PP 270: Prosperity Through The PouchPlan with Mitchell Walker

Mitchell Walker earned his Bachelor of Business Administration from Southern Methodist University and embarked on an entrepreneurial career. He has owned five businesses: an insurance agency, multiple restaurants, an automotive dealership, a personnel recruitment firm, and a farm. His financial experience spans 25 years and includes working with the public to being the CFO of a Berkshire Hathaway company and a community college. He has served his local community as a City Councilman and County Commissioner.

For many years, Mitchell’s passion has been helping people improve their personal financial situations. He believes and shares this key message: If you do money right, life gets easier. You do money wrong, and life gets harder.

The PouchPlan was developed based on his expertise, but more importantly, was put to the test and proven by Mitchell and his wife Suzanne over 20 plus years as they raised their blended family of seven. He credits Suzanne and the PouchPlan for greatly improving their finances and moving their family “from ouch to Pouch.” They live on their hay farm in Northeast Texas where they enjoy their large family (they have five children and 10 grandkids), church, and extended family and friends.

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Kim Sutton Welcome back to the positive productivity podcast. This is your host Kim Sutton and I’m so happy that you’re here to join us today. And I’m thrilled to introduce our guest today, Mitchell Walker. Mitchell, welcome to positive productivity.

Mitchell Walker Thank you, Kim. It’s wonderful to be with you today.

Kim Sutton Oh, it’s wonderful to have you here. Mitchell is the author of the Pouch Plan Budget, the simple way to find hidden money, improve your life and build wealth. I have to admit, I have not read it yet. But I want to go get a copy because I am so intrigued. Mitchell, would you mind sharing how you became the author of the Pouch Plan Budget and the interesting life changes that you had that brought you here?

Mitchell Walker I’d be glad to. The Pouch Plan really started almost 25 years ago when I was coming out of an unexpected divorce and needed to say all newish and struggling business for pennies on the dollar. And when the dust all settled Kim, I didn’t have a job, it was about $100,000 in debt. Over the next two or three years, I’m making better choices in my life financially and otherwise, that improve the situation but I barely move the needle on most of the financial situations in my life. But one major thing did change, I met the most wonderful, sweet, smart and beautiful woman and we fell in love. So when we decided to get married, we would be bringing together a blended family of seven with five children ages five to 17. And we knew in our house, there would be more love and money right from the beginning. And sure enough, it didn’t take long for the cracks to show from the stress. couple of months the end I was laid on a car payment we’d established. And my sweet and wonderful and beautiful wife very gently reminded me but firmly that we made a commitment and we needed to make sure and meet those commitments. And I told her I said no problem, I’ve got this. And next month rolls around and I forgot again. But this time when I go to pay it, I didn’t have enough money in my account. So I have to go to my newlywed wife in five months and say I had messed up twice in 30 days and didn’t have the money to solve the problem. So that’s where the stress came to start.

Kim Sutton Oh my gosh, Mitchell. So I have to just share, for those of you listening who haven’t listened before, my husband and I have been married for five years now. And each of us brought two children into the marriage. And now we have a total of seven ourselves. So Mitchell, I totally understand that big blended family. However, I remember the night that we were actually sitting at McDonald’s and we weren’t even that serious yet. But I had to open up and tell him that I was close to 100,000 in debt.

Mitchell Walker Wow.

Kim Sutton And his, his eyes sort of got big. But he said, don’t worry, I’ve got a lot of debt too and we’ll work this out together. But you’re so right, those cracks start to show. And I don’t even know if I’ve shared this on the podcast before but just two years ago and late 2015, we actually had my husband’s car repoed because the money just was not there. And for those of you who are listening just because your car’s repoed does not mean you can’t get it back. We had to work really, really hard. But we did get it back. But that was just one of those. You’ve got to be kidding me. How are we going to get past this hurdle type of moments.

