Episode 156: The 3 Steps to Secure Your Financial Future with Michelle Brown — Transcript

The 3 Steps to Secure Your Financial Future with Michelle Brown

In this episode of the Happy Productive Podcast, Jennifer Dawn sits down with Michelle Brown, founder of Texas Money Maven, to share how business owners can secure your financial future. This transcript reveals practical steps to turn profits into long-term wealth.

Full Transcript: Secure Your Financial Future

Jennifer Dawn: Hey, hey everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Happy Productive Podcast. You guys, I am truly thrilled about my guest today because not only only is she like brilliant she’s also, I would consider her an amazing friend. She’s been a long time client of mine. She’s one of my favorite people in the world, so Ms. Michelle Brown, welcome, welcome, welcome to the show today.

Michelle Brown: Hey, greetings from Texas, warm Texas.

Jennifer Dawn: Yes, I’m recording this from Cold New York, so I definitely am like, I wanna be in warm Texas with my, my good friend Michelle. Michelle. Tell everybody you guys, this is a topic that I think is so important and that as business owners especially we don’t always know and it goes into, alright, so we spend all our time, at least as a business coach, this is what I spend all my time doing, is helping all of our clients drive revenues.

Jennifer Dawn: Be profitable and you know, have a business that gives them the freedom that they want. We pair that with some fun adventures here and there as well. And that’s really my whole world. But what happens when you do this work and you make the revenues and you are profitable and now you’ve got money? And what we do with that money, and I’m not a financial advisor or a financial planner and I don’t really know, it’s like I don’t know what we do.

Jennifer Dawn: I’m so focused on making sure that you have the money. And that’s really my wheelhouse. And so Michelle’s wheelhouse is really helping business owners with, all right, now that you have the money, what are you gonna do with it? And how are you gonna plan for retirement? Because as everybody knows, as business owners we’re not working for big corporations.

Jennifer Dawn: Our retirement isn’t just handled for us, and we need to be savvy in this area. So I’m super excited to jump into this conversation with Michelle. Michelle, before we dive in, just tell everybody, give everybody, you know. A minute or two on your background, your story, how you came to be helping business owners.

Jennifer Dawn: Like, you know, what do I do with the money and how do I plan for retirement?

Michelle Brown: Yes. Yes. That’s a lot, Jennifer. But yeah, so, I am a financial advisor, retirement planner specialty. I got into the business. I actually was a high school teacher, high school counselor loved the kids and it was always my childhood dream to teach. So I decided I wanted to teach at the university, started to work on my PhD.

Michelle Brown: Everyone always asks me, why do you have a PhD in your financial advisor? And that’s why. So I was working on my dissertation and I went to work as my husband’s assistant. He’s a certified financial planner, and one day I am. His assistant outside of his office, and I hear a lady crying in his office.

Michelle Brown: She had come in a widow. Her husband had just passed away, and of course she was grieving over his death. And what was worse was she didn’t even know us. She didn’t know us. She didn’t know him, the certified financial planner, she was in his office just crying. And I heard her say things like, I’m so afraid of making bad decisions.

Michelle Brown: I’m so afraid of not being able to manage the money. I wish I would’ve listened more. You know, am I gonna lose my independence? Am I gonna lose the my way of life? And. It was literally that day that I decided that I needed to empower people with financial knowledge. I’m already working to become a university professor, and I realized that day.

Michelle Brown: I had just left the school district. I have TRS, which is the Texas Teacher Retirement, and I wouldn’t know what to do with it. And I’m the oldest of five girls. I have four sisters, and I knew they wouldn’t know what to do. So yeah, that day my life changed and I decided to empower women with financial knowledge and get into financial advising.

Jennifer Dawn: That gives me chills. Like such a beautiful story. And so from that day now, you’ve been helping women, women only, or women and men with their financial planning?

Michelle Brown: Yeah, women and men, I haven’t really, yeah. Specialized totally. But ’cause I just love people. I’m a military brat. I love people, I love people’s stories. So yeah, I enjoy it.

