More Money Podcast - 077 Listener Series - How Steve Saved Up $3 Million for Retirement Working a Regular 9 to 5

Episode Date: November 24, 2016

Think you can become a millionaire by working a regular 9 to 5 job? I know I have a lot of guests on the show who promote the benefits of entrepreneurship and working for yourself to get ahead financially. But for this Listener Series episodes, I chat with Steve Cousins from Arkansas about how he was able to reach financial freedom by working as an employee for the same company for almost 40 years. I know, I know, many of us Millennials may think that Steve's story sounds exactly like the advice our parents gave us. Go to university, get a job, work hard, save and contribute to your retirement fund, then you'll be able to retire in style. This was a way more common path for Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, but I don't think it's impossible for us Millennials. When talking with Steve, it becomes clear that that's not exactly the path you need to take to grow in your career. You can't just get any degree. You need to get one that has a high demand for skilled workers. You can't just work hard. Everyone works hard. You need to realized when it makes sense to stay at a company and when it doesn't. Just like he said, he encouraged some of his co-workers to leave his company because he knew that if they stayed, they wouldn't move up as fast compared to if they went to another company. And lastly, you can just save and contribute to your RRSP or 401K. You need to live frugally, not try to keep up with the Jones', invest wisely and have a plan to continue to earn money during retirement. I absolutely love how Steve has become this serial entrepreneur with 4 different jobs now that he's retired. And it's not that he needs the money or is working 24/7 now. He gets to work when he wants to doing what he wants to. If that's not living the dream, I don't know what is! Thanks Steve for sharing your story with me. Got a story that you think would be good to share on an episode on of Listener series? Please email me! For more podcast episodes, check out the Podcast page. Shownotes: jessicamoorhouse.com/77 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, and welcome to another fabulous listener series episode. This is episode 77 of the Momoni podcast. Thank you so much for joining me for another episode. And today I am interviewing Steve Cousins. He wrote into me with a very interesting story. He's basically living kind of the dream, the financial freedom dream. And he comes from an older generation, not a millennial, but he has a very interesting point of view on just kind of saving for retirement

to have a very fulfilling retirement and how he got there. And he didn't go kind of the solopreneur, entrepreneur route. He did the corporate thing for decades. And then when he retired, then he became an entrepreneur. So that kind of seems like a, you know, very similar to the episode I did with Todd Tresser. That was episode 46, in case you want to listen to that one after this one. But yeah, I'm excited to share Steve's story and interview with you, and I hope you enjoy. Thank you, Steve, for joining me on the show today.

I'm excited to chat with you and share your amazing story of financial freedom with everybody. Well, it's my pleasure to be here. I'm a big fan of your show. I never miss it. Well, thank you. All the way down here. I appreciate that. Yeah, all the way down in South Arkansas, which is a long way away from where you are.

And you know, I love when I get reader emails and podcast listener emails to be on my show, but I especially love people from down South with accents just because I don't have one and I wish I had one. You sound great. No, no, you've got an accent. I don't have an accent. Do I? Okay, okay. Fair enough, fair enough. I guess this is, is this a typical Canadian accent, or?

You know, we actually have Canadian friends here in town. I actually played tennis with a Canadian this morning here in our town, and you don't have a very strong one, I wouldn't say. No, I think it just, yeah, it depends on what part of the country you're from. And I'm originally from the West Coast. Then I moved to Toronto. And I don't know. It's kind of a mesh of both those accents.

