Sarah Poynton-Ryan 0:01
Money matters. I wish that I've been taught when I was at school I'm an investor, a business owner and a money educator understand it better. Compound income, cash flow, budget or investment to recover from debt. No one explained to me, put your money to your work is about normalising the conversation. Do Hey listeners, how are we doing? Welcome back to The Money Mechanics podcast. It's me Sarah Poynton-Ryan, and today I'm joined by Daniel Wood, who I'm very, very excited to interview today. So I've known of Daniel for actually about nine years. I've followed him online. I've got a lot of what he's done. People that I've worked with have worked with Daniel over the years, and he is the CEO and co founder of a business called the Swedish wealth Institute. And what Daniel's business does, really, is to connect entrepreneurs with incredible mentors, and he works with people like Robert Kiyosaki, Kim Kiyosaki, Canfield, Les Brown, like all of the big names that you guys will have all heard. And he runs global summits, global workshops to make those connections. So Daniel, welcome to Money

Speaker 1 1:13
with Connect podcast. Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 1:16
It's great to have you here. Do you want to just tell everybody who you are, what's led you up to this point, and then we'll get into this. Yeah.

Speaker 1 1:23
Well, everyone's backstory is a long story, right? But I'll try to try to summarise it. I started investing at, well, I was about 20 years old. I read the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, as I'm sure many have, and got really excited about property investing. And I thought, This sounds like a brilliant idea. And then it was a British company. So I'm born and raised in Sweden. My dad's from the US, that's why I sound this way. But I'm born and raised in Sweden, and a British company came to Sweden and was teaching how to invest in real estate. So I thought, This sounds amazing. Let's do it. Let's learn property. And it turned out they recommended investing in the UK, because shocking. That's where they were from. Yeah. And I looked at the market and said, Yeah, I agree, because Sweden is really not a good market to invest in. There are so many

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 2:12
laws limitations, isn't there in Sweden in terms of there?

Speaker 1 2:17
Yes, you know, there's difficulties with loans, all that. So it is a much better market in the UK. So I jumped in both feet first. I, you know, bought mentorships. I thought, you know, they've done it. They know what they're doing. I'll, you know, they say, jump. I ask how high. And I was the perfect mentee. They told me, go out and raise money. I called everyone I knew. I got a whole bunch of money together, started buying properties and got ripped off for about 400,000 pounds, yep, and this was, you know, family, friends contact, who now I had to call back and go, Hey, you know that property deal we were doing? Well, it didn't really go according to plans. And I was obviously ridiculously stressed out, and I get a phone call from my accountant. And now the the way, you know, like the UK and the US treat bankruptcies compared to Sweden, like in Sweden, if you bankrupt the company, that's essentially your entrepreneurial journey. You're done like no one's ever going to trust you with credit ever again. Yeah. So he calls me up and says, Daniel, it's time to bankrupt your company. And to me, it's basically great. It's over. I'm done. I'm never gonna do any of this Rich Dad, Poor Dad stuff again. I'm done. That was it. And I said, okay, so Michael, what happens now? And he says, Well, what we're gonna do is we'll sell the assets you have, we'll shut down the company, we'll pay, you know, from those assets, what we can pay, and then, well, then we write off the rest of the debt. I open you a new company, and you start again. Say that once more, what am I going to do? So well, you just start over. It's fine. I said, Can you do that? Yes, of course. And I don't have to pay the debt. No, I don't. Why didn't you tell me this a year ago? I've been stressed for a year, like if there was a reset button. Why have we been fighting so long? But then I asked the question that kind of forever changed my trajectory. And I asked him, so, okay, so great. This sounds amazing, but what happens to my investors, yeah. He said, Well, they're not getting very much back. But, you know, they invested in a deal. It didn't go well. And, you know, so I was like, well, so you're saying I start over as if nothing happened and they lose, you know, in some cases, life savings, yeah, and, and he said, Well, yeah, that's how how investing works. And for to me, I like, I knew, yeah, technically they invested into a property deal, but in reality, they invested into me, and I couldn't, you know I was I said, No, we're not bankrupting the company. I'm not throwing them under the bus and then I'm going on. And he said, Well, how are you going to figure it out? I said, I have absolutely no idea. And. And, and I'll share a little bit about kind of what the result of that, that crazy decision, he still tells me today, like, he's like, he's still my accountant today. He's like, I've never seen anyone do what you did. You are an absolute idiot, and I so respect you for it, and I appreciate him saying that. But it, it was, to me, an obvious decision,

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 5:21
but in an obvious decision in a really dark place, I imagine, because losing that sort of money, like no one can afford to lose any money, everybody you know, it hurts when you lose any money, but losing 400,000 and losing money that is your friends and family's money that must create, not just commercially, a problem, but emotionally, quite a big problem.

