#79 Is The Money Mentorship For You?

Ryan: Hello Terry. Welcome back mate. Big conversation you had with Rachel last episode.

Terry: Yeah. Did you like it?

Ryan: Ah, mate. Huge. I love her. She’s such a legend and what a weapon. Just absolutely killing it.

Terry: Yeah. It’s funny, she sent us both an email afterwards and she was like, I, I’m not sure how I thought it would come across. I was a little bit nervous, but I’m really glad we did that. And I was like, so am I. Because I know a lot of people are gonna get so much from that episode and it’s gonna have a lasting impact I think.

Ryan: Yeah, I know, I did. And there was just some ideas that existed there that make you go, you what? Sometimes he’s got a grit teeth, lean in, do some stuff. And I just loved that she kind of really highlighted how important action is in terms of kind of unlocking progress and making things happen for her. And I loved that her dad said when she was training or there was something hard going on, he was like, put a rock or a stone under your tongue.

Laugh: Yeah.

Ryan: And redirect your attention around pain. I was like, oh yeah, I could see how that idea is permeated for her over time.

Terry: Oh, and I’ll tell you what, there’s very few athletes that have pain tolerance than rowers because the amount of lactic acid they have to have just coursing through their veins to do what they do. Like they just, they, no one’s more tough, I don’t reckon.

Ryan: yeah, yeah. But just for anyone to take that and go, Hey, sometimes you gotta lean into that pain. Cause on the other side of it is a big reward. And we’re probably gonna talk about that a bit today, aren’t we?

Terry: Yeah, we are, we sort of thought about, you know, we’ve got a few people reaching out after that. Tell me more about the money mentorship. Could it work for me? And we’ve never really discussed this in its entirety on the podcast, but we thought it might be a good opportunity to do that because, uh, it was bound to be a lot of folks who kind of listened to that, did get inspired and went, what’s my next action?

And then asked themselves some questions about the money mentorship. So we thought, why not actually kind of sit down, map this whole thing out, and talk people through step by step exactly how we use all these principles we’ve been discussing in this series on hacking money habits. How do we use all this evidence, all this information to change people, to help people like raach achieve their big money goals?

So that’s what we’ve been talking about and I’m excited about it too.

Ryan: Me too. And it’s not just, Rachel Taylor retiring early. think about, what this program has done for people over the years. You know, some of the big things that come to mind are breaking the cycle of financial abuse. We met with, one of our clients the other day, which kind of just brought back some memories about how far she’d come since that time.

 Navigate tricky career transitions, you know. Making changes and kind of going through periods of unsettling change. Couples wanting to get on the same page and pull in the same

Terry: saving them from a divorce.

Ryan: saving them divorce, recovering from divorce is another one. What else comes to mind for you?

Terry: Yeah, like moving across the country, starting new lives with their families without an income. Those are big ones, big decisions. Starting their own businesses, using that passive income, buying their first home, buying their first investment property, pulling back from full-time work, spending more time on their own passion projects.

And Gab, who some people will know early days. One of our first exemplars on the podcast is now funding scholarships at the school that she used to attend, which is cool because remember we talked about that and she was kind of laughing about how she thought Legacy was a joke and now she’s funding scholarships, which is awesome.

Ryan: Yeah. Another one I always love is a lot of guys have funded some pretty big overseas trips as well, some big holidays, and kind of fitted that in around weddings and organizing weddings, funding weddings, another one, babies. There’s so many things that this unlock can have for people, and so I’m excited to kind of explore what this might mean for whoever’s listening to this one.

Terry: Totally. And look, if you’re wondering if this is for you, this episode’s relevant for you. This is for you. If you’ve been wondering at all about the specifics of the mentorship and you ask yourself those questions afterwards, if you’ve gone onto our website and you’ve hovered on the mentorship page and you’ve gone back and wondering whether you should book a call, this is for you, or if you’ve even filled in an application but you never got to the call, this is for you as well.

So hopefully this answers a lot of those questions and helps you figure out whether you even want to take that kind of next step in this direction or rule it out completely cuz it doesn’t feel like it vibes for you. That’s absolutely fine too, that our number one thing is like just getting into action. Whatever it is you’re doing is gonna be better than sitting on your ass.

Ryan: I love it. I remember back in the first season, we always used to use the word program in the program and everyone was always like, what’s this bloody program you’re talking about?

Laugh: Yeah.

Ryan: So it’s good to pull back the curtain and dig into what that actually is. So everyone knows what we’re actually talking about when we say program.

Terry: It’s probably well overdue actually.

Laugh: Yeah.

Ryan: Wait til episode, what is it? 70 or so?

Terry: 78, 79, sorry.

Ryan: 79. And so in this episode, we’re gonna reveal our program philosophy, what underpins everything that we do, the four evolutions that we go through that make up the structure of the program and the evidence behind our approach.

And then who this works best for, and I guess who it doesn’t work for as well. We wanna make sure that we help people see if it’s not for them. At the same time, might also touch on why we dropped our afsl, weren’t we the license? So the difference 

Terry: Oh, you might need to explain that Ackerman mate.

Ryan: Ah, yeah. Australian Financial Services license. and we’ll probably just hit on, I guess, a difference between advice versus education.

I mean, how we kind of made that transition and why we made that transition realistically. really?

Terry: Yeah, we get that question a lot. So I think it is worth kind of delving into that and taking folks through that decision, cuz it was, it was quite a big one for us. And the goal of this episode is really just to help you make an informed decision on what your next steps might be and whether it might or may not be with us.

So if you’ve ever wondered what’s under the hood when it comes to the mentorship and why people tell us that this is more like a personal development program than a personal finance course, then hopefully this episode answers all those questions for you.

Ryan: Yeah. Brilliant. So I mentioned the program philosophy. What is our philosophy?

Terry: Geez, I don’t know if we have a name for the philosophy. do we, the cash flow co way.

Laugh: I dunno,

Terry: I guess the most important thing to note with it is that it’s not stuff we made up. It’s based on our own kind of research, our own experimentation with ourselves and experienced in terms of what worked for us. And then as we move through and we start working with other folks through the podcast, what we experiences were with them, because I think that teaches you so much, right?

It’s like getting a PhD in the problem. You see the same problem from all these different angles, and everybody wants to know how to make their money work harder. The folks that we work with, they don’t have money problems. They have money opportunities, and they just wanna know that they’re making the most of those opportunities, don’t they?

Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s always kind of drawing from those learnings and iterating the training that we have. So I just spent two weeks literally just stripping apart a training, a specific part of one of our modules, and recreating it to change that user journey. Because I was like, there’s new ideas and there’s new way of doing things, or there’s new kind of bolt-ons that I know will have a big impact on the way people are doing it and kind of learning it how quickly they can pick that up.

And so it’s like we go back and go, now let’s tweak that. Let’s make it better for everybody from there. So you get to get pulled from that hive mind in that way.

Terry: Yeah. It’s massive, I think because every time you sit in front of someone, you get more insight. You say something slightly differently, you show them in a different way, and you kind of see things click. And when you start to see those patterns, I get a little bit excited, but I also get a little bit intimidated because it’s not easy to create.

It’s much as it takes time and it’s, it’s a very big battle between you and your own self critic.

Ryan: Labor of love, yeah.

Terry: But they’re huge. Right? We get them. Right. It’s huge. I mean, I, I I’m thinking about a module that, that you introduced, uh, just recently around the third dimension and how debt plays a role in your wealth strategy and, and how, how to think about it. And the amount of conversations I’ve had with folks on how that kind of really did help them reframe that concept of debt and make better decisions when it came to what their strategy was, the steps they were gonna take.

