The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast MathCelebrity.com CEO Don Sevcik

Episode Date: May 18, 2019

MathCelebrity.com CEO Don Sevcik

Hi, I'm Chris Voss here from thechrissvossshow.com, thechrissvossshow.com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to go to youtube.com, Fortuna's Chris Voss, hit that bell notification button, and tell your friends to do it. Just grab your friends and say, hey, you need to subscribe to the Chris Voss Show podcast. But don't grab them too hard. Grab them in a loving way.

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And today I have on the show, very interesting gentleman. He's the CEO of math celebrity.com and it's Don Sebsik. And he's, and has basically made a website that's an automated online math tutor. This can help you and your kids get smarter with math. He's got over 3.5 million unique visitors that he came into his website in 2018 without spending even a dime on traffic. Holy crap, we're going to learn

a lot from this gentleman. He was a top 100 homeschool website in 2016. He's written two books, both on Amazon, One Second Math, Homework Help On Demand, and Free Traffic Frenzy, How to Get 450,000 Website Visitors. Holy crap. He's also the host of the College Prep Confidential Podcast. We have some fellow podcasters on the show. Welcome to the show, Don. How are you doing, bud? Good, Chris. Great to be here. Good, good, good, good. And everyone can find your website if they want to look at it. They can go to massdelivery.com right now. Don, tell us what brought you here and how you developed this website or what got you to be who you are. Back in 2007, I wanted to make a little extra money outside of my day job. So what I did is I

started tutoring a few students in my neighborhood for math. So one student turned into two, two students turned into four, but I eventually ran out of time and I couldn't give up my day job. So what I did is I went back to the drawing board and I said, how can I serve these people, but almost extend myself? So I'm at work one day building boring spreadsheets for some teammates. And we had to teach a few people overseas about American pension plans. Anyway, as I'm building the formulas, I built the math into the formulas. So when these people typed in the information to learn pension plans, the math behind the numbers would show. And so I'm sitting in my cube job and I said, oh, there's the light bulb went off. Why don't I build

math tutoring on a website? Why don't I take everything I know and put it on a website? So in July of 2007, we launched the website, probably one of the ugliest websites you've ever seen. It took a while to get some traffic. We had one or two visitors the first few months. I tried to promote it. After three or four years, we started to get more visitors, and eventually it became 200,000 visitors a month. And then in 2016, we finally started cracking 400,000 visitors a month. So the premise behind the website is simple. You enter your math problem or your search term, you press the button, and in one third of one second, we'll show you the step-by-step solution

behind that problem. That's pretty awesome. I'm looking at the website too. I entered two plus two because I'm that bad at math. I have to reference a website. And it asks me several things that I want to take and do. I can add the two numbers using a traditional method or carrying. I can rewrite the sum using distributive property or factoring out the GCF. I think I had brain hemorrhage trying to figure out what that means. Clearly, I flunk math in public school. Add the two numbers of partial sums.

Add the two numbers using number bonds. Estimate the sum, common core, and take the sum to all-inclusive numbers between 2 and 2. I just learned something today. There's more ways to add up 2 plus 2. Yeah, one of the things we built in for parents, they came to me a couple years ago, and they were really struggling with this new math. Also, you might know it as common core.

So over the summer, I worked with five or six parents because they learned how we learned, right? So they know the traditional math. But they were asking me, Don, is there a way to show me how to understand this Common Core math? Because one of the stories I heard was pretty powerful. There was a straight A student in fifth grade. She aced every math class. but as soon as she had to learn common core, she was getting her answers marked wrong. Now, mind you, she got the answer right doing it the way you and I and my parents have learned, but because she didn't use the common core methodology, the teacher flunked her. Oh my God. So they were forcing her to write the formula out in that

format? Right. And so this girl who was formerly a straight-A student is coming home in tears, right? Oh, that ruins your self-esteem. That ruins, yeah, that ruins schooling for you. Oh, yeah. So it was breaking her confidence. And that's how the whole Common Core piece on my site got started. So the premise is simple. If there's a way to use Common Core, I'll show you the way you and I learned called traditional,

and then I'll show you the Common Core way so mom and dad and the kids can kind of toggle back and forth. Well, this is great because what a lot of parents have a problem with is when they try and help their kids with math or math homework they're as lost as their children are you know it's like hey mom can you help me with my algebra oh geez I think I barely flunked I think I flunked like algebra and whatever they were forcing me to take and I

think I barely made that basic math but I just hated the the formulaic sort of you know it's like the why of why I needed to do this and stuff. So you guys are really popular with the homeschool audience and group. Yeah, we went to a couple of conferences in 2015 and 16. So California, Chicago, Baltimore, and then Connecticut. And we got a really good reception from the homeschool folks. So we've still stayed in contact with that audience. Like you said at the beginning of the

