Investing in Experience: How "Return on Life" Changes Financial Priorities

In this episode of The Money Script Podcast, Yohance Harrison talks with Justin Castelli  return on life, financial planning, and the new book Even More Than Money. They cover how advisors can think beyond traditional ROI, what it took to bring a multi-author financial planning book to life, and why real advice is still deeply human. Justin also shares his personal money script, his dream of using wealth to create impact for others, and his thoughts on AI, mentorship, and the future of the financial advice profession. It’s a thoughtful conversation for advisors, aspiring planners, and anyone curious about money and meaning.

Linkedin- Justin Castelli

 Even More Than Money: https://www.amazon.com/Even-More-Than-Money-Financial/dp/1804091243/

Website- https://www.justincastelli.io/

IG: https://www.instagram.com/jus10castelli/

Transcript

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Yohance: Justin, it's been a month of Sundays, man. Where, where have you been?

Justin: I know, busy, man. I got, you know, kids and work initiatives and my personal initiatives. So, yeah, it's, it's been way too long.

Yohance: It's been way too long. But I'm sure we'll see each other here real soon. We've got, you know, the biggest financial conferences in the world coming up really soon.

Justin: Yep, yep.

Yohance: As soon as we get through the summer here. I, I know that we're going to talk about more than money, but first I have to say thank you for a post that you did on LinkedIn.

Justin: Okay.

Yohance: Because. And I'm sure you get this often, but it was life changing. The post that you put up was of your boys swimming in the pool. And I think your comment, and I'm paraphrasing, said something like roi. Don't try to count it, Rol Unlimited. Now, my wife hasn't heard this yet, but she's been asking for a pool for a long time.

Justin: Okay.

Yohance: And the conversation that we've had over and over has been about the roi, because we plan to stay in the house for a long time. So we're not, you know, we're not doing it because, oh, we'll get more value when we sell it. I live in Texas. Everybody wants a pool and to get one that's decent, I mean, we're talking about a six figure investment.

Justin: Yeah.

Yohance: And again, we call it an investment. But that's been my counter argument. I was like, it's not really investment. We're not going to get any of this money back. We're just spending money. But when you said R O, L, which for those that haven't heard the phrase yet, Justin, is this your phrase?

Justin: Did you come with this? No, not my phrase. I don't know who said, I feel like, like a Tim Mauer thing, but. Okay, definitely is not. It definitely is not my, not my phrase, but tell them what it is.

Yohance: So Rol is return on life, Justin. I immediately, immediately started integrating that into client conversations the same day. And, and they loved it. They're like, well, that's a, that's a good point. And think about it that way. And I said I wasn't either until about 10 minutes ago. So, Alicia, I know you're going to hear this soon. You're right. And she's been trying to say that, but she didn't use those three letters, so it wasn't landing. But Alicia, you're right. The Rol return on life of putting a pool in our Backyard will be immeasurable. So I am open to having the conversation again. And fortunately, we did get a client recently that is a pool designer.

Justin: So there you go.

Yohance: Hey, maybe we can bring the price down just a little bit or at least have someone that we trust that's doing everything because, you know, we've got all his money, so he's probably going to want to take good care of getting our pool in the ground.

Justin: Exactly. And that's a synchronicity, my friend. I would not look past the fact that your wife wanted a pool. The post comes, you have a new client that is a pool designer. Like, that's not by. I don't believe in coincidences. Like, that is synchronicities telling you this is a path you're supposed to go down. And the reason I did, the reason we did the pool was I, like, my plan has always been around this stage of life to be traveling a lot with the boys. I didn't. I've never been to Europe, so I had goals of going to, to live in Europe for a month and a month and a half of the summer. Different cities and like, living in the towns and. But with my boys, with basketball and soccer, like, we can't get away for that amount of time. So I was like, well, if we're not going to travel and I have, you know, this financial plan budgeting us doing this travel, let's. Let's make home more desirable because our lives are home, basketball court, soccer field. That's basically it. And the funny thing is my family didn't think I was going to do it because I just out of nowhere. So let's get a pool and like, oh, yeah, you're not going to do that. And like, three weeks later, I had the pool company out. We're doing. We're mapping it all out and started it in last February, and it was open just in time for the, like, early spring. So it's. It's been amazing. So. And I think what's really important about it is, like, the return on life part of things is, yes, we have to be financially responsible, but we also have to remember that, like, life is meant to live and what good is having? And. And I did it even worse. Like, we went into debt for this pool. I took a home equity line of credit to go and I think that's.

Yohance: Which I would probably do the same thing just because I, I don't want to spend my money.

Justin: Right, right. I think it's, I mean, I think it's good use of debt. It's a good use of leverage. It's. It's equity from the home. Going back into the home.

Yohance: Going back into the home. Yeah. Yeah.

Justin: We didn't do it to buy TVs and, like, silly stuff, so. But just, like, the time that's been spent there looking out and seeing the boys, you know, swimming together. I love being in the pool. I never would imagine I'd love it so much, but in a summer and just a month, totally worth it. I don't mind making that payment every month.