I guess this gave them the fuller picture of everything they, they needed to consider. So that’s huge. I think for sure. I think for us, the biggest thing that we’ve learned, and you sort of tell me if I’m wrong on this, but I mean, I feel like we harp on this all the time, that the number one thing is what you do matters 10 times more than what you know.

Ryan: I think Rachel smacked that home last episode too, didn’t she?

Terry: Yep. Yeah. Massive.

Ryan: money is not a math riddle, it’s a behavior puzzle. And removing down comes from doing, you know, it’s that acting your way into a new way of thinking and gathering evidence about what you’re doing. And if that’s working and gathering evidence to see that what you’re doing is working, it’s taking you somewhere is really powerful.

And as you removed out, you unlock new potential and new progress that’s possible for you. And so, you know, I guess we’ve just found that confidence comes from competence. Knowing how to do something, getting good at it builds the confidence that removes doubt, unlocks progress, and you know, things just channel in the right direction.

Would you agree?

Terry: Yeah. And the other thing I think is, and we’ve had this discussion more recently, but like financial modeling over long, long time periods doesn’t work. It’s a waste of time. It’s much, much more effective to really understand what you’re trying to accomplish and then build structures and systems that tighten feedback loops that help you course correct faster and better, make better decisions on the journey.

Would that be right?

Ryan: Mate, if you’d asked me that four years ago after, you know, I’d probably put in nearly the 10,000 hours of financial modeling. I would’ve killed you for saying it. I would’ve disagreed, but I had to let go of that. I’ll admit

Terry: You were damn good at it too.

Ryan: I’m good at it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was. But the thing is, there’s, for every variable you can plan for, there’s a thousand that you can’t, and it only takes one variable to change.

And so much of it goes out the window. And so you’re right, life is fluid and you are actually better served just having the things in place that help you inform decisions on the fly and just see that the decisions you are taking or you are making, taking closer to where you wanna be. Yeah, I’d agree with that.

Terry: There’s a couple of observations and a couple of lessons for us that I guess have taken some time to learn and a lot of repetitions, but let’s talk about some of the beliefs that underpin, I guess, the way we approach the whole program. The first one, and I think it’s the most fundamental, and hopefully you’ve already picked this up.

If you’ve been listened to our podcast, we have a huge bent on this, so this shouldn’t be any surprise. But the number one thing for us is that any personal finance solution, it should not be centered on how money works. It absolutely should be centered on how people work with money, because. How people work with money is how results happen.

How money works doesn’t necessarily equate to how results happen. There’s so many smart, smart people who understand how money works, but when the people component comes into it completely fall down, don’t they?

Ryan: Yep. Couldn’t agree more. A big one for me is learning should be separated from doing and shouldn’t be mistaken for doing as well. We think about this podcast or reading books or all these YouTubeing, whatever it might be. Gathering more information is very different from. Doing and gathering feedback, creating the feedback loops that help you iterate your approach, um, and inform your decisions.

And so you always wanna keep those separate. Am I just learning to build my frame of reference ideas and models and learnings from others that I can draw from? Or am I actually doing and gathering feedback about whether or not what I’m doing is working?

Terry: There’s a second part to that that I wanna add to around why learning should be separated from doing. It’s a lot around. The finance profession and the finance industry. And I’ve sat in those rooms where you’ve got a very smart accountant or a financial planner and they’re just kind of spewing information at you, making a bunch of assumptions about what you already know, and you feel a bunch of pressure to like get it in the room.

And so they go, does that make sense? And you go, uh, yeah. I don’t wanna look like an idiot. So, yeah. But what we’ve learned is the best way to learn money, or the best way to master money, is to separate the learning. So you can do it in your time and your way and not feel the pressure to have to get it in that moment.

And then be able to bring really informed questions to somebody who can help you, answer them whilst you take action. And so we separate the learning and the doing in the program. So you just talked about a module, right? Yes. We use modules. We use the modules to do the teaching. All of the what and the why.

And we use the coaching sessions to do the doing, but that doing is informed by the discussion that happens from the learning as well. So the best way to do it is to kind of code. Cool. Bring, go through this information, bring your questions. Now let’s take those questions sense, make meaning, make understand how this fits for you.

Now do the doing.

Ryan: Yeah. Which highlights another big belief of ours, which is if you get really good at asking the right questions, you’ll get better answers. And we love, we love when members come into a session and they’ve got a list of questions and it’s so thought through and you can see the question is gonna give them the right answer.

It’s such a powerful thing. And another thing about learning should be that it’s centered around universal principles. Things that are tried and tested and proven over time, not necessarily about the new thing, the shiny object, you know, the thing that’s trending right now. It should be you building your frame of reference on what we know works and building on, what’s the analogy of standing on the shoulder of giants, being able to, you know, look at what is true and proven separate that from trending.

And then the doing is all around, applying those principles and then gathering feedback and iterating from there. Would you agree with that?

Terry: Yeah, totally. It’s says universal principles, but then the, the next part, probably the next belief here for us is that coaching. Is about the configuration of those principles, and then how do we apply those using tools to your own circumstances, right? So we had this really important discussion around the difference between advice and coaching.

And advice is where you’re telling, whereas coaching is where you’re pulling the answers from somebody. They’re coming to those conclusions for themselves. And it’s a very different kind of way of working with someone to be able to draw the insight from them. And that is the thing that I love when it kind of clicks for people like, yes, I get it.

This is what makes sense. This is what we’re gonna be doing.

Ryan: They trip over the truth.

Terry: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s not that we all need to do the same thing. We’ve gotta figure out what makes the most sense for us. And no one can tell you that. Only you can tell you that. So I think coaching is about helping guide people through those conversations, come to those conclusions for themselves.

Ryan: Yes. Yes. And I think just to highlight, we’ve got a huge bent on tools, don’t we like making it easy to embed the practices that give you those feedback loops that help you make informed decisions just to collapse the time it takes to do it all, keep it sticky. And then the final one, I would say, and you know, I actually think this might be the most important one, is we believe that money can be a game that we enjoy playing.

Yeah. It doesn’t need to be this time that we need to get all serious and, you know, all adulty about and, um, put on a suit to talk about

Terry: Well, the boxing gloves,

Ryan: or boxing gloves. Yeah. It can just be a game that we enjoy playing. And as we learned from, you know, BJ Fogg really highlighted this, what is enjoyable is sustainable. So if we can get that right, if you just love playing the game of money, then you will go further without a doubt.

Terry: I just wanna differentiate loving the game versus loving the thing. As opposed to like loving money, it’s more about loving the game, figuring out how to master the game, leveling up, becoming a different version of yourself, actualizing who you are along the way to make your life work better. I think those are very two different things.

So important to note. But um, it’s funny, like I think there’ll be a whole bunch of people that are like, there’s no way you can make this enjoyable, Ryan. And I think we can now say with conviction, after having hundreds of folks go through this and say exactly that, how is this so actually enjoyable? Why am I looking forward to this?

You can absolutely do it.

Ryan: I think RA should have that, um, that idea shattered by now. Hopefully. And so I guess that’s what we believe. Right? That’s, um, some of the big beliefs we have. Is there anything stands out to you that we don’t believe we oppose?

Terry: I think the biggest one for me is we don’t believe that people can’t learn this, and we don’t believe that anyone can’t learn this, because now we’ve seen, again, so many folks from all different walks of life, different qualifications, different backgrounds, different experience, different confidence levels when it comes to money.

We’ve seen so many people make that transition, make that transformation. So at this point, it’d be very hard pressed to explain to me why that’s not the case. I think anyone can learn this.

