How to Develop Clear Goals for Your Financial Future – Ask Clay Anything

Audio Transcription

My name is clay type serious Clark. I’m the former US SBA entrepreneur of the year who faithfully gets to join you here on the weekends with my good friend Paul Hood poet. How are you?

I am amazing. Clay, how are you this morning?

Well, I. I’m fired up. I’m fired up because I think this topic is applicable for anybody out there, whether you’re into personal financial planning or you’re into just having a successful business conferences life. This idea of developing clear financial goals is what we’re talking about, but really it can be. We can say we’re just talking about developing goals, so I’m going to start with you on, on the, on the, on the thrive time show, we talk about the f six life a lot. We talk about faith, family, finances, fitness, friendship and fun. So I’m going to pick on you and on and on the, uh, the f six life, but in just three areas of productivity, which you seem to be doing well at. Okay? So here we go. Let’s go. Why do you have to be intentional about designing your f six life in the area of fitness? Now you’re a CPA. We’re talking about financial planning, but why do you have to be intentional about setting goals for your life in the area of fitness? You can learn all about this during our business conferences.

What? Clay? Everybody is super, super busy. Uh, you know, I don’t. Yeah, I think a minute or an hour goes faster today than it than it did 10 years ago. And you have to be deliberate. You. So with fitness, just like anything else in life, if you set, if you start with the end in mind and then you design a plan, you work your plan and you measure your results, you can get there. But see, I don’t. And this is one of the things I really want to ask God why? When you know, why is it that all the stuff that tastes good is bad for you? And all the stuff that doesn’t taste good is good for you. And why is it that our bodies fight us and really, you know, you, you go in. And, and when I was training for this, this physique bodybuilding show, you know, it was very deliberate and everything went great.

But then right afterwards I hit, I hit this breakfast buffet clay. Oh yeah. And I was there for like two and a half hours. So you have to leave sir. I had to go. But it came on a whole lot quicker and easier. It came back, you know, than it went away. But, um, you know, I think clay, one time you said, I believe you said that it’s, it’s so easy, it’s too easy, uh, to, to not be successful in the United States is too easy to be mediocre. And that somebody who’s mediocre in American lives better than 90 percent of the world. Um, and that’s the same thing applies to, to your physique or your body. You have to control what goes in control and you and you have to set a specific time to exercise a specific path that you’re going to be on. Have all your tools ready. You know, you talk about all these things and in your two day workshop that you can’t just get up in the morning and say, you know, I’m a workout today, but you don’t know where you’re going to work out. You don’t know what you’re gonna do when you get there. You have to be very deliberate and have all this planned out ahead of time.

I want to, I want to hammer home on this because I think this is something that you said that was, was pretty, pretty powerful. This, Justin, you said that. Are. You asked the question, why do the things that taste good? Why are those the things that are bad for you? I have a really intense worldview that will probably wake up seven in the morning. They’re going to say, oh, well, I never thought of it that way, but this is what I think. Um, if you sit down intentionally today and you do this for if you’re somebody who actually listens to what we’re saying and you do it today, if you write down your goals, your f six goals this weekend, you will be probably in the top five percent of our country. I mean maybe five percent of people write down their goals. Maybe, maybe. So you write down your goals for your faith, your family, your finances, your fitness, your friendship, and your fun.

Okay? So write down your goals for your faith, your family, your finances, your fitness, your friendship, and your fine. So we’ll, these are, these are your goals, right? So let’s say that you’re on a boat and we go out to um, let’s say we go out to grand lake because we’re a baller and we go out to grand lake and we are in a nice boat. And the boat, we’re going to go from point a to point b. We look across the coast and we say we’re here at point a across the water. On the other side of the other side of the water, there is destination. Be by default. It is impossible for you to go from point a to point b without keeping your eyes on the goal the entire time you’re on the boat, the entire time that you’re. If you’re the captain Phillips steering the boat, if you’re not looking at the other coast line the entire time, I’m making small adjustments as you go the entire time, it is impossible for you to navigate a boat from point a to point b on the lake.

