Rich, Fit and Happy Show

69 | Future Funds: Unlocking Financial Success for Families & Millennials

• Crystal O'Connor • Season 2 • Episode 69

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Today I spoke with Wesley Belden, a fintech entrepreneur who has helped over 30,000 people improve their family’s financial future through investing, and has managed over 1 billion dollars. His humble beginnings instilled a drive for making the world a better place for those looking to empower themselves, and has led to Wesley helping people navigate the quickly changing world to provide financial security for themselves and their families through his current ventures, Raise Financial and Scholar Raise.

Wesley lives in Nashville with his wife, two kids, and his dogs.

Find more about Wesley Belden at:

Sign up with Ageless Ambition by visiting https://www.AgelessAmbition.com

You can also schedule a call with me or one of my team members at https://www.calendly.com/wealthy-wellness

Health and Wellness practitioners: you can learn more at http://www.WealthyWellnessAcademy.com

Welcome to Rich, Fit and Happy. I brought you on a financial expert because money talk is a big deal lately, and it always has been but it's becoming more and more of a big deal. And today I brought on Wesley Belden. He's a FinTech entrepreneur who has helped over 30,000 people improve their family's financial future through investing. He's managed over a billion dollars. His humble beginnings instilled a drive for making the world a better place for those looking to empower themselves and has led to him helping people navigate the quickly changing world to provide financial security for themselves and their families through his current ventures, which is called Raise Financial and Scholar Raise. And that's what we're gonna talk about. And he lives in Nashville with his wife and two kids and his dogs. And we just discussed Nashville, didn't we? So right before I hit record, I was talking about the beach and he was talking about how great Nashville is. And it's great to like share that with an audience. A lot of financial reasons, I've seen a lot of people have to move out of Naples. And then some are moving in from New Jersey and with the financial atmosphere, people are wanting change and they're looking for places to live and I've heard that Nashville is just filling up and so is Naples by the way. Yeah, I, I think everyone, everyone's kind of following me here to Nashville. It's kind of become a really hot spot. They're following you. Okay. So I love that you call yourself the FinTech entrepreneur on a mission to fix capitalism and I wanna hear about that and what that actually means. Sure. First of all, Crystal, it's so great to be here and thank you for having me on the show. And then also making me a little bit homesick about Florida and the beautiful beaches there. But yeah. So when we say that, we look at kind of a lot of the things that are working so great right now in our economy. You think about kind of how our capitalist society works. It's very, very good at providing resources to businesses and endeavors to kind of produce products and outputs. It's great. I mean, you think about like how our economy just hums and how it really moves. And what we're saying is that as this works, the primary feature of our economy here in America is that idea of producing things output, and then being very geared towards doing that. What we're saying is how do we get more people, regular people, everyday people invested in the outputs of that? And by that we mean invested in a meaningful way in equity, ownership, you know, thing like stocks - in these companies, right? So you look the last 30 years we've seen productivity increase, but wages have remained static. The difference between those two graphs has been recapitalized in the share price of these firms. And so this has been a really great way to enrich yourself, has been a great way to produce long-term economic stability for yourself and your family. But it means that you have to be invested in these companies. You have to be invested these markets. And if you do that, you can use capitalism to really kind of enrich yourself. Capitalism is such a controversial topic, isn't it? I'm all about capitalism, but I like the word conscious capitalism. Do you hear that thrown around? I was at first annoyed by it, but then I started realizing that, I guess, it's necessary. It's a necessary I don't wanna call it evil cause I don't think capitalism is evil, but it, it has its problems, right? So how is capitalism gonna fix the problems that capitalism has caused? So, I think like what is that old adage? Capitalism is the worst system except for all of the other ones. Uh, I think- That's right. You know, I mean any system that we put together is gonna have its inherent upsides and downsides, and that's just kind of the nature of any complex organization. And so I think what's really important is to look at what works really well in a system. And then think about how you can expand that success to include more people, right? And so, for whatever reason, you talk about conscious capitalism, like that used to be a much larger tenant of the way that large corporations thought about themselves in society. They would look at themselves and say "We are supporting our employees. We are paying taxes to the community. And then we're enriching our shareholders as well." So they looked at this and said, we have three main stakeholders, or four if you count the customer. So you have your customer, your employees, the society in which you operate, and then your shareholders are usually somewhere in that stack towards the