Losing money is an unavoidable part of trading. Losing your sanity shouldn’t be. Financial freedom can feel elusive, achieving it through speculation for many seems like a dream even further out of reach. So where do you start? How do you learn? Are there ways to mitigate risk? B.R. Sutton learned portfolio management the hard way. Like many traders, at first, he was in it strictly for the money but after 10 years of making money and losing it, learning and growing, Sutton gained what he was lacking in his life: Autonomy. Now, he’s helping others learn the financial lessons he’s learned starting with the mental framework necessary for success in trading and in life.

Here’s my conversation with B.R. Sutton.

Welcome back to Author Hour. I’m your host Benji Block and today, I am thrilled to be joined by Brayden Sutton who has just come out with a new book titled Money Mind: Beyond Speculation. Brayden, welcome to Author Hour.

Brayden Sutton: Thank you so much, Benji. Happy to be here, thanks for having me.

Benji Block: It’s going to be a great conversation. Let’s do this and just start here man. Tell us a little of your background for those that are new to your work and a little bit about yourself?

Brayden Sutton: Certainly, yeah. I definitely come from humble beginnings, pretty average guy, grew up in Canada, always had a lifelong fascination with money, with what sort of makes money-people tick. I grew up in a household where we were rather unprivileged, so I’ve sort of known this lifelong journey of determining what separates the haves and the have-nots if it were and how much of that is in the mind, again, humble beginnings. I did struggle quite a bit as a kid, I had some parents with some serious issues, ended up really ultimately as a street kid before I was 15.

I was not able to finish high school. I had a very fascinating early few years in the technology sector, got extremely lucky in business, really dedicated myself to the capital market by the time I was 18, I was really – call it a professional trader still learning my trade. It wasn’t until about 30 that it really sort of started to feel like I was a professional but really, just a very average guy, very humble beginnings, suffered a lot as a youngster with things like dyslexia and anxiety, depression, of course, substance abuse and really just on a journey to better myself.

You know, money was constantly that key thing, that key differentiator that seem to separate people that were really just enjoying life, having a good quality of life and ultimately, been on a mission to find out what causes that and three kids, wife, relatively nice calm life at this point but…

Benji Block: And a number of dogs, right?

Brayden Sutton: A number of dogs. My wife has five chihuahuas so it’s a lively home without a doubt. For a quiet guy that loves peace and solitude but I think that’s maybe a life lesson or something I put myself into but definitely, unique upbringing and a cool life.

Benji Block: Wow, we’ll dive more into some of that because this book does a good job I think of balancing both your personal journey and then also giving away some really practical mindsets, right? In ways that we can think through money and investment and so, let’s do this, let’s go a little peek behind the curtain and just tell me, “Why now?”

Why now for writing a book and taking on a project like that? Because that’s – maybe it’s on a bucket list for some of our listeners, write a book down the road, right? But this is a big project. Why did you feel like this was the right time Brayden?

Brayden Sutton: Definitely. I mean, talking about timing, we’ve got meme stocks and crypto going wild, we’ve got working stiffs everywhere, getting stock brokerage accounts for the first time and starting to speculate without any prior education. Ultimately, it really goes back to journaling. I’ve always been a writer, I’ve always put my thoughts in on paper and I’ve always found trends and about 10 years ago, I ended up writing what I sort of joke as a recipe, which is kind of like a 10 commandments which is, if I’m going to be an investor, if I’m going to treat this like a business, if I’m going to be like a surgeon going in and having to do a job, there’s a protocol, there’s an SOP and there’s rigidity involved and things and rules that you need to stick by.

So, ultimately, I guess, it was the 500th working stiff who approached me and said, “Man, I just bought AMC yesterday, now it’s down, what did I do wrong?” I went, “Oh my God” I need to be able to scale this knowledge. I need to be able to put it in a book with no expectation except to hopefully help people that want to speculate and to ultimately help people understand that gambling/speculating/investing are very different things with a very different set of rules and very different outcomes an expectations. So helping people to decipher what separates a billion-dollar hedge fund from a struggling $60,000 a year working person.

