Define Your Enough | Daniel Yerger | Growing Money with Sean Trace

This episode got personal in the best way. 

Talking with Daniel Yerger, I kept coming back to this idea that nobody actually wants money for the sake of money. What we really want is the life it allows us to live. We broke down why financial anxiety often has nothing to do with numbers and everything to do with deeper fears, and why even people who “have enough” still struggle to feel secure. The biggest takeaway for me was this simple but powerful question: if money wasn’t the issue, what would you actually do with your time? That question alone can change everything.

If money wasn’t a concern at all, what would your life actually look like tomorrow?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I think people use money as a measuring stick, and this sort of comes back to the the problem of the moving goalpost, but they essentially think of it as something that will make a change in their life. Um and and there are certain thresholds to this, right? There are plenty of people in the world that do not have enough money, right? Where they do not enjoy an abundance. They they suffer from a scarcity. And that scarcity is real in their life, right? It means that their children go without healthcare, it means that they skip meals, it means that sometimes the power goes out. Um so I want to be cautious when I when I then go on to say that money doesn't fix many problems. Um, for somebody living in scarcity, it will solve an enormous amount of their very real tangible problems. But money is not going to give you a better relationship with your children. Money is not going to buy back time with your parents before they pass away. Uh, you know, money can buy experiences, money can buy possessions, but it cannot replace the human element. There is no amount of money that buys a good relationship, that buys a good life experience beyond the tangible affects of it. Um, and so that's something where, you know, for a lot of people, when they come to us and say, you know, I worried that I'm not gonna be able to retire, or I'm worried about, you know, sending my kid to college or whatever it is, what they're usually expressing is not actually a financial anxiety. It's a deeper anxiety or it's a deeper sense of insecurity about this particular problem in their life. And money is not already answering that problem for them.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Well, welcome everybody back to the Growing Money with Sean Trace Podcast. I have a really awesome guest with me today. Would you like to tell people who you are and a little bit about what you do?

SPEAKER_00 1:38

I'm Dr. Dan Jurger. I am the president of My Wealth Planners, a fee-only financial planning firm in Longmont, Colorado. Uh, and in my spare time, I like to do research on financial planning models.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Which is kind of awesome. Like you're actually the first uh doctor uh uh of financial planning, like the person who, you know, probably the most highly educated guest I've had, which is pretty rad because you've studied financial planning at like the doctoral level and practiced it in the real world. And where do you think that academic definition of wealth misses the human definition? Do they match up all the time or are they far different?

SPEAKER_00 2:14

I think a challenge uh of academia in financial planning is that uh we we have borrowed a lot of our foundations of academic research from fields like economics, traditional finance, uh, psychology, those areas. And all of these areas have a deep and abiding respect for large data sets going out there and you know, making sure you've got 5,000 people in your sample or something like that. Uh, and that's very helpful for statistic validity. It's helpful for replication, reliability, all sorts of things in the practice of academia. But the challenge is that financial planning is a uniquely individual activity. Uh, and so I think you know, there's a challenging line to walk between doing studies where you can apply it to large representative stuff uh you know, cohorts of the population of a certain country or certain region, and remembering that financial planning is a uniquely individualistic activity.

SPEAKER_01 3:04

I I think that's so interesting because one of my guests last night, we talked about how money is very unique for each person, you know, what their values are, what they want to be spending it on, is so unique. And no two people are the same. You know, one person I saw this one guy on on uh Instagram who was super interesting. He uh was a uh in the fire movement and he was living out of a one of the coolest camper vans I've ever seen in my life that he built himself, and I was just like, that's that's rad. But I if I tried to talk my wife into living in a camper van, she'd kill me. And it's just not you know the thing. And and like, you know, you also for our family, like when I moved to Southeast Asia, one of the things that I we had these cultural misses at times, because for me, I'm I'm super thrifty and I like to spend on experiences and things like that. But my wife's family loves meals, like they're a big, you know, dinner is a cultural thing. And like they will try to find time to have these big meals. And I was just like, why do we have these big meals? And like what she explained to me finally was like, they budget for it, they save up for it because it's part of their social fabric. It is one of the most important things for them. And that's one of the points that like, I mean, these are small examples, but they compound into bigger things that, you know, money is a very unique and personal thing, and our relationship is even more so.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

