[00:00:00] Outro: We’re saying goodbye to the rigid numbers and strict budgets, and putting relationships back at the heart of personal finance. This is more than a podcast, it’s an invitation to reimagine your money story and journey with us through a landscape of intuitive strategies and abundance. Join a community that nurtures transformative financial mindsets.

[00:00:25] Welcome to Intuitive Finance. I’m your host, Dylan Bain.

[00:00:36] Dylan Bain: I’m sitting down with a couple for our very first coaching call. We’ve gone through the intake process. I really believe that I can help add value to this couple’s financial life. And so we are sitting down and we are level-setting, and one of the questions I asked them is, so what is the main point of friction for you in your relationship with each other in regards to money? And the bickering was instantaneous. They started arguing over this idea of investing. Where they were going to put their excess money, where they were going to create the retirement and how they were going to create their nest egg. And he’s saying, but we need a Vanguard. We have to have a Vanguard. And she keeps saying, no, we have to have an ETF. ETF is the thing that we need. They’re going back and forth and back and forth. I’m sitting here, and I’m kind of gobsmacked because I don’t know what to do because they’re talking right past each other. And more to the point, they don’t actually know what they’re talking about. He keeps saying Vanguard as if it’s a thing that you could invest in, and she keeps saying ETF as if it’s a company. And both of those positions are wrong. This couple’s lack of basic knowledge means that they are missing each other. And they don’t even have the words to even have the discussion in the first place.

[00:01:49] I tell this story, ladies and gentlemen, because it is so important for couples to be able to sit down and actually have a conversation about money, but it starts far before you become a couple in the first place. Financial education in this country is lacking. And I don’t think that it’s controversial for me to say in any way, shape, or form that our school systems and our educational systems do a terrible job preparing people to live in a modern financial economy. And yet, we’ve created an entire industry that thrives off of that information asymmetry. You have a public that doesn’t understand what’s going on, and an industry whose livelihood is dependent on keeping it that way.

[00:02:29] When I’ve talked about this on a podcast before, whenever you find a middleman who’s slotted themselves into an inefficiency in society, it’s next to impossible to get them out of that particular place. In the case of the financial industry, this is doubly true because the worst thing that could ever happen to them is if people actually understood how financial markets worked. Instead, by cloaking themselves in this idea that finances are just too big, and there’s secret strategies, and you need 10 tips and a great chart and all this stuff — financial industry makes a killing on fees. They are the equivalent of somebody who’s selling shovels to people that they’ve promised can go find gold. And so, the importance of financial education is really hard to overstate in this particular case, particularly when you’re up against a multi-trillion dollar industry that thrives when you know less and you feel less confident in what you’re doing.

[00:03:27] The good news here, however, is that a little bit of financial education will go a long way. This isn’t like you have to go back to school and get a degree in finance. Remember that personal finance is always personal first and everything else is a distant second, and so when we start with our educational knowledge here, the first thing we have to know is us. What do we want and what are we looking to get out of this entire thing? Having that one piece of knowledge will completely flip the tables on anyone else in the financial industry. Why? Because you know what you’re about. You’ve already made the decision of what you’re looking for. You’re not letting them guide the conversation. And this is what I mean by a little bit goes a really long way. Because knowledge will lead to confidence, and confidence will lead to consistency. Those two things are what will make or break your financial future and your financial freedom. Knowledge leads to confidence. Confidence leads to consistency.

[00:04:28] Now there’s the other part about this is, when you start to educate yourself about the financial system and having that financial education, it’s important for us to also not only know what we know, but also to know what we don’t know, and when that is okay.

[00:04:44] Let me give you a great example. When it comes to investing, there are people who will sell you all sorts of classes. There’s tons of books on this. There’s YouTube videos galore where they’re trying to tell you, oh, I’m going to teach you everything you need to know about stock investing. Here, ladies and gentlemen, is everything you need to know about stock investing. Find a low cost index fund that’s as broadly diversified as possible, buy that, and keep buying full stop.