Ryan: Yeah, I’d agree with that. And to second that or build upon that, I would say that you shouldn’t outsource the thinking for your future to somebody else. Yes, you should use professionals, but professionals should be there to inform your planning, not make your plans. We have made comment around, you know, financial advisors.

We do think financial advisors are important. Very important. It’s just where they fit in that planning part for you, and it’s easy to kind of go, I’m gonna get someone else to do it. And absolve yourself with responsibility in that way. We directly oppose that. It’s like, if you wanna be the maker of your own life and you need to be the creator of your own plans, and so that’s a big one for us, isn’t it?

Terry: We should explain why we think that one’s important and for, I think it just comes down to the research, right? What does the research show most investor returns, lag, investment returns. And it’s usually because of some kind of behavior gap. And so it’s something we are doing with money that gets in the way of us getting our returns.

And usually the thing that we’re doing with money is fiddling with it. Jumping in and outta plans like a diet. You know, I’m gonna try this now, I’m gonna try this now. And so if you don’t stick to the plan, it won’t get the result. And the most important variable for you to stick to the plan is whether it’s yours or not.

If somebody gives it to you and it doesn’t quite make sense, you don’t have the context, it’s easy for you to set that aside. Now remember this as a coach, right? I would spend hours and hours and hours and hours researching, creating the best programs, the most re thoughtfully researched things. But if I didn’t take that athlete on the journey with me and get them to buy in and actually co-create it and actually feel like, yep, this makes sense for me.

I’ve had some input. This actually has real contact. This is gonna gonna get me to where I want to go, and it makes sense based on who I am, then I would just see that program on the floor. And I think that’s pretty damn common with financial planning as well. you get this big thick document full of legalese, and you kind of go, what’s this?

Laugh: What’s this? 

Terry: It’s, it’s, it’s pretty, it’s interesting.

Ryan: One final one. We don’t believe. If you’ve been listening, you’ll know we’ve mentioned this. We don’t think you should set and forget your money. We see the opportunity to be in the way that you continue to interact with your money, the decisions you make, you know, creating for every decision, every decision you make, being, you know, you creating what’s next for you.

And it’s actually something that can be very exciting if you do it right. And when you start to set and forget, you actually remove the opportunity for yourself. You rob yourself of the opportunity to create win states and to enjoy that journey more. And so much of what we learned from listening to the experts that have just gone before us around motivation, around embedding habits that take us closer to where we wanna be about achievement, we do that because we love the energy that comes with it.

We love feeling motivated. We love feeling energized and excited. There’s internal states that come with that, and we actually rob ourselves of the opportunity to get that when we set and forget things.

Terry: Yeah. Hard to build a new way. Density around something if you ignore it.

Ryan: Hard to have fun with it too. Instead, it’s just a bit of a gray cloud that can exist in the background. Yeah.

Terry: Yeah. And it doesn’t have to be onerous, right? Like if it’s enjoyable, it’s not onerous. You know, if you’re having fun, it’s the opposite. So I think a lot of people think, oh, I’m gonna spend inordinate amounts of time doing this, and it doesn’t have to be like that. If it is a game, if it is something you’re enjoying, you don’t, sitting there counting the minutes, counting the time, you’re actually kind of going, cool.

I’m actually pretty engaged with this. It’s having a real impact on my life and it’s something that I’m getting a lot of purpose meaning from.

Ryan: Yeah. And I say to people, you only need to spend 15 minutes on this a month. That’s it. And then they spend up 60, maybe 90. I’m like, guys, you don’t need to do that. Uh, but they say, well, we just want to.

Laugh: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Ryan: Uh, 

Terry: So you don’t have to though. You don’t have to.

Ryan: Brit, my partner, is a perfect example of that. She, uh, completely pushed against it took her six months before she started, you know, doing some of these things with me, maybe longer.

Actually it was probably more like 18 months, to be honest. And now she’s driving it. She’s the one reminding me, she’s saying, let’s sit down and spend a bit of time thinking about this. So it’s amazing how things can shift. So, pretty strong beliefs there. Very strong beliefs there that we’ve developed over time.

Let’s talk about the program itself. So, you know, what does it actually look like? What’s the process we work through? How do we help create that transformation? Make it a game that’s fun to play?

Terry: Yeah, I think at a higher level what we’ve done is we’ve broken it down into four, we call ’em evolutions, and each of these evolutions is designed to help you answer really important questions that you can use to resolve doubt, move forward, make progress. So I’ll quickly go across the four and then we can deep dive into them.

So the first one’s clarity, and that’s where we create a really compelling vision. The second one is structure, and that’s where we engineer your environment for success. The third one is consistency, and that’s where we’re mastering the practices of wealth creation. And then the fourth one is leverage, and that’s where we make the big money moves.

Decouple time and money to make money work harder for us. So let’s talk about the first one, clarity, mate. What do we need to know here? What do we mean by that? What are we doing when we are creating compelling vision?

Ryan: Yeah, I suppose we’re, we’re using cutting edge motivation science to bring fuzzy ambitions into focus. We’re taking what can feel like, I guess, a bit of a distorted abstract view in front of us and making it very clear so that we know and have a reference point, a north star that we can keep coming back to and saying, you know, good decision, good use of money takes us closer to that.

And you know, this is one of the things that we, we love to and we need to spend the most time on because it kind of preempts everything else. It sets everything else up. Cause everything else needs to be about helping actualize the vision that you have for yourself.

Terry: How we do that.

Ryan: This is a deep dive on our ends. It’s a, it’s a good, you know, 90 minute facilitated coaching session, which we call Life by Design.

And yeah, it’s really digging into some big questions and kind of bring to the surface, you know, what a rich life looks like for you. And we always make sure that we highlight the internal state, or you know, what you want money to buy for you. Sometimes saying, this is the life. This is how we wanna shape the physical reality around us.

You know, where we wanna be, what we wanna do, what we want to have. But it’s also then digging into what that does for you. Well, it is the state change that that can create and that state change is important because, you know, our nervous system, our gut decisions that we make over time are so informed by that state that we can experience in in doing that.

And we also kind of uncovered the unconscious drivers that will motivate you to move. You talked about this with Rachel in that last episode. It was kind of referencing going back to that and going that I don’t want to be true for me. I don’t want to find myself in a place where that is me. And it’s kind of this away from energy where you’re just making sure that that doesn’t actualize for you, which can be a really potent motivator.

Anything else you’d add there?

Terry: No, I think they’re the main ones. It’s probably really important to talk about why we do that, and the big one for me is you cannot create a future you haven’t imagined. And even more importantly, you cannot optimize effectively if you don’t know what you’re optimizing for. So people get stuck in spreadsheets trying to optimize their life, but they dunno what they’re optimizing for.

So everything feels like a big deal and they procrastinate and hesitate. And it’s because they haven’t sat down and asked themselves a more important question, which is, what’s the money for? Where does it have to take us? What does it have to do for us to feel wealthy? For us to make the most of the limited time we have here, and we talked to John d Martini about making sure that your goals have to be aligned to reflect your values if you wanna achieve them.

Cuz your values are essentially like a superpower, right? And if you can align those efforts, you can align those things, then it’s so much easier for you to get into action and persist. You know, he talked about how he overcame his own learning difficulty, it’s that desire that’s linked to those values.

So it’s huge. Right? Cuz you know, we also talked about like building an internal scorecard and getting outta these mimetic rivalry games. Tell me if I’m wrong or if you agree, but I would frequently see when folks get to the end of this session, they go, I’m actually shocked at how much simpler. That definition of wealth is then what I feel like we need to be doing.

What I felt, it’s so much simpler, right?

