Billy Peterson returns to discuss the importance of financial literacy and how he’s teaching critical skills to younger generations in his community.

Book: From the Starting Gate Book

Podcast: Harnessing Your Wealth Podcast

Website: https://petersonws.com/

Julie, I love talking today to today’s guest, Billy Petersen, because he’s one of these people who saw a need in his community and actually went after it. So today we’ll be talking about financial literacy for young people. But tell our audience a little bit about Billy Petersen.

Billy Road Race horses for nine years as a professional jockey, becoming the number one quarter horse jockey in the USA. After retiring, he became a financial advisor and as a five time member of the Raymond James Chairman Council. He was also named to Barron’s list of top advisors in the United States and has been selected to America’s best in-state financial advisors by Forbes six times. In short, our guest knows all about winning, and it’s a lot easier to outpace your peers when you are prepared from the starting gate.

So joining us now in our conversation we have with Billy Peterson about how to empower the next generation with financial literacy. Hi, I’m.

Jack. And I’m Julie.

We’re the hosts of the Heart of Funds Human Centric Investing podcast.

Every other week, we’re talking with inspiring thought leaders to hear their best ideas for how you can transform your relationships with your clients.

Let’s go.

Billy, welcome to the Human Centric Investing Podcast. We’re so excited to have you here with us today.

Thank you very much. I’m glad to be here.

Well, Billy, today’s topic for the podcast, a little bit different than the nuts and bolts of financial planning, although it’s really not. But, you know, one of the things that when we in our industry sit down and think about what are the ways we can get back, what what are really important components of our of our world, really, that need to be more financially literate. We oftentimes come to thinking about young people and the lack of financial literacy amongst our youth. And we even look back at our own schooling and say, Hey, we had to figure all this stuff out on our own, if only we had known earlier. But Billy, I know this is an area that you are very active in through a charity called Live Astride, and you hold these financial health and wellness literacy boot camps. So this whole episode is going to be about your involvement, kind of how you came upon this. The less some of the lessons you’ve learned that you want to transmit to that next generation and really kind of about the boot camps themselves, what you do and how you do it. But let’s start with what kind of motivated you to to get involved in your community this way.

You know, John, I think it’s just goes back to me wanting to repay what I learned and maybe pay it forward. What I learned when I was that age and that age being 14 years old when I had a local farmer teach me the concepts of investing, and he took the time to show me what it meant, what how it was going to be different for me and how it was going to be extremely beneficial to me. I had no idea at the time just how beneficial. Not only did it set me on a path to financial freedom, but it also set me on a career path to what I do today. It just opened the doors for me. Not immediately, but it opened the doors for me to want to have an interest in this. And then it took a few more doors opening years later that actually led me into the career I have. And so I’ve always felt strongly about helping people, let’s say, get across. And I always refer to getting across what is it? Get across whatever chores and whatever river that you’re trying to cross. And so many young, young teens or young adults are figuring out life. And it’s challenging. And we can all think back on when we were that age and not really sure what we wanted to do. At least most of us weren’t really sure. And even if we were fairly sure, we still had a lot of doubts and things that crept up that can we do this? Can we make it? Can we be successful? What should we be doing every day to get there? And so I’m really, really passionate about helping kids make those decisions and finding the right path across and and getting there is so much easier if you just start teaching them how to set themselves up financially. Too many families, unfortunately, fail at this. And and children adopt habits of their parents. Right. And maybe the parents adopted habits of their parents. So it’s sort of a generational thing. And you you you kind of track the habits that your parents have and the tendencies that they have. So if they’re big spenders, you know, you might be a big spender. You just just do whatever you feel like doing at the moment. Get by. You know, if you always seen your parents are getting by, well, you kind of feel like that maybe that’s what life is all about and we’re just going to get by, wait for that paycheck to come in and then figure out a way to get to the end of the month again. And it doesn’t have to be that way. And I really strongly believe that kids just need to be taught the right path, shown the right path. And that’s what I try to do in this financial boot camp. I started it many years ago. I think we’re going on our 16th year now. And at first it was just a small concept and this happened. And to be honest and unfortunately for me and for my family, it happened as a result of my youngest brother committing suicide, taking his own life. He he he took his own life because he had so many deep, dark places that he couldn’t overcome. And one of which I think the biggest of which was his his debt levels. He had he had accumulated so much in student loan debt that he felt absolutely trapped. He didn’t know how he’s going to get out of it. Luckily for me, I didn’t have to go that route. I had a lot of scholarships and I had a lot of help as I was a jockey going to school. So I had resources to help me pay. I never had to borrow any money. I had, matter of fact, money left over from scholarships and awards that I received. But I didn’t even realize that my brother Brodie was accumulating that kind of debt. He was going for a master’s of Business business Administration, Fort Collins, Colorado, and he one day just decided he couldn’t handle it anymore. And he and he took his life. And it was tragic for us. 2009. And I decided, you know, I wanted to also I wanted to not only help young kids at that point, I was starting to help people just on a small scale. But at that point, that just kicked me into high gear and that’s when I started to create the event. And we did tons and tons of event. And then it just kind of developed from there. And I it’s grown to where we’re doing close to 600 students per year at this event. When it started, I maybe had ten. So it’s really became a very well known event here in our community. And I’ve had so many students and teachers, former teachers of former students still emailing us or calling us or telling us how it changed their life. And that’s that’s the reward. That’s we don’t charge anyone to come. We put all we put all of our own money into this to help kids. And that just became kind of a calling for me, if you will.

