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Jamie Shilanski  

A financial advisor who doesn’t employ and have and meet regularly with a another financial advisor on their own finances has a risky portfolio. Welcome back, TPR Nation this is Jamie Shilanski in an episode of Worlds to Conquer and we are going to get so uncomfortable today. I hope you are ready because we are going to talk about income disparity inside of a household. And what does that mean? That’s means when you have two people living in one house, and one is the quote unquote bread earner of the household. So either both people are employed, but one makes a lesser income and the other one makes far superior and I’m not talking like marginal 10-10 to 15% more income. I’m talking when somebody makes 100 or 200 or 300% more income than somebody else in the household. And then this could also mean that maybe one person works and the other person is a stay at home spouse and their responsibility is to keep the household running. So we’re going to talk a lot about the head trash in the hypocrisy that comes into those relationships, myself included because you know, I love to call a spade a spade and I know when I’m being a hypocrite on this topic. So one of the beautiful things about running an RIA up in Anchorage, Alaska, is that we employ a lot of military spouses and one of the things when my mom and dad fought and Rosa Shilanski was starting the company back in 1980s. Prior to that, my mom was a military spouse before my dad got out of the Air Force, and she had a hell of a time finding a job. A lot of times people wouldn’t hire because they knew she was only going to be there temporary. So she had just real low end jobs and she gets so frustrated with that because she knew nobody would give her a chance. So when we started our own business, that’s one things we set out to rectify as we wanted to give people opportunity and God bless the internet because now when we find really great quality people, we don’t have to let them go. They get to stay employed with our firm, even if they’re working in a remote or hybrid capacity. But sometimes in those situations, that means one person’s career path is more important than the other person’s. Now the second you guys hear this you’re saying no, no, no, that’s not the case. Everyone’s career is just as important. But when we really get down to the nitty gritty when we’re actually balancing that checkbook, when we are making financial decisions… It’s not. That we can get ourselves all we want but it’s not we’re always going to prioritize whoever is making the most amount of income. And if you’re a financial advisor listening to this podcast, this could become really problematic in your household, because all of the sudden, you have this situation where you’re sort of in your very beginner stages starting out your practice, you’ve got less than seven years and this is the grind period. This is the licensing that designations learning what you know isn’t so try to figure out how to network trying to figure out how to prospect what are the channels of marketing that you should be pulling. Just because somebody can fog a mirror doesn’t mean that they should become a client. You’re learning all of this stuff and when you’re in those learning stages, your spouse is normally incredibly supportive because they believe in this goal. They want this goal, they want it to happen for you. So they are rallying behind you and super super supportive and somewhere around year five of being in the finance industry. Your schedule starts to get so busy, your family begins to grow. And you have to ask yourself an important question. Should both people in the household be working or is it time that one person maybe gives up their career and stays home? Now I’m not saying that’s how it should be. I’m saying that’s a conversation. Most households I know with children have, they have on a regular basis? Does it make sense for us to both work, especially when one person doesn’t have a lot of time? You don’t have an abundance of extra money and daycare in the United States of America is outrageous. The cost of childcare is just astronomical. I remember when my son was in elementary school, and we would drop ’em off 30 minutes before the school hours started. And we needed somebody to we need to subscribe to one of these services for 30 minutes after school was done before we can get him and that was six months by the time he was done with elementary school. It was $800 a month. That’s a lot. Anda lot of times people will ask themselves will does this make sense for me to work if I’m only earning 2000 $3,000 a month? Is it just better if we save that money? So we have a financial and emotional question just like when we talk to our clients? We have to run through the finances. We have to run through the emotional aspects and ask ourselves what makes sense. So then as your business begins to grow, and you guys have that conversation, then you go into the next stage. So there’s really three stages. There’s a stage in which you’re just in the growth ascpect that’s all you should be focused on hyper hyper focused on is growth, growth, growth, growth, growth. If you do not have the ideal number of clients that you want to work with – the only thing you should be focused on as a financial adviser, assuming that you don’t know how to build financial plans, etc. is growing your practice that needs marketing and prospecting but then once you get to where you know the growth is coming in, you’ve got those levers figured out, you’re