Ryan: Couldn’t agree more. And it just goes to show if you don’t define your own dreams, you’ll always chase somebody else’s. You’re always gonna lean into their rivalries, look sideways, look laterally at what other people are doing and go, Hmm, maybe that should be what I’m working towards. So often that’s shiny objects.

They get you. And you think about the arm wrestl, we’re always in with our money. It’s finding this balance between where we are now and where we want to be in the future. And if that future’s not worth working towards, then you’re not gonna balance your resources between now and then. So think of it like a scale or you wanna put weight on that future side of that scale so that you can preference it alongside getting through today.

And you know the realities that exist right now. And so, Coming back to that, always start with what is it that we wanna work towards? What does money need to do? And is that make sure that’s worth working towards compelling enough? Emily Bellis had a really good way of thinking about this too, didn’t she?

In terms of the lens that we have.

Terry: She talked about how you need to widen or narrow the aperture of your focus at different points in the pursuit of any goal. And at the start of anything, you wanna widen the lens to perceive what’s possible for you. Because it has to be compelling. It has to be compelling enough for you to get up. Do something different in pursuit of that, right?

And so she talks about this process of materialization, and the first time you do this, when you map this out and you put it into words, you put those words on a page, you organize the words, you turn it into a narrative. What you’re essentially doing is you’re taking it from this vague, amorphous ambition that maybe you’ve had a discussion in your own mind about, or maybe you and your partner have had corridor conversations about on the pillow at night, where you’re like, wouldn’t that be great?

Or maybe on holidays you’re taking all those conversations and you’re like, bring ’em all together and let’s actually put this picture together and let’s actually make it really, really clear. Turn it into something we can see, we can feel we can touch. Critical, I think critical.

Ryan: One of our coaches gave us an incredible analogy for this, didn’t he? Mitch,

Terry: Yeah. Mitch, shout out to Mitch.

Ryan: gonna give you the pleasure of sharing this cuz he said it to you first.

Terry: You know, I love an analogy. This is one of the best analogy as I heard.

Ryan: You’ve been smiling ear to ear since you heard it.

Terry: We just talked about a lot of evidence and stuff like that. But you know, what does this actually mean? What it means is, you know, he, the way he described it, he says, look, before my partner Brooke and I did this, it felt like we were working really hard trying to solve this thousand piece puzzle, but we did not have the picture.

So we didn’t know what we were solving for. And then straight after this session, that picture came into focus. And when we looked down, it wasn’t a thousand pieces. Now there was only 10. And I was like, that’s the best way I’ve ever explained it. Because that’s right. Like you think you, you’re working really hard, you’re working hard, you’re like putting in all this effort, but you, and you might feel like you’re, you know, on different wavelengths of times and things aren’t, they don’t feel like they’re clicking.

But when you can get on the same page like this, God, it makes it fun cuz now you know exactly what to optimize for and you can gauge success now cuz you can see how close are we to that?

Ryan: yeah, yeah. The feeling like there’s less pieces is massive cuz before you feel like you just need to know everything and now we’re all you need to know is what will take you closer to that. We’re exploring a project right now about building some tech, and before we really determined what it is, what it needs to do, it was like learning coding was just like, I need to learn all these different languages.

But then you’d go, all right, that’s what I’m working towards. And you get some insights from others around what is needed to do that, and then you just go, all right, now I just need to channel my energy towards these tools that help me achieve that. All this waste of time and energy that exists in exploration can fall away.

You’re no longer just chasing more information. You’re just looking for the right information, which is completely different thing.

Terry: That’s huge actually, isn’t it? Cuz now it’s tuning your brain to focus on the 80 20. What’s the 80 20 here like? Oh cool. It’s that. It’s that. I just need to think focus on that now and that’s gonna gimme the 80% results. I’ll move to the next thing. It just removes overwhelm I 

Ryan: yeah. If you would’ve heard a reticular activation system, Tony Robbins talks about this a lot, kind of governing what information your brain or your, you actually perceive what comes in. Cuz we get so much data you only perceive and receive, a small amount of that and all of a sudden what you start receiving is very much attuned to just that.

And it can cut away the way so even, you know, without you even noticing it. So with intent application, but also with just, you know, kind of that passive, navigation as well.

Terry: I had this, observation, which has really just only hit me recently. And after doing hundreds of these, what I understood is that, you know, we talk about how identity matters when it comes to change, because both people focus on processes and outcomes and they focus on area of change. I wanna change what I’m doing.

I wanna change the results I’m getting. And what they ignore is identity is what informs action. And when you get this right, when you set this vision the right way, what you’re essentially doing is starting that and catalyzing that process of changing your identity. Because here’s what happens. If you map this out the right way and you connect to it emotionally, and a big marker for me is whether I can make you cry. If I know I’ve made you cry. You’re connecting to it emotionally, right? If you get that right, what essentially happens is you have this new picture of what life could be like, right? And if you are connecting to it, you’re gonna have this next feeling, which is like, I’m very excited, but also a little intimidated.

And I have this other realization, which is kind of hard, but it’s really important to have, which is I cannot remain the same person and accomplish that ambition. I must accomplish that ambition by becoming a different person, trying different things, trying, learning, failing, falling, using that information as feedback course correcting towards that vision.

And that is what makes people change that identity. And that’s how I think a lot of people completely miss that. And you know, when you talk about like set financial goals and people just set the number, I’m like, that’s not it. That is not it.

Ryan: Yeah. Yeah.

Terry: to be an emotional sort of conversation you’re having with yourself about the future you and how you live.

Ryan: It’s such a healthy challenge. You’re not just looking to get a pay rise and being like, I need to learn all these skills. I need to be a different person and do that. It’s you just being like, wow, that’s how I want to be and the things I wanna have ’em, and all those things. And you’re going, there’s a version of me that exists then that has that, and now I wanna do the things to make sure I level myself up to get to that point.

You know? Obviously it’s very much worth working towards. And if I think about, you know, the importance of this, So easy for guys to think this is something you can skip over. Let’s just get into, you know, the nuts and bolts of things. Let’s get things set up. Let’s get our plans in place, let’s get investing, let’s do all that.

And we do a member of you at the end of the mentorship. So whenever someone’s gone through the program, we do a reflection at the end and we gather feedback. And one of the big questions we ask is, what is the one thing in this program that you should never change? And we get the same answer all the time, which is that life by design session.

Terry: Never taken out. Never.

Ryan: Never take it out. Yeah. And you know, it’s a pretty big insight cuz I know a lot of those people when they started, they’re like, oh, we don’t need this fluffy shit.

Terry: I can think of so many people, arms crossed, you know, body language, just like, what’s going on here? and then they’re the ones that are replying, going, never take that out.

Laugh: Yeah.

Ryan: Love it. And if you wanna get more on this one, we did an episode, episode 47, how to build a burning desire to achieve your goals. If you wanna go deeper on this, absolutely feel free to go find that episode, episode 47. So that’s the first evolution, which is, as we said, create a compelling vision. Let’s go deeper into the second evolution.

What’s in there?

Terry: So this one’s about structure and what we’re doing here is engineering your environment for success. And I’ll explain what I mean by that. We’re sitting down now, we have that vision, we’re sitting down to go, okay, cool. So how do we build a customized banking structure that is geared towards the most proximal goals that exists within that vision?

And how do we make progress very visible so that this becomes a game that you enjoy playing? Cuz you’ve got a goal rules and a scoreboard, basically. So we want to take that big vision, we wanna boil it down and say, cool, these are the things we wanna sprint for over the next 12 months. And then we want to specifically design a banking structure that makes progress really visible.

