Getting Better With Personal Finances – Episode 295

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[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Welcome to another episode of the Prosperity Podcast. Today, we’re taking a community question or actually we’re answering a community question with a group. And in a forum that I often spend times in, there was a question posed and I think it’s a bad question, but we’re going to give it to Kim. And the person said, is it worth it to take a pay cut to be happier? And I think that’s flawed, but I would love to hear. Tell us. Tell us why you think it’s a bad question or a flawed question. Well, I think, is it worth to take a pay cut to be happier? Pay cut means that they’re operating from a scarcity mindset. And I don’t think a person should be operating that way. I think if you don’t like what you’re doing, then in order to make more,

[00:52] you have to provide more value to the marketplace. I think that a person in their off time or whatever that could be, could develop necessary skills. And if you have savings capital, well, you can employ that capital into cash flowing investments or things like that. And so I think the pay cut is almost saying like, I’m stuck in my situation. This is my only option. What do you think? I agree. You know, it’s interesting. I think there is one simple thing that so many people could do to absolutely transform their lives. And that’s just stop watching TV. I totally agree. I agree. And just stop. What do you call that? Feasting on the fat of the internet, the stuff that’s not good for you. Absolutely. It is so easy to get sucked into it. And I literally have never

[01:46] spent more than maybe five to seven minutes and I mean that like not even ten minutes fussing around on the internet before I realized, oh my gosh, this is not good. And so I remember over the holidays, I actually gave myself permission for about a two hour block of time to just fuss around on YouTube. And I was looking for singing events like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir or, you know, the Vienna Choir or whoever would be singing cool Christmas carols. And I got done with it. I found some, I enjoyed them. You know, I’d watch them maybe for 10 or 15 minutes and then go on to the next one. And I thought, okay, that’s cool. I’m not doing that again for like another year. It was just, it was, and that you could even call

[02:36] that was like semi legit and productive. But the watching of TV, the fussing around on the internet, Facebook, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever site is yours. If you want to do that, that’s awesome. But give yourself a very limited time with which to do it and then put it away. Stop and think about what you can do to be productive. So let’s address this question. Okay, somebody wants to change jobs because they don’t like what they’re doing. Absolutely positively. Yes, I agree. You should change jobs. Go out there and look. This is what you should be spending your time doing is looking for what’s out there and also doing some self reflection and self study in order to figure out what it is that you do

[03:21] love. Now, maybe you already know that so great you can skip that step. And yet I think a lot of times because we haven’t saved and I’ll try to stay off the saving soapbox this go around, but because we haven’t saved, we’re forced to take another job really quickly. Well, okay, so be it. So next to go around, do what you can to save, do everything that you can to reduce your lifestyle. But more importantly, do everything that you can to increase your income. And that should always, always be our focus. How can I provide more value in the marketplace? How can I provide additional value in the marketplace in order to get paid more? And so one of my favorite recommendations is a company called Udacity that grants

[04:06] these nano degrees that then is making you ready to be hired. And they have a crazy high hiring rate for the people that have completed their nano degrees. And they have a massive number of things that one can learn to generate some part time income. And so much of it is done from our laptops at home. And so the time that you would spend getting your nano degree, which I think is like six months or less, and then the opportunities that you would create for yourself, that would be so much better use of time than TV or fussing on Facebook or whatever it is that you’re doing. And there’s always time. It’s just about priorities. It’s about calendar control. And it’s about really being committed to

[04:53] living the best life that you can live. And it’s worth having work that you love because we spend a lot of time at work and we should spend a lot of time at work. Human beings were designed to work. We need to not only be working quite a few hours during the week, and we need to be taking our weekends off. Now weekend doesn’t have to be Saturday and Sunday, but I’m just a big believer in taking breaks. And we need to be working in to our 70s and 80s and maybe even 90s. You know, there was a 96 year old man that just won the Nobel Prize for some kind of energy thing. Is that not cool? That is amazing. It truly is. Agreed. So back to this person’s question, please, please do find work that you love. Please, please make an effort to develop savings so that

