Optimal
mental at this altitude. I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking and oils you a personal question. I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
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Well, hello boys and girls, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show. Where is my job to interview and dissect world-class performers and all around funny people like my guest today and I'm going to butcher his name, even though I've known him for a thousand years ramit Sethi. That's our am i t s. Ethi author of The New York Times bestseller. I will teach you to be rich has become a financial Guru to millions of readers in the 20s 30s and 40s going to make sure I don't disqualify myself soon. He started his website iwillteachyoutoberich.com is a Stanford undergrad in 2004 any now hosts more than a million readers per month on his blog newsletter and social media ramit and his team of dozens of employees build premium digital products about personal finance entrepreneurship psychology careers and personal development for top performers, the iwt community includes 1 million monthly readers 400,000 plus newsletter subscribers and 35,000 premium customers. He has written about personal finance for the wall.
Journal the New York Times and has been interviewed on dozens of media Outlets including MPR ABC news CNBC and the Tim Ferriss show. Welcome back to the show
remain. Thanks a lot. It's great to be here
and you can find ramit if you want to say hello ask a question or yell at him on Twitter at ramit rmit and Instagram at roommate. So I thought we could start with the floor mats. Maybe you could tell me about your dad and the floor mats. You want to start there.
Yeah. Alright, so, you know how you grow up and you discover that your parents did things a little differently and you just thought it was normal. I thought it was normal to take five days to buy a car because that's what my dad would do. My mom would say home. My dad would take us he would take a couple of the kids in my family including me and we would go to the dealer. It was always Honda or Toyota, you know that and we would start looking.
And and my dad would play very innocent. Like he didn't know anything about cars. My dad knew everything. He knew how much the dealer was paying how much the whole back was everything. So we'd go we test drive it. He wouldn't be sure dada and then we'd stay there for five hours and he'd say, okay, I'm gonna think about it the car dealers spent like five hours with my dad. He goes. No, thanks. This price isn't good. I'm gonna go there like what so we literally left then we go back the next day like we're basically having breakfast at the dealership. And I remember one time we were buying a car for our family and it was like the fourth day. Okay again, I thought this was normal and we're down to the last bit where the part where the Dealer's drawing the numbers, you know and telling you like well, it's actually a really good deal and my dad, you know, he knows the math. He's an engineer, of course, and and finally we've closed the deal and my dad goes you're going to throw in free floor mats, right?
Is it 50 bucks?
And the guys like sir, we're losing money on this car. How can we throw these floor? And my dad says I'm out of here and we just walked up and left and I was like a Vietnam vet. I'm just shell-shocked walking out. My eyes are just glazed over and I'm like, we just spent a week buying this car and we walked out of here over $50 floor mats. So that's where I learned to negotiate in the most elite negotiation of all
now where where are your parents from there from India and are they first generation they emigrated to the u.s.
Yep. They came here in the 70s. My dad came here actually to study he went back to India and it was known that he was coming back. He was a bachelor and you know, they sort of arrange things so that he meets people when he comes back and it passed around the community that this Bachelors coming back and he ended up meeting my mom. They met by both families coming together in a living room and talking and they met each other the families decided. It was a good
Ding seven days later. They were married. My mom got on a plane and flew to the US for the first time and they've been married for about 40 years now amazing.
We have so much to talk about and so much to catch up on it so many questions that I want to ask but I thought we could we could start and certainly will bounce all over the place. But you said before we started recording because you have a new edition of your book. I will teach you to be rich noticeably lacking a photograph of you barefoot on the cover and you have some incredible quotes testimonials. I should say including from Burton malkiel author of random walk down Wall Street, but you said to me because I haven't read the introduction that you either should have started it or you did start it with I was right. Could you explain please explain?
Okay. So this book I will teach be rich originally came out.
In March 2009 and let's just dispense with the idea the name sounds like a scam we both know we write books that sound like scams, but they're not I mean it's like a running and I've just learned to embrace it guys. It's the weird sounding book, but it's actually good advice. And in the first edition, I talked about long-term investing low-cost investing thinking about really automating your money and using psychology against yourself for positive results. Now, if you had followed that advice it turns out that when the book came out in March 2009, that was the absolute bottom of the recession crazy enough now, I don't believe in Market timing, but if you had used the advice in the book this $10 book you would be set for life. So I started book off by saying well, I was right. Let me tell you all the things that would have happened. If you'd use this book. I did get a couple of things wrong. I had to change one of them and the biggest mistake of my life was putting in interest rates in the book like that. Okay.
You remember what that was like me putting doing Market testing with magazines in the world my God.
Okay. So I put in back then savings rates were five percent. Remember these Banks were paying 5% So I was like guys 5% that it all. Here's the math and then like the minute the book came out. They dropped to four three two, and then point five percent. Now the point of it is you don't make money on your savings account. Anyway, we're talking about twenty one dollars a year or a month versus four dollars like it's irrelevant. It's tiny details every day for the last decade. I've gotten like 10 emails a day that are like, fuck you. Where's the five percent you talked about you liar? And so I'm like never again. I'm never putting interest rates in this book again. So I took him out. I clarified it. I corrected a couple of things that I wanted to update and I added like 80 new pages of material. So things have changed a bit but good advice
really shouldn't change that much now I have I've had a chance to observe you as sort of an animal in the wild.
For ten plus years and part of the reason I enjoy having our conversations but also sharing your tactics and scripts and so on is that I've seen you use them and walk the walk which is more than I can say for a lot of financial pundits or commentators out there in the world and I wanted to to perhaps just mention a not really an upsell maybe a side cell which is if somebody wants to be either greatly informed on the Arts of negotiating or if you're just looking for outraged porn to get really angry. If if that's your current sport of choice. You can find a guest post that you put on my blog quite a few years ago called how to negotiate like an Indian which which I can only imagine the response to that title. If I were to publish it probably not a bad idea, but it's staying staying.
His folks so there you have it. If you want to Google that on Tim dot blog you can find it. But let's talk about some of the press counterintuitive things that you do because we talked about all sorts of aspects of finance and investing in life in general on the phone just the two of us, but I'm looking at a number of different bullets that I was hoping to explore and one is you've mentioned that you've lived in the same apartment for ten years. Why do you still rent?
Yeah, I get this question a lot because in America real estate is religion. And if you're successful, then you're supposed to buy right and the old tax deduction and they're not making any more land and all these things that we say that we don't really understand. I rent intentionally, I could go buy a place in Manhattan tomorrow with cash, but I don't want to it.
Makes sense for me financially. And also I enjoy the flexibility just to give you an example. I love that the building that I live in has awesome Services. I love the anything that goes wrong. I make a phone call somebody there was a it started raining last winter and Water started coming through my window sill. So I made a phone call and they came up and they took a look and they were like, we actually have to replace this part of the roof because it connects and we have to send someone to the outside of the building. I said sounds good to me. It doesn't matter to me. I'm going to be out of town for the next few days. So have a blast. I would estimate that that repair probably costs in Manhattan on a weekend probably twenty-five thousand maybe $35,000. I didn't pay it. Right. So that's Financial also flexibility issue, which is I don't know where I'm going to be five years from now, and if you're going to buy and you run the numbers, it makes sense to plan on being there at least seven to ten years minimum so that you can sort of
The cost of the transaction fees by think the biggest thing that really surprises people is that in America. We have been told so many times real estate is the best investment and in my opinion, that's just not true a lot of the time now, I don't think it's a bad investment always but I always say you should run the numbers and when I run the numbers in Manhattan, it just makes no sense. I would rather take that money and I would put it in the stock market and I know consistently what that outcome is going to be over the long term. I don't have to do any repairs and I as we may talk about I really hate anything that affects my convenience. So I think for a lot of people I just want people to think like hey, is it really true that real estate is the best investment for me? It's not it's a cost and I'm happy to pay the cautious. Like I'm happy to pay the cost of you know, a basket of strawberries that I'm going to eat. I don't think I'm throwing money away on strawberries. I don't think I'm throwing money away on rent.
So he said Real Estate is is religion or it can be and I think this is worth digging into for a second because
There are a lot of statements that in certain circumstances can be conditionally true. Right like real estate is the best investment asterisk fine print if yes ABCDE and there are then there are things that are just patently I think untrue, right like you need money to make money false. It's who you know, not what you know, yep false dichotomy. Not mutually
exclusive investing is only for the rich, right? Ironically the way you get rich is by
investing and there are a lot of different ways to invest I think so one perhaps undertone or
Portion of context that I think is is worth talking about because I've been thinking a lot about this myself in the last 10 years is that there are there are investments that you make to optimize for financial Roi and then there are investments that you make sure which are decisions about allocating resources for optimizing other things. Right. So I'll give just a perfect a perfectly seemingly opposite example, which is I have bought real estate. I've also had my ass handed to me of year and a half before your book out. In fact, hello just about rate mortgage first home buyer. Yeah, that was that was ugly. But I have I have bought real estate. Typically I have used mortgages of various types and I had a friend of mine a different Indian who was also
who first generation. Who is this guy? We all know each other Naveen to Cara. Okay. Yeah.
So thank you in advance for this advice by the way who I've known.
Ages also an engineer brilliant guy and we were looking through different financial decisions because and I want to talk about kind of what got you here won't get you where you want to go type changes, right? Because I imagine you do things very differently from your parents total even though their behavior makes perfect sense. Yeah based on their conditioning and their experience what he said to me looking at my balance sheet. There's a small amount of principal left to pay on a mortgage and he said just for your peace of mind for this primary residence. It doesn't make Financial sense. You should pay this off so that you feel as though no matter what you have that and it's almost like a homestead right? You have something that on many levels cannot be taken away. That's how you feel. And I did that. I'm not saying this is the advice that everybody should take by the way, but for me in that
Moment there was there was so much uncertainty in my life to make a decision that seemingly did not let the numbers line up was in fact the right thing to do.
I completely agree. I'm so glad we're talking about the Nuance because I believe there's a few underlying beliefs when it comes to money and I believe that number one most people are mostly the same and that's profoundly different than a lot of people who believe that we're all individual. We have different situations. No, I believe that most of us are mostly the same and if we can optimize if we can basically just follow good advice for 90 95 % of the way, then we learn the right to take advantage of our individual Specialties in differences. So for most people that means saving a certain percentage investing a certain percentage Etc, but I do think once you do the basics, then you earn the right to say hey, what are the nuances here? Where do the rules not necessarily apply to me? So for you? Yeah, you have the principal may be financially it didn't
Sense, but it just felt good or it provided safety in an uncertain world at that moment. I've got examples in my own life where I pay for stuff that makes no rational sense. I hired a personal trainer for the last many years that doesn't make any sense. I could theoretically find the same workouts on YouTube and you know, they're all printed out or I could just stop going with my trainer why he's giving me all the workouts but there's something more that I get out of it. And when I was starting out when I was like 22, I wish I could go back and shake myself because I was very utilitarian and really judgmental about how other people spent their money and I would scoff I would say, you know, flying business classes so stupid we're all getting to the same place. I'm just paying 20% of what that person's paying and what I really should have done is say, why do they do that? Like if we're listening to you right now saying you paid off a principle where you really didn't have to you could have just dripped it out. You're not paying much in interest why and for you?
At safety was meaningful for me. I like the flexibility and convenience. So I'm not saying don't ever buy real estate and you're not saying buy or pay it off tomorrow. But what are the circumstances in which people who are otherwise probably pretty thoughtful
make certain decisions and the mistake that I've in retrospect made a lot when I was younger and I think that's also in part because I grew up with by necessity very very frugal parents is sounds like much like yourself. I would scoff at and look down upon a lot of behaviors that head. I actually looked closer and said what am I missing? Right? All right a bunch of wealthy people are doing X. Yeah.
They must know something
now. I'm like, holy shit. I can't believe I missed it for like 20 or 30 years. I could actually makes a whole lot of sense.
