Adam Torres and Tony Steuer discuss money management and mindset.
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Show Notes:
Why should we change the way we think about money? In this episode, Adam Torres and Tony Steuer, Author, Podcaster and Financial Preparedness Advocate, explore how people can take control of their financial futures and Tony’s book, “Get Ready!: A Step-by-Step Planner for Maintaining Your Financial First Aid Kit.”
About Tony Steuer
Tony Steuer — author, podcaster, and financial preparedness advocate. Tony believe’s that he was put on this planet to help people change the way they think about money. His passion for helping others learn more about finances started when he was working at his first job and realized many people lacked confidence and resources when it came to cultivating healthy money habits. He is dedicated to financial education with a focus on best practices. Empowering others to change the way they think about money is what drives his passion.
Collaborating with those who share this mission is his goal, including financial advisors, certified financial planners, insurance agents, registered representatives, wealth managers, financial coaches, financial therapists, accountants, CPA’s, real estate professionals, bankers and other professionals. Tony provide knowledge and resources, so people can put financial literacy into action.
About TONY STEUER
Tony Steuer, CLU, LA, CPFFE is an internationally recognized financial preparedness advocate, podcaster, and award-winning author. His newest book, The Get Ready! Blueprint: A 52-Week Guide to Changing the Way You Think About Money, presents The Get Ready Method, which he created to empower people to take control of their money while providing a framework for integrating financial products, financial advice and advisors.
The Get Ready Method provides a framework for integrating financial products, financial advice and advisors. He is also an Advisor at Insurance Nerds, Paperwork and Dingo Technologies. Meanwhile, he is a member of the ThinkAdvisor’s LUMINARIES Class of 2022 as a Finalist in Thought Leadership & Education. He served as a long term member of The California Department of Insurance Curriculum Board as well.
Steuer shares his trailblazing thought leadership on financial wellness as a contributor for ForbesAdvisor, expert content reviewer for Nerdwallet, and a guest/contributor for ABC’s Seven on Your Side, Cheddar TV, New York Times, the Washington Post, Fast Company, Chicago Tribune, CNBC, and Fox Business News. His podcast, Get Ready Money Podcast, is another way to absorb his expertise.
Steuer’s books, including The Get Ready Blueprint, Get Ready! A Step-By-Step Planner for Maintaining Your Financial First Aid Kit, Insurance Made Easy, Questions and Answers on Life Insurance, The Questions and Answers on Life Insurance Workbook, The Questions and Answers on Disability Insurance Workbook and The Questions and Answers on Insurance Planner, have won numerous awards, including four awards for Excellence in Financial Literacy Education. His books are used in college courses, financial planning certification courses, insurance agency training and financial planning firm resource libraries.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today’s guest is Tony Stewart and he’s an author, podcaster, and financial preparedness advocate.
Tony, welcome to to be here today. Thanks for having me on. All right, Tony. So excited to have you on. I know you were referred over to us by Rita, to the show, who’s definitely a friend and author at Mission Matters, a podcast host on our network. And I can’t, speak high enough of her.
So Rita, if you’re listening to this, thank you so much for bringing Tony to the show and Tony, just to get us kicked off here. I know one of the things and some of the things we’re going to talk about is how we can change the way we think about money and really our mindset about around money. But just to go back a little bit further , what were some of your original concepts on money?
Like, where did you get started on this path? Well, I got started on this path is I sort of fell accidentally into being in financial services. When I was in college, I was trying to decide what I wanted to do. As a major and I figured well, hopefully whatever I do, I’ll make some money. So maybe I’ll just do , business and learn about money and so I got started on the journey and over the years I was an insurance agent quickly became a fee based insurance consultant Which is where I spent the bulk in the next 30 years and doing that is I got to understand I consulted financial planners and attorneys and trust officers and they found it You People who were buying insurance didn’t really understand the insurance they were buying.
It was being sold by people who didn’t really understand what they were selling. The policies were issued by companies who didn’t really understand what they were issuing and being regulated by regulators who didn’t really understand what they were regulating. disconnect in your story right here, right?
Like, a lot of disconnect, like, mm hmm. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. And so I got started like, okay, well, can I educate people? Can I help them to better understand it? But then I really got into the thinking of, , is it the psychology? Is it really how people are approaching this? Do they even know the right questions to ask?
Are they thinking in the right way? And that’s, that’s where it got to the point of change the way you think about money and insurance. And so I want to stay in the early days , a little bit longer. And I, I liked this conversation as well, because , when I say there’s a lot of disconnect, I think financial services attract people with the biggest hearts, like people are out there.
It’s a hard job. It’s hard to have clients and work with clients, even though it can be a labor of love, but it’s not. still difficult. And for those that are, and you may not know this, Tony, but I was in financial services almost 14 years prior to, I’ve been in media now full time, eight years, but I, , I worked hard and I, and , it was challenging.
