Powerful Principles of Prosperity – Episode 002

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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 hosts, best-selling author Kim D.H. Butler and No BS Money Guy, Todd Strobel. Hey everybody, welcome to another edition of the Prosperity Podcast. This is No BS Money Guy Todd Strobel with our special guest, best-selling financial author Kim Butler. We’re going to pick up where we left off on the last show, and we were talking about the seven principles of prosperity, and again, if you don’t have a copy of the first one, we covered the first three principles on Prosperity Podcast. Go back and pick up that one, or certainly you can jump in here at number four and

[00:47] you won’t miss a thing and you can go back after we finish. Kim, if you would, just kind of go over those first three real quick and then tell us about number four. Of course, and I want to say too how these principles came to be because we developed these in their current form, oh gosh, maybe 10 years ago or so, but they literally have existed potentially even since the biblical age. The reason that I say that is that the book, The Richest Man to Babylon, if you read that book by George Klassen, C-L-A-S-O-N, I think, E-N maybe, The Richest Man to Babylon book, if you have the seven principles of prosperity as we espouse them and you read through that book, you’re going to pick them up. And they exist in many other forms.

[01:34] If you read Robert Kiyosaki’s material, they’re in there. If you read Tom Wheelwright’s material, they’re in there. Again, not maybe in our exact language with our exact seven words, but these are basic economic principles. And when I use that word economic, I mean your personal dollars. These are basic economic principles that affect your wallet, your family’s money. But they also work and exist in the worldwide arena of finance, corporate finance, personal finance, government finance, all areas of finance or economic, and the reason that I use the term economic around them instead of just finance is because economic indicates a much bigger environment. And that’s how our finances work. Our finances are not just the dollars in our checkbook or the money in our IRA.

[02:24] Our finances exist inside our own personal economy, which of course exists inside the US economy, which of course exists inside the worldwide economy. And so when we look at these seven principles of prosperity, we need to be thinking in very big terms and they give us a series of thought that enable us to then do things with our money. And so the very first one is think and to make sure that you’re thinking from a prosperous mindset. The second one is CSEE to make sure you’re seeing the big picture of your family’s personal economy, rather than just the one micro environment that you’re looking at at that particular time. The third one is measure. And by this, we don’t mean the typical financial planning job of

[03:12] measuring how close you are to retirement or how much money you’re going to need for education. We mean measuring your opportunity cost and reducing that opportunity cost. And that may not be familiar language to you, although it is taught in every economic class in this country, but opportunity cost does apply to your personal finances. And if you don’t know how it applies to your personal finances, then please reach out to us on ProsperityPodcast.com on our website, partnersforprosperity.com. We work with clients in all 50 states. We’d be delighted to give you a quick example of how to measure and then reduce or recover opportunity costs so that you could apply that idea to your personal finances.

[03:57] So that brings us current Todd. Shall we head into the rest or you want to say anything else? I just want to mention that that’s partners spelled out the number four and then partners, our partners and the number four Prosperity.com. So it’s, it’s the number four in the middle there. And there’s some great free materials that are available for you on that website that you can go and download to get more information on what we’re talking about today and go ahead with number four. Wonderful. Well, four is flow F L O W. And what we mean by this is cash flow. Now it may have some spiritual or inspirational terminology to go along with it, and that’s perfectly acceptable, but our focus on it today is around cash flow.

[04:44] And that may seem again, like an obvious one from a personal financial environment, but we’re focusing on cash flow right off the bat. This is not something to focus on when you’re just quote, getting ready to retire and we’ll talk on another podcast about how we absolutely detest the word retirement because it means to take out a service. Cash flow should start from the day you start to save money. Literally when you are right out of college or right out of high school and you’re starting to work in the working world and earn money and save money, you want to be identifying ways to get your cash to flow. It’s obviously flowing away from you, but you also need to have it flowing to you because in our opinion, the true measure of

[05:29] prosperity is cash flow, not net worth. Got it. And I will challenge all of you who are listening to think of this one step farther is so many people think that money ends by putting it in a retirement account, money ends by putting it in a savings account. When that money goes into those vehicles, you may not be participating in the rewards of that flow, but the banks and the financial institutions that are holding your money are not really holding that money, they’re using that money, they’re leveraging that money and that money is out there hopefully making money with additional money, not necessarily all the time, but that’s what’s happening at the banking level. The question that I have to ask people is, is how much of that

[06:24] are you participating in? If you have, you know, a lot of our clients have 20, 50, a hundred thousand dollars sitting in a savings account, their buying power on that money is going to be less 12 months from now than it is today. While that bank has leveraged that money and made profit for themselves with it, we’re not real happy about that, are we? Absolutely not. It is amazing how disconnected people get from cashflow of money. And that’s something that we aim to help you turn back around. And there’s lots of sources on the website to get into that further. And again, if you have questions, please reach out to us. We’re happy to help with it. Super. Well, let’s hit number five. Number five is control.

[07:07] So we want you to have control of your money, not us, not the government, not your employer, not the financial institutions, the insurance companies, the banks, the brokerage houses out there. All of those various, and I’ll just use the word institutions want to control your money, but we want you to control your money. You know, the old saying about those with the gold make the rules. When you control your money, you get to make the rules. And so many times we relinquish that control to the financial institutions or our employer, the government or what have you. And so we have been, I guess, really brainwashed in our society. And this is largely contributed to, by the media to think that we can hand

[07:52] over the control of our dollars to other people and that they will treat them well and help them grow for us. And we absolutely disagree with that. We don’t want to control your money. We want you to control your money. And there are a variety of strategies that we use to put the control of your money back into your hands, and that still enables you to get help investing those dollars, but the control is still on your side of the table. So again, if you have questions about that, please read our material. And if you have further questions, reach out to us. We’d be happy to develop some strategies for you where the controls back on your side of the table. Sometimes it’s by purchasing a different product, but sometimes it’s simply as

[08:35] easy as checking a box on an existing product that you already own in order to put the control back on your side of the table. Super. One thing I can promise you is that no one will ever care more about your money than you do. What’s number six. That is so true. Number six is move. And this is an interesting one. And it relates closely to principle number seven, but we’ll stay on six for a moment and by move, we mean that your dollars need to be moving through your personal economy and that that action will actually accelerate prosperity. And when your dollars are not moving through your personal economy, I’ll give an example here in a minute, then that, that lack of action actually slows the dollars down.

