Ramit Sethi — How to Play Offense with Money, Plan Bucket Lists, and Take a Powerful $100 Challenge

[Music] hello boys and girls ladies and germs this is tim ferriss welcome to another episode of the tim ferriss show i'm speaking quickly because we're going to cover a lot of ground we have ramit seti ramith seti if you want to get it right but that's confusing because it's r-a-m-i-t space last name s-e-t-h-i you can find him on twitter and instagram at ramit r-a-m-i-t he's author of the new york times bestseller i will teach you to be rich has helped tens of millions of people live a rich life with their monies careers and businesses and psychology he hosts more than a million readers on his site i will teach you to be rich dot com newsletter and social media his new podcast i will teach you to be rich by bernie sethi reveals real stories about love and money from behind closed doors you can find him on instagram remate on twitter at ramit and you can find podcast episodes at iwt.com forward slash podcast for meet you sexy son of a [ __ ] welcome back to the podcast oh man it's good to be here and i must say we were talking about this while we were doing a little bit of pre-game but the expectations are gonna be very high you have been on the podcast several times some of your episodes are the most downloaded of all time across 600 or so episodes now so we will need to get to a lot of tactical practical and we're going to discuss a lot of i think sensitive topics we're going to get into some juicy territory for folks talking about couples money all things in betwixt and in between and or maybe it's is it betwixt in between i can't remember i'm trying to get too old-timey but let's just jump right into it because you and i have had many conversations offline we've had many conversations publicly and there's a lot more to explore so as a starter what are some of the most memorable money conversations that you have had in the last few years because it's been a bit since we had our last conversation on the podcast so a lot has transpired the last time we talked we talked about prenups and what that was like walking in and i remember giving you a call and i said you know hey we could talk about this on your podcast and you said wait you'll actually share the details i say yeah and that was very juicy because nobody talks about this kind of stuff publicly right so after getting married and going through that process with my wife i thought okay great done deal you know kind of wiping my hands together oh we're all good and then i started speaking to other couples about their money and you know i remember speaking to a number of couples the first one that i spoke to was a couple where one person had over 500 000 of debt he was a vet by the way interestingly the people who i speak to who are in the most severe debt are veterinarians it's very interesting and he was very nonchalant about it no big deal like we'll find a way no problem his wife felt totally constrained and constricted there's nothing they could do they were putting off moving because there was this huge looming ghost in the middle of their relationship i got interested and i started speaking to more and more couples and i remember talking to another couple where there was a young woman and she had paid off something like 50 000 of debt which was very impressive but whenever her husband said let's go on a trip the first thing she would say is oh we can't do that we can't do that because my debt and so i said to her when you finally pay off your debt do you think you're going to magically change the way you think about money and she was silent and she said yeah with a question mark at the end yeah which means no people tend to have this it's a false belief that one day when they pay off their debt or one day when they make a certain amount of money they're going to magically change the way they think and act about money and the fact of the matter is that doesn't happen and so that is why i got interested in speaking to couples and they let me in to their conversations their private conversations about love and money can i just share a quick personal side note and i'm not drunk i'm not over caffeinated people if you're wondering why i'm such a loose cannon already today but i thought you would appreciate this because we've had a lot of conversations like this so i'm in a house right now with a brand new washer and dryer but a few weeks ago i was i was agonizing over whether or not to get a washer dryer because i'd been doing wash and fold and paying kind of by the load to get clothing washed and folded it was it was pretty inconvenient and i was talking to someone about it and i'm spending a lot of time considering whether i should continue using washer and fold or getting a washer dryer and i i mentioned the cost of the washer dryer and so on and so forth and i said you know for that i could do this number of wash and fold sessions and that i expect would take x number of weeks or months and really i'm only here for a certain period of time and at the end they were like tim i think you can just spring for the washer dryer but the amount of time that i spent like running this calculus and weighing the pros and cons was a great illustration of uh terrible investment of resources and time well it's deep in you and i think you know when you when you think back to four hour work week and some of the analyses you did right you can tell you love the spreadsheet and you love comparing certain things it's in you and for you know i think a lot of sort of tech oriented guys in particular it's in them it's not painful to us to sit there and compare things we'll do it forever i'll give you an example from one of the people i spoke to this one really blew my mind so he goes ramit i love to get a good deal i said okay i can already tell where this is going by the way and it's not good but i said okay he said whenever i order groceries online i hate the idea of overpaying i said really he said so i open up two tabs i have whole foods on one side and i have whatever competitor on the other ramit you're not going to believe it sometimes they charge 15 for organic groceries but over here i can get it for seven dollars i said wow by the way what's your net worth tim you want to guess [Laughter] you know i i i don't want to even hazard a guess i'll tell you what was the 8 million dollars now it's very easy for us to laugh okay and even he laughed as i just sat there silently staring at him you know but what what is revealed there is that it's not a certain number that's going to change the way we feel about money and if you're listening to this right now maybe you have a partner maybe you've had a couple arguments about money or you just don't see eye to eye on certain things the easiest way that we rationalize it is to say well if we just get that promotion or if we just save this much then everything will be perfect but my friend who i spoke to who has an eight million dollar net worth listening to him you know it's not about the dollar value it's not and nothing will change that feeling unless he personally works on it along with his partner all right so i i want to plant a seed we're going to come back to specific questions i want to ask you what sort of the prying bar looks like what tools you use when talking to couples that you found illuminating and helpful right questions that people then who are listening might use before we get to that my question is and we don't have to spend a ton of time on it but why did it take you so goddamn long to start a podcast um yeah all of my podcast friends including you are like are you stupid they keep telling me this you know you should have done this 10 years ago i'm just slow you know i'm just i don't know i don't know what else to say i have no good excuse really i don't believe i don't buy that [ __ ] excuse me so you there has to be some calculus involved here well i guess something led to you doing the podcast yes okay so i asked you a lot over the course of many years i was like hey i'm thinking about it and you had some great advice for me you know record this many episodes etc the thing that i love about your podcast is you really love interviewing all these different people from across the spectrum i don't my nightmare is waking up and talking to a bunch of people who wrote some book i'm like i don't really all right let's cut this short i gotta go but what i do love is talking to ordinary people about psychology and money and in particular the difference between what we claim we want to do and what we actually do you know hey i know i should be eating healthier but i don't why not let's get into that no judgment but let's try to peel the onion and try to figure that out and part of that is just myself you know i i had a lot of things i claimed i wanted to do but i didn't really follow through and when i finally figured out that i could just talk to people and ask them about their money and they would trust me enough to share real numbers then i started to be like wait a minute this could actually work and after trying it a couple times i realized i could do this for four hours a day every day and i would love it that's why i decided to try it out you also there are certain things that you'd be willing to do four hours a day that are utterly puzzling and hilarious to me just for people who are like that sounds like a politician's answer i don't buy it i don't buy it ramit i will tell you this is also someone who has done very well in business and in life that's roommate who loves to feed the trolls you will send me extensive threads of just toying with trolls from email because tim when do you get a chance to meet someone who walks up to you in this case on instagram and the first thing they say is [ __ ] you and i go are you having a bad hair day let's discuss what do you what kind of burrito do you like and then the responses are just truly unbelievable you know 50 of them right off the bat they go oh i didn't even know someone actually reads this account which leads to another question why on earth would you write