Jennifer Dawn: Yeah, and I didn’t even think about like if you are married or in a long-term relationship and your partner passes, like, are you set up? Are you ready to handle those things? And I don’t know, I, when I think about that, I’m like, well, I hope I’m the one who goes, so he’ll have to deal with it all. But, ’cause if he goes, I’m like, Hmm, am I okay?

Jennifer Dawn: Am I set up? So that’s a really big question. So why don’t we just like kind of dive into. Let’s, let’s start with, you know, you’re working hard in your business. You’ve made the money, and now you’re like, what do I do with these profits? How do I invest ’em? And guys, we’re not gonna give specific investment advice here, so we’re gonna talk kind of high level.

Jennifer Dawn: But if you’re a business owner and you’ve experienced this, like Michelle, what are some steps that people can do to t to like, just get started if they don’t even know, like where to begin with investing some of those profits from the business?

Michelle Brown: So, I mean, I’m a business owner, so coming firsthand from setting up my business and learning how to do those things myself as well, as well as being a financial advisor, I. I always tell my clients, start with emergency funds. We wanna know, you know, when I talk to clients, they come to me, they usually have a hodgepodge of different kind of investing.

Michelle Brown: A 401k here, an IRA there a bank account. But I always explain, we need a plan, we need a strategy, we need a why. So you wanna start with your emergency funds. And our why is because when we save for retirement and we save for growth, we don’t wanna touch those. Those funds, we want to be able to lead those in long term.

Michelle Brown: So you wanna start with your emergency fund. They usually say about six months of income, of salary in emergency fund, especially as business owners, we have to be prepared. I mean, cash is, they say cash is king. So it’s, it’s good to have some kind of account like that. So you wanna start there, have your emergency fund.

Michelle Brown: Set aside and get that build up. Now, once you get that build up, what I see a mistake is that we leave that in our checking account, so we want to have most of it in a high yield savings account. There’s a lot of great ones out there. They’re making four to 5% right now, so don’t keep it in a checking or savings account that you’re making 0.00 something, I don’t even know what these days, but do a high yield savings account that you can connect to your checking account and you can easily transfer back and forth when you need the funds, but while you don’t have your money working for you.

Michelle Brown: So that would be step number one.

Jennifer Dawn: Okay. I love that step because pretty much anybody can go set up a high interest savings account. You can link it to your bank account. So as you’re building up your emergency fund, an emergency being like liquid money, cash that you can get to very, very quickly, but because it’s sitting in a high interest savings account, it’s, it’s liquid, but it is at least earning some money for you instead of sitting in a traditional bank checking, you know, bank savings, account earning.

Jennifer Dawn: You know, 3 cents a month, you know, you know, basically nothing. But it’s still very liquid. And so when you talk about that liquid account where you said about six months of living expenses sitting in that liquid

Michelle Brown: Or salary. Yeah.

Jennifer Dawn: I. Or, or salary. Great. So, and I’ve heard anywhere from three to six months. I like that number.

Jennifer Dawn: I, I think that’s a very good amount of money you’ve got. ’cause really, if something catastrophic happens, you’ve got three to six months to figure things out. And liquid cash, I think you’re gonna be fine and you’re gonna have a lot of time to kind of figure it out. So. I love this as a first thing, so all of you guys who you’re just like, I don’t know where to start.

Jennifer Dawn: Well, we just told you where to start with. Set up a high interest savings account, start to put your money in there and work to build up an emergency fund that’s sitting in that high interest savings account. You agree, Michelle?

Michelle Brown: I agree.

Jennifer Dawn: Love it. All right. What’s next?

Michelle Brown: So number two, start working on retirement. The earlier, the better. There are all kind of charts out there where you can see putting in $25 over 40 years or 30 years, you’ll make so much more than putting in $500 for the last 10. I can’t tell you how many people I have come to me that they’re 55 years old and they wanna retire in five years, and they wanna start there.

