Afford Anything - Okay, I’m Financially Independent. Now What? -- with Jim Wang

Episode Date: June 20, 2016

#30: When Jim Wang was 29-and-a-half, life changed forever. Jim started an online company (a blog) in his mid-20's. His website grew to several hundred thousand readers and started earning five-figure monthly sums. It sounds too good to be true. I know. But it's Jim's life. He experienced the heady, surreal boom; that crazy era when a business grows beyond wildest expectation. He experienced the fear and worry that the good days might not last. And he experienced the reality of trading his website for a life-changing seven-figure sum. And then what? What happens when you're 29-and-a-half, and you suddenly discover that you're financially independent? What's next? Where do you go from there? What becomes important? And what lessons, what universal truths, can this reveal about our own lives? What can we learn from the aftermath of financial independence -- regardless of our current bank balance? Jim and I have a frank, forthright and insightful conversation on today's show. It's a long episode, but a good one. To receive updates via email or more information about the show, visit http://TheMoneyShow.co Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, welcome to The Money Show. I'm your host, Paula Pan, and I have a big announcement at the end of this episode. We're changing the name of the show, and we'll be changing the format, starting next week. So if you want to find out what's next for this podcast, please stick around until the end. We'll cover everything then. But for now, let's meet today's guest. Today we hear from Jim Wang. He created a business that he sold for $3 million.

By itself, that's amazing. but I'm bringing him on to the show for reasons much more thought-provoking than that. After Jim tells his story of creating a business from scratch and becoming financially independent in one major life-changing transaction, that, by the way, happened when he was 29 and a half. His interview from that point takes a much more introspective turn. Jim shares how becoming financially independent, redefined and challenged, The way that he values his time, his work, fulfillment, and family. Oh, and Jim also turns the tables on me at the end of the episode

and starts grilling me about what I've learned and what I could take away from this. We also learn a new word for hippopotamus. So let's welcome him on to the show. Here's Jim Wang from WalletHacks.com. Hey, Jim. Hey, Paula. How you doing? I'm good. How are you? Fantastic. Excited to be here.

Background for the listeners, Jim, you and I have known. How long have we known each other? Do we count the second time? I met you and I forgot that I had met you. Oh, yeah. That was so funny. We had met at FinCon, I think the second FinCon. I was the first one I went to was the second FinCon. 2012 and then I'd forgotten. We had met up in 2013 and we were chatting and I'm like, I feel really comfortable talking with Paula. as if I know her.

And she was like, you knew me last year. But we met last year. I was like, oh, wonderful. Well, but also, Jim, in fairness, like, you were a pretty big deal. Were. I caught that as soon as it left my mouth. You know, you're famous, and you are famous in the financial blogging community. And I was, like, Jack, nobody.

So, you know, it's. I thought your name was fake. I thought it was like a pseudonym. Like Paula Pant, she must really like alliteration. You know, my middle initial is also P. Oh, that's perfect. Jim, I'm going to cut straight to the chase. You built an online company and you sold it for a bunch of money.

How the F did you do that? I have no idea. Let's talk about it. Okay, let's figure it out. Let's reverse engineer what you've done. All right, let's do it. Tell me about starting this website. I'm talking day one when you registered the hosting in the URL.

What was going through your mind? Basically, what was going through your mind as you started asking me the question, which is, what am I doing? What exactly is this? I don't really know what I'm doing. Why don't I start a blog? Like to start for the beginning, I started working full time at a defense company called Northropan. And I'm a couple years older than my then-girlfriend, now wife, and she was still in school. And so I was off, you know, working 40, 45, 50 hours a week.

So you were, and you were in like your mid-20s? Yeah, I was in my mid-20s. And, you know, I had really nothing much to do after work. And here I was starting working and, you know, you start your first day. You sit down. You get sort of these massive employee manuals and this whole like 401K. How do you plan your life for the next 40, 50, 60 years? And so what I was doing after work was trying to like figure this stuff out.

This is around the time that blogging became popular. So I said, why don't I start a blog? I can look at it, you know, write in it from work and do it from home and just be able to journal and keep things up. And that's sort of how the blog started. And I think if you go back to 2004, 2005, blogging wasn't considered anything you could do as a business. It was literally journals, people sharing. If you think about the early days of Twitter when they would joke around people saying, oh, I ate a banana today. Yeah.

Like stupid updates. You know, that's what blogging was back then, just little updates. And what people quickly realized was that, you know, in the era before social media really started, you shared these thoughts. And then when other people in sort of the search for community and learning and sort of talking with someone that was going through what they were going through, blogs were one of the core ways that people connected. And so I think that's sort of how the bargaining, which was the name of the blog, that's sort of how it became. became popular and grew, in part because it was one of the early ones in personal finance. And two, it was just, you know, had that sort of young professional perspective that, you know, people that were just starting out families, just getting to work, they identified sort of

with my story, with the things that I was interested in and we connected. At what point did it transition from a hobby into a business? Actually, let me take that question back a little bit. Was there a point at which that happened? Or was it a slope, a spectrum? I think what happened was initially, you know, for the first like six months, nobody visited the site. I know the feeling. It was like, I would joke and be like me, my girlfriend and like my mom.

And then me again from like home versus at work. Like I got four hits today. That's awesome. And four hits is awesome. Like imagine, you know, having an audience of four anything, right? So I mean, in the beginning, it just slowly grew and grew. And then there wasn't necessarily a turning point, but it just started to grow. And so I kept going.

And eventually it started ranking up highly in the Google search results. And before I know it, it was making a little bit of money and a little bit became a lot more. I'm going to pause you there. Yeah. How long is before I know it from the time you started till the time you knew it? Before I knew it was a business. Before you made that first dollar. The site didn't really make money until sort of the 18th month mark.

And that's when it started, you know, you start getting ranked in Google. And that's also around the time that I discovered affiliate marketing and sort of the performance marketing space. And how if you drive leads and sales and things like that, you can get, you know, a few percent and commission. Okay. So 18 months, you started making money and fueled the transition from hobby into business. Yeah. But at the time that I quit probably, I think it was three years in. I quit my job.

Your day job? My day job, the site itself was earning more than what my day job was earning by like many multiples, which was part of the sort of the, gave me the confidence to quit what I consider a stable job. In the defense industry, security clearances, like if I wanted to sort of coast into retirement, as funny as it sounds because at the time, you know, I'm under the age of 30, you know, in defense software with security clearances, you're pretty much set. Yeah. For the, you know, your career-wise, at the time that I quit, I forget the exact multiple,

but I considered what I'd earned in the business as buying me runway to sort of mess up and fail. And so it made four times my income. I knew, okay, I'd purchased, in a sense, four years to try to figure this out and make it even bigger. And what I wanted to do was to sort of minimize regret. Jeff Bezos is sort of famous for regret minimization in that I didn't want to, in three or four years, have the site, know, earn less, fail, whatever, collapse, and I wasn't putting all of my energy into it. And so that sort of drove me to quit the job. Even though, I mean, I enjoyed my job.

I was working on fun projects. I enjoyed the people I was working with. I mean, it checked off all the sort of career boxes and wants. And if I didn't have the site, I'd be very happy, you know, working. But it was regret minimization. I just didn't want to look back and say, oh, I kind of messed up, not pursuing this. Let's stay on this topic of regret minimization. So I understand how you took that concept and applied it to bargaining.

You know, the idea of I want to make sure that I don't ever look back and think what if. Did you ever also apply that concept to quitting your job? Like what if you one day regretted quitting your job because the website didn't work out or it did work but you didn't like it? I mean, you know, there are many reasons to also regret quitting something that's going well. One of the interesting things is before I made a decision, I talked to a lot of people, you know, colleagues that I trusted and that I knew I sort of had this going on. Most of them, especially the more senior ones that had sort of been in the industry for a while, they said, you know, once you get cleared the first time in terms of security clearance, you can get clear again relatively easily compared to starting from scratch. And as long as my skills remain relatively sharp, and now looking back like that would have been impossible to do because I'm not doing any sort of software programming right now that translates. As long as I kept that up, I could find the job back in that industry again.

