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"We never seen this before." Max, the one to watch for a good scream with Cricket. "Yeah!" Phone plan, streams, and standard definition. Programming subject to change. Fees, terms, and restrictions apply. See cricketwireless.com for details. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

On today's show, I'm going to speak with Matt Minor. Matt, I've invited you on because you're a long-time listener to the show, and we've had some correspondence. And we're going to profile your story because, no offense, but you're a pretty normal guy who just simply does ordinary things and has accomplished a pretty dramatic transformation.

So I think this will be a neat episode to share your story with my audience. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Well, thanks so much, Joshua. I guess we're an ordinary family that is striving to be as extraordinary as we can be, and I'm delighted to have the chance to come on and speak with you and with your audience.

I have truly enjoyed your show and benefited from it over probably about a year now, and I'm just delighted to talk to you today. Absolutely. Now, we're going to talk about your financial change because it's basically been about the last five or six years, and you've made tremendous progress.

But I'd love for you just to sketch out a little bit of the back story yourself. Tell us about your life path leading up to where you were in 2010 when you first started paying attention to money a little bit more in a more focused way. Yeah, no, absolutely.

So I had always been focused on earning money from the time that I was nine years old and got my first paper out. And I hate that my children don't have the opportunity to be paper deliverers because that was a great way to practice meeting people and doing collections and all kind of things that are just important in business.

But from that, when I got to be old enough that I could work as a W-2 type employee, I kind of got through a couple of high school jobs and was always focused on the next job and how I could earn more income. And so the focus for me from the time I was nine years old really right up through my late 20s was just on the salaried side of the equation, how I could grow my income without a whole lot of focus on either assets or debt or the resulting net income number.

And the result of that was that we always were growing and improving kind of in my career and in my job, but was not doing a super great job from an accumulation standpoint. And that was kind of the transformation that you referred to in 2010. But the real, I guess, the real significant thing that kind of drove that transformation was the ultimate money making increase in my mind, at least at that time, was to go from sort of an ordinary post-collegiate finance analyst kind of type of job to sort of monetize what I saw as my managerial skills with an MBA degree.

And so what I wanted to do was not primarily driven by the money, but was to transition from working in a finance function, doing cost accounting and project analysis for general managers to being a general manager. And I thought that a great way to make that transition and to facilitate an industry transition as well would be to go to business school.

And I was delighted to be accepted at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in Durham, North Carolina. And we left. We'd been living in Arizona prior to that. I've been working for a large semiconductor firm out there and moved to Duke. And we had a wonderful two years there.

And I wouldn't trade that time for anything, nor the experience or the learning of the people that we met. I think that that's all the real deal. And we're super positive on that and have stayed involved with the school since that time. But I came to grad school with my wife, who is a stay-at-home mom with a two-year-old and an infant.

And I left grad school with a four-year-old, a two-year-old and another infant with about $225,000 in total debt. And it was kind of at that point in looking at this number and realizing what a staggering sum that was that a couple of cousins who are close friends shared with me Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover book, which I know from listening to you played a role earlier in your life than it did for me.

And my wife had always been super conservative about money, but she's also tremendously not interested in it. And so since I was the one who squarely, she's like, "Really? You're sure this much debt is a good idea?" Absolutely, sweetheart. Because just look at the income statement. It's doing great.

Sounds exactly like me and my wife, especially in my younger years. That's why I'm just laughing because it's exact. Sorry, that just rings very close to home for me. So one of the things that I was truly blessed with was my wife was just immediately on board with getting serious about debt reduction.

And we did get real serious about it. From August of 2010 to March of 2014, we paid off the full $225,000 just through earned income. And that was all after tax money because my income was too high to qualify for any sort of student loan interest deduction. And the day that we cleared that debt in March of 2014 was certainly a memorable one.

Very thankful for that. And I guess just over the course of the last few months, have become interested in seeing if there's a way to share that story and maybe try to help some people who would be considering going to graduate school as they do their planning to consider some of the things that I failed to consider and how maybe they can enjoy a faster time to freedom than I did and a shorter duration of ignorance.

What I love about your story is, I mean, just for the record, you didn't go and live in your car, right? No, we're strictly regular people. Great. Yeah. That's one of the, I mean, we came out of business school with a post business school income. And I won't say for a minute that that wasn't a huge advantage in being able to repay that because we were able to live like what amounted to pretty normal looking folks while making big payments on a loan.

It meant like at one point we sold a 2007 car and moved to a 2004 car. And at one point when we sold a home, we opted to rent for a year rather than jumping right back into home ownership. But we were not suffering in any way. So other than being focused.

Right. It's a matter of focus. And the name of Radical Personal Finance is Radical Personal Finance. And so I try to cover the extreme stories. But man, I've got a lot of probably Jacob Lund Fisker's website is the best where it seems like it's usually the men. I've almost never, although I know they exist because I've read his forums and whatnot.

I almost never get an email or a story from a woman who reads his website and it somehow appeals to them. But guys often read his website and he talks about living in an RV and living on $7,000 a year and walking everywhere and eating lentils for food three times a day.

And it seems like there's something in the male heart that responds to say, "Yes, I want to do that." And what happens is they go and take that to their wife and say, "Look, honey, look, we could live on $7,000 a year." And she says, "Huh? I don't think so.

Not really going to do it." And my hope is to say to people, "Listen, just because you're not going to do that doesn't mean that you can't find an appropriate path in your situation." Because especially as men, we're responsible to provide the things that our family needs. And sometimes, maybe some families, the best thing is to go and live in an RV and live in a boat and live on nothing and eat lentils.

