December 9, 2025 • 40 mins
I’m joined once again by Phil Weiss, Founder of Apprise Wealth Management — a CFA, CPA, and RLP® who brings heart, honesty, and deep purpose to every financial conversation.
Phil’s mission was shaped by his own family’s story — stepping in to support his mom through stage 4 breast cancer and helping navigate the financial chaos that followed. That experience inspired his passion to help women feel financially confident and secure, especially during times of transition.
In this episode, we talk about:
Facebook: AppriseWealth
Instagram: @phweiss11
Tiktok: apprisewm
YouTube: philipweiss9408
Phil’s mission was shaped by his own family’s story — stepping in to support his mom through stage 4 breast cancer and helping navigate the financial chaos that followed. That experience inspired his passion to help women feel financially confident and secure, especially during times of transition.
In this episode, we talk about:
- What it really means to reclaim your financial power
- How creating a life plan can bring clarity and peace
- The story of “Linda” — and how her plan transformed her life
- The question we all need to ask: Do I have enough life?
Facebook: AppriseWealth
Instagram: @phweiss11
Tiktok: apprisewm
YouTube: philipweiss9408
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to The Rewrite, a podcast about divorce, choice and
new beginnings. I'm your host Wendy Sloan, former TV producer,
mom of two and one sweet golden retriever. This is
a space for real talk about the moments that break us,
the choices that define us, and the power we have
to begin again. You'll hear personal stories, heartfelt insights, and
(00:22):
honest conversations about healing relationships and reclaiming your life one
choice at a time. I'll be joined by experts in divorce, finance,
mental health, wellness and more and everything you need to
support your next chapter. The most powerful chapters might be
the ones you write next. Let's begin your rewrite together.
This episode is brought to in part by the Needle
(00:44):
Kuda Law Firm guidance that moves lives forward. Welcome back
to the Rewrite. I'm your host, Wendy Sloan, and my
guest today is a proud sponsor of The Rewrite and
I'm so thankful for that and to bring him to
you all. With over twenty five years of experience in
personal finance and investment manner, he is a chartered Financial Analyst,
certified Public account and registered life planner, and we're going
(01:06):
to talk a lot about that today. But beyond his credentials,
he's someone who truly understands what it means to start over.
Today we're going to talk about the power of reclaiming
your finances and also a life plan will dive into
what kind of life do you really want to live
and what does that mean? And understanding your finances is
more than more, there's more important steps to that towards
(01:28):
freedom and healing. Welcome back to the Rewrite, Phil Weiss.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Thanks Hendie. I'm so happy to be here today. I
really look forward to this conversation.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Oh I am too, and you are a perfect example
of the rewright because of your personal story. So I
want you to bring that back to us. I know
you talked about that on IT. This is our second interview.
I know you talked about that before, but if you
could bring us back to your story, your journey of
how a prize wealth management prize wealth started with your
(02:00):
mom and your dad and your story as a young boy.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Sure, so, growing up in my household, it was the
typical family model that we usually hear about. My mom
was responsible for taking care of my sister and me.
My dad was responsible for taking care of the finances.
But here's the thing. When it came to managing finances.
To say he wasn't good at it is to put
it mildly, my father just is terrible. We had no credit,
(02:27):
we had no savings, We had services turned off for
not being paid. When I was old enough to drive,
I remember going to the local utilities and giving them
a check so that they could turn our services back on.
Because he had this view that he didn't pay for
anything in an advance, so he wouldn't pay.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
It was just a mess.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
When it was time for me to go to college,
I was told, go anywhere you want. So I went
to Duke and I visited, and I fell in love
with the campus and the environment there, and I wanted
to be a doctor d and I thought that would
be the best place to go to become a doctor.
When I was done and I was a psychology major,
I did a lot to stay in school. I even
spoke to the president of the university when it made
changes to the student loan system, and they said nobody
(03:12):
would have to leave because of it. But after my
junior year, I owed the school enough money that we
agreed that while I was still eligible to come back academically,
I needed to pay what I owed before I could finish.
So I left school and after a few months at home,
it was just too toxical an environment. So I moved
(03:33):
across the country. I moved to Tucson. I've lived out
there for a year and a half, and I worked
to make the money to pay off that debt. And
after a year and a half, I was like, this
isn't the right thing. I need to go back to school.
And I had decided that while my grades were good,
they weren't good enough to get into medical school, and
(03:53):
psychology was going to mean more school and that just
wasn't usible for me. Right, I plot and Duke doesn't
offer accounting degrees, and that's what I decided I wanted
to do. So I had residency in Arizona. I had
residency in New Jersey, where I'm from because of my parents,
and I applied to both, and I thought I'd get
(04:15):
a better job coming out of Rutgers. So I came
back home. I went to Rutgers. I'll tell you that
it still wasn't easy. Those credit card checks that we
get in the mail, I don't think we get them
as much anymore. We used to get them a lot.
I would use those to pay for tuition. I would
use them to pay for rent because I lived in
a house that I shared with other people, whatever it was,
(04:36):
because that's what I needed to do to get by
when I finished school. The end of that first year,
I looked at so how much I paid an interest.
I was like, oh my god, I don't make enough
to pay that much interest. So I decided, without the
Internet to consult or anything. Fortunately, I figured out one
of the ways that they talk about paying off credit
card debt. I decided to attack the one with the
(04:58):
highest interest rate. First pay that off, and then work
the rest of the way. I put in place a plan.
I actually had the good fortune to get assigned to
and out of town assignment where I had no real expenses,
so I paid it off faster than I originally planned. Anyway,
I'm living home while all this is going on. One
day I come home, I get the mail and there's
(05:20):
these credit card bills. They had my name on them.
If there's only one thing they weren't mine. I actually
got copies of one of the applications from one of
the banks sent it to me. It was my father.
He forged my name to get credit cards because he
couldn't get credit Oh wow. Yeah, and he had been
paying on those cards enough that they were in good standings,
(05:43):
so that banks just took him and moved him into
his knee. The fast forward a little bit. I had
started my career. My mother had gone back to school
to become an occupational therapist, which I know she really
did so that she could be in strong enough financial
vision of her own to move to move on. But unfortunately,
(06:03):
she spent so much time trying to build her business
that she neglected herself and she was diagnosed with stage
four breast cancer. When that happened, that's when we found
out how bad the financial situation at home really was.
Those credit cards they were now in collection. My parents
had to sell their house because it would have been
foreclosed on. This is all while my mother's trying to
(06:25):
battle cancer, right, and I did what I could to help,
but unfortunately my mom didn't make it. Eighteen months after
her diagnosis, her cancer metastasized to her brain.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
She passed away.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
I'm so sorry, thank you.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
And now I view the work that I do as
trying to help other women not go through the kind
of things that my mom did, and that's why I work.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
With women facing new beginnings.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
And I'll also tell you mentioned I'm a life planner,
So becoming a life planner is an experiential process. So
I have my own life plan, and the first lean
of my life plan is I want to start a
scholarship for women who go back to school later in
life like my mother did. I started to put some
money away. I haven't put everything in place yet. I'm
hoping by the end of the year to have that
(07:16):
so that it'll be in place for the next academic year.
But that's kind of my story and why I work
with who I do.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
I love your story, and that's the whole reason we're here,
right because we've been through something and we're trying to
make a difference for other people. And that's pretty amazing.
So when you were that, when you were that, when
you came home and you saw like bills in your
name that weren't yours, you must have been like.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
What it first is like, this has to be a mistake, right,
So that's why before I decided to confront my father,
because that was I guess a suspicion. I asked for applications.