[00:05:07] You don’t need to know about PE ratios, you don’t need to know about charts, you don’t need to know about the cross of death, and all the other sexy names that they give to these things. It’s okay that you don’t know, because you don’t need to. Because at the end of the day, they’ve only come up with those terms because they’re trying to sell you advice. If their advice actually worked, they would just invest it themselves. Always understand this. So sometimes you can look at it and go, I don’t actually need to know how bonds function because I’m not a bond trader. I don’t need to know that the coupon on a bond is actually just a fancy way to say the payment of the bond. Because remember, the financial industry thrives on information asymmetry. They have all sorts of extra terms and they made it a chaotic mess, and they have really weird ways to describe things. And that is a design feature, not a design bug. So when you look at it, you’re not — as a retail investor — going to be helped by understanding how bonds trade on the market. That knowledge could be good, but ultimately you probably don’t need it. So knowing what you don’t know and when it’s okay to not know that thing is critical so that you don’t end up going down a rabbit hole here.

[00:06:17] But at the end of the day, that high finance stuff with bond trading and stock markets and PE ratios actually takes the second chair, because the first chair is all about how you’re managing your cash flow, your ins and outs. Because financial literacy will impact your relationships because relationships are a business in their own right. Businesses will not be able to invest unless their cashflow is strong enough for them to do so. Relationships are no different. And this, of course, is also just your relationship with yourself. You are your own business. Even if you’re just working a W-2 job — you go to work, you do the thing, you do the trick, you get your paycheck, you go home — you’re still a business. You’re a brand. That is how you’re functioning and showing up in this economy. And so it’s important for us to understand that we are a business, and that all the extra highfalutin stuff about fancy investing and strategies and crypto, that’s all second to how we’re managing our day-to-day ins and outs into our bank account.

[00:07:18] And so understanding that we’re a business — we need to sit down and have a business meeting. We need to be able to actually be — have a conversation with ourselves and with our loved ones over what’s actually going on in the business that is this relationship. What is our investments? And I practice exactly what I preach. This isn’t theoretical. My wife and I literally sat down today right before this recording and looked at, okay, what did we spend in the year before? And what are we going to need to spend in the year that’s upcoming? We are planning for our expenses, our vacations. Where we’re gonna be going. Do we need to buy a new car? How much longer do we want to keep the cars that we have? What other capital investments do we need? Do we need a new refrigerator? Are we going to remodel the bathroom? Are we just going to decide we’re sending our girls to the most prestigious school in Colorado? I don’t know! But I wouldn’t know unless I actually sat down with my wife and talked about it. I know that I send my girls to a summer camp every summer. We had to plan for that. What dates are we going to? Where could we end up? This was a business meeting. This was actually year-end planning, just like I do in the corporate world as a corporate CPA. As a corporate auditor, I sit down with the company and we look at the year that came and the year that’s coming, and we figure out what happened and what we need to do moving forward. I’m doing this with my wife too.

[00:08:41] And for those of you who have been following me for a while, you know that I also have a roommate. And that roommate lives in the house. You know, she has her own life and she does her own things, and we all share a common area, which is the kitchen. So we sat down with her. Okay, what are your plans for this upcoming year? What are some things that we need to upgrade in the kitchen? What are some things that we need to upgrade in the house? Are there any friction points that we need to address? We’re managing the business of the household.

[00:09:06] And what’s not happening in these meetings is we’re not sitting down and accusing people of various things. We’re not hiding anything. We’re not just trying to say what we think the other person wants to say. We’re treating this like it’s a business meeting because it is. And when you don’t have these meetings, now suddenly you’re no longer on the same page. You don’t know what’s important to yourself, and you don’t know what’s important to the other person. This makes it impossible for you to be able to navigate successfully through the day-to-day operations of your life. So if you want to be able to get to the point where you’re like, being able to look at your portfolio and manage investments and do all the sexy shit, well, ladies and gentlemen, guess what? You have to do the boring stuff first, because the real movement in your life comes from the boring. The sexy things are always a distraction. Brilliance is in the basics. You need to sit down and look at your financial life like the business that it actually is.

[00:10:05] Number two on how this literacy will impact relationships, is that sometimes people don’t have the words. Now at the story the top of the show, that couple was talking past each other. The guy kept saying, we need a Vanguard. We need a Vanguard. Well, what he was talking about is Vanguard Financial, which is a company. So essentially what he was saying is we’re going to select Toyota. Reliable and cheap Toyota. That’s the company level. She kept saying we need an ETF. We need ETFs. Well, ETF stands for exchange traded funds. They’re basically mutual funds that trade on the market. She was saying the equivalent of we need a V6. We need a V6. And he’s going, we need a Toyota. She’s going, we need a V6. You can get the Toyota and a V6. This is why they were talking past each other. They didn’t understand the words that they were saying. And without those words to discuss it, it’s impossible to get on the same page regarding the past, present, and future states of the business that is your financial life.

