Episode 49: Education Removes Panic

Announcer:                  

This is The WealthAbility® Show with Tom Wheelwright. Way more money, way less taxes.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

Welcome to The WealthAbility® Show, where we're always discovering how to make way more money and pay way less taxes. Hi, this is Tom Wheelwright, your host, founder and CEO of WealthAbility®.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

Look, we're in a crisis today with the coronavirus. This is as much a crisis of education and leadership as it is a health crisis. It is not just a health pandemic. It is a general panic among people. So today, we're going to discover together how to deal with this pandemic and how to prepare, not just for now, but for the future. One thing we know for sure is this will change life for the foreseeable future.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

The Great Depression, my parents grew up in the Great Depression and they did not waste anything. They made sure we cleaned our plates. They were careful with their money, and the reason was is because they had none and they had to make do. And so that generation, it changed their entire generation.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

This pandemic will do the same thing. The challenge in this pandemic is, we have not just a leadership crisis, which is clear. There are very few countries who are dealing with this appropriately. We're seeing some of the Asia countries, Taiwan, Korea, even China, doing a decent job handling this pandemic. The Western countries, not so much.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

What do we see? We see a run on toilet paper here, Australia, Europe. We're seeing these runs on the grocery stores. I'm going, “This is not… We don't have a problem with the supply chain folks. We have a problem with people panicking because they lack education.” So two things are going on right now. One is a lack of financial education and one is a lack of personal education, okay.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

I'm in Costco the other day and I noticed a couple of things. First of all, everybody except me had a case of bottled water. Now that case a bottle of water is going to last their family a day, maybe two, right? That's it. Everybody had one. Okay, there was a limit of two; so some of them had two, some of them had one. When you walk in the store on the right-hand side, there are water coolers. Nobody had a water cooler in their cart. Now, I didn't have a water cooler on my cart because I have several water coolers around my house. All you need is a water cooler and then you call one of these companies like Sparkletts, Arrowhead, Culligan, whoever. They will deliver you all the water you want. Those aren't stopping. They have plenty of water. This is just not thinking. This is like thinking we're in a panic, and what solves panic is education. That is what solves panic.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

I'm very fortunate because for whatever reason, my wife and I seem to be prepared for this. And it's not like we were preparing for it. It's not like we're preppers, okay. It's that this is the way we live our life. Let me give you an example. My wife is a great cook and she's a great gardener. We are right now redoing our irrigation system because it was not up to snuff. Well, that's to me a better way to spend my money on my irrigation system because guess what? My wife can grow all the food we need. It is spring. You can grow food. There's no reason to be panicking.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

What's interesting to me is it's the fresh food, particularly the fruits and vegetables. They're in plentiful supply. It doesn't matter. I mean you see Trader Joe's, all of the frozen shelves are empty. The meat shelves are empty. Guess what? The fruits and vegetables, lots of them, no big deal because people are panicking and they're going to what they know, which what they know is how to you use prepared foods.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

This is where the solution for each of us is to get educated on how do we take care of ourselves. I grew up Mormon. And the Mormons, I suspect right now… Now, I don't participate in anymore. I'm absolutely positive that the Mormons are not panicking. Why? Because they have always said, you need a garden, you need to have six months to a year supply of cash on hand and you need to have a year supply of food on hand. They bake, they cook, they plant gardens. I'm going, really what I'm missing are our chickens. That's next on my list, and maybe a goat. Okay, because then you have protein.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

Think about, instead of thinking about, “Oh, I can't go the grocery store,” think about what would be a long-term alternative? Think about this: Do you focus on I can't buy fish or do I learn how to fish? Now is the time both financially and otherwise to get educated and really to be self-reliant, really to be so self-reliant. To know that if you need to isolate yourself, you're okay.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

And part of that, of course, is having cash, gold, et cetera on hand. But look, if you can have all the cash in the world on hand, if there's no food, what are you going to do? It's amazing to me you've got the federal reserve pumping billions of dollars into the system and they're putting it in the wrong place. They're putting it into the banking system. The banking system is not failing, folks. Where it needs to go is to the manufacturers. Where it needs to go is to the restaurants to help them gear up so that they can be solely delivery.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