Benji Block: Yeah, I like the language you use there around essentially, what are the rules that I would follow if this was a traditional business and then, how do I carry that almost as guard rails for success in something that is so speculative and you do a good job of showing both your failures there, right? But then also, how it’s worked out really well for you and that’s obviously going to be very encouraging to readers.

Let me ask you one more behind the scenes question which is, you’re talking about those that come to you looking for advice, which is clearly some of why you wrote this so you can just say “Here, I did the work, I put it into a book, this is where you should start.” Beyond that, was there someone you were imagining, maybe it’s an earlier version of even yourself as you’re writing this going, “This is who I imagine reading this and getting the most out of it.”

Brayden Sutton: Man, I’m glad you asked. So, I have a tremendous friend and mentor and a guy named Jamie Wheal. He is an author, his recent book Recapture the Rapture. I went to him and I said, “You know, I’ve heard this term of avatar, like you write for an avatar” and he looked at me and he said, “Write this to your 18-year-old grandson” and that really resonated. I said, “If I were to have given this book when I was 18, it would have dramatically altered the course of my life for the better.”

If I would have been able to given these key principles and concepts and ideas and little seeds to go off and recommendations on books, it would have saved a decade of torture, frankly, of banging my head and slowly losing money. It is very much, if I were to go back in time and put something in the 18-year-old version of my hand, this is that book.

Intuition and Positioning

Benji Block: Okay, yeah, let’s talk about the younger version of you. At 15, you’re like installing floors, then 19, and you alluded to this earlier, you’re running an IT department for one of the world’s biggest oil companies. Then you start to realize, you could make more money if you were just buying and selling shares in that company than the time you were spending kind of your nine-to-five situation so you quit.

But then, you talk about — and I love this interesting choice in your story — it was actually the legal weed business that makes stock trading your life. So, tell me a little bit about that season and how the weed business actually made stock trading your life?

Brayden Sutton: Yeah, I appreciate that. You’re exactly right, conviction is ultimately an authenticity so I was a rare subject matter expert in cannabis. I happen to be a medical user, I was a very much student of the plant, and I had a deep appreciation for its healing properties and recognizing that it’s not magic, it has its downside as well but I did know it better than anything.

I truly felt and better than most, as the capital markets intersected in 2012, really, in 2008 but it didn’t really happen ‘till 2012, I got outside of myself and I reached out to a couple of press releases that came out, the first one being Supreme, which I ended up spending a long time with, raising a lot of money but I again, just fear aside, called and said, “Look, I’m a cannabis expert, I know nothing about the capital markets, you guys do but you need cannabis people, let’s talk.”

That ultimately turned into me consulting in State of Colorado, Washington State, Nevada, lots in California, lots in Ontario up in Canada and lots in British Columbia. It provided a career, really, because I was a specialist, I was hyper-focused in something that ultimately kind of came to me you could say and I remember a joke, millions of years ago someone said, “If you’re the best underwater basket weaver in the world, you’ll be successful” and I guess, I just had such a strong deep understanding and then a strong desire for understanding in the capital markets that they did fuse quite naturally and really provided an awesome life for me but it was one of those things where I said, “You know what?” Back in 2000, I said, “This sector will come and it will – hopefully I’ll have something to do with it.”

I really had no idea that I would be part of some of these big businesses but I think those founders of those companies saw in me something that couldn’t be faked. Something that you couldn’t bring someone in and have them fake it till they make it, they really needed cannabis people per se and there just weren’t any capital markets cannabis people out there back in 2012.

Benji Block: And so, at first, it was you reaching out and then over time it’s like an anvil answer, snowball effect, is that what you’re saying where then, it was like, “Okay, now I’ve established myself in those, others are reaching out to me”?

