Michael Sakraida
Appearances
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
Inflation hasn't impacted them on an emotional level. It's an inconvenience. but it damaged their lives. And soon we're seeing it now with the employment numbers. Soon there's gonna be more and more layoffs, especially in the tech area and in other areas. And it's not the lack of money. It's that I don't have, it's my fault. It's something I'm doing wrong. Look at all these other people.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
I made a poor choice and becoming a coder, whatever it might be. And oh, I wish I can go back. Coulda, woulda, shoulda is... an awful feeling to have instead of just looking forward and saying all right this is the lot i'm i have right now let me just figure out a way take inflation for example with that i have the three e's how you perceive.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
So you're looking at it and saying, okay, this is actually an opportunity. Where there's crisis, there's opportunity for me to improve my life. Get me to focus on what am I wasting money on? What should I do differently? Should I have a side job? What have you? What things can I do? Instead of sending my kid to a private college, doing an in-state college where it's either free or very low cost.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
Then coming up with the conceiving ideas of how am I going to implement all these changes? And then the creativity of that and doing that. Now, so this person is going to be happier. So they still don't have the money. They still are getting killed by inflation, but They are now taking control.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
Most stress, most depression comes with people feel that they don't have control of what's going on around them. So now let's give them control. Now, you don't see any of this anywhere. You don't see articles on this. You don't see Wall Street saying, you know what, we're going to donate money.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
and create a program to help people like Elon Musk donating satellites for whatever, helping Ukraine, helping flood victims from in North Carolina. Wall Street doesn't do that. And so that's why it's a little complicated answer. It's a simple question, but when we lose control We stress, we're unhappy. Money helps us have control.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
In the absence of money, we need to find other ways to get that control so that we're happier, we're not frozen, that we're actually moving forward. Don't let a good crisis go to waste.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
It's everything. It changes everything. That's why the first chapter of my book is called Zen and the Art of Change. The greatest misunderstanding with Wall Street and the financial media is that they don't understand that the three E's of investing are emotions. And so it's the same with change. So we have to have this Zen-like state of calm. First of all, don't have that state.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
We're going to be holding that golf club too tight and we're not going to get much distance in a swing. But there's always so much time and there's always so much emotional energy to changing. You want to change. Focus, have that laser focus, if you will, on the changes you should make and ignore the ones you can't change. So your personality. You're going to try to change your personality?
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
No, it's just not going to happen. Work with your personality. Don't waste time trying to change your personality. Then there's the change that you can and should make. And then there's the one that also trips up a lot of people, waste that emotional capital. And that is change you can do, but don't waste your time on it because it's like triage.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
You look at the old MASH TV show, MASH actual hospitals in Korea, you couldn't care for every soldier that came in injured. So you had to say, this one I could save, but it's going to take three hours. And in that time, I could have saved... six other soldiers. And if I do this person save them, then those six soldiers are going to die. It's that triage.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
You need to look at it and say, yeah, I can do that, but it's going to take too long. It's going to take too much emotional capital to do it. So now we have this smaller focused types of change that we can and should do, and then set about doing that. And too many times we try to change our outlook, change our view. I've done some work with the whole ESG movement.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
The criticism I have of it is too many times I've tried to change people's minds, change their view. No, what you first do is you change people's actions.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
and and then by changing your actions getting up earlier doing allocating certain time reading certain books hiring somebody to be your accountability partner and to generate ideas you want to do that and then through those changes your outlook's going to change your perception of things its actions change thoughts You can't change your thoughts very easily without doing that.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
And looking at my journey to where I am today with the mission of trying to help over a million individuals and their advisors, there's really three key segments to it. And the overriding theme in each of those segments is an extension of the Robert Frost poem of taking the road less traveled. I guess I took the road less traveled.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
that wasn't completed and the parts that were completed had some potholes and other damage to it. And so the first part of my journey to how I got here today was the developmental years. My childhood, I had lots of mentors and guidance and muses from people both alive and dead. Had two great-grandfathers who were very successful businessmen. One who came over from Eastern Europe, civil engineer.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
So he did build roads, actually, and made his fortune and went back. to the old country, which was unusual. And then another great grandfather who was in banking and finance and extremely wealthy and unfortunately was killed when his bank was robbed back the Bonnie and Clyde days with that. But my childhood, my neighborhood, neighbors, my parents, kind of what came out of that was
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
Not, I can't do this. I'm not able. How can I possibly do this? It was more, why can't I do it? And would sit around with some neighbors at our beach club in the South Shore of Long Island. And I would listen to their stories because I always had that curiosity. And in those stories and just observations, I saw that these were people, yes, they had the money.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
but they had the balance and they had the joy and fun in their lives. They had a range of interests that, besides being CEO of a bank, they also had a jazz that they orchestrated music and performed. Even in college, making sure I took not just the business courses, the finance, accounting, but also taking philosophy, having a history major. And there's a lot...
