014: Searching for Enough: Season One Wrap

Jonathan DeYoe: Hey, welcome back. On this episode of the Mindful Money podcast, I’m going to recap season one and say a few, uh, specific thank yous. So first, to our growing listener base, thanks for coming back after each episode and listening to another episode. It turns out that when you return, the algorithm picks that up and says, hey, this is something that’s worthwhile. People are coming back and seeing it again and again. So it then shares it with more people. So thank you for returning and thank you for sharing this with family and friends. And to the guests that we’ve had on so far. We’ve had 13 guests. I want to say thank you to each and every one of you today. We’re going to recap that. And if I going to ask everyone one more thing, it’s really easy. I’d love it if you’d give us a review or a rating. All you got to do is go to ratethispodcast.com mindfulmoney and follow the steps. Again, it’s ratethispodcast.com mindfulmoney. So today I’m going to read one of the reviews that came through in the last couple of weeks. Someone says, or, uh, Holly Morph says it’s a great money podcast. She gives us five stars. And she says, I really like this podcast because Jonathan goes into detail with his guests about what it takes to build wealth and have an empowering relationship with money. Thanks for that, Holly. And if you put your rating in here or your review in here, I will read it as well on the air. So thank you very much for going and doing that. Thanks in advance. So again, just real quick, we’re going to do a recap. I want to go back to episode zero to start episode zero. I introduced this idea behind the podcast and I really wanted to do two things. The first thing I wanted to do is I wanted to describe the paradox of personal finance. So many people are held hostage to this idea that there is some specialized knowledge beyond the very basics that can give you an edge when it comes to investing. The paradox is the less time you spend working on your portfolio, the better. The more time you spend working on yourself, the better. Which is why many of the guests that we have on are talking about that trade off. Now, after 2019 client presentation, one of my clients came up to me, one of my favorite clients actually was a very recent client came up to me and said, jonathan, I finally get it. You build portfolios, but you don’t manage the portfolios, you manage the people. And I think that’s 100% accurate. Once a family has a portfolio that’s allocated appropriately to provide long term returns required to meet that, uh, family’s goals, once it’s diversified across industries and company size and geography, and you’re in a pattern of regular rebalancing, the portfolio itself doesn’t need management done right. An advisor’s job is no longer portfolio management, it’s people management. The key is to keep the family on plan. Don’t allow emotional responses or predictions, future predictions of reality, to keep them, to scare them out of things or get them too excited about things, but to generally keep them from attaining their long term goals. The second thing I tried to do is I tried to describe, this is in episode zero, I tried to describe why I was sharing this message. And today is, I’m, um, recording this on June 18. This is my brother’s, would have been my brother’s 46th birthday. On June 17 of 2021, he passed away. I’m sharing this message in a nutshell because I had plans with him to have really big impacts. And uh, I’m going to talk about, I’m going to have an episode, not this episode, but I’m going to have an episode coming up where I’m going to talk about a little bit more of what we were going to try to accomplish. But he died before we had a chance to do that. And so the thing we wanted to do is we wanted to scale advice. A lot of folks have scaled individual pieces of advice, but we wanted to scale advice instead of a product effect to reach more people, especially people who don’t have access to advice. One of my problems with my industry is everyone is moving up market. Everyone’s trying to help the people that have a million or 5 million or 10 million or $50 million. And I always had a problem with that because if that’s all I ever tried to help, I would not be helping people like my parents, people like my aunts and uncles, people that I was raised by and who cared for me when I was little. I’ve been an advisor for 25 years, and without my brother, I know that I can’t do the same advice scaling as I would have if he was still here. So this podcast is a way for me to highlight people that I think are doing great work, to interview them, to ask them questions, and to maybe hone some of those questions and answers into specific things that people can do to improve their own lives without actually being the advisor, just offering access to really good advisors in sort of, uh, a curated way. Without Dave, I can’t scale my own advice, but I can still have an impact through this podcast, and I appreciate