More Money Podcast - 106 How to Become a Millionaire on an Average Salary - Andrew Hallam, Author of Millionaire Teacher

Starting point is 00:00:00 hello hello hello and welcome to episode 106 i'm your host jessica morehouse welcome to the mo money podcast thank you so much for joining me on this lovely wednesday day for another episode of the show i'm very excited because i uh talked to an author who i love, who wrote a book I literally devoured in a weekend. I'm talking about Andrew Helm, the author of Millionaire Teacher. You may have even heard of the book yourself because it's one of the kind of go-to investing books that isn't dry or boring, but is actually easy to understand and makes a lot of sense and gives you actionable steps on what to do after you read the book. So it kind of gets all you want in an investing book. So I talked to Andrew while he is currently in Dubai. This guy is like, oh, no problem. I'll be in Dubai, but

Starting point is 00:01:00 internet might be spotty, but I could do it. Like what an amazingly nice guy. So we chat about his journey, his book, all these great things. I got to pick his brain. Lots of questions I got to ask him. It was such a treat. So I'm very excited to share this episode with you. But before, I'm very excited also to share some news that I've been keeping secret for the past little while.

Starting point is 00:01:26 I have been secretly working on an event. I threw a similar event back in September. It was called the Millennial Money Meetup, and I really want to do another one very, very soon. But I got kind of busy in the whole quitting my nine to five and starting my own business and all that kind of stuff. But the timing was right. I found a sponsor, Meridian Credit Union, to come on board. Thanks a lot, guys. And they are helping me throw this next event, the second Millennial Money Meetup.

Starting point is 00:01:56 It is going to be taking place in Toronto on Tuesday, May 23rd. And you can find out more information on how to join us on May 23rd. If you just go to millennialmoneymeetup.com. I'll also include some information about it in the link in the show notes. So just go to jessicamorris.com slash 106. But the best part about this event is it is for kind of people of all ages, you don't have to be just a millennial, but is kind of focused on like what millennials are really going through, struggling with, want to know. And so this event that I'm going to be doing is all about housing and buying your first place and what you should know about doing so in this kind of crazy real estate market. So I've got an awesome panel of experts that you can find out more about on the millennial money meetup.com website. And also,

Starting point is 00:02:54 oh, yeah, best part. So not only do you get, you know, a free drink, some fun appies, and get to network with a bunch of awesome money nerds like myself in Toronto. But it's also free. Yeah, free, free, free, free, guys. So you will definitely want to take this opportunity to sign up, grab your ticket before they are all gone because the last event I did sold out in two weeks. That's it.

Starting point is 00:03:20 So time to take in. Make sure to grab your ticket, tell a friend, and we're going to have a lot of fun. So hope to see you there. I'll stop yabbering. Let's get to that interview with Andrew. Okay. Thanks, Andrew, for joining me on the Mo Money Podcast. And you're currently in Dubai, so thanks for making the time for me. I'm in a really super hot spot right now. Yeah. Is it really hot? It's hot, yeah. It's 32 degrees Celsius today. And they actually get, I wasn't aware of this,

Starting point is 00:03:54 but they do get a bit of a winter. And their winter is a bit like a British Columbia summer. Oh, yeah. So I was here before and I arrived here in January and it was really, really nice then, but it's starting to get a bit hot now. So are you currently on the travel kind of thing? So I read that you are now retired. So now are you just kind of enjoying your retirement and traveling the world?

Starting point is 00:04:22 Yes and no. So I still do some writing. I still do some writing I still do some writing but I love I don't think I'll ever do nothing yeah I think that's I think that's one of the things that people people often if they really want to get a lot out of their life they've got to have a degree of purpose that you can only get up and like have massages and lay in hammocks for so long before wanting to actually do something so but we are my wife and I are trying to travel as much as we can we're like travel addicts we're like total junkies and we always have been and so I guess what financial independence has done for us is it's allowed us to see much more of the world and we're not like country counters we've

Starting point is 00:05:03 never really been country counters i know there are a lot of people who will say oh you know i did france and i did italy and i i mean i shoot to do a country almost implies that you've like turned it inside out yeah exactly looked under every rock and um so we're not country counters but the other day we were thinking about that going oh geez you know probably been to like 80 countries wow which yeah that's a lot but we're having a lot of fun so since january i've been traveling around my wife and i've been traveling around talking at different international schools and businesses about saving money for their retirement and how to invest in low cost index funds. And so we were in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Kuwait. We went to Egypt.

