Find Your Freedom with Jamie Hopkins | E102
Financial Planning for a Life on Purpose.
On today's episode, Jason Pereira is going to talk to Jamie Hopkins, Managing Partner of Wealth Solutions at Carson Group, a national wealth management firm that offers coaching and partnership to financial advisors. Jamie is a well-known personality in the US Financial advisory space and recently published a book called Find Your Freedom Financial Planning and Life Purpose.
Episode Highlights:
04:31: The whole first half of Jamie's book is about finding purpose. What does freedom mean to you? Writing your eulogy, looking at values, getting beyond goals, to aspirations? That is the first half of the book. The second half of the book goes back to financial planning.
05:17: As per Jamie one must take care of basic level of financial planning, cash and flow, budgeting, debt management before one can move on to more complex financial planning, pictures, and strategies.
07:21: Jamie shares his background story and the motivation behind writing the book.
08:06: Jamie explains how they challenge people to write their eulogy.
10:03: If you would change your whole life if that was the case, it probably means you are doing the wrong thing, says Jamie.
10:32: Early childhood development is a lot more impactful than we probably give enough credit for, says Jamie.
11:03: It becomes harder and harder to change people's behavior. We must change the environment or the situational factors around them to then develop actual change, says Jamie.
13:31: In his book Jamie talks about scarcity that changed his view on money.
15:29: Jamie explains how he and his mom encountered different experiences post his father's demise.
16:35: Jamie talks about his childhood trauma and how he learned to handle money.
17:22: Focus on the amount of money, you need to save, there isn't enough money. You can go to the richest person in the world, and they are still trying to save and accumulate more that will never go away.
17:46: Ask yourself what you want to accomplish and the way you want to live your life. Then suddenly, the money just becomes a means towards that, and you can get over some of that trauma or scarcity, says Jamie.
20:17: When saving money, if the focus is on accumulating, you can't get to an end number. It doesn't top out, but when you can start thinking about the impact you can have, you will find it to be meaningful.
21:04: Community is such an important aspect of our lives in the world and there are great books and research and experts just on the aspects of community.
22:15: You might have stayed in that community past where it was beneficial to you and suddenly you are hanging out those guys and they are still drinking. They are partying, they are gambling, and you are in your 40s and you are spending a lot more money. That's putting a stress on your work, your finances in your home.
27:36: People who retire are happier than those that are still working, says Jamie. But if you dive into the data, the average moves up because the majority of people shift up. However, there is a group that shifts down. You have more people who find themselves to be depressed in retirement than those that are working.
28:16: Our purpose gets taken away from us, but we don't have to let that happen, says Jamie.
29:36: Jason preps people all the time and especially the business owners or anyone who has really spent most of their lives around their career and their career is their identity in a lot of ways.
32:09: Goals are mile markers along that way to your aspiration, says Jamie.
32:31: Aspirations can change too; you don't have to be permanent on that.
32:59: If you do not feel freedom in your life today, you don't feel financial freedom.
3 Key Points:
Jamie explains how people's upbringing around money can really impact the way they see the world around money going forward in their adult life.
Jamie shares how important purpose is and how it affects different people and how people can take steps to prevent that gap in their life from existing purpose.
Community is important, but it can also be very negative and draining and it can subtract from your life if you are not purposeful on it.
Tweetable Quotes:
"I was writing it like a textbook, and I was trying to break down my view of what true financial planning is or what financial planning should feel like to a consumer and it just ended up like I was teaching financial planning to a CFP professional and that's how the book was turning out." - Jamie Hopkins
"If you are living on the street and you just need to figure out where your next meal is, you're not worried about climbing Mount Everest." - Jamie Hopkins
"You can just literally Google Carson group and blueprinting guide and you will be able to grab it and download it." - Jamie Hopkins
"It's my legacy and when you remove that from somebody, it can take away a lot of their purpose, and if you're not intentional on replacing that purpose." - Jamie Hopkins
Resources Mentioned:
Full Transcript:
Producer: Welcome to the Financial Planning For Canadian Business Owners Podcast. You will hear about industry insights with award-winning financial planner and entrepreneur, Jason Pereira. Through the interviews with different experts with their stories and advice, you will learn how you can navigate the challenges of being an entrepreneur, plan for success and make the most of your business and life, and now, your host, Jason Pereira.
