How Principles Help Clients Understand Finances with Lou Pineda – Bonus Episode

This transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors.

[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 this episode of the Prosperity Podcast. Today I have a special guest. Our special guest today is a new advisor that has been working with Kim. This advisor has some pretty fantastic stories. He’s continuing to grow his mind, his intellect, and his expertise. So I want to welcome Lou to the podcast. Are you there, Lou? I am. Thank you, Spencer. Glad to be here. So before we started recording this podcast, we were chatting and I noticed there was one thing that you have in common with Kim is you’re a voracious reader.

[01:04] Now, being a voracious reader, not of just jumping into the Harry Potter books or things like that, but you actually like to read from Austrian economics, all kinds of financial books, even be it in real estate. So tell us a little bit more about your passion for reading and then we want to jump in to know more about you. Yeah, you bet. So my passion for reading really just came from, I think, my lack of reading and my lack of loving books when I was a very, very young man in my early teens. It was just not something that I did. Frankly, just to be completely honest, I couldn’t get past a chapter in a book. It was one of those scenarios to where you read it and then all of a sudden you’re like, what did I just read?

[01:51] And then you go back and then you try to read it again and then just have to keep doing it through iteration. What I developed my passion, I would say that right after I graduated high school, I started to dabble in some philosophy and also some just literature like Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau and all these different types of books. And I fell in love with reading. I just could not put the books down. I was reading everything from poetry to books about the Fibonacci sequence and books on math. And I just fell in love with learning. And I fell in love with self-education. And ever since, every chance I get, I pick up a book just on various topics. It’s just what I believe has kept me so curious and not just curious,

[02:47] but I guess excited about new things that are evolving. And I just love doing it. Well, that’s fun. I think that’s probably a good reason why Kim has decided to associate with you and have you be around different people in the prosperity movement and working with her and clients. You have this love for reading, and that’s really principle-based. Now, tell us more about yourself. We would love to get to know you. If you could tell us where you’re from. Tell us a little bit about your family and maybe some of your hobbies so that we can start to understand who Lou is. Oh, absolutely. So I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado. I still live here. It’s a beautiful sunshine state. And I’ve lived in other places, but I always come back here

[03:42] just because I don’t think there’s any place that’s better. Sorry to any listeners that are listening from a different state, Florida or California, Texas or anything. Those are great places. Don’t get me wrong, but I could never leave Colorado permanently. There are a lot of outdoor activities and just fun people. And I’ve seen this city grow so much just in every single way, from our infrastructure to our demographic. Just the mines here are absolutely wonderful. My entire family lives here. I have four brothers, my mom and my dad, and the rest of my extended family as well. Probably fourth or fifth generation are American, so Hispanic is my heritage. And we just have a great time in Colorado.

[04:32] Now, I did go to college here. I got my degree in finance in 2007. And around that time, I actually had married my wife, Liz, and she’s from Puerto Rico. And we’ve been together now for about 12 years. We have a two and a half year old daughter going on 18. She’s just a ball of fun and a wonderful, wonderful young lady. So yeah, that’s pretty much my family story. Now, tell us, so you went to school, you focused on finance, and you worked in a pretty unique situation where you were working with a lot of high net worth individuals. And in the capacity of working with them, you were able to see people that were investing their money differently or even just wanting to have access to capital. So tell us what you gained from the experience of working

[05:33] with those individuals. Absolutely. So when I graduated college, I immediately started in banking, first in a corporate finance role for a couple of years, just learning. That’s where you learn a lot of your skills, how to model, how finances basically work, income statement, balance sheet, all that stuff, the language of money. And after some time in banking, I actually ended up at a bank that dealt with a lot of high net worth individuals and real estate investors, people that were basically full time employed as doctors, but also hobbyists, investors, et cetera. And that really opened my eyes. It opened my eyes into how people make money and what that looks like on a balance sheet. Now, in college, I thought that if somebody had cash,

[06:22] if someone had money, that means they just had a great job. They were either a lawyer or a doctor or they had been an engineer or something like that. And that model, in my mind, changed over time because I realized that was just not so. They weren’t even stock investors. On these balance sheets and these financial statements, I saw that a lot of these people that had money and opportunity were either business owners or they were investors in real estate. And I was completely blown away by that. I had no idea that was actually the case. And what was even more surprising was the, I guess the relationship between education and opportunity. And that might be a little confusing, so let me kind of back up a little bit.

[07:12] What I mean by that is here I am, I’m working at a bank where there’s a whole bunch of really smart guys, smart people, smart women, and they love what they do. They’re good at what they do. But the people that were making so much money that were on the other side of the desk, they came from all these different backgrounds. Some of them didn’t even go to college. Some had really hard times just building their careers, one customer at a time or one property at a time. And they had terrific stories. And what they all had in common was grit, the curiosity for racist learners. They love people. They just are fantastic with people. That must be something there, right? And it was really eye-opening for me

[07:57] because I thought to myself, wow, so this is how it’s done. This is what I didn’t learn in school. That was a pretty big revelation, I would say. Yeah, that’s pretty eye-opening. Would you say that maybe some of those the high net worth individuals were people that maybe they didn’t possibly understand some of the, what do you call it? Some of these foundational principles of prosperity, but they were actually living them, focusing on cash flow and focusing on freedom and control and things like that. Totally, absolutely. It’s interesting because a lot of our customers, you have a certain section of customers that couldn’t read a balance sheet financial statement. They just couldn’t. But the ones that were the most successful

