Wyatt Yates Host 00:00 Money doesn't have to be complicated. You can achieve financial independence. This podcast gets to the truth behind the money miss you here, from your grandma, your broke uncle, the latest social media influencers and the so-called money experts. Welcome to Money Miss with your host, wyatt Yates. For this first episode, I wanted to talk a little bit about you know why it exists. Why am I doing this podcast? Tell you a little bit about myself so you can decide for yourself if I'm worth even listening to, and then give you some insight into what type of content you can expect from the podcast, where you can watch and listen to it and when it's going to be released. For the first point, why am I doing this podcast? 00:52 America is the wealthiest country in the world, yet the majority of Americans are struggling financially. Here's some stats for you on what the typical American looks like financially 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. 41% can't even pay for a thousand dollar emergency and only 10% believe they have enough money in their retirement savings to be able to retire. As far as small business owners, half the US workforce is employed by small business owners. 86% of small business owners make less than $100,000 a year and 50% of them will fail in the first five years. This is not what the wealthiest country in the world should look like. It is sad and there is absolutely no reason for it. So this podcast is to inform you. It's to help you. 01:54 There is a ton of bad information out there in regards to personal finances. You have anywhere from your uncle giving you advice and your parents. You see the latest social media influencer posting on here's a next get rich quick scheme. You have the so-called financial experts that are giving you advice and you can just Google any personal finance topic. You will be bombarded with literally thousands of results that seems like they all contradict each other. One thing that a lot of the results you may get online or may hear from people, a lot of it does not take into consideration what personal finance really is or what being a small business owner really is, and there's a lot of emotion and behavior behind your personal finances or business ownership and that drastically changes how you need to approach it. It's not a simple math equation. It never is. It's looking at the emotion and behavioral aspects, your habits, and applying that. Because you can know the math, you can know what you're supposed to do or what mathematically seems right and you still won't do it because of the behavior in the motion side. So that's what we will be covering a lot of, especially initially in this podcast is going to be looking at your money mindsets. It's going to be always looking at the emotion and behavior behind decisions and how that is going to affect what you do and how you can combat that. 03:48 Now for point number two. Why should you listen to me? So to tell you a little bit about myself, I have been in Money finance accounting basically my whole life. So I have my degree in public accounting and business administration and I have a minor in economics. After college I went to work as CPA firm for three years where I helped individuals and small business owners with taxes, audits and consulting services in a wide range of different industry types from your service based industries to manufacturing, to insurance and finance, to health care and farming and I really enjoyed working with those individuals and business owners. But an opportunity came up where I was able to move from Omaha, nebraska, to the Denver, colorado area and work for a private equity group that was just getting in to investing in real estate tax liens and they wanted somebody to come on board to run that company. So I made the move site unseen out to Colorado and started working for them. I worked there for 12 years and during that time it was growing that real estate tax business. We grew it from startup phase to we bought over $140 million in tax liens and then during that time also during the 2008-2009 recession, where real estate prices plummeted we actually were very opportunistic and got heavy into real estate. So we built a startup on affordable housing that we grew from startup phase to nine figures in valuation. 05:48 You would think, with my background in education and what I was doing, I was the finance and accounting investing guy. I should know what I should do with my personal finances right. So met my wonderful wife 10 years ago. We've been married for almost nine years now and with that we were not good when we first got married as far as our personal finances went. She looked at me as being the money guy. I should know what I'm doing and put it on me. And though I made poor decisions before with my personal finances, but we were pretty well off financially when we got married and we weren't in that big of a mess as I was put in charge of it, I would made a lot of bad decisions as far as how I handled it, our personal finances, how we communicated about it and how we rationalized what we were doing and why we were doing it. And it put a strain on our marriage to the point where it almost ended our marriage. 07:05 And we got to that breaking point where we realized that we cannot continue like this and when we finally started getting on the same page with our finances and her getting involved and realizing, yes, my husband maybe knows the money side, but I can't be completely uninvolved in In our financial decisions. I need to understand what's going on and for me to get over my limiting beliefs about money that started in my childhood and my rationalization for why we were doing what we were doing and then being more open in our communication about it together and actually having financial goals. When we started that journey, we were over $300,000 in debt, excluding our mortgage. We could rationalize every single reason why we had the debt that we had, but bottom line is it was a big stress in our lives and it was tearing us apart. So we really put our nose to the grindstone and worked on our relationship first and then worked on our money issues and in a couple years we paid it all off to where we no longer had any consumer debt and we're able to finally achieve our first initial financial goal of having the financial freedom that goes with not having that debt. And I am not going to lie, it wasn't easy. None of it was easy. It was very simple in how we did it, but that doesn't mean it was easy and that enabled us the freedom to do what we wanted. 