Podcast Episode 15: Your Body is the Most Important Asset in Designing and Building a Good Life (Part 2)

Hello, this is Cory Shepherd, vice president of Sound Financial Group, and I’m excited to welcome you to Sound Financial Bites where we bring you bite sized pieces of financial knowledge to help you design and build a good life.

Hello, and welcome to episode two where we’re spending some time with Krisstina Wise, longtime friend of mine, successful business owner, and coach in helping people design and build a good life. In fact, her real estate company is called the Good Life Team, and in all of her coaching programs what you’re going to notice is the focus on making sure that you’re wealthy beyond your assets. In fact, what you’re also doing is taking care of the rest of your life. I hope you enjoy part two of two as much as I enjoyed the conversation with Krisstina.

If you’re going to move to this other side that we’re talking about, you have to get naked, you have to meet with a planner, you’re going to have to get some help, and just know that it comes with the territory if you want to really have riches and wealth, like really.

I do love the metaphor going to the doctor because even if you’re really fit, and in good shape, and the doctor says, “Hey you got to take off your clothes. I’ll be back in a minute.” There’s nobody that’s like, “You know what, I’ve been really looking forward to showing my quads off to somebody.” Even somebody who’s in great shape is going to have something that they feel embarrassed about, and the reason — we’ll just do that for a doctor, we’ll almost always only be because we’ve got some acute issue. Not only should we probably do that with a doctor more often, but we need to do that more often with an advisor, somebody that can take that holistic view of money. That’s what we try to do here, and helping people do that design and build a good life. One quick shift in topic, Krisstina, periodically on these podcasts what I will do is give people a fun good life tip. Something that they can do, and I didn’t prep you for this, so sorry. Some piece of technology where you might be able to say I’ve used this piece of technology made my life better. One, my good life tip for the day that I didn’t realize until relatively recently, but it’s been amazing is using Siri on my iPhone and its geo-fencing ability to remind me, when I leave work, to do things, or when I’m leaving the house, or when I’m coming to the house. It automatically knows when I’m moving in and out of that geo-fence and produces the reminder.

Remind me to call Paul when I get to the office.

Yes, exactly right, and what’s that done for me from a good life perspective is that I can do that quick note with no new thinking. I also use something like Evernote and the secret weapon philosophy with it. But that quick note allows me to, something distracts me, I need to call Krisstina when I get to the office tomorrow. I make the quick notes now I’m back and totally present with my family. Not having prepared you for that one, is there anything that’s top of mind for you from either a technology perspective, or something you’ve done structurally in your own life that has made life the kind of thing somebody could leave this podcast and do directly as a result of that idea.

Well, there’s maybe two things that are jumping out at me. You stole a couple of mine I used. Hey Siri is a good one too if you haven’t set up your iPhone just say, “Hey, Siri,” that you don’t have to touch the button you just say, “Hey, Siri”. Now you don’t even have to push your button when you’re driving you just say, “Hey, Siri, please call Paul Adams for me.” It’ll dial the office or, “Hey Siri get me directions to this sushi restaurant,” or, “Hey, Siri, remind me to call Paul when I get to the office.” So anyway, the Hey Siri is a really great feature if you haven’t set that up, which is with the newest upgrade. Let’s see… As far as other tools, there’s something outside of what I love internally, which is Slack. It’s a really great tool for managing teams in communications to get out of email house. Slack is a good tool that I use, and then another one that I’ve used recently that really helps me manage my team, and my own sort of to-dos is Trello. It’s a task management tool, and it’s a really great app, so I like apps to integrate with the software. So, no matter if I’m on my desktop or my phone, everything integrates. It’s a really great thing just to do items, and you can set up different boards. It’s more effective than, for example, I use to do Evernote to do some task management, and checklists, and stuff. Trello, you can set up different boards, I can share boards so I can really keep the bird’s eye view of what I need to work on, what my teams working on, another very easy- part of my motto is simplification so I’m just always looking to simplify things to be just more efficient or more effective and take one more click out, or one more layer of complexity out of life. Those are some tech, some of the apps that I use, and then one other thing when it just comes to managing money as I talk about the concept of bucketing, and so what I recommend is you have buckets for all your spending so that you spend according to your bucket. You have a financial wealth bucket, and it’s an actual account. So you have your main checking account, which I call a home operating account. Your first bucket off the top, if you have to pay your taxes, you have a tax bucket. You have your investment bucket, so 15% off the top of your gross income goes to your financial investment bucket assuming –

We call that one the wealth coordination account.