Speaker 1 5:42
Oh, I ended up signing personal guarantees to people so that I literally burned the bridge like I cannot walk away from this debt. Now I've signed a personal guarantee, and this is after we lost it all. I went back and said, By the way, let's add a personal guarantee to this. And well, let's go deep into how horrible it got before I tell you the second phase when it turned around. But no, we ended up selling our apartment. I moved with now my ex wife wonder why, and my kids into our summer house, which was this tiny little just cottage that we had on the outskirts of Stockholm. It only had running water in the summer. So in the winter, when we lived there, and you know, this is Sweden, there's snow, we would pack our then we have, I have three sons now, but I had two back then. We'd put them in their double stroller, and we'd push them through the snow to get to the to the bathrooms, to brush their teeth and everything. And I would be walking with a wheelbarrow with a big, you know, dunk for water so that we could fill so we could boil it and cook food and do the dishes and stuff, and as though it really went, went downhill. And, like I said, we sold our home to be able to repay

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 6:55
how many years ago was that?

Speaker 1 6:56
This is close to, well, it's got to be just under a decade ago, like 2015 ish, something like that. Yeah, about, yeah. So it was before Arthur, my youngest, was born. So right around, right around there, and, well, what happened was, and we'd already started that during this journey, was we realised, like we needed more help, right? And we needed coaching, but we already lost all of our money and then some, so we couldn't really hire a coach. But what we had done was, when we went through this education, was we gathered everyone else who'd gone through this education, and we kind of everyone who then went through other companies, education and all that, everyone started to kind of gravitate into our little community that we were building. So when, when everything kind of blew up, because property so slow. It took a while to realise that, yeah, it had blown up. But by then, we had a couple 100 people in this community, and we realised that, wait a sec, if we invite speakers to come and present to our group, but hopefully they can help the group not to do what we did, and the speaker will be happy, and then we can take the speaker out to dinner and get some free coaching. Right idea? Yeah, and that was the, that's how the Swedish wealth Institute was founded. It was basically, how do we create a win, win, win solution that ends with us getting free coaching. It was never meant for us to make money off of the Swedish wealth Institute. The payment was help us fix our property business.

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 8:28
Okay, a very short interruption of the episode. So I want you to get back to listening. I just wanted to remind you that the Money Mechanics weekly newsletter is completely free, and we'll send this out to you every week. All you've got to do is find the link in the show notes and get signed up when we send this out to you, this weekly newsletter is going to include things that will help you to become a better money mechanic. It could be things like what's happening in the markets, things like budgets, how that's going to impact you. And I'm also going to share a lot of insight into what I'm doing in my own portfolio and in the portfolios of the guests we've got on the podcast, to really just help you understand what you could do differently to make your money work as best as it can for you. Make sure you go and find that link and get signed up.

Speaker 1 9:09
And we started doing that, and I've been very blessed. I know this sounds weird after that beginning of the story, but I've been incredibly guided. I feel throughout my life, because if my property deals had gone well, I would have, you know, the deals would have gone great, I'd probably still be married. I'd be living on an island somewhere, drinking my ties and not having a care in the world, which, compared to my life now, is a really, really boring version of my life. So I think I was guided through these mistakes. They had to happen for me to do what I have ended up doing. And our timing, starting the Swedish wealth Institute, was very fortuitous, because the the market in Sweden had no one doing what we had done or what we were. Doing. There had been another company that had been doing it for years and teaching, but they went bankrupt about one year before this, and no one had filled the space. So they'd kind of prepped the market and kind of done the tough work of showing people that Rich Dad, Poor Dad, is a book and, you know, all these things. And we could kind of just come in when we opened it, out of our little group. We just said, All right, everyone can come. So we could grow pretty quickly, and with no competition, we became the de facto biggest company in the country doing what we did. So it took probably a year before I got a call from who was then Tony Robbins partner for his European events. And they said, Do you want to be the partner for the Swedish market, and all of a sudden, within a year of starting the company, and still essentially bankrupt, I was now the partner indirectly to Tony Robbins, amazing. Yeah, it was, it was just really weird, and I didn't really know who Tony was at the time, and they said, come join the event. And I went to the event, and it was just, you know, this absolutely amazing four day experience. I got to work on a lot of my own stuff and my

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 11:06
Unleash the Power Within event, yeah. But I know loads of people that have been I've never been to one yet, but I hear such incredible things about it.