But yeah, it's not super Canadian, I'd say. Well, it's clear you're not from Georgia. I'm not from Georgia. But enough about me. I would love to dive deep into your story because when you emailed me with all the details about your story, I was like, what? You are absolutely living the dream, my dream, lots of other people's dreams. You worked in the kind of corporate world, but were really smart with your money. And now you are retired and enjoying the fruits of your labor, so were really smart with your money. And now you are retired

and, you know, enjoying the fruits of your labor, so to speak. So I'd love to kind of start from the beginning of, you know, what did you used to do when you were working full time? And how did you what made you think to just live kind of frugally and be really smart and strategic with your money? Well, it came back naturally. My parents were very, very frugal. They paid for the necessities, but it was pretty clear around my house, even from the time I was in elementary school, just the first few grades. I had to get jobs throwing newspapers, working in hardware stores, just pretty much

worked all the time, part time all the way through school to have spending money because they took care of all the necessities. But they really believed that you learned a lot by working for your own money. And I think you did. Because once you spend it, it's fun, you know, and you understand the give and take of the whole thing. Absolutely. Go ahead. No, no, you keep going. I was kind of a nerdy kid. I mean, I loved math and science and physics.

And through high school, from some of my math teachers and science teachers, I figured out that a career in science or engineering was definitely going to be the best thing for me. And I did enough research, and my folks did as well, to decide that engineering was a lot better than pure science from a vocational standpoint. I didn't have the desire to get a Ph.D., but with just a bachelor's degree, there were just dozens of jobs open all the time. And I picked chemical engineering because I like chemistry. And it's not for everyone at all. Pretty hard major if it doesn't come naturally. But for me, it was it was pretty easy.

And, you know, when I when I got out after four years, I had literally had a dozen job offers, could have had more. Oh, my gosh. I feel like all the millennials listening are like, I have no idea what you're talking about. We had 120 companies come through our the University of Arkansas where I got my degree. And there were six of us graduating midterm. No way. People that could interview all of 120 companies. And virtually every company you talked to gave you a plant trip and a job offer. Wow. Now, I kind of had a plan all along,

and my first thought was to make sure I could find a place where advancement opportunities were great. So I turned down the really large oil companies. Oil was the thing at the time. And I picked a very small one, but I had interviewed there and I actually had interned there for a summer and noticed they didn't have anyone there under the age of 30. They hadn't really hired a new engineer in over 10 years. And I thought, you know, they're going to get older.

They're going to promote out. They're going to transfer. They're going to retire. And by the time I'm 40, I should be running this place. And it took me to 41. And I was running the place at 41. And not because I was the best engineer in the world, but because I had picked a place where the competition was somewhat limited. And, you know, I think the place where the competition was somewhat limited.

And, you know, I think the formula that can still work for people, the one I took was take a vocational major, you know, not art history, but something that is very job oriented, like engineering or accounting. But the catch is that, hey, you have to have a passion for it. And that's going to push a lot of people to entrepreneurial work because they're not going to find a vocational major that they've got a passion for. But if they are, if that works for them, then to me, just interview, pick a company with advancement opportunities, be great at what you do. I mean, attack it with the same kind of passion that entrepreneurs attack that daily self-motivation that they do. And you will advance, you know, and there's great opportunities, some great advantages to that corporate life. Your health insurance is paid. You've got the

benefits. You've got a savings plan that's usually matched pretty heavily, a 401k or at least in this country. And generally the matches are 5% or 6% or more bonuses every year. I mean, I don't see how an engineer starting in the U.S. can work 25 years. If they put away a decent amount of their pay and not be a millionaire, it would just be hard too. Well, hard for you possibly because you know where you're, you know, you're very strategic with where your money is. But I think a lot of people, they, you know, get sucked into that kind of lifestyle creep. And once they kind of keep making more money and more money, they find ways to spend it. Well, they do. I mean, even when I

was running the whole company up until January of this year, when I retired from that career, there were a lot of hourly guys out in the plant. And they made good money. You know, they were probably making 60 or 70 or 80 thousand dollars at times. But they had better cars than I was driving. I still tend to buy used cars, nice ones. But I don't I don't buy Mercedes or Lexuses or things like that. And I get cars that are three or four years old. They look great.

