YOU DON’T HAVE A MONEY PROBLEM — YOU HAVE A SYSTEM PROBLEM

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:00:02

Welcome to the show. Tired of the hype about living a dream? It's time for truth.

This is the place for tools, power and real talk so you can create the life you dream and deserve your ultimate life. Subscribe, share, create. You have infinite power. Hello, and welcome to this episode of youf Ultimate Life.

The podcast designed specifically to give you the stories, the inspiration, the tools, guidance necessary to create a life that you love to live every day. A life of purpose, prosperity and joy. Today, I've got a special guest, Wade Reed. Welcome to the show. Wade.

Wade Reed: 00:00:50

Kellan. Thank you so much for having me.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:00:52

You are welcome and I am delighted to, to have you here. You know, one of the things I really love about doing this is the opportunity.

It's a real opportunity I have to get to hear hundreds and even thousands of people's stories and participate in their journey through life and what they learn. And I'm sure this will be no different. So thanks for being willing to come and share your heart with us.

Wade Reed: 00:01:20

Absolutely.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:01:22

You know, this show is about helping people with the tools, the mindset and the execution tools, the mindset and the execution to create the life they want. And that might seem difficult and you have a particular specialty, so I'm not going to pretend to summarize or introduce you in that way.

Why don't you tell us the joyful and intentional way that Wade chooses to add good to the world and make good things happen.

Wade Reed: 00:01:53

Yeah, thanks for the opportunity, Kellen.

I have been really driven by a passion regarding financial slavery, you might call it that, is that there's this mindset around money that people take on, beliefs that put them in a place of scarcity and worry and fear.

And for some reason it seems to perpetuate itself everywhere among all peoples I've talked to, among my peers, among family members, among business owner, colleagues and so forth. And there seems to be a really almost dark sense of incapacity. I'm not capable of handling this on my own. I need somebody else to do it for me.

And so somewhere around 20 years ago. I was really pondering what it was that I needed to do for my life's work.

I was a young 20 something kid, married for about a year or so, around 25 years old, actually, no, 23 years old. This was 20, 25. And my gosh, something just, just kept whispering at me.

All of you listeners, I'm sure you've had that from time to time, that little sense of, you know, a voice telling you you need to do something that's a little uncomfortable at Times, it's, it's inspiring at other times. And this is one of those that was kind of inspiring and like, you need to take a personal finance class, Wade.

You need to take a personal finance class. And I was not really headed that direction in my career. I was really into the physical body. I wanted to be a physical therapist.

I was going to go into exercise and sports science.

And I followed this whisper that was a complete elective that was unrelated at all to what my other course curriculum had been in my undergraduate days, and invited my wife to join me. We were about a year married, as I said, and she said, okay, let's do it. And in that class, the fire was lit.

I saw people's lack of awareness around money. Kellen. And These were again, 20 somethings, often single. And a lot of the concepts, mutual funds, bank accounts, insurance products, were budgeting.

Like all this stuff was familiar to me, but most people were not familiar with it. They seemed almost clueless about these things.

And I started looking back over some of my history as a young kid at 3 years old, a little bank that had three compartments in it, spend, save and give. And from a very young age, I was learning the importance of separating our money into different purposes.

My parents had healthy dialogue around money. And we had my mom, I remember keenly as a kid, my mom would pull out these green ledgers and she would track her budget on this green ledger.

We knew how much was coming in, we knew what went to different categories. We knew it was available for us kids for school lunch or for maybe school clothes at the beginning of the year.

And I watched my mom have a successful experience around money. My dad was really good about managing money and it was just a healthy thing. I didn't know that was not common.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:04:58

I was going to say, do you know how rare.

Kind of an experience that is Growing up, I had a, you know, we, we had some of that, certainly not that discipline, but we had, you know, we were taught to save and to give and to, you know, have spending money and so forth. So those three categories, I remember they were the same. But the discipline and seeing your parents do that. Yeah, my, the mystery.

I knew what I needed to do with my little money, right. That I earned.

Wade Reed: 00:05:30

Right.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:05:30

But their, that was all a mystery. And I. So I know often that we just heard we can't afford that or, you know, there's limited this, that the other, but it was really all a mystery.

So that's really common phrases, right?

Wade Reed: 00:05:42

The family tends to be unaware of the actual family economy. It's shrouded in this fog of. Of. I guess it's a taboo.

Like if you know what we're making, you might share it with your friends and they might share it with their kids, parents, and then I might get found out that I'm not doing very well. And all the shame sort of experience.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:06:07

I was going to say the secrecy seems to be around the shame. There seems to be a. This entire economy of judgment that's built into it. Intimate connection between the money you make and the worth. And your worth.

