eorge grombacher 0:02
Andy to get us started. Let’s do two truths and a lie.

Andy Baxley 0:08
All right, I’ve got some good ones for you here, George. So here they are, number one. I’ve been to over 100 Chicago Bears games. Number two, my great grandfather led the development of the moving assembly line for Ford Motor Company in 1913. And number three, I lived in Seoul, South Korea for four years.

george grombacher 0:29
Those are good ones. I bet the Bears game is a lie.

Andy Baxley 0:36
How did you know that? Yes.

george grombacher 0:41
It’s all just guesswork. It’s all just guesswork. I bet you’ve been through a lot. If you’ve been to like 99, bears games or something like zero pairs games.

Andy Baxley 0:48
I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed to say this, because I do live in Chicago. But I’ve only been here for years or so now. And a good chunk of that time was was COVID. And I have to admit, I’m also just not as big of football, as I used to be so, so no bears games. But I do intend to go to one. Before I leave here one day.

george grombacher 1:07
Awesome. I love it. Well, I’m excited to have have you on and dig in everything. What is top of mind for you right now.

Andy Baxley 1:16
You know, there’s a there’s a few things that are top of mind right now, for me, I think the one that I’m thinking the most about right now, is this idea of a statement of financial purpose. So this idea that, you know, I’m a financial adviser, I help clients with their money. And there’s a lot of tactical advice I can give, I can tell you how to how to build your portfolio, I can tell you how much to say I can tell you what types of insurance policies you should buy. But something that I’ve realized over the course of my career is, you know, if we don’t tie all that advice into a deeper, why a deeper sense of purpose, that, you know, often the advice just ends up being bad, it might be a good rule of thumb, it might work for most people. But if you don’t really understand what’s important to the person that you’re that you’re sitting across from then I think the advice often just doesn’t quite hit the mark. So, but thinking a lot about my own statement of financial purpose, how do I help clients get clear on their statements of financial purpose? And and once you’ve done so how do we use that as a lens to look through whenever a financial decision or any life decision comes our way?

george grombacher 2:24
Well, I, I love it. That is music to my ears right there. I couldn’t agree more. So it sounds like there’s a benefit to the client, obviously, but then a benefit to you as the advisor as well, having clarity around that.

Andy Baxley 2:38
I think that’s right, I think there’s, I think there’s multiple benefits to both sides. For me what I’ve experienced, I’ve been experimenting with this idea for a while now I first got it from Carl Richards, in his book, The one page financial plan. And what I’ve noticed, as I’ve done this work with clients is yes, it benefits me because whenever there’s a big decision to be made, like I said, we now have that lens to look through and making that decision. And I think that just leads to better decision making down the road. I’ve also noticed that it leads to a lot more fun at work. These are really fun conversations to be having with people. And when you practice and learn how to have them skillfully. It just leads to much deeper, more in depth meetings and really in depth in the way they want a meeting to be in depth not getting lost in the weeds behind the numbers. And, you know, how’s my portfolio doing compared to this benchmark, but, but again, taking that step back and exploring the deeper purpose so, so I’ve loved what it’s done for my relationships with clients. You know, I think my relationships with my clients is much closer, I become a trusted thinking partner for them in a way that that maybe I wasn’t white before. So yeah, it’s been beneficial in a number of ways.

george grombacher 3:49
More fun, I am game for that for sure. Trusted thinking partner. I like that a lot. Tell me a little bit more.

Andy Baxley 3:58
Well, I think we can all probably agree or most of us can agree I certainly would say this about myself that when it comes to other people’s money, I can think really clearly about your money. George I can think really clearly about what what you should be doing. But when that same exact question comes my way. There’s all kinds of biases and ego and you know, the voice of my mom and dad, the voice of society, all these things that sort of come in and create this very interesting stew in my head that can really cloud my decision making and just make it really difficult for me to think clearly. So again, you know, somebody else has asked me for advice. You can cut through all that really easily when it’s somebody else because you’re you’re separate from it right? And I ultimately think that that’s the role of a really good financial adviser, in addition to all that technical expertise is somebody to sit beside you and say, okay, here are the facts. Here’s what I hear you saying it’s important to you and here’s my perspective on that and having that addition perspective, often, I think it’d be the difference between success however you define that and, and failure

george grombacher 5:09
wouldn’t be interesting and probably a lot easier if everybody just walked in with a blank slate without any existing biases, or without feeling the pressure of assumptions from family or co workers or neighbors and just society and everything else. But that’s not how it goes, we have all of those things that we are just that’s just present that you could say that they’re bad, some might be good, but it’s there. And to pretend like they’re not going to pretend like those aren’t influencing decisions is is a bad idea. So changing the conversation and going deeper into, let’s strip this away as best we can and find out what is really most important to you.

