Other people's time, knowledge, and expertise: the Ultimate Leverage with Alan Franks - Episode- 533

In order for us to do a really good job with financial planning, we need to find 2 points. And those 2 points inevitably are, where are we right now financially? And it's so hard to know that. It's so— there's no scale. Once we know where we are, let's dream about where we want to be. Because the truth is, is that we can have anything we want in life. We can't have everything though, right? So we really got to get very in tune with our values and say, okay, what do we really want? Really, really, really want.

There's a massive difference between making a good living and building real wealth. This episode unpacks how to stop chasing more and start designing better. You've mastered your careers, you've earned the income, but if you're still trading your time for money, it's time for a new strategy. So welcome to Enlightened Investors. I'm your host, Dr. Allen, and this is Streams to Impact, the podcast for professionals who want freedom, fulfillment, and financial flow. So let's get into today's conversation about creating wealth that works even when you don't. Allen Franks joins us today, and he's a certified financial planner who brings a holistic, human-centered approach to personal finance. From his book, Empowered Money, to his daily work with clients nationwide, Allen's mission is to help people align their wealth with their most meaningful goals. So Allen, welcome to the show. And if you would take us into the program and share with us just a little bit about the turning point in your life that brought you to the point and place where you became—

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. When I look back, I've been doing this for 15 years, but when I look back to say, okay, what was the most meaningful thing that I ever saw? And it was to watch my father create multigenerational wealth in one generation, going from where his parents lived and basically retired on Social Security paychecks with no inheritance at all to create Creating significant wealth, um, and then not uber wealthy, right? You know, but, but good, a really good life for me and my family, um, and learning how to do this. And so, uh, early on, I know Robert Kiyosaki's been mentioned on this podcast a million times probably, but early on he purchased a program from him. And I remember being in the attorney's office when they closed on 6 homes with no cash down.

Wow.

Obviously, that was probably about 2005 that they did that. You know, you can't really do that anymore, at least not to my knowledge. But I remember seeing that and I remember playing the board game Cashflow with my 2 brothers and my father and wanting to carve out 3 or 4 hours on a Saturday to play this board game called Cashflow. If anybody hasn't played it, highly recommend it. Great game to play with your kids. Teaching your kids financial literacy is one of the best gifts that you could give them. But in general, you know, this board game, you have this rat race in the middle. In order to get out of the rat race and onto the fast track, you had to get your expenses— sorry, your passive income be more than your expenses. And after that, you got onto the fast track where you got to make really fun deals, right? And what's so cool about that is I remember at the beginning, you pick a card out of random. And you could pick the attorney who makes a lot of money but also spends a ton of money, or you could get the plumber who didn't make much money but didn't spend much money. And the entire time, we were always hoping to get the plumber, always hoping to get the plumber, always hoping to get the plumber. And then, you know, at the end of— what was so great about that is at the end of 3 hours of trying to beat your brothers, inevitably, you would either land on divorce or bankruptcy.

Hmm.

And on divorce, you had to give away half of what you had worked the last 3 hours to build. So, you had to give up all your cash. And I just remember how much it hurt at that time and these lessons that I was learning as a 12-year-old, 14-year-old, right? And playing this board game, we're just trying to beat your brothers and learning a lot about life and a lot about money at a young age.

Well, I have never played the game. It sounds like a fascinating game. I've heard of it, but I have never played it. I didn't— no one's ever explained it to me, but it sounds like a real-life scenario. That's the way life is.

Yeah.

You never— I mean, you have to play the cards you're dealt, and they're oftentimes not the most advantageous cards in the world there. I'll have to get a copy of that game. Sounds fascinating. Well, Alan, thanks for sharing that with us. Your approach as a financial planner is, from what I understand, it is lifestyle first. So, can you share how you work with your clients to clarify their vision for life before actually talking about numbers? I mean, that seems like a very practical way to structure this. And actually, you know, working off of the Cashflow board game, I would say that certainly is how my life has actually come together, was actually getting my life together before I could even think about building wealth.

