5 Day Weekend with Garrett Gunderson – Bonus Episode

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[00:03] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast, fresh alternative personal finance talk for independent thinkers who prosper outside of Wall Street. Here’s your host, best-selling author, Kim D.H. Butler. Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Today we have a special guest joining us and that is Mr. Garrett Gunderson and there’s quite a great background and history to the relationship between Garrett and Kim, which they may dive into, but there’s also a special announcement and news that Garrett is joining us and sharing today. So are you there with us, both Kim and Garrett? Hello, Spencer. So glad to have you introduce us and Garrett, welcome. Hey, thanks for having me. It’s an honor. Yeah, long-term relationship here.

[00:56] I joined strategic coach in my early 20s and I intentionally chose Kim as my coach because when I started in financial services in 1998, she presented in Phoenix at my onboarding meeting for the company I was writing for back at the time. So that’s a pretty decent history considering I’m not that old of a guy. And how fun it was 98, I couldn’t have pinpointed in the time frame. So here we are 20 years later, just having a little mutual appreciation society going and loving every minute of it. And I think one of the coolest things that we have that we still share amongst many is being writers. You know, how funny both of us speak a lot in various ways. We do all kinds of things. And yet I have an English background.

[01:51] I write a lot of my books. I know you write a lot of your books. Of course, both you and I also big believers and unique ability and getting a lot of help around the edges. But I think you’ve got a new book coming out and I can’t wait to hear more about it. Yeah, it’s funny because now that I have this new book coming out, I just recorded the audio book for What Would the Rockfellas Do? And, you know, you and Todd got a lot of love in the audio book version because I ad lib quite a bit. So I’m recording it or then like I’m talking about like we feature some truth concept calculators in it. And then I and you know, and so we went and then plus you gave me, oh, that’s what. Remember, I said you did a big favor for us.

[02:33] It was you went through and marked up What Would the Rockfellas Do? And we just are going to reprint with complete and full edits to have the right terminology and language. So that’s what it was. How funny. Yeah, before the podcast, he couldn’t remember what we had done. I’m going to say we you’re right. It was me, but I like the we word better and I couldn’t remember it either. The other here’s another funny story, not to derail us too much, but I used to have this radio show five days a week, two hours a day start. And then I think I went to one hour just because it was it was a pretty big commitment. But Kim used to host one of the days every single week with me. And it was like about five tracks of wealth.

[03:17] So it was like financial sole purpose mindset, health and then social life. And I picked Kim for the social side. And then Todd would just laugh and joke and tease and say, it’s funny of all the five that you pick for Kim, you know, she wants to be out on the land in Texas and not necessarily. But I like I would have never known that because you were so good at those sessions and bringing up everything on the show. Well, thank you. It was certainly a precursor to the podcast that we have today. And Spencer, what do we have, like 250 episodes or something? Yeah, I think we do. I mean, we are we’re well past 250. And I think let’s set the mark for at least 500 or a thousand. It’s a deal. And Garrett, something that I don’t know that you’ve seen is my sister,

[04:05] Tammy, and I have started doing podcasts. And when you think back to some of your early days in radio recording and the awesome relationship that you had with some of the people that were doing that co-hosting with you, think about adding a family member to it. Tammy and I go down some bunny rabbit trails about our childhood and we get some great responses from the advisors. So that’s on the advisor advantage podcast. And how fun it will be for you some time to grab another family member or your kids or whatever it is as you continue to progress in your work out in the audio world. And aren’t we grateful for podcasts and not radio? Now, I’m telling you, like my 10 year old, he would be so much fun on a podcast.

[04:50] He’s got so much personality. He’s he’s kind of a mini me version, like when I’m out of town traveling, my wife’s like, well, I have a good alternate for you when you’re gone because your 10 year old just tells jokes and entertains me. And it’s like having the child version of me around, even though I’m kind of a big child. So it’s fun to do a little podcast with him. Oh, you should. It’s a joy. Absolutely. All right. Well, tell us a little bit. So so you’ve got the Rockefeller book. Why don’t we start with that? And then you can switch gears and tell us about the new book as well. Yeah. So Rockefeller book I wrote with Michael Isom. He and I had been, you know, doing business together in some way, shape or form for almost 16 years.