Jason Pereira: Hello, and welcome. Today on the show, I have Jamie Hopkins, managing partner at Wealth Solutions at Carson Group. Jamie is a well-known personality in the US financial advisory space and recently published a book called Find Your Freedom, Financial Planning and Life Purpose, and I brought him on the show today to specifically talk about that book, what he hoped to accomplish with it and how the lessons from it can help you think about your retirement and the rest of your life, and with that, here is my interview with Jamie. Jamie, good to see you.
Jamie Hopkins: Jason, great to see you too and, uh, thanks for having me on the show here today.
Jason Pereira: Uh, absolutely. It's, uh, you know, it's either that or I just Twitter troll you nonstop, so one or the other. All right. So, Jamie Hopkins, tell us about yourself.
Jamie Hopkins: Yeah, so, uh, tell me about myself. That's always, that's a good what to phrase it, so we'll start, uh, where will we start today. I'll start with my dog because, you know, he was barking, and I locked him up, so, uh, I'm, I am a dog owner and lover. I've got Baxter who is a Labradoodle. He's fantastic. He's wandering around elsewhere in the house right now. Uh, father of three, husband, and, uh, try to still be a runner. I don't run as much as I used to. We might get into a little bit of that. Uh, where I sit down from a work perspective, I work at a, a company called Carson, and we're a national RAA, and I oversee, uh, Carson Wealth and, uh, Wealth Solutions, and really that's our financial planning and, uh, financial planning offering for individuals in the United States, so it's, uh, really rewarding. I mean, I think that the advisory world and helping people with their money and the meaning that they find in life is a super noble profession. It's not about the dollars, but it's about what you can do with them. It's a means, and that's what I get to do every day, and I love that, and I hope that the rest of my life I get to work in this space somewhere, and I feel really blessed about that. The last couple weeks is, we've kinda watched the banking crisis and other things that have occurred in the US, and just knowing that we're kinda sitting helping people with those conversations and making sure that their cash and their wellbeing is taken care of.
Jason Pereira: Yeah. A scary time for many no doubt with that, and I'm sure even with the most solid plans people are still, and I know from experience, even with the most solid plans people are still gonna ask questions just out of concern and fear, so I brought you on, on the, uh, show today because you basically published a book recently called, uh, Find Your Freedom, Financial Planning for Life on Purpose, so talk to me about what inspired you to basically write this book.
Jamie Hopkins: Yeah, I'll talk a little bit about the inspiration. I'll tell a little story here that for anybody who has written a book or, uh, thought about it will feel really painful, and it was painful, and so I set out, actually when I, uh, this is my, to some degree my eighth book, really my second consumer book though, so I think that I'm, I'm proud of, but when I started this, when I started writing a book, and I got about what I would say is halfway through my outline, and I outline books before I start, I got about halfway through, and I started reading it, and I sent it to a friend of mine, and I was just like this, it feels really bad. Like, it's not good, and it was really boring, now that's not, uh, probably a good thing when you wanna publish something and say hey, my book's really boring, and that's like the quote you put on the front, like, this is really boring book, and that's how I felt, and honestly, I was writing it like a textbook, and I was trying to break down my view of what true financial planning is or what financial planning should feel like to a consumer, and it just ended up like I was teaching financial planning to a CFP professional, and that's how the book was turning out, so I actually just, and then I was debating do I just finish it and live with the product? Do I try to transform this into something else, and I ended up just scrapping it, so I have half of a written book that's just scrap, and so I restarted it, and I, I started kinda kicking around like okay, what should it be instead because you just get so stuck on here is my, my mental view of my outline or here's where I'm gonna end up with the book, and I just couldn't move it, and so eventually it came up as a conversation with Ron about well, you should write more about this, this term, freedom, and, uh, what does freedom mean to you. We, we ask that a lot at Carson, and so I started down that path, and it's really completely different. The whole first half of the book is about finding meaning, finding purpose, what does freedom mean to you, writing your eulogy, looking at values, getting beyond goals to aspirations. I mean, that's the first half of the book. The second half of the book then goes back to well how does financial planning help you get there because we live in that, that world of needs, wants and wishes and that if we don't take care of our needs we don't have a house, we don't have food, we don't have security, we can't move up to the aspirational aspects of things. Right. If you're living on the street and you just need to figure out where your next meal is, you're not worried about climbing Mount Everest. Right. Like, that's not on your list of things to do that day. It is I need to find food, and that's overly exaggerated, but it is reality as we move through. You think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. we have to take care of those basic level of financial planning, cash inflow, budgeting, debt management, before we can move onto more complex financial planning pictures and strategy, so that's really the second half of the book walks through that part, and then some stuff that probably isn't normally in a financial planning-type of book. Like, I talk a lot about community, and a lot of people have told me that's been their favorite chapter is I just talk about what is the role that community plays basically in your financial life, and that's one that I have spent even more time thinking and talking about since I put the book out because it's, I don't know that you can find another book where community is a core part of like a financial planning book, so that's a little bit unique, so we put the book out, and it hit a Wall Street Journal best seller, which has been great, and still doing a little bit of promotion around it and kinda pushing it out there, but if you go back to the real question, and I know I've been talking for like 5 minutes, but this is what I do –
Jason Pereira: Keep talking. It's all been good, and I got lots to ask you about after.
