Welcome to the Smart Dad podcast where we help you lead well at home, in business and in life. I'm your host, Derek Moore. Smart dads are intentional, engaged and ever learning. Whether you're a seasoned dad who's been through it all a new dad, still figuring it out, a supported dad with a great woman at your side, or a solo dad carrying the load alone, this podcast is for you, no matter your background, your challenges or your goals. 

Fatherhood is a journey of growth and we're here to do it together. Each week I'll share insights that I've garnered throughout my life of raising kids, building businesses and leading others. I'll definitely share some failures, some successes, and I'll even be able to show you tools and strategies that you can use to become a smart dad in your own life.

Hey, welcome back to the Smart Dad podcast. I'm really glad you're here today. We're to be talking about our third dimension of our eight dimensional living. We've covered faith. We've covered family. Now we're talking about finances. A lot of attention goes to finances, a lot of anxiety around finances, dads, moms, grandparents, kids, adults, seems to be thinking about money, about finances. So let me say this upfront. I'm not here to give you any legal advice, any financial advice. I'm not a trained CPA. I'm not, I'm not even an untrained CPA. I'm not trying to tell you any strategies. I'm not trying to sell you a course. I just want to share with you what I've learned from building wealth.

I have spent 40 years in business. I have lost money, credit, banking relationships, finances, twice. I'm going to tell you about the most recent time. So I've lost millions of dollars, millions, tens of millions of dollars and rebuilt it. So what one learns about family, about personal values. It can't be duplicated in a lab. can't be made up just by reading a book. So I don't recommend losing tens of millions of dollars, but I'll just tell you a couple of things.

There's a truth that I experienced and it changed how I think about finances.

I've decided to continue my journey of teaching my children by the age of 15 about finances that I didn't learn until 30 years old. I'm going to take a deep dive into how I lost tens of millions of dollars and why I wouldn't trade that lesson for all the money in the world. And then finally, I want to share my

Mindset it I call it the wealth with balance mindset as a smart dad. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. Let's dive in the first principle I Want to share with you and you can pause you can go back if I talk too fast. You can slow me down, but I want you to hear this you can make more money. But you can't make more time now someone else smarter than me smarter than I am probably said that but if I had to sum up my financial mindset in one sentence that would be it you can make more money, but you can't make more time. This principle came to the forefront of my mind really over the past few years. We had this massive, you know pandemic. People were locked down people were dying alone even after that I had friends in their 40s 50s and 60s die and they and and they were just gone too soon.

And I kept thinking, what did they do yesterday or two days ago? What'd they do a year ago? 10 years ago? Did they expect to go to be gone this young? And of course the answer is no. So that really helped radically reset my perspective. So think about this. What are you building? Are you building a bank account? Are you building a life?

So my highest priority now is I want to use my time and my energy and my money so I can create some memories so that I can have some experiences so that I can spend time with my family and live some lessons. So let's, let's go back a little bit. 10 plus years ago, you would look at my life on paper and you would think this guy he is just into doing things a lot. I had more than 10 kids. I had 10 vehicles. had what 12, 15 houses. I even had bought a plane. Now that might sound crazy, but some of those purchases really at the time, all of them were set up to help me solve problems and help me create freedom. Having two adults in a house plus someone taking care of the kids, that's three cars. And then we had a driver who was available to drive kids around town when everyone else wasn't available. I had a Mercedes Sprinter bus that I would use to travel for work. I had a little SL-550-2-door hardtop convertible. Yeah, that was my toy car. Okay, maybe that was a little excessive. I had a work truck I had cars for the kids. There was a lot going on but the plane buying the plane was Absolutely for one purpose. It was to buy my time back. I was working all over Texas and All the flights stopped flying and I was still working at 9 o'clock 10 o'clock 11 o'clock some nights Having a plane having a pilot I could get home at one, two in the morning whenever it was still wake up the next day and drive my kids to school by 7 a.m. or get out the door to meetings or start homeschooling whatever was on the agenda at that point the cost didn't matter I was trying to get my time back and Tim Ferriss wrote the four-hour workweek that book taught me something powerful I'm designing my life for freedom, not for retirement. I think sometimes people, dads, we might tend to hyper focus on retirement, almost making it our god, our idol, our supreme focus. And we miss out on the life we have in front of us. So this book, The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss helped me start doing the things to get time back. wasn't trying to impress people with money. I was trying to invest in memories and being present. Remember, I was working 80 hours a week. When I wasn't working, I was sleeping some and trying to spend the rest of my time with friends, family, and faith. So, what happened? Well, it didn't always go this way.

