One of the most incredible things about human beings is that we are creators, and we're able to think abstractly and conceptually. We're able to visualize places that we aren't, both physical places and places in life, non-physical concepts. And I think this is really, really valuable when it comes to goal setting.

We want to think about, is being in a different place worth it? If I go down this path of building wealth and becoming financially independent, is it gonna be worth it? It's one reason why I encourage you, spend a lot of time with wealthy people. Take once a week, take somebody rich out to lunch and ask them, how did you get where you got to?

Well, I try to do that here on the show for you a little bit and today I'm thrilled to have Jim Wang. Jim is an awesome guy, built a website called Bargaineering, was at the Pioneer, he's one of the pioneers of the online personal finance community, sold the website, got rich, and he's here today to tell us what it's like so you can decide if you want to copy him.

(upbeat music) Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. I'm your host, I'm your guide, I'm your Sherpa, I'm your lead adventurer. Working hard each and every day to build a rich life now, while also constructing the foundation for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

And today, my guest has done both those things. (upbeat music) Longtime listeners of the show will recognize that as I really try to narrow in on what's the message of financial independence, or excuse me, what's the message of radical personal finance? I tried to home in on that and really get clear.

And as far as I'm concerned, the best I've got so far is, it's about living a rich life now and building financial freedom in a short enough time span where you can actually conceive of it. I'm not against building financial freedom in 40 years, but I also don't think you gotta wait 40 years.

I think a decade is a really reasonable amount of time. And so part of my fulfilling that mission, that vision, that outline, that catchy statement is to bring you examples of people who've done it. And we'll talk in the future, what is financial freedom? I've got the stages and steps of financial freedom, lots of different ways to define that.

But today, my guest has done it. He lived a rich life and built financial freedom in 10 years or less. And he proves that it's doable. More importantly, not only was it doable once, he's doing it again. He's proving it again. And so I think you're really gonna enjoy this conversation with Jim Wang.

Before I play the interview for you, two sponsors today. Number one sponsor is Paladin Registry. Paladin Registry is my go-to solution that I went out and tried to find for you guys in answering the question of how do I find a great financial advisor? Many of you have written to me and spoken to me and said, Joshua, I appreciate the show.

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So you go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/paladin, radicalpersonalfinance.com/P-A-L-A-D-I-N, link in the blog post for today's show, or if you just go on the website, you'll see on the sidebar, banners for Paladin Registry. Click that banner. That'll take you to a landing page. You'll put in your name. Your address, your phone number, your email, all that stuff.

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Each of them will be different. I encourage you to interview multiple people and choose the one that works the best for you. Radicalpersonalfinance.com/Paladin. Sponsor number two today is Jay Fleischman and the Student Loan Show. Jay's been a guest on Radical Personal Finance several times and Jay's an awesome guy.

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And you get a discount for using my referral code. Go to studentloanshow.com/radical, studentloanshow.com/radical, and check in with Jay. And with that, here is the interview with Jim Wang. (electronic whirring) Jim, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. - Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here. - So I love getting the opportunity to talk with guys like you.

Having started to take an interest in the online world of personal finance back in the mid-2000s myself. Now, 10 years later, I look back and see all these names of people, and you're one of those guys who were involved in the very early days of online personal finance, and it's a real honor to spend a little time with you.

And I'm thrilled to bring your story to my audience. I'd like to start with a simple question. You grew up rich, knew everything you needed to know about personal finance, and then have always been rich, right? What's your story with personal finance? - I think very few people that grow up rich sort of have good personal finance upbringings.

'Cause I mean, what's actually, it's funny you say that, because I think a lot of creativity comes out of not having a ton of money, right? You talk about, you think about startups. Startups, they get a ton of funding. They run into a lot of problems, because now they have the pressure to have to spend this money.

A lot of problems, you turn the money to solve them. You lose a bit of that creativity. And while I'm not, just to set the record straight, didn't grow up rich. We grew up middle class. - There was heavy sarcasm intended in the leading question. - I don't wanna run past that and let everybody, you know, think like that.

- Indeed. - I was one of those guys that was rich and lost it all. No, no, not like that. But we grew up, my parents immigrated here in the late '70s, '78. My dad came here on an education visa. My mom joined him a year later. And then I was born about a year after that.

We were, I never felt like we were poor, though we certainly weren't rich. Like every family, we had to make trade-offs on what we wanted to spend on and what we didn't. And one of the big things that was important for us is family. And all of our family at the time was back in Taiwan.

I mean, a lot of them are still there now. Many also moved to California. But in order to see them, you'd have to get on a plane. And if you can imagine flights, even today if you wanna get a flight to Taiwan, it's still a thousand plus dollars per person.

- For sure. - You think about back in the '80s, right? You didn't have direct flights. Well, I remember we had flights where, I grew up in New York. New York to LA, LA to Alaska, Alaska to Japan, then Japan to Taiwan. It was over 24 hours. But so we would make trade-offs of what we wanted, which was to visit family.

And given the limited income, I think, I look back and I didn't think that we were poor or anything like that, but we certainly weren't rich. - When did you start taking an interest in personal finance topics? - I think when I started working full-time my dad had always sort of preached being smart with money.

And for them, they very much wanted me and my sister to focus on our education because when you move here, education is the clearest, most guaranteed path towards being able to support your family, get a good job and sort of live that American dream. There are so many different paths, but why is there always the sort of stereotype of Chinese kids, you should be a doctor, a lawyer, whatever, a lot of these professional type of degrees is because it's not a guarantee, but it's certainly better than say starting a business or things like that, because if you could start young and get that education as opposed to move here as an immigrant without necessarily the college degree or things that sort of the economics here will recognize as being valuable.

You know, that's more of a guarantee than anything else. - Definitely. - And so, you know, they never really talked about money. Like even to this day, I don't know how much my dad makes or my mom makes. There's something we never talked about, it was sort of the adults took care of it and the kids, you focus on school.