So it’s like a scoreboard. And look up at it and go, this is where we’re going. This is how fast we’re moving. But also, we want our banking structure to help us surface spending trade-offs. And this is really important too, because it’s kind of like it turns it into a dashboard as well. And what does a dashboard do?

It helps you make great decisions on the fly. And so by deliberately designing this, we actually design the architecture within which we make decisions. And we talked about this in a recent episode, which we’ll kind of we’ll point to here in a second. But I think that that’s kind of like the process we actually go through to sort of say, all right, based on what you’re trying to accomplish, what is the vehicle that we need to design that within which you’ll be making all these decisions.

Because remember, we say this all the time, but every decision is an act of creation. It’s cutting a one path of possibilities in favor of another. And if that structure isn’t helping you optimize those decisions to move towards that vision, Then I think that’s where a lot of people get stuck, right? They have either no vision or they have a very set and rigid structure that isn’t connected to a vision and they just don’t feel like they’re making progress.

And there are a lot of very thoughtful, deliberate people that are kind of stuck there because I guess they kind of followed some of those prescriptions and just did what others told them to do instead of trying to connect it to a bigger picture. Would you agree?

Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, if you think about why that’s so important, structure dictates behavior, and behavior dictates results. What you see directly impact impacts what you do. And what you do obviously creates the outcomes. And BJ Fogg, you know, he mentioned about making it easy and making it enjoyable, because we don’t change by feeling bad, we change by feeling good.

And so it’s important to make sure that the visibility is easy to get, the trade off decisions are easy to make and make it possible in a fun and enjoyable way, so that you continue to do that more and more over time.

Terry: And we need to have these containers for progress, right? We talked about, uh, UKI Chow talked about the eight core drives within his SIS model. One of those is development and accomplishment. The feeling like we’re leveling up the feeling like we’re getting somewhere. And so if our banking structure doesn’t create containers for progress, it’s hard for us to perceive progress.

And so sometimes we’re actually making great progress, but if our structure doesn’t reflect that, We just rely on how we feel right now. I just got a bill and the bill was $200 more than I thought it was, and so now I feel like a failure, but I’m winning. Like I’m literally winning.

Laugh: Yeah, you know,

Terry: So I, that’s super important.

The other part of it is Parkinson’s law, and we’ve discussed this ad nauseum in like season one, but if you think about regulating supply, then you can moderate demand, and we always talk about this with the analogy of you eat more if the fridge is full. So if you want to eat less, make sure the fridge isn’t as full and make sure it’s full of better stuff, and your banking structure should do that for you so that every time you go to the fridge, it’s the right food in the right quantity at the right time.

And the banking structure should make that super easy for you, right?

Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. And you say containers for progress, always wanna be leveraging that peak end effect, which is basically just making sure that you can see a finish line and the closer you get to that finish line, or you know, that goal, the more that you can start to see, the more you can visualize the attainment of that achievement.

And so it’s why the, the marathon runner, his last mile is always his fastest because he can see the finish line and he can see the relief and the reward that comes with crossing that line. And we wanna be able to do that with our goals, with our objectives, with, you know, when you’re funding big life goals, the closer you get to funding it, to having enough for it, the more you can see yourself doing it.

I’m gonna Columbia tomorrow for three weeks. It’s funded, it’s there, I can see it. Obviously it’s tomorrow so I can really see it. But as soon as that became funded, it was like, all right, now that’s happening. So I can now let myself give myself a mission to see myself enjoying that experience.

And the closer you get to it, you more you allow yourself to do that, which is cool.

Terry: That does tie into Emily Chet’s stuff as well, where she’s like, you know, at the start of the journey, you want a wide lens. As you’re on the journey, you want to narrow that lens and at as you near towards the end, you wanna look at how much to go because that actually does pull you toward the end.

So that does allow you to use that power of focus to build persistence. The other thing it does is it helps us to surface those spending trade-offs. And we said this before, I know that if I pull from account A, which is Columbia, so take this night out on the weekend, I know the true cost of that trade-off.

And if you don’t have a structure that allows you to see these trade-offs, you don’t think you’re making any. But to your point, a couple of episodes ago, you absolutely are. You’re making them every day. You just don’t know what they are. And it’s unfalsifiable too, because you don’t see the other reality you could have had.

And so it just feels like, oh, where’s all my money go? Where’s it all going? I don’t know what’s going on with it. You know? Uh, so it makes it hard for you to answer that question.

Ryan: It’s a reality of fine art resources. We’re always choosing between this and between that option A and it’s option B. And the more that you can see what this and that is, the more you align your decisions, your resources with the things that are most important, the highest priority. And the cool thing about that is when you have an option A and an option B and option A is the preference comes to the front and it puts option B into its shadow.

And so you have that effect of getting more of what you do want, that internal scorecard, but also getting to shadow the things that are less important and create a shadow around the shiny objects. Often that is, you know, the way that structure allows you to, you know, that’s why we say decision architecture and how that informs what you see and what you then decide and do with that is sort of heavily impacted by the way money is laid out with your bank accounts.

Terry: And you might be thinking, oh, this sounds like a lot of messing around and a lot of kind of fiddling. You know, there is a little bit of work required it in this, but what I’d say is that we use this analogy of, you know, if you’re a professional bike rider and you’re doing the Tour de France, you don’t go and get an off the shelf bike.

You get a bike that’s tailored to your dimensions so that you can extract absolutely every ounce of effort out of what you have. And this is essentially what we’re doing. We’re building a tailored vehicle for you that allows you to go further and farther with less effort, isn’t it?

Ryan: And minimal strain, I would say.

Terry: Yeah.

Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. And hopefully without injury. And look, to be honest, like our observation of this would be most people have accumulated lots of different accounts. You know, looking at different ideas and methods and kind of just stitched them together, new things popped up and said, oh, let’s try.

That. Kind of kept what existing and things just get messy for people over time. And you know, to be expected. It was me until I decided to go, you know, I’m gonna come up with a very specific way of doing this, and then teach people that, and then iterated that and made sure I was always, you know, doing that.

To be able to understand it and then teach it. It’s normal. Nothing against you for if that is the case. And look, this can take some finessing, you know, working through some of the limitations that can exist with existing commitments with your loans, your offset accounts, or you know, some banks have got just random restrictions.

But I can tell you and Rachel absolutely smashed this home in the last episode, on the other side of it, things get easier and a whole lot more enjoyable. And when you feel organized, you feel in control. And that feeling, you know, it’s like doing the weekly shop, having the fridge full, cleaning the house and everything, just being in the right place.

As soon as you do that, you relax into your environment a whole lot more. And so we just wanna be able to do that cause there’s not all these unfinished or loose ends that can exist around the way things laid out with our money.

Terry: And if you want more information on that, then episode 76, we did a deep dive when we talked about how do we eliminate waste, make more mindful money decisions. So we are just kind of doing a high level here. But if you want that deep dive, go to number 76 and you’ll get that for sure, mate, let’s talk about the third evolution, consistency, master the practices of wealth creation.

Can you talk more about that?

Ryan: Yeah, so this is where we wanna build the skills and the habits to develop a, a worms eye view of your money, but also a bird’s eye view and kind of zooming out, seeing the whole thing. And this is all about just knowing where every dollar is going and what it’s doing, and, and being the controller or the decider of where money goes.

So impacting the flow of money. And it’s all about, you know, how do you kind of get into a routine where you’re making really good decisions around the money that you have and the money that you’ll get to get as much value from it as you possibly can. And we’ve got four really big practices that we look to embed with our members.

And the first one is measuring your money, knowing where it’s going, where it’s coming from. And that’s just to know which levers you can pull. To go faster or to align more with that internal scorecard. Second one is money mapping, which is extracting maximum value from your income forecasting, which is all about engineering dynamic balance between current self and future self, between covering the bills and enjoying your money now, but also making meaningful progress and revising your strategy.

