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That's FijiAirways.com. From here to happy. Flying direct with Fiji Airways. Need a little motivation on your get out of debt plan? On your financial independence plan? Today I've invited Casey Lewis on the show and he's going to share with us some ideas and strategies that have been helpful to him as he and his family have dramatically transformed their financial lives.

Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Thank you for being with me. This is the show where each and every day I try to work hard to bring you some ideas and some strategies that will be helpful to you. Some content that will make a difference on your earning, on your spending, on your planning, on your strategy, that will help you clarify your path to financial independence and then crush that thing.

That's what we're about here. And today we're going to do all of those things. I'm going to deliver to you on some ideas, some inspiration and some strategy with my guest. My guest Casey Lewis is a really awesome guy. He runs a financial blog, has some financial coaching work that he does.

And one of the coolest things is just simply his breadth of knowledge and information. He's involved in real estate and just a very diverse guy. When I was researching different potential guests to invite on the show prior to attending the Podcast Movement Conference, which is where this interview was recorded, Casey stood out to me as somebody that I definitely wanted to have on the show.

And I think you're really going to enjoy this interview. We talk about a lot of different things. Specifically some conversation I think is probably the most interesting to me was about goal setting. And I'm going to be doing a lot more on goal setting in the future. But as a little teaser, here's the interview with Casey.

Casey, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Hey, George. Glad to be here. So I've invited you on today. I wanted to talk with you about some of your perspectives and some of the things that you've learned with regard to money. One of the things that I love to do with Radical Personal Finance is not always talk to everyone who is an expert, but also talk to people who've come from just a normal walk of life and hear their stories.

So I'd love for you to share with me a little bit about your story. Yeah, sure thing. So I got involved in personal finance and helping people with money by accident because I was an idiot. And I went to college at Dallas Baptist University, didn't have any idea what I wanted to do.

And made a bunch of really bad financial decisions as far as student loans and taking the student loan refund check and buying golf clubs with them instead of... That's a perfect use for student loan checks. Like that was when I first got my Mac computer and all of that stuff.

So went through that, got married right outside of college, had a really good job. My wife had a really good job. We had a fantastic income. We worked really, really hard, spent a whole bunch of money that we didn't have, bought a house that we couldn't afford, bought cars that we couldn't afford, financed everything that we could.

And as long as we were able to have our really, really good income, we could afford those minimum payments and everything was fine. Never missed a payment. All that was good. And then all of a sudden, we both lost our jobs within 30 days of each other and life kind of sucked.

The stock market crashed and the real estate market tanked and both of our businesses were very tied to those industries. This was 2008. And you were one of the ones where both family members lost you. I lost my job. I was laid off. My company laid off about 3,000 people.

And 30 days later, my wife was in real estate working for a real estate company and they laid her off 30 days later. What was that day like when she came home and said, "That's it"? I was just, "Okay, cool." And I had an idea. I'd been involved in the real estate market but wasn't full force.

And I was like, "You know what? Job market's tough. I'm just going to start up in real estate at the worst possible time to start up in real estate." As an agent? Yeah, as an agent. We crashed and we fought off it. We did everything we could to avoid bankruptcy and foreclosure and repossession and everything we could.

We sold everything that we owned. So all the cars, all the furniture, our house went down. We had nothing in the house. A small baby at home. I would work in real estate full time during the day and at night I would deliver pizzas. And when I wasn't delivering pizzas, I would work as a janitor cleaning toilets at our church.

And when I didn't have anything going there, I would put ads on Craigslist to fix fences or do manual labor or install light fixtures. My wife got a job at Steinmart working. And we hustled. And we got rid of the debts that we had. We didn't file bankruptcy. We didn't have to go through foreclosure.

You short sale the house? We still own our house to this day. Oh, wow. So you were a little boy then. And our income during that time was probably even better after we got through that stuff. Our income was better. It was just we were so sick and didn't want to be anywhere near bankruptcy, foreclosure, anything bad to do with money again, that we paid off everything.

And it was a two and a half, almost three year of hustle. Let's get rid of everything. And then we just avoided ever going back that way. And in the process, people were like, "Hey, you are driving a 15 year old car now. Why are you doing that?" And so I got to start sharing our story of like, look, we got out of debt and here's the things we did.

And all of that led into me helping other people with money. And I realized we're not the only ones that went through that stuff. Everybody that I met, 75% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Everybody is one paycheck away from being right where we were. And so it's my passion now to help those people realize what type of life you can live when you're not strapped of monthly payments, when you're not strapped to having a car payment or student loans, or the idea that if you really hate your job and you've got 20 grand sitting in the bank, you just say, "Hey, boss, have a nice day." And you just walk out and you go get a new job.

