Ryley Smith Wealth Strategies

03/10/2024

4 Rules of Financial Institutions:

1. They want your money
2. On a consistent basis
3. For as long as possible
4. When you go to get your money, they want to give as little back as possible

Which financial products or strategies are you participating in where these four rules are true? If you don't have control over your time and money and your dollars are not doing more than one job, I can help.

Common strategies promoted by financial institutions that follow the 4 Rules:

1. Pay off your mortgage early/accelerate payments
2. Qualified retirement plans
3. Roth accounts
4. College savings/529 plans
5. Buy term insurance and invest the difference
6. Compound interest
7. Dollar cost averaging
8. Low deductibles on insurance
9. Mortgages of less than 30 years

06/03/2023

Yikes...

https://www.usdebtclock.org/

05/24/2023

Look at the pictures. Which one would you choose? Pretty easy right? The one that says a rate of return of 25%.

I love using this example when I talk to clients and business owners.

*11.11% return: imagine you own a business. It generates $1 million/year of revenue, and you have $900,000 in expenses. You don't get to keep the full $1 million because of these expenses. In this scenario, that's a 11.11% return. Not too bad.

*22% return: same business and expenses. Except now you decide to work some weekends and late nights in your business and trade more of your most valuable asset, time, for little green pieces of paper. You're able to increase your revenue to $1.1 million. Your expenses remained the same though at $900,000. You can see your rate of return increased to 22%.

*25% return: same business, except this time you focus on being more efficient and plugging the holes up where money is getting away from you. This could be paying more in taxes than you legally and ethically have to, double/over coverage on insurance premiums, raising your deductibles on insurance contracts to decrease outgoing premium costs, etc.

The message is simple: there's more wealth to be had in finding ways to recapture costs than there ever will be in chasing a rate of return or by simply trading more time for money. Be efficient and approach your financial life from a holistic perspective.

As a mentor of mine says, "you have to look at the whole car not just the tire."

Let me know how I can help and discover if there are ways for you to be more efficient with your time.

05/12/2023

I asked a CPA the other day, "If compound interest is so good, why don't banks do it?"

Banks don't simply let the dollars they collect sit in their vault or "under their mattress". They get it moving and have it doing many jobs at once. This is called the Velocity of Money.

Look at the pictures below. One is of interest rates from a couple of years ago, and the other is what interest rates are today. Look at the rate of return the banks are earning when we compound our money and only have it do one job. Meaning, they're paying us .05% (old interest rates) to park our dollars in their bank, and in return if I wanted a mortgage in past years, I had to pay them 2.75%. This is a 5,400% rate of return!

Compound interest can be a good thing if you know how to use it to your advantage. If you have money sitting in a taxable environment (checking/savings/money markets/CD's, brokerage accounts, etc.), and it's earning interest each year, your tax bill is also growing. Compound taxes are not something you want!

Take the interest you've earned out and get it moving to go and pay for other items in your life or to grow in a more tax-advantaged position.

02/25/2023

Had a great conversation with Maureen McCann from Spartan Invest. She brought a ton of value to this episode.

Great financial advice from her and how she does 3 things to win the money game:

1. Buy assets that appreciate in value
2. Buy assets that cash flow
3. Buy assets that reduce your tax liability

How many of these are you doing? Check out Spartan Invest and Maureen's team at https://www.facebook.com/SpartanInvest/about or https://spartaninvest.com/.

If you're looking for turnkey real estate investing Spartan Invest provides a great service to their clients. Check them out!

12/15/2022

This could be a good idea, or we could ask ourselves, "how can I use the talents and abilities I've been given to add more value to others to increase my income by an additional $5,000/year?"

Two very different ways of thinking: scarcity vs abundant. Spend less than you earn, no doubt. Yet let's also focus on increasing our cash flow.

11/22/2022

11/21/2022

Do you have your personal assets separate from your business/entrepreneurial activities? If not, listen to this episode and learn how to!

11/07/2022

Holy cow Dan and I were together in person for a podcast episode!

Why is life insurance so polarizing? People tend to have a lot of misconceptions about life insurance and how it can be used.

Listen for some of the reasons that we hear from people why they don't want or need life insurance, and how after chatting with us they usually change their minds.

09/16/2022

Well would you look at that!

We just reached 500 followers! Thank you for continuing support. Just getting started!. 🙏🙏

08/12/2022

From The Tax Foundation

The Senate would:

🔹 Increase net revenue by ~$324B

🔹 Eliminate 29k full-time equivalent U.S. jobs

🔹 Reduce long-run economic output by .2%

🔹 Reduce avg. after-tax incomes for taxpayers across every income group over the long run

https://taxfoundation.org/inflation-reduction-act/

08/11/2022