Wealth Podcast Post

Love and Money

George Grombacher February 13, 2023


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Love and Money

Happy Valentine’s Day! George talks about what love truly is, how money ties into it, what too many of us are concerned with, and how to show up for yourself and others! 

 

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George Grombacher

Episode Transcript

Happy Valentine’s Day. So a wonderful time of year, or awfully horribly depressing time of year. For many of us, either, maybe you love the holiday, and you are filled with love, and you filled with the promise of love, because you’re in a new relationship, or you’re full of hope for the future and potential new relationship. Maybe you don’t care much about the holiday, maybe think it’s kind of a bullshit consumeristic holiday. Now invented to extract money from you, who knows, wherever you are at with it, here we are. I, me I want to explore the idea of what real love is, I’m going to do it through the lens of money and finance, because that is a lot of the work that I do is and a lot of the thoughts that I think about is through that is through that prism or through that lens. What is real love, and what is real love when it comes to money. It’s estimated that we Americans are going to spend about $26 billion, this Valentine’s day could be more could be less. And that’s going to be spent on stuff stuff like chocolate, lingerie, flowers going out to dinner, Valentine’s for your kids at school, which I know that that’s certainly something that my family is engaging in, which is a sweet and nice thing, obviously. So $26 billion, comes out to about $200 a piece for most Americans. Is that money that is well spent, and the Grinch Who Stole Christmas in me, the grumpy guy who isn’t that excited about Valentine’s Day in me says that. If you look at the numbers, and the statistics, if the majority of Americans are unable to come up with $500 in cash in case of an emergency, we should be really should we really be spending 200 bucks on Valentine’s Day. Why weren’t why? Probably not. But we are. That’s just kind of what it is. And then you look at other drivers of long term wealth, or the opposite. Drivers of destruction of long term wealth are things that prohibit us prohibit us from pursuing long term wealth. You look at credit cards, credit card debt, and during the pandemic, because of whatever the term is the government sending us money, credit card debt went down, personal savings went up. Well, that’s no longer going on. So guess what? personal savings going down credit card debt going up. So I’ve got this sort of an unfortunate and destructive inverse relationship. And I’m well documented on my feelings about debt, particularly credit card debt, I think is bad. And I think that you should think it’s bad too. But that’s just sort of the state of play. When it comes to America and Valentine’s Day, we’re spending a lot of money on, on stuff. And again, I hope it’s a wonderful day for you. And I hope that you are getting everything that you want out of your relationships and that they’re happy and that they’re filled with love. And all the experiences do you have are absolutely wonderful. I started my career selling life insurance 2001. And I had the benefit of being able to learn from and work with people who had done it for a really, really long time, kind of the old timers who were some of my mentors, and they had all these wonderful saints. And one of them was that life insurance, a life insurance policy is the greatest love letter ever. And I remember hearing that I’m like, oh, that’s kind of cheesy. Let me think about it. And like oh, yeah, you know what that really is the greatest love letter ever read that if something happens to me, I want you to be taken care of. And I’m not just writing out I’m actually putting money there. And I’m going through the exercise of going to a life insurance company and applying for the coverage putting the coverage in force paying the premium. Even though there’s a very low chance the likelihood of me dying before I’m supposed to is very low. But recognizing the consequences should I die or I’m supposed to be catastrophic and will make the life of my loved ones the people that I left behind, very, very difficult. And because I love you, I am doing this. So you And I think that a close second is making myself financially secure. And working to position myself and my family so that we are financially secure, doing the things that it takes and making the sacrifices that it takes to get there. I think that is a pure and true and honest expression of of love towards me myself as an individual and my closest loved ones, and, and my community as well. So, I’d like to think about it like that. Valentine’s Day is great. It’s all awesome. Chocolates. Great. Everybody likes chocolate. Probably not true. Lots people like chocolate going out for dinner. But have I really, am I really expressing my love to my loved ones Am I really showing my love to my loved ones through my behaviors of the things that I’m doing. So when I’ll keep exploring that and kind of going deeper on that my grandfather was a member of our greatest generation. And he was born on a farm in South Dakota. And he was born on a farm in South Dakota during the dustbowl has a really terrible time, if you’re not familiar with the Dust Bowl is during the Great Depression. And he just couldn’t get him to grow so tough to be a farmer and South Dakota during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression and the resilience of these human beings to be able to make that happen to be able to eke out a living and survive. And then when he turned 18 years old, Oh, guess what he got drafted, like literally on his 18 years old, he got drafted to go fly for our country, and the humanity and World War Two. So you went did that. And you came back and used use the GI Bill to start a business. And then he got recalled to fight once again, the United States Army during the Korean conflict, the Korean War went and fought again. And he came back. And then he went to work with with with a life insurance company and ended up having a great 30 year career with with with a really great life insurance company. And so he was very, he was very, he was one of those old timers who had a great same and a great, great thoughts around around financial stuff, particularly obviously life insurance. But he would say can remember vividly saying I can tell if you’re gonna be financially successful or not. You’re gonna be good with money or not? And the answer the question is, can you save money? Yes or No? If you could save money, probably gonna be financially successful. If you can’t, you’re just not. So I think that that is a great question that we need to be asking ourselves, I encourage you to be asking yourself that. And as you take that common sense wisdom, which is as true today as it’s ever been. And it’s a truism, that’s just, you know, it’s stretched across time generations and will be true in the future as well. There’s this great book called The Millionaire Next Door. And I think that there are a lot of people who are wasting their time and their energy consuming material and content on, you know, what does it take to be a millionaire invest like, or I’m sorry, what does it take to be a billionaire invest like a billionaire activities of billionaires. And that’s all fine and well, but I think we’d all be better served to take our cues from millionaires and to adopt the activities and mindset and