It’s a challenging business, but the reward of helping people. So I, , I like to bring that out because even though there’s this disconnect, it’s not that the people that are even maybe creating , some of the challenges there. It’s not that they’re bad people. They’re good people.
There’s a lot of people in the financial services that maybe are just working with some of the tools they’re giving and maybe even this conversation about mindset and the way people think about it may be a little bit different for them., even the professionals out there, because I think at least in this Okay.
The way I was brought up and the way I, my understanding was, as many people feel like they’re supposed to just have this knowledge magically, manage their finances or how to do all these other things. It’s like, even if they did teach it in school, guess what? I don’t remember algebra. They taught me that in school.
So if I like, like you have to use it, right? Exactly. Exactly. So it’s more about, , your habits and how you’re thinking about things than the actual, like you say, is the very nitty gritty. , and that’s where, the financial literacy community, I think, struggles and why financial literacy in the country hasn’t increased is because nobody really wants to watch a video about 401ks.
And even if they do watch the video about 401ks, they’re not going to remember anything within a half hour or an hour later. CFP, right? Unless you’re studying for your CFP, but those are for professionals, right? Exactly. Exactly. And so, , you, you nail it. There are so many amazing people in the financial services world, but the world has become so complex that it’s an industry of incredible complexity, even just with the terminology and the jargon that it can be hard for people to get to know where to start and there’s a lot of turnover, at least in the insurance space in the early years because it’s a tough business. And , it’s hard to learn about the products and the services and , and that’s why. All these issues come up is because it’s about communication asking the right questions So looking at I want to get further into the mindset of things here.
Let’s say that We’re working with the premise that just in my opinion entrepreneurship. You’re not born with that skill Managing money if we agree that you’re not born with the skill of managing managing money and managing your finances Which I think many would agree with that we’re starting at a baseline.
Everybody’s at different levels Do we all have the ability to improve here? Like do we all have the ability to improve from wherever we’re at? 100 100 and it’s all about learning how to ask the right questions. It’s You can learn how to do anything. You may not be a master at it But you can definitely learn the basics.
, like let’s take chess, for example, that’s a complex game, but if you start playing it and you start, , watching videos, reading books. learning strategies, you can become very successful at chess. You may not become a chess master but you’ll do very well. And I think money is the same thing is that you have to put in the time to become educated.
You have to, , develop a little bit of confidence. You have to become involved, but the issue is, and it’s the same thing with chess is like, well, where do you start? What is the right question to even ask? And I think that’s a problem in the money world, is we expect consumers to come in and say, well, , I want to buy this product.
And the financial services industry, that’s how most of us are taught in the financial services industry. Sell them a product. , you have this product, you want to sell it. And instead of saying, okay, well, what problems are you trying to. Take care of what are your challenges and looking at the right tool, but instead we start with tool and say, hey, we’ve got a hammer, , do you want to hammer?
And that’s what people are looking for that people are looking for. Well, , sometimes they’ll have a nail, but sometimes they’ll have a screw and a hammer is not going to do them a lot of good. They’re trying to, , work with a screw. So that’s really the thing is we need to get, , help people.
To think about what they want to accomplish first, and then know what questions they want to ask to accomplish that goal. If they can’t express their problem, we can’t provide them the right tool. And so you mentioned something that I, I mean, I can’t, you put that out there. I got to pick it up, Tony, where do we start?
Where does someone start? Like, where do they start and changing and going down this process? Well, I think the first thing anybody can do is to commit themselves to thinking about their goals first and what they want to accomplish rather than the product. So Bitcoin is the example that I like he is because it’s been so popular.
It’s like. Should I buy Bitcoin or should I not buy Bitcoin? And I think that’s the wrong question. I think the right question , this is my goal. I want to be financially independent when I’m 60, , whatever the goal is, I want to retire when I’m at 60 or whatever, I want to buy a house.
Then you can say, okay, is Bitcoin the right tool that will help me to accomplish my goal? If you want to buy it, if you’re saving to buy a house in five years, Well, Bitcoin is highly volatile, it’s liquid, it’s illiquid, and you may have your own viewpoint on Bitcoin in general, but, , just those points alone, it’s volatility, volatility and lack of liquidity may be things that you don’t want to do if you’re saving for a down payment on a house.
So that’s a big part of it is to help people to think about, like, okay, what questions Do I want to ask rather than just saying, okay, does this tool work or not? Yeah, it makes perfect sense. And I feel like what you’re saying, I mean, it sounds simple, but it’s one of those things where whenever you’re trying to reprogram, or introduce new ideas and program new habits.
And do you like, , it can be challenging in anything, whether it’s gym, finance management, I mean, just period, , like it can be challenging. What have you found that people that have been successful in going down this path? Like, what are some attributes or some things that, , people could strive for in terms of like, like sticking with it, so to speak?