Now, if you want to play the game where you don’t look up and adjust as you go, you’re gonna run into somebody something you’re not going to get to your goal by by default. So okay, so that. That’s my first kind of Aha. It is impossible to get to your goal if you don’t keep your goal in front of you everyday because there’s always little adjustments. So let’s start with this. That, that, that first idea there, Paul. So Paul, you have your eye on the goal, right? You’re on the goal financially. You let’s say. So you wrote down your goals for your, your finances, and we’re going back to the grand lake analogy. And you’re, you’re in the boat and you’re having a good time, and then you’re kind of a typical grand laker. See, you’ve got, take me home tonight. Blurring of the business conferences speakers.

Ah, don’t want to let you go to. You’ll see the, he’ll take me home. Dude, I know you’re just in. All of a sudden all of a sudden you look up and you realize, oh no, we’re drifting left. So you turned to the right and then you crank up your music again. Take me home. Then this goes on for a half hour and you’re driving in your inner going across the lake. And then, because you’re, let’s say you’re the listener, you’re a 22 year old man and there’s these 17, 18 year old ladies on the Jet Skis, right? They’re coming by and uh, uh, you’re saying, hey, how come everything that tastes good is bad for you? So you’re seeing these 17, 18 year old girls and they’re, I’m sure you’ve been on grand lake before. Usually they’ll have like a beer in their hand while they’re driving a jet ski even though you can’t do it. And they’ll go,

hey, hey girl, how you doing? How are you doing? How you doing? Obviously in this story, you’re not, you’re not married, you’re, no, you’re just a guy. You’re at the dude who happens to be driving a yacht on the lake. We go, hey, how are you doing? Hey, and all of a sudden you begin to go further and further left, left, left. All of a sudden you almost hit somebody because why you took directed. You got distracted. Yep. But you’ve got to keep your eye focused on that price. Hey, I need some clarification. So you said were ballers. So you’re a 23 year old baller. So when you’re a baller, because your middle name is ty barriers, right? That’s a ballers name. So in this scenario we’re going by Tiberius barriers, right? Right. Can I borrow your name? Sometimes. I like Tiberius. Well, let me tell you, that nickname came from Steve Sutton is a good friend of mine.

That’s why when you walk into the thrive button, there’s a, there’s a, there’s a, a captain Kirk rolled a cardboard cut out to the right. He said, as an entrepreneur, I’m kind of like Captain Kirk, he’s like, you always find a way to solve a problem that I don’t understand how you do it. You always go over the wall, around the wall, through the wall, if you know the goal you can do. All right. And so he’s like, you’re, you’re kind of like a, you know, James Tiberius Kirk. And so I’ve been going by that for a long time. But anyway, so the point is though, the point is if you get distracted, you’re not, you’re gonna, you’re gonna run real ground. You’re not going to get from point a to point b. now, those of you who are into the Bible and not into my grand lake analogy, that’s fine.

We go back to the Bible, we opened up the Bible. Let me get my Bible music credit so I can get myself kind of just early in the morning for my Bible music. Let me dust off this. The bound book. Here we go. Michael reads John Ten, 10. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life and have it to the full. Now, the thief in this particular example is the devil. So think about your areas of your faith, your family, your finances, your fitness, your friendship, and your fun. Think about this with your family. What’s your family want you to go to grand lake if you’re a married man and chase around 17 year olds on jet skis? No, I wouldn’t say that would represent a thing called temptation. Aka The devil was your family want you to weigh 407 pounds and be so massive.

You can no longer sit on a one seat on a southwest airlines flight. It seems like. I always, the person who is always pushing the weight limit is always sitting next to me. Yeah, so you’re stuck in the middle. Oh, stuck in the middle with you. So anyway, with your family, that is that. What do you believe that God has called you to be so out of shape that you have to get one of those carts at Walmart that you drive around because you just can’t physically move anymore. You’ll hear your offensive so accurate, right?

So Carl, you know Warren Buffet, put it this way, he said, imagine this, imagine you’re 16 years old and somebody came to you and said you can have any car on the planet, any car, any car, uh, but this was the only car you you’ll ever have. So his point was, how well would you take care of that car? How often would you watch it? How, how often would you make sure it’s maintained? And that’s the way our bodies, as God gave us this one body. And it’s, it’s our responsibility to take care of it. We don’t get another bite, at least right now with technology, may be that we will some point in time in the future, right now we get one body and you know who Satan is. When I was going through a what represented Satan for me when I was going through this bodybuilding bill, that cheese cake factory. Oh, that is cheesecake saying, oh shit, it’s just not right. Those people and those cheese cakes and you walk in and it’s right there at. That’s temptation.

