Episode Transcript
Brenton: [00:00:00] Hello, this is Brenton Harrison of New Money, New Problems, and your host for the New Money New Problems podcast. In this short introductory episode, we're gonna tell you more about the why, the what and the how of this podcast. So learn who it's for, what it's about, what the format is, and what you can expect from us moving forward.
Let's get started.
For those of you who don't know me, I am a 14 year financial professional who has spent the entirety of my career. Serving people who are the first in their family to earn high income establish wealth, or really just be presented with any type of opportunity to establish real wealth.
And while I serve people from all races and creeds, the majority of my clients are black and brown professionals who are also trying to fight through some of the struggles and overcome things that they've seen in their parents' finances, or they're trying to dodge some of the ghosts and the residual effects of negative things that have happened in those previous generations financial lives.
And when you [00:01:00] wade into these waters consistently, as I have over this period of time, you start to develop some capacity. By this point in time, I feel very knowledgeable and well versed in some of the steps that a person who is confronting wealth for the first time needs to take in order to get to that next rung of the ladder.
But you also start to see some trends. There are things that you notice when you help one family after another or go through life with one family after another, where you can use that knowledge and experience to be able to speak to the next person that's in front of you, and that's one of the things that I'm hoping to do with this podcast. To expose you to some of the trends that I have seen throughout the course of my career.
Because in reality, the natural progression of establishing trust and building a business as an advisor has allowed me to walk hand in hand with people who are at very different stages of this journey.
When I started in this industry, I was desperate for business. If you were breathing, I mean, if you were [00:02:00] barely breathing, I would work with you. And unfortunately, people smell desperation on you when you're an entrepreneur. So rather than working with high income earners, I was instead serving people who were unable to find access to an advisor in their daily life. These are people who earned $30,000 to $60,000. No one else was willing to talk to them about money. And fortunately for them, and fortunately for me, I was there to give them assistance. And the things that they needed help with were not figuring out how much to put in their 401k, was not trying to figure out if they should do tax loss harvesting or a Roth conversion.
These people needed credit help. And I'm not talking about credit, trying to position themselves for a better mortgage rate. I'm saying if I don't get this credit under control, I'm not even gonna be able to lease a car, or I'm gonna have some things that go to collections and I'll be unable to use my credit moving forward.
They needed budget help, not in the sense of positioning themselves to buy a vacation home, but [00:03:00] budgeting helps so that they could keep themselves from being evicted and better manage the expenses that they had to confront on a monthly basis.
And they needed help with employee benefits, not to determine whether they should take advantage of an employee stock purchase plan or stock options, but help to see if they could even afford their company's dental plan or a vision plan.
They were barely surviving financially and they were simply looking for someone to get them to the other side of that hump where they could live a less stressful financial existence.
After doing this for a number of years, I started to develop some goodwill. Name starts to get out into the community, and all of a sudden I'm meeting with people who are earning a hundred to $250,000 a year. These were what I would consider my aspirational clients when I started as an advisor. And when I used to reach out to them, I used to cold call them.
I would do so assuming that they had everything together financially. I was just gonna be there to benefit from the spoils of their great wealth. [00:04:00] But when I met with them and actually dug into their finances, I saw a very different story.
These people still needed budget help, not because they were trying to dodge eviction, but to figure out why they were making more money than they ever thought or imagined they would, and they still feel like they were living check to check each month.
They needed credit help not to position themselves to lease a car, but because now they have the same job, live on the same street and drive the same car as their peers, but somehow that car cost them a few hundred dollars a month more. They're paying 2% higher on their mortgage, and they're not able to do things like buy that vacation home or take that trip like the person in the office or the cubicle next to them that seemingly makes the same salary.
And they needed help with their employee benefits. They have the basics under control by this stage in their career.
But some of those more luxurious perks like that employee stock purchase plan, like those stock options are now being presented to them and they can't ask their [00:05:00] parents about them. They can't ask their uncle or their aunt their grandparents about them because they never had those options presented to them.
So these people suffer from the lack of wisdom from previous generations.
And there were two other common threads that I noticed amongst this group of people. The first is they had not yet invested enough to reach the half a million dollar, million dollar minimums that you see with many wealth advisors. And as such, their only experience with a financial advisor to this point was with one who was paid when they purchased
products, and many of them had purchased products that they didn't understand and weren't seeing a benefit from five or six years into that experience. But they had never done full financial planning or had thorough financial advice across their entire portfolio. Second, almost to a man or to a woman because they were the first or the only to earn that type of money, their family thought they were doing way better financially than they actually were, and in many cases, they were having to support family financially, which only made [00:06:00] it more difficult for them to establish wealth for themselves.
