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Bill Cantrell-become a millionaire

Bill Cantrell

Do you want to become a millionaire?  

It’s simpler than you think for you to become a millionaire.  It is disappointing how few people have even $100,000 in savings by retirement age.  Everyone needs a savings/wealth plan, and when you were promoted into management your financial opportunity compounded.  Listen to today’s ManagerMojo Podcast for some simple and insightful ideas to translate the opportunity you’ve been provided by being a manager into your future financial freedom.

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You need a wealth plan to become a millionaire.  Start now!

Steve:             Hello and welcome everyone to the Manager Mojo podcast.  Today I’m pleased to share with you our guest is going to be Mr. Bill Cantrell.  Bill is a Principal at Cantrell Financial Strategies and is registered investment advisory firm in the State of Arizona.  Bill has over 40 years experience in management, consulting, and advisory positions in the banking, home care and investment services industries. 
                        Currently Bill consults with individuals and businesses on long-term goal setting, strategy development, implementation and monitoring.  His particular interest is helping clients leverage their resources for retirement using efficient, well diversified investment vehicles and comprehensive estate protection techniques.
                        Prior to creating his advisory practice Bill spent 15 years developing leadership teams in the banking industry and also owned his own non-medical home care franchise serving hundreds of clients as they chose to live at home during their senior years.
                        Bill is a proud graduate of Purdue University with a Bachelor’s degree in economics and has attended post graduate studies in Washington D.C. and Toledo, Ohio and has held numerous positions in the financial industry.  In addition to all these things, Bill is a CPA and speaks frequently to public and CPA groups.  Bill, I want to welcome you to the Manager Mojo Podcast.

 

Bill:                Well, Steve, I’m thrilled to be with you and I appreciate the opportunity to share some time with you and your listeners and hopefully we can have a very productive discussion.

Steve:             I’m sure we will and I’m looking forward to it.  So first, if you don’t mind, tell us a little bit more about what you’re doing today.

 

Bill:                Sure, I’d be happy to.  As you described, and I typically explain to people that I talk with, I use what I call “Comprehensive Financial Planning”. Oftentimes, when someone mentions that they’re a financial planner or financial advisor they mean that they focus in one of several areas – it could be investments, it could be insurance, sales. My background and my passion that’s developed over time is to look at the complete financial picture for someone, so I use a process that allows me to actively learn and listen to the client and learn about their goals, their concerns and what they’re already doing financially.  Then I begin to educate them about things that I think are important, so that they understand and hopefully we will establish an ongoing working relationship.  I have few clients, but I pretty much know everything about them, because that’s the approach that I take in working with them and most of my clients have been clients for anywhere from – I would say – minimum of five years and most of them twenty to twenty-five years.

 

Steve:             Awesome, Bill and I just want to let our listeners know that Bill has been a longtime friend and he has worked with my wife, Cindy, for well over twenty years and, so I know that Bill provides great value to his clients.

Now, Bill today in this podcast I really don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about management techniques.   I really want our listeners to understand that they went into management because they wanted to make more money, they wanted to help more people, but yet they’re so darn busy that they really don’t think about their future long term and, so what I want to do is start with: what would be your advice to people that are either starting or in the middle of their management career – maybe they haven’t been paying attention. What would be some of the things that you would tell them to start considering right away?

 

Bill:                Well, I think you need to assess just where you are and I usually start by just saying, “If we were here a year from now what would you like to have made progress on?” or “What are the two or three top concerns that you have about your own personal financial situation?” and begin to make that to-do list. Just like you do, probably, in your business and management world where you’ve got to have a set of priorities to focus on. Do the same thing in your personal financial life and to me – I grew up as a certified financial planner and learning, in my terms, there are six key areas of financial planning – and, so what I do is try to help people focus on each one of those six key areas and the starting point is just: what do you have? What do you own? And what do you owe? And how is that wealth, if you will, how is that structured?

If you begin to spend a little more time – they say people spend more time planning their two week vacation every year than they do looking at their financial situation – I think if you start to think about finances are important to me and I need to do an assessment of my own situation and then begin to build my own set of concerns accordingly, find somebody like myself who you can work with to help you organize your thinking as well as your acting on them. That to me is the starting point. You have to say, “Where am I today?” and “Where would I like to get to?”

I’m a begin with the end in mind kind of guy, so if I can help a client paint a picture or create a vision for where they want to be long term – it may be ten years, it may be forty years, there might be multiple goals in between – but just begin to think about where do I want to get to? That usually is enough of a dialogue to get going.

