Why Most Couples Stay Broke (Even Making Good Money) | The “Payment Matrix” Explained with Tony Manganiello

Why do so many couples feel stuck financially… even when they’re making good money?

In this episode of The Voyage Cast, Eddie Eccker sits down with Tony Manganiello, a 3-time Inc. 500 executive and organizational development consultant, to break down a hidden system he calls the “payment matrix.”

According to Tony, most families are not failing financially because they lack discipline. They are following a system that was never designed to help them build wealth in the first place.

This conversation goes beyond budgeting and surface-level advice. It gets into the structure behind financial stress, how it quietly impacts marriages, and why so many couples end up fighting about money without fully understanding what is actually happening.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re doing everything “right” but still not getting ahead, this episode will challenge how you think about money, debt, and long-term security.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why making more money often does not solve financial stress
 • How debt can quietly consume nearly half of your working income  
 • The “four buckets” where your lifetime income actually goes
 • Why traditional budgeting strategies often fail over time
 • How financial pressure amplifies conflict in marriage
 • A different way to think about eliminating debt and building wealth
 • The psychological patterns that keep people feeling stuck

About Tony Manganiello

Tony Manganiello is a:
 • 3-Time Inc. 500 Executive
 • Organizational Development Consultant
 • Author of Transforming Payments into Prosperity

He has spent over 30 years helping families understand how money actually works and how to build sustainable financial stability.

Connect with Tony:
 TonyMags.com
 LinkedIn: Tony Manganiello

Free Resource

Tony is offering a free copy of his book here:
 https://podcast.smartestwealth.com/complimentary

Call to Action

If financial stress is showing up in your relationship, this episode gives you a clearer framework to start thinking differently and moving forward.

Subscribe to The Voyage Cast for practical conversations on marriage, emotional health, and building a life that actually works.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Hey, this is Eddie with the Voyage Cast, and I have another great guest with me today, Tony Manganello. Did I say that correctly, Tony? It was close. Manganello. Manganello, got it. Well he has spent over 30 years helping his family rethink how they use income, uh, manage debt in many families, and how to build what he calls real prosperity. His book, Transforming Payments into Prosperity, challenges some very common assumptions about budgeting, retirement, and how money actually works, in America at least. Tony, I'm really glad that you're here today. Thank you so much for joining me. Um, before we get into the book, can you just tell us a little bit more about yourself and what inspired you to write this book?

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Well, thanks, Eddie, for having me. First of all, I really appreciate the honor and privilege to be part of your journey here and to speak with your audience. Um basically, I got started in this particular business around 30 years ago, but before that, the whole idea of money had been something that had had my attention all the way since I was a child. When I was around 11 years old, our family kind of broke up a little bit, and as I grew older, not a little bit, but my father left. And um, as I grew older, I realized that even though there were a lot of problems in the family at the time, the one problem that amplified everything else was the fact that they were struggling financially. And as I grew older, I realized that more and more families are experiencing the same thing. And when it comes to a family, uh a husband and a wife, you're sitting at the kitchen table, you're not sitting there saying, you know what I'm really grateful for with the chaos we have with our schedules, the kids going crazy everywhere, we gotta run them everywhere all day long, and you know, the stress at work, boy am I glad we're stressed out financially on top of all that, said no one ever, you know? It's always the the opposite. And what happens is that what I've discovered, I don't know if you could hear that, I live two miles from Luke Air Force Base. The sound of freedom just flew over my house.

SPEAKER_01 2:19

Perfect, that's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

But um I found that more and more families experience the same thing. They wind up amplifying or putting a magnifying glass on small things because financial stress doesn't help the family survive or thrive, it just erodes the family structure. And so when I started doing this, it was primarily because I always thought making more money was the way to go. And um, it doesn't hurt, but if you don't know what you're doing with it, it can actually make things worse. And so my impetus, my motivation is to share the message I have with as many families as I can so that they can turn the volume down on the financial stress part of their life and hopefully learn to have more of a solid structure within their family to survive, to thrive, and not be bothered by math, which is all money is all about.

SPEAKER_01 3:18

Yeah, and and this is more than just math, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, this is this is about families and relationships, and it seems like that's kind of your heart that's behind it. I mean, coming from where you come from in your childhood, where your family struggled with money, you saw the negative impacts on how that affected relationships. Yeah. Um, do you think like because I know you coach couples, uh, so for our listeners, he coaches couples on finances as well. Um, but uh when you are working with people, do you find that the fighting is about money or is it about fears, about shame, pressures? What do you think about it?

SPEAKER_00 3:51

It's about all of the above. It really depends on the individual's background, what the money issue is amplifying. You know, we all have different backgrounds, we all have different baggage for lack of a better way of saying it. And when I'm meeting with uh a couple over Zoom, like I do often, it's real funny that when they both see how the numbers work, it's almost as if the tension between the two of them dissolves because they realize, oh, it wasn't so-and-so's fault, it wasn't my fault, it's not because I'm and this is the thing that kind of gives me a little extra energy, is that when I find people feel like they're failing because they can't get ahead, I try to help them understand that's the way the system's designed. You know, the I call it the payment matrix. The payment matrix is a multi-trillion,$24 trillion banking system that drains your wealth while at the same time it makes you feel like you're never going to make enough.

