Simoo 5 keys- Preface

SIMOO 5 Keys to Financial Success Preface

By: Jerry Hernandez

The most successful people, to me, are the ones who have been able to master the various aspects/complexities of life, which in turn makes them a better overall person. We should all desire to be the best worker, spouse, sibling, friend, etc. that we can be. AND not just being solely focused on your own goals/success but also being impactful to the people you surround yourself and come in contact with. This is the driving force behind SIMOO.

I am incredibly blessed. Some come from much better situations than me and much worse. SIMOO is built on the idea that no matter what your current situation is, you can change it for better or worse. I realize and appreciate the fact that there are extreme circumstances and some people are born into terrible situations, but I truly believe that even in those cases, those people can change their situation- for better or worse. It is up to them to do that.

Success, in itself, takes many forms and I truly believe whatever your defined success is has a lot to do with where you came from. While I do want to be successful in all of the various aspects of life and I still have a very long way to go. One specific area that I chose to focus on in my first 29 years is that of financial literacy. Even from an early age, the impact money has on people is something that has always intrigued me. I come from a middle-class family and when I was growing up, it seemed to me that my parents would always fight about money. I never wanted to hear my parents fight so I would sit in my room and think of ways that I could go eventually make money to make sure that this wasn’t an issue for them ever again. I feel like this is a common theme in lower/ middle-class families in America and across the globe. I want to change that.
After years of being in school/working/managing my finances and getting a career in finance, I began to develop a certain curiosity and passion for understanding what makes people who come from situations where they have little to no money to then changing their situations and having some/a lot of money. What separates those who end up with some vs. a lot? Two examples that I thought about very often were my dad and some professional athletes who have been open about the less than ideal backgrounds they come from. My dad’s story is one that I am closer to so that tended to occupy most of my thoughts.

Some people closest to me are familiar with his story and it is something I mention in the Foundation of SIMOO but here it is in short:

• My Grandma and Grandpa were both Mexican Americans who had five kids together.
• My Grandma couldn’t speak English very well.
• My Grandpa served in the Navy.
• My dad is the oldest of the five. He has 3 brothers and one sister.
• My Grandpa would take my dad to work with him when my dad was very young to teach him the value of hard work and money.
• My Grandpa left my Grandma when my dad was 12.
• My Dad had to start working when he left and became the man of the house.
• My Grandma worked multiple jobs trying to provide for herself and her 5 kids.
• My dad started making what he considered “real money” when he was allowed to work at a local beer distributor in Dallas at the age of 17.
• He has consistently gotten up at 3:00-4:00 a.m., hustling and living paycheck to paycheck since then. He is now 56 years old.

To answer the question I presented above, “What separates those who end up with some vs. a lot?”, I think about the above timeline of events in my dad’s life. To my knowledge, there was never anyone who came to him when he started making “real money” to advise him on how to correctly save, budget and grow his money. Coming from where he did, it is understandable that he didn’t have the time or realize the importance of education and building his financial foundation. Then I started thinking, what would’ve happened if someone guided him and helped hold him accountable? How many situations are there that are like this all over the world? While there is no precise answer to these questions, I think it is safe to assume that the answer to the first two questions is that he would’ve been better off financially and that there are A LOT of situations like this all over the world. In the same way that professional athletes who come from lesser-resourced backgrounds get paired up with an agent/financial advisor to help them navigate their professional careers, what if you could bring the same types of resources to those people in the world like my dad?

Then I thought to myself if we could build a foundation of key factors to financial success that we could then use to build a curriculum off of and deliver it to the historically under-resourced areas, that could be huge. While our education system, in my opinion, makes somewhat of an attempt to do the same I am afraid to say that it falls very short of giving youth the foundation they need as far as basic life skills and financial literacy. Or maybe they are trying to do that but it is not resonating with them as much as they would hope which makes sense. As sad as it is, I think the education system can sometimes get the mom/dad factor applied to it. What does that mean? Think about it- have you had situations where your mom and dad have told you to do something and it has gone to deaf ears but then you hear the same thing from someone else and it impacts you? I believe the same thing happens within our schools and athletic systems. That is why I think there is such value in someone coming in as an outsider and reinforcing some of those same values from their experiences that that audience may have heard before.

The idea has continued to grow over the years and at the end of 2019, I had come to a point in my life where I felt good about the foundation that had been built what I had been able to accomplish thus far. Please understand, I am nowhere near where I would like to be and there have been many mistakes along the way, but I felt like if I built a platform to provide resources and help people learn from some of my mistakes then that would be a great outcome. Not to be cheesy but after all, it is not about the mistakes you make but it is how you come back from them that matters. Then I decided to put a team together and set SIMOO Industries up as a business. In short- the mission of the business is to positively impact others. As a part of this and given my passion regarding personal finances, I brought in some of my closest friends who are in the finance industry and we built a foundation for what we believe goes into making a person successfully manage their finances throughout their lifetime. The SIMOO 5 keys to financial success.

In my opinion, these 5 keys apply to a lot more than just your financial success. And, I hope you feel the same. I am a firm believer that if I am delivering a message to 1,000 people and I make an impact in one person’s life, and they go out to make a difference in someone else’s, that is a success.

Are you the one?