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Overview
Robb has turned his life around and used lessons from the past to elevate his life. He sees financial situations as a way to help others and has written a book to pass on the lessons.
Most people have financial problems that Robb addresses by guiding them to the right questions. He is passionate about his topic and shares his wisdom through speaking and his book.
His Book
Website
https://rhillenterprisesinc.com
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YouTube
Transcript
Stephen: today on Discovered Wordsmith, I wanna welcome Rob Hill. Rob, how you doing this morning? Outstanding as you. I love that answer. And that’s your answer when I asked you earlier. So I love that something people can learn from. Rob, I’ve met you, but nobody else on the podcast probably knows you.
So before we get started talking about your book, let’s talk a little bit about you. Tell us a little bit about yourself, where you live, what you like to do outside of.
It’s okay. I’m sorry. You know what? I’m sorry that I have no problem with that because most of the people I interview are new authors and a lot of ’em are like in their laundry room or in their bedroom with cats running around. And I love that, honestly, because. It show because too many other authors I think, get anxious.
Oh I’m not in a cabin in the woods writing full-time. I’m not as successful. And what I’ve found after almost 150 interviews is just about everybody. Even the biggest names I’ve interviewed aren’t necessarily that Stephen Kings. We can’t all be Stephen Kings. When there’s stuff going on I actually love that because it makes all my listeners a little more comfortable, so no problems there.
All right. Go ahead. Tell us about you, where you live, what you like to do.
Robb: Like I said, my name is Rob Hill and I’m a financial advisor, author and speaker. What I like to do is I like to see the light come on in people’s eyes because there’s so much the level. of deception is so deep these days.
We gotta get back to the truth of the matter right here. You look at the way things are going with our finances and all this kind of stuff it’s it’s really challenging for a lot of people. A lot of people have no idea what retirement is. They just think that I don’t have to work no more and I’ll still get.
That’s not what retirement is. But then I go into that a lot. The reason that I’ve written this book in a couple of other books was because reading develops the powers of concentration and creative thinking. Okay? It’s something about those black words on that white page. It just rearranges everything.
Okay? And I’m not talking about breeding for entertainment. I’m talking about reading. Improvement personal development. Okay. I spent about 18 years of my life in the drug, drugs and alcohol. Okay. I, one day I woke up and realized that I was so much more than what I had become, and so I had to replace those habits with something else, and that something else just happened to be.
Nice. Breeding is a beautiful thing. It’s a
Stephen: beautiful thing, and I love that you say that because you probably have listened to Anthony Robbins, or at least seen him around a bit. He is a pretty well-known big motivational speaker, and some people like him, some people don’t, but, One of the big things he basically says is we either do things because we want pleasure or we wanna avoid pain.
And we usually don’t do one or the other until it becomes so overwhelming we don’t have no choice. And. It’s so simple to make a change. You just decide to do it and do it. And that sounds stupid. And people always look for that golden panacea, the pill that what do I gotta do? That sounds too simple.
I need to do something else. It’s, it seems to be, if you decide this is what you wanna do, this is your priority, that’s what you work on, and it sounds like that’s what you did and what it, what got you out of your situ.
Robb: See the decision is just one part. That’s just one part. This it’s very simple.
However, it is so simple that it gets complicated.
Stephen: Yes, absolutely.
Robb: The first thing you want to do is you decide that you are not where you want to be in your life. The second thing you gotta do is you have got to control your tongue, . You have got to control your tongue because what you say is what you get.
It’s so true. What you say is what you get. So if you want something other than what you’re living in right now, you gotta start speaking what it is that you want it. It’s
Stephen: the old, you gotta put out into the universe what you want and it comes back manifest. ,
Robb: most definitely. I wouldn’t say the old, put out what you want, universe.
I would call it new because a lot of people have no idea how much control their words have over their current
Stephen: situation. Okay. So we’ve talked, oh we’ve jumped into things. Give everybody what is the title of your book and what it is about, and it’ll make more sense what we’re chatting about.
One
Robb: The one book that, that I believe would make the most difference is called Ask the Right Questions, get the Right Answers for Sound, financial Retirement Planning. And this book goes into four areas of any solid financial plan. One being rules and trust, long-term care, safe alternatives to the stock market, and final expense.
