Q&A: The Effects of Fear on Life and Business
Braelin Thornton is a financial advisor with Northwestern Mutual. Braelin has been a part of Ashley’s personal advisory board for a little over five years. Recently Ashley sat down with expert Braelin for a Q&A to give our audience insight and advice on all things fear, money, business, and life. Ashley emphasizes that with the right person you have the opportunity to make great business decisions or personal life decisions without having to have fear of money.
Q: Would you mind telling us a little bit about where you work, your history, and how you got started?
I have been in the industry for a long time and I've had the firm for almost 12 years. Ashley and I have known each other for quite a long time. I work in a very strategic way with my clients and take a very individualized approach depending on where the clients are at in their relationship with money. You know, whenever we're talking legacy planning, business planning, a lot of times it's overlapping.
I have my undergrad in accounting and then I went to get my MBA at Union Grad school, I do Iron Man on the side for some fun hobby activities and stay very active, and have an eight-year-old, but I absolutely have a passion for what I do and how I help people hit their goals. I am a very long-term thinker and I love to look at this like a 3D puzzle — so everything that I've done in my life has culminated to help me in the position that I'm in now running the firm. I really love the strategy portion and everything that I do in life is really aligned with the firm and long-term thinking.
Q: How do you work with your clients and make sure that they are stable enough to not have to make decisions around fear and money?
I think this is twofold and in my opinion, a lot of fear comes from a lack of preparation and a lack of knowledge. Confidence comes from keeping promises to ourselves and truly understanding how to effectively make decisions not based on fear. A lot of this is parallel to endurance racing, similar to planning strategy. If you have done the strategy work and you have all the chess players on the board, you can win the game. But if you don't, it's very difficult and you are basically pigeonholed and being told what you're going to do and how you're going to be taxed.
Estate planning is a multi-dimensional puzzle that we're solving and when the client understands why and how it works — how all these pieces tie together and that there's a tax — the fear can dissipate and you can keep every promise to yourself. When you haven't done the preparation, you're going to be very, very fearful of the day. But if you show up and you've done the work and you're prepared, you're actually going to really enjoy the brutal day ahead of you. A lot of what happens at the beginning of this kind of relationship is understanding the relationship that the client has with money.
It doesn't serve anybody to have fear, and with education and knowledge comes the power to put that fear aside. Through an in-depth strategy and outline, we come up with a plan so that nobody’s caught off guard. If XYZ happens, there is a plan in place. But if you think about fear in your life every day and how that can translate — so many people like to keep their heads in the sand doesn't matter how many zeros are on their net worth. Having a strategy in place allows you to have the headspace to focus on other things and to essentially be the truest version of yourself and live life to the fullest when it comes to finances and fear.
Q: Who can have a financial planner? How do you coach someone who doesn’t have a lot of money or doesn’t have a steady income?
One misconception is that you have to be wealthy in order to have a financial planner, which is not the case! There are so many events that you need to plan for — you want to be in a position where if something happens such as the pandemic — you feel comfortable not having to rush into finding another job.
When I start working with someone I need them to first have the mindset of wanting to put in the work. Your mindset is the foundation — just because your net worth might be a certain amount now doesn’t mean the dream isn’t here and the execution and the action plan to get there can’t be put into place. With anything, you have to believe in yourself first.
Second, you need to have the education to know what you’re walking into and then someone to help build security around a fluctuating income if that’s the case like on a consulting contract. It’s a lot easier to fly and do better and be coached when you feel safe. You believe in yourself, you understand how it’s going to work and how it’s going to compound for you.
Q: There’s often a lot of guilt around money or expectations set by childhood or societal stigmas that affect how people treat money. How do you work around that? How do you get your clients to let go of some of that stigma?
I need to understand someone’s relationship with money before I can start coaching them on their relationship with it and how we can make it aligned to move forward. Money is a form of energy and it’s important to understand how someone was raised, how their parents treated money, how they’ve seen money, and how they’ve been interacting with money since they were young. Discipline equals freedom. So if you’re willing to be vulnerable and deliberate with your money and have an ethos on how you treat it — little rules in place for yourself — then you have that discipline. I’m not a psychologist but if you rework the different synapses in your brain to know where you can go and believe that until you’re living it.
For example, when you don’t buy coffee out you’re saving $7, but it’s not about the $7 it's about the synapse you’re creating in your brain every time you drive past Starbucks. You’re disciplined and deliberate instead of simply succumbing to whatever desire you have at the time. What you’re doing to retrain yourself is stronger than the $7 you’re saving.
Q: Have you had clients who have hired you and want to tell you how to do your job?
I have experienced it and I’ve called it what it is and I’m not an advocate of wasting my time. I’m extremely big on efficiency and I want to have mutually beneficial relationships with my clients. I think my job is very fluid and I’m not demanding a client does anything, it’s a back-and-forth conversation. But if there is zero regard for my time or advice, then I don’t need to be in that space just as much as I would anything in my life. One thing that’s important for people to remember is that you’re not a good fit for everyone, and that’s okay! There are people who you are a perfect fit for and that’s who you should be working with, and the other people should be going and finding people that work great for them.
Q: What’s your one key piece of advice for someone who’s a freelancer in any business? What’s one thing that you know they need to do?
When you’re a contractor, you’re going to get a bulk of money dropped into your account. But it’s not always guaranteed to be dropping in, so you have to treat any and all large lump sums preciously. By doing this, no matter how large your net worth becomes, this money won’t be flowing in and flowing out and you’ll have a higher regard for it. Often people assume that the revenue is just going to continue all the time. The people who are successful are consistent as they are prepared for the downtime. It’s not IF it’s going to happen it’s WHEN it’s going to happen because if you don’t run into a snag in business, the economy will change and you’ll have to shift as a result.
