Reducing the Emotional Element Will Lead to Better Financial Decision Making

Jun 14, 2021

Reducing the Emotional Element Will Lead to Better Financial Decision Making with Bob Wheeler

Typically our financial decisions can be emotionally charged. Unfortunately, emotions can lead us to make poor financial decisions. We should try to shift to reduce the emotion surround financial decisions and look at them from a logical perspective. It sometimes helps to take a step back, especially for larger decisions and take time to process them.

About Bob

As a man of true integrity with infectious energy, Bob Wheeler’s crusade for personal growth has cross-pollinated with his accounting practice to create a new approach to personal finances. His passion is to help others gain insights about how their emotions trigger financial decisions. Combining finances with behaviors, Bob explores his personal concept of creating a healthy relationship with money in his book, The Money Nerve: Navigating The Emotions Of Money, his online course, Mastering The Emotions Of Money and his podcast, Money You Should Ask.

While strengthening his accounting practice, Bob has simultaneously pursued his love of satire and ventured into the realm of standup comedy. From his thirty years of helping clients, Bob has distilled a concoction of warmth, humor, information, motivation and budgeting directives that he offers to anyone with financial concerns. He is also currently the CFO for The World Famous Comedy Store.

Bob’s world travels have led him to high altitudes. He has climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, ascended to the Mount Everest Base Camp, and hiked several smaller mountains in between. With charm and humor, his experiences on the road, in the office, or running a Greek marathon, feed his wit as a stand-up comic and financial motivator.

www.themoneynerve.com

www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com

Full Transcript Below

 Reducing the Emotional Element Will Lead to Better Financial Decision Making with Bob Wheeler

00:00:02
Roy
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the business of business podcast. I'm your host, Roy, of course we are the podcasts that bring you a wide variety of guests to talk about a bunch of diverse topics to help you in business. And, we want to see you succeed sometimes as small business people, we don't really know what we don't know, or if we do know that we have a, a shortfall somewhere, trying to find somebody that can help us, that can be a trick too. So, today is no different. We have an awesome guest with us, Bob Wheeler, he's a financial expert and motivator. He is the book author and founder of The Money Nerve, and he is also the CFO of the World Famous Comedy Store. We may dive into that just more as well, but Bob, welcome to the show. Thanks for taking time out of your day to be with us.

00:00:55
Roy
We certainly appreciate it.

00:00:58
Bob
Well, thank you, Roy. It's great to be here. I always love having these conversations. Yeah.

00:01:02
Roy
Great. Tell us about, what inspired you to write the book. I think that, I think it's a little deeper than just the book. It looks like that, you actually have, kind of, a website or some stuff to go along with the book. Kind of tell us more about that.

00:01:22
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. So, I went into accounting after, deciding I didn't want to be a lawyer. I was all set for law school. I was taking accounting as a, to get my grades up cause it was a pretty easy way. I got into accounting, but I had my own financial struggles that I wasn't really aware of. I struggled between having lots of money and following my creativity. I settled initially on money because, that seemed to give me more choice. As I was working, I was doing comedy. I was I'm CFO at the comedy store and one of my friends came in and she was upset because her parents and her siblings who are all doctors were giving her grief because she had chosen to be a comic and she was crying and saying, oh my God, I'm the only one who doesn't understand finance. I said, you're not the only one.

00:02:19
Bob
There's so many people out there and they present well, but they're struggling. Most of us have made financial mistakes. I realized, and having gone through my own journey and seeing how clients were making, decisions that were in exact opposition to what seems like really sound financial advice. I realized I wanted to write this book to help people start to understand that there was a connection between our emotions, our money beliefs and our money blocks and our financial success.

00:02:50
Roy
Yeah. That was one thing that really, caught my interest about yourself and the book is that, the emotional part, we all are that. The, I guess unfortunately we can let that control us instead of thinking things through being logical. The other thing too, to, whether we have money sense or not sometimes, we are guilted or goated into following that path that will make us more money, but then we end up being very unhappy. Sometimes that whole, follow your heart and everything else works itself out. Anyway, so what are, well then the other thing is that you, so, you became the CFO of the comedy store, which that's awesome. I guess you get to see a whole lot from that seat, correct?

00:03:47
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. And, even that came to me through following my passion, I was doing stand-up comedy and, to supplement my income. And, so I was running a show and Mitzi, who owned the comedy store called me up and said, Bob, I know you're a CPA and you got to come help the store, we're having trouble. For me initially, it was really about making sure that myself and my friends had a stage to perform on it. Wasn't about like, oh, this is some longterm thing. It was really selfish for my friends and I, and, I jumped in and there were a lot of issues and I really loved working with Mitzi. And, my, a lot of friends of mine are comics and I, I love being in that creative world. And, and so I do get to see a lot of amazing comics, people that make it big or people that you think are super big, who are actually broke, and others that you would think aren't making that much are making millions.