Brayden Sutton: Yeah, well, it was intuitive to be totally honest. It was a lot of the old cheesy Wayne Gretzky saying, “Be where the puck’s going to be.” So, for example, in Canada it was like this land grab, let’s build these giant Costco sized cannabis facilities and I kind of went, “No-no-no, you can’t do that, you need small, focused and partitioned rooms” and then, a year later, it was a real focus on branding and then a year later, it was a focused on extracts and then edibles came into picture.

So I was always going where the sector was going, I was never chasing which is an important theme in life and investing but I knew that if we’re here now, this is where the sector’s going to be next year. So I was constantly positioning myself a year in advance and then letting things kind of come to me. So even the moves that I made, they might have been boring for the six months and then boom, I was kind of in the eye of the hurricane so it was just true conviction in me.

It is a strong intuition that said, “You know what? This is what I feel, I couldn’t be wrong but I’m going to go with what I feel so that at least, if I am wrong, I’ve only got me to blame” if that makes sense.

Benji Block: No, it definitely makes sense and I like that you said, even you use the word, “Trends” earlier and that’s something you bring up in the book and you had a way of spotting trends, right? That was hitting very vital to your success and clearly, that pattern developed over time so let me ask you this. There’s the practical side off this book which is that those that are reading it, you talk about mindset and there’s so many of us that don’t fully understand how our relationship with and are kind of our attitude towards money, directly, impacts our personal experience.

I would say, there’s a lot of people that are intrigued or maybe they want to become investors but they’re going, “Where do I start? How do I even learn, how or begin?” you know? You say that like any life-changing action, it begins in the mind. I want to go there, a lot of – if you want to say, self-help books or books in that space where we’re bettering ourselves, we’ll talk about mindset but I wonder, particularly, how you see this playing out in our attitude and relationship towards money?

Brayden Sutton: Yeah, that’s a good question. I am sort of reminded – I’ll give an example. I had a really clear picture as a kid, I was quite fortunate because I can give the example, talk about it in the book where I had a grandfather who spent most of his life as a military man. As a pilot, he never exceeded about 50, 60,000 a year. Retired an incredibly wealthy happy man with a couple of homes, vacation homes, airplanes, RV’s, just a phenomenal life and he was never a high earner but his relationship with money was incredibly healthy.

He saw money much more like fuel, just like go juice for all of life’s little paywalls and things that was never something to be hoarded. He never have a poverty mindset. Then he had a son, it was my dad who was an exceptionally high earner, very intelligent in his own head, you know, broke 250,000 a year, most of his life. Died young, died poor with nothing.

It always really was just such a head-scratcher. How is it that people can retire wealthy that earned very little and people that retire with nothing that earned a fortune throughout their lifetime? And it was abundantly clear to me that many people have a victimhood, a lot of trauma around money because they saw their parents arguing about going out for dinner or buying a new vehicle and so, money comes with it a certain amount of angst and then other people really, again, just saw money as choices. I’ve shifted my mindset that money is nothing more than choices.
Money gives you freedom which is choices, which is an abundant life and if you have this mindset of pursuing paper, that’s not a noble existence and frankly, it’s a chasing existence that will just perpetuate this poverty mindset that there’s never enough. I think there needs to be a switch in the mind, first and foremost, “Look, I have a pair of shoes, I’ve got a full belly and I’ve got a roof over my head, I’m rich.”

“Now, I’m just going to start working on my money habits and sort of grow my wealth.” That’s the mission I feel like I’m on in life because when I watch my dad struggle, every two weeks, he’d get this massive paycheck and then he’s like, “Well, that’s not enough!” Then he’d go and he blow it before it’s even two weeks later, the next one and try making ends meet.

It always fascinated me, it really did and I think I’ve finally read enough of the old, really ancient scripts that all say the same thing for thousands of years, they’ve talked about the Scrooge McDuck syndrome where you got a big horde of gold and then guess what? Your life’s now dedicated to sort of identifying with this gold, with ensuring it, with polishing it, with guarding it, with protecting it to the point where you can’t leave your house.