Okay, so let's talk about what are some examples. What are some things that
you
Scoffed at in your early. Let's say teens or 20s that now you're like, oh I get it. Well
and I you know, I don't want this to sound obnoxious to folks because we're going to start to we've gone through many kind of check points, right like we View and I have been very fortunate and we've made some good decisions had a healthy dose of luck, but I'll give you an example because you just mentioned business class. All right, like my assistant I have today my primary full-time assistant still remembers when Tim this is not that long ago would get a middle seat economy class ticket, right? Because I remember when I first had people reach out to me about paid speaking engagements, which seemed completely absurd at the time. Number one. I said yes to everything. So I was like what people are going to pay me to speak. Yeah. Sure. Yes to everything all the above. And one of the options that I realized was available at one point was they could buy
Tickets for me which was if negotiated by speaking Asian or something usually business or first class or they could give me the cash expected for first-class ticket and then I could just pocket it by a middle-class economy seat, which I did once to Australia for a speaking gig that was Anna. I mean at the time kind of my high water mark, right like it was a very important gig I it was critical that I do. Well this be engagement and I sat like, you know, I might hinged at 90 degrees at the hip in a middle seat with like my arms thrust in front of me like a cadaver like a Dracula for whatever right like 18 hours and got there and I was just pounded hamburger meat for like three days and I said, okay that was that was very Pennywise an extremely pound foolish. So that would be one example, and I think that's the broader category of protecting the physical
asset.
Yeah, what I like about these examples like I don't find them shallow to discuss. I think that each of us no matter what level of your success has gone from a certain place in life when you're in your early 20s to a different place, right? I used to read pcmag and think about what parts to build my own computer now, I just go buy a Mac like it's as simple as that and you know, I haven't kept up and it's just not a good use of my time. I just want someone else to make the decision for me and it doesn't matter whether you're buying first-class tickets internationally or you're going to a restaurant instead of cooking food for yourself one night, you know one night a week or a month. We all intuitively know that as you change in life, you're going to your spending is going to change so I actually don't think anyone should listen to your example of middle middle seat and say like, oh my God, like must be nice to be Tim or for me. You know, I have an assistant as well must be nice. It is nice, but you might have money and you don't choose to spend it like that you choose.
Spend it on something else. I have a student of mine in this book who use the book he told me he retired at 35 and his wife retired their 35 and 36 and they drive around in an RV. That's their rich life. That is not my rich life but to him that's his rich life. So when I was back in my 20s what I wish I would have done was to look at people who had succeeded in the ways that I could conceive myself succeeding like I would have never seen myself in an RV. So maybe I didn't have something to learn from that person. But if I was really interested active and if are really curious I would have said to him like, how'd you do it? Yeah, what'd you do? And why did you choose of all the things to live to travel in an RV? If I done that I would have put myself aside and all these things that we love to Define ourselves our which by the way is interesting people. Love to Define themselves by what they're not as opposed to what they want. So you see it on dating profiles everywhere. Don't message me if or people say
I would never do that if I had a million dollars. Well, you don't have to worry about having a million dollars because when you define Yourself by what you're not you won't get there when you choose what you would want to do now becomes. Okay, cool. Like I want this I want that. How can I work to get it? So I wish I would have reframed the way that I thought about money and psychology earlier on how
do the Frameworks or rules guidelines anything that you use for financial decisions differ from those you absorbed from your parents or other people when you were younger and there are number of different ways to approach that right? Like we could look at sort of the approaches. You used to you mentioned a million bucks to get to your first million versus what you used after that point, right? Because if it's anything like my experience very different totally, but I'll let you tackle that anyway, you like because I think what's If people could take one thing from this conversation it would be test your assumptions.
And be try to be aware and it takes a lot of effort and practice of what rules you're following or biases you have that you arrived at through logic and reasoning versus having simply absorbed over the course of like bouncing around like a pinball in a pinball machine in this thing. We call life for the last twenty Thirty forty years because those are not your rules. There's somebody else's yeah.
I call them invisible scripts. These are the scripts that run our lives and they're so deeply embedded in us that they are invisible to us and you see it like, you know one invisible script that I grew up with was education is always good and I believe that I believe that's a positive invisible script. I think it's a really good one. I'm all for an education self-development. That's what I do for my business and in my life. I also grew up with things like you shouldn't pay for that we could do it ourselves. Yeah me too. Right? Yeah, and so and it really trickles down and lots of peculiar ways. So there's some ways
I really love when we used to take vacations. Our vacation was mostly driving from where we lived in Northern California to La we would visit family my mom would pack lunches and we would stop on the way and eat and you know what I love about that is like we didn't need any fancy food. Like we were a family we spent time together that was vacation for us. I didn't know what it was like to stay at a fancy hotel. In fact, I never ordered room service until I was like 20 years old on an interviewing trip for Microsoft. So I like that I like knowing that I grew up a little hungry not physically, but just knowing like oh cool like we're happy. We're good. There's another level, you know, we can't quite do it right now, but we're happy but I think I also grew up with some beliefs that I've shed or changed. Some of them would be like being really conservative with my job. Like if I had followed all the paths in life, I'd be sitting here wearing like a very oversized Cisco engineer t-shirt and just
You know, I'd be telling you about my sales engineering stuff. Like it's a conservative go get a good job at cetera and as I got older and I started making different choices my parents were supportive, but they were a little surprised I think on the financial side. I didn't really understand why people would pay more why pay more when you can pay less but there's a famous quote from Dan Kennedy. He says why pay less when you can pay more total flip of the equation. So whether that applies who's Dan Kennedy, Dan Kennedy is a famous marketing consultant and he has a great book out about marketing to the affluent, which if you read it, it can be a bit abrasive but it's also like a very eye-opening shocking book because what he points out see most people go through life with a lens. I call it a money lens. They put a pair of glasses on and they look at the world through frugality lens. How can I save money and you see this in lots of ways if you say oh that's a really nice jacket. Where'd you get it? They'll tell you they'll say aye.
I got it on sale. I got it for 50% off. That's interesting. But if you talk to somebody who bought like a absolutely like a something they love this they went to Italy and got this perfect jacket that was handcrafted. They would never say I got it for 50% off. They have a different lens maybe craftsmanship. I grew up with the frugality lens. Everything was about costs growing up now. It's also about value. So as Dan Kennedy says why pay less when you can pay more if you're going to have an amazing anniversary dinner, perhaps that's the place. You don't need to save 50% perhaps you actually want to spend more to create a memory. You will never forget
Dan Kennedy interesting guy. I've never met him but one of his books I'm blanking on the name will put it in the show notes at Tim dot block for / podcast, but it's something like million-dollar ideas or how to make the most or find your own million dollar ideas. And it was as I recall it a collection of different business ideas and
Examples which was really useful for also removing the financial lens that I would have had on at the time which was you make money doing a b or c which were the happened to be whatever three things. I had seen maybe around me and to show just how flexible the approaches can be and I'd love to
here a bit since you have such a great sample set of students. What are some of the
Psychological blind spots or rules that most prevent people from reaching their financial goals and I want to touch on so think about that I want to touch on one thing you said which was frugality and and having grown up with a definite frugality lens. I think this is this is worth commenting on that is for reality has its place like you don't want to just be Flying Blind because you know about what is it a fool and his money are soon separated. I mean you no matter how much money you have you can spend it all and I've seen this a lot it's not hard. So you have to have a means of assessing what is worth spending money on and what is not however, if you make let's just say 20 30 40 $50,000 a year fill in the number, but let's just say $50,000 a year if you want to reach all of your financial.
Goals by by cutting costs the maximum amount that you can cut is 50,000 at which point you are. You've got like a t-shirt and you're a Wandering ascetic, you know begging for food and and so on so there is by definition a limit to the Delta. You can create between the money you spend and the money you have. Whereas if you if you have an equal focus on income generation or even disproportionate focus on income generation sky's the limit in a sense, right? So that would be one where like I was trained like cut cut cut cut cut
But if you're not simultaneously looking at income generation or increasing income, it can be really problematic
a hundred percent. That's why most of America and most of the world has the frugality lens on right there's a limit to how much you can cut but no limit to how much you can earn and if you think about the typical Financial advice, it's a very pointed question to ask why don't any of these so-called Financial experts in the newspapers talk about how to earn more money and the answer is they don't know how that's not their job their writers. So to be able to understand that you do need to manage your costs. For example, there are a lot of things I do in my life that are highly Frugal highly especially for the income that I have and I just it's not of interest to me, but I also would like my wife makes fun of me because I run my entire business on a MacBook Air and you know, I put my feet up on the table. I got my thing on my lap and she's like once you get a new computer like that fan is so loud.
I had to up how long have you had it? So I that's what I wanted to find out. I went to the Apple thing in the top left corner and it shows you when you bought it. It's seven years old but like it still works. So I don't want another one and I also when I grew up this comes from my childhood, we didn't buy a new computer unless the other one did not turn on. So I've kept that with me and I like having little places in my life where I intentionally impose scarcity. I think it's healthy. I think it's healthy to have restraint. I think it's healthy to build that discipline if you just go out and buy everything you can I think you're on a quick path to a bad place. You're also aware
that you're doing it. Yeah, right.
Yes, exactly. So exactly another example is I hardly ever eat out at all. And that's a big change from tenure. Well, I was single and I was seamless like my seamless receipts are just like through the roof seamless is an online delivery service in New York everybody there uses it and now
For health reasons and also just for cost reasons as well. We like to cut back on that. Yeah, but I spend more on things. So I always like to spend extravagantly on the things I love but cut costs mercilessly on the things I don't mercilessly. So I like that I actually would I think a lot of people kind of try to cut back a little bit here and a little bit there and they just end up generally unhappy about it. I would actually encourage people to pick the area. I call it a money dial pick the area of your life that you truly love spending money on like let's do a quick exercise. What's the area of life that you love? It gives you Joy to
spend money on.
Travel travel and food perfect day, whether I cook at home or I go out I would say and now I you had a Veracruz breakfast taco this morning. Yeah, which was amazing not expensive. No, I love but delicious at the same time. I could go to say San Francisco to like Cézanne there and enjoy that as an experience. So those would be two areas travel and and food
perfect. So let's let's do this. Now. A lot of people say travel. It's one of the most common ones. Mine is convenience. I like my life to be super convenient. So I've spent a lot of money and time engineering that now let's take your money dial Travel and like a stereo dial. Let's turn it up. Let's say just for easy math that you spend $100 a month on travel again easy math. What if you 10x that or let's say you hundred X that what would travel look like for you different than what you do now.
Let's see.
Well, I would probably mean that I have which quite honestly I've thought about because I've had some given some of the gnarly crazy places I go. I've had some catastrophes and near catastrophes. I would probably have a fixer on the ground each place. I went I would have somebody who is on call and available to effectively fix any problem or tackle any challenge or want that came up. I love that anything else.
That's the one that comes to mind. Okay, because it's yeah, that's that's that's the one that comes. That's the one that comes to mind. All right.
Now what's something in your life that you spend money on but you don't really care. It doesn't make that much of a meaningful difference you clothing. Perfect. Okay. So this is you'll find
into college. My fans have given me unending great for
you know, my wife is a personal stylist. Okay. Oh, man. All right. Well, she won't like me. Okay. So I love this exercise. There are about ten money dials that I've identified travel is a big one convenience is very rare. There's health and fitness there's relationships. There's a few more what I like to see people doing is actually spending more on the thing. They love
health and fitness is the one where I would ratchet it up. Okay, that's where that's where I would turn the dial the heart would you do I would actually get a trainer which I do not have currently have different Trainers for different things, but it's all a la carte. Nothing has been prepaid or
Scheduled which is an issue, right? I suspect that part of the reason tell me if I'm wrong that you like having a trainer is the accountability and the regularity hundred percent and I would like to do
that. Okay, I love this. By the way, whenever you ask someone about their money dial, you can just see their face light up right because they loved it. I loved I love I'm obsessed talking about how I have built my life around convenience. I'll take you through every Last Detail. You can see the joy in my eyes. So what I love to do is for people to dream big if it's travel, it's not just like adding an extra 10% It's like 10 Xing it what would that look like and then in order to get there whether it's 2 X 5 X 10 X. What would you be willing to cut back on and suddenly people start to realize that money actually should be bifurcated. It should be highly bifurcated. Its spending very little on the things you don't like and going extravagant on the things you do and when you start to think this way now, you're rich life becomes way more specific and meaningful to you.
As opposed to me, I don't need a fixer because I don't travel at those kind of places and I don't do the kind of traveling you do but for me, I want even more convenience and now, you know, I want a different type of travel now that I'm married. So these are things that I want everyone to think about. What's your money dial and what if you could 10 exit
and this is valuable also just for people who may be listening and going like waste of time. I don't have the money to spend 10 x on it, whatever whatever the pushback might be is a thought exercise. This is very very valuable in the same way that if like when I wrote my last book I asked myself if I only had a month actually for the last two books, you know, if I only had a month to write this book, how would I do it? Oh really? What would it look like and and 90% of the ideas were terrible But Then There Were Ten that made the process. I was planning on already two, three, four, five times more efficient. And so the question itself might seem absurd but many of the ideas.
