The Simple Road Toward Financial Freedom: A Guide to Building Wealth and Independence

By Mark Schlipman and Steve Short

During their years of friendship, Mark and Steve had many conversations about the need for more financial literacy, especially for the younger generation. There are countless books written by financial advisors and money-savvy consumers alike. But when a financial advisor and a corporate executive combine

• Language: English
• Publisher: Game Changer Publishing
• Release date: Apr 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9781962656467

Mark Schlipman

Mark Schlipman is a Financial Advisor and founder of Schlipman Wealth Advisors, with locations in KS, MO, and IL, and a strategic partner with Carson Partners, which has 140+ Partner Firms and 430+ total Advisors. Mark is an Accredited Investment Fiduciary Professional and a Certified Exit Planning Advisor. Mark and his wife have two adult children and a dog named Zeus.

Book preview

The Simple Road Toward

Financial Freedom

The Simple Road Toward Financial Freedom

A Guide to Building Wealth and Independence

Mark Schlipman and Steve Short

All Rights Reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other – except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles without the prior permission of the authors.

All material contained herein is copyrighted by Simple Road, LLC

2265 Bagnell Dam Blvd. Suite 200 Lake Ozark, MO 65049

(This address is not registered or affiliated with Cetera Advisor Networks, LLC)

Published by Game Changer Publishing

Cover Credits: Skylar Cawley

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-962656-44-3

Digital: ISBN: 978-1-962656-46-7

www.GameChangerPublishing.com

DEDICATION

To our loving wives for being very supportive and putting up with us running with this crazy book idea for the last 2+ years. Also, thanks to our kids for clearly communicating with us; this information is very valuable and needed for their age group, and, unfortunately, it’s not something they learned in school.

Thank you for reading our book!

As a token of our appreciation, we would like to offer you a free gift we are confident will be helpful on your journey toward financial freedom.

Please visit: www.simpleroadbook.com/gift

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Simply Scan the QR Code Here:

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The Simple Road Toward

Financial Freedom

A Guide to Building Wealth and Independence

Mark Schlipman & Steve Short

www.GameChangerPublishing.com

Foreword

Hello readers! You might be wondering why I’m writing the foreword to this book. It’s a great question. One of the reasons is that I’ve known one of the authors, Steve Short, for over 35 years. Steve and I have had a great friendship, and I’ve watched him go on to have an amazingly successful career in business.

The other guy Mark… I met once. Seemed like a nice guy, but who knows??? It doesn’t matter. What matters is these guys wrote a fantastic book! And I’m sure it was more Mark’s idea than Steve’s.

Yes, the title is The Simple Road Toward Financial Freedom, but this book is really more a guide to financial security. I love that the central idea is delayed gratification, which is something we talk a lot about with our own kids. Steve and Mark lay out the basic blocking and tackling (football reference) of putting a share of your earnings aside so that when you are ready to retire or even make a career change, you will be on solid financial footing.

I’ve been extremely fortunate in my career with finding the right people to guide me financially. However, had I been on my own, I would have been lost, and this is where this book can help you. These guys teach you how to take control of your life without living paycheck to paycheck. It’s also a great read. I read it in 4 minutes, but I’m a graduate of the Evelyn Wood Speed Reading School.

Another great reason to buy this book is that a portion from every book sold is going to the charity Cancer for College, which provides need-based college scholarships to cancer survivors and amputees… you know what? I think I like Mark after all. This is a charity that I’ve been involved with for 30 years, and it is near and dear to our hearts.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy the book. If you run into me after making your first million, buy me dinner, please. I need it.

Will Ferrell

The above endorsement is not from a former or current client of Mark Schlipman or Cetera Advisor Networks LLC. No direct or indirect compensation was received for the endorsement. Endorsements are not a guarantee of future performance or investment success and may not be representative of a client’s experience. For additional background on Mark Schlipman, please visit FINRA’s BrokerCheck (https://BrokerCheck.FINRA.org).

