Wealth Secrets: The Only Way To Create Generational Wealth!

There were some wealthy folks that thought, hey, if that changes and the government knocks that from 11.7 down to 5 or down to 3, I want to make sure that I'm carving some of that money out for future generations while I can.

Today, New Year's resolutions often involve health, wealth and elf when it comes to wealth, do you ever wonder what billionaires do to stay rich throughout the years? Today you will learn three ways they do that you can do too. Jim do will share three ways billionaires stay rich that you can implement for yourself and for your family. Jim has been advising elite entrepreneurs on their wealth planning for 26 years. He helps entrepreneurs build virtual family office structures so that they can get and stay rich. But rather than go into more of Jim's credentials and experience, I'll just say that he's been Joe Polish's personal financial advisor for more than 20 years. What more can I say? Please welcome Mr. Jim Do.

Thank you, Tim. I appreciate that very much. What I'm going to do today is I'm going to talk about three things that I've learned through studying billionaires that we implement with our clients that you can implement yourself. And these are the three things that billionaires really nail when it comes to their wealth planning. Get through the disclosures. That just says, don't believe a word I'm about to tell you and let's get into it. So the first of the three things that billionaires do very well, I'm going to just draw a continuum right here. And on the left of this continuum I'm going to put distraction. And on the right of this continuum, I'm going to put focus. By the way, I was supposed to be a doctor, so excuse my handwriting. So on the left on distraction, I see many entrepreneurs and what they have when it comes to their wealth building is what I call random wishes. And random wishes doesn't get it done. A little more toward the focus I see goals. So there's some goal setting a little more focused I would call success. But if I had to tell you about those three areas, random wishes, goals and success, I would put those in the red because there are plenty of entrepreneurs like you that have random wishes, goals or success. But really to get sustained wealth, you need another level over here. And this other level is a compelling focus. And if you have compelling focus and believe in the billionaires have compelling focus, that's when you get something that we call sustained wealth. So what are your first steps on this? For each one of these, I'm going to tell you what the concept is. And then I'm going to give you an action step. So I'll just kind of star the action steps. So the first action step for a compelling focus, something that Keith Cunningham calls thinking time. And thinking time is for you to sit down in a quiet place and first ask yourself, why do you want to be wealthy? Why do you want to be seriously rich? It's really important to get clear on your why. Also ask yourself, what. What would you do if you got seriously wealthy? How would you use that money? And then the second part of this I'll put another star is ties into Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan's book who, not how. I'll give you a quick story on something that happened to me during COVID So when Covid happened, they shut down all the gyms. Mimi and I are really into working out. We couldn't go to the gym, and it was making me crazy. Well, I have a friend who's a personal trainer who said, jim, I can get you in a private gym. No one's in there, but you have to pay me as a personal trainer. I remember thinking, I don't need a personal trainer. I have been working out for 30 years. I know my way around a gym. But I had no choice. So I hired him. Two weeks later, I was surprised to realize that I had the best two weeks of workouts I'd have in over a decade. And guess what? Now I have a personal trainer. And what I realized is the personal trainer gave me a compelling focus. I wasn't on my earbuds listening to one of Paul Culligan's podcasts. Sorry, Paul, I wasn't talking to my friends in the gym. I was focused during that workout time of just intensely getting it done. So you can hire a good wealth manager to give you a compelling focus. And that's the who. So those are your steps on compelling focus. The second area that billionaires do a really good job. I'll just draw this diagram. Here is something that I like to call wealth discovered. Most of you are making enough money already to get seriously rich. The problem is you're leaking money, and you don't know where you're leaking money. And in my experience, 26 years of working with entrepreneurs, the number who know where their money's going and they're not leaking money is very small compared to, like this red. Better compared to the entrepreneurs who don't know where their money is going. In my book, I talk about Mark, which is not his real name, who's an entrepreneur who gets Introduced as selling his company for more than $80 million, which is a true statement. By the time Mark sat down with me, he only had $5 million left. You go, how in the heck does he do that? Or did he do that? Well, first of all, he had taken on investors, so he only owned a little more than half of the company when it sold. But, you know, $40 million is still a lot of money. He had done no planning, no exit planning, no tax planning, no asset protection planning. So he ended up paying too much in taxes. And then he put money in a bunch of silly investments with friends and with other people and lost a lot of that. The reason I tell you that is you don't want to end up like the entrepreneur that says, I can't believe how much I made in the last 10 years and how little I have to show for it today. And