Financial Wellness for First Responders: Expert Insights on Managing Money, and Retirement

Ashlee [00:00:00]:
What unique financial challenges do first responders face compared to general public sometimes? Or is there a reason why we see it so much in our office?

Jennifer [00:00:09]:
Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Jennifer.

Ashlee [00:00:12]:
And I'm Ashlee.

Jennifer [00:00:14]:
And it's my turn to say we have a super special guest today. I am so excited about our guest, Brian Box, who I got to meet an awesome, I don't know, Brian, what we would call that just a meeting of the minds here in the Texas area. And so, Brian, I'm going to give it to you and introduce our listeners. Tell us about you.

Brian Box [00:00:33]:
Yeah, my name is Brian Box. I am a financial advisor with Financial cop, which is based out of Frisco, Texas. And since we're going to talk about finances, got to lead off with a little bit of a disclaimer here so that all your listeners know that what I'm saying is an opinion. But I'll go over that real quick. The views expressed are for informational purposes only and are not designed to advise you on how to handle anything specific to your finances, nor will listening to our advice guarantee your financial success. Opinions expressed are subject to change without notice and do not take into account your specific financial situation and or needs. Discussions in this show should not be construed as specific recommendations or investment advice. Always consult with your investment professional before making important investment decisions.

Brian Box [00:01:23]:
Advisory services offered through Retirement Plan Advisors, llc, a federally registered investment advisor. RPA and Financial cop, LLC are not affiliated with that out of the way.

Jennifer [00:01:36]:
Appreciate that letting us know.

Brian Box [00:01:38]:
So a little bit about me. I graduated from Texas A and M in 1994 and obtained my commission in the United States army as a second lieutenant. I went off to San Antonio, Texas to do my Officer Basic course as a Medical Service Corps officer. Spent five months there. It was pretty, a pretty hectic time in my life because I graduated on a Friday, got commissioned on a Saturday and got married the following Saturday. So, and then two weeks, two weeks later started active duty. So did that for, for five months in San Antonio. Then I went off to flight school in Fort Rucker, Alabama, which is in southeast Alabama, went to flight school, graduated flight school, got assigned to the medical evacuation unit there at Fort Rucker, Alabama.

Brian Box [00:02:22]:
And over the next almost five, four and a half years, I jumped from different unit to unit at Fort Rucker doing different flying assignments and then went off to Germany. Came back from Germany, had a little expense, paid vacation to Kosovo for a few months, came back to Fort Hood, Texas, and then I got to take a extended deployment to a place that has a Lot of sand. And so I spent a little bit of time in Kuwait and Iraq and went as far as Baghdad and did medical evacuation during the initial push during the war starting in 2003. During that time, I really, I gotta say, one of the probably biggest parts of my life was going to the desert. I mean it was, it was one of those life experiences that you thought would just be horrible, but actually turned out to be a really cool experience. We been in a medical service corps unit. I mean we evacuated casualties off the battlefield. That was our mission.

Brian Box [00:03:22]:
And there was a lot of, a lot of job satisfaction to doing that. Went back to Fort Hood, decided it was time to watch my kiddos grow up. I'd spent about 10 years in the army and I found the Carrollton, Texas Police Department, which is one of the suburbs on the north side of the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex. And spent 15 years in, in, in Carrollton as a, as a police officer. I did just about everything you could do as a, as an officer except for be a K9 officer and a full time detective. We were a small smaller department. So a lot of opportunities to do different things as additional duties, not full time duties. So I was a motorcycle cop, I was a commercial vehicle inspector, I was on our honor guard, I was a SWAT team member, I was an explosive breacher on SWAT on our SWAT team.

Brian Box [00:04:08]:
Started our technology program because I was a pilot brought into it. So that was kind of the officer side. But then I decided it was time to promote. So I promoted to sergeant, spent a little bit of time on the patrol, then went became the training coordinator which is ironically where I met my now current boss. Once I met him, I was looking for a financial advisor. My parents lived in Houston, I was using theirs. Both my parents passed away and I was, that's a four and a half hour drive and zoom and streaming audio wasn't as big of a thing. So right started talking with Nick and Nick became my advisor.

Brian Box [00:04:43]:
And he was just starting out, starting out the company. So this was probably 2017, 2018, getting the company going and one of his, I'm one of his single digit first clients. So it's happy at the police department. But this opportunity presented itself to go back to flying. So I went to Nick and I says, hey, can I do this with my pension? And so I was going to have an earlier pension, I was going to leave it 15 years and count my military time and be able to obtain my pension.

Jennifer [00:05:12]:
Gotcha.

Brian Box [00:05:13]:
So we came up with this plan and he says, Brian, you just, you Know you deployed to the desert. He said, you can do anything you put your mind to for 18 months. Because I was looking to go to the airlines to go fly for the regional airlines. They were bringing in a lot of the helicopter guys. They were figuring out that if they can just teach us not to hover at the end of the Runway and just keep flying the airplane to the ground, we were pretty, pretty solid pilots. And so I did that. I went to work for Envoy Air, which is based here in Irving near Dallas Fort Worth Airport. Everything was going great.

Brian Box [00:05:44]:
So I retired in May of 2019. And we all know what happened in March of 2020 that pretty much threw a complete monkey wrench in my plans, because the plan was for me to take my pension, but I was going to take about a 50% pay cut in pay. And so this now marked the second time that I had taken a pay cut during a career change. That 18 months now was looking more like it was going to be longer than 18 months. So I kind of. I was getting close to getting furloughed. I was 140 people away from being furloughed. And so here I am, got two kids in college, got a wife.

Brian Box [00:06:22]:
I'm the primary breadwinner at the time. And I'm like, you know, this isn't. This isn't looking too good. So the. The. With all the military training and all the law enforcement training, I kind of went into panic mode. Called Nick up. I'm like, going, what am I going to do? Started looking at a kind of a financial coaching program that most people have probably heard about.

