Lets Talk Prosperity – Episode 001

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[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast, fresh alternative personal finance talk for independent thinkers who prosper outside of Wall Street. Here’s your host, bestselling author, Kim D.H. Butler and No BS Money Guy, Todd Strobel. Hey everybody, welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. This is No BS Money Guy, Todd Strobel with bestselling author, Kim Butler. Kim, welcome. Thank you, Todd. So glad to be here. This is a great change for us. We’re going to be podcasting so that those of our clients that don’t like to read have a chance to listen to us. Of course, we have our blog and we like to post information on that every week. But the books, which thank you for the bestselling author, you know, you can be

[00:47] bestselling in the category of life insurance on one single day and still call yourself a bestselling author. But the books are books and so not everybody likes to read. So let’s talk. Super. Well, this word prosperity, first of all, I kind of want to get your take on that. It’s something that we certainly see bounced around the internet a lot, and I think it can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. So when you’re talking about prosperity, the Prosperity Podcast, and certainly the prosperity movement, what is it that that means to you? Oh, thanks for asking. That is a cool word. I’ve got to go back to eons ago when we set up our company, which is Partners for Prosperity, and the choice of that word, both the prosperity word and the

[01:35] partner’s word, but we’ll focus on prosperity for now, we’re very, very specific. And the reason that I like the word prosperity as opposed to wealth or some of the other terms that happen to go when people handle personal finances is that prosperity can be a very mental state and it can also be a very, I guess I’m going to use the word intellectual. So to define the difference between mental and intellectual, you can be prosperous in your mindset and you can also be prosperous in your thinking, in your actions. And sometimes that goes along with having a lot of money. Sometimes it absolutely does not, and I’ve experienced both cases and we’ll talk about that in our coming podcasts. But prosperity is wealth without limitations to me.

[02:29] Prosperity is acting from a prosperous mindset, even if you don’t always have the money to back it up. Prosperity is enabling your dollars to do lots of different things instead of just whatever the one thing they might be designed to do or chosen to do. And prosperity begins in our thought. And when we think from a prosperous mindset, then we can act from a prosperous mindset and then the money will follow. That’s what prosperity means to me. Super great definition. Thank you very much. I know when I think of it, I think of prosperity, then I think of the opposite as scarcity. And I think there’s a lot of scarcity in our world today, thinking that there are a limited amount of resources that are divided up against an ever growing

[03:21] population of people. So there’s an attitude of I have to get mine versus a prosperity mindset, which is basically the, I don’t know, I guess the entire universe, if you want to discover it far enough, continues to expand. So there is always the potential for more in that I can create value or however we want to determine that. And that I can experience abundance in my life, experience prosperity in my life without taking that from someone else. In fact, if you really want to take our core beliefs down even farther, we believe that we are helping other people to obtain prosperity at the same time that we experience it for ourselves, correct? Absolutely. And if you go back to the elemental aspects of it, just the act of saying

[04:17] thank you, the act of being grateful, those are prosperous actions. And again, those start in our thought because obviously we don’t do that unless we’re thinking about it. And when we give first or when we say thank you first or when we do something for somebody without expecting anything in return, that’s prosperity. And I like to view it. I wish I had a better mental image of this, but when you think about a tornado where it starts small at the bottom and then it goes up and outer and bigger and more up and more out and more bigger, some good English there, that’s the view that I have about prosperity. And it is absolutely a one plus one equals 11 environment, not a one minus one. As you said, there is no taking, there is just giving.

[05:09] And when we give, good things happen. And whether we’re giving of our time or our money or what have you, that’s what helps us develop prosperity. Again, first mentally, intellectually, emotionally even, and then right behind that with our money. And when we help our clients free up their money so that they’re not afraid of losing it, it enables them to be and to act more prosperous. So the two go hand in hand. And that’s what I love about our work is that we enable people to have a sense of freedom about their money so that they don’t fall into that scarcity mindset because people can have a lot of money and still fall into a scarcity mindset because they’re afraid of losing that money because of

[05:57] the types of investments that they have. So when we can provide investments where people don’t lose money, that shifts them over to that prosperous mindset where then they can give more. And again, I’m not talking just monetarily, but also monetarily give more of their time, their space, their energy, their thinking, their money, et cetera. And that’s what keeps that ever expanding environment growing and growing and growing. Got it. And then, of course, there’s going to be people who are listening to this that are probably in the traditional or conventional money mindset that are going to say, OK, if you’re talking about this with prosperity must in some way be related to risk. And you’re setting me up to take greater risks with my money so that I

[06:43] can experience prosperity. What would you say to that? Yeah, it’s so interesting when you look at the definition of risk. Because we as a society, especially in the United States, have gotten so caught up in the stock market as the only definition of investing. And so when we say risk, we typically go to the stock market and we think about loss of principle. And when you look at some of the definitions of risk, so to back up for a minute here, we know that in the investment world, there’s, I don’t remember, nine or ten different types of risk. But one of them, if you look more at like a dictionary definition rather than just an investment definition, one of them is the propensity for loss. And that means losing principle, that means losing potentially