in my experience, that's about 4% that actually don't have that, that are actually not leaking money. And that's one out of 25. So in this area, what's the problem? One is missed opportunities. The other one is being comfortable. Believe it or not, being comfortable is a big problem for wealth discovered. So what do you need to do about wealth discovered? You need to sit down and think about where is your money going as far as taxes, one of the biggest costs for successful entrepreneurs. What about insurance premiums? What about legal fees? What about investment fees? And what about expenses, both business and personal? You need to really be aware of those things if you're going to find out where you're leaking money and then have a good strategy so that you can start building wealth. Let's talk about the third thing, which I'm going to watch. How fancy I am here. I'm going to add a page as we speak. Add page. Look at that. That's for people that say, I'm not good at technology. Mimi. So let's talk about the third thing that billionaires do really well. And I'm going to just draw this diagram here. So this is infrastructure. And infrastructure is. Is really the people and the process for how you make financial decisions. The billionaires do a great job with infrastructure. So as I said before, most entrepreneurs, and I'm talking successful entrepreneurs like this, they have kind of a red zone as far as infrastructure is concerned. But the ones who end up in the green, this is only about 2% in my experience. So what is good infrastructure? Well, one thing that is not good infrastructure down at the bottom here is entrepreneurs that are unconsciously unaware. This is the Ostrich. And this happens to most entrepreneurs at some point is you're so busy building your business and taking care of your family, you're unconsciously unaware of the people in the process. That is your infrastructure. And then another enemy is you have enough of an infrastructure, so you're executing, but you're really not at the level you need to do because the highest level of infrastructure gives you absolute confidence. So when it comes to infrastructure, here's the exercise I want you to do. I want you list your professionals. In tax, legal, insurance, and investment. And then I want you to give them a grade, not five Ds. I'd say one to 10. 10 is amazing. Great personality. Proactively bringing you ideas works well in a team. All those things would be a 10. A 1 would be, you should have fired that person a long time ago. And a five, you might be, I'm not quite sure who. How good this person is. But rate your professionals when it comes to your infrastructure.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Infrastructure is so important. I just wanted to take a minute and show you something that we created for clients. The entrepreneurs virtual family office. And this really we took from billionaire families and have honed it over the last 15 years. But I want you to think about your own situation and how you can better create an infrastructure of the people in the process by looking at this model. So we believe, Mimi and I believe that entrepreneurs are the reason for most great things in this country, the reason for jobs in the economy, the reason for innovations, the reason even for a lot of the giving that goes on. And every entrepreneur I've met in 26 years, they all have wishes and dreams, but very few of them do something that we have coined. Make rich real. And make rich real can mean different things to different entrepreneurs. So to you, it might mean having a certain amount of passive income every month. It might mean having a certain home in a certain area. It might mean having a private jet. It might mean time off, three months off a year to travel the world. It could be causes you care about or people you love that you want to take care of. Mimi was an immigrant, is an immigrant to America. Her family came over when she was five years old. And when she was young, it was very hard. They were on food stamps. It was a big challenge. And a few years ago, I asked Mimi, I said, is rich real to you? And she said, it is. I said, how do you know? She said, because when I go to the grocery store, I don't look at any prices. I can buy whatever I want. So what makes rich real for you could be different. But you really need to be in tune with what that is for you. And then to get there, you have to have these three outcomes. You have to have absolute confidence in your team of professionals. You have to maximize your wealth. I'll make that bigger inside and outside your business. And then you have to have a plan for sustained wealth. Because building businesses and making money is a different skill set than managing money. Then to get there, there's three main areas. First is protect moving from vulnerable to secure. Then manage moving from uncoordinated to worry free. And then finally grow moving from incremental to exponential growth. Within each of these, we created three catalysts. So these are the nine areas that billionaires really nail. And you need to also so under protect asset protection, this is having a plan so your assets can't be taken by a lawsuit. From the basic liability coverages, personal and business, all the way up to entity and trust Design wealth transfer. So making sure if you have kids, they're not ruined by money, that they only have opportunities. And then whether you have kids or not, make sure you have the right corporate documents in place so that if you get sick or injured, the right people step in so when you're better, you don't lose your business. And so that if your partner or your business associate gets sick or injured, you don't end up business partners with that person's spouse or brother or parent.

