Lourens Oberholzer — Retire Rich And Happy

Mix 93.8, some legendary radio for you on a Monday evening in this edition of What's Involved, proudly brought to you by Retire Rich and Happy. You can find out all about their next financial forum at www.retirerichandhappy.co.za. And well, so it's brought to you by Retire Rich and Happy. I might as well say good evening to you, Lawrence O'Browsa. Hi, how are you, Dave? Hi to the listeners. It's good to have you with us. Yeah, it's good to be back. I haven't been on for a while. It does feel like forever for some weird reason. Has it been a longer period than normal? I think it was two months instead of one month. Really? Usually it's a month and I think this was a two month period. We missed you. What can I say? We missed you. So you've been well. Very well. Very well. It's been one of those, these last few weeks have been insane though. What with the heat and everything, I've been running around. I've got to tell you, I was very, very fortunate. I got invited to the Singularity U summit last week. So it was the South African summit. They had 25 odd speakers, all about this tech and going forward and what's happening. And that we're talking about bioengineering and biomechanics. Exciting times.

It's amazing. Also artificial intelligence. I'm machine learning, you name it, it was all there. It was actually, I think for a sort of just a normal person like me, it was like, oh, lots and lots of information. I read about this artificial intelligence and I don't know if we should be excited or scared or sort of scaredly excited or something. Well, I don't know. If you've ever, if you've got Netflix, there's a limited series on there called now called Unnatural Selection. And it's all about this human genome and gene editing and CRISPR. And there's a group of people that wanted to be out in the hands of everybody. So you can kind of do your own genetic test yourself at home. Okay. I'm just thinking, well, and then obviously the ones that are against it. And I thought, you know what? We are definitely living in a brave new world. The problem with living in a brave new world though, is that up until they can find that magic bullet, we all are going to get older and we're all going to need to retire. Retire at some point. Yeah. And you know, with what you do, let's hope we can retire rich. And happy. And happy. Yeah. Because, and a lot of people when I give them the name of the company, they go, oh, okay.

So, but rich is, not everybody wants to be rich. And I say, but rich is a very subjective thing. You could be rich in experiences. You can be rich in happiness. You can be rich in love. It doesn't have to be rich in a money sense. But it doesn't hurt. Yes. Yeah. No, it definitely doesn't hurt. But the thing is, it's about retiring rich and happy. Just having money doesn't bring happiness. So it's about living a fulfilled life. And that's why we created the five steps over the last 17 years to get people there. Yeah. And we've mentioned this before. I mean, when we spoke in your story with your dad and what happened, I've mentioned with my mom, she's now sitting in exactly the position that the job that she had, they sort of very unceremoniously got rid of her, is the best way that I can describe it. Yes. That money, she was, because of the investments and everything, she was relying on to keep that house. Exactly. Now, we sit as the family with, you know, what is my mom going to do? Because all the retirement money and everything, money my dad left, is running out. Okay. And, you know, somebody said, well, just sell the house, move into a smaller place. Well, no, she can't. Because now she's going to have to put more money in there because, you know, and this is, I don't think we plan for this as people many, many years ago, but people are living longer and longer. Back to singularity to you. They reckon 60 is the new 30. Yes. Yes. And people are going to continue to be longer lived as technology progresses. Exactly. So we're up the creek without a paddle. And here's the thing, most retirement planning, and the way we've been doing the retirement, and this is the thing, we get taught that retirement, and we think that the way retirement planning has been done has always been like that. We're only like the second or third generation of people that have a retirement plan in this way. So it's not tried and tested. It's not like for hundreds of years, this is how it work, you go to work, you get a pension, you save and you retire. It is actually not trialed and tested at all. The first retirement annuity product was only launched in 1957. So what we only now the second generation of people that is retiring in this way. And remember, five, six generations ago, there was very little middle class, it's only with industrial revolution that we started getting the middle class, and then they had to figure out how do we plan for retirement. So we have this this misconception or misperception that, well, it's always been done this way. So surely it should work in some way. And it doesn't. Because here's what typically happens. We go to school, we get a good education, we go to a job, secure job, go into a pension fund, and then we save as much as we can, we then retire, we start living off the money, the money then runs out before we run out. And then we start getting dependent on our children, then what happens is they go through the same cycle, they save enough, while they look after us, they retire, money runs out before they run out, and we just keep running that cycle. Because it is we taught single generational wealth. But also the thing is, I mean, it always used to be a standing joke, I want to live long enough to be a burden on my children. Yes. And then it became I want to live long enough to be a burden on my grandchildren, kind of thing. And it was a joke, but it's, it's a reality. Yeah. There's a talk that I do. It's called yesterday, today and tomorrow. That talks about if you look at our grandparents, most of the families, about 90% of those families were single income families. Yeah. Then we got to our parents where there was about 50/50, 50% were single incomes, 50% was was joint income families.

