Episode Description: Kim Curtis, author of Money Secrets: Keys to Smart Investing, and Retirement Secrets shares how to use love to perform at a higher level, take more intentional risks and ultimately find greater financial success.
Video Highlight: Kim Curtis speaks about love leading to money.
Kim Curtis’ Bio: Kim is a nationally recognized wealth management advisor, speaker, president, and CEO of Wealth Legacy Institute. She is proud to have created a firm where she can truly put her clients first, bringing the alignment she needs to feel true joy in her work. For Kim, how you deal with money says a lot about how you deal with life, and she’s passionate about helping her clients find a balance. Kim is a bestselling author of Money Secrets: Keys to Smart Investing and Retirement Secrets, published by Financial Literacy Press. Kim has spoken on leadership, negotiations, and finance to organizations such as West Point, Oracle, EPA, University of Colorado Hospital, Comcast, Level 3, CenturyLink, OtterBox, Johnson & Johnson, and AAUW, amongst others. She has been profiled on NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, CW, and The Wall Street Journal.
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Full Transcript:
Bobbi Rebell
Welcome friends. This week we are talking about how love leads to money and prosperity. And in fact, our guest will teach us how we can use love to amplify our success.
But first - our quote of the week. I’ve been doing some spring decluttering and it is hard to get rid of things. So this really helped me keep some perspective and I hope you like it too.
And it is from the actor Sir Anthony Hopkins. Quote “The most important things in life, aren’t things”.
Let’s get to this week’s guest. Kim Curtis is the President and CEO of Wealth Legacy Institute. She is also the author of Money Secrets: Keys to Smart Investing and Retirement Secrets.
Our interview focused on how a focus on love and relationships done with the right mindset, will ultimately lead to prosperity. But it can also destroy relationships. Kim has some unique financial wellness strategies that I know will help all of us get closer to our goals.
Here is Kim Curtis.
Kim Curtis you are a financial grown-up, welcome to the podcast!
Kim Curtis
thank you Bobbi
Bobbi Rebell
i love the name of your company it is Wealth Legacy Institute you know a lot of people don't know this but the word wealth and wellness have the same roots which you just told me I love that
Kim Curtis
yes the etymology of the word wealth is well being which when you think of how much stuff we have around the word wealth and money but yet if we understood that it brought in so much more in terms of spiritual and personal and physical it just allows us to embrace it and come to the table easier for most
Bobbi Rebell
I love also what you say about your company is that your specialty is working with accidental millionaires how do we become accidental millionaires Kim what's the secret
Kim Curtis
That's a great question you know i could only speak from what i see with my clients but i think that you just do certain basic financial principles and then you forget about it you're just put it on autopilot and then as you get closer to retirement all of a sudden you don't realize that you have over a million dollars in retirement because you're just slugging away you're doing the job you're putting it in your four one k you're not touching it or borrowing from it and you're not messing with it when the capital markets go south you just keep contributing and not mess with the location
Bobbi Rebell
so it's not the lottery ticket just to be clear
Kim Curtis
for clarification bobbie it is absolutely not the lottery ticket because we already know those statistics that generally within three to five years the lottery winner has lost the money and the family is fractured
Kim Curtis
a lot of data around that
Bobbi Rebell
we're gonna mentally reset now and we're going to talk about the topic of this of this week which is how love and money connect, before i get into my specific questions tell me your viewpoint on this
Kim Curtis
where do i start it's so riveting of a conversation but i will i will start i will i'll throw it out there bobby and then we can go for it how's that
Bobbi Rebell (02:08.189)
good go
Kim Curtis
um i think that you need both however starting with love always provides a more fulfilling life ultimately so that's where i'm going to start
Bobbi Rebell
okay now i'm gonna pay devil's advocate we talk as financial professionals were both certified financial fanners you have a lot more alphabet soup after your name than i do maybe someday i'll catch up but anyway we tend to to remind people that for example who you choose as your life partner whether you're married or you partner together financially they are you know kind of the biggest financial decision of your life and yet in society there's this push back don't marry don't date for money love terms of all money can come and go do what do we do
Kim Curtis
so can love come and go but ultimately if we lead with love first it allows us to feel more empowered and more supported and more complete and when we feel that we're more likely to take more risk and we're more likely to be more successful because we're performing at a higher level when love supports us and when you perform at a higher level you're more likely to get promotions and earn more money and so it's kind of this wonderful circle that allows for money to find you
Bobbi Rebell