Yohance: Totally worth it.

Justin: I appreciate you. I appreciate you sharing that story and the impact that that had, not just for you, but also for your clients. And I wish I was smart enough to come up with Return on Life, but. And I wish I knew exactly who it was so I could give proper credit.

Yohance: You were smart enough to repeat it. You were smart enough to repeat it, and that. That's. That's good. So, yeah, like I said, that was a. That was a. That was a new day for me. I was like, huh. Okay. I guess I can. I can see the benefits here. Now, I will say to you, Justin, we have similar goals on being able to spend time in Europe or some other country during the summer. And I did find a workaround because we have a soccer situation as well.

Justin: Mm.

Yohance: So I've been doing research for summer camps in London because, you know, soccer is big over there now. Basketball might be a little bit tougher, but I'm sure it exists. So we are. So last year, we went to Europe for the first time, and we were out there for three weeks, and it was. It was great. Came back home, and Inbox was on zero, which was incredibly rewarding. Talking about Return on Life, I was like, oh, okay. And, you know, I gave clients proper warning and said, here's what's going to happen. Everybody was good with it. So after spending that three weeks there, I began to imagine what it would look like to spend an extended period of time, say four to six weeks. And I was also thinking about the summer programs that my daughter's in. I said, okay, well, maybe we could find a program there that she could be a part of while we, similar to you said, visit, you know, because we have some family there, we could actually take a little bit more extended weekends away and have some place to go back to. And I. I. Right now, I'm thinking it will be two years from now, will be the first summer that we tested out. And then, of course, I could still get some work done, because the work day just starts a Little later and ends a little later. But I, I'm, I'm trying to figure that out. So I'll, I'll. As I get more information on that, on how to make that possible, I will be very happy to share it with you.

Justin: Please do. Please do.

Yohance: Because I, I, I'm with you now. I might take a little minor setback with this situation. It's going to be going on soon. The funny thing about getting a pool, it will also solve my landscaping and irrigation problems I have in my backyard.

Justin: Yeah. Take up all that space. Okay.

Yohance: I won't have to worry. You don't have to worry about the pooling that's happening every time it rains. There's a pool now. So that, that could work. That could work. So this return on Life concept, I feel that it also has, it also relates very closely to More Than Money concept.

Justin: Mm.

Yohance: Now, as a curator of More Than Money, can you start with the first book? Like, where it was? Was this just a fever dream that popped in your head and said, hey, let's do it? And then just the coordination of it all. You have, you had what, 17, 18 authors in the first book?

Justin: We may have been in the 20s on the first book. So I'll back it up in the idea. So the idea came from a community member and he just came, he had written some books before, and he just said, you know, wouldn't it be cool if we came together as a community and wrote this book, you know, telling people what real financial planning looks like? And seemed like it was a fun idea and the whole game plan was just to self publish. Like there was not a big ambitious goal of going to Herriman House and raising a bunch of money and doing all these different things. It just started off with an idea and all of the credit of corralling everybody together, organizing it, planning it. That's, that's Shanadu. Shauna's name's on the COVID before Taylor and I as curators, as it should be. Because the book number one and number two don't happen if it's not for Shauna. She took on the, the project of being the go to person to get everybody together and organizing it. She's the one that actually got us to Herriman House, which is really cool to have it actually published with a big publisher like Herriman House is one of the top financial publishing companies out there. All of Morgan Housel's books are on Herriman House. So, like, we're right there on the Herriman House bookshelf, if you will. Next to Morgan Housel, which is pretty cool. So. So it was just. It was just an idea. It's. So much of what the AGC is about is, you know, as a community looking for opportunities to do things together, to, you know, grow as professionals. You're writing a chapter in a book requires you to grow and think about how can you communicate better and what's the story you want to tell. But then we're also, you know, growing the profession outside of us, because the book was really cool about it, both versions. It is, you know, a book for the public, but it's also a book for other financial advisors. So it's. It has dual audiences because it's making the public aware of what financial planning looks like. Because I think not everybody knows what real financial planning, real financial advice looks like. They have, you know, stereotypes and stories they've heard, but they don't really know. And then you have other advisors that might be coming into the profession or as you know, and other advisors listening. There's so many different ways to show up as a financial advisor, and if you enter in, in one track, you may not know of all the other possibilities of ways to work with clients. And so I think it's really cool that it's. It's serving multiple audiences with the same stories.

Yohance: Now, you said There were over 20 in the first book.

Justin: I mean, I think so, yeah.

