Ramit Sethi — Automating Finances, Negotiating Prenups, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show

[Music] well hello boys and girls this is Tim Ferriss welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job to interview and dissect world-class performers and all-around funny people like my guest today and I'm gonna butcher his name even though I've known him for a thousand years ramiz say T that's RA mi T se thi author of the New York Times bestseller I will teach you to be rich has become a financial guru to millions of readers in their 20s 30s and 40s gotta make sure I don't disqualify myself soon he started his website I will teach you to be rich calm is a Stanford undergrad in 2004 and he now hosts more than a million readers per month on his blog newsletter and social media we're meet and his team of dozens of employees build premium digital products about personal finance entrepreneurship psychology careers and personal development for top performers the IWT community includes 1 million monthly readers 400,000 plus news letters subscribers and 35,000 premium customers he has written about personal finance for The Wall Street Journal the New York Times and has been interviewed on dozens of media outlets including NPR ABC News CNBC and the Tim Ferriss show welcome back to the show remain thanks a lot it's great to be here and you can find remain if you want to say hello ask a question or yell at him on Twitter at repeat RI MIT and Instagram at roommate so I thought we could start with floor mats maybe you could tell me about your dad and the floor mats you want to start there yeah all right so you know how you grow up and you discover that your parents did things a little differently and you just thought it was normal I thought it was normal to take five days to buy a car cuz that's what my dad would do my mom would stay home my dad would take us he would take a couple of the kids in my family including me and we would go to the dealer it was always Honda or Toyota you know that and we would start looking around and my dad would play very innocent like he didn't know anything about cars my dad knew everything he knew how much the dealer was paying how much the holdback was everything so we'd go we test-drive it he wouldn't be sure dead uh and then we'd stay there for four or five hours and he'd say okay I'm gonna think about it the car dealers spent like five hours with my dad he goes no thanks this price isn't good I'm gonna go there like what so we literally left then we go back the next day like we're basically having breakfast at the dealership and I remember one time we were buying a car for our family and it was like the fourth day okay again I thought that this was normal and we're down to the last bit were the part where the dealers drawing the numbers you know and telling you like well it's actually a really good deal and my dad you know he knows the math he's an engineer of course and and finally we've closed the deal and my dad goes you're gonna throw in free floor mats right these are 50 bucks and the guys like cerner we're losing money on this car how can we throw these Flora and my dad says I'm out of here and we just walked up and left and I was like a Vietnam vet I'm just shell-shocked walking out my eyes are just glazed over and I'm like we just spent a week buying this car and we walked out of here over $50 floor mats so that's where I learned to negotiate in the most elite negotiation of all now where where are your parents from they're from India and are they first-generation they immigrated to the US yep they came here in the 70s my dad came here actually to study he went back to India and it was known that he was coming back he was a bachelor and you know they sort of arranged things so that he meets people when he comes back and it passed around the community that this bachelors coming back and he ended up meeting my mom they met by both families coming together in a living room and talking and they met each other the families decided it was a good thing seven days later they were married my mom got on a plane and flew to the US for the first time and they've been married for about 40 years now amazing we have so much to talk about and so much to catch up on it so many questions that I want to ask but I thought we could we could start and certainly will we'll bounce all over the place but you said before we started recording because you have a new edition of your book I will teach you to be rich noticeably lacking a photograph of you barefoot on the cover and you have some incredible quotes testimonials I should say including from Burton Malkiel author of random walk down Wall Street but you said to me because I haven't read the introduction that you either should have started it or you did start it with I was right could you explain please explain okay so this book I will teach be rich originally came out in March 2009 and let's just dispense with the idea the name sounds like a scam we both know we write books that sound like scams but they're not I mean it's like a running and I've just learned to embrace it guys it's the weird sounding book but it's actually good advice and in the first edition I talked about long-term investing low cost investing thinking about really automating your money and using psychology against yourself for positive results now if you had followed that advice it turns out that when the book came out in March 2009 that was the absolute bottom of the recession crazy enough now I don't believe in market timing but if you had used the advice in the book this $10 book you would be set for life so I started book off by saying well I was right let me tell you all the things that would have happened if you'd use this book I did get a couple of things wrong I had to change one of them man the biggest mistake of my life was putting in interest rates in the book like okay do you remember what sounds like me putting doing market testing with magazines okay so I put in back then savings rates were 5% remember these banks were paying 5% so I was like guys 5% dah dah dah here's the math and then like the minute the book came out they dropped to 4 3 2 and then point 5 percent now the point of it is you don't make money on your savings account anyway we're talking about 21 dollars a year or a month versus four dollars like it's irrelevant it's tiny details every day for the last decade I've gotten like 10 ml's a day that are like [ __ ] you where's the 5% you talked about you liar and so I'm like never again I'm never putting interest rates in his book again so I took him out I clarified it I corrected a couple of things that I wanted to update and I added like 80 new pages of material so things have changed a bit but good advice really shouldn't change that much now I have I've had a chance to observe you as sort of an animal in the wild for 10 plus years and part of the reason I enjoy having our conversations but also sharing your tactics and scripts and so on is that I've seen you use them and walk the walk which is more than I can say for a lot of financial pundits or commentators out there in the world and I want to to perhaps just mention a and not really an upsell maybe a side sell which is if somebody wants to be either greatly informed on the arts of negotiating or if you're just looking for outrage porn to get really angry if if that's your current sport of choice you can find a guest post that you put on my blog quite a few years ago called how to negotiate like an Indian which which I can only imagine the response to that title if I were to publish it no idea but it's staying and staying the way it is folks so there you have it if you want to google that on Tim that blog you can find it but let's talk about some of the perhaps counterintuitive things that you do because we talk about all sorts of aspects of finance and investing in life in general on the phone just the two of us but I'm looking at a number of different bullets that I was hoping to explore and one is you've mentioned that you've lived in the same apartment for 10 years why do you still rent yeah I get this question a lot because in America real estate is religion and if you're successful then you're supposed to buy right and the old tax deduction and they're not making any more land and all these things that we say that we don't really understand I rent intentionally I could go buy a place in Manhattan tomorrow with cash but I don't want to it doesn't make sense for me financially and also I enjoy the flexibility just to give you an example I love that the building that I live in has awesome services I love that anything that goes wrong I make a phone call somebody there was a it started raining last winter and water started coming through my windowsill so I made a phone call and they came up and they took a look and they were like we actually have to replace this part of the roof because it connects and we have to send someone to the outside of the building I said it sounds good to me it doesn't matter to me I'm gonna be out of town for the next few days so have a blast I would estimate that that repair probably costs in Manhattan on a weekend probably twenty-five thousand maybe thirty five thousand dollars I didn't pay it right so that's a financial also a flexibility issue which is I don't know where I'm gonna be five years from now and if you're gonna buy and you run the numbers it makes sense to plan on being there at least seven to ten years minimum so that you can sort of eat the cost of the transaction fees but I think the biggest thing that really surprises people is that in America we have been told so many times real estate is the best investment and in my opinion that's just not true a lot of the time now I don't think it's a bad investment always but I always say you should run the numbers and when I run the numbers in Manhattan it just makes no sense I would rather take that money and I would put it in the stock market and I know consistently what that outcome is going to be over the long term I don't have to do any repairs and I as we may talk about I really hate anything that affects my convenience so I think for a lot of people I just want people to think like hey is it really true that real estate is the best investment for me it's not it's a cost and I'm happy to pay the cautious like I'm happy to pay the cost of you know a basket of strawberries that I'm going to eat I don't think I'm throwing money away on strawberries and think I'm throwing money away on rent so you said real estate is is religion or it can be and I think this is worth digging into it for a second because there are a lot of statements that in certain circumstances can be conditionally true right like real estate is the best investment asterisk fine print if yes ABCDE okay and there are then there are things that are just patently I think untrue right like you need money to make money false it's who you know not what you know yep false dichotomy not mutually exclusive investing is only for the rich right ironically the way you get rich is by investing and there are a lot of different ways to invest right so it's so that one perhaps undertone or portion of context that I think is is worth talking about cuz I've been thinking a lot about this myself in the last ten years is that there are there are investments that you make to optimize for financial ROI and then there are investments that you make which are decisions about allocating resources for optimizing other things right so I'll give just a perfectly seemingly opposite example which is I have bought real estate I've also had my ass handed to me a year and a half before your book came out in fact hello just about rate mortgage first home buyer yeah that was that was ugly but I have I have bought real estate typically I have used mortgages of various types and I had a friend of mine a different Indian who was also who first-generation who is this guy we all know each other Naveen 2-car oh okay yeah so thank you Naveen for this advice by the way who I've known for ages also an engineer brilliant guy and we were looking through different financial decisions because and I want to talk about kind of what got you here won't get you where you want to go type changes right because I imagine you do things very differently from your parents totally even though their behavior makes perfect sense yes and their conditioning and their experience what he said to me looking at my balance sheet there's a small amount of principal left to pay on a mortgage and he said just for your peace of mind for this primary residence it doesn't make financial sense you should pay this off so that you feel as though no matter what you have that and it's almost like a homestead right you have something that on many levels cannot be taken away that's how you feel and I did that not saying this is the advice that everybody should take by the way but for me in that moment there was there was so much uncertainty in my life to make a decision that seemingly did not let the numbers line up was in fact the right thing to do I completely agree I'm so glad we're talking about the nuance because I believe there's a few underlying beliefs when it comes to money and I believe that number one most people are mostly the same and that's profoundly different than a lot of people who believe that we're all individual we have different situations no I believe that most of us are mostly the same and if we can optimize if we can basically just follow good advice for ninety ninety five percent of the way then we earn the right to take advantage of our individual specialties and differences so for most people that means saving a certain percentage investing a certain percentage etc but I do think once you do the basics then you earn the right to say hey what are the nuances here where do the rules not necessarily apply to me so for you yeah you have the principle maybe financially it didn't make sense but it just felt good or it it provided safety in an uncertain world at that moment I've got examples in my own life where I pay for stuff that makes no rational sense I heard a personal trainer for the last many years that doesn't make any sense I could theoretically find the same workouts on YouTube and you know they're all printed out or I could just stop going with my trainer why he's giving me all the workouts but there's something more that I get out of it and when I was starting out when I was like 22 I wish I could go back and shake myself because I was very utilitarian and really judgmental about how other people spent their money and I would scoff I would say you know flying business classes stupid we're all getting to the same place I'm just paying 20% of what that person's paying and what I really should have done is say why do they do that like if we're listening to you right now saying you paid off a principal where you really didn't have to you could have just dripped it out you're not paying much an interest why and for you that safety was meaningful for me I like the flexibility and convenience so I'm not saying don't ever buy a real estate and you're not saying buy or pay it off tomorrow but what are the circumstances in which people who are otherwise probably pretty thoughtful make certain decisions and the mistake that I've in retrospect made a lot when I was younger and I think that's also it in part because I grew up with by necessity very very frugal parents is sounds like much like yourself I would scoff at and look down upon a lot of behaviors that had I actually looked closer and said what am I missing right all right a bunch of wealthy people are doing acts yeah they must know something now I'm like holy [ __ ] I can't believe I missed it for like 20 or 30 years like it actually makes a whole lot of sense okay so let's talk about what are some examples yeah what are some things that you scoffed at in your early let's say teens or 20s that now you're like oh I get it well I and you know I don't want this to sound obnoxious to folks because we're gonna start to weave we've gone through many kind of checkpoints right like we've we've you and I have been very fortunate and we've made some good decisions had a healthy dose of luck but I'll give you an example because you just mentioned business class all right like my assistant I have today my primary full-time assistant still remembers when Tim this is not that long ago would get a middle seat economy to last ticket right because I remember when I first had people reach out to me about paid speaking engagements which seemed completely absurd at the time number one I said yes to everything so I was like what people are gonna pay me to speak