This is also a chance for us to look at our own business strategically. What can we do differently in our business so, A, we can be remote, okay. I mean, look at Amazon. Amazon's going to thrive through this. Absolutely going to thrive because everything they do is, it's remote, right? They're actually set up for this. The food delivery services are thriving through this, right, because this is important.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

I look at our business, we have been set up, our CPA firm, in fact, all of our CPA firms and our network are set up to handle clients remotely. I had a client the other day, he sends me an email and he goes, “I'm sure this is affecting you. Don't worry about being on top of my tax returns.” And I said, “Not affecting this at all.” Because for years, we have allowed people to work from home. They're all set up to work from home. Our phones, they can actually take them home because they're set up to have the same number. We do almost all of our clients remotely. The fact that we're already set up that way is a huge advantage for us.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

And so when you think about your business, think, “Okay… ” And I would encourage everybody, don't think this is just an eight-week crisis. This will change the way people behave for the foreseeable future. People will get used to getting delivery, they'll get used to working remotely, not a bad thing. In my opinion, it's fine as long as we're prepared as a business to do so.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

Now Apple stores are closed. This is a challenge right now, right? How are you going to get people working remotely if you can't get computers? Right now, here's another thing I really think we ought to be doing in our businesses. We ought to be looking strategically, and how about our employees? We can get on on a webinar with our employees. And let's have those employees who can't be working because let's say you're a restaurant or you're some other type of service that is shut down right now, okay, let's be looking strategically as now's the opportunity to work on our business. You always hear we should be working on our business, not always in our business. Well, what an amazing opportunity.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

I'm looking at this… All the events that I typically travel to and so forth, they're pretty much canceled right now, right? So I'm looking at this, this is a great opportunity to write my next book. There are opportunities now; and since the internet is functioning just fine, we can go on and we can learn anything we want to learn. We can get financial education, we can get education about preparedness. You can go on, look at YouTube videos about how to plant a garden.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

This is an educational crisis. And imagine this, if you had toilet paper on the shelves, all of a sudden the panic goes away. It's the stores being empty that foments the panic. What we ought to be doing is… You want to pump money into the economy? Put it into the manufacturers. Let them build temporary manufacturing facilities quickly, okay. Let them step up production, particularly those that… And on a temporary basis and fund it.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

Let's get toilet paper back on the shelves folks, because that is going to have a bigger impact on the panic aspect of this pandemic I think than anything else. If you saw toilet paper and towels and paper towels on the shelves and hand sanitizer on the shelves, you'd be fine. The challenge is that our manufacturers, they're at their capacity. And it's not like they have money just sitting around, right?

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

This is where, okay, policies wise, I personally would love to see the government putting the money, instead of in the banking system, let's put it into the manufacturing supply chains, into the grocery stores. Let's set up those systems as well as the healthcare systems so that they're taken care of, okay. Yes, we're going to need to bail out the airlines. Great.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

Okay, now let's bring it back to us. What can you do? First of all, you need to make sure, because one of the things that we're worried about is, right, we're going to see drops in business, in a lot of businesses. What's the fastest way to put money in your pocket? Reduce your taxes. Make sure now that you're… I say sitting down with your CPA, but you're on a conference, you're strategically working with your CPA to reduce your taxes. Best way to put money in your pocket, reduce your taxes. It's immediate.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

Literally, when we have clients come to us, we're reducing their taxes from 10-40% within the first week sometimes. Typically within a month we've had significant impact on their taxes. Well, that's money you don't have to pay in. That's money that now goes into your pocket, that can be used for other things. That is number one, make sure that your CPA has remote access capabilities like ours does, so that you don't have to go in and be at risk; or they may be working from home, they may not want to see you. Okay, make sure that that's a real possibility. Remember, I mean this virus stays on paper. If you're sending your physical paper in, there's a risk there, okay, to both you and your CPA. That's one thing.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

