EP 186: Beyond Dollars: How Emotional Baggage Masks Financial Truths

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The entirety of going from now until retirement. To picture
it as like an ecosystem. It's a self contained bubble. Okay,
Now inside of that bubble, there's a math equation. There
is a math equation. There's literally formulas and numbers and
variables that will tell you how to go from now
until retirement. But because there are variables, that means it's

(00:22):
not fixed. And so I tell people we can do
a couple of different things to get to the final
number in retirement accounts that we need to successfully step
into retirement. If you kind of play that backwards, you
know that there's a lower number, a lower number, a
lower number. If you follow that graph all the way backwards,
you get to today. But we get to design the
path as we go. So we can and I say,

(00:43):
some people like to save the same amount every month
from now until retirement, and that's totally fine. And if
we want to plug that in the formula, we can.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Hey there, and welcome to Money and You. I'm Michelle Perkins,
your host. My search for more fulfilling work led me
to career in business coaching, where I stumbled upon a
game changing discovery. Money issues often start with our mindset
and habits. You see, our relationship with money is the
key to overcoming those frustrating financial obstacles. As an entrepreneur, coach,

(01:18):
and problem solver, I'm passionate about helping you create a
great relationship with money, because turns out that's the foundation
for a limit free life. Each week on Money in You,
I speak with amazing guests about all things money, mindset,
practical tips, and everything in between. We're here to give
you new insights, education, and empowerment, so money can be

(01:40):
one of your favorite relationships. So join us for some
lively conversations and let's transform your financial life together. Hello, Hello,
welcome to another episode of a Money and You show.
So happy to be here with you all today and
to bring on a terrific guest who I had a
great converse with and I'm super excited that he's taking

(02:02):
the time out of his busy life to share some
of his insights with you. I am going to read
to something that they caught my eye on his website,
which is Second Comma. His name is Mark Hanson, and
one of the little sections on there when I was
looking for more about Mark, is one that jumped out

(02:24):
of me and it says what I do is help
you take a breath, which I think is so important
around money. As a financial planner specializing in single income families,
his goal is to free up your time and your
mind by moving some of the most complex financial items
off your plate. So Mark, welcome. We're going to have

(02:46):
you go a little further into that, and we'd love
to know kind of how you got to to the
place where you wanted to do that for people.

Speaker 3 (02:57):
Yeah. Yeah, I would thank you for having me on.
I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
I would say my path into this is much more
of a into financial planning. It's much more of a
discovery than it is an intentional walk. It's much more
of a meander. But where I found myself was in
let's call it Corporate America, doing the typical nine to
five thing. And over the course of time, my career
took me deeper and deeper into microsoftic cell, and then

(03:22):
people started hearing, oh, Mark's pretty good at microsoftic cell.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
Mark runs the budgeting team.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
I wonder if it can help me with my personal budget,
And so people would come in and they'd say, hey,
can you help me, And I say, of course, of course,
I've really wanted to help as many people as I could,
and so we talked about some stuff and this continued on,
and then this email came out from the head of
HR that said, whoever's giving financial advice to their coworkers
needs to stop immediately. And I just I thought I

(03:49):
might be in the wrong career. I wonder if I'm
in the wrong career. And so flashboard a couple of
years and here we sit, Mark Hanson, second Comma, and
I love helping people be more INTI with their money
and try to take finances and as best we can
put it on the back burners they can free up
our time.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
Well, thank you, that's great. All came back to me
when you said that, I remember that storing up. So yeah,
that is super cool. I also think it's very interesting,
you know, sort of philosophically that the HR person wanted
you to stop immediately sharing valuable money information with people,
because that's the way our society works with money, is like,

(04:29):
let's not educate people, let's not help each other or
have many conversations, and then we'll be great. But so
I think that's terrific what you're doing. And why did
you move into financial planning versus maybe something you know,
more budget oriented.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
As you were doing that, Yeah, yeah, well, what I
realized was budgeting was really just a piece of the
larger puzzle. If you get the budget, So if we
get it figured out, if we use our air quotes,
there you still need you know what to do with
the money. How do you steward the money. Even if
you can get the day to day puzzle piece of
budgeting figured out, and even if you can commit to

(05:08):
the week in and week out doing of the budget,
you soon need to do something with that money to
get you from now into retirement. And that's where under
the umbrella of financial planning, I really enjoyed that whole walk.

Speaker 3 (05:21):
I hope that these.

