The Automatic Millionaire Reimagined: David Bach on Wealth, Freedom, and the Future of Money with Joe Polish

The Automatic Millionaire was my fourth book and everybody kept saying to me, I just want to know the one thing I need to do. Just tell me the one thing. What's the secret to being rich? The secret is you've got to pay yourself first one hour day of your income automatically for life. And it comes down to automation. Because in the real world, budgeting doesn't work, discipline doesn't work. So what I learned as a financial advisor is what really works is you just automate everything. Now, most Americans are financially illiterate and that allows you to be taken advantage of for your entire life. If you don't know how to be smarter with your money, somebody is smarter with your money and they have a system in place to take it from you. So you have to become your own best advocate.

How can you be a domino for someone else? The Joe Polish Show. Any problem in the world can be solved with the right genius network.

David Bachelor has a grade line and it's you don't get rich by intention, you get rich by automation. And so in 2004, David brought out a best selling book, more than 2 million copies called the Automatic Millionaire. And it really just totally established David right around the world as one of the most trusted financial advisors. And he started as an advisor with Morgan Stanley, big deal. He was a senior vice president at Morgan Stanley. But there was another opportunity that he wanted to take advantage of, which was writing and speaking and teaching. And he also started Strategic Coach. So he was in the very first workshop that Joe was in. So they made then this would have been 28 years ago. And now David is a frequent guest on major publications and in TV shows. In addition to the Automatic Millionaire, he's got nine other New York Times bestsellers and translated into 20 languages. And I bet David has created more automatic millionaires than anyone else in the world. Some people can write, some people can do. David puts the two together. He's both a writer and a doer. He's just a very special person. Enormous energy and takes very complicated things and makes them very simple. In the last decade, he also founded AE Management, one of America's fastest growing RIAs. Anyone who knows what that means. With over 40 billion in assets. He's also the founder of Finish Rich Media, delivering his message of financial freedom around the world. And so all of you I know are here because you want to get rich. You want to see your money grow. And I'd like to welcome David Bak.

Thank you. Thank you very, very much.

Thank you, Dan.

Joe Pollard.

Thank you, sir. Thank you. Awesome. Give it up for Dan. You know, we. Dan, we would not have met had it not been for you, too, in a lot of ways, I think.

Or did we.

How did we first meet?

He's going backstage here, but I would. Dan, where's Babs? Where are you?

Right there.

I love you. And Dan, I love you. I know you're backstage right now, but I would not be here. Was it not for the two of you and strategic coach, Because I can get really emotional and choked up as he was doing that introduction. I remember being that financial advisor and sitting at a table and taking out my worksheets and working on my bigger plan on how I could help millions of people and not just work with 100 clients. And I did that. His strategic coach. And I would not be here without the two of you, So I love you. Thank you. Thank you. And I wouldn't know you, exactly. I wouldn't know this guy, because the funny thing is, I'm sitting in this. You know, it was a class of 75 people, and someone says, you know, you're the youngest guy in this room. And I think I was just about to turn 30. And someone said, no, there's one other young guy, too. His name's Joe Paul. She's in the corner over there. And they go, joe, come over here. And literally, you skipped over to the table, and you were like, dude, what's up? And, you know, we've been friends ever since.

Exactly.

Yeah.

We know each other for over 20 years. Did I have a ponytail? No, the ponytail.

Oh, you had a full ponytail.

Okay.

I always think, as Joe back in the day when he had a ponytail, as like, Tiger, you know, Remember Tiger the Tigger with Winnie the Pooh, you know, bouncing up and down. And you bounced over to me.

I'll never get that memory out of my head now. That's funny. Well, yeah. So we've seen you go through this really massive rise. You've sold over 7 million books. You've been on so much TV. You're really good on media. I mean, today, this is interesting. We're talking. I don't know how many weeks ago it was now, but we were having this conversation, and he was sharing with me this idea, which I'm going to get to. I'm not going to get to it first.

Perfect.

But he's like, you know, I was like, if we could talk about this at the annual event. So here's what I will say. You're going to hear some things through the conversation with David that there's a lot of people in this room that, that know how to invest money. There's a lot of people that are financial advisors, wealth advisors, many very wealthy people that are in this room. This room represents literally several, I mean, billions of dollars of assets and valuations. It's in the billions for companies that are sitting here in the room. So there's a lot of people here that are very good with their money and know how to make money and some that have. How many of you have lost tremendous amounts of money as much as you've made money, too?