Okay.

And then finally the time energy shield. So this is having someone in your life that protects your time and your energy from things like pitches, projects and other professionals. Under manage. The first is the wealth wheel. So this is having your wheel of advisors, we just talked about this. All a players. They're collaborating and communicating on your behalf, but you're not in the middle managing those. You need someone in the middle who can speak the languages of tax, legal, insurance and investment that can manage that for you. Linchpin partner. This is who holds it all together. This is someone, typically in wealth management, who has three distinct qualities. First, experience in building these type of structures because you don't want to have someone learn on your dime and your time. Second, someone who specialize in work, specializes in working with entrepreneurs because you have a different set of problems and opportunities than other types of investors and other types of individuals. And then finally, someone who takes a fiduciary standard of care, always represents you from a legal standard, doesn't sell products, doesn't have investment minimums, doesn't take referral fees, kickbacks or revenue sharing. And then finally, business value. So your largest asset, if you haven't exited, is your business, making sure that you plan far in advance for that exit exit to get the best outcome possible for you. And when you think about business value and exit, you will exit your business, I guarantee it. Every entrepreneur exits either because you sell to a strategic or financial buyer, you get sick or injured, you die, you give it to your kids, you sell it to your employees, you get beat up by competition. Under grow, the first is tax planning. So having a well thought out, annually updated and implemented tax plan investments. So building wealth outside of your company and things like real estate, stocks and bonds and private equity. And then finally profit amplification, which is identifying the critical drivers that drive cash flow in your company. So you can easily monitor and improve those critical drivers. So those make up the virtual family office, but also are the areas that you need to build infrastructure for yourself. So I'm going to end with this and then we'll open up for questions. You are in your current financial position and no matter what I know, in a period of time you're going to have your future financial position. And let's say that's five years from now. So no matter what, from today to five years from now, you're going to be in a different financial situation. And what I've seen with entrepreneurs is if you don't pay attention to this stuff, what happens is you naturally drift. And when you drift, you can end up in instability or worse yet, if you even drift farther, which I hope this wouldn't happen to you. But if you drift even farther, you can end up in crisis. Nobody wants that. On the other hand, if you really focus on this, you can, oops, let me redo that. Your financial future, five years out and let's go to here. Okay, so what you can do though is you can move up the curve and this takes, you have to decide and you have to act. And if you do that, you can get to a place called security. But there's a higher level and that is getting to where I say you make rich real now in that journey. Guess when you're closest to those higher lines today Today you're closest, and the longer you wait, the farther that distance is to jump. Because the whole idea is you want to jump the lines and you want to ride the curve. Once you get on the right path, it will happen for you. If you wait in the future, it's going to be riskier, it's going to be costlier, and it's going to be more stressful. So now's the time to jump the lines. Now there's a way you can jump quicker, and that is if you get some sort of assessment. We call this a family office assessment. But if you get an assessment, you know where you are in all those nine areas, you can much more quickly jump the curves and get to here to make rich real. So an assessment really is having some experts dive deep in all areas of tax, legal, insurance and investment to find out where you are and then put together a game plan, as I said earlier, to give you a compelling focus so that you can get there. I don't want to make you dizzy, but I'm just going to go through the three main points again. The first is compelling focus. And remember, set aside thinking time, why you want to be seriously wealthy, what you're going to do with the money and the who if you need to hire someone. Second, make sure you look at wealth discovered. Where is your money leaking? And that's how you're going to max your wealth. So sit down and look at your taxes, your insurance premiums, your legal fees, your investment fees, your expenses, personal and business. Find out where the money's leaking and redirect that to something more positive. And then finally, your people in your process, the infrastructure and list out all your professionals in the areas of tax, legal, insurance and investment and grade them 1 to 10 to give you a starting point. So with that, I'm going to just say this, that you can start managing your wealth like a billionaire, even if you're not one yet. Let's open it up for questions.