Speaker 1 11:16
Oh, it's such an experience. It's absolutely amazing. And I was so happy to be the like, I couldn't really afford the ticket. Like, it was a stretch for me to figure out the flights in the hotel. But I got the ticket because we were, we were partners to it, and I was invited into the back room. I was invited into the partners meeting. So I got to meet all the other European partners that were, you know, we'd brought, I don't know, 30 people or so this, you know, this was the first year. It grew every year, but that first year we probably bought brought 30 people. And I'm in a room with promoters bringing 1000s of people to this event. And so first I was, I was learning from them, what were they doing, and building all these connections. And then I flew home, and it must have been six months or so later, I get a call from from Roland, who runs a huge company in in Estonia for personal development. He calls me, he says, Hey, we, we talked at at the Unleash the Power Within event. And I'm like, Yes, I know who you are. You brought hundreds of people. Do you? How do you remember me like I was the little guy who no one really wanted to talk to, but he said, Well, look, I'm bringing Kim Kiyosaki and a few of her friends on a European tour. Would you like her to stop off in Sweden? I went, Well, yes, I would. I will do that. That is okay. And, you know, I had to go back and actually borrow money, because we had to, you know, there were a bunch of fees and costs, but we were able to figure it out, and we made it into our before. Then we'd done one Empowered Women event, and so it kind of worked perfectly into that brand, because that's Kim's brand, and so we ran this as our Empowered Women event, and it went, it went phenomenally. But the biggest thing for me was I timed it so we got the Saturday, so she flew into Sweden on the Thursday, I believe, and then she flew out on the Monday. So she had, you know, close to a week in Stockholm. And, you know, we took her out to dinner, to lunch, showed her around town as we got all this time spending with her. And during one of our lunches, I explained the situation, what had happened in the property business, and this is where it's so crazy, because, you know, we'd had mentors, we'd have coaches, we'd have speakers who had all tried to, like, help us figure out, how do we turn, you know, our big black hole into, you know, how do we positive, yeah, how do we get out of it, if nothing else, but, you know, how do we turn this into a workable business? And, you know, we this was, you know, we'd probably been in this hole now for about two years, after that first year of, you know, since Michael told me it's time to bankrupt the company, and I show her like this is where we're at. And it took her 15 minutes to give me the plan to fix it all. And she just looked at it and said, Well, you got to restructure that debt. You got to restructure that deal, and you got to do two more deals like that, and you're done.

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 14:20
Isn't it interesting how people who, in my experience, people that see that have more money than me, people that I spend time with, who are more successful than me, quite often come from very similar background to me, but I have just made it. Have got there? Yeah, when they look at money, when they look at a deal, when they look at structuring things, there's a there's an air of simplicity, I think that they apply to stuff that's different to people that, or certainly how I was 10 years ago, when I was in a lot of debt, like how I looked at stuff, like I would really get into the weeds and the detail of stuff, and I'd be like, Well, you've got the risks and everything all that, all I'd find all the reasons why it was hard. Yeah. Whereas someone like Kim Kiyosaki just sitting and saying 15 minutes will restructure that wiggle, that about and move that completely changes things. Do you think that that's a mindset linked to having money? Do you think people that have more money have think about money in a different way?

Speaker 1 15:16
Yeah, I think, I mean, what was fun, what you said about going through that same journey. She actually, she and Robert lived out of their car for a while because they were homeless. Like they have really gone through that journey, like she just saw it mirrored. And I think partially it's that, that they're thinking about it differently, but also all these things we do, it's a repeatable skill. She's done 3000 property deals. So she's seen every single scenario of a property deal. So she just, she just recognises it and looks at like she looks at the whole but then, and then looks at the part. And you know, she can analyse it right away, because, as you say, she does have a different way of viewing things, and doesn't have the same stress about it that we do. And then she goes, Well, the time that this happened to me or to my friend, we did this, and then we did that, and then we did that. And, you know, it's just very simple, because she's done it before. And I think that's the difference. I mean, that was the big difference for us between all these other what I want to call, like, so called mentors, or bad mentors? Yeah, and someone who actually knows what they're talking

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 16:25
and change the trajectory of things. Did you take the advice and do the things that she said? I mean, it took, it

Speaker 1 16:31
didn't take me 15 minutes to implement. It took me years to then implement. But yes, I just took it and ran I was always a brilliant student, like I said with my first mentor, when they said, jump, I asked, how high? When Kim Kiyosaki told me, do this, I said, Yes, ma'am, I'm doing it. Yes, I'm doing it.

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 16:53
Do do you think that the way that money circulates in people's lives is driven more about practical stuff, or more about the way we think about money.

Speaker 1 17:05
I mean, money is such an emotional thing, isn't it? I mean, it's, it's like I was talking to Les Brown about this. I was interviewing him for the Swedish wealth Institute podcast, and it was so interesting to hear him start talking about this, because he said, When, when humans kind of project forward, we tend to see the upside and ignore the downside. So that's why, you know, a lot of these, like, you know, crypto investments and these scams that come out pull in so many people, because we see, wow, if I can make them 1% a day. In two years, I'll be a trillionaire. And so we see this upside and we ignore the downside. But then when we lose money, the pain of losing $1,000 is bigger than the pleasure of winning 10,000 so we have a very weird, natural relationship to money. Where we're we're always chasing the upside, and then the downside kills us emotionally, and it

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 18:10
lasts longer as well, doesn't it? I think when you have really positive experiences, I know for me in business, you know, as a businesswoman, we've gone for certain investments that have paid off really well, but then you're like, right? I need to do a bigger thing when we've done profit. We've done property deals, but now I need to do a bigger one, more profit, more, more more when we've run our coaching business, mentoring business. We've had like, 100 grand days. We're like, right? I need more than that. I need to do more, more, more. And we strive for more. But actually, when things go wrong, the feeling around it lasts longer. So we forget we've done 100,000 pound day, and we move on to that wanting more. We say, Oh, actually, that's quite a big deal, but we don't really give it the space that it probably deserves. Yeah, when you lose 1000 pounds, Oh God, I lost 1000 pounds, and it lasts for a really long time, it carries, doesn't it, or has the potential to Why do you think that is?

