3 Ideas That Changed The Way I Think About Money

 In this video I'm going to talk about three money epiphanies that I had early on that changed the way that I viewed money people and changed the way that I communicated. So epiphany number one was you clarity. It was very fascinating to me that a lot of people would come into the bank and ask questions about money and ask where they should invest their money. They didn't really have understanding of what they really wanted out of life. And even as a 19, 20 year old kid I would ask some questions like what do you truly want? What would success look like? And they wouldn't really be able to answer me, which was crazy. I then read something by like Alice in Wonderland. I didn't read Alice in Wonderland but I heard the story where the cat on told Alice when she got to the fork in the road like where she wanted to go. And Alice was like, I don't know. The cat said something very, very profound. He said, Alice, if you don't know where you want to go any road will get you there. It dawned on me that a lot of people approached that same mindset with their money. They have no clue where they want to go what their goals are, how money even works. And yet they're living their life. They're working 40, 50, 60 hours and they're just going through the motions listening to some half true. So it relates to how they should spend their money. And so what was really interesting is that concept of a lack of clarity. So that was a piphany number one is most people had a lack of clarity around what is wealth. And so while I couldn't articulate it at 20, I would start asking them like, okay, if money wasn't an issue, what would you be doing? And like, what is the definition of wealth? Now I take a step back and say, wealth is so much more than just money. It's so much more than just resources. wealth is a sum total of your time, your relationships, how you're using your talents. And yes, how you use your resources to prove this point. Think of like a wealthy wealthy person. I'll use Warren Buffett as an example. He's 91 years old, worth over $100 billion. It's a ton of money. And yet I know for myself and many people watching this, you would not trade places of Warren Buffett. Why? It's because he's 91 years old and you're most likely, well, if you're watching this channel, you're probably under 40. And so it's like interesting. It's like we value our time on this earth. More than $100 billion if use would not trade places with one of the world's quote unquote wealthiest men on paper. It's fascinating to me because we don't necessarily approach that way of thinking on a macro level, we get it. But on a micro level, we devalue ourselves every single day. And we don't value our time as it relates to millions or billions of dollars. And yet on a macro level, we agree that we wouldn't trade places with some of the quote unquote world's wealthiest people. And so when you think about that, you start needing to create a different metric that you make decisions by because if you're not going to make decisions based on $100 billion, if you're not going to trade places, then we need to start creating a different metric. And so I would encourage you number one to figure out what that metric is. We call it a better wealth. Intense. Better wealth intentional living because intentional living is what you're going to do on what you should be striving for. And then we should make our money decisions or time decisions or relationship decisions, how we use our talents based around that metric. So that was a piphany number one. Piphany number two was this importance of cash flow. It's really interesting because we throw out this word called retirement. And I never really resonated with retirement. And then I read in a book where they talked about retirement being taken out of service. And it's like, man, you wouldn't want to retire anything when it relates to like, if you're a horse, you do not want to be retired in that definition. And yet that's kind of like the care that's making us stay in a job that we semi-hate or something that we're just not so much. And so I always had like a distaste in my mouth for this word called retirement, but it's interesting. I think retirement just doesn't even articulate what we truly want. What we really want. I think when we're talking about retirement is future cash flow. What I think we're talking about in retirement is I'm going to work whether I like it or not. And I'm going to set aside resources. And then I'm going to get to a place in my life where that those resources will create income or cash flow coming to me so that I have the option or I can just stop working and it's a future cash flow. And we called quote unquote retirement future cash flow planning, which I think we should start should start calling that we may do different things with our money. And so I realize a lot of people are deferring or postponing their money to an unknown date of like what what the government's going to be like, what are taxes going to be like. We're we're deferring our money on a roller coaster ride called the stock market that we don't really understand how the stock market is priced. What makes matters worse is we have no clue how what's called distribution planning or retirement planning or what I think we should call it future cash flow planning works. And so there's just a lot of quote unquote misinformation. And