Speaker 1: 0:01

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Train for a Great Life. Today we're going to dive into a topic that I'm passionate about, and it is managing money how to manage, how to stop bleeding it and how to get it working for you. And I'll be honest that talking about this can feel a little bit weird for me, so I'm going to acknowledge that right up front. I bounce in and out of whether I want to talk about this stuff at all and like who the hell am I to talk about it, but really, some of the things that I can talk about now are exactly what I needed to hear, you know, five and ten years ago. So that's the angle that I'm coming at this from. Is that all I'm trying to do is provide a nugget that maybe sparks something in your mind and makes you ask a question, and you know you, you can do what you want with with that.

Speaker 1: 0:53

So what money is I mean, and and why? What does it mean? Obviously, it's a tool to buy goods and services, but it also can create the absence of financial stress, it can create security, it can create opportunity and it can create freedom as well in terms of time and choice of what you do. So a bit more background and about me, because we all come to the table with different stuff. I grew up with enough. I had a roof over my head and loving parents, but like everybody, I inherited some limiting beliefs around money, like the idea that wealthy people didn't really deserve what they had or that having money had to make you less humble. The truth is, we bring our own mindset and baggage into conversations about money. I believe that financial health is a key part of building a great life. It will definitely hold you back if you don't have it. Not necessarily making millions of dollars, but being free from constant financial stress. I want to be able to make a bunch of money, not to buy fancy cars and Rolexes, because that's not what I value, but to have the absence of financial stress, because I have lived in it and constantly thinking about it, and then also to have freedom of time and choice of what I do with my life and my time. I've been in phases of pretty deep financial stress and perceived lack of opportunity and options, periods of less financial stress and then also phases where I know that what I'm doing is moving the needle ahead for me and my family to create security for our future, and I just want to talk about it and share it Now. To be clear, I am not your financial advisor, or a financial advisor at all advisor, or a financial advisor at all. What I share might apply to you now. It might not apply to you now or ever, but again, my hope is that some piece of information in this episode sparks a thought or a question and helps you move forward and make your own life better in some meaningful way. So if you hear something that you have a question on, shoot me a message or email and I'll do my best to get you an answer or point you toward a resource that I think would be helpful. If you're just joining us on this podcast, this is probably not your average one, but this is where I talk about all things fitness, family and finance to help you build and train for a great life, one rep at a time.

Speaker 1: 3:23

A bit more background I grew up most of my childhood in a one-car family. My brother and I neither of us played hockey, even though we would have loved to, partly because of scheduling and partly because of the cost. We weren't a family that took a lot of vacations. We did Disney when I was 10 and we did a family trip at West when I was 17. Other than that, we had holidays and stuff and cottages, but like a family cottage on my mom's side, but we didn't do a lot of traveling. This isn't to diminish my childhood or my parents whatsoever. I was raised with great values and honestly I don't think that it's necessarily good to get everything that you want. Especially you know as a kid where you're not necessarily doing the things to provide that. So there's value in real struggle and learning to build and learning to appreciate what you have. I'm proud of lessons that I took from my parents, but since we're talking about money today, it's important to acknowledge that we all inherit a certain mindset around it, often without realizing it, and those early beliefs shape who we are and how we operate.

Speaker 1: 4:29

My dad is a collector. Growing up, there were four bedrooms in the upstairs of my house my parents' room, my room, my brother's room and the card room, which was bigger than either of my brother and I's rooms, and when I say card room, I mean hockey cards, to be specific. At least, mostly there was other stuff, other sports and lots of memorabilia. In the last two decades. My parents mainly my dad have a collection of Swarovski crystal animals. I didn't hear about growing, growing, investing, about investing. Sorry, growing up, my brother and I definitely, as kids, went down that road of like having our own collections. You know, hockey cards, marvel cards, pogs if you remember those. My parents did save a good deal for our education, but I don't ever recall hearing about investing or hearing that word really at all. Nor did I ever have any inkling of owning a business or owning anything really.