Now we're at a position where 90% of families are double income families. So if you look at that trend, we went from predominantly single to 50/50 to predominantly double, where are we going next? To continue our standard of living, where do we go? Because there is no third party in this whole thing. So where do we go? It's a scary, scary thing. So is there, is there an alternative to retirement? I mean, you know, I was, I was with my mom, it's, it's her birthday today. Yes. 77. Yes. Hey, still working. And this is the thing that that suddenly struck me is in the old days, retirement was, and you still had the option to retire at 55. Yes, 55. No, no, you know, 60, 65 retirement. And my mom was, she said to me, she's going to end up working until the day she does. And I, from where I'm sitting, I'm pretty much in that exact same boat. Somebody else has just said you're up the creek without a pedal in the rapids or ahead of us. So yes, we get this. That's the thing. And yes, the thing. So the first thing at the forum, and that's why we developed this, this forum, because we focus on financial education, everything starts with education first. If you don't educate yourself, you'll never know what the solutions are, because you'll always have to listen to somebody else telling you what to do. You need to educate yourself so that you can become actively involved in your own retirement. For too long, we've been passively involved. We go a broker, financial advisor, whoever comes, they sell us something, we sign the debit order, they come take money out of our account every month, and we hope to hell they do something with it. And most of the time, it doesn't work the way we think. But then we want to blame the industry, we want to blame the broker, we want to blame everybody else. But for 40 years, we didn't want to take responsibility for our own retirement. We put our head in the sand and said, oh, I'll be okay. We need to move away from that. Our broker said we're going to be okay. Yeah, so we're going to be okay. Yeah, it comes to see us once a year. And we say, how are things going? Yes. Looking good. Can you afford some more money? Yes. Can you afford?

No, not really. Okay, not a problem. Yeah. And the thing is, and then we want to blame them, but it's actually not their fault. We need to take responsibility. You are responsible for your retirement, not me, not the coach, not the advisor, not the broker, whoever you want to call. You are responsible. You can use these tools, but you have to educate yourself first. So that's why we started the forum is to give people a place to come where they can get taught the basics, so that they at least have a place to start. And then from those basics, we then go over to the coaching, where we actually help them to bridge that knowing doing gap and actually start implementing them this in their lives. Now, this is something I've noticed evolving since the time that we've known each other. Yes, is, you know, usual that that just the forum just attending some of the additional bits and pieces wasn't kind of quite enough. Yes, because people come there, they get all this information, they walk out, they say, just this makes so much sense. I need to start doing it. But I just have to figure out a few things in my mind. I'll start next week. And the next week comes and then they can't really remember exactly how to do it. And then I'll talk to Lawrence in next week. And then before you know it, six months has gone past and you haven't done anything. Yeah.

So that's why we then said, but how do we help people to bridge the knowing doing gap, knowing what they need to do and actually implementing it. And speed of implementation is one of the core principles of doing something successful. If you have a good idea, you need to implement something as quickly as possible. It's the old the old Chinese proverb, the best time to have planted the trees 40 years ago, the next best time is today. Yeah. So what we do with the coaching is we then take that information and we take people by the hand and we help them to implement it in their lives in a step by step basis, instead of just trying to get everything done all at once. Yeah, so this is the thing. I mean, initially when you said to me, and you talked to me about the forum, we have talked about the forum before, I was like, okay, but you're just strange. How much does it cost? And you went, well, no, nothing. You can come and listen for free, you know, and that is something that is absolutely amazing to me because, you know, the old saying again, I'm into old sayings today, nothing for nothing. Yes. But this is truly, you know, the only thing you're giving up is your time. That's exactly it. And how do we benefit? We benefit by getting people to understand what we are trying to achieve by into that, and then have people to work with. But saying that you've attended the forum, I've been to a lot of these free seminars, free this, free that, and it's basically a place where they just pitch products.

