Welcome to Milestone Moments, the show where we explore the journeys that lead to success.
I'm Sheila Slick, your host and founder of Five Milestones. In every episode, we will bring you
insights from the minds of entrepreneurs, leaders, and experts who will share not just their expertise
but the milestone moments that have reshaped their journeys and led to significant achievements.
So if you're looking for motivation, you're in the right place. Subscribe now and discover the
milestones that mark the path to success. Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining me today
in Milestone Moments in Business and Leadership. I'm your host, Sheila Slick. And today, my guest,
Jerry Fedda, is a wealth expert who helps people take control of their finances. He is founder of
Wealth Dynamics and two other organizations, Fraud Free World, which is a nonprofit initiative
aimed at preventing and eradicating financial fraud from this planet, and the North American
Effective Management Association for Financial Services, where he serves as founding director.
Jerry also serves on the leadership council of the National Small Business Association
in Washington, D.C., and is an author of five books, all centered around wealth creation,
money management, and financial guidance. Welcome to the show, Jerry. Thank you, Sheila. It's great
to be on today. I've read a lot about what you do, and I'd love for you to share a little bit of
your backstory. How did you get to where you are today? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think, you know,
my my story is is not too much different in certain elements from from many of our stories
where, you know, I didn't grow up learning about money. And that was something that caused a lot
of problems and a lot of pain in my family growing up. Right. So, you know, one unique part of my
stories when I was eight years old, all in the same summer is a hell of a year. Mom and dad got
divorced. We lost the house. The car got repoed. I was homeless both on my mom's side and on my dad's
side. On my dad's side, we were living in a tent. I was eight. So I thought we were just camping.
And then on my mom's side, we were in a dry camper behind someone's house. But I knew all of that
happened because of money. And so that was something that, you know, was kind of a negative experience
for me. And I grew up kind of not wanting to be involved with money. I had a disdain for it. And
that definitely kind of planted an early seed into, you know, me doing what I do today. A big part of
that is tied to the experience that I had growing up with money. Why do you do what you do? Is it
because of what happened to you as a child? Do you want to help others or did you want to help yourself?
Yeah. So, you know, when I first got involved in this, this finance stuff that I do, my vision
really was like, I want to learn this, right? Because I started becoming an adult, you know,
learning that money was kind of like oxygen and gravity. It doesn't just go away. It's a very big
part of all of our lives. And so I realized it's something that I need to learn, or it's going to
continue to be the master of me and my decisions and my freedoms and the things I can and can't do.
And so I got into, you know, financial services from that aspect. And as I started learning this
stuff, Sheila, I started seeing solutions for the things that my parents faced when I was a kid.
And I started seeing that a lot of them weren't that complicated. It was stuff that
if the information was presented, I'm sure my mom and dad would have been like, wow, this makes
sense. We should be applying these things. And I just was never taught. I wasn't taught this stuff
in school. So that was kind of my initial thing was I wanted to just learn this for myself. But
when I saw how helpful and how impactful it can be for anyone, really, I love helping. And so that
was something where like I felt the need. That was like, now that I know this, it would almost be
unethical of me to not share this with more people and prevent, you know, the stuff that I had to go
through as a kid. And that was kind of the first point. That's evolved quite a bit. I've been doing
this since I was 18. I think I'm 32 or 33 now. I always have to count my age and remember how old I
am. But my vision today is a world where the majority of wealth is controlled by good people
who use it to make the world a better place. And I think that finances are a tool that we can use
to improve quality of life for ourselves, the quality of life of our loved ones and the quality
of life for the world around us. And that's really my big push on everything I do today.
Wow. Thank you for sharing that. Yes, here I also have that you believe the right to build wealth
and the right to help are both human rights and they're only right. So long as we know them,
we use them and we protect them. And it says with great financial wealth comes a responsibility
to lead by example in our daily lives, to help others achieve the same and ultimately to use
financial wealth to help make the world a better place. I really like that perspective that you
have. And you have a quote that is also highlighted that I'd love you to explain, walk us through what
it means to you. And it says before investing in any venture, take the time to evaluate its
ethical implications and align it with your personal principles. Yeah. So that quote for me,
it's very important because I didn't grow up in the financial world that way. And I think a lot
of us when we invest, we've not solved one of the major problems in our lives. And most people have
this and it's the disconnection of what you do for money and your purposes and your values.