Mitchell Walker Most people don’t really consider how many areas of their life that that money affects and how they handle it and how they talk about it. And that was one of the big light bulbs that went on. As we began to make progress and began to share what we were doing with others. We we saw that and then I spent a time dealing with the public. And I saw how it is as you would get their financial life in order. So many other areas of their life would improve as well. But I’ll go back to what happened with us. So there we were, we’re in a situation where we did have the money to make the payment. We moved from one bank account to another but my my sweet wife without any condemnation are actually accusation, you said, we’re going to put a plan together to take care of this stuff. And if you will give me who to pay, what to pay, and when to pay out of each paycheck. She said, I’ll take care and see that all our personal staff is is paid on time, and in the right amount. And that was really the beginning of the path plan. She is an organizational guru who can literally herd cats. On the other hand, in a big picture guy who numbers speak to me like music does to a lot of people. So numbers made sense to me and organization made sense to her. And that’s why that’s how we started what we did with the path plan.

Kim Sutton Mitchell, of all the people that you spoke with would use, I know, a common problem in our house was, well, there’s money in the account that means we can spend it. And that’s what was often causing us not to pay our bills on time, if at all, because the money had already been spent. Did you see that being a common issue? I mean, I guess it would simply be lack of budget.

Mitchell Walker No, no, that’s a budget issue. But let me tell you where the real problem line on that Kim. I also come from a corporate background, where I have been 15 years as the CFO of a Berkshire Hathaway company. And I dealt with the public in a tax and bookkeeping business for 12 15 years before that. So I’ve been exposed to the very best practices in corporate America, budgeting and analyzing and projections. The problem is that the average person doesn’t possess the skills, the resources, the knowledge to be able to budget like the big boys do. Okay? Yet they need that information more critically, than large businesses or other entities such as governments need, what you just described is a perfect example of something we had to assess. And so let me if I can kind of give you a real quick definition of of how some reactors they have have a Pouch Plan developed in what it currently is. We basically had you divide your expenses into two categories we’re going to call them piles. And the first pile is what we call regular, and that’s regular in amount in time each month. These would be things like your house payment, or your rent, your utilities, your cell phone, your cable bill, your car insurance, your life insurance, your house insurance, all these things that come by on a regular basis, same time each month, and either the exact same amount or real close to it. That’s one stack of that. Those bills are set up to pay through your checking account, but here’s the key. That’s the only thing you pay to your checking account. So each paycheck that you get the pouch plan has figured bar you how much you need to deposit into your checking account, to pay all of those regular expenses that come due until the next paycheck. So your checking account changes from a place where you park your money while you’re deciding what to spend it down on to a place where every dollar that you deposit is considered spent, as soon as you deposit into the bank account, that’s a big number one, we call that accomplishes a couple things. Number one, you will never get another overdraft ever again. And number two, you get the ability to literally forget about those automatic payments and take them off of your plate. From remembered standpoint, to a funding standpoint, because you set it up to happen automatically. That leaves us another stack of our expenses over here, the irregulars. And here’s another interesting thing, that regular pile of bills for most people is 50 to 75% of all their financial activities during the month. And so now you’ve taken 75% of your problem off your plate. And that leaves you with the irregular which are going to be out of like food, household expenses, hair and nails, entertainment, giving, these things that fluctuate both and when they occur and the amount in which they occur each month. And all of these we’re going to have you pay with cash. That cash is available after you the paid all the regular expenses into your bank account. And this is where the pouch itself was developed. We started with the old envelope system, which you may remember where you list on the outside of an envelope a category, and you put the cash in there that you want to spend on that category for the month. Well, talking, my wife was an organizational guru. After about two months, it was really hard to handle because there were too many things going on with the family of seven. And it was just tough to administrate. And so once we set everything up that we put on automatic payment through our bank, all of our regular bills, she throw away the rest of the envelope and she grabbed a coupon organizer. And on each section of the coupon organizing little file, though, you know, that seven inches by four inches or so, she wrote the category that we wanted to control our spending on, food, [inaudible] school activities, these type of things, and then we pre funded those each month with cash as to how much we want to spend on each category.

