All right, let’s get started excited to be with you today talking about, obviously a topic that is near and dear to my heart and yours as well. How do we find financial independence? Is it possible? If it is possible? How do we actually do it? What is it all about. And I am a person who, instead of just telling somebody to do it, I want to give you as specific instructions or as specific instructions as I possibly can talk about the steps that I think are necessary to follow in order to get the result that you are interested in getting. And that is something that I am going to do, but a lot of conversations as of late about work. And that’s, that’s probably something that’s always been true, we’re probably always been talking about work, how often we should do it, where we should do it from how long we should do it. And the pandemic caused us to question and change and adapt, and lots of interesting, some positive some negative things regarding work. So you might be in an environment that is only from home, or you’re back in the office, some kind of a hybrid work environment. Or you may be in the camp that you want to work as much as you possibly can for as long as you can. Or you may be interested in stopping doing work as soon as you possibly can. And I’m here for all of it. My goal, and typically, all this stuff is to help people to figure things out for themselves, to think your own thoughts to critically think about what’s most important to you. And then once you decide what is most important, how do you arrange your life so you actually get the life that you want? So finding financial independence is a big part of all that. How do we actually make it happen? Because last I checked, the bills keep coming. And life has costs and expenses. And we know that it’s become more expensive than it was just a short time ago. So how do we navigate all this stuff. So I’m going to talk about some of that today. And I’ll leave it up to you as to whether or not I’m able to help you solve any of these challenges or opportunities. It’s all relative, as Albert Einstein talks about, or talked about, rather breastpiece, Albert Einstein, it’s all relative. So my idea of financial independence is probably going to be different than yours, maybe a lot, maybe a little bit. But as always, I want you to make up your own mind, I want you to make your decisions. Certainly, we were all raised under certain conditions, and systems and assumptions. And we’re currently operating. Under all of those things. Think about all the different places that we show up in the world, you receive information from your family, and from your friends and your loved ones, and where you work and where you went to school and who you grew all this stuff. And if we’re not conscious other conscientious of it, or thoughtful about it, just sort of go through life, going through the motions. So I want you to be as conscious and as intentional as we possibly can be and figure out what it all means to you. Because again, it is all very relative. So maybe your idea is to be like James and Jack here to spend all your time at the beach. Maybe you want to be in the mountains, maybe you want to be in your office, maybe you want to take your last breath. As you send your last email. Maybe you want to spend your last dime as you take your last breath. Maybe you want to leave a ton of money to other people. I don’t know. I want you to figure that out. Here’s baby Jo. She is now when do you stop being a baby? Because she is now over the age of one. So she a baby anymore. I don’t know. She’s not walking. I haven’t gotten any real first words yet lots of data. But not only for first words, I will keep you up to date. So none of this stuff is easy. Financial stuff is enormous. And you’ve got to get the kids out the door and get yourself out the door and get the laundry done in this step. The only thing it’s one of my favorite quotes from James grombacher, who happens to be my seven year old he was exasperated one morning I was I was I had overloaded him with stuff that he was supposed to be doing. Which is probably just get your shoes on. He said I’m trying to try. And it just it just hit me like that’s so funny because that’s what we’re all doing. We’re all trying to try. So thank you James as always. So Oh, who’s got two thumbs and does dumb stuff with money, this guy. So I always want to share with people that I’m fortunate to have made lots of great financial decisions over the course of my life. And I’ve made all the dumb ones also. So I share that just to let you know that wherever you are, I’m confident gets you a little bit closer or farther to what it is or where it is that you actually want to be. But the last thing I want is for you to think that I’m some perfect version of a human being that’s never made any mistakes or doesn’t consistently still make some dumb financial decisions, because I do. And in a lot of ways, I think that, that our fallibility, with everything, particularly when it comes to money and decision making and habits and all that stuff. That’s a feature more than it is a bug. And it doesn’t benefit us all, to beat ourselves up too bad over any of this stuff. And it certainly doesn’t benefit us to avoid financial matters if we are not where we want to be. So wherever you’re at, I’m interested in getting you closer to where you want to go. I believe that financial success is available to everyone. I believe that you’re worthy of the level of financial success that you want, I believe that you are even deserving of it. But none of us are entitled to it. So we must work diligently, hard in