How to Become an Automatic Millionaire | Breaking Down 5 Words of Wisdom of David Bach

Audio Transcription

All right, thrive nation. Welcome back to another exciting edition of the thrive time show on both your radio and podcast download. I am the former United States Small Business Administration entrepreneur of the year for the great state of Oklahoma. I have five incredible kids. I took Algebra three times in my act three times. I did not graduate from college because the head of Oral Roberts University did not find the parody rap song that I put together to be as funny as I did that that was asked to leave the school before I wanted to leave, but I am glad that I exited and years later I was asked to come back in to help them lead their alumni marketing department and the great irony of life. So my career path doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Paul hoods does make a lot of sense. He is a CPA. Paul, can you explain to the listeners a little bit about your educational background?

You said it makes a lot of sense that I’m clever guy. Go ahead, Paul. I appreciate that. Uh, yeah. I graduated. I actually graduated from Bartlesville Highschool back in 80. Prestigious. Just had the whole four point. Oh, you did? Yeah, I went to, I thought I could play football and went to. I got a little scholarship to play football at northeastern state over in Tahlequah. Yeah. And then decided I was tired of getting beat up and went transferred Oklahoma state and graduated from Oklahoma state in 1989. Three nine. Couldn’t get that for. Oh, but you know, all that really doesn’t matter. You know, that’s the first time I’ve said my gpa and you know, until you get good at it.

I’m bringing this up because a lot of people are saying I cannot become financially successful because I did not graduate with a degree with a three point nine, so approved from a school. So I don’t make sure we’re getting this right. Rightly divided as we’re, as we’re breaking down the five words of wisdom, what we’re teaching today, how to become an automatic millionaire. Okay. How to become an automatic millionaire were teaching that today, but I want to make sure you get this. I did not graduate with a degree. I took my act three times. I took Algebra three times. Paul does have a degree. He does. He does. He’s done very well academically, but he’s also done well in the world of business. Okay, so it’s not mutually exclusive that you have to be great academically to become successful. So we’re going to do is we’re going to break down five notable quotables from David Bach, and you might be saying, who’s David?

It’s David Dot a guy. No, he actually is a nine time New York best selling author of a book called the automatic millionaire. Smart women finish rich. He’s been featured on Oprah and the today show and pretty much every show out there. He’s very, very successful person. So chip, I’m going to have you read this first notable quotable from Mr David Bach. Financial Education needs to become a part of our national curriculum and scoring systems so that it’s not just the rich kids that learn about money. It’s all of us, man. Jason, you manage three of the elephant in the room, men’s grooming lounges. You are the super manager. I want to get your take on this. When you were going to high school or college, did they teach a whole lot of practical financial planning classes?

So in high school, my senior year I took a math and finance class. Got In. I thought that that would be a really good way to learn how to manage a checkbook, basic accounting, practical stuff. The first thing we did the first day was our teachers set us up on a free yahoo stock account. We could learn how to like track stocks and then the very next day for the entire semester we watched the same Dave Ramsey video over and over. Are you being serious? Yeah. Clay, you know, did you go to high school? Edison? Okay. Back to you. You what? We. We live in the greatest country on the planet and it’s based on free enterprise that we do not our education system in and I’m not slamming. It was great. Whatever. I’m slamming it. Yeah, you can slam it. Also have a. You can’t stop the, but we teach people how to be a good technician, how to be a good accountant, how to be a good plumber, uh, how to be good, you know, whatever Dj, we don’t teach people the principles of creating wealth to live in low lawyer means to leverage time, leveraged people how to scale those kinds of things we don’t teach.

And that’s what we teach it.

I have a huge, huge pile on, on this real quick because I want someone to get this running it. The reason why your college or high school professor cannot teach you financial planning, preach it is because they are not financially planning themselves and they don’t know how. They don’t. They don’t know how. And if they did, if they were good at financial planning, they would not be at your high school working for $36,000 a year of teaching a class on financial planning. And I’m just thrilled. I’m just, I’m just, I’m, I gotta, I gotta get this out there. We’ll call you MC slammer. Well, no, this is, this is big though. I, I mean this, uh, um, recently, this was probably six months ago, I had one of my high school teachers reach out to be a great guy, a great guy. I am 37, I believe.