Certainly. And I think that's something where, you know, whether it's cultural, whether it's at the family level, uh, you know, money is not defined the same way for everybody. You know, there's a technical definition of what money is, but everybody has unique experience with it. Uh, and something like, you know, what you might think of as uh maybe silly, right? You, oh, we're gonna, we're gonna save or budget or spend so much on these family meals might be the most important money somebody spends. And I think the the unique challenge of financial planning sometimes is recogni you know, reconciling somebody's unique individual goals with the technical mathematical reality of what their means provide.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

That that's interesting. Well, you know, one of the things too is when I was looking at your your um bio, and you you one of the things that popped up again and again and again, and I've heard other people talk about it, but your your your your bio and post were talking about a lot was like fiduciary responsibility. And, you know, at a deeper level, what does it actually mean to hold someone's financial future in your hands? Because there's a lot of faith and a lot of trust. And we uh can I sidetrack for a second? I had um someone helping my wife with her music and music distribution, and we just found that they were helping her, but also not doing what was most optimal for her. And now I'm having to pick up the pieces and fix that situation because my wife trusted someone. And I was like, We, you know, and she's like, Well, he's a friend. And I said, Okay, I like friends, but you know, can we be clear that this person has your best interest in mind? And I wish that in other areas as well that there were people that had, you know, those types of responsibilities to keep other people's best interest in mind. But talk to me about fiduciary responsibility, if you wouldn't mind now.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

So I'll I'll be interested to sort of return to your uh your sidetrack here in a moment. But uh, you know, to answer your question, I think the best framing of this that I've actually seen and looked at is sort of a definition that's a work done by uh Dr. Stuart Heckman out of Texas Tech. Um and he makes the argument that financial welfare is both financial measured in monetary terms, but is also a health impacting thing. And we see this in reality uh in both literal physical health, and we also see this in social, cultural, psychological health, right? Uh, you know, money is a leading cause for divorce, a leading cause for suicidality or suicidal ideation. Stress literally has been shown to measurably reduce your life expectancy and increase uh things like blood pressure and have harmful effects on a number of kind of medical markers. And so it's an interesting thing because when we think about fiduciary responsibility and we think about the idea of holding somebody's financial future in our hands as financial planners, as you know, financial professionals or professionals of another type, what we often do is skip to the finite point. We say, you know, I'm I'm responsible for your finances. Fine. But to have a fiduciary obligation to somebody is to place their interest before yours, to act with a duty of loyalty and a duty of care. And that duty of care is interesting because you might think that if your primary responsibility is solely financial, that that would mean that your primary responsibility is largely just to maximize wealth outcomes, to, you know, get the best returns, to have the most money and so on. But I think functionally, that misses the point that money is just a mechanism for life. It is a way of measuring value and being able to exchange value without having to, you know, trade uh sheep and chickens for you know podcast editing. So, you know, in that context, it's really more of a responsibility to ensure that people are able to live a best life, to have a high quality of life, to obtain both practical and pragmatic, realistic things they need in life, but also to help facilitate a best life as they personally define it.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

That's awesome. I uh, you know, I think that if we can get more people that are on that page, it's it's phenomenal because there are people that don't have that best interest in mind, or there is an agenda, you know. And I think one of the things too that continues to pop up for me, and this is something that there is the educational component as well, like because you're not just like you are there to not just work with people on maximizing the numbers. If if we could all just hear the numbers and know this is what I'm supposed to be doing, it would be everyone would be in great financial shape. But the reality is we all have those, those, those challenges. You know, I was I was a kids teacher, and I can tell you that if you leave a bag of candy on a table in a kid children's classroom, it's gonna be gone. You like, you know, it'll they'll come back in and they'll just be like, ooh, I'll be like, hey guys, don't touch this. Uh I'll come back and then half of them will be eaten, and half the kids will be looking at me in a guilty way. Um the reality is is that you know, we we have to process some of these things. And like one of the things I was thinking about too is there's a difference between being rich and being financially secure, you know, and how can you help clients understand that difference before they chase the wrong target? Because for me, you know, I'm building my media company, and my daughter's like, Do you want to be a billionaire? And I was like, No way, actually. I want to be like at this place where I have enough. And she's like, Well, what does enough look like? And I said, Enough for me. And then I froze up and I was thinking about it and I was like, I got to think about what is enough, you know, because I don't need to be Elon Musk. I don't need that level of stress because that's a lot of work. But I want to spend more time with my family. And so I was starting to kind of define that. But how do you help clients understand the difference before they chase the wrong targets, you know?

