Good Neighbor Podcast: Cooper City
Bringing Together Local Businesses & Neighbors of Cooper City
Good Neighbor Podcast: Cooper City
EP #280: Matt Simmons with "Find Your Hidden Treasure Chest"
Could your path to wealth be waiting in the simple act of tracking your phone bill? Join us as we welcome former Navy serviceman and surgical device sales rep turned author, Matt Simmons, who is proving that wealth isn't just for the elite. Matt's debut book, "Find Your Hidden Treasure Chest," is shaking up the traditional view of wealth-building by revealing how small, mindful adjustments in daily habits can pave the way to financial stability. By sharing his personal journey and practical strategies for those living paycheck to paycheck, Matt demonstrates how even the smallest savings can lead to substantial wealth over time.
Embarking on the journey of writing and publishing his first book, Matt faced a unique set of challenges, from the intricacies of formatting to the art of marketing. Through candid anecdotes and valuable insights, he encourages aspiring authors to embrace feedback and turn setbacks into stepping stones. Targeting young adults and anyone seeking financial wisdom, Matt's project has already become a transformative tool for readers eager to improve their financial literacy. Tune in to discover how this engaging conversation with Matt can inspire you to cultivate strong financial habits and make smarter decisions that could transform your financial future.
Call: (678) 643-3626
Visit: https://www.findyourhiddentreasurechest.com/
Follow: https://www.instagram.com/findyourhiddentreasurechest/
Like: https://www.facebook.com/FindYourHiddenTreasureChestBook/
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Jeremy Wolf.
Speaker 2:Hello, hello everyone, and welcome back to the Good Neighbor Podcast. I am your host, jeremy Wolf, and today I'd like to welcome to the show. We're doing something a little bit differently. We're mixing things up a little bit. Our next guest, matt Simmons, actually found his way on our calendar to come promote a new book that he's releasing soon. He's having a. He'll get into it. He's having a book promotion party over at the Barnes and Nobles in Thurber Pines. The book is titled Find your Hidden Treasure Chest. If I could speak today, we'd be in good shape, right, matt? So I'd like to welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us and I'm excited to get into this to learn more about the book and what you do. So, matt, welcome. Thank you for having me Jeremy.
Speaker 2:It's a pleasure no, it's our pleasure, and thanks as always to our listeners, and hopefully you'll get some good stuff out of this today. So let's get into it. Let's start off by why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about the book Find your Hidden Treasure Chest, and then we will go from there.
Speaker 3:Sure Well, I've written this book as a self-help book. It's designed, obviously, obviously, to help people, and there's a myth out there that wealth is a treat that's reserved simply for the rich, and that's just not true. It's actually the exact opposite. The fact of the matter is that most of the wealth in America was created by people by coming from all walks of life. They did it by investing.
Speaker 2:Interesting what. What inspired you to start writing? How did you, I guess, first find your unique voice as an author? How long have you been doing this? Is this your first book? How many books have you done? Let's get into the backstory behind this.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm ex-Navy. I was on board two aircraft carriers and I got started in correspondence at that time. I wrote a lot of correspondence. I've got a degree in business administration. I've started my own, formed a business, started it, grew it and eventually sold it, and I was also a surgical device sales rep. And while I was doing that, I began putting ideas together for a number of books that I am writing, and Find your Hidden Treasure Chest is my first release, and it basically offers a new way.
Speaker 3:Half of all working families have zero dollars in the bank today and they couldn't even afford a $400 unplanned expense.
Speaker 3:If it came around, they'd probably have to finance it.
Speaker 3:So the problem for all of these people who are everybody wants to have a future, everybody wants to create their own wealth, but if you're living paycheck to paycheck and barely making ends meet, then these are the people who just can't find a way. So, rather than ask people to go into their income and their paychecks to build this future, what Find your Hidden Treasure Chest does and here's a copy of my book right here is it goes back into your expenses and it finds those savings, and it takes you from start to finish by the time you finish this book, if you don't have an investment account, you will have already created it with my help, and you will have already identified numerous avenues of your expenses whether it's cutting back on driving through Starbucks, maybe you've got some unused apps, atm fees, your heat bill, your energy. There are over 60 different ideas in the book. What makes it really simple, jeremy, is that you pick the ones that are easiest for you and you can create hundreds of dollars that you can suddenly begin investing each month.
Speaker 2:Very interesting.