Andy Baxley 5:50
That’s right. And one of the one of the areas that I’ve always found really interesting as it pertains to all of this is retirement timelines. So when somebody comes to you, and they say, I want to retire at 65, where do you think that numbers coming from? Do you think that they actually want to retire at 65? Or they, you know, if you’d ask them when they were 10? You know, what’s your deepest dream of retirement? They’re gonna say, well, 65, that’s the age No, no, of course not. That’s not. That’s not something that’s naturally inside of us. That’s, that’s a narrative that was told to us. And, you know, I think largely, the idea of retiring at 65, or 67, or whatever it may be, is kind of pegged to the when we can claim Social Security. But I love this idea of creative retirement timelines. And that could be anything from earlier retirement, later retirement, phased retirement, periodic sabbaticals, any number of different ways you might be a little bit more creative with the timeline of your work life. I love exploring that with the clients, because often a they just haven’t really thought about it. They haven’t thought about what’s possible. And it’s just this really obvious way in which when we kind of step back and say, Gosh, why do I want to retire in my 60s? What is it about my 60s that’s special, and you realize, well, there’s really nothing special about your 60s. Ultimately, it becomes a math problem, which we can solve, but then it’s also a problem of what’s important to you. And if you could design life, however you wanted to design it, what would that look like? And that’s a much more fun conversation, then, you know, how do we just blindly follow this traditional nine to five job or 65 narrative?

george grombacher 7:24
That’s so funny, right? 65? It’s just such an arbitrary age. But what do you think like 90% of people would would would give you that number, if if just randomly asked.

Andy Baxley 7:35
Yeah, and I think that changes through time. I think that’s right. I think it probably would be 90% or more. A couple 100 years ago, you asked me that question is say, What’s retirement? What do you mean? When am I going to retire? I mean, a couple 100 years ago, you work till you die. That was retirement, right? You weren’t till you died, or till you just simply weren’t able to work anymore. Then with the advent of modern pensions and the Social Security system here in the United States, we started to think about that little differently and say, Okay, well, maybe we can step away from work and live another 10 years beyond our working life, and then see life expectancies in current use here, and especially in the last 100 years or so well, now, we’ve got this sort of arbitrary age 65 thing that’s pegged to pensions and social security. But then we also have this life expectancy of another 30 years beyond that for a lot of people. And the questions around, how do I fill that time? What exactly do I do I do with that time? And all of this is to say, I think it all comes together into this moment we have where we can start to question those assumptions and say, Okay, we’re living longer, we’re healthier for longer. How do we actually want want this to play out? And how do we maybe step outside of the box a little bit?

george grombacher 8:42
Yeah. Such a huge and fun opportunity, going back to that word fun, which probably people don’t commonly associate with financial advice or money in general. But it’s a whole world that that opens up, like, take out a blank canvas, and whatever your favorite kind of writing utensil is, if it’s a craft, or some markers, or pencils, and let’s talk about what you want your life to look like, you can make it look like anything.

Andy Baxley 9:09
What’s your answer to that question? George, I’m curious.

george grombacher 9:13
In terms of just the whole thing, or

Andy Baxley 9:15
in terms of how you think about work, and life and balancing those two, and how long you want to work, what types of work you want to do.

george grombacher 9:25
I found that I, it’s helpful for me to break down my life into six different areas. So it’s just sort of thinking about life because I can’t get my arms or my head around that. So I think about what I want for my family, my community, for my work, and for my finances, I kind of lump those together, maybe I shouldn’t from a wellbeing perspective, so my physical health and mental and spiritual from a learning perspective so personal development, what do I want to do just for the sake of learning and then finally from a kind of a peace of mind spiritual? And so when I break it down like that, I can, I don’t want to say attack the problem, but it just helps me to kind of get clarity or give myself prompts a little bit more, as opposed to just sort of being overwhelmed with oh my god, I have no idea I don’t I don’t even know where to start. So