Speaker 1 (05:22):
Are ten and twenty and thirty year relationships with people
to take them from where they are, which is maybe
money confusion, and then through the process of teaching them stewardship,
get them into a retirement that feels comfortable mentally more
so than anything else, and help them understand how to
maybe pass that wisdom down to the next generation.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
Yeah, and you know, you look pretty young, so I mean,
were you concerned with retirement or engaging in retirement savings
and things like that early or I mean, was that
already something you were doing.

Speaker 1 (05:57):
Yeah, I'm more of a leap then look kind of
a person, unfortunately. And I did the same thing when
it came to saving for retirement. And so what that
looked like was I talked to somebody and they said, well,
you know, start out at four percent or so for
putting away your money, and then every year just try
to increase it by one percent, and eventually if you
can get to something like ten percent, that would be

(06:18):
really good. And so I just went in and set
it at ten percent and said I'll figure it out
from there. And so ten percent and just kind of
from there. And I realized, oh, that's that's a way
to do this. You can start at two or three
and go up one one one one one. You can
also start at ten and just kind of figure it
out from there. But I realized after talking to some

(06:39):
other people, let's say flash back to that story. I
was telling the people that are coming into my office
and asking me for help, I realized they started at zero,
and they stayed at zero, and then they were trying
to go to one and to two, and I realized, oh, wow,
this is a very different path that people are taking,
and I started to become very curiously why do people
take these different path as this is It's one instance

(07:03):
where leaping and looking actually played out better for me.
Not to say that I've made it or I've arrived,
or that I don't do any financial planning for myself.
It just was very interesting getting the money into the accounts.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yeah, I love this and it really brings up, you know,
your whole relationship with money and your mindset around money,
because I feel it's just a feeling, not proven. But
I feel like the reason people are saying, you know,
start with two, three four ramp up is because overall
people kind of don't expect that people are going to
do anything, and so I feel like to make it,

(07:37):
you know, easier at a stomach, like just do a
little bit. But what you did is really the smartest
thing is don't do a little bit. I mean do
as much as you can do, or do more than
you think you can do, because it's just putting you
so far ahead of the game.

Speaker 1 (07:50):
Yeah, and I talk about that sometimes too with my clients.
It just in general, it's if you do too much,
you can always dial it back. Yeah, if you do
too little, you're giving up time, and that it's a
very very different equation. I am of the mindset the
way that I wanted to approach it. I would rather realize,
oh wow, it's kind of hard to pay the light bill.
I should probably dial back that four oh one K contribution,

(08:11):
versus let's say I'm in my mid fifties or something
and realize, oh wow, I've paid the light bill really easily.

Speaker 3 (08:17):
I wish I would have put more money into the
four oh one k.

Speaker 2 (08:20):
Yeah. Yeah, And how you know, just tell us a
little with what you've seen people adjust things. You feel
like you can't do something, and you know, it's like
the idea of the automatic withdrawals.

Speaker 3 (08:32):
I mean, if you're.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
Automatically sending you know, however much to your investment account
every month, you do forget about it. I mean, it
is weird. It's a psychological thing. I mean, I guess
if you were really, really really struggling, maybe not. But
for most people, if you're working and you have an
income and you do these things that are sort of
happening without you doing much, you just adjust, you know,

(08:57):
So I don't know, what do you see? How do
you how do you implement some of those strategies and
what you do.

Speaker 1 (09:05):
Yeah, I really I think we see that principle everywhere
all the time, as in, if you pay for something
like Netflix, eventually you don't realize you're paying for Netflix anymore. Okay,
maybe we think a little bit larger. If you went
to the exact same vacation every year, you might find
yourself becoming bored of that destination. And I realized it

(09:29):
doesn't specifically matter how many dollars we attach to a
specific thing. If it happens enough and that cadence continues,
we don't realize that the money's going wherever it's going.
And so then if we just say, okay, so pretty
much any money that I spend on pretty much anything,
I will eventually forget that I'm spending the money there.

(09:50):
Then it is simply orienting and sequencing how the money
comes out of our account and where it goes. And
if we can get the money going to the places
that we want it to go first, and then we
forget that we're doing something really good. I mean, that's
a backburner platform that I can really get behind.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
Yeah, I love that. I think it's one of the
coolest things you can do with your money and your
example of Netflix. Oh my gosh, I literally just this
last American Express bill tried to go through and see
what the subscription thing is crazy. I mean, if I
got rid of half of subscriptions and just you know,

(10:28):
I wouldn't I wouldn't know that they were gone, and
I use that money for something else. So anyway, it's
a that's a great example. We were all doing it,
so we can all see it. Let's go back to
the budgeting for just a minute, because a lot of
what I'd help people with are the fundamentals like that.