00:04:44
Bob
It's not all as it seems, but it's definitely been a fun, interesting ride. Yeah,

00:04:50
Roy
I bet. Yeah. And, so talk about the emotions, what is that, how does that impact our decision making when we start talking about finances, because so many people think that, well, we can emotionally overeat and we can do, we can get angry out of emotion. So, you know, I'm sure that, and I'm not even going to bring my girlfriend on to talk about her emotional shopping, but anyway, I'll let you know, let you pick it up.

00:05:20
Bob
Well, the best example that I can give that I think is a great illustration, was when I was working with my editor on the book, she said to me, Hey, Bob, this is great. You're doing this thing about money and emotions, but I don't make any of my decisions financially around money. Like there's no emotion involved. And I said, okay, that's cool. Let me ask you this. When you go out to lunch with your, dad who pays for it, and she goes, well, he does, I'm his princess. He has to pay. I said, okay, well, who pays when you go out with your mom? She said, well, I do, because I feel so bad that my mom w my dad left her. And so I feel really for it. I said, okay, well, who pays for lunch? When you go out with your sister, she goes, oh, we split it, Dutch we're equal.

00:06:02
Speaker 2
Oh, I get it. I get it. So.

00:06:06
Bob
Even something like that, like splitting the bill at a restaurant with a group of friends, watch the emotions, go crazy. When somebody is paying for the wine, they didn't pay for it. Yeah.

00:06:18
Roy
Yeah. I've got the, I've got a daughter like that too. She starts out at the top, the cheap stuff on the menu until she figures out I'm paying for it. It's like, or her hands, you can see it slide down the middle to that till the expensive items I'll have the lobster. Yeah. It's, finances, a funny thing. I'm of an age that, when I came through high school even, I think they taught you how to write a check, maybe how to even how to balance your checkbook. We, we turn people loose in, and even if you went to college, I happened to be a finance major. So, I kinda got more deep into that, but, if you happen to do some other tracks where they don't require you to take finances, it's like, we turn people out into the world and we've really given them no understanding of finance.

00:07:13
Roy
It's not something, there are some families I know that work together, but, it's just an interesting concept that finance is such an important part of our life. Being able to maintain housing, utilities, eat all of that stuff, but we just, we pay very little attention to teaching people about it.

00:07:37
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. I have to say, my parents were not great talking about money. They didn't handle money. Well, and I got out of college and, I was given probably 40 or $50,000 worth of credit cards. And I thought it was free money. I was like, cool. I got 50,000 bucks. Boom, boom. Spend, spend, oh, this is not good. Yeah.

00:08:02
Roy
Yeah. I mean, that's the thing isn't, it's easy. I think it's easy to get caught up in that cycle as well. We think, well, we've got to have this now. Certainly things are going to better, next week, next month, and we'll be able to pay it back. All of a sudden, we're just, we collapse under so much debt. Again, I can't even imagine these kids coming out of college today and the debt that some of them have had to rack up. And, unfortunately they're not able to come out into the, I think everybody has the dream. You go to college, you graduate and, there's $125,000 job offer on the table when you walk out and life is just a smooth and easy after that. Unfortunately, that's just not the way, you end up starting at the bottom. The income is low and all of a sudden it's like, we are just, you're starting out life under this crushing debt.

00:09:01
Roy
And, hopefully they're doing some things about that to help us out. But, I just, you really have to worry about that. Many kids are even having to go back home to live that it's anyway, it's having a huge impact. We'll just say that.

00:09:20
Bob
It's having a huge impact. I think if were started to teach this in high schools and younger, if parents would start to feel more comfortable having conversations about money, even when they don't know, and starting early with teaching children about delayed gratification, that we don't have to have everything right this minute.

00:09:41
Roy
Yeah. There's a great book about that called the marshmallow theory, I think is basically, a study over time, the guy gave people a chance. You can have a candy bar now, or you can wait till tomorrow and get to, and there was some correlation between the impulsiveness that I'm taking my candy bar now and success later in life. I guess, a lot of it has to do with this. I'll take the money on my credit card today. Not thinking about the impacts in the future.

00:10:14
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. That's the Stanford marshmallow study and it's a fascinating study, in the impact of learning delayed gratification, which is hard in this culture. We've got social media, we've got everybody on, Facebook, Instagram, Tik TOK now. Yeah.

