Navigating Life and Finance in a Rapidly Evolving World

Ever wondered how a simple mobile device morphed into such an indispensable part of our lives? In this episode, we reminisce about the astonishing shifts in lifestyles and opportunities over recent years. We share tales from our own lives that showcase the remarkable journey from luxury to necessity, and we analyze the generational advancements that can sometimes leave us in awe. We also tackle the fears that economic fluctuations bring, especially in an eventful election year, and offer our listeners the wisdom needed to maintain composure amid potential financial turbulence.

Sensational news can be like a siren's call, luring us towards unnecessary panic or irrational financial decisions. In our conversation, we draw a line between news that truly matters and the noise that doesn't, helping you to remain focused on what's crucial for your well-being. We contemplate the resilience of markets amidst unforeseen events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and question the endless pursuit of material wealth. Our aim is not just to educate but to foster a mindful approach to personal finance, steering clear of impulsive reactions sparked by fear or the fear of missing out.

Rounding off our chat, we reflect on the instant gratification era, fueled by technological wonders like virtual reality and the soaring costs of college education. We urge you to explore alternatives and embrace a 'what if?' mindset to combat stress in the face of a rapidly changing educational and career landscape. By shifting from a defeatist outlook to one of opportunity and growth, we hope to inspire you to see the silver lining, even when economic headlines seem daunting. Remember, this journey is not just ours—it's shaped by your insights. So, we invite you to tune in, join the dialogue, and contribute to the conversations that matter most to you.

🌍 Check out the Worldometer - real-world statics! Updated instantly.

______________________________________________________________

Looking for additional content that can help you get the most from your life? Check out Unleashing Leadership with Travis Maus, premium bonus content from Ditch the Suits Fans, at https://unleashingleadership.buzzsprout.com/

Thanks to our sponsor, S.E.E.D. Planning Group! S.E.E.D. is a fee-only financial planning firm with a fiduciary obligation to put your best interest first. Schedule your free discovery meeting at www.seedpg.com

Ditch the Suits is produced by NQR Media. NQR also produces the One Big Thing Podcast with Steve Campbell.

You can watch all episodes, as well as other great content produced by NQR Media through their YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/@NQRMedia

📧 For more information or to get in touch with us, visit https://www.ditchthesuits.com/ or email us at info@ditchthesuits.com

👍🏼 You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at @nqrmedia

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ We'd also love for you to subscribe to this podcast and leave a 5-star rating and review

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

Welcome to Dips the Suits, a movement awakening an opportunity for you to start getting more from your money in life. I'm Steve Campbell. With my amazing co-host, travis Moss, we're going to share industry insights nobody wants you to know about, so buckle up and enjoy the episode. Well, happy new year. I know we are off to a fresh start here in 2024. Steve Campbell here with Travis Moss on Dips the Suits. We wanted to have this fun episode today about how much life has changed and just things that maybe we had 20, 30 years ago that we take for granted. Travis, just giving people a framework for how to look at time in life. What's a good starting point for where we want to take this conversation today?

Speaker 2: 0:52

This is one of those grab bag conversations. It doesn't really belong in any kind of little series of shows or anything like that, but it's a conversation that I had with somebody better part of a year or two ago. It stuck with me ever since because it was a very powerful conversation and I see a lot of clients actually struggling with this type of thought process, just to get into it. I know a guy who was in his 80s and he told me he was sharing a conversation with me or an experience with me where he was saying that he was just in absolute amazement at what his children and grandchildren were actually doing. His son is very, very successful, sounds like a great guy, has very good financial means and was having an experience with his daughter. I think that they were flying someplace or something like that. It was just absolutely amazing. Maybe it was skydiving, I don't know. Whatever it was, it was something that basically he couldn't ever have imagined doing. That maybe would have been the one big thing when he was growing up that he would have done. Now they do it literally every summer. It was really an acknowledgement, a really happy story about it. It's amazing because every generation says this right they want their kids to be better than they were. It's like looking at your kids and seeing what your kids are doing and going. I can't believe that they can do that and what they're doing, I can't. You know how big their houses are and how much money they make and the vacations they go on and the schools they send their kids to. I'm so proud of them. At the same time, there's just a little hint of jealousy there too, right, it's like, oh, I wish I could have done some of those things. You're trying to kind of keep up with it and stuff like that.