I didn't see myself regretting quitting because I could always go back. Right. That makes sense. The blog is a bit more of a limited time opportunity, something that it's happening now and you've got to go for it. programming software, you know, the defense industry, those things, that's a business that'll be around for a very long time. Blogging, who knows? Right? Like these things, you know, Facebook is, it's about 10 years old now. Like that's relatively new. I mean, defense industry has been around for a long time. What happened after that point? You were now three years into the growth of your website. You quit your job. You're full time working on this project. Did you have any

contractors or employees working with you or was it a one-man show? It was pretty much a one-man show. I had the idea to, I hired a couple of freelance writers because with a blog, a lot of it's about voice and who you're trying to connect with. And you want to make a strong connection. And the best way to do that is to write authentically, share your stories. And so here I was sharing the story of a young professional male, just gotten married at the time. So I was like, that's one voice. I'd really like to add, you know, some more like frugality, some family, some female voices, just different perspectives that when someone visits, they could connect with something other than, other than me.

So I hired a few writers and things like that, but for the most part, it was still just a one-man show. Bargeneering remained a one-man show for the period of which I ran it. It just never, I don't know, I think my sort of entrepreneurial, maturation, never got to the point where I was willing to take on the risk of hiring someone full-time. And so I had like various tasks that I hired people for, you know, to work as freelance, but nothing ever with a full-time employee. What about all of the little minutia, you know, deleting spam comments, fixing 404 error pages, all of the, that tiny little crap that

pulls you away from the big picture. I did it. So here's the biggest thing. I didn't run into a lot of the major technical issues that a lot of people run into. I don't know why. It just maybe by the design of the site or something like that. I mean, one big issue that a lot of people face is a tremendous amount of email. Yeah.

Yeah. I actually don't get a lot of email. I think it's because people don't like me. I don't know why, but I actually don't get a ton of email. I still don't get a ton of email. I mean, at the height bargaining, I think it had six, seven, or eight hundred thousand visitors a month. Like, I didn't get many emails, a couple a day.

And I tell people, and they're shocked. You know, one of our mutual friends, J.D. Roth, you know, he gets a tremendous amount of email. Because people, you know, I think because, you know, I think because, JD's very relatable and he writes in a very, in a casual tone such that people connect very well with him, which is something that I envy a lot. I don't know if I write in a tone that is as approachable or maybe I just make it harder for people to email me. But the minutia, things like that, I don't remember it being a big enough of a problem. I do know that I rely on a lot of tools to help pull data so that I don't have to.

and I know that I relied a lot on, you know, plugins and things like that to keep spam at bay. I mean, tools today compared to seven, eight years ago, are tremendous. Yeah. Yeah, they absolutely are. And the complexity has grown quite a bit. How big was social media at that time? Like, how influential was it?

How many times a day did you feel like you had to tweet and gram and pin and scope? Not at all. I mean, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat. Snapchat. They didn't exist. Right. Facebook started in like 06, I think. I had an account in 05. I remember that clearly because that was the year I graduated from college.

You're a child. And at the time, you needed a college extension. You needed a .edu in order to get a Facebook account. And I got in right before I graduated. I mean, it turned out I ended up being able to keep the dot EDU extension anyway. But I remember being like, whew, cleared it, made it on to Facebook before they kicked me out, before I aged out. Or you aged out. I know.

And so it wasn't public for everyone, I think, until like 0-506. But like, you know, back then it was a banana. You know, Twitter was probably a couple years later. I don't exactly know the chronology. But back then, social media isn't the tool that you can use today. Right. Like Facebook was just a toy. Twitter was just as, hey, what?

Yeah. No, not at all. I mean, back then, everything was about search. I think that's the biggest, this might get more into the weeds a little bit, but why Google and Facebook are such at odds, because, you know, I'm sure some of this market share of Google AdWords has been taken by Facebook, Facebook ads, and all these other channels because they're newer.

That's where people, you know, back of the day, people talked about portals and how people, they start their day and Yahoo's their homepage. Well, now Facebook's their homepage. Ask Jeeves, is my name. My homepage. Yeah, ask what? They still exist.

They've rebranded into Ask. Oh. They got rid of Jeeves. Jeeves was like the only reason why anyone used it. I know, right? They got rid of the best part. Now they're just ask.com. No one knows who they already want.

Yeah, but social media is such a powerful tool. If I think back to my first, let's say, year. So wallet hacks is less than a year and it is much farther along that bargaining was, at the one year mark. I'm probably around a year and a half, two years faster progression. Now, part of that is, you know, I don't have a full-time job. I'm not just writing a journal. I'm a little more deliberate in the things that I'm doing, like the tools that you can use to build sort of a blog business are much better now through social media, Twitter, and newsletters and things like that. But back then, there was nothing. And so you basically relied on Google search to sort of get the

word out. On the other hand, it was more valuable because when people were searching and clicking through to your site, there was a certain level of intent. Right now you have on Facebook and all the social media sites, it's relying a lot on the curiosity. And no one's looking for a new credit card, a new bank account or whatever, whenever they're clicking through to a story. Right. So the strategy is changing, and I have to sort of learn that and adjust to it. But the fact that you have this firehose of traffic available to you if you can figure it out is not something that was necessarily as easily accessible 10 years ago. Yeah. So. All right. So let's talk about what happened next. Because the part of your story that I find fascinating and spoiler alert giving away the ending is ultimately you received

this $3 million payout not long after that. And that was, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I would imagine that that would be a life-changing event. So let's walk through that because the story that I'm hearing now is Jim, a normal guy who had kind of a boring software job and a website. He quits the job to run a website. So far, it's all a normal story of a normal guy. And then you're approached by a bigger company. What happens next? What happens next? Okay, so to sort of put or set the stage, for a site to be worth that much to begin with, it has to be generating significant amount of money. And for about a year and a half, it was making five figures a month, like mid to high five figures a month.

And that was actually more mind-blowing than sort of the spoiler alert that you alluded to. I still haven't to come to grips to how it exactly happened and how to sort of react to it other than this is a rocket ship. Let's get on and figure out how to get this thing to fly higher. Where do I get more fuel? Where do I get bigger rockets? All the sort of things that you're like, this is something special. I have to take advantage of it. Fortunately, you know, I'm working on a full time.

So I have the energy, the intention to drive that. I mean, the process isn't any different than, you know, if you're trying to sell a car. It's just the numbers are just bigger. Okay. Okay. Well, as a rule of thumb, you know how companies are typically valued at X of their earnings? You know, like on the stock market, a publicly traded company might be valued at 15 times its earnings, its annual earnings. Is there a rule of thumb about that for websites or was there at the time?

