#250: How to Solve 90% of Your Business and Personal Problems

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey there. Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia, and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. You can find detailed show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com Episode 2, 5 0. Those notes always include a summary of our discussion, as well as any links to resources I mention during the show. So today we're going to talk about how to solve 90% of your business and personal problems. I know that seems like a clickbait type title in headline, but just bear with me because I really believe this is true. And let me just give you the answer right off the bat. I'm not going to leave you hanging. So money can solve 90% of your business and personal problems. And you might think, well, duh, sure, of course. I mean, money can solve all of them. Well, no, it can't. But it can solve quite a few of them. And this is a topic that I know, at least in America, can feel a little uncomfortable. In this country, we don't really like to talk about money. It's kind of a taboo subject, and I get it. But it's a very important topic, and you'll see why it's so closely tied to your happiness and success and joy as a freelance professional. So when I was in high school, I worked full time every summer in my uncle's auto parts distribution warehouse, and I mainly did shipping and receiving. And my dad would drive me there every morning on his way to work, and he'd pick me up at the end of the day. But one of the great things about these car trips with dad is that we got to spend a ton of time together and we'd always have great conversations about topics that I still find fascinating. Things like politics, business, money, the state of the world, even more philosophical issues. And dad and I are very similar that way. We just love to talk about this stuff. One of the things I remember dad stressing during these conversations was the value of money. And he'd say to me, ed, look. And by the way, I should mention, we've always been very middle class. Okay, so this wasn't coming from someone who is wealthy, but someone who understood the importance of this topic. And he said, look, having money and more specifically having wealth won't solve all your problems. It won't solve things like relationship problems or health problems to a great degree. And there was a few others, but these are just some examples now. He said, but it will solve about 90% of your problems. And that really stuck with me because I knew it to be true then as a maybe 16, 17, 18 year old. And I know it to be true now more than 30 years later. Of course, being the stubborn person I am, I was foolish with my money for a big part of my adult life. I mean, I can understand these things, right, intellectually, but one thing is understanding them, the other is really practicing every day through habits, the right habits. I won't get into all the reasons why I had a tough go of it, but I know a lot of it had to do with the fact that I didn't earn enough for a long time. I know everyone makes the same complaint, right? Well, I just. I need to make more. It takes money to make money and all that stuff, right? But really, for a while, I barely earned enough to live during the first two, three years of my professional career. I mean, I was okay, but it just, you know, really down to just a few dollars. I mean, I had zero margin for error. And it took eight or nine years to fully get out of that place. So when I finally started earning a nice income, I squandered much of it. And I paid the price of those decisions for years to come. But for several years now, I've come full circle to Dad's sage advice. Isn't it interesting how that works? You set off to do the right thing, and then you don't. And then you spend a long time learning those lessons the hard way. And then you finally kind of come back to where you started. And, I mean, I've dug myself out of a tight spot. I've turned things around. So I've been through all faces of this. I've seen the good, the bad and the ugly. I'm sure you may have as well. So it shouldn't come as a surprise when I tell you that I can't overstate the difference that being in a better financial spot has made in every aspect of my life, including my business. And I tell you all this because I'm absolutely convinced that managing your money well is one of life's most important, what I like to call lead dominoes. So it's one of those very few problems that if solved, automatically solves dozens of other problems. And that includes business problems. Because when you're totally stressed about money, you make poor business decisions, you take on subpar clients and crappy projects, which makes your business less enjoyable, to put it mildly. It also impacts your confidence in your sense of self worth, which causes you to keep mismanaging your money, which keeps you stuck in the cycle of poor business decisions. So in life and in business, I try to look for these lead dominoes. I try to look for things because they're so. It's so overwhelming, right? You know, it. I mean, there's so much information, so many things that people tell you you need to do, right? There's all these shoulds, I should do this, I should do that. And you know what? They all are, but there's dozens of them and it becomes overwhelming. And when you're overwhelmed, what do we do? We don't do anything, right? We just like just freeze up. So I look or try to look for these lead dominoes. And managing your money well in your business and your personal life is absolutely one of those. So question is, how do you get out of this terrible cycle? Now, look, I can't give you all the answers in this podcast episode, and frankly, I don't have all the answers. I'm learning as I go. I'm in this journey with you. I'm just a passenger on this bus. And I'm certainly not a financial professional. In fact, I should mention that right off the bat, I'm not a financial advisor. I'm not a qualified financial professional. So none of this, even though we're not going to get into the