Season 3, Episode 11 Being a Money Talker: Talking to Your Kids about Money and Inspiring Entrepreneurship

Eric Brotman: [00:00:00] Welcome to Don’t Retire… Graduate!, the podcast that teaches you how to advance into retirement rather than retreating. I’m your host and valedictorian Eric Brotman. And I find it incredibly difficult to believe that this is the season finale of Don’t Retire… Graduate! for our third season. Uh, and for all of our listeners, I can’t thank you enough for being loyal listeners, for leaving the reviews that you do and really making the show fun. We will have one more episode next week of office hours with our final extra credit assignment before our summer vacation. But today we have our last guest of season three and I can’t be more excited to have Cody Loughlin on the show.

Eric Brotman: Cody is the host of the Money Talkers. He in his, in his infinite wisdom had me as a guest on his show. We had a whole lot of fun and I’m excited to introduce him to our audience. Cody, welcome to the show.

Cody Loughlin: Eric let’s do this. I’m excited to be here, man.

Eric Brotman: I can think of no better way to close our third season, um, than with a true [00:01:00] podcasting expert.

Eric Brotman: I mean, you’ve, you’ve done close to 200 shows and those are just the ones you’ve hosted. So I guess let’s, let’s learn a little bit about you and about your story and how you got into podcasting and how you got into the, the money conversation and personal finance.

Cody Loughlin: So money talking has been something that I have been open to for quite a long time.

Cody Loughlin: Um, it, the reason I named it, the show Money Talkers was actually, I started out as The Trillionaire Movement. And that’s because I wanted to teach a million kids to be millionaires and a million times a million is a trillion. So, or a million millions is a trillion. And so I can’t spell very well sometimes.

Cody Loughlin: So I, I didn’t want to keep autocorrecting. So I needed to get something different than the word trillion in my name. So I wasn’t, I had decided that, you know, I found out, uh, a marketing trick and not trick, I would say a tip that if you can identify as something, that’s the strongest force that you can have.

Cody Loughlin: So if you say I am a money talker, it’s not taboo and it’s not out of context, it’s not uncomfortable for you to talk about money. And so I ended up coming up, calling this the Money Talkers. As I set out originally, what I wanted to do is I wanted to [00:02:00] teach personal finance to kids. I, it goes back to being 19 years old, sitting into my first finance class at the university of central Florida.

Cody Loughlin: I was in school to be a Marine biologist. Had never really known anything about personal finance, finance, you know, money. Uh, in my house, we talked about entrepreneurship because my parents were entrepreneurs. So I always assumed I could own a business, but we never talked about money. And so I was sitting in a finance class and they explained compound interest to me.

Cody Loughlin: I was 19 years old and I was sitting there and he said, I remember the exact example. Um, it was burned in my head. He said, if you make $2,000 a year away doing summer jobs, From the age of 16 to 20 years old, you’ll have more money than if you put $25,000 a year away from 50 to 60. If you wait till 65 years old and the math just blew me away, I was so just enamored looking at it, thinking wide-eyed like, wow, this is a possibility.

Cody Loughlin: He’s like why? And then I started thinking like, why am I learning this right now? [00:03:00] You know, I had just graduated high school. I had a pottery class the year before. You know, my, my coil coasters were going to come in real handy when I was 65 years old. I didn’t know what a mortgage was. I didn’t know how insurance works.

Cody Loughlin: I didn’t know what an interest rate was. I had a bank account, but I didn’t really understand what that was. And it just really started tearing at me sitting in that class, because what I started thinking about was here, I was in class learning about this at 19 years old, wide-eyed and very, you know, in a very contained environment

Cody Loughlin: 95% of the kids in my class from the year before, were never going to hear this information and it really kind of stuck with me. So over 20 years, um, there’s a, you know, I think there’s a, there’s a big story to unpack about how I got there. But, uh, 20 years later I had the ability to, um, quote unquote retire, which I’m excited to talk to you about.

Cody Loughlin: And, uh, And I wanted to give something back. And I was in a coaching group with about 2000 [00:04:00] entrepreneurs that were paying $30,000 a year to be together. So this wasn’t low level, you know, pie in the sky type people that were thinking, I want to have a company one day. They were all business owners and very successful at it.