Yeah.

Other than most of you. So there's a lot of perspectives and a lot of opinions and a lot of models and methods that people do. But I want you to listen for not why this won't work, but why this could work. Listen to it from that perspective and I think from that. And we'll get to that later in the conversation. So I do have some prepared questions for you. So your very first copy of the OMAC Millionaire, which now has over 2 million copies of this, you're doing a re release of it and it comes out in December. And, and I'm sending everyone, you're just going to get it in the mail. So we're going to send you a copy of David's new book.

And so thank you for that.

Yeah, yeah. So I appreciate it. And we met at Strategic coach. It was 1997, I believe is when we met. And you had not even written a book yet at that point in time. And you were doing seminars for women.

Yeah, yeah.

And so can you. And the last I checked, you're not a woman. So I don't know what made you. I mean, we won't go.

Not there's anything wrong with that.

No.

So. So you were doing, you were talking about, you're doing events for women and money.

Right.

So talk about that in the beginning because I think it's instructive on how you developed not only this knowledge, but you also niched it and then you built a fricking giant business around it and you've reached millions of people. And how many times have you been on Oprah as an example? Because that's where the book first.

Seven.

Seven. Okay.

Which was life changing.

Yeah, yeah.

Totally.

Completely.

And so talk about that.

Talk about which actually it's funny to start with that. With that because I hadn't thought about that since just now. But I tried to get on Oprah in 1993, like the first month I was a financial advisor. Guess what? She didn't have me on the show. What happened? So how did a guy end up teaching classes for women and money? And the answer is, if I go all the way back. I learned about money from a woman. And that woman was my grandmother, my grandma, Rose Bach. And my grandmother made a decision at 30 that would ultimately change the entire destiny of our family. My son Jack is over here. So, you know, this whole, my whole family, one woman's decision changed everything. And the decision that my grandmother made at 30 was that she didn't want to be poor anymore. And my grandmother didn't have a college education. My family was from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They were completely middle class, living paycheck to paycheck. And my grandmother at 30 turned to my grandfather and said, jack happens to be the name of my son over here. This is not working. And he said, what's not working? And she said, well, in case you haven't noticed, we're poor. And he said, well, what do you want to do about it? She said, you know what I want to do is I want to take 50 cents out of my paycheck and 50 cents out of your paycheck and I'm going to start investing this money and I'm going to learn how to build wealth. And he said to her, you have no idea what you're talking about. You don't know anything about investing. And she went out and learned. And the way the story turns out is over my grandmother's lifetime, she became a self made millionaire and she taught my father how to invest. He became a financial advisor. Me, she helped me buy my first stock in McDonald's at age 7.

You still own that stuff?

I do. At 9 years old, I was at Disneyland. I was like, hey, is this place public too? And so I learned from my grandmother how to Invest starting at seven years old. So I became a financial advisor in 1993 and I started in the business with my father and my dad. I'm giving you just the whole story here. My dad said, all I want you to do for the first month is sit at this table with me and take notes, just listen in on the meetings. And so in the first 30 days, I sat in on three meetings with three widows where the husbands had died suddenly and my father was sitting down with the wives going through how to read their brokerage statement, how to know where the money was going to come from. And every one of these meetings the wife turned to my father and said, marty, Jim told me if anything happens to you that you would take care of me. And he's like, I will. You have nothing to worry about. And after the third meeting, I closed the door to my dad's office, and I said, what is going on in here? And he said, what do you mean? I'm like, dad, you have all these clients that are dying. First of all, he goes, well, we have older clients. That's what happens when you have a retirement book of business. I go, but the wives don't know what's going on with the money. You're teaching them about money at the worst possible point in their life. And to my dad's credit, he said to me, well, what do you want to do about it? And I said, you know what? I think I want to teach a class just for our women clients. So I decided to go teach a class originally for our women clients. And I told my mother about this idea because she had been involved in business, and she said, well, it's not just widowhood. It's also divorce. And so she started going through all the things that were happening to her friends with divorce. So I basically decided to teach a class.

By the way, just as an aside, if you can hold that thought for a moment, because I'm trying to remember time. Were you single or in a relationship at the time?

I was in a relationship.

