I’ve been spending a good amount of time thinking about what matters, what is true, what matters, what is true, and that’s because we need to know, we have to know the answers to those questions. And you’re sitting there and you think, Well, that’s obvious. I know what matters. I know what’s true. And I say, Do you Do you know what matters? Do you know what is true? Do you know what is most important to you? And I think it’s more like, like goal setting in the in that we all know that goal setting is really important. The verdict is, in we’ve known that for a really long time. So I think intellectually, we all know that goal setting is important, that it’s a an effective and very functional thing, very practical thing, yet nobody does it. So it’s this extremely super human thing. We all know it’s really important, but only three of us, 3% of us, have actually written down our goals. So do we really know what matters? Do you really know what matters? Do you really know what’s true? Do you really know what’s important? And the lot of realities, lot of realities coming at you. Little dose of truth for you, a little cold water in the face today on the Align money show

Unknown Speaker 1:30
we all

george grombacher 1:33
have universal needs that we must meet.

Unknown Speaker 1:37
It was Elizabeth

george grombacher 1:38
husserla husserly, on the show a month or two back, talking about how we all have universal needs, and we meet them personally. And this is really interesting, that is pretty profound. So how are you meeting the needs that we all have? You need to make those kinds of decisions. You need to decide what you want your life to look like and all that stuff. The problem that we are running into, you and I, collectively individually, is that we are robbing Peter to pay Paul, and we’re doing it to ourselves or family members for that matter. We’re doing it inter generationally, where the the earlier generations are are are consuming so many of the resources that there are fewer resources in the form of opportunities left over for the newer generations. So if the boomers buy up all the homes and never sell them, then there’s more scarce housing for millennials. If one generation decides that they’re just going to spend everything if they’re going to use all the oil whatever, there’s not going to be anything left over for future generations. And if you, if this current iteration of you, today’s version of you, spends all the money, spends every penny, every nickel that you earn, and there’s none left over for your future you, that older version of you, that God willing, you will one day become then you yourself have rob Peter to pay Paul. So it’s all over the place right now. All over the place right now, with budget deficits being astronomical and getting bigger and bigger and bigger and printing money and causing inflation and essentially locking out generations and millions and millions of people from the housing market,

Speaker 1 3:44
and you get it, but do you get it? I don’t know.

george grombacher 3:51
I don’t know if you get it. I don’t think that any of us really get it, and our behavior, I don’t think is illustrating or giving evidence to

