Zero To A Hundred – Episode 27: Financial Planning For Long-Term Success With Reese Stiller

Accelerators! 🚀

This episode is a game-changer for anyone who wants to master their finances. We’re joined by Reese Stiller, founder of Kingdom Guard Financial Group, to uncover the keys to creating a financial plan that supports both your personal and business goals. Reese shares how separating your finances, reshaping your money mindset, and building the right systems can unlock financial clarity and freedom. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, investor, or just starting out, this episode has powerful insights for you! 🎯

What’s on the Menu:

💼 Why treating your business as a tool—not your identity—is essential.

🧾 The steps to separate personal and business finances effectively.

🧠 How to overcome limiting money habits and build a growth mindset.

Why Tune In?

Reese combines decades of experience with actionable strategies to help entrepreneurs gain control over their financial systems. Learn how to set yourself up for long-term success and make your finances work for you, not against you!

💬 Gem from Reese:

“Financial freedom starts with clarity. Align your goals with your systems, and the results will follow.”

Get in Touch with Reese:

📧 Visit KingdomGuardFG.com or follow Kingdom Guard Financial Group on Facebook for more financial tips.

Don’t miss out—hit that subscribe button and let’s take your business from zero to a hundred! 💥

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Financial Planning For Long-Term Success With Reese Stiller

My guest, Financial Advisor, Reese Stiller of Kingdom Guard Financial Group, is going to shed some light on how you should be managing your finances. What I really like about Reese is that he goes beyond the numbers to help his clients build an actual business. Some of the topics that we are going to cover is the difference between having a true financial plan and just having accounts balancing your personal and your professional finances separately. It’s something that I think the audience really needs to know because it was a unique perspective that I sometimes forget myself as a business owner, it is that you are not the business.

I am the Founder of BoxFi. We are the nation’s leading payment consultant, providing business growth solutions through payment processing. I’m very excited to share the network that I have built over my multi-year entrepreneurial journey to help you grow your business and become more profitable. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s accelerate together.

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Reese, it is great to have you on.

Thanks for having me, Derek.

Before we dive in, we have a new way of starting each episode and we ask our guest if they have a motto or a quote or something they always find saying to their clients when they’re doing business with them. What is yours?

Ours is see the difference.

See The Difference: A Faith-Based Approach To Financial Planning

Walk me through what see the difference means.

Yeah, so in general, it is just the aspect of how our overall service model comes in. We were always repeating like, “That’s the difference here. Here’s the difference here,” versus things that they always experience. We’re like, “We are different.” See the difference is what we’ve really figured out is our main slogan, motto, whatever you want to call it, for a multitude of reasons between the service levels we provide, our faith-based background in the financial services industry, which is usually pretty rare to come across. Just how we conduct ourselves overall, our service options themselves. That’s why we’ve just coined see the difference and that came up from the start as we were just working with various people and clients. We’re like, “This is a repetitive statement.”

It’s interesting that you say faith-based because I always say on the show that we don’t talk politics or religion in terms of the world is this way because of politics or religion, but I always welcome the conversation around anyone’s business that is based on their faith or their belief. What is cool is that I just learned that one of my dear friends, who’s well respected in the family office and wealth management arena actually has a Theology degree. I can’t remember what school, but a pretty prominent school for theology. He works with some very large financial organization guiding them on faith-based organizations and investments. Some of the bigger corporations are starting to look at that now and I thought that was really cool.

That’s something that years ago, more people have actively come to us asking for. In our general conversation, obviously, we’re not shying away from anybody who isn’t a believer or anything, but the conversation always comes up like, “How do you care about investing? Do you have certain beliefs, whether on various different topics or just on a religious topic, that you want to make sure you stay away from?” Something that just the general request that started to come up over the last few years a lot more prominent is, “I’m a Christian and so these are my values and I want to invest in companies who are in agreement with that.”

Education First: Building A Portfolio Around Your Values

You said see the difference is your motto and I want to lean into that because I think it’s important to talk about the way in which you approach working with the clients that you work with from an advisory standpoint and it’s really education first for your clients. Walk me through what that actually means and how you build a portfolio and investment strategy around that education first component.

