085: Accredited to Accredited with Gena Lofton

I am a refugee of the Thomas fires that crept dangerously close to my home in Montecito, CA. That's why my audio sucks on the introduction of this week's podcast. Fortunately the actual interview was done before my evacuation. As I mentioned in the introduction of last week's show, I woke up to ash on my deck and my smoke detector went off without any apparent fire. The air was clearly getting worse. So, my wife and I made the decision to drive about a hundred miles north to San Luis Obispo. That worked for a couple days until we saw smoke creeping over the mountains. It was a little eerie—like it was following us. So, we got back in the car and drove up to Santa Cruz where my wife grew up. We've been away from home living in a hotel for about a week now. Now…we didn't really anticipate being gone for this long so we didn't bring much. We were pretty stressed out and the kids could feel it. They were scared and emotional. In the midst of feeling sorry for myself, I started thinking to myself—imagine what it would be like if you had someone shooting missiles at you at the same time and you couldn't feed your kids. That's what's going on in Syria. Now how does that kind of reality affect a five year old boy's perspective? What if he sees horrible things and feels hopeless every day? How does that manifest itself in adulthood? Of course, since this is ultimately a show about money, I'm thinking about this in financial terms. If you grow up not knowing if there will be food to eat or if you have a roof over your head, how does that influence your view of the financial world as an adult? I don't think there is one answer to that question. I will tell you this, however. My dad grew up in India dirt poor—now that's poor. He started tutoring other kids in the neighborhood as a child and helped put food on the table for his family. As an adult, he came to the US in the late 60s on an engineering scholarship and he never looked back. The opportunities that he saw in this country—well, he was like a kid in candy store! I truly believe that his experience as a kid working to survive without safety nets served him well as a scrappy real estate entrepreneur who truly lived the American dream. What about the rest of us? How can we tap into our inner immigrant? It's hard. You have to imagine a world without the structure we are so accustomed to having. You have to imagine a world where simple things like clean water and a roof over your head are not guarantees. If you do this, the world seems a lot more scary. But..maybe a little bit of that perspective is healthy? After all, most of the security we feel is artificial. Take for example the concept of job security. There really is no such thing as job security. If you work for someone else, you are at the mercy of your company's financial performance. Just because you don't get to see company financials doesn't mean they don't exist. And…if you are the boss and you own the business. You know even better that there is no such thing as job security because you have likely been confronted with the prospect of letting people go and because you see your own financials go up and down! You see, behind our façade of a "secure" world is an underbelly of reality that we should be cognizant of and for which, at the very least, we should be prepared. The major difference between immigrants fleeing hardship and most of us living comfortably in this country is that many immigrants have seen the world without its makeup on and it ain't pretty. I am grateful that I have not experienced that world, but I know that it exists. Gena Lofton did not grow up in a war torn country but she did grow up homeless in this one—that world isn't pretty either. On this week's Wealth Formula Podcast, learn how Gena used her experience to leverage into the world of the accredited investor!