Afford Anything - From Money Moron to Millionaire, with Scott Alan Turner

Episode Date: December 12, 2016

#55: Scott Alan Turner used to be a money moron. (In his words.) He traded a Jeep for a Porsche in his 20s, purchased a 3,000 sq. ft. house with two mortgages, and bought luxury furniture on credit. The Porsche cost him $800 per month. The house cost $200,000. The furniture? Who knows.
 Scott didn't have a budget and never tracked his spending. He only knew that he could afford the monthly payments on these luxuries ... until one day he realized his mortgage was due in a few weeks. And his bank account was rather empty. And he didn't have an emergency fund. Oops. Scott realized he was drowning in debt. So he decided to make a change. He sold the Porsche and paid $6,500 cash for a truck. He paid off his credit card. He aggressively attacked the mortgage on his house. Step-by-step, he made strides toward improving his financial future. After listening to Clark Howard on the radio, he realized it was important to free his money from the grip of debt and put it toward savings and retirement. Once he got married, he sold his house and downsized to his wife's town home. They then downsized to a 1,000 sq. ft. rented house, and downsized once more to a 300 sq. ft. bedroom with his in-laws.
 Throughout all of this downsizing, Scott kept saving money. He eventually saved enough to become a millionaire at age 35. Today he writes and speaks about personal finance full-time. He hosts the Financial Rock Star podcast. And he's stayed debt-free -- including mortgage-free -- since 2009. How did he go from money moron - buying expensive cars and furniture - to disciplined saver? He can answer that question in one word: Contentment. He doesn't need to buy more, because he's happy with what he already has. Scott credits his frugality to feeling satisfied with his possessions, rather than running on a hedonistic treadmill of always wanting more. While he still appreciates fine craftsmanship -- a gorgeous house, a designer car -- he realizes that he doesn't need to own luxury items. He can appreciate art and design without making a purchase. He prioritizes spending on his values: more time with friends and family; more life experiences. He doesn't spend to impress others, which is a losing game. Discover Scott's fascinating philosophy on the link between frugality and contentment (and learn from his money mistakes!) in this episode. Enjoy! -- Paula For a full list of resources, or to leave a comment, visit http://affordanything.com/episode55 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. And every dollar that you spend, every decision that you make is a trade-off against something else. You want that fancy car? Well, that means that you're not going to be able to retire as early as you might otherwise have been able to. You want that huge house with the big utility bills? Well, that means that you might be one of those people who claims that they, quote-unquote, can't afford to travel. When, in fact, you can't afford to travel. You just can't afford that plus the house, plus the car, plus the world.

wardrobe plus the everything else. My name is Paula Pant, host of the Afford Anything podcast, where we go over the thorny issues of deciding what you want, what you don't, and making sure that your spending aligns with your values and priorities and principles. And this applies not just to your money, by the way, but also your time, your energy, your focus, attention, anything in your life that's a limited resource. Today's guest transitioned from being a money moron to a millionaire. Now, money moron are his words, not mine. That's how he describes himself. If you are a podcast junkie, if you listen to a lot of shows, you might recognize him. His name is Scott Allen Turner. He hosts the Financial Rockstar podcast. And once upon a time,

back in the day, he made all the classic mistakes. He bought a Porsche. Can I repeat that? He bought a Porsche. And I don't mean he bought it with passive income from an investment property. I'm talking he was living almost paycheck to paycheck deeply in debt and still bought a Porsche. And did I mention he also had a Jeep? I'm not saying this to criticize him. I would play this for him and I know he would laugh because he is the first person to criticize himself over the decisions that he made back when he was a different version of himself, back when he was a younger version of the person who he is today. And those mistakes were critical in helping him figure out what was actually a important and what wasn't. So in today's interview, you're going to hear from him about how he made that transition from being a rampant consumer to being an investor and a producer, from being somebody who was stuck in a job that he felt kind of me about to somebody who is now an entrepreneur. I'm not going to give away the ending. You should hear him tell the story. So here he is. Scott Allen Turner describing his journey from money moron to millionaire.

Hey Scott, how are you? I am doing excellent. Just go back from a week in Mexico. Oh, fantastic. Where in Mexico and why are you still not there? We are outside of Cancun at an all-inclusive resort. We go there every year for Thanksgiving because my wife doesn't like to cook. That is a fantastic way of getting out of cooking.

Go to a country that doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving. Yes. She does like to cook. She doesn't like to cook Thanksgiving because it's three days of preparation and then 10 minutes of eating, which she's not cool with. Yeah. It does seem rather wasteful. Like it's a gluttonous holiday, which I understand like 200 years ago when you were settlers and you were facing the risk of starvation. But now, yeah, I'm not so sure it's necessary anymore. Yeah, it's still a lot of good food, though. Man, I like Thanksgiving. You know, I actually spent Thanksgiving in Ecuador. And what do they do down there? Well, so they don't have a Thanksgiving holiday for obvious reasons. But what's interesting to me is that they still have Black Friday, even though they don't have Thanksgiving. And their Black Friday, for some reason, lasts for three days.

That's a lot of shopping. Yeah. Well, and also, by definition, it's Friday. So how is it three days long? Sure, yeah. Yes, but speaking of shopping, I don't know, that's a terrible transition. Speaking of shopping, you used to buy a bunch of shopping. you used to buy a bunch of stuff. I was listening to you describe your life story.