Speaker 1 18:58
Well, you reminded me of a conversation I had years ago. This was during that like Kim had told us what to do, and I was doing it, and I sat with with another mentor I had for a short time. We knew each other for a short time, but absolutely amazing man called Steven moranville, who's he's blind, but he always says he's blind, but he can see better than most people. And I was talking to him about our situation, and you know, all the emotions of you know we are living in our you know we're living well, we weren't still living in the summer house, but like we I wasn't providing the life that I felt my family deserved. And he looked at me because we'd been talking for a while, and there were two things that he said that were very kind of that that hit home. The first thing he said was, you got to stop thinking about money as money. I said, What do you mean? He said, Well, money is just points on the board. And I think that's kind of what you're talking about. Is like I had 100,000 Pound day like that is unreasonable. Like, when you start thinking about that, you make, I mean, I started looking at my finances, like, when we start making a million dollars a year, like, what am I going to spend that on? I have my big red light therapy machine here. I have, you know, I have all my toys, and it's like that doesn't make a dent in a million dollars, and then next year you make more, and you make like money is just it's ridiculous. Once you get Pat over that hump, which, with Robert and Kim Kiyosaki, they do this with the cash flow board game, right? You're stuck in the rat race, and the moment you get out of the rat race, everything is very easy, and it's like money becomes this unreasonable thing. So to keep it fun, to keep it exciting, it really just becomes points on a board, and it's your way of seeing and he's a very good person, so he talks about this from an impact perspective, not out of a I'm gonna beat someone else. But what it does is it tells you that your reward for making an impact in someone's life is you get paid. So the more you get paid, the bigger impacts you're having on more people. So this is your way of seeing, did I make a bigger impact this month than I did last month?

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 21:13
We get paid as a consequence of doing a good job in whatever capacity we do it. And I think you know that's it's absolutely right. In everything that you in my experience, everybody who becomes successful is having some sort of positive impact on someone or something else, and they are getting paid as a consequence of that. And I think we forget that, you know, good, exceptional service, real quality products, that sort of thing is what creates that transaction that people are willing to put their money into, you

Speaker 1 21:42
know, I mean, we're seeing that today with with like boycotts and stuff going on, is if there is a service that we connect with, we will buy it. If we don't, we won't. So if you've made money, you've somehow created a connection with enough people that make them want to give them your money? Yeah.

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 22:04
So let me ask you a couple of questions. So do you think that everyone should want to be wealthy?

Speaker 1 22:12
Yes, and I'll say why? So, one of the things that really stuck with me from that first Tony Robbins unleashed the power within. I mean, we became partners. So I've been to like, seven or eight now, but the first one this really stuck with me was when he said, You can't help the poor by joining them. You can't help the poor by joining them. And that really hit home with me, because I know a lot of people want to help others. They might not want to be rich for themselves. They want to help others. And so what they tend to do is, as soon as money comes into their life, they give it away. And the problem is, if they give away too much, now they're poor and someone else has to give them, and they haven't fixed the problem. They've just added to the problem. There's now not another poor person. So if you can become wealthy for you know, either you do it for your sake, your family's sake, and that's great, and you're doing an impact in the world, and you're changing lives. But even if that's not who you are, if you can build up a wealth that allows you to help more people at a higher level, that's amazing. Just look at Tony Robbins. He's fed like whatever it is, a billion people, because he's Tony. And you know, we do a lot of charity in Africa, especially around the cash flow board game, because we're partners to it. We every time someone buys a cash flow one on one board game through us or their member of our community, every time there, there is a payment for their subscription. 10% of that goes to helping increase financial literacy in Africa and in schools in communities in Europe. That's amazing. And yeah, so the more, the more is

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 24:00
actually that, and those things wouldn't be happening if you weren't making money from doing

Speaker 1 24:04
a good job the charity, I couldn't be giving the charity Absolutely.

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 24:09
So let's talk about I know for certain that I've been guilty of this. I'm sure probably you've done it, and most people listening to this at some point have sabotaged their own financial success because of either fear or guilt or shame or something. Have you ever sabotaged your own financial success? Did you know it at the time? Or do you look back and know that it happened?

Speaker 1 24:34
Oh no, never. I'm always perfect every time I've made so many bad decisions. And one of my one of my mentors, T Harv Eker, he says this so brilliantly. He'll say the universe when it wants to tell you something, it starts by whispering it in your ear. And if you listen, great, but if you don't listen, it will tap you on the shoulder. If you still don't listen. And it will slap you across the face. And in my life, I'm trying to get better at this, but I have been slapped because I've been bad at listening, and so I've, yeah, it's kind of, if you go back to my initial loss there, where I lost 400,000 pounds. I mean, I didn't have to move that quickly, right? We set a target like we were going to buy a million properties over two years. You know, whatever our target was, if it was 1015, 20, over two years, it didn't have to go that quickly. If we had bought one, finished that deal, and then gone on to the next one, either I would have known, oh no, I've lost 30,000 pounds of this one. It's time to stop and reassess. Or we could have caught the issues before they became an actual problem, and then moved on to the second and if we'd done one deal every six months, yeah, it's not 20 deals in two years, it's four, which is really boring, but I would have had four successful deals, or I would have gotten out a lot earlier, and again, now I'm happy this happened, because I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing if I would have gone back, or if I'm recommending someone else, I would say, you know, you'll move a lot quicker by moving slower. Sometimes, you know, the tortoise and the hare