[08:46] could totally do that and more. And they were, if anything, even if they can’t, I mean, you don’t have to know how to read a balance sheet in an income statement and be an expert in finance to be well off. I mean, it helps and learning and knowing the language of money definitely, I believe makes you more successful. But what I noticed with all these individuals is that they did have, they were principled. Maybe they couldn’t speak to the math, but they knew the principles in their mind, like the seven principles of prosperity that Kim is always talking about. That’s very true. That think, that very first principle, it’s profound. Their mindset is set for optimism. It’s set for gratitude. It’s set for giving to others and helping other people

[09:34] and always adding value. And that mindset really begets more opportunity for them. And they’re always talking about, I won’t go through all the principles, but they’re always talking about opportunity cost and what they’re looking at opportunity A and opportunity B. And if they go with B, what’s the opportunity cost of going with B? What is the long-term effect? So you hear a lot of long-term type of discussions with these individuals. Since you were able to be around them, you were able to understand both, from the balance sheet, the technical side of things, and then the principle side of things. How do you feel that you’ll be able to apply that working inside of Partners for Prosperity? That’s a fantastic question, Spencer.

[10:22] I believe it’s directly applicable, mostly just because understanding the language of money that is easily translatable, that’s the first thing. The second is I got an opportunity to understand banking, to understand how banks make money, how they essentially take in deposits, lend out those deposits, and then use velocity, which is another principle in the Seven Principles of Prosperity, to amplify their earnings. Now, that same type of strategy, those same principles are directly transferable to P4P. Because at P4P, what we’re doing is we’re helping individuals become their own bank, become their own source of opportunity and own source of generating money. So through this system, if they start to generate money just like a bank would,

[11:16] we’re going to help them understand how they can use velocity, that principle, to reinvest into themselves and put that money out into the marketplace so it can work for them. Okay, that totally makes sense. Now, I want to jump into another piece of your background. And one of the things in your background is a little quote that you said. You said a healthy body equals a healthy mind. So you said when you and your wife were first married, you focused a lot on fitness and keeping yourselves active. Can you share with us some principles or some guiding way of living, how you are living your life to have a healthy body and a healthy mind, and maybe how that will as well help people that you’re working with?

[12:08] Wow, let’s see if I can throw out a nugget here. I think the biggest thing that working out, and I’m not saying working out, so that way you can have a beach body and look in the mirror and see all these defining lines and stuff. I don’t think that’s really what it’s about. And it wasn’t about that for me because I definitely don’t have those. It was mostly just about keeping your body in shape so that way you can stay alert, so that way you’re focused. So that way you got something really tough completed at the beginning of the day. That’s when I like to work out. I like to go at five, six in the morning. So that way I do the toughest thing first. And it’s just weird because after that, I have this huge amount of energy

[12:55] for the next seven, eight hours. At least it’s just, it’s a really great start to your day. The other thing that I really liked about working out early is it makes you intentional. Something about working out, you have to get up, you have to go through this routine to where you put on your clothes, you get to the gym, you do your workout, you change it up, and you have to be intentional about your workout if you want some type of result. And then when you get out, it’s just so much easier to translate that into your daily life. And if there’s anything I could throw out there that I think is really important is to be absolutely intentional with your time. If you have a time block from like eight to 10,

[13:42] use that specifically for something that you love to do or something that gives you energy because that’s where all the magic happens. You know, that’s a great piece of advice. I think for our listeners and for clients or even prospects with Partners for Prosperity, all of us are listening to this because we’re trying to get educated, we’re trying to learn more, we’re trying to become better. And so having a clear intention is very powerful. Totally agree with you. Now, as we wrap up, you know, we’ve got to know you a little bit more. We understand that you have this language of finance, that you understand that from the corporate background, but you also understand the principle piece because you worked with high net individuals

[14:32] who maybe weren’t savvy with balance sheets, but they understood the principles. So as we begin to wrap up right now, can you share some parting words with us and also maybe explain to the prospects and clients why you would be there to be able to help out and answer questions? Absolutely. So there’s a lot of information out there in the marketplace, it’s all over. If you look on the internet, you’re going to find courses that are going to teach you how to do things one way. If you continue to look, you’re going to find a stock investment course, et cetera. My biggest piece of advice is be curious. Learn as much as you can for yourself first. If someone gives you a piece of advice, you can take that advice, there’s nothing wrong with it.

[15:30] I do that all the time. And question it, think about it, and try to find a piece of information out there that is contrary to what you just heard. Not so that way you can come back and battle, I would say, but so that way that you can be an informed person and develop your own original opinion about it. That’s what’s helped me, that’s actually what helped me get to this place, making that jump from being a banker to being an advisor. I really looked wholeheartedly at the process, at the strategy of what we’re doing. And I had some initial doubts because that’s human, that’s normal to have those initial doubts and to be a little afraid. And I thought, okay, well, maybe it is the typical financial advice

[16:19] that I learned in college, is that right? Everyone else is doing it. But I promise you, if you ask questions and you keep digging and you’re curious, you’ll find the right answer for you. That is such a fantastic summary and conclusion to our conversation today. So for all of our listeners out there, if you do have that itching inside to be curious, if you wanna learn more about the principles of prosperity, make sure you go to partnersforprosperity.com. There’s also special eBooks, downloads, audiobooks that you can get on that website. And you can even get to know Lou a little bit more. So, Lou, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. Well, thank you, Spencer. It’s been a joy. All right, take care.

[17:09] You too, thank you. 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. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. See you next time.