Speaker 2: 2:52

But as we get into the new year and we're making resolutions and stuff, one of the interesting things is that we need to keep everything in perspective, because the flip side of this is this fear that somebody's going to come along and take this away from us I talk a lot about. We're coming into an election year and you're going to have all this infighting in the politics and stuff and it's going to percolate into the financial kind of economic news and everything like that, and there's a fear that, like, look at where the housing market is right now and interest rates your kids will never be able to buy a house again, right? Or you'll never get good investment returns again, or you know that something's being taken away. There's a fear of loss and whenever we have a fear of loss, we're just so conditioned, because I mean, think about how incredible it is.

Speaker 2: 3:45

I'm 43 years old and my entire lifetime all America has done is grow. All we've seen, if you're American in your lifetime, is growth. You've seen the country grow and the GDP grow and the economic power grow and the things that you can do grow and the groceries that you can buy. Like everything has improved, you know, economically, as long as we've been alive. And now we're looking at that going. Oh my gosh, maybe it's not going to grow anymore, maybe it could even go backwards, and there's a real fear and it's palpable.

Speaker 2: 4:22

And I tend to feel it more, or experience as more of a clients that are older, that are in their 70s and 80s, where they're very nervous about where the direction of the country is going and those types of things and they're very nervous about well, you know, I need to leave this money to my kids because they won't have Like somehow things are going to disappear and opportunities are going to go away or they themselves are going to lose an opportunity or something's going to go, something's going to change for them and they're going to be in some kind of dire situation, and so what I wanted to try to do was put this in perspective a little bit. Okay, so, when we're looking at taking a step backwards, what does a step backwards actually mean? Like, as we get into this year and as the news headlines start rolling and as we start making decisions, financial decisions that are going to possibly impact the rest of our lives, I want to give everybody who's listening tools to put it into perspective. So if I were to say, oh, the market could go down 30% this year, what does that actually mean for you? And so I came up with a list and, steve, you can chime in whenever you want.

Speaker 2: 5:38

What I wanted to do is basically talk about the difference, like what happened then and what's going on. Like, for instance, when I grew up, there was no cell phones, I think as I was like an older teenager, they came out like Nokia had the phone with the little thing. I mean you didn't, actually none of my friends had phones, but I think I got one in college, and that was more for chasing around the little snake on the screen and playing the little handheld video game. That was part of it. But cell phones were not really a thing, and then they were a luxury item, and now everybody's got a cell phone.

Speaker 1: 6:15

Well, it was hard to imagine growing up in the late 80s and 90s. I remember seeing movies where there'd be somebody with a really rich car that would have a portable phone in their car and you were like, wow, it's not attached to a landline in a home you would have never imagined we just celebrated our holiday where in the 90s, growing up which when you look back at video seems like a completely different time I remember my father, who's now in his 70, having this massive camcorder on his shoulder, that he'd have to start and stop and put video cassette tapes in and he would narrate it Meanwhile. A couple of weeks ago at Christmas, I got my iPhone out in my hand. That's tiny, shooting 4K videos that you can make and mix and all this stuff. And so, even just within cell phones, you never would have imagined basically having a personal computer in your pocket that you could do anything with, and I think it's just.

Speaker 1: 7:06

It's hard for us to really understand and calculate what technology is going to look like in the future and something seems so far off like how they could ever be. I just remember growing up as a kid watching Back to the Future and when Marty McFly went into the 2020s, being like there's no way life is going to look like that. And now I look back watching that movie with my kids and I'm like holy crap, we have a good majority of these things. So just life changes and develops and evolves in ways that no one can ever really predict.

Speaker 2: 7:39

But it's funny because what if everything took a step back? What if the economy was really bad and America wasn't America anymore and all doomsday is happening and stuff? Probably everybody's still got a cell phone. That's a luxury, that's an amazing thing. That 30 years ago wasn't an amazing thing, but it wasn't a computer in your pocket where you could do your groceries, buy stuff you've never seen or heard of before, play all your music, watch a movie, connect live stream with your friends. I mean you used to have to get in an airplane and fly to see your grandmother.

