#108 SHOT | Use This Wealth Razor to Make Wise Money Moves
Apr 26, 2024
Terry Condon
Financial decisions can be paralysing. In this SHOT ep Terry shares his most powerful tool for making money moves 10x simpler. This simple question will unlock clarity and conviction while ensuring you accumulate the most valuable asset you can own.
Join the Private Podcast Community Click here to access free courses and trainings, build new habits, and connect with us and others on the journey to financial self reliance.
Other links 👇
Money mentorship: Click here to start putting what you've been learning into practice.
Financial decisions can be paralysing. In this SHOT ep Terry shares his most powerful tool for making money moves 10x simpler. This simple question will unlock clarity and conviction while ensuring you accumulate the most valuable asset you can own.
Join the Private Podcast Community Click here to access free courses and trainings, build new habits, and connect with us and others on the journey to financial self reliance.
Other links 👇
Money mentorship: Click here to start putting what you've been learning into practice.
Follow us on Instagram: Click here to see behind the scenes of our business and learn more about personal finance in bite-sized chunks.
Can I legend. This is Terry your house. And in this episode, I want to share with you a concept that I found really, really useful. I think it's one of the most. Useful raises to simplify and improve every financial decision. That you make. And a razor is just anything that cuts away all the trivial to reveal the vital. It helps you just think a lot more clearly and act more confident when it comes to making those really important money moves, because it is really, really easy to get paralyzed by choice, not wanting to make a mistake when it comes to these money decisions. These big money moves that need to be making over time. And especially when it comes to investing, you might be investing in yourself, you might be investing your financial capital or you might be investing in some sort of enterprise. And it's really hard to know, is this the right thing to do? And is this the best thing to do? And if you've ever found yourself stuck in that cycle, asking yourself the question, what's the best thing we should do. Those two words, best insured. They should be accused for you to kind of sit back and have a think for a second. And I want to sort of talk you through. I guess a bit of a useful tool that I came across, retrospectively recently. That has really helped us, um, over time. And aren't, I think I would have had the language for this up until fairly recently. See about three weeks ago. Elise myself and the twins took a trip down to Y river. it was the first. school holidays for the kids, and it'd been a really hectic. Kind of period of time for us, like going to school first up. Having the kids kind of get used to that whole process going to, and from school, getting them ready, all those kinds of things. And it feels. It just felt like life had sped up so much for us. And at the same time, we've been making a lot of change on the back of the business and we've had more people coming and joining the team. And more roles really to manage. And so we were kind of like, let's, let's just take a little bit of time out. if we can end. I also was a bit inspired by. I guess every time I catch up with Mitch's all around Australia somewhere, and I just was like, man, what would it be like to be working on the road? And, and can we try that on, obviously we're at different stages with the kids at school, but while the kids are at school holidays, these are opportunities that we actually have. So we decided to book a trip down to Wye river. And recently we upgraded our camper trailer to a caravan. And so this would be the second trip in this caravan. We're still kind of working the whole thing out. And so we're like, what if we just took three or four days, you know, at the start of a week, you. It's not too busy down there just to kind of go down there. And just work on the road and just see what that kind of feels like. And we love why Revit. It's just a beautiful place down the great ocean road. Green mountains behind you, blue water in front of you. Rocks cliffs, just beautiful, beautiful sort of outlook. And on the second morning we were there just after I'd spent the morning exploring the rock pools with Smith and explaining that he's not a mermaid. That he can't just jump in the water wherever he likes. He's gotta be careful about the currents and those kinds of things. I'd sort of settled down and started to do a bit of work in the caravan. it was kind of this period of the morning where the kids are kind of getting ready. They're getting ready for the day. They're just kind of having breakfast, that kind of thing. And Elisa's making them breakfast and she puts on Beyonce, his new song. Texas Hold'em. And if you haven't heard this song, just Google it. it's super catchy song. You hear the first time and you're kind of like, oh yeah. Okay. Interesting. Different. But you hear it third and fourth time and it really does get you. anyway, so at least had been singing this song for a week or so, and she put it back on and the caravan and she starts humming along to it. And as she's humming along to it, my daughter, India, who is Smith's twin, she starts to get the