Money Talks with Coach JP Money

The Secrets to Family Finance with Marriage Success Advocate Steve Cooper

• Johnny Punish / Steve Cooper • Season 1 • Episode 3

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Family Fundamentals - Talking about the Foundation of Wise Personal Finance with Steve Cooper from The Love Safety Net in Australia

The average family's security is currently under extreme stress.  It's time to explore the path forward for young families to win the future.  In lieu, host Johnny Punish welcomes Steve Cooper to GT Radio to shed light on getting the yellow brick road of success.

Steve Cooper

Steve and his life wife, the world-renowned author Kim Cooper, have worked hard over the years to develop content that hopefully inspires families to focus on what they call Family Fundamentals.

Their content encourages husbands and fathers (or wives if they are more of the leader in the family) to complete a fundamental analysis of their family's systems of governance that assesses the security of their assets;

* Which Includes * emotional well-being and meaning in their lives and start working towards getting their families governance structure SHIPSHAPE.

For example: "Does their family have a decision-making process in place –a process that all members have agreed upon– of how resources are purchased and allocated?"

If you search the internet on how to set up a business or corporation, you will receive lots of detailed and highly professional advice. Search for how to build a family, and you will get a lot of vague, unstructured platitudes, such as ‘Communicate and make sure you spend time together’.

Getting your family fundamentals in place can certainly be overwhelming. Like most people who establish their own business, getting solid fundamentals in place often takes years.

To get started it can be helpful to arrive at a 'mission statement' or purpose of the family staying strong and united.

For example: “To produce excellence in providing emotional and physical security and stability for all family members, including a home where we get to eat, rest, enjoy companionship, and take care of our personal needs.”

Or once children have grown up and moved out, it might be more like...

“To produce excellence in providing emotional and physical security and stability for all family members, including supporting each other to reach our full potential.”

Kim and Steve are GenX - they were reliably told that working hard in paid employment would allow us to retire comfortably but that old advice isn't looking so good. It is rapidly becoming an outdated approach.  Families need to get to their financial freedom through cooperation and a shared vision.

