BiggerPockets Money Podcast - 58: Optimizing Every Channel to Achieve Financial Freedom with Grant Sabatier

Episode Date: February 4, 2019

Grant grew up knowing his parents didn’t have much money. He recognized their constant stress about finances throughout his childhood, and one of his first memories was his dad telling him, “Money is freedom.” Graduating from college in the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Lately, I've been listening to Bigger Liener Stronger for Fitness, The Anxious Generation for Parenting Perspective and several Arthur Brooks' audiobooks that have been excellent for mental well-being. What makes Audible so powerful as its breadth. Beyond audiobooks, you also get Audible Originals, podcasts, and a massive back catalog across business, health, parenting, and more. All accessible in one app. If you're looking to turn everyday moments into real progress, Audible has been indispensable for me over over 10 years. Kickstart your well-being journey with your first audiobook free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at Audible, Welcome to the Bigger Puckets Money podcast show number 58 where we interview Grant Sabatier from

Millennial Money. Financial freedom, I think, has never been more accessible to more people. And I almost think it's a human right that people shouldn't have to wake up every day stressed about money. They should be outliving lives that they love because we only get one shot at this. It's time for a new American dream, one that doesn't involve working in a cubicle for 40 years, barely scraping by. whether you're looking to get your financial house in order, invest the money you already have,

or discover new paths for wealth creation, you're in the right place. This show is for anyone who has money or wants more. This is the Bigger Pockets Money Podcast. How's it going, everybody? I'm Scott Tranch. I'm here with my co-host, Ms. Mindy Jensen. How are you doing today, Mindy? I'm doing fantastic, Scott.

How are you today? I am doing great. I love Grant. I think we think about things in a very similar manner when it comes to money. and I just really enjoyed the discussion we had with him today. I think it's going to be a fantastic episode. Really, he's kind of put in a lot of thought, I think, for anybody that's interested in financial freedom, but we both kind of share that approach that's a little hyper-aggressive

and then in the early couple of years in the journey to kickstart the approach toward financial freedom and then to begin settling back into exactly what you like once you kind of made some of that quick progress in this first couple of years. Yeah, you know, I liked the episode today because it's not. not just the same spend less. And while I think spend less is a very valid point, I think most people do have a lot of things that they can cut out of their day-to-day lives

that they won't miss. One thing that he says is there's only so much you can cut, but there's no limit to how much you can make. And that, you know, that's something that I think that a lot of people don't really think about. They don't really consider, oh, I make $60,000 in my day-to-day life. That's what I can do. That's my income.

Well, it doesn't have to be. Like we said in the side, Hustle episode with Nick Loper, it doesn't have to be just your income. You can have side hustles. You can make more in your day-to-day life, you know, just by reevaluating what your market rate is. This episode was just tip after tip after tips after bombs of knowledge. And it was just fantastic. Yeah. I mean, you're going to hear this incredible story for the first 30 minutes or so. And then we go right into tips. How do we help people in various scenarios, starting on the to financial freedom. And I loved, like you just mentioned, that he approaches it from an income

perspective rather than a savings perspective. Obviously, we're not dismissing the importance of savings. It's just there's more scalable opportunity there. And look, I operate, I think, sometimes from too much of the assumption personally that most people are doing everything they can to optimize on the income front and there's no more room for growth. And I think his just such obvious commonsensical tips of how to approach your career and just take a step back and do this in the next month and see what happens, really do offer a way to significantly increase income for potentially a lot of you who are listening in a pretty short period of time, three to six months, maybe a year.

Well, and he attended YouTube University, I mean, or Google AdWords University, whatever was called. He learned how to do an entirely new thing in, what did he say, two weeks or four days or something like, just this really small amount of time, you can change your whole career direction. There's never been a better time to, what did he say? There's never been a time where you can make more money. I forget exactly that quote. You'll hear it later on the show.

But I think it was something around to the effect of, hey, never before in history, have you been able to get so much data on exactly what you should be paid and what your benefits should be? And then be able to apply it so instantly to positive, you know, effect. I'm sure I'm not sure. Yeah, no. Well, and we'll let him say it in a few minutes. But what I'm talking about is he graduated. I didn't really bring this up.

He graduated with a degree in philosophy, which is not the most lucrative degree you can get. It's got some practical applications and, you know, thinking and whatever. But there's not a lot of hard and fast jobs, at least not in 2010, that were looking for degrees in philosophy. He saw Google AdWords or mobile ads or something. He clicked on that. He's like, wow, I can change. the whole course of my career, and he did so. And it took very little time. What did he say? Like two weeks, I think it took him to learn how to do this and start making money.

Yep, absolutely. And I can relate entirely to that, and as I'll mention. Okay, but let's not rehash his whole story for us. Let's let him tell his story. Before we bring in Grant, I wanted to just share that he has written a book called Financial Freedom, a proven path to all the money you will ever need. and this book is available at financial freedombook.com in like 5,000 languages. So if you're listening to this show in English, but you speak a different language, you can order it every language that it's available at financial freedombook.com. Grant Sabatier from Millennial Money. Welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. How's it going today?

It's great. Glad to be here. Excited. Very excited to have you. Let's jump right into it because I know you've got a ton of things to talk about. Can you walk us through where your journey with money begins? Yeah. So my journey with money really begins about the time I was four or five. My parents grew up with very, very little money. When I was six months old, they moved to the Washington, D.C. suburbs and were very kind of low class compared to the neighborhood they moved into, the city they moved into. You know, like my father used to get one pair of pants per year. My mother grew up on a really small farm. And so they moved east to give me a better opportunity. And I always kind of felt that. You know, they talked about it. It was very present in our household. But money was a really

stressful thing. And interestingly enough, one of the first things that I remember my father telling me was that money is freedom. I was probably four or five. And I never knew really kind of what he meant by that until I actually had him on my own podcast. He was the first episode of the Financial Freedom Show. And we got to dive deep into what he meant by that. And he really saw. money and moving east as kind of a way to get out of this cycle of poverty that he grew up in. So it was always very present. I knew my parents didn't have a lot of money. I knew that they talked about it a lot. And it was something that was always present in our household. And yeah, so it's played a huge part in my life. It was a lot of stress for most of my life. And I think

it's not lost on me why I now write about money. And I've thought so hard about it since that time. So what did your money journey look like kind of entering into adulthood? Yeah. So I went to college, studied philosophy, you know, I took out some loans. I got some good scholarships. I went in just wanting to think, wanting to write, got out and bounced around about four different jobs. This was the Great Recession. This is 2007 to 2010. I never kind of found my right fit. You know, I worked at like a call center analytics company. I worked as a researcher at a small newspaper. I got laid off two of those four times. One time my boss clearly told me you're not making our company enough money. So I was just like my head was all over the place. I realized that

I traded about 4,700 hours of my life for $85,000 after taxes during those four years. So some jobs paid okay. Most of them didn't. And so really my kind of of real journey with money starts at the age of 24. I moved back home with my parents. They said that I could crash with them for three months, but they weren't going to give me a dime. So literally, I was like 24 years old, sleeping in the same bed that I slept in as a seven-year-old kid, and I'd go down to dinner and I'd just get this kind of extremely disappointed look from my parents being like, how did you end up back here? And so I would say I really didn't have great money habits, you know, as a young 20-something, you know, I went out and spent everything that I made.