People think they're new. They tell me what a great car I've got. But I'm paying way less than half of what the car would cost new. I want to kind of talk to you about – because you said sometimes you just have to pick the right company and then kind of put your time in and then, you know, you will advance. And that can be true. Absolutely. But I'm wondering, like what your perspective is on like, how do you know if the company actually is going to help you grow? Because almost every company is like, absolutely, like every company I've worked for, it's like, there is room for growth. And then you get the job, you work there for a bit, you're like, I don't think there actually is. Like, what was your kind of insight when you knew the company you worked for? It's like, no, I'm going to stick this out, because I think this is actually kind of a good horse to bet on. Well, the way I could tell was by the size projects I got. And so I initially started working on small projects,

but within a year or two, I was spending the company's money, serious amounts, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then into the millions of dollars on projects that I was the lead on. And so I think you've got to look at it from a competitive standpoint. They hired about six or seven engineers shortly after me. And you just kind of judge what kind of work are you doing versus what they're doing. Now, I tried to be a team player. I enjoyed the people I worked with. We were really good friends. We socialized together. But from a competitive standpoint, I could tell that I was a step ahead. If I hadn't have been, I think I probably would have changed companies. And I told several of my friends as their careers

went on, they seemed to plateau out. And it was clear that the bosses above me didn't see them as being the guys to promote up. When they would look at other opportunities, I'd tell them, yeah, you need to move because it's clear you're not going to get ahead here. But that was never the case for me. I never ran into a ceiling. And I stayed there 38 years, if you can believe that, at the same company. Wow. It sounds weird and hard to do, but it still happens even in this day and age. It does, absolutely.

But, yeah, like you said, it's like you, you know, it does kind of become clear where you're like, no, things are moving along when they aren't. And when they're not, it's time to, you know, move on because there's no point sticking around a job that, you know, isn't going to help you grow. You're going to, you know, you don't want to look back several years like, oh, I wish I'd, you know, looked for a job a couple of years back. What a waste of time. Well, and my friends that I actually, I didn't, I didn't tell them you need to leave, but when they made that decision, I encouraged them. Almost every one of them went on to do at least as well as I did at some other company.

They just found a place where they fit and where they could get advancement. And that, that's what you've got to do. You've got to put the same effort into it that people do into the entrepreneurial side. Just think it's a little easier because you're not so much of the stuff that you have to provide yourself in the entrepreneurial world. Yeah. It's provided for you.

You've got an IT department. You've got an administrative assistant. You've got, you know, an HR department. You know, now that I'm in on the entrepreneurial side at my advanced age here, a lot of that stuff is harder than I would have ever thought. You know, just working out my computer problems, fixing my printer and, you know, all that kind of stuff. We're absolutely going to talk about what you're doing now. But I would love to know, you know, when you said that you are, you know, have a net worth of over three million. How did you like? Yes, you've had plenty of time to kind of save up all that money, but that's still a big chunk of money.

How were you able to do that? Well, we always just about maxed out the 401k. Now, one of the things that I didn't have, 401ks didn't exist for the first 10 years or so of my career. And there was no real savings plan at all. So I was kind of on my own. And so we spent most of that time plowing all the money we could into the house so we could pay it off early. I think you need to have a target of trying to save around 20% of your gross income if you can. I know that's really hard to do.

When I started work, it was for $18,000 a year. Now that's $56,000 in 2016 money, so that was not a bad salary. It was considered a pretty good salary. But only in the last three or four years of my career was I what anyone would call an extremely high earner. And I already had pretty much over $2 million in my net investment by then. So I think it's just a matter, you know, the stock market had some good years during my time. I had a couple of bad ones, but when we'd hit those, I would just leave it all in stock and hope it'd come back. And it always did. But I think you have to live below your means.

I never bought anything on payments. I bought a pretty inexpensive house and then we cash flowed renovations to it. I'm still in that house after 38 years, which is strange. But it's over twice as big as it was when we started. And it's a very nice house now. I think another thing, I mean, you can't really do this on purpose. You have to get lucky. But I married a really great life partner 38 years ago and we stayed together. And she is very frugal. She's a great shopper, a great

home engineer. You know, she does all the projects around the house and the yard. And although she retired after about nine years of work, we made a great team. So we did all that on one income. But I could not have lived nearly as cheaply by myself as I did with somebody that was as great a domestic engineer as she is. I like that domestic engineer. He's very bright. Smarter than most things. No, absolutely. I think to achieve such a big goal like retiring with that amount of money to play with after, you definitely need to have a partner on the same page that's just as interested and motivated to find ways to save.

