An Entrepreneur and Former Leadership Trainer,
Spencer Cites a “Deathbed Charge” From His Father As The
Inspiration Behind His And Noble’s Comprehensive,
Highly Personalized Process
Barry Spencer was heir apparent to his family business. His father had grown up on a Michigan farm, and despite humble beginnings, he built a business from nothing to become a self-made millionaire. The business was, as Barry describes it, a “debt free, cash rich, profitable, recurring revenue enterprise.”
Who wouldn’t want to inherit such a legacy?
But Barry’s path was destined for a different direction. After receiving his Master’s in Education and Leadership, Barry’s extensive work in the non-profit world led him into a pioneering career providing leadership training and coaching, and eventually, expanding it internationally.
Now a well-respected author and owner of three successful businesses, Barry inherited more from the elder Spencer than his entrepreneurial spirit and DNA that is hard-wired for achievement. He also received what he calls a “deathbed charge” from his dad in April 2007 before he passed away at 62.
In a scene that sounds as though it was ripped from the silver screen, Mr. Spencer reached out to his son with the words, “Be sure you take care of your mother.” Those final instructions became “The Charge of a Lifetime” that propelled Barry onto a passionate course to not only solve the troubled financial legacy of his own family, but to find a way to serve wealthy families and help them plan for their futures.
Even before he and his business partner and longtime friend Scott Noble officially created and launched their proprietary process, Wealth With No Regrets®, Barry was sharing his family’s story with friends and neighbors in the hopes they could avoid a similar challenging fate. Although his father had a massive estate plan in place, the Spencers’ biggest fears about such things as estate tax issues were later realized. Nearly half of his dad’s wealth had evaporated three and a half years after he died, and his mom, in her early seventies, faced an increasingly uncertain future.
Worst of all, Barry’s family was caught in a downward spiral of conflict and regret—all because of well-intentioned, but ultimately poorly designed wealth planning.
He found a kindred spirit in Scott Noble, a fellow entrepreneur and veteran CPA, Personal Financial Specialist, and CFO of multiple companies. Scott’s passion for helping others grew wings after a well-intentioned financial advisor “pantsed” him and his wife out of a substantial financial windfall, analogous to the way that a high school buddy “pantsed” him on the basketball court in a gym full of students. The culprit was the broken financial industry that doesn’t instruct on delivering a comprehensive planning process to clients.
“There are two or three strategies that could have preserved all of that wealth,” Scott says. “But I missed out by not going through a process. Having endured this terrible experience of regret led me not only to work with Barry, but to become a valuable speaker on the importance of a well thought out process when I speak to attorneys, financial planners, money managers, and CPAs.”
Barry’s triumph now is in helping wealthy families remove the regrets wealth can create. He and Scott have helped countless clients and their families throughout their home base of Alpharetta, Georgia (the greater Atlanta area) and throughout the country.
In his book, The Secret of Wealth With No Regrets, Barry shares that creating wealth is just the beginning, but enjoying it and making it endure is where the greatest meaning of wealth exists. The hard-hitting, insightful work is a roadmap for thinking about wealth in a more comprehensive way.
Peppered with dynamic quotes from a variety of iconic voices (Bill Gates, Erma Bombeck, Thomas Jefferson, Winston Churchill, Henry Ford, even Jesus and Solomon!), the 145-page volume details the many key facets for having “Wealth With No Regrets®.” Among them: Wealth With No Regrets® is founded on wisdom and knowledge; it is a living plan, not merely a death preparation plan; it is a focus on the desires of your heart in motion now; it’s about more than the assets on your personal balance sheet; it’s living responsibly with the use of all resources; it’s a living opportunity; and it’s a significant life purpose in action.
On the back cover of of Barry’s book is this powerful quote from Stephen R. Leimberg, CEO of Leimberg and LeClair, and creator of “The Tools and Techniques of Estate Planning:” “Barry Spencer covers many of the deeply intimate and essential non-technical questions that need to be asked—but all too often are not—by estate and business planning clients—and their counselors.”
Spencer and Noble have also written a powerful report that serves as a self-assessing guide for smart millionaires who want to get their estate done right, “7 Regrets Wealth Creates and How To Avoid Them.” Key regrets include: Paying more in taxes than you have to, living with the fear of not having enough, wondering if you’ve done everything you can to put your wealth in proper order, and not giving as much as you could have to the causes that are dearest to them.
At the end of the report, Barry and Scott make an exceptional offer in a sidebar called “How We Can Help.” Their no-obligation, 73 minute, “No Regrets Conversation” is a lively, interactive experience that allows potential clients to gain greater insight into their concerns and challenges, better understand potential opportunities in their unique situation, and more clearly picture a bigger future that aligns with their desired intent.
To take advantage of this unique conversation that is “all about you and your situation” (and not products, pitches or one size fits all solutions), they ask that those who are interested simply call 678-278-9632, email conversation@wealthwithnoregrets.com, or contact Barry and Scott through their website www.WealthWithNoRegrets.com/contact-us.