[05:32] The original partnership I had in a firm called Ingenuity was with him and two other partners that actually died in a plane crash in 06, and Kim knew them very well. And Mike and I were just talking about, you know, how do we reach more people? How do we make greater impact? And we decided to write the book together. So the book has been out for a little while and been doing pretty well. And then I just decided to do the audio book because I feel like with a five day weekend coming out, now it’s finally time to do the audio book for those people that like to listen. And I had when I recorded Killing Sacred Cows audio book, it took a day and a half. And I think we had a hard time rescheduling with the studio

[06:12] because I didn’t really candidly write Killing Sacred Cows. I talked it out. And my co-author, Steven Palmer, did most of the writing, which he is just a voracious reader and a lot of the classics. And so if something I would say in one sentence, he would say in a paragraph. Everything’s more elaborate. There’s more commas. There’s more, you know, there’s there’s a higher vocabulary than I’m probably capable of. And so what you don’t know about the Killing Sacred Cows audio book is that if they left, they had thousands of edits. And I’ve never sworn more than I sworn that day and a half because of how many things I made mistakes on. With What Would the Rockfellas Do? I was done in five hours and I made almost no mistakes

[06:53] because I did so much of the writing in that versus just writing it off. Although I did use Michael Levin with Business Ghost to support that because of unique ability, like we’re talking about going through What Would the Rockfellas Do? It’s a pretty cool concept about how you, you know, use a family office, a family retreat structure and a family constitution as kind of this triad of how you perpetuate wealth and especially the non-monetary assets. But if you add the component of a permanent whole life insurance plan at the center of that, the death benefit is going to replenish the kind of family bank and family trust for generations to come so that you’ve just got your own system for this whole thing.

[07:37] And if there’s an economic downturn or some of your heirs that make mistakes with the cash, which I think every business owner makes mistakes along the way, there’s this kind of backup plan and contingency that’s very much at the heart of these three pieces. And we really tell the story of the difference between the Vanderbilt family, which had more money than the U.S. Treasury, yet somehow managed to destroy it. And the first heir that had nothing that they left behind was 54 years after Cornelius Vanderbilt’s death, where the Rockefellers are on their sixth generation, over 150 people living off the trust, not as trust of farians or trust fund babies, but we’ve seen bank presidents and senators and business owners like so.

[08:18] They’ve created specific incentives and structures to preserve it, to perpetuate it and truly protect that wealth. And so it’s really illustrating a lot of that, but it’s also demonstrating what are the mindsets that come with the advice from Susie Ormond and Dave Ramsey that hate with a passion something like whole life insurance versus like where they write, where they may be limited in their perspective. And then really how these types of plans and policies work. So how they work and what they are, there’s nothing too new or unique there. Although for so many people in the population, it still seems like this massive aha. But I think some of the Rockefeller stories and and the legacy type structures and learning about a statement of purpose

[09:00] and family constitution that governs your trust versus just legalese. I think that’s the most important book I wrote was the 51 pages that are in my wife and I’s words that are for the future generations as signposts and philosophies distilled for how the trust and how the family can thrive, just like when the U.S. has a constitution, it’s really meant for freedom and liberty, but it comes with a degree of responsibility in order to achieve that. And that’s kind of that delicate balance. I’m working with my own family. Yes. Isn’t it a joy to be able to understand that with freedom comes responsibility. And I see it all the time when you’ve got a I’m going to call it like the bumper. That’s what goes on in our thought.

[09:45] And we get whatever it is that we’re studying. We get whatever it is that we’re reading, thinking about, letting into our thought. And that is what is then prevalent in our lives. And so I love that there are more and more books coming out. You keep writing. I’ll keep writing. There is a movement in the works. And this is the kind of thing that helps people shift their thought from the scarcity minded kind of mentality that so much of the financial writers have out there to a way more prosperity oriented mentality. And I’m just so grateful that you’re doing your own work and I love Michael Levin, a business ghost. What a great partner he can be in taking some raw thoughts and having them be out in a little bit more appropriate manner

[10:38] for really our entire world to consume. Right. It’s not just the U.S. It’s worldwide that you’re starting to make an impact on. And I know we get comments from time to time because, yeah, the tax laws are a little different, but not that much. Yeah, the products are a little different, but not that much. So shifting gears, then, to your five day weekend book, first of all, awesome title. How did you come up with that? I inherited it. I I I feel like I’m a good at writing titles like Killing Secret Cows and What Would the Rockfellas Do? But Mick Halleck, my co-author, had come up with the title before he even brought me into the project. So credit goes to him because he was truly living a five day weekend lifestyle, hustling pretty hard for two days