So I think that's absolutely a key thing. Not always easy, but you lucked out clearly. I did. I did. I highly recommend farm girls if you can find them, but they're hard. There aren't many anymore. They're hard workers. Absolutely.

Yeah. I always feel like the laziest person in the house and she backed that. Oh, goodness. And you backed that. Oh, goodness. And you mentioned that you had, how many kids do you have? We have three grown kids. Two engineers and one has a master's in education. Wow. And you paid for all of their school as well?

You were able to afford that? Well, we would have, but they're kind of, they but they're very brainy kids. We were there. They all got free ride scholarships, not only tuition and fees, but also room and board all the way through. That's awesome. They had pretty good test scores and they picked the majors that but they stayed in state. They went to the University of Arkansas, as my wife and I did, which is already a fairly inexpensive school. But to keep good students in Arkansas, they were giving out a lot of scholarships to local kids. And we could have cash flowed their education, but we didn't have to. Just kind of gave them some of the money we saved up for them after they graduated.

Now that gone on, my engineer daughter has went on and got a master's in engineering on her own nickel. She worked for the university while she did it. So she basically had free tuition. And my chemical engineer son, after seven years of being an engineer has decided to become a doctor. So he's, he's a halfway through med school now and he and his wife are paying for that. So I just paid for the first degrees. Wow. You've got some ambitious and bright kids from the sounds of it. They're supporting themselves and they live all over the place. And yeah, they're great kids. So we were blessed there. Absolutely. Wow. So, you know, that's amazing. At what point did you have a date that you wanted to retire that you were kind of working towards?

No, I was really gonna, I thought I might work to 65 or even 70 because I was having so much fun at work. I was the so much fun at work. I was the kind of guy that would get up on Monday morning and look forward to going to work. And that was a rare thing. I mean, even where I worked, not many people felt that way. And that was true up until about two years ago. The company sold about, for the second time, I had three different owners during my work there. Sold to a publicly traded company.

And for the first two years, that was pretty fun. It was a lot of intensity on quarterly profits. It was a Fortune 500 company. But it got to where I didn't enjoy it. And I had always said that I would quit and do something else if it ever got that way. Part of it was me just having done it a long time. And part of it was I just didn't get along with their style very well. So I did it for another couple of years because the money had gotten really good compared to what I had made before.

But then I just walked away. And I was to the point where I don't need any more money and I don't need a hassle. And I've got these other things I'd kind of like to do. I have that safety net of having that nest egg. So let's try to do something more fun. And that's what I've been doing this January of this year. Yeah. So, you know, you mentioned that, yeah, there's things that you wanted to do.

And you kind of noted that you're more of an entrepreneur now in retirement. What kind of things keep you busy? What kind of business businesses you have going on now? Well, I've got four things that I'm doing. OK, that's a lot. Our company, along with 15 other large companies in the state, believe it or not, Arkansas does have some large companies. Walmart's one, but they're not in my group. We're members of a couple of different trade associations that, that one was there to try to maintain the lowest net for large companies as

possible in the state. And one was there to try to keep the lowest electricity rates for people who used a lot of electricity, big companies. And those had kind of run on a volunteer basis, but they had gotten to where the budgets were pretty big. We had a lawyer and we had three or four consultants and we had an administrative aide, but we didn't really have a director. We had had one at times in the past, but we'd gotten along with various companies, loaning people to run those organizations. We had run out of those people. So since I had just decided to retire, I just approached those boards, which I was chairing at the time. I said, look, just give me a flat fee. I named a number that was based on what I made as a salary for about two days a week.