So that brings me to the third group of people. These are people who are earning $350,000 or more. If I had been able to work with them early in my career, my only thought would've been, Oh my goodness, I hope I don't mess this up. And you can't even cold call these people because at this stage in their career, they have assistants.
They don't have their cell phone or their email address readily available. You have to be introduced to these people.
And unlike the previous two groups, they had often been through many advisors in the past, but they had never been able to find a fit. And that's not surprising because many of the advisors that they met with had never worked with someone who was the first. They had worked with generational wealth. They had worked with people who weren't experiencing some of the troubles that come when you are the first, or worse, if you're the only.
And even worse, some of them had become so successful, so acclaimed, so notable that advisors had simply stopped reaching out to them because it was assumed [00:07:00] that they had everything together and that in their position of authority, they had no need for outside counsel.
But these people needed help too. They needed help with their budget. Now they have plenty money left at the end of the month, but they have no idea of where to put it outside of maybe maxing out a retirement account and sticking the rest in their savings. No one there to give them a plan. No one there to bridge the gap between making the money and making the money work for you.
They needed help with their credit. Their mortgage is fine, their car is fine, but now they understand that with their income and a strong credit score, they can leverage those two tools in ways that can position them for substantial growth when it came to their overall portfolio.
And they needed help establishing even some of the most foundational elements of a firm financial plan.
I can tell you if I come across 10 people who are earning $350,000 or more, it wouldn't surprise me if seven of them hadn't done the basics like establishing a will, [00:08:00] advanced medical directives, or even simply buying a safe to store their important financial documents.
What I learned from working with and serving all three of these groups is that if you don't come from a family that hammers home financial literacy at an early age, you end up having money problems no matter how much you make. The problems are just different at each stage in the process.
But when you have financial literacy on your side, there are more opportunities out there than you can even imagine. And that's why we started this podcast.
The New Money New Problems podcast was created specifically to provide resources to professionals in areas such as establishing the balance between eliminating debt and accumulating assets, using things like business credit for entrepreneurs and white glove employee benefits for professionals that they can leverage when building wealth.
Unlocking financial opportunities available to those with exemplary credit and liquid assets.
And tackling tough topics like helping family with money and avoiding the [00:09:00] pitfalls that minority high income earners, or even just first generation high income earners, often fall into when they're building wealth.
So what's the format? Well, this is gonna be a micro podcast where the majority of the episodes are gonna be 15 to 20 minutes in length, and each of these episodes are gonna be jam packed with value, and we're gonna break them down into different themes.
The first theme is What's In The News, where we're gonna take a recent article that impacts our listeners, break it down, why it's relevant, and what actionable takeaways you need to know. The next theme is, So That's What That Means, where we're gonna educate you on financial subjects you read about, you see online, see on social media, and you're wondering if it's real, if it works, if it's legit.
We're gonna walk through these things together.
Next we have Ask The Expert where we interview industry leaders in areas where I'm not the expert, but I still want to give you the information.
And lastly, My Money Stories. And I'm really excited about this one [00:10:00] because I don't want you to just hear from me. And in these segments, we're gonna interview professionals of all income levels industries and levels of notoriety.
And we're gonna ask them questions about their relationship with money and how it's impacted their career and even their relationships.
While most episodes will be around 15 minutes or less, these interviews may go a bit longer, and we're gonna post the full video recordings of each interview on our new Money, New Problems YouTube page, which you can find by simply searching new money, new problems on YouTube.
We'll release one episode each week, and I chose Micro Podcast because I know you would love to sit and listen to me over the course of three or four trips for an hour or an hour and a half. But in reality, we all lead busy lives, and if you're taking a quick trip to the grocery store, I wanna make sure that in the time you go there and back, I've given you some tangible and actionable value that you can take outta the car and back into the house.
So I hope you're excited because we've got some really cool things [00:11:00] ahead and I've got one last thing before we go. I highly encourage you to sign up for the email list for this podcast at newmoneynewproblems.com/podcast because on our email list we're gonna share details of recent episodes, bonus content that you may enjoy or just give you a heads up for events that we feel might be helpful to you as we navigate this wealth journey together.
So join us over the next few episodes as I give you a sneak peek into each of the different types of themed content that we've mentioned, and you can get a taste for what you enjoy, which is hopefully all of them. But no matter what your preference is, I am confident that we'll have something that speaks to you and I can't wait to get started, and hopefully you'll join me in doing so.
See you soon.