top as the idea of them being the priority. As modern capitalism or late stage capitalism kind of came in, a lot of that focus shifted to primarily and almost exclusively focusing on the shareholders as the only real stakeholder in the firm. And they started looking at it as the fiduciary responsibility of the leadership of that firm to enrich that shareholder above and beyond everything else. When the focus shifts towards that, you're gonna have it at the detriment of the employee in the form of wages. You're gonna have it at the detriment of society in the sense of reduced taxes. But that money isn't lost or disappeared. It's just been recapitalized in the hands of the shareholders. So if you think about that, if you want to be conscious about how you want the world to work, how you want it to look, if you make yourself a shareholder, you're going to receive those funds and you can deploy them in the way in which you see fit. And I think that's kind of the way of saying, you know, be the change that you want to be. But these systems are like trying to turn an aircraft carrier, right? Like our society move in this direction, our capitalist structure moved in this way. You know, you're not changing it. It's enriching too many people. It's too good at doing this. So if you're not changing it, use it to do what you want to do. And that's kind of what we're saying. The idea of working your way to economic stability is less and less tenable now. You need to work, you need to have that income. But then what you do with that income is you need to invest it..By investing it, you can basically reap the rewards of this new structure of capitalism where it's so focused on enriching shareholders. So become a shareholder is what you're saying. What are some of the first steps? My audience isn't necessarily younger, but name one or maybe two or three things that a younger person can do to improve their financial future in this weird and volatile environment? Sure. Yeah. I mean there's a lot of rules of thumb. Simple, basic things that everyone should be doing. Obviously everyone's picture's a little bit different. But you need to be focused on your retirement. If your employer offers a matching grant for your retirement, definitely make sure you're maxing that out. Make sure you're setting yourself on that space. Look at your different debts and your outlays. What your objectives are. If you want to buy a house, you gotta start thinking about that down payment. And how long it's gonna take, what that's gonna look like, you know, buying a home in your market. And then like, when it comes to investing, we are huge fans of really, really boring and basic things. Buy a broad based market ETF. And what that means is you buy basically an exchange traded fund, which you buy and sell just like a share of stock. But that share of stock owns a little piece of every company that's traded on the total stock market. So what you're basically saying is, I'm not trying to pick the Amazon in 1998. You're basically saying the entire stock market. We think is going to go up over time because we think American capitalism is going to increase in value, it's gonna increase its endeavors. And so you're basically placing that long-term bet on the total market. And this is proven to be one of the best ways to invest for the long term. That balance of risk and reward. And it's super simple. And so we always say that's a great foundation just to make sure that you're doing that. If you wanna do something more exotic with a smaller percentage of your investible funds, then by all means, but once you take care of that base. And that's one of the easiest things to do. Just kind of just get involved in the total market and just park your money there. So, so you're talking about just using the app, like the Robinhood app? Is that what you're talking about? You can use Robinhood. Yeah. But you know, like, be careful. Because Robinhood, the way they monetize themselves. They do what's called payment for order flow. And basically you are the product that they sell to larger institutions to be the other sides of their trades. So the more times that you trade, the more product they have to sell. So they try to incentivize you to trade more frequently. Like if you buy something on Robin Hood, the confetti goes off and it's like this dopamine hit and it's great. But one of the axioms and investing is you don't want to be over trading. So Robin Hood is incentivized to make you trade more frequently. Investing rules of thumb say you should be trading less frequently. So that reminds me of what Facebook knew when they developed the first click and dopamine hit cycle. And remember that Netflix show where one of the creators of Facebook came out and said that when he saw this and what was happening or what was going to happen with the clicks, and he knew that it was going to be a big thing, but also he saw the negative coming from it. And so there's like addiction. There's a book called Dopamine Driven. I've been meaning to read it. A friend of mine's reading it, but we are dopamine driven. And so what you just said, I, hadn't realized, but yeah, when I've bought stocks on Robinhood, it does that and I guess it does give me a little feeling. It's fun. Right? Get a buzz off of it. Interesting. So, they really want you to do that more. That activity. So they might even like what is the day trading? So you like day traders? Yeah. And I think an important component to look at this is their mission was to democratize access to stock trading. Right? And to a large degree, these companies have done it. And, you know, we started with E-trade. A lot of these things offering low fee