Steve and Kim Cooper Resources

Resources




Okay, and we're on with Steve Cooper from the Love Safety Net straight from Australia. Steve, how you doing today? Hey Johnny, I'm great, thank you, and how you doing over there? Fabulous, I'm over here in Paris, France on my typical free thinking relocation tour. I do about three months a year. I just travel around the world and locate myself wherever the hell I feel like it. And it's part of being financially free. It's the benefits of that. Now you're in Australia, right? That's correct. We're loving our life down here. It's a pretty lovely, peaceful country. We're very happy here, but we're not averse to going overseas. So I'm interested to know more about that too. Absolutely. Now Steve, you and your wife Kim are experts in the marriage and family area, is that correct? Yeah, that's right. So we, we put ourselves across as peer support specialists. So we're not experts. We don't work in the academic field, although we reference academic work all of the time and the academic works fantastic. It's very useful, but we are peer support specialists, definitely in the non-academic realm, but we've been writing for over 15 years now and we've, we've got a lot of work. We've got a lot of content online. So we've been doing it for so long. We feel like we can offer a lot. Absolutely. In fact, I want to talk today about financial freedom because that's part of marriage and part of partnership and there's a lot of misconceptions about how to do it and how to make things work. Obviously, we've been around a long time, both you and I, we've seen success and failure in our lives, right? So we have a lot of adversity that we've overcome to get to the place where we can talk about success. But you know, there's a lot of young people out there, a lot of young couples out there that... are struggling with this and they can't figure it out and it's terrible. You watch it happen in front of your face and you're like, oh, I know all the answers, listen to me. I've been there 25 different times already and it's hard, right? So they don't listen sometimes and that's the hardest part for me. What have you found out about finances and family and how their success relates to freedom and getting things up and running? Well, that's a really good question. And I guess I could start from the beginning from how Kim and I arrived at this position in our lives where we're working online and sharing the information that we do have. We started out with different mindsets, Kim and I from different backgrounds. Kim's from California. I grew up in Australia. We had a completely different idea about what it was going to be for us to work together as a family, for us to be a couple, for us to raise children, for us to be in business together. You know, well... I'm thinking back 31 years when we met now and the ideas I had, the ideas Kim had, they were not compatible. I mean, we loved each other. Look, the whole romance and when we met and it was wonderful and passionate and fantastic. And I remember it fondly and there's no problem there, but it just took us a while. And you talked about the adversity that we faced when we were young. We didn't realize what adversity was coming at us. And it does just take that experience to learn and grow through that and face it when it's right in your face. So that really set the tone for us to think, well, what is it about our mindsets? And what is it about our preconceived notions, our predetermined ideas of how we were going to be financially free, how we were going to make this marriage work? We didn't have any idea. Well, we both had different ideas. put it that way. And so that was what was difficult. And that was really, really harrowing at times. Kim and I had a very difficult time when we were just, when we had young kids, you know, I don't know, every, anybody that's listening to this, it's had young kids, you'll know that that's just such a demanding time in your life. And it's hard to get your mind on the job. You've got a split. responsibilities, you've got a responsibility to your children, to your wife, husband, partner, and then you've got this responsibility to a boss and you're trying to please your boss as well. Please the kids, please your partner. And I think speaking from experience, Johnny, that's just me when I was young and doing that, I was a young parent in my early twenties. I first started having children and Kim and I first started having our children. And that's just so difficult. So it took us some time to get through that and that adversity was real. We talk about that in our site and at the Love Safety Net, we talk about a lot of those experiences and how they helped shape us and how we faced some of those more difficult positions that we found ourselves in. So to move through it, we had to endure the difficult stuff, but it was eventually we found it was our mindsets. Now there's a lot of talk. There's a catchphrase, growth mindset. You hear a lot about that in coaching and in the corporate world, the growth mindset. That's very much a terminology used in business coaching. But how often does that apply to a family situation? It took some time in Kim's research because Kim's an amazing researcher. That's her skill, that's her talent. She researches extremely well and she writes and conveys that to the audience. That business knowledge of improving your mindset was one of the most important steps in our healing as a family. And that was the first step to us becoming financially free. So it's an interesting story. It's probably a bit too long for this podcast, but I mean, to put it in a nutshell, the support for people... facing conflict in the corporate arena is evidently everywhere. You have HR departments and you have even psychologists in some of the bigger corporations now that help people get