Speaker 2: 8:22

Cds are kind of in the same vein. Remember the CD cases that you used to have under your visor in your car or something, because CDs are the precursors of MP3s, which was. They were awesome because before that there was cassettes and I actually remember my parents having eight tracks. You know which was like you'd have a bin of music that you would haul around this plane. Sports on turf. I grew up in a very small rural school district. I watched them. They just won the state title for the third time in a row or something like that, and you know they're playing. Their school field is turf. I mean they've got a field that when I was growing up would have been like you would have gone to college camp to get to touch, and even then most colleges probably didn't have a field like that. The kids today are playing on that. What if the economy was so bad that schools could not afford a $30 million athletic facility for the kids to play football or field hockey and they had to play on grass? They'd still be okay. I'm pretty sure they'd still be okay.

Speaker 2: 9:40

Let's jump into the market a little bit Over the past five years. So you go back to December 2023, the S&P. And now this is when did I run this? I ran this through mid-December, okay, or through the start of December. So this is a little bit dated now. But five years back, from the beginning of December 2023, the S&P had returned 81.38%. 81% in five years, even after 2022 being a double digit negative year seems horrible, right? Even if the market dropped 30% from today's high, it would still be about 27% higher than it was five years ago. So next year or this year, I mean we're recording this in 2023. People are gonna be listening to this in 2024. In 2020, where the market crashes 30%, you're still 27% higher than you were five years ago. It's not Doomsday, it's just a sucky situation. It's a sucky coincidence, it's a timing issue, right, it's a frame of reference issue. It's not a horrible situation. There could be much worse situations.

Speaker 1: 10:55

And I think what you've tried to do and what we explained in our year-in review for those that are new to our podcast is Travis and I are not here to give you specifics that the hottest stocks or what you should do when to take your pension, but what we try to do is always provide you a framework and I think what we always try to do a really nice job of, especially when it comes to world news economic headlines is, man, when you've spent the majority of your day working to provide for your family and you come home, you know the last thing that we would want is that you are emotionally getting sucked dry because of what you hear on the news as you're supposed to be playing with your kids about the market's gonna crash and you're gonna lose all your money.

Speaker 1: 11:36

That kind of stuff begins to really just deteriorate your happiness and your forward-looking outlook.

Speaker 1: 11:41

And you know you think about over the last five years what you just read that 81% is fascinating because, folks, it wasn't too long ago where Sam's Club and Costco in every grocery store was lacking toilet paper because the world was coming to an end through COVID and you could have not have convinced somebody if you stood there with a sign in the middle of these warehouses with, hey, we're all gonna be okay and the market's gonna be up, everyone would have said you're full of it, because we're trying to experience life as it comes at us and we don't really all have good systems or filters for, like, what is really information that is truly going to impact me, and then what is just kind of sensationalism and we're not saying like just turn off the news and don't listen.

Speaker 1: 12:23

But when you hear information, how can you more proactively understand what really is going to impact you, so that if there is a movie you should make you know what to do, but if it also is not something and it's really a talking head just being paid to say something about stocks or bonds or your money, like how can you also begin to filter through and not make detrimental things with your money in life that really that person that gave you that advice is never gonna have to be accountable for? And so I think even just you reading that I think really brings to light and it's shocking to me even hearing that, because you would just assume, based on everything that we hear, that life has been pretty dreary and pretty crappy. But to make that potential amount of money if you were invested in a particular way is kind of fascinated given everything we've all experienced as human beings.

Speaker 2: 13:15

Yeah, and to your fun analogy there I was standing in the Sam's Club looking for toilet paper. I'm still in bewilderment. We're afraid that the whole system's gonna lock up. Sees up, you got no toilet paper, but the canned goods section at Sam's Club is still full food. It's just a weird thing. It's food or toilet paper. You got to have food so that you can use the toilet. It just kind of seems like you know. Anyway, I'm going for the food next time, not the toilet paper. All right, side track. Sorry, steve.