Brian Box [00:06:43]:
Nick says, well, I got a different idea for you. Have you ever thought of being a financial advisor? Like, no, I do not. Never. I'm not the numbers guy.

Jennifer [00:06:52]:
Yeah.

Brian Box [00:06:53]:
I said, remember, I'm the SWAT guy. I take, you know, square pegs and I fit them into round holes. So. But he told me, he said, yeah, he said, think about it. He said, you know, of all people, why I think you're qualified to do it is because we put you on a plan to take that major pay cut to live well within your means for 18 months. Because that's when I would probably upgrade to captain, which would put me right back to about where I was at the police department. And I said, okay, well, came home, talked to my wife about it, and we decided, you know, this is a pretty good opportunity. Let's go ahead and give it a shot.

Brian Box [00:07:26]:
And the best part is, he said, you can keep staying at the airlines. You can do this part time. He said, the business is growing. We need. He said. And that's how he started. His chief at his department said, hey, you're teaching this class. I want you to start teaching this to the recruits.

Brian Box [00:07:40]:
And then he saw how this now was becoming a career path change for my boss. And he said, you know, do it part time. Well, Nick told me the same thing. He says, it worked for me. I'm, I'm willing to let you work part time. So I did it part time. I was getting fed up with the recovery of COVID from the, at the airline side of it and started looking for other options, which then got me back into the helicopter world. And I went to work for Phi Air Medical, which is a medical helicopter company that's based out of Phoenix.

Brian Box [00:08:10]:
And we had a base here and at the Denton Hospital, which is about 15 minutes from my house. So 25 years, I've gone full circle. I'm now back flying helicopters, working with a nurse and a medic, loving life. The joke's always been between first responders is, you know, the cops are jealous of the firemen and the firemen are jealous of the cops and, or, you know, it's always that back and forth.

Jennifer [00:08:34]:
Oh yeah, the beef.

Brian Box [00:08:37]:
And if you're in a department like I was, we had a good beef with our fire department. So we always had this great working relationship. But everybody at the police department says, brian, how do you like working at Phi Am I going, well, it's pretty cool. I said, you know, I get to sit around, you know, once my job's done getting aircraft ready, I search the Internet, I take a nap, I go eat, I do whatever I want to do. I said, so all the jokes about that we tell about the fireman. I'm basically a fireman now because I'm now driving the ambulance and I do my tasks that I've got to do at work. And then whenever I have my downtime, I do whatever I want to do. So.

Brian Box [00:09:14]:
So I was working a week on, week off schedule. It was great. Worked a week of days, a week of nights, and then I was doing financial advising at the same time. But in reality I was doing two full time jobs. And Nick kept saying, hey, we're growing, we're growing, we're growing. He says, I need you. And so I finally took the leap. This July will be two years that I've been full time with him.

Brian Box [00:09:37]:
And this past April was four years that I've been part time, you know, so total time as a, as a financial advisor, now full time. Working for financial cop out of the Fort Worth office.

Ashlee [00:09:51]:
That is amazing. All of that. I'm, like, so blown away. Thank you, first and foremost, for everything that you have done and continue to do.

Brian Box [00:09:59]:
Thank you.

Jennifer [00:09:59]:
Absolutely.

Ashlee [00:10:01]:
Absolutely. Jennifer, were you chiming in? I see.

Jennifer [00:10:03]:
You know, I'm glad you didn't leave anything out, Brian. You know, we kind of started with what led you to doing, you know, finance and then first responders. And I think your resume is a good example of how that happened. But talk a little bit about, obviously, some life things kind of drove you in that direction. But what interests you about the financial aspects of that kind of change in your career?

Brian Box [00:10:29]:
I wouldn't say it was a struggle. It was. It was hard seeing myself doing it. Math is not my strong point. Numbers are not my strong point.

Ashlee [00:10:37]:
Really.

Brian Box [00:10:37]:
I found the connection was. Is I'm a people person. You know, my. We joke and say, our pastor at church asked years ago, asked. He said, you talk about fears, and they said, people. There are people that scared to death of speaking in public, and there's people that are scared of going to the dentist. He said, so if you had the choice to stand in front of a thousand people and talk or go to the dentist, what would you do? And my wife's immediately going, I'll go to the dentist. And I turned around and looked at the guy behind me and said, what's the topic? And so, you know, so what it did was it got me specifically in this realm because we do focus on working with first responders.

Brian Box [00:11:14]:
We work with other people as well, families and friends of first responders that ask for our assistance. But it was getting me back close to the people that I enjoyed being around and that kind of. That taken care of. I mean, I'd been an officer in the military, which I had to take care of my troops, then as a. As an officer taking care of the public, but then as a supervisor taking care of the officers that I was responsible for. And one thing I did leave out of my history is I had been a volunteer fireman and an EMT in the past. So I have this history of public service and public safety. And again, this just was an opportunity to get me back around the people that I enjoyed being around, because one of the things I learned at the airlines was quality of life.

Brian Box [00:11:58]:
That was one of the big phrases. You know, what base is you're based out of, do you commute? Do you live in base, all those types of things. Well, because of COVID I really didn't have the quality of Life, I really wasn't looking forward to going to work, but once I was there and flying, I was happy. I didn't mind the three or four day trips, but I just didn't have that personal connection with people because I was flying with a different captain just about every time that I flew, different flight attendants. And so there was really no consistency there. This job was that opportunity to fill that void that I didn't have when I was at the airlines that I had. I was back around. People with like minded ideas understood the struggles that they were dealing with because I'd been in those same situations.

Brian Box [00:12:41]:
And then just the finance piece was just, I think just the mechanism that allowed me to, to do that. I will say that the test was not easy, but obviously I passed it.

Ashlee [00:12:51]:
Say you did it.

Brian Box [00:12:52]:
Yeah, so I did it. And so now I'm just again, it's just sometimes it's really, it's like a social event going to work because I get to talk to people from other departments about different things that they're doing. And you know. Oh yeah, well, you know, well, I was a motorcycle cop whenever I was a brand new officer and then I had to promote, you know, so there's so much connectivity regardless of what the agency is. And then from the fire side I can talk about, you know, well, I was in a medical unit and understand the medical side of it. It just gave me that opportunity to get back around people and that I enjoyed being around.