Or if you have this passion and something that you want to go do, which we're here at Podcast Movement, everybody's talking about these things that they want to go do. When you can free up your cash flow and you get your expenses down to a certain point, you don't have to make as much money.

You can take some risks. You can go chase some passions. You can go chase some dreams. You could take some time off of work and go be with your family and do fun things when you can figure out how to get rid of that debt. Did you figure it out on your own?

Did you have resources? Was that like a Dave Ramsey thing? Did you start listening to him? No. I mean, I'd heard of Dave Ramsey. I'd done those things. But it was hard knocks like, "We've got to figure something out." It goes for pretty much anybody out there. The fastest way out of debt is to boost your income.

The fastest way to get financially free is to find ways to make more money. Because at some point, your grocery bill can be slashed to nothing and you're eating ramen every night and your grocery bill is what your grocery bill is. You've sold the cars, your electricity, your shit.

At some point, you're going to reach the minimum that you can do there and you may still not be able to make the traction. But if we can take you from making $30,000 to $60,000 or from $50,000 to $100,000, this situation changes really, really quickly. That's what I realized when we were going through it is that I've got to go from, at this point, I was making nothing because I was unemployed, to I need to go make a lot of money really fast and what are ways I can go do that?

Work more hours. That's always the solution. It was a lot of hustle. How much debt did you pay off? Any idea on how long it would take? Total student loans, credit cards, car payment, all of that stuff was about $250,000. That deserves a high five. So now what do you do?

So now my full-time job is to help people realize the same stuff we did. I help people get out of debt. I walk them through their unique situations and go through that. My focus and passion is helping people and providing tools and resources for them to be able to make more money, to go from making $30,000 to $40,000 to $60,000 and really boost their income.

I feel like if we can get people making more money than what they currently make, and this goes for the single mom that's struggling to get by making $25,000, if we can show her ways and equip her to go, "You know what? I'm worth more than $25,000." Once she can get to that point, she can start paying off those debts, get out of debt, build a firm foundation for herself, and then go start doing really cool things.

Those really cool things could be whatever you want to do. I'm not going to define what awesome is for you. Awesome for me is like, I want to build water wells in Africa. I want to use the money that I'm able to do to fund other ministries and projects and things that I want to go do.

I also want to travel. I want to go do fun things with my wife and my kids. Awesome for you, maybe you want to start that business. Awesome for you, maybe that you want to go buy a G6 jet and fly around the world whenever you want to. I don't care what awesome is for you, but awesome is not living paycheck to paycheck and worrying about the debts and the bill collectors and all of that stuff.

Are you doing this with face-to-face coaching, with blogging, with podcasting? Yeah, so I've had a blog since 2008. Good for you. Kind of chronicled our journey out of all this stuff and then realized like, "Hey, there's people reading this and how can I help and give equipment and tools?" I have a blog.

I have a podcast. It's the Casey Lewis podcast. Because I have a big ego and not very creative. And then, yeah, so I do some one-on-one coaching. I'm still a licensed real estate agent. And so if you need help anywhere in the country trying to find a real estate agent to help buy or sell a house, or if the agent you have is struggling to get your house sold, I have somebody in your area that can help.

And so people through my blog or through the podcast will reach out to me and say, "Hey, I need a real estate agent and I'll help them find somebody." Are you at the point where you're able to live off of your online income and your coaching business or is it still being built?

Absolutely. I have no other jobs, nothing. I am full-time on... I help people get out of debt and find ways to boost their income and then help them with real estate stuff. Of course, if you've been doing it since 2008, you obviously got rich overnight. Yeah, exactly. I launched out full-time doing this in December of 2014, so six months ago.

Well, that's exciting. So let's talk about some practical tools and strategies for people who are looking to increase their income. Let's talk about the single mom. I love that example. I'm a single mom and I'm making $25,000 a year and I'm busy. I got to be home with the kids at night.

I'm working a job that doesn't have a huge income potential. Where do I start? Well, a great place to start is with your boss. Are you a good employee? Are you working hard? Are you a valuable asset to that company? If you are, go ask your boss for a raise.

That's a great first step. Just say, "Hey, I'm making $25,000. Other people that do similar work to me are making $30,000. I've been here for two years. I've been here for four years. I'm a good employee. I would like to make more money." And just see what your boss says.

What's wrong with just asking for a raise? We sometimes get stuck in the annual review mindset where I'm going to get my 3% raise once a year or whatever. Just go ask them for more money. See if they'll pay you more money. Now, don't do this if you've been at your job for 60 days.

Don't do this if you stink as an employee. What you say, I agree with it, but it drives fear into my heart of thinking, "Okay, well, wait a second. The first place I would start is not go ask for a raise. The first place I would start is make sure that you've done a good job of being a startup employee." Well, yeah.