And there was a point in your life when you were a money moron, as you call it. So I'd love to hear the story from you, but I want to circle back to that point in your life when you had student loan debt and a Jeep and a Porsche and the most expensive house that you could possibly qualify for that had two mortgages and PMI. What else? Did you have like a golf stream or something in there? I wish. I had some pretty cool furniture. I had this awesome dining room set. It sat eight, which is just what a bachelor needs.

You know, full china cabinet, all oak wood or whatever kind of what it was. But yeah. For you and your seven girlfriends? No girlfriends, but yeah. Me and my one cat. Cool. And anything else? Was the dining room furniture gold plated?

It had these cool tiger paw feet on all the chairs and the table. I mean, it looked amazing. It's just absolutely useless. I used it maybe once or twice in probably the five years I owned that home. Wow. All right. So take me back to these days, back to your Porsche driving expensive house days. What were at the time?

Do you know how much debt you were in at the time? Cumulative. I can list off each one. Well, bring me back to the story, I got out of college. I, like most people, didn't get financial education from. home, high school, while in secondary education either. So I came out of college, got my first credit card, which I had in college, but after college is kind of more free. My parents were looking over me with the Hawkeyes. First thing I did, after six, nine months on the job, went to the Jeep

lot and saw this awesome Jeep, fell into the same trap most people do. How much can you afford each month. I was like, oh, I can afford this amount, not knowing about interest rates, getting that set ahead of time or buying something that's useful or that you can actually afford. Bought a G, so I had a car payment. Then I had to go out and get an awesome stereo, of course, because I was a dude. And a car alarm. At the same time, I had student loans. I paid off my student loans relatively quickly because I didn't like seeing the interest being wasted each month from the first time the payment came in. So it took me two and a half years to get out of those. Still had the G. traded that in for a Porsche as my income increased my lifestyle did as well more expensive rent

on apartments and then one day my co-workers like hey I'm buying a house and I thought whoa you know I make more money than you do I guess I can have hoard house too and the bank agreed with that of course they said yes and they said here's how much house you can buy and then my boss agreed with them too he said you should buy as much houses the bank will let you I thought oh well that makes sense because house values are going to go up I mean nothing about this stuff did that got a expensive house, had the expensive car, went out and bought some, the awesome furniture, which I just mentioned, couches, dining room set, big screen TV. So I had the furniture on a no, no, no plan, and the car payment. And I was like, I don't have any emergency fund. And I'm single.

Got into one of your guests, Clark Howard that you had on your show, started listening to his radio program. And he's like, no, that's not how you should live. You know, you should pay off your debts, not have all these mortgages that I have. So that was my beginning of the awakening, the root awakening of a bad financial situation that I was in. You had to ask how much debt I had. I had a double mortgage, $200,000 house. I don't know how much money I had in furniture, which I put on credit as well, and then my $800-month Porsche payments as well.

Wow. This shows you how little I know about cars. I don't even know what a Porsche costs. Would that be like, for an $800 a month payment over five years, that'd be like, what, $100,000 or something? It ranges. I mean, you've got the real 9-18 spider, which is the awesome. some of a supercar in the world, which only Bill Gates owns. So those are, those are a million dollars.

Okay. How much should your Porsche cost? Mine was $49,000. Mine was the cheap, quote unquote, cheap Porsche at the time. Hmm. Okay. Which a lot of SUVs nowadays, a lot of duly trucks, which we have a lot of trucks down here in Texas. I mean, a truck can run you 70 grand. Yeah. I was about to say that $49,000 price tag, that actually doesn't sound so bad. You said, Porsche, and I'm thinking six figures, but you know, you could spend 49,000 on a Honda. Yeah, there are certainly a lot of six figure Porsches out there. I was not in a position to buy one of those. I bought the one that I could, well, I couldn't afford it, but I bought it anyway. So how did, of course, we're going to take your story through when you got out of that, but before we do,

I want to kind of focus in on the mindset that you had at that time and how that mindset developed. you know, were you in the mentality of thinking that as long as you could make the monthly payments, you'd be okay? Were you just not thinking very much about it at all? Tell me about your mindset. Yeah, I didn't really think about it at all. I went on purely, what is in my checking account? Am I going to, do I have enough money to buy X, whatever X happened to be? Or can I make the monthly payment on Y? And that's how it would go about doing. Didn't have it a budget or anything like that. Again, listening to Clark Howard, I learned about not necessarily budgeting, but just tracking my money. spending so I started doing that each month and really as soon as I got into my

house and drain my bank account paying off the closing costs having no savings in realizing hey the the mortgage is due in six weeks and then you've got all these payments here and then realizing what an emergency fund is and was and why you should have one again listen to the radio and finding myself in that situation I was like I don't I don't like this I don't like this one bit so it didn't take long I ended up selling the Porsche getting a used, very, very used pickup truck for $6,500 in cash, really downsizing everything in my life and just started throwing money at my mortgage.

Because, again, I didn't like that PMI that I was paying. It was $130 a month in PMI. And that just pained me, seeing that go out to when I was like, $130, it's not going towards anything. Was this a fast transition or did it happen slowly? You know, was it an overnight eureka the next morning every, you commit to changing your life? or was it a slow conversion?

It was definitely the Eureka moment, waking up one day saying, ah, this has got to change. I like this feeling over here or a potential feeling of, I'm going to get rid of all these debts. I can have this car that's paid for. I can focus on my mortgage. And really, once I got rid of the car, that gave me a little bit of money to seed an emergency fund

and build that up over three to six months, get the furniture paid off as well, since I had my truck, which I paid for in cash, there's no car payment there. Oh, I'm going to start investing and saving for my future after I realized how important that was. So that was really an aha moment. I would say it was almost instantaneous, even though it probably took a couple, three months to get everything in order with all those decisions. Yeah. Well, I mean, in the span of a human life, two or three months is instantaneous.