And when those two things become unlinked, that's where you have people that are working at jobs
that they don't love just because they need to make a paycheck, just because they need to pay
the bills. And it's like you have this monotony going through life. And so I think when you can
align your activities that you do to earn income, the way that you exchange with the world around
you to bring money in, if you can align that with things that you really value and things that you
really believe in, it fundamentally changes who you are. Now, what happens is most people don't
have that. We don't have that figured out yet and we've not aligned those two things together.
So we step into the investing world and we don't have alignment between money and purpose.
And so we start looking for investments that are just going to give us the highest rate of return
or the best looking retirement account or whatever it might be. And we don't realize that the
investments that we're funding our businesses and enterprises and organizations and those
businesses, enterprises and organizations, they produce something, whether they're good or bad,
that something provides a financial return. And I can remember a time when I was a licensed
financial advisor sitting down with a client and realizing the portfolio that I built them was
really good, but they started asking questions, Sheila, and they're like, what are these companies?
And I was seeing warfare, pharmaceuticals, things that I would never usually support.
And I was like, okay, well, if I wouldn't support this with my time, if I wouldn't work at this place
for my job, why would I invest money there? Because it's creating an effect that I don't believe in.
And it goes against my values. I think that that's a point of responsibility for all investors to
really understand that and keep their integrity in with that. So how do you serve your clients apart
from the books, which I do want to go over one of the books that really fascinated me?
How do you help your clients? Yeah, so I've been in this industry for,
I don't know, 12, 13 years, something like that. And one of the things that I've seen is there is a
lot of new things being used. And when I say new, for example, the 401k, everyone does it.
It's only been around since 1980. And so when you look at, okay, we've got this, just as an example,
we've got this financial tool that we're using. And it's kind of a social experiment. We've never
seen a full generation of people successfully use that from start to finish and get the result
that's been advertised. Yet everyone's going all in on it. So I started to really study, Sheila,
the top 1% of wealth historically. What are the people like the Carnegie's and the Rockefellers
and the Vanderbilt's? What were they actually doing? And the way that I did that, as I read
their biographies and I read about how they conducted business and investments, and I started
to see that those things are very different than what the average American is doing today. And I
started to see that there's a lot of commonality between those kinds of people. All of them had
very similar strategies. So I started just on the premise of if you do what successful people do,
even if you do it badly, you're going to get some semblance of what they have.
Right. So I started doing that and I started to see some incredible results in my own finances.
So I took my financial background, the planning, the investing, all the stuff I was doing. And I
said, I want to really blaze this trail where the average everyday person that's doing the right
things with their finances can start doing the right things with the right tools. And those
would be the same tools that the wealthy use. So that's really kind of in a nutshell what we do.
Our vision is good people building more wealth and making the world a better place.
And so we work on education. We help people set up investments that they do believe in.
We've got a lot of really cool technology stuff going on where we've leveraged artificial
intelligence, mobile apps, certified financial planners, and kind of put this into an interface
where it gamifies your finances, really simplifies it, and it allows anybody to go through the
literal steps the top 1% would go through to establish their wealth. And where can the
audience get more information about this? So go to my website, wealthdynamics.com,
and you can start learning more about all of the different things we've put together for that.
Okay. Do you want to spell that out? Yeah. So we spell it unique. It's wealth,
like W-E-A-L-T-H. Dynamics is D-Y-N-A-M, and then just the letter X. So like dynamex.com.
So apart from that, you also have five books. In your book, The Big Three Daily Habit Tracker,
you talk about three big daily habits that we must master in 90 days in order to achieve
financial freedom. Can we talk about what the big three are and why 90 days?