show, we won the 2016 Top 100 Award. And the homeschool parents appreciate what we're trying to do because for them, it's more about learning and less about, as you see in the public school system, rigid testing. So that relationship has been very good for us. And being able to learn in several different ways. I mean, like I said, I just put two plus two into your inner math problem, search an algorithm, algorithm, and you give me one, two, three, four, like six different variations I can take and do this. So this is incredibly helpful if I'm trying to help my kids with math or if i'm trying to do math myself um you know

it's really hard both my mom and my sister were teachers uh for 20 plus years and it you know some kids brains work one way some kids brains work the other way and a lot of times with education they try and force you like you have to do it this way. Like I've seen, I guess it's called that new math or common core. I've seen the way that's done. And that just makes me mental just watching the whole formula. But I guess, I guess you've got it when in Rome, you've got to play the game with the, with the education system to be able to complete your math homework and get your grades. Yeah, and a big thing, and one of the hidden benefits of our site, which parents have told me about before, which goes along the lines of Common Core is, you know, mom and dad may have had

math years ago, but they want to help their kid without leaving the house. Well, they look like a hero if they can open my site in the background, pop the problem in, learn real quick, go back to the kitchen table, and teach their son or daughter how to do it. And so that's one of the hidden benefits of the site is mom and dad get that quality time with their kid, and they don't have to go back to a textbook and spend hours relearning greatest common factors or common core or equations. They can just look at my site, get the math, and be a hero to their son or daughter. So that's really nice. So they can be a math celebrity. I got the plug there.

You should actually have the model below. Be a hero to your kids. Use our website. Yeah, that's a good tagline. I'll have to adopt that someday. I have so many friends that have kids, and they'll be like, yeah, I told her I knew how to do the algebra, and I had to go look it up on the website or had to go read a book or try to figure out.

So I didn't tell my kids that I didn't know what was going on. But, yeah, it's interesting. Like I said, I've seen the Common Core math videos videos and they're just so much more work for me i i've i've always been fairly good at math and i've been good at math doing a lot of math in my head when especially when i was younger it seems to be fading now to hit my 50s the sharpness is a little off um but uh uh you know sometimes i just break stuff down into simplistic stuff where i'm like take the fives you, cut it into fives or cut it into tens. And then, you know, add one or two at the end and then times whatever. Like I can take most math and cut it down and put it together.

And it's way simpler than common core. And it's actually simpler for me to think. But everyone uses a different format. So it's cool that you guys have this and they can enter in algebra stuff, mod stuff, I guess. I don't even know what that is. Clearly I flunked algebra.

Yeah. We cover statistics, algebra, calculus, pre-algebra. So we try to start, we started about third grade and go all the way through the college curriculum.

Wow. And so you've got the podcast too. Do you want to give us some plugs for the podcast? Yeah. So the podcast just launched last month. It's called college prep confidential.com. And if you want the shortcut, it's just cpcshow.com. And the premise behind the podcast is college prep. So if you've got a kid and saw a sophomore, junior in high school, and you're getting ready for college prep, we're giving you the tips and tricks how to ease that process. So filling out mountains of forms is not fun for mom and dad. Negotiating and arguing for financial aid is not something that mom and dad want to spend a lot of time on. So what we did is we put together testing experts from ACT and SAT exams because I'm a big proponent of work smarter, not harder.

And any time you can save hours for education or college prep, it really helps ease things in your life. So a lot of people will apply for college, get the bill, and say, wow, even with financial aid, I'm in deep life. So a lot of people will apply for college, get the bill and say, wow, you know, even with financial aid, I'm in deep trouble. So there's certain things you can do with college prep finances, your exams, the forms to not only save time, but money. And colleges aren't going to tell you these things. So you have to dig deep. You have to go around and see the people before you that have saved the money. And so that's the premise behind it. So basically the great thing about your guys' website is if you're not a celebrity in Hollywood and paying half a million dollars to bribe collegiate educators to get into college

and then going to jail for it, this is a much better way because you don't have to spend all that money and you're not going to go to jail. So that's, you know, this double bonus right there. Oh yeah. So I noticed you've got a tab on the website of mass celebrity.com for a CT and SAT help. You've also got a forum so that people can go in there and probably ask some questions or chat about math or talk about math and all that good stuff.

And then you've got your podcasts on there and then college funding secrets as well as another tab on mass celebrity.com. Yeah. So the college funding secrets is a free training for parents with kids that are getting ready to go to college and it covers what it extends on the podcast. So it's a free training, how to save money, how to do better on exams and how to simplify simplify the process so you're not having headaches and rushing at the last minute to get into college. And it's just so amazing today. I mean, nowadays they say you've got to start preparing your kids for college pretty much the moment they're born. You've got to start saving for it, too.

