Build Wealth Easily with Gordon Stein

Gordon Stein is with me today to talk about building wealth with minimal effort and minimal sacrifice.  He will share with us how his approach to finances in his Cashflow Cookbook is able to help reduce stress, grow wealth, and develop habits that can carry over into other areas of your life.

Cashflow Cookbook is a simple, step-by-step approach to get out of debt and build wealth. There are no gimmicks and no complicated schemes. Nothing to sell, risk or budget. 

The ideas began in a list, became a spreadsheet, then a book, a blog, a newspaper column, and the focus of my speaking engagements. The ideas have been used to help people end their money worries, build wealth and easily prepare themselves for costs of housing, college and retirement.

It works for those earning $50,000 a year and for those earning $500,000 a year. You can apply all of the ideas or just start with a few of them today. It’s time to begin your path to financial wellness. Your financial future is served!

Connect with Gordon at https://cashflowcookbook.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cashflowcookbook/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cashflowcookbk
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cashflowcookbook/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gordonstein/detail/recent-activity/shares/

Transcript

Magic Barclay: 1:00

Welcome back to a Magical Life. I'm your host, magic Barclay, and today I am joined by Gordon Stein. Gordon is an international keynote speaker, blogger, personal finance expert and author of Cash Flow Cookbook 2 million of Financial Freedom in 60 Easy Recipes. He delivers transformational talks that help people crush their number one. Their finances. His mission is to improve financial wellness and help his audience regain focus, balance, and joy in their lives. Gordon combines his trademark. And his no BS style to speak with employee and association groups, financial advisors, and the media about a breakthrough path to financial wellness with no risk, minimal effort, minimal sacrifice, and no budgeting in his spare time. He's an avid sailor, aging downhill ski racer, and not yet great or even good guitar player. Welcome Gordon.

Gordon Stein: 2:07

Thank you. Magic. It's perfect to be here.

Magic Barclay: 2:09

Now come on, there's, there's a few things we've gotta pull out of this bio. Now. The first thing is your trademark wit. I love funny people and my sense of humor can be quite left of center. So how do you make finances fun and.

Gordon Stein: 2:30

Well, you know, I think people really struggle with their finances and I see that, you know, with audiences all around the world, I think it can be a whole lot simpler and I think it can be more fun. And I think one of the key things with fun is if you read things from a lot of personal finance authors and bloggers, you know, it's all about budgeting and saving 10% of what you earn and giving up things that you. And that's not a lot of fun So, the approach I have is really different. It's about driving a lot of costs. Of things that you're spending money on anyway month after month. So the idea is to drive out a lot of costs without changing your lifestyle. So you keep the fun, but you're slowly seeing your wealth building and growing over time. I think that's what makes it fun. And then in Cashflow Cookbook, that's a personal finance book, and I wrote it as a cookbook. So the fun part, Cera comes from a lot of cooking puns. As my editor said, it's enough bad cooking puns to fill a roasting pan.

Magic Barclay: 3:29

That sounds very good. And you're an avid sailor. What do you sail?

Gordon Stein: 3:37

Well, I've done a lot of, uh, long distance and offshore races. I did the Newport to Bermuda race, uh, a few years ago and I've had two different racing sailboats, for about five years each. So, uh, I love any kind of sailing. Wonderful to be out on the water. And now, uh, here in Cleveland, Ohio, um, starting to do a lot more kayaking cuz there's terrific rivers in the.

Magic Barclay: 4:01

That sounds lovely. Now, Gordon, I always ask my guests the same three questions for our first episodes together, and the array of answers I get never ceases to amaze. So here goes. what can your expertise do to accelerate health, be it emotional, spiritual, or physical? Because we know that stress affects health and when you're stressing about finances, your health can go down too. So how can you help people with that?

Gordon Stein: 4:31

Well, it's interesting. It's a great question. If you look at a lot of the wellness programs, they put an awful lot of focus on reducing stress, you know, meditation and all these kinds of things to help people, uh, relax and de-stress themselves. But the data tells us that people's number one stress is their finances. So to my mind, why not go straight to that? I think if we could help people with their finances, that's gonna reduce their stress dramatically. Of course, that's gonna impact every aspect of their lives.