And the first paycheck that I ever got, you know, I just blew it. And my real actual money journey didn't start until I was 24 when I was like, hey, working in a cubicle sucks, getting laid off sucks. I don't want to be doing this forever. And the same token, you know, I was 24. My parents were at that time in their late 50s. They were both still working. My parents are in their 60s now. They're both still working. A lot of their friends are still working, you know, in kind of the middle class America, retirement has talked about nonstop. And so it's something my parents talked about. It's something their friends talked about. And so for me, I was like, you know, there might have, there has to be some other way to do this

thing than just bear down. Because even my parents are like, yeah, you know, you're going to have to save 30, 40 years. And I was just like, I can't do this. I literally had post-traumatic stress syndrome from, you know, I had the crappy, crappy cubicle job, crappy bosses, and I was like, I can't do this again. So you mentioned a couple points that I think are, you know, hey, four years of my life for $85,000 after taxes, I'm back living with my parents. I don't want this kind of concept of working until I'm 60 and not being able to retire, all that kind of stuff. Was this a gradual buildup of these things over time, or was there a moment in time where you kind of made a hard transition in how you're going to approach your finances. Yeah, so it was August 25th,

2010 was the aha moment for me. You know, I, so I remember the day, man, I took a screenshot of my bank account. It's on my website. It's in the book. And it was the day I woke up and I had $2.26 in my bank account. I'd wanted to go to Chipotle. And I knew I didn't have a lot of money left, but I was just like, oh, you know, I've got to have enough for a burrito. And I literally didn't have enough to buy a burrito. And so I was like, I just felt terrible. I'd already sent out over 200 resumes the past couple of months to different jobs, all different types of industries, everything you could think about. And I hadn't gotten a single email back. So I was pretty low. I was pretty low that day. And I went out and I literally just laid down in my backyard that I'd laid down in as a

kid. And I was just like in tears. And I was like, I got to figure this thing out. And so that was kind of the hard stop for me. About a week later, I was doing a search on my phone and I saw a Google mobile ad. And I'd never seen one before when I was like, oh, what's this? And then I just Googled Google mobile ads. And I read pretty quickly that demand for people who ran Google campaigns was growing, that you could get between 10 and 20 percent of media spend to run these ads and that there were jobs. And so I was like, I need to have a whole new skill set because I really didn't have any marketable skills. And I also didn't know what I wanted to do. But once I had that sort of resolution to try to make a million dollars as quickly as possible, you know, sometime in the next couple of weeks after that kind of

breakdown in August, I was like, I want to make a million dollars as quickly as possible. And then that was my sole goal for the next five years, pretty relentlessly nonstop. You know, that was the big aha moment for me. Once that, once you made that change, things turn, you have a pretty incredible story. over that five years. Could you start walking this through some of the highlights of that? Let's talk about the first step with the mobile ads. Yeah, absolutely. So I learned that there were jobs running Google campaigns.

And best of all, you could get certified by Google for free. So at the time, it was called Google AdWords University. And you could learn how to run Google campaigns and get certified. You know, it's simple. You take a test. You get the certification. So I did that. I put it on my LinkedIn profile.

I put it on my resume. and literally the first digital marketing agency job that I applied to, I got the job. They were looking for people to run Google campaigns. And the first client I actually had was this website called Cubs World. So I was running Google campaigns selling Chicago Cubs hats and jerseys. And I never run. Before they won the World Series. Yeah, absolutely.

But Google AdWords, I mean, everything, literally probably every dollar that I've made in my entire career, my entire FI journey, all traces. back to the series of free YouTube videos and getting this free Google certification. I mean, and this is something, you know, I shout it to the rooftops. Every lift, every Uber I'm in, I tell people about become Google AdWords certified. You don't even need a college degree and go run campaigns. There's so much demand. It's just growing. And I feel very grateful that, you know, I did that simple Google search. So I got the job. I was making $50,000 at a small agency in Chicago. And I went in with the explicit goal of, okay, I'm going to save him. million dollars. How do I do it? Okay, $50,000 is not enough money to get me there as fast as I want to.

But I moved to Chicago. I lived in the crappiest apartment ever. My wife, then girlfriend, wouldn't even come over to my apartment. I needed a car to get to my job. And so I bought a $700 Nissan Maxim on Craigslist. And I just banked every dollar I made. And I stayed late at the office. And I felt grateful because it was about a 30-person company. And so I spent a lot of lot of time with like the SEO guys and the web developers and the designers, but most importantly, I spent time with the sales team. And one of the things that I realized was they got all these calls from companies that wanted digital marketing help that just didn't have budgets that were at the level that my agency wanted to work with them. And so I was able to eventually start

working with some of those clients that didn't have enough money to work with my company, but needed someone to help them with digital marketing campaigns. But that was a little bit later further down the road. Probably about three, three and a half months in, I looked on Craigslist, and I got my first side hustle client, which was for a small law firm, I built a $500 WordPress website. And I'd never built a WordPress website before. So once again, went to YouTube, watched the videos, watch the tutorials, built somewhat janky website now in retrospect. But I got the $500. I was like, this is incredible. It was the first money that I had like really ever made outside of a full-time job. So I felt empowered, felt in control. And I was like,

I'm going to do more of this. And so I really got on this lawyer. I was like, can you know, do you have anyone else who needs websites? You have any friends? He ended up introducing me to kind of a little association of small lawyers in Chicago. And through that, I was able to get more and more engagements. And then finally, three months later, I sold a $50,000 website to kind of a mid-sized firm in Chicago, and I underbid a big agency by about half. And literally, I just swung for the fences. I was like, I'll get this done in two weeks, $50,000. I used the same template that I'd used for the $500 website, and they bought it. And I did the website in like four days. I made $50,000. I remember going down to my mailbox and like my hands were clammy when I opened at the mailbox because of the

first check, you know, they'd pay me a $25,000 check. And I was like, anything is possible in life. And I felt so happy. And I invested all the money at that time in index funds. I was a huge fan of like the coffee house investor and the vocal heads guide to investing. And I was off to the races. And by the end of that year, I'd made almost $300,000 from my side hustles doing so many different things, not just website building, but flipping Volkswagen camper vans, flipping Volkswagen or flipping vintage mopeds. I was writing white papers. I invested in a small moving company. I was like watching my neighbor's cat. I was, you know, I did, I just literally every minute that I had, you know, I was like a 24 year old just like all the time, always on,

all energy. And I was investing all the money. That year, I saved about 82% of the money that I made. And then it was off to the races. And kind of the next five years were a lot of the same. I launched two digital agencies myself. I continued side hustling. I continued investing as much as I could. To be honest, I was a lot more hardcore now in retrospect than I probably would have been. I mean, it took me a while to realize that I had a lot of the freedom that I was looking for much earlier. You know, I didn't need to have a million dollars or get to FI. I really already had a lot of that freedom. But it almost felt like post-traumatic stress where I was like, I got to escape. I got to escape. And then once I started seeing you,

my investing balances grow, I just kept at it. And it took me five years, three months, and six days to get there to when I had $1.25 million in my investment accounts. And that day, I also took a screenshot of my bank account. And I never had taken a deeper breath. I remember just waking up and just literally sobbing, being like, oh, my gosh, I made this happen. And then I slept for like a week. So I think this is really interesting. interesting. So many people have this mentality of, oh, no, I can't do this. I could never do that. You didn't just sit around. And like Patrice Washington from episode 50, they were real estate

agents and mortgage brokers in 2008 when the whole economy crashed. And instead of just sitting around and licking their wounds, her husband took a job as a Taco Bell manager just so he could make sure he had food on the table. And here's you telling basically, the same thing. Look, you're not going to sit there and just somebody's going to give you a million dollars. You went out and you tried this and you tried this and you tried this and you were, you were watching cats that can't pay a ton of money, but it's also how difficult is that to do? I mean, as long as you're not allergic to cats, you basically just have to give them food and water and scoop their litter. I mean, it's not a difficult thing. It's just a few more dollars in your

pocket. And you were flipping mopeds. I don't imagine there's a huge moped market either, but hey, every dollar is another dollar. And you were saving 82% of like all income. Right. And still living kind of well. Where were you in Chicago when you said your girlfriend wouldn't even come to your apartment? Yeah. So I lived in Bucktown.