That actually leans right back into the see the difference, like you had said, difference on even that general concept. We really aren’t, if you want to call it investment managers and advisors itself. We’re more so designed to be financial planners. Usually, our conversations are starting off getting to know everybody’s situation as in detail as possible. That goes down to where your legacy is. What it was like growing up, how finances were discussed growing up, your various challenges, where you want to go, where you like going on vacation.

All those types of things that make up somebody’s character and personality to help design a plan and at least a process and guide rails for moving forward so that it’s as best lined up with them as a person, not just numbers on a page. The portfolio is more structured around what their objectives end up coming out to be. Not so much, “Here’s your risk. How much do you want to stocks, bonds, etc.?” That’s usually dialed down based off of the goals themselves. We then take a step back and say, “This is how we want to invest.”

Unpacking Childhood Beliefs And Building Good Financial Habits

Let’s talk about something that you brought up in terms of the questions that you ask. I think this is really important. It’s the discussion or beliefs people have around investing or money that comes from their childhood and what they grew up with. How much does that impact the investment decisions that they make? We’ve got an audience of business owners and entrepreneurs who always take risks and want to build or correct something. A lot of times, they’re focused on building the business. They’re not focused on making sure that their personal finances are actually set up. How do you deal with that and help them get over built-in biases that they might have from childhood so they get to a place of really good financial management?

Definitely a lot in that question there.

Break it down. We’ll go in steps.

First off, the correlation between how they were raised and then how money was communicated in the household drives a lot whenever somebody grows up. A lot of that actually comes down to how they treat their spouse and how communication is between their spouse. That drives a major impact in relationship. The number one reason for divorce is because of financial reasons. The communication factor itself around money is usually a massive driver that we’re trying to unpack when we first talk with somebody. Usually, it is just more so bringing it to light because most people just aren’t even aware. Everyone’s absolute favorite quote from anybody is, “What does everyone else do?” The amount of times we hear that a week is hilarious.

You’re not trying to be average. You’re trying to hit your goals. If you’re different, then you’re different. Great. Usually, there’s a route as to why you handle things a certain way based off of how you are raised. It’s breaking down how is it that you were raised and then what are your current goals. Can you achieve that on your current track or do we need to figure out how to change your behavior around and your mindset around money? That’s the starting point on the impact that it has for most people. It’s very heavy for almost everybody.

As far as getting over that hump for business owners instead of just focused on growing the business and then neglecting their personal finances, it’s very difficult on a advisor level. Most business owners, if they’re getting advice from somebody, unless it’s another fellow business owner and they actually have a track record of success, it is from what you would call a consultant or whoever. Usually, the experience behind that is they’ve never done this before. “They’ve never been in my shoes before so they’re just telling me to do these things and they really don’t hold the weight in it.”

There are three partners here at our firm, myself, Eli and Shane. All of us come from different backgrounds, and we are all involved in business. We have multiple businesses ourselves. We do the boots on the ground stuff. We build the systems and the processes, we do the marketing, we do the HR work, we have an employee benefits company, so we know exactly what it’s like dealing with all the insurances that you got to deal with the headaches and regulations behind on that, too.

It’s just getting the concept that you are not the business separated. The business can be a tool for you on your personal finances, but the business itself is pretty much a separate entity. If you’re an LLC, C-Corp, anything registered basically, legally, it is a separate entity. That is not you. It’s getting the concept that the business itself is not you so you have to put the things in place and the people in place to allow it to work for you, not for you working for the business. That is so different for everybody. Probably the biggest thing is getting people to realize the distinction between that.

Financial Planning Vs. Investment Accounts

That’s something that I want to come back to that you are not the business and how you actually effectively separate all that. We’re going to come back to that. What I want to understand from your standpoint is what the difference between financial planning is and just having investment accounts. What is the difference between the two?

I know a lot of our business owners have investment accounts because their established business owners who have been operating successful businesses. They’re looking to grow and create more profits. How do you decide or is there a time in which you should move from just having accounts to financial planning? Should you start with financial planning and then have accounts? How should it work?

All of this is my personal belief, so obviously, it can be different from anyone else you might interview, but our personal belief is you have to start with a plan first. If you don’t have the vision, the goal is and know what it is you’re trying to accomplish, you can’t work backwards to know what you have to put into those accounts. Usually, it starts with the plan to then know what needs done to achieve the goals. As far as the difference, we run into people all the time. This is just like out in public a question, introductions, whatever might come up. One of the number one things we always ask is, “Do you have an actual retirement plan?” They say, yeah, I have a 401(k) at work,” and so forth. I’m like, “That’s not a plan.”

