- Big Boyz Comedy Kings is coming to Yamaha Resort and Casino Saturday, December 9th with D.L. Hughley. - That sweater so tight, it look like a snap between the legs. - Cedric the Entertainer. - Once we stop running, I'll find out what it was we was running about. - And Paul Rodriguez.

- What is it about old Mexican men? They could be missing a leg, they still want to get into a fight. - Hosted by my man Eric Blake and a special performance by Mario. Big Boyz Comedy Kings, December 9th at Yamaha Resort and Casino. Tickets can be purchased at AXS.com.

This is a 21 and over event. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a 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. Today on the show, I'm going to tell you a story about a man I think of as the accidental millionaire.

This story comes from my background and experience working as a financial advisor. One of the great benefits of that business is you wind up meeting with hundreds and hundreds of people and talking about money with them. And if you talk to enough people about money and you keep your ears open, you can quickly find out what works and what doesn't work.

But every now and then, somebody will surprise you. Usually, you get pretty good as a professional of pegging people. You start to see a couple of clues or hear a couple of clues and pretty quickly, you start to put people into boxes. But the accidental millionaire was a man who didn't particularly fit into any of my preconceived boxes.

I met him on a Friday. He came into my office for a meeting and I had never known him. Somebody referred me to him. I called him up, asked him if he wanted to meet with me and he said sure. And he wound up coming into my office. And so he came in.

He didn't know me. I didn't know him. And we went through the standard procedure, which was basically a conversation. We would call it in the business a fact-finding interview. And I would ask him about what his goals were for the future. I would ask him about all of the things that he'd done, ask him about his money and his income, etc.

And interestingly, he didn't have a lot of specifics on his situation. He didn't remember a lot of the numbers. He wasn't 100% sure about how much money he made. He wasn't 100% sure about how much money he had. But as we start going through the numbers, they just started climbing and climbing and climbing.

And by the time we got to the end of his statement of financial condition, where we calculated out his net worth, we both discovered that he was a millionaire and I'm pretty confident that he was well on his way to being a multimillionaire. And he sat there and he looked at the paper and he kind of scratched his head and said, "Huh, I didn't know I had that much money." And it struck me because very rarely do you ever find someone that looks at a paper with how much money they have and they say, "Huh, I didn't know I had that much money." And he actually didn't know that he was a millionaire.

It wasn't something that he knew right off the bat. He may have guessed that he was a millionaire, but he hadn't just thought about it. He hadn't looked at it. That's very unusual. If you work with people with money, most of the time you find that the errors are in the other way.

People usually understate their expenses and overstate their assets. They think they have more money than they do. They think they spend less money than they do, but unfortunately they have less and spend more than they think. It's very rare to find somebody who counts it the other way. And I tried to figure out what was it about this man that led him to be in this situation.

Now what most stood out to me was the fact that he didn't really want to spend much time in my office, not because he didn't like me, but because he had other plans. He had weekend plans and he was leaving for his hobby on the weekend, which I later found out was mountain biking.

That was basically his one hobby that he really enjoyed, was mountain biking. And it stood out to me because I thought about it and I asked him about, he was heading to a mountain bike tournament, and I just asked him about what he was doing and what it looked like and what he would do at the tournament.

What stood out to me was how modest that hobby expense was for him. He had I think a Toyota Matrix or some Toyota hatchback or sedan or something like that. And he would just take his mountain bike and he would go to mountain bike tournaments. He wasn't particularly good at it.

It wasn't like he was doing it professionally. It was just his hobby. But I later really thought about that and I realized what a great hobby it was. Now I'm not sure it was the best hobby for someone who lived where we lived in South Florida. He'd have to get a good mountain bike tournament.

He had to go up to North Florida at the very least to find any hills. But it was a very modest hobby. He had a bicycle and he rode it. And the great thing about that hobby is it didn't cost very much to get into. It didn't cost very much to do.