Some of the banks just kind of ignored me, but
one actually sent me the application. And once I got
the application, I still a handwriting. I knew it was
(08:05):
my father, so that way I could go to him
and say, did you do this? And he admitted that
he did. And so I was paying rent to my
parents when I was living home. At that point, I said, fine,
my rent. Because that the banks wouldn't take them make
those balances out of my name, they left them in
my name. They would move the credit cards going forward
to him. So I sat down. Yeah, so I said,
(08:29):
my rent is going to go to pay these balances off.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
That's what it's too.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
So what are some of the most common mistakes you
see women making right after divorce or like during or
not even just after divorce. What about during divorce or
like even if they're starting to think about what should
If they're starting to think about I think this marriage
is over, what should they do?
Speaker 2 (08:52):
So I think the first thing is and I actually
have a tool that I put together to help with this,
and a.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Divorced preparation guy.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
And you want to make sure that you have a
good understanding of what's going on, what your financial situation is,
and a lot of times that doesn't happen because talking
about finances is not something that's easy for us. I
often say in have read too like it's not just
me saying this that it's easier for us to talk
about sex and this for us to talk about finances don't.
(09:24):
It's it's so personal our finance, we don't want to
talk about them. So in some families there's no conversation
about it, and one spouse doesn't know what the other
spouse is even doing. So you want to really get
a good handle on what's going on and then other
things to do to prepare. It's like, there was a
client that I worked with when I was before I
(09:44):
launched my firm, and I was working for somebody else
and she was going through divorce and her husband and
it was a nasty divorce and her husband was responsible
for paying everything, and she had credit cards in her name.
He stopped paying on them. So when she went to
move out, need her family to help or be able
to move out because they had to provide backing for
(10:05):
the rental agreement that they because she had no credit.
Because we don't realize it. But when you go get rent,
they check your credit, and if you don't have good credit,
you might not be able to rent. So there's things
like that. There's also the idea that when you're a couple,
make sure that both of you have credit cards in
your name. I know, when we open up a new
credit card, or we get a car loan, or just
(10:25):
car and auto loans, that's all we really have. I
mean car and home loans. Carnodos redundant, but carnoto and
home loans. But when we get those things, we'll put
some of them in my wife's name and some of
them mind. Because if everything is joint and your spouse
is listed first, that's the Social Security number that they
report on. They don't really look at you the same way.
(10:47):
You don't really have the same credit. So you want
to make sure that you have credit. You want to
make sure that you understand the financial situation. When it
comes time to split up the assets, you want to
look at what's the tax carcharacterization of all the assets.
And I started as a CPA and did tax work,
and I've seen mistakes made where the one spouse had
(11:10):
wroth irays and the other had regular irays, and those
are very different from a tax perspective because with the WROTH,
you put in after tax dollars and there's no future
tax liability. With an IRA, you put in pre tax dollars,
so ultimately, when you pull the money out, you pay tax.
And one couple that I work with, they split and
his attorney didn't distinguish between the WROTH and the regular
(11:32):
area assets. She had the ross, so it ended up
to her benefit, but he definitely suffers because he's going
to have to pay tax and they just split the
money evenly. So that's a simple mistake. It can be
easy to make. And then I think the other thing
that's really important is when we have kids and we
don't want to disrupt their lives too much too. It's
(11:55):
clearly a disruption when the family splits, but sometimes we
get and now or with the idea we have to
We can't change anything, but make sure if you're going
to stay in that house, that you're going to really
afford it, because that can be a big burden because remember,
if you take a lot of your value in the house,
that means you don't have a lot of other money
coming in. How you're going to be able to pay
(12:16):
for it, and what kind of life you're going to
be able to live if you become house poor, and
what are.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
The consequences of staying in a house and the bills
that come with that as well, Like Okay, yeah, you
get the house, but like there's other things that come
with it, especially when things start to go you know, south,
and you need to fix the house or things start
to break and all that other stuff. I think we
talked about this before, and I've talked about this a
lot on the podcast, that when you're in the you know,
(12:42):
when you first meet someone and you know it's heading
in that direction and you're in the happy, like lovy,
wonderful stage, maybe that's the time to start to talk
about like finances and how it's going to look going forward,
Rather than when you're like being married for a certain
period of time and you're starting to fight and things
are starting to unravel, that's not the time to talk
(13:05):
about finances. Maybe there's a plan when you're first starting
out together about finances.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And
if you're already together and you haven't been talking about it,
there's nothing wrong with saying let's have a money date.
Maybe it's once a month, maybe it's once a quarter,
or maybe it's once a week, depending upon what cadence
works for the two of you. But let's meet and
talk about our finances. I know we do that in
my house. I do take care of the finances. I
pay the bills, but my wife knows what every account
(13:34):
is and the ones that she can't see. Periodically, we'll
sit down and I'll go over so that she knows
what the balances are and she looks at all the
bills and everything else that comes in so that she
understands what's going on. So it's ideally you want to
have that conversation before you're even together because it can
help head offul lot of problems in the future. But
(13:55):
if you don't, or if you're already together and you
don't know, do something like have money dates periodically so
that you can at least start to communicate. Talk about
your finances. What are your plans? You know you have kids,
you want to pay for their education. How are you
going to do that? You have a retirement, and it's
it's saving for retirement and it's also balancing the life
(14:16):
that we want to have now versus taking care of
our kids, having the experiences having a retirement. Like, there's
lots of things that you want to consider and to
talk about them and make sure that you're on board
is really good. And you even want to decide are
we going to each have our own separate finances or
everything going to be commingled. Either one can work, but
you just want to make sure you have an understanding
(14:37):
of what that's going to be.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
It's so important, so important to know about the finances
for both, for both parties. Okay, so you're a chartered
Financial Analyst, certified public account and you're a registered life planner.
Tell us about being a life planner and what that means.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
It's Being a life planner is honestly the favorite part
of what I do, because when I work with a
client on their life plan, I really get to know them.
I really get to understand what's important to them. And
in my business, I'm supposed to be a fiduciary for
my clients, which means I'm supposed to make recommendations that
are in their best interests. It doesn't matter what it
does for me or how it benefits me. It's all
(15:19):
about the client. And if I've worked with you on
your life plan, by the time we're done, I know
what's important to you and I can make those recommendations
in your best interest because you know what matters to
you and that you really and you.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Know what kind of life that they want to live,
So that makes a big difference, Like if they want
to travel the world, that's a big difference. And where
money is going to be saved and spent. Right, We're
going to talk a whole bunch about that, and we're
going to take a quick break for our sponsors. We'll
be right back. This is the rewrite I'm on with
Phil Weis, the founder of at Prize Wealth Management. We're
(15:54):
going to rewrite back and so much talk about with
life with the life Plan.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
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(17:06):
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We're back with Phil Wise, founder of a Prize Wealth Management. Okay, so,
how what role does mindset play in financial health?
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Mindset is so important, It really is, because if we
don't have a good healthy mindset about money, it's really
hard and so much like if we go back and
part of the life planning process too, when I'm going
through the early meetings, I try to understand what are
your early money memories, Like what was money like for
(17:55):
you growing up? What about money is important to you?
Because all those things matter because they sh ape our
money mindsets, because a lot of the feelings and things
that we get come from how we grew up. And
at the beginning of the life planning training, the first
course I took was quote seven Stages of Money maturity,
(18:15):
and we talk about how we progress in life. And
if you think about it, like I told my story
and I had really bad role models, right, but you
can still learn a lot from a bad role model.
In my case, I was fortunate. I learned everything not
to do when I realized those were not the things
to do when I was able to do the right things,
(18:36):
But some of those memories, like I have a couple
that I work with and they have very different he's
the financial person, he's not, and because of his story,
he desires to pay off their house and really would
like to live on a farm where they can be
self sufficient. And she's like, but our mortgage is at
three and a half percent, why would I want to
(18:57):
pay that off quickly? Because I can earn more on
that money by investing it. And it's a lot of
conversation that we've had around that so that they can
now they understand where each other is coming from. But
that's really important. But it all stems back to what
they experienced growing up.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
I was going to say when you when you said that,
I was thinking about my life growing up and we're
and we're going to dive a lot into you know,
what kind of life do you want to live? And
with money? And in regards to money, so my dad
the minute, the minute he got home from work, he
went to the mailbox, he got his mail and whatever
(19:35):
bills was, and he paid him right away. He didn't
wait for the due date. He paid him right away.