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
that people don't understand about history in terms of the value of it, because it's not just remembering regurgitating dates and locations and activities, but what led to it, what really caused it. With history, you have the advantage of that time so that you can have now the revisionist view.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
with a more accurate view of that history so I applied all this to that which took me to my second stage and that was the kind of the learner's permit as someone told me at my beach club and that is going out there working for companies when I started I had two job offers one was with a brokerage firm and being a stock broker. The other was investment management firm.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
brokerage firm paid more, but I didn't see the same growth and development and didn't like the whole, at the time, brokerage model. So I took the lower paying job and was very successful with that. Again, because I didn't know I was too young. We had this mutual fund that was started to take advantage of foreign tax credits for U.S.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
based companies we started cold and you know had all these companies interested but no one wanted to be first and so I'm doing a cold call to a treasurer of a large corporation in the northeast he hung up the phone on me and I called him back I said you just made a big mistake so I Took him off guard.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
I said, yeah, I understand nine out of 10 times person calling you doesn't have anything really unique and that's not going to really help you. Well, this time it's I'm that one out of 10. And so he was like, okay, go on. And he not only was one of the larger investors in the fund, but he was the first one. So everyone else was standing around the pool waiting for someone to jump in.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
He's the one that jumped in. Then everyone else jumped into the pool. So I had this ability through looking at the human element of of sales, the human element of working with financial advisors, getting sub-advisory work with large mutual fund companies and other institutions, that human element I quickly realized was make it about them, not about their company, but what do they want in life?
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
And everyone wants more money. They want... balance or time and they want more joy or social wealth and so trying to show that to them this big discovery incorporating this into all these programs and huge success with this but Total fights every step of the way because I was the change agent.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
And by me being successful in implementing this change in the eyes of these people that were there for years and years, I made them look like failures, that they couldn't do it and this non-insurance guy had to do it. And after a while, I got tired.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
of working at these different companies doing wonderful things for them for their financial professionals that we sold to for their clients but always being sniped at and so i just got tired of always fighting that fight and Actually having a target, the more successful I was, the more I helped my companies, the bigger the target was.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
So then decided to go into the third stage and that is having consulting business and going out there and working with different financial companies. It's really funny. As an employee, they swipe at you. They don't want to listen to you, question everything you say. As a consultant, all of a sudden now they listen and they want to do what you have.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
everything based on what the three key things people want and taken into account. It's money, balance, and joy and taken into account their emotions and just human nature. And so many times I saw people that, oh, it's all logical. No, it's not logical. And I could talk more about that later. But it's about human nature. It's about people's individual needs.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
So that has led me up to where I am right now.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
Sure, money buys happiness when it's part of this three-part ecosystem. And that three-part ecosystem's working in harmony, working holistically. And the three parts of money, monetary wealth, second is time wealth, and the third is the social wealth or the happiness or joy. So we all know the stories of people All they do is work.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
And the thing is, especially my generation, the boomer generation had a lot of people like that. But the thing I learned from the greatest generation, my parents generation was no, you had to have that balance. You had to have that joy. You. You had to have that range of a personality and not just be the single mind in this focus. So money per se doesn't buy happiness.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