Jennifer [00:13:20]:
Yeah, I have to be a therapist for a second. It sounds like you really know yourself. Like, know like oh, people is important to me. And asking yourselves a question about quality of life, I love that. Okay.

Ashlee [00:13:32]:
I also love how it circles back around to like connection. Right. In every topic that we have kind of brought on here, everybody listens because we connect. Right. And so that's such a beautiful way to, to do that. And I'm really excited because for Jennifer and myself, like seeing so many first responders and specializing in it, the financial aspect of it is something that comes up all like whether it be the individual that I'm seeing or even like couples counseling, like families. Right. Like that financial piece is always there.

Ashlee [00:14:04]:
And so I'm really excited to learn from you today and to see kind of, you know, like to learn because I'm like, I feel like I need more information on all of this. Well, one of the things that we were kind of wondering is what unique financial challenges do first responders face compared to general public sometimes or is there a reason why we see it so much in our office.

Brian Box [00:14:24]:
You know, the one thing that I would say that first responders have that a lot of other folks don't have is they don't have almost a built in overtime mechanism. They have the opportunity to work overtime jobs and not have to go out and learn a new task or learn something new and get a part time job that's not related to their career path. There are programs now that the departments are using to where they post all the overtime jobs. You go up and you sign up for these overtime jobs and because I'm back as a reserve at my police department after five years of retirement, again, maybe because I enjoyed being around the people that I was around, I'm on that list. I mean, I don't participate in it, but I'm on it. And I see all these jobs that are coming up and it's like going, these guys are making, you know, 50, 60, sometimes $80 an hour to do an overtime job. And they're just out there. So they've got a tool when it comes to the financial world to get themselves in a better position.

Brian Box [00:15:17]:
But the struggle is, is, are they truly using that tool to the best way that they can on the civilian side. They just don't have the opportunity. They have to go out and find a secondary job, you know, and on their time off, they've got to now go learn something new or do something new and maybe not make the money that they really could that the first responders had that opportunity for.

Jennifer [00:15:37]:
I appreciate that and that makes a lot of sense. And I know a lot of officers, they work their butt offs in those overtime opportunities. So what are some of the common financial concerns or goals of first responders when they come to you?

Brian Box [00:15:53]:
We have a slide that we use in our class. We talk about, you know, the title of it. Why is it important to talk about financial planning or wellness when we're talking about first responders? And one of the biggest things are, is that first responder just the job itself is inherently stressful because of the situations you're dealing with, whether you're the police or fireside, just the situations that you're dealing with, the danger that's associated with it, the hours that you're dealing with. So that's adding already a stress to the job itself. So that's putting a struggle on them, you know, at work and then also when they take it home. But because of that, just look at some national statistics, about 50% of marriages now are ending in divorce. Well, when you, when, when you throw in the first Responder side, that number tends to bump up somewhere between 60 and 75, depending upon what source you look at. And so now you take that higher level of stress, the higher potential for divorce, and now let's throw the financial piece in it.

Brian Box [00:16:57]:
And I don't know the statistic on it, but I've always heard finances is one of the biggest reasons for divorce because it's causing the most stress in the household. And so we see that a lot. You know, a lot of, lot of people are just struggling with managing their funds and their, their finances, and it's just causing extra undue stress. And so when I teach my class, we all teach very similar, the very similar topics during our class, but we have our own little spin on it. I tend to lean in and focus more on the wellness side of it more than the planning side of it, because if you take care of the wellness part of it, the planning is going to fall in place.

Jennifer [00:17:35]:
Can you define what, like the financial wellness is for people?

Brian Box [00:17:41]:
So when we look at it, we, we don't want to live, you know, paycheck to paycheck. You know, there's some of the stats that we talk about that, you know, 80% of people couldn't, you know, are living paycheck to paycheck. They don't have anything extra at the end of the month or they're short at the end of the month. Not, I mean, again, going back to the stress part, that just adds extra stress to it. But then it goes into that overtime extra duty cycle is that I've got more going out than I have coming in. So now I have to go out and work more so that I can cover the shortage. But now I'm taking away from time with family or I teach a lot of recruits. And I have a picture of that I put up on the screen of this is the academy graduation starter pack.

Brian Box [00:18:27]:
And it's a, it's a picture of a new vehicle, it's a picture of a gun, tattoos, you know, just whatever. But you buy that, you know, these, especially these young officers, they're getting things that they have a paycheck that they've never had before. And these, these officers are getting paid well. And so they go out and buy all these toys, but then they don't have enough money to pay for it, so they have to work overtime. But now they don't get to enjoy the toys that they bought because they're always working overtime. So it becomes this vicious cycle that they can't get out of. And sometimes they Just get stuck and then they have to reach out. And that's what we try to do with the first responders that we work with is try to break that cycle so that they can at least start moving in a positive direction with their finances so that we can work on what does it make their stress level come down at least at, you know, from the financial piece of it and how they can enjoy the things that they're doing or spend the money that they're making on doing fun stuff instead of constantly having to pay somebody else for things that you're not getting to use.

Jennifer [00:19:28]:
Yeah, I definitely have seen that with clients. And it sounds like you might be kind of a marriage counselor too, Brian. Is that something that's happening?

Ashlee [00:19:37]:
But.

Brian Box [00:19:37]:
Well, we always joke in the law enforcement world that, you know, yeah, when you get your license to be a peace officer, you pretty much got a. You're. You're in a class of, you know, financial or not financial, But Marriage Counseling 101 because of the disturbances that you go to. And yeah, so it's. You do a little bit of all of it well.