Cody Loughlin: And I brought the subject up because I thought about, I want to give something back and I kept bringing it up. And every one of them to a T were like oh, my gosh, I wish I had learned some of this stuff. I wish I had learned about money when I was a kid. Like I could have done so much more. I mean, where I’m at, where I’m at with all the ups and downs and bumps and bruises, but my parents never talked to me about money and I asked them, I said, well, do you talk to your kids about entrepreneurship?

Cody Loughlin: And they said, yeah, absolutely. They lit up, you know, because entrepreneurs do that. We’ve all got a little bit of hubris in us and we all kind of light up to get excited when somebody else wants to talk to us about it. And then I turned the question on him and I said, well, do you talk to your kids about money and personal finance and successful mindsets?

Cody Loughlin: And they said, well, I try, which is code word for no. And what I realized at that [00:05:00] point was it was going to be very hard to push a string, to teach kids about personal finance, but it was a lot easier for me to say, you know what, I’m going to connect the parents and I’m going to give the parents the tools and the encouragement and the information that they need so that they can talk about money in their households, because it’s going to be very difficult to teach all things finance, as you would know, Eric, you’ve got a, you know, a litany of, um, you know, uh, letters behind your name with CFP and every other one back there. Right. But so there’s really never, you really never learn it all. But what I could do is I could help them open the conversation so that when they’re having small money talks with their kids and their families, they would be able to later in life, when the questions come up, because there’s an unknown number, unnumbered amount of variables there could be, that they would have somebody in their corner that they could go to and talk to about these things and that they would strengthen that relationship and build it together. Because if we plant just a little bit of seeds, they have [00:06:00] so much, they’re so rich in time that the compounding effect of it just like compound interest, it turns into, you know, huge effects later in their life. And that’s where Money Talkers came from.

Eric Brotman: I love that. And I do want to come back to the idea that you retired in quotes, but before we do, um, let, let’s talk a little bit more about this financial literacy piece, because I happen to believe, and I agree with you completely, that financial literacy is one of the keys to financial freedom, to ever reaching financial freedom. You have to understand what decisions you’re making before you can possibly make good ones. And the challenge that I have, because I desperately want to help young people learn this and it’s not taught in schools. And the fact that you got that in school is kind of amazing, really, because so few do, um, it’s not taught in schools for lots of reasons, but parents don’t understand this stuff.

Eric Brotman: And, you know, if, if you learn habits right from your parents and it’s not deliberate, and it’s not thoughtful, you’re going to learn a lot of bad [00:07:00] habits. And, uh, you know, people bring the habits that each of their parents taught them either by accident or on purpose to a marriage. And then married couples fight about money because of the lessons they each learned.

Eric Brotman: And it just really does snowball and cause problems. And starting early is the best possible recipe for abundance. I mean, there’s no more valuable commodity than time when it comes to building wealth, you know, I, we, we have conversations with clients all the time and we actually do meet with their, with their kids.

Eric Brotman: Sometimes they’re high schoolers, sometimes they’re college, sometimes they’re young adults. And what we tell them is what you have on your side from a time perspective is priceless. It’s something none of the rest of us can get back. So, so tell me about some of the resources, some, tell me some of the things you use to talk to kids about money or to talk to parents about talking to their kids about money.

Eric Brotman: What are some of your best practices?

Cody Loughlin: Yeah, I I’m glad you say that because, um, you know, there, the, the pushback you usually get is [00:08:00] parents will say, well, they’ll say a few things. One, I’m not a financial expert. Two, I don’t know where to start. You know, three, I don’t want to talk about my situation. Right?

Cody Loughlin: Cause it’s going to get better if you stick your head in the sand and one of the, one of the things that’s really come out of this, I’ve learned so much over the 200 episodes I’ve done in the last year and a half, and I’ve gotten to speak to experts, high-achievers, you know, um, just people that have, have taken the path and gotten somewhere really great in life.

Cody Loughlin: And what I found most of the time is that none of it’s a straight line. Right. It’s always up, it’s down, it’s up, it’s down, but they’re learning. And so they’re trying. And the thing that I always find about is if you take action, it doesn’t matter if you fail. If you ask my kids, my kids are seven and nine, and they’re my little test subjects.

Cody Loughlin: But if you ask my kids, like what, when do you fail? They’ll say, when you quit, then you say, well, what happens if you tried something and it doesn’t work. And they said, then you learn how not to do it. And [00:09:00] I’ve really feel that that is the key to these things because you’re taking such a giant subject that you really can’t learn everything about.

