Today on the show I share with you an interview with Tom Corley. Tom is an accomplished accountant who is also a financial planner by trade. He became interested in the subject of wealth and performed a survey of his wealthy clients trying to elucidate what made them different from other people.

Completed a survey of a number of wealthy people and also a number of poor people and from those surveys and from that research extracted some habits and some principles that were common to all of the wealthy people and were uncommon to the poor people. He went on to write a book called Rich Habits, the Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals.

Find out how the rich get so rich, the secrets to financial success revealed. He followed that up with an additional book called Rich Kids, How to Raise Our Children to be Happy and Successful in Life. Kind of an important subject, don't you think? Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast.

My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host, your guide and your fellow adventurer on the journey to financial independence. This is the show where we talk each and every day about all of the concepts and all of the content and all of the information required to construct a rich and successful life, day by day, working hard, doing all we can do to build and grow toward financial independence.

I'm very much looking forward to hearing your feedback after this interview. I was thrilled to do it. It's one of the more enjoyable interviews that I have done with an author and it's enjoyable for a number of reasons. Number one, the content matter of this interview is a perfect fit for Radical Personal Finance.

After all, this is exactly what we talk about. It's also in many ways a confirmation of many of the ideas that I've held for a long time and it's always exciting to see some of the ideas that you hold near and dear to your heart confirmed in the marketplace.

Most importantly, I want you to pay attention to the story. During the course of this interview, I did not focus heavily on the content of Tom's books. I personally have found that authors are very challenging people to interview and one of the changes that I've made with my interviewing style, you can tell me if you like it or not, is not so much to focus on trying to get an author to go step by step through their book.

That's a mistake that I made in earlier episodes of Radical Personal Finance and it doesn't, in my opinion, doesn't work well because they wrote a book for a reason. If you want to know what the rich habits are, read the book and obviously a good quick summary is very useful.

But more than that, I was interested in Tom's story. So listen for that through the course of this interview. Listen for Tom's story and how he personally changed and the steps that he took because there's nothing that Tom has done that you or I can't do as well. Tom welcome to Radical Personal Finance.

I've been looking forward to speaking with you. Tom Gjelten: Thanks for having me on your show Joshua. It's really an honor to be there. Tom Bilyeu: I've been wanting to talk with you because you have written extensively about success habits which is going to be the core of our show but you've also built a career in financial services.

And so as a fellow financial planner, I've been looking forward to talking to you about the intersection of these things. Before we get into the meat and potatoes, I'd love it if you'd share a little bit about your background and your journey through the financial planning industry and the accounting industry and how that ultimately led to your creating the Rich Habits books.

Tom Gjelten: Sure. Well, I'm a CPA and I'm also a certified financial planner. I also have a master's in tax and I mention that only because I spent a great deal of my career focused on large corporate tax and complicated individual tax areas like expatriates and things like that.

What happened was the transition into what I'm doing here was really just by happenstance. I took over the reins of this CPA firm, Seraphus & Company in 2003 and sometime in the middle of 2004, one of our clients who was a business owner was struggling financially. They needed to have a meeting with me immediately.

Their bank had shut down their line of credit and they couldn't make payroll and so they were basically coming to me looking for a Hail Mary pass with a couple of seconds on the clock and I told them I couldn't find a bank that quickly. Those things take time, building banking relationships.

The guy just broke down and started crying. It was a family business he had inherited from his dad and because of, as I found out, because of certain bad habits that he had, he was basically taking all the cash flow out of the business. He started crying and he asked me what was he doing wrong, what are my successful clients doing.

It affected me emotionally and so I started doing some initial research. I found some okay information, mainly it was the millionaire next door research, but it didn't really tell me what the guy was doing wrong and there wasn't a lot of information in there that was helpful, I thought.

I started doing the research then. It took me about six months to develop what became my 20 question list, which is really 154 questions, but I broke it down into 20 categories. It took four years of interviewing. Initially I started out interviewing wealthy people and I stopped at 233.

Don't ask me why, I just stopped. I thought I had enough. I didn't want to go above really 150, but I was just drawn into this. It was so compelling, the information I was gathering. Then I said, "Well, I know what wealthy people are doing, but what are poor people doing that are holding them back?" My goal was to just interview 100 poor people.

My goal was actually 150 poor people, but I struggled, believe it or not, finding poor people to interview. I only got 128, but I thought it was relevant enough sampling for me. I wasn't doing this for Princeton. I was doing it to try and answer a question that I had, which is why are people rich and why are people poor?

I took all of this information that I gathered through this 20 question list and I dumped it onto a bunch of Excel worksheets and I started categorizing it. It took about 18 months. Now I've got over 300 data points that I've tracked from my research that really tell the story, tell us a whole story about why you're rich and why you're poor.

I started doing these learning sessions. I have a conference room here in my office and you could fit about 10 to 12 people in it at night. I had about a dozen of those learning sessions. Some of the people had real success with some of the training from my research.

They asked me to write a book. I was reluctant because I'd never written a book before. I didn't know how to even go about it. That took another six months of research on how to write a book. That took me to Rich Habits. I ended up spending about a year writing Rich Habits.

I stumbled in the beginning. I had two manuscripts that I ended up throwing out and I settled on a template that I used was Aguilino's Greatest Salesman in the World. It was a great book. My initial template was The Millionaire Next Door. I had about 350 pages of graphs and data.

Someone whose opinion I value a great deal sent the manuscript back and said, "This is great for college students or postgraduate work, but you're not going to help anybody who really wants to change their life." He sent back the manuscript with a copy of Aguilino's book. I'd never read it before, so I read it and I realized, "Oh my God, this is what I really want to write." I kind of mirrored his book.

I used it as the format and Rich Habits was the end result. It's a good format for those who haven't read Greatest Salesman in the World. It's kind of a combination of what you call a parable. It's almost a story with a bit of instruction and an overall narrative parable and then a focused parable within a parable somehow.

I don't quite know how to name the genre, but it's a useful style. I think of even books similar in some ways to Richest Man in Babylon as a narrative format, but you're trying to use that to teach these certain steps. That's right. I wanted to tell a story and weave into the story the rich habits somehow and that's what I tried to do.

It's accessible. I want to ask you a follow-up question on your research. The way that I first came across – by the way, I really enjoyed both of your books. The way that I came across your name, though, however, was after you gave an interview on Dave Ramsey's show.