I don't know if I've told you the story before, but in the late 90s, when I lost everything in the cell phone business, I ended up full time in a tutoring position. Within 30 days, I had 30 hours a week of tutoring at $30 an hour. By the early 2010s, I had built a high end tutoring company servicing families.

All over the country, mainly focused in Texas. We had folks in California, New York, Florida, Vermont, Arkansas, and all around Texas. And this tutoring consulting company was scaled into the millions of annual revenue. In fact, the net profit, the EBITDA were really good. We were firing on all cylinders. We had everything going. In fact,

I was CEO-ing about 15 minutes a day. We had prepaid retirement. We had prepaid taxes. We had rental properties throwing off cash. We had business equity. I thought we were doing everything right. But then it happened. A single relationship fell apart. It was the domino effect of the last straw.

And for the first time, the emotions, which I really hadn't allowed to lead my life, I had had emotions, I'd had passion. I don't know that I ignored them, but I put them in their place when I was hitting home runs every day, stay calm. If I'm singles every day, stay calm. If I'm striking out every day, stay calm. But for the first time in a long time, emotions started overtaking me.

Because when your family cracks, whether it's health, whether it's marriage, whether it's children, whether it's  all the above, your numbers don't matter. Your bank balances can't save you. Now, I had a surgery to take a tumor out of my face. It wasn't cancerous. But if it had been, what would I have paid to make that go away? I would have traded all the money in the world to get rid of something that could have shortened my life. So,

Back to the story. The straw that broke the camel's back and I began to lose everything. Little by little, it was stripped away. wasn't overnight.

And it was all gone. All gone. Tens of millions of dollars in assets. All gone. The power of compounding. All gone. The momentum of decades of building a business. Gone. And Robert Kiyosaki's book, Rich Dad Poor Dad, popped into my head here.

You don't own your success unless you can survive a reset. You don't define your life and your identity by your business or by your bank balance. Cause if you're doing that, you're already bankrupt. You just haven't gotten the notice in the mail yet. You haven't been notified that you're upside down completely. Your life is more than about how much you can make, how much you can save, how much you can invest. It's more than all that.

I can tell you there was a lie there was a lie there were a couple lies, but one of them that I believed Because I didn't know any better Was that there's a number big enough once I can hit this number I Think I'm Untouchable I think that I'm insulated now some people say it's 250 million some people say it's a billion some people say it's a hundred billion I don't know my number wasn't that big but I thought

We've got some momentum here. We should be able to ride this out and coast. The truth is, there is no number big enough.

The Great Depression, stock market crashes, people lost everything. I have a friend I was talking to yesterday. He had tons of property, high-end property. He had some debt on it, but it was maybe 50 % leveraged. So it's a $10 million property. He had $5 million of debt, $5 million of equity. He had those all over America and in three months.

six months, boom, boom, boom, boom. They were gone. I won't bore you with the story, the domino effect, cross collateralization, all the things that he thought he had prepared for, gone. Same way in my life, gone. So the truth is there is no number big enough. You're not big enough. You and I can lose everything. We can lose it fast. So why does that matter? Well, I had a belief in my twenties. I had a belief in my thirties.

And I said it, I know with certainty everything in me that I'll make more money next year than I did this year. I'm in control of how much I bill. I'm in control of how much I charge. I'm in control of how much I add value to my mind, to my relationships, to my degree, to my credentials. And I'm going to go to the marketplace of free market ideas and I'm going to ask for another dollar per hour.

or another $10 or another $100 and I'm going to keep doing that year after year because I can. And you know what?

