I Will Teach You To Be Rich - 60. “My health is in question, but I don’t want to stop making money” (Part 1)
Episode Date: September 13, 2022Today’s conversation will shock you—point blank. Tom and Julie are in their early fifties and have two school-aged kids. Both are savvy with their investments, and they’ve amassed a $12 million ...dollar net worth in the process. But Julie’s still working. She thinks of the income as an added layer of safety and security in their lives—but at their level of wealth, they’re making more in interest than her salary could ever bring in. Their situation may sound like it’s black and white—but wait for the jaw-dropping moment that changes everything. And look for next week’s episode, part two, as Tom and Julie start to reckon with their true reality. Connect with Ramit Website Instagram Twitter Facebook YouTube Linkedin If you and your partner have a money issue and you want my help, I occasionally select a couple to work with, free of charge. Apply for my help here. Produced by Crate Media.
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I like to go out to eat so I'll say, hey Julie, should we go out to dinner and chill
off and reply, can we afford it?
But I'm joking.
But you're really not joking.
That's the part that kind of worries me.
And Julie, what is your net worth?
If you include our primary residence, it's in the ballpark of 12 million.
12 million dollars.
How would you describe yourself socioeconomically?
Upper middle class.
Take a take out the upper part at your right.
Oh boy.
Another couple worth over 10 million dollars who cannot admit that they are wealthy.
And in a rich life, as I always say, you have to be honest.
Honest with yourself, honest with the people around you.
If you cannot be honest with yourself that you are wealthy, it causes all kinds of peculiar
challenges.
Today, you're going to hear that from Tom and Julie.
They're in their early 50s. They have two children.
And as you just heard, they have a net worth of about $12 million.
Julie is wondering if she should quit her job to spend more time with her family,
but she likes the income from her job.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that today's episode will shock you.
That's why I want you to listen to the entire thing.
Julie thinks of money in terms of safety and security.
But how much is enough?
And what happens when you have to make tough decisions relating to your money and your life?
Welcome to I Will Teach You to Be Rich.
Julie, when you think about money, what words come to mind for you?
Oh, like protection is a word that comes to mind and safety and security. My view of money is you never want to run out.
Okay. Okay. And can you think of a time where you behave out of sync with how much money you
actually had? After I finished my second master's degree, I went to Southeast Asia for 10 weeks,
and I didn't have any money to speak of.
I had no question.
It was on maybe $35 a day or something very conservative
or very, very frugal,
but I chose to have that experience
versus going right to work.
Did you catch that?
Did you catch how she interpreted my question?
My question was, can you think of a time
where you behaved out of sync with the money you actually had?
Kind of getting at, can you think of an example
where you had a lot of money but you behaved like you didn't?
That's the obvious thing that's going on here.
She's got $12 million and she's agonizing over potentially quitting her job.
But her answer was to share proudly a time where she was extremely frugal.
I find her interpretation of my question to be fascinating.
What about more recently in the last 10 years,
can you think of an example?
Now you're laughing.
Okay, I can't wait to hear this,
where you acted out of sync with your financial status.
And did something really decadent, you mean?
Nope, that's not what I mean.
I mean that here's your financial status.
I'm holding one hand up and the way you behaved
did not match your financial status.
I shop at Target a lot because they have the drive up thing
and they have these little rewards.
Like if you spend $50, three times in this amount of time,
you get a $20 gift card, and I'll
always try and plan my spending.
So I get those rewards, and Tom feels like Tom is just laughing at me.
You shouldn't waste your time on $20.
Some of the things that Julie will do is
wait for coupons to come before she will buy something
or hope the coupons come in the mail.
Julie, you're cutting coupons still?
What cute for what?
I love this store called Bowden,
which is just like middle-aged women's clothes
with a lot of prints.
They're from England.
It's all super cute and
But but I will wait till like they send me a 10 dollar off for $25
$10
And then it'll be like my excuse
Oh my god
All right, okay, thank you Tom. Tom's got it. Hold on. Tom's about to plot a long papyrus scroll of all the stories
He's been waiting to share go ahead Tom. What else you got?