Then later he published a blog post that listed out some of the data from your research. Well, that blog post went on to become quite the controversial topic. That was when I came across it was after hearing about the controversy. When I read the blog post, though, everything within me wanted to jump up and down and say, "Yes, this is awesome." Just to cite a few example statistics of how this data is presented, things like 80% of the wealthy are focused on accomplishing some single goal.

Only 12% of the poor focus on a single goal. Or 63% of the wealthy listen to audio books during their commute to work versus 5% of poor people. Or 63% of wealthy parents make their children read two or more nonfiction books a month versus 3% of poor. There are many other data points that are cited.

My reaction to that was as a lifelong self-learner and someone who's been focused for a very long time on my own personal development, I wanted to jump up and down and say, "Yes, this is the greatest thing of all time for the personal development industry. Here's the data." That immediately made me become suspicious because of the ability to actually trust the data because it almost seems like too perfect of a package.

It feels more like you invented numbers to match a story rather than pulling a story out of the numbers. So, two questions for you. Number one, has anybody questioned or affirmed the statistical validity of your sample set? Secondly, did you go into it with a perception of thinking what you were going to find or did you approach it as a pure researcher?

On the first question, I have sent some data to different people, particularly after that CNN article came out that lambasted me and Dave Ramsey. They got so much wrong in that article. Welcome to modern life. Including my name. My name is Tom Corley, not Tim Corley. My brother Tim is a top dog at the DEA, so he wasn't too happy about that.

Anyway, it's hard for me to send the entire research because there's four -- I mean, it fills up an entire filing cabinet. What I was doing was sending out the research summary and some other information that I had that I knew would make it more accessible to people and easier to look at.

And then they wanted to know my demographics. I've got a hundred questions that people ask me and I tried to respond to each one of them. How many were white? How many were black? How many were -- what were the nationalities? How many were male? How many were female?

And I have all of that. And so, how much was their wealth? And I have all that. So, I sent all that stuff out as best as I could, which took a lot of time, but it was worth it. So, I did. There was a little bit of vetting going on there.

And the second part of your question was -- just repeat that again, Joshua. I was just saying, like, in the book, you talk about it using the narrative that you tell in the book as from the perspective of, "Well, I was starting to do the research to figure out what was wrong in my life as the accountant, your protagonist.

I was just curious if you were actually starting from that place yourself or if you were coming from a place of more experience and then kind of having an idea of what you would find and then actually digging into it." Well, you know, I think part of the problem is, one, I hated wealthy people when I started doing this research.

You know, because my story was we were rich and then we were poor and I spent most of my life in poverty. So I had a real -- just from growing up, my mother was the homemaker. And, you know, some of the things that through my upbringing that I -- some of the beliefs that I held were not too favorable to wealthy people.

I really didn't like them at all. So there was a prejudice there, which probably is contrary to what, like, CNN was thinking. So, you know, I think for sure that affected me. But what happened during this whole research project is I went from hating the wealthy people to admiring them.

And it was sort of catharsis for me because then I said, "Wow, you know, I've got this all backwards." I mean, I really -- I really grew up in a way that we had most of these poverty habits and we didn't have a lot of the rich habits. And so I was -- I don't know if that makes me objective or subjective, but it is what it is.

And the other part of it was I was a CPA and a financial planner, so I was in constant contact with wealthy people. And that part of it, you know, a lot of my best clients were my wealthy clients. You know, they were the nicest ones. They were the ones who were in constant contact with me, communication.

They weren't -- you know, the ones that I struggled with were the people in the middle class or who were trying to get out of the middle class who were constantly complaining about their fees and the time I spent on stuff. They were the ones that gave me the heartache, not the wealthy people.

So a lot of these things were kind of playing in my mind. And so when I wrote Rich Habits, I guess I had -- I was at that point where I had reached a conclusion that wealthy people weren't bad people after all and that this information needs to get out there because, you know, society, especially nowadays, everybody's beating up on the wealthy.

And they're, you know, with all that happened in 2008 and 2009, it didn't help. So I said, well, you know, I'm going to write a book about this. I'm just going to lay it out there and, you know, I don't know if I'm going to sell one book or a million books, but I'm just going to try and write something that I think is truthful.

But, you know, the other part of what you said is, you know, I have over 300 data points. And some of the data points, they don't fit the narrative necessarily that, you know, wealthy are this or poor are that. Some of them are pretty close. And so the only data points that the media picked up on or wanted to highlight were the ones that showed the big differences between the wealthy and the poor.

So I don't know if that helps explain it. Yeah, it's useful. And I'm sorry to lead off with an aggressive question. But as we get into the habits, I love the material that you presented so much. But I'm, as I already said, I was so immediately fearful of, wait a second, I love it too much.

I'm immediately suspicious of the objectiveness of it. Because all of the habits that you outline in the book are habits that I have learned over time from other people that I have been taught and that I've worked hard to implement. So it's easy to get into a position of confirmation bias of, well, I've already figured those out.

So absolutely, this is exactly what I'm looking for. So let me outline the habits real quick just for those who obviously haven't read the book. And just a summary from early in the book. I'll read just one paragraph here as a summary. That the summary of the Rich Habits promises is that I will form good daily habits and follow these good daily habits each and every day.

I will set goals for each day, for each month, for each year, and for the long term. I will focus on my goals each and every day. I will engage in self-improvement each and every day. I will devote part of each and every day in caring for my health.

I will devote part of each and every day to forming lifelong relationships. I will live each and every day in a state of moderation. I will accomplish my daily tasks each and every day. I will adopt a do-it-now mindset. I will engage in rich thinking each and every day.

I will save 10% of my gross income every paycheck. I will control my thoughts and emotions each and every day. Each of those is expanded in many chapters across the two books. But in looking at that list, it's certainly intuitive when you look at it and say, "Any person, starting from any place, if they would implement those habits consistently in the fullness of time, they're going to experience a massive change in their life." Yeah.

This is really the core of my research. It's the little things that you do every single day that change your life or create the life that you have. These little things are habits. They're the little habits that we have. Habits are, because they're unconscious, for the most part, they're unconscious activity.

In a book that I'm writing right now that's actually at the publisher, they're working on it, "Change Your Habits, Change Your Life," I get into a lot of neurogenesis, neuroplasticity, and how the brain works with respect to habits and how the habits can increase your intelligence and your IQ and things like that.

There's a lot of cool stuff that I'm unearthing from my research that ties into science and neurology. I think that I've really stumbled onto something profound. I know it's my calling in life. I'm going to be doing this until the day I die, whether I make any money on it or not.