So having your plan, but recognizing that life is fluid and you have to take an iterative approach, so you’re always kind of checking in, tweaking, refining, extending upon the plan that you have. Obviously having that plan first and then being able to iterate from there and to throw it across to you. Why do you think those practices have become so important for our people?

Terry: Because of what we said before around skill versus knowledge. This is where skills and habits are developed. And I guess the, the major insight for us early, early days was when we looked at that book, the Millionaire Next Door, and we looked at all the differentiating factors and the one that stuck out and the one that, the only one I think they really pointed to was the difference between those folks who were self-made millionaires and everybody else was actually how much time they spent actively managing their money every month, actively managing their money.

And that gave us the insight to go, hang on all this, automate everything, stuff is crap. Because if it doesn’t move us toward those results, and remember, millionaires only a measure of success. We’re not saying these people are all successful, but they are showing that they’ve been able to accumulate what we want to power our wealth.

And so if we are following the evidence, Then it makes sense to actually think about, well what are these people doing to actively manage their money? And what do we need to do to number one, change our identity, improve our decisions, and compound our efforts over time. So huge for be able, being able to do that.

And these practices, like money mapping, slows down the financial pulse. It helps you make a lot more constructive decisions when it comes to money that not, not reactive, which is huge, right? We’re in the, we’re not in the base of our brain responding from the animal brain. We’re using our neocortex. And then we also wanna know how do we check the score?

How do we adjust our play, the way we’re playing the game? And I think that really matters because, you know, we talked about us being able to kind of iterate, but Yukai Chow talked about this as one of the core drives. And I think it’s one of the reasons why I’ve heard no one ever tell me, no, we don’t money map anymore.

It’s like financial hygiene. Once you start doing it, you just feel weird not doing it. I think it’s because you actually get to do this your own way. We’re not telling you what percentages you need to hit. What we’re helping you do is figure out what works best for you. Yuka Chow would call that creativity of feedback, and what that means is you’ve got flexibility to design your own way that you wanna play this game.

Nobody’s telling you how to do it. You are figuring out what is the best way, what works best for me to be able to accomplish my goals. and that is why people stick to it because they don’t feel oppressed by somebody’s prescription. It is a practice that’s helping them to get more of what they want and power that progress and that sort of, you know, leads into development and accomplishment that sense of leveling up and encoding success with BJ Fogg as well.

So there’s so much behavioral science in this stuff and the way we’re building these practices into it, based on that insight of like, let’s not automate everything. Let’s make the doing more enjoyable. Let’s make it more constructive. Let’s make it more effective so that people aren’t trying to like forget this and sort of distance themselves from it.

They’re actually moving toward it cuz it’s creating that sense, that feeling of control that we all crave.

Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s so much about just settling on your game style, your way of working, building that, and. I had a great conversation with feller on action setting call earlier this week. And um, I said to him, you know, whenever something happens, he sits down, he does all the planning, and he’s very thoughtful and deliberate in kind of organizing everything at that point.

And I made the comment to him, him, I said, it sounds like you’re being very proactive in a very reactive way. So every time you need to react to something, you have to be, you’re being very proactive. And I think that’s kind of, um, and he felt like that really kinda hit the nail on the head. 

And I think that’s probably true for a lot of people in that, yeah, we don’t just push it away and just completely ignore it. It’s just that we only sit down and think about it and do the work when we need to.

Terry: When crisis happens, some kind of crisis makes me stop and, oh, what are we gonna do? What are we gonna

Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. So in the medium scheme of things, we’re being very reactive, but in the immediate, we’re being proactive and it’s just making sure that we’re proactive across the board so that you don’t ever need to feel like you’re reacting and need to sit down. In fact, things are just always in motion and it’s amazing how when you get that right, when you get that routine, right, you said 30 minutes a month with the right tools, you don’t need 30 minutes, 15 is plenty.

And when you do do that, you just get to sit it down in your mind. It’s like going to the gym in the morning and then not worrying all day about needing to exercise. You’re not going, shit, when am I gonna fit this in? Am I gonna have enough energy when I finish work? You know, then I go cook dinner and you start, all this mess just gets created in your mind around trying to get in that exercise later.

But if you do it in the morning, you create this cognitive ease. And you just find yourself worrying less about it, and you get to relax. And, and I love that quote by Jeff Bezos. He says, stress doesn’t come from the things that you can’t control. It comes from the things that you can, that you haven’t made any action upon.

And so stress comes from inaction, and the action then alleviates that stress. So if you can get the action right first and not give stress a chance to even creep in the door, then you’ll just find that you just have more energy and more mental faculty to direct towards other pursuits, towards learning, towards relationships, towards exercise, lots of things.

Terry: Yeah, I just think this is, I said it before, but this is really, really sticky and once you do it, you can’t sort of do it the other way. I actually asked a couple of questions the other day in the review and I said, if you were to go back doing it the other way, would you do that? And they’re like, absolutely not.

And I said, how much would I have to pay you? Go back doing it the other way. And they said a lot, they said a lot, a lot of money. And we dunno what the number is, but it’s a lot. Uh, and that kind of spoke to how sticky it is because once you do it this way, it’s just weird. And it gives you that structure, it gives you the rhythm, it gives you the routine.

And that’s huge for mental health. Absolutely huge. And I’m reminded of one of our earliest members who unfortunately recently had a, just quite a really significant tragedy happen in her family. And I ran into her down the street and we kind of caught up and sort of, you know, seeing how she’s going. And she made this comment to me.

She said, you know, I would’ve spent all my money in the past if I didn’t have this practice, this structure, this system. Because that kind of just, it anchored me to something. And I knew I had this to sort of keep me moving forward in this way and to just to keep me away from all these destructive, impulsive behaviors, which I absolutely would’ve done in the past.

Cuz I had the money and I would’ve just sat there and used it to, to sort of, I guess, repair my mood or deal with the emotion that I was feeling at the time. And I thought that was pretty significant. I was like, yeah, it was really good to hear that this kind of thing can have that kind of impact, uh, for people.

Ryan: Mm. It’s, you know, any athlete or you know, people trying to achieve something, recognize that you don’t always perform to the best of your ability. Usually you fall to the level of your training and it’s kind of making sure that that training, that practice is creating a baseline that you can never go below.

So it does kind of allow you not to bottom out even in times of struggle. Yeah.

Terry: Absolutely. If you want more information on this, check out episodes 18 and 19 where we go into depth on all the principles behind money mapping. And then in episode 70, we did a deep dive on forecasting, um, which is how to spend guilt-free and achieve your goals. So those are two episodes that go into a lot of detail around what we’ve just discussed here.

They’ll give you more of that evidence.

Ryan: And then the fourth evolution. Leverage the sexy stuff. Make the big money moves. Talk to me about it.

Terry: Yeah, and look, before we even do this one, like a lot of people, I think they feel like, oh, that’s stuff that feels like a lot of things we do before we get to investing. And what I’d say is what we just talked about represents about 60% of this whole pathway, and this final evolution represents the final 40%.

And why do we spend the 60% of time? Why do we do that first? Avril, another one of our coaches gave me this analogy and she explained it better than I could. So she said, when you’re building a building, the wider and the deeper you dig the foundation, the taller the building can go. Essentially what we’re doing in those first three evolutions is going deep and wide for the foundation so that we can go taller when we are actually building.

