How to Stop Just Saving Money and Start Building Cash Flow — Andy Tanner, Del Denney

Welcome back to Rich Dad's Stockcast. I'm your host, Del Denny, and today we're talking about a financial transition that millions of people struggle to make, going from someone who saves money to someone who confidently invests it. Think about it. You work hard, you pay your bills, you put money into savings. Maybe you've even built up a pretty healthy bank account. You're doing everything you were taught to do with money. But there's a problem. Saving money and building wealth are not the same thing. And for a lot of people, the thought of taking that hard-earned money and putting it into the stock market is terrifying. What if the market crashes? What if I lose everything? What if I make the wrong decision? So instead of investing, they just keep saving year after year. And today we're going to talk about how to break through that fear and make the transition from being a saver to becoming an educated, confident investor. Andy Tanner is joining us to explain why saving alone isn't necessarily enough, what separates savers from investors, and how someone can begin developing the skills to put their money to work. And before we jump in, head over to StockCastsBonus.com. We've got some great resources to help you to continue. your financial education and becoming a smarter, more confident investor. Andy, welcome back, sir. Boy, this is awesome, man. I just created a new webinar about three weeks ago that has a lot to do with this very thing. So it's actually fresh on my mind. And I'm going to share some of that, if it's okay, some of my thoughts on that, because it's such a great way to look at it. But... So yeah, I'm ready to hop in. I can't wait to hop in here. I'm going to pause for a second. There's another resource called StockCastBonus.com. There's some webinars and some great education there. Can you explain a little bit more about that? Yep. So speaking of going from saver to investor, that's a great move right there. StockCastBonus.com, free stuff. Lots of downloads, tools, webinars, e-books, stuff that you can continue your education with. The theme I use a lot on that is if a person's never established, like if you're not receiving, I receive and make money every month and build my account with this thing called Click and Get Paid. Every single month, I take the opportunity. To grow and bring money to me with what Liam Neeson might say, I have a very particular set of skills honed over a long career. And if a person does not have, if you said, well, you know, in this last month of, let's say, October, if you did not click a mouse and have money dump into your account, that is something I think every single person could learn how to do. I think they're leaving money on the table. I think it's probably the easiest and simplest, particularly simple. You know, maybe it's not easy if you don't know how to do it. But to me, I feel like it's way easy. It takes me about, you know, maybe a half hour or something like that once a month to go through this, go bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. If a person is living a life where they're not doing that, I would just, you know, I wouldn't admonish because I'm not into, you know, begging people to change their lives. It's their life. But I would recommend that someone go to stockcastbonus.com and see what that looks like because it is achievable with some education and some discipline. I don't care if it's just a mom whose daughter is in cheer. You know, or if it's a mom or dad whose son or daughter is on the travel team, you know, that's going to cause a divorce. Divorce and bankruptcy go together, right? Most attorneys that do divorce do bankruptcy and vice versa. You know, if you got a kid on the travel team, you know, a little, a few extra bucks might make a big difference, right? So yeah, that's what StockCast Bonus is for. StockCastBonus.com is to help people say, you know, I would like to establish an income stream from paper assets. And I'd like to be able to have that skill where every single month I spend that half hour for my family, not day trading, not buying low and selling high and trying to guess where the crypto market's going to go or where a commodity market's going to go. Taking a mouse. You know, clicking it and having money come to you, everyone should see what that looks like because that's what we do. So StockCastBonus.com, fantastic place. A lot of people have the opportunity to get started there. And then, you know, within 30 days, 60 days maybe, whatever it is, they can be a person. Even if it's a small amount, they can say, hey, I clicked my mouse and I added to my income because of my knowledge and the skills I learned. So StockCastBonus.com. Beautiful. I love that. Now, income, important. We're going to talk about saving here. And, you know, I think a lot of people have been conditioned to believe that saving money is the ultimate financial goal. And saving is important, and we're not arguing against that. But I think there's a big difference between protecting the money you've earned and actually learning to grow it. So let's start with that distinction. What's the biggest difference between a saver and an investor? I might throw a bit of a curveball here because I want to back