Episode #786 - The Financial Key To Living Your Dreams with Bill Orender

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell. Yeah, and it's like I used to tell people, you're in a free country. You can buy the car you want, live the life you want, take the vacations you want, do whatever you want as long as you can afford it.

That's right.

If you don't have the income, it doesn't matter that you've got all this freedom because you don't have the financial resources to exercise the freedom. You know, you look at the people who have income, they're able to exercise the freedoms that everybody has, but they just happen to have the financial resources to go and do it. And there's a certain arrogance. You don't think of it this way. You kind of think of yourself as, I'm just pure. I'm not money motivated. I'm interested in mankind. And then they'll come in. One thing is like, you're hoarding. In fact, a good friend of ours that, you know, very, very well said, you know, that's hoarding. They try and, you know, accumulate a lot of hoarding, and you can make you feel defensible. I got all this money, I'm hoarding it. That's not the point. The thing is, not to put a priority on accumulating money is an arrogance. It's an arrogance that life will not, life cannot do to you because you're so good, what it does to everybody else, you know, and like it says in the Bible, you know, chance, circumstance helps help us at all. You know, the rain falls on the good and the bad. You know, earthquakes happen with the good and the bad people in the town, you know, and so the deal is that when you don't take advantage of the opportunity to accumulate some protection for yourself as fast as possible, you're living with an arrogance toward the future. And the thing is, like you pointed out, we don't know the future. Bill, I went through my entire life in financial services, recruiting, training, you know, in the insurance and the investment world. And one thing about that comes up, like disability insurance. And I used to say to people, look, disability insurance, one of the reasons, you know, get it if you want, but one of the reasons not to get it is because insurance companies are not going to pay you disability until after six months. And you know why? Because they know that after six months, you'll either be dead or you'll be back in business again and they won't have to pay for it. So don't buy disability insurance, you know, and so what they. And now I've said that my entire life. I've told people that, you know, in 90 days you'll be dead or over it. And so that's why they don't pay for six months now. On the other hand, Bill, I'm coming out of 16 stinking years of this cycling accident in the middle of Palm beach in front of the police station where they put in a new curb and I hit it at night because they hadn't put the lights in yet where you'd see it when it got dusk. And I hit that thing and tumbled and gained 100 pounds, fought. I just been going on my full time job, has been going to therapy for 16 years, try and find people who had answers. And even now I'm out here in Aspen. I've been out here, if I'm not even recovered to the point where I've been on the hill yet. I've been out here for like five days. I had two beautiful days to get out there and the go power just not there. I'm just not quite, you know, the engine is not quite recovered yet. And so, you know, I'm on the right track. I got positive signs that it's happening. But that costs a fortune for all this therapy and, but by the, you know, and I look back and you know, to have a business to where I could work through the phone, through, you know, through live communications, conference calls, things like that is a blessing. And that's why it's another thing is try and organize, you know, work to organize your business to where other people can run it in your absence and you can run it through them as fast as possible. That's another reason for the, you know, to build up the net worth protection but also to get some systems in place in your business where it can be run by other people on a minute to minute, day to day basis without you actually there. Because we don't know that we're actually going to be there. But as long as we can have an influence, we can still maintain our position at all. But it is an arrogant attitude that we don't know, you know, we think we're being, you know, holier than thou. Yeah. Pious by, you know, that won't happen to us. I'll give it a, you know, you know, but even the amount of money you give away, I mean if you're giving it all away. That's great. And they say you can't outgive God. And I don't think you can. However, I think you're supposed to be a good. That doesn't mean you're supposed to live penniless, paycheck to paycheck or commission to commission, because that put. You're not supposed to live vulnerable. The idea is, in the world, when you are making big income, running a big business, you have a lot of influence. You have a lot of people counting on you. And when you make yourself vulnerable, either financially vulnerable, either business vulnerable, any vulnerability, that's on you as the leader because you should work hard to remove those vulnerabilities. So you can be. You have a cocoon, a cushion, a good cocoon bill like you used in your recent book, a good cushion around. You know, you could be like Norm Schwarzkopf in the war on Iraq. He was in the war, but he was in a bunker a couple hundred miles away. He had very little, little chance of a terrorist group sneaking in and killing Norman, you know, and so, you know, you know, that's where you need to build. You need to build these protections in place. But this is one that is so easily missed, isn't it?