Is end up being extremely practical and let's talk about convenience. So what are some of the what are some of the things that you do or have found disproportionately rewarding gratifying from a convenience sample?
Okay, I'll tell you but it's going to sound weird because like to me this is truly. Joyful and two other people I'm going to sound like a lunatic but this is my rich life. So I'm going to break it down. I wake up in the morning. And by the time I wake up early we started waking up at 6:00 after we went on our honeymoon. We were waking up early for Safari and then we both kind of looked at each other and were like you want to keep doing this and so we do we sleep around 9:30 10:00 wake up at 6:00. And by the time I get start working, I just open up my calendar and I double-click on whatever's in the morning. It's usually riding in the morning and everything is like perfectly organized. The link is there I click the link the document is ready to go with exactly the right information.
Action, it's all organized. Like there's nothing left to chance. There's no documents over here. There's no files over there. It's all in its
place. You've prepared this in advance. My assistant has
and my team has so that has all been engineered and I do believe that the best morning routine is decided the day before the week before even the year before. So by the time I get there, it's just ready to go. It's like a chef walking in me some place
exactly and everything's in
its place. So I love that then on a day-to-day basis things like scheduling my assistant Jill handles that she's fantastic. And even when I was coming here, I walked outside to get it Uber taxi and I didn't even know what airport I was going to I just knew that when I double-click my calendar it would tell me so it's all taken care of.
Finally a couple other examples when I travel especially for an extended period of time we have something called the travel protocol and Jill activates the travel protocol. That means my plants get water if they need to be that means that she handles email in a different way. That means that all these details that I normally attend to when I'm in the office are now attended to by somebody else.
Let's get super boring not for me not for you, but maybe for some people is this a checklist that lives in a Google Document. Where does that protocol once you once you click on go go gadget travel? Yeah, where the in where do the instructions live because let's say Jill is sick. Yeah, and somebody needs to fill in we don't have to get into that complexity if necessary, but the
The instructions. Yeah, they're in a Google doc. There's a Google doc. That's roughly 25 or so pages of preferences. Like when I travel if I'm traveling over five hours. I want to sit in this type of seat. It's all lives there and it's updated. So it's alive living document one recent thing that I updated was when I travel for a longer period of time. I want to have food delivered to my hotel so I can try to stay generally on diet. So I'll get to the hotel and they'll have a Whole Foods bag. They're delivered with food that I know that I can kind of eat on the go and it's got a spoon to because the first time we did it there was no spoon and there no spoons in a hotel room, which I'll add to learn myself. So it's like a lot of iteration. But to me, I don't find it annoying. I actually love it because I'm like cracking the code of what it takes for me to be really efficient. So it lives in a Google doc if my assistant were sick for some reason she would transition it to someone else and so it's accessible to anyone at the company and we just go from
there. I want to mention something some
Extremely particular about preferences for travel. So hotel room not near an ice machine not near the elevators a very particular thoughts on if it's a hip cool hotel with a really loud Lobby certain Max Heights, but take into account fire escapes. And so I mean I have a whole set of preferences. I love this. But when you let's just say that somebody listening is a thought exercise had dialed up their travel money dial. What you realize is that in some cases the things you would expect to be expensive or problems. You would expect to be expensive to fix are not expensive like the Whole Foods example. Yeah, so cheese so you could do a Whole Foods may do its own delivery. If not, perhaps instacart. If not in a place like Austin you could use favor. There are really inexpensive ways to do this to give an example. So I used to I still do ice baths and I didn't have what I have now, which is this somewhat
Risky MacGyver cold plunge, and I've engineered which you have to make sure you've unplugged before you get in. But before that when I was living in San Francisco, I had ice delivered where I would have ice picked up. I usually stop at a gas station after the gym and like pack my trunk full of ice which was a huge pain in the ass. And then I realized wait a second at the time instacart will deliver like 60 pounds of ice for five bucks. And I was like, I am that asshole I'm the guy who's like can I order kettlebells on Amazon Prime get them shipped for free so don't have to pay for like twice the cost ya and lo and behold I was able to do it. So the the solutions even if you brainstorm them in a wealth exercise do not always end up being expensive hundred
percent. That's why I'm so glad you said a few minutes ago. Don't scoff at the mental exercise like, oh, I don't have enough money like dream--big dream the dream of what?
Needle is at 10x but the solutions are often. So simple every time I travel I will post a video on Instagram of the food that was delivered and it's like classic stuff. It's like yogurt. It's stuff that we all eat yogurt. It's some almonds, maybe a peanut butter thing and people like what service did you use? That's the question what service and I'm like the service doesn't matter. You could find somebody on Craigslist. This is like a $20 purchase $20 that can change your life. And in order to get there. You just have to start with the Dream It's the money is like really the last of it.
So this $20 this is a my I have a very good assistant it and it's taken it's taken quite a bit of time and it's not something you necessarily get right off the bat and you don't need an assistant for this but she said to me at one point. She's like Tim. I don't know when this was is not that long ago. She's like Tim just travel with a roll of 20s and you can solve almost any problem and I was like,
That's a good idea and I'll give another example of a lifestyle upgrade that does not cost a lot of money. If you go out to restaurants choose a restaurant you think you're really going to like go to that restaurant not on the weekend. So say between Monday and Thursday go either early preferably like right when they start for dinner service sit by yourself. And again, this is this is this is kind of a one-time investment go there for a week. This is also stuff. I picked up when I was writing the 4-Hour Chef because I would go in with a little notebook and I would order a bunch of stuff and I would take a little notes and they're like who the fuck is this guy? Right number one, but they the chef typically that point is not going to be as loaded not on booze. Although that happens to but on like 52 menus open at once that's not going to happen at 5:00 or 5:30. So they they might take an interest in
Maitre d might take an interest in in you order all sorts of stuff to to try and then tip like 40% and do that 3 days in a row and you are forever VIP at that rest awhile. So I
like that little insight the 40 percents not that surprising but the three days in a row
do it a couple of days in a row. So people get to know you you get to know them well and like your VIP for life, okay and sit at the pass if you can so if there's a chef's table or counter where you can see the kitchen sit there because most people will never asked
for that. I love this. Okay, I love how to take a mundane experience like a restaurant and turn it into something special. So thank you for sharing that. Let me share a couple of my own. I had two experiences one where we I think we got something magical and the second where we didn't do it, but we got an idea. We were on our honeymoon and we were just having the most amazing time. We went to four different countries and we started in Italy.
He then Kenya India and then Thailand and the hospitality was just like on another level right? We're on a different planet and I said to my wife if there's anything you think of or you want just ask because at these hotels they really really really want to say yes, and we were at one hotel in Thailand and my wife loved the spring rolls. And so the the manager comes out and he said hello, you know, how's your meal data? And she said, you know, I was wondering she's kind of nervous. I was wondering if we could have the recipe for these spring rolls because he's the best I've ever tasted he goes. You know, what give me just a minute. He goes to the back he comes out with the chef chef in his hat and the chef says I heard that you're interested in the recipe and he goes I would actually love to arrange a cooking class for you. Amazing. What time are you available tomorrow? She's like, she's like I can come anytime so she goes to this cooking class private.
In the back in the kitchen not only did they make four different dishes. They even said okay, you know, your stove doesn't have as much flame as are so you want to adjust the recipe Etc. So she sends me these photos. I'm just sitting in the room. I was doing some writing and she sends me these photos of for full dishes and then they were like here you go compliments of the of the kitchen like she will never forget that never and it was just about asking how do you do this? She didn't even ask for the class. So I learned from that and I thought that was magical the second experience is a new thing that I've added to my playbook which is my buddy. Nick took me. He's like, hey, you want to go to a tea tasting in New York? I was like, yeah, let's go green tea. I thought it would be a typical tea tasting, you know, you go some
typical pieces. I don't know just want like
just another kid who like T. They do it we go there. Okay, there's like six people from Japan. There's a translator and there's a photographer. We're like what is going on right now? We're like do something happening, but we don't
Stan what's going on? So we're sitting there and then this person comes and starts speaking in the translators translating and they basically say this is the best tea in Japan and it's being brought to the US for the first time and we're like, okay like how good can good be it's t, you know, like we didn't understand quality at this level. Okay. So the way that we truly understood it they told us, you know, they only grow it on a certain part of the mountain and they use these types of things and we were like, okay, okay the way that we truly understood it was when they put the tea leaves in and they said okay steep it for a second and they said drink one drop one drop and we're like what and so we drink one drop it was amazing. It was really I've never tasted anything like it and then there was a little thing that said the prices.
We looked at each other my friend Nick and I and we said ounce for ounce is the most expensive thing we've ever had to drink if we were to buy it was like $70 per Sip and I've known this like crazy, right and we didn't pay that much for the tasting but what we learned from that was number one sometimes quality you can you can only tell it by certain attributes to I wasn't at the level of being able to appreciate it and three and this was the real key what
we should have done.
And what I'm going to do from now on is whenever I go to a cool whether it's a tea tasting or any kind of interesting a restaurant. I'm I have a little play book now. I asked my assistant Jill to put it together. We're going to make the reservation. Of course, I'm going to pay I'm not asking for anything free but she's gonna send a note ahead of time that says, you know, hey roommates coming in he would love to be able to take a kitchen tour and you have just going to say that if you have 15 minutes ahead of time, he would love to be able to take it and if possible he'd love to
I posted on Instagram whatever again not asking for anything free but like what I've learned is people who are the best love to share it. So I there's this phrase, you know, those who can't do teach that's totally incorrect never believe that the very best loves. You
can't wear those who can do those who can't teach
or they say those who can't do cam. I got a shot at yeah and like that's a total misnomer the very best people like here you are you're the best in the world at what you do and you love to teach everyone who's the best whether it's a chef or a tea Master they love it. So I'm going to try to do that when I go to these places and I'm just like every one of us can do that. So anyway, that was my exciting experience.
See you said, you said that 100 that's the one that gave you the idea. Yeah. I didn't execute that yet and the the
Well, there are many things that one could take from what you just said one. I want to underscore is the importance of asking and
I think that it'll what I would hope for myself because I'm still developing my thinking and priorities will change and worldviews will change as it relates to money. Right money is an interesting thing we can talk about like what the fuck money is to begin with but that's a separate thing. It's part of the reason why I have a 100 trillion dollar note from Zimbabwe framed that I put up on a wall because it's important to remember just how conceptual a lot of this is but my thinking will change but to stress test your own assumptions.
It's very valuable to not do thought exercises but certain real-life exercises. So one could be asking for a kitchen tour and don't by the way don't do it unless you're interested. So and if you're not interested go watch Chef's Table like Francis moment or one of those I get excited about it and have some basic vocabulary. So you can appreciate what the hell is being shown to you if you're going to do it don't do it just to do it. But that is a question. Right and we know someone who lives here in Austin also Noah Kagan who has his coffee challenge, right? So walk into a coffee shop ask for 10% off and you can't tell them you're doing an experiment. You can't tell them that so-and-so told you to do it. It doesn't matter what they say. So it could be a Starbucks. It could be an indie doesn't matter and if the what about what if I don't like coffee, it's like fuck. I don't
care get a water
get a you know order Pellegrino and or dirty but as for 10% off,
Cultivating the muscle used for asking for things is so incredible and I you you're talking about you know, those who those who can't teach and how they're these these common sayings that are that are taken as true. I do there is one that I like which I do think is generally true in that is in life. You don't get what you deserve you get what you negotiate. I agree and sometimes negotiating is just asking for what you want. Right? So are there any exercises that you would suggest or practices phone calls questions to people who are listening that might help them kind of stress test some of the things they've
accepted. Yes. I love this. So I'm going to give you a small one and I'm going to give you a big one. The small one is if you have any sort of late fee, you should just use the scripts in my book or you can Google for
And you should call up your financial institution. Usually
it's a credit card and negotiate the late fee. What should the Google
specifically if you don't if you don't get the book, but if you don't get the book get the book you can just Google ramit Sethi negotiation scripts. Okay, and you're going to see there. This is how it's going to go you call up the credit card you say hi. I just wanted to confirm that. I've been a member for the last four years and they're going to say yes, I see that mm. Whatever year. Okay, great. I noticed that there's a late fee here of thirty seven dollars from last month. I'd like to get that wave to please and they're going to by the way notice my tonality. I'd like to get that waved, please why sir? Well, I made a mistake, but I sent the payment in the next day and I'd like to confirm that it can be removed and it won't affect my credit.
