Crisis of Conscience – Episode 174

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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 back to the Prosperity Podcast. This is No BS Money Guy, Todd Strobel. Once again, we have our co-host and bestselling financial author, Kim Butler with us. And today we’ve got kind of a treat. Kim was recently interviewed. This would be the February 2017 edition, we’re assuming, of the California Business Journal. And she was interviewed as well as another one of the advisors that we feel are definitely on our team, Sheldon Singleton. And they basically, the name of the article is Crisis of Conscience.

[00:59] Conscience. I have a hard time saying that word. But it kind of talks about the personal journey that they each had to go through when you really want to, you’re so busy in the beginning in your career that you’re just listening and doing what you’re told and then at some point the light goes on and you realize that if you’re really doing the best for your client, you can’t be doing the things you’re doing anymore, can you? So true. The very aptly named article, I really credit Rick, the editor, for coming up with it. Those guys are always good at titles, subject lines and whatnot. So essentially what he brought out is that both Sheldon and I as prosperity economics advisors needed to go through a crisis of conscience, yes that is hard to say, and

[01:52] realize that what we had been taught from the financial services industry was incorrect. It had missing pieces and parts and primarily that around what I’m going to call the securities industry. So the series six and series seven licenses that then enable you to sell mutual funds and stocks and bonds, just come with them an awful lot of missing pieces. Once you have sat through a certain number of meetings with clients saying, yep, your principal’s down and nope, there’s not much we can do about it, at least for me personally, I just finally put my foot down and I said, I’m not having those kinds of meetings anymore. Furthermore, once you realize the impact of fees and the opportunity costs that

[02:45] fees drive, so you pay a dollar or a percent, however you want to look at it as a fee, you haven’t just lost that percent, you have lost the opportunity for that percent or that dollar, if you will, the fee that went to the money manager to earn any kind of revenue for you, dividends, capital gains, interest for the rest of your life. And once you look at a couple of these illustrations, or I guess it took me a little bit longer than that I’ll admit, once I’d seen that enough times, I finally just realized that this was not something that I wanted to be involved in personally. So I pulled all my own money out of the stock market. And then in time I realized that I didn’t want to be involved with it professionally either.

[03:32] And what’s also interesting in my early years is I worked with the life insurance products known as variable universal life and regular universal life, and now they’re known as equity indexed universal life or just indexed universal life. And I didn’t know the difference between universal life and its various parts and the basic old boring whole life that’s been around forever and ever and the life insurance industry didn’t do a good job of teaching me that difference, but over time, I started to realize it over time, the truth concept software that in full disclosure, my husband writes helped me see the difference and prove the difference and understand the difference. And so it’s enabled me to thankfully, thankfully get past that crisis,

[04:23] which for me was 96, so yeah, 21 years ago, 95 I think is when it started and to be able to find alternative investments that help people earn an income or grow their money. And then of course, learn more about the whole life and how it really works and how it’s such a fabulous place to store cash. And it’s so interesting to me. You still see insurance advisors every day being taught about life insurance as an investment. And I just really feel strongly that it’s not. Now, remember in the midst of our podcast work here, we’re doing a case study where we’re taking somebody and having them reduce their 401k contribution and putting it into life insurance, but we need to remember that when the 401k started, it was called a savings plan.

[05:12] It was a 401k savings plan. And the whole idea of quote investing has come around later. And there are just so many people that invest first and then save second, and it’s just backwards. It’s just not the right order with which to do things. Thoughts on that Todd? Well, I think the, the part of it that got being more than anything was that if you know one person ever gets fully disclosed, the fees, in other words, there’s the fees that the employer sets up on the plan, and then there’s the employee, the fees that the employee pays on the side of the plan, and then there’s the fees that are paid inside, like the 12 B one fees and the trading fees and all of that kind of stuff, and we don’t live in an interest rate and environment that