It's like Western and McLean. It's over in this area. You know, it's a nice area. But I lived like right by the train. So the train was really loud. I lived right next to an exhaust shop. So there was always like people coming in. There were two shootings when I lived there the first year.

that I lived there in the alleyway. And it was just a crappy building. You know what I mean? It was just like, it was crappy. I mean, the thing about me is like, I'm pretty flexible.

And so I probably actually would have stayed there longer than I did. But my wife is just like, oh, you got to get out of here. And thankfully, then I started investing in real estate. But, you know,

I think when you really firmly commit to something, especially trying to reach FI as quickly as possible, I mean, the gains compound, the energy compounds. It's like, you know, I realized pretty quickly that I could accelerate the rate of compounding. That was my huge thing. It was no longer like save five to 10 percent. I was like, if I can save a million dollars by 30, I probably don't need any money for the rest of my life. I realized that the whole idea of saving as much as early and often as you can

was a much sounder strategy than kind of rolling the dice and banking on a future. a really uncertain future in a lot of cases. So you've mentioned a million dollars several times. And there's actually a tweet over the weekend where somebody's like, if I have to read this thing about finding a million dollars or saving a million dollars again, I'm going to get some frustrated. Why is a million dollars such a thing? And Aaron from broke millennial said, well, you know,

a million dollars allows you to live off of 40,000 per the 4% rule. Had you heard of the 4% rule? You've said a million dollars, but where did you come up with that number? Yeah. So a million dollars was pulled out of the air. I mean, it was just like middle class. Like, I'm going to save a million dollars. Like, I don't even know any millionaires. I'm going to be a millionaire. That's as sophisticated as I was when I started. And interestingly enough, it wasn't until about two and a half years late 2012 when I first discovered Brandon, the mad

fientist. He was the first five blogger that I discovered. And I was first, I was like, whoa, other people are doing this. And this guy's got a lot of great strength. bad and cheese. And so finding him, I remember finding his site and just reading everything that he'd written. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is pure gold. And then I discovered Pete and there were a few others at the time, but not many. Mid 2012, there were not many people writing about this at all. And so I felt really kind of happy that there were other people out there doing this because I didn't feel so alone. Because that was the big thing for me is that I tried to read books. on retirement, but they were also dry and so boring. I read some great investing books. I read some

great entrepreneurship books during this period. But in terms of like retirement, planning for retirement, none of it was built around trying to retire as early as possible. And early retirement, like the stuff that was written, it was like really academic and, you know, written for people who like retire at 51. And I was like, I don't even know how to make sense of any of this. So when I discovered Brandon, And I was like, ah, this is like, literally like, I was like, ha, you know, it's like such a great. I've told him that story many times too. He's like, oh, man. I was like, seriously, man, I wouldn't exist without you.

I'm such a fan boy. Once I got into it, then obviously the Trinity study, all these numbers. But the thing about it, even the more I research and the more I dive in, you know, those models are nice starting points. But one of the things I quickly realized when I did my first retirement calculator calculation, it said I needed three points. $3.5 million to retire. And I had like nothing. And I was like, $3.5 million. How am I going to get there? So I was just like, I got to get to a million first. That's the first stop on this journey. And one of the things is I think the FI community, the personal finance industry, the money world, I think they sell a level of precision that's just completely unrealistic. And so I also realize that how can I even begin to figure out how much money I'm going to need for the rest of my life when who I am this year, I'm very different than who I was two years ago and three years ago. So I think what's more important is understanding what you enjoy and how much money it takes to live a life you really love. And then longitudinally make sure you're moving in the right direction. And I knew there was going to be a lot

of margin of error, but I didn't sweat it too much because once I got to the million dollars, you know, then I kept saving more and making more. And for me, it's one of the, it's kind of does it past the sniff test. And one of the things I know in the future is if, you know, everything breaks down and the stock market blows up, you know, I'll at least have enough saved and can really ratchet back my own lifestyle in order to live forever. And so I never got super, super, super granular with the spreadsheets. I was just like, instead of spending all my time trying to optimize my expenses and track everything perfectly, I'm going to go out and try to make as much money as possible and invest my energy there. And then I eventually got to a point

where I was like completely burnt out. And I was like, okay, I have enough for now. I'm going to, you know, exit the corporate world, leave my agencies. And I also realized that I hadn't taken advantage of all the freedom that I'd been able to buy myself. And so now I'm in a point in my life where just having the space and time with which to meditate and grow and exist and be is so much richer and has made my life richer than money ever could. And yeah, that was, I'm not very focused on the numbers now. Money to me has a lot of diminishing returns. Now I'm more focused on helping my friends who are all really stressed.

And I think most people are kind of two or three steps away from a life that they'd really love. And so I'm writing more about that and thinking more about that. Money often factors into that. But a lot of people are stuck in their lives and I got unstuck. And now I'm completely dedicated to helping those around me and anyone else out there that feels stuck, find a way out. Because it's literally never been easier in history to make more money. And even like Brandon says, it's like you're in the U.S. It's like because of the favorable tax treatment, because of all the income opportunities, because the ability to control your cost of living, it's never been easier to reach FI.

And so incredibly exciting time for those people who are willing to make some small changes in their life. Financial freedom, I think, has never been more accessible to more people. And I almost think it's a human right that people shouldn't have to wake up every day stressed about money. They should be outliving lives that they love because we only get one shot at this. So earlier on, and I want to kind of jump way back to this, because when I look at your story, your remarkable story of how you kind of went from $2 to a million, 1.2 in five years,

it seems like the key leverage points that you went after were entrepreneurship and then an extraordinarily low savings rate. So it was basically to earn as much as money as possible, spend as little money as possible, and then attempt to build assets and I assume invest aggressively. So you're literally optimizing every channel of financial independence. And the one that stood out the most to me was that you, went and took a free online course. And I don't try to make it. When I graduated college, I was going to start a job as a finance professional.