your listening, and I hope you’ll share this. So I want to go through episode by episode and look at a few of the people that I talked to. So I spoke with George kinder, and I was so excited to speak with George. I’ve followed him for a long time, and he agreed to do the first episode, the anchor episode. And no one I know has had a greater impact on the financial services world. He teaches advisors what really matters in clients’lives, how best to have a real impact. He created life planning, which is exactly right. It isn’t about money. It’s about life. And George kinder is the source of a lot of those conversations. And in talking, we talked about the fact that it’s still such a small piece of the advisory community. It’s amazing to us how many people don’t do it this way. So he challenges us with the responsibility of our freedom. Not even the most compassionate and empathetic among us care as much about, or can have the same amount of effect on our outcomes as we can have ourselves. We all need help. No one is alone. But our success begins with taking responsibility for our own freedom. And I challenged him a little bit on that in our conversation, and he was like, yes, your freedom is, ah, a right. It’s also a responsibility. If you don’t engage this responsibility, you won’t get the outcomes that you want. It’s just as simple as that. In our second episode, I talked to Lisa Peterson. She’s someone I’ve known in the fire space. The finnish independent retire early space, the financial commentary space. She has a podcast. She’s written a couple of books. She speaks at the conferences, and she gave us a story of recoveries from financial trauma, both her own and some of her clients that she talked about. We talked about the story of her career, shared concerns about the lack of financial literacy and how this leads to a couple of things. It leads to greater inequality. If we’re not teaching financial literacy or financial education in schools, then the people that don’t get the lessons fall further and further and further behind. In addition to that, no financial education creates sort of a pervasive danger of a scarcity mindset. I was raised in a world where we didn’t have. But we believed, like, my parents didn’t have wealth, we didn’t have a lot of stuff. I didn’t have a lot of choices, but they told me that I could succeed. They instilled in me the belief in myself of making a difference in my own life. Now, both Lisa and I fear for people who aren’t granted a belief in their own ability to overcome challenges and who, throughout their lives, never know how powerful they really are. In the third episode, I had a chance to talk to Catherine Payton. Catherine and I connected on LinkedIn long before she moved to the Bay Area. She was thinking about becoming an advisor. We talked about that. We just maintained an open dialogue for many, many years. We’ve helped each other out at random times. We’ve talked about the financial dynamics in the podcast. We talked about the financial dynamics between men and women. She was raised in a house, and her brothers were treated a little bit differently than she was. We talk about the critical questions. She offered us some critical questions to ask a, uh, potential advisor. She offered us some of the resources that she looks at at a regular basis, and she differentiated between advice that is often offered, but is never helpful and advice that is rarely offered but is always helpful. And so look for that latter kind of advice. I then talked to Robin treasure. This is episode four. Robin Treasure is a sales coach who relies heavily on emotional intelligence and open, honest communication. She talks about the need to really listen to what people want and need. She authored a book called Heart Powered Sales, and she coaches individuals and teams on how to sell from the heart. Now, whether we admit it or not, we’re all in sales. But sales has a stigma tied to it that makes many of us sort of shirk that or run away from that. We don’t know how to promote ourselves. We don’t know how to tell people about the importance of the work that we do. We don’t want to sound grandiose, we don’t want to sound egotistical. We don’t want to be full of ourselves or the products that we have. But there is a way to help people with the stuff that we have and do and know. And so getting to that is everything that she’s about. Now, if we could help more people sell from the heart, instead of shrinking or holding back, I think we could probably improve the world a little bit. In the fifth episode, I interviewed Pamela Slim. Pamela was a corporate coaching. She was a corporate coach. She turned business coach and the founder of a local incubator where she helps small businesses get more and more successful. She still does corporate coaching, and she still works with larger enterprises as well. But in her heart, she has this passion for grassroots economic change and helping people escape the cubicle nation. We shared a belief in the power of