Confidence Classic: The Money Mindset Shifts That Can Increase Your Wealth with Heather!

22:16So just like when you go in the dressing room, you try an outfit on for size, is it a fit for me? Is it not? Instead of saying that's a dumb idea, or why would you want to do that? We've made an agreement that we always try each other's ideas on for size. And part of the rule is it doesn't have to be a fit. There is no obligation for it to be a fit. When somebody brings up, hey, I would love to try this or I want to switch careers or, you know, what if we could start experimenting with X, Y, and Z? If you shoot it down right away instead of trying it on for size or considering it, that makes the other person feel bad.

22:46And then they stop bringing exciting ideas to you. And then that dooms the relationship. So you want to create an atmosphere where it's absolutely okay to reinvent yourself or bring new ideas into the relationship and know that the other person isn't going to embarrass you or shoot it down, but instead they're going to try it on for size. So that's been one great rule that's kind of helped us morph into who we are today. I think the other thing is we have, you're going to laugh at this, but we've always been walkers. Like we walk three to six miles a day. every single day. It's a non-negotiable for us.

23:21If it's a pouring rain out, we'll still be out walking because when we've got that guaranteed container to physically remove ourselves from the place where we've done battle all day and change our state a little bit. And we know that we're going to have that chance to connect first thing in the morning. And then at the end of our workday, that's a really important container to be able to talk through anything that would otherwise be put on the back burner. And I'll tell you what, we've done a great job of putting things out when they're smoke instead of letting them turn into a fire and trying to put it out then.

23:52And we're able to do that because we've got this daily container where we're willing to address anything that we have to address. So those are just a couple of ways that we've kind of grown into the people that, you know, they look at us today and they might say, oh, must be nice to have found another entrepreneur that understands how you tick and all that. We were not those people. We grew into those people together.

24:16Growing up, money in my house was scarce.

24:24Heather Monahan:And the conversations around it were a little stressful to say the least. That shaped how I handled money for years. Modern didn't just change that. It gave me the chance to rewrite that part of my story and start a new story. Here's the thing about lifestyle creep. It's silent. You don't even notice it happening. My savings rate had quietly slipped 20 % and I never noticed until Monarch put it right in front of me. Now it's like having a financial advisor in my pocket. The AI Weekly Recap catches spending spikes and net worth shifts before they become a real problem. And when I want a straight answer like how much did I spend on travel last summer, I just ask Monarch's AI assistant.

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26:32When I launched my own podcast about two years ago, the World Series was coming to Arlington. It was the first time that they'd had a neutral side because of COVID. So my daughter is a huge baseball fan, Heather. So I bought a ticket for my daughter, myself and her boyfriend. But then I said, you know what? I'm going to back myself against the wall here and say, I'm not going to allow myself to go to the World Series until I get a certain number of downloads on the podcast. And I wanted to go all in. And so I came up with a variety of ways to do that. And it was amazing how when I put myself in a situation of I'm going to lose something valuable, my brain went into overdrive.

27:09It was like ideas began to fire back and forth because there was a purpose. There was a cause. I had to do it. So the day before the World Series, we hit the goal. But I say all that because for people who are thinking about their money as if I go to a job, I come back home, I press repeat and do it again the next day. And then Sunday about four o 'clock, that icky feeling settles in that says, oh, I got to start this all over again on Monday. This message is for you. And I want to tell you, if you're working in a job right now, where your feet are today is where you can have the most impact. And if you can find a way to increase business, reduce costs and grow the bottom line where you're at right now in a job, you can make more money, which means you can then give more money to the causes you care about.

27:56And I want to dispel something real quick, Heather. This was a problem I had to work through myself many years ago. And that was when I would give to an organization I believed in, I was giving money. So therefore I was losing money for them to gain the money. Okay. So get this, it was lose win, which is never a good scenario. And what I realized when I came upon this generosity purpose, this is a way for you to make more money, do more good. And because you're doing more good, more people typically want to work with you and you are driven to make the business successful, which means you keep making even more money to do more good.

28:31And the cycle just keeps repeating itself. And so no longer is it lose win, it's almost win win. And the charity gets one win. You're almost winning more than the charity is because it changes your mindset to have a fulfillment mentality. And you're helping your customers. And I think you're helping your business, Heather, because you're decommoditizing the product or service you've got. There's so many things right now. People can work with any CPA, realtor, attorney, salesperson. It all looks the same, sorry to say to the audience, to the outside person. But when you raise your flag up and say, you know what?