And I felt that my four-year degree in economics with a minor in finance gave me no preparation for on-the-job training. And I took a free YouTube course. It took me two weeks. I did it two weeks before I started my job. And that propelled me to be way more effective at that job. And I think that that is really one of the things that sticks out to me is you going out and doing, like most people don't do that. Most people just don't read a book or study a subject to

learn a new skill. You can literally do Google ads in two weeks and be right up there with any industry professional, you know, not any industry is professional, but get a job and begin working on it within four days, right? And that mindset applied to a bunch of different things, applied to all these different side projects, watching cats, you know, whatever it is, you're going to find an opportunity that's scalable that you enjoy, that you can go after, if you're trying them one after the other relentlessly, right? Right. So if you're listening to this and you're in your early to mid-20s, like, this is it, right?

That's your chance. You can't do this if you have a family and it's 10 years down the road. It's much harder, right? And you lock into your style. Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, even energy. I mean, just the amount of energy that I had at 24 compared to now at 33 is vastly different. It's vastly, vastly different.

And so the whole idea is the paradox is that when you're young, time is more valuable from an income building and compounding perspective. It's also more valuable because you have more of it. And so you can leverage it in that sense. But time seriously collapses as you get older. And in a way that as more, you know, there's kind of like the curve as you have more responsibilities, but then you literally have less time. And I've studied this intensely, just the fact that we have at least half of our life experiences by the age of seven. And by the age of 26, there's actually a marked acceleration of time because that's the moment in which we've had over 80% of the experiences that we're going to have in life. And so new experiences actually elongate time in a way that few other things do.

That's why you go on vacation and the first couple of days that you're there. It feels so new. Time feels like it slows down. That's the beautiful thing about travel. It actually expands time. And for me, I was just, I'm infinitely fascinated by both time and money as human inventions. And the thing is, we embed both of them with so much meaning, so much power. We put all of our emotions into them.

But if you actually step back and look at money and time as both human inventions and you embed them with your own meaning, I mean, the relationship between time and money, this is the biggest myth in, I think, the entire world, one of them. is that people think that time is money. And time is not money. Time is so much more valuable, so much more rich than money. And you actually can get to a place, whether it's through investing in real estate or hiring some employees to do the work instead of you, you can get in a place where

the relationship between time and money is no longer linear. And once you get to that place, it gives you more of both. And that's one of the things is as long as people keep believing that time is money and that they need to trade their time for money, they're always going to be kind of held hostage by that simple idea. And so that's why when you're young, you have more time. So make the most of it in that sense. And it's all about not wasting time at the end of the day. So if you just do a couple things right, you're going to buy significant amounts of freedom, not even in the future, just in the next couple of years. And that's the biggest takeaway for me of this whole journey is that you don't need millions of dollars or to become.

to get so many of the benefits. Just get like two years of expenses saved and then figure out what you'd want to do with your life. You know what I mean? Leave the crappy job. Take some time off. Take a deep breath. Whatever it may be.

Like you do not need millions of dollars to be financially free. Yeah. And I think what your story demonstrates, what this is is that all out approach, right? Maximizing potential in all these areas saves you time, right? Because time is money until you. create a situation where it's not, right? Absolutely. Right.

You know, your median income earner earning 100 grand with no little to no relative invested wealth, time is money, right? Right. But as you save your first $500,000 million, you're moving towards that and building a really solid financial freedom foundation, the change that you're talking about becomes true. And the stakes, I think, are so high to do this. That's why I'm so passionate about this job, what I do here, what me and Mindy and you do. You know, like this is, I think the stakes are really high.

you need to get on the other side of this as early in life as you can, you know, whether regardless or where you're starting. But you need to do this. The stakes are very high and life becomes very different afterwards, right? And the time you can apply that pressure in that extreme way that you did in all four of those areas, extremely low savings, extreme effort on every front with the vast majority of your time on a daily basis, both earned income and entrepreneurial efforts. And then total dedication of your portfolio to the most aggressive.

assets, right? The time to do that is in your 20s because the risk becomes untolerable, you know, later and later. So I just like want to point that out. Like, if you're listening to this and you know someone who's in their 20s and could be persuaded, like this is the right approach, two, three, four years of this and to rest your life is totally, the world is your oyster. I'm going to jump in here really quick because you are both slightly younger than me. And I am going to stick up for all of the people who did not discover this in their 20s. When I was in my 20s, not a thing. This was, you know, nobody, well, except Vicki, nobody was talking about this. There were no blogs. I mean, there wasn't even the internet when I was in my 20s. But you can still

do this even if you're older, even if you have a family. It's, you know, I don't recommend you quit your job that is putting food on the table because you have no, you have nothing in savings. I don't recommend you quit your job and then go try to figure out YouTube University. Maybe Google Ads isn't the thing for you. But there are always. things you can do on the side. So I wouldn't, I just want to clarify that I'm sure neither of you guys are saying, don't do this unless you're 20, but you just have so much more room for growth when you do it when you're 20, but you can still do it when you're older. Okay. Absolutely. Yeah, I think money only matters if it helps you live a life that you love. And that's one of the things that I

actually didn't even realize when I was going through this process. I had to get out the other side and kind of detox from it until I realized that. And when I read Scott's book set for life, I'd already become FI and Scott was on my podcast. And I was like literally, it was kind of like looking in a mirror, but I was like, oh man,

this dude is so hardcore. I'm not this hardcore, you know, but then I realized like, oh yeah, I am this hardcore. But one of the things, you're absolutely right,

it all comes down to tradeoffs. And this is the big thing. We live in such an all or nothing world where people are like, I'm either an entrepreneur or I'm not, or I'm either, you know, going to dive into this thing, do everything perfectly, or I'm going to do nothing. And what this all comes down to is you get like 90% of the benefits just doing a couple of these things. You know what I mean?

Just realizing that there's a limit to how much money you can cut back. There's just going to be a limit. Things like, you know, even as you write about Scott, there's a limit to how much, like those small things in your life, those are the ones that are probably giving you the most joy. So don't cut them out. Focus on just cutting back your housing expense. You know, I mean, just the path is so simple. And you don't have to go all out.

You don't have to change your entire lifestyle. No matter when you're starting, just a few of these simple switches are going to give you a lot more options and choice and freedom in your life. And then you can do whatever you want with that. It's incredibly empowering. I mean, that's the beautiful thing about this. It's like you're in a crappy situation. You don't have to get, you're not stuck there. Like these tools are out there.

they're available. There's more and more people that are doing this. It's not like this path, you know, where the first people treading this path. There's everyday success stories of people who've done it different ways and been creative about all their different income streams. And that's the beautiful thing because it's like it's so empowering. I mean, it's so empowering just to live life on your own terms. And you can do that at any age, no matter where you're starting. I get emails from people in their 50s and they're like, I'm just getting started. And I'm like, here are the four things that really matter. It's up to you, you know, to make the choice of, of actually implementing this or not.

Okay, so let's shift a little bit and start looking at how we can help people who may be just coming to this concept for the first time. Where does somebody start? What is a good first step for somebody who maybe just discovered this concept of financial independence and, you know, ooh, I want to do that. I don't know where to begin. Yeah, so I think the personal finance industry always tells you to start with your expenses and to start with your budget.