[07:36] a hundred percent of your money. And I have absolutely no risk tolerance. Let me say it this way. My risk tolerance is zero. I don’t have a propensity to lose. I don’t, I literally do not want to lose any of my own money. I certainly don’t want our clients losing money. And so this idea of risk to me says we need to make sure that we are putting our clients where they are not putting their money at risk. They’re not putting their money in a place where they can lose it. Now the corollary to that is that most people think, oh my gosh, then it’s going to be earning one or 2% in a CD or, you know, maybe immunity bond or something like that. No way. We need double digit returns, low double digit returns on our dollars

[08:25] in order to beat inflation and taxes. When you want to talk about risk, those are risks. Inflation and taxes are risks that we need to be very, very careful about. And so inside the prosperity world within Partners for Prosperity and all the things that we talk about on this podcast, we’re talking about investments that get the opportunity to earn high single digit, low double digit returns without the potential for loss of principal and that to us is protecting that money and enabling the client to think from a prosperous mindset. And yet still beat inflation and taxes with the good returns we can get on the investments. Super. And if some of you, this is probably your first experience to Partners for Prosperity or Kim Butler.

[09:14] But I think that’s what makes the prosperity economics movement, certainly Kim Butler’s organization so special is that they’re prepared to have these conversations that start at philosophy to start at your mental attitude, to start about the questions that you have about money, because that’s the root, but yet all the way down here at the other end of the spectrum, they’re in the business every day of making your money more protected while earning greater rates of return. And you’re doing it by not necessarily following the cookie cutter mold that’s out there. There are certainly different investments that a lot of people have not heard of, but they’re safer investments with much higher rates of return.

[10:03] So those of you out there who like the philosophy side, it’s here. Those of you out there who are at the point where you have money and you’re looking for practical solutions, I would encourage you that’s here as well. Um, and just to kind of give you a taste or give you an idea of what’s in there where today we’re going to be talking about the seven principles of prosperity. These are the seven principles that Kim has built her company on. She’s written her books on, and I can’t think of a better place than to just jump in there with number one. You want to read that for us, Kim? Certainly. So the first principle as we identified is think, and that is where we turn our brains on and we start to think about things and we back up from the

[10:47] media where the constant barrage of fear and scarcity is put forth. And we back up from our own scarcity thinking. And I know I have to do this sometimes literally on a daily basis. And we back up from all the stuff that’s out there from the government and our employers about what we should be doing with our money. And we think from a prosperous mindset, because when we think from a scarcity mindset, we really get stuck. And I have looked at decisions where if I put on my prosperity hat, I make the decision one way. If I put on my scarcity hat, I make the decision another way. And so that tells me that when we’re thinking from a prosperous mindset, we make different decisions. So we need to be making sure that we are thinking from a prosperous mindset

[11:39] when we’re making decisions about our money, when we’re making decisions about all the things that are important to us, like our family, our inspirational time or our spiritual time, if you will, any of those aspects, we need to make sure that we’ve got the ability to think from a prosperous mindset and really get in there and have the positive, the gratitude, the, we can do this mindset and that we make decisions that way. So principle number one, seven principles of prosperity, think from a prosperous mindset. And I just want to add, these are available on our website. They’re, they’re free. They’re available to anybody. Please get onto partners. Number four prosperity.com that’s partners for prosperity.com and

[12:26] sign up for the prosperity accelerator pack and get the seven principles. We even recommend that you print them out, throw them on the fridge, put them on your bulletin board, do whatever you need to do to have these in front of you so that they’re there and you can be thinking about them and in later podcasts, we’ll even go through them in a more thorough way where we talk about using them as an opportunity filter for investments so that you can have investments that are double digits that don’t lose principle, but we’re just going to go through them quickly today. Got it. And just as kind of a wrap up to that, you know, the biggest thing about the thinking part, in my opinion, is not even so much changing

[13:07] the way that you think it’s just becoming aware that we live every day with mental shortcuts and, you know, things that have been said to us about money sometimes before we were even old enough to understand what they were govern our attitudes today and if we could just back up enough to say, Hey, you know, why am I automatically dumping the maximum I can into a 401k? Is that the best choice for me? Um, you know, just the simple things that we do every day. Let’s question those and start understanding why we have the attitudes about money. You know, why is it that when we get upset, we find ourselves at the mall with the credit card out. That’s another great thing that happens to a lot of people.

[13:51] So, um, principle number one is think what’s number two, number two is C and I always have to spell it. It’s S E E because especially in audio, it’s easy to mistake that for other, uh, spellings, I guess of that word. So see S E E. So you want to see things from a very big picture point of view. One of the biggest mistakes that clients make is they get too narrowed in on a particular subject. So a real common one as an example is the difference between insurance and investments. And people talk about them as if they’re two totally separate things. They view them independently and they forget about the fact that all of a family’s personal economy operates from one single wallet and needs to have its decisions made holistically.

