Latest / The Great Wealth Transfer / I Had Million Dollar Businesses and Still Felt Broke | Ali Katz

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I Had Million Dollar Businesses and Still Felt Broke | Ali Katz · The Great Wealth Transfer

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  $124 trillion is transferring from one generation to the next. Right now, if we don't grow up around
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  it and see that it's not just a billionaire issue, it's an US issue. Half of that money is in our
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  hands and in our parents hands. If we don't take action around these resources, our share of the
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  $62 trillion, we're going to lose it. And the baby boomers, maybe your parents are turning 80, and
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  once they become incapacitated, once they can't make decisions, it's too late to be in the
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  conversation. I'm Ellie Katz, and after graduating first in my law school class and working on tax
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  transactions for Warren Buffett at Charlie Munger law firm, I realized that the world of estate
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  planning was broken and I set out to fix it, and since then have trained thousands of lawyers who
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  have served over 500,000 families, protecting over $25 billion of family wealth. And I'm
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  going to bring everything to you right here, so you can learn the very same strategies that I've
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  been teaching them and put them into place in your own life and in your own family, and step
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  into your role as a family wealth steward. Welcome. $124 trillion is transferring from one generation
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  to the next. Right now, if we don't grow up around it and see that it's not just a billionaire issue,
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  it's an US issue. Half of that money is in our hands and in our parents hands, and it's time for
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  us to step up so that we don't lose the resources that we have access to now, to build the thriving
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  future that we all want. That's what this podcast is about. If we don't
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  take action around these resources, our share of the $62 trillion, we're going to lose it. And the
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  baby boomers. Maybe your parents are turning 80 this year, and once they become incapacitated,
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  once they can't make decisions. It's too late to be in the conversation. And the conversation could
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  take some time to happen. And your growing up process could take some time to happen. And so
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  these conversations, they have to start before it's too late or we lose what's ours to care
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  costs. To court costs. To confusion. To chaos. Something happens. It's too late. At that point, the
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  resources are gone and your family is probably losing right now, somewhere between 10 and
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  $100,000 a year. Overpaying in taxes that you don't need to be paying. But you are just because
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  you don't know. You probably don't even think that this impacts you because
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  you think I'm not rich, or my your parents might be saying to you, or you might be thinking about
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  your parents. They're not rich. I'm not inheriting anything. They're not going to leave me anything.
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  Well, I inherited $50,000 from my father at the right time, and it changed my life. So whether
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  you're inheriting $50,000, $500,000, $5 million, these are a lot of resources.
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  And you might think that you're not rich because you don't have millions of dollars in the bank.
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  But the reality is, is that your resources can grow and they will grow over time. In fact, what I
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  found is that most people with between 1 and $30 million don't think they're rich. It's money
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  dysmorphia, and money dysmorphia is the distorted view that we have of our financial reality that
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  causes us to sacrifice our nonrenewable resources, time, energy, attention, relationships, and health in
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  service to money. Thinking we have to get more money. We have to get more money because we're not
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  rich yet, when the reality is we could be taking care of what we already have right now and
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  growing it. You may not be thinking about it because you think you're not rich. You think your
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  parents are not rich, or maybe they are rich and they think, oh, you think they've got it taken care
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  of, they've already got it handled, or their guy has it handled, or you're not going to really be
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  able to get into conversation with them because they don't want to talk about it. But this is
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  exactly how the wealth leaks out of the middle class. And we are the middle class, right? 1 to 30
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  million in wealth, which, by the way, is rich. So let's start with that big issue with when
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  we think we're not rich, we don't take care of what we have as if we're rich, and then we're just
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  losing it. Paying more in taxes than we need to be paying, getting the wrong kind of insurance. The
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  wrong type of insurance because we're just getting insurance sold to us instead of going out
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  and buying what we actually need. Not having the right financial systems in place, worrying about
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  how much we have, waking up in the middle of the night instead of having systems, rhythms, flow
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  systems and structures to be looking at what we have. Getting stuck in conflict. Getting stuck in
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  court. All because we don't think that we're rich. Even if we're inheriting $50,000. Certainly
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  $500,000. Definitely $5 million. Right? That's rich. I inherited $50,000 from my
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  dad when I was 30. It was a life changer for me to get $50,000 from my dad, to be able to
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  invest in my business. Change the game. Now, if he had left that to me in a way where I had to go
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  through a court process to get it. It wouldn't have changed my life in a positive way. It would
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  have hurt my life. It would have cost me time, energy and attention that at that time when I had
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  two little kids and a brand new business, I didn't have. And so if we don't take care of what we have,
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  if we don't take it seriously, what we end up leaving is a huge burden, a huge mess. Instead of
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  giving this huge gift to the people that we love. And so when we take it seriously, when we see that
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  we already are rich, then we're able to grow our family wealth from one generation to the next. And
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  this is when the conversation has to start. It can't start later. It has to start now. I
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  discovered this thing that I call money dysmorphia, and when I discovered it, that term
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  didn't exist. Now, some folks have taken that term and talk about it as if it's something other than
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  what it is. So here's what money dysmorphia is. It's a distortion we have of our financial
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  reality that causes us to sacrifice our nonrenewable resources individually. That's time,
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  energy, attention, relationships and health. Planetary. It's our nonrenewable resources.