I do the same thing because I watched my dad
do that right and and I to this day like
I and my dad always said too. If you you know,
my mom and dad would say the same thing, like
if we waited to have you three kids, so we
had enough money, we would have had you three kids.
So I say that I do that a lot too.
(19:57):
I think about that a lot too, Like I'm like,
we can't wait until whatever, Like let's just I want
the experience. But I do pay my bills right when
they come in because of my dad. So it's true
what you said, and that brought back a lot of
memories for me too. But let's talk about you work.
You know, you work with so many clients who face
(20:18):
major transitions. Can you share a story. We're going to
talk in particular about a story that you shared with me,
and we're going to call her, Linda, about her story,
and we'll dive into what kind of life do we
want to be living.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
I'm happy to and this is one of my favorite stories,
and Linda's one of my favorite clients.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
And it's all started.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
It was right after I got that from there's three
stages to the life planning training, and it was after
the middle stage, and she was actually the first client
that I like planned And it's all started with this.
I got an email from her basically said this fill
I've taken a leave of absence from work. I don't
know if I'm ever going back. I don't know what
(21:01):
it means for a financial plan. I don't know what
it means at all, but I had to do this.
It's easy to email, so I started the email. I'm like, no, no, no,
this is not a time for an email. I called
her and I asked her what was going on, and
she told me some of the story, and I've learned
a lot more since. But I said, let's work on
(21:23):
your life plan. She's like, okay, and I'll give you
a little bit of the background her on what was
going on. So she Linda's working in a really high
pressure job and that was creating a lot of stress
for her. Linda and her husband have two kids, one
of them had just started college who was going through
(21:44):
a lot of things at college. And then to be
up talking to her one, two, three in the morning. Well,
that's not a great way to live when you have
to get up and go to work and have a
stressful job. Linda is also responsible for the finances. She
and her husband both had could paying jobs and they've
been living on one salary. But she's responsible for managing
(22:05):
all this and she's an MBA, so she's very financially aware,
so she had and then they have rental part. They
have a lot of things that she's taken care of,
so that's what was causing all the stress. So we
started working on her plan, and when I got back
from that part of the training, I wrote a multi
part blog where I shared my life plan because I
(22:26):
feel that if clients share with me, it makes sense
for me to share with them too. So she took
the time to read it, and I got back this
email from her bill, thank you so much. I've been
sitting here trying to build the biggest pile of money
without ever thinking about how much I needed or what
it was for. So over a period of several meetings,
(22:47):
we work through Linda's life plan. It starts with just
some exploratory questions and then we go through give some exercise.
There's one of the exercises there's what's called the three questions.
And the first questions are really easy one it could
be fun to answer. It's imagined that money was no object.
What would you do and how would you live your life?
(23:08):
What would you change all that you can dream big?
Think of all the things that you like to do.
Then we start to dial it back and the second
question becomes more serious, and it's this time you go
to the doctor and you have you're told you have
five to ten years left to live. The good news
about that is you're not ever going to feel sick.
But the bad news about it is you don't know
when you're going to go. And now it's money is
(23:28):
part of the equation. So it's what would you do?
How did you live your life? And what would you change?
And then the third question is the really hard one.
It's this time you go to the doctor and you get
the unfortunate news that today's the day. Now it's not
you you're going to die today. Now, it's not what
would you do? Although some people try to answer it
(23:49):
that way, I think they want to avoid the question
when they do that, right, But what did you not
get to do? And who did you not get to be?
And I think of this as a question to help
you avoid regret, because you can identify those things that
are really important to you that you can start to
do and work on now that when you do get
(24:09):
to the end of your life, whenever that may be,
you don't die with regrets and you have a more
fulfilling life because you're doing those things that really matter
to you. And so we take those three questions and
some of the information in the other exercise. When you
create a vision, and that vision is usually going to
be six to eighteen months out. So this is an
iterative process. Right, we can update your life plan. It's
(24:29):
not like it's one and done. Right, So we created
Linda's life plan. Not everything has gone the way that
she talked about, but it did involve her leaving her job,
which she could have done at any point. She just
didn't realize it because when we worked on our plan,
I mean, I knew they were in position to be
able to do that, but she needed to be convinced
and she needed to get those things that she could understand.
(24:51):
What is she wanted to do with her time? She
does a lot of different things. But my favorite part
of it is it was about a year after we
did we started the life plan work. I got another
email from her Phil when I was in my twenties
and now she's in the.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Early fifties and she lives outside of Chicago.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Did I go to Cubs games and I'd be sitting
in the stands at Wrigley Field, You're drinking beers, whatever,
and we'd see these older women there and they were
taking tickets, they were working as ushers, whatever they were doing.
Said I want to do that someday. So she goes,
I went to the Cub's website and I applied for
a job. She goes, I go in for an interview.
(25:31):
I'm wearing my Cubs jersey, my Cubs World Series T shirt,
and there's all these young kids there that are dressed nicely.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
I got the job.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
I love this story.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
It isn't a.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Great She goes, I don't know how long this is
going to last. There's a concert that a Wriggledly this summer.
I want to at least make it to that so
I can be at the concert. Well, i'll tell you.
She made it through. Last year she worked. They had
the Winter Classic Hockey game and Wriglely. Last December she
worked that. She's still working for the Cubs. The Cubs
(26:02):
are in the playoffs right now, and I know she's
working the home games in the playoffs and she's so excited.
And it was actually her husband's birthday during the game yesterday.
I don't know if she got a ticket, but she
was trying to get him a ticket. Because she was
working the game and she wanted him to be able
to go.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
Ah and.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Linda, there's some stuff that you don't know, so Linda,
because it's not in the story, because this all happened
after So I did go out to see Linda and
some of her friends, one of whom became a client
as well. And Linda told her friends that working with
me changed her life, which from my percentage, I mean,
that's part of.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
What you do exactly.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
And Linda, now, in addition to what I told you
about her, she's got a mother who her parents are divorced.
Her mother has all times in late stage all timers,
and her mother lives in is in a facility in Wisconsin.
She's the primary caregiver for her. Her father lives in Atlanta,
(27:05):
and he's had a pacemaker since we were working together,
and she's the primary caregiver for him. And then earlier
this year, this was really sad. She found out that
her brother had cancer. He's now in hospice and as
financially savvy as Linda is, that's how non savvy her brother.
(27:28):
They're not at all alike from everything that Linda has
told me. But she's now become so now she's become
the primary caregiver for him and his family financially like
trying to help because they weren't financially savvy. And she's
trying to help her nieces and nephews and her sister
in law with managing all this now and going forward.