So you and I were working on a project at the end of the year, and you mentioned that all the trust attorneys that you know of were swamped at the end of 2020. Why was that? I've been wanting to know the answer.

That's a great question. A couple things. One, there was an election in November and there was some fear from some clients that laws could change. And one thing is for 2021, the current exemption from estate taxes is 11.7 million per person. There were some wealthy folks that thought, hey, if that changes and the government knocks that from 11.7, down to 5 or down to 3. I want to make sure that I'm carving some of that money out for future generations while I can today. So that means that all the very good attorneys who do a lot of advanced estate planning are getting overwhelmed. And guess what? Those people didn't talk to these attorneys in July or September. They waited till the election was done and then they all descended on these attorneys. So they had all that work to do. In Arizona specifically, we had a tax increase of 3 1/2 percent. Now we're at an 8% marginal rate in Arizona, which is one of the highest in the country. So then we had clients who were decanting trusts into Nevada trusts and all these kinds of interest advanced things to avoid. Because remember, when it comes to tax planning, avoid legal evade, you end up in jail. So to me they sound the same, avoid and evade, but they're very distinct legal terms. So you can avoid taxes and you should, but evading taxes puts you in a orange outfit that may not be flattering to you. So that's why they were so busy is because the election and all the things that are changing and wealthy folks were afraid if we wait and get into 2021, they may change the laws and then we're out of luck.

So given all of that, is there anything that most of us in Genius network that, given what's been happening in 2020, that. Is there one key nugget that, you know, you think we all should look at?

It's a great question in this.

I know you had your great presentation with a lot of good tips, but is there a one time sensitive 2020 suggestion that you have?

Well, 2020 is behind us for the most part. There's not a lot.

I mean, given what happened.

Given what happened, given some of the political changes and things of that nature, I'll just say really three things and I'll just address the political, since it's such a hotbed, is when it comes to advanced financial planning and anything of that nature. I would say, first of all, no matter what happens in the government, remember the things people promise to get elected are lists this long. The things they get done after they're elected is a list this short. And you can go back every president since I've been alive and you can look, they promised a list this long, they got done a list this long. So that's the first thing I tell anyone, is don't assume, because I've seen a lot of publications recently like here's Joe Biden's Tax plan. And this is. And people are publishing it to get everyone's attention. Like, oh, my gosh, what if that happens? It's extremely unlikely that all these wishes that anyone says to get elected actually come true and they get put into place. And this is true when presidents have control of Congress. It's much harder than you think. The second thing I would say is you don't want to do planning based on guesses and predictions, because often these things don't come true. You want to do planning on. Based on what you know. And as these laws change, which is why you want to have a really good team that's proactively looking at these things. Because think about just the tax changes. We had the Tax Cuts and jobs act of 2017, then we have the Secure act, then we have the CARES act, then we have the Paycheck Protection Program Flexibility act, and we just had the Consolidated Appropriations act that I'm going to talk briefly about tomorrow. That's just since the end of 2017. So you have to have a team that's proactively reaching out and helping you plan for these types of things. So that's probably my best lesson. The other thing is, before you assume, and I'm not saying you're assuming this, but some people are saying the stock market's going to crash, real estate market is going to crash. Politics is only one thing of many. There is consumer confidence. There's consumer spending, there's interest rates and the Fed. There's monetary and fiscal policy. There's many, many things. Corporate earnings. There's many things that impact the economy, impact stocks, impact real estate. That doesn't have to do with policy out of Washington. And Washington, remember, is dysfunctional. Even when you have control over both houses in the White House, not as much gets done as anyone believes might get done.

Thank you.

That was awesome. Yeah, thanks, Denise.

Talking about the inheritance tax and trusts and so forth at the end of the year, are you referring. Because there's a concern of that Sunshine Law, where it's. The 11,000 is going to revert back to like. Is it 5 million or something?

