Stop Planning and Start Preparing – Episode 457

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[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Prosperity thinkers, welcome to the podcast. Depending on when you’re listening to this episode, if it’s now, when this was first released, you are gearing up for tax season and if you’re a business owner, you know what, you deal with this all the time, so it doesn’t matter. But one of the most well-known tax professionals out there is Tom Wilwright. Can you set the stage with how you know Tom and your relationship? And then I’m going to fire in some of those questions. I’ve known Tom for about 30 years, I’m guessing. I met him in Phoenix, Arizona, when he and I were put together by a friend. Don’t remember who might have it in my database. Can’t remember. And he was looking at buying a CPA firm at the time whose owner I knew.

[00:51] And so he was curious about what I knew about the firm. We had a great discussion. And then as he is now known and the history has shown, the involvement with Robert Kiyosaki was also something that we shared jointly in those early days of the Rich Dad Poor Dad brand. And Tom is a joy and I’m honored to work with him and it’s so amazing to watch what he’s created with his Wealthability brand and he’s doing a lot of the work that my husband and I are doing where he has his own practice that he’s helping tax clients with, but then he’s also an advisor to other CPA advisors, just like Todd and I are advisor to other life insurance agent slash advisors. So it’s been fun to watch Tom grow his organization and the work that

[01:44] he’s doing in the sort of dual space, if you will. Yeah, that’s interesting. Well, we’ll notice it’s a long-term relationship and you know, that momentum falls in line with your principles of starting small and starting slow and then having things grow. The piece that we’re going to talk about right now in this episode is a part of your forward from the book, Busting Financial Planning Lies. And are you cool if I read a short little paragraph? Absolutely. Okay. So Tom says, and at a deeper level, you will discover the value of preparation over planning, protection over risk tolerance. Creation over consumption and prosperity, mindedness over scarcity thinking. But most important, you will learn that building sustainable wealth

[02:35] always begins with the good, the bad, and the ugly, knowing the whole truth about your money. So he packed a lot in and there’s a whole lot. There’s a couple of things that I wanted to touch on in that paragraph that I think will be really helpful for us, which is the value of preparation over planning. Can you talk about that and why that is different the way that you do work versus other people? Absolutely. So I was trained as a financial planner and financial planners try to plan things and planning is generally based on a whole bunch of assumptions, worse, it’s trying to figure out where you want to be in the future and then work backwards to today to try to figure out how you’re going to get there.

[03:29] And there might be a little value in that for dinner tonight, but frankly, none of us are guaranteed tomorrow, none of us are guaranteed anything in the future. And so I found over time that this act of planning was not as valuable as a lot of people thought that it was. And you got to do something. So what is it that you do instead? And that is that you prepare and so prepare, and you could argue that these are the same things. We could absolutely also get into a political slash economic discussion about the countries in our world that have tried to quote plan. But leaving all of that aside, let’s just identify that preparing is first of all, taking a look at what you can do today and doing

[04:17] something about it, and second of all, making sure that the aspects of your life that are uncertain things like, are you going to wake up tomorrow are as prepared for as possible so that then you can live your life today and fully enjoy it and not have to be worrying about these ancillary things that may or may not happen right away. And so that’s what preparation does for us is it takes all the areas of uncertainty, tries to make them as certain as possible, and then crosses them off the list and moves forward. OK, so the question is this because of times of uncertainty now. And I don’t personally, I don’t feel it’s necessarily totally out of whack, but it’s not, you know, roaring when things were

[05:08] just humming along with this, you know, less certainty now. There’s this teeter totter that we have, and I’m not going to use the word balance because I simply don’t believe that. I don’t, maybe others do. But on the preparation side, we can go deep and we can say, OK, I now have a vault full of gold and silver and I’ve got five years worth of food and I have a bunker. And on the other side, you could say, I’m going to see where the wind carries me tomorrow. Kim, what does that look like for the prosperity minded people that you work with? Well, I like your comment around the idea of balance and how pretty impossible that is. I think sometimes the term blended is more helpful, like a blended life, blended between personal business,

