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Episode 84: The Uncommon Wealth Book
110 Plays4 years ago
Come along with Phillip and Bryan to hear more about the Uncommon Wealth Book.
They wrote it with YOU in mind, to provide the philosophy, mindset, and tools to get you started on your uncommon path. What you’ll learn: the process of how the book got started, where to find tools to go along with the book, and the details of the flow of the book.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Book Announcement
00:00:00
Speaker
As many of you know, we've been working on a book for the last two years. It is finally done. We hope you enjoy it. Go to www.uncommonwealth.com and click on resources and underneath the resources tab, it'll be a book where you can buy your own. Hope you enjoy it and hope it helps you get down your uncommon path yourself.
00:00:21
Speaker
Everyone dreams about living an uncommon life, but how we define that dream is very different for each of us. And for most, it's a lifelong pursuit. Welcome to the Uncommon Life Project podcast. We're going to introduce you to people who are living that life or enjoying the journey to get there. We're going to also give you some tools, tricks, and tips for starting or accelerating your own efforts to live an uncommon life.
00:00:46
Speaker
A life worth celebrating and savoring.
Authors' Background and Motivation
00:00:49
Speaker
Please welcome your hosts, Brian Dewhurst and Philip Ramsey.
00:00:54
Speaker
Hello, and welcome everybody to another episode of The Uncommon Life Project, where I'm your host, Phillip Ramsey. And I am Brian Dewhurst. Thanks for tuning in. We are glad you're here. This is a duo cast, and Brian and I are going to talk about something we've been working on for a long time now. It feels like a decade. It really has. It is the book that we wrote. The Uncommon Wealth. You're your best asset. Invest in yourself.
00:01:19
Speaker
If that doesn't tell you what we do, I don't know what else would. We're financial advisors that think you are your best asset, and we are here to prove it to you and show you that your unique gifts, passions, and experiences can help you build wealth and impact others. Amen.
00:01:34
Speaker
Oh, can't wait to talk about this. I feel like we've been talking about this, you and I, for a long time. The book? Yeah, the book. You've always wanted to write a book. In fact, we've tried it one time. And no joke, Brian buys a dictation service. He he's like, Hey, I want to write a book. And then the next day, he's like, Hey, I wrote the book. And it wasn't the next day. It was maybe five days later. It was like a month later. Okay, he's like, I've done with the book.
00:02:00
Speaker
And I was like, oh my goodness, let me, let me see it. So I'll email it to you. He emailed me the dictation of the whole thing as he was driving. And I tried to copy it and tasted it together. Okay. Yeah, even better. I read the first two sentences and I'm like, we haven't written a book.
00:02:22
Speaker
It was basically a collection of thoughts. Wow. And so we actually have written a book and we have, uh, with the help, I would say of a ghost writer. Yeah, we're going to get into it. We are. Do you want to just go into it? I don't know if I want to yet. Uh, let's talk first about why did we even write the book? Well, to me and my recollection of things, which can be skewed,
00:02:47
Speaker
I feel like as we get older, we skew our recollection of things a little bit. Not maybe knowingly, but unknowingly. The reality of what we're looking
Building a Community Around a Financial Philosophy
00:02:55
Speaker
at, yeah. So we were invited to speak to a high school class on personal finance a couple of times.
00:03:03
Speaker
And so that was one of the influences for me is cause you know, these doe eyed high school kids that think they're smarter than you, you know, we're trying to tell people like, what do you do with your money? And it was just like, yeah, we need like a quick one, two, three, one, two, three, four, four step process of what to do. And then, you know, we were talking when we meet a lot of people and it was like within a month, I think three or four different people are like, you should write a book.
00:03:29
Speaker
you know, totally unrelated, you know, we weren't asking for that type of advice. It was just kind of unsolicited. Hey, you should do this. And then, yeah, just kind of thinking through, you know, our most fun, successful clients and what the common denominators were. We flushed out kind of the philosophy of what we've been doing for the last decade and wrote a book about it. So that would, to me, was the genesis or
00:03:59
Speaker
you know, the inputs to the catalyst to write a book. Right. And, you know, here's the deal. At the end of the day, Brian and I are not the most efficient people. Like we're just not. And so every time we meet somebody, we either try to like recreate the wheel to try to show them how they can walk down their own uncommon path that makes it easy to read for them. And everybody's different. So we seem like we always recreate the wheel. And we were like, we need something to galvanize kind of like my uncle Dave Ramsey, which is not really my uncle.