weeds, none of this should be considered financial advice. I'm just sharing it with you for illustration purposes only, really, to get you thinking about these things, especially because of what I mentioned a minute ago, the fact that it's just, where do you start? What do you do? What do you focus on? There's so many things that I've thought about this quite a bit and I've narrowed down to a few simple things to focus on. So recently. And the way this came about is I just started outlining the content for a book that I want to write for my kids next year. Actually, I shouldn't say next year. Over the next few months, I really want to get going on this. And it's a book on how to live a better life by making money work for you. So this is a bit of a. It's not going to be a formal book. It's not going to be something I'm going to publish. At least that's not my intention. It's a legacy book. It's something I want to leave behind for my kids. And of Course, it's something I want to teach them. I don't want to just hide it in the closet and hope that one day when I'm gone and it's too late, they find it. This will give me my thinking is this will give me the framework to have this conversation with them. And I've had some of these conversations already with my oldest, but. And that's what I was trying to do. I mean, we're talking about kids, right? So you have to really be able to narrow things down, to simplify them, to describe in a way that it's not going to overwhelm them. That goes for anybody, but especially for teenagers. And yeah, going through this process has just forced me to narrow things down to the core essentials. In fact, I've narrowed down the solution to this dilemma to four basic pillars. And let me tell you what they are, and then I'm going to go into each one of them just a little bit, just so you have an idea of how I'm thinking about it. And hopefully this will get your wheels turning and give you a framework for maybe making some improvements. So pillar number one is earning more. Okay. So growing your income. Pillar number two is managing it well. Pillar number three is investing wisely. And pillar number four is protecting prudently. So let's go through each one of them in a bit more detail. Earning more is the first pillar. And this is really about doing this, earning more by becoming more valuable and indispensable in whatever you decide to do for a living. So this is probably the one variable that most people focus on to solve their money problem. It's like, well, I just need to earn more. Right? That's the thinking. That's the first solution that comes to mind. The thing is, it's only one piece of the puzzle, as you see, right. So filling a tub with that's got a bunch of leaks, that's not gonna solve your problem. You're just gonna exhaust yourself. And it is exhausting, believe me. I mean, I've tried using this as kind of my key strategy for getting out of the messes that I've created for myself. And, you know, it helps us solve part of the problem, but it won't solve the whole thing because you haven't addressed the leaks and all the other problems your tub has. But it's definitely, of course, it's a key piece. Now I feel very fortunate that I've learned and I practice financially valuable skills. So things such as marketing, sales, helping others get tangible financial results as a coach that's, you know, that's my main job. And if you're a freelance writer, copywriter, business writer, content marketing writer, that you're fortunate as well and that you're, you're providing a service that, you know, if you get good at your craft, you're very. And you're very good at marketing yourself. Okay? And that, that's key. You can do very well for yourself in the income category. And I say marketing is the key because, and this is not the topic of this episode, but you could be just a slightly above average writer and do very well financially, much better than someone who is at the very top of the game but doesn't have their marketing systems and their positioning and everything that goes with that. And of course, operationally, including pricing and strategy. And they're just not good at the business side. I firmly believe that. Okay. And I see it every day. I see it every single day. And I've saw it in my own practice. I feel like I'm certainly not the best business to business writer and copywriter. I never was. I was better than average, but not by a ton, I don't think. But I was very good at positioning at marketing and sales, at pricing. It's strategy, at having the right conversations and, and just taking some calculated risks that push, push me out of my comfort zone. Anyway, I digress. So those are good skills to get really good on. I should mention that because the word selling was in there and I know a lot of people cringe when they hear that. That's because I think many of us have kind of this weird idea of what selling is. And let me just say, look, everyone sells, okay? If you got kids, you're selling, they're selling to you. If you have clients, if you have neighbors, I mean, like, just think about it. You're always selling. Selling is simply having a conversation and trying to persuade in an ethical way. I mean, maybe that's not the formal definition, but that's how I think about it informally. So, you know, this is not the only way to boost your income, but you need to find ways and work on ways to grow your income because that can certainly move the needle. There's smart things you could do, going after hungrier clients and hungrier markets, for example. And when I talk about hungrier markets, I'm talking about how your same set of skills can command twice, sometimes 3, 4, 5x the fees in different markets without having to change much. So I see a lot of people just having a really hard go of what their business because they're basically going after clients who are cheap and they can't afford you and they're only willing to pay so much. It's not that they're bad people, just could be for a number of many different reasons. But you take those same skills and you go after a different set of clients and, you know, you