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Up Your Average is the “no nonsense” podcast made for interesting people who think differently. Learn to navigate your life with unconventional wisdom by tuning in to Keith Tyner and Doug Shrieve every week.
Everybody has a financial worldview. And the more that you, I think, put this into the reality of your decision grid, I think you're gonna make better decisions as you go forward, particularly about finances. I don't know if you know what a Gimbal is or not, but some people call it a gyroscope and a number of things. It's more modernly seen with social media people with their cameras. It's a gyroscope that holds something level in spite of how you do it.
Keith:And Gimbal Financial was established in 1997, and we didn't start it with a name, we started it with an affiliation with an organization and then realized we need to name the business in a marketing kind of manner. And for many, many months we had been publishing a newsletter called The Anchor with the idea that you are best served when you anchor your life to things. And so we liked that nautical name and thought, well, let's look at a nautical dictionary and that's where we came up with the name Gimbal Financial. And so we've just used that as a kind of a anchor to our business model as well. A Gimbal, as you can see, it holds the compass level on this device in spite of what's going on in the world.
Keith:And that's what we see ourselves as financial advisors as leveling devices. We can't fix everything, we can't do everything, but we think that our wisdom can add value to you. And so years ago when this occurred, we hired a marketing company and what they did is they took the top view of the gimbal and made that our logo. In case you ever see this logo and you're wondering what it's all about, the spaces are the negative part of this photo. So the compass would be the yellow here, but these black, or excuse me, blue lines coming here are the parts of the gimbal that allow the compass to stay level.
Keith:So that's our logo and the evolution of it. And what I would say is that when you are thinking about a financial firm, probably their worldview is a big deal. And mostly what we present over time beyond our financial ideas are these five principles. We think you should think differently. We think you should buy wisdom in all the endeavors that matter to you, like what you do, live adventurously, and finally, generosity wins.
Keith:So that's part of the Gimbal's worldview. But I thought I would just then take you a little bit to the idea of a worldview. And we designed this worksheet, which we can attach to this to help people think through what's really important to them. The idea of a worldview is it's a lens for which you view the world, that the world makes sense to you. And this idea came to me because of an old saying, blessed are the peacemakers and the peacekeepers in the world.
Keith:And we live in a time with a lot of divisiveness and disagreements. And I think if one identifies their worldview reasonably well, then they can probably find themselves less divisive, less argumentative in life. So the idea of this is that you would come up with the ideas that form your lens of life. And a couple that I don't have on here that maybe I've used over time would be career and hobbies. Those are things that kind of drove my worldview.
Keith:Maybe as a teenager, my hobbies drove everything I did. And so, then with the concept of this worksheet, then you can conceptually have some write in ballots down here. You rank ones that are important to you. You don't even have to include the ones that are important to you. So for me, high up in that would be my identity and my family, and then low in it would be politics.
Keith:And I mentioned that one because that seems to be a divisive one. But if my identity was high and I gave it a rank one, and how strong conviction I have between zero and ten, I'm strongly convicted, that'd be an eight or nine conviction on that. Family, probably be two, and eight or nine conviction, which means I'm going to focus my energy on that. If I were to put politics on my list of worldview, I might put it at a 25 or something like that, low priority, and maybe a six or seven conviction on that, like I have strong opinions, but they don't drive my worldview. It's not the focus for which I look at life.
Keith:So then if you take that idea to the next level, and that's what I wanted to present to you is kind of how we think about that. Everybody has a financial worldview. And the more that you, I think, put this into the reality of your decision grid, I think you're gonna make better decisions as you go forward, particularly about finances. And this evolves with time when I was a new hire in business, I just wanted to be a success. So the money wasn't the high driver, but the idea of making my career high value was a big deal.
Keith:And so there's many ideas that can be in a financial worldview. We put financial freedom, that's something that some people have, family time, risk avoidance, we see older people like high up there as risk avoidance. And maybe some people want to leave a financial legacy, some money to the future generations, or maybe you want to experience life. For me, I would probably narrow that down and put travel. Travel has been a high value financial thing that I would rank it probably very high on this number, and give it a strong conviction.
Keith:I just booked a travel to Alaska in the winter this morning in that thought process. So experience life, helping others that could be through charity or time, you could value free time. We have a friend who over time didn't want more money from his employer, but every time they were offered him a raise, he said, could I get more time off? And so in his example, he really appreciated that free time to do the things that really mattered to him. Simple living, man, the more complicated that you make your life, my experience has been, the more expensive it gets, the less free time you have.
Keith:It's just a vicious cycle, so that could be part of your financial worldview. Minimizing taxes and sharing or things, maximizing wealth. When I was in my early twenties, conquering the world would have been part of my financial worldview, I really wanted to own everything. I wanted to be the Elon Musk or the Bill Gates of the day. One of the things that I had to come to grips with at one point was how much is enough, that would have been a financial worldview I was working through.
Keith:And then another one that's really been a big deal to me and it's retirement. Retirement is really been narrated to you via marketing and financial services over the years. And it wasn't really an idea until maybe a little over a hundred years ago. Most people had to work until they died basically. And so then with the great depression and social security, and the government getting involved, and then big financial institutions getting involved, the marketing over the last seventy five years has made retirement almost a expectation of reality that's always gonna be there.
Keith:And so, like for me, I just redefined retirement a number of years ago, probably about the time we started Gimbal as doing what I want to do. And that redefinition helped me prioritize some of these other things on the list there. So, I present all this to you because there's just not a real simple explanation of what you should do with your finances. I think if you would take the time personally, you and your spouse to navigate through this and create a conversation with this, I think it'll go great guns for you to help think things through. Like if you watch some of the recent immigrants in America, family has really high value to them, and that there are a lot of people that live in a single house today.
Keith:Well, that way of their financial worldview enables them to gain wealth quicker than maybe even people that have been in America for a long time, because they haven't had their worldview formulated by the advertising and marketing of the financial services industry. So I encourage you to sit down, think about this, talk about it with those who are important to you. And then if we can help you as you're navigating a financial plan for the future, we would be honored to do so. Just give us a call. And in the meantime, I hope today's a great day and I hope this helped up your average.