The Prosperity Pledge – Episode 473

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[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Prosperity thinkers, welcome to the podcast. We’re going to be covering the Prosperity Pledge. And if you haven’t heard the Prosperity Pledge, you are in for a treat today. Kim, can you set the stage of what the Prosperity Pledge is and then we’re going to get into it. Absolutely. So a story, I think, will serve us best. And that is your person that wants to take care of their finances and has bought life insurance, maybe from new policy or maybe owns life insurance. And they get all inspired and they go on to Mint.com or You Need a Budget or Personal Capital or the myriad. There’s about 50 different finance apps out there. And they try to put maybe their business or their real estate or their life insurance in on these apps.

[01:04] And they try to make the apps give them some holistic, panoramic view of their finances. And they fail. Like these apps just don’t do that. They will help you budget. All of them will. And prosperity is not about budgeting. They will help you keep track of some inflows and outflows. Prosperity is not about nitpicking. It’s about that panoramic view because prosperity is so much more than money. We want to make sure that we’re looking at our money very holistically. So we spent a couple years working with developers to create a space that will act like an app that will do the job of giving you a panoramic view of your finances. And it is so valuable that we decided to up-level it in a way that it could be super useful as well.

[02:12] And that was to create a course, which is called the Prosperity Pledge, and has in it this technological capability, but is paired with a service. Because all of us know that when you are in a business, you are serving. And our team loves to provide service to our clients, but it’s a challenge because of just the nature of the effort that is playing out when service is required. So you can think about changing beneficiaries or understanding how to borrow against your cash value of the loans and the life insurance or a myriad of other things that go with that space. And so we just thought, you know what, let’s pair these two things together, offer the course, offer personalized service with the course,

[03:04] and build this additional community inside our Prosperity Thinkers community, whereby our team is stepping up to the next level, enabling our clients to step up to the next level, and getting both the service and the app or the product, if you will, of the Prosperity Pledge. Ooh, I love it. That’s awesome. Really, that is great. You know, it’s funny because any type of course out there or learning, you kind of have three different applications. You have the do-it-yourself, and then you have the do-it-with-me, and then you have the done-for-you. And what you guys have done is you’ve made it possible for anyone. And I really enjoy how you’re saying that prosperity isn’t about budgeting. And you know, when you’re starting out, you’re paying a lot more attention to the very small pieces of money.

[03:58] And you mentioned many times on the podcast that, you know, what is it, problems only grow with zeros? How does that work? Cash flow issues only get bigger. They have more zeros on them. Exactly. And so, you know, for some of our listeners that are just starting, maybe the do-it-yourself is perfect. And then for others that need more support, the done-for-you are done with you. And so I love it. So tell me more about the Prosperity Pledge because knowing you, it has to be anchored in on principles. Yes. So it starts with an actual pledge, and then it has a money poem. And then it has five specific, what we call wealth renegade reports that cover the five main areas of people’s overall finances.

[04:51] So it’s car and home, and then saving, like saving as a verb, as well as saving as a noun. And then the retirement space, IRAs, 401Ks, all of that. And then life insurance, and then all other investments. So there are five reports, those five areas, that are all standalone reports. So you can download them. You can hand them out. They’re very, very useful. They have the seven principles of prosperity in each one of them. And they use the seven principles of prosperity as a bit of an opportunity filter, if you will, to take something like car insurance through the seven principles. And then in addition to that, once people have gone through the app, the technological part of it, and put their information in, it is automatically summarized on something that we’re calling a prosperity profile,

[05:46] which is a one-page piece of paper, eight and a half by 11, horizontal view, so that you can look at it well on a computer screen or print it out. And that is enabling you to pull those five components in in a much better perspective or point of view than people typically have. So here’s the problem. As we know, your typical balance sheet that has assets and liabilities only has those two things on it. Like that’s a good perspective of your finances, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Correct, yeah. Then the next thing that people look at, and this is true of a business or of a family’s personal financial life, is typically some type of income statement or profit and loss statement, where you have income and you have expenses.

[06:39] But again, that only tells part of the story. And then the fifth part, where all the protection is, the life insurance, the car insurance, home insurance, wills, trusts, even other things like LLCs, family limited partnerships, even things like credit scores. That whole protection component usually is completely missed. Like there isn’t anything out there that I’m aware of that does a good job of summarizing not only the protection component itself, like I haven’t found anything that does that, but to take it to the next level and pull together all five elements. So you have assets, liabilities, income, expense, and the protection arena on a single piece of paper. So this is not detailed. I mean, the app itself will have all the detail, but the profile is the summary.

[07:29] And I believe it is going to be super, super valuable for people to have a profile that they can pull once a quarter, once a year, however often they want. They can share it with other advisors that they are using like a CPA or an attorney. And it’s on a single sheet of paper to summarize their personal financial environment. So good. So for you in the landscape of life insurance, it’s a different vehicle, like as you mentioned, because, you know, most institutions, they don’t really understand. I mean, they understand it, but they don’t understand it, meaning they can sell the product, but they don’t really know what it does beyond that. They only list it as an expense. They forget that whole life insurance is an asset.