“The reason we emphasize that the 73-minute conversation is not about products, pitches, or one-size-fits-all solutions. It has to do with the state of the modern financial industry, which seems stuck in product solution mode,” says Barry. “Large companies sell people things they may or may not need, because to them, it’s all about ‘status quo’ in the industry rather than the individual client. Depending on whom you’re dealing with, it’s all about an existing trust structure, legal documents, or financial solution—but not about what the family or individual wants to accomplish, both today and for years to come. For the majority of the industry, it’s about product pushing and convincing people that they need certain “silver bullet” style financial products that will somehow magically solve all their problems.”
Spencer and Noble believe that there’s only one way for wealthy people to enjoy true peace of mind, to live with the “walk away freedom” to do what they want and to experience the joy of giving to causes and institutions that matter deeply to them. “The only way to accomplish these things with great confidence,” Barry says, “is to have a comprehensive, integrated process that customizes a planning result that’s unique and personal to them.”
Critical to this process is a clearly defined, written direction that gives individuals the knowledge that there will always be more than enough money to live out their lives with true peace and confidence. They believe that the most effective results come from a planning process that is simple, energizing, and engaging, with outcomes that are understandable (Scott calls it “simplifying the complex”).
Through their proprietary process, they build cooperation among their clients’ other trusted advisors, resulting in a functional team that helps the clients accomplish their clearly defined goals. The entire process is ultimately about showing wealth creators how to avoid regrets so they can more powerfully impact their families and the causes they care most about, as well as their own legacies. They welcome the opportunity to unlock their clients’ wealth potential, remove regrets, and open the door to confidence and hope.
“What Scott and I realized,” Barry says, “is that people need to step out of solution mode, because the ‘Shoot First, Aim Later’ approach inevitably turns into ‘Shoot First, Never Aim.’ So, we set out to reverse that into a more effective ‘Ready, Aim, Fire’ approach. In essence, it is a ‘measure twice, cut once’ idea.
Our question was, ‘How do we take the process away from a ‘foreign language’ that is filled with indecipherable industry jargon that puts advisers in the position of control, and then give that control back to the people with money? We want to leave the money in the hands of those who own the wealth!
“That’s where Stephen Covey’s idea comes in—in his bestselling book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, he describes one of those foundational habits as ‘Begin with the end in mind.’ The only way to give the control back to the people who have created the wealth, and ensure that they will be responsible for what happens with it now and after they’re gone is to ‘Begin with the end in mind.’
“It starts with the vision and a unique set of priorities that result in a set of highly customized goals. Wealthy people to want to work with professionals who understand them and their situation, and Scott and I both have backgrounds that make these up front connections easy. As a result, clients know we’ve been where they are and that they can trust us.”
And Barry truly has been in their shoes. In fact, the Spencer Family’s struggles all began after they met with one of the “big box” financial firms in Atlanta in the hopes of securing the family’s wealth for the future. “After some typical financial conversation about my father’s wealth, the firm’s legal counsel arrived at the ‘solution’ that would solve my father’s estate problems,” Barry says.
“He summarized the situation in three sentences littered with highly technical language. Due in part to the fact that my father couldn’t understand what was really being recommended, my father didn’t act upon those recommendations. Later, when he was among his wealthy Detroit friends, he received referrals to their estate planners and advisors. In the end, he worked with some of those advisors, who happened to do very traditional estate planning. The result of that planning was a ninety-page legal document that troubled my dad enough to make his deathbed charge to me.”
Barry says that the services his dad received were simply deficient. “Traditional estate planning and traditional financial planning are broken systems—and Wealth With No Regrets® exists to fix those things. My dad had a sense that what he had done (or hadn’t done) was going to cause problems, but at the time, he felt he didn’t have another option. He was a smart man, but peer influence, combined with a lack of better options, led him to do what his friends were doing. His advisors were well intentioned and well meaning in what they were trying to do, but the reality is, he had outgrown their advice. His underlying vision and desires for his legacy and his family were bigger than what they were capable of handling.”
Barry and Scott created Wealth With No Regrets® to ensure that people can overcome the obstacles that stand in their way. It’s a registered trademark process, because the traditional approach doesn’t deliver exceptional results. “We provide a unique experience that’s highly customizable, user friendly and plainly communicates in ways that help people understand their present situations and the bigger opportunities that are out there,” Scott says. “We help clients uncover possibilities that excite them and help them realize or even uncover hidden dollars. Then we put all the pieces together so they can have confidence in what they want to achieve. We take potential regret and turn it into an opportunity they even didn’t know they had.”
Barry adds, “For me, the best part is that we get to help people see these possibilities that they can’t see on their own and then help them achieve more than they ever thought they could. In short, our process empowers our clients to achieve what they want, and then it moves them from where they are to exactly where they always hoped they could be.”