But for other families, that just means we're going to drive a 2007 car instead of a 2010. We're going to move and we're going to rent for a year. And we're living a relatively normal-looking lifestyle, but just with focus. And instead of taking our bonuses and blowing them on the expensive vacation or blowing them on the new boat, we're just going to, for a time, focus.

And you can make tremendous progress when doing that. No, absolutely. And that was our model. And for us, it was rice and beans, and the kids definitely did get sick of it. But I think if you're going to tout Dave Ramsey, you have to do a little bit of that for a while.

Peanut butter also figured big in our plans. So tell me, during this period of time, this four years, 2010 to 2014, when you were focused on paying off this debt, you were earning a good income. But tell me the specific things that you did to cut expenses, to free up money for debt.

Look, I think that the first thing you so often and helpfully covered in your earlier episodes, especially, relate to, number one, know where the money's going. So it's hard at this point, because our life at this point is kind of on autopilot and the buckets just sort of fill themselves.

But back then, we got super drilled down on the budget or spending plan, whatever you want to call it. And for us, that started with, what is the income that's coming in? And then we gave a tithe and an offering all through this time. For us as Christians, that was critically important.

That's the second line item in the budget. And then, from there, it's like, okay, this is how much is left over. And we got very specific and very conservative about portioning that money out. We did switch to using cash for the categories where it made sense for us. Those categories were and continue to be entertainment for both.

We have a family entertainment fund, as well as my wife and I have some small dollars, separate money that we use for clothes and our hobbies. And we switched that entirely to cash. And then we switched grocery entirely to cash. And we really did do the thing where I put, if the monthly figure is $650, I put $325 in there on the first, and that's got to last till the 15th.

And then I put $325 in there on the 16th, and that's got to last till the 30th. And those were definitely some things that were helpful in accelerating this and finding that extra money in the monthly income. The story that I look back and laugh about was with much younger children and fewer overall demands other than the student loan thing.

When we started this thing, I thought that our monthly minimum required cash outlay was in the neighborhood of like $7,800 a month. I really thought that was how much we needed in order to live. And here we are much farther down the road. And I know that with enough focus, we can do a $3,500 a month, and we're very comfortable at $4,500 to $5,000 a month in terms of monthly expenditure.

And so the $7,800 figure that I thought was like, "Well, just how are we ever going to live on anything less than that?" was just the result of major sloppiness in a variety of categories, again, spearheaded by me at every step of the way. Was it one thing? Like, for example, were you living in an expensive house and you had a massive heating bill, or was it a lot of little things?

More the latter. So I loved to eat out, so that was definitely a big category that was in there. And then buying stuff. So for me, that was hunting, clothes, just things like that. And then I would say to a much lesser extent, in my wife's case, stuff for around the house.

And we're still able to do those things. We just do them in a much more planful manner. And it's much more comfortable now than it was then, obviously. Appreciate your leading with the hunting stuff. My pet peeve is usually these big burly men or redneck-leaning guys that talk about, "Man, I can't believe those women spend all that money on the Jimmy Choo shoes." Meanwhile, you look over there and there's a $400 scope mounted on top of a $2,000 rifle.

And you say, "Listen, there's your Jimmy Choo right there." It's called a Leupold scope and this fancy-dancy rifle. So it's always good to lead by example in these things. That's right. That's Jimmy Choo times six. Exactly. So it took four years to get out of debt. And then what?

Then what did you do? Well, I guess what we've been able to do since then has been kind of just accelerate some other things. So obviously, we've been able to save more. We've been able to give more. We are working on repaying the house at this point. The other thing that I think is great is one of the things that helped us get out of debt was I was in a major industry upcycle.

If any of your listeners checks out my website, at the end of this, at designindependence.com, you'll see that I was in the agricultural industry. I still am. And 2005 to 2013 was an unprecedented bull market, at least since the 1970s in that industry. So that helped with the income during that time that we were repaying the debt.

And then we're in a major industry low point in the cycle right now. I'm into the tune of what the construction industry did in 2008 through 2010. And it's been great to have gotten the structure in place during what turned out to be very good income years to deal with the challenges that we have now from an industry that is in so much more of a depressed state, and it's always just a good reminder to anyone to just take money off the table.

My first post-undergraduate job was with Intel Corporation. And that was in 2005. It was close enough to the end of the dot-com boom when a ton of managers were still in the company that had been there through the stock run-up from, say, particularly like '85 to '99 at Intel.

And there were those who had taken a million or two or three million dollars off of the table at some point in their career, and there were those who had watched their paper net worth go to three to five million dollars that was now much, much less than that because the company stock just didn't do in the 2000s what it did in the 15 years prior to that.

So anyway, that was a rambling answer to say taking money off the table was a good thing from a structure standpoint. I think what you focus on there is a key personal finance skill that is very rarely discussed, and it's to kind of go with the flow. Let me find a better way to say that.

To pay attention to what the actual conditions are and then to play to those conditions. So if you're a surfer, you know that you've got to wait until the waves are good, and the waves are not always good. But you don't go out on a flat day and expect to have this unbelievably epic ride.

You wait until the waves are there. And sometimes when the waves are not there at the beach, you take your paddle board and you go on the bay or you just go paddling instead. Like you find something else to do on those days. Well, with personal finance, what happens is because we generally tend to be such short-term thinkers, we think, well, the way things are now is just about how they're always going to be.

