Episode 78: Taking Control of Your Financial Future with Jeff Mount – Transcript
Rennie Gabriel 00:10
Hi folks, welcome to Episode 78 of the Wealth On Any Income Podcast. This is where we talk about money tips, techniques, attitudes, information, and provide inspiration. I'm your host, Rennie Gabriel. In past episodes, we spoke about how to build an Income and Expense Report, how to measure the level of pleasure based on where you spend your money, how to track your money in 5-10 seconds, what to look for on the net worth statement to see how close you are to Complete Financial Choice®. And last week, we had Ildiko Haag speaking about her financial journey, and the new Wealth with Purpose Program. Today, we have as our guest, Jeff Mount. Jeff is a columnist for various publications, host of the Dynamic Mapping Podcast, public speaker, and the President, CEO of Real Intelligence LLC. After spending 25 years in the financial services business, helping financial advisors improve productivity, Jeff and his business partner, Mike Helgason - did I pronounce that right, Jeff?
Jeff Mount 01:17
You got it. You nailed it.
Rennie Gabriel 01:18
Great. They are bringing an innovative method of financial planning that can help anyone find their unique path to financial freedom. This method is fast, intuitive, metaphorically visual, and dynamic. And Jeff and I have had a conversation about this. I'm looking to hear more. Jeff, welcome to the Wealth On Any Income Podcast.
Jeff Mount 01:43
Thank you. Rennie. It's a pleasure to be here.
Rennie Gabriel 01:45
Well, let's get right to it with some questions. Tell me a little bit more about what you do and why?
Jeff Mount 01:53
So while I was in the financial services business as what they call a wholesaler, most people don't know that that level of distribution actually exists. But my territory was generally New England and in New York State, although I did occasionally cover further south than that. Working with advisors and helping them to become more productive, whether it was automation of their investment processes, or help them with the financial planning side of things. What we know is that the typical financial plan takes 13-14 hours to actually complete when you figure in, and of course, the investor is as involved in this as the advisor, is because the advisor always comes across with a question. He used to call and say, 'Well, I didn't get a clear answer on this. Can you help me?' Yeah, that just takes forever. And of course, the output is 50-200 pages. If you're an analytic and you love the maze of spreadsheets, this is for you. For the rest of us, it's just absolutely dog-tiringly boring. I mean, you just literally pull your hair out when you read these things. And there's tears coming out of the side of your eyes, because you just don't know what it's telling you. It's not intuitive. In fact, I would argue, leaves people more confused after the fact than they were before. Yep. Yep. It's overwhelming. It's not a great way to start a relationship with an advisor because they're wondering, Why am I so confused coming out of this - why can't I have a strategic conversation quickly with this person?
Rennie Gabriel 03:22
Yeah.
Jeff Mount 03:22
That is our - that's our motivator.
Rennie Gabriel 03:24
Yep. And yeah, because I used to do those plans, it took hours, I was ready to shoot myself after completing one of those. And I said, I can't do this. I can't, this is no way to earn a living.
Jeff Mount 03:39
You know, there's a percentage of advisors, I don't know what the exact number is - they're almost intellectually superior, because that prospect is confused and kind of relying on them to tell them what direction to go. Again, not exactly a very good trust-building element. And that's something we want cure. We want to make sure that the adviser and investor can very quickly get into strategy, because they understand where they are, they understand the consequences of their current actions, and they can explore all this really quickly.
Rennie Gabriel 04:14
That makes so much more sense. Now, because I donate 100% of the profits from the work I do my books, my programs, my coaching. Philanthropy is an important part of the work over here. So is there a particular charity that you support and what do they do?
Jeff Mount 04:31
Yeah, so I've been involved with Junior Achievement for a long time. And of course, their three mantras are financial literacy, work readiness and entrepreneurship. All three of those things are things that we talk about on the Dynamic Mapping Podcast on a regular basis. And it's interesting, you know, I live in Fairfield, Connecticut, which is a fairly affluent town, but then you go just one town up - where Bridgeport is a very economically-challenged town and that's where you know, you really earn your stripes. You got to go in there and do the best you can to inspire and motivate as many as you can to start thinking about financial literacy, work readiness and entrepreneurship.
Rennie Gabriel 05:13
Yeah. And yeah, that's not an easy road. I get it. So now you're, when you were, and I do know what a wholesaler is, because I'm certified as a financial planner and sold those type of investments. But back then your target market would have been other financial planners - who are your target market now?
Jeff Mount 05:32
You know, so when we first started this company two years ago, our intention was to truly deliver a productivity tool. So the Dynamic Map App, which was originally created, was meant to get through the calculations really quickly, in fact, 10 minutes or less. That's our mantra - visualize your financial future in 10 minutes or less. And then with the advisor and the investor they can start exploring all the "what ifs". But the challenge is it wasn't intuitive enough for the end user to figure it out on their own. There had to be an advisor helping. And of course, my intention was to travel the country training advisors and how to capitalize on this. And truly build scale into the business because you're only spending, let's call it 15-20 minutes on the actual math, all in, and of course, that the investor understands you get into strategic conversations really quickly, as opposed to wasting the 13 or 14 hours of time prepping for the big plan. So that was great until COVID happened. And I couldn't travel. And we tried to do it by Zoom. But as you know, it's hard to keep people engaged on a Zoom screen for the entire day. And it's a two-day training session.