Speaker 1: 5:30

For more backstory on that, episode number 20 on this podcast is how I got into the fitness industry and episode 21 is the catalyst to my financial education. So we're kind of picking up from beyond the struggle of the early years of the gym and beyond the catalyst to financial education. I started to look at money more as a game. I started seeing ways that I could get ahead and I started seeing for the first time an investment working in our favor, meaning money producing more money. Now, keep in mind, as a business owner, you don't have any type of retirement or pension set up for you. It's something that you have to figure out along the way, hopefully whatever that looks like, and that's been a huge part of my journey and personal growth, as well as finding people to surround myself with that I can learn from in those areas. I also want you to keep in mind that when ownership and something starts to work in your favor you're not trading your time for dollars anymore you begin to see points of leverage, okay. So from there, things have shifted. I began to nail down the basics allocating money for saving and for investing, and really letting that playbook run for years pretty consistently. This would have been like 2016.

Speaker 1: 6:47

For the next few years, we moved from spinning the wheels and surviving, just stabilizing, paid down all consumer debt and student loans and really had a hard reset there. We stopped the bleeding, so let's not start it again. We'd also been executing a savings plan without knowing it Again. Refer back to episode 21 for the details on that. It's a pretty crazy story and in doing so, we were actually more financially successful than we thought. We started to build up a little reserve for the first time for like an emergency fund, and then started slamming away as much money into the TFSAs as we could once we realized what they could do and when I say what they could do, meaning that any gain in that account, you can take out completely no taxable event. So do with that what you will. I mean you can. If you put in $1,000 and you know you take out $1,200 a year later, that's great. But we're going to talk about compounding and how you taking money out of that can sort of break that system. So I'll get to more of that later.

Speaker 1: 8:03

In 2018, we incorporated our business, so instead of it just being Jay and Lacey's gym, now it was its own corporate entity and while there were costs associated with that, this was more tax advantageous. So now we were kind of working on that side of things as well. Any money that we could leave in the corporation that we didn't need personally would be taxed at a lower rate than if we took it all personally. Then we got into building our home, which, depending on how you look at it, isn't necessarily an investment at all. Building our home which, depending on how you look at it, isn't necessarily an investment at all. Yes, we added an asset to our net worth, but by building it for less than what it's worth but I lean more toward the rich dad, poor dad philosophy here Unless you sell that asset and pocket the gain, you're not really actually ahead. You've actually just added a bigger monthly payment and a bigger liability. So, yes, if we did sell that good chunk of money, you still have to land somewhere now. So, that said, we did need a place Like the plan was never to stay in the spot that we were at, and it ended up working out well, even though we built in a very expensive time during the late stages of the pandemic.

Speaker 1: 9:17

That home build dominated our financial picture for a couple of years and just all the moving parts with that. Once we got into the house and things stabilized and we sort of knew what our costs were each month and where we needed to be to have some breathing room in terms of cash flow, we started to build in the some breathing room in terms of cash flow. We started to build in the next layer of the system. So that included creating a holding company to house any profit beyond um what we needed in our operating company, meaning the gym. There's a few reasons for that.

Speaker 1: 9:51

One um, just moving that money out of that account. It gives a new purpose. Moving it to a separate entity, um, you know, if you leave it in there, it's going to get used for something. Two and this one is key as well. This was taught to me that it offers liability protection, so if, for some reason, our gym were to ever get sued, everything inside the operating account would be fair game. So for anyone else running a business and keeping cash in their main company, it is worth thinking about that type of and so far this has mainly been about managing expenses, saving and investing without really getting into like too many specifics.

Speaker 1: 10:34

The home build for us is definitely a bigger move. I still, in some ways yes, it was a real estate move, but not necessarily like buying a long term rental or something like that Again, depending on how you look at it, more of a liability than an investment. Beyond this, we are going to start to get a little bit more complex with our system. I'm going to stop the story here for now and leave the next stuff for the next episode. I will leave you with a teaser that at this point in time, there are nine different ways that we are making money, either from active or passive pursuits.

Speaker 1: 11:13

If your brain is sparked, which I hope, it is a great spot to start would be Rich Dad, poor Dad. It's a bestseller for a reason. It's, you know, even as I say this, it's one that I should go and read again, because I haven't read it in years and I'm sure that I would look at it differently than I did when I first read it. So we'll get into more of the specifics on the next episode. See you in the gym.