Episode 1591: Interview with Joel Miller About How Getting Your Money Right Helps You Focus on What Truly Matters

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Scott Maderer: [00:00:00] Thanks for joining us on episode 1,591 of the Inspired Stewardship podcast.

Joel Miller: I'm Joel Miller. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent, and your treasures to live out your calling. Having the ability to be brave enough to talk about your finances is key, and one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this.

The Inspired Stewardship podcast with my friend Scott Maderer.

You gotta live below your means. We need to learn the process of delayed gratification that's important for so many areas of your life. Whether it is your finances or it is your fitness, or it is fill in the blank. We need to learn delayed gratification so that we can see the amazing results. That the future holds for us.

Scott Maderer: [00:01:00] Welcome and thank you for joining us on the Inspired Stewardship Podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent, and your treasures for your true calling and the inspired Stewardship Podcast who will learn to invest in yourself.

Invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.

In this podcast episode, I interviewed Joel Miller. I asked Joel about his journey to building his own financial planning firm. Joel also shares with you how you can reset your mindset to be less intimidated by your money. And Joel also shares how you can pay attention to finances without giving up your faith or your identity.

I have a great book that's been out for a while now called Inspired Living. Assemble the puzzle of your calling by mastering your time, [00:02:00] your talent, and your treasures. You can find out more about that book over@inspiredlivingbook.com. It'll take you to a page where there's information and you can sign up to get some mailings about it, as well as purchase a copy there.

I'd love to see you get a copy and share with me how it impacted your world. Joel Miller is the founder of Flames Financial Planning, a flat fee membership base, financial planning firm. He's on a mission to bring peace and freedom to your financial life. Outside of work, he's a strong believer that physical fitness directly impacts both our overall wellbeing and professional performance.

He's an avid cyclist and has completed three 70.3 mile half Ironmans in his view when fitness begins to slip in priority, our work and finances often follow.[00:03:00]

Welcome to the show, Joel.

Joel Miller: Thank you so much for having me. It's an

Scott Maderer: absolute pleasure. Absolutely. I'm looking forward to our chat today. So I shared a little bit in the intro of some of the things you've done. A half marathon is yeah. I tell people I've run a marathon. I've actually run three, it was my first marathon.

My last marathon and my only marathon. So that's, there you go. Done it one time.

Joel Miller: Absolutely. That is way more than most people have ever done a marathon

Scott Maderer: because Yeah. No it's it takes a lot outta you. I can't imagine doing a half Ironman much less of full Ironman either for those people that do that.

So I shared a little bit that's obviously outside of work about your work and other things, but I think intros are always like Instagram photos. They don't really show the full picture. So back up for us and share a little bit more about your journey and what's brought you to the point where this is the work you're [00:04:00] doing and the message you're putting out in your, in the world.

Joel Miller: Absolutely. Such a good question. I have always felt the ability to lead and I've always had this ability to cast a vision and something else that's just ingrained in me is a really hard work ethic. So at any point in my life, I've just tried to put my best foot forward. I've never been the smartest person in the room, but I always want to be.

The hardest working, if not one of the hardest working people in the room, and that's got me to where I am today. I'm so lucky that I got to start my career at Vanguard. What a great company that puts people first, tries to lower the cost, completely changed the cost of investing over time. So I'm very lucky to have worked for incredible employers.

But I always said I think I can do more. I know I can do more. So by continuing to do what I thought was best at that time, that's how I got here today. [00:05:00] CEO of my own planning firm.

Scott Maderer: So why did you decide to start your own

Joel Miller: firm? Why go that way? I had a vision. I think every good entrepreneur. Gets to a point where they're like, I see some, I see a business opportunity here.

I could make some tweaks, I could improve some inefficiencies, and I could go start something for my own. When it came down for me, I love being a financial planner, but I was really only impacting the families that I was working with. So one of the reasons that I wanted to be the major decision maker and start and run my own firm was so that I can not only have an impact on, let's say 200 families, I want to have an impact on 5,000 families, 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 families.