(10:49):
I tried not to call it budgeting because that term
is just you know, so whatever. But but what it's
spending plan whatever you want to call it. So I
just heard a really other great term for that. I
can't remember of it. It's like something magical like to
make it really enticing, but it's all kind of the same.
It's really just I always say, you need to know

(11:09):
how much it costs to be you, so you know,
there's not a lot of judgment put on that there.
There's not a lot of right or wrong. It's just
how much is it costing you right now to be you?
And then what do you want to do with that information?
But I feel like those kinds of fundamentals people have
to put in place before they can really be successful

(11:33):
investors and kind of go that to that next step.
I mean, to me, a lot of it is understanding
your relationship with money, your beliefs, your ideas, you know,
the things limiting you inside your head, and then you
have to put the fundamentals in place, and then you
can sort of be a successful investor. But what's your

(11:54):
that's my own little philosophy. What is yours?

Speaker 1 (11:58):
I think I think you said something really interesting there,
and I take that same approach of what does it
cost to be you? And then I always tell my
clients when we start talking about household cash flow and
kind of where's the money going? Everybody thinks I'm about
to tell them, don't ever go to Chick fil again,
cancel Amazon Prime, and don't ever turn your TV on again,
And I tell them none of those things matter to me.

(12:20):
We will always talk about the consequences, good and bad,
of the life that you tell me you want to live,
and from that perspective we can talk about it. It's
very easy to talk about it because I let them know.
If you tell me I can't not go to Chick
fil a twice a week, that's fine. We're just going
to build it in and as long as we know
it's part of the plan, that's fine. Did The most

(12:41):
absurd version of this is if I would go to
a client and I would say, just can't They say
what do I cancel? I say cancel everything? Hey, well,
why would I do that? Because then only turn back
on the things that you remember that you're not experiencing anymore.

Speaker 3 (12:55):
That's kind of good.

Speaker 1 (12:55):
I like that, and it sounds absurd, But then if
you think about it, is how many things could we
not paying for and not even realize that that money's
not going to that place anymore.

Speaker 3 (13:05):
Now?

Speaker 1 (13:05):
If I flip on the light switch and the lights
don't come on, and I really wish the lights would
come on, then I remember I do want to pay
my electric bill, you know. I like when the water
comes out of the tap and the lights are non
I like that little magic box on the side of
my wall that lets me tell the air what temperature
to be. But from there we could really start getting
into the sequence of things. And I tell people I

(13:25):
have five main categories and their categories because they're not prescriptive.
They're purely descriptive, right, And so I say, imagine that
there's five tables at a banquet, and you have to
serve all five tables, and you are going to serve
them in a specific order, and I say the order
is going to be, you know, generosity is at table one,
and some people do and don't serve that table. And

(13:47):
I don't put that on people. I just tell them
that's table one. Table two is going to be saving,
Table three is investing, and then table four is your
fixed expenses, and then the final table is your variable expenses.
And people always say, well, how do I know if
something should be at table four or at table five?
Is it a fixed expense or is it a variable expense?

(14:08):
And I say, these are things that if you stop
paying for them, they get taken away, and you either
care or you don't care. And that's how you know
if it's a fixed expense or a variable expense. As
an example, I specifically myself, and there's no judgment here.
I don't care about Netflix, So if I had Netflix
in my budget, it would be at table five a
variable expense. And then why do we want to know

(14:30):
about fixed and variable expenses? Well, let's say we do
the analysis. It's hete Michelle. What we need to do
is get about eight hundred dollars more a month headed
into some investment accounts, and then you say, well, gee,
where am I going to find that money? And then
I can say, start at table five, Start at your
variable expenses, because those are the ones you've already told

(14:51):
yourself and told me you're willing to cut those. And
then people understand, Oh, that's why we're supposed to do
this money stewardship thing is so that we understand where
to cut.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
Hmmm, that's great. I love the tables. I love that
whole analogy. It's really easy for people to see. And
I wish we talked about money more in this way
where people can relate to it. They can visualize some things,
and you put it in a way that's not scary.
It's like, here are your variable expenses, like you you

(15:21):
figure it out, you choose, you know, I mean, and
just knowing that there are that many variable expenses. I
just had this conversation with my daughter and she was
so you you know, saying there's no She has a
pretty good salary, but she's like, there's no way I could,
you know, live in this town with you know, that's
some help from me. I still pay for a few things.
And I thought about it and it's like we kind

(15:45):
of went through that exercise a little and there's a
lot she'd have to stop doing. But truly it's variable stuff.
You know that she's engaging in buying whatever. And I
think we lose because we build our lives around all
of these things, and we're comfortable, but we don't feel
like we're We're not going crazy. I'm not running to

(16:05):
Beverly Hills every five minutes. I'm buying a new purse.
But I so it starts to feel you forget how
much of that really you don't need to be doing.
If you want to, you can, like you say, I
I think the whole the whole reason budgeting got a
bad name is because people did think it meant cut
things out of your life, and it's it's really more

(16:29):
just have your information. I mean, you know, yeah, I
love what you said too.

