Certain Success™ Podcast
Welcome to The Certain Success™ Podcast, where faith, family, and business intersect to create a business (and a life) of purpose and design. Join your hosts Matt Fagioli & Joe Gaeta, both successful entrepreneurs, avid learners and disciples of Christ, as we share our stream-of-consciousness rants and interviews with fellow business owners & entrepreneurs to explore the unique challenges and opportunities of building and operating businesses while putting God first in life. Matt & Joe have dedicated much of their careers to helping entrepreneurs become more amazing humans that win big. If you're all about living intentionally and constantly growing and learning, this is the podcast for you!
Matt & Joe bring a fresh perspective to the world of business and entrepreneurship. Don't miss out on the chance to learn from experienced entrepreneurs and grow in your faith while building your business. Tune in to The Certain Success™ Podcast and discover the keys to living a life of certain success.
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Certain Success™ Podcast
Understanding Wealth vs Income and the Journey to Financial Freedom with Krisstina Wise
Ever questioned the correlation between wealth and income? Or pondered upon how much money is truly 'enough'? Join us on this enlightening journey as we chat with Christina Wise, an entrepreneur who has walked the tightrope between chasing success and finding spiritual balance. Detailing her transformative journey, Christina shares how her relentless pursuit of success led to a health crisis, forcing her to redefine her perspective on wealth and success.
Christina's story is a potpourri of lessons learned, insights on the 'entrepreneurial trap', the critical four pillars of wealth, and the rules of money that lead to financial growth. She uncovers how wealth and income, although often used interchangeably, are not always synonymous. Navigate with us through the complex world of finance as we delve deeper into understanding the difference between income and wealth, breaking down the need to focus on wealth creation rather than solely on income generation.
To round out our conversation, we explore the exciting concept of 'wealth in the margins', a strategy for maximizing wealth and income. Christina imparts practical tips on financial management, guiding us to understand our numbers and discover how much money is truly enough for us. We even touch upon her insightful quiz designed for entrepreneurs, aiding them in grasping their financial landscape. Tune in, as we unpack the secrets to achieving financial freedom and wealth creation on your entrepreneurial journey. This episode promises to be a treasure trove of financial enlightenment.
I was always chasing the money and I was always chasing the success. I had to get to the next level and I had to prove myself more and more and more. I just pushed myself. Why? Because I always had to get to more. The day I let go of me trying to control everything and I put it in God's hands and said you know what I surrender. And when I let that go, it's like the first time in months and months and months and months. I saw this like pin light. This white light is like the size of a pinhole. It was tiny. That was like God talking to me, like there's light on the other side of this darkness and just keep following me. If you'll listen, I've got something to teach you. And there's a lot of light on the other side.
Speaker 2:Hey guys, welcome back to the Certain Success Podcast. I'm your host, matt Fagioli, and today I want to share with you an interview from last week with an old friend named Christina Wise. Christina has built an amazing program to help people, particularly entrepreneurs, manage their money and become wealthy. Over time, they get old fashioned way, and this is a huge subject for entrepreneurs and business owners. If you're like me and I bet a lot of you are you're way better at making money than you are at saving it and investing it, and there's this perspective of reinvesting money into your business and putting off profit for tomorrow. All those things are wonderful, but you can wake up 10 years later and realize that you're not hitting your wealth goals, which is the whole point of running a successful business is to build wealth over time while you're serving clients well and all those other things that we want to do in our businesses. But anyway, this one is a really important one. So if you're catching this, listen up, grab a pen and enjoy this conversation with Christina Wise.
Speaker 1:I am so excited to be having this conversation with you and it's so much fun to do events like this and interviews like this with good friends and old friends. So, yeah, I'm really excited.
Speaker 2:Our paths kind of crossed again after many years recently through a mutual friend, rob Cosberg, who I'm doing some work with and you've worked with in the past, and so that part is fun too, where you know sort of planets collide and you reconnect through awesome people like Rob.