SPEAKER_00 10:25

Yeah. I think the the first thing is to recognize that most people don't measure their goals in terms of just getting getting rich, right? I don't think I've ever had somebody come to me as a financial planner and say, Dan, I want more money and that that is my goal. Uh and I used to have this sort of uh tongue-in-cheek uh, you know, uh metaphor that I would put in front of clients. Uh, and I and I would say, you know, we're not dragons. Uh yeah. And when I say that, what I mean is, you know, if I gave you a choice between have$10 million or live your life adequately in the way that you would like to live your life for the rest of your life without money being a concern or limitation, what would you choose? And inevitably, everybody is going to pick the second option because, you know, we're not here to sleep on piles of gold or beds of cash or something like that. Money itself is not something with intrinsic meaning. Again, it's it's just this mechanism. But in terms of then helping somebody, you know, uh decide, you know, what is enough, and I think you bring up the perfect language there, right? Uh to have enough, it's that money can be a measuring stick, but the problem is that it often is a moving goalpost, right? Somebody like a Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have more than enough money to do anything they want in life that money can buy. So at this point, their wealth accumulation or people in their situation, or even, you know, one one hundredth of their situation realistically, are in a position where they are not pursuing something that money can actually buy. They just happen to have accrued an enormous amount of wealth along the way. And that's not to say it's not providing many great things for their quality of life or giving them access to certain things or enabling certain things, but their accumulation of wealth is not about money, right? And and for most people, the accumulation of wealth is not about money itself. It's about enabling that best life and their version of enough.

SPEAKER_01 12:11

I I I I love the um they're enabling their version enough because I think that one of the things that a lot of people, you know, it it that's essentially the counter to keeping up with the Joneses. You know, you have to understand what your version is and it and understanding what it's not. I um I loved Macklemore's song back in the day. It was about the Nikes, and where he had, I can't even remember the name of the song. It's such a good song right now. Uh, it was such an old school song, but he talks about how, you know, there was all these people that were just trying to chase after this thing, and it wasn't a thing that it was actually that important in the end. And it's interesting because we see a lot of people, and like that, that McLamore song struck me because people think that those sneakers, those kicks are gonna give you something. They think that the money is gonna give you something. They think that that new job is gonna give you something, they think that there's uh this thing that needs to be fixed almost. But like in your experience, what do people think money will fix that it almost never does?

SPEAKER_00 13:14

I think people use money as a measuring stick, and this sort of comes back to the problem of the moving goalpost, but they essentially think of it as something that will make a change in their life. Um, and and there are certain thresholds of this, right? There are plenty of people in the world that do not have enough money, right? Where they do not enjoy an abundance, they they suffer from a scarcity. And that scarcity is real in their life, right? It means that their children go without healthcare, it means that they skip meals, it means that sometimes the power goes out. Um so I want to be cautious when I then go on to say that money doesn't fix many problems. Um, for somebody living in scarcity, it will solve an enormous amount of their very real tangible problems. But money is not going to give you a better relationship with your children. Money is not going to buy back time with your parents before they pass away. Uh, you know, money can buy experiences, money can buy possessions, but it cannot replace the human element. There is no amount of money that buys a good relationship, that buys a good life experience beyond the tangible affects of it. Um, and so that's something where, you know, for a lot of people, when they come to us and say, you know, I worried that I'm not gonna be able to retire, or I'm worried about, you know, sending my kid to college or whatever it is, what they're usually expressing is not actually a financial anxiety. It's a deeper anxiety or it's a deeper sense of insecurity about this particular problem in their life. And money is not already answering that problem for them.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

100%. There's some underlying thing that is not being met already. You know, I I've seen it with um I saw with my daughter, you know, when she was a baby and she was crying, it wasn't about what you thought she was crying about, you know? Like you sit there, the kids freaking out. You're like, oh my goodness, what's going on? Oh, they have a dirty diaper. Well, you didn't see the dirty diaper in the beginning, but it was there. And I think as adults, a bunch of people are walking around with the uh the adult version of a dirty diaper going on, and they're just freaking out because there's some type of unmet need that they're not really expressing, you know? But you know, I wanted to ask you this too, because you've written about the evolution of fees versus commissions. And this is something that I've always wondered, and this pulls me back to the thing with my wife and the music thing. Um, you know, how do people get compensated? Because beyond compensation models, what do you think this debate says about human incentives and trust? Because honestly, it's tricky to know who to trust and how to trust them, you know?