The only exceptions were when I started working, you know, my dad said, "All right, we're gonna open up a Roth IRA." And I was like, "I don't know what this is." He's like, "It's for your retirement. Don't worry about it, this is what you should do." And it wasn't until I started, you know, paying for the bills myself, sort of in college, not as much because there weren't that many bills.

But once you start working and you have rent and utilities, and now your credit cards and things like that, once you start paying the bills, you start to really care about where this money's coming and going because now you're sort of out of the nest, right? We had for the time period until I was in college, my parents were sort of watching and making sure everything was okay, financially and otherwise.

And once you graduate and you go out to the, quote unquote, "real world," sort of that safety blanket's removed and you sort of have to learn it. You know, I got help from my parents and they would explain things to me, but it was more like, here's real life, figure it out.

And I felt like, you know, I have to figure this out, otherwise things will go badly. - When and why did you start bargaineering? - So I started it in 2005 or four, I forget. But I started it because I had an interest. So I started working in 2003, worked a couple years.

And at the time, my girlfriend, now my wife, was, she had a year left in school and then she worked, you know, two hours away for another year until we moved in, got married, all that stuff. And so I had all this free time at night. Like I wasn't going out, I wasn't doing any of that stuff.

So I said, well, what am I gonna do with this? So I would just read about finance stuff. You know, I'd go to the gym, I'd come back, and I wasn't really a big television watcher. So I was like, well, what am I gonna do? I just started studying these different things, like 401ks, and you know, you get the employee manual.

And I'm like, what is all this stuff? And I just started getting interested in it. And I said, well, you know, I also worked in a secure environment. I was in the defense industry. So I couldn't really like take notes and things like that. I wanted to be able to see what I was reading and interpreting while I was at work.

And so I was like, oh, why don't I start a journal? And I just put, well, why don't I put it on the internet? And my background is in computer science. So the whole technical, sort of the light technical aspects of starting a blog weren't that challenging. So why don't I just start a blog?

And over time, I've met other people, and it sort of snowballed into something bigger. - How long did you run bargaining before the site was sold? - I ruled five years. - Did you do it the entire time as a part-time endeavor, or how much were you working on the site?

Did you transition from day job to full-time on the site? What was the story there? - So it's funny. I worked on it for three years full-time. And at the time that I quit my job, the site had been earning multiple of my salary, even though I was spending more of my hours at work.

And it was interesting because I'd always associated sort of hard work and the actual time with how much money it was worth. Right, so I was paid a salary to go to work, and I enjoyed it a lot. I was doing interesting things. I was working with great people.

So my work situation was great. And then I had this sort of side project that due to the scale of the internet was just enormous. But I only worked a couple hours a night on it. And near the end it started getting to be a little much 'cause I had all this work that I wanted to do and only so much time.

So I started stretching it more and more at night. And so it got to the point where like, I have to spend more time on this, even though it's kind of a solitary effort. I was working on it on my own. I would lose the social aspect of hanging out with people and just chatting and whatnot.

But I remember when I called my dad to just ask for his advice. I was like, oh, here's the website. And for him, my parents are very pragmatic, but you can imagine, like, we put all this education. I have a lot of degrees associated with engineering and computer science.

And here I was telling my dad, hey, all these years I spent, all this money we spent, I'm gonna go work on this website that I created three years ago. And my dad was like, are you sure? And that's all he said. I mean, he said other things, but near the end, it was just like, are you sure?

He wasn't trying to dissuade me. There's an understanding that due to my expertise and my experience and the fact that I had certain clearances I could get back into the work I was doing relatively easily as long as I didn't wait like 10 years. But a couple of years, I could probably get back into it without much of a problem.

So I was like, well, if this fun little experiment fails in say three years, I can always go back. It's not a big deal. I don't know if I could go back after, even now, I guess 10 years later. I guess it's only been seven years since I quit my job in '08.

But it was interesting when I went in to tell people because they were a little like, ah, it stinks you're going, but they were really intrigued. Like you have this website on the side. I was never anonymous, but I never shared this with my coworkers. It just never really came up too much.

But you're gonna quit your job in the defense industry, pretty stable, pretty high paying to work on a website? And there were thoughts like, is this porn? Like, are you in porn? I'm like, no, I'm not. (laughing) But that was always the running joke a couple years afterwards. Like, really?

So you work at home on a website. Yeah, but it's been amazing. - What did you do when you went from, 'cause you had a salary, and then you had, at the time that you quit, you were making much more than that with the website, and then following on, and we'll get to the big change when the site was sold later, but what did you do with the extra money?

How did that change your life? Did you start spending it? Did you know better enough to save it? What did you do? - So in my mind, I had always considered the salary that I was earning was essentially buying time in the future. So I thought, all right, if let's say it made three times my salary that year, or five times, whatever it is, I was buying three to five years of just experimentation.

Like, that was my psychological thinking in being able to quit a stable job, right? You can either trade an income stream that theoretically will be until I retire, say 30 or 40 years, for this sort of less stable, little riskier stream that's three or five times more, but may disappear in a year.

So my thinking was, I'm just essentially, present value of my future. I was saying, all right, I can screw around for the next five years with this money as my income. So I saved it all. I saved as much as I could. I didn't buy anything extravagant. And I put a lot, as much as I could, into a SEP IRA, and just tried to reinvest as much as I could back into the business, to the extent that I knew how to.

But the rest just went into savings. - So I read in an online, in a Forbes article, profile of you, that you ran bargaineering for five years, and then ultimately it was sold for about $3 million. You don't have to confirm or deny that. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.

That's a big difference as far as a financial situation, where you go from earning a salary as an engineer, to having a really nice windfall. Facing that situation, what did you do when the checks started clearing? - I didn't do anything yet. Like, I waited a couple months. - To see if the money was gonna disappear out of the bank account.