Speaker 2:But you know, I was really glad to reconnect with you and when we did some things together 10 or 15 years ago you were in a different space, you were living in Austin, and over those years now you've, you know, pivoted probably more than once and are running a wonderful business which I want you to talk a little bit about. But the audience of the Certain Success podcast is business owners, entrepreneurs, lots of us Christians. But I'm a little selfish with this one, christina, because I've been really good at making money in my whole career and not very good at keeping it, and so I need you to coach me in this podcast. But I bet this is going to resonate with a bunch of entrepreneurs. I think we're all kind of cut from that cloth. Like man, I'm just going to go make more money so I can burn this money that I've got. So with that teeing it up, will you just tell the audience a little bit about you know who you are and your business as it is today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I will do that and I'll tell a little story too to get it started. And first of all, what I want to say, just with so fun, about life and even being the stage of life and experiences that Rob Cosberg, who's a mutual friend of ours and we both then work with, and is that he's not in our previous space, which is real estate at all Right. And so I came across Rob and build a friendship and then work with him and the business I'm in and you came across him totally separately and here we just cross, pollinated and reconnected, not through old relationships but through a new one. So it's just fun how life works like that Good people really connecting with good people.
Speaker 2:I didn't know Rob had passed history in real estate too, but of course none of that had anything to do with our connections or whatever. But still, yeah, super fun.
Speaker 1:That's why we probably just really jive with him. So I'll tell a little story, matt. So this was in February of 2013. And in February of 2013, we knew each other really well and at that point I mean I'd surprising to me really, but I'd become an icon in the real estate industry. I mean, christina Wise in Good Life was a household name, agree, and I was on exchange with Zillow, as on the advisory board of DocuSign. My Kelman would fly me up to Seattle to talk to the Redfin people and I mean I was sitting with kind of the biggest and the brightest, the best leaders in the country at that time and my business was exploding when Inman of the Year, which was a big deal then, and it was disruptor and innovator, just all these things, and that's right and high, you know, and I'd worked hard to get there. But you know, there's a lot of fame and there was a lot of success and it was awesome.
Speaker 1:And in February of 2013, I was speaking on a stage and there's about 150 of these top leaders in the room that I was invited to speak to and I was invited to speak the keynote, and these were the leaders of the leaders, you know, those that make all of real estate happen at that level. And I don't even remember what the speech was, but it was an important speech they wanted me to do to open everything off. It probably had to do with the future of real estate and technology and some stuff that I'd talked about at the time and I'd rehearsed this it was. I mean, I knew how important it was and I really knew in the back of my head that if I landed this, that that like game over, this was exactly what I needed for kind of that last feather in my cap to just do whatever I wanted to do in the real estate industry. So I gave this presentation and it was. It was awesome, like I'd like hit every mark, like a Broadway performance. I knew I had everybody captivated.
Speaker 1:In about three quarters, 80% of the way through, I heard this screeching sound in my brain and like this snap and it took me off for a second, like what happened? Because I was so rehearsed, knew all my lines, so to speak, and I got it back together and somehow got back online and finished my speech. I got a standing ovation. It was awesome, and I'm walking out the room and people are clamoring at me like Christina, can I have you, you know, sign this or Christina, will you speak at my event or Christina, we? I mean it was just I owned it and I'm walking out the room.
Speaker 1:I kid you not, this is 100% full truth. I'm walking out of that room and going back to my hotel room, out of the conference, from the hotel room, and I'm thinking Christina, girlfriend, you've made it. You started in a trailer home, yes, and you have made it to the industry. You can name your price. You've got it. You've got the industry out of your hand. I mean I couldn't believe the people in the room that wanted me, but that was my conversation myself, like wow, look at this.
Speaker 1:But I was on adrenaline, all the things. I got back to my room and all of a sudden I started feeling really weird and I mean I can't even explain how my body was off, what was happening. I got really scared because it was just all these sensations and feelings that I'd never felt before. I actually get on a plane and go home early and I can't even really function on the plane. I'm having a hard time breathing, I get home and the irony of this story is, within 48 hours of that event, I couldn't get out of bed. I couldn't think I couldn't, I couldn't. I reached up in my hair and all my hair just came out in clumps. I couldn't keep food down and I didn't know what was wrong. And the first thing that came out is what? The first thing that started this whole domino effect of perfect storm of just my body shutting down and being like game over. Like game over. But they diagnosed me first with the TIA, which is a stroke. I had a mini stroke on the stage and it's a stress stroke, so it's caused by stress, and my brain shut down and then that started shutting the rest of my body down and it ended up being like a year and a half of health crisis and awful, like it was horrible. So it's just funny. How life is that here I thought I'd made it and here God, universe was saying no, we've got something else to pay attention to, so it's just one. It was.