[05:44] you’re not beholden to the one paycheck that you have and then also create ways to earn additional income. And with those steps you’ll end up with a much happier life. And is that going to happen overnight? Absolutely not. So what you can do in the meantime is really work on your mindset. And I’m so grateful that we live in an era when this is an okay thing to talk about. Like it used to be kind of woo woo or oh, you know, those are for weird people or what have you. Now every one of my mentors, Peter Diamandis, Dan Sullivan, you know, I could name 15 others, they’re all talking about mindset, the importance of mindset. And the most awesome thing is that working on your mindset is literally free because

[06:39] there are wonderful books that you can read. Okay, maybe it’s 10 bucks, but there are wonderful books that you can read. There are absolutely some free. Okay, so now would be an okay time to go on YouTube, right? There are also numerous things out there that are just blog posts and that kind of thing. So figure out how you learn. Like are you a podcast listener? You must be if you’re listening to us. There are numerous other podcasts out there that help people with mindset. And if you’re struggling in that scarcity mentality of, oh my gosh, I’m fearful, which I struggle with that, too. I have to work on my mindset every single day. If you’re struggling with, oh my gosh, I hate my job and I’m miserable, then work

[07:25] on your mindset. And you never know if you work on your mindset, you may end up actually finding work that you love and maybe with just some small shifts in the work that you’re doing, you could actually love it a lot better or find maybe another job in the same company or find an additional thing that you could do while you’re looking for work for an additional job, what I mean by work, so that along the way you’re happier. These are all concrete steps that you can take today. And so if you figure out how you learn, so listening, watching or reading are typically the three ways you could add a fourth of being involved physically, like, you know, with your hands, if you figure out how you learn, then go after that method with a vengeance to pick up the

[08:21] additional mental aspects that you want to add to your life, which will then lay themselves out in how you spend literally every day, whether you’re working or not. Yeah, absolutely. You know, you you touched on a lot of pieces and I want to address a couple of things and then give you a story that is absolutely in line with what we’re talking about. Now, the first piece is about the way that we learn. And Mark Andreessen, he’s a venture capitalist. He was the co-founder or the founder of Netscape. So one of the early guys on the internet, and the end of 2018, he said that audio will be titanically important. Being talking about podcasts and things like that. And so for our listeners that are listening to a podcast, this is free. Meaning,

[09:15] Kim is paying to have this distributed throughout the internet, have it produced, have it ready for your ears. You don’t even have to go and buy that ebook that you would normally have to buy or travel across the country to a seminar, you can put headphones on and listen to this podcast. So one, Kim, we, meaning listeners and myself, I’m grateful that you do that you provide this education portal for us. Two is when we look at the future of the way we learn, Peter Diamandis has said that we’ll be learning through virtual reality, we may be putting on these goggles or glasses or who knows what we’ll put on and we’re going to learn differently. And now, the story, I think it ties this together. A friend of mine was a manager at a retail store

[10:05] and it’s a large retail store throughout the country. But he was inquisitive and he was wanting to learn more and move up in the company. But he knew moving up in the company by his sales skills wasn’t going to take him that far. So he went on YouTube, and he started to learn how to program. And he got interested in analytics. And so he focused on the most important analytics in their company. And he focused on programming and understanding how to get those two worlds to talk to each other. So fast forward about two years, and now he is the director of analytics for that company without a college degree. But he focused and he developed those skills on YouTube. So it’s, it’s truly impossible for us to not fail if we have the right mindset, and

[10:59] we put in the work, and we provide value to the marketplace. What do you think, Kim? I love that story. That’s so awesome. And it’s so amazing how much time all of us really have with our brains to put ourselves to work. Anybody that’s doing any kind of commute. Yeah, listen to your favorite pop song or rock and roll or whatever for five or 10 minutes, but then turn your car into a university on wheels, turn your train commute into learning. And as you’ve indicated podcasts are just so amazing. You know, I’ve heard that radio is more about history, and podcasts are more about the future. And I love that because there are so many good positive things on podcasts that are other people like me that are

[11:51] sharing their wisdom and every bit of it at a deep level. I mean, so much that, and I know I’ve heard people say this about ours, and I’ve seen it about other podcasts, so much that people really do feel like if they listen to somebody’s entire podcast set, that they know every secret that they have. And I would agree. And I hope that’s the case with our listeners. I so encourage you if you’re new to us to go back and grab some past podcasts and learn about finances, because every single person needs to be skilled in the area of personal finance, it really should be your second or third job, like you should have your main income earning job. And then understanding personal finance should be a