29:06We provide great service, But what helps us stand out is we help make our community better. People want to work with that person. And research tells us, surprisingly, they're willing to pay more money to do it because they're part of a thicker story. So when the competitors come knocking, they may be teased with a price reduction from the competitor, but they won't change because the bigger story of how you're helping make the world better and helping their community really is what hooked them in the first place.

29:34Heather Monahan:Oh, it's so powerful. And I'm telling you, it works. I'm living proof. Please raise your hand at work. Make this change in your business. You will be thankful for it. Okay. People listening right now are thinking, oh, well, this guy grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth. His dad handed him his financial advisor business. I know that's not true, but I'm hoping you could share with them a little bit about the truth behind how you came to be the person you are today. Well, I wasn't that kid where I had to walk up hill in the snow, both ways to school. And I carried a warm baked potato to keep my hands warm.

30:05I ate that potato at lunch. It's not a story like that, but I grew up lower middle class. And what I didn't have going for me was I didn't see my parents take any risk. My dad was a metallurgical engineer, so he was very math oriented by nature. And he would always get to the precipice, Heather, of wanting to take a risk, of wanting to launch a business and do something more. But he couldn't quite get there. So I grew up liking money and I began to connect at an early age. the more money I made, the more I could give away. I remember writing even like in my left hand to make it look anonymous to give a cash donation to our church and the food bank so it wouldn't get traced back to me.

30:47There was something about that that just drove me. You know, even as a kid, I kept track of every dime I found on the ground every quarter of my first paycheck. So I didn't grow up in utter poverty, but I would say I had sort of a poverty mindset mentally when it came to my money because I didn't see my parents have a plan or an ability to work themselves out of the bubble that they were in. It wasn't until my first job out of college that I reached a very important fork in the road. And what it looked like was I got passed over for a raise, which really bothered me. The boss would routinely say on Fridays, hey, by the way, Saturday is a work day.

31:24I need you to come in eight o 'clock tomorrow. I have to call my wife and cancel our plans. And then get this, back when people wrote checks, he actually bounced two of our paychecks. So imagine this, I give a tithing check to my church and my pastor calls and says, hey, Derek, I don't know how to tell you this, but your tithing check bounced, which meant the business didn't have money to pay us. So I quickly saw the writing on the wall and I reached this moment and I thought, I can either stay at this job or a salaried job like this, but someone would always be telling me what I'm worth. based on the salary that they're giving me right then.

32:01That's what they're saying. Here's how much I'm worth to the company. Or I can take a risk. I can put the chips on Derek. I can bet on myself and go into a financial planning business, which I've always wanted to do. And that's the path I chose. So I continued working full-time for three more months, got licensed in the evenings, in the studying on the weekends and so forth, and eventually made that break. And people told me, Derek, you're going to fail. You don't have enough money in cash reserves. You're not smart enough. You don't have a financial background. But what I had in my heart, Heather, was I recognized I was sort of a nobody, but it was with the heart and a desire of a somebody.

32:37And I recognize even in high school when I ran for office and won because I brought people together is if you can help people feel important and heard and appreciated, regardless of their age, regardless of their net worth, they will have an affinity toward you because you're endearing yourself toward them and making them feel an important part of your life.

32:57Heather Monahan:Oh, that's so powerful. You brought up this poverty mindset. What are some of the strategies that you can share with people listening right now, how to switch that mindset? Well, let me ask our listeners this. Did any of you grow up with this scenario where you might have seen mom or dad or grandma and grandpa hit their fist on the kitchen table while you were a kid and they'd say, if only we had more money, then we could fill in the blank. Okay. So Heather, I mean, when you see that as a kid, you can't help but begin to believe that, well, I guess that's just how money works. The lack of it causes pain.

33:34And because we can't get more of it, we live with the pain. Or you might've heard someone say to you, you know, in life, there's the haves and the have nots, and we're in the have not category. Well, those, those beliefs, I just wish I could just punch my fist through some glass right now and say, look, stop that thinking. I mean, we get one shot on this earth. And whether you've made bad decisions in the past or people have told you you're not worth what you're making right now or you'll never get paid more than that or you've made some really bum decisions, you can move ahead today and change that.

34:10And let me tell you a quick story to illustrate this. So there was a woman who I was in the office on a Saturday morning and my voicemail, I was blinking and I pressed it and a woman's voice came on and she was scared beyond belief. She said, Derek, you've got to call me back right away. I bounced a check and I'm going to go to jail. My gosh, what? I was like, who goes to jail because they bounce a check. So I quickly called her back. I knew this message wouldn't wait until Monday. And I said, tell me what happened. She said, Derek, I feel so stupid. I didn't move money from my savings to check-in.