SPEAKER_00 15:41

So there's an interesting problem here. Um, and in the research world, we'd call this a differences and differences problem. Uh, and succinctly, the example might be you have two counties next to each other, and one decides that it's going to be a dry county, and one decides that it's not going to be a dry county. And that's the only difference between the two counties other than their literal geography. Um, but their proximity makes them relatively similar, populations are similar, all of that. Um, and you can look at differences over time in things like you know, healthcare spending, crime rates, uh, you know, poverty rates, all these sorts of things, and try to say, okay, you know, is the core difference here that one county is a dry county and one is not? Um, that problem persists in the individual world. And this is where I want to come back actually to your to your example of your wife's situation. And I, of course, don't have all the details here, but um the differences and differences problem exists in the fact that we can't observe the mutually exclusive alternative of our lives in whether we make the decision to trust somebody or don't. We can only measure what happens in our actual life and we don't see that invisible alternative reality where we did work with that financial planner or we did hire that uh, you know, production person, that producer, or you know, decided to go about it on our own. Um, and so that problem exists because you you bring this question up of you know, what does this say about human incentives? What does it say about uh trust? Um, I think there's two layers to this. I think the first layer is the most obvious and very clear layer. It's the the layer that gets all the attention in this conversation, which is there's a lot of people in the world of financial services, there's a lot of people in many different industries who are not entirely good actors. They're not necessarily bad actors, they're not thieves, they're not fraudsters, they're not con men, but they are willing to put their own interests or willing to let conflicts of interest get in the way of what is best for their client, for their customer. Um, and that, you know, that's a problem. That's something that we in in all professions and all industries have to kind of internally police as best we can and try to move the needle in a positive direction so that more and more people within the industry largely do better things, do the right things. But I think the second layer that often gets ignored here is you know, if you go to that suboptimal broker or if you work with this suboptimal friend who's helping with distribution and now you're kind of picking up the pieces to do it better, the question becomes what was the invisible outcome of the alternative reality in which I never got financial help at all, or which I never got that distribution uh, you know, help at all. And we don't know what the difference is, but we can look at larger populations and say that even the people who are working with less than optimal professionals often are still doing much better than those who are not working with professionals. You can always find an anecdotal example of something uh different than that. But generally speaking, right, the people who see their doctor regularly tend to be in better health. The people who exercise regularly tend to be in better health, but the people who work in uh work with personal trainers tend to be doing a better job with their exercise routines. So all of this comes around to this question of to some extent, there's the incentive problem, right? You've got a lot of people doing less than optimal things because they have a conflict of interest and their incentives drive them to do the less than optimal thing. But there's also a question here of trust, which is to say, can I work with somebody that I know is not perfect if the outcome for me is still better than if I tried to go it on my own? And I think that's the really curious question at the heart of those problems.

SPEAKER_01 19:05

I never thought about that because it's like I love the gym analogy because if someone's going to the gym and you have a personal trainer, maybe they're not a perfect personal trainer, but they're sure going to be better than having no personal trainer at all. You know, you're you're in there, you're doing something, and you know, but at the same time, there is that. Are they doing things that are reckless? You know, and you then pull a muscle or you blow out your ACL and it sets you back beyond where you were at, you know. I mean, I I I I watch some of the Finfluencers on Instagram and like put everything in Bitcoin, 100% or crypto, you know, and it's like the the you're like wow. Um, and I mean I I don't know about all this stuff, but I I do know that diversification is a pretty good thing. And, you know, put anything in anywhere. That's like go to Vegas, put everything on, you know, one thing. That's not always a smart move, you know? So to me, it's interesting because um uh, you know, getting something is good, but like sometimes I'm I get so worried about, you know, how are you if I end up with that person who's really the bad one, you know? I don't know if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 20:17