Yeah, absolutely. And I've got a copy of it just to show what it looks like here. So this is the
big three challenge, and mine's a little tattered because I use it myself so much. But basically,
this came, Sheila, because I used to be a bodybuilder and a personal trainer.
And as I started to get more and more involved with finances, I started realizing that there's a lot
of advertising, marketing, and reliance on financial products and services. But there's a lot of,
I guess, lack on education and basic fundamental behaviors. And I really related that to like when
I was a personal trainer, you still have to go to the gym, you still have to drink enough water,
you still have to eat right. And no supplement under the sun is going to change that. It can
enhance the good things you're already doing and help you make more progress. But if you take bad
financial habits and plug them in with all the greatest tools in the world, it doesn't change
the fact that a bad financial habit is a bad financial habit. So the big three themselves,
what we've put together in the book is really the concept of the amount of time it takes to build a
habit. So I was taught 21 days. What were you taught Sheila? Was it the 21 days as well?
21 days to build a habit. So that's not my expertise. I'm going to let you pick that
because I'm learning from you here with the habit and the discipline, which is what you need to be
able to break a habit and replace a bad one with a good one. I was always taught the 21 days thing
as a kid. And some of your listeners might be listening to that and be like, yeah, I was taught
the 21 days also. A study was done that actually showed on a minimum level, it takes 66 days
to build a habit or to break a bad habit either way. So that's a lot more time. That's like more
than 300% more time than we're expecting. Now we live in a day of automation and artificial
intelligence. Well, the real original automation is human behavior. If you can build habits,
your mind will automate those things and you just do them daily without having to think about them
or use too much discipline or effort. So we really put this together on 90 days because I believe if
you can do anything every day for 90 days, you can do that thing forever. It can really become
that habit. The three behaviors that we go through in this program is number one, learn about money
every day for at least 10 minutes. And 10 minutes might not sound like a lot, but if you add that
up, that's an hour a week, little over an hour a week. And if you do an hour a week, every single
week for three months in a row, you really start to change your financial intelligence level.
And for the better, the second thing that we teach is do something additional to earn extra income.
And this is because one of the keys to building wealth is active income. And we've got this weird
thing of like go to school and get good grades and go to college and get your degree to get a job.
But then once you get the job, you can't wait till you turn 60 to stop doing the job you just got.
And it's like kind of contrary. So in my company, we teach income is good, working is good,
being productive is good. It's how we add value to people around us. And so that's something where
we shouldn't be looking for less ways to do it. We should be looking for a higher level of
contribution and a higher level of income from that contribution. So that's the second habit is
no matter what it is, even if it's Uber eats, do something, whatever it would be to earn more
income. And then the third one would be really paying attention to your expenses. And so we
have something called the one to five game where every day our clients, when they're going through
this challenge, they're reviewing all their expenses for just the day. And the reason we do
it for the day is if you think about if you wait an entire week to do dishes in your house, in your
kitchen, you're not going to want to do them. There's this giant stack and it's like, this is
overwhelming. If you do a little bit every day, it keeps it down and it's easy for someone to
confront and handle because it's like 10 dishes instead of 40. So if you do the expenses every day,
you'll get the same kind of experience. And that one to five skill, it teaches how to prioritize
expenses and to focus on things that generate income, that reduce taxes or things that are
like vital needs with your finances. If you're trying to budget, you don't ever want to cut out
things like food, shelter, clothing, transportation, education, personal wellbeing. Those are things
you would want to make sure you make room for in the budget. Something like a flat screen TV or a
new truck or, you know, a brand new four hundred dollar shoes, maybe not such a priority, depending
on where you're at in life. And that program kind of teaches someone to prioritize those things.
Do you have like a special tool or one that you would recommend for someone that isn't tracking
their finances? You know, we do it old school in the journal here. We have it to where someone can
literally just go through the pages and they can write here and I don't probably can't see that
very well, but you can write here in the book, in the journal and you can actually there's maybe
10 or 20 line items so that you would just write what they are in the journal and then you would
write them right there in the journal. And that kind of takes the barrier of like, I forgot my
password or I need to download the new version of the app or any of these things that can stop
someone from doing it. Good old pen and paper is always the most successful foolproof way to get it
done. Interesting, because you're kind of like a millennial if I calculated correctly, right?