order to get what it is that we want. So that’s what we’re here to do today is to advance that and to get a little bit closer. So how about you? What are some of your favorite ways to make money mistakes? What are your What are your some of your faves? Some of your greatest hits when it comes to stupid financial decision making? Hmm. What is it? Credit card debt? impulse buys retail therapy, just not paying attention. Like that was my favorite. My favorite was just avoidance. Even though I’ve been working in the field of personal finance for almost 25 years at this point. It makes me seem and feel old, mostly because I am getting old. But aren’t we all? So what are some of your favorites? What is the truth about money? What is true about money? From your perspective, I think that this is a good starting point. When we’re talking about what financial independence means we need to get a sense of what is true about money. There are first principles when it comes to personal finance. And I believe that a lot of these are, in fact, objectively true. We’re going to talk about Subjective Truth in just a minute. But objective truth. These are things like you don’t want to ever run out of money, that money has time value that we need to, to prepare, we need to plan. So think about what is true what you believe to be true about money like that, that is a good starting point. And then again, the next step is okay, now I sort of know what’s true about money. And it’s a question of what is most important to me about money. And this could be that you want to have enough money to be able to go to any restaurant and not have to worry about what you can or can’t order what you can or can’t afford could be that you want to have the freedom and flexibility to send your kids to whatever kind of school that you want to be able to take whatever kind of vacation that you want. Maybe you’re interested in helping your kids with their college education, maybe you’re not maybe you don’t think that that’s a valuable thing. Maybe you are an entrepreneur, maybe you think that the best source of financial freedom is working for yourself. Or perhaps you believe that working your way up through a company. And getting on the C suite of a fortune 1000 company is the right way to go about your career. Maybe you think that stock market investing is the best way to accumulate wealth, maybe you think it’s real estate, maybe you think it is some kind of a crypto asset, maybe you’re very conservative, maybe you are very aggressive at what is true for you. Money, and wealth. These take many different forms, which was why we started with Albert Einstein, that it’s all relative. So I encourage you, I advocate that you sit down with a pen and paper, cup of coffee, a glass of wine, whatever you want to say what I want to I believe is true about money. And what is most important to me, my family, my loved ones in my community when it comes to money, wealth, what is true of financial independence, what is most important to me about financial independence.

It’s, I mean, there’s so much interesting stuff going on in the world. You’ve got most of Europe going to afford a work week but then you have Greece that says we’re going to push actually go the opposite way and make it six weeks or six days a week, six day work weeks there, I was able to figure it out. Have a six day work week. So bucking the trend, maybe you think that everybody should work from home, all this stuff. Because it’s not just money, it’s work. It’s investing our money. It’s all of these things that go into what you believe that financial independence means and financial freedom, how long you should do it, how often you should do it, how you should do it, how money and your family interact together, how you talk about money, so much stuff. But it’s all accessible to you. So there is figuring out what the key is that’s going to unlock financial freedom for you. That’s what I want to help you to find. What do you need to break free from? What is keeping you stuck? Maybe it’s a question of, I don’t understand how money works. I don’t understand investing. I don’t I don’t get real estate. I’ve never done it. I’ve never invested in crypto, is this worthwhile? So these are all the questions What is the key that you need to be able to unlock financial freedom, financial independence for yourself and your loved ones. That’s what I want to help you to find. So briefly about me I’ve been at this for like I said almost 25 years I’ve worked for great big financial companies that you’re certainly well aware of today, I own and operate financial company that you are probably aware of, but very well may not be we’ve helped a lot of people I am the host to podcasts now, lifeblood and they aligned money show by them wherever you listen, your podcasts, written a bunch of books, how to get good at money, but you’re on CFO and the purpose book. And I’m honored to be named to invest PDS list of the top 100 financial advisors in the United States five years in a row. Also, dad, husband, all of these things, I believe that the more aligned we can get when it comes to every aspect of our lives, the better that we can be. I believe that financial success and personal success and happiness and ultimately contentment is found when we align our most important values and priorities with how we act how we allocate our most valuable resources, time, attention, energy and money. So do I understand and know why I’m doing things? Also notice my purpose? Do I know what I want in my life, also known as goals? Do I know who I am, my beliefs in my values. And then do