I said, just pay me that for these groups and I'll do that. I enjoy it. It's a lot of fun. And, you know, if I work two days, if I work one day, if I don't work, or if I work seven days a week, just pay me the same thing. And that set that up as my base to work from. And then in addition to that, I do some contract lobbying. I'm a registered lobbyist and I, I did some of that in my former life. I testified before both the Senate and, and, uh, the house in DC on some issues. And, uh, yeah, I've got a few YouTube

things on there and, uh, did a lot of, well, they were pretty harsh. Uh, I was not here as a friendly witness, but, uh, uh, yeah. And also did a lot at the, at Little Rock, our state Capitol. And so I still do some contract lobbying. And then, uh, the latest, which I've just been doing last month and this month is expert witness work for some refinery cases. I'm a licensed professional engineer and still pretty technical. So I've got those four things. Mostly I do the two associations. They provide pretty much our entire living expenses. And then anything I can earn on top of that is just this gravy and just fun.

You know, the expert witness work's been tremendously fun. I mean, who would pay to call yourself an expert? How can that be better? And yeah, and those are all very kind of interesting, you know, side hustles that one wouldn't really think about. So I think that's actually pretty creative of you for doing all those different things. Well, and out of my experience, I didn't have to learn anything to do them. And that was a nice thing. There was not much of a technical risk because I already knew how to do that stuff.

And I know that's hard, but it wasn't an accident. All during my career, I'm a huge believer in this. I volunteered for everything nobody else wanted to do at the company. And that's how I became a lobbyist for the company and how I ended up in D.C. testifying to hostile senators and congressmen. Nobody wanted to do that. But I thought, you know, that would be great if I learn how to do that. And someday when I want to leave the corporate world behind, there's a skill set that I've got that that almost no engineers in the world have. And in the same way, I'm an expert witness. Every time we had a trial, I would volunteer to be a witness for the company.

And I learned how to do that. It's a skill set. You know, it's kind of dangerous to put somebody on the stand that doesn't understand the process. But I'm pretty safe because I've done it, did it half a dozen times for my company. And now, you know, it's but I had at the time that I volunteered for those things at my corporate job, it was in preparation for what I might want to do later. So I'm always thinking ahead. Yeah, I was wondering, did you always have the idea that once you retired, you wouldn't really just retire, so to speak? It would be more just like now I'm going to kind of do my own business, which I find is quite a common kind of idea that lots of early retirees do.

I did. I did. Definitely. But what I particularly didn't want to do something that was going to be a 40 hour a week job where I couldn't schedule. And what I've got now is almost not it's almost a fee per job. And it's not really that related to how much time I spend on it. So I still have, you know, I probably play tennis five times a week. My wife and I are distance runners. We run at least three times a week. We hike. We snow ski.

We fish. We have all the same hobbies, so we spend a lot of recreational time together. And I can schedule my work to where it doesn't interfere with my fun. We just, we have all the same hobbies. So we spend a lot of recreational time together. And I can schedule my work to where it doesn't interfere with my fun. And you mentioned in your email that you've done like several marathons. Like what was the number, 18 or something? 15 so far. 15? I may be retired from those just because I've got a knee that is, it doesn't mind running eight miles, but it's not about 26

miles anymore. Yeah. No kidding. But there, that's again, something that I highly recommend for whether somebody is an entrepreneur or in the corporate world is taking care of yourself physically. Uh, I just started running because I love to play tennis. And I was I was starting to get beat by people that were fitter than me. They weren't better players. And so I thought I'd just take up running. And wow, it ended up I guess I ran a thousand miles a year for the last 20 something years. And and, you know, it's got some nice benefits. I can eat whatever I want and not gain weight. And, you know, I sleep well. I think it's good for you.