He’s like 55. He reached out to me. He said, Hey, I’ve never started a business before, but I am on the verge of one. This is the guy who taught me my small business and personal finance class. He said, I’ve never started a business before and I wanted to see if you could coach me. I hopped on the phone. I talked to the guy. I walked him through some things he doesn’t need ongoing coaching. He just needed to understand that his particular business idea was terrible. That happens. And so I steered him in the right direction. It might actually come to a workshop, so it’ll be kind of fun if we connect again, but he’s a very, very good guy. He impacted my life quite a bit and a lot of positive ways, but he personally doesn’t know anything about personal finance. No. Or about business, but he taught it because in school you’re allowed to teach courses that you’re not qualified to teach because someone has to teach it. That’s right. And if they ran around saying, hey, does anybody here actually have a lot of money saved? Uh, they would not probably probably hear something like this.

And so they need someone to teach the class. They have to have somebody teach the class so there’s going to be someone teaching, but it doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking

or you do what they did when I was in high school, which is, you know, decade or so before Jason here, which is, they just don’t teach anything at all. I remember my junior year probably coming home and had a bank account and had some things going. I was working with my parents and asking my mom how to fill out a checkbook. And she’s like, they don’t teach you this in school. And I was like, no, not even close.

I had a, a. As we get it, we’re going to get back here into how to become an automatic millionaire. But I’m just setting the background kind of setting the foundation for what the average person out there can relate. Why it’s not automatic already. Right. I remember my, my senior year, I’m in Minnesota. If you have enough classes, enough credits, you can go to college early so you can opt out of highschool. Still technically be a high school student, but you can spend your entire senior year going to college. And so I enrolled in St, cloud state university and I never really went to high school classes anymore. But I had one class I had to go to any like one more credit or something. And I got put in this woodshop class and I am not, I’m not kidding the book. The teacher would sit down in a room, it looked like a garage and his eyes were Minnesota.

So all. Alright everybody. Today we are going to be building awesome things. Would boxes. It’s like a box that could shut the two wood for clay and other people who I know do not have mechanical skills. Uh, just try to get something done. Don’t lose a finger. Now I know some of you guys are smoking weed out there. I know a lot of you guys are smoking. Ice can smell it right now. And I gotta I gotta put it out there. I’m asking. No, I’m serious. I just, I’m not really, I’m going to call you out. Um, I just um, uh, just, you know, anyway, so then he had a water bottle that he would sip on during the day and we knew it was filled with

vodka and he would hold up their glider doesn’t make your face look like that. We need to

serious and he is just super. And he used to sit there and just sip on vodka and people in the back would just be smoking pot. And this was my high school class.

Don’t ruin his gig. He had a great. Hey Clay, you know, I’m reading a book right now by a guy named Jim stovall. You know Jim and he’s actually. Jim was actually a client of ours and he is a man. I am so excited to work with him, but he’s a book called the millionaire map, millionaire math. Good Book. And one of the things he says, and there’s you go check the fruit on the tree, you’ve got to say, if somebody, if somebody just wanting to give you financial advice than you need to say, well, show me your financial picture of somebody just trying to give you marital advice will. How long have you been married? Not that you’ve been married six or seven times. That’s not right.

Really good. Every time it hits. I’ve been bankrupt seven times. I’m a financial expert practice.

But here’s the principle is you check the fruit on the tree. And uh, yeah, it’s, it’s, I have an, I am not going to name names, but yeah, there’s, there’s technical schools that have people that I know that are teaching entrepreneurship that have never owned a business. I, it, I don’t understand.