That’s incredible. I’m sure we have many financial professionals listening that are have or are feeling some of the same things that you felt and thought through the years that I would. I see the need. I feel the need. I would love to do this. I wanted to do this. But they don’t know where to start. Right? That oftentimes is the biggest challenge. Maybe in a moment we could you could describe in detail where your program is today, because it sounds like it’s an incredible success. But obviously that could feel overwhelming because you’ve been doing it for 16 years. Could you maybe walk us through exactly how you started, what outreach you did? How did you start with the you know, who did you reach out to? What was the initial program? How did you you know, what was the grassroots efforts just so that maybe that one financial professional that’s been wanting to do this might be inspired to say, you know what, I’m going to pick up the phone or I’m going to write that initial email. I want to get the ball rolling and emulate what you did because I need to. You’ve got to start somewhere.

I love the talk about this stuff because, you know, it’s a big part of it’s a big part of my life. And yet I don’t make any money on this. This is not a business building activity, okay? None of these students are clients of mine. And I’m not expecting that. I don’t want that. I want to help them. And I’m not asking for anything in return. What I’m doing, what I’m getting out of it, is satisfaction, knowing that I’m helping the community. I’m helping students get on the right track with their lives. And I know without a shadow of a doubt that it’s going to make a huge impact. I wish I could go back and thank Mr. Tucker, who showed me the path when I was 14. I didn’t understand how significant it was at that point in time. But if I could go back and if I could talk to him again, I would. And so I know that I know what it’s making a difference. And it’s going to for years and years to come. When I first started to get back to your question, I wanted to help, but I didn’t know how. And so I reached out to some of my local clients, some of my top clients that I knew had children about the age of, let’s say, 12 to 16. And I thought, well, that age they’re kind of there. They kind of had the ability to understand concepts about money investing versus saving versus debt. And so I just asked them, look, would you guys be interested in bringing your kids if I did a little event one day event. Resounding, positive response. Absolutely. We want to bring our kids, you know, this was huge for the parent. So we got 12 to 2 of which were my own kids and brought them in and and kind of just a fun activity. Now, I didn’t bring them to my office. I had to rent. The basement of a local bank. At that point, they just had a little kind of a conference room that had bigger, more table space. And I had enough for probably 6 or 8 kids. I didn’t have enough for 12 plus some staff, and a few of the parents wanted to stick around, watch them. So we kind of created a little activity and it was maybe a three hour program where we were going to teach them about getting a job, then what to do with the money, kind of how to budget for things you want to buy, things should things that you’re going to need to pay for. Maybe you want to give some of that away so we can have three different three different areas of what you can do with your money. And also, we taught them the concept of taxes. Now, that was eye opening for these kids. What do you mean taxes? I think everyone has an opinion about taxes, and that is that they hate them. No one wants to pay them. So we’re trying to figure out how to cut taxes, but also have enough left over to invest. And I flip that around. I said, How about we invest first and then spend maybe what we have after that? So these concepts are about rewarding the behaviors that you’re trying to instill in these kids. So it was a good success. We had a lot of great feedback. The next year we said, We want to do this again. Next year we had maybe 25 kids. We did it in the same place. All right, great. And we started to send this kind of information out to all of our clients and then more wanted to get involved. How do I get my kid to that event? So it became all right. We’re going to need a bigger facility. What are we going to do? And then we started to change maybe the direction we were adding in events. At that point in time, I wanted to do as many events as I could because I was I was still I was still reeling from my brother’s death. And I wanted to change people’s outlook in a big way. So we we added like bike races. We added a ten K run. We were having people come to we were we did a baseball tournament where we had age groups from everywhere, from eight and under all the way up to 14 and under. So we had seven different age groups, each of them having maybe 10 to 12 teams. I mean, we had anywhere from 50 to 70 teams throughout this stretch of doing this baseball tournament. We did it for maybe five years and we had a home run derby with that where we everyone was entering the parents, the coaches, the kids, the sisters and brothers. Hundreds and hundreds of people entering these home run derbies. We’d set the the fences appropriate for the age and move it. We had four different fields going all at once, and everybody’s entering this thing, going to get ten pitches and try to hit many as you can over the wall. All that money we gave back to