Kim Sutton Mitchell, I have to share that I absolutely love the coupon book idea, as well as the whole function of it. Because there are so many times and I don’t know what it’s like in your house, that there’s money in the account, which we know has to go places. And I’m using present tense because this is still a struggle for my husband. He’s not a listener, sometimes I wish he was but now I can talk about him. Well, he’ll go to the store and come home with all these un necessities. I just made up a word I think unnecessary items that most certainly weren’t on the grocery list that I provided to him. For instance, the other day, he brought home a couple apple pie. But that was just like a couple of the things that he brought home. But if he had, if he knew that this is the money that we set aside for groceries this month, so stick to it. And I know you’re not saying that we can’t get those extras once in a while, but they have to be part of the budget and they have to be part of the plan. So and then the other reason I love the coupon book, or the coupon book method is because my three year old twins and four year old, they take things off my desk all the time, especially envelopes, because it’s just another piece of paper for them to draw on. But if it was a coupon book, I’m gonna have to try that, thank you.

Mitchell Walker Right, you just get to put them in your purse, or I stick mine in my back pocket. I mean, my wife and I actually, we have our own, we call them the mini pouches, we fund our major pouch, we find in leaving it actually in the top drawer of a dresser in our bedroom. And we’d go and get money out of it and put it in our mini pouches when we need to. That just because we work apart and our days are not exactly aligned. But let me explain some of the reasons why this work. Now I would not be this smark when I started doing all this, but I discovered as we went through the process, that we just stumbled on something that was really good. And so we refined it and made it better. But it is so powerful, because of a couple of reasons. One reason is that you have a plan in front of you that you’re trying to accomplish. There’s a study out of Virginia Tech in 2015 that showed that people who had a written and reviewed plan, their net worth was not double, it wasn’t triple, it wasn’t even quadruple. Those people who don’t have a plan, it was nine times more. I mean a plan is so powerful. Because here’s a basic truth and you get up to this truth and your listeners get up to this truth and I get up to this truth every single day. There’s a lot of people out there who want to move money from your pocket to their pocket every single day. And if you don’t have a plan, you can rest assured they do and their plan for your money will beat your no plan every single time. So pouch plan by its existence and you’re using it gives you a written and reviewed plan, every time you put money into it, every time you take money out of it, even every time you don’t look at your bank account. To decide what you can and can’t buy.

Kim Sutton Mitchell, how do you account for emergencies in pouch plan?

Mitchell Walker Well, we have an emergency fund. You know, everything doesn’t have to be in cash. For example, our savings. It automatically comes out, we consider that part of the regular expenses that take place in our life. So that money comes out of the paycheck automatically goes into a savings account, or into a mutual fund or wherever we choose to put it. The same thing with emergencies. Now, I personally encouraged people to have 500 to $1,000 of cash hidden somewhere in their house. And it’s the universally accepted gift card. Everybody will except for Benjamin Franklin, in the United States of America over both the world actually. I just think that it provides you a sense of security, knowing that no matter what the issue is loss of power, flat tire, a trip to the emergency room, you’ve got that part of line covered. And like I say, for most people, that’s going to be between $500 to $1500, depending on the size of your family. So the pouch, that would be one of the first things that you would want to make sure you get covered and that would be a regular expense that would come out before you start spending all your irregular money.

Kim Sutton Oh, I love that. I’m not a bad driver. I don’t want anybody to get that impression. But I remember one day last year when I got a little bit too close to the curb and the next thing I know one of my tires is rolling across the street. And I had actually jacked up the whole axle on my van on the big family van. So that was a non negotiable had to fix it right away. And we thankfully had that money. But there have been so many times in the past when things that have happened. We had to ask people for money. And that’s not

Mitchell Walker Yeah. If you can get this emerging fund built up. And here’s the thing, if you’ll put a plan together, let me tell you what we found. If you put a plan together, and by that I mean a budget simply a, where’s my money going? And how much do I have coming in, and then you look at where it’s going. Most people, Kim find 10% of their spending, they wish they weren’t doing that is easy to change, very simple to change. So you take the average American family that now is approaching almost 60,000, that’s 600 bucks a month in spending that is being really squandered if they have no plan. They’re following someone else’s plan, not theirs. So in three months, you could save $1800 and I want to taste that when you take all the aggravation of blast waves that come at you. They’re storm waves that hit and they hit constantly. Now those storms did kind of like you have an old whale in the Gulf of Mexico, one of those big rigs, all those waves go underneath you now. They no longer affect your life negatively. They just pass on by, you handle them and you move on to what’s important in your life.

