Season 2 of Money Mountaineering with Peter Neuwirth: Diving into the Sharing Economy

A Note from Actuary and Author Peter Neuwirth, FSA, FCA — I invite you to tune in for this week’s episode of my podcast and video show, Money Mountaineering, where for 30 minutes, financial experts help us answer the question: What’s your future worth?

Get ready for Season 2: The Sharing Economy — Thank you for being part of my podcast and video show, Money Mountaineering: What’s Your Future Worth? In Season 1, we discussed developing effective, efficient, and sustainable retirement income strategies. Our guests were fabulous, and I hope you got as much from their insights as I did. This summer, we are launching Season 2, which will continue fascinating conversations on a different topic: the Sharing Economy.

The back story: I live in Santa Rosa, California, and I will be talking to many of the folks I’ve gotten to know over the last several years since my house burned down in the famous Glass Fire that swept through the area on September 27, 2020. It was just before I finished the manuscript of Money Mountaineering, and in months that followed, I got to learn an awful lot about how to recover from a disaster financial forest fire — and how powerful the sharing economy is to enable everybody to survive and thrive as a community rebuilds from the ashes.

The key aspects of this perspective as it relates to the Sharing Economy are:

• What we each consider as “assets” to live on comprises far more than our financial assets and real estate, but also includes our skills, knowledge, relationships, and things that we own that we don’t use all the time and can share with others.
• Sharing is both financially efficient (cutting out middlemen and transaction costs) and more sustainable long term than spending down a finite pot of money.
• A sharing economy requires “affinity” and happens best locally and in the real world. How and where it works and how scalable it is are the questions that I will explore in the upcoming interviews.

Steve Shirrell, owner emeritus of Santa Rosa’s Stanroy Music Center

Our guests for Season 2: I’m very excited about the guests I will have on the show, including those who have survived a natural disaster like a fire and those who have just fallen on hard times.

• Episode 1 of Money Mountaineering with Peter Neuwirth features Steve Shirrell, owner emeritus of Santa Rosa’s Stanroy Music Center — My first guest in this new series is the former owner of Stanroy Music Store in downtown Santa Rosa. I met Steve when I was looking for a new djembe drum to replace the one that had burned up in the fire. As I looked at the shop’s selection, the manager said, “Just pick out what you want. It’s yours.” When I asked him why he was doing that, he said, well, the owner of our store has a policy that anybody who loses an instrument in a fire — which unfortunately is very common here in Santa Rosa — can come in and get one to replace it. That epitomizes what the sharing economy is all about because I have been back to Steve’s store many times and sent plenty of my friends there to buy instruments.
• Episode 2: Rebekah Wright, Bookstore Manager for Barnes and Noble in Santa Rosa, CA — Bekah will be talking with us about the power of books, including those that are controversial, and why they play an important part in the Sharing Economy.
• Stay tuned for more!

The bottom line: The sharing economy is a very powerful opportunity, and we’re going to talk about how it can be an alternative to many of the financial matters we’ve been discussing in the last few months on Money Mountaineering: What’s Your Future Worth? It’s about living, shopping, and working locally because sharing economy is a local phenomenon. It happens in the real world among real people. I hope you will join me!

Click here to learn more about actuary and author Peter Neuwirth: www.PeterNeuwirth.com • Listen to our podcasts on PeterNeuwirthRadio.com • Watch all of our video episodes: www.PeterNeuwirth.tv