Speaker 4 (16:36):
It reminded me when I ret my office is in
the middle of being already done, but I couldn't redo
it without taking every single thing out of it, and then,
like you said, I'm trying to only bring in the
things I really want.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
It was shock full of stuff that I really didn't
need anymore. So it's a that's a great way to
do it. I feel like kids credit cards and starting
over and seeing.

Speaker 1 (16:57):
What Yeah, yeah, I've The worst way to go about
it would be just cancel all of your credit cards
and wait till the mail starts showing up and it's like, oh,
I do want to pay for that?

Speaker 3 (17:06):
Oh yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 (17:07):
I know it's great. But the thing is, you can
do all that and unless you make some new decisions
about what to do with the savings that maybe are
coming from this, because that's the easiest thing for people
to do, is find savings and then just find new
ways to spend it. So that's where discipline comes in.
And how do you feel about disciplined?

Speaker 3 (17:30):
I think this is something else that I tell people
all the time.

Speaker 1 (17:35):
When I view my role as a financial advisor, My
one of my biggest fears is that people would take
their one life, they would take the hours of that life.
They would work very hard, and they would dedicate their time,
and they would trade those hours for dollars and then
they would waste the dollars. And that's all I'm trying
to point people out. I'm just trying to show them

(17:56):
you got those dollars by trading your time, wisdom, something.
As you climb the chain, so to speak, you get
to trade your wisdom more so than your your manpower.
But you are trading something for dollars, and I just
if you want to waste the dollars, that's okay, please
don't maybe watch it, but I'm trying to let people
know this money didn't just show up in your account.

(18:19):
You know, if you're really blessed, somebody else, maybe in
your lineage, traded their time or their wisdom for the dollars.
I just I try really hard to help people see
that full circle view. If that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And I love
this idea of being a steward for people's money because
we don't tend to always do that for ourselves. It
depends on, you know, sort of your money personality and
the way you operate with money. But there are people
who very quickly get rid of any additional money that
comes their way, and then there are other people who
squander it and don't really live their life. And I

(18:53):
mean there's a lot of different you know, money beliefs
and consequently personalities out there. What's a good balance to
you between sayings spending living your life not living your life.

Speaker 1 (19:07):
Yeah, So I explain this to my clients pretty frequently,
that it's the entirety of going from now until retirement.
To picture it as like an ecosystem. It's a self
contained bubble. Okay, Now inside of that bubble, there's a
math equation. There is a math equation. There's literally formulas
and numbers and variables that will tell you how to

(19:29):
go from now until retirement. But because there are variables,
that means it's not fixed. And so I tell people
we can do a couple of different things to get
to the final number in retirement accounts that we need
to successfully step into retirement. If you kind of play
that backwards, you know that there's a lower number, a
lower number, a lower number. If you follow that graph

(19:50):
all the way backwards, you get to today. But we
get to design the path as we go. So we
can and I say, some people like to save the
same amount every month from now until retirement, and that's
totally fine, and if we want to plug that in
the formula, we can. Some people want to save upfront
and then let time do a lot of the compounding,
the heavy lifting for them, and that's okay. The formula

(20:12):
allows for that too. Some people are in a life
circumstance where they need to spend all of their money
right now on things that they say are valuable, and
that means we're going to backload savings for retirement. And
that's okay too. The formula can handle all three. And
so I tell people if you I basically set it
up as if you want to get to retirement, let's

(20:32):
go flat level, save the same amount every single night.

Speaker 3 (20:35):
Let's start there.

Speaker 1 (20:37):
If you can't save that amount because household cashflow doesn't
allow it, then you know we are naturally doing the
backloading of saving for retirement. If I give you a
number and you're saving more than that, then we're naturally
front loading retirement. And now I let people know at
a certain point we're only going to do one of
three things. We will exactly hit retirement exactly when you

(20:58):
wanted to. Something will happen that will extend retirement out,
or something will happen that will bring retirement closer, and
when you start to break it down, that is mathematically
as simple as it is to retire. Now, your formula
looks different than my formula, looks different than anybody who's listening.
We don't have the same formula. And in my mind,

(21:19):
from my perspective, that's why a financial planner might be
somebody who's helpful to talk to. Is because there's not
just a simple sticky note that I can mail out
to everybody, and now everybody knows how to retire. But
the formula is mildly flexible but also mildly rigid at
the same time.