Yeah, I mean it it does. And and I think ultimately, you know, there there's obviously the extreme version here, which is where you do end up with the fraudster or the con man. Obviously, you'd be better without that relationship. I think there's you know no reason to abdicate the responsibility for evaluating and assessing the value you receive from these professional relationships. But controversially, I think the problem is that to some extent, to really spend enough time to build genuine, validated trust with a professional often is too much time and too much cost for that professional to bear. And so when you go to the doctor, you just sort of look at them and say, well, you're an MD and you're a cardiologist. So I just have to trust that you know what you're talking about when you talk about my heart. Um, and to some extent, people have to do a lot of the same things with their personal trainers, their accountants, their chiropractors, their financial planners is we can never spend enough time as a professional to build genuine deep trust before beginning the relationship. So it's on the client to really assess the value they're receiving and build the trust as they go along.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

I love that. One of the things, too, I wanted to ask you is like it's interesting too that how um you know herd mentality shows up in market constantly. You know, how much of wealth building is really about emotional discipline rather than intelligence? Because, you know, uh I would like to say that I'm not gonna be the sheep that jumps when everyone else does. But man, you know, the other day uh I was watching this thing and gold was making a run and the silver, and everyone here in Asia was like running to gold shops. And I was like, do I need to head to the gold shop? You know, and like it we we all we have that you know that mentality. I think a lot of people just have. To fight against that. But talk to me a little bit about that. How can you not get pulled down those those trends as well? You know?

SPEAKER_00 22:08

You know, uh, I hate to say it's it's embarrassing how much of long-term wealth building is that emotional discipline, uh, rather than you know, being first to something, right? Buying Bitcoin in 2008, buying gold, you know, two years ago when it was still still lower or something like that. Uh, don't get me wrong, there, there's always a person on the far end of the distribution, right? The the three standard deviations over who did buy Bitcoin early, who did buy into Amazon and has held it the whole time, or Apple or Chipotle or anything else. Um, and that's terrific. Uh, but that's not a reliable mechanism for the average person. And this is where I like to make the comment, right? The the odds apply to everybody, but especially you. Um, and so in that particular sense, you know, the the interesting thing is that what a lot of the research literature shows is that there's a large gap between investment return, right? The the return that gold gets or Bitcoin gets or SP 500 index funds get, and the average returns of the people who invest in those things or in those products. Um you'd say, well, if you buy it, surely you're gonna get the result. But the problem is what a lot of people are doing is they're buying the thing after it's gotten exciting, and they're selling the thing after it's already started to, you know, lose its luster. Um and that trend of chasing what is currently doing well and that trend of running away from things well after they've soured is a great challenge for people. Um, you know, it's a it's a funny thing because uh what a lot of the research literature shows is that there's a several percentage point gap annually between the returns of assets and the people who invest in them. Um and you know, if you go to any consumer financial planning services and you ask them, hey, why are you gonna hire an investment manager? Why are you gonna hire a financial planner? Almost none of them, right? Maybe one out of a hundred would say, because I overreact to market conditions, because I chase trends, because I don't, you know, I'm not sure what to invest in, and I really just need somebody to just take it off my plate and deal with it for me. Some people are looking for that. But the vast majority of people are gonna say specific problems, right? Helping my kids go to college, helping me retire, helping me deal with my parents' estate. Um, and that's sort of the interesting thing here is that that herd mentality is out there. Um, but the best advice I can give for that is to disconnect from it as much as possible, right? If you were to spend most of your adult life just buying, you know, a diversified portfolio of domestic international index funds, um, you know, with maybe a little bit of exposure to fixed income as you got closer to your objectives, whether that's retirement or certain financial objectives, and you never once read the financial news or financial media, and you never looked at your financial statements, and you just kept putting in your contributions, your 401k, whatever it is on a going basis, you're probably going to do substantially better than your friend with four different market apps on their phone who trades you know six times a day.

SPEAKER_01 24:56

I I had a uh one of my best friends and um smart guy, nice guy, but he was uh it was 2000, well, what year was it? It's a long time ago, 2006, 2007, and it was right before the housing boom. Uh the and like everyone and he's like, oh man, everyone in LA is buying houses. I'm gonna buy a house too. And they bought a duplex for like$650,000. And it it was it's still not worth that much, you know, and it was just like they got buried, and he was like one of the first to say, like, you know, that was probably not the best decision we ever made, but because they saw everyone doing it, and like everyone was talking about it, and they it was everywhere on TV, you can get a mortgage loan too. And he's like, we should do this, you know? And it was really hard to disconnect because of the level of noise, and that was before modern social media just really amplifies it even more so than it did back then. You know, I mean, when things start trending on TikTok now, it's not, you know, but it's interesting because I yeah, like you pointed out, so much of financial planning is self-control. It's us sitting there looking at that shiny thing on the desk and going, ooh, that's nice, and realizing that if you wait till after class, you'll get two or three of those, you know? And I think that's the reality that's hard. But you you've worked with both aspiring planners and established professionals. What patterns do you see and how high earners misunderstand wealth?

