Do you hate the thought of working past 55 or 60? Do you hate not being able to live the life you deserve today? Do you hate not knowing what your financial future looks like? It's time to stop doing what you hate, here's your host, Mr. Harold Green.
Hello everybody. Thank you for joining the show today. This is Harold Green of Brighttree financial and it is seriously time to stop doing what you hate. On today's show we're going to be talking about stewardship versus stupid shit. Stewardship versus stupid shit. I know stupid ship is not a word
(00:39): But it's something that I made up and I want to talk to you guys about that. I've been considering this topic for years and I've been considering how to put out accurate information and regards to giving, charitable giving donations and different things like that. And the subtitle of my message would give spark. There's a smart way to give and then there is a very, very foolish way to give. Like I said, I've thought about this for years because you know, when you get into giving and you know, donating to religious organizations and different things like that, a lot of people have different mindsets and different belief systems when it comes to things like this. And again, and putting this information out, it is not my goal to offend you or to make you feel bad for what you are doing, but I just have this whole fiduciary thing of doing what's in your absolute best interests, giving you advice that's in your absolute best interest.
(01:37): And that's where my heart is at. So I really want you to just hear me for what's in my heart and I'm going to be talking to you from my own personal experience, but I've seen this happen in many people's lives and so I'm just here to help you guys and I really want to share some key nuggets with you today that's going to help change your life forever. Okay? You guys ready? All right. One, two, three less get it as win. One of the first things I want to share with you is this, people Harish and suffer for lack of knowledge, not lack of time, not lack of money, but lack of knowledge. I'm going to drop some knowledge on you guys today, but you can go back and fact check it if you want. But people do perish and suffer for a lack of what they don't know.
(02:24): And you know what? For many, many years I was no different. I'm just like everybody else. I was human making mistakes that I should not have made. But you know what? I saw the writing on the wall, but I avoided it. And here's something that that I rent. And when I saw it, it really bothered me. It said, a wise man sees trouble and hides himself, but the foolish and I Eve continue on with a punishment and suffering because I didn't wake up to my situation. I continued on with a lot of punishing, a lot of suffering. And I'll share with you what some of that was in a minute. But another key component to being a smart Gipper is you can't give what you don't have, all right? You must make the leap to stewardship. Stewardship. It's a lot more than just writing a check, okay?
(03:13): You gotta be wise, you gotta be diligent with your resources. And I'm going to give you guys some things to consider as we proceed throughout this conversation today. All right? So stupid shit. One of the key ways to be in what I call stupid ship or a foolish giver is giving under compulsion. You should never ever give anything under compulsion at all. It's very unwise. And so for years, and this is, and this is where I'm coming from, my background, you know, I was raised in religious organizations and so on and so forth. And so I had been hearing this stuff for years. And so I talked to you guys in an earlier show about how your belief systems could be harming your financial situation. Okay? And something you're really going to have to dig into. But for years I was told to give a certain percentage of my income because of the religious beliefs that I had.
(04:09): Okay. And so, and I, and I think therein lies the problem. For me it was religious beliefs, not actual knowledge about giving, but my own beliefs, things that I had took to heart. You know, if I give, I'm going to be, I'm going to be rewarded for my gift. I'm going to be looked upon favorably, I'm going to have great things happen to me in my life and I believe that for years. And the honest truth was I was giving 10% of my income because I was told and I was promised certain things. The problem was the one that was supposed to be responsible for coming through on the promises that were made wasn't the one actually advising me. And because of that I was putting things like my groceries and other bills and things like that on credit cards. I was racking up credit card debt like you wouldn't believe just because I was told that I had to give 10% of my income first in order for, you know, for me to be abiding by the rules of, of my religious beliefs.
(05:10): And again, this is many, many years ago and even as a planner back then I knew something was wrong. I just, I felt in my heart that something was wrong, but I just wasn't ready to, to face my reality because I was ignoring my reality. Everybody else around me was doing it. And so if I wanted to be a part of the group, that's something I had to do. But you know what? My reality hit me in the face and why tell you it hurt like hell, I had a very rude awakening and it was, it was about a million dollar awakening and I'm not going to get into all the details, but my wife and I, we worked our way through it. And fortunately what we went through didn't cost us $1 million. It only ended up costing us about 70 or 80 but it could have been a very bad ordeal.