(laughs) - It wasn't so much that. It was just like, you kinda, my feeling was like, you have to kinda sit with it for a little bit, and kinda not make any sort of rash decisions, and any guesses. I remember, I remember riding the train back home, and realizing that that had happened.

I was like, wow, this is not at all what I had expected when I first started it. This is really cool. Well, part of me was also like, what am I gonna do next, in terms of professional career? - Because that was your whole life at that time. - Yeah, it was everything.

And we could talk about sort of like, the emotional challenges that came a little after that. But, you know, initially I was just like, I'm just gonna sit with this, wait for a little bit, and then maybe talk to some professionals to see if there's something I'm not getting.

And yeah, a lot of it has to just do with comfort with the fact that it's such a large number. Right, like when you think about it, if that's all invested in the stock market, you know, 1% for most people, if you have 100 grand in the stock market, it goes down 1%, that's $1,000.

That's, you could swallow that. - Right. - You could be like, oh, okay, this is something I'm not gonna touch for 30 years. Well, if you're in the millions and it goes down 1%, now you're talking sums that would equate to annual salaries. - Right, right. - Like there were times when the stock market was going up and down in 2008 where it was like how much I would have made in a single year, that first year I was working.

And it was like, it's something you just gotta deal with. And you sort of get comfortable with it over time because you realize, you know, trough to peak, it's no more than a couple years. And if you're looking at it for 20 years, you're like, all right, this is gonna happen probably a couple more times, don't freak out.

But yeah, it's, I don't know if I'm still comfortable with it, and actually I'm certain I'm still not comfortable with it, but I just tell myself, don't touch it. Just let it be there. Have an insurance plan in place if everything goes to sort of crap, but don't freak out.

- What was the emotional journey like over the last five or six years? - So the emotional journey, this is the thing that sort of caught me off guard, was oftentimes we associate our worth with maybe how much we make, but also what we're doing. You couple that with, I very much need something to be working on, or I need to be working on something.

And so for the longest time I was working on bargainering. Waking up, getting excited, jumping out of bed. I had this laundry list of things that I wanted to do. Wasn't things that I was forced to do, I wanted to do it, and I was excited to think about how am I gonna overcome all these challenges.

And then overnight, it was like gone. There's the old adage, no one washes a rental car. Well, now I was in charge of a rental car, and while I was still invested financially, but also emotionally, it wasn't the same. I have two kids. I wonder if that sort of emptiness will happen when kids go off to college and graduate and start living their own lives.

You spend all this time always thinking about making sure they're okay, building them up, all that stuff. And then that responsibility disappearing could be jarring. But yeah, so for a couple months, weeks or months, I can't exactly recall. I just felt a little empty. And while I wouldn't say I was depressed, a lot of people describe depression as not so much sadness but an emptiness.

And that's sort of what I felt in the closest that I think that I have been to being depressed. But at least I sort of understood the thing that caused it. But yeah, but after that, I started finding other projects that I was interested in, and I started working on those, and they sort of filled in that space for me.

- Did you ever, so it's obvious by the way that you speak, by your professional education resume, that at least you come across as very engineering, which is awesome. - Is that good? - It's a great thing. I mean, engineers are some of the most productive creators and accumulators of wealth because the careful personality, the controlled emotions, the logical mind, those skill sets when transferred over to financial management are really, really, really, really valuable.

But I gotta ask, did you at some point pop the relief valve and buy something fun? - No, I don't know. - Nothing, not a car, a house? - But it wasn't related to that. It was because we needed a little more room. We were in a townhouse, and we bought a house that now in the Washington, D.C.

area had 11 acres. So we, you know, granted, as I think back, would we have bought the house we're living in now if I was still working in the defense industry that I probably wouldn't have? But that's really the only extravagant thing. Yeah, I wonder, so my wife very much loves to celebrate little wins, and I know that celebrating wins is a very healthy thing to do.

I just have never felt the need to. Like, I'm just like, oh, this is a good result. You know what it is? It is the engineer. It's the, you focus on the process and not necessarily the result, because the result can be a function of a variety of things, and it's your process that you need to sort of hone in and get right.

And sometimes it doesn't work out due to things that are out of your control. And I think my thinking is just, you know, I'm focusing on the process. And, you know, it's not like we don't, we do enjoy it in the sense that we go on vacations and things like that, but nothing really crazy.

- At this point in time, I know you-- - Should I? You're the professional here. (laughing) I'm just the engineer pretending to be a financial guy. - I think it's almost a balance, and the reason I'm probing so hard on this, and I appreciate your candor, is because this is a conversation that rarely happens in the public space.

Many people, me included, many people who, me included in the past, who are working toward a financial goal, what happens is we tend to set our sights on the financial goal. For me, the most striking thing was when I had set a goal of getting out of debt, and I put that as my number one goal, I put that as a primary focus, I put that as a very high goal, and I achieved it.

And then I was left with that almost sense of loss, of saying, well, what do I do now? Where do I go from here? What's the next thing? And I tried to put the goal then, and set the next financial goal on an income goal, or a savings goal, and I achieved some of those things as well, and I still had that sense of, wait a second, this is the wrong thing.

And then I started paying attention to what, I guess I just started, because I was coming through that sense of dissatisfaction with actually achieving the goal, I started to analyze it and realize that what I really enjoyed was the work, was the process, was that sense of focus, that sense of clear perspective.

And I came to a couple of conclusions for myself, that money is a terrible goal, there may be things along the way that can be bought with money, that can be helpful, a little bit fulfilling, give a sense of value and of purpose, but money is a terrible goal.

You might think it means a little bit different, you might think that looking at numbers on a spreadsheet is gonna, or in your bank account, is gonna be satisfying, and it is a little bit. Right now, I've got more money in my checking account right now, due to selling some investments and repositioning all of my finances for the next stage of my personal finance plan, I got more money sitting in my checking account than I've ever had.