Starting point is 00:05:57 We went to Oman, which is amazing. Then we went to down to Africa, went to Tanzania, Ethiopia, and we just came back from Kenya. Wow. That sounds like a nice kind of killing two birds with one stone, like traveling around and seeing all these amazing places, but also doing some good in each place by educating people about finance. It can be a really nice balance when you work it the right right way so we uh we also went to jordan which was incredible so we went to petra and and that was just gorgeous just so awe-inspiring um and so spoke there and then went and saw the sort of the ancient um the monasteries and the ancient it's like it's like everything is kind of carved into these sandstone cliffs. And so they carved their temples into sandstone cliffs.

Starting point is 00:06:52 I don't know if you've ever seen it before, but it's just phenomenal. No, that sounds amazing. You're definitely giving me kind of like, I don't know. I want to go traveling right now. I want to start looking at flights. There you go. You can do it. You can start talking about money all over the world. Oh, that would be the dream. That would be living

Starting point is 00:07:09 the dream to me for sure. But before you started this kind of travel educational journey of yours that you're currently on, I know you're originally from Canada, but have been living abroad for a number of years. Where are you originally from in Canada? I grew up in Kamloops, British Columbia. Oh, I didn't know you're from BC. That's awesome. I'm from BC too. From BC.

Starting point is 00:07:32 Yeah. You're from BC. I am from BC. Yeah, I used to live in Vancouver. Oh, I remember seeing that on your website. Yeah. That's right. I know. I miss it.

Starting point is 00:07:41 Just outside Vancouver. It's beautiful there. But I've been to Kamloops a number of times. I loved it there too. It was a good place to grow up. I grew up there and then I went to UVic and my family moved down to Victoria. And I ended up getting my first teaching job on Vancouver Island in Comox, British Columbia. And so I taught middle school English, social studies, fitness there.

Starting point is 00:08:03 And then I taught at a high school called GP Van Utes in Courtney. And that was great. I took a deferred salary leave when I was 32, and I traveled around the world for a year. And while I was doing that, a job came up in Singapore. So one of the guys that I knew who I worked with in Canada got a job as a vice principal at Singapore American School. And he said, this place is amazing. You've got to apply for this job. And so I did that. And I worked there for 12 years. Wow, that's a long time. I guess you liked it. It was a great place to live. Yeah, it was fantastic because of what was surrounding the place. It was just such a

Starting point is 00:08:46 cultural smorgasbord just outside Singapore itself. So Singapore is a city-state. It's quite small. There are 5 million people that live there. It's only 42 kilometers long and 24 kilometers wide. Yet they've done such an amazing job planning the city that about 45% of the land mass is completely undeveloped jungle. Wow. That's incredible. Wow. And then of course, outside there we would have Indonesia. So we'd take holidays in Indonesia or to Malaysia. Um, a weekend flight to Thailand would sometimes cost like just over a hundred bucks. And you could sort of finish work on a Friday and then you could be having a late night dinner, late night, like 7 p.m. dinner in Phuket. Wow. Yeah, that's so yeah, it was an amazing place.

Starting point is 00:09:43 Yeah, that sounds yeah again living my dream a little bit um so at what point so you were an english teacher yeah so i taught it i taught at an american school so in in singapore we really they have four official languages and the only one that everybody understands is English. So, um, this particular school that was for expatriates. And so it was based on an American curriculum and there were 4,000 kids and they represented 56 different nationalities. Wow. That's crazy. And so I'm just curious, uh, at what point did kind of personal finance come into the play? Cause I know then that kind of became the thing that you were known for and that you started teaching the students.

Starting point is 00:10:30 Well, that would have been when I was 19 and I ended up meeting, as I mentioned in my book, I met a mechanic who was a millionaire while I was doing a summer job to pay for my college expenses. Yes, I love that story. I went and read it in the book. I'm like, that's very kind of nostalgic feeling. And it almost seems like a fake story because it's like, how many mechanic millionaires are out there? I've never heard of any. Yeah, well, no, this guy was real.