through this stuff. That mindset, if it can be applied to a family, can bring about so many fantastic results and it has for us. So that's where we're at. many young people that get married in a romantic way and you know, especially when they're younger I mean my goodness is they're 21 22 and this is a disaster waiting to happen right there They're gonna run into a wall. It's like you want to warn them. Hey, you're running into a wall It's coming. You can't see it, but it's right in front of you and there they are. They get married They're romantic. They're in love a blood and the next day they got to pay the rent Oh that you know and you run into that wall and they were not prepared for it, right? So Divorce is hanging over their heads, stress is hanging over their head, they don't know what to do. It's a terrible, terrible situation. What do you say to those younger people as a learned couple, where do you start from that point? How do you get to the place where you can get yourself under control? How do you break down the romance and break down the reality? Ah, that's, that's really great to start there. So first of all, let's just talk about divorce. Divorce is something that's become an item on the shelf to just, it's a consumer item. It all has become that. Unfortunately in our generation, and I think Johnny, you know, roughly the same age, and we know that divorce rates, uh, when we're, we know that you, well, just let me tell you a quick story. When I was in primary school in Australia, I was the only person in my school who I knew. whose parents were divorced. My parents divorced when I was quite young. This was in the early 80s. So I mean, it was very unusual. By the time I finished high school 10 years later, I only knew two people in my whole class whose parents were still together. I mean, we're talking about the early 80s to the early 90s. So this is just, you know, the divorce has become a consumer item. It's become a bucket list thing for people. It's become too easy. Unfortunately, it's become too easy. And that's one of the most difficult things. So going back to the young, the question about the young people, what are they facing? So there's always an opportunity to stop and reflect. And there must be, there has to be, because what we're trying to do is trying to get two people with different ideas. And it's very difficult to thrash out those ideas when we are young, because we are still idealistic about what the future brings. We are trapped in the romance of what we've just been going through. Now today's Valentine's Day here in Australia. I think it's going to tick over to Valentine's Day there soon. Yeah, it's 9 in the morning here in Paris. What day is it? It's the 14th, so I guess that is Valentine's Day, isn't it? Valentine's Day to you, Johnny. And romance is in a very important part of any relationship, of course. I'm not going to put Valentine's Day down. It's something we should be celebrating every year. It's a wonderful calendar event. Kim didn't get a bunch of flowers today, but we got some flowers in a pot that's going to go into the garden. So that's just where we're at in our lives now. We like to think practically, we still try to keep the romance alive, but talking in practical terms, but romance. on romance, yesterday I took my wife to a brasserie down the corner. We had some lovely champagne for lunch and some oysters. And I've taken the approach of romance every day as opposed to Valentine's Day, which I generally protest. I hate forced romance. It's like, you know, force making love. Like, I'm not in the mood right now. You know what I mean? Maybe, how about later? You know, so it's a very strange, but it is a lovely idea of the holiday and there's nothing wrong with it. So I'm just a strange person. we have to be careful joining as men to put down Valentine's Day. We shouldn't be going there at all. But I mean, if we can talk about the romance, because Kim and I now, one of our most recent publications, talk a lot about romance. Romanticism has become somewhat of a means to force us into consumerism. And this is not a new concept that I'm sharing. everybody knows that. And of course on Valentine's Day, you know, the cynical side of all of us can very easily say, yeah, well, okay, it's just a day. But Valentine's Day is something else. Romanticism is what we really focused on in our book. Romanticism has been with us since the very early days of fairy tales. Now the fairy tales of, we go into this in our book, into it in depth in one of our chapters. The romanticism of the fairy tales is based on some very unrealistic expectations. It's based on a lot of things that really don't hold up in the historical records. So like a young Cinderella type story, a young Cinderella who is mopping floors will never marry a prince. That just never, ever, ever happened. That's not how things worked. Marriage in those times were about... consolidating power between families. There wasn't the romance part of it. It just had to be pushed out into the romance novel. So one of the most successful genres of literature is the romance novel. It is phenomenally successful. Unfortunately, the success of that is because there are so many, particularly women, and in this case, it is women who are reading romance novels because they're not getting that connection from the people in their lives. They're not getting it from their husbands. They're not getting it from their children. They're not getting that kind of intense, oversimplified emotional intensity. They're not getting it. And so unfortunately, romance novels do. And we can see in cinema and television how much that has been pushed on us as well. I think the biggest movie of this century for a long time was the Titanic, which was essentially a love story. I mean, it was a story about a boat going down, one of