could command much, much more. So getting smarter about that, getting smarter about the services you offer. You know, I see so many writers, just all they do are blog posts because that seems to be what a lot of clients want. That's kind of their comfort zone, and that's what they stick to. But that type of writing has been commoditized in most industries, in most markets, to the ground. I mean, it's just a very difficult way to raise your income that way. You have to crank out so many projects just to eke out a decent living. That's going to lead you to burnout very quickly. Be more strategic with your pricing. I've mentioned that already, that that's an important element of this. My clients and I, my coaching clients and I, we work on that quite a bit. Like, you know, how can you bundle things better? How can you package things better? How can you frame your offerings and your value differently? How can you think about that stuff differently? Because you know what, the first person you have to sell is yourself about what you offer and the value you offer and why these fees are worth it. So how can you make those changes so that you're able to increase your income over a period of months and years? This pillar is obviously important again, it's the one that most people focus on when solving this problem. But it's not the only one. So let's talk about the others. The next one is managing. Well, okay, obviously I'm talking about managing your income, what you do generate. This is a piece that was severely lacking for me. And this is why I got in such a tight spot. And I was there for a long, long time, even though I was doing better and better and better with number one, if number two is not right, again, those are the leaks in the tub. And by managing, I'm talking about managing what you. Again, what you earn through smart systems, rather than through emotion and learning to follow those systems, religiously trusting the systems because you know that they're going to take you and keep you in a better place. So I found that. And this is. I firmly believe this. Systems are 90% of the solution. Okay, systems. When I talk about systems, I'm referring to systems that make it easy to Follow steps without getting emotionally involved in the process. In fact, I would say the process trumps financial expertise any day. And what do I mean by process? Well, what I decided to do after a lot of internal fighting was to adopt the envelope system. And the envelope system has been around for a long, long time. I've looked it up, and nobody can really take credit for it. But it's the old way of managing money. You take income and you automatically allocate it to different envelopes. Now, for a long time, people did this, and people still do. They have physical envelopes. They put cash, they take their disposable income, they withdraw that from their checking account, and they go ahead and put cash in different envelopes. And, you know, there's an envelope for groceries, for example, and when that's gone, then that's it. No more money for groceries. So you have to be very mindful and very careful about how you manage the funds in that envelope. So it's obviously a budgeting process, but it's very much. It's a very active, very tangible budgeting process. I do it digitally, and I've played around with it. I won't get into all the specifics, but I don't have an envelope, so to speak, for every category, like groceries and clothing and utilities and anything like that. I bundle a lot of these categories together so that I can consolidate the number of envelopes. But that's not really the point here. The point is that as much as I resisted doing that because I just felt really constrained. I just thought, oh, that. No, that's terrible. You know, because I had been there before. I had been on a budget for. Again, I told you for a long, long time because I was barely earning enough that I had to keep track of every dollar. And I didn't want to go back to that. And here I was, I was a grown man with kids. And, like, I don't want to do that. But I started understanding that that was going to be the only way. And frankly, once I started, it was not an issue. The great thing about the envelope system is there's no thinking, okay? You just follow the process with minor tweaks over time as needed, of course. And, you know, the money is there. And you know what? I actually, I will tell you, I have more freedom now with the envelope system in my business and in my personal finances than I ever had before. I got categories that have surplus money all the time. And it's so nice to see, Wow, I got this extra money in here. I can, you know, Go ahead and have fun with it, or you know, maybe roll it over to a different account, put it in savings, pay down some debt, whatever. It's just great to have those choices. And the other good thing about the envelope system or anything along those lines is it gives you greater visibility so it enables you to get clarity on opportunities for better money management, for savings, for cost cutting, et cetera. In fact, I mean, it's, I, it's enabled me to save a lot more. I earned less in 2020 than I did in 2019, but I was still able to grow my savings and retirement account contributions. And what's cool is it becomes kind of this virtuous cycle because as I look for opportunities to save, to invest more, to save more for retirement, I get really excited. So then my brain is now programmed to keep looking for other opportunities because now I'm thinking, wow, this is, let's see if I can find some more. And I'm always on high alert for these things. So the big point I want to make here is management. Money management is kind of a no brainer. I think we all understand this conceptually. But the big, big key to making it work is to have systems, processes that you follow blindly, checklist, if you will. Well, this is what I told myself and I committed to doing. I'm gonna do this and then this, and then I do this and then I allocate that and then you just follow it. You don't think about it, you don't get emotionally involved. You don't say, well, wait