I did. I made money, more money. I made a little bit more or a lot more every year than the previous year until I didn't. And then all of a sudden things start unraveling. So when you think you know something to be true, check your truths, check your certainties, check your convictions. They might just be wrong.

So the millionaire next door is a book I had read. And when I met these people, the people who live next door, the people you don't even think of, they drive the old beat up pickup truck. It's not about flash, right? It's about margin. It's not about income. It's about simplicity and peace. Folks with real wealth living below their means aren't doing it in a loud way. And I didn't think I was, but I look at my social media posts.

I look at my heart, listen to what I said. I was basically performing. Was it for myself? Was it for others? I don't know, but there is no number big enough and I didn't always make more money the next year than the year before. So with that, I spent a lot of time with my kids over the years and that has increased even more. I want to talk to you about what my kids

learn at the age of 15 or by 15 that I didn't really know or think about by the age of 30 because I was a hard worker and I was a smart worker and I was a builder. I did not understand compound interest. Now I had heard Albert Einstein say compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. I had read books about starting to save at 22.

$2,000 a year. I had done the math on it and then only doing that for six years and your friend waiting till he's 27 or 28 and he can't catch up with you. I had learned about the compounding interest effect after 30. My kids learn it as teenagers. The rule of 72, if you don't know it, it's doubling of money. It's also compounded interest. How to grow money. I had a conversation with my teenage daughter about Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts, name your coffee shop. I think we were talking about Starbucks and simply said this, if you or your mother or your grandmother or your me, your father or your friends or your neighbors, instead of going to Starbucks every day and buying a Starbucks coffee, would drink free coffee and buy that same amount in Starbucks stock, you would be a millionaire before you know it.

Now that sounds silly, but the point is simply this. You aren't thinking about money and waste as a teenager for the most part. And just having them think about it is a win. Think about where you spend money. Think about if you, instead of buying a burger at Burger King or at McDonald's, made a sandwich, made a burger at home, and bought stock in Burger King or stock in McDonald's. So these are real life trade offs that I've talked to my kids about. I didn't think about them because I was just working hard in my teens and in my twenties. They learned it though because why? Well, we talk about how much things cost. I'm not afraid to say, hey, these shoes cost $20 or they cost $250. We talk about what things are worth.

See that house there? That is a beautiful, huge house. wouldn't that be a great house to have? Well, that house is worth $5 million. Do you know that you probably need 10 % of that every year to keep that house up and going and running? And the higher the value, the higher the worth something is, the more expensive it is to take care of.

And then most importantly I want to teach them, show them what money can and can't buy. an example, what dream do you have? What dream do you have that's worth saving for? I mean you could say a boat, you can say a car, you can say a trip, whatever it is I'm not going to denigrate your dream. You might say I want to buy something for somebody else. I want to experience something. That's what I want my kids thinking about. And then what do you need to do today to accomplish that dream? Because finances matter. Finances are about money. What is money? Yes, money is a store of wealth, but money is simply energy. It's the temporary storage of energy.

If someone gives you a $100 bill, a $100 gift card, a $100 check, a $100 Zelle or Venmo, that is an exchange of energy. That person did something to earn or create that, or someone else did something to earn or create that for that person, and that person's passing it on to you. So, when I'm on a cruise ship and 6,500 guests get off, and there only 200 left behind, and it feels like you have an entire cruise ship to yourself, for four to five hours? Is that something you can buy? No, it's an experience that's irreplaceable. And I want them to have that experience. Maybe that sounds silly to you. Okay, what's your dream? What do you want your kids to experience? 

I go by this tree almost every week with my kids and one of my daughters, we've been walking by it, she calls that our tree. Hey daddy, let's go look at our tree. Wow. Look at the ant pile is gone. Wow. Look at how the hole is closed up. Wow. Look at all these aspects of our tree. That is our walk. Look at an explore tree. How do you buy that? You can't. How do you replace that? You can't. So we teach money by living it, not by lecturing it. We teach finance by showing and talking and engaging and then modeling it. 