Okay. Because I was trying to really see your motivation.

Yeah. And my wife was a financial advisor. Well, not the time. Your mom was a financial advisor also. And I was like, well, let's just teach this class. Let's send out an invitation. I was actually told by management that it wasn't a good idea. And my dad said, you know what? Just try it. So we sent the invitation out, and I had rented a hotel room that would fit. I didn't know how many people would fit. I never thought about it. And I come into the office, and my dad goes, I think you have a problem on your hands. And I go, what? He goes, go into the other office and take a look at how many return envelopes we've gotten. There was a stack on this table of just all the people who had RSVP'd. Yes. We had 225 women wanted to come to the first seminar. He goes, you better call the hotel and figure out how many people they can take. And the hotel can only take 110. So we literally. That was our first problem. We had an event so successful that the room is completely sold out. And then at that seminar, that workshop in a hotel room, I got asked, what's a good book for women and money? And I said, I don't know if there is one, but I'll go look. And ultimately there wasn't one. And I kept teaching that class over and over again. And then I was in Strategic Coach and I started doing my how do I 10x all of this? How do I reach a million women? Because I don't want to just help 100 people, I want to help millions. How do I do that? I said, well, I do a book, I do seminars, but I don't do the seminars. I train financial advisors all over the United States to teach my seminars. I do a PBS show. Like I wrote all this out on worksheets in Strategic Coach. I'd do a PBS show. I'd write Smart women, finish rich, I create a licensing program. And one by one, I mean, I just told Dan backstage. It's insane, the things that you put down on paper that become real when you go to work on the plan. That's what happened to me.

That's great.

I love it.

Yeah. So, well, then that launched everything and then you became quite a big deal. And so with the Automatic Millionaire, which I read the pre release version, actually we had numerous conversations before you released it. So that's over 20 years ago. So what's changed since you launched it? Let me say what's changed. One of the first, most impactful books for me that I read was the Richest man in Babylon. A little book right about it was save money, pay yourself 10%, pay yourself first. And so through our conversations and through looking at the marketing that we were going through back 20 plus years ago on marketing, all of this, I really started adopting a lot of the behaviors that you had written about in the book. But I wasn't very good at it. And there wasn't as many easy ways to automate. Like today, there's so many more systems. And so Jim Duback here, he was my advisor and so he helped me set up so many things also. And I basically used your advice and I used the advice that Jim was giving me and I have no debt on anything.

And you bought a building.

And I bought, yeah, several buildings. And now it's funny, now we own a ghost town, owned 4,000 acres two miles from there. We took that company public. I mean, there's all kinds of crazy stuff, a lot of equity and different things, but ultimately I have seen people over the years bring in 100 times more money in terms of gross revenue and things that I have brought in in my business that, that don't have anything to show for it relative to what they have brought in. It's pretty wild. Like, people still do not do this. Many do. And you taught many, too.

It's tragic. It's tragic to be at our age now and know people our age who's just literally spent 20, 30 years working on things, but they actually have no financial freedom.

Yeah, yeah.

Shouldn't be like that.

So let's talk about how to solve that, how to fix that. And here's the thing. So we started Genius Youth. And so we have a lot of the young people here. And the book that I'm giving to all of you, those of you that have young people, either kids or some young people in your life, they're the ones that will benefit tremendously from his book early on, because I started studying this stuff when I was in my 20s, and it's made all the difference in the world. So I'm not up here to be like, hey, great book. You sold a lot of copies. I mean, no, the methodologies actually work if you use them.

First of all, thank you for that. And I'll just give Joe Craddock. Joe's a. What's your quick start? Are you a nine or a ten?

Five. Two, nine.

Three.

Three is my Colby. I'm a nice.

So, you know, when Joe and I met and talked about the Automatic millionaire, I'm like, look, you got to pay yourself first. You got to save money automatically. And I said, joe, and you got to buy a building. And you why? I go, because all my wealthiest clients got wealthy by accident. They bought a building for their business. So this building, you should buy this building. And what'd you do? You turned around immediately and bought the building. You know, a lot of these ideas, they're not rocket science. You just actually have to do them. So the Automatic Millionaire was my fourth book, and it was. I did Smart Women Finish Rich? Then I got asked by all the women, I need a book for my husband. So I did Smart Couples Finish Rich. Then I got asked for a book on how to get out of debt. So I did this book called the Finish Rich Workbook. But what happened is everybody kept saying to me, I just want to know the one thing I need to do. I don't want to read all about financial planning. Just tell me the one thing. What's the secret to being rich? And so I would say, well, the secret is, you've got to pay yourself first one hour a day of your income automatically for life. That's it. By the way, you have to pay yourself first one hour day of your income automatically for life. And when you start in your 20s and where are all the young people who's here under the age of 25? Do I have any of the young people? Hello.