Rennie Gabriel 06:45
Oh, yeah.
Jeff Mount 06:46
So I'm like, 'Okay, this isn't going to work'. And in January of this year, we made a major pivot. And the pivot was we're gonna go direct to consumer. And pivots are painful, they're necessary sometimes - but that means all the time and money you spent on the original project is now gone. It's out the door. We had to rebuild the app to make it more intuitive. We had to build in 30 strategic videos that will help anybody on their own to accumulate wealth. If they want to work with an advisor, fantastic. If they don't, there's enough there that they can do it themselves. And of course, we do have these apps available in the both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. But that's just to get brand recognition, if you will. Our real effort is to go after corporate America to help them with this financial wellness initiative that they've been talking about for 20 or 30 years.
Jeff Mount 07:33
They really haven't done anything. You know, they'll have the 401k guy come in for a day, once a year. And they'll check the box and say, 'There we go.' No - you didn't. The schools are terrible at this. Colleges offer elective classes on personal financial planning, but they don't really go as far as truly making it part of the curriculum for everybody as they should. And I think the only option we have here is to turn financial wellness into a real HR program. And the faster we can get people to that point, and the more engaged we can make them on this conversation - and track it. Yeah, that's the nice thing about apps. Is if you want to build it so that the HR department can see which videos people are watching and how engaged they are, then they can give them points towards an Amazon gift card, or whatever it is, like they would for normal physical and mental wellness initiatives. So that is a big part of what we're doing. We are in talks with a number of big employee benefits providers, as well as of course, HR departments directly. It is the focus for what we're doing now.
Rennie Gabriel 07:33
Yeah, talk. All talk.
Rennie Gabriel 08:42
And that makes so much sense. Yeah, for decades, corporations have been talking about financial wellness. And you're right, they'll have someone who handles their 401k come in and talk, at a lunch and learn, and say you know they've done their job. Yes. And you're talking about the colleges have that as an elective. Yeah, that's right. As a matter of fact, there's nothing taught in high schools or junior high schools. And the problem is, most people, as far as I know, do need to handle money and they get no education whatsoever in what to do, or how to do it. So I applaud you for doing this. Jeff. Now, I know you've already talked about big failure in terms of the direction you were going. So what would you say was your insight the pivot you needed to make to make this change? Or was there a different failure?
Jeff Mount 09:38
Please go back to the beginning of the question.
Rennie Gabriel 09:39
Not a problem. So anyway, we're talking about you know, the failure of the direction you were going with the business. Was there any different failure, whether it was personal or business and a different insight you gained from that? You know - you decided to pivot.
Jeff Mount 09:53
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we made the pivot. I'll tell you, Google Analytics is an amazing tool. I mean it really dig into what you can learn from that. And one of the things that we learned when we launched the new app was that 25 - 35 year old males, love this app, and they play with it at noon, and at five o'clock. And that's great. That means that in their spare time, they're thinking about their finances long-term. We also noticed that males aged 55-65 are playing with this app. However, they're doing so at midnight, and 1am, which tells you, and me, exactly what's going on there. They're worried about their future, and they're exploring all the "what ifs", what can I do to to change things. The gap between 35 and 55, it's interesting - male's - they just aren't, I don't think they're focused on retirement. Now, the good news is the Dynamic Map App does help with college tuition planning. It does help for saving for your kids wedding. It throws your mortgage in there. So it's not just retirement. And we noticed that females, less than 20% of the downloads are females, so those are two groups that we really know we missed. And we have to make some changes. And we have some changes in mind, that can emotionally pull them in to the conversation. And of course, we want to gamify the Dynamic Mapping more so that people who are playing with it are somewhat entertained by it, because we know how people are with it. As soon as they're entertained they're playing this thing all the time. And it's educational. That's a good thing.
Rennie Gabriel 11:29
Great. Okay. So let me ask you this. I think I've got it nailed down, but what would you say the the main benefit, goal, objective or outcome is that people who use this app will end up achieving?
Jeff Mount 11:45
Clarity. Because we are actually identifying, this is unique, most financial plans do not do this - we identify your future value need that is graphed out year by year on this app. And I guess I haven't talked about the visual. The graph actually creates the image of a sailboat. And that is our metaphor. The metaphor is sailing through life, as opposed to the boring spreadsheets and pie charts and bar graphs we talked about. Sailing through life. And your success is determined based on how well your boat is built. So if you have big billowing sails that, those represent your assets, and your hull represents your future value liabilities for each of life's purposes. So it's not just retirement, but your retirement definitely creates a clear hull. But it also does the same thing for college tuition, which of course, is a four year payout per student. And of course, a wedding, which is all one time payout, but it shows you where you should be both in accumulation and distribution year by year. So that is in fact, I would go back to something you said at the very beginning and that was the concept of net worth.
Rennie Gabriel 12:58
Yeah.