Table of Contents

Introduction – The Climb

Part 1 – New To the Workforce

Chapter 1 – The Power of Positive Thinking

Chapter 2 – Creating Your Monthly Budget

Chapter 3 – The Three Bucket System and Risk vs. Reward

Chapter 4 – Opening A Brokerage Account and Bucket 1

Chapter 5 – Bucket 2: Mid-Term Savings

Chapter 6 – Bucket 3: Long-Term/Retirement Savings

Chapter 7 – Health Savings Account

Chapter 8 – Your Automatic Investment Plan

Chapter 9 – Investing Overview

Part 1A: New to the Workforce – Other Important Items

Chapter 10 – Building Credit and Your Credit Score

Chapter 11 – Don’t Throw Away Free Money

Chapter 12 – Auto and Home/Renters Insurance

Part 2 – When Life Gets More Complicated

Chapter 13 – Your Silent Partner: Taxes and the IRS

Chapter 14 – Assets vs. Liabilities

Chapter 15 – But It’s Only $400 per Month

Chapter 16 – Retirement Plans and Changes in Employment

Chapter 17 – The Family Budget

Chapter 18 – Life Insurance - STL CHECKPOINT

Chapter 19 – Estate Planning Simplified

Part 3 – Late-In-The-Game

Chapter 20 – Death and Inheritance

Chapter 21 – Social Security

Chapter 22 – A Simple Way to Teach Your Children Financial Literacy

Chapter 23 – Divorce - STL CHECKPOINT

Chapter 24 – Reaching The Summit

Introduction

The Climb

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. – Albert Einstein

Most people would consider Forrest Gump to be a pretty simple guy. But despite a modest IQ of just 75, he has an uncanny knack for making the complex incredibly simple to understand. Even if you haven’t seen the movie, you’ve probably come across his famous quote, Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get. Forrest’s observation from an Alabama bus bench wasn’t just his major thesis on life. This clever one-liner also applies to the mindset of the average American investor. All too often, they work hard for forty years, only to be surprised at how little of their money is left over when they retire. To them, the financial system feels like a gamble. The stock market looks like a jumble of complicated acronyms and random numbers, no different from the blur of flashing lights and colors on a Las Vegas casino floor. No matter how hard they try to manage their finances—they never know what they are going to get.

Most people know they should save money for retirement and that they should invest, but at the end of the day, they don’t take the simple actions to learn what they need to do to get there. They just hope that one day they’ll open up the box of chocolates, and everything will have magically fallen into place. They rely on luck instead of learning what steps to take to create financial freedom for themselves. They buy and sell stocks based on emotion rather than proven financial wisdom and often have no retirement plan in place.

The average consumer is just enjoying eating the chocolates in the box—one by one—spending their hard-earned paychecks just as quickly as they deposit them. As a result, they keep living paycheck to paycheck, year after year, hoping that one day they will get that big inheritance, big promotion, or big raise. Sadly, as soon as they get that windfall of cash, it usually evaporates just as quickly as they received it because they never had someone to teach them how to manage their money properly.

Many people think that being a millionaire is just a fantasy. If you polled strangers on the street and asked them what they would need to do to be a millionaire, they’d likely tell you that they would have to be a professional athlete, rob a bank, or become a movie star to rake in that kind of life-changing dough. Very few of them are aware of the reality that for most Americans, saving as little as 20% of their annual income and investing it in the right places could net them a million dollars in only 20-25 years.¹ Sadly, there is a large percentage of Americans who aren’t financially literate. Only 57% of Americans claim to be financially literate, leaving the other 43% clueless.² We aren’t just talking about 25-year-olds, either. Many people in their forties and fifties are still struggling to understand the complexities and nuances of how money works.

Returning to our fictional financial forecaster, Forrest Gump, a fun fact is that his character invested nearly $100k in a little startup called Apple Computers. His imaginary investment in Apple stock back in 1994 would be worth tens of billions of dollars today!³ Despite being an average, simple guy, that one simple decision earned him a spot on Forbes 2012 Fictional 15⁴ of the wealthiest fictional characters, alongside other magnates like Scrooge McDuck and Bruce Wayne (Batman). But you don’t have to invest in the next big fruit company like Forrest did to become a millionaire.

If you’re a little skeptical right now, don’t worry. You’re the reason we wrote this book. The best-kept secret in the financial industry is that understanding how to manage your money isn’t some great mystery. It’s a combination of simple concepts and simple actions that we are going to teach you.