That was probably one of the key decision making moments for me was how can I have the largest and biggest impact and leave the largest legacy. [00:06:00] What that really came down to was starting my own business instead of settling, like most financial planners, settling for you get your book, you set it up, you a lot of people, they try to work less hours, they try to work at more in certain parts of the year and then take off a big portion of the year.

And I just knew that I wanted to do something much bigger and broader than that.

Scott Maderer: When you, when you think about starting your own business, what are some of the. The biggest challenges that have come up that maybe were not what you expected? I we always have a roadmap before we start our business.

This is what's gonna happen and very seldom is that what happens. So what are some of the biggest challenges that you found that were maybe a surprise to you?

Joel Miller: Yeah, absolutely. What I realized is I'm not very good at sales, to be totally honest. Like I have a lot of financial people are, quite frankly.

Yes. Because what's so funny is that financial planners are [00:07:00] expected to wear this hat of you gotta be the best sales person in the world, but you also have to be the best financial planner in the world. And I'm very thankful that I actually have never really had to do. Cold sales at any point in my career.

So I came into this envisioning like, wow, we're gonna grow so fast. I'm gonna start hiring employees really quickly. And you quickly learn that it doesn't always, you don't always find that instant success right away. It's coming and thankfully the clients are coming in. People are really happy, people love the business, but it is a little bit of a wake up call when you're, when maybe the numbers aren't exactly where you would've.

Thought they were gonna be in your initial roadmap.

Scott Maderer: When you think about the journey that you've gone on, one of the things I like to highlight for the listeners is that intersection between our faith journey and whatever that looks like for us, as well as our life journey and how that's a feedback loop between the two.

What would you say [00:08:00] has happened in your faith journey that's paralleled these decisions you've made or fed into the decisions that you've made?

Joel Miller: I think that's everything. As a Christian, everything I do is centered around making disciples and reflecting Christ in the way that I talk, the way that I act with people, the way that I do business.

And that was another reason why I wanted to go start my own financial planning firm is because then at the core, you know that you are working. With a Christian and that they have a heart of generosity. So if you don't have that, I think there's more conflict of interest that get brought into the equation or when I am making a business decision.

It is with Christ at the center of that. So every decision I make, every move that I make, everything that I do is really based on an eternal mindset, which is really different and it sounds [00:09:00] super ironic, but whether it comes to tithing or who we're gonna partner with, or what we're gonna do, or where revenue goes, all of that sort of stuff.

It's all with a Christian foundation. We are a biblically based founded business, and that reflects in the work that we do and the people that we partner with.

Scott Maderer: What are some of the things that you've taken as a different approach? You mentioned when you were working for others, you saw things that you wanted to do better or different or whatever.

What have you embedded in your business as a different approach from what. What others are doing out in the marketplace. Again, not necessarily better or worse, just what are the things that you've changed or decided, Hey, I want to do this in a different way.

Joel Miller: So one of the cool things about financial planning is there's a, there's so many financial planners out there, and they all do it a different way it was really easy for me to say I know what I want to do. I know what I wanna offer. I want to be different. I don't want people to be overcharged. So from the very beginning, I knew that we are going to [00:10:00] be a flat fee financial planning firm, which means the cost does not increase as your wealth does.

Very different from the rest of the industry who charges a percentage of your assets under management. And then the other really exciting thing is being a comprehensive service. One that actually offers you investment management, financial planning, tax filing, and estate planning, all included. So those were the biggest decision makers of, I knew I was ready to go offer a unique business opportunity and a value proposition to, to individuals, but also.

Employers. One of the things I'm most excited about is being a package that employers can offer to their employees. How cool is that as the employer, if you can offer this incredible financial wellness benefit to your employees, all of a sudden your employees are having all of that done, paid by the employer.

You know how good that feels? It makes you stand out compared to your competitors. It keeps your [00:11:00] favorite employees. It's like something that you can use as an offer to maybe grab employees from other companies. So being able to package my service as a employee benefit is really exciting.

Scott Maderer: Let's talk a little bit about the mindset and the behavior. I'm, I work with people as a financial coach. I talk to a lot of business owners and individuals about mindset and behavior. I obviously don't do the investing side of it. I find other people to send them to that I trust that are good at that.