Yohance: That sounds like herding cats. I mean, how did you keep that many advisors? I'm sure this was more Shauna than you, but really, what was the strategy to keep that many advisors engaged? Because from being a part of the second book that was a full year or a little bit more than that of work, but keeping them engaged, keeping to the schedules and the deadlines for publishing, what were some of the things that you did to help do that or as a group that AGC provided

Justin: well, so one of the. I mean, one of the things is the motivation. So if you want to be a published author, you need to. You need to do these things. So there's the motivation of the advisor of wanting to be a part of this book. So you have to kind of meet the deadlines. Now, did everybody meet the deadlines perfectly? No. I know Shauna was chasing people down, and. But for the most part, the majority of the advisors were on. Were on track and did meet those deadlines. I think it also speaks to the character of the advisors in the community. It's, you know, a special type of advisor that joins the agc. Abundant mindset, high quality, wants to be Growing. So I think it speaks to, to the community as well. And then there's financial incentive. Not that we were making money because both books, all of the proceeds that the community we get gets donated to charity, but they, all the advisors had to pay to be a part of the book. There was a cost associated with doing it. I mean, it wasn't prohibitive to keep people out, but it's also enough money to where you're not going to want to waste it. And not that having skin in the game should be the reason people do things, but at the end of the day, if you have skin in the game, you're going to, you don't want to waste that money. Even as a financial advisor, you realize, hey, I paid to be a part of this. I said I wanted to be a part of this. I'm not going to waste my money. So let me hit those milestones. And the good thing was each advisor is only responsible for their chapter. So it's not as if one advisor is writing everything. So your commitment is just to write your chapter. Now, there was some peer reviews and peer editing that added to it as well, but I, I, I can say it didn't feel like it was that hard because I didn't have a whole lot to do with it. To do with it. I tried to just back up Shauna, reinforce things, make sure people are going to be there when they needed to be. I never was called in to be the bad guy and say, hey, like, if you don't do this, you're out. So if you have Shawna on, she may be able to give you more insight on kind of how she managed all the cats and got them all herded together. But I think between her, the little bit of skin in the game and then just again, I think the quality of the advisors, you know, they say they're going to do something, they're going to get done. Like you said, hey, at the beginning, I'll have a bunch of the authors on my podcast. Here you are having a bunch of your authors on the podcast because you said you would do it. I'm sure there's other things you could be doing that right now that are more productive for you and your business and your family. But you said you were going to do it. You're a man of your word and you kept that commitment. And I think that's a lot of, a lot of the reason the success of the books have been what they have been.

Yohance: So let's talk about the success of the first book because There had to be significant success there to say let's do it again. So when was the first book published?

Justin: You would ask that. So the first book was published in. I meant to look it up while we're talking. I can't remember when it was. It's been a couple years. I know that because I want to say we started it definitely post Covid. So 2021 maybe. Okay, I'll try to look it up. But yeah, we, I mean we had. It wasn't a New York time bestseller. I think we were like number one in the Amazon category for a while, which is really cool. But I think that this, the success of writing a book together, getting it on a publisher and having it published and I don't know what the, what the tally is right now, but we have distributed a decent amount of money to the first book, had three different charities. So we've distributed the money to three charities. So I think that in itself is a success. And there was must have been enough to your point for Herman House to say, okay, let's run it back and let's do it again. I did forget one cool thing in the first book. So go back to more the money. When we originally started, the goal was to self publish and so to kind of also help people hit the milestones. We entered into a fun agreement with Carl Richards. So Carl is a friend of the community, great guy. And we basically went to him and said, hey, we're going to write a book and we want to, you know, we want you to hold us accountable. So we wrote him, I think it was a $5,000 check and we mailed it to him in a little box. And if we did not publish a book by, by the, the set date, he got to cash that check and, and he was going to use that check to buy a bunch of books of other financial advisors. So he wasn't going to go into his pocket. But still there was, there was money from the AGC on the line that was going to go to Carl. We didn't want Carl to get that money. Now we didn't hit the, the deadline, but that was because we got picked up by Herman House which pushed it out a lot further. But the whole game plan was we'll just self publish through Amazon and we're going to hit this day. So I think that's a really cool story. Carl did a video with it, put it out there to help us market it, which is really cool. We didn't do that this time around. I don't think we needed To. Because since we had already had one book done and we kind of had figured out how to navigate getting all the things done, like, the second time was probably a little bit easier than the first, but still a lot of work for Shauna. But I love that story, and I forgot to forget to share that earlier.

Yohance: That's a great story. That's a great story. Carl's amazing. I haven't had him on the show yet, but he's on the list of future guests. It's going to happen soon. I'm gonna get to the. To the end of this. This list. On this book, I'm gonna say, carl, now you have to do it. He did. He.

Justin: I'm back. That was weird.

Yohance: Yeah, I am too. We just had an Internet moment there. There you go. Technology doing its thing. Carl did give me a verbal yes that he would do the show eventually. He just hasn't. We haven't aligned our schedules yet, and I haven't given the formal ask yet. So that'll come one day. So I. We've thrown this. This acronym around a couple of times, and I just want to make sure that our listeners and whether your advisor or you're, you know, someone that's aspiring to be in the industry of the agc. Can you give a quick commercial on the agc, Justin?