How has your life changed since you started to understand the habits that your wealthy clients implemented and to implement them in your own life to a greater degree? I can tell you that there are two things that have changed dramatically for me. One is my weight. Some of the research had to do with health.

I didn't understand why wealthy people were healthy people, but they are. I found out why, because if you're healthy, you can make more money. You're more productive. You have fewer sick days. You can't make money out of a hospital bed. A lot of the wealthy people take care of their health.

Even before they're wealthy, they got into that habit. I was able to create something I call the tracking schedule. I call it my rich habits weight management system. I was able to go from 214 pounds in July of 2007 down to 174 pounds in February of 2008 just by tracking my calories in, calories out, and the amount of exercise.

That was one profound thing. I'm now very healthy. I'm at probably 185 to 190 pounds. I exercise every day. I watch what I eat. That's had a profound impact on me. The second thing is it shined a light on one of the things that wealthy people do, which is they create multiple streams of income.

Almost all the wealthy people in my study had three streams of income. Some had four. Some had five or more. What I started doing was that was just about when I got into financial planning. I said, "I'm going to go." The research made me realize that I had to add multiple streams of income, and financial planning was the first stream I added.

Then I started adding other streams. I started doing some of the training. That became an income stream. Some of the speaking engagements, that became an income stream. Of course, the royalties from the book, that's an income stream. Now I've got five streams of income, whereas before my research, I had one.

I think those two things have—my income's doubled. It's not by accident. I have a whole one stream of income that gives me half of my income and four streams of income that give me my other half. I think that, to me, was really important. I didn't know that wealthy people had multiple streams of income.

How has your personal self-development plan changed since this transformative research, since you started about seven, eight years ago? Now I wake up a quarter to five in the morning. I didn't before. I spend about an hour reading for learning. That was something I picked up in my research. In my business, I always had to do technical reading, but I never processed it, to be honest with you, Joshua.

I did my reading in bursts. I'd spend a Saturday and read for five hours or something like that. Wealthy people process their learning every day. I found about 30 minutes a day is what the wealthy devoted to learning. I said, "Well, if I do 60, maybe I'll get wealthier quicker." I've been doing that since 2006, I guess.

I read everything, anything and everything that has to do with learning. Right now, I'm reading books on history and on successful people. What I do is I read the books, and then I highlight the important sections. Then I sit down and I transcribe it onto a piece of paper, and I put it into a binder that I now call my fact binder.

That is helping me learn more and become more knowledgeable. It does have a positive impact on my life because now I'm able to converse with people on many subjects that I wasn't able to before. The exercise, I always was pretty good at exercise, but again, I didn't process it.

I was doing it in bursts. I'd do four months during the spring and the summer, and then I'd tail off and I wouldn't do it again. When I learned that wealthy people exercise every day, so now I do. The key is to do your exercise, not an enormous amount of exercise, but a little bit every day.

If you do a little bit every day, for me it's 30 minutes to 60 minutes every day. If you do a little bit, you'll do it every day. If you do too much or you put too much of a—where you're obligated to do too many, too much minutes, you're going to fall off.

There are days that I only do 25 minutes a day of aerobic exercise. There are days where I do an hour and a half that includes weightlifting now. I just incorporated that about a year and a half ago. I'm trying to stay as healthy as I can. I guess those are some of the benefits that I derive from the research.

When you wrote the book, had you previously or when you started the research, prior to starting the research, had you been publishing within your industry within the accounting field? Yeah, that's an important point. Good point. Most of my writing was technical. I'd write about IRAs. I'd write about SPIAs.

I'd write about tax issues, commodity traders, and all hosts of different things that were specifically related to my expertise. I guess I had the writing down in a sense that I knew how to write an article. It turns out I'm a pretty good writer. My grammar is good. I always knew that.

Even when I was writing the technical articles, I knew I had some good grammatical skills. I didn't always. I had to read a couple of grammar books so I could understand where commas go and where parentheses go and where the apostrophes go and all that stuff, quotes, commas, and that stuff.

But since I did my research and I started writing Rich Habits, I started doing more reading about grammar and writing skills. That's helped me. The reason I ask is what I was trying to figure out. Let me give you just my 30-second review of the books. I enjoyed both of them.

I preferred actually your second book, Rich Kids. Although I thought Rich Habits was good, in Rich Kids you brought together all of the rich habits but with much greater granularity. It's a very pithy book with many, many things that can be highlighted and many valuable lessons. It's one of those things where I constantly found myself saying, "Ah, he's including one idea here.

He just listed it in one sentence in the middle of a piece of dialogue, but this is a key idea that if somebody were to read this multiple times and they focused on this idea here brought artfully into the dialogue, just that idea alone is worth the price of admission times 100." I really thought it was extremely well-written.

What I'm most interested in, as is probably apparent from my questions, because the audience can read the books, what I'm most interested in is the changes in your life. You had so much personal development material in Rich Kids. It's fascinating for me to try to figure out how much came from the wealthy people that you talked to and how much came from what talking to the wealthy people caused you to do which was to up your personal development regimen and then finding all of the many other ideas that have been well-written about by personal development authors.

Do you have a sense as to the varying impact of the changes in your own personal habits versus the wealthy people's input? Yeah, I'll be honest with you. I would say probably 30% of the interviews that I did with the wealthy people were in-person interviews. The rest were either primarily on the phone, but the in-person interviews had more of an impact on me when I was sitting across from them.

I guess a good example is this one individual who was 67 years old. He was worth about $17 million and he's still working, Joshua. I asked him the question, I said, "Why are you still working? You have $17 million. You could be traveling, you could be enjoying your life and doing fun things." He looked at me like I was crazy.

You can only get that when you're sitting across from someone. They're body language, right? He looked at me like I was crazy. I'll be honest with you, I felt like I was an idiot for asking the question the way he looked at me. He said, "Look, I've been exercising for 45 years.

I've been watching what I eat." He was probably 5'9" and 140 pounds or something. He said, "I did all of that because I knew at the end of my career, that would be when I made the most money. I was trying to squeeze an extra four or five years out of my career." The impact that that had on me was, "Oh my God, I've really got to exercise more and take care of my health more." Because he's right, I'm going to make more money at the end of my career than probably the last four years or five years of my career, I'll make more money than I made in my first 20 years.

How old are you now? I'm 54. Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. Dr. Andrew Hill: So that's when I said I'm—I was all in after that. After he said that, that's when I started creating the Rich Habits Weight Management Program and I started processing my workout routine and started watching what I ate.