up just one step before saving. I have spent so many years with Robert Kiyosaki, Kim Kiyosaki, Blair Singer. Those guys, you know, 14 years of my life was just dedicated to learning from those guys. I mean, that's a longer time than any other thing I've studied in school, Del. High school was three years, sophomore, junior high was to ninth grade, and then I had 10th, 11th, 12th, and then I spent a little time in college picking away. Those were like three and four-year stints. I spent 14 years, and it's indelibly in my mind, I don't think it's the neuroplasticity in my brain could be undone at this point. It's just set to where it's about who We do have, it's just, it is, it is personal development issues. So when I look at saving and investing, I look at it through a personal development lens, which means I'm going to back up even one more before people save, because I've been all three in my life. I've been all three of them. So I'll share three stories moving from even before what happens before you become a saver and what do you become? When you become a saver, what personal development traits do savers have? When I was young, in my teens, and, you know, I probably started mowing lawns around eight, nine years old, and worked in a warehouse, and, you know, did all this that manual labor teenagers do. You know, cleaned up, I had a guy's shop I'd go clean up that, you know, made airplane parts on his lathe, and I'd clean up all the shavings. I had all these odd jobs as a kid. And what we'd do is we'd get, you know, you'd mow a lawn and get, you know, a couple of bucks. And we did two things. We'd go to the mall and buy a milkshake, and then we'd put the rest of it in a pinball machine. And I was a consumer. So before you're a saver, you're a consumer. And I had a friend who, his dad had this nice big house, and he seemed to be rich, and he was in stocks. His name was Lynn. I'd go to, I'd pal around with his son and he'd look at us like these guys are never going to amount to anything. At least the Tanner kid's not. I don't think he ever thought I'd amount to much. But I was friends with his son and I said, hey, I want to be rich. He says, no, you don't. I says, no, I feel a feeling. I look at what you have. I honestly can say I would like to have this. I want to be rich. And he says, no, you don't. He says, you think you do. And I know your feelings are genuine. But you really don't want to be rich. What you want to do is play pinball. What you want to do is be what we call a consumer. You want to take money and buy stuff like this. You want to buy stuff like this. You're excited about having stuff, see? That's not. Being rich means you got a lot of money and income and assets, not a lot of stuff. He says, you really want to be a consumer, bad, because you want to have stuff. I already see it. You want to do stuff and have stuff. Which means you want to play pinball and you want to have ice cream all the time. And finally that sunk in and as I got a little older, when I first got married, Marcy and I decided to become savers. So we lived really small. We lived way small. Very, very small. I just remember one time we set a goal to save $100,000. This same person who had chewed me out for being a consumer said, And $100,000 wouldn't do it, by the way, anymore. This is 1,000 years ago. But he said, Andy, if you can save $100,000, you really can give the finger to anyone. You can quit any job you want because there's plenty of time to get another one or there's bridge money. You really are your own person when you're not paycheck to paycheck. Now, back then, $100,000 would last someone about three years, I think. And I remember when we hit that goal and had $100,000 and we were driving an old car. And I remember someone said, we weren't consuming anymore. We drove an older car. And I remember we were living in a basement apartment still. And my wife smiled because someone made a comment about our car. And we thought, yeah, but they don't have $100,000 in the bank. And we do. So what did we become? We became disciplined. So the shift from, and I know I'm being loquacious, but the shift from consumer to saver is the personal development of discipline. Now that's good and it's bad. Robert got his discipline from the military. I have areas in my life that still aren't disciplined, particularly when it comes to banana bread, stuff like that. But that's the first key, is a saver is discipline. Now that's good. Here's the bad part. I think this is where I picked on Dave Ramsey in the last podcast. This is where I part ways with Dave is Dave's a disciplinarian. He's much less of an educator, mostly just a finger wagger. Don't buy lattes and don't spend. Don't be a consumer. And if you're not a consumer, then that's good. But there's no creativity to that. Now I'll get to your original question is, what is it about saving? There's no creativity to discipline. You simply choose. to save more money than you spend. There's no creativity. There's no genius. There's no education. There's no creation of cash. There's accumulation of cash, but no creation. It lacks creativity. And so the first jump is you get disciplined because you can't invest if you can't save. That's another thing that mentor Lynn told me. He says, you can't invest if you can't So the discipline must be