I know how I like to do things, how I like to get things done, those are habits. So the closer we can get or the more thought we can put into these four different areas and syncing them up. I think the better off we’re going to be the closer we’re going to be to financial success and independence. If you’re interested in digging deeper into those concepts, you can get the purpose book for free, go to money, alignment, academy.com. Go to courses, and there you will find the purpose book course as well as the PDF version of this and would love for you to pick it up. Because I wrote it for you, friend. All right. So how do we find financial independence? How in the world do we do this? Well, there’s so many different ways to do it. You could win a lottery, you could inherit a bunch of money. That’s that’s a smart way to do it. If you can go back in time, or somehow engineer being born to be the child of Walmart folks, or Bezos, Sue’s, or the gulag, whatever, that’s impossible. So we’re not going to do that either at the bank, but probably going to end up in jail. So that’s probably maybe even prison. So you don’t want to do that dumb idea. Forget that. I said that. A lot of different ways to find a financial independence. We’re eventually going to talk about that today, I promise. So I’m very fond of saying the only way to live how you want is to know how you want to live. Only way to live, how you want us to know how you want to live. We are very much human doings, I know that I am a human doing, working on becoming a better human being. But when we’re so caught up in the day to day of the doing, it takes it takes effort. And, again, intentionality to take that step back and say, Okay, I need to take, take a beat here, take pause, what is most important to me, ask these questions and really formulate, because if I have no idea what I want my life to look like then I’m going to have an awfully hard time finding financial independence. So the first step is really to take big picture view of what it is that you truly want, also known as goal setting. And I like to talk about goals as a superpower because what you’re doing when you’re thinking about goals is you’re just simply imagining any world or any future that you want. It’s amazing. anything, you can imagine your life looking however you want. And then you make plans for bringing that desired future into current reality, and then you execute on those plants. Amazing. It’s what separates us that and our opposable thumbs from many of the other creatures on planet Earth. So, but too few of us do that. So that is the first step. So when he talked about goal setting, I advocate that while we’re talking about money, we make a mistake, when we silo different things, when we just look at something in vacuum, versus looking at how it all interacts, and how it all fits together, I think that we are much better served by looking at it that way. So think about what’s most important to you and your family. From a personal development standpoint, what do you want to learn to get better not just for the sake of doing it, obviously, from a financial standpoint, for your work, that’s going to be really, really important. From a wellness standpoint, what are you interested in doing? Or rather, how can you make yourself as strong and capable as you possibly can? about physical wellness standpoint, from a mental from an emotional from the spiritual, all of those things? Community is the glue that holds it all together. So what are your goals for your social life, more importantly, what are your communities, they’re all around us, but I don’t know that we spend enough time thinking about what they actually are. And then finally, what would give you greater peace of mind, greater sense of contentment. That’s what I want for you. And as we go through all of these as we go through what I believe the steps are to finding financial independence, and through that financial peace of mind, I advocate that you think about it in increments, three years. And that’s just because while it’s important to have goals, 50 years from now, that’s very abstract. And when we think too short, if we just think about life in terms of one year, we have a tendency to overestimate what we can get done in one year, three years, we have a tendency to underestimate what we can get done in three years. So you can get a lot done in a year. But you can absolutely change your life in three years. You could change your life in three years. So I want you to be thinking about your all six areas in in terms of short term, which is zero to three years mid term, which is four to 10 years, and then long term, which is 10 plus years. But then figure out what do I need to do over the next three years, in order to get to that point, where it all comes together. So what will happen is, you will start executing, and through the process of doing and executing, you will obviously be making incremental progress towards what it is that you want. But so many other virtuous and wonderful things will be happening, you’ll be developing self confidence, you’ll be proving to yourself, you’re capable of doing these things, you will develop momentum, grit, mental toughness, tenacity, again, really awesome things. Look at it like this, if you if you when you execute on your plan over the next three years, I can almost guarantee that you’ll win the next three years after that. And then you’ll win the three years after that. And you get the idea. It’s the whole snowball thing, you’ll just get bigger and bigger and bigger. And you will eventually find the level of financial success