Yeah, I'm not I'm not going to get through all of them, but just just as another example, it will be like, I will often I like to go to
eat. So I'll say, Hey Julie, should we go to dinner and chill off and reply? Can we afford it?
often reply, can we afford it?
But I'm joking. But you're really not joking.
That's the part that kind of worries me.
And Julie, kind of curiosity,
what is your net worth?
If you include our primary residence,
it's in the ballpark of 12 million.
12 million dollars.
Yeah, yeah.
But it feels so satisfying to, and so concrete to save 20.
Okay.
Have you ever said that number out loud?
No, it makes me really uncomfortable.
How would you describe yourself socioeconomically?
Upper middle class. Take out the upper part if you're right. Take it all out. You're not upper middle class.
Okay. Now, tell me why did you say that though before we talk about what you really are?
That's what I feel like reflects our value in our lifestyles.
If we only have one resident, it's we only have one house.
We send our kids to public school right now.
I just feel like we don't do a lot of things that rich people do.
And what do rich people do in this metaphor?
The first thing that comes to mind for me is boarding school, multiple homes, private jets, club memberships, elaborate clothes. And that's
how that is my stereotype of what people who are truly rich.
This idea of rich has a lot of roots in our richy rich version of wealth, sitting on long
tables, eating food that's served under those big silver things, being chauffeured around,
only living in dark wood paneled houses.
My goal is to show you that your rich life is yours.
That's everything that I do in my business, my book, this podcast, my programs.
I want to show you that your rich life can be traveling six months a year.
It can be tipping 50%.
It can be camping one week every quarter.
Your rich life is yours.
But we also need to be honest.
At $12 million, you are not middle class.
You're not upper middle class.
You are wealthy, plain and simple.
And if you don't admit that,
you're doing a disservice to yourself
and to the people around you.
It's not a virtue to live a smaller life than you have to.
So my challenge to you is to define your rich life in extremely vivid details.
And the more you define it, the more different it should become from anyone else around you.
In fact, the more bewildering it should actually become.
it should become from anyone else around you. In fact, the more bewildering it should actually become.
Now, as for Tom and Julie,
we skip over how they amassed their huge wealth.
She basically calls it boring tactics at one point.
That's the best way to do it.
They lived under their means, they saved and accumulated money.
The classic I will teach you to be rich way.
They invested consistently every single month,
and they grew their wealth to millions and
millions of dollars.
In fact, it was around eight or so million dollars that they accumulated.
And recently they received a three million dollar inheritance.
But remember, they only received that after they were already multi millionaires.
So I want to share all that with you to let you know that the
I will teach you be rich method works. It takes time, but it is sustainable. And it allows
you to accumulate a large amount of wealth. But that's not the end. The real challenge
is what do you do with your money? And how do you use it to create a rich life?
Where did this idea of protection and safety
when it comes to money come from?
My mom grew up in a situation where she didn't have.
It was just her and my grandmother and her little brother.
And things were quite rough for them.
And they didn't, they were literally living
hand to mouth in one of my mom's ants addicts.
And I think it like had my aunt not taken them in,
they would have been homeless.
I remember a lot of stories about, well, I couldn't have this or all the girls at school had. I'm just
making this particular example up at fancy white gloves to where to the dances, but we couldn't afford that.
And remember, it seemed like stories of scarcity or of not being good enough and ways that manifested
themselves through not having things.
And I feel like money was tied to that in addition.
And my mom didn't talk much about like those early rough, rough years.
But I do feel like there was an amount of whistfulness
tied to money about, I wish I could have been like the other
people, or it'd be like a gap.
It was a pretty dire situation.
And so I think because of that and my mom's, my mom's early experience with money, she has
inculcated into my sibling and I that you always want to be prepared for
whatever eventuality there. And that was her lived experience so that that really
made sense for her. Why do you think she didn't talk about those tough times? I still don't know the
full story. I never will because she's passed away, but I think she didn't because it's something that
she was, I think they really troubled her and and it's just something that she would rather.
I don't think she wanted to burden us with it.
Like I remember I gave her this book about,
it was for a grandmother to fill out for their grandkids
and it was a way to get for them to get to know you.
And my mom was like, I just can't do this.
