Get ready for an exciting episode as Paula Christine sits down with Peter Huryk, a genius who switched his cleats for a pen. From the soccer field to the world of finance, Peter takes us on a thrilling journey with his book "Setting and Scoring Financial Goals." Co-authored with financial strategist Chris Schaefer, this isn't your usual financial guide. It's a playbook where soccer strategies meet financial planning, specially curated for the vibrant age group of 16 to 26.
Dive into the inception of the book, born from a pandemic-time chat between Pete and his bestie, a financial wizard. Feeling that finance can be a snooze-fest, they decided to spice things up with a universal love: soccer. Their mission? Ensuring the youth, our future leaders, don't just dribble through the financial world but score big!
Discover how your finances are just like a soccer match. Pete breaks down the essence of setting goals, mastering the art of emotional control, and ensuring you don't just shoot impulsively but think of the long game. And here's the clincher: each financial move is a soccer position. Who knew taxes could be opponents on the field and assets had their soccer equivalents?
Not a soccer fan? No worries! Pete hints at more sports analogies in the pipeline. And for all, you "Ted Lasso" enthusiasts, hold onto your seats! Pete, a massive fan, spills some beans about Roy Kent and "Zava" that you wouldn't want to miss.
The goalpost? Gifting young adults a toolkit of financial wisdom wrapped in the thrill of soccer, ensures they remain champions in the money game throughout their life.
For more on Peter's vision, check out: https://www.sportsfinancellc.com
To reach out to our fabulous host Paula, head over to: https://paulachristine.com or drop her a line at paula@paulachristine.com.
Tune in, as we take a corner kick and score some financial goals!
Paula: Hi, welcome to Beyond The Paycheck. I'm Paula Christine. Today, we're joined by Pete Huryk, who is a soccer coach turned author. In his book Setting and Scoring Financial Goals, he and his co-author Chris Schaefer used soccer as a metaphor to explain the complicated world of finance. Now, personally, anybody that can make finance less complicated, I just know I needed to talk to you, so welcome, Pete.
Pete: Well, thank you very much for having me.
Paula: How did you come up with writing a book about finance and soccer?
Pete: Basically, the concept came pretty much out of the pandemic. My best friend, Chris Schaefer, my co-author, and I were talking about finance for a variety of different reasons. I had read the book Rich Dad Poor Dad.
Paula: Yes, good book.
Pete: I felt like I needed to get a better education on finance. With my best friend being a financial planner, I thought, who better to explain it to me than him? As we started talking about the concepts behind finances, I started thinking, "Well, this is not a subject that I want to spend a lot of time on. It doesn't get me excited." He and I both love soccer so much. I was like, "Well, how does this relate?"
As we started working through the personal discussion, it's like, "All right, well, if we could make this simpler for young people", especially, I'm a high school teacher, I'm a soccer coach at the high school level, if I can get my high school and possibly college-age students to understand finance that much better, they would have a leg up that I didn't have when I was in my teens, 20s, 30s, and that's the whole genesis of the book.
Paula: Yes, that's the goal of this podcast is to educate those 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds about money because nobody taught me, and I'm going to assume the same thing for you. I had to learn it through experience, and I wish I would have known what I know today back when I was 20. Is the book, is that would be a great graduation gift for a high schooler? Is it written at their level?
Pete: I think it would actually be a great graduation gift. Ultimately, we had the target age between 16 and 26 that we would be aiming for. The whole entire reason being that if you understand the concepts earlier and as you know from educating other people about it, the earlier you start, the better your chances of having a firm grasp on your financial life so waiting until you're in your 40s is not as advantageous as doing it when you're in your 20s. The whole entire concept is targeted 100% at that younger demographic so that they can take the concepts a lot farther as they get older.
Paula: I haven't read the book yet, I actually have it on order, so I'm waiting for it to come in. I think the first part of it talks about setting your financial goals. What do you believe is the most important part about setting those goals?
Pete: To be quite honest with you, it's actually something that has nothing to do with money. I don't know how Chris would answer this question, but for me, the most important thing is kind of an emotional control thing. I think that having financial goals, a lot of people get caught up in the idea of, "Oh, I want to be a millionaire, I want to have this car or that thing or whatever." They don't have the emotional control to decide what they really want, not what I want in the moment and that's why the supermarkets have the candy in certain aisles and not in other aisles so that parents can avoid those temptations for their kids.
As you get into your teens, 20s, it's real easy to get caught into that trap of, I want this thing, and I want it now, even though I don't have the money for it, I'm going to buy it anyway on credit or whatever, and you're having an impact on your larger financial picture rather than having the emotional control to say, "Wait a minute, is this a good financial decision or not?"
Paula: How do you get a 20-year-old to think like that? I have five kids, so I'm like, "Hmm."
Pete: Well, that's why we use the soccer metaphor because of the fact that, when you have it in the terms of finance, when you think about buying things and making money and everything like that, it seems like the object of money is for you to get stuff. One of the first concepts, one of the first chapters or breakdowns that we have is possession, not possessions. I know you're probably not a soccer person, but-
Paula: No, I had a couple of kids play it, I understand it.