SPEAKER_00 26:37

I think a lot of people fall into the trap of thinking that once they've become wealthier than they were, whatever that means, right? Somebody starts from zero who gets to 100,000, somebody gets from 100,000 to a million, whatever, whatever their progression has been, is there's sometimes a temptation to fall into the belief that now that I have more wealth than I used to, I need to make this more complicated somehow. Um, you know, now that I have a million dollars, I should start thinking about private equity or alternatives, or now that I've sold my business, I should start thinking about, you know, buying into other businesses or whatever that is. Um, there's not a lot that changes over an enormous range of wealth. When I say enormous range of wealth, uh what I'm saying is, you know, whether you have a million dollars or whether you have$15 million, there's not a lot that needs to be different for you in that situation. Um the biggest deriver is going to be tax and estate considerations. And those do not necessarily create demands that we have enormously different investments, enormously different savings patterns, uh spending patterns, enormously different uh types of insurance or amounts of insurance, other than just adequately covering our potential liabilities. But you know, in that sense, there's uh this temptation, I think, as people get more affluent to think, well, this got me this far, but what's going to get me to the next step? And I don't think there's a great deal of complexity that's really necessary until you get to sort of what I'll call obscene wealth. And I say that without judgment, but you know, when you get to 100 million, 500 million, a billion dollars, we're now deep into territory of complex tax and estate problems where, you know, now we can start thinking about getting a little bit more complex and breaking things up a little bit more, if only to be even more diversified than we already were. But, you know, if somebody tells me they have$2 million or somebody tells me they have$5 million, there's not a great deal of difference in the advice I give them. And the same thing between somebody who has$50,000 versus$500,000. Again, not a huge amount of difference in the advice that I'm going to give them because there's some fairly basic, uh, I would almost go so far as to call them sort of properties of financial physics that don't really change based on your level of wealth. And I think people assume now that I've gotten to there, whatever there is, now that I've reached my enough, whatever enough is, maybe I need to do something different. And chances are for the vast majority, excuse me, for the exact vast majority of people, that's just not the case.

SPEAKER_01 28:58

I love the indifferentiation there because again, I go back to the um, you know, if you're just in the gym and you're just lifting weights and you just want to get fit, you know, there's not a huge difference in how you're going to train. But yeah, if you're the power lifter, okay. If you're an Olympian, you know, it's probably gonna be different. But like still, the fundamental principles are the same. You show up, you put in the amount of work, and then you go home and you rest and recover, you know. And I I think that we tend to want to overcomplicate it. And you know, and I mean, and we everyone wants the quick fix. I I uh went into this gym once here, and I was like going in, I was like, and I'm not any, I'm just you know, uh a dad who's in there trying to get back in shape. And one of the guys there was like, hey man, you want to get ripped? And I was like, Yeah, yeah, cool, I'd love to. What's your strategy? And he's like, This. And he just pops into his arm, and I was like, dude, did you just do steroids in front of me, man? And he's like, it helps. I'm like, well, I'm sure it does. That's not what I'm looking for, man. I'm not looking to get on the juice right now. And he uh I was just like blown away by that. But like, you know, it's like I don't need the quick fix, I just need to show up every day and do what I gotta do to kind of put the time in because the principles are there, you know? And I mean, certainly that's not what I'm aiming for, you know, it's not where my value placement is at. But for those people that are doing that, uh to them, their own man. But like if everyone, if someone hits every financial milestone, maxes retirement accounts, buys the house, builds the portfolio, but you know what? They still feel anxious. What usually is going on beneath the surface for that person?

