The Prosperity Economics Movement – What is it & Where is it Going? – Episode 124

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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 to another edition of the Prosperity Podcast. This is No BS Money Guy, Todd Strobel. Once again, we have my co-host and the president of Partners for Prosperity, Kim Butler, with us. And she’s going to be talking today about a nonprofit movement that she has started and is sort of the spokesperson and head of today. And that’s the prosperity economics movement. So welcome, Kim. Can’t wait to hear more. Well, spokesperson, now that’s a title I can get my arms around because that is

[00:50] something that I love to do is to talk and share the wisdom that is behind this prosperity economics movement. So, yes, we, myself and Todd Langford, the other Todd, can be identified as current leaders, but I think it’s so important that our clients know that the prosperity economics movement is really for them. Now, it’s for advisors as well. I’ll talk about that in a minute. But from a client perspective, how many times have you thought about your whole life insurance or thought about the bridge loan that you’re investing in or the life settlement fund or whatever it is that we’ve guided you to do and felt like you’re the only one out there handling your money in this way with these products and these strategies.

[01:37] And how many times have we as advisors heard our client or more often potential clients say, how come I haven’t heard this before? Hey, do you get that question, Todd? Oh, I’m thinking right away of the conversation that I heard you record. I can’t remember the call, but it was on the subject of traditional versus typical, and I don’t think we can go past here without you mentioning it. Absolutely. So the typical financial planning that is done is what most people are aware of. It is the stock bond mutual fund realm. It’s often by term and invest the difference. It’s financial planning, which when you think about the word plan and you think about how ineffective that is, you know, Russia tried to do it.

[02:26] Cuba tried to do it as human beings. We really can’t plan much more than maybe what we’re going to have for dinner tonight. And sometimes even that is subject. But when we instead look at how long things like whole life and bridge loans or hard money loans as investments and life settlements back to 1912 or 11, I think 1911 have been around. That is a traditional way of dealing with money. In fact, there’s a quote from a researcher that says financial planning used to mean whole life insurance and a mortgage. So you want to talk about traditional and whole life, of course, been around almost 200 years. So we feel very strongly that it’s important to identify that our work is traditional and it’s financial planning that has been around only

[03:25] since the 1950s or so that is what we like to call typical. And yet financial planning is so prevalent that it makes it really, really hard for our clients because they feel like they’re the only ones out there using this coined term prosperity economics. So I want to talk for a minute about where that came from. But I also just want to help everybody get really clear that the role of the movement for clients is to help them stop feeling like they’re the only one out there handling their money based on the principles of prosperity economics. So Partners for Prosperity has seven principles that it is used with its clients for years and years and years, and we gifted them, if you will, to the prosperity economics movement, whereby people

[04:17] could focus on these seven principles and the term prosperity economics. So why prosperity? Well, yes, that goes with Partners for Prosperity, but that’s not the reason. Prosperity is there because it implies all kinds of ways to be prosperous. You can be spiritually prosperous, you can be materially prosperous, you can be educationally prosperous, you can be physically prosperous. I mean, it’s such a wonderful open word that just implies a lot of good. And then economics, because what we talk about are true economic theory that have stood the test of time. I mean, when you read The Richest Man in Babylon, which, of course, talks about biblical days, there are prosperity economics theories espoused in that book because our personal economy, the money that we bring in,

[05:11] the money that we send out, the dollars that we use on a daily basis, the money that we save with, the money that we invest with, that’s our personal economy, has basic underlying economic principles that are true regardless of whether we agree with them or not. And so it’s important to look at our personal finances with economic theory behind us, with economic practical steps behind us, with economic principles behind us. So when we combine the term prosperity with the term economics, it’s just the best way that I could find to describe what we do, because we certainly don’t do financial planning. That is a dead end road. If you’re going to plan for something and you’re actually going to try to tie finances to it,

[06:02] it’s going to be a very difficult thing to do because money is not real life. And you can measure money. You can apply dollars or mathematical things to money all day long. But it often has absolutely nothing to do with real life. And every financial plan that I did from 1990 until 1995 should have a red pen slashed through it with a big F as in failed, circled like the teachers do with their big, thick red pens, because those financial plans have failed. I mean, that’s just what happens to them. So prosperity economics is so much better of a term to describe what we want our clients to be doing with their money, what we’re trying to help them do with their money and what we’re doing with our own money.

