Automate Things In Your Life – Episode 297

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[00:01] Hello, listeners and welcome to another episode of the Prosperity Podcast. With technology coming at the fastest rate we’ve ever seen, we’re going to be talking about how we can automate things in our life to make it more fulfilling, to make it easier, and to make it more prosperous. Kim, are you there with me? Absolutely. I’m so excited to talk about this. This is a good one. And I’ll tell you why. Because we both just came off of learning from Peter Diamandis, who, as we’ve talked about many times, is one of the most innovative thinkers in the world. And the new realm that we’re working into is, I think now we feel pretty cool when we can talk to a smart device and all of a sudden a couple of days later

[00:49] something shows up at our door. We’re just scratching the surface of where automation is going to be. So I’m going to turn the mic to you for a second. For you to share with us some automations, I’m going to share a few. And then we’re going to talk about one of the best automation pieces out there that’s actually been around for a long time and some reason media and everyone else has it tagged wrong. So let’s go for it. Awesome. Totally excited to share some of the things that I do. And I don’t consider myself super technologically oriented. And so I think just admitting that to yourself is helpful. So when I’m looking to automate something, I will turn to my kids or you might turn to your grandkids to get help with this. There is an idea that’s out there

[01:39] in the marketplace these days called reverse mentorship. And it’s literally where the younger crowd is mentoring the older crowd because of their capability with technology. So the one that I’m going to share I actually saw information about on the Super Bowl ads and I’m not a huge football fan but I was certainly conscious of what some of the ads were. And it’s Expensify this. So Expensify is an automated tool to help you track your expenses and create records for getting your taxes done more in a more automated fashion. And I have a bookkeeper and I’m still totally excited about this. And there’s so much about our expenses that’s happening via email these days. The Expensify this app just enables you to collect that information, categorize it, makes it a piece of cake

[02:38] to link it into QuickBooks and potentially send an expense report if you’re the kind of employee that has to send expense reports in or like I said prepare for taxes which is something on all of our minds these days. And January, February, early in the year a great time to start something like this so that you’re even more prepared so that your taxes can be even more automated next year. Now of course if you’re W-2 employee maybe this isn’t as important and yet all of us should have some sense of our expenses. I’m not a big believer in budgeting but I am a big believer in keeping an eye on things as it relates to what we’re doing expense-wise. So that’s my first tip is ExpensifyThis.com or the app Expensify. Oh I like that I didn’t know about it so I’ve got

[03:27] that written down as a resource. Well I have one to share with our audience and it is called the Idea Capture Machine. I know it sounds really cool doesn’t it? Yeah. It’s one of those things. All those things. What is that? So it works like this. We as humans process information and we all think in various ways. So meaning some of us can think in the car and we write down notes you know at a stoplight or we may be walking and we give an audio note or however that happens but at different times of the day we come up with ideas but the problem is oftentimes those ideas don’t get momentum because they don’t get processed. So what I’ve done is I’ve set up an idea capture machine and I had a mentor teach

[04:23] me how to do this and so on my phone now anytime that I have a really good idea or even an idea something I want to follow up on I push one single button and it says audio note and I push that button I talk into it now it takes that idea it moves it into a task management system and then it also goes through and transcribes it so now I can see it it’s in a to-do list and I can now easily assign it to someone or assign it to myself so I’m never losing track of the things that I have to do or the ideas that I have. Hint that’s how a lot of these podcasts happen because I’ll be going along and I’ll say oh this would be a great podcast boom I take a note and now it gets processed and I can easily go to it now for us as you know listeners of this podcast for any of you

[05:18] if you’re saying oh I really need to become better with my finances I should read Ken’s latest book well it’s kind of hard to think of it in the moment and then forget it and then come back to it so by creating an idea capture machine you’ll automatically find ways to get reminders and I can even set up reminders so that when I get to my house in the proximity it sends me alerts so it’s pretty cool I can happily send some of those resources in the show notes as well Kim. Oh that would be great yes because people want to collect them and one of the coolest things about podcasts is our ability to be on the go and listening but then we might struggle actually taking action I think I had um Alexa

[06:04] talking with me in the back here isn’t that fitting um yes yes but the one thing that we wanted to cover is this as as we get enthralled with technology sometimes we have to look all the way back to what the traditional technology pieces are in the most simplistic ways you know for example compound interest once you understand compound interest wow like you really have a new insight on finance well the best savings vehicle in the world happens to be something that’s very old but very true and tested and works all the time and Kim what is that? Well it is the most boring yet effective product that I know and it’s called whole life insurance and it will enable you to automate your savings and here I’m using savings as