Andy Baxley 10:13
yeah, I love that I don’t know, if you’ve ever encountered a exercise out there called the wheel of life, I highly encourage anyone to google it, it should be one of the first things that pops up on like a Google image search. But it effectively breaks life down into these different components, not too dissimilar to the ones that you just mentioned. And the idea behind it is, if you imagine a wheel with different spokes, each of those facets of life is a spokes on the wheel. And you’re meant to effectively rate on a scale of one to 10 with one being, you know, I’m so far from ideal in this particular area of life and 10, being you know, everything’s perfect, I couldn’t imagine it being any better. And you just kind of write on a scale of one to 10, you know, how are things my work? How are things in my finances? How are things going with my community. And what’s really interesting, I’ve done this exercise with dozens and dozens of clients at this point, it’s just really interesting to see how challenging it is to have all of those maxed out at the same time, you know, we move through life and these different chapters, and in one chapter, you might be scoring really high on certain facets and not so high on others. And then, as time goes on, that starts to shift. So I think taking that really high level holistic viewpoint of of wellness and including, you know, not just your, your working life and your finances, but everything else as well. And looking at that on one page can be very powerful. For

george grombacher 11:31
sure. And I bet people like that, that they kind of like to be able to say, You know what, I’m probably right now I’m probably a seven or an eight, and which is, and that’s probably, sometimes you’re like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe I’m six or seven. But other times people say, you know, I’m totally fine with that. I’m just, I’m in the middle of my kids, and we’re growing a business. So it’s that season of life, but maybe in a couple of years, I can revisit it.

Andy Baxley 11:58
That said, I had a two year old, almost another baby on the way this month actually. And I think about like leisure, for example, maybe being one of those facets of life, I’d probably give it a I don’t know, four or five, but honestly, that’s great. No at this, at this stage of my life, I’m, you know, I get some time every night to curl up with a book before bed, and I get to walk my dog every morning. And and that’s funny for me this this chapter, whereas, you know, in my 50s, or 60s, if that’s all I get to do with my free time, then that might not be as satisfying. But again, back to this idea of different chapters for different moments, right? Yeah.

george grombacher 12:36
And all that is predicated on thinking about it. And considering what is important to me, what do I want this to look like I’m here now, I could always be here, if I never think about it, or do anything about it. But I do have the ability to set an intention, set some goals, and actually put them into action and work towards them. Yeah,

Andy Baxley 12:59
yeah, absolutely. Think you open up that Pandora’s box a little bit, you know, just everything kind of reverse open, and it can lead to some really neat outcomes. I think when you start thinking that way, and, and, you know, ultimately, when I think about why do we even do this type of work, it really comes back to this idea of regret minimization, you know, when you get to, we’re all gonna die one day, unless technology really progresses in it really unexpected way that allows us to be immortal. But assuming we’re all gonna die one day, you know, we are gonna look back on our lives. And we’re going to ask ourselves, what are we really proud? We did? What do we wish we had done that we didn’t get a chance to do and asking these questions while we still have our health or while we still have time. I think that’s really the why behind this is to get those long term records to minimize those long term regrets.

george grombacher 13:49
Because those are real, those are real. I know, I’ve read about in the past the most common regrets of people on their deathbed. And when you read them, you’re like, Oh, my goodness, I do not want to find myself in that position, where I am also filled with those kinds of regrets. So I love that idea of regret minimization. I have to imagine that going through a process like this having the conversations like we’ve been having, it then makes the actual financial planning stuff a lot easier.

Andy Baxley 14:18
Yeah, certainly it does. Certainly it does. I mean, every single decision we make in our personal finance, with our personal finances involves trade offs, right? Literally, every single one doesn’t even if it’s, you know, do I get this term life insurance policy or not? It’s like, well, that’s gonna cost you a little bit of money each month, and is that trade off worth it? Or, or what’s the opportunity cost with those dollars? So when we have this deeper sense of purpose, you know, for me, so much of my purpose is around protecting my family and giving them opportunity. And I know probably a lot of parents out there will resonate with that. Then it’s like, well, yeah, my turn life insurance costs me 50 bucks a month and that is the best money that is spend, right because if something were to happen to me unexpectedly, I wouldn’t want, I wouldn’t want those opportunities to be taken away. So all that is to say, when you’ve done that work around purpose and understanding what’s important, you have that lens, and you can look at every single decision that comes your way everything, every single trade off that comes your way through that lens, and just see it much more clearly.

george grombacher 15:21
And I think that that’s really powerful. So one of my favorite quotes from Thomas Sol, is there’s no solutions, there’s only trade offs. And the more informed you can are, the more better the better you can get at making decisions. And when what you’ve been talking about linking those decisions, day to whatever is most important to you, that just increases our chances of not, it’s never going to be perfect. And it’s not supposed to be, but it just gets us closer to what we actually want.