80% of the time right there. You're going to get it removed and there's a reason I put that in chapter one of my book as well as with bank fees overdraft Etc. It's that most people have never proactively taken control of their money. They just accept the world the way it is all the credit card screwed me again. No, you can get that back. And once you get that late feedback, you're like, oh my God, I can actually have control over this these companies work for me. So that's that's the first thing I would say the second exercise a little bigger and it's more conceptual right now. I'm doing a small coaching program with like a hundred and fifty people go. I'm walking him through my book and it's like this private group, and I'm just walking through every chapter.
And I asked him a thought exercise a couple of days ago. I said if I gave you $10,000 tomorrow or if you just found it no obligation. No strings. What would you do with it? Okay, Tim. What do you think? They said they would do it this $10,000
$10,000. This is just like right off the cuff pay down mortgage or invest in and in Index Fund but I'm guessing closer to the former than the latter. I don't
know. Okay, you pretty pretty close. So it turns out that according to these answers that they're all Saints. We have a bunch of Mother Teresa's in the group there like I would pay off my dad. I would give 10% to charity I would do this in that. I'm like you got $25,000 of credit card debt, you're telling me that you would magically take this money and just pay it off. They what they were doing was they were having a very optimistic sense of their future selves. I would rather they say I actually don't know what I would do.
His money based on my past Behavior, I'd probably just spend a lot of it or I have no system or way of thinking about what to do with my money. That would have been more honest. Yeah, instead when faced with what we're going to do in the future. We're really optimistic. I had work out four times a week. I pay this off I pay for my parents retirement. What I would really like to see people is go through this exercise start with your optimistic self. And then try your realistic self. If you say you're going to pay off all your debt. Why are you even in debt in the first place? Clearly you didn't have a system that would keep you out of it. So I think for people whether it's $100 $1000 $10,000 whether it's you know, you could even go as big as somebody just gives you a house what you gonna do with it. I haven't even done that myself, but you could play with the concept and then remember if you don't have a system like for me the answer is I would put it straight into my system put in their checking account and money would be withdrawn to certain places 20% would go here ten percent would go there some money would be spit out for guilt.
Be spending and I probably go buy a beautiful sweater. Where do
they that's where it always ends in you and your sweater. I know I love so where where do those funds go if you're comfortable talking about some of the places sure so you get 10 grand you put into the checking account and then it gets kind of put into this process.
Yeah. It's like a pro. It's a process map basically like an email inbox and it gets filtered and shunted where it needs to go. So day-to-day. My spending is very consistent except for two areas rent is the same food is basically the same everything is pretty stable. I like to put my target is I start by saying I want to save and invest at least 20 to 30 percent and I think that's a good healthy number. If you're doing that. The rest of your life is generally in control. It's 20 to 30% and because we don't have kids right now my wife and I have been talking about our numbers. We want that number to be towards the higher
end when he just 30%
Technical question is this pre-tax or is this taking into account taxes as a great
question? It can be either if I always like to be more conservative always so post-tax is really good. If you can do that because you're you know, you're going to be putting more in but really for any of these numbers if it's post or pre you're generally in a good place anyway, so then that money is getting saved and invested and investing is like I try to go more aggressive on investing because we're young. So I put that into things like a Target date fund and you know, I love Vanguard and I recommend him I don't have any deals with them, but I think they're the best that's where I
put what is the target date fund Target. I understand all the separate words, but I don't actually know actually know what that is.
Okay, so very quickly everybody thinks investing is about picking stocks and like sitting and looking at this screen that looks like Minority Report that's not investing investing is very simple low cost funds.
And these cost you almost nothing these days we're talking a point one percent expense ratio. It's very very low cost. What you do is something like a Target date fund is you pick a Target date that you're going to retire. So if you're 30 and you're going to you're going to presumably retire at 65 that's 35 years from now. So there's a Target date fund called Vanguard 2060 fund. Okay, and what that does is it's like a pie chart it's pretty aggressive in your 30s because you're young and as you get older it gets a little more conservative. Basically what it means for you is that you don't need to do anything except put money into it automatically every month. I love this as a great simple low-cost way to invest and the bulk of my portfolio is either in Target date funds or individual index funds. So that money would go in there. I have some money in sub savings accounts. I've got some targets like, you know, I saved up for my wedding before I was before I even met my wife saved up for an engagement.
Ring I like to plan ahead. So I have those numbers same for a down payment on a house, which eventually I will buy even though it doesn't make sense for me right now, but I still plan for it also vacation. So like midterm goals you're talking about roughly one to five or so years.
How do you keep these things separate or is it or they only separate in a spreadsheet where you're keeping track? You know, how do you not co-mingle?
Yeah. I like keeping them separate because I think it's like a separate meaning separate bank accounts. Well, you can have sub savings
account. I see subsidies. So Capital One 300 light and authorized employee on a credit card account or something like exactly just for tracking her for tracking purposes.
And I also think it's nice if you have one big old commingled account. You don't really know what's for what but what I would encourage everyone to do is think about what do you want to save for between one to five years and for one year, there are things like Christmas gifts like, you know, that's a known irregular expense or it's a non regular expense. It's coming every December.
So if it's 500 bucks, you might as well start saving now, then there are things like an anniversary dinner. There's also mistakes. I used to have a stupid mistakes account because I used to get a lot of parking tickets. I don't do that anymore. Thank God so I don't need to plan for that. But then there's things like a down payment may be getting married things like that above and beyond five or so seven years. I just put in the market because I don't need it and it just
grows then you're putting it in the market with a Target date fund Target date fund. Yep,
and those over the long term over history have returned about 8% So if you do the math and you go to one of these calculators like it bank rate or something you can plug in the numbers and you'll see that your money doubles roughly every it's the rule of 72 72 divided by 10. It'll double about every seven years. That's why compounding is so powerful. If you start now and you put even a hundred bucks a month in that number gets very large very fast. So that's the power of investing.
The rest of the money pays my fixed expenses, like rent things like that and finally out pops out guilt-free spending. This is my favorite part the sweater account the sweater account. That's basically so that brings me to my two things that are variable travel. I tend to overspend on travel a bit and clothing and I've set up this system because now I've sort of advanced my financial system where a lot of it is automated. I have a meeting once a month. I have a personal CFO. We kind of look at it and I basically told him I want my document prepared in this way. I want an executive summary. I want the expenses categorized as such and I only want you to flag the following ones because these are the ones I'm variable on like I don't really care if I spend 20 bucks more on deodorant that doesn't move the needle but like too much on travel I got to know about it so I can kind of correct over time. That's how I think about the spending.
Okay, so to next topics I thought we would discuss prenups. So this
A topic that is shied away from a lot. It seems to be an important topic at least in the US and it's something that came up in conversation recently. And you joked that you might be willing to talk about it on the podcast. This is one of those subject areas. That is I think neglected and I've seen a lot of difficulty and angst and pain and discomfort faced as a result of I think an unwillingness to to make it more of an open conversation. So where should we start with prenups?
I'm an open book man. I'll tell you anything. All right, this is one of those things that when I walked into it, I didn't know anything and I only know I only knew what I had heard on TV that prenups are bad or there for people who have generational wealth that's been inherited. Like I didn't know anything and then I discovered when I talked to friends.
There was so many people who have thought about this or gone through it, but none of it is online. It's all behind closed doors.
So prenup prenuptial agreement. What is what is a prenup? What's the purpose of a prenup
prenup sets the terms of what you are coming into a marriage with and it is a acknowledgement that certain people might have certain assets or interests like a business or cash or Investments whatever the case may be and it also sets the terms for if the marriage ends for whatever reason what is to be done with those assets specifically the pre marital assets. That's what a prenup is about.
Okay. So, how did how did you think about this because I've heard some disaster stories of this process being handled poorly or terms not being perhaps reviewed as carefully and
And I should point out also that I this is not a male-female thing. I've seen this in same-sex couples. I've seen this in cases where the woman is coming in with significantly greater assets then the husband to be so how did you think about this? And what's one of the smarter ways to go about thinking about this?
Well, I'll tell you what I did and I'll tell you some mistakes I made to and I'm the reason I want to talk about this is that I want to shine the light on money topics that people don't talk about and I want people to be informed you can make your own decision, but I walked in to thinking about getting married with a lot of preconceived notions about what a prenup was who it was for and just to give you a sense like nobody around me ever signed a prenup growing up. It just was not a part of my culture. So I started thinking about getting engaged a few years ago and my
At the time we were discussing it and discussing. What oh the engagement. Yeah that, you know some polling what's going to happen eventually and you know, we're together for the long term things like that and I started looking into it. And if you Google how to sign a prenup you're going to find a lot of really generic and borderline bad advice. It's from disgruntled redditors and it's from like ask man or these just magazines where they have these things this advice like you should blame it on your lawyer or you should blame it on your parents or how do you get away with not making your fiance mad? And I just thought this is not the way I want to start this relationship and this financial relationship as well because that's what marriage is it's legal its Financial. It's also love it's your team in every way. So I sat down I did a lot of research. I talked to a lot of my friends and the thing that shocked me was when I started bringing up with friends so many of
Especially entrepreneurs had lots to say lots. So I'll fast forward to what happened when we had my girlfriend at the time. We sat down we had a really serious meeting like we actually had a Google Agenda we came with our bullet points and we had a very adult meeting where we talked about just the two of you, you know, legal counsel and I like that no. No we were just the two of us we talked about. You know, when would we like to be engaged and married? Where would we live? Do we want to have kids? So
just to be clear. This is a life Logistics meeting not a prenup meaning that may be part of it, but it's a broader conversation. I hadn't even brought the prenup up. Yeah. Okay,
so we go through you know kids and and I told her, you know, I even mentioned to my wife I said, you know, let's talk about the names of our kids because I never saw myself having a some kid named Mike. I don't want Mike running around in my house and she's like what the hell wears his
From I'm like I just feel particular about this. So
so then thorugh nothing nothing
so we go through the list and the good news is we were generally on the same page. It's funny thing. She goes, you know, I'd really like to be engaged by q1 of next year. I'm like, oh my God, this is the girl of my dreams. He's talking in financial quarters. I'm like, I love you babe. So so then at the end of that conversation I said, you know, there's something else that's important. You know, I it's really important to me that we discuss a prenup
and she was
surprised kind of taken aback. She's like, okay, what do you mean and I said look you and I grew up very similar we both grew up in California. Our parents have similar jobs and I said because of certain decisions I've made because of my business and because of a lot of luck. I've been put in this fortunate position where I have a business and I've accumulated a certain amount of assets. I said, it's really
Important for me that we talk about what that means before we get married and that we sign an agreement in the worst case if something bad happened and this was really I was nervous very nervous because like what what is someone's reaction going to be I have no idea but I thought if anything is going to be bad, but I felt very I was nervous but I also felt confident cause it was something that I knew that I wanted to do. Like it was really important to me. So to her credit she said, you know what I'm surprised I didn't expect it, but I'm open to it. Let me get educated about it and we can talk. Okay great. So that was as good of a response as I could have hoped she goes off and she does her own research. She talks to her friends and we start discussing more and more right we've got about four or five months until I proposed to her.
We start talking the next step is to get lawyers. Now interestingly. You have to retain counsel. Each side has to retain counsel and oftentimes what happens is the person who has more assets will actually pay for the other person's lawyer which I did. These are very expensive. Right? So I said, you know what I'll take care of that I'm happy to do it so she found her own lawyer.
And we start to go through hammering these basic terms out. Now the basic structure of a prenup is most people don't need a prenup because most people are coming into a marriage with relatively similar assets the places where it starts to make sense or if you have some major amount of assets, whether it be a house, whether it be an inheritance a business those kinds of things it starts to make sense to think about I had to get signed flexural property. Yeah. Absolutely. I had to get comfortable with the idea that this wasn't a bad thing. I wasn't planning for us to fail and that's the most common objection people have to prenups which is your planning for it to go wrong. I'm not planning for it to go wrong. I intend to be married forever. I want to I always emphasize that with my wife and I made it clear that we're a team, but I also mentioned that
For whatever reasons, I've accumulated these things and it's really important for me to plan for what might happen as we talked more and more about it. It became even more and more clear that in every other part of life top performers plan. They plan ahead they plan for good. They plan for bad they plan but it's like just in this one situation of life that Society has told everyone. No that's wrong. You shouldn't plan at all. You should go into it like a dough with you know, these doe eyes and you shouldn't really think even for a moment about what would happen if something goes wrong
then when you get on an airplane, they give you a safety briefing they don't stop because they expect the plane to crash into the water that a great example. It's also placed just to jump in where it's I thought a good amount about this just relationships marriage in general is that when you get married in an official capacity you are involving the state in
Our fares you are signing up for sure and contractual agreements and so in any well-planned agreement, you're going to have contingencies for what happens if things do not work out. There's going to be a termination Clause you're gonna have that a publishing agreement. You're going to have that in any number of dozens or hundreds of other contracts. You will sign will always have a separation Claus.