(05:56): And that's when, that's when things hit me in the face. And so I left my religious organization and I began an intense search on the right way to give. Now I didn't give up on my religion and it's not really a religion, it's a relationship. But if you like a conversation on that, you guys can call me up. (808) 521-4401 schedule an appointment with Leanne and we can chat a little bit, but I want to get into what I did to jump from being foolish with my giving to being a steward. Stewardship. I enrolled in a graduate designation program at the American college on charitable giving. I was sitting down on a bench one day and just kind of sitting there and meditating and thinking about my day and it hit me. You need to learn more about giving. You need to learn the right way to give.
(06:43): And so the American college has a program called charitable advising and philanthropy. It is a graduate program. You must have so many years in the industry and I think some other designations or whatnot. But it took me about a year or so, and I finished in our earn, my charitable advising in philanthropy. And in the meantime I had stopped giving 10% of my income and just focused on a couple of charities, number one, meals on wheels because senior citizens are really dear to my heart. And I've heard some horror stories about seniors and all the things they've gone through. And that's why I worked really hard to make sure I'm taking care of the seniors that are my clients and my soon to be seniors that are working their way towards retirement. And I think it was about a total of about a hundred dollars a month all together because at the time, that's what I felt that I could do.
(07:26): That's, I was passionate about those things. And that's what I wanted to do. So, and the charitable advising for the rent and philanthropy, I learned a lot of stuff. I learned so much about wealth, wealth and family, setting up charitable organizations working with people that are worth millions of dollars to set up a plan giving it, it was a lot. But what I've learned, here's what I learned. I still maintain my religious beliefs, but I've changed them from religious beliefs to relational knowledge. And some of you may know what I'm talking about and some of you don't. But we can get into that with a phone call now. I no longer have a great desire or, or feel obligated to give what I don't have. And again, the wise man sees trouble and Heights himself. But the foolish and naive continue on with Ashman and suffering.
(08:15): So now am I giving, what I do is I follow one commandment, one key tenet that I follow. And if you follow it, it's going to serve you extremely well. I'm going to read it to you. I'm not going to say I'm going to, I'm not going to tell you guys where I got it. You can go look it up. But before I do, let me say this. If you and I enter into a contractual agreement, we sign it, date it, or get it notarized and everything's good, right? We both have to abide by the agreement, but what if I say, what if I come back and I say, Hey, I've thought about it and I want to change the agreement because I feel that it's in both of our best interests and the new agreement is way better. You know, we look it over, we talk about the details and we say, wow, yeah, this is way better.
(09:00): We both agree on it, right? We sign it, we dated, we notarize it. Now you can't come back to me and say, Hey, I liked the old agreement better because you know, it's just what I'm used to doing. Or you know, my friends and others think that something is wrong with the new agreement. No, you have to abide by the articles and the tenants of the new agreement, unless you're going to face some very serious consequences, and I want you guys to take this serious. If you're giving according to certain principles and so on and so forth. Now I'm going to call it old covenant versus new covenant, which basically means old agreement versus new agreement. You can't mix the two together. We can't take the two contracts and put them together. It doesn't work that way. So, so here it is for me, the new covenant tenant that guides that gift, you have to have a guide for the gift. You just can't put it out there. And it says, let each one give thoughtfully and with purpose just as he or she has decided in his or her own heart, not grudgingly or under compulsion. Now there's two words in that thoughtfully and with purpose. So many people are giving and they're not giving thoughtfully and they're not giving with purpose and it wasn't what they decided in their heart, but they are giving because they were compelled or they're told to.
(10:28): All right, so let's take a look at three ways that you can become a smart giver. Number one, take care of yourself. All right, so in taking care of yourself, there's four things you guys are going to have to do. Number one or a is saved for retirement. I've seen a lot of people giving more than they should and it puts them in a position so that they are not able to save for retirement. And I think that's, that's irresponsible. And I think that if you're putting yourself in that position where you're giving more than you, you should and you're not saving enough for retirement for whatever reason, you're going to have to correct that for a lot of different reasons that I won't get into on the show. B, I want you to look at eradicating bad debt. If you're giving away so much money and you're racking up credit card debt, that's not being a smart giver.