SPEAKER_01 4:50

And so I mean that's most people in America today.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

Yeah, and and it's the funny thing is the average individual is making two to three million dollars in their working lifetime. So it's not because we're not generating wealth, it's because no one's ever stopped to show them how to accumulate the wealth they're already generating. And that's really what the focus is, is to get them to stop thinking about winning the lottery and lifestyles of the rich and famous. I'm dating myself with that one. But right, you know, it's it's just about having uh peace of mind, clarity about how money works and how your financial future looks. Because most people really, it's just rolling the dice and crossing your fingers. But it's really about having clarity and peace of mind knowing that you're not when you have when you understand, though, that's where all my money's been going, it wasn't because you were spending it all or you were using it all. Sometimes that comes into play. But when they understand how the numbers work, it really dissolves a lot of that tension and helps them begin to. And Tim from Portland, I always remember him, has 22 years of marriage, no more fighting over money. You know, it was that that's the type of thing I'm after, and what I'm hoping to be able to achieve with helping folks.

SPEAKER_01 6:00

So in my counsel office, like I'll get people who are maybe not, I mean, maybe they're ready for something like what you have to offer, but sometimes I I see just a lot of irresponsibility, a lot of kind of adolescent spending behaviors, a lot of impulsivity, things like that. Um do you think there's I guess what I'm trying to get to, do you think there's like a um like a readiness phase for something like you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 6:24

Yeah, I think a lot of that behavior you're talking about is basically because you know they feel like nothing they do matters anyway. And that when they see, and it when I'm not when I'm talking about numbers, I'm not talking about advanced calculus, you know, stuff like that. When they see the simplicity of the numbers, it all of a sudden brings their you know, brings that behavior into focus in a sense that oh, there is hope, and this behavior is not helping uh project us into that uh future, it's actually you know keeping us from that. And they feel like, oh, since I now have hope, maybe my behavior can begin to change a little bit instead of feeling like it's hopeless. So what what the heck? Nothing matters anyway. I think that has a uh a shift to it that helps a lot of people.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

Yeah, yeah, that makes tons of sense. Hey, tell me a little bit more about this payment matrix things too. I mean, it sounds like there's this your description is almost like there's this kind of system designed. I mean, I think this is what you're saying, the system's designed to not generate wealth. Um help me understand a little bit more about that.

SPEAKER_00 7:32

I explain it in the book, and by the way, um if you don't mind, I I would like to offer a free version of the ebook of the book. When we're done, I'll give you the information for your show notes and they can just download it. Yeah, that's because I'm just trying to help people. I want them to see the truth. It's not you're not you're struggling, not because you're failing, you're doing something wrong, you shouldn't be ashamed. The payment matrix is a$24 trillion banking system. Most people, when they are operating in this culture that we live in financially, they go to work, money gets deposited on payday into their checking account, and then they make their payments. The whole idea that we've been following is you gotta budget, you gotta pay yourself first, you know, there's such a thing as good debt, all of these traditional um ideas, they're part of the system. So let's take a look at budgeting as an example. When people budget without knowing it, they're applying a purpose to their income. What they're saying is, I gotta put that top number, that's my household income, all these payments in between. Hopefully the bottom number is as big as possible, because if I'm supposed to pay myself first with that, I gotta have as much of that as possible, right? That's usually the thought process. And that thought process unknowingly applies the purpose of my income's purpose is to pay, make payments. And that's where everybody goes wrong. Because that's obviously part of the structure, part of the equation. But I teach people the purpose of the income from your work or your career should be to replace the income from your work or career, first and foremost. That gets you thinking differently, like, well, how the heck can I do that? Because that's you know, the National Institute of uh was it retirement security. So 92% of all the hardworking Americans in this country will never be able to retire and remaintain the same standard of living they enjoyed while they were working. So that basically means you got to work till you die. And I call that the retirement cliff. The thing about the retirement cliff is once you go over it, you don't die, you just have to work until you do. And the system is designed to keep you working, it makes you feel like you never make enough because the more you you try to make, the more it can suck from you. And it's something I call the 50-50 drain. When people follow that path of work, deposit money, make payments, put hopefully I can put 10% into my pay myself first, which let's face it, the only one who ever gets paid first is Uncle Sam. Everybody's really paying themselves last. But the the whole idea behind that is to keep following this consumption model that has been developed. When you have maybe you're familiar with something called the debt to income ratio or DTI.

SPEAKER_01 10:30

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

Okay. You know, they call anything less than 36% is healthy. So people with a 34, 32, 30% debt to income ratio, you're told it's healthy. What no one ever tells you is who's it healthy for?

unknown 10:45

Right?

SPEAKER_00 10:46

Yeah, that's a great question.