I don't think I would have had the same impact if I was talking to him on the phone. So yeah, I would tell you that the face-to-face meetings, they had the most impact on me and they altered my behavior the most. And of course, they worked their way into my research but the impact was already there before the research was done.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The lesson I'd like to focus on from what you just shared is there's nothing that you have done that any person listening to my voice can't do themselves. One of the success habits that I've tried to have over the years is to always invest a certain percentage of my income back into my own personal development.

My numbers have fluctuated from anywhere from a few percent to 10%. But when you look and say, "Okay, if we use as a good example the 10% number and we say how can I invest 10% of my income back into myself which is in my opinion a far better investment to start with than buying mutual funds, then all of a sudden when you have a budget, it leads you to the question of what do I do.

So in the early years, I might be reading a book. But one of the habits that I've tried to implement is consistently connecting with anybody that I admired, whether that was somebody that I admired for their financial success, I knew they were wealthy, whether it was somebody I admired their character, and just set aside a lunch budget and take that person out to lunch.

And almost anybody will be happy to be invited out to a nice place for lunch and be asked to talk about themselves obviously if it's clear that there's no ulterior motive other than to learn. And what has emerged from my doing that is feeling like when I was reading your book, you had all the same conversations that I've had.

You learned all the same things that I've learned from other people that I've talked to and the reality is success is simple. It's not easy but it's simple. It's a matter of implementing a systematic process, some core habits, some key ideas and then giving enough time for those actions to lead to the ultimate effect that you are expecting.

And so I've zeroed in. I don't know if you've given I'm sure many interviews but I've zeroed in more on your story than the content of your books because what I perceived in reading your books was that this was a very transformative experience for you and it's something that every listener can model and repeat and duplicate themselves.

Yeah, you know, that's a great point. I was just thinking about this over the last couple of months because my mindset now before I worried about everything. I worried about primarily my business. I worried about my family. I thought about these worries as a negative thinking, right? And when I started talking to all these wealthy people, Joshua was as if they didn't have a problem in the world and I thought, "My God, isn't it great to be wealthy where you have no problems?" But that wasn't the case.

They had probably ten times the amount of things to worry about that I had because they had four or five streams of income. They had to worry about each of those streams, right? But what they got into the habit of doing was what now I call positive thinking or rich thinking.

They stopped thinking negative thoughts. And I just wrote a great piece on that this morning. My tip of the morning to you was unhealthy thoughts. And it's with all the stuff that's going on in the news with Donald Trump and McCain and the Iraq, the Iran nuclear thing and all these murders going on, all these riots.

You know, I see on social media all these people, you can tell that they're ticked off and they're going at each other. And that used to be me. And now I look at it and I said, "These people are just wasting their time. They're thinking about things that they can't possibly control." And I think that's the main point.

What the wealthy people worried about, if they were worrying, was only about the things that were within their control. The things that the circumstances that they could have control over. They didn't worry about all these other things that all of us think about and that cause worry and that cause stress and that creates, you know, the cortisol production and unhealthy living.

So I've been thinking about the last three months because my mindset right now is, I feel like I'm almost worry free. And I believe this is absolutely a byproduct of all this research and these people that I've been exposed to. I would say you have good reason, not only just from the mental perspective, but you have good reason to feel fewer worries.

And certainly there are always going to be problems. The richer you get and the older you get, it seems to me, the bigger your problems get. But with regard to the worries, if you think about the transformation that's happened in your life and in your career, to go from a respected accountant to leading a larger financial planning firm with multiple areas of business to establishing a personal brand that goes beyond your professional capacity, that just gives you so many more backup options and backup plans that if your business fell apart, just even the personal network that you've developed from your publishing work gives you a whole host of opportunities that would not exist if you were a staff accountant at a large international tax firm.

Yeah, I think that the important point to highlight here is, without me really knowing it, I was pursuing what is now my main purpose in life, teaching these rich habits and continuing this work that I'm doing. And I think that's part of the reason why I feel so mentally content.

I found my calling in life. And I think when you find your calling in life, when you pursue that thing that you're passionate about, I really think it transforms your mind from negative to positive just almost by default because what you're doing is you're stoking the fires inside of you.

The passion doesn't go away. It gets bigger when you pursue your main purpose in life. So I think that part of the reason I'm content is I now know I'm doing what I'm going to be doing until the day I die. How many of us can say that? Most of us, 95%, aren't crazy about their job.

In fact, in my research, only 7% actually loved their job, even the wealthy, 7% of the wealthy, only 7% loved what they did for a living. But I'm telling you I love what I'm doing with this rich habits and I feel that that's because it's my main purpose and it's the reason I'm feeling worry-free right now because I'm doing what I was intended to do.

How much is your personal vision? And we can think about this and you pick which of these you want to answer, but your personal vision, and let's talk about it in the context of your own personal financial plan, your own numbers on paper, what you project for your own life, or just think about it with your own future mirror letter to the 70-year-old you, the 80-year-old you, the 90-year-old you or your obituary.

How much has your personal vision changed over the last 10 years? Oh, it's completely different. Prior to this, I felt, well, I was very good at taxes and I liked taxes, but it wasn't something I loved. I mean, let's be honest, you're preparing tax returns, you're dealing with usually stressful situations, so there's all of that that goes into the tax career.

I think that because my whole mindset shifted when I started pursuing this, it's of course improved my life financially, and now what I'm thinking about is, okay, I'm going to make some moves in my life. Some of the things that I've always wanted to do, my wife and I used to live down by the shore, the Jersey Shore, so we're going to end up selling our house and we're going to move down by the Jersey Shore.

That's something we always wanted to do. I could never afford to do it before. Now I'm having some success in life and I'm getting close to being able to afford to do that. I'm feeling that I'm going to have a retirement now. I didn't feel confident about that before.

I feel confident about a lot of things, I guess is the main point that I wasn't confident about before because I know I'm on the right path. You just know it, Joshua. It's not something that if you have to ponder whether or not you're on the right path, you're not.

I can tell you that because I don't think about it anymore. I know this is the right path and I know I'm going to benefit. When you help other people improve their lives, you derive a benefit from it. Oftentimes, it's financial. I'm confident now that this is just going to grow.

I'm going to help more and more people. I'm going to make more and more money. My success is going to increase incrementally over the next 20 or 30 years. I'm tickled pink that I'm in the situation that I'm in right now. When I read Rich Kids, and the premise of the book is the narrative that you used is a father on his way to college with his son recounting some early childhood experiences that the father had had with his grandfather back in the early 1980s.