00:10:32
Roy
Yeah. That's something that we need to guard against not only as just humans, but as businesses as well. We only see the, we only see what people want us to see. We don't see the negative, the nobody ever takes a picture of the overdrawn bank account and waves it on Instagram showing what dire straits that they're in. We only present the awesome stuff and it can be, I'm old enough to where it really doesn't matter. I get it. But, sometimes, the younger people that haven't been around a long time, they think that is life and that these people are, that much more successful. And, again, it creates an emotional burden on them.

00:11:18
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. We do want to present ourselves as having success. We're not out there. Yeah. I filed six bankruptcies. I I've had all my cars repossessed, come hang out with me. I'm a written Spiration. Right, exactly.

00:11:34
Roy
That the other thing there are tricks and stuff. I know one thing we used to do, we probably weren't as good as we could have been about it. When kids, when the kids would get money for birthdays or whatever, we would try to, we bought a, it was like a Tupperware plastic bowl that was divided into three sections. What we would have them do is, they could take a third of it to spend today a third of it to save. If they chose to do the tithing, their third of it for that as well. And, you know, it was pretty good. I don't know the long lasting effects of it. I wish we would've started earlier and been more staunch about it. But, those are the kinds of things that I think we can teach our kids, that we have to be able to put money back.

00:12:26
Roy
And we translate this into businesses. Especially when you're, self-employed solo preneur entrepreneur, that, you have to put money back every time you get a check in order to pay your quarterly taxes. I mean, I'm just, I'm not even talking about the savings component. I'm just talking about future expenses that we know, because it's unfortunate. We have the same, the mindset of that is, income is coming in today. A lot of times they don't really think about the implications of the future. Don't put the money back and then we don't make a quarterly tax payment. On, April 15, now we're trying to come up with this whole ton of money that we just don't have.

00:13:14
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's funny. I'll tell this story, but, my mom used to have an art store years ago, she had an art store and she thought that all the money in the cash register was her profit. Right. Every night she'd empty out the cash register and spend all the money and didn't understand, that my dad had to pay for the supplies that she was selling. And, you don't get to keep it all. She's like, it's there it's mine. Right?

00:13:43
Roy
Exactly. Yeah. We'll compound that effect if you actually have, employees that work for you too, because you're going to have to pay, your payroll tax on them. I know the reason that's kind of fresh. We had a, it was a really good restaurant here in town, not long ago that, they'd been in business for years, but they finally went out of business because they evidently hadn't been keeping up on their payroll tax. And, and, those are things that you just can't skirt. The, that bill comes due and you might can push it down the road for but you can, without going through a whole bunch of legal, I guess, legal maneuvers, there's really no way you're ever going to get out from under that. They're going to get you to the detriment of your business.

00:14:30
Bob
Absolutely. It's so important, especially as an entrepreneur start having a business, paying attention to the finances, I've seen more than I wish I had seen a place cases where the bookkeeper was embezzling money, where a salesperson was taking money. Because the owner was so busy, like, oh, I love everybody. Everything's good. I don't really want to look at that stuff. They ended up self-sabotaging because they weren't actually paying attention. Right.

00:14:59
Roy
Yeah. Just one more note on the savings component before we move one of the, well, of course the compounding effect is, in the time value of money, probably the two biggest theories in finance that just, they change the way you look at things as you go through it. There was an example they used to use with two sisters that, saved money. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but one of the sisters, right out of college, she started putting so much money back. The other sister, she was out traveling, having a good time spending it. Basically what happened is the sister that saved save for about 15 years, had a baby and never saved another dime, which kids will do that to you. But that's another podcast issue.

00:15:51
Speaker 2
But anyway,

00:15:53
Roy
The other sister, she lived her life free spending for 15 years. She started saving, from, for the next 30 years. Basically when both of these sisters get to age 65, they had the exact same amount of money. The sister who put it off, she had to save, I think twice as much, twice as long. Anyway, it just, yeah, I guess what I'm trying to get across is just the time value of money, especially when you're young, there's just, it's hard to catch up from if you don't take advantage of it.