SPEAKER_01 10:47

I would assume the assessment would be it's healthy for me.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

No, it's healthy for the lender because that means if you have a low debt-to-income ratio, I can lend you money and have a high degree of probability that you'll be able to pay me back with interest. But when you look at a 34% in the book, I have a family that I put together after decades of research and working with people, and they're they have a 34% debt-to-income ratio. What nobody stops to think about is that the debt-to-income ratio is is created by taking your debt payments and dividing it by your gross income. And I don't know about you, but not many people pay bills with gross income. They pay with net income. So what I teach people to do is stop and think how much do you have to gross to bring home enough for that payment? And for the average family, that's about 47 to 50 or so percent of their gross annual income. So 50% of your gross annual income, working uh January to June, is just so you can bring home enough for all the debt payments. And then because they're following this budgeting model, trying to make that bottom number as big as possible, what they're doing is they're trying, the only way to do that is to lower the payments in the in between, right? You know, the and so when you start to make minimum payments or close to minimum payments on your debt, you are paying the maximum interest. And in that type of an equation, what we do is I'll show people with the simple calculator that you put in your monthly income, or excuse me, your monthly debt payments, the interest rates, and you'll see that you're paying that month when you when you paid your last month's bills, but that we're in we're in March. So when you paid February's bills and you made all those minimum payments, how much of that do you think went to interest? It's about 50%. Wow. Even though you've got a 6% mortgage, a 8% car loan, a 15% credit card payment, that percentage rate you're being charged has nothing to do with the interest you pay. It just tells you what they're going to use to calculate your payment, but they don't go any deeper. And when I show people that you're working half the year to bring home payments that are costing you 50%, that's an eye-opener. And that's why chapter one in the book, I talk I talk about just because you can make your payments doesn't mean you can afford them. Because let's face it, if you can afford your payments, everybody would be sitting on piles of cash somewhere, but they're not.

SPEAKER_01 13:26

Yeah, no kidding. Uh in the book, you also talk about something called the four buckets. Yes. Can you can you expand on that a little bit? I feel like that's a kind of a natural progression to what you're talking about right now.

SPEAKER_00 13:38

Yeah, and that's really one of the things that I like to help people understand. And in that context of that part of the book, I talk about something called the lifetime value, which is where people are making between two and three million dollars in their working lifetime. The question is, where's it all going? And those four buckets are the buckets that it drains into. The first bucket's taxes. You know, we're not gonna get away from that. You can vote, you can do some tax planning, that sort of thing. But Uncle Sam always gets paid first. The next is your living expenses. You got to eat, you got to put gas in the car, got to, you know, pay. I don't know about you, but I've got like eight people on my mobile phone because we have such a big family. Um, but you know, you got pay, it's not just one line, one, you know, it's it that everybody fights over. Everybody's got it in their pocket now. Streaming services, all of that, those are your living expenses. And that's, you know, let's face it, you got to live a little, so you should be able to put some money towards living and maybe have a have a decent time to a good time while doing it. And then there's the debt payments, and that's the thing that people have the the least amount of understanding about. And then obviously the final payment is the retirement bucket, which you know the book um people talk about pay yourself first. That comes from the book uh The Richest Man in Babylon by George Clayson, was published in 1926. It's a hundred years ago. I think a few things may have changed since then. Maybe and that's the whole thing is that you're not paying yourself first, you're paying yourself last. And those four buckets, you can't do anything about taxes unless you want to go to jail. You have to live, and sure, you can trim the fat and do things you know frugally there, but when it comes to debt and retirement, instead of just letting the first three buckets take the you know, drain into that that you're living your uh lifetime value, draining into that those three buckets and drip a few uh drops of money into your retirement bucket, use the retirement bucket to uh liberate the debt bucket and pay off all that debt which we help people do in less than a decade. And most people can't believe that it's possible, but we've been we've done it for millions of people over the last 30 years. And the buckets are about making sure that you're focusing on wait a minute, that debt bucket, it doesn't have to be permanent, that can be temporary. And that's where we begin to make the shift to show that the two, three, four thousand dollars a month you're paying for your mortgage, your car payments, credit cards, whatever it is, student loans, that those payments can have a uh a termination date. And once you make that termination date faster than they would have you do it, it changes everything.

SPEAKER_01 16:23

Yeah, because I I can't imagine that these lending companies really want you to pay it off too quickly. Because they're making great money on the interest, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:31

Oh yeah. There that's why there's a when I say the$24 trillion banking industry.

SPEAKER_01 16:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:37

If you look at um the Federal Reserve data, the American banking community has$24 trillion in assets. Where did that come from? Do you know what happens when you open up a checking account, a savings account, any type of banking account?

SPEAKER_01 16:55

Do they just like leverage the money that we have in the accounts?

SPEAKER_00 16:58

Yeah, and they only they can only do that if you sign, you know, you don't just open a bank account, you have to sign a bunch of documents. Basically, what you're doing is you're signing over, you're basically saying to the bank, what I deposit in this account is yours, and you can treat me as an unsecured creditor on your books. And and that's how they're able to take the money that is on deposit and lend up to$10 for every dollar on deposits. It's called fractional banking. And by taking our money and lending it to our neighbors for their house and charging uh interest rates they don't understand and credit cards and car loans and everything else, yeah, that's where that$24 trillion has come from over the last, I don't know, 30, 40, 50, 60 years. And so that's the that's the payment matrix. You know, you unless you can unplug from that, yeah, some people do make it to the end in decent shape, but I would suggest that if they unplugged at some point earlier and followed the path I try to get people on, they would be better off.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

So give me a sense of kind of for our listeners and for myself too, give me a sense of that path. Like, what does that look like practically? Um because I know, I know in our previous conversation you talked a little bit about kind of insurance and then retirement and different things like that. Like, how is that leveraged? Help me understand these things.