It’s unbelievable. So again, notable quotable number one, financial education needs to become part of our national curriculum and scoring system so that it’s not just the rich kids that learn about money. It’s all of us. I agree. However, Mr David Bach, you and I know it’s not going to happen because the educational system is not going to change because of the bureaucracy, but notable quotable. Number two, David Bach rights. If you’re in a hole, stop digging a stop digging. If you’re in a hole, stop digging. Paul, how do you see people financially in the hole? Like what? What kind of scenarios do you see very commonly when you sit down with the average customer for the first time before you begin, before you’ve been able to help them correct where they’re at, where they’re going financially.

Well, yeah, we just tell them to down to shovel. I mean, gosh, that you’re. You’re going, you’re going a direction in life and in that direction is based on the decisions you make, whether that’s in your marriage and if that’s if your body, if that’s with your financial picture, and so you’re either going the wrong way or the right way. Very few people are just standing still and so you’ve got to decide. You’ve got to paint a picture of where you’re at today and and figure out which way you are. You are. You digging down, are you climbing up and if you’re digging down, we we tell them these are the directions of things that you’re doing that are there that are affecting you negatively.

If if you find yourself in a hole out there falling, you’re making tons of payments on different things. Is it smart to try and consolidate all that debt down as much as possible or what would you suggest?

Yeah, it depends what we typically will do because we do see this. I have clients come in and they’ve got a lot of equity in their house, but then they’ve got all this consumer debt that. The key is, and this is going to sound really, really weird. I, I tell people don’t do anything yet because we’ve got to change the habits that you’ve created that, that have put you in this position, so don’t go out and borrow a bunch of money on your house to pay off your credit card debt and then just keep living the life you’re living because debt back five years later, it’s going to. So we’ve got to change your thought process before you do anything. And so a lot of times that consumer debt is actually an inhibitor to get further in the hole to dig deeper. And so just stop. Let’s change the habits is figure out why you’re in this position in and then we can correct it.

Okay. Question. No, I have three action steps I want to give to all the listeners. Don’t have Paul kind of unpack these. Okay. Accidental number one. And I’ve done this with many of my business coaching client, all of them, right? Yes. I, I will, uh, the ones who will allow me, I would say 80 percent will not allow me to do this true. But the ones who allow me, I do this. Yes, it’s true. Um, I create a spreadsheet with them of all their income on one column and all their expenses on another column. And most people are using some kind of software program, quickbooks or something. And they haven’t done this ever. So this is an action item on everyone out there to do this today. Make a list of all your income. I’m not kidding. Everybody needs to do this. Make a list of all your income on one column, all of your expenses on another.

Most people have never done this when we do this. I would say it takes the average person four to five hours to get all their income into one column of the spreadsheet because a lot of them say, well, what’s in quickbooks? I’ve got an quickly, so that’s great, but we’ll go through the spreadsheet here and when they finally look at all their credit cards, all the ways they spend money, all their checking accounts. When you make a list of all your income on one side and all your expenses on another, that is powerful because you will see that you are spending more money than you’re bringing it in. Right?

You’ll see it and if it’s. If it’s just in the software, that’s what I tell my clients. I call it quick brokes because you think everything is in there, but it’s not. You actually have to reconcile that stuff and put it out on this spreadsheet, like clay saying, Yo play the. It’s not really funny, but it’s kind of like when you’re watching the comedian and you’re just waiting for the punchline. I’m 99 percent of the time when we go through this process with clients. I’m just kinda waiting. I’m kind of waiting until they go. The reaction is, oh my gosh, I didn’t know we were spending that much money and and, and so you just kind of wait for it. It’s not funny, but it’s the realization that I didn’t know we were spending that kind of money on this or on that and the even more comical side or exciting thing is when we have a couple that comes in, you know how your face gets red. We were talking about your teacher drinking that water flush. So when we just even mentioned this process, a lot of times one or the other’s face or both really flush and sometimes we never see these people. Again. When we talk about we’re actually going to look at where your money’s going, but if you want to be successful, you’ve got to change something and you’ve got to. The first step though is realizing where you’re at today, where your money’s going, clay,