Jennifer [00:19:57]:
And how do you balance that? Because I definitely, you know, have seen first responders who are about putting the food on the table and are taking. Taking those over time positions. I think with a lot of integrity of saying, like, this is about providing for my family and then what that does cost at times in terms of sadly hearing about relationships that end. And my partner was never home. They were always picking up overtime or they work these crazy hours and that loneliness for a spouse. Is there some. I don't use the word advice, but what are your thoughts about that or if you see something like that that shows up in your financial planning?

Brian Box [00:20:41]:
So when we sit down with folks, we run through basically an interrogation of their finances because I need to know all the details. Just like I need to know what happened on the family disturbance call or what the fire department needs to know when they show up on a cardiac call. They need to know all the details that go to it. And so what we have to try to do a lot of times is we got to stop the bleeding. Leaning towards the fire side of it, but it works for us as well. I mean, we've got to stop the bleeding. We got to find the source of what the problem is. And then once we can figure that out, then we can start working on skills and techniques to slow the bleeding or to stop the bleeding altogether and then to start repairing the wounds.

Brian Box [00:21:20]:
We like to sit down and do a couple of meetings with Prospective clients, we ask them, do you first off, do you do a budget? And 9 out of 10 times the answer is, I usually get a chuckle. I don't get a yes or no. I just get a laugh. So I get that. No, I don't do that or I get the. I know about where my money's going, but I don't know exactly how much I'm spending. And so the first step and everything that we do with folks is we've got to get a budget established. We've got to figure out what's coming in, what's, what's going about.

Brian Box [00:21:54]:
That's your greatest wealth building tool that you have is the budget. Everything goes in and through the budget and it's going to allow you to accomplish the goals that you have financially and personally and professionally. Just because you now have a path figuring out that budget, telling them to sit down with a piece of paper and pull out your. I joke and say bank statement. So I date myself. But pull up your computer and see where did I spend all my money this month? They find out that, man, I eat out a lot or I spend a lot of money on stuff that I really don't need. So it, it's about building that first strategy of we've got to figure out how to stop the bleeding using that budget and then building from there.

Ashlee [00:22:37]:
I'm just like soaking this all in because I'm thinking about, you know, another big thing we talk about a lot on this show is the family aspect of it. And it's like a child of first responder. I saw my dad kind of go through these exact things, especially when my parents got divorced. Was that like he worked. I almost didn't see him for days on end because he would be working all this overtime to try to kind of overcompensate for now being alone in the house and taking care of kids and you know, like having to do that by himself. And so it's very interesting to me just that notion of, of all that kind of like that family dynamic playing an impact on the financial aspect of everything it does.

Brian Box [00:23:15]:
And it's funny because I go through like I did at the very beginning in my class. I show the, here's me in the army and then I progressed to the police department. I went through there. But my last slide is a picture of my parents. And I tell them, I said that this is where we learn a lot of our skills or lack of skills. I'm an only child. I grew up. I was very blessed.

Brian Box [00:23:38]:
I did not have to take any student loans. Mom and dad was able to basically fund me going through college. I didn't want for much. I didn't do like kids do now to where they're playing baseball and soccer and all these other. I had to pick one. And it was kind of the big things was baseball or boy scouts, and I picked baseball and I stuck with it. And that's all I ever did. But then after my mom got sick and got diagnosed with cancer, she actually did what we.

Brian Box [00:24:05]:
What we. We can talk about here in a little while of a tool that we use. But she wrote down everything on a piece of paper. Because my dad was the go to work guy. He worked shift work. He wasn't a first responder, but he worked shift work. And so he went to work, he made money, he came home, he took care of things around the house, but he had zero clue about the finances of what went on with the house. Well, mom passes away and now dad has no clue.

Brian Box [00:24:32]:
I'm now jumping in because my dad was not technologically advanced at all. And so figuring out how to get their bills paid. What I learned was mom and dad had a lot of debt. And I now know that that was probably one of the stressors that I just felt in the house, on top of the fact that my dad worked shift work, and that was hard on him. But just that financial stuff is like, man, they had so many credit cards because they were from that era where credit cards first started coming out and hey, do this, do this, do this. And it's like, I mean, I could go to just about any store and pull out a card for that store out of mom and dad's wallet. Instead of maybe having one card and doing it all on one, they fell victim to the marketing tool that came out. Talking about using credit cards, using that as that dynamic, the being gone and not being present.

Brian Box [00:25:25]:
If we can find ways of having people where they don't have to work as much and they can actually be at home, maybe the marriage situations will be a lot better. So.

Jennifer [00:25:36]:
Well, and I think that you're right. I mean, we had a side conversation about that. I think that, you know, we. We do what we know, and I, I think being really transparent, I. I'm glad that for you, Brian, you just sensed that there was some stress. Like I definitely heard stress about finances, and maybe two people that raised me weren't on the same page about finances. And we take that information in when we're young, and that can really be our roadmap. I'll Say for me, I know in getting married, it's like, I don't want to fight about money.

Jennifer [00:26:11]:
I don't want to fight about money. I don't want to fight about money. So let's not talk about money. Well, that's not, that's not, that doesn't work. No, let me tell everybody that does not work. And what it really does is that you have to kind of have some of those hard conversations. And some of that is, what do I know about money? Where did I learn about money? I learned that money equals conflict. Well, I don't want conflict, so I'm not going to deal with that.

Jennifer [00:26:33]:
And it's not that. It's, let's walk through this, let's talk about it. Let's be on the same page. I do love the aspect and I think it's opposites attract. You know that there's a spender and there's a saver and you guys definitely guess which one I am. But it's also about, well, let's have compromise in that we shouldn't, we shouldn't save every single penny and not enjoy anything in the present and we shouldn't blow it all right now. So we don't have anything on a rainy day. It's trying to find that balance.

Jennifer [00:27:04]:
And so when you're having those conversations, besides the budget, which is great, but even coming to talk about a budget, how do you work through maybe some of those conflicts if there's a spender and a saver, and that happens quite.

Brian Box [00:27:18]:
Often for various reasons, they didn't have anything growing up and now they've got money that they could spend and now they want to buy the, that they never had when they were growing up.