[05:57] blended between protection and preparation and just letting the wind take you where it goes. So I think it also matters whether you’re single or not. I have a lot of single clients that absolutely, you got a backpack and some water and you can pretty much live wherever. Great. If that works for you, that’s beautiful. And then I have others that have families and businesses that they’re responsible for. So there’s no way that they could let the wind blow with them that much. And so I think it’s super important for each family. And it is very important that if there is a spouse there, that there is conversation about this, each family needs to decide what protection and preparation looks like for them so that they

[06:44] can live their lives fully on the days at hand. And so if preparation and protection for you means five years of food, then make that happen. If for you, it just means some water and, you know, a 30 day supply of food, then great, make that happen. Decide what it is for you and make it happen. And so that I think is the best way for people to go about it. And you can read what others do. You can take courses, you can look at lists, but in the end, you’ve got to decide for you. And the same is true on the monetary side. You know, for some people an emergency fund is $10,000. For Oprah Winfrey, she has publicly stated it’s $7 million. So again, because she has responsibilities, businesses, right?

[07:37] That she has to support also. So decide what it is for you and your family and then make that happen. And then cross it off your list and live for today, because there’s no point in being overtly scarcity minded such to a degree that it’s affecting your day-to-day life. Yeah, your, uh, your mention of the, the preparedness and the clarity and then getting it off the list. I’m going to, I’m going to say that I’m frustrated with myself with one thing that you said. And it’s not even what you said is this. So right now I’m teaching my son how to drive. He’s got his learner’s permit. Uh, for any parents out there that has gone through that, God bless you, cause I’m learning right now. It’s great, but there was an important lesson that was taught last week.

[08:32] Cause he’s asking me a lot of very specific questions. Like, Hey, in a school zone, what I do here? Oh, this, and he’s wanting to know the black and white and all the situations. And I had to zoom out and say, son, let’s focus on the principal. That’s getting us from point A to point B safely. And when we are in life, it’s something that we want, especially around the preparedness. We would want someone to say, Hey, you really need that month of water storage and that should be, you know, a hundred gallons. And then you should have this fuel here and you should have this amount of assets. But really it has to be pulled back of, let’s go from, uh, a point of uncertainty, just like my point day to a point B, which is the point of certainty.

[09:22] That’s not something that most people think and act like Kim. I applaud you for that. Thank you. Yes. It’s just come with experience and the coolest thing about helping people their finances in all 50 States for as long as I have is I’ve gotten the wisdom. Not just that I’ve gained myself, but of all these families all over the country and what they do in times of both certainty and uncertainty. And so you distill that down and then I believe it’s part of my responsibility to share it back out again. So I’m glad you’re benefiting. Yes. So taking the second part of Tom’s comment leads. So we’ve already established this piece of preparing versus planning. So that’s good. And we’ve made that distinction between the two.

[10:08] The next is Tom that says, he says, learn that building sustainable wealth always begins with the good, the bad, and the ugly. He used the term sustainable wealth for a reason and good, bad, and ugly. Can you dive into that a little bit more? Absolutely. So sustainable wealth is having wealth that will sustain your family, sustain you both mentally and in times of emergency and opportunity. And so there are so many things out there today that are awesome, but potentially not sustainable. And that’s that uncertainty spot. So great. Do some of that and use the certain assets that will sustain and will be there and have guarantees that are boring and yet also effective. So I think that again, it’s a time preference thing.

[11:05] So the long-term things are sustainable, those that are short-term or not, and it’s totally okay to have both, but make sure you have both. Okay. So that’s the sustainable part. As it relates to the good, bad, and ugly, one of my most favorite things to do is to talk about here’s where this can go wrong. So every product has ugliness to it. Every product has good and bad to it. There is no one perfect financial product or no one perfect any product. Right? You could say, oh, you need tons of water. Yes. And you need meat. So, oh, you need meat. Yes. And you need water. Oh, you need vegetables. You know, like nothing’s perfect. Right? We have to have more than just one thing. And in our financial world, it’s no different.