What triggered that? I mean, I know you mentioned that you started listening to Clark Howard, but there must have been some trigger that brought you to the Clark Howard show. He has a lot of billboards in Atlanta. And that's where I lived at the time. So I would drive down on my 40-minute commute to work and just see his face or his advertisement or his radio show. Clark Howard, every day on the radio from noon to three. And one day I just tuned in. Maybe I was driving home from work early or something and started to listen to him.

Wow. That's, okay. So that is fascinating because most people I talk to, they become interested in money. And as a result, they then seek out Clark Howard. or Dave Ramsey or Gene Chatsky, they become interested in money and then they seek out people who talk about it. But it sounds like you just randomly, through absolute, just chaotic randomness, happened to come across his show. And that triggered the Eureka. It was. I think it was John Wayne, who's my guardian angel.

I think he is anyway. He occasionally looks out for me, shines down some wisdom. And it was one of those times. All right, just check out this radio show, see what this dude has to say. be getting hooked on it, hooked on talk radio, because I'd never listen to it up until that point in my life at all. Political, financial, the morning home shows on Saturday morning, any of that stuff. It's purely listening to Radio for Music and pleasure, never for learning or anything about that. So you had this awakening. You sold off your Porsche. You started aggressively paying off your debt.

You started aggressively saving. What were you doing for work at this time? I was in IT. I started out as a software developer and I was still in the same job at this point. I'd been there for probably four or five years. I bought that house when I was 25, 26. So it was very early on, again, way too early to own a home, in my opinion, for a single guy anyways who really didn't have a big plan for his life other than, oh, owning a home would be cool. Yeah, and you're 42 now, right? 44 just turned, yes. Oh, happy birthday. Thanks. So you were making a decent salary? Yeah, not the crazy salaries. Like people make today. at IT when you're just hopping out of college and making, I don't know, say 50 or 60 grand.

It was different times. The dot-com boom had not happened yet. And so coming out of school, I think I did the math a while back. I was making the equivalent coming out of college of, I'd say, $30,000 a year when I graduated school. How long did it take between that moment, that awakening, until you became debt-free? I got married along the way. So I'd say 10 years, roughly. 10 years?

Wow. Wow. Yeah. Okay. I mean, when I say debt-free, I mean, the mortgage is gone. Okay. So rather than just not having student loans, car loans, or credit card debt. Let's pause here.

Let's kind of go through the chronology because I'm... Sure. What year did you graduate from college? 1994, yes. Okay, cool. So in 1994, you graduate from college. You ramp up your spending all throughout the 90s. That explains why you bought a stereo.

It was a big 12-inch. subwoofers. It was not just any stereo. It was amazing. People heard me coming down the street. Did you have a six-disc CD-changer? I don't think that's a CD-changer. Really? No, it may have been one disc. One disc. Wow. The five to six-disc CD-changers, my predominant memory of like what rich people had in the 90s. Yeah, they had the changers in the trunks of their cars. Yeah, that's right. Okay. So, you. You graduate from college in 94. You ramp up your spending all throughout the 90s.

You hit your eureka moment right around... It was about $2,000. 2000. Just ever I purchased my home, started paying that down aggressively. We're really thrown... Aside from investing in my 401K at the company, everything extra went towards the house just to get it knocked down as quickly as possibly can. I could just get a smaller payment.

And then when did you get married? I got married in 2005. So when we got into the marriage, I had my home and my wife had a townhouse, which she had two mortgages as well, starting out just like I did. And then she had a car loan. She didn't have any other debt, so outside of those. So when we got married, we combined her finances together. I think it was probably three, six months into the marriage.

We just had a discussion. Like, your car is a, it's a POS. It's always got kind of, I mean, this car, it was an expensive car. It was a brand new Volkswagen Jetta, which she had a car loan on. But just the problem, the clutch went out. That was three grand. That's what she brought to the marriage. Big expenses that I could pay for, like a $3,000 clutch.

Someone had shot a bullet through the front window. The roof leaked on our honeymoon. He came back. There was an inch of water on the floorboard. So this car had tons of issues. So we're like, let's get rid of this. We'll bring it to the dealer, get a cheaper car. We'll get rid of your loan and pay for a car and cash at the exact same time, which is what we did.

We traded in a $24,000 car, which I think she owed about. 10 grand on, I want to say, and we bought a $15,000 brand new 2007 Honda Fit, which I still drive today. So that wiped out that debt. And then we took some of the proceeds from my house sale. I moved in with her, applied that to her second mortgage, so we could get that interest rate dropped. The second mortgage had higher interest rate on it.

And from there, careers started shifting at that point. We were back in Atlanta. She wanted to move back to Texas where her family was. She was going to school for commercial real estate development, which set industries that She thought, wow, this is a great industry to be in. This was 2008 before the whole economy tanked. She had all kinds of references to get into jobs. She had a great internship.

Decided to move back to Texas. Couldn't get a job. During that, we sold her townhouse, moved into a rental home in Atlanta for about six months, just a transition. Got back to Texas, moved in with her family, and we ended up staying with them for a year because she could not find a job. So this is an interesting narrative because, in the year 2000, right around the dot-com boom, when everybody's feeling rich, you've got your

Porsche and your fancy dining table with the tiger claw legs and your giant stereo. And fortunately, you also at that point had the wake-up call and started getting out of debt. And so you gradually put yourself into a better and better financial position. And that probably helped by the time that we got to 2008. Your wife was unemployed and you were living with your in-laws during the worst recession of our lifetimes. Yeah, we kept downsizing. For me, I look at it. I had a 3,000 square foot home, which was 2,000 furnished in the basement.

