Money for Life Strategy with Curtis May

Curtis May is the creator and owner of Practical Wealth Advisors (PWA) and host of The Practical Wealth Show Podcast. The primary focus of his financial planning firm is to help individuals and families become financially free by following the principles of wealth creation that have endured for centuries around the world. As the host of his popular podcast, The Practical Wealth Show, and in his individual meetings with clients, Curtis teaches people that their only financial asset is their knowledge. The more they know, the lower their risk and the greater their chance of success over time. He feels strongly that financial products are simply tools. What makes the biggest difference in people’s lives isn’t the product. It’s how they use it. Curtis has been planning for individuals for more than 35 years, and he is passionate about helping his clients save money and live the very best life they can right now. Curtis is blessed to be married to his wife of 22 years, Erica, a family law attorney. They like each other so much that they even share an office together. Curtis and Erica have three amazing daughters and love to travel.

Episode Highlights Here:

Curtis:

Most people want to skip saving because they just want to be invested in, you know, making money on savings accounts, and blah, blah, blah, I don’t care.

Brett:

So teach me to fish. What are these big dogs doing?

Curtis:

So they look at it. So it’s two ways to look at so they’re doing the opposite. So while they’re teaching you to buy and hold, they’re creating velocity. So when you look at investing, I think investing is, you know, you know, so I, people who say I want to learn invest. Now, I don’t give investment advice. I help people play defense. Okay. And so one of the things they do is let me give you the principles we’ve pulled down from studying Kiyosaki and other stuff. And it’s, it’s kind of from my mentor, Kyle. Christian has a great book called principles-based planning. And that’s kind of what I’m a proponent of. So the principles, what do I do I teach principles to help our clients become and remain financially free. Okay. Passive income growth expenses. So if that’s what you want, that’s, that’s what we’re talking about. So what do you have to do? Save? Okay, see, most people want to skip saving because they just want to be invested in, you know, making money on savings accounts, and blah, blah, blah, I don’t care. Okay. It’s the habit of saving, saving, what? 15 to 20% of your gross income. All right. And we’ll get into it later. I’ll show you a little easy, simple thing to kind of, was to automate that. Okay. The second principle, and if you look at them all good investors if you check out Kiyosaki his book, who took my money? And what’s the other one? Rich Dad’s guide to investing, they all invest with insurance. So you have to play defense. You have to have what I call a fortress balance sheet, which is where you’re looking at your liability coverages Do you have umbrella coverages? Do you have adequate life insurance, do you have a state trust and all that stuff set up so that’s a whole process that we teach called maximum protection, what is the maximum you can get not the minimum, you know, you want to they set up legacy when it makes sure you leave a legacy of wealth and wisdom, which is our third principle of personal finance. The fourth principle is liquidity. See, we’re taught to invest, which is to send money away from us. I teach people to capitalize, like accumulate financial value. So then, if we teach them to put it somewhere that allows them to leverage it or collateralize it so they can use it to buy other assets, they don’t have to liquidate the account. So most people put money in and take it back out, put it in, take it back out and see one of the things they don’t teach you in personal finance is the concept of opportunity costs. Because you finance everything you buy, right, you’re either paying to use somebody else’s money or when you use your money, you’re giving up interest. You could be earning like people don’t calculate that. And that’s a real cost. And the last one is, which is what your listeners and what we’re talking about are the velocity of money, which is just an economic principle of, you know, can you like Mr. Wonderful, if you’re white shark tank, he’ll go, Hey, I’m going to put this million dollars in your business, what do you want to know? How soon Am I getting my money back? Right with it with friends? And then what is he doing with that is he puts into another deal, then he gets back, he puts into another deal. Now those deals are; still, he’s in them, and it’s throwing off cash, but he’s got his capital outs. He has no risk. He’s got his money back. And that’s velocity, okay. And on the real estate, that will be the bird myth in business, you know, is how many times can you turn over the product, so money is made by the movement of money, money in motion, and the, you know, then they want cash flow, then they want to leverage and then they want, you know, they protect or they store their cash in like insurance based products. And so that’s the fifth principle. So that’s what they do. Okay, and guess what, all of those strategies, they work in personal finance, so we just kind of boiled it down into a process and but principle five is you like that’s you figuring out okay, here are the four asset classes business real estate, paper assets and commodities. What do you like? What do you understand? What do you want to become an expert at? Because that’s your job to make yourself rich there’s nobody outside of you that can make you rich. You know, you can get mentors you can learn stuff, but you got to do and if you don’t want to do the work. I always tell people don’t call me okay because I can’t help them. I need to call your cousin at Primerica or Dave Ramsey’s coach or whatever. Because there is a design I just give you money to us. Let’s just max out your 401 K and get out of debt and keep it moving. All right. For some people. That’s great advice, but for people that want to be rich. You can’t do that stuff. Yeah, absolutely.