It's this cross-generational narrative. When I was reading it, I had the distinct impression that you were writing the vision for your life at 67 years old and you were writing about the summer that you intend to have with your grandson. You were clearly identifying each of the personal goals and the personal lifestyle that you're interested in developing for yourself.

Am I right? You are spot on. You hit the nail on the head. What's interesting about what you just mentioned is this. Most of us, we're kind of like leaves. I write about it in Rich Habits. We're kind of like leaves on a fall day, just kind of floating around.

When I wrote Rich Habits, and also Rich Kids, but Rich Habits got me started on this, I said I'm going to write the main character. It's going to be a future version of me. J.C. Jobs is really the future version of me. When I wrote Rich Kids, you were exactly right.

I was thinking about my grandkids and teaching them and instilling in them, mentoring them through all these habits and these strategies. It's much easier. Where I'm going with this is where you can benefit from this is if you just sit down and write a 500 to 1,000 word narrative on the future version of yourself, the ideal perfect future Joshua Sheets, it gets your subconscious mind working behind the scenes.

It starts nudging you. We have this thing called intuition. It starts nudging you with intuition on, "Hey Joshua, you should do X or you should do Y or don't do this or don't do that." It's almost like a GPS. It starts moving you in a different direction, but it all starts with crafting a narrative of your ideal future life.

I think that's the most important thing you can do. It's a beautiful, even just your vision is a beautiful vision. I found it's in many ways similar to some of my visions. I've never published them. What you describe is a grandfather being able to take an entire summer and just experience this incredible joy-filled summer with his grandson.

That involves the grandfather showing his grandson and his grandson's friend around the country in an incredible lifestyle, able to easily afford all of these peak experiences. Everything is fully connected. It's the peak experiences of a helicopter ride over New York City or an RV trip through the Shenandoah Mountains to go and get the best burger in the world from New Orleans.

All the time, it's done with health and vitality. It's one of those visions that's compelling. When I compare that to the vision that many people have, at least what I've worked with in financial planning, many people have a vision that's so boring, there's no ability for it to compel them to anything.

With you have a small vision, there's small motivation to actually get up and do anything to put the vision into practice. I found it to be inspiring because in many ways, it mirrors some of my own vision. It's a retirement years that aren't retirement at all, but it's something that's worth looking forward to instead of this horrifying US-American archetype that we have of age being something to be feared and dreaded.

Why is it that our end game is retirement and then doing nothing, when what it should be is pursuing something that you're passionate about until the day you die? That's what J.C. Jobs did. He was still at the age of 67 and teaching and educating, and he was doing it around the country.

He was never going to stop. That's the way I feel. I think that when you create, most people, like you said, lack a vision of where they want to go. Their vision might be just that they're going to retire, but what happens after that? You die. If your vision is real enough to you, it's going to alter your behavior.

It's going to change the course of your life, and I think you're spot on. Most people don't create a vision for their ideal perfect life, and as a result, their vision is limited to retiring. I'd like to dig deeper on one of the pieces of research, one of the wealth habits that you have listed in your book.

In my experience, I personally began in the professional world of financial planning at the age of 23, following years and years of consuming personal finance suggestions. What I thought was the path to wealth was to save and invest heavily in my retirement accounts and to always put a portion of my money aside and to invest it appropriately in a diversified portfolio of mutual funds, because that was what the personal finance books recommended to me.

When I started working as a financial planner and had the opportunity to be face-to-face over six years in the trenches with over a thousand people, many of whom were wealthy, I started to notice a trend, and the trend was the fact that none of my wealthy clients ever became wealthy because of saving 10% of their income.

Rather, they actually became wealthy because they had built a business that was extremely valuable or they had developed an extremely high income so that when they naturally saved a percentage of their income, the compounding effect of 10% of a $400,000 income was so massive that they almost couldn't help but become wealthy.

My question is I concur absolutely that saving is an important discipline because of who it can transform you to be and because it can provide the capital to be able to build future businesses, to invest in future opportunities. But in your research, did you ever find that anybody who is wealthy actually became wealthy through what's taught on the front page of Yahoo Finance or CNN Money, put 10% of your money into a Roth IRA, buy an index fund in it and leave it alone for 50 years?

Or did you find that the majority of the wealthy had achieved it through private business and a very high income? >>John: Yeah, boy, that is a great question. Well, 51% of the wealthy in my study were business owners and 177 of them were self-made millionaires, meaning they came from nothing.

But there were a good percentage that-- I'm thinking of one individual right now who was an attorney and he worked most of his life for the government, which you don't make a lot of money, right? But what he did that was different is he didn't invest in mutual funds and stuff like that.

He invested in individual stocks. And then he would reinvest-- there were two individuals in my study who did this. And so he has now-- well, at the time, he had about $4 million in stock that he probably invested $400,000 in over the years just by living below his means and just investing in those stocks.

The other guy was a little bit lower than $4 million. So they did it that way. But the vast majority of the individuals in my study who were wealthy, where the savings came into play was to give them just what you said, the seed capital to start a business and to do something with that money, whether it was start a business or real estate or invest it in some way that created a revenue stream before they were retired.

So they were investing their savings and then doubling down on it, and they just built an empire essentially. So there's two ways. There's really three ways that you can become wealthy. This is really-- it boils down to three things, in my opinion. You either live below your means, you either expand your means, or you do both.

And the ones that made the most money or had the most net worth of all the millionaires were the ones that were doing both. They had gotten into the habit of living below their means and saving. And then they expanded their means. They took their money and they invested it in something, and they just persistently pursued it until they were successful.

So I think the savings is important, but if you really want to get rich, if you really want to be wealthy, you've got to deploy that savings in a way that's going to involve risk. I'll give you a-- I love-- I think that's a good model. I'll give you my model.

I'm working on a manuscript of the Radical Personal Finance book. And I've boiled it down into three essential functions. And these are the functions that will ultimately guarantee, no question about it, determine how much wealth you have. Number one is the amount of your income. Number two is the amount of your expenses.

And number three, the rate of return that you earn on the difference. And there are two more pieces to the model, but they don't-- they're not numerical components. If you look at each wealthy person, you can create a formula for wealth regardless of the numbers of theirs as long as the income are in excess of the-- as long as income is in excess of the expenses.

But if you want a fast-- if you want a fast growth to wealth or if you want to achieve massive wealth, you need to really amp up one or more of those categories, ideally all three except that usually most people don't do all three. But if you could have the highest income possible and you could have the lowest expenses possible and you could invest at the highest rate of return that's ever been achieved, guaranteed you're going to achieve massive wealth quickly.

Hard to do all three of those things well, which is often why you see people focusing on one or the other. And so the long, slow route to wealth, the people are taught, get a good job, earn $60,000 a year, save $6,000 a year in your IRA from 25 to 65 and earn 8% annualized on your funds.

Yes, that will make you a millionaire over the course of a 40-year process. But if you take the same $60,000 income and you drop it to $20,000 a year of expenses, so now you're able to invest $40,000 a year at the same 8%, now you move into the world of early retirees, of the extreme frugality folks of which this show speaks and we speak a lot of that language.

Pretty reliable thing to do if you can discipline yourself to live on very low expenses. Or if you're more attracted to the business route, which is the main way, I want to emphasize 177 of the people that you – excuse me, 51% of the wealthy that you interviewed were business owners.

If you go to the general population and you compare that 51% number to whatever the number percentage is in the population of actual business owners, you'll see that why the massive amounts of wealth are concentrated in the hands of entrepreneurs. But back to the model, you can also earn $60,000 a year and spend $50,000 a year and then you can create an app that grows at annualized returns of hundreds of percents a year.

There you have a situation of a Mark Zuckerberg or those types of people or you can create a business that grows at say 30% to 50% a year and there you have your local car dealer and it takes a little longer than Mark Zuckerberg but over time that person is growing.

So what I love about your books and that's a long-winded compliment to kind of further the discussion is that you brought together the personal development side and the business side with some of the financial concepts. I hope that in your future writing you continue that especially given your background as an accountant and a financial planner.

We need more of that in the financial planning industry. We need a lot less here's how you choose between an IRA and a Roth IRA. When you look at the facts which are the vast majority of Americans are broke and they're never going to retire and we've been repeating the same tired problem for 30, 40, 50 years, we'll just invest money in the stock market into your IRA.

The reality is it doesn't work. It's not that it can't work, it can work if you reliably do consistently do it but the vast majority of people have shown that they're not going to do it so therefore it doesn't work except for a very small percentage. But these other strategies put together when you combine personal development and strong personal habits and then you go ahead and say well what's a tax efficient and cost efficient way of investing and I'm going to allocate some of my investments over here into passive investments that aren't connected to whether or not my General Motors franchise succeeds or fails because GM has a massive recall, then you get into wise financial planning which is where we can really help and serve the public.

Yeah, everything you said I agree with. I think that's why I'm really trying to get this information out there because having been rich as a kid and then grown up poor, it's clear to me that most people are doing it wrong. In fact, my mother, I just went to visit my mother who's in a rehabilitation facility on Sunday.

She's reading my book Rich Kids and she said you know I feel bad because I didn't teach you any of this stuff and I said I know. That's why I struggled for so many years. I said I'm trying to help other families so that their kids don't have to struggle like I did and we did in my family.

I said it's all about education, Joshua. It's actually what it boils down to is parenting. If parents take on the responsibility of even if they're non-millionaire parents, take on the responsibility of teaching their kids some of these good habits and these good strategies, they will put their kids ahead of the eight ball because their competition isn't learning this stuff.

I'm seeing it right now with my son who just is into his third year working. He's knocking it out of the park. He's my guinea pig because while I was doing this research, I would come home and I would say, "Brendan, you got to do this," or "Brendan, you got to do that." He's the first one out of the gate.

He's knocking it out of the park. I'm not kidding. He's doing so well. He's doing everything I told him to do because now when you get college kids, it's hard to teach them anything. When they get out in the work world, they realize, "Oh, it's not that easy. There are certain rules you got to follow." He's now realizing a lot of stuff that I taught him is going to help him in his professional career.

He's using it and he's having success. I wish I could just get inside the head of every parent in this country and give them the same sense of importance that I feel that this stuff deserves. I think too many of them are too busy watching the Kardashians or Bruce Jenner or whatever you call them now, Caitlyn Jenner, and they're not interested in doing the things you need to do in order to succeed in life.

Tom: Other than reading your book, I want to give you a couple of minutes and just share some ideas of where a parent listening who's looking at their son or daughter and saying, "I want to really help my son or daughter with some education that's helpful," what would be some of the core ideas that you would like them to teach to their kids and how would they go about doing that at a young age?

Dr. Fauci: One of the great stories is Dr. Ben Carson. He grew up in the ghettos of Detroit and he had a brother and it was a single parent. His mom raised them. She used to clean the houses of wealthy people and she used to listen in on their conversations and watch what they did.

One of the things she noticed is that they all read every single day they read. They read for education. She came back and she said, "No more TV," and in today's society that would mean cut back on social media and on your cell phone, watching YouTube and wasting your time, and start reading.

Start reading to learn. She made her two sons read every single day. They were only allowed to watch an hour of TV a day and it was specific programming. Parents need to take a little bit more responsibility over the media that their kids are consuming. That's one thing. Then make their kids read every day for education.

That's the second thing. We know what happened with Ben Carson. He became one of the top neurosurgeons in the world. His brother, by the way, is doing very well. He's an engineer with Boeing. He makes a good living and he's very successful. This stuff works, so parents need to really limit the consumption of TV and social media that the kids are taking in and force them to do a little bit more reading.

One thought on the social media that ties into an earlier thread is if you, if anybody listening, if you're like me, where you want to get involved in online discussions, I can read just about anything and want to jump in and argue with somebody. I made a commitment with the exception I break it once a month or so and then I realized the futility of my ways.

I made a commitment to say, "Instead of being a consumer of this stuff and arguing about it with other consumers, I'm going to be a producer of thought." It is not possible to argue in a Facebook comment thread and spend an hour on a political debate to actually change anybody else's mind.

All you do is make yourself temporarily feel better because you got involved in an argument. But if you sit down and go ahead and take the time to do what Tom has done with his writing or do what I've done with my podcast and actually create some useful content, there you have the opportunity to actually influence people.

That one will actually change your life over time. So that's what I'm going to be teaching my kids is let's work on your skills so you can create actual original thought. Tom, last question for you. At the end of your book Rich Kids, you talk about the eight core fears and those eight fears are number one, the fear of failure, number two, the fear of success, number three, the fear of rejection, number four, the fear of not being good enough, five, the fear of scarcity, six, the fear of being alone, seven, the fear of losing control and eight, the fear of being different or standing out.

In your discussions with poor people, which of those fears stood out as being more dominant than others and what would be some strategies that you've learned to work against those to learn to overcome them? Yeah, I think the fear of standing out is one of the things that is the worst.

It's the one of the worst fears, in my opinion, because it stops you dead in your tracks. And I talk a lot about this and I write a lot about it. I call it the herd doctrine. We are all as human beings. We have this, I guess, this evolutionary need to herd and it's built in.

It's hardwired into all of us. There's safety in numbers. So what I found that the wealthy people, what the most successful wealthy people, what they did is they separated themselves from the herd somehow. Mark Zuckerberg did this. The guys from Google did it. So did Steve Jobs. They put themselves out there and usually they're all alone for some period of time while they're investing their time and trying to be successful.

And while they're doing that, they are separated from the herd and they're vulnerable. And it's a very real fear. And in fact, there was a candid camera episode where they did this, the prank, where four people entered an elevator and one person was a stranger and four people were candid camera pranksters.

And they would turn around periodically and eventually the stranger would turn around with them. There's this need to follow the herd that we need to, this fear of being alone and not being part of the herd that we need to break free of if we want to take ourselves to the next level.

When you separate yourself from the herd, that's when you grow into a completely different person. So what you really want to do is try and find some product or service that's unique, that not everybody else is pursuing. And if you believe in it, pursue it, you're going to be on your own for a little while.

But eventually, if you're persistent, you're going to draw some people into your herd and then you'll create your own herd and have enormous success. I forgot I had one more topic and question I wanted to ask you about. So this is going to be the actual last question. I heard through the grapevine and some mutual acquaintances that when you had written Rich Habits, you had done a lot of work, but then it was just really struggling and you had gotten to a point where you thought about kind of throwing in the towel to some degree or another.

And then a few things happened and then all of a sudden some events occurred and it was a large success. What was the story behind that when you were facing dark days and it felt like it simply wasn't working? And what happened that changed that for you? Well, you know, this book business, this author business, it's a business first and foremost.

I mean, it's like you're starting a new business. And as in many cases, when you're starting a new business, when it's something that you've never done before, you don't know what you don't know. And one of the things that I learned about the author business is that 99 percent of the business is about promoting yourself.

It's about getting media attention. I didn't know that. It took me a while to figure that out. I thought you put out something great and people will automatically through grassroots or whatever, start buying your books. That's not how it happens. That's a very rare instance. So I started to when I realized that somebody pointed it out to me, a famous author.

And so I started pursuing the media. And I honestly, Joshua, I hate pitching the media. I love doing media interviews like what we're doing right now. I love this. This is my sweet spot. But I hate pitching them and I hate pursuing it. So but it's one of these things that in life, when you're pursuing something you're passionate about.

You know, 75 percent of what you're going to do, you're not going to like. But it's the 25 percent that really gives you that passion that keeps you in the game. And so I was almost fed up in 2000 and 11 and 12. I was really at the point where I was going to quit and stop promoting rich habits.

And I wasn't going to stop writing books. I was just going to not promote it anymore because I didn't know what I was doing and it was too hard. But I couldn't stop myself. And I kept persisting. And I think it was because I was that 25 percent just kept me going.

And then all of a sudden it was like a watershed event, you know, three years of nothing and then two years of nothing but media attention. And it all started because of being persistent and tweeting. I did it every day like I was brushing my teeth. I hated every minute of it.

I did it an hour every day. I tweeted. I wrote a book. I wrote articles. I pitched it to the media through email. I call it my daily five. I did five pitches a day. Hated every minute of it. And then after a couple of years, I got somebody to respond.

Farnoosh Torabe from Yahoo Finance. They did an interview with me here in 2013. It went viral. We had two million hits on the video in 24 hours. They never had more than 400,000 hits ever on this show. And then Dave Ramsey picked it up. Next thing I know, I'm on Dave Ramsey's show.

Next thing I know, CBS is interviewing me. MSN is interested in me. It just went on and on. It hasn't stopped. But it all happened because I did not quit. I did not quit on my dream, even though I wanted to and I came close to it. I persisted.

And this is an important point. The people who succeed in life, they never quit. They will go bankrupt before they quit. And I think that's an important line to draw in the sand. If you're really dedicated to what you're doing, it means you're willing to risk everything for it.

And I'm at that point right now that it doesn't matter what happens with the rest of my life. I'm going to be doing this to the day I die, even if it forces me into bankruptcy, which it won't. But I'm going to be doing it because I realize this is my passion and that's what I learned from wealthy people.

They just don't quit on their dreams. Lewis: I love it. The two books are Rich Habits and Rich Kids. The website is richhabits.net. You write a tip of the day and then a tip of the week. And so I'd encourage people to consider going over and subscribing there. And then when does the third book come out?

Fischer: It's going to come out the end of October, early November. And it's called Change Your Habits, Change Your Life. And in it, I talk about habit change, but also I get more into the rich habits, particularly with respect to the 177 self-made millionaires. Lewis: Awesome. Put me on the publicity list if you like when you get ready for pre-orders and we'll try to help you get a little bit of publicity when it's closer to launch date.

That would be awesome. Tom, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate the time. It's been a joy to talk with you. Fischer: Thanks for having me on. And there were great questions and I really enjoyed the interview, Joshua. Lewis: I told you it was a cool story, huh?

So now, here's the reading recommendations for you. Get Tom's books. They're available on Kindle. That's how I read them. You can get the hardback if you want. But these, well, actually, you know what? These are good hardbacks to get. The Rich Kids, especially. And if you're going to read one of the two, if you're trying to figure out which of these two to read, read Rich Kids.

That's the one that I preferred more. But both of them are useful. They're just a little bit different. So check out the books. They're very pithy. Rich Kids, especially, extremely pithy. And I think that if you're a parent, this is definitely one of those that would be valuable for you to read to think about, "How do I guide my children?" Success habits are not an accident.

They are learnable and teachable. And if you learn them later in life, don't you think it might be worthwhile to focus on how you learn them and then teach them consciously to your children at a young age? I think it's a worthwhile pursuit. As we go today, before I kick off the music, I want to recognize the sponsor of the day.

And the sponsor of today is Audible. Now you're very familiar with Audible. They're everywhere in terms of their marketing footprint. And here is no exception. I've done an exhaustive study of the audiobook marketplace and Audible is, in my opinion, the best audiobook provider. If you're interested in details on that, check out episode 219 of the show for a survey of the marketplace.