Your paper says it’s a plan when you get your statement but by definition, it’s not an actual plan. That’s an account. You don’t know what the account is doing for you besides just growing it, and you eventually use it. A plan has outlines, the purpose, the account fulfills the purpose. That’s how we would explain the key difference between the two. Actually, I was on a call and they were going through the general concepts that are out there in terms of like it’s about building advisory practices and so forth. It was a good relation back to business. Think of it like a Walmart. They are a generalist, basically. They don’t specialize in anything. They’re just, “Here’s a bunch of stuff,” and because of their size, they’re able to bring prices down which makes them more competitive and that’s how they’re growing.

On the financial services and advising sector, having a large national company keep trying to grow and expand their footprint doesn’t allow them to specialize. They have to actually get more general. Most of the advisors that work for the national companies aren’t getting a true specialized service for their clients. Whereas the independently owned financial companies like we are, they can choose what their niche is and they can go deep into that and that’s what they work with. Now they’re highly specialized, and they can help in those situations. For us, it’s business owners.

That’s the key difference a lot of times on working with say a conglomerate versus an independent financial firm, whether it’s us or somebody else, usually, we lean more towards at least work with an independent financial advisor because they’re not tied to incentives, extra bonuses, all that stuff from their managers that it would just be a production-based thing through whatever company they’re associated with.

With that in mind, tell me what the difference is between an advisor versus an asset collector. What is the difference between the two?

Working With An Independent Financial Advisor

I would associate that more so with people who actually try and get to know why you have an account and where you want to go and then they’re actively having the conversation with you on why they are suggesting to have things invested a certain way to be achieving your goal. It’s all about you in those conversations, not all about like, “We can put the money here, we can do this.” The one is it’s based around you rationale. The other one is based around where it’s being invested, how it’s being invested and so forth. It’s a minor difference, but when you’re in the situation, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s a whole different experience for the client on the feeling. Option number one for somebody who’s just trying to help advise, they really don’t care about your result.

I think what’s interesting is how you put it that when you’re dealing with a larger advisor, there’s incentives for them to sell certain products and that is a thing. Finding somebody who has a niche who can service your needs is really important to make sure you’re building the right financial plan. When you’re going in and you’re actually meeting with someone, so say it’s one of the business owners or entrepreneurs that is our audience, what question should they be asking to make sure that they’re working with an advisor that’s going to be able to meet their needs?

The most important questions are going to be what’s the exit strategy? Do you have accurate books? What do you want your income to be when you retire?

What should the client be asking you? If you had the perfect scenario, what should the client be coming in and asking you?

That’s a great question because usually, that’s not how it works. I really got to ponder on this. A great starting point would be that I want to know how much I need to retire and how many different ways I can do it. If this is for like more of like a vetting of an advisory you’re sitting with, try and just gauge how much they’re aware of different strategies. All they bring up is, “You can sell the business and then you can take that. You can invest it or you can have that produce income.” If that’s all they say, they’re not really talking about the true different strategies. You have seller finance when you sell the business.

The concept of selling the business, is it a lump sum at one time? Is it seller finance? I think the last stat is like 87% of small businesses when they sell is seller finance. They should be bringing up and making sure you’re aware of, “If you do intend to sell the business, you should probably plan on the fact that you’re not just going to get a check at the end,” because more than the vast majority don’t have that happen.

Unless you’re special in whatever your circumstance is, we need to plan that. You’re not going to get a lump sum check. It’s income strategy, it’s talk about how long do we want to have income for. Basically, if all they say is a couple sentences and they really don’t get into any actual strategies or anything because the question was, “How am I able to retire? I want to be able to know how to retire. What’s my strategies?” If they can’t name at least a handful based off of what they’re aware in your situation already, then they don’t quite have the experience working with a business owner who is actually looking to be using their business to retire.

Strategies For A Seamless Retirement Exit

Let’s say we’ll use a real-time case. We’ve got a business owner who’s had a business for fifteen years in their early 60s and they’re looking to exit and retire. What are some of the strategies you would suggest that they employ to be able to do it seamlessly?