Speaker 1 4:01
whether or not we we get it or we don’t. But

george grombacher 4:07
just as we rob Peter to pay Paul, the Piper must be paid at some point. So we have austerity measures that must come into play if, collectively, as a country, as a people, we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve spread ourselves way too thin, and all of a sudden, the interest on our debt is going to be the third, second, third, largest line item, biggest line item on the federal budget. Something’s got to change. Something’s Got to Give buddy, this is not sustainable. So what do you do? Well, Doge, the Department of government efficiency becomes a thing. Who could have seen like who could have seen something like that coming? Well, had to happen somehow, some way. And. And it’s happening in a way, or by a person who is extremely polarizing and not really for any Well, Elon Musk is an extraordinary human being. It’s wild how successful he has been. It’s wild the success he has enjoyed monetarily, but more so just he’s, he is he’s. He has literally changed numerous industries through sheer force of will and intelligence and determination and who knows what else, but he also, I don’t know if what people thought of him before he bought Twitter. I don’t know if he was quite as polarizing, but then he buys Twitter and turns it into x, and half the country hates him because he appears to be more on the conservative side than he has on the progressive side. And in the times that we’re living in, that’s not an acceptable thing. You’re either in with the in group or you are in the out group. And of course, there’s nuance in there somewhere. But Elon Musk comes in and he says, You know what we need to do is we need to trim some fat here. We need to get in here and make some pretty serious changes to the structure of our government, because it’s become this massively huge entity. It’s the largest thing in history of Earth, the federal government, United States, federal government is the largest organization thing that ever has been and again, this is not a sustainable thing, so cuts have to be made. So I personally, I can’t wait. I can’t wait to see what he and Vivek Ramaswami come up with, what moves they end up making, what the impact eventually is. And I also appreciate that when you’re dealing with such a massive bureaucracy that is the federal government, it’s easy to look at that as a collection of nameless faceless people, but within those collection nameless faces, people are regular human beings, hard working, well intentioned, very effective people working within the government. And there’s going to be casualties and layoffs and people will be negatively, adversely affected by losing a position or losing their job. And so I don’t think that that is a happy thing, but it may be, maybe certainly be a necessary thing. Things change. Technology displaces careers. The workforce today is very different than it was 50 years ago, and certainly different than it was 100 years ago, and will continue to become more and more different as as as the more things change, the more things change, I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. So all that to be said, we’ve got Doge going on, and a lot of people who are going to be interested in affecting the composition and the Outlook or the look of the federal government, which I am for, I’m for that. You’re probably not surprised to hear that. But what about you and I, dear friend, dear listener, should we engage in our own personal, familial Doge? Should you be putting some austerity and austerity measures into place within your life, within your personal finances? And I think that the answer is probably yes, not only is the federal government bloated and burning cash and and just being crushed by massive debt, we as individuals and as households are also doing those things. So credit card debt higher than it’s ever been. Personal savings low. Let me just look across the board at every different metric. We are overweight, we are just not healthy. We are not well. We are sick all over the place. We’re physically sick or mentally sick. We’re financially sick. So I like to talk about financial wellness all the time, but what we have is more of a financial sickness problem than a financial wellness problem. The lack of financial wellness, we have an epidemic, pandemic of financial sickness. So. So the only way out is to make change. So how do we do that? Because I think that it’s it’s beneficial for, even if you are doing well financially, to constantly be looking at different opportunities to become more efficient. And it all comes down to, like Elizabeth was talking about, how are we meeting our universal needs in our very, very personal way? So we all have choices to make and talk about what’s true and what matters, bringing it back to that, we have to understand and make decisions around what is true and what matters for our individual circumstances. So you’ve got universal needs, but you have to make individual decisions on what matters and how you’re going to meet those universal needs, right, right? Because there’s a lot of things in your life that are important. There are a lot of things in your life that matter, but not everything can be the most important thing, and not everything can matter the most. So we need to take a big step back, kind of push back from the table a little bit. Put the fork down, or the spoon or the food down, however you’re using to shovel things into your mouth. Stop doing that for a second. Change the aperture a little bit. Let’s look at the forest through the trees. Right, right. So out of all the things that matter, get a pen and paper down. These are the things that matter. And invariably, when I say that, recognize that that’s a giant question. And so it’s beneficial to break it down. It’s more manageable. You break the problem down into smaller parts. So I like to think about just life in six different areas. I think about number one, my family life. So what is it that I want for my family? And perhaps that could be, you want to start a family. You want to start a relationship. You want to have a serious relationship. You want to have a family. You want to have kids. You want to get married. You want to have a better relationship with your kids. You want to want to want to have grandkids. You want to have a better relationship with your parents, your brother, your sister, whatever, whatever those schools are, what are that you want to be able to travel? You want to be able to have great experiences. You want to be able to okay community now community. These are folks outside of your family. These are people that you have an affinity or an affiliation to or you want to, here’s a stuff that makes life worth living outside of our immediate family. So it could be that you want to find community in pickleball, or that is an Alumni Association, or you’re into writing, or you love music. So how can you find community or build or foster community, or create community around those things. The next one is, is money and your work. So career and financial. So what are your financial goals? What would you like to see happen, giant, get out of debt, start saving, become an investor, buy a home, be able to retire, give money to charity if you want to start a business or get a promotion or earn more money. So what would you like to see happen? What matters in that area from a well being perspective? So that’s number four. It’s well being. I knew that COVID taught me a lot of things, but it taught me to need to be stronger, for sure. So how can I become physically stronger, mentally stronger, emotionally stronger? What do I need to be doing? Maybe I need to lose weight. Maybe I need to do some strength. Some strength training. Maybe I need to be able to do cardio. Who knows the next one is just personal developments. What do you want to learn? Just for the sake of learning? Do you want to learn how to how to speak a foreign language? Or you want to start writing? You want to start a podcast? Because you know this great, really brilliant guy who does these podcasts, it seems like really easy. And then

