How to Tap Into Your Money Persona With Garrett Gunderson

In this episode of The Agent of Wealth Podcast, host Marc Bautis is joined by best-selling author, 5X entrepreneur, and financial expert Garrett Gunderson.

Garrett is the Founder of Wealth Factory, an Inc. 500 company that educates entrepreneurs on effective ways to grow cash flow, plug financial leaks, and reach economic independence. He is a New York Times best-selling author having written nine books, including Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths That Are Destroying Your Prosperity, as well as What Would the Rockefellers Do?: How the Wealthy Get and Stay That Way And How You Can Too. This October, he released his newest book, Money Unmasked: Unlearn, Unlock and Take Back Control of Your Finances and Life.

Whether in writing or speaking engagements, Garrett uses a unique blend of humor and financial education. With a passion for helping people understand how to keep more of what they make without cutting back, he uses his comedic talents to deliver financial advice in a way that is both entertaining and informative.

In this episode, you will learn:

The different money personas, including how (and why) to uncover yours.
How we can embrace our winning money persona.
What the “cycle of creation” is, and how we can leverage it.
Gunderson’s upcoming children’s book, I Am Money, I Don’t Grow On Trees.
A variety of other takeaways from Gunderson’s newest release Money Unmasked.
And more!

Resources:

Moneyunmasked.com | Free Quiz: What Is Your Money Persona? | Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths That Are Destroying Your Prosperity | What Would the Rockefellers Do?: How the Wealthy Get and Stay That Way And How You Can Too | garrettgunderson.com | garrettgunderson.com/musings | Garrett Gunderson TV | Bautis Financial: 8 Hillside Ave, Suite LL1 Montclair, New Jersey 07042 (862) 205-5000 | Schedule an Introductory Call

Disclosure: The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity and content. It is not a direct transcription of the full conversation, which can be listened to above.

Welcome back to The Agent of Wealth Podcast, this is your host Marc Bautis. On today’s show, I’m joined by a special guest: best-selling author, 5X entrepreneur, and financial expert Garrett Gunderson.

Garrett, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me. I sure appreciate it.

I’m glad you’re here. It’s not often that someone can bring a comedic element into discussing finances, but you do it extremely well.

When you think about it, most comedians don’t talk about money because either they don’t know enough about finances, or they’re extremely wealthy. But there’s a lot of funny things about money… Especially the way people behave. It’s fun to laugh at money’s expense, for a change.

That’s great, I’m excited to get into a conversation about your comedy. But first, I want to talk about your newest release: Money Unmasked. What is the main goal or message you wanted to convey through this publication?

Why We Should Understand Our Money Personas

Of all of the books I’ve written, this has been the most impactful on me. Money Unmasked is really seven years in the making – writing and rewriting, writing too much and refining to pull it back.

I always wanted someone else to do the work and tell me my money persona, but I could never find a resource that nailed it. So, when I started thinking about that back in 2008, this journey began. I did a lot of research and understanding as to how people operate with money…

What are people’s subconscious beliefs about money?
What are the things that govern money success?
What are the things that govern money failures?

That research led me to understanding money personas. Money Unasked is about our relationship to money and our relationship to ourselves.

We need to understand why we have these thought processes, frameworks, and even bad philosophies around money, because hard work with the wrong philosophy can lead to devastation, destruction, or bankruptcy.

After writing Killing Sacred Cows, I asked myself, ‘Well, where are these beliefs coming from, and why does scarcity have such a stronghold?’ Ultimately how do we heal from that? That’s where these money personas really were born.

I think that Money Unmasked has a little bit more emotion than my previous books.

Yeah, that’s one of the things I’ve learned working in this field… Money is much more than numbers – it’s about emotions, beliefs, and behaviors. I appreciate that your book encourages people to get a handle on that side of money, as it’s really important and can set you up for success. In doing research for Money Unmasked, what are some of the things that you found out about beliefs and personas?

How Gunderson Came to Understand His Money Persona

Well, I started by looking at my own life. I had been in business for 10 years (1998-2008). I was over-leveraged with real estate. I was distracted by having too many things on my plate. For some reason, I was in this belief that if I continued to sacrifice, one day – someday – I’ll get it all.

I looked at my belief systems and asked myself: ‘What led me to this place where I’m doing things that I don’t love to do?’ That was truly a moment of clarity.

I ended up discovering, first off, that my wife is a conservative/planner, which is one of the money personas.

On the shadow side is conservative. This is all about accumulation, delayed gratification, and planning for the future (but never enjoying the present).
On the winning side is planner. This is all about being stable, thoughtful, and strategic. It’s about working to be more efficient and plan for contingencies.

I always considered her to be hesitant and overly analytical. She was the one who would pump the brakes. On the other hand, my money persona is a striver/creator.

On the shadow side is striver. The striver thinks they can just work harder to make more money, but they almost always burn out. The striver is more about status than actual quality of life.
On the winning side is creator. The creator is really good at initiating things, leading with innovation and ingenuity.