So, start with, "I need to be a good employee that's worthy of a raise." Second, go ask your boss for a raise. And if that doesn't work, maybe you need to apply for some other jobs. And if you're going to apply for other jobs that are paying $30,000, $5,000 more, why not go ahead and apply for some jobs that pay $50,000?

Maybe you're just charismatic enough to convince somebody and trick somebody to pay you more money. Yeah. What's wrong with just throwing some applications out there for a $50,000 a year job if you're making $20,000? There's nothing wrong with doing that. And then the last thing, or another way that we can do this is realize that you are one person that has multiple talents and multiple passions and multiple things.

I'm a writer, but just because I'm a writer doesn't mean that I have to just write. So I make money doing all kinds of other things that have nothing to do with writing. You could have a full-time job and maybe you could start up an Etsy store or maybe you could start up...

My wife is a teacher who also develops curriculum and sells that on a website called Teachers Pay Teachers. That's awesome. So you're not limited to one income source. And I think sometimes we're like, "Oh, I'm busy and I've got all these things going on." My wife is a teacher.

She prepares lesson plans for her job and then just sells those on Teachers Pay Teachers. It's not anything extra. It's no extra work. It's just an extra resource for her. But once we can start getting out of the mindset of, "I have a job and this is where my income comes from and it pays me what it pays me and that's all I'm going to earn," when you can realize you have other resources.

We live in a time and an age where we are not limited to the income that one job produces. And so in the Lewis household, we have 17 different ways we make money. And some of those are $20 a month. That's fine. It's $20 a month. Over a year, that's $250 I can take my wife to a nice dinner.

What's the littlest one? What's the smallest of those 17? So I've got a deal. I was with a real estate agency that has a profit sharing system when you refer an agent in and you get paid off of the profit for that. And so that's the smallest one. It pays about $20, $25 a month.

And what's cool is I've had buddies of mine. I mean, another example, I've had buddies of mine who were real estate agents say to me, "Joshua, you've got to get a real estate agent just so you can get the referral commission when you refer a buyer or a seller to another agent." That's how I started and that's about 50% of our income.

My business revenues is from real estate referrals nationwide. Somebody finds I write a blog article or something like 10 reasons why you need to sell your house or whatever because clickbait and drive people to the website. They read that and at the bottom of the website I say, "Hey, if you need help in your area, click here." They fill out a form.

I call them, talk to them, find out what they're looking for, what they need, and then I reach out to another agent in their area and refer them and I get paid a commission off of that. And anybody with a license could do that. Yeah. Anybody with a real estate license is able to do that.

That's awesome. What is the weirdest, most unusual of the 17 streams of income? Most unusual. I've been fortunate in my business to use different tools like Leadpages or different tools that have affiliate commissions. It's just been surprising to me how easy some of those ways to make money are.

Easy because you spend hundreds of hours writing articles and then there's the easy $3.67 at the end of it. But Leadpages is a great example of one because there are other business owners that want to know how to build their business and what to do. I just happen to have some tools and I did a quick 30-minute webinar screen share of, "Hey, here's the tools I use and here's how you could do it for free, but I use this tool because it makes my life easier, but I do have to pay for it.

And then here's my affiliate link if you want to buy." So for that 30-minute webinar, one sale is $120 commission. One sale, 30 minutes of work. It was fairly a simple process to do it. That's what's cool about online business. If you've done the work of being underpaid in the beginning of building something that's a value such that people notice it and value your opinion, then over time there are many ways that you can earn revenue in a way that helps your readers and community and also helps you and helps the companies that you work with.

Yeah, from an online business standpoint, 98% of what I do is free. I have 2% of things that I charge for. And so if you need help budgeting, you can go to my website and you can get budgeting forms. If you need help figuring out how to get out of debt, you're going to figure out how to get out of debt.

If you need tips and tools and resources on how to boost your income, I've got 20 podcast episodes dedicated to boosting your income. There's everything that I do is free. And then if there's something that you need help with, you just call me up and we work something out.

So let's go back, continue on the income. If you've got 20 podcasts, you've got more ideas around increasing income. What else? So a great example is find multiple revenue streams. Find multiple things that you can do to earn income. So I've been doing online business stuff for years, but I've had a full-time job along with that.

So boosting your income really comes down to finding multiple ways to do it. Because at some point, you're going to hit a ceiling. The CEO of a company that's making $350 or $500 or a million, they've hit a ceiling. There's nothing more they can do. But we live in an age and a time where you can create something of value for somebody else that somebody else wants to do.

And I love the idea that it's like a sixth grader can help a third grader with math. You don't have to be an expert. I don't have to have a math degree to help a third grader with math. I just have to be further along than you. And so a great example here that we've learned this weekend at Podcast Movement is if you have a podcast, we know how to set those up.

