Click below to listen to Episode 134 – The #1 Reason For Financial Failure
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134 – The #1 Reason For Financial Failure
There can be many reasons for financial failure, but one sticks out above all the rest. Bob and Shawn go into detail about the #1 reason for financial failure and the detrimental effect that it may have on your financial future. What exactly do we at Christian Financial Advisors consider financial failure? It can include a variety of items, but some financial failures that Shawn and Bob talk about are:
– Not having a will in place
– Not having life insurance (or enough life insurance)
– The inability to retire because of lack of savings
Listen in to see how you can help prevent financial failure in your life!
HOSTED BY: Bob Barber, CWS®, CKA®
CO-HOST: Shawn Peters
Mentioned In This Episode
Christian Financial Advisors
Bob Barber, CWS®, CKA®
Shawn Peters
Bible Verses In This Episode
PROVERBS 13:11
Dishonest money dwindles away, but whoever gathers money little by little makes it grow.
2 PETER 3:8
But do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Intro:
Welcome to Christian Financial Perspectives, where you’re invited to gain insight, wisdom, and knowledge about how Christians integrate their faith, life, and finances with a biblical worldview. Here’s your Christian Financial Advisors’ host, Bob Barber and his co-host, Shawn Peters.
Shawn:
Welcome to another episode of Christian Financial Perspectives, where we discuss how to use God’s word in finance. Bob, what do we got for today?
Bob:
Well, we have for today, Shawn, we’re gonna be talking about the number one reason for financial failure.
Shawn:
That’s gonna be a good one.
Bob:
I got a little tagline behind that, and it’s not what you think. Most people are gonna think very differently about financial failure after we cover today.
Shawn:
Then before we go any further, for those of you watching on YouTube, go ahead and put a comment down below on what you think the number one reason for financial failure is.
Bob:
Hey, that’s a great idea. Yeah, I like that.
Shawn:
And then we’ll see who got it, right? Yeah.
Bob:
Yeah. Do they get a prize?
Shawn:
yeah. You get to be the right comment.
Bob:
Okay. There you go. That’s right.
Shawn:
If you’re listening to us though, I guess you’ll have to go to YouTube for that. So let’s start with couple scriptures. Okay. How about Proverbs 13:11?
Bob:
I think that’s a good one.
Shawn:
“Dishonest money dwindles away, but whoever gathers money little by little makes it grow.”
Bob:
You know it’s the last part of that that’s so powerful here is that gathering money, little by little, that’s what makes it grow. It’s not all about getting rich quick. And we’ve talked a lot about that on Christian Financial Perspectives.
Shawn:
Yep. Well, let’s do one more then. 2 Peter 3:8, “But do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day.”
Bob:
I love that scripture. I’ve thought about it over the time cause sometimes people say, well, the Lord’s gonna be coming back tomorrow. I say, well it could be a thousand years because one day is like a thousand years with the Lord, because when we look at eternity and how long time is, but you’ll see how this goes, how these scriptures go with this later during the podcast. Alright. Or episode, because now we do video.
Shawn:
That’s right.
Bob:
And so we’re gonna be covering the number one reason for financial failure today. But next episode, we’re gonna be covering the number one reason behind financial success.
Shawn:
So make sure you tune into that one, too.
Bob:
There’s always two sides to it, and I want to give the reasons for signs of financial success as well. But I think it’s important that we look at these reasons. And a lot of people may relate to this because some of this has happened in their family, possibly.
Shawn:
And I think what we should do first is what is considered a financial failure? Because if you don’t know what we’re talking about here, you might be thinking something very different. And so, just to kind of get us all on the same page here, we’re gonna go over five examples that we’ve seen over and over, you more so than me.
Bob:
Oh yeah. In 30 years of doing this. I have seen these examples many, many times. And that first one…
Shawn:
That first one, A breadwinner dies without life insurance or enough to take care of the family in their absence.
Bob:
Seen this many times, unfortunately. And the breadwinner thinks that, oh, all I need is a hundred thousand dollars worth of coverage and they make a hundred thousand a year.