gist of this song and she starts humming along with her mom as well. And it just hit me in that moment. I looked up from my laptop. And just watch them. And I just thought to myself, And this is what it's all about. Like if I was 80 years old, what would I give to be able to come back right now to this particular moment, be able to relive it and just reveling this particular memory. And it gave me just a lot of clarity and a lot of perspective on the journey that we've taken, the things that we talk about on this podcast. The only reason to master the game of money is to win the game of life. And personal finance. It is a game you can win because it's personal, right. And for us winning isn't about maximizing money with our limited time. It's about maximizing time through money. And the moment that we realized this, that there is no. Best option. There's only what's best for us. Well, that was the moment that we became really confident making financial decisions. And five years ago, the choices that we made, then they paved the way for the choices that we have now. And if you listened to our recent episode, 106. You'll know that it hasn't come without its challenges. But those challenges that's, what's made this whole thing meaningful. These are the challenges that we chose and facing those challenges together, moving through those, getting to a place where we have the choices that we want. That's only brought us closer together.'cause I kind of caught, at least as I, in that moment, I said to her, I'm like, this is what it's all about. These are the choices we talked about. All those years ago when we decided to change things up and reconfigure our whole lives. To live a more wealthy life as we defined it. and the big kind of realization that sort of hit me after that is that the only asset really worth accumulating is a memory. Everything else has to serve the accumulation of memories because winning isn't about dying with the most money. It's about dying with the least regrets, at least for me. Anyway. And so the thing about a memory is that it's probably the best asset you could accumulate because it trades 24 7. It's very cheap to acquire it only ever appreciate in your mind, and it can never be taken from you. So for me, every financial asset, it has to make it easier, not harder. To accumulate more memories. Because what good are financial assets? If they're not improving the quality of your life? So, this is why we never can flight net worth with wealth. Cause wealth and money out. The same thing. Talking about how much money you have doesn't necessarily say anything about the life that you're living. Cause remember we talk about wealth and we say wealth is having more of what you value. And I love quoting Goodhart's law when it comes to this, what he said was when a measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure. So if you're only ever tracking net worth. And you're not actually tracking the quality of life. You can very easily win the game of money, but lose the game of life. So for us, the way we apply this insight is we track our time and our choices to measure our progress, not just money. And we reflect on memories to measure wealth for us we're trying to accumulate a portfolio of memories that continues to pay us dividends. Over the course of our whole lifespans. Because we know that's what we're going to retire on. We're going to retire on memories and as that gets harder and harder, To go out into the world and live life. We want to be able to recall these memories in our minds. And so the job of money is to help us get more memories. So if we ever find that we have more money, but less time and less choices. That is when we know it's time to rebalance our portfolio of assets to provide more wealth. And we have found that to be one of the most useful raises for wealth. And like I said, at the beginning, a razor is anything that cuts away the trivial to reveal the vital. So, if you are struggling with making financial decisions and you're procrastinating, hesitating, My advice is to really go back to first principles and really understand what's the money for first. Understand what you're optimizing for. What are the memories that you actually want to create? What are the experiences you want to have? What are the choices that you want to make available? And then ask yourself that question. Does it help us get closer to, or further from that future? And what does that look like? And it's really important to kind of think about what does that look like over time? Because sometimes you might make a decision that in the short term might feel like it's providing you less choices. Really? Long-term it actually gives you more. You have to be willing to kind of think through that trade-off and say, are we happy with that choice? Are we happy with that trade off for this period of time. And does that make sense for us? I think the worst thing you can do is to try and look for the best option. Because it doesn't exist. There's only what's best for you. And you have to actually ask yourself that question. What do we want in order to be able to answer that question? So if you're stuck and you're struggling, stop it. What do we actually want first? How do we want to be living? And then use that wealth, raise it to make sure that you're not only accumulating money. You're also accumulating memories.