 Ah, and welcome to Money Talks. My name is Rianne Ishaves, and I am filling in for Shonda Park. So I will be your host today. Welcome everyone and happy new year. So I'm very excited. Yes, it is the new year. And usually the new year means new beginnings. And so, you know, usually at this time of year people set rules, they set their new year's resolutions, right? So people are very inspired to really make some changes in their lives. And so I thought to kick off today's show, you know, we wanna talk about what people tend to, what the most common things that people set during their new year's resolution, right? So when we think about what people want to accomplish throughout the year, the two main things that people want to make changes and are number one, their health and of course their wealth, right? So I'm really excited to have this discussion with our guests today. You know, I couldn't think of a more qualified person to talk about finance today and really helping people to find solutions that they may not even have thought about. And so, you know, this person, I've known him for a really long time. You know, he's someone that I respect personally and professionally. He is also a financial educator like myself. And he's been in the industry for almost two decades. So he is a wealth of knowledge. And I know today with what we will discuss, he will bring a lot of value to our viewers. So without further ado, let's go ahead and welcome Ben to our show. Welcome Ben and please introduce yourself to our viewers. Hi Rayyanne, how are you doing today? Great, so what about yourself? So for me, I've been, like you said, almost two decades of the financial industry, 17 years to be exact. And just something that I enjoy and love doing. We've been able over the last 17 years, educated thousands of families in our team and we've been able to span not only out of Honolulu, which is our home base here, but we've been able to expand in roughly about 10 plus states now. So I see a huge need for what we do. Just very, very excited to begin this new year. Yeah, absolutely excited for this new year as well. And so let's get right into it, Ben. We want to talk about how people set financial goals in the beginning of the year. But you've been in this industry for almost 20 years. So that's a long time. And I'm sure you've sat down with many families, but what do you see is the most common financial goal that people set when you sit down with them and discuss their finances? Yeah, so financial goals are something that people think about throughout the year, not just during the new years, but during the new years, definitely it's a time where people do revisit their goals and they have a refresh attitude about accomplishing them. Over the last 17 years, I see that the most common goals, number one is to get out of debt. Almost every person that I talk to, every family I talk to in America, having debt is such a big part of our lives. So getting out of debt is a very common goal as well as being able to save money for their kids' college education. Buying a home, buying a home is another very, very common goal. And a lot of people also want to be able to financially be able to travel. So these are, I would probably say, the four most common goals. And if you look at all four of these goals, it includes saving and investing money, right? You wanna be able to get to that point where you're able to, whether it's buy a home, get out of debt, travel as well as help your kids with their college education. So these are the four most common goals that we see over and over again throughout the year, but especially during the new year's time. So yeah, Ben, I would have to agree with you. Sitting down with many families over the last 10 years, those are the most common goals that I do see people share with me. And I think Google will also agree with us too. So if you just looked up this year, what people set as their financial goals that you would see the same things. But right now with the high cost of living, especially in Hawaii, we see high inflation everywhere. And with people not, with their salaries or their income, not increasing at the same rate as cost of living and inflation, what can people do? Cause I feel like, that's why every single year when you look at the goals that people set, very similar to the goals that they set every year. However, why is it that we are not reaching these goals? And why is it that even more importantly today, we have to really pay attention? Because first, would you agree with me, Ben, that when people start looking at their finances, they look at the income that they make, they look at their expenses, and they kind of look at, okay, where can I cut down? But within today's environment, it's very difficult to do that. Because again, cost of living, high inflation. So can you talk about what are the most common people, the common things people do as far as solutions and maybe some alternatives that they have not even considered yet? Absolutely. And like you said, a lot of people, they have the best intentions around the New Year's time. They want to accomplish all of these goals that they set out. But most people, this is what we're taught. We're taught that if we need to make more money, then the solution is either get a part-time job or you try to maybe get a raise at the job that you're in, or maybe you make a lateral move, right? You don't work for this company, you decide that you're gonna work for another company, and this other company hopefully offers you a bigger salary. But my personal opinion, those solutions may not actually help you accomplish what you need to. And the reason why I believe that is because whenever you make a fixed income, your dreams and your goals will also be fixed. So if you, a lot of people, what they think is, okay, my dreams and my goals are yay high, right? I wanna