(27:50):
And Linda last summer or fallic guess it was Linda
and her I'm sorry, it's least spring and her husband
and the other daughter who was a senior in high
school at that time it is now in her freshman
year in college. They came to Annapolis, which isn't too
far from me and my wife and I went and
(28:11):
visited them for brunch. Linda is very appreciative, and she
sent me an email a few weeks ago thing that
she was so appreciative of the work that we did,
because she said, it's the end of the day, despite
everything that's going on, I'm now a better wife, I'm
now a better mother, I'm now a better aunt my
(28:32):
nieces and nephews. I'm a better caretaker for all these
people that I'm helping to take care of. And I
couldn't have done it without the work that we did together,
because it really positioned me to be in the space
where I could and then that cubs job. The best
part about that is that's her release when all this
is going on, she has that as her release. It's
(28:52):
not like she's making a lot of money. She says,
I probably spend more in souvenirs and stuff like that
when I go then I get paid, but just a
way to escape and help her sanity.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Really, so the life plan, what it did for Linda
and how it can help others is basically it can
tell you, so maybe you don't need to make the
millions and millions and millions of dollars because you have
enough for what you want your life, and your life
might not look like somebody else's life plan because we
all have different things. Like I don't desire to travel
(29:24):
the world, so I don't need to have all that,
Like that's not in my desire in this life that
I'm living now to do that, but I do so
ever since you and I talked, and ever since you
came into my life and the rewrites life and this story,
I think about that too. I'm like, well, how do
I want my life to look? And I take that
(29:47):
really serious now because I'm doing some renovations in my house,
and I'm like, do I really need to do that
to make my life better? Or do I need to
do this to make my life better? And I know
how it looks because I know what I have have
to make my life. Okay, you know you know, so
it's it's yes, It's like, so the question really is
what is enough? And what does that.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
Mean to each person that's absolutely right?
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Enough? What enough is for you? Phil might not be
enough for me? Or what enough for me? It might
not be enough for you. So the reflective message is
pretty simple, what kind of life do I want to live?
And you may have enough money, but do you have
enough life?
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Yeah, because at the end of the day, we have
one life, right, that's all we get, and we want
to live it to the fullest. And I'll tell you
that one of the things that I love about the
Lifeline and training is the fact that it is experiential
because it helped me to figure out some of those things.
And if I look at my life and my view
(30:51):
of life, it's changed since I went through it.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
And I know that.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Going through all the stuff that I did at the
beginning of my life, I was much more pessimistic, and
as time has changed and things have improved, I become
more optimistic. And now I have an even better outlook
because now I'm focused more on those things that really matter,
and those things that don't then just let them happen.
It doesn't really matter. You want to focus on the
(31:19):
things that are going to bring you joy and bring
you fulfillment and not worry about what somebody else is
doing or what somebody else has, because it's your life plan,
it's not anybody else's. And even when you're married and
I work with a couple, there's places that they overlap,
but there's also places that they're different. But that's okay
because you each you have to have some overlap, right,
(31:39):
otherwise it's really not a good relationship.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
But when you think of someone like you as you're
an accountant, your chartered financial analyst, you don't think of
someone a financial planner like yourself as a registered life planner.
I mean, I don't think a lot of financial people
have that in talk about that, right, I mean, they
(32:03):
owe you about dad. But the question is is that
you know how many people have ever thought about what
if today was your last day to live?
Speaker 2 (32:14):
Yeah, we don't because one of the parts, another part
of your financial plan is putting together your state planning documents.
What is one of the things that most people are
very happy to push off and push off and push off.
It's all us a state planning documents. Why because we
don't want to think about our death. We don't want
to think about the fact that we that we're going
(32:35):
to have an end, but we are. And it doesn't
mean that you have to sit there say, oh my god,
I'm going to die at some point. It's more I
want to make sure that I do that, make the
most of it until that happens. And that's really what
this is meant to help you do.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
I think about those reflective messages often, like what kind
of life do I want to live?
Speaker 3 (32:56):
A lot?
Speaker 1 (32:58):
And you know, and what does it look like for me?
Because maybe I don't need those millions of dollars, maybe
maybe I need a lot less, or maybe maybe you do.
But everybody's everybody's different. It's it's really it's really fascinating.
I love the story of Linda. I love that you
shared that, so thank you for sharing that with us
(33:19):
in her journey, And if you could leave our listeners
with one message about rewriting their financial story. What would
it be.
Speaker 3 (33:29):
I think it would be.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
To sit back and not just reflect on what you
want to do, but also if we say something's important
to us, look at where you're spending your time, look
at where you're spending your money. Does that reflect what's
most important to you? Because if it doesn't, then either
(33:50):
you're not being true to yourself in terms of what's
important to you, or you need to make some changes.
I just interviewed Carl Richards, who he used to write
the Sketch Guy column in the New York Times. He
started as a financial planner, and now he talks about
behavior and in finance, and he's a really bright guy
(34:14):
about all this stuff. And he says that his favorite
thing is time with his family outside and every once
in a while I look and see am I doing.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
That or not?
Speaker 2 (34:26):
And if I'm not, why, and.
Speaker 3 (34:30):
Like right now?
Speaker 2 (34:30):
So he just released a book and that's really what
the interview that I did with him was around with
his new book, and we talked about some of the
sketches in the new book. And so that's taking his time,
and he understands that because he wants to get that
out there and it's really meant to help people have
better conversations about finances. And but that's the thing. He
knows what's important. He stated it, and he goes back
(34:52):
and checks. He says, if I'm watching ESPN too much, well,
that's not really in line with my mission. So why
am I not doing those things that are really important
to me? So I think that's a really good place
to start, is when you think about and say those
things are really important to you, Let's go back and
look are you're spending your money on those things. You're
spending your time on all those things. Because I think
(35:12):
of it, we have kind of four sources at capital,
and it's I call it a team of capital. We
have time, energy, attention, and money. And the nice thing
about our money is we can exchange our money for
more time. We can exchange our money to give us
more energy, and we can use our money to free
up our attention. So kind of look about the inner
place when you're thinking about those things. Sometimes you can
(35:35):
use your money to get yourself more in those areas,
which is also really important. Like when I moved to
this house that I live in now, I decided the
woman that had the house before us, if you had
a tractor, I'm like, I'm going to buy the tractor
from her. I'm going to cut the grass, no problem,
it'd be great. I'll save some money. So I started
cutting the grass. The only part I ended up enjoying
(35:58):
was that one of my kids would sit on the
train with me while I was driving around the ore.
It was taking me three hours and I wasn't even finishing.
My wife found the guy that was cutting some other
lawns in the neighborhood and it was forty dollars.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
And I said to myself, Okay.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
I know it's not going to take him three hours,
but that's what's taking me, and that's thirteen dollars an hour.
I think my time is worth way more than thirteen
dollars an hour. And I can do a lot better
things and drive from this tractor with maybe a kid
on my lap while I'm doing it. We can do
much more fun things. I'm going to spend my forty
dollars and let somebody else cut the grass. That's a
(36:34):
great example of how you can take your to your
money and use it to buy back more time.
Speaker 3 (36:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
I actually did that with my kids when they got
out of When they got out of college, I was like,
for Christmas, like, you don't need a fat Like my
son never needed anything, but my daughter would have Google
docs and everything that she need with links and everything.
And I'm like, and which is fine, because we'll do
some of that too, because she that's been her whole life.
But I was like, let's instead of just me buying
(37:02):
things just to buy things, you can open things up
now that you're like, you know, out of college and older.
Let's have experiences. Like I'd rather put my money towards
experiences because we're never going to forget. My son is
the biggest Knicks fan in the entire world with a
thousand other people, but he is our next fan. And
he's like, well, he'd want to go to the next
(37:22):
game on Christmas. I'm like, nixt miss, that's what we're doing.
So that's what we've been doing the last few years.
And that's worth so so much to me because it's
an experience and that can't.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Be bought right it can And I know I've asked
my kids sometimes to ask that question, said, so, which
would you rather we do that we take some of
the money that we have because my kids are like years,
they're older, right, which would you rather do? Take some
of that money and let's go experience. And so we've
taken our kids. We do like to travel, and so
we are this summer. We were in London, Belgium and
(37:57):
Amsterdam and three of our four kids came with us.
And the youngest of those three kids is nineteen and
the oldest is twenty five.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
I could become one of your kids and go with
you guys next time, anytime.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Let me know I will. But it's just great to
have them coming.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Yes, I think we've given Phil. I think we've given
the listeners a lot to think about today. I think
we've summed it up in the reflective message which I've said,
which is pretty simple. What kind of life do you
want to live? And do you have enough money? But maybe?
But do you have enough time?