And we've consciously moved away from that. If you come, you sit there for the four hours, you walk away and we never see you again. At least you've done something. We believe we will still benefit in the long run because we believe in paying it forward. But we do see that a lot of people that come to the forum, it makes sense for the first time. And then they say, help us. How do we actually implement this? Is there a limit to the amount of times you can attend the forum? Because, you know, to me, maybe you don't get it in the first time. I mean, you know, I'm a special case because, yeah, I definitely didn't get it the first time around. But, you know, if I went last time or the time before and I'm still like, I didn't really understand everything. I'd like to take it a bit further. Can I come again? You can come again, yeah. So you can come as many times as you like as a free, you can book as many times as you like as a VIP if you want the tools and the upgraded tools. The forum also evolves. If I look at the first one we did in 2017, I think it was about August 2017, we did the first one, which was a total disaster, as it should be, because all of these things that we start new is usually disasters in the beginning. But if I look at the information we shared then, and where the forum is now, it's evolved and it's become much more practical for people to actually walk out and have things to implement. Yeah, so when is the next one? Because we got to have one before the end of the year, surely. That's what we're talking about is the last one, the 9th of November, the week after the World Cup final. So hopefully by then we are all in a good space and we just want to learn. We don't have rugby to watch. So it's the 9th of November at Momentum Head Office in Centurion and it is from 8.30 for 9 o'clock in the morning up to about 3 o'clock in the afternoon. Okay, now what are we looking at? I mean we talked about, you know, this concept of retirement. We need to redefine. Redefine what retirement means and that's if we take your mom as an example. She was taught that typical thing of you go to school, you get any good education, you save as much as you can and at one point you stop working because that is what retirement is.

Retirement is the day that you can stop working. What we're teaching people is that we need to redefine what retirement means. It shouldn't be the day you stop working. It should be the day that you can work because that is what you want to do with your life and you enjoy doing it, not because you have to do it anymore. So that can be at any point. That can be at 45, that could be at 50, it could be at 70. It doesn't matter as long as you get to a point where you can work because you want to, not because you have to anymore. But what we are saying though in terms of this financial planning that we need to do, this financial IQ for want of a better way, is you need to get to a stage where you may stop working but your money has to work for you. Yes, yeah. That's again one of those old sayings that you were talking about the whole day. It's that you have to stop working for money, you have to have money work for you. And everybody says this is such a cliche and everybody it sounds so clever but very few people know how do you actually do that? And what we teach is specifically focused on that. How do we get you to a point where your money starts building more passive income streams? So you start building spirals of wealth generation. We call it a generational wealth spiral. So instead of having the single generational wealth where you just focus on money, the money runs out and then you start all over again. We start with generational wealth which is built around assets. The asset, if you pass away, the asset doesn't go anywhere. The asset still generates that income and that can go to the next generation. Okay, well I tell you what, when we come back let's find a little bit more about that.

You are listening to What's Involved, it's mex93.8, What's Involved, proudly brought to you by Retire Rich and Happy. If you'd like to go and join the forum and that's on the 9th of November, go to retirerichandhappy.co.za and when you land on the page there'll be a little pop up there and you go yes please I want to go and that'll take you there. You can do all the bits and pieces. We'll talk a bit more about what you get with the various options when we come back and chat more with Lawrence O'Brileza. What's Involved, proudly brought to you by Retire Rich and Happy. Find out more about the financial forum at www.retirerichandhappy.co.za. You can book all your tickets through there. My guest in studio with me is Lawrence O'Brileza, CEO. So we're talking about the forum, it's on the 9th, it's almost a whole day. Yeah, it's like up to three o'clock. We usually finish that, nine o'clock, 8.30 for nine in the morning and we go up to three. So there's free tickets so anybody can come, you can bring your whole family and we make it entertaining. I mean you've been there, it's not like boring figures and numbers and everything the whole time, it's entertaining. You're actually okay at this whole presentation thing, I'll give you that.