Because it's just crazy what it costs. And, um, do you work with a lot of people that are like one of my, one of my friends that I was referencing earlier, uh, she, she takes in works with college kids to help them prep for their SAT and SAT things. Do you work with people like that that are, that are, uh, I don't know what they are. They're basically like SAT coaches or ACT coaches. They help them practice, help them get prepared for the SAT and ACT tests. Yeah, that ACT and SAT tab you mentioned

earlier is an online platform that we built. So in order to simplify the process of exams and not go through thousands of headaches, what I did two years ago was sit down with a group of Ivy League testing experts. And so my only purpose was how do we take tests smarter? How do we get better grades? And as you know, I mean, in sports and education and life, there's always a top 5% at the top of the pyramid, and they're always doing something different than what I like to call the herd or the rest of us. And so these 5%ers, I got them in a room and I just said, look, what are you doing differently than the other test takers?

How are you getting these high scores? What techniques, tips, and tricks are you using? I took all that after sitting them down and we built it into a platform. So this platform helps you study faster and smarter and not spend hours every day to prep for the ACT and SAT exams. And you guys even give a free report out, the College Funding Tactical Report. You can go to the website and get a report for that on the seven steps guide through College Funding Tactical Report. I mean, it's just amazing how much work goes into going to college. Like when I was growing up, you're just like, your dad's like, just what do I do now that

you go to college? You're like, okay, I guess sign up for college. But now like, you know, there's so much competition in these colleges. There's a lot of brilliant, smart people out there. And, you know, your kid's got to compete not only from a money basis but from a smart basis. And I think the smarter you are, especially if you can, like, maybe pick up, what do they call those things,

the grants that they can give you if you're really smart or have special skills like athletes and stuff, you can get involved with those. But definitely, I mean, certainly it's going to make for a better college experience for them. They're going to learn better. They're going to grow better. You know, I really discounted math for a lot of my years when I was learning math in high school. Well, I went to high school, clearly, and public school.

But I want to do a joke here, and I just don't want to do the joke. But basically, when I started my own company, math really kicked in for me. Like, I started my first company when I was 18, and it's like, holy crap, I got to learn accounting because I can't pay an account because I just started my business. I got to learn how to balance the books. And so if you've got a kid who's like, you know, a lot of kids these days, these Gen Xers or Gen Zers, Gen Yers, I can't keep track of the numbers. They basically, you know, they all want to start their own business. They all want to be entrepreneurs, whether it's YouTube, Instagram, entrepreneurs, or, you know, start their own companies. They all want to start their own business. They all want to be entrepreneurs, whether it's YouTube, Instagram, entrepreneurs, or start their own companies.

They all want to start their own companies. And if I was a parent, I'd be telling my kid, look, you want to start your own company, you've got to understand math because if you're going to be a successful CEO, you've got to understand the mathematics of what's going on in your company, how things are working. Math was something that helped me understand. When you build a giant company.

I mean, I think the largest one we built was about 100 employees. When you build a giant company, there's a lot of math that goes between the whole process, especially when you take your client's business from the beginning of your company all through the processes of your company and comes out the other end as a finished product or service. There's a lot of different math that goes into that. And a lot of it's either financial or sometimes it's about the machinery you're using or whatever. And so learning math ends up being really important. And, you know, I think it's really important that when people sell math to people, they really help them see what the real angles or what you can do. And that,

that has helped make me, uh, an entrepreneur since I was 18 and, and doing the thing. And, and math, math became a big part of it. Cause for a lot of years we couldn't afford to do a,

an accountant. And so I had to do all the books. So I had to, I had to get my math down. Yeah. That's funny. I want your website back then. How much do I owe the IRS?

Nowadays, they just ask me for a blank check. So that's how that works. But hey, they keep the roads moving. I don't know. There's no joke there. So you've written two books. Do you want to talk about the second book that you guys, or at least the two books that you have? Yeah. So the first book's One Second Math, Homework Help on Demand. And half of the book is just how I got started, how I built the site. And it starts with the story I told you earlier

about building the spreadsheets and tutoring the students. The reason why I did that is just for anybody who aspires to build a business to let them know, especially if you have a day job and you're unhappy at a certain time or you have bigger dreams. I wrote the first half of the book to just be a model and an inspiration for people and let them know that, look, you're not the only one out there going through this. Because if you've worked a day job, I mean, especially in corporate America, you've no doubt seen wages are starting to slow down. You're expected to do more work, stay longer hours. And so I wrote that book to, it's almost like an, I understand what you're going through, but here's what's possible if you got the time. The second half of the book is just shortcuts, tips, and notes. So think of it as a math book combining 15 math books from, like, third grade to college. But what I try to do is shortcuts.