[07:02] a verb as in the act of saving money and because we pay our bills if your life insurance premium and then there’s a thing called paid up additions which is a way to enhance this particular type of savings vehicle so if you have your premium and your paid up addition show up as a bill or automatically debit out of your checking account you will do a better job saving there’s no way that my family would have done as good a job saving as we would have over the years if we didn’t have a whole life insurance premium to pay every single month on numerous policies sometimes annually so just like all things that we want good results in you want to automate and you want to build habits and saving money is a habit and paying bills is a habit and

[07:57] working out so that you have good physical capability is a habit and getting up every morning and feeding your mind with inspiring things is a habit and if we can automate as many of these habits as possible then we will get better lives and there’s so many places that you can turn to for help in automating your life and so if you’re a business owner or even if you’re not hiring somebody to do some of the things that you maybe are not as good at or that you don’t like to do is not something to be looked down on in fact neither are the people that we hire to do them you know i think in the old days if you hired somebody it was like oh you’re up here and they’re down there that’s not accurate anymore everybody’s on a level

[08:48] playing field in terms of using their skills to move life forward and the very thing that you hate somebody else may absolutely love and so you can automate a lot of your life by getting help to get things done and even if you are an employee there are maybe some things in your personal life that you could automate by getting help to get things done maybe the automation is a person maybe the automation is a piece of technology or maybe the automation is a service that you pay for or what have you but if you want good results you want to automate things so that they just happen all the time and this is what whole life insurance does it automates your savings and then it automates the growth of your emergency slash opportunity

[09:37] fund because whole life insurance companies so these are typically called mutual life insurance companies pay a dividend pretty much every single year now it’s not guaranteed that they’re going to pay a dividend but what is guaranteed is that your cash value is going to grow by a guaranteed dollar figure even if they don’t pay a dividend now most of them have paid a dividend every single year well over 100 years and as you indicated Spencer there’s just so much misinformation out there in the marketplace about this product because a lot of people think that the dividends that the life insurance companies pay are affected by things like the 2008 recession or previous aspects in our economy’s dips that would have caused a life insurance company to not pay a dividend

[10:32] that’s not accurate the life insurance company’s ability to pay a dividend is first because of their business model and so think about their business model collect money wait pay a death claim collect money wait pay a death claim over and over and over and over and over for literally hundreds of years and so that is their first reason that they have the ability to pay dividends now of course they do invest some of this money but that’s their second reason for their ability to pay dividends and so mutual life insurance companies are typically not impacted by recessions like 08 and the myriad of previous you know all the way back through recessions depressions world wars every financial calamity that you can think of

[11:28] at least over the last period of time about 100 years some of them are 150 180 years old but since research and keeping records on things like this has begun they’ve paid dividends now what if they don’t let’s just address that what if they don’t pay a dividend your cash value still grows by a guaranteed dollar figure not an interest rate so why is that important if you don’t have any money in your account you don’t really care what the interest rate is but if you know that you have a guaranteed dollar figure and you know that that money is going to grow by a guaranteed dollar figure the next year and the next year and the next year and that each year it grows a new floor is set that can never go back down

[12:14] then there’s so much confidence that can be built for your savings for your liquid money the dollars that are your emergency slash opportunity fund which should not be subject to risk so this is a fabulous and very easy place to automate some of our personal financial lives very well said you know that’s exactly how it should be and i think for a few of our listeners if you still have questions on exactly how to set it up or what it’s going to look like for your unique situation the best thing to do would be to send an email to kem at hello at partners for prosperity.com and there are many books that you’ve written sometimes it’s just nice to send a question about the unique situation wouldn’t you agree

[13:03] absolutely and i’ll admit i love email i think it’s the most fabulous tool to be able to help people with because you can write down your question you can get an answer and then you can learn because it’s not a voice conversation that you lose track of or anything else and i am delighted to help people on email i’m usually fairly quick to answer we have a great team that helps me out sometimes as well and you can get as specific as possible and just as we’re wrapping up today i want to share that i think one of the biggest questions that i get is am i too old to start a life insurance policy and in the last three days my husband and i just did what we call truth training for financial advisors where we analyzed some policies that

[13:51] were purchased by people in their 70s and those policies cash value was growing by about three and a half percent without taxes every single year and so and that’s after the cost of the death benefit after the cost of commission to the agent and after the cost of running these mutual companies so it’s not too late especially if you’re healthy and if you aren’t healthy then you can actually buy life insurance on children and grandchildren not typically nieces and nephews just so people will know but as you said spencer there’s lots of information out there the best place to start is our book live your life insurance it’s available on audio and like you said if you don’t want to read a book or don’t want to listen to a book

[14:38] and you just have a simple question please email me hello at partners number four prosperity.com i am more than happy to help thank you so much kim and we’ll make sure to put a link to that email address inside of the show notes as well fabulous 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