More Money Podcast - 046 Finding Financial Freedom - Todd Tresidder, Blogger at Financial Mentor

Episode Date: April 20, 2016

Todd Tresidder from Financial Mentor and I talk about how he was able to retire from his career as a hedge fund manager at early age of 35. But he didn't just put up his legs and relax once he retired, he put his energy into growing a money coaching business from scratch so he could other people find financial freedom just like he was able to. Long episode description: Todd Tresidder from Financial Mentor is a numbers guy. It helped him craft a successful career as a hedge fund manager, as well as figure out a way to retire at the ripe age of 35. But his plan wasn’t to just save up a bunch of money and spend the rest of his days on the beach sipping margaritas. Financial freedom to him meant he could finally spend his time doing something he loved. What I really enjoyed about talking with Todd was that he was just as open about his failures as he was about his successes. Although society tells us we are to aim for perfection and failure isn’t an option, in reality failure is natural and a big part of succeeding. If we didn’t fail, how would we know what not to do? That’s a big component of Todd’s story. He started his website back in the 90s when you had to hard code everything. I can’t imagine trying to start an online business without the saving grace of WordPress, so big props to you Todd! It’s gone through a number of evolutions since that time, and he shares that he learned a lot about digital marketing and e-commerce the hard way. It’s great to see that he’s now really hit his stride. No lie, I work in digital marketing for a living and I listen to a ton of marketing podcasts — everything Todd is doing on his website is exactly what the experts are saying to do! Although Todd admits he made a number of mistakes when it came to his business, every single mistake he made helped lead him to where he is today. Not only is he a top money coach, blogger and podcaster, he’s also a self-made millionaire and living a life most of us are still striving for. One of my favourite parts of this episode is when Todd stopped the interview to grab a post-it from his computer to share the following Andy Warhol quote that he frequently refers to: Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art. I love this quote so much, and man did it really hit home for me when he read it out loud. Growing up, I thought I would be an artist as a career. And I still thought it when I enrolled in film school in my early 20s. When I had to get a real job and start my adult life, I was honestly a bit ashamed that I couldn’t make a living making art like I thought I would. Well, I’ve been adulting for over 6 years now, and what I’ve realized is that I am making art. My business is my art, and that’s pretty darn cool. Thanks for the quote Todd, it’s now a post-it on my computer too. I’m hoping it will give me that much needed focus so I can attain financial freedom at an early age just like you. Some Great Financial Resources 52 Weeks to Financial Freedom Course Todd’s eBook 18 Essential Lessons from a Self-made Millionaire Todd’s free Audio Education My Favourite Financial Mentor Podcast Episodes How To Build Wealth Through Business with Jaime Tardy Simple Financial Planning – The Only 6 Ideas You Need To Know With Philip Taylor How to Get Rich Slowly with J.D. Roth Follow Todd on Social Follow Todd on Twitter Like Todd on Facebook Subscribe to Todd’s Financial Mentor podcast Shownotes: jessicamoorhouse.com/46 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Mo Money Podcast with your host, Jessica Morehouse. Hello and welcome to Episode 46 of the Mo Money Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Morehouse. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode. I'm very excited to talk to my next guest, Todd Truster from The Financial Mentor, financialmentor.com. He also has a podcast of the same name. So very excited to talk to him about his journey and what he does as a money coach. He didn't always start out as a money coach. He actually was a hedge funder and was able to retire, air quotes, at 35. He was financially independent, was able to leave his day job and do whatever he wanted at the age of 35. And of course, as a serial entrepreneur like he was,

he started his own business and his own website. So I'm going to talk to him today about what retirement at such a young age meant to him, why he got the idea to become a money coach and start his own side business and what kind of tips he would give to any of us, me, about starting your own business and just how to rethink financial freedom in retirement. So we're going to talk about a lot of interesting things in this episode right now. Thank you, Todd, for joining me on the show today. Thanks, Jessica. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. I found out about you when I went to FinCon in 2014, so I'm super excited that you're on the show with me today and I can kind of pick your brain. Happy to be here.