yeah sure yes to everything Molly above and one of the options that I realized was available at one point was they could buy the tickets for me which was if negotiated by speaking Asian or something usually business or first-class or they could give me the cash expected for first-class ticket and then I could just pocket it and buy a middle class economy seat which I did once to Australia yeah for a speaking gig that was I mean at the time kind of my high-water mark right like it was a very important gig it was critical that I do well the speak engagement and I sat like you know I might hinged at 90 degrees at the hip in a middle seat with like my arms thrust in front of me like a cadaver like a Dracula for whatever right like 18 hours and got there and I was just pounded hamburger meat for like three days and I said okay that was that was very petty wise and extremely pound foolish so that would be one example and I think that's the broader category of protecting the physical asset yeah what I like about these examples like I don't find them shallow to discuss I think that each of us no matter what level of your success has gone from a certain place in life when you're in your early 20s to a different place right I used to read PC Mag and think about what parts to build my own computer now I just go buy a Mac like it's as simple as that and you know I haven't kept up and it's just not a good use of my time I just want someone else to make the decision for me and it doesn't matter whether you're buying first-class tickets internationally or you're going to a restaurant instead of cooking food for yourself one night you know one night a week or a month we all intuitively know that as you change in life you're gonna your spending is going to change so I actually don't think anyone should listen to your example of a middle middle seat and say like oh my god like must be nice to be Tim or for me you know I have an assistant as well must be nice it is nice but you might have money and you don't choose to spend it like that you choose to spend it on something else I have a student of mine in this book who used the book he told me he retired at 35 and his wife tired there 35 and 36 and they driver on in an RV that's their rich life that is not my rich life but to him that's his rich life so when I was back in my 20s what I wish I would have done was to look at people who had succeeded in the ways that I could conceive myself succeeding like I would have never seen myself in an RV so maybe I didn't have something to learn from that person but if I was really introspective and if I were really curious I would have said to him like how'd you do it yeah what'd you do and why did you choose of all the things to live to travel in an RV if I done that I would have put myself aside and all these things that we love to define ourselves are which by the way is interesting people love to define themselves by what they're not you as opposed to what they want so you see it on dating profiles everywhere don't message me if or people say I would never do that if I had a million dollars well you don't have to worry about having a million dollars because when you define yourself by what you're not you won't get there when you choose what you would want to do now it becomes okay cool like I want this I want that how can I work to get it so I wish I would have reframed the way that I thought about money and psychology earlier on how do the frameworks or rules guidelines anything that you use for financial decisions differ from those you absorbed from your parents or other people when you were younger and in there are a number of different ways to approach that right like we could look at sort of the approaches you used to you mention a million bucks to get to your first million versus what you used after that point right because if it's anything like my experience very different totally but I'll let you tackle that any way you like because I think what's if people could take one thing from this conversation it would be test your assumptions and be try to be aware and it takes a lot of effort and practice of what rules you're following or biases you have that you arrived at through logic and reasoning versus having simply absorbed over the course of like bouncing around like a pinball in a pinball machine in this thing we call life for the last 20 30 40 years because those are not your rulz there's somebody else's yeah I call them invisible scripts these are the scripts that run our lives and they're so deeply embedded in us that they are invisible to us and you see it you know one invisible script that I grew up with was education is always good and I believe that I believe that's a positive invisible script I think it's a really good one I'm all for an education self development that's what I do for my business and in my life I also grew up with things like you shouldn't pay for that we could do it ourselves yeah me too right yeah and so and it really trickles down in lots of peculiar ways so there's some ways that I really loved when we used to take vacations our vacation was mostly driving from where we lived in Northern California to LA we would visit family my mom would pack lunches and we would stop on the way and eat and you know what I love about that is like we didn't need any fancy food like we were a family we spent time together that was vacation for us I didn't know what it was like to stay at a fancy hotel in fact I never ordered room service until I was like 20 years old on an interviewing trip for Microsoft so I like that I like knowing that I grew up a little hungry not physically but just knowing like oh cool like we're happy we're good there's another level you know we can't quite do it right now but we're happy but I think I also grew up with some beliefs that I've shed or changed some of them would be like being really conservative with my job like if I had followed all the paths in life I'd be sitting here wearing like a very oversized Cisco engineer t-shirt and just you know I'd be telling you about my sales engineering stuff like it's a conservative go get a good job etc and as I got older and I started making different choices my parents were supportive but they were a little surprised I think on the financial side I didn't really understand why people would pay more why pay more when you can pay less but there's a famous quote from Dan Kennedy he says why pay less when you can pay more total flip of the equation so whether that applies who's Dan Kennedy Dan Kennedy is a famous marketing consultant and he has a great book out about marketing to the a flow which if you read it it can be a bit abrasive but it's also like a very eye-opening shocking book because what he points out see most people go through life with the lens I call it a money lens they put a pair of glasses on and they look at the world through frugality lens how can I save money and you see this in lots of ways if you say oh that's a really nice jacket where'd you get it they'll tell you and they'll say I I got it on sale or I got it for 50% off that's interesting but if you talk to somebody who bought like a absolute like a something they love this they went to Italy and got this perfect jacket that was handcrafted they would never say I got it for 50% off they have a different lens maybe craftsmanship I grew up with the frugality lens everything was about cost growing up now it's also about value so as Dan Kennedy says why pay less when you can pay more if you're gonna have an amazing anniversary dinner perhaps you that's the place you don't need to save fifty percent perhaps you actually want to spend more to create a memory you will never forget Dan Kennedy interesting guy I've never met him but one of his books I'm blanking on the name we'll put it in the show notes at Tim that blog four slash podcast but it's something like million dollar ideas or how to make the most or find your own million dollar ideas and it was as I recall it a collection of different business ideas and examples which was really useful for also removing the financial lens that I would have had on at the time which was you make money doing a B or C which were that happened to be whatever three things I had seen maybe around me and to show just how flexible the approaches can be and I'd love to hear a bit since you have such a great sample set of students and what what are some of the psychological blind spots or rules that most prevent people from reaching their financial goals and and I want to touch on so think about that I want to touch on one thing you said which was frugality and and having grown up with a definite frugality lens I think this is this is worth commenting on that is frugality has its place like you don't want to just be flying blind because you know what is it a fool and his money are soon separated I mean it's you no matter how much money you have you can spend it all and I've seen this a lot it's not hard so you have to have a means of assessing what is worth spending money on and what is not however if you make let's just say 20 30 40 $50,000 a year fill in the number but let's just say $50,000 a year if you want to reach all of your financial goals by by cutting costs the maximum amount that you can cut is 50 thousand at which point you are you've got like a t-shirt and you're you're a wandering ascetic you know begging for food and and so on so there is by definition a limit to the Delta you can create between the money you spend and the money you have whereas if you if you have an equal focus on income generation or even disproportion to focus on income generation sky's the limit in in a sense right so that would be one where like I was trained like cut cut cut cut cut but if you're not simultaneously looking at income generation or increasing income it can be really problematic 100 percent that's why most of America and most of the world has the frugality lens on right there's a limit to how much you can cut but no limit to how much you can earn and if you think about the typical financial advice it's a very pointed question to ask why don't any of these so-called financial experts in the newspapers talk about how to earn more money and the answer is they don't know how that's not their job they're writers so to be able to understand that you do need to manage your costs for example there are a lot of things I do in my life that are highly frugal highly especially for the income that I have and I just it's not of interest to me but I like what like my wife makes fun of me because I run my entire business on a MacBook Air and you know I put my feet up on the table I got my thing on my lap and she's like watch you get a new computer like that fan is so loud and I had to how long have you had it so I that's what I wanted to find out I went to the Apple thing in the top left corner and it shows you when you bought it it's seven years old but like it still works so I don't want another one and also when I grew up this comes from my childhood we didn't buy a new computer unless the other one did not turn on so I've kept that with me and I like having little places in my life where I intentionally impose scarcity I think it's healthy I think it's healthy to have restraint I think it's healthy to build that discipline if you just go out and buy everything you can I think you're on a quick path to a bad place you're also aware that you're doing it yeah right yes exactly so exactly another example is I hardly ever eat out at all and and that's a big change from tenure while I was single and I was seamless like my seamless receipts are just like through the roof seamless is an online delivery service in New York everybody there uses it and now for health reasons and also just for cost reasons as well we like to cut back on that yeah but I spend more on things so I always like to spend extravagantly on the things I love but cut costs mercilessly on the things I don't mercilessly so I like that I actually would I think a lot of people kind of try to cut back a little bit here and a little bit there and they just end up generally unhappy about it I would actually encourage people to pick the area I call it a money dial pick the area of your life that you truly love spending money on like let's do a quick exercise what's the area of life that you love it gives you joy to spend money on travel travel and food Perth say whether I cook at home or I I go out I would say and now I you had a veracruz breakfast taco this morning yeah which was amazing not expensive no I looked but delicious at the same time I could go to say San Francisco to like say Sanh there and in way that as an experience so those would be two areas travel and n food perfect so let's let's do this now a lot of people say travel it's one of the most common ones mine is convenience I like my life to be super convenient so I've spent a lot of money and time engineering that now let's take your money dial travel and like a stereo dial let's turn it up let's say just for easy math that you spend a hundred dollars a month on travel again easy math what if you 10x that or let's say you hundred X that what would travel look like for you different than what you do now let's see well I it would probably mean that I have which quite honestly have to thought about because I've had some given some of the gnarly crazy places I go I've had some catastrophes in New York attached trees I would probably have a fixer on the ground each place I went I would have somebody who is on call and available to effectively fix any problem or tackle any challenge or want that came up I love that anything else that's the one that comes to mind okay because it's yeah that's that's that's the one that comes that's the one that comes to mind all right now what's something in your life that you spend money on but you don't really care it doesn't make that much of a meaningful difference you clothing perfect okay so this is you'll find this in college my fans have given me unending great for you know my wife is a personal stylist okay oh man all right she won't like what you talk about this okay so I love this exercise there are about ten money dials that I've identified Travel is a big one convenience is very rare there's health and fitness there's relationships there's a few more what I like to see people doing is actually spending more nothing they love health and fitness is the one where I would Ratchet it up okay that's where that's where I would turn the dial though what would you do I would actually get a trainer which I do not have currently I have different trainers for different things but it's all Alec Hart nothing has been prepaid or pre-scheduled which is an issue right I suspect that part of the reason tell me if I'm wrong that you like having a trainer is the accountability and the regularity hundred percent and I would like to do that okay I love this by the way whenever you ask someone about their money dial you can just see their face light up right because they love it I loved I love I'm obsessed talking about how I have built my life around convenience I'll take you through every last detail you can see the joy in my eyes so what I love to do is for people to dream big if it's travel it's not just like adding an extra ten percent it's like 10 Xing it what would that look like and then in order to get there whether it's 2 X 5 X 10 X what would you be willing to cut back on and suddenly people start to realize that money actually should be bifurcated it should be highly bifurcated it's spending very little on the things you don't like and going extravagant on the things you do and when you start to think this way now your rich life becomes way more specific and meaningful to you you know as opposed to me I don't need a fixer because I don't travel at those kind of places and I don't do the kind of traveling you do but for me I want even more convenience and now you know I want a different type of travel now that I'm married so these are things that I want everyone to think about what's your money dial and what if you could 10 exit it and this is valuable also just for people who may be listening and going like waste of time I don't have the money to spend 10x on it whatever whatever the pushback might be is a thought exercise this is very very valuable in the same way that if like when I wrote my last book I asked myself if I only had a month actually for the last two books you know I only had a month to write this book how would I do it oh really what would it look like and and 90% of the ideas were terrible but then there were ten that made the process I was planning on already 2 3 4 5 times more efficient and so the question itself