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  Planetary. We sacrifice those resources and service to money. But money's infinitely renewable
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  if we know how to use our nonrenewable resources. And the way that I discovered this was, well, first
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  of all, when I started my career as a lawyer, I'm making $165,000 a year. And I still felt
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  broke. That was very confusing to me because I had only ever been a waitress before. How could I feel
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  broke making $165,000 a year? But I found that that feeling continued through building
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  $2 million businesses. I still felt broke. I still felt that I didn't have enough money. I still felt
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  that I wasn't rich, I still felt constantly worried about money, and I decided I would walk
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  away from everything that I had created because I might as well just give up. I wasn't good at
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  business. I was making all sorts of mistakes because I wasn't taking care of what I had,
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  because I thought I wasn't rich enough. So I walked away from everything, and in the process of
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  walking away from everything, I discovered no matter how much we have, we're never going to feel
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  rich. We're always going to feel this underlying insecurity of not enough. One of the ways that
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  money dysmorphia causes us to lose our resources is because we don't see what we have, right? And so,
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  so many people would come in and meet with me for their estate planning. When I was a 1 to 1 estate
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  planning lawyer, and they'd never looked at what they had and they were shocked, like, oh, I really
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  actually have a lot. And as a result of that, you think, oh, I don't need estate planning. Well, if you
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  don't need estate planning, what's going to happen is that when you become incapacitated, illness,
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  accident, injury, something you don't expect is going to happen. Your family has no idea what you
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  have, where it is, or in the event of your death, they can't get into your phone. Now what happens
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  is your family is going to the court, and once you're in the court process. It's really bad. It is
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  unnecessary expense. It takes a lot of time. There's likely going to be conflict in the family
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  and the assets just end up lost. And worse than that, I would say, is all of the
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  assets that go to pay for care costs for people who wouldn't have even wanted it. So, for
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  example, I know that for myself, I do not want to be kept in a nursing home, kept alive not
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  necessarily on a breathing machine, but being force fed to be kept alive when I don't even have
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  any cognitive awareness at all. Most people would probably say the same thing. They also don't want
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  to be kept alive, but because they didn't write it down, document it, make plans for it ahead of time.
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  All of their family resources are spent keeping them alive, force feeding them and all of their
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  resources going to the medical industrial complex that they never would have wanted to support.
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  Assets are lost. There's $70 billion in state departments of unclaimed property across the US
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  because somebody dies and nobody knows what they had, and those assets end up going to the state
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  and not growing in the hands of their families. So this is just some of the ways that assets are
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  lost from one generation to the next, and it can totally be avoided. I'm having this conversation
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  with you so that you know that you can you can do something. You can take action. You don't have to
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  bury your head in the sand. Or like my mom, she didn't know what to do when she had to invest her
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  retirement account at school, for example. And so she asked one of the male teachers because she
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  figured, well, he'll know what to do. I don't want you outsourcing anything to some guy because you
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  think he's gonna know what to do when you need to know what to do and listen. I did the same thing
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  myself when I first, um, was given a retirement account at my six figure attorney
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  job. I was 28 years old. I didn't know what a 401 K was. And they gave me this piece of
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  paper and they said, okay, tell us how you'd like us to invest it. I looked at the paper. We didn't
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  have Google back then. I saw a bunch of letters on the paper. I was too ashamed and embarrassed to
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  tell anybody. I didn't know what this was. And so I literally closed my eyes, put my finger down on
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  the paper, and circled that one and handed the paper back to them. So that's what I call eyes
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  squeezed shut decision making. We don't want to do that. We want to make eyes wide open decisions. And
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  that's why I call my ecosystem eyes wide open. Collective is because we want to make decisions
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  with our eyes wide open. I did not do this myself. And so what I want you to realize is that you
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  have a huge opportunity here to start making eyes wide open decisions. Acknowledge what you don't
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  know. It's totally okay, and start to get educated. The first thing that you can do is start
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  to treat your personal affairs as if you had a family office. That seems like a big word, right?