a minute, but you know, that means I can't do this over the next couple of weeks. You know, you don't get into that. You just do it, you follow it and you trust the process. Trust is a big element here. Okay? Until I had that trust in the system, I wasn't following it once. I just trusted and just left it all to the system. It was just all smooth sailing from there. Well, I shouldn't say all smooth sailing. There was bumps, but you know, over time and then once I became a full convert, then all was good. All right, so that's pillar number two and that's to manage well. Pillar number three, investing wisely, and not just wisely in terms of picking smart investments, but also investing a significant portion of your income because you've learned to live on less. Because, you know, from pillar number two, again, we talked about that already. But more importantly, investing consistently and automatically. So automating your investments. Okay, so this is, has a lot of the elements from pillar number two. In terms of management, obviously. So just talk a little bit more about this. Let's unpack it. And I'm not going to get into again with any of these. I'm not going to get into the weeds. But where you put your investment savings is very important. And I'm not going to get into how to make those decisions again. I'm not qualified to do so. I have my own process system that my dad has taught me and I love it. It's great and it's very effective. But that's not really the point here. The one thing I wanted to make sure I came across was the fact that just as important is how much you're investing and how consistently you're contributing to your investment accounts. Consistency is the key. Consistency. So really it's with consistency that the question becomes, how do I make sure that consistency happens? It's not dependent on me. It's not dependent on something flaky, something that is not very dependable. I'm not very dependable. I would have to remember to do certain things. I'd have to remember to make those contributions, to write those checks, to make those transfers. So really it's about automation. Automation makes consistency a thing, okay? And that's why 401k plans in the United States, which are retirement plans through an employer, work so well, because the contributions to those plans are made automatically by your employer. They deduct that from your paycheck and they go ahead and send it automatically to the investment company, okay? The problem with self employment is that our withdrawals that go into retirement savings are typically not automated. Most people don't have them set to be automated. So you have to do something. You have to write a check, you have to physically log in and make a transfer. You know, so you want to do as best as possible. You should try to make your investments, your investment contributions, I should say automated, or create a system where most of it is automated and requires no thinking, no discipline. That's what we're trying to remove. We're trying to remove the necessity of discipline and willpower. That's a big, big topic in habit development. And the whole idea is if it depends on how you feel, if it depends on discipline and moods and all those things, there's a likelihood that you're not going to do it. You might, but there's a likelihood that you won't. And you obviously don't want to depend on that. So as you manage your money better from pillar number two, you'll again find opportunities to cut some costs and shift those savings into additional retirement account contributions. That's the other nice thing. And I mean, I'm embarrassed to even admit that there were several years over the past decade where I didn't contribute at all to my retirement. And it's because of these things that they weren't in place that I just told you about. And I was telling a story that wasn't serving me. I was telling a story to myself that, oh, I'm investing in my business instead, you know, and, you know, I could tell that story all day long and it could be very convincing. And it was. It convinced myself and I felt better about the fact that I wasn't contributing to my retirement. But it's a story that was not serving me, okay? It was not serving me because it was just an excuse and it's not a true story. And the fact is that I could have contributed something. Okay? By the way, I'm a huge believer in percentages, not fixed amounts. So, you know, one thing to just an example of how that works is I could have just said, okay, well, I got all these things going on and I'm investing everything I can in my business, but can I invest 1% of my income? You know, so percentages are better than amounts. Amounts seem big, they seem not doable. Many times percentages are better, especially if your income fluctuates. So 1%, I could have absolutely done 1%. And the important thing about this concept is 1% would have gotten me on the road to 3%, to 5%, to 7%, to 10%. The difference between 0 and 1% is massive. That's the biggest chasm. And if I had to cross that, I had said, you know, let's just start with 1%. And then once I'm there, what would have happened is the motivation would have been such that I would have felt really good about myself and I would have kept going. And then a few months later, I would've said, you know, I can easily increase that to 3%. Or maybe I would have said, well, let's try 2%, and that's fine. Over time, I would have easily gotten a 10%. But I didn't do it. Good news is I've turned things around and I'm in a much better place again. I have this automation in place and that's made all the difference. The fourth and final pillar is protecting prudently and protecting mainly through savings, insurance, and knowledge. And by knowledge. I'll talk about this in a minute. But that means your knowledge and that of other trusted Partners. Here's the thing. You don't want to do all this work earning, managing and saving better only to have some unexpected event wipe you out. So that's why you have to protect your assets. How? Through savings, insurance and knowledge. So let's talk about these savings. I'm not