[14:46] And so when we use the word C again, S E E, you can really increase your prosperity by adopting a very macro economic or big picture point of view. And when you do that, you avoid the micro economic or tunnel vision problem that people get themselves into, you know, I’ll have somebody look at their a hundred thousand dollar IRA and they’re not paying attention to any of the rest of their asset base and they’ll make a decision on that a hundred thousand dollar IRA that would be different if they looked at the rest of their asset base. So you, you’ve got to do it, whether it’s insurance investments or IRA versus regular money, you’ve got to look at that big picture and have everything together for you

[15:30] all the time in your head. And sometimes even on paper that enables you to make that big picture decision so that you’re seeing the things from a big picture point of view. Got it. Um, not much more I can add there other than that. Uh, you know, I think more and more what comes to mind is the student loan and the college funding environment, you know, so many times we make automatic assumptions that our kids are going to go to college and, you know, we don’t really sit and think about the fact that the money that we’re parking here is, um, money that comes out of our personal budget, regardless of the fact that it’s earmarked for college. This is earmarked for retirement. It’s all coming out of one budget.

[16:15] And boy, if there were ways that we could create one tool that would do multiple things rather than trying to divide up these little piles, that probably each and of itself never does the full job that we intended it to in the first place makes much more sense to me. So what’s number three? Number three is measure. And this would seem an obvious one when you’re dealing with finances, but we view the term measure very, very differently than the typical financial advisor does. When we talk about measuring, we’re identifying something called opportunity costs. And so the exact statement on the principle is that you need to be aware of and measure opportunity costs because this enables you to recover them.

[17:03] And if you ignore opportunity costs, which I’ll explain here in a minute, you can actually reduce your money drastically because of ignoring them. So opportunity costs are what happened as a result of a certain decision. So for example, if I decide to, you use the credit card at the mall, if I decide to blow 500 bucks at the, at the mall on something that I really don’t need to be having right now, then, and this is just an example, this isn’t something that we’re really going to be measuring all the time. So I’ll give another one in a minute, that 500 bucks times say 10% interest times the rest of my life is, I don’t know the exact calculation, but it’s probably over a hundred thousand dollars that’s opportunity costs.

[17:48] So a better example is if I have car insurance and I don’t pay attention to my car insurance, I don’t look at the deductibles and my coverage and see if there’s a way that I can optimize it, but instead I just pay the premium that the guy says I should pay and I don’t pay attention to that. That might cost say two or $300 a year. No big deal. You think, but that two or $300 again, invested at let’s say 10% every single year for the rest of my driving life. So, you know, let’s say we’ve got a 16 year old that they’re just getting their first car and they don’t good, they don’t make a good decision about this. That is, and I have done this math that can be over a couple million dollars and that’s opportunity costs.

[18:33] So if you measure opportunity costs, then you can strategize around ways to reduce it. And if this does not make sense, please reach out to us. We are happy to help people very briefly on email. Of course, we’d love to have a phone discussion with you. If that’s appropriate, we do all of our work over the phone and the web. And so we can help people in all 50 States and we come at the help from a fiduciary standpoint. So we’re going to help you do best for what’s you regardless of what we’re doing or what we’re selling or anything else. And a lot of the measurement tools that we have are about strategies, not about products. So a strategy is something that you do. A product is obviously something that you buy.

[19:20] And so inside measure, we look to reduce opportunity costs and we really welcome your interaction on email. Please reach out to us if this is something that you are unclear of this issue of opportunity costs and we will find some ways to give you an example of how you could change a strategy and adjust or reduce your opportunity cost. Got it. And one thing I would like to point out is that, uh, you know, I know how you run your personal schedule. Um, and I’ve watched Kim every year, the first thing she puts on her calendar is the private days that she’s going to spend with her family. So by opportunity costs, we’re not in any way, trying to say that you have to save every penny because another

[20:02] opportunity cost is another way to look at this is that, wow, if I max funded all of my investment and lost those quality opportunity times to build memories with my family, the long-term effect of that is also opportunity cost, isn’t it? Absolutely. I agree. And it’s so important that we get clear on our values. We get clear on our priorities and that we put those into our lives and that we do put first things first. So that means maybe in the morning spiritual or inspirational time, that means family when it’s family time, whether that’s a Sunday or a Saturday or a vacation or whatever it is that that comes first. So I’ve really enjoyed talking about these first three. Let’s wrap up for today and hit numbers four through

[20:50] seven on our next podcast. What do you think? Sounds fantastic. All right. This is no BS money guy, Todd Strobel with best selling author, author, Kim Butler, and thank you for listening to the prosperity podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you. Visit us at partners for prosperity.com. If you liked this episode, make sure you subscribe and leave a review.