Wade Reed: 00:06:24

Yeah. And it's typically shown on the outward.

Right, the, the style of home you have, the finishes inside your home, the clothes you wear, the car you drive, maybe even the job title that you hold. It creates this Persona of success or failure. And that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about the slavery aspect of money.

It puts us in a position where we're. We're trying to often present ourselves in a different light than. Than we actually are.

And we're often living into other people's beliefs about what we should or shouldn't do with money instead of our own. We've kind of lost a sense of self discovery about what I actually want in life.

And one of the reasons I wanted to participate in your podcast is because we share the vision of living your ultimate life, a life that you love to live every day. And when we're living by somebody else's standards of what should or shouldn't be with regard to how we spend our money, we're a slave.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:07:24

It's true about everything. Like I am a testament to that. My own life, I lived with a very particular set of this is how you're supposed to be.

And it didn't just cover money, it covered everything. And I don't even remember feeling the sense of that I. That I was not only allowed, but supposed to discover for myself what anything meant.

It was a framework, all of it, and all the walls and bars, and some of them felt like bars. This is what you got to do. And you know, like many mine was tied to a particular religious construct. And if you don't do this, you're bad.

And it had the. It had a weight for me that was even bigger than the shame that we were just talking about of not having enough money.

The bad label was like this incomprehensible weight.

Wade Reed: 00:08:23

Yeah, it can be heavy, for sure. In fact, I had a client who once described the feeling they had about money, that it was an albatross around their neck.

That would pull them to the bottom of an ocean. If they jumped in, they would not be able to get it off.

And part of that was related to the debt they had taken on and some of the bad choices that had that had happened.

properties. You know, this is: 2008

And they just believed that it would always work because somebody said that it would. So, anyway, this is the sort of mission that I'm on, Kellen, is that we need to bring some awareness to the fact that money.

Is a construct of society, really. In its simplest form, it's a means to exchange with one another.

Where we used to barter, now out of ease, we exchange with credit card transactions, debit card transactions, physical cash, Venmo. And we rarely barter anymore. But ultimately that's still what it comes down to, is exchanging value one with another.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:09:43

Right?

Wade Reed: 00:09:43

And we now have digits on a bank account, on a ledger somewhere that describes our personal worth based on how much we have on that ledger. And that's just. I think that's the wrong approach to money. Money is. Money is a tool to help us accomplish our life's mission.

We get what we need according to the desires that we have and. Not good or bad. Right. There are people who are certainly greedy out there. There's crony capitalism that people get upset about.

I think there's also a form of sort of righteous capitalism or conscious capitalism, you might say, where people are really looking out for each other, doing the right thing for the right reasons, and creating businesses around that, solving problems for people. I think a lot of that still exists.

And I think we who are listening to this podcast and people attracted to live our ultimate life are probably in that category where we're trying to really bring light and truth to the world and in my case, help remove the feeling of being enslaved to our money by understanding what money is, how it works, and really how simple it can be.

And I've developed a framework about that that over 20 years now of working with a thousand plus clients, probably 20,000 conversations I've had over the two decades. I've seen patterns of what works and doesn't work.

And so my framework, I call it my awesome Money Method, and that's an acronym, O S O M. And I was sitting one Day whiteboarding. And these four words came to mind. Organize, systemize, optimize, and maximize. And I was just kind of brainstorming.

I put those on a whiteboard out in my hallway, and my son walks by and he says, dad, that says, awesome. I was like, oh, my gosh, you're right, son. You are awesome. Thank you for that. And so it became my awesome money method.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:11:38

Awesome money method. So I know that we're going to talk about more about it, and I also want to talk a lot about.

I know that you've recently done a book, and I want to talk about that too. And so I want to dig in just a little deeper before we get into the nuts and bolts of teaching. Because what's interesting to me is your desire.

And you. You acknowledge other people's desire to solve problems, add good to the world and everything else.

And what's really fun for me is to see the infinite number of ways that people.

That we can all do that, because people have this story that I don't matter very much or that everything I have to say has already been said, so what's the point? Or, you know, a similar expression of that. Sea, that abyss of doubt and the lie of smallness when the truth is your particular.

Like, there's a zillion people that talk about money. We got books and we got programs and we got Susie Orman and we got Dave Dorkstick, whatever his name is. I forgot Ramsey.

You know, we got all these people telling us, well, we don't need anybody else. And yet, having participated in that, your book, and visited with you for a while.

I know from my own experience that your voice, your story, your tools are different than other people's. And they're different not necessarily so much in structural things, but they're imbued with the energy of your own experience.

And so when you said that, you know, trying to add good to the world, you are, and so are a zillion other people. And I want to encourage every one of you to do what you feel because it is important and it's necessary. Now you can teach us.

