Should You Hire a Financial Advisor ASAP?

We’re going to move on to Juan’s question. He says, “Why wait till 500k to hire a financial planner? Shouldn’t you work with one now, as soon as possible, in order to get to 500k as efficiently as possible and to ensure you don’t make any mistakes on your way up?”

Yeah, so you used to have to call a guy or a girl and have them open your account and place your trades if you wanted to buy a stock or open an account. But technology has changed the world. Now we have a plethora of information available to us, including blogs, podcasts, articles, YouTube channels, and books, among other resources. These can help us make sound financial decisions. When you’re first starting out, when you’re early on your financial journey, it’s not incredibly complicated. The steps are fairly basic: make sure you’ve got some money saved up for an emergency, live on less than you make, follow a budget, and save for the future. If you can do those things early on, it’s not incredibly difficult to set yourself up for a lot of success. So, what we tell younger folks earlier on in their accumulation journey is that, in the very beginning of your journey, every dollar that you can pull together is going to be so much more valuable building up your army of dollar bills, following through on the Financial Order of Operations, than paying a financial advisor’s fee. Can they come in and add value and tell you some interesting things? Absolutely. But I would argue that, right now, you could tune into this podcast or watch this YouTube channel, and you’re going to get a lot of that content. You’re going to get a lot of that information that you can take and, in 20-30 minutes, go implement yourself. So, why on earth would you want to pay a fee for that when you could take those hard-earned dollars and let them accelerate your wealth-building journey? That’s why we like to say, early on in the game, early on in your wealth-building, use the resources that are available to you and focus on save, save, save, save, save until you do hit that critical mass number.

Yeah, it’s gosh. There you go. You’d be dynamite on Family Feud. I mean, we gotta go on. I mean, seriously, we could crush it because it’s still Steve Harvey, right? Oh yeah, Steve Harvey.

We’d love to do a Money Guy Family Feud. Let us know. I mean, you’re just good. The only problem is we’d have to do all the answers coming through Bo first, so you know, we kind of need to capture all the other team’s mistakes. But okay, here’s what I wrote down. Number one was “know thyself” because I want to be careful because some of you, I think, sometimes I’m guilty as a financial mutant that I just assume everybody knows a lot of the things and they’re motivated by the same things of optimizing and so forth. But Juan, you know whether you’re gonna do something because somebody’s nudging you or not doing something because you’re not being nudged. I’m always amazed when we talk about mortgage debt and other things people are like, “Yeah, that might work by math, but I don’t know anybody who is actually putting that money to work versus paying down the debt.” And I’m realizing there are probably a lot of people that just, because you can see it in the credit card stats when over half the country doesn’t pay off their credit card every month.

Number two is, is that we really touched on this too, is that the do-it-yourself resources, because of technology and innovation, are dynamite right now. I mean, they are to the moon on how much opportunity you have to go out there. Through podcasts, since 2006, we’ve been blazing that trail, and then taking it into YouTube and even into some of the newer things of Instagram, TikTok, and so forth. There’s lots of stuff now, look. There’s a lot of bad stuff out there too, yeah, absolutely, but it is, I think, you can hopefully the good stuff rises to the top so you’ll know where the resources are, but there’s a lot of opportunity for you, and that leads to, and Bo said it in this closing statement, is critical mass is definitely important.

So, Juan, what I worry about is that in the beginning, your decisions should be pretty simple. I mean, because it really is, as much as that’s why we have the Financial Order of Operations. We’re really trying to just build up your financial foundations through deductibles covered, you know, employer match because that’s free money, paying off the high-interest debt. We’re trying to protect you from yourself, but these are easy understandable concepts because all I want you to focus on is how do you get to that critical mass where when you make 10% on $500,000, that’s $50,000. That’s potentially replacing a full year’s worth of living expenses. 10% on $5,000 is $500. That’s going to be, you know, a road trip or this month’s food or something, you know, like a grocery store or whatever, but it’s not going to be replacing full amounts. So you have to focus on how do you get to your assets being at the size that they truly replace you working so you control your time. You’re kind of at the true independence level, and that’s why I wanted to take away all the distractions because there’s so many in the financial world. The easiest thing to do is, that’s why we talk about indexed target retirement funds, is because you just have to know how much can you save, focus on that. Just like Bo said, when do you need it? They do everything else for you so that you can focus on making more money, spending less money, being purposeful with what your why is, how do you get the career, not the job? Those are all the things to focus on. I just don’t want you getting busy doing nothing, focusing on this financial game when there’s a lot of this stuff could be, you know, really automatic for the people and be created an automatic, automated wealth-building process. That’s where your resources and your calories and your horsepower, mental horsepower should be focused on.