going to get into a lot of detail with any one of these, but you should have an emergency fund, a fund for unexpected expenses. Okay? Don't want to get too much in the semantics or if then scenarios. But think about scenarios that could really get you off track financially. The refrigerator breaks down. You got to get a new refrigerator. The transmission in your minivan goes out, you know, and it's, I don't know, $3,000. I don't know about you, but for a long time when those things happen, I would just put it on my credit card and, well, that's not good, because how am I going to pay that off, you know, And I don't. That's the problem. And you, like, chip away at it little by little, but then you add some other things and it's so hard to get out of that cycle. So an emergency account should cover you for, for unexpected expenses like that. Now, it's items that could get you off track. It's items that are completely unexpected, and you'd normally have to put it on a credit card. So that's a very important one. That's the first one I would fund. So Dave Ramsey, famous financial personality, author of Financial Peace and Money Makeover, says, start with $1,000, okay? So kind of stop everything else and anything that you are paying toward, anything above minimum credit cards, anything else where you can kind of scrounge for a couple of months. Just do whatever you can to fund an emergency account and start with $1,000, which is doable for most people, you know, even if it takes you a little bit of time. And then once you're there, you should work your way to, you know, X number of months of living expenses. Okay? A lot of people talk, by the way, about, oh, you should have an emergency account, savings account based on X number of months of income. I think that's a mistake because in my mind, if it's an income situation where you lose your income completely, you're going to make some severe cuts in your spending. And it's really now about living expenses that you need to cover and in fact, even reduce living expenses, not regular living expenses when you're making an income. So anyway, my whole thinking is just, you need to determine what's best A lot of financial advisors say six months of living expenses, some say a year. I think that's extremely conservative and unrealistic for a lot of people. I think that might be a good long term goal. But if you tell someone who's at zero right now a year's worth of living expenses, they're going to give up. They're never even going to start. So emergency start with $1,000. Okay? That's a really good intermediary goal. And then from there you determine the number of months of living expenses. Now, I have a separate account that I call my buffer savings account. And that account is for variable expenses. So you know, like when your kid suddenly is playing a sport and it's like $300 for equipment. It's like, oh my gosh. Well, I had no idea. I thought, you know, maybe $50 and you know, I was going to take that out of regular checking. But $300, that's not in the budget. Okay, so that's where the buffer account comes in. Let's say that your life insurance policy comes due twice a year and so the premium and it's a big number. I don't know, let's just say it's $300 every six months just to stick with that number. That wasn't in your budget because it's your budget. Maybe it's typically for things that happen every month. So for variable things that only happen every quarter or once a year or twice a year, the buffer account takes care of that. So I put money into that account every month. In fact, that account for me continues to grow a little bit every month, even though we get these dips. But it's always very well funded. And it's nice to know that if something happens or we gotta get something, we gotta fix something in the house, I don't want to take it out of the emergency account because again, that's for big things. Big things. But we're talking about $150 item. I gotta put in a, you know, a storm door in the back door or I gotta something insignificant or broke. I don't want to dip in an emergency. Emergency is for true emergencies. My buffer account is for variable expenses. And that's really nice to have. I didn't have that for a long, long time. And I found that that was creating a ton of stress in my life. All right, so enough of that then. Savings accounts for long term purchases. Okay, so for a home down payment, future home, a car. So I have an account that I've set up about a Year ago, where I put a little bit of money in every month for a future car, whether it's going to be for down payment on a car or my hope is that my next car I just buy outright in cash. It'd be nice to have that already there for college savings. So we've been saving for both of our kids just a little bit every month. It goes into a college savings account. So long term purchases, long term things. And you know, we start kind of getting into the money management pillar with some of this stuff. But I just wanted to mention it here. So savings is the first thing in terms of protecting prudently. The second thing is insurance. So health insurance, homeowners insurance, auto insurance, liability coverage, disability insurance. By the way, just real quick so you can look this up, Google it. There's a much greater probability of becoming disabled than of losing your life. So a lot of people have life insurance, they don't have disability insurance. But there's a higher probability that in the course of your life you will be disabled. Then you will lose your life prematurely. We're all going to lose our lives, obviously, but I'm talking about prematurely. So it's an important policy, in my opinion, to consider. I know it helps me sleep better at night and it's something. Again, consult with your financial advisor to see what's best for you. But why insurance? Well, I think it's obvious, but look, you don't want to work hard doing all these other things only for an unexpected, severe, unexpected event to take a chunk of it away or for the income to stop because of death. So protecting, very important through insurance. And then the