listen, step one, everybody out there. I want you to do this. Create a spreadsheet today of all your income versus expenses. If you have a gmail account, you can use google sheets. It’s free if you don’t get a piece of paper with my Dj Company, I remember doing this. I put all my income on one side. I thought, okay, I got $250 a month coming in from shows because I’d like one show a month. Okay, and I’ve got about $400 a week coming in from applebee’s. I’ve got about $300 a week coming in from target. I’ve got about $400 a week coming in from direct TV. I add it all up and I’m going, okay. Some of my income I’m tracking monthly. Some of it’s weak. I got to put it all into a just a monthly, so added up and I start looking, okay, okay, I got this.

I’m making $7,000 a month between applebees, target and direct TV over here. Great. Now my expenses over here, I’ve got a yellow page ad, which is about $2,500 a month. Um, I’ve got, um, a mini storage facility that was like $300 a month. There’s over at 96th and Riverside. I turned $50 a month. I’ve got a phone bill. I had a phone bill setup. It’s about $40 a month. I’ve got a website I had hosted through easy tail, which is $45 a month. I had a bridal show that I was in. I had an ongoing ad and the Tulsa world, you add it all up and you go, okay, I am barely able to make it here. Now this, this next step is you gotta make some painful cuts. Now when I built the DJ company, I can tell you I didn’t have any big overhead, but this exercise, as I continued to, as I continued to grow, I all of a sudden began to get a take on some, uh, um, expenses that I didn’t need to have.

And so I added this up one time. Chip. I’m looking at my numbers and I realized I’ve got a guy on my team, I’m paying about $4,000 a month to on my expenses side, and he doesn’t bring in any revenue, nor does he contribute. Intellectually. Doesn’t do anything to help. So you have to make painful cuts. So again, step one, create a spreadsheet of income versus expenses, but step two, you’ve got to make some painful cuts. Exactly. If you’re not making at least one painful cut, I know you’re not following this system. Paul, I want to get your take on this painful cuts. Painful. Talk to me about. Talk to us about some of the painful cuts that your clients have had to make in order to correct their financial.

Yeah. Clay, we, we teach our clients that hood Cpas, that short term gain means longterm pain, but, but a short term pain means longterm gain. So if you sacrifice a little today, you’ll have a lot in the future. You just don’t understand it. And so some of the cuts are um, okay. Maybe we limit how much you spent at starbucks. Yeah. Maybe you a look, you change your direct TV bill. Instead of paying $200 a month, you’re paying $20 a month because you got less programming stuff. Everybody. So you just don’t want anybody have fun. No, I want them to have fun, more fun in the future, a little less fun today. More fun in the future because if you spend it, you know, it’s kind of like the old adage, if you don’t eat your seed corn, you know you can’t just consume everything that you produce today.

You got to put some back and so you have to replant that seed corn and so it’s not in. The reality is is you’re, you’ll be happier in life. You’ll know where you’re going. You’ll see you’ll be positive. It’s kind of like clay again, back to getting in shape. If you hate getting on that scale when you’re not doing the right things, but when you’re doing the right things, you can’t wait till it’s time to weigh in. You can’t wait to see your progress and good tie in, right? Like it’s like cutting sweets and stuff out of your diet. If you want to get in shape, doesn’t matter how much you work out, if you only eat candy, candy corn is unbelievable. It’s called coin coin. It’s kind of a vegetable seed corn put as much of that in the ground and nothing’s growing and grow. I

go into this. I haven’t had a candy corn and probably five or six years at all and I put my seat, but I see candy. I remember just thinking, I don’t even like this stuff yet. Like I’ll eat like a whole bag. Handfuls at a time. You’re mixing with peanuts, it tastes like. Is that a life hack? It’s so good. That deserves some cowbell.

They have a secret way of getting that candy corn and you know, I think reese’s or somebody you can buy the reese’s and this got candy corn in it. Those jerks. It’s secret. It’s a conspiracy. You teamed up somebody. I don’t know if it’s recent, but I saw candy bar the other day that had.