Speaker 1:There's so much in that story, what had happened, but a couple like when we're gonna talk or how it's relevant to what we're gonna talk about today, is that part of what caused that was I was always chasing the money and I was always chasing the dollar and I was always chasing the success and, no matter how high I got, there was always more and I had to get to the next level and I had to prove myself more and more and more and I was running marathons and I was raising kids and I had a big company at home that I was growing and doing all the things and I just pushed myself. Why? Because I was never satisfied. I always had to get to more and there's all sorts of things underneath that, like having to prove myself not good enough, all that kind of probably struggles that so many of us imposter syndrome, all the stuff that most all of us face of entrepreneurs on a regular basis. But we've certainly probably come across these at least once in our career.
Speaker 1:But what happened when it comes to money and we're gonna talk about money today is it going through my experience of kind of a year and a half of really kind of fighting for my life and not sharing what was gonna happen. Next, I went through a total ego death and this experience, like the first six months, I just wanna get healthy so I could get back to what I was doing before. And then what happened, too, is going through this process. I was very egocentric in the sense that I had created all this and I was responsible for it. So there was a lot of I and where I kind of not part of the story here, necessarily, but part of that story is where I think it might be even relevant to your audience as an entrepreneur is that I was slowly dying and I was holding on for dear life because I didn't wanna die and I was scared to die.
Speaker 1:But the day I let go of me trying to control everything and I put it in God's hands and said you know what I surrender, I give you. I'm here to learn the lessons. I'll give up my past, I'll give up everything. This is in your hands now. And I swear, like it was at that moment, like that I came to that that I was in complete darkness. I mean it was a black existence and nothing was good. I mean it was my whole. Like I was trapped in this really dark ugly space of a lot of stuff. And when I let that go, it was like the first time in months and months and months and months, I saw this like pin light, this white light. It's like the size of a pinhole. It was tiny. But imagine complete darkness and you see this one little piece of white. That was like God talking to me, like there's light on the other side of this darkness and just keep following me and the light will keep getting bigger. And if you'll listen, I've got something to teach you. And there's a lot of light on the other side and that was kind of the message I got. But it came at surrendering and letting go of my ego, of my need to prove myself, of my need to, for all the stuff always more is always better, and slowly but surely the light got brighter and brighter and brighter. And here I am today in really bright white light. So it's just such a journey there that even the faith part of this whole journey is a really significant piece of letting go and I think a lot of the again we can relate to that, that constant need to push and be more.
Speaker 1:Now, when it comes to money, the lessons that came out of the story which is so interesting, I find in hindsight, and when I ended up writing a book called Falling for Money, that was the first thing I did really coming out of the whole experience. I pretty much stepped away from the real estate industry. Here was this icon and I just lit it up and put it on fire. The burn the boats, like I'm just gonna burn the boats because it's too easy to go back to if I don't burn the boats and because I knew that there was something else I was supposed to do. That was some message that I got and part of I wasn't quite sure what it was, but part of what came out of that was this realization of here I was publicly building this public identity as an entrepreneur right, so successful entrepreneur and I was the poster child Like I'd be the Gary V poster child from rags to riches story, entrepreneurial success story.
Speaker 1:I did all the things I was taught to do. I had all the mentors, all the coaches, read all the books and it worked, but nobody talks about it. At what cost? Like, my income was came at the cost of losing my life, kind of. In that what I'm gonna talk about is the entrepreneurial trap. What's interesting, matt, is that my whole identity and people that they associated with money they would have associated about my entrepreneurial business success, right, and I was pretty good at making money. I was starting to turn a lot of business income. So what happened the day I got sick with my business? Do you think?
Speaker 2:I bet everything came to a screeching halt or started breaking or you know, even if you have systems in place, I mean things start spinning off the rails Very quickly like much.