That’s prison, right? The lottery phenomenon which I’ve always studied is another great topic where it’s like, if you stick two million bucks in someone’s lap, you will ruin their life. You will literally ruin their life if they’re not equipped with the tools required to manage money. If they don’t know how to allocate assets, you’re going to end their life and that’s fascinating to me. I found that absolutely fascinating.

Benji Block: Have you seen the movie Back to the Future?

Brayden Sutton: Of course, yeah.

Benji Block: Okay, I recently heard this example and as you were saying that it totally had me thinking about it but there is that scene, it might be even in the sequel but he goes to the future and he grabs the sports paper so that he knows all the teams that win, right?

Then he comes back and he’s going to bet on it but I heard this like, what if, if someone was going to hand you a thousand dollars cash today or they’d let you go on the trip to the future and you could come back with the paper, which one would you choose? And a lot of people, I think, live in this space where they would take the cash because they don’t know – well, clearly we wouldn’t take the cash but we would take the future because we would know the outcome, right?

We would know but then, when it comes to our life now, we would rather have the safety of the thousand dollars then like learning what we need to learn, have the rules to actually be able to play financially and I feel like that’s what the books that you referenced and even the one you wrote is more like the trip to the future.

Here’s the rules and choose that, choose knowledge, choose wisdom, choose getting things setup, right? Instead of just, “Okay, I’m just going to do my nine to five, I’m just going to chase the thousand whatever dollars and then leave it at that.” I don’t know, it’s just a road you took me down for a second, Brayden.

Brayden Sutton: That’s awesome. I’m reminded when you mentioned that movie too because it’s like, we have that superpower so if you take like one example, it would be let’s say you’re a TESLA fan. I’m not but if you’re a big Elon fanboy, you love TESLA, instead of getting retail and going and buying TESLA shares and hoping for a moonshot which is too late, it’s already had its explosive upside. Go upstream. Learn that you know what? TESLAs going to go through more nickel and zinc and lithium, frankly, than anyone over the next 10 years.

If I just load up on that and wait for it to come to me, bring that to me, there’s a way of almost playing the future without having to have a crystal ball if that makes sense. I think some of the best speculators in the world know they don’t have a crystal ball but almost in that they pick a niche, get to know it and then wait for the market to come to you, be an accumulator years before anyone wants it and then distribute it back to them years later when everybody needs it and you’re the only guy that h as it.

Benji Block: But man, the mindset needed there to go after knowledge and wisdom instead of the fast or the safe play or whatever you would call that, right? To actually go out of your way and whether it’s laziness or who knows man, there’s a million reasons why people don’t do it but that’s why you’re writing this, right? Because you put the time in so I appreciate that.

Let’s talk about trading for a second. The common mistakes that you see people making when they try to jump into it. Is it, yeah, I mean, I would love to hear maybe a few really common mistakes you see done over and over again?

Brayden Sutton: Well, money for nothing. I mean, meme stocks, meme stocks and crypto to me literally represent money for nothing. I call it like the lottery ticket phenomenon, I’m going to go to the store, I’m going to buy a lottery ticket, I have pretty much a 99.9% expectation of zero return but you know what? I just might make it big for doing absolutely nothing.

And that’s lazy, that’s shortcuts and there’s no shortcuts in life, right? I’m reminded of 1929 which was a pretty biblical – the first big wall street crash let’s say, in modern history. Closed most of the institutions, wiped out most the independent traders, certainly took a lot of household wealth.

Here’s the most important part, 1928 was the biggest rally that saw more Americans participating in stock market than ever before, it sucked them in. And it sucked them in because the doorman or the driver or the housekeeper said, “Oh, are you buying Ford? Are you buying Ana Cut Steel?” to quote Wall Street.