Wade Reed: 00:13:32

Okay. I think that's a really important context. We all have our own uniqueness that we bring to a topic. And I've not been immune to that sense of.

Well, others have talked on this topic. What. What's my role? And I'm finding more and more. And in fact, I don't know if you remember this.

Earlier in the year, we were together in Pensacola and had a nice evening together, and part of our conversation was related to the topic of what is it that drives me in this realm of personal finance. And what it boiled down to me was not only the sense of individual slavery to money, but also what this does in a marriage dynamic.

Now, I know not everyone is married and maybe has been through multiple relationships. I'm a big fan of the Institute of Marriage still.

I believe that it has such a really important foundational role in society to bring man and woman together and children into a home that can be raised in love and righteousness and goodness and be brought to be creators and value creators in the world. And I've seen so many marriages break as a result of the topic of money.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:14:39

I couldn't agree more. And you know, I'm a big proponent of the family, even though I've been through my own sets of struggles with that.

But I know, you know, I've been married now 18 years this time, and I am just delightful. I've married, but I actually, you know, I got married to an angel, so that's the exception perhaps, but I couldn't agree more.

And I'm grateful that you have, have also seen and are driven by the difference it can make as the world becomes more greedy, more separate, more polarized, and more everything else.

The, the relationship and the together that you can, togetherness you can create by the unity around this one topic which permeates every area of our lives is just really important.

Wade Reed: 00:15:28

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Back in the 70s, a man that I followed named Marvin Ashton wrote this little book called One for the Money.

It's a little kind of primer on some principles around money. And he interviewed a young couple and they were just, you know, in their early twenties preparing to get married.

And he asked him of the many questions he asked, one of them was, who's going to manage the family finances? And they both looked at each other. I don't know, we haven't talked about it.

And of all the topics that had been addressed, maybe their, their family, how many kids they might have, you know, the jobs that they wanted to have, whether the wife would stay at home or not. You know, even their sex life may have been discussed and how that might be developed, but money had not been discussed and who would manage it.

And, and it really dumbfounded this man. He said, oh my gosh, like how many, how many couples?

So we looked it up and statistically back at that point, around 80% of marriages that ended in divorce claimed money was the problem. And today, Fast forward about 40 something years, it's still at least 50 to 55% who claim money as a primary reason that they separate.

And so what I'm finding, though, is the couples I've worked with, and I've worked with, almost all the people I've worked with, have been married. Many have cited that as they've dealt with this conversation together.

Oftentimes it's the husband or the wife who takes lead in the relationship about money.

The one talking to the financial advisors, the one a little more interested in being responsible for managing transactions and things that kind of happens, even if it doesn't get discussed. One tends to take lead and then the other just relies on that person and kind of takes a blind ear to it.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:17:13

And.

Wade Reed: 00:17:13

And, you know, they may decide they want to buy something or go somewhere, and the person who's managing the money doesn't really see it in the budget or the spending plan. And so they start to have this disagreement about money.

And ultimately it boils down to not having made some decisions together about their vision for their life. Each has their own separate vision, which is beautiful. And when is that coming together again in unity?

If you're married, the idea is that you unify yourselves and become one flesh to be united in all things.

And one of those things is your vision together of what your family is to look like, what your future is to look like, ultimately, even on separate paths, to some extent, coming together on what matters to both of you. So that as these decisions are made, money is the way we finance it.

The tool of money is how we finance or make the purchase decision of the new golf clubs or the handbag or the trip that we take or the car or the clothes. And if we're in misalignment because we haven't really had the conversation, it creates a rift.

And then oftentimes there's anger and frustration and it just gets avoided. And so I see another phenomenon of avoidance of the topic of money in relationship.

But when we have this conversation together, and because I've worked as a financial coach more than a salesman, most people in the financial world, unfortunately, because of the way the system is set up, become salesmen of either investments or insurance products. And maybe it's accounting products and services, and maybe it's estate planning or legal products and services, but ultimately it's. It's.

It's a product of some kind.

Well, as a coach, I fell into the realm of being counselor to some extent and just being willing to hear people and provide the context for people to go, okay, husband, this is what you're experiencing.

Wife this is what you're experiencing, you know, make you make sure each other hears that and they give them some space to hear each other and maybe pare back and practice some communication skills, which, you know, that wasn't my intended role to become a counselor, but you kind of have to be when you're in this type of situation because it's such a hot topic.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:19:12

Well, that's.

Wade Reed: 00:19:12

As people come together, they finally, like, get each other and they go, oh, money doesn't have to be challenging. We can let it be a unifying thing in our marriage instead of a rift.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:19:22

Well, what a. What a. What a thought. I want you to. I'm going to repeat that because it's such an important thing.