entrepreneurship, even on the micro level, to change individual outcomes. One of the things we talk about in the podcast, or one of the things I intend to talk more about on the podcast, and one of the things that I haven’t done a lot with clients who already are successful, but one of the things I want to do more of is help people build the original wealth or build the original income. That can lead to the savings and lead to the investing, that can lead to the wealth. And that’s one of the things that she works on. She wants to help people develop their innate leadership ability and expand her ecosystem model to create the widest net. We then in episode six, talk to Mark Silver. Mark recognizes that business has done some terrible things, but he also sees some businesses being, uh, a force for incredible good. He teaches business owners how to do business with their heart, with integrity, and be successful. He said something that resonated with me, and I’m just going to read this. He said, it’s so beautiful because people feel so empowered when they do embrace their sovereignty and when they realize they can make the business exactly how they want, they can make decisions from love and care without leaving themselves out of the equation. Now that struck me, because early in my own career, I was turning in my resignation letter to my manager, Ernie Guzman, and he talked me out of it. And he told me at that point that, and this was, uh, I was working for, it was Morgan Stanley at the time. And he told me I didn’t have to do it the way every advisor there did it. I didn’t have to do it the way Wall street did it. I could do it my way. I had metrics I had to reach. I had to be successful based on the numbers. I had to reach the right number of people. I had to open accounts, and I had to have revenue. But I could get there my way. And that really helped me stay in this business. This is probably 1998, so I’ve been in the business maybe two years. I almost washed out three or four times. I know Ernie Guzman. I have Ernie Guzman to thank for telling me, giving me the same message that Mark Silver gives people, and that’s business. People can do business their way. They don’t have to follow any unethical business practices. They can follow their heart. In episode seven, we talked to Barry Tesler. Barry was one of the, uh, if not the first, financial therapists. She founded the art of money. And she has worked with individuals and couples for over two decades to create more meaningful and deep conversations around money. Now she talks about self compassion, understanding money emotions, knowing your own money story, and how to overcome the often overwhelming universal money challenges. One of the things that she talked about was money dates. So, whether you’re solo or you have a partner, it’s you or you and your partner sitting down on a regular basis and just looking at your finances. Go through the checkbook register or go to your online banking and just look at the money flowing in and money flowing out. By doing that on a regular basis, you begin to understand it better. One thing that we talked about that’s really, really important is you can’t just ignore a, uh. If one of you does most of it, you have to include both of you in the decisions and these money dates so that you’re both on top of things. Don’t just turn this over to your partner to do. In the 8th episode, I got to talk to Tom Corley. Tom is the rich habits guy. He’s been both rich and poor. He talked about a story when he was a child about a lesson he learned in that when you make money, you better spend it really quick, or your family’s going to take it from you and use it for their bills or use it for something that they need. And so he didn’t learn to save early on because he had a poverty mindset. The thing that he’s done differently, that many people have not done, is he’s interviewed hundreds of individuals about their habits. And from this research, he has a lot of data that supports this is the habits that lead to success and financial wealth. These are the habits that do not. And as long as we’re interested. If he says, if we’re interested in building wealth, then he can show you these are the habits that get you there. And just as importantly, he identifies a bunch of habits that if you’re pursuing these habits, if you watch too much television, if you don’t read within your area of expertise, if you listen to people who are very, very negative all the time, these lead to less success. So there’s a bunch of things you should do. Also a bunch of things you should not do. So if you’re doing them, stopping them is probably your first step. Now, I’ve read a ton of success literature. Tom has always struck me as a bit of tough love. He did research, he shares it daily. He gets a ton of pushback because it’s not nicey nice stuff. It’s do this, you’ll be successful. Stop doing this to be successful. If you’re doing this, it’s going to hurt you long term. A lot of folks talk about the trauma of money and