(11:15): So you definitely have to look at eradicating bad debt because it's very harmful to your overall financial picture and helping yourself make sure you help your kids get educated. I've seen some people giving more than they should and in doing so their kids and go to college now that is somewhat irresponsible and in helping your kids to go to college, it doesn't have to be a four year degree. It can be trade school, it can be any other type of way to help them sell, to get educated, educated and in order to have a better life for themselves. And then D, make sure you're taking your vacations and getting the rest that you need. So many people are all broken down because they're not taking the right there. The vacations of lemonade too. They're not getting the rest of their need. They need and they're doing, they're giving so much and in some cases they're not giving their money, they're giving their time, they're all over the place, volunteering at many different things and they're not taking care of their responsibilities and self that you make sure you're, you find some time to take a vacation and put that in your budget and so that you can recuperate and rest and I'll talk to you a little bit more down there about when you give right what happens.
(12:23): Okay. Number two, decide who you are going to give to. This is very important. You want to determine the impact that you want to have in the world, whether it's the humane society or the cancer society based on something you or a family member have gone through. You want to find an organization that it's already doing what you want to do and then donate there. There's no need to recreate the wheel. There's a lot of good, good organizations out there to give to and then see, make sure they have some sort of donor bill of rights. In other words, organizations just can't take your money and do whatever they want with it. They should be responsible for how they are administering the gift that you have donated and so you want to know what they're doing with it, who they're giving it to, what their expenses are.
(13:07): You want to see that breakdown because if they aren't administering your gift the way you want, you might want to pull that and put it somewhere different. All right. Number three, you've got to create a giving plan. What is a giving plan? A giving plan takes into consideration the things I talked about before, who you want to give to the organization and so on and so forth. And from there you determine the amount that you want to give and then you set up a giving account and then B, you want to fund that once a year. Okay. And then C, you want to create automatic monthly deductions from that account to the recipients. Here's why. If you give it all up front to that organization and you run into trouble throughout the year, you may need those funds and if you don't have them, you might have to go into debt or, or something else.
(13:51): Okay. So you want to make sure that you are being very judicious about how you also administer, you're giving a plan to its recipients. Okay? So giving should not be painful. And if, and if it is, you've got to reevaluate, evaluate what you are doing and then you have to stop giving out a compulsion. You have to come up with a plan because I gave out a compulsion for years and it was very painful. Went through a lot of things because of that. And so if that's you, I really want you to consider not doing it that way. And if you don't have a plan, I'm going to encourage you that now is the time to create a plan. And more times than not, I see people giving what they do not have. And trust me, I've been there. It hurts. And I got me into a lot of trouble.
(14:33): Now, here's, here's what happens. When you give the right way, when you realize that there's a better way of doing things, a couple of different things happens. Your process tightens up and your mind becomes free. You become more aware of what's going on with you and around you. And the guilt goes away. And tell me the guilt can be blinding. It leads us into things that we should not be doing it. It puts us in positions where we're not taking care of their responsibilities. Okay? And so if you continue on, there is a tremendous price to pay. Trust me, I paid it and I want to help you. I want to help you stop doing what you hate and when you do is going to lead to more creativity and your job, more productivity and your work, you're going to be able to produce more and in the long run, if you're able to produce more you, you're going to be able to increase the amount that you give.
(15:22): I know increased the amount that I give every single year because I'm able to produce more. I'm not giving from a position of what I do not have. I'm giving from a position of that which I, I do have. Trust me. I know that this works may not make sense of. Trust me, it works. And if you like a plan that not only covers your retirement, your lifestyle, your giving and everything else in between, go to retire now, retire while.com download my rapid retire brochure, go to the rapid retire section of the website, download the brochure. Also click on the game changer forum. Complete that and then get in contact with me and I will help you stop doing what you hate. I'll help you create a plan to get you from where you are today, where you really want to be. All right, so until next time, one, two, three. Let's get it.
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