Financial Friday's featuring Rick Webster of Renafi.com

Get ready for an exciting new podcast series: Financial Fridays! Shane Thrapp of Creating Order From Chaos kicks off the series by introducing Rick Webster from Renafi.com, a groundbreaking behavioral finance education platform tailored for individuals with ADHD. They dive deep into the emotional aspects of finance, offering invaluable insights and resources from Renafi's comprehensive courses. The conversation covers vital topics such as impulsivity, financial jargon, managing needs and wants, investment strategies, and the remarkable partnership between Renafi and the Men's ADHD Support Group. Tune in for personal anecdotes, organization hacks, and the undeniable value of face-to-face financial interactions. This thrilling start to the Financial Fridays series is a game-changer you won't want to miss!

If you're interested in checking Renafi out to see if it can help you and want to get a 50% discount, copy and paste this into your browser!  https://renafi.samcart.com/referral/renafi-homepage/7xnfFbfAXgwFqtjr

Check out our website for great blogs, information, and upcoming events! Men's ADHD Support Group Website

If you identify as male and have ADHD Join our Facebook Group!

And follow us on all of our other social media!

Our Facebook Page

Our Instagram

Our Youtube:

Our Twitter

Our TikTok

Our LinkedIn

Transcript

Shane: [00:00:00] So thank you everybody for coming. All the people who are viewing, we really appreciate the, we, the trust that you're putting in us to kind of help y'all with this guidance on money. And, we are really proud of the work that we're doing with Rick Webster offi.com.

And one of the things that we really wanted to start doing there is having more content for y'all on a more regular basis. So this is where Financial Fridays came from, and what we wanna do is monthly we're gonna have Rick, come on to live and have a conversation. And what we are going for is to have these.

Conversations, these questions and answers that Rick is going to be able to help us with. And sometimes we'll have, , repeats, but that's okay because the more we hear the, the, the similar stories, the more included we feel in knowing that we're not alone in these problems that we have. And with that, we want to kind of start really, really giving more and more resources.

So [00:01:00] with all of that being said, I want to introduce Rick Webster c e o of the Renafi. And I just wanted to really say thank you for coming on, Rick. 

Rick: No, it's great to be here, honor to be here. 

Shane: Excellent. So can you tell us a little bit about Renafi for those who don't know? 

Yeah. Renafi we're behavioral finance education platforms specifically for people with Neurodiversities at this point, that's largely ADHD Right.

In that, in that respect. So as you might imagine, our money problems, they're not very they don't seem to work out just because we create a budget, right? We, we sit down, we create a budget. We say, okay, here's all my income. Here's all my outflow. I'll tweak it a little bit. Three months later, we're not on that budget anymore.

W we, what? We don't realize it's almost invisible because like a fish and water, right? We just don't notice it cuz it's there all the time. It's our behavioral aspects that are actually our emotionally driven behavioral aspects that are causing the [00:02:00] misalignments and such that we have with our money. So, You can teach people all the academic stuff you want about money, and it'll help a little bit.

But if you don't manage the emotional aspects that under the undercurrent of that, it will fail over and over again. You may solve it in one area and then like whack-a-mole, you'll have another problem somewhere. It's like when, when people stop smoking, they start eating, right? So they just substitute one habit for another because they're not addressing the underlying reasons why they're feeling the need for those things.

So that's really what Renafi is about. We built a community. We have nine, we had six, we moved it up to nine horses that rinse, wash and repeat. So we repeat those. Each of those horses is six weeks long and we run three of 'em at a time concurrently. And one of 'em yours, right? We created one specifically for your men's club here on impulsivity, based on a pole that you ran.

And impulsivity is such a huge issue and people. I just did something impulsive. They don't realize that [00:03:00] that's the tip of the iceberg. Right? It wasn't actually impulsive. There were things that drove us to do those impulsive things. So we had nine courses. I think we had 12 different weekly events, including a book club where we reviewed different books.

We reviewed Ari Tuckman's book and worked through it. His workbook for, for the ADHD Mind. We did Atomic Habit just recently by James Clear. We basically pick a book and review it and, and work on it together in a community, in a small group. Typically 10 to 15 people in the room at the time in a Zoom room.

Excellent. And then we have a few things that don't require that much time. So like every seven weeks they pop up in some kind of rotation, like stock market basics and things like that to help people. All that doesn't. Yeah. It's in a nutshell. That's us. 

Ironically enough, actually one of the questions that we have has to do with , Working on different on the jargon that comes into investing.

Mark says that he [00:04:00] has a, a, he struggles with understanding financial concepts and jargon. He's interested in investing, but feels intimidated by the technical aspects. Yep. His quote is, I find financial information overwhelming and hard to understand. How can I educate myself on financial matters when it's hard to focus on complex information?

Rick: Well, let's start right off as an infomercial here. Join us at Renafi. That's what we do. And, but he's exactly right. You gotta get the jargon first, right? You, you are early. If you go down to the doctor, you're, you're being seen by the doctor and they throw all these kinds of medical terms at you. You don't, you have no idea what they're talking about.