might seem absurd but many of the ideas end up being extremely practical and let's talk about convenience so what are what are some of the again what are some of the things that you do or have found disproportionately morning gratifying from a convenient standpoint well okay I'll tell you but it's gonna sound weird because like to me this is truly joyful and to other people I'm gonna sound like a lunatic but this is my rich life so I'm gonna break it down I wake up in the morning and by the time I wake up early we started waking up at 6:00 after we went on our honeymoon we were waking up early for safari and then we both kind of looked at each other and we're like you want to keep doing this and so we do we sleep around 9:30 10:00 wake up at 6:00 and by the time I get to start working I just opened up my calendar and I double-click on whatever's in the morning it's usually writing in the morning and everything is like perfectly organized the link is there I click the link the document is ready to go with exactly the right information it's all organized like there's nothing left to chance there's no documents over here there's no files over there it's all in its place you've prepared this in advance my assistant has and my team has so that has all been engineered and I do believe that the best morning routine is decided the day before the week before even the year before so by the time I get there it's just ready to go it's like a chef walking in me some plus exactly and everything's in its place so I love that then on a day-to-day basis things like scheduling my assistant Jill handles that she's fantastic and even when I was coming here I walked outside to get it uber taxi and I didn't even know what airport I was going to I just knew that when I double-clicked my calendar it would tell me so it's all taken care of finally a couple other examples when I travel especially for an extended period of time we have something called the travel protocol and Jill activates the travel protocol that means my plants get watered if they need to be that means that she handles email in a different way that means that all these details that I normally attend to when I'm in the office are now attended to by somebody else let's get super boring not for me not for you but maybe for some people is this a checklist that lives in a Google document where where does that protocol once you went once you click on go go gadget travel where are the instructions live because let's say Jill is sick yeah and somebody needs to fill in we don't have to get into that complexity if necessary but the the instructions yeah they're in a Google Doc there's a Google Doc that's roughly 25 or so pages of preferences like when I travel if I'm traveling over five hours I want to sit in this type of seat it's all lives there and it's updated so it's a live living document one recent thing that I updated was when I travel for a longer period of time I want to have food delivered to my hotel so I can try to stay generally on diet so I'll get to the hotel and they'll have a whole foods bag they're delivered with food that I know that I can kind of eat on the go and it's got a spoon too because the first time we did it there was no spoon and there are no spoons in a hotel room which I had to learn myself so it's like a lot of iteration but to me I don't find it annoying I actually love it because I'm like cracking the code of what it takes for me to be really efficient so it lives in a Google Doc if my assistant were sick for some reason she would transition it to someone else and so it's accessible to anyone at the company and we just go from you I want to mention something I'm extremely particular about preferences for travel so hotel room not near an ice machine not near the elevators a very particular thoughts on if if it's a hip cool hotel with a really loud Lobby certain max Heights but take into account fire escapes and so I mean I have a whole set of preferences I love this but when you let's just say that somebody listening is the thought exercise had dialed up their travel money dial what you realize is that in some cases the things you would expect to be expensive or problems you would expect to be expensive to fix are not expensive like the Whole Foods example its Sochi so you could do whole foods may do its own delivery if not perhaps instacart if not in a place like Austin you could use favor there are really inexpensive ways to do this to give an example so I used to I still do ice baths and I didn't have what I have now which is this somewhat risky MacGyver the cold plunge and I've engineered which you have to make sure you've unplugged before you get in but before that when I was living in San Francisco I had ice delivered where I would have ice picked up I would usually stop at a gas station after the gym and like pack my trunk full of ice which was a huge pain in the ass and then I realized wait a second at the time instacart will deliver like 60 pounds of ice for five bucks and I was like I am that [ __ ] I'm the guy who's like can i order kettle bells on Amazon Prime for free so I don't have to pay for like twice the cost yeah and lo and behold I was able to do it so the the solutions even if you brainstorm them in a wealth exercise do not always end up being expensive 100% that's why I'm so glad you said a few minutes ago don't scoff at the mental exercise like oh I don't have enough money like dream big dream the dream of what your money dial is at 10x but the solutions are often so simple every time I travel I will post a video on Instagram of the food that was delivered and it's like classic stuff it's like yogurt it's stuff that we all eat it's yogurt it's some almonds maybe a peanut butter thing and people like what service did you use that's the question what service and I'm like the service doesn't matter you could find somebody on Craigslist this is like a $20 purchase $20 that can change your life and in order to get there you just have to start with the dream it's the money is like really the last of it so this is $20 this is so my I have a very good assistant it and it's it's taken it's taken quite a bit of time and it's not something you necessarily get right off the bat and you don't need an assistant for this but she said to me at one point she's like Tim I don't know when this was not that long ago she's like Tim just travel with a roll of 20s and you can solve almost any problem and I was like that's a good idea and I'll give another example of a lifestyle upgrade that does not cost a lot of money if you go out to restaurants choose a restaurant you think you're really gonna like go to that restaurant not on the weekend so say between Monday and Thursday go either early preferably like right when they start for dinner service sit by yourself and again this is this is this is kind of a one-time investment go there for a week this is also stuff I picked up when I was writing the 4-hour chef because I would go in with a little notebook and I would order a bunch of stuff and I would take little notes and they're like who the [ __ ] is this guy right number one but they the chef typically at that point is not gonna be as as loaded not on booze although that happens too but on like 52 menus open it once that's not gonna happen at 5:00 or 5:30 so they might take an interest on the maitre d might take an interest in in you order all sorts of stuff to to try and then tip like 40% mm-hmm and do that three days in a row and you are forever VIP at that rest oh wow so I like that little insight the 40 percents not that surprising but the three days in a row do it a couple of days in a row so people get to know you you get to know them Wow and like your VIP for life okay and sit at the pass if you can so if there's a chef's table or a counter where you can see the kitchen sit there because most people will never ask for that I love this okay I love how to take a mundane experience like a restaurant and turn it into something special so thank you for sharing that let me share a couple of my own I had two experiences one where we I think we got something magical and the second where we didn't do it but we got an idea we were on our honeymoon and we were just having the most amazing time we went to four different countries and we started in Italy then Kenya India and then Thailand and the hospitality was just like on another level right we're on a different planet and I said to my wife if there's anything you think of or you want just ask because at these hotels they really really really want to say yes and we were at one hotel in Thailand and my wife loved the spring rolls and so the the manager comes out and he said hello you know how's your meal data and she said you know I was wondering she was kind of nervous I was wondering if we could have the recipe for these spring rolls cuz these are the best I've ever tasted he goes you know what give me just a minute he goes to the back he comes out with the chef's chef in his hat and the chef says I heard that you're interested in the recipe and he goes I would actually love to arrange a cooking class for you amazing what time are you available tomorrow she's like she's like I can come anytime so she goes to this cooking class private in the back in the kitchen not only did they make four different dishes they even said okay you know your stove doesn't have as much flame as our so you want to adjust the recipe etc so she sends me these photos I'm just sitting in the room I was doing some writing and she sends me these photos of four full dishes and then they were like here you go compliments of the of the kitchen like she'll never forget that never and it was just about asking how do you do this she didn't even ask for the class so I learned from that and I thought that was magical the second experience is a new thing that I've added to my playbook which is my buddy Nick took me he's like hey do you want to go to a tea tasting in New York I was like yeah let's go green tea I thought it would be a typical tea taste thing you know you go some tea they do we go there okay there's like six people from Japan there's a translator and there's a photographer we're like what is going on right now we're like just something happening but we don't understand what's going on so we're sitting there and then this this person comes and starts speaking and the translators translating and they basically say this is the best tea in Japan and it's being brought to the US for the first time and we're like okay like how good can good be it's tea you know like we didn't understand quality at this level okay so the way that we truly understood it they told us you know they only grow it on a certain part of the mountain and they use these types of things and we were like okay okay the way that we truly understood it was when they put the tea leaves in and they said okay steep it for a second and they said drink one drop one drop we're like what and so we drink one drop it was amazing it was really I've never tasted anything like it and then there was a little thing that said the prices we looked at each other my friend Nick and I and we said ounce four ounces is the most expensive thing we've ever had to drink if we were to buy it it was like $70 per sip this is crazy right and we didn't pay that much for the tasting but what we learned from that was number one sometimes quality you can you can only tell it by certain attributes - I wasn't at the level of being able to appreciate it and three and this was the real key what we should have done and what I'm going to do from now on is whenever I go to a cool whether it's a tea tasting or any kind of interesting restaurant I'm I have a little playbook now I asked my assistant Jill to put it together we're gonna make the reservation of course I'm gonna pay I'm not asking for anything free but she's gonna send a note ahead of time that says you know hey roommates coming in he would love to be able to take a kitchen tour just say if you have 15 minutes ahead of time he would love to be able to take it and if possible he'd love to post it on Instagram whatever again not asking for anything free but like what I've learned is people who are the best loved to share it so I there's this phrase you know those who can't do teach that's totally incorrect never believe that the very best loves you can't wear those who can do those who can't teach or they say those who can't do , shot it yeah and like that's a total misnomer let the very best people like here you are you're the best in the world at what you do and you love to teach everyone who's the best whether it's a chef or a tea master they love it so I'm gonna try to do that when I go to these places and I'm just like everyone of us can do that so anyway that was my exciting experience so you said you said that one oh that's the one that gave you the idea yeah I didn't execute that yet and the the well there are many things that that one could you take from what you just said one I want to underscore is the importance of asking and I think that you know what I would hope for myself because I'm still developing my thinking and priorities will change and worldviews will change as it relates to money right money is an interesting thing we could talk about like what the [ __ ] money is to begin with that's a separate thing it's part of the reason why I have a 100 trillion dollar note from Zimbabwe framed that I put up on a wall because it's important to remember just how conceptual a lot of this is but my thinking will change but to stress test your own assumptions it's very valuable to not just do thought exercises but certain real-life exercises so one could be asking for a kitchen tour and don't by the way don't do it unless you're interested so and if you're not interested go watch chef's table like Francis moment or one of those I get excited about it and have some basic vocabulary so you can appreciate what the hell is being shown to you if you're gonna do it don't do it just to do it but that is a question right and we know someone who lives here in Austin also Noah Kagan who has his coffee challenge right so walk into a coffee shop ask for 10% off and that you can't tell them you're doing an experiment you can't tell them that so once i've told you to do it it doesn't matter what they say so it could be a starbucks it could be an indie doesn't matter and if like what if i thought what if i don't like coffee it's like i don't care get a water get a you know order Pellegrino and we'll order tea but as for 10% off cultivating the muscle used for asking for things is so incredible and i you're talking about you know those who those who can't teach and how there are these these common sayings that are that are taken is true i do there is one that i like which I do think is generally true and that is in life you don't get what you deserve you get what you negotiate I agree and sometimes negotiating is just asking for what you want right so are there any exercises that you would suggest or practices phone calls questions to people who are listening that might help them kind of stress some of the things they have accepted yes I love this so I'm gonna give you a small one and I'm gonna give you a big one the small one is if you have any sort of late fee you should just use the scripts in my book or you can google for them and you should call up your financial institution usually it's a credit card and negotiate the late fee what should they Google specifically if you don't if you don't we'll get the book but if you don't get the book but you can just google remits 18 negotiation scripts okay and you're gonna see there this is how it's gonna go you call it the credit card and you say hi I just wanted to confirm that I've been a member for the last four years and they're gonna say yes I see that mm whatever year okay great I noticed that there's a late fee here of $37 from last month I'd like to get that waive to please and they're gonna say by the way notice my tonality I'd like to get that waived please why Sir well I made a mistake but I sent the payment in the next day and I'd like to confirm that it can be removed and it won't affect my credit 80% of the time right there you're gonna get it removed and there's a reason I put that in Chapter one of my book as well as with bank fees overdraft etc it's that most people have never proactively taken control their money they just accept the world the way it is ah the credit card screwed me again no you can get that back and once you get that late feedback you're like oh my god I can actually have control over this these companies work for me so that's that's the first thing I would say the second exercise