(00:05): Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken in Britain between four 50 and one 50 bc. You might have heard it from some very wise men back in the day, right? Well back in the long, long, long time ago. And it's usually interpreted as being about the power of friendship, but cannot. It can also be about two individuals. Remembering the divine is with them to make three. So going into 2023, we wanna remember, remind you of the power of community, right? In a world becoming more and more isolating and lonely, friendships and connections are even more powerful. And that's why we just think this is really important right now. I want you to take a leap with us. What if your financial strategies were more powerful when they had friends? If you got a single financial strategy, it may be overpowered.
(01:15): Perhaps you have two and they can defend themselves. But a court of three, and again, stick with us here. Three financial strategies working in harmony is not quickly broken. If you're at all concerned about a recession in the next five months or five years, this episode is for you. Hey, I'm Brandon and welcome to Wealth Wisdom Financial podcast, episode 1 23, financially free in 2023, the power of three. Yes, we went there with all the threes. We just happened to be in episode 1 23. But our hope is in this new year that in 2023 you are going to have some financial freedom and using again the three thing, the power of three.
(02:16): Yeah, three is a very powerful number. There's a lot we could probably say about it, but let's focus on financial strategies today. Hi, I'm Amanda Neely. Financial strategies are widely touted from those based on economic models to those based on human psychology from those that use paper and pen to software based ones from those that prop up the powers that are currently in place. To those that question those powers. Now, we haven't tried to make a full list, but I would say it wouldn't take very much creativity to list over a hundred different financial strategies to make use of over 400 different financial products that are available today. We wanna share what that search has been like for us and the three time tested wealth wisdom strategies that we believe as they're working together cannot be quickly broken. Now, before we jump in, rather than our usual intro, we might have a little bit of music there. We wanna share some exciting news with you. Time is of the essence to act on this news. So we're putting it here at the top of the episode because again, it's a time of the essence and we are creating some amazing things with an amazing woman who's done some amazing work.
(03:39): You're embarrassing me, Brandon. The big news that drives the thing that you need to act quickly on is that I'm now officially A C F P certified Financial Planner professional. I'm approaching this designation a little differently than most would expect though. The thing I'm most excited about is that now I can serve my clients better and in new ways and make financial planning more accessible to more people. So for example, part of how we wanted to celebrate this accomplishment and start fulfilling that mission of bringing financial planning to more people is what we started a free private ad free app that you can have on your phone you can pull up in your browser where we share curated wealth wisdom with those who are looking to grow their knowledge around wealth building. We'd love for you to check it out, see how it could help you on your journey. We've had this community since early 2022. It's always been paid. We added a free element to it to help make the tools of financial planning more accessible to more people. But they'll link in the show notes, but that it's really easy to find. It's at wealth wisdom fp.com/community.
(04:53): Yeah, so we'll wait right here while you type that in. Wealth wisdom fp.com/community. You can even be listening while you're typing that in, cuz multitask in there and join that free part of the community. And there is a bonus that is free again through December 31st of this year. So check it out and claim your bonus, the unofficial guide to bank yourself before it's no longer free. And there will be some of it. Again, there's some pieces that are premium pieces that we are charging for. And if you've listened to this and it's not December 31st, it's past that day, still get that thing cuz it's not that expensive and it could literally change your life. It's the unofficial guide to banking yourself. You want to get that. It is what has really been powerful for us. So go to wealth wisdom fp.com/community and get the free access. And if you still have time, go get the guide and that quest there.
(06:03): Okay, now we're going to give you our top three financial strategies that have brought us more financial freedom in the order we found them. But before we do that, the biggest thing I like to remind people who are trying to build a financial plan is that it's really hard, if not impossible, to start multiple strategies at the same time. An actual cord of three strands is built one at a time and then the strands are weaved together. You don't weave and create the strands at the same time. Of course, financial strategies are not actual chords or not actual strands on a accord. So you might think you can weave and build and weave and build some more. In our experience though, we were really, really glad that we found one strand. We implemented it, we strengthened it. Then about a year later, we founded the next strand. We implemented it and strengthened. It wasn't until two years later that we founded this third strand, but we actually just started dabbling in it. We didn't, weren't really serious about it. And it wasn't until about five years after we found the first strand, that third strand we really got serious about and made it strong. And then we've been weaving them together over time.
(07:17): So in other words, do not rush it. Follow one course until success and build from there. Even though there are three strands, a accord is really only as strong as its weakest strands. Once that first strand breaks, the other two often unravel and they unravel quickly. So you wanna build each strand to be strong on its own. Ooh, Brandon, that's such a good point. If we go back to the relationships that this original interpretation that there's a huge parallel here. I think we all know a friendship or a romantic relationship is only as strong as its weakest member. I bet most of us have been the one more in love with a boyfriend or girlfriend at some point. And since the truth bind accord is only as strong as its weakest strand, we know this from our relational experience. What if we put it into our financial experience too?