Magic Barclay: 5:02

Definitely. Now. This next question, Gordon, is, it's almost like it's written for you, and the question is, what are your top three tips to creating wealth?

Gordon Stein: 5:13

Well, I would say that the first one, I'll, I'll borrow this right from my book, cashflow Cookbook. I talked to you in the book about the very first step. I call it broil a bill. So I carry the, you know, the cooking pun forward, but really to take. Any bill that you have, your car insurance, your house insurance, your house taxes, all of them can be reduced. And I lay out, they might bought Cashflow Cookbook exactly how to do that. And I think it's a great place to start cause it's very empowering. And then suddenly you freed up some cash from something you have to pay anyway. Um, but then you start to thinking, Hey, you know what? I can really use this to pull my finances into order. So that's, you know, first tip. Second tip, I call it saver the savings. And what I mean by that is, let's say you're able to save$200 a month. On your car insurance. So you could just leave it in your checking account. But we all know it's gonna get slurped up, you won't get any real benefit outta it. Save for the savings. What I mean by that is take that money and right away, increase your mortgage payment or right away increase your investments, uh, that you're making on a monthly basis. So what happens now is you really put those savings to work. So I think that's the second big one that I would offer. The third one that I would say for people is to get wiser on their wealth. What I mean by that is if you say to most people, how much wealth do you have right now? A lot of'em wouldn't understand the question. They wouldn't know how to calculate it. A wealth is just what you own, minus what you owe. So setting up a wealth tracker is a way of saying, What do I own right now? My value, my host, my cars, all these things minus what I owe, my credit cards, my line of credit, et cetera. And that gives me a number. Some people call it net worth. I don't like the term we're worth more than our money, but uh, that gives you an idea of your wealth. If you start tracking that every month, you know, I think it'll build a lot more mindfulness into your finances. So those would be my.

Magic Barclay: 7:14

There's some great tips there, and I think that can be applied to so many areas of life, not just wealth creation or wealth building, but that's certainly a great place to start. It is for fear. Now we do talk weight loss here because many people battle this needlessly. And I know from my personal experience with my weight as my financial situation fluctuated, so did my weight. And so have you ever battled your weight, Gordon? And if so, what was your trigger or or impetus to losing it? And how can you help the listeners if they're in that kind of situ?

Gordon Stein: 7:58

It's great. It's interesting the way you're putting the question because I think there's so many parallels in life. If you think about every aspect about our lives, you know, there's our diet and our exercise and our, you know, what are we doing spiritually and what are we doing on our finances? And all of these things have a lot of common patterns and to me, they really come down to. Two things of consequence. One is measurement. So something like your weight, you know, weighing yourself every day I think makes a huge difference. It builds up some mindfulness and it makes you think every day about, you know, you're getting in the exercise, are you eating healthy? And if I draw the parallel in terms of your finances, knowing that wealth number and how is that fluctuating month by month, and are you moving things into a good direction? The second big part of this is habit. And I find that people are very self-limiting around their habits. They'll, they'll make a statement about themselves, I can never lose weight or, you know, I only drink 2% milk, whatever. It's, I can't exercise. I'm not a runner. And they set themselves up that. You know, something isn't a changeable habit. They view it as a, as a doctrine that that's the way they're always going to be. So I think all of us need to change that. I think anything is possible, and the way to do that is really think about your current state. Hey, I weigh 2 0 4, I want to get down to one 90. So what habits do I need to change? And every habit that we have, they're. Absolutely changeable. It takes a little bit of, it takes a bit of a starting push, takes a little bit of an effort, and the key thing is it just takes a bit of time. If you yourself 30 days on the new habit, it's gonna start to snap in a position. So for weight, that might mean a daily walk, you know, for your finances, it might be growing down one of your bills and applying that to paying down a mortgage or something faster. Once you see that in either a case, then you're really on your.

Magic Barclay: 9:55

I think there's some great points of clarity there to really mm-hmm. not just impose these, these rules, these sanctions on yourself, but to kind of go with the flow and pardon the pun, but the flow creates your wealth.

Gordon Stein: 10:13

I think that's it exactly. It really does. You get the habits started and you get it, you know, you get it set up in a good direction, and then I think the results follow very naturally from that. And as I say throughout my book, castle Cookbook, it's all about building wealth with minimal effort and minimal sacrifice.