be able to live in a beautiful home. I want my kids go to college, I wanna be debt-free. But when they look at their income, it doesn't match their dreams, right? So a lot of people, they go, okay, well, I need to make more money. So they get another job, they try to get raises, but that still brings us, maybe slightly closer than our dreams and our goals. And so a lot of people end up reducing their dreams and their goals to the, or their dreams and their goals to the size of their income. So in my belief, you need to have an income source that is not fixed. And the most common way to do it is to be an entrepreneur, meaning to be a business owner. And so when you're a business owner, then your income is not going to be fixed, right? You're gonna be able to, as long as you're able to service the market and take care of people's issues and you can find a solution for them, then your market could be limitless, okay? So that's what I believe in. I just wanted to share how I started that line of thinking. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, just like a lot of people, my parents told me, okay, go to school, get good grades, right? And then when you graduate, get a good job that's steady and pays well. And so that's the route I took. I actually became a computer engineer, right? And yeah, a lot of families and a lot of parents do that. So being an engineer, I thought, okay, wow, this is a career that a lot of people work hard for. And at that time, I did not make a six-figure income yet, but my dream was, okay, I need to make a six-figure income. If I make a six-figure income, then I feel like I'm living the American dream. So, but the problem was our expenses tend to catch up too, right? The more we make, the more we tend to spend, right? I had no knowledge of money. I had no knowledge of being an entrepreneur. So one day what happened was a friend of mine that was my coworker, he actually eats lunch with me every day. And this one particular day when we went out to lunch, he told me, Ben, I'm quitting my job. And I looked at my friend who's my coworker. I said, why would you do that? Did you find another job that pays better? At this time, it was around 9-11. So jobs were scarce where people were getting laid off. And he told me, no, I'm not looking for another job. I'm actually gonna become my own business owner. And I said, a business owner, why would you wanna do that? And he said something I still remember today. He said, if you truly wanna be financially free, you can't work at a job. Because if you do, your boss will always dictate how much you make, what kind of dreams you're allowed to have. And if you wanna build something that has no limits, you gotta work for yourself and become an entrepreneur. So that started my thinking of, oh, I wanna be my own business owner. I just didn't know where. But one day, a friend of mine introduced me to the financial industry. And slowly, but surely, I transitioned from being part-time in the financial industry, full-time as an engineer, to giving up my engineering job full-time and becoming full-time in this industry and helping a lot of families. Yeah, absolutely. I'm so glad that you shared that, Ben, because as you were sharing, most people don't think about, cause we're talking about financial goals and solutions to how they can accomplish these financial goals. And yes, immediately, it's either we cut down our expenses or increase our income, but there's only so much that we can increase our income at our jobs, right? And one way is to start a business, but I think for most people, they don't see themselves as business owners, right? Because most of us, like you said, we go to school, get a job, and we start working, and so we don't necessarily see ourselves as entrepreneurs or business owners, but I'm so glad that you shared that, you actually started off as an engineer and then transitioned to being a successful business owner today. And that's very similar to my story, as you know, you are my mentor and most people don't know that I actually studied to become a dental hygienist. And right away, I actually saw the career glass ceiling in my career. And so I knew that if I wanted to accomplish my financial goals faster, I had to find another source of income. And to the second point that I was gonna make was that, some people think, well, it's either or, like I'm gonna be an employee or a business owner, where in fact, you can actually be both, right? So can you expand a little bit more on maybe the benefits of being an entrepreneur, different sources of income that you can create being a business owner? Wow, yeah, definitely awesome question. There are so many facets that I can touch upon when it comes to why being an entrepreneur is so powerful. Earlier I talked about limitless income. So what an entrepreneur really is, is they look for a problem and then they find a solution for it. And the bigger the problem or the more people that have this problem then the greater the market for what you do, right? So that's why your income is limitless versus if you get another job or get a part-time job or something like that, your income will be limited. Okay, so that's one benefit of being an entrepreneur. The second benefit of being entrepreneur is obviously the tax advantages, right? There's a lot of tax advantages, with being an entrepreneur versus being a employee. See, as an employee with a W2, you have two major deductions, right? Your house if you own a house and your kids. But as an entrepreneur, almost every business expense could be a deduction for you. Right, so you look at my business, when we take business trips, our licensing, when we spend money on the office, right? When we hire a staff, all of these things are now considered business deductions in our business, right? So we get a lot of tax breaks as an entrepreneur. But I would say