[06:03] can support all of those fees and still outpace inflation. So we’ve created an incentive system that says you’re much better off to spend your money than it is to save it anywhere. Well, and with interest rates so low, of course, it’s just heartbreaking for people to save and save and save, and then realize that the only thing that’s in their account is the money that they put in. And I find that that happens in the 401k world as well. They put their own money in, they put the match money in, and then supposedly it’s growing, but when they really look at it, the fees are undoing both the match and the tax deferral, and it’s very, very disconcerting to people when they realize it and just feel

[06:50] like they’re ending up going backwards all the time. So we are just big believers in using alternative investments that provide specific cash flow, using alternative investments that provide a dedicated growth orientation with no loss of principle. And then of course, providing people a good place to store their cash, that emergency opportunity fund. And I’m super grateful to have realized these things over time. And then here comes Sheldon and he’s gone through essentially the same path and he’s struggling trying to figure out why isn’t this working. And he comes to a truth training, which is a three day training that Todd Langford, my husband and I do together on the truth concept software.

[07:34] And he’s just blown away so completely happy that he’s now been given proof that all these things he kind of sensed in his gut or in his conscience, if you will, were true or are true. And they are detrimental, frankly, to people’s finances, but more importantly, that there’s a better way and there’s a very concrete and specific path for a better way. And it’s called prosperity economics. It’s the term that we’ve coined to describe what we do because we certainly don’t want to call it financial planning. We certainly don’t want to call it stock market investing or wealth building, like so many people do. And to me, prosperity economics just says it all. It’s about prosperous thinking and being and living and doing and

[08:22] having lots of money in order to do all those things. But it’s also based in economic fact and economic theory that is provable to the nth degree so that people can go forward with confidence about what they have, what they’re doing, the strategies that they’re using and the products that they’re buying. So this is interesting. Inside prosperity economics, the products are no different. Okay, they’re a little bit different. They’re alternative investments to the stock market and that kind of thing. But so often where the rubber really meets the road is the strategy that you employ, the thing that you do with the product that you bought. Because prosperity economics doesn’t have any special products.

[09:08] It’s not like we created a product. It’s the same product everybody else uses whole life. It’s life settlements, it’s Bridgelands. The difference is what we’re having you do with them. I would say that it goes even deeper than that in that, you know, we spend enough time at philosophy level that, you know, we find out what your core beliefs are and I believe those limiting beliefs are more powerful to change prior to even talking about strategy or product. Well, Kim, I think this would be a great time for you to, you have a book that’s available just to our listeners. I think this would be a great time to mention that. Yes, because that book does cover both the products and the strategies. Very helpful.

[09:53] And that is available only at partners number four, prosperity.com slash ebook. There’s an audio version as well as a printed copy. And this is one where you can get the gist of it with the audio version. And it’s not on Amazon. You can’t get it in anywhere else, but partners number four, prosperity.com slash ebook. And I, again, that’s another great book because it goes into, um, also this, uh, this article, what if they wanted to get a copy of the article itself? Ah, that’s a good point. I think I have it. So all they need to do is email me hello at partners number four, prosperity.com and that will get them the article. They can just put article on it. Crisis. How about that? That’s even better.

[10:43] Crisis at the top and it’ll get you a copy, uh, of, of this latest email. Again, we encourage you to keep sending in your questions. Um, if you have case studies, you know, we don’t use your name on here. You can be John and Jane. Um, we glad to get any information that we can to you. Um, I think, you know, we’re, we’re going to be seeing some very rapid things starting to happen out there financially and there just can’t be a better time to grab hold and really understand your finances, uh, than right now, anything on that, Kim? I agree. Learning is good and action is even better. So let us help you take it. Super. Well, again, this is no BS money guy, Todd Strobel. Special thanks to Kim Butler.

[11:26] Um, great job for, uh, Sheldon Singleton out there taking care of his business out there in California. And again, we’re here if y’all need us. Take care. 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.