[11:22] and then five days where he’s just out there doing, you know, he’s he’s really trying to make a much bigger impact. Like he’s doing this big documentary series and he’s traveling all over the world. He went and taught in North Korea. He’s like he’s an adventurer that was a rock star in his early 20s that instead of partying it away when the rest of his bandmates were off, you know, doing the rock star type things, he was investing in real estate, learning how to be a better investor. So it was it was his title. And they said, would you like to come and contribute and fill in the nuts and the bolts and and how, you know, we can get everyone to be able to achieve a five day weekend lifestyle, not just someone that, you know, was an entrepreneur at an early age

[12:03] or or, you know, had a bunch of money coming in from rock band. Although, I mean, he just he truly lives it. That’s so great. You know, I think when people start to be focused on replacing their income, it seems like such a big step. But if they can be focused on replacing their expenses with some passive cash flow, that’s maybe not as big of a step. It depends on the situation. So tell us a little bit more about what’s in that book. And when is it coming out and how can people get a hold of it? So it’s out. We hit the Wall Street Journal list with it already. We’re hoping that we hit the New York Times. I don’t know. You know, Nick’s never hit the New York Times. I’ve hit it before. So it’s a pretty nice kind of letting you know

[12:47] that enough people are getting in their hands overall. But the real framework of the book is number one, how do you keep a lot more of the money you make without budgeting? So where are their inefficiencies by people overpaying tax or overpaying on interest or having improper structure duplicate coverages with their their insurances or non-performing fees that are a drag on their investments? So it’s all about what they can do to add more money in their life. First and second, how do they grow their wealth from a standpoint of making more money, not investing yet? It’s keeping more than making more, whether they’re an entrepreneur or an intrapreneur working within an organization, how they can actually make more money by adding more value

[13:28] and what that looks like. And then the third piece is how to become a better investor and grow your money. And then the fourth piece and the final kind of like framework of the book is how do you look at yourself as your greatest asset? Invest back into that so that you continue to expand your vision and select the right type of choices along the way. So it’s a bit of personal development at the end. I love it. I scribbled down, keep more, make more, grow more. Yep. Is that the middle part of the book? How fun. That’s fabulous. We’ve gotten such good response from the books that we’ve done our own audio work on. And as much as I’m a huge believer in unique ability, which is basically getting clear on what you’re good at doing

[14:14] and what you love to do and doing that as much as you can, we hired some people to do the audio version of one of our books and it just didn’t land as well. And so I’m going back to recording my own as well. I think there’s just a lot of good in the human voice as it connects with people on a one-to-one basis. So I trust you’re going to get an audio version out as well? Yeah, what we’ll do is based upon, I mean, we have a pretty big campaign going on. I think we got a total of 48,000 books in the bookstores from airports to Barnes and Noble to mom and pop shops. And so we want to maximize this all out because it’s a 90-day window that if it’s not selling well enough, they just send them back.

[14:58] And once we’ve kind of got the momentum there, then record the audio book. Now, Nick is from Australia and has quite the accent and talks pretty fast. So I talk really fast. So between the two of us, I think if we record that together, people will probably have to put on half speed to actually listen. Most people speed books up, they probably have to slow it down for us. Right, right. That’s funny. Well, that’ll work. That’s the beauty of that technology. We were talking earlier about really digging for the positive aspects of technological change when you hear about them, and that’s pretty funny. You’re right. I hadn’t heard of somebody going half speed for things. Maybe that’s the solution for you guys.

[15:42] I heard someone said they almost always listen at 1.5 but on Killing Sacred Cows, they put it on 0.75. So it’s funny because when I do stand-up comedy, I’m really slow, articulate and deliberate a ton of pause. When I’m speaking about finance, I have a lot of passion around it and I like to bring a lot of energy. So it’s like two different versions of who you would get on stage based upon what the intention is. But I just recently spoke in Toronto to a global audience. There’s a bunch of interpreters in the room. And Kim, I’ve never gotten worse feedback. I just think that the problem was anyone that was international to try to have the interpreter. Forget it. Yeah, and also I’m sarcastic and I didn’t think that came across as well.

[16:27] I mean, I couldn’t believe it. Like my overall score was an eight out of 10, eight something out of 10. But I looked at every other speaker. No one was in the nines, I don’t believe. I think everyone is in the high eights or some people got down in the sevens. But I had international people give me a zero. I’ve never gotten a zero before. So maybe I’ll slow down next time I’m in an international crowd. Oh, wow. Well, you know, they’ll come up with AI that just picks up your voice and prints behind you the words so that they can read it and maybe that’ll up your scores a little bit. Hopefully so. You know, just a little hit to the ego, but I’m okay. I’m still making it through. It’s good for you, Garrett.