That’s 94. This is like an Illuminati thing. Keeping up with the candy corn. Okay. We put men on it now too, so you can just. The third action item is decide not to paper rich and cash poor decided not to be paper rich cash poor. Let me give an example of what I made this Justin. Years ago when I was doing real estate, um, I was, there was a company called fears and Clark and my partner fears was the broker, the real estate guru. My job was to just do the marketing and I’ll never forget, uh, we would meet with guys who had huge mansions, very nice houses in midtown at 111th and Sheridan or memorial huge houses. And one guy was a surgeon, very skilled surgeon, and apparently he had a stroke and so he could no longer be a surgeon. It happened like in his late forties and it was like just unexpected.

Boom. Now he’s got a house that’s almost entirely paid off, but he doesn’t have access to income. Right? So he’s got a $2,000,000 house is paid off, almost entirely paid off, but he doesn’t have any income. And he goes to the bank to try to get an equity line and the bank will not let you do a home equity line. Generally, generally speaking, if you don’t have any income. And so he had a house that’s worth $2,000,000, but he can’t afford the taxes on it. He can’t afford the air conditioning, he can’t afford the. So we went to his house and it’s like overgrown now. There’s a lot of grass growing things or maintenance has been deferred obviously for years. It’s starting to get bad. And I saw this situation over and over with people in big commercial buildings, a big commercial building, but they can’t afford to fix the air conditioning unit on Paul. How do people become on paper rich but cash poor?

Well Clay, we talk to clients about what phase in life they’re in and when you’re an early age or before retirement, you’re in the accumulation phase and after retirements, the distribution phase and real estate is a great asset for an accumulating for accumulating wealth. But it’s a not a good asset for creating distributions. And so what they do is, is whether it’s out of pride or whatever you can, you can get assets and you think their assets, but really an asset is a, and I won’t print out you give me a hard time about pronouncing her name. I’m going to have to Sharon Leclair. It’s always a question when I say her name, she, she talks about an asset is one that creates income and asset is not your home. And so a lot of people think that, and I’m not a big proponent, fine, have a big nice home. Don’t pay it off because that’s not producing anything for you. Do you take those assets that that money that could be in that home and put it into other real estate or other investments actually going to create an income stream for you so that that accumulation process is you’re accumulating a equity in an asset that’s going to produce income for you instead of accumulating equity in an asset that is not going to produce income for you.

Chop. I think there’s somebody out there who’s going, wow, there’s a lot I need to implement here, but let’s keep moving onto the next notable, quotable. No notable quotable. Number three. Before you can really start setting financial goals, you need to determine where you stand financially. Paul, where are most people at financially? When you first meet them?

Flat broke. I don’t care how much money. I don’t know. It’s a gut punch. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please forgive me, but it’s true. I don’t care if you. If you make. We talked about several times about the income side of it. What’s important is what’s going out. I don’t. I’ve had people sitting in my office that make $30,000 a year have had people sit in my office that make a million dollars a year, that have, that are flat broke. They’re spending more than what they’re bringing in, and so it’s. It’s again, back to exercise weight. You got to step on the scale to see where you’re at today, to build a set, a goal for how we’re going to get to where you want to go so you have to paint that picture. We have to see where you’re at today and it’s nothing to be embarrassed about because that’s the norm. Unfortunately, that’s the norm for you to come in and sit into my office at Hood Cpas, for us to go through your numbers and know you’re not saving. You’re not being diligent. That’s okay. That’s where we come in.

