Ep 130 | The Beat of Personal Finance with Drew Boyer

In this episode, Drew Boyer, a CFP, shares his journey in the financial industry, the inspiration behind his book 'Hip Hop X Finance,' and practical advice for managing personal finances.

✅ The Inspiration Behind 'Hip Hop x Finance'

✅ Financial Lessons from Hip Hop

✅ Drew's Personal Financial Struggles

✅ Financial Education and Early Lessons

✅ Advice for Overcoming Financial Challenges

Connect with Drew Boyer

https://www.facebook.com/hiphopxfinance/

https://www.tiktok.com/@hiphopxfinance

https://www.instagram.com/hiphopxfinance/

https://hiphopxfinance.com/

Send me an email with your questions, thoughts, and takeaways from the podcast to: elevatefinancesllc@gmail.com

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Transcript

 Hey Drew, welcome to the podcast. Excited to chat with you today. A little music in here, a little fi, you know, personal finance. Can you share with listeners a little bit about who you are and how you've come to be a certified financial planner? 

I. Yeah, thanks dalene for having me today. I am a 20 plus year veteran in the financial services industry.

I started out in 2003 after the tech bubble kind of exploded. I had done an internship when I was still in school at Merrill Lynch, and I had solved this slow motion train wreck happening. And then when I got out into the business, because I wanted to do it. It, was very difficult to start talking about people with finances and get reinvested again.

I got five years in and I thought I got my 10,000 hours of expertise and I thought I knew a little bit. And then in oh 8, 0 9, the bottom falls out again. I. Didn't, I realized I didn't know what I was doing. I've committed since then to never stop learning or always keep learning no matter what.

No matter what headlines you have there, but fast forward to now I'm an independent CFP, so Certified Financial Planner. I. I work primarily with a lot of blue collar Americans that work hard and need help with their money. I help them make decisions based off that. And I just got done launching my very first book, which is, called Hip Hop Ex Finance.

And it's using something's very public like music and celebrities with something that's very private, which is money. And, and you might be asking, why did you write this book? It's because before I had to grow up and get a real job. I had been a drummer my whole life and somebody gave a real spastic sixth grader, a couple drumsticks, and I sat down and I just was able to do it and I can hear music and play it, and I love all kinds of music.

So writing a book about finance and, and picking a genre that was good to go with, I try to go with something, has these big bombastic titles and the machismo and the flaunting of wealth. And that's why I settled on doing hip hop. 

I love how you are relating it through hip hop as I think really it does give us that median in relating.

Situationally, it gives us experiences from others to kind of, you know, portray what we're trying to teach sometimes in our expert lingo, which doesn't always translate to the individual. Yeah, I love that. So first, tell us about your love for hip hop culture. I know you said you love a lot of music. Is hip hop your top love or is there something else?

I love all music and like I've got two young daughters that I've, I've really enjoyed watching them grow and play piano. And one's in choir one also plays violin. I've always loved all kinds of music. Hip hop was probably the very first music I was able to go out and purchase when I started earning money.

And so I went back and not like a therapy session or anything, but I went back and thought about like what was the first music that really impacted me. And I remember shooting hoops in seventh grade. And we had, we had started, my brothers and I had started earning some chore money. And what we would do, if you remember from your similar age group as me, you'd go to the mall, you'd go to maybe your local Sam goody store and walk in and see what cassette tapes were available for you kids out there.

That's not around anymore, but we were able to, you could tape off of the radio. It was great. And then, where I grew up in rural Ohio, you know, we had one, one music station that was outta Cleveland and it was more of an urban music station. And I, I remember the, the moment that my life changed with, with hip hop is there's a song that came on and it's, it's a classic by sir mix a lot.

And so that's one of the stories I. Baby got back, comes on. I'm like, what is this? And I, I, I went that day to the mall and I purchased this. And my parents', number one rule, I lived in a pretty conservative household is that if you buy something that we don't approve of, it will be season destroyed. And they kept their word.

But I write about that in the book where my mom puts the cassette tape in and you hear like, oh my God, that look at her. And then her face goes nuclear, and then it gets popped out and it got smashed when I got home.

I love hearing all kinds of other people's stories about similar things.

So I, my cassette tapes were easy to destroy, weren't they? I mean, oh yes. Leave them in a hot car and just step on 'em. And remember, the tape would come unwound. You'd have to find a pencil or a pen to scroll it back in and. Wow. Crazy, crazy. The dual cassette 

tape. So you could make copies of copies.