the most... But... It was a romance, not that it was about the romance and not to say that they didn't do a good job of that film. I'm sure it's great. I haven't seen it. Kim and I don't watch that kind of stuff. We don't really have time for that. But that is really pushed on us by the marketers and the marketers and the advertisers are the people that want to try and get into our space. They want to get into our wallets, they want to get into our bank accounts, but they really want to get into our space, the space between each other, the space between each other in families. And that's what's getting eroded. We're finding it very difficult to match what's happening with Leo DiCaprio and that lovely British actress, whatever her name is. We can't compete with that. And so this oversimplified romantic notion is pushed on us from all levels of art. and even the sciences try and convince us that we need to be doing this and that. This is really threatening us as families because what we need to do as families is, yes, encourage the beautiful intimate romance that happens. It's beautiful. Kim and I have a very close relationship. We try and every day try and make lighthearted gestures towards each other. It's really important. We really make an effort to show each other that we love each other. But beyond all of that, because as you say, Johnny, at the very beginning of most relationships, that romance is so intense, but then the rest of your life, there's a lot of practical stuff that needs to be attended to. And it's, and it sounds boring when you're young. Yeah, it's morning. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I always say this, 95 % of our time after we get married is who's going to do the wash and who's going to buy the groceries and pay the rent, pay the utilities and the making love stuff. That's like 5 % of the time. Hopefully it's more, but we're so under financial stress that it causes such aggravation. In fact, I think I saw a study where it said more people get divorced over money than over infidelity. It's just a massive amount of stress, right? It's survival, basically. So I was just wondering, what are the steps young people can take to mature into a responsible financial disposition as opposed to pretending? Get out of the pretend stage and get into the reality stage and deal with the reality that we need to deal with money and finances. It's not taught in schools. Our kids are graduating high school. not knowing anything about marriage or money. I mean, money is literally the most important thing besides health, right? If you have no health, there's nothing to negotiate. But after that, it's money, folks. And I know you don't want to talk about it, but the people that talk about money have money, and the people that don't have money, we need to talk about money. Money is a serious subject. It's based on survival. We're not in La La Land living in some socialist world where everybody just gives us money. I mean, that's La La Land, right? The reality is, Capitalism and globalisms all over the world. That's what global thinkers is about So I want to talk about that Steve about money How do the young people in their 20s and 30s get over that hump? What do you say to them? Well, so Kim and I at the Love Safety Net, we have some very helpful tools. So let's talk about this. When you're investing in a business and anybody that's in any serious investor always looks at the fundamentals of a business. So that's the terminology, the fundamentals. What is its profitability? How long have they been in business? Who is in the leadership role? Do they have their legal and accounting? What are the assets? So, I mean, the fundamentals are more like the assets, the liabilities, the cash flow and the outgoings. Those are the business fundamentals. And then beyond, there's more than that. So any serious investor will always look at the fundamentals of any entity he or she is going to invest in. And, hey, who's to argue with that? That's just how, that's the reality of it. And that's what we have to focus on. with our family also. So what we have as part of the Love Safety Net is we have a tab on the top of our site called Family Fundamentals. Now this we have, it's called the lovesafetynet .com. So that's the lovesafetynet .com. You'll see a lot of articles there Kim and I write together. Kim does most of the writing and the researching. We have a family business. Kim and I work together. She's very good at sitting still and researching and writing. And when she's tired of that, she's like a dynamo. I can't slow her down. I'm the opposite. I'm the opposite. I like to be moving all of the time. That's a bit of a yin and yang thing we do together, you know, and that's just how it works. And we've learned to love each other for being that way. It is, it works well. It took us a long time to really respect that about each other, but it did take us some time. So the business fundamentals are one thing. So the family fundamentals are the other. Now it's... slightly different. We're not looking at assets and liabilities, although that's important. We have to get good at bookkeeping and we have to get good at forecasting within a family. If you're in a relationship, any kind of relationship, especially an intimate relationship, a husband and wife team, boyfriend and girlfriend team, yes, your bookkeeping is really important. That needs to be transparent. Anybody that doesn't pay attention to that is really only setting themselves up for a big fall. Yes. in terms of family fundamentals, it's very different. There needs to be decision -making process. And that's one of the offerings we have at the Love Safety Net and the family fundamentals. Do you have a decision -making process for spending? Who decides what? Maybe it's not something you've ever thought about. Maybe it's not