Speaker 1:I thought it built a pretty good business and it was a good business. But the second I wasn't there to lead it and grow it every day. I mean it started to fall apart. Should get shenanigans started happening. I mean it was, I was too sick to really even notice or care, honestly. But you know, I'd actually had people come to tell me like Christina, do you have any clue what's happening with your business right now? You might wanna know so, but it started falling apart. So that's just that piece. One is that we think we can always be making money and just you know just what I call the easy button as entrepreneurs, like I'll just build a bigger business, I'll just build the next business, I'll just go sell another unit, I'll just go do the next thing. And we get caught up in that belief like we can just constantly be money generators and because we're making money and we love making money and it kind of comes easy to us, maybe relative to other people. So that's that piece. So what's interesting about that is the second I was out and needed to be out.
Speaker 1:My working income, business income, started deteriorating really fast and got really ugly Now, while what I was doing privately. Nobody knew this about me because wealth is opposed to income, income's very public. We get an idea of how much people money people are making by the size of their business, the cars they drive, the house they live in, the social circles they are in. So, no, we don't say, hey, you know my business, you know I make a million a year or something. But people judge us and they get an idea, they put us in a class that we're probably making a certain amount of income and we can get trapped in that. And then we're used to like, hey, people identify me with this and the car I drive and the house I drive. So the more money we make we always want to kind of keep upping that class. And again, we can get trapped in that. But privately, wealth is private. People can make associations, maybe how much money I had based on those things I just said, but nobody could see my balance sheet, nobody can see my financial statements, nobody could see how much I had in stock or real estate or anything, because that's all private. We don't talk about that. Wealth is a private affair. Success is a public affair.
Speaker 1:What I'd been doing is I'd been studying money for a long time because I wanted to be rich. I wanted to be financially free and I didn't really know what that meant or why at the time, but I'd been studying money. I started to build a portfolio and build net worth. It's interesting I was just doing it because I wanted to be wealthy and money was very much my motivation and my drive. And all of it business, money and then this wealth over here.
Speaker 1:What's this interesting is that the money that saved my life. It cost me a quarter million dollars just to have the change. It was so much cash. I was writing checks constantly. If somebody would have said, hey, pay $100,000 and there's this guru in Africa and you hang upside down on a tree and it will kill you, I would have done it. I was just going to spend it any straw and writing big check after big check to do it.
Speaker 1:Ultimately, some of that worked. Clearly, what happened is that I'd had some assets and passive income from those assets and they paid the bills. I actually had to sell some assets to pay for some of this healthcare, but I had the assets to sell. My business could actually go away. It still keep food on the table, not live my total lifestyle as living, but I could survive. That became this awareness of. Oh, this is what financial freedom is. Financial freedom is when your assets can help you out and contribute 100% or partially to keeping you alive, metaphorically or literally, when your business or working income can't that is such a powerful message for all entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2:You said a couple of things there that I think resonate with everybody, but for sure with me. One is that we, as entrepreneurs, we're not salaried employees, where I think if you're working in a salaried employee role for a long time, you get boxed into this this is how much money I make and I need to save this much and it's very structured. As entrepreneurs, we're just like I can make unlimited money, I need more money, I work harder or whatever. There's never this sense that there's not going to be more. That's also tied to this sort of typically mentioned, but also seems to play out every seven years of this cycle. We ride the cycle long enough and it's go, go, go, go, go go. We forget like, oh, there's a cycle coming and nobody's ever ready for it, especially all of us crazy entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2:I think what you're talking about is such important stuff for everyone, but particularly for entrepreneurs. The other thing that really jumps out at me about what you were saying is that, while I've made tons and tons of money mistakes, I learned a long time ago that margin is everything If you do everything else wrong but you got six to 12 months worth of margin. You can miss that iceberg in your path and navigate through a health crisis or work change or whatever. I'm so excited for what you have to share with everybody about how you're managing money and how you're helping others manage it.
Speaker 1:Just again that became awareness. Some of the takeaways there is just to understand there's a difference between income and difference between wealth. We want to be in the wealth game and not the income game. But most entrepreneurs are in the income game. I want to make more money, to have more money, spend more money. If I don't have enough money, I can work harder to make more money. That's what I call the entrepreneurial trap.
Speaker 1:Without any wealth strategy or without any strategy understanding plan, we always want to be playing two games at the same time. We want to be playing the income game and entrepreneurship with an employee. That would be called the ladder climb. You're climbing the corporate ladder. That's the way you start increasing your income is you just take run by run. You try to make more money. That's the end game of the corporate, the income game of the entrepreneurs. We built it, we're creative and we put all their chips on the table and it takes a certain personality type and it's risk reward. We can be heavily rewarded by by taking the risk and being these weird personality types that we as entrepreneurs are. It's just to understand.