00:04:25
Speaker
I always feel like I have to caveat that. But if you're a long time listener, you know what I say that if you saw the hair, you would instantly know that that you're not related. That's right. So we needed something like that to help galvanize people of like how to even go down this uncommon path. And so as we started doing that, I was like, oh, this is actually getting kind of good. And we
00:04:43
Speaker
we have something that I think is cool in the philosophy of the uncommon wealth, which you are your best asset, start investing in your passions and dreams and get paid for what you're, what you're excited about. Um, but then how do you get that? And then we tried to really unlock Brian's mind candidly of how he thinks about people's numbers. So that's how we started it. Um, it's kind of went through, we had a ghost writer help us. So we would try to do high level thoughts. And then we outlined the book, masterminded it. Yep. And then
00:05:14
Speaker
detail outlined it. Yep, and then gave it to a ghostwriter to fill in the...
00:05:19
Speaker
So proverbial cracks. Right. And then we would get it back and be like, yeah, we got to change this, that and the other. But we get a book and I'm actually really excited about it because let's be honest, it wasn't going to be a common book. Even if people think it sucks, it's like it's a huge accomplishment. I agree. Like it's it's really I mean, we got two years into this thing, basically. I mean, we started September of 19.
00:05:43
Speaker
when we started writing it. So it's almost two full years. Yeah, it's crazy to think that way, but it is. But once we got it done, we pretty much redid it to add the uncommon dashboard, which is on our website. So you can, inside each chapter, there's homework or a tool to kind of go through to help you flush this out, this uncommon path and what you want in your life.
00:06:09
Speaker
And then how do you organize your resources and capital to support those things? So anyways, there's tools within the book and we put all that within our website at uncommonwealth.com. So you can go and fill that out along with reading the book. Because we just didn't want people to take the book, read the book, really.
00:06:28
Speaker
Resonate with the book and then not have something they could do. Yeah, and then move on to the next thing Yeah, and I think the other thing that's really important and I mean, we're pretty open book because we we help people grow Not only their wealth but their businesses and and their things so like we're trying to eat our own cooking as well of not just telling people to do this stuff but actually do it ourselves and kind of use ourselves as the guinea pig and so
00:06:52
Speaker
You know, we've talked to people about writing books and building kind of like a value ladder,
Phases for Achieving Financial Freedom
00:06:59
Speaker
if you will, or, you know, a stepping stone for people to, you know, consume your content, you know, become a client, those types of things. And so this was a big step for us to do the same thing and to kind of live out our own cooking. That's a good point. I want to go back to you said we talked to high school kids.
00:07:17
Speaker
It's really interesting because I've talked to, I've spoken to some high schools kids before that or after that. And here's my thing. When you're in high school, you have this unbridled thought of, well, of course I'm going to get paid for what I love to do. Like that's just what I'm going to do. Right. So I'm just going to be really honest with you. Our philosophy doesn't really resonate for those high school kids, honestly, because they're like thinking about like, how do I invest for retirement and like the next day or later?
00:07:46
Speaker
But really, they really have the right mindset of, well, I'm going to get paid for what I love to do and like, nobody's going to stop me. So when I talk to them, it's kind of like, well, that's my reality. And really what we do is we talk to adults and we help kind of change their mindset and like, you don't have to be stuck in a dead end job. So it was interesting. I wanted to make that point about the high school kids because
00:08:09
Speaker
those are the kind of mindset that we want people to go back to. The difference is you now have assets that you've accumulated over the years to actually help you unlock that passion and your experiences and your gifts. So, all right, let's talk about it. Well, one other thing I was going to say, and I kind of forgot, but so part of our, we use kind of the EOS methodology, entrepreneurial operating system, the traction book, and Mark Stanley has been on the show.