something that you really care about, but it's something you should care about. Because... what is going to happen if somebody starts deciding that they're going to start booking an overseas holiday, let's say, and not informing the rest of the family. Let's just say somebody did that. Or let's just say, let's take a really horrible example. Let's just say somebody in the family decides they're going to buy a dog and not talk to anybody else. There's been no decision -making process. They just turn up with dog one day. I hope you didn't, I hope you never did that. Did you, Johnny? No, not me personally, no. I love dogs though, I mean I've had dogs but no. Well, if you're going to get a dog, it's very important that in the decision making process that everybody's decided that it's going to be okay. And that there's going to be some responsibilities for that. So we also have a conflict resolution process. Now, this is all that these are all documents that people can read and download and review and reference when they're in. danger or they're in trouble in the relationship. So the conflict resolution process is another important thing. A conflict resolution process has come straight from the corporate world. Corporate culture, for everything we say bad about corporate culture, and there's plenty of it, I like to throw mud at them all the time. I'm not a corporate culture type at all, but we have to give them credit for they do manage people very well. Yes. They do manage conflicts and they do manage demarcation and all of those important processes that happen within a court. They have to, they can't afford to just lose people. They can't afford to have. they have, a huge company, you better be a master of it. Yeah. So in a family, it's the same thing. Now, it's very difficult in the modern era, as you say, Johnny, the financial pressure is building on people. And we hear it at the loves, because we do, we do mentoring, and we handle a lot of email correspondence. And we're hearing from people. It's horrendous. Our books are very inexpensive, you know, they're under, you know, 20 US dollars and our subscriptions are only about $8 a month. We have a very cheap entry to what we're doing and we don't have a very big ticket item at the end. We're not trying to get money out of people. But the people that do contact us are really struggling to even find that much money. Now, how have we got to this point? That's probably the topic for another podcast, but we have to recognize that people are under a lot of financial stress. But... if we can get that connection and that synergy within the family, there is a ton of ways that we can ease that pressure, not just the financial pressure, but the stress of the financial pressure. That is what's killing people. That is what's killing people's sex life. That is what's killing people's decision-making. We're facing a lot of uncertainty this year in 2024 and our... opinion is that we have to do everything we can and throw everything we've got out online that we've been developing for the last 15 years to help people get through this. It's important, you know, it's not just the young people, it's the parents of the young people that are struggling with that because when young people have trouble in the family, the parents are affected as well because everybody cares. Family is a big thing. Family is not one thing, right? Extended family is important. Connections are important. And to pretend they don't exist or not to care about them is actually silly because we're all interdependent, right? So... family, in my case I have three children and seven grandkids, we have an awesome family, right? Now we've had our challenges and we still have a few challenges that we're dealing with, but the truth is you gotta keep it together. And the way to keep it together is by love, communication, connection, sharing, putting your hand out, caring, not being judgmental, but also being tough with the younger people that are not getting it together. Sometimes it happens, you know? They just... They're in the wrong space and they're not getting it together and they're putting pressure on everybody else around them unnecessarily, not taking personal responsibility. And I think that's where parents and grandparents can be a little bit more tough love in a way of caring. Not to throw somebody out or say, I don't want love you anymore, I don't want to talk to you anymore because those are extreme choices that you have to make sometimes in life when someone's really a sociopath and really out of control. I mean, there's completely... You know, they might belong in prison or something for doing bad things, you know. But other than that, the smaller things can be overcome. But young people are having a hard time growing up. And they're having a hard time, they're not educated in money, they come into a relationship with zero experience and zero knowledge, and they expect to win, and they don't win, they lose, they get their butt kicked, and they don't know why, right? So that's what I'm trying to get at is these young people, what do they have to do? How do they, is it a mature leap? Is it a maturity thing? Do they have to lose before they win? Is that how they get there? Or can they just call you? You know what I mean? Why don't they call us? I mean, we are the experienced warriors who have blood all over our hands and scars everywhere. I think I got hit with a sword a few times and you know, I mean, all kinds of things happen to me. I mean, I've survived all this garbage. I mean, I know what I'm talking about, right? So. You tell me what you think it is. Do they need to lose before they win? Is that what has to happen? Well, I certainly hope not. I don't think it needs to be that way. But what I think we are witnessing from what you've said, and this reminds me of something very