Pete: Okay, so the world's best team for a while was Barcelona, and now it's Manchester City, and they were both coached by this guy Pep Guardiola. His whole entire concept is keep the ball as much as you possibly can, keep possession of the ball for 80% of the game, so the other team doesn't have the opportunity to score against you. Well, we took that concept into the book where it, the things like emotional purchases, taxes, et cetera those are all your opponents.
When you have the ball, you want to give it to your teammate, and that's a simple concept in soccer. I have the ball, I want to give it to one of my teammates or keep it myself. Each of the players on the field, as we broke it down, become some kind of an asset class. If it's on your team, it's an asset class of some sort so we've got things on the defensive side, like insurance and your savings account, and things like that.
As you go up the field and you have a midfielder who's going to move you forward but going to do it slowly or things like your home purchase and things like that. Then as you get farther up the field, the ones that really score the goals for you are the more risky but still they create a lot more opportunity for you, things like stocks and things like that.
Ultimately, the whole entire concept is you have money, it's kind of like possession of the ball in soccer, where are you putting your money? If you're always giving your money away to the other team, that's fine if that's what you want to do, but it's all up to you. That's one of the things that we stress throughout the entire book is that on a given Sunday or Monday, after a weekend of games, there's plenty of people who look at what a manager did and said, "Oh, I would have done something differently there. I would have sold this player or put him on the bench or her on the bench," and you end up making these decisions for somebody who's really at the top of their game.
When you have the possession of your own money, when the decisions are on you, can you make the right decisions for your financial future?
Paula: I love that, and I understood that.
Pete: Well, that's the whole entire point.
Jon: I'm more of a football guy than a soccer guy, but I'm trying to figure out what the soccer equivalent of Monday morning quarterback is.
Pete: Jon, you've just asked a great question that has nothing to do with the soccer book, but the whole entire concept is that not everybody loves soccer. This is the first book of what we intend to be a series.
Jon: Okay, great.
Pete: The first book is soccer, the second book is going to be football because, believe it or not, football and soccer are the same sport. I know that sounds weird
Jon: Sacrilegious to some.
Pete: Yes, exactly. The third book will be basketball. I'm still figuring out baseball, but ultimately, I want to do a book for each of the major sports here in the US so that when we are delivering this concept to a soccer team, and if I go out to a high school and talk to the coach and his players and say, "Okay, here's the deal," and the football coach comes to me and says, "Oh, I love that idea, but could you do it for football?" Yes, we're going to do that. It's just we started off with soccer because it's the one that we love the most.
Paula: Like I said before, I think it's a great gift for a college or high school graduation or sweet 16, or just educating our young will put them in such a better position that I know that I'm in myself because I didn't have that education.
Pete: Absolutely, it's 100% a leg up that I, as well, did not have. Again, we put all the decision-making process onto the reader, but there's all kinds of things in there that when you are in your teens and 20s, there are certain things that you really don't need to worry about, so you don't need to build up your defense as much. You don't need your insurance because your parents take care of that and things like that.
You have the ability to yes, have fun in your 20s for sure. It's not the time where you have to win every single game, but it's also a lot easier to stay in the black when you have a support system, such as you're living rent-free at home or something along those lines so figuring out the right combination of strategies that are going to be good for you in your "season of life," because that's one of the other things. Again, Jon's not a soccer guy, but most of the top leagues in the world, they usually have about 24 teams in their league. All right.
Basically, they play each game home and away. At the end of the season, they played a total of 46 games. If you do the math, all right, 46 from 22 years old, and that's kind of where we aimed. 46 plus 22 gives you 68. Each of the years of your career from 22 to 68 ends up being a game in the season, and so we break that down as well.
If you look at a soccer game, at halftime, you might be losing, you might realize that you're behind by a goal or something. Again, breaking down a year into, "All right, well, it's July right now, did I make good financial decisions over the first half or I might need to change my strategy if I'm in the red or, if I'm in the black, that's great. Again, how you decide to set your particular goals is really up to where you are in life and what you're looking to do.
Paula: Wow.
Pete: That was a lot.
Paula: Yes. It's not necessarily just about your age today, but it's really kind of like projecting out your life in some ways. Because I would think midlife is what, I don't know what most people think, but I hope it's 50. A lot of people, if we look at didn't make good financial decisions maybe, but they can even use that analogy to make better financial decisions going forward. Is that what I was getting from that or did I get that all wrong?
Pete: No, absolutely. It's 100% accurate because in the beginning of your season if you're 22 years-old, you're just out of college 22, 23. You have the ability, the freedom because you're either living at home or you have four roommates or something like that where your expenses are a lot lower and you don't have as many responsibilities. You have the ability to decide what is it that you're going to do. Maybe you do start putting money into some stocks or some other forward moving situations that even if you were to just put a small amount, let's just say okay, I bought-.
Paula: Roth IRA.
Pete: Yes. Roth IRA or some Apple stock or something like that that you could just let sit there for that 46 seasons or the 46 years that you have over the future. What's going to happen to that money over time is it's going to compound. Before you get into a situation and I know again, going back to the whole idea of the players on the field, normally you have 11 players on the field and you have a balance.