[00:11:05] And so taking the time to make yourself financially literate, if for no other reason than to give you the words that you need to actually have the discussions, both with yourself and others, is critical to creating your financial future. Without the words to discuss it, you can’t get on the same page. Sad, but true. And so with my job as the financial coach in the situation for the couple of the stop — was to stop and just be like, hey hold on, let’s just back off for a second. Let’s have a conversation. And I took them through explaining how this investment type of structure works. And that’s my role as a coach. I’m to educate my clients. I have to educate and I have to guide. Those are my two biggest things that I have to do. But they didn’t even have the words to discuss it. So they couldn’t get on the same page. So of course, they’re bickering about it because they didn’t know what they didn’t know. And they didn’t know what was okay to not know. And because they didn’t have the knowledge, they didn’t have the confidence, therefore they were inconsistent, therefore they didn’t have trust in their relationship or themselves. You can kind of see how this all fits together.

[00:12:14] The third way that literacy impacts relationships is that money is emotional. And we’ve talked at length about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, that you have that bottom tier that’s your survival needs, your basic physiological needs of food, water, shelter, sex, all those things. Those physiological needs that keep humans alive. And then above that is your safety and security. Can I lock the door at night? Do I sleep well at night? Can I have confidence that the environment I am in is safe? And then, of course, we have relationship on top of that and so on and so forth. But the important thing here is that, that hierarchy is sitting on the dirt that we call money. Because money is the foundations for all of it. And without those foundations, without managing those foundations, we’re not going to be able to have the conversations we need to have, which then leads to stress. Stress for yourself.

[00:13:07] You might be sitting there thinking, well I’m just really bad at this. You might be thinking, I can’t do it. You might be thinking, well they never cooperate. These are all points of stress because money is emotional. If we don’t have money, it threatens those basic physiological needs. Because myself, like so many people that have a home, I have a mortgage. Can’t pay the mortgage? They take the home. Money’s important. Because it’s important, it’s emotional. And so, being able to have some knowledge to actually sit down and be able to assess things, to have enough knowledge, to be able to ask the questions that are going to help you plan and execute on the things that are important to you, that is critical to being able to manage the emotions of money.

[00:13:49] So here are three tips for you to increase your financial knowledge. Number one, the tried and true books. Go read about it. There’s tons of them. Now, there’s some books about parental figures of various wealth levels, and I would advise you to skip those books. What I would say is, find some books that are willing to actually talk to you about the numbers. Mindset’s important. Yes, but numbers are too. So here’s two books suggestions that I have found to be incredibly useful.

[00:14:19] Number one, The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins. This is a book on investing, and how you as the retail investor will be able to build a lot of wealth in your life in a very simple and easy-to-understand way. JL Collins is an engineer who wrote this book down — and I’ve had plenty of people read it and go, wow, I didn’t know it was that simple. Hey, go back to the top of the show where I’m talking about, you have a financial industry that thrives on information asymmetry. JL Collins’ book, The Simple Path to Wealth will help you address that asymmetry. It is a tool in the toolbox.

[00:14:56] Number two is a book called Just Keep Buying by Nick Maggiulli. Again, here’s a guy who sat down. He’s an investment guy, broke down all the numbers, looked at it. What about dollar cost averaging versus lump sum investment? How do I budget? What are some good strategies on how to do that? He’s got it. He tells it in prose. He tells it anecdotally, and he grounds it all in really solid research.

[00:15:19] Those two books — you combine those two books, if you can read them, you can understand them, and emotionally you can be invested in them, then congratulations, ladies and gentlemen. You’re 99% of the way to financial freedom. Now, you might think to yourself, I read those books and it didn’t do anything. It didn’t get through.

[00:15:37] Cool. Here’s the second way. You hire a coach. That is what I am. That’s why I do this podcast. I’m a financial coach. I’m also a men’s coach. I help those two groups — those two groups of people. Those who need help with their finance and men be able to navigate through this emotional field that is life. And so when we’re looking at this, if you’re sitting, you’re saying like, man I just wish I had someone to talk to hire a coach. A good way to find me is get on the email list. You can go to the website, sign up for the free toolkit. The toolkit is a great conversation starter, a great place to start, and having a conversation about your money, both with yourself and with your loved ones. And you’ll get on my email list, which I put out offers for free 30-minute sessions all the time. Love, love, love when people sign up for that. I give a chance to talk to people and help them start on their path to financial freedom.

