in which this communication was written, the information contained herein is subject to change. This is not an offer to sell or buy securities, nor does it represent any specific recommendation. You should consult with an appropriately credentialed professional before making any financial, investment, tax, or legal decision. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. You cannot invest directly in an index. All investments are subject to a risk of loss. Diversification and strategic asset allocation do not assure profit or protect against loss in declining markets. These materials do not take into consideration your personal circumstances, financial or otherwise. Trademarks and copyrights of materials linked herein are the property of their respective owners.