So create a quick little class and show people how to set up podcasts. There's people that don't know how to do it that would gladly pay you money to learn what you already know how to do. Right. And the two variables that are benefits of that is number one, information out there is free.

Every little bit of information that you need about how to set up a podcast is available free on the internet with no charge associated with it. But personalized advice and service is not. And people value personalized advice and service. If you want to get all the knowledge of the world, it's sitting down in your local library and it's sitting on the internet connection that you can go to get at the local library.

But if you want specific applied knowledge to your situation, that's a really valuable thing. So just because somebody else has created a class already on it doesn't mean... Well, yeah. And a lot of people think, "Oh, well, I'm not qualified to do that," or "I can't do that." Yes, you can.

You have that knowledge to do something that nobody else does. I have read over 200 books on personal finance, so I know more than you do about personal finance. Not you personally. I'm sorry if I offend you. But I know more than the average person is going to know about personal finance.

And so would you like to dig through and read all the books and go through the classes and go through the bankruptcy and the stuff that I had to face? Or would you just like to pay me a little bit of money to figure this out? And so when people start to realize what you know and what you have is valuable and there are people out there that would gladly pay some money to shortcut that or to get to where you are faster, then yeah, that's what online business is all about.

And that's what has value. So the book example is a good example. Takes time to read 200 books. Yeah. A lot easier to pay somebody $200 than to read 200 books. Exactly. That's it. It's worth it. And if you aren't worth $200, go read 200 books and you'll be worth $200 to other people.

Takes time to create lesson plans. So it's a lot easier for someone to pay. How much does your wife charge for lesson plans? Anywhere from $5 to $50. A lot easier to pay $5 to $50 and save yourself hours and hours of work if someone else has done it.

Get that lesson plan, get out $5 and you're done. And if you compare in many people's scenarios, I'm a teacher making $40,000 a year. I pay $15 a week for my lessons plans. That's going to have a negligible impact on my lifestyle in terms of the monetary component of my lifestyle.

But it might have a massive impact in saving me a huge amount of time. Exactly. And it's worth it. Yeah. Yeah. And don't say like, again, we live in this time that's pretty stinking awesome. Don't say, "Oh, I don't know how to do that." Because like, "I don't know how to do that" is just an excuse for, "I haven't Googled it yet." Just go to Google, go to YouTube and figure out how to do some of this stuff.

We live in a time where you can make more money than what your boss is paying you. And a great place to start, be a good employee, go ask your boss for a raise, and then start finding other ways to bring more money into your house. I promise you, if you're making $30,000 by the end of this year, you could be making $50,000.

It just takes some tips and some hard work to do it. It takes focus. Yeah. And you have to listen to 20 podcast episodes about how to make more money. And likely, none of the ideas that are in the 20 hours of content are appropriate to your situation. But the creative contrast, the creative connections between those ideas will get your brain starting to look around you and say, "Ah, in my area, here's something that I can do." Yeah, exactly.

You could figure something out for your situation. And one of the things, when I talk to people, is that they don't have an income goal for the year because they're like, "What's an income goal? This is what my boss pays me. Why would I..." I set an income goal for the year.

And so I challenged people at the beginning of 2015 to double what they made in 2014. They're like, "How?" That's your job. I don't know how. I don't know how. And so many people have reached out to me over the last six months like, "Holy cow, I'm making $30,000 more this year.

My debt's going away all because I just said, 'Well, I made $50,000 last year. What if I made $100,000?'" And then they track it and everything else you would do with a goal. You'd write it down, you'd track it, you'd follow it, you'd see where you're at and try to make course corrections.

But just the sheer idea of writing down, "I'm going to make $100,000 this year if you make $50,000 or if you make $30,000, let's say $60,000, or we're in July, or we're in August now, so there's four months left in the year. What if you can in the next four months make an extra 30% over what you've done the rest of the year?" Just a little bit changes your situation drastically, especially if you're living paycheck to paycheck, have debt, don't have a savings account.

Just a little bit, $200, $300 a month, and that is really easy to come up with in this world. And the cool thing about just thinking about a little bit instead of a lot is that it's easier... Earning a little bit of money as a side income is a lot easier and a lot more doable than replacing your full-time income in the first few months.

Earning an extra $1,000 a month because you're delivering pizzas, that's really useful if it's on top of $5,000 other dollars that you're already earning. But if you're trying to earn the total amount that you need to support your family on delivering pizzas, that's a lot more challenging. And so adding up these little things, there can be little businesses where every now and then someone calls you and asks you for help on this.

Sure, I do it. It's $100 an hour, and you go and you only do that six hours a month on one Saturday whenever somebody calls you. There's no reason why you have to have just one thing that you're known for, one business. There's no reason why you can't have 17.