They know because, , they've been to medical school and that's, that's, that's the environment they swim in. But we don't know. So it's really hard sometimes for a doctor to say, oh my gosh, I gotta talk in everyday terms. Especially when those everyday terms, maybe there isn't a term for whatever it is that is part of their jargon.

So our stock market basics class, you, you [00:05:00] led right into it, a large part of it is about that. What is a bear market? What is a bull market? What is a securities broker? What is a an et tf? What is a, what's a mutual fund? How, why is a, why is a mutual fund different than a savings account? Which, , in my area near the Silicon Valley here, a whole bunch of people found out very rudely that there's a huge difference between a mutual fund and a account savings account.

You're federally insured, mutual fund. Mutual fund. You're, you're on your own. They'll, they'll probably get 70 cents on the dollar when that, when Silicon bank dust all settles from, from the failure. So it's a huge difference. But if you don't know that, , you walk into the bank, which is a retail organization by the way.

It's just like Walmart. You walk in there and they've got these different products and you say, well, geez, why wouldn't I do the mutual fund? It gives me 5% instead of your savings account. It gives me 4%. Well, one reason's because it's riskier. Not real risky maybe. But as people at Silicon Bank just found out there is a risk.

Shane: Excellent.[00:06:00] Are there any I guess are there any books or audio books that you recommend people to read that are kind of that are simple enough to kinda start as a primer? No, 

Rick: but I, I will tell you, modern age, let's hop into that. You can open up an account with Ameritrade or with Charles Schwab for very small amounts of money.

Robin Hood's another TD Ameritrade has got one of the best educational platforms out there. You can, they have an entire library of both videos and blog posts and all kinds of things where you can learn and, and learn a lot and, and you're gonna learn better at TD Ameritrade than you are by going to Facebook or YouTube, or any of these others.

There are, it's really insidious, but social media is filled with people. First of all, they don't know what they're talking about and second, who are trying really hard to develop an audience. And so they say these outlandish things like your home is not an asset. That is absolutely [00:07:00] crazy. But the guy that says it has a lot of followers because he says something different, right?

He's, he's literally telling people a house is not an asset. I don't know what world he is living in, but he's got a lot of people following him. Starting to believe that. And, and just to clarify, in case there's somebody here like that, the house is an asset every, every step of the way. It comes with liabilities like taxes and maintenance and insurance.

It comes with liabilities. The house itself is a, is a tremendous asset. 

Shane: Yeah. I actually, I, I got talked out of a, a impulse by this this past weekend. My wife and I went on a vacation up in mass Nutton Virginia. There's a resort there, mountains and all that stuff. And of course it's a timeshare situation and.

We got it up there. And as we were sitting here looking at it and talking about all the, talking to all the different people, , one of the people that were there, they were, , they were talking about, , oh, well, I'll just, , I'll just use this and I'll probably , do a I'll Refinance the house and go ahead and, [00:08:00] and pur and purchased me something here.

And I was like, why, why would you Refinance a house to get it here? And he was like, oh, , these timeshares, they're horrifyingly expensive in my brain. I'm like, I don't feel like this one is. And so we went, we actually wound, went and talked talking to somebody and it was really interesting.

It was, so we've talked to timeshares before and it was like 8,000 $20,000 for the rest of your life, and you can pass it on to your kids. Yeah. And this one was significantly cheaper. And I was like, And in my head I'm going, okay, I cannot do the impulse buy. I cannot do the impulse buy. My wife goes, Hey, this is a good idea.

Let's do it. And I'm like, wait, okay. I'm not impulse buying this. And she's like, I know we've thought about it. This is good. This is an excellent price. I said, are you sure? Cuz I do not want this coming back at me. And she goes, no, this is really a good price. We totally need to take it up.

Cause we've been spending that much money on traveling to various parts of [00:09:00] North, North Carolina. I'd love to be able to go to Montana or something like that for the same price as staying somewhere in North Carolina. And I was like, all right, I didn't make this decision. You are making this decision with me.

Just making sure we're clear on that. And she was like, you're we're good. So if you've got spouses, y'all and, and they are the responsible one, make sure you're getting that feedback from them. 

Rick: Well, and, and you, let me re interject cuz that's mm-hmm. That's brilliant. The.

People with ADHD frequently have money problems. Money problems lead to relationship problems they uncover them at least. And in that, I think it's really super important when you're in a relationship with someone, you both need to decide because like you said, if you decided and it worked out great , that would be good.

And if it really tanked, that would be awful because that would be held over your head the rest of your life and it might have compromised your future as well as yours. Right. So, I think it is really important not to go ahead impulsively and do [00:10:00] something big without your partner being on board for that.

That's just, it's a recipe cuz there's no guarantee. So at least if it does, if it doesn't go right, at least you can both say, Hey, , okay, we both screwed up here a little bit. Let's fix it. 

Shane: Yeah. And I, I think that was one of the things that I was looking so forward to was, , I have a tendency, and I know, and, and my wife and I, she's been a hundred percent behind my back since the day we met.

And , she knew I had ADHD before I even knew it. And I think one of the things that really helped me out with that was the fact that she's never made me feel shitty for things that I've done. Yeah. It's always been a conversation like, okay, hey, what do you need from me to make sure that we're not spending money and that you still have the ability to get that outta your system every now and then.