suicide prevention causes and different things like that. And then some of what we take and help to promote the financial literacy camp, which kept growing and growing, get to a point where we realized this was a big deal and we realized we needed we needed to establish a day and we really wanted to frame it to the kids that were. More or less ready and capable of taking action on the information we’re giving them. We actually brought in a whole host of different presenters. We leased a facility up at Weber State University. So we had the entire upper upper section of the university’s union building, including five different huge ballrooms. And we just started calling, calling high schools and saying, look, we’re doing this event. We think it’d be worthwhile to get your kids there. I think that first year we did it, we had 200. And it just kept going. So now it’s like to a point where you wonder how many can we actually can we take? And we have to be close to 600. And we have a keynote speaker that somebody that’s a motivational type speaker comes in, talks about adversity, and I’m big on overcoming adversity. How are we going to deal with adversity in our lives? Is that going to knock us down? Is it going to define who we are? Are we going to be done at that point? Because none of us get through life without some scars, right? We have some scars. And all of us can look back and decide how that framed the rest of our lives. Did we learn from it? Did we grow from it? Did we make something out of ourselves because of it? And so the the keynote is a big part of the day. And then right after the keynote, we have a business panel where we have 4 to 5 local business leaders and we call them business leaders just because we don’t have a better title, but they can be from any walk of life, really. They’re established in their career. So we’ve had policemen, we’ve had accountants, we’ve had doctors, lawyers, all sorts of different business owners, very unique backgrounds, businesses that have, you know, business owners that have started multi-billion dollar companies, very, very big type businesses. And then some small business owners, you know, that maybe started a private school and they do that. We’ve had veterinarians, we’ve had plastic surgeons. The list goes on and on and on. So every year we have 4 to 5, you know, how many years we’ve been doing this? Or we’re getting up to where we’ve had close to 100 different business models. The cool thing about this business panel is they all share their story of what it took to get where they’re at, why they chose their profession, what they could they should or would have done differently if they could do it all over again what they attribute to their success, and then open it up where the kids get asked tons of questions. We always run out of time. There are literally dozens of kids that still want to ask questions and we’re out of time. We have to. We have to leave. So we try to communicate at and feel those questions and then respond later. But it’s just an amazing experience for that. All throughout the morning, we have all these different classes that are being held from debt management to investment concepts to and we have some folks that John would know. Matt, Matt Montague comes every year. He’s such a power force in that he he loves to be there. He teaches kids all about concepts of investing and and doing smart things with money and also about just being being a good person when you’re and how to maybe secure a job, how to get in and make yourself different. And then we have an h.r. Representative that comes in and talks about all the key topics like signing up for health insurance, signing up for the retirement plan at your business, how to how to create a proper resume, how to go in and conduct a professional interview. Now, if i would have been able to sit through a program like that when I was 15, 16 years old, I think I would have I would have done wonders. It’s amazing what you can learn. And I’ve just brought it about all this together over the years because I, I learn as I go and I can see there’s a need and I can see that one of the things we’re failing in this country is teaching our kids how to be financially independent. I don’t think they’re getting near enough of that. They’re getting too much basket weaving and not enough financial literacy. And that’s what I that’s what I really feel like is area that I have been called to help teach.

Billy I think what’s unique about and Matt talks about your event all the time just in terms of the young people who are there and how excited and energetic the event is. But I think what’s interesting is you mention that foundation was around financial literacy and teaching them the basics of many and especially practical implications of financial literacy. But it’s also you specifically called the Financial Health and Wellness Bootcamp, right? So was wellness always a part of it? Did you see that need that needed to be addressed? And I know you mentioned the keynote there, but you’re right, these those are such influential ages. And I believe I don’t know about you, but I think being a kid today, it’s got to be ten times harder when we were kids because now you got all this social media stuff and technology around you. And so I think the wellness part of it is probably every bit as important as the financial literacy part. Can you talk a little bit about that and kind of how what have you seen these kids react to that 100%?