And then I moved into my wife's 1,200 square foot townhouse, which we then moved transition to a 1,000 square foot rental home, which we then transferred into a, 300 square foot bedroom in the in-laws apartment. Oh, wow. And staying there and in respect. We could have moved out at any time had we chosen to. But during each of these steps, it was really a step, not downwards or backwards, but we're scaling back our life because the home costs are going down, allowing us put more money into savings. We don't know for what. We're just banking money, especially when we lived with the in-laws because when it was in a town that had no good restaurants, nothing to do.

and we got cheap rent. We're paying like $435 a month, including all the utilities for the two of us. So you're in-laws charged you rent? We paid them. Yeah. They didn't charge us, right? Yeah, yeah. We helped him out. Yeah. And there are this whole process, we're just bank and money and saving up for our future home whenever that happened to come into play. So do you think that your commitment to constantly downsizing your expenses over the course of those 10 years, do you, do you? you think that that was a big part of what was able to get you guys through the recession and the unemployment? Like, basically, were you able to, I'm not asking this question very well. How do I ask this question better? What I call it is it's a bit of forced frugality or even forced minimalism.

It's not something that we had planned on. We didn't plan on her being out of work for a year. We thought, we're going to move to Texas. We're going to stay with your parents three weeks. You got all these interviews lined up with all these great companies. Surely you can just hop over to Dallas and get a job as soon as we get there. And that didn't happen at all. So she was very depressed about that at the time. And we had started a little side business for her, which eventually started kicking off enough money. We're like, well, you know, just work on your side business full time. It's making almost as much as you would at a regular salary job. And then soon that kind of like skyrocketed from there. So that helped out. And at that point, she didn't have to go find a job.

But from that forced fragality, we learned budgeting, being content with what we had, and living in that town where we couldn't go out and do a whole lot. We just learned to enjoy the little things in life. We didn't have anything to spend on. There's nothing to go by. What motivated you to continually downsize? I mean, it took 10 years from when you had your eureka moment to when you became completely debt-free. How did you stay with it for 10 years?

I mean, most people wouldn't be able to stay on a diet for 10 years. I think it was just contentment in the current situation, wherever we happen to be, whether it was her townhouse. We learned afterwards, we moved out of her townhouse. We were into the UPS guy one day, into the rental home. And it's like, oh, I didn't realize you guys moved over here. It was like, yeah, we're staying here in this rental house. It was like, all right, good for you guys. You know, that neighborhood behind you, we refer to that as crack town.

And we're like, oh. And there was one day I was working from home. There's a police officer outside. I run out of the street and say, hey, what's going on? What does police cars do in the neighborhood? I says, oh, have you seen any suspicious activity? It's like 13 of your neighbors' homes have been broken into recently. It's like, oh, we're in a really great neighbor.

I think it was that contentment of just being together with what we have, not being super materialistic, I'll say. I mean, we like nice things. We were in a beautiful, amazing home now, and we like spending money, kind of like you, going on vacations and spending money on experiences. But we never focused on, I could have the latest shoes. I use an example, or a fancy Rolex, just the fleeting stuff that some people are into. And then really the car situation, I think, kicked it off for me. Once I get rid of the expensive car and got content with my beater pickup truck,

and now I've got my, I call it my beater Honda Fit, which, I've been driving for 10 years. It's got $110,000, or sorry, $110,000, $110,000 miles on it. And it's still running. And I think, you know, I could run out buy a fancy car at any time. But, you know, this, this car is fine. It suits me. And it works. And it gets me from point A to point B. And I don't have a car payment, which I love. So it sounds like what worked for you was that you never felt deprived, because you felt content. Yeah, exactly. Content in whatever situation that we happened to be in, whether it was the 1950s rental home where all that was not super content because there's like bugs all the kitchen. I'm not a big fan of bugs, but we enjoyed it. We enjoyed our time there.

We can go back to that situation if we ever had to. If there's like a catastrophic financial meltdown medical issue, we could go back to that lifestyle and still be content in it. And so do you think for the people who are listening? I mean, is contentment the key to frugality? I think it's part of it. I think what we did a couple, I'll say earlier. this year. We got out of that bandwagon of minimalism, cleaning out your house, getting rid of all the extra stuff. And so we did that and we had to find out, man, we get a lot of stuff here that we don't really care about. And even now, I still think we have a lot of stuff, but I look around at it. I was like, I would just like to trash most of this stuff. And I think people can learn that as well as

find contentment in friends, your position at work, whatever that happens to be, your situation, experiences in life, and not necessarily stuff. Because everything we own, no matter what it is, is going to end up in the dump at some point. You can't take it with you. It's going to rust. Moths are going to get it. Going to end up in the dump. You're going to donate to somebody.

You're really going to ask yourself, and is this going to be a happier person? And the answer is, yes, for about 24 hours. And then it's just going to be another part. of your life that you're not going to pay any attention to. Do you have to continually remind yourself of that? Or is that like a muscle now? I think the purchases I make now, and I've gotten so into the habit, so it's kind of hard for me to reflect on it, is I don't buy a lot of stuff necessarily.