Starting point is 00:10:55 I worked with Russ Perry and that was his name. He was the mechanic down at BC Transit in Victoria. And what... But he said... Yeah, sorry, go on. He says something really inspiring to me in the beginning. He said, you know, you can do what you want to do and you can be passionate about a job. You don't have to choose a job just because it ends up paying you a lot of money. So he said, as a teacher, you're going to have a middle-class salary, but you can still end up

Starting point is 00:11:20 building wealth if you become financially literate. And he was quite funny too. And, and judgmental at the same time, he says, most people are financial fools. I'll use the word, I'll use the word fools. He was very blunt about it. He said, you don't learn this stuff in school. And most people are just complete knuckleheads when it comes to money, but you'll have such an advantage if you get it together at a young age. And so he did, and he inspired me to do that, and that's what I ended up doing. And then, so while I was teaching, I also started writing. So I was writing articles for Money Sense Magazine, because I got right into the reading. So I ended up reading more than 450 books on personal finance by the time I was in my early 30s, mid 30s. I was just a crazy reader of personal finance. I'd love to write about it. So yeah, that was my beginning for that. And then it just kept going. When I was in Singapore,

Starting point is 00:12:19 I recognized that most of my friends had no, they weren't contributing to a defined benefit pension scheme the American ones weren't contributing to social security so they were completely on their own like they're not contributing to Canada pension none of that so you know when they come home they're not going to be able to benefit from the same kind or at least they won't be able to benefit to the same degree with respect to social benefit platforms because they've left behind. They've sort of left their home countries behind. So they were investing often poorly, not saving enough money.

Starting point is 00:12:57 So I was doing my best to encourage them. And then I was buying the books. I'd go down to the bookstore and I'd spent thousands of dollars on personal finance books. And I just gift them out to people. I just felt like I had to show them something, teach them something. Absolutely. No, I totally agree. It's almost astounding how little people know about money when it's something that we deal with on the daily.

Starting point is 00:13:24 And obviously you're very passionate about educating people. And that's kind of why I got into personal finance, too. It's when I realized, you know, kind of like, when you realize from that mechanic who said it doesn't really matter, you know, if you're in a middle class salary, you can amass wealth, if you're smart with your money. That's exactly why I got into it, too. And it's, yeah, it's pretty incredible just when you kind of just do a couple different things. And we'll talk a little bit more about, you know, why you're so passionate about telling people about index funds, how it could really, you know, change the game for you in life. So I would like to talk a little bit about that,

Starting point is 00:14:02 because that is kind of like the core of your book. And I was just rereading some of it last night. And I remember coming downstairs to tell my husband, I'm like, Josh, like we need to get, we need to move some of your money because he does still have some money in mutual funds and it's just doing nothing. And I'm like, we need to get on this like tomorrow. This is crazy. And this is, you know, a sentiment across the board, I feel from other, you know, personal finance bloggers and other people I know, that index funds really is kind of a no brainer. So why do you think, like, most people aren't doing it? Like, that's the thing that just frustrated me when I was reading your book. I'm like, this is amazing. Why isn't anyone following suit? Like, why isn't anyone doing it? Well, I think most people get their

Starting point is 00:14:45 financial advice from financial service companies. That's where they get their financial education. And so they walk into the Royal Bank of Canada, or they walk into investors group. And these are the people that know about investing. And so these are the people who, if they do bring up the index fund concept, they try their best to talk them out of it. No, that's true. And that is true. Because I think when I started kind of learning more about index fund investing, I did talk to our old financial advisor and brought it up. And he did not seem super keen. I'll tell you that. I feel like he basically brushed the conversation away and then went to be like, but this mutual fund has such a great 10-year history. Yeah, that's funny. And that's often the kiss of death. I mean, funds that have done well in the past rarely do well in the future. So there's something that Spiva comes up with every

Starting point is 00:15:36 six months called the Spiva Persistence Scorecard. And you've got to check it out because it's really quite funny. They'll look at the best performing funds within say a five-year period and they'll look at all right which funds were in the top 25 and then they'll go two years on to see how many of those still maintain their winning ways just a couple of years later and it's such a crazy crazy small percentage of them it's typically between two and six percent to continue their winning. And then if we add on another couple of years, we have a whole new set of funds that end up winning funds. And so a lot of investors just chase their own tails chasing winning funds. One of the best strategies of all is to build a diversified portfolio of low-cost index funds and rebalance it once a year. Like, do you think that like one of the issues with people when it comes to investing is they don't really think of index fund investing as like the way to go because it

Starting point is 00:16:30 seems too simple, like kind of how it is, is yeah, be diversified and then just kind of don't touch it. And I think, do you think people like that's their main issues? Like they just can't help themselves? Yeah, perhaps. I mean, if they didn't, if they don't know enough and they don't read enough and then they're easily talked out of it if that's the case yeah because it just yeah like just again reading your book i'm just like this is such a kind of no-brainer i just don't understand why yeah lots of people yeah it could just be that they just don't know and like you said a lot of how people understand money or know anything about it is they kind of look to their financial advisors as their educators. But at the end of the day, most of them are salespeople.