Yeah. That's a drastically different conversation than shaming me and making me feel crappy about it. Right. It's now we're working [00:11:00] together and we're coming up with a system that I know that if I mess up, she's still going to come, come back, and we're gonna have another discussion about it. And how does this look and what is, where do we go from here?

Yep. And so all it is is literally we have a budget. She manages it. She says, you have X number of dollars that you can spend this month on whatever the hell you want. And I'm like, cool. And I immediately go out and blow it all on something. But , she also understands that sometimes there's just gonna be those circumstances where I buy something that she said that we need and she just hasn't done it yet.

And I have an itch to spend some money. Well, I know that's a need. I know that we actually have talked about it. I know we're going to get it. Yeah, I'll go ahead and do it now and I'll make sure to put it in a budget. Yeah, I have a, I have an alert from my bank every time I do it, , and I edit it so it goes into, put into budget and I get an alarm from that, from my website or from my email.

Rick: We have needs and we have wants. Mm-hmm. And there's a. [00:12:00] Gray area in between, right? It's shifting from is it a need to, a want? And the problem comes with, with ADHD decision making we've, for everybody really, is that there's a needle in between and it shifts.

So what was a need is probably gonna stay a need, but what was a want suddenly moves over toward the, oh, I really need this now. Mm-hmm. And, and we rationalize it and then, , it all happens in a flash. And then we come home with the thing, and then we find out from our partner that, no, that was a want and we couldn't afford it.

Now we got a big problem. But, but, but just realize that that's, that's a, that's a behavioral thing also. It's a decision. It's, it's a where are you putting your priorities and that needle will shift based on the pressures you're under, especially if you're depressed or anxious. 

Shane: Yeah. That is, that is 100% true.

There are definitely some days. Like all everybody with ADHD, we have cyclical emotional outputs and inputs and how we're feeling. And so just some days when I'm just like, and Amazon's doing that thing and I get a [00:13:00] little alert on Facebook, oh, hey, buy this shiny. I'm like, Ooh, look at that. Shiny. And I'm kind of like, honey, I feel bad today.

And she's like, no. Oh my God. So kinda continuing on. Again, for those in the chat, if you have a question, feel free to put it in, on the chat or raise your hand. 

Rick: I gotta put it out there first. I'm not a financial advisor, so I really can't advise you on those sorts of things. So I, I, unfortunately that's not my lane. And one thing I have learned over the course of my life is, somebody said, Everybody, including me, has an opinion on everything. Right? And I certainly do.

I have an opinion on everything, but there's only a few things that I'm informed upon. And so I try to stress, try to stay in that lane. 

Tom: Well, thank you, ed. A lot of this I understand about not being a financial advisor. 

What I am saying is that it's a customer service problem because I got like this [00:14:00] shell game where there was a local advisor, and then suddenly your account is now being serviced by Matt Mullen in our St.

Louis headquarters office and. I call and I call again, and it's like I'm shouting into a void. And he did return one call and said, what do you want from me? And it was just a matter of saying, I don't, I, I don't mesh with them at all. 

Rick: Well, the one piece of that I see in there that I can answer, you can absolutely transfer your account.

Your retirement account can be transferred within the company. It can be transferred to another company entirely long as you don't take possession of that money. You can transfer it anywhere you want to. And they are the ones that would facilitate that. Your, your new entity and the old entity, they just work it out, right, which gets transferred from one to the other.

Sometimes there are some fees, [00:15:00] but they're, they're, they're not allowed to be more than the cost would be expected to be. So they're always reasonable. So I don't know if that that helps at all, but you, you can, that, that, that does, 

Tom: because I just feel like, and Shane would be able to address this too, of trying to have a conversation on the phone, being an ADHD person and all of the distractions as you're trying to get an answer about how things work, that having a face-to-face interaction with someone local, I just would feel so much emotionally better about that.

Rick: Yeah, no, no, and I understand that. So means you are going to have to get that account pulled back from wherever they sent it to and move back to somebody that's local and it says, sounds like your local broker, or they transferred it out, so you'd have to actually bring it back in. One of the, let me just talk about [00:16:00] customer service for a minute, because it's, Gone downhill, right?

It's a lot different than it was 40 years ago. So realize that there are, in most banking institutions, like, like JP Morgan Chase or Wells Fargo, bfa, there are three basic levels of customer service. There are more, I'm sure, but there are three. There's tier one. That's the person who has almost no authority to do anything.

They can forgive two late fees a year. They can forgive a couple. Bounce checks. Two, two per year. The fees on those, they can do really small stuff. They can't do a lot more, they don't necessarily tell you they can't do more. They just say, oh, we can't do that. So when you run up against that, we can't do that.

But you think they should be able to do that. You ask to be escalated. They know what escalation means, and it's the same thing as asking me to talk to a manager. It's exactly the same thing. They'll move you into tier two. And tier two customer service people have a bigger playbook. They have more authority, and Tier three has the most [00:17:00] authority of all of anybody you're actually probably gonna end up talking to at the bank, right?