My wife and I both have our own personal allowances, and even she doesn't buy a lot of, like, extra stuff. So I'll go to the store and buy clothes once a year. I still have longings for awesome vehicles. when they go by. I was like, oh, yeah, I could see myself driving that, the land rovers, because they look really cool. So I still have the temptations and the longing. And then I find that they're just, they're fleeting thoughts. Sometimes I'll be sitting out on my front porch working. I'll see all the cars go by. Yeah, that's an awesome car, awesome car, awesome car. And then I come

back inside, carry on about my day. And then the thought is gone. I don't think about it anymore. So one thing that's coming up for me is there are some of the principles. or the values that underlie this transition that you've made. So the feeling of contentment, the recognition that those temptations are fleeting, and that if you just observe them, they will go away. Those are some of the values and the principles and the practices that I hear coming from you. A, am I reflecting that correctly? And B, is there anything else that you would add to that?

I think you've reflected perfectly. Stuff is I've learned over the years, and maybe this is part of the new minimalist movement, which I don't necessarily claim to be a follower of. I just kind of fell into it, I would say, or the frugality movement. And I want to give you the person that we don't own a lot of nice things because we do. We just choose to spend our money on different nice things, such as going on awesome vacations. And we like to eat. So we like to eat well and go out to nice restaurants and buy good stuff to cook at home.

But when it comes to clothing, I mean, see me on the street. I look like somebody who doesn't necessarily dress particularly well. Wearing my camo shorts and Metallica T-shirts out to most places. I mean, you never expect seeing me or my wife on the street. Wow, these people are early retirees. They're quite successful. We don't dress that way or try to show off in that way. And I think we've accumulated that over the years from really the constant downsizing that we had to go through.

those challenges that my wife had with her career, not going where we thought it would early on, but changing out definitely for the better. And I also think that it's something that can be achieved by anybody. I mean, it's really focusing on what do I value in life and what do I value long term? What are my long term goals?

You know, 10, 20 years from now, I know it's hard to fathom for some people, but are my circle of friends that I'm hanging around now? Are they the same friends that I had 10 or 15 years ago? Are they going to be the same friends I have? 10 or 15 years from now, the same neighbors. And am I investing more into looking good for them and putting on the front? Or am I investing more in myself and my long-term goals and my family and what isn't going to be important to the long run? And I think when you start to focusing on

the inner you, rather than how you present yourself to everybody else, that can change the shift in priorities in your life and where you put your money towards. So what are some of the priorities in your life? Well, we have twin three-year-olds. So they're up in the list. They keep us quite busy. For my wife, she does a great job of taking care of the family. That's what she enjoys, making sure we're well fed. She does like to cook. For me, I like helping people. I turn my money moron moments into what I get to do now, help people with their personal finances, kind of like what you get to do. And I really enjoy that. I'm very passionate about it and sharing that knowledge with other people so that they don't have to make the mistakes

that I made years ago, and they can see the light of the end of the tunnel. Or maybe they don't even know what the tunnel looks like, but we can help define what the tunnel is. And maybe you've never even heard about this thing called financial freedom or early retirement or whatever it is that you're seeking out there and just change their mindset in order to see something different from where they are now. Kind of like when I was 25, I didn't know about it. So there's nothing I could have done about it because they're just unaware. When you started focusing on values, When you started asking yourself the questions, the question like, you know, am I spending money to impress my friends or am I spending money in a way that's true to me? Were these your values at the time or have those values changed and iterated?

I mean, obviously you didn't have twins at the time, but you might have had the idea that you would have had kids eventually. At the time, I would say it was focus on housing for a second. I bought a nice house and I even own a nice house today simply because I love architecture. Yeah. And I like going into, it doesn't matter if it's a $100,000 house or a million house that I walk into. I just like looking at it. I'm a big fan of this old house. I watch so many episodes of that when I was single. And that was the pre-HT TV show. And going into a space and saying, you know, this is awesome. You know, what could we do here? Could I see myself living here? And appreciating it for whatever it was, again, for whether it was a $100,000 starter home or a million

dollar home that at the time I never realized I could even begin to afford a home like that. But I enjoyed walking through them. And that was one of the activities my wife and I did on Sunday afternoon just go through the new construction homes and the airport looking around. I just dream, wow, this is amazing. I don't think we'll ever have this, but it's cool to look at. With the Porsche, it was the same thing. I didn't buy the Porsche to impress everybody, anyone.

I bought it because this is a beautiful car. I like the way it looks. I could see myself driving this. It was exciting to drive. It was really cool. And for me, it was more about the appreciation of nice things rather than trying to impress anyone, which is different from some people and some people want an expensive house and an expensive car to impress others as opposed to just, you know, I want to own this because it's nice. We can enjoy this. So it sounds like you are coming from a place of you appreciate art and beauty and design.

Yes, and that's still true. I mean, I'll still go into a new construction home and look around, even though we have no, plans of moving or buying just to see, you know, what's going on in the architectural world these days and what are they building? Or even look on a line at realtor.com. So it sounds like you've basically found a way to still appreciate that without owning it, you know? Yeah, and it's certainly faced the same temptations everybody else does as well.

If you walk on a new car, oh, where was I? I was getting my car fixed several weeks ago, driving through the lot. You got to go to the service station, just looking out the corner of my eyes at all the nice new cars that were there. I'm thinking, man, I could drive away with that right now if I want to. And just turn it, reel it back. It's like, nope, this car is paid for. It drives fine.