Do your listeners know what FinCon is? Financial Bloggers Conference? Oh, I mentioned it a couple of times. It's the nerdiest. I reference it as like, it's the nerdiest conference you've never heard of. But you know, what's amazing is you put all these financial nerds, you know, they're basically introvert writers, financial geeks, and they are one fun crowd. No, that's true. That's true. You would never think that, right? You'd think, oh boy, that's a fun place to go. And actually it is. It's one of the best conferences, total fun. It's like total fun crowd. And it's huge. Like I had no idea. Like I know it has always been this big, but when I went to the 2014 one in New Orleans, there was so many people. It was incredible how many people were, you know, in that industry or had a personal finance blog.

It's crazy. Yeah. I've been going since the beginning. I went to the very first FinCon. There was just a couple hundred of us. Wow. It's grown like exponentially. It's crazy. Yeah, I've been going since the beginning. I went to the very first FinCon. There was just a couple hundred of us. Wow. It's grown exponentially. It's insane. Yeah, it's credit to Phil Taylor. Phil Taylor, I mean, it's his culture that he created. It's almost his family.

And he sends a lot of love out to it, and it comes back. Absolutely, yeah. So let's kind of jump in, Todd. I want to know, you have a crazy story that you are a serial entrepreneur and you were able to retire, air quotes, by 35. So let's jump in and let's kind of go from the beginning. How did you get interested in personal finance and investing and entrepreneurship? And how did that lead you to where you were, you know, financially able to retire at 35? Well, I had always been an entrepreneur. I don't know if people are born that way or what, but it just, you know, I've always been figuring out how to solve problems

and create things and do stuff. And I was just always innovative and got into it. So I've been an entrepreneur. I mean, I started with paper outs as a kid and I had one and then I used the money to buy a motorcycle so I could deliver more papers faster and ride a cool motorcycle every morning, even though I didn't have a driver's license, you know, and then, uh, branched out from there and had a sailboat refinishing business. And I had a pool supply business when I was in college and I've just always done it, you know. And then when I came out of college, I had this crazy vision that I could make money investing in assets and not knowing about them. I could do it all statistically and mathematically. And I was told it was- Are you a big numbers person?

You know, I'm kind of a weird mix because I'm a bit of an engineer type mind, a numbers geek. And yet I'm also real intuitive, you know, because of my coaching side, I, you know, I've done a lot of coaching with people for years. So there's a real intuitive personal side to me, but yet at the, it's all anchored or foundation of a bedrock of numbers, quant and science. Like the way I teach this is wealth building is science. You know, it's all the way your wealth compounds is by math and science. It's, you know, there's a discipline to it. And yet ultimately getting wealthy is all about you. You know, your wealth plan is about you.

So even if you look, like I have a process up on my side called seven steps to seven figures, and I didn't make it up. I mean, I quote unquote discovered it or observed it in all my coaching clients. And it's the natural seven step progression everybody goes through in the path of building wealth. And I just noticed it in the clients and just started categorizing it. Lo and behold, I had seven steps to seven figures. And what you'll see in there, there's a little pyramid diagram on the main landing page, the main sales page that talks about all seven steps. And you'll notice that they're grouped in pairs.

You've got a personal one and you've got a financial one for each level of the pyramid. So like the foundation has a personal foundation to wealth as well as a financial foundation to wealth. And it's the coupling of both that creates success. You have to put the personal with the financial. I totally agree with that. Yeah. So you were a hedge fund manager. For how long in your career were you a hedge fund manager?

That's a hard thing to say really fast. Sorry, hedge fund manager. There we go. So I believe 12 years. Wow. I don't know what to it, but I think it was 12 years. Can you tell me exactly what that is? Hedge fund? Yeah. Or yeah. What did you do as a hedge fund manager? It's skill-based investing, right? So like traditional investing is almost

all, you know, you see almost everywhere on the internet and it's commonly taught. It's basically the quote unquote truth of the day. The truth of the day varies with market cycles. We've had prolonged bull markets in both bonds and stocks. And so the truth of the day has become a low-cost passive index buy and hold. You can go back in time. Like you can look at the truth of the day as evidenced by Gerald Loeb's Your Battle for Investment Survival back in 1935. It was a bestseller on the back end of the Great Depression.