into the ether if you didn't expect anyone to write back i don't know do you not find that fascinating i do find it interesting and this is just to lend credibility to your answer you choose your sports in a unique way just so everyone listening let's make sure we we capture that he just said ramit is credible because he spends hours a day interacting with trolls on instagram tim i don't know if that's helping me out here man that was a bit of a journalist reframe so what you're saying is by the way pro tip to anyone who's ever interviewed if someone says oh so i guess what you're kind of saying is a b and c do not just say yes quickly to that because they will take that and they will quote you as saying whatever they just said they are trying to write their piece in advance by paraphrasing you be very careful so those are your words mr seti not mine however let's come to the questions so what types of questions what are some specific questions you like to ask or that people can ask each other or in the context of a therapy session that they might use that you found useful first question i always start with is in the last 30 days can you think of a specific situation where you were not on the same page financially with your partner and this is a great question for a couple of reasons number one 30 days limits you otherwise people often feel like they have to give you their whole life history and i don't need their whole life history truthfully i only need a little bit just to advance to the next question that's number one and then being on the same page is pretty gentle you know some people get in fights and some people they just disagree about you know who should pay for the check at dinner and so it doesn't have to be this massive 10 out of 10 argument but i do want to hear where they were not aligned from there it just kind of flows because people instantly can remember something from the last 30 days and they love to talk about it then the next question i ask as i get into it i'll ask him what is your rich life now this is a concept that i've been talking about for about 15 20 years on my site and that is the idea that you don't have to cut back on lattes life isn't about competing who can be more frugal you know there's more to life than optimizing cell c3 of your spreadsheet but i want to hear people talk about what their rich life is i had a young woman whose rich life was i want to shop at whole foods without counting the prices of whatever i buy now okay that's fine if you're just starting out maybe you're in 25 000 of debt she was professionally extremely successful so with that i kind of push her i say okay let's say you could do that tomorrow how much would your shopping cart cost she said uh like a hundred i said push it get something really nice 150. i said you know you make x hundred thousand dollars a year let's dream a little bigger and this is a huge topic that unfolds because again another interesting insight about couples most people have never thought about what their rich life is individually much less what their rich life is together so question about this woman so if she's making hundreds of thousands dollars per year in fact maybe i'm missing something obvious but she could very easily afford to spend 150 at whole foods so did she just feel as though she could not or she wouldn't allow herself to do that or did she feel like she needed tens of millions of dollars in order to without guilt spends 150 at whole foods how did that conversation unfold people's feelings about how they are doing financially are highly uncorrelated with their actual financial status i spoke to a couple uh on the lower east side in manhattan and they were living in a one-bedroom and they were saving a lot of money the uh their income was 330 000 a year and i said to them how do you all feel you're doing and they said we don't know we have no idea are we doing well are we doing horrible we don't know and that's one of the problems which is no one talks about money you have no idea how to benchmark yourself particularly if you live in a city like manhattan where spending is different than living in chicago for example and so they had no idea and when you take a couple look at some basic metrics what's your savings rate what's your expenses you know what is your housing cost and i said to them you guys are doing really well you should give yourself a pat on the back and they go okay yeah yeah yeah so anyway we got this question about our accounts i said hold on a second let's celebrate for just a second you've done really well and i think there's a lack of celebration with couples because there's just so much uncertainty around it i would imagine there's a lot of positional economics also right in a place like manhattan where it's like if you have three friends who are doing or appear to be doing substantially better than you are then you will evaluate yourself very differently than if you are in your peer group doing the best even if in absolute dollar amounts you were making less in the latter instance right i have to imagine that's also a big part of it so if you live in a place that is highly competitive with many successful people like manhattan your reference point is going to make celebrating in some respects more difficult i think that's true and i think that americans love to compare themselves to their neighbors i love it well americans love to do a few things that are completely irrational they love to think that if they do certain things it'll make them happy and then they do the exact thing that will make them unhappy we love it and we can go into all this but think about the typical couple living in some suburban city think about the conversations that are happening about money regarding their neighbors well how did leah and john go on vacation for the third time this year you know maybe we should be going on vacation for a third time this year and it doesn't have to be living in manhattan you can be living anywhere what's going on there the answer is that money is opaque money is unclear because you might have a different savings goal than i do and also there's a lot of secret sources of where money comes from oftentimes you'll find that parents are funding certain things oftentimes you'll find that people are in debt oftentimes you'll find someone's actually just really wealthy and they make a lot more money than you think they make or they're really in debt and they have the picture of financial health but they're funding it by sort of lighting their credit on fire yeah that's also possible let's come back to rich life so when you ask someone about their rich life what their rich life looks like so you gave us an example of the disconnect right between someone's sort of objective financial status and then the whole foods shopping what would be your answer okay just so we can have an idea of models of what a more fleshed out answer might look like i would say that i want to travel for six to eight weeks six weeks consecutively at the end of the year when i fly i wanna fly in this exact airline seat and when i travel i wanna stay at these three different hotels and i wanna bring one or more family members with me when i travel and cost is not the first second or third issue when i take these trips so that's an example another example would be i don't want to start working until 10 a.m every day that could be an example and and just so everybody knows i finally boiled these down into what i call ramit's money rules so it's almost like a personal value statement i'll give you a couple of them some of them are kind of boring and some of them are super permissive and i before i start i just want to remind everybody these are my rules not yours they should sound kind of crazy if you're listening to them so one of them is you know always have one year of emergency fund cash okay fine this you could make it six months or a year whatever but here's another one never question spending money on books appetizers health or donating to a friend's charity fundraiser now each of those is very meaningful to me because i didn't grow up being able to afford appetizers so now if i eat out with friend or whoever i say look whatever you like on the menu just order it and that feels amazing what does it cost me an extra 20 bucks but it feels incredible and then there's some really big ones like anytime i take a flight over four hours business class or be able to pay in full for large expenses including a wedding dream honeymoon or even a house okay those are really big rich life dreams and rules most people are listening like hey i'm not going to pay all cash for a house totally fine what i would challenge each person as they think about their rich life is i would love for them to say you know what every week i love fresh flowers it feels a little indulgent to me but it just makes me feel so good and so i'm gonna buy fresh flowers for myself every week beautiful i'm kind of smirking as you say that because i'm going to tilt this i'm not sure if you'll be able to see it but uh oh look at that beautiful sunflower yeah there's a bouquet of flowers right in front of me and that was actually a recent decision it's like flowers each week completely changes my experience of my home why just having a symbol of life and vibrancy also of change and having something to care for if you're changing the water it really just fundamentally changes my experience of space and aesthetics in the home and it's such a simple thing so that's why i'm smiling i love it you know what every time i ask people their rich life and i probe their first answers are never what we ultimately settle on but as we start talking about it and we spend a lot of time really probing and pushing why that well what if you dreamed a little bigger and they also smile the whole time because no one has ever asked him what is your rich life and really asked him why never so usually if it's something like a handbag right something tangible most people start off by saying like this well i know i mean i guess i'd like a purse it doesn't have to be like the fanciest