00:16:31
Bob
Absolutely. The biggest thing a lot of my clients say to me is I wished I had started putting money in a row, in an IRA or a Roth or in a savings account when I was younger, I wished I'd understood it. Right. And, and it's not too late. People always are waiting for that big windfall. I'll start a savings when I get the big bonus, I'll start it when I win the lottery. No start now 50 bucks start doing it. Yeah,

00:16:55
Roy
Yeah, no, I used to, I was a financial advisor many years ago and, my favorite story to tell is, I had a guy that w were pretty close and, I was always trying to get him to start something for your kids, start something for you, whatever. Okay. You know, well, we're struggling along. As soon as we get, kind of get ahead of things, I'm going to give you a call. We'll set something up. I'm like, we need to do this sooner rather than later, went through this conversation for, six months. I guess when, June rolled around, he gave, I got a phone calls like, Hey, we're going to the lake and our new boat. You want to go with us? And I'm like, where'd you find money to buy it?

00:17:35
Speaker 2
Where'd you find why you buy a boat? but unfortunately,

00:17:39
Roy
That's just the way things are. We would rather the instant gratification of having the boat today versus, having that money in a savings account for, well, not only for our future, our retirement, but in case of disaster, like this COVID, I think it, the pandemic kind of shined a light on people's savings habits, and it's not pointing fingers, or I don't, I'm not trying to be literal anybody. That's not what this is about. It's more about the realization that we never know what can happen. Sometimes luckily that they put some, programs in place to, help the masses. What I will say is that if this had happened to me or you as an individual, the government's not going to be there to write us a check and to help us out. I think it just really amplifies the importance of why we need to put money back, no matter how much it hurts, quit, cut down on that, Starbucks coffee, and maybe, have one brewed at home or, however you can do it.

00:18:48
Roy
That's the other thing I think we always think is, I have to put this massive sum of money back and I'll let you speak to that for a minute, but sometimes that $5, $10 here, that adds up over the years.

00:19:03
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I, one of my tips to my clients and people I work with is on Friday afternoons, take out all the $5 bills out of your wallet and put them away. He can't spend them for the weekend. A bunch of $5 bills adds up pretty quickly. If you do that every week, it doesn't have to be a huge amount, but you need to cultivate the habit. Right. That as you're doing stuff, you go, wow, do I really want the Starbucks, or do I really want to have an amazing retirement? I think I'll put the five bucks back in my pocket.

00:19:36
Roy
Yeah. If you're, if you happen to be an employee where you can have the payroll deduction, I'll tell you the best thing for me as a young person was I had some good advice, surrounding me when I was young. When I started, when I signed up for the 401k, you could do a percentage of your pay. Some guy told me, you're going to get a raise in six months, but he said, set that at the highest you can, I think it was 6% at the time set it for that. You're going to hurt for six months. You know, it wasn't hurting. Like weren't going to eat. We weren't going to be able to go have as much fun. Anyway, you're going to be kind of throttled back, but he said, when you get your raise, then you won't notice the 6% of that incremental raise you got, because it's already gone.

00:20:25
Roy
There was so much truth to that from that point on that, the initial, that initial time period between then, and when you get your next raise, it can be painful, but once you get past that, then it's kind of HomeFree.

00:20:41
Bob
Absolutely. Even if you can't put in the 6%, if your company matches take the match, but it's free money. Yeah.

00:20:51
Roy
Yeah. That's for sure. A lot of people don't realize that you're just giving that away. Yeah. So, one thing that you do point out is that, we may or may not need financial therapy. Can you tell me about what financial therapy might include?

00:21:08
Bob
Yeah. Financial therapy is really starting to get aware of your family history, your financial journey. Most of us make financial decisions and a lot of other decisions. When we're 5, 6, 7 years old, and we observed the world, we make decisions. We go forward as dif a five-year-old should be making these financial decisions. What happens is we get into our adult life and we start making decisions back to, oh, I'm not good enough. People are gonna judge me. People are gonna think I am greedy. We start with these stories and we really bring them into our current lives. Doing therapy helps us to go back and say, oh my gosh, I remember when I was six and I lost the milk money. I remember my dad saying that's really selfish or whatever it might be. We made a story and made it a lifelong commitment.

00:22:03
Roy
Okay. Yeah. That kind of leads into also, what does a healthy relationship with money look like? I know that, we, I think we see a lot of extremes either. There are people that are so focused on money that they actually miss out on life, or they treat people poorly because they, want to get more money. There's kind of the opposite of that is that there are some people that, they want to help everybody to the detriment of themself.

00:22:32
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. I think having a healthy relationship with money is about being able to set boundaries, to make sure that you do take care of yourself. It means being able to live within your means. It means being able to have a choice of saying, yes, I could spend on this in the moment and feel really good for 10 minutes, or I could save this and know that it's going to help me in the long run. I'm going to have a much more happy life overall. It means learning to be appreciative for what you have, not what you don't have. I think that gratitude, is a big part of that learning to cultivate gratitude and realizing that we're pretty abundant, especially if you're growing up in the U S have a, you have it pretty good. Even the people that seem like they have it the worst.