to then now fee-free trading. But I think it's very telling when you look at the demographic. So more people own stock today than ever before, but when you compare the actual stock market value hold it is concentrated towards the top. So the 10% wealthiest Americans own 89% of the total stock market value, and that number keeps concentrating towards the top. So access to basically investing in a fee-free way isn't necessarily the answer. It's investing the correct way. And so I think distinguishing between those two things and if done properly, what an awesome and powerful tool to have access to basically buy and sell stocks for free. That is an incredible opportunity for an individual investor. I think it's just really important to understand where that firm's priorities lie and what you should really be focused on for your personal long-term investing strategy. I am kind of shifting a little bit with my question here or topic wise, but how are subscription services hurting the every man and why is ownership so important? What do you mean by subscriptions too? And I'm pulling this from a a question that was on your list of questions and I didn't completely understand it, but it intrigued me. So I'm curious. There's a lot of really interesting components here and it's basically this huge innovation in business model. It's huge business model innovation to try and figure out how you can open up your product to more people, right? So Adobe looked at it. They've been very good at like their subscription as a service model. Adobe is a software company. They make things like Illustrator and Photoshop. And these products were traditionally thousands and thousands of dollars. And so if I'm trying to start my freelance photography business, maybe plunking down two grand on this software after I just spent a thousand bucks on my camera is not tenable. So they said, "Well, we could open this up to more people by charging them a monthly subscription." And so this seemed great, right? But you start seeing this permeate through the entire marketplace. I'm actually tired of it and I remember not too long ago having a conversation with my daughter. In my day, we didn't have subscriptions. It something that was basically stealing from us in a lot of ways. Is that kind of what you're talking about? It's like depleting unnecessarily funds that you could be putting in stocks you could be saving. Yeah. It's like the difference between renting versus owning a home. You are getting some benefit because when you rent a place, you know you're not living on the street. But when you have a home at some point, the idea is that you pay that home off and then you no longer are paying to shelter yourself. If you did plunk down the thousand dollars for Adobe Photoshop you know, it may be an older version, but you have that to continue using and it doesn't have this continual draw. These companies didn't do this because they thought it was gonna net them less money in the long term. They knew what they were doing, so but when you really think about this, you know, you're investing in something that you no longer own. And if you decide to stop investing in it, you just don't have it. And so it's an important component to really look at. For some things it's less important, but for other things it's a big distinction like there's a floor that you cannot go below when you owe something or own something. If I paid off my car, I always have that car. If I stop making the payments because I paid it off, I still have it. If you're renting that car, leasing that car, and you stop making the payments, they take it from you. So thinking about that from a perspective life is a subscription service. It's like everything is a subscription. And we joke that they want us to own nothing and like it. And I think in some places it makes sense. You know, like you think about like your subscription fee for Netflix. I think that makes more sense than owning these DVDs because you know it's diminishing value every time you watch that DVD because it's no longer fresh and new. But I think like applying this business model to more things is maybe a detriment to the consumer because it's a base of not owning things. You really have to pay attention and do what you just suggested, which is make that decision and look at long-term and short-term. Maybe even set up a system. I have to put things into my calendar to remind myself. Basically, when I help people with their online businesses, one thing that I reiterate a lot is test, track and tweak everything. And you have to keep your eye on it. Or you're just wasting money, wasting time. What is another example of something that could be purchased for a thousand instead of paying a subscription, then you just never own it. Leasing cars is an example. you could look at it and say, you know, the Netflix example, which is kind of the huge innovators in this subscription. You could buy all of these DVDs or other things, but not necessarily. Or cable. Cable was the other alternative there where it was kind of this flexible thing and subscription services kind of came in and disrupted that. And now you have 15 different subscription services now, and it's like, okay. When you start to look for it, you'll see it everywhere. You know, my gym is a subscription as a service. It's just everything. It's kind of everywhere. I just ask you about Raise Financial, what it is and why you started it. You've helped a lot of families. Tell me exactly how you helped them and what started all of this? So the origins of the company, we kind of started this product to help young parents save for their kids future education. It was really more of like