Ashlee [00:27:27]:
Right.

Brian Box [00:27:27]:
I mean, that's very common a lot of times. It's also two income families and I see a lot of two income families that are result they've come together after a divorce and so now they, they're keeping their finances separate because they got burned in the past. And so they're very cautious with their money. But the biggest thing about all of it when we're trying to sort through that is I'm not telling you not to have fun and not to spend money. But we got to deal with the bigger issue right now, which a lot of time is that consumer debt because we're paying so much money in interest right now on credit cards and car loans that it's going to be hard for you to truly enjoy what you want to do in the future unless we can address what's currently right here. And so a lot of times we'll tell them, hey, this is not going to be easy. This is going to be something that's going to take discipline. It's not going to happen overnight.

Brian Box [00:28:21]:
But I'll tell them, there are videos that you can go on to YouTube and you can watch about people that are, you know, saying, hey, we were 180,000 in debt and in 18 months, we're now debt free. Well, the reason they did that is because they sat down, they looked at what their spending habits were, they changed their spending habits, they became very disciplined, started that. My, it's a change of mindset is what is a need and what is a want.

Jennifer [00:28:47]:
Right?

Brian Box [00:28:47]:
You know, and so I want a new vehicle. I don't need one, but I want one, but I don't. But then I also, then turn around and go, but I also don't want another car payment because my vehicle's paid for. You know, it's, it's a lot of times it's that coaching, and we do a lot of that with, with our prospective clients. I mean, they may never, they may not even be a client for 10 or 15 years, but they're, they need coaching. They need somebody to show them the tools that they either didn't learn growing up or they need to be reinvigorated. Maybe somebody just to kind of hold them accountable. Because I'll tell them, I can go as an advisor or a coach to you.

Brian Box [00:29:28]:
I can either go very little pressure. I can go extremely hard pressure. And I can be calling you every month saying, hey, tell me about what you're doing. But usually what happens is somewhere in between is, you know, we'll give them the plan and we'll say, here's what we recommend that you do. And we'll give them, we'll look at all their finances and say, okay, well, you've got money in savings. Why don't you pay off one of the credit cards? That's one less debt that you have to worry about. You know, we try to build in that debt snowball mentality of put your, your debts in lion from the, the smallest balance all the way up to the highest. Don't worry about what the monthly payment is and dump everything you can towards that smallest one.

Brian Box [00:30:06]:
Then you get rid of it. And then our human brain likes that atta boy or atta girl and says, hey, now we've succeeded well, now we just take that money, we roll it into the next one, and we just keep doing that. And it's that snowball effect, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. And that's how these folks are. You know, 180, $200,000 in debt, and then at 18 months, they're out of debt. But they made a big sacrifice on. We're not going to go out and eat all the time. We're not buying new cars.

Brian Box [00:30:30]:
We're not going on vacation. We're covering the needs that we need to take care of and not much else. But on the budget thing for those spenders and savers mentality, when I was going through this, I was not a budgeter. When I first started working with Nick, I mean, and I. And my excuse was one that was very common. I'm covering all my expenses. I really don't need a budget. But Nick got me on a budget.

Brian Box [00:30:56]:
We used an online tool. It's a very basic, simple tool. It focuses on budget. And he said, so here's what I need you to do. I need you to create two extra lines in your budget from something that you don't already have. And I'm like, what's that? He goes, I need you to create a Brian allowance and a Melissa allowance. He says, so dedicate a little bit of money for you and a little bit of money for your wife, and that's free to spend. However, as long as you've covered your bills, use that to spend whatever.

Brian Box [00:31:24]:
But if you factor it into your budget, you don't feel guilty about spending it. And on the budget things, a lot of people just think of budgets like it's a dirty word. You know, I don't say that word around me, but in reality is if you do it consistently and get focused on it and really stick to it, you'll find out you can actually spend more money with less guilt. The example I always use is if you budget $500 for going out to eat at the end of the month, you've only spent 350 bucks out of your budget. And there's no other big need. Why don't you go out and have a really nice dinner?

Jennifer [00:31:59]:
Yeah.

Brian Box [00:31:59]:
Because you budgeted for it.

Jennifer [00:32:01]:
Yeah.

Brian Box [00:32:01]:
So.

Ashlee [00:32:02]:
Right. I'm loving this. This is amazing. And what my brain keeps going back to is like just so the education piece. Right. Like, often, like, it goes back to that, too, of just not being informed. Right. And I hear, I heard you say earlier in the show that you guys, you speak at.

Ashlee [00:32:20]:
Did you say at the academy?

Brian Box [00:32:21]:
I teach most of the academies here locally. There's a couple of regional academies, so we get to talk to a lot of different departments and sheriff's departments. And you know, every once in a while we'll have a fire department, firefighter in there that's going to become an arson investigator. But yeah, so that's what I tend to teach a lot. But we teach. All the chiefs of police in the state of Texas has gone through the class. This was Nick's baby when he first. This is what started the company was the teaching side of it.

Brian Box [00:32:49]:
And if I counted the numbers right, I believe between me and Mike, who's one of our other advisors, and Nick, 24 states. I think Nick's been to most of them. Mike and I tend to stay a little bit more local. The joke was always that Nick flies more than I do. Whenever I was a pilot because he was traveling so much. I think we're over 40,000. The last number I heard over 40,000 first responders or first responder families that have set through this version of our four hour class. It may only be a two hour class, kind of condensed, but our class is designed to be a four hour class.

Brian Box [00:33:22]:
And I mean it's the educational piece because you don't know what you don't know. And the tips that we're going through in our class is the how to get to where you want to be. You know, if you don't have a plan, it's just a wish. And so if you can figure out where you want to be, we'll help you figure out a plan to do that. And we were all instructors in the police department. And so we have that heart of a teacher. And so we like to sit down and tell folks if there's any questions whether we're managing money for you or not. Drill us on those questions.