[11:51] And yet as long as you’re clear on the good, the bad, and the ugly for each product and each strategy. So I believe that products are things that you buy and then strategies are the things that you do with the products that you buy. And so for each product, you have good, bad, and ugly for each strategy of good, bad, and ugly. Just get clear on what those things are. And so I always help people understand here’s where it can go wrong. Here’s the downside. Here’s the bad. And here’s the ugly. In addition to here is the good. And I think not all salespeople are confident enough in their work to be able to do that. And yet, you know, clients are smart. They know it’s not a hundred percent deal.

[12:32] Not one thing is going to solve all issues. So let’s get clear on what those good, bad, and ugly things are. And then we can make decisions and go forward with confidence. Ooh, I like that. Uh, and one thing that I’m thinking about with this is that we’re teaching principles right now. So this can be used universally across whatever part of your life. I’m going to dive into another related piece, which is inside of your network. We have another podcast. It’s actually called Wealth Renegade. And the cool thing about this podcast, you know, Kim’s not going to do the self-promotion, but I’m going to it’s her son, Robbie. And they’re talking about, you know, their generation of wealth. They’re the generation Z, the younger, and they’re going through the trenches

[13:18] right now in some real estate deals. So if you can maybe list out some of the uncertainties that they’re facing, and then maybe some of the certainties that they’ve gained or that they will gain soon, I think that’d be a good wrap of connecting these two unconnected things together. Absolutely. Well, and Tom Wilwright helps with real estate so much. Robbie has really enjoyed learning from him as well. And real estate and life insurance have so much in common. And so Robbie and Ben and Emma have all, so those are the two and sometimes three people on that podcast. And sometimes I join in as well. They have used life insurance to support, build, create their real estate structure. And it started out with residential homes and then has amped up

[14:13] into investment properties as well. And it’s so fun to watch from afar and listen and learn as they go through the various aspects of real estate that are the good, the bad, and the ugly, right? Like we said earlier, the products that we have out in the landscape all have good, bad, and ugly with them. And so these kids, if you will, in that next generation are doing a great job of learning along the way. Looking at the experience as a whole bunch of learning, which is awesome. Somebody said the other day, there’s no such thing as failure. You started something, you learned. Like that’s it. And that’s what these kids are doing and they’re sharing their wisdom along the way. And it’s really fun for me to see the life insurance leveraged helps

[15:01] the real estate, which then leveraged helps the life insurance, which then helps the real estate. And they are doing a good job of building that sustainable wealth because they are using those two products and the interplay between them to get the best of all worlds. It’s that classic one plus one equals 11 that I like to share. So, you know, people say one plus one equals two. That’s the math. One plus one can equals three. When you add in like the human element or relationships or whatever. Well, when you multiply that up and really get dollars doing a whole bunch of jobs and dollars moving throughout those systems between the life insurance and the real estate and back and forth and back and forth,

[15:47] you’re totally getting the multiplier impact of one plus one equals 11. And so they’re just sharing that experience along the way as they go. And I think they’re doing a great job of it and super fun. And it’s totally renegade space. Yes, it is. You know, it’s so neat to see this happen. You’re sharing principles here in this episode. We actually stepped through a lot of things. I’m kind of creating my own table of contents as we started out with the, this little quote from Tom Wheelwright and Tom’s obviously in the financial space talking about, you know, taxes and how we’re structuring and doing things. And we’ve listed out, okay, we’re now, we’re going to focus on preparing instead of planning.

[16:34] Okay. That’s a principle we can hold onto. Another thing we’re going to focus on things that will sustain us. And now you just brought in this ability to multiply, meaning as we become our own banks, we can now have the money from that hard work that we did go and apply and work as its own team, its own entity for us. And you’ve shared principles. These weren’t tactics that are going to change tomorrow or with the next presidency or whatever it is. Yes. Foundational principles that stand the test of time. It’s absolutely an honor to be involved in those types of things because we’re all in this for the long run. And so it’s nice to know that you have absolutely foundational items that have been there for centuries and we’ll be there for more

[17:30] centuries in the future. Oh, I love it. So good. We’re going to put a link to the wealth renegade podcast. So for any of you listeners that are looking to hear, you know, stories from the trenches, you’re going to be able to listen to it on Apple, Spotify, or any of your favorite podcast players. And we do want to thank you for listening to this podcast, as you can see timeless principles that you can apply to anything in your life. So thank you for being a loyal listener with us on this show. 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.