Justin: Yeah. So the AGC stands for Advisors Going as community, and it is a online community that has branched out to be in person that Taylor Schulte and I co founded back in 2019. The whole premise behind it was a lot of advisors oftentimes feel like they're on an island by themselves, whether they are a solo advisor or they happen to be a part of a team where there's just a little bit of disconnect in the way that they view things. And we both realized that we would benefit from being around other great advisors. We had both been having a lot of kind of pick your brain sessions with advisors. I think we put together a listeners, maybe there's maybe a thousand calls that he and I had had over a couple years with advisors. Just talk and shop. So we thought, okay, advisors are looking to get together and talk to other advisors. What if we put together kind of this community? We didn't know what we were doing. Our goal was to get 50 members in kind of the beginning of the phase that happened within, like, 72 hours. So the community lives online. We use a platform called Circle. We try to get members together in person. I think this week we're having a women's retreat, which is really cool first time we've done something like that. But the premise is we can benefit. We can all grow together personally, professionally if we come together rather than viewing each other as competitors. There's more than enough people to serve. We all serve different audiences. So abundant mindset is the way to, to live life in general. And so it's a bunch of abundant mindset advisors coming together, sharing. We have guest speakers, we do, we write books, we have, you know, book clubs and a bunch of other things. But it's really about just getting better as a profession with other like minded advisors. It's really cool. And I, I don't know what Taylor thought, but I never would imagined it would grow to be such, such a cool community that has done such a lot of such great work inside and outside. We have mentorship programs with college kids. Like it's really a cool community and

Yohance: I am a member of the community so I'm very grateful for it. It's actually how I learned about the more than money opportunity because I have the desire to be a published author on my, in my own right. So for do my own book and I saw this as a, as a first attempt or a training ground. It's like, okay, all I have to write is a chapter. Can I gather my thoughts? Can I put them on paper? Can I present this chapter and be a part of and be held accountable to a group of other advisors and be a part of this, this book from beginning to launch. And again, shout out to you, shout out to Taylor, shout out to Shanna and all of the rest of the authors. And I appreciate all the camaraderie that was created there and we did it. So as we're recording this a little bit early, but by the time you're hearing this, the book is available. It's in stores. Barnes and Noel, Amazon, anywhere else you get books or you know, hit me up directly. We'll put a link in the show notes to where you can can pre order and it's just been. It's been an incredible journey. It's been a lot of fun.

Justin: Just wait. Just wait. It's good. You're gonna. There's gonna be.

Yohance: Not even there yet.

Justin: Yeah, there's gonna. No, it. It totally has been. And you won't. You wanna. This will kind of like be. It's not the perfect example. It's kind of like being. Becoming a parent. Not, not the same way. But what I'm gonna say.

Yohance: No, I get it.

Justin: There will be a moment where you will be in the mall or you will be in a store or somewhere. And I go, let me go see if the book is in the store. And you're gonna see the book in a bookstore. Like, I, I went to one here in. In town Indianapolis when the book launched, and I think there was three copies. And so I went up to the front desk and said, hey, like, that's me on the COVID Can I, can I autograph this? And so they let me and they put a sticker on. Like, that was a really cool moment, but I went there knowing the book was going to be there. There was a time when I was up in Michigan for an AAU tournament and we were going around the mall and Roman was with his friends. And so I just went into the bookstore not knowing if it was going to be there. And it was there. And that was a really cool moment when it wasn't planned. I didn't know the book was going to be there. And there you see your book, your chapter in a bookstore with, you know, there's like, there's classics all around you and then there's your book. Like, that is a really cool moment that I can't wait for you to get to experience. It's so cool.

Yohance: I look forward to that. I look forward to it. So let's talk about More Than Money, Volume two. So can. Can you give our listeners just a. A prequel for, for the book? What was the. I mean, well, we know the motivation behind. Okay, the last one was a success. Let's do this again. But, but what was the real the.

Justin: The.

Yohance: The. The. The. The meaning behind this Secret Sacrifice second edition.