purse but you know i'd like this handbag and like maybe once every decade it could be like a nice one and i go what if it was every year and what if it was that brand the the most beautiful version of it and their eyes light up because no one has ever talked to them about the thing that deep down they love what i call their money dial instead it's kind of seen as frivolous particularly things like handbags which i don't agree with i think you could buy a beautiful handbag for the craftsmanship for the functionality or just cause you want it for those people who can't see ramirez now he's winking at me so i know what to get you for christmas thank you very much please continue and you know i'm hoping as i'm asking these questions that their partner is seeing and can model this because you'll usually find that when one partner is nervous because they think that it's frivolous that there's a reason for that that their partner has said something multiple times in the past like well why do you don't need a handbag like that you don't need that kind of car and yeah you don't need it but we're here talking about your rich life to start we're going to get to the spreadsheet stuff we're going to get to your spending plan but let's just start off with your vision of what a rich life is that is exciting so if we rewind just back to the blueprint here not so much a blueprint but your series of questions within the last 30 days where have you not been on the same page right financially what does your rich life look like what are some of the questions that follow or could follow after that usually when i find that one person is an over spender and they admit it themselves i ask them have you ever said no and what i mean by that is have you ever said no to your family who's asking you for money or have you ever said no to your partner when they ask for xyz have you ever said no and almost always they say no i've never done that so you realize at that very moment that there's a deeper issue than just money it's being a people pleaser it's not being able to set effective boundaries things like that we get into that i also ask people how big of an issue is this on a scale of one to ten and this is a really interesting response i get in this case what is this the thing that they disagreed on within the last 30 days yeah yeah okay and almost always they will say it's like a five out of ten it's not that bad now remember they've gotten on a podcast with me where they're sharing real numbers they're sharing fights and and challenges they've had for years and they're going oh it's a five out of ten so i know that there's something going on here i say okay five out of ten what do you think happens if you know you both disagree about how much to spend at brunch on saturdays what do you think happens when you have kids and then when you decide to move to a different city and when you have 25 years of this going on what happens and they go oh yeah that's like a 9 out of 10. i go yeah and what do you think happens at 9 out of 10 and they realize that when people say we got divorced because of money it was not fighting over seven dollars at target but it started there and it calcified over 25 years that could be the title of your next book it could be seven dollars at target small disagreements and how they lead to big divorces oh you are the best at titles tim i'll take my customary 15 it's very reasonable because we're friends all right any other questions they'd like to cover no that's where we start that gives me a lay of the land and i can kind of walk you through an exercise that i do with them may be helpful if you think let's do it all right great so this is one that i actually started with my wife and we were talking about our rich life and it's hard when you start talking about your rich life because you don't even know where to start many of us have spent our entire lives being told what we can't do with our money so when you ask people what they want to do the answers are fairly facile you know the whole foods is an example so what i did was i said okay let's take separate pieces of paper and let's write down in the next 10 years what's on our bucket list and let's just write it down and we took 10 15 minutes and the way that i thought of this was i was inspired by stephen king's national book club speech now he was living in a trailer with his wife and he was running out of money and he got a job offer to be a teacher and his wife said to him will you be able to write and he said no i won't but at least it'll allow us to pay the bills and she instantly said well then you can't do it wow and so that chilling moment and then fast forward just a little bit in the future he signs a massive deal for his first book a massive deal he gets the check brings it home to his wife in their trailer and he said we sat there we looked at the check we talked about what we were going to do with the money and we cried he said it was one of the most beautiful conversations of his life and i love that i love the idea that money can be this thing that lets us do more not less it lets us dream bigger lets us be more adventurous more generous so i started off with my wife i said let's just write down our bucket list items okay so we come back after 15 minutes she had some interesting ones she wanted to learn another language that was just individually for herself together you know we wanted to i think i wrote down i want to design a house with you because she's very creative and we're both into design and we wanted to have a beautiful 10-year wedding anniversary in india we know the exact place we know all the people that we want to bring with us great we're talking about this we're loving it we're having a blast and i said let's pick a couple of these and let's put a dollar value to them so we picked the ten year wedding anniversary and i said okay pick a number there's no way to know the right number but just pick a number what you think it'll cost so she kind of takes a second i take a second and the numbers that we picked were hilariously different my number was something like five to ten times bigger than the number my wife picked and she looked uncomfortable like visibly uncomfortable yeah i was gonna ask you if there's an asymmetry of wealth i would imagine the person who has fewer resources may be very nervous about actually speaking honestly or adding big items or offering big numbers well you're totally right most people are afraid of dreaming about their rich life at all because they feel that once they write it down or tell someone if they don't achieve it then they're a failure but in my opinion that's just going through life playing defense and i'd rather play offense so what i said to my wife is like look neither of us know what this is actually going to cost we just made these numbers up but if we're going to choose a number let's go with the bigger one why because we have a lot of time we have eight plus years to save and invest for this two i think we can do it i know what we can accomplish together we could do it and three wouldn't it be magical to be able to take all of our friends and family the people who can't afford it just go to the airport and the ticket will be there for you wouldn't that be amazing and so really coming back to that vision instead of well it's actually going to be seven percent return and i don't know no this is a vision exercise so she begrudgingly said okay i will say that one year later my wife has done an amazing job working on her money psychology and we kind of revisited this and she said oh yeah like now i know without a doubt we can hit that number easily and that's when you're really aligned with your partner where the two of you are rowing in the same direction it's not one person saying come on but it's both of us saying oh yeah we could do this so let me ask may i ask you a very personal uncomfortable possibly uncomfortable question and then you can tell me okay so you said we can hit the number right was there a discussion with some of these items of how each party sort of contributes to that big goal right even though you're not getting into immediately the nitty-gritty i understand it's a vision exercise but since you're using the example i figured i might as well ask because i bet this is something that is going to be an inevitable topic that people have to navigate okay i'm glad you asked and i'll definitely share how we did it so i think that the reason that we came up with these joint goals like a 10-year wedding anniversary is that we both want to contribute to it okay we want to contribute proportionally based on income but we both want to contribute to it the thing about you know my wife wants to learn a certain language i'm not contributing to that she makes what language just out of curiosity spanish okay cool yeah she's taking a class she's doing a great job nice and she decided to get her own tutor and that's her thing and she's covering that on her own and i'm thrilled i have my own stuff that i pay for again we have our join accounts and our separate accounts but i will say that the reason that i wanted to have this exercise is that when we meet once a month to talk about our finances we have something to look forward to we have an exact number that we are saving and investing together for and we look at it it's almost like one of those progress bars okay we're four percent of the way there oh my gosh we're now eight percent of the way there and we can see that this goal which was so big originally we're actually just chipping away at it day by day that's magic so the the once monthly meeting to discuss finances i want to hear more about this yeah what's the format okay the four so you and i talked on our last podcast about checking in and you had some great suggestions for some questions and we've used those and adapted those for our own relationship it's one thing to do a relationship check-in yep i also think another really valuable check-in is a financial check-in and so the way that we do it is we have a spreadsheet that we've built it's custom for us based on what we what's