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 26:15
isn't that interesting, like I hear, I say this a lot to clients of mine. We overestimate what's possible in a short space of time, and we underestimate what's possible in a long period of time. So like we want to do, I meet clients. They say to me, Sarah, I want you to help me to buy 20 houses in 20 months. And I'm like, Why? Why do you want to do that when you've never bought a house before? Why don't we just actually build you the basics that you understand what you're doing. You know, if you've had loads of money and you want to buy 20 houses, fine, but you're starting with no money, no experience, no team, no nothing, why don't you just try and buy two houses this year rather than 20 all done? Yeah, which we completely overestimate. What's doable in the short space of time. But then people say to me, Well, you know, I want to make a million pound in 10 years. You're like but you could do more than that. You absolutely in 10 years is a long time. You could make multiple millions if you really have a strategy behind you. And I think it's really interesting how people focus so so heavily on which results must be now, must be fast, must be big and impactful versus the long term. And I say this in the book. I talk about it a lot. Nobody wants to get rich slowly. Everybody wants to get rich quickly. And actually getting rich slowly is way sexier, because it's more sustainable. I think, What's your thoughts on that?

Speaker 1 27:37
Well, I think what it is, it's, it goes back to all the emotions around money, right? I mean, when I was there and, you know, 400,000 pounds in debt, and obviously that kept thing accumulating. So it actually got worse than that. I mean, yeah, I wanted someone to come in and just drop a million pounds and fix my problems, right? I mean, that was, that was the dream. So I think I get it, and especially like that. You know that I want to call it a fictive person, but obviously you've met 1000 people in that situation who, you know, they got no money, they have no experience, and they want to fix all their financial problems within two years. I get it. I mean, they probably have debt. They probably have debtors calling them and they're saying, Well, if I buy one property and add 200 pounds a month, that would be awesome, but that debtor is still going to come, so I need to do these and and so I get that emotion where it's coming from, and at the same time, because I did it like, well, and I didn't even have debtors, it was just my own arrogance and ego that said, you know, they said that this guy did 10 deals in two years. Well, obviously, I'm twice as good. I'm doing 20. It was just pure ego and and I did. I mean, I did. I hit my target. I again, I don't remember what that target was, luckily, because I'd probably be embarrassed. But, you know, it was ego that drove me, if it's fear and stress, like, I totally get it. And that's where I think, as mentors, our job is to kind of, well, I don't mentor. I bring in mentors because there are so many people that are smarter than I am. But what I hope you know, the all these brilliant mentors do is they look at the person and see the total and say, Well, look, let's, let's go out and do a property deal, because that's your future. That's your dream. But in the meantime, let's fix what's wrong. And that's kind of what Robert and Kim. I that Kim shared this at this first empowered women's event, and she's spoken to me a lot about it in, you know, times we've jumped on calls and stuff, and she shared her story of how they were living in their car, right? They were homeless, they lost everything, and they they realised that they couldn't handle their finances, so they actually brought in a CPA to help them sort and pay their bills. And so the first thing the CPA says is, well, you guys can't actually afford me, but you need me. So, like, I will take you on as clients, and I will help you do this. But. But no, I as your first invoice to be paid, I'll be paying me, which means you'll be actually in worse in worse shape. Yeah, that's fine. Just help us get control. He said, Great, I will do that. Then they said, Well, we do have two rules, though. He said, You have rules? Said, Yes, we have two rules for you. The first one is a 10% of all we make is ours to keep. They're quoting the richest man in Babylon here. And they he said, What do you mean? So well, 10% of everything we get we are going to put into investments to build future cash flow. He said, You can't do that. Yes, we can, but you you can't pay your bills. You cannot take away money from it. They said, yes, because that's the only way we're going to build our future. So we're going to do that. He said, Well, all right, it's your funeral. Fine. What was your second condition? 10% of everything. And he's like, Oh, no, 10 what? 10% is going to charity. Charity. You need charity. You can give money to 10% goes to charity. You can't pay your 10% goes to charity. They said, Fine, whatever. It's your funeral. We'll do it. And so they were living in their car, and they said, those two buckets, those two jars, are not going anywhere. 10% is to build our future. 10% is to, you know, to give to others, pass it on. The other 80% prioritise it however you need to. So we have food, so we have a home, and so we don't have as many people calling us as as we have today. Swamps did, yeah, so that we can focus on on making enough money to pay everyone back, and and, and they did, and it wasn't a quick fix. It took them time, but they were able to turn their lives around. And I think if you can separate your current financial stress from your future financial bliss, and say, All right, this is I call it with my kids, they have money machines. So they're 810, and 12, and they have their little money machine. So we've invested that for them in a mix of different index funds. And every time they make money, a portion of anything they make goes into the money machine. The rest they can do whatever they want with. They buy their V bucks and robux and whatever else. And that's completely fine, but a part of it builds their money machine. And if we can do that as adults, and then a mentor coming in and helping us see what Kim saw for me, restructure that debt, restructure that deal, and do two more of those. You can do that with your life. You know, if you look at it,