And basically the truth of the day was the direct opposite of what the truth of today is. Yeah, so the truth of the day varies with time. But right now, the truth of the day is that it's low cost passive index buy and hold. And that's what everybody teaches. That's what's practiced with, you know, I don't have firm numbers, but probably 90% of the money out there or more. And so that's how everybody does it. And what I did was I did an active approach. And the approach, hedge fund investing actually has a variety of different disciplines. The discipline I fell into is what would be called quant investing. So everything's done statistically and mathematically. Now there's other forms of hedge fund investing like global macro and these are called styles. These weren't mine.

Mine is purely quant. So I would develop statistical and mathematical algorithms for the markets and do everything by the numbers. Okay. Okay. And so I guess you were really good at that because you were able to kind of retire when you wanted at 35. Yeah. good at that because you were able to kind of retire when you wanted at 35. Yeah, we had out of the 12 years, again, I believe it was 12. We had 100% profitable years, however many years I was doing it. Oh, wow. And that's, you know, that's through a lot. That's through inflations, deflations, presidential assassination attempts. Chernobyl blew up and

wiped out the commodity markets downwind of it. And I mean, you know, a lot went down in that timeframe. And so we went through a lot a lot went down in that time frame. And so we went through a lot of market conditions and we had 100% winning years. The investors actually had a really, in full disclosure here, I had one system blow up one year. I did a thing called, again, I'm using fancy terms here, but it's the way you described this stuff. I had a method called long, short, long, short, equity market neutral, which means I'm simultaneously

long and short equal amounts of stock. So I'm neutral on the market. So I neutralize market risk by being long and short equal amounts. Anyway, so you make money on the spread and the performance as opposed to having an outright market direction bet. So anyway, I had a portfolio on that and it was before the days where you could do real extensive computer research. You got to understand, I was doing this stuff back in the day when, you know, Apple IIs were still being made in the garage by Wozniak and Jobs. You know, so, you know, I was one of the early pioneers in the industry. And, you know, some of this research, I couldn't get databases.

Like in order to do this research, I had to hand code in monthly data out of old Wall Street journals. Wow. In order to even come up with a decent stock database in order to test stuff. And it turned out the data was a problem. I didn't have sufficient data sample size in order to really prove out the method. And I had one of my systems blow up on me. And it was totally my fault. It was faulty research, right? And it had enough of a loss that the other systems all that year were kind of mediocre. They were positive, but they were mediocre, not great years for anything. And then I had one really bad system that blew up. And so the combination, the portfolio only slightly made money that year. But the expenses

were high enough that the investors experienced it was a tiny fraction of 1% loss. Right. And that was my worst year ever. It's not bad if that was just one year out of 12. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So what made you decide? So so you, you decided to, you know, retire. But I mean, as an entrepreneur, I get that. You don't really retire. You just kind of choose to do what you want to do and give up the desk job. So first, did you always – That's a fun conversation.

Yeah. What is retirement, right? Yeah. Well, what was your idea of retirement at that point? Yeah. Well, I mean retirement is just a euphemism for old age financial independence, right? I mean that says a lot right there, right? Because I mean you can have financial independence at any age.

You don't have to turn old to do it. Absolutely. But then you go into this question, the flip side question. It's one thing to retire at 65 or 70 when you're old and you're tired and you just want to play golf and read novels. So then you retire at 35 and have hedge fund investing be the last great thing you ever did with your life or your creativity, which is kind of lame. So, yeah, I had financial independence, but it doesn't mean that I'm not going to create anything with my life. And that was part of the journey was just trying to understand what creates a fulfilling life. It's an interesting process when you go through financial independence.

A lot of people don't understand it. And it's a thing where you spend your life where you're trading time for money, right? Most people have jobs and they have work that they do and they're kind of trading their time for money. And when you have financial independence, you don't have to trade your time for money. Instead, you're trading your time for whatever fulfills you. And it isn't necessarily what I call the pro-leisure circuit, right? It isn't just endless entertainment for you. That's not fulfilling over the long term.