is a little bigger it's more conceptual right now I'm doing a small coaching program with like a hundred and fifty people I'm walking him through my book and it's like this private group and I'm just walking him through every chapter and I asked him a thought exercise a couple of days ago I said if I gave you ten thousand dollars tomorrow or if you just found it no obligation no strings what would you do with it okay Tim what do you think they said they would do it this $10,000 $10,000 this is just like right off the cuff pay down mortgage or invest in and in index fund but I'm guessing closer to the former than the latter I don't know okay you pretty pretty close so it turns out that according to these answers that they're all Saints we have a bunch of Mother Teresa's in the group they're like I would pay off my dad I would give 10% to charity I would do this in that I'm like you got $25,000 a credit card debt you're telling me that you would magically take this money and just pay it off they what they were doing was they were having a very optimistic sense of their future selves I would rather they say I actually don't know what I would do with this money based on my past behavior I'd probably just spend a lot of it or I have no system or way of thinking about what to do with my money that would have been more honest yeah instead when faced with what we're gonna do in the future we're really optimistic I'd work out four times a week I pay this off I'd pay for my parents retirement what I would really like to see people is go through this exercise start with your optimistic self and then try your realistic self if you say you're gonna pay off all your debt why are you even in debt in the first place clearly you didn't have a system that would keep you out of it so I think for people whether it's $100 $1000 $10,000 whether it's you know you could even go as big as somebody just gives you a house what are you gonna do with it I haven't even done that myself but you could play with the concept and then remember if you don't have a system like for me the answer is I would put it straight into my system put it into a checking account and money would be withdrawn to certain places 20% would go here 10% would go there some money would be spit out for guilt-free spending and I'd probably go buy a beautiful sweater where do they that's always in your sweater I know I love where where do those funds go if you're comfortable talking about some of the places sure so you get 10 grand you put into the checking account and then it gets kind of put into this process yeah it's like a projects a process map basically like an email inbox and it gets filtered and shunted where it needs to go so day to day my spending is very consistent except for two areas rent is the same food is basically the same everything is pretty stable I like to put my target is I start by saying I want to say invest at least twenty to thirty percent and I think that's a good healthy number if you're doing that the rest of your life is generally in control twenty to thirty percent and because we don't have kids right now my wife and I've been talking about our numbers we want that number to be towards the higher end twenty to thirty percent just technical question is this pre-tax or is this taking into account taxes it's a great question it can be either if you I always like to be more conservative always so post tax is really good if you can do that because you're you know you're gonna be putting more in but really for any of these numbers if it's post or pre you're generally in a good place anyway so then that money is getting saved and invested and investing is like I try to go more aggressive on investing because we're young so I put that into things like a target date fund and you know I love Vanguard and I I recommend them I don't have any deals with them but I think they're the best that's where I put what is the target date fund target I understand all the separate words but I don't actually actually know what that is okay so very quickly everybody thinks investing is about picking stocks and like sitting and looking at this screen that looks like Minority Report that's not investing investing is very simple low cost funds and these cost you almost nothing these days we're talking a point one percent expense ratio it's very very low cost what you do is something like a target date fund is you pick a target date that you're gonna retire so if you're thirty and you're gonna rip your gonna presumably retire at 65 that's 35 years from now so there's a target date fund called Vanguard 2060 fund okay and what that does is it's like a pie chart it's pretty aggressive in your 30s because you're young and as you get older it gets a little more conservative basically what it means for you is that you don't need to do anything except put money into it automatically every month I love this as a great simple low-cost way to invest and the bulk of my portfolio is either in target-date funds or individual index funds so that money would go in there I have some money in sub savings accounts I've got some targets like you know I saved up for my wedding before was before I even met my wife saved up for an engagement ring I like to plan ahead so I have those numbers same for a down payment on a house which eventually I will buy even though it doesn't make sense for me right now but I still plan for it also vacation so like midterm goals you're talking about roughly one to five or so years how do you keep these things separate or is it are they only separate in a spreadsheet where you're keeping track you know how do you not co-mingle yeah I like keeping them separate because I think it's like separate meaning separate bank accounts well you can have sub savings at Kelly's subsidy yeah so capital want like an authorized employee on a credit card account or something like exactly just for tracking for tracking purposes and I also think it's nice if you have one big old commingled account you don't really know what's for what but what I would encourage everyone to do is think about what do you want to save for between one to five years and for one year there are things like Christmas gifts like you know that's a known irregular expense or it's a known regular expense it's coming every December so if it's 500 bucks you might as well start saving now then there are things like an anniversary dinner there's also mistakes I used to have a stupid mistakes account because I used to get a lot of parking tickets I don't do that anymore thank God so I don't need to plan for that but then there's things like a down payment maybe getting married things like that above and beyond five or so seven years I just put it in the market because I don't need it and it just grows then you're putting it in the market with a target date fund target date fund yeah and those over the long term over history have returned about 8% so if you do the math and you go to one of these calculators like a bank rate or something you can plug in the numbers and you'll see that your money doubles roughly every it's the rule of 72 72 divided by 10 it'll double about every seven years that's why compounding is so powerful if you start now and you put even a hundred bucks a month in that number gets very large very fast so that's the power of investing the rest of the money pays my fixed expenses like rent things like that and finally out pops out guilt-free spending this is my favorite part the sweater account the sweater account that's basically so that brings me to my two things that are variable travel I tend to overspend on travel a bit and clothing and I've set up this system because now I've sort of advanced my financial system where a lot of it is automated I have a meeting once a month I have a personal CFO we kind of look at it and I basically told them I want my document prepared in this way I want an executive summary I want the expenses categorized as such and I only want you to flag the following ones because these are the ones I'm variable on like I don't really care if I spend 20 bucks more on deodorant that doesn't move the needle but like too much on travel I got to know about it so I can kind of correct overtime that's how I think about the spending okay so two next topics I thought we would discuss prenups so this is a topic that is shied away from a lot it seems to be an important topic at least in the US and it's something that came up in conversation recently and you joked that you might be willing to talk about it on the podcast this is one of those subject areas that is I think neglected and I've seen a lot of difficulty and angst and pain and discomfort faced as a result of I think an unwillingness to do to make it more of an open conversation so where should we start with prenups I'm an open book man I'll tell you anything all right so this is one of those things that when I walked into it I didn't know anything and I only know I only knew what I had heard on TV that prenups are bad or they're for people who have generational wealth that's been inherited like I didn't know anything and then I discovered when I talked to friends there was so many people who have thought about this or gone through it but none of it is online it's all behind closed doors so prenup prenuptial agreement what is what is a prenup what's the purpose of a prenup prenup sets the terms of what you are coming into a marriage with and it is a acknowledgment that certain people might have certain assets or interests like a business or cash or investments whatever the case may be and it also sets the terms for if the marriage ends for whatever reason what is to be done with those assets specifically the pre marital assets that's what a prenup is about okay so how did how did you think about this because I've I've heard some disastrous stories of this process being handled poorly or terms not being perhaps reviewed as carefully and I should point out also that I this is not a male-female thing I've seen this in same-sex couples I've seen this in cases where the woman is coming in with significantly greater assets than the husband-to-be so how did you think about this and what's one of the smarter ways to go about thinking about this well I'll tell you what I did and I'll tell you some mistakes I made too and I'm the reason I want to talk about this is that I want to shine the light on money topics that people don't talk about and I want people to be informed you can make your own decision but I walked in to thinking about getting married with a lot of preconceived notions about what a prenup was who it was for and just just to give you a sense like nobody around me ever signed a prenup growing up it just was not a part of my culture so I started thinking about getting engaged a few years ago and my girlfriend at the time you know we were discussing it and discussing what oh the engagement yeah that you know also bowling what's gonna happen eventually and you know we're together for the long term things like that and I started looking into it and if you google how to sign a prenup you're gonna find a lot of really generic and borderline bad advice it's from disgruntled redditors and it's from like ask men or these just magazines where they have these things this advice like you should blame it on your lawyer or you should blame it on your parents or how do you get away with not making your fiancee and I just thought this is not the way I want to start this relationship and this financial relationship as well because that's what marriage is it's legal its financial it's also love it's it's at your team in every way so I sat down I did a lot of research I talked to a lot of my friends and the thing that shocked me was when I started bringing it up with friends so many of them especially entrepreneurs had lots to say lots so I'll fast forward to what happened when we had my girlfriend at the time we sat down we had a really serious meeting like we actually had a Google agenda we came with our bullet points and we had a very adult meeting where we talked about just the two of you just to us legal counsel and like that no no we were just the two of us we talked about you know when would we like to be engaged and married where would we live do we want to have kids so just to be clear this is a life logistics meeting and not a prenup meeting that may be part of it yeah it's a broader conversation I hadn't even brought the prenup up yeah okay so we go through you know kids and and I told her you know I even mentioned to my wife I said you know let's talk about the names of our kids cuz I never saw myself having some kid named Mike I want Mike running around in my house and she's like what the hell where's this coming from I'm like I just feel particular about this so so then so we go through the list and the good news is we were generally on the same page it's funny things she goes you know I'd really like to be engaged by q1 of next year I'm like oh my god this is the girl of my dreams she's talking financial quarters I'm like I love you babe so so then at the end of that conversation I said you know there's something else that's important you know I it's really important to me that we discuss a prenup and she was surprised kind of taken aback she's like okay what do you mean and I said look you and I grew up very similar we both grew up in California our parents have similar jobs and I said because of certain decisions I've made because of my business and because of a lot of luck I've been put in this fortunate position where I have a business and I've accumulated a certain amount of assets I said it's really important for me that we talk about what that means before we get married and that we sign an agreement in the worst case if something bad happened and this was really I was nervous very nervous because like what what is someone's reaction gonna be I have no idea but I thought if anything is gonna be bad but I felt very I was nervous but I also felt confident cuz it was something that I knew that I wanted to do like it was really important to me so to her credit she said you know what I'm surprised I didn't expect it but I'm open to it let me get educated about it and we can talk okay great so that was as good of a response as I could have hoped she goes off and she does her own research she talks to her friends and we start discussing more and more right we've got about four or five months until I proposed to her we start talking the next step is to get lawyers now interestingly you have to retain counsel each side has to retain counsel and oftentimes what happened is the person who has more assets will actually pay for the other person's lawyer which I did these lawyers are very expensive right so I said you know what I'll take care of that I'm happy to do it so she found her own lawyer and we start to go through hammering these basic terms out now the basic structure of a prenup is most people don't need a prenup because most people are coming into a marriage with relatively similar assets the places where it starts to make sense or if you have some major amount of assets whether it be a house whether it be an inheritance a business those kinds of things it starts to make sense to think about I had to get site intellectual property yeah absolutely I had to get comfortable with the idea that this wasn't a bad thing I wasn't planning for us to fail and that's the most common objection people have to prenups which is you're planning for it to go wrong I'm not planning for it to go wrong I intend to be married forever I want to I always emphasize that with my wife and I made it clear that we're a team but I also mentioned that I've for whatever reasons I've accumulated these things and it's really important for me to plan for what might happen as we talk to more and more about it it became even more and more clear that in every other part of life top performers plan they plan ahead they plan for good they plan for bad they plan but it's like just in this one situation of life that society has told everyone no that's wrong you shouldn't plan at all you should go into it like a dough with you know these dough eyes and you shouldn't really think even for a moment about what would happen if something goes wrong I mean you get on an airplane they give you a safety briefing they don't it's not because they expect the plane to crash into the water that's great exactly it's also a place just to jump in where it's I've thought a good amount about this just relationships and marriage in generals that when you get married in official capacity you are involving the state in your affairs you are signing up for certain contractual agreements and so in in