But what have you seen as you've worked with folks are some of the. The mindsets, the behaviors, the attitudes. People tend to be intimidated by money and it's not something we talk about a lot, and especially when it comes to investing, A lot of times the attitude is, oh, I'll deal with that later.

Of course they look up at 57 and later now [00:12:00] it's that kind of thing. What are some of the things that you've seen from folks that you've worked with?

Joel Miller: Yeah, I think this is one of the things that we're trying to champion is to raise the financial literacy floor of Americans.

The earlier we start talking about this, the better. We should not be ashamed to ask the questions. It's so unfortunate that this is a hard conversation with family or with friends. And honestly, it really comes down to it's because we're very prideful people. We're very selfish people. We like to compare ourselves to other, instead of comparing ourselves to Christ, we compare maybe our house or our car or everything else to like maybe our neighbors.

Which just leads to this circle of disappointment. I don't wanna talk to someone 'cause I don't wanna have less than them, so I'm never gonna talk about it. And it's just this spinning circle. That's why I think it's so important to partner with a financial planner so that you can have that open and incumbent.

Like honest conversation. I talk to [00:13:00] people about things that they haven't told their parents or their best friends or their kids because it's that third party that, you know, hey, they're not gonna judge me. But one of the questions I get more than anything is. Hey, how am I doing? How does this look compared to someone who looks like me and is in a similar life stage as me?

And you know what I tell 'em, it doesn't matter. There's nothing we can do to change the past. All I care about now is changing that mindset, setting the goal going forward so we can change the future. We can't change the past, but now that we're working together, it is my job to make sure you are financially set for the rest of your life, and that's what we're gonna do.

Scott Maderer: When you're working with Christians and the, the biblical mindset I've seen interesting things in the way Christians think about money as well. I like to use the example of, I, I tell people that you'll often hear four things from the same person. That can't all possibly be [00:14:00] true.

You know what, which is the, oh, this person has no money. That must be because they've done something wrong and God isn't blessing them. This person has no money. That must be because they're really holy and spiritual. Flip that on the head and, oh, that person has money. It must be because they're evil and taking advantage of people.

Oh, that person has money. It must be because they're really spiritual and God is blessing them. Sure. Obviously, all four of those cannot something's wrong, and yet I'll hear that often in the same church or in the same. Group of people where it's like no matter what's happening, it's somehow, it's a bad thing.

Is the approach. What have you seen or how have you helped people align their faith, their values, their identity, while still thinking about finances in a healthy way?

Joel Miller: Yeah. The first place I'm gonna go is to the Bible, right? Money is one of the most discussed subjects in the entire Bible.

So where better to [00:15:00] gain the truth of where biblical money wisdom really comes from. So one of the things that I often will recommend someone to do is Hey, read proverbs. Read one proverb every single day, and let's decide together what the Bible says about money. And blessings and wisdom and fruitfulness.

So that's what I would say is. There's so many different things you could say about it, and the Bible's often so misrepresented in a lot of ways, but that's probably because they're saying Bible plus this. And anytime that you say plus something, you're probably adding in your own sinful view of whether it's judgment or comparison or any of those things that we talked a little bit earlier about.

So I wanna go to the source and thus source only. What does the Bible say about this? And that's what's so cool about it. 'cause then I can teach people how to be more generous. I can teach people how to be more loving. These at the end of the day. And it sounds so [00:16:00] ironic as a CEO and of a financial advisor to say, this money's just money.

It is a temporary resource that we have the ability to steward while we are on this earth. We're not taking what, whatever you believe about an afterlife. What we can all agree on is none of this is going with you. So how can we best steward these resources on the small limited time that we have on this temporary earth?

Scott Maderer: Sorry I immediately got this mental image of someone walking up and basically somebody being like oh, you've gotta swipe your debit card before you can enter. Yeah. It's

Joel Miller: No, wait, don't worry. There is no, there's like all of this sort of stuff. And that's why I want to teach people about generosity because that unlocks something within you that we can all relate with.