a passion project, just kind of something we were doing on the side. And what we were looking at is young parents today, they look and feel very different than young parents of previous generations. They're paying off their own student loans. They're trying to hit their employer's match. They're trying to save for down payment on a house. They would like to save for their kids education because they would like them to graduate with less debt than they did, but they have more immediate financial needs in place. And so they focus on those and rightfully so. There's this program called a 529 College Savings Program. It's basically a tax advantaged investment account. So it's kinda like a Roth IRA, but it's for your kids' college fund. And it's a really powerful way to save for college. But these parents of this plan was designed for, weren't using it because they didn't have the discretionary income to invest in this after they handled their more immediate financial needs. So we looked at this and said, okay, well how can we make this plan, fit this audience that it was actually built for. And what we came up with was let's make it easy for these parents to create this account. And instead of putting the responsibility on them to fund it, allow them to give permission to their friends and family to support them in this way. So instead of buying, you know, your kid, a onesie or a stuffed animal around their birthday, grandma and grandpa can invest money directly into this college savings fund. It gets invested, it goes to work. Your college roommate can do this while they're on the way over to your kid's first birthday party. And basically what we're looking at here is more parents with college savings funds and with dollars in these accounts that never would be there. So to put it in perspective, compared to a regular 529 plan, we have 10 times as much gifted contributions in our plans. So we're really, really producing this outcome where these kids are gonna leave college better than we did. And that's a really powerful thing. And so that kind of is what got us into this business. We looked at this and said, okay, that's a really powerful insight. We looked at something and said, who is this audience and how can we take this product and make it fit their needs? And that's kind of the ethos of our company. We continue to innovate in that space. We're launching a high yield savings account, and then we're also launching a long-term investment account which is kind of tackling a lot of the headwinds that young people are facing in their long-term investment journey. So where do they go to start? So our website is raisefinancial.com. That's the best place to kind of learn all about what we're offering and what we're into. You can reached out to us through that website. Also our Instagram is a great way to get in touch with us. That's @raisefinancial. We monitor both those channels 24/7. We're an always on company, so if you have questions, we have answers. But yeah come check us out. Look at what we're working on. We'd love to chat about and see if it's a good fit. And what does Scholar Raise? So Scholar Raise is that educational component I was just talking about. It's the Shareable 529 College Savings Fund. So right now that's a separate company, but eventually that's gonna be under the Raise Financial umbrella as we move forward. So tell me about your humble beginnings. When someone has a story that really pushes them to it, it drives a dream. And I thought I saw that in you when I was reading your- Yeah. And so it was a tumultuous childhood. I moved around a lot. My parents split up, so I lived in 18 cities in 10 states. So you kind of learn to roll with the punches a little bit. You weren't a military brat? No, just a rolling stone. No, but but yeah, so you kind of learn, you learn, you know, to adapt to a new place. You learn to kind of, you just learn to move around. Makes you kind of tough and maybe a little bit more, you know. Resilient For sure. And so that was kind of my childhood. I didn't necessarily have a lot of advocacy from my parents. They were a little more laissez-faire in their approach. So I kind of did a lot of things for myself from a survival aspect. I think as far as dreams in childhood, they didn't seem like things that were for me. Was it your parents' career or job that had them moving around a lot? Yeah, I mean, I guess. You lived in 10 states. You got to see a lot of the country. So you had mentioned you lived in Florida. Mm-hmm. And did you ever live in the Midwest? So I lived in Cincinnati for three years. I lived in Kentucky for a little bit, and I would consider Tennessee the Midwest, I guess. Central time zone. Yeah. Most, most of it was the East Coast. So New York, Vermont, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia. Oh, wow. Where else. Where out in South Carolina did you live? Aiken. Aiken, South Carolina. And then I lived in Columbia for a little bit and then Charleston for a few months. Oh, I love Charleston. Charleston was a great town. So that really gave you a lot of, wow. That's actually very cool. It may have been hard in some aspects but you feel like it did make you resilient? Well, I think young people are resilient in general. And I think, whether you intentionally apply some of these pressures or not, you either keep that or you lose it. I think young people are resilient and if you don't use it, then you kind of lose it. And I think I definitely got put through the ring around a lot of things that resilience kind of, you know, crystallized in, in who I am and how I look at problems and solutions. Yeah. And so it was very clear that from that age, you were