34:41I wrote a check. I got this letter in the mail. It bounced. And now I'm going to go to jail. I said, okay, let me press pause. We can call the bank on Monday. We'll take care of the bank and so forth and the cash, the check, the bounce. But why do you think you're going to go to jail? So she began to tell me a story. And when she was seven years old, she's 55 right now, seven years old, she overheard her dad receive a call from a store owner that he had just bought some school supplies for and some clothing for her and her siblings. And he accidentally bounced a check as well. And the store owner said, because you bounce a check, I'm going to send the police over there and we're going to send you to jail.

35:18So this seven-year-old girl thought that if you bounce a check or even more, if you make a bad financial mistake, you go to jail. So now fast forward, she's 55 years old. And what that did for me, Heather, is it gave me this entire epiphany of for the past 10 years as we worked together, she was always hesitant to take risk. She wouldn't take advantage of investment options I gave to her that would have made her quite a bit more money. And she was underpaid for the position that she had. Once we began to talk about this and she began to realize the false money belief was not just false, it was actually costing her money and opportunity.

35:57She actually got another job was making more money, her life dramatically changed. And so what I want people to hear is, don't just think when you say money beliefs, it's just this abstract thought. Your money beliefs can actually change the course of your family and your family's generation for generations to come. And it all starts with you having the courage to bet on yourself.

36:27I feel for me a lot of my my life up until even when I started the first business I was running from that pain that life like you know I didn't want I wanted to make money because I didn't ever want to have to depend on anyone like I wanted to be successful so that I had power and control over my decisions and my autonomy of my life so that's I was running from the interesting thing was I even once I got longer on my journey, I never chose what to run towards, because I was running so hard, so long from things. Now, if we talk specifically about the abuse, I never talked about it other than when it first happened, I literally bottled it up, stuck it down inside, and for 20 years never uttered a word.

37:13And looking back, it's interesting how our survival mechanisms that are so strong in us will kick in and will really get us through whatever we need. So for me, it was about just always grinding, always focusing, because I didn't realize then that I got so caught up into who I wanted to become and how much, how far I wanted to get away from all this situation that I was really just trying to create the life that I wanted because I didn't want to acknowledge what was. And I didn't probably address it. I think I was close to 30 before I ever really talked about it and really have only opened up to talk about it publicly in the last couple of years is for me, it was one of those things where everything started to connect.

38:00My life started to be so much clearer when I started to open up because I think that we have as much pain as great as our secrets. And I think when we're hiding from something and we're trying to minimize something or we're trying to just completely compartmentalize something, no matter how hard you try or how good you are at it, which I was really damn good at it, it will surface in other ways. It will surface in choosing the wrong partner next. It'll surface in making a bad choice and hiring someone or having, you know, who you're going to sleep with or who you're going to marry. I think that you choose bad decisions when you aren't really healing what you've already gone through.

38:43And so, you know, it was definitely a journey that then took me to like really talk about it and open it up. But the interesting thing was when right before I probably talked about it for the first time, I had bought a building because I was investing in real estate, commercial building, and had no idea what I was going to do with it. But I just loved commercial real estate at the time. So I would buy any deal that I could find. And I bought this building. It was sitting there vacant and I was driving, leaving the business. You know, I'm like rushing and pushing and I'm like climbing so many mountains.

39:13And I made this like mecca little place that like everyone wanted to come to. And we were really known to be like a pioneer in the space on the East Coast and like all this stuff. And yet I felt so freaking empty. I felt so unfulfilled. I accomplished every one of those goals on my list when I was 15. and yet I still was driving by that building and thinking, is this it? Like, did I do all of that? Did I get out of all of this abuse for this, for this feeling? And it was like in that moment, the best way to describe it, Heather, is like I recognized everything that I've done and then everything that I still didn't have.

39:56And at that moment, I was driving by this building and I thought, what am I gonna do with this building? Like this has been sitting here for a year. I got to do something with it. And it was like a voice, like we're talking said, put your animal shelter there. And I was like, I never wanted to open an animal shelter. I never wanted to have a nonprofit. Like those weren't things that were ever a conscious decision for me. And, but I did, it was like a gut, it was like a gut check. And it was something that I immediately did. And of course, cause everything else I figured out, like, why can't I figure this out too?