Speaker 3 (38:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (38:35):
And so we all need to have a financial plan
and I love that, and so reach out to Phil Weiss.
He's going to give a free consultation to listeners, so
you can call him. Check him out, Prize Wealth Management,
check him out. It's so important and you bring so
much of it because of your own personal journey and
(38:56):
you really want to empower people financially and what our
life can look like, not just with dollars, but with
in general. So thank you for this another you know,
inspiring interview. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
Thank you so much. Minda, it was great to talk
to you again. I enjoyed it.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
Thanks so much. Deal Needokuda Divorce and Family Laws Attorneys
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(39:37):
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(40:00):
dot com or call two O three five five seven
nine five zero zero
Welcome to The Rewrite, a podcast about divorce, choice and
new beginnings. I'm your host Wendy Sloan, former TV producer,
mom of two and one sweet golden retriever. This is
a space for real talk about the moments that break us,
the choices that define us, and the power we have
to begin again. You'll hear personal stories, heartfelt insights, and
(00:22):
honest conversations about healing relationships and reclaiming your life one
choice at a time. I'll be joined by experts in divorce, finance,
mental health, wellness and more and everything you need to
support your next chapter. The most powerful chapters might be
the ones you write next. Let's begin your rewrite together.
This episode is brought to in part by the Needle
(00:44):
Kuda Law Firm guidance that moves lives forward. Welcome back
to the Rewrite. I'm your host, Wendy Sloan, and my
guest today is a proud sponsor of The Rewrite and
I'm so thankful for that and to bring him to
you all. With over twenty five years of experience in
personal finance and investment manner, he is a chartered Financial Analyst,
certified Public account and registered life planner, and we're going
(01:06):
to talk a lot about that today. But beyond his credentials,
he's someone who truly understands what it means to start over.
Today we're going to talk about the power of reclaiming
your finances and also a life plan will dive into
what kind of life do you really want to live
and what does that mean? And understanding your finances is
more than more, there's more important steps to that towards
(01:28):
freedom and healing. Welcome back to the Rewrite, Phil Weiss.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Thanks Hendie. I'm so happy to be here today. I
really look forward to this conversation.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Oh I am too, and you are a perfect example
of the rewright because of your personal story. So I
want you to bring that back to us. I know
you talked about that on IT. This is our second interview.
I know you talked about that before, but if you
could bring us back to your story, your journey of
how a prize wealth management prize wealth started with your
(02:00):
mom and your dad and your story as a young boy.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Sure, so, growing up in my household, it was the
typical family model that we usually hear about. My mom
was responsible for taking care of my sister and me.
My dad was responsible for taking care of the finances.
But here's the thing. When it came to managing finances.
To say he wasn't good at it is to put
it mildly, my father just is terrible. We had no credit,
(02:27):
we had no savings, We had services turned off for
not being paid. When I was old enough to drive,
I remember going to the local utilities and giving them
a check so that they could turn our services back on.
Because he had this view that he didn't pay for
anything in an advance, so he wouldn't pay.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
It was just a mess.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
When it was time for me to go to college,
I was told, go anywhere you want. So I went
to Duke and I visited, and I fell in love
with the campus and the environment there, and I wanted
to be a doctor d and I thought that would
be the best place to go to become a doctor.
When I was done and I was a psychology major,
I did a lot to stay in school. I even
spoke to the president of the university when it made
changes to the student loan system, and they said nobody
(03:12):
would have to leave because of it. But after my
junior year, I owed the school enough money that we
agreed that while I was still eligible to come back academically,
I needed to pay what I owed before I could finish.
So I left school and after a few months at home,
it was just too toxical an environment. So I moved
(03:33):
across the country. I moved to Tucson. I've lived out
there for a year and a half, and I worked
to make the money to pay off that debt. And
after a year and a half, I was like, this
isn't the right thing. I need to go back to school.
And I had decided that while my grades were good,
they weren't good enough to get into medical school, and
(03:53):
psychology was going to mean more school and that just
wasn't usible for me. Right, I plot and Duke doesn't
offer accounting degrees, and that's what I decided I wanted
to do. So I had residency in Arizona. I had
residency in New Jersey, where I'm from because of my parents,
and I applied to both, and I thought I'd get
(04:15):
a better job coming out of Rutgers. So I came
back home. I went to Rutgers. I'll tell you that
it still wasn't easy. Those credit card checks that we
get in the mail, I don't think we get them
as much anymore. We used to get them a lot.
I would use those to pay for tuition. I would
use them to pay for rent because I lived in
a house that I shared with other people, whatever it was,
(04:36):
because that's what I needed to do to get by
when I finished school. The end of that first year,
I looked at so how much I paid an interest.
I was like, oh my god, I don't make enough
to pay that much interest. So I decided, without the
Internet to consult or anything. Fortunately, I figured out one
of the ways that they talk about paying off credit
card debt. I decided to attack the one with the
(04:58):
highest interest rate. First pay that off, and then work
the rest of the way. I put in place a plan.
I actually had the good fortune to get assigned to
and out of town assignment where I had no real expenses,
so I paid it off faster than I originally planned. Anyway,
I'm living home while all this is going on. One
day I come home, I get the mail and there's
(05:20):
these credit card bills. They had my name on them.
If there's only one thing they weren't mine. I actually
got copies of one of the applications from one of
the banks sent it to me. It was my father.
He forged my name to get credit cards because he
couldn't get credit Oh wow. Yeah, and he had been
paying on those cards enough that they were in good standings,
(05:43):
so that banks just took him and moved him into
his knee. The fast forward a little bit. I had
started my career. My mother had gone back to school
to become an occupational therapist, which I know she really
did so that she could be in strong enough financial
vision of her own to move to move on. But unfortunately,
(06:03):
she spent so much time trying to build her business
that she neglected herself and she was diagnosed with stage
four breast cancer. When that happened, that's when we found
out how bad the financial situation at home really was.
Those credit cards they were now in collection. My parents
had to sell their house because it would have been
foreclosed on. This is all while my mother's trying to
(06:25):
battle cancer, right, and I did what I could to help,
but unfortunately my mom didn't make it. Eighteen months after
her diagnosis, her cancer metastasized to her brain.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
She passed away.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
I'm so sorry, thank you.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
And now I view the work that I do as
trying to help other women not go through the kind
of things that my mom did, and that's why I work.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
With women facing new beginnings.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
And I'll also tell you mentioned I'm a life planner,
So becoming a life planner is an experiential process. So
I have my own life plan, and the first lean
of my life plan is I want to start a
scholarship for women who go back to school later in
life like my mother did. I started to put some
money away. I haven't put everything in place yet. I'm
hoping by the end of the year to have that
(07:16):
so that it'll be in place for the next academic year.
But that's kind of my story and why I work
with who I do.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
I love your story, and that's the whole reason we're here,
right because we've been through something and we're trying to
make a difference for other people. And that's pretty amazing.
So when you were that, when you were that, when
you came home and you saw like bills in your
name that weren't yours, you must have been like.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
What it first is like, this has to be a mistake, right,
So that's why before I decided to confront my father,
because that was I guess a suspicion. I asked for applications.
Some of the banks just kind of ignored me, but
one actually sent me the application. And once I got
the application, I still a handwriting. I knew it was
(08:05):
my father, so that way I could go to him
and say, did you do this? And he admitted that
he did. And so I was paying rent to my
parents when I was living home. At that point, I said, fine,
my rent. Because that the banks wouldn't take them make
those balances out of my name, they left them in
my name. They would move the credit cards going forward
to him. So I sat down. Yeah, so I said,
(08:29):
my rent is going to go to pay these balances off.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
That's what it's too.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
So what are some of the most common mistakes you
see women making right after divorce or like during or
not even just after divorce. What about during divorce or
like even if they're starting to think about what should
If they're starting to think about I think this marriage
is over, what should they do?
