Do you feel stuck in a financial rut, living someone else’s dream? This episode dives into the often overlooked, yet profoundly crucial concept of vision in personal finance. Host Wade Reed explains how crafting a clear vision for your financial future can break the cycle and empower you to achieve your goals, whether it’s traveling the world or pursuing a passion project. He also discusses the importance of surrounding yourself with positive influences who will support you on your journey. If you’re ready to take control of your money and design the life you deserve, don’t miss this out!
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Do You Have A Vision For Your Future?
Why Vision Matters
For all of you who are reading, I want you all to become Money Masters. That’s my core objective, to become a money master. We are going to deal with topics that relate to mastering money. Our topic is going to be vision. Vision is a bit of a cliche when it comes to business because it’s so used, it’s used so often, and it’s so familiar that people overlook it.
Yet it’s so crucial to success in life, to success in business, and success with money. Yes, we need to have a vision for our money. We need to have a future that we envision about how we deal with money, the things that we’re able to accomplish with money, the trips we’re able to take, and the type of life that we get to have. In other words, we need to have a vision for our life. And the only way that we accomplish what we want to in life is by using money.
Again, if you’ve been around for any period, money is a tool, it’s a shovel for that matter. It’s a tool that allows us to accomplish a certain task. Money is a tool of exchange, is its primary function. It allows us to give and take one another without having to barter. Barter is an old-school thing, guys. Bartering used to be, “I’ve got pigs, you’ve got cows, I need cow meat, you need pig meat, let’s trade.” “I know how to make clothing, you know how to make pies, let’s trade.”
Do you know what I mean? It’s an old-school way of exchanging and so we had to facilitate that and make it easier and we came up with ways to do that and we call that money. It used to be gold and silver, it’s not so much that anymore, but paper currency known as the dollar, and today, digital currencies such as Bitcoin and other things are ways that we exchange with one another.
Why does vision matter? When we deal with vision, my favorite place, because I’m a religious guy, I’ve grown up always with a heavy focus on my religious life. I believe in God. I am a huge believer that if we don’t have a clear faith, then we’re often absent of a vision. Having a godly future gives me the motive to do right by people, to do what’s right and let the consequences follow.
If we don’t have a clear faith, then we’re often absent of a vision.
I believe in a just God. I believe that life has all that we need, that this world has everything that we need and more. If we use it wisely, we can have all the things we desire and everyone else can have all the things that they desire because we won’t harm one another. That’s the world I live in and the belief system I have.
The Old Testament talks about vision. It says in the Proverbs, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” This had to do with leadership. If the leaders of a group of people are unclear on what’s to happen, where we’re headed in life, and where the group intends to go. Such as Moses of the Old Testament, when he took people out of Egypt and went into the wilderness. He had to have such a clear vision driving him because he believed in God and the visions he had had in speaking with God.
He knew that they were doing the right thing. He took them out of Egypt, where even though they were slaves, there was still a sense of familiarity. Took them out of that life, crossed the Red Sea into what’s just simply called the wilderness. They spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness, which is a desert in that part of the world.
Since they had lost their focus on what their future was about, they wandered for 40 years. A whole generation had to die off before the vision that Moses had for them was able to be fulfilled. They were able to take over the line of Canaan and start a new life for themselves as a free people. We too are in a form of bondage. It’s a financial bondage based on a system that was created for you, not by you, but for you by people who came before you.
It’s not your fault that you may not have a clear vision for your future and how to deal with money because you’ve been told, taught, trained, and educated to do things a certain way. We have to look historically at money to determine what we can do today, how we can make things different, and how we can thrive even more than what we currently are if we’re not in a state of thriving, so that you can get into a state of thriving.
Henry Ford
Let’s look back about a hundred years to the time of Henry Ford. He had a very clear future. He wanted everyone to own a Model T. He wanted the automobile to become so cheaply available that everyone could have a new form of transportation that would replace the horse and buggy. People pushed back and pushed back, but his vision was so strong that he gathered people into his factories, he gathered engineers, and his vision was able to come to fruition over time.
How did he attract people into his factories when other manufacturers were trying to do the same thing? He instituted a $5-a-day wage. At the time, that was about twice as much as the typical wage. In essence, he pulled the best talent and new talent, people who were otherwise farmers living a subsistence lifestyle, into a work environment where they could make more money than they had ever known in their entire lives.
This unintentionally ushered in the state of the world that we live in, which is consumerism. People typically were subsistence farmers. They lived day to day, hand to mouth, and they had a decent life. They got by, they enjoyed family relationships, and they created memories, but they did not have leisure. They did not go on trips. They did not fly across the world. They did not have nice clothing. They did not have customizable vehicles. They did not have all these things that we enjoy today, 100 years later.
For the first time in people’s lives, they had a surplus. Due to a lack of vision for what they could do with that surplus, they succumb to other people’s visions. People who had visions to start businesses to create a leisure industry. People have extra money. What if I started a business and took people on trips? Cool, now we have a leisure industry. Somebody had a vision and drew people in to spend their surplus cash and keep them more or less in a subsistence lifestyle because everyone was so used to that.