Is giving back and feeling good about what you're doing and making an impact and what that, all those are all biblical [00:17:00] principles that I can teach and equipped anyone with, whether you're a Christian or not. You're probably gonna benefit by learning some of these things earlier. So how can we start having these conversations?

With middle schoolers and high schoolers and college kids in twenties and thirties and forties. Most people don't get really serious about these sort of things, if you're lucky in your thirties, if you're unlucky in your forties or fifties. So I'm teaching my three-year-old about. Money principles. He knows why I go to work, what the role of money plays in our life.

He also knows that it's not ours, right? These are the Lord's resources that he allows us to steward, and we gotta make sure we do a good job with that.

Scott Maderer: So for you, what does doing a good job, what that looked like?

Joel Miller: It means starting with tithing, giving the back to the Lord, what his is, his, and then how can I set up my family for success?[00:18:00]

How can I make a impact on the world? And I think it also changes. That's my, one of my favorite things about financial planning is it's not written in pen. It's not written in permanent marker, it's all in pencil. Whether it's my own financial plan, my journey, or someone else's. We get to use pencil, we can erase something, we can make edits and marks and changes because this is a journey.

Just if you're planning a road trip across the entire world, you can do the best you can to say, all right, I'm gonna be here on this date. I'm gonna do this thing. I want to go to this place. But it's also gotta be flexible. Life is going to come at you, it's gonna come quick. And if you're not ready for it.

It could completely throw you off course. So that's a big part of financial planning is here's our projection of the next 80 years of your life, but I'm right here with you. The moment something goes wrong, the moment that we need to make an adjustment, maybe it's a good adjustment or a bad [00:19:00] adjustment, depending on like maybe you got a really good job change and your income went up a lot.

So that's still a change. It's an exciting one. We get to do more with your resources. But oftentimes there's also really hard conversations around losing a loved one or losing a job or something else. And we need to be ready. And how great is that to do that with someone else instead of putting that entire burden on you, or you and your spouse feels really good to have an extra person in your corner to talk about those things with.

Scott Maderer: So when you think about you and your approach to things what are some of the. Things that you really think are important for the listener to hear about how you approach things. So if somebody was thinking about working with you, what would be your kind of elevator pitch or your bullet form of, Hey, here's some of the things that I take that are a different approach.

Joel Miller: Yeah, I would say. You gotta live below your means. [00:20:00] We need to learn the process of delayed gratification that's important for so many areas of your life. Whether it is your finances or it is your fitness, or it is fill in the blank. We need to learn delayed gratification. So that we can see the amazing results that the future holds for us.

Oftentimes we're too shortsighted and we want instant gratification today instead of the delayed gratification like working out. It takes time. But you gotta believe in the process. Same thing with financial planning. You gotta believe in the process. You gotta put your future self ahead of yourself today.

You gotta push off that purchase. Don't buy that $70,000 car. Don't overpay and get yourself into a hard mortgage. So that's where I really like challenging people is let's live below your means. I'm happy to cover so many areas [00:21:00] of your financial life so that you can focus more on what you love. My goal is to take this burden off of your shoulders, place it on mine and the business shoulders so that you have more capacity for your loved ones or your hobbies or your work.

I'm hopefully opening up more of you to do other things and less of this.

Scott Maderer: So I've got a few questions that I like to ask all of my guests, but before I ask you those, is there anything else about the work you do that you'd like to share?

Joel Miller: I would say you need to evaluate yourself. You need to have an honest conversation about is this something that you can do by yourself? Do you have the time, willingness, or ability? To handle your own personal finances or is it time to have someone else step in and assist with some of those things?

Because you might want to do [00:22:00] it, but is that what's truly best for your long-term? It's a tough pill to swallow. We all need to figure out those things in our life when it's better to hand that over to a professional. And that's what I think like wisdom is and knowing what you should do or what someone else should do.

Is a really good lesson to learn.

Scott Maderer: So my brand is inspired stewardship, and I run things through that lens of stewardship. You mentioned stewarding resources earlier, and yet stewardship is one of those words that I've discovered means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. So when you hear the word stewardship, what does that word mean to you?