important to us so we have our expenses that are in there in the course of a 30 minute call we will look over our expenses and the call by the way is with a third party who kind of walks us through some of the the numbers the expenses take five minutes because really most of our expenses are planned for okay i'll give you an example except for your handbags except for the handbags that's right well those are going to be an incoming gift from tim ferriss soon enough my my private label handbag line i can't believe you've told the world that's right so here's the thing i think about expenses i think most people they spend time all their time looking at expenses and it's really depressing yeah this is the wrong place to spend a lot of time what we did instead was we said okay our groceries are basically the same every single month our whatever rent is basically the same every single month there's a couple areas that are variable so we actually sat down at the end of the year and we planned out how many trips do we want to take how much is each of those trips and we kind of got we got pretty granular about it we also know that some surprise expenses come up with things like gifts so we planned it out appropriately ahead of time this is how many people we're going to give gifts to this is the amount we're going to gift charity same thing and so those are baked in so on a given month yeah we might be a little bit over on food we might be a little bit under on gas but it's basically within parameters okay after five minutes of that we spend way more time looking at our rich life goals so we have about five rich life goals that are actively being saved for that would be like the 10-year wedding anniversary and so each quarter each month or quarter we have money going into those goals and then we have a backlog you can never have too many rich life goals because at some point we're gonna hit one of those goals what's next guess what we got our backlog ready to go and so that backlog could be you know hiring somebody to do xyz for us it could be taking this special trip buying a new car this type of specific car and model it's all there what would be your true but most embarrassing backlog rich life goal to share on this podcast right now oh my god um this is horrifying let me think okay well my okay so once i sat down and i asked my friends i was like what is what is the next level for you the rich life next level and so one one of them was like i want to jet and one of them was like i want to take a trip to tahiti or something like that and mine was uh i never want to have to pack a suitcase again in my life and they're like are you stupid that's like 50 bucks but okay i'll tell you what it is now the suitcase part i don't want to have to carry luggage when i travel okay that and that's relatively inexpensive you can ship it for like 100 bucks i don't i just don't want to i want to walk out of an airplane free and not sweating because i have a like a bag that i'm carrying around with me that was a very i don't know it feels a little indulgent to me but it's like a hundred bucks okay so so shipping luggage as opposed to transporting luggage correct yeah i know i know a few people who've done that for many many years they refuse they refuse i know one also who hates to select clothing to travel with so he wears black shirt tan cargo pants uh every day kind of steve jobs with uh like a limp biscuit twist to it and and uh same shoes and so his assistant will pack i guess their gallon ziploc bags or something like that with each day's outfit because he hates doing laundry also so he just has all of these versions of the same outfit and so if he's going on like a 10-day trip there will be 10 gallon ziploc bags with each day's outfit this is not what i thought was going to be his rich life but god bless you i mean all the best that's why it's his rich life for me all right okay so that so that's what we do so we um we start off with the expenses like five minutes we spend more time on the rich life goals and then we have an open backlog of questions you know there's sometimes things like hey we've got this trip coming up like do we want to stay here there or like should we get this or that things like that we have a document a running document that we just track these questions on and usually within 30 sometimes 60 minutes we're good to go for about a month that's roughly the structure i would encourage it for anybody and i want to add a twist for people when you do these meetings it can be really depressing because talking about money for most people is really negative why did you spend this much we don't want that at all we want this to be a positive experience so i would encourage if possible you know go out to dinner or if you have children and you have the ability to maybe get some help for one hour two hours take advantage of that this is supposed to be a positive experience where you can say you know what i really want to talk about money in a way that benefits both of us and i would love to get your input what can we do to make this a great environment for us to have this conversation do that and you're going to be way more set than having it with dinner on the table and people screaming that's not going to be conducive to this type of meeting so let's say that you both want that to be the case let's just assume and this is not from my my personal experience just to be clear but i would imagine there are cases where you have a couple and one person is an overspender maybe it extends further than that like you said maybe their people pleaser they don't have clear boundaries with other folks but nonetheless like the the hemorrhaging is coming predominantly from one side what's what type of conversation would you recommend for people in that type of situation this is really hard but this is the most common of all to have these conversations it's usually one person effectively dragging the other person to the meeting all right so that's not a good place to start and i'll tell you what the typical approach is and then what a better approach is the typical approach is to say hey we really need to get a handle on your spending this is not working so let's talk about money okay that's never going to work so just stop that right now another approach would be to say okay i built this spreadsheet model look at tab 16 it'll show you all the math and right now we're compounding don't do that nobody cares about compounding you haven't earned the right to talk about math at this first conversation the third and i think much better approach is to say you know what babe i've been listening to this podcast episode and they were talking about money they were talking about a rich life and you know i i guess i never thought about it this way you know there was one woman who said she wanted to be able to go to whole foods and just spend without looking at the prices i mean you've mentioned that right what would that feel like to you you know for me a rich life would be to be able to get in the car and drive and if we see a place we like we can just stop there and we can order whatever we want without looking at how much it costs like i would love to do that with you so what would it be for you you know i'd love to know let's just pause right there notice that in that conversation that we just had a couple things i did in a couple things i didn't do first i set the context why am i bringing this up feel free to throw the tim ferriss show under the bus oh i was listening to this weird show some guy came on ramit sethi i don't know okay do that give give them a reason number two i was genuinely curious you know hey i know you've mentioned whole foods what would that be like for you i find in couples that have trouble they have rarely asked the other partner a question a single question in months if not years okay so that's number two notice what i didn't do i did not talk about i mean questions about money or no any questions anything when i talk to them i'll give one of the one of the young women in my um episodes she revealed that she had an alcoholic father and she had she and her family had had to walk around on eggshells because of him she said if we're really getting real that's that's how i was raised and you know what happened her husband started talking over her well yeah you know that's why i really wanted to have the courage to be an entrepreneur i said man are you listening right now did you know about that he goes no i go would you like to maybe ask her any type of question about this bombshell she just dropped which by the way reveals everything about the trouble they were having and he struggled to ask the question his question to her was how do i help you achieve my goals i was like wow okay we're going to start at ground and so tough kiss tough case very tough doctor but you know you know what i think um sometimes people in relationships they do want it to be successful but they need a little modeling they need to see what it looks like to actually ask a single curiosity-based question and so we worked through it and eventually he said this is the question he asked which i was so happy about he said what do you mean that's all it was it was as simple as that what do you mean i said we've been talking for an hour and a half that was the first time you've asked a single question of your wife and i loved it so this curiosity thing is another thing that happens and as you kind of get into these conversations with people you realize boy we have these patterns that we've been repeating for months oftentimes years and if we need a third party to help us or if we can just switch locations let's go to a nice dinner and talk about it listen to this podcast suddenly you can kind of turn the leaf and start that process of building a new relationship with money okay so couldn't agree more i've had to train myself to be better at this if at some point though you need to get to the er to triage and stop the financial hemorrhaging you you can go like directly through the worst neighborhood yelling and screaming to the er you can also