And it had other benefits like keeping him in great shape. Here's this man who's in his mid to late 50s and he's in great shape. Well it's because he enjoyed mountain biking. Now as I thought about the accidental millionaire and later with hindsight considered his situation, I came to understand some of those basic things that were true in his situation that led to him being wealthy and on track for a very wealthy life without even paying attention.

That's my point is he didn't even pay attention and he was getting great results. I think it's worth paying attention to things like that, us. Because when somebody just gets great results and they don't even have to pay attention, they're probably doing something that would serve the rest of us well to pay attention.

So let me explain. The first thing that he had that led to him being an accidental millionaire, a millionaire that didn't even know he's a millionaire, was a good income, a strong income. In his case he was an engineer. And he did kind of an interesting kind of engineering.

He didn't work at a big company, he worked at a small company, but he did engineering work. And engineering is one of those occupations where if you're competent with it, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to earn an upper middle class income. In his case he was earning a six figure income.

The other great thing is he'd been an engineer for a long time and he really liked the work of engineering. He was well suited to engineering. He liked the challenge of it. He worked at a small company where he had quite a bit of autonomy and he enjoyed the actual work of engineering.

He didn't get involved in management, he didn't get involved, he wasn't chasing a big career. He just liked doing his particular version of engineering. And that strong income gave him the ability to live well without thinking about it. The next big structural thing was that he had a structurally modest lifestyle.

He lived in an ordinary house, a reasonable house. It wasn't particularly expensive except for the fact that it was located in South Florida, which by definition is more expensive than other places in the country. But it was a reasonable house. Just an ordinary suburban house, ordinary suburban neighborhood. Ordinary size, everything was ordinary about it.

But it was a modest, reasonable house. And he and his wife had lived there for a long time. They had bought the house decades earlier. They had gotten a mortgage. They had just simply stayed there. They'd raised their two daughters in that house and they continued to live in the house and they had no reason why they wanted to move anywhere else.

One of their other hobbies was just simply fixing up the yard. They enjoyed gardening, working on their house, making sure that it looked nice and having the yard and the plants and all those things. That was something that they enjoyed doing together. So they had a reasonable, comfortable, normal house that they lived in.

And they had modest hobbies. Didn't have any particularly expensive tastes. He had a reasonable car, but a modest car. He had the modest hobbies of gardening with his wife and mountain biking. He didn't have any major vices. He didn't drink. He didn't gamble. He didn't race fast cars or anything that would be expensive.

He just had a fairly ordinary approach and he had his couple hobbies that he enjoyed. His wife wasn't into the mountain biking. She would stay home when he would go. He would go to the mountain bike tournaments and he would come home. He had a modest lifestyle. Now if you combine those things, a strong income and a modest lifestyle, then there should be excess money available, which goes into investing.

In his case, that was the case. He didn't have a budget. He didn't know how much money he spent, but what he did have was retirement accounts and he would automatically have transfers into retirement accounts and savings accounts. And those retirement accounts weren't anything special. They were just an ordinary 401k, but they were good enough.

He had good enough investments. Just good ordinary mutual funds. And he didn't touch them. He just left them alone, which of course is the key to successful investing. Buy good investments and don't sell them. Very simple. In this case, his carelessness, meaning his lack of paying attention, really serves him.

And it serves most investors who buy stocks. If you buy good stocks, buy good mutual funds, and just simply ignore them and leave them alone to compound for decades, they'll compound and they'll do really well. Probably better than if you look at them every day. Now there were two other factors that led to his success.

The first of those two factors is he didn't have any big errors. He'd lived an ordinary life, a mainstream life, a decidedly non-radical life, if we're talking about doing weird, crazy stuff that is fun to tell stories about, but he had avoided the big mistakes. He and his wife had a successful and very long lived marriage.