Unless you've got a hundred million problems. But the fact is, if tier one, two, and three, tier three has the biggest playbook, they're authorized to do a lot of things way more than tier one. So if you're not getting where you want, don't just argue with the person. They're just paid by the hour.

It's not their fault. Just ask to be escalated and get up into tier three, and you will, you'll find somebody who's nicer, who's less stressed. Believe me, tier one is a horrible job to have because everybody calls up yelling, right? Everybody's mad by the time they get through the 45 minute wait on hold and all the phone tree stuff.

So tier three, they're dealing with people who are a little upset, but they've moved up the ladder, so they're more optimistic. And so tier three people get to talk to. , people that are friendlier and nicer and, and more calm and legitimately they have a lot more authority. So if you're trying to do something and you're being told no, , for your [00:18:00] audience, everybody, not just, not just Utah, but everybody watching this, just ask to be, don't get upset, just ask to be escalated.

A ask to talk to a manager. Escalated. 

Shane: Yeah. And the other thing is kind of look in your area. I use Edward Jones and I'm not, I'm not, , advocating for them or anything like that, but Edward Jones has local offices all over the United States, right? And I, I'm the same way. Like, if I can't go in person to talk to them about the money and things like that, that I'm working on, then I at least want a company that will do a video call with me.

If I can't find a company, they'll at least do a video call with me. They, they're not getting my business, like in today's age age, like, if you can't do a video call, you're just not, you're not keeping em with the times. And then of course, my paranoia goes into fact as how are you treating my money?

Right. Are you still doing old? What is what was it what was the old stock of that? Ready? Oh. Sears and robots? Or are you actually looking at the New age? New age of stocks and kind of making sure I'm staying up to date on that stuff. Mm-hmm. I wanna [00:19:00] jump into another thank you question that I have.

Thank you Tom. Thank you. One, this one is from a guy named John. He says that he keeps forgetting to pay his bills on time. He keeps dealing with the late fees and penalties that he's accumulating, and what he said was, I struggled with keeping track of the bills under due dates. Can you suggest any tips to help me stay organized and avoid missing the payments?

Rick: Well, I'm gonna say this so many times. I don't make any of my payments. I don't make any of them. They're all automated. They're all automated either on a credit card or a debit card. And I'll explain why credit card is better, but the, they're all automated.

I don't pay my utility bill. They take it out of my credit card and that's just all there is. And then what the part I do take care of is I go in periodically and I pay my card back down to zero cuz I wanna keep it there. I, I don't feel like paying 18% for to borrow money. That's, that seems crazy to me.

So I keep it at zero, as close as I can and [00:20:00] it's all automated. So now I'm getting out of the realm of doing and getting into the realm of overseeing. I'm not putting a stamp on a check and sending it out. Right. I'm not doing that anymore. I'm not spending an hour doing that. I'm spending three minutes overseeing, make sure that okay, the credit card expired.

I have to change a couple things and straighten it out though. There's little things you have to do to oversee it. But I would say, and this is what we talk about when we talk about the d ADHD tax. It's not a literal tax from the government, but it's a tax of late fees and penalties and missed opportunities and jobs that we've lost at all these different things that are happening because of the ADHD issues that go on with our executive function, offshore, all that stuff.

I don't need to tax my, my executive function trying to remember to send my utility bill out. I don't need to do that. A computer can do it much better than I can and if everything, if a computer can do it, let it do it. Right? So automate all these different things. I do wanna say really quickly, [00:21:00] cuz I'm sure some people are saying, well why would I do it on a credit card?

I was always told to cut up my credit cards and get rid of 'em cuz they're horrible and I don't believe that. I think that credit cards are really valuable tools. If you wanna live in the modern world. The only problem with the credit card is when people begin to think it's their money. It's convenient.

You can put your bills on it. You can buy stuff at the store. You go home and you pay it off. You pay it down to zero. When it becomes a problem is when you buy something for $700, $700 worth of pleasure, you pay $20 worth of pain. The minimum payment? Well, that's a pretty good deal. Your, your brain says, Hey, $700 worth of pleasure, $20 worth of pain.

I'll do that over and over and over again. Right up to my credit limit. And now I've got the withdrawal symptoms. Cause I'm stuck with a $500 a month payment forever. And I can't keep getting the, the, the rush I was getting from buying things. So if you treat the credit card is not your money, keep it down to zero.

Realize its convenience. They're incredibly good tools. The reason [00:22:00] the credit card is better than your bank account for paying your bills primarily, there's other, there's reasons, but primarily if it's a checking account, you gotta have money in there. For your utility bill to get paid. Otherwise, you're gonna pay a late fee to the utility company and a bounce check fee to the bank.

They've gotten a little better than that recently, but basically you could pay two late fees and the thing wouldn't be paid. So you've still got a problem. If you have a credit card with a $4,000 limit and your're keeping it at zero, your utility bill is always gonna get paid. Whether you think about it or not, it's always gonna get paid.

