Thoughts On Things Financial | Schulz Wealth

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“I wrote this book as an opportunity to say some things on financial and investment topics that I discuss all of the time with clients. Here I can say these things to more people and hopefully help them understand the key issues, skills, and knowledge required to achieve personal financial success. This book is written for people at all stages of adult life, but mainly geared for those who may feel stuck, overwhelmed, confused or discouraged. It’s easy to feel this way and we’ve all been there. I’m hoping to provide a little wisdom and encouragement.”  

– Rob Schulz

Rob Hat Headshot

Thoughts on Things Financial is a no-nonsense, wealth management guide for all ages to enjoy, written by Rob and available now for purchase.

Focused on delivering smart, practical financial advice, Rob’s budget and investment strategies are designed to be easily understood and implemented by all. His book also explores fundamental truths about personal finance, so you can make good future financial decisions that are right for you and your family.

Inside, you’ll learn:

  • How to create a winning financial plan that balances your busy life with your long-term goals.
  • How to determine if you’re a net spender or net saver and methods to store up cash reserves for both.
  • A plain English guide on the players in the money world and how to utilize the best ones to improve your personal finances
  • How to take on risk in the stock market to increase your chances of success
  • Easy Do’s and Don’ts when it comes to teaching financial education to your children.

Rob’s straightforward explanations will shine a light on your current financial situation while providing you with simple tools to become smarter about your money.


“Rob Schulz offers practical suggestions, like "the key to implementing a sound financial plan is automation," to help readers build strong financial habits. His clear, understandable style makes this book a helpful guide, especially for readers new to investing or financial planning.”

Rick Kahler, MS, CFP®, CFT-I™, CeFT®, Kahler Financial Group, co-author of Conscious Finance and The Financial Wisdom of Ebenezer Scrooge

A must read for anyone who wants to gain control of their finances without getting overwhelmed with information in the process. Rob Schulz delivers smart, practical, and easy to apply advice through the important fundamentals of financial planning and money management. When you read Thoughts on Things Financial, you will not only be encouraged to gain control of your financial life, but you will have the tools and knowledge necessary to do so. This book can be a financial game-changer for you!

Jeff Holler, CFP, Founder & CEO, The Capital Chart Room, LTD, Podcast host, Author of Bigger Than Business

“This gem truly encapsulates the issues you and your family need to address for your future financial success.

Using thoughtful personal experiences and Rob Schulz’s incredible depth of knowledge and wisdom, Thoughts on Things Financial is an easy-to-read guide for people of all levels interested in personal finance. The book feels more like a conversation with a wise old friend than another boring financial book. Read this book and watch your life improve by following some simple down-to-earth principles.”

"Very few personal finance authors are able to tackle a wide range of complex topics while making them interesting and easy to understand. This book does both, covering everything from cash flow management and investing to end of life planning and how to approach money with children with real-world examples. Readers can take action after reading this book."

Taylor Schulte, CFP®, Co-Founder, The AGC™

From the book: Thoughts on Planning

There is an entire industry of get rich quick schemes out there, preying on those who are desperate to find an easy way to succeed financially in their personal lives. Maybe you enjoy spending large sums of money on seminars about real estate and options investing or get a big kick out of persuading your friends and family to buy and market products and services through multi-level marketing. If that’s you, then fine, but you don’t need to do this. All you really need is a financial plan.

But most American’s won’t take the time to sit down, focus, and decide what it is they want to achieve from a personal financial standpoint. There are lots of good excuses for putting this off: It’s complicated. It’s hard to find someone you can trust to help. And it’s hard to find the time in our busy work and family lives. If you don’t think you have time, then you’re right, you are running out of time. You’ll have to make time because we all lose a little more of this precious resource every day, and time is a critical component in the time value of money concept we will discuss later as the lynchpin to your personal financial success.

Along the way you will find that there are a lot of advisors and companies out there who are not worthy of your trust. In this book, I’ll teach you how to distinguish those who can truly help
you from those who are just wanting to sell you their expensive products. As life happens, there are a multitude of things that pull at our financial resources. Sometimes it’s hard to know what to do. I’ll help you frame and prioritize your goals so you can make good decisions. You will also learn how to expect the unexpected, and I’ll help you be better prepared for some of the bad things that you and your family may have to deal with. Also, in our quest for financial success, we can sometimes be our own worst enemy. There are tricks and systems I can teach you that will help you manage savings and debt in a way that enhances rather than detracts from your long-term goals.

This book is designed to provide a guide, in basic English without all of the fancy financial terms, with the right information you need to step up to the plate with confidence. With the basic
knowledge I’ll provide, once you step up it should not be that hard from there. But stepping up is hard. For over 25 years, I’ve been working with people just like you to help them achieve personal financial success. By far the greatest trap is not ever starting and, therefore, never having a plan until it’s too late.

From the book: Thoughts on Spending and Saving

In the personal financial world, there are net spenders and net savers. Net spenders pay interest. Net savers make interest. Net spenders can never seem to catch a break. The car breaks down or needs tires, or a large medical expense pops up out of nowhere. And boom, the net spender just falls behind even more. The net spender usually is oblivious to the real reason for their financial woes; they think it’s their circumstances, not their financial habits, that are to blame.

To the contrary, the net saver experiences many of the same hardships but is able to adequately handle these expenses with cash savings. Same circumstances, but the net saver feels blessed that they had the resources available to handle their circumstances Rarely does the net saver realize how important their saving habits were to the pleasant financial outcome they experienced when under duress.

If you are a net spender, understand that the inertia of your financial habits is going to be very hard to overcome, and it may take awhile. Regardless, the first step is to start saving cash reserves.

The first step is not to pay down debt with every extra penny you have. You may need car tires, or maybe shoulder surgery, or something in the near future. If you don’t have cash savings, all that debt paydown was for nothing, and the endless debtor cycle will continue with no end in sight.

I know it’s sad to think of it this way. But there are people who learn how to achieve financial success, and there are those who never achieve financial success. Certainly, circumstances come
into play. But let’s be honest; it really just comes down to whether or not we spend more than we make or make more than we spend. If you set up an automatic cash savings plan, you are much more likely to make more than you spend, so do it now.

From the book: Thoughts on Investment Diversification

We can successfully diversify away a lot of the risk and noise created around individual stocks in the stock market pond, but the waves of up and down momentum are something we definitely feel and must contend with. We must think long term because the frantic movements smooth out over days, weeks, months, and years into mountain graphs of long-term growth we can clearly see over historical periods of time.

But it’s easier said than done. Maybe this conceptual illustration will help. It’s not uncommon for any number of well-known stocks to trade 10 or 20 million times every day. Each trade represents a new consensus on the stock’s value between a buyer and a seller, so that consensus happened 10 million or so times at various prices during the course of the trading day. Now imagine you put your house on the market this morning, and by 4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, it had changed hands 10 million times. That’s potentially 10 million people climbing in the attic, inspecting your sprinkler system, and running market analysis to determine value.

Do you think by, say, the millionth transaction that just about every known defect and market factor affecting your home value had been uncovered? Surely.

Now let’s say this crazy activity continued day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year. We would then have to consider your home a marketable security, with extreme liquidity. It’s still a home, but the price is being determined instantaneously throughout the day, based upon known changes and market factors.

My point is sometimes we assume an investment like a home to be safer than it really is just because its price does not appear to fluctuate. But the price would fluctuate if it had the same marketability as a stock in the stock market. To invest properly for long-term returns, we must allow all of this frantic trading to occur below the surface and try to ignore it as best we can. Later, much later, we’ll be glad this liquidity exists because it allows us to easily convert our investments into income for retirement.