any well-planned agreement you're going to have contingencies for what happens if things do not work out there's going to be a termination clause you're gonna have that a publishing agreement you're gonna have that in any number of dozens or hundreds of other contracts you will sign will always have a separation clause the reason why this go this is such a heated topic for people I think there's two reasons one there's just a general ignorance of prenups because it is inherently a private affair inherently when you have assets being discussed it happens behind closed doors specifically lawyers closed doors it's not public there are no good guides or no ebooks on how to do a prenup there's nothing there's not even any sample prenups out there they're very very poor quality the second thing is it attacks our belief that in America a marriage is purely about love and I believe a marriage is absolutely about love but go look at any parents or any couple that has let's say kids go look at them and look at their day to day yes there's love but there's also teamwork there's this person's doing dinner this person's taking the trash out this person's changing the diapers it's an arrangement it's a team and on any team you have to have a set of rules and so I got comfortable with that saying you know what this is a love marriage we found each other we met each other we love each other but it's also we want to make sure that this is a team and we're setting expectations so we went through the process and we talked to our lawyers and the lawyers are hammering it out and this is where it started to get really tough everything was going great but then once you everything's great in concept and then you talk about real numbers what are the if I'm a like so what's what are the basic terms that you're agreeing upon in a prenup the first thing is you're laying out all the assets that each person has yeah those could be assets liabilities you kind of put those out out on the table by the way that was a good conversation that we had I forgot to take my own advice about when to talk about money with your partner so my wife had asked me years ago to help her with some 401k thing and I was like yeah I'll help you but first read my book so she reads my book and then she was like okay I still have this one question so we went through it and I got to understand her pay and and all that stuff and it was great like we worked through it like a year or two later she said you know I feel a little unbalanced because you know everything about my finances but I don't know anything about yours and that was when I realized like I had made a huge mistake I by not telling her I had put myself in a very unbent placed in an unbalanced position she's not fair so that afternoon we talked about it and we talked about my net worth we talked about what it means for us and that was I would say one of my most pleasant conversations most pleasant yeah because we talked about what does it mean for us like our our rich life now what does it mean and it means that when we travel we can take our parents with us and we can spend extra for them to stretch their legs out we can travel to places or we can make certain investments or take risks that we might not normally be able to do again as a team so that was actually one of my favorite memories of talking about money in the early days now we had listed out all our assets and liabilities and now the basic structure of a prenup is what happens in the case of the marriage ending and there are so many ways to cut it know - prenups are alike what happens if the marriage ends in three months at an extreme in many cases a cheque is written can you believe that if a marriage ends in three months somebody might write a check to the other person why just like pure goodwill severance pay you could call it that yeah and then both partners might still have a job etc but what happens if the marriage now ends you know 30 years later let's say there's two or three kids let's say that one partner has stopped their job so that he or she can take care of the kids well it's kind of fair that that person should be compensated in some way because it would be unfair for somebody to walk out of the marriage with just this large amount of relative assets and the other person left with nothing that's just not fair it's not fair in my eyes personally and it's not fair in the state size either in in each of these cases or in most prenups is it a lump one-time payment or is it like an ongoing and new annuity that gets paid each year was a great question yeah what does it look like it can be decided however you like but each lawyer is going to argue for their size so the person who would be receiving the payments is going to want it all upfront right right and so there are also other questions about what if you're living in a house with kids and the marriage ends who leaves how soon that has to be dictated right and and then there are other questions about what happen is there a cap on how much can be paid out and that's important to understand though a couple of things the money that I'm gonna speak generally now the money that is earned when you are together is generally community property right so when you are married generally the money that is earned is together it's yours there are certain exceptions like if you have a business there's this in that and you can kind of carve those out ahead of time but in general we're talking about money that was accumulated before the marriage that's really important to understand kids are definitely a complicating factor but you are not really dictating the terms of child of what's it called custody custody custody and also payments the state will determine that so that's really important to know as well you can't come up with a rule right now that says you know if we have three kids and this marriage ends like I'm gonna write you a check for $1 or 1 million dollars a month that can't work the state will decide based on lifestyle let's use a question just from from my perspective yeah why get married at all what what is this because I did really dislike and this is something that I talk about usually in the first few dates I mean I have a great girlfriend right now but like is like once we've covered like what do you want for your amount your main course pretty quickly the subject comes up is like yep marriage not keen on having yes some bureaucracy involved in my relationship it's a great question and also it's like if you're coming into a relationship where the current trajectory of earnings is is vastly disproportionate the idea of having a bureaucracy involved and having sort of everything past a certain day become community property doesn't have a whole lot of appeal to me so it were your reasons for getting married your desire your partner's desire your families multiple families expectations or their other reasons that's a great question and I think only in this day and age can this question really be asked because as recently as 25 years ago this question would have never been asked it would be of course you're going to get married and now you and I both know plenty of people who are either single or in cohabitating relationships or casual or whatever the case may be and they're perfectly happy not being married I think for me the answer is probably all the above it was a desire on my part a desire on my wife's part and also our families yeah and this might be an invisible script from my childhood yeah that I always saw myself as married so there's a lot there what the way I thought about it was I love my wife I love when we're together she makes me a better person and I think I do the same and together as a team we are like amazing like I love laughing with her I love how she challenges me and I want to deepen that relationship the financial part of it for me was a part that I wanted to address but I also felt confident knowing that we could solve it yeah that we could come to an agreement and I didn't see it as adversarial at least until the middle part which I want to tell you about okay but but I approached it like very much like can do yeah it's like hiring someone like I'm gonna make him an offer I want to make him a great offer and I expect that we're gonna have some back-and-forth but overall it's about coming to an agreement that we can both work in a capacity together now I know that sounds a bit unromantic for a marriage but I'm talking about the financial part of the marriage there's a whole there's so many different layers and we in America only talk about love what I'm trying to share is like there are lots of other parts like be aware of it don't put your head in the sea you're also talking about you're not talking about marriage as a concept you're talking about the contract of marriage and if you get married whether you go down to you know the whatever it might be a blanking on the term but like some office downtown to get rubber-stamped like you're entering into a contract with multiple parties yeah and so you can enter into a very nebulous contract or you can enter into a very clear contract I always say for every major purchase in your life every major purchase in every major decision spend the time most of us should spend less time on most decisions and we should spend a lot more time on a few key decisions like I want to take this seriously so did my wife so we did we spent months right so now here we are the lawyers are going back and forth and it's starting to get a bit slow like they're arguing and now we're talking about it and it became stressful and at some points like pretty heated okay and I was like I mean there are so many things that happen during this time one we would just stop talking about it for like weeks at a time because it was just too stressful and we had never had these kind of conversations before about money and like my perspective was like I've thought about money for 15 or 20 years every day like this is my business and I'm really proud of what I've accomplished financially and I've met and I always love to come and like I made a very fair very fair offer bending over backwards that was my perspective my wife's perspective was very different and I think that I didn't listen as much as I should I was like IIIi came out I did this I made this offer and she would say something and I would say like look at the spreadsheet like the the look at the numbers and she was like yeah but and she was talking about something else in a completely different language and I was so preoccupied with like mr. spreadsheet guy so finally she said you know we got to go talk to somebody about this we should go see a therapist and I was like yeah we really should I totally agreed with her so you might wonder like where do you go to find a therapist and for us the answer was Yelp we literally opened up Yelp and typed like therapist and we found one two blocks away so that's how it's done guys and we walked over there and we sat down in this room and we had a conversation like we've never had before this therapist was very good she asked us about how we grew up with money what it meant and it turns out it meant totally different things to us like for me it meant being proud of what I've accomplished it meant all the work and for anyone who's built anything you know the sacrifices it took to build that you look back you can remember Friday nights where you didn't go out or you can remember X or Y or risks you took and I was seeing that and what my wife was seeing was something different money meant something different to her and this therapist helped us kind of bring that up and we find ourselves you know we went one two three sessions we found ourselves talking about our childhood and I it's kind of like a caricature like a joke of what you talk about in therapy session but we walked out of each of those sessions like wow that was that was pretty good that was pretty helpful so we still were having the lawyers go back and forth but now we were connecting more with each other financially and we we were reminded by this therapist like we're a team this is just an agreement we need to come to but remember why you are together remember why you're getting married we finally came to an agreement and we signed it and it's funny because one of my buddies he held an event called like should you sign a prenup and he invited like 20 or 25 people right and one of his friends who was married and had done a prenup sent him a note and said I'd rather be dead than come to this event and he was like whoa whoa why and he's like dude that was the worst six months of my life imagine you have someone you love and you're arguing about money with lawyers for six months and I didn't get that until I'd gone through it I would say that in retrospect I learned a couple of things number one I should have talked about money with my wife way earlier like way earlier I violated my own advice and that was horrible I should have talked about it earlier - I should have stopped being mr. spreadsheet dude and actually listened and said like let's put the numbers aside and talk about what money means for me like I told you I'm proud of it my wife wanted to feel safe she wanted to know that if anything went wrong that she would be taken care of and that and I didn't really internalize what that meant to her like what does that mean I should have listened I should have gone to see a therapist earlier and we should have not let it stretch out for as long as it did that was really torturous for both of us how would you have expedited it Wow therapy earlier well I mean that's why I'm here that's what I want to share with people don't just hope that it will kind of work itself out over time it's everybody involved in the process wants it to stretch out the lawyers they're not trying to just bill you more but they're incentive is to get you the best deal and the other lawyers to get the other one you have to take control and manage the process but both of you have to be aligned on that I would have yet definitely talked to a therapist ahead of time with my wife we would have gone there together faster and we kind of would have I would have started off not talking about money but like rather about meaning that and that's something that I'm hoping to be able to talk more about but I hope from people listening to this if you go in and you've got a spreadsheet that you want to discuss you've taken a wrong turn that's what I did I should have talked about meaning and fears and hopes about money as opposed to like let's go through the numbers the numbers are like the last part I was gonna say it's not either/or right it's it's sequencing both end and you got to talk about the numbers but once you get meaning aligned the numbers work themselves out so when we've chatted about this it's been passing in the past because I wanted to make sure we did on the podcast yeah a couple of stories have come up that I'm not sure how to grapple with now I'm at a point also where I haven't had conversations with attorneys about this type of thing although I mean it makes sense to think about estate planning yeah whether your estate is small medium more large it makes a lot of sense to think about that and things can be really messy speaking as someone who had grandparents who didn't think about anything and we're not you know rolling it doing backstroke and a pool full of coins like Scrooge McDuck but nonetheless when emotions are heated kids can fight over anything even if it's just table scraps and that was a mess I don't want that to ever affect if I have kids to affect my kids so yep you should think about earlier but the point I was gonna make is I haven't gone through the actual drafting of say a prenup and but I've seen marriages implode and like the the the numbers if you just like let's try to coldly objectively look at the numbers in the u.s. they're not that hot so it makes make sense to plan whether it's like driving about the seatbelt in your car like you're not planning on getting accident but you want to be covered if you do I've heard horrible stories right so I've heard stories of friend who had a prenup went through all the same process and then I think it was a week after he got married or Shore or just before he got married his wife to be your wife said I signed the prenup under duress oh my god I don't I don't feel good about it and it was back to the table that under duress for people who don't know is and this is not a legal definition but under extreme stress therefore the position of the person who's claiming dress is that the contract is invalid because you they were pressured into it and this can apply to quite a few contracts it