The reason why this go this is such a heated topic for people. I think there's two reasons one. There's just a general ignorance of prenups because it is inherently a private Affair inherently when you have assets being discussed. It happens behind closed doors specifically lawyers closed doors. It's not public. They're no good guides or no eBooks on how to do a prenup. There's nothing there's not even any sample prenups out there. They're very very poor quality. The second thing is it attacks our belief that in America?
Marriage is purely about love and I believe a marriage is absolutely about love but go look at any parents or any couple that has let's say kids.
Go look at them and look at their day-to-day. Yes, there's love but there's also teamwork. There's this person's doing dinner. This person is taking the trash out. This person's changing the diapers. It's an arrangement. It's a team and on any team you have to have a set of rules. And so I got comfortable with that saying, you know what this is a love marriage we found each other we met each other we love each other but it's also we want to make sure that this is a team and we're setting expectations. So we went through the process and we talk to our lawyers and the lawyers are hammering it out. And this is where it starts to get really tough. Everything was going great.
But then once you everything's great in concept and then you talk about real numbers.
What are the if I may like so what's what are the basic terms that you're agreeing upon in a prenup.
The first thing is you're laying out all the assets that each person has those could be assets liabilities. You kind of put those out on the table, by the way, that was a good conversation that we had. I forgot to take my own advice about when to talk about money with your partner. So my wife had asked me years ago to help her with some 401K thing and I was like, yeah, I'll help you but first read my book, so she reads my book and then she's like, okay, I still have this one question. So we went through it and I got to understand her pay and all that stuff and it was great like we work through it like a year or two later. She said, you know, I feel a little unbalanced because you know everything about my finances, but I don't know anything about yours and that was when I realized like I had made a huge mistake I
By not telling her I had put myself in a very unbalanced. She had been placed in an unbalanced position. It's just not fair. So that afternoon we talked about it and we talked about my net worth we talked about what it means for us. And that was I would say one of my most Pleasant conversations most Pleasant. Yeah, because we talked about what does it mean for us like our rich life now? What does it mean and it and it means that when we travel we can take our parents with us and we can spend extra for them to stretch their legs out. We can travel to places or we can make certain Investments or take risks that we might not normally be able to do again as a team. So that was actually one of my favorite memories of talking about money in the early days.
Now we
had listed out all our assets and liabilities. And now the basic structure of a prenup is what happens in the case of the marriage ending and there are so many ways to cut it. No to prenups are alike what happens if the marriage ends in three months at an extreme in many cases a check is written. Can you believe that if a marriage ends in three months somebody might write a check to the other person why just like pure Goodwill severance pay you could call it that and then in both Partners might still have a job Etc. But what happens if the marriage now ends, you know 30 years later. Let's say there's two or three kids. Let's say that one partner has stopped their job so that he or she can take care of the kids. Well, it's kind of fair that that person should be compensated in some way because it would be unfair for somebody to walk out of the marriage with Justice.
Large amount of relative assets and the other person left with nothing. That's just not fair. It's not fair in my eyes personally and it's not fair in the state size either in each of these cases
or in most prenups. Is it a lump one-time payment or is it like an ongoing and new annuity that gets paid each year was a great question. Yeah, what does it
look like? It can be decided. However you like but each lawyer is going to argue for their side. So the person who would be receiving the payments is going to want it all up front. Right? Right. And so there are also other questions about what if you're living in a house with kids and the marriage ends who leaves how soon that has to be dictated, right? And and then there are other questions about what happened. Is there a cap on how much can be paid out and that's important to understand though a couple of things the money that I'm going to speak generally now the money that is earned.
And you are together is generally community property. Right? So when you are married generally the money that is earned is together. It's yours. There are certain exceptions. Like if you have a business there's this and that and you can kind of carve those out ahead of time but in general we're talking about money that was accumulated before the marriage that's really important to understand kids are definitely a complicating Factor, but you are not really dictating the terms of child of what's it called custody custody custody and also payments the state will determine that so that's really important to know as well. You can't come up with a rule right now that says, you know, if we have three kids and this marriage ends like I'm going to write you a check for $1 or 1 million dollars a month that can't work the state will decide based on
lifestyle and she has a question just from from my perspective. Yeah, why get married at all? What is this because I did really dislike and
Something that I talk about usually in the first few dates. I mean, I have a great girlfriend right now, but like is like once we've covered like what do you want for your your main course pretty quickly the subject comes up. It's like yeah marriage not keen on having. Yeah some bureaucracy involved in my relationship. It's a great question. And also it's like if you're coming into a relationship where the current trajectory of earnings is vastly disproportionate the idea of having a bureaucracy involved and having sort of everything past a certain day become community property doesn't have a whole lot of appeal to me. So it were your reasons for getting married your desire your partner's desire your family's multiple family's expectations, or are there other reasons? I think it's a great question and I think
only in this day and age can this question really be asked because as recently as
Five years ago. This question would have never been asked to be alone. Of course, you're going to get married and now you and I both know plenty of people who are either single or in cohabitating relationships or casual whatever the case may be and they're perfectly happy not being married. I think for me the answer is probably all of the above. It was a desire on my part a desire on my wife's part and also our families. Yeah, and this might be an invisible script from my childhood that I always saw myself as married. So there's a lot there what the way I thought about it was I love my wife. I love when we're together. She makes me a better person and I think I do the same and together as a team. We are like amazing like I love laughing with her. I love how she challenges me and I want to deepen that relationship the financial part of it for me was a part.
And I wanted to address but I also felt confident knowing that we could solve it. Yeah that we could come to an agreement and I didn't see it as adversarial at least until the middle part which I want to tell you about. Okay, but but I approached it like very much like can do it's like hiring someone like I'm gonna make him an offer. I want to make him a great offer and I expect that we're going to have some back and forth. But overall it's about coming to an agreement that we can both work in a capacity together. Now, I know that sounds a bit unromantic for a marriage but I'm talking about the financial part of a marriage. There's a whole there's so many different layers and we in America only talk about love what I'm trying to share his like there are lots of other parts like be aware of it. Don't put your head in the
school. You're also talking about you're not talking about marriage as a concept.
You talking about the contract of marriage and if you get married and hundred whether you go down to you know, the whatever might be in blanking on the term, but like some office downtown to get rubber-stamped like you're entering into a contract with multiple parties. Yeah, I'm so you can enter into a very nebulous contract or you can enter into a very clear contract.
I always say for every major purchase in your life every major purchase and every major decision spend the time most of us should spend less time on most decisions and we should spend a lot more time on a few key decisions. Like I want to take this seriously, so did my wife so we did we spent months right? So now here we are the lawyers are going back and forth and it's starting to get a bit
slow
like they're arguing and now we're talking about it and it became stressful and at some points like pretty heated. Okay and
I was like, I mean, there are so many things that happen during this time one. We would just stop talking about it for like weeks at a time because it was just too stressful and we had never had these kind of conversations before about money and like my perspective was
like I've thought about money for 15 or 20 years every day. Like this is my business and I'm really proud of what I've accomplished financially and I've always loved to come and like I made a very fair very fair offer bending over backwards. That was my perspective. My wife's perspective was very different and I think that I didn't listen as much as I should I was like III came out I did this I made this offer and she would say something and I would say like look at the spreadsheet like look at the numbers and she was like, yeah, but and she was talking about something else in a completely different language and I was so preoccupied with like, mr. Spreadsheet guy. So finally she said, you know, we got to go talk to somebody about this. We should go see a therapist and I was like, yeah, we really should I totally agree with her. So you might wonder like where do you go to find a therapist and for us the answer was Yelp.
We literally opened up Yelp
and typed like therapist.
And we found one two blocks away. So that's how it's done guys, and we walked over there and we sat down in this room and
we had a conversation like we've never had before this therapist was very good. She asked us about how we grew up with money what it meant and it turns out it meant totally different things to us. Like for me it meant being proud of what I've accomplished it meant all the work and for anyone who's built anything, you know, the sacrifices it took to build that you look back. You can remember Friday nights where you didn't go out or you can remember X or Y or risks you took and I was seeing that and what my wife was seeing was something different money meant something different to her and this therapist helped us kind of bring that up and we find ourselves. You know, we went one two three sessions. We found ourselves talking about our childhood and I it's kind of like a caricature like a joke of what you talked about in therapy session.
But we walked out of each of those sessions. Like wow, that was that was pretty good. That was pretty helpful. So we still were having the lawyers go back and forth. But now we were connecting more with each other financially and we were reminded by this therapist. Like we're a team this is just an agreement we need to come to but remember why you are together. Remember why you're getting married. We finally came to an agreement and we signed it and it's funny because one of my buddies he held an event called like should you sign a prenup and he invited like 20 or 25 people, right? And one of his friends who was married and had done a prenup sent him a note and said, I'd rather be dead than come to this event. And he was like whoa. Whoa, why and he's like dude. That was the worst six months of my life. Imagine. You have someone you love and you're arguing about money with lawyers for six months and I didn't get that until I had gone through it. I would say that in
Respect I learned a couple of things. Number one. I should have talked about money with my wife way earlier like way earlier. I violated my own advice and that was horrible. I should have talked about earlier to I should have stopped being mr. Spreadsheet dude and actually listened and said like let's put the numbers aside and talk about what money means for me. Like I told you I'm proud of it my wife wanted to feel safe. She wanted to know that if anything went wrong that she would be taken care of and that and I didn't really internalize what that meant to her. Like. What does that mean? I should have listened should have gone to see a therapist earlier and we should have not let it stretch out for as long as it did that was really
torturous for both of us. How would you have expedited it? Well there appear earlier. Well, I
mean, that's why I'm here. That's why I want to share with people. Don't just hope that it will kind of work itself out over time.
I'm it's everybody involved in the process. Once it to stretch out the lawyers. They're not trying to just bill you more but their incentive is to get you the best deal and the other lawyers to get the other one you have to take control and manage the process. But both of you have to be aligned on that. I would have yeah definitely talk to a therapist ahead of time with my wife. We would have gone there together faster and we kind of would have I would have started off not talking about money but like rather about meaning that and that's something that I'm hoping to be able to talk more about but I hope from people listening to this if you go in and you've got a spreadsheet that you want to discuss you've taken a wrong turn. That's what I did. I should have talked about meaning and fears and hopes about money as opposed to like, let's go through the numbers the numbers would like the last part
of those going to say it's not either/or, right? It's
sequencing both end. You got to talk about the numbers, but once you get meaning aligned the numbers work themselves out.
Suit when we've chatted about this it's been passing in the past because I wanted to make sure we did on the podcasting Yeah, couple of stories have come up that I'm not sure how to Grapple with. No. I'm at a point. Also where I haven't had conversations with attorneys about this type of thing. Although I mean, it makes sense to think about estate planning. Yeah, whether you're a state is is small medium or large. It makes a lot of sense to think about that and things can be really messy speaking as someone who had grandparents. You didn't think about anything and we're not, you know, rolling doing backstroke and a pool full of coins like Scrooge McDuck, but nonetheless when emotions are heated kids can fight over anything even if it's just table scraps and that was a mess. I don't want that to ever effect if I have kids to affect my kids. So, yep, you should think about earlier but the point I was going to make is I haven't gone through the
Actual drafting of say a prenup and but I've seen marriages implode and like the the numbers if you just like let's try to coldly objectively. Look at the numbers in the u.s. They're not that hot. So it makes makes sense to plan whether it's like driving with a seatbelt in your car like you're not planning on getting accident, but you want to be covered if you do I've heard horrible stories, right? So I've heard stories of friend who had a prenup went through all the same process and then I think it was a week after he got married or or just before he got married his wife to be your wife said I signed the prenup under duress. Oh my God. I don't I don't feel good about it. And it was back to the table now under duress for people who don't know is this is not a legal definition, but under extreme stress therefore.