a component. But once you have the discipline, then you add to your discipline knowledge, right? You add to your discipline knowledge, and now you can create cash. Now you've become someone who can create money rather than just accumulate money. There's a big difference between saving money, accumulating money, big difference between saving and creating. Cashflow. Creating machines that produce a wellspring. You can have a water tank and accumulate rainwater in a water tank, or you can get a wellspring. You know, you can be like Moses and take your staff and smack the rock and out comes the water. That's creation. That's creating water. And so I would say if you're going to become an investor, You go from being, notice these words be, from being a consumer to being a saver to being an investor. And that's, maybe we just end right there. That's a long-winded answer, but you can tell I've thought a lot about it and it's about who we become. I can't wait to dive into this more. Now, We always talk about be, do, have, but let's take a quick break. When we come back, let's get practical, right? If somebody listening has spent years, we'll get a little more granular here. You know... The question will be is, you know, what mistakes should I avoid and how do I start making decisions without feeling like I'm gambling on my future? So let's do this. Listener, make sure you visit StockCastBonus.com for more resources to help you to take that next step towards your financial education. Stick around. We'll be right back. So far, it's been great. I needed a source where I could really enrich my education through stocks. I didn't really have an avenue for it. And it's helped me a lot. The simplicity has really gotten me on the track to where I Enjoy the learning as well as it's really solidifying in my mind. Like they're not just trying to sell you something. They really care about the people that are in the course and they really do care about you and your personal goals and what you want to do is to help you and your family and whatever your goals are in life through that. So it's really been great. Welcome back to Rich Dad's Stockcast. I'm here with Andy Tanner and we're talking about making that transition from saving money to becoming a confident investor. Andy, let's imagine someone listening has done a great job saving money. They've got some money set aside, right? They're financially responsible, but they have absolutely no idea where to begin with investing. So let's give that person a personal roadmap, if you will. So what would be the first step someone should take before investing their hard-earned money? Well, one of the things you said as we went into the break that... that I don't want to use the word push back on, but maybe comment on, is you say, you know, what can people do and how can they avoid common mistakes? And I get that. I get that wanting to avoid mistakes, but, you know, Robert, he always used to say, never waste a good mistake. I think the idea of trying to avoid mistakes is wise. Uh, in that, uh, if there's a mentor you can find or someone who's blazed that trail before and give you some guidance, but you're still going to make them. So eliminating the idea that you're going to make a mistake, uh, is robbing us of some great, great lessons. So I wouldn't be too concerned about making mistakes, um, especially financial ones. Cause you know, I've made, oh geez, I've made some expensive mistakes that make people just Turn, you know, they turn green, you know, it's just what? But those are great learning lessons, you know, things I have not repeated, you know, different lessons. And I'm sure I'll make some more as I go along. So don't worry too much about making mistakes. I think that what a person does is they think about asset classes first. So if I want to move from being a saver, one of the challenges we have with being a saver is we're not going to outpace inflation. Uh, money has a currency has a half-life, uh, to its value that, that there's no better place to feel that than the grocery store. You know, COVID, this was a horrible thing to do because, because inflation makes the rich, richer, you know, we have a 1.7 trillion dollar rescue package. And this time it wasn't just the Fed getting bailed out. It was the consumers. This is helicopter money. And we did it, and this is so sinister, because we say, well, we're going to do this to help the poor. And they don't realize the currency moves. It's not going to sit in the hands of the poor. They're going to be consumers, like I said. And that money goes from consumer to investor. That's where it goes. And so when they dropped all the COVID money out, that's why you have, people often say, why do we have so many billionaire socialists? Well, they love it. They absolutely love it. I mean, give the people cash, right? Give them cash and let them go to Walmart and Costco and pay rent and give that cash to the, it goes in their pockets and they don't pay taxes. So if you can, if you can tax the middle class. And then give that money to the poor. And then the poor takes it and gives it to the rich. That's like a system of getting rich for those people, right? Tax the middle, because the rich don't pay taxes, right? So you tax the middle class, you give that money to the poor, and then the poor