Jamie Hopkins: Oh, yeah, but I, I gotta answer the other part too though, right, is what is, right, what was the inspiration for this one. The reality is the inspiration for this book, like, my reason for being in this profession is my family. My dad passed away when I was 8. My mom then raised us and, and built up opportunities for us, which were tremendous, so that aspect of my life, those early relationships that I developed with money are my driver for all of this. I mean, that's why I wrote this book was also give people permission to if you come from a place of trauma or abundance or wherever you came from that that that's okay that you shouldn't feel shame in living a life of well-meaning and financial freedom, and you shouldn't feel shame if you're coming from a place of scarcity and a negative mindset and that if you don't feel free today, that's also okay that everybody is not gonna feel a 10 out of 10 on the freedom level and security and that giving people permission to feel that way, but then to take action is really where I want the book to play a role.
Jason Pereira: Fair enough, and it's, um, you know, as a side note, I will say that, uh, your origin story there in terms of your background is interesting, 'cause, I mean, one of the things I find very common amongst people who have gotten into the planning profession in general is some form of financial difficulty in their personal lives growing up, but that scarcity affects us all. Some of us manifest it into solving that problem for ourselves and others, so, um, not surprising, very, very common, but thank you for sharing that, so you said a number of incredibly interesting things there that I wanna really unpacked, and I think what I will say with your approach is it looks like you did the old Simon cynic, start with why. Right. Starting with why, which, which frankly is, at the end of the day, money returns alpha, whatever term we use, right. At the end of the day that is all in service of purpose, and, you know, that's, that's where you start, which makes a lot of sense, but you mentioned writing your eulogy. I, I want to unpack that. Talk to me about what you mean by that.
Jamie Hopkins: Yeah, so literally we challenge people to write their eulogy. How would that read today, and in a document that we, we reference in here that you can grab online if you Google it. We have something called blueprinting that you can do at Carson, and you can just literally Google Carson Group and blueprinting guide, and you'll be able to grab it and download it. It's pretty long, so a lot of people don't go through the whole thing in one sitting, but you could grab the eulogy part and write it out, and it's a really powerful thing 'cause it really questions whether or not you are living life within your values, whether you're doing the right things today. Like, would people write in your eulogy that, like, you know, I'll use myself today. Like, my kids would probably write today dad works too much. He loves working, and he travels all the time, and we wish he was home more. Right. Like, that would probably be part of my eulogy if my kids wrote it today, which is probably not where you wanna live your whole live. Now, I'm making some –
Jason Pereira: Mm hmm.
Jamie Hopkins: – of those decisions today in tradeoffs, and I know that I am making them, and my wife and I have discussed them, but it's who do you wanna be. What life do you wanna live? How do you wanna be remembered? There is a story that sometimes I use around this too which I think it was Saint Ig, Saint Ignatius and Loyola, but I could have gotten the saint wrong. I'm, well, it's been a long time since I checked that, but some saint story, so we'll just go with that, and you have this kinda younger monk that goes out to search out for this person, and he's, it's a monastery, and they say hey, you know, where is the saint. He goes into the back and finds the saint in the garden, and he asks him all these questions about life and meaning and God and faith, and then he gets to this point where he says if you found out the world was ending and judgement day was today, like, what would you go do, and it's such a powerful question, right, and he just says –
Jason Pereira: Mm hmm.
Jamie Hopkins: – finish this row. Right. Like, that's it, and I al, like, I have always remembered that, and it's been a powerful story maybe 'cause are you doing today the, the things you'd wanna do if you knew this was the last day of your life, and if you would change your whole life if that was the case, it probably means you're doing the wrong thing, and I challenge people to write that down. Write down who you wanna be. Write your eulogy as if you passed away today, and is that the life you wanna leave behind? Is that living a life on purpose?
Jason Pereira: Absolutely. So let's go back to the concept of financial trauma 'cause touched upon that quickly, and I want you to kinda share with us about how people's upbringing around money can really impact the way they see the world around money going forward in their adult life.