unknown 18:20

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 18:21

The first thing is you to begin to understand and get clarity. Most people, let's face it, the new year comes around between losing weight and getting finances in order. You know, I think those are the top two. And you know, uh, we can we know why, you know, it's hard to lose weight because you know, I'm Italian, I like to eat, and yeah, you know, it's just hard to not. When it comes to um budget, when it comes to finances, though, that's like I've been budgeting. I just had a uh conversation with a lady the other day. She's like, I've tried budgeting, I've tried all this stuff, and it never seems to work. That's because it's designed not to work. And so what you have to do is realize, okay, I need to have an audit of sorts. What's coming in, what's going out, what's left over, and where's everything that's going out? Where's it going, and how much is it costing me? And so we provide that type of insight. And then we say, here's what happens if you redirect the dollars that you would have otherwise put into retirement, and you're rolling the dice, hoping to get double-digit interest rates of return, which won't get into the details, but the data shows that the average equity mutual fund over the last 30 years did not get 12%, even though that's what they tell you. I talk about that in the book too. It's like 7.19% before taxes, which is still decent, but not as good as it could be. I try to teach the acres of diamonds story. You may have heard it of Acres of the Acres of Diamonds.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

No, I haven't heard that. Tell me about it.

SPEAKER_00 19:52

It's um, I forget the guy's name. It's kind of funny, but it he he wrote a story about in Africa when the diamond uh, like we used to have the gold rush. Yeah, there was a diamond rush, so to speak, in Africa. And the guy, I forget the his name in the book, it's a it's an odd name, but he decides he's gonna get involved into this diamond rush thing. And so he sells his property, sells everything, and takes all that money and goes hunting for diamonds, trying to find a diamond vein. But the guy who bought his property while he was out one day noticed something interesting in a in a spring, like a little river type thing in his backyard, looked, was one of the biggest diamond mines in the world. And so a lot of times we're chasing all after all this stuff, and the guy who sold the land, he wound up dying in poverty. So, what the acres of diamonds that I try to get people to understand is that you don't need to go chasing after rates of return in the stock market to get there. That's not the direction to go. The direction is look at what you're already spending. Understand that your debt payments aren't what you thought they were, they aren't what you were sold, and realize that the three, four thousand dollars a month, thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars a year in net pay, getting that money liberated for your use for the future is going to do far much more for you than taking the five to maybe ten percent if you can muster up enough and hoping that the stock market over a long period of time will generate enough to replace your income. And that's why budgeting should be had the purpose first and foremost not to make your payments, but to replace your income. Because otherwise, unless you can replace your income, you're never going to be able to stop working.

SPEAKER_01 21:41

That's absolutely crazy. So you're suggesting that instead of putting the money into a retirement account, it goes where?

SPEAKER_00 21:50

What I suggest we do, and this is what we've been teaching for decades, is to pay off debt to liberate that cash flow. Okay, so debt first. Yeah, debt first. And then after That's what we used to teach was put it into you know IRAs, 401ks, max out whatever you can. But most people, when they're debt free, one of the things that we discovered is you can't retire on debt freedom. But being debt free can make a huge difference. I won't get into that just now. But the question is, I should say, how do you become debt-free? What is the best way to do that? And we taught that snowball method for decades. And then we came across a system that allowed you to pay off your debt and build tax-free wealth with the same dollars at the same time. And that was a wait what moment back in like 2011, 2012. And that changed everything for us because a lot of people who start thinking about their financial future are in their 40s, 50s, and they're they're kind of running out of time. You know, if everybody like my kids, I've got them all set up in their 20s, you know, they they're gonna have time value. Money is really gonna be working in their favor.

SPEAKER_02 22:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:57

But snowballing to become debt free can take five, six, seven, eight years, depending on the numbers. That would mean you're not saving anything until you're debt free. Okay. Uh that works okay if you stick to it, because then you have thousands a month to put away. And that will make up for the time that you lost. But when we found out that there was a way to use the money that you're paying off your debt to simultaneously begin to generate interest and dividends for your future and do two things at once, that to us was like, holy crap, this is something else. And and so that, you know, the way we teach that is in something called private family banking. Many circles refer to it as infinite banking, bank on yourself. And the story for that's kind of funny because when John, who was my business partner, he's my father, all he's retired now. Um, when he told me about it back in the beginning of 2012, I want to say it was maybe 11, he told me, you know, it's whole and life. Yeah, I used to be a bi-term investor rest guy. You say hell, whole and life in the same sentence, and I'm like, grab the torches and pitchforks. There was no way I was gonna listen to that.