I'm sitting there looking at it, but it's like, okay, well I always dreamed of being able to look at that number there, but realistically, it's not, it's just a number. And so I purpose to focus on the process and focus on the journey, and I thought that the best encapsulation of it was who, I guess, Jim Rohn popularized it, but where he talks about the most important thing of becoming a millionaire is not having a million dollars.

The most important thing of becoming a millionaire is becoming a millionaire, becoming the type of person who accumulates a million dollars. And then once you're there, that's one reason why the rich continually get richer and the poor continually get poorer, is the first million really is the hardest, because the person that you've gotta become to go from zero to a million dollars is very different than the person who starts at zero and stays at zero.

But once you're the kind of person who puts together a million dollars, well, to add another million dollars, you're already that person, so you've already accomplished that personal transformation, those character development, that skill set, that stability, that careful approach, all of those skills that go into it. And so I guess I determined to always set my goals longer and to always be thinking about the next things and not to tie my goals to financial, not to tie them to finance.

It's good to have financial benchmarks, but I don't have any monetary financial goals. My goals are about who I am and who I want to be and what I want to do, and then I need specific benchmarks along the way for those, to make sure that I'm on track and I'm not fooling myself toward the accomplishment of my goals.

- Yeah, if you have, I'm very much a systems versus goals type of person, and what's funny is I recently stumbled upon Douglas Adams' blog and his book, Douglas Adams, the same guy that made Dilbert, and he's a really-- - Scott Adams. - Scott Adams. - Sorry, yeah. - Okay.

I grabbed my pen and I was writing Douglas Adams, I never heard of this guy. - I also love Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, his books too. Scott Adams, yeah, sorry about that. But he writes a lot about sort of the things that he's discovered going through life, and one of them is the idea of systems versus goals.

And it basically echoes what you were saying, like goals are tricky because it doesn't actually talk about how you get there. Right, it's like, oh, I wanna make a million dollars, or I wanna have a million, or whatever, and it's like, well, how are we actually gonna do it?

Well, that's actually the system that you put into place. Well, before you can get the system into place, you have to figure out how are you gonna develop the habits, right, how do you become the millionaire before you actually have a million bucks on your balance sheet, and that's, a lot of the things, his book is really good for a lot of those sort of, those thinking type of ideas.

But yeah, I fully agree. I mean, goals are what makes you do silly things, like, oh, I want to have a net worth of a million dollars by the end of the year, so you start doing all these like, you know, financial engineering type of things to make it happen, when in reality, like, does it matter?

Not really, it's good to have a goal, but it's a system that's much more important. - I also think it's important to recognize that from what I hear from your story is that your character, your personality, the skills and habits that you've put in place, those are the things that have allowed you to enjoy and benefit from sudden wealth, a windfall event, rather than to be destroyed by it.

Because I guess the person who best encapsulated it was T Harv, years ago I read T Harv Eker's book, "Secrets of the Millionaire Mind", and he made a big point about talking about the concept of the money thermostat, the idea that we all have a comfort level. Some people have a comfort level of zero dollars in their bank account.

Some people have a comfort level of $1,000. Some people have 10,000. Some people have hundreds of thousands. Some people have millions of dollars. And as you described, it can take a little while when there's a sudden change, upward or downward, it can take a little while to adjust our self-image, our perception of ourself, to that different number.

The example I use is, let's say Donald Trump woke up and found himself with 10 million bucks in the bank. Would he be rejoicing at the fact that he has $10 million in the bank? He would be horrified, and he would immediately cancel anything, he would cancel his presidential campaign and say, "I've gotta make some money." Because his self-image, his financial thermostat, is set in the billions of dollars.

That's where he's comfortable. Whereas many of us, if we woke up with $10 million, I don't know, if I woke up all of a sudden with $10 million in the bank, and I hadn't gone through the process of gradually adjusting my comfort level and my self-image to that place, I might do something stupid and get rid of it.

Hopefully I wouldn't, but it's a real danger. And it describes why character and planning and structure is so important for us to build into ourselves, so that when we come into those windfall events, instead of destroying our lives, they can enhance our lives. - Yeah, and I also think that, as you talk about the thermostat, there are lessons that you learn managing 10,000, 50,000, 100, before you get to the million.

And those things, while they'll also move your thermostat and your comfort level, they also give you the information and skills, so that when you do get the windfall, it's not as crazy of an event. And you don't, like you say, do something foolish. I mean, 'cause before, it wasn't like the lottery, where one day there was seven figures in a bank account somewhere.

The site had been generating significant income up to then, and so I still had to figure out, I can contribute this much to my retirement accounts and this and that, and how I should invest it in the allocation of things. So it wasn't as big of a shock for that reason also.

- Have you been able to find good financial advice at this point, since you've achieved almost a different perspective in life? Have you found a good financial advisor or trusted advisors to work with you? - We have a financial advisor. She's fee-only. We don't do any investments with her, and she's sort of just, is someone that can act as a sounding board for ideas, and just sort of has an eye on where we're going and making sure that our future needs are funded in some way.

But we don't actually have any investments with her. - When you started, you were primarily, I think, focusing on just basic personal finance topics. That was, as I understand it, that was kind of just the standard approach, starting with basic personal finance topics, money management, budgeting, debt, credit cards, just the standard, basic level.

You're now at a different financial position. I'd like to know, what was the theme, I guess, that continued forward, that has come forward over the last 10 years, where you started talking and writing about 10 years ago versus where you are today? What's the same? And also, what's different?

What were you talking about then that now, in retrospect, you see is very different in your current place in life? - I think now, what's different now is a bigger focus. So, what's different now, yeah, is a bigger focus on sort of the systems and developing good habits, as opposed to in the past, say 10 years ago, I might be writing about how to save money on X, and it would be maybe a service or something like that.