This building is Tower of Wealth, if that makes sense. So that’s why we’ve done it that way because most folks don’t have a good sense on what they can fund consistently before they start making decisions about investing. And I think. That’s why a lot of people get stuck procrastinating and hesitating trying to find the right vehicle when actually they’ve done the wrong process or they’ve missed or ignored different, important parts of getting this to all work together.

Anything you would add to that?

Ryan: No, I would just say that, jeez, our coaches are bloody come out with some good stuff.

Laugh: I know.

Terry: I know.

Ryan: Yeah. They’re teaching us a lot.

Terry: talk about how we do this.

Ryan: So the first thing is we always wanna start with developing a first principle’s understanding of investing. So it’s, you know, what is investing, what’s the difference between investing, speculating, you know, kind of digging into the granularities of different dimensions of assets and things like that.

but also understand your own profile as an investor, who you are, what’s unique to you in the way that you see the world, and how you wanna approach things in the, I guess, you know, when it comes to investing, it’s, it’s gonna be a rollercoaster. To some degree, and it’s choosing how much of a wild rollercoaster do you want to go on?

And you know, it’s also looking at the different pathways you can take. What are the different vehicles, the assets that you can use to take you closer and which ones will take you closer while giving you the experience you want to have. You know, it’s also kind of making sure we, you mentioned ad adapt module before, how we make sure we use the way things are in our monetary system, in our financial system to your benefit.

And it’s always kind of comparing those pathways to relevant options, but also just making sure that the ones you choose are clear for you and you’ve got that mix right. Cause it’s not always one or the other. It’s not property or shares or you know, shares or crypto or anything like that. It’s just all right, how do you get that mix right and you know, one and the other and the other, and how that works for you.

And obviously creates an income that you want it to. But then importantly we bake that into a plan. We make concrete steps on what to do next. We lay that out. This is the asset allocation, and obviously we co-create this and figure out what is that mix of investments, what are the concrete steps that you want to take to be able to make that happen?

Help you think through the technical nuances of that. You know, why do this? Why do that? Asking the right questions before, love the question that you asked as a member of you, you think about that question itself. That was like a way to quantify value. How much would you pay me to not do this? That’s an example of a question that uncovers all this insight that’s so easy to miss.

And so in this process, we create the space, the really thoughtful questions that people can ask. And so much of that is to, you know, think about why we do all that. It’s so that you can remove doubt on what to do next, because the more you’re removed out around what to do next, the easier it’s to take that next step and the next step and the next step, and importantly, when you create that plan.

You design it, you think through the steps that are involved in that, you take full ownership of that, don’t you?

Terry: You do? Yeah, and just wanna point this one thing out. We talked about materialization before and Emily Chetu. So think about this. What we’ve done is we’ve gone vision goals, structure, system plan steps, and that is how we’re materializing this amorphous dream and turning that dream into a reality. And that’s how the Rachels of the world get those results.

It’s how we move people through that process of materialization. I think that’s really important to kind of note.

Ryan: Mm. You know, it’s the ownership of those steps as well, isn’t it? In making that you think about the IKEA effect, you value what you make more than something that you were given. I made my own bedside tables in year 12 in high school. Only just 

threw them out. They were, they, they fell apart. They genuinely fell apart and they were discolored.

And I held onto ’em for five or six years longer than I should have. but I built it and, you know, I fully owned that and I committed to it for a long period of time. Same thing is true for your plans, for your practices. That’s why we always take that co-creation approach. And the reason why is because you are gonna be the biggest driver of your plans.

No one else is going to want it for you more than you want it for yourself. Maybe your parents, I don’t know. I’m, I’m not a parent, so I don’t, haven’t, haven’t got that insight yet. But most likely no one’s gonna drive it and apply it as much as you will. And so just wanna make sure that you have the conviction in it and the confidence to fulfill those steps, which is why we do that.

Terry: I, I don’t think a lot of people realize how much real estate this question of what to do with our money takes up in their mind. And for me, once the, what are we doing with the money question is answered, it was like, the way I explain it, to give my own analogy here, is you don’t know that you’re under slept until you have a good sleep.

Ryan: Mm,

Terry: And that’s exactly what it feels like When that question’s answered and you realize, my God, that was chewing up so much bandwidth, just sitting there on the edge of my mind the whole time. What are we gonna be doing? What are we gonna do about the future? Where’s the money going? What are, what’s our plan?

What’s our plan? What’s our direction? This is kind of what happens in this last evolution where we kind of pull it all together, actually start taking those steps because we’re now just focusing on what to do, not what we should be doing.

Ryan: Yep. Massive. Massive. And so if you wanna dive deeper on that, we’ve got an episode on that, don’t we? Episode 60, how to stay on track and avoid Shiny Object syndrome. So it’s a good one to kind of pull out how do you actually formulate that in a way that, and the sequence of things so that you don’t just get pulled in every direction.

You’ve got concrete steps, and if new things pop up, then you weigh that against what you’ve already got. Sometimes you adapt it, other times you just ignore it, and again, helps you kind of remove that bandwidth issue. And so go deeper on that one if you like. Let’s touch on who this is for, and probably also importantly, who this is not for.

Who do you think this is most beneficial for?

Terry: Yeah, well, we spent a bit of time kind of thinking about who does the best and who gets the best results, who moves fast, who moves through this with minimal fuss and gets the best value for money. And for me, it’s usually folks that value coaching. And they want to buy the time that it would take to figure out what’s already been figured out.

That’s probably number one. They know these questions have been answered. They just want the answers and be able to figure out, cool, what do these answers mean for me and how do I use this information and insight? So other people have gone and done the work, let me benefit from their work. Probably the other part of it is these are people who see themselves as unfinished and they’re excited by that.

Ryan: Yep.

Terry: That’s not something they see as a weakness. They see that as something that they’re excited by. They see this as another project to polish themselves as a person. And also they wanna have fun playing the game of money, right? Instead of being played by money, they realize that this is the game we’re all in and they wanna get better at it.

And they’ve got that growth mindset. They believe they can do it and they do. So that’s what I’d say in terms of the mentality. Do you wanna talk about the three different types of people that we see that have that mentality, that get the most value?

Ryan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. The first one would be singles who want to set themselves up. So kind of looking at head. Rachel talked about in the last episode, she was nearing 30, and she felt this pressure to kind of feel like an adult and get yourself to a place where you can stand on your own feet. You know, you can look after yourself, you can be fully independent.

And so that’s probably, you know, the first one that this really suits. Second one would be couples who want to merge their money and combine their efforts without ruining the romance. They don’t want to have money kind of turned into this thing that just gets in between it and, you know, becomes, you know, unsexy.

Instead, they wanna see it as a game that they just enjoy playing together. And then finally it’s probably established couples who have merged but wanna get on the same page so that they can go faster. You know, maybe there is some friction that might exist there and they just don’t enjoy it at all. You know, they’re pushing it away.

Or one person’s carrying the weight and they’re like, nah, let’s figure out how to do this together and develop a way of working. They’d be the three that stand out for 

Terry: If I was to tie those all up into a boat, I’d just say like, I guess it’s a big. Cohort of people that are mostly ignored by financial advice, and a lot of these folks come to us and they’ll say, I went to see a financial advisor. They never called me back. It just didn’t fit into the box that they want.

That’s essentially who we decided to serve. It’s like all the people ignored by this industry. Would that be fair?

Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. I said, we’d mentioned who it’s not for. Who is it not for?

Terry: It’s probably not for the a hundred percent DIY mentality. The person who wants to do everything themselves, they don’t have to pay for anything. Hopefully we are given that person still enough information on the pocket we’re given away as much as we absolutely can in this kind of format, because I think, look, there are a subset of people that can do this themselves and want to, but they are happy to trade the time and spend the time instead of spending the money in that way.