It's got a lot of miles on it. I just want to see how far we can take it. Can we get it to 200,000 miles or when is it going to break down and not be able to drive anymore? Have you ever thought to yourself? You know, all this general advice is great, but I have a specific question about my personal situation. Who can I talk to? Well, guess what? NerdWallet has an app that allows you to get advice from a financial advisor through your phone,

and it's available at no cost to you. This cool new app allows you to talk to an advisor about anything you want, retirement, investing, insurance, how to pay off your debt, any topic that's related to money, you'll be able to get feedback about your own situation. And again, it's all at no cost to you. To check it out, head to nerd. me slash Paula. That's nerd, n-E-r-d-m-E-slash-P-A-U-L-A. At what point did you become a millionaire? I was 35.

We had the downsizing allowed us to accumulate a lot of savings. And at that point, we had been investing some in the stock market. And it had appreciated it pretty well. We had... What year was this? Let's see. You're 44 now. So this would have been... I think it was 07. 07. Ah, the stock market in 07. Yes.

All right. Sorry, I cut you off, though. All right, you were 35. You'd been saving for a while, for seven years at this point. You'd been investing for seven years. You'd been paying off your debt. Saving, investing. We had some appreciation from the home that I sold. My wife's house, hers was a wash after we... She lived in it for two years after we paid off. Closing costs. after getting out of that. So she netted zero during that transaction. Then moving in with the in-laws, allowed us to save a lot of money. My wife's business started generating a good sizable chunk,

so we sock that away as well. When we had our current home, we had that built for us. We ended up putting 50% down on it. And then probably, I'll say a year later, we would talk with our financial advisor. And we thought,

you know, we're thinking about paying this house off. Do we have enough money and investments to do that? He said, yeah, you could do that. He didn't convince us one way or the other, you know, if you leave these investments in the stock market, you know, in 30 years, it could be this month. He just said, some people choose to go this route. Some people choose to be debt-free like you're thinking about. It's not going to sink your retirement one way or the other.

And we made that decision. It was like, all right, we want to be done with this mortgage. So we cashed out a few investments, some savings, wrote a check, and we were debt-free. And so what year was that? That was in 2009 when we were completely debt-free. Okay. So that's interesting. So you were millionaires before you were debt-free.

It happened, yeah, just slightly, not too much earlier than that. And at the time, we had never thought about retiring early, the fire movement, financial, independent, retire early movement or any of that stuff. It was more of a, hey, you know, we've done pretty well here. We didn't have a lot of, I don't actually, I don't think we had any friends that were had accumulated as much at the net, at least that we did not know of, that were outward about it in our circle of friends that we hung out. I know that feeling. It's a lonely feeling when you look around at all your friends and you're like,

there's nobody I can talk to about this. Yeah, thankfully, we had a financial advisor. We could talk to about us. And we started going within about six months after we first got married. Yeah, I just have the internet, you know. I've got the blog and the podcast, conversations that you can have with people who calculate their net worth on a regular basis. You know, that's a small sliver of society. It is, yes. And it was good to have him as a bouncing board for ideas and saying, you know, we could do this or what do you think about this. And he would give us investment advice as well, long term planning. So all those things we could talk to him about, which made our discussions more comfortable, our choices more comfortable, knowing that, all right, we go to this third party. He's saying, not saying, yeah, your nay, but giving us good advice one way or other as to our financial future. Was there any amount that you set as your boundary for enough? when it comes to net worth or to income or to spending or to, you know, any of those arbitrary barometers? The weird thing was, is we never focused on the accumulation of money or a particular dollar amount.

That's not entirely true. When we first met with our financial advisor, we got into discussion. Hey, it's like, hey, how much money do we need to retire? And he's like, uh, no, no, they did this back of the napkin thing. He's like, $12.5 million. What? Oh, let me guess. He was calculating based on your income and not on your spending.

I have no idea where he got that number from at the time because it was so long ago. I was like, what do you mean $12.5 million? We're never going to have that much. That was a number he tossed out. But when we became millionaires, it wasn't until some period later where we even realized, oh, we've got a million dollar net worth because it wasn't a focus of ours. How much are we making? We've saved a lot. We're in that frugal zone in our lives.

We're putting money away, working towards getting the house down payment. And then one day, the day some time later arrives, like, oh, well, we've hit this milestone. It's an arbitrary milestone. Having a million dollars in the bank doesn't mean you've arrived or anything. It really depends on how much you spend, really. It's like, oh, we're millionaires. Okay, let's go back to work. It wasn't really a big deal.

Similar to when the mortgage was paying out, that was slightly a bigger deal because not having a mortgage is super cool. So we had a little celebration. dinner there, but then the next day arrives. All right, the mortgage is paid off. Let's go back to work. Has your experience then been more about the journey than any given destination? Yeah, the experience has definitely been about learning about money as much as possible, really. Still, you know, there's always ongoing learning and not necessarily setting these arbitrary

milestones right at your life. But even today, it's, all right, we've got this financial situation where we are, we're this exact same people that we were 10 years ago when we got married. And I'm the same guy who bought the truck for $6,500, except now I've got the cheapo Honda Fit instead of the cheapo truck. And really, I think that's the important part of the whole thing. Keeping focused on, here are my long-term goals. I'm going to work toward those. Okay, I've hit a mini goal, I've hit a medium goal, or I've hit one of the big goals.

Okay, that's awesome. It's been a cool ride to get here. What's the next thing on the horizon? And I think there's joys along the journey. There's obviously a lot of setbacks as well. There are going to be bumps and detours and things that you don't expect and sickness and just weird things that you'd never expect to happen. But once you hit that big milestone, it's not like, ah, this crazy moment when you look back.