Speaker 2 (08:52):
So I think the first thing is and I actually
have a tool that I put together to help with this,
and a.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Divorced preparation guy.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
And you want to make sure that you have a
good understanding of what's going on, what your financial situation is,
and a lot of times that doesn't happen because talking
about finances is not something that's easy for us. I
often say in have read too like it's not just
me saying this that it's easier for us to talk
about sex and this for us to talk about finances don't.
(09:24):
It's it's so personal our finance, we don't want to
talk about them. So in some families there's no conversation
about it, and one spouse doesn't know what the other
spouse is even doing. So you want to really get
a good handle on what's going on and then other
things to do to prepare. It's like, there was a
client that I worked with when I was before I
(09:44):
launched my firm, and I was working for somebody else
and she was going through divorce and her husband and
it was a nasty divorce and her husband was responsible
for paying everything, and she had credit cards in her name.
He stopped paying on them. So when she went to
move out, need her family to help or be able
to move out because they had to provide backing for
(10:05):
the rental agreement that they because she had no credit.
Because we don't realize it. But when you go get rent,
they check your credit, and if you don't have good credit,
you might not be able to rent. So there's things
like that. There's also the idea that when you're a couple,
make sure that both of you have credit cards in
your name. I know, when we open up a new
credit card, or we get a car loan, or just
(10:25):
car and auto loans, that's all we really have. I
mean car and home loans. Carnodos redundant, but carnoto and
home loans. But when we get those things, we'll put
some of them in my wife's name and some of
them mind. Because if everything is joint and your spouse
is listed first, that's the Social Security number that they
report on. They don't really look at you the same way.
(10:47):
You don't really have the same credit. So you want
to make sure that you have credit. You want to
make sure that you understand the financial situation. When it
comes time to split up the assets, you want to
look at what's the tax carcharacterization of all the assets.
And I started as a CPA and did tax work,
and I've seen mistakes made where the one spouse had
(11:10):
wroth irays and the other had regular irays, and those
are very different from a tax perspective because with the WROTH,
you put in after tax dollars and there's no future
tax liability. With an IRA, you put in pre tax dollars,
so ultimately, when you pull the money out, you pay tax.
And one couple that I work with, they split and
his attorney didn't distinguish between the WROTH and the regular
(11:32):
area assets. She had the ross, so it ended up
to her benefit, but he definitely suffers because he's going
to have to pay tax and they just split the
money evenly. So that's a simple mistake. It can be
easy to make. And then I think the other thing
that's really important is when we have kids and we
don't want to disrupt their lives too much too. It's
(11:55):
clearly a disruption when the family splits, but sometimes we
get and now or with the idea we have to
We can't change anything, but make sure if you're going
to stay in that house, that you're going to really
afford it, because that can be a big burden because remember,
if you take a lot of your value in the house,
that means you don't have a lot of other money
coming in. How you're going to be able to pay
(12:16):
for it, and what kind of life you're going to
be able to live if you become house poor, and
what are.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
The consequences of staying in a house and the bills
that come with that as well, Like Okay, yeah, you
get the house, but like there's other things that come
with it, especially when things start to go you know, south,
and you need to fix the house or things start
to break and all that other stuff. I think we
talked about this before, and I've talked about this a
lot on the podcast, that when you're in the you know,
(12:42):
when you first meet someone and you know it's heading
in that direction and you're in the happy, like lovy,
wonderful stage, maybe that's the time to start to talk
about like finances and how it's going to look going forward,
Rather than when you're like being married for a certain
period of time and you're starting to fight and things
are starting to unravel, that's not the time to talk
(13:05):
about finances. Maybe there's a plan when you're first starting
out together about finances.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And
if you're already together and you haven't been talking about it,
there's nothing wrong with saying let's have a money date.
Maybe it's once a month, maybe it's once a quarter,
or maybe it's once a week, depending upon what cadence
works for the two of you. But let's meet and
talk about our finances. I know we do that in
my house. I do take care of the finances. I
pay the bills, but my wife knows what every account
(13:34):
is and the ones that she can't see. Periodically, we'll
sit down and I'll go over so that she knows
what the balances are and she looks at all the
bills and everything else that comes in so that she
understands what's going on. So it's ideally you want to
have that conversation before you're even together because it can
help head offul lot of problems in the future. But
(13:55):
if you don't, or if you're already together and you
don't know, do something like have money dates periodically so
that you can at least start to communicate. Talk about
your finances. What are your plans? You know you have kids,
you want to pay for their education. How are you
going to do that? You have a retirement, and it's
it's saving for retirement and it's also balancing the life
(14:16):
that we want to have now versus taking care of
our kids, having the experiences having a retirement. Like, there's
lots of things that you want to consider and to
talk about them and make sure that you're on board
is really good. And you even want to decide are
we going to each have our own separate finances or
everything going to be commingled. Either one can work, but
you just want to make sure you have an understanding
(14:37):
of what that's going to be.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
It's so important, so important to know about the finances
for both, for both parties. Okay, so you're a chartered
Financial Analyst, certified public account and you're a registered life planner.
Tell us about being a life planner and what that means.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
It's Being a life planner is honestly the favorite part
of what I do, because when I work with a
client on their life plan, I really get to know them.
I really get to understand what's important to them. And
in my business, I'm supposed to be a fiduciary for
my clients, which means I'm supposed to make recommendations that
are in their best interests. It doesn't matter what it
does for me or how it benefits me. It's all
(15:19):
about the client. And if I've worked with you on
your life plan, by the time we're done, I know
what's important to you and I can make those recommendations
in your best interest because you know what matters to
you and that you really and you.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Know what kind of life that they want to live,
So that makes a big difference, Like if they want
to travel the world, that's a big difference. And where
money is going to be saved and spent. Right, We're
going to talk a whole bunch about that, and we're
going to take a quick break for our sponsors. We'll
be right back. This is the rewrite I'm on with
Phil Weis, the founder of at Prize Wealth Management. We're
(15:54):
going to rewrite back and so much talk about with
life with the life Plan.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
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We're back with Phil Wise, founder of a Prize Wealth Management. Okay, so,
how what role does mindset play in financial health?
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Mindset is so important, It really is, because if we
don't have a good healthy mindset about money, it's really
hard and so much like if we go back and
part of the life planning process too, when I'm going
through the early meetings, I try to understand what are
your early money memories, Like what was money like for
(17:55):
you growing up? What about money is important to you?
Because all those things matter because they sh ape our
money mindsets, because a lot of the feelings and things
that we get come from how we grew up. And
at the beginning of the life planning training, the first
course I took was quote seven Stages of Money maturity,
(18:15):
and we talk about how we progress in life. And
if you think about it, like I told my story
and I had really bad role models, right, but you
can still learn a lot from a bad role model.
In my case, I was fortunate. I learned everything not
to do when I realized those were not the things
to do when I was able to do the right things,
(18:36):
But some of those memories, like I have a couple
that I work with and they have very different he's
the financial person, he's not, and because of his story,
he desires to pay off their house and really would
like to live on a farm where they can be
self sufficient. And she's like, but our mortgage is at
three and a half percent, why would I want to
(18:57):
pay that off quickly? Because I can earn more on
that money by investing it. And it's a lot of
conversation that we've had around that so that they can
now they understand where each other is coming from. But
that's really important. But it all stems back to what
they experienced growing up.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
I was going to say when you when you said that,
I was thinking about my life growing up and we're
and we're going to dive a lot into you know,
what kind of life do you want to live? And
with money? And in regards to money, so my dad
the minute, the minute he got home from work, he
went to the mailbox, he got his mail and whatever
(19:35):
bills was, and he paid him right away. He didn't
wait for the due date. He paid him right away.
I do the same thing because I watched my dad
do that right and and I to this day like
I and my dad always said too. If you you know,
my mom and dad would say the same thing, like
if we waited to have you three kids, so we
had enough money, we would have had you three kids.