Money can be a unifier and indeed must be if you're going to live that ultimate life. Because if you've got something that is so universal, parcel as money in terms of it affecting many, if not all parts of your relationship.

And if it's not unified you, it's going to be really hard. You've got this great big, you know, elephant that you're not talking about and you just sort of Hope gets fed every day.

Wade Reed: 00:19:57

Yep.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:19:59

You know, hope it doesn't swing the trunk around and knock the walls down or whatever. I mean, you know, silly example, but it is.

I've seen it not as a money advisor at all, but certainly as a, as a coach who's dealt with people and had to think about their businesses and their mindset and growth opportunities. So that's all true and great. I love the passion that you're bringing to this work that you do.

Wade Reed: 00:20:24

Yeah. Thank you. So again, whether you're married or not, it doesn't matter.

But that's an undergirding thing for me because it's just such a core foundational value that I have. So as an individual, if you're not married, you may need to have conversations with loved ones about circumstances or challenges you're having.

And having good language about money is going to be helpful. Having frameworks about what money is, how it works, and how to be successful with it will be helpful.

So if we want to go into that framework, let me share with you what the the acronym stands for.

The first one is Organize and why Organize first, what I have found is that there are so many different financial documents that we have that are scattered all over the place.

Imagine, I'm sure everyone has a junk drawer somewhere in their home where they just throw their, their keys or their extra little thing, doodads, whatever. If that junk Drawer like I know it's in there somewhere is often the thing, that little pin or that little screw or that little, that.

That earring that I found the other day, it's in there somewhere. So we go rifling through and we eventually find it. But it takes us quite a bit of time to do that.

If instead we have a little organizer in there and little trays that different size things can go find, it makes it a lot easier to find those little trinkets and things that we're looking for. Well, our financial life is often scattered in a similar way. Our insurance documents are in paper format or digital format on some website somewhere.

Our tax documents, what we need to file our taxes is often missing. Our bank account and credit card statements.

Oftentimes I find people are spending on four or five different credit cards and no rhyme or reason to it, they're just like one day I spent on this card, another on this card and whatever, it gets chaotic.

The investment accounts, you know, your 401k or RSP if you're in Canada, your IRA accounts, your individual brokerage accounts that have the investments that you're using to try to prepare for your future. If you happen to have your estate planning done, where are those documents? How are they saved? Do you have a safe at home?

Do you have a safe box at the bank? Do you have them digital on a computer somewhere? It just feels kind of overwhelming.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:22:41

You know, I have to agree when every year, and I'm certainly not going to be a model of this, and it's a good thing I'm not trying to do what you do every year. When I got to prepare my tax return. It'S the same thing. It's scattered all over the place and I know sort of where it is.

And the first day or two is just spent putting all that crap in one place, right?

Wade Reed: 00:23:03

Yep, it's. And oftentimes I use tax planning and it's one of the most prominent things because most people are scared of tax season.

They don't know how to file a tax return, don't know how to read a tax return, don't really know what they should be providing to their tax preparer or if you're a business owner, a cpa, so they can actually do some strategy with you and help you minimize your taxes.

Oftentimes there's literally a grocery bag or a shoebox full of receipts that just gets dropped in the tax preparer's lap and like, good luck, you know, help me figure out what I owe. And that's really not helpful to anyone because you're going to miss deductions, you're going to overpay in taxes if that's the way you do things.

So what I have found over the years is that if we get organized first, and it's relatively simple, we.

It'll take some time, but you log into each of your insurance providers and your investment account providers and you download a most recent copy of your declaration pages or your. Your investment account statement.

Usually your tax return is available in digital format and create a Dropbox folder or a Google folder or an icloud or whatever your cloud drive is. Just find someone that you use consistently and create Personal financial Files, a folder called Personal Financial Files.

And then if you don't do anything else but just put it like the name of what it is first.

So like the word tax dash, you know, whatever that year's tax return is, the word investment, or just shorten it to inv Dash, whatever that, you know, Fidelity 401k account or Charles Schwab Brokerage, and then put ins for insurance dash and whatever your insurance product is, maybe the name of the company.

And you know, if it's a State Farm again in the United States, State Farm Auto insurance, State Farm Homeowner's insurance, or whoever your carrier is, just so you know who it's with and what it is. It'Ll automatically put it alphabetically for you.

Simple naming convention with a little bit of a header on there will let you know what it is and it'll put them all together. All your investment states statements are together, all your insurance statements are together, all your taxes are together. And then it's easy.

And why this matters is because when you're organized, it creates clarity. So the role of getting organized is to create clarity about what you actually have.

