The Financial Stoic @financialstoic1

When people interested in entrepreneurship say that “I don’t have an idea for a business” here’s what I suggest… Start with the “Who”. Who do you want to serve? Next..”What”. What are their problems? Now test your potential solutions incessantly with the Who’s….

Hearing all the chatter about the ‘big guys’ getting into the wealth ‘advising’ space. A TON of opportunity for the fee based RIA’s and consultants to offer wealth ‘creation’ advising as well. Why not help our clients ‘create’ wealth and THEN help them manage it? Help them

I’m in the middle of updating my retirement asset/holdings plan. Heard something I really liked… Just like a football team, you don’t want to put all quarterbacks out on the field. You need to have different players doing different things. Same goes for retirement.

A former CFO taught me a LOT about optimizing up to the existing capacity of the company. Some of us want to believe that bringing on just ‘one more customer’ will always be profitable. However, it may be the thing that adds enough cost that we now need a a LOT more customers

This is certainly NOT a one size fits all solution to everyone’s business…BUT The first things that I look at when working with a business that is struggling is the status with their Product, Market, Sales. Just about 80-90% of problems w/businesses are in these 3 areas.

We all should be able to predict our financial future by knowing 5 numbers; our monthly housing payment, car payment, school loan payment, what’s left over after expenses and what we invest of that. You can run so many predictive scenarios with these numbers.

SNL may have given the BEST financial advice EVER about a decade ago. SNL? Financial advice? Yeah! The skit’s called “Don’t buy stuff you cannot afford”. Crazy right? But it’s absolutely spot on advice. What’s ‘funny’ about this is that it’s sounds so crazy when you hear it.

I’ve been very fortunate to have earned several industry credentials.. But if I had to learn just one skill it would be deal structuring. Figuring out how to design a deal where everyone wins and believes no one is being taken advantage of is literally worth millions of dollars

Being an Entrepreneur means that YOU get to decide if you won the day… Not someone else who you may or may not like, respect or even think is more qualified than you are. You’re responsible for YOUR own success. Either YOU rung the bell today or YOU didn’t. I LOVE that.

Working with some entrepreneurs who amaze me… They totally get that the startup phase is about Customer Development and not Product Development. I do require that they read ‘The Four Steps to the Epiphany’ and ‘The Lean Startup’ as part of the class, however 😉

I heard something today that I LOVED! Each one of us chooses the tax code that applies to us. Some will choose a more favorable one. Some will choose a less favorable one. I can honestly say that I like the tax code that comes with being self employed more than being a W2er.

It used to be you tried to keep up with the Joneses… Now that life costs so much more and more people have been sucked into the expectations of social media… They now are trying to keep up with the Kardashians. With a 3.4% savings rate that seems to be what is happening.

I’m working with this individual who was shocked when I told him the plan of action to get him out of debt and $1 million in investments was going to take him 10 years. Really? What do people think happens when they’re deeply in debt and can’t save a dime?

I hear the phrase ‘Wantrepreneur’ a lot in the circles that I’m in. I want to coin the phrase ‘Needtrepreneur’… I’ve figured out that more than ‘wanting’ to be an Entrepreneur, I NEED to be one! When I went from ‘wanting’ to ‘needing’ that’s when things started to click.

Income into assets and assets into income… Rinse and repeat. If there was ever a perpetual money machine…that’s it.

I met with a high ranking credit union executive for lunch. He asked what I was talking about when I mentioned “this FI stuff”. For him to not have heard of something that could greatly benefit his clientele, who are of lower economic means, is HIGHLY disappointing.

A person I work with said to me “I think I have a spending problem”. Probably true but what I see is most of us have a spending AND an income problem. Although it’s true that you create wealth from what you keep, you need to create the biggest gap in BOTH directions possible.

As entrepreneurs and wealth builders we naturally are inclined to seek out the complexity in everything. What if we sought out the simplicity in everything? I was reminded of that yesterday when I reviewed an index fund investment for the year and it returned 19.94 percent.

The Stoics believed that you should always do the right thing even if others ‘didn’t notice’ or give noticeable appreciation. As entrepreneurs our customers don’t have to give us additional accolades…although it would be nice. Buying from us is a start. Notice THEM instead.

You MIGHT be able to build a $1 mil dollar business as a solopreneur. You’d be an absolute outlier if you built a $10 mil dollar business. To build a $10 mil dollar business you need to hire people focus on EQ WAY more than IQ. IQ gets you to $1 million but not $10 million.