Well, think the repetition is important. I, we’re going to talk about the get ready money clip in a minute, but , that’s what I’ve tried to create is a way for people to keep doing this. I think that’s the other thing in financial services, so many things are set in and forget it. Enroll in your 401k.
People don’t go back and review their 401k investments. Yeah. Buy an insurance policy. It sits in a drawer. They don’t go back and review it. And we go through all the financial services and products, , somebody hasn’t updated their will, , in the last 20 years and their ex wife and last two kids aren’t mentioned in the will.
That it’s, , that it’s developing. Like you said, and you talk about going to the gym, it’s like making it happen and committing yourself that you’re going to continue to do this going forward. And I think that’s the biggest thing, biggest challenge people have is that they don’t go back and revisit these things over and over.
So just let it ride. Yeah, that I I’m smiling over here, but I’m more so cringing than smiling. Cause when I was a financial advisor and you think about updating, like something like that, the set and forget it part of a state planning, otherwise, Oh, it breaks your heart to see when, especially in your example is a perfect example.
And I’ve seen things like this and I know we’ve all heard about in the news or otherwise, and somebody, and so there’s even been famous cases where somebody doesn’t update where , their will or their estate or other things like that. And. Like you said, they may have something, somebody completely who they didn’t want to be inheriting something or anything else, and those are like largely costly mistakes and litigation.
And otherwise that can be avoided based on, , habit building and based on like reviewing and not necessarily setting it and forgetting it, right. 100%. 100%. And that’s the whole reason I created the Get Ready Money Club. And if it’s okay, I’ll talk let’s talk to that. Go into that. Let’s get, let’s get into the Get Ready Money Club.
Absolutely. Okay. So fantastic. So what it is, it’s based around my latest book, the Get Ready. Blueprint, but I wanted to make it a framework, easy and accessible for everyone. It’s a completely free program. And what it is, it’s a weekly action item to review all areas of your financial life. And the goal is that it repeats every year at the same time.
So one, if you forget to do it one year, no big deal, you’re going to come back to it. But two, you’re going back and reviewing everything. So once a year, you review the beneficiaries. On your 401k plans Your iras your life insurance, so it helps you Remember, go back and do these things that you and I are talking about because that’s the thing is, , even if you have a financial planner, they have a long list of things that they want to go through in each meeting with you because there’s a lot of stuff they have to cover and there’s only so much time.
So what I tried to deal with the generating money club is to hit the big things and then to point people to the right resource when they need it, , is this a time to sit down with your estate planning attorney to update you will trust, , so it’s to get back to what what I was talking about earlier is to help people know what questions to ask and what habits to focus on to help them do these things.
, another thing is a family communication meeting is so once a year. I mean, I think people should do this more often. But sit down with your aging parents and talk to them about their final wishes their aging plan , do they plan to age in place? What are they going to need to do that? Check in with them to make sure that they’re able to manage their money confidently, , are they showing signs of mental deterioration, all those things that we don’t think about have you worked it out , do they want to be buried or they want to be cremated?
Do you even know where? You the power of attorneys who is the power of attorney is it which sibling is it? So those are the things that I try to get at. This is all completely free because I wanted to get it out there for people to have this kind of cohesive framework because we talk about all these different things but then People can’t do it.
It’s hard to do without a framework. So, , I decided to create a framework. Yeah, it’s amazing. And for the readers a lot of readers that listen to this show and we do move a lot of books. I like interviewing authors and I’m a big fan of it. So , I do want to get a plug in there for your book a little bit further.
So , get ready step by step financial planner for maintaining your first aid kit. Do I have that right? Yeah. Talk to us about the book. so that’s the first one. So get ready is it’s an organizational tool because that’s something I found is that , we don’t have our financial documents organized so sometimes we’ll have duplicate financial products.
We’ll have something that we forgot we Purchased, a long time ago. So I felt that organizing was the first step And then I wrote the get ready blueprint, which is the latest book the get ready blueprint It’s a 52 week guide to changing the way you think about money And that introduces eight habits And then has 52 weekly action items, which again, , I hope that people will buy the printed book but you can get the pdfs for free as part of the get ready money club because I felt it was so important for people to establish these habits to start to lace together all the different parts of the financial services world that they see and see how all the pieces fit together is, , if you think about the financial services world, it’s like huge jigsaw puzzle and there’s all these pieces floating all over the place, but nobody knows how to put the jigsaw puzzle together.
And that’s why I want to help people to do is to put their jigsaw puzzle together. Okay. Yeah, and I see you also have , some other books out there whether they’re supplemental works or others. So like question and answers on life insurance some workbooks and some other things. So what I like about , your brand overall, by the way, great design in general.