turns out and he was he was in a position where he had to go back and it was renegotiated and the numbers changed so like the lump payments and so on were changed and so that's that's fear-inducing that's scary you could have an agreement and then end up in a situation like that right and the point number one whether it's legally forced upon you or just practically day-to-day you're like well where the [ __ ] do we go from here and have to then step back into like negotiation mode and I've also heard of approaches I'm not saying maybe this is getting too much into like the dark arts or something but we're friends have thought like alright if if I'm going to if I'm trying to defend against the worst case scenario would it make sense for me to go engage X number of very high caliber divorce attorneys they're conflicted out if we end up having a divorce later like that's a that's a little Voldemort but I can also see the practicality of it so like how do you think about what landmines you might need to avoid if there are any right like yeah it's a big question but it's like this [ __ ] gets messy you know I would say that I've spoken to a lot of different attorneys both in in getting married but also as a CEO and one of them told me something really interesting they said that the people with the lawyers with the most interesting stories are criminal lawyers of course the second most interesting lawyer stories are workplace attorneys I would be willing to bet that the third is divorce attorneys because the stories are just like out of this world I didn't really approach it like that to tell you the truth I I didn't plan on the marriage ending I simply wanted to account for what might happen financially so let me put it this way if at the point where you're sort of already thinking about like let me engage all these divorce attorneys which I don't even know if that works or not I've heard it's a rumor but like I feel like there's a larger problem going on there a much larger problem these lawyers are not stupid they're all very good they've seen it all and and the thing is to negotiate in good faith you have to remember you're not trying to get one over on your partner you're if you were just trying to get one over like a car dealer you're trying to maximize it cuz it's a one-time transaction this is the partner you're gonna be with for the rest of your life so that actually necessitates a different way of negotiating like when I was discussing with my attorney and that attorney was negotiating with my wife's attorney I had to compromise on things that I normally would not compromise on and that just to put it bluntly like I haven't had to compromise financially in the last 25 years right at all yeah so suddenly I'm like what what is this taste in my mouth I haven't tasted this taste of compromising bile yeah it's but but that's why I think it's really important a couple principles came up for me one is go slow to go fast I should have done a better job of this of like let's talk about the meaning with the meaning right go slow to go fast and the second one was always remember the North Star the North Star here is not getting an extra dollar or protecting the extra two dollars it's we're gonna be married day to day for the rest of our lives that's the North Star and like putting that in perspective like as the lawyers saying this or that I had to constantly remind myself so did my wife and by the way I just want to say she was excited for me to come here and talk about this she actually encouraged me because I wrote about it in my book I wrote some more details and I asked her I said are you okay if I share this and we talked about it we both realized going through this that both of us were pretty alone no one was talking about this publicly and we're both big fans you know she's a stylist I do what I do we love shining the light on things that people are not really talking about publicly because we're both very curious and we both want to get better so if she had said no I would have never written this stuff I would have never come on here and talked about this but she actually said yes go on there and tell them our experience because other people should know this whether you do it or not you should know all right I've questions so this is gonna be a super awkward one made for me to ask more than for you to answer because you're being put on the spot but I'm the one who has the option of asking whatever I want so this is something I've seen so many people struggle with what I'm about to bring up and I want to hear if it affected you and if so how you used mental jiu-jitsu or contortionism to get through it and that is if you're coming into a negotiation say for a prenup and you are the person who is bringing in disparate the assets and income and that could be not necessarily a 51/49 split right I mean this could be like a 90/10 split 99 1 split and it very often is I mean it can very often be when you're looking at the settlement and the amount right so it's very hard for someone let's just say who's made ten thousand dollars a year to ever imagine what it really means and what it takes to make a hundred thousand ditto if someone's making like fifty grand a year what does it mean in terms of sacrifice and planning and like Friday's missed and weekend's worked and holiday skipped to make a million dollars right and so all of a sudden then you're going through a negotiation where someone who has perhaps not made a decade or two decades of sacrifice is asking for an amount that is more than you made in the first thirty years of your life how do you navigate that because there's like viscerally I know a lot of people and I'm one of them who's just like that makes no sense and it also brings up like well wait a second if that's the amount that gets paid out I would start questioning the sort of motives of the other person it's like okay well they were able to kind of do whatever they want for X period of time but now if we get divorced three years from now they're set for life if they don't screw it up how do you I would that would make me feel very uncomfortable to me too I mean I think remember when I said that like I was proud of what I had accomplished and you go through so many emotions in this process and the funny thing is when it comes to money I'm not emotional at all like day-to-day I'm super I call it hot to cool I think most people or some people particularly those in debt money is like a phantom or a gremlin it's a beast that they're fighting right they need to break the shackles of this debt I've overcome those things to me it's a tool and I use it for convenience things like that so to find myself going from nervousness in bringing this up to be pride that I wanted to talk about the numbers and I was very proud of what I had accomplished and what it meant for us and then resentment you know I definitely felt resentful because you know to me I'm like look at the spreadsheet like I have gone above and beyond and like how can you not acknowledge that I found myself like experiencing these emotions I hadn't honestly ever felt about money and and I think that's where a therapist helped me but I should have done it sooner cuz it really was not healthy to just sort of soak in them for literally months and remember we're like seeing each other day to day and so that definitely affects you as you're planning a wedding with your partner you can sequence it out you're like don't do that you know I think that it's a question that I don't have a good answer to I think that the the basic there are certain things in life that are just not fair okay and one of them it might be this but really that's not the point the point is not for me to win that's what I learned along the way at least this is my lesson some people might think differently my point in retrospect was not to win this negotiation it was to win our marriage meaning both of us get there together as a team and if I have to compromise a few things which in business I would never have made a couple of the compromises I made but this is more important than my business right this is the person that I'm gonna spend my last days with so that actually really put things in perspective for me it's like oh [ __ ] sometimes you learn about yourself just by observing what you yourself do and I was like did I really just agree to that that one 10th term we've been discussing for a month yes I did Wow like my wife is that important to me and I realize like yes she is so I don't know I don't have a good answer for you on that but I'll tell you I really swung emotions I felt resentful and I hate feeling resentful it's one of the most toxic emotions but I think there's something larger than like being right in this now maybe that's just well I mean that's I think I think cutting off your nose to spite your face to be right doesn't make sense yeah I also think that it's possible to play not to lose or set yourself up for blind spots why all not at all costs trying to win 100 right right like don't be an [ __ ] and like make a bunch of insistent demands based on principle that don't practically make sense is fair but walking into something blind and just offering yourself as a pinata yeah doesn't make sense either okay you know what's crazy about this whole thing now so once you sign it like it's done in fact in at least in our case we're like all right thank God we don't want to look at this now like file it away good the real challenge actually since we got married just about a year ago has been like day-to-day spending and that now using the tools we learn from this therapist and also going slow to go fast like my dream okay my fantasy was to have this just beautiful financial model okay that's what I wanted like this model that we look at and everything's like going from side to side we've built that it's taken like eight or nine months what what I realize now is emotions first what does it mean who's cooking dinner who's taking the trash out let's get all that stuff done the model part is like the last part of it and because we had these tough conversations earlier on now we're like okay let's let's start with the emotions we have buffers so if we overspend a little bit on eating out right now that's okay we'll dial in the numbers later like what I've realized is the numbers really come last and so we are both really thankful we went through the process although I wish we could have been I wish you could have had some guidance really but funny enough though once you sign it it's not like you're reviewing it every single day yeah you're it's the day to day now it's literally the littlest things like who's picking up X at the store you know that's where day-to-day financial stuff comes in and that's another area where I think you use the I will teach you to be rich stuff the system's the idea that you don't really want to be spending your valuable cognition on like who's buying deodorant or rice like have a system automate it boom we were talking about what spend a lot of time on it but your relative who you thought was 65 you and your wife thought was 65 or something it ended up being 87 and uncle's and how regimented regiment is the wrong word how much of his life is is routinized right it wakes up at the same time and we are just grabbing coffee earlier and I said I wonder how much of his longevity is that lifetime accumulation of avoiding decision fatigue on [ __ ] that just shouldn't consume your brain every day at all so I believe just like you have a playbook I believe in a playbook for life here's a couple playbook rules that I have one I call it row meets book buying rule if you ever see a book you're even remotely interested in buy it don't debate it don't ask if it's the second best just buy it it's ten dollars is the best money you ever spent have a year of cash have it available liquid and if you don't have it build up to it save up for big expenses engagement ring wedding honeymoon all that stuff house sub accounts sub accounts boom when I eat at a restaurant now my joy is if I see anything that looks good I just order it and I also tell the people eating with me do the same don't even think about it and so like my co-workers loved eating out with me because I'm like disorder at all like I got the bill just a quick side note for anyone who has not seen it it came out not long ago from the time of this recording but there's an incredible ESPN article on coach Gregg Popovich and the dinners and the wine for the Spurs it is phenomenal fantastic people can look that up they have a couple of areas in your life where you have absolutely no budget it doesn't matter how much you spend you just love it unlimited unlimited there's no if you love strawberries like when I grew up I loved strawberries but we had a big family and strawberries were expensive there is no amount of strawberries that will ever cause me any material difference in my life it's three bucks four bucks 5 bucks 6 bucks doesn't matter buy it have something it could be as small as strawberries it could be as big as whatever eat the same for this is for me personal a lot of people don't agree but eat the same thing mostly the same thing every single day I do it it's just easy decision fatigue I do the same thing yeah and then also so this is what my wife and I've been talking about recently is let's come up with some rules for our relationship - these are guidelines we can change him but you know we were planning a vacation we're gonna stay with a friend for their birthday in Mexico City and we're looking at flights and I find that we're deciding which flight should it be economy should it be business what hotel this or that and I said like hey let's let's get into it let's kind of figure out where we like to travel together in what style but over the course of the next few months let's kind of come up with some basic rules for example if you're traveling over five hours business class or if we're staying just the two of us we don't need a fancy hotel whatever the case make a basic guideline so that we don't have to think about it all the time and even down to like who's taken out the trash like let's just kind of articulate that and be explicit so that it's all on the table and that way it clears up any misconceptions so I love this general playbook for life especially what's this what was your conclusion on the trash oh dude I take the trash out okay and it just got revealed because like I would notice the trash filling up and then she would take it out once in a while but really she would say like would you mind taking the trash out and it just became very clear in any relationship there are certain things that one person does or doesn't like to do and like the same thing true for cooking ironing clothes yeah Cass cooks my iron quick note on that one thing that I've found really helpful is whether it's with friends or your significant other but especially significant other is agreeing in advance from a scale of 1 to 10 10 being absolutely heartfelt must have or must not have you can't use a lot of tents like so that you only really get a couple of tens in your pockets so don't spend them on nonsense right but asking someone like zero to like 1 to 10 how much do you like doing this or 1 to 10 how much do you hate doing this and it's like all right if to you it's like you don't love taking out the garbage but if it's I'm a five out of ten like six out of ten who cares like it doesn't really matter she's like I grew up in such a such a way I hate taking out the garbage like okay fine I'll take out the car wait so what's your ten on liking or not liking let's go both so I for instance very fond of cooking very unfund of cleanup love it right lassic yeah and what about something you hate well something I hate would be the cleanup okay other things I hate would be for instance I and much happier to pay for things if I can avoid decisions so if my partner is willing to handle logistics we went to Burning Man it was her first time and I knew what I was signing up for and I told her I was like I will go but only if you handle the logistics I will pay for everything but in terms of like getting costumes and like getting everything there and the bikes and the lights and the but that thought the thought that uh you need to be like this the CEO of this operation and I'm happy to be like controller her approves the checks love it but that's it got it so I love that you're explicit and I love that 1 to 10 I have to think about that I've overheard my wife talking to her parents and I grew up with my mom cooking food for us every night right every night like right off the stove she would be giving us rotis or whatever she was making and we