FutureHack!: How To Reach Your Full Financial Potential

By Scott Jarred

CHANGE YOUR TOMORROW BY HACKING YOUR FUTURE TODAY.

Too many of us struggle with anxiety over money. Income, debt, career, lifestyle, taxes, and so much more put pressure on your dollars. Anxiety leads to poor decisions, poor health, strained relationships, and distraction from what you really want for your life.

The good news is aut

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jarred,LLC
• Release date: Mar 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781735111254

Scott Jarred

SCOTT JARRED is the CEO of Invst, a firm that specializes in providing comprehensive wealth, building solutions for people who are abundantly minded, growth-oriented, want to win, love themselves, and love their family. Invst has created an environment outside of Wall Street conformity that's broken through the limitations of financial planning and instead focuses on financial positioning. Jarred is dedicated to providing smarter, faster, and more innovative personal wealth solutions for his clients. Connect at: Invst.com

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Copyright © 2021 by Scott Jarred.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews, without prior written permission of the publisher.

Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure the accuracy and completeness of information contained in this book, we assume no responsibility for errors, inaccuracies, omissions, or any inconsistency herein.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020919932

ISBN Casebound: 978-1-7351112-0-9

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-9496396-1-2

Cover Design: Carly Blake

Layout Design: Mary Hamilton

I want to dedicate this book not only to those people whom I have learned from but also to those whom they learned from. This book is a collection of all those ideas, truths, and actions that have been paid forward. I truly believe this knowledge is what allows us to hack our future to live the life we want.

ready to #FutureHack your life?

I’ve put together a FREE training revealing:

The Invst4Life process to help you live the life you want

The 4 challenges to building wealth

And proven strategies to make money work for you

Are you ready to invest in you, your family, and your future AND improve your cash flow to protect your value and reach your full financial potential?

Head over to www.futurehackmylife.com to access this free training now!

Contents

Introduction

How to Make Your Financial Life Radically Better

Chapter One

Be an Abundant Thinker

Chapter Two

Always Evolve

Chapter Three

Haters Gonna Hate—

So Beat ’Em at Their Own Game

Chapter Four

Adapt to Change

Chapter Five

Control Your Controllables—Protect Yourself!

Chapter Six

Be a World-Class Saver

Chapter Seven

Live Your Life—and Insure It Right

Chapter Eight

Build Your Game Board

Chapter Nine

Create an Evidence-Based Investment Philosophy That Works for You

Chapter Ten

Get Some Momentum with Factor VI

Conclusion

It’s Time to #FutureHACK!

Appendix

Interactive Future Hacks

Introduction

How to Make Your Financial Life Radically Better

If you were to write your obituary right now, what would it say? Seriously, have you thought about the dash between when you were born and when you will die? This may seem morbid. But it clearly distills what you want to be remembered about your life. About who you want to be. About what you want to accomplish. About the legacy you want to leave behind. If you don’t understand what you want in and from your life, then you can’t work to achieve it.

Beyond this critical foundation is the ability to fuel your life—money. Too many of us struggle with anxiety over money. Income, debt, career, lifestyle, taxes, and so much more put pressure on your dollars. Anxiety leads to poor decisions, poor health, strained relationships, and distraction from what you really want for your life.

I’ve been there.

The good news is you don’t have to be there. And if you’re not quite that bad, there is still great room for growth and an even more rewarding life.

Traditional thinking has limited your potential for too long. I escaped the anxiety-ridden life to create the life I want, to define my dash myself. The purpose of creating my firm, JarredBunch Consulting, is to help people achieve their goals, their dreams, their wants, the life they want to live.

It All Begins with the Right Mindset

With the right mindset, you can accomplish more on your own than you’ve ever imagined. It’s time to live the life you want to live, to make your financial life radically better, to unleash your full potential, to change your tomorrow by hacking your future today.

I’ve always been an entrepreneur. In fact, I’ve never really had a choice but to be an entrepreneur. I didn’t have much when I was a kid. I grew up in a low-income family with a single mother, living in subsidized housing and relying on food stamps. We were fighting just to survive.

That fight motivated me, from a very young age, to figure out how to make opportunities happen for myself. At age twelve, I had a paper route, and before long, I had expanded and taken over the whole neighborhood. I even had people working for me. When I was in high school, I started playing football, and I had a carpet-cleaning business that helped get me through high school. Luckily, I was able to get a full-ride scholarship to college to play football. College wasn’t really for my family or for people like me. No one in my family had ever gone before. When we were asked in high school who was going to college, I didn’t even raise my hand, because I didn’t think it was an option. Football was my way out; it was a chance to see the world, and I jumped on that train. My first year in college was rough as I had no idea what to study. I was only academically eligible because of the special NCAA standards for athletes. My guidance counselor thought it would be best to pick an easy major so I could stay in. So I chose criminal justice.

In one of my first classes, I had to interview professionals, and I met a computer-aided design specialist who was designing a building for a local real estate developer. In talking to him, I decided that being a real estate developer was my ticket and I had to find a college offering that program. I found a program at Ball State University in Indiana, so I transferred immediately.