But here's one thing I want to emphasize. And in Tom Corley's book, Rich Habits, he talks about rich habit number three, which is I will engage in self-improvement every day. And let me read you an excerpt from the book. Successful people engage in the process of self-improvement every day.

They read industry periodicals and technical material specific to their profession or trade. They become students of their industry, profession, or trade and keep current with changes that occur. They do not spend excessive amounts of non-work time watching television or surfing the internet. Successful people read for self-improvement. They are perpetual students.

Each day, they devote blocks of time to better themselves by studying subject matter that will improve them in some way and better enable them to perform their jobs. Time is too valuable to be wasted on matters with no tangible value. They coordinate their goals with self-improvement and set specific goals.

This may involve obtaining an additional license, a degree, or developing a new niche for their business. They are continuously engaged in some constructive project to increase their skill sets, promote their business or careers, keep their minds sharp, or expand their business prospects. Unsuccessful people are not students of their industry, profession, or trade.

They do not routinely follow their industry. They do not regularly read industry periodicals. They would rather spend hours each day watching television or engaged in junk reading. They use rationalization to justify their negligence in improving themselves. It involves engaging in some activity every day that will improve your mind and expand your knowledge to better your career.

This is one of the core habits of wealth and success, and it's a habit that I believe that throughout our entire lifetimes, we need to continue to implement and develop and perfect. But you need a strategy because there is so much material that you need to learn and study, and it's impossible to learn and read and consume it all.

So we need a strategy. Let's say that you're going to set aside 30 minutes a day for reading. Well, 30 minutes a day for reading comes out to three hours a week. That's pretty good. You could read, book a week at that rate, depending on your reading speed, book every week or two weeks.

But is that the best use of that 30 minutes of focused self-development time? It might be. But remember that there are many materials that you should keep current on that are simply not available in an audio format, and so you'll want to choose those materials to consume during that morning time.

That would be things like your industry trade journals, your industry publications, keeping current on the latest research that's being published in your industry. Now some of that might be available in an audio format. There might be an industry podcast. If there's not, you should have started one by now.

If there is, you might be able to consume it in the industry podcast format. However, that's going to be good material for reading. If you're pursuing an additional license or degree, that's going to be good material for reading. So take some of the books that you would ordinarily read and move them over to audiobooks.

Now unfortunately, I wish that Rich Habits and Rich Kids were available in an audiobook format, but they're not. So Tom Corley, what are you doing? Get your audiobooks published. I'm sure there's some story to it for the reason that they're not there. If they aren't, then those would be excellent books.

But audiobook, Audible recommendation of the day today is get the book The Richest Man in Babylon in audiobook format. And this is a good one to own. The other book that Tom mentioned, The Greatest Salesman in the World, is also excellent. I've listened to the audiobook version of that, but it's not available on Audible.

You might be able to find it somewhere else. Believe I listened to it years ago from the library. And when I was an initial sales—no, I own it. I have it somewhere in my files. So I bought it at some point. It's just not available now. When I was early in my sales career with Northwestern Mutual, I would listen to that book over and over and over again.

And if you've ever heard the book, you'd know why. If you're a salesperson, it's very encouraging and motivating. But get the book The Richest Man in Babylon. And this is a good one to buy. Pick a narrator that you like. There are about four different narrators available on Audible.

Pick a narrator whose voice you like and whose style you enjoy. And then use it and burn CDs for all the young people in your life. The Richest Man in Babylon is a fable. It's a parable. It's not a fable. It's a parable. And it's a story that's very digestible.

Now, it's a bit old-fashioned in style. I personally enjoy that. You might run across people who don't. So that's why we need newer versions of this type of literature. But I think this is a good one to give to people to start them off with personal finance. So buy a copy of The Richest Man in Babylon with your Audible subscription.

Burn it on a CD and share that with the young people in your life. And hopefully, you'll be able to set them on the right path. If you'd like to support the show, I would appreciate it if you would use the website RadicalAudioBooks.com. Go to RadicalAudioBooks.com, "books" with an "s" on the end, RadicalAudioBooks.com.

You can get a free month on Audible and you'll be able to get a free audiobook of your choice with your one-month trial subscription. If you choose to continue, it's $14.95 a month and you get a book a month with that price. You can get a free audiobook at RadicalAudioBooks.com.

So consider making Richest Man in Babylon your choice. Thank you all so much for listening today. I appreciate your time and attention. I hope this content was interesting to you. As we go, I'm going to again point your attention to Tom's story. Recognize that there's nothing that he did that I can't do and there's nothing that he did that you can't do and there's nothing that he's doing now that you and I can't do.

You can interview all the rich people in your life and you should. Take some of your education budget which you have established in your budget and use it on taking rich people out to lunch. Take anybody out to lunch that you admire for some reason. Financial riches are one component of a life of success but there are many other components.

If there's somebody that you admire how they treat other people or you admire their heart and their generous attitude or you admire their relationship with their spouse or you admire for their parenting ability or you admire for their academic accomplishment and achievements or you admire for their place of respect in the community or you admire for their spiritual vitality and insight, it doesn't matter.

If there's somebody that you admire, invite them out for lunch. Just tell them I'm interested in asking you some questions and learning about this. A couple appetizers, a couple meals, a couple of drinks and maybe some dessert, always a good idea to stretch those meetings as long as you can reasonably do it to get as much out of a person as you can.

It's a good use of your education dollars and essentially that's what Tom Corley did. Take good notes and you might find yourself writing a book. You might find yourself writing a book which would then expand your career, get you featured all around in the world, can allow you to be an encouragement and help to many other people.

So consider copying him. The other thing is read Rich Kids and look at Tom's vision for his life as a grandfather. That vision is powerful, a lot more powerful than this idea of I'm going to drop out of life at 65 and sit around and be a hermit and play shuffleboard in Florida.

Don't do that. Thank you all so much for listening. If you'd like to support the show, please also in addition to going to RadicalAudioBooks.com and signing up for an Audible trial subscription, please go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. That's where you can directly patronize the show and send me money in exchange for the work.

If you've received value, consider sending me some money. I'd appreciate it very much. RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. Cheers, y'all. Sweet Hop is an online marketplace curating the best in premium seating at stadiums, arenas, and amphitheaters nationwide. With Sweet Hop's 100% ticket guarantee, no hidden fees, and the personal high-level service you expect with a premium purchase, you can relax knowing you'll receive the luxury experience you deserve.

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