To be honest. these are one-off transactions like selling a car and as much as you'd like to point like oh well I have a Honda Civic and this Honda Civic was sold for this if you get into a point where you have a couple people that all

want your Honda Civic you're going to get more and you're going to get a higher multiple and if these people are crazy about it then you're going to get an even higher than you would expect multiples so I don't really like the idea of multiples I remember thinking to myself get rich slowly five cent nickel

two other personal finance blogs that sort of started around the same era were acquired by other companies you know knowing the guys that ran it i knew a ballpark estimate of like what they were getting in terms of a multiple but i told myself you know two people two bidders make a market and as long as i got that then it's it's something that i'd pursue i also knew that you know if they're big players with big resources coming in to this place i was a little worried that i wouldn't be able to compete. So part of the thought process was, this is a nice rocket ship. It may be time to sell the rocket ship when someone else run it. And then I'll figure out what I want to do afterwards as long as I'm being fairly compensated. Okay, tell me about that. Why were you concerned

that you wouldn't be able to compete with the introduction of bigger competitors into the market? And by competitors, I assume you're referring to just websites that are owned and managed by major companies with more resources. Yeah. So I'm thinking to myself, you know, if I had unlimited resources and smarter people than myself working on it, what would I do? It'd be a lot of analysis. It'd be a lot of sort of the things that scale up if you have, you know, the right people

doing it. And I just assume that these larger companies did. And my worry was that all, you know, the placements in search and all that would get crowded out by these companies that bought sites that, you know, were already pretty strong and could only get stronger. So I didn't want to compete against that. That's not even counting the other players that were getting into the space, right? Like, if you look at the search results today for a lot of the terms that were very popular back in the day, like the credit cards and the banking, like they're dominated by a small subset of players. And they're not the ones that

eventually acquired, you know, get rid slowly and five-scent nickel. So I don't know. I just felt like if you took people that were more disciplined than me and smarter than me and you gave them a pile of money and you made, you know, like a hundred of them, like I wouldn't be able to compete. So the smart move is to get out and see what I didn't, what I underestimated or didn't account for was the fact for two big ideas. One is that large companies move slowly and two, employees just don't care as much as operators.

Right? It's just that's just the reality of it. No one, you know, no one washes a rental car. So I didn't account for those two things. Though looking back, there's no zero regret at all. Yeah. The major thing that stands out to me when I hear you talk about that is the notion of competition. And it makes sense if you're operating in an environment that's purely search-based because

There are a limited number of people or websites that can be on page one of the Google search results. The Google. God, I sound old. So that totally makes sense because you've got a limited number of spots. That is the definition of competition. Whereas today, personally, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on this, I don't feel any sense of competition with anyone else who is blogging about any of the same concepts that I, because it just seems to be much more of a web.

And I say that partially from the position of somebody who has never, not even for a day, thought about search rankings. You know, most of my energy, not necessarily my traffic, but most of my focused energy tends to go towards social media and guest posting and all of these networking level ways of reaching out to an audience. So maybe that expansion of the Internet, the way. web becoming more webby might have also affected it. I don't know. I'm rambling. What are your thoughts, Jim? I mean, I agree. Today, the whole relationship building is far easier with social networks

with, you know, email, marketing and things like that. You're able to reach folks faster and more directly one-on-one. It's really a one-on-end, but like it feels one-on-one to the person who's on the other side. If you're doing it right. Back then, without the social networks, it was all sort of they were looking for something and then they found you. Right now it's sort of you share what you have and you start building this network like he used, you know, 10 years ago, you wrote guest posts in one to get exposure to other audiences, but also for link building and that in turn improved your search results. People started abusing that, you know, and then that became less of a valuable signal for search results. Relationships has always been the core idea for building any sort of business, whether you're, you know, the gas station down the road or a retail shop or whatever, or a block. Like, it's all about you connecting with people and them, you know, learning from you, getting entertained, you just sharing ideas, whatever it is.

I mean, you look at the popularity of Mr. Money Mustache. I mean, that's relationship. Like, people connect with him, not because they found him on search. They discovered him because he shares his message and the way he lives his life is sort of that message. And people love it because it's sort of like anti-consumerism, not necessarily survivalist, but like self-sufficient, self-powered life, which is great. Especially, you know, when you turn on the TV and there's something about the Kardashians who no one really knows why they're popular. And it's sort of, they're just like a, you know, a flaming car wreck that people enjoy watching to kill time. and it's like it's running exactly counter to that.

And that's what relationships are, right? Okay, so this is kind of an aside. But if you ever listen to any of the popular pop songs, like every Taylor Swift song, and I enjoy listening to Taylor Swift songs, is essentially permission for you to feel what you want to feel, right? Jaded lover, you know, whatever. And I feel that a lot of blogging

and sort of the online relationship building is just, giving you permission to feel what you want to feel. And some people don't want to buy into this whole, I got to work 40 years before I can enjoy my life. You know, I have to get this huge car and this huge TV and this huge whatever so that other people won't see me and think that I'm a failure. But you know what, screw that. I don't want that. I want to live the way I want to. I want to work 80 hours a week to pay for this huge car to whatever. I just want to live a simple life. I want have some chickens, I want to grow some plants, I don't eat the stuff that are going out of the ground with my own hands and prove that like I could survive in this world without having to

go to their grocery store all the time. I think that's awesome. And that's where people connect on that level. The internet has made that a lot easier now. So it's not necessarily always about, you know, building a business to make money. There are other benefits to it as well. And part of that is sort of that learning and growing. And I think one of the things that you were curious about was sort of the life after. And, you know, finding purpose in like a semi-retirement type of situation. And part of that is just constantly learning and just growing a new blog, starting other businesses, other entrepreneurial ventures that sort of keep me busy and entertained.

And I find entertainment in learning and understanding new business. businesses and solving problems. Yeah, so let's talk more about that. Life today, life after. The epilogue that everybody glosses over, because what strikes me a lot of times when I hear interviews with the millionaire internet entrepreneur story, you hear so much of the how, like, what they did and how they did it. That epilogue, I feel like never gets shared.

What happens next? What do you do when, how old were you when, like, Life changed, Jim? I was 30. 30 exactly. Actually, I wasn't even 30. It was 29 and a half. Okay, you know you're young when you're still counting your age in half.

Unless you're 59 and half. That's an incredibly specific personal finance joke. Listeners, if you got that, you are my people. 29 and a half. Oh, okay. Wow. And where do you go from there? Good question. So I think a lot of things, you know how they say like history, you know, it doesn't necessarily repeat itself, but it rhymes. Like I think a lot of the things that happen in life are very, very similar. And I think, now I have two young kids. You know, they're five and three. And so they're still. How old are you now? I'm, what month is it? I'm almost 36. Okay. So they weren't around when that happened.

But as I look back and think, you know, what's it like when my kids graduate and sort of leave the house? You know, right now we're still like dealing with diapers and like getting them off to school and, you know, very busy, busy. But there'll be a time when it won't be. And it's going to be a little sad. And so when they graduate and go off and like we drop them off at college if they go to college and we drive away, that was sort of like the feeling, you know, when I was, you know, 29 and a half and a day. And what do you do after that is sort of the same challenge I feel a lot of people have whenever their kids go off to college or more importantly when they retire, right? The thing that they had been focusing on eight hours a day and that they identified with

is now essentially gone. Yeah. And so initially, and I don't know if I've talked much about this with you personally, but I was kind of a little depressed afterwards for like a couple weeks. And why I thought I was depressed, in part was because when people describe depression, they're like, it's not when you're sad. It's when you're empty. And I was like, oh, I get it. Like that, in the weeks afterwards, I got and I was like, this is kind of scary. And but eventually, you know, I discovered new projects and like put myself, like kept myself busy and gained interest in other things and sort of that sort of that emptiness, the sort of professional growth and learning emptiness went away. And, you know, I just started doing other

things that I was interested in that, you know, up until that point, a lot of what I was doing was driven by money, right? I started the website and figured out it could make money. So I tried to make more money. And I did, you know, optimization and all these different things to try to make more and more. And now, you know, that was in part driven by learning and trying to figuring things out, you know, solving problems, but also to make money. Now it was pursuing things. And, you know, that financially didn't make sense, but they scratched all these other itches, trying to, you know, start a new business, figure out, you know, membership sites and hiring people and all these different things that I hadn't done before, that if you looked at the sort of the time

effort involved, wasn't worth it. But I found it to be a lot of fun. And I remember talking to friends, they were like, why are you doing it? It's like, it's totally not worth your time. You know, the stock market moves in a day. And back then, the stock market, move tremendously on certain days, like wipe away any amount of money you'd earn in a year doing what you're doing. And I'm like, yeah, that's true, but it's fun. So let me pause here for a second. So what made you decide, you know, because in a previous episode, I interviewed Jeremy and Winnie, and they retired in their 30s, but Jeremy was driven by the vision of, like, sipping piniacaladas on the beach. Why didn't you do that? I don't like sitting on a beach.