Here few.

Chuck, you're there.

In another room though, we have the whole genius youth people.

When you start when you're young, building wealth is simple and it's easy. And what happens is people don't usually do it in their 20s. They hear about money in their 20s, they think about in their 30s, they worry about in their 40s, and then they hyperventilate in their 50s. How many of you wish you had started saving and investing when you were younger? Okay, so I don't know if all the young people saw those hands go up, but it's the number one thing. Everybody goes, I wish I had started when I was younger. I've started my kids on Roth IRAs. James got to start at 12. Jack, you started three years ago. So you run the numbers on somebody who starts when they're young. In the automatic millionaire, I teach the miracle of compound interest. Everything in the automatic millionaire should have been taught in school before you gotta high school. It literally is taking all financial planning and bringing it down to the most basic tenets of what you need to do. And it comes down to automation. Because in the real world, budgeting doesn't work, discipline doesn't work. Why don't those things work? They take time and they're not fun and they kind of suck. Nobody likes dealing with budgets. So what I learned as a financial advisor is what really works is you just automate everything. You automate your savings automatically. It's one hour a day of your income, which is 12.5% of your gross revenue. We know the formula to being rich. Right now there's 24 million millionaires in this country. The bulk of them got wealthy by doing two things. Paying themselves first automatically using their retirement account, 401k plan, IRA account, SEP IRA. And then they bought a home. And then after they bought that home, they paid it down and maybe they bought a second home. But most people, if someone just 20 years ago, and I have all these stories right, the book came out 20 years ago. If they pay themselves first, use their 401 plan automatically, and they bought a home, chances are they're a millionaire today. Now the market's gone up sixfold in 20 years. That's the stock market and the real estate market's gone up fourfold. Now people go, well, is that going to continue? I don't know, but it sure looks good. Right. Like we're living through one of the greatest economic opportunity times of our lifetime. Wealth that's been built in the last five years is the beginning of the hockey stick. When you talk about AI technology and what's changed, the speed by which wealth is being built right now is unlike anything we have ever seen in our lifetime. And what's happening is it's easier to build wealth today than ever before. Because as you said 20 years ago, if you came into my. I used to do these seminars and I'd say, if you can save $50 a month, Barry's over here. So I know Barry can appreciate this. Right? They were called systematic investment plans. And you would come into our office at Morgan Stanley or wherever you worked, and in order for me to help you save money automatically, you had to fill out a six page form. It took 45 minutes. You had to give us a voided check. Remember those? Then we had to send it to the bank. And it took three weeks to get your account debited. Now you open up your phone and you like, oh, I think I'll open an account right now. I'll go to Acorns. Go, click, click, click. In less than 10 minutes, you can automate your retirement account, your savings account, your college account, your home account. There's no friction anymore. These phones are money making machines. And there's an important point here. This right now mints money automatically, or it takes money automatically. What's happening in our country right now is we are living in an automatic economy. And that automatic economy right now, and this is a major issue, it's an opportunity, and it's a major issue. This automatic economy is making 2 out of 10Americans really wealthy. We have 24 million millionaires now in America. That number is going to double in the next 10 years. When I wrote the Automatic Millionaire 10 years ago, the number was about 8 million. So we've gone up by 16 million millionaires in 20 years. The amount of money in retirement accounts now is $45 trillion. You should write these things down with notes because this is. I'm going to talk about how to unleash some of this money. $45 trillion. So all of the money in the United States now is either in a retirement account or it's in home equity. Here's the challenge in America today. When you want to know, why are people so pissed off they can see that 2 out of 10Americans are getting really wealthy and 7 out of 10Americans are broke. Now, the amazing thing to me, because again, when I updated the automatic millionaire. I did it with fresh eyes. The amount of Americans that were living paycheck to paycheck, Joe, 20 years ago, it hasn't changed. So it's the same amount. The same amount of people that are living paycheck to paycheck 20 years ago are still living paycheck to pay paycheck. And that's about 77 out of 10 people, right? So you just go, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Seven out of 10 people in America are living paycheck to paycheck. One out of three American families making $150,000 a year are still living paycheck to paycheck. So when you look at right now, what's going on, just for a moment with the government and the fact that we have a shutdown, I don't think the 2 out of 10 fully grasp what that looks like. They haven't got a PayCheck. Now for three paychecks, seven out of 10Americans can't get their hands on $1,000 in case of emergency purposes. Just let that sit for a second. When you hear that people aren't getting paychecks, it means that they can't eat. I asked my wife yesterday a question, and I won't actually ask it to the room, but I'll ask you to ask yourself, because I didn't know the answer to this until two days ago. How many people do you think are on this thing called SNAP, the SNAP program in the U.S. how many people do you think are. How many people do you think United States get a snapcheck? Do you know what a snapcheck is?