pulling down on him and you’ve got a good systems in place. Then you need to move on to systems policies and processes, systems policies and processes. Now I said those three things before I said people why? Because a lot of people start with people first. And they forget that without systems policies and processes, you can throw all the human capital in the world at it, but you’re still not going to solve the damn problem. Because you don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know what the expectations are and you don’t know how to show them what has to be done. You both are just kind of figuring it out as you go along. So I don’t like to throw people into something I don’t have a process around. Now. That doesn’t mean as we grow as we evolve as we take on new tasks, we can’t develop new process. That doesn’t mean that at all. What that means is I’ve got some idea and I work with a lot of organizations, especially right now, I mean post pandemic, you know, coming out of it and we’re still in the early stages of coming out of it, even though it’s 4 years behind us. But post pandemic a lot of people go down to part time or they want to give up their current roles and responsibilities and they want to do something else. So for the first time of my life, I’m seeing a lot of really great employees and different organizations in different lines of work, come back to the employer and say, Listen, you know, I’m just no longer fulfilled, I’m not happy. I don’t have good work life balance. I don’t want to leave this job, the pay and the benefits, but I really just wanted to make this work and they’re coming up with their own job titles and their own job descriptions. Now sometimes that makes sense. Sometimes. We worked at the hospital that I that I’m involved with and you know, we had a nurse who was really, really great fun to be around. They got four kids at home and the husband was gone half of the year. You know, with his employment two weeks on two weeks off. It just didn’t make a lot of sense for her to maintain full time employment, especially because all the kids were under the age of five. And she said, You know, I don’t have enough time to do everything but I got enough time to do something. Is there something at the hospital that we could do? And you know what we put in charge of client callbacks? Because they didn’t when the kids were down for now doesn’t matter when she called because clients are grateful for a call back from a hospital or a doctor anytime. It doesn’t have to be between nine and five on a weekday basis. They’re happy if you call them at six o’clock at night. They’re happy to call on you know at four in the afternoon so she could really you know, in that situation, we could mold a need for the hospital into a job that fit this person. But that doesn’t mean we can do it for everybody across the board. And that’s one thing that business owners have to be really be responsible for. Sometimes you’re really, really gonna like a human being but they don’t fit your business model anymore. And your ultimate responsability is to make sure that you’re profitable you owe that to not only your family and your loved ones, but your clients. You have to stay in business in order to impact lives. So as two people in a household having conversation whose job should be priority, who has the opportunity to have greater success, and that’s really the evaluation tools that we are using. It’s not that we don’t want both people in the house to be fulfilled. We have to look at it economically and say, Okay, who’s got the greatest prospects? Who’s going to earn the most amount of income so that we can one make sure our security and our safety are taken care of because those are the things that we will solve all day long. We will always make sure our security and our safety are taken care of. And then we’re going to move on to what are the things that we want? Because labor is an exchange of money, right? We want to be able to exchange our labor exchange services exchange ideas, to earn money to buy the things that we want in turn, and so as the husband and wife or wife and wife and husband husband have this conversation, normally one person either stops employment altogether, or they take go down to a part time job or they go to like a gig economy. I see a lot of photographers, so a lot of people that have like online jewelry business, photography, maybe they’re doing a cooking channel, maybe they’re selling clothing or they’re doing meal prepping, personal trainers. I see a lot of spouses have those type of occupations and allow them to operate anymore gig environment. A gig environment is that you are hired for a small job at a small task of small time frame that doesn’t mean a long term commitment. Because we as financial advisors, let’s let’s be honest here, we need those people. Those spouses to take care of households take care of the kids to take care of all of those other tasks. So that we can be on for our clients and so that we can grow our practice and earn the money that is required to supplement the lifestyle. When we are on the precipice of leaving our growth. We’re always gonna be aimed towards growth, but we’re not so focused on prospect and marketing, because we can’t afford to make payroll anymore. And we move on to getting policies, processes and systems in place. And then there becomes this weird time. It’s this weird time where we dedicate ourselves to flushing out processes and we did this over a period of 15 months, really five years, but 15 months where our office wasn’t