Almost always, in that circumstance, we hire a tax planner to work with us. This isn’t tax advice, from my understanding with the current tax laws, if you have a business and you change it to a C-Corp, after five years, you can actually sell the business for up to $10 million and you pay $0 in taxes. That’s just the key strategy where if you’re planning ahead of time, now we might know that could be a variable for you.

From there, that helps us dial in what it is to we have potentially to work with. We’re also looking at it as this is how much income you said you wanted with your current assets, what can be produced, what’s the gap to know what we have to sell the business for? From there, we get a business valuation. Do we think we’re going to be able to sell it for that? If the answer is yes, then it just starts getting into more conversation, such as, “How do we start getting the structuring and the processes and systems in place to make that transition more seamless?” That’s when we start working with our various other professionals to improve the functionality of the business to get maximum dollars.

Can you walk us through an example of a business owner that you’ve worked with in the past that has sold a business that you helped them maximize the value in the marketplace?

They haven’t sold yet, but we’re working with them. We’ve working with them for a few years now. When they first came to us, they had a business valuation done from an accountant that actually did not end up being accurate. They did not have any systems or anything in place to allow for somebody to purchase the business. It’s a form of mechanic for marine equipment. Just in case somebody saw this and it is from around here, we are a very rural community, so I don’t want to give any more details on it. Now that we are getting into the conversations of, “Now you have to make sure your people are trained to do the stuff that you do so that when a new owner does come in, it can help that transition.”

We started working on this, getting through, getting these systems in place. We had our meeting and it’s been quick and they said they now have a buyer currently interested and the conversations are moving forward. Prior to that, they tried selling it multiple times, but they couldn’t get anywhere because they couldn’t really trust the books.

The people looking to buy it were like, “You guys are the ones who know how this operates. Your employees can’t fix this thing but you can and you’re going to be retiring on me.” Now that they’ve started getting that training and implementation in place, they’re probably about six months to a year, in my opinion, to be where we can basically go on the open market and try to start selling versus them privately sourcing.

This business owner went from not having a buyer to having a buyer. What key systems did they put in place that made the buyer look at it and go, “This is a company that we can acquire because it can operate without the owner being involved?”

This one wasn’t quite so much for without the owner being involved. It’s just the business can run without the owner. There’s still the management structure behind that. The first thing was making sure all the mechanics were cross-trained. That wasn’t a thing before. The wife did all of the ordering, inventory for the sales department and pricing. No one was trained how to do that portion of it. That was offset to their management staff, who are now basically what you would call their CFO. Their CFO now knows how to do the books from that standpoint and helps with ordering and pricing. That’s been the two biggest drivers. It’s just the ability to perform the service and then how to actually handle the sales and pricing aspect of things.

It sounds like to me that some of the key sops that the business had to create were trainings, sops, sales sops, bookkeeping sops, how to manage inventory, how to manage ordering. For that particular business, that’s the systems being in place is what made them much more valuable in the marketplace.

Yeah, definitely.

You Are Not Your Business

Let’s dive a little bit deeper into that because something that you said earlier on was that as the business owner, you are not the business. The business is the business and is its own separate entity. How do you help business owners shift their mentality so they can get to a point where they can remove themselves from the business so the business functions without them?

That’s very situational. Usually, it comes down to if the business owner is actually willing or looking to do that. I’m going to pretty much just say there is almost no such thing as actually being passive as a business owner. You can do things to minimize how much time you need to spend in the business, but you’re still going to have to spend time there because your employees see that the owner is not involved. It’s just culture related that things start going South from there.

We can get you to a point where you’re basically the culture builder and you’re just there to help engage and interact and morale and motivation high within the workforce. You’re basically just having meetings with your staff about the financials or any new projects you’re coming up with and so forth. You’re putting leads in place where they’re taking care of all the work, and you’re just making the logical decisions instead of the doing the physical work yourself. That’s really where we’re trying to get the business owners to, so that way, they’re thinking 10 years in the future, not 1 year in the future or the next paycheck. That way, the business has a future to go with it, not if you leave then the business starts to collapse. It starts at the ground floor of what your intentions are.

I think you have the name of your book, The Culture Builder, and I love the concept of you, as a business owner, need to get to the point where you’re overseeing each thing and component of the business and working on the business but not in the business as the culture builder so it doesn’t rely on you. I love that. We’ve got business owners who are deep into their business 5, 10 years. They’re not at the point where they are looking to retire or sell the business, but they’re at the point where they want to have more financial certainty. How do you balance the planning for your business and its financials and your personal financials?