And we forget about the seasons of life. We forget about the cycles of business. And it's important to recognize that when you're in an up cycle, enjoy it. Maybe do some of those things that you might like to do. Enjoy the up cycle. But recognize that the up cycle is going to be the down cycle.

You're going to go down. Whether it's a dot-com crash that affects Intel Corporation, whether it's an agriculture bull market, whether it's a construction industry. I mean financial advisors in general, painting with very broad strokes, seem to be very terrible at this. Market goes up and we get so used to being optimistic that the market always goes up.

We forget about the fact that the market doesn't always go up. And it's shocking how many financial advisors I knew who their personal finances were thrown into woeful disarray back when I got in in 2008 due to market crashes. And their income was dramatically affected and they hadn't planned for it.

So when your income is high, it's always good to take some off the table and recognize that things will change. What's that old parable of the man went out and the king hired his wise men and said, "Give to me the wisest wisdom of the ages." And they got together and they wrote several books.

And they came back in and presented that to him. He said, "Too long. Make it shorter." And they went through this process a dozen times until finally they come back with four words. And the king is satisfied that these four words encapsulate the wisdom of the ages, which is, "This too shall pass." So when times are good, this too shall pass.

When times are bad, this too shall pass. I think that's a great point and well said. So for you, what you found to be the biggest driver of your financial progress was increasing the income through the use of the MBA. And then also just systematically focusing on the expenses, freeing up some of that money from the monthly budget, and then being diligent with things like bonuses, being diligent with things like extra income.

Is that a fair encapsulation? Yeah. And I think that that's absolutely fair. And we're hyper-conscious of how blessed we were to have the problems that we had. But still, I look back at it and see, one, the course that I was on of just always thinking that I could out-earn my spending was not a good one to be on.

And then, two, wishing that I could have had the decade back from 2000 to 2010 and realizing, like you've expressed at different times, if it sort of run into this financial independence stuff younger, that it would have made just a dramatic difference in terms of where we are today.

So where we are today, we're incredibly thankful for it. We know that it could be immeasurably worse. On the other hand, I'm also aware of the fact that just frankly with better planning and more knowledge earlier on that it could also just be even more so than it is right now.

And I guess that the balancing aspect of that is at the end of the day, you have to learn something and experience is usually the best teacher. So I recognize that there's a lot of value in the experience as well. How old are your children now? Yeah. They are – my eldest is now 11 and my next is 9 and my small one is almost 8.

One thing that I see that I encourage parents is that as your children age, especially going into the early teens and 10 and up, 10 to 20, a lot of times you at that time most benefit by having some financial flexibility, by being able to have some flexibility to make different career decisions that lead to time, different things like that.

What would be your advice in terms of your experience of having put in the hard work when your children were very young to now being able to enjoy some of the fruit? How does that affect your parenting? Yeah. That's so interesting. I think about it in a couple of ways.

On the one hand – and I think about it a lot, almost more than any other financial topic probably. On the one hand, I speak to my children about financial independence now and I'm like, "Look, I don't know if you guys will do this or not, but if you'd like to listen, I'll be happy to show you some things that you can do from age 12 to 30 that I think you'll be really happy if when you're a 37-year-old old man like I am that you can have done these things." And they – my middle guy in particular expresses interest in that.

And we have – they have daddy's bank accounts that earn 10% annually compounded daily. And they all have some degree of interest in depositing there and they – my middle guy is a math guy and he gets the compounding thing. The other ones are like, "No, that sounds like a good deal." And so we try to work with things like that.

But to answer your question more directly, it was good that we did what we did when they were young. Obviously, it would be even harder to do it now. So clearly, one of the ways that it has helped is that when it comes to sort of – so we homeschool our children and when it comes to doing the extracurriculars and things like that, we don't have to in any way sweat the fees or whatever.

We're able to do those things that we want and we're very intentional about what those things are and how many of them we do. But like I'm so glad to not be worrying about sports fees now whereas we were certainly deliberately avoiding some of that stuff during the debt repayment stage.

So they're certainly – they're in an environment where they're aware that – they understand the concept like if there's something that we want to do as a family, we can't do everything but we can do anything. And if we'll commit to that, we'll make it happen. On the other hand, I am not yet financially independent.

I know what my number is. We're aiming for it. And I probably won't be at least until the children are in their teens or perhaps even through college. And I wish that that time could have been accelerated because while I expect to always enjoy my time with my children, I have a great relationship with my surviving parent and had a great relationship with my dad until he died.

So I trust that that will be true in our family as well. But I really would so dearly love to have had just more freedom in these elementary school years whereas I am still quite committed to my career and to earning income. So while I'm not – while we're in good shape, we're also still selling a lot of my time for money.

The question I was going to ask was about debt. They're tied and I'll just present both versions of it and let you pick which one you want. I was going to say if you woke up today with an 11-year-old, 9-year-old and an 8-year-old and you were in that same debt situation, do you think that recognizing the stage that your children are in, you'd be quite as – you'd be just as focused on paying off debt, recognizing that it might require more hours, fewer expenses, take you away from your children, etc.?

Or would you mentally kind of just say, "Okay, I'm just going to wait a little bit recognizing that this phase is so important for my kids." And the second way I guess is where you're at right now is saying, "Okay, I've got an 11-year-old, an 8-year-old and a 9-year-old.

Are you going to spend all your time just focusing on financial independence or are you going to moderate those plans a little bit and take advantage of these very special years with your children?" Yeah. And I think the answer to the first question, like in all things, I think you'd have to apply wisdom to that and see what made sense in your family context.