00:08:36
Speaker
Um, but part of our mission, you and I for uncommon wealth is to reach 25,000 people with this message. And so we know we can't help everybody, you know, one-on-one kitchen table type. Uh, now, you know, a lot of it is over zoom, but, uh, we still love meeting in person and doing events. So the book is really a tool for us to reach more people. Um,
00:08:59
Speaker
And it's kind of a stepping stone for people that, you know, maybe listen to the podcast or hear about us. It's just another, you know, tool to kind of flush this out and then also give them the resource, the website to start documenting their own process. Right. And normally when people write books, there always is an end game. What do you want the end game to be? Some people hand out their books just so they can get there. I don't want to do that. You know what? That's funny because when you
00:09:27
Speaker
think about the end game of our book. Everyone kept asking, what's the end game? We're like, we just kind of want to write the book. I don't know. That's it. So, but we do know, and Brian, I'd edify that totally. We know that we can't be advisors to everybody that this message and philosophy hits, but we do want to encourage and give them something to help kind of encourage them to keep going down this path. Well, and I think the end game for us is the C word community. And we've always envisioned
00:09:55
Speaker
Uncommonwealth is being an open source platform, and one of the things we talk about with the seven sources of residual income is there's so many different ways to make money, and we've got to speak to so many talented people who are making money in different ways and share those insights.
00:10:09
Speaker
And you look at the Bigger Pockets website for real estate, which is an open source collection of the best ideas in real estate. We want this to be an open source platform eventually and a community of people bringing the best ideas to the table because things change.
00:10:27
Speaker
businesses have been flow. And then some things just stay the same. Wisdom is wisdom. Truth is truth. But yeah, we want it to be a collection of people that are bringing the uncommon wealth to the next level, not just you and I. Right. So something that I think that is interesting to talk about when we're helping people is we normally don't bring these investment ideas to people.
00:10:50
Speaker
It's usually we help you try to unlock what you're excited about, what your passions are, what your gifts are, and what your past experience are, and then try to put those all together for your specific uncommon path. And so in that, we sometimes have to leverage the other people in the community that help that, and we've kind of vetted those. And so that's fun for us, too, to try to just meet those, you know, make those introductions and such. So we're not saying we have all the answers. We're saying that we're actually pretty good
00:11:19
Speaker
making a plan for you to be able to step into a reality that you want to make in the future. So, okay, so I want to say high level. Let's kind of break down the book. The first part is more of a philosophy. Maybe why, even if you've just randomly picked this book up at Barnes and Nobles, because I think you can. I don't know.
00:11:40
Speaker
Maybe not. You can like order it there, but it won't be on the shelf. I think it's going to be a Des Moines dog on it. If I'm going to I'm going to try to make it. Yeah, figure that out. But so let's say you pick this up, just reading it out like you have to have a mindset shift. There has to be a mindset shift that hey, maybe the way that my parents
00:12:00
Speaker
built wealth, or maybe the generations before me built wealth. What's the right way to build wealth? And for us, we not only give a pitch to this philosophy, obviously, but we also give a couple instances of the problem, why this philosophy is so important right now. Could you remember any of those reasons why?
00:12:21
Speaker
Well, obviously, our parents' generation, it's the three-legged stool of retirement. You have a pension from the company you work for, you have social security from the government, and then you have your own personal savings or investments. Right now, I think in the country, social security for the average American is about 50% of their monthly income.
00:12:44
Speaker
But when we look forward to the next generation, most pensions are gone. I'm sure there's still great pensions out there. But for a large portion of the United States, pensions are no longer a part of the equation. And with inflation and the amount of money that's been printed in the last couple of years, inflation and the devaluation of the dollar, or trying to say it in a more understandable way, like groceries at the store being more expensive,
00:13:13
Speaker
you know, the portion of social security as an overall percentage of your income isn't going to be 50%. You know, it might be 30, 25, 20%. And so if you don't have a pension and social security is cut in half as a portion of what you need to survive, you know, more of that onus is going on to the individual to support themselves into perpetuity or, you know, to the end stages of their life.