Starting point is 00:17:11 And I think that's a big issue that's going on right now. People are kind of realizing, oh, wait a minute. Maybe that person doesn't have my best interests at heart. Yeah, that's true. And something Dan Bartolotti told me, which was really interesting, too, he says it's not really part of their training. So, you know, Dan went from writing and now he's a financial advisor with PWL Capital, how to build a diversified portfolio with index funds. It wasn't actually part of the training, which you find quite mind-boggling. And I've spoken to some certified financial planners who've told me much the same thing and confirmed that.

Starting point is 00:17:57 So another fascinating aspect. I think they typically learn about it on their own, but they learn that they can't necessarily get a big free lunch when they put their clients in index funds versus the trailer fees and commissions they can make with actively managed products. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of, it's frustrating because, you know, it is better for the customer to, you know, for them to go into that option. But yeah, if it doesn't make them money, then why would they push it? And I think that's kind of most people's experience, why they probably never even heard of this type of investing from their advisors, because well, why would they? Because either, yeah, their advisor doesn't know, or they don't see much

Starting point is 00:18:36 benefit for them, which is just super frustrating. Yeah, I mentioned in my book, which is I did something quite kind of fun for me was I sent four or five millennials into banks asking the advisors to build them portfolio of index funds. And it was really quite funny what ended up happening. They recorded the conversations either on their iPhone or one went in with a pen and paper. And then they came back and, of course, shared with me what the advisors had said. And in every single case, of course, the banks all have their in-house brand of index funds. TD has them. RBC has them. CIBC has them.

Starting point is 00:19:13 And they're expensive for index funds. But on aggregate, they outperform the banks' actively managed products. So an entire portfolio of them outperforms typically the portfolio of actively managed funds from the same banks. So I did write a series of articles for the Global Mail that actually described that. But sending people into the banks was really funny. Just what really did show is a shocking lack of education on the part of the banks. Yeah, it's kind of mind-boggling. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings.

Starting point is 00:19:51 Try it today and get up to $75 in PC optimum points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. I'd like to, I have like a couple questions for you. So you do definitely drive home the message in the book, the importance of starting as soon as possible, which is, you know, kind of in every personal finance book, which is, again, an easy concept. But I think lots of people don't do it because maybe they're like, well, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to do it. I don't know. You know, I don't know. And so they just don't. And they delay, delay, delay until it's like, oh, wait, five years have gone by. And that's five years you could have, you know, taken advantage of. But what I always kind of get asked is, you know, okay, say I'm a bit older, maybe I'm in my 30s or 40s. Is it too late? Or obviously, there's a downside from investing later on. But say you're like 10 years away from retirement, and you have all your, you know, investments in mutual funds, is it still worth it to switch over to index fund investing? Well, it most definitely is. And here's why it's a lot of people will think, okay, well, let's say they're 55 and they plan to retire when they're 62. So they say, really? I mean,

Starting point is 00:21:03 seven years, is it really worth it yeah but the issue here isn't how long you're actually going to be working that person who's 55 doesn't have a seven year duration of investing that person who's 55 has potentially a 30 plus year 30 plus years left investing and that's because your money needs to last well beyond the date of your retirement. So when you retire, you're going to be withdrawing pieces of that portfolio literally until the day you die, because you need that to cover costs of living. So someone who's 50, yeah, they could have 35 years left in the markets. Now, that's definitely, I think, yeah, a good way of thinking it that I think lots of people don't really think about. They just kind of think, well, retirement that

Starting point is 00:21:51 like, I don't know what they're thinking, but I think they kind of almost do have this idea that they'll just like cash out everything and then it'll be in a bank account that they slowly drip from. But so, yeah, I like that answer. It's never too late because retirement isn't like, okay, that's it for you. Yeah, retirement is just another chapter. And it can be, you know, people are living longer. Many people are going to end up living a lot longer than they may want to live. But people are living longer. They're healthier when they're older.