Speaker 3 (21:35):
I hope I've been able to describe that.

Speaker 2 (21:37):
Well, yeah, no, that's great. I love that. And you know,
as a financial planner, are you also a financial advisor?
Can you help people with their investments?

Speaker 3 (21:49):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (21:49):
Yes, And so I do help people with we'll call
it AUM. That's a typical financial plan So assets under management.
I can manage people's assets. Sometimes there's not a lot
of a to put under m if that makes sense,
and we're trying to we're trying to maybe figure out
a budget to get things directed into the correct accounts,
and that all falls under the idea of what what

(22:12):
do I call that fee for service is what I
technically call it, But that's financial planning, and so there
is the advisor there is to planning for me. They're
pretty interchangeable. But there's two things that I can offer
to people. If you have money saved up, I can
help manage that. If you need to understand how do
I take the dollars that come into my bank account
and put them into the assets that need to be

(22:33):
managed or turn them into that that's all financial planning,
and there's a lot of help that I can provide
around there. But I do provide both of those services.
I think that they're helpful. It's important to me to
be able to walk, like I said, alongside somebody, which
means I don't find a lot of enjoyment in just
walking around looking for people that have already successfully saved

(22:53):
for retirement and helping them keep that money. I really
enjoy helping people direct that money, steward, that money into
the investment accounts.

Speaker 2 (23:01):
Yeah, I love that, And I do like the distinction
between the planning and the investing because I do think
a lot of people don't realize that there are people
like you who will help them, you know, move to
that point and then you know, maybe also help them
with their their investing. But a lot of people do
avoid the you know, the financial industry until they feel

(23:22):
like they have enough to go talk to an advisor,
and that's not what they should be doing. Relieve I'm
there was something I wanted to go back to here
that you were discussing. Yeah, you know, oh, entrepreneurship. So
you went from a corporate situation to being an entrepreneur,

(23:44):
and I I think I read that you help a
lot of entrepreneurs as well. But there are some very
specific financial issues that come up with entrepreneurs especially, and
maybe you experience this, but when you're trying to build
your own business, you know, it's hard to that money
is so directed back into the business. It's hard to
pay yourself, let alone pay yourself enough to invest. So

(24:06):
any any advice on that one.

Speaker 3 (24:10):
Yes, I do. So.

Speaker 1 (24:11):
When I say single income families, typically that single income
is coming from somebody who owns a business.

Speaker 3 (24:16):
And I find it so interesting that.

Speaker 1 (24:19):
These people engine not these people as if it not
to section them off that I'm trying to specifically talk
about entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs might be really really good at running
the widget factory or providing the service, and that they
might be able to spin up in the best way,
a multi million dollar business. But I have come across

(24:40):
time and time again the business owner who is making
we'll call it three four million dollars of revenue and
doesn't know how to pay themselves. Not asn't they understand
mathematically how to pay. I understand how to move the
money around, but they don't understand how how do I
not destroy the business. And so sometimes it's a lot
of Okay, we've got really good velocity, we've got a

(25:01):
lot of revenue, but then we're actually changing the internal
fundamentals of the business to allow for one of the
business expenses to be owner compensation. And so teaching people
how to think about that, because again, the entrepreneur is
typically very very good at thinking how do I build
the business? How do I build the business? I have

(25:21):
trained myself to become how does the business pay the
owner without jeopardizing the business? I think that's a totally
different skill set. Entrepreneurs are very very good at certain things,
and I think they become partially confused, partially embarrassed. Hang on,
there's this thing that I'm not good at, and nobody
likes to admit what they're not good at, and so
it's kind of sneaky to you have to kind of

(25:43):
sneak into their mentality, if that makes sense. It's like, hey,
do you have these questions burning inside of your head
keeping you up at night?

Speaker 3 (25:49):
Yes? Why do you know that?

Speaker 1 (25:50):
So, because lots of other entrepreneurs also have those same thoughts,
we should talk about that sometimes.

Speaker 2 (25:56):
Yeah, that's great, and you're right, I think it's so,
you know, it's so important. I feel like, because we're
kind of we get into habits and habit patterns. And
so if you have a business and haven't paid yourself
and you haven't really kind of gotten out of that
struggle at some point made some decisions that would allow

(26:16):
you to see the business in the way that you're describing,
it's hard. It only gets harder when you let it
go too long, and then you feel like, well, I'm
used to never paying myself at this point, so you know.

Speaker 1 (26:26):
Yeah, exactly, And that's where again, single income. So I'm
imagining a spouse situation and two people who have entered
into marriage. It's got to be hard on the non
working the non earning spouse both watching the entrepreneur the
earning spouse spin out of control almost or literally spin
out of control, sometimes with not working themselves more and

(26:49):
more and more.