the emotions of money. I’ve interviewed many of them. He says, it’s not enough. You have to build better habits. In the 9th episode, I talked to Jennifer Rayner. Jennifer is a retirement plan consultant. She works with companies to establish 401 ks or 403 b’s or retirement plans in the workplace. She’s also the founder of Moneywell, which is a text based financial education well being program. Now, we connected over the fact that financial education programs are. There’s a lot of them out there and they’re pretty worthless. Not because the content isn’t good, you mean. Ask me. I have one and I can tell you how many people actually go through it. People start these education programs and they don’t complete them because they’re a pull. You have to recognize you have the need for financial education. You have to seek out the financial education that you need, then you have to pursue it to the end. And even where my financial education resources are hosted, if a, uh, school system decides to use mindful money, like the financial legacy courses or the pathways courses, if they sign up for it and they give it to their teachers and their staff, or their seniors in high school, or their college students, or their athletes, if it’s a program or if it’s the members of a church and everyone has access to it, and they open up, say, 100 slots, maybe 20 people go through it. And of, um, the people that begin the process, maybe only ten finish. So I’ve seen firsthand how you can give people access to the financial education resources and they just don’t take advantage of it. And two thirds of folks in the US fail simple financial questions. So this is actually a big issue and we talked a lot about it and it’s really interesting to me. What she has done with Moneywell is she’s created a text based push program. So it’ll send you a text or a company sign up for this and their employees will receive a text from this text based program. And it may be something as simple as, hey, remember to pay off your credit card by the end of the month and they have a chance to respond. And when they respond, it starts building sort of a Persona about them and it’s not there yet, but eventually the goal is to have a knowledge base and people can respond with a text based question and get a text based answer that is on demand resource. That is. I think it’s a brilliant idea and, and I wish her incredible success in this. I hope to work with her in the future on some things as well. Number ten. I don’t know how we got Debbie Allen to come on the show. She was fantastic, actually. I do know how she was introduced by a friend. She’s the number one authority on expert positioning. So people who are experts, she takes their expertise and shows them how to broaden and deepen their reach and build a business on top of that expertise. She’s the author of about ten books. She’s a world class business mentor. And I wanted to actually talk to her about mentoring, and she helped us with understanding the mutual beneficial relationship between a mentor and a mentee. She talked about the importance of mindset of a mentee and the importance of always learning. And she’s a lifelong learner herself. That was episode ten. In episode eleven, I talked to Gary Ray. Now, Gary Ray is a little different than many of the other folks that we interviewed. He’s not a financial expert. He’s an entrepreneur himself. He doesn’t teach entrepreneurs, though I’m sure that he’d be open to it if someone wanted to learn. Gary runs a retail game store. Think board games, card games, puzzles, toys. It’s a store that should have been crushed by Amazon. I mean, completely crushed by Amazon. But he has thrived and grown every single year. He has probably had a dozen competitors enter his area, uh, start and fail within a couple of years in his geographic area. While he’s been building, building. He had one setback in the pandemic where I’m sure he thought everything was going to go to zero. I thought the business was going to fail. He started doing direct deliveries, but he had to close his doors with everybody else and he still had to pay rent. So this is a challenge. It was a challenge for a lot of businesses. He survived it with a little bit of that government ppp money and just a lot of elbow grease and spending a lot of time in the business. And he came back incredibly strong. The last couple years. He’s had record years, two years in a row since the pandemic. So the thing that’s interesting to me is because he’s in retail, he’s never going to make a lot of money because his competition is enormous. Amazon is incredibly powerful and it’s always going to have cheaper stuff. He has built a community. He does what he does because he loves games. He loves people who love games. He’d never really done anything in a business before, has no business background, was tired of the rat race in it when he was there and decided, I’m going to start this business. He didn’t do it to get rich. He did it because he loved the topic, he loved games and