Starting point is 00:22:22 And I'm sure you've seen it too, Jessica, where you'll see people in their 60s and 70s who are out running marathons, cross-country skiing, and putting most 20-year-olds to shame. Oh, absolutely. Wow. That person's really 70. Wow. I know. Those people put me to shame, that's for sure. No, we want to be those people, don't we? Yeah, I do want to be that person. I do, for sure. One thing that I also remember hearing was, although you know your stuff when it comes to investments, you have made some mistakes in the past,

Starting point is 00:23:01 which you obviously learned from. Did you want to share some of the investment mistakes you've made in the past that may you obviously learned from. Did you want to share some of the investment mistakes you've made in the past that may be helpful for people to learn from? Well, I guess the most common was starting off with actively managed funds, but I was able to get out of that at a fairly young age. But the one you may be looking at would be the Ponzi scheme that I got into. I know. And you know what? I think it's not anything to be ashamed of because I feel like

Starting point is 00:23:30 there's so many people that probably have done the exact same thing and they just, it seems like kind of simple, like how, uh, I heard you describe it was, it just seems like kind of, you know, this person, you know, your friend or whatever was making this incredible return. And he did a year over year. And after a certain, you know, point, you're just like, well, I need to get into this because it seems like it's the real deal. It was about eight years, Jessica. This guy was like, how can you not kind of drink the Kool-Aid after eight years? Right.

Starting point is 00:24:01 And so every year, I mean, every year, first year he got into it i'm saying you know what no this is too good to be true this isn't going to work um this is this is not cool this 54 percent that you earned you haven't really earned it because yeah he still has your initial capital then in the second year okay he'd earned another 54 so he'd earn his his money back the third year this guy's using the money traveling the globe fourth year fifth year anyway and along the way i ended up meeting the the founder of this company and so i was just curious and my friend wanted me to meet him and ask him some tough questions and i did and i was fascinated by the whole thing and i don't know whether it started off as a ponzi

Starting point is 00:24:40 scheme or whether it was just a really bad investment model that sort of got the guy end up getting into some trouble. But clearly, towards the end, clearly, he was taking new investors money to pay out interest for old investors. So it did sort of disintegrate into a Ponzi. And yeah, after about seven years of watching my friend earn 54% a year, I thought I'm gonna tip my toe in this water. And the moment I did, the money disappeared. So I'm so glad that I put a ton of money in it. I think I might have invested something like seven grand, but still seven grand. It kind of hurts to give somebody seven grand and have that disappear. Yeah, that's your hard earned money. It's annoying.

Starting point is 00:25:22 And the irony of the whole thing is I probably did more due diligence than any of the other investors. But still, I mean, here's the bottom line. If it sounds too good to be true, it definitely is. And I need to hammer that into my head more thoroughly than I did, obviously. Yeah. And I guess that's another thing I wanted to chat about is lots of people think that in order to kind of get the highest returns, you always hear about somebody who made a ton from the stock market. My husband, for instance, has friends. He's like, oh, I invested in this and man, I made a killing. And so he's like, oh, is this something I should look into? What are your kind of thoughts on just buying

Starting point is 00:25:59 individual stocks? Well, most of the time when you're buying an individual stock, of course, you're purchasing that share or those shares off an institutional trader, somebody on the other end of that trade. And while you might do well for a while, the odds are that over an investment lifetime, you're probably not going to come close to beating an index. So you might do well for a while, knock the lights out, start thinking that you're really good at it. And then after about 13 or 14 years, even if you've done well for 13 or 14 years, it's still a blip in terms of your investment duration, so your lifetime of investing. And of course, we know that most professional investors

Starting point is 00:26:40 underperform the stock market index, they're at it they're at it they're at it full-time it's their full-time job so to think of course i ended up building portfolios of individual stocks as well that's sort of the beginning of my investment and i did well with it but i was able to separate i had to separate my my pride from the whole thing and say okay look you've been doing this for, what, 12 years, 10, 12 years. That's a blip. You've done well with it, but there are people way smarter than you, way smarter than me, of course, who have underperformed the market, who did really well, perhaps beat the S&P 500 with a mutual fund for many, many years, and then got completely

Starting point is 00:27:21 shellacked and ended up giving it all back. And so I did make a conscious decision when I thought, you know what, Andrew, you're not smarter than Bill Miller who beat the S&P 500 15 years in a row until he got a beatdown. You've got to figure out where the highest statistical odds of success are. And quite frankly, it's just with a portfolio of low cost index funds and then getting on with your life. Money investing is not meant to be exciting. If it's exciting, doing the wrong thing. Yeah, that's another thing I kind of got from your book that, you know, the reason lots of people probably aren't making as much as they are is because