And when you're clear on what you have, then you can start to make decisions. It can ease some of the stress that you have. And I have a tool called the Total Wealth Organizer.

It's a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that I've put together where you can take all these documents that you've organized and put them into a single location, take the data out of them and plug them into and easy to fill out. Spreadsheet. You don't have to create it. It's chug and plug.

Just put the numbers in and it'll help you feel like, okay, now I can not only have the documents organized, but I have it in an, in a tool that I can look at these different sections of the spreadsheet and go. Okay, here's what my personal financial statement looks like. The, the value of what I own versus what I owe.

I can look at all my insurance is in one place. I can look at all my.

In fact, here's something I haven't talked about yet but organizing your financial team, who is my advisor for this insurance or this investment or this tax situation? What's their contact information?

And in the end what will happen is whoever takes lead on this will feel much more clear and confident about what they have. But then the loved one, the spouse who's not as keen on managing it, knows where to go to find the information.

And then they feel more unified because now they're both aware of what's there.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:26:51

I, I can just, I want to just insert here. It's so true and it's interesting because I've adopted different roles in.

You know, I've been married before, but there was some situations where I, I was in charge of all the money and I had filing cabinet and just manila folders with those things on it before we put things in digital. And as being married to this woman now, Joy, she really likes that. So I'm now in the role of. I don't really know everything that's going on.

And so it's interesting to feel that complete shift. Like I don't.

And in some ways I enjoy not having to worry about it and in other ways, you know, I have to say I, I actually don't know a bunch of stuff. And so it's funny for me as you tell this story because I've been in both of these roles so it's funny.

Wade Reed: 00:27:42

Yeah, I'm sure everyone has to some extent and. I obviously, maybe not obviously, but you might have guessed I take lead in the finance in my family.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:27:53

I would have expected that.

Wade Reed: 00:27:56

My wife is extremely capable. When we were early on in our marriage, she did a little bit more of it than I did.

But now her primary role is stay at home mom and she takes care of the six children that we have and she helps with their educational pursuits. And I've created ease for her by having these systems in place so at any time she can know where to look.

And okay, we've got this much in the bank and hey wait, I've got this expenditure for the kids. Is it okay if we do that? And it's a quick conversation because we both know we highly value education.

So when it's an educational pursuit or an extracurricular that develops our kids talents, it's almost always a yes. Because we know what's there. It makes it really easy because the confidence comes with having that awareness. So that's okay.

The next piece, once we have things organized, is to put a system in place, a system for how to keep those things updated. So on a quarterly basis, as your statements come in, you can update that file that you've put together.

Maybe you start to create folders, because now you have multiples of these particular statements. So you might make a folder that says investments and folder that says insurance.

And then within that, give it some naming convention that keeps them organized. So the system though is mostly related to the way we manage the income and the outflow.

You know, if both of you are working and Maybe you've got W2 income, you know, wage income, and it's direct deposited into a bank account. Usually it's going to a checking account is what I found. And the checking account is like the.

When we used to carry cash around, it would be in the front pocket, typically maybe the back pocket if you have a wallet. But it was in our pocket, it was easily accessible. And usually if it's in your pocket, it's available to what Kellen spend without thinking. Yep.

And whatever we want, it's just available. And the checking account basically acts in that way for us. In today's world, it does.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:29:46

The debit cards are easy to use and. Same thing.

Wade Reed: 00:29:50

Yeah.

So what's happening is that we're typically spending every dollar that comes in and we don't really have a way to capture savings for short term or long term things or to set money aside for giving. Remember that third piece of my three year old little bank account box? Spend, save and give.

So what I have found is that if we go to the checking account, we think it's all available to spend. And so we typically do that.

But we might say, you know, I got to save for this car down payment or I've got to save for paying back a debt, or I've got to save for a down payment on a house or, you know, I want to start saving for retirement or improve the amount of savings going to retirement.

But if our system is currently going to our front pocket of our pants, which is our checking account, and it's all mentally available to spend because it's in that account, we typically will spend it. So we gotta adjust the order of the flow of our money, not necessarily the amount of money, but the flow of the money.

Okay, so just imagine you're both making 50 grand a year. So you got 100,000 a year household income, and it's all going to the checking account, and you're virtually spending everything.

And you say, well, we want to save for something, so let's start putting 500amonth into a savings account. So it goes to the checking and then of the savings account, and you do it without automation.

You just, okay, well, we got to move that money over here. But then maybe you hadn't thought about what your spending needs are in reality, and so you have to pull the money back out of savings.

I see this over and over and over again. We call it kind of the hamster wheel or the lifestyle creep hamster wheel.