But I think that's the absolutely one of the worst pieces of advice. out there. First off, I think that budgets reinforce a scarcity mindset. They force you to look at those small purchases that in reality are the things that often make you happiest or give you the most joy. So let's put the budget to the side for a second and focus first on optimizing where you're currently making money. And so there's always going to be a limit to how much you can cut back, but there's not going to be a limit to how much that you can make. But a majority of Americans are actually leaving money on the table just because they're not doing things like taking full advantage of their benefits at work. This is one of the things that just blows my mind is that your company,

no matter where you work, they likely have some benefits that you're not taking full advantage of. So schedule a 20-minute meeting with your HR department, go in and ask about all the benefits that you have and if you're taking full advantage of them. And then the second thing I recommend, once again, on the income side of the coin, is making sure that you're making as much money as you can in your full-time job. A majority of Americans are actually getting paid under their market rate, and it's never been easier to go out, for example, and figure out how much money you should be making in your job based on your skills and experience. And so we spend literally over 2,000 hours working for money per year, but we spend like less than 30 minutes on our own career

optimization. And so go out and dedicate a couple of hours to, for example, going on Glassdoor or and D.com, checking what people with your experience and job title are getting paid for their jobs. One huge, huge piece of advice, go out and talk to recruiters in your industry because these recruiters are literally paid when they help you find a job. These are people that are going to know what jobs are out there, how much money you should be making based on your experience. And they're going to give you tips around skills that you don't have that you can add to your current skill set in order to be more marketable. either at your current company or at other companies.

You know, I always say that skills are future currency. The more diverse your skill set, I can guarantee the more money you're going to make, not only today, but for the rest of your life. And so talk to recruiters and see what you should be getting paid. And then the final thing is just go out and actually look for research in your industry. And this is one of those things. I get emails all the time. Hey, I'm living in Syracuse, New York, and I work in IT, and I'm making $70,000,

but I really don't see how I can make more money. The beautiful thing today is that so many companies are looking for remote workers that you can literally live in Syracuse and, you know, with a decent cost of living and get a job in New York City doing the same thing that you do, but do it remotely, make twice as much money and then bank the difference and you don't even have to move to a different city. And you can do that just simply, no matter where you are, look at the biggest city near you and just Google Chicago IT recruiting company and then call them up, talk to some recruiters and be like, like, hey, I live in Des Moines, Iowa, but I'm looking for work remote opportunities with companies in the IT industry in Chicago. That's the fastest way to get paid more money as well as be able to do it in your own time. And so a lot of people focus on the expenses and how much money we're spending, but like I said, there's a limit to how much you can cut back. There's not a limit to how much you can make. And even if you don't like your full-time job, that's the place right now where you're going to be able to make more money in order to save it. And if not, you're going to talk to some recruiter

who's going to find you a better job or you're going to learn, hey, instead of going after being an art director, I should be a creative director and I can make $70,000 more dollars in two years. And that was the biggest thing for me is like, I think that Google AdWords, in a vast majority of U.S. cities, you can get to six figures starting from nothing in two years or less because there's such a high demand, the acceleration path, the promotion path is so clear cut. And so focus on optimizing your full-time job first because you definitely don't want to be leaving any money on the table. And the last thing is a vast majority of companies now are willing to negotiate work remote opportunities, but most people don't even ask.

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slash money-free and start building something amazing. Get more with you. Northwest Registered Agent at Northwest Registeredagent.com slash money free. That's awesome advice. That's really good for, hey, I've got a job and I want to earn more money on the income front. And I agree. That's probably one of the fastest ways you can really begin scaling your income in a meaningful way in a short period of time.

But suppose that you're in a profession that maybe doesn't have the ability to rise to the ranks like that. Like maybe you're an accountant or something like that where there's a kind of a set career track, even in various different companies. How do you think about earning more money outside of that career track? That's a great question. So first, you always want to start with the skills that you currently have. So one of things, before I get into that, a majority of people think about side hustling all wrong. They think, okay, you know, I'm going to go out and drive for Lyft or drive for Uber, pick up a couple jobs on Upwork. But there's a huge difference between side hustling for someone else and

side hustling for yourself. So you can only drive so many hours with Lyft or with Uber. And what you're getting paid is still being controlled by someone else. You only have so many hours of your life that you can trade and drive before you just, you can't drive 24 hours a day. But what there's not a limit to is connecting supply and demand. And so I always tell people, become your own Uber. Uber doesn't drive their own cars. All they're doing is connecting people who need rides with people who will give rides. and anyone can become an Uber in their industry. So as long as say you're an accountant, to your point, if you're going out and you have to trade your time, sure, you can charge more per hour if there's demand for your services. But even better, instead of selling your own time, start brokering others' time.

And so start an accounting firm that specializes in helping online entrepreneurs, for example, and then hire a couple young accountants who are familiar with creating courses and building online communities. and who are accountants and all of a sudden go out and connect online entrepreneurs who need accountants for their online businesses with accountants who are experienced in that industry. So all of a sudden, as an accountant, you're no longer just trading your own time for money. You're brokering others. And that's the beautiful thing today because you don't have to hire a bunch of full-time employees in order to broker this type of supply and demand. And so instead of just doing the work yourself, sell it and then have someone else do the

work and facilitate that connection. And you can do that in any industry with any job, whether you're a lawyer or an accountant or no matter what you're doing. And the second thing is side hustling is so amazing. It's an amazing way to get paid for doing something that you love. And I think a lot of people, they see people making money online and they're like, oh, I want to go do that or I want to do this. But like anything in life, you can only do something that you don't like doing for so long. even if you're making money. And the chances that you're going to be successful if you're doing something that you don't like or love are much lower anyway.

And that's the beautiful thing today because if you compare your skills and your hobbies and you look for overlap between the two, it's never been easier to go out and actually get paid to do something you enjoy as opposed to just something that you think of as, hey, a job. I think that's fantastic advice. And I love that what you're talking about is kind of what's something that's scalable, right? It's an outcome-based thing rather than a time-based side hustle, right? I think that's correct. But what if I'm earning $50,000 a year?

And I feel optimized on that front for my full-time job. Sure. And I've got less than $10,000 in liquidity and savings that I can access to go after this. I may feel at that point. And it may be hard for us to convince that person from this podcast that they're in a position to go out and hire a couple of accountants, for example. Sure. Right. They're not even paid a level of one account. and how they're going to pay three accountant salaries, right?

So what's kind of that baby step in that direction that you might say? What's the path towards? Because when you're talking about your side hustle, right, you're in $500 with one website. Right. And then a couple of progressions later, now you're earning 100 times that. Right. So like anything in life, it's all about feeling it out and seeing what works and what doesn't. And so for someone who's making $50,000 and their full-time job and they're like,

hey, I want to make some money on the side, we live in a world that tells, them, oh, you have to jump off and now be a full-time entrepreneur. But the best thing for that person to do is go out no matter where you can and find one person to offer accounting services to on the side and see how it makes you feel. Just feel it out because maybe you won't like doing it. You know, maybe you'll do it and be like, oh, I had to chase down my clients and they wouldn't pay their invoices and this got really complicated and, you know, getting emails at 2 a.m. from this person. It really stressed me out. And gosh, you know, I'm happy in my full-time job because I can leave at 5.30 and then I can go

home and not have to think about work. And that's completely cool. Like, if that's you, great. Then if that's the case and you don't want to launch something on the side, make sure that you're at least on the career track based on the skills you have. And that'd be the second thing that I'd note. Look at those people who are above you and figure out how you can jump levels faster. So what's the difference between a level one accountant and a level three accountant or the person at that next level. Is it simply hours of experience? We used to live in a world where you had to put in your dues two to three years and then you'll get your promotion. I don't believe in that at all anymore. Like, yes, experience is extremely valuable, but I think in a lot of cases, skills can trump

experience. And so figure out, okay, what are the people at the higher level in my firm doing that I could do and how can I learn that? And if you don't have an answer to that, it's probably enough evidence that you should be looking to work at a different firm where you could accelerate that process. I mean, it's not lost on anyone that whenever you look for a new job, your market rates are then reassessed. And so if you look at people over their career, if you jump jobs every two to three years, you statistically end up making between two and $300,000 more in your career lifetime simply because leaving to a new company forces you to your market rate. You don't have to do that by any means. But test it out. See how you feel.