Kim Sutton I love that analogy. I actually want to go get a picture from my wall now. And I’m not even joking when I say this. I want to get a picture of a ship on the ocean just to symbolize how, you know all struggles. We can coast right over them.

Mitchell Walker Yeah, and we can and the other nice thing to visualize is, if you don’t have that, think of yourself standing in a swimming pool or somewhere right up to your nostrils, you know, and someone jumps in and causes a little wave. Well, how long can you bounce before you’re just worn out? It’s a killer deal, not only emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually, every way to be struggling financially.

Kim Sutton I don’t normally time date episodes. However, we are recording this episode about a week and a half before Christmas. Where do you account for gift giving in this whole system? Is that the same as the emergency fund?

Mitchell Walker It actually is an amount that we stick back every paycheck into our cash amount, the end of one the envelope. Now I’m not enveloped into the past sections. Now to tell you the truth about Christmas, we really tell that a little different but giving, I mean, we find that our gifts,  well we had five children, you know, somebody was having a birthday every so often or they were going to a birthday party or there was a cousin or something else and then they started graduating. And then they started having, you know, their friends were having a baby shower. So I mean, we have a regular section on our pouches where  we put in for gifts. And for us, it’s about I think it’s $40 a month now, that’s just what we spend on gifts for our family. Christmas was always part of our regular savings. It was a little different. So we would take it out of there. But it’s just really just the planning part so it doesn’t surprise you. And it’s okay if you stick back, you know, $400 a month and you say $50 and that is going to go for my Christmas at the end of the year, the stress is gone, you made the choice. Here’s what a budget should really do, people think of a budget is something that constricts them, it is not. In the corporate world, budgets are used to make sure we fund the things that are necessary and wanted. If people would think of their budget as to why they fund the things that are necessary and wanted in their lives, they would have great lives.

Kim Sutton I agree. Mitchell, from the entrepreneur standpoint, I know a lot of us get caught up in shiny object syndrome, the same way that you were talking about everybody else having a plan for our money, and that is to basically give it to them. And one of the things that I found I had to do was just start unsubscribing to news to newsletters, because they’re also I would be constantly be receiving offers for Oh, get my new products, oh, this new app is coming out look at this hot Deal of the Day. And I really had to develop a plan for my projects, exactly what tools were necessary, exactly what stuff was necessary and how much money each of those was gonna cost me. What other recommendations do you have for the business side?

Mitchell Walker Well, you’re exactly right about all the distractions and all the people coming at you. And most people in business recognize a need for a plan. So I would tell them, if they’re in a couple ways of planning that I learned through the years with Berkshire Hathaway and on my own, you need some tools out of a toolbox that you can use. And my favorite one is the 8020 principle. That principle basically says that you don’t get the same results from the same actions in your life, some of your actions produce dramatically different result and returns than to others. And your key is to determine which of those actions are the ones that produce dramatically better result, and to forget about the others, and concentrate on those ones that produce great results for you. That’s the best tool I’ve ever seen and used for any kind of analysis is which 20% is causing 80% of your problems, which 20% is causing 80% of your profit, which 20% is causing 80% of your happiness, which 20% is causing 80% of your sadness and worry. It’s consistent often lie the 80/20. Now it’s not always 80/20 Kim, it may be 95/5, it may be 60/40. But there’s gonna be a differential every single time on the actions in your life and the choices you make as to what was produced by those choices. So an examination, what am I doing and what producing good results should drive you to focus on those things that you’re good at produce good results and literally forget the other ones.

Kim Sutton Absolutely. I can sort of equate that to both of our families. You know, the kids will see the shiny new toy that they like and “everybody” has it. But really, number one, if we buy it for our kids, are they actually going to play with it? And how long is it going to be before it’s at the bottom of the toy box or in the back of the closet or under the bed being neglected? And it’s the same thing with any of these trainings or tools that we can bring into our businesses, because I have seen so many of my clients who have spent and I’m not joking or exaggerating here, hundreds of 1000s have dollars on training that they signed up for and they never even used. So for every single purchase that you’re looking at, listeners, number one, are you going to use it? Number two, should you be using it? And number three, do you need it right now? Is it really going to be the growth tool? Is it going to take you to the next level. And this is so embarrassing to admit, I actually, listeners, you’ve heard about my websites being hacked, I purchased a backup tool that to this date, three date is three months after I purchased it, has not yet been installed on my website and then I have to do it now because, you know, there could be a hacker listening, who knows who could go in and try to get me again. But really don’t buy something unless you’re going to take immediate action with it unless you have time and unless it’s going to produce results.