It's painful and I don't want,
a lot of it was about her background
and what things relate when she was growing up.
Wow.
So I think that all that weighed heavily on her.
What a story.
What effect do you think it has on Julie
to have grown up seeing what she saw?
To have recognized that her mom would have almost been homeless
if not for the help of her family. And notice that Julie decades later still carries those
messages with her. Safety, security, will I have enough? And think about it.
As she says those things out loud, half jokingly,
you think her daughters pick up on that?
I do.
I think that's exactly why whenever I speak to people who have some sort of
affliction with money, about 85% of the time,
there is something distinctly vivid in their childhood
that they are now living.
And when they're living it today,
they're also passing it on to the next generation.
I want Julie to understand the roots
of where her beliefs about money come from.
That's not going to change it,
but it is the first step to acknowledging it and then
deciding if she wants to make a change. So coming from a family where your mom was nearly homeless,
to you having a joint net worth of $12 million. What does that feel like?
What does that feel like? I feel proud of us that we have built these assets by investing over time and largely by doing
these very boring tactical things.
And I've always looked at it this way, but like anything that you spend, there's the opportunity
cost of what you could have gotten if you...
Don't buy that latte when you're young because...
So okay, I mean, there's some truth to that.
You could take that thousand dollars at per se or five dollars at a coffee shop and you
could invest it or you could spend it on something else.
That is true.
In your mind, Julie, is that a philosophy you live with for the rest of your life?
The opportunity cost philosophy?
Intellectually, I realize that that philosophy that helped us build, or established the financial situation we have today.
I realize that philosophy is no longer working for me,
but what is hard is to change my behavior.
Like I do little changes, which is the beginning of an evil,
but that's how you evolve, right, through little changes.
But I feel that they're,
I feel like I need to make, I need bigger change. I need, there's an opportunity for me to make bigger changes.
I think part of me feels somewhat, like I know not all my friends have this, this amount
of assets, even people who do more trips or have other things that you might associate with assets.
So, so I'm a little embarrassed of it that way. And then I think there's also this other
frame of reference of, well, but there's people who get paid that in a year who I, like,
I know I used to work with the like I used to go to school with them. And so I think there's
this other frame of reference and that that leads to this feeling of, and this seems illogical, but like,
oh, whoever has the most when they die wins,
and I know that is not true.
I know it's not a game, and when you expire,
it is game over, but I still somehow constantly
find myself, say, tell you myself, that is not the right model to be working with.
It sounds like this inner tension of what you tell yourself logically versus what you feel about money.
Yes, I would say that is very accurate. I feel like there's some cognitive dissonance
with that and just trying to create a plan forward for us because of those two different
holes. What if we just didn't even need a plan at all. Well, I like a plan.
Of course you like a plan.
That's what you want from today's call, right?
A plan.
I guess what I'm looking for from today's call
would be a different perspective
because we, Tom and I will often joke.
What would R me say? So just now we get to to hear another
perspective that I feel like is the voice of a reason in some
ways. I think you two are very reasonable on your own. You did
a great job accumulating a lot of wealth,
but maybe my voice can be something totally different today.
Maybe we don't need reason.
They don't need a voice of reason.
They need a voice of intuition.
They need somebody to just help them have some fun.
In many ways, I see so much of myself
in the way that Julie processes these things.
She loves logic.
She loves control.
She loves to have it in the spreadsheet.
And I totally get that.
In fact, those things can be adaptive.
They can be helpful.
Obviously, she and Tom have been very successful following this methodology.
It's made them multi-millionaires.
But the problem is, as we've heard, too much of anything is bad.
Everybody nods.
Oh, yeah, yeah, everything in balance, everything in moderation.
But when it comes to their own lives, they totally disregard it.
I think it's possible Julie is too logical.
And that's what I want to find out now.
One of my favorite things to talk about is this concept of money dials.
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Now I get it.
I spend a lot on certain areas of my life.
For me, I love hotels that falls under luxury.
I love convenience that falls under having my food delivered, et cetera.
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That's rocketmoney.com slash R-A-M-I-T. Where in your life are you intuitive?
Where do you go with your feelings?
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by that.
Okay, that's a big tell right there.