So all you have to worry about is making sure that the card doesn't expire right, which it will every three or four years. So the credit card is a better vehicle. Now caveat is if, if it's a loan, like a car loan, a real estate loan by regulation, they can't collect those payments on a credit card. So you'll have to put that on a, on a checking account or some kind of demand account where you actually have the money.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. [00:23:00] Yeah. 

Shane: So one of the big things that I always work with my clients is the ADHD life coach is really. Try to make sure I am at least doing my best to track what I spent last month, right? I don't my time blindness in, in the time horizon that we deal with, with h adhd, it's very difficult for me to like, keep a history without being able to like literally go back month by month on my budget that my wife puts together.

But what we do do is like the things that are monthly payments, we have it and that money, no matter what is being pulled outta the check and put into our our, our charge account for that. And that goes to a credit card, right? And, and it, whatever is on that thing, it pays off that credit card at in the month.

And if we've got anything extra, we have a discussion about it, right? Did we sign up to a new thing? Did we, , did, was there, did we spend more money on this thing than we normally would? But we know that [00:24:00] every month we have X number of dollars that are going to come out for these bills and they're all set to go to that one credit card.

And thank you by the way, cuz you told us that about three months ago and I put it in place immediately. And so, but since we did that though, , , cuz we were using debit originally, we've really been able to make sure that the rolling credit and I've already seen a 20 point bump on my credit score from doing it.

Yep. That's another reason. And and like, I'm like, okay, cool. Also just had my debt paid off or part of my debt paid off for college loan. So also gonna throw that one in there too. Yep. So I wanna kinda move on from there. Cause I want, there's a couple other questions that I saw. First off, does anybody in the on the video, oh Vic, you have your hand raised.

What do you got? 

Victor: I was gonna say one thing I've done I do have automatic payments coming out, but they're coming outta my chicken account. So I have a dry erase board and it's, , it's a monthly dry erase board and I just wrote, , one through 31 and I put [00:25:00] down what day each automatic payment mm-hmm.

Come out so that way I can make sure and pay attention to my checking account. I still have enough money in there for the 15th when this comes out, even though my paycheck switches and I gotta look, my paycheck's coming on the, on the 12th. Okay. One's coming out on the, on the 10th, shit, I need to make sure there's still $120 in there on the 10th because I don't get paid to the 12th, , so that's one of the thing.

But I like the idea of of, of doing it on a credit card, , cause like I finally got, I've been avoiding a credit card for so long and I finally got one and I've been decent with it luckily so far, but no, I like that idea of, of, of just paying down the credit card to zero. 

Rick: Mm-hmm. And, and let me respond to some of that because you'll be perfectly okay with the credit card as long as you keep top of mind that it's not your money, right?

It's just there for convenience and you got 25 days to pay it off with zero interest, right? So you don't even have to pay for that convenience if you get a card with no annual fee. Of course. I think of [00:26:00] what you just said really as a reservoir, right? I, I live in California, right? We have droughts, so we have snowpack and we have a reservoir system, and then it feeds into, , all of our municipalities.

So if you have a reservoir of a $4,000 sitting in your checking account, it would be the same as the credit card with a $4,000 limit because, , whatever comes through that you've authorized will be paid without you worrying about you have enough. Even if you didn't make enough last month, you've got a reservoir, right?

My issue is why would I keep $4,000 dormant in a checking account? When I can have the reservoir effectively the same being a credit line, right? I, I don't keep, I, I don't keep hardly anything in the checking account. I keep a tiny little bit just because it's useful to me, but I, I keep my money in an investment account, right?

Which I can two day settlement period, I could have my money back. But it's also, it's a nice ADHD thing because I can't just impulsively hand somebody my [00:27:00] debit card and spend $2,000, cuz I don't have $2,000 in there, right? Could give them the credit card. But I'm gonna think, well, can I really pay that off?

I don't know if I want to, if it's a big purchase and I really want it, I can wait two days for the settlement period for some security to get sold and for it to be back in my checking account. And during that two days that I'm waiting, I just might cool off and say, , I really don't need that.

And that's a big deal about impulsive fending too. We, we might get into that, I don't know, but the, the idea of implementing a pause is absolutely huge. Our. Emotional mind in, in a sense thinks in pictures, it sinks in a flash, whereas our rational mind thinks in words it's much slower like the speed of sound.

So if we can pause before we make some impulsive decision, it gives our rational mind time to catch up and to say, nah, it's not such a good decision. Or maybe we should, , find another way to solve this problem. So bunch of different things in there. But if, if it's working for you, if the check [00:28:00] account's working for you, I have no problem with it.

I just know for myself, I don't wanna keep $4,000 in and I don't wanna bounce any checks. So I'd rather use the credit card and the credit cards. Got little things like, , Perks. It has perks. It's got fraud protection, which checking accounts do too now. But there's a lot of things that go along with that that you gain, including the 20 point rise in your credit because you've used the credit paid off.

Used the credit paid off. That's that's a good sign. Yeah. 

Shane: So, all right. I wanna move to another question cuz this kind of goes in line with what you were just talking about. David messaged us and he says that he's having trouble saving money. He feels like he's constantly living paycheck to paycheck and he keeps having an issue with impulse buying.