I'm thankful not to have to make that specific choice, but I think in many cases the answer would be, yeah. I mean really are you going to not have your kids do any extracurriculars for six years between the ages of 7 and 12 because you're trying to spend – send an extra $200 a month to your student loan lender.

I don't think that that would be a great tradeoff. And also with regard to the financial independence thing, yes, certainly we do spend money now on experiences. We are at this stage in our life, largely due to my work, are more constrained by time than by money in terms of we have – for the things that we want to do, paying for them is not such a big problem.

Getting the time for them when I'm still having to be engaged actively in a career is the more challenging aspect. I would prefer to solve my time problems more than my money problems. And I often tell anyone who will listen, although I haven't gone so far as to share it with my employer, that if I could work two-thirds of the time for half the money, I would gladly make that exchange.

And I would point out that in the coming years, my prediction is you will find a way to do that. But you can only do that when you have the reality of saying I have – I can live on $4,500 a month or $3,500 if I had to, $4,500 comfortably enough.

I don't need $8,000 a month, because – especially if you are recognizing that it's for a temporary period of time. People who are – people who haven't gone through the transformation of paying attention to expenses don't see that as a solution. And that's why it's so important to go through and pay attention to the numbers, pay attention to the debt payoff plan, and so important to stretch yourself because sometimes going ahead and moving from the big mortgage to the smaller mortgage, going ahead and moving from the expensive extracurriculars to the cheaper extracurriculars can buy the opportunity to be able to work less.

And I think it's a brilliant plan if you have a period and you say, "OK, for the next six years, I've got this opportunity here. I know it's going to pay less, but you're in that unique phase of your children's life." Take that plan, just earn enough to live on for those number of years, and then plan to ratchet it up after they're transitioning to further independence.

I think that that's a wonderful idea. Speaking just very personally, I'm still trying to figure out precisely what that is. Right. Right. A lot of things are easy in concept. It's more challenging sometimes to find an employer who will pay you great money to work 30 hours a week.

That's right. Or even mediocre money. Exactly. It's not always easy. But I think even just the desire and being open to it is something that is not common to our culture. This is where money goals serve as a gateway to the goals that have the true value. The amount of money that we had, that we earned, that we have in our bank accounts when we die, the amount of money that we have in our retirement accounts when we retire, these are poor indications of success.

They are indications of progress, but they're not by themselves objective indicators of success. We want to track them because they're objective and numbers are valuable so we can assess the progress that we're making. But they should be feeding goals that are more important. Not to get too theoretical, but by having the goal and recognizing.

I don't know the years, but I look at it and I see probably from 6, 7, 8 to maybe 12, 13, 14, 15. That range seems to be that crucial range where your children are still children. They're not yet adults. They're not yet young adults. And there's that intense working, that intense sewing as you start to transition them to the independence.

And I hate that those years in many people's lives tend to be the years where they're most obsessed with the careers. Then they wake up when their kids are in their late teens and say, "Okay, now I can pull back. Too late, buddy. You missed it." Let us not miss those valuable years.

That's right. And then I think to not put all the working fathers, including myself, in despair out there. I think obviously there are a lot of great kids who have parents who do work hours. And I think that some of that can, being intentional, of course having one spouse stay at home, how you manage your time can certainly be a really important part in mitigating the challenges caused by the work week.

Valuable. Work is not the enemy. We don't have to do work in order to be able to achieve goals. Work is not the enemy, but there is an appropriate balancing act to pursue. Matthew, I want to ask you some questions about grad school because your career and what you described is the – it's probably what is held out as an ideal by a lot of people.

I'm going to go to grad school so I can make a lot of money and it worked out for you. How did you know that – or how did you come to decide that going to grad school was the right decision for you? And how do you advise people, especially from a business context, big corporate management type of thing?

How do you advise people about making that decision? Yeah. So I'm fascinated by that question because I think you're right. By God's grace, in many ways, everything did work out exactly right. And we're so thankful for that and leads you to ask the question, well, one, what if something had gone a little bit differently?

But two, if even when things go exactly right, you still wonder about the opportunity cost of having undertaken that decision, heaven forbid something should go wrong. The decision to attend grad school I think was the right one for me. Like you, I enjoy academics. I really did enjoy my time there.

I had a very clear why I was going, transition functions, transition industries. I was looking for the pay bump and sometimes having the recruiting help and a very kind of a track to run on can sort of be a real – can be a real help there. I think that the people who just painting with a very broad brush do well in grad school have the best reason why to go.

And the people who struggle either during or after were there for some kind of less than ideal reason. And I really think that that's true whether you're talking about a PhD, an MA, an MBA, a JD or any other advanced degree that you might think of pursuing. It's knowing why you're doing it is the critical differentiator for success versus not success.

How did you do grad school? Did you go full time, go in the nights and on weekends? Yeah. I went full time and that was important to me at the time was to be able to be focused on that. So I quit one job and went and took two years off.

When you're doing these programs, you do have the opportunity to summer and usually can earn a pretty good income relative to the amount of time that you're working. It's more like a post-grad school income as opposed to a pre-grad school income, but it's just for three months. And so the way we got to $225,000 in debt was you've got in round figures $55,000 a year in tuition and fees and that's full boat.

And I had no scholarship help at my school. And then for us as a family, we were not living as conservatively then as we did afterwards. So we were again in round figures spending about $50,000 a year just on lifestyle, which is not it's not a huge sum of money.