And it was very much shorter term than it is today. I think today, I try to just figure out how, yeah, how to install systems so I can spend more time on things that are more valuable to me and worry less about the sort of the hardcore, like money-saving things where you're trading a lot of time for money and things of that nature.

I think it's because, I've also gotten older. When you're in your early 20s, you have nothing but time. Now, I'm in my 30s, my time is valuable because there's so many different competing interests. And so, a lot of things I try to put into place are to make sure that I'm still on top of my money, but without spending a ton of time doing it.

- You, based upon your birth story and your parents immigrating into the United States, you're in a very interesting position of observing your parents, who are immigrants to a different culture, but then you basically growing up within the US American culture. When you look at the difference between mainstream US American culture and traditional Asian culture, what are the things that, with regard to wealth, stand out as being the most crazy to you about US Americans?

And what are the things that you perhaps value from your traditional Asian culture? - So, I've thought about this a little bit, and my thinking is, I don't know if this applies to traditional Asian cultures or just to my parents and family, but if you think about when the Depression was in the United States, and then you think about when the Cultural Revolution and World War II, that whole era in China and Taiwan, you have the need for frugality differs by 30 years, 20 years, something like that.

So, it's basically one generation. So, if you think back, in American culture, if you think back to your grandparents, or maybe your grandparents, and how frugal they are, it's sort of like how my parents are today. And you have that sort of development. Like, when you live in an era where you have to like scrimp everything when you're a child, that sticks with you.

Those are habits that you develop that are gonna continue on. And so, my parents were very frugal, 'cause they came here, and they were saving up so we could go visit home, and we would shut off the electricity, or shut off the heat at night, and just bundle up in blankets.

And we lived in New York, and it got cold at night. Just sort of the things that you would do. And if you think back to a lot of folks' grandparents, that's probably what they did too, during that era. So, I think that's probably the biggest analogy that can help folks understand why certain groups are frugal.

You just think about when they had sort of a significant belt-tightening moment, and it often translates. I don't know if there's anything too crazy. I do know that one of the, maybe the big disadvantages I had was in not having more of a financial education. And I don't know if anybody else had a better financial education.

But money isn't just something that you should be saving all the time. Like, you should be investing it. You should be thinking about ways of making it grow and work for you. And that just, money can be seen as sort of like this living thing, and not just an asset to be consumed or saved.

And that's just something that took me a while to understand. And part of it was through blogging and talking with more people, and saying, all right, so there's a certain group of people that they take this money, and they're investing in the stock market, or they're putting it into real estate.

And it's not so much like a gamble as it is, you spread it out and try to make it grow, and not just put it all in one thing and look for an awesome deal or something like that. So, yeah, I don't know if I answered that or if I just started rambling, but-- - How old are your children now, Jim?

- They're four and two. - What's your plan for their financial education? - Good question. I don't currently have one. Though, I mean, I imagine it'll evolve as they get older. I do know that every so often my son, who's four, will come in and say, hey, I wanna sell you this thing, whatever.

It'll be like a block. I'm like, sell? Where'd you learn to sell? He's like, I don't know, but I wanna sell it to you. I was like, how much? He was like, $1. Like, that's it, just $1? He's like, $3. I'm like, okay, fine, $3. I don't know, we'll just grow it from there.

But I think that he'll probably, I don't know. How should I do it? - Well. (laughs) - They're young, so it's, are they young? You tell me. Are they too young yet? - So, I'll recognize, I've got a two-year-old and a six-month-old, so we're at similar stages. I've perhaps spent maybe more time thinking about it because it's important to me, and I'm gonna be doing a bunch of shows on radical personal finance in the future on my own ideas and plans, and I've been studying, I've been studying many people, and success stories, failure stories.

I guess the biggest thing is to recognize that the axiom, or the aphorism, I'm not sure which is the appropriate word, the saying is, shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations, and that is your biggest danger. As an affluent father, your parents sacrificed to come to the US.

They raised you with frugality. You've taken that frugality, used those habits and that character to pass on and build wealth. Now, the danger is, usually by the third generation, the third generation doesn't see, you saw the sacrifice of your parents' generation. Your kids aren't gonna grow up seeing you sacrifice.

You're gonna live in a nice house, you're gonna enjoy the fruits of your labor. They're not gonna see the sacrifice. And so, what happens is they tend not to value things as much, and most parents, number one, parents tend, we have a tendency toward indulging our children, and those with means have a tendency to indulge more than those without.

And so, it's a big, big concern. In my mind, the key is to mold and shape their character and build their education and their skills. And the way to do it is gonna be different within each family. I think it's important to, my personal opinion is, I think it's important to maintain some austerity in their lives.

It's nice to be able to enjoy the fruits of wealth, but there should not be, in order to build similar character and hunger into our children, they can't be indulged to the point of having everything they want without work. That doesn't mean you can just ignore the status that we have in life.

All of us are affluent on a global scale, but the question is how do we build an appreciation in them and build that character and form it in them in an appropriate way, and then how do we involve them in our family finances? Because there's, based upon what you're describing, unless you were to go through some radical change, I mean, your children are going to come into the stewardship of very large amounts of wealth.

Unless you make foolish investments or somehow spend the money or give it all away, they're going to come into the possession of very large amounts of wealth. And so the biggest financial challenge you have is to shape and mold their character so that it doesn't destroy their lives. - So you know, it's interesting.

So when you asked me what we're doing, I was thinking strictly in sort of the financial education sort of arena of skills of what we teach. And so while we're too early for that, I think now is obviously the prime time for the character building grit and being able to persevere sort of through adversity.

And we try to do that. You know, we try to instill good habits of like making your bed and cleaning your room and things like that where you start off early. And it's already paying off dividends for us just because now there's areas that he'll pick up after himself.

And yeah, so we're trying to teach him more how to be like a decent to good human being. And hopefully the actual concrete financial lessons will come later. But yeah, it's tough 'cause they have their own opinions and it's a tendency of all human beings to be lazy, especially when your parents are there.

- Definitely. And it's, yeah, absolutely. You have been involved since leaving bargaining, you've been involved in various other online endeavors. And specifically I'd like to ask you about the world of blogging. Today I see many people, especially in the personal finance situation, sphere, who are building blogs and they're primarily doing it in order to build an income for themselves.

And I'm guilty of the same thing. I built Radical Personal Finance with the intention, I experimented a little bit, and then I've built it with the intention of providing an income for me based upon talking about finance topics. Share with me what, is what happened in your situation duplicatable today in 2016?

- Oh yeah. I think everything that anyone's really ever done is duplicatable, not necessarily in the same way. Like you can build up an internet property, a website, a blog, whatever you wanna call it, so that it's valuable to someone else and then sell it for a large sum.

Is it, was it, will it be as easy as before? I don't know. I guess you would define, you'd have to define what easy is. But if you work hard enough, I think that anyone can build sort of a following and then either sell products or sell their own products or someone else's products to that audience.

And yeah, I don't see why not. I mean, I'm trying to do it again, in part because, so one of the things that prompted me to start bargaining in the first place, or actually one of the reasons why it started making money was because I started seeing affiliate links and the sort of puzzle solving gene in me or whatever you wanna call it, part of my brain said, what is this?

How can I figure this out? I'm very much fascinated by how other systems work and reverse engineering them. Like there's the engineer again. And I think even today, maybe the methods are slightly different, but it's still definitely possible. You just have to spend the time, study what other people are doing, copy them and then innovate on it in order to sort of take it beyond where they're able to take it.

- Many times in growth phases, there's a factor of individual skill and there's a factor of fortuitous timing. For example, you can look at various investors in the stock market and some component of their results might be based upon the generalized market trend. I had a 30 year bull market trend and so that helped you to look like a better investor and some of it may be based upon their individual skill.

Looking back at bargaining, if you were gonna guess a percentage of your success and assign a percentage to your own personal skill, uniqueness in the niche versus the general trend of growth of online personal finance blogs, how would you break those numbers out? - Good question. I would probably 20% timing, 80% personal.

I think, and in the personal aspect, there's, as we talked about our kids and grit and perseverance, like part of that is just sticking around long enough. And granted, start to finish of five years is not quote unquote long at all, but there are plenty of blogs that quit out in the first year, first six months.

So, I mean, 80% skill, I would like to say, 90, 70. It's hard to assign numbers to what is essentially a qualitative thing. But I mean, if you look, so if you look towards today and compare the experience now and then, I would say the 20% then was the fortunate timing of how much easier it was to do search engine optimization.

And remember, search engine optimization, how high you're listed on Google search results now is gonna be a lot harder in part because of how they do the rankings in the first place, but also how many more sites there are and how many more high quality sites writing about similar things.

These days though, the technology exists that you can build a following, a much closer following, a tribe, what have you, more easily than you did five years ago or even 10 years ago. So there's always going to be something, right? There's going to be a bull market somewhere. And now in terms of building a business or a blog, you have to find out where your efforts are best put.

- When did you recognize in your journey, as you started it just as, okay, I'm gonna scratch this personal itch, write about these things, when did you recognize that you were in a rising market? - I think when, so I started it in January and then in September, I was in the New York Times on like a Sunday edition photo, what was it, Sunday of their business, I don't know.

But I was like, whoa, I could start a blog and get my picture in the New York Times. I'm not a financial professional. There's really no reason I should be here other than this is an article about people sharing their net worths. And that's when I was like, oh, this is gonna be a thing.

And even though it didn't make any money, I guess I made money off ads, but it wasn't like a financial windfall by any means. But it was sort of something that said, hey, blogs are for real. Even though for years people had joked about people sharing their journals and how boring they were.

Sort of like how they started in the beginning of Twitter, right, when they're like, oh, you're sharing what you had for breakfast, awesome, no one cares. And then a bunch of celebrities go on and now they're publicly traded, although not doing that great. But still, this is a service that has people share 140 characters, like what is this?

- The reason I was pressing on that is a trick question, is to develop a theme, I guess just an opinion I have. And I wanted to hear it from you, 'cause I was like, test my opinions on other people. But I would say that, so my way of answering the trick question is, I think 100% of your, well, I would say 99% of your success was skill, and part of that skill was being able to recognize the timing of what was going on in the market.

Because if you hadn't looked and seen, okay, I've been doing this for two or three years, let's say you'd done it for three years and you weren't getting any traction, you looked around and nobody was reading finance blogs and that New York Times article hadn't happened, then you wouldn't have continued doing it.

So I think recognizing timing is a skill, and paying attention to the industries and the things that you're involved in, part of that is a skill. Now we can't control the macro trend of timing necessarily. We can't control the fact that we live in the digital age where we're able to create this digital content and influence other people.

We can't control that, but we can recognize what's going on. And I've done the same thing with Radical Personal Finance. When I was, I started it just a little bit, podcasts, we're in the wave of podcasting, where more people are starting podcasts, more people are, it's a hot new thing.

A couple years ago when I went to FinCon within our industry, everyone's, okay, I've got to get into podcasting, got to get into podcasting. Well, part of the skill for me, I'm convinced, is I was watching that and I said, I see the next wave because I'm my best consumer, I know what's coming, and I've got to start now with my own podcast journey.

I've got to take the leap because I see the trend in the wave that's coming. And I think this is something that we've got to pay attention to in our careers, whether it's a digital career, whether it's something else, in any business, this is an applicable lesson. Can you time the market?

Can I time the market? I can't, I don't have the interest or the connection to pay attention to it, to the generalized stock market on that much of an interest. But I can time my market if I pay attention. I can know my industry, whatever that industry is, I can search for the trends, I can stay plugged in.