Balancing Business And Personal Finances

It all goes back to having a plan. If you have your personal financial plan outlined, you know what it is you need to personally be able to bring home. At that point, we look at is it are you in that situation where your business, as of right now, from what you understand, can produce that. If it’s a yes, then the conversation is, “Now we just need to see what factors in the business we can stabilize so you feel more secure on that aspect.” Usually, it does come down to, and I know all the business owners hate it when they hear me say this just because they have everything on their plate as it is, but they need to know where their own personal household expenses are so that they know what it is they actually need.

Business owners waste so much money in their personal finances in comparison to I think even the standard W-2 employee. That’s saying a lot because over 60% of the country is paycheck to paycheck, but it’s because they’re focused on where’s the expenses on the business, not their selves. Knowing where your expenses and the income that you’re actually taking into your household if you have a spouse working or something is very important. That way, you know what it is you have to personally work with. Once you know what you have to work with, just the, “How do we increase it?” Making money isn’t hard. It’s the managing of money that’s hard. Once we know the baseline, how do we get it higher and what systems have to go in place or what improvements or slight adjustments have to be made at the business level to make that happen?

Let’s say I’m a business owner and I come to you and my business is buttoned up but my personal finances are a mess and I don’t have a plan. What are some of the key tips that you would give me to start managing my personal finances more effectively?

We don’t really believe in budgets but we believe in tracking. It sounds counterintuitive but money is more psychological than actually math. We always start with giving a tracking template where you just record your expenses every single day for 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, or you work backwards and you see where you were at. Just that itself usually gives people the realization like, “That shouldn’t be like that.” They just recognize it then and that’s how behavioral aspect starts being applied to it because once you’re doing it repetitively and you know where your money is going, eventually, you stop doing those bags. Unless it’s by choice, not just out of habit or stress-related or whatever it may be because you know you’re hurting yourself. Usually, the starting point is just actually track your spending to know where it’s going. A lot of things that just fix itself.

The financial habits are really important that you bring those up because up until maybe a few years ago, I did not have good financial habits. I’d make or earn a lot of money but then I’d make an investment or I’d spend it not even on frivolous things. Ultimately, it ends up being frivolous things when you’re spending $5 a day on a coffee at Starbucks, that ends up being a lot of money. Until you pay attention to your cashflow in a business and your cashflow in a personal sense, you start to get a grip on your personal and business financials. I do believe that the psychology around money is really important and paying attention to your money and how you’re spending it is tantamount to success at achieving your financial goals.

Yeah, and that’s not even on a personal level. It’s also on the business, too. Something we encourage business owners to do is, say they have a partner. I’ll start there. If they have a partner involved, financial review meeting, depending on your situation, it’s either every week, every two weeks, every month or every quarter. Break down the financial health of the business and just discuss, “Where are we at financially on what improvements we’re wanting to do and what’s our next projects that we’re wanting to invest in?”

That way, you have that constant health on your business and tracker, and that comes down to making sure your profit and losses are up to date throughout the year. You can see where you’re actually at as you’re making these decisions as the year goes on. That also allows you to sit down and say, “We have $50,000 in the bank account. We internally pretty much set a minimum of $40,000, so there’s another $10,000 extra that’s not earmarked and that we don’t have to put into the business. Now we get to pay ourselves an extra $5,000 each.”

You wouldn’t have known that if you didn’t sit down and talk about it. If money’s in the bank account, it’s eventually going to get spent. You’re going to log in, you’re going to see, “I got $50,000 in the account. I can buy that $10,000 machine.” Technically, that’s frivolous because you really didn’t need it in this situation. You didn’t have that pain point of handing the cash over to make that purchase.

Understanding Financial Cycles And Stepping Points

I’ve suffered through it myself. It actually leads to my next question, in which I want you to talk about the financial cycles that people and business owners have in their lives. I do feel like at different points in my life and in my career and different ages, I’ve had very different focuses on the management of my capital, how I’m running my business, what profitability looks like. What are some of the key financial stepping points in most of your clients’ lives?