Mitchell Walker Exactly. And that and you know, prioritizing is so important. So if you have a tool that you learn how to use that, you know work, it becomes easier to use it again and again. And that’s why I found the 80/20 principle, so effective in my life. It’s a tool I trust and it’s a tool I use all the time. But I guess it’s counterintuitive for people to do that. It kind of reminds me of something I heard one time, you may be familiar with the Clifton Gallup Strengthsfinder test?

Kim Sutton Yeah.

Mitchell Walker Okay. I think they have 24 characteristic that you can write down is what your strengths are. Typically, they only give you your top five, because what they found out was if they gave you all 24, people wouldn’t want to go to the bottom of the list and start trying to improve those that they were horrible in. And the results were pitiful, just pitiful. They would spend months trying to work on number 24 and they might move it up to 23 at the end of six months and a whole bunch of effort. However, if they would go work on number one and number two, they would find dramatic improvements in each and they would find really good result spreading all throughout their life because they were in their zone and they were doing what they were built to do, that’s what 80/20 really shows you, what were you built to do? Now it just because you’re not built to do something doesn’t excuse you from doing it if necessary. I will be honest with you and tell you at one point in time hospitality ranked really low on my strengthsfinder test that didn’t give me the right to not be kind and gentle and civil to people but it did make me understand that I shouldn’t be out there trying to open up some kind hospitality business because if it was not my nature.

Kim Sutton I’m over here laughing at that, just because hospitality would not be at the top of my list either even though I’m very kind hearted I would be killing people with my cooking.

Mitchell Walker It’s funny because giving is like number two or three on my list. I thoroughly enjoyed giving, the hospitality part I struggle with so I need to concentrate more on my giving increase that because I received a great enjoyment from that activity. Whereas the other one I don’t and I’m not good at it. So I’m sure the people receiving the hospitality didn’t enjoy it either.

Kim Sutton Right. No, totally. Mitchell, do you have a somewhat comical example of an experience that you and your family went through that the pouch planned really helps save the day?

Mitchell Walker I can tell you one that I’ve been laughing at now for a while. And it’s the number one reason why people we have worked with fall off the pouch plan. And let me preface this with telling you that most people don’t fall off the financial planning wagon. The real problem came is they never get on. And that first step on is a doable usable budget. However, it is not uncommon that we see people 2 3 4 months down the line quit doing the pouch plan because their finances have improved so much. We had a couple that we worked with, he was a first responder and she was in the medical care profession. And together, their combined income was about 110 $120,000 a year. They had too worn out cars, you know, over 250,000 miles on each car, his commute, I think, was somewhere around 100 miles, but he only went every other day. And, you know, they were just struggling all over the place. Monetary wise. When we put their budget together, sure enough, the 10% rule was just right there. Within three weeks, they had made $1100 a month difference in their spending $1100 a month. Two months later, they pull up in front of our place with a brand new $65,000 van. They were a people mover, they did have five kids. And they told me the payment was only $900 a month, so they were saving 200 more than they had been spending.

Kim Sutton Oh, wow.

Mitchell Walker So, you still have to make good choices, okay? And actually, for these couple, or that family, that might not be a bad choice. They homeschool their children. I think they have a couple more kids now they may have either six or seven now and having a reliable form of transportation for that many would be extremely important. So I don’t think it was a bad choice for them but I’m not there to make that choice. Where I found that pretty funny just because they really were kind of embarrassed of there purchase but they shouldn’t have been.