I finished college, maximizing every credit hour I could get, from economics to entrepreneurship, architecture to urban planning. I really wanted to be a real estate developer—that’s where the money was, and it looked fun. When I first got to Ball State, I walked straight into the College of Architecture and Planning and asked the front secretary, How do I get into this program? She gave me a look before she answered and said, We are a top ranked college, and most of our students are presidential scholars. What have you done? I certainly wasn’t a presidential scholar, but I wasn’t deterred. I asked her who makes admission decisions and if I could I have their phone number. Long story short: I brought my C average up, and I got in. But when I eventually graduated, I didn’t have any money to get started as an actual developer, so I went back to school and earned my master’s in technology. I had friends who were out of school and making bank in the technology industry. I figured I would be able to build telecommunication facilities, which was the highest price-per-foot in real estate. It wasn’t long before I landed a corporate job with a high-tech company and moved from Indianapolis, Indiana, to Tampa, Florida. I was making great money. I had, by any measure, made it.

Next Ten Years?

But once I was there, I started asking myself, Now what? Where will I be ten years from now? I realized that just making it wasn’t enough; I wanted to do something more. I wanted to help people and not corporations. I really wanted to make a difference in people’s lives, and I wanted to help them achieve financial stability, independence, and control over their financial futures. That’s all I wanted for myself, and I thought others had the same issue.

When I left Indianapolis and moved to Tampa, I moved into a three-bedroom apartment overlooking the water with two other roommates. One of them, Branden Bunch, worked in financial services and happened to have a big TV and great living room furniture. He was a perfect roommate for a couple of guys right out of college. One day when we were talking about what the future could hold, I said to Branden, Hey, let’s start a consulting company for small-business owners that helps people with their money. So Branden quit his job, and we split my paycheck while we focused on getting the business up and running. Once we had enough clients, I left corporate America for good—and in 2003, JarredBunch Consulting was born.

All I knew at the time was that JarredBunch was created to help business owners. Owners needed help with employer-sponsored benefits. It quickly became apparent there were several other needs as well. Mainly, the owners themselves needed personal financial help. They were good businesspeople but very poor at managing their personal financial lives.

The easiest path to start was also a traditional path. The financial industry, at the time, had very few independent firms. Most were affiliated with broker-dealers. That traditional path gave us a start, but it limited what we could do for our clients. Not only in coaching and consulting but also in how we provided planning, investment management, and other services. The goal of the broker-dealer is to sell products. We were registered representatives of … salespeople for their products. This became unacceptable for us.

Once the goals of the institutions became apparent (more on this later in this book), I knew JarredBunch had to leave the traditional model. I wanted to sit on the same side of the table as our clients, to offer what I believed was in their best interests not the best interests of the institution.

So began the next leg of my journey.

I abandoned a pension, renewal income, and the perceived safety of the traditional financial industry to create something bigger than myself. As an SEC-registered investment advisory firm, I was now forever free to tell the real financial story and to completely implement financial strategies that would radically help the clients we serve as a true fiduciary.

Mission Driven

Our mission statement is, and always has been, to help educate, counsel, and guide our clients toward reaching their full financial potential. Whether you are a business owner, a corporate employee, or someone starting up your own business, JarredBunch was built to help you create a radically better financial future for yourself and your family.

Doing that demands following a strategy—and even fiduciaries don’t necessarily adhere to a comprehensive, rules-based, wealth-building strategy. That’s why it’s important to create one for yourself. If you can write your own story and dream what you want yourself, then you won’t be submitting to someone else’s agenda, one which may not be in your best interest. You decide what you want, and then you go and find the solution that achieves your bigger future.

Rules to the Game

Any pension plan, any endowment, any large family office will have what’s called an investment policy statement. Your IPS lays out the rules for how the money is supposed to be managed. How your money supports your life. We believe that everyone should have an understanding of—and a say in—how their money is managed. There should be some form of evidence and rules behind every financial decision that fits with that person’s Investor DNA. Your Investor DNA is unique to you. It’s how you are wired to use, live with, and invest your money. Understanding this is a critical component of your financial life success.

Certain people have been mind-blowingly successful at managing their money; some have even won Nobel Prizes for their proven financial strategies: Warren Buffett, Eugene Fama, Kenneth French, and Ray Dalio, for example. What’s their secret? They each developed a strategy, a set of principles and rules, and adhered to it. These strategies are defined and are backed by a rules-based philosophy that adheres to their personal Investor DNA. Each of these individuals used a form of evidence to complete their philosophy, and their wild success proves their strategies really work.

We know what doesn’t work: speculation, stock picking, market timing—it’s all gambling. Instead of gambling, you should be using a strategy that focuses on the risk of loss first, that will adhere to the sequence-of-return risk, and that you can stick with for the long haul.

Why? Because human beings are by nature irrational. We live lives of uncertainty. As much as we might try to be logical, we are not robots. We have emotions, and those emotions influence our actions, for better or for worse. We often act out of fear. We get sick; we’re mortal; we worry about illness, about dying too young, about outliving our means. We want to make sure our loved ones are taken care of. We worry about whether the market is too high or too low, whether we need to get out or stay in. But if you can find a strategy that works for you, you can abide by those rules. Rules allow you to stick with a system, rather than being emotional, illogical, or impulsive about your investment decisions.

Of course, past performance is no indication of future performance. You have to take into account risks and volatility and how those strategies will react to a changing world and the unknowns of the future. The world is always evolving—and today, it’s changing faster than ever. Back in the 1970s, the Greatest Generation had gold backing their money. It was a totally different time, which you can hardly compare to where