all ate together as a family and I really loved that so every night my wife will either make food or it'll she'll have cooked it a couple times and then she'll bring it to me and like that is so meaningful to me because it reminds me of my childhood and by the way the the food that we eat is extremely inexpensive like we're not getting the fanciest cuts of meat we don't care about that but it's carefully we track all of our macros and all that stuff so we care about that but really it's about the meaning behind it macros 4p blue tone of fat protein carbohydrate yeah the percentages of each what does the pie chart look like the I don't know the math off the top of my head but it's like every week it changes depending on whatever my goals are and like I think the meaning there is really important and then there's certainty forecast that you know she likes or she doesn't like and I'll do trash is a perfect example I just kind of discovered like she really doesn't like taking the trash up no problem it's easy for me to take it out so getting those on the same page and developing this just life playbook of general rules of thumb you're going to use especially for stuff that's not important man that really frees you up to to really get into the stuff that is important yeah for sure so I I know we don't have too much time left but I want to jump into one of these because I'm curious what what you will say in response to some of these questions and we may only have time for one or two but so these are from people on the interwebs always a risky proposition but they were they were voted on or up voted and won this is from Scott no last name here indicated weirdoes for me disagree with what Tim teaches or preaches or Brian and I'll just rephrase that but like what do you think we disagree on this is a good question it could be anything right but far away oh my god I love this I think that we disagree on morning routines yeah I think they're overrated you know I think that the best morning routine is decided a year ago it's about your psychology it's about how much you sleep it's about what you know what have you outlined in your calendar it's all those softer details and I think that you know I get people asking me every day what's my morning routine and I'm like who gives a [ __ ] like you think you think if I ask Michael I'm not saying I'm Michael Jordan at all but if I ask Michael Jordan what shoes he wears or what his morning routine is am I going to be like Mike no and similarly if you find out what kind of coffee I drink you're not gonna be doing what I do either but I know that you're not saying that but that's what people are taking away that drives me insane well yeah I mean what keep was correct the record in one person tries to impart and what people here are sometimes very different thanks for yeah right the gift that keeps on giving still morning routines I think are number number one for me coming back to what we just said morning routines are one example of removing decisions that's it there's a little bit more to it for me in the sense that as someone who had onset insomnia and slept very poorly for several decades I would wake up and be non-functional generally speaking so having a boot up sequence which didn't require any thought I'm not deciding what to eat for breakfast I'm not deciding what step number one is do I do a b c d or e first no I'm always going to be doing be right well a whatever it might be has been very helpful I also know equally or far more successful people who have your answer they're like I wake up I drink a [ __ ] cup of coffee i reaiize know Instagram first literally the first thing I do is I get on Instagram while I'm in bed it's like the worst possible thing but I'm like I like it yeah and it's all cabins it's all cabins I swear to god the the the question I think that is that is also just like a macro questions worth asking is is this person you're looking at succeeding because of or despite what you're looking at right this is really important it's especially important if you're studying people who have already reached escape velocity in some type of success or financial freedom and you are still working your way up because hindsight is not 20/20 a lot of folks who are on top of the world and are just crafting billion dollar deals every day do not remember very clearly what helped them when they were working in the office on Thanksgiving or whatever might have been this is a great point and so powerful by the way this is why I love your podcast because here we are two people who seemingly disagree on something but now we're getting into the nuances and we can really cracked a code of what's what's the differences in similarities I will totally agree with what you just said about the more successful you get or the more time you get away from something the less details you remember I'll give you an example my wife started she used to be a senior buyer Equinox she left to start her own styling business about 18 months ago I would hear her doing sales calls in our living room and I would see her sometimes closing a client and sometimes going weeks without closing a client and you know I've got a business now I've got amazing employees we've got traffic that's coming you know we've got people coming and regular customers and all that stuff but when I started off that [ __ ] was not easy I would go weeks without getting one person joining any of my programs and I forgot how emotional it is you're the highs are so high and the lows are so low and half the game in this is just living to fight another day he's just not giving up and improving just a tiny bit every day and I watched it and I heard her and I saw her go through the ups and that lows and it's amazing now this month she told me how many clients she's done she's totally booked up for two or three more months it's amazing what she's accomplished in eighteen months she never would have believed it but you forget and you forget fast the tiniest details of what it means to wake up in the morning and say like wow the last four weeks I haven't gotten one client am I gonna do it different today so I just big shout out to every entrepreneur who's starting out out there it's tough and you should always put in context the advice that you hear and thanks for bringing it up because people need to know it's not all roses like [ __ ] is hard when you start it's hard for everyone it actually should be hard but if you stick with it hopefully you're doing the right thing you can get escape velocity so morning routines one thing we have somewhat differing approaches to what else tools I think that tools are super valuable people love to talk about tools but you know you give Andre Agassi a wooden racket he's gonna kick my ass so I think like when you ask well if somebody asked me like what apps do I use like my apps are horrible I don't use I use like TripIt that's it it's but I think the more powerful things are the psychology are the systems which are run through a Google Doc that's my take on tools and and so that's those are my two areas of disagreement curious to hear what you think about the tools and also if you disagree with me on anything well I provide a lot of tools because I think the specifics are helpful but it's the reasoning behind it I would imagine we're probably on the same page with and that is the tools are byproducts of principles or strategies right so for instance I use TripIt - I think it's underrated yeah but people are like ok great I'm gonna go you strip it and that's gonna be grand it's like well yes but maybe but what are the principles behind it and it's it's so that I can avoid manual checking of things like gate updates it's so that I'm avoiding a certain decision certain manual activities that are being automated right it's so that I don't have to go I don't have to go to Google or wherever on my phone and search fill-in-the-blank airline check-in yeah because I can click a button and trip it and do it automatically whether it's Delta United American whatever all rights the end in that principle if you were to pull it back will be will then allow you to deduce which tools to use or at least ask people for the right tools but it's it's it's very easy to believe they're like oh wow so-and-so is a great player so-and-so is a great business person so-and-so is a great artist because they use watercolors it's like no whether it's watercolors oil Conte crayons doesn't matter charcoal graphite you need to know the technique and the principles behind it and the process then you can choose your tools yeah I think it's easy to become a tool fetishist without understanding why you're doing what you're doing and then you become kind of like where is it Solomon Islands where they have the cargo cult or they have like the fake runways and the fake towers and it's like okay great you have flown full of the greatest apps like you've got 79 different rules for email filtering and guess what you didn't do one [ __ ] important thing today so okay I agree with you on that I think that's really good and I think the way you articulated deduce what TripIt what the principles behind you using TripIt are is critical I do the same thing we use it for the same reasons but I also take that same principle and apply it to what I do in the morning and how I decide what place to meet someone for coffee all that stuff has been automated so I don't have to think about it ever again so that's a good point yeah and I would say also that it is possible very possible and actually very common to procrastinate by searching for incrementally better and better tools oh I do that all the time and I could do the vast majority of what I do with like a day planner yeah and in fact I think the finite nature this is why I still use paper I still use note cards or small pieces of paper for to-do lists and things like that because it is it is by its very nature finite I cannot have a list of 37 things I need to do so the in some respects I think applying constraints to the tools that you use in the same way that I had Neil Gaiman actually sitting right where you are on this podcast not too long ago and he uses very often a fountain pen and pads of paper for drafting and it sounds very romantic and it is in some respects but it also has a number of psychological and practical benefits but it seems very primitive it's not the the latest cutting-edge tool all right I love it that's a great explanation of the nuances behind tools yeah so yeah I appreciate that and it's also easy I think for us like we could disagree on tools all day long right I mean we could we could disagree on the implementation of various things but here's here's I think one observation that is important that is you and I are not the same person meaning like like you like you like fancy sweaters I'm wearing an $8 t-shirt that my mom got me right yeah and like these pants and these shoes were both given to me and I'm not wearing socks and so we have different desires your vacation may look differently from mine your family India is different from my family on the east coast of you know this country and that's all fine that's great and it also means that the way we approach problem solving is going to be different yeah that's a really good point and that but the principles a lot of the principles I I do think are very similar or like the values and the principles are similar otherwise I don't think we would have been friends for as long as we have totally agree and I think there's a there's value in the diversity of how we think there's also value in knowing that those will change over time right so as I've gotten married I'm like oh wow there's this whole world I didn't understand before and now I'm learning that and I'm growing with my wife I think as we've gotten in relationships we've talked about how that's changed us Wow and that's like a pretty interesting topic and then you know if we had like if we had anybody else here who maybe didn't look like us or if we they weren't our gender we had all different kinds of diversity opinions we would have even more ways of thinking about how we approach problems and I think what I have learned along the way like when I wrote the book for example I was a bit judgmental about what the rich life was in the first edition I was like this is how you should invest follow the principles and like this is where you end up now ten years later there's a lot of people in the fire community for example that's financial independence retire early and many people are happy to acquire enough to basically be able to live on 30k a year live a very simple life and if they want to have a fun afternoon maybe they'll go to the park and they're like we don't need materialistic stuff we're happy and back then I think I would have been pretty judgmental about it now I've realized look there's lean fire there's fat fire there's all kinds of different fire and some people don't want a fire in fact most Americans will never fire they will work until they're of retirement age but rich life looks different to different people and part of that comes from how were we raised where what do our parents tell us and then part of it is do we want to change that story or do we want to just go with that question about retirement I was gonna ask this earlier so this I mean I've you know wrote about this as far back as is my equally scammy sounding book 4-hour workweek a thousand years ago but the this is concept of retirement right let's replace that with financial freedom because I want to ask you what that means or what you how you think people should think about it because a lot of thinking about retirement I find to be extremely porous at best like it's it's very faulty and well you're in your book you had a great example of mini retirements and like you want to buy a Ferrari why don't you just rent it for a week yeah great exam or you think like okay 20 years from now everything I'm doing is predicated on being able to like buy a boat and I'm gonna live on my boat and sail around the Mediterranean for 20 years after that's like maybe you should get on a boat first yes and try that for a weekend like go take a sailing course you might come out of being like that [ __ ] sucks and I was who I felt sick the entire time okay good to know that now and not when you've kind of slaved away and done something that you find distasteful for 20 years and people mess up the math too right I mean they often miss calculate and end up having very tough time in retirement per se so with with your students how do you encourage them to think about the objective right yeah well I don't believe that most people are automatons that sit down and say here's my 50 year goal and let me break it down in reverse engineer to what I'm gonna do this week I know about two people like that and they're special on their own but most people don't do that most people are very simple they want to wake up they want to have a good day at work maybe they want to have a little bit of fun or watch Netflix or have a good conversation with their partner or their friends and that's a good day and that's okay now to kind of push people out of that and make them think a little bit bigger it might be taking a vacation they may not have done it might be going to a tea event that they may have never thought of going to it's these experiences that people remember I would say that your comment about retirement is really true for people our age I don't hear anyone saying like when I retire this that my pension like those conversations are not happening with our generation so there's more of what do I want to do there's more spending on things like wellness and vacations and experiences and we're seeing that in the economy as well what I tell people is a couple of things number one you may not think right now that you want to retire but when you look at what everybody else who reaches a certain age does if everyone does something it might be true and so plan for it like I don't want to buy a house but almost everybody else does so I saved enough for a down payment I don't need to use it but it's there if I need to similarly don't wait right and think bigger so don't wait means go take a trip for three days and think bigger is like your retirement doesn't have to just be sitting around it can actually be much bigger that money dial turn it to ten and it could be traveling with a fixer it could be going for a month a year or two months but in order to do that you need to build a muscle now of thinking bigger people have this linear belief that once this bifurcation of retirement happens then the curtain opens and I get to do all this cool stuff dude if you haven't