Okay.
Let me try to explain.
I know that you're intellectual with your
finances. I know that you are intellectual with your planning, even deciding when to
go shopping at that store with the coupons. But is there a part of your life where you
operate on instinct or feelings where you don't intellectualize it.
No.
OK.
Kids?
I'm pretty, I'm pretty like, we do piano lessons.
And we don't do piano lessons because I want them to be great musicians.
We do piano lessons because I believe it teaches them these skills. Okay, great. So you have a plan. I totally
get it. Food? I tend to view that as more functional. Functional. Okay, totally fine.
I get it. Tom, is there anything where you would say Julie operates on instinct or emotion, not on intellect?
I don't, that's a really tough question to answer.
I think she's been pretty accurate and she is pretty intellectual about all that stuff.
I mean, for me, I have so many answers to that question that I could give because
that's a part of me, but like it's, I don't see it as much with Julie for sure. I mean,
obviously she, I would have hoped she would have said, oh, yeah, when I think about the
first time I met Tom, like, that was one of my answers that I could give. But that didn't come up.
So you guys are great.
You know what?
There's nothing wrong with that, Julie.
Not at all.
What I appreciate is that you're just being honest.
You're like, Hey, even for my kids, this is why I have them in piano.
This is why E what I eat.
I don't mind it at all.
It's I'm just trying to understand
your worldview, how you view certain things. Let's talk about a few other things just so I get a sense
of how you spend your money. You shop at Target. Where do you go out to eat? What type of place?
Super casual. Like?
Which I think, oh gosh.
A place called the Sunshine Factory,
which is...
Is it like an American restaurant?
Like, how much do you think's cost at this place?
15 or 20 bucks for an entree?
Okay.
Fine.
And would you ever go out for like a special dinner or anniversary type thing? What would you do for that?
I would say that Tom was very reluctant to getting a babysitter or about getting a babysitter.
Tom was that because was that because you didn't want to be away from the baby or was it a cost issue? What was it?
I'd like to say it was the first, but it's more accurately the lighter. So it was a cost issue.
Yeah. How many years ago was this? Oh, this is probably eight or nine years ago. So the babies that are there costs. How much?
Like 15 bucks an hour. Okay. is that expensive for the two of you?
A lot of silence on this call suddenly.
Well, everybody got very quiet.
I think we both have similar personalities as far as like
always saving money as much as we possibly could
and being frugal about things.
And I feel like I've come a long way in that.
And I feel like Julie maybe isn't as far along
as I think she should be given our financial situation.
Just so I understand when you say you've come a long way,
can you clarify that?
Yeah, I no longer walk out of grocery stores without everything I went to buy
because it seems a little more expensive than I think it should be. And that's
something four years ago I would have done easily. And buying whatever I need, it
doesn't matter, I know it doesn't matter, I'm not worried about the small costs
of things, I just get what I need. Four years ago when your net worth was around $7.5 million.
Yeah, that's probably accurate.
For everybody listening, $7.5 million is when you can stop checking your receipt at the
grocery store and splurge for the extra bottle of, you know, Topo Chico.
All right, you heard it here first.
Another rich person agonizing over grocery spending.
This really shows you how hard it is
to rewire your money psychology.
It also shows that Tom and Julie are both deeply embedded
in this frugality dynamic.
That dynamic becomes comfortable.
It becomes an identity.
And for the two of them, it's an identity that have actually been very successful at.
But they're here talking to me because they want to change that identity.
In order to do that, you've got to rewire your money psychology.
And that is challenging, whether you make $50,000 a year or $500,000 a year.
If you want to change your money psychology, I put together a free mindset mini course.
This walks you through the steps to identify your invisible scripts around money and then
change them.
And you can get it for free at iwt.com slash episode 60. Now I'm glad that Tom is feeling free at the grocery store,
but we're talking about $12 million,
and a lot more than that as it continues to compound.
I've got to have them thinking bigger than the grocery store.
So I'm curious what Tom thinks the problem is
and what role he has played in it.
It is that emotional component that we need to work on.
I mean, we, she's, that's one of the reasons why I love her is we're similar.
She's super smart.