The way I teach it is that vacation is wonderful and I vacation three months plus a year. But it's only meaningful in the context of a fulfilling life. And that's usually work that's creative and adds, you know, adds value to the world and is your contribution and creates connection with others like we have here and, and so on and so forth. So there's, there's a lot more to a fulfilling, happy life than just, you know, laying on a hammock on a tropical beach with an umbrella drink. Exactly. That sounds fun for about a week. and then I'd probably go a bit stir crazy. Yeah. Yeah. So what was your plan when you kind of quit your job at the hedge fund manager? You were financially independent. Did you have the idea like, okay, I'm going to start my own website

and blog and a coaching business? Or did that come later? No, no. I totally blew it. Because, well, and this is a principle I teach. See, everything I teach, I teach from experience, right? My life is kind of the crash test dummy for everything I teach. And so I blew it, right? Because I didn't really have a plan of what I was going toward.

No, I just had a plan of what I was going away from, which is having to answer to making money. And so when I came out, I fumbled. I had a couple of business adventures that failed. I did some travel. My wife and I put on backpacks and traveled around Europe and Middle East for about six months, which was really cool. I came back and blew out of business, lost a bunch of money. And then we said, well, now let's go to Thailand and Asia. And so we did that and came back again and made some more mistakes. And it was a really – it was a tough period of disillusionment because I didn't – it took me a long time to really sort out what am I here to do? What is my unique contribution?

What is satisfying for me? You know, that kind of stuff, I hadn't really sorted out before I quote unquote, retired, I had to fumble through it post retirement. And, you know, that causes a lot of mistakes, you know, like I made another classic mistake, which I thought my investment was my job, you know, investing. And when you make investing your job, you put a lot of pressure on your assets and you start forcing activity because you feel like you should be doing something. And a lot of times the smartest thing, the most profitable thing you can do is nothing at all when it comes to investing. And so you don't want that to be your job. So anyway, I just went through a lot of mistakes and it cost me a lot of money. It was really a bad period. Well, I think that's

interesting for people to hear because I think, like you said, when people think of, oh, wow, you're able to retire early. That must have been a dream. You can travel and do everything. It sounds amazing. I totally understand the whole disillusionment. where I have a day job and I also have my side job with my website and this podcast and everything like that. When the idea comes of what is my purpose, what am I doing, what am I going towards, what am I running towards, I don't know because sometimes I just don't even have the time to think about it. So if I did have all the time in the world to think about it, yeah, I'd probably make

mistakes and have a long period of what am I doing here, you know? Yeah. So the way I teach it is that, and you basically just said it, which is when your life is structured in a workaday world, it's pretty clear cut. And so you don't really, I mean, you have to lead a responsible life, but you're not really responsible for leading your life because the major decisions are already made. You're going to have a career. You're going to report to your job X weeks out of the year. You're going to take a few weeks of vacation. You know, the basic structure of your life is pretty well laid out. When you have financial freedom, all that gets cleared out and

there is no basic structure and you're suddenly self-responsible for every aspect of your life, including your happiness. Like when you're having to report to a job and you got a boss and your boss sucks and work suck and you'd be happier if only this and if only you could get to here or you could get to this raise or you could get to this new position, you'd be happy. Like you have all these excuses for why you're not happy. And when you're financially independent, suddenly all those excuses are stripped away and you're self-responsible for your happiness. You're self-responsible for what you do with your time, how you create your life. You're self-responsible for everything. And that sounds really cool and it is. It's a gift. It's wonderful, right? But it's also a

tremendous burden if you're not prepared for it. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. So what are some things that you, I mean now you're doing great. What did you learn in that first year that you were able to kind of overcome those obstacles and be in a better place? Well, I fumbled for far longer than a year. Oh, yeah? No, no, no.