(08:15): Yeah, it's the same in friendships, making the phone calls, getting the connections if it's only on one side eventually. So with financial products, if one strategy, it can unravel the rest of them. Let's say one of your strategies is a short-term rental and another is e-commerce. If all of a sudden people stop traveling or switch back to using hotels, your time and intention will be drawn from the e-commerce business over here. And you might need to use funds from there to pay the mortgages and the maintenance and the utilities at the rentals. And very soon you could see yourself having no e-commerce business anymore cuz you're kind of pulling from this healthy business to service and grow this not growing business and the changes and challenges there. Yeah, this reminds me of a really good point I wanna come back to after we share our top three strategies. Cuz I feel like the point is going to be much better understood if people see the strategies first, and then we can talk about how they work together to give you a little teaser there. So here they are, the three financial strategies that have helped us be more financially free and that are now our court of three strands, not easily broken. And our loyal listeners might look back at the last three months of podcast episodes and guess these already. And we spoke in depth on some of them.
(09:52): So number one is bank and yourself. We discovered the power of the bank and yourself strategy in 2013, and we've been strengthening this strand of our cord every single month since over the last nine years. This strategy has helped us get outta student debt out of business debt, helped us get through an emergency, sell a business, go on a 40th birthday turned baby moon trip of a lifetime. We're able to buy our first home. We became real estate investors to this strategy. So many things, right? It's really our foundational wealth that keeps getting better and better every single year. And there's nothing we can do about it. It just keeps getting better. , go back to the last two episodes that we published in December of 2022. Episodes 1 21 and 1 22 for more details about the bank and yourself concept.
(10:44): And also remember, go to wealth wisdom fp.com/community because we have that special guide, that unofficial guide to bank yourself that is really unlocking how we've built it, used it and how we built that strand. So go get that. You'll also notice there's a couple other quests when you're in there that we teach about in that we use. And that leads into number two. And this is you need a budget for short ETK software. Now I have to jump in here. I've always been the budget nerd, always kept a budget. I used pencil and paper in college. Yes, I actually had a budget in college. Weird of me, right? Y a's free for college students. If you know any college students, make sure they know they can use YAB for free. Anyway, we started tracking via software when we got married to help us do things better. I thought it was going to be quicker, all those things. And it didn't really, I mean it kind of worked, but we got busy starting a business doing all the things. So we just kept the big picture in mind. We kept seeing our net worth increase. So we really didn't worry too much about every single penny until
(12:05): It was in 2014 when we were actually introduced to yap. We found a budgeting strategy that was so much more than software for tracking. It did a little more for us. And we talked about YAB in depth in episode one 17 and one 18. So go back and you'll see the YAB titles and stuff like that. And if you're not familiar, there are four rules with the software that helps you adopt the system. These four rules are really a system that you don't need an app to live by, but can absolutely create a strong strand. You can just implement those four rules and without even using the software, and you're going to be in a better place. It's a very simple idea that you could learn in a short time, but there are so many layers to mastering their system that for us, it just keeps getting stronger with time rather than getting cumbersome or worthless. A lot of budgets do, right? And I'd say that we wouldn't have been so successful with our bank and yourself strategy if we hadn't found YAB to keep us mindful and intentional, which is going to our still method, right? With our cash flow. But now I'm getting ahead of myself. So before we talk about how they work together, let's reveal number three.
(13:39): So did you start scrolling through our latest podcast episodes to find the answer already? Do you know what number three is? This is from episodes one 19 and one 20. I know some of you started scrolling through the last episodes to see what we've been talking about lately and adding them to your listening queue. I hope Number three is profit first. I believe it was in about 2016 when I first heard Mike Malowitz on a podcast mention profit first and thought, what a great idea. We started paying ourselves at the beginning of the month, rather at the end of the month and started trying to figure out how do we prioritize ourselves, our happiness, our fulfillment in our business, rather than always coming last. That was great. We got a lot out of that. But then when we actually fully implemented in 2019, so actually at the end of 2018, beginning of 2019, so a li about five years after we first implemented Baker yourself was when we fully implemented the Profit First system.