Yes, 

yes, yes, exactly. Or did you ever tape? 'cause it broke, the actual tape broke so you had to tape it back together and then you'd play it back and it'd go, you know, 'cause it was no music there. So. Good Times, times the old days. So tell us about your book and share with us one of your favorite stories in there.

Man, this really sounds like something I need to read. 

Yeah, I hope you do Check it out. It's on Amazon. It's called Hip Hop Ex Finance. And I was gonna say that we've gone to something where when I was going to the mall, I was looking at the parental advisory stickers. So on the book, I made sure that I've got this because I'm including, including some lyrics in here to help tell the story.

I. Through rap, selected rap lyrics that are in there. But it's interesting to me too, to see how we've gone against something that was a no, no, no. Like we gotta get rid of this. Where you have people now, like Dr. Dre who's able to put his name on the side of a university with money from that he's been able to create from beats.

These aren't beats, but similar headphones. That's probably my favorite story in the book. Be, and, and to tie in with cassette tapes, because when I was just going to college is when Napster was created. If anybody still remembers that I. And it really put the music industry into a complete tailspin about how do you make money now if it's not gonna be from records ended up being, you know, touring revenues.

But Nat three gets out there, they try to buckle down that. And a company called Apple who's now one of the largest in the world. Comes out and figures out if we sell things for 99 cents, it's not too much. So it's something that people would pay for a single and we need to develop a hardware to be able to hold it.

And so the original iPod, if people remember back held like a thousand songs, they had 10 hours of battery life. And it was this big thing before the iPhone came out, and that's kind of how they ac company figured out how to repackage music again. But what the problem was is they came with really cheap $1 earplugs that came in with it.

And so Dre was on the record of being quoted saying, well, it's bad enough that they're stealing our music. Now they lose the field of music. Because coming from him, west coast hip hop that was out there it was really base heavy. And so you don't get that in these little cheap earplugs.

The story starts there. The genesis of the most successful hip hop product, the date is, is Beats by Dre, and so he's solving a problem. For, he's making, creating a solution for a problem that he had, and it was a very pop culture thing to be able to go do it. And so the genesis of the story is, it starts with Napster.

He's also at the same time persuaded by a sneaker company to possibly do a sneaker line. And there's a, the, the, the actual chapter in the book is called Speakers, not Sneakers, and a partner that he knew to reach out to Jimmy Iovine had told him, you don't know sneakers, you know speakers, you know, sound.

You're the producer. So let's do this and solve the problem for it. And it's really amazing evolution of how they didn't trust sound engineers. They would invite in other artists to put them on and they were playing 50 cents Monster first hit into club. And so they were getting artist feedback and by involving all these other people into the team that when they actually came out with Beats, the artist that had tried them out.

Started wearing them. And then you see in our celebrity obsessed culture, oh, they're at beats on, I should wear beats too. And it's really interesting how that goes out. And at the end of the day, they get end up bought out by Apple, to, they were solving the problem for for $3.2 billion. And you can read it and check it out for what happened, but they, they lowered it by 0.2, which doesn't seem like much, but that's $200 million.

And then they end up selling the company to Apple for $3 billion. 

Wow. 

So amazing. 

Yeah. I love how you shared the story and that they found a problem . Identified a problem, and then found a solution. How can we learn from that with our personal finances? 

So one of the quotes in the book, and I think it's Benjamin Franklin, is that an investment in education pays the best dividend or invest in what you know,

so don't try to go running after the current theme of whatever is now. Like AI is very hot and I think energy's becoming a, a heated up sector a lot of the times. You could just do what the great John Vocal said. He was the founder of Vanguard. He said, don't look for the needle in the haystack.

Buy the haystack. So index investing. You don't really have to do all these exciting things to try to get ahead and build wealth. You can do the boring things over and over and it actually adds up over a long period of time. And it's also a lot less risky, but just, just solving a problem first is a great way to start that.

If you can make yourself more valuable to earn more money and then to save, that's a great situation to go into. 

Yeah, I like that. You also mentioned that hip hop got you through some of your own personal financial struggles. Can you share with us about that? 

Yeah, music's always been there for me.

You can be alone and still be able to turn on the record player. But I, I found solace in like hearing stories that, you know, that people had gone through bankruptcy before or started from nothing, learned how to hustle by any mean necessary, and their ambition got them ahead. I would say more of is something that I took into, like my actual persona is to, to figure out how to make things relatable to clients.