Now, good news is the IRS is likely to give us an extension from April 15th until June 15th, okay. That's what we think's going to happen. Now there've been slow about it. Why they haven't done this already, I don't know. It's likely to happen, okay. And they will postpone payment as well. Right now if you live outside the country, you automatically get till June 15th anyway. This is a really easy fix. It just lets everybody do it and that's something we're likely to see, so watch for that.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

We've got this tax cut. At the time we're recording the show, it's not passed, the package, so we don't know exactly what it's going to show. But here's the problem with it. It's going to hurt a lot of businesses because right now it's showing that, well, for the first $600 of pay, you're forced to give two weeks of sick leave. Well, if you don't give sick leave, normally that much sick leave, then what's going to happen? Well, anything over that $600 you're going to be on the hook for.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

The biggest news here and the biggest lesson here is we cannot be relying on the government. We cannot be relying on the government. We have to take our education and our preparedness and our leadership into our own hands. Now, I said it was a leadership crisis. It's clear. Most countries, their leadership is behaving badly. I mean, the UK, they're just letting this run. They're going to kill off a whole generation. In the US, this isn't a big deal. We only have like 3000 cases. Well, you haven't tested anybody, so of course you don't know how many cases you have, okay.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

The lack of leadership in the country, what's been great is though we've had great leadership in the big companies. Stores that have shut down voluntarily. Sporting events that have shut down voluntarily. Amazon kicking off the idiots in Kentucky who were trying to sell hand sanitizer for $400 a bottle on Amazon. They've kicked off all the money grabbers on Amazon that were trying to take advantage of this. The corporate world actually, I think, has done… The best leadership has been at the corporate level.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

The question is how good are we being at our business level? Are we leading with our employees? Are we leading with our customers and our clients? This is a leadership crisis, but this is an opportunity for the best to come out. What we've seen a lot of is the worst of people. We've also starting to see the best of certain people. This is a chance for us to be our best, becoming self-reliant, which means becoming self-reliant socially as well, right? So that we're comfortable with ourselves, so that we are prepared emotionally and socially as well as physically and mentally. These are opportunities for us. This is an opportunity with employees, like I said, to really sit down with them and figure out what can we do better.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

We're got a whole day leadership conference coming up with our leadership in our company, and we're doing it remotely. It's set up to do remote. Nobody's going in. We're already set up for that and we're working strategically. If we work strategically, in other words we are working on a plan of action, we don't have to worry so much about this stuff.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

You have sleepless nights because you're worried. There's a lot of stress going on. Okay, and people are blaming the government. Don't blame the governor, okay? Just don't be an idiot. You know if you're educated, education takes out panic. It completely removes that panic, so let's get educated. Think about the people who are making millions and billions of dollars on the stock market crash because they were already educated and they were already understanding that the market was overvalued.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

I don't know anybody in my circle that didn't think the market was overvalued, that this was going to happen one way or another. Now, it was the pandemic that triggered it. It was always going to happen. Robert Kiyosaki, my friend, has been preaching this for years, this is going to happen. It was the longest bull market in history. This is a correction. How far it's going to correct? I heard Goldman Sachs says they think it could correct all the way down the S&P all the way down to 2000. We'll see over the next few days. We'll see what happens over the next few weeks.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

On top of that, of course, we have the oil crisis, which is a serious crisis, which has also been underplayed. Good at the gas pump. Really bad if you're invested in oil and gas or if oil and gas is your business.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

Russia is really targeting the US. They're hitting while we're down. Again, it's a leadership crisis. It's an education crisis. Take the time to get educated. Spend the time with your CPA. Spend the time to develop a plan of action for permanently reducing your taxes. Spend the time to get financially educated.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

We have a ton of stuff, of education available to you. Most of it is completely free. Rich Dad, good friends of mine over there at Rich Dad, Robert and Kim Kiyosaki and their group, they have tons of education online. There's lots of good financial education out there. Now's the time. It's not too late. Let's get educated. Let's get educated so we don't panic. Let's reduce our stress level. Let's stay safe. And when we stay safe and we get educated, we will always make more money, pay less taxes and sleep at night. See you next time.

 

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You've been listening to The WealthAbility® Show with Tom Wheelwright. Way more money, way less taxes. To learn more, go to WealthAbility.com.