Speaker 1: 13:51

Well, but no, no to a side note, though you, you, every one of these things can be learning opportunities for you when you experience worldwide events, news headlines, things that maybe you did something drastic because you had information you'd never experienced before you did something.

Speaker 1: 14:07

That's fine. Well, what did you learn from that? Was that the right call? Was that the wrong call? Was that the? I just thought I did what I was supposed to do, so that, like what we're trying to talk about in this episode, when you hear a similar set of information, are you going to make the same drastic decision and say, oh my gosh, should we go again? Or is it like, hey, wait a minute. I remember last time the guy on TV told me to sell all my stocks, you know? Or do this thing Like how can you not do nothing, but maybe have a half second of pause that can allow reasoning to come back into decision making, not just reacting?

Speaker 2: 14:49

And well, that's Steve. That's where a lot of this is coming from. A lot of this kind of pseudo jealousy is coming from an impression that's being made on us from other people, you know, and it's because, again, we're afraid of losing something or we're afraid of missing out, instead of celebrating all the progress that has been made. You know, if in the last five years, you've made 81% of your money, that's an incredible amount of progress, and there's been good years and bad years, so it's not unprecedented that there could be a setback. It's part of the process, right, but you've still moved forward. We have houses today with two and three car garages that are absolutely full, like Gourmet kitchens, quartz countertops, beautiful furniture. We have stuff today, like I remember my grandparents had a big box TV until the day they died. Basically, I mean, they just didn't have the stuff that we have today. We have incredible stuff.

Speaker 2: 15:59

It would be okay if people, when they say, well, nobody's going to ever be able to afford a house again, well, maybe people shouldn't, maybe everybody shouldn't be buying a 45 under square foot house with three car garage. I'm not saying everybody is, that's a horrible thing to say, but you know what? We keep getting bigger, bigger, bigger. Maybe we have to get smaller once in a while. Maybe there has to be a reset. Maybe it's not just going to get bigger and fancier for eternity. Maybe once in a while it's got to get grounded, and so there could be periods of time where certain things are much more expensive than other things because it's got to reset. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bad thing or that, oh my gosh, we should live in fear now. It just means that maybe you need to check what we're doing.

Speaker 1: 16:49

I think what you're alluding to again you're talking about the markets, but also maybe just a conscious level of appreciation. Think back on your life and where you are now raising a family, or maybe you've raised adult children that are now out of the home. There were things that you worked for, that you believed for, that, you cast vision for that. It took you time to accumulate, to make whatever it may be, and you now have it. If you're not careful, that thing that was once so special in your mind can become so part of everyday life that it's just on to the next, to the bigger and the better that. What if you were able to actually look at all the things that you've been able to do in your lifetime and have just such a level of appreciation that it kind of grounds you in a way to understand you? And I did an entire series and episodes around virtues and values that most people have never really written down what their values are and their virtues and what they stand for. What would it look like if we're not always thinking about what's next, what's more or what can be taken from us, when we understand where we've come from and you know what? There was times in our marriage where, man, we did without and we did absolutely fine, thinking that someone's going to come and take things away or do things to what we've worked hard to then are we really just building a house of cards that can so easily be burned up in a fire, or is it more like 2024 is going to be a year of really fortifying the foundation of our life and what's important to us, so that when we receive news, if it doesn't apply to us, you move on, but if it is really something that's going to shake the foundation of what we've been building, then, boy, what do we do with that? So there's a lot that's coming out in this conversation, because I think you and I are just big champions for helping people understand, control what you can, let go of what you can't, but now have a framework for how you can make sense of a lot of things that don't make sense to us.

Speaker 1: 18:42

Hey, at Ditch the Suits, we're all about bringing you great resources and you're obviously here because you love podcasts. Well, what if we told you that I, one of your co-hosts at Ditch the Suits, has now launched my own podcast? If you like the tone of obviously you've learned in this episode I try to always bring kind of the heart of the issues that we bring, to bring it full circle as to how to apply it to your life. Well, if you want to head over and check out the One Big Thing podcast, it's an inspiration and encouragement podcast where my job is to help you, as a listener, really move the ball forward, to take you from inspiration to transformation. So, if you like podcasts, be my guest, head over to the One Big Thing podcast today and take a listen.