But on the other hand, when you're earning nothing, it adds up in a hurry. So, yeah, my decision was to go full time. You generally have better access to recruiters when you're in a full time program than you do when you're in a part time program. Part time program has a lot of financial benefits from a tuition standpoint, obviously, and you don't have to pay for it.

But is usually more of a support to your current career on some kind of a continuous track. And full time thing is more of a I'm trying to transition from X to Y, in my view, at least. So did you think about, for example, one thing I think is really powerful, trying to find an employer who will pay for an MBA or pay for grad school as a term of your employment contract?

Did you think about that path and did you reject it for a certain reason or did you just say, I'm just going to go in and sign checks because I want to be done? Well, it wasn't so much about done versus not done. I did consider so my former employer would have paid for me to go to a local program in an evening, an evening deal.

So that obviously is a great offer. As I looked at the people within my firm who had taken the evening route versus there were also those who had been recruited from the type of full time programs that I was interested in pursuing. I saw a qualitative difference between I guess probably it would be more accurate to say between the people than per se between the education.

And I was more interested in emulating the people in column A than the people in column B. The other aspect for that, I'm poor at having a lot of multiple endeavors. And so at that point we had one young child, but I just, whether it was laziness or self-awareness elected to take the full time route.

And I still think for us that was probably a good deal. I was also too ignorant to realize that or just wasn't aware that even though the employee benefits package might say this is the program that they'll pay for. That there can be ways within a firm to negotiate something different, whether that's a leave of absence where when you return they reimburse you one year at a time for the program that you went to or something like that.

I mean, certainly I would encourage anyone to explore something like that if they can find a way to both get what they want and help have the current employer finance it. I think that that's almost always a good deal. Going for the degree that the employer will finance I think is less compelling than selecting the degree program that's right for you and trying to negotiate a way to get that paid.

I know that your good friend Brandon over at the Mad Scientist has done something right along those lines. Yeah. And what's written in the – one rule of negotiation, maybe you tell me if this is in your MBA speak is correct. One rule of negotiation is that everything is negotiable.

And yes, things are written in manuals. Things are written down. But that's usually to cover the back of the HR person. But everything is negotiable. And at the end of the day, employers still have the ability and the right to provide varying forms of compensation for their employees. Now, there are some legal restrictions but they still have that ability.

I learned this when I was in college at very small dollar figures. But I had dropped out of college during my junior year and had transitioned into a corporate job. And at the corporate job, I was doing good work and my bosses were happy with me. And they asked me, "What are you going to do with college?" Kind of just normal caring for a young man who dropped out of college.

And I said, "Well, I'm thinking about going back." And long story short is they gave me some extra income, extra scholarship income that wasn't tied to my normal salary in order to help enable me to go back to school. And it wasn't in the HR manual. It wasn't an official program.

It was just an agreement between my bosses and me that I would consider working for them for a certain period of time. We didn't have a contract on it. It was just I would consider it, man of my word, working for them afterward in exchange for some extra scholarship income.

And that was one of the things that helped me to pay cash for my senior year of school and to get out of debt. So, everything is negotiable. And I assume you'd recommend if you're thinking about going to school, at least talk to your boss, right, to tell them about it, right?

Yeah. No, I think absolutely. And I think it also can be one of those just as you described kind of soft contract kind of things because if you negotiate an arrangement where someone who is sufficiently highly placed within the company, they like you, they support you, they appreciate your work.

They say, "We don't know what hiring conditions will be when you come out. But if you come out, why don't we consider this as a sort of leave of absence and I will see if I can't go to bat for you to negotiate tuition reimbursement after the fact." And you've certainly lost nothing by having that conversation even if full-time attendance is your goal.

And then if at the end of the day, they don't have the position for you, well, they haven't gone back on their word and you're no worse off. And if at the end of the day, you decide that you don't even prefer to go back to the company where you started, again, you're no worse off.

But you may have just by having that conversation created a valuable option. That was exactly what happened to me. When I was working there, they said, "We want you to consider staying on with us after college." But during that period in time of college, I was working as basically a graphics person.

I had a very manual job making the presentations and documents of the company that I was working for look better. There was no thoughtfulness involved beyond just a little bit of graphic design. When I graduated, I went back and I said, "Okay, I'm here. What do you got?" And at that time, they said, "Well, we don't really have anything." So I said, "Well, I'm not going to keep doing this graphics coordinator thing that I was doing.

This is not why I went to school." So I resigned. And as I was at my last day at the job, they were having kind of a going away party for me. As I am at the party, my boss pulls me aside and says, "Listen, I'm working on a few things.

Come see me," because I had scheduled a trip to somewhere to do something. I can't remember. I think I had a couple months scheduled to go around the country on a road trip or something like that. But he pulled me into the office and he said, "Come and see me when you get back." And so I went on my road trip, 13,000-mile road trip around the country.

As I remember, it was about two months. Visited all my friends, and I came back and we had lunch. And during the interim, they went ahead and created an analyst job, which was not entry level and it was not senior level. It was a middle-of-the-road job, and that was what I did for the next year until after a year.

They hired two other people into that job, and then after a year, they decided it wasn't working. They closed the job, laid me off, and my other coworkers. But it worked out because they didn't actually have a position for me, but then they created one. And at the end of the day, it was an extra few thousand dollars of income in my pocket, which was really valuable and a flexible work schedule, which allowed me to go to school full-time and do it.