They had to find something to do with their surplus. They couldn’t store it up like they could with grains and plant it and grow a harvest for the next year. Money wasn’t that. It was a physical object. It was paper. They started to put money in banks. The banking industry started to thrive even more. Banks had more cash than they knew what to do with.
What do they start doing? They start lending more. They start offering things on credit. Credit becomes easier over time. New industry comes up. What if we could invest in other people’s businesses? Over time, the stock market becomes publicly traded. At the time of the Great Depression, there were only about 3% of people, maybe 5% of people who had any money in stock.
Today, it’s over 65%, 100 years later, at least 65%. It’s probably more than 80% now. The financial industry came up, trained, taught, and educated us that we should give our money to them instead of having the vision of what we could do with it ourselves. Guys, are you starting to get the picture here? Vision matters.
If we don’t have our vision, we succumb to somebody else’s vision. I’ll ask the question sometimes, “How are you guys doing?” When I meet an old acquaintance, “How are you doing?” Somebody says, “Living the dream.” That’s just a common phrase we use. It’s just a filler phrase. I’m living the dream and I’ll come back and I’ll ask them, “Whose dream are you living?” It throws them off and says, “That’s a good question. I’m not sure.”
Money Mastery Coaching
We need to ask ourselves that secondary question, “Whose dream am I living?” Is it mine? Have I envisioned my future sufficiently that I can create something I care about, something that matters to me? I want to share with you some of the visions I have in my business, Money Mastery Coaching. When I set out to do this, I’ve been at this for over 18 years now, almost two decades.
I’ve been working with money as a personal finance coach, as an advisor, and as a wealth strategist. I’ve worked with well over 800 people one-on-one, often for a year at a time, doing coaching with them, intense, in-depth coaching, transforming the way they think about money. Vision is one of the first things we do.
In my business, the vision of Money Mastery Coaching is that we envision a world in which people are unburdened and unshackled from concerns about money and instead free to pursue the life they love. First sentence, free to pursue the life they love because they’re unshackled and unburdened from concerns about money.
Second part here, we believe that people are happiest when they are optimistic about the future and when they are proactively and intentionally preparing themselves for both future crises and future opportunities. That’s a really big deal. Future crises and future opportunities. If you have a vision for becoming financially free, quote-unquote, most people that I talk to have this vision. They want to be financially free and financially independent.
We have to come up with a definition of what that looks like. Is this what some people call “F-U money?” I could take off and do anything I want, whenever I want, and wherever I want. I have private airplanes or charters I can take to get anywhere in the world. I have so much money, I have no way of ever spending it all.
That’s highly unlikely that any of us will get there. Very few people in the world are that level of rich but we can get financially independent in that our assets that we own are paying our bills. We might have partial financial freedom where our house payment is covered by some passive income. We might have maybe our car payment and our house payment covered.
We have different incremental steps that we can take. You have to envision what level of financial independence you’re looking for and have a reasonable, believable goal. A vision that you can believe in because unless the mind can believe it, it will not be proactive about achieving it. It cannot be intentional. It’ll get sabotaged by our unconscious, subconscious belief systems that we’ve learned from our very, very early ages, from zero to seven years old.
Have a vision that you can actually believe in because unless the mind can believe it, it will not be proactive about achieving it.
We are programmed to believe in certain ways, and thereby our behavior follows that. We have to very intentionally check in with ourselves and make sure that what we’re setting as a vision is believable. If it’s not truly believable, it will not become a reality, it won’t be achieved. Being proactive and intentional is what allows us to prepare for the crisis.
Every time I’ve seen somebody deal with a financial crisis, it’s because they were illiquid. Part of your vision might be that you need to have cash available at any time for any purpose. Instead of locking it away in a 401k or an IRA, which we’ve been trained, taught, and educated to do, maybe we unshackle ourselves from the government control of that financial partnership and choose other assets.
Other places to store cash that can grow and have tax advantages that are still liquid so we don’t have to tap into a 401k or an IRA and pull money out early in the event of crisis and have an extra tax and lose access to those investments that we had in those vehicles. Preparation is a big deal. If we have a crisis, usually a crisis of liquidity.
Perhaps we accelerated paying off our mortgage too quickly. We got a 15-year or a 10-year mortgage versus a 30-year mortgage. When things get tight financially, we can no longer make the bigger payment because we chose a shorter-term loan. By having a longer-term loan, we have more freedom to deal with crises.
If we have a home equity line of credit against our house, we have liquidity on that equity that we’ve been building up instead of it being locked away in what I sometimes call “money jail.” We need to have that vision of a future that allows for liquidity so that we can deal with crises. That same liquidity can allow us to take advantage of an opportunity that somebody else can’t. Instead of being in the space of FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out on something because our money is all tied up, you can take advantage of it. Wouldn’t that be beautiful? I love that.
The next part. To do our part to make the world we envision become a reality, we empower our clients to take control of their money and achieve their impossible dreams. That’s crucial as well. Your impossible dreams. Do you even have one of those? Have you come up with an impossible dream? That’s the power of vision.