SPEAKER_01 24:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:08

But when he told me that we can teach people to pay off their debt and build tax rewealth the same dollars at the same time, that was when I decided to take a deeper look. And you know, I joke in the book about how if you're on a plane with a chatty Kathy sitting next to you and you want it, you want quiet, just say, Hey, do you know I sell life insurance? And then we'll be quiet right away. Yeah, no kidding. You know, so life insurance has got a bad rap, and for the most part, it's been well deserved. But the reason it has a bad rap is because nobody I have ever met before I started teaching this ever bought it right, including myself. Everybody buys life insurance wrong. And what I mean by that is that they buy life insurance thinking, and with a this thought is noble and responsible. What will my loved ones get when I die? Obviously, you want to protect your family against loss of income. That makes everything just seem right. But the when it comes to protecting against loss of income, the insured, the guy buying the policy or the folks buying the policy, they're not the only ones trying to protect themselves against loss of income. Because so is the insurance company. The insurance company is not going to sell you a 30-year or 20-year term life policy for a half million dollars for$30 a month if they think there's any slight chance you might die in that 30-year period. Because at most you're putting out$7,200 and they got a half million dollars on the table. That is an equation that doesn't work unless they're confident, supremely confident, you're gonna live 20 years in one day. And so the idea about life insurance is everybody who doesn't like it is because they're buying it wrong, they're betting against the house. They're betting, I'm gonna die inside of 20 years. So it's like, do you really want to live like that? Instead of buying life insurance to answer the question, what will my loved ones get when I die? You buy it by saying, What will this contract do for me while I'm alive? Because if the insurance company grants me or offers me a contract, I'll tell people, you want to know how healthy you are? Don't go to your doctor to get a checkup. Apply for a million dollars worth of life insurance. You'll find out how healthy you are. You know, because they have all the data. So if you're offered a contract, you're betting with the house, and you're basically just saying, I'm gonna be around for at least that term. And when you do that, the key is how you spend your premium dollars. And the IRS has jumped in back in the 80s, and bottom line is you don't buy death benefit, although it does become obviously part of the equation. You buy as much cash value as you can because the industry of the life insurance industry, they have five trillion dollars in assets. And those assets are what you're putting your money in when you buy cash value. So when you do that and you do it the way we teach, you wind up using the cash value in your in your policy to pay off your debt while it's working for tomorrow at the same time. And so instead of snowballing payments to your creditors like we used to teach in the snowball method, we're snowballing into the the cash value of the contract and the family and my and then borrowing back out of it. Yes, borrow back, take, pay it back, borrow, just treat yourself like you treat every other lender you you have and pay yourself back.

SPEAKER_01 27:41

But it's your own money that you're borrowing from, essentially.

SPEAKER_00 27:44

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 27:45

And it's also been working towards a life insurance policy, too.

SPEAKER_00 27:49

Yeah, and and the thing about this type of a contract is because it's front loaded with money in the cash in the beginning, when you're when you need your death benefit, which is going to be somewhere in your 70s or your 80s, it's going to still be there even if you're not making premium payments because there's something called paid up, meaning the insurance company says you put as much as you can into this contract, we won't allow any more. And then as you're in your retirement years, you it's growing so much that you're able to use it to supplement retirement, and it's also paying for your death benefit. So when you need your death benefit, when you're in your 70s, 80s, or even 90s, many people are living into their 90s these days, you're gonna still have a death benefit.

SPEAKER_01 28:29

So this this this life insurance policy is like a um it's kind of like an high interest account of some kind, investment account.

SPEAKER_00 28:37

It's it's referred to as a high cash value, dividend paying whole life policy. And then you gotta have the right kind of contract, the right kind of company. You know, we I teach about that in the book. When you have all those uh elements in play, yeah, then you can rinse and repeat, press play, and just live your life, making sure that you're following a slightly different set of rules, but you're not plugged into the payment matrix, you're plugged into a system designed to generate wealth for you and your family, and all of that wealth that is that you're generating into the contract is tax-free.

SPEAKER_01 29:15

So interesting.

SPEAKER_00 29:17

Yeah, because life insurance has always been treated as a tax haven. And so you know, that's everything's tax-free. When you're in retirement, you'd have to, as you're using that money, you don't have to report that on your income taxes every year. It's tax-free money.

SPEAKER_01 29:32

That's wild. What a good system. I mean, this is a very I mean, for my sentiments, I mean, as you're kind of describing in the beginning, too, like we all have a preconceived idea of how to do these things to varying degrees. And I think a lot of people probably more like me than um the highly responsible ones out there where they're just it's all kind of Greek to them. They don't they don't probably understand a lot of this stuff. Um, and so to get a a shift in paradigm, yeah uh completely from and and I would say it actually it's like a shift in paradigm from something that we barely understand to begin with, yeah, you know, to a whole new paradigm of how to think of finances. You mentioned though, like from a very practical sense, you mentioned though, like first step is to get the debts dialed in. Yeah. Um and then over time, if you need to take a loan out or something, you eventually front load that account, and then you can if you need to take a loan on something, you take a loan from your front loaded account, and then you just pay that back, um, and you're really just paying yourself back. Does that seem like a basic summary?

SPEAKER_00 30:36

Exactly. You're taking like one of the things people when I I'll ask people when I'm giving a talk to a group of folks, I'll ask them when you think about money, what's the first thing that comes to mind? And most people will say things like budgeting, stress, work, all these, you know, need more of it. Yeah, need more of it, okay. Um, and I say those are all reasonable answers, but there's only one answer you need to be thinking about. That answer is actually a question between now and when you want to retire someday, you're gonna generate a finite amount of income. The question is, how much of that are you gonna keep? And you know, when you think about people in their life, uh lifetime value generation, if you're you know, at my age, I'm I'm almost 60, so I'm kind of at the end of the road. So thankfully I've been doing things right. But somebody who's in in their 40s, they're kind of halfway through that lifetime value generation. So you can't do anything about the past. We will tell people best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, next best time is today. And so see about okay, between now and you're gonna retire, if you're making, if your household is bringing home$80,000 a year and you've got 20 years of that left. And most people probably make a little bit more as the years go by, but to keep it simple, if you're making 80 grand a year for the next 20 years, that's$1.6 million. How much of that can you keep? And that's what our plan is to do, is to show them how to do that. And then as they as they gain momentum with the plan, they when they want to go on vacation, when they want to do anything that buy a new car, all of that stuff, you borrow from yourself, make the payments you would have made to the car finance company, to the home home remodeling, you know, whatever that is. Make those payments you would have paid anyway, and that money keeps working for you. And in the in the book, I talk about buying a$30,000 car. Okay and how you know most people say, you know, don't buy a brand new car, it's such a waste of money, right? You know, if you buy a brand new car, you lose money going driving it off the lot.