Once we began to understand each other’s money personas, we started to think about how we could illuminate the best path forward. All of a sudden, we became a team unit.

So that was a game changer for me, and I thought, ‘Well, I can’t just keep that information to myself. Let’s dive deeper.’

While researching, I talked to thousands of people to see how they operate. It was pretty enlightening. When it comes down to it, people get into isolation, fear, scarcity and worry in the name of preservation and protection. When they do that, they actually push other people away because they’re so focused on scrimping, saving and sacrificing, and they miss out on production.

The Different Money Personas

How many money personas are there?

Miser/Mindful Manager

The first one is the miser, which plays the game of preservation. I came from a family of misers. My great grandfather and grandfathers were coal miners. There were strikes that would happen. There were times where the mines were shut down. That lack of stability created a place where they tried to hold onto all that they could. They would clip coupons, they knew where the cheapest gas was, they had food storage… From a financial standpoint these things could be helpful, but from a mindset standpoint there is limited growth.

On the flip side is the mindful manager. This winning persona is detail-oriented, efficient and great at improving things. They’re instrumental for organizations that are looking to enhance ideas and reduce waste.

If you’re a mindful manager, you’re delegating and collaborating. If you’re a miser, you’re isolating, in scarcity, and reducing.

Conservative/Planner

The next one is the conservative/planner, which I previously mentioned.

The conservative plays the game of accumulation. They end up with funds that they can’t spend because they’re always trying to save more and more.

On the flip side is the planner. This winning persona is stable, thoughtful, and strategic. They monitor the effectiveness and efficiency of things, and plan for contingencies. It’s very helpful.

Striver/Creator

The striver thinks they can always work harder to make more. They’re addicted to status. As I mentioned, the problem with the striver is they burn because working harder leads to sacrificing, and that grind becomes exhausting.

On the flip side is the creator. This winning persona is about co-creation, delegation and collaboration. They are a creator, entrepreneur, inventor, artist. They lead with innovation and ingenuity and they create new ways for value to experience.

High Roller/Catalyst

The final one is the high roller. They play a game of opportunity, but they likely end up bankrupt or in financial ruin because they take on too much risk and don’t pay attention to the details.

But, on the flip side, is the catalyst. This willing persona is a visionary, mover and shaker, or a connector. They think and play really big, and show us ways we can all win together.

That’s a very quick rendition of the money personas.

Wow, that’s very interesting. Thank you for sharing. Now, who is the primary audience for the book?

I think that 40- to 60-year-olds are going to resonate with the book the most. Money Unmasked is really for the people that have checked a lot of boxes in life, but are not as fulfilled as they want to be.

Now, a twenty-something will get a lot of value from the book – especially in understanding their money persona – but they might not quite understand the value of designing a game worth playing.

And for people who are retired, the book might make them think about reentering the world of value creation and not just staying retired. But, they’re probably going to be most resistant to the concepts.

One of the topics in the book is on the “cycle of creation.” Can you explain what that is, and how we can learn to leverage it?

The “Cycle of Creation” and How We Can Leverage It

When we were doing advanced reader groups, this was the most popular chapter of the book.

The concept is this: Without having to invest upfront, how can you profit from your ideas from day one? How do you win before you play?

We engage in this behavior when we pay for concerts, comedy shows and sporting events. Before we know the outcome – or how good it is – we’ve purchased, and someone has profited.

The cycle of creation is about building momentum using both mental capital (your ideas) and relationship capital (people that know you).

For example, I pre-sold 22,000 copies of my first book, Killing Sacred Cows, before it came out. I was already winning because I used this cycle of creation.

We’ve seen this with crowdsourcing, right? Products get funded by the people that want to use the product, instead of investors. When you get a lot of micro donations or contributions, you don’t owe money to one large investor, you just owe the product to the people that wanted it.

What inspired you to start Wealth Factory?

The Wealth Factory Story

Back in the year 2000, I had this firm called Ingenuity. Prior, I was selling life insurance and mutual funds in 98 and 99, and it went really well because the stock market went well. I didn’t know what I was doing, but the stock market went up in 98, 99, so I seemed like I was really intelligent. Then the market started to go down in 2000 and all of a sudden all my friends and family and their parents that cashed out Double E Bonds were like, Hey, wait, wait, those never lost. Why are the accounts going in the wrong direction? And so I decided to really dedicate myself to figure out how to, where could there be a higher degree of guarantee to help people with money? And what I came up with was if I help them be efficient, save tax, save interest, save non-performing fees and structure insurances properly, so there’s no duplicate coverages or inefficiencies.

As I went through that, I started meeting these young guys that were really inspiring. They’re asking a lot of questions. So we formed a firm called Ingenuity, and it was kind of this intellectual partnership. We came together because we would do study groups and we built a brand together, but we all kind of had our own book of business and our own clients. But what it did is that it felt more collaborative and it felt like we could learn from each other and challenge each other. We started doing events together and we started to do these monthly memberships that people paid for and they could come in person and they get daily emails with little quotes and they could get audios where we’d interview great people. And so it was a really cool learning environment. And then my two partners died in a plane crash.