We have to imagine. We have to use this amazing gift we’ve been given of an envisioning imagination to create a future ahead of time that we care deeply about that matches with our values and what matters to us, our principles, our priorities, and ultimately then create it. Ask yourself, are you in a place where you’re living the life you love, where you’re fulfilling what you might have seen as impossible dreams, that they’re coming to fruition because you envision something beyond what the block might be?
I’ll give you a quick example. I have a person I met with who was exploring working with me and one of his goals he said was to take a trip to Australia. This guy lived on the East Coast of the United States in the Baltimore, Maryland area, making a nice income as a salesperson. I asked him, “What’s holding you back?” I wanted to understand why he hadn’t done this yet. He said, “This is just so far away. I asked, “What do you mean by that? It’s only a 24-hour flight away.”
You can get a flight from where you’re to California and then a direct flight from California, even Salt Lake City, to Sydney. It’s a sixteen-hour flight, maybe seventeen hours direct. “What’s holding you back?” “I can’t get the time off.” “How much time do you think you need to get off?” “I think I might need three weeks, maybe four.” “Haven’t you ever taken more than a few days off?” He said, “I’ve taken maybe a week off.”
“Have you known anybody who’s taken more than a week off?” He said, “No.” I said, “What? You don’t know anyone who’s taken more than a week off of work? You’ve just met him.” I’ve done this. I took a three-week trip in 2018 to Africa. I did a Kenya safari with my dad. It was a posh safari. It wasn’t a hunting safari. I’m not a hunter, but my dad was going on this trip and he was going to go by himself with this group. I said, “Dad, you didn’t even think of asking me? Come on.?”
I found a way to do that, and I got three weeks off. I said, “Listen, you now know somebody who’s done that. What do you think? Is it possible? What if you just talk to your employer and say, “This is a really important thing to me.” I’d like to be able to get to Australia. I need about three weeks to do that. Can we create a way for me to take that time off?” He hadn’t even thought of that possibility.
We have to be willing to use our imagination to achieve impossible dreams. For him, that was an impossible dream. He wanted it, but he didn’t believe it was possible. I’m hopeful. I haven’t connected with him since that original conversation. We’ve lost track of each other, but I’m very hopeful that he’s implanted that possibility instead of an impossibility.
We want the people we work with to live in a way that allows them to use their money as a tool for a better life rather than a source of stress. Money can be fun and easy, guys. I envision a world where money is fun and easy to work with, and where we have systems in place that are easy to manage. We don’t feel the same stresses that everyone else does around us because we’re not living by the same set of rules.
We live by our own rules. We don’t have to “keep up with the Joneses.” We don’t have to have the nicest house or the nicest cars because our neighbors do. Perhaps you want to live in a single-wide trailer that costs next to nothing so that you can go travel. Well, do it. Perhaps you don’t care about the nice car, you want to drive the junker.
That you have money instead to invest in rental properties. Maybe you want to start a business, so you have to live a life that’s different from your neighbors so that you can choose between that impossible dream and the life you want to love and do things differently. Guys, I believe that if you create a vision for your future, you will live into it.
It will become a reality as long as it’s a believable vision and it matches your values and priorities in life. The right knowledge and the right encouragement make all the difference, the right knowledge. I’ve found that when people are misunderstanding things like the 401k and the IRA and how illiquid they are and how risky they are in the stock market, people somehow have come to believe over the past 40 years that you’ll just automatically be a millionaire if you invest in your 401k.
It’s not true. The average American at 65 only has about $65,000 in their 401k. It’s shocking because they live by somebody else’s dream. My invitation to you guys is to choose proactivity. Be proactive in your life. Create a vision for your future that you care about, that nobody else has to care about but you. You don’t have to share it with anyone unless you’re married, share it with your spouse. Share it with your kids if you have kids.
Be proactive in your life. Create a vision for your future that you care about, that nobody else has to care about but you.
Share it with an accountability partner, somebody who will believe in you and help hold you accountable to achieving that. Somebody who will look up to you. Somebody who will help you accomplish it. But you don’t have to share it with anyone. If you just do something you believe in, people will naturally be attracted to you and start doing things that you’re doing.
You’ll probably find a group of people who believe the same way. You may start spending time with new groups of friends because you have a different envisioned future. Now, one of my favorite mentors, his name is Jim Rohn, and several others of his day and age, have passed away. Zig Ziglar passed away, but some of these greats used the phrase, “If you can believe it, you’ll achieve it.”
If you can imagine it and believe it, you can achieve it. They also said, “You become the top five people you spend the most time with.” Our entourage, those we spend time with, really matter. Choose friends, associates, and colleagues. Spend the most time with family members who are encouraging of you, who are loving toward you, and who want to see you thrive. Find groups of people like that. They exist, I promise you that. If you don’t currently see that, I promise you they exist.
Start acting as though you are worthy of friends like that. Start seeking them out, start asking questions, spend time in new forums online, connect with certain groups, and even follow an ad so you can talk to somebody who’s doing things that you might want to be doing. Even if you never do business with them, at least you meet somebody new. Be courageous, do something that matters. Again, I encourage you to create a life that you love by having a vision for your future.