Yeah. The sunset provision in the estate exemption. Yeah. Where it drops back to million. That's part of it. But the rush to get in at the end of 2020 was because of the uncertainty politically. Now, sometimes that can make sense, especially often it's people doing planning that they should have done and it was smart to do last year, the year before. But inevitably, guess what? Often people don't do the planning they should until there's some reason where they get scared or some reason where they get pushed. And I'm seeing some nodding like from Scott Danner and some of the other advisors could certainly support me in this. When you have the client who's going to Europe and they want to get all these things done the day before they go to Europe because they're afraid their plane could crash, which of course we know car accidents and other things happen every day. But I see Walter Clark's on here too. We have a lot of great advisors on the call. But yeah, really you want to do your planning far in advance, not just when you're afraid politically or there's a change or the laws change, something of that nature.

Well, thank God I rated you as a 10.

Thank you, Jim.

I want to say something because this is very important and I've been living with this for the last six months. Surprisingly enough, of the maybe dozen or so clients that we have that are in the 100 million to billion and a half range, very few of them actually gave gifts this year and did the wealth transfer technology, you can beat the government out of about 4 million bucks right now, a couple by doing some kind of wealth transfer intergenerationally. I want to caution everybody that low hanging fruit in the new Congress, if it's all Democrat, is going to be changing tax rates on ultra high net worth people, which you may very well be in that classification, which could mean some very easy stuff that even the moderate Democrats in Congress are likely to vote for. And it's going to be hard for Republicans to resist which would be increasing ordinary tax rates on people that make a lot of money, decreasing the lifetime gift exemption from approximately 11,6 to 5 million or 3 million per person in a married person or single person. And so that if you feel like you have enough money, and this is the crucial thing because a lot of people don't think they have enough of a client that has a billion dollars that doesn't in their heart of hearts believe it's enough and that's okay. But if you feel like you have enough and you want to pass some of the money intergenerationally, I believe that there is going to window. If there is legislation change, it's very uncommon for it to be retroactive to January 1st. But it is not uncommon for the date of effectiveness of a new law to be the date that the legislation is introduced into Congress or maybe the joint committee approves the bill that's going to eventually be passed, which means that there may be a 60, 75 day window to do these kinds of wealth transfers. And I implore all of you to call your advisors, your gym dues and have them help you understand maybe if you have enough or maybe what would happen and how you could put money into a pool intergenerationally to be managed for those future generations. You don't have to give your kids money now. You can do it in a way that they can't just get any amount of money. But I think that's very important. Final thing for me is that the apropos of what Jim talks about in grading your advisors, there's a very useful formula called the Trusted Advisor formula that was in a book written by David Meister and whatever his name, last name, Green, and it's in my book that I wrote where you can actually not only measure 1 to 10, but actually you can refine it. What do you think the quality of their advice is? How expert are they, how reliable are they? How intimate can you be with your advisor and what's your perception of their self orientation? That's an incredibly interesting tool and I can probably have that chapter in my book set up and I can make it available to everyone in Genius Network to take a look at because I think that's really powerful, Jim, really enhance what you've offered, which is probably some of the best planning structure that I've ever seen.

Thank you, Tony, I appreciate that. And Tony is an amazing cpa, a partner of a substantial firm in Los Angeles, and he does an incredible job. We've referred clients to him. Michael Fishman actually gave me that book the Trusted Advisor years ago. And that's one of the many reasons why Michael Fishman is such a good friend and such a good, I would say, mentor in the world of entrepreneurship, just because he thinks of those things and helps out in that way. And remember, there's not only things like transferring to future generations, there's things like asset protection. So there's things. And remember, you need a team for this and often entrepreneurs are are trying to scramble to do this stuff when a law changes. You need a team that's going to proactively look at this stuff for you ahead of time because it's hard to piecemeal that together. And ideally you want that kind of the wealth manager central to your wheel evaluating all those professionals, someone that's used to evaluating those professionals. But for example, on asset protection, one thing that we see a lot of clients do is something called a slat, a spousal lifetime access trust where you have one spouse give 11.7 million to the other spouse, then that spouse can give 11.7 to the first spouse. Now you have to be careful about reciprocal trusts and sometimes you put those in two different tax years. But it creates great asset protection without making that money unreachable if you need it in your lifetime. So there's all kinds of planning ideas from basic to simple and that's why you need a good team. And thank you for that, Tony. That was fantastic. Anyone else have questions or comments? Yeah, I do.