and financial independence, that financial independence that you desire and that you are looking for. So alright, let’s get into how we actually do it, we need to know where we’re at. So we need to understand what your current facts are. And in terms of money, it’s, I have to understand my cash flow. And this is about as basic a concept as it gets. But we need to make sure that we are executing on our fundamentals, because very few of us are very people understood very few of us. Very few people understand how much money they actually have coming in every month. And then how much money is actually going out every month. You think about if you were a company, and you did not know those numbers, how successful would you be? You may be successful in spite of that. But so much of success in life comes down to small little bits. And if you can get 1% Better 5% 1020 30% Better. Well, that’s going to have a massive impact over the long term. And that’s what we’re looking at. That’s what we’re talking about and looking at, I hope you’re able to, you know, rip off huge trucks and hit home run after home run but a lot of success in life is to use a couple of sports analogies. It’s singles. So in baseball, you just hit singles, you steal bases,

it’s small ball, or you’re gaining two to three yards per play versus throwing 190 yard touchdown passes. Those are awesome, but your long term success is going to be based on your ability to incrementally improve. So knowing your cash flow is a huge part of that money in money out. Then we also have to know what our balance sheet is what is your net worth? What are your current assets? And what are your current liabilities? So what do you own that is a value to your real estate, it’s your possessions, it’s stocks, it’s companies, whatever it is, know what the value of your assets are, and then know how much debt you have know what your liabilities? Are you working off that information and make it as current as you possibly can. And then we have to have a budget have to have a budget. Just like those organizations that we’re talking about. If your company didn’t budget, there’s very little chance you’d be financially successful. Would Amazon be successful? If they didn’t budget, they didn’t try cashflow. Again, they might be but probably not. Probably not maybe on the short term, but not over the long term. So I’m not. I used to hate budgeting just absolutely hated it. I felt like I was getting in trouble when I did it. And in my household, my wife keeps our budget. Even though I’m the financial person. I recognize a budget for what it is, which is an extremely empowering tool. It’s a plan for your money, lets you know that you are on track to meet or exceed your financial goals or that you are behind. Both are good answers tells you that can I retire? Do I have? Have I achieved financial independence? Am I getting closer to it and are getting farther away from it? So these are all valuable they help us to course correct to let us know. So these really cashflow on budget. But then understanding what your assets and liabilities is extremely important. But when you’re tracking those two key things that will get you closer to what you want. All right. So let’s talk about financial literacy, financial wellness knowledge equals what you know, hey, financial literacy is what you know, financial wellness is what you do. So are we able to take and put into play or put into practice, but to work that which we know, that’s not a guarantee? The world is littered with educated derelicts. People that know plenty, but cannot execute, cannot put plans into action cannot follow through on things. If you want to find financial independence, that can’t be you, you need to be able to execute on your financial plans, you need to number one, understand what you know or where you’re deficient. I want you to be consciously incompetent. And then I want you to move from conscious incompetence to conscious competence. The last thing I want for you to be unconsciously incompetent because that means you don’t know what you don’t know. So that’ll be tricky. I mentioned earlier time value of money. What’s important about that is simply this, the longer it takes you to start pursuing your most important financial goals, the harder it becomes for you to actually realize them. So this is something we need to assess immediately. So how much DNL? Where are your gaps? What are you missing? So on a Tate’s scale of eight to 10? Skip seven? Where are you at? Are you an eight? Are you a nine? Are you a 10? Okay, you can call yourself a 10 and call yourself an eight. I’m not judging you, I want you to be as honest with yourself as you possibly can be. So what are the areas that you need improvement in? Do you understand how to put a budget together? Do you understand how to track your cash flow? Jay, understand how your 401k work works? Do you understand how to if you are a business owner, put a 401k or a retirement plan in place for yourself and your employees. If you want to get into real estate, you understand how that works? Where can you get the new education or the new learning the resources that you need, in order to get what you want? The we have the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, literally. So I don’t think that there are too many excuses for being financially illiterate today. In an afternoon in an hour, you can learn the steps that you need to do just about anything. So that’s what we’re here to talk about. That’s what I’m here to help you do. And finally, in closing the loop on the literacy and the wellness piece is do you