You can't go to the happiness store, but it helps you. You can hire someone to do the cleaning, mow in the lawn. different painting hire buy pre-made food or go to restaurants versus booking everything from scratch so that can buy you the time then the joy that comes from it you can get involved with volunteer work being part of the community but the great thing is
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
each helps the other so that the people who are very successful the time part helps them make more money the joy part helps them make more money so it's this wonderful merry-go-round if you will you know you have to have that range you have to have all that in your life because otherwise it's just not a joyful life why bother
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
When I was at this big insurance company, my boss was just this tightly wound person who After you knew him for 10 minutes, this is not a guy that really was fully enjoying life. And that the old school of, oh, work is work. I put in the hours, I do the work. I really don't like it or I tense up and stress out about it. Then I go home and then I could... have fulfillment.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
If you look at some of the great people out there, they are much more broad doing activities. They start with not, I want to make money, but I want to help people. I want to change the world. Steve Jobs, I want to change the world. That's what he wanted to do. It wasn't, oh, I want to be rich. Now, the money part, of course, comes with it, but
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
When you look at some of those leaders, you look at Elon Musk, who will, at the drop of a hat, with flooding in North Carolina, say, hey, I'll reassign my satellites to help with communications. He's not doing that for the money. He's not doing that for the publicity. He's doing that to be a good citizen, to help people. So it's just a much more enjoyable life.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
It's not nine to five of misery, clock out and... then have joy. But why can't you have that joy? Why can't you have that fulfillment and meaning in your job as well? If you could do that, you're going to be better at your job, better able to help people. You'd be better for your faith and really enjoy yourself.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
And one of the things I saw with a lot of financial advisors was they were holding the golf club really tight. They didn't take into account, they became advisors because they love math or they love investments. And the advisors that I worked well with were the ones that became advisors because they love their clients.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
They love how they could go from having somebody be a total stranger to a great friend, client and great friend within months. And the kind of the rush you get when you realize that your client trusts you. So these are all the things with me, my upbringing, that this is how people should work. And that holistic wealth or the total wealth with everything. It's so simple.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
Things that really help are simple.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
So you take out the wealth component. Why are they unhappy? unhappy they don't necessarily have to be unhappy but they are unhappy because we have wall street we have advertising look at what's been going on with inflation so we have this huge cumulative inflation the the american population went from like 40 percent living from paycheck to 70 percent
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
And do you really see anything from Wall Street, from the politicians, from the financial media, just about what a devastating effect this is having on people and just the psychological and emotional effect? So these people feel like, No one knows them. No one appreciates or understands what they're going through.
Chief Change Officer
#229 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part One
I did a cartoon on Instagram yesterday, making fun of this, how you're supposed to be happy. And somebody commented, I thought I was the only one that felt this way of being alone. people not understanding what I'm going through. That loneliness, that feeling that, oh, I'm doing something wrong because why? The financial media, they're that top 10%. Wall Street, the top 10%.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
I said, then why wouldn't you talk about municipal bonds? There's dead silence. Because he knew exactly what I was talking about. And just completely missed it. I was in my early 20s at the time. It just showed me how many times they get it wrong in the financial media. So they have to get oriented. They have to have greater self-awareness.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
And what's important to them, most people need to have that orientation, that increase in self-awareness. And one of the things I say in there is, okay, if your candidate advisor isn't asking these three main questions, you should... Ask them, tell them to ask these questions. So the first is really understand the source of your wealth and how does that affect you emotionally?