So you wanna start early, and time is on your side. If you start early, even if it’s a little bit of amount, and there’s a rule, it’s called pay yourself first. So you wanna take the amount that you can, that you wanna put into retirement every single month, and you wanna add it to your list of bills, like, I pay my rent, I pay my utilities, I pay my retirement.

Then whatever’s left, we get to spend not the other way around. Where we pay all our bills and then what’s left? We put in retirement. No, it’s pay yourself first, and once you start with that a little amount. Every time that your business increases, you know, your, your profitability goes up, you put a little, you increase that amount a little more by the time you’re 50 or 60, believe it or not you’re gonna be saving a great amount and it won’t, you won’t feel it ’cause you’ve done it over all these years a little bit at a time. Does that make sense?

Jennifer Dawn: It makes perfect sense, except of course for those of us who are on the other side of 50, we’re like, oh shit. Now what? So I know there’s gonna be some people listening who are like, okay, well what if we are over 50, over 55 and we haven’t really had the time to, you know, we haven’t done it over the period of time.

Jennifer Dawn: So is there still hope for, for us, Michelle, if we’re we’re past that Mark?

Michelle Brown: great question. So if you’re there, we have great tools. Financial advisors, retirement planners like myself, we have great calculators that we can back into. We, you can say, okay, in retirement I need four to 5,000 a month to live on. I can tell you, okay, this is how much we need to save and this is how much you need to do a month.

Michelle Brown: And you know, Jennifer, we break that down in little goals and little increments to get to where you wanna be in retirement. So we can do that.

Jennifer Dawn: I love that. And then, you know, you can also look at driving passive income. Now I know everybody has different businesses, but if you look at your business, I know I’ve done this with my business of looking at. Let’s say that I didn’t wanna work or I couldn’t work, what pieces of my business could still drive income for me?

Jennifer Dawn: So creating things like books. I know Michelle, you’re writing a book now right now too, which we wanna hear about, but you know, books, it’s one of those things that you can write a book and you can make money off of that book forever, like. Forever and ever and ever. Courses different products, different other kinds of services.

Jennifer Dawn: There’s things like that that you can create that will also help drive passive income. So I’m gonna drop that one in too, that if you’re a little bit panicked with the retirement if you haven’t got it set up, get it set up and if not also look at things that you can do to drive some of that passive income if you are not able to work or when you, you won’t wanna work anymore.

Michelle Brown: Right, right. I.

Jennifer Dawn: Yeah. Awesome, Michelle. All right, so what else? What else should we know about? I’m loving. I’m loving this conversation. So valuable.

Michelle Brown: So you definitely with that, that savings I was talking about, whether it’s. When you’re 20 or 50 we wanna look at different, different vehicles. And of course, you know, you want a professional to help you. And I don’t wanna get on my soapbox, but everybody should have a financial planner, just like everyone should have a coach.

We coach you on your specific situation. I think people are afraid. I think people think we’re only for rich people and that is not true. And we’re trying to help you save and have a great retirement. I teach classes at colleges about retirement planning, and I always start out, I mean, retirement is your second act.

It’s your chance to do whatever you want. There’s a. A guy, Tom Hegner in our industry writes lots of books, a guru in retirement planning, and he says, retirement every day is a Saturday. You get to do what you want when you wanna do it. So why wouldn’t you make that great? So when you’re thinking about saving and doing this retirement planning, you want a professional to help you.

And I, my second question I’ll always get, or second fear is, how much do you cost? Well, I don’t cost. Any more than the big name people that say do it yourself. You can have a coach for the same price. So my soapbox is everyone should have a coach. But you wanna get started like on. And that’s enough of my soapbox.

So you wanna get started on Roth IRAs simple IRAs 4 0 1 Ks. These are vehicles to help business owners put more money into retirement, especially 4 0 1 Ks. You can pay a bigger amount. These, these things, the rules are governed by the IRS. So there are rules on each of these. Different kind of vehicles.

So that’s why you want someone to help you so you can make the, you know, the most out of the rules that you can to get the biggest and best retirement that you can.