really want to do this. So it comes down to the desire. Because if you are not interested in devoting resources, time, attention, energy, to learning the things that you need to know, in order to get what you want, then you’ll probably need to expend or to commit your final, most valuable resource money to it. Be honest with yourself. If you’re not going to learn about investing, then you probably need to work with some kind of an investment professional. If you’re not going to put a plan together. You probably need to work with somebody to help you put your plan together. And if you need accountability to keep you on track, then you probably need to hire somebody to do that as well. And that’s true of every aspect of your life. truth of your diet, if you have no idea about proper nutrition, you need to hire somebody to put a meal plan together for you, if you don’t know how to exercise, as we get older, we need to get stronger, you need to be doing cardiovascular exercise, you need to be doing weight training and resistance training, you need to get stronger. So if you’re not going to do that on your own, you need to hire somebody who’s going to help you to do those things. So be honest again, are you willing to put in the time attention and energy to learn and then do these things. If not, the need to hire somebody to do it, this stuff is too important. Again, money has time value. I also want you to maximize your earning potential, we want to earn as much as we can, we want to save as much as we can, we want to invest as much as we can. And if you are somebody who’s interested in giving, I want you to give as much as you possibly can. These are all your value judgments, not mine. But in terms of your human capital, your ability to earn money, you want to increase that you want to maximize your ability to earn as much as you can. Particularly if you are interested in the fire movement, financial independence retire early. Well, we need to do this ASAP. I need to figure out how to get more bang for my buck. or rather how to how to get the most bucks for my work. That’s it narratives that’s gonna say something inappropriate there. I’m glad I caught myself, maybe I should. Maybe now anywho you need to maximize your earning potential. So what is that? What does that look like? Well, if you are working for a company, if you are in industry, for lack of a better term working for a company, how can you make yourself more valuable than new certifications designations? How can you get promoted? How can you get bonuses? How can you earn more money in the environment that you are in is the your chosen career, your current career, the right delivery mechanism for giving you the life that you want isn’t going to give you enough money long term to become financially independent? These are questions you have to ask yourself to evaluate. Okay, let’s project this out. Let’s play this out in the future. If I keep doing this, is it going to provide me with the lifestyle that I want today, five years from now 10 years from now is going to allow me to get the life that I want. Again, the only way to live how you want is to know how you want to live? You get clear on that? And then you say okay, am I do I have the right delivery mechanism? Yes, no, maybe. So how can I make sure that I could earn more to be a career change? Could be entrepreneurship, could be sales, could be investing. These are all the things we need to figure out. These are things that you need to be thinking about and figuring out. And then ice cream. My boys love ice cream. James and Jack are giant ice cream fans turns out to love gelato as well, who knew popsicles were right now popsicle season in the grombacher household. Unbelievable. What a time to be alive. Now we want to make a plan. So gone through and done some assessments of ourselves but thoughtful about what matters about money. What’s true about money, we want our lives to look like goal setting planning data. Now it is making a plan. So what does financial independence look like for you? What does it mean? It’s going to come down to how much? How much? Do I need to be financially independent? If you want to be able to step away from full time work? What’s that going to take? So let’s make a plan. Let’s say that you want to be able to step away from full time work 20 years from now. So we have a 20 year plan. And it’s it’s irrelevant to me can be 10 years could be two could be one could be 3030 years from now. 20. Let’s just stick with 2020 years from now I’d like to be financially independent. Okay. So we need to project out you need to know obviously what your current expenses are. But then we need to be able to look into the future and say, What will my living expenses be 20 years in the future? So you need to figure all that out. So factor inflation, which is impossible right now, because inflation in some examples is like 100%. Who knows? Maybe it’s leveled out? Maybe