That's why I was able to transition from a full-time job where I was making really good money to a career where I'm a self-employed entrepreneur going out and hustling and getting stuff done. If I had to depend on just the salary from my coaching, for example, I coach two new clients a month.

I'm never going to make enough money to feed my family off of two clients a month. But if I have two clients a month in coaching and I help somebody buy a house or sell a house and I'm in Texas, so in Michigan, we start adding all these things up and revenues get to where they need to be to where it's really easy for me to say, "You know what?

Full-time job? I'm going to go ahead and let you guys go away, and I'm going to go focus on those 40 hours for what else I can build and do." It's got to feel good. Doesn't it feel great to be in the position of a teacher and see people taking action on...

It's so great. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. This has been a hard journey. I think everybody has a hustle season in their life. Even in your 20s, if you hustle early on with money in your career and you get your income up and you start saving, you get the benefit of 40 years of compound interest on your investments and you retire.

People that do their hustle season in their 30s and their 40s, well, they're doing it because they are trying to clean up some messes that they made in their 20s from overspending. If you don't hustle in your 30s and 40s, you realize in your 40s and 50s, the kids are getting ready for college, I'm coming up on retirement, I should probably hustle, clean up some messes, get ready to retire.

And then in your 50s and 60s, it's like, "Oh no, I've got to hustle." But if you don't hustle any of those times, you're going to be hustling in your 60s and your 70s, working a lot harder and a lot longer hours when your body should really just be relaxing on a beach.

My hustle season, I'm coming up on the end of this five to eight year journey of working all the time, living on next to nothing, putting as much money in savings as we can. And I've got two small kids, I want to hang out with them too. That's a hustle season and get through it because I promise you, I promise you, I promise you it's worth it when you get to year eight and year nine and year 10 after you start getting rid of the debts and you've got a good healthy savings account, you can afford to make less money, you can afford to take some time off work, you can afford to spend time with your family and kids.

It's so much more rewarding once you've gone through this hustle season to be able to be on the other side and say, "I don't have to work for somebody else just because I need the paycheck to pay the bills." Do you set goals? Absolutely. I figured. I was just giving you an out.

You just gave a sermon on you got to set goals. How did you learn to set goals and when did you start? So I learned setting goals when I was in car sales. That was the first job I had right out of college. I had a great mentor in it that just said, "Hey, your bonus level started when you sell 12 cars and when you sell 15, you get another big bonus." So we broke down like, "Okay, I'm going to sell 15 cars a month because that's where the big bonus money is." And so for every 10 people I talk to, I sell one car.

So let's do that math to find out how many people I need to talk to in order to sell 15. Well, for every 10 people I talk to, one buys. So I need to talk to 150 people this month. There's 22 working days in the month. Divide that out.

I need to talk to 2.3 people a day and I'm going to sell 15 cars. How do I talk to 2.3 people a day? Well, I have to make these many phone calls to make that happen. That's how I broke down, like really getting really nitty gritty with the details to a daily level of, "Oh, I just need to make 15 phone calls a day that will generate 4 appointments coming in the door for me to talk to this many people about buying a car.

And if I do this every day for the whole month, at the end of the month, I will have sold 15 cars." And so when we started getting out of debt, it was the exact same translation of, "Oh, we've got $250,000 of debt. Here's how much money we have available to do it.

It's going to take us X amount of months and just do the math, set the goal and follow the daily disciplines of making it happen." What percentage of your coworkers in the car business set goals that way? Half. Not to the detail. I was number one when we were doing it.

I would imagine most salespeople are told to do it and then never actually break it down and do it. And then what's worse is you set the goal and then you don't do any of the action steps that you said you were going to do. Right. Well, that's the thing.

It's just funny because it's so simple. In the financial services business, it was exactly the same. I knew that if I was introduced to 1,000 people, I would call and I called 1,000 people. 500 of them would meet with me on an initial basis. Of the 500 that would meet with me, 300 would give me all the details of their lives and share with me their goals, what they were working for.

Of the 300 that would do that, 60 of them would start working with me, would buy a product from me, or would engage in some further work with me in the first year, the first 12 months after first meeting me. 30 of them would engage with me in the second 12 months, 12 to 24 months of meeting with me.

And then 10 of them would engage with me in months 24 through 36. And after months 36, nobody that was still in the initial 1,000, they would have found someone else. They would have moved. I don't like you, but I don't want to do big things. If you know that number, let's just go find 1,000 people.

Exactly. So you break it down. And what do we have to do daily to go find those 1,000 people? You break it down. You make 40 phone calls a day. Of the 40 phone calls a day, you set five appointments a day. You set five appointments a day. You go into the week, you have 25 appointments.