Usually, it’s the realization that they did not see everything that was happening with their finances, mainly what they were spending their stuff on. From there, it usually goes into a form of, “Now I want to make a correction,” and they have a few months of good, but then they start falling back into the cycle. If they’re not in our actual advising, whatever program, as I would call it. They heard the concepts, they started with it, they realized they’re gung ho. They want to move forward with it, not working with us on an accountability standpoint, then they start dropping off again. We have our next meeting, and then they will get re-motivated and start going again. Usually, there’s going to be 2 or 3 bumps of motivated and then not motivated. Not once you get over that third house

It feels like that’s when everything just starts taking off. Actually, there’s a concept whenever it comes to revenue on where your pain points are as a business center. Usually, it’s $300,000. Your bottleneck is you’re doing everything and you’re being everything to everybody and then it’s $1 million and at $1 million that’s where, “I have a lack of capital. I’m not really making what I want to make but I have some people in place but I need to make another big investment to get me to the next level.”

Once you get into between $5 million and $10 million, depending on the industry, then it’s more so the headaches that come along with the, “I don’t have enough time to get all this done because I have too many projects and the ever-expanding team.” That’s where your delegation comes in, your executive assistants, and so forth. That’s where your next, I guess if you want to call it cycles come in because if somebody stops at 300 points, then there’s just going to be a running on the hamster wheel. Same thing at $1 million and then so forth. Those are usually the next stages that come in place once people have their standard understanding.

What you see in terms of the business cycles is the businesses that are doing $300,000 that the owner is really heavily involved. When you graduate to the million-dollar range, you’re doing more, you have employees but you need investment capital to expand. When you get to that $10 million to $25 million mark, which let’s call that the third cycle, that’s really when you start to have so much on your plate and so much opportunity, that delegation is going to be key and you have to be a different person in each one of those cycles to take your business to the next level.

That’s where the mindset and how you handle business and everything comes in and that’s why the cycle is a cycle because if you don’t adapt and learn, you’re revert to the previous one.

Types Of Insurance We Need In Our Business And Personal Lives

Let’s pivot a little bit and talk about another component which is really important to your financial planning and that’s insurance. As a business owner, because you’re talking to an audience of entrepreneurs and business owners, what type of insurances are key to making sure that our business and our personal lives are secure?

Yeah, a lot. I am definitely not a fan of being over-insured. I think insurance is one of those things that everybody hates paying for, but it does serve a purpose. Just in the last month, two months we’ve had three death benefit claims for businesses that we work with for their group life. We had to go through that whole process. Each of those businesses are going to run into a problem because that employee’s no longer there and they’re instrumental to the success of that business.

In terms of I’m going to say protection standpoint, obviously general liability, any E&O, workers’ comp, all that stuff. I’m really not going to talk a whole lot on that because that’s not really where we shine. There are specialists for that based off your industry. In terms of the insurances that you need to start thinking of, when you’re getting to say the $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 in revenue, that is what you’re going to use for the retention of employees.

The smaller businesses are really have to start offering employee benefits now to compete with the large. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Group life, disability, accident and what else is there? Vision, dental, so forth. You can get really reasonable rates as an employer if you’re fully paying for it. That’s the key difference. A lot of businesses will say, “I want to pay for 50% or 75%.”

The insurance companies actually give a pricing discount if the employer is just writing the check every single month because they know that they’re going to get paid, it’s not going to drop off. An employee doesn’t leave or an employee doesn’t decide, “I no longer want to pay for this just randomly.” They don’t have the administrative headaches involved with that. They actually give discount for employers to just write the check. That really helps.

Health insurance is definitely a very big one but there’s a lot of things going on in that space right now that is hyper situational. For example, ICHRAs, QSHERAs doing general group health. That’s all various things. I recommend talking to your employee benefit specialists that you’re using on the topics of ICHRA and QSHERA where that might work in your business. In the latest report, ICHRAs are expected to increase by number of people participating over 250% in 2025. That’s a very big increase in what’s being expected in the industry using that tool. I don’t have time to get into details on that, obviously.

Walk us through that tool briefly because I’m not familiar with it.

Yeah, so basically what it is is an individual health reimbursement account.  What it can be used for is health insurance premiums. Say you’re currently paying $1,000 a month per employee for your health insurance and you’re just fully covering them. Group health insurance is almost always more expensive than individual coverage on the marketplace.