Like she knows, she knows, she understands the time value of money, understands like,
hey, look, we could both quit our jobs today and we would not have to worry about money.
We could live the same lifestyle you know I've we've done those calculations but she just can't accept it it's almost like. And the whole thing where we talked about too, like how would she describe herself? She would say that we're middle class full stop, right?
Middle class.
That's what she would say.
Whoa.
And it's, I feel a little bit similar.
It's hard to talk about it.
And I totally know that there's a lot of people that we know that have way more money than
we will ever have.
And there's hundreds of thousands, millions of people
who are way more net worth, whatever.
But you're never gonna win.
You're never gonna have the most.
It's not a competition.
But at some point, you have to look at the numbers
and just like, take the win and say like we,
we kind of, because we say, because we are fortunate,
because we were lucky enough to have education,
we are where we are and just like take the win.
It's almost, you've never been in a sales meeting
and like there's a sales person that just won't take
yes for an answer, right?
It's just like take the win and like stop, right?
And I feel like that's intellectually where we need
to get to, just like take the win and like understand
we have options because of where we're at
and we could be doing things differently.
And it does kind of like when Jill was talking about when our kids were younger and I didn't
want to get a babysitter because I didn't want to pay $15 an hour that breaks my heart.
I mean, it's tough to hear, but I tried to change. I think we could make
it happen. I think it's just making the decision to make it happen. And hopefully we can kind
of expand it, do more and more. But I think the main thing I think is just both of us realizing like we can
we can make that stuff happen. We kind of do have a magic wand. As we all know, I will
all anybody is guaranteed is today and and it's just that that hits a little closer to home for
us than some people. So we just got to take advantage of of knowing that being able to act on it.
Let's talk about the stakes. Julie, I understand you recently had a medical procedure. I wonder if you can share a little bit of that with me so I can understand it.
I had a double lung transplant in October of 2020. By that time, I was like on oxygen all the time and could barely make it up the stairs
and it just seemed like it didn't really, there was not a lot of value in pursuing the diagnosis. But anyway, so I had this undetermined condition.
And the, I mean, basically, like these lung conditions,
it's, there's the only path forward
after a point is a lung transplant.
And so you go through this, this workup
to get a lung transplant.
And then you get put on this weight list.
You have a score that is based on many things.
But a key one of them is how long they anticipate you
have left to live based on your long function and some other inputs.
And I was incredibly lucky to get a call
from the Transplant Center a couple of days after I was on the,
put on the transplant list,
and I got a transplant.
And I had my first six months were pretty roughly 50%
of people who have a lung transplant survive five years,
roughly 30% survive 10 years.
So, well, my quality of life is very high right now, and there's things I can control,
and I am controlling them.
There's many things that I can't control at the cellular level.
This like rejection, graft rejection is a big one.
And so it my, my time isn't, nobody's time is unlimited,
but I feel like my having and a life is by no means a guarantee.
And then also I feel like there's a question of quality.
I know people who have lived for 20 years and bike all the time and just have a really full life with transplant. But then I know other people who are
a year or two out and have had major setbacks. And so I feel extremely lucky to have this gift
because if things have gone differently, my outcome could have been very different. But now
gone differently. My outcome could have been very different. But now I think I've had this, I've just been wrestling with, okay, how do I use this time for a while?
According to my calculations, I have about like a 67% chance of living five years post-transplant, so another three and a half years roughly.
And so, but I'm behaving like I was when I thought I might live to be 90.
And there's like virtually no chance I'll live to be 9.
And so, but then to actually change my behavior and of how it's like that reality,
I feel like is really a hard,
it's hard to go from like intellectually grasping that
to making those changes.
This isn't just about having a lot of money
and finding it difficult to spend it.
Julie reveals that she knows of her own mortality and she knows that statistically
in the next 10 years she likely will die. This isn't just games, it's not just numbers on a spreadsheet,
this is life. And so you can see why I wanted to speak to Tom and Julie. Because it's one thing to amass a large amount of money.
But it's another thing to accumulate millions of dollars and have a husband and two
daughters and want to create these experiences with them and know that you have a ticking clock
before you die.