 

Steve:             There are so many points of wisdom here and I want to talk about some of them as we relate them to the world of management. You know, we oftentimes will think about in our career, “Okay, I’m at this level now and I’m making this level of income, but if I just can improve my skills and get to this next promotion where I’m going to get a really nice raise and more stock options, more benefits, then things are going to get better for me and my family.”   But as you and I both know, oftentimes that’s not the case because when they get the new promotion they really never had any plan on what they were going to do with that extra money, so what would you advise on a mindset change that people need to really think about because I think this is a huge problem in the US and all around the world.

 

Bill:                Well, I agree absolutely and, in all honesty, what we can think of from the time we get out of college or by the time we’ve started that business and began to anticipate moving up the ladder is: what can I do with that extra money? You know, and oftentimes it doesn’t include: how can I save? Again, one of the old adages is pay yourself first and the thought is when you get a paycheck put some away first, as opposed to, is it possible for me to make ends meet on that given everything that I feel like I have to have. I’ve counseled people that, for the most part, until you’re making substantial money you ought to be thinking in terms of spending about half of a paycheck. I mean, between taxes, other obligations you have that’s about all you get, if you will, and you need to live a comfortable life and lifestyle on about half of what you get paid and I see so many people that when they start they’re thinking, “If I’m making X thousands and I was a college student making nothing, then I now have that full – whatever that number is 30, 40, 50, 60 – thousand to figure out how to spend and that’s a wonderful opportunity,” and the reality is start thinking much less about how to spend it and I think you need to save a minimum of 10 – 15% for you own personal use down the road as soon as you get started earning money.

 

Steve:             That’s great.

 

Bill:                I’ve got all kinds of little analogies or stories or hypotheticals that show how much wealth you can create. You know, we have so few people that have more than $100,000.00 saved for retirement. I’m talking people in their fifties and beyond.

 

Steve:             Right.

 Become a Millionaire, the secret is compounding!

Bill:                And, yet just a little bit of money put aside systematically for 20, 30, 40 years the power of compounding – which Albert Einstein said is the eighth wonder of the world – allows your wealth to grow.  If you do that consistently, a little bit wins the day.

 

Steve:             What a great analogy. I thank you for bringing Einstein into this because another thing that Einstein said is, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.”

 

Bill:                Exactly.

 

Steve:             So, if you’re spending all of your money and you’re not investing, you’re not saving and expecting that you’re somehow going to get ahead that’s not going to happen, is it?

Bill:                No, it really isn’t and, quite frankly, the early years, if you will, of somebody’s career is the opportunity to be a little bit more diligent or prudent about how the money gets spent because as time goes on and we desire the bigger house or the kids come along and, then we realize we’ve got other requirements potentially with education funding, et cetera it gets more and more complicated if we haven’t built that mindset from the beginning that we’re going to live within our means and we’re also going to save money within our means, regardless of how little we’re making or how much we’re making.

We need to understand that we have to have a focus on putting a good portion of it away and someone like myself can help that be somewhat painless because it can be done automatically and, then I think a lot of times if you have a sense that if I do this – in terms of putting money away – I get this down the road, so that there’s some realistic understanding of what the benefit of doing that is, that can be huge.

 

Steve:             Yeah, that can be and, Bill, if you don’t mind, I really want to dive into this a little bit today and get this concrete into managers’ minds. My research has shown that the average worker in the United States makes approximately $35,000.00 a year. The average manager makes $46,000.00 a year. It actually amounts to about $10,700.00 more per year that a frontline manager would make than a non-management employee would make over their career.   If you were looking at a forty year career, that alone is well over $400,000.00.

The US Government has done studies that say that it’s really even better than that, in that their studies show that people in management, over a lifetime, average $25,000.00 more per year, over their life, than those that are never in management.  So in a forty year career, that’s a million dollars right there, yet people are not saving anything.  If they did, they could easily become a millionaire.

I mean, how horrible is it that in your 50s and 60s you don’t have more than $100,000.00 to live on? That just shows that we spend everything.  It’s part of this easy credit world we live in today, is it not?

 

Bill:                Well, I think it is and there, again, I think we’ve been trained to be thinking in terms of whether it’s keeping up with the Joneses or the mindset is what more can I acquire, as opposed to I’m very comfortable living in the lifestyle that I’m in and, so when I get that promotion and I get that sizeable bump in pay that this is an excellent opportunity either to play catch-up if I haven’t been doing as much as I feel like I should or it’s an opportunity to get ahead of the game because one of the other things that I think is important for all of us to acknowledge is: there is no guarantee that the lifestyle, the income, that there’s going to be a consistent line up over time that we’re going to always be making more money, we’re going to always have a wonderful career.

Careers get interrupted and that can be for business reasons, it can be for personal reasons, it can be for medical reasons. Careers get interrupted and suddenly the last ten years that you were planning on really putting money away or really having your wealth grow that may not occur at the level that you’re expecting or may not occur at all and, so once again, we need to be prudent about how we spend in the early years because spending in the early years really can affect how much wealth we have in our later years.