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
You have the wealth because you made a business, sold a business, and now you're worrying, I can't screw it up because I don't have another business to sell with it. Did you inherit money? Grandma started a business on the kitchen table and you inherited that money. That comes with a lot of responsibility. I can't waste or do stupid things with grandma's money because she didn't do stupid things.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
I got to honor her. There's that pressure. So there's all different scenarios affect you from an emotional standpoint. I've had financial advisors yell at me, what does that question have anything to do with me putting a financial plan together? By the very fact you asked that question, you might want to rethink what real value you add to your client. The second question is,
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
What are your financial goals and non-financial goals? What kind of legacy do you want to leave financially, non-financially? The kids, being involved in the community, being involved with your church, want to sail around the world or participate in the Bermuda race. A friend of mine recently did the pilgrimage in Spain. So that took years for him to be able to do that.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
The third question is, what's been your experience with Wall Street? Is it good? Is it bad? Have you felt ripped off? Have you felt talked down to, clueless? Again, the emotion. Like you said before, hey, Mike, talk about your past because that shapes who you are today.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
So all those three questions and doing the work, the answering and really the self-awareness from that tells you where you're at today. And that's going to help you make the changes go on the plan.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
Now, one of the other things, the greatest mistake people make with investing, and this comes into play with risk tolerance, is they look at their investments as just a jumble of money and stocks, bonds, whatever. They don't look at it as an extension of their values, who they are, their hopes, their dreams.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
And there's studies, I know at least one academic study on this, and I'm sure there's others, that the more you view your investments as an extension of you and your values or your faith or both, the less likely you're going to fall for the fear and greed emotions that we talked about.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
Wanting to increase your risk at the top of the market where you have the greatest chance of the market to go down. And that fear, after the market goes down, you sell where you have the greatest odds, when you have the greatest odds of the market going back up. Financial professionals fall for the same fear and greed. So don't think I'm talking down to the non-financial professionals listening.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
Many advisors, many CEOs of banks or CEOs of insurance companies, what have you, fall for fear and greed. If not, you wouldn't have had all these companies that had to be bailed out during the Great Recession. You wouldn't have had all these brokerage firms or investment banking firms that went out of business because of that. You have to look at it, those kind of three key things.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
So anything based on emotions is not a do-it-yourself project. It's not this quick thing that I could do an Instagram post and everyone's so goody like some of these financial influencers. And that's why, honestly, I had to write the book was to help these people start this journey and then get them to the point where they're able to take that next step in the journey.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
For me, financial independence is where you don't have to work, but you still work because you get a lot out of it. You're not doing it for the paycheck, you're doing it for the enjoyment. Yes, there happens to be a paycheck that comes along, but if all of a sudden there's a pandemic or your company goes out of business, or just for health reasons, you can no longer work,
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
You don't have to worry about paying the bills. You don't have to worry about having money to leave, have that financial legacy. Independent wealth is both being able to leave a financial legacy, but also a non-financial legacy. That the non-financial legacies is important, if not more important than the financial legacy. To me, you die and you have $20,000 left in the bank.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
To me, it's not financial independence. That's just being lucky that you didn't outlive your money.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
I think the whole risk tolerance, how that's handled by the wealth management industry is awful. They have a new client, do a risk tolerance questionnaire, just 10 or so questions. Voila, you're conservative, you're moderate, you're aggressive, and that's how we're going to manage your portfolio. That's as much a CYA approach.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
that the compliance wants to do, but they're not explaining what this means. If you're a conservative person, if the market goes down, say 10%, where 15% to your investment, your overall worth on paper goes down 10 or 15%, you're going to be more upset, more stressed, maybe even unable to sleep at night than the moderate risk person.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
but they don't explain, okay, here's what this means for you in terms of achieving your financial goal, your financial legacy that you want to have. I did an analysis on data provided to me by a financial firm that over a 32 year period, if you're that moderate risk person, The advisor has to say to you, you're less likely, statistically, to reach your financial goal.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
I had clients like this when I worked directly. They were super wealthy. They had generational problems. For them, to be conservative didn't matter. But other clients I had that were in that accumulation phase, being conservative or moderate does matter.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
The advisor needs to have that conversation in very simple terms, not financial advisor speak, not behavioral finance speak, but again, about their emotions. You need to then say, are you okay with this? Some people say, yeah, I just want to be conservative. Yeah, I want to be moderate. But others say, no, I'm not okay. How am I going to have this type of legacy?