What happens is our income increases, our spending increases, we want to save, but we don't have a system for that. So here's the magic Kellen. I had a mentor who, in his second career, became a financial coach.

So this man's in his late 70s at the time I met him, and I said, hey, will you mentor me? I want to know what you've Learned over your 25 years as a coach, but also as a businessman. What is. What's most successful with the flow of money?

I said, this is what I'm having my clients do. They typically go to a checking account, and then they have them send it to a savings account automatically. And it just doesn't seem to be working.

He said, wade, you've got it wrong. I said, what? You've got it wrong.

And he started to share with me this concept of the spending checking account is the spending accounts, the front pocket. He said, you literally have to put it all in a savings account first. Literally send your direct deposit to a savings account first.

He said, by virtue of this one thing. Savings account says it's for later, checking account says it's for now.

So if you put it in your savings account first and then only move out what you need to, which requires that you look at your spending and go, okay, what is our average spending every month? And of that 100,000 that's coming in, let's say you need 5,000 of it.

Part of it's going to taxes, but you only need 5,000, but you're typically spend it all. Well, if we actually only need 5,000, let's only move 5,000 out into the checking account. And that way we know what's available.

Even if we're using a credit card to temporarily delay our expenses, we know the total amount we can spend on that credit card is, say, three of the 5,000. The other 2,000 is going to come out through automatic transfer. To pay a mortgage and to pay other bills that can come out of the checking.

But you know, it's 5,000. You got 8,000 coming in, 5,000 coming out. Some of the taxes are withheld, so whatever's left over automatically stays there. Calendar.

And we save first, literally every dollar, which tells us I'm valuable. The money I've earned is mine first to keep before I let anyone else have a call upon it. It's mine. I honor it. I respect it.

I've done something of value to receive this, and now I have to be a steward over it. I have to make good choices over it. So I'm going to save it all first and then carefully decide what I'm going to spend it on.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:33:40

You know that. That piece right there, You've got it all wrong.

Save first and then figure out what you really want to move is really important because when you spend first, then you think, I'm going to save, and I'll just put whatever's left. And there's never anything left.

Wade Reed: 00:33:53

Never anything left.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:33:54

Yeah. And so that is. I love that framing.

Wade Reed: 00:33:59

And it just slows us down. It's in a different account. It's kind of out of sight, out of mind. It's not in the checking account.

When you pull up the bank account on our phones, it's in a different account. So we go, oh, it's not available. I wanted to spend 500, but that was just a whim. It's not in the checking account. I'm not going to spend it.

It just literally causes us to delay our spending choices a little bit, which helps us say no more often to the. The spontaneous transactions that aren't.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:34:23

Right. Right.

Wade Reed: 00:34:25

You know what I mean?

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:34:26

I do.

Wade Reed: 00:34:27

So let's. Let's jump to the next one more on that. On. On my. In my content, if you want to go look it up.

I've got my own podcast called the Wealth Acceleration Podcast. You can find an episode where I talk more about these things there, too. So S is systemized. That creates ease.

When we have a system in place that's automated, that creates ease. So clarity first, then ease. The third piece is optimize. And to optimize is to get the most efficiency out of something.

So putting the system in place helps us optimize our cash flow or our spending plan. And we get to keep more, which then allows us to do what?

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:35:07

Save it. Have investments, grow, do other things. Right.

Wade Reed: 00:35:10

Pick the trip we want to take, have the money for the down payment, Fulfill our life's goals.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:35:16

Right.

Wade Reed: 00:35:16

Actually, accomplish them because there's money available for that.

So we optimize our life, saying, okay, now that I have this system in place, let's get really clear on our vision and decide what's the highest and best use of this money. And also, since we have this awareness, are we overspending on something? Have we talked to our insurance agent about the cost of our insurance?

Could we move from one company to another and reduce our costs for the same coverage? Can we put something in place now that was missing? Now that we have some funds to do that, maybe we need to improve our life insurance.

Maybe we need to pay for the estate plan we've always been saying we need to do, and we have some funds available to do that. And that's part of optimization, improving and tweaking the things that we have. So that creates efficiency. And the last part, the M, is maximize.

And this is where things get really fun. Oso are the three musts before you can do maximize, which is about creating compound growth. And that's where, as you said earlier, we can buy assets.

We can make investments that might be starting the business you've always wanted to start because you have funds to do that. Maybe it's buying a rental property, maybe it's buying a duplex.

If you want to live in half and have somebody pay most of your mortgage for you and have a tenant next door, upstairs or downstairs. Maybe it's investing in somebody else's business. Maybe it's, you know, making some sort of individual stock purchase, whatever. Right.