00:23:21
Bob
Yeah.

00:23:22
Roy
Yeah. And there's all kinds. There's all ways, little tricks. For me, one of my tricks was always trying to get rid of, not get rid of, but move money from a spendable account to an account where it was kind of out of sight out of mind. I'll tell a story on me back in the day I worked, when I was younger, I worked for at and T and were at this, there was a local, it was a chip. They manufacture chips for their restaurants, but they sold them to the public too. This cable gets cut behind this building and we're out there working. This guy I'm working with like, Hey, we ought to go get some chips and hot sauce here. Went around there and said, we'll just take a, can you give us one ship in a hot sauce? They're sure, well, she mainly grabbed the mic and said, Joe, get the forklift and get these, get some chips and hot sauce around here.

00:24:14
Roy
And we're like, whoa, wait a minute. They ended up bringing out a whole case of chips and a whole case of hot sauce. Luckily between the two of us, we had enough money to pay for it. We just, we ended up paying for it, a life lesson, I quit carrying cash after that. Like, I, I used to have, and this has been a long time ago, but, I would have like a $5 allowance for the week that would get me, buy me some coffee break, or Coke break or whatever. But, I just find myself, if I have money in my pocket, it tends to go much faster today. We can equate that, I guess, with the bank account, a debit card, it can go easy. So, there are a lot of, the paycheck, we talked about that the auto deduction, but in your bank account, you can also get other accounts that will draft that account.

00:25:03
Roy
You get paid, you can move money out of there to the savings account. It just won't show up in your checking account or, your spendable account, I guess. Yeah,

00:25:14
Bob
Absolutely. I think it's even better to have a separate bank for your savings so that it can't automatically cover overdraft because otherwise it's just really a slush fund. Right.

00:25:25
Roy
Exactly. No, that's a good point. That's a good point. Yeah. What kind of get back to the business for just a minute that was, I didn't do the separate banks. That would have been good, but what I did was, early on opened up a, I had a tax account and I had a, SEP account, well, not only the accounts, but I had bank accounts. Whenever I would get client money that would come in, I would just automatically take whatever my percentage was, through, I had my accountant worked out the percentage and said, look, you got to pull out 20% for taxes and you need 10, 15% for yourself. Every time I had a client check come in, I would segregate it and put it back immediately, and then the discipline of not to try to reach out, to use those accounts. I think, for me, fortunately, it was just a way to get it away from the regular bank account, know that it wasn't mine to spend.

00:26:22
Roy
So, I guess we have to find all the little tricks that we have to help our, to do that we can do to help ourselves to be able to, not only, like I said, save for what our future expense is going to be, but also save for our future.

00:26:38
Bob
Well, absolutely. For me, myself, when I set up my corporation and had my bank accounts, I was much more focused on protecting my business. When I was a schedule C and I was sorta, co-mingling it, when I finally went, this is a business. Yeah, this is separate and I need to nurture and protect it. I gave it a lot more attention and a lot more, like just really focus.

00:27:03
Roy
Exactly. That's, you know, that's another good point. I know that, we think about, accounting and things like that at the end of the year where we just have somebody plugin numbers into a, to our tax return or whatever, but there's also, there's so many strategies that, our CPA, our tax experts can help us with through the year in order to, well, keep us on track. Are we actually making money? What does this product look like if you have multiple product lines, but also you said, that protection that we can give, protect ourself from our business, protect our business from ourselves. However you want to look at that. There are a lot of different things that we can do.

00:27:54
Bob
Absolutely. One of the things that's interesting is, and this happens a lot with my clients. I'll send them a draft of their tax return and they'll write back and they'll go, this is wrong. And I'm like, what's wrong. I didn't make $300,000. Okay. Well, did you make this deposit? Yeah. Did you make this deposit? Yeah. Did you make this deposit? Yeah. Did you make that equals three 50? Well, where did it go? Well, I don't know. That's a separate question, but you made the money and that happens all the time,

00:28:23
Roy
Right? Yeah. I guess the message is, also too is to reach out and,

00:28:32
Speaker 3
Your,

00:28:34
Roy
Your financial professional, whether you have a fractional CFO or it's your CPA or accounting person, whatever is, you need to have a relationship with them through the year. It's not a once a year check in and, you'll be okay because there's a lot of strategies and, the bulletins that come out, that's another thing, I'm a finance guy. I could probably find my way through putting numbers in turbo tax, but there's so many rules that come out through the year that I don't keep up with that, professionals like yourself, you keep up on all these taxable changes and tweaks some for the better, some for the worse, but at least, We're not, stepping into a bear trap.