Jamie Hopkins: Early childhood development is a lot more impactful that we probably give enough credit for, and so, uh, and meaning by that if you start looking at the research about development of our brain, development of our relationships are drive how we relate to money, it forms a lot earlier than you would expect it to, so that's one piece of things is just kinda recognize the fact that look, we develop really early in our lives the way that our brain's gonna react to things, and it's really hard to change that later on, um, and it becomes harder and harder to change people's behavior. We actually have to change the environment for the situational factors around them to then develop actual change, so we get developed really early on, which means later on when we have to actually figure out how we're gonna do financial planning and relate to money, it is a really helpful exercise go back and explore our early relationships with money or our first money memories. Now I'm gonna tell a story that's not in the book that's tied to the book because it's stuff that has occurred since I wrote the book and published which was I talk about my first early, it's probably not my very first, but my early impact on that scarcity, and my dad passing away. He was the person who made the money. He did construction, went up on the job site, was doing gutters at that time in his life, and, uh, you know, we lived in Baltimore, and it was raining, and then, uh, temperatures drop, aluminum ladder froze over, and when he was coming down that ladder, he slipped and fell and broke his neck and passed away that day. Right. Like, you know, so I went to school that day as an 8 year old with a dad and a mom that are running their own construction company and came home that day with, without my dad, and I remember where I was when I had found out in the kitchen that he passed away, and, and nobody even said anything to, like, that's one of those things that I just, just super remember. I saw the truck come home 'cause I was told hey, he was in an accident, so as an 8 year old, like, the only accidents I really thought about were car accidents –
Jason Pereira: Hmm.
Jamie Hopkins: – and I remember seeing the truck from my bedroom window pull into the driveway, and I was like hey, the truck looks fine, so, like, he's probably okay. Right, and so I went downstairs, and we had a, like, spiral staircase down to the kitchen, and, uh, like, I just remember getting there, and you could see everybody, and, like, you just knew, like, it wasn't okay, and so, like, to me that whole next time period was just uncertainty, and, I mean, as an 8 year old you know that, like, my dad's the one that goes and does the work so there isn't somebody to do that; therefore, there's no money, and, like, the family unit is at risk, and so I talk about that in the book and that kind of fear that it created in me. Now, the interesting part about that is so my mom who then continued to run the company. She still runs the company today. I talk about a lot of things. You know, she's never had a 401k. She never worked for other people, so she didn't have kind of a employer-side benefit. She has been running her own construction business for 30 some years now, and, you know, has done really and gave me and my sisters all these opportunities, and so I probably over focus on the book on the, the scarcity part of that because that's the part that really changed me from my view on money, but mom's book would be more of a success book if I actually wrote one about her, right, that she's overcame all this and provided all this –
Jason Pereira: Mm hmm.
Jamie Hopkins: – and, like, super amazing, so she feels the book is too negative, so I will, I will give her that point, um, and, you know –
Jason Pereira: Uh, yeah.
Jamie Hopkins: – but that's the really interesting conversation that my mom and I have had since we wrote the book is that her experience around this, obviously still filled with trauma, did not change her perception and relationship with money. Right, and I, like, well, if I do a different version of this or whatever later on, I'm gonna talk about that, which she'll probably is not her favorite thing is not me talking about our family on everything, but it's this super interesting dynamic that this was a super traumatic time period, and it did impact my mom, and she was super worried right at the beginning, but then she knew and believed in herself and her ability to earn money, and she knew that she was gonna take care of our family and be successful. Well, the reality is, like, her formation of money started when she was a kid, and she watched her dad, who was also an entrepreneur running a company, be successful and to be able to grow a construction company over time too and lived in that world, so her mindset was I've gotta do this because, right, my spouse passed away, and I've gotta be able to run with this, but that being said, it wasn't her first money memory. It didn't change her relationship with money. Now, for me, I didn't know those things. I didn't have a different view. I wasn't formed with watching my grandfather build a, a business at some other port, period of time. My view was the person who makes the money is gone, and so I left that with more trauma around money than she did even though we had the same, right, experience. Our relationship and impact of that was completely different, and I find that to be incredibly interesting, right, that you can have the same experience but because the time period and your other experiences were different, the outcome of that was the complete opposite. Hers is then, then a story about perseverance and knowing what she can go build, and mine created a sense of scarcity and fear around that that my mom didn't have, and I f, I found that to be super interesting, and I mean, it ties to all of this, which is those early experiences are super formative, and so if you go through –
Jason Pereira: Mm hmm.