You just have a right to do that and start to create some compounding growth on your surplus money that's there because you have a system in place and we learn some responsibility, and it's a skill set. By the way, Kellen, becoming an investor isn't automatic. Nobody will ever care more about your money than you.

So even if you try to pass it off to some investment advisor and ask them to take care of it for you, they're busy doing other people's stuff, too, and they will miss things, and they'll make investments maybe you don't agree with, and there will be money that's lost.

So if you are willing to take some personal accountability for your life and the things that matter to you, you'll be more likely to make better investments, and you'll do so slowly and deliberately and be more likely to be successful with that.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:37:21

It, it. When you describe it this way, it feels very methodical and organized, which, of course, is what you intended. And I can tell you in.

In you know, I've had the opportunity to read. Read the book that you have and look at the program. And I. I felt it then and I feel it now as you describe it, the.

The power of a system to take you from one step to the other so it doesn't feel mysterious or complicated. And I felt that then as I read it, and I feel it now as you describe that.

Wade Reed: 00:37:53

I'm glad to hear that it's landing.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:37:55

Well, then it's just right.

Wade Reed: 00:37:58

So finally we found each other earlier this year, and you told me you had this program to help write a book. And I had been wanting to do that forever, and I said, okay, I'm going to jump into this group and get this book written.

It's been on my heart for years. And so the book is going to be called True Wealth. Replacing Financial Fear and Worry with Confidence and Capability.

And it's going to have some of my backstory in there. It's going to have this framework in there and a lot of examples of how to apply the framework.

It's got some case studies of clients that have been successful in applying these things. And.

True wealth, though it's a deliberate choice of words, wealth obviously kind of invokes the idea of money and preparing for retirement and success and all that. But true. What is true? What is that part? And that gets at the fact that there's other four really important areas of our life.

There's our physical health.

There's our emotional and intellectual health, the things that we pursue that are interesting to us, that develop our mind and help us be more valuable to society. There's the social aspect. That's the marriage component, the children, the neighbors, the colleagues, the community support that we participate in.

And then there's the spiritual side of our lives, our connection with God or higher power, the motives that we have to do good in the world because we believe that there's a higher purpose than just human pleasures. There's more to it. So those four things, the physical, mental, spiritual, social, and did I get them right?

Physical, mental, spiritual, social, those four. Money just helps us get more of those things.

So I like to remove the roadblock of money, the sense of slavery, so we can be unshackled and have the freedom to choose into the life we love. And those other four areas, you've defined.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:39:53

It in a way. Yeah. When you say true, and you've defined it in a way that's just. The podcast is purpose, prosperity and joy.

And I use prosperity and sort of that same larger context and not just Cash, it includes that.

But it, you know, having been somebody that made more than they knew what to do with and had, you know, the ladder on the wrong wall, sort of example and, and have it get to all kinds of stuff that, you know, I had to fix later. Money isn't the answer.

And so the concept of true wealth implies an idea of peace, perspective of, you know, being confident and capable, rather than just a pile of cash. Right?

Wade Reed: 00:40:37

That's exactly it. Yeah. So that, that book should be, should be available about the time this episode airs mid December. So that's the goal.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:40:49

I love it.

Wade Reed: 00:40:50

Hopefully listeners, if it's not, there'll be a wait list. If it is, you can just go grab it.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:40:54

So what I want you to do now is I want you to tell people, you mentioned your podcast. I want you to tell people about your show, your website, where to find you, because they've heard this.

I have participated in the flow of your explanation.

You know, you've been on the LA talk radio show, and yet I heard a bunch of stories and examples and things here that were different, which we intended. And I want people to know where to find you, where to get your advice on a regular basis, like where are you and where do we go to find more.

Wade Reed: 00:41:24

Yeah, so my website's called Money Mastery coaching and that's a.com moneymasterycoaching.com. you'll find a lot of resources there. You'll find me on Instagram and Facebook primarily. I'm on LinkedIn as well. Feel free to look me up there.

Some, some great stuff's coming out. I've got a course that's going to launch associated with the book that will go through this awesome framework and provide context.

You'll have access to that total wealth organizer that I, that I mentioned as a part of that course. I've got a spending tracker and planner available again on the website or as a package, depending on how you.

You get in, that helps you track what's going on. You need to have about 90 days of tracking to be clear on what the average is for the monthly spending to put that system in place.

I'm not a huge believer in tracking every single penny every single month. It gets onerous and challenging.

You can get to a point where it's, it's pretty consistent and you just work on averages, but you need to do it for a good 90 days to get a sense of that. So you have a tool for that called the spending tracker and planner. All these things working together.

I have this financial organization Guide that talks. You know, as I mentioned earlier in the organization part of our conversation, that sort of structure, I've gotten a written format.