Cody Loughlin: And so people use it as an excuse to not try it at all. But the thing is is that if you know how to open a bank account, your kid doesn’t, you’re a money expert to them. Right. You just have to take a little bit of action and a little bit of time. And so with the podcast, that’s really, the main takeaway was, is setting goals.

Cody Loughlin: And actually just determining what you want. If you don’t have a target to aim at, you know, it’s like driving a car and you’re going, if you’re not going somewhere, you’re just literally driving up and down the streets. There is anxiety. There’s confusion, you know, there’s, uh, there’s just a, a sense of hopelessness, but if you know where you’re going and you’ve got clear directions to get there, it’s a whole lot easier and you’re going somewhere.

Cody Loughlin: It’s exciting. It’s fun. You know where you’re going. You’ve got a, you’ve got a purpose in life. And I really feel that financial planning and just having the conversations it has to start with where do you want to go? [00:10:00] Because once you get a plan in place and I do this with business owners, I do this with people that I talked to, I do it with my own family.

Cody Loughlin: And I had to learn these things, but if I have a goal lined out and it’s clear, then I put a timeline on it, then I can make the plan to get there. And I have very small steps. I break it down. You know, if someone says, Hey, I want to make $1,200,000 a year, uh, in my business. Cause that’s what you hear. You hear everybody say, they’ll say, oh, I want to make a million dollars in my business.

Cody Loughlin: Well, that’s revenue, first of all, but that’s another story. Um, let’s say it’s $1,200,000, so it’s a hundred thousand dollars a month. Okay. You need to make $25,000 a week. If you’re going to work five days a week and you need to make $5,000 a day, how do you do that. Well making $5,000 a day is a lot easier problem to solve than making $1,200,000 a year.

Cody Loughlin: But if you don’t make $5,000 a day and figured that out in very small steps, you can’t get to the million two, just the way it works. That works a lot of the way with personal finance, you have to take small steps, determine where you want to get to, put the plan on plate in place, because I feel like, you know, you mentioned something where a lot of couples and a lot of divorce comes [00:11:00] from money arguments.

Cody Loughlin: A lot of those arguments come because they’re not on the same path to where they want to go. They haven’t had that conversation. They just want to be better. They want to have more, they want to buy more, you know, it’s just very generalities, but if you sat down and make a plan with your significant other, and you guys had a clear cut agreement of where you want to get to, and then you could just start to determine how you’re going to get there, that all that stuff goes away.

Cody Loughlin: The confusion goes away. The anxiety, the wondering, the blame, uh, that starts those fights. If you’re both going to the same destination, then you’re in the car together. Then you’re going to get there a lot more successfully and it’s going to be, it’s going to have a reverberation through the house and the kids are going to see that they’re going to feel that as well.

Cody Loughlin: So now they don’t have anxiety about money. So more is caught than taught. What that means is if you have, I have a bad relationship with money or you have anxiety or you’re having arguments constantly about fighting about money. They’re going to pick that up no matter what you [00:12:00] tell them. And so you need to take action today to change the way that you interact with it.

Cody Loughlin: And if you feel uncomfortable, it’s because you’re not running towards a goal. You’re not getting, you don’t have a plan in place. You’re not on the same page with your significant other. And if you want your kids to be successful, which I’ve never met a parent that doesn’t, then it’s on your shoulders to take a stand today.

Cody Loughlin: Don’t wait until tomorrow, don’t do it in the future. It’s something that’s important. Put Netflix off, turn down Disney plus, whatever it is that you’re doing, take that time where you’re using it and not having a purpose to get somewhere and spend that time where you want to go and get your life in order with these things.

Cody Loughlin: Because, you know, it’s, it’s the same saying where they say, you know, most people spend more time planning their vacation than they do their financial life.

Eric Brotman: I often hear that said as people spend more time on their vacation than their retirement. So I want to come back to what you said in the very beginning of our show, because I loved it.

Eric Brotman: You sort of put retired in [00:13:00] quotes mentally or audibly, which I love because you’re retired and you’re also busy and active and productive, which is what we’re trying to teach people to do that retirement is not disappearing. It’s not a retreat, it’s not a surrender. It’s a graduation to the next phase of life.

Eric Brotman: So can you talk about what retirement and you can define that any way you want, but what does retirement mean to you?