Jennifer Dawn: Yeah, I agree so much. And Michelle, you touched on something really important about, yes, everybody should have a coach. Everybody should have a financial planner. But like there is a misconception out there that I think you have to be rich in order to have a financial person helping you. And that’s. Not true at all, but what are some things like a person should look for in choosing a good financial planner?

Jennifer Dawn: Because there’s a lot of them out there who don’t know what they’re doing and I, I, I think we have to like address the elephant in the room of like. I’ve met some financial planners that are morons and I’m like, I would not trust you with my money. I wouldn’t Now you are amazing and that’s why I, I do trust you and have trusted you to help me with some of these things.

Jennifer Dawn: And so, but like, what should you be looking for? In a financial planner because it’s a, you have to be licensed. It has to be like in your state, so you’re in Texas. But if you’re not licensed in a state that somebody’s listening to, like they would need to go in their state and actually look for somebody.

Jennifer Dawn: So what are some things that people need to know about, like finding a good person to work with?

Michelle Brown: So I do, my business is called Texas Money Maven, but I am not only licensed in Texas. I can, I’m licensed all across the US as many financial advisors are We. You can check a potential advisor out on the website, broker check.org, and you can see if they have any complaints or any judgements against them.

So that’s a great part, a great place to start. But Jennifer, I love what you said. I always tell my clients you have to feel it with your heart. I think, you know, like people. Wanna be with like people, I think like a surgeon or a doctor you would interview and you would check them out. There’s always bad apples and everything.

So, you know, go with your gut check on broker check.org. Maybe get advice from other people who they’re using. And like I said, I, I really believe you just have to feel it. I mean, you should feel comfortable. I mean, money is a very emotional and personal thing, but I tell my clients we never wanna make choices out of fear and greed.

Never. So don’t let that fear override you. Find someone because it could make all the difference in the world.

Jennifer Dawn: Oh, I love that. So, so true. And so on point. And so, okay, so Michelle, so let’s say that we’ve done the work, we found our person, we’ve got ourselves set up for retirement planning. You also, so what do I do with the rest of the money? So do you guys also help people in invest money for just normal investments?

Jennifer Dawn: Can you just talk to that a little bit?

Michelle Brown: So I am a retirement planner, so I’m a little on the cons, more conservative side. I don’t sell individual stocks. I don’t really believe in stock picking. I don’t really believe that I can tell you what is going to make you a millionaire tomorrow. So I’m a retirement planner. I believe that you need.

Three legs. You need liquidity. You need stability, and you need growth. So you’re talking about growth. ’cause our retirement incomes, or our retirement funds need to be a little bit stable. We wanna grow them, but safely, but you can have another growth bucket. And in our growth bucket, we take a little more risk to combat inflation and things like that.

That kind of investing. I recommend like money managers, money managers these days. I’ve been in the business since 2008 and it used to be that we didn’t have access to these great money managers, but, and they were only at industry level. But now it’s come down to the individual person and we can put a person with a money manager that can put your funds in 44 different countries, 6,000 different funds in your pie, in your little nest egg to give you diversification, to give you growth, to give you protection.

So it’s come a long way. Investing has.

Jennifer Dawn: Yeah, I don’t feel so bad about like, how, how is anybody supposed to keep up with, you know, 6,000 potential places that you could put your money. So it makes so much sense to go and work with somebody who, this is their specialty and they, they do know what to do to set you up so that you can have your portfolio grow, but then also be stable and then have the liquidity that you need. Nice. All right, Michelle, any other great tips that the listeners need to have as far as investing, retirement planning, anything that we haven’t already touched on so far?

Michelle Brown: Well, I would say the other thing about looking for a financial advisor, financial coach, teacher, they should be all that to you, is look for a fiduciary and.

Jennifer Dawn: You read my mind. I was gonna ask about this. Please explain this. ’cause I think it’s a really, really important thing.