The position of the person who's claiming dress is that the contract is invalid because they were pressured into it and this can apply to quite a few contracts. It turns out and he was he was in a position where you had to go back and it was renegotiated and the numbers changed so like the lump payments and so on were changed and so that's that's fear-inducing that's scary. You could have an agreement and then end up in a situation like that right in the point. Number one, whether it's legally forced upon you or just practically day to day you're like well where the fuck do we go from here and have to then step back into like negotiation mode and I've also heard of approaches. I'm not saying maybe this is getting too much into like the the dark arts or something, but we're friends of thought like all right, if if I'm going to if I'm trying to defend against a worst-case scenario, would it make sense?
For me to go engage X number of very high caliber divorce attorneys. So they are conflicted out if we end up having a divorce later. Like that's a that's a little Voldemort, but I can also see the practicality of it. So like how do you think about what landmines?
You might need to avoid if there are any right like yeah, it's a big question but it's like this shit gets messy.
You know, I would say that I've spoken to a lot of different attorneys both in getting married but also as a CEO and one of them told me something really interesting. They said that the people with the lawyers with the most interesting stories are criminal lawyers, of course the second most interesting lawyer stories are workplace attorneys. I would be willing to bet that the third is divorce attorneys because the stories are just like out of this world. I didn't really approach it like that to tell you the truth. I I didn't plan on the marriage ending I simply wanted to account for what might happen financially. So let me put it this way if at the point where you're sort of already thinking about like let me engage all these divorce attorneys, which I don't even know if that works or not. I've heard it's a rumor but like I feel like there's a larger problem going.
On their a much larger problem. These lawyers are not stupid. They're all very good. They've seen it all and the and the thing is to negotiate in good faith that you have to remember. You're not trying to get one over on your partner your if you were just trying to get one over like a car dealer you're trying to maximize it because it's a one-time transaction. This is the partner you're going to be with for the rest of your life. So that actually necessitates a different way of negotiating like when I was discussing with my attorney and that attorney was negotiating with my wife's attorney. I had to compromise on things that I normally would not compromise on. Yeah and that just to put it bluntly like I haven't had to compromise financially in the last 25 years right
at all. Yeah,
so suddenly, I'm like what? What is this taste in my mouth? I haven't tasted this taste of compromise bile. Yeah, it's
but but
that's why I think it's really important a couple principles came up for me one is go slow to go fast. I should have done a better job of this of like let's talk about
Meaning
the meaning right go slow to go fast. And the second one was always remember the North Star the North Star here is not getting an extra dollar or protecting extra $2.00. It's we're going to be married day to day for the rest of our lives. That's the North Star and like putting that in perspective like as the lawyers saying this or that I had to constantly remind myself so did my wife and by the way, I just want to say she was excited for me to come here and talk about this. She actually encouraged me because I wrote about it in my book. I wrote some more details and I asked her I said are you okay if I share this and we talked about it. We both realized going through this that both of us were pretty alone. No one was talking about this publicly and we're both big fans. You know, she's a stylist. I do what I do. We love shining the light on things that people are not really talking about publicly because we're both very curious and we both want to get better. So if she had said,
I would have never written this stuff. I would have never come on here and talked about this but she actually said yes go on there and tell them our experience because other people should know this whether you do it or not, you should know. All
right, I've questions. So this is going to be super awkward one made for me to ask more than for you to answer because you're being put on the spot, but I'm the one who has the option of asking whatever I want. So this is something I've seen so many people struggle with what I'm about to bring up now. I want to hear if it affected you and if so how you used mental Jiu-Jitsu or contortionism to get through it. And that is if you're coming into a negotiation say for a prenup and you are the person who's bringing in disproportionately the assets and income and that could be not necessarily 51/49 split right? I mean, this could be like a 90/10 split 99 one split and a very often is I mean it can very
Be when you're looking at the settlement and the amount, right? So it's very hard for someone. Let's just say who's made $10,000 a year to ever imagine what it really means and what it takes two to make a hundred thousand ditto if someone's making like 50 Grand a year, what does it mean in terms of sacrifice and planning and like Friday's missed and weekends worked and holiday skipped to make a million dollars, right? And so all of a sudden then you're going through a negotiation where someone who has perhaps not made.
A decade or two decades of sacrifice is asking for an amount that is more than you made in the first 30 years of your life.
How do you navigate that because there's like this surely. I know a lot of people and I'm one of them who's just like that makes no sense. And it also brings up. Like we'll wait a second if that's the amount that gets paid out.
I would start questioning the sort of motives of the other person. It's like okay. Well they were able to kind of do whatever they want for X period of time but now if we get divorced three years from now, they're set for life if they don't screw it up.
How do you
I would that make me feel very uncomfortable? Me too.
I mean, I think remember when I said that like I was proud of what I had accomplished and you go through so many emotions in this process and the funny thing is when it comes to money, I'm not emotional at all like day-to-day. I'm super I call it hot to cool. I think most people or some people particularly those in debt money is like a phantom or a gremlin. It's a beat that they're fighting right? They need to break the shackles of this debt. I've overcome those things to me. It's a tool and I use it for convenience things like that. So to find myself going from nervousness in bringing this up,
You be Pride that I wanted to talk about the numbers and I was very proud of what I had accomplished and what it meant for us and then resentment. Yeah, I definitely felt resentful because you know to me I'm like look at the spreadsheet like I have gone above and beyond and like how can you not acknowledge that I found myself like experiencing these emotions. I hadn't honestly ever felt about money and and I think that's where a therapist helped me but I should have done it sooner because it really was not healthy to just sort of soak in them for literally months. And remember we're like seeing each other day to day and so that definitely affects you as you're planning a wedding with your partner. I mean, it's not it's like the worst time you can sequence it out. You're like don't do that. You know, I think that it's a question that I don't have a good answer to I think that the the basic
There are certain things in life that are just not fair. Okay, and one of them might be this but really that's not the point. The point is not for me to win. That's what I learned along the way at least this is my lesson. Some people might think differently my point in retrospect was not to win this negotiation. It was to win our marriage meaning both of us get there together as a team. And if I have to compromise a few things which in business, I would never have made a couple of the compromises I made but this is more important than my business, right? This is the person that I'm going to spend my last days with so that actually really put things in perspective for me. It's like oh shit. Sometimes you learn about yourself just by observing what you yourself do and I was like did I really just agree to that that one tenth term we've been discussing for a month. Yes. I did. Wow, like my wife. Is that important to me and I realized like, yes she is so I don't know. I don't have a good answer for you on that. But I'll tell you I really
Swung emotions. I felt resentful and I hate feeling resentful. It's one of the most toxic emotions, but I think there's something larger than like being right in this maybe that's just what I tell myself. No, I
mean that's I think I think cutting off your nose to spite your face to be right doesn't make sense. Yeah. I also think that I think it's possible to play not to lose or set yourself up for blind spots while not at all cost trying to win a hundred percent right Hunters, like don't be an asshole and like make a bunch of insistent demands based on principle that don't practically make sense is fair but walking into something blind and just offering yourself as a piñata. Yeah doesn't make sense either.
Okay, you know, what's crazy about this whole thing now. So once you sign it like it's done. In fact in at least in our case were like, alright. Thank God. We don't want to look at this now like file it away good the
He'll challenge actually since we got married just about a year ago has been like day-to-day spending and that now the using the tools we learn from this therapist and also going slow to go fast like my dream. Okay, my fantasy was to have this just beautiful financial model. Okay, that's what I wanted like this model that we look at and everything's like going from side to side. We've built that it's taken like eight or nine months. What I realize now is
emotions first. What
does it mean who's cooking dinner? Who's taking the trash out? Let's get all that stuff done. The model part is like the last part of it and because we had these tough conversations earlier on now, we're like, okay, let's let's start with the emotions we have buffer. So if we overspend a little bit on eating out right now, that's okay. We'll dial in the numbers later. Like what I've realized is the numbers really come last and so we are both really thankful. We went through the process, although I wish we could have been I wish you could have had
Guidance really but funny enough the once you sign it.
It's not like you're reviewing it every single day. It's gone. Yeah, you're it's the day-to-day now, it's literally the littlest things like who's picking up X at the store. Yeah, that's where day-to-day Financial stuff comes in and that's another area where I think you use the I will teach you to be rich stuff. The system's the idea that you don't really want to be spending your valuable cognition on like who's buying deodorant or rice like have a system automated boom
we were talking about with what's been a lot of time on it. But your relative who you thought was 65 you and your wife thought was 65 or something ended up being 87 uncles and how regimented regiment is the wrong word. How much of his life is routinized, right? It wakes up at the same time and we are just grabbing coffee earlier. And I said, I wonder how much of his longevity is that lifetime accumulation of avoiding decision fatigue on shit that
Just shouldn't consume your brain every day at
all. So I believe just like you have a Playbook I Believe In A playbook for Life. Here's a couple Playbook rules that I have one. I call it repeats book-buying rule. If you ever see a book you're in even remotely interested in buy it don't debate it. Don't ask if it's the second best just buy it. It's $10 is the best money you ever spent half a year of cash have it available liquid and if you don't have it build up to it save up for big expenses engagement ring wedding honeymoon, all that stuff house sub-accounts sub-accounts. Boom when I eat at a restaurant now my joy is if I see anything that looks good. I just order it. And I also tell the people eating with me do the same don't even think about it. And so like my co-workers love eating out with me
because I'm like disorder at all. Like I got the bill just a quick side note for anyone who has not seen it. It came out not long ago from the time of this recording, but there's an incredible ESPN
Call on Coach Gregg Popovich and the dinners and the wine for the Spurs. It is phenomenal. So Fantastical can look that up.
There have a couple of areas in your life where you have absolutely no budget doesn't matter how much you spend you just love
it unlimited
unlimited. There is no if you love strawberries like when I grew up, I love strawberries, but we had a big family and strawberries were expensive. There is no amount of strawberries that will ever cause me any material difference in my life. It's three bucks for bucks 5 bucks 6 bucks doesn't matter by it have something it could be as small as strawberries because be as big as whatever eat the same for this is for me personal lot of people don't agree but eat the same thing mostly the same thing every single day. I do it. It's just easy decision fatigue. I do the same thing. Yeah, and then also so this is what my wife and I have been talking about recently is let's come up with some rules for our relationship to these are guidelines. We can change him but you know, we were planning a vacation
Going to stay with a friend for their birthday in Mexico City and we're looking at flights and I find that we're deciding which flight should it be economy should be business what hotel this or that and I said like hey, let's let's get into it. Let's kind of figure out where we like to travel together and what style but over the course of the next few months. Let's kind of come up with some basic rules. For example, if you're traveling over five hours business class or if we're staying just the two of us. We don't need a fancy hotel whatever the case make a basic guidelines so that we don't have to think about it all the time and even down to like who's taking out the trash like let's just kind of articulate that and be explicit so that it's all on the table and that way it clears up any misconceptions.
So I love
this General playbook for life, especially who has the way what's this? What was your conclusion on the trash all dude? I take the trash out. Okay, and it just got revealed because like I would notice the trash filling up and then she would take it out once in a while. But really she would say like, would you mind taking the trash out and it just became
Clear in any relationship. There are certain things that one person does or doesn't like to do and like the same thing true for cooking ironing clothes. Yeah cast Cooks quite iron
quick note on that. One thing that I found really helpful is whether it's with friends or your significant other but especially significant other is agreeing in advance from a scale of 1 to 10 10 being absolutely heartfelt must have or must not have you can't use a lot of tents like so that you only really get a couple of times in your pocket. So don't spend them on nonsense, right but asking someone like 0 to 1 to 10, how much do you like doing this or 1 to 10? How much do you hate doing this and it's like all right, if T, it's like you don't love taking out the garbage. But if it's like I'm a 5 out of 10 like six out of ten who cares. I guess. It doesn't really matter if she's like, I grew up in such a way. I hate taking out the garbage like okay fine. I'll take out the guard way. So what's your tin on liking or not? Liking
let's go both.