Yeah, absolutely. So, in order for us to do a really good job with financial planning, we need to find 2 points because when we have 2 points, we can draw a straight line. And those 2 points inevitably are, where are we right now financially? And it's so hard to know that. It's so— there's no scale that we can just go step on, right? And say, oh, we're doing good, or, hey, we're doing bad. Society is not there to tell us what good and bad is like they tell us about our weight all the time, right? Right? So the first thing that we've got to do is really establish the good, bad, and the ugly of where we are right now. And very few people know that. They're constantly asking me, hey, how are we doing? Are we ahead? Are we behind? And the truth is, we're all running our own race. Whether we're ahead or behind doesn't really quite matter as much. It's just really identifying, taking a second to evaluate and be self-aware about where we are financially here. Okay, now once we know where we are, let's dream about where we want to be. Because the truth is, is that we can have anything we want in life. We can't have everything though, right? So we really got to get very in tune with our values and say, okay, what do we really, really, really want, right? So for instance, the other day I saw one of my clients' Lamborghinis. You know what I said? That'd be nice to have. You know, of course I'd like to have a Lamborghini. I don't know many people that wouldn't like to have a Lamborghini. But do I want a Lamborghini? Is that really something that drives me? Is that something that motivates me? Am I going to put that on my vision board? Probably not at this stage of my life. Maybe later on. Right. But, and so when we think about what we really want, oftentimes it goes to these toys, nice car, nice boat. Right. And the truth is, is that oftentimes those are, those can be a little shallow.

Right.

And so we really want to get into the deepness of, hey, what do we really, really, really want? And let me share with you one of the things I really want. I really want to be able to take my family on a family vacation to celebrate New Year's Eve every single year for the rest of my life. And the reason I want to do that, because I know how fun my family vacations have been, and I know how my parents turn New Year's Eve into a goal-setting, fresh new start, just this awesome feeling, right? And so it's a— it's an experience that I want to one day be able to take my kids and eventually my grandkids out to somewhere where we can unplug and relax and really talk about everything we accomplished this past year and everything we want to accomplish next year, right? It's a deep passion of mine. And obviously to do that, that's gonna take money, right? And so what we're doing whenever we are trying to— whenever we start working with a client The first thing is to figure out where they currently are. And the second thing is to unpeel these layers of what they really want, because nobody comes out and tells you immediately what they really want, right? And sometimes they haven't even unpeeled those layers, right? But once we have those 2 points, where we are and where they want to be, then we can draw the straight line between those. And in the financial planning world, that is the most cost-efficient and the most tax-advantaged way of getting where you are. to where you want to be, right? And we just like, we like to reverse engineer it. We like to say, here's where you are, here's where you want to be. Let's reverse engineer a financial plan, keeping the end in mind, just like a business owner will need to keep an exit strategy, right? Keeping that end in mind, let's reverse engineer a financial plan here that helps you get there in the quickest way possible.

Allen, I really appreciate your perspective on that because that is exactly the way that we work with all of the members in our program is really to start with that end purpose, that end meaning, that biggest vision of their life. And what we really want to be sure of is just exactly what you mentioned. Does that greater vision really rest upon their core values because you're so right. I mean, you know, we can look out there and go, oh, I'd love to have that Lamborghini, but does that Lamborghini really speak to my values? And in most cases, it probably doesn't. And so I think that's what you're talking about is just exactly the same core of exactly what it is that we do before anyone becomes a member in our program is to approach it from that very same direction. So I really do appreciate that. So what I understand, it's values, purpose, and vision. The other point that you really point out there is that point of really understanding exactly where you are today, and from that, drawing a straight line from there to, to where you are. A very practical approach there. I appreciate that very much.

You know, a few notes on that. I think there's a saying where things are never as bad as they feel and never as good as they seem, right? So both tragedy and triumph are imposters is another way to put it. Right. And so when things are bad, I heard the other day, and feel free to fact-check me on this, but if our life gets 1% worse than it is right now, it feels 7% worse. Right. But if it gets 10% better, it only feels 1% better. Right. So it's amazing how quickly we adapt to the new, fresh success and not even really realize it or not really even celebrate it.

Right.

But man, if we have a failure, We really feel that failure, right? So, we are genetically— and so, we focus a lot on human behavior because think about this, like, we're supposed to set up for retirement from age 65 to 90, right? I don't know when the life expectancy actually passed age 65, but if I had to guess, it's probably in the last 100 years, right? And you think about how long human beings have been alive evolutionarily, right? How long we as Homo sapiens have existed, 300,000, 500,000 years. 1,000 years, who knows, right? And in the last 100 years, we just started living past 65, right? And now, all of a sudden, we're supposed to go from a hunter-gatherer hoarder mentality here, right, where we need to eat this meal because it might not be there tomorrow, to, hey, we need to peel away parts of our income for 30 years to 60 years in the future. That is not normal human behavior, right? We are fighting our own human behavior here. Now, what is normal human behavior? is this pack mentality. And it's so important for us to understand the influence that society has on our spending. Will Rogers has one of the best quotes ever. He says, we spend money we don't have on things we don't want to impress people we do not like. Right now, that's what we would call the keeping up with the Joneses mentality. And I will say this, so I'm 37 years old. You know, I definitely like my parents' generation a lot more on the material side. My generation is a lot more on the experience side, I would say. It's like, oh, no, we don't have that keeping up with the Joneses mentality. Oh, really? Then why do you post all your trips on Instagram if you don't care what other people think of it? Right. And so I think it just switched a little bit from materials to experiences. But still, you know, you know, you want to take that picture of the beautiful blue water and the hut that's over it. Right. So we have to be aware of how Our environment influences us subconsciously and therefore the spending and the money decisions that we make.

Yeah, I really appreciate that, Alan, because, yeah, we just— so much of our lives seems to be stuck in that hunter-gatherer scarcity mode. And I think we're just learning As a human species, or at least some are learning that the difference in that mindset from scarcity to to looking at life from a perspective of abundance, which is looking at that much more universally as we live in an infinite universe with infinite possibilities and. Yeah, you're right. Just in the last 100 years that we've had power generated other than from human power or from essentially equine power to mechanical power. And here we are on the verge of replacing human labor with robotic labor, and we aren't even ready for the place we're at right now. I was listening to a tech specialist not too long ago, and he was talking about— he drew this correlation between the early 1900s, and in 1900, if you went to any urban center in the— at least in the Western world, almost 95% of the vehicles were equine-powered. And by 1916, that had completely reversed. 95% of the vehicles were powered mechanically. And the correlation he was drawing is, is that in the next 16 years, we're going to see the human workforce replaced by robots. And I'm a professor, and I don't see our institutions preparing our population for that. And We're going to— in 16 years, there is a real possibility that we just won't need humans for the workforce. What are we going to do with those humans?

And, you know, the biggest cost of that, in my opinion, is going to be a psychological cost, right? We need to be productive, right? The idea of, hey, we're going to have robots do everything so we can go lounge and relax and go enjoy life, it's just not how how we're wired. We got to be striving towards something in order to get that fulfillment that we're all looking for, right? Um, otherwise, when we aren't striving, that's when negative thoughts show up. I do believe that's why suicide rates have gone up so much here recently, right? We're no longer pushing and striving and challenging ourselves and getting to that deeper level of fulfillment there. Uh, you know, on the other hand, we are trying to bring some manufacturing back to the States, and there's some, there's some reasons why we're doing I think that would be a huge, big psychological impact because we've gone to making Excel spreadsheets, right, from making stuff with our hands and making Excel spreadsheets. And we're just not getting that satisfaction anymore with the Excel spreadsheet, right? Now, my wife's an accountant. She loves an Excel spreadsheet, right? And she's great at creating it. She gets satisfaction out of that. But we'll see because making stuff with our hands here, it can really add a lot of happiness. But I think When it comes to AI, the people who are generally genuinely adding value, adding value, are going to be okay. It's the ones that are doing more commodity stuff, that's doing more stuff that's easily replicatable, that a lot of other people are doing that aren't necessarily unique. That's— I would be very worried. So I was at a conference in Washington, D.C. last week, and they were talking about our my profession, right? And I was talking about how, hey, you know, investments might be all robotic in the next 10 years, right? Insurance is going to be somewhat robotic, but people don't really, you know, like car and home insurance, you have to have. So maybe that'll be robotic. Life insurance, people don't typically buy. They're typically sold it. They need to be dragged across the finish line on that. But then as it gets a little bit more complex to estate planning, right, and tax planning, Those are areas where you're still going to need to customize to each individual person. And so the way that firms set up to do holistic financial planning, the way we start with the end in mind, and a lot of times that's with trust and estate planning, right? That to me, I think we've done a great job of insulating ourselves from that and therefore maybe even saying, hey, with AI, how can I how can I utilize this to build my practice? And I'll give you one example right now. Um, you know, our business has been growing very fast here the last 4 years. How cool would it be if I could actually generate me as a duplicate and have multiple, uh, meetings, review meetings at the same time, right? And what that would do is maybe people would say, well, that's not— I don't want that, that's not customized, and that's not going to happen, right? I don't— it's not gonna happen anytime soon, right? But, you know, all of a sudden, maybe we can have a review meeting once a month instead of 3 times a year, right? Maybe all of a sudden we can start adding more value to our clients using AI, right? And so that's the way that I'm looking at this, is saying, hey, there's a lot of risk out there for a lot of people, and we— that's not going to be us. We're going to come out as champions. How do we utilize this to help us add more value to our clientele?

Yeah, you touch on another very important point. You had mentioned that we as humans need to be productive. We need to be achieving. And that is so true. And Seligman, who is a psychologist, psychiatrist, who was really kind of the founder of positive psychology, That's one of the elements that he states is very important to living a fulfilled life is that ability to achieve and to strive for achievement. And the other aspect of that is that the statistics tell us that the majority of people who retire, they die within 2 years after retirement. And at my age, I also know a whole lot of retired people and I know people who have retired from their jobs but they still are very productive and they're still very engaged and still producing in some way, shape, or form and they're fulfilled and— they find happiness. And then I also know other people who are isolated and have lost their purpose and meaning once they lost their job. And the other thing, you know, you were talking about AI, and I was listening to a podcast with another tech specialist, and he was talking about AI and Silicon Valley, and a lot of what is going on there is, from his perspective, and he's in the He's deep into it and he goes a lot of it is really anti-human and it is— and it's not going to survive. But the one thing he said is that AI, that robots, that they have no consciousness and we're not even close to the point in place where they are going to have consciousness because we as humans don't even know what consciousness is.

We know—

Yeah. We have it, but we have no clue what it is or where it is. And I do a lot of work in consciousness, and that is so true. Neuroscientists have no clue where it is. Is it somewhere in the brain? Is it outside of the brain? We have no clue.

Yeah.

But what he was saying is that robots AI does not have consciousness. It's just— they're just chips. That's all they are. And they are not going to have consciousness, certainly not in our lifetime, our grandchildren's life, our great-grandchildren. So—

But it reminds me of a quote I heard from Elon recently that stuck out to me. And it said the The idea of a genius is going to be reinvented. The idea of, you know, what we thought of a genius is going to be somebody who knew a lot of information, was able to retain a lot of information, right? And right now, information is pretty cheap, right? You can find out a lot real quickly, right? So it's going to go— the idea of a genius is going to go from the information that we know to the questions that we're asking.

Mm-hmm.