So we, we get stuck in this world of acronyms and people like, what does an IRA stand for? And it was cute, but my wife said Internal revenue. I'm like, no, it's IRS. Yeah. So Ira is individual retirement account. . But hip hop had always been there in music while I was going through just trying to start a business, which that's one of the chapters or which I call tracks in the book how to be an entrepreneur because you don't have to be, but it's, you know, it's another option and working for somebody.

I watched how other people had done it and, and researched it when I could, and that's how I, that it literally helped it happen. Get through and get through some hard times and build it up to what it's come today. 

Yeah, I like that. And I know earlier we talked about, you know, always learning and never giving up on a, on that learning journey.

And when I was on my financial journey, that's exactly what I did. And I share with, you know, in previous episodes how, pick a topic, dive into it, learn what you can, fix, what you need to then move on. Like it is a rinse and repeat and so, yeah. I love that. Tell us a little bit about your, learning journey, just so people understand better about how they're supposed to learn or ways they can learn.

Two things is I don't think that, that there's a formal financial education curriculum in America. I know there's a bunch of states, and I think in Ohio where I'm at right now, excuse me. They, they do have something that's starting up in high school where you have basic financial education. I'm, I'm trying to think back in the day when they, we had these things called checks.

You had to learn how to balance your checkbook, like at home ec, I doubt, I doubt they're teaching that anymore. And not many people. I love having younger kids come in and they're like, what? What is a check? Like something left in the past. I think that we're generally missing that and that needs to be brought in somehow.

And I think they're starting to, I just know it's state by state for my education. I was lucky enough to have parents that, you know, were not divorced in the eighties. 'cause that's really when things went 50 50. And my parents. My dad was a veterinarian and my mom was a teacher. Education was a big thing in our house.

Not a lot of emotions, but education for sure. But my dad being an entrepreneur, being owning his business and he had a partner, we were always taught to work hard. And, you know, we remodeled how to be an entrepreneur. That always spoke to me, but I literally had to figure out all the other blanks.

The one story in the book is when I graduated college, I'd walked out and my parents had given me a card, you know, out of the horseshoe here in Columbus, I. And I thought it was like a graduation card, which it was, but it was a, you owe us statement and I realized that not everybody gets this, but that was, that was what I had.

I had a tab I guess I had built up over the time in there and so I got a double whammy of, wow, I got a $400 payment starting up in a couple weeks, so I better start working. And a couple weeks after that. Because I graduated college from OSU, they must have had some kind of arrangement with Discover Card and they mailed me a check with this limit on it.

That is more money than I'd ever made my entire college career. It was like a $20,000 credit limit and I didn't do anything fun with that. I, I, they would start mailing you out these checks in the mail. And when I was in the process of building this current business, and when Lean times come, which is part of an entrepreneur, you're, you're not having a steady paycheck coming in.

I was using some of these, these cash back things there and there, or the checks, the cash to pay for rent and utilities and, you know, it got me in a lot of trouble after a few years just trying to get my own business off the ground. And that's a, a lesson I don't ever wanna repeat. And so I'm trying to share a lot of this in the book to help other people.

I was debt free when I was 18 and by the time I was 25 I was. You know, I was on debt row is what I put on here for debt row records. I was on debt row with over a hundred thousand dollars that I owed in, in seven years. And just because I didn't know any better and I, I hope that this is something that can bridge the gap and share my story with other people so that it doesn't happen to them.

I. 

Yeah. And I think that progress, regardless of the ending balance right, is very, very common. I think we have to kind of fumble to figure out the way unless we actually had somebody really demonstrate to us all of the things. And so what advice would you give to somebody who finds themself in that situation, regardless of age?

How can they pull themselves out of that? 

Warren Buffet, quote, who's, who's genuinely accepted as the goat of investing the greatest full time. Just, just had his news thing come out over the weekend. His newsletter's, annual one for Berkshire Hathaway, he says about debt or any kind of situation that's negative is that when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

You're probably, there's some reason why you're where you're at right now. There might be some situations where you've done retail therapy or you're doing something to not. Deal with the problem and, and my, and my current work here, a lot of it starts with having the dreaded B word, which is the budget.

You really need to get under control what's coming in and what's going out. If you have a bunch of debt that you owe, there's some strategies that you can do where you can perhaps try to renegotiate it or get a payment plan that's a little bit better if, if you have a mortgage. It's like refinancing a mortgage essentially, when you can, if you can get a lower rate, you do it.