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 32:28
it's so true. And I talked to, I had a conversation with client yesterday, actually, and we were talking about, she's running her business, so she's working really hard to build her business. And I said to her, but you need to be putting a portion away. So your money's working for you, because at the moment, you're working for your money. So if I haven't got any at the moment, I haven't I haven't got the time. There's no money. I haven't got the time, I haven't got the headspace. I don't understand it. I'm just going to concentrate on my business. And we looked at him, we said, well, even if you could take 100 pounds a month, 10 pounds a month doesn't matter. At some point right now, you're working really hard to work on your business, and you're not investing at all. If you actually start to invest, the amount of effort that has to go here will be offset by what happens over here, which allows you to retire, become work optional. It allows you really the freedom that we all strive to have in life, which is to you know, go on holiday travel, help other people pay for the kids to do what they want to do, like all of those things, right? And no one's ever stopped her and said, building a business is one thing that's working. It's earning your money, but then you need to take your money and do something with it. So it's working harder than you are. And this light bulb went off with her, and she's, you know, we focus societally. I think we focus so heavily on making money, trading time for money. We've not been taught at school. We've not been taught by parents, you know, all these things. Why do you think it is that we're not as a society, aware even that putting our money to work for us is an option, like most people don't. People, don't even realise that. You know, Joe blogs public with 10 pounds a month, 20 pounds a month can invest, like most people, think it's a rich person thing, and it isn't. Why do you think that is?

Speaker 1 34:13
Well, I'll actually challenge that a little bit with the Swedish culture. It's, it's very different. In Swedish culture, we are taught that you should be putting away money into your savings account with the bank every month. Savings, yes, you put it in. Well, they the banks are very good here at getting you to put that into managed funds. That's part like from me being a kid, I was putting money away that way. The problem is, no one in Sweden actually questions the banks. So you're not putting that money into index funds, because the banks have framed them as high risk, so you put them into a managed fund, and then what they did, and this has to be maybe 1520, years ago, I believe they created what. Is known in Sweden as a fund and a fund. So now you don't even have to choose your funds. You choose a fund manager that will pick funds to allocate your money into, okay? And the reason why they did this is because each fund, these managed funds, will have fees of one to 2% Yeah, compared to an index fund, which will have, you know, zero to 0.2% and then now you have the fund in fund manager, he will only charge 1% and because that's the fund you're investing into, they don't actually have to declare what is the fund, what is the cost of the funds he's investing into. And so he will always choose the bank's own funds, and he will obviously chose, or she will choose the more expensive ones, and they might be costing two to two and a half percent and the 1% on top. So all of a sudden, you're paying fees of about 3.5% which means it won't grow like over time, over your lifespan, your money will just marginally grow, and all your investments have done is pay the bank. So in Sweden, we have, we do save, and we do invest, but technically getting all,

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 36:14
yeah, the thing here, I think, with us, we're taught, as a nation, culturally, save money for a rainy day. That's what our thing is here, right? And the what no one then teaches you is what inflation does to that savings over time. Because inflation, you know, inflation, a few years ago, it was up in double digits. Like inflation is something that impacts every single one of us. But when I speak to like just normal Joe blog public and say, do you understand what inflation is, what it does to your money? Most people say, No, yeah, we're encouraged to save and get our naught point, whatever percent in our savings account. Here, inflation is chiselling away at 3% 4% whatever it is. And you know,

Speaker 1 36:54
it's, well, I remember that of being a kid in school and having this argument with my friends about because they, they're they believe the best thing was to have the but your money under your mattress. And my argument was, well, if you put it in a bank account, you're getting 0.1% that's more than zero and dust. Yeah, exactly. And, and the teacher said, Well, you know, in flight, and she was, in that sense, she was good. She didn't act, she just didn't teach us what this meant, but she said the biggest losers in inflation are the people that have the money in the bank. So my friends took that as See, we were right. You're wrong. It's better to have it in the mattress, because we don't have it in the bank. And it was like, Oh no, no.

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 37:37
So Daniel, in your opinion, what do you think is the most damaging money advice that is floating around at the moment.