So I say that I do that a lot too.
(19:57):
I think about that a lot too, Like I'm like,
we can't wait until whatever, Like let's just I want
the experience. But I do pay my bills right when
they come in because of my dad. So it's true
what you said, and that brought back a lot of
memories for me too. But let's talk about you work.
You know, you work with so many clients who face
(20:18):
major transitions. Can you share a story. We're going to
talk in particular about a story that you shared with me,
and we're going to call her, Linda, about her story,
and we'll dive into what kind of life do we
want to be living.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
I'm happy to and this is one of my favorite stories,
and Linda's one of my favorite clients.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
And it's all started.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
It was right after I got that from there's three
stages to the life planning training, and it was after
the middle stage, and she was actually the first client
that I like planned And it's all started with this.
I got an email from her basically said this fill
I've taken a leave of absence from work. I don't
know if I'm ever going back. I don't know what
(21:01):
it means for a financial plan. I don't know what
it means at all, but I had to do this.
It's easy to email, so I started the email. I'm like, no, no, no,
this is not a time for an email. I called
her and I asked her what was going on, and
she told me some of the story, and I've learned
a lot more since. But I said, let's work on
(21:23):
your life plan. She's like, okay, and I'll give you
a little bit of the background her on what was
going on. So she Linda's working in a really high
pressure job and that was creating a lot of stress
for her. Linda and her husband have two kids, one
of them had just started college who was going through
(21:44):
a lot of things at college. And then to be
up talking to her one, two, three in the morning. Well,
that's not a great way to live when you have
to get up and go to work and have a
stressful job. Linda is also responsible for the finances. She
and her husband both had could paying jobs and they've
been living on one salary. But she's responsible for managing
(22:05):
all this and she's an MBA, so she's very financially aware,
so she had and then they have rental part. They
have a lot of things that she's taken care of,
so that's what was causing all the stress. So we
started working on her plan, and when I got back
from that part of the training, I wrote a multi
part blog where I shared my life plan because I
(22:26):
feel that if clients share with me, it makes sense
for me to share with them too. So she took
the time to read it, and I got back this
email from her bill, thank you so much. I've been
sitting here trying to build the biggest pile of money
without ever thinking about how much I needed or what
it was for. So over a period of several meetings,
(22:47):
we work through Linda's life plan. It starts with just
some exploratory questions and then we go through give some exercise.
There's one of the exercises there's what's called the three questions.
And the first questions are really easy one it could
be fun to answer. It's imagined that money was no object.
What would you do and how would you live your life?
(23:08):
What would you change all that you can dream big?
Think of all the things that you like to do.
Then we start to dial it back and the second
question becomes more serious, and it's this time you go
to the doctor and you have you're told you have
five to ten years left to live. The good news
about that is you're not ever going to feel sick.
But the bad news about it is you don't know
when you're going to go. And now it's money is
(23:28):
part of the equation. So it's what would you do?
How did you live your life? And what would you change?
And then the third question is the really hard one.
It's this time you go to the doctor and you get
the unfortunate news that today's the day. Now it's not
you you're going to die today. Now, it's not what
would you do? Although some people try to answer it
(23:49):
that way, I think they want to avoid the question
when they do that, right, But what did you not
get to do? And who did you not get to be?
And I think of this as a question to help
you avoid regret, because you can identify those things that
are really important to you that you can start to
do and work on now that when you do get
(24:09):
to the end of your life, whenever that may be,
you don't die with regrets and you have a more
fulfilling life because you're doing those things that really matter
to you. And so we take those three questions and
some of the information in the other exercise. When you
create a vision, and that vision is usually going to
be six to eighteen months out. So this is an
iterative process. Right, we can update your life plan. It's
(24:29):
not like it's one and done. Right, So we created
Linda's life plan. Not everything has gone the way that
she talked about, but it did involve her leaving her job,
which she could have done at any point. She just
didn't realize it because when we worked on our plan,
I mean, I knew they were in position to be
able to do that, but she needed to be convinced
and she needed to get those things that she could understand.
(24:51):
What is she wanted to do with her time? She
does a lot of different things. But my favorite part
of it is it was about a year after we
did we started the life plan work. I got another
email from her Phil when I was in my twenties
and now she's in the.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Early fifties and she lives outside of Chicago.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Did I go to Cubs games and I'd be sitting
in the stands at Wrigley Field, You're drinking beers, whatever,
and we'd see these older women there and they were
taking tickets, they were working as ushers, whatever they were doing.
Said I want to do that someday. So she goes,
I went to the Cub's website and I applied for
a job. She goes, I go in for an interview.
(25:31):
I'm wearing my Cubs jersey, my Cubs World Series T shirt,
and there's all these young kids there that are dressed nicely.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
I got the job.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
I love this story.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
It isn't a.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Great She goes, I don't know how long this is
going to last. There's a concert that a Wriggledly this summer.
I want to at least make it to that so
I can be at the concert. Well, i'll tell you.
She made it through. Last year she worked. They had
the Winter Classic Hockey game and Wriglely. Last December she
worked that. She's still working for the Cubs. The Cubs
(26:02):
are in the playoffs right now, and I know she's
working the home games in the playoffs and she's so excited.
And it was actually her husband's birthday during the game yesterday.
I don't know if she got a ticket, but she
was trying to get him a ticket. Because she was
working the game and she wanted him to be able
to go.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
Ah and.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Linda, there's some stuff that you don't know, so Linda,
because it's not in the story, because this all happened
after So I did go out to see Linda and
some of her friends, one of whom became a client
as well. And Linda told her friends that working with
me changed her life, which from my percentage, I mean,
that's part of.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
What you do exactly.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
And Linda, now, in addition to what I told you
about her, she's got a mother who her parents are divorced.
Her mother has all times in late stage all timers,
and her mother lives in is in a facility in Wisconsin.
She's the primary caregiver for her. Her father lives in Atlanta,
(27:05):
and he's had a pacemaker since we were working together,
and she's the primary caregiver for him. And then earlier
this year, this was really sad. She found out that
her brother had cancer. He's now in hospice and as
financially savvy as Linda is, that's how non savvy her brother.
(27:28):
They're not at all alike from everything that Linda has
told me. But she's now become so now she's become
the primary caregiver for him and his family financially like
trying to help because they weren't financially savvy. And she's
trying to help her nieces and nephews and her sister
in law with managing all this now and going forward.
(27:50):
And Linda last summer or fallic guess it was Linda
and her I'm sorry, it's least spring and her husband
and the other daughter who was a senior in high
school at that time it is now in her freshman
year in college. They came to Annapolis, which isn't too
far from me and my wife and I went and
(28:11):
visited them for brunch. Linda is very appreciative, and she
sent me an email a few weeks ago thing that
she was so appreciative of the work that we did,
because she said, it's the end of the day, despite
everything that's going on, I'm now a better wife, I'm
now a better mother, I'm now a better aunt my
(28:32):
nieces and nephews. I'm a better caretaker for all these
people that I'm helping to take care of. And I
couldn't have done it without the work that we did together,
because it really positioned me to be in the space
where I could and then that cubs job. The best
part about that is that's her release when all this
is going on, she has that as her release. It's
(28:52):
not like she's making a lot of money. She says,
I probably spend more in souvenirs and stuff like that
when I go then I get paid, but just a
way to escape and help her sanity.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Really, so the life plan, what it did for Linda
and how it can help others is basically it can
tell you, so maybe you don't need to make the
millions and millions and millions of dollars because you have
enough for what you want your life, and your life
might not look like somebody else's life plan because we
all have different things. Like I don't desire to travel
(29:24):
the world, so I don't need to have all that,
Like that's not in my desire in this life that
I'm living now to do that, but I do so
ever since you and I talked, and ever since you
came into my life and the rewrites life and this story,
I think about that too. I'm like, well, how do
I want my life to look? And I take that
(29:47):
really serious now because I'm doing some renovations in my house,
and I'm like, do I really need to do that
to make my life better? Or do I need to
do this to make my life better? And I know
how it looks because I know what I have have
to make my life. Okay, you know you know, so
it's it's yes, It's like, so the question really is
what is enough? And what does that.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
Mean to each person that's absolutely right?