So I would have assumed everything is digital, digital. So I like the pen and paper. I've heard
it six more when you use your hand, right? You jot something down rather than type it in,
you know, a telephone or a computer. So I found that fascinating. But I do agree, you know,
being aware of where your money's going is a great step to be able to control it. Otherwise,
you can't make smart decisions if you're not at the very least tracking it. So that would be a
great beginning for anyone looking to, you know, transform their finances. So you've been an
entrepreneur since 18, you mentioned. What has been, you know, entrepreneurship is a roller coaster.
We all have our ups and downs. So throughout that journey, what would you say was one of the biggest
challenges you had to face? And how did you overcome it? Yeah, the the entrepreneur thing
is not easy, right? And I think like many people, when I started, I had this romanticized idea that
I was now my my own man, and I was going to be free. And for the longest time, Sheila, I made less
money and worked more than when I just had a job. Right. And so I think for me, you know, the biggest
struggle that I had to really solve for myself as an entrepreneur is probably two things. One of them
is if you look inside an organizational board, like an actual company's org chart, there is no
post title called entrepreneur. There are CEOs, there are VPs, like there are a lot of executive
type roles, there's general like managers and workers. So you can be an entrepreneur to get started.
You're not going to stick as an entrepreneur, you need to become an administrator and an executive.
And you need to learn how to run a group and run a company. And you've got to have operating
procedures and statistics and a lot of different things. And it's very organized. And it's a lot
of detail work. Right. That's the first thing. And so I was never taught that it took me a long time
to really start figuring that out. And that's why I started the North American Effective Management
Association for Financial Services is to teach those skills to other financial services businesses.
There was something for me when I learned it, I was like, where has this been my whole career?
It's been five, six years of just struggling, simply because I didn't know what my key performance
indicators were. I didn't know what my standard operating procedures were. I didn't know what my
org board looked like. Right. The second thing that I had overcome was I think as an entrepreneur,
sometimes we become entrepreneurs because we're bad with groups and people.
And we don't realize that about ourselves. I don't like having a boss. I don't like having
coworkers. I don't like having, I just like doing my own thing. And I like to be my own guy and come
up with my ideas. And you'll never grow if you can't overcome that. As soon as you get into a real
business, you have to be really good with people. You have to be really good with managing and
dealing with emotions and reactions and various levels of understanding and getting people to
learn things and retain them. And so it's a lot of work. It's a lot like having kids where there's a
lot of just repeating and training and making sure people are getting it. And so I think that
that's a barrier where an entrepreneur, for me anyways, I got into it thinking like I'm going to
run my own show and be my own person. And I immediately realized I need to hire people.
And then I had this barrier of like, well, I don't like bosses, but now I'm a boss. So how do I
figure that one? And I don't like distracting coworkers who don't do anything, but now I need
to go hire a bunch of people and teach them to not be that. So when I was able to reconcile those
things, and it all was me, like I had to change my own knowledge and understanding and realize that
declaring I'm an entrepreneur doesn't do anything other than just declare you're an entrepreneur.
There's a lot of work that goes into it after to become who you need to be. And as I started
putting in the time to become that person, I started overcoming those barriers.
And one of your books, if I'm not mistaken, is about your journey.
Yes, the man in the arena. Exactly.
Exactly. Just give us a little bit about that book. I know I chose the big three,
the daily habits, because I love learning all about habits. What is that book about?