00:13:39
Speaker
Another way to say this is if you talk to a younger person, let's say a 40, 30-year-old, they're going to say, don't even plan on social security. So you have to be thinking differently. And as Brian and I get to meet with lots of people, it's been fun to see. It'd be fun to interact with these things and kind of hire trends. What I've found is my grandparents were a lot more entrepreneurial than my parents.
00:14:06
Speaker
And so it seems like it's starting to swing back to people are starting to understand, like, if I'm going to really love my life tomorrow, I have to create something on my own because me working for somebody else at Wells Fargo or wherever got to love you Wells Fargo. You're always my example. I'm sorry. But.
00:14:24
Speaker
Anyway, you you have to start thinking differently. And so that's a really good way. And it really complements this uncommon philosophy of, hey, create something on your own and you'll love your life every day. So now not say it's going to be easy, but it is. It is. It most certainly won't be easy. Right. But it will
Investment Readiness and Personal Growth
00:14:44
Speaker
be something that you'll learn from and you'll get to wake up fulfilling and impacting others. It's pretty it's pretty neat. And I love this thing. If you give me
00:14:54
Speaker
a lot of money, and I put it in the market. And let's say something happens, the market goes away, falls down, and the money goes to zero. What did you really learn? Well, you haven't really learned a lot, except not to put your money with Philip and Brian. But if you use that money and you try to create something, and let's say that thing goes to zero, what did you learn?
00:15:14
Speaker
a ton. And so for me, just the learning aspect of it, that's just the way I'm wired. Some people aren't. But anyway, so we do all the traditional stuff, but we also like try to help people create that. And so that's the first kind of part of the book is the philosophy, the problem, and then the philosophy, the high level answer. Yeah, right. And then that's followed up with the mindset, because like you said, you know, when you start something,
00:15:39
Speaker
you know, it takes the right mindset to keep going. And, you know, we kind of talk about when you're a kid, you have a coach, but when you get out of college, you kind of don't have a coach. And so being mentored or being coached is so important. And renewing your mindset, even the Bible talks about that, renewing your mindset as a business owner or entrepreneur, if you're gonna go down this path, is you gotta surround yourself with people that are like-minded and have been through it because it is gonna be challenging.
00:16:07
Speaker
And so you have to rewire your mind a little bit to go down this path because it's counter-cultural. And so a lot of the inputs and different things you're going to be hearing or seeing are going to be saying like, you're crazy. I mean, I think that's one of the biggest questions we get. Someone will share like, well, this is what I've been thinking. Am I crazy?
00:16:28
Speaker
And it's like, no, you're not crazy. You're just probably not surrounded by people that have the appetite for that type of risk or maybe can't see the vision that you have because they're not able to step into that mentally. And so yeah, you're not crazy, but
00:16:46
Speaker
you know, you are different than other people and some people just can't handle that. So, so then we go into the phases of how we help people step into the uncommon wealth path or uncommon philosophy. And phase one is you have to know your budget. You have to know your numbers. And if you don't know your numbers, I love this one because there's some people who just don't want to know their numbers. Right.
00:17:09
Speaker
And I would say those people aren't ready for the uncommon path. So it's a very low barrier to entry, but also one that is a very good test exactly to see if they're going to weed themselves out. And so the first one is just like, how much money do you need a month?
00:17:27
Speaker
And you can go into super detail of this. You don't have to. But I know when we do a call or meeting with a client and we're like, well, what's your monthly budget? And they're like, well, let me just pull up my spreadsheet. We got that. But you know they're ready to go because they've done the work. And it does take work.
00:17:45
Speaker
to know what you're spending a month. Right. And I'll edify my homie, Dave Ramsey, because he does a good job with that. Here's how to do it. This is why you do it. And so, kudos. Phase two is honestly a lot like my uncle, but it is to create a capital fund. I hate the word emergency fund personally.
00:18:06
Speaker
It's like a poverty mindset thing. And I hate it. It's like, let's just ask things to go wrong in our life. And, you know, we're, we're, we have kids, a mortgage house, we run a business. Stuff's going to go wrong for sure. But like, I just, yeah, we want to put capital together because we want to build things and we want to move forward.