activities and, and habits of people who are millionaires, because you know what, I You’re certainly capable becoming a billionaire. But in order to become a billionaire, you have to become a millionaire. It’s probably not necessarily true. Probably the most common path though, is for you to focus on. Number one, getting out debt. Number two, you know, just starting beneficial habits, starting to save money, becoming a millionaire becoming a multimillionaire, and then you’re really positioned to become a billionaire. Long story short, the really wonderful book, The Millionaire Next Door, they really broke down and tried to figure out what those drivers are, what are those activities, and one of the key takeaways to people who actually were able to become millionaires, that they were good savers, just like my grandpa was talking about, so that they had developed the habit and the mechanism, whatever you want to call it. They saved at least 15% of all the money they earned. So there you go. The opposite people that are unable to save money are unable to reach millionaire status, really financial freedom. They were all highly, a lot of them were highly educated people, but they just burned all their money, they spend it all on lifestyle. So I think that is obviously the opposite, you can either save money or you’re unable to save money, and that’s going to longterm determine whether or not you are going to be financially successful or not. So, love is a lot of things love is it’s giving people and speaking in our love languages, it’s understanding how I like to receive love how I’d like to be given love, if it’s through acts of kindness or acts of service are kind words, if you’ve not read the love language book, it’s a really great book, it’s valuable and important to have a better understanding of how you yourself like to receive affection and love, and how the people that you love, also enjoy receiving that. So you know, kind of optimize and get better at that. So love is a lot of things. But love is honesty. Love is honesty, the more honest we can be with one another. That’s our romantic partners, our children, our parents, our friends, our business partners, people that we have relationships with. Love is honesty, love is accountability. Love is, is holding people to the standard that they want to be held to. And I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this. But finally, love is shared values. That’s really where I wanted to get with this. Love is knowing what your values are. And I think that it’s certainly possible to be in love with and love people that have different values than you are. But over the long term to in an ideal world, you will share the values with those people that that you love, you will have shared values, common objectives and goals with the people that that you love. So obviously, way deeper than giving somebody some chocolates or taking them up for dinner or giving them a card. It’s being honest with them. It’s holding yourself accountable. And it is sharing values. And now I want to get to the fundamental sort of the heart of what I wanted to talk about today. And it’s this would you rather appear to be wealthy? Or would you rather be wealthy? If we talk a lot about values? I know I think we talk a lot about values. But when it comes to money, this is one of the big ones right there. What do you value more, being wealthy, or looking wealthy? I want you to spend time thinking about that, let that sink in. Where are you at with that? I have to imagine the majority of us for really being honest, would rather be wealthy than appear to be wealthy. It’s very, very human. For us to want to play pretend to want to put our best foot forward to want to appear to be up here to have our acts together appear to be successful appear to just be successful, appear to you know, have money. But we’re not serving anybody lying to ourselves playing dress up playing pretend that doesn’t get us anywhere. In fact, what it does is it prevents us from actually pursuing and actually doing the things that we need to do to be wealthy. Money has time value, there’s opportunity cost to money. So when I’m spending way too much money on my carbs, spending way too much money on my house, and I’m doing these things, because I want to appear to be wealthy. Well, by the very nature of that I’m cutting off my nose to spite my face. Because for every dollar that I spend in one place, I am saying no, and I’m not spending it on a place where I should be spending that. If I’m not saving 15% of the money that I’m bringing in, which very few of us are. Well that means that and this is more a conversation on that’s conversation for everybody. It’s a conversation that everybody needs to be paying attention to. And we need to be honest with ourselves. And I’m not perfect at this at all. I spent the majority of my 20s just trying to appear to be wealthy. And I imagine that there are plenty of places where I am showing up and pretending to be something that pretending to put a better try to position myself in a better way than I really am and other aspects of my life. So this is not me not to Trying to figure WAV, not trying to whatever make you understand what I’m trying to say. Just really, the more we can take that hard look in the mirror and saying, what what am I doing here? What is really important to me? Is it more important for me to look wealthy? Or is it more important to me to actually doing to be doing the things that will actually get me wealthy one day. So not easy. Sounds easy, does hard. Not a game of perfect. It’s all these things. I mean, nobody’s immune to it. We’re all many of us are on social media. And we want to be, be presenting ourselves in that happy light, in that in that good light. So that so that we look good. And appreciate that, and we position ourselves to world is really, really important thing. But going back to that love is honest thing. I don’t want to be BSC, myself, I certainly don’t want to be asked my loved ones. And when I am making choices that are going to more towards I want to look wealthy versus be wealthy. Why not serving anybody. So you are, we are all of us are worthy. We’re worthy of having the lives that we want. But in service of that, or to to get to the lives that we want. We need to do uncomfortable things, we need to do hard things, we need to make sacrifices, personal finance requires sacrifice. It requires tough decisions. And we can’t do everything that we want to do right now. So we need to make good choices about things. There’s no right or wrong. It’s just trade offs. So making sure that that you are living as close to your values as you possibly can. And if your value is actually want to be wealthy, well, then it’s not then you need to be doing some of those tough things. So you are certainly capable of these things like that. If you’re able to have a smartphone and download a podcast app and then listen to a podcast, you’re capable of most anything. You’re certainly capable of doing hard things. I just know that you are and I think that you’re obligated to do it. I think that once we know once we’re aware, okay, I’ve got choices to make. I could choose to do this or I could choose to do that. I think it’s an obligation to yourself. I think it’s an obligation to your loved ones to your family, to be making as good decisions as we possibly can. So, Happy Valentine’s Day friendly reminder to do your part by doing your best

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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