SPEAKER_02 32:47

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:48

That's because they're thinking of the product wrong. The product in that equation is the money being used to buy the car. So if you have$30,000 in your cash value that you can borrow to pay for that car. And even if the rate on the loan is higher, like I give an example of you're paying 5% on the loan, but you're only earning 4% on the cash value as it's growing. People will say to me, Well, how do you not lose money if you're paying more interest and you're getting you're getting less? Well, that's because as you're paying interest, you're making payments, you're paying interest on the outstanding debt, which is a decreasing balance amount. But as the interest is growing, it's growing on an increasing balance amount. So in that equation, you buy a car and you pay it off in five years, you own the car, and you made$2,600 in net return, net profit inside your private family banking system, and you've been driving a brand new car. Do it five or six times, you make$100,000, and you've been driving brand new cars for five years all your life.

SPEAKER_01 33:56

So you're saying, in some sense, that we pay interest back to ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 34:01

That's what a lot of people say to oversimplify it. But in a sense, Okay. I want to I like to be very clear. There's a chapter in the book that's um chapter nine is the myths and realities, because you'll hear a lot of people promoting these types of policies. Oh, you can borrow against your policy and never pay it back. Well, that's true, but not without consequence. You know, and so we I like to teach the the pros and the cons. But the the idea is you're paying interest to when you when you take out a loan. The reason you can take out a loan with no credit check, no um uh application is go online and make their loan request that shows up in your bank account in days. Okay. Yeah. When you do that, you're getting money. That money comes from the uh life insurance company's general account, and it charges you whatever the going interest rate is at the time. And then Zed, that's a separate type of deal. But they lent that to you because they put a lien on the cash value of that amount. So it's kind of like in your mortgage, if you have a half million dollar home but you owe$400,000 on the mortgage, you only have$100,000 in equity. So if you have a$50,000 cash value and you borrow$30,000 to buy a car, you only have$20,000 in equity. And so that equity is growing along with the entire amount because just like the house, even though the house isn't owned full, you know, free and clear, the house appreciates not just the equity amount, but the whole amount. And you got to have the right kind of contract to do that. And so as that happens, the 4% on the$30,000, and I think it's like month 13, you're earning more interest than you're paying. And so that's why you're coming out$2,600 a head buying a brand new car. Now, if you go ahead and do something like buy a I I like to, I've been driving the same minivan for the last 11 or 12 years. Things been paid off. Every time I get in it, I'm like, there's no payment, it runs fine, but I still kind of look at what's on the street. I'm like, well, maybe I'll just say, ah, it's not that important. I never drive anyway. I work from home. But the point is, the money is what's at play. The money is the product. Whatever you're using it for, just make sure you're doing things, you know, at least with some amount of reasonable reasonability. And it just grows no matter what. And as long as you treat yourself like you treat the third-party lenders that you break your neck to make payments to, make payments to yourself. If there's something that goes wrong, like in COVID, when COVID happened, and all kinds of people saying, Oh, I don't know what I'm gonna do, you you can press the pause button on the payments. You're not gonna get called by the any collection agencies or collection departments. Life insurance company doesn't care if you pay it back or not. They're gonna get paid whether you're coming or going. Because if you pass away and you have a$50,000 loan against your policy, the just like when you sell a house that has an outstanding mortgage, the title company pays off the mortgage and then gives you the rest. Same thing, what happens?

SPEAKER_01 37:10

Oh, so they still take they take it. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 37:12

Yeah. So they know they're they're guaranteed to get paid. Their business model is rock solid.

SPEAKER_01 37:18

Huh. I should have been an insurance lender, you know what I mean, or start my own company. Maybe that's the way to go. So when when people first reach out to you, kind of what's their state of mind? Like what is usually going through their head when they're first like, hey, Tony, I need to meet with you. Let's get this thing rolling. What's going through their head usually?

SPEAKER_00 37:40

A lot of it is cautious optimism. Because typically, when somebody reaches out to us, they've either watched a video or a couple of videos or read you know one of our books, and they're they're dipping their toe into water. They just want to know, is this true? And you know, basically, my approach for the years I've been doing this is everything we do is all about the numbers. You know, we let me show you what your numbers could look like. And if you like them, great. If you don't like them, that's great too. Because at least you get that question mark and try and transform it into a period where you know what the deal is. And so it's really just about understanding how the system works and why this stuff is possible to begin with, and then to understand how your specific numbers would look and how they would work so that you understand with clarity what you're moving forward in. And that's what I find to be one of the biggest advantages is that clarity. Because right now, if you ask somebody, where do you think you're going to be in the next 10 years? They have no idea that if they're following a plan like this, they can look at reports and say, this is where I should be. And this is where I, you know, the the progress I've made so far is on target. So at least there's clarity, there's predictability, and it's not as much of a big question mark, which creates quite a bit of anxiety in a lot of people.