Brian Box [00:33:55]:
And if we don't know the answer to the question, we're going to go dig it up and find it because it's education for us as well. But we want you to understand why we want you to do the things that we're doing. Because if you don't know what the purpose behind it is, you're probably not going to follow through with it.

Ashlee [00:34:10]:
Yeah, absolutely.

Jennifer [00:34:12]:
I love that heart of a teacher. That's beautiful. So this is something I don't understand at all. And maybe, and maybe people in a pension system understand it more than I do. What are conversations that you have around pensions and first responders?

Brian Box [00:34:29]:
The state of Texas has several different versions of pensions. A lot of the cities have a municipal retirement system. The school district has a teacher's retirement system. But school resource officers, sometimes you know, their isd, police departments fall underneath those. The county and the sheriff's departments have a county pension system. And then cities like Fort Worth and Dallas have their own pension. Some of those larger cities have their own pensions. One thing that we always tell folks is that this is the one job that you're never going to get fired from.

Brian Box [00:35:01]:
So if you meet the requirements of your pension, you're always going to have this amount or this paycheck coming in at the end of the month. The ultimate goal is when you retire that you have enough money in your pension to cover your expenses. But a lot of times that's not the true case. The pensions are not, they're not designed to fully replace your income. And then some of the departments have opted out of Social Security and have gone with some other investment tools to replace that. As a secondary way of doing it, we look at that pension and say, is it going to be enough? Well, for one way that it's definitely probably not going to be enough is if you're carrying all this extra debt. So the ultimate goal is to be what we consider consumer debt free, which is anything other than your mortgage. All that's gone.

Brian Box [00:35:48]:
Those are all depreciating value and depreciating asset type expenses. And if you can get out of your mortgage and have it paid off by the time you retire, you might be able to live on your pension. But the problem is, is that you might have to stay 20, 25, 30, 35 years. And if you're like me, starting at 33.

Jennifer [00:36:08]:
Right.

Brian Box [00:36:09]:
Saying 30 years, I don't know if I'd want to be a street cop. You know, at 63 years of age. I know there's guys that do it. Yeah. And girls that do it, but man, it's, that's a long career of all the stresses that we've talked about and just the stuff that you see. So the pension is definitely a great tool. And a lot of, a lot of first responders, they'll retire, draw their pension and do like me, and they'll go off to another career. Well, the beautiful goal of that is if that other job is paying you the same or better, you've got extra money.

Brian Box [00:36:40]:
And we'll use that to pay off any debt that they still have once their debt's done building up their savings. So they have that emergency fund, if something comes up, can do it. I believe the statistic right now is about 66% of the people in the United States could not afford to go and pull $1,000 cash out for an emergency. So we'll walk them through building up that emergency fund. Right now they're debt free. They got that emergency fund. Use that, that pension check that you get. Let's just start building additional wealth through your retirement.

Jennifer [00:37:08]:
Right.

Brian Box [00:37:09]:
So you can help supplement your second job that you, your second career path that you've chosen.

Ashlee [00:37:13]:
Yeah, I think retirement's a really big thing for us in this world. And even, yes, on this podcast, a lot of our first responders are, are talking about retirement and what that looks like and how do you, you know, like what is there anything that you say to people in terms of first responder world? Like even in the academy. Right. But like thinking about retirement and ways to set themselves up successfully for that.

Brian Box [00:37:36]:
Yeah, I tell them, I said it doesn't matter if you're starting today or you're retiring tomorrow. It's never too late to start planning for the future. Especially what I try to hit with those young guy guys and girls in the academy is, okay, this is the first big boy, big girl check that you've maybe ever had. And I'll do that. You know, the compounding interest discussion. Do you realize that if you were to put X number of dollars in and we show them some scenarios that if you were to take. I think one of the scenarios is about a $200 something dollars car interest payment that you would have been making if you would have invested that from age 18 to 65, it comes out to like $3.7 million.

Jennifer [00:38:16]:
Oh my gosh.

Brian Box [00:38:17]:
Now that's a long period of time, but if you got $3.7 million, I think you could probably go buy whatever car you wanted. You could go whatever vacation you want to go on. But yeah, we just have to deal with them at the very beginning. Hey, if, if you will just get the discipline established early in your career to where this is now becomes, you know, it's. You just do it. You don't even think about it. Money comes out, it goes to your retirement. Don't even think about it.

Brian Box [00:38:42]:
Yeah, down the road is where you're really going to reap the benefits of. But for those folks that are, you know, towards the end of their career, they'll come to us and they'll ask us, hey, I wanted to, I do a lot of this is, hey, I just want to see where I'm at when it comes to retirement. Because what I'll do with them is I'll take their pension projection and I'll take their current pay stub and we'll do an apples to apples comparison. We'll go in there and we'll take, okay, this is what your, you're currently paying, get what you're currently getting paid. But we'll start taking out all the things that you would not be contributing to anymore, making the assumption that you're just going to retire and not work at all. We're going to take out your retirement contribution to your pension. We're going to take out the police association funds. We're going to take out your different little things, your Social Security, your Medicare, all those, all those deductions that's going to lower your now give you that adjusted income.

Brian Box [00:39:33]:
Now I can compare it to your pension and then I'll run some numbers and I'll tell them and say, okay, with your current pension that you're looking at, based on your current adjusted income, you're going to be making whatever percentage of your income. So that means one of two things. Either you're going to have to reduce your standard of living in retirement, which I don't think you want to do, or you've got to go find a job that at least brings home this amount of money to keep you at the same point that you are right now. And so with the debt elimination that allows them to have a little more freedom of whether or not it's time for them to retire. And some of them will look at it because five years will make a huge difference on what their pension is. They may look at it and go, okay, well I can honestly work another five years and I'm going to work really hard to get rid of what little debt I have left. Then I know that when it comes time to retire because at least in the municipal retirement system I can have them run projections is far out. Anything more than a couple of years isn't going to be exact.