Cody Loughlin: As I alluded the very part of it, that there was a big story to unpack in between where I got from 20 years ago to where I am today. Um, but when I learned that the, the financial pieces in that finance class, when I was 19 years old, um, I also had a interaction with the guy, gave me a book and it’s very, you know, well-known book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

Cody Loughlin: And after reading it, it was the first book I’ve ever read, cover to cover. And after reading it, I decided I was going to be a millionaire by the time I was 30. And so I told everyone that because I spoke it into existence, right. And at 27 years old, uh, I was a millionaire on paper. [00:14:00] I was a big paper tiger though.

Cody Loughlin: I had four businesses. I had condos on the beach. I had rental properties. I, I thought I had life by the tail. And, uh, as I tell people, I thought I was on a rocket. I thought it was one of the world’s greatest businessman. And, uh, it turned out to be a rocket, a bottle rocket, and it just blew up on me. Uh, so at 28 years old, it was $700,000 in the hole.

Cody Loughlin: No, uh, in foreclosure. IRS tax liens. Unfiled tax returns, uh, four businesses closed, no prospects on the, on the, on the table for me. And so I, I am not very much a pity party person, uh, in that part of my life though, I did take a month or two of just, why did this happen to me? And, uh, one day my wife looked at me and said, what are you gonna do about it?

Cody Loughlin: And my mom had asked me that most of my life. Because life is going to hit you with things. And when you have the determination to say this isn’t fair, this isn’t right. Or it’s the way the world is, or the whole part about is what are [00:15:00] you going to do about it? And so I determined I was going to start, I was gonna, I was gonna look in the mirror.

Cody Loughlin: I was going to look at myself and say, you know what? You’re not a good businessman, a good businessman wouldn’t have had this blown up on them. You’re not good with money. And I, because I, I was clearly in, in wishing I tell people this, Eric, I wished I was broke, right. So I went on a mission and I started learning.

Cody Loughlin: I came across the fire community, which is financially independent, retire early. Um, you know, there’s some crazy stuff in there, but I really, it really gave me hope that if other people could have enough passive income, that they could have the freedom to do the positions and the job and the impact that they wanted.

Cody Loughlin: And so I fixated on it and I said, I’m going to be retired by the time I’m 40, I needed a new goal. And I did, I set out and I said, okay, that’s, you know, 10 years from now, I’m $700,000 in the hole. I’m in [00:16:00] foreclosure. I don’t have a job, but I’m going to retire in 10 years. And I just kept thinking that and I said, okay, what do I need to do in year one?

Cody Loughlin: And I started making a plan and that’s where I come to. I said, okay, year one. I need to be here. Year two, I need to be here year three, year four, year five. All right. So if I need to be year one, I need to be here. Where do I need to be at the end of month one? And I said, okay, what do I need to do day one?

Cody Loughlin: And I broke it all the way down to what I needed to do to get to the position, to the goal that I wanted. People look at, you know, budgeting and they look at life planning and things as an anxiety. And for me, what I found out was when I could turn it around, it was an empowerment issue. You know, I think coffee gets brought up a lot.

Cody Loughlin: When we start talking about personal finances, like skip the $5 coffee, but people look at it as I’m taking something away. When I made the sacrifices and choices not to buy things or not to spend my money, what I was doing was I wasn’t wondering where my money went. I was telling it where to go. [00:17:00] And when I did that, I had a goal to get to.

Cody Loughlin: And so that goal was bigger for me than the little tiny sacrifices that I didn’t care about. And I would pick those things. And so I never felt like I was taking away from myself. I always felt like I was giving to myself. I had a goal to be fire and retire early before the age of 40, because I wanted to play with my future kids, which I didn’t have yet.

Cody Loughlin: And so I would think about those things and by that’s why I said the most important thing you can do is set the goal because once you’ve set the goal and done the planning, it’s easy to say no, that’s what a lot of people don’t understand that you need to ability to say no to things, but it’s not no and I’m taking away from, Cody doesn’t get something. I’m saying no because I have a bigger purpose.

Eric Brotman: I love that. I especially love this idea that you didn’t wonder where your money went. You, you told it where to go. Uh, that is an empowering message. And one that I hope, um, resonates with our audience, for sure.

