Your First Step To Prosperity – Episode 206

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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, bestselling author, Kim D.H. Butler and No BS Money Guy, Todd Strobel. Hey everybody, welcome 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 today. And we’re going to be talking about prosperity and our goal for this is really to reach out to you. We’d really like to get some feedback on this. So we have just a couple of questions that Kim and I are going to discuss. And again, like I said, send this to your friends, send it to whoever, because I

[00:51] think there’s a room for a lot of definitions for a lot of people. And if we have at least defined what prosperity is, we have a goal or an objective to work towards. How are you doing, Kim? I’m doing great, Todd, and delighted to talk about this. The word prosperity just has so much meaning to me. Of course, our company is called Partners for Prosperity, and I picked that term prosperity on purpose because it has such a broad definition to include more than financial wealth or monetary wealth. And so prosperity to me is a mental construct. It’s a place that you get to mentally first. And it comes with gratitude, it comes with positive focus. These are things that we’ve talked about in previous podcasts.

[01:51] When you come from a place of gratitude, when you are looking for the good that’s going on, you will find prosperity. And I would first define that as a peace of mind, to have the confidence and the groundedness that life is good, and to be then, secondly, seeking out that good, focusing on it, looking for it, because we all know that we get what we focus on. And then third, of course, being grateful, and sometimes the gratitude comes first, as I’d indicated, but then being grateful again, and then yes, applying all of that to your personal finances and developing good stewardship, proper savings habits, the ability to invest without losing money. All of those play a role in the definition of prosperity.

[02:46] Just last night, we went out to dinner and we’re at, I don’t know, I guess, a little pub-type establishment next door, and the lady that was taking care of us, I’ve been in the habit of just asking this question to everybody I run into, just trying to get answers, and it was probably 10 o’clock at night, and I’m sure she’d been working on her feet quite a few hours, and she didn’t seem particularly happy, but she had an actual bodybuilder body. I mean, you obviously could tell that her body was trained to precision. I mean, not just natural beauty, she was really well-defined, and I said, well, what is prosperity to you? And of course, she started talking about health, and I said, well, how do

[03:38] you get to be that healthy? Well, I work out five hours every single day, and I said, well, what else is it that you could be doing and still have that five hours? I mean, the job that you have may not be the exact one that you want, but it’s allowing you to get that priority, which is to have a competition body worth, and I can imagine it takes every bit of five hours a day. Amazing. Yeah, so did she respond to that? Did she see the value that she was having in her life by enabling herself to make a choice, making the choice, the choice was to work out five hours at the gym to have that particular approach and strength and look, et cetera. Do you think you helped her come around to see the value of that?

[04:30] I think so a lot, because I mean, it was a relatively nice place. I’m sure the tips were pretty good and her schedule is probably flexible. And five years from now, she may want to think more towards motherhood, which is not going to go with the five hours in the gym and everything anyway. So right now it’s allowing her to keep this priority. And as her priorities change, she can still maintain prosperity, even though the definition of it may change. Absolutely. I think that’s a really important point is that not only is the definition up to you, each individual person can define their own definition of prosperity, but that changes as our lives change, as things adjust, as we get clearer on what’s important to us.

[05:17] And sometimes as we get fuzzy and pulled away from what’s important to us, because that happens, too. I know that’s happened to me. And as we zigzag through life, sometimes on course, sometimes not. It’s important to keep the definition of prosperity in front of us to be clear on our values and to make sure that our values are being supported by the work that we do, the people that we hang out with, the things that we spend our time on and to remember every single moment, it is a choice. And I’m guilty of this, too. I remember being in a stressful situation one time and just looking at my husband and saying, we don’t have a choice, but frankly, we did. And even if all the choice was was a mental choice, you know, let’s say we

[06:10] had to do something physical, like you, you had a storm and you had to completely clean up the basement. They got two feet of water in it. Okay. So, yes, you have a choice about how you are being during that cleanup. I mean, are you being grateful that the rest of the house didn’t cave in? Or are you totally frustrated and mad that you have to do the job? And we could also admit that we have a choice. We could choose to pay somebody to come clean out the basement with two feet of water. Or we could choose not to. And some people would say, oh, I don’t have the money. I don’t have that choice. You still have a choice about how you respond or react to the situation at hand, and that is where the control is.