Jeff Mount 12:59
We challenge that, strongly. And the reason we challenge that is we are big on fulfilling your family obligations and we define wealth as excess abundance. So the money that's left after you fulfilled your family obligations. That is true wealth. However, you know, and I know that the net worth concept is based on a balance sheet. Right. And a balance sheet would say, here are your assets, here are your liabilities. So if somebody has $275,000 in their 401k plan, and no debt, no mortgage, no credit card debt, no debt at all, what's your, by definition, your net worth is $275,000. However, that's in your 401k. That money is already allocated towards your retirement. So that does not, in our definition, represent wealth because that would not be excess abundance. Same would be true of a 529 college savings plan. That is committed already to one of your family obligations. So these are the key differences that you're going to see here. And we throw in with the whole sailing through life metaphor, tail winds and boulders because we don't want a plan that's just a snapshot in time. Life happens. Yeah. Tailwinds are good things. That's an inheritance. That's the sale of a family business. That's vested stock options. In the strategic videos, those 30 videos I talked about, we do outline how you can manipulate the actual calculator with more "what ifs", and of course to identify what your potential outcome could be from those good things. There are unfortunately there are realistic things. There are boulders that are out there. Things like divorce, things like...
Rennie Gabriel 13:24
Disability - yeah.
Jeff Mount 14:37
Yes, getting sick or hurt, whatever the case may be. And we do of course, have videos to help you through those periods as well. This thing is meant to be as dynamic as your life is.
Rennie Gabriel 14:48
I mean, this, I'm really looking forward to digging more into this and finding out how that actually fits my situation and I'm sure the people who are listening are wondering, is there some valuable free resource that they can see or look at to, you know, get more information?
Jeff Mount 15:09
Certainly a couple of things. First of all, the Dynamic Map app is a free download. We give you the math for free. I'll tell you a funny story in a minute about how we got to that. The actual graph is created for free and if you want to access the 30 strategic videos to help you create an actual action plan, you have two ways you can pay for it. Either $19.99 one time and be done with it, or $2.99 a month, $2.99 a month, and then you can turn it off at any time.
Rennie Gabriel 15:36
Ah, okay.
Jeff Mount 15:37
So, your call.
Rennie Gabriel 15:38
Now, what's the name of the app, when they go to the App Store? How do they find it?
Jeff Mount 15:43
Dynamic Map is the name of the app.
Rennie Gabriel 15:45
Oh, okay fine.
Jeff Mount 15:47
If you are retired or retiring soon, there is another one called Woosh! Prime for Retirement and that talks about distribution planning, which is very different than accumulation planning. And that one has the same price choices, as you have with Dynamic Map, all at once or month by month. The other thing you can do is you can go to Real Intelligence 360, which has all of our podcast episodes, as well as, of course, the media placements we've had, which give you all kinds of strategic tips regarding how to manage risk. We do it different than risk profiles, we do it towards your purpose-based accounts distribution dates. So it's an aging of portfolios, whether it's identifying that future value, as we talked about - the hull again. So all of that stuff is discussed there. And I think you'll get a lot out of that. And it's free.
Rennie Gabriel 16:36
Fabulous. I'm going to put Real Intelligence 360 in the show notes for anyone who couldn't write fast enough or can't spell real or intelligence. Is there a question that I should have asked you, that would also provide some additional value to those who are listening?
Jeff Mount 16:54
I often get the question, Do I need an advisor? And that is an individual decision. I think if you're . . . You think about 85% of Americans do not have an advisor currently. I don't know if people know that. That came from Fidelity Institutional, and I trust them because they do work both the retail and wholesale side of the business. They know. That means that 85% of people, there's something there that they're just not sure about. They're not sure if the adviser has their best interest, or if they have enough money to qualify. I'm not sure what's holding them back. But please understand that if you are looking for an advisor and you want an elite level of service. We have trained a number of advisors in this method. They will deliver an essential family office experience to investors. We call them middle class millionaires that have 750,000 house investable assets or more and control over their budget. And they will literally tie in everything from accounting, and legal, to property, casualty risk management, to wealth management, so that all of those stars that would normally work with you talking to you in silos will actually be cooperating together on your behalf. If you want to do it yourself we'll show you how to do it through the podcast. But most of the time, when you get to that point, you definitely want somebody else taking that load off your hands.
Rennie Gabriel 18:17
Great. Jeff, thank you so much for being on the show. And to my listeners. Thank you for tuning in. Again, Jeff. I appreciate what you've put together. I think it's gonna be really helpful.
Jeff Mount 18:31
Thank you, Rennie.
Rennie Gabriel 18:32
You can listen to the Wealth On Any Income Podcast on your favorite platform. And please rate, review and subscribe. And if you'd like to know how books, movies and Society programs you to be poor, and what the cure is, then log on to wealthonanyincome.com/TEDx. You'll hear my TEDx talk and can request a free 27-page Roadmap to Complete Financial Choice® and receive a weekly email with tips, techniques, or inspiration around your business or money. Again, that's wealthonanyincome.com/TEDx. Next week, we'll have Stephan Spencer, who's the author of the textbooks on search engine optimization, SEO. If you want to know how about SEO, tune in next week. Until next week, be prosperous. Bye bye for now.