been doing it until you're 60 years old you're not going to magically do it at sixty years old in one day so I would encourage people to start building the muscle just like you've told him and realize that doing creative things trying different things is a muscle I found myself getting lazy with this in New York I looked at where I had gone to in the city like over the course of the last six months and I was like I live in this amazing city and I'm not even taking advantage of it so I put it into my calendar once a quarter minimum I'm gonna do a cultural event like a show or a tea tasting whatever the case be something that I could only do in New York and so now it's like on the calendar and you can say it sounds unromantic but I'm like that's what I needed to do that to keep building my muscle of trying new things so whatever works for people do it but I would say don't wait until you are retirement age yeah and I feel like so much in our conversation has come back to you making one decision that removes a thousand decisions in the sense that like you put it in your calendar and for me if it's not in the calendar it's just not real right so even what we call batching conversations for with me and my girlfriend for discussing certain like constant not issues in the sense of problems but like we have a with regularly scheduled times to talk about certain things we do the same thing and it's in the calendar so it's and that's true with certain types of kind of like date nights it's true if we're talking my relationships right it's true for taking trips together yeah it's true for visiting my family visiting her family and by making that decision and putting it in the calendar you preserve your brain power and emotional resilience and so on for other stuff that is less predictable do you have a consistent thing you talk about on your check-ins we do yeah we have a whole format and everything yeah okay so this is amazing I love meeting smart people who apply their intelligence to a different part of life like for example there's a book out by Gretchen Rubin who we both know and she's just so smart and she decided to write a book about keeping her house and workspace organized and I'm like yep bought it and the stuff she writes about in there is clever interesting it's exactly what you would think a smart person applying themselves to something for like a year would come up with and the fact that you and your girlfriend have we call it a touch base or a check-in and you have a consistency it's on the calendar like I love that and yeah you know I want to know like what's on that how do what what surprised you did it because we're going through building our own one and we're tweaking it and I'm like this is awesome she's much smarter about anything involving emotions oh that's funny my wife is the one who suggested most do much more much more observant than I am it's like two cavemen talking yeah she she's much yeah are we good we're good okay great like that would be our chicken we could be [ __ ] good cuz I don't feel like having this conversation uh yeah we're good okay great oh no maybe this will be helpful for folks we'll spend a few minutes on this we have a number of rituals and things in the calendar that I think are important for the care and nurturing of the relationship and one a epiphany that I think we both had at one point was that a I have a tendency to emotionally shut off or get defensive with a lot of questions involving emotion or emotional vulnerability it's just not something I was really exposed to growing up yeah I mean there was or in school or with coaches I mean really the feeling was and like I say my family as a whole but I come from a pretty it's the right word here stoic and not in the the cool hip like Marcus are really a sense but like a fairly stoic like Protestant like environment we're in school for instance you know that and in coaching the general feeling was like don't tell me the good stuff because the good stuff takes care of itself like tell me what needs to be fixed yeah turns out that's not I've come to realize the best approach for longevity in the relationship that I want to have with my girlfriend and which we tried to be pointed out to make some why this is amazing because just think about this what got you here yeah something got you here to a very elite level and it would be easy to just be like oh my god I'll just keep doing what I'm doing because I I won that game well they were playing a different game well i think that the question i didn't ask for a very long time is like what did it cost yes and what what was the collateral damage wow breaks it's like yeah the Hulk's a great [ __ ] superhero he all [ __ ] mess that's a good one and I think that there was a lot of collateral damage that I probably didn't notice and certainly didn't weigh very heavily because I was like yeah but look what I did totally or yeah but look what happened and it excused a lot of mess 100% and so she's but the so what we what we realized after that was pointed out to me was or what I then said to my girlfriend because she was curious about how to better word things so that I wouldn't have a disproportionate like emotional response that's cool that she was curious about that yeah she's very good at asking questions and probing because if I think I have a sensitivity as someone who's effectively worked as a freelancer for decades that if like I have my headphones on and I'm in the middle of like a project I don't want to stop and have like a five-minute conversation about something extraneous it I get I get unnecessarily spun out over stuff like that and she says well how should i phrase things so that it's it's easier and less distracting for you and and I remember saying is it I said it has nothing to do with the content it's all timing and and that was a real breakthrough for our relationship not because we had the conversation this is really [ __ ] important cuz like yeah you can go to like fill in the blank seminar you can read fill in the blank book you can take fill in the blank drug and have this amazing epiphany and do nothing with it what we did from that point was then set up what we call these batching times once a week or once every two weeks where we sit down and she has a chance to talk to me when I am prepared to talk about things that are going to make me uncomfortable and she can handle it whenever she's more adaptable and resilient in that way but I can blame it on bringing I can blame it on being just a weirdo who knows or just you know if a heteronormative male who doesn't like talking about [ __ ] who knows having that time blocked out where I can like steal myself and like warm myself up psychologically to talk about things that are gonna make me uncomfortable is very valuable and the format the format that we currently have so we couldn't find any real great advice on the same and the Sephora we have is we will well we take notes we have like meeting notes after everyone yeah and it's and where we capture what in in kind of bullet points what was said so we start with one person we'll start and they'll they'll say what they think they've been doing well nice and it didn't start out this way but it ended up they start with what they think they've been doing well or doing better then they talk about if they want where they think they've dropped the ball or could focus more which is very helpful for defusing things because they bring it up them so yeah then they will they will tell the other person what they're doing well and then they'll tell the other person we started off with like [ __ ] you need to fix or that was probably my phrasing and then it was growth opportunities and now it's what I'd like what I would love to see more of nice and that the phrasing turns out to be really important right so it's like what I think I'm doing well since we last checked in what I think I could do better what you're doing well and then what I'd like to see more oh yeah and then we take notes and each then we forward it to the other person and we can we can take a look at it and that's that's it amazing then it usually takes an hour maybe two hours and this in the morning or in the evening usually in the afternoon or evening on a weekend oh okay interest that's most common okay yeah so the note part is also interesting so you take notes quickly saying or she'll know one of us will take notes on the whole thing okay okay god there's kind of like one secretary or or minute keeper for that session that's cool and so it could be me I take notes in notebooks a lot so I'd take notes in a notebook then take a photo in senator or she'll take it in notepad Senate it's interesting interesting part of it too is like each person will have some skin in the game in terms of recording it yeah and then I have an Evernote file where I put all of our chickens in reverse chronological order so the most recent is at the top yeah so I can go back and look and see like alright did did we and this is not - as a gotcha it's just like alright did I keep up my end of the bargain did I say I was gonna work on something three weeks ago and then I kind of forgot about it but also later also not just from the avoiding bad but doing look good yeah like you imagine after a year now you go and you're like oh my god like we have been super consistent and like look at the things we used to talk about and look at the things we're talking about now yeah the good the the highlighting what is being done well is really important and that it's it's so against every behavior in habit that I've built over my entire life but I have come to realize that without that yeah it can really really be tough so one of the things that I love about this first of all thanks for sharing those Ness super helpful as we are starting this ritual on our own and I think this is a great example and by the way my girl like I my girlfriend did 90% of that so like I'm along for the ride but you want to give her proper credit totally I think that's an example where the ritual itself may be even more important than the content yeah the ritual of having the time having it on the calendar respecting it always showing up being mentally present and tracking it that is like 90% of the ballgame and that just shows this awesome mutual respect you both have for each other and the fact that you take it seriously and it's not weird to write down an agenda I think so many people are they think about things as weird or weird to have a Google agenda or be weird to save for an engagement ring I don't I'm not even dating anyone well I think it's weird to live life as most people you know I think that's weird I would rather plan ahead I would pick some things I want to do differently and just be unapologetic about it so I think it's really cool that you're sharing that including down to like what are the questions because I'm gonna take some of those and take it back to my wife and we're going to do those it's it's been it's it's it's really been a big deal for us and it like you said I think the the intention in the act of calendaring it is is of great value aside from the implementation right the fact that you are both setting aside time to keep the relationship on the rails and to improve it is in and of itself going to have an impact on the relationship and there are times also when we'll put these batching sessions out well schedule them out and she's better at this than I am I'm I could actually find any a gram pretty helpful even though I'm not convinced it's more than like business acceptable astrology basically but in any case any of them can kind of be interesting as something to fit into this so we can talk about that on another podcast but very important to her to schedule things out and if you see if we schedule it out for say four or five weeks there are times when we'll look at it we'll know it's coming it's like okay are we gonna do this and it's like now we're good like there are times when we just we don't have a critical mass of stuff to talk about it's like now they can wait like we'll just do it we can push it a week yep and so it's it's but you you want to from my experience thus far better to have it on the calendar yeah and then say hey we can play hook and make it an opt out instead of Alton exactly then to not have it on the calendar and have to like hit DEFCON five when things boil over dude everything that's important in life should be opt-out everything it should be by default it's gonna happen it's on the calendar and whether that is call your mom every Sunday evening whether that is go train at the gym three four or five times a week whatever it is put just that intentionality of writing it down and putting it on the calendar even the intentionality of everyone listening and saying what are the four things that I want to accomplish every week I want to call my mom or dad I want to train I want to whatever I want to read a book for 10 minutes and then putting those down on your calendar it doesn't matter if it's in the morning or night whatever works for you that instantly separates you from being opted in from being buffeted by the winds left and right and just going wherever the world takes you you decide don't let the world decide for you here here super feet set the safety how do you say your name Franklin Ramiz say T ok so you have the second edition of I will teach you to be rich available and I'm sure but by the time people hear this it may be available it should be available and it has AE new pages of material yeah tools insights about money in psychology stories of readers have used the book these scripts that we were talking about yep and oh yeah look at those real reader results yeah yeah we're looking at how do they look right now I wanted to show people that rich a lot of people think rich looks a certain way but I wanted to put photos of these readers men women black white young old everyone of us has someone we want to see ourselves represented you know I saw an ad on the train for an Indian dad in Hindi and I was like you know what ten years ago that wouldn't have been meaningful to me but now I'm actually appreciating and represented so that's what I wanted in this book and you you've tagged a couple of things for me to check out later which I will check out you got I'm just gonna read the tabs you don't have to go through all of stories next victim culture which I'm sure you're a huge fan of kidding word-for-word scripts ignore reddit invisible scripts crypto love and money so you got a lot here and as I mentioned earlier oh I'm just gonna read the first paragraph on the back of the book because I haven't seen this in ages just quick quick back story note I remember when you were writing this oh I came to you for advice and I gave you your the I gave you a bird by bird by Anne Lamott and but here's here's the first paragraph of the back copy by as many lattes as you want that's a reference to people who recommend you cut back on all these things like a lot to spend extravagantly on the things you love live your rich life instead of tracking every last expense and you know what I've what I've always enjoyed observing and learning from our the tests that you do you experiment you actually implement these things and you provide scripts and actual algorithms for achieving very specific results so awesome to see you thank you dude it's been a pleasure I love catching up and thanks for having me on yeah people can find you on twitter at roommate instagram at roommate and website i WT comm are there any other places where people can check you out see what you're up to or anything else that you would like to say before we wrap up this episode get the book it's on Amazon and come visit me in any of these social places and the site and the newsletter and would love to talk more with everyone about their rich life ravit thanks so much for coming on thanks a lot and to everyone who is listening thank you for joining in you can find the show notes links to everything we've discussed at tim dot blog forward slash podcast along with every other episode and until next time track wisely calendar the important [ __ ] [Music] plan you're batching sessions and thanks for tuning in and i will be in touch very soon you

Channel: Tim Ferriss

Views: 392,872

Keywords: tim ferriss, 4 hour workweek, 4 hour body, 4 hour chef, timothy ferriss, angel investor, ferriss, tim ferriss blog, timothy ferriss speaker, Tim Ferriss Podcast, Ramit Sethi, Personal Finance, I Will Teach You To be Rich, Negotiation, Prenup, Financial Independence Retire Early, Mr. Money Mustache

Id: 7sbqa2Nq0lM

Length: 141min 17sec (8477 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2019