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  Family office. That's just for billionaires. Well, no, it can be for all of us. We can all treat our
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  personal affairs as if we were the manager or the steward of our own family office. And it starts
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  with just looking at what you have, understanding what do you have? What do you have in the bank?
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  What do you have in retirement accounts? What do you have for insurance? How do you how are you
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  filing your taxes or not filing your taxes? It's really just starts with an inventory of what you
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  have, and then an inventory of what your parents have. And also looking beyond just the
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  financial assets. So it's not just about what you have financially, it's also about what you can
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  create. What talents do you have? What gifts do you have? What skills do you have? What can you offer
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  to the community where you can give what you have and receive what you need? So starting to
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  inventory that as well, and starting to see that what you have is not just the zeros and ones also
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  looking at your credit score. All of us should be looking at our credit score on probably a weekly,
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  if not monthly basis. Not because we want to feel bad about ourselves, but so we can
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  improve it. Why do you want to improve your credit score so you can get credit? Credit is a resource
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  for us to use. It's not something to be ashamed of using. It's something to use to be able to build
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  something. It's the only reason to have a good credit score is to use credit. So that's part of
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  your inventory is what is your credit score? How can you improve your credit score? How can you use
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  credit in a really wise way to be able to make the investments that you want to make for the
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  future? So I want you to see this as a rite of passage into adulthood. Right. We've lost our rites
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  of passage. We've lost our initiations. But this specific experience of you stepping into your
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  role as the one in your family is a rite of passage. It is an initiation that you can take
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  yourself through so that when you're connecting with your parents or your adult kids, if you have
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  adult kids or when you have adult kids. You're coming from a place of true adulthood around our
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  collective resources, your collective resources, and your family. And what's going to happen as a
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  result of that is you are going to feel more fulfilled than I imagine you've ever felt in your
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  life. At least that's how it was for me when I spent years making more money achieving the next
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  metric of success, hitting the next goal. The goalposts kept moving. And maybe you've heard that
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  before, right? Or maybe you've had that experience yourself. Or like I hit the goal and then it moves
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  and it's like everything is the next thing, the next thing. But what I found for myself is that
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  when I really stood up around myself as a steward of my family wealth,
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  it was the most fulfilling thing that I'd ever done. I finally felt like I made it. I finally felt
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  like I made it when I could take care of my mom and make sure that she has a place to live for
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  the rest of her life and not be worried about the burden of, oh my God, how am I going to take care
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  of my mom? Kind of living in the back of my mind and know that I can take care of my family if
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  anything happens, not because I have tons of money. At that time, I didn't have
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  tons of money. What I had was clarity. What I had was knowing that I was a good steward of our
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  collective resources. What I had was connection with my sister and our mom, so that we could treat
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  all of our resources as family resources. It was the most fulfilling, transformational
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  experience that I had, and I think it will be the same way for you as well. Whether you're feeling
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  inspired, overwhelmed, or motivated, you're in the right place because it means that this topic is
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  touching you and you know that this is the right conversation for you to be in at this time in
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  your life. And I'm bringing you this work to give you the solutions, to give you the tools to take
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  you behind the scenes into the conversations that maybe you otherwise wouldn't get to see, so that
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  you can be in the right conversation so that you can be taking the right actions so that you can
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  start to relax your nervous system around these topics that can be really anxiety producing or
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  create avoidance or uncertainty or fear. You don't know what to do. And at the end of the day, you're
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  going to be able to relax and know you're never going to be taken advantage of. You're never going
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  to be ripped off, you're never going to make bad decisions. And if you do make bad decisions,
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  they'll be learning experiences that you'll be able to share with others. Share with your parents.
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  So I want you to like, follow, subscribe. And that way you're going to get notified of every episode
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  that I bring to you. And most importantly, share this with somebody you love because there's
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  somebody that you love that needs to hear this as well. And if you share this with them, you can be
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  in conversation with them about it and be having these really important and intimate conversations
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  that you might not be having right now. So do that, and I'll look forward to seeing you in the next
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  episode of the Great Wealth Transfer podcast.