0: Countless times I run into people and they tell me about their investing and
they tell me what they're investing in and this and that,
and they got this great plan and I think it's wonderful.
And one of the things that always kind of comes back to mind is things that have
actually tricked people to look at what they want to hear,
not what they should actually hear. When you go back to the basics of investing,
there's so many different things. For example, commercials,
how much your number,
how much should you have people thinking about how much should they invest to,
and they work with people about how much to save into their investments and
they're missing the most important thing, which is what do I really need?
What do I really need? What do I need to spend? What do I do?
How do I do that? And there's a reason to this and I like to explain that to
people and show you what we here at Siracusano Sleezer Group,
do to a) differentiate our services for our clients,
and b) help you get to a goal and a strategy and a plan that makes sense
and stays with your family. So let's think about this a little bit.
If you go back about 25 years,
the American public started taking their income
and we created something magnificent. It was called direct deposit.
And this direct deposit would actually go directly into your checking
account. It was a great tool.
No longer do you have to wait for your check to clear,
it automatically hit there. It was phenomenal. Now,
what people didn't realize is this usually went into an account that allowed you
to spend from it.
So all of a sudden your income would go in there and you'd start to spend,
many people would then meet with people like myself or even do it on their own
and come up with a strategy on what to save.
And all of a sudden they would then set up a savings account
maybe through their employer or on their own or whatever they were doing,
and they would start to save every single month.
But what's fascinating to me is this number
became a fixed variable. Interesting.
People would set up their money where all of a sudden money would go right into
their savings account on a regular basis and they'd feel like everything is
done. One of the examples I often use is I'm old enough to remember how you
would drive with maps. And all of a sudden you get off the highway one time,
you get back on the highway and you figure out what's going on and you realize
you're off the map and you got to turn all the way around,
and maybe it was only 10 or 15 miles, which is no big deal.
But if you're doing this for 10 or 15 years,
you basically designed a strategy based on your income from 10 or 15 years
ago and not where it is today, and you've been tricked.
You're also in a position where in order to save money,
it's a personal decision. And when dealing with your own money,
it can be hard to completely remove emotion.
That's where this strategy may fail people,
and I believe this is a roadblock to meeting one's financial goals.
So let's keep this in mind about what a lot of people are doing these days and
as we move forward,
we're going to talk to you about what we do to help clients not have to worry
about this instead of taking your income and having it go directly to your
spending account. Because remember in this scenario,
if your income goes up,
spending may go up and your savings has stayed the same.
What we teach people to do is to take all of your income
and save it.
Now your income becomes a portion of your
long-term wealth management plan. If you get a better job,
it doesn't mean you should spend more right away.
It means it should help your family. That's what it was all for.
We then take a look at how much does your lifestyle cost.
So when you are looking at your spending account out,
if we together are dictating what you want to spend,
now you are in control of your investment plan. This is fascinating,
this little tiny, simple move.
I always like to use the example of the beginning of the Wizard of Oz when
Dorothy is getting on the yellow brick road and it makes that nice little
circle, envision that in your mind.
What people don't realize is surrounded by that yellow brick road is a red brick
road. Now the book tells us it goes in an entirely different direction,
but if you imagine if she got on the wrong road,
to me that's this. So many Americans these days are
taking their income, putting in their checking account, spending what they make,
and if you have a job change, a life change or anything occurs,
you don't know how to spend, the anxiety level may increase substantially.
Potentially making short-term investment decisions challenging.
If you're in a position where you have extra money and you want to save it,
it has to be a conscious decision to do it. Nobody does that. And let's face it,
if the economy is bad, you're not going to want to save as much.
And if the economy is good, you want to save more,
which is the opposite of what you want to do. In our scenario.
If your income increases, your savings increases,
and your ability to achieve your financial security has just gotten
sooner, not later. In this scenario,
we don't know when it's going to be. I see people all the time,
I want to retire. Oh, I've got all this money. That's good to know,
but what do you spend?
What we do for our clients here at Siracusano Sleezer Group Wealth Management is
we help you figure this number out,
not with an ugly four letter word like budget,
but with a way that we can regulate your spending. And over time as we really,
really, really understand this,
now we know exactly what it's going to take for you to retire.