Joel Miller: That means. Taking care and best utilizing what's been given to you. So if I give a teddy bear to my three-year-old and I say, Hey, this is your responsibility. I need you to take care of him. I need you to [00:23:00] keep him clean. If I'm giving that to him to steward, I'm passing that responsibility onto him, and I'm trusting that he can follow the instructions and obedience of what he was told, right?

So that's what stewardship would really mean to me. The Lord said, Hey, I'm going to bless you with these resources. I'm going to give you something, and now what I need you to do is take good care of it, grow it, invest it, make sure that it is going to. Last through your entire lifetime.

Scott Maderer: So this is my favorite question that I like to ask everybody.

Imagine for a minute that I was able to invent this magic machine. And with this machine I was able to take you from where you are today and transport you into the future, maybe 150, maybe 250 years. And through the power of this machine, you were able to look back and see your entire life. See all of the impacts, all of the connections, all of the ripples you've left behind.

What impact do you hope you've left in the world? [00:24:00]

Joel Miller: I like to think extremely aggressive. So what I would say, if possible, I think this would be the coolest thing, is to be remembered as one of the most influential people for the mass affluent class. A lot of people wanna work with the extremely high net worth.

Or the richest of the rich. I wanna work with the mass affluent class if I'm remembered as changing the game or having a huge impact on the most people. That's what I'd want to be remembered for, of disrupting the industry and ablazing a brand new idea of. Being a financial wellness benefit for employers they offer to their employees, that gives us the ability to work with hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people who deserve financial planning, but [00:25:00] either can't afford it for themselves or wouldn't prioritize that payment with everything else that they have going on in life.

So I wanna be on the Mount Rushmore of changing the game for the mass affluent class.

Scott Maderer: So what's on the roadmap? What's coming next as you continue on this journey?

Joel Miller: Continuing to work hard every single day, making a difference in people's lives. Finding employers that say, yeah, you know what? We wanna stand out compared to our competitors.

We wanna retain talent. We want to be able to offer an incredible benefit service to our employees. So that's what I'm looking for is the people. Who want to package this and offer it to their employees. And that's what I'm searching for. So every single day I'm looking for employers. I'm pitching the business and seeing if this is something that they're interested in and continuing to push the bar.

I want to. Change the financial planning industry to say, Hey, this should be a fixed cost. It should not increase, [00:26:00] the fee should not increase as your assets under management does. I don't think people should be paying a percentage of their a to a financial planner. So there are so many things that I'm trying to disrupt in this industry because it's time for change and excited to be a big part of that.

Scott Maderer: So you can find out more about Joel Miller over@flamesfp.com. Of course. I'll have a link to that over in the show notes as well. Joel, is there anything else you'd like to share with the listener?

Joel Miller: If you're listening today, I'm proud of you. I. This is huge, that you are taking time out of your day, out of your commute, wherever you are right now, to be inspired to listen and to grow and to learn more about stewardship.

So you're doing exactly what you should be doing right now. You're listening to this and there's a reason that's happening and I'm excited for you. I can't wait to see what you do in the future. So I would say [00:27:00] keep doing what you're doing. 'cause if you're listening to this right now, then I think you're doing a great job.

If you love what you heard today, I would love to meet with you. If you're an individual or a family that is looking for a financial planner, reach out. You can book time through my website and I would love to hear about your financial journey if you're an employer who wants to beef up your benefits package.

Also feel to reach out. I would love to connect with you. I'd love to hear what you're doing right now and see if this would be a good fit for you to add Flames, financial planning to your benefits package to offer for your employees. So really excited. Thanks so much everyone for listening, and I can't wait to meet you.

I.

Scott Maderer: Thanks so much for listening to the Inspired Stewardship Podcast. As a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard [00:28:00] and find a way to live your calling. If you enjoyed this episode. Please. Please do us a favor. Go over to inspired stewardship.com/itunes.

Rate all one word iTunes rate. It'll take you through how to leave a rating and review, and how to make sure you're subscribed to the podcast so that you can get every episode as it comes out in your feed. Until next time, invest your time. Your talent and your treasures. Develop your influence and impact the world.