Right? Because when we are going into— and we can have an AI ChatGPT write us a paper, you know, it, it's not about, it's not about what's in that paper anymore. Anybody can get that information rather easily. It's about what questions did we ask and how did we frame that paper, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so, to me, it's— I see a huge amount of opportunity in this new world that's coming up. And I understand why some people were going to see risk. But, you know, that's why you got to seek the opportunity.

And yes, exactly. And, you know, there always is opportunity in crisis. And we are at a crisis point. I mean, there are so many vast changes that are coming that we can't even even predict or know where they are. But you're so right, there is always opportunity within that crisis. And I don't agree with Elon Musk on very much, but I would certainly agree with the fact that what we think of, what we typically think of as genius is definitely going to change. However, I think that even the geniuses in the past were the ones who asked the questions. And weren't necessarily the ones who retained great amounts of information. But to that point of the fact that AI does not have consciousness, that it's just a bunch of chips, what this tech expert was saying is that it's always going to come down to relationships. And those who can form trustful relationships are going to thrive.

Mm-hmm.

That's the case now, and that's really not gonna change no matter how much robots take over the workforce, no matter how much AI influences what we do. It's always going to come down to relationships. So, Alan, it's been a wonderful conversation with you today. If you would, But just briefly tell us about your company, what you do, and how it is that we can get in touch with you.

Yeah, so I've been in financial planning now for 15 years, and I felt this calling, this need, this responsibility to write a book about everything that I've learned. And so the book that I've got is called Empowered Money, and you can buy it at empowered-money.com, empowered-money.com. And on there, you can also reach out directly to me on there. And there's also a 10-minute free financial plan. We talked about needing to know where you are financially, right? So, there's a 10-minute complimentary financial plan that you can get access to. Highly recommend doing that. And then, you know, where we really come in is helping you take that next step on your financial journey. We talked a lot about hunter and gathering. It's almost like that's, that's almost like what, that's our income, right? That's the hunting and the gathering, it's our income. But we need to plant some seeds, right? Those are investments. Those are the passive investments. Those are the storage facilities, the multi-unit complexes, right? The, um, the hard money lending, right? Those are the seeds that we need to start planting. And so what we're able to do is kind of teach you how to farm, right? Teach you where to plant those seeds, what kind of seeds to plant for your particular situation, right? And so we're one of the few financial planning shops that I know of likes doing these alternative investments in. Um, and, uh, that's, that's what we're kind of known for. So we'd love to work with you. And, you know, I'm just going to give you my cell phone number here too. I love talking money. I love talking strategy. I love talking taxes. So if you want to, feel free to give me a call, 706-202-6424. That's my personal cell phone, 706-202-6424. Would love to chat money with And, uh, and yeah, and let me know what you think of my book.

Well, Allen, one last question for you, and this is a personal question. When you come to the end of your journey and you lay on your deathbed, what will you look back on as your most, uh, meaningful and fulfilling, uh, aspect of your life?

Gosh, that's, that's so good. Um, it's such a good question. And, and I, I tell you this, I, you know, transparently, I do not spend a lot of time volunteering. I don't give a ton of money to charity, and eventually I will, right? Um, but on the other hand, I don't need to. I get so much fulfillment out of helping individuals reach their goal. I get so much fulfillment in the 50 to 60 hours a week that I'm working in my job and helping people realize what they originally thought was impossible, right? And I hope that that's the statement that I leave. It's not that not only was I able to raise my kids to be great people and have my ceiling be there for, right? But also that we were able to do that for all of our clients and help them give their kids a financial education and help them leave a legacy that's going to last multiple generations here and really reflect their values, right? So that's— That's what I hope my legacy is, is that I help other people leave a legacy.

Well, thank you for that, Allen, and for that honesty. And Enlightened Investors, thank you so much for being with us today. I know you really enjoyed today's conversation and enjoyed the time to get to know Allen. And if you would please, I would appreciate it if you would take some time to like, share, and subscribe. And if you would also leave us a rating and a review. So until next time, live abundantly, and we'll see you in the next episode.

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