I'm not nearly that quick, right? So no, I fumbled around for a while. I went through a lot of personal growth. That's part of why I've got kind of this weird dichotomy, a combination of personal growth and strong engineering mindset, strong quantitative mindset. So no, I went through a period of disillusionment to really kind of sort my way through it and just kind of fumbling around. I started Financial Mentor, financialmentor.com. I started that, oh, at 97, 98. That's how I started financial mentor, financial mentor.com. I started that. Oh, 97, 98. That's how I ended up with that URL. No way. Yeah, it was way early on. I'd seen,

you probably don't even know the name, right? Nobody knows this guy's name anymore. And yet he was almost like the pioneer of internet marketing. His name's Corey Rudall. Have you ever heard the name Corey Rudall? No. He taught most of the gurus who you would have learned from. Really? Yeah. He was one of the early pioneers. The reason you don't know about him here at a company called Internet Marketing Center. And this guy was brilliant. He is so brilliant. He would talk 90 miles an hour and his voice still can keep up with his mind. Wow. Right. Like, I mean, this guy was just a nuthead and just but really smart really cool guy and i happen to have lucked into seeing one of his first speaking appearances ever and he was already making over a million a year on the internet when most people didn't even know what the internet was

no way and he was one of the first guys to realize that it was the ideal direct marketing medium yeah and so i had sold the hedge fund and I just happened to end up in this conference and I'm watching this guy and I went, wow. I mean, my jaw just dropped. I totally got it. I got what was there. I saw the opportunity. And my wife had kind of been getting on me about, what are you going to do with all your knowledge, Todd? Everybody asks you questions about stuff and you just kind of blow them off because people don't really even have the basis for asking the right questions. Back then, you got to understand the stock market was hot and everybody wanted hot stock tips, right? This is going back to late 1990s in the great bull market. And so I do blow off answers and avoid it. I got this URL and I just said, you know,

I'm just going to start building this thing. And if it turns out to get ugly and, you know, because my ideas are kind of unconventional, you know, and doesn't follow mainstream finance at all. And I was like, if it gets ugly and people start attacking me on the internet or whatever, I just give myself permission to drop it. That's how I got the courage to do it in the first place. And I never did.

I mean, it just, people were very supportive. They're very appreciative. They're like, wow, finally something's saying some, somebody's saying it the way it matches my intuition. I always thought it just, it, people were very supportive. They're very appreciative. They're like, wow, finally something saying some, somebody saying it the way it matches my intuition. I always thought it was this way, but I never had the words or knowledge for it, you know? And, uh, and so I've been building it ever since. But so that's how I lucked into it was, uh, 1997. I saw Corey Rudall speak.

The only reason you don't know his name, by the way, I had to finish the story is, uh, he was into fast Porsches. He used to race Porsches. And he was the passenger in a Porsche that hit a wall at about 200 miles an hour. Oh, that's awful. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he died young, ran fast, brilliant guy. Yeah. Wow. Well, that's a pretty crazy story, though, about your... I didn't realize how old your website was. That's insane. Good for you.

Well, what I did was, yeah, good for me. Why isn't it bigger? Why isn't it more famous? Right? What are you talking about? Come on. Well, you know, the funny thing was, again, this is just being candid, right? I just made lots of mistakes. So what I did is I made all the mistakes everybody does with a website because back then WordPress didn't exist. Oh, yeah. So there was no simple CMS. So like every page. Did you just code everything yourself? Yeah, everything had to be hand coded. And the common refrain for entrepreneurs is, oh, you can't be an expert at everything and so you have to hire it out, right? And so what happened was I ended up in this stuck place where any page I would put up, I knew that I was hiring somebody else to code the page and I would get into this endless cycle

of perfectionism because I knew I couldn't go back and touch it. And so it was just this nightmare. You'd have to know FTP to go in and change a spelling error. It was just terrible. And so it was a cumbersome process. And so I just put up a brochureware site, which fortunately was enough to keep the coaching practice full. Because I've always ranked right at the top for financial coach, financial coaching, money coach, money coaching. And so that traffic was enough to keep my coaching practice full. And it just kind of sat there and languished.