Yeah, so the man in the arena, and I've got a copy of it here as well. This one, this is based off
of Teddy Roosevelt's quote, I don't know if you've heard about the man in the arena. And just to
paraphrase it, he basically is saying it's not about the critic. You know, it's not about the
person pointing out the faults and saying what could have been done better. It's about the man
or the woman that's actually making it happen. Right? They're in the arena, they're experiencing
life, whether they win or whether they lose. If they win, you know, they achieve their goal. If
they lose, they become a better version of themselves in the effort of trying. Right? And
that's who it's about. So my book, The Man in the Arena, was really, you know, kind of my story up
till now covering some events that I went through in life as a business owner. You know, one of the
things that I don't think is talked about enough is as a business owner, that can be really rough
on relationships. Right? How do you balance the two? So part of my story is I had a failed marriage
because of my business. And I had to figure out, okay, if I'm going to be a family man as well,
and a husband and a dad and all these types of things, also, I need to figure out how to make
sure that aligns with being a business owner. Right? You run into, you know, working with people
that you shouldn't have, you trusted the wrong people. And I had times like that in my business,
where I lost a great deal of, you know, assets or businesses or maybe reputation because I trusted
the wrong person. And so I think those are some of what I've put in here is really the raw, like,
what do people go through as business owners? And I don't know if mine's better or worse or the same
as what everyone else experiences. But I think these are the stories that don't get told. And
it's kind of a tribute to every other entrepreneur that's out there in the arena making it happen to
say, Hey, I see you when I'm there with you. And I understand. And it also is showing to others that
aren't aren't in the entrepreneur space. Like this is the journey. And it's not this really pretty
Instagram highlight reel all the time. It's a lot of hard stuff you go through as you climb
that entrepreneur is a mountain. Well, thank you for sharing that other book. So what is your next
milestone? So my big milestone right now is I want to continue expanding my company internationally.
So we've taken our big three challenge right now. And we're working with kind of the concept of
accountability partners. And so we're starting to pair people up, which is really fun, right? So
we've got clients that they're working together as accountability partners going through the big three
challenge. And so, you know, with with the finance world, every country is different,
different currency, different financial services, different investments, but learning about money,
increasing your income and being in control of your expenses. That translates over to any country
on the planet. So it's been really cool. We had the end of 2023, we had our first big three
challenge twinship, we call it where people pair up as twins. We had that happen in UK and also in
Germany. So we're continuing to expand with that one. We've got a group now starting in Canada.
Obviously, we've got the United States. We've got someone in Central America that's interested in
doing it. So this is kind of my I guess for me, that's the fun part of this is like really seeing
the impact on a wide scale. And this is a way to do that really without borders as a barrier.
Well, I wish you much success. Before we wrap it up. What one you're only going to get to pick one,
what one key takeaway can you share with our audience so that you can inspire them to take
action? Yeah, so this one, I post this on my Instagram story every day, right? So I work out
every day and every day there's a reason not to and every day I do it anyways. And so I have learned
as an entrepreneur and just as a person pursuing success in life, the condition of our lives
currently are a total cumulative sum of the times that we did it anyways, whether good or bad,
right? So if I, for example, with my gym thing, right, I know I need to go and I I'm tired or
it's cold outside or I'm going to be late or traffic is bad or whatever. And I have the choice
for it then to do it anyways, and make the gym happen or have the choice to look at all the
barriers and reasons not to say, well, I'm going to do those anyways, even though I know I should
be going to the gym right now. And life really comes down to that, right? The more times you
can say, I'm going to do it anyways with the things you know you should do and the things
that really align with your goals, those add up. It's kind of like, you know, the whole idea of
cause and effect. It's a natural law. If you put those causes out there and effect will return,
we don't know when, but those moments where you do it anyways, that plants those little seeds,
those will pop one day and you'll experience the benefit of it. And, and that's really the
taking action part is just do it anyways, right? Whatever the thing is, don't think about it.
Don't get involved in the reasons not to just make it happen anyways.
Well, thank you so much. It's been great having you on the show. And if you'd share your website
one more time with our audience, I'll also put it down in the summary so that they can connect
with you more. Yeah, absolutely. So you can go to wealth dynamics.com. Again, that's the word wealth
W E A L T H and then dynamics is D Y N A M and then it's just the letter X. So dynamics.com.
Thank you very much. Thank you, Sheila.