tell me more about that what do you mean by that you mean because i just saw a statistic the other day that you know and i don't know what to believe and went not to believe because as i hate to say this but as a former journalist we've learned that statistics kind of say anything we want them to say but i did see a statistic that you know married men live longer there's all these studies about that which is kind of depressing because i think that everyone should live longer it shouldn't be just you know because i put so much undue pressure, especially on single people to pair up what is the connection between love and money i mean our single people doomed i don't want to believe that
Kim Curtis
no no not at all i actually bobby will take it a little further back to put context around the conversation i tend to believe how you do money is how you do life so if you have your head in the sand on money you have your head in the sand on other areas of your life so success around money is an inside job so the more you know yourself and when you have a relationship it's easier to get to know yourself because you tend to understand and learn more of your preferences of what you like and don't like so if you knew how you do money is how you do live and then you understood that actually to have money… money is actually looking for you not the other way around when we think I need money i need money, no money needs you it needs your ideas your vision your values to turn it into something of use to the world
Bobbi Rebell
so give us an example of that okay so give us an example of that how that would work in real life because you're losing me a little bit
Kim Curtis
fair fair the money means nothing it's a piece of paper it only is a value that we give it so it's like our arms and our legs we need them but is our arms or our legs more important no we need them both so that's kind of the conversation with love and money it isn't necessarily that one is better than the other you need them both to have a successful abundant life and so if you start with love first then you're more likely to have a more rounded approach to money but it doesn't mean that you can't it doesn't mean that you can't have money without love many people have money without love it just is not as fun
Bobbi Rebell
one of the things that causes a lot of financial anxiety even when you do have love in your life is if you disagree on your financial values if your inner relationship and you find yourself for example let's just say one person wants to spend a lot of money and one person wants to take the long road and save more.how do you balance that and not have it destroy your relationship frankly
Kim Curtis
that is such an excellent question because money does destroy relationships um and i think the biggest thing is depending on the listeners is that that's a great conversation before you tie the knot is to find out debt and know what you're getting into ahead of time and then before tying the knot have those conversations around money and how money will be spent and saved so some couples especially if it's a second marriage will keep their own separate accounts checking and savings and then whatever that agreed upon percentages into the joint account that pays the family that pays the household bills and so they generally oftentimes will keep everything separate except for those joint expenses and that's one way to navigate desperate spending habits is by keeping your own stuff separate and that you see a lot of that in second marriages
Bobbi Rebell
what if you are having that conversation and you do find out or maybe you did know already that your love has debt maybe it's good debt maybe it's bad debt maybe we shouldn't judge at i don't know but is that ground i mean what you do are you supposed to break off the relationship that seems crazy
Kim Curtis
there is a difference between good debt and bad debt which you probably talked about before on your podcast
Bobbi Rebell
so we should be judgmental about debt that's a go okay well you know because there's sometimes there's vague lines i mean there's good debt and you could say student loaned it but there's credit card debt which you might judge on the surface is bad but what if that credit card debt came to pay a medical bill that saved someone's life right so it's not always so clear to judge
Kim Curtis
very true that's really fair to make that point clear i think that to have harmony in love that if there is different values around money that it's important to see not a financial planner a certified financial planner but someone that in therapy you're coaching that could work with a couple to navigate the differences so you could stay in your own line and still have love and companionship
Bobbi Rebell
a lot of relationships breakdown also later in life when there are disagreements about retirement you even wrote a book about retirement… retirement secrets tell us about that i mean how do you navigate when sort of you know you're in that later stage of life and you're maybe you're empty nesting at you know the flip side of the getting married and you find yourself having disagreements or maybe not even being where you thought you would be financially and that's causing financial stress in your in your relationship
Kim Curtis