Speaker 3 (26:50):
Because that's the skill that they're really good at.

Speaker 1 (26:53):
And then it's the business can become the bad guy,
but the business can't be the bad guy because that's
how we pay the bills. And then you get a
lot of this tension and if that, if that continues
to run, run, run for a long time, that could
become a real area of strife. And you know, I've
seen some really really good situations. I've seen some really
really bad situations. But I like stepping in and letting

(27:14):
people know, Okay, we're lost in the woods right now,
but it's okay because we can get back to the
trail and we can go.

Speaker 3 (27:19):
The direction we want.

Speaker 1 (27:20):
Right now, our current status is lost in the woods,
but it doesn't mean that we live in the woods.

Speaker 3 (27:25):
It just means we need to get back on the trail.

Speaker 2 (27:28):
Yeah. I love that, And I do think sometimes entrepreneurs
will kind of give themselves an excuse to and think,
if I just build the business big enough, that'll be
my retirement at some point. Yeah, and that's also I
would not recommend.

Speaker 1 (27:41):
But well, if you think about that, if we play
that out, Okay, So now let's say Michelle. Michelle has
this business. She's built it, built it, built it. She
has never created the business to be able to pay
her and to where she's more managing it. What Michelle
has built is a job. And so now I'm just
going to sell this business. No no, no, you're selling a job,

(28:02):
and you're trying to find somebody else who wants to
step into the shoes that you feel are so frantic
you can't understand how to step out of them. So
just imagine a pair of shoes moving around to eighty
miles an hour and Michelle says, hey, do you want
to put your feet in these? Nobody wants that. Nobody
wants that. That's why I say we have to change
the business fundamentally, not move from widgets to do dads,

(28:23):
not like that. You're just changing how the money moves
in the business to allow the quote unquote shoes to
slow down enough that somebody else might think, I think
I do want to put those on.

Speaker 2 (28:35):
Yeah, And what's the right time to have this conversation
with somebody starting a business, because you know, first couple
of years you might really need to just plow all
your money into it. But how do you look at it?

Speaker 1 (28:47):
I look at it as you know, if people can
get through the first three to five years, then they've
turned the corner of building the business to maintaining the business,
if that makes sense. So at first, you know, the
initial efforts of entrepreneurship, you are literally building this business,
building the service model something like that.

Speaker 3 (29:07):
The year three, year, four, year five.

Speaker 1 (29:09):
You're going to hit a level of comfort where it's
more you're trying to get more eyes looking at your service,
looking at your product, and that's your next level of
scaling when you get to there, if you can turn
that corner, because most people are going to either go
out of business right here or create a business that
will last time. And if you make that corner and
now you're looking at how do I scale this thing

(29:30):
by getting more people focused here, that is the time
when as you scale, you don't want to scale chaos.
You actually, as you turn that corner and you start
to try to scale, you want to make sure that
you've got everything organized well so that what you scale
is already correctly organized.

Speaker 2 (29:49):
You're making it sound so clear and so doable. Did
you run into any of your own blocks as you
were doing this yourself?

Speaker 1 (29:59):
Oh, I am in the middle of it. That's I
described that corner. I am looking at that corner right now,
and that's and I see it. And that's what's really
wonderful about getting into financial plane. The way that I
did it is maybe the strangest way to get in
as in I'm doing a much more solo style here,
but I'm able to mirror the entrepreneurship mindset and I'm

(30:20):
able to play it out and I see it real time.
And so when I say things like that to people,
I'm saying what's in their head. I'm talking to them
about the things that they only talk to themselves about
in the mirror or while they're laying in bed staring
at the ceiling. And I can meet them right there.
And because I've taken the time to walk through it
and I've tried to turn that corner, then I can
talk about turning that corner.

Speaker 3 (30:42):
And I'm doing the same thing for myself.

Speaker 1 (30:43):
You know, when I think about my family, I don't
want my wife looking at me doing this job and
saying Mark is working really hard, but he's exhausted. Mark
is working really hard, but I never see him. Mark
is working really hard, He's very successful, but he keeps
missing baseball games. He keeps me seeing the recital, he
keeps not being there at these things that she knows

(31:04):
I want to be there at. And so it's it's
in that of how do I not let this get
away from myself?

Speaker 3 (31:10):
You know?