So I
For instance, very fond of cooking very unfunny of cleanup. Love it. Right a classic. Yeah. And what about something you hate? Well something I hate would be the cleanup. Okay other things I hate would be for instance. I am much happier to pay for things if I can avoid decisions. So if my partner's willing to handle Logistics we went to burning man. It was her first time and I knew what I was signing up for and I told her I was like I will go but only if you handle the logistics, I will pay for everything but in terms of like getting costumes and like getting everything there and the bikes and the lights and the thought that that that that data you need to be like this the CEO of this operation and I'm happy to be like the controller her proves its checks love it, but that's it
got it. So I love that your explicit and I love that one to ten. I have to think about that. I've
overheard my wife talking to
her parents and
I grew up with my mom cooking food for us every night. Right every night, like right off the stove should be giving us rotis or whatever. She was making and we all ate together as a family and I really love that. So every night my wife will either make food or it'll she'll have cooked it a couple times and then she'll bring it to me and like that is so meaningful to me because it reminds me of my childhood. And by the way the food that we eat is extremely inexpensive. Like we're not getting the fanciest cuts of meat we don't care about that, but it's care if we track all of our macros and all that stuff so we care about that but really it's about the meaning behind it
macros for people who don't know if that protein carbohydrate. Yeah, the surface antigens of each. What is the
pie chart look like the I don't know the math off the top of my head, but it's like every week it changes depending on whatever my goals are and like I think the meaning there is really important and then there's certain things forecast.
You know, she likes her she doesn't like and I'll do trash has a perfect example. I just kind of discovered like she really doesn't like taking the trash up. No problem. It's easy for me to take it out. So getting those on the same page and developing this just life Playbook of general rules of thumb you're going to use especially for stuff that's not important man that really frees you up to to
really get into this stuff. That is important. Yeah, for sure. So I I know we don't have too much time left, but I want to jump into one of these because I'm curious what what you will say in response to some of these questions and we may only have time for one or two. But so these are from people on the interwebs always a risky proposition, but they were they were voted on or upvoted and one this is from Scott. No last name here indicated where does ramit disagree with what Tim teaches or preaches or brand and I'll just rephrase that but like what do you think we disagree on this is a
Camera question. It
could be anything right but far away.
Oh my God. I love this. I think that we disagree on morning routines. Yeah, I think they're overrated. Yep. I think that the best morning routine is decided a year ago. It's about your psychology. It's about how much you sleep. It's about what you know, what have you outlined in your calendar? It's all those softer details and I think that you know, I get people asking me every day. What's my morning routine and I'm like who gives a shit like you think you think if I asked Michael, I'm not saying I'm Michael Jordan at all. But if I asked Michael Jordan what shoes he wears or what his morning routine is am I going to be like Mike no and similarly if you find out what kind of coffee I drink you're not going to be doing what I do either, but I know that you're not saying that but
that's what people are taking away to drive you insane. Well, yeah, I mean what Kate was correct Direction one person tries to impart and what people here are sometimes very different.
The 4-Hour workweek Tim. You work more than 40 hours. Yeah, I'm just like, okay. Thanks for yeah, right the gift that keeps on giving it's still morning routines. I think our number number one for me coming back to what we just said morning routines are one example of removing decisions. That's it. There's there's a little bit more to it for me in the sense that as someone who had on set insomnia and slept very poorly for several decades. I would wake up and be non-functional generally speaking. So having a boot up sequence which didn't require any thought I'm not deciding what to eat for breakfast. I'm not deciding what step number one is. Do I do a b c d or E. First know I'm always going to be doing be right where our way whatever it might be has been very helpful. I also know equally or far more
Successful people who have your answer there like I wake up I drink a fucking cop cough Arie. I didn't
know Instagram first. Literally. The first thing I do is I get on Instagram while I'm in bed. It's like the worst possible thing, but I'm like, I like it. Yeah,
and I don't wonder what accounts anyways it's all cabins. It's all cabins. I swear to God the the the question. I think that is that is also just like a macro questions worth asking is
Is this person you're looking at succeeding because of?
We're despite what you're looking at, right? This is really important. It's especially important. If you're studying people who have already reached escape velocity in some type of success or Financial Freedom and you're still working your way up because hindsight is not 2020 a lot of folks who are on top of the world and are just crafting Billion Dollar Deals every day. Do not remember very clearly what helped them when they were working in the office on Thanksgiving or whatever. It might have been.
This is a great point. And so powerful. By the way. This is why I love your podcast because here we are two people who seemingly disagree on something but now we're getting into the nuances and we can really Crack the Code of what's what's the differences and similarities. I will totally agree with what you just said about the more successful you get or the more time you get away from something the less details you remember I'll give you an example my wife started. She used to be senior buyer Equinox.
She left to start her own styling business about 18 months ago. I would hear her doing sales calls in our living room and I would see her sometimes closing a client and sometimes going weeks without closing a client and you know, I've got a business now, I've got amazing employees. We've got traffic that's coming. You know, we've got people coming and regular customers and all that stuff. But when I started off that shit was not easy, I would go weeks without getting one person joining any of my programs and I forgot how emotional it is your the highs are so high and the lows are so low and half the game in this is just living to fight another day just not giving up and improving just a tiny bit every day and I watched it and I heard her and I saw her go through the ups and the lows and it's amazing now this month she told me
How many clients she's done? She's totally booked up for two or three more months. It's amazing what she's accomplished in 18 months. She never would have believed it but you forget and you forget fast the tiniest details of what it means to wake up in the morning and say like wow the last four weeks. I haven't gotten one client. Am I going to do a different today? So I just big shout out to every entrepreneur who's starting out out there. It's tough and you should always put in context the advice that you here and thanks for bringing it up because people need to know it's not all roses like shit is hard when you start it's hard for everyone. It actually should be hard. But if you stick with it, hopefully you're doing the right thing. You can get escape velocity.
So morning routines. One thing we have somewhat differing approaches to what else
tools. I think that tools are super valuable people love to talk about tools. But you know, you give Andre Agassi a wooden rack, he's gonna kick my ass. So I think like when you ask well if somebody asked me like what apps do I
Like my apps are horrible. I don't use I use like trip it that's it. It's but I think the more powerful things are the psychology are the systems which are run through a Google doc. That's my take on tools. And and so that's those are my two areas of disagreement curious to hear what you think about the tools and also if you disagree with me on
anything, well, I provide a lot of tools because I think the specifics are helpful, but it's the reasoning behind it. I would imagine we're probably on the same page with and that is the tools are byproducts of principles or strategies rights. For instance. I use tribute to I think it's underrated. Yeah, but people are like, okay great. I'm gonna go you strip it and let's going to be grand. It's like well, yes, but
Maybe but what are the principles behind it? And it's so that I can avoid manual checking of things like gate updates its so that I'm avoiding a certain decisions certain manual activities that are being automated right? It's so that I don't have to go. I don't have to go to Google or or wherever on my phone and search fill-in-the-blank Airline check-in. Yeah, because I can click a button and TripIt do it automatically whether it's Delta United American whatever rights the and in that principle if you were to pull it back will be will then allow you to deduce which tools to use or at least ask people for the right tools, but it's it's very easy to believe that like, oh, wow, so and so is a great player so and so is a great business person. So and so is a great artist because they use watercolors. It's like know whether it's watercolors oil Conte crayons doesn't matter charcoal graphite you need to
No, the technique and the principles behind it and the process then you can choose your tools. Yeah, I think it's easy to become a tool fetishist without understanding why you're doing what you're doing and then you become kind of like, where is it Solomon Islands where they have the cargo cult where they like the fake runways and the fake towers and it's like, okay great. You have phone full of the greatest apps like you've got 79 different rules for email filtering and guess what? You didn't do one fucking important thing today. So
okay, I agree with you on that. I think that's a really good and I think the way you articulated deduce what TripIt what the principles behind you using TripIt are is critical. I do the same thing. We use it for the same reasons, but I also take that same principle and apply it to what I do in the morning and how I decide what place to meet someone for coffee all that stuff has been automated so I don't have to think about it ever again. So that's a
good point. Yeah, and I would say also that it is possible.
Possible and actually very common to procrastinate by searching for incrementally better and better tools. Oh, I do that all the time and I could do the vast majority of what I do with a day planner. Yeah. And in fact, I think the finite nature this is why I still use paper. I still use note cards or small pieces of paper for to-do lists and things like that because it is it is by its very nature finite. I cannot have a list of 37 things I need to do. So the in some respects I think applying constraints to the tools that you use in the same way that I had Neil Gaiman actually sitting right where you are on this podcast not too long ago and he uses very often a fountain pen and pads of paper for Drafting and it sounds very romantic and it is in some respects but it also has a number of psychological and practical benefits, but it seems very primitive.
Not the latest cutting-edge
tool. All right, I love it. That's a great explanation of the nuances behind tools. Yeah. So yeah, I appreciate
that. Let's see where else in and it's also easy I think for us like we could disagree on tools all day long where I mean, we could we could disagree on the implementation of various things. But here's here's I think one observation that is important. That is you and I are not the same person meaning like like you like you like fancy sweaters. I'm wearing an $8 t-shirt that my mom got me right and like these pants and these shoes were both given to me and I'm not wearing socks. And so we have different desires your vacation may look differently from mine your family and India is different from my family on the east coast of you know this country.
And that's all fine. That's great. And it also means that the way we approach problem solving is going to be different. Yeah, that's a really good point and that but the principles a lot of the principles are I do think are very similar. I like the values and the principles are similar. Otherwise, I don't think we would have been friends for as long as we
have totally agree. And I think there's there's value in the diversity of how we think there's also value in knowing that those will change over time, right? So as I've gotten married I'm like, oh wow, there's this whole world. I didn't understand before and now I'm learning that and I'm growing with my wife I think as we've gotten in relationships, we've talked about how that's changed us. Wow, and that's like a pretty interesting topic and then you know, if we had like if we had anybody else here who maybe didn't look like us or if we they weren't our gender. We had all different kinds of diversity opinions. We would have even more ways of thinking about how we approach
Problems and I think what I have learned along the way like when I wrote the book, for example, I was a bit judgmental about what the rich life was in the first edition. I was like this is how you should invest follow the principles and like this is where you end up now ten years later. There's a lot of people in the fire Community, for example, this financial Independence retire early and many people are happy to acquire enough to basically be able to live on 30k year live a very simple life and if they want to have a fun afternoon, maybe they'll go to the park and they're like, we don't need materialistic stuff. We're happy and back then I think I would have been pretty judgmental about it. Now. I've realized look there's lean fire. There's fat fire. There's all kinds of different fire and some people don't want to fire them fact. Most Americans will never fire they will work until their of retirement age, but rich life looks different to different people and part of that comes from how will we raise?
Just wear what our parents tell us and then part of it is do we want to change that story or do we want to just go with that
question about retirement? I was going to ask this earlier. So this I mean I've wrote about this as far back as is my equally scammy sounding book 4-Hour workweek a thousand years ago, but the this is concept of retirement, right? Let's replace that with Financial Freedom because I want to ask you what that means or what you think how you think people should think about it? Because a lot of thinking about retirement I find to be extremely porous at best. I guess it's very faulty and
it while you're in your book you had a great example of mini retirements and like you want to buy a Ferrari want you just rent it for a
week. Yeah great exam or you think like, okay 20 years from now everything I'm doing is predicated on being able to like buy a boat and I'm going to live on my boat and sail around the Mediterranean for 20 years after that's like maybe you should get on a boat first. Yes and try that.
Our weekend like go take a sailing course, you might come out of being like that fucking sucks. And I was I felt sick the entire time. Okay good to know that now and not when you've kind of slaved away and done something that you find distasteful for 20 years and people mess up the math to right. I mean, they often miscalculate and end up having very tough time in retirement per se. So with with your students. How do you encourage them to think about the objective? Right? Yeah. Well, I don't believe that most
people are uttama towns that sit down and say Here's my 50 your goal and let me break it down and reverse engineer it to what I'm going to do this week. I know about two people like that and they're special on their own but most people don't do that. Most people are very simple. They want to wake up. They want to have a good day at work. Maybe they want to have a little bit of fun or watch Netflix or have a good conversation with their partner.
Friends and that's a good day. And that's okay now to kind of push people out of that and make them think a little bit bigger. It might be taking a vacation. They may not have done. It might be going to a tea event that they may have never thought of going to it's these experiences that people remember I would say that your comment about retirement is really true for people our age like I don't hear anyone saying like when I retire this that my pension like those conversations are not happening with our generation. So there's more of what do I want to do? There's more spending on things like wellness and vacations and experiences. We're seeing that in the economy as well. What I tell people is a couple of things number one.