It was just a sort of cute little boutique business that I had on the side that I did this coaching experiment around. And I was working stuff out. I started figuring out seven steps to seven figures. I was really trying to figure out, could I help ordinary people really achieve extraordinary financial results? And it took me a few years. I'd say it was three, five years of making mistakes and doing a few things right and helping people out. And I started getting into a system. I really started producing consistent results. And then about then is when I discovered WordPress. And then that's

when it really took off because what it did, WordPress is, you know, it's a simple CMS, a content management system. But what it really did was it matched to I was C because if I'm a perfectionist, what it did is allowed me to just make it good enough because I can easily go back and change it. It was, everything was within my reach and I could touch it and manage it. And so it solved all my perfectionism issues and I could just start building. So that was where financial mentors – so really financial mentors, you see it today, really kind of – I would say kind of 2007, 2008 is when I started taking it seriously. And so from 1998 to 2007, 2008, it just sat as brochure where, and I really worked on my real estate portfolio instead.

That's awesome. That's really inspiring because one of the things that I hope to achieve in, I don't have a timeline necessarily, but one of the things that I definitely want to do is besides have a blog and a podcast is absolutely have some kind of service where I'm a money coach to, you know, millennials and just be able to help people. I want to help people. So it's really inspiring that you were able to do it and hopefully I'll be able to do it. And your website's amazing. It has so many really, really useful resources, which I love. Thanks. You're welcome.

And it takes a little effort. Oh, a little, just a little bit, just a little bit. Oh man. Yeah. I can imagine. See, this goes back to what's fulfilling. See, for me, that's my art. Yeah, exactly.

It's fulfilling. I had a guy tell me this a long time ago, because I was like all frustrated. And I said, oh, you know, like, you know, I kind of viewed myself as an artist. And he looked at me one time and he knew me pretty well. He's a really smart guy. He says, you know, this is Todd.

Business is your art form. I never got that until he said that to me. It was like he just set me free. And then I saw I should pull the quote for you. Hold on. I got a great quote for you. Let me just grab my computer, please. Hold on. So this one sticks on my computer, which I've got the mic way over away from it so we don't reverb um so this is by andy

warhol who if you know andy warhol i do he took a lot of abuse for um for commercializing art yeah right and so he has this quote which i I love. It says, being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art. I like that. I might have to put that on a post-it and put it on my computer. Yeah, I just love that, you know, for an acclaimed artist to put it that way. And it just kind of matchrides that. And so where I'm tying that back into is financial mentor is my expression. You know, that's where I'm expressing my art. Again, I hope I'm not just rambling on here. No, I totally get where you're coming from. Yeah, you have a space that's yours that you get to

say what you want and help people. That is exactly what art is, right? Yeah. And so the funny story on this, the back story on this, where this came from was I had my old junk site. I call it my old junk site, right? So years ago, I had just been cobbling it together over the years and just learning how to do all this stuff. But it was a mess, and it was all put together. And I was at my niece's wedding and all these family members I hadn't seen from all around were there. And they're all coming up to me and telling me how much they liked my site and

how they had been following me. And I cringed. I didn't feel proud. And I was like, I mean, even though they were complimenting me, and it was such a wake-up call. I went, so what's up with this, Todd? Why are you cringing finding out that your family members have been following you for years? And that was the turning point for me. I said, you know, I'm going to fix this thing. I'm going to make it so I feel good about it. What I'm curious about, since you have had your website for so long and your coaching business,

what do you have? What's your kind of, you know, one year or five year plan for it? Do you have a certain goal you want to reach or you're just kind of seeing where it goes? Oh, gosh, no, no, it's all in goals. It's been through cycles. You can actually see the cycles on the site. Like the first cycle was just getting up the core content. Right. And so you'll see that in a lot of the categories. The second cycle was I got really into the calculators and that took a long time. I mean, Oh yeah, that's hard. There's 80 calculators on there, you know, so there's different calculators for basically all