Starting point is 00:28:00 the exciting products are the ones that cost you the most. Like those actively managed things. Yeah, you get the sales pitch. Like, wow, that sounds amazing. Yeah, sign me up. And expense are kind of boring, but they're effective. They are very effective. Yeah. So I know you updated your book because it originally came out in, I believe, 2011. And so this is the updated version because, I mean, the financial industry, it does evolve and it's changed quite a bit since that time. What are some of the things that you added into the book that you want people to really get that they didn't get from the first version? Well, they're the robo advisory firms that have come to light since 2011. And that that's, I think, going to completely revolutionize the industry, especially with

Starting point is 00:28:46 millennials that are tech savvy. They're going to recognize that they don't want to be paying the same as their parents and grandparents are paying. They're recognizing that, you know what, more and more people, thanks to blogs like yours, and thanks, of course, to the Global Mail and Dan Bordelotti's Couch Potato Portfolio. And then, of course, the Plethora of books that have been published on the subject. They're recognizing that the less they pay in investment fees, the more money they're going to make. And so these robo-advisory firms have really come forth to fill that niche. And it's great to see that. So I was able to profile that.

Starting point is 00:29:17 And then, of course, when I wrote the book in 2011, Vanguard Canada hadn't introduced their low-cost ETFs to the Canadian market. And once they did, just by virtue of being there, they ended up raising or rather lowering the bar in terms of costs. And then the other financial service companies started lowering the costs on their exchange-traded funds like iShares, like BMO. And that was just great for the retail investors. So I was able to go through those processes with people as well when I described and updated the book. Yeah. No, RoboAdvisors is something that I think still it's very new to people who are, you know,

Starting point is 00:29:56 kind of at the beginning of their personal finance journey. But as a millennial, they're awesome. Like, they're very exciting to me. It's like, wow, there's another way better option out there. I don't actually have to go see some guy in a suit at the bank. Hey, I'm going to ask you this question. Do some of your friends lease cars? No. I mean, I live in the city, so there's not a lot of people that own cars. Everyone kind of bikes around.

Starting point is 00:30:21 And it could just be the people I hang out with are pretty frugal. But I did really like that section of your book talking about cars, because there was a time where my husband was considering he'd always get used cars. But then, you know, they last like a year or two, and then they break down, he'd have to kind of, you know, get another one. And he was, you know, just kind of sick of the whole, you know, you know, every two years getting a new used car. And so we decided to get a new new one but there was a point where he was considering should i lease or should i buy and uh at the time i was starting to get into personal finance i'm like it's always better to buy if you're gonna buy and then i went to the dealership with him to make sure that the guy wasn't gonna oversell

Starting point is 00:30:58 him on crap that he didn't need um and so he got kind of like the cheapest but still like well uh you know working it was still a good car it was a high-end day uh car and i mean i think he's had that for about eight or seven years now and it's never had a problem and it didn't cost him too much money so i know you have your your um you know thoughts on leasing and also buying, which I really liked the part where you talked about buying used cars, and then yeah, having them for a few years, and then selling them for like, basically what you bought them for. That seems like a lot of work, though. But I guess it is worth it if you're saving that much money down the road. Yeah, you know, it really wasn't after a while it was it was fun, because what I did was I would

Starting point is 00:31:43 just be looking at sort of classifieds or you could be looking online as I was eating my breakfast and I was looking to see if anybody did anything or was willing to do anything silly like sell a car with really low mileage at a very very reasonable rate and if I did see something like that as I was just eating my breakfast cereal I gave him a call and I went over there and if it was an absolute gem, then I ended up buying it. So it didn't take a lot of work. It was just scanning through the classifieds was just my form of entertainment while I was eating cereal. And how long did you kind of do that cycle of buying used cars and then selling them

Starting point is 00:32:22 after a few years? I probably did it probably about 10 years, probably a little less than that. But it wasn't, I didn't really think about it as, oh, I'm trying to make money. I was just, you know, this car, it is a car, it's better than mine. And there's someone selling it for about the same as what I think I could get my car for. So shoot, why don't I buy it and then sell my car so yeah i was able to do that a little bit i thought about you know what it's funny because what russ told me the mechanic yeah he said you know what kind of a fun game is to see if you could take like it would take a while but he said see if you could take something like a three thousand dollar toyota and say i'm going to spend three grand on a toyota hopefully i'm going to buy one that somebody is selling it at a silly price low mileage vehicle or five thousand bucks and