But it wasn't written in the manuals. It was based upon doing good work, being a valuable employee, and then just being a normal, nice guy to interact with people and not be a jerk. No, I think that's a great story. So, Matthew, I know that you've kind of made this a little hobby.

You do consulting in this area of grad school. When you're doing consulting with people who are in the corporate environment especially and you're trying to give advice, tell me the framework that you use, the decision tree that you teach people to go down to decide whether they should go to grad school, and if so, how they should go to grad school.

Yeah. I mean, I think without wanting to belabor the point, the first question I always ask people is why they would want to go. And then, you know, depending, I think, on what someone has to say with regard to that, the key there is to have a particular reason for a particular program at a particular school.

And, you know, if you have that, then you have, I think, a pretty decent chance of success. I think another really key consideration there is what is going to happen after the school that will make this whole endeavor worth it. And that's kind of just like anything you might do, sort of a visioning exercise, and then again asking the question of whether this is really the best way to go about getting to that end state goal.

Since kind of getting a little bit more well-read in the sort of financial independence and entrepreneurship space, I take time now when I talk to people about that just to ask them, you know, have you ever considered the kind of self-directed business education that you could get for the amount of money that you're about to spend?

Have you considered the type of business that you could just start if you were to invest that amount of money directly into a business? You know, have you considered the things that you will no longer be able to do, especially if you do go full-time and take on some level of student loan commitment?

You know, have you really given due consideration to the opportunity costs? And, you know, this was a key hang-up for me growing up. My parents were successful, self-employed people, but always on a relatively modest scale. And they're financially secure now, and everything's great. But the folks that I saw who had big incomes were the ones who worked for big employers with nice jobs.

And so that was where I got my idea like, okay, if you want to have a big income, go to work for a nice employer. And I've learned since working with a whole lot more self-employed people and entrepreneurs since then that, one, there are a whole lot of people who look like they have money who don't, and that's obvious to everyone who listens to your show.

There are also a whole lot of people who don't look like they have money that do. And I think, you know, in Tom Stanley's words, not everybody wears their income statement or drives their balance sheet. And, of course, nor should that be our goal. But there are other paths to both high incomes and probably better paths to wealth than strictly the highly compensated employee route.

So those are some of the things that I like to talk to people about. I would guess my perception is that Duke is considered to be one of the more prestigious programs, kind of the upper echelon of MBA programs. So you're paying for kind of that ranking category. Is that true?

And if so, what benefits did you receive from going to kind of one of the upper tier MBA schools as compared to local MBA factory school? Yeah, well, look, never let me miss a chance to represent and say, let's go Duke. Duke is a great school and is for all the blue devil haters out there.

I'm sorry. I probably saw you in the airport. But the so I guess I would say what you do get from that, certainly there's a particular group of employers that recruit at particular schools and you can learn that in advance. And so ideally, if you have an idea of an industry or an employer that you're targeting, and that would be one of the good reasons to go to school, then you can sort of figure out in advance just to pick numbers that I won't speak with firm names because I would I would say something that was just untrue.

But the big consulting firms, the biggest strategy consulting firms do, in fact, hire at a school that's down the road from Duke University in a town here in North Carolina. But if you want to go to work for one of those big consulting firms, they're going to hire collectively maybe 70 out of 400 students from the from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke.

And they're going to hire maybe four students from school down the road. And those are those four students that they get are going to be every bit as good and perhaps in some cases better than the ones that they're getting. But if you're looking to go to sort of a feeder school for whether it's an investment bank or a consultancy, that's something that you can get by targeting the name brand school.

It's not that you can't get into those same arrangements from another school. And with the right amount of hustle, no question about it, you can people do all the time. It's just do you do I want to for me and you might have a different answer. Do I want to bet that I'm the do I want to bet that I'm the one in 10 or am I more comfortable betting that I'm the median and feel like that stacks things in my favor?

The other thing that happens is if you do graduate into an employment contraction, you're going to be you're going to be hurt no matter where you are. But the stronger your school, both the more overall recruiting will hold up. And secondly, the more options you'll have if your primary recruiting opportunity isn't there the way that you thought it did.

For point one, the reason that overall recruiting holds up is because it's driven by alumni networks. And the stronger that alumni network within the recruiting firm, the more likely that some level of recruiting is going to continue to go on, even through a downturn. And that's that's not true if there's not some kind of alumni network or person back of that recruiting effort, just driving it through a difficult time for the company.

You know, on the on the I guess I kind of lost my train of thought, but that's that's some of the advantages that I think you you do get out of out of attending a name brand school. Do you think it's better to be one among many at a name brand school or to be top of the class at a non name brand school?

I guess I think if you could pick, it's probably fine to be top of the class at a non name brand school. I don't I'm I guess I consider myself reasonably successful student and I was unwilling to make that prediction for myself in advance. I don't know the answer.

It's an interesting question. The problem in discerning the answer would be to say, what's my competition? Who are they? And if I go to this school, am I going to stand out? And I have no idea if it's better to be one among many and just say, well, I'm going to this name brand school and all the graduates from the school are picked up versus not.

I do think that regardless of the choice that can be made, I think there are ways to highlight your experience. Example, when I was applying for school, when I would put on my resume at the bottom what my educational background was, one thing that I would do would be that I would put on there.

I graduated from Palm Beach Atlantic University in downtown West Palm Beach. It's not a name brand school. I mean, it has local recognition, but it has no no benefit across the country. It's not particularly strong in their business department, things like that. But I put on there that I was that I worked full time and got straight A's all through college, all through my senior year.