00:18:28
Speaker
Right. And sometimes those plans have a wrench. Yeah, a wrench gets thrown into it. So the number one killer of all businesses is not sitting on enough cash, lack of capital. So we really think capital, the capital fund is a huge deal. And for depending on your risk tolerance,
00:18:49
Speaker
it should be bigger or smaller depending on what you want to do. You want to have very little margin, maybe $15 in your capital fund. If you want a very large margin, maybe 12 months. So whatever you feel comfortable with, but whatever that monthly expense is to have that and try to figure out how much in your capital fund you need. And then phase three. Phase three is now the investing phase of you've done the first thing, you know how much you need,
00:19:14
Speaker
You have a capital fund, now you move into the investing phase. And this to me is what's fun to be able to step alongside people with is because we're agnostic on the investment. What do you want to do? We're speaking about investing globally, not like stocks and bonds specifically. Could be any type of investment. Real estate, business.
00:19:36
Speaker
Yep. Whatever it is. So you've heard us all talk about the seven sources of residual income. That's kind of how we broke those out in those and kind of detailed each one of those for people to kind of like just read about it and see which one resonates with you. We don't care. And I haven't, there hadn't been a lot of people who've invested outside of that, but, um,
00:20:00
Speaker
Hopefully, that falls into that and it gets your juices flowing and you get excited about something. Maybe that Jumanji drum beat that we talk about a lot beats harder and you can figure out what you want to invest in. That's phase three, the investment phase. Your goal to get out of phase three is start creating enough income to cover your monthly expenses that you just figured out in phase one.
00:20:22
Speaker
When you know that, you move into what we call financial freedom, phase four. Or I'd say phase 3.2, 3.1. And in that, then you're starting to cover your base need, and you're learning more about yourself. But we know that we've done phase three right. When you get to phase four the first time, you're like, I can do it better. I like this part, but I sure didn't like that part. So you go back into phase three, and then you
00:20:51
Speaker
tweak it. Just keep refining. You keep refining. And you do that a couple times, right? You do a refining. Oh, it works. Oh my goodness. Now I don't have to do that one project I hated. You hire somebody, whatever it is, you make it more efficient. You buy software, whatever it could be. But usually it does take some investment back into the business.
00:21:09
Speaker
in order for us to get more return out of the business. We love it. So to me, that's a fun deal to see people wanting to go back into the phase three because we know that they're not really doing it for the money per se. They're doing it because they like to do it. And every day they get to go do that. And now it's a different switch in the mind because they're not necessarily worried about how they're going to pay the bills the next day.
00:21:35
Speaker
So you do that a couple times. And by couple times, I mean like, hey, you tweak things, you... You're perfecting the system. Right. And you're getting more and more out of it. But eventually you do get to this like financial freedom date or financial freedoms.
00:21:50
Speaker
place. Let's just call it place. And that's what we would say, the people that we really like to work with are the people who are like, I need to go help somebody else with these four phases. Like, not only did it work for me, I need to now go invest in somebody else, pour into somebody else, because there's just not a lot of people out there that are helping
00:22:10
Speaker
entrepreneurial people win. And so those people can walk beside somebody else and show them the four phases for them. And we have some of those people right now doing that, and it's super fulfilling. For sure. What else do we want to talk about?
00:22:26
Speaker
Well, in the book, in each, I don't think in the first couple chapters, but most of the chapters there's a case study. So we highlight an actual case study or family that kind of embodies that chapter of the book, trying to show different ways of how actual real people have made money.
00:22:46
Speaker
you know, more so independently and uncommonly. And then within each chapter two, there's kind of like homework or an action item that you can take to help organize, you know, your thoughts and ideas, dreams, passions, along with your resources, your capital, you know, where all your different accounts or
00:23:06
Speaker
how much equity in your house kind of walks you through how to organize your numbers, kind of like you said earlier, based on the way we kind of think about them and how we organize people's stuff to show them a plan. And then that is...
00:23:22
Speaker
you know, on our website at uncommonwealth.com under resources, the Uncommon Dashboard or Uncommon Wealth Dashboard is kind of where you can input those things and it will send you, you know, our website will send you a PDF version of your one page dashboard. So, and we have a podcast on that if you want to listen to that specifically, but that's kind of how the book is set up. How do they get the book?