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
Some advisors do this, and I got this idea, frankly, from an advisor. And when I first heard it years ago, I was like, of course you should do this. So what he does is they say, no, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to work together. It's not going to happen overnight, but it's going to get you further out on that risk tolerance continuum.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
So that you're going to go from conservative, say, to a moderate, and then eventually down to aggressive. Now, this is only the client wants to do that. And again, with the client understanding this isn't, you can't snap your fingers and have this change happen overnight. So the other problem with the whole risk tolerance is that it's, the questions are taken at a point in time
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
and a point in time with the economy and with the markets. So you're going to have people that, oh yeah, I'm aggressive after the market's been up and a long bull market creates a lot of aggressive investors. And so now all of a sudden the market goes down even 10, 15%. And some of these aggressive people, their whole risk tolerance just changed. They're flipping out. They're upset.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
What should I do? I should sell. I should sell everything. Dive into the bunker and wait till the bombs stop going off. So the advisors, though, oh, Al's aggressive. I don't need to call him. I don't need to check in on him.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
and if he's having a problem he'll call me sometimes one don't know when they're the fear and greed emotions are kicking in and number two they might be embarrassed to go from yeah i know i told you i was aggressive and i know my survey said i was aggressive but right now i'm really panicking
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
And so it's an instrument, the risk tolerance survey, the setting isn't fully being used for the benefit of the clients and also for the benefit of the advisors.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
First of all, with them, they should either be licensed and regulated like financial advisors or put out of business is my opinion. The regulators, I don't care what is being regulated, are awful. with handling new technology. So all they see is it's this cool technology, social media, and these people providing some help.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
And it's different than a financial advisor's charging a fee or getting commissions and all. They're just awful with it. But you look at Bitcoin and all that, there's still no regulation on that. It just dropped the ball with that. So if I'm on Instagram,
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
And I have these testimonials from people who did my coaching and they saved X amount of money and say, oh, this person, they save an average of 5,000 a year and increase their income by an average of 20,000 a year. And the FTC, which they're doing, knocks on my door, says, oh, we saw this posting. We need to see all this. We need to see who did this, what each person's result was.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
And if not, then you get a nice fine from the FTC. No one's doing that with these people. whatever, internet influencers. So if I have to worry about what I say and get in trouble or I get in trouble, if a financial advisor has to worry about what they say and do and show any conflicts of interest, for example, then I don't get it. I don't get why all these financial influencers...
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
are just allowed to do what they do. So that's maybe not an answer you want to hear, but this is serious stuff. This is serious stuff with people's money. This is their livelihood. There's a reason the Balfour guy, whatever the Wolf of wall street guy, which was a real life person was put out of business. that they were stealing money from people.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
There's a reason advisors and broker-dealers have compliance people, to make sure that everything is done. An advisor cannot even send out a mass email without compliance reviewing it, filing it, and when they get audited, gonna see, okay, they have to see all that. This is my opinion. I don't care if there's some good advice out there. I don't care if there's good intentions out there.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
All I know is There's a lot of bad actors. There's a lot of stupid people. You talk about the financial media, how you'll read an article and kind of scratch your head. And that the advice in my book, I call some of them the financial media smut club. They just focus on tantalizing things that get you excited, but really aren't good advice. And a lot of these people are
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
They don't know what they're writing about. A recent article I read on restaurants with inflation. So the financial writer was talking about how expensive everything is for these restaurants. They have to charge more. The financial reporter said, I don't know why that would still be an issue because inflation's down. Inflation's not down. The inflation rate is down.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
And so either that reporter knows that they're lying or that reporter has no clue what they're writing about. I remember there was an article years ago, there's an article in the wall street journal. The author completely missed the point. The article was about if you have a windfall and you're going to buy bonds, what do you buy? It's all corporate bonds, treasuries.
Chief Change Officer
#230 Michael Sakraida: Change Your Money Mindset, Change Your Life – Part Two
I called up the writer of the article. I didn't care. That person wrote for the Wall Street Journal. They didn't intimidate me. They probably went to a better college than I did. I don't care. And I said, okay, if this person has this huge windfall, now do you think that would probably guarantee that they're in the top tax bracket? Yeah, of course, duh.