take a detour through like the amusement park and make the entry a little easier but eventually you get to the er and the fact remains that one person is spending a lot more than the other when they get to that crux or at the point that that is to be the topic of conversation how have you seen people do that successfully in the past you are right there actually actually let me let me ask a better question because that that implies a bunch of things need to happen and maybe they don't how do you see people successfully solve that situation that's a better question ultimately if they're going to solve it together they both have to want to create a vision a north star together it is extremely unlikely basically i've never seen it where one person drags their partner and makes it happen it does not happen it can work for a while but the rest of your life fighting about everything from the cost of starbucks and a candle to the cost of who's paying for our kids college it's just a dreadful life and um and that's exactly why people end up getting divorced among many other reasons when it comes to money what i find is that of the people who change successfully one there is a desire to change and that's why i ask them why now right it's never about the dishwasher it's them realizing that oh we don't have the tools to do this or oftentimes it's them with their son or daughter who will make a comment and they realize that their toxic money behavior is actually being picked up by their kids that's a really common one okay and any examples one young woman said to me that her son came up to mom and said don't tell daddy about buying this there was a lot of hiding money and spending in their relationship just like there had been with mom's parents so it's passed down generationally and when i pointed it out to them i said you know you two could probably make it work over the course of your life you know you're both very resourceful you're high earners but how do you think your children are responding to this and their faces went completely white and they looked at each other and they knew they knew they said oh yeah my son already knows about this he told me the other day don't tell daddy about spending and so that was the thing that got them to make the change so by the way it's not enough to just want to change like everybody wants to have this smooth relationship with money where we can be you know abundant and live our rich life but i also find that there's a combination of wanting to change psychology and use tools and systems so psychology a lot of us think that it's weird to have a meeting about money once a month or once a quarter it's weird you know what you know the way that most people are raised is you don't talk about money until there's a fight that's the predominant world view on money and couples in this country and so when you shift it and you say yeah you're gonna have a standing agenda you two are actually gonna have a google doc one of the most common reactions i get is that sounds like a job sounds like work i go yeah that's because at work you're measured on certain things you're trying to bring some of that into your relationship you can still love your partner and sleep next to them but you can still have a running agenda so that's one changing that psychology the second is using these systems you know usually when i find that um people are i'm speaking to these couples who have some type of big major money problem they are not aligned on basic financial principles and they're not using like basic systems things like they don't understand compounding so one of them goes well late let's just like spend our money because we don't know how long we're going to be here for or we'll never make enough and i point out if you guys started saving and investing properly today you'd have like six million dollars they go what so that's number one two is just you know using things like do we have a shared spreadsheet things like that i i had another couple that was extremely financially sophisticated they were in the realm of being cpas and i asked them how much money do you think you make what's your net worth and the answer between the two of them was off by millions of dollars remember these are highly sophisticated people so i said i said why is that and um the answer is that they are so sophisticated they had all these exceptions well this one is here but this is liquid and this is not i said guys you got to go back to first grade create a one-page google doc like basically right on it with crayon this is how much we have this is how much we owe this is how much you know we've invested and they had to kind of accept that even though they're super advanced at work in their personal life they need to start back at ground zero can you think of an example of a serious fight it doesn't have to be from your personal experience but in your experience with all the readers and various couples and so on something that was a 9 out of 10 in severity that had a really simple solution that worked yes yeah does that make sense like something something that's that that had been intractable right this couple had been smashing their head against a brick wall or against it's been smashing each other's heads together and at an impasse and then lo and behold there was a simple solution there's a couple who lives on the upper east side of new york all right the complaint was he has been starting a business i need him to contribute a hundred dollars a month to the household for food things like that they have two children okay and he said look i'm putting everything i've got into this business so she was very upset because she's like look we're going in the red every month now i asked him a couple questions i said how much does your apartment cost the rent was 3 800 a month they were making 70 000 per year oh wow yeah okay so all right well what's that's probably here they have been pre-tax that's pre-tax correct they have been fighting about a hundred dollars per month that has been a debate in their household for something like nine months and there were a lot of tears there were a lot of real agonizing conversations but you know what the real problem was they were bankrupt in two months and they didn't even know it wow so this is a really difficult conversation we had and the solution was very very tough which was she had a conception of how she was going to live her family lived very close to her she could visit them every day but the truth was they needed to move out of the city and likely move out of the state and go to a much lower cost of living now imagine how it feels to have your entire world that you've constructed and the plan for you your husband your children and then on this call you realize that is not going to happen it's devastating it's very tough and so you know they put me in a position of trust to be able to talk to them and one of the things i told them was look it doesn't mean that you have to move away forever there are lots of things you could do with this company make it successful increase your income but you can't ignore that this is the real problem in the relationship ignoring it will not make it go away it'll just get way worse and so it really goes to show that there are things that we can agonize over for weeks or months or even years in our relationship but sometimes the true problem is way out there in left field what did they do do you have any idea i will follow up with them soon and i hope to do follow-up episodes where we find out what actually happened post-mortem could be could be the second podcast what are some of the other situations that you've run into and actually i'd be curious after our last conversation related to prenups although we covered many topics not just prenups was there any feedback or subsequent learnings from people who heard it or people who read your writing that you found interesting puzzling thought-provoking or otherwise well the first and most important reaction that i got was people recognizing that prenups are not just some rich [ __ ] trying to screw their partner and i was i was really happy about that and i want to thank you for letting me come on and kind of share my own personal experience because the only way most people hear about prenups is from tv and it's super untrue and dramatic the way that it's portrayed and so i saw a lot of comments on reddit on my instagram dms people saying like hey i had no idea that's how it actually works so that was very gratifying again as i said in the episode most people don't need a prenup okay but if you do if you're coming in with a pre-existing business or a disproportionate amount of wealth then it's worth talking about it and a prenup is something you agree on or side note if you may inherit any asset from your family yep also totally right so it could be real estate could be a house it could be anything yeah also also consideration you know sometimes i read a lot of reddit and sometimes i see these conversations where um one person goes my partner wants me to sign a prenup and i think that they're an [ __ ] i'm gonna break up with them and then of course there are like hundreds and hundreds of comments and once in a while i will see someone reference that episode and that makes me really happy whether it's that episode or another place that someone's really talking about this stuff i think there's slowly being a shift where people are starting to recognize hey this isn't just [ __ ] oh so and for people who i'm sure it's easy enough to find but we'll create a short link it's not legal advice folks but it is a fun conversation and very very detailed tim.log forward slash prenup we will just make a short link for people who are interested so that'll go straight to that episode what other tools questions exercises resources anything that you think might be beneficial to listeners of this episode the broad topic being couples and finance couples and money what other ground might we cover let's talk about what i call the 100 challenge and this is for people who tend to struggle spending money on themselves now i