focused on growth, we allowed the marketing system to we kept our foot on the gas pedal, but we concentrated on systematizing our office. So we have a new client onboarding process, and we have a pitch in this process. That’s when you pitch a prospect and it doesn’t work out for whatever reason and you want to stay active on their radar. We have a loss client process. We have a networking process, we have a tax process, and then we kept going on to money movement processes, R&D processes, how are we doing Roth conversions everything is a process and the beautiful part about a process is that it’s no longer rely on a person on an individual. So often I see in small businesses and I was just on a call with the CEO this morning. And I said you created this problem because you got so dependent on one single person knowing that job inside and out. They didn’t write it down. They didn’t have a policy. They didn’t have a process and now that they have left their employment because people leave employment, either because they want to move on to other opportunities. They no longer need to work and they’re going back home to take care of the kids or parents maybe aging parents that’s a big one also, or they moved on and they just don’t want to work anymore. Whatever the reason is that they are got, they got hit by a bus does not matter. Whatever the reason it and why are buses so dangerous. I find scooters and motorcycles are more likely to hit me than a bus but you know, whatever. But anyhow, that person moves on and now you are so gosh darn dependent on that single individual that you don’t know how to replicate the same amount of success. And so that’s why it was important for us at Shilanski and Associates to keep a you know kind of a neutral position on our marketing for a little while keep doing what we were doing not really ramp up to our full potential, but keep our foot just moderately pressing cruise control. And then we focused we hyper hyper focused on getting our policies and our processes documented, documented. That’s the big one, not what I think should happen between my two ears, but actually a repeatable process that somebody else could look at and be able to do it. Now if you’re in the process of creating your processes. Sorry for your alliteration there. But if you’re in that stage, make sure that you don’t use nouns. That’s one thing that we found out very, very early when we were doing a bunch of recordings. We did a bunch of video recordings to teach new people as we brought them on what our processes were, but we were using nouns we were using like go to Red Tail go to money guy pro go to over here and then as we replaced those systems so software companies guess what, we had to go rerecord the video because it didn’t mean what we thought it meant. So instead we would use a vague noun, we would say go to the CRM or go to your email, go to the financial planning software, or whatever it was at that time. We just replaced it with that so that way anyone can pick up right then and get a little cheat sheet and say, Oh, their CRM is Infinity. That’s where I need to go to. And that worked out really, really successfully. So during that stage, all of a sudden, you know, once you got your policies and processes and systems in place, this weird weird thing happens. You go from your phone blowing up 24/7 to all of a sudden, you’re kind of picking it up throughout the day, making sure it’s still on because you’re not getting called as much as there are no emergencies to put out every single day. There’s no fires spreading out across the network of businesses, because you have everything you put in place from communication policies to how funds are distributed, what taxes are being withheld. I mean, you’ve got it all documented. And now you can find the people and you’ve given them the proper training, go through all those protocols. And all they have to do is follow the process because it’s so well written. They understand the objective, the outcome and the roadblocks. Super, super critical. If you hit this roadblock, stop and do this. And when your phone goes silent, all sudden you get the freedom of time. And that’s really what we’re solving for. Once you get out of growth and you get into this other stage and then you go on to this, this enterprise level this huge level. Now you can replicate not only your success in your protegees success, but you’re ready for more advisors to come on more team members to come on. And you get this 15 Plus person office with all replicatable success. You have the luxury of time you’ve bought your time back. And that’s what happens is you go out of growth and go into this systems policies and process stage all of a sudden, you start outsourcing everything that is not necessary in your life. And this is where people transition into becoming the masters of delegators. And so you delegate so much of your time, but I promised you this will be an episode of sick sad truth. So anyone remember Daria calm where my 90s MTV baby’s Sick, Sad World next on Daria so as you enter into six sad world and you figure out all of these keys to success that hey, you know what, me jamming out an hour of content is way more productive than me spending an hour mowing the lawn so I’m gonna hire the kid down the street. He’s gonna mow the lawn for $40 I’m gonna go jam out content that’s going to lead to two more prospects that leads to you know, potentially $40,000 of reoccurring revenue every single year. I’ll spend that money all day long. But then you get towards the end where you’ve got all