Speaker 1 37:45
Well, I have to go to that fund and fund, I think. But I interviewed a Robert Raleigh who wrote the book The million dollar decision on the Swedish wealth Institute podcast, and he shared a calculation of like, how these fees eat your your money. And basically, you know, we the financial advisors that are supposed to help and support us, and you know, they charge whatever their you know fees are. Yeah, they're actually killing your your future. Then you know they and the banks are getting your entire rewards of investment. And essentially, what you're doing is saving in many ways, you're not you're probably going to be as good, maybe even better, off just putting it into a savings account, because, well, now you at least have no downside. You just have inflation, because it's not really going to grow much in these really high fee funds. So I think teaching people and property is obviously great if, if you can not do what I did, but if you otherwise having a mixed fund of my good friend Andy Gupta, who speaks at our at our summits, he spent 20 years on Wall Street, you know, Harvard Business grad where, you know, he managed billion dollar funds like he was high in that in that space, he left it because, really, because he's, he was thought of his mother and on Wall Street, like female, women are generally pretty marginalised. They're just expected to, you know, let the men handle the money. And he just said, this is awful. I cannot do it. And he left, and he decided to teach the secrets of what Wall Street is doing. And I went through his 12 week course because I run my business and I don't really have time to handle investments. So I said, Great, let's see what the top 1% in the world are doing, because they're also generally busy running businesses, and he just showed me, he calls them bad dance partners. So you want, you want to have different types of assets that are bad dance partners. That means they don't move the same. They move differently. So they don't dance together. They dance parallel, playing and but. Putting together a little portfolio of these with very low fees per asset, where the fees are zero to 0.2% you can mimic what is happening on Wall Street. And he teaches a method called the Holy Grail style of investing. I'm not going to go into all the details you can check out Andy, but it really, really works. And that's what I did to go back to your friend there who was or your client who was working so hard, I made that mistake myself. I, you know, I run an event company, and then covid came and we couldn't do the business. I mean, I had to refund. I had to refund more than you know that the first years of covid revenue, so I actually had negative revenue the first year of covid because we couldn't deliver and I didn't get back the money we'd spent to sell those tickets. So it was, it was absolutely awful. And I had just as your your client, I'd put everything into the business, and I tried to grow the business, because, you know, if it grows next year, that's the best possible investment, because I'm doubling. Because I'm doubling, you know, I'm doubling the value of the company every year, and I doubled my company every year like clockwork, but I didn't take anything out for myself and having that separate pot my money machine with Andy's method now, and I use some of the things from Robert and these other amazing people we work with and and put that together, it allows me to build a separate pot of wealth. So no matter what happens with the business, which I, you know, I don't want to think anything bad is going to happen, but I didn't think covid was going to happen. I always have a separate now, pot of security, no matter what happens.

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 41:39
You know, we talk about this a lot in the book, is that financial, we call it fuck you money. So like being in a position where you've got fuck you money is it means if your business does go bust, it doesn't actually matter if you need to leave a relationship, if you need to leave a job, if you need to jump on a plane and just escape from whatever's going on in your world. You're in a position where you can do that, and so many people like I speak to so many clients, say to me, you know, I'm really unhappy in my marriage, but I can't leave because I can't afford to leave because I've never put away money for even a deposit and to hire a van to take my stuff. Like there's so many people that are in a place where money is they've just ignored money, obsessed about the negative parts of it, but not ignored, putting it to work for their whole life, and they're now starting to realise I absolutely need to do something about it. But the conversation around money isn't being had enough. I don't think which is hence why we do what we do now. But I think

Speaker 1 42:35
totally agree with that, and to me, that is a really important thing. Like if you're going to get into a relationship with someone. You want them to be able to leave you want them to have an independent source of self of funds, so that it's not that they need to be with me. They choose to be with me. And that's what makes the relationship powerful. And as Stephen Covey says it so well in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Where he says, you know, there are three levels to a relationship. There is dependency, where, obviously, I need you, I cannot survive without you. I cannot leave because I can't afford a home. There's the second level of interdependency, where we're kind of, I do you, you do me. Like we're, we're, you know, we're off doing our things. And then the the most beautiful level is when you get to interdependent. And we're two strong, independent people who are working together to lift each other up and build something beautiful and and I think if you, if you're not independent, you cannot become interdependent.

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 43:36
100% I love that. And I've not read that book. I own it. I have not read it yet.

Speaker 1 43:43
I used to read it every quarter, and every quarter it felt like a completely different book because I had changed. It's it's changed.

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 43:51
I'll definitely get that on the list. So last couple of questions, because we're definitely running out time. Want to make sure we don't run over too much. What would you say is the biggest lie that you think people are told about money and wealth, I

Speaker 1 44:07
think money is the root of all evil. Money is dirty all these, you know, money doesn't grow on trees. All these kind of negative parts to money. Because, for me, I don't like money isn't actually a thing. Money is, is energy. It's a it's a means of exchange. It doesn't actually exist. It's an invention by by humans, because it was too complicated, if I wanted that beautiful scarf you have that I had to go and sell my goat to Tom who had the hammer that you wanted to have in exchange for the scarf. And so we invented money so that we could do that really easily and and that's all it is. So putting all that emotion into it has is pure. That's us. That's our fantasy. So money is just a means of exchange. And when you have money, money, as we were kind of joking about. I don't know what I would do with it. What you do with it is you exchange it for experiences. You can now experience things that you wouldn't be able to do if you didn't have money.