There you go, so that’s your —

Only able to buy assets. Not to be spent on anything else.

Nope, just assets, but then also the other 5% off the top. I suggest 20% off the top for investments to take care of your future self. So, yes, just your financial asset accumulation bucket, your Wack, I guess, you’re calling it. Mine is just called –

Wealth Corporate Account, WCA.

Okay, WCA, so that, I just call an investment bucket, but then there’s also your health wealth investment bucket. So 5% of your gross income goes towards to put into that account that can be an HSA that you max out, and which you can contribute to your HSA. At least that’s one place to put money aside if you’re doing an HSA, which I really highly recommend. But then I put a lot more. I take 5% of our total gross income off the top, and that’s what my husband and I in the family spend for our preventive maintenance healthcare. I get acupuncture, and I get massages, and I get glutathione IV drips, and I do lots of blood work, I do lots of bio hacking, I buy certain equipment, I have a sauna in my house, and I have a walking treadmill. These different equipment even, it’s expensive. It’s expensive to take care of your health as an investment, but when you take the money right off the top then you get used to spending what’s left over. Then the other bucket, your other spending buckets, and I teach the concept of you spend to save, and you save to spend. So, your three savings buckets below the line aren’t investment buckets, they’re short term savings buckets. They’re your reds buckets, and of course we’ve all heard of the rainy day bucket. People get confused to the difference between investing and savings. A lot of planners, they mesh all that work together, and I teach that they’re very distinct. Investments are long term future, non-liquid, compounding accumulating assets. You do not touch them, they’re for our future self somewhere to put in there, what I call, above the line. They can straight up your gross income, and then below the line, part of my money management flow system, I talk about how to flow your money for wealth. Is that then you have your spending, which you spend on just your living expenses. Your other three spending accounts are what I said your rainy day. That we know that that’s a savings. It’s short-term. You hope you don’t have to necessarily use it, but you need to know that you have liquid money right there that when life happens that you have access to that money. Clearly we all teach rainy day buckets, so that’s our bucket. You have that six to nine months living expenses set aside. You have your E bucket, which is your education bucket. It’s the way you start building that either for you kids if you want to, or for yourself. If we’re going to stay relevant, and valid in our careers – again, there’s a lot of free information online – but if we’re going to make high incomes to continue to grow our incomes we have to personal development, professional development. Things are changing rapid fast, and most people I know, they quit learning and they can’t afford to go to the conference or to do whatever they’re going to do. So, I teach there’s a percentage of your money that comes off and goes into your education bucket. We always have the money, so we’re not saying oh I’d love to go learn that but I can’t afford it because it’s up in Seattle, and I can’t afford the plane ticket and the stay, or whatever, without it really hitting my budget. That’s the education bucket, and then the third one is the dream bucket, and that’s the stay out of debt bucket. How to stay out of dreams savings bucket, and that’s to save money for that next car. So you pay cash for it, it’s to save money for the home improvement, it’s to save money with the new sofa so that you don’t put it on a room store credit card or whatever. It’s the stay out of debt so that those high purchases, the vacation, doesn’t go on your credit card. That all comes out of what I call the dreams bucket, or the stay out of debt bucket. Then you’re saving, you’re spending every single month, and you’re shaving a little bit off of every check to slowly build these buckets so that nothing ever hits any one big caught off guard – one big outflow a month that nobody can really afford. So, it’s a very specific way to start, and this is how you spend your way to become rich. You spend it through your different buckets.

That’s great, and you talk about the future savings. We had a unique opportunity, about eight of us have combined efforts here with the firm, and we’re releasing another book later this year. I guess it’s called The Anthology Format because there’s several different authors. When we had this guy, who’s a bit of a coach, help us sketch out what the chapters were going to be. He asked, “What do people get when they work with you in it?” Everybody was ready with this long list of the kind of benefits in the wellbeing and peace of mind of everything of working with our firm specifically. He said okay, he finished that up and he’s writing on the whiteboard. He takes that one, and puts it on the wall, and then new blank sheet. He says, “What are people willing to give up to work with you or to have those things?” and you know, what was the major hit us all in the center of the chest. After everyone was quiet for about a minute I said, “I think I’m about to say what everybody here is afraid to say.” and that is people aren’t willing to give up anything. Then a big part of — and we have seen people in let’s just take somebody who’s early 50s, who if they just made some big changes in their life, they could literally save enough money to be financial secure, not over the top spending, but be financially secure, health-wise secure in their old age and they won’t do it. Like, “We really like this house,” or, “Our kids love coming in this house,” and what we realize is about the only thing that people are really comfortable with is saving part of what’s coming in the future. So, if somebody gets their mindset changed, and I think that especially when going to events, events are great for decisions and commitments, but then we have to live them out every day afterwards. So I could see people going to the event, and going, “Okay, I got to make big changes,” and then almost what they have to do whether it’s that, or hopefully if you’re listening to this podcast you may not be able to write it, or you can’t. At least, not without significant pain because if you’re driving down the road, and your BMW 7 Series right now that you shouldn’t have bought – you can’t just take it back because you got a three-year lease, but what you can do is make a commitment to start filling those buckets, or we call them short-term, midterm, long-term buckets with a wealth coordination account feeding them. You can commit that the next increase I get, or the next whatever I get that I didn’t expect, I’m going to save half that. So I guess my question for you is I know we haven’t talked about it yet. You have these events, these Wealthy Wellthy events, and maybe you could talk two things: a little bit about what that conference is structured like when people get a chance to engage you in your organization that way, number one and then number two, what do you think people have to do to get the mindset changed enough to not only commit to changing something tomorrow, but to literally go back in their lives and make some massive changes today.

Change is the hardest thing right? That behavior change. Well, part A of your question is I do have a Wealthy Wellthy conference, and that’s where I teach really the mindset strategy at a high level for money wealth and health wealth. I bring in health experts, I bring in money experts, I teach my systems the way I teach money and health. That’s certainly for those actually this triggering like, “Holy cow, yeah. I really do want to own this health wealth, and money health — I mean, money health, and health wealth thing,” so but then beyond that, I actually have a money course. It’s called Mindful Money, and I teach my very precise, specific protocol for managing money and flowing it exactly within its formula. There’s a formula. So, I teach exactly 100% of gross income, 15% goes to investment bucket, 5% goes to your health investment bucket. You get to spend 100% of what’s below that line, and that’s called your spending cash. Not more than 80% of what’s leftover that spending cash can go towards your living expenses, and then part of the exercise is the work to start these baby steps on how to make change is one of the exercises that I ask people do. Everybody listening can do this when they get home: look at all of their expenses and go ahead and circle the expenses that actually provide a lot of meaning to your life. If you have a cable bill, is this cable meaningful? I mean, it adds meaning to my life, and to my family. These expensive cars, are they meaningful? Is that Nordstrom’s credit card, is it meaningful to really connect, what I call, money and meaning as an exercise? Then, with your reds bucket, it’s 5%, 5%, 5%, and then I talk about debt reduction also of your spending cash. It’s a formula that I teach so that people at least have a formula that’s guaranteed to work and if you follow this you can’t not get rich, like really, because the math and just following that system, if you learn this system — so first we have to learn money. We have to get over some psychology money hang ups. We have to learn money mechanics. Then I teach, for example, through Mindful Money from my specific system that’s guaranteed to work. Part of the program going through it, for example, is that then you can at least make a choice. The first part is having the knowledge to be able to make the choice. Most people they can’t just radically change their, life like you said. You just can’t get rid of the two BMW payments, but you can start making these little baby shifts and start looking at, “Okay, where can I make different shifts on my spending that I can shave a little bit out of cable, and put that cable in one of these other buckets and start shaving little pieces.” So that’s step one, and then step two is really just asking the question is do I want to sacrifice my future self for the saking of overspending today? Because to your point earlier is that there is going to be a confrontation, and just like our health and our money that there becomes a future point in time when it’s really going to suck. So, it’s better to go ahead and make some behavioral shifts today.

Well, so many times people go through and the vice president of my company here, Corey, I wish I could remember the name of the character, but there’s a character in a sitcom that will consistently say, “Oh, that’s a future Paul problem,” or whatever the character’s name is. That’s not my problem, that’s tomorrow Paul. He’ll worry about that hangover. Tonight, I’m going to go ahead and drink. That’s a 30 years from now Paul problem, the money. But once future Paul runs into that problem, or future Krisstina runs into that problem, they’re now at the point that they have no ability to do anything about it. The time is long past when they could do anything about it. We’re not thinking about that future us. Ben Stein, I don’t know if you read much of his stuff. The guy, the actor, he’s an economist. He’s known for the, “Bueller, Bueller, Bueller comment in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” You know that comment used to not show my age, now it does? What he did is he talked about this idea being interviewed about the tremendous amount of debt that people have. The guy interviewed says, “Oh, you mean like credit card debt?” He says “No,” he says, “Think about how much money is required for you to have the same income and retirement as you have today.” If you net present value that back to today, most people in this country, especially people that are earning top 1%, owe themselves millions, but they’re not recording it on their balance sheet.

Yeah, that’s well said. It reminds me or causes me to think that when I start my money classes and my workshops. I have my Wealthy Wellthy conference, I have my money course, and I have some workshops that I do, but how I start my workshops I always start it with the question is, “What is rich? So, tell me the distinction for being rich. Raise your hand if you want to be rich,” and either if you don’t want to declare that publicly, if it’s politically incorrect. If you want to at least declare it privately because guess what? Everybody wants to be rich, but what is it? I want to be it, but what is it? Is it quantifiable? It’s a starting question because I think it’s like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know what rich is,” and so I let them know, by the end of the day, if you’re in this day-long workshop, I’ll let you know my distinction for being rich. Really it’s a simple distinction that I use, and you can quantify it and being rich can be different numbers to different people. But, really, what it boils down to is being rich to have enough income generated from your assets that underwrites the cost of living the lifestyle that you want. So when you reach the point where your assets take your 4% number. If $40,000 is enough to underwrite the cost of living the lifestyle that’s plenty okay for you then you need a million bucks. You can work off some of those numbers, but it’s looking at setting up your life so that your future self at whatever point and time, and granted there’s so much to talk about. We have to get over some of this language like retirement, and some of this antiquated language that we use and mindset that we use because you can’t retire anymore when retirement was set up. That’s a whole other conversation, but the point is you keep accumulating until the day your assets produce, replace your working income as much as your working income or more, assuming that that’s enough to cover the cost of living. It’s very easy then to quantify how much money is enough, and what is being rich to me and my family. It’s an accumulation game, and we spend our way to hit those numbers. We don’t income our way.

Yes, yeah.

It all boils down to that, and once you know that it’s like in debate I teach this system exactly that enables you to do that very easily, and then money can actually be so simple. You want to look at it, then you feel at least you’re in a little bit better physical shape when you take your clothes off than terrible shape as you continue to work with planners, and have these types of conversation. At least then, you’re not embarrassed to take off your clothes. It’s actually a little bit more comfortable. You want to look at your money, you want to talk to others about it, you actually want to grow it, you have confidence, and you know you’re not living a lie. It’s more of an authentic lifestyle because I think, even subconsciously, we know when we’re living a life we can’t afford. We know when this isn’t completely real, we know when we’re kind of – I don’t know – we’re not quite what we represent ourselves to be. It’s psychologically it’s this little kind of death of a thousand cuts.

Yeah, and when we watch, my wife and I, will watch families go through stuff who are in our lives where they hit whatever the bump in the road is, and there’s no disagreement, no stress going on in our household only because we’ve set ourselves up specifically just on the financial front in a way that when you talk about this security and authenticity that you can have, I think that also rolls right back to your marriage and rolls right back to some of your close, caring, and intimidate relationships. Something I hope to have impact — my kids are real little right now, but I hope that that’s one of those things that will also impact those relationships because we’re talking about it.

One hundred percent, and marriage that’s another thing. I teach a course that’s called Money and Marriage and your point exactly is that money is one of the top three reasons why people get divorced. It’s the number one thing that couples fight about. When you do have a money understanding together, I really encourage couples to learn about money together, and to tackle these things together. You and your wife, when you have a plan, and you know where you’re going, and you have your philosophies, and you’re both in this together, and you can talk about it, and you can make decisions, it’s not a conflict. It’s actually an opportunity and you really are in talk about money in a way that’s like, “How do we use our money to serve what we care about and our value system as a family and who we are as a couple and how we exist in the community?” Then it becomes what I call a pillar of your marriage versus something that is part of what tears your marriage apart.