Yeah, it is. Yeah. And a lot of camaraderie, all the road trips and the marathons. I never liked running, but it was a lot of fun associating with runners. Absolutely. I should get back into running, actually. Maybe that should be my, my new year's resolution. I try not to like those. I know me too. I like to, I prefer goals instead of resolutions, but that's definitely, I used to run and not that I was by, I never do a

marathon, but the most I've ever done was a 10 kilometer run, but we'll see, we'll see what happens. But so it seems like you, you, you know, you're kind of doing retirement in such a awesome way. I think lots of people think of retirement as, yes, finally I can start, you know, relaxing and enjoying my life. But I think a lot of people are worried that they won't be able to afford it. But so I like how you're, it's not that you, you know, I need to save up so many dollars so I can finally afford to live the life I want. It's like you just, you did that, but then you're also figuring a way to keep that cash flow going, which I think is very important to never kind of have, you know, just now you have cash,

you have to make it work for the next, you know, however many years? Well, there were two things. One is I'm an extremely lazy person. I mean, ridiculously lazy. I know that doesn't sound right with the marathons and the corporate success, but it's a good thing if you're an engineer to be lazy because it drives you to find easier ways to do things. And that's really what you're getting paid for. So it helped my engineering career. But I think I would have been a disaster at the conventional sit on the couch type retirement because I've got to have deadlines. I've got to have a little bit of creative tension in the back of my mind, knowing that I've got stuff I've got to do. Because otherwise, I really could just sit there and watch TV or read books.

And I don't think that would be good for me. So the career I've got, it has, you know, the rate cases and the legislation. There are always deadlines. There's always stuff I need to do. And it's not hanging over me like a big weight, but it's just a little bit of a nudge to, okay, you didn't work yesterday. You better go up there in the office and do some work. And then it's fun too. You know, I didn't have a clue how to really go about this expert witness job until I got into the middle of it. And I kind of liked

that pressure of, oh gosh, you don't want to mess up because you might not get another job in this area. But it ended up being pretty cool. And I was pretty proud of the work product. And we haven't gone to trial yet. So I don't know if we'll win. But so far, it's been been great fun. Right on. That's awesome. So before I go ahead. No, I just want to before I let you go, because I feel like we could talk for a while. I really do want to pick your brain. Because you did kind of mention to me that you followed, you know, kind of, you know, there's like the Dave Ramsey and the Mr. Money Mustache kind of way of doing things. You kind of did that before they were doing that a little bit. You just kind of had the sense of what to do.

What kind of pieces of advice could you give to, you know, listeners right now, maybe people my age that can maybe follow in your footsteps a little bit. Cause I feel like this is kind of, you know, I'm in my thirties now and I feel like I would absolutely love to be where you're at at your age. Well, they are kind of the Dave Ramsey kind of things, even though I'm, I'm three years older than Dave, so he can't claim to have taught me much, but don't buy things on credit other than your house. That's my first piece of advice. You know, if you can't afford a new car with cash, then just get a used car. I mean, if you can, I'm not saying that we were a hundred percent, never bought anything on time, but we were at least 99%. So I think that's pretty big. Second thing is put money in

savings. If you can put 10%, put 10%, but to the point where you can afford it, I would recommend at least 20%. Now, I know some people like Mr. Money Mustache might say you need to save 40% of your income and then you can retire at 40. But again, I'm older than him, and I didn't know that then. But I think 15% to 20% is enough to get most people to financial freedom before they, or by the time they hit 60 anyway. That's mainly it. You know, you want to take advantage of company matches. You don't want to borrow from your retirement plan. You don't want to co-sign. You

don't want to get involved in a lot of student loans. You know, I recommend a vocational college degree if you can get it. And at the cheapest school you can get it from because nobody ever asked me either my grade point or where I got my degree. They just, you know, chemical engineers. Yeah. I don't think that's as important as people think it is, because, yeah, for every job interview, they just kind of want to know my experience. But they never asked me, how well did you do in school? And, oh, you went to this school. They didn't really care. They just want to know I had a degree.

Yeah, yeah. There are some people, investment bankers working up in New York or Vancouver or someplace. It might matter if you'd be an Ivy League school. But it's not that important for most majors. You know, network at work, whether you're an entrepreneur or corporate, that network's priceless. And I learned that early on. Learn, you know, buy a drink for that expert that teaches that seminar you went to. And they'll tell you everything they know. And you'll have a lifetime friend. And so by the time I had been an engineer for 10 years, I knew most of the leading Ph.D. type gurus in the country that had to do with oil.