he wanted enough. Now m the conversation with Gary around enough is incredibly powerful for him. It’s not about money, it’s about time. He wants time with his son. He wants time doing what he loves. And I know he has that time. He’s not wealthy, but he is happy because of that idea of enough, how he defines that enough. And he’s going to be fine financially as well. He wrote a book that I recommend that’s, uh, the five year path to a middle class income. In the 12th episode, I talked to Kathleen Real. Kathleen was a financial advisor when she lost her husband. Now, uh, I ran across some of her writing and ordered her book to read for myself and to give to my brother’s widow, my sister in law. After reading the book, I wanted to chat with her and I reached out to her directly and she said, absolutely, let’s have this conversation. And we had this great conversation. I remember after Dave died, I was looking for lots and lots and lots of things to read and listen, just to figure out grief and loss and trauma and all this stuff. And I listened voraciously. I read voraciously. I wanted to have an episode this first season to basically make a deposit in that space. That space helped me survive after my brother died and I wanted to do something that would give back as well. There’s a couple things. So those are the episodes. There’s one more that I’m going to record. It’s going to go out her, uh, name is, uh, holly Morphew. She is a financial coach. And I know it’s going to be a fantastic conversation. I do want to highlight two things from this season that I thought were incredibly powerful, and that sort of changed the way I think about things. The first thing was the conversation just happened to be with George Kindred, and it was about this responsibility to freedom. I have thought so much since my brother died about how I live my life relative to how he lived his life. He never hesitated to. He had no fear. He didn’t hesitate to spend a resource to help a friend. He didn’t hesitate to do a thing. I’m not saying that I hesitated. I’m not saying that I didn’t do the thing. I’m saying that I hesitated he would just lay it on the line, and he was not afraid of losing it or hard work or. I’m the oldest. I have anxiety issues. He was stoic, and I aim to have a little bit more of that in my life. And this is what I think George kinder was talking about when he was talking about, you have a responsibility to freedom. We are all free. We have our choices in front of us. We have a responsibility to make those choices, to seek our best selves, to live our best lives. If I can take a lesson out of my brother’s life and, uh, out of his death is the lesson is you don’t know when it’s going to go away. It is impermanent. Live your best life today. In the next episode, I’m going to actually talk about some of the conversations we had and some of the impacts we had wanted, some of the things we wanted to do together that we never got a chance to. And part of the reason we didn’t get a chance was because we just didn’t take the steps. We could have taken the steps earlier. We were waiting for something, waiting for something, and now we can’t take the steps. So hopefully there’s an impact that you get out of it that actually touches home. That’ll be in the next episode, uh, that I record. That’ll be a hard episode for me, but I do think there’s value in it, so I want to share it. So the other thing that I wanted to share is, and I kind of touched on that already, is I want to share Gary’s idea of enough. It’s interesting how quickly we switch from, oh, if I had this, I would be happy, or if I had this, it would be enough. Or if I could have this job, that would be what I wanted or if I could have this kind of spouse, that’s what I would want. And how quickly it’s the hedonic treadmill, how quickly that additional thing that once we get it suddenly isn’t enough anymore. So one of the reasons that I talk about mindfulness and where I met Gary originally was at the Institute of Buddhist Studies, where we were both studying mindfulness. We were studying specifically buddhist meditation and budhist philosophy. And I went towards Tibetan, he went towards Zen. I know that he has a lifelong meditation practice, so I know that meditation practice has benefited him in his definition of and sticking to this idea of enough, he’s defined what he wants, and in defining what he wants, it’s easier for him to get it. And he doesn’t let it creep much. He’s human, he’s a good friend. So I do see it creep, and no one’s immune to that. But really getting clear on what your enough is and then pursuing that and not letting it slip, not getting excited about the next thing, not losing the focus is really incredible. So I really appreciate all the guests we had in season one. I’m really looking forward to doing season two, both designing the topics and the conversations and bringing some of my brother’s thinking into it as well. So thanks very much for listening to the episode and we will see you next time.