give it to the rich. How do they do it? They line up and go watch them. Go to Walmart and watch poor people give money to people that own Walmart stock. Very simple. And that might be a bit of a digression, but the savers are losing their cash as value. And there's no better place to feel that than the grocery store. Because after COVID, we had to raise interest rates to control inflation. Now we have a housing crisis. Now people can't get in a house because we gave away all this money and up goes everything. The grocery store prices are not going to go back to how they were. They're just not. In fact, they're trying to stop them from going higher. Try to get out of a grocery store for under $100 and see if you can get more than one bag of groceries for $100. It's tough to do. Tough to do anything of quality. And so the savers are really, that's just not a solution. So if you're going to be an investor, what happened in this story? Well, we went from someone who spent all their money. Then we had the story where we saved our first $100,000. And then we started to create cash. We got our first rental property. So now we had cash coming in from something that we'd bought. And then we started doing some stocks, right? And we have cash coming in because of something that we bought. And so you look at asset classes of business, real estate, paper assets like stocks and options. And commodities like gold and silver, and I'll throw Bitcoin in that. And understanding, an investor understands those things. A saver does not need to understand leverage of options or leverage of debt. A saver doesn't need to know financial jargon like net operating income or cap rates or P/E ratios or PEG ratios. Or EBITDA, or enterprise value over EBITDA, or any price-to-tangible book. They don't know that jargon. Savers don't know that jargon. Savers don't know what delta is, and gamma, and theta, and strike prices, and expirations, and what a gamma smile is, and that you have... Gamma is a changing rate of delta and all this type of financial education and jargon that just goes over people's heads. You start going into jargon, it has no meaning. Education allows information to have meaning and transformation is the evidence of education. If you aren't transformed, you're not educated. The butterfly is the evidence of the metamorphosis. It's a different creature. It's the same creature, but a different creature, if that makes sense. Same DNA, same being, but it becomes something different. It becomes a different, it's a metamorphosis. So I look at investing very much like that caterpillar to butterfly. It's not minor. It's a major change. And the change is when that discipline of saving becomes increased. It takes more discipline to invest than it does to save. Saving, you do it one time, you get some money and you put some away. You get some money, put some away. There's not the discipline over emotions of risk management and greed and fear. And disciplining those emotions, the investor's master. So you just become a more complete human. You know more, you're smarter than you used to be, and you're more disciplined, and your temperament has to improve. And so you just become a different human. I'm not, I could not, in the day's eyes as a consumer, I could not have received premiums from options. I didn't know how to do it. I wouldn't have known how to structure a real estate deal to cash flow. I didn't know how to do it. And when I was a saver, I didn't know how to do it. And now as an investor, I want to learn more and more how to do it better and how to do it. So cash creation, how do you not love to study that? Why do people want to be so stupid? Why do people say, I don't want to learn all that? I guess it's just school ruined them. You know, you got some teacher that. I see teachers that'll fail half their class and they think they're smart because they failed half their class. It means they're not a very good teacher, in my view, if half your class is failing. But that's what the universities do. They indoctrinate more than educate, I think, anymore. At least there's a greater percentage of indoctrination. So to become educated should be an exciting thing. And when people say, you know, I just don't want to learn it, what they're really saying is I just want to be dumb. And I don't understand. I do not get why people would want to be stupid, especially financially stupid. Well, I just want someone else to do that for me. Okay. I want to be smart. I want to be disciplined. I want to have a good temperament. That's what I want. So that's what StockCast Bonus is about. That's the place you go to to start that journey. So one more thing on that. I know these are long-winded answers, Del, but you've just hit a webinar. I just did. So you learn about those asset classes, This is business. Real estate, you know, paper assets like stocks and options and commodities. And you start, some people like to pick one and get really, really, really good at one. Some people like them all. You know, maybe that's a weakness I have because I, you know, I'll go all kinds and maybe I'm not focused enough, but I love all of them. I just, to me, it all spends the same. The cash looks the same once it hits the account, regardless where it came from. So I like studying all of them. Uh, but, but that's where