SPEAKER_00 30:52

Well, I think that's uh comes back to that highly individualistic component. There is something going on beneath the surface, but what whatever is causing them that anxiety, it's not financial, right? They they might look at money as the manifestation, right? I don't have enough, the the goalpost has moved on me. I need, I need more, I need to save more, I need to be wealthier, I need to have the bigger house, the nicer car, whatever it is. Um, but that's an expression of something else. And there's a fine line as a financial planner where you have to say, is this something that is coachable? Right. And I'll give the example here of a client I've worked with now for five or six years. And when they first came to me, they could have retired immediately. And it still took two years for one of them to retire, and it still took another four years for the other one to retire, but they could have retired on day one. And what they needed wasn't a financial plan to tell them they could retire. They needed to be coached and you know, counseled and given comfort with the idea of spending the wealth they'd accumulated. Um, in other cases or more extreme cases, then that's where we get into the domain of financial therapy where you know we have we have some sort of cognitive bias, cognitive block, or uh I'll say mental illness. And I don't mean that in a in a pejorative way, but just hey, you know, there there comes a point at which logic and emotional coaching only gets you so far. Sometimes there is a you know biological mechanical challenge going on here that's causing us to have a different level of anxiety.

SPEAKER_01 32:12

I I think that it's so true. And like I think that um one of the best books I ever read was The Practical uh called The Buddha's Brain, the practical neuroscience of it was written by these two like meditation experts at UCLA, uh, and they were looking at how the brain was wired for anxiety, and that the you know, because it kept us alive back in dinosaur times, our mammalian ancestors were like, if you didn't get eaten, that's a pretty good thing, you know, surviving the day. And so anxiety was kind of wired into us, you know, like we're anxious creatures by nature, we're not a super predator, you know. And one of the things that that you see is like you have to sit there and work to overcome that, you know. And I was, and it's not easy, you know. You think about that, you think about all of the stuff that's programmed into us. I mean, like, just way back since time, time before time, even, you know. Um, my daughter is deathly afraid of the dark. And I want to tell her, you know what, there's nothing to be afraid of. But dude, I watch these you I watch these Instagram channels where it's like it's like uh, what was it? Um, what is the name of that channel? Nature is brutal. And I watched like animals sneak up. I used a leopard snakes up on this animal at night, just whooshes it away. You know, it's just it's gone, you know, like a little zebra is like, I'm gonna cross this lovely little river. And like there's that 30-foot crocodile in there, you know? Our anxiety is there for a reason to protect us, but now in our modern society, it can make us a little crazy, you know, and you have to figure out how to balance that because it's not the money, but there is something underlying that you have to think about or have to look at. Absolutely. I want to ask you this question. You you've seen the profession evolve over decades. Do you think the industry is getting better at aligning money with meaning, or are we still optimizing spreadsheets over lives?

SPEAKER_00 34:14

Um, I think the industry, I think two things can be true at once. I think um of the cohort of what I would call real financial planners, and uh, I don't want to get too much into defining that because that that sort of uh becomes its own discussion and and in the industry becomes its own argument, as it were. Uh, but you know, amongst real financial planners, I think alignment of money and meeting is pretty core to what most of us are doing. Um, I think in the larger industry across, you know, 300,000 plus people who give financial advice or or sell financial products for a living, I think the industry has gotten better at pretending that that's what it's doing, um, but is still largely optimizing spreadsheets. And I think in a lot of cases is optimizing uh their spreadsheets as opposed to the client's spreadsheets.

SPEAKER_01 34:57

That is is is true. It's like the uh the underlying motivation and it comes back to that trust factor again, you know? Um, one of the things too that I was thinking that if someone comes to you and they're just like they want to change their financial path, their financial traject trajectory, whether they're super wealthy or you know, building wealth, what are some things that people can do today to get on track?

SPEAKER_00 35:23

I think the best thing to do is to understand what your actual objective is. And this is the question that I like to pose to people when I'm first getting to know them as a potential client. Um, I asked this question, which is if money wasn't the issue or the object, what would you want to do with your time? Not not what do you want to do with your life, not what what do you want to accomplish, not what are your goals? But if you were suddenly living in a world in which you know you're you had a magic credit card that paid for everything reasonable. So you didn't win the lottery, you don't have a billion dollars. But if you just never really needed to worry about money itself, are you still working the same job that you work? Are you still spending time on the activities that you spend a good portion of your activities on? Are you still living in the same home, the same town, the same state, the same country? Right? What would you be doing? What would be meaningful to you in your great life if money was not the obstacle driving so much of your behavior or a need for money just to get by was driving so much of your behavior? Um, and I think when you start with that framing, that helps you articulate the important steps much more clearly. Because depending on what your answer is, it might be double down on your career, build, build up more wealth and capital to accomplish certain things, or in other cases, it might be, hey, take a step back. You're doing more than you need to. And everywhere on the spectrum in between those two extremes is something that's valid and reasonable for any individual to go through. It just depends on at the end of the day, if money is not the problem, what do you want to do?