Yes, I know. I know a little bit about it.

I'm putting you a little bit on the spot. But by the way, my wife. What'd you say?

14 million.

14 million. He said 14 million. My wife thought 4 million. I read yesterday, two days ago, because again, I used all you. I use all the AI engines. They don't always agree. You just said 60. I read 41 million people. Yes. Did you just take that in For a second? 41 million Americans get a snapcheck every single month to eat. Now, the question is, how big's the check? It's $6.35 per person per day. So when we, you know, if you let this settle for a second and you think about this, I think long term, it's not a sustainable game for this country. For 2 out of 10 people being so wealthy and 8 or 7 or 6 out of 10 to be completely missing this opportunity. Continue and the Automatic Millionaire book. I sat on stage with Oprah, we did this amazing first show book becomes the number one New York Times bestseller. It's a life changing experience. She turns to me at the end of the show and she's like, they should teach this in school. And I go, I know Oprah. They should. Everybody should listen to Oprah. But they're still not teaching in school. And financial education is the basis for how we fix these things. We have to put in tools in place to make it easier to save and invest automatically for all Americans. But it starts with education. And most Americans are financially illiterate. And that allows you to be taken advantage of for your entire life. And it starts with your college loans, and it goes to credit card debt, and it goes to the loan that you get for your car and your mortgage. If you don't know how to be smarter with your money, somebody is smarter with your money, and they have a system in place to take it from you. So you have to become your own best advocate.

Yeah. So, well, what. What do we need? Like, how would you define money? What do we need to know about money in general? I know it sounds like a ridiculous question, but just the whole concept of money. I think people have a really. Some have a healthy relationship with money. Some people know how to leverage it. A lot of people, it's. When you say they should teach it, I often wonder if someone does not live it or it's not integrated into their life, can they really teach it? You know, do they know how? And I think that's what left. You know, obviously you became a teacher. This room is filled with entrepreneurial teachers. This room is filled with people that look for problems that exist in the world. They come up with solutions for it, and then they offer those solutions to other people. So, but let's just go down to money. I mean, what do we need to know about money in general?

I think the greatest thing to know about money is that money is just a tool. And I believe that money is a tool to free yourself. It's a freedom tool. People talk about the American dream, and when I think of the American dream, people go, well, it's a house, it's a car, it's putting my kids in school so they have a better life. I want to be able to retire one day. But the real dream for most of us is the freedom to live our life, how we best choose to live our life. Now, I believe that we're all put here for a purpose. I believe in a higher power. I Believe in God. And I believe that each and every single person in this room was given a gift. You're given many gifts, but you're given gifts. And when. I think as an entrepreneur, we're the ones that sometimes hear those gifts more than others. But when you have this idea, it's a gift coming from a higher power. And what I believe my purpose of being here was, I think I was put here to free people financially so that they could hear that calling. Because I think this is just my own belief. I think what happens is when you live paycheck to paycheck, when you are struggling financially, when you wake up scared and you go to bed scared, I don't think you can listen to your true voice. I don't think you can hear your soul. I don't think you can hear your higher calling. And so to me, I've spent 30 years just basically trying to teach people how to free themselves financially so that you can go hear your voice, so you can hear your soul and that you can live your best life.

Great. So we got our whole room full of entrepreneurs. What's the biggest mistakes that they do make or are making when it comes to money and finance in general?