you start becoming investors, studying an asset class and becoming a master of generalized principles and then applying to that asset class. Thank you. So speaking of asset classes and education, uh, I too love real estate, love the stock market. Someone that's looking at the asset class because this is the, you know, we're talking stocks. What should a beginner investor learn before buying their first stock? Well, the first gift that Robert gave Ken was an accounting course. And I think knowing cash flow is a great place to start, is understanding cash flow patterns. I first saw what a cash flow pattern looked like in a book called The Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I didn't understand currency, that it moved like a current. I didn't understand that it moved, and there's different patterns, you know, like a cashflow pattern of a poor person, cash comes from a job, comes in through the income column, exits through the expense column, and that's a consumer that I, that's what I was as a teenager, job, income, spend, savers, job, income, spend, some of it gets funneled to asset, and the asset accumulates as savings. The ultimate, I think, is borrow, liability, asset, income, expense with a difference that produces cash flow. I think that's the ultimate cash flow pattern. So I can see those in my mind easily. I look at Wall Street's cash flow pattern. They have an infinite return because they just receive fees and they don't take any risk. Yes. Um, So whenever I see a transaction, I see it through the terms of a cash flow pattern. That's a great place to start as an investor. I think Warren Buffett often says, learn accounting. You could argue that the book Rich Dad Poor Dad is a book on accounting. I think it's more a book on mentorship than accounting, but it has a lot of both in it. But yeah, the cash flow game is an accounting game where you have the three parts of a financial statement, statements, cash flows, balance sheet, income statement. Um, investors understand how cash flows. So I said that would be a good start. Um, learning more about the jargon of an asset class. That's a good start. Uh, getting a mentor is probably the number one thing I would do though is, uh, people want to learn stuff on their own. If you want to learn cashflow patterns, hang out with me. I can teach them to you. I know, I know what they are. Um, hang out with people that know. That might be the best first step is find the investor, find someone that you want to emulate and copy them, start learning from them. Fantastic. All right. Final question. And it is a little bit kind of similar to my last question, but I want to go back to the, the B do have, if I want to be an investor, what do I have to start doing this week? Well, check those two boxes, maybe do an evaluation. We talked about becoming more disciplined and becoming more educated. So maybe you take an inventory and you say, all right, what did I do last week to move the needle on my discipline and what did I do last week to move the needle on my knowledge? And if those are lacking, go to stockcastbonus.com and, you know, at least do the knowledge part and then maybe learn about the discipline part. But it would take discipline to go there, wouldn't it? It would take discipline to say, all right, I'm going to go here instead of scroll now. You know, I'm going to podcast is done. I'm going to go there instead of scrolling to the next thing that's entertainment. And I think people know that. I think there's a harmony, there's a vibration that people feel when the truth is told. You know, I hear these politicians and I just don't feel that harmony when they're talking. I feel spin and rhetoric and agendas. But when I say, hey, you want to become something, become more disciplined, become more knowledgeable, we call that something that rings true. And human beings often have a good feel for what rings true. So, yeah, go do some stuff. Go to StockCastBonus.com. Start there. Beautiful. Andy, this has been a fantastic conversation because I think there's a really important lesson here. Being good at saving money doesn't automatically make you good at investing money, and that's okay. They're two different skills. And like you said, saving requires discipline, investing requires discipline, but it also requires education and the ability to make informed decisions when the outcome isn't guaranteed. And here's what I want everybody listening to remember. You don't have to become an investing expert overnight. You don't have to start with a fortune and you certainly don't have to gamble with money. You can't afford to lose, but you do have to be willing to learn. And if you're ready to take that next step, visit StockCastBonus.com. We've got resources available to help you to continue to learn and to grow and develop your investing skills. And if you've enjoyed today's episode, make sure you like, subscribe, comment, share this episode with somebody who's great at saving money, but hasn't quite figured out the investing side of things. And as always, Andy, thank you so much. Another great conversation. And listener, thanks again for listening to the Rich Dad StockCast. I'm Del Denny. Stay smart. Stay invested. And we'll see you next time. Thanks, Del. This podcast is a presentation of Rich Dad Media Network.