Jamie Hopkins: – that scarcity one, you will behave in ways like that later on, and the more you explore this, the more you'll start to understand about your why and how you behave towards money.
Jason Pereira: Hmm, powerful stuff, and, and it makes a lot of sense too. I mean, like, her dynamic was formed around a successful entrepreneur and the work that needed to be done in order to become secure. Yours was based around insecurity at the time, so I mean, it's, right, it's, it's a very different point of view. Even though you went through the same experience at the time, it's just the background was the r, her background stuck with her, right, and, and kept –
Jamie Hopkins: Mm hmm.
Jason Pereira: – her going, so that is, uh, thank you so much for sharing that story both in the book and, and personally, so, yeah, I mean, it's, I, and oftentimes, one of our favorite questions about the clients, not necessarily right off the bat, but in early, early on is asking them about what money was like growing up because that just gives us so much insight. If there was a trauma there, there's like a deep breath and an opening up and almost like, uh, letting this out, and I've also found, and tell me if you see the same thing, I've found that that level of insecurity leads to typically a need for, for degrees of safety that oftentimes make it difficult to complete a plan, so for example the constantly moving the goalposts –
Jamie Hopkins: Mm hmm.
Jason Pereira: – I've had several entrepreneurs in the past say okay, I need to get to this, and I think I'm comfortable, and then, you know, you meet with 'em 2 years later –
Jamie Hopkins: Yeah.
Jason Pereira: – and they're there, and suddenly it's $2 million larger, and, you're like, okay, come on. Does your, your lifestyle has an increase –
Jamie Hopkins: Yeah.
Jason Pereira: – uh, what other manifestations do you think you see. Like, uh, that's just, just one example there.
Jamie Hopkins: Yeah. Well, that, I mean, that's a great one, and I talk about that in the book too is also like you're, there is never enough if that's what you're chasing. Right. Like, what's enough. Well, there's never enough, and so if you focus on a dollar number, and I wrote this in my other book too in **** that if the focus is on an amount of money you need to save, there isn't enough. There just isn't. Right. Like, you can go to the richest person in the world, and they're still trying to save and accumulate more. That will never go away, so instead for people who really feel free about money, you actually have to get beyond that part, and you have to start to focus on, right, what are the things you want to accomplish and the way you wanna live your life. Then all of a sudden, the money just becomes a means towards that, and you can get over some of that trauma or scarcity. Now, Ron talks a little bit about this in the book too, well, and, uh, he's talked about this publicly, so I'm not sharing of his deep, dark secrets, uh, that he hasn't shared already. Ron's done super well financially over the course of his life now, right, and like that's not a, it's not a secret –
Jason Pereira: Absolutely –
Jamie Hopkins: – either. He's done well. He's built a really good business. He's built a, a, a over a billion dollar valuation in a business that he started in his dorm room. Right. Like, I think it's such an amazing story too, and sometimes it gets lost. Like, he's built a billion dollar valuation firm from his dorm room originally. He picked up the Yellow Pages and started making calls from his dorm room, and that's a super inspiring story. Now, up until super, well, like very recently within the last couple years, Ron has always felt though because he went through the experience of his parents going bankrupt that even though he became very secure, and honestly past the point where he was gonna run out of money, he still felt he could go bankrupt, and he lived, like, he doesn't like debt. He didn't use debt. He never borrowed. He was against all of that because he had that feeling, and he only recently kinda said he got to the point where he was like look, I, I always felt like I could run out of money, and, you know, this is a, it's a very successful person that in all honesty probably wouldn't run out of money, but he's kept that feeling until –
Jason Pereira: It'd take a lot of work for him to run out of money **** –
Jamie Hopkins: Yeah. Like it, like, it'd be really, like, you'd, you'd have to, right, you'd have to, you know, get super big –
Jason Pereira: Well, that's, that's the line I give people all the time –
Jamie Hopkins: – yeah –
Jason Pereira: – right, and I'm not picking on Ron **** –
Jamie Hopkins: – gambling, and you'd have to –
Jason Pereira: Yeah. You'd have **** –
Jamie Hopkins: – you'd have to go that route, right, like, yeah –
Jason Pereira: Well, and I think of this, this third route, like, where, like, you're just literally just throwing just absurd sums around for no good purpose, right, and that, and the problem is is that, like, not the problem, but those people after so long, you can't have that concern and worry and save, and then at some point just let go. Like, it's like you have flexed muscle that's now completely cramped –
Jamie Hopkins: Mm hmm.
Jason Pereira: – and you cannot, you cannot unstress that.