Speaker 1:As entrepreneurs, we need to know the income game means we're building our business, we're driving higher top lines to get higher bottom lines. That's the business money the money is part of. Business is all about income. Again, why do we want to build the business bigger? We keep more money. If I was a $500,000 revenue business and I get to keep $100,000 and then I have a million dollar business and I can keep $300,000, my personal income went from $100,000 to $300,000 by growing the business. Supposedly I have more time and some of the other benefits of having a business, some tax strategy, but that's just income. As entrepreneurs, we want to be in the income game and we're always working on the business to get better, to make more money, to keep more money in the business.
Speaker 1:Business is the game of income. Business is not the game of wealth. Wealth is a personal game and well, this, how well we manage our personal finances so that we can have a surplus. Like you said, margin is created, the margins that's a money. Maximum wealth is creating the margins, and so the surplus or the margin is that we need to spin less than we make.
Speaker 1:How we get wealthy is just been listening make personally and that margin is what we use to build our wealth over time and as entrepreneurs, it's really important because we don't have a parachute, we don't have a company match 401k, we don't have some of these other incentives to save and invest, that that kind of built into the handcuff system over there. So, again, we have to create our own wealth and our wealth our business is not our wealth. Our wealth is on our personal balance sheet. So again, it's just it's important as entrepreneurs that we understand this distinction, that that in the game of money, we want to be great income earners. How will we build our business? We want to be great wealth creators by how well we manage our money, and wealth is a money management skill.
Speaker 2:You mentioned me when we were preparing for this conversation. You talked about four pillars. I want you to talk about that, because I think that's really gonna help.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I'll give it kind of break it down and these are the four wealth pillars and it's pretty simple, like it's. If you really, what I mean by principles is these are laws right there there, these unseen there, always at work, and there are the rules of money. If you follow the rule, you create wealth. If you betray the rules, you get stuck in what I call the entrepreneurial trap or the entrepreneurial hamster. Well, what the entrepreneurial trap is in hamster well is it can go on forever with this belief that someday I'll have enough money. But it's just this that you know.
Speaker 1:We start our business and our first goal is to have six figures of profit. Right, we make a hundred thousand dollars more business. So then you know we could quit the corporate job or whatever we did. We had six figures of profit and so we pay ourselves a hundred thousand dollars and now our lifestyle cost a hundred thousand dollars. We keep grinding and doing, we do, and then we make two hundred fifty thousand dollars profit. Then what we do is our lifestyle then cost two hundred fifty thousand dollars, and that's called Parkinson's law of money. And Parkinson's law of money says that expenses will always rise to match income. It's a law called Parkinson's law, expenses will always rise to match income and it happens so naturally. And then we're just great at money getting, being money earners, and we were more excited to make more money. So we go back and we build the business to five hundred thousand dollars profit. Now our lifestyle is even more Exciting and expensive, and it just happens naturally.
Speaker 1:What we're doing is that every time we grow the business, it costs money. So every time you start a new business or really want to grow the business from one jump to another big time, it requires capital. So here's a capital start the business. You start negative. But what happens then is that we borrow money from our household account or we don't pay ourselves in the business, which is a Either form, is it? We're robbing from ourselves, basically, and we keep feeding this machine, this business machine and this business business I mean it's like I, it's akin to the cookie monster Remember the cookie monster and just stuff it up. Our businesses are casheeting machines like it will eat every single dollar we give it, it loves it. I mean businesses love eating cash and so we have to really manage the money and really be aware of the cash and availability cash. But it will rob our household wealth building opportunity. So any cash that we do have left over, that we either take from our personal account to put back in the business or, like I said, we don't pay ourselves and pay in ourselves and therefore, not putting any income into our household, we leave that money in the business and the business will keep eating it.
Speaker 1:So again, with this belief in the back of our mind is like one day I'm going to have a lot of wealth, or when the business gets to a certain size, then I'll figure out how to do all this other stuff. And it's a trap and it will. That hamster, will that month to month, forever. And that's where entrepreneurs get trapped. And they'll do it for five years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, and you know, then they reach a certain age and they realize they don't have any wealth or passive income. And then you know, maybe it becomes an awareness.