your stuff done. You’ve given it over to the people that need to execute on it. And now you’ve got this beautiful, beautiful afternoon, totally yourself and you don’t have to be at the office. You get to cut the cord you get to go do the things that you want to go do and be with the people that you want to be with. And so now you go home and you have time to give back to your spouse. You have time to help with house. There’s time to help with the chores there’s time to go play and go kayaking or rafting or boating or skiing or whatever it is that you guys like to go and do. But your spouse has just spent the last five to 10 years building the household and having their own system policies and processes in place. That you are now throwing a monkey wrench into. We talk about this a lot with our pre retirees or pre retirees when which they have one person that stays at home and then the other person that goes in work when that person is done working, and now they’re home all the time. Now we have a little bit of conflict that has to be resolved. You see this also a military households, when you have a special ops person especially that’s gone a lot on TV wise for long stents six months a year and then they’re home for three or four months and then they’re gone again on another deployment. And all of a sudden they go to retire and they’re home. 365 days out of the year. They are completely absolutely unequivocably, messing up the system at home. You’re throwing a monkey wrench in it and causing all kinds of chaos. You are jacking up everybody’s schedule because now you have time and the luxury of time to go to do that. And you’ll know what’s happening because your spouse will look at you and say, Don’t you have work to do or should you be at the office or do you have client meetings? I mean, there are days that it works out really, really well. In which it’s like hey, you want to go to the fair on a Wednesday afternoon. Yeah, I don’t have any appointments. Let me just clear out the morning I’ll get up and work from five to nine. But at time you kids are ready to move out of the house. It’s 10am so I’m good to go. Let’s let’s go do those and I can have the whole afternoon. And those times those are great those a little rewards. But those aren’t everyday occasions. You’re not every single day planning and going doing some activity. Most the time you’re just getting in the freakin way. You’re not being of help you’re being a hindrance, especially because now you’ve gotten so used to delegating your time now that if your spouse comes to you and says hey, I really want to work on the house today. You’re like cool. Which carpenter Am I calling? Which landscape artists Am I calling? What do I what do we need to get done that we can pay somebody so we can go do the things that we want to go do? And it’s not about self satisfaction, like there are a lot of people especially for some reason surgeons love woodwork. And I think it’s the hand and the creation and making something out of nothing and the finesse that goes into it. But I’ll have a lot of surgeons that just love the plain wood. They just they just love building their own furniture. They love building their own bookcases. They could totally go buy it a hell of a lot cheaper someplace else, but that’s something that they enjoy doing. That’s something that they’re passionate about. So they’re not outsourcing, you know they’re buying furniture and if you’re listening is going oh, I’m not going to be one of those people that outsources everything Oh, okay. Well I better see a loo in your house and you better be like spending your own clothes and I want to check your credit card statement to make sure you never go to the grocery store or buy gasoline because we are ready outsource a lot of this in a first world country. We’re already doing it. We just don’t think of doing it in other ways that really successful people that want to buy their time back. And that’s one thing that I’m constantly telling my son I’m like, Listen, you have different stages in your 20s you have a lot of time you don’t have a lot of money. And so you have to do the work because you can’t afford for somebody else to come in and necessarily do it. But when you get into your 30s and 40s give a lot more money than time and it’s all sudden you’re buying your time back by handing these tasks over to somebody else because it’s not at your highest and best use but this is when your spouse will say well you’re just gonna have somebody do it for you. And in my mind, I’m thinking hell yeah I am. But my mouth is not saying that because it becomes to sound very arrogant. It becomes a sound ostentatious, you know that. Yes, I am having somebody else do it. No, this task is not beneath me. It’s just not my highest and best use. It’s just not what I need to be doing right now. Because I could weed the garden or I could spend two hours doing this other tasks that’s super important to us. And so making sure that your spouse understand as you begin to delegate tasks out the purpose and the reasoning of delegating those tasks out. But then also the responsibility of saying, hey, are there things now that we’re in this stage of our life? And are there things that you just absolutely don’t want to do? My spouse, I’m the breadwinner in my household, and my spouse does a phenomenal job of taking care of the house and all of the routine maintenance and all of those things. But I still hire a housekeeper to come in one day a week and absolutely deep clean the house. Why? Because if you walk into our house any day of