40:28So figured out how to start a 501c3 and, you know, turn that building into a kennel and everything that we needed to be to house animals. And it was through that. It's interesting. I built a nonprofit to save animals. But in the process, they saved me. I didn't realize that throughout life, because I felt so alone, that I turned to animals to heal. My dog that I would see. You know, the rabbits or cats that I would save and want to bring every stray animal home. And so I look back and think if I didn't have all of that happen to me, I wouldn't have the heart that I have now to help end suffering and to not want to see other people go through it.

41:13And so it was really through a very unconventional way that I truly healed. And it was through pure contribution. It wasn't the achievement of my goals. It was through giving and being in service to others. Oh my gosh, that's so beautiful.

41:28Heather Monahan:You can make me cry. I love that story. I love that you have turned such an horrible situation into such a gift. And I'm just so proud of you. That's such a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing that. Okay, so back to business, because this was something, you know, looking through all of your content, looking at your book, one of the things that you talked about that was helpful to me incredibly as someone who's on this journey now working, you know, 25 plus years in corporate America, which I know like the back of my hand, I don't know this new entrepreneurial world. I'm only a few years in, so I'm a rookie and learning as you go, which is exactly what you did, figure it out along the way, which is fine.

42:07Heather Monahan:However, it's helpful sometimes when someone's ahead of you and they give you some tips and, you know, hearing you explain the difference between someone who's working alone, like your father did versus someone who becomes an entrepreneur, like you did. What are some of those hacks and differentiators that you can share with us? So the biggest thing to remember is oftentimes people think they're becoming an entrepreneur. They think that they're building a business, but really what they do is they end up building themselves a job because they didn't build the business with intentionality of how they want their life to look if they're ever gonna exit this company.

42:45Because, you know, and it's fine if somebody wants to be a self-employed person, nothing wrong with that. Some people love what they do and they want to continue to be the artist or the talent, but they never sat down to identify, are you really the entrepreneur or are you really great with managing people or are you the talent artist within your business? And you're the one that should be front stage as we call it, as opposed to building the business and directing the growth. So it's really key. You can build anything you want, but what I see most people do is they don't recognize the difference.

43:17So social media has glamorized being an entrepreneur. I have no idea why. when I came out of my ex, I didn't even have an Instagram profile. Like, so when I came out of my exit and like saw this, I'm like, why is all of this being glamorized? Like I've been pulling my hair out for 20 years. I'm dealing with employees, lawsuits, like you, Nate, like all the things, um, business structure. And, you know, I mean, it's just been nuts. So I was like, I don't understand. And then I really started diving in and that's when I was like, Oh, okay. Well, most of these people actually haven't built a business.

43:46So that's why they're glamorizing it because they can take a laptop to the beach and that's supposed to be some fun thing until they realize that they have to take the laptop to the beach because they have to run the webinar. They have to do the thing. They have to have the workshop. They have to connect with the team. So if you're not intentionally scaling and growing a business, if you're not intentionally building systems and having efficiency in the business that other people can run, you will always be tied to it. And that's a job. And actually it's harder than just having a job because people think, oh, I want time.

44:18I want to be able to do what I want with my time. When you're an entrepreneur, oftentimes you have no control of your time because if your team, someone calls off, you have to step in. If all of a sudden the event's not going as well as you want, you got to jump in and handle things or this ball was dropped and you got to jump in. It's actually, maybe you actually just want a job and then you can take your money and build assets so that then you can do whatever you want. The difference between building a business and a job is a job you always are going to trade time for money. A business, you build a machine that generates revenue, generates wealth so that you can invest it and do anything you want.

44:55If I did anything right, it was by reading books in the beginning that taught me that. And I've always been able to, if I do anything that I'm good at, it's identifying patterns, which is why I can jump into someone's business and like really see things or jump into someone's investment and be like, oh, that's because this is wrong based off of two and a half years or two and a half decades of seeing different patterns. If you want to build a business, it is a totally different skillset than just being really good at something that you do. Neither is right or wrong, neither is bad or worse, but just make sure you know what you're building so that you don't end up in golden handcuffs.

45:33I see a lot of times people end up in these golden handcuffs. They think, oh yeah, they look like they're doing great, but really you just had to sit on back-to-back this or you had to go do all these coaching calls or you had to do all like, and yes, it's nice that you can do it from anywhere, but you know what's even nicer? To be able to do it from anywhere and not have to drag your laptop around unless you really want to. Like that is really what building a business is all about. You want it to build wealth so that you're not constantly trading time for money.

46:12Heather Monahan:growing inevitably something will happen no one succeeds alone you don't stop and look around once in a while you could miss it i'm on this journey with me