Magic Barclay: 10:31

Now talking of this book, cash Flow Cook, I guess people are probably wondering why is it a cookbook? How did you come up with that? And it's certainly quite intriguing. So can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, it's,

Gordon Stein: 10:49

it's interesting, you know, I've read all kinds of personal finance books, and in many ways they're, they're clones of each other. They always start off with this idea of you need to save 10% and then you need to invest it in something. Exchange traded funds, mutual funds, real estate, but they always start with this notion of saving 10%. But I think it's good advice, but the problem is, It's really hard for most people to do. It's hard for a lot of people to save one or 2%, or even just to get the unloading paycheck to paycheck. And so I really thought that there was a need for a book that goes before all the other personal finance books, and one that starts by answering the question, where does that 10% come from? So again, the usual ways of where it's gonna come from really aren't that palatable. Maybe I don't want to give up, you know, my glass of merlott at the end of the day. You know, maybe I don't want to give up my sports or my hobbies, but what I discovered with the book, and it started with a way of getting car washes for free. And that was through retailer, uh, gasoline retailer, uh, points, loyalty points system. And so I found this way of getting car washes free. It saved, you know,$25 a month. Not a lot of money, but right on the heels of that. Then I discovered a, a company that provided discounted home alarm monitoring. So we keep your existing hardware, but they take over the monitoring. Um, and that saved another$25 a month, so there's$50. Then I got my spouse on the carwash program. There's 75 and that's not a lot of money. No one's finances are gonna change the$75, but it really piqued my interest cuz here's$75. That took no effort whatsoever. So from there I started making a list of these idea. And they all had to be ones that I would actually do myself. You know, there's a lot of crazy ideas about making their own cleaning products and clipping coupons, and I'm not gonna do any of that. So what are the easy ways to pre-up cash flow? And how much could it save? And then that list became a spreadsheet and I took a look at, hey, if you invested these monthly amounts, how much would that add up to over 10, 20, or 30 years? And it was really remarkable, and I took the whole thing to my account and I said, Tell me where the math errors are in this thing. This, these numbers cannot be right. He went through it and he said, actually, they're right. He says, this will make a fantastic book. So that's really how the whole thing started. That's a, the beginning of Cashflow Cookbook. But originally I thought of writing it as a novel. I had my characters lined up and, you know, they would sort of understand and learn about these financial. But I realized there's a lot of numbers in it and there's an opening story. But then we go into these ideas that just didn't fit into a novel. And so I, under my breath one day, I said, Jesus, it's more like a cookbook. And I thought, wow, that's exactly what it is. And so that was the Birth of Cashflow Cookbook. So the basic ideas, we've got a story at the beginning. We look at a couple, Eric and Tisha, and we follow them as they make these financial discoveries and they free up a million and a. For their retirement out of nowhere and minimal effort, minimal sacrifice. So that's the start. That's part one of the book. And the second part of the book, I outlined 60 of these financial recipes, which shows us how to save significant amounts of money in every category that we buy. Things from our houses to our transportations, to our food, household, lifestyle, and financial. And that's what's in cashflow Cook.

Magic Barclay: 14:30

That sounds amazing. Now speaking of Cash Flow Cookbook, we love to give the listeners freebies here. So what can you offer them today?

Gordon Stein: 14:41

Oh, well that sounds great. I mean, if you wanted to, uh, organize some sort of a contest, I'd be happy to throw in five copies of Cash Flow Cookbook. Figure out the logistics. I could ship it to your office and get it out to them.

Magic Barclay: 14:56

That sounds fantastic. So listeners, we are going to run a contest and you can get one of Gordon's fantastic copies of Cash Flow Cookbook, so stay tuned for that now, Gordon People can find you on LinkedIn at Gordon Stein. You're also on Facebook at Cash Flow Cookbook, Twitter at Cashflow. Cook, bk and also on Instagram at Cashflow Cookbook. Thank you so much for your time today. I would love to chat more with you in our next episode.

Gordon Stein: 15:31

That sounds terrific. Thanks so much. Magic.

Magic Barclay: 15:34

Thank you. Listeners, thank you so much for your time. This was your episode 1 56. Go forth and Create Your Magical Life.