So I don't like long, drawn-out, you know, discussions. I don't like hour-long to, you know, behind theories. I like real-world shortcuts, tips, and tricks. And so that's what the second half of the one second math book is about. And then the second book I wrote is, we get people that say, look, I'm starting a website, I'm starting a business. How did you build your traffic? And so I want people to know that these things don't happen overnight. But again, I like shortcuts, tips and tricks. So I packed that book with every single tactic I've learned to get the 3.5 million visitors that we got in 2018. So how to speed up your site, how to make content more interesting where people will lay on the page more, read what you have, and come back wanting more. and a lot of times you may see with SEO consultants there's a lot of jargon but one of the things I'm

proud of is I write that book at a fifth grade level so even if you're just starting a website you don't know anything about SEO you can glide over the words from the first chapter till the end and understand what needs to be done to grow your website traffic that's awesome fifth grade fifth grade education you know that that that that's, I can probably read that cause I went to Trump university and got my degree there. So, uh, I probably, I probably can read that. I'm not sure. We'll have to see fifth grade. I might be at a fourth grade though. I'm just kidding. Uh, but that's awesome, man. Getting that amount of traffic to a website, making it simple. I like how you do this where you make everything simple.

It goes right to how to do stuff quickly. I think that's why Common Core is good for some people because some people, some kids looking at it that way can understand it better than like because that was the biggest problem I had with math. It's like why? Why is it done this way? Why do I care? And I could have never solved that riddle at the time.

I learned it when I started my own business. But when I was younger, I'm just like, why do we have to even do this BS? Like, I just want to go play and ride my bike. And so having a simple way to do stuff makes a difference because, you know, that's one of the things that made me successful in business was I just like direct lines to stuff. I don't like giant lines. Like one of the problems I have when I watch baseball, they go around, you know, all three bases. And I always look at it and I go, why doesn't that guy just run past the pitcher and go to second base and then run back to home and then just call it

a day or just run up and punch the pitcher and whoever wins the punching match runs back to home plate and they win. To me, I'm like why do we have to do that whole box thing? It's really an octagon or something.

Why don't we just have to why's really an octagon or something, but why don't we, why don't we just have to like, why can't we just do straight lines basically? And that's how my brain works. But that's, that's how, that's one thing that made me successful in business was I would say there's always a better way to do stuff and there's always a quicker and speedier way for us to do stuff. We just have to figure out what that stuff is and so that was my whole thing i'd look at automation uh before i started work for myself i was uh doing what we call entrepreneur for other companies and that was my job i would go into processes and systems in place in a company and it's you know the the customer would come in this side and product service come out this side and you'd be like, how can we make it so this is as quick and seamless process,

saves money, all that sort of good stuff. And that's made all the difference when it came to math. Yeah, I'm a big fan of the 80-20 rule. So 20% of what you do is usually responsible for 80% of the results. And that's what I've tried to build in the website is just how can we save time? How can we make things easier? I mean, you mentioned earlier about kids asking, when am I ever going to use this? story is I'm at a fifth grade school a couple years ago, just giving a talk for career day about who I am and what I do. And after the talk, a kid comes up to me and he says, Don, when am I ever going to use this in real life? And so when I told him that math is used in Xbox for the 3D motion and the video games, suddenly, you know, the kids get interested. And I think that's one thing that we can all do better, both as parents and schools and teachers, is when are we going to use math and how is it important?

So, for instance, somebody that's excited about the markets, right? You know, there's math behind the stocks. There's math behind the options. Somebody that's excited about, say, games, there's probability. And that's all statistics. So once you incorporate their passions with where the math ties in, then the light clicks on. Yeah. I mean, I wish I would have said, you know, I mean, I knew I wanted to start my own company when I was young.

And I wish somebody would have told me, hey, if you ever want to be successful in business, you got to learn math. And, you know, I don't have to learn algebra to run my own business. But there is a lot of math between the accounting. You know, you can hire accountants to do the work for you, but you've got to know as a CEO what the hell is going on with your company. You just can't be like, somebody that does math over there. I don't know how the rest of this stuff works. You've got to know your numbers because no one's going to know your numbers.

The buck stops if he was a CEO. And you're right, gaming is really huge. If you're going to be a coder in today's world, you've got to understand math. If you're going to write programs, if you're going to do gaming, if you're going to build games, you've got to understand math. You're going to build products. There's a lot of stuff that goes into engineering and math. I mean, what would have probably worked for me as a teenager is someone who sat down with me and said, look, well, they would have sat me down with the Scarface movie. First you get the money, then you get the chicks.