(14:40): We read through the book, we did what Mike shared in the book full fully, and it's been totally life and business changing for us. Probably the biggest benefit is that we fight way less about the money in our business. We have a formula for how much we're going to pay ourselves. We never have to worry about having enough when it comes tax time, when Brandon or me, but mostly Brandon gets an idea of a new operating expense. There's either money to pay for it or there is not. There's much less debate and worry and profit first, like Winab and Bank and yourself is something that for us has just kept getting stronger and stronger every single year as we've used it. We have the system in place, we keep running it, we keep finding ways to do it better and customize it for us. But ultimately it keeps us running as well and continuing to find fulfillment in our business.
(15:35): It keeps us focused right on what's important in our values. All three of those do that. So, okay, now for the best of all, these three core systems reinforce and strengthen each other. If one of the systems starts to unravel, another system can step in and strengthen it up the, we've seen that where we've used one for a short period of time or it's Helped. I've got an example, The other Pieces. Yeah, I've got an example. So we're about to celebrate five years of being in our business this current business. And when we started as financial professionals on January 18th, 2018,
(16:17): Yeah, now we're going with eighteens. Now, No . That just happens to be the day I actually looked back at the Google calendar and saw it. That's exactly when we started, for sure. I fact checked myself. But within the past five years, we've had an opportunity to switch from being just two individual financial professionals working alongside each other and alongside with an awesome team to being the CEOs of a financial services firm. And that switch took extra operating expenses and it costs more to be a financial services firm than to just be two random financial professionals. But the real revenue doesn't catch up right away. So in other words, the profit first system could break and start to unravel as we made that switch. So what we did was we used our bank and yourself strategy to give us some funds to cover those extra operating expenses without breaking the compounding of our wealth. And so the Profit First system had the potential to unravel, but bank and yourself strategy stepped in. And how we used that strategy stepped in to make sure that Profit First wouldn't unravel. And then YAB stepped up to help us make sure that we tracked everything, kept enough contingency funds, really had a game plan going into making that switch so that we could do it smartly stably, is that a word? We could do it smartly with stability and really make smart moves in that way.
(17:49): And if not, we also created a new word here today. Stab stably. Stably. So yeah, so not Stabler the character. Yeah, No, no. So what we're trying to say here is that we love what we love most about our three strategies that they reinforced each other. They all three are working in the same direction. They don't compete for our time and attention, right? Cuz they're helping build. Now, we're already starting to build into these systems with real estate and other strategies to make our cord grow. But these three will always be the core. And we believe their strength will hold us up and bring us to even more financial freedom and more wealth and all the forms of wealth that we like no matter what happens with the peripheral strands that might get added.
(18:46): So now let's turn to you. We wanna invite you to reflect on some questions. Do you have a cord of three strands that's not easily broken? Are you ready to build one? Perhaps you have one strand and you're ready to get a second. Perhaps you have two and you're ready to weave a third. Maybe you have three, but they don't feel very strong. And you're thinking, well, which one's the weakest? How could I strengthen it? Or do I need to switch it out for a different strand? Use this analogy of a cord and really sit down, evaluate what you're walking into 2023 with describe it, question it. Really get a full picture of here's my cord of three strands, or here's my cord of one strand, here's what it looks like. Here's what I like, what I don't like, all those kind of things. And then set an intention for how you'd like to strengthen those strands and strengthen the cord together. Is there a way you might use one of your strands to strengthen another strand or vice versa? Or if you took one strand out and put in a new strand, how would it strengthen the other two? Those kind of things. Consider how strong your financial strategies are and how you can strengthen them to bring you more financial freedom, more wealth in all areas of life, and have less worry, less stress in the new
(20:12): Year. And again, if you've got big dreams for 2023, and I hope that's every one of us, and for your own financial freedom, we'd love to help you achieve them, we'd love to be part of that community. Again, that three strands in the community aspect is so, so important, and that's why we've created a community space, right? The first step though is to schedule a discovery call with us, and you can just go again to our website@wealthwisdomfp.com and click on the right side. There's a little button that says Discovery call right? And it's a 20 minute conversation. Let's see if we can be one of your three strands of financial allies and strengthen your financial team. Again, the first step is to schedule that discovery call@wealthwisdomfp.com.
(21:05): The final thing we want to mention is that we have some surprises in store for you in 2023. We'll let one out of the bag now for our loyal listeners that have stayed with us here to the end, thank you so much. We're super excited to switch back to weekly episodes in 2023. Every Friday. Look for a shorter, more power-packed episodes starting the first Friday of the year, January 6th, 2023. So until next time, keep growing and protecting your foundational wealth so you're ready for the next adventure. Life brings your way and we hope you live long and profit. The topics presented in this podcast for general information only and not for the purpose of providing legal, accounting, or investment advice on such matters, please consult a professional who knows your specific situation.
This is thepodcastfactory.com