Unknown Speaker 45:11
Yeah, for sure, I think the

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 45:15
money is the root of all evil, like these phrases that we hear a lot, and in the book, there's about 12 different ones that every single person I interviewed for the book, they all said the same ones. This is like generationally built in, right? It's, you know, hundreds of years worth of people saying that money is a day thing. We shouldn't talk about money. And even my own name says to me, Sarah, I'm so proud of you. You've done incredible things with your life, but I wish you could do what you do without talking about how much money you've got. And that, in itself, is mad because I just, I do talk about money and investment all the time, but it's because she's fearful that someone will try to take it from me. She's fearful that people will try and come for me. Because I say I've got abundance, and I live in a place where, you know, money is something that I enjoy, and I want to talk about more. If people have got that in a narrative, money is a root of all evil. You know, what's your advice to those people to start changing that pattern in there, in in terms

Speaker 1 46:14
that that is a brilliant question. And obviously there are a lot of events that will help you with that, like Tony Robbins UPW, we do that at your path to financial freedom and the financial freedom summit and our different events in many ways, though, for me, I think action is is always the solution to everything. So by just following that simple rule that Robert and Kim did, and putting 10% away to to your financial future, and then putting 10% to charity will pretty quickly teach you, like when you give money, and especially if you can find a way to give money directly to the people you're helping. So you're not just giving it to a big organisation, but you can actually see the impact you have. It's really hard to say that this money is evil when this is the reason why this child is eating today. So try to get, give, you know, give 100 pounds to a starving kid and then tell yourself that money is evil. And see, see how that feels.

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 47:12
I love that. That's very good advice. Okay, so last thing at the end of all of my podcast interviews, what we do is we ask, we we have a question to ask you, which has been given to us from a previous guest. For you, they didn't know it was you, but we've got you a question, and then I'm going to ask you a quick for a question for us to ask our next guest, so you can ponder that while I ask you the question. So the the question we had from our previous guest was, If money had a personality for you, what would that characterization be in your life?

Speaker 1 47:47
Oh, that is such a cool question. I will not have as good a question. That's okay. That was really good. Okay. So, so for me, the instant, like, my instant thought, here, this, this is coming instinctually, is it's really a kind of flirtatious tease. I love that, yeah, like that real, like, brilliant diva that glides in, gets everyone excited and flirts that, yeah, that would be money.

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 48:22
To me. I love that. That's so cool. Thank you very much for answering that. I would make sure we tell them as well what your answer was, yeah. Oh, that was a

Unknown Speaker 48:29
brilliant question.

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 48:30
So Daniel, lastly, what is a question that you would like us to ask our next guest?

Speaker 1 48:37
What is a money based success quote that has always inspired you and share a story as to why amazing.

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 48:47
I'll get that done. Thank you so much. Appreciate that, Daniel, it's been incredible having conversation with you. I know we've kind of backwards and forwards on WhatsApp for a little while, and I've followed you for a long time, so it's been an absolute pleasure of mine to be able to interview you and just get your insights on this stuff. And I know the guys listening to this will have learned a lot from that and be really, you know, inspired by a lot of different things. If anyone wants to contact you or get in touch with you, like, how do they do that? Is it Instagram? Is it where are you hanging out?

Speaker 1 49:13
Yeah, we're we're kind of everywhere I will try to be. So obviously, everyone here listening listens to podcasts. So maybe the easiest is to go to the Swedish wealth Institute podcast and check out, you know, the interview with Nick Vujicic, with Les Brown, with Jack cam field, with Joseph McClendon and these absolutely amazing people, or go to Swedish wealth institute.com and check out our coming events, where we've gathered, you know, some of the best speakers in the world, and we will give you a free ticket or connect with us on Instagram. You have the Swedish wealth Institute, A, B, or me under real Daniel wood, so yeah, any any way you feel that the easiest for you to connect with me is that's the one you go with. Thank you.

Sarah Poynton-Ryan 50:00
So so much. It's been a pleasure. It's been a brilliant conversation, and I probably could have shared with you for a really long time. So we will tune out now. Thank you everybody for listening. If you want to get hold of Daniel, obviously you know what to do it. We'll put all of that in the show notes as well. And yeah, it's been amazing. I'll catch you guys later. Thank you so much for getting to the end of the end of the podcast episode. I really hope that you enjoyed it. I just wanted to take this opportunity to remind you that the weekly Money Mechanics newsletter is available to you completely free. This is a newsletter that I'm going to send out every week to just give you some ideas around what's happening in the markets, what's happening at a global level, what's happening at a lot more local level, so that you can better understand what you can do with your money to make it work for you for the future, I'm also going to share in the newsletter what I'm doing in my own portfolio, just to give you some insights into what my ideas are, why I'm making the decisions that I'm making, in the hope that it will help you to make those decisions in your own portfolios as well. All you've got to do is find the link that's with this episode, hit the link and subscribe, and that newsletter will start to come out to you every single week. I'd also really love to take this opportunity to invite you to drop me a review. I love the opportunity of getting to share these podcast episodes with you. It really helps me to better understand how we can do the best job that we can here at Money Mechanics, if you tell us your feedback. So drop us a review. Tell us the sort of guest that you want. Talk to me and connect with me on Instagram, you know, talk to us on YouTube, wherever you are hanging out. Tell us how you're finding it, and we can make this the very best podcast it can be. Thank you again for being such a valued listener. I appreciate you all, and I'll speak to you soon. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai