Hello, everybody. It's Sam from Financial Samurai. And finally, at long last, two and a half years later, the book Buy This, Not That, How to Spend Your Way to Wealth and Freedom is out. Hooray! Woohoo! So I have with me my wife, Sini, who has been with me on this journey since the very beginning.

She has edited and reviewed the book multiple times. How many times would you say you have read the book? We went through it about four different times during the whole process. Right, four different times, and it's a 300-page book, about 110,000 words. So it was a long, long process, but I truly believe Buy This, Not That will be the best personal finance book anybody can ever read.

What do you think? Oh, totally. It is. It's an incredible feat and accomplishment that you have put together. We have put together. Well, you did, obviously, the bulk of the work with all the writing. And I'm glad I was able to contribute to helping with the editing process and fact-checking and looking at numbers and formulas and all that stuff throughout the book.

It was an incredible learning experience. I know you definitely feel the same. Yeah. And congratulations. Made it! We made it. Woohoo! And here's something interesting, folks. We went through so many revisions. I would say a couple dozen revisions, and each revision was more polishing, getting better, more inclusive, thinking about new ideas, thinking about things we missed.

And despite all the editing, all the grammatical error changes, the formula fixing and all that, there are still some errors in the first edition of Buy This, Not That. Yes, it's true indeed. It was crazy because I was, you know, after I sent my last pass, which is supposed to be the last, last pass where we don't get anything back, it goes to the copy editors, they polish it some more.

About a month later, I was like, "You know what? I'm going to go read the book again in the hot tub." And I was reading the book, and I was like, "Wait a minute. What's up with this spelling error?" And the spelling error was made four times in four subtitles.

You may or may not find it. And I was totally bummed. I was like, "What was the point of spending dozens of hours?" I know. It's tough. It's tough. And it's hard when there's so many people involved. And publishers have a system, a way that they do things for a good reason.

You know, they've been doing it for decades and decades. And it was a new process to us, and we sent through, you know, a lot of fine-tuning in the last time that we touched the book. And there were some changes that happened between that time and when it actually went to print.

And we didn't get to see the final final before it went to print. And somewhere along the line, there were some goofs that happened in that last bit. And it's just what happens. It seems to be very common with any book that goes to print. So true to Financial Samurai fashion, we always look at silver linings.

Silver linings, when bad things happen, we think, "Ah, thank God I didn't break my ankle when I sprained my ankle. Thank God I didn't drive off a cliff and I just blew a tire." You know, just think about the positives. And the one positive that I thought, it's actually a huge positive because I've been a collector of awesome things like Chinese coins, baseball cards, comics, and rare books, is that a first edition book that becomes a bestseller, which I believe Buy This, Not That, will become – it's actually already an Amazon number one bestseller in the retirement planning category.

But first edition bestsellers with errors actually are more valuable on the secondary collector's market. Yeah. I mean, there's this one – I was doing some research for this post and it was called like the Upside Down Jenny Stamp. It was like an old plain. It was just printed upside down and it sold for over a million dollars.

Yeah. It's a classic collectible that's known for being printed funny. Yeah. So Buy This, Not That first edition has just a small spelling error but it is still an error so I will embrace it. And I think less than – maybe about 15,000 first edition copies will be sold in the United States.

And what I'm going to do is I'm going to sign and have a special stamp. Nobody else has this stamp. I'm going to have this special stamp and I'm going to sign and special stamp less than 300 copies. So it's kind of going to be like the golden ticket in the Willy Wonka factory where if you can get your hands on one of this signed and special stamped version, it could be worth a lot of money in the future.

Who knows? Yeah. All right. So writing and editing a book over two years is one level of hardness. I would say it's, I don't know, 10 out of 10 in terms of level of hardness. How would you – what would you think? How hard is it to write a book you think?

Well, I didn't do the writing so I would – I can't give a complete answer but based on the amount of work that you spent writing, I would say definitely 10 out of 10. The editing process was intense to say the least just due to the volume. The back and forth, literally probably a thousand plus emails.

Yeah. There were a lot of questions that we were answering back and forth. It wasn't just me doing the editing. Obviously, there's a whole team at Portfolio that was doing it. I was just assisting and it's an intense process to edit an entire book. It really is. But you know what's funny?

The marketing, the marketing of the book is even maybe more intense. Different type of intense. It's actually – it's really difficult, folks. So I started marketing Buy This, Not That three and a half months before July 19th, the release date. What happens is you put your hopes and dreams of the book, everything you have into this book, you think it's the best thing you've ever created and it's been polished and looked over dozens of times by five, six people, right?

And then so because you have worked so hard and you believe so much in the book, you want everybody to read it and therefore you believe with all your heart that other people should help promote it, right? But the problem is people will say no and it's those no's that I was reminded over and over again.

It was either no, I'm not interested in marketing your book or just no response. That kind of bummed me out for a while. Yeah, it's definitely hard to feel like you're – when you're reaching out about something you're so excited about and then you get nothing back. Like nothing, black hole of darkness.

It's pretty rough. And so it's an expectations game where you think some people will help you but then they end up just ghosting you or saying nothing. And these are the people you've helped before in the past. I've allowed them to do a guest post on Financial Samurai and help them build their traffic and their brand and then nothing.

It was just a rejection. So that was pretty disappointing and that reminded me one of the reasons why I left the finance world. In any job that pays well, a lot of it has to do with selling. You have to sell your company's product. You have to sell yourself and you would just get no's or ignores, I would say most of the time.

But if you have a 10% hit rate, that means you better ask 10 people before you get a success otherwise you're not going to make it. And so this whole marketing process of the book has really reminded me why I left my day job and why I actually don't want to go back.

Yeah, for sure. The other interesting thing I learned is how to deal with anxiety. So I now firmly know why people don't try to do hard things or to create anything new. And the reason why is you put your heart into it, people say no, people reject you, they don't return your emails and calls and whatever you do create turns out to be a big flop.

And so for a while, one of the funny things is I talk to a lot of editors who have edited my work. I've talked to you, I've talked to my father, I've talked to other people who have great grammatical and editing skills. Make me feel like English is a second language, I guess that's how you write it.

And I always ask the editors with such great editing ability, why not create some amazing prose of your own? Yeah, we've had this conversation before. And my take is that they're two very different skills. I do enjoy writing and I have written a couple posts, well, not a couple, more than a couple on your site.

And for me, my challenge is speed. It takes me a really, really long time to put together an article. I enjoy it, it's just not my strength in terms of efficiency. But I have a realization here. Go slow to go far. Speed is overrated. You don't need speed to write unless you're like a production factory, like you're on a deadline, you work for a newspaper or whatever, right?

This is Financial Samurai, we do whatever we want. Right. There comes a point where maybe it takes too long. And if you look at word count, for example, let's say it takes you an hour and a half to write an article. If I were to try and write something of that same length on the same or similar type of topic, it might take me anywhere between five to eight hours, you know, significant amount more.

Right. Whereas, you know, maybe I could have put those hours towards something else that I am faster at doing. More efficient, yeah. Right. Because unfortunately, we all have a limited amount of time. And given we're parents of a five-year-old and a two-year-old, you know, you're not sleeping much, I'm sleeping okay, thanks to you.

But you know, opportunity cost. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, Buy This, Not That is about opportunity cost at the end of the day because we're trying to choose between two decisions, the most optimal decision and to avoid those suboptimal decisions. But I would say give yourself more credit.

You've had a lot of posts on Financial Samurai do really well, really connect with other people and, you know, again, speed. Yeah, that is the funny thing. It's like we only have so much time. And so we better utilize our time the best way we can. Yeah, and I think, you know, in terms of editing, I'm obviously not a professional editor, but it's something that I do enjoy.

It's something that I can do fairly quickly, especially in comparison to writing. And I'm a detail-oriented person, so I like catching the little things. Right. And you're good at it. After, you know, as a writer, after you write something, a lot of these errors just fly through your – fly over your head, fly over my head.

I just can't see it because I've written it and read it so many times. So back to the topic of anxiety. For the past three months marketing the book, I have felt this consistent low level of anxiety. And it's kind of annoying, actually, and it's kind of weird because I'm generally not an anxious person.

I'm pretty happy-go-lucky. I like going to battle in USTA tennis because I like the feeling, the nervousness, the adrenaline and all that. Win or lose. I mean, obviously, I'm bummed when I lose. But now, you know, as an older guy now, I'm like, "Oh, whatever if I lose." And it also doesn't last that long, right?

You have some anticipation up till the match. Yeah. Then the match is done in several hours. It's not taking months after months. Yes. That's a great point. From start to finish. It's a different timeline. That's a great point. Yeah, you're right. Like, the anxiety before a match will last a couple days before.

Anxiety right before the match, definitely a warm-up. And then during the match, I kind of have an out-of-body experience sometimes where I'm just like, "Am I really playing this? This is really cool. This is fun." And then hopefully I win. I had an 83% win percentage this year. Went like 19-4.

That was pretty sweet. Showed up. But with the book, man, it's like- It's a long process. Three months. It's like a three-month anticipation of the match where you're just working hard, reaching out to people, calling local bookstores, "Hey, do you have Buy This, Not That available this week?" "No." "Oh, why not?

I'm a local author. Do you want to support local author?" Well, you also had marketing on your mind even before we finished the editing process. Just kind of lurking in the back of your mind knowing that it was coming. Yeah. It was coming. I tried my best over these three months to not make Financial Samurai and the podcast all about Buy This, Not That.

I know everything is free, right? So I can do whatever I want. But I also wanted to have a balance where I would continue to provide value in the newsletter, in the posts, and in the podcasts. But at the end of the day, this is maybe a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me.

I don't know whether I want to write another book, which will make the first edition of Buy This, Not That more valuable with the air. And so I just have to make it count when it counts the most. But I will share with you how I have dealt with this anxiety of this book launch and the worry of whether everything will go smoothly if you're trying to do something hard or if you're trying to be creative.

So the first thing I did was focus on a process. I came up with a game plan, a marketing game plan, and I followed it. Every week I would write a post that related to Buy This, Not That. Every week I would release a podcast episode that would be related to Buy This, Not That.

And I would have a list of people, blogs, media outlets that I would contact, and I would just go through it. That was one, just having a plan. Two was setting proper expectations. For example, the Financial Samurai newsletter at financialsamurai.com/newsletter has about 50,000 subscribers. So that sounds pretty good, but it's actually not that big based on when I started in 2009.

And I told myself, well, I did some research and I know this, that the average conversion rate for someone to buy anything from your newsletter is about 2-3%. So you could take 2-3% times 50,000 is 1,000-1,500 buyers of Buy This, Not That the book. And so I set those expectations as a goal.

Okay, if I'm the average, then maybe I'll be able to sell 1,000-1,500 copies, hard copies. And then that is the hurdle. That's the realistic expectation. And if I am over that, and I'm glad to say I'm over that, then it's like, okay, you're doing your job and you're doing better than the average.

Another way to deal with anxiety is to just say, you are doing the best you can with what you have. Always tell yourself you're doing the best you can with what you have. And what will happen is you'll end up working harder, thinking about more things, leaving no stone unturned so that when your product is finally out, you won't have any regret having not tried your best.

Another strategy for reducing anxiety and just keeping the motivation going is to diversify your activities. So I have been writing, waking up at 5 a.m., 6 a.m. to write for a couple hours, you know, for a couple years now. And it was my necessity because the kids would wake up by 8 and I just can't concentrate with them all screaming and wanting to play.

And so I diversified my activities through physical activity, namely tennis and softball, talking to other people in different industries who have different interests. And this was really, really helpful for mental health. And the final thing I did to manage my anxiety was to put things in perspective. Ten years ago, I tried to get a literary agent.

I reached out to at least a dozen and I got rejected or no word from anybody. But I said, screw that. I'm not going to take the rejection sitting down. And you and I created an e-book called How to Engineer Your Layoff. And my dad helped edit it. And it's in its fifth edition now.

And since the e-book was published in 2012, it has been purchased and read by thousands of people and it has generated over $500,000 in net profits. And that's great. That's like $50,000 on average a year. I mean, that's almost livable income for us in San Francisco. And so to count your wins, even though you get rejected, is a good thing.

And also to look at the perspective and say, well, I have this book. If it becomes a bestseller or not, it's okay. Because I was able to get a book deal with a reputable, one of the best imprints in the nonfiction space, which is Portfolio Penguin Random House. I couldn't even get a literary agent.

Now I was able to skip the literary agent and go straight to the top with a great publisher. And so I just want to feel proud of the work that I've done and whether it becomes a nationwide bestseller or not is less important than being able to get the work done and not quitting, not quitting during a pandemic with two kids.

I mean, when we look back, our kids are going to ask, so how was life like during the pandemic? And I'm going to say, it was tough. We worried about you constantly, but we provided as much love and care as possible. And we created this book that you could be proud of.

Yeah. I mean, you really did not waste a minute in the last two and a half years. I mean, and it's about defiance. You've encountered something bad and you can take it sitting down or you can say, you know what, screw this bad situation. I'm going to make the most out of this situation.

So when we got married in 2008, it was the global financial crisis right in the heart of it. I was like losing lots of money. We're worried about our jobs. We're like, hey, you know what? All I remember from December 2008 was our beach wedding. It was like 16 people, cameras.

You had your white Target dress. I had my Aloha swap meet shirt that cost like several dollars and our flip flops. And it was a simple life, but it was really good memories. And so this defiance about not letting a bad situation or a nervous nerve wracking situation get you down is the financial samurai way.

And I hope everybody takes that into consideration and helps cultivate their own defiance. All right. Well, it's getting late in the episode here, but the final thing I want to talk about is embracing one's underdog status. So I believe we're an underdog. We don't work for a large media publication.

We're not huge on social media. We're not out there, but we can still fight to create an amazing book with the resources we have. And we can still fight to make Buy This, Not That a bestseller. And you and I know we've known each other for so long, right?

Since what, 1998? And I think you have felt you've been an underdog as well. Yeah, I'd say so. So what are the things that make you keep on going no matter what? Well, competition helped me when I was younger. I had some rivals in my day, nothing serious, but wanting to do better and have that sense of competition helped keep me going, and also just wanting to be independent.

I didn't come from a lot. And my parents had a lot of struggles, and I knew that they wouldn't be able to comfortably support me. So I knew that I needed to study hard, and I knew I needed to get a job that I could count on that would give me a steady paycheck that would provide opportunity for me to succeed and do well and learn and grow through my career.

And that really, really got me going in my younger years, and it just continued to give me the fuel and motivation to make them proud, make myself proud, make you proud, and build our life together as a family. Yeah, there's a saying that it's an internal motor that I have, and that's, "Why give up when you can keep on going?" Why give up?

No way. Don't give up when you can keep on going. And I think since our children came in 2017, it's just added more motivation to keep on going because not only do we want to provide for our children as any parent would, we also want to make them proud.

We want to protect them. We want to nurture them and educate them. So it's been a great, great journey, folks, and thank you so much for supporting Financial Samurai and picking up a hard copy or an audio copy or digital copy of Buy This, Not That. You can buy it at any bookstore you'd like, or you can go to financialsamurai.com/btnt.

I'm really excited about one thing over the next couple of weeks, and you know what that is? No. Yes, you do. Okay. Wait. I don't know. That one thing, oh my gosh, I am so excited. This is the most excited I've been in a while. And that is to pick up our son from school and go to the bookstore.

We're going to do a treasure hunt for the book, and we're just going to have so much fun and we're going to find it and we're going to talk about it. We're going to take some pictures. So if you want to support your local bookstore, which I definitely will be, go to your local bookstore and ask if they have a copy of Buy This, Not That.

Barnes & Noble should have one, but that's like the big conglomerate. Those are indie bookstores. They might not have a copy, but you can always order one as well to support and just tell them you'd love to get more copies in. That'd be great for us and it'd be great for everybody.

So again, thank you so much for supporting us and we will talk to you later. Thanks, everybody.