[08:14] So for you that understands that this is an asset, how do you think this will be changing the game as far as your clients using the asset that they have? Oh, such a great verb, using it. Because it is truly life insurance. It’s not death insurance. Now, term insurance is death insurance, and that’s awesome. And you should have it up to your human life value, which is 15 to 30 times your income. Or one times your gross worth, like valuable product, but it’s an expense. So when you look at whole life as an asset, and we just did a podcast with Tom Wheelwright, the CPA, where he talks about it as shifting things from an expense to building an asset by converting or switching term insurance to whole life insurance.

[09:00] So on the profile, the whole life insurance information is at the bottom, and it’s indicative of the foundation that it lays and provides for somebody’s personal finance. We know when you build buildings, if you don’t get that right, the rest of the building is suspect. So in our personal finances, it’s the same issue. If we don’t have our emergency opportunity fund right, then the rest of our finances are suspect. They’re at risk. And so it will help people literally see. So your question was how do they then learn how to use it? Well, it’ll help people literally see the value of the cash value as the foundation, see the value of the death benefit as something that they can use in their lives.

[09:46] And then because it’s all there on the same page, they’ll more easily assimilate how life insurance supports and contributes to literally almost every other asset that they have. And that is, I think, a hard thing for people to get their arms around. Like they may understand how to use it just by borrowing against the cash value, but they don’t really understand the holistic or panoramic nature of the death benefit and how it plays a role while they’re living and how it can be utilized in just a perspective, a mental shift, because it’s definitely something that’s done later in life. But if we know that we have that opportunity later in life, it makes a difference in our world today. And so I’m hoping that whether profiles get put on the bulletin board,

[10:36] magnated to the refrigerator. I’ll tell people a lot of times, pull your life insurance statement, circle the cash value in green and write the word liquid on it. So the profile will actually show that total because people are building portfolios of policy. Sometimes it’s hard to kind of keep track of which one is where and how and who. So it will summarize all that and just make the asset more actually visualized, a version of it to be used today. And when we can see it mentally, then we can understand what to do with it financially. If we can’t see it mentally, we can’t get there. Oh, absolutely. You know, two things come to mind with this. You know, the phrase, what gets measured gets managed.

[11:20] And so now this is something that at least, as we’ve talked about doing family retreats, it could be covered there. When we get together as a family and we go over finances or with spouses, that’s something there. The other thing I think about with life insurance is at least from an outsider, this is what I’ve seen, that new people, they jump in and they’re like, okay, I want to be using this right now. And you’re like, no, no, no, hold on. Like, good things take patience. And then the other side of it is sometimes people will go a little too long without using it. And so I see this prosperity pledge as being that vehicle that says, okay, we’re getting your foundation solid. And now you have that snapshot so you can adjust your life and say,

[12:10] oh, we do have this investment coming up or this expense. Let me start using it. So it shrinks timelines. Yes, yes, well said. And it is such a long-term, I mean, the word whole life, right? It’s for your whole life. That is a very, very long-term perspective. And I think us human beings can get stuck sometimes in a little bit of a McDonald’s mentality where we want everything right now quick. And yet we know when we step back that you can’t get a porterhouse steak at McDonald’s, so it’s going to take some time to take some time to build the beef, take some time to cook it properly, et cetera, take some time maybe to create all the fixings that go with. So this portal that is where the information is input is the beginning,

[12:59] and then it will automatically create the profile. And I know so many people that have their personal finances on Excel spreadsheets, which that level of detail is helpful, but there’s no good summary. So I’m really trusting that this is going to do a good job. It’s been a long, long time in the making. We’re super excited to release it to our clients, and we want it to be used, hence the course, so that the learning is there to really support that usefulness. And then you said it earlier, what gets measured gets managed. The way I’ve heard that quote is what gets measured improves, what gets measured and reported improves exponentially. So that brings us back to that family retreat that we’ve talked about.

[13:53] Good heavens, even if it’s a simple Zoom call once a year, what an awesome way to report to your family the financial progress that you’re making and or the financial challenges that you’re having and have your family weigh in on it. And it would be so fun because if all family members were using the prosperity pledge that generated for each family their prosperity profile, it would enable other family members to very easily look at the profile and spot areas that they could help, contribute to, just have the family more involved and on the same page. So we’re trusting that it supports that family legacy work as well. Oh, that’s so good. So what we’ll do is we’ll put links to it inside of the description of this episode

[14:46] so that you can get access to it. And for you early adopters, that this sounds like a perfect fit, and you’re saying, hey, we’ve got a family retreat coming up. We want to get hands on this. Send an email to hello at ProsperityThinkers.com. That’s a dedicated email address just for the podcast. It’s like I should use like a quiet voice, be like, that’s like the secret way in. So hello at Prosperity Thinkers. I’ll put the link in the description for that one as well. Thanks, Spencer. Appreciate it. This is going to be amazing. Thank you so much, Kim. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit ProsperityThinkers.com.