057: Helping Ordinary People Achieve Extraordinary Financial Results (w/ Todd Tresidder)

Summary: Todd Tresidder is a successful entrepreneur who has built many businesses and actually retired at age 35 from his position as a hedge fund investment manager responsible for over $20 Million dollars. He is now a financial coach and educator at financialmentor.com where he offers coaching, a blog and ebooks on how to build wealth and invest smarter.  <br> <br> He is the author of five financial planning books including “How Much Money Do I Need To Retire?,” “Don’t Hire A Financial Coach,” and “Variable Annuity Pros and Cons.” <br> <br>  <br> <br> Period in full-time business <br> <br> He says he has been in business his whole life. He only worked as an employee for 6 months and then got fired. When in college, he was the associate students’ business manager at the University of California which involved running the student run businesses on campus. He had been an entrepreneur since childhood starting out with paper routes and working his way up. He also had a boating business, taught sailing and had a pool supply company when in college. He says he is unemployable. He worked for HP straight out of college but was fired after 6 months. <br> <br> He had made them millions by cleaning up their service contracts but got fired because his great performance made the boss look bad. <br> <br> Core revenue streams <br> <br> Currently, his revenues come from <a href="http://www.financialmentor.com/">www.financialmentor.com</a>. He sold the coaching business about 3 years ago. The coaching generated good revenue but he never wanted to become a thousand dollar an hour coach which is how people make money in coaching. He knows he could have done it but he didn’t enjoy it anymore after a while because it started becoming like a job. <br> <br> He is in the process of converting the business into the seven steps to seven figures courses. He began the coaching business because he used to ask himself how he could help ordinary people achieve extraordinary financial results. From coaching people, he learnt that acquiring wealth involves 7 processes that people go through and he finally got it down to a system that worked for clients. He then had to figure out how to formalize it into a structure that worked for everybody regardless of their class. It took some time for him to figure it out but he eventually broke it down into a 7 step process and he is now turning all that into product form so that he can be able to scale it in the long term. <br> <br> Retiring at 35 <br> <br> He says it was planned. He worked his way through college and came out with debt. He used to work all summer while other students went on holiday. He didn’t want to struggle in life and was determined to have financial independence so he figured out how to do it and mapped a path with the hedge fund business being a big part of it.  <br> <br> He figured that since he had to learn how to compound wealth then he might as well get paid to learn how to do it. Hedge funds were the only way for him to achieve that so he went to work for a hedge fund where he was responsible for developing statistical and mathematical trading systems. <br> <br> Tip: You have to have a plan that's built around your interests, skills, resources and abilities because otherwise it won’t work: This is step 3 of the seven steps to seven figures <br> <br> A hedge fund <br> <br> Todd says that the difference of a hedge fund from a mutual fund is that it’s skill based (the return is a function of skill) but with a mutual fund, the return is the function of what the market gives. If the market is up, most mutual funds are up and vice versa. A hedge fund has skill based strategies and therefore they can make money under any market condition. <br> <br> The 12 years to success <br> <br> At the hedge fund, Todd started working in the marketing department and all he had to do was attract company presidents and vice...