I like the get ready and then the get ready blueprint. The design’s amazing and, and it all matches and it’s definitely a cohesive brand. You can kind of tell when somebody put a lot of thought and effort into building something , and nothing against anyone that just through something together, because for the record, I’ll pick on myself.
My very first book. Yeah, I wrote that on a train on my phone and I leave it up there. I mean, now, now we’re a publishing company as well. That’s one of our business lines. We published over 400 authors, but I leave that original. I like to call it the ugly duckling. The ugly duckling is left up there in purpose, because even though I am I’m deaf definitely touting and praising your brand and the design and everything, it’s obviously very professionally done.
For those that maybe don’t have that vision, I still say get a book out there because I mean, your knowledge, like the thing is, is your knowledge and your expertise and your sharing is going to resonate with somebody or who needs to hear it. That’s the way I see it. And that’s why I leave that ugly duckling book out there because my first one is nowhere We’re near as nice as yours, Tony.
I like it though. That was just the first edition. Oh, okay. Got it. Oh, did you have an ugly duckling? Oh yeah. All right. Well, that’s the, thank you for sharing that because that’s even more of a testament for those would be content creators that are out there, maybe standing on the sidelines or sitting on the sidelines to, Hey, get, get in the game, share your expertise, there’s a lot of people out there that you can help and that, and that needs you.
So that’s awesome. Tony. So, kind of next steps here, Tony, I definitely want to give our audience , some takeaways here and some to dos, because I’m a person of action, I think our audience is as well. With the club where do people start? Like, kind of take me through the user journey and what that’s going to look like.
Well so right now they just can go to my website, tonystuart. com. There’s a big button, join the Get Ready Money Club. They get that, they get, they’ll get my weekly email with a weekly action item. And they’ll have access to a dashboard where they can find a fillable PDF to match that week’s action item.
So it takes them through, like, how to actually do it. So we’re talking about. Review your disability insurance. It helps them take their group disability insurance, any individual disability insurance they have, and then figure out if they need more disability insurance or not, or if they need to make changes to it, or if they need to get rid of some of their disability insurance, , and I’m just using that one.
As an example, but it takes them through that to also find worksheets from get ready the original get ready book to help them organize Their in this case for disability insurance policies So i’m not being a good business person here because all this stuff is available for free I just , I ask people to support me patreon style if they like what i’m doing or to buy a book so I can’t say this is a great business model.
I can Tony, I can say it. It’s like, it is a great business model. I’ll it’s cause the more you give, the more you receive, , who gives away a ton of books, David Meltzer. And he gave me his numbers once and I’m probably going to get them wrong right now. So anybody who wants to email and be like, you’re wrong, Adam.
Okay, great. That’s fine. But he gave me. I use my own experience my first year to that very first book. I gave out like 2000 books and based off of that, like so much came to me. So that’s just one of those things. And Dave Meltzer, he does, he gives away, I don’t, don’t call. He did something like I’m going to stab number.
It was something like he said, he gave away, I think last year, like 5, 000 books or something like that. And he sold 25, 000. Why? Because that’s the way it works. It’s the law, , reciprocate like reciprocity. So I’m going to slightly disagree on yours on that one. You’re on the right path. So many good things will continue to come that.
We can’t even fathom based on you , leading with value. And that’s a lesson to us all. Like I didn’t make that up. I’m just been the beneficiary and people that are much farther along than myself have shared with me some of the numbers and what they’re doing. And now my goal is, and my challenge to everyone is figure out how they can give more because they’ll receive more too.
So that is an amazing business model. Please continue Tony. Oh, cool. Well, I am very glad to hear that. Thank you, Adam. So, and I, and I think it works out well for people because I don’t think that this is information they’re getting anywhere else. Yeah. At least currently. Yeah, and just to kind of wrap up here, Tony, websites, how do people follow up?
How do they connect with you and your team? Best place is, , sign up for the Get Ready Money Club on my website, tonystewart. com, and connect with me on LinkedIn that’s my most active social media network. Amazing. And for everybody listening, we’ll definitely put Tony’s LinkedIn link, hyperlink and all that good stuff in the show notes.
So you can just click on the links and head right on over and definitely sign up for the club. The get ready money club. Absolutely. Again, it’s complimentary and Tony’s providing so much value and letting people into his world and the expertise that he’s been working on for many, many years. So.
Definitely take them up on that. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t done it yet hit that subscribe or that follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new thought leaders, new executives. new visionaries and hopefully new ideas that will help you along the way in your journey as well.
That’s what this is all about. So again, hit that subscribe or hit that follow button. And Tony, thank you so much for again, for the work that you’re doing and getting out there spreading the message. I know that’s not easy and I know that, that getting work out there, putting yourself out there with content is, definitely It’s work regardless of not so maybe it’s a lot of work though.
And so I really do appreciate what you’re doing. So thanks again for coming on the show. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Adam. That was a real pleasure. Thanks for all that you do.