A book that really helped me here is called The Richest Man in Babylon. It's a great book. It's very easy to understand. And you know there are a couple principles there. Pay yourself first. Right? Live beneath your means. Make your gold multiply. Your gold needs to have silver babies and your silver needs to have silver babies and they need to keep growing. Another way to say it, raise your level of broke. Someone says, man, I need some money.

You can tell them, hey, I'm broke. Now, for me, broke is not zero dollars. For me, broke is not my credit cards are maxed out and I got no cash on me and my home is over leveraged and my cars are over leveraged and I have debt swallow me. That's not broke for me. Broke is a thousand dollars in the bank or broke is a hundred thousand dollars in the bank or broke is a million dollars in the bank. What your level of broke is, is between you and your spouse or between you and God. So if someone asks to borrow money from you, you can say, Hey, I'm broke. You define your level of broke by living below your means. Okay. So let's talk about the difference between earning with wisdom, not just with effort. told you about my twenties. Man, I just, I knew that I could outwork anybody. Someone asked me, would you rather have 1 % of a hundred men's work, or 100 % of your own work?

 And I said, absolutely my own work because I cannot work anybody. Well, that was foolish because if I could set up systems to help 100 men work to the point where they wanted to pay me 1 % or yield me 1%, then I'm working smarter, not just harder. Think and grow rich by Napoleon Hill really helped me understand that if I crystallize strategically speaking and focusing on what I want. It's not magic, but it's focus. Whether I achieve that or not, the focus will help me accomplish it. So I was billing $30 an hour in the nineties. And then I remember thinking, what if I raised my rates to a hundred dollars an hour? Now I had gone up to 35 to 45 to 50 to 60 to 75 to 90. It took me six, seven, eight, nine years to get to $100 an hour, then to $500 an hour, then over $1,000 an hour. And the market kept paying me. So the question is, what's gonna happen if that's where I find my identity? Well, I'm gonna be a failure. But if I can leverage that into creating assets or creating systems that make me more money, that's what I wanna do. 

So, I worked to specifically focus my skills and increase my bill rate every year. Okay, that's what I was doing. And the reality is, I knew that I could solve problems quickly and that the market would reward me. I had clarity in my communication. I had confidence that I could handle any student or any business coaching situation and I delivered real solutions. You might be able to open up a hood and look under any engine and solve that problem. Hey, that's a huge issue. You might be able to walk into a house, smell it and know this house is $30 per square foot to remodel or this about $10 a square foot or $50 a square foot. I have a friend who could do that. It's crazy. He's bought fixed flipped 800 homes in eight years and he could just smell the house and he literally knows 10, 20, 30, 40 or $50 per square foot to remodel. It's crazy.

But whatever your gift skill is, deliver that to the market, let the market reward you. And when you do this, just remember, you can accumulate assets. There's nothing wrong with that. But I have now changed from chasing assets to living free or freely based on cash flow. So,

I knew how much my real estate was worth. knew how much my company was worth. I knew how much cash. knew all the numbers before, but it was a focus that I did not do well with. After the collapse, now I ask a different question. What can generate me $1 of cashflow per year, and then per month, and then per day, and then per hour, and then per minute, and then per second? What gives me some margin today? Not someday, not, if the stock market doesn't crash and if we don't have inflation at 20 % and if if if what can give me some room in my life today? I bought a plane at one point. I needed some margin in my life to wiggle around today What fits my family listen not a lot fits my family, but in terms of cash in terms of decisions we have a Hotel right by us that drives us all over the place on a 15 passenger, 20 passenger bus whenever we ask. We go to hotel, we buy a coffee or a tea, and we tip the guys well, and they will drive us anywhere we want. How great is that? I don't own a bus anymore, or two buses like I used to. I can use their bus for a fraction of the cost, and we have a great relationship with these men. So align your money with your values.

What do you value? Align your money with your values, not just with your goals. Cash flow, a dollar per day, per week, per month, per year, per second, per minute, per hour, whatever, it's gonna give you options. Having a stack of assets.