John couldn’t couldn’t have said it better. The wellness was added. That was a layer that was added about four years ago. The health part is same. The health has started started to become a big topic for me. About ten years ago, I was going through all kinds of health issues myself. So, you know, we’re good six, seven years into our into our event. And I’m I’m struggling. I’m a shadow of myself. Like I, I can’t even function. There was there was times when I was thinking about I can’t do this anymore. And matter of fact, that’s one of the reasons why we had to cut back on all the other events, the baseball, the races, the the other things that we were doing. It just took too much. And I didn’t have the energy and the mental capacity to continue with all of that. Health was something that I had to learn. I had to I had to kind of understand how it all originates. And I always been healthy from a physical standpoint. Like, look, I exercise at time. I eat pretty good. I’m I’m not what you call an unhealthy person if you look at me. But I didn’t understand the mind. I didn’t understand how the mind is central to everything. With our health, the mind regulates everything. And so you start hearing this concept called mind body and you start you start rolling your eyes and you start actually listening to a little bit and you start learning about it and you start realizing that that’s the whole deal. The mind is the is the key to everything. So why wouldn’t I want to introduce these concepts to kids? Because I didn’t learn about this till I was middle aged.

Billy For those financial professionals listening that I’m confident you’ve inspired to take action and finally do something about this, this thing that they’ve been mulling over probably for years. What would you say is the first step? What’s that one thing that they could do to take this from that idea in their head to making it reality in their business?

Well, first off, I think you’d have to have some help. So if you’re a financial advisor and you have a staff, you have some people that work for you or with you. I think get everyone on board, get them excited about what you’re going to do and then, of course, reach out to some of your better clients who are local. That, number one, you’re not going to find any parents who are going to say, no, that’s a dumb idea. I don’t want my kids learning anything about this. They’re going to they’re going to put you up on a pedestal. They’re going to love you for this. So, number one, you get get yourself to a in a position where you’re going to be an authority. You’re going to help these kids learn the basics. You don’t have to teach them all these sophisticated things. We’re talking about fundamentals, about being being financially successful in life. And it’s just really, really easy stuff. Create some some presentations. Make it fun. Have prizes and things to give away. You know, you’ve got to remember kids at that age have a very low attention span. They’re on their phones. As you mentioned earlier, it would be tough to be a kid these days. And I concur. My wife and I are always asking each other, how are we going to how are we going to teach our kids that there’s more those the world than their phones. And I am very scared for what this next generation might be dealing with. I’ve dealt with some kids and they really have a hard time. It’s challenging for them to communicate one on one, to verbally communicate, because they they’ve never developed those skills. They’re on their phone. They’re I coached softball for nine years, high school level. I was a head coach, high school softball team, and I saw it right there. Over the years, it just got worse, trying to communicate with the girls. And they are terrified to look you in the eye. They don’t know how to, you know, verbally ask you a question. They would rather be looking at their phone. And so they might leave practice and then send you a text or something like that. Like, why don’t we talk about this? What’s wrong? And I feel like that’s that’s a big challenge for the future generations. But I’m I don’t know how that’s going to shake out. It’s going to be interesting. But I’m training in this in these boot camps to teach them that the skills that you’re going to be needed to display and what’s going to separate you and set you apart from the majority of the people in your age group. Is the ability to talk. The ability to get up in front of people to do a presentation. And number one biggest thing I think is ability to sell. If you can sell something, you can get a job anyway. You have those skills. And you can’t sell things by sitting behind your computer. At least I don’t think you can. I mean, you have marketing plays a role. But if you want to if you want to gain a relationship, you have to be able to speak one on one.

Well, Billy, congratulations on all your efforts and and how you’re touching the lives of kids in your community. It’s admirable. And I hope that some of our listeners have had some of those same thoughts. Maybe they’ll follow your lead and start something, whether it’s in their basement or the basement of a bank building in town or wherever. They’ve got to do it. I hope you’re very proud of what you’ve been doing, and I know those kind of comments aren’t why you do it. But I mean, just for Julie and I listening, it’s inspiring. And, you know, just a moment ago, you mentioned fundamentals and fundamentals of investing. Well, Julie and I have a little exercise we like to go to with the fundamentals of the guests that we have on the program. We call it our lightning round of questions, where we just like to ask our guests some very simple questions. We’re looking for top of mind answers, just to help our audience get to know Billy Peterson a little bit better. So if your game will fire for you these questions at you, see how it goes.

Let’s roll.