So I want you to think about your f six goals, your goals, your goals for your faith, your family, your finances, your fitness, your friendships, and your fun. Think about this, your faith. Do you feel like that God would want you to be devout to your faith, your family? Would God want you to block out time for them? Your fitness, what God wants you to say no to things that are going to hurt your body, your finances. Would God want you to delay gratification, to save some money? I’m thinking, think about that. Think about your faith, your family, your finances, your fitness, your friendship, and your fun. And I would just, I would encourage you to ask yourself this question. Do you believe that you’re doing that? You’re, that these things are evil, these things when you, when you, when you decide to just because my default napoleon, Napoleon Hill rights here in his book, outwitting the devil, he writes, drifting without aim or purpose is the first cause of failure.

This is drifting without aim or purpose is the first cause of failure. So I actually believe the habit of hitting the snooze button, the habit of going, well I shouldn’t, but I’ll go ahead and have an extra brownie tonight. Uh, the of chasing around the ladies at Grand Lake, uh, the ladies of ill repute who are having their beer as they take me home tonight. I think all of that is, is, is when you just drift a little bit. That’s what gets people down. A bad habit, not habit, I believe is something that everybody is in a thing called a habit. There’s a hypnotic rhythm that we’re all in. We’re used to doing things and we begin to do things without even thinking about it. And so that’ll blow your mind it because once you get into a habit of savings, then all of a sudden saving is easy. Paul. Paul, what’d you get in the habit of saving? It’s easy, Bro.

It is. Yeah. And again, I’m going to quote this very wise person that goes by Tiberius. Oh, nice. Nice. Yeah. He said, don’t get your emotion in the way of the motion. Be focused, but expect issues and be disciplined and intentional. That right there is the definition of success in staying on path because you know what, it’s not the, it’s not the big temptations that gets you. It’s not, you know, let’s go rob a bank or whatever. It’s the small little steps to say the little drifting. All of a sudden you look up and oh my gosh, we’re way off track and you don’t. That’s the problem. What we do at Hood Cpas Dot Com is a lot of times you know, people want to set a goal, but they want to set a goal. It’s 20 years from now so when that’s okay, but we have to back that goal into something that’s measurable. Something that’s five days for five days from now and then two weeks and then a month and then six months and then a year in five years because the closer your target, the easier it is to tell that you’re drifting.

Let me give you an example. I know that you’ve sat down with one client in particular that I can think of. I’ll mention all the details, but you sat down with these guys. You had to print off their expenses for the first time in years and identify how they can decrease their expenses by three percent. Hey, you can put that into a savings vehicle and a business conferences legend has it. This particular person, this man is now saving a thousand dollars a month for the first time in his life when previously he had never saved probably 10 bucks. That’s right. Stay tuned. It’s look under the hood with

Paul. Tells us the one CPA. Check them out today.

Two, one.

You are now entering the Dojo of Mojo and the thrive time show, thrive time. Show on the microphone. What is this? Top of the charts in the category of business driven down on business topics like we provided you with shift over the past that you might get. Motion sick. Grab a pen and pad to the NAB. That’s good.

Three, two, one. Here come the Ninja.

My name is Clay Clark. I’m the former US SBA entrepreneur of the year and the father of five incredible human kids. And we’re talking today about the importance of developing clear goals for your financial future fuel for your financial future. Easy for me to say, we’re talking today about developing a clear goal for your family’s financial future. Uh, that will be your f six goals. Your goals for your faith, your family, your finances, your fitness, your friendship, and your fun. I want to talk to Paul about the first few of these apps because these are three diagnosis. You’re very intentional about. Talk to me about your fitness. Again, what do you. Because you were the big principle when everyone to get today’s. If you have a goal written down, if you write down your goal, and let’s go back to the lake analogy. Let’s say you’re on a lake and you’re driving from one point on the lake to the other point on the lake, all the way across the lake.

As long as you keep your vision on that distant goal and you make micro adjustments as you drive the boat, you will in fact get to your destination. But if you take your eye off the prize, there’s too many. There’s waves, there’s wind, there’s distractions, there’s boaters. You have to go around. If you’re not careful and you don’t look up, you will eventually run a ground. You will drift by default. So Paul, talk to me about setting goals, not just for your finances, but for your fitness. How do you, what are some goals that you have for your fitness and how does that impact what you put into your body on a daily basis?