And that can be something that draws a major difference in my growth rate in my career. And I think it's important for my audience to recognize that and apply it to their career, whether it's a blog, whether it's a podcast, or whether it's owning tire stores and car repair stores or whatever.

Always staying tuned and saying, what's the generalized trend? And how can I take my unique, specific advantages and apply them over to the generalized trend? I tried to start a personal finance blog back in 2000 and about six or seven. I launched the site, I posted some articles, I would sit down on a Sunday night and I would try to write.

But writing is not my skill set. And at that time, I didn't have enough content or material where it flowed. And so I shuttered the blog, took it offline, and went on. But when you recognize the intersection between your skills, your ability, your interests, and the generalized trend, and so for you, if that was writing, for me, it's speaking, that's where a major growth can occur in our careers.

I just, I don't know. You agree, disagree? - I totally agree. Also, a couple things I wanted to share. So I had to take the SAT2 writing exam to get into college. It was actually required by Carnegie Mellon, even though I was going into computer science, like they required it.

I guess they wanted us to be semi-well-rounded. And I couldn't write. Like, I was terrible at writing. I was a typical engineer. And I mean, I did fine on the SAT verbal, 'cause that's just definitions and whatever it used to be. But writing, I had to get a tutor, and I don't know what I scored.

It was like 500-something out of 800. I still got into college, so I guess the bar wasn't particularly high. So I wasn't a good writer, but I became better the more I did it. Like any other skill, you get better as you do it. But to go back to your whole starting a blog and deciding it's not for you, like I'm sure you learned things from that experience that helped when you started Radical.

- Definitely. - You didn't have to figure out how to register a domain and get hosting, and you were able to get that, which far less friction. And then you were then able to focus on the thing that you wanted to do, which was record and publish podcasts. - Yeah, absolutely.

- I totally agree. - And that's why just experimenting and trying different things. Today, everyone should have a blog. Everyone should have a podcast. Everyone should have a YouTube video because the process of creating it will teach you something, and then you'll be more well-equipped where when you identify the thing that's appropriate for you, it's not the first time.

It's a whole new skill set, and this skill set is important to start building before you need it. - Exactly. And then there's also the point of like you aren't going to be able to find every single trend, but if you see something and you get yourself into it and investigate it, and granted, if you're gonna open up a tire store, that's gonna be a much higher startup cost, but starting a blog, starting a podcast, starting any of these mostly online endeavors won't require a tremendous amount of time.

You won't have to sign a lease or commit to a huge liability. So I say you try 'em all, and then if one doesn't work, then you shutter it. There's always the tricky question of do you wanna quit too, how do you avoid quitting too early? How do you try to survive and things like that?

But I remember when I went to college, it was 1998, dot-com boom. I'm like this is great, I'm gonna do computer science, I'm gonna graduate, work at a startup, and then March 2001, everything implodes, and I'm like well, I still got a year left of school, so what am I gonna do in the worst market for computer science graduates?

And then I graduated, I found a job, everything was fine, and then I'm looking to buy a house, I catch it at the peak of the boom, I'm like man, my timing is incredible for all these major life decisions. But it just goes to show those are huge markets that you're trying to predict, and not only are they huge from different factors perspective, there are a lot of different players that are going to be spending a lot more time, have a lot more technology than you do.

Try to play in a world that's a little bit smaller, that isn't as developed, and where the players in it aren't nearly as mature, and you're more likely to succeed. - Play in the world that you know. - Exactly. - What are your current projects? - My current projects, so I mentioned that I was starting up another blog, I started about four or five months ago, it's called Wallet Hacks, and it's sort of taking that engineer's eye towards finances, how do you build systems so you can manage your money, and it's not taking up a tremendous amount of your time, how do you just be smarter with money, just with that engineer's eye.

Have a meal plan business, so I like solving problems, and one of them was trying to figure out how do we build sort of a membership site, and help folks that, it started about two years ago, a year and a half ago, very much in the how do we help folks save money on one of their biggest expenses, which is food and meals, and so it's called $5 Meal Plan, and I work on that with a great partner, Erin, at $5 Dinners, it's all her recipes, tested, she has four kids, and it's great.

Those are the two main projects I'm working on right now. - Why do you work on those, why do you work, why do you do that? - They're fun. I don't know, it's just the whole problem solving again, like you asked before, can you create a blog today and build it to be a success?

And I don't know if the answer is 100% yes, but I'm gonna try to do it again, I'm gonna do it a little differently since the environment has changed, and it's just fun to learn these things. And it's also, one of the big things that I missed about working sort of in an office was that social aspect, and when, the meal plan business was fun from the perspective of how do we build a membership site, how do we build a community, and work with a partner, and that's been great, it's exceeded my expectations, but sort of writing about personal finance is a constant interest of mine, and then seeing if I can rebuild the blog has been fun.

Like I miss getting emails for those years that I didn't have a site, I miss getting the emails from folks, like asking questions, and just learning about their experiences, and I guess I'm trying to relive old glory, and seeing if I can make it new glory again. (laughing) - It is kind of fun just to see, hey, I wonder if I could still do that, I think about that, I was like, I wonder if I could still sell insurance, I bet I could, but it's fun to be tested against the market.

Are you enjoying it more this time around, now that it's more of the challenge, but the financial pressure is gone, what's the same, what's different, of this versus in the past? - So here's the funny, like it's fun because I don't have to fight through the frustrating elements, because like I said, when you started a blog before, you learned things, and now you don't have to relearn them.

You know, it was fun not to have to do that again, and like have things break and not realize what's going on. The other thing is that, and I never realized how much of an impact this had on me, but when people, I guess when they had low expectations of you, like whether because you're young or whatnot, like it's really fun to prove people wrong, and when you don't have that, there's a little bit of that motivation, it's not a big piece of my sort of internal motivation, but when people aren't like, wow, you really built an awesome thing, when you come at it years later, after you've had success, people are like, oh, well of course you're gonna do well.