00:29:18
Bob
Well, absolutely. I just was saying to a new client the other day, when I, I said, well, this is what we charge for a tax return with a schedule C and I could hear of like, well, that's a little high. I said, what? I could probably do your tax return in five minutes. You're not paying me for the speed at which I input your taxes. You're actually paying me for the knowledge and for the education and saving you hundreds of thousands of potentially over time. It might be worth that extra two or 300 bucks.

00:29:46
Roy
Yeah. Yeah. And also the, potential prison time that.

00:29:50
Speaker 2
You can help people avoid.

00:29:53
Bob
Exactly.

00:29:56
Roy
I know that you went on a trip, I guess you had a pivotal moment. You were on a trip to Africa. What happened while you were in Africa that changed some of your beliefs around money?

00:30:09
Bob
Yeah, so, before that trip, I really believed that, I was socialized to believe that I am my accomplishments. I got to make a lot of money. You got to have nice things, material things to be happy. And, and that was sorta my, those were my goals. When I went to Africa, I was in Tanzania and the average income there was annual income was $100 a year, and, not a lot of money. And, and this was back in the nineties, but still, not a lot of money. And these people were incredibly happy. They were like, tell everybody to come and visit us if you liked it. They would give me the shirt off their back. I was throwing away jars and they were like, can I have that jar? And I'm like, it's trash. They're like, no, I can use this. I just kept saying to myself, what's wrong with these people.

00:31:00
Bob
They're too happy. They don't have nice things and they don't have hot water and they don't, there's something wrong. It really had took me some self reflection to realize that they were all about community. They were all about living an experienced life with good experience, good family, good community, and that they could be incredibly happy and learn to work with what they had instead of running around in this hamster wheel of trying to get somewhere when they were actually already there.

00:31:33
Roy
Exactly. That's a huge point in, I had an experience it's been a few years ago when my grandmother passed away. She lived in an older home that had the detached garage that had some storage in and so we're in there cleaning it out. And, we just ran across hundreds of Mason, jars, hundreds of, like pot pie and, tins that you get at the store with the cakes in it. She saved everything, and it was it's interesting because she had come through the depression. That really set her on this path of what was important. The scarcity, I guess, is the best way to say it. Foil, she would get foil and try to wash it off as good as she could and save it. We just don't realize, well, I think we've learned through the pandemic and of course, us here in Texas this last week have learned with the storms is that, scarcity can come upon us in heartbeat.

00:32:40
Roy
Yeah,

00:32:43
Bob
Absolutely. I, I, for me, I also have of that scarcity mindset. I've got six months of food in my pantry. I've got all those things and, I'll probably always have that. I just don't let myself go crazy with it. I, I, I can be compulsive, but I have to go, whoa, slow it down life is okay. Right, right.

00:33:04
Roy
So, you also, an interesting story that, you went to Nepal and you were tracking to the base camp of Everest, which that's amazing in itself. What, again, we could probably do a whole podcast, but tell us about surrounding that trip. I mean, that must have been incredible.

00:33:24
Bob
Yeah. So, Nepal is an amazing place. I love it. I been there a couple of times. Okay. On the second trip, I really, I had some friends, we all wanted to get to base camp. That was our goal. And, some people were experienced some weren't and we hyped the first day just to get into the park and you go down the steep hill to go back up the steep hill. At the end of the first day, all of my friends, everybody on the team said, this is really hard. Let's quit. Let's just go back in town and get massages. I'm like, no, wait, I just spent a lot of money. We got to finish this trip. You know, I'd be practical. I spent money. And, nobody wanted to take the, everybody was ready to quit. And so I said, what? I gotta do something I'm S I'm the team leader here.

00:34:11
Bob
I said, how about this? Why don't we negotiate? Let's agree to hike an hour. At the end of the hour, let's see if we want to continue. What we did was every hour I set my watch and we would stop and we would decide, are we going to hike another hour? Or are we going to go back? And what happened was after the first couple of days, we started saying, let's see if we can hike two hours and then last hike, four hours. What I found was that when we took it in baby steps, when we took it incrementally, instead of trying to look at, we've got to get from here to the top of the base camp, let's just get from here to that next little mountain, let's get to this next little goalie. And, and that's how we got to the top was really negotiating it, hour by hour instead of, oh my God, we've got 15 days to get there.

