Taboo Subjects – Episode 362

This transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors.

[00:00] I founded Ornot in 2013 and we made clothing for cyclists. For me, the best part of Shopify is the possibility of managing the business even without having technical knowledge. We managed to manage everything, from back-end to front-end, and make sales online, without complications. If Shopify were a cycling equipment, I would say it would be the bicycle itself. And that’s what allows us to get where we want. It is in Shopify that we manage our business. Start your free evaluation at Shopify.com Today, we’re going to be talking about the taboo subjects. Yes, we’re going to dive into all of those things that no one wants to talk about. So are you ready, Kim? My favorite things to talk about. Well, good.

[00:47] That’s a script to a very scary movie. Basically, it’s money and death, don’t you think? Taxes, but whatever. I think it’s money and death. Yeah, it’s true. Maybe we’ll throw on some politics too, right? Yes, absolutely. Religion? Have at it. Yes. So money and death. Why do you start there? Well, money is an obvious one, and this is what I love. So I overhear two people talking the other day, and they’re debating whether or not it’s right to talk about salaries and income at the dinner table. And I’m thinking, pretty much any job, all you got to do is look it up, and you know how much somebody makes. So why have salaries and income continued to be a taboo subject? And in our book, Perpetual Wealth, which we are working on getting our second version out,

[01:40] which will be so exciting. The first version was kind of a draft, and we got it to all of our listeners, and now it’s in cleanup mode, and it’s going to be so cool. We talk about the utter importance of discussing money at the table. And in other conversations, it doesn’t just literally be the dinner table, but to talk about money as a family. And so many families don’t. So many families and friends consider money a taboo subject. Why? Where does that come from? You know, that’s sad, isn’t it? Because the one place where it’s probably most needed for kids growing up, and it’s not happening. So what can we do about that? And I think the easiest is to just start the discussions and start them wherever your family is, at whatever level of age and appropriateness

[02:29] your children are. And this includes adult children. Like, just start having the discussions. And this may include bringing up some embarrassing things that you have dealt with. Maybe there’s a bankruptcy in the family. And so, you know, that’s not the end all and be all. Sometimes that is an actual strategy to move forward. Businesses use it as a strategy. They don’t think it’s a taboo subject. So why do we think of it as taboo on the personal side? And maybe it’s a… I saw a statistic. Something like 27 or 29% of America has incarceration in their past. I don’t know anybody. I don’t think I know anybody anywhere. But maybe because it’s taboo, maybe it’s not talked about. But holy cow, that’s a huge percentage.

[03:25] And please don’t quote me on that. I’m sure I have my stats wrong somewhere. But nevertheless, a large percentage of America has had some jail time, apparently. So, okay, what did they learn there? What were the mistakes that occurred to get you there? Like, why are these subjects taboo? This is not helping us learn and go forward. Yeah, I think maybe there’s some of the reasons why it’s taboo is because there’s oftentimes not a lesson that’s learned from it. And then you get to repeat offenders. Maybe that’s one of the reasons. Yes, that’s well said. And so clearly, we want to be learning from it and to take that learning and share it with our most treasured friends who are our family. And then, of course, if it is appropriate, also friends that can benefit from that

[04:15] learning. I love that you picked up on that. I think that’s dead on. And so that, of course, dead, death, right? That’s another thing that just does not get talked about. I saw the coolest, and I can send you this link so we can put it in the show notes, little moving graph of life expectancy of men and women and how much it has risen. And it’s done on this super cool moving graph shown in 13 seconds. It’s like from 1950 to 2015 shown in 13 seconds. And the bottom line of it is that we’re living so much longer. And yet death still occurs. Death occurs every day. And of course, here in the middle of 2020, when we’re talking about this, there is so much misinformation about why people are dying.

[05:15] And yet I’m actually kind of grateful that this is happening to us because I actually think it’s going to help move death from being a taboo subject to helping it be a more mainstream, like let’s talk about this, especially if you have older family members. You need to be talking about what’s going to happen when they die. And I’ve also seen massive increase in savings rates because of what’s going on in 2020. So maybe that will help money become less of a taboo subject as well. That could be exciting. That definitely could be. So maybe we can take just a tiny bit of time and we can unpack the subcategories with the money and death. And so, for example, you’re talking about with the money, you have savings.

[06:00] So that’s not one where we’re sitting around the kitchen table and we pull out our accounting statements and we’re actually going through our IRS documents. We don’t need to do that, but we could have a conversation around savings. So what would that look like? Well, I think when we focus on savings and when we appreciate our savings, then they appreciate also. So the way to get good results, as we know, is to have a little habit. So thank you to BJ Fogg and his Tiny Habits book. If anybody wants to check that out, the idea of a habit is something that then installs discipline. So Dan Sullivan has the great quote, we are 100% disciplined to our current set of habits. And the only way to get good results in savings is to make it be a habit.

[06:48] And so one of the things we don’t want to be doing in this category is going to the store and buying a bunch of things on sale and saying, oh, I saved $50 today because what I was going to buy was 100 bucks and now it’s 50 bucks. No, that’s not the right definition of savings that we want to be focused on. The savings we want to be focused on is the $50, $100, the $10,000, whatever the numbers are for you per month that you are setting aside with savings as a verb, meaning to put away. Now, back to the earlier story, if you really want to make your savings a habit and you go to the store and you save 50 bucks, then go home and put that 50 bucks in your savings account. There you go. I like that. Those are perfect.