Speaker 1:So the way to avoid the trap or pillars and I just call them the four money principles and the first, and so I'm going to ask that, just pretend these are true, pretend they're true. Somebody tells us that gravity is real, but we can't see it. So we don't necessarily believe that, but we're just going to believe it's real, just for a second, to play it out, right, because if we say gravity is real, we can play that well, if it is real, but I don't think it's real. Off the 20 story building what could happen, right, you're going to find out. Principal number one says you have to know your numbers.
Speaker 1:Front, then income. This is different. So this is all about wealth creation, and wealth I mean on the balance sheet, net worth, net worth, future passive income. So you have to know your numbers. And the number one question implore every entrepreneur to ask themselves and know the answer to is this Question how much money is enough? And if everybody if anybody's listening and writes that down, I kind of here's an assignment Write that down, how much money is enough and see if you can answer that like within two minutes.
Speaker 2:I've heard this brought up a couple of times from different sources and when you said that I think of a monthly number like this is my number, like if I make this per month and I'm happy, and that's what I'm going to do, and I'm going to say that I think of a monthly number like this is my number, like if I make this per month and I'm happy and bills are paid and money gets put away and all the things happen, and but are you talking about that? How much money saved in the bank? Total number.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So see, it's not an easy question to answer because it actually has many parts to it. So it's exactly that you're like, oh yeah, I can wait a second. That could be all sorts of things, right. So that's exactly where I want you to go, because the answer to that is like there's several answers to answer that one question, because you need to know how much money's enough in many, in a few different categories. So that's the first one we want to be able to. And it goes at the same time, right. So you can't choose one and leave out three, and they all coexist together, so one, they work with each other. So when you're following these four principles and you your income generation to wealth creation, so again, how much money is enough? Now I'm going to go back to that to answer your question, and what I'll say is that I have a quiz that's like how much money is enough?
Speaker 1:Quiz takes two minutes and I it's a wise money methodcom slash quiz and again, I just you and anybody listening just take the quiz. It's super fun, but it's really revealing. And the revealing part is it really it causes us to realize, like holy shit, I don't know my numbers, that I need to know these numbers to be wealthy on the net worth, on the balance sheet? Maybe I need to dig a little deeper and go do the work to find out the answers to these questions. All right, so on that quiz, it's going to quiz you if you know how much money is enough in these different categories and it's going to give yourself a score and then you can see how you did. Great, it's fun quiz, kind of a financial literacy quiz if you will. And what we realize is that on this quiz map, the people, like thousands of people, have taken it. Now, and at first, you know it's just the numbers were small, so it's hard to make any type of real, you know, critique or assessment of this. But now that thousands of people have taken this and these are entrepreneurs who take it, these are good income earning entrepreneurs, you know, like I said, they're driving nice cars and living in nice houses and you know kids are maybe in private school and the average score of this quiz is 33%. So what that tells me is just money is not obvious. We're just so gung ho about making it and we think if we make enough of it, money is going to, money is going to work out without understanding that there's a lot more to the equation. So that's that's the first one. Know the numbers. They're all organized around how much money is enough. Principle number two we've already talked about this one, Alt is in the margins and, like I tell everybody, you want to know how to be wealthy, spinless than you make, and that's both of these categories.
Speaker 1:So we have a business and we have our personal and money is existing in both of these as entrepreneurs. So how we make the highest amount of income in our business is based on the margin. So if we have a 10% margin, if we make a million dollars a year revenue, we have a 10% margin. We get to keep 100,000. But if that we now we can have it. We can double our income as a business owner without selling one more widget. If we have a million dollar business and we can raise our profit margin to 20% by reorganizing the expenses of the business and cost of sales, now we can. We can double our business without taking any more risk.
Speaker 1:And now, 20% margin, we pay ourselves $200,000. 30% margin, $300,000. That's the surplus, that's the margin. So we want to know our margins of our business and we want to get that profit margin as high as possible with our business model and for most of us, as lifestyle entrepreneurs we're not Walmart that can sell bazillions of units at a large margin we really need to manage our expenses to create that margin as much as possible. But if we're not managing our expenses there's no margin, which means there's no income Wealth. You know income is created in the margin.