final item here in protecting is knowledge. So by that I mean learning all you can about this stuff. I mean, even if it's an uncomfortable topic, but learning, there's a lot of information out there for the layperson. I consider myself kind of a layperson in this area. But learning, just studying, understanding, learning different strategies. But one quick warning about that. Not letting it confuse you, not letting it take your focus away from the fundamentals. That's what these four pillars are. They're fundamentals. Okay, let's stick with the fundamentals. If you stick with the fundamentals and you execute consistently on the fundamentals, you're going to do well. Okay, if you start getting fancy and then getting really complex, that has a high probability of failure, has a high probability of failure in terms of you not following it and not doing it consistently. So learning all you can. And then the other part of knowledge is partnering with a professional you trust it could be more than one professional, but the one professional, especially if you're self employed, that I can't recommend enough, is an accountant. Okay? A good accountant. In my only thing in terms of what kind of person should I look for? I would look for someone who is used to working with either very small businesses or solo professionals. So owner operated businesses, okay. You want someone who maybe that's not all they work with, but a high percentage of their clientele or people like us. Okay. Because you want someone who understands you, understands your world, understands your concerns, understands the opportunities in terms of tax savings for people like us. So I consider my accountant kind of part of my board of advisors, if you will. And very early on in my business, before I was really earning much at all, I went out looking for someone because to me it was a long term investment. It was somebody I wanted to find early on before things got really kind of out of control. And I'm glad I did. I've had my accountant for, geez, about 15 years now and great guy, great firm, small firm, they do great work and it's great to have somebody on your side like that again. That's part of the protection, the money protection. In terms of financial advisors, I'll just say this, I'm not a big fan of financial advisors. Find that many financial advisors are compensated in a way that's incongruent with what you want from them. So they're compensated. And this is not everybody. So please don't send me emails, oh, I'm a financial advisor, my husband is one. And you're wrong. My understanding, and I've seen this and you can read about this, it's not just me saying it is a lot of them are paid to sell certain products and they're going to push what has higher commissions. So I, I think the compensation is misaligned in many cases with the goals of their clients, number one. Number two is I find it interesting that many financial advisors don't do very well financially, you know, and I don't know about you, but you know, if I were to hire a health coach or a physical trainer, I would want that person to be very healthy and be in excellent shape in the case of a physical trainer. Right. So why would I want to take financial advice from somebody who wasn't independently wealthy already, you know, or very close to being there. And many of them, from what I've seen are not. So, you know, I'm not trying to trash on financial advisors. I'm just saying that I find that These days you can do very, very well on your own. I think the biggest thing is really not, you know, getting a stock dip or, you know, getting in on these complex strategies. The biggest thing you can do is what I talked about earlier is this consistency and automation. Automation is actually what feeds the consistency. Okay. If you can get into these habits that are automated and just, it's part of what you do when you have checklists and you just follow them, that in my experience so far is really the biggest driver. Okay. This is the one thing that can make all the difference in the world. And then you don't really need a financial advisor. So anyway, that's my editorial on that. So what I like about this process, okay, these four pillars, it's not really a process, it's really a framework. Is that it really. Again, it boils things down to some very simple things. I mean, number one, earning more, number two, managing well, number three, investing wisely, and number four, protecting prudently. It doesn't have to be complicated, and for me at least, I'm easily overwhelmed. But seeing it this way, thinking about it this way helps me quickly identify where I need to make improvements in my own business or personal finances. And then what elements of my financial life need some attention. Again, I can't stress this enough. Not only am I not a financial advisor, just financial professional, but I don't want you to think of this as me preaching down to you, okay? That's not the intention at all. And as I mentioned earlier, believe me, I've made an insane number of mistakes over the years and that's why I'm passionate about it. That's why I wanted to talk about it today and just put it out there because really understand that this is coming from a place of love. I want you to thrive as a self employed professional. I want you to have a wonderful and fulfilling life. And I know in my heart that 90% of the solution, and I really believe this 90% of the solution is getting the money thing right. You get the money thing right, your business has a much, much higher probability of long term success. Okay? So start solving the money problem and most of the other problems in your business and your personal life start going away. It's really that simple. Simple, not necessarily easy. And it becomes easier. The hardest part is getting started. Once you get started, develop the habits, stay focused, it's not as hard anymore. Hope this was helpful. This has been Ed Gandia. I hope you have an awesome rest of your day. Take care. The high income Business writing podcast is a production of B2B business launcher. Learn more at B2B launcher.com sa.