Eric Brotman: Because, um, you know, I, [00:18:00] I sometimes refer to budgeting as the B word because nobody wants to talk about it. It’s like dieting, Um, and you know, going on a crash diet might, might allow you to lose a few pounds, but it’s not the same as having a mission of, of, of health. And I think the same, thing’s true with a budget, a budget in a short term to save X dollars or to, uh, to pay down a certain debt or something is, is great.

Eric Brotman: And it can be helpful, but if it doesn’t change your behavior, your lifestyle, your attitude, your philosophy, you’re liable to wind up back where you started. So, uh, it sounds like you, you made a, a huge, um, you made a huge recovery from what some would have referred to as an insurmountable, certainly debt, if not financial situation.

Eric Brotman: Um, and now you’re retired, you’re able to play with your kids. You’re um, you’re, you’re doing the podcast. What other things are you doing in your so-called retirement?

Cody Loughlin: So, uh, I own three businesses. Um, so that’s my [00:19:00] retirement.

Eric Brotman: It sounds like retirement. That’s retirement in my book. Anyway, I like that.

Cody Loughlin: I, it makes me happy.

Cody Loughlin: Right. And, uh, but, uh, you would be, you know, my, my actual work hours is what people require, you know, th that’s what they, they attach to retirement. Right. And like, I don’t want to work anymore, but it’s not really work for me. Like I enjoy, I really enjoy what I do. I like to build. Um, I like to keep my mind active.

Cody Loughlin: You know, I’m still, I’m still at 41 years old and I would tell people that I’m re I am retired, but I do. I actually just get to have freedom. And that’s really what for me, what the retirement is. I’m not chained to something. Um, you know, my businesses work for me. I don’t work for them. I have, you know, really, really dug into efficiencies.

Cody Loughlin: I had a company with 110 employees. And now I have one in three companies. And so I enjoy what I do quite a bit more because I get to work on the things that are important. I don’t do any of the busy work stuff anymore. And so when I talk about retirement, what I really just have is I [00:20:00] have freedom. And that’s where, you know, you kind of talked about the, how, right?

Cody Loughlin: Like the budget is kind of the, how to save to, to know where your money’s going, but you gotta determine the wall. The why is way more powerful when you’re up against it, because it takes the hows are easy there’s, step-by-steps, there’s plans. There’s people that can help you. But if you don’t determine that why inside of you, that’s the fire?

Cody Loughlin: That’s the burning piece that says, no, I don’t, I’m not going to go and I’m not going to buy that thing. That’s in the, you know, that it’s an impulse buy. That’s going to, that’s going to blow my budget because if you have a, because I want to be X, Y, Z. Right. And whatever your, why is, if you can add that because of, I’m not going to do that because, and you have your why in the backside of it, the how is a lot easier.

Eric Brotman: So let’s talk about entrepreneurship a little bit, because like yourself, I have, I’ve started a business. I do run the business. It’s sometimes does run me, however, so I could take some pointers from you for sure. [00:21:00] Um, but entrepreneurship is a special bug and not everybody has that bug and not everyone feels that they either can or want to take that kind of leap or that kind of risk or that kind of even responsibility.

Eric Brotman: So talk about how that, that burns a fire in your belly, how it gets you excited and how you can coach other people or encourage other people who are thinking about taking that leap to do it.

Cody Loughlin: So 14 is the number right now. That’s how many businesses I’ve started. Uh, 10 of them have failed miserably. Uh, four of them I’ve done over $200 million in sales, uh, between the four of them.

Cody Loughlin: Okay. It is a process like anything else. You have to start. Right. I tell people like, to be able to find your voice, you have to start talking, you know, the, to be the, the, the Michelin chef, you’ve got to start as the bus boy, right? If you’ve ever listened to Joe Rogan who sold his podcast for a hundred million dollars, if you ever listened to his first podcast, like the first couple hundred of them, [00:22:00] they’re atrociously bad.

Cody Loughlin: And so. The people see this. I actually didn’t read the guy who started. Um, he wrote the software for Carvana, which is the largest used online, uh, largest used car dealer in the world now. But it’s, it’s also an online platform that you can shop and buy things for. And he said, you know, I was, he was from Stanford, um, with a lot of the guys, the Google guys and all those kinds of people.

Cody Loughlin: And he said, you know, uh, when I sold the software that I wrote to Carvana, he goes, everyone touted me as an instant overnight success. He goes, but they didn’t see the 10 years that it took me to write the software and struggle and live on couches and eat poor food and do all these things. It was like, I was, I chased my dream so hard that everyone thought I was an overnight success because no one had heard of me until they bought it.