Starting point is 00:33:13 over the years trade up until you have like a bmw just for kicks so that you could go yeah i traded it would just be a fun little game to play if you had a little bit of time and I thought he brought that up years ago and I thought yeah that would be kind of fun you'd have to like it though I mean you have the kind of thing that you actually enjoy doing in your in your free time yeah absolutely were you able to do that did you ever try no I never tried that I I didn't. And none of my cars were really worth a lot of money. So I think the most valuable car I had was probably worth like 5,000 bucks. I think it must be a lot of it too, is a lot of people that buy cars, they associate it with, you know, status, or they, you know, it's very personal to them. So I think, and that's, you know,

Starting point is 00:34:05 kind of just a big lesson in personal finance, a lot of people kind of make kind of money mistakes, because they they put it, or they just put too much personal on it, you know, they take it too personally, they're too attached to whatever object it is. And same with cars, whereas I think a lot of people probably wouldn't even try to do what you did because they're like, but I like my car or, you know, my car is this and I'd only drive these types of cars and stuff like that. I think that's kind of an issue that lots of people deal with. I think that kind of status or at least the pursuit of it can be like a ball and chain. I think the ultimate status, if that's what you're seeking, is a status that you measure internally just for you. And freedom and having the time to spend, having the freedom, the financial

Starting point is 00:34:52 ability to spend a lot of time with the people you love and do things that you enjoy and having wonderful experiences. I think those are things that are really worth pursuing when you look at studies done on happiness. Happiness doesn't come from the acquisition of material things at all. It comes from experiences and it comes from time spent with people we love and respect. And there's another part of your book that I really identified with was when you talked about the kind of beginning of your teaching career, how frugally you lived, and some people mistook you, like some of your co-workers mistook you for just like broke and down on his luck. But really, you were just like saving an incredible percentage of your

Starting point is 00:35:35 income. I know you probably don't live like that anymore. But it does seem like you definitely value kind of this, you know, it's sort of kind of become a little bit more trendy or popular, this kind of concept of minimalism and, you know, living below your means and frugality. It's almost like a virtue. Do you kind of still ascribe to that way of thinking? Like, you know, I think a lot of people think when you're, you say you're a millionaire, they think, oh, you must be able to spend freely and just, you know, get all the stuff now. But really, it's not about that. No, that's what happens to a lot of lottery winners, right? Yeah, they're instant millionaires, and they spend freely, and they don't have the financial muscles to keep the money or to grow it. So they end up typically broke five years later.

Starting point is 00:36:18 And a lot of sports athletes do are much the same, much the same thing. But I do spend more for sure than I ever did. But I don't spend it on material things because I've noticed that. I've noticed that they don't really give me added levels of contentment. They don't typically make me any happier. And when I look at studies on it, too, I find it quite fascinating that there's a study in Germany that was done on how satisfied people were on their drive to work or the last time they drove their car. And they found that it didn't seem to matter whether someone had a Mercedes, BMW, or a secondhand Honda. The driving experience ends up

Starting point is 00:36:58 typically being reported as the same in terms of their level of happiness. Now, of course, when you first get a new car, you're happy. But after a while, it's just a car. But the nice thing about spending money on experiences and spending money on travel, and that's where we really splash out, is just seeing as much of the world as we can and meeting as many people as we can, is that these things, when we do look at studies, and again, the studies show that it's experiences and it's actually doing things over material things. So I wish other people could understand that too, people that are constantly pursuing material

Starting point is 00:37:33 things that they can't specifically or they can't typically afford. If they're borrowing money to buy them and they're putting themselves into debt, which adds misery, and then the acquisition of those items themselves doesn't actually add further levels of contentment. Yeah, no, I am totally on that wavelength. I've always lived fairly frugally, just because, you know, I either just wanted to build my wealth and feel that kind of security with, you know, money and investments and in the bank and everything like that. But when I do do spend money it's mainly on experiences because i feel like those kind of can last you know years and whereas whenever i buy something it's you know fun for a minute and then it's done and you kind

Starting point is 00:38:14 of forget about it it's like well what's the point yeah intuitively we know like when we have to really sit down and think about which we would prefer experiences or material things intuitively, we know, but for some strange reason, um, we chase this odd sugar fix. At least many people do. Absolutely. Um, before I wrap up and let you go, cause I know you're busy and have Dubai to explore, which I'm very jealous of. Um, what would be one or two takeaways that you really want people to get from your book,