Speaker 2:A lot of what you said is resonating with me right now because building wealth I've been thinking about this a lot lately building wealth and it really really comes down to your mindset and creating small habits, small daily habits and rituals over time that it can feel when you're living paycheck to paycheck.
Speaker 2:It can feel impossible to get to the point where you are able to retire comfortably and have a wonderful nest egg set up. But, that being said, if you start paying attention and I've done this recently for me, for for the longest time I didn't really track expenses, I just bought whatever, whatever I needed to buy, and I didn't really think much of it. But I really sat down and started to create a budget and craft um, a plan moving forward, and just the simple act of being cognizant of what you're spending and documenting it starts to make you think twice before you make needless expenses and you start to question do do I even really need to buy this right now? Do I want to add this to my list of expenses? So just some of these little micro habits really help to open up your eyes in the future. Is that something that you cover in the book.
Speaker 3:You're exactly on the money, jeremy. It's about creating a habit. So a lot of us, when we get a job, we probably get something in the paperwork about a you know, do you want to begin contributing to a 401k program? And a lot of people go, oh, that looks interesting, maybe I'll get going on that next year. And then all of a sudden you get into the routine of most people spend what they make and a lot of people spend more than what they make and they get into debt and things become difficult and you can never get started and a lot of people wake up when they're 50 or 60 years old going holy cow, I need to get started or I'm going to have to do it all of my life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've spoken to a lot of educators on the podcast. We talked about the public school system. I think this is one of those things where these topics should be discussed with children from the earliest stages, from grade school should be talking about these types of concepts, because the earlier you start with this, obviously like with anything else, the easier it is, especially with starting to save and build these routines and habits. And we live in an instant gratification society and it's such a fast paced society and we live in such abundance. There's so many places to throw money away. I mean, look, you can go on Amazon now and order something that you probably don't even need and it gets delivered in the next hour or so and then it ends up collecting dust in your house.
Speaker 3:Sure, we're waiting on stuff right now. It's very interesting how you put that no-transcript of. People are struggling, and I know that there are people out there right now who have no hope. They have no idea how they're going to create a successful, wealthy future, and I'm here to tell them that everybody can become wealthy. It's not a treat reserved for the rich become wealthy. It's not a treat, not a treat reserved for the rich.
Speaker 2:Yep, you know we live in the land of opportunity. So this, this book that you're, that you're releasing, is this something that you've been thinking about writing for a long time and you've had bits and pieces of it I'd imagine you have throughout your journey. Or did you sit down one day and said, I'm just going to, like, what was your walk us through the writing process? Like, how did how did this come to you? How did how did pen come to paper and the thoughts come from your head to put this down and in your book?
Speaker 3:Good question. I've always been a business person and I've always been a numbers person. And in the book it starts off basically saying and this is really how this started with me I called a phone company. I got an outrageous bill. I called them up and said look, this is ridiculous. You know, we've got to find a way to save me some money. So we had our discussion and a few minutes later I hung up and we had saved 20 bucks a month. I was like cool, 20 bucks a month.
Speaker 3:Well then I started looking forward and said that's $240 a year and that's $2,400 over the next 10 years, and then you do it by 30 years or 40 years. But that's just the money, the savings. What I hadn't figured and what I calculated next was what if I didn't just have 20 bucks a month? What if I put it into an investment account and let it grow at 7, 8, 9, 10%? The stock market basically has grown 10% per year since inception, including the depression. When I did that math, all of a sudden it was in 70 or $80,000 over the course of the next 40 years for putting in about one 10th of the money.
Speaker 3:So that kind of was the inspiration and I began looking and I always have looked at expenses that way and I found over 60 of them, and the book encourages everyone to look at what they spend, because people are spending money on things that I haven't even heard of. But I'll bet you they can find five bucks, 10 bucks, 15 or 20. And if you pick five or 10 little savings in your expenses and put them all together Now, you're getting into the hundreds of dollars that you can donate towards your future. And guess what? It might hurt a little bit to put that money away. It feels like you're paying a bill, but guess what? It's still your money growing and you can do what you want with it growing and you can do what you want with it.
Speaker 2:Wise words, I like this. I'm definitely going to have to check this book out. It sounds like a wonderful resource guide. You said this was the first book you've ever authored or published, correct? What were some of the biggest challenges I guess you faced in putting the book together and how did you overcome them?