Well, you know, my goal is just to maintain, you know, what God gave me those, but as well as I can, um, you know, and you know, the anti drift, you know, we’re talking about drifting. The anti drift is knowing what you’re going to do before you’re, before it’s time to do it. So not only do you set a goal, but you just us establish a plan, a game plan. And I, and I know what I’m going to do tomorrow morning at 5:00. Uh, what I, I know when I’m going to do Monday morning at 5:00, I know what I’m going to do Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. So I’ve already got this planned out then. Not only do I know what I’m going to do, I know when I’m going to do it, I know where I’m going to do it and I have all the tools there. Um, because, you know, I’m 50 years old so I got to wear a weight lifting belt because you can bend over and tie your shoes at 50 and pull your back out. So, um, you know, I have everything ready and know exactly my plan. It’s written out. You wear a belt a, I wear a weight lifting belt. Yeah, because I don’t want to throw my back out. And then where do you work out? I have a gym at the house or I work out at [inaudible] fitness.

And then you see you have a belt you’re wearing. If you have a set time, you’re working out.

I get up at five, five to 5:15 every morning. I know exactly what weights I’m lifting. I know the, the Rep. so I’m going to do it’s preplanned because that’s how you keep from drifting. If you know, if you could just get on a boat and say, hey, where are we going? You know, you’re, you’re to drift. If you know where you’re going to go and what you’re gonna do and how you’re going to get there. You’ve preplanned you boat is gassed up and you know you’ve got your beverages, you, you’re ready to go. You don’t drift. And it’s also very, very efficient. You know, clay, I don’t know if you’ve like, if you’re going on a trip, you don’t get up the morning of the trip and start packing, start the prepacked you know, you, you, you have your flight.

Now that our American, the American airway systems, the airport systems, air travel systems are becoming more like a bus station. You might want to give that talk to a third of the business conferences passengers. We might. There’s some people that look like they’re just now figuring out they’re going on a trip as soon as the plane leaves.

Hey, did you know the newest, newest move? They do. What’s the newest move is? So if you can go to these discount places and, and buy your tickets from them instead of going straight to say American Airlines, but if you buy one of those tickets now they, you can’t carry on if you’ve got one of these discounted tickets, they have a little thing you’ve got to stick your carry on and I’m telling you, most women’s purses would not fit in that thing. And, and so if you bought one of these tickets, you can’t carry on a bag much bigger than a briefcase or you got to pay 25 bucks.

So you know, and who travels on a trip with things, I mean, right? Come on Paul. That such a harsh observation. Okay,

sorry, I’m sorry to be negative with this

now. Okay, so Mr. Telephone man, Alexander Graham Bell, the man who founded American telephone and telegraph company, he says before anything else, preparation is the key to success before anything else, preparation is the key to success. Okay? So if you want to be successful in the areas of your fitness, your friendships, your finances, your fun, any area of your life, you have to prepare. Paul, your friendships, talk to me about how do your, how do your goals for your life impact the sort of people that you choose to spend time with?

Well, just like everything else, you have to be deliberate. Um, I, you know, I love spending time with friends. Um, right now I’m very focused on, on, on things that are important. And so those friends, you know, I set aside time for just downtime and so really those friends that don’t bring a lot to the table as far as my financial future, I can spend time with them and I love. There’s certainly bring as far as maybe they make me laugh or they entertain me or they just allow me to get my mind, you know, refocus. But the reality is, is I try to spend time with people like you that, that I can learn from because I think I don’t care who you are, you, I learned from my clients. So they learned from me. I learned from my friends. And so I’m very deliberate on who gets my time because it, there’s only 24 hours in a day. And again, to be focused and to keep from drifting. I, I like, you know, having a good time. But can I, can I multitask? Can I learn? Can I call that? What’s the next book? Am I going to. It

comes this just in. You will become the average of the five people that you spend the most time with. Again, you’ll become the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Your network is your net worth. So Sean, you are a business coach. You’re also a young whipper snapper. I want to ask you about goals and the importance of goals. So you, you mentioned this morning that you went out to a Baha’i. Jack’s yesterday, is that right? Oh yeah. Now what is Baha’i? Jack’s a, it’s like half as good as chipolte lay, but it’s in a Waso oh, nice. The same type of restaurant now. And use it. It’s the first time this week you ate carbs? Yeah. Why? Well, because, uh, I’ve lost a bunch of weight from not eating carbs. How much weight have you lost by not eating carbs? About a year ago in May I weighed 234 pounds.