Speaker 1:Now we move, let's say, our $200,000 from our business to our household. Now wealth is in the margin. So if we paid ourselves $200,000, and let's just say we calculate that you know we want to put away, just keep the math easy we wouldn't do this but just say we want to put $100,000 towards investing 50% margin. Now I wouldn't recommend that. But let's say we do a 20% margin. So that means that I'm going to take 20% off of my gross income I just paid myself, which was $200,000, which is $40,000. So I'm going to invest over here into my wealth creation and I'll live off the rest. So again, we have to create that margin.
Speaker 1:And for the entrepreneur, I don't care what stage of business we're in, I always want money to be moving. When money has energy, it has to be moving. So we want to move it from our business to our household into assets, maybe assets back into cash, but cash back into assets, and maybe sometimes those assets back in the business. But wealth is through momentum and movement. If we just have it in this, you know just this trap of in our business a little bit of our household and we're just going in this circle and this loop again, we just can't create the wealth. So the entrepreneurs, I'd really say we want to get in the practice. I don't care where you are in your business. We're always going to have a story like I don't have the money now but no, I don't even care if it's a 5% margin of living by these principles. You know it's, you know it's biblical. Even like to savings and make that. You have this, so that's in the margin.
Speaker 1:Number three means money needs a structure, it needs a system, needs to be managed. So in every dollar. So as entrepreneurs like I just want to make it, I don't want to pay attention to it, I just I'll hire bookkeepers or harder CPAs. I just all I want to do is create and make as much of it as possible. Everybody else can worry about the money. That's fine if you don't want to be a creator of wealth. But again, if you want to be wealth creation, you care about every dollar. You care about every dollar of your business and you care about every dollar that flows to your household. You give it a job, you give it a role, you appreciate it, you're grateful for it, you really connect to the spiritual side of the money that comes in and have a great appreciation for it. And it's biblical too to be a good steward of our money and that's what it means. It means to be present with it, to manage it, to care for it and to give it direction.
Speaker 1:For three that we really have to be good stewards and managers of our money and we have to spend time with it. We need to look at our books and we need to do our profit and losses and we need to look at our household expenses and make sure that every dollar we're paying attention to it. And I teach a methodology to really how to look at your money because we want to line item and categories. So every month I call it a personal profit and loss where we can see we reconcile all of our expenses, we put them, all the categories, we sleep it and put it in the different buckets to make sure we always have a surplus and get that money out of the main account according to this financial system. And we have a financial system and methodology and practice of how we move with our money. So now we're we and our money in a really great relationship with each other and we want that great relationship and great relationships based on attention and time. You know, and energy goes where attention goes and you know that's where we went growth.
Speaker 1:So again, just again, we want to get out of the mindset of I'll do that when later or I'm going to pay somebody to do it and it's so fun and rewarding and it just creates so much magic and so much comfort and so much confidence and so much comfort from knowing where all the money is and how it's working. So when we want to put it off, if we can quit doing that, we're going to gain so much more financial security and comfort just by managing our money and having a system and structure for doing that and a very diligent practice. You know where. We know how important is. You know it's like I say hey, we maybe have babysitters for our kids when they're young, but we don't have to pay parenting. So we may have some people that help us with our money, but we never want to have to pay our money. Nobody's ever gonna care about our money as much as we do. They're making their money from our money. So we want to be the great stewards.
Speaker 1:Set that there when the finer final one is and you know that we can open up to any final comments, questions but the final one is is you have to put money to work your money. You have to put your money in places. It's making money, it's growing and that's where well happens. Well happens not through hard work from our strength and going in the business, compounding the snowball effect of money and we and it takes time. So that's why we have to be very disciplined with that margin. That's why money, managing our money, so important. Make sure we always keep that margin and keep our all of our finances in check so that when we put him into growth vehicles, any type of assets can grow and compound over time, over time.
Speaker 1:Traditional conventional low risk index fund, if that's where you want to do it, it is growing, let's say, at that average of eight percent. Eight percent if you put twenty five hundred dollars a month away for twenty years. Eight percent. You have a million dollars Because that it's without and all you're doing you're putting in about five hundred six hundred thousand of it and the money is doing creating the rest of that wealth and that's the margin. That's called the wealth margin is the amount of money your money created for you, not the amount of money you put in from your hard work.