SPEAKER_01 39:02

Yeah, 100%. I mean, finances create unbelievable anxiety in people. Yeah. Uh I have couples who fight about budgeting and spending and all the things all the time. And that's that's from an array of wealth statuses, let's say, from kind of below, you know, kind of middle income to middle income to doing just fine financially. But man, the fights are unbelievable. And I think some of it's because, kind of to your language, like there's just not a lot of clarity about um the future. Like, what is our goal? Where are we going? What is the mutual plan together? And I think that's kind of the psychology of it, isn't it? Like they, you know, especially married couples, you know, they marry, but they don't realize that they also have to be on board with these future plans sometimes. Um, and that's part of kind of adulting in a in a marriage, is that we have to decide like what future makes the most sense for us? How can we plan appropriately for that? And in some ways, like, what do I have to say no to? Because there's a lot of that, right? There's a lot of no. Like you're driving your van, you're saying no to those lovely cars on the road that you're driving next to, you know.

SPEAKER_00 40:10

It's not so much no as I like to replace that with just not now.

SPEAKER_02 40:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 40:16

You know, it's it's really about re understanding that, yeah, I could do this now, understand the consequences of doing it now, understand the consequences of doing it a little bit later. And that's where I find to be the most, the biggest issue is people don't understand the consequences. And or they they don't care because, like I said before, what's the use? So when you can begin to give clarity into a place that's nothing but blurry and dark, could shed some light on it and bring it into focus, that because most people don't really want to hit themselves in the head with a hammer. There are those that do, and you really I don't know how much help you can, but yeah, most people will be like, Why am I you I have a headache every day? Well, that's because you're hitting yourself with a hammer, you know? And when you show them that they're hitting themselves with a financial hammer, they're like, wait a minute. No, that's where all this pain, stress, and anxiety is coming from. And that clarity helps them hopefully make better decisions. And that's really all we can do is provide as much clarity as possible, and then they have to take the responsibility with that information that we've provided them, and at least we know we've done the best we can, and the rest is up to them.

SPEAKER_01 41:32

Absolutely. Uh, you you quote in the book from Proverbs as a man thinks in his heart, so is he. Tell me a little bit about how that plays into your framework or psychology of wealth. And that's kind of what we're at right now, is like people coming in, you're working with them, they're gonna come in with a certain philosophy of how they see things, but you're gonna present something that's maybe a little richer for them to understand.

SPEAKER_00 41:56

Yeah, I go back to knowing how my father must have felt. And, you know, he went left, he left. And um when I was around 25, 26, we reconciled and had a good relationship up until he passed, which I'm very grateful for. But throughout his whole life, what he thought about himself was probably the biggest challenge he had to overcome. And I think a lot of the the issues that people face, and you would know obviously much better than I, given your your field of work, is that a lot of people really need some self-love. You know, we're to love ourselves as love our neighbors as ourselves. So you can't love your neighbor until you start loving yourself a little bit. And so there's that self-respect, self-esteem that people need to have. And I think a lot of times that when financial stress and pressure is included in this equation, it's that what's the use type of mentality that really overrides anything else? Because money comes in, money goes out, I've got nothing left over. What's the what's the use? I you know, I made more. I like to ask people, are you making more today than you were 10 years ago? And most people are. And then I ask them, Are you do you feel 10 years richer? Nobody does. Why is that? And so there's a lot of this that the payment matrix has mastered this deception and these disguises with their low easy payments and all this other stuff that secretly, quietly just continues to drain from that lifetime value of millions of dollars. You know, if you ask any one of your clients who're struggling with uh finances, I mine as well, if you won two million dollars today, would that change your life? Yes. Well, if you're gonna get it over the next 20 years, why would that be any different? You know, most people are gonna have two, three, four million dollars in working lifetime income, especially households, you know, two income households. And so when they realize that, oh, and Kind of like going into someone's refrigerator and saying, these four things on this shelf, if you just got rid of those, you'd be healthier in a month. And if you could could do that, most people, you know, unless it's Reese's peanut butter cups, then I really struggle with that.

SPEAKER_01 44:16

Me too on that one.

SPEAKER_00 44:17

Oh gosh, I gave that up for Lent, and it's like they're haunting me. Every year is the same thing. But um you know, the thing is if you can identify what's causing the problem to begin with, then it's usually a little easier to solve the problem.

SPEAKER_01 44:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:35

But when they don't know, it's like they're they're they're I'm trying to budget, I'm making all my payments, that's not working. I've I'm I've got money going on my 401k, that's not working. That clarity answers a lot of questions and solves a lot of problems.

SPEAKER_01 44:49

And so I would say that's probably your answer to like if people listen to this or people that come in through your door and they're feeling overwhelmed, they're feeling shame, they're feeling um all these things, and they need this mind shift, they need this paradigm shift, um, it's clarity. I mean, it's kind of this this clarity we're talking about of seeing the world of finance very differently than what's been typically propagated to us. Um what is the first step? If somebody wants to work with you, if somebody wants to do even if they want to do it on their own or figure it out on their own or whatever it is, like what's the first step? Like, we'll put your book in the show notes, we'll put that link, and I appreciate the generosity on that. So hopefully everybody understands it's a big deal giving away free content that you've taken time to create and develop. That's that's not trivial. Um what's the first step that people could take today?