Retirement is really simple. If you know what you need to spend,
it's not simple. If you're entire career,
your spending has changed with your income. Now the question becomes,
what do we do with this? If you've got all my money and I'm not doing this now,
the very first thing that I look at is if your income represents Y and
your spending represents X lesson number one, Y,
better be greater than X. Obviously,
spend less than what you make makes perfect sense,
which means now we have extra money to start saving.
We've created a strategy and I want you to envision in your mind kind of like a
stack of champagne glasses, how you fill up the top one, the next one,
the next one, the next one, how they all kind of flow through.
And if you can imagine in your mind that these are buckets that can potentially
preserve your money and allow you to have layers of money. Well,
traditionally, going back to our parents and our grandparents,
people had a checking account and a savings account.
If we have a layer of cash that
meets your family's needs,
one idea is to look into cash alternatives and other short-term investments that
offer interest on your money with potentially little to no downside risk.
So if once you've decided how much you need to spend every month,
you have a little bit of money here, enough to cover probably a month,
you have the money going in there every single month,
and then you have a little bit of money here, probably enough to cover one, two,
maybe three months depending on your risk tolerance. But really now we're done.
We have enough in short-term needs making the least amount of money.
That's what a checking account does. So once that bucket is full,
we go to the next one. Your next bucket is an emergency money.
Now every family is different. You may have different emergency needs,
you may have healthcare needs,
you may have multiple properties or homes or businesses or whatever.
We help you to work on satisfying that concern of what your emergency needs
could be. We set that up,
fill up that bucket so it's there just in case. Now we go to the next one.
I like to call this, what if,
what are you saving for? Do you want a second home?
Do you have a child that's getting married?
Do you have that 50th wedding anniversary?
Do you have retirement or that boat you want to buy?
Some people are saving for things. In my opinion,
one of the most devastating things that can happen to families is they save for
something for a long time and then all of a sudden the stock market was down and
they can't buy what they were saving for. Well,
all they really did was they had the money. It was just in the wrong place.
We help people the difference. So once these things are taken care of,
all of a sudden we've taken care of your short-term needs.
Because let's face it,
no money should be invested long-term that you may or may not need short-term
and you're investing. Maybe a lot of things might be college planning,
might be retirement planning, might be just saving just to save,
might be investing. It doesn't matter.
But the beauty of this model is when your income goes up
or down, we know what you need to live off of.
As long as you have extra money,
it flows through and we have an investment strategy that
now it knows what it needs to accomplish. Very simple.
It needs to replace this. So eventually,
now you're full circle if you do retire or anything like that where it produces
income. But we have a clear direction the way
most Americans do.
Their planning is to just save as much as possible with no real knowledge as to
why. Well,
this is the why they're spending here at Siracusano Sleezer Group,
one of the fundamental core practices we do with most of our clients is help
them understand what they're spending. This is the very,
very first thing that comes to everything, I'm sorry,
comes to all into your planning.
The number one thing that this does for most situations also
is no matter what the economy is doing, whether it's good,
whether it's bad, if you call me up one day and say, Hey,
I'm buying a new car and I need some extra money.
The very first thing is we look at the economy. If the economy is bad, well,
we already planned for it. It's over here.
Now. We take it from there and we let the income refill one of the buckets.
So suddenly you took a plan that you hope will work when you really don't know
what you're spending, that you hope will work.
When you're really not measuring your income to your spending,
you've made a plan now that you know you're spending, and more importantly,
have a strategy for every single market condition,
for almost all things that are going to affect your family.
So this is one of our basic strategies that I love to put families in front of
all the time, because number one, it's simple, it's easy,
it's manageable.
It also gives you a clear direction of saving non emotionally
and spending within the control that you set up.
You are in control of your spending, not your job, not your income,
not whether or not you're going to get a bonus or you're going to lose your job,
but based on a decision you've made that works within the numbers.
Thank you for listening. We really appreciate it.
Hope you like this and more strategies. If you have any questions,
please don't hesitate to give us a call.
Love to be of service to you and anyone on our team can help you out with things
just like this. Every day.