it hasn’t, I don’t know. What we’re doing is we are planning and making projections. And every time that we do that, we need to be able to course correct and make changes here or there. adjust as necessary as stuff that is well beyond our control, pop up like inflation, but need to be able to figure out and try to factor in, what is life going to look like? More importantly, how much is life going to cost 20 years from now from a living expenses standpoint, but then also, it’s important to factor in major purchases because you may want to buy a new home or air conditioners or travel or grandchildren or whatever it might be. So Think about major purchases that are going to be coming along over the course of 20 years, and then 20 years plus, we need to have cash on hand. So more so than just having income come in, want to make sure that you have cash reserves, in case of an emergency, so that you are able to make a major purchase, just so that you’re nimble. So those are the factors those are the considerations we skipped. When that probably I should have put that Renner neath our goal here, but you get the idea. And then the idea is how much do I need to be saving today, in order to be able to actually realize and achieve my goal of being financially dependent in the timeframe that I am interested in becoming financially independent. So I talked about the one versus three, or rather the three year plan, you’re able to do the things over the next three years, not that you’re going to have all the money saved up three years from now, but that you’ve been putting money away towards the means through which you will receive or reach financial independence. Let’s say that your goal is to, to have $1,000,000.20 years from now in your 401k. Okay, that’s pretty easy to back into and say, Okay, I need to be saving this much each month. Today, in order to 20 years from now have accumulated at an 8% rate of return $1 million. It’s an arbitrary number. But the same is true of real estate. Same is true of, of if you wanted to retire on dividends of accumulating the stocks of companies that pay dividends, you get the idea, that’s the whole game here is I cannot boil the ocean, I cannot make all this happen tomorrow. But what I can do is put a plan together and know what I need to be doing right now, over the next three years so that I will be positioned 20 years from now to be financially independent. So that is what it’s all about. And in the spirit of that, where do you want to have income coming from? So your streams of income. I’m not an advocate of saying you need to have dozens of these. I think that we need to be thoughtful and think about what kind of investor that you want to be are you interested in accumulating or rather achieving financial independence through stock market investing, mutual funds, qualified plans, like a 401 K or an IRA or a SEP IRA, dividend producing stocks, maybe you were a real estate person, so you want to begin accumulating or developing a portfolio of income producing real estate. Maybe your intention is to be able to take out a reverse mortgage on your home, because you are you got a great deal on a house five years ago, 10 years ago, your interest rate is low. So you’re going to have your home paid off and take a reverse mortgage out on it. And that will hopefully be a big source of income in your retirement, maybe you’re a business owner or you’re interested in, in starting a business and growing it to the point where you will be able to be the CEO and do less, but still earn income from it. Or you’re interested in growing a business and selling it. And that’s your exit plan, your retirement plan. Maybe you’re a really conservative investor and you want to go through CDs at the back great doesn’t matter to me. municipal bonds, maybe you’re going to be reliant on Social Security or you’re in a you’re in a career that will give you a pension. So you say, Okay, I’m a firefighter. And if I stick with this for 20 years, I’ll be able to retire and you get the idea. So where what is your plan for creating income that will last for as long as you needed to that will allow you to be financially independent and step away from full time work, at least partially, if not completely. So these are some of the most common streams of income that people put to work in order to accomplish that goal. So habits are what we do. We are creatures of habits and routines. And the more we can create habits, the better off we’re going to be. And right now you have plenty of habits. That doesn’t mean your habits are serving you necessarily but we have to be human beings follow very predictable habits and routines. We do things very much the same way. Now, that doesn’t mean that yours are serving you because you may be in the habit of going and spending 15 bucks at Starbucks every morning. And I’m not saying stop going to Starbucks but I am saying stop spending $15 at Starbucks every day. You may be in the habit of whatever data you get the idea. Part of auditing or understanding your cash flow is doing exactly that which is auditing your cash flow auditing your consumer behaviors. That’s what it’s all about. All my current behaviors, aka habits, going to get me what I actually want over the long term, are my current habits going to get me financial independence? Or are they guaranteed that I will never reach financial independence. Right now, if you live in paycheck to paycheck, you’re in the habit of living paycheck to paycheck. Right now, if you are in credit card debt, you are in the habit of being in credit card debt. And to find financial independence, those are two habits you have to break. I know I did. It’s true. So many of us. Vast majority of Americans right now are in the habit of doing one or two or both of those things. So we need to examine our habits, and habits plus routines, our rituals of success. So habits plus routines equals a ritual of success or success ritual. So your habit is, I’m in the habit of doing a thing. And then your routine is how you actually do the thing. So you may be in the habit of waking up at five o’clock in the morning. But then your morning routine is the different the steps that you follow, in order to get through the morning to get out of the house or to start your day. And this