He never went through divorce, never had to pay alimony, never had to pay child support, never lost the use of their money. So they had the benefit of their assets building together, their expenses being minimized by being together, and then they just continued to grow together. He had the satisfaction that came from that long and successful marriage relationship that provided both of them with the emotional stability to be okay with who they were, to enjoy gardening together in the backyard and riding a mountain bike and not to have to go out and try to compensate for some emotional deficiency by spending money.

They had successful and healthy children. Now we can't control necessarily the health of our children, but they had done a good job with their children, so their children weren't a financial drain on them. They weren't worried about how to get their children off of drugs or how to bail them out of prison or how to figure out how to make sure they get a job.

Their children had successfully been raised and had successfully launched out on their own. So he had avoided all the big errors. He'd never faced a lawsuit, never, just had avoided all the big errors. And then the last component was plenty of time. He was in his mid to late 50s.

He'd had plenty of time to work. He'd been an engineer for decades. He just simply set up these structural things in place, and there was plenty of time for investments to compound, plenty of time for income to go up, plenty of time to enjoy the fact that that mortgage was paid off with inflated dollars over time and then it was eventually eliminated and you could enjoy the time of the house and save those house payments instead of paying them, etc.

He had plenty of time. There was nothing radical about his lifestyle except that he was radically wealthy because he got a few of those big rocks right. If you're the kind of person who is well suited to this approach to life, I want you to be confident in your decisions.

I want you to feel confident about the fact that you don't have to do anything wacky. I talk a lot about wacky weird stuff on this show because I enjoy it. My personality is not the accidental millionaire's personality. I thrive on the craziness, on the change. I enjoy doing the wacky weird stuff.

But that's not necessary for you to live a very satisfying life. That's not necessary for you to live a rich life. That's not necessary for you to enjoy financial freedom. You don't have to do wacky stuff. You just need those factors I discussed. Think about them. You need a strong income.

You're not going to become wealthy if you don't have a strong income. You need a strong income. But you don't need a million dollars a year necessarily. You just need to be in the perhaps upper half, preferably upper quartile, top quartile of income earners. This will change with inflation, but target at least six figures.

You can do six figures with your interests and your abilities in a job that you will enjoy doing. You can take satisfaction in doing a job. That's the thing about that accidental millionaire. He enjoyed the work of engineering. I worry a little bit that we focus so much on the things that we don't like about work that we minimize just the satisfaction of doing work well.

I really appreciate craftsmen and tradesmen who just do work well. It's satisfying to do work well. All of us can find a type of work that we're well suited to that we get satisfaction from the actual doing of it, the actual work. Sometimes this is with ideas. Sometimes it's with things.

But you can find a job that will allow you to earn a strong income and do work well. Now the great thing is if you can find a job that will allow you to work a long career where you're not physically beat up. For example, the accidental millionaire wasn't particularly interested in retiring.

Why would he? He had a reasonable job in a low stress environment where he made good money doing work that he enjoyed. Why would he want to quit that? He liked riding mountain bikes and he liked gardening but he didn't want to do that 100 hours a week. So why would he quit that?

He had plenty of time to leave early on Friday, go to a mountain bike tournament, come back in and do his work on Monday. Why quit that? That's one of the most powerful wealth building tools. Don't quit. Don't retire at 65. Build an income from a job that you enjoy that you can keep doing into your 70s, into your 80s, etc.

Build that modest lifestyle. You don't have to live in an RV. You don't have to live on a boat. You can live in an ordinary house. I'll tell you what, there's something really great about a house. A comfortable house with comfortable furniture, a nice table that you can gather your family and friends around.

You don't have to worry about all the weird stuff that comes from living weird. A great house really works well. You can buy a comfortable house, make it beautiful, make it nice, make it your own and you can do that without spending inordinate amounts of money. You can develop an interest in reasonable hobbies.

Hobbies that give you dual benefits like mountain biking where it gave him the benefit of enjoyment of something he enjoyed doing while not costing all that much money and it gave him the benefits of the physical exercise. The fact that he was in great shape and he had this thing that he enjoyed doing that gave him a lot of joy and satisfaction and kept him in great shape.