Jamie Hopkins: Yeah, and Ron's didn't come from really changing his view on money. It cha, came from changing his view on the impact and where he wanted to spend his time –
Jason Pereira: Hmm.
Jamie Hopkins: – right, so he went from wanting to be business owner advisor to wanting to impact, right, child hunger and clean water, and it was more so through that work of kinda figuring out who I am and where my true values and impact are gonna be that he then felt like wow. Like, I now have the ability to actually use my money for these purposes versus just accumulating stuff, because again, if the focus is on accumulating, there isn't enough. Right. Like, there, you can't get to an end number. It doesn't top out, but when –
Jason Pereira: Yeah. Yeah.
Jamie Hopkins: – you can start thinking about the impact you can have, you're like wow. This is pretty meaningful, and so that's been a really, well, I've known Ron for what is it now, 16, 17 years, and he's gone through an amazing journey being able to watch him, and, you know, we were, we have been closer in the last 5 years than we were in the early part, but even in the last 5 years getting to, getting to learn from Ron and be part of that journey with him has been wonderful.
Jason Pereira: And excellent. Woo, I feel like every time we start talking there's more to unpack with it. Now, I wanna **** turn, uh, you know, 'cause we, uh, b, being cognizant of time, I wanna turn to the area you said that was unique and was not, uh, you know, people have said they really love, which was the community aspect. Talk to me about the approach you took and what you were trying to p, what you were trying to explain about the importance of community.
Jamie Hopkins: Community is such an important aspect of our lives in the world, and there is great books and research and experts just on the aspects of community, and so I pretty basely touch on it, but this notion of community when I, when I have time in my life to actually take a deep breath and think about probably three or four topics, this is one that's just really embedded on my mind that sometimes we use the term culture too, but, like, what is the community that you have in your job, your local community, your family community. I have also, so I'm sure somebody else has talked about this too, but I talk about like unintended communities or accidental communities. I use that term a lot, and those are communities we just kinda like fall into. They're not purposeful. I'll use a, a simple example of this, which is like super, I don't know biased or sexist or whatever too, but it's just like guys go to college. They might end up in a fraternity or sports team. You continue down that route with that group because you were there. They existed the same time you were. You might not have even picked 'em. It might have been because of floor you –
Jason Pereira: Mm hmm.
Jamie Hopkins: – ended up in your college dorm room, and that became your community. Now, I call that an accidental community. Now, you might have loved that community, but you might have stayed in that community past where it was beneficial to you, and all of a sudden you're hanging out with those guys, and they're still drinking, and they're partying, and they're gambling, and you're in your 40s, and you're spending a lot more money, and that's putting a stress on your work, your finances and your home. Now, there are people who fall into that, right, out there in the world today, and that's an accidental community that you could be purposeful about how does that impact your life, and those can be really hard to change and pull yourself out of. You also get accidental communities like your family. Like, you didn't pick your family. You were born into it. Now, that's, there are less options you have there, but there are still ways, and I talk about it in the book, that like you can put up parameters around how you wanna engage even with your family, and if you have unhealthy aspects of your family that are negative for your finances, you can put parameters in place. I talk about gifting a lot in there, and my family is not unhealthy on it, but I think I do run into people that say oh, I've got all these siblings and nieces and nephews, and we all buy them Christmas presents, and it puts financial stress back on you, set different parameters. Say we're not gonna do that. We're gonna buy one present, and that's all for the holidays. You can set healthy parameters for yourself even inside your communities, and then I think the last part of that is when you think about your financial world. Like, are you picking communities that are helping push you into positive financial behaviors, and being purposeful and intentional on that, and then thinking about the role that you play in communities is another one. That's the one that for me personally has changed the most over time is I think a lot of our early communities we end up accidently in, and we don't think about our purposeful role in that community. You play on the team. It's your neighborhood. It's your city. It's your church, whatever it is, you just kinda end up in it, and whatever you were doing is then your role versus being super purposeful. Is my job to be a good follower, and I commit to the community? Is it to change the community? Is it to welcome others into the community. Right. Whatever it may be. Is it to lead the community? And you can find different roles if you're purposeful on it, and I think that's a really interesting way to look at the world, our money and communities, and then I will close with this one. Community has this super positive connotation. Right. When you hear the word, community, we're all like hey, and part of this is pointing out that there are really negative aspects of community too where a lot of areas I have to point out like debt. There's positive parts of debt. This is one where I'm like hey, community is really important, but it can also be very negative and draining, and it can subtract from your life if you're not purposeful on it.