is true of every aspect of our lives, we have habits in Him, we have routines. Finding ritual success means that these are benefiting that these are beneficial and benefiting us, these are moving us closer to life that we want not taking us further away. So that’s what we’re interested in doing. I think that in order to find financial rituals of success, in order to find financial independence, first and foremost, we must accept full ownership and responsibility of our personal finances. It doesn’t mean that when the stock market goes down by 40%, that I’m taking responsibility for that. But I am taking responsibility for how I react when that happens. So but I’m also taking responsibility for my behaviors, I’m taking responsibility for how I’m allocating my resources, all of those things. And again, I talked at the top, you don’t have to do all of it. There are plenty of people that are doing great work in all areas of money and finance, real estate and crypto that you can borrow expertise from. A lot of it’s free. I’m not saying you need to spend money on things, just take advantage of the resources that are available to you. Be honest, when you need help with something, give yourself the grace to ask for help. And then when you ask for it, make sure that you’re receiving the help. So here’s a couple of different habits or rituals of success, or rather, one that I think you should you ought to put to work immediately. So what you’ve done is assuming that you go through the different steps that I talked about, is you’ve looked at your current situation. You’ve thought about your cash flow, you have a good understanding of it, you have a budget, you understand your assets and your liabilities, you have audited your current level of financial know how your financial literacy level, you’ve made plans, you’ve thought about what you want, think about what’s important about money, what’s true about it. Now the habit is holding a monthly money meeting. And I encourage that anybody that you are sharing responsibility with or people that are stakeholders, for lack of a better term in your financial future, that you ought to be holding monthly money meetings with those people. So I encourage you to hold this in the same day and time every month. And it need not be a PowerPoint presentation, it can be you and your partner. Again, having a coffee or glass of wine or a Scotch or going to the park or just doing it over the kitchen table, review your goals, review your plants, look at all of your accounts. Just make sure that everything is tracking the way that it ought to, you need to review your budget and your cash flow. Those are the key areas that I encourage you to to check out. Generally Steps to Success to get you started to get off on the right foot.

If you are currently in a place where you say okay, I really desire financial independence. But right now I’m not charting, I’m not tracking towards it. The first step is to save $1,000. And this needs to be this is the beginning of your emergency fund. So you need to open up an account that’s separate from everyday checking account. So it could be a savings account, it could be a money market account, and then get $1,000 saved up. So stop doing everything else until you’ve got 1000 bucks. That’s enough to cover most minor emergencies. From there I want you to start paying yourself first. So if you are interested in developing wealth through stock market and your 401k at work, just enroll in your 401k at work, even if it’s a 1% you need to pay yourself first you need to put your your and your family’s priorities ahead of everybody else’s which is exactly where they should be. Eventually I want you to get to saving 15% of your Your income towards your most important financial goals but main from from small things we have to get started somewhere. So just start with 1%. Get to if you’re with an organization that offers you a match on your retirement plan, get to that number as soon as you possibly can. Some people refer to that as free money, I think it’s part of your employee benefits package. So very, very important to do that as quickly as you possibly can. We’re talking about real estate, same thing. You need to be saving money and understanding. Okay, my goal is to buy a $250,000, one bedroom condo as my first investment property, my first rental, whatever, okay, what’s that going to cost, you start saving money for the down payment, or investing money for the down payment, and you get the idea. And then from there, I want you to get to one month’s worth of your expenses saved up. So you’ve now gone through your cash flow you’ve gone through and you have a personal budget, our household budget rather, you know what your monthly expenses are, so get one month saved up. So you build on the 1000. If your household expenses are $4,000, you need to save an additional 3000, then that will be obviously three plus one tracking with me for so that is one month’s worth of your expenses, then from there, I want you to get mad and eliminate any credit card debt that you have. So make a plan. If you need help with that we have a free course called get out of debt. I’m awesome at naming things, you can access that money Landman academy.com forces, get out of debt that will help you put a plan together for paying off your credit card debt. Or check out Uncle Dave, Dave Ramsey. He’s obviously the world leader in helping people get out of credit card debt. And put a plan together for doing that, it’s going to be one of the most important things you’ll ever do for yourself is getting out of credit card debt and staying out