00:35:00
Roy
Yeah. That's, I was having a conversation with a client prior to our call. That was something that we got to talking about is just, sometimes it's a good life lesson because sometimes tasks can just be daunting or overwhelming that we just can't even get started. We can't find the motivation to get started. It's like, it's so big. We'll never accomplish it. Let's just, and I guess we can talk about saving for retirement in that, in a vein, is that, it seems like, oh my gosh, how can we ever amass the amount of money we need, but going back to the steps, the $5 a week, taken out all the $5 it adds up, and that's a great way to approach, money management and savings for sure.

00:35:47
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. I think the other important thing for a lot of people out there that feel like it's overwhelming or struggle is asked for help. It's okay to ask people, how did you do it? Right. What can I do? What would you recommend? What are your tips so that you can do it? Yeah.

00:36:05
Roy
Let's touch on retirement for just a minute. I think, this is a lesson that we, as financial advisors that we tried to talk to people about is that, well, not only are you going to need a lot of money and not only are we living much longer past our working retirement age, but the other part of this is that when, there's some, misnomer that when you retire, all of a sudden, you only need 25% of your current income. I guess for some people, if you're making a ton of money, maybe that may.

00:36:41
Speaker 2
Be right. But, you know, for,

00:36:44
Roy
Excuse me, for the normal person, it's like, when you retire life, doesn't quit. I mean, you still have the same bills. Actually you find in the short term, your expenses can probably go up because now you've got time to travel. You got time to go out to eat. You got time to catch up with friends. It's like, I think recent retirees can be very shocked about the burden, the financial burden that may be on them still.

00:37:15
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting, the old model used to say, put away all your money and you'll be in a lower tax bracket when you retire and that's not true. Most of my retirees are still in the same tax bracket, if not higher tax brackets, as they're pulling money, getting their pensions, pulling out RMDs, from their IRAs and stuff. What I work with a lot of clients is now trying to get money when they have lows in their income is to convert it to Roth or it converted to a post-tax so that we're not getting in those higher brackets. But, I tell people, look, when I get to retirement, I don't want to be eating beans, sitting in a little, not turning on the heat because I want to save every penny. I want to be carried around on a carriage. I want like rapes served to me.

00:38:06
Bob
I want to be making income. I have to plan accordingly that I'm going to be in a high bracket when I'm in retirement.

00:38:12
Roy
Yeah. The, the other part of that too, is, something that's come to mind a lot lately is, outliving our wellness. We have to also take into account that, we may not be able to work into our seventies, if were healthy and everything may be so, but a lot of times whether it's physical or, other ailments that get us, that we maybe would be not able to produce an income or go get up and go to work. We have to think about those things as well.

00:38:45
Bob
Yeah. I think it's important for a lot of people to look at their social security. When am I going to take it, do I take it early and take less, or do I wait and take it later where I'm going to get a larger amount for some of my clients. For many of my clients taking it earlier means I'm getting it. I'm getting money for five years more than if I waited until I was, 72 or something like that. It's really important to actually do the math right. See where you are because I have clients right now that are struggling. If they didn't have that social security taken early, they wouldn't be paying the rent.

00:39:20
Roy
Yeah. Well, and I think that times have changed, from back in the time when I did my financial advising is, most people were still on defined pension plans. I don't think we, people don't fully grasp the, I guess the enormity of that change or what I see as that, and for those that are, don't know what that is. Basically, in the old days you worked, you retired and your company said, if you were fortunate enough to work for a company that had retirement, they said, we're going to pay you X number of dollars for the rest of your life. Or, you could take less and your spouse could keep up, there are variables, but basically they said, this is what you're going to get. I guess maybe around the two thousands, somewhere in there, we kind of switched over and I think most people now are on the, what is it, defined contribution where it's mainly the company is going to throw some money in.

00:40:17
Roy
You're going to throw some money in at the end of time, there's going to be a pile of money. It's up to you to manage it, to get, to make it last long enough to match your lifespan.

00:40:30
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. Most people, it's interesting, most people that are doing that don't even realize what their money sitting in. I've had clients that we go in and look at their funds and realize they've been sitting in a savings account, even though it's in a, and I'm like, of course it's not making any money for you. You're not investing it. Right. Oh, I just thought if it was a retirement account, it's automatically doing that. Yeah.