Wow. I only got 25 minutes. Okay. What's the single biggest mistake entrepreneurs make? In most cases, what I've seen is entrepreneurs plan on having an exit, building their business and selling their business. And then that exit's gonna be what provides financial freedom. And today we hear about these exits all the time. So it's almost like a mythology. But I think, yes. You wanna build a business to sell it? Absolutely. Why would you not? That's the point of building a business, a wealth management. Our whole thing is teaching financial advisors how to build businesses that create equity that can be sold. However, most businesses don't sell. Now, certain businesses sell because you know what the formula is. This business gets built, I buy it for 3x, I sell it for 10x, I can buy it for 6x, I can sell it for 20x. But most entrepreneurs build businesses that aren't saleable and they don't pay themselves first. So as an entrepreneur, the number one thing that has to happen is you have to be putting yourself first financially. And it's harder because you don't have a regular paycheck. But you should, you should be paying yourself first automatically. And at least 15% of your gross income should be going off the top 100%. For those of you who have smaller business without employees, you should have defined benefit plans for yourself. It's such a phenomenal way to put a ton of money away. You could be putting away over $300,000 a year away. Tax deductible. If you have employees, you have to have a 401 plan in place. You should be maxing out your 401k plan. And again, entrepreneurs like, oh, what's the big deal if I save, you know, 30, 40, 50, $60,000 a year? Trust me, it's a big deal. The second thing as an entrepreneur is that you should be, you shouldn't be paying rent. You should be buying a building. Because when you buy the building for your business, whatever that building is, a condo. Even if you don't have employees going to the building, you should be buying a building. Now we have the new beautiful tax bill. You know, we've, we were able to accelerate our deductions again on buildings. You should be buying a building, doing cost segregation, depreciating it. That building should be in a separate llc. Your business should rent from that. And again, I don't care if you have 100 employees. It doesn't matter because you could go buy yourself a beautiful building and you could have your business pay rent to you, who owns the building, and you're depreciating the building. And then later, when you sell the business, you keep the building. So all of this still is about having a plan. So as an entrepreneur, it's not enough to have the bookkeeper and the cfo. You do need a financial planner. And you, Joe, like, you've done this from the beginning. And then you need to not make big mistakes. And I know I am the classic fiduciary. You brought ideas to me that I said no to. Entrepreneurs because we're risk takers in business. We will often be risk takers with our investments. And I am here to tell you that the risk that you're taking with your business is phenomenal. And then what? You, I believe if you hired me as your financial advisor and I don't do this anymore, but if you hired me, I would treat your money like it's the last dollars you're ever going to have. And I would make it so fricking secure. I have so many entrepreneur friends that are in their 60s and they're buying, they're investing in startups. And I'm like, I know that's sexy and cool, but dude, first of all, if you invest in 20 startups in your 60s, I don't know if anybody's told you, but there's a longevity issue here, right? So your startups someone's inheriting your startups. If you're married, your wife's going to have to go deal with these fricking pieces of paper that are certificates, that are sitting in folders that are not liquid, that you don't even know if they can be sold. So part of life too is, as you get older, it's cleaning up things. I'll give you guys a fire drill here. You never want to bring a room down, but I almost died three years ago, so my wife found me flat down on a floor. I was in blood. I was taken to the hospital in Florence, Italy. I was in a coma for four days. I woke up. This gives me chills. I woke up to a doctor with his hand on me. And the doctor said, hi, do you know what your name is? And I said, yeah, my name's David. And he said, okay, great. Second question. Do you know what your last name is? And I said, it's Bach. And he said, okay, great. Now tell me where you are right now. And I looked around and I said, I'm in Milan. I just had an ankle surgery because I had been in Milan two weeks earlier and had an ankle replacement surgery. And he says, no, you are in Santa Maria Novella. You were in the icu. This is in Florence, because this is where I live. And you've been in a coma for four days, and we are treating you for meningitis. And now that you've opened your eyes up, you're gonna be okay. And. But that's not always the case. I know people who've got meningitis, who are paralyzed, who are blind, who have died. So now I'm lying in this bed and they bring another woman into the room. And that woman is my wife. And they say, do you know who she is? And I go, that's Veronica. My wife's name's Elisha. And she looks at me like, who is this? I go, veronica. And I go, honey, I can still be a smart ass in the icu. So then she's screaming. She's like, oh, my God, he's okay, he's okay. And it did lighten the mood in the room at the time. But I wasn't okay. And I knew I wasn't okay. And. Because when you have meningitis, you have swelling of the brain. And so all of a sudden, I couldn't remember most. I couldn't remember the passwords to my computers. I couldn't remember the passwords to any of my stuff. Now, fortunately, my kids had embedded their faces into my phone, so they were able to get into my phone so I could tell my wife who to reach out to. But the point of the fire drill is as I lied in bed and I was in the hospital 17 days. First of all, I didn't know if I was going to get better. So I said to my wife two days later, honey, if I don't get better, you don't need to stay. I did not ask you to sign up for having to take care of me for the rest of my life. She was like, you're crazy. What are you talking about? And then I started going through all the things that weren't cleaned up like they should be if I had died or if I died. I'm in the money management business. Everything should be perfect. However, I was managing our money because this is what I do for a living. So I had my accounts, which I liked a lot. But you know who doesn't care about those accounts? My wife. She cares about the fact we have the money, but she's not the least bit interested in the investments. So the first thing I did, and you should be thinking about this, is you should run a fire drill in your mind right now. And that fire drill looks like this. If you die tomorrow and you're married, what does your spouse need to know? And the answer is everything. Everything. You know, our will was done, but it was out of date. Our trusts were done, but that was out of date. So we went and I went through the process of once I got out of the hospital and I got better, and I'm telling this story because I know this applies to so many of you. I said to my wife, okay, we're going to finally hire a financial advisor. It's not going to be me. And we're going to go out and interview financial advisors so that if I die tomorrow, you like the person you trust, the person you know who you're working with. I do not want you starting over after I'm dead. And partially, I don't want her starting over after I'm dead because not all financial advisors are good and I don't want her being taken advantage of. So we went through the interview process. We hired the advisor, she calls him the nice guy and his name's Jared. But also we hired somebody young because, sorry, the guys who are my age who are financial advisors, but you don't want to hire a 58 year old financial advisor because they're getting ready to retire in the next five years. So we hired a financial advisor in his late 30s, so he will outlive me and probably be there for her much longer. So I think the fire drill, you ask yourself is with all the things you're going to do here when you go home, if you're married, how many of you are married? Okay. If you're married, ask yourself, what does your spouse need to know if you pass away tomorrow when it comes to everything in life that matters? And go get that taken care of? Yeah.