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Enough? What enough is for you? Phil might not be
enough for me? Or what enough for me? It might
not be enough for you. So the reflective message is
pretty simple, what kind of life do I want to live?
And you may have enough money, but do you have
enough life?
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Yeah, because at the end of the day, we have
one life, right, that's all we get, and we want
to live it to the fullest. And I'll tell you
that one of the things that I love about the
Lifeline and training is the fact that it is experiential
because it helped me to figure out some of those things.
And if I look at my life and my view
(30:51):
of life, it's changed since I went through it.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
And I know that.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Going through all the stuff that I did at the
beginning of my life, I was much more pessimistic, and
as time has changed and things have improved, I become
more optimistic. And now I have an even better outlook
because now I'm focused more on those things that really matter,
and those things that don't then just let them happen.
It doesn't really matter. You want to focus on the
(31:19):
things that are going to bring you joy and bring
you fulfillment and not worry about what somebody else is
doing or what somebody else has, because it's your life plan,
it's not anybody else's. And even when you're married and
I work with a couple, there's places that they overlap,
but there's also places that they're different. But that's okay
because you each you have to have some overlap, right,
(31:39):
otherwise it's really not a good relationship.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
But when you think of someone like you as you're
an accountant, your chartered financial analyst, you don't think of
someone a financial planner like yourself as a registered life planner.
I mean, I don't think a lot of financial people
have that in talk about that, right, I mean, they
(32:03):
owe you about dad. But the question is is that
you know how many people have ever thought about what
if today was your last day to live?
Speaker 2 (32:14):
Yeah, we don't because one of the parts, another part
of your financial plan is putting together your state planning documents.
What is one of the things that most people are
very happy to push off and push off and push off.
It's all us a state planning documents. Why because we
don't want to think about our death. We don't want
to think about the fact that we that we're going
(32:35):
to have an end, but we are. And it doesn't
mean that you have to sit there say, oh my god,
I'm going to die at some point. It's more I
want to make sure that I do that, make the
most of it until that happens. And that's really what
this is meant to help you do.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
I think about those reflective messages often, like what kind
of life do I want to live?
Speaker 3 (32:56):
A lot?
Speaker 1 (32:58):
And you know, and what does it look like for me?
Because maybe I don't need those millions of dollars, maybe
maybe I need a lot less, or maybe maybe you do.
But everybody's everybody's different. It's it's really it's really fascinating.
I love the story of Linda. I love that you
shared that, so thank you for sharing that with us
(33:19):
in her journey, And if you could leave our listeners
with one message about rewriting their financial story. What would
it be.
Speaker 3 (33:29):
I think it would be.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
To sit back and not just reflect on what you
want to do, but also if we say something's important
to us, look at where you're spending your time, look
at where you're spending your money. Does that reflect what's
most important to you? Because if it doesn't, then either
(33:50):
you're not being true to yourself in terms of what's
important to you, or you need to make some changes.
I just interviewed Carl Richards, who he used to write
the Sketch Guy column in the New York Times. He
started as a financial planner, and now he talks about
behavior and in finance, and he's a really bright guy
(34:14):
about all this stuff. And he says that his favorite
thing is time with his family outside and every once
in a while I look and see am I doing.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
That or not?
Speaker 2 (34:26):
And if I'm not, why, and.
Speaker 3 (34:30):
Like right now?
Speaker 2 (34:30):
So he just released a book and that's really what
the interview that I did with him was around with
his new book, and we talked about some of the
sketches in the new book. And so that's taking his time,
and he understands that because he wants to get that
out there and it's really meant to help people have
better conversations about finances. And but that's the thing. He
knows what's important. He stated it, and he goes back
(34:52):
and checks. He says, if I'm watching ESPN too much, well,
that's not really in line with my mission. So why
am I not doing those things that are really important
to me? So I think that's a really good place
to start, is when you think about and say those
things are really important to you, Let's go back and
look are you're spending your money on those things. You're
spending your time on all those things. Because I think
(35:12):
of it, we have kind of four sources at capital,
and it's I call it a team of capital. We
have time, energy, attention, and money. And the nice thing
about our money is we can exchange our money for
more time. We can exchange our money to give us
more energy, and we can use our money to free
up our attention. So kind of look about the inner
place when you're thinking about those things. Sometimes you can
(35:35):
use your money to get yourself more in those areas,
which is also really important. Like when I moved to
this house that I live in now, I decided the
woman that had the house before us, if you had
a tractor, I'm like, I'm going to buy the tractor
from her. I'm going to cut the grass, no problem,
it'd be great. I'll save some money. So I started
cutting the grass. The only part I ended up enjoying
(35:58):
was that one of my kids would sit on the
train with me while I was driving around the ore.
It was taking me three hours and I wasn't even finishing.
My wife found the guy that was cutting some other
lawns in the neighborhood and it was forty dollars.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
And I said to myself, Okay.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
I know it's not going to take him three hours,
but that's what's taking me, and that's thirteen dollars an hour.
I think my time is worth way more than thirteen
dollars an hour. And I can do a lot better
things and drive from this tractor with maybe a kid
on my lap while I'm doing it. We can do
much more fun things. I'm going to spend my forty
dollars and let somebody else cut the grass. That's a
(36:34):
great example of how you can take your to your
money and use it to buy back more time.
Speaker 3 (36:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
I actually did that with my kids when they got
out of When they got out of college, I was like,
for Christmas, like, you don't need a fat Like my
son never needed anything, but my daughter would have Google
docs and everything that she need with links and everything.
And I'm like, and which is fine, because we'll do
some of that too, because she that's been her whole life.
But I was like, let's instead of just me buying
(37:02):
things just to buy things, you can open things up
now that you're like, you know, out of college and older.
Let's have experiences. Like I'd rather put my money towards
experiences because we're never going to forget. My son is
the biggest Knicks fan in the entire world with a
thousand other people, but he is our next fan. And
he's like, well, he'd want to go to the next
(37:22):
game on Christmas. I'm like, nixt miss, that's what we're doing.
So that's what we've been doing the last few years.
And that's worth so so much to me because it's
an experience and that can't.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Be bought right it can And I know I've asked
my kids sometimes to ask that question, said, so, which
would you rather we do that we take some of
the money that we have because my kids are like years,
they're older, right, which would you rather do? Take some
of that money and let's go experience. And so we've
taken our kids. We do like to travel, and so
we are this summer. We were in London, Belgium and
(37:57):
Amsterdam and three of our four kids came with us.
And the youngest of those three kids is nineteen and
the oldest is twenty five.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
I could become one of your kids and go with
you guys next time, anytime.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Let me know I will. But it's just great to
have them coming.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Yes, I think we've given Phil. I think we've given
the listeners a lot to think about today. I think
we've summed it up in the reflective message which I've said,
which is pretty simple. What kind of life do you
want to live? And do you have enough money? But maybe?
But do you have enough time?
Speaker 3 (38:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (38:35):
And so we all need to have a financial plan
and I love that, and so reach out to Phil Weiss.
He's going to give a free consultation to listeners, so
you can call him. Check him out, Prize Wealth Management,
check him out. It's so important and you bring so
much of it because of your own personal journey and
(38:56):
you really want to empower people financially and what our
life can look like, not just with dollars, but with
in general. So thank you for this another you know,
inspiring interview. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
Thank you so much. Minda, it was great to talk
to you again. I enjoyed it.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
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