What it did was the masses sort of piggishly piled into the market at the top and if you go back 200 years of S&P data, the biggest 500 companies in America or mutual funds, which actually show this data as well and that is that the public has an incredible ability to pile in at market tops because again, they hear everyone around them getting rich. They pile them at the very end of the choo-choo train going up the hill and then they all rush out at the bottom, which is incredible.

Which goes back to Warren Buffett’s what he’s lived by, which is literally be greedy when others are fearful and be very fearful when the whole world is greedy and I think my main driver behind writing this book was because I see so much greed and so much fear and so much piggishness and I would often find myself reminding people like you can be a real bear in TESLA, you can be a real bull in TESLA but don’t be a pig.

Don’t buy it blindly expecting for it to double because that is not real and if you go to your work and you expect to do that work, you can’t expect to stick around, so if you buy stocks recklessly, you buy crypto on your iPhone using a shady crypto exchange with using a credit card to buy and you wonder what is going wrong it is like, “Well shit, you are doing this wrong.” You are literally treating the heart of the economy, being the New York stock exchange, like a lottery ticket.

I think that’s an epidemic frankly. I think we are actually in an “everything bubble” because everybody wants to be a part of and nobody wants to put in the work.

Benji Block: Well, let’s dive into the second part of this book then because that’s where you start to layout. First part is your mind and we’ve touched on that for multiple angles and the second half is your money and some of these rules if you will or the ways that we can shift in our thinking. So I am going to pick a couple and then I’ll have you pick one that you want to highlight but I’ll just start where you start, which is plan your trade and trade your plan. Break that down for us and what that rule is in your mind Brayden.

The Money Checklist

Brayden Sutton: Totally. Well, let’s say you get in an airplane and you are going to go flying, whether it’s a jumbo jet or a little Cessna, you have a checklist and every single pilot has to go down this line of about 40 items otherwise you could die. You will literally die from that small tiny oversight. In stocks, it would just be losing money. If you set out on a ship and you don’t have a map or you don’t have a rudder, you are going to go in circles until you come back to the port.

So it is kind of a metaphor for life and that if you go and we’ll pick on TESLA again, if you go buy TESLA with a $100,000 and you have no plan, you are just swashing around the ocean, you are flying around without a map, you are doing every checklist –

Benji Block: Fingers crossed.

Brayden Sutton: Yeah, you’d come down to land and you don’t have your landing gear down because you didn’t check your checklist. So I guess being surgical comes to mind for me. Again, I use that term because the precision required to be an effective trader is incredibly surgical. It’s a very precise thing, there is a number of things that you need to use including timing and things like dollar-cost averaging and all of the tools but ultimately, if you think you can willy-nilly go into a surgery or go into a flight and just wing it, an accident will occur.

If it doesn’t, it will eventually occur and it will be devastating and it will probably end your career. The same thing goes for trading, the same thing goes for brokerage account, if you just start, you know, a good example using myself, at 18 years old I put a thousand bucks into a brokerage account. I literally did, I say in the book 50, it is probably more like 200 times that I kept putting a thousand bucks in like a pension or a slot machine wondering why am I not making it.

Well, I didn’t actually have a checklist, I didn’t have a roadmap, I didn’t have a plan, how in the hell am I going to expect to get to the holy land if I don’t have a map of how to get there?

Benji Block: Yeah, okay so let me ask you then about that checklist. You get frustrated, you’re like, “I need a checklist.” Is it going back to — because you referenced several older books. I actually didn’t put it in my outline but I made a separate list so that I go read those books but — was that kind of the light bulb moment for you where you started your checklist or what is that kind of list? What’s on that list for you now I guess?

Brayden Sutton: Yeah, definitely. So a big, big, big one is no. The big one is having patience, having the ability to spot opportunities when they come and then not chase them. So first and foremost, you have to again let those opportunities come to you. You can’t just open up your laptop and find a trade setup and go ahead and carve out a couple thousand bucks in 10 minutes. It is not like that, you have to spend days.