Now, these four area. Need to be visited by everybody. Okay? So many of us are just barreling along and we don’t realize that the road that we’re on goes off of a cliff, but we’re just rolling right along. We just keep on going right along and we don’t realize that it rolls off a cliff.
See, a lot of people think that retirement is an age. Retirement is not an age. Retirement is a financial. . Okay. The reason why they have 65, or it’s gonna be higher than that now, but anyway, 65 was the retirement age was because number when they input that nobody was living to 65, right?
And so now they’re, because of medical advances and all this kind of stuff, people are not. 18 months in retirement, they are living 18 years in retirement or more. So now we gotta where? Where’s all this money coming from? You’ve stopped producing, so now you want to just get paid. This is why in 1978, a law was introduced by president Ford called erisa.
That’s the employee retirement income security. I think that’s a misnomer because what it should be called is the Employee I Retirement Income Security Act. Because what it basically did was it made all W2 wage earners investors, but didn’t tell ’em about it. Okay? This is why we have what is known as a 401k, which was never meant to be a retirement vehicle.
What the 401K did was it took the burden of retirement off of the employer and placed it squirrly on the back of the employee, but didn’t tell ’em about it. Okay? This is where they come up with the, you can do this 401k thing, you can put your money here, and here, but they’re all their choices. You think you got choices, but they’re all their choices.
They said you can pick this and regardless to however the stock market. , the managers still get paid. What happens? You remember Enron, WorldCom and all forget, we get to the cupboard and the cupboard is bare . Alright? Our ours just think about this.
We live in a consumer driven. Now just on his face right there, it really doesn’t say anything. But when you really think about it, when you dig down into it, a consumer driven economy, what does that mean? That means that we have got to get these consumers to spend their money. So then you come up with advertising, all these different TVs, all these different advertisers on advertisements on Televis.
just getting you to separate from your money. You are like, Walmart, save money, live better. Really? No, you don’t save no money, you just
Stephen: get more stuff. It’s that old joke where the wife went out, I spent $3,000 cuz everything was on sale, so I saved money. , right? Yeah.
Robb: And you, it would surprise you how many people believe that people that they will.
Hours driving around looking for a deal. They got the cheaper over there across town and all that. When,
Stephen: what’s your time worth? Yeah, that was my father. That was totally my father. You might, you
Robb: might as well buy it here and use that time to do something else, as opposed to riding around. My my stepmother , she goes out and just buys things just because it’s on , right?
My, I had ads too, like that, man. They would just go to the store and just buy things that they never opened. They sit there why’d you buy this? Or it was on sale,
Stephen: right? Yep. Yep. I think that’s the post depression era thinking it is just, they don’t know what to buy anymore. It’s like the millionaires and billionaires that lose all their money because they had to buy a. Bathtub or something. . So lemme ask you this, Rob. Why did you decide to move into financial planning, financial advising, and write this book? Why choose that avenue? It
Robb: Actually it, it we have to back up to when nine 11 happened.
Okay. Nine 11 was a transition period for me because that was when I was working for the. . I worked at a high energy physics laboratory and nine 11 happened, and the bottom fella, okay, so I had to find a new a new avenue. And so I started working for Caterpillar, and then I decided to go back to school and finish my degree.
All right? I was enrolled in school and I walked in there one. My counselor, she said Rob, you gotta meet my cousin. And I was like why do I have to meet your cousin? She said, because he’s got a job for you. And I told her, I don’t want no job, and anyway long story short, I met with him.
He was a partner with New York Life, and that’s how I got into the life insurance thing. Okay. After a short stint with New York Life and a few other organizations, I realized. , I could help people better if I did this on my own without, because most of the insurance companies and I, I don’t mean anything bad about this, but all they want is sales.
That’s it. They want What did you sell that? That’s it. Me, myself, I go in and educate people cause. . A lot of people, the first thing they out of their mouth is they wanna know how much does it cost? How much does it cost? And I said that’s a great question. However, that’s the wrong first question.