If you can make the term a little bit longer, your payments would be lower. So there's multiple strategies that that certified financial planners like myself can help someone that's starting here get to here. And it's different for everybody, but that's, that's the general point. It's to stop digging if you're in problems and seeing what you can do to start slowly working your way out to like credit cards.

I doubt you max them out overnight. It probably happened over a long period of time. And reality is, is that it's gonna take a while to get that out from underneath you. So there are no overnight solutions despite what you hear on TikTok and Instagram. 

Yeah, that's great timing. I just wrote an email to my subscribers this morning about instant gratification and you know, whether you on a, a financial journey or a health journey, it's very discouraging because.

There is no instant gratification per se, so you have to make your own instant gratification. Let's talk more about your book and how somebody can find it. I know you mentioned Amazon earlier but what they will find inside and why they wanna read it.

The book is available on Amazon. There is a spoken word option as well for me, audible, which was a fun task. I've never narrated a book before. My record for redos was 157 times, but somehow the sound engineer did amazing work and you can't even tell. So there's that, there's an ebook, there's a physical book.

I can grab this one, but it's full of, of graphics that are inside, if I can find. So we have this. That's the story of Dre on there. I have lots of relatable graphics. You might find yourself singing along with it because peppered throughout it are relevant snippets of rap lyrics that I take that are relevant to what I'm writing about in that period, or financial wisdom that the person that was writing it was trying to share with you.

I pull out snippets for educational purposes to put those throughout and the graphs are always really easy to look at. And I try to make it a book that 18-year-old me. Would've enjoyed reading, and it was, it's just a different, different take on how to learn about personal finance. And it's educating, it's entertaining.

I'm a bit of a joker, so I try to pepper it throughout with, with humor just like I do in my appointments here. As far as anything else on there, the, the big lesson to try to, to figure out on your last question, where you're at now, and this is, you become a victim of, of social media. It's everybody's saying, look at what I've got, you know, on Instagram here, Instagram there.

Compare yourself to who you were a year ago, not anybody else. It's a big thing on that. And that's what I'm trying to share you through the book is that where I'm at now is not where I was at 20 plus years ago. And it took a lot of work to get there. And if you've seen that quote about the icebergs, you know, people see only the success and they don't see everything else below the surface that took the gut to get there.

That's the biggest takeaway from that one in the book. 

I noticed you also shared with me some quick, like who they're gonna find in their kind of their rundown of their personal finances. So if you'll share that right here. 

Yeah, absolutely. So chapter one is Mc Hammer.

He was the first global phenom and hip hop number one hit. I'm sure there's no pictures of anybody running around with those pants he used to wear, but those used, they might come back bell bottom's sitting here. Now they might. He had made quick money, 72 million, but spent 82, you know, don't buy gold toilets or hot tubs or statues of yourself is generally, and don't try to employ 200 friends.

Goes on to 50 cent, was another big rapper who's seen some really big highs and lows. He, he at one point was worth almost a half a billion dollars. And had to declare bankruptcy. He still had some money left after it, but lots of budgetary problems. He's in the chapter called Mo Money Mo Problems.

My favorite title, which might be a little bit you know, cliche or something, but for understanding taxes, like the boringest part of this job, taxes, legal, and insurance. That whole track title is called Back Your Assets Up. And there's some really good stories in there about rappers who had untimely deaths.

That had a will in place or did not have a will in place, or had insurance, or didn't, or a lot of them that did not pay their taxes on time. And there's lots of great stories in there. And then they end it by straight outta compound instead of Compton. Talking about how to compound your time and your education and you know, your money over time and how to give back and work on your legacy.

Amazing. I am a reader. I'm an avid reader. Oh, good. Definitely we'll put that on my list. I hope listeners will as well. If somebody is interested and wants to connect with you, how do they do that? 

Just reach out to the website. There's some director gives, write to me the emails. Hip hop x finance.com.

Perfect. All of those links will be down in the show notes. Drew, before we close any last words.

Get started, like it just get started. If you find yourself in a spot right now where you're not where you wanna be, you have to first acknowledge that and then figure out what you're gonna do to stop digging and how to get started and writing down a plan. In this business, I think the stat is you're 80% more likely to do something if you write it down.

And for me, I'd started journaling a few years back, which led into writing an entire book. So get started. Write down your plan. If you're in need of, of help or education, ask people the answer's always no. If you don't ask or you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take. I could say a lot of other quotes, but that's what I would say is last words for what to do.

Well, thank you, drew. This has been a very fun conversation and listeners go connect with him. Links are down in the show notes, and until next week.