By default, by default chap, I think it just. It’s easier to spend than it is to save. It isn’t. You won’t know unless you do what clay said a minute ago. That action item, number one, to create that spreadsheet of income versus expenses and what’s stopping you from doing it is that you haven’t scheduled it yet. If you put it on your calendar and you make it a priority, you will do it and you will realize that you need to make some changes. Now, this next notable quotable chap coming in, hot from Mr David Bach v nine times New York time, best selling author of the automatic millionaire and smart women finish rich, etc. He says what the great truth about money is that in order to keep it and grow it, you have to fight for it. So jason, you’re, you’re a young guy, you work witH elephant in the room, you manage a superman to these three stores. Oh, you’re the, you’re the super manager there. Can you talk about why you have to fight or at least work hard to make sure that the, uh, the, the daily checklists are being implemented in a store like that with as much volume as we do it, as many daily customers. Why do you have to just fight to get those checklists done? and why don’t they just happen by default will? Because you can’t ever approach anything passively.

Like you have the idea, like the passive million or somebody who thinks that they’re gonna just get money by doing. What’s the guy’s name? Thai

lopez. Oh, click funnels.

right? So what I found with management as you can’t be a passive

manager, like we have checklists up within line of sight everywhere and you would assume, hey, it’s there, somebody’s going to do it, but if you don’t follow up on it, you’re going to find that you got to check the checklist in two hours into the day when box a, b and c should have already been checked. Everything should be spotless. it’s not done. Some of the things at the elephant in the room that every hour half to be done. I mean, you know, there’s hot towels and things like, okay, what were the things that have to be done everyday ongoing that would drift and it would not be done at the elephant in the room. Men’s grooming lounge if you were not on it. Oh, a laundry. Just to make sure we have towels ready to go to the hot towels, dry towels, sanitizing the bathroom and the shampoo room.

Just sadly. Cleanliness, restocking the fridge. So guys get free cold beverages when they come in. Like the hiring is like, oh yeah, there’s like the daily what you’re talking about there. I 100 percent agree and then there’s hiring like everyday. Do we not have somebody shadowing about every one or two days? Somebody interviewing every one or two days for sure. Just keep them coming in and why? So we always have a plan in why would people occasionally leave? What kind of reasons have you heard that are realistic, that are good non nefarious reasons why people decide to move on? Oh, you just family reasons or finding a better opportunity moving out of town, having a child careered so we can never stop interviewing at the alpha in the room who never stopped recruiting. We can never Stop checking the hot. It’s like a garden. Okay.

You got to tend to it. Or the weeds began to sprout and financially paul, it’s like tending a garden. You can’t Just do it one. You can’t just meet with a financial planner one time and then be good. You have to meet on a monthly basis to make sure you’re pulling the weeds. Paul, what are some. What are. What are the kinds of weeds that can sprout up and somebody’s financial garden if they don’t tend to it on a monthly basis? Well, you know, play anything in life. You have to actually be very diligent you and it’s a struggle. It’s a struggle looking at facebook and seeing, you know, the neighbor just got a new car. It’s a struggle seeing on tv the ads for the brand new tv in these 68, d, eight k, whatever they are, 40 billion, 40, yeah, whatever they are and and so it’s real easy because you’re doing it.

Especially when you start doing well, you start doing well and then you got a little money and clay, you open up that investment statement or whatever and you think I should buy a boat or something. And so you have to have that fight in the, in the weeds are, is staying diligent. Really realizing that we’re going to keep our income, our lifestyle to a certain level so that we can enjoy life in the future. Chuck, what’s the next notable quotable? He says, change is a funny thing. Although most people say they want to change so they can have a better life with more love, more dreams, and more fun. the fact is that many of us are afraid of change. That’s true, and so if you’re out there today and you’re saying, I want to make a change, but I don’t know the first step, I would encourage you to go to hood cpas.com.

It’s hood cpas.com and schedule your free one hour consultation and when you schedule that one hour consultation, Paul Hood and his team will give you a free copy of warren buffett’s only authorized biography. The book is called snowball. You get one of the best books out there written about one of the best financial minds in american history. Warren buffett, and you get one hour of time from a financial consultant from hood cpas. You get the hour of time, the consultation, you get the free copy of the book. Get it today by going to hood cp, [inaudible] dot com, and as always like to end the show with a resounding pool. Here we gO.