And they were they're my friends to this day. You know, the ones that I haven't outlived, which is probably half of them. So, yeah, but that's no, that's actually a very good bit of advice. And I think something that my generation kind of doesn't maybe focus on or realize the importance of. And as I've gotten older, I've realized how invaluable it is to create a network like that and getting to know people in your field or doing what you want to do so you can pick their brains. And yeah, like you said, every time I've asked someone for some advice or their opinion, they're more than happy to share it because they want to share their wisdom. Oh, it's fun, yeah. One last one I've got that's a little counterintuitive is giving. Yes, I agree with that for sure.

We've given over 10% of our gross every year that we've married a non-profit charitable a lot of it church some non-church uh and you know you'd think that would kill you because that's a huge amount of money that means that plus what you're saving is more like 30 but i never felt like i missed that money and i felt it gave me a better uh a, a better feel for what money is. Money's not everything. It's not that important. If you give it away, then you're, you're just not as naturally stingy. And I think the older you get, the bigger the tendency is to, if you're not earning as much as you used to, to want to hang on it too tight. But that, that habit that you build of giving more than you're comfortable with giving.

I think that I hate, it sounds trite to say it makes you a better person, but I think it makes you a better person as far as money is concerned. Absolutely. It's not such a one sided thing. Money's not just for you. It should, it could and should be used to help others that are in need and, you know, need a helping hand. Absolutely. I think, yeah, kind of putting that, and I always do that, put some, you know, kind of a little charity category in my budget so I can kind of save up for that. And then, you know, I always, around this time of year, choose a charity or a nonprofit that I want to help out, and then I donate my money to them. That's a great idea.

And sometimes you come across people that you can help either anonymously or just give them a hand. And maybe they don't need much. Maybe $100 makes all the difference in their life at the time. Or just leave an outsized tip for somebody, some waitress or waiter that's having a really rough day. It's actually the most fun I have with money is I think is when you give it than just buying a toy or something. You know, I do like toys.

Absolutely. No, absolutely. And yeah, I think that's a great way to kind of leave the episode on and a very positive note. So thank you, Steve, for joining me and sharing your story. And, you know, thanks so much for reaching out. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Jessica. I had a great time. And that was episode 77 of the Mo Money podcast, another episode in my listener series. If you are a listener, because clearly you are, you're listening to me right now, and you want to be on my show to share your story, it doesn't have to be crazy. It can be big, small, whatever you want. But you just want to share your story. It doesn't have to be crazy. It can be big, small, whatever you want, but you just want to share your story with people listening to this podcast, which I think is so

powerful, important for people to learn from others. That's how I have learned how to manage my money is by learning from how others do it themselves. So if you want to be in my listener series as a guest, all you have to do is email me, jessica at jessicamorehouse.com. Super easy. Or you can go onto my website, jessicamorehouse.com slash contact. And there's a contact form

and you could just fill in your details and it'll shoot me an email directly. So I would love to hear from you. I am starting to get new guests for my upcoming season in 2017. And so there's plenty of slots open. So don't be afraid. I do not buy it and we'll have a bunch of fun. So make sure to shoot me an email. And if you haven't already, I would absolutely love an iTunes review. I think that would be super, super cool. All you have to do is go on the iTunes app or on your desktop and shoot me

a rating review and I will give you a shout out on a future episode. But besides that, I want to say a big thank you again to Steve for taking the time to chat with me and sharing his awesome story. I'm super motivated to, I think, make a game plan for early retirement. I never really thought about it too much. It's always been a dream, not so much a plan, but I think it make a game plan for early retirement. I never really thought about it too much. It's always been a dream, not so much a plan, but I think it might be a plan actually I'm going to put into action. So thanks again for listening and I will see you back here next Wednesday for another fabulous episode of the No Money Podcast. See ya! this podcast is distributed by the women in media podcast network find out more at women in media.network