Andy Baxley 15:49
Yeah, it’s, it’s never going to be perfect analysis. A, it’s never going to be static, either, right? The, the, just because we’ve determined, okay, this is what I value. This is my sense of purpose, right now, here’s the lens, I’m gonna look at these problems through, that’s not going to be the same lens 10 years from now, right? You have to continue to revisit these things when I think about, I’m 37. Now, when I think about what was important to me, back when I was 25, you know, the values that were how do i adventurer? How do I get out in the world? How do I have experiences? How do I meet lots of different and interesting people. And it’s not that I don’t care about those things. Now, I’ve carried that those values with me today. And we still love to travel as a family. But when I think about my core values, and what’s most important, what’s most deserving of my my time and my attention and my financial resources, the answers just a lot different now. And so I think leaving space for that evolution, and that growth is is important, too.

george grombacher 16:46
Yeah, like it’s a really, really healthy thing. For sure. And a two year old and one on the way, this month coming up. Well, that’ll certainly, that’ll certainly make things more fun. Also, Andy, are you ready?

Andy Baxley 17:03
I think we’re getting there, we’re gonna be putting due date is December 31, we’re gonna be putting the crib together this weekend. Fortunately, all the stuff we use for baby number one can pretty much get reused for baby number two. So I will say there’s a lot less anxiety going into baby number two than baby number one. But you know, there’s always, always those fears around loss of sleep and loss of free time and the normal anxieties that come come along with welcoming a new family member. But all things considered, being a dad is is certainly the most fun I’ve ever had. And I’m just expecting that to dealt with number two. So we’ll see, you might have to bring me on to see if that turned out to be the case. At some,

george grombacher 17:42
I love it. Let’s just plan to do that. So exciting times going from one to two and maybe who knows, end two to three or three to four or five to six, whatever.

Andy Baxley 17:54
A depends depends who you talk to, for touch with my wife. On a good day, she’d probably say, three to talk to me on pretty much any day. And I’m good stuff in it too. But we’ll see. You know, I’m happy to explore the third potential. You never know what’s gonna happen. Like we said, you gotta leave room for that evolution, right?

george grombacher 18:10
Gotta leave room gotta leave room, different seasons of life. I love it. Why, Andy, we are ready for that difference making tip, what do you have for us?

Andy Baxley 18:21
My tip for everyone is something that, you know, I just recently had a birthday and I looked back on the last year or so on what was the one lesson that I learned this past year that was most valuable. And it’s what I’ll share with you today. And it is sort of a two parter. So find your community and then do your work in public. And what I mean by that is, you know, find, find your community meaning find the people that you really resonate with, whether that be in a professional setting, that’s where I learned this, but it could be other settings as well. But really find find the people who are like minded enough that you feel at home, but not so like minded that you don’t have plenty of new ideas to share with each other. But then once you’ve found that community, you know, anytime you’re doing especially creative work really share that work with those people. The specific specific example I’ll give is actually tying back to this idea of a statement of financial purpose. I had created an exercise to help clients establish a Statement of Financial purpose and I shared that with some folks in my community, a professional group of other advisers called the Society of advice that was put together by Carl Richards. Anyway, long story short, I shared that got passed around a little bit and, and now Carl, and myself and our friend, Jeremy Walter are all working together to create a course for fellow advisors. And if you’d told me a year ago that I would get to work with those two guys on a project I my head would have just exploded, it wouldn’t have felt even remotely possible to me, because they were just two people I had looked up to for so long. And by finding that community sharing my work in public one thing led to another and and now I’m involved in the It’s projects that I’m just incredibly excited about, incredibly excited to bring to the advisory community. And it never would have happened if I hadn’t shared in public. So so that was a big lesson for me this year. Well,

george grombacher 20:11
I think that that is great stuff that definitely gets caught. And I love everything about that. I love everything about reviewing your year talking about what you’ve learned, that’s super cool. And something that I do as well and scratching your creative itch and letting your inner artist or creative or however you think about it, do that work, but then taking that the next step further and sharing it and look what’s come out of it. I think that’s totally incredible. So well done. Thanks, George. And thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you?

Andy Baxley 20:50
No, I I hate to say it. I’m not terribly active on social media. But the one place I am fairly active as LinkedIn. So you can certainly find me on LinkedIn. You can read my my bio at the planning center.com Planning Centers, the name of the firm that I work for, where you can reach out to me directly Andy at the planning center.com. Excellent.

george grombacher 21:10
If you enjoyed this as much as I did, go to the planning center.com and find Andy Baxley find Andy on LinkedIn as well. And I will link all of those in the notes of the show. Thanks again, Andy.

Andy Baxley 21:24
Thanks, George. It’s great to be here. And

george grombacher 21:27
finally, a friendly reminder that there will never be anybody more interested in your financial success than you are. So act accordingly.