Bonus #30

Ellen Yin16min

Ellen Yin

00:06

Hey friends welcome back to cubicle to CEO, the podcast where we ask successful entrepreneurs the business questions you can't google. This segment is a continuation of our q2 2023 income reports, an ongoing series advocating for financial transparency and supported by our sponsor Theory Planning Partners. Returning to the podcast for this special is the CEO of Theory, and my personal wealth manager, Kaitlyn Carlson, here to answer the existential question that plagues most entrepreneurs. How much is really enough?

Ellen Yin

00:39

In our quest to earn more, scale more, and advance our business to new financial statuses? By striving for six, multi six, seven figures and beyond? Are we really getting closer to making enough to support our dream lifestyle? Or are we blindly reaching for more because we don't understand the actual numbers required to achieve what we want? After spending years managing money for the world's richest people and entrepreneurs, Kaitlyn has a unique take on understanding when more revenue is a necessity, and when it's actually a distraction.

Ellen Yin

01:12

Hey, friends, we're gonna do a very special segment with my friend and wealth manager Kaitlyn Carlson, who many of you met in a recent episode episode 193. On the podcast, Kaitlyn was part of our retirement for entrepreneurs series. And she very bravely shared all of her own personal numbers about what her and her family are saving and investing every single year in order to retire in her early 60s with a $15 million portfolio that will allow her to passively withdraw and live on around $360,000 a year. So very inspiring. And I know a lot of you are really encouraged by that episode. So I wanted to bring Kaitlyn back as a financial expert, since we're on the topic of money, and share a little bit more about one of the biggest myths and misconceptions that I think plagues a lot of entrepreneurs, including myself, which is this idea of how much we really have to reach for how fast or how big we need to scale our companies in order to realistically create wealth that allows us to live the lifestyle we want. So Kaitlyn is going to speak to that a little bit today. Kaitlyn, can you like kind of distill more, what you see is the main challenge for entrepreneurs who think this way?

Kaitlyn Carlson

02:29

Sure. So whenever I'm presenting to a group of entrepreneurs, I always start by saying that context leads to intention. And our mission is to help our clients lead intentional lives. And so we provide that context to them by quantifying the goals that they've laid out for us. And one pattern that we notice over and over is that entrepreneurs are relieved at the end of onboarding because they realize, Oh, it doesn't take as much as I thought it did. Or oh, it's not as scary as I thought I can actually achieve this. And so typically, when I'm presenting, I always give the example of Emily.

Kaitlyn Carlson

03:05

So if Emily came to me, and she said she wants to be we often say work optional, versus like retirement, if Emily wants to be work optional at age 60, with a lifestyle of $20,000 per month, if she's coming to me at age 30, I would say to her, okay, Emily, you have to save around $5,200 a month to achieve this goal. If she comes to me at age 40. Now, she has to save around $11,000 a month to achieve this goal. If she comes at age 50, now she has to save $30,000 a month to achieve this goal. And if she comes to me at age 60, she has to come up with $8.2 million. And so I love to present this in a visual way. Because there are just so many things we can extrapolate from this mountain chart that I give.

Kaitlyn Carlson

03:54

The first is that the younger you start, the less it takes. And so that's why our mission is to get people moving on this and their 30s and 40s. Because it's going to be such a lighter lift, obviously $5,200 A month is much different than $30,000 a month. So that's the first thing that we talk about is the importance of taking action now. But sometimes I have entrepreneurs come into me with high margin businesses, and they say, Wait a second, I can actually already save 11 or $12,000 a month. And I say well, that's amazing, because that means you could be financially free in 20 years versus 30 years.

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