Yeah, it’s great. It’s great. one more good life tip that I have that I don’t want to forget. I’ll have to put it at the beginning of one of our other podcasts so that we don’t forget. There is a website called prosperity4kids.com, and it has a book that goes for your kids called Money Mama and the Three Little Pigs. There is this big pig that is 70% of the total volume of the piggy bank, and then three little pigs that are 10% of the volume each. Your kids, we have three of these in our house, you can write on them and label them the way you want. We have one labeled tithe, one labeled investing, one labeled saving, and one labeled spending. Money Mama is the spending one. So my kids, for the first time, two weekends ago we actually emptied their piggy banks, counted how much money was together. There’s a three, four, and five-year-old, and then I was able to tell them how much money we have and we went onto Amazon and purchased the stuff that they had enough money to get. Andrew got a couple of Lego sets. My girls got, exclusively, My Little Ponies with their money and they took a bag of money to go to church to give their tithe, and now I’ve got this little stack of money that I’m going to either throw inside their life insurance, or open up a brokerage account for the three of them to work on their money together because they’re going to have one fund until each kid turns 18, and then spend of their third. But you just made me think of that when you talked about money in the home, and I’ve been meaning to share that with our listeners. Thank you for that.

You start with the kids, and the kids have no money hang ups so they can learn very quickly, and then we tend to impose our money psychology, our money hang ups on our kids, and we adopt all of our hang ups for our parents mostly. But, here’s the thing, pretty much the exact thing that you’re doing with your kids is what I teach grownups.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s great. It’s great, I love it. Everybody, Krisstina Wise now, I didn’t tell you about this earlier, but it’s clear distinction, K-R-I-S-S-T-I-N-A and you start typing Krisstina with two S’s like that and she is all over the first search in Google. It will self-complete and pull you in her direction. You can go to krisstina.com and I think there, Krisstina, they can get your ability to look at the workshops, they’re going to be able to see the podcasts, they’re going to be able to see the blog post that you’ve written. Did we miss anything in any way that people would get the opportunity to engage with you?

No, that’s great. So yes, just type in my name, K-R-I-S-S-T-I-N-A.COM, or wealthywellthy.life which is harder to spell. Well, keep it easy, and then also if you want to have more conversations, and listening to talk on the money side of things, and the health side of things, and the integration between the two, I actually interview a lot of experts on the health side because I’m very passionate about learning for all of us to learn how to be optimally healthy because, like I said, our body is our number one asset. That’s the Wealthy Wellthy Life podcast that you can find in iTunes.

Right on, right on, well thank you so much for being here Krisstina, and us being able to spend the time. I know that our listeners will have found it valuable. If you haven’t yet had a chance to ever meet with one of our advisors to really learn whether or not our process would be appropriate for you at this time, I would encourage you go to our website, hit the contact link. We’re going to get somebody set up with you to just have a 30-minute phone call. It’s our preference that we do that phone call even if you’re right here local. We work with clients all over the country, but even if you’re local we prefer to have that initial call me by phone because what it gives us the opportunity to do is to sit with you, have a conversation, and see whether it’s even appropriate for us to engage and whether it’s appropriate for you to engage us. So, we really look forward to having that conversation with you. Once again, huge thanks to our guest, Krisstina Wise. Krisstina, I look forward to having you back sometime soon.

Thank you so much, it was so much fun to be here with you today.

Yeah, you’re welcome, take care.

Well, that wraps part two of two of Krisstina. We look forward to having all of you on a future episode, and our thanks again to Krisstina Wise and her Wealthy Wellthy team.

Hey, this is Corey again. I just wanted to say that it’s been great to have you here listening to this episode. You can find out more information about us on our website, www.sfgwa.com, or you can find us on Facebook under Sound Financial Group. We’d love to hear any questions or comments from you there. Who knows? You may hear one on a future episode. For our full disclosure, you can go to description of our podcast series, this episode’s description, or our website.

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