of it once and for all. And then from there, and once you two months saved up in terms of your expenses, then three, then four, then five, then finally six. And those words leave my mouth so easily. But I know how hard that is. I know how hard it is to pay off your credit cards that I know how hard it is to get to the point where you’ve got six months worth of expenses saved up. But what you’ve done what you’ve achieved, once you’ve done that is financial security. And it’ll be such a wonderful feeling. I’m so excited for you to have it if you don’t currently. Let the tension come on your shoulders. Take a deep breath a sigh of relief. You’ve paid off your credit card debt, you’re paying yourself you’re saving and you’re investing in your future. You’ve got six months worth of cash. It’s amazing. Now you’re ready to really pursue financial independence, financial prosperity, however you want to think about it. Okay. Then it’s a function of rolling with the punches. Mike Tyson here he famously said, Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth. So goes or watch some early Mike Tyson highlights holy cow. If you haven’t done that, do yourself a favor and check them out. Scary stuff that everybody had a plan for boxing Mike Tyson told me actually, that till the bell rang, and then they got their bell run. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself there. So will your plan survive its collision with reality. You make the plan, executing that stuff’s gonna happen. To be ready to weather the storm to be gritty to have the mental toughness, the emotional fortitude, to be able to weather life’s hiccups, inflation, real estate market doing what’s doing interest rates going up. So many different things that are beyond our control are going to happen. It’s going to happen, how will I respond? Will I be able to stay the course? Do I have the money, the insurance, all these things to be able to absorb and move past these things? It’s critical that we do. So. Now. Thank you for checking this out. Thanks for taking the time, I’m very aware of the value of your most valuable resources, time, attention, energy and money that you decided to give me some of yours. I’m grateful for hopefully you receive value from your investment. But if you don’t do anything with this for a year goes by, oh, that’s right. I was gonna pursue financial independence. And this guy George was talking about it. What was it that he said, that’ll be a bummer? Because we will both have wasted our time and I don’t want that to happen. So making it real. When will you take action on the things that we’ve been talking about? When will you think about what’s true about money? What’s important about money? What financial independence means to you? Goal setting, the budgeting, the cash flow, the planning all this stuff? When will you do it? I’m literally I want to know what day what time Saturday at 10. But it will What do you normally do on Saturday at 10? That’s when I play pickleball Okay, well, that’s not going to work them. Because I don’t want you to miss pickleball or whatever it is that you do. So you need to find a time that you’re going to actually stick to it, where you’re not going to bump it. Because this is too important. Your financial future, your financial independence is too important to not do these things. So stick to it, execute on it, get it done. buffaloes, bison, it’s really this is really interesting. I love this story. My friend Abby large told me the story, said there’s this one place in the Great Plains in the United States where cows and buffalo come together just naturally. And it’s interesting because you get to observe really important behavior. And in the Great Plains, you can see forever, and so you can see when a storm is headed your way. And when the storm does show up, the cows turn and start walking away from it. To buffalo, the bison walk right into it, they start walking towards the storm. What happens is, the cows prolong the amount of time that they are in the storm. Because they’re essentially just walking with it. So they’re getting rained on or hailed on or lightning dawn. Lightning dawn. Yeah, lightning on for way longer versus the bison. Just walk straight into it. They steer into it, they lean into it. And while it might be unpleasant, and a little scary, they get through it way faster. Moral the story is when it comes to financial difficulties, setbacks, fear, do not brush it under the carpet. Do not try to avoid these things, because you’re not going to avoidance simply prolongs the pain and suffering that you’re going to go through. So be a bison, be the great American buffalo. Face your fears, walk directly into them. It’ll be painful, that it’d be painful for a lot shorter. And again, money has time values, the longer we wait to pursue what’s most important, the harder it becomes to get there. Again, you are worthy. You are deserving of the financial life and financial success that you desire but you’re not entitled to it got to do the work. And there’s never going to be anybody more interested in your financial success than you are so you have to act accordingly. Take advantage of the three free courses we’ve got on money alignment academy.com courses, its goals course the values course the good debt course you can download the purpose book for free there as well. Check out the lifeblood podcast and the aligned money show wherever you listen to your podcasts and feel free to send me a message GA money laminate cut. George money alignment academy.com I always love hearing from people. All right, appreciate you checking it out.