[00:16:28] Number three in increasing financial knowledge. And this one might be a little controversial. Get in motion. Like seriously, just start doing. The best way to learn something is to do it. The best way to start doing the money game, so to speak, is to sit down and start budgeting. Like, look at your finances for maybe the first time in your entire life. Sit down and just make a list of your expenses, and then assign them categories. Oh, these are my fixed expenses. They never changed month to month. These are my variable expenses. Okay, cool. You can do that one thing. You will learn a lot about yourself, your spending habits, and how that money is flowing in and out of your bank account by just looking at one month.

[00:17:08] If you go to my website, DylanBain.com and you sign up for the website and one of the toolkits, one of the tools that comes to you is called a spending analyzer. It’s a spreadsheet that’s designed to help you look at three months worth of your spending and figure out what your money’s going. If you get to the end of the month and you’re like, man, I don’t know where any of my money went. Here’s a tool to help you figure that out. Now, does it take time? Yes. Can it be a little tedious? Also, yes. But at the end of the day, you’re going to learn a lot. I have never had a client or anyone else who’s downloaded my toolkit, go through the spending analyzer, take the time to actually go through it and come out the other side and say, yeah, it wasn’t worth it. Every single time this generates endless amounts of conversation.

[00:17:56] I didn’t even know we were paying that bill. I can’t believe how expensive my car is. Why am I spending so little on food? Am I eating? All conversations I have directly had with clients after going through their spending and actually looking at it. Get in motion. Just start looking at it. And if you’re sitting there thinking like, ah, I’m going to — I’m going to open up my Robinhood account. I’m going to start day trading. No, no, no. Stop, stop, stop. Breathe. You’re going to be fine, but that’s the wrong approach. Unless you have already gone through and you already know what your ins and outs are on a month-to-month basis, you’re not ready for that level.

[00:18:31] Again, if you go read the book Just Keep Buying, Nick Maggiulli points out that the vast majority of us are in what he calls the income stage of life. That is, we’re trying to build income. And then you move into the saving stage of life, where you’re just trying to put as much income away as humanly possible. And maybe you’ll get to the investing stage of life, but most of us don’t. And I can tell you firsthand, I’m not in the investing stage of life where I’m trying to manage my financial portfolio. Instead, I’m taking as much money as I can and putting it in the market and investing it through 401ks, IRAs, HSAs, and all sorts of other different vehicles to be able to do this. Or to use the example I used before, I’ve got my Toyota, I got my Honda, and I’ve got my Lexus. Great. And now I’ve got different engines in each one of them that start making my money world go round.

[00:19:18] Get in motion. And I would really encourage you to start at a very basic level with just your basic personal budget, your ins and outs, and that type of thing. Sit down with your partner and try to have a conversation about, honey, I want to just sit down with you and go through everything we paid out this month. And she might, or he might look at you and go, you are insane. Well, that’s information you didn’t have before and so you’re already making progress. This can be really hard and challenging. But a little knowledge will go a long way. And when I sat down with a couple, gave them a crash course on finance, back them up and say, no, no, hold on a second. When you’re saying Vanguard, it’s like you’re talking about a car. You’re talking about the very top level company of this car. And when I turned to her and I said, you keep talking about ETF, we’re talking about the engines. Okay, so let’s put this all together. They realized that they wanted the same thing. Through a little bit of education, less than 30 minutes, they were able to understand that they were so emotionally wrapped up in what they were saying because of how deeply they cared about each other’s financial future. And in the end, they both wanted the exact same thing.

[00:20:33] And as a result, they grew in confidence and then they grew in consistency, and I’m happy to report: their net worth has increased every year since they came into my coaching practice.

[00:20:47] Outro: Thanks for listening. The conversation doesn’t end here. Please share this show with friends and make sure you keep up with all the latest updates on Instagram and Threads @TheDylanBain, and dive deeper into the world of finance with me at DylanBain.com where you’ll find insights, resources, and strategies to reimagine your money story.