responsible for yourself. And so that kind of catalyzed me to do different things. Like when I was a junior in high school, I moved out and I was looking for ways to kind of pay my bills. I had been working in construction in the summers and I launched this company where we did epoxy flooring for new construction. And it was this like really neat way of kind of juggling these constraints. Like I still had to go to school but I needed to pay my rent. I needed to feed myself. And so like this epoxy foreign company. It was an amazing way to basically, have high income for low input. Like it would take you a few hours a week and I was making great money for a 17 year old. It was an interesting time, but that's kind of, you know, when you learned at that and you said, okay, well I can do this on my own. I can be resilient or solve these problems. And to be clear here, I was not taking care of myself the way that I should have, but I was able to do it. And I think that kind of gave you that confidence of saying, I know I can start something. I know I can do something and you know, if I need to or want to, I can. It did. it built your confidence is what it did. So, yeah. And then you were able to do the physical labor and then you have that to kinda learn from. Meaning you kind of know now that you've done both physical labor, mental entrepreneur. I think doing those two things, makes an entrepreneur because it builds confidence. I always look at like the journey to entrepreneurship, but I think when I was younger, I was always looking at things. I was always seeing things probably for moving around so much. You see the differences between different things. And remember, I would look at things when I was young and I'd be like, oh, that's stupid. And then as I got older, I'd be like you know, they should do it this way. And then I hit like a certain age and I said, you know what, I'm gonna do it this way. And that's kind of when that like observation to critiquing to then actually taking the action to do something or drive a change or build something. And I always kind of look at that as like the different phases in life. And it comes down to how you look at this like as far as like what your opportunities are. When I was younger, in a lot of sense it was kind of really focused on just more immediate needs and taking care of yourself. As I started building my career, it gave me a little bit more degrees of freedom to kind of think about these different things and kind of hatch ideas. And then when I was in a safe and stable place financially, I was like, okay, well. Now's the time to go build something. Yeah. So it really, really kind of looks like that's kind of how the journey was, at least for me. Yeah. What do you have to say about compound interest as we wrap this up? It is one of the wonders of the world. If you can take advantage of that, it will change your life. Small things that I did not because I'm uniquely smart or intelligent, but just investing early in my career. You know, mostly cause I was so busy, I didn't really have time to spend the money I was earning. So I was just kind of investing it. That has made all the difference. It's just the sooner you can start, the better your outcomes are going to be and it's really going to change the trajectory of your life. Yeah. I love it. Okay, so I do this fun little thing and I don't like to be wrong, so I'm really risking here. I'm risking, but I'm gonna guess your sign. Are you a Taurus? I am not, you're not. My dad's actually a Taurus, which is crazy. I, yeah. I'm a Virgo. You're a Virgo. Then you're gonna do just fine. My daughter's a Virgo, and my son is a Leo. My daughter is a Taurus with a rising sign, Virgo. I wouldn't say she overthinks it, but she takes her time making decisions. Mm-hmm. And, but then she's so thorough about it and then I see my son and how he is, and that they're just also drastically different. But I just got interested in it when I started realizing that personality and astrology, there is a connection there. It's fun because, when you understand how a person's mind works, how they make decisions, you can start appreciating them more. And it helps relationships. It's just a fun thing. Sure. Crystal, what? What sign? What sign are you? Aquarius. Yeah. And this is an interesting fact. So we've moved into the age of Aquarius right now, they say, and the las-, It's the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. I remember that song. And so this is an interesting fact that I recently heard. The last time that we were in the sign of Aquarius, the Earth, was in 1776. The revolution. So, Think about that for a second. Wow. There are so many revolutions happening right now. Really? So it's like very disruptive. So I see that t here is something going on and I see the connection and I, I see the connection with that song, the Age of Aquarius and the Fifth Dimension. Wasn't that band called the Fifth Dimension? I believe so, yes. It's so interesting. Okay. Thank you so much. Here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna put the links in the show notes for the audience and they can click on it. They can follow you on Instagram. I'll put all your social media and your website and then what would you like them to do when they go to your website, for instance? Come join us for the financial revolution. The financial revolution. It's the age of Aquarius. Come check us out and you know, reach out if you have questions and you know, we'd love to connect. Okay. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

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Crystal O'Connor

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