the week, it’s clean. It’s well maintained. My spouse has a little OCD, so it’s very nice for me, but I still hire that person to come in and do those things. I still offer to hire the person to come in and clean out the fireplace and change the air filters and do all those mechanical things. But my spouse is 100% capable of doing it. Why? Because I don’t have to have them do it. We can we can both outsources activity because I would much rather hire a housekeeper to come in one day a week and give some reprieve on the house and my spouse and I go kayaking, or we go fishing and float down those creek called the willow here in Alaska. There are other activities I want to do with my spouse, but I need to honor the fact that it’s not just my chores and my tasks that have to be outsourced. It also has to be theirs. And then this is the other part of it. This is the hard part. This is the super achy, uncomfortable part. So when you make a lot more money than your spouse, your job initially started out as the priority but then you bought your time back then you got all this freedom. And now you have the luxury of scheduling your day the way that you want it to do because you are the boss, but in most situations, your spouse is an employee of somebody else. So if they’re not a stay at home spouse entirely if they’re doing good work, then they’re of course if you’re doing good work, you’re You’re not the boss, so you’re totally obligated whenever you get hired, right. So let’s just say photography for an example. You’re a photographer and you’re gonna go to a wedding and you’re trying to line up the wedding season in June. That means during the month of June, you’re probably not doing anything with your spouse on any single weekend because everybody’s getting married. And they don’t get to choose the date and times in which people choose to get to get married. If they want the job. That’s when it is and that’s when you have to show up as the photographer or the caterer or the whatever the person is that you’re being in that role. And so now you come into this place where you have to start picking up some of the slack because they have a job that doesn’t afford them the freedom that you have. And so now it becomes like this shifting dynamic in your household. And then when it becomes problematic let’s just say for example, you know, my spouse is out shooting my spouse does not do this, but he’s out shooting a wedding, and it gets all the photography and I’m like, Hey, I’m really annoyed because I’ve got this other event going on. I really wanted to participate. It’s super important to me that you’re there. And they’re like, Well, I can’t this is my job. And in your mind, if you’re being totally honest with yourself, you’re like well if you don’t do that job, that $500 can be replaced pretty easily. I could just give that money to you. Well, now we’re shifting the disparity. Now we’re becoming this really weird place financially, where we’re making other people feel undervalued for not contributing to the household. So how do we solve this? Because everything that we do at The Perfect RIA is about calling things out no be as sick, honest truth around here, and then also giving ourselves a toolset to say how do we solve this? So I already shared with you going to my spouse and say, Hey, what are the things that I could take care of? What are the things that I could outsource for you so that we can have this time together? The second thing that you need to do is their job is real. Just because it’s not your job doesn’t mean it’s not a real job. And a lot of my military wives, they get super frustrated with their husbands about this because most of them that are no longer in our anchorage area. They’re hybrid and so their spouses are like I’m gonna go home for lunch today. Can you make sure that I have lunch you know, at the at the house ready for me? And they’re like, No, I have 11:30 meeting I have to be on you know, and there’s this well, why why aren’t you not at a beck and call but it a little bit is but why aren’t you available when I want you available to do the things I need to do when you’re not treating that individual like they have a quote unquote, real job with real obligations, because it isn’t the highest earnings and it doesn’t provide the most amount of benefits for the particular household. And whether we want to and there will prioritize things like that financially, we will. We’ll even do it when we sit down with our clients. So how do we solve this? So one of the things that I love to do with clients and I take the same very approach in my own household, because if my advice is good enough for a client it is good enough for me. If my advice is good enough for a client, it’s good enough for me, we eat what we cook around here, mostly because I really like food. So how do I solve it? Well, one of the things that I love to do is cashflow management, especially when we have income, huge income disparities. In the household. When we have substantial income disparity. One person is normally paid by some type of sales or bonus or commission revenue. So that needs to be taken into consideration. So whenever I have a young couple that’s just getting married. I start this out if I’m doing some course correcting of somebody in their 40s I do this also and we carry it all the way through retirement. But I want three bank accounts, three bank accounts minimum only for an individual. And the fourth one that I talked about is going to be an income source. And I’ll tell you about that, how that’s going to flow in