[17:07] It’s always good for you. Well, I wanna say when I heard the title, Five Day Weekend, I immediately thought, well, that’s what I have right now because I have five days, Monday through Friday where I get to do what I love to do, which is help clients and help advisors understand the principles of prosperity economics. And then my weekend is on the farm and it’s interesting the perspective of when you love your work, what you call a quote weekend. So I’m super excited to read the book and really encourage people to go out there to the bookstores and get the book, buy a couple for your friends. It is a real gift in terms of thinking. And obviously all change starts there in our thought, but then also some real actionable items.

[17:57] And if you’re a client of Partners for Prosperity, you’re gonna recognize a lot of the information because as Garrett said, we have the same financial background in terms of what we do with whole life insurance as a place to store cash. We love alternative investments that meet our principles first and then come back around and create cashflow and growth in ways that are not going to be interrupted by the whims of the stock market and the inefficiencies of the banks. And then as Garrett has indicated, the importance of focusing on keeping money first, second, making more money, and then third, getting it to grow. Garrett, last final thoughts? Yeah, I mean, focus on economic independence where you have enough recurring revenue

[18:43] to cover your basic expenses and it’s such a strategic advantage because then every active dollar you earn in life, you could build more assets. That’s 100% that could be put towards use versus maybe 10% like the rest of the population. And when you’re there, you also have more freedom to swing for the fences and what you’re up to. You have more ability to experiment and make a mistake and not have it harm your family and put yourself into deep scarcity. So I think that cashflow is critical and you’re in the right hands with Kim. I mean, like I said, I came up with her as one of my mentors and we still have great conversations and I think learn from each other as she’s writing her books, I’m writing my books and she’s reading

[19:28] and giving me feedback. So I really hope that you enjoy the book and most importantly that you just, you don’t get a second chance to live a life you love and build a legacy that lasts. Legacy really comes down to our choices along the way, the example that we live. It’s not just something that we leave behind. It’s not just a tax-free amount of money that you leave to the next generation. It’s the signposts, the philosophies, the values, the thoughts, the traditions, the rituals, the experiences that bring so much joy in the world and my family lost that because my great-grandfather had to leave Italy in 1913 because he didn’t have enough money to truly put food on the table and his wife was pregnant with their first child.

[20:07] So seven years they were separated and him working in coal mines, that creates almost to the cellular level a deep amount of scarcity and when people get so entrenched in that scarcity, they stop doing things that help them to love life or to grow and it becomes about playing not to lose and when people play not to lose, it’s a very small-minded place to be even if it’s for the intent of keeping everybody and everything together but what I do know is that they also lost a lot of joy in life and I’m here in my family’s legacy to bring where people live and love their life, engage with their unique ability and what I would call their sole purpose so they’re out there expressing the best of what they have to offer

[20:48] because their finances are in order and when you get your finances in order and the right financial team behind you, you have such a strategic advantage because my great-grandfather never had that and it cost him time, stress and even putting himself at risk of not having enough food to get across the ocean to Ellis Island where they changed his last name because he didn’t even speak English and so I figure if he can go through all that, it’s now my job to add that leg to my family history of I want people to choose into the life that they want, into a career that they love, to live by purpose, not just by time and effort and hopefully you can have your story written in the way that you want it to as well.

[21:26] Well, thank you so much, Garrett. The cool thing about mentorship is it does work both ways. So I may have mentored you at the beginning, you certainly mentored me back and we’ll just continue going with that, passing the buck back and forth and keep doing good in the world. I really appreciate your stories and your ability to enunciate them in a way that is just driving home the points and I know that all of our listeners will really benefit from today’s podcast and trust that they’ll go out and get the book. That is the only call to action. I’m not even gonna share my email today. I want you to go grab the Five Day Weekend book by Garrett Gunderson and say Nick’s last name. I’m sorry I don’t have it.

[22:09] Halleck, H-A-L-I-K, N-I-K, H-A-L-I-K, Nick Halleck. Awesome, Five Day Weekend it is. Spencer, wrap us up. All right, well, listeners, thanks for being with us today and as Kim mentioned, she’s not even sharing her email address or no call to action there. I strongly suggest it. I’ve looked at the book. I’ve known Nick for quite a while. It’s something that is going to help you live a better life. Thanks for spending time with us today on this podcast. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit us at partnersforprosperity.com. If you liked this episode, make sure you subscribe and leave a review.