You know what I always remember is when my mom died, she died of cancer and she was in hospice and it was like very clearly the end and
she was my sister and I were in the room and she was talking and she was saying, oh, I probably won't see any of your girls graduate
from college.
And my daughter was in kindergarten that year.
And I just remember thinking like it was April
and my mom was only going to make it another day or two,
best case, but I just kept thinking
that you're not going to see your granddaughter graduate
from kindergarten.
What are you talking about college?
But I feel like that even in her mind,
there was like this hope or this like inability
to come to terms with the finiteness of her life,
of her situation.
And I feel like that is my tension too. Like I
understand earlier that day, you know, my mom had given us all
her password. And like she knew the end was coming, but she
didn't, it's like she hadn't internalized it. And that's my
situation is different. Because I think I hopefully have more time than she had at that
point.
But also, I think my time is very finite.
Like, there's, when you look at survival rates for transplantes, it's not a great outlook, but yet I'm living like I'm planning to live to a hundred and
me long-term care in all this.
And I feel like there's a big question in my mind about not only the quantity of my life,
but the quality of my life.
And the quality of my life is pretty great now. Like I am like best case, or maybe
not best case, but I have had a very successful outcome for the procedure that I had. But
I'm not. And so I need to be taking it, like I understand that intellectually I need to be taking advantage of this time.
But yet, I'm still stuck in worrying about the opportunity
causes of what I spend.
Yeah.
Julie, the story about your mom is so interesting and telling.
And what is interesting to me most is about the way you tell that story.
In that, your mom in her last days, intellectually knew that it was her time to go.
But emotionally, she wasn't ready to accept it. She had this tension.
And when you tell the story, your first analysis of it is,
my situation is different. I have longer. But from my perspective,
situation is quite similar. Your mom couldn't grapple with the difference between
intellectually what was going on, what she accepted, and emotionally what she couldn't grapple with the difference between Intellectually what was going on what she accepted and emotionally what she couldn't accept
Do you see any similarities to you?
I I do I feel like I'm having trouble acting like I
I I'm having trouble acting like I should, if I would advise myself as a friend, like I would say, oh, just enjoy this time. But then I find myself sucked into my spreadsheet all day.
sucked into my spreadsheets all day.
Who? Tought the two of you what to do
with your millions and millions of dollars?
Nobody, and that's where we're at.
And why we're living less of a life
maybe than we could be in.
It's about experiences and getting out
because what do I want my girls to remember?
I would want them to have happy memories of me.
I would want them to say, oh gosh, I remember doing that
with my mom.
Julie's mom was unable to face reality.
But in many ways, Julie herself hasn't started to truly grapple with the reality of her situation.
She has over $12 million.
She has two young daughters.
And she has a ticking clock on how long until she dies.
You would think that it would be easy to make changes, but it's not.
I remember studying psychology in college and we were studying human behavior specifically
around patients who received a terminal diagnosis if they did not take their medicine.
And everybody kind of shrugs and laughs and says, of course, they take their medicine.
It's life or death, wrong.
About 50% of patients did not adhere to their medication,
even when they were facing death.
And we can see here with Julie that she really wants to change.
She's come to me.
She's gone through an application process.
She is here, but she
still finds it incredibly difficult. In part two of this episode, I will continue my conversation
with Tom and Julie, and I think you will be surprised that the direction the conversation
takes. As you can hear from today's episode, so much of how we treat money involves our money mindset.
So to get all the mindset material that I discussed, you can go to iwt.com slash episode 60.
And be sure to tune in next week to hear part two of this conversation with Tom and Julie.
Here's a sneak peek of that conversation now.
I had a double long transplant in October of 2020. According to my calculations, I have about
like a 67% chance of living five years post-transplant, so another three and a half years roughly.
But I'm behaving like I was when I thought I might live to be 90.
And there's like virtually no chance to live to be 90.
At some point, we're going to be looking back, saying,
what did we do?
The stuff we could do, what we could do it, which is now.
There's no virtue in living a smaller life than you have to.
But yet it does feel sort of satisfying in some way.
I can't quite explain why.
Thanks for listening to I Will Teach You To Be Rich.
I'm Ramit Saiti.
Please follow the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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