Michelle Brown: Yes. So in my classes I actually show a little video. What is the difference between a broker and a fiduciary? So the difference is that like a butcher, you walk into a butcher shop, he can sell you any kind of meat, he can sell you beef, he can sell you chicken, you know, seafood, it doesn’t really matter.

Michelle Brown: But a fiduciary is more like a dietician. She’s gonna take your weight and she’s gonna give you blood tests, and she’s going to say, okay, no B before you, because your cholesterol is too high. So more specific to your your situation. What is most appropriate and suitable for you? That is what you wanna look for.

And when you go to broker check.org, you can find out if that person is a fiduciary or not.

Jennifer Dawn: So I had learned a few years ago that, and you can correct me if I learned wrong, that a fiduciary has to act like in the interest of the client, where if you’re not a fiduciary, they can basically sell or do whatever the heck they want and it can be in their own interest. And even if it’s not, not in your client’s interests, they are legally, they are not obligated to do whatever, but a fiduciary is legally.

Jennifer Dawn: Obligated to act in the interest of the client. Is that, I think that’s right.

Michelle Brown: You are totally on point. Totally.

Jennifer Dawn: yeah, I actually learned that from a lovely woman who is an a financial person and she was just like, she was explaining this to me. This was years ago. And I’m like, how is it possible that you can hire people who actually don’t to, to, to manage your money, that don’t actually have to act in your best interest?

Jennifer Dawn: Like that blew my mind. So everybody, if you take nothing away from this show, make sure that when you go out to find somebody and you should make sure that they are a fiduciary

Michelle Brown: Yes. Like I said, it’s, it’s the butcher versus the dietician. What is best for you? Yes.

Jennifer Dawn: Such a great analogy. I love it. All right. Before we run out time, I know there’s people listening who are like, I wanna talk to the Texas Money Maven. So Michelle, tell everybody where they can find you. And also Michelle’s in the process right now of writing an amazing new book. And so it’s not out yet, but just tell everybody where they can find you and just give us a little bit on the book before we run out of time.

Michelle Brown: Well, you can find me at Texas money maven.com. Real easy. My phone number, my email is there. I’m just a straightforward personal person, so you just text me or email me and I will respond. My book, I’m so excited about my book. Like I said I’m a people person. I love studying people. I’m a military brat, so I’ve traveled and lived a lot of different places in Europe and stuff.

So my book, I’m excited and it brings out the teaching part of me also, that it’s very, hopefully very simple. Breaking it down, easy to understand with these great characters, great stories of my real life clients that I have, like Miss Annie Oakley in there. I have big tall Joe that worked for the oil company.

So it’s, it’s super fun. I have Miss Kitty I’m trying to think of all the names, but super fun and easy to understand, but important. It’s about retirement planning and what is so important. ’cause we don’t wanna just wing retirement planning. I can’t say enough that this is your second. Act in life.

This is your chance. And what we say is retirement is about lifestyle, and lifestyle is driven by income. So that’s what the book is all about, is how to make that income and make your retirement the best that it can be.

Jennifer Dawn: Oh, I love it so much. All right, you guys. I know the book’s not out yet, but when it is definitely you’re gonna wanna grab a copy from Michelle. We will put all of her information in the show notes so that you can go grab a free consultation. She’s a super down to earth, amazing person. Shoot her an email.

Jennifer Dawn: Hop on our site, get a, get a free consultation for yourself. And you know, today’s, today’s the day. Take a step to manage your money, plan your retirement, set yourself up for success down the road because we never know what might be headed our direction, so, you know, better, better to be prepared than just leaving it all to chance.

Jennifer Dawn: Michelle, thank you so much for being here with me today.

Michelle Brown: Oh, thank you, Jennifer.

Jennifer Dawn: All right guys. That’s it for today’s show. Get out there and have a happy, productive day y’all. Bye.

Michelle Brown: Bye.

Key Takeaways From This Episode

• Build your emergency fund before investing
• Pay yourself first to grow retirement savings
• Work with a fiduciary to create a personalized plan
• Start early—but it’s never too late
• Treat retirement as your second act in life