When you're in your 20s, you could have seven forwards if you want to, because you don't need to be really defensive because most of your needs in that defensive area are taken care of by your parents, or you don't need them yet because you don't have any children. You have the ability to be a lot more offensive.
Then when you're in your 40s, 50s, 60s, you probably have to be a little bit more defensive, especially if you haven't been particularly smart with the money that you've used. You can't afford to gamble on going with an all offensive strategy. You need to be more defensive or balanced depending on the situation.
Paula: That is just such a cool idea because I've been in the financial services industry for 23 years and I love that this caters to the young kids. I'd also would like to see it for people who delayed their thinking and now that are 40 years-old and starting out, can you write a fifth book?
Jon: Mid-season acquisitions?
Pete: Yes. The soccer analogy isn't particularly age specific. It may be a situation, and this happens all the time in professional sports. It's like, oh we just fired our manager because of the fact that the season wasn't going well. You're not going to fire yourself as the person who's in charge of your finances. You have to be in charge of your finances.
Jon: I've met some people who should have fired themselves.
Pete: Yes. I'm getting a little bit of an education, of this later in life because of the fact that in the past, two years I got divorced.
Paula: Welcome to the club.
Pete: My ex-wife and I, she used to run the finances and I always knew what was going on, but ultimately now I'm 100% in control of my own financial world and making those decisions 100% for myself without having to defer to anybody else's, opinion about what it is that we are going to do with the money. I kind of am in that exact boat that Jon was just talking about. It's, I'm in the mid-season of my life. Now I've got to make decisions based on the information that I have now.
It is kind of an all encompassing metaphor because if you're a soccer fan, you're going to get it no matter what. It's just we're aiming at the younger generation because of the fact that I personally I've written two other books, all have been self-published with the idea of helping out young people.
I'm a high school teacher. I've coached in college and high school for a long time. I see these kids going through a lot of the same things that I've gone through, whether it's in finance in this case, or relationships or self-belief and self-confidence. I want to give them a leg up that I possibly didn't have. It's I stepped in that pothole five times. I'd like to tell you that that pothole is coming up so that you don't step in it.
Paula: Very interesting. I have to ask this question. Did you watch, Ted Lasso?
Pete: I am one of the biggest Ted Lasso fans. I have watched the entire three seasons, all episodes multiple times. I don't know if you would know this, prior to the series coming out, it was based on two commercials that NBC did back, in the early, like it was 2012.
Jon: Yes, that's where Jason Sudeikis developed the Ted Lasso character, right?
Pete: Yes, exactly. During the pandemic, I was actually taking my master's and I had to do a project that had to be a video. I was like complaining to my wife. She said, well, why don't you just do it how you would like to do it? I was like, okay. I dressed up as Ted Lasso and I did this entire like, video project of me as Ted Lasso. Then a week later, or actually that week when I was doing like all of my research for the assignment that's when the first three episodes dropped. I kind of happened upon Ted Lasso by accident completely.
Jon: Even as a non-traditional soccer fan, Ted Lasso is one of my favorite shows.
Paula: Oh, I love that show.
Jon: The best description I've heard of it is relentless positivity. Yes.
Paula: Yes.
Pete: It was just so well done.
Paula: Oh, very well done. Loved every minute of it.
Jon: Roy Kent is one of my favorite characters of all time.
Pete: Yes. He is totally based on a real person. Roy Keen.
Jon: Is he?
Pete: The soccer player Roy Keen, who played for Manchester United in the 80s and 90s was exactly that kind of a stern character. That's who Roy Kent is based off of. Zava is based off of Zlatan Ibrahimovich. All of the characters have little bit of a founding in real life.
Paula: Interesting. I didn't know that.
Jon: I think we could go on for all three of us for hours about Ted Lasso.
Paula: I know.
Jon: Pete, we'll put a link to the book in the show notes. How else can people reach you?
Pete: The best way to reach me and find out about the book is probably our website, which would be sportsfinancellc.com. Because of the fact that we're going to be doing the other sports, we wanted to keep it generic. We went with sports finance. That's how to find out about like the next books as they come out. Our Instagram is under the same heading and, you can get us by email off of the website.
Paula: Thank you so much, Pete, it was so interesting talking with you. I love the sports analogy.
Pete: With regards to those people who are outside of the sports world. We're looking for the right metaphor or situation to explain finances to people who didn't particularly care for sports. The way that my brain works, I'll figure it out eventually. I liken teaching Spanish, which is what I teach on a regular basis. I liken it to everything under the sun, mathematics, or art or whatever. I'm always looking for a good metaphor to help somebody understand something.
Paula: My brain's working, so I might come up with something for you. I'll let you know. I think it would be a huge.
Pete: Yes. I'll have to figure that out that's an interesting take. I really appreciated talking to both of you. This has been great.
Paula: Oh, you too. Thank you very much.
Pete: You're more than welcome.
Paula: If anybody would like to get ahold of me, they can reach me at paula@paulachristine.com or check out my website at paulachristine.com. Thanks again, Pete.
Pete: You're welcome.
[00:18:12] [END OF AUDIO]