Kim Sutton I drive around in 1996 GMC conversion van. Now, this episode, I hope that there are listeners who listen to it well into the future, like years down the road, this episode is being released in the beginning of 2018. So at the time of this release, this van will be 22 years old, the oldest of my children is only 15. So he’s a little bit embarrassed. But what he doesn’t understand is that this van only cost us $1300. And we only had to put 800 in it before I sort of ran into the curb. I will neither confirm nor deny that I ran into the curb, I don’t remember it happening, I just remember the tire flying off. Anyway, while I would love to someday be riding around in style, you know, in a Mercedes 12 seater or something, the only way that that’s going to happen is if they sponsor me to be driving it, because I know that I can go out and get a Ford or a Nissan that seats nine and is a third of the price if not more. And I can even take it lower if I just buy used. I’ve done a lot of listening, Mitchell. And I’d love to hear if you have as well to Dave Ramsey, just in the past year. And one thing that I’m curious to know what your thoughts are, is he constantly says no to credit, like no credit cards, don’t purchase anything on credit, period. What are your thoughts on that?

Mitchell Walker I think credit you’ve got to be really, really careful with. Now coming from a business background, I have seen it used wisely, to spur growth, to make a business more competitive. There are lots of positive ways to use credit. But there is extreme debt danger there if you don’t know what you’re doing. I would really tell most people that it’s kind of like, you go to high school diploma. So let’s get your bachelor budgeting and that’s how to take care of thing. Your college is going to be the education that teaches you how to borrow for a house. Other items that, you know rental property, things like that. But I would say that MBA or that Master’s is disbar that person who is already well schooled enough to know the consequences of a bad choice debt wise. And unless you’re at that place, you just need to stay away from it. I know that’s hard for a lot of people, but the damage that it can do can take years to overcome and for some people may not ever be able to overcome. So well, I don’t believe that, you know, debt is from the devil, I do believe that you need to understand the entire transaction. It needs to be in a facility. Let’s say, for example that, you know, you have to have a car to get back and forth to work. And like this couple I was just talking about, I mean, this could be with 100 miles, okay? Well, he can’t get to work legally, it is a $75,000 a year job. So to be making a $300 a month car payment, to guarantee that he has a car that’s good enough to get him the 100 miles every other day is a good choice. You know, rather than driving something that would break down and he would miss work and have a chance of getting fired. So I think there are situations where a reasonable amount of debt for a reasonable reason can be justified. I find credit card debt in 99% of the cases to not be one of those.

Kim Sutton Oh, I agree.

Mitchell Walker Yeah, for that 1% and maybe even the last. But that’s all the has a written and reviewed plan. I mean, you know, one of my children does this, they charge my [inaudible] card. And they pay it off every month. I’m going to be issuing the watch to see if a balance creeped in there over the years. They just started this about a year ago. And they told me they paid it off 12 months in a row and they’ve been able to fly five or six different destinations for free. So they love it. And right now all seem to be working well. But that’s how credit usually starts out. All seem to be working well up front, and then it ends up biting you somewhere down the line.

Kim Sutton My husband and I are currently in a land contract, I’ll make this really fast. But for those of you who aren’t familiar, a land contract, when we got this house, we did not have good enough credit to actually purchase and get a mortgage. So we’re basically in a rent to own for a couple more months before we can get the mortgage. So we’ve been monitoring all of our spending, we’ve been paying off our debt. And it’s been seven years since we’ve been together. So this has been something I’ve been tracking our credit scores for seven years, no joke. I have seen them just because of the mistakes that we’ve made in the past and that my husband actually had a prior car repossessed Let me try that, again, a prior car repo before we got together. Our credit scores have gone from the three hundreds, which is abysmal to high six hundreds. And because of past poor decisions, I had had credit cards, but I built up inventory for the e commerce shop that I had in the 2000s I that’s how I accrued my $100,000 of that, well, I couldn’t pay those credit card bills. So they actually all just shut me off. Not just recently, but years ago. But in order to rebuild our credit, one of the flags that we kept on having on us was that we had no open credit cards. And it seems sort of to be an oxymoron is actually more on the right, or a catch 22. You know, we were trying to build our credit boat, but they want us to have a credit card. So what we have now is just one credit card with a $300 limit on it, which is still sort of funny because the credits, the credit score will still say, well, you don’t have enough available credit to your name. What that does not mean though, is that they don’t want us to go and spend more money on it. Because I’ve noticed on the rare months that we will make a purchase on there and not get the whole thing paid off, it’s just as detrimental to have 85% of our credit used as it is to not have that– they want to see that we’re not using any of our credit.