[12:40] very critical role that you play. And if you don’t feel like you’re super analytical, that’s fine. Guess what, I’m not either. But understanding personal finance and learning about it is so critical. Spencer Todd Langford, my husband and I just spent the last three days teaching financial advisors about personal finance. And we started with the truth concepts calculator. So many of our listeners are familiar and anybody’s welcome to go check it out truth concepts.com. This is typically for financial advisors, but it has a really important message that I wanted to share with our listeners, which is that all financial functions and all financial analysis, essentially come down to five specific things. One

[13:29] is time. Another is rate. And then there is present value like today’s dollars future value, obviously, tomorrow’s dollars, and payment like a loan payment or a car payment. So time, rate, present value, future value, payment. And because in order to calculate most of those things around personal finances, you need a financial calculator, think either truth concepts or an HP 12c. Or there are some financial calculators that you can get on the web, there are tons of financial calculators that you can get in apps for your smartphone. In fact, HP 12c is one of them, but it’s a really difficult one to learn. So I would encourage people to find simpler financial calculators. But because any of those five functions require

[14:27] financial calculators to truly get the whole truth of the matter. And most of us do not run around with the knowledge of financial calculators, we run around with the knowledge of regular calculators that add and divide and subtract and multiply beautifully. And we try to use these regular calculators to figure out financial things. And we make mistakes because of it. And so going back to those five things, time, rate, present value, future value, and payment. When you’re talking about personal finances, when you’re looking at your savings ability, when you’re thinking about car payments, mortgage payments, anything like that in your life, which as I’ve said should be like your second job that you want

[15:12] to be learning about things around the personal financial arena. Pay attention to those five things and start to learn how to deal with them and learn just enough about financial calculators that you would know if something was wrong. And kind of the bottom line of it is if you’re using a regular calculator to calculate very much inside the personal financial world, there’s a good chance you’re not calculating it right. And I see it all the time. So as it relates to this second job, if you will, I just want to really encourage people to learn more about personal finance. We all know it’s not taught, you know, if you have a class in high school, it’s how to pick stocks. If you have a class in college, it’s, you know,

[15:57] maybe part of accounting or econ or something like that, never brought down to your personal level that has any meaning at all. Or if there is an attempt to bring it down to your personal level, and some schools are trying to involve it. When you’re a kid in high school or college, the stuff they talk about doesn’t have any meaning to you. You don’t understand mortgage payments and even potentially car payments and how things are calculated. And I know this because we had the joy of having our son Robbie at the truth training that we just did. And Robbie is 22 years old, just out of college. And he’s had a great head for personal finance for many, many years. And he said, Oh, my gosh, this has so much more meaning to

[16:42] me now that I’m out in the working world. And that’s a kid that had a natural interest. So for those of us that maybe didn’t have a natural interest, I think just getting clear that understanding and learning just a little bit about personal finance is a challenge that you want to rev yourself up for. I completely agree. And earlier on, that we can do that. And the more simple we can make that process, the more that we’re going to make make an impact on it. What of the ebooks that you’ve written do you think should be the best for our listeners if they want to take a quick dive? Well, I particularly like busting the interest rate lies, which may sound kind of like a boring title to some people. But the reason that I like it is it

[17:28] actually starts in it has a story in it. And it actually starts with a kid in a high school accounting class where the teacher brings in a personal finance expert. And it’s that kid’s story as he grows up and goes through life. And there are a lot of aspects of interest rates that are very difficult to understand. And they are addressed and taught in that book. And then like I said, there’s a story that goes along with it. So it’s not a boring personal finance book, if you will. And so that would be my recommended starting place to learn a little bit more. And then, of course, there’s five or six others that will just support the message if people want to read. And if they prefer to listen, there are audio versions of

[18:19] all of those books. Okay. And for listeners, we’ll make it easier for you. We’ll put a link to Kim’s Amazon page so you can select the best version for you. If you want to look through it on Kindle, or if you want to listen to it, whatever is best for you. Kim, thank you for sharing additional insights on how we can become stronger and better if we’re looking for a job transition, but ultimately understanding the principle of getting better with our personal finances. We appreciate your time with us today, Kim, and for the listeners for being with us. 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.

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