They'll give you math. They'll tell you you're worth a lot. But only one of those can take your daughter out to lunch today. If you don't have the time to enjoy your money, if you don't have the cash flow to enjoy your money with someone you love, then what's the point? Wealth with balance is elusive. So that's really what I like to talk about. I have failed. I've lost a quarter million dollars. I've lost tens of millions of dollars.

Wealth with balance means this, be present, okay? Presence in your family is more important than pressure to provide for them what you never had. Give yourself some margin. Almost five days a week, I don't have an alarm clock in the morning because if I need sleep, my body might sleep. Today, I woke up at 4 a.m. I've walked

10 miles already today. I didn't need sleep last night. The madness of keeping a crazy schedule is not balance. Cash flow may be more important than complexity. For me, it has been family. We talked about family last week over flexing. man, look at my SL 550 hardtop convertible. Cool car. Yeah, that's cool. Nobody cares about that when you're dead.

They care about your time with your family, your words, your memories. How many lives did you affect along the way? So my kids don't care what I drive, but they do care if I show up. Same with your kids. All right, smart dads, let me reiterate this. Not everyone has the same path. Obviously I've got 10 daughters and five sons in 28 years. I've had 15 kids.

That's not a path anyone I know has ever taken. Anyone I know personally, right? We have different skills and work. We're wired to think differently. We have different motivations. I've mentioned a lot of different books. Go back and listen, find the books, research them. You can read some blurbs on them. Which book connects with you? There's a new assessment that I came across. It's got 65 years of science behind it called Motivation code, motivationcode.com. If you go to dntmore.com, you can find out about the motivation code. I use it for myself, for my family, for my clients, and it helps figure out what deep drives. They're almost immutable that get you out of bed. If you have 10 things to do, why do you do these three and avoid these three over here? That's my path, that's your path. And you can figure that out. Might be a personality profile. It might be a skills assessment. It might be talking to someone who knows you. I use the motivation code right now because I've seen how powerful and effective it is. But you need to figure out your path. My goal today is to tell you I've done a lot of things wrong.

I've done some things right. But just like Jesus is the only one who went to heaven, came back, told us about it and went back and set a whole new place for you. Okay. If someone has been to the mountain top of business success, comes back down and tells you, are so many things I've done wrong and seen done wrong along the way. Please listen to that person. Believe that person.

Interview that person get to know that person. And the way you do that is you read the books of those who've gone before us so I mentioned some of the books you can look those up. They'll be in the show notes Money's a tool. It's not your identity It's not your scorecard. It's not your security blanket. It doesn't guarantee you anything Okay, remember You can make more money, but you can't make more time and You can't afford to waste the moments that matter most, you don't know when your last moment is your wife, your kids, your legacy. What are you doing in the moments? Yes, there's a vision. Yes, there's a goal beyond the impulse, but I want to leave you with the fact that money is simply a form of energy. Let's get our finances in order, bring our stress down, and begin to teach our kids by how we live the power of that freedom. So start living the truth. Start pointing it out to your kids. Start modeling it with your time, with your tone, with your choices and watch those around you pick up on it. Cause remember your habits are caught, not taught.

That's it. Thanks for spending time with me. If this episode on finances and money has helped you, has, has given you a reset or a shift, do me a favor, send it to another dad who might be ready to think differently about money. If someone is struggling because he's broke, if he's struggling because he's rich or he's struggling because he's normal and in between, this might help him. If you think it does forward it along. 

And as always, I'm here to help you build a life that's rich in the ways that matter most.

Faith comes first. Your family comes second. And your finances come third because that is the fuel, the energy for success. 

Thanks for joining me. See you next time on the Smart Dad Podcast.

Thank you for joining us on the Smart Dad Podcast. Be sure to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. For resources, links, and more, check out the show notes. Also, if you like what you heard today, please leave us a five star review so other dads can find the podcast and be the dad they are meant to be. Now go out and be a smart dad today.