important I want to say is that the role of leadership in a family is so crucial. And it doesn't so traditionally, so you and I, Johnny, are old enough to know, I mean, I had to obey my father. There was no question of it. The only people that disobeyed their fathers were people that were going straight to prison as soon as they were old enough. I mean, that was just the generation I grew up in. That was the culture I grew up in here in Australia in a sort of Anglo ethnic upbringing. Father was everything. Now I'm not defending that. I'm not saying we have to rewind the clock to a time when we had didactic parents and didactic fathers. That's not what I think needs to happen. Although the role of leader needs to be honored and that role of leader can never be undermined. So unfortunately, this goes back to our conversation about divorce. The concept of the, well, the growth of divorce has set the arena into something that we've never experienced before in our cultures, in our global culture. There is this tendency to undermine... the leader in the family because there is always the option that somebody can pull the pin and say I'm out of here and I'm taking half of all of this and the kids can go every second weekend that way and every Wednesday night here and we'll just negotiate that we'll let the lawyers deal with it and we'll let the court deal with it. So I think that is okay that's very hard to quantify so if you're talking to an academic they'll say well you can't really prove that kind of proposal. Well, I'm proposing it. I think leadership is so crucial. Now in our family, it's been very difficult. Kim is a very cardinal type person. She's very much a leader. She's very, very intelligent. She's very focused. She's a great leader and she came from a different generation. I'm sorry, her father was from a different generation. Her father fought in World War II. I mean, my grandfather fought in World War II. So there's this gap between our understanding of what's right. And so I think there's always, and in our life, in Kim and my relationship, we had that problem. I wasn't able to step up as a leader. That left a vacuum. Kim had to try and fill it. And of course that doesn't work with children. That doesn't work in families. I was going, well, hang on, how come, why isn't Steve, why isn't Steve doing this? Why is Kim trying to do this this way? You know, so that, uh, gap that I had, if I could rewind the clock, I would go back and I'd say, okay, so we have to get our family governance in, in, in order right now we're having kids. This is happening. We're into it. We're in business together. We've got the, we're going to have three kids. Goodness me. We need to be ready. And I wasn't, and I wasn't ready to take that leadership role. And that was through my own narcissism and my own immaturity and my own inability to really, to understand that I had to take, I had to take that role and I had to learn quickly and I had to be prepared to make mistakes. Now, some of the mistakes I made, it just so regrettable. I dread thinking about them. Yeah. I, yeah, I kind of. And the older I get, those regrettable moments seem to get worse in my mind. You gotta forgive yourself. That's what I do for myself. I'm like, yeah, I've made mistakes too. And you know, we all do, right? So let it go. You're doing a great, I always say, I'm doing a great job now. It's the best that I can do. I'll take that. You know, I'll take the best I can do. You know. right. So, I mean, you're a grandfather. So, I mean, I'd be encouraging you if you were writing to us and you were talking to us through the Love Safety Net, Johnny, I'd be saying, you have got this gift to be grandfather to seven children. Take that, build on that, make that something special for those kids. Don't be afraid. Don't ever be afraid to look uncool because I know you're cool, Johnny. I know I'm cool. You know, I'm Steve. I'm cool. I don't, I'm ready to be blunt if I need to be. And, and I just own, yeah, only a couple of weeks ago, I, I, I butted heads with my daughter who's 25 years old and, um, and I didn't feel any guilt. I, what I said to you, darling, was actually what I believe. And I think you needed to hear it. I'm, I'm sorry. I hurt your feelings, but I'm not going to retract what I said, but taking that, that took me a long time to get comfortable enough to be that. father figure for her. And you know what? She didn't really like what I said a couple of weeks ago, but you know, a few days later, she actually, we had a really lovely conversation and she really understood that it was what I needed to say and it was my truth. So she couldn't argue with it. So leadership is not always a vote for personal popularity. It's not a popularity contest, right? I'm going give you a little thing that I do. It's kind of funny, so I want to share this with you, Steve. What I do with the little kids, with the grandkids, for example, or when my kids were little, I call it what I call a family meeting. I go, family meeting, because let's say something really bad happened or something went wrong or whatever. We need to fix it. Family meeting. And with the littlest kids, I have a family meeting. So I put all seven kids on the couch. You know, gotta kinda corral them in like, you know, chickens, cause they're all running, you know, they're seven years old running around. And I'll say stuff like, we have a family meeting and we got something important to discuss. And they're like, what is it grandpa? You know, I go, we have discussed, do we get pizza or do we get hamburgers? I wanna have a vote on this, right? And so I go pizza and then they go with the raised hand, the other guy, you know, he says, I want hamburgers or whatever. And I'm conditioning them to have a family meeting because very, very soon with them. we're gonna have a family meeting