He's like he says that I'm struggling to save money and I know that it's important. Can you set any, suggest, any tips for setting aside money for emergencies that I can't use for impulse spy uhhuh? Oh, I like that question actually. That's kind of a twofer. [00:29:00] Yep. 

Rick: Very simple mantra to B plant in your head.

Pay yourself first. That is the complete answer to that. So you're getting, you're working somewhere. I'm, I'm just gonna make assumptions, but we can change this any way you want to. You're working somewhere. You're a W2 worker, you're getting a paycheck, you're getting $4,000 a month, let's just say net. So you, if you say, , if I have $200 left over at the end of the month, I'll save it.

Well, we don't, we don't have any money left over at the end of the month. But if you say to your employer, wherever the money's coming from, and you can do it yourself if you want, but you say, what, don't send me $4,000. Send me $3,800 and put $200 in my retirement account, or put $200 into my securities account, or wherever it is, right?

They'll do that. Most employers can do that. So when you pay yourself first, you will learn how to live on the 3,800 and still, you won't have anything left over at the end of the month maybe, but you've saved 200 bucks. If you save what's left over, I guarantee it won't work. It won't work very well. It, it will.[00:30:00] 

It might, we can use self-discipline for a while, but self-discipline is a short-term energy source, so to speak. If you're trying to live your life by self-discipline, it's you're white knuckling it and it's no fun. Right? You're always kind of discipline yourself and say, no, you can't do that. It's just no fun.

Pay yourself first. Make it invisible. Make it regular and consistent and send it into an account, which you can get the money back if you really need it, but it's a few steps to get it back. It's not in your checking account. 

Shane: Yeah. Work harder. Yeah. My wife actually set this up for us because when I lost my job in 2018, we knew that we had to really put a good nest egg back because of no job.

And then of course, in December we found out that she was pregnant with twins. Well, January and like it was really important that we needed to save money because we just had a lot of different things we needed to make sure that it was happening. And then of course, kids are [00:31:00] born at 27 weeks, so now there's an even more important necessity for having the finances to be able to cover the costs for just whatever would happen from there.

Now, what she did was set it up through her company, through her payroll, where it rolled into a savings account that cannot be accessed online. We can't transfer money online. We can't do anything with it online. It has to be an in-person transaction at the bank through the drive-through or whatever, and $500 if her check goes into that account and we can't touch it.

And so we live off the, , the rest of the money minus that $500. Yeah. And it's a, it is an emergency fund. That's exactly what it's there for. It is, , it is. Accruing interest. Not a whole lot of interest, but it's better than nothing. And it's just there for safety sake. And if it hits a certain amount, that money gets shifted into the Art Edward Jones account, which then [00:32:00] it's put, it's invested for us.

And now we have even more percentage coming back on it. Well, not the, not last year, but this year we're having somebody coming back here from it. So we have like, , the standard six months of survival, and then after that it goes into the Edward Jones. And I think that that's been one of the biggest benefits to that advice that you just gave for us, is just going through the payroll and letting, letting them take care of it.

Rick: Yep. And, and putting a step between you and the money is a really good one. You, it's your money. You will get it back, you get the return from it. But if it's a little bit difficult, you're gonna think before you do it, which I think is really important. I, I don't know if I misheard or not, but, And maybe I gave you better advice if, if, if you, if you have the six months worth of, of income replacement, we call it, it's really minimal living expenses, but income, it really shouldn't be in a savings deposit bank account anymore.

It should be in a stable and conservative and non-volatile [00:33:00] investment account. You'll go from getting 3% to four to 6% with almost no extra risk. Cause, cause six months of income, that, that's a chunk of money, right? So you, you begin to pay attention to the amount of return. It's giving you a thousand dollars emergency fund in your checking account.

You don't care about the interest. You just need to know it's available to you instantly. And, and by the way, another misnomer, they sometimes call that three to six months of income replacement. An emergency fund. It's not an emergency fund, it's reserves for replacement. Emergency is like, your car breaks down, I gotta fix it.

Income replacement is a longer term kind of thing. And so you have a reservoir against that. So you're, you're taking that money and you wanna, it's a bigger chunk, so you wanna make sure it's getting you somewhere. This all comes back to another mantra. It's one of the things that, again, at Renafi that we do is lots of little mantras.

Once you learn them in your head, they're like pictures. A thousand words, right? We should all be thinking about stability before growth. It doesn't matter [00:34:00] how to climb, how fast you climb the ladder, if you fall off right. You need stability. You, you can't just build vertically, you gotta build with safety nets and with whatever it takes.

So the, so that the progress you make is solidified and you won't slide backwards too much. A lot of people with ADHD were really good at whatever we do, right, business wise or whatever, and we build vertically and we have no. We're the single point of failure in our businesses frequently. So you really wanna build in stability in, in your life, especially, well, everything, but, but finances for sure.

A lot of people depend on your, I don't care. Even if you're single, there's a lot of people in your environment that depend on you not crashing and burning. So especially if you've got kids or you've got older parents or whatever happens to be. But even if you're single, this, I don't know it, it's the airline's Got it.