What a lot of employers are doing, if they’re over 50 employees especially, they’re just dropping the group health. They’re not getting their 20% renewal rates and everything every year anymore and they’re just saying to the employee, “I will cover $1,000 a month for you to go onto the individual marketplace. You get to choose whatever plan you want. If you want it where it’s fully paid for by me, great. If you want to pay for a premium plan, you can do that too.”

That can be set up in multiple ways. A lot of people, they then have administrative team where the employees have to give them proof of payment and then they direct deposited into their bank account or whatever it might be, which HRAs, because they’re reimbursement is tax-deductible to the employer, but it’s tax-free to the employee. Whereas health insurance, it’s pre-taxed to the employee not tax-free. That’s another key difference for factoring that stuff into.

This is fascinating because what you’re saying is you can use benefits and health insurance as an employee retention tool when you’re a smaller business and there are products out there now that make it economical and affordable for you as the employer.

Yeah, correct, especially like those ICHRAs, QSHERAs. You set what you are willing to pay. If you are willing to pay $100 a month, you can do that.

Before we get into our fun rapid-fire section, I do have one more question and I would love for this to be the takeaway because I think it’s important for our audience to know. If you’ve got a business owner who’s looking to put a plan in place to take control of their finances, what would you recommend their first steps be to do so?

Compile your overall documents. Where’s all of your accounts? How much is in every single account? What’s the value of all your equipment? Compiling your total portfolio is important because a portfolio isn’t just your investments in the stock market; it’s also what the assets that you own are. Compiling that, seeing what that is, is the number one thing to start with because from there, that’s when you’re taking it to a financial planner and now they have the full picture on the physical sense.

Rapid Fire Questions With Reese

Now, we’re going to go into our rapid-fire section. I will throw out a question. You’re going to give me a quick answer. Are you ready?

Okay. Ready.

Coffee or tea?

Iced tea. Not a fan of hot tea. I’ll take iced tea.

It is a zombie apocalypse and you have to get out of your home and protect your family. What would be your weapon of choice to take with you?

I don’t know how I can answer that because the analytical side of me comes out and it’s like, “Can they actually be killed? That’s a bad question for me.

Most people have an answer to that. Mine would be a flame thrower. I understand. Do you have a favorite book that you think our audience should read? Maybe about financial management or business management?

Yeah, on a business side, a book called Principles by Ray Dalio. It is a very dense book. I’m going to preface that, but great material in there on the structuring of your business, how to be taking it to the next levels and so forth.

Do you have a coach or a mentor?

Yeah, so I have one for multiple different things on a financial standpoint, I have one guy that I always go and I bounce ideas off of. Obviously, nobody can know everything, so you’ve got to have a team around you. I have an attorney that I talk to, CPAs I talked to, so forth for the various situations and try and compile everything to make informed decisions and then how to then grow on an emotional standpoint and everything else as well.

Give us three money-saving techniques for 2025.

Tracking. Pay with cash. The tracking, like we were talking about, just have a tracker. Write down your expenses and everything that you did on the days that you did it. Using cash. If you go and you say, “I have $200 bucks this week for groceries,” using cash over credit cards, that is a very big difference. Number three, reprice out your insurance. Make sure you have adequate coverage.

Our last question. Who are two people in your life who have helped you get to the level of success that you’ve achieved in your business now?

My wife. I’m going to actually say 3 because my 2 are my other business partners.

Reese Stiller, thank you for joining us on the show. Please tell everyone where they can reach you.

Yeah, so they can reach us through Facebook. Just Kingdom Guard Financial Group. Our website, KingdomGuardFG.com. Call in the office. That’s another way. We’re pretty easy to reach. Just got to look us up. We’re all over Google.

Reese, it was great to have you. Thank you.

Thank you, Jarrod. I appreciate it.

Important Links

• Kingdom Guard Financial Group
• Principles: Your Guided Journal (Create Your Own Principles to Get the Work and Life You Want)
• Kingdom Guard Financial Group’s Facebook profile

About Reese Stiller

Reese is a Financial Advisor who prides himself in putting the needs of his clients first and believes that individuals should have complete control of their finances. He graduated from Clarion University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor’s degree focusing on Business Management, Human Resources, and Marketing. Reese was introduced to business at a very young age and is a third generation small business owner.