Jason Pereira: Yeah. I mean, it's, you're right. There is an inherent positive bias to the term compared to debt, which has the n, nar, negative bias, so yeah, and it's, I think we've all had that experience with people who were part of the community because we went to the same school or whatever it is, and we ended up outgrowing those people. It just, it happens. Right. That's life. Right. And so such as, **** again, such is life, so cognizant of time too, I wanna make sure that, you know, I think what we're really getting at in a lot of this, and this is one of the topics I said I wanted to cover before we even jumped on is a lot of what you're focusing on, and especially in the end of the book, which I'm not gonna focus on as heavily because it's more about the actionable, like, steps people can take in an easy way, it's more so about, your book is primarily about purpose. Right. It's about life purpose and how to achieve that really, so I wanna spend a little time on that 'cause we kind of really kinda touched upon it in a lot of ways, but how, about the importance of purpose, and in particular for different types of people, and, you know, I'm gonna pick on business owners as being the c, the core of this. Right. I find, I find a lot of them the thought of giving up their business and retiring is an identity loss, right, and, and a loss of purpose. Talk to me about how important purpose is and how it affects different people and how, how people can take steps to prevent that kind of gap in their lives from existing.
Jamie Hopkins: Purpose is I think crucial for existence. I mean, I don't even wanna like try to pair it back more than that, but like when we don't have purpose, it becomes hard to exist, and, like, that might seem like a big statement, but it's true, even if when you think about just nature in general when things don't have a purpose anymore, when they don't fit an ecosystem, they eventually cease to exist. Right. Like, if there is there a food source that's no longer needed in an ecosystem, it will disappear. If you don't have purpose in your life, you will eventually disappear. Right. You will fade out. That joy, that spark in your eyes, that drive, it will disappear, and our lives are filled with major moments that shift that purpose. In our space, Jason, just as well as anybody, like, retirement is one of those challenge spots. Right. Like, for business owners that then sell their business and move out of it or shut it down –
Jason Pereira: Yeah.
Jamie Hopkins: – like that, you know, people often refer to that as like my baby, my kid. Right. Its' a part of me. It's my legacy, and when you remove that from somebody, it can take away a lot of their purpose, and if you're not intentional on replacing that purpose or actually defining what the value was or aspiration that that was fulfilling in your life purpose, which I, I tend to find is actually the case, uh, isn't actually the company in a lot of cases. It is fulfilling some other need or aspiration –
Jason Pereira: Mm hmm.
Jamie Hopkins: – and that becomes the way in which you are achieving that purpose that if you don't, if you don't intentionally try to replace that, you end up in retirement, you end up without purpose. You actually see in the data that when people retire, overall people that retire are happier than those that are still working, so then people are like hey, retirement is this happy thing, where if you actually dive into that data, the average moves up because the majority of people shift up; however, there is a group that shifts down. You actually have more people who find themselves to be depressed in retirement than those that are working, and so you actually get an increase in the number of people that are depressed, and the main reasons for that, and there was a Harvard study that floated around this past week, is the fact that people feel that they lose their purpose, and they lose their connection to others, which is another big one of that, which is why the community and purpose are so tied together –
Jason Pereira: Uh huh.
Jamie Hopkins: – that our community becomes taken away from us. Our purpose becomes taken away from us, but we don't have to let that happen. The reality is we have the ability to choose to not let that happen, but we can't just hope that it accidently happens. We have to be purposeful on. We've gotta plan it out. We've also gotta understand what is it that we are replacing. Is the purpose of your business, right, to provide money for you so your kids can thrive? Well, if that's the case, you might be okay when you retire if you feel like you've put them in that spot. If part of your business is named after you, and that's your legacy, and you don't have kids, and you want that to be around after you're gone, and you sell your business to somebody, and they change the name, well how are you gonna replace that legacy then –
Jason Pereira: Mm hmm.
Jamie Hopkins: – right. Like that becomes a totally different thing. Your business was your legacy. Now that is gone. Now how do you take the money and the time that you have to find legacy impact, and is that at your charity. Right. So all of a sudden maybe giving back or mentoring people can become part of that legacy where you were trying to get that from a name before, and you can swap those things out, but that's where understanding where is that business, where is that purpose or meaning coming from today, then how do we replace that if that was tied to your business, your work or your community before you retire.