You know, you're right, Larry. And a lot of it is we're brainwashed into it. And ever since we're youth. Don't make too much money. Go to hell. And you know how many men I know they're relying on their spouse's income. Between her and Kem and my income and my son's paper out, we'll be okay. You know how many people, children are forced to go borrow money to go to college because the parents don't want to accumulate money for fear of it's going to be bad. There's $1.7 trillion in student loans out there that these people are not going to pay back. And the government's using it as a wedge to get votes. So we'll pay it back for you. And so somebody's got to pay those back. And that's why we want to create in the people that listen to our call once a month an encouraging word that it's okay to want to make money. It's okay. I look at the mind, Larry, is the garden. What are you planning in your mind? Most people are planning fear. And number one stressor that causes divorce in America is financial. That's math. That's the truth. The third largest killer of people in America today is stress from a job where people hate their jobs. 70% of all Americans go through something called the Sunday night scaries. And they go into work, they hate it, they're crying as they're going in, but they can't. They need that paycheck. I owe, I owe, so off the work I go. And they've never had written a book on money and finance. They've never been encouraged. That's why I read. Every third book I read is a money encouragement book. One of my favorite ones is a book called the Wealth Choice. The Wealth Choice by Dennis Kimbrough. It's a masterpiece. I just finished rereading again for like the eighth time. Think and Grow Rich. There's another one I just finished reading called Born Rich. There's one called I'm a Badass at Making Money. Another one I just finished reading is how to Become a Millionaire God's Way. These are all books encouraging people that it's okay, but you've got to plant the thought of having and accumulating money and having a net worth in your garden for it to grow. And you got to tend that garden and you got to weed that garden. And. And that's why most people today are living financially fruitless lives again. When a tide goes out, we're going to find out who's been swimming naked. Most of our country today is being run on debt from our government to families. All these nice cars, nice houses, nice. It's all debt. And so someone like you and I, Larry, we have zero debt, zero debt. We're not living our lives based on the come that, you know, based on our ability to make money. And so, Larry, it's a very encouraging group of people that we associate with. And you're absolutely right. I'm scared to death for people that don't have a money consciousness because they automatically have a poverty consciousness. And that's not healthy.

Well, we learn things by stories and examples. And he wasn't able to get onto this call, but you chose your partner for this podcast because he had a similar tough background. Omar's background is he grew up in Miami and his father was a cop and they lived in the cop neighborhood and they were struggling to make ends meet and just like, you know, hand to mouth type existence. And so that creates all kind of tension and created the kind of family tension and job tension and all that. And so he grew up not getting any kind of financial input. But and then when he got to college, he tells a story. When he got to college, you get in there and they find out that everybody wants to give you a Credit card. So he went. He got a whole pocket full of credit cards and immediately spent all the money. You know, it's just like, you know, free money. You know, what's wrong with this? And got himself immediately down the hole financially. But, you know, he came out of it. And you can come. The story is you can come out of whatever hole you in because you really don't have a choice to come out of it. But when you come out of it, the thing is, I'm going to come out of it, but I'm going to be different in the sense that step by step, I'm going to put aside, you know, start, you know, make that a number one priority. In fact, we had Red Wieson on this podcast here a little while ago, and she talked about that was so ingrained with her and Bobby back when he was making $5,000 as a teacher at a private high school there in Atlanta, Georgia, before he started his financial business, that even when they were making $5,000 a year, they saved money. I said, how'd you do it? She said, we just figured it out. And we made it a game of how little money we could spend. I had a garden in the backyard. We had a decision. If there was a choice of two things to buy, we always went for the cheaper one and had the story of her. Like her oldest daughter went out to get her some new shoes and she said, which fair do you want? And the daughter said, I'm going to get these. She said, why'd you like those better? She said, they're cheaper. And they had that ingrained into their kid. And I remember even J. Paul Getty back, he was known as a skin plant. But the thing is that he said the reason he was such a tight one, he said the. The frugal person has a much bigger margin for failure and for things to go wrong than the spendthrift. And so that's why he was always pushing on the side of frugality. So you have greater margins for success. And so I'm sure you've got a lot of those kind of examples and stories, but you can't have too many of them, can you? Because the more you can reinforce this in your mind, the better.

Yeah, Larry, again, none of us come from any kind of a money background, and we are all products of our environment. And again, you're right, we call them cheap. You know, Bill, you're just cheap. Well, again, I'd rather Carol and I, we'd go out to dinner and once you understand the rule of 72 and the compounding money. And after dinner comes, I pay the bill and I start looking like this. And I'm looking up to this guy. She says, stop it. I can't stand it anymore. I know what you're doing. What I was doing is, well, I just spent $50 on this meal. If I put that in a mutual fund and every 10, six years that thing would double. So that's 100, that's 200. This meal just cost me $3,000. On 65. Say, well, Bill, that's the wrong kind of. Well, we'll see whether or not your way of thinking is correct or our way of thinking is correct. But don't ask for, ask me to pay more taxes to take care of your butt because you are not willing to take a personal financial responsibility for your life. You're dependent on a company, you're dependent on a government. You're dependent on your wife's income. You're dependent on everything going smooth and nothing bad ever happening to you. You're dependent on you never having heart problems or cancer problems. You, you're dependent on your children getting student loans. You see that they've always got a cushion there where they don't have to be responsible. Well, one day reality is going to hit you right between the eye and then you're going to start realizing maybe I should. I've never met anyone that said, you know what, Larry? I'm sure glad I didn't save a lot of money in the early days. I'm glad I spent it all and gotten to death. I'm happy. No, we've had enough 65 year old people. You and I both know, Larry, our business. They wish they put away more money, they wish they accumulated more money. They wish they put in better places, they wish they hadn't spent money on ridiculous things. And it's got to come home to roost. And we're just giving you a forewarning. You know, you and I are Christians and we talk a lot about heaven, but we don't talk about eternal damnation. And you know, I've got a fear of eternal damnation more than I do a desire for heaven. And so that keeps me on a straight and narrow when maybe I don't want to.

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