SPEAKER_01 36:51

I felt about this a lot for myself. I know I I've answered this. I would do podcasts and I would build my daughter's YouTube channel. And we do fun educational content and we just do fun stuff and we learn about the world. I'd be doing science experiments like Mark Rover style with my daughter and just having a fun. And one of the things that I had to realize is that once I had that realization, I had to figure out how what steps can I do to grow wealth and money to allow me to do that. Because, you know, if I can do these fun things with my kiddo and we can make videos about it, and that could be what we're doing, like I don't think there's a better, better dream for me than that. But that's my dream. And I think everyone's gotta have the different one. I the I'm reading this book called The One Thing, and I absolutely love it. And it references one of my favorite movies, um, City Slickers. It's an old movie with Billy Crystal where he goes out and does this this cowboy drive, having this midlife crisis, and they they do this cattle drive from one place to another. And um Jack Pallance is this old rough guitar, like a uh cowboy guy, and he's like, it's this one thing, and he holds up the secret of life, is this thing, and like the dude dies, giving the story away. But I think a lot of people have seen city slickers, actually, maybe not in this day and age, like maybe people haven't seen city slickers at this point in time, but uh Jack Palin's character dies, and so but he comes back in the next movie as his brother, actually. Um, but the the character dies, and this one thing is what uh Billy Crystal's character goes through the whole movie trying to figure out like what is that one thing? And then suddenly he realizes for him it was his family and like wanting to get back, be with his family and his friends. And I think that if you can figure that out, if you can figure out what your one thing is, it's powerful. I had uh I was gifted a very challenging event. I got really sick a long time ago. I had this viral heart infection, and it took me into a bad, bad place, and there was a couple nights where I was just sitting there not sure whether I was gonna get better, you know, and I walk and dust step was really, really hard. And then, you know, I started getting walking two steps and walking three steps, and yet my whole life, like I didn't really have much of a purpose. Um, I loved my wife, I loved my dog, but there was a day when I went to the hospital with my wife, and we did this ultrasound, and I saw this little face staring back at me. And the game changed after that. And since then I've had my why. And I think that for everyone, you got to figure out that why. And uh, I don't know, I'm not trying to get into advice right now, but I I I think that that finding that financial why, what is it that you're trying to build? And like once you can figure that out, and maybe your thing is philanthropy, maybe your thing is just you want to go up to the mountains and be you and read books, like whatever it is, you do you.

SPEAKER_00 39:58

Yeah, I mean, and that's that really is what it comes around to. Uh at the end of the day, money is just a form of permission. It's a permission at a certain level to survive, and then well beyond that, it is a permission to live life the way you want to. I think that is really the the core thing everybody has to try to keep in mind is that no nobody is going to be happier because they died with a hundred million dollars than if they died with one dollar, they're gonna be happier if they lived the life the way the way that they wanted to.

SPEAKER_01 40:23

I have heard and I was getting ready to like slide into the wrapping up portion, but I have never heard, I've always heard money as a tool, but I've never heard money as permission. And I love that because it's so true. You know, it's permission to make the changes in your life that you want to. Um, I had heard um one of my favorite things that I heard Steve Harvey say once is he says money turns um problems into inconveniences, you know, or disasters into inconveniences, you know. And so I think that for someone who grew up with a some family members who were to tell me money is the root of all evil, I've had to redefine my relationship with money. And now tonight you gave me a new one. Money is permission. So I appreciate that. Where can people go to find out more about you and what you do?

SPEAKER_00 41:11

So I'm I'm pretty prolific on uh LinkedIn, uh Twitter as our X as X as it's now called. Uh we have a blog at mywealthplanners.com, and then uh as well, we also have our own podcast, uh, The Science of Wealth, where we talk about kind of basic financial education topics every week.