in my personal opinion, if you play the long-term game, which I like to play, is that being an entrepreneur allows you to create something we call passive income. Now, most people in the world will make something we call active income, right? Income that they make when they go to work at their job. They're trading their time for money. That's what's known as active income. But a true entrepreneur eventually earns passive income, which is income that comes in, even though we're not actively working. See, every human being in life, we have 24 hours a day, just like everybody else. But we can't work all 24 hours. We have to sleep, we have to eat, we have to spend time with our family, all of these things. And if we get injured, if we get sick, if we go on vacation, our income stops, if we make a fixed income, that's active. But as an entrepreneur, you can start to leverage passive income, right? Build sources that can create an income stream for you. And that's how you become financially independent. You will rarely find people that make active income financially independent. But most of the time, when you look at financially independent people, they are people that are entrepreneurs that create passive income. So I think that's why being an entrepreneur gives you so much more freedom as you would being a employee, right? So, freedom of time is another big, big example. I'll share one quick example, and then I'll hand it back off to you, Rayette. But I remember one time when I was working in the business and my wife told me, hey, Ben, our son has a basketball game and it's gonna be Monday at two o'clock in the afternoon. And I said, sure, no problem, right? So I scheduled it in, I went to the gym and what really struck me that day, Rayette, was that almost the entire gym was empty. And I thought to myself, where are all the other parents? Well, of course, they're working, right? They're at their job. They have to work at their job to make a living. But being an entrepreneur, I got to control my own hours and I set my own time. And that's one of the freedoms you have as an entrepreneur. I mean, don't get me wrong. You still need to work hard, but the rewards can be much greater. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I agree with Ben. And I was able to transition away from my dental hygiene career to now being in business, right, in the financial industry. And one of the benefits really of being in the financial industry as well is learning the financial concepts. So I forgot to mention to you earlier, I know you said when people make more money they tend to spend more money, right? You said that earlier in the show and there's actually a term for that. Or I think it's called Parkinson's Law, right? So the more money you make, your expenses tend to catch up with the income that you make. And so I think that's why we see, again, going back to why people set financial goals and why maybe we need to also break that cycle and start to really change our approach and how we approach our finances. And so I know being a financial educator is really important. And another reason why I think that in addition to not just working on these financial goals that we set, but I think sometimes we have to first, I think it's number one, it starts with awareness, right, Ben? Like if you're setting financial goals, that means you have some kind of awareness where you know you wanna be somewhere better financially, right? So that's a very good place to be. Would you agree with me? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first of all, you have to know what you want. The issue with a lot of people today is that we simply don't know what we really want. If you ask people, what is it that you want out of your life? And again, the goals that I mentioned earlier, right, buy a house, be able to pay off their debt and things like that, those are wonderful goals. But for a lot of people, it's more like a wish list item. It's not a actual definite goal. And one of the key factors that you'll know if someone is very serious about their goal or it's not is do they have a timeline? Do they have something very specific in terms of when they're going to accomplish this, right? Because when I ask people, okay, you wanna buy a new home, when do you wanna buy it by? Or where do you wanna live? What kind of home are you gonna have? And most people's answer to those question is, I don't know, right? So when you don't even know what you want, how can you get what you want? So one of the things is when you are setting your goals, be absolutely clear on what it is that you want. The more specific and more clear the picture is in your mind, the more chances you are, or the higher the probability of you accomplishing that goal. So wearing this is absolutely critical. Yeah, I think those are some of the things I spend. And do you have any words of encouragement for people to kind of guide them in maybe what they should do next, right? So I think the very first thing that you said, number one, be very clear with your goals, right? But can you give them some tangible steps that they can take so that they can start off this new year great with their finances? Absolutely, I wanna just encourage all of you that have these goals and these dreams that you've been holding in for a long time, right? You might be thinking about them for a while now and you think, can I ever accomplish this? Earlier you mentioned that a lot of people, being an entrepreneur may never have crossed their mind or maybe they never thought they could do it. Nowadays with all of the opportunities that are available to us, whether it's online or whether we see a lot of things that we can improve on and do better, it is, in this time and age, it is easier to be an entrepreneur than it ever was in the history of the world. I believe that we have all the tools that we need. If