They probably should have sent me down and said, hey, if you want to get the chicks, Chris, you've got to get the money. So you've got to learn the math so you get the money, and then you get the chicks. And I would have been like, oh, okay, I'm going to learn this math thing. So it's good that people learn it. But having a simple way, and I love the way people can go to their website and they can see multiple ways that they can solve a problem. So depending upon what you're trying to do,

and this gives a real way for people that are real basic like me, we're just like, I don't know, I've got some numbers here, trying to figure out how to, I don't know, I'm trying to do like a partial something. So, oh, hey, there you go. So I like that because it can help people like me that clearly went to public school be able to figure it out. And I like that a lot of homeschool people really like you guys because there's a huge amount of homeschoolers in this country. It's gotten pretty huge, the amount of people that

are doing it. It is. And I mean, if you look at the numbers, if my numbers are correct, it seems like it's growing every year. When we were at the conference a couple of years ago, one of the things that blew me away about the homeschool families was they had booths set up to sell products and services. And almost every single booth have the kids with the parents to learn how to take the money, how to go package the product if they had to put it in a box or gift wrap. And even some of the kids were upfront describing the product. And I know me personally, if I could go back in time and make one change when I was in college, I would spend time with an entrepreneur or somebody that owned their own business just to see how it's done. Because I think that's one lacking skill that

we don't teach in school is how to work with the public, how to sell products, how to understand how to run a business. Because at the end of the day, if the sales and the business isn't good, none of us have any jobs. And that doesn't matter what career you're in and so it took me a long time to understand that but now now i get it and in the future i i i don't know how soon we're going to move to this but it's moving fairly quickly we're going to eventually become an economic society that's based not on labor not on blue collar sweat brawn i imagine there's still be a play for that sort of stuff but what i see is in the future it might be hundreds of years from now is a cerebral society that makes money off of their brains off their thought patterns off what they think about and sells it to other people and you're paid for

being a thought leader as opposed to to really producing say a product so much although that will still be done i'm'm sure, products and services. But it's going to become a more cerebral society. You're seeing that now. A lot of this, I've had a few people on that are Gen Y or Gen Z, whatever it is this week, of the kids that are just barely graduating high school right now and going to college.

These kids are more entrepreneur than probably any other entrepreneurialistic generation before it. And they're interested in starting their own business. They're interested in doing their own thing, being their own boss and basically creating their own lives. And I just got lucky at 18 to be, to start my first company without really thinking about it. I got fired from McDonald's and pizza one day for my long hair and my rock and roll T-shirts. And fortunately, I learned a skill with my dad to do subcontracting work, plastering foundations and stucco work. And I learned that with him growing up because, you know, in the summers, you go help your dad. And he's like, why don't you just start that business?

And that was my first business I started. And before I knew it, I was knee deep in all sorts of, you know, the challenges of starting a business and keeping it going. And so many of these kids, and once I got that drug, I mean, I just could not get off the drug of owning your own company all my life. In fact, I used to tell my investors in my board, I'm like, I don't, I don't, you know, people say to me, it's cool. You do what you love. And I'm like, I really don't love this company or what we do here. I mean, I love what we do, but I don't, I'm not really passionate about it. And they go, why do you do it?

And I go, cause I like being the CEO. I like being the guy who's accountable. I like being the guy who makes this thing go from zero to whatever. I like, I like me taking company from nothing and making it profitable. That's the rage I like. I'm like, you know, when it really comes down to it, you can just put my name as CEO on a card and not pay me. As long as you pay my basic expenses,

I'll be happy because I just like being that guy. And the problem solving, the challenges, the innovation. Innovations are really something you you got to do these days. And sometimes it has to do with math and being able to break down. OK, why do we do this? One of the things I learned a long time ago from an entrepreneur when I bring it up is, you know, a lot of people look at big companies and they start businesses. And they're just, you know, mathematically, they're just like overwhelmed because like how I build a billion dollar company. And years ago, I had a great CEO named Forrest Baker who taught me a lot.

And he says, Chris, here's how you build a great company. You take a widget, you just take a box. Okay. Whatever it is, customer service,

whatever product you're trying to make, he goes, you try and make this as best as you can, as profitable as you can. It, the most small segment of it. And he goes, then all you do is

expinate it from there once you do that and of course you keep making it better but he goes you just you just build off of that box you start with that little box and you you build it into a million pieces you know uh some guy builds a mcdonald's store and sells burgers it goes well puts them all over the world um and so you know that, that concept of being able to understand stuff, being able to understand the math of, okay, so if we make two cents per profit on this widget, but we expinate that times 10 million units, how much, you know, it's all math. And so being able to do that and approach it from that state of mind really helps.

And like I say, when you get a big business going and you're signing, you're signing checks every two weeks that are like half inch thick as a CEO, and you're going, wow, this is a lot of money going in and out the door. You really got to understand the math of your business and what's going into it. And, and also as a parent, I probably shouldn't discount that to just being an entrepreneur, but as a parent, you know, you want, you want to look like a hero. You want to look like you're smart in the eyes being an entrepreneur. But as a parent, you know, you want to look like a hero. You want to look like you're smart in the eyes of your kids.