[07:37] So one of the subcategories is savings. That’s a money conversation that we could have. Now, how about an investment conversation? What would that look like? Ah, great question. So one of the things that you can just enjoy is getting from everybody their definition of an investment. And of course, if we talk to mainstream media, the definition of investment, the only one that they have are stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. If you ask other people their definition of investment, especially if you include younger kids in the discussion, you’ll get some awesome answers. And one of the things that comes up is all of the various types of things that you can invest in as individuals. Now, of course, you know, as financial people,

[08:20] we talk about alternative investments like life settlements and oil and gas and all that kind of thing. But a child will say, oh, well, I could invest in learning a little bit more. I could invest in maybe having this special tool that would enable me to go get jobs, then help out in the marketplace, like literally a broom, a shovel, a lawnmower, that kind of thing. Or there are all types of different human capital-oriented investments that people would define as an investment. In fact, the blog post that Partners for Prosperity has out just I think the last about the middle of May 2020 is on all the different definitions of capital. So clearly, invest can be a verb as well, just like save can be a verb.

[09:08] And the end result of invest as a verb is typically capital. Well, there are, I think in the blog post, we came up with like 10 different definitions of capital. And there’s relationship capital and there’s human capital and there’s all kinds of different aspects of capital that can just expand our definition there, which then working backwards expands our definition of investing the verb and investments the noun. Ooh, that’s so good. And if you’ve had the conversation about savings, well now you have the capital to do the investments. So we can see you’re creating a win-win with the family or whomever that may be. Yes, and it’s so fun when you can link savings and investments together and get clear on the difference

[09:54] because you can get clear that savings again as a verb is what people have as their emergency opportunity money and investments are parlaying that opportunity up into the next level of activity as it relates to money. And so many people wanna do it the other way around. The mainstream media just says your 401k is your investment. So you have all these people that are just going straight to their 401k. Well, fast forward and a lot of our clients that are in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s even are now realizing what happens when their only asset is their 401k and it’s not a pretty picture. And so for our younger listeners, please, please know that you want to have dollars saved as a verb outside of 401ks and 403Bs

[10:47] because those are 100% government controlled. And for our older clientele that have more resources and capacity available learning what different investments are beyond what mainstream media talks about. Again, that stock bond mutual fund being the only definition is a really critical step to take because at some point you may have the opportunity to roll a 401k or a 403B into a self-directed IRA and then look at investments that would be something different besides the stock bond and mutual fund market. And as we’re just beginning to wrap up the investment discussion, I always encourage people to remember the question compared to what. So as an example right now, we’ve got this middle of the year 2020

[11:41] stock markets going all over the place. And so a lot of people will say, oh, well, my investment is down. Well, compared to what? Like down from a month ago or down from a year ago or 10 years ago, that’s a very important second question. So like, think of the habits, right? First thing is my investment’s down. Well, what’s the second question? And the second question or the question behind the question, if you will, is that compared to what question? Because for a lot of people though, they may have a little bit less money available today compared to say last month, it is still a lot higher than what it was a year ago as an example. And so I encourage people to really consider that carefully

[12:28] because compared to what puts a whole different light on how they’re doing with their investments. And I think as we have wrapped on the whole investment side and the taboo subject of money, the death side is really being able to have those conversations around life insurance and having conversations around what’s going to happen, funeral or long-term care or anything like that. And really they don’t need to be heavy conversations when you approach it properly. So well said. So I have a fun quote to share that I saw on my niece’s graduation t-shirt. And it is, some have story, we have legacy. And I just loved that because as we know, life insurance installs legacy. So we talk about the emergency opportunity side

[13:21] of life insurance all the time, which is the cash value. But life insurance, death benefit is legacy. Death is a guaranteed event. We just don’t know when. And so knowing that you have legacy is the coolest thing in the world. I am aware of a distant friend, third, fourth, like friend of friend of friend that was on a date. Both of these people are over 50 years old. Both of them with some substantial means and we’re talking on their first date about what their legacy was going to be, which I thought was so cool. And so I encourage each of our listeners to think about that. What is your legacy? And for those that have life insurance, that’s very straightforward. But there’s additional legacy things

[14:10] that are out there that are important to you, like values and ideas and maybe perspectives about life that you want to leave your family with that are way beyond and way more important than the money or the capital aspect of legacy. So I think that’s a really fun discussion for a family to have. What’s your legacy? It doesn’t matter how old we are. That’s a good thing for people to be thinking about. Listeners, I hope you hear what Kim just did there. We were going to start out and talk about taboo subjects. And here we are. We found what should be difficult conversations, considering how most people think. And we made this fun. Now we’re ending with talking about legacy and something that’s going to be beneficial to everyone.

[15:00] And I think that we can approach life that way. We can approach it and be scared. We can have trepidation or we can look at it with gratitude. We can change the way that we look at it and we get the results that we want. So well done, Kim. Well, thank you. I’m just so grateful for you, Spencer. This is such a great way for us to help our clients and our prospects that listen to this awesome podcast. And I’m so grateful to each of our listeners. And we would love to hear your comments and notice that a lot of what I shared over the last various podcasts have been questions. Questions are a great way to start a conversation, to get things moving, to help people shift their mindset. You can ask yourself questions.

[15:43] You can ask people at the dinner table questions. And it just is a really helpful tool to be able to move things forward. So I encourage you to ask us questions, which you can do hello at partners4prosperity.com, but also ask yourself and your family members and friends questions as well. Perfect. We’ll put a link to that email address to make it easy for people to send those to us. And thank you for being on the podcast and listening, spending your time with us today. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit us at partners4prosperity.com. If you liked this episode, make sure you subscribe and leave a review.