Speaker 1:So these are the four principles and they all work together. Like you're never going to have enough money to invest and to create that, put that money to work if you're not managing your money really well and put it in and you know keeping track everything. And you're never going to have the wealth if you don't. You know the surplus, if you don't care about the surplus and what the surplus and understand the surplus. And then you know all the way back to the beginning that if you don't know your numbers and how much money you need to put away for how much time to make sure your network is going to grow at that you know rate, you'll never know how much money to put away. So again, they're also connected in there. All really simple. Like for one reason or not, we have a story or we choose not to.
Speaker 2:Christina, thanks so much for being here. I know a bunch of people that are catching this are going to be like alright, how do I get on board with this program and get my finances Lined up? So can you just tell everybody you know how they find you and tell a little bit about your awesome program?
Speaker 1:Matt, thanks so much. I would love to. So there's, you know. They say in marketing, get place, one people, one thing to do in one place to go. So we're going to break that rule. So, everybody listening, we know the rule and work. We're defined it on purpose, and I think I mentioned earlier. But what I really recommend, whether you find me or not, do this for yourself, and this is to take this quiz and the quizzes wise money method dot com slash quiz. Wise money method dot com slash quiz.
Speaker 1:Take the quiz, find your score and see if you can beat the average of 33%. If you're 80% or higher, you probably don't need me. If you're 70% or lower, or somebody like me. Or at least pick up a money book, something, do something right, because you're failing when it comes to to wealth building and personal finance. So that's, that's a first thing to do. You're going to get a workbook. It's this is the workbook that is really the crux of the program, so it's very valuable. It's the real work that we do, which is finding out how much money is enough, and how much money enough is absolutely the most important financial question and answer you need to discover for yourself. I mean, I believe this wholeheartedly. So again, just do it for yourself, figure out what to do from there. But I think it will be very eye opening if you just do that work. So take some action. Take the quiz. Quizz is just a fun little two minute thing to get a result, to get an answer, but it's really that workbook. If you take Thirty minutes to do that workbook, it's going to make some type of impact on your life. So that's an action item. Whether you connect with me or not, just do that for yourself. Now, if you want to connect with me, that's one way to do it. Just send me an email out of that. Super easy, very you know old school, but old school still works.
Speaker 1:What my program is is I actually have a money school and it's I kind of think of it as a financial literacy literacy school on the most basic level, because if you're scoring, let's say, a 70% or less, what that on that quiz, it's really telling us that we're financially illiterate. Now what's so confusing about that is that we can make a lot of money, we can be multiple six figures a year in personal income and still be illiterate when it comes to wealth creation and financial freedom. They're not one in the same. We can be a badass in one and suck in the other, and at the end of the day, if we're going to be a badass in anything, I'd rather you be a badass at wealth creation over income creation, right? So that's what I teach and so that's the class week. It's a school.
Speaker 1:I organized it like going to a semester at night school saying I want to figure out this money thing and learn to be rich and wealthy, and my professors, christina wise and she's going to take me through 12 weeks at night school to master this money thing. I'm sick and tired of money being an issue and it not being enough and being on the answer will, and today's the day I'm going to change that. Or today's the day I want to get me and my spouse on the same page and we're going to master this many things together, because I'm sick and tired of fighting about money and I can solve those, those problems. So the next class starts. I do it twice a year, so just give me a call and we can determine if my class is the next thing for you, how much money is enough, how to build wealth creation, build a financial plan, have a financial system, master personal finance. It's profit.
Speaker 1:First, you're going to rock your money. You're never going to have many problems again. I swear this will solve all of your money. So that's it. And again, if you are interested, that Matt has a link and you can just set up a call on on my calendar. And actually, first I recommend a money mindset Call with my financial coach. Go over that quiz and go over that financial thing together and then we can change that and we can chat about the program to see if it's a match and, if not, will at least give you some good coaching and I promise you'll be better off by spending 45 minutes with us than you were when you showed up to the call. So that's all the juicy stuff to be able to get with me if you want to.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, that's incredible. And, guys, I've known Christina a long time and I know her program is going to change a bunch of lives and for all of us silly entrepreneurs that are great at making money and terrible at keeping it. So Thanks for listening into the search success podcast. Definitely check out Christina info in the show notes and see you back here soon.