That is, it's very entertaining and I think you know with me I suffer from foot-to-mouth disease. So I think beforehand I was like please tell me it's not death by PowerPoint because I cannot deal with that and it's not, okay. It held my attention so that's something with it. With the bubble loss, it still has held your attention. Yes, indeed it did. So you got to go and check it out. Now we talked about you know redefining retirement and what it is and I think you know you've got to get your head wherever you are now, if you're listening, get your head around the fact that you are not 99% sure from my side, you are not going to be able to pay into a retirement fund and then retire at age 65 and live happily for the rest of your life. It's just if you do the maths it's not possible. Yeah, one of the big things Dave that we also show at the forum is one of the big reasons people battle with retirement is not when they retire. I get so many people that say oh but my uncle just retired and he worked for Escom for 30 years and he's doing fine. He just bought himself a new house. They say the problem doesn't arise when you retire. It's five years after retirement. That's when people get into trouble. My mom's been okay, my mom was okay for about 10 years, 10 years you know and then you know over these last few years it just literally just takes a dive. We call it the death spiral. So it slowly starts getting you and the problem is by the time you realize you're in the death spiral it's too late to get out of the death spiral because now you're so far in it you can't reverse the trend and that's because people overestimate the value of capital. What happens is we look at a capital amount and we say well I've got 3 million rand from my retirement fund. So if I put it in the bank I get 10% I'm going to get 300,000 rand a year in interest. That's going to give me 25,000 rand a month.

That's about 22,000 after tax. I'll be okay. I can live on 22 but the problem is you can't take 22 because next year you have to take 25 to have the same value as 22 but your 3 million cannot generate more than 25. So now you have to take a little bit of the capital to maintain that extra income. So now you have less capital that generates more income and then you take a little bit more of that capital and then slowly you start eroding that capital and when you realize oh I'm in trouble it's too late and that's what we call the death spiral and we show people how that works as well at the forum. Now we've doom and gloomed so far. It seems like every time I come I just talk about all the doom and gloom. Let's talk about the positive things and I'm going to issue a challenge here as well because we've been to the forum we've done a bit of the stuff that you've said but there are people that have been through the process. Yes. So the challenge is next time you come you're coming in November again. Yeah I think it's going to be the just before that Monday just before the forum. Yeah it's in the next couple of weeks. Yes. The time's going so fast now. It's like 10 Fridays until Christmas. Yes. Goodness me. But can you bring somebody with that's been through it and then we'll sort of gag you and tie you up and put you on the one side and then hear directly from them. Yes. Fantastic. Fantastic. Okay so we get there we doom and gloom. What is the upside because there has to be an upside. So what we teach people is that retirement and getting to that point in your life where you can work because you have to you want to not because you have to anymore. That shouldn't take you 40 years. You can get there in 10 years. Now a lot of people when we show them the strategy and we say it's going to take you 10 years they go really I have to do this for 10 years. And I say really you're saving for 40 and then you have a 96 percent failure rate but 10 years is too much. So you could do it in 10 years. So if you are 45 you could get there by 55. If you are 55 you could get there by 65. That's where I'm heading. The thing is if you are 25 and you start saving on the traditional plan you're probably still not going to get there by 65. I doubt it. Yeah. So that's the upside. We can show you a way in doing it in 10 years instead of taking 40 years to get there. And it's all about building assets and understanding the game of money because it's basically a game. It's like monopoly. It's just on a more realistic scale. And I mean who hasn't played monopoly. And that's the basic principles is take money buy assets. Assets generate more income but then take that income and buy more assets. The problem is what people do is they understand the asset part because they read rich dad poor dad and rich dad poor dad said you must buy property. So they went and they bought properties but they increased their expenses. They first have to put money into the property and if they make some profit out of the property all they do is they just put it into their normal lifestyle income buy a bigger car buy a bigger house and then the money doesn't keep rolling. You need to build that momentum. So how we teach people to win at the game of money is a couple of things. The first thing is you make sure that you understand and minimize your risk. Make sure that if anything unforeseen happens you are okay. The second thing is then take control of your cash flow. If you don't have control of your cash flow what money comes in how much money is spent and how much positive cash flow I have at the end of the month you are dead in the water. You cannot build anything if you don't have control of your cash flow. This was something that amazed me and then and then after I'd been on the on the forum with you I asked around asked a couple of people I know people here at the station is saying do you budget? Well yeah sort of we know you know we know and some people get very defensive. Yes what do you mean? I know I know what money goes in okay the reality is we don't because we really don't pay attention and you know where I found that I got caught with a lot of stuff my fiance as well is it's those little tiny you know somewhere somewhere somebody along the line sells you an insurance policy or you get this cancer cover yeah or this thing there or or maybe