 

Steve:             So true and what an awesome discussion that we’re having here. You mentioned that you would recommend that somebody put aside 10 or 15% as a minimum, but let’s discuss the other big lie that we have in our world in the media today and that is that they’re always talking about the people that made the home run investment and all of sudden became wealthy. That is really not the norm and it’s almost rarer than the lottery, is it not?

 

Bill:                Oh, yeah it is. In all honesty, it is and it’s unfortunate because in our media world of 24/7 coverage of  what goes on those types of situations sell newspapers or sell TV shows and, so it’s pretty common that that’s the big splash, but the reality is: most of us are not going to be in that situation where we even have that opportunity and there are stories that abound of even the lottery winners who, through their own decision making, fail to retain much of the wealth that they received from winning the lottery because, again, their judgment gets skewed by the fact that this sudden influx of wealth. Of course we know pro athletes are in the same situation – another great example of people that just spend unrealistic amounts of wealth and then, suddenly, their career is cut short and suddenly they’re destitute even though they may have earned millions of dollars in their lifetime in a short period of time.

 

Steve:             Wow, yeah. I’m just curious — I don’t mean to put you on the spot here. Let’s say that somebody was investing, would it be a good target for somebody if they averaged 3%, 5% in a year? Do you have an example of what would be a minimal amount and you earned X amount of money over a lifetime, what would that look like? Do you have anything available like that?

 

Bill:                Well, I have one that I created to help people understand a little bit about that and I said, if you started at age 25 and started putting away $5,000.00 a year, but you just did it for ten years.

 

Steve:             Okay, so let’s make sure we get this right: $5,000.00 a year, you start at 25.

 

Bill:                Yeah, so that would be the equivalent, for example of, say, I’m putting money into my 401K or I’m putting money into an IRA. Doesn’t have to be a retirement-oriented account, just $5,000.00 a year and I do it for ten years. And if I earn 8%, which is not unrealistic. I mean, the market historically have earned 10% a year if it’s 100% stock in the stock market, so if we had combination of stocks and bonds and other things that weren’t so aggressive, so we earned 8% a year and, then we just stopped investing after 10 years.

            First of all, after ten years, we’d have about $78,000.00, but if we just left that $78,000.00 alone – and let’s say it was our retirement account – so we left it alone for another thirty years, so by the age 65 we’ve had the money invested – some of it for forty years, some of it for thirty-nine, et cetera – but that $78,000.00 over that next thirty years would grow to $780,000.00, so you’d have ¾ of a million dollars if you put $5,000.00 a year away for ten years.

 

Steve:             Wow!

 

Bill:                Yeah and that’s why when I see these numbers that talk about how few people have more than $100,000.00 I know we just missed so many people that had the opportunity because, let’s face it, there’s more boomers than any generation, so these people who are turning sixty-five now have had the opportunity to do what I just described and we’ve lived through some very solid stock markets as well as some not so solid, but if they had done that for forty years, they’d have ¾ of a million dollars. Imagine you did it a little bit less, you only have half a million, you’re still not in bad shape.

 

Steve:             You’re still five times ahead of what most of the rest have.

 

Bill:                Exactly.

 

Steve:             Oh my gosh — so I just want to say that one more time.  I want our audience to understand how important it is – you’re working your butt off right now if you’re in management.  It is not easy.  You’re working ridiculously long hours, most of the time six days a week.   If you are fortunate enough to just work five days a week I promise you, you are still working ten to twelve hours a day, so what Bill’s suggesting: find a way to put away $5,000.00 a year. That’s $5,000.00 a year, right Bill?

 

Bill:                Yes.

 

Steve:             Okay, so $5,000.00 a year – which is a little over $400.00 a month – do it for ten years, invest the heck out of it, leave it alone and you’re looking at ¾ of a million dollars by the time you’re at 65.

 

Bill:                That’s exactly it.

 

Steve:             That’s impressive.

 

Bill:                Well, and I’ll tell you, most of the people who are listening probably aren’t 25, but if you wait until 35 – so let’s say you miss that 25 – 35 age group – so you put away the $5,000.00, but you do it for twenty years. You put it away from 35 – 55, now you’ve put away twice as much money and then you stop putting it away at age 55. By the time you get to 65 you will have over half a million dollars, so again, not a bad place to go, but I invested double the amount, but still just get started where you are. It’s important and I go, “Hey, I’m 42. I’ve already lost my opportunity.” No. Maybe by then you’re making more money and you can put away more than $5,000.00. Maybe you’ve already got a little  bit of a nest egg, just keep at it because even if you did $5,000.00 for twenty years and, then left it alone at that point for another ten years, you’d have over half a million and that’s certainly better than a poke in the eye.