There is prep to get to the actual execution. I guess the key thing that a lot of those books showed was ultimately of a self-honesty I suppose you could almost say, a feeling that if I am going to do this, I am going to need to – it is like there’s an old saying, you know, “Dress for the job you want” right? Buy the suit for the job you want. So if you want to be a professional speculator or a professional stock trader and you don’t think you have to act like an institution, which does it quite rigidly.

But at the same time, you know be flexible enough to be fluid and be able to adapt and to learn and evolve as things go. Again, I think it’s unrealistic. I think so many set out and want to be the best at anything and if they – they are fooling themselves if they don’t think that they have to actually become completely proficient in that field, have all the tools and then be consistent. I think the word consistency for me, if I were to reflect in all my loses, what’s the word? Consistency, right?

When I broke my rules and again, the flip to that is that yes, you do have to be flexible and you have to be like that palm tree that can, the top of the palm tree can literally touch the ground and that is how they survive the hurricane. So ultimately looking at the boringness of a Ray Dalio or a Warren Buffett or an Anthony Degan and going, “Well, these guys are pretty robotic and they’re billionaires.”

So the people I know that are pretty willy-nilly and lose and inconsistent are struggling and that was a key, key piece for me.

Benji Block: It makes a lot of sense and definitely appreciate the resources of other books because I think you give a great way to start with our money and then lots of jumping-off points to things that have been beneficial for you and I know, I appreciated that as a reader. Let’s talk about another one here, so you talk about this balance of know when to cut a loss and then literally the next chapter is take profit when the trade is good.

I’ll let you take this either way you want but obviously, both are vital and people get this one wrong all the time, right?

Brayden Sutton: Absolutely. So again, my journal has been my most valuable thing because when I go back to the journal, I go, “Well, shit. I am selling my winners right away and watching them go up and I am going ahead and I am jumping into other things too soon.” So it’s like, “Okay, what am I doing?” Well, my human tendency, my human nature, again, driven primarily by fear and greed, which is ultimately all that the stock market is.

It goes up on greed and it goes down on fear, it’s that binary. And then realize that, “Okay, well my nature is to actually stop my gains and to actually jump into things and prevent or – pardon me, promote loss. So if I can just again remove emotion, quite literally remove emotion, let my winners run, get the fear out of my mind of like, “Oh, what if rolls back, what if it does that?” and actually allow them to do what they do, which is run.

Then also on the same flip-side of that is be emotionless enough to admit defeat and if you buy TESLA on a Monday and it halves on Tuesday and you can’t afford any further loss, you know what? That is a valuable lesson, that’s the cost of tuition. You didn’t lose mine, of course you lost money but guess what? You made a huge mistake that hopefully you won’t ever make again with an extra digit next time.

You talk it up, a new journal, you reflect and you find out that your emotion made that trade, what you didn’t do is you didn’t buy it slowly overtime or you didn’t wait for that perfect setup, so just really, you know, I’ve had massive loss and it was always attributed to breaking my own rules, which is some sort of fear-based decision making I would say.

Benji Block: Let me ask you a question for those getting started, right? So part of this is research and you are talking about patience as well. Would you advocate as well for, “Okay start doing the research and practicing” and then like you just mentioned, just do it with smaller dollar amounts to practice and see what happens and then as you gain confidence, you can go into bigger amounts or how do you think of that kind of practice overtime?

How and Where to Start

Brayden Sutton: Yeah, that’s the big question and the first thing I would say is no, don’t practice small, practice on paper. The greatest tool a trader or a perspective stock market participant has is paper tradings. So you pull up Apple and you go, “Okay, well it’s X price per day. I am going to write down that about a 100 shares and I am going to check in tomorrow, I am going to check in next Monday, I am going to check in the next month.”

Once I hit 10 out of 10 and I actually make a gain, only then would I say go back to asset allocation, which is take your pie, take your net worth and go, “Okay, here is a $5,000 chunk but you know what? I am okay loosing this.” I need to be detached from the outcome. I need to first be mentally okay with losing this money. I am now proficient in trading it on paper, I am going to sort of scale in gently, you know, don’t be cute.