Speaker 2: 19:21

Well, be careful of the impulse, the now, now, now impulse, and I think that this is something that's plaguing every generation now. It used to be, oh, you know, those millennials or those gen actors or whatever. I think every generation is struggling with that. Every age group that I work with or interact with all the way up into the well, not every in the 90s, they don't see this People in their. I have a couple of people that are in their 90s and they don't have this problem, and they're the ones who probably should have the problem because they're the ones with the very limited time. But it's in the 80s and the 70s and right on down, it's now, now. Now it has to happen now. If it's a step back, it's too late. Oh no, you know, I have to be an all time high right now.

Speaker 2: 20:06

One of the things that's happened and I caught a podcast on this and it was very, very eye-opening for me they were actually talking about how the virtual reality that a lot of us live in. So if you think about this 80 year old that I'm talking about, if you think about 50 years ago, when he was a young man, life experience you couldn't get it through. A video game. You couldn't get through social media. You had to go live it. You had to actually go do something, and so you might work your entire life to have three or four really incredible experiences, and those experiences were probably transformative. They made such an impression the first time you see, you know, the Rockies, or the first time you went to Europe, or something like that. There's something in there that was so rare and so unique that you had to earn and save and wait for, and there was a progression to get there. Now you have video games that look like real life, you have virtual reality that they, you know, they put on your head, and you're in a world you can go swim with the dolphins if you want, Not actually being there, but you still get the emotional attachment to the experience Right, Like it's actually programming you. So you have these things in your life, where you are. Historically, you would have a small handful for most of us would have a small handful of transcending experiences. Now you can pack them all in, and so it's like every day I got to do something amazing, because otherwise I'm bored, and that's where a lot of mental illness, depression, basically, what do I have to look forward to. So that's why it's so easy to feel like, oh, you're taking something away from me, or I don't have as much, or I don't have an opportunity when you know, and to forget to reflect on where you've come from.

Speaker 2: 22:01

Our last example that we wanted to get to, before we try to wrap this up a little bit, was kids going to college at the cost of $60,000 per year plus. Would you imagine that 40 years ago? Unbelievable what it costs to go to college, right? Well, the reason why it costs to go to college for $60,000 is because people will pay $60,000. If you could not, what if? Do you play a what if? Game with everything that's stretching you out? Right? What if the market crash? Okay, well, what if? What if? What if you couldn't afford $60,000 of your college? Does that mean that you're gonna be uneducated? Does it mean that there's no other options? Right? If the world changed in a way and you couldn't send your kid to that school, could your kids still go to another school? Could they still get an education? Could they still get a job that pays the bills? Absolutely they could. So it depends on what people are taking away from you, where this dude they comes from and the fact that there's no entitlement to anything. That time can change, right, it's you have what your situation presents available to you. Just because you could go to college for $20,000 a year 20 years ago, the same college, doesn't mean that now, if it's 60, somebody's taking something away from you. No, it's changed. You need to pivot with it.

Speaker 2: 23:31

So I think that the game there was basically when we're feeling anxious because we're feeling lost, we're feeling like, okay, the market's crashed, or the people on TV are talking about how bad things will be and how limited chances our kids are gonna have, or you're gonna have personally, or something like that, when they're talking about taking things away, that is provoking a fear reaction and it's not rational and, like 99% of the cases, it's not rational. If it was rational, they probably wouldn't be on TV or on YouTube or something telling you about it. They'd be out running around like crazy trying to protect themselves, right. So I just wanna put in perspective and this especially being an election year and everything I just we're trying to set the year up for success, right, let's get our mindset strong. Let's really think about how we're gonna let things come in and impact us.

Speaker 2: 24:31

One of the things they're gonna talk about is the economic demise, how the US has fallen off of its perch, how the rest of the world is passing us by, and this is really fun. This is really. This is just kind of like a bonus for this episode, Steve. A little bit of numbers here, but I think that this is a little bit eye-opening to how great we actually have it. And even a step back, we still have it incredibly good. So you can go to the worldometersinfo. I don't know, Steve, can we put that in our show notes?