Oh wow.

At that point I was like, well, I tried to work it the way it was with our three offices without them, but they were big personalities and it wasn’t really going that well. So I said, look, I’m going to take this program and I’m going to make it my own. I’m going to call it Freedom FastTrack. And I ended up calling the company Freedom FastTrack because our company Ingenuity was now two of them dead. So the flagship program was, let’s take this concept of the old school family office where you’d have a family that had a financial team just for them, but let’s make that available in kind of a fractional way or in a virtual way so that it’s not just one family having one financial firm, but we could have an attorney that could represent a hundred families or we could have an accountant that could represent a hundred families that these were people that didn’t have enough money, they might make a million dollars of revenue, but they definitely couldn’t afford to have that would be more than the financial team would cost too much. So

I started to build that, and then what I realized is it was very labor intensive and it wasn’t very scalable. And there was this company called Elevation Group that had sold 50,000 online education programs around finance. They had this platform that people could pay for and they could hear all these interviews and this guy Mike would say, Hey, watch me on my wealth journey. I’ll interview attorneys and I’ll interview real estate people. And so he kind of got in a place where he was not able to really do that anymore because there had been a loss with some of the people that watched one of these videos and it was some scam thing. So he was done, but he wanted to see it continue. So I bought that and in buying that I was like, Hey, freedom Fast track’s the name of our program. We really need to have a different name.

And they were tinkering with this name Wealth Factory. So when I bought it, we turned the company into Wealth Factory keeping Freedom FastTrack as the flagship program. But now we have digital programs that could start educating people because my mission was how do we reach a million people so they could be liberated and improve their financial life even if they aren’t extraordinarily wealthy? So we were serving the middle class or upper middle class. So we were talking to a more entrepreneurial audience, and that’s how Wealth Factory is because now we were saying, look, we’ve got all these courses, video courses and newsletters and digital products that if you don’t have the money but you have time, you can get the information. But if you have less time and more money, then you can still do these programs that we created that have a lot more one-on-one help.

And we would do workshops and all this. And I just got to a point in that company where it had run its course, I wanted to do other things. So I sold that in 2021 and my focus now is how can I make one-on-one more impact and less scale, but then how can I have more scale through entertainment and less so their kind of scale through a hybrid of some one-on-one and a lot of group coaching, I’m very one-on-one, like I have someone flying in today that will go up to my cabin, we’ll spend an entire day together. We’ll look at their whole financial life, their business life, but most importantly their life design and quality of life. And I help build the relationships and the team and refer them out so that then they walk away. They really kind of get more done in a day than they’d probably get done in 10 years when it comes to their financial and business life.

And I love that because I get really connected to them, not scalable, but high impact. Whereas a children’s book or a comedy special or a theatrical keynote is much more scalable. But I thought, Hey, if I can make it entertaining, people will pay closer attention. I’ll reach people that never would’ve thought of these things versus the people that are raising their hand and saying, oh, I sure want to be educated, which are the few, there’s millions that want to be educated, but billions want to be entertained. So that’s a hard craft to figure out how do I entertain and educate at the same time? I could just tell jokes about my family, super funny, not all that educational, but telling money, jokes, it requires a different skill set. And that’s been something super challenging and fun.

You mentioned that you wrote a children’s book. Has that already been published?

Financial Literacy For Kids

I wrote a children’s book called I Am Money, I Don’t Grow On Trees, which comes out in January of 2024. It is a collaboration with Julia Cook, a brilliant children’s author that has sold over 3 million books. Source Books is our publisher, and they’re fantastic.

It’s a super fun book with a brilliant message. In it, “money” is the main character. Who better to teach us about money than money itself?

The main message is that while money has been proven to make people happier, it’s not a guarantee that money will make you completely happy. So what will make us happy? Some examples include investing in ourselves, developing skill sets, giving back, and so on.

It’s composed of some really cute stories about what we can do with money. I’m excited for it to come out.

What is the age group that the book is geared towards?

Kindergarten through third grade, but I think kids up to 12-years-old will get value from it. Here’s a secret: Adults will even get a lot from it.

That sounds great. Well, we’re just about out of time. Garrett, I’d like to thank you for being on The Agent of Wealth Podcast. You provided some great insight on how people can tap into their money persona and create a life that they don’t want to retire from. How best can someone find out more about you?

I have a YouTube channel (Garrett Gunderson TV), I write a blog (garrettgunderson.com/musings), and your listeners can purchase a copy of Money Unmasked at moneyunmasked.com. There, you can also take the money persona quiz. We also have some really cool bonuses attached to the book that people should definitely check out.

Great, we’ll link to all of that in the show notes. Thanks again, Garrett. And thank you to everyone who tuned into today’s episode. Don’t forget to follow The Agent of Wealth on the platform you listen from and leave us a review of the show. We are currently accepting new clients, if you’d like to schedule a 1-on-1 consultation with our advisors, please do so below.

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Episode 177 – How to Tap Into Your Money Persona With Garrett Gunderson