these different financial things that you got to do in life and they make the number crunching easy, right? Cause they just, their little turnkey calculators solve all these problems for you. So that took me 80 of anything. When you look at that, that's a long time. So between getting the articles up there and getting the calculators and getting set up, so that was a long project. That was a year plus, maybe two years, I don't remember. And then I went off on the books. So then there's five books. So then that took a while. And then I went through the content audit to get all the stuff cleaned up, which I was talking about that came after my niece's wedding, got it all built up. That was like a year and a half, two years with two different site revisions and on and on, massive content cleanup, and just trying to pull all the loose

pieces together that I created over the years and make it a cohesive body of work. And now I'm into building the courses out, which is the seven steps to seven figures. And that's what I'll be doing for the next two to three years. So what you see is these constant cycles of evolution, each step building on all the previous steps. And then once I build out all the courses, the next evolution after that, now I have the monetization platform and the courses are there to serve people. So now I turn out and I really roll out the content marketing and really build out the categories of content and expand the whole site. And then that's when I'll also make it each of the categories will, so you have category specific experiences by then, right? So if you're in one category, the whole site will have a different experience. And if you're in one category the whole site will have a different experience and if you're in a different category you'll see all different offers and different things so i have years and

years of stuff planned ahead on the site of the evolution of it that's awesome i'm excited to see where it goes thanks you're welcome um so just kind of wrapping up i think you're you're so inspiring how you i mean you you're not a website developer. You didn't really have any expertise when it came to websites when you started your own. And now you have a huge website with a, you know, it's a money making business. And that's really cool to me just because, you know, as a millennial, I find a big thing with a lot of people that I know is entrepreneurship. That's something that was of people that I know is entrepreneurship. That's something that was never something that I even knew existed or was a possibility when I was growing up, even in university.

It was very much like, you know, you go to school, you get a job, you do that job and you kind of just, you know, do what your parents did. But, you know, that doesn't work anymore. I've had a second job since I finished university and I don't know if I'll ever not. So as a serial entrepreneur who has a money-making business, what kind of tips would you give for someone who is at the beginning of their career and they just want to figure out what are some good ways that they can do the best – instead of just doing the nine to five, what kind of things that they could do on the side. Yeah. So there's a couple of quotes that come to mind as you're asking that.

I'm a quote freak. I love quotes. I love quotes. I love quotes. I capture a lot of knowledge in a small space. One of them is everybody overestimates what they can accomplish in one year and they greatly underestimate what they can accomplish in 10 years of focused planned effort. And so if you notice, if you know, there's a theme that runs through almost everything that I've done in my

life, which is I have focused plan effort. Like I didn't learn the hedge fund business overnight. I spent a decade researching. So it's almost that 10,000-hour rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. I mean, I spent a decade at the computer testing systems and figuring out what works and what doesn't in the markets. I paid the price. I learned my chops. And then once I kind of figured it out, I was done with it. It no longer stimulated my curiosity, right? That's another one is just be curious.

Follow your curiosity. no longer stimulated my curiosity, right? That's another one is just be curious, you know, follow your curiosity. So then once I saw Corey Rudall speak, then I was really driven by this whole idea of what the internet could do. It allowed me a platform for connecting with people in a way that was efficient. I could give through content marketing rather than sell, right? You can just give value. And I really got how it worked and I was excited by it. And so I started doing it. And again, that's just a thing. It was this long journey of learning. I wasn't a marketer. I didn't know how to write. So I had to learn writing. I had to learn internet marketing. I had to learn sales funnels, how all these pieces fit together.

There's a lot to it. And so it's been a great adventure. And so that would be another piece I'd throw in. There's embrace the adventure. Another piece I'd throw in, particularly for millennials, is focus on your earning capacity. Try to increase your earning capacity because your wealth is a function of how much you earn minus how much you spend. And so how much you spend is, you can control it, but you can only go so low before you experience deprivation. And so there's limits to how far frugality can take you. But there's no limit to how far income production can take you. Which is something I've definitely learned as I've gotten older.