you look at a lot of people today that are the younger generation, the millennials and the Gen Zs, many of them are entrepreneurs through a tool called social media, right? So there are so many different ways that we can become an entrepreneur now. Being an entrepreneur is no longer, I need to have several hundred thousand or million dollars in capital. I gotta take all of this risk in order to become an entrepreneur. Nowadays being an entrepreneur is as risk-free as possible and it doesn't take a whole lot of your time. So many times people can do it as a part-time thing. One terminology that's been gaining a lot of momentum in recent years is a side hustle, right? A side hustle does not mean get another job. A side hustle, if you really think about it means you do something that you have passion in and that is your own thing, right? You know, your own business. So I think nowadays everybody can become an entrepreneur. You just gotta take action. And some of the things that I can encourage people to do is look for someone in your network that is a successful entrepreneur or is doing something part-time. Maybe ask them a few questions and see how you can branch off in doing your thing. Maybe you can partner with someone. Maybe somebody else has a similar idea as you or a skill set that you can work together it. So why don't you work together and create a solution for somebody, right? It could be as easy as, you know, maybe you and a friend get together and then you create a landscaping business and then you go from house to house and you help people during the weeknights or the weekends, right? But when you start to become an entrepreneur your whole world changes because your view of how money works, right? We talk about finances. Your whole view about how to generate money changes, right? Because for me it was such a paradigm shift when I started to really understand active income versus passive income. So, you know, don't give up. You know, being an entrepreneur is not going to be an easy journey and it's not supposed to be, right? If it were easy, everybody would become an entrepreneur. And but there are going to be definitely tough times and challenges that arise in your journey as an entrepreneur. But these are normal things that an entrepreneur has to go through, right? When you go through these challenges, you know, it actually makes you a more effective and a better entrepreneur. You're able to better solve people's problems. You're able to better help people, right? So I think that, you know, today again I think there's so many opportunities, you know, to be an entrepreneur. I'm in the financial industry and so are you. You know, this is an industry that we're always constantly looking for good people. This is an industry that is a very high paying industry and very underserved, meaning that there's so much market for what we do but we don't have enough people to help more people. So if you go, well, I mean like, you know can someone like me be part of the financial industry? Absolutely, because that's how I started. When I first started as an engineer, I had no financial education or knowledge, no experience in business at all. But, you know, our program, Raeanne, you know, trains people just like me, just like you to be able to be successful in the financial industry, right? So, you know, if you are interested in learning more about what we do, how you can create an income part-time that could eventually, you know bring you the freedom that you desire. I know Raeanne has some contact information, you know, to help you wrap up this call. Thank you so much for that, Ben. Yeah, you're right. There are so many benefits, you know you mentioned some tangible benefits and intangible benefits to being an entrepreneur. And, you know, I just wanna leave the last few minutes for our viewers who maybe are not quite ready to join a business or, you know, become an entrepreneur. Can you share with them some resources at the Financial Center that they can tap into to really help them with their financial goals? Yeah, so absolutely. In our Financial Center in Honolulu, we do financial workshops every Tuesday night at 7 p.m. and every Saturday morning at 10 a.m. So these workshops are really good because they're designed to be very easy to understand. We teach topics like how to pay off debt, how to be able to invest, what are, you know, the ways that you can properly protect your family. So a lot of these topics that we teach in our financial workshops are very, very powerful topics that we start applying them. And our workshops are, you know, free classes. It's open door policy. Anytime, you know, somebody wants to come and take a workshop, they're more than welcome to. So if you're interested in, you know, taking financial workshops, you know, Rayyanne has some contact information for you in just a moment. Yeah, absolutely. You know, we love those workshops. I think they are a great start to, you know, and it really doesn't matter where you are financially, whether you have some experience or no experience at all. I think the workshop can really benefit anybody and everybody. In fact, we have all walks of life that come in and attend the workshop from, you know, high school students because I do believe that the earlier we start financial education, the better. So we have, you know, people of different ages, people who have already retired or looking into maybe their next phase in their retirement season and where they have a lot of questions about Medicare, long-term care. There's so much that you can learn from the financial workshops. So we do want to invite every single one of you to come and join us. You'll see my contact information on the screen very shortly. So give us a call. And until we see you next time, I just want to thank you so much for joining us on this show this afternoon. Have a wonderful day.