Like, I don't like sitting around and not doing anything. I am happiest solving problems. Like, I like discovering how to do something, especially things that I'm not good at. Like, people, you know, Gary Vaynerchuk has this famous quote, and I'm paraphrasing, but it's like, work to your strengths, punt your weaknesses. I'm like, okay, I mean, that's fine. But I actually don't want to punt my weaknesses. Like, I, you know, when my parents say, you could do anything you want, like, I actually

believe that give it enough time, I could do anything. Like, I could figure anything out. Like, I'm not going to be able to play in the NBA or do those things. But for the most part, I can figure anything out. And you give me enough time. And if I push myself, then I'll do it. And so my, you know, one of the first few things that I did was I started business with a couple of friends. It's an internet-based business, but we hired people and just learning how to deal with different personalities. A few years later, I would start a membership site

and learn how to, you know, customer service, something that I'd never done before. Customer service is not actually that much fun. Building the systems to handle it was fun. Like doing beta testing and things like that, to build a service that people like and depend on was a lot of fun.

You know, there's plenty of time for leisure. There's less now with kids, but there's still plenty of time to do whatever you want to do. And if you want to sit Pinacolados on the beach, by all means, I just don't. That isn't what excites me. Figuring out how to play golf was kind of fun. I'm not good at it by any means, but now at least I can go out and not be embarrassed.

And so, yeah, that's just how I like to live. How long did it take you to figure that out about yourself? Is that something that you'd always known or did you figure it out after life changed at 29 and a half? It was after. Life changed after. Tell me about the process of figuring that out. I thought to myself, like, what do I want to do next? When I had bargaining, I would wake up thinking about something. I would think about, like, the problem that I had, something to fix, something I wanted to try. And I wanted to recapture that. So afterwards, I didn't have that at all.

That was sort of that emptiness. That's how it manifested itself, at least, as how I saw it. So I started looking for things that would make me think about it all the time and, like, be not necessarily upset. obsessed, but my mind was constantly on it. And I realized it was trying to figure things out. Like I just over time, I just picked up different things. I'm like, oh, I started playing a little bit of golf. I'm like, golf is really frustrating. You know, but when you first start, you know, one out of every 20 shots you hit is great. And like, you're chasing after the thing that's great. And then you start thinking about like, what am I doing and this and that? And then eventually

it became doing these different businesses, like, what do I want to try? Next. What do I, you know. And once that came back, I realized what I really enjoy was building these things and then figuring them out. And then the hard part is once they're a little bit on autopilot to refocus and find things to learn and discover is much harder. And so it's very easy to like, in the early phase of a project, I'll like do a ton and then I'll slow down because now you're starting to get into maintenance mode. Right. A little bit.

Right. Like 50-50. Well, then the key is then to take the maintenance. stuff, give it to someone else to maintain it. Like teach them, train them. They do it. So now you're, the only piece that you have left is the grow part. That's, you know, that's what I see as a, as a primary driver or problem for businesses is growing. So trying to figure that out. That's interesting because it, not only is it good business advice, but it sounds like it's the thing that makes you happy. It's that like compatibility between the two. Because if,

if what makes you happy is learning and growing, then by definition, if you're always doing that and handing off the maintenance to somebody else, you're leveraging your time and you're leveraging your efforts in a way that is ultimately profitable, not that it's about the money, but, you know, in a way that fuels, that fuels the activities of a company or a project and also is the thing you like to do. Yeah. And also one of the other things I've learned is the key for me to be happy is, in all the things that I'm doing, to reduce what I consider active time working, meaning, you know, active time is things where I have to do it right now. If someone calls and they have a problem with a product or the service, you know, the membership site, it's for meal plans. If they can't, like, download it or whatever. And they call me, I should answer the phone. right like i i quote i would have to answer the phone that's active time that i have to do right now on demand and that that kind of stinks and i don't really want to do that and so you build systems

in place so now that everything is sort of not active it can be deferred someone else is doing it it's active time for someone else but you know they're they're hired to do the job and so they're happy as long as i reduce the amount of active time then i'm then i'm good and it's also important from just sort of a life perspective because now I'm allowed to, when my son or daughter, they have a field trip to go on, where we go to like a farm or something with their school, I can go. And I can, as part of the whole regret minimization, like I was very much, I remember this one time I'm sitting in Northrop, the defense contractor at some sort of like leadership thing.

And so they have these, you know, these four gray beards. They weren't. They didn't all have beards. But they were all older employees. One was a woman. So, yeah, she didn't have a gray beard or any beard whatsoever. You know, so they're sitting up there. They're older employees and they're just saying like all these lessons to try

to impart on the younger employees. And one guy was very frank. And that was sort of his personality as, you know, other people that worked for him knew. He was like, I work too much. Like, I regret being in the office all the time. And he was very important. He was very high up.

He had a significant impact. And he was the type of person that you wanted to work all the time because he was smart. And he took care of things, he got things done. But he was like, I worked too much. And so he missed like little league games for his kids and like all these different things. It was kind of sad. I remember that very distinctly thinking like I don't want to miss any of them because I'm working or whatever. And so far I'm at 100%.

Like I've gone to all. I mean, they're only like a couple of year. but, you know, it'll wrap up as they get older. But I like being there and spending the time. So it all makes sort of improving the life, the lifestyle. Your comment about active, reducing active time, what's interesting to me about that is I got an email recently from a listener of this podcast who asked a few questions about kind of the difference between active versus passive.

businesses because, you know, on afford anything, a lot of what I talk about is managing rental properties in a way that's enhanced, you know, in which you're maximizing the passive. And what I'm hearing from you, Jim, and tell me if I'm completely mishearing this or just, you know, tell me how you react to this is what I'm hearing from you is that you'll actively work on a project, like a business or a project and actively figure. it out and once you do, make that piece of it passive such that you can then actively figure out something else. So it's, is that correct? Am I characterizing it? Cut it. I guess active is probably not the right term. I think the on, not on demand.

The urgent, the urgency? Yeah, urgent. Like, I don't want any urgency. Yeah, I don't want like immediate urgent work right now. Right. But it also does sound like you, by virtue of handling, developing the systems and handing it off, create, if not passivity, then what's a different word for that? I think the message is getting across correctly in that I don't want to get a phone call or an email

that I must answer right the second. And by must, must, you know, there are shades, right, or degrees of how on demand or how urgent something is. But I would like that to go into some sort of process where I can hire someone to do the urgent work. So anything that's customer service,

I want that to be urgent. I want the moment that that comes in, or at least however often our customer service person checks the box, that they respond immediately. I don't want to do that. But I'm totally fine going in and analyzing ads and doing statistics. When I say active, I don't mean me physically actively working.

I'm fine working. I just don't want to have to work right this second on a problem that's on fire, unless there's nothing to be avoided. Like if a site is down or something's broken, yes, that's fine. But I don't want to schedule necessarily active work. Right. I have to think of a better term than active because all work is acting. Like I'm not sitting around and words are appearing on the screen.

Stuff is happening. Like I just urge, I don't want urgent immediate work. Are you familiar with Stephen Covey's concept of urgent versus important? Yes. Yeah. That's very much what this reminds me of. I want the urgent unimportant. I want to never see it.

I want to put the system in place. You want not urgent but important. Yes, if I remember the system. No, anything important is fine. I just don't want, right? Because the whole key idea of that is to don't get mired in the urgent unimportant. That's like the number one point, if I remember correctly. And I want that to go by process to someone else.

who especially like so as as an entrepreneur you do so many different things like if the CEO hat you have the worker bee hat like I don't want to be stuck in the worker be had all the time the sort of like switching back and forth comes at a cost like the worker be extremely valuable because that's how the business is run a lot of the times like keeps going I want someone who's dedicated to that so that they're most proficient doing that because without without good customer service like people will leave in droves and so all the energy you put acquisition, you know, leaks out of the bottom of the bucket. But I just don't want to do it.