Alright? The first question should be, when does it start? And the second question is, when does it end? Because there are a lot of different types of insurance products out there, okay? And price is not always the best. That’s not always the best indicator of having the best product. Okay. What I do with people is we sit down and we do a forensic audit, so to speak.
Okay? We find out what it is that you have and what it is that you think you have, because nine times outta 10, when I sit down with people, what they have and what they think they have are two very different. . And so we, first, we gotta make sure that you, everything is dressed right, dress then there are other different products out there.
There’s there, there’s so many ways that companies go about selling things. They want to mislead you this way and pull you over this way and it sounds good over here and all this kind of stuff. But at the end of the day, at the end of the day, we gotta find out what the bottom. Okay.
That, that’s what I do. And I’m not gonna say that I’m the sales guru and all that, but when I do put something in place, it’s solid. Okay. It’s gonna meet their expectations
Stephen: all the way. So how did you take this knowledge, this information, and working with people and put it all into a book so people would understand and be able.
Get some benefit from it. People that live in Canada or over in California where you aren’t how did you go about that?
Robb: The idea is simply this. It’s not what you make, it’s what you keep. That counts. Okay. That, that, that’s what it all boils down to. It’s not what you make, it’s what you keep the counts.
Because our government, whether here or anywhere else, our government has an insatiable appetite, okay? They just want more. And if you don’t have everything nailed down, guess who’s gonna get it? Okay? You look at the. You’ve heard the name Vanderbilt. Yeah, of course. Commod Vanderbilt.
Commodore Vanderbilt. He had amassed something like 93 million back in the 18 hundreds. By the time 1973 rolled around, there was not a millionaire in his family. Why is that? It’s because of our government, our taxes. They just keep you heard of death tax estate. Tax here, sales tax, income tax, all these different tax.
We’ve got so many taxes. We don’t know whether we coming or going. Okay. But the politicians that put these taxes in place, oh, they know how to avoid them. Tax evasion and tax avoidance are two very different things. , okay? Tax evasion is illegal. Tax avoidance is. So we want to avoid paying those taxes and how do we do that?
There are a lot of different tools out there and just briefly will and trust. Okay? If you don’t have a will, get one. If you don’t have a trust, you need to look at it because if, let’s just say you got this $300,000 house and you leave it to your. You know what you just did, you thinking it’s going to be a blessing, but actually it could turn out to be a curse because there are taxes that are gonna come with you.
And before he can get take possession of the house, he’s got to pay the taxes first. So the idea is simply this. Why not move all your hard assets into a trust? Okay. The trust is a legal. Okay. The trust does not have to pay taxes, but your heirs can still have access to that property that you leave.
Now, there are many different types of trust and one that really rocked my boat was called the dynasty trust. It stays off taxes for up to a hundred years. Wow. Think about that. It’s a beautiful thing. Now these we live by the Golden Rule. You know what that is, right?
Stephen: Yeah. Do who?
Robb: So these people, they wanna keep more of what they want. They want keep more of what they’ve earned. And they do that through the different financial vehicles that are out there, the will and trust, the, all these different kinds of things. Now, medical. Costs are skyrocketing. This is where that long-term care insurance comes into play.
Nursing homes aren’t no joke. You gonna be paying three, four, $5,000 a month to stay in a nursing home, right? Where is this money coming from? It’s coming from all that money that you’ve been making. Steve, our system forces people into poverty before the government takes over. . So you can’t very well retire with a hundred thousand dollars in assets and expect the government to foot the bill.
No, they’re gonna make you sell everything first, and you’re gonna, you’re gonna be pretty much on welfare. That’s what the government steps in. So in order to stave off this kind of stuff, there’s long-term care. Okay. And the long-term care insurance, you’re gonna pay a small premium over the years, and then in the events, something catastrophic happens and you end up in a nursing home.
Then they’re gonna take over the payments for you. Okay? So it’s better to get it sooner as opposed to later, like all insurance favors your age and your health. Okay? The reason, another main driver for me writing this book and why I titled it asked the right question. Was because people asked the wrong questions.
See, if you asked the wrong questions, you not gonna get the right answer. Okay? I don’t care how many times or how many ways you ask it, if you ask the wrong questions, you are not gonna get the right answer, right? And so sorry. Finish Jeff. No, I was just saying that’s why it’s entitled that because it was out of anger.