Speaker 3:Learning how to publish my own book was something else. I had a lot of help. Writing the book was the fun part, and when I got to the point of where I said, ok, we've got something here, let's make this into a real book and let's publish our first book, that's when the fun started. What I'm not good is what I learned about things like formatting fonts, how many pages you can fit into a book, how big should the book be? It could be too thin, or it can be a Tolstoy novel and be a thousand pages and nobody would even want to pick it up. So I used some outside resources and, you know, once we had it published then it became well. Now how do we market this? So it's been a continuous learning process, and one of my little sayings that I like to follow is that I enjoy failing because I know I've just learned something, and when you fail enough, you eventually begin to embrace failure, knowing that it's moving you in the right direction.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. What advice would you give to aspiring authors out there who maybe they have some thoughts in their head, maybe they've written things down before and they just haven't taken that leap of faith and haven't you know? They've wanted to put something together and release a book and they just haven't quite done it. What advice could you? Share that got you over that.
Speaker 3:Share that got you got you over that I I would say to write your book to the best of your ability, or at least the concept, and share it with friends and colleagues that you trust, who will be honest with you. And uh, when I began writing my book, I it's easy to get caught up in yourself and say, wow, this is really something else. And then you let your wife and your friends and your colleagues help you out with it and they come up with some fantastic ideas that lead you in the right direction. So use your community would be my best advice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the feedback is instrumental. Has the book already been released? Is it already out there or is it?
Speaker 3:going to be released soon.
Speaker 3:The book is released, it's growing. We like what we see and the biggest thing that I get out of it is I know every time somebody buys it, if they actually open it, they are probably going to find something that they know that they can do that will help them. I've had one other book signing and we had a lot of parents come in that wanted to buy something for their child to try to get them going in the right direction. So it's probably a book that's best targeted for young adults, but anybody in the chain of a career who's struggling to find a way to put some money away can benefit from this book.
Speaker 2:What's maybe been the most rewarding aspect thus far of sharing your work with others through this project.
Speaker 3:It's knowing that the book is helping people. I've talked to people who have told me that they are now saving more money than they used to and that their program is working.
Speaker 2:That's huge for me to and that their program is working. That's huge for me. What?
Speaker 3:books or authors have played an influence, have influenced your writing style, your perspective? I can't. I can't point to anyone in particular. Interestingly, I am not the world's greatest reader. I don't go through a book every week. I might go through a few books in a year, so I'm probably not the person to ask that question. I've got a couple of kind of favorite authors with, you know, with novels, but as far as something like this, you know you can name people like Dave Ramsey and that kind of thing that inspired me when I was younger, driving around doing my job and you'd have your radio on and I found Dave Ramsey, for instance, and I would say he was an inspiration or help.
Speaker 2:I would say he was an inspiration or a help. Nice, nice you mentioned, so you have this book signing coming up. Tell everybody a little bit about when that's happening and how they could attend.
Speaker 3:Sure, the book signing is next Tuesday, october 15th, from 2 to 3 pm. There are two Barnes and Nobles in Pembroke Pines. This is the one called Pembroke Pines, this is the one called Pembroke Gardens. So I'll be there from 2 to 3. I would love to have a discussion with you if you're looking for ways to try to jumpstart your future. I'd love to sign a book for you, anything that you want to do, but I'll be there and I'm here to help you.
Speaker 2:All right, sounds good. And where can our listeners find the book for purchase?
Speaker 3:Sure. So the title of the book once again is Find your Hidden Treasure Chest. So I've got a website. It's called findyourhiddentreasurechestcom and we've got a blog on there and if you want to come on and chat with me, feel free. I'd love to have a discussion with you online if you can't make the book signing, but I sure would love to see you there if you can make it.
Speaker 2:All right, sounds good, and we will, of course, drop a link in the description to all of your information as well as the date and location of the signing, so if anybody wants to go check it out, matt doing some good things here for our community, so thank you. Thank you for joining us. It's nice having you on the show.
Speaker 3:Thank you very much. One last thing the book is, of course, available on Amazon Also. Find your hidden treasure chest and it'll take you right to it.
Speaker 2:Perfect Sounds good. All right, matt Pleasure brother. Thanks for coming on the show, jeremy. I really appreciate this. Thank you so much. Of course, thanks as always to our listeners for tuning in, and we will catch everyone next time on the next episode of the Good Neighbor Podcast. Everyone, take care, have a wonderful day, thank you.
Speaker 1:You too. Bye Thanks for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast Cooper City. To nominate your favorite local business to be featured on the show, go to GNPCooperCitycom. That's GNPCooperCitycom, or call 954-231-3170.