Jason Pereira: Excellent, and it's, it's interesting. I mean, the, um, and it goes so back to the, so it's, it's fascinating 'cause I see this all the time, and I prep people all the time, and especially the business owners or anyone who's really spent most of their lives around their career and their career is their identity, in a lot of ways it's the, and I joke around it, there's two retirement plans. There's the one I work on that's mathematical, and there's the one they gotta work on which is how they're gonna fill their time and find meaning in what they do with their time after they decide to retire, and that is, that is one that frankly should worry people more because it is one that can lead to a lot of depression and a lot of issues if you don't do that, and, and as for community, and I'm also gonna wrap this up with a, with another comment of that. Old age homes often get a bad rap, and some for some very myriad of reasons in, in life, but I, time and time again I've seen the isolated individual who lost the spouse who can no longer taken care of themselves resist emphatically moving into an old aged home, only to move into an old age home and suddenly be reinvigorated because now –
Jamie Hopkins: Mm hmm.
Jason Pereira: – they have community again, and it's, it's such an important, important view or, or like a great test or, or a demonstration of how the loss of that, and then the, for the brief, the c, the now creation of a new one can basically reinvigorate people.
Jamie Hopkins: Yeah. I can close with a quick story around that one too, a personal one which is, you know, my, one set of my grandparents lived in a continued care retirement community. That's what we call 'em in here in the United States, the CCRC –
Jason Pereira: Mm hmm.
Jamie Hopkins: – which is kind of freestanding living when you move in, and all the way through kind of the long-term care hospice-level career at the backend in this facility, and when my grandmother was alive, her and my grandfather had like a great community. They were constantly active doing things, and I would say that their quality of life was super, super high, and that was enabled by that community. Interesting thing though is after my grandmother passed away, my grandfather did not partake in any of that anymore, and, uh, he like deteriorated very quickly, which is not super uncommon when you have spouses at that age and one passes away. A lot of them –
Jason Pereira: ****
Jamie Hopkins: – lost meaning and, and connection quickly too, but he really did. Like, he didn't feel the same desire. He didn't interact as much. He just kind of pulled back into himself, which was kind of sad, but also beautiful in some ways to kind of experience and watch it.
Jason Pereira: Excellent, so before we wrap up, what kinda final words of wisdom do you have for people, and, uh, besides, you know, buying the book, which I will encourage, when, when looking at, thinking about their lives and, and their financial lives and their financial futures, what are kinda the foundational steps you think that you are, or the, the kinda sage words you can give them, and no pressure.
Jamie Hopkins: Yeah. I'll give two things that I kind of weave through what we said before, so the very first one is it's the setting, and I call it aspirations. Like, who do you aspire to be, and that is different than a goal. Goals are mile markers along that way to your aspiration, so do you wanna be somebody who is a great philanthropist? Do you wanna be a great parent? Do you wanna be a great creator of jobs? What is that thing that you aspire to be? I think it's really hard to get to all the other stuff if you have no notion of that whatsoever. Now, aspirations can change too. Like, you don't have to be permanent on that. What I aspired to be in my 20s is not what I aspire to be now, and, like, that's okay, but I do think spend some time on that. Like, just sit, think by yourself, and then write it down. I, I always challenge people to write these things down. It's different having to write down, like, I aspire to be, and then see it on paper and read it out loud, and then tell somebody. Right. Like, do all those –
Jason Pereira: Yeah.
Jamie Hopkins: – things. Then the last part of this, right, if you do not feel freedom in your life today, right, you don't feel financial freedom, you don't feel freedom, what I want you to do, the first step is recognize that, like, you are worthy of having that feeling, and then No. 2, what is the one thing you can do that can move you along that path to finding freedom like within the next 24 to 48 hours? I do a lot of coaching, and a lot of times when I have people list goals to me in coaching, I then ask them what can you do today to move that forward, and if their answer is there's nothing I can do today to move it forward, I always tell 'em it's the wrong goal. Like, if you can't do anything to action on it, you, that's a useless goal. Right. Like, uh, you have to be able to action on it, so if you don't feel that you have financial freedom today, what is one thing that can you do in the next 24 hours that moves you closer to having that feeling.
Jason Pereira: Excellent. Sage advice. Jamie, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time.
Jamie Hopkins: Jason, thanks for having me on. Always appreciate talking to you, and stay safe and healthy, my friend.
Jason Pereira: You too, so that was Jamie Hopkins of, uh, Carson. Hope you enjoyed that, and again, the book is Find Your Freedom, Financial Planning for a Life on Purpose, and again, I highly encourage everyone to contemplate both reading that book but also just deeply thinking about their purpose because everything comes from that in the end. As always, if you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review on Apple Podcast, **** Stitcher, Spotify or wherever it is you get your podcasts, and until next time, take care.
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