Don’t think you’re an expert in something that you just began the journey and start to play and I used to joke that Suncor, which is that company before doing when I was 19, for years, Suncor was an ATM machine because I was completely glued to the chart. I watch through from 30 bucks to 33 every week for probably 200 weeks in a row and I just played that bracket, up, down, up, down and I didn’t even look at other stocks.

When I did jump into other stocks, guess what? I was bitten quickly. So journal, journal, journal, paper trade, there is a lot of really cool digital free tools. I prefer just a pen and pad, pick something you love like literally high conviction, “I am the biggest Netflix fan. I am the biggest…” you name it, it could be Blocky Martin, it doesn’t matter what company, pick something that you want to be a part of the story, if that makes sense.

It could be Bitcoin, I disagree with that thesis but it could be a crypto but literally pretend to trade it for two to three months and then scale in gently with money you can afford to lose and then six months later when you are making more money than your job, don’t be surprised because you did something that is completely achievable for anyone in the world, any disabilities, any lack of capital.

You don’t need a lot once you have that 5,000 bucks that you can, again, I’ll say afford to lose, you can start to make three, 400 bucks a day. You really can but it takes the prep, it takes the journal and the paper trading because once you step in minus the prep, your emotions are going to fuck it up. You are going to do the right thing until you have that first “Oh shit” moment and you’ll go ahead and you’ll make a move.

Then the next week, you’ll go, “Oh my god, that one little moment, that one little CNBC article, that one little phone call I got and I stepped out” and you have to be able to mute the noise, put on the horse blinders and I think the only way to get there is to really simulate the environment and my best advice for anybody would be pick one instrument and it actually doesn’t need to be a company too.

It could even be the NASDAQ, you could literally go queue-queue-queue and buy the entire NASDAQ in one ticker and just play the tech sector, which is a great way to have exposure but not throw darts but paper trade, paper trade, paper trade. If I would have spent a year paper trading at 19 years old, I would have saved my 20s or saved a decade of loss.

Benji Block: I want to throw it back to you to pick one more of your money mindset kind of rules before we wrap up here. You have done a great job because I am looking even at the table of contents and the rules that you lay out in the book. We’ve touched on them throughout your answers, you can tell they are very baked into the way you think, which is obviously great because you have written a whole book on this but is there anything else you want to highlight here before we wrap up as far as rules around money?

Brayden Sutton: Yeah, I think reshaping is the key. For some reason, the term asset allocation comes to mind because again, I just had a great conversation with a longtime friend and he called me up because he is struggling. He’s got this credit card debt, he’s got a bunch of stocks, he’s bought this, gone red on them, he just feels horrible and then he goes, “Well yeah but this house, you know, we got no mortgage and I am debating if I should take out more.”

I go, “Whoa, what do you mean?” he’s, “Well, the house is worth two million bucks” and I go, “But you’ve got credit card debt and your stocks are red and you feel like you’re drowning. You are so unallocated that you in a period of a week, by rebalancing your personal money picture, you can feel complete.” What I mean there is once you can take your time as well as your money, which is that circle, that pie and you go, “Okay, here is a quarter for my personal health.”

“Here is a quarter for my employer, my job, here is a quarter for my spouse and my kids. Here is a quarter of it that I maybe going to give back to the universe” exact same with your entire financial picture. So if you are someone that has all of your net worth, let’s just give an example and pick on this friend of mine, let’s say that 99.9% of your net worth is in your home and you feel poor and you work in a job you hate, you can fix that.

You can actually change that. Let us say you live in a condo in a city with a quarter million equity and all you want to do is live in Cabo and trade stocks, well news flash, you actually have that option because once you allocate soundly and you take that 100% of your net worth out of your home and again, I don’t recommend anybody goes and mortgages a home, that is not what I am saying.