25 appointments, 15 you'll keep, 10 will cancel on you. You keep 15 appointments. Next week you follow up. You schedule again the appointments on the day. You know, you just track the numbers. And so the way that you set an income goal, okay, I want to make $100,000 a year.

What's my average commission per sale? What's the average? And then you do that. And then you start to control what you can do. And the only things that you can control what you do is your actions and your activities. And so you take each part of your business and you say, all right, well, I can control the number of phone calls that I can make.

I can't control who says yes or who says no. I can't control if they say yes or if they say no, but I can control the number of phone calls that I make. Number two, I can control the questions that I ask. So if I recognize that my average commission per sale is $52 because I'm working with people that make $20,000 a year, I can ask to meet people that make $120,000 a year.

And then just due to the fact that they need much more help, everything goes up. And I think that's one of the things I, it's cool that you learned the same lesson from car sales. That was one of the things that I wanted to learn when I went into financial services.

I wanted to learn how to do that. And it's so useful when you do that because then you always look at the world the same way and you take any goal and you break it down to a list of action steps and you say, what are the activities that I need to do to accomplish this?

And for your listeners, if you're struggling to get out of debt, the first logical step is let's write it down. How much debt do I have? Like a lot of people, you've probably buried your head in the sand and just have a stack of bills sitting at the house and you're like, I know I owe people money, but I don't know how much and where.

When you actually write down who you owe money to, how much you owe money to, you get all that stuff down. The next logical step is, okay, so how do I get rid of this stuff? And you set a goal and you start working toward it. Writing it down is a huge first step that you can take to really accomplishing, if I want to boost my income, if I want to reduce my debts, what is it?

Just write it down. The other aspect of income, if we can apply the same thing to income even without the numbers regarding car sales or financial product sales, you can apply it to income in the way of just simply per hour. So if you want to make $200,000 a year, that means that your hourly rate needs to be $100 an hour.

So $100 an hour is $200,000 a year over the course of a 40-hour, 50-week per year working schedule. And a little trick there is, you put me on the spot, all of a sudden I'm questioning my math. I didn't put you on the spot, you jumped into this one.

So if you just take the hourly rate and you double it and then you add some zeros, you'll get the annual income. So somebody is making $8 an hour, you take the 8, you double that to 16 and then you add some zeros, you wind up with $16,000 an hour.

So you can convert any hour, $10 an hour is $20,000 a year, $20 an hour is $40,000 a year, so $100 an hour is $200,000 per year. But if you look at the $100 per hour, that means that every single hour that you work, you have to create more than $100 worth of value for your employer or for yourself.

If it's for your employer, you have to create more because your employer has other costs and expenses that are associated with you. They're paying your employment taxes, they're paying insurance, they're giving you an office. So you might have to create $170 worth of value per hour. If you're an entrepreneur, you can figure it out yourself.

How much more do you pay? What are your taxes, etc.? So you have to look at every single hour of work and say, "Am I producing $200 worth of value so that I can earn $100 per hour in the last work?" The answer is if you're not doing it, you're not going to earn $200,000 a year.

That's why you're not earning $200,000 a year is you're not producing for every hour of work in excess of $100 a value per hour. But breaking the goals down, the reason I went into that is very few people do that. A lot of people set goals and say, "I want to make $200,000 a year." I kind of sit around and wish and hope and think, "Well, I can make $200,000 a year." And I've been guilty of this myself, of saying, "Well, something's going to happen." Well, something might happen, but you should also look and say, "I'm going to work 40 hours a week.

If I'm going to earn $200,000 a year, every hour that I work, I need to be doing work that's valued more than $100 an hour." Exactly. Well done, sir. This is your podcast interview and I just stole it. No, that was great. I think this is why I love the world that we live in because we all have a little different angle and we need all of our input because different people's brains work differently and different examples work and it helps.

People can find the person who speaks their language who's able to convert a complex topic into something simpler and more straightforward. Get outside of the hourly mindset of it and just say, "If I've got a product for sale for $200 and I want that product to make me $200,000, well, how many of this product do I have to sell in this time period?" You get that taken care of.

That's from an entrepreneurship world. I did this exercise a couple of months ago. I sat down and I said, "I would like Radical Personal Finance to make a million dollars gross income per year." Okay, a million dollars gross income, where can that come from? So I designed 10 individual income streams, each of which can produce $100,000 of income.

Then I broke the $100,000 of income down and I said, "Okay, let's say I write a book. How many books would I need to sell at what rate in order to reach $100,000? If I'm going to create a product, a training product, how many products would I need to create at a certain course level to do it?" What's helpful is I look at a million dollar goal and I get completely overwhelmed.

I say, "How on earth can I build a business that makes a million bucks gross in a year?" I've never made a million bucks gross in a year. But if I break it down and I say, "Well, let me think about this," and I break it down to a certain number, now I know I need to sell 2,432 books or I know I need to sell 452 tickets to a three-day seminar.

Then I can take each of those things down and I can say, "How can I develop the plan behind it in order to make sure there's value?" So if I'm going to charge $452 for a three-day seminar ticket, how can I develop a seminar ticket that's worth, my goal is 10x return, that's worth $4,500 in value to a participant so that they'll be willing to happily pay me $450?

You can break it down. When you break it down, over time you create your action list, you create your daily list, you break the goal down, you start working on it. Create one line of business, get that going, create another, and then improve, tweak, improve, tweak, and that's how you get from zero to a million dollars per year.

- That was the key, one at a time. If you're listening to this, you're like, "Holy cow, he just said 10 things with 100." Pick one. - Right, right, right. - Pick one. If it's a course, do the course. If it's a book, do the book. If it's you need to go ask your boss for a raise, go ask your boss for a raise.

One at a time, slowly and steadily, set the goal, write it down, come up with some plans, and just go take some action on one thing at a time, and then over time, one thing at a time leads to you did 10 things, which leads to those 10 things getting $100,000 a piece, which gets you to the million dollars.

- I wish your wife were here. I'm interested in her business. Talk to me, hopefully you know enough about it that you can share a little bit. How did she come up with that idea? - The website exists, and it's called Teachers Pay Teachers. It's like an Etsy store for teachers, or just an online little classroom thing for teachers.

- But I mean, did she ... She was a teacher, and were you guys just sitting down and brainstorming ideas for businesses? - No, this is just something she did. - Somebody else created the website, and then she just submits lesson plans. - Yeah, it's like Etsy store. All she did with this is she created it, and was like, "I have this.

I've heard of Teachers Pay Teachers. Let me upload this and see what it did." In the first month, we made $80. We were like, "Well, that was weird." She was like, "Okay." We checked, and they have a premium plan where you can pay them ... I don't know how much it is for the year, but you pay them, and their commission rate goes way down.

I think it's like a 70/30 split with you, but if you pay them money up front, it's like a 90/10 split on the commission that you get. - That's awesome. - We paid that, and yeah, I mean, it's an extra several hundred dollars a month. When teachers complain that they don't have enough money to buy supplies for their classrooms and stuff, my wife is like, "I have $200, $300 a month coming in that I can go buy supplies for my classroom." It's things that she's able to take care of that way.

- That is so cool. - Yeah, it was a great thing that just simple, easy, and if she wanted to, which she doesn't want to, she doesn't have to, she could upload a whole lot more stuff and do a little bit more work inside of that, and really create a business.

There's teachers that have stopped teaching because they're making more money just creating content and selling it on Teachers Pay Teachers. - Reminds me of that guy who, he worked for a big company in some kind of software engineering job, and he was being paid $40 an hour, and he outsourced all of his work to China, or to India, and paid a guy there $15 an hour to do all of his work.

He just collected the difference. He did it for years before he got caught. He was immediately fired when he got caught, but he had outsourced his job for the last three years, and he just kept the spread. He kept the float between the 40 and the 15, and put it into his pocket.

- This is not an endorsement to do that. - No, but it's just funny because you think, "Okay, I'm going to go get a teacher job, and the government school system, okay, I got the job. I just got to do the bare minimum. I don't feel like making lesson plans or doing them.

I'll just go buy them. I'll pay someone else $15. There's enough money sloshing around that I can take enough to live on while someone else does a lot of my work." Of course, I still have to actually teach in that scenario, so the programmer's job was better. What tools, do you have any specific tools that you really have found to be beneficial for you in managing the process of your finances?

- This is a question that comes up every time, like, "What software do you use?" Everybody wants to know what's the secret. There is no secret software that makes your money better. There's nothing. It's a pen and paper, and knowing where every dollar is going. That is what makes your money better.

When you sit down and you write it down, and to this day, I don't use a software. I don't have a budgeting tool. There's a ton out there. I sit down with a pen and paper. I say, "This is how much money I'm going to make this month. These are my bills.

This is what I want to save. This is how much I want to give to our church. This is how much I want to give to these ministries," and make all that balance out. Then I just go execute that game plan every month. Some months it's hard. Some months, like we're at a conference this month that three weeks ago I wasn't planning on coming to, so I had to adjust the budget to make that stuff happen.

We always, it never fails, get to the 25th of the month, and we've used all the money we said we were going to use for groceries. We've got six days left in the month, and we eat out of the pantry because it's the last six days of the month, and we don't have any money left for groceries.

When we do that type of stuff, my investment accounts get filled. My savings accounts get filled. I get to give the money to my church that I want to give. My kids' college funds get taken care of, and all of that stuff is done. Whereas, if I'm not paying attention to that, it's, "Oh, we need groceries.

Go to the grocery store. Spend the $200 for this last week of the month." Okay, sure, no big deal, but over time, that's $2,400 a year over a five-year period. That's $10,000 a year, and you can see how people over a two and a three and a five-year period wake up with $10,000 of credit card debt.

No, it's the principles are timeless and can be applied consistently. You say you've read over 200 books on personal finance. What's your favorite? Which one do you recommend more than any other, more frequently than any other? Besides my own. Tell me about your book in a second. I didn't know you had a book.

I have a book, and it walks people through personal finance, everything from budgeting to everything else. But Dave Ramsey's is a fantastic book. Total Money Makeover is a fantastic way to start. Then he has another one that I really, really recommend. It's called More Than Enough. If you haven't read that, it is about how you have more than enough money right now where you're at, and it really, really focuses on the contentment aspect of you don't need that new car.

You don't need that bigger house. You don't need that nicer furniture. You want it. You may want it really, really bad, but what do you want more? The book's called More Than Enough. What else? Those are probably the two best to just get started and really get moving forward.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad's a great one for small businesses getting into the mindset of transitioning from the "I'm an employee" to "I'm a self-employed person" to really moving over to the right side if you've read the book into "I'm a business owner and now I'm an investor." When you can start making those switches in your mindset of how you earn money, you really start getting to earn a lot more money.

Awesome. Tell us about your book, your website, podcast. All right, cool. I have a book. It's called Impact. The whole idea behind it is the four phases of personal finance. Phase one is education. We all have an education in money. It's how it was taught to us when we were kids and our parents didn't do anything.

We're taught by the world that we need car payments and we need student loans and all that stuff. I really tear down those walls of the old way or the way the world teaches us about finance and just teach you what we've been talking about. Then the second step of that is to take action.

Really start doing things that are better with money, making better decisions, and that you're not going to be perfect with it. The third phase is that you're going to have time to get mastery in this stuff. Then the last phase is being awesome. Like I said earlier, I don't know what awesome is for you, but if you go through and you learn the right ways to handle money, you take action on it, you get better over time at doing that stuff, eventually you get to be awesome.

Awesome for you may be that you're writing people's electricity bills for them because they can't afford to pay their electric bill or like I said, maybe it's that you want to buy a G6 and fly around the world. I don't know what awesome is for you, but eventually over time, enough discipline, you'll get more awesome.

That's the book. It's called Impact. It's available on Amazon. I think it's like five bucks. That is my book. You can find me on Twitter @CaseynLewis. The N stands for Ninja. My website is Casey-Lewis.com. Casey, thanks for coming on Radical Personal Finance. Thanks man. It was fun. Sound so simple when you hear other people talk about it, right?

Guess what? It is simple. Not easy. Not at all easy, but it is simple. Especially the approach to goal setting, laying things out, making a plan. In the future, and we'll see depending on I'm pre-recording this, probably leaving for FinCon and XYPN. So we'll see if I'm able to get it done before or after this.

But I've got a little sneak peek for those of you who made it to the end of this interview. I've got a little goal planning software that I want you to check out. It's at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/goals. The software is called Goals On Track. I'm going to do an entire episode to introduce it to you, but it's something that I went out and searched for some number of months ago and I've really found it to be useful.

It's basically a lot of what I've talked about, but it's put into a computer software system that can be helpful. So if you want a sneak peek on that, go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/goals and look forward. That is an affiliate link, so it'll make me a little bit of money if you buy.

But that is something that I went out and searched for because I was dissatisfied with a lot of the other software solutions that I found. So entire episode coming about that. But lay out some goals for yourself. Work on some plans. And then get busy on the action steps that will make them happen.

Check out some of Casey's work, links in the show notes for today's episode. Hopefully many of you can find some of his content to be helpful. That's what I love about profiling other financial bloggers, financial podcasters, other people who have different voices is they can bring an air and a different style that will appeal to different people.

We all resonate more with different styles. And so make sure to go out and check out some of Casey's work and hopefully many of you will find him to be an expert coach and advisor to you. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you especially to the patrons of the show.

If you gain benefit from today's show or any of these shows, would you consider supporting the show directly? This is a voluntary deal. I work hard to give away a bunch of value. And then if any of this value is helpful and useful to you, I would appreciate it if you would send a little money my way.

And the way you do that is go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. Thank you to the over 220 of you who do that. We're working hard to get by the end of September to in excess of 250. So if you want to see how we're doing on that, go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron and you can see the numbers.

Since this was pre-recorded, I don't know the number, but you can. See you all soon.