Once they start thinking you don't know what you're talking about, you probably lose them anyway. So you've got to stay on top in that control position. But, yeah, it's really awesome what you've built here. This is pretty cool. Thank you. Yeah. So you've got the podcast people can go to and so the podcast series

do you just uh interview other people on that podcast or do you interview uh educators or things like that or right now it's solo so it's just me sharing the the tips and tricks for how to get more money how to save time better exam scores in the future we're going to line up some people that have been through the process from coast to coast. Because I know when I went to college, what I wouldn't have given to have somebody who went through the process and say, look, over the last four years, here's the five mistakes I make. And if you don't make them, you're going to save X amount of time and money. So that's what we're trying to do is just help them save time and money. And so in the future, we're going to have

interviews but right now it's just me that's awesome so people can tune in they can learn how to do stuff when it comes to the cost of education nowadays you really want to save some money because it's a lot of money i i you know i was gonna have, and then I heard what the college cost is. I said, hell no, dad's buying a BMW and dogs. We're not. I'm just kidding. But it's expensive. I have a nephew and niece that are high school right now, and they're approaching to where they've got to make their college decisions.

And I'm just overwhelmed thinking about what they're having to go through. I can't imagine what they're having to go through it I can't imagine what they're like the the pressure and and all that sort of stuff and what they have to learn to do uh it's just crazy man yeah I mean I'm I was reading a report on Forbes the other day that were student loans outstanding or over a trillion dollars with a T that, I mean, that, that blew my mind. I was just talking with a family the other day who we work with for colleges. And the dad said, I can't believe how much money this costs. Like not even the top tier schools, like some of the, you know, maybe upper 30%. He said, this is, this is like another one or two house loans for me. But I think if you can work the system and I, I would love to find a better phrase than that right now, but if you could work the system and find ways to save money.

So like this family we're working with, we save them $25,000 over the four year period. Now that may not seem like a lot, but if mom or dad takes the 25K and rolls that forward, that's shopping trip for mom. That's a new fishing boat for dad. I mean, it adds up. It's a shopping trip for mom, not a boat for dad.

We know that married life works. And, you know, I got to tell you, and this is the part that a lot of people don't think about, is the impact of these loans that you take out for education and what they do with your life. For about 20 years, one of the companies that we owned was a mortgage company. And so what was really interesting to me, this is the other reason I'm single and don't have kids, is a mortgage application, a lot of times, is a personal balance sheet for your personal self, your personal company, if you will. And so when you hand in a mortgage application to a company like ours that we had, it's like a P&L.

It's a profit and loss business sheet. It's a balance sheet. I can see how well you're doing. It used to be back in those days I could look at your credit report. I could tell you when you got divorced. I can tell you a lot of stuff just looking at your credit report and your mortgage application about your life. And one of the things that was interesting is in the later part of our business, we started seeing these people that had the college loans kicking in uh, the dead load of them trying to survive still buy a house, buy a car, raise kids, family, all that stuff, and still be able to service these loans that you can't

ever get out of, um, was just shocking to me. And the sad part was a lot of people weren't really, I don't know if they just didn't do their homework or their, their counselor should have if they just didn't do their homework or their career counselor should have told them better or something, but there's some people that they paid a horrendous amount for their college education, and I don't know if they didn't do the research, but they came out the other side, and they really wanted to be social workers because they like helping people, and that's really awesome, but the problem was these social workers aren't paid very well, and so trying to survive with that income based upon the investment they made in college,

you know, it's just, it's just like on a business, there's an investment and a return on investment and you really got to balance those two. And I just thought, well, man, these guys are making really bad choices. And then I remember when we first got we first got our uh guy who was a pharmacist and he you know he didn't quite hit doctor you know they say that if you're not a doctor and you're a pharmacist or a dentist you probably failed that part of the uh doctor schooling but he was a pharmacist and he got paid really good money uh to be a pharmacist usually you do um but over half of his income every year was being wiped out by like i think it was like 60 000 a year for his for his uh college uh payments for his college loans it was crazy and this guy even though he's a pharmacist you know semi-doctor sort of thing

you know i'm sure he'll make a lot of money once he gets those babies paid off he was a pharmacist, you know, semi-doctor sort of thing, you know, I'm sure he'll make a lot of money once he gets those babies paid off. He was basically in the same sort of place as someone would be living on minimum wage. Oh, yeah. After all the payments and money left over, he could barely afford to buy a house for his family. And this is a guy who was making a lot of money, but it was all going back to the college. And the way we did the math, he had like 10 to 15 years of this. He was still gonna have to pay. So he's gonna have to live at minimum wage unless he, I don't know, maybe found a better pharmacy to work for or something. Um, he was gonna have to work at minimum wage for about 10 years before

he could really start, you know, seeing some sort of break from that thing. And it's almost like indentured servitude the way it goes. You know, I've been in business. We've had business. We've turned into bankruptcy, one. And, you know, you can go, hey, do over. You can walk away. A lot of rich people use bankruptcy as a thing.

But poor people can't use – you can't away a lot of rich people use bankruptcy as a thing but poor people can't use you can't file bankruptcy on the student loans you can't get away from it all so you're stuck with them so yeah anytime people can use services like yours where they can save money and and uh make some better choices on the front end before you get to that back end because everybody's like you know i've had people say to me well well, they just, you know, they offer me a student loan. Signed for it free here, nothing down, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And now I'm in indentured servitude for the next 15 to 20 years. There's some friends of mine, it took them until 40 or 45

to pay off their student loans. Yeah, I mean, if you... Oh, yeah, I mean, we were just talking about this the other day. If you take... So if you take a dollar at 5%, let's say you're walking down the street, a dollar falls out of your pocket. You forget about it. 15 years later, you wait, and all of a sudden, that dollar comes running back with another

dollar attached to it. So at 5%, your money doubles approximately every 15 years. Think about the lost wages, like you said, even with a doctor, if you're a doctor or a dentist, how much those student loans are eating away at your income. Let's say you want to save for retirement early. You got to give up 8, 10, 12, 15 years just to pay back those student loans. And so I don't know if you saw on the news the other day, but there's been some creative financing. So did you see that article treating students as stocks?

So what they're doing is they've got hedge funds and investment firms that will pay your college loans in exchange for a cut of the future wages that you make. But this is fascinating, though, because now you can eliminate the loans, but the question is do you want to give up some of your income in the future? And so here's a perfect example where math comes in. If you can project your future salary, if you're going to be a guy or a girl who makes $100,000, $150,000, $200,000, then maybe this arrangement doesn't make sense. But if you're going to go $60,000, $70,000 in the debt to come out of college on the back end

and maybe make $15,000 or $20,000 an hour, this may help you because now you don't have that giant debt load that you brought up. It's interesting to me. There's a whole lot to unpack with that With that concept because I've seen that concept I mean now we're having Hedge fund people It speaks though To the fact that there's so much

Oversharging going on from colleges That somebody finally got Wise of business and went hey They're making so much profit we can Half that or three quarters that And save some people money but still Make a butt of money. And then it's just like another version of indentured servitude. I mean, from some of the math that we used to sit and look at, because we started getting a lot of these loans after a while, I'd sit and look at people's math and I'd be like,

you know, you might've been financially better off just to skip college and go to work at Starbucks for 20 years than what you're doing because the end result of the net of what you're taking home, because that's what I used to have to do. I used to have to do the math of the percentage of your housing and your debt to income based upon what you want to buy and what you earned when you took home after all the bills. I mean, that was the key, what you take home. you know, and, and even a lot of people still don't get that in,

in the America's economy where they don't understand that it's not about, it's not about how much you spend. It's about how much you keep. So that should take home. Like you can own a really nice BMW to borrow a phrase from the movie fight club to impress people who don't give a shit about you. I used to own three or four of them and I did them to impress people. I didn't impress myself. I grew up poor. But after a while, I started realizing that no one else really cared

and anybody who saw me thought I was an asshole anyway. So it kind of came to a point where like, why am I paying all this money to impress myself? And, you know, whatever. So you have to really look at what you're taking home and what that's about in future evaluating your life. So some good concepts we talked about here. And if you're a parent, you've really got to think this through with your kids. If you're a kid, you've really got to think through your future nowadays with college, with finances, what job you're going to want in the future, whether you're going to love that job, because one of the problems you have with both of these scenarios with going to college and, you know, getting saddled with debt, I mean, I've known CEOs who were CEOs of major technological companies who had a literary arts degree. I think there was a CEO years ago for one of the big Fortune 500 companies

who learned, who I think they mastered in ballet or dance or something like that. People are like, what? You got what in college? You're a CEO of Fortune 500. But that's kind of how it goes. There's a lot of times, I mean, I've owned a lot of companies and I get sick of them sometimes. Like I'm like, I don't want to do that one anymore. Let's go do this one over here. Let's move over here and do something. I don't want to live in the state anymore. So shut that company down and go to this state and live there and do some other companies. And that's kind of the process of life. You kind of find yourself and what you like and stuff. So you can invest a lot in a college degree or sell your soul to one of these VC things. But you may get to the other side and find maybe you want to be an entrepreneur.

I don't know how to handle that. Or you may find that you don't want to be a social worker. You don't want to be a teacher. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with those fields. But you may not just like what you're doing. You may be a lawyer or a doctor and you're like, I've known doctors that are like, screw this doctor stuff. I'm going to go be an entrepreneur, start a company and write books or, you know, do something else. They just don't like it. And so you've really got to think through these things. And so I think it's really good that you

guys offer some tools like that. People go to the website and just be really smart because you've got to spend a lot of time thinking about investing because it's your future. It's your life, if you will. It is. We were talking about back when I started in the workforce. So this was back when I had brown hair and not white hair. And 23 years ago, you talked about college and being an investment. Usually when you go into an investment, you want some sort of return. And, you know, back 20 years ago, when, you know, early or late 90s, early 2000s, if you had a college degree, you were basically guaranteed a good job. And now you can pay back that college cost in a year or two. Exactly. Equate it as like being

paid back. You can say, well, I earned in two to three years, I earned what I paid for college. Exactly. And so you were guaranteed a job and you could pay off the loans. Now the cycle has completely changed. I was just talking to my father-in-law who was in the unions for 40 years. And now the trades, the trades without a college degree are paying better than if you get a college degree and you come out, you're only making some of these, some of these people spent 50, 60, 70 K on college and they're working at Starbucks or making 12, 13 an hour versus my father-in-law

was just saying the trades are exploding. So you could skip college, do an apprenticeship for a year and you could be, you could come out making far ahead of what the people who spent the time and money on colleges. So again, like you said said it's an investment yeah i mean when i'm when i'm seeing doctors living on basically a minimum wage after after you know all their payments and loan payments and stuff well i'm seeing people living on nickels and dimes where they can barely afford to buy a house and you know buying a house important. A lot of kids don't think about that either. I mean, you're going to want, you're, you're going to want a wife and kids or a partner and they're probably going to

want a house. You're going to want a house. So either for investment purposes or build your nest of your family in, or just, you know, have a place to live. It's always good to have a roof over your house, over your head. You know, you, you, you're going to want a house, and it takes money. You're going to want a nice car that doesn't break down on you. You're going to, you know, it takes money.

And a lot of people don't ever equate this stuff. And sometimes, you know, the other thing I think that's deceptive to a lot of people that don't do the math, if you will um another reason why they should use your website is people don't people don't they think okay well if i go be a teacher i'll make i don't know i'm just going to throw a figure out here it's not accurate in any way shape or form i'm going to make 50 grand a year well that sounds like great like a lot of money but after taxes whoa well that's gone and then after uh you know car payment house payment credit card bills, you know, it's it's it's pretty crazy. And even like one thing we should teach people, the mortgage company, because I have people come to me and we pay off like thirty thousand dollars of credit cards debt with their equity when the the values of homes are going through the roof. And then we'd say to them, don't go run up that debt.

And if you have $5,000 on a credit card, you pay the minimum payment. It will take you 25 years to pay it off, and you'll pay five times that amount. You'll pay $25,000 in debt service or $20,000 in debt service to buy that original $5,000, so you pay $25,000 total. And a lot of people don't realize that and between math or I'm sorry between credit cards between college and everything else

there's a lot of debt service you end up in life and then there's kids and those kids want to go to college too so you got that as well but yeah you really got to think things through and prepare and so I like how you guys have all these different things. Anything more we need to know about you and mathcelebrity.com?

Yeah, if you want to learn more about how to prepare for college and save money, you can check out the College Prep Confidential Podcast or get the free training at cpcshow.com. That's cpcshow.com. And we certainly appreciate Donnie coming by. Be sure to check out his podcast because ongoing education like this is super, super important. From what we've seen in celebrities, I mean, it's a bad thing. They're bribing people. What you're seeing is how much investment fairly smart people, although they're probably going to jail, but you're seeing how much competition. I think that's maybe what I want to say, you're seeing how much work other parents

are putting into getting their kids successful in college, and this is kind of some of the stuff, hopefully not criminal, that your kids are having to compete with, and you've got to, you know, if you really love your kids, you want them to be successful, you've got to get in there and do them, or at least, you know, hopefully get them motivated to do this work as well. So there you go. Anyway, Don, we appreciate you guys coming by. We appreciate your audience coming by the show. Be sure for your shows, your friends, relatives, and all that good stuff. Be sure to go to mathcelebrity.com where you can be a celebrity to your kids by being really smart. Or if you're a kid, you can become a celebrity too because celebrities even need math to cash those big movie checks.

So there you go. You got to know where your math is going and your money. So anyway, folks, we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure you give us a like, subscribe to us on YouTube, hit that bell notification button. Also go to iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, RR Radio, all the different places you can find us on the web

and any podcast app out there. So I appreciate you guys tuning in. We'll see you next time.