You can get, it's all there. MoneyMasteryCoaching.com is the primary place to find me.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:42:44

You know, I can tell you people that are listening just there's lots of people that talk about money and they're going to tell you what to do with it.

The stuff that I have heard and read and been, you know, participated with Wade in as he created some of this is as good or better than any that I've heard.

It's coming from a place of truth, personal experience and with a genuine engine in him to help you create that sense of peace, control and get over this fear that we all have, have had in greater and lesser amounts about money. And even if you had more money than it never was a problem, then it's like ignorance, okay, so you can get past the fear and, or the ignorance.

And for most of it it's not ignorance, the fear. Nobody wants to look under the hood because it's like, oh crap, I don't want to do that.

Wade Reed: 00:43:38

You know, it's a mess, it gets a little scary. And I, I'll be honest, those that it doesn't go away when you have more income.

I work with people in, in low income brackets and upper six figure brackets, sometimes in the millions. And there's this sense still of uncertainty about what's happening with the money.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:43:57

I'm laughing because I was that guy. You know, I had boatloads of cash and didn't know what was going on. So I was that guy.

Wade Reed: 00:44:08

Money is not the solution. More money is not the solution. We have to become more financially aware. A higher level of financial literacy. Might even call it a financial iq.

You know, we need to improve that so we have the confidence.

And I spent nine years working with another organization, coaching hundreds and hundreds of small business owners and I found this to be a missing piece. We would, we would teach them all these tax strategies and all these cool ways to free up cash flow and keep more of what they make.

But they often still felt uncertain about what their actual day to day looked like. And so we hated to talk about budgeting with that company. And I don't love the word budget.

I think we all have some sort of negative visceral reaction to it. It's like, oh, that means I'm going to be restricted in what I'm doing.

So I use the word spending planning or spending strategy or cash flow plan or strategy And I think that eases things a little bit, but the idea is we take a proactive approach to it.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:45:06

Yeah. If I pick a goal that I want, it's a question of do I really want it or not. So, no, nobody's going to make you.

Nobody's going to tie your burn your debit card. But the question is, you've made a commitment to yourself. Do you want this or do you want that?

And it, it allows you to make those choices on purpose instead of accidentally.

Wade Reed: 00:45:26

Yeah.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:45:26

And I, I really like that. Yeah. So is there anything else that we haven't covered that you want to say? We're, we're, we're at time.

Wade Reed: 00:45:36

Yeah.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:45:36

And I want to make sure you've said everything that you want to, you want to share.

Wade Reed: 00:45:41

I, I feel really good about what we've shared today, Kellen. I hope the listeners, I hope you guys are really feeling a sense of inspiration about. You can handle this. Money doesn't have to be this cloud, this.

I call it the money fog. You know, when we feel disorganized, everything's here and there and logins. I don't know where they are in my papers. I don't know where they are.

I don't know what I'm earning. I don't know what I'm spending. I don't know what I have in my investments. Should I be doing this? Should I be doing that?

I call out the money fog, and it just feels like we need some light to come burn off that fog.

And that's what I'm hopeful today will help do for you to start to burn off some of that fog, to have some ways to get your life organized so that ease, confidence and capability takes over from that sense of fear and worry.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:46:24

Well, I want you to know, both from your description today and from what you've taught in the book, that I can sense that. And I want to say to the listeners, it's really not as hard as you're pretending.

The money fog comes because me and you, we're like, oh, I don't want to do this. It's going to be hard, and I'm not going to like what I see.

And that might be true for five minutes, but you can get organized so you can live in the fog the rest of your life, or you can turn on the lights and get clear.

Wade Reed: 00:46:50

Yeah.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:46:51

Wade, thanks for sharing everything with us today. I really appreciate it. I, I enjoy talking to you every time.

Wade Reed: 00:46:58

Love it. Kellen, appreciate being here.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:47:01

I want you to. Listeners, listen to this again.

He talked fast because he just is eager to explain all the pieces to you and they're not complicated and they're not over your pay grade. And if you choose to remain ignorant or if I do, all it means is I won't know if I'm accomplishing any of my goals.

And then a year or two or a decade later I'll be like, yeah, have I made any progress? I don't know. So I want to tell you it's not that hard.

And this understanding, this clarity, this control over this really important piece of life is a big tool to move forward and create your own ultimate life. Never hold back and you'll never ask why.

Wade Reed: 00:47:49

Open your heart.

Kellan Fluckiger: 00:47:51

And this time around, right here, right now, your opportunity for massive growth is right in front of you. Every episode gives you practical tips and practices that will change everything.

If you want to know more, go to Kellen from flukegarmedia.com if you want more free tools, go here. Your ultimate life ca subscribe Share.