Justin: The. I would say that the first reason to do it again was to give more advisors an opportunity to become published authors. That was part of the motivation because we did have success. The second reason was can we do better the second time around? We learned a lot the first time through. So with even more than money, we did a. We. We did some things a little differently. It's still a collection of chapters from advisors telling stories that have been anonymized of real client stories. So every, every chapter in this book is a real factual scenario of someone's financial planning situation, life story that an advisor has helped them through. We all got approved. We all talked to our clients to make sure it's okay with them. Made it so there's no personal information. Like you would never know whose chapter is about who. But the message and the story is really, is real. So what we did differently this time is we decided to kind of carve it into sections so one of the things, the feedback we got on volume one was that the flow was kind of a little jumpy. You had different authors and different styles. No one writes the same. If you think about most books, the tone is the same all the way through. And here you have people who write differently throughout. So it's different, you know, different styles. So it kind of bounces around. And we can't totally fix that because then that takes away the authenticity of the chapter written by the author. But what we did was group it into sections. So we have five sections that are. It's Living, Changing, Dreaming, Giving, and enduring. So each section has a handful of chapters that could be categorized by Living, changing, dreaming, growing, enduring. Like, I have a chapter in Dreaming, which I thought was a really cool thing to do, because now you can go through a section and you can kind of have some consistency with the type of story, rather than if you went from a giving story to an enduring story to a dreaming. It's. You're kind of emotionally all over the place with the type of story. You know, going into the enduring chapter, the enduring section at the very end, that's probably going to be the most emotional because that's where we're talking about loss and other things and enduring life and how finances can help you not avoid it, but kind of get through it and recover and come through a resilient on the other side. So I think that that was one of the things we did that was really cool. The other thing that we did that was different was I narrated in between each of the sections. So while we have different voices in each section, what we tried to do is create one voice that takes you all the way through it. And it's not a lot of extra writing. There's an intro and kind of an outro of each section that I do to try to tie everything together. And so that was fun. That was a unique challenge. I didn't write a chapter in the first book. I just did the intro. I actually wrote a chapter in this book which was a lot of fun. So between writing the chapter and writing the. The. The narrative thread, that was a lot of fun for me. But the. The sections and the narration through are kind of the biggest differences. Otherwise it was the. The same. Same idea, same goal.

Yohance: So your. Your section was an enduring. I was in changing. Let's talk about enduring a little bit for our advisors that are. That.

Justin: That.

Yohance: That can gravitate a bit towards these concepts. When you say money is for enduring, what do you mean?

Justin: I was actually in Dreaming, but I'll still.

Yohance: Oh, dreaming. I'm sorry, I thought you said enduring. I'm sorry.

Justin: No, no, no, no. Okay. So, yeah, so enduring is you think about like, life has its ups and downs and not everything always goes our way and finances will always play a part of that. And so the enduring part of it is how. How can money, how can financial resources, how can financial planning help you, you know, not crumble when, when you get challenged? How can having a plan, how can having that stability. How can or, or if it's a plan for you, an inheritance, losing a loved one, how can, how can you endure through life's challenges with finance, with finances? Because you're going to have to like, money touches everything. That's what's beautiful about this book is there's all types of stories of all different things through life. You can't escape money and you can pretend like you can try to not have to need money in life, but you do. So the enduring part of it is how do finances help you not run away, but get through these tough moments. Moments be resilient and come out on the other side and come out triumphant and not struggling.

Yohance: Okay. And so you were in dreaming.

Justin: Yeah, I'm a dreamer. There's no way I could write anything other than dreaming.

Yohance: You are, you are a dreamer. I will give you that. That, that, that does fit you very well. So I think we touched on this a little bit as we were. It was probably before we, we hit the record button, but we were talking about, we mentioned, well, we mentioned the pool, we mentioned travel. So we did talk about it here early on. So what are some of the money dreams that you have right now?

Justin: Oh, man, I got lots. So I. So this is perfect money script, right? We have these money scripts that run through us. Money stories, sometimes people call them. So I am, I actually am working through my own money script that has been limiting and I've been working on the last year. So I'll get to why I'm sharing this money script because it relates to one of the financial goals I have because right now from a, Taking care of my family, living a good life, doing the things we want to do, giving my, my boys every advantage I would want to give them. I'm in a situation where, where I can do all of that. So like, money wise, the want for more is not for, not for me. And that's the, the narrative I had. So I have had a narrative and I don't know where it came from because I don't remember being Told this from my parents or anything, but I've never wanted to make making more money a goal of mine because I felt like that was greedy. And so I've navigated my whole career. Show up, take care of people, do the right thing, and money will take care of itself, and it always has.

Yohance: And.

Justin: And I do believe that money operates like energy, and there's a flow to it. Like, I'm right. I'm working on my first book that will be about how do you view money as energy and how do you change your life? You know, navigating in a world where money flows to you and you can do things to command it. So I have this belief, but I also was always afraid to make money more, make more money. The goal and what I realized as of the last year, doing just. Just personal work and diving deeper into myself, is that my reason for wanting to make more money is to help other people. So one of my big financial goals is I want to be in the position to where I can help give people a start. I can invest in others. I can wipe out someone's medical debt if I need to. I have one of my favorite clients coming in when we get done recording to fill out QCD paperwork to send money to one of the charities. Love QCDs. I mean, he maxed. Every year, he maxes out the maximum amount you can give for a qcd, which is six figures, and he still gives more. And so he inspires me to help people, and he does it without people knowing. So, like, I have, you know, my personal trainer shout out to Franklin. Like, I would love to be in a position where he needs to have his own gym instead of bouncing around from Crunch Fitnesses to help people out. I would love to say, Franklin, I got you. I believe in you. Let's go find a building. I'm gonna get it. We're gonna work out some arrangement for a period of time, and, like, eventually you're gonna buy this building from me, and I'm not going to make any. I'm get my money back, and that's it. Like, I want to be able to do it where I'm not looking for roi. I'm looking for a different ROI return on impact. That's what I want. I want to impact people's lives, that sometimes money isn't everything, but sometimes finances are the obstacle that keeps somebody from being able to go do this thing they're supposed to do. And they may not have the ability or the background or the support system to be able to go overcome that. Financial obstacle. And I would love to be that person and again, do it kind of on the down low and just be like, all right, while you're not paying me for the building, I'm not going to pay you for training. That's our barter here. And then. But you're going to. Everything you get from the building, you keep. You don't have to pay me anything. So as you build your business, you have this, this, this building to get going and you're good. So that's my big motivation, is I want to increase my capital to be able to help people who aren't going to be able to get it from somewhere else if I can see that they really need it. And I believe in them. So that's one of my big goals.