00:23:51
Speaker
they get the book by going to our website, www.uncommonwealth.com. And under, you know, books or whatever, it's gonna be on our website. You can find them by the book. It is also on Amazon and you can also get it on Kindle as well. And it's in the trade, as our publisher calls it. So if you went to a Barnes and Noble or Borders or BAM, you could also order it there.
00:24:21
Speaker
Nice. Okay, so that's basically it. And like
Future Plans and Conclusion
00:24:25
Speaker
I would say, you don't have to buy the book to do the uncommon wealth dashboard. You can just go to our website right now and do that. Honestly, we hope that that helps you. And we hope that that really galvanizes your thoughts and you and your spouse to get on the same page to move forward.
00:24:39
Speaker
But yeah, I would just encourage you to do something. Reach out to us, like let's just have a 15 minute call, see if we can help you unblock yourself from any kind of obstacles in your way and talk through those. Email us, we'd love to hear from you as well. Here's my last question. After writing our first book, would you write another one? And what would it be about?
00:25:04
Speaker
I certainly do want to write several other books. Several, I love it. You know, a couple of them are more personal. One is like a kid's book. I've actually outlined a book on pitching, baseball, softball, pitching. I'm talking more uncommon words, man. I know, but I'm just saying...
00:25:22
Speaker
I think for you and I on what we've discussed, I like the idea of, you know, I think what Dave Ramsey has done of wiring personal finance into the church is interesting. Obviously, we don't agree with a lot of what he says. And I think from the stuff that we're reading,
00:25:42
Speaker
and some other books and influences in our life, showing people, showing Christians, showing how to churches to partner with businesses. Because ultimately, you know, money is a tool and businesses help generate money because, you know, we're involved in commerce, we're creating goods and services, we're creating value. And so how do we do that and fund, you know, the next generation? How do we invest in
00:26:09
Speaker
people and causes and things to lift people up and share the glory of God. And so, I think for me, it's pursuing that relationship.
00:26:21
Speaker
you know, of what we're kind of trying to create with uncommon wealth. And then obviously, you know, how does that coexist or flourish within a church setting? So nice. Okay. Well, you've been listening to what about you? You know, I, you know, I don't know. I, I would say that the first book was really good just to be able to, we've got a lot of ideas and just to put them on one piece of paper and have them stay on that piece of paper.
00:26:45
Speaker
It's very encouraging to me. So yeah, that one always kind of appeals to me a little bit, as I think that there's a better way to build wealth than just put it into a 401k, obviously. So that's appealing to me for sure. We'll have to just see how this book resonates with the listeners. And then after that, I think I can give you a good decision. But right now, I don't know if I can. Do we have any promotion for the people listening to this podcast that want to buy the book?
00:27:15
Speaker
Yes, we do. What is that? So if you input the code...
00:27:22
Speaker
uncommon wealth into the website. If you go to our website, you know, we have our own website to sell the book. So this does not work on Amazon. So here that, uh, this is what they just did on our own website. But if you type in the term uncommon life, let's do an uncommon life project. Okay. That's the podcast. That's why you did it. Let's do the uncommon life project. All one word, all capitalized. Okay. Uncommon life project. All one word.
00:27:48
Speaker
Capitalized what do they get 20% off? Oh, wow of the book. Holy cow Getting crazy. Yeah, we're getting crazy watching by the book
00:27:57
Speaker
Yeah, by the book, definitely thank you for listening. Thanks for being a part of this journey with us. Obviously, it is a project of ours that we enjoy, we're passionate about, and we really do feel like you are your best asset. We're excited to unlock that for you. So you've been listening to the Uncommon Life Project. I've been your host, Phillip Ramsey. And I am Brian Dewhurst. Till next time, go be uncommon.
00:28:18
Speaker
That's all for this episode of the Uncommon Life Project, brought to you by Uncommon Wealth Partners. Be sure to visit uncommonwealth.com to learn more about our services. Don't miss an episode as we introduce you to inspiring people who are actively pursuing an uncommon life.