[09:30] So the typical financial advisor is going to say, put your money into, in other words, to not through a retirement plan or an education plan or a life insurance plan, whatever it is that they’re talking about. And when you do that, you are basically then going to just accumulate the money in that particular product. And again, accumulation slows money down. Whereas movement of money accelerates prosperity. So what we recommend, and again, this is a strategy change, not a product change, a strategy, something that you do a product is something that you buy. We recommend that you run the money through particular products where you’re literally putting it in one side, taking it out the other and going and

[10:13] doing something else with it. Now, again, that’s a strategy and it is operated with different ways via the different products that are out there, but the movement of money or the velocity of money or getting your dollars through assets instead of two assets is what’s going to build prosperity quicker, more effectively and with less risk than just putting your dollars to products. Super. And again, some of you, this may seem a little bit confusing. And I think when, when we go through the examples on the website and you dig into this a little bit farther, it will make much more sense. But just kind of accept the principle as something to think about for now. And I think also principle number seven helps with that as well.

[10:57] It does. And they, as I said, are very closely tied because when you move money, principle number six, then you get to multiply money, which is principle number seven and multiplying money means that $1 because it is moving through the products can do multiple jobs. And so what I mean by that is that you might have a dollar that both educates a child and contributes to your financial independence in your later years, what many would call retirement again, a word that we don’t like, but if you can get your dollars to both educate your children and provide financial independence, then it has done two jobs. If you can get your dollars to both provide for some life insurance and finance a car or a real estate property for investing, then you get

[11:50] your dollars to do lots of jobs. And there are some products out there. Real estate is a great example of one that we work with very closely for our clients. I’m talking about individually owning investment real estate where the product itself automatically does five or six jobs. And then there’s other products out there that really needs strategy applied to them. Again, products are what you buy strategies or what you do. And other products really need strategy applied in order to get that multiplier effect, that impact of $1 doing lots and lots of jobs. But again, when we get our dollars to move through the asset, then the multiplier effect comes very naturally. And so these two principles are very tied together.

[12:32] And I love the fact that we have seven principles because seven really indicates completeness. And again, these are out there in the marketplace in lots of different places. We didn’t invent them. We just put them on a piece of paper with seven single words that you can follow individually, think, see, measure, flow, control, move, multiply, so that they’re in theory, easy to remember. Because as I’ve indicated in another podcast, we will talk about using these seven principles as an opportunity filter. We’ll take one particular investment and work through the seven principles of prosperity, using them as an opportunity filter about that particular investment to see if it’s really something that we should do.

[13:15] And it enables us to be very holistic in our work for you as the client, the user of these principles, to be very transparent and clear on what’s going on with each of your investments. And not that every investment is going to meet each of the seven principles, but typically my rule of thumb is if we can get five out of the seven, then we’re doing pretty good. And it’s really interesting to see on the alternative side. If you take something like a 401k plan as an example, through the seven principles, you can only get one or two of them. So it becomes pretty clear. If you agree with the seven principles of prosperity, as we’ve put them forth, then it makes it much easier to make financial decisions.

[13:59] Super. And just to kind of give you an example, I had an opportunity to talk to a couple of clients this week. And the first client that I talked to had a W-2 job and had a 15 year mortgage, was making extra payments on the mortgage, had three children and had decided that they could only afford for one kid to go to college. So they were funding a 529 educational plan for one child. I guess they picked whichever one they felt was the smartest one. Don’t know exactly how that worked. Um, but I mean, things were tight for that client. And by the time they max funded their 401k and made their mortgage payments and put the money for the one kid to go to college, pretty much life was not fun for them.

[14:41] The second client that I talked to, which was actually an annual review from one of our existing clients, um, had set up a C Corp was self employed, was paying his children a W-2 or a 10 99, sorry, wage up to the maximum amount that they could receive each year. That money was then being transferred into a overfunded whole life insurance policy that was earning about four or four to 5%. And then the cash value of that life insurance policy was invested in another investment that was paying about eight or 9%. So they had, you know, all of their children were building a financial education. They had a much lower house payment. They had a much higher quality of life. And what was so funny is, is that when we actually looked at the

[15:27] number, the first person who was struggling had twice the adjusted gross income of the person who is accomplishing everything because of the way that they changed their mindset and were following the principles versus trying to fight them. I mean, it’s almost like fighting gravity versus going along with it. Absolutely. It’s a great analogy. And as we know, gravity works regardless. And so these seven principles of prosperity work regardless too. And it’s been a joy to cover these. I hope it’s been helpful to you. Again, we really encourage you to reach out to us through the prosperity podcast website and, or our company’s website partners, number four prosperity.com download the prosperity accelerator pack, follow the series of emails.

[16:13] Of course, you’re welcome to opt out at any time. If you don’t like the information, but these seven principles work, they’ve been proven to work over literally thousands of years. And it’s an absolute joy to be able to help clients with them. Thank you so much. Again, that was bestselling author, Kim Butler. This is no BS money guy, Todd Strobel, and we really appreciate you listening to prosperity podcast. Take care of everybody. 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.