Cody Loughlin: And that’s a lot of what you need to think about when you’re looking at small business, uh, working. There’s a really, really good book that I would encourage anybody who’s thinking that because they have a technical skill that they can run a business and it’s called the E-Myth. It’s the entrepreneurial myth.[00:23:00]

Cody Loughlin: It basically likens it to this. Like we have six pieces into a business. We think we have the technical skill. So let’s say you’re the guy who’s putting the roof on the house. You’re not the roof company owner. And you say, man, I make $20 an hour putting roofs on. And this guy just got 3000 bucks for, you know, selling this roof.

Cody Loughlin: I’m going to open a roofing company.. And it works somewhat. Usually in the first six months, year, two years, maybe you can just put a saddle on your back and will your way into staying in business. But all you’re really doing is you just be going from being an employee to self-employed employee, right? There’s a quadrant where you need to run into, to be, to move up.

Cody Loughlin: And so you become the business owner. And as the business owner, it’s really difficult to take that saddle off the back because you want to run. That’s how you built your business. You just proved it to yourself and to hand off pieces to other people so that they [00:24:00] can do them as you bring in team members.

Cody Loughlin: And then the ultimate Ascension is into the investor. And what I like to call it is built for exit. And so you’re building a business there’s only three ends to a business. You close it, you give it to someone or you sell it. Well, obviously the best choice is selling it. Entrepreneurship is the fastest path to wealth.

Cody Loughlin: It’s probably the most risky, but you can actually control it. And so if you’re building a business to sell it. What does that mean? The business doesn’t need you as the owner. Um, doesn’t need, you doesn’t need your work. So if you can look at a concept and look at a business and say, okay, could this, could I go take a two week vacation?

Cody Loughlin: And if that gives you anxiety, you’ve got work to do inside of your business. If you could go take a two week vacation and you couldn’t take your cell phone, let’s put it that way. Right? So you can’t, you can’t sneak off between maitais to go shoot emails back to your, you know, your staff and employees. If they could run it on their own, then you’ve built a business and that’s really what I’ve done.

Cody Loughlin: Uh, I’ve learned to do over all of my [00:25:00] failures. Um, you know, I’ve learned from them and the ability for me now, if I wanted to take off for a couple of weeks, it wouldn’t suffer at all. And. That piece was a big learning process. And so what I generally do as the owner and the entrepreneur, and being now that I’m in the investor stage, what I look for is I look for what I call the big domino.

Cody Loughlin: And there are things in your business. If you picture a four box piece, you’ve got urgent and, um, not urgent, you’ve got important and not important. The majority of business owners spend their time in urgent/important and urgent/not important, replying to emails, putting out fires, handle customer support. Uh, your employees got a bad attitude that didn’t show up today.

Cody Loughlin: You know, all the stuff that really like at the end of the day, doesn’t move your business forward. But if you can, if you can focus your attention into the, um, not urgent and important bucket, [00:26:00] right. If you can figure out what the one thing is, you could do to. That would really move the needle in your business.

Cody Loughlin: And generally you have some of those things in your mind because it’s, oh, I want to do this down the road. Oh, I don’t have time but that would be really helpful. Impactful. If you spend your time in that and find a way to take the things that don’t really move the needle on your business. If you knock down that one thing every single day, the rest of the time that you spend on a business, it’s just bonus.

Eric Brotman: I love the quadrant piece and, um, and actually have put that in front of our team before. I mean, you’re, you really are.

Cody Loughlin: Uh, it’s a Steven Covey piece. Yeah. When I’m repeating a lot of things, it’s not really a lot of my original ideas. It’s things that I’ve learned from people that were way more uh, successful and smarter.

Eric Brotman: Oh, I completely understand. And I certainly do the same thing. I actually think that’s a leadership trait in and of itself is finding some greatness and deploying it. Right. But Cody you’ve described my life. So since I’m getting some free therapy today, um, [00:27:00] you’ve described my life as, as wanting to take those two weeks off and step away from the business, which I now am able to do.

Eric Brotman: So I feel like that’s big progress. You know, we’ve got an amazing team of people. I still find myself in break fix urgent mode more than I want to, but less than I used to. So I think there’s, there’s hope here. And by the way, I’m a math guy. So for you to say you started 14 businesses and four were successful.