And I can put in the system in place and I can compensate people to do those jobs. And sort of that's sort of the goal. Part of this is because so I started with bargaining, there was no urgent work, right? I had active work. I was writing articles, you know, doing all that, all that work. But, you know, as people signed up for things, like there was no customer service, there was no urgent work. And then after that, a couple other businesses where there started to be more urgent work. And I'm like, oh, well, business should have employees and it should do this.

And why don't I do a membership site? And while they've all been fun, they've all taught me that really, I was really lucky the first time making money on a business where there was no urgent, unimportant work. Did you ever, with your blog, did you ever feel a self-imposed urgency? Like, I got to get this article out today. I got to get this podcast episode out. All the time. That was actually another thing that was hard to deal with was my parents are, well, the Chinese, and they're not like the typical strict Chinese American immigrant families,

but they do stress hard work. And so it's sort of like, why are you sitting around? Why aren't you doing work? Like they weren't as, you know, why did you only get a 99? Like we talk about it, whatever. But there wasn't like, I didn't get hit because I got a 99 or I didn't get extra credit. or whatever. But they were very pushing. They pushed me. I think I have a reasonably good work ethic. I don't think I live up to their standards in terms of work ethic. But so that's a constant,

it's like anything else with your parents. Like you, there's always that sense like maybe you don't live up to their expectations, no matter what you do in life. Like it's just sort of part of the whole thing. And so afterwards, you know, being able to realize, all right, I don't have to be, you know, bargaining, I wrote three articles a day. I published three articles a day. One in the morning, one in the afternoon, one at like noon, and then one in the afternoon. It was a tremendous amount of output. But, I mean, when you think about it, if that's primarily what you're doing all day, it's actually not that hard.

The idea generation is harder than the writing. At least it was for me. Now, my writing isn't as good as most others, but in a world where it's just a journal and people are just hearing your story, it's actually not that bad that you have grammatical mistakes. as long as it doesn't interrupt the flow tremendously. But after that, the output dropped. I'm spending more time. But now I spend a lot more time with the kids and doing sort of the things that are considered more fun than work.

And it's taken many years to adjust to that. Why? What was the hardest adjustment? Or what were some of the difficult adjustments? Feeling like I should be working. I don't know on what. I just should be doing something. and I shouldn't be just sitting around.

Like I wasn't, it wasn't being interrupted by like me watching TV or sipping pinacolada at two in the afternoon in my kitchen by myself. But, you know, it was, I just felt the sense of like, okay, I should be doing something. I don't know what, but I should sit in front of the computer and do something. And then I realized, I don't. It wasn't like a realization. It was just an adjustment as I stopped doing that. I started doing other things that I realized.

I realized, you know, it's okay. Things will keep going and I don't have to work a tremendous amount in order to get the same sort of production. In fact, if you work a ton, it's almost not good, right? Because your 10th hour of productivity is not going to be good as your first. Right. Right. And you may have to spend time the next day fixing the mistakes that you made or, you know, the wrong paths you went down the night before or whatever. So I don't know. I don't how I adjusted to it, but just over time, I think you get older and you calm down a little bit. And you have kids and you get tired and you're like, you know what, it's okay. Actually, you know what?

Having kids was a big adjustment in terms of just the psychology of things being perfect. Because with kids, things are rarely perfect. And you start, you know, getting used to it. And maybe the sort of the level of work and the importance of work diminishes a little bit. And I mean, I understand that I'm very fortunate, you know, both financially in terms of a windfall and sort of the income that are generated beforehand, as well as the successes of businesses afterwards, that I'm able to have more of this passive time. But, yeah, but kids had a big impact. Kids are fun. When you were adjusting from pre-windfall to after, I've asked you about what?

what was difficult, what aspects of that adjustment, that new life, were easier than you had anticipated? That's a good question. I don't know if anything was necessarily easier. You don't think about the cost of smaller things as much. You start thinking about your life in terms of time and less about money. And also quality of life, I'd like to reduce frustration as much as possible. And now part of that has nothing to do with money.

right? It's just a realization that now I don't want to jump through hoops to do things. I want to keep my life as simple as possible, which means cleaning up more and like getting rid of clutter and things like that, all of which have nothing to do with money. But just that realization that, you know, all these different like annoyances and frustrations I want to sort of disappear. And whereas it would have cost, you know, a couple bucks, like two or three dollars to solve it, I might have done it myself. Now no longer make a lot of sense. Can you give me some examples? Tubes of toothpaste. This sounds kind of stupid. So there are two sinks and there's like I don't want to go in. I want to brush my teeth, floss, go to sleep. I don't want to go into the bathroom and look through all the bottles to find the tube of toothpaste. So all we, and this, I mean, you just buy, you know, six at once from Amazon and you put one next to my sink, one next to my wife's sink.

no longer an issue. That's like a $2, you know, $2 tube of toothpaste. Now, when I need toothpaste, I know where it is. We don't get into fights about, you know, her sink is like, I can't find anything there because I don't need to look at anything there. So that's her space. It's my space. I have my $2, $2 tube of toothpaste. I'm happy. It's only a couple seconds, but that's a simple. A lot of people talk about how one of the best purchases they ever made is like hiring a cleaning service, right? That's the whole, if you have the means, reducing that headache from your life and improving your quality of life, improving your relationship, because that's one less argument you have. So that's one example. A lot of the things in life are solved with relatively

small purchases, like a tube of toothpaste. And you just don't think about it because you're not thinking in terms of time or thinking more in terms of money, which, I mean, that's how a lot of the things are driven by cost. So it makes sense. What's really interesting to me about what you just said is that once you reached the point at which all of your time was open to you, you know, you're 29 and a half years old. You theoretically never need to work again. So you've got the next 60 years, 70 years, 80 years of your life open to you. That's the point at which time for you actually became more valuable. Yeah.

I wonder. I think it's because of kids. I think it's just realizing like, I remember another parent told me this and they're only a couple years older, but they're like, you know, once you know you're done having kids, your last kid as soon as they stopped doing things. Like, that's the last time. Someone's going to ask me to carry them up the stairs. That's the last time. So you realize like your time left is going down. Like you're at an age where you're, you know, when you're like five, 10, 15, 20, 20. 25, you're thinking like, time is limitless. And then after a certain point, it's kind of now, whether you start thinking that at 60 or you start thinking at the 30, who knows. But there's a point where you're like, well, I have to make sure I get the most in.

And then it's also like at like, I remember at like 25, my friends started tearing ACLs. And that was like the first time where like people were getting hurt doing like not stupid things, but like mundane things. Right. Like one friend was like getting into a car and like tore his ACO. Who tears their ACA? Well, you're getting older. Right. And these freak things happen.

And then like as you get older and older like friends get cancer, friends die in accidents. Like these things start piling up and you're like, listen, like you thought nothing could happen to you. Now I'm not in the moment where I think everything bad is going to happen. But it's like, don't waste it. Because when it does happen, you don't, I guess it's regret minimization rearing its head again. It's like, you know, how do you want to spend your time? And, you know, I'm fortunate so I get a little more control over it. But I don't know when it happened, but it happened.

What do you teach your, or what will you teach your kids about money? And not just money, but time and work and mentally how to kind of conceptualize it all. What framework do you want to impart on them? That's a tough question. I'm asking it because I'm trying to pull out, you know, from your story, these universal truths that would apply to anyone in any situation. If I just directly said like, well, what do you want the listeners to know? That's not a very good way to ask that question. In terms of money, I would like to think that they have limited resources and that their creativity needs to solve problems rather than money.