Get a client on the side. The one big piece of advice that I have for everyone that wants to side hustle that tells me, oh, well, I can't go out and sell a client. You know, this is the biggest barrier. How do I get my first client? Or how do I get, how do I build a business? And the whole idea is there's so much demand, for example, for accounting services or digital marketing services and in some cases legal services that simply just act as a back office freelancer or a contractor and then work for agencies who are doing the selling for you. And so just a simple case study, I had a buddy who was making about $4,000 a month running digital marketing campaigns at an agency, hated his boss, hated the company, was forced to work just like so much overtime. And he was like, I want to be a freelancer,

but he's kind of a shy guy. He's like, I can't go out and win clients. How do I go against these big agencies. And I was like, dude, just contact the recruiters in your agency and tell them that you're willing to work as a freelancer to agencies that need back office, you know, back campaign management support and let the agencies do the selling. This is the big thing in the digital marketing world is that agencies often hire contractors or freelancers because if they lose a big account and they don't do that, then they have to fire everybody. And so what he was able to do is he actually got hooked in with eight different digital marketing agencies in Chicago. And now he's the contractor for these agencies.

He's making $100,000 a month. A month? He went from $4,000 to $100,000 a month. Now working as a back office, doesn't have to do any selling. These agencies reach out to him and they say, hey, we got this client. Can you do this? Can you do that? And now he has so much work.

He tried to do it all himself, but he can't. But he's hired another one of his friends. And so all of a sudden, going from being a salaried $4,000 a month employee, he's a back-end. He runs PPC campaigns for big agencies in Chicago, who there's so much demand for that. He's making over $100,000 a month. I think it's fantastic. And I could not agree more with the concept that skills should Trump experience, right? Right.

When I started my career, I was a financial analyst, right? And in that world, it's not as true. Right? It's not as true. The time and experience really does seem to trump whether or not you can just do the work or not, right? And because of that, in my first year, I was on the track path toward financial freedom, it became glaringly obvious that if I stayed in that track, and there's not really like a lot of financial analyst contractors out there. You really need to be like an employee of the company, get to get all the sensitive information. And so it became exceedingly clear very quickly that there was no upside in this career, unless in a similar company setting. unless I quit and did something like investment banking and put in the reckless hours or went in a totally different direction, right? So I left and went on a different career track that had scalability, right? Well, exactly what you're saying. I started a bunch of side hustles, did all that. If you're working a job that is super time consuming and all the scale comes as a result of years and years of experience in that career, then that's a slow path toward financial freedom.

And you got to assess and you got to make the assessment early. Now, I got a tough question for you. suppose that I'm 10 years into that career, right? I'm listening to the show. I'm 10 years into that career and I'm a director of finance, right? And I'm making 125. Right. So it's not a joke money. It's not, you know, what do I do then?

Do I really consider this? Because the upside is there. But I'm also potentially foregoing my very nice salary that I've now earned into because of those years of experience going in. Just because you've earned something isn't enough to keep you. I mean, I hear this all the time, people. I put in my 10 years. I got to the job, even though I don't like it. I spent 10 years getting here. What matters is do you love your life? Are you enjoying your life? Doesn't make you happy. So I'd flip that on you and ask if that person's making it 125K and they like their job and they like their coworkers and they're showing up every day and they go home at 6 p.m. and hang out with their kids and they like their life and they take a couple of vacations a year and they're happy. Congratulations. You won the game. that's it. You've won the game. You know what I mean? You don't need millions of dollars in that case. You don't need to be financially independent. You just, you've won the game. You're living a happy life that's

sustainable, you know, that you can afford. Hopefully you're saving 20, 30 percent of your income. But if you're 10 years in and, you know, say you're 38 and you're making 125K and you're hearing this and you've been stressed all week and you haven't slept and you're not spending time with your young kids and you feel like they're growing up too fast and you feel really stuck in your life. That's a whole different scenario, right? And I would encourage that person to make a transition or plan for a transition in the next three to six months and start unpacking where you're at, how much money do you have saved? Can you take a couple months off to make a pivot? And then, like I said, let's go back to talking to recruiters. Dude, you have 10 years of experience in this

particular industry with probably a great skill set, is there a company that you could move to where you could get paid the same amount of money but work less time? Then you free up time to spend more time with your kids or do something. Is there a less stressful job? Is there another more lucrative career that might pay you double the amount of money but have the same amount of time trade off? Move over into private equity. I get these questions all the time. What, you know, oh my gosh, I'm working 100 hours a week. I'm in private equity and I can't sleep and it's so crazy. You have to remember that a vast majority of companies, they're just legal pyramid schemes. That's what they are. They're built to make people at the top more money, whether it's a shareholder, you know, whoever it is.

And so you have to just decide, am I willing to climb this pyramid and make those tradeoffs in private equity? That tradeoff is insanely high, you know, you make 80K a year for three or four a year. years, then you bump up to like 350. You know what I mean? And so the net ROI over time. But, you know, at the end of the day, the most important question is, are you living a life that you love? And if you can, if you say yes to that, no matter how much money you're making or where you're at or what you're doing, then you've, you've won the game. But if you're stressed out, you know, there's often a couple small decisions that you could make that could give you a lot more happiness and flexibility in your life. Okay. So this big,

This brings up a really great comment, and I'm glad you said this because I have a job that I love. I see myself doing this for at least another 10 years. I've got kids in school, but they're in school like 35 hours a week for 40 weeks a year. So I need something to do with my time. And I have thought I had the job that sucked. And I quit when I got pregnant and had a baby. And I was very happy to quit. And now I'm very happy to stay here.

And I think that not all jobs suck. And you don't have to have this. Oh, yeah. This FI mentality, oh, well, I hate my job, so I'm leaving. My sister loved her job. Absolutely could not talk more great things about it. And then her boss left and she got a new one. And she's like, oh, my God, now I know what you're talking about when you hated your job so much.

She didn't go down the FI path because she loved her job. She never wanted to quit. That's just a really great reason to do this too because you love your job. What's to say you're not going to get cancer tomorrow? I have a friend whose husband has metastatic pancreatic cancer. That's not a great diagnosis. You go through your FI path because you want to lead this best life. You want to make sure your kids are taken care of.

You know, you never know what's going to happen. And just because you love your job now doesn't mean that your boss is not going to leave and you're going to get some, I don't want to say the word Nazi, but you could get some really awful person who comes in and changes absolutely everything you love about it. So, you know, just because you love it now doesn't mean that you're always going to love it. And I love that, you know, that concept, you won the game. I won the game. I totally won the game with this job.