Shawn:
Right.
Bob:
And then they pass. So you got one year.
Shawn:
Exactly.
Bob:
Or you just haven’t gotten around to raising that coverage, or you don’t have any coverage at all. This is a very sad one, especially with a breadwinner that has a couple children at home like you do. You gotta make sure…
Shawn:
It changes over time. I know when Jenna and I first got married, the amount that I got was wasn’t millions of dollars. But the amount that I got at the time was enough that should something happen to me, it would give Jenna enough to completely pay off the house. That was the first thing. And also give her, I think it was like five years worth of supplemental income. You know, she wasn’t gonna be living like a queen, but it would be enough to cover all the necessities and everything. Give her time. Hopefully she’d grieve me for at least five years.
Bob:
Well life insurance today is just so cheap, Shawn, that there’s no reason for you to not get a 5 or 10 or 15 year term policy. It’s just pennies on the dollar.
Shawn:
But it changes over time. So that’s one of the things that like if you are the primary income earner make sure that hey, you got a new kiddo, well, you need to reevaluate your life insurance, as an example, especially if you’re still younger. You know, obviously if you’re talking about someone in their fifties and sixties, then by then you really should be focusing more on your own assets. Cause life insurance gets a little more expensive as you get older.
Bob:
I know.
Shawn:
So anyway, so that’s the first one.
Bob:
So here’s the second one I’ve seen. And this one just puts the family. I mean, you ever heard the old saying “rakes you over the coals”?
Shawn:
Yes.
Bob:
I mean, it just really rakes the family over the coals, and it is very sad. And I’ve seen this maybe 5 to 10 times in my career. Go ahead.
Shawn:
It’s when you have a family member that dies without a will and everything is locked up in probate for months or longer. Which also then costs the family thousands of dollars in attorney fees and all those accounts are locked up. So whether it’s spouse, parent, grandparent, aunt, or uncle, when someone dies without that will in place, there’s so much of that that could be preventable. Both the frustration – like you’ve already lost a loved one, but then they have to go through all the probate and the costs associated with it and not even having access to much of the funds anyway that could have helped with all kinds of things.
Bob:
Let’s get into the third financial failure that I see a lot of. And this one is a sad one as well. These are sad. All these are are tough to say. But there’s a reason, there’s a number one reason, this happens to every one of these failures that comes behind it.
Shawn:
So this next one is someone 65 to 70 years old. They can’t retire because they lack enough savings and investments to provide enough income for necessities. You know, again, it doesn’t mean necessarily having enough to retire like a king or queen.
Bob:
No, we’re not talking about 10 million dollars.
Shawn:
But not even being able to retire just for basic living expenses, and it’s sad.
Bob:
The fourth one is there’s no cash reserves when an emergency situation arise or loss of income.
Shawn:
Or sickness.
Bob:
Or sickness or just how about this one? Just your air conditioning breaks. Nowadays, that can cost $20,000 to fix. That causes failure because now what do you do? You either have to go in debt or you have to go in, say your 401k and borrow money out. And I consider that financial failure. And I’ve seen this not five times like we did on the probate. I’ve seen this hundreds of times.
Shawn:
Yeah. And a good a good rule of thumb that we always talk to people about is they have money that they want to invest, and one of the first things we ask is, well, what’s in your emergency fund right now? And many times people don’t have an emergency fund or they ask, well, what do you mean how much should be in there? So you always wanna make sure you’ve got about six months of your expenses, at least, for an emergency fund. And you might wanna have a little something else, too. Like you said, what if something goes out that’s expensive?
Bob:
So let’s get to the fifth one and we’re gonna just keep going and we gotta get to five of these, and there’s more. But I’m only using five today. And that fifth one I see is a financial decision that cannot be made on behalf of someone when they’ve been in a major accident or maybe they’ve had a heart attack and they go into a coma for a while, and they don’t have the right documentation in place to make financial decisions. I’ve seen this not a lot, but it has happened. And it can be scary because now the person that makes the financial decisions is no longer competent to do so.