Right. Put your own oxygen mask on first, get stable and then you can help other people. If you're not stable, you're gonna be a burden to [00:35:00] other people. Yeah. 

Shane: So it's, it's essentially living expenses. It's like whatever our, our, our natural living expenses, we've got about six months of that. It's about five months of that.

Yeah. And then anything extra after that, it goes into the savings or it goes into the stock account that we have with Edward Jones. Yeah. Tom had asked the question, how many months of expenses should be covered by an emergency fund? But you kinda answered that, but well, I'll go, 

Rick: I'll take a slightly deeper dive on it.

The, the general rule of thumb, and it's so generalized, I don't know if it's worthwhile, but they say three to six months, and they're not really talking about income replacement. They're talking about minimal living expenses. So maybe you're living on five, but you could live on four comfortably. So four is your number, even if you're making 8,000 a month.

So you want three to six months worth, the more stable your income is if you're working for the post office, you've been there for 15 years, everybody's happy with you, you've got a great retirement fund and, and insurance and all that. Maybe you only need two or three months. But if you're [00:36:00] self-employed, if you're a therapist or a coach or something and your income is highly volatile or a real estate agent or, or an attorney, maybe you.

Three to six months worth. If you're gonna start your own business, maybe you'd better have 24 months. So you really gotta look at your own situation as, as it sits. But the general idea is three to six months, myself it's just a, it's just almost an imaginary line. You're gonna keep saving. It's your money, right?

You, you want to accumulate that, but then you wanna continue to accumulate at some point, you want your investments to be able to pay for all of your living expenses without capitalize, without compromising the capital. We call that simplistic terms. We call it financial freedom day. The day you could put your job and all your bills would get paid, and then you're truly working at what you wanna work at instead of what you have to work at.

Shane: Tom asked to kind of go back over what you were saying about instead of a, a savings account. Where would he find the, the other account that you were talking about? 

Rick: Well, I, I'm gonna speak for myself. [00:37:00] I keep a very small amount, like a thousand dollars a little bit. What more than that? Cause I have some loan payments paid out of it, but I, I keep very little in the checking account cuz it doesn't pay me any interest.

It's just there in case I desperately need it and I need it instantly after that, for bigger number, bigger money, , four, five, 6,000, 50,000, whatever happens to be, I'm gonna put that in a conservative. And if it's reserved for replacement, non-volatile investment account, and I'm gonna put it specifically in an E T F, which is an exchange traded fund and I, not a financial advisory, can't tell you which one to get, but they're, they're, they're out there.

Just Google it. So, or if you're a TD Ameritrade or Charles Schwab, , just, they have plenty of research on these things. That's where my money would go. I don't actually consider the stock market investment. I, I really don't. I, I, it, it's a place to park money until I want to invest it somewhere. So I'm gonna park it there in a conservative.

Non-volatile, if it's reserves, volatile, if it's not reserves, because volatility will give you a higher [00:38:00] return. Volatility is not a measure of risk, it's a matter of up and downness. So I'm just gonna, I'm gonna keep it there and I'll get probably four to 6% in this market right now. If I'm definitely want it fairly quickly, I may just be lazy and put it into a TBI and that I can get, , four and a half percent on that.

So that's, that's really where it goes. Once it's in an, in a, in a securities account, it's really depends what its use is that maybe I, if it's reserves, I want it non-volatile, right? A lot of people had money for their reserves when covid hit until all of a sudden 40 million people are out of work, they want their money.

But there's a lot of things going on in the economy. The market was down 30 or 35% if they were in a volatile investment. Now they're selling their reserves off at 70 cents on the dollar to pay their rent. It's a, , you, if it's, if it's a reservoir of money, make sure it's not volatile, not very volatile, [00:39:00] very, , just things that are level, straightened level.

And if you're beyond that number, then you start looking at volatility because volatile investments actually return a little higher rate, which makes sense, right? Retired people don't want volatility. There's fewer, fewer dollars going into that. But again, you, you're never gonna beat that market, right?

If, if you're, if you're truly in investing, which will be the next step past that, you're gonna invest in something, , right? If companies, if h high tech, maybe you invest in a startup, maybe you buy some real estate, maybe you buy some artwork or a classic car, whatever it is that, that's where you would invest money.

And the, the stock market, I don't wanna belabor it too much, but it's, it's what they call a perfect market. Everybody has all the information, all the time. You cannot beat that market, you will get the return that that market delivers, and you cannot change that. So it's, it's kind of not an investment in, in that sense, you, you'll get whatever the market returns, you literally can't do it if, if you, [00:40:00] if you do beat it, they, this, the s e c will be looking down your, down your neck.

Right? Because they know it can't be beat. And that's how they find people who are cheating is the, they're beating the market. They know that. Yeah. All right. 

Shane: So we're getting to that time that we wanted to talk about. So Rick, could you go over the you kind of hinted on a little bit earlier, but could you go over the course that you've designed for the men's h ADHD support group?

Rick: We're actually pretty excited about it. At first it was like, okay, we gotta do this and we gotta do it by a certain amount of time and we'll figure it out. Cuz that's, that's what we do. And, and we wanted to do it with you guys. Got into it the more exciting it got. So but anyway, we're, we we're. We have courses, as I mentioned in the beginning we are creating a course for impulsivity.