Brian Box [00:40:30]:
But I mean it's going to give a, give a good litmus test of can I do this or not? Helps him make the decision. Man, maybe I need, I need to stay a little bit longer or hey, I'm in a pretty decent spot and I've got this, I've been working in criminal investigations and I'm specialized in this. And there's this outside civilian company that is kind of been, you know, courting me to, to come work for him. I got a friend that's starting a, wants me to come work with the business that he's at. We'll do those type of analysis to, to figure out, hey, is now the time to retire? Do we need to stay a little bit Longer.

Ashlee [00:41:03]:
That's awesome.

Jennifer [00:41:03]:
I was a young person once and got a class like yours, Brian, and I did not listen, man, I could have had those millions by now, but.

Ashlee [00:41:11]:
I was sitting here like, oh, boy, yes, I need to get on this, like, for real. Right? It just opens so many. Right. When you said that, I'm like, oh, my gosh. Yep, yep.

Brian Box [00:41:24]:
If the earlier you start, the better off you're going to be. But again, it's never too late to start.

Jennifer [00:41:29]:
No, I, I've got my act together now, but there you go. My twenties. What a wash. But, right? So tell me in terms of this work, like, tell me some of, like the impact and as a people person who enjoys connections, can you talk a little bit about some of those real successes of getting to see people come and take your class and, and unlike me, follow your directions, you know, because.

Brian Box [00:41:55]:
Because I've only been doing it, haven't been doing it full time for less than two years. I don't have like one big success story. It's like going. That's my go to story of like, this is a person that I completely turned them around. But I've had a lot of little ones. And I had one just the other day. My agency has me to come back because I teach all the academies in the Metroplex. Well, that's where the officers from my department go to.

Brian Box [00:42:18]:
So they got the class there, but then they come back to the department, they do six weeks worth of in service. But we're also hiring lateral officers so they don't have to go through the academy. So the trainer guys are saying, hey, can you come in and teach this class again? Well, I had the guys the other day in class and one of them, two of them were from the academy class, and he had asked me some questions after class and he goes, hey, you know, paid off the car. How am I going? There you go. So it's those little success stories. Because, I mean, you could tell he was, he felt good about it. You know, it's like I've got this burden because I tell people, I said, you know, I, I never carried a lot of consumer debt. I wasn't one of those $200,000 in debt kind of guys.

Brian Box [00:42:55]:
But I just, I had a couple car payments and, you know, little balance on a credit card, but I had to get rid of all of it. I said, but when I wrote that last check for that last car payment and There was a $4,000 check and wrote it, I felt like somebody lifted a building off of me because now it's like the only thing I have to worry about now is my monthly expenses and my mortgage. And so it gave me a lot more freedom. But yeah, I've had had several of those folks from the academies do that. But probably the bigger piece of it too is that guys and girls that are close to retirement been eligible, they're beyond the eligibility. So now they're, they're just trying to figure out is now a good time. And then you sit down with them and go, you know, you're almost at that point to where you're almost paying the city to come to work. And they're like going, really? I'm like going, yeah, you can actually retire now.

Brian Box [00:43:40]:
They're going to old, that's great. And so they start looking at it going, I love the job, but just tired of getting up at 4 o' clock in the morning to be on day shift at 6 o', clock, you know, so it's, it's little things like that. It's just those little, little small victories that are probably the cool part about it because you know that you had a piece in giving them the direction to get to where they're going or when I sit down, we do annual meetings with folks and I go and my first question with them is, you know, hey, how are things going? What are the updates? Let's talk about how things are going. And they said, you know, hey, we had a little hiccup because you know, really cool thing called life happened. And so we had to address that issue. But we got right back on it. We're right back to following the plan because that's how we write our plan. Do step one, move to step two.

Brian Box [00:44:25]:
When step two is done, move to step three. But if something happens in the mix, go back to that previous step or go back to that. You had to take on debt. All right, well we talked about throwing everything towards the debt and getting rid of that. Okay, well I had to buy a car. I didn't have enough money saved up to pay cash for it, but I had to take a loan. Alright, well we did it once before, let's do it again. Your car payment is $400 a month.

Brian Box [00:44:46]:
Let's make a $800 car payment to it. Let's work a little bit of that extra overtime. Now we're going to do it for a short period of time to get you back to where you're now debt free and you're now back into that wealth building stage. Flexibility happens and it's nice when you see those people that have embraced it and said, you know, I can see myself down the road. We'll ask them at the class who got into this job to be a millionaire? And I'll have them stand up and I'll say, if you thought you got into this career to become a millionaire, continue standing. And everybody sits down because they don't think they're going to be a millionaire. I said, but think about a 20 year career and how much money is going from the HR department, through finance, through your paycheck. You could be a millionaire.

Brian Box [00:45:25]:
It's your spending habits that are going to allow you to be that millionaire down the road. So when they embrace that and they finally realize, I can see what you're talking about, it makes sense. Now that light bulb moment comes on and then they just continue driving towards it. It's, it's, that's, that's the cool part about it.

Jennifer [00:45:41]:
Well, and I feel very fortunate. I mean, I, I don't help people with finances by any means, but have had clients in really dark places, stressful places, and finance being a part of that, working with people who have the financial stress. And again, I don't help them with their finances, but when they get to that place of like, oh my goodness, I finally got out of that debt or I paid my last car payment, I love celebrating that with clients. So that has to be so rewarding and a part of your job for sure. Can you just go one more time in terms of what you guys offer?

Brian Box [00:46:14]:
We do teach at the academies, teach a lot of local departments. And I've gone and done some roll call briefings, you know, just a little 15, 20 minute thing with officers that I've met throughout the years that are now supervisors and they're like going, I run into them someplace and they go, hey, you know, we can't afford. The budget doesn't allow us to pay you guys to come do it. I said, can you come do this? I'm like, yeah, I mean, I'll come to a 15, 20 minute roll call briefing with you and just kind of do a very condensed version of what we do. But we have an online academy that is basically, we've, we've taken it and created what we call the eight phases of financial training and what those steps are. It's, it's very, it's pretty simple. It starts out with budgeting and then step two is building a temporary emergency fund. Then we go to the debt snowball, getting rid of the consumer debt, then build up now a fully funded emergency fund.