can help people with their investments i can help them change their money psychology i can often fix their businesses but if there's one thing i cannot fix it's cheap i can't fix cheap people if you're cheap i can't help you i'm sorry well you can help them but you can't fix them unless they want to be fixed but here's the thing yeah here's the thing they never want to change it so cheap people they write me tim this is the one group of people i've just decided i cannot help them because they right now there are levels and there are levels right uh yeah that's true okay we're talking about like nba all-star cheap meaning yeah maybe that's not the right metaphor to use but you're talking maybe you could just give some examples of what we're talking about i mean throw out the car deal because we didn't get the floor mats that kind of no no not that not that although i don't think my dad thinks there's anything wrong with that uh so i guess i'm proving my own that's a true story i'm proving my own point as i say this um it is people who write and they say hey we've you know saved a bunch of money and but i can't bring myself to spend it um and i and so you know i developed all these variety of techniques and i say you know what will you do with the money and they acknowledge that it's irrational but when i give them something to do about it they ultimately go oh actually it's fine they don't think that's that big of a problem they minimize it so i'm going to give everybody a 100 challenge here to try to preempt this problem before you become a cheap ass you take this challenge right now and you can take that fork in the road towards a rich life instead of whatever cheap place you're about to go to so here's here's the challenge in the next 48 hours i want you to spend a hundred dollars on something you love you cannot spend it on kids you cannot spend it on pets and you cannot spend it on charities it has to be on you now if you're a high earner you can take that number and you can multiply it so for example if i'm going to tim i'm not giving tim the 100 challenge tim's challenge has a lot more zeros on it okay and so so you you can just finally get can finally get that botox i've been eyeing you can decide what the amount is but the point is it should be meaningful right it should make you think and it should make you go oh wow what am i going to spend that on and this is just one little way one method to start shifting your life towards spending on the things that are important to you you know a lot of people they're 30 40 50 they go i don't actually know what i want to spend on and i find that to be a tragedy i think it's a tragedy to live a smaller life than you have to so here they are with hundreds of thousands even millions of dollars in the bank and almost as part of their identity well i don't you know i'm fine i just eat a taco bell listen i ate at taco bell a long time myself it's great okay but what else can you do with your money and really dream into something bigger more meaningful it could be luxurious it could be adventurous whatever the case may be that's what i want for you doing this 100 challenge so if if that were posed to you and i'm sure people have asked you this right what would or what have been some of your answers oh good question um besides besides the luggage concierge aka fedex yeah great question so so my number would be bigger than 100 i would probably do one thousand to five thousand dollars and in that price range what i would do is i would there's a few things that i have done so one is i would take an a last minute trip wherever just to see a friend right i'm gonna get on a plane and go wherever they live in the world and just hang with them it could be as short as two days it could be five ten days that's very abundant for me two is i love clothes so i would go and buy the most beautiful coat or sweater that i've had my eye on boom i always have a list of things that i'm like that's i'll get that next and three i love convenience so it would be you know for example hiring uh a travel agent and saying okay this is the type of trip i want give me the entire itinerary laid out that's what i would do what about you you know i was gonna say i came across an amazing cashmere onesie that i think would look amazing on you i need to tell you something about this because okay years ago do you remember that site guilt guilt.com i do okay yeah yeah guilt group exactly so i um i at one point i signed up and i mentioned it in my email list and i became one of their top referrers overnight and so basically i had like unlimited money on guilt for years okay so at one point they were they were selling meat so you know high-end meat so i just order meat and just like send it to my sisters i'm like hey keep your eye out in the mail today you know just crazy stuff and so one day i said you know what i really need from guilt group is a cashmere blanket that's what i need okay so i go on there and and it was there and i ordered it okay tim this blanket comes alright of course it's beautifully wrapped and i open it up and it's the size of slightly larger than a facial washcloth and i go i go no i go this cannot be like because it was folded into itself you know it's very very premium and i go this cannot be i must be missing one of the unwrapping things so i keep turning it and pulling at stuff nothing and i i go back and look at the size the size is correct and i was like what in the hell is this stupid thing okay it turns out it was a cashmere swaddle blanket for a newborn yes these exist i was like this is crazy who the hell would buy this so i don't have that cashmere blanket tim i returned it but somebody out there actually bought it well that's why i thought the cashmere onesie with the crotch snap release would be perfect for you so dvd i don't wanna i don't wanna give too much tmi on on the podcast this is family programming after all uh what would mine be uh well i i actually i mean this might be cheating but i kind of know in the sense that i i have something like this which is something i've already committed to although it remains to be seen whether the travel is going to work but to have an incredibly gifted musician and teacher come spend a week with me to do intensive hand drumming training at least twice a day no kidding and it's not cheap but it's not collecting ferraris right it's it's it's something that i think i i don't think i know even five years ago i probably would have hesitated to do for whatever reason perhaps putting it in the frivolous category well i think let's be honest right you don't you said i i need a cashmere blanket you don't need a cashmere blanket you want a cashmere correct and there's nothing wrong with that great no there's nothing wrong with it but i think for me i i would have criticized myself for the expense and the travel and everything else involved because i think in part just didn't grow up with a lot of resources you know certainly enough we had shelter and warm clothes and everything else but that that would be one example okay so many things i love about that first of all the fact that you have a clear vision of it i love that the second that it's meaningful to you that makes no sense to me but i love that it makes perfect sense to you i love that that the more dialed in your rich life becomes the more incomprehensible it should become to everybody else so that was beautiful and then the other thing i love is that it really kind of becomes part of your identity you and i have talked a lot offline about growing up and you know the way that we grew up was totally different than silicon valley and all this kind of stuff that we've become a little bit more exposed to and you take that with you i certainly have taken it with me i don't want to just drop money frivolously on everything but if there's anything i would say that is impressive about what you said it's that you have changed your identity from where you came from which was great but now you're at a different place and it's also great to honor that and say i can still be the tim that grew up over here but i've achieved a lot i've been fortunate i've been lucky i've worked hard and i get to reap the rewards of that for myself and for the people around me i think that is an amazing answer thanks man it's uh it's also one that i've tested so this would be the second time that i've done it and i think it's worth noting probably that this isn't the 90 of your net worth challenge this is the 100 challenge or the fill in the blank challenge which is enough to make you perhaps a little uncomfortable if you're used to being frugal but it's not enough to do any real damage so you can actually test and so i tested it there are other things i've tested that have not been replicated for instance like there are some really fancy meals i've gone to them or like no i'm never going to go back to that place like i i don't i don't need to do that twice i don't think it was worth it in this case i decided it was worth it it helped me further develop a skill which then persisted after the fact the teacher himself is is amazing and he's just fun to spend time with and some of the experiences we had like doing an impromptu impromptu like duet jam session at a friend's house with a bunch of wine our our memories i really really cherish so that one made the cut love it therefore here we go again round two yeah this is what i want everybody listening to be able to do is just like tim he tried out a fancy restaurant hey tried it once it didn't break the bank cool i did it i don't need to go back there again on the other hand i tried this thing boom great that is so different than a life of frugality which is often coded for fear the fear that if i go to this michelin-starred restaurant once that i'm going to trip and fall and have to go back there every single day for the rest of my life that does not happen my friends and you can just as well say no to things once you've tasted them you can also say yes to other things and i love that so for couples this is doubly hard because it's not just you but it's your