00:40:54
Roy
Yeah. That's another thing we could talk just quickly about is that an investment cycle, the advantages to getting in when you're in your twenties and thirties, is if you look at the markets over time, what is it, I mean, there's all kinds of saying it's like time in the market, not timing the market. I had a finance professor that his favorite saying was, bears make money, bulls bait, make money and hogs get slaughtered. And, that's trying to, buy in at the bottom and cash out at the top. It just doesn't work that way. If you look at the markets over time and I haven't a while, but I'm sure it still probably runs true that if you're in this for 30 years, you are going to make a good return. As long as you have appropriate investment, not highly aggressive and not a highly safe, but if you're in the middle of the road and have good portfolio mix, you are going to make a decent return over a 30, 40 year period.

00:41:58
Bob
Absolutely. Again, that's where emotions are so important. Don't get emotional and panic when the market drops. Right. If you cash out, that is a loss you've lost the money. Yeah.

00:42:12
Roy
Yeah. So, so many things. But, so before we start wrapping up, I'm going to ask you, who is the, who was the favorite or the most famous most, your favorite, most famous comic that you've seen come through the comedy store?

00:42:32
Bob
That would, even though they came before me, I would probably say the most famous comic that I really love and appreciate was, Richard Pryor. Okay. His, what was humorous to us was also his life story and a lot of his pain. If you actually, read his biographies, if you read about them and stuff, an amazing person, but incredibly talented, right?

00:43:02
Roy
Yeah. He was a good one. That was back in the days when they used to release a lot of albums. I don't know that they still do that. Back in the, I guess the mid, late seventies, these comedians, they would release a full length albums with just the shows and material that they had. Yeah.

00:43:19
Bob
No, totally. It's a whole, it's a whole different world, but they've all got podcasts now. All right, Bob. Well, what is a tool that you.

00:43:28
Roy
Use in your life? And it could be personal or it could be professional, but, what is a tool or a habit or ritual something that you do every day that really adds value?

00:43:41
Bob
The thing that I do every day, and I purposely have a dog to make me do this. I get up every morning, around six or six 30, and I walk for an hour with my dog. While I'm walking, I express my gratitude and I do affirmations of welcoming in all that I want. Again, just going back to just reaffirming my gratitude for everything. That really puts me in a good frame of mind when I start my day to remember that even when I think it's terrible or something, I didn't get my favorite coffee. Right. Like I can go back and say, what? Life's actually pretty amazing. And I'm actually grateful.

00:44:21
Roy
Yeah, you're right about that. We have so many things to be thankful for and I've got the doll, I guess it's not really a blessing, but we've got the dogs too. They help us get up because after all, it's either like get up or get eaten, it makes you jump out of bed and start the day. Yep.

00:44:39
Bob
Absolutely.

00:44:42
Roy
Well, tell us about, who is your client? How can you help them? And then of course, how they can get ahold of you, but then also tell us about, the money nerve as well.

00:44:56
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. In my accounting practice, we work with everybody. I've got kids that we have now become adults from their parents. We work with a range of people. I work with a lot of entrepreneurs. I learned, I love working with people that are out there trying to create their own, impact in the world, work with a lot of retirees. And, in The Money Nerve arena, we work again with all walks of life because we all have emotions around money, depending on what stage we're at for getting older. We might be a little panicked if we're younger, we're trying to figure out what we need to do. So, anybody that has any kind of relationship with money we're going to work with? yeah. Okay. You don't have to be super rich to work with us. You just have to be nice.

00:45:46
Roy
Right? Exactly. All right. Well, how can they reach out and get ahold of you.

00:45:52
Bob
They can reach out to me at info at The Money Nerve and that's nerve, n e r v e, not nerd, I am a nerd, but it's The Money Nerve info it, The Money Nerve. They could shop, check out our website. We have a lot of resources. We've got articles, we've got tools. We've got an honest budget, quit, program. They can use, we've got a money quiz they can do just to get a sense of where their money nerves are. And, people can reach out. We, we interact with our clients and people that reach out to us.

00:46:22
Roy
I like that. The money nerd. That's a good one. All right, Bob. Well, thanks again for taking time out of your day, y'all reach out, check out Bob, go over to the money nerve and, see this good material he's got. It's never like we've talked about in this show, never too late to get started, but the earlier you can get in this and get involved the better off you're going to be. So, check it out. That's going to do it for another episode of the business of business podcast. I'm Roy, and you can find us atwww.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com. We're also on all the major social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, a LA the, video of this will go up on YouTube as well. When this episode goes live. So check us out. We're also in all the major podcast platforms, iTunes, Google, Stitcher, Spotify. If we're not one that you use, reach out, we'll be glad to get it added on.

00:47:19
Roy
Until next time, take care of yourself and take care of your business.

www.themoneynerve.com

www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com