about responsibility and who's gonna make your bed and your allowance and how to use money and talk about money even at an early age. But for me to do that, I need to get their trust. So they need to feel that that family meeting is a fun thing as opposed to a roll your eyes at me thing. So I try that. Now with my older kids, you know, they're adults. I don't have family meetings anymore. My kids are 38, 35 and 32. There's no more family meetings. But when they were in their teens, The family meeting was a serious conversation. I treated them with the respect that they deserve, which is treating them with being direct and honest with them about, hey, we got a problem in this family. Right now, we're not having enough money. We got to pay the bills, utilities. You guys are leaving the lights on. You guys are doing this. We got to cut that out right away. Everybody's got to do their job. Everybody's got the responsibility. Now you, make sure you clean your room. You make sure you do this. Everybody sacrifice and we all win together. And like, whoa. And then I get that a little bit of rolling eyes, another not a family meeting again. But you know what the funny thing is Steve? They all listen and they all did it. And you know what? We had great success. So if anybody out there listening to this, try the family meeting routine. It works for me. I'm not saying it works for everybody. Maybe your personality is different, but you know, it's basically a management tool that you use in business, right? When things go wrong in business at the corporate level, you call a meeting, right? And you sit down on the meeting table and you discuss it. Sales are down, what's the problem with our product? What do we need to change? And that's kind of what the family meeting is about. Now, we're talking about money here, but we're really talking about management of people and leadership. And money success kind of follows that. So if you have success with your family meeting, everybody on the same page, then you can have money success. But I think you were alluding to is when one person's going that way and the other person's going this way, buying the dog routine, like I'm buying a dog without you knowing. Hehehehe. direction. I see this happen to some young people recently where the husband's going that way, the woman's going that way, they're not talking, and they're spending money on their own as if they're not even married. And they're failing. They can't pay the rent. They literally can't pay the rent. So there's that. So it's a scene then. Yeah. What say you, Steve? I think the revelation I had, and it wasn't until recently, it wasn't probably until about 20 years into our relationship with Kim, was that, I mean, I was raised thinking that if I just stuck in my job and I pleased my boss and I worked my way up through the system, that I would be rewarded. Now it became apparent to me way too late. In my forties, I realized that this isn't just isn't simply is not working. Kim and I, we have amazing experience. We've synthesized our skills into a family business, which we've been running for the last decade or so. And what we've been able to achieve since then is the financial freedom, the ups and downs. But as a fabulous business mentor said to me once, he said, Steve, Business goes up. Business is good sometimes. Business is bad sometimes, but stay in. Stay in business. Just ride it out. It'll get good again. Just stay in. Just don't lose faith. And Kim and I had a couple of rough patches. COVID wasn't much fun at all, but that was for everybody. No, but we rode through COVID as well. And that was very difficult for us. Our cashflow just diminished and virtually zero. But we got through it and we, because... we had this family structure, we had a family governance structure in order, and we were able to do some things that enriched our lives during that downtime. We didn't have a lot of money. I mean, the flip side of COVID was we weren't spending money. We didn't have anywhere to go and spend money. So. you cut down your expenses big time, you hunkered down, you got tight, you got rid of all the excess and you survived it. Is that what you're saying? and we developed a new business, which is still operating now. We developed a new business during COVID that's a supplementary business. So that's what I'm so excited about and sharing with our audiences because COVID was a blessing in that sense because we're able to go, let's just get good at this. We really like doing this. It's a very simple business. It's just a simple cashflow business. It doesn't really pay our rent, but it pays our expenses. It pays, it's our spending money. So all of our business incomes just going into the business back into the business. And we've got a sideline business that gives us our money to, to go out to dinner, to fill up the car if we need to. It's a fabulous sideline business, but we were. what I'm hearing from you, Steve, is that both you and your spouse are on the same page. And that's what we're talking about, I think, is that the husband and wife, the family, needs to be on the same page. And when they're not on the same page, that's when chaos happens and failure happens and an unbelievable amount of stress and everything around them gets hurt. Their friends, their family, everybody's suffering over this because... Two people can't get on the same page. You gotta have that family meeting. Don't you think, Steve? I mean, we're gonna have that family meeting. Sit down. We're gonna talk this out and we're gonna work this out, you know? And we're to have patience to do it and we're going to respect each other's different opinions. And yet there's in our process, in our documents, it takes you through all of those steps. But what we can do is we can control how our family operates. We are in charge of that. You, me