Yohance: I love it. I love it. Gyms are hard businesses, though. Yep, they are. They're tough. I, I've participated in a couple of those investments over the years and they're, they're, they're tough. But if you got the right, I say the right motivation and the right people, I mean, think about it. Crunch Fist Crunch Fitness started as one building somewhere and now they're, I mean, I think they're publicly traded or something. One of those gyms are. Yeah, they're everywhere. So. And, but no, that's, that's beautiful. I like that. I like that. When you think about the future of our industry with the impacts of technology, the impacts of AI, the aging population that is in financial services, what do you think we as a community need to be doing, especially over these next, we'll call it five years, where we're really seeing the impact of technology and AI. What do we need to be doing as a community to secure the future of financial services?

Justin: That's a great question. I think it has to be somewhere along the lines of we have to be doing more to attract the right people into the profession. Because all of the narrative right now is all the entry level jobs are going to be replaced with AI. And so if we know we have an aging population of advisors and you can only roll up so many advisory firms and have a success, like have a business model that actually is serving the clients well, how are we going to begin to fill this backlog if we're not even bringing in new, new talent? And so something I think about a lot with AI and the technology conversation is just because we should, just because we can, does that mean we should? Meaning, yes, I can run my business more efficiently and more lean by not hiring a younger advisor, but just because I can, can use that technology. Do I have a, do I have a responsibility to the greater good to bring in a younger advisor, be less profitable as a business in the short term, but then be building the future of the profession because I brought somebody in and so I wrestle with that. And the same thing with just in life, like, we have a company that comes in and clean our house, small business in the area, woman started it. She employs I don't know how many other local women, in three or four years I'll be able to buy a robot if I want to clean my house just because I can do that, should I do that? Or do I have an obligation to the greater good of continuing to pay a higher price for a service, knowing that that service is impacting the lives of many people? And so I don't know that I don't think it's always cut and dry. But I think that we as a profession need to think about, do we do everything for margins, do we do everything for profitability, or do we need to make some changes that impact our bottom line? But it's better for the profession because we're able to bring in great talent, train them up, and probably train them up pretty quickly. And if we're not having to teach them all the technical stuff, it's more about, hey, here's the technology that will do the technical stuff that you need to review with your expertise and get them doing more of the human side of money, which I know you appreciate and you believe in, and, and put the focus on that. I, I think that's what we need to think about.

Yohance: Yeah, no, I, I, we cannot switch to a robot for our team that cleans our home because they also provide us with handmade, authentic tamales and, and tortillas.

Justin: They're smart. They made themselves indispensable not by the service, but by the, by the perks.

Yohance: I, I'm not going a, you know, holiday season without my tamale. And they appreciate that. I prefer the vegetarian tamales. You know, I'll do chicken every now and then, but they, they whatever I asked with the spice level that I want, Sorry, I, I don't think a robot's going to replace that part anytime soon. And I, quite frankly, I don't want to teach a robot how to clean my house. She knows where everything is when it comes to supplies. She knows how to make sure they're on the, you know, telling Alexa, now that's the robot we use. Alexa continue to order supplies, which I'm good with that, but, but No, I don't, no, no.

Justin: I feel, going back to my big, my big goal of trying to help people. It feels good to know that my hard work and the ability to be able to do that is making sure other people are taken care of. Like I, I don't want to, I don't want to take that away. It feels good to know that I'm, I'm being impactful because there's people who are being impactful for me. Like we're small business owners. We have clients that could have the opportunity. Hey, they could, I could go use Chat, GPT and Claude and a robo advisor. I don't need to pay Justin or Yohance anymore. But I don't like, I'm not giving my clients tamales. But I think that I'm doing a lot more than just the number stuff to where they don't want to get rid of me. So I don't know, I just think that there's got to come a time where we put people over profits and realize that it's better for everybody to be, continue to employ people or in our case in the profession, bring in young talent to make sure that we have enough advisors to serve everybody. Because I do think that we might see that the business change a little bit to where maybe more of the deep face to face bumps up to higher income levels and so we can leverage technology to serve people who haven't been able to have advice before. It's better than what they would do if they're on their own. But I just think that we can't just assume that we're going to lean on technology to replace the aging advisors and not have more people coming in. Because at the end of the day, I may be naive. I think money is too emotional to where we can operate solely on AI and technology and not having humans sitting across from other humans having important conversations about money.