[06:54] I think what’s most interesting is that when we talk about the concept of prosperity or we talk about the concepts of abundance, that is available to each person individually, regardless of the local or national or world economy, isn’t it? Yes. And I’m so glad you brought that up because invariably every day I get an email from somebody, what about gold? What if the dollar falls? What are we going to do? How about this? And my answer is always focus on what you can control. And you can control your thinking, the material you’re reading and listening to and what you do with your money. And so if people are truly concerned about the dollar failing or something like that, what they need to do is go buy

[07:42] bottles of water to store and food that will last more than a year. I mean, truly, that’s what they need to do, because that is something that they can control. And we cannot control what the government does with quantitative easing or what the debt is of our country or where interest rates might go. We cannot control or really do much about any of those things, but we can control our thinking. We can control what we’re feeding our brain, meaning the reading and the listening and the watching that we’re doing. And we absolutely can control simple things like having access to a garden or food storage or water storage or what have you. Because if we truly do have a major dollar economy collapse,

[08:27] what’s going to be important is what you have to eat. Oh, couldn’t say it any better. We’ve kind of talked about the who and the what of prosperity economics. But what about the where? Where’s it going? Ah, yes. And we need to bring in the advisors because advisors that practice prosperity economics, advisors that espouse the seven principles of prosperity. Advisors that use whole life insurance as a place to store cash and create opportunity funds. These are the advisors that we are interested in helping. And these are the advisors that espouse our message. And it doesn’t need to be our message. It’s the message. And the message is do things that work. Follow the seven principles. Store your cash in an emergency opportunity fund that will not go down

[09:14] and is protected and invest with a goal of double digit growth without loss of principle. All those goals are the things that prosperity economics advisors espouse. And so within that, there’s the prosperity economics movement, both for clients and advisors. And the client site is at ProsperityPeaks.com. That’s P-E-A-K-S. And the advisor site is at ProsperityEconomicsAdvisors.com. Yes, I know it’s long, but once you type it in, it will show up again. ProsperityEconomicsAdvisors.com. And you can just remember it’s plural because being plural is the way to help more people. We want lots of advisors. We want lots of economics focused on because there’s lots of principles of economics and we want them all included.

[10:06] So where we’re going is truly literally just to help more people. And we can help advisors, which then, of course, they go and help more people and we can help our own clients because then we are still walking the talk. And I love our clients and don’t ever want to not help individual clients. So this movement is going to continue to grow. It’s going to continue to support events like the Summit for ProsperityEconomicsAdvisors that we just had in Utah. And we’re hoping to get our dates for 2017 here very shortly, probably late July if we can pull it off in Utah again. And then the movement also needs to continue to pick up additional clients. And we want to even create meetups or LinkedIn groups

[10:53] or whatever is the new appropriate thing to create these days with social media and other things. And people can almost think about it like a revolution, you know, a movement. Obviously, that’s what it’s called. One guy at the summit said, it’s a crusade. So that’s fine. We can call it that too. But it’s designed to help people handle their finances more effectively. As a podcast listener, I would encourage you to the question that comes up in your mind is probably on the mind of hundreds, if not thousands of other people. And we so appreciate hearing those questions because we are willing to literally answer every question. As far as I know, Kim, there hasn’t been a question we’ve ever backed away from.

[11:37] That’s right. And the email for those questions is hello at partners number four prosperity dot com. Those are special emails just for our podcast listeners. We pay very close attention to them. And again, that’s hello at partners number four prosperity dot com. Super. Well, Kim, I invite everybody to participate in the prosperity economics movement. If you’re for or even against, you’re still part of the prosperity economics movement. And we welcome comments and questions from people who maybe even disagree, would love to have those, because in that debate between what is right and I guess what is working and what is not working, we learn as well as you. Correct. Absolutely. Yes. We’re happy to answer all questions, address all issues

[12:28] and tackle the tough issues that people have and questions around money. It’s sad that in our society, we don’t talk more freely about it. And so we want to help families talk about it. We want to help advisors talk about it. And if you have questions, send them in. Hello at partners number four prosperity dot com. Again, I’ve heard that money is a lot like air. You don’t notice it till it’s gone. Oxygen. Anyway, this is Todd Strobel, No BS Money Guy. Special thanks to Kim Butler. Thank you all. Keep sending in your questions and comments and we’re here to serve you. Thank you all very much. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you.

[13:09] Visit us at partners for prosperity dot com. If you liked this episode, make sure you subscribe and leave a review.