How much do you weigh now? Right now I’m about 190 pounds. And what do you, what do you eat during the week? What would you say you don’t eat carbs? W What are you? Uh, I’ll eat quest bars. Those have like two grams of carbs. And a quest bar. Quest Bar? Yeah. It’s just a protein bar. All the peanuts, cashews. I’ll eat carrots. I’ll eat almonds. You have a goal though. You have a goal and to keep yourself from drifting away from the goal you’ve prepared. To quote Mr. Telephone man, Alexander Graham Bell. Before anything else, preparation is the key. You don’t get to work. And then go where the quest bars. Where’s the quest bar section you’ve prepared. You’ve made a plan. Andrew, you’re a young whipper snapper. You’re newly married. Talk to me about goals. What kind of goals do you and your wife have right now?

What’s a goal that you wouldn’t get in trouble for sharing on the radio? Um, one of our financial goals is we set aside a certain percentage, a automatically every single time a check comes through. So every time a check comes through we have a percentage that comes and goes the door savings and we have a financial goal setup and that we, you know, we don’t touch that savings account because it’s there for a reason. It’s there for a purpose and we’ve set up the automatic transfers that way. Drifting is a lot harder. Hang on, hang on Andrew. So what you’re saying is you know what you’re going to save next week and it’s this week. Exactly. You don’t, you’re not going to wait all hood to decide what you’re going to say with very limited, with very limited time. I’m not sure if the listeners go to [inaudible] dot com, go to [inaudible] dot com and you can schedule a meeting with Paul Hood who will help you develop a clear financial plan and a system. So Paul, back to you. You’re saying Andrew is very intentional about saving money. How can you help your clients? So how can we, what? What do you guys do? We, we sitting at me, can you help somebody save money every week? Absolutely. Clay, you know, what we do is first we find out where the money’s going. Um, we asked them to bring in 12 months where the bank.

Well the credit card statements I do, it’s been a lot of money at the ice cream, but I love ice cream. I do. I do spend 18 percent of my income. I made these because maybe the right next to cheesecake factory. We’re the place that I happened to go to get that ice cream and that is the only money I spent except for over there at bed, bath and beyond. Not heavy thread towels. They are so thoughts and you can exit fame, money pop. If you sell for towels, you can fade because they give you the next one free. You favor like $40 or 25 percent return, $200 left. We could have paid for it. And you gotta spend money to save money, right? That’s what would say.

But people. I think people think that though. I think people are just not. We’re just in this habit of drifting. We’re just going around from one person

just to the next card, spending money on stuff, saving money on towels. Oh my gosh. I woke up drunk in a bush. What happened?

That’s crazy. That’s back to you. That’s exactly right. You’ve got to figure out where your money’s going first. So then the second step is we established help them establish a budget to control where they’re going and the, and then we start with their goals in the next step is their goals. And so, but just like, you know, we’ve talked about many, many things and everything we’ve talked about though is knowing what you’re going to do tomorrow before tomorrow gets here. No one what you’re going to eat. No one were. These bars are. I bet he, I bet we see people that are intentional about their fitness, know what they’re going to eat tomorrow. Most people get up, what do I, what do I want? Daylight donuts, Dunkin donuts, you know, they don’t know. And, and uh, Andrew knows where he’s going to save money. You know, it’s already established. And that’s very, very simple. It’s not complex.

And I believe this to be 100 percent true on a just kind of an anecdotal level and a deep spiritual level. If you’re trying to go from point a to point B on a lake while you’re in your your yacht at Grand Lake, listening to take me home that night and driving on the lake. If you don’t look up at your destination every few seconds, you’re going to get off course. Also with your fitness, your family, your finances, your friendship, your fun, all that. If you don’t be intentional about planning and preparing, you’re going to drift. If you find yourself right now, drifting financially and you’re not getting where you want to go right now, when you, when you have that little feeling inside, set an appointment, go to [inaudible] dot com. Do it right now. While you’re a motivated, go to [inaudible] dot com and schedule your one on one consultation with Tulsa’s number one CPA in every way. That’s Paul Hood Hood Cpas Dot Com. Book your business conferences tickets at Thrivetimeshow.com