Speaker 1 (31:10):
And then again you start having conversations and you start seeing, oh,
I guess the detriment to some entrepreneurs, they only see
their chaos the benefit to me. I get to see
everybody's chaos plus mine on top of it, and I
start seeing the commonalities, and I start, Okay, we need
to diagnose and treat this a lot faster because this
is a recurring issue that people have.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
Yeah, yeah, that's great. I'm right in the middle of
listening to Buy Back Your Time read that book. I
forget the author at the moment something Martell.

Speaker 3 (31:40):
I think, yeah, Dan Martell, Yeah there you go.

Speaker 2 (31:43):
Yeah interesting. So okay, I want to go back just
for a second. We're almost at a time, sadly, but
I want to talk about retirement for just a second again,
because I've had a few guests on talking about kind
of the new way to think about retire, like, you know,
maybe sixty five is no longer like the age you

(32:04):
should be looking at, or what can you do after
retirement to continue generating income? Or is can you possibly
save enough for retirement to actually retire? You know, there's
a lot the world is different, and you know, so
I don't know any kind of just ideas on your
part that might be like new ways to think about

(32:26):
retirement or maybe not.

Speaker 1 (32:28):
Yeah, I feel like it's, uh, I get kind of
I get caught up here because I think that this
is the way people have always thought about retirement. But
what I mean is this the way I've always thought
about retirement. But I keep telling people about it, and
people keep saying, oh, that's a very interesting way to
look at it, kind of like with the budgeting and
the table scenario earlier. But the way I talked to
my clients and about retirement, it's it's when your assets

(32:53):
can generate the amount of money that they need to
to allow you to earn the dollar amount that you
want to. Okay, so it's not specifically I'm going to
set this timeline of which I actually have no control.
There's a spoiler alert for everybody. I can say sixty
five just as easy as I can say sixty six
or sixty. I can shift that around so that the

(33:15):
timeline isn't specific. You think about that's drawing a line
in the sand really close to the waves. We've got
to understand that that's the kind of line that we're drawing.
But let's say we put this there. What I'm really wanting,
what I'm actually thinking, but I'm not saying it correctly.
When I say sixty five, I mean at this point
in time, I hope to have the choice to be
able to live off of the money that I've saved

(33:36):
and invested and earn the money that I want. Some
people want to earn zero dollars, which puts all of
the burden on their invested accounts, and some people are okay,
still doing something. You talk to entrepreneurs, they're not real
good at going from busy, busy, busy, busy couch. They're
going to go crazy. Most entrepreneurs two to three years

(34:00):
into retirement start another successful business because that's they can't
fight their nature. And so we talk about, well what
does it look like? Okay, so Michelle. Again, you've built
this very successful company. We've gone through, we've done the reworking.
Now this business is paying you. And now we're we're
starting to set up. Okay, you think you want to
step away from this business and we'll call it five

(34:22):
to ten years. Now we're really planning for the exit strategy.
How do we get somebody else, How do we get
Stacey to come in here and be the new Michelle?
And how do we get Stacy to pay you the
number and all the contracts and whatnot. But then it's Michelle,
what do you want to do after this? And again,
very very rarely do my entrepreneur clients say well, I
really just want to go and sit and do nothing,
because it's just totally not who they are. And so

(34:44):
then it's well, what do you want to do? And
we start hearing what are your goals? So what do
you what do you hope to do with your time?
And then just a few sentuteses later, I'm typically helping
my client. See yeah, that's called consulting, but that's that's
what that is, you know, And I start showing people,
I'll do some calculations and I'll let them watch me
do the calculations where it's your retirement. If you make

(35:06):
your invested accounts hold all the burden of paying all
the bills, that is completely different than if you just
earn ten twenty thousand dollars a year. You take somebody
who's who's got a seven figure revenue business, and you say,
do you think you can earn twenty thousand dollars a year?
And oh, yeah, it is easy. If you can earn

(35:27):
that much money, the burden is no longer on your
investment accounts. And again, this is how I've thought about
retirement all the time. But when I say it, does
that sound a little bit different to you?

Speaker 3 (35:39):
Or is that what your other guests have talked about?

Speaker 2 (35:41):
I think, yeah, I think that's a lot of the
conversations we've been having, Like, retirement doesn't need to mean
sitting on the couch or a golf course twenty four
to seven or you know whatever. I mean, it can
theres a lot of opportunity post retirement. And yeah, I
think for the people who I mean this so much,

(36:04):
we could do another whole show on what if you
get sick? I mean, there's so many things that retirement
could possibly be used for which isn't you know, playing golf.
But so you know, you're right. I loved it that.
I loved what you said about drawing a lot lying
in the sand close to the waves, because I mean,
there are a lot of thoughts, but I do think

(36:27):
we it's it's it's fun to think of it differently,
because I do think it in the past it was
sort of the I mean, in some cases, kind of
a death sentence to like work like a crazy person
for fifty years and then stop, Like you say that
hard stop is like you know, people would people would
die a couple of years later. I mean, you know,

(36:47):
so I think that's not what you want. That's so
you don't want to save your whole life for that.
So I do think it's important to be, you know,
kind of creative and innovative in in that space too. Also,
like you said, I love what you said because having
the choice is what all of this is about anyway.
I mean, money is really just to give you choices

(37:09):
and options and allow you to have that freedom. So
this is just another space where you know, sometimes I
don't know, it's almost like your financial life ends at
that point where you retire.