Absolutely. But I went through a lot of really crappy losing seasons to get to this winning Super Bowl win that I have. Yeah, this moment is all there is. I mean, that's all there is. And the thing is you might not have the next moment. And so I also think me personally, I was addicted to FI. and FI can be money addiction in another form, just like chasing that next promotion or the million dollars over optimizing. I mean, Brandon's talked a lot about this, just deprivation generally.

You know, and honestly, I probably going back, I feel very grateful for what I went through and what I learned, but I probably would have stopped to smell the roses a little bit more along the way, you know, and I feel grateful that I made it through. But that's the thing is FI, all this comes down to is money. gives you the ability to have more control over the time and space in your life to do what you want with it. And that's why, you know, I called the book Financial Freedom because it's like financial freedom means something different to so many people. FI is one thing. It's like how much money do I, do I have enough money for the rest of my life? But financial freedom for someone might be just

not having any debt so they can sleep at night. For someone else, it might be having a year expenses. So if they get fired, they don't have to worry so much. And so the whole idea is, once again, we live in a world where there's so much precision around money that's being sold and so much fear that's cultivated. And we have to make sure, especially sharing the FI path, that we don't share that as well or support that as well. All that money is for is to help you live a life that you love, to help other people live a life that they love, to impact the world, to change lives, whatever it may be. And there's no perfect number. There's no perfect strategy. The whole idea is, are you waking up and enjoying your life and how's money helping

you do that? And that's what it comes down to. And the beautiful thing is that it's never been easier to have a great moment, have a great time, have a great day, spend more time with your kids, you know, and asking yourself that question of what kind of life do I want to live is the leading question. And then maybe saying, you know, I'm willing to get paid half the amount of money because I get off at three and I can pick up my kids and that's what makes me happiest. Or I can take a month off, but I'm not making as much money as I could. And this is the thing. It's not all money, money, optimize, optimize, optimize.

And in fact, I think that kind of the quantified self movement often, you know, how do you live when you're scheduling every 15 minutes of your day? I don't think I could live that way because to me, life happens when you open to it, when you exist, when you put your phone in your pocket or leave it at home and take a breath and say hello to the person next to you. That's where life happens. Life is the unexpected. It's not the optimized in my case. And it took me a while to learn that. I mean, these are all perspectives. It's one of the reasons I wrote the book because I'm like,

I can close that door. I can shut that chapter. And looking back, I did some things that I wouldn't do again. I made some tradeoffs that I wouldn't do again. But the beautiful thing is that it's so easy for so many people to get more freedom and time in their life, no matter what that freedom means. And it's a joy that we all get to share that with others and help others do it. Because, you know, like I said, this is, this is all we have. Time is much more rich and valuable than money. Oh, I love it. I can't top that.

Time is much more valuable and rich than money. Okay. It is time now to move on to our famous four questions. These are the same five questions that we ask of all of our guests. Four questions and a command. I will command you at the end. Cool. What is your favorite?

finance book. Your money of your life. Vicky Robin, Joe Dominguez. I read it in September 2010. Simple premise. What are you willing to trade your life for? Completely changed my life. I interpreted it now knowing Vicky and working with Vicky. I interpreted it much different than she intended. My interpretation was, oh, if I'm trading my life energy for money, I need to make as much money as possible, which wasn't her intention at all. But, yeah, best book on money, period. What would you say your biggest money mistake in maybe those first couple years were? Probably my biggest money mistake was I actually didn't invest in real estate soon enough. And so I'm a huge believer now after talking with so many people and reading so many books and,

you know, just spending my life now writing about this, that real estate is by far the fastest path to FI, hands down. I mean, just two or three properties. I mean, after entrepreneurship and these side hustles blow it up for 350K. Preaching to the choir here, but I would have invested in real estate sooner and I probably would have made more investments in real estate. I never actually house hacked myself. I just lived in a crappy apartment. I could have lived in a nicer apartment and had a couple of roommates. So that would have been the biggest thing that I would have done.

Love it. I love how your mistake is an opportunity cost, right? I think most people say, I took out a bad debt on this car or whatever. No, no. If you're really kind of optimizing here, it's always I failed to invest in the appropriate opportunity. But I could have given my philosophy. Yeah, savings is an opportunity, not a sacrifice. And even debt, I wish people stop talking about.

debt because debt is the biggest excuse and crutch that most people use not to save or not to go out and make more money. Like I had like over 20,000 in credit card debt in 2010 and I was just like, if I just let this, you know, hold me back. It's counterproductive. I'm going to go out and make $20,000 and pay it off in one fell swoop instead of try to chip away at it. Love it. Yeah, that's fantastic. And you're right. Debt is the biggest crutch and excuse that people use. Oh, I can't do it. I'm in debt. Well, then get out of debt. Or just don't think about it for a while and go out and make more money and then deal with it later. You know, it's just like, gosh, any excuse.

People just come up with excuses and that's fine. I mean, that's up to them. But you can't say that, you know, this isn't rocket science. This is not right. None of this that we talk about. It's rocket science. It's like just do it for a little while. You don't have to do it forever.

Do it for three years. And you're going to be better than 99.9% of people in the world. And then go back to living that life that you were living before if you want. too. But it's all about having that cushion and just doing this for a little while. It's not all or nothing. Just because you don't like your living situation. Your apartment sucks doesn't mean that you have to live there in two years. Just do it for a while and bank the difference. You know, I figured that every $700 that I was saving per month living in a crappy apartment now, because of all the investing that I used, you know, I saved like over $20,000 in two years.

That's worth over $300,000 now because I invested it in Facebook and Amazon. And, you know, I feel grateful that I started investing in 2010. And that's the one question I get people like, oh, you got lucky. You started investing in 2010. And I was like, well, I set myself up for luck. You know, it's like I was ready when it came. Sure, it would have taken me maybe three to five years longer. But you also got lucky by investing in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2013, 2014, 15, 10, 2016, 1017, here in 2018, right? So maybe you'll get lucky again next year. Maybe you won't. But yeah, just set yourself up for luck, you know. I just wish, you know, I just wish, you know, all this, I just wish that people took some pressure off themselves. I think money, people feel so

much pressure. And you can just be like, you know, do better than you're doing and keep doing better every month. But don't stress out if you fall off the boat and spend too much money this month or spend too much money. You know, it's one of those things where it's like, as long as you're moving in the right direction, good is better than nothing. You don't have to be best. You don't have to understand everything. You don't have to have it all figured out. Just get started. And it's going to be messy for a while and you're going to mess up and you're going to fall off. But the beautiful thing about money is that it grows if you keep adding to it and if you keep investing, even if you didn't invest this month or didn't invest as much. And at the end of the day, I always recommend

to people, it's like look back at what you spent the past month and look through that lens of, did we enjoy what we spent our money on? And maybe you spent too much money, but you had a killer month and it was amazing. You won the game. Sure, you didn't save as much as you wanted, but you had an awesome month. That's a month that you're never going to get back. So take a deep breath, start over again, and then maybe use that information to re-optimize how you're spending money. And in January, when you can't go outside, spend less, but in July, when you can travel all the time, spend more. So don't be so hard on yourself. Take it easy. This is all relative. This is life. We're going to make mistakes. Just make sure you're having a good time. Okay. Well, I think that kind of

jumped begun for the next question, which is what is the best piece of advice for people who are just starting out. Kind of everything you just said. Yeah. I mean, I think the biggest thing, whether you're in a relationship or doing this by yourself, just sit down and write down what the perfect day looks like for you, the perfect week. Just write some things down. It can just be a scribble.