Like of course, what do you mean of course I'm gonna do well? Like you have all the friends and networks and connections, like yeah, but think about if you were to redo it, would you just go begging around everyone to like let you do this and that, without regard to what value you're providing them?

No, of course not. Right, you'd essentially not start from zero, but you wouldn't be like asking all your friends for help. You wanna rebuild it on your own. And so there's a little bit of that, you know, oh, of course it'll be easy. That can get a little annoying, but I mean, whatever, you still gotta do the work.

- Four final rapid fire questions. Favorite finance related book? - Favorite finance related book? Oh, I don't have one. I don't know if I've ever, yeah, I don't have a favorite finance book. - Is there one that's impacted you more than most others? Doesn't have to be, just curious.

- No, I just, there was a book that The Motley Fool put out years and years ago that I remember, it was probably the first one that I read, and I wish I could remember. Yeah, I could send you the title maybe later. - That kind of stuff, unless it was unique, it was one of those, here's the general guide in line and out line, framework type of thing.

That's easy to find. All right, favorite personal finance related blog that's not wallethacks.com in today's world? - Ooh. So, man, now I feel like if I name one, this is what happens when you have a lot of friends. They're all like, oh, well, thanks for not. (laughing) - It's okay if it's someone that's not prominent.

I'm just always interested in who, who are you paying attention to? Who are you enjoying reading? Not exclusive, who are you enjoying reading right now? - Who am I enjoying reading? So, there's, oh, you know what? One that I don't think a lot of people, there are two that come to mind.

One is, I think it's Dad Is Cheap. The guy's name's Victor, Vic. I think, I'm always just interested in his stories. He only recently started his blog, and he lost his job and is spending more time at home, and it's just a very interesting, a lot of it mirrors the experiences I have.

I didn't lose my job, but I spent a lot of time at home with the kids, and they go to daycare, but some of the same issues. The other one I like is Brokepedia. It's Kristen. She also writes for Lifehacker, their Two Cents blog. But, yeah, those are the two that I'm really getting into.

- That's cool. - That maybe aren't as well-known. - Yeah, that's cool, 'cause I haven't heard of either one, so that's awesome. All right, favorite, or a personal finance or finance-related podcast or other podcast that you enjoy? Obviously, you would say Radical Personal Finance, but other than Radical Personal Finance.

- There are a lot of really good podcasts. So, I mean, I really like Farnoosh, Tarabi's So Money. - So Money. - But I feel like she doesn't need any more press. She's already a rock star. - She is, absolutely. - So. I like Listen, Money Matters, Always a Reverend.

That's always fun. And then Stacking Benjamins is fun. Yeah, those are the ones for me. - Cool, and is there a YouTube channel, someone that you see doing a great job on YouTube that you'd like to shine a little light on? - Ooh. Yes, but I don't know the name of the channel.

I just know it's Thomas Frank. - That's the guy's name? - He does study hacks. Yeah, it's like study hacks type of things. - Awesome. - But it's for students. And it's, they're like things on like how to take notes really quickly. And I just like how well the videos are done.

I don't watch a lot of stuff on YouTube. I mean, I suppose I do, but it's not cat videos. But they're all like Conan O'Brien videos where they're like driving around a car or getting an Uber, things like that. I don't know if those count. But they're hilarious. - Well, awesome.

Jim, I wanna thank you for coming on the show today. I've enjoyed it. Congratulations on being one of the grandfathers of our budding personal finance industry. If you were gonna give some closing words of advice to somebody who's interested in personal finance or listening to my show because they're interested in building their knowledge and their wealth, and you were gonna close with some final words of advice, what would you say?

- I would say, if you ever have any questions, you can email me, jim@wallethacks.com. But there is, just keep working hard at it. If you wanna start a blog or any sort of business, perseverance is sort of underrated. And just keep after it. You'll learn a lot, even if things end up not as well as you'd hope.

But just keep after it. - Thanks for coming on. - Oh, it's a pleasure. Thanks a lot. - I chose to profile this interview very intentionally. And I want you to pay attention to one major theme that came through the interview. Jim gave a lot of great experience, a lot of great advice.

Pay attention to this theme. Jim is financially independent. But yet, what does he find himself doing? Working and building businesses. So, I am working to be financially independent based upon being able to live off of the income from my investment portfolio, but I'm not there yet. But you know what?

I've built financial freedom through working and building businesses. It's not quite the same financial freedom that Jim Wang enjoys at this point. He's got more money than I do. I'll get there, but you know what? I'm enjoying the process. And I'm at a phase in my life where, at this point, I'm not willing to do a full-time job and work nights and weekends and everything on the show.

I'm at a different family stage than he was at that time. But I can still figure out my plan. Jim figured out his plan, and you can figure out your plan. Can't promise it's gonna work. Nobody can, of course not. But I can promise that if you try, you'll be closer to it working than if you don't try.

So the best way to get started is to simply get started and adjust, correct. If you wanna see adjustments and corrections, just listen to this show. Go back and listen to the archives, and you'll see adjustments and corrections everywhere. I'm always figuring it out, still working on it. But still, that doesn't mean that the process isn't worth it and that you can't make it happen.

So learn from the example, work toward financial freedom in 10 years or less, but also live a rich life now. Thank you so much for listening to today's show. I hope it's been useful to you. I hope you found it encouraging, inspiring. If you have benefited and appreciated the show, number one, send Jim a note and let him know, say thanks for coming on.

Feel free to connect with him at all the links mentioned and linked in the show notes for today's show. Also, however, if you'd like to support me and my ability to continue doing this for you, go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. Sign up to become a paying patron of the show. I am at your service in that capacity.

Radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. And I appreciate the many of you who do that. Radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. Be back with you very soon. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)