A simple decision to pursue mountain biking instead of motorcycle riding could make a big difference in your financial situation and in the size of your belt. Just one simple decision. Both are fun. Mountain biking is fun. I love riding a Harley. But the Harley costs $20,000 to $30,000 out of pocket and depreciates and costs maintenance and care and upkeep that's often hard to do yourself.

And the Harley encourages sitting on it for hours at a time, getting no exercise, hanging out with lots of other fat bikers and going out and eating greasy meals as your target destination. That was very different than mountain biking. What does a great mountain bike cost? A thousand, a couple thousand bucks for a really nice one?

Buy a great mountain bike, you can much more easily do the work yourself and it lends itself to hanging out with an active young sort of crowd which kept the accidental millionaire young and kept him in great shape. So choose carefully the hobbies, the lifestyle that you choose. Make good enough investments but put those structural things in place.

Anytime somebody is really good at something, they tend to get dogged on. I always feel bad for David Bach who wrote the book The Automatic Millionaire. He gets dogged on for his latte factor. Well, good for him. He made a lot of money with that brand and I'm glad for him.

But he was right about the idea of the automatic millionaire. If you just simply set up some basic structural things, buy some decent investments and then invest in them over time, you'll do fine. You don't need to have the best investment. It's got to be good enough and then stay invested and avoid the big errors.

That's why if you get those basic structural things right, a well-chosen mate, a well-chosen job, a good geography, etc. so you're not constantly moving across the country, you're not bailing your kids out of prison, those kinds of things, just avoid the big errors and then add time. Add enough time for the income and the expenses and everything to work out.

Time is one of the most magical factors. Time fixes almost any major financial problem. If you're in debt, well, you need some time to earn income and pay off the debt. Even if you make big, see air quotes in your head, big errors with money, time will fix those errors.

Let's say that you buy a new house and you have to go out and fill the house with furniture. You do the classic thing of going to the furniture store and filling up the whole house with brand new furniture all purchased at 0%, no money down, monthly payments for 48 months.

That's something that I can't imagine any financial person would recommend to do. It's a very expensive way to do it, risky way, etc. so nobody would recommend it. But you know how you fix that error? You just make those monthly payments on time, pay it off in four months and then keep the furniture for at least a decade or two.

And the longer you keep the furniture, the lower the monthly cost of the furniture amortization schedule actually winds up being and the more reasonable of an expense it winds up being. If we could predict our lives with enough certainty so that we didn't have to make big changes, the best plan would be buy a new house, spec house from a builder, but a reasonable one, fill it with new furniture, reasonable furniture and just live there for 50 years.

It works if you had time. Now we usually don't have time and there's other points of the conversation. But remember the story of my accidental millionaire. If you get annoyed by the radical stuff or if that's not you, don't think it has to be you. Recognize that the ordinary stuff might not make for super compelling podcasting, but it can make for wealthy people.

I can't create a podcast every day on this kind of ordinary financial plan, but you can live really well on this kind of ordinary financial plan. It works and it's not a bad life. There's nothing that has to be run away from in the story that I described. It's not a bad life.

It's a great life. That's the story of the accidental millionaire. As I close, I want to invite you today to simply just come by radicalpersonalfinance.com/store. Check out the store, see the courses that I have in there. The course that I think would be really applicable to you today is the career and income course, the radical personal finance guide to career and income planning.

Whether you buy the course or not, just recognize that in these basic pillars that have to be there, one of those big ones is income and figuring out how to build a strong income in a way that's suitable for you, in a way that's agreeable for you, where you're not groaning about going into work on Monday morning.

I wrapped up my best ideas for that in a course called the radical personal finance guide to career and income planning. Come on by radicalpersonalfinance.com/store and check that out. I hope it helps you. Don't just dream about paradise. Live it with Fiji Airways. Escape the ordinary with Fiji Airways Global Beat the Rush Sale.

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