And so the people that would be looking at the resume would would always ask me about that and not about Palm Beach Atlantic University. So I think regardless of which option you choose, then just find a way to highlight what you're strong at. If you're at a mediocre school or mediocre name recognition, find a way to to highlight something where you are the leader and the best.

And if you're at a great school, yes, certainly highlight the school that you were at, but you probably still should figure out a way to stand out. Oh, absolutely. And I think I think what you point out is a really great point. And I think the other thing that's key, especially for probably your listeners, certainly for me, people who view themselves as kind of like lifetime learners and self learners, is that I would be the first to say that any actual domain knowledge that you want to get is available anywhere that you want to go to school.

And I went to I went to a state school for my undergrad. I am planning on encouraging my children to do the same. I think that there can be some value for your ultimate degree in being at probably the best school you can get into. But you need to but you need to evaluate that alongside what you're trading off in order to accomplish that.

And I am convinced of that. If you go if you're going to go to if you're if you're going to pursue a degree beyond a bachelor's degree, whatever your terminal degree is, that's the prestigious school you want to go to, because no one's going to pay attention to anything before that, because one of the major functions of schools is as a screening screening process.

And so if you've graduated from local state school, but you were accepted into the Harvard Business School and your or the Duke Business School, I won't try to pretend that one is better than another. Oh, no, it's all right. But if you if you are going to a prestigious school and that's on there, the person reading the resume is going to see that final terminal degree.

They're not going to pay so much attention to the to the undergraduate because one of the major functions of college is as a system of screening. It's a it's a way that that an employer can do less work to screen their own employees. They can trust that the colleges are screening and preparing and training their employees to some degree.

And thus they're going to have a higher percentage of success by allowing the college to be part of the pre-screening process than them doing them doing it all themselves. It's an interesting question, Matthew. And I do think we should seriously consider it, because one major financial mistake, I think, can be to always go where competition is the heaviest.

If you are very smart and if you are looking for a high paying profession, you're going to be considering law. You're going to be considering medicine. You're going to be considering corporate consulting. Those paths work, but you might be able to take the same intelligence and go into a less prestigious field and earn way more money because your competition is not applying the things that they could apply to their area of business.

I think it's a great insight. I agree with it completely. You set up here in our in our notes, a couple quick a couple quick things here. You talk you wrote in the preparatory notes. You said the path dependence that is set up by the decision to go to grad school, whether you understand path dependency or not as a topic of conversation.

What do you mean by that? Yeah, you know, I think your listeners are going to know we just haven't been speaking spontaneously if they've made it this far in the interview. You know what I meant by that? Particularly focused on student loans. Obviously, if you take on student loans as a general statement, you have to repay them.

And so, you know, you read routinely these articles now. And I think you even posted recently on an Allstate blog about, you know, referencing an earlier Wall Street Journal article, people deferring starting businesses, having families, getting married, whatever the decision, because they feel constrained by student loans. So thing one, obviously, if you're paying back for it at some level, the presence of that debt and the existence of that payment is going to.

It means you have to pay back that debt, you have to make that payment, and it has an effect both on your checking account balance and also on your mental freedom. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing we've already touched on. So I don't want to belabor the point is that the opportunity cost of what you forego, if entrepreneurship is your true passion, rather than not that the education won't help you in your business, but you're almost certainly better off just doing the thing that you want to do.

It's going to be harder to just do the thing that you want to do, where instead of walking away from a pre-business school job earning $70,000 or $80,000 a year, now it's like, well, shoot, I've set myself up in a career where I'm going to start at 130, and within two years, I'm going to be over 200.

And now we're not talking about foregoing 80 to start my entrepreneurial endeavor. Now we're foregoing 200, and I have specific training that makes me worth that in the context of a large organization and makes it relatively easy for me to find that in the job market. So those are some things that I think about that I didn't think about before school.

I had a conference call yesterday or consulting call yesterday with a physician who'd recently graduated in a medical specialty and an intense medical specialty, been in school for over a decade, just under half a million dollars of student loan debt for all of the medical school. You cannot graduate with an advanced medical specialty and half a million dollars of student loan debt, and then all of a sudden, two years into your career, change your mind.

You got to pay the debt back, and you need to be working in that specialty where you can earn the money to pay the debt back. You can't all of a sudden decide, "I think I'll go and do X here for $80,000 a year." It doesn't work. So you're going to be committing with time and money.

You're going to be committing for a certain period of time until you can satisfy that loan. Final question I want to ask you about here is on our outline. How a person's desires may change from his mid-20s to his mid-30s. You've been through this change, and I know for me, this was the hardest thing that I look back now and see as a young person that I didn't conceive.

I listened a lot to older people who shared with me how my desires might change, but I didn't see it as much as I wish I had. When you consult with somebody, what do you lay out for them to expect how their desires may change as they age? I don't know if there's any way to learn this other than just going through it.

I think as a particular example for me, some of the things that I thought were glamorous or romantic about business, either in terms of travel or perquisites or meeting people who I think are particularly impressive, if those things come at the expense of having more discretion over your time or more time with your family, you just may not feel the same way about what you thought you wanted 10 years on.

I think your example of the physician is an extreme example of that where they lock in in their early 20s immediately after undergrad, and they are in some cases going until their late 30s before they're really out doing their thing. If their desires have changed from their 20s to their 30s, they're really there.

One of the things that I write about on my blog is just being open to the possibility that your desires may change, even if you don't think that they will and even if they in fact never do. The less you lock yourself into something, the more flexibility you'll have if your desires are different than you thought they would be.