in my case it was subscriptions to internet service providers etc you kind of forget about it okay. It's only 50 and 80 rand and 100 rand. You don't use that service anymore it's gone but it just it goes off everywhere and you look at it and you go oh it's just too much of a pain yes that's where the problem lies. Yeah so when we do the strategic expense planning the budgeting program that we developed we actually 80 percent of that is looking backwards first because people look at budgeting as a prediction of what's going to happen in the future but 80 percent of budgeting is looking back first and understanding what happened in the past so we first make people understand where their money's gone once people start realizing and becoming aware of where they are spending their money they immediately start changing their their habits they start changing how they do it because they they start asking them the questions why am I spending this amount of money on takeaways why am I spending five grand a month on takeaways and then you go but if I go on a Friday evening and I buy hamburger patties and buns I can do it for 100 rand instead of 500 rand for the family so we start making small changes that creates positive cash flow but you can also firstly you can make a whole lot better than you would you know probably get a takeaways and and secondly you can make it something that involves the whole family yes yes so it's those small things that you only become aware of once you start finding out where your money's going and people don't so that's the first thing minimize your risk then control your cash flow and the whole purpose of the strategic expense planning is to find or to create a positive cash flow create and increase your positive cash flow that's the same with any business what do you want to do with the business you want to create and increase your positive cash flow your profit at the end of the month that's the aim of a business to generate profit aim of the game of money is get money coming in get expenses and have a positive cash flow or profit at the end of the month you should run your life like a business exactly that's what we teach people is if you start a business you'll immediately start tracking where's my money coming from how much am i spending on certain things and how much profit do i make if you don't know that you don't know if your business is thriving or dying and also if your business is making a profit you end up going bankrupt yes which is the long-term effect of just trying to retire because you are basically a business whether you work for a company or you have your own small business or you're a self-employed individual you are a business if you work for a company you are selling your time your expertise to a company for a profit that is the whole idea so you need to start looking at your personal finances if it is a business now how do you how does a business increase their profits they either increase their cash flow or their their revenue or they decrease their expenses or a combination of both and that's what you want to do in your in your personal life you want to decrease your expenses so you have a positive cash flow and then start creating more revenue and you do that by either becoming an entrepreneur which is step three of our process and building income generating assets which is step four of the process let's let's go through those in a little more detail when we come back my special guest in studio CEO of retire rich and happy it's Lawrence Urbrolzer retire rich and happy is brought to you by well what's involved retire rich and happy is brought to you by what's involved wouldn't that be nice what's involved proudly brought to you by retire rich and happy if you want to find out more about the foreman forum cheese i've obviously used up my quota of words today if you want to find out more about the forum all you got to do is log on to retire rich and happy.co.za and you can find out more also it'll direct you exactly where to go to get your tickets to the next forum happening on the ninth of november it is what's involved proudly brought to you by retire rich and happy if you'd like to find out more about what they do and about the financial forum you can go to retire rich and happy.co.za my guest in studio we're back with Lawrence Urbrolzer so we said we're going to i wanted to talk a bit more about those those those steps that we that we go through yes um because it is um it's a it's from nine in the morning to round about three in the afternoon we do have a break for for lunch um you've been good enough once again to offer up some tickets so what are we giving away tonight so we're going to give away five free vi double vip tickets so you and your spouse your partner can come along with the vip tickets you get access to the forum you're part of the vip group that has lunch with me tea with me in the beginning so you can ask me questions if you have any any things that are not clear throughout the morning you can come and ask me you get lunch you get all the tools so you get the strategic expense planning tool you'll get the um the debt settlement calculator the bond settlement calculator as well as the investment calculator so all of those calculators you'll get uh plus then lunch uh with me okay which is which is great i mean that's that's five vip tickets um okay if you want to enter all you've got to do is there's an sms number and a whatsapp number it's not the mixed numbers okay i'm going to say this again not the mixed numbers the sms number four double five zero nine so you've got to use that and then send your name r r h and your name so r r h for retire rich and happy and your name two four five five zero nine and then the same thing to the whatsapp number which is oh eight two six four one three triple five that's it so if people yes if people battle if it says uh sms not going through it's because it doesn't take free sms you have to have paid sms on your on your phone so then rather just whatsapp or or h in your name to oh eight two six four one three triple five once again those numbers the sms number four double five zero nine that's also charged what 150 i think it's 150 yes four double five zero nine is the sms