finally, from a peace of mind perspective, what would give you greater peace of mind? Being outside, touching grass, meditation, spiritual practice, getting back to church, giving, who knows? So those are the areas. Think about what matters in those areas, and then it’s a function of treating the things that matter like they really matter. So how do we do that? Well, we do that by making decisions on how we allocate our most valuable resources, which I believe to be time, attention, energy and money. So you understand what matters, we need to get a sense of what you need to do in service of what matters, and then we need to do that. So we vote with our dollars, we vote with our time, we vote with our attention, we vote with our energy. These are valuable things because they are scarce. So we need to make good decisions. It’s incumbent on us to make personal decisions on how we’re satisfying our universal needs. Got it makes a lot of sense. And then again, just honoring that, Thomas so famously says there’s no solutions. There’s only trade offs when we. Say yes to one thing, we’re saying no to everything else. So this is why we must know what matters. We must know what we believe to be true, and then we must act in accordance with that belief. So if it is of great priority, if it matters to be financially secure, well what do we need to do in order to become more financially secure. That’s where personal austerity is. Personal Doge comes in. So how well do you know your cash flow? Do you monitor your cash flow? When was the last time you logged into all of your accounts and reviewed all of your transactions? How long has it been? A day, 10 minutes, five years? Well, however long it’s been, I advocate, really encourage you to go back through and look at all your different transactions from a cash flow perspective. It’s such a basic thing, but like most basic things, most of us have no idea how much we earn down to the dollar and how much we spend. We should also know how much debt you have the value of your assets, also known as what your net worth is. You have one. We should know that we must keep a personal budget. Without a personal budget, how in the world could you ever be financially successful? Speaking of, does the government do we have a balanced budget? No? Do we even have an approved budget? Who knows the Pentagon has failed their audit, like, 10 years in a row, and they can’t account for like half their budget? Well, that’s a bit of a problem. And I bet that that’s true of of so many different things. And this isn’t a political thing, really, I’m not. I’m not interested in it being political. I don’t care if it’s just trying to think about prominent democratic business person, Jeff Bezos. Is he? Is he? Whatever? Let’s assume that Jeff Bezos is a Democrat, great, if he did, Doge, I’d be super happy. Great, go do it. I don’t care. I want a future for me and a future for my family, and a future for you and a future for your family. So the government needs to have a balanced budget, or we have to have a budget. Stick to it, you and I as a household, as individuals and as a household, must also do that. So do you have that? And then we have to just consistently be reviewing these things. We have to make goals, we have to make plans, all of these kinds of things. But here is the big thing, if you are not currently on track to meet or exceed your most important financial goals and priorities, to do what matters well, then we need to take a big step back. We need to pause most everything, pump the brakes, figure out how to make this happen. So there is something called a reverse budget, which I think is a really, really appropriate thing, and it kind of brings together everything that I’ve been talking about. So you’ve probably no doubt familiar with the idea that we must pay ourselves first. A lot of people, including myself, think it’s one of the top rules of personal finance. Pay yourself first. Now that just means that you put yourself first and your needs ahead of everybody else’s, which is exactly where this should be. Because if you’re in the habit of paying everybody else first, waiting around the end of the month to pay yourself, you will discover that there is no money left over for you, and more, more often than not, there’s more month than there is money, and that’s a super sucky place to be. Okay, so reverse budget just says these are my top priorities. So let’s just use a couple of common ones. I want to get out of credit card debt. Okay, so that’s priority number one, and I want to be saving up my down payment, or rather, saving up my emergency fund. So those are two foundational things. So that’s one and two, one and two. So number one is pay off my credit cards. That simply means I have to put a plan together for doing that. So you have to know, just down to the dollar, what the current balances are. So just get a piece of paper, get a spreadsheet out, write down the company that your credit card is with so it’s visa. And on our Visa card, we’ve got $3,000 balance, and the annual percentage rates 18% the minimum monthly payment is $400 I’m making these numbers up. And then we have a MasterCard that is $2,000 the APR, annual percentage rates 22% and the minimum monthly payment is $300 so you get the idea, write these things down and then make a plan for what it’s going to take to actually pay them off. So this is a function of you have to know your cash flow and your budget, right? So if you’ve got, in this example, $5,000 of credit card debt, and you’re. Want to pay it off in in a year? Well, that’s about 400 500 bucks a month, right? 450 bucks a month, give or take, or if it was two years, then it’s you just just back into it. And while I am certainly a proponent and an advocate and a fan of being really precise with everything, we just need to take action on this. So whatever it’s going to take. So you use round numbers. So if you’ve got $12,000 credit card debt and you want to pay it off in a year, it’s about 1000 bucks a month. You want to pay it off in two years, it’s 500 bucks a month, right? Give or take. So there’s plenty of great financial calculators out there, but you can just use round numbers and then figure out how to go into your spending and how you’re consuming and make cuts if you need to. Because again, what we’re talking about is what is most important to you, your biggest financial priorities, and then doing whatever you need to do in order to make that happen. So if it’s cutting out lifestyle, which I’m not a big fan of, I’m not a monk, I’m not taking of all poverty. I don’t expect you to either. But I also do know that money is time sensitive. It has time value, and that simply means that the longer we wait to pursue our most important financial goals and objectives, the harder they become to reach. So the longer you wait to start saving for your retirement, the harder it is, the more you’ve got to save as we get older, and it becomes, at some level, really, really hard to do. Obviously, the best time would have been when you were a baby and your parents started saving a couple 100 bucks a month. You’d be all set, probably today. Maybe that worked. Maybe it didn’t. But here we are, and we can’t turn away from this stuff. We have to stare it right in the face. Can’t run away from it, no matter how scary it is and how uncomfortable it makes. Us. Got to rip this band aid off engage in a little personal austerity. If we have to stop going out to eat quite as much, if we have to downsize in our vehicle, if we have to move into a smaller home? I don’t know these are tough questions, but that’s what austerity is. So hopefully you found value in this kind of going through those steps I’ve got in the next video, I do I’ve got a six step process that I outlined in my newest book, Your Money Story, how to get the ending you want. And I’ll go through those because I think that it also would be beneficial if you do find yourself in a position as the majority of us do, living paycheck to paycheck, struggling with credit card debt, and just not getting ahead financially, we don’t have time. I don’t have time to be putting this off. I don’t have time to be waiting to do anything about this. The time is now the government’s going to do it, or rather, if somebody is going to force the government to do it, then probably beneficial for us, you and I, to put in place our own personal or familial

Unknown Speaker 22:57
Doge.

george grombacher 23:01
That’s very much in line with what the idea of the show here is that there’s never going to be anybody more interested in your financial success than you are, brothers and sisters. So act accordingly. I.