just a minute. But three bank accounts for this individual household and one of them is going to be a joint account and in that joint account all of the expenses for the house and you to come out of that. And so that’s the car insurance as a home insurance. That’s a mortgage payment. That’s the heat electricity, food for groceries, not dining out food for groceries, all of the household shared expenses go in that name, household account. And we literally call it the household account. So what do I do for that? Well, I take the operating costs to run the household, I mark it up by 20% and that’s the income I want deposited into that account one time a month or twice a month because a lot of people are most familiar with getting a paycheck twice a month, which however it works for the for whoever the individual is that you’re working with. I do once a month for myself. I’ve gotten good enough cash flow management that I don’t worry about multiple deposits, but so many get into that household that runs the household. All right, and then the other two bank accounts that I want are for the individuals so you have spouse a and spouse B and you know Husband, husband, wife and wife, husband, wife, whatever it is, you have spouse, a spouse B and they have an individual bank account. Now what goes into individual banking play allowance that you get to spend on whatever you want to spend your money on. If my spouse who absolutely loves tennis shoes, wants a $300 pair of tennis shoes and I think that is mind blowing waste of money because they already have 24 sets of tennis shoes and only two feet to my knowledge. Then I don’t get a say in it. That’s how they choose to spend their money. Now I have two vanities in my life. The first is my brain. And the second is my hair. I love my hair. And so if I want to buy $100 shampoo and my spouse is like, you can get this to in one part. I don’t give a they better stay out of my shampoo. I’m going to spend my money on whatever I want to spend it on because that’s my discretionary dollars. Those are my funds to pull from. Now, here’s where I see it become incredibly problematic. And I have a lot of prescriptions with females about this. That is when I’m talking to a client or friend or an employee. They say yeah, but all the stuff for the kids has to come out of my account and I’m like, well tell me more about that. In fact, my niece and I were just going over her monthly budget with her husband and it’s the same way our monthly stipend for the dance classes and the skating lessons and the clothing and all of that has to come from her account, not the household account and not her husband’s account and she doesn’t always find that fair. No woman I’ve ever talked to is fair. Now when I have the same conversation with the normally the husband or the man, you know they’re communists. Yeah, because they buy a lot of nonsense. I don’t want to have to pay for the Bose the several sets of clothing doing every sporting event under the sun. Making sure that they have a brand new pajamas for pajama days all nonsense expenses that one party thinks is a waste of money. Now I tend to be a little bit more masculine in my way of thinking. So I also think it’s an absolute waste of money and kids don’t need darn near what they have in this country. But that’s my opinion, that’s not gonna get a vote with my dollars. I’m gonna get to spend my money how I want to the way that I solved this for my son was when he was in sixth grade. Every school year we would give him a certain amount of money, dollars. He would get a list of items that he had to buy for the school year, and then I would take it in the mall and he would ask my opinion like oh, is this is cool. Do I like this you know, etc. And uh, but I didn’t get to the side what he ended up purchasing as long as he had money for it. And it was on the list pair of pants X amount of underwear X amount of socks and T shirts. Then he got to buy it and so he got to vote with his discretionary dollars. You got to learn about financial education. And he also learned how to budget that if he wanted that really cool hoodie. That doesn’t mean he gets three really cool hoodies and three T shirts. Instead he’s got to make concessions. And so for us that worked out really well. So when it comes to a household that has a lot of disparity about the kids and kids situation, I like to set a budget. I like to say okay, great, what’s the average we spent last year don’t justify it, don’t explain it. Don’t say oh, they have this sporting event or Oh, we had to do this braces or oh, they broke their leg. You know, those things are always going to come up. They’re just going to come up in different ways. So whatever you spent last year, knock off 15 or 20% of that and then put that down as the budget of what you’re going to spend this year and then you’re both getting into compromise because then if you’re more you know quote unquote masculine thinking such as myself, you’re not blowing as much money on stuff either the household doesn’t need and then the other person also doesn’t feel that their budget went to zero and it has to come out of their personal dollars. That’s how I like to solve it. I solve it that way. Now, let’s talk about this other part but where’s the income being deposited conspire to people and they work in the same household? Sometimes people do percentages. I am not a fan of that. I am not a fan of somebody saying what I earn 80% of the income for all to cover 80% of the bills and you earn 20% So you cover 20% of the bills. I don’t like that. I think