09:11 So I started a financial coaching and consulting practice for individuals and families and small business owners called rugged financial, and now I work with people and small business owners looking to achieve more financially Whether that be getting out of debt or retirement goals, or they have a business they're looking to grow or a business they're looking to start up. It's been extremely rewarding. I love helping people. My wife and I always say the purpose of life is to help other people and this enables me to do that. And I would have never been able to do that if I didn't get my hands around personal finances and what it truly takes to succeed with your personal finances. I had the business side figure it out. I know how to do it on the business side, but when you add the dynamic of emotion and behavior, that isn't completely lacking in business, but it's way more personal with your personal finances and there's no reason any person in America can't do the same. And those stats I gave at the beginning show that people are struggling with it. The same things I was struggling with and I see it every day with the clients I work with, and the clarity that can come from discussions like what we're going to have on this podcast will help you tremendously. I see it with my clients every single day when we have our coaching or consulting sessions, and you will get success If you listen to this podcast and do the things we talk about. There is absolutely no reason why you can't succeed financially and that is the goal. So that's me in a nutshell. That's my story in a nutshell, besides getting into the nitty gritty details. 11:17 The last point I wanted to cover was what you can expect in terms of content and where you can watch and listen and all of that good stuff. So initially the podcast is going to be audio only. I hope to add video at a later time so you'll be able to listen to it anywhere. You can listen to podcasts as well as on our website at ruggedfinancialcom slash money myths. Now these first few episodes are going to be just me talking. Maybe eventually I'll do some interviews with some guests as far as experts in their field, or maybe some other financial coaches and advisors and stuff, to get their insight into stuff or people that have gone from being financially burdened to achieving financial independence. But for these first several episodes it's just going to be me talking. So get used to my voice and hearing it. 12:21 Now, how it's going to look on these first few episodes, it's going to be each week, on Mondays, the episodes will be dropped or released or whatever you want to call it, but every Monday morning a new episode will be released and in that episode, each week, I'm going to take one money myth that you hear and it could be a myth that is true or something that's false, or maybe it depends and I'm going to look at that myth and break it down. You know what about? Why does it exist? What about it may be true, what about it may be false? And we'll go through the whole episode talking about that myth and either confirm or bust the myth. At the end of the episode we are going to have action steps. 13:13 So you've heard the saying knowledge is power, but it's false. You can have all the knowledge in the world, but your life isn't any better. You know, knowledge is not power. Knowledge plus action is power, as Jim Quick would say, and Knowledge doesn't mean wisdom. Wisdom is your action on that knowledge. So I want you to be wise at the end of this. So it's not just getting the information from the podcast and understanding the money myth that we covered and why it's true or false, but it's also applying it to your personal life how do you improve your, your personal finances and how you can improve your business. So at the end of each episode, we will have a couple action steps on how you can apply it, and you need to really encourage you to apply the steps to your life, because it's going to help you. No doubt about it. It will help you. 14:22 So that's kind of how these initial episodes are going to go. We have a myth, we break it down on why it exists, why it's true or false, and then we have action steps at the end for how you can apply that knowledge to your life, to have wisdom and half power, and each month is going to have a theme. So we're going to be covering myths a myth related to the theme for that month. So, right out of the gate, here in May, we're looking at mindset behind money. So the first couple episodes is going to be money, mindsets type stuff, and we'll just kind of follow that pattern. So that's what it's going to look like. Decide for yourself. 15:07 Do you want to listen? 15:08 Do you want to get better with your personal finances or grow your business? You heard the stats at the beginning. Do you want to be the normal or do you want to be different? Please listen in on these first few episodes and let me know what you think. Do you have a topic that you would like covered that maybe I haven't covered yet? Shoot me an email, send me a message on our social media pages. We'll see if it's something that's already not in our pipeline that we can maybe cover in one of the future episodes. 15:42 But I'm really excited about this and I think you guys are going to get a lot of valuable information out of it, and I hope you put it the information to work so we can start making an impact on some of these stats, because there is absolutely no reason why in America, the average American can't be better off financially and the average small business owner cannot succeed. So the small businesses, as we said, it's half our workforce. We need them to succeed. We need people to succeed financially because when you're struggling financially, it's not just your finances that are impacted, it's your entire life. Everything is affected by it. Your work is affected by it, your relationships are affected by it. You have to get it under control so you can have a fulfilled life. 16:36 Thank you for listening to this introductory episode. The next episode comes out on May 24th Monday morning. We're going to break down the myth of money is a scarce resource, so we'll get to whether it's true or false and what you can do about it. Thanks for listening. If you found this episode interesting, subscribe to the podcast so you can make sure you get all the future episodes. Also, leave a rating and review so you can help us grow this podcast, so we can lead more people to financial independence. And, lastly, please take a screenshot of the episode, share it on your social media channels and tag us using atruggedfinancial. We'll see you later.