Just like you said, there's a deprivation situation that can happen when you're like, I can't cut back anymore. So you have to figure out another way to like, how do I earn more? Yeah, it's not fun. It's not. I'd much rather make money. Well, that's one of the things I teach is sometimes it's easier to figure out how to make more than to spend less. You can spend as much time and effort trying to figure out how to save as you can just to make more and pocket it. So anyway, as a millennial, you want to focus on your income earning capacity early on and really magnify it because that will compound over your lifetime.

So anyway, those are just a couple different ideas to throw in there. The other one I would throw in for millennials, one of the few regrets I have is I wish I'd purchased more real estate when I was younger. Because if you get it on fully amortizing fixed rate mortgages, one of the great opportunities right now is with interest rates at all-time historic lows, the cost of borrowing has never been lower. And it's almost certainly going to pay you to borrow at some point. Like if you have a 30-year mortgage at some point in that 30 years, inflation has to greatly exceed whatever fixed rate mortgage you could lock down now. And so essentially, they should be paying you to borrow money over the course of the loan realistically. And so I think that's one of the great opportunities is to get income-producing real estate on fully amortizing fixed rate mortgages. But you got to be careful and notice

my exact wording as I said that so that you don't make mistakes. Income-producing real estate on fully amortizing fixed rate mortgages. But you got to be careful and notice my exact wording as I said that so that you don't make mistakes. Income producing real estate, i.e. positive cash flow. Okay. So there's a valuation component implied in that statement and it's financed with fully amortizing, not balloons, not any sort of funky financing, right? Just traditional, fully amortizing, fixed-rate mortgages. And that to me is one of the great opportunities that millennials face. Though I do feel – because you're from the States and I'm from Canada. I don't know if you're aware, but like I live in Toronto. I'm originally from Vancouver and it's – in my mind,'m like, not the right time to buy at the moment.

Though interest rates are super low. It depends on the market for sure. Yeah, it depends on the sub market you're in. But that's why I was very specific about positive cash flow. Yeah, you got to make sure it is a good investment, you know? Yeah, premium markets, like you're talking about, you're talking about two major cities. Yeah. Premium markets will not be positive cash flow. No. For sure.

Well, thank you so much for joining me. One of the things I think I'm going to take away and just think about for a while, especially since you started your website in the 90s and you've taken it to where you are. Sometimes I get caught up in looking at other people that are at the next level of me and like, oh, how do I get to up in the, you know, looking at other people that are, you know, at the next level of me and like, oh, how do I get to that point? Sometimes it just, it takes time and you have to keep going. And I've realized that, especially like I've had my blog for four years and it's definitely grown over that period, but I'm excited to kind of see where I can take things the next four, 10, 15 years. So I think there's definitely some value in what you said about time and having a plan, having some very structured goals and just doing it really.

Yeah. I mean, most of the growth in my site's only been in the last four or five. There you go. The first 10 years, it was just brochure wear. And then I had several years of fumbling around and doing everything wrong. And so it's okay, you can make mistakes. And you can, you know, start something and set aside for a while, just have a plan and have focused effort and just do it. And, you know, the main thing is just embrace the adventure, just go live it, because you're gonna get old like me, and then you're gonna die someday. So you gotta, you gotta go for it, because life's short. And I mean,

it sounds so stupid to say that to millennials because they think they got forever. You don't have forever. No. I mean, it's a cliche, but it's totally true. It will go by fast, really fast, particularly if you're really living the adventure. It will go by very fast. Absolutely.

Well, thank you, Todd, for joining me on the show. I appreciate it. All right. Thanks for having me on the show, Jessica. And that was episode 46 of the Mo Money Podcast. Thank you so much to Todd for chatting with me. Make sure to check out his awesome blog, financialmentor.com, and also his podcast of the same name. I will make sure to include links to both in the show notes, which you can check out at jessicamorehouse.com slash 46.

And I had such a great time chatting with Todd, but I want to know what you think. So make sure to send me an iTunes review. Let me know what you think. You can also tweet me. I love when I get tweets about what people are thinking about and if they enjoy my podcast. It makes me feel good.

So make sure to reach out. I love it. And I will see you next Wednesday. This podcast is distributed by the Women in Media Podcast Network. Find out more at womeninmedia.network.