Yeah.

Follow this. Tim, Just following up with what Tony said and great presentation. Jim, I would imagine that you do some kind you do wealth discovery. You look at, you would rate. I mean you ask us to rate it. I can give numbers, but what do I know because I don't know much. So I would imagine there you do this and others in the network probably provide discovery and then have a. Have a team.

Yes. I mean what we do in our firm is we evaluate all the current professionals. We keep as many as possible. We replace the ones that are not a players. We hold them all accountable and then we manage the team so that our entrepreneurs don't have to go to the attorney and the accountant and the insurance agent. We're managing that process and then we're holding them all accountable because often we'll see maybe a fantastic attorney that just doesn't put the entrepreneur on the top of his or her desk and they're doing work that could be much better. And when we come in, we put them under a microscope in a really nice way to let them know, hey, you're going to be held accountable. And we expect responses and proactive advice. And then the other thing is the coordination because too often entrepreneurs have a silo where you have the attorney and the accountant and the insurance agent and everyone's kind of dealing in their own silo. But there's not a coordinated effort with the entrepreneur's values, goals and important relationships in the center of that that's driving that planning process.

This Randy, I'd love to reiterate what you said about choosing wisely professionals. So I'm part of my background is being a lawyer and in the whole process of choosing wisely here, you have to be careful about trusting old relationships. I guess I'll say like you talk about, we vet and we want to make sure that they're with the right people a players and too many people bring old relationships that were good for them while they were a certain size. But when you get, you know, past 30 or 40 or 50 or 100 million. The whole team is going to be a different team. So if you're not growing with that, if you didn't have anybody that's on your team that was talking to you, these things about these things last. Last summer was when we started working on all these issues. Right.

And so we were.

We were finished pretty much by October before all the rushes started. So if you don't have the people that are already setting you up for this and you have this kind of wealth, then you clearly have the wrong team.

Thank you, Randy. And Randy wrote a great book that I've read, Braveheart Exit. And Randy, you have a recent book out. What's the name of that book for anyone who wants to read it?

It's called Bulletproof youf Exit, which it deals with some of the things that you talked about on making the family and the company sort of bulletproof so that they recognize and realize, no matter what happens, the value of that company either at sale or even at death.

Thank you, Randy. Very good stuff. Like I said, that was a great presentation. Thank you, Rick. It really was good.

Thank you.

Team thing is that for me, having done it 33 years, that's more important than anything.

You get the right team and you've got a chance.

I guess. The who. Ian. It's no different than when you're building your business as an entrepreneur. So you start out and kind of everything's up to you. And then all of us have these different transitions in our life as an entrepreneur. If we want to grow, if we want to do more, if we want to reach more people. And as you grow, you have a different team. And, and the team that served you when you were three employees is different than the team that serves you at 10 or 20 employees and different revenue levels and everything else. And probably the hardest thing for entrepreneurs is to know when you need to change your role and step out of doing. From an operator to an owner, et cetera. And the same thing with the wealth planning. Sometimes entrepreneurs feel like they have to be involved in everything and really it's far beyond their knowledge and their understanding.

And.

And the other thing that happens is the time, really your time becomes more and more valuable because a startup entrepreneur, their time might be worth $50 an hour. And then you get to a point where your time might be $10,000 an hour. And of course, the more you can delegate that to a great team, the better.

Great presentation.

May I ask a question? I think something that's like really underrated is the thinking time that you mentioned that's been a game changer for me. The art is I'm figuring out how to pose my thinking time, so I stay away from immediately going into solution mode. So could you talk a little bit about that of kind of some broad strokes to start that inner dialogue with yourself so you have that, like, meaningful individual conversation?