we're not even clear on why we're doing same like why we're doing what we're doing and what the results are example of this is a lot of people break about rate return. They'll say like, hey, my 401k my IRA is getting X amount of rate return. And for the longest time, I would buy in to say, okay, higher rate return the better, but at the end of the day, why does rate return matter like that might sound simple and I'm telling you it rate return does matter. It's the appreciation of your asset. The reason why that should matters that should impact your cash flow. You can't spend a rate return. And what I found is, a majority of people do not understand how cash flow planning works. And if they did, they would invest their money way differently, they would work way differently. And they would just make different decisions with their money because they would reverse engineer their investment decisions, how long they delayed the lack of control they're giving up for cash flow. When they saw the cash flow numbers in a lot of cases, they really, really sucky cash flow numbers that come out of 30, 40 years of deferring and hoping, they would start doing things drastically different with their money. And so that was epiphany number two is the importance of cash flow. You should invest for cash flow and retirement should really be called future cash flow planning. The third epiphany that I had was life insurance. I always saw life insurance was this, this thing that you had to have if you loved your family and you had like that whole like how much you love your family and if your wife is sitting there for you're like, you know, you're going to like be duped into buying more life insurance. And then I learned this thing called permanent life insurance. And then I would listen to someone like Dave Ramsey who said like life insurance is the worst place to put your money or it's a scam. It's a rip off. And so I always kind of bought into like buy term invest in a Roth IRA. You're going to be fine or buy term put your money in a savings account and invest in your number one asset. And then I started learning about these concepts called infinite banking and people that overfunded life insurance not as the investment, but as the really the place where they can take capital. And it was like a good place to park their money. And then they could utilize it to buy other things, pay off debt, buy assets and their money continue to grow. And I was like, man, that there's got to be some catch and it's a probably still a terrible investment. And then I really opened up when I realized that life insurance is not an investment. It would not be a great investment strategy because life insurance doesn't grow that like it doesn't grow like good investments grow. But when I realized that life insurance was not an investment, but it was like an an asset. It could be like a savings vehicle that could have my dollars do more than one thing. It could protect me. It could grow. I could use it while it protected me and grow. It would increase my future cash flow because it would give me all kinds of options and abilities to potentially enhance my cash flow in the future. And then I was like, man, as a 21 year old as a 20 year 21 year old, I can actually save money but not have to say, see you for the next 40 years. I could utilize that capital for things like investing in myself and real estate and whatnot, but I still get all the benefits of the future and all all while I'm being protected and my money's being protected and there's other benefits. And that's that's when I realized was like, okay, is it possible if life insurance was not an investment, it was an and what if we understood the power of the and what if I could put my dollars in a place. Stay and control those dollars while also getting all the benefits future benefits and short term benefits of life insurance. And that's when it occurred to me that man life insurance is an incredible and asset. And I should really share the world where they can really give the their dollars more than one job. And so in summary, number one, acoclaredity. I realize most people that have no clue what they want. And the number one question that you can ask is what do you want and start planning around that metric. Number two is plan for cash flow. The most important financial metric is cash flow. Majority of people are going to say rates of return and retirement, but don't be don't be confused or do cash flow plan for cash flow now and in the future. And number three, have an open mind as a release of life insurance when set up. You just properly, it can be one of the greatest places to save and use your money. Remember, it's not an investment, but it can be an amazing savings vehicle to help you better invest and give you options in the future. I want to thank you for watching till the end. If you enjoy our content, please like share subscribe. It helps other people find our channel and we really, really appreciate it. I also want to let you know that we have this thing called the Better Wealth Efficiency Quiz. And our goal is to give you a wealth efficiency score in less than three minutes and really highlight and get you to start thinking about the potential inefficiencies that you have in your life. So if you haven't taken the quiz, go check out it'll be the link below. Check that link out. Take the quiz and then let us know your score. Thank you.