And I think that that's possible because that's in a sense still how I think. Now that that goes to the question of, well, you bought two tubes of toothpaste instead of figure out of it. So there are limits to that. But in terms of like solving major problems, you know, anything that breaks in the house, if it's within the realm of me being able to fix it, I fix it. So like we had a door that there was some bolt in it that broke. So you buy a new bolt, you take apart the door. or you put it back in and everything is fine.

Well, you can hire someone to come in to replace it for you. It's a better, for our financial situation, time, value of money, whatever, it's better for us to do that. But I'd much rather fix the door myself. Why? It's the problem-solving thing. I like the idea of understanding how that door works. And also, part of it is that it fell into a realm where the job was too small. It was like a 15-minute job.

order apart, unscrew some screws, put it back in. I'd much rather do that than have a random person come into my house. I'd do like a 15-minute fix that I could do with a YouTube video. So just showing like resourcefulness. Because I really think that a lot of my problem solving came from the fact that growing up, we didn't have a ton of money. We did a lot of saving in order to fly back to Taiwan. And so, you know, 25 years ago, four people, my sister, my parents, flying back to Taiwan, it's like $6,000, $7,000.

So we had to save a lot. And it wasn't that we didn't have money. It's that the money had to be rationed and, you know, used intelligently because not only were we traveling back to Taiwan every couple of years, but, you know, there's a mortgage and all these other things. So a lot of the resourcefulness came from that. I remember in college, the first computer I had was a 286. And this was when Pentiums were out. So 2080s, 586 is like this is like four generations old technology that I'm using because it was inexpensive. And it worked fine.

It was just slow. I had to like load up programs and like walk in the other room and do something else and then come back. So, you know, I think just resourcefulness coming from the fact that you can't, don't try to solve every. problem with money is going to be a valuable lesson to pass on. Because then you start, then you become a little bit like me where you start enjoying the problem solving aspect of it. Because it's kind of fun to like, here's a problem. You don't know how to do it.

Let's figure it out. And now you do know how to do it. And it's like someone's giving you this gift that not everybody else has. You know, it's easier now with YouTube. But remember, you know, before then, no one else really knew how to do it. Only a handful of people. Now you're part of this club of people that can solve this problem. And there's a bit of discovery and joy in that.

So I think that and sort of the idea of grit, just the idea that you can persevere. I went to Carnegie Mellon for computer science. And they're like, oh, because it's a really good, first of all, it's phenomenal school, especially for computer science. And people have asked me like, what's the thing that you learn there? I learned that I can solve really hard problems if you give me enough time. I wasn't the smartest kid there by any means.

You know, what might take, you know, the sharpest kid like 15 minutes might take me three or four hours. But after that time, I can get it. Like, this is not an unsolvable problem. I just need more time. And that sort of confidence is very powerful. And so I don't know how I teach that to our kids, but it's something I'd like to pass. What about in the way that they conceptualize work and career and entrepreneurship? I think a big thing is that there's multiple paths to a quote unquote career.

As I said before, growing up as an immigrant family, college was the big path, right? Yep. So high school, you go to college, you get a job, you start a family, you retire, you play golf, and then you die. But you play with your grandkids and then you die. Like that's sort of like the high level bullet points. And college is a big thing. Well, and then I graduate and I start working and I meet all sorts of different kinds of people. And you realize there are multiple paths.

Now, I think I'm still going to selfishly try to direct them towards sort of the safest path because you kind of always want the safest path for your kid. But I don't want it to seem like it's the only one. Because if you do that and they decide that it's not for them, now they're wholly unprepared. You know, they think there's only the one thing. then the whole disappointing your parents comes in the play and this is that so i think you know urging them to go to college and pursue a career in some sort of professional or engineering type of service is what we'll try to do but not to the detriment of other pursuits and understanding that other paths are there because the goal is to prepare them for life not prepare them for work

and sort of try to figure out what they're good at and you know ultimately it's kind of all about contentment and happiness. And you want your kids to be happy and safe and, you know, be able to take care of themselves, not necessarily follow exactly what you say. Because then if you're not there for whatever reason, you know, now they're unprepared to make smart decisions.

What would you say if they wanted to go into a, quote, unquote, riskier or a typically lower paying career? What if one of them wanted to be an actor? I think that's great. they're happy doing it. You know, acting is traditionally a, it's, it's riskier, but it's a career path that offers a lot of things that maybe like an office job doesn't, like life lessons that you can learn. Like one of the things you think about is, you know, in acting, oh, is someone, what is success to an actor? You know, for some, maybe they just like performing. And so they,

they work their lives in community theater and they're happy, right? And, they don't necessarily need to become a movie star. Maybe they want to act in commercials and do standout. Maybe they want to do whatever. But they're happy doing it. They're pursuing it. It's a hard problem, maybe that they're trying to solve, figure out where they fit. And maybe they do it for five years and decide it's not for them. There's plenty of time left to do something else. There's plenty of time to keep pursuing it after five years, 10 years, 20 years. It's that, it's obviously, you know, the journey is better than the destination. And I'd have no problem with it.

Now, what I wouldn't want is for them to, like, pretend that they want to do, like, say they want to get an actor, but not, like, fully pursue it and sort of half-heartedly pursue it and say, like, oh, well, I can't make it. I'll just keep doing it. Can you send me some more money? That's the thing. Now, I don't know how you determine, you know, real and pretend. But my thinking is if they want to do something, I'd happily support them.

Not sending them money all the time, but love and things like that. They're hard to answer because our kids are so young. Yeah. And so these are issues that I haven't thought about yet. I have thought about the whole idea of how do you do allowance and how to teach them to save and donate and support different causes and things like that. because that's something that what's funny is wasn't really taught to me. And so it's something I've learned from my wife, which is surprising that I didn't learn because my parents do support charitable causes.

We just never talked about it. So I never saw it. Right? Like I wasn't there when my mom would write checks to American Cancer Society or whatever she was supporting. So I never grew up valuing it and learning it. But my wife does. And so we do support organizations, but it's mostly through her urging. So I think that's something that I think would make our kids better people.

Yeah. How did you, after the windfall, how did you deal with, because I would imagine just projecting myself into your shoes that all of a sudden there are, there's this multitude of opportunities to do really amazing things, big projects that require bigger dollars or a little, you know, a bigger amount of seed funding. For me, the first one that pops into my mind is starting another no-kill animal shelter here locally because Nevada has such a big homeless pet population. There's just not enough shelter space. Like that's the first, you know, one of the first things I think of.

But there are so many competing good causes. And for many people who are limited in, and I guess everybody is ultimately limited in their financial means to. affect that. But when your personal portfolio is bigger and you can start imagining bigger options, how do you sort through all of that? How do you filter? I don't know if I thought about those bigger opportunities as something that was open to me. Because as much as the windfall is great, it's not for someone who was under 30. Like, that's a lot of time left. And so I saw it as sort of like a a nest egg that I'd put away and avoid tapping into. And, you know, that would buy me 30 years or whatever to pursue any other entrepreneurial endeavors that I wanted. So I wasn't thinking immediately

that I would want to support on that level, sort of a charitable cause or social cause. You basically saw it as like the principal endowment that fuels your life, giving you time. Yeah, exactly. And so I want to. to, you know, the things that we supported were on a much smaller level. Like, I would think opening a no-kill shelter would be a significant undertaking that you would want to figure out how to support for the next, however, of 20, 30, 40 years. And I don't know if I, I definitely didn't think about something at that level. So I never, never filtered it. But in thinking about it now, I'd have to do some research to see if that's something.

Like, because you could probably get grants and things like that to help defray the cost. But if it were something like, you know, donate some amount in the beginning to get it up and running and then it could be self-sufficient without additional significant funding, maybe, but to take on that big of a, I don't even know how much it would be. Yeah, I have no idea. Right. So even if it were like 50,000 a year, that would be a lot. That would be a big financial burden on an endowment. of a couple million bucks, I would think. Well, at the 4% withdrawal rate, that would be, what, 1.25 million?