line and the whatsapp is oh eight two six four one three triple five uh numbers who are we going to choose you can choose for us choose five numbers three five seven eleven and seventeen three five seven eleven and seventeen okay there you got it those numbers are the ones okay so you could you could win those and and during the course of the day you go through the various steps let me play devil's advocate for a second what are you what if you go listen couldn't you know for me having two people can i just buy the tools can i buy the tools you can you can buy the tools on our website you can go and get the tools you can buy them separately or you can buy them in a package okay the package is about i think $4.99 if i remember correctly um and then it's about $199 and a tool um there is instructions on it so you can do that we've just seen that by putting everything in context and understanding where each thing fits into the next is it's important for people to really implement that's why the forum is so important i don't want to give away too much but you know where my aha moment came yes with the bucket analogy yes the variable cost segregation yeah you said yes you said that bucket system and my eyes glazed over and then you explained the bucket system like got it understand variable costs just say the bucket system but once you see that illustrated yes suddenly at least for me light bulbs went okay bingo that for me was worth the price of admission yes so here's what happens is the first thing we do is we say take control of your cash flow so by by doing your budget making sure that you understand where your money comes from and then doing or getting a positive cash flow you then create the variable cost segregation or the bucket system which then manages that cash flow so that you can take the positive cash flow and get rid of your bad debt so that's the next step in the in winning at the game of money get rid of bad debt so what is bad debt bad debt is any debt that is not secured by an asset like for example a credit card a personal loan an overdraft that is the debt that you pay the highest amount on and the highest interest on so we want to get rid of that debt first so that we can move your zero back to zero another hugely important point there yes got to take note of this one yeah so what we want to do is we want to move your zero and i don't i don't have the i can't draw the pictures yes i'm going to quickly explain so what happens over time is when we start working if we have zero money in the bank we have zero money in the bank and then what happens is we get a credit card we get a personal loan and then eventually our zero moves to minus 20 or minus 50 or minus 50 000 and then what we do is we earn and we spend but we don't earn and spend around zero anymore we now earn and spend around minus 50 000 and then we are taught that that credit card is security but actually we're in exactly the same situation we only have the money we earn and we spend but now the bank's making money on our interest on the the court charges etc etc so what we want to do is we want to move your zero back to zero so that if you have zero money you have your zero money you don't have minus 50 000 when you have no money left i i like i like having my own no money yes my own no money makes yeah i'd rather have my own zero money than have the bank's minus 50 000 yes because they tend to want to ask for a lot of interest on that as well so what we do is we teach people a strategy to get rid of that unsecured debt and i've taken people that it would have taken them 72 months to get rid of all their unsecured debt and we're doing it in 16 months we're about halfway there now from 72 months so you don't need to get under debt review and all of these things to get yourself out of debt you just need a strategy one of the big objections or obstacles that people have is but i don't have the discipline and i always tell people it's not a discipline issue issue it's a strategy issue you don't have discipline because you don't have a plan once you have a plan in place it's much easier to be disciplined the thing is if you have 5000 rand left in your account and you don't have a plan on what to do with it it's much more difficult to to not spend it on shoes or take away so easy to do yeah so so easy but if you have a strategy you know listen whatever's left in my account at the end of the month is going to go into my unsecured debt or it's going to go into my reserve account you have a strategy and then it's easier to be disciplined okay so so we've got the strategy we've got the plan we've talked about the buckets um when when you talk about budgeting though because this is the one thing that that i was very resistant about um is like don't don't pry into my face what do you want to what do you want to know about you know i know what i'm doing with my money um but that budgeting tool that you get so so here's my advice um if you're not certain what does a ticket cost it's not a lot of money anyway it's $4.99 for a single vip ticket $7.49 for a couple all right so yes you could win one so if you haven't entered yet why not uh rrh and your name four double five zero nine is the sms number uh otherwise you can whatsapp oh eight two six four one three triple five we're giving away five vip tickets to numbers three five seven eleven and seventeen Lawrence and his auditors and special people count that up they will be in touch if you win he does that they will be in touch with you okay um but if not you know go go there for you know you this this they've got a little canteen there you can get snacks and cauldings and food yes so so if you're not going to vrp with just go and listen just go and listen and if at all possible get those budgeting tools because you can decide there if you want to buy the tools as well that's the big thing and you can get those tools you mean right there you can you can say i want it um it is well worth it because specifically the budgeting thing and the other one was was about uh paying off your bond yeah let's talk about that quickly it's the unsecured debt uh settlement tool which is brilliant all you do is you put all your debt in you put in how much extra you have to put