We're calling it a blueprint for success. I always like to frame it in the positive way, although impulsivity, tanks a lot of our plans, right? Because that's the whole point, right? We have a plan and then we impulsively do something that wasn't in the plan. So people experience [00:41:00] impulsivity in a lot of different ways, and I, I think it's not very well understood.

And then since we do behavioral finance, , that's, that's our wheelhouse. People make kind of reckless decisions. They precipitate arguments, they engage in risky behaviors without looking at what's happening in the long run. Right? We pursue immediate rewards of dubious value sometimes at the cost of much larger future benefits that we might have had, right?

So I think that. That's, that's the core of, of this. What we are, are doing is we're gonna get down to the root causes of that. You can't just say, I'm not gonna spend money impulsively anymore. You, you, if that worked, you would've had, you would've learned that when you were 18 and stopped. Right. The first time you did something horrible, you would've stopped.

But it doesn't work that way because we are actually rewarded for our impulsive decisions. It's a little bit like a, it's like a narcotic shot in the arm, right? It makes you feel really good for whatever reason. I [00:42:00] don't actually know, but that, but that people that use narcotics, there's a rush to it. And that's what we get when we impulsively buy something.

But it compromises our future because now we don't have that money available to us for anything else. We, we don't have it available for our kids' college tuition. We can't take a vacation. We, we've depended upon social security, which is probably inadequate, , if we haven't saved money. So that's really what we're at.

We're, we're looking at. The deeper causes and helping people really understand, I'm all, I'm all about mindfulness. We, we can't, we're oblivious until we're not, right? We, we can't solve a problem if we're not aware of it, but if we're aware of what the fundamental issues that are going into our impulsivity, right?

You, you, , Hey, I was at work and the boss yelled at me and someone cut me off on the freeway and now I'm home and I think I'm gonna eat the entire chocolate cake in the refrigerator. That's not an impulsive decision. It might seem like it, but it started way back upstream. So what we're gonna be looking at is what's happening up in [00:43:00] upstream for you that led you to this one thing, right?

If someone buys a $700 kayak that they didn't know they wanted it in the morning, they could probably look back a couple days and see a cascade of events that led them to that weakness or whatever you want to call it. So that, that's really what we're doing. I, I'm, I'm pretty excited about it and we are also.

Because we really do wanna support you guys, and I think this is, I was delighted. Mark came up to me at the, at the Dallas conference and talked to me a little bit about it. And I love the concept of what you guys are doing. We are, we're gonna do two things financially because we know a lot of the people, I mean, the whole point of us is to stay cheap because I don't wanna be the $5,000 month coach.

It's just not what I wanna beat. I'd rather coach a lot of people for a smaller amount of money. It's like, , do I wanna sell bottles of ketchup or yachts? Right. I'm, I'm a ketchup guy, I guess. But the, the we're gonna do two things. One, we've got a, a promo code called the Men's Club. And Shane, I dunno if you've got it, I can type it in if you want, but if you put [00:44:00] that promo code in when you're signing up with us you.

You'll get Renafi at half the price for the first, first cycle of your membership. And then secondly, we're gonna contribute a, a portion of all those proceeds back to the men's club to help support them. I, I know what it's like to be in the nonprofit. I mean, it's, it's really hard to, to , constantly be out there looking for money and stuff.

So we hope to be kind of a, probably small but a stream of, of income for you guys that you can count on. Yeah. And that would be for the lifetime of the membership. , if you've got a membership and our members, we have a pretty low churn rate. If you're, if you stick it out with us for two years, Ben's club gets compensated for that the entire two years.

I will talk about pricing. It's a, the coupon and you can give that to anybody, right? So it can be used over and over and over again, but it's only one time per account. So if you've got a friend who could use this, you could give them this, this number. What we have is the subscription, which [00:45:00] you can pay for one month or two months or five months, and you obviously save money if you, , I think it's $22 for one month, and if you buy the five month thing, it's like $17 a month.

So it's cheaper, but I'm not quite sure how to articulate it simply. But the coupon's good for one shot, right? So if you use it on five months, use it on one month, it's, , different. So anyway, I don't, I I, I think I strangled that one. Hopefully I got it across. I, I'm not sure if I did or not. If anybody didn't understand, just tell me and I see.

Shane: Yeah. So essentially what it is, when you sign up, it'll work the one time for your one account and you'll be able to both A, get some help with Rick and Renafi and be able to, , really start to get a handle on your finances and b, able to help men's h ADHD support group as well, which we really, really appreciate.

 All right. So I just wanna sit here and say thank you, Rick. I really appreciate you coming on again, everyone, we are going to be doing these every Friday at 7:00 PM and , this is going [00:46:00] to be a new thing that we're offering to the Men's ADHD support group.

For those of y'all who signed up and weren't able to make it, I'm gonna send out an email with the promo code and, the other information that you need. And I really look forward and I hope that we are able to continue this partnership going on. Rick, I really appreciate all of the work you're doing.

Rick: Appreciate you having having me here. Thank you.