An obvious example for me is I always assumed that I would want to work for someone else until I was 65. I just assumed that that was what I would want to do. I know that I will work until I die or until I'm unable to work, but I think that I would like as soon as possible to have the freedom to pick my context and pick my activities.

What advice do you have to solve this problem for somebody? There's no way to anticipate, I think, both how your feelings may change or what they will be. The only practical advice is to don't borrow more than you need to borrow. So borrow the minimum amount necessary. Don't spend more than you need to spend.

The key to that is to living like a student while you're in school and probably for some period of time afterward as opposed to living like a highly compensated professional while you're in school and then immediately continuing living like a highly compensated professional when you come out. The only practical advice that I have there is just to be open to the possibility and to set yourself up for flexibility, which is a huge part of, I think, what you're trying to help people do in radical personal finance is to give yourself options which are valuable.

I'll give one more practical suggestion that I think can help a lot in this area as well, especially for us as parents or for those of us who perhaps mentor younger people. And that's to try to help our children or other young men and women to get as much exposure to a diversity of employment as early of an age as possible.

Because I can look at – you talked about the things that you think you're going to like, the glamorous and impressive things. I'll give just two anecdotes from my experience. I always thought that I wanted to travel. I always liked travel. But at that same company, there's a company called – it's been bought a bunch of times.

So, I was working for a company called Landis Strategy and Innovation. At that same company, at a young age, while I was in college, I had the opportunity to be working with big Fortune 500 companies and big brand names. Now, I was not a senior consultant in any way, but I was working on their projects as a junior level person.

And as a component of that, I remember one time I went on a trip to California. And I was going to school, and I went on this trip to California, and I thought going in, "Oh, this is going to be great." I had the big corporate consulting experience of flying by myself, flying to California, reserving one of the black sedans to pick me up in advance, coming out of the airport gateway, seeing my name on the sign, jumping in with the black sedan, doing it all on the company credit card, staying in the hotel room, et cetera.

And then I had the experience of taking the red-eye flight back to West Palm Beach from California because I had to be in class at 8 o'clock on the day, and I had to fit the whole trip into this very short period of days. And I spent the entire time in a hotel room working while in California.

And I was, after one trip, completely disabused of the notion that somehow business travel is fun and glamorous. It's not. And any of the business travelers know that. You're in an airplane in a hotel room, and the airplanes are all the same, and the hotel rooms are all the same, and the restaurants are all the same, and the clients are all the same.

And yes, there's a tiny little bit of difference, but it's basically all the same. And so I realized, "Well, I like to travel, but business travel is not quite--that's not quite what I'm going for." And another one was while I was also in college, I got this weird job working for a company called Triangle Telecasting Corporation, which is now defunct.

And at that time, I was working with the founder, and one of the business jobs that I did was--this was in 2000 and--must have been 2004--presidential cycle of 2004. And I went to Boston for the Democratic National Convention, and I went to New York for the Republican National Convention.

And I had full access to both of them. We had press passes, and the entire job was going to cocktail parties and schmoozing and doing this schmoozy personal sales work with all these political things. And I had a great time. I really treasure the memories that I learned at that experience.

But I came away from it just convinced that, "Yes, this seems impressive. Here I am getting my picture taken with Al Sharpton, and here I am with--what's the guy, the big tall guy that does--on Fox News, he has the talking points--Bill O'Reilly. I'm in Bill O'Reilly's studio watching Bill O'Reilly do his show, and just watching him film it from within the studio there in New York City.

And I had these peak experiences, and I came away just feeling like, "Well, that was cool. I enjoyed it. But I don't want to do this as a business and as a career." And I think that a lot of times, just a little bit of exposure with the real world can help young men and women to gain some benefits and to find the things that they're really drawn to.

Because those are just two examples of negative things. It seemed glamorous and prestigious, and in hindsight, I didn't want to do it. So, it doesn't have to be negative, although it's valuable to be exposed to those things. And we do a disservice by constructing the schooling and educational model the way we do, where we do a lot of school and education first, and then all the exposure comes afterward.

Far better to get the exposure along the way, and a diversity of exposure, or a little bit in advance. Then when you go to school, then when you pursue the higher education, you're not doing it blind. You're doing it knowing, "This is something that's appropriate for me and what I desire." And I think that we as parents and as mentors can have a dramatic influence in young people's lives to help them choose paths where they're going to use their college degree instead of get it and then not want to do it.

I think it's a great point, and well said. I'll talk to you later. Matt, any other closing thoughts that you'd like to have that you've learned from your experiences before we close this out? No, I think you've given me a lot of opportunities to share those and just appreciate the chance to come on and visit with your listeners and to have this conversation with you, Joshua.

Cool. And then tell us also, you're primarily working in the corporate world, but you're doing some part-time consulting. Tell us about your website and the work that you're doing there in case any of my listeners want to follow up with you after the fact for your personal services. Well, I would love to visit with any of your listeners regarding personal services or anything else.

It would be a pleasure. You can find me online at designindependence.com. That's designindependence.com. My wife pointed out it sort of looks like designing dependence, but that's not what it is. It's designindependence.com. And I'd love to catch up with you there or if you have any feedback on that work.

And then I'm hoping to use that as sort of a beachhead to continue to grow a side business of both writing and consulting. And I'm excited about that for the future. Matt, thanks for coming on today. My pleasure, Joshua. I hope you have a wonderful afternoon and I thank you for your time.

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