Shawn:
So making sure you and your spouse are both on accounts and have signing authorization or maybe other part might be is having some sort of limited power of attorney or medical power of attorney or things like that.
Bob:
Yeah. So I want to ask you, you have any guesses yet? It’s really one word that leads to all this, these reasons for financial failure. Any guesses?
Shawn:
And if you’re watching, last chance to put it in the comments.
Bob:
Put in your comment. Okay. All right. Now, I’m going to go over the next part. We’re gonna give you some hints as to what this word might be because it’s a major word. And I’m telling you, I’ve seen this over and over, the number one reason. But we’re gonna quickly go through these. Shawn, you’re gonna read one and then I’m gonna read one.
Shawn:
All right. So to give you a hint, “It’s nearly Christmas. I’ll get around to getting that will done after the new year.”
Bob:
“It’s a new year, and we’re so busy. Let’s wait a few months until it slows down and then we can get on it.”
Shawn:
“Oh, no. Gotta get those tax returns done first, then we can talk about getting that will done. Saving and investing, getting an adequate life insurance policy. Let’s just wait until after April 15th.”
Bob:
“Oh no, it’s April 15th. After then, school is about out for the summer. We’re so busy now with all the kids and activities. Let’s wait until after school is out to get all this done.”
Shawn:
“The kids are only young once. We really need to plan our summer vacation for the family now, and we are all just so busy with the kids outta school. So let’s do all of this when we get back from summer vacation and get the kids back in school, kinda get back on a normal schedule.”
Bob:
“Yeah. Well we got ’em back in school now. But now we’re so busy with the kids and school and football and soccer and band and dance practices. Let’s wait until things slow down a little and then we’ll get some of these things done like getting that life insurance policy or starting that savings plan.”
Shawn:
Exactly. And the cycle continues. Now we’re back to Thanksgiving and Christmas and what do you know, New Year’s.
Bob:
Shawn, there’s never a convenient time. Okay. There’s never a convenient time to do these things to keep you from having financial failure. Shawn, you have an example when I was talking to you about this – I think it’s interesting that we have a client that for six years has been, what is this example?
Shawn:
So, unfortunately, we have a client that for the last six years, going back and looking at the previous meetings that we’d had and seen basically what looks like the same meeting, which is, okay, here’s where you’re at. Here’s what you might be able to retire on. Okay. Here’s what’s going on. And kind of, here’s the shortfall and here’s the solution. So maximize your IRA contributions and you know, a couple other little things. And so we get together the paperwork to get that move money authorization in place and get everything ready to go. And then, the same thing happens every year where we have a couple months where we’re contacting the client and trying to get things signed and move forward. It’s one of the things that, “Later we’ll get this done.” And now six years have gone by, six years that could have involved consistent investing and actually getting more prepared for retirement. And now, if they wanted to retire in another three or four years, they’re not gonna be able to because of that thing we talked about before. They’re not gonna be able to meet minimum necessities.
Bob:
So here’s that thing already. All right? It’s one word, it’s called procrastination. Procrastination.
Shawn:
End the video. Just kidding.
Bob:
Procrastination is the number one reason for financial failure. Every one of these that we named was because of procrastination. It was procrastination to get the will done. It was procrastination to get the life insurance policy or to get more coverage. It was procrastination to start saving. It’s procrastination.
Shawn:
There’s another one where that could go right along with that, Bob. All of these resulted from procrastination, but they were all preventable.
Bob:
Every one of ’em, every one of ’em was preventable. So Shawn, I went and I did some research on procrastination, like, why is this happening? I thought, well, this person just won’t get around to it or they’re just lazy or whatever. I was wrong. So, there’s a difference.
Shawn:
Not only that, Bob, but I thought it was really cool how God kind of orchestrated this script together because you tell me what this is about. That is, and I go, well, that’s weird because it was like two days before that maybe that I had just had a Ted Ed video that I saw pop up in my feed and it was on procrastination and like the science and the psychology of it. And it was just kinda cool. You know, we kind of both came to the same conclusion separately.