partner right i remember speaking to one couple and they had not gone on a honeymoon yet even though they were married and they were talking about where to go and one of them goes yeah let's go to i think it was indonesia let's go for like four weeks we'll have a blast and his partner says four weeks that's kind of long we'll get bored right uh two should be enough now think about listening to a couple where one person is actually excited about a honeymoon and the other's first reaction is to minimize their partners dreams that is a really common they weren't intending to basically stomp on their partner but they did and so i just kind of gently said hey why don't we try this again and this time let's both get excited right you're excited over here let's get excited as well and instead of going into a downward spiral it went into an upward spiral hey what if we did that oh my gosh and what if we also rented a car and we did this and you could see and hear the energy change so again if you are going out for your first conversation with your partner you know one of the things you might agree on is hey today just for the next hour let's agree that we're gonna pump each other up we're not going to minimize each other we're just going to pump each other up that's all and that can profoundly change your interactions about money what other advice so we talked about the 100 challenge this is in the next 48 hours has to be for you you can't dodge it and kind of deflect it to another entity whether it's your partner your kids your dog there's that what other tools exercises questions do you have for people who have trouble spending money now that might sound strange but ultimately money is this piece of symbolism that we trade for something else yeah whether it's a feeling or an experience which is usually upstream of a yet another feeling you interviewed a couple as i understand it that saved millions of dollars but they seem unable to enjoy it yeah they have not had a vacation in the last decade right or people who struggle over small expenses well what are some other tools in the toolkit or questions approaches that you use in cases like that and this might sound really strange to people like it's rarefied air right they might be like ah like they're taking this conversation in a direction that will not relate to anyone but that's in my experience not true i think the the developing competency and comfort with translating dollars into value whether that is through investing or spending which is oftentimes another type of investing i think is a skill that you develop i don't think anyone has it innately right so this applies to many more but since i believe you've interviewed this particular couple what other tools do you have in the toolkit besides the 100 challenge so first i have a lot of compassion for them because everybody teaches us how to save but nobody teaches us how to spend spending is a skill and you know my dream is to take someone who's made money and take them out in new york for two or three days and show them how to spend money commensurate with the level that they are at now please do not dm me and ask me to take you out in new york or la i'm not doing that anymore tim if you want to do that but i think you spend money fine but please don't dm me and ask for a free tour you know i'll make a confession just real quick so i think i'm actually it has been very hard for me to learn how to spend money very challenging and in fact i'm interrupting so don't lose train of thought but the reason i'm interrupting is that literally this past weekend was the first maybe the first time ever i have done like a proper weekend in new york city with my girlfriend really yeah wait is this is this about to happen are you and i gonna have a romantic adventure where i'm gonna you know we're gonna like go to a broadway show together and well i mean i'm open to that i literally just did this though this past how did it feel it felt [ __ ] amazing and uh it was it was outstanding and we had so much fun and it brought us closer and you know there are things we would do again and some things we wouldn't do again but ultimately it was affordable and like why are we collecting all these m ms like you can if not to ultimately use them in some fashion and that's not to say you don't save i mean i've spent my whole life saving right but as you said like you just don't you're getting the first piece of the puzzle but then you have to figure out the rest of it please continue so so thrilled to hear that and it doesn't matter whether the amount is you know ten thousand dollars that you save or a much larger amount invariably if you've been saving and or investing for a while you will ultimately have an amount where you have to decide what to do with it and most of us spend our entire lives focusing on just the saving part but i think probably every single one of us has a parent or a relative or somebody older than us who does not know how to enjoy their money and they still drive around town to save money on gas and you say look you've got enough what are you gonna do with it and then ultimately they will say something like well i guess i'll just give it to my kids your kids don't want the money they want you to have a good life they want you to spend it on the things you love and so that's why i'm so passionate about this in fairness some of the kids want the money but a lot of kids also want their parents to have a great okay i did not make an allowance for those people they're like counting the clock oh that's sad so you know i have found that you cannot tell people who struggle with spending money hey guys you really need to spend more money it's just it goes in one ear and out the other it's not even a factor in their life that's why i spend so much time saying what's your rich life it's very much like the same you can't tell someone who loves chocolate cake cut out the chocolate cake instead we say hey let's add a little bit more delicious chicken let's add some really good asparagus yeah you still want the chocolate cake cool but it's probably gonna just naturally become a little bit less of a part on the plate so when i when i talk about their rich life when i understand the texture the color i don't want them to say travel i want them to say i'm going to indonesia for four weeks with my beautiful wife we're going to sit in c2a or 2d and this is where we're going to stay and this is what we're going to do and we're even going to have a food tour and we're going to do this and that now it's vivid vivid enough that they get excited about it i also use the stick where i say okay right now you're 38 years old this was a couple that i spoke to and i said by my calculations by the time you're in your 60s you will have over 26 million dollars when are you gonna start spending your money and they looked at each other and he goes well probably when i retire and i just point blank said to him i don't believe you do you believe him and the wife said no i don't believe of course i don't believe he can't even spend his money right now and so what i encourage them and what i showed them was would you rather end up at 60 with some amount of money or would you rather end up at 60 with just a little bit less money but a lifetime worth of experience ultimately when i'm speaking to people like this who find it difficult they're just afraid afraid that they'll lose it all and as i probed him you know what he told me his dad had lost all of his money late in life so you often find these family challenges that they cannot escape from how did he lose his money do you remember how did his dad listen he was in another country and he made a series of bad investments and bad deals and lost it all so they've constantly lived with this fear as by the way all of us do based on the cues we were raised with that you know i could lose it all or that i'll never be rich or that the rich are all evil and those are some of those invisible scripts that we have to work through if we want to work with our partner together towards a rich life where should we go next let me share just a couple of my biggest fascinations that i've taken away from these couples these are the patterns that i've noticed which which really surprised me because i thought there would be a couple but not these ones the first pattern is that people will work for years and years and years save their money but never think about what they want to do with it one couple they said that their rich life is that they want to own four cottages eventually and i said cool what do you want to do with that they go i wanted to throw off passive income so that eventually we can buy this beautiful rv and go camping with our family i said that sounds cool how old will your kids be you know from the sounds of it their kids would be like 65 years old by the time they could do this i said can i make another suggestion what if you rent an rv you go for two and a half weeks and you do it 18 months from now after you've saved the money to do it they had built up this vision of that they had to buy four cottages and then buy an rv to go camping with their kids the kids would damn near be dead by the time they could do that just go rent the rv and go and see if you like it okay so that's one is we save and save and don't think about it the next is we often have a ghost in the relationship often times there's a third party in this relationship and i encourage them to name the ghost one of the couples name their ghost franny and franny is the one who's always concerned about debt because they had she had debt always afraid of what can go wrong and so not saying that you should try to smother frannie or ignore franny but rather acknowledge hey franny i hear you i do have my debt pay off plan but i've also decided i'm not going to wait and spend nothing while i'm paying this debt off i'm going to be reasonable and have a balance another pattern is that people create a story for themselves and then they live it but this story can often be popped like a balloon with just a few questions so somebody will say something like