Yohance: Yeah, and we did a show a couple of weeks ago with Will Hoffman and we were having a similar conversation about AI and he brought up a very good point that I had not considered because like you said, the talk in the industry is the entry level jobs will disappear. They'll be replaced by AI and finances at the top of the list where they say that's going to happen. The law field is another one where they say that's going to happen as well. But he, he had a different view. He said he's using AI as a way to train more younger advisors. Because if you think about when we came into the business that you would have a manager or a leader that was sitting beside you in all of your first meetings for the first, you know, year or two of your career. And we didn't have meeting recorders. Well, now if you put the meeting recorder in that meeting, you could have a younger advisor on their own a lot earlier and be able to still coach and give them feedback on the meeting because you have the recorder that's there. And what was. What kind of hit me like a ton of bricks was like, well, wait a minute. That means that advisor is getting the confidence of making decisions a lot earlier on versus when I'm thinking about my. When I first started in the business, the client asked a question, but a prospective client asks a question I don't know the answer to. We all just look at the other person in the room and then it almost. It kind of takes away. I think it did or it does. Sometimes it takes away from the opportunity for that younger advisor to say the most important words in the English language. I don't know. Because there's a lot of confidence built from that too. And I, I remember Clyde's like, yeah, can you find out for me? Absolutely, I can, but right now I don't know.

Justin: So, yeah, that's the way to build trust. Two parts of it. Being able to. I had this conversation with my oldest last night around admitting that you don't know or maybe that you made a mistake like that. People respect that and appreciate that. Saying, I don't know is the first part, but then following back up with the answer when you said you would is the other part that blows people away. I remember this. I remember discovering that early in my career, like, being surprised that I told somebody, you know what? I'm not quite sure. Let me go look back. Back up. I'll call you tomorrow. And then when I call them the next day and give them the answer, they're like, blown away. And it's like. Because so many people say they're going to do something and then they. They don't follow back up.

Yohance: Yeah, yeah. So I'm excited about that. Very excited about that. All right, so, Justin, I want. I appreciate you spending some time with us on the Money Script podcast. This is specifically our channel, Only Human. We're speaking to advisors directly speaking to individuals that want to come into his career that are curious about it and want to hear from. From some other folks that have been in this industry for many, many years. And we welcome you. First is, please continue to ask your questions, continue to look for organizations like the agc. Pick up the first copy of More Than Money. Pick up the second copy of Even More Than Money. Like Justin said, it's probably in a bookstore near you right now. Right. But of course you have all those other sources for online. Out of curiosity, and this is more personal question, has there been any talk about the audible version of Even More Than Money?

Justin: They we haven't talked about yet. There's an audible version of the first one, so I assume that there will be an audible version of the second, which was a really interesting process. Like they gave us five or six voices to choose from. And so I don't think that it'll be any of us doing the reading, but I would imagine since we did the first time, I would imagine there'd be an audible the second, but they haven't. I can't remember on the timeline when that came to be, but I'm sure there will be.

Yohance: Okay, well, audible coming soon as well. We'll put the little coming soon asterisks beside that. Justin, if anybody wanted to reach out to you, where can they find you?

Justin: The best place is just my name, Justin Castelli I.O. and anything that I'm doing, you can find from that website.

Yohance: Wonderful, wonderful. Well, Justin, we appreciate you spending some time with us here on the Money script podcast, Only Human. And thank you again for allowing me to be a part of this process or even more than Money. This was an amazing, amazing journey. I'm looking forward to, like I mentioned, finish my solo project as well. I did not do my 30 minutes this morning, but that's okay because I know I don't have to do it every morning, but if I can get at least the majority of days out of week, four out of seven, that's good enough for me. And I will let you know when we break ground on that pool.

Justin: That sounds good.

Yohance: Indeed. All right, Appreciate you, sir. Take care.

Justin: Thanks.

Yohance: All right. It was awesome.

Justin: You're a good host, my friend. Which I'm not surprised.

Yohance: I've done this a couple.

Justin: I love the pool story, man. I'm serious. Thank you for sharing that. That's awesome. Like, it's funny, the posts that resonate with people. Like, I never would have imagined that that would be like. I thought it was going to be something like, something deep that I said. And it was the pool. Yeah, I love it.

Yohance: That was a double entendre right there.

Justin: I got you, I got you, I got you. I mean, it's not too. I think our pool was like one. I think, I think settled around like 120, 130.

Yohance: Yeah, no, that's, that's where. So my client said he could probably get us down to about 1 10ish is what he said, based on all the features that my wife had previously said she wanted.