Starting point is 00:38:45 which I'm now going to tell everyone to read? Well, I would say first and foremost, keep the investment costs as low as possible, but save your money and invest it. And I think that's a really big thing. It doesn't really matter. There are a lot of people who get really, really particular about, you know, I've got this low cost exchangeed fund, but this one's a little bit cheaper, so I'm going to get into that. They spend so much time worrying about that. But I think the bottom line is you've got to save, and you've got to save a fair amount, and you've got to get that money working for you because once it works for you, you have to work less in the long run. So I think that's a really big takeaway. And, and I was so fortunate that the life that that mechanic said I could end up living the life that

Starting point is 00:39:31 I'm living now. So I love getting out there, especially with young talking to young people and saying, this is so, so doable. You really, really got to do this because it's so darn rewarding. No, and that's, I think why a lot of people are drawn to your story this because it's so darn rewarding. No, and that's, I think, why a lot of people are drawn to your story, because it's not some glamorous, oh, I did this, you know, get rich quick. It's very sensible. It's very realistic. It doesn't seem like it's like, yeah, it's like you were able to do it. Why couldn't I? And it's true. It's like anyone could do it if they just kind of follow your game plan in your book. It's nothing that hasn't been kind of talked or written about before, but you kind of just explain in a way that's very

Starting point is 00:40:09 easy to understand and digestible. And, you know, you kind of feel like after reading it, oh, I can do this and I know how to do this. And I think that's the important thing too. A lot of financial books are just hard to kind of really comprehend. Well, thank you. You're welcome. So thank you, Andrew, for taking the time out of your travels to speak with me. I'm very glad you did. And thanks again for sending me that photo of the giraffe. That was a big, that made my day, I'll tell you. That made me laugh so hard. Well, I got headbuted by the giraffe. Yes, that was the best. That was lovely.

Starting point is 00:40:46 You weren't able to, you weren't able to see the contact there, but you were able to see my face and the expression on the giraffe. It was amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks, Jessica. And that was episode 106 with Andrew Helm,

Starting point is 00:41:01 the author of Millionaire Teacher. You can learn more about him and his books at andrewhelm.com. And I highly recommend you do because honestly, I don't say this a ton because I read a lot of personal finance books. I get sent a ton of books to read, and there's not a ton that get me as excited as I was after I put down or even was like 20 pages in to Millionaire Teachers. So if you are in the market to find a really awesome, inspiring, motivating personal finance book that will get you excited to really tackle your money and your investment specifically, I highly recommend you grabbing a copy of his book, Millionaire Teacher. And of course, visit the show notes, jessicamorris.com slash 106.

Starting point is 00:41:49 I'm going to put some more information about Andrew, his book, his teachings, some important links so you can learn more. jessicamorris.com slash 106 to find out all of that stuff. So before I let you go, I, you know, mentioned at the beginning of this episode that I am doing an event and I just kind of want to tell you again in case you forgot because I'm really excited. But also tickets are limited because it is a free event. So I want to make sure you take advantage of this time while you got it.

Starting point is 00:42:21 So I'm hosting another Millennial money meetup as I call it. I did my first event back in September of 2016 and it was a smash success if I do say so myself. We sold out in a matter of weeks. We had over 140 people attend and it was freaking awesome. We had a panel discussion about kind of general personal finance but this event, the one that is going to be taking place May 23rd, 2017 in Toronto, will be more focused around homeownership, housing, mortgages, the real estate market, all that fun stuff. So you will not want to miss this if this is kind of something you've been thinking about, you want to learn more about, you know, buying a place, it's kind of going to be the most expensive thing you probably buy in your lifetime. So you want to be informed. I'm so glad I did my research before buying my first place and not buying several other places I looked at because I was an informed shopper. So

Starting point is 00:43:16 I highly recommend you go to millennialmoneymeetup.com to learn more about this specific event and register before you know every ticket is taken because again it's free we got some free drinks free appies we've got a contest giveaway lots of really great stuff so make sure to check it out and sign up and I hope to see you there all right I will see you back here next Wednesday for another episode of the Mo Money Podcast. This podcast is distributed by the Women in Media Podcast Network. Find out more at womeninmedia.network.

More Money Podcast - 106 How to Become a Millionaire on an Average Salary - Andrew Hallam, Author of Millionaire Teacher

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