Mitchell Walker Right. It’s an interesting thing to where the credit reports work. And you know, people need to take a look at that. But you’re exactly right. You want the credit card down there but you do not want to have any usage against them, not usage. You don’t want to have any balances on them, or even very little balance. And I think if you get above a 30% math balance on any of your available credit that it starts hitting your score.

Kim Sutton Yeah. Mitchell, it’s a 20 point hit on your score. So if you’re right there on the cusp of whether or not you can get a bank loan or a car loan or a mortgage, that’s a big hit to take 20 points.

Mitchell Walker Yes, it is. But I will tell you, if you get the basic budget in place Kim, you will find that phenomenon that takes place that I have seen. And that is that when you put your budget together, you decide what’s important to you to make sure that you find and take care of, you’re going to pay your half to spark. Those are the things that if you don’t take care of they’re going to be immediate and bad consequences. You don’t pay your electricity bill, your electricity gets cut off, you don’t pay your mortgage, you lose your home, you don’t make a car payment, your car goes away. So you prioritize those things to take care of your have to’s, then you have your need to. Your need to and got to meet things like you need to say, you need to get your car inspected, and you need to have car insurance. This are need to’s and after you fill up the have to buckets, you’ll take care of the need to bucket and then now after the need to bucket gets filled up, then you go to the want to. And the want to’s are our desires and wanted to have sitting out there but you put those further down the list until you find your have to’s and your need to’s. And here’s the amazing thing we’ve seen Kim over and over and over again, if you will take over your have to’s, if he will take care of your need to’s, your ability to have more of your want to’s grows every single paycheck.

Kim Sutton Mitchell, it sounds to me like I need to have a serious sit down with my husband tonight. Because we have not yet taken our honeymoon because we haven’t been able to do the want to. So I am committing and I’m gonna get him to commit and I always handle the money that in 2018 and 2019, we are getting our have to’s and our need to’s. That doesn’t sound right but I know what I’m trying to say, under control so that we can not only get to our want to use but take our honeymoon, take our family vacation and really live the life that we want to be living with the security of knowing that we can do it that way. Because we have everything under control. Thank you.

Mitchell Walker Yeah. And I would love to come back sometime and visit with you about how amazingly intimate money is in a marriage and for a couple. I ask people this question occasionally, which is more intimate money or sex? And I get this kind of blank stare back or maybe a little grin here and there. And then I asked them, which have you shared more often your body or your checkbook. And then the light goes on. And they understand what I’m talking about. Money is a window into your spouse’s walk desires, and so as to where they want to spend that money. And that’s an amazing thing, to be able to find out and share with another person.

Kim Sutton You have that invitation to come back and have that discussion that definitely needs to be shared. Mitchell, this has been an incredible conversation. I look forward to having another with you. So thank you so much for coming on today. Where can listeners connect with you and get to know more and pick up your book?

Mitchell Walker You bet the book is available on Amazon. It’s going to be out in Barnes and Nobles coming up in a couple of months. But right now it’s on Amazon. And you can also get it the Pouch Plan P-O-U-C-H P-L-A-N all one word dot com. We have available on our website. And just come to the website, I’m on Twitter @thepouchplan. I’m on Facebook @thepouchplan. So come check us out. And you know, our goal is to change the number of Americans who are financially successful and have a plan and a budget from about 3-4% to get it to 10% before I quit doing this in 15 years, and that means I’ve got to reach about 24 million people in order to do that. But if I can do that, I think it’ll change the whole trajectory of our country.

Kim Sutton I will do whatever I can to support you with that. Thank you for what you’re doing, Michell. It’s greatly needed. Do you have a last piece of parting advice or a golden nugget that you can offer to listeners before we go?

Mitchell Walker Yeah. I would tell people to remember that if they do money right, life gets easier and easier. To do money wrong, it just gets harder. So it takes a little bit of effort. It’s definitely got to be worth it.