Defining Your Financial Freedom

It is important to determine what defines financial freedom for you. Many people we talk with define financial freedom as acquiring a million dollars. We will be referencing the goal of acquiring a million dollars; however, your goal may be a different number, reducing debt, selling your business and/or another specific goal. Financial freedom for some people means having assets and a mindset that affords us a life we desire for ourselves and our families.

It Doesn’t Have to Be So Hard

We know what you’re probably thinking: being a millionaire isn’t easy. But what if someone came along and told you that becoming a millionaire was actually simpler than you might think? Sure, it may be a lot of money, but with the right plan, it’s not that complex. The goal behind this book is to demystify some of the inner workings of the financial system to show you just how straightforward it can be to join the million-dollar club.

Metaphors can be valuable tools because they help us think about colossal concepts in simple ways. To use a metaphor, becoming a millionaire is a lot like climbing a mountain—it’s a big concept. When you are standing on the ground looking up at the side of the mountain, it’s easy to see the peak bursting out of the horizon. The goal is a million dollars by the time you reach the top. That’s easy to see from the ground. But what you can’t see right now are the cliff faces, hidden crags, and pathways that will lead you there. That’s where we come in.

This book will be your guide. It will show you the simple road you need to follow to get to the top of the financial mountain. A mountain is a great visual aid for thinking about your financial journey because the goal of climbing a mountain is pretty self-explanatory—you want to make it up to the top. Even if you’ve never climbed a mountain before, intuitively, you know that it is not always easy and it’s not a fast process. Becoming a millionaire is very similar. It will take commitment, hard work, and putting one foot in front of the other to follow the simple advice we will lay out in this book. In the chapters ahead, we will reference the mountain metaphor to help put your financial journey into perspective.

This journey will take consistent hard work, training, tools, and a game plan to scale the summit, but if you know what to do, it is very possible for the average American. You just need someone who has done it before to show you (and it also helps if they’ve successfully helped thousands of others with their investments.)

People don’t accidentally climb 14,000-foot-tall mountains. Likewise, most people don’t accidentally become millionaires. There is a simple strategy that you must follow to get there.

Preparing for the Climb

You can try to become a millionaire all by yourself, but just like climbing a mountain, it is nearly impossible without some support. Everyone needs a good guide. Even millionaires like professional quarterbacks make risky investments that lose them millions of dollars—we, of course, won’t name any names. There are countless stories of people who amassed real wealth only to fall off the mountain and lose it all because they didn’t have the right people in their corner guiding them.

We’ve divided the information in this book into three sections: New to the Workforce, When Life Gets More Complicated, and Late-in-the-Game. Breaking the chapters into three different sections allows you to easily find the information that is most useful to you and your current financial situation. It also gives you a preview of what’s to come and some helpful considerations you should think about early in life to prepare for your later years. However, even though all the chapters in this book may not apply to you right now, we strongly encourage you to read the entire book because the information and knowledge it contains can help you at every stage of your financial climb.

To make it easy to get started, we’ve written this book to be a practical guide covering most of the basics of your financial future. This book will not go into depth on every aspect of financial planning, as many of the topics we will discuss could take an entire book just to explain. Remember, learning about investment strategies and money management is a lifelong process. Our goal is to help you get on the road to becoming a lifelong learner and understand the basics behind financial freedom. This book can’t teach you everything there is to know. It is simply a guide that will provide real-world advice on how to help the process of becoming a millionaire.

In this book, just like mountain climbing, we will share things you need to look out for, what to avoid, and how you can prepare for the road ahead. If this sounds difficult, don’t worry. You don’t need to be a financial advisor to understand the knowledge and information contained in this book. The goal is to empower you, not make it so complicated that you need to hire a financial professional to interpret it for you. We will make this information as simple to understand as possible so that you don’t waste any time getting on The Simple Road Toward Financial Freedom.

Why We Wrote This Book

Good things happen when two people from different backgrounds combine their skills in the pursuit of a common goal. We realized that combining forces could be really helpful for explaining the full picture behind financial planning. There are countless books written by financial advisors and money-savvy consumers alike. But when a financial advisor and a corporate executive combine their knowledge, it enhances the narrative. It also allows Mark Schlipman’s skill sets as a financial advisor to complement Steve Short’s consumer-side experience. From a practical how-to perspective, both authors have a lot to offer, and the goal is to make this information easy to understand and even easier to