Yeah. Yeah, that's not an insignificant chunk of change. So actually, here's the other thing. Like, your immediate thought was something that was much bigger than my immediate thought. Now, granted, I'd cap myself at the sort of, I'd like this to be an endowment for the rest of my life, in a sense, a safety net. one of the other things that's been a challenge afterwards is thinking much bigger. Right now, I've I've leaned on those sort of solve problems and have fun while I'm doing it.

But eventually, like, I'm still in my mid-30s. They'll come a point where I need to start thinking bigger and be more impactful. And whenever I figure out how to make that transition, we can chat about it. But thinking bigger is also something that I have to figure out how to do. So that's interesting to me because you built in. sold a company for millions. And then you went on to hire, to do other projects that involve hiring people. Those seem to be the indicators of thinking big. But I hear you identifying yourself as someone who's not thinking big yet. And I just find that interesting. I guess there

isn't really a question there. I just... I guess big is relative. Yeah. That's exactly what that indicates to me. There's also like, you know, people think I've run a one-man show. I've run, you know, a bunch of lifestyle businesses. Maybe the next step is to do some kind of startup. Maybe this next thing is to do, I don't know what it is. But there's a view that, you know, startups are bigger than lifestyle businesses. And there's a competing thought in my mind that I read, I don't want that urgent work.

Like I kind of like the more casual. I call it casual. I don't know if that's a good word for it. I like the more flexible lifestyle. And I don't know, maybe I don't want to do it. Now, should I be okay, not wanting something bigger? My instincts are to work hard and go for something big. But part of me also kind of wants to take it easier and not necessarily risk as much

or spend as much time or commit as much time, I should say, on these higher risk, lower probability projects that could be enormous. Because in the end, like, when I'm 65, 85, whatever, and I'm hanging out with my kids, like, will it really matter? Like, what will really matter then? Having a startup or, like, being in my kid's life and, like, spending more of that time. We joked before you started recording that this would be, like, half counseling and half interview chat.

And I think these are all issues that a lot of people. grapple with at certain points in their life. Like, you know, I like my job. Do I really want to start a side business? Do I really want to get into investing and do all these other things? And I think the answer is you won't know until you try. So maybe I should try a startup. Who knows? Do you differentiate between quality time with your kids versus sheer quantity time? I'm curious because I'm talking to you, you're in a position in which you have time. And I'm just wondering how that affects the way you see that time. I don't know.

I think all my time with my kids is quality time. And maybe that's because they're young. And when we do spend time, it's like they're pretty stuck on you. They're very present. Yeah. Yeah, they're very present. And I'm very present. But we send them to daycare.

So during the day, we can, my mind, wife and I could both work. I mean, some people would say, oh, you should keep them home and spend more time. But then that prevents some of the other things that as adults we sort of need, right, which is work and sort of like making progress on projects and things of that nature. But we have plenty of like the weekend times. And I don't really differentiate yet between quantity and quality. I think it's all pretty quality. I'll ask you again when they're like the nose is buried in their phone while you're trying to talk. to them. Yeah, yeah. I don't know what we're going to do then. I'll try to teach them how to deal with

money then, too. I don't know if that's going to work. Who are you going to talk to about quality of time? Well, you know, it's a concept that I got from a book, actually. Of all things, it was a book that Al Franken wrote, the comedian from Saturday Night Live. It was just a throwaway comment in one of the sentences in which he said that he values not just quality time with his kids, but just heaps and heaps of quantity time. And it was a brief line he didn't elaborate, but that concept always stuck with me. I don't remember where I read this, but they were talking about the idea of quality time, just people like try to shoehorn that in and like push like, I need quality time. What in reality, you just kind of like when you're hanging out with your friends, like you're

not thinking, I need quality time. You're just like, I just want to hang. I haven't seen this person in a while. We're just going to chat. There's no objective, right? We're just sitting around, two friends catching up, like what's new? And then something happens that you then remember for years. And that little bit is the quality.

And you can't predict it. You can't say, right now, Paul and I, we're going to have some quality time. Bring the quality. I need more quality. This is not quality enough. Like, that doesn't work. But like you sit here and you chat and then things come out. And, you know, I didn't think before we started that we were going to talk about how I'm going to teach my kids about money, like talking about how after the windfall, like feeling like empty and not pursuing a product.

Like I wasn't necessarily sure that was going to happen, but that sort of quality that comes out of the quantity. And I think with our kids, like, they do funny stuff all the time. And the more I spend with them, the more funny and the more endearing things that we know, they say that we remember and that we. We do. Like my daughter calls hippos, water bears. That wasn't because we were like, let's do some quality time reading. It was that she looked at a picture and said, that's a water bear. And I thought it was hilarious. And that's all quality. So the more time, the better and quality will just come out of it. I guess we should wrap this up. I don't even know how to end this because a cheesy question like, what would you tell the listeners is, just seems very

disingenuous, disingenuine, whatever that word is. I want to flip this and ask you. Oh, wow, that's exactly what J.D. did in our interview with him. He flipped it and started interviewing me. I was going to ask you, in our conversation, what did you get out of it? Like, what was the thing that sort of stuck out? Well, one was that you get this windfall. You've now got an endowment, so to speak, that provides enough residual income.

I mean, I don't know how you've invested it, but just assuming a 4% standard index fund, 4% withdrawal rate, that alone is enough for a family of four forever. So you reach this, you know, what I heard in this interview is, you know, you reach this point when you were 29 and a half that was a turning point in your life and that essentially bought you the rest of your life and kept those books open. And the thing that happened counterintuitively was that you began valuing your time more. But you value your time from a different perspective than a busy worker does. You know, a busy worker, myself often included, I will value my time based on this almost linear calculation of like, well, one hour at the office could yield this much, you know,

and when I work, I, you know, my hourly rate, so to speak, is this much. And so X, Y and Z is not worth my time. Like it's almost a leveraging type of equation, whereas your approach feels different. Your approach isn't what is the monetary value of my time. It's an approach that strikes me as even though time is abundant, I still am not going to waste it. I'm still going to cherish it. And if something creates frustration and negatively impasse, that time, I am going to eliminate that frustration to the greatest degree possible so that I can devote this time so that this time can be slow. That's a big piece of what I got out of what you said, is your time is slow in a good way because it's within that slowness, that lack of rush,

that lack of urgency, that you can learn and experiment and problem solve and grow. I like it. You formalized it in a much more elegant way than I think I did. No, thank you. It's accurate, improving the quality and the lack of demand of others on my time. I think that's really a lot of what's behind sort of that financial independence movement. Just being able to control your own time. And I'm still learning how to do it more and more effectively.

Yeah, you know, I've spoken to a lot of people who are on their way to financial independence. And it's tempting for the people who are mid-jurney to see financial independence as the end goal, like the panacea that solves everything. When in fact, it's just another step. Yeah. Not enough people talk about the sort of post-retirement. What are you going to do now? And some people are going to drink pina coladas on the beach and others are going to want to find something else. else that scratches their itch. I think everyone's happy not being forced to go work, especially if

they dislike what they're doing. And it's only a means to an end. Well, and I think that you kind of highlight, it's not that work itself is inherently the issue, because you still work, even though you don't quote unquote need to. But, you know, when you work, it's for the purpose of learning and growing. And that seems to add a layer of fulfillment that doesn't come from being driven by being pushed around by demand and urgency and necessity. Yeah. And it's like I said earlier, that adjustment took time, right? If you grow up thinking that you need to work to pay for things and then you're fortunate enough where now working still pays for things, it's just you're driven by you know, sort of these other

other fulfillment activities that provide additional fulfillment. It's a hard adjustment, but I'm not complaining. I don't want to make it sound like I'm complaining about it at all. Well, no, I mean, I can relate. Like the emptiness that you described when you first made that transition

and you went from having a business that occupied your mind, that, you know, you went to sleep thinking about it and you woke up thinking about it and all of a sudden that wasn't there anymore. You know, at a much smaller scale I can relate, just from when I quit my nine to five job. And, you know, I didn't, at that time, I wasn't financially independent. I just quit and decided to go live on some savings for a while.