What I am saying is when you look top-down 30,000 view and you go, “Okay, here is my net worth in a circle in a pie. It should be – ” and I am going to use quarters to make it really simple and round, 25 here, 25 here, 25 here and 25 here, that is an incredibly good feeling. It is a wholesome feeling. So once you have 25 safely put away for the future, 25% maybe in real estate, another 25% let’s say it’s in your business and then you have another 25% and you want to become a speculator.

Well, guess what? Now, you have that luxury. Now, you can actually take that 25% of your net worth put it into an account, be prudent, read the books and start to trade and guess what you’ll carve out a living. But you have to remember allocation, allocation, allocation. If you get a paycheck, pay yourself first. Put a little bit away for taxes, put a little bit away for massage or for personal wellness but I think the key thing that everyone is missing here is how to allocate their assets and assets being time as well as money.

But if one could just focus on asset preservation and asset allocation, it’s a game-changer. It’s an absolutely – what it does is it buys you time and I talk a little bit in the book and not to drag on here but you know, I talk a lot about runway and for people that are really sort of displeased or not getting satisfaction in their life, let’s say you need a 100,000 a year to live. Well, if you can put 50,000 away, you effectively bought six months of your life.

You’ve literally bought half a year, so if you can put away another 50,000 you can take a year off. If you can put away 200 grand, you’re in essence financially secure. At least you’re financially independent for the next 24 months. I think reshaping our relationship with our runway and our time as oppose to the hamster wheel is really my life’s mission is to help people understand, to see it completely different than we’ve been programmed through the school system and the money system and the banking system.

The industrial complex that created the clocking in and out and the nine to five and the Monday through Friday, those are all fairly new constructs that we are still as spiritual beings trying to wrap our head around because they’re quite unnatural things and if I am unhappy with my career, my spouse or my job and all I need is like a two-year runway and I could actually sell an asset to create myself a gift to myself 24 months of freedom to learn to become a financial speculator and make my own money every day on my own laptop with no meetings, no staff, no inventory and no bullshit, I don’t know.

I feel like a lot of people almost feel like, “Oh it is not for me, I can’t” and that is the reason for the book is that if I can do it as a literal high school dropout street kid that was addicted to so many drugs before I was even 18, my god, everybody can and there are no excuses for people anymore with the tools that are out there I think.

Benji Block: Wow, I think you left us with a lot of fuel right there with that last answer and I think you’re totally right, it is about putting in the work and the work can start even just reading this book, and getting into the correct mindset to get rid of the excuses that often kind of keep in our way from helping ourselves, opening a lot of doors I guess in our future if we would put in the work now. So what a fascinating conversation.

Brayden Sutton: Thank you sir, just eliminating that victimhood, getting out of the programming, the belief, the stories, which is all they are.

Benji Block: Yep.

Brayden Sutton: You know, “Money is elusive to me” it’s bullshit. Money is not elusive to anyone, money is completely – it is just like water. It flows, it is, it’s silent, it does not care about you or your feelings so tap into that energy and stop being a victim mindset as it relates to money.

Benji Block: Well Brayden, for those that want to stay connected with you, what is the best way for people to do that?

Brayden Sutton: Yeah, I am on Instagram. I guess just the personal account, you can look me up on there, Brayden Sutton. I am on Twitter @BraydenSutton as well. I know, it’s B.R. Sutton in the book and I am on LinkedIn, you can always shoot me an email, [email protected]. I’m pretty accessible and always available to chat and anybody with any questions, you know, I am on a journey myself.

I am a student of money, if anybody reaches out, I am always more than eager because my assistance and my writing this book helps me and helping others, so anybody feel free to reach out.

Benji Block: Well again, the book is titled, Money Mind: Beyond Speculation and you just eluded to it but if you’re searching that on Amazon or you’re trying to find it, again, B.R. Sutton to find the book and Brayden I know you put a lot of work into this thing. I know it’s going to be a great resource for so many. Thanks for stopping by Author Hour today.

Brayden Sutton: Thank you, sir. Thank you so much for having me.