Eric Brotman: Um, that’s, you’re batting 2 85, which may not be a hall of Famer, but you’re, you’re a solid utility infielder at least. And if you’re also hitting for power, you’re in good shape. I mean, as long as the, as long as the four hits are, dingers you, you you’re on any roster in the, in the, in the bigs.

Cody Loughlin: That’s my strategy: swing big.

Eric Brotman: That’s that’s a beautiful thing. I could talk to you all day. Um, we’re, we’re actually running to the end of our show and the end of our third season here. And I think you’ve, you’ve actually already given us several assignments, several extra credit assignments, whether you know it or not, but I’m going to ask you to distill it down to one.

Eric Brotman: But one takeaway that folks can [00:28:00] have having spent some time with us. And, uh, uh, and, and what would that be? What would the one piece of actionable advice to help graduate into retirement?

Cody Loughlin: Well, you used one of my favorite words right there actionable. So my one takeaway would be this. If you’re listening to podcasts, you’re already feeding your brain, right?

Cody Loughlin: Your brain will seek to validate what you put into it. And so if you continually put good positive things. The things you want to get better at those are the things you should consume, not the mindless drivel that we watched through entertainment, but if you’ve got good inputs coming in, that’s the first step.

Cody Loughlin: The second step is to take action. They don’t need to be big actions. You know, that’s what you mentioned earlier, like crash dieting, crash budgeting, right? You’re usually already party to. I like to tell people with money talkers that I’d like to put Dave Ramsey out of business [00:29:00] and not his education side, but his helping people get back out of the debt side because I was a Dave Ramsey graduate because I looked for everything I could because I had messed up so bad.

Cody Loughlin: But what I learned was is that if you take small amounts of action, then they have big results. Everyone looks at the big results and they say, You know, oh, you were lucky. Uh, it will luck is where preparation meets opportunity. So if you think that your opportunities come and then you prepare to learn how to take advantage of them, you’re too late.

Cody Loughlin: So if you are starting to build now and you’re listening to this podcast, whether you’ve got kids or not, you need to start taking small steps. They add up over time. I once had someone tell me, they said, Hey, do you read business books or sales books? And at the time it was, uh, I was the best salesman on the team is what I told him.

Cody Loughlin: I said, no, I’m the best salesman you’ve got on your team. And he said, well, do you, why not? And I said, well, because a lot of it’s just repeat, you know, it’s just, there’s [00:30:00] one or two. He’s like, don’t get anything out of it. And I said, yeah, I said, maybe I’ll get, you know, a nugget or here. And he said, well, do you think you get 2% better at sales?

Cody Loughlin: And I said, yeah. And he said, what if you wrote, what if you read five books a year. I said, well, I’ll get 10% better at sales. I’m a numbers guy, too, right. All right. And I said, all right. And he goes, well, where would you be at in 10 years, I go be a hundred percent better than I am today. And he goes, so you can get better.

Cody Loughlin: And you should be reading books because you’ve got a 40 year career ahead of yourself and you could be 400% better by the end of that. And he goes, oh, actually it has a compounding effect. And since you’re a banker, you can do the math. And he goes, you’d be in the million percent better than you are. I said, okay, man, I’ll start reading books.

Cody Loughlin: And so it, if I get to that, if, if my one takeaway is anything is just start, you don’t have to be a genius. You don’t have to, there are no financial savant, right? There are people that, that, well, I guess there are, but you can’t get there unless you start taking little steps, but little bit of steps has a lot of [00:31:00] impact.

Cody Loughlin: And especially if you’ve got a family, involve your kids. Go in with no expectations will be my best thing and ask a lot of questions will be my other best thing. When you tell you, we’ve been talking to kids about these things and Eric, I’d like to leave you with one quick story about something that I learned from my podcast by people telling me that, you know, you should ask your kids questions, ask your kids questions.

Cody Loughlin: I said, okay, well, what does that mean? And he said, ask him why when you get stuck, right. When you get stuck an uncomfort uncomfortable conversation with your kids, ask them why they’re they’re asking the question. Listen. Okay. And I don’t know where it went. It went somewhere in the back of my head, you know, and one day, a couple months later, I’m walking through my kitchen and I’m holding a big thing of like barbecue.

Cody Loughlin: Cause I like to barbecue. And my son stops me right in the step, right in the way into the kitchen. And he’s six years old at the time. And he says, uh, he says, dad, how much money did. You want to talk about an anxiety question? Cause I’m running through my head. Like my initial reaction is like, don’t worry about that.