Bob:
So, I found two different definitions of procrastination. One is, and Garrett, I want you to put this up while I’m reading this so everybody can see this. Procrastination is the habit of avoiding an urgent task despite negative consequences. When people procrastinate, they often delay priorities and instead focus on less important, more enjoyable, simpler tasks instead. Okay. Shawn, will you read that next one? And put this definition up for this one also.
Shawn:
Sure. Procrastinators tend to prefer pleasure over progress. They are task adverse, putting off important tasks by doing something else that feels more productive or easier and enjoyable. They don’t seek rewards that seem far into the future.
Bob:
So we are gonna go over it, there was a lot of words and some common reasons about what causes procrastination, and we’re just gonna list these. But I’m telling you as I went over this, I never thought of it that way. Especially this first one, which is…
Shawn:
Perfectionism.
Bob:
Perfectionism. So they’re waiting for the perfect time. So a lot of people that procrastinate are actually perfectionists. Which they wanna do it the right way, right?
Shawn:
Yeah. And I used to think that, too, that procrastination was typically more associated with people are just lazy, you know? Or like, they just don’t feel like doing any work.
Bob:
It’s not the case.
Shawn:
And yet the vast majority of it is, I mean, we’re gonna go through ’em, but you’ve got perfectionism, you have fear of failure.
Bob:
I can see that.
Shawn:
Fear of criticism.
Bob:
Yeah. That I’ve made the wrong choice, so I’m just going to procrastinate and I’m not gonna move forward.
Shawn:
And I felt that when we were going through these and making this list, like, oh, I feel guilty that so many times, too, where I realize I’ve been putting this task off not because I don’t know how to do it or not because I don’t realize it’s important, but because to an extent, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, “Well, I don’t want to fail at it.” You know? So for those of you watching and listening, I feel you. This is not just something we’re throwing at you, and we’re not guilty of it.
Bob:
I think we all feel this. Okay. All of us have done this. As an example to avoidance, I’m just gonna avoid this. It’s not gonna happen.
Shawn:
Maybe it’ll go away.
Bob:
I’m never gonna die. I’m never gonna get sick. I’m never going to retire. I’m never gonna have a cash reserve need. I’m like, wait a second. But you can avoid it for only so long because it’s gonna come along. Cause there’s a time for every season under the sun. And it says that Ecclesiastes that there’s a time for everything.
Shawn:
You know, Bob, my pastor in the last message he said, I don’t remember in the context of what he was talking about, but he did say that, “Right now, last I checked, the death rate’s still hovering at about a hundred percent.” Yeah. So that avoidance, it’s not gonna work because eventually we’re gonna go be at home with the Lord.
Bob:
There could also be some self-esteem issues, a tendency to self defeat. Depression can cause procrastination, trouble focusing, this is kind of one that maybe you and I, Shawn with our high energy.
Shawn:
What? No. ADD?
Bob:
Not at all.
Shawn:
Neither one of us. I’m not on medication for that either.
Bob:
Task aversion, resisting challenges. You don’t like that challenge. You just don’t want it because it doesn’t feel good. It’s hard to go into that.
Shawn:
Number 12, decision fatigue.
Bob:
Oh yeah. I think a lot of people do that.
Shawn:
Yeah. Especially, I mean, you’re at work and you know, you have all these different things you have to do and you’re trying to make decisions between all of them and you literally just get fatigued from all the decisions you make, and so you avoid some of them. You procrastinate. And it doesn’t go away.
Bob:
So we only have three more. Difficulty defining goals, a disconnect with the future self, and really just a lack of energy. I got a lot of these from a website that we could put up there. I thought was really good. What causes procrastination?
Shawn:
And there’s also really great Ted Ed video that we can maybe throw in there as well.
Bob:
Yeah. If you could do that for us, Garrett, and get that in there. Okay. So, one of the things I thought was, let’s give some solutions. And one is I think start very small. Okay. Don’t try to eat the whole elephant at one time. Just take small bites.
Shawn:
If you’re a vegetarian, don’t eat the entire gourd at one time.