So if you’re the someone who would rather spend the time, then this is probably not for you.

Ryan: and I was probably also someone that feels like they have all the answers as well. cuz a part of this, there is a bit of a trust factor, which is you have to go, all right, I’m gonna do it first, then assess it. Cuz you have to experience it before you know whether or not it works or not for you. And so there’s a bit of, trust that’s required in terms of saying, I’m gonna lean in, I’m gonna take a project mentality, I’m gonna work through it, and then I’m gonna look back and assess and go from there.

Terry: Situation wise, the person that this isn’t necessarily suited to, it’s more so for folks that are accumulating basically us, right? What we wanted when we sort of started going with this, without having to go and accumulate all the information, figure out sort signal from noise, turn that into a pattern, turn it into principles, turn it into a pathway that actually makes sense, and build tools around that.

It’s for that person who wants that to be able to accelerate everything they want. If you’re moving more towards retirement and you’re thinking about retirement planning, it’s super and all that sort of stuff, it’s probably more so that’s, that’s actually better for you to go and seek advice because there’s a lot of implications.

Some of those laws can change. There’s more kind of more moving parts in that sense, and it’s generally not something we step into. Is it?

Ryan: No it’s not. In saying that, you know, think about Rachel. She went and saw her financial advisor and was like, nah, I can’t retire. Uh, you know, I’ve got a lot of work before that is possible. And then she worked with us and realized she could. So, you know, it kind of goes both ways, but, um, but if you do want very specific things around Yeah.

Superannuation around, you know, probably insurances, things like that, this is where this probably creates a space for you to go, all right, which specific experts should I bake in? You know, kind of lean on to inform our plans versus should I, you know, lean on to inform the plan that I have, not necessarily about creating that plan for you.

Yeah, it’s a big difference. Yep.

Terry: and just to quickly answer that question, hopefully it’s already obvious the difference, but the difference between what we’re doing with financial education and financial advice is there’s no point where we’ll tell you what to do. Ever. We’ll never tell you what to do. We’ll never talk about financial products.

We’re gonna help you come to those conclusions for yourselves, give you the tools, give you the resources to make that happen. And the best way I would describe it is we’re about teaching people to fish. Whereas financial advice is more about giving people the fish. And you know, it’s for, it’s pretty important cuz one’s about the thinking that you do for yourself that informs your plan.

And the other one is, like you said before, a little bit more about outsourcing and thinking. And there are occasions where that’s warranted and that’s valid. And I think it’s important. It’s just that for the folks that we’re serving, that’s generally not, that’s generally not for us.

Ryan: Yep. Yep. And that’s a big difference between education versus advice, isn’t it telling you what to do versus helping you think through your options and then make the informed decisions and co-create that plan? Yeah.

Terry: And it makes sense to just quickly talk about why we dropped that financial services license. And it was probably primarily about who we wanted to serve and what we realized in financial advices. Financial advices. Serving folks that are beyond that accumulation phase and trying to figure out how do they make their money, turn it into an income.

For retirement. We wanted to help folks that were growing their money and mostly ignored by that model and kind of left out in the cold in that sense. And we had made the observation as well that, you know, even for me going through that model, I actually sort of saw that most of the value was in the education.

But when we actually got the license, what we found is we were incentivized against spending too much time educating people. Cuz for every minute that we spent in front of someone educating them, we would have to spend two to three minutes on the back end documenting and justifying and trying to protect ourselves to make sure that, uh, we weren’t gonna get in trouble,

Ryan: Yeah. Yeah, 

Terry: uh, we couldn’t be sued.

It unwittingly creates a competition type relationship between you and the person that you are seeking to serve. The competition is who’s gonna spend the least time and extract the most money. And so we were like, I don’t like that system of incentives. And again, like, I think there’s value in it for a certain person, but for us, for the people that we wanted to serve, most of ’em had come to us and they’d said they’d read The Barefoot Investor.

It hadn’t quite worked. In the way that they wanted it to for them because things had changed in their lives. And the other observation that we made is that the technology has made the implementation part so much easier, right? So much easier. And I think people still think that it’s very clunky and you need a professional to do all this sort of stuff.

In actuality, it’s are you willing to take responsibility? And our hypothesis was there are a big cohort of people that are, so that’s why we decided to drop the license and focus on this and building this different 

Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. And two final points to that would be, um, the licensee that we had, the guys that basically managed the compliance for us, told us, set up your coaching, your education stuff in a separate business. Do that, separate from it because it’s not the same. And so we did that and all the feedback that we’re getting from people we’re working with was on that side of things, and it wasn’t on the advice.

So we’re like, you know what, let’s lean into that. And the second thing I wanted to mention was, as you can gather from this podcast, we need creative freedom to be able to solve problems. We need to be able to come at it from different angles, explore, experiment, test out different ways of doing it. And we just didn’t have that capacity.

So we decided, you know what? Let’s recap ourselves in that way and let’s see what we can build. And so that’s where we are now. 

Terry: All right, so there you have it. The pathway we’ll just walk you through is exactly how folks all over the country are leveling up their money lives. And funding you in exciting futures. So if you’ve been nodding your head through this episode, at this point, you might be wondering whether or not this could work for you.

And I reckon the best way to figure that out once and for all is to an action setting

Ryan: yeah, absolutely. And I wanna be clear, this is not a sales call. it’s a coaching session and something where, often people say to us, They can’t believe that we don’t charge for it because this can put an end to years of confusion and frustration and that feeling of going around in circles.

Terry: I actually kind of think of this as the first part of the program. Some people continue to go on and other people just don’t. other people move in different directions. So let’s quickly explain what happens in

Ryan: Yeah. So it’s a 45 to 60 minute guided conversation where basically just help you accomplish five big things. first one is we wanna discover what’s really driving you, what’s pushing you forward, and hint, It’s often not at all what you think it is. Um, the second thing is we’ll unveil the deeper obstacles to progress and then we’ll pinpoint the most lucrative opportunities you might be overlooking, the biggest points of leverage that exists for you right now to speed things up the most. And then we’ll determine your next best steps well as settle on a timeline for action. And so, point of this, right, is to basically just drop you in a hot pan. You’re gonna move in some direction. doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be with us, uh, but it’s absolutely gonna get your feet moving. So that’s what we’ll aim to do.

Terry: And at the end of this, you’ll know exactly for sure whether this pathway’s gonna work for you. That’s why I say some people choose to move through and keep continuing on the path and other people go into a paths and we’ll tell you if we think there are more suitable pathways for you because.

it’s a bit of a risk for us to, to take on the wrong people, right? Our business only grows because we can share stories like reaches and we wanna make sure that if we do work with you, you can be successful in our model. So successful that like Raach, you wanna sing it from the rooftops and you wanna tell the world about it.

Ryan: Yeah. If we don’t think you’re gonna be a raving fan at the end of it, we’ll definitely say so. That’s for sure. And we’re not looking to sell to anyone. We’re focused on serving the right people and seeing them succeed.

Just like you mentioned Rachel in that last episode. And this is for you, if you resonate with our philosophy and know that 

where you are and where you wanna be requires action on your behalf. And you’re keen to get your hands dirty, building a better future, and you don’t wanna waste time figuring out what’s already been figured out.

Terry: Yeah, mate. So time is the resource, right? We wanna make sure we’re not wasting time to keep money. So if you do wanna give yourself the best chance of reaching your financial potential, all you need to do right now is follow these three steps.

Open the episode description on your podcast player Number scroll down to the link that says, book my action setting call. And there you’re gonna find a form that’s gonna help you figure out exactly the best time gonna work

Ryan: it. Nice. Looking forward to it.