Speaker 3 (37:23):
Start using it and it really shouldn't.

Speaker 2 (37:24):
It should be you should still be doing financial planning
in some way.

Speaker 3 (37:28):
Yeah. Yes.

Speaker 1 (37:29):
When I work with people, I'm typically working through two
acronyms because I'm a big fan of acronyms.

Speaker 3 (37:34):
Is how my brain works.

Speaker 1 (37:36):
But I tell people we're looking at financial CPR, which
is how do we take the cash flow and direct
it towards retirement and what kind of protection do we
need while we go from this cash flow towards retirement.
That's a CPR and that covers a lot of things.
That's very simple. But if you just remember financial CPR,
take the cash flow, direct it towards retirement, what kind

(37:57):
of protection do I need to get me into or
towards retirement?

Speaker 3 (38:01):
And then the larger one that I.

Speaker 1 (38:02):
Have, it's my clarity process where we're covering cash flow, legacy,
asset protection, retirement, investment, tax planning, and your goals.

Speaker 3 (38:12):
I believe all of those.

Speaker 1 (38:13):
If you can cover that entire acronym, if you can
fill out my entire process, then all the information is
laid right in front of you. It's kind of like
taking the puzzle box and dumping it out. It's not
initially helpful. You actually want all the pieces oriented correctly.
You want the picture facing up. And I think that's
what financial planning does. It takes all the information out
of your brain and it puts it on the table

(38:34):
and it orients it to where all the pictures are
facing you, and then you can start trying to put
the pulls together, and then you can start figuring out, well,
what do I want to do? You want to pay
the mortgage off early? Do we want a lake house?
Do we want to send the kids to college? All
those things are easier once all the informations on the
table in front of you.

Speaker 4 (38:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:50):
Wow, I love the way you describe things. So I
think people should call you just to hear you put
it in visualizations that you're doing here. So I hate
to be finishing here. There's so much more to talk about.
But thank you so much for being on And can
you tell people how to contact you? Do you help
people all of the country? What's your.

Speaker 1 (39:12):
Yeah, it was important to me getting into this again
if I was going to have as much control as
I could try to have. I wanted a very nimble business,
and so my whole setup is completely virtual. I meet
with most of my clients, I say ninety nine points
something percent of my clients. It's all virtual, done via
zoom or phone call or text message. But if you
want to find me learn more about me, you can
find me on LinkedIn. It's Mark Hanson.

Speaker 3 (39:34):
It's h A N. S E. N.

Speaker 1 (39:36):
It's not like the boy band from the nineties which
had an O. But yeah, Mark Hanson. You can see
a lot of what I do there. That'll link you
out to my website. You can read about me how
I help the Secret Service, which NFL team a part
owner of a couple of little tidbits of tidbits about
me on there. And I've got a podcast that people
just want to hear, like, well, how does Mark think
about this? How does Mark lay out his metaphors? You

(39:56):
can hear more about me on my podcast, which is
again linked on the websit.

Speaker 2 (40:00):
Okay, well, thank you so much. That is great, and yeah,
thank you for joining me today. I love talking to you,
and I think you provided some great information to our listeners.

Speaker 3 (40:11):
And very clearly and well done.

Speaker 2 (40:13):
So anyway, yeah, appreciate it, and so I'll put your
information in the show notes and audience by hope you
contact Mark because he knows what he's doing and he
sounds like a really great steward for your money as
he put it, so I think that's wonderful. That's a
gift to people. So yeah, thank you and thank you

(40:36):
audience for being here. Love having you join us on
the Money and You show. You can find note on
all the podcast platforms. You can find the show on
the Limit Free Life YouTube channel, and you can find
me at limit FreeLife dot com and learn more about
what I am doing out there and sign up for
my newsletter so you can get all kinds of good
information from me as well. And yeah, thanks so much

(40:58):
for listening. We would love it if you would share
the show with your friends who could use O listen
and h and also rate and review the show so
we can continue to bring on great guests like Mark.
So thank you so much and we'll see you next week.

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