well i'm he's good with money i'm not and i'll go is that true and then she will go oh yeah yeah i go hey out of curiosity have you read my book no do you think if you were to read this book that you might be able to get pretty decent with money and that's a beautiful moment because suddenly that person realizes that story they've been telling themselves may not be true i mentioned that people minimize the problem you know they'll say this is a 4 out of 10 but a 4 out of 10 left alone in a couple especially when there's kids and a mortgage involved turns into a 9 out of 10 so whether it's emptying the dishwasher or spending on starbucks this one really surprised me which is stress is not correlated to the amount of debt stress is not correlated to the amount of debt so there was a couple that had about six hundred thousand dollars of debt educational debt they were two of the most capable calm people i've met like they were awesome they have this huge amount of debt but they had a plan they were aligned and they were clearly in love the way that they were talking about taking care of each other that really showed that the amount is not necessarily correlated to the stress and finally people often don't treat finances in their relationship like a business and they let it they think that it's weird to have an agenda or a plan as i mentioned there's nothing weird about it at all i've always been a fan of just doing things that might seem weird but if they work for you they work for you and so for any couple listening hey if you have some weird thing you want to do but it works for the two of you fantastic don't let anybody including me tell you not to do it just focus on what where you want to get to together with your partner do you have any other recommendations for people listening who want to further explore sort of developing the skill of financial comfort right which i do think is a skill i think it's a it has many different component parts we've covered a decent amount already are there any other recommendations you might have resources that you think would help people develop a higher degree of comfort having these conversations right there you know they're books like crucial conversations or crucial confrontations i think is the follow-up to it that can help with these types of things but any any other thoughts whether they be exercises resources yeah anything else i'll give you two one is i'm a big fan of the gottman institute and um my wife and i took a class there for an entire weekend and it was very time consuming and energy consuming but it was really worth it just to put a stake in the ground that says our relationship is important to us we're setting time aside for this so that's one and two is i often ask couples to write down what kind of couple they want to be what do they want people to think of them and we all know this we all have couple friends where when we think about them you know a few words come to mind and i ask them oftentimes they'll say something like they're generous they're fun and then after they've written down this typically very glowing document of what they want to be known as i ask them how do you reconcile that with the conversation we've been having about spending money at target or the pizza place and it becomes very clear that there's a discontinuity that's okay now we say how can we rewrite our actions to match up if you claim you want to be generous can we just tip an extra 15 and just start being known as generous because we are generous and suddenly they realize oh my gosh i created this thing but i haven't been living up to it and it only takes a tiny switch to completely change that yeah yeah the tipping example is a great one right it's like look if the bill even if the bill is small if you just make the commitment to like always tip five bucks it's incredible how far that will go right like if you buy like a coffee and you tip five bucks like you just made someone's day and it's it really can change how you think about the positive power of money bingo it's such a it's such a small thing i'm so glad we talk about that my wife and i added that to our line item of expenses the same as gifts charity we added tipping and we added a number that was big enough that we have to go out of our way to tip larger like it actually is pulling us towards tipping more not just reflecting what we normally tip and the same as you we recognize that a 20 tip to somebody else is incredibly meaningful incredibly and we would rather just work harder and earn more and be able to easily do that and so you know when we talk about being generous and charitable and adventurous this is what money can do for you and can do for the people around you just as a quick personal note and i've i've mentioned this before which usually i hate when people say that on any podcast because i'm like well i don't want to be the johnny come lately getting this for the 20th time but it just goes to show the power of the experience i have mentioned probably 15 times on this podcast that at some point when i was 14 or 15 working as a busboy billy joel would come into this restaurant where i worked and he would have a coffee read a newspaper and he would tip 20 bucks for his coffee and that blew my mind i mean like 20 bucks was a big deal to me and i remember that being and he also took time to chat i worked up the courage one shift i haven't told this part over like two hours because he would take his time to walk up and ask him how he met christy brinkley because they were together at the time and that that was that was incredible for those who don't know incredible power couple i mean and i wanted to ask him so i worked up the courage and he turned to me and he talked to me for a few minutes and you know to this day i remember that experience so vividly remember what i was wearing i remember the table he was sitting at i remember all of it i remember which side of the table and in that moment i remember thinking wow one day if i could just be so rich and successful that i could tip twenty dollars for coffee that is the craziest thing i've ever seen in my life right so you think about the effect that had on me right this this this really small thing which i'm i'm sure you know he's done a hundred times so he would have no memory of it but this like chance encounter small thing just really can make an impact it's huge so i'm glad you mentioned tempi that's awesome and now for everyone to be able to hear all the millions of people listening to this to be able to hear that yeah you can tip 10 20 100 nobody's stopping you from tipping more and many of us find it easier to tip or to spend money on others but you can also do the same for yourself and there's no shame in spending extravagantly on the things you love that is the classic way to create your rich life here here and if people go to 10. blog fort slash prenup which will be created by the time this airs and people listen to our previous conversation we talk about the levers right then 10xing on very specific things and how you can think through that but for this episode we're coming to a close ramit sethi twitter instagram ramit r-a-m-i-t his new podcast i will teach you to be rich by ramit seti you can find it wherever fine podcasts are served and you can find it also at iwt.com forward slash podcast i'm glad better late than never you're finally in the audio game and i've been looking forward to you entering the fray so i have no doubt that it will be outstanding and encourage people to check it out is there anything else you would like to share any closing comments requests of people who are listening anything you'd like to point folks to before we come to a close yeah i would love to hear from all your listeners tim whether they want to do it through twitter instagram dms whatever i'd love to hear how your first conversation goes with your partner this is a real beautiful crux of a moment you get to start this conversation it will last you years and years and it's you and your partner creating your rich life together so let me know how it goes i would be so curious to hear from you and if you are not in a couple you could i'm going to volunteer you or me to also get feedback because i know you have means for contending with this for people who test the 100 challenge yeah love that in the next 48 hours after hearing this then i will get i'll get the highlights and the low lights via via screenshots and text messages from mermaid and uh i'm gonna go order that cashmere onesie for you on amazon and then you can you can wear the infant swaddling cloth on your head you might be able to fashion that into something maybe a kerchief for your suit and look forward to hanging again soon man yeah i can't wait to see you in person yeah it'll be really fun to see you in person and any anything else you would like to add do you feel complete i do feel complete and i want to thank you for the warm welcome to podcasting land you have been a fantastic mentor and you know you've just been a good friend and been patient as i spent the last seven years trying to find the concept that i was really excited about but now that i've found it it feels right and i'm very very excited about it yeah i'm excited for you i'm excited for your listeners as well i will teach you to be rich bye ramit sethi check it out iwt.com podcast or you can just search ramit seti on the interwebs and podcast and i'm sure it'll come right up ramit thank you as always for hanging great to see you thanks tim and to everybody listening we'll also have links to everything we discussed in the show notes as per usual at tim dot blog forward slash podcast and until next time thank you for tuning in you

Channel: Tim Ferriss

Views: 94,307

Keywords: tim ferriss, 4 hour workweek, 4 hour body, 4 hour chef, timothy ferriss, entrepreneur, author, writer, angel investor, ferriss, tim ferriss blog, timothy ferriss speaker, Tim Ferriss Podcast, Ramit Sethi, Personal finance, I Will Teach You To Be Rich

Id: GAviVicC4i4

Length: 87min 50sec (5270 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 28 2021