you know it's funny i don't know if it's as much financial stress as it is having different visions of what retirement may look like as couples i think one of the biggest conversations that we have for couples that are about to step off into retirement is making sure they get on the same page. because one spouse may want to buy an RV and travel the country to find their great new place location well that's the last thing the spouse wants to have to do lunches and meal and travel when all they want is to live close to their extended family and so you have to bridge that in terms of what is the best outcome within the financial realm that they have so once you identify what their monthly spending amount is and they recognize okay let's say the monthly spending amount is seven thousand a month net then they could have different conversations about what's realistic and what's not from a standpoint that's not as much emotional even though outcome is always an emotional one despite the money it's always an emotional outcome
Bobbi Rebell
it is emotional i mean that's talk about that i mean the fact is you know we can talk about money in numbers and i think we always think if we only had x dollars more we could do what we want how do you sort of i guess you don't take the emotion out you just kind of admit that it is part of it it's what you're saying
Kim Curtis
yeah i think it's important for us to unpack what some of those money stories are that brings that charge into because some people just dive in and like it immediately triggers something and so what are those early money messages that were given to you and the nature of our work we actually ask questions that go back generationally we call it we call it humanographics humanity on a graph so it's kind of like a family tree where we plot up and down parents grandparent and where do they come from how do they come into the country what are their occupations and then what's your first money story what's your first money memory and what happens as we plot and then ask more questions around the functionality of the family we realize that may be some of that icky whatever about money what's your great grandpa who was a tight wad it has nothing to do with you but it has worked through the family and you can then say i'm not going to be that person i am going to that no longer serves me i'm going to come up with my own money wellness
Bobbi Rebell
i love that you brought that up because you write a lot about different generations and how we can take care of our parents and then back to how we take care of our kids love isn't always just through romantic relationships and partnership it's also the parent-child relationship i wrote a lot about this and launching financial grown ups what advice did you have then for parents who find themselves not just helicopter parents but concierge parents you know not only but it's true we want to be there for our kids and we are reachable pretty much all the time just like concierges often solving problems with money just like a concierge do parents sometimes use money to kind of i hate to say to buy their children's love but let's say to secure it in some ways especially as the children become young adults and we want to stay close to them and we want to not let go of our role as parents talk about the money love thing there
Kim Curtis
wow that has so many places i can take it Bobbie but i think that as mom's and parents that the best thing we can do for our child is to allow them to have failure around money early on and that could be you know ten eleven and twelve-fifteen… allow them to make decisions around money and um giving an allowance should not be tied to just being a member of the family it should be tied to chores so that they know that they get money for nothing that they have to work for the trade off and then as young adults, it's so hard you know you want to help them get into a house you want to help them if you have them if you're lucky enough to have those means but the key around that is that they need to understand the struggle so that they have resiliency I mean if you think the world right now is disruption and if they don't have grit and resiliency and agility then you've done more harm than good by that gift or that help or that manipulation to keep them nearby
Bobbi Rebell
this was great where could people find out more about you and all of your books
Kim Curtis
yes Wealth Legacy Institute dot com and my books Money Secrets:Keys to Smart Investing and Retirement Secrets:Keys to Retiring Happy, Healthy and Free can be found on Amazon.
Bobbi Rebell
thank you so much
This week’s extra credit is actually a reading assignment that may also help improve your finances- but you might not be happy with the reason why.
Sadly It was inspired by my own personal experience this past week when I went over one of my bills. It seemed high so I took a closer look. I noticed one day I had the same charge three times. Then, I also noticed the following date- I had a different charge and this time it hit my bill two times. And yes- it was the same vendor. I actually don’t think it was malicious. They have been hiring new staff and I do think it was an honest mistake as they were training. But it is money. And they are correcting it.
So yes, this week instead of me telling you to watch a movie or listen to a podcast- I’m telling you to read your bills. Go back a few months while you are at it.
There are apps that will flag double charges for you- they are aimed at subscriptions but they are probably good for this. Let me know if you have any experience with them. The names that come to mind include Rocket Money which used to be Truebill, as well as AskTrim and Pocketguard. DM me at bobbirebell1 with your take on these and I can share your advice in an upcoming newsletter.
You can get on the newsletter list by going to bobbirebell.substack.com- and please share this podcast and the link to the newsletter with someone you care about.
Loved this weeks’ interview - big thanks to Kim Curtis of the Legacy Wealth Institute- for helping us all be financial grownups and teaching us how to invest with peace of mind.