It's the journey that you got there that makes it who you are. I kind of like it to. I ran one marathon my entire life. And I remember training for it. And it was really hard going through the training at the time. It was winter back in Atlanta, which is not super cold, but super cold for me, training in January, February. Oh, yeah, I cannot deal with winters in Atlanta. I am such a baby. Temperature drops below 60 degrees Fahrenheit. And I'm like, how do humans live in these conditions? Yeah, but after I get done with the

marathon, I look back, well, it wasn't so much about the race of that day and going through that. I don't recall much of that at all, but all that training that I went through leading up to that, that's what I think about all those times out on the roads or the trails, preparing for those. Those are what stick in my mind, not that six and a half hours it took me to run through the actual marathon itself. More of the journey and the training, getting out on Saturday morning running, hitting up the barbecue place on the way home to eat a ton of food because I deserved it. After burning all those calories, not so much about the race itself. That's a great analogy. That's a fantastic analogy.

The race, the arbitrary one day, yes, it's a benchmark, but it's one that you set so that you can stay motivated to have that diligent practice in the months leading up to it. Yeah, exactly. And for anyone who's run 5K, 10K, half marathon, one of the tough muddurers or any of the, I don't say tough mutter, but those training sessions where you may run in a group on a weekend or for me going out and buying a book saying, here's a step-by-step guide to how to run a marathon. It's like, okay, I'll follow this guide and learn how to run a marathon. I'll go out and do the training. And then the day comes, all right, you run your race, you get your banana and your juice at the end and your metal. All right, that's cool. And you get the metal up on your wall for however long you decide to keep it. But then you think back, well, the training is what got me there.

Right, right. It's not about the event. It's about the training. Interesting. So what advice would you give to people who are listening who are in the middle of making their own transatlant? from money moron to millionaire? What I like to around my own people is we all start in kind of the same place. Nobody or very few people, maybe a very small percentage of people, come out of high school,

come out of college, having all this great knowledge or becoming or they're arriving as a money expert from day one. You're going to make the money mistakes. You're going to buy the stupid stuff. We all pay the stupid tax as it's saying. You're going to pay interest where you shouldn't be paying interest. and buy too much stuff. And that's okay.

We start where we start. We traverse in our own spot, whatever that happens to be. And you just got to realize there's a path that's been proven to get you from where you are to where you want to go. Sometimes it's a long slog. Maybe it's a couple three, ten years, maybe, depending on somebody's got $150,000 in student loans. But you work through it, step by step. Then you arrive one day and it's like, oh, you know, I've got all these debts.

of and my life is going to be amazing now. I realize it's amazing along the way as well. But once that final check is written for the student loan or the credit card payment or the car payment or the mortgage, all those little milestones along the way, that's what's truly amazing. And it's achievable by anybody. The point is you've got to realize, all right, I accept where I am. I'm going to come up with a plan to get to where I want to go and then I'm going to execute it. Stay mission driven, it almost sounds like.

Yeah, and realize that they're going to be setbacks. We all have, it doesn't matter what any goal in any aspect of your life, they're going to be setbacks. When I was training through my marathon, I got a shin splint so I couldn't run for two months. It's a physical setback. I've had business setbacks over the years. I've had eight different companies, four of them and complete failures. That's part of the business world. They're not always going to be successful.

Financial setbacks, their routine doesn't matter. have any amount of money, you're still going to have financial setback. Something's always going to go wrong at some point. Something's always going to break. You know, that you own a bunch of rental homes. Something's always going to break. And I think if you prepare yourself for those, all right, things are going to break. I expect them to break so that when that does happen, okay, you know, I knew this was coming. It's bad. I'm going to be, as I like to say, I'm mad at the situation. No, I'm not mad at my wife. I'm mad at the situation. So I'm allowed to do that. rather than getting angry at her.

And then you work through that, it's a bump, move on to the next part of the journey. You know, when things break, the way that I've reframed it, I'm actually really happy when I have to pay for a new appliance or a new air conditioner or a new roof. Because the way I see it, sweet, that thing was going to have to get replaced anyway. And I've done it now, so now I don't need to worry about it for the next 20 years.

Yeah, exactly. Our financial planner says, You should be happy. You're paying so much taxes. So much in taxes, I'm like, yeah, I'll be happy, but not that happy. Paying taxes is a good problem to have. It means you're gainfully employed. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. All right. Great. Well, thank you so much, Scott. Where can the listeners find you if they want to hear more from you? Sure. My website is Scott Allentunner.com, A-L-A-N. And thank you so much for having me on the show. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much, Scott, for coming on to the show.

What are some of the chief takeaways that we can get from this time that we've had together from this interview? Well, first of all, I had no idea that a Porsche could be the same price as a Honda. So I guess takeaway number one, I don't know if this is really the point of the interview is don't be that swayed over brand names. Because when you break it down, man, stuff doesn't necessarily always cost what you think it did. But real takeaway, the actual thing beyond that is that, brand names don't matter, quality matters, value matters. You don't necessarily want the cheapest piece of junk. They're still such a thing as looking for the best value in terms of the utility that you'll get from a purchase, but don't concentrate that value on brand names. Because having a designer whatever, whether it's a car or a boat or a handbag, that doesn't necessarily imply value or quality. And it sounds like one of the big changes that Scott makes. in his life is that he went from wanting impressive things, things that signaled success, to wanting valuable things, things that actually now contribute to his life in a positive way. From the way

that I interpreted this interview, it used to be when he was younger that he bought things that looked good, and now he buys things that actually have utility and efficiency and bring him joy. And so that's chief takeaway number one. Think more carefully, more deliberately about the things that you purchase and only buy something if it has value and utility. Chief takeaway number two that I got from this interview is, and I hope this is obvious, but it needs to be stated, don't think about whether or not you can make the monthly payment. buy things in cash, and specifically I'm referring to consumer products. If you have to think about a Jeep or a Porsche in terms of the monthly payments, you're going about it all wrong.