Like, what do you enjoy doing? Okay, I like walking my dog in the park. I like having beers with my friends. I like playing in fantasy, you know, football league. I like reading books. I like doing X, Y, and Z. and then step back and actually ask yourself how much money it costs to live that day or live that week or live that life. And this is one of the things is a vast majority of those things that tend to make us happiest cost very little, if any, money at all.

And so realign your life so that you can do more of those things. You know what I mean? It's like you talk to like, I don't know if you know, Alex Honnold, you know, the really famous mountain climber. He just climbed Al Capitan and Yosemite, free solo. great documentary. Highly recommend it. But you know, he's just like, I get paid to do what I love. And I mean, that's what it's about. You gets to do it. It makes them happy. He gets to go out. And so if you really enjoy reading and writing and traveling, just make sure you set your life up to do a lot of that and figure out how much money it costs to do that. Don't just think, ooh, I need this promotion or this job. Because arguably, with more money and promotions often comes more expectation and more responsibility.

So even though you might want that promotion and want to make $50,000 more, your boss is going to expect you to stay later and they're going to expect a lot more from you. So if you're happy with how much money you're making and it fuels your lifestyle, you know, once again, you've probably won the game. I love it. What is your favorite joke to tell at parties? Gosh, I was thinking about this. So I'm kind of a spur of the moment joke person. You know, I'm not somebody who like comes prepared, you know, with jokes to tell. that's kind of not me.

So I'm kind of more opportunistic where I look for that particular thing that's happening in the moment. And I often make reference back to, you know, for example, like maybe a current event. So I often have a lot of political jokes, which I make sure I will not bring here on this podcast. But I'm more of opportunistic. I don't think that I have like a prepared party joke. I'm more in the moment.

That's kind of how I live my life. All righty. We'll have to get a good one from our audience. That's fine. I mean, I can talk to. They're often inappropriate. That's one of the things, too. You know, it's just like.

We're not against inappropriate jokes as long as it's, we'll just say it in advance. Yeah, these are like after three glasses of wine, inappropriate jokes. Might have said something to you, Scott after at FinCon, you know. All right. I got one from Ivan here. He says, did you hear about the claustrophobic astronauts? No. He just needed a little space.

That's good. Thanks, Ivan. That was awesome. Yeah. Okay. Grant Sabatier, where can people find out more about you? Oh, no, tell me where people can find out more about you. Yeah.

So I'm going to do the shameless plug. I have a book that's coming out this week. Financial Freedom, there you go, a proven path to all the money you'll ever need. financial freedom book.com, millennial money.com, at millennial money on Twitter. And yeah, I'm so stoked, 2019. I'm doing a 40 city book tour and starting in March and then 17 international cities. So I'm going to take this message around the world and help people hopefully have less stress around money and live lives that they enjoy and realize that money's not the goal time is. And by the way, I'll say I got a chance to read the book early and

loved it. And I think that we think very similarly in terms of how we kind of approach the challenge of money and really kind of got a lot out of it. So yeah, go check it out. When does it get released again? February 5th. February 5th. That's tomorrow, Scott. Buy it today and you'll get it delivered tomorrow. Perfect. All right. Grant, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to share just knowledge bomb after knowledge bomb after knowledge bomb. I'm typing furiously trying to get all these quotes in and I'm failing miserably. I'm going to have to go back and listen to it again to get these all in. But this was fabulous. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for all you do. It's fun to be on this journey with you both and hope you have a good day. Thanks, you too.

We'll talk to you soon. All right. That was Grant Sabatier from Millennial Money or should we say author, new author here of Financial Freedom. Again, you can buy that at Financial Freedombookbook.com. I thought it was great. So go check it out. And that will be released tomorrow. So congrats to Grant for releasing a book. Yeah, that was really one of the best episodes we have had so far, Scott. Just knowledge bomb after tip, after actionable bit of information that you can take and apply to your life and really just further yourself down the financial path. I really thought it was very interesting. He said, you only have to do this for a few years. You don't have to actually reach financial independence. And like I said, my sister has a job that she doesn't really love anymore,

but she used to. And having the freedom of having a large cash cushion would have allowed her to go and find a new job without having to worry about being able to pay her mortgage and put food on the table and that sort of thing. So I think that's a bit of information that we haven't heard before is you don't have to follow this all the way to the end. Anything you're doing, any progress that you're making is better than doing nothing. Yeah. And I can relate to that entirely because, you know, when I started out on the journey to financial freedom as an individual, I remember going through that phase of just optimizing and depriving of everything, right, making these like fairly large sacrifices, moving to places that were well below my means, biking in cold weather, preparing

six meals in advance, six days worth of meals in advance, having minute by minute the whole day planned out to maximize opportunity, maximize learning, maximize income potential, future growth, all that kind of stuff. And I did that for a year or two. It was pretty hardcore. I I sometimes forget how hardcore it was. But after that, I built a base of financial stability from which I could scale. And that became less meaningful. So now I don't have to optimize on every single front. And I can kind of enjoy it.

And I'm going to continue to coast through, have my wealth grow and all that kind of stuff. I can relate exactly to what Grant's talking about. And we got another guy here at the office called Craig Curlop. He's been on one of the episodes. I forget which one. But he... Joe 35. Yeah, he's currently doing that, right?

And again, all of us know, like, the goal is not to live 50 years in complete all-out optimization to every front in the pursuit of making more money. That's ridiculous, right? That's totally defeating the purpose of life and financial freedom. But if you can do that for a couple years, you might explode past all of that and be able to do whatever you want and live exactly the life's all you want within three, four, five years to the letter, right? Especially if you're starting from position of little to nothing.

That was great. You know, Scott, I wanted to mention because this is bigger pockets, well, bigger pockets money, but primarily bigger pockets is real estate investing. And while Grant's primary investment is not real estate, you know, his biggest money mistake was not investing in real estate early enough. And I wanted to just remind everybody that biggerpockets.com is a real estate investing website. We have a forum where you can talk about all of the things that you are interested in doing. You can ask questions to get some.

answers to specific situations that you're encountering. There's a blog. We have two podcasts, the money podcast and also the real estate investing podcast. And we have this new thing called Deal Diaries, where you can go onto your profile and share your experiences. It helps give a little bit of, I don't know, I don't want to say legitimacy because that makes it sound like if you don't have this, you're not legitimate. But it helps lend to your site credibility, right? filling out all the information about deals that you've had, partnerships that you've made with people that you've found on bigger pockets. That's another great thing that you can use bigger pockets for.

So I just wanted to remind everybody, you know, it's a new year, new you, all of that. BiggerPockets.com is a really fantastic place to go to learn how to invest in real estate. Yep. And our philosophy always boils down to your odds of success increase. If you can see and hear and learn from stories from people who are like you, near you succeeding on the journey to financial freedom and through real estate. And that's all we're trying to do in mass with these deal diaries. So please do post them and go check them out if you're interested. Awesome. Okay. Should we get out of here, Scott? Let's do it. Okay. From episode 58 of the

Bigger Pockets Money podcast, this is Scott Trench and Mindy Jensen saying Sayanara.