Bob:
Yeah. So when we look at these five things, like if you’re the breadwinner, if you think that you need more life insurance, go online today and just get a quote. Or, just call your life insurance agent. Maybe that’s the one thing you’re gonna do. Not all five of these, but just that one that we mentioned, or if you don’t have a will, make that call to an attorney. So you don’t have to do number one right now, but maybe you just need to do number two right now. Or, you haven’t started saving. Well, you look at that and you’re going, man, I just don’t have the funds. Don’t go to Starbucks. Quit buying the expensive coffees. Don’t go out to eat as much. Just start with $20 a month or $50 a month $50 per pay period.
Shawn:
Just get it. Just do something where you get in the habit of adding something to your investments. It doesn’t have to be that you’re completely maxing it out, but like you said, maybe it’s – for that little step, Bob – find one thing that you know you keep spending money on that’s very discretionary and you don’t really need, and cut that budget in half and invest the other half.
Bob:
It’s like we were gonna say at the very end, I just gotta say it right now, it’s all about baby steps.
Shawn:
That’s right.
Bob:
Now, you knew when I said that what I was talking about. There’s a funny movie from years ago called “What About Bob?” And you know, I’m Bob. So it’s called “What About Bob?” and it is so funny, but it talks about baby steps and he can’t get anything done because he’s scared to go to the next one. You gotta see that movie. It is hilarious, and he starts doing baby steps and eventually gets where he can do anything.
Shawn:
That’s right.
Bob:
He actually becomes a psychologist in the very end. It is a funny movie, but I’m just telling you, don’t try for the all or nothing approach.
Shawn:
That’s right.
Bob:
Okay. Just little parts at a time. I think we can help you get over that procrastination.
Shawn:
And that’s just like the scripture that we read, it’s little by little. It’s not all at once. It’s little by little. Just start knocking out those individual steps.
Bob:
Make it this week I’m just gonna call the attorney and make an appointment for the will. Make it next week. I’ll just make one call, one call. I mean, I’m talking 40 or 50 hours in the week. Just make five minutes. Five minutes to make the phone call to the insurance agent or to go online for that quote. Your family will appreciate it. You will appreciate it. You will be glad that you started. Go to your human resources at your work and start that retirement plan. Say I’m gonna put $25 a week outta my paycheck. And then it’s gonna be $50 and then it eventually you’ll be surprised. I’ve got clients that are putting $1000 a month or 2000 a month into their plans
Shawn:
Your goal would be to just slowly try to increase that stuff at your work for your retirement and at least get to where you’re putting away the maximum your company will match, because otherwise you’re leaving free money on the table.
Bob:
Well, that’s gonna do it for today. I tell you, if you need help, we want to help guide you to get you in the right direction for this. And you can give us a call at (830) 609-6986 during business hours, or you can text that number or you can go visit our website www.christianfinancialadvisors.com. Now, I want you to join us on our next episode, because we’re gonna be going over the number one reason behind long-term financial success. And that’s gonna just be two words. This week was one word, procrastination. The next one will be two words. You can be thinking about what those words are that link up to long-term financial success. Until then…
Shawn:
Thank you for joining us and God bless.
Outro:
We invite you to listen to all of our past episodes, covering many financial topics from a Christian perspective. To make sure you don’t miss any of Bob’s upcoming episodes. You can subscribe to Christian Financial Perspectives on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or Amazon Music to learn more about integrating your faith with your finances. Visit Christianfinancialadvisors.com or call (830) 609-6986.
Disclosures:
Investment advisory services offered through Christian Investment Advisors, Inc DBA Christian Financial Advisors also known as Christian Financial Advisors Management Group, a registered investment advisor. Comments from today’s show for informational purposes only, and not to be considered investment advice or recommendations to buy or sell any company that may have been mentioned or discussed. The opinions expressed are solely those of the host Bob Barber and his guests. Bob does not provide tax advice and encourages you to seek guidance from a tax professional. While Christian Investment Advisors believes the information to be accurate and reliable, we do not claim or have responsibility for its completeness, accuracy, or reliability.