And it was exciting the first, say, six to eight weeks because I left the country and I was traveling and so a new environment. That's always exciting. but eventually I felt a very similar emptiness to what you described, where I would wake up and, yeah, I was still traveling, but I felt like, okay, I'm in a different country. Now what? Yeah, yeah. What next?

How did you transition? I mean, after you came back, like, how did you, I guess, fill that emptiness? Well, I'd say I started looking for ways to fill it while I was still traveling, because initially going to different countries, you have the twin elements of novelty and challenge. You know, I flew to Cairo on a one-way ticket. And all of a sudden, I had to figure out how to navigate my way around Cairo. So, you know, the culture, the street maps, the just everything about it is different. And I went there in the middle of Ramadan, so all day long, nobody was selling anything to eat.

Oh, wow. And I didn't have access to a kitchen, so I couldn't keep any refrigerated food around with me. So, you know, like, boom, okay, I've got to figure that out. Solution. Buy figs. You know, keep a stash of figs with you all day. You know, so those were the problems I was solving. And that keeps your mind engaged and it's interesting.

I'll often get comments on my blog from people who are like, well, you just want to travel. That must be nice. And I'm like, well, it's actually really not about leisure. It is about that problem solving. It is about the figuring out a wholly different world than the one that you have just been in. Because when you're in that position, you have the mind of a child, but with the context of an adult, you don't know this new environment, but you have the skills to figure it out. So it goes back to what you were talking about, resourcefulness, creativity, gumption. But again, that got me through the initial few months of travel, but eventually even, you know, once that challenge started to fade, and I guess I would liken this to Jim, what you described in a business where now you figured out the system and you're ready to pass that system onto a worker so that you can grow to the next level, travel is a skill. And once I started to get pretty good at the skill of dropping myself into new environments constantly, then I was no longer learning, you know, or not as much. And then I felt empty inside because I would wake up and be in a new country and who cares? What now? You know, what next? So then I started looking for other things to learn. A lot of it came from reading books. I read, a lot of books and just started focusing on the teachings, the message within those books,

but then partially studying the writing styles of the authors and using book reading as a just way to learn how to be a better writer. That's cool. I wonder how much of that sort of emptiness is, or, you know, as you travel to be like, oh, now what next is related to this idea of wanting to build something. bigger. And you know, you figure it out travel. You're just in a new place using the same travel skills and you're not building on your skill set. You're not building not necessarily a business or an asset, but just like building on something that's longer than say the time period of the trip.

Right. Like knowing how to move around Cairo is useful for Cairo as you go to somewhere else. There's still lessons that translate, but you only need to learn how to move around Cairo for the period in which you are actually in Cairo. And that won't be like many, many years. But building something will span many years. I wonder if that plays into it, right? Because as you teach yourself different writing styles and study the people that you like, that's building on a skill set that you will use for many years. And maybe that feels more enriching.

Right. Well, I mean, and building on the skill set of traveling, the skill set of walking into a super crowded bus station where everybody around you is speaking a different language. and it's jam-packed, crowded, and there's flies everywhere, and you're completely calm, you're not intimidated by that. That's a skill that takes time to develop. Or the skill set of reading a map, like a subway map of a brand new city in which the characters are not Roman ABCD characters. So you don't understand any of the, you know, it looks like scribble. So how do you read that map?

those are the skills that translate to any country that doesn't use the 26 letter Roman alphabet. And beyond that, the broader, the greater skill is resourcefulness, you know, learning to look at a map in a different way than you've previously done it. You know, you're like, oh, my old way of reading this is not working. I need to figure out a new way to read this. So those are universal skills that I have carried with me throughout my business and my life. But yeah, but, you know, eventually you get good at that or at least good enough that it doesn't keep your mind engaged. And then it's on to the next thing.

I don't even remember what your question was. There was a question. I do eventually once the kids get older and we get summers off because they're in school, do you want to spend time like living in other countries and seeing what that's like. And I think that'll be a lot of fun. When that day comes, maybe I'll call on you for. travel tips. Yeah. I don't think you need any from me.

The biggest tip is be flexible and be resourceful. You know, don't be too caught up on any preconceptions of what you think it'll be like. Just if you embrace it for the challenge rather than like people, if you travel for pleasure, travel is a pain in the ass. And there are going to be many points that are not pleasurable. And so if you are seeking pleasure, you will probably be disappointed. But if you're seeking challenge and growth, you'll get a lot of that. I will seek challenge and growth.

Put our kids in challenging and growing situations so they can learn how to endure and grit and all that other good stuff. We'll see how it goes. Yeah, I guess the moral of the story is that people enjoy growing. People enjoy learning. Or at least you and I do. And probably a lot of our listeners. Anybody who's made it this far into the podcast as someone who enjoys learning. We've gone on some meandering topics that have been personally fun for me to chat about.

And hopefully, hopefully the listeners got something out of it. I guess we'll wrap up. This is the least graceful wrap up ever. It's all good. I guess this is the point where I invite you to give a shout out to however the listeners can find you. Yeah. Is that what happens at the end of podcasts? Sure. I'd love for them to join me at wallethacks.com.

I read about personal finance and different strategies for people. to get ahead financially and in life. Do you want to shoot me an email? I don't get a lot of email. I read all of them. Jim at wallet hacks.com, as I told Paul had not a lot of email. Ask me about anything. Say hi.

I'd love to hear from you all. Yeah, thanks for coming on, Jim. I appreciate you having me on. Hey, welcome to the State of the Show report, the postgame wrap-up. We've decided to change the name of the show. And in order to explain what that's going to be, I'm going to bring Steve, the game. who does stuff behind the scenes, I'm going to bring him on so you can overhear a conversation

that he and I had about this. But before I do that, there's one thing that I want to be absolutely clear about. This show is not and never will be a quote-unquote real estate podcast. For some reason, probably because I've done a very bad job of branding, there seems to be, in some people's minds, a misperception that I want this to be a real estate show. I was reading through some of the iTunes reviews and some people said, Paula wants it to be a real estate show, but Jay Money wants it to be a something else. I don't want this to be a real estate show. If I did, every episode would be about real estate and clearly it's not. I want this to be a show about being super intentional and super deliberate about how you spend your most limited resources, your money,

time, energy, focus your life. That's what the concept of afford anything, which is the name of my website, that's what the concept of afford anything stands for. It's the idea that you can afford anything but not everything. And every dollar that you spend or every hour that you spend is a trade-off against something else. That's what I want to emphasize. There's the how and there's the why. Real estate is one of many possible hows that can get you to finance. independence, but it's not the only one. And at the end of the day, it's not about which how you choose. It's about the act of choosing, the art of choosing. A lot of people just blindly accept the default life that's been handed to them. And my blog, my podcast, my message is don't do that.

Don't stick around with the default. Be intentional. Be deliberate. So I'm going to get off my Soapbox for a second, and we're going to bring Steve onto the show and let you know what the new title of this show will be, and also what that means for you. Hey, Steve, I've been thinking about changing the name of this show. Really? What are you going to change it to? I was thinking of calling it afford anything. Oh, I was hoping it was going to be Steve, that guy that does stuff for Paula show. Ooh, that would be kind of a long title, but totally interesting.

Everyone would click on that. It would totally be niche. I hear it's a hot search term. We would dominate those keywords. So it's the Afford Anything podcast by Paula Pantt, who blogs at Afford Anything, and she's on Twitter. It makes sense. You're at Afford Anything, so I get it. I'm on board.

Yeah, just seems more accurate to call it Afford Anything because that reflects on the why. Okay, well, I'm on board. So let's see if we can't make this happen by the next episode. Sweet. It's a deal. Let's do it. All right. I'm putting on my calendar right now.