and Kim, you and your partner, Johnny, anybody else listening, you and your partner and then your children and then the satellites around that. But you're in control. There's so many other things that we're not in control of that stress us out. But we have the power in our own hands. We just need to be able to get in the right mindset. A growth mindset for family. Yes, and the growth mindset for better income and a growth mindset for more generous happiness when the sun's out or if it's raining, all of the little things that happen around. Yes, the mindset needs to be there. So we can't rely on anybody else, particularly governments. churches, sporting clubs, nobody's going to give us that power to develop systems for ourselves, to free ourselves financially. We have to do it ourselves. Absolutely. On that note, Steve, it is Valentine's Day. I'm going to definitely take my wife out for a Valentine's Day lunch, get her some flowers, of course, that kind of thing, because it's a nice thing to do, right? It's a lovely thing to do. It's a happy thing to do. We should do that, right? Agree? Okay. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. It's cloudy, it's cold, and it's perfect. It's great. a baguette and a croissant. Now, before I let you go, it's really important I want you to share all your stuff again, you know, what you're doing, your books, your subscription to Kim Substack. Can you kind of explain to our listeners and viewers all over the world exactly how to reach you, what you guys offer, that kind of thing. Well, the very, very, very best thing to do is to search for Kim Cooper on Substack. All of her work is there now at the moment. She's actually getting some of the, our oldest books that have been written a long time ago back in the back end of that. So people can access that at the best price they've ever been able to get it for very, very important publications. So it's Kim Cooper on Substack. So that is, it's been a fabulous, it's been a revelation for writers. Substack. It's just so fantastic. It gives writers so many tools that they. had to waste time in the past doing various different systems. So Kim's very, very happy. So if you can come over to Substack, there is a free option to subscribe. There's a lot of free articles that come out. Kim's got a very good sense of what to put out in a timely fashion and she doesn't bombard your emails. She's very good at that. We also have a site called the lovesafetynet .com that I mentioned earlier. The lovesafetynet .com has lot of reading material that you can go through and and look at some of the stuff. So it'll relate to everybody. Now, if you're in a really great relationship and you've got your finances sorted and you've been in love and you were childhood sweet outs and everything's fine, maybe you don't need to come and listen to us. But you will find that there are people in your orbit that are having troubles and our website really helps people because a lot of our information is free. We have a very, very cheap subscription on King Cooper at Substack. And then the Love Safety Unit, we have a bookshop. And I encourage people to have a look at Family Fundamentals because that page really does give you a lot of the information I was talking about today. Do you offer any one -on -one direct coaching if someone actually wants that? Do you guys have that service? We do, although we find that we don't actually get a lot of... So let me just say this. We are not trained to mentor people. We are not trained to analyze people. We do offer a service in emergencies really only. What we found is that Kim's writing is so clear. Kim's able to get a message into something that's very... simple and very easy to digest. So the world of academia is a beautiful place. It's wonderful, but their books are a little bit too long and a little bit too academic. What Kim does is she distills all of that information and she puts it into easier to read stuff. Now, yeah, mentoring is something that we can offer if it's in special circumstances, but Johnny, to be honest, We have a fabulous business where we get to publish. We've got a microagurance business. We've got an accommodation business. We've got three beautiful kids that are getting into business themselves. We don't have a lot of spare time. So mentoring is the one that's been throttled back in the last 12 months or so, but we can do it at an emergency if we need be. but in this case, you got the books, you got the sub stack, and if anybody wants to reach out to those, if you're listening out there, go check out Steve Cooper and Kim Cooper's stuff on the internet and educate yourself, get yourself positioned to win the future. It's very important, Steve. I want to have you on again to discuss a more advanced family finance situation. In other words, people in their 30s or 40s who are kind of maturing into their lives and how... do they actually build wealth? For example, I have a daughter who's 38, she'd been married 10 years. They're doing really well, but they're getting to the point where bills are paid, they have extra funds for their income, and now what do they do, right? So how do they actually become millionaires, right? That's the key, right? Because it's not about being a millionaire, it's about getting a personal power to live a relatively free life in an unfree world. And that's the key, right? I mean, to come to Paris for three months and hang out. You know what I mean? That's what it's about. you've got a good family structure, you can do that. Absolutely on that note. I'll wish you and Kim and happy Valentine's Day in Australia. We're over here in Paris We're gonna do the Paris love connection. I hope everybody out there's listening and do the same thing and we'll talk to you soon Steve Take care, okay

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