Brian Box [00:47:03]:
Once we're debt free. Now we start really getting hard and heavy on investing for future retirement goals, saving up and investing for the future or vacations or cars or college, those types of things. The biggest one is paying off the mortgage. That's usually the last step in the process. And then the last one is just building wealth like crazy. So that's a technique that we, that we use. That's kind of the path that we write our plans in is to go through those steps in that way. So Nick has gone and has done our virtual academy, which are these eight steps and he's done them in 2030 minute segments and then we're looking at even adding on additional ones to talking about will and estate planning, which is one of the very first things which I probably should have started this out.

Brian Box [00:47:47]:
And for your listeners, if you don't have a will and the living will document, I highly encourage you to do it. A lot of police associations do it. A lot of the fire associations don't. But I mean it's a basic will is in the grand scheme of things is relatively inexpensive. But I would much rather you make decisions for your family and not the courts making decisions for what's going to happen with your.

Jennifer [00:48:10]:
Listen, I am not a first responder and I have a will, an estate. I think if you're a parent you should have those things. I feel very fortunate that.

Brian Box [00:48:21]:
Exactly.

Jennifer [00:48:22]:
I don't know who intervened to make that happen. I think that's great advice.

Brian Box [00:48:27]:
Not just in Texas, but I mean again, like I said, Nick has traveled to and Mike has been out of state. I'm going to a couple of places later on this year, but we'll actually come to a department departmental budget as part of their, you know, their training for the year. And then they just work with our director of client relations to figure out what's the pricing for us to come up there and actually teach a class. But another resource that is out there is Police one Academy and Fire one Academy. A lot of departments are paying for these resources and our financial class is on that platform. So it's out there. We recently became a national business partner with the Fraternal Order of Police on the national level. So we're doing a lot of the FOP conferences, either state or regional or national conferences, going and teaching our class and doing basically what I'm doing at the academy.

Brian Box [00:49:22]:
We're just doing it on a bigger scale nationally. So a lot of resources that are out there and we'll for the show notes, we'll definitely give our social Media links that any of the listeners can look out, reach out to and on Facebook, Instagram and just our website alone to get some additional information on if that's something that their department might be interested in.

Ashlee [00:49:44]:
Absolutely.

Jennifer [00:49:44]:
I think that's great information and I'm glad you're willing to share it with us.

Ashlee [00:49:48]:
Yes, thank you so much. I think I, I'm even like, I have all these notes and ideas in my head already too. I'm like, this is such powerful things that we need to talk about.

Jennifer [00:49:57]:
Yes, absolutely.

Ashlee [00:49:59]:
Absolutely. Else.

Brian Box [00:50:02]:
Yeah, I was going to say one thing. Talking about the website, we do have tool that I was selling that like my mom used. She just, she just wrote everything out. But we call it the Legacy Go back. And it's a, it's a 16 page PDF, I think it's 16 pages that you can go through. And it's. A lot of departments already do this, at least on the police side of, you know, if you're injured in the line of duty or you're killed in the line of duty, who do we notify and you know, who is your companion officer and what type of, for your, for your service do you want to be in uniform? Are you a veteran? All those types of things that go into that. But we've created one on our side as well.

Brian Box [00:50:36]:
And it starts out with a cover letter of what's the intent and purpose of it. And it goes through and it lists, you know, this is where my will and estate planning documents are. These are all of my bank accounts and my passwords and you know, account numbers and balances and, you know, it's anything that you want to put in there. But on just about every one of our pages, there's a, a yellow little rectangle at the bottom. It says, you know, financial cop, legacy Go Bag. You can click on it and download it for free. We're not going to spam people, we're not going to sell your email address.

Jennifer [00:51:07]:
That's good to know.

Brian Box [00:51:08]:
But, but it's a tool that's out there and it just gives your family something. If, like the situation that I was in, you know, had I not had that, I would probably still be looking for money. And my mom passed away over 15 years ago. I'd probably still be looking for stuff for. Or I'd have bill collectors calling me going, hey, are y' all gonna pay this? So it is a tool that's out there and then just, just information of what we can provide. And even though we're Texas based, I've got Clients in. I've got a client in North Dakota, Wisconsin, Florida and Indiana.

Jennifer [00:51:38]:
Take Hoosiers as clients.

Brian Box [00:51:41]:
Our ultimate mission. I mean, more of. Of a concept so much than something that's written down. Our ultimate goal is that every first responder nationwide is going to be able to retire when they want to stay around at the job, if they love the job, but not stick around because they have to, because they're not in a financial position to be able to retire. So that's our ultimate goal. Our goal is to take care of first responders. That's our passion. If we can help anyone out, that's what we're here for.

Jennifer [00:52:08]:
It makes me so happy that I was able to corner you and make you come on this podcast.

Ashlee [00:52:13]:
I mean, you're just so knowledgeable and good, like, and it's just heartwarming. This is exactly like I. Oh, this is for our people who love this population and will do anything, you know, like, you do it in this aspect, but you're also a first responder. You know what I mean? So, like, incredible. And we're so. I'm so thankful that you're here today.

Brian Box [00:52:32]:
Yeah. You know, I'm, I'm a. I'm a big believer in things happen for a reason. And Jennifer, you and I were both not on social media and ended up at the wrong location for the training that day.

Jennifer [00:52:42]:
Yes.

Brian Box [00:52:43]:
You know, and it happened for a reason.

Jennifer [00:52:46]:
Exactly. It was meant to be. Well, thank you so much for your time, and I'm excited for our listeners to follow up if they have questions and things like that, to reach out to Financial Cop. And then. Ashlee, you want to take us away?

Ashlee [00:52:59]:
Yeah, absolutely. Brian, thank you so much again. And we will post the things that we can on our social media and help spread the word. We just like to always end with our famous line, is that when the call hits home, Jennifer and I are always here for you guys, so thank you so much.