So, Billy, what’s the best age?

The best age.

Age? Yup.

For people.

In your opinion. What’s the best age?

Let’s see. I’m going to say the best age is at that age when you don’t think anything’s ever going to change. And that’s from about age. Probably about age 15 to 21. You know, you’re just everything. You have the world by the tail, right? There’s no problems from any bills. You don’t have any problems. You’re just going around. You’re all your friends. And that’s when you’re a night and that’s when you really there’s no late. There’s nothing that’s too late. You know, You want to go. You want to go to party. It’s one in the morning. I’m there. Where are we going? I’m down. Let’s go now. I mean, somebody calls me wanting me. Go out at 830 at night. I’m thinking, you know, are you crazy? What are you thinking? I’m not going.

Okay.

But at that age, you know, there’s so much, you know, excitement and you’re always dating and you’re. I don’t know, It just. It seems like there’s always something and you’re always excited about something. And the worries are very, very small at that point in time. Then you get married, have kids, and everything just starts to hammer. Yeah. So it changes quick.

Sibila, I know you’re busy, guy, not only with your business, but your family, man. You’ve got charitable interest. So my question is, how do you get all this stuff done to use a paper to do list or a digital to do list?

You know, my staff around here, they get so annoyed with me because I have to write everything down. I’m just such an old fashioned guy. I’m still having them order me the calendars, you know, that I use to write things and I don’t know what some about writing it down. It makes it official. When I put it in my phone, I don’t really consider that to be official. I’d be like, Nah, maybe I’ll do that, maybe I won’t. So it’s I started to use the note app more in my phone, but it still takes me a conscious effort to think about opening that up. And I guess it’s just old habits are hard to break. I just like the paper. I like to touch things and see it on in writing. I like to write. I like to write things down. So I still going to use a calendar and write down scheduled items, things like that. But I I’ve tried to get a little bit more conscious about going into this. What did we call it? 21st century nowadays. Hey, my my whole staff is got us on paperless, so I’ll open up filing cabinet and there’s nothing in there anymore. What the hell happened? All this stuff is in here. It’s gone. So it’s somewhere in the cloud.

I got to. They figure once they immerse you in digital, you’ll have no choice. I guess.

Speculation.

Forced me in there whether I wanted it or not. Sink or swim.

What’s your favorite city in the US?

Favorite city in the U.S.. It’s going to. It’s going to have to be Boston. Boston. I love it. I bet I’ve been there multiple times. And every time there seems like there’s something new. I’m a history buff, so I love seeing places that have a lot of history and you can just kind of feel like you, you know, you’re imagining what was going on back in those days and how things transpired to form our country. And of course, I love the Red Sox. So going to Red Sox games. I’ve ran the Boston Marathon four times and I became a Red Sox fan in 2004, which obviously broke the curse. So I take most of the credit for that.

As you should. So, Billy, my last question. We all know how successful you’ve been in in your business. And obviously we’ve talked a lot about horses. So but you talked about kind of sensing the horses and being present with them. Would you describe yourself as an introvert or an extrovert or maybe on a scale of 1 to 10, one being heavy introvert, ten being heavy extrovert? Where would you put yourself?

I’m an introvert, no doubt about it. And it drives some of my family members crazy because they want to go to parties all the time. And I’m kind of like, Ooh, how do I find my way out of here? And I mean, if if if I were to choose something, whether it be a raging party or going to read a book in a library, it would be the book. I just I just connect. I find myself to be know more comfortable where I am, not having to always answer to answer questions and talk to people and kind of come up with things that I’m going to say or want to say. I know I’ve had that was a challenge for me having to get out of my comfort zone because I’m in a business where I need to talk to people. Obviously, I need to talk to people. And so it was it was something that I needed to overcome. Let’s say it was a crutch and I felt like I was always uncomfortable, but I made myself comfortable being uncomfortable and I had to do that. But it’s I mean, I’m still by nature, I’m more of an introvert. And I, I spend time with my horses just by myself. And for some reason, that’s just so relaxing to me. I enjoy it.

Well, Billy, we can’t thank you enough for joining us here today on the Human Centric Investing podcast. And for our listeners, if you’re interested in finding out more about Billy, there are three ways to do so. First, you can check out his new book from the Starting Gate. Second, you can access his podcast, which is called Harnessing Your Wealth. Or third, you can visit his website which is Peterson wsc.com. Thank you again for your time today and for sharing all of your wisdom and insights with us.

It was fun being with you guys. Appreciate it.

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The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the guest who is not affiliated with Hartford Funds.