Yeah, I love it. Matthew, that's tremendous. Tee up. And I think a really important thing for all of us is you really need to, in your thinking time, start thinking first. I would first say think about your history with money, your experience with money. And I'd go back as far as your memory can go back. Ask yourself as a kid, what were the things that were talked about in your house or not talked about in your house about money? What were some of your early experiences when you interacted with money? Spending and saving and all those things and giving? Because getting really clear on your history and your family, I'd even look back, I know a couple of generations for my family, very poor people. On my dad's side, all steel mill workers. On my mom's side, all farmers. And really an interesting kind of family dynamic. And then both my parents are depression babies. So from that understanding that money is hard to earn, and when you earn it, you got to save it and you got to protect it. So I learned that. But then Mimi, who's her family, immigrated to America. Her dad always said, it's easy to make money. My dad said, it's hard to make money. Her dad said, it's easy to make money. This is America, easy to make money. But her dad didn't save it because he said you can always make it. So he spent all the money that he made, and he made a lot of money as a young man in America when he brought the family over and spent it and gambled it and did all those kinds of things. I. I don't think my dad gambled a dollar in his entire life. And I said earlier, you know, my dad's 95, so my parents were of that nature. So Mimi and I coming together, one thing we had to understand is our histories with money. And as we talked about that and learned more about each other, it actually became a great balance to help up level our game in the wealth management space personally. So I was the one that every year, and she knows this, in December we sit down and here's the question I love to ask her. How much more are we going to save and invest this year, this coming year over last year? How much more? That's the way I asked the Question. And then the negotiation begins. But we always invest more each year because that makes me happy. I love saving and investing. It makes me feel good. It gives me that security that my parents were always chasing. On the other hand, Mimi's like, what are we going to do? That's fun. What are we going to do? That's an experience. And I always say, I'd be back. I'd be in the little apartment we used to rent in Channel Arizona 30 years ago if it was up to me, and I wouldn't be in a beautiful house in North Scottsdale. So she is great. Credit to her for expanding our lifestyle and our life experiences and the memories. But together we balance each other out. So you have to, especially with a spouse, know each other's history. But on a personal level, which was your question, one on one, go through your history and your memories about money to understand where all these concepts come from. Because believe me, a lot is between our ears. It's not just, you know, money is emotional. It's emotional for everybody. So coming up with your history and then kind of where you are now, it's almost like the, where are you now? Where do you want to go? And then, as I said, why do you want to be seriously wealthy? What will money do for you? Or who do you want to help because of money? And becoming very clear on that then pulls you forward. Because, look, we all have ups and downs. And if you have something that pulls you forward when it comes to wealth building, much easier than always having to try to push that rock uphill. What's the story about the guy pushing the rock uphill and then always rolls down to the bottom? Sometimes people feel that with their wealth building. And by the way, don't think it's not influencers, don't think it's entrepreneurs that are running huge companies. Because I see these people, they get introduced to me, and we sit down and guess what I find out they're not doing as well as you think they're doing. They'll say, Oh, I did 2 billion in launches and all this stuff. They sit down with me and the first thing they say is, jim, I don't have as much money as you think I have. So why do you think I think you have money? Because everyone thinks I have money.

Now.

There's some entrepreneurs even in this group who are quiet, just. They kind of say, gee, I really don't have that much going on. I just got this little company and we sit down, I go, wow, this person has accumulated a lot. So don't think that you're alone no matter where you are on your extreme, but know why money is important, what it's going to do for you. And that way you can, as I said, make rich real. And I have to tell you, we've gotten really clear on this personally. And in the last five years, even in the last three years, when I look at how much our net worth has jumped, I mean, not just looking into how real estate and stocks have gone up in the last couple years, but just in general, how our wealth has expanded because we're so clear. And that vision kind of pulls us forward. So I'm not a woo woo person. I'm a numbers person. But having that vision in your mind and that feeling about why you're doing this and where you want to get to, that's really a key. And you can do that through thinking time through blocking some time off and taking notes and going back and revisiting and then talking to people that you love and care about, even siblings you grew up with. You might say, what do you remember about money in the house? And I could tell lots of stories in my house, but I'll stop there. Okay.

I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here.

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