Justin: One thing of advice. If, if you're, if you're thinking of like skimping on the concrete, the advice we got that was really good would be like, go ahead and get the extra concrete. Because if you think like, oh, we can go back later and do it, it's gonna be more expensive than. It'd be a bigger pain. And so, like, if you were wanting a bigger concrete footprint, you're probably going to be better off just going ahead and doing it now rather than trying to go back on later. And I never would imagine, like we didn't do a bunch more, but I just love the space that we have on our pool. So that was one thing that I wouldn't have thought of and I would have probably tried to save money on the concrete. But we just went ahead and got the, the amount that we thought we needed so that we didn't have to mess with it later on.

Yohance: Smart.

Justin: Because it is easy to like, it is easy to run it up in price and it's also easy to try to find things to cut out. Like, one thing that we got that I'm not sure we really needed, it has a in floor, like vacuum system. So it has these. It has three pumps that will come up and it pushes everything towards the center and then the center has like your normal thing. But we also foolishly bought a robot cleaner that cleans the bottom. So I, I think the robot cleaner probably would have been enough and we didn't need the in floor one. And I don't know if the in floor stuff ends up causing problems and like, it's more things to break.

Yohance: Did you go salt or chlorine?

Justin: We went. It's chlorine, but it has like a, not an infrared light. But it's, it's, it's not a, a traditional chlorine pool. We don't need to put as much chlorine into it. But we didn't go salt. And the reason we didn't go salt was the water in Indy is pretty hard already. And so the guy that we talked, the guy that we worked with, I've had two clients build with them and their company is really reputable. He said you could do a salt water, but it's probably going to cause more problems over time. And we ended up doing a vinyl pool instead of doing oh really? Fiberglass. Yeah. Here was fiberglass. But the reason we didn't do fiberglass was the fiberglass pools that they had available. We didn't like the depth structure, so with vinyl, you can just build it however you want. So we did, like, a few steps, like a big step you could lay on. But when we built it, Silas was only set 6, 7. And we wanted to have a section of the pool where he could touch and be. Be. Okay. So we have like, maybe three or four feet where it's three feet deep, and then it drops down, and it went 4ft, 4 inches, which is a random depth. But we, the boys, wanted a deep end. I'm like, you guys won't use a deep end, and we don't have a big enough pool. Like, the whole premise of this is we want to play basketball and play like you want to be able to touch. And we went to Jamaica before we had finalized everything for New Year's. And the pool that the slide went into was 4 foot 4, and it was like, oh, this is, like, the perfect height. So that's why we did that. But we wanted to be able to pick our heights and depth of the pool to make it to where we could. Like, I wanted to maximize the use of the pool and not have this section that no one uses, because you got to tread water the whole time. So that would be. The other thing, is think about whether or not you would really use a deep end if you're thinking about a deep end, because most of the time, you don't. I knew I didn't want a water slide. I knew I didn't want a diving board because those are just accidents waiting to happen.

Yohance: Yeah.

Justin: And so we got a basketball hoop on the side, and the boys love it. And the depths worked out perfectly for us. So that's. We did vinyl.

Yohance: Yeah. What I can't get my wife off of is the water feature. She wants some sort of water falling cascade feature. She won't let go of that.

Justin: We got. We got little bubblers in the. The area where you can sit on the real shallow first step so it shoots up a little water. And I love it because I love the sound of the water going. But it's nothing. Nothing like that.

Yohance: That's what she wants to. She's like, I need movement of the water. Yeah. California girl. So it's the ocean thing to her. So I'm like, okay, let's go put an ocean in our backyard and figure it out. So. Indeed. All right, well, I've got to get to my massage. Today is my birthday, by the way.

Justin: Oh, happy birthday. Thank you very much for sharing it with me.

Yohance: So. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, all right. Podcast and massage and that's it.

Justin: There you go. Well, enjoy yourself.

Yohance: Indeed, indeed. I appreciate it again, man. Thanks a lot.

Justin: Thanks. Appreciate it. Bye.

Yohance: All right, bye. Welcome to the Money Script podcast. It's your host, YohanceHarrison. In this day. Whoa. Messed that up. We'll do it again. Welcome to Only Human, featured by the Money Script podcast. So happy to be with each and every one of you today. Today I have a good friend of mine from the agc, the Advisors growing community. And we are going to be discussing our new book, Even More Than Money, for those of you that read the first version. Awesome. That's cool. I didn't even know it existed until I had the opportunity to be in the second. But it's a group of advisors that came together and were telling stories, financial planning stories, of course, anonymizing the clients, but financial planning stories to get through different concepts of financial planning. It was a tremendous undertaking. It. It was something I'd never done before, but now that I've done it, I can't wait to do it again. So Justin is one of many interviews I'm trying to to interview as many of the authors as I can, so he'll be one of many in this series as we go through even more the Money Volume 2. And Justin pointed out something very important to me that we'll actually start the show with. And I really encourage you to really think about these concepts of ROI in Rol. We'll see you soon.