”A Bigger Life” with Adam Carroll

Personal Background – pathway leading to him doing what he does

His family appeared affluent or middle class, but money wasn’t really there.
His family was loving and considerate.
I used to use my credit card in college, and so I became part of the debt stats;
He was an entrepreneur in college, hence borrowed loans from students to build this business.
He studied books about personal finance and started applying the principles, and he was able to pay off all my debts at age 26, except the mortgage.
This enabled me to save between 3,000-4,000 USD per month, and made me feel like a millionaire, something I started sharing with other people.

Making this my career

I met a personal financial guide and mentor, who gave me a couple of books.
I became intrigued by the concept of passive income, and how to create it, especially as an educator, speaker, and creative.
I wanted to make money speaking, writing, and creating content; so I describe myself as a mediapreneur – meaning I like creating media in all its facets and then figure out how to turn around and sell it.

The Shred Method

One of the big things the podcast is dedicated to is retiring debts, hence the need to know every new dynamic, principle, and practice to achieve that.
The Shred Method is a tactic for optimizing people’s income.
Most people don’t have an income problem, they have a liquidity problem; they make enough money to afford what they are doing, but they are not able to go beyond that to save because money is tied up in their lifestyles.
The Shred Method tries to help people manage their finances by helping to knock off the debts one by one, maximizing how much money you have remaining at the end of the month, and then figuring out what one should do with the money that is left over; i.e. what is the most efficient use of that money that is humanly possible?
Our goal is to create certainty around retirement, to guarantee the working class that they can retire comfortably and never worry about debts and sustainability.
We rephrase words differently, for instance, we call retirement choice-age, because we want people at retirement to have many choices and not limited by money in any way.

The Shred concept:

I was a mortgage broker for a number of years; I started a company that I branded and packaged as the first socially responsible mortgage company in our State.
I witnessed the exploitation that was happening in the mortgage sector. This was underhanded and morally reprehensible.
I wanted to start a company that didn’t function that way; we would receive people who wanted to refinance their mortgage, and we would do the math and show them they could save between $50-$200 per month; but I would be left with this feeling that you have just paid $2000 or $4000 to refinance your mortgage, which essentially would send the client to the same square they were before.
I started digging deeper into this mortgage issue at the decision table, I realized that you pay interest for the first 36-40 months, and this is when most people would refinance before they got their hands on the mortgage game itself.
So Shred happens in the first 36-40 months of payment is where you can make the biggest difference in how much principal you can pay down on a mortgage
When you do that, you are paying in advance your mortgage; you are accelerating your decision table.
So we started realizing that one of our goals was to help people have more equity in their homes, reduce the amount of interest that they pay, and then figure out what to do with that extra equity and strategically deploy it in the right places to start building their own wealth.

What do you think about *HELOCs?, a sort of establishing an emergency fund or capital?

A broad brush statement: Anyone who has equity at home, must have a HELOC as an emergency fund – in addition to money saved which is liquid and readily available.
We use a HELOC very differently at Shred; it is not a spending account. For people who are disciplined in their expenditures and have a predictable income projection, this works well, provided you have money at the end of the month.

MasteryOfMoney.com

This is a financial literacy resource.
We should all pursue mastery; mastery has no peak; you are forever climbing higher, and getting better and better at what you do.
MasteryOfMoney.com is built on this premise.
I also have books on MasteryOfMoney.com for students, and others on Amazon; we are gearing to launch a podcast by the same name.
We will be doing deep dives into a variety of topics from insurance, to mortgages, to investment in real estates, and people who are on their path to mastery can listen in.

How MasteryOfMoney.com podcast differs or dovetails with Building a Bigger life podcast:

Build-A-Bigger-Life was started in 2015, and it was born out of interaction with people who were asking, what do I do with my life if I am not satisfied with my current life?
I bounced this by the group I was coaching, and for instance, one of the ladies in the group just wanted to travel; when I asked her why she isn’t traveling she responded that she had just bought a new car, and new furniture, which she was presently financing, and she had a couple of gym memberships which she was paying every month.
I said to her, I think you have built a really big lifestyle, but you don’t really have a big life. That became the show. I interviewed people who were building a bigger life, people who were doing what they were doing versus what they were supposed to be doing; this was an awesome conversation with people who were inspired to change their life in a better way.

Major Takeaways from the 170+ shows of the Build-A-Bigger-Life podcast:

We are the architects of our own life, and we’ve got to decide what that life looks like.
The way to do this is to identify what your core values are, and then live by those core values on a day-to-day basis.
My interviews revealed that people who live by their core values are generally very fulfilled; and those who are missing out on some of their core values are always feeling unfulfilled, wanting to change some things, which they probably also do not know how to do.
For instance, we do a self-assessment and help them ask the foundational and bigger questions, which helps them think through why they are not building a bigger life.
Aiming for something for a lot of people requires permission – probably by family, employer, significant others, etc.

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