SPEAKER_00 45:38

I guess the only way I could think you've seen the movie Endgame. Yeah, yeah, of course. Okay. Do you remember when Natasha finds Hawkeye in in the in the towards the beginning of the movie, and he looks at her and he says, Don't give me hope. And she says, I wish I could have given it to you earlier or sooner. That's the thing, is people feel so my take in working with well over a thousand one-on-one people over the years with our content and other options, over three million people. The same lack of it's almost like uh a frustration that hope isn't even possible. And so it's really it's like to to think like how Hawkeye felt at that moment when there was that glimmer of hope that maybe things could get better and he could see his family again. And that's what I would like for people to understand is that you know, I'm never going because I've spent a number of years you know chasing the big payday as well. But there's there's hope if you just look and see that where you're at now is a design, a system designed to drain every amount, every penny it possibly can from your hard I c I call it your blood, sweat, and years of work. And what I want people to realize is that there's just all you gotta do is stop for a second and take just a moment to believe that there could be something better, and that if you can do that, that there could be hope and move cautiously into that direction. Let the information and the education shed the light and guide you. You don't have to worry about you know, at least the way we operate. It's all about education. When when we work with people, we're not we're never I hate I've been a salesman all my life and I hate selling, but I love to teach. And when you teach people, I know that's what you do a lot as well. Yeah, you're trying to teach folks, and when they begin to learn those lessons, that's what makes the difference, and that's what sparks more you know more hope and more hope and and beyond. And that's really the only thing that I would I suggest to people is first of all, take stock, and if you're if you really thought you could make your payments and that that one thing was meant that they were affordable, where's your pile of cash? If you don't have one, it's not your fault because you've been playing by the rules, the system is set for you to play by. It's time to find a different system with a different set of rules, rules that are designed to work for you and not the system. And that's all we're trying to teach people is that that system and that set of rules exists, and all you gotta do is take a peek. And I love it. It's up to you.

SPEAKER_01 48:31

I love it. What what's one thing people should stop doing today immediately?

SPEAKER_00 48:38

I guess the maybe top three. Um, I would say stop letting the system just run in your mind. You know, as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. And Paul writes in in Romans that to be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And so the whole idea is to realize that the the scripts that are running in your head, just stop ignoring them and start asking questions like, why does why did I think that? You know, when it comes to money, why did I think that this is just the way it is? You know, you tell people if you give somebody news like your transmission needs to be replaced, story of my life. Stop, right? I mean, we expect the bad and we get shocked in the disbelief when the good happens. That right now, stop doing that and realize that that mentality is kind of what's driving the what you see in your world is what you're reflecting as far as your beliefs. So stop ignoring those little scripts that run in your head and start questioning them. And then to start, like I said, just start realizing that there is hope that you can get into a place of clarity financially. That you know, it doesn't mean you're gonna be living on yachts. And no, it doesn't that's I mean, I don't have a yacht, you know, but I'm I'm happy with the way things are. You can be content. And that financial becoming a millionaire is the one thing that all of us need to realize. We are all millionaires in the making. From the day we start working, we're millionaires in the making, and the payment matrix knows it. And that's why they're worth$24 trillion, and we're not. And so start realizing, stop you know, running these scripts in your head and start to just say, you know what? If there is another way, I need to find out. And the book is free. I that's because my mission is uh I know what it was like when my family was torn apart. And it was heartbreaking. And my family today, you know, I constantly have to pinch myself because I don't deserve the family I have. You know, I have a beautiful wife, beautiful children, and it's heartbreaking that that's not common.

SPEAKER_01 50:56

And it is heartbreaking that that's not common.

SPEAKER_00 50:58

And that families deserve so much more. Your family deserves, everyone that's watching this, your family deserves so much more. And that's where I would have you start is by thinking, is my family better off if I keep going down this path, or is my family better off if I press the pause button for a moment and see if there's perhaps maybe a way that could serve us better? And that's really all that's about.

SPEAKER_01 51:27

Tony, I appreciate the clarity, I appreciate the generosity uh of you giving away your book. Uh, I appreciate your time on the Voyage Cast. And everybody listening, everybody watching, we will put all the notes in the description. Uh, there will be plenty of information, websites, all that stuff. Any way to get a hold of Tony, I will make sure all of that is there for you to get a hold of him. Um and what he's saying about finances, by the way, is actually really true about marriage as well. Um, if you want marriage to be different, you have to make a decision. And to do that, you have to have clarity that you're participating in something that's failing or not going well. Most of the times when I get couples, especially if they're really at the end of the rope, I need to know like, are you in this to win this or do you just want it to be done? And if you're in it to win it, I can show you a way. I can show you a way, and you won't sometimes like that way, because it might go against your preconceived ideas of what you think marriage should be like, and usually it does. Um that's a very tough paradigm shift even in marriage to figure out what works versus just what's not working great or or or is just destructive. And so there's a lot of parallels in what you're saying, Tony. I appreciate how you're presenting this, I appreciate what you're offering. Um, if you guys like this content, make sure you like, subscribe, reach out to Tony. Uh, get involved. Don't wait. Today is the day to plant the tree, as Tony said. If you didn't do it 20 years ago, today's that day. All right, thank you, Tony, so much for joining me on the VoyageCast. I really appreciate your time. Appreciate your expertise and the generosity you've given.

SPEAKER_00 53:10

Eddie, thank you so much for having me. It's been it's been my pleasure.