towards your debt and it tells you exactly put this much money into that um debt when that one's finished you take that amount put it into that one it tells you exactly what to do the bond settlement is people know about one strategy most people is pay extra into your bond and that is something people need to understand the value of that a lot of people think that if i can only put in the extra 100 rand it's not worth it it is massively worth it even if you only put 100 rand extra a month into your bond and we show you but there's actually four strategies that we teach you at the forum so if you take all four of those strategies combined you can pay off your bond in half the time easily so if you've got a 20-year bond you can do it in 10 years so when you get to the point where you can retire because you can work because you want to not because you have to you could be finished with your bond as well and and that is a brilliant thing because this is the one thing that i always had a problem with you know buy a house buy property your house is an asset well not if i haven't finished paying it off it's not it's not you know this is something i i sit with people a lot because i get the question a lot especially when we look at what the markets look like and and with all the uncertainty around property and everything people say to me should i buy a house or should i rent and then i usually ask people say but you know that if you're buying a house you're also renting you're just renting from the bank because what's what happens if you don't have a strategy to get rid of that bond the interest you're paying on that house is probably more than the rental you would have paid if you rented that same house so it's basically the bank's house you're paying them rent to stay there you want to get rid of that as quickly as possible but it's not an either or because that's the other question i get a lot is should i first just put all my money in get rid of my bond and then take all of that cash flow and start investing it and in theory it sounds like a good idea but in practice it never works i've seen it through the 20 years i've been in the industry what happens is you start paying it off you've paid 300 000 rand off and then your wife goes but we have another baby on the way i think we should get a bigger house or we should build a new wing and then you go back to the bond and then you never get to that point one of the worst inventions i believe ever me personally yes i speak for myself is that little thing called an access bond yes it's a very powerful tool but it's a very dangerous thing i've seen it personally as well where people i had clients that i worked with they had a house almost paid off somebody came to see them gave them this access bond and when i saw them the next time they had that access bond maxed out yeah because suddenly we need to do this little johnny needs to do that but darling we've needed to go on holiday now we deserve a nice holiday you know and just all that good work yeah so again if you have a proper strategy that you're working towards then it's easier not to do the wrong things it's when people don't have a strategy when discipline comes in because now i have to make that decision to make the right decision consistently and i don't have anybody to tell me whether it's the right decision or not and i don't have the education so i do what i think is right and 19 of the time that is what i feel i want and not what's the right thing and this kind of brings us full circle because we're running out of time again um but that your focus is the forum so that you can give you know pay it forward give that knowledge out but then you're focusing more on the coaching aspect of it so coaching you through these stages and everything and you get your own coach which i think is absolutely fantastic you've even got ways of breaking down the payments hard works etc etc we're not going to go into that now maybe maybe we'll have a bit of time next time to chat about that but um i think it is a phenomenal thing that you guys are doing um and the nice thing is and i and i tested this and i you know loans came we did the whole thing and then they had a look at our stuff and i go well what happens if i don't want to go with the person you suggest it and they go not a problem you know there isn't there's not that we're doing this and you then have to sign with us you can take all that knowledge and the tools and if you are confident in it you can do it yourself you can yeah but but there's always about uh i think the coaching just makes it that much easier it's just a little bit of accountability exactly accountability and having backup just i get it so i drive in the corner i get a voice note of a client that says i've got this situation what should i do should i do this or should i do that and then i just go you know what this is what would happen if you do a this is what's going to happen if you do b i think b is a little bit better than a you go well that makes sense and you go so within two minutes you have somebody with experience that could tell you just give you a point of view that you might not have seen for yourself yeah absolutely brilliant uh that forum again is on the 9th of november um you can get your tickets online at retirerichandhappy.co.za a little pop-up goes there it'll direct you to do everything um it's well worth it just go that's all i can say uh we'll see you back in the next uh week or two because what we're going to do is we're doing this one and another one leading up to the forum yes and then we're giving you a break over the december period and we'll be back in january yeah where everybody's going i should never have spent that much money we'll talk to you in january about yeah so the next one the next time i'm on would be the 4th 4th 4th of november a couple of weeks up yes fantastic stuff lowrence thank you so much as always for coming in thanks for having me and thanks for the listeners to listen there we go what's involved is proudly brought to you by retirerichandhappy.co.za is the place to go if you'd like to find out more about what lowrence and his team do and also to book their tickets he's going to be back again in a couple of weeks