Because I would sit down with people and the first thing outta their mouth would say my agent said this. My agent said that, my agent. And I said, wait a minute, hold up. The only thing that really matters is what’s written in the contract. I don’t care what the agent told you. It’s all about what’s written in this contract.
Cause all life and financial instruments, there are, they are. And if it’s not in the contract, they are not obligated
Stephen: to it. So what you said about the questions, it so if someone’s really worried about cost I can get long-term care insurance for 50 bucks, but if I go into a nursing home, it’s only gonna give me a hundred a month.
Whereas I could get another one that’s a hundred dollars and it’s gonna pay 5,000 a month. So that early cost is almost, who cares, cuz it’s, it gives you a lot better. That’s what you gotta look at. That’s, and is that the right there, is that the exa type of example, what you want people to understand after reading your book?
Things to think about?
Robb: Yes. See, the thing about that is when you’re talking about health insurance, earlier is better. Okay. Get it while you’re young. Because even with life insurance the longer you wait, the more it’s gonna cost because all insurance favors your age and your health.
Now, as far as what’s gonna meet your expectations down the road, then we would take into consideration some family history and things like that. Okay. Because if you’ve got a person that’s got heart disease in their family, okay, and. 55 years old, it’s gonna, it’s gonna be pretty, it’s gonna be a pretty big chunk to be set aside.
Okay. So there, there are a lot of different things that need to be looked at when we’re talking about this long-term care insurance. Okay. It’s not a one size fits all or anything like that. It’s tailored to each
Stephen: individual. Okay. So the people that have gotten your book and read it, what type of feedback are you getting from.
Robb: Well, a lot of people like the first thing is I didn’t know that . I didn’t know that. They’re really looking at the way that I go through a short history of how we got to where we are today with regards to retirement and our financial system and all this kind of stuff.
A lot of. Think about inflation. When they say inflation think things are costing more. Things are costing more. Things are costing more. That is not what’s happening, okay? What’s really happening, what’s really going on is that the value of your currency is falling. Your money is not as strong as it used to be.
Since 1913, the US dollar has lost 98% of its value. Wow. they’re still printed, 40 going North . Okay. There’s nothing backing it. There’s nothing backing it. And here we are. We’ve got 300 million people that are running around and have no clue. No clue what’s going on. Okay. We got payments on everything, right?
I Why do you think we have renter centers and all this kind? Okay. Payments on everything. Just, and it, it is ridiculous. See, it used to be, when I was coming up that if you wanted something you worked and you saved up the money to get it. The powers that be said, oh no, we can’t have that.
Give it to ’em now. Easy monthly payment plans and all this kind of stuff, man. And that’s where we’re at right now. You can finance anything these days. Yes. Anything. Why? Because the borrower is servant of the lender.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve seen that and I’ve warned my kids against that. My, my son’s pretty good.
He basic, he has basically no bills, no credit cards, and pays cash for just about everything he can. And he’s doing good there so far. .
Robb: Yeah. That’s a good thing. Now he’s also gotta learn. Pay himself too. See, because a portion of all that you earn is yours to keep. Okay. The 95% of the people that I run into are living paycheck pay.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. He’s, he is working on savings and I’m working with them on the next things and looking at that. Hopefully we’ll get some of that,
Robb: a really good book to. The millionaire next door. Okay.
Stephen: The millionaire next door. I’ll put that in the show notes too for everybody.
Robb: Definitely. That is a great book. Okay.
Stephen: All right. Rob, I wanna besides just talking about your book, I want to talk about your career and your talking and stuff. But before we get, move on to that phase if somebody came up to you and said, Hey Rob, I heard you wrote a finance book.
Why should I get that? What would you tell. The elevator pitch.
Robb: Okay. I would tell ’em that because I would say, look, there’s four areas that you, that need to be addressed and you need to look at these four areas. Okay. And that’s what I would say. This right here is just a guide. It’s not going, it’s not a how to, it’s more of a why to, why you need to look at these boys.
And that’s what I would doubt just the curiosity. Why do I need to look at these forms while I read the book?
Stephen: Okay, great. All right.