You may not think right now that you want to retire but when you look at what everybody else who reaches a certain age does if everyone does something it might be true and so plan for it. Like I don't want to buy a house but almost everybody else does so I saved enough for a down payment. I don't need to use it but it's there if I need to similarly don't wait right and think bigger so don't wait means go take a trip for three days and think bigger is like your retirement doesn't have to just be sitting around. It can actually be much bigger that money dial turn it to 10 and it could be traveling with a fixer. It could be going for a month a year or two months. But in order to do that, you need to build a muscle now of thinking bigger people have this linear belief that once this bifurcation of retirement happens, then the curtain opens and I get to do all this cool stuff dude. If you haven't been doing it until you're 60 years old, you're not going to magically do it at
years old and one day so I would encourage people to start building the muscle just like you've told him and realize that doing creative things trying different things is a muscle I found myself getting lazy with this in New York I looked at where I'd gone to in the city like over the course of the last six months and I was like I live in this amazing City and I'm not even taking advantage of it so I put it into my calendar once a quarter minimum I'm going to do a cultural event like a show or a tea tasting whatever the case may be something that I could only do in New York and so now it's like on the calendar and you can say it sounds unromantic but I'm like that's what I needed to do that to keep building my muscle of trying new things so whatever works for people do it but I would say don't wait until you are retirement age
yeah and I feel like so much in our conversation has come back to making one decision that removes a thousand decisions in the sense that like you put it in your calendar
And for me if it's not in the calendar, it's just not real right. So even what we call batching conversations for with me and my girlfriend for discussing certain like constant not not issues in the sense of problems. But like we have a we have regularly scheduled times to talk about certain things. We do the same thing and it's in the calendar say it's and that's true with certain types of like date nights. It's true if we're talking about relationships, right? It's true for taking trips together. Yep. It's true for visiting my family visiting her family and by making that decision and putting it in the calendar you preserve your brain power and emotional resilience and so on for other stuff that is less
predictable. Do you have a consistent thing you talk about on your check-ins
we do. Yeah. We have a whole format and everything. Yeah.
Okay. So this is amazing. I love meeting smart people who apply their intelligence to a different part of life. Like for example, there's a book out by Gretchen Rubin who we both know and she's just so smart and she decided to write a book about keeping her house and work space organized and I'm like, yep bought it and the stuff she writes about in there is clever interesting. It's exactly what you would think a smart person applying themselves to something for like a year would come up with and the fact that you and your girlfriend. Have we call it a touch base or a check in and you have a consistency? It's on the calendar like I love that and you know, I want to know like what's on that how did what surprised you did it? Because we're going through building our own one. We're tweaking it and I'm like, this is awesome.
She's much smarter about anything involving emotions. Oh God, that's funny. My wife is the one who suggested for us too much more much more observant than I am. It's like 2K
Men talking to each other. Yeah. She she's much are we good? We're good. Okay, great. Like that would be our chicken. We good we fucking good because I really feel like having this conversation. Yeah, we're good. Okay great. So maybe this will be helpful for folks will spend a few minutes on this. We have a number of rituals and things in the calendar that I think are important for the care and nurturing of the relationship and
one Epiphany that I think we both had at one point was that a I have a tendency to emotionally shut off or get defensive with a lot of questions involving emotion or emotional vulnerability it's just not something I was really exposed to Growing Up yeah I mean there was or in school or with coaches I mean really the feeling was and like I say in my family as a whole but a come from a pretty
it's the right word here stoic and not in the the cool hip like Marcus Aurelius sense, but like a fairly stoic like Protestant like
environment where in school for instance, you know that end in coaching the general feeling was like don't tell me the good stuff because the good stuff takes care of itself. Like tell me what needs to be fixed. Yep. Turns out that's not I've come to realize the best approach for longevity in the relationship that I want to have with my girlfriend and which which had to be pointed out to make
some like this is amazing because just think about this what got you here? Yeah, something got you here to a very elite level and it would be easy to just be like, oh my God, I'll just keep doing what I'm doing because I won that game. Well, they were playing a different game. Well, I
think that the question I didn't ask for very long time is like, what did it cost? Yes. And what was the collateral damage Wow breaks. It's like Yeah The Hulk's great fucking superhero. He also makes a fucking mess. That's a good one. And I think that there was a lot of collateral damage that I probably didn't notice and certainly didn't weigh very heavily because I was like, yeah, but look what I did totally or
Yeah, but look what happened and it excused a lot of mess hundred percent. And so but the so what we what we realized after that was pointed out to me was or what I then said to my girlfriend because she was curious about how to better word things so that I wouldn't have a disproportionate like emotional response. That's cool that she was curious about that. Yes. She's very good at asking questions and probing because if I think I have a sensitivity as someone who's effectively worked as a freelancer for decades that if like I have my headphones on and I'm in the middle of like a project I don't want to stop and have like a five-minute conversation about something extraneous it I get I get unnecessarily spun out over stuff like that and she says well, how should I phrase things so that
it's easier and less distracting for you and I and I remember saying as I said it has nothing to do with the content it's all timing and then and that was a real breakthrough for our relationship not because we had the conversation this is really fucking important because like yeah you can go to like fill in the blanks seminar you can read fill in the blank book you can take fill in the blank drug and have this amazing Epiphany and do nothing with it what we did from that point was then set up what we call these batching times once a week or once every two weeks where we sit down and she has a chance to talk to me when I am prepared to talk about things that are going to make me uncomfortable and a she can handle it whenever she's more adaptable and resilient that way but I can blame it on my upbringing I can blame it on being just a weirdo who knows or just you know if a heteronormative male who doesn't like talking about shit
Who knows having that time blocked out where I can like steel myself and like warm myself up psychologically to talk about things that are gonna make me uncomfortable is very valuable and the format the format that we currently have so we couldn't find any real great advice on the same. And that's the for all we have is we will will we take notes. We have like meeting notes after everyone and it's and where we capture what in kind of bullet points. What was said so we start with one person will start and they'll say what they think they've been doing. Well nice and it didn't start out this way, but it ended up they start with what they think they've been doing well or doing better then they talk about if they want where they think they've dropped the ball or could focus more which is very helpful for diffusing things because they bring it up themselves then they
They will tell the other person what they're doing well and then they'll tell the other person we started off with like shit you need to fix or that was probably my phrasing and then it was growth opportunities. And now it's what I'd liked what I would love to see more of nice and that the phrasing turns out to be really important, right? So it's like what I think I'm doing well since we last checked in what I think I could do better what you're doing. Well and then what I'd like to see more of yeah, and that we take notes and each then we forward it to the other person and we can we can take a look at it. And that's that's it amazing and usually takes an hour maybe two hours and it's in the morning or in the evening usually in the afternoon or evening on a weekend. Oh, okay interest. That's most common. Okay. Yeah,
so the note part is also interesting. So you take notes. I took noticing
or no one of us will take notes on the whole thing.
okay got his kind of like one secretary or or minute keeper for that session that's cool and so it could be me I take notes and notebooks a lot so I'd take notes in a notebook and take a photo and send it to her or she'll take it in notepad on your phone and then send
it it's an interesting interesting part of it too is like each person will have some skin in the game in terms of recording
it yeah and then I have an Evernote file where I put all of our chickens in Reverse chronological order so the most recent as at the top yeah so I can go back and look and see like all right did did we and this is not tip as a gotcha it's just like all right did I keep up my end of the bargain did I say I was going to work on something three weeks ago and then I kind of forgot about
it but also later also not just from the avoiding bad but doing look at the good yeah like imagine after a year you go in you're like oh my God like we have been super consistent and like look at the things we used to talk about and look at the things we're talking about
now yeah the good the the highlighting what is being done well is really important and that
It's so against every Behavior inhabit that I've built over my entire life, but I have come to realize that without that. Yeah, it can really really be tough.
So one of the things that I love about this first of all, thanks for sharing those names is super helpful as we are starting this ritual on our own and I think this is a great example.
And by the way, my girl like my girlfriend's did 90% of that so like I'm along for the ride, but I want to give her a proper credit. Totally.
I think that's an example where the ritual itself may be even more important than the content the ritual of having the time having it on the calendar respecting it always showing up being mentally present and tracking it that is like 90% of the Ballgame and that just shows this awesome mutual respect you both have for each other and the fact that you take it seriously and it's not weird to write down an agenda. I think so many people are they think about things as
Weird Odie weird to have a Google Agenda or be weird to save for an engagement ring. I don't I'm not even dating anyone. Well, I think it's weird to live life as most people. Yeah, I think that's weird. I would rather plan ahead. I would pick some things I want to do differently and just be Unapologetic about it. So I think it's really cool that you're sharing that including down to like what are the questions because I'm going to take some of those and take it back to my wife and we're going to do
those. It's it's been it's really been a big deal for us and it like you said, I think the the intention in the act of calendaring it is
Is of Great Value aside from the implementation purpose fact that you are both setting aside time to keep the relationship on the rails and to improve it is in and of itself going to have an impact on the relationship and there are times also when we'll put these batching sessions out will schedule them out and she's better at this than I am. I'm actually find Enneagram pretty helpful, even though I'm not convinced it's more than like business acceptable astrology basically, but in any case and you're going to can kind of be interesting as something to fit into this so we can talk about that on another podcast but very important to her to schedule things out. And if you if we schedule it out for say four or five weeks there are times when we'll look at it will know it's coming and it's like
okay are we going to do this it's like no we're good like there are times when we just we don't have a critical mass of stuff to talk about it's like no it can wait like we'll just do it we can push it a week yep and so it's but you want to inform my experience thus far better to have it on the calendar yeah and then say hey we can play hooky make it an opt-out instead of often exactly then to not have it on the calendar and have to like hit defcon5 when things boil over
Dude everything that's important in life should be opt out everything it should be by default it's going to happen it's on the calendar and whether that is call your mom every Sunday evening whether that is GO train at the gym three four five times a week whatever it is put just that intentionality of writing it down and putting it on the calendar even the intentionality of everyone listening and saying what are the four things that I want to accomplish every week I want to call my mom or dad I want to train I want to whatever I want to read a book for 10 minutes and then
In those
down on your calendar doesn't matter if it's in the morning or night, whatever works for you that instantly separates you from being opt-in from being buffeted by the winds left and right and just going wherever the world takes you you decide don't let the world decide for you
here here ramit Sethi safety. How do you say your name correctly? Ramit Sethi? Okay. So you have second edition of I will teach you to be rich available and I'm sure it but by the time people hear this it may be available. It should be available and it has a new pages of material. Yep, tools insights about money in Psychology stories of readers have used the book the scripts that were talking about. Yep. And oh, yeah, look at that is real reader results. Yeah. Yeah, we're looking at about a book right now.
I wanted to show people that rich a lot of people think Rich looks a certain way.
I wanted to put photos of these readers men women black white young old everyone of us has someone we want to see ourselves represented you know I saw an ad on the train for an Indian dad in Hindi and I was like you know what ten years ago that wouldn't have been meaningful to me but now I'm actually appreciating who represented so that's what I wanted in this
book and you you've tabbed a couple of things for me to check out later which I will check out you got I'm just going to read the tabs you'll have to go through all of them stories next victim culture which I'm sure you're a huge fan of getting word for word scripts ignore Reddit invisible scripts crypto love and money so you got a lot here and as I mentioned earlier I'm just going to read the first paragraph on the back of the book because I haven't seen this in ages just quick quick back story note I remember when you were writing this I came to you for advice and I gave
you're the birthday I gave you Bird by Bird by Anne lamott and but here's here's the first paragraph of the back copy by as many lattes as you want that's a reference to people who recommend you cut back on all these things like a latte spend extravagantly on the things you love live your rich life instead of tracking every last expense and you know what I've what I've always enjoyed observing and learning from our the test that you do you experiment you actually Implement these things and you provide scripts and actual algorithms for achieving very specific results so awesome to see you
thank you dude it's been a pleasure I love catching up and thanks for having me on yeah
people can find you on Twitter at ramit Instagram at ramit and website I WT.com are there any other places where people can check you out see what you're up to or anything else that you would like to say
Before we wrap up this episode
get the book. It's on Amazon and come visit me at any of these social places and the site and the newsletter and would love to talk more with everyone about their rich life
from it. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks a lot and to everyone who is listening. Thank you for joining in you can find the show notes links to everything. We've discussed at Tim dot blog forward slash podcast along with every other episode and until next time track wisely calendar the important shit plan your batching sessions and thanks for tuning in and I will be in touch very soon.
hey guys this is Tim again just a few more things before you take off number one this is five bullet Friday do you want to get a short email from and would you enjoy getting a short email for me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend and $5 Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I found or that I've been pondering over the week that could include favorite new albums that I've discovered it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the the world of the esoteric as I do it could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends for instance and it's very short it's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend so if you want to receive that check it out just go to four hour workweek.com that's 4-Hour workweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one and if you sign up
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