it sets up a hierarchy in the household. That does not benefit a marriage. There’s no long term benefit to a marriage. What you did was you put yourself in first and second place. You created a hierarchy and you’re no longer a team coming at this together. You’ve created my money and your money. But even though I said that you said Jamie you just set up two accounts for individuals. Yes, in which you are both a lot of the same dollar amount to go and spend discretionary. Now. I like to have another account. Normally we custodian at Schwab for us I use Schwab for this and all income all in courses get put into this account. Now, of course if I’ve got a self employed person we’re carving out 30% putting in a tax bucket that’s completely separate, but all income so if I have doctors that work off production or commission if I’ve got executives that get bonuses, if I’ve got pharmaceutical techs that end up getting their bonuses, which can be really substantial over the last couple of years. All of the income goes into that one income depository account. From that account gets dispersed to the three minor bank accounts. I call this my wealth building strategy. So now I’m wealth building and they counted jointly named it’s both sources of income and and we call it the wealth building account. So I’m just going to use an example here. Let’s say I’ve got a household that’s bringing in $50,000 a month in revenue, and their household expenses are 15,000. And they both like to have around $2,500 of discretionary funds in their account. Well then, when that deposits come into this account at Schwab this wealth building account, I am now making a one or two times a month depending on how the person processes and proceeds money if they have worked their whole life and are used to getting two paychecks can get make it two disbursements. So if I have that 15,000 going into the household account and again, you know 7500 7500 If I’ve got somebody that’s used to making one time per month payments, cool, the whole 15,000 goes in on the first and we’re good to go. And then the other two deposits that 2500 gets sent to that individuals account. Now let’s say I want to buy something that costs more than $2,500. Well, great, go ahead, save. That’s how that works. You have to save these are your funds. It’s your discretion. It’s your choice how you choose to spend them, but if you blow through all of your $2,500 you don’t get to dip into any other accounts. You don’t get to put it on a credit card. My spouse is a toy enthusiast. So RC cars RC airplanes, dirt bikes, mountain bikes, fishing boats, fishing rods, fishing poles, there’s a difference. The list goes on and on. And no matter how much stuff we bring into this house, it’s it’s never enough. There’s always something else coming out or something that was better or something that I got broke. I mean, it just it’s perpetual. My spouse single handedly single handedly and this is a really a token to their modesty, but single handedly pulled the United States of America out of the 2008 global financial crisis and never once took any credit for it. Never once, but they double down and spent as much as possible to get this economy back on track. And so if that’s the case, cool, I’m a nerd. You know what I like? I like good food and good literature. That’s what I like. And so my money you know, books I might spend you know, I probably, gosh, to be honest with you, I probably spend around four to $500 a month on books. And that’s between business planning books and fiction, as well. A little hack for me that I’m trying to teach the young uns in my office is in the morning because I believe morning people conquer the world in the morning. I’m listening to business literature, I’m reading business books, and I’m getting my mind set up for conquering in the evening I’m winding down and that’s when I really dive into my fiction which are and that’s how I kind of get as a wind down process for conquering and battling all of this natural energy that I have for world domination. So if I want to only spend $500 a month and my 2000 continues to build a bill to build cool, then I’ve just got more savings that I can do whatever I want with if we go out to eat, you know, we might kind of volley back and forth between who gets that particular expense, but we don’t run things on credit. In fact, that’s one of the roles of my spouse is that they can buy whatever they want as long as there’s cash to buy it and it doesn’t go on any type of financing. No loans for dirt bikes, no loans for side by sides or boats or any of those things, you got to pay cash for it. And that means that sometimes we both have to save to buy something for the family then guess what we both have to save. Now if you’re running into a situation in which you’re like, Okay, well I bought this fishing pole and you can’t use it you need use your own money to buy your own fishing pole. Your problem is not about money in your household, you have a much, much bigger problem. And you need to concentrate on that for the sanctity of your relationship. But for the most part, this works, and I apply it to my clients. I use it in my own household. I use it with affluent business owners, and it really helps equalize this economic disparity and also remind one another that we are in this together we are wealth building together both people made sacrifices so that you can get to the place you are today. TPR Nation this has been an episode of Worlds to Conquer. This is Jamie Shilanski. Go find people who share your values and change the world.