[06:58] And that is what prosperity is about. So that’s question number one. We’d like your response on is what is prosperity to you? And then question number two is, do you have prosperity today? I mean, now we first, first we define what it is. And now I guess it’s pretty much a yes or no answer at this point. And then next question is, what are the steps would it take to get you to your definition of prosperity? I love it. So yes, I will answer with an unequivocal yes. And it is because of how I’ve defined prosperity. So if you asked me, well, do you have enough money to never work again? No, absolutely not. But do I have prosperity? Yes, absolutely. So because of how I’ve defined it and that enables me to enjoy my life today.

[07:57] And as listeners on our podcast, no, the idea of having enough money to never work again, to me, that’s not a goal and that’s not something that’s important to me. I love my work. I want to work forever and ever and ever. And yet I also want to be able to take time off and control my schedule and the types of things that I do, et cetera. So in this third question and just restated again, so I make sure I’m answering it directly. And it is, if you don’t have it, what would it take to get it? Fabulous. So that’s still a valuable question to answer, even though I said yes to number two, which was, do you have prosperity? So understanding what it takes to get it is equally important because we always

[08:46] want to be working on it all the time. And I don’t think that prosperity is a finite game with an end. It’s an infinite game. It’s one that we’re playing all the time. And I want to give kudos to our additional prosperity economics movement leader, Patrick Donahoe, because in his presentation recently, he made a big deal about the infinite game versus the finite game. And within our infinite game that we’re going to go on and play for the rest of our lives, we want to continue to build prosperity. Now, inside that is maybe a finite game of having a certain financial goal that we’re working towards. So like one of my financial goals right now. Is to continue to work towards paying off all of my life insurance loans.

[09:40] A lot of our life insurance loans are for investments. And yet at the same time, I still want those loans paid off because when I get them paid off, then the income from the investments can be used for other things rather than right now, of course, it’s helping pay those loans back the interest to the insurance company. And then, of course, the principal back in so that those cash values are completely available again. The cash values have been whole all along the way, but they are certainly not available if they’re collateralized elsewhere. So that’s a finite financial goal. And yet the larger picture is still prosperous. The larger picture is still, yes, we have prosperity. And yet that larger picture is something that I work on every day.

[10:32] OK, maybe not literally every day, but at least every week, I’m conscious of financial transactions that are going on and steps that are being taken. And so all the time we want to continue to build financial prosperity while at the same time, we have mental prosperity. It’s amazing. I think that I really actually, when I thought of these questions, I, you know, obviously there’s questions we’ve used before. I knew that it was important, but I just read an article today that Chick-fil-A has four times the net earnings of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Holy cow. That’s a big number. If you think about it, that’s they make up four times more money and they have a third of the stores and they’re closed on Sundays for over six days a week.

[11:33] Yes, because that’s their value system. And they accredited this whole thing is that every manager knows every person on their team’s dream so that he is helping them daily to position themselves towards maybe working their way out of the food industry. They said they spend as much time, but there’s still management, the management, the numbers, whatever it is that would be a teaching experience that they can try to enhance the person towards what that person’s dream is. And it’s the fact that that’s what they credit the profit to is that somebody cared enough to ask them what their dream was and how they could help each other get it. Oh, that is super cool. Maybe you can provide a link to that article on the show notes for this

[12:28] podcast, because there’s so much value there and something else that I would like to share as we’re wrapping up here on this subject is that there’s a new book that the prosperity economics movement has put out and it’s called eight perspectives on prosperity economics. And it’s actually eight financial advisors that have written in their own perspective on prosperity and then of course on prosperity economics. I wrote the introduction, the subtitle of the book is turning financial advice on its head to help you and your family prosper now and in the future. So again, that’s eight perspectives on prosperity economics. And we actually haven’t even done the book launch on it yet. So this is a sneak peek for our podcast listeners only.

[13:17] And the book is available on Amazon and there will be an audio book. It’s not there yet. I still need to work on that and it’s on my list. But if you want to grab a sneak peek at the book, it’s eight perspectives on prosperity economics. Super. And again, with, we would like to have your story to be on our podcast. What’s the best way for them to get that to us is hello at partners. Number four, prosperity.com. That’s a special email that we have for our podcast listeners. We’d love to have your answers to the questions that Todd asked and any other additional story or any questions that you have. So that’s hello at partners. Number four, prosperity.com. Super. Well, this is no BS, funny guy.

[14:05] Todd Strobel special thanks to Kim Butler and thanks to our listeners. See y’all again real soon. 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. property. Bicicleta. It is what allows us to get where we want. It is in Shopify that we manage our business. Start your free evaluation at Shopify.com.