 

Steve:             You know, I think people oftentimes get afraid of mathematics and they don’t realize how simple it really is.   What we’re talking about here – if I’m manager – all I want to do is – even if I can’t start with the $400.00+ a month – to get me to $5,000.00 a year, if I started at $100.00 and then just steadily increased it I’m still going to be in great shape if I have that kind of mindset through my career.

 

Bill:                Oh, absolutely and I think there, again, once you start doing that it begins to feed on itself.  Let’s put it this way, it becomes much easier for someone to save more once they’re seeing the fruits of their labor.   Doing that and, again, not to sing the praises of the investment industry too much, but it helps to know what to do with the money when you’re putting it away. I’ve seen some situations that make me want to cry where people have been either doing it on their own or, quite frankly, maybe haven’t gotten the greatest investment advice.  It’s so common that people will put money away into a retirement plan and not really know how to diversify that investment to where they’re not putting all their eggs in one basket. They may think they picked four different mutual funds to invest in their retirement plan and they’re all big company stocks, but just four different names of mutual funds that, essentially, are buying the same thing four different times for them.  So there’s a lot to be said for sound investment strategies that include diversification of investments and, oftentimes, that takes either study on the individual’s part, but, oftentimes, they can be well served by talking to somebody who that’s they’re business. The managers have their expertise, we have ours.

 

Steve:             I think that’s a really important distinction because it’s strange to me that when we’re ill and we know something’s wrong with us we don’t try to fix it our self, we go to a physician that’s been trained in trying to diagnose what’s going on.   We basically hire that physician to help us get well and, yet it’s tough enough to be great in management, I mean, it requires a tremendous amount of skill, a lot of investment of your time and energy.  To think that you’re also going to be a great investment guy or gal at the same time that you’re being a great leader of people, to me just seems foolish.

 

Bill:                Well, I tend to agree. There are very few individuals that I’ve met that have the savvy and the commitment of time to do both and I know when I was focused in management, years ago, I wasn’t focused in this and it became my passion as my career was changing and I thought, “This is the area I want to help with. I want to learn about it myself,” but this was where I saw so many people who were being replaced in their world with consolidation and downsizing and really did not have any understanding of how much insurance they had or what should they do with their 401K that now was going to be distributed to them and it just clicked for me that this was where I wanted to go with my career.

 

Steve:             Bill, in your experience, have you seen people that were in management that the fact that they didn’t take care of their financial well-being really affected their career in a negative manner?

 

Bill:                Well, I think what happens is – and I have in a variety of ways – certainly, again, when I get back to the situation of the person who is moving along and thinks that they’ll always be moving along and moving up and, then something happens to derail that and, then they’re in a panic because they still have a lifestyle that requires them to spend, probably, as much as they’re making or close to it and suddenly they’re not in that position, so I’ve had clients who haven’t had the opportunity to build enough wealth and suddenly their career has changed on them, and so that creates a tremendous amount of stress which is going to obviously affect your decision making or the decisions or the careers that you choose from that point forward, so it’s an example of an area where when things are working great. 

It’s like the stock market.  When the market is going up substantially like it was in the late 90s and like it has in the last five years, quite frankly, it’s pretty easy  for people to feel comfortable about their financial situation and that can translate into a pretty nice quality of life, including their work life, but when the markets change it tends to create a lot of stress for people and those of us in the industry know that things work in cycles, so that’s not surprising to us, but that can begin to create more stress because, suddenly, the financial picture has changed more dramatically than they were ready for.

 

Steve:             Awesome, well, Bill, great examples and I want to thank you for really helping us understand this in a real nice, clear way today. That’s been very helpful.

 

Bill:                Well, it’s my pleasure.

 

Steve:             I want to point out to our listeners that Bill is the author of the book The Financial Point Man’s Success Strategies and Bill, how would you prefer for people to contact you if they’re interested in learning more?

 

Bill:                Well, sure that’s an opportunity that I hope people will feel like they can benefit from. I do have a website which is my name – Cantrell – cantrellfinancialstrategies.com and there’s an opportunity there to connect with me as well as connect with me through e-mail – direct e-mail [email protected] – is a great way to start either with “I’d like to talk with you” or “here’s a question for you”.  I’m beginning to have a few different opportunities to help people through websites where they will just send me a question or indicate an interest in talking with me, so I’m happy to follow up and respond through e-mails or phone calls and usually a 10 – 15 minute phone call is a great way for us to start.  I can even give my phone number it’s: 480-734-1256.  All of that’s on the website as well.

 

Steve:             Awesome.  Bill, thank you for sharing your forty years of expertise in this very, very critical area to managers.  Thank you for your time today.

 

Bill:                Again, I appreciate the opportunity. It’s been my pleasure, Steve, talking with you and your listeners, so have a great day.