Speaker 2: 25:04

We'll make it happen so people can figure out how to get there. So worldometersinfo, and then a whole bunch of slashes and other stuff after that, but basically they've got a calculator, giant calculator, and they calculate GDP. So that is the size of the economy of a country. And so they keep talking about how China is going to surpass the United States and whatnot. The US currently is at about $25.2 trillion of GDP. That's how much we generate in business, essentially a year in economic activity, which equates to $75,000 per capita. We are believe. How much would you guess without looking at the notes, if you had to guess, how much percentage do you think we make up of the world's GDP?

Speaker 1: 25:52

Oh gosh, I guess, because I'm, from the news, expecting a very low number, 15% 25%.

Speaker 2: 26:02

The US all by itself is 25% of the world's GDP. That's a quarter. That's a lot, right. I mean there's a lot of other countries and China's huge right. So you would think, well, china must be 50% then. All right, china is second place. They're at 18 trillion. 18 to 25 trillion is a lot. That's not even close, like it's not even maybe close. That is a huge spread For going from eight and look at it this way Per person or per capita.

Speaker 2: 26:44

It's not per person, but per capita is 12,598. That's the economic production per capita. I need to make sure I'm getting my terms right. So I guess, yeah, that is per person. I was having a conscious dilemma there for a second, making sure I was representing that correctly. All right, so that's China.

Speaker 2: 27:11

Third place, japan 4.2 trillion. 4.2 trillion. We're at 25.5,. They're at 4.2. 34,000 per capita, so almost three times better than China, more productive per person. That is dramatic Numbers.

Speaker 2: 27:34

Three through 10, so that includes Japan, germany, india, uk, France, russia, which everybody's trying to scare us with Canada and Italy. You combine all of them and we're talking about $24 trillion. We are bigger than three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 combined. We are bigger economically than Japan, germany, india, uk, russia, france, canada and Italy combined and we're worried about whether or not we have a bad year.

Speaker 2: 28:16

That is the epitome of Arrogance or ego, you know. I mean like talk about being egotistical. We can have a bad. It's okay if we have a bad year. It's okay If once in a while we got to take a step back and there's a period of discomfort. We don't need a painkiller for everything. Every now and then you got to have some discomfort so things can be reset, so you can continue to march forward. Right, you can't just go full speed ahead a hundred percent of the time. Sometimes you got to take a bump. But oh my gosh, people who live right now today have so much better and and so much more the people 30 or 40 years ago. You couldn't even imagine some of the stuff 30 or 40 years ago that we can do now and then we have now. It's incredible. So you know we need to. What I wanted to do is just set the tone. Let's not buy into defeatist attitude this year. Look at every single thing that happens, no matter how bad you think it is. What is the opportunity?

Speaker 1: 29:14

here. Well, and I and I think you've talked about this in other shows, but we'll bring it home with this you know there are so many different competing things for our attention and if we're not careful we can be mixing all of them together in one big pot that we think we're cooking up you could be having. You know, personal world affair, personal news, personal freedom issues, personal finance issues, race issues, all these different things that are just every headline is something from one of these areas and they can all kind of bleed together. I think it's also important to to start to like separate what is all these different sources of news and what is really impacting you personal finance, not having that defeatist attitude. And so, again, what we wanted to do was give you a framework of the world is continuing to change, there are things happening, but again, you need to be able to sort through, you know what's a headline that's actually affecting you, what's news that you need to take action on? First is just how can you go out and make 2024, regardless of what's happening, the best you, for you, your family, so you can be present, you can live life on purpose and again, kicking off this year, we thought that this would be a great way to have a conversation with you, to let you know that maybe, if you're thinking like Travis and I, you're not alone in your thoughts, but there are some things you can do.

Speaker 1: 30:26

So, as always, thank you for stopping by ditch the suits. We hope it's not your last subscribe. Leave a five star rating and review. Reach out to Travis and I if there's topics that you Want to hear about. This year, in 2024, a lot of our content comes from you, the listeners. So if there's topics, if there's series you want us to cover, please make sure you reach out to us. But, as always, thank you for being our guest on ditch the suits.