Because whether or not you, quote, unquote, can afford something doesn't mean, oh, I can finance it and afford the monthly payments. It means I've saved up this money in advance, and now I have a pool of money, a basket of money, that I can put towards buying this item, whether that item is a car or a vacation or whatever big-ticket consumer item you want to purchase. And that leads me into chief takeaway number three. Don't compare yourself to your neighbors, the people around you. You know that that cliche of keeping up with the Joneses. Well, the Joneses are broke. Normal is broke. And that next door neighbor who is living in a really fancy house with all this nice furniture, you don't know they're

financial situation. And it might be the case that that neighbor bought the biggest, most expensive house that they could qualify for. It might be the case that that neighbor put a 5% down payment on a property that has two mortgages and PMI and also has student loans and also has car loans and also isn't saving for retirement. If you're comparing yourself to the spending habits of other people, you don't know if those other people are spending at a rate that represents 5% of their income or 500% of their income. Those outside external indicators of wealth are actually reasonably meaningless. And so it seems like all of the takeaways from this episode, at least the takeaways that I got, really revolve around the meaninglessness, the hollowness of consumerism.

Every time we buy a consumer product, we are trading a portion of our lives, a portion of our time. And that time is expressed as money. We're trading that time for that item. And so any time that you buy something, ask yourself, is this worth that portion of my life? Is this worth a week of my life or a month of my life? And if the answer is no, then you know what? It's okay to drive a beater car and wear clothing from Target if that brings you closer to financial independence. if that brings you closer to living a life that is more aligned with the values and the principles that you hold.

It's not about being cheap. It's not about being frugal. It's just about living in a principle-centered way. So those are the takeaways that I got from this interview. I'd love to hear what you got from the interview. What are some of your key takeaways? Please share them with me on Twitter. I'm at Afford Anything. Or head to the show notes and leave a comment. By the way, we have come up with a new and much easier way for you to access the show notes. You can now just go to afford anything.com forward slash episode and then just type in the episode number. So if you want to read the show notes from today's show, for example, just head to afford anything.com forward slash episode 55.

That's 5.5. While you're there, you can read a synopsis of the interview, leave comments with your take. on it and ask questions, either to me or to Scott, we would both love your feedback and opinions about today's episode. And speaking of feedback, I want to thank all of you who went to iTunes and left us a review. These reviews are really helpful in terms of giving me insight into how I can improve the show. So I'd like to thank Zoo 23, ZUI 23, who left a review at the beginning of December, that says, and I thought this was a very helpful review, he also.

she says that they think that the show is light on detail. That's the title of the review. And they say it's good for people new to personal finance. However, for anyone else, it's basic sound principles curated from elsewhere. The good news is that these are principles that work. The bad thing is that the host has a lot more potential. If she decided to, she could provide original information or perspectives not found elsewhere. So I love this review. This is actually super, super helpful. Thank you so much for sharing it. I would love to know specifically what type of, how do you want me to go further? I don't want this to become, you know, a show that's specifically about real estate investing, for example, or a show that goes deep into the weeds of how to analyze a PE ratio.

I want this to be more of a show about values and principles. But that being said, obviously, it's not going to do anybody any good if it's just rehashed same old, same old. So I want to hear from you in what ways could this show go deeper? For example, has there ever been a time that you've listened to an episode and there's a question that you've wanted me to ask a guest that I didn't ask and really provide insight that isn't found elsewhere? If there is, share that with me. Leave a review or send me a tweet or leave a comment on the show notes. Let me know that because I'd like you and I to collaborate together on a review. how to make this show better for everybody who's listening. So thank you, Zwee 23, for your review.

That is excellent. I love it. I'd also like to thank Dale Bradshaw, who left a review at the end of November that said that it's a great podcast for lifestyle design, pragmatic ethical advice for tools and techniques to take control of your life and money. Thank you so much, Dale, for your iTunes review. And here we've got somebody. The title of the review is Eric. arrogant, annoying moron. And this person says, she knows nothing but thinks she is special. She is pathetic, self-righteous idiot. I believe that that statement should be she is a pathetic self-righteous idiot. Okay. But in all seriousness, if you've got feedback, good, bad in between, I want to hear from you. I want your honest feedback. So please head to iTunes, leave a review. And while you're there,

upvote the other reviews that you find helpful. That is how we make a show great, is by getting that feedback and by sharing that feedback with others. So thank you so much to all of you who are listening for being part of the community. Thank you in advance for leaving reviews on iTunes and for upvoting other reviews on iTunes that you find helpful. And thank you so much just in general for all of your support. This podcast has come a long way in the year that it's been on the air.

and we've had a great 2016, and we're going to continue to have an even better 2017 in the year ahead. Some of the upcoming episodes that we have planned for you include an interview with Philip Taylor, better known as PT. He's the founder of FinCon, and an interview with Billy Murphy, a former professional poker player who shares some of the lessons that he learned from that era in his life and how he's applying that now to business and money. So that's what's coming up in the rest of December. Thank you so much for staying with me till the end. My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast, and I'll catch you next week.