Cody Loughlin: And then I’m like, wait, [00:32:00] I’m the money talker guy. Like I gotta just lay it all out. Now I got to explain to my six year old where all my money is and what kind of investments I have and the way my brain is like just having an epic, civil war inside of itself, you know? And I’m like, I got to tell him, I’m like, I can’t talk to him about this.

Cody Loughlin: What am I doing? I’m holding barbecue. You know what I mean? It’s just going crazy. And somehow it popped up in my head, ask him why. And I just stopped and I set the plate down and then I got down on his level and I said, son, I said, why, why do you want to know that? And he said, dad, he goes, you know, I have a hundred dollar bill, right. And it’s like, it was like his, he talks about all the time. It’s like, one of us is prized possession. Right. And he’s like, you know, I have a a hundred dollars bill. And I was like, yeah. And he goes, well, I need to know if you have a hundred dollars because if you don’t, I want to give it to you to help the family.

Eric Brotman: Wow.

Cody Loughlin: Waterfalls. It just, I mean, I welted up so hard and I just looked at him and I didn’t even know what to say. [00:33:00] I just hugged him and I thought I would have missed this moment. Right. If I hadn’t, if I, if I hadn’t listened to things or talked to things or found out, like to find out where they’re coming from.

Cody Loughlin: If I had just done the normal reaction that we do as parents and shut it down. I would’ve, I would’ve missed one of the most beautiful moments of my life.

Eric Brotman: That’s a great story. And I thank you for sharing that. Um, we’re, we’re wrapping up Cody, where can people check you out, find out more about your, your show or, or the work you’re doing so that, uh, our listeners can, can get more from you.

Cody Loughlin: Absolutely. I appreciate the opportunity. I appreciate the people that have listened to this. Um, thank you. Uh, first of all, thank you also, Eric, for having me on the show. Um, what I would do is I would encourage you to seek out Money Talkers podcast. It’s got a big, uh, Emerald green logo with my smiley face on it.

Cody Loughlin: And, uh, I’ve interviewed, you know, high-level entrepreneurs, high-level parents sometimes, and actually some kids. And, uh, and I get a lot [00:34:00] of actionable tips. We do two different podcasts. I do kind of a learning zone of genius podcast, uh, which you were a part of. And then we do the high impact series. And so in the high impact series, it’s they’re less than 10 minutes.

Cody Loughlin: It’s a one piece takeaway, which was, I love that you asked me that at the end of your show. Um, but it is to get people out of the learning loop. Like if you don’t know where to start or what to talk about, you can just listen to this for 10 minutes and have a dinner conversation with your kids. And there is some amazing advice that comes out of these podcasts from these people.

Cody Loughlin: And it’s really boils down to a take, take away actionable piece. You don’t have to tackle the whole world. You could just take away one high-impact series money talk, or look, you sit on the end of your here. Just what’s a takeaway. And then go take some time.

Eric Brotman: Sage advice, my friend and, uh, Cody Loughlin.

Eric Brotman: Thanks for joining us on don’t retire, graduate. I thank all of our listeners for listening to another season of Don’t Retire… Graduate!. We will be back [00:35:00] next week with an office hours with your final summer reading for the year, and then we’ll be back in the fall with a new season kicking off in September. Uh, if you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast and post comments and reviews on apple podcasts or other download sites.

Eric Brotman: Don’t Retire… Graduate is a book available in print, Kindle and audio formats. And it’s a workbook with all the steps you need to build your own financial freedom plan. For more go to Brotmanmedia.com or buy a copy and leave us a review on Amazon. We’ll be back next week with our final episode of office hours.

Eric Brotman: And later in the year with our next school year season. For now, this is your host, Eric brotman reminding you don’t retire, graduate!

Narrator: From this day forward let us begin visualizing our dreams and building our futures. Today, I implore you don’t retire… graduate! Visit our website at dontretiregraduate.com to subscribe. And please like us and [00:36:00] post comments on social media.

Narrator: Securities offered through Kestra investment services, LLC. Kestra IS, member FINRA SIPC investment advisory services offered through Kestra advisory services, LLC. Kestra AS, an affiliate of Kestra IS. Kestra IS or Kestra AS are not affiliated with Brotman financial or any other entity discussed