Good advice. Yeah. Most people won't do it unless they get to scare. But if they do, it makes all the difference. All right, well, let's talk about your big idea.

Okay.

So we were talking on the phone. I was like, this is interesting as heck. This could actually change everything. So you have this very big idea. There's what, 45 trillion. How much is it? 45 trillion.

So note takers, write down 45 trillion again. Okay.

And it could revolutionize what's being done with retirement money. And you literally. But this is. First describe the idea and then what needs to get done in order to put this into action. And I'm also curious to see how many people actually believe this is viable. So take it away.

Perfect. Okay. Well, so in updating the automatic millionaire and seeing that retirement accounts had grown to 45 trillion, I have had an idea for about five years that impacts how we tax retirement accounts. So how did all this money. Let me set the stage. How did all this money get into these retirement accounts? And the answer is, in the last 40 years, the tax laws changed. The 401k plan got created, and we took the responsibility for retirement planning off of the employer and we put it on the employee. That's how this all got going. So over the last 40 years, the financial service industry has done a remarkable job of creating products and solutions so that all of us invest for retirement. That's amazing. And by the way, automation is what made this all work today. Because 401k plans are completely automated and now they're automatically signing you up. This has worked. That's the good news. What's the problem? As Dan would say, the danger. What's the danger? We incentivized people. And again, I spent 30 years of my life just on this. My whole life has been based on teaching you to save and invest for retirement. Pay yourself first. Use a deductible retirement account. Why? You get a tax deduction, it grows tax free. Then later, when you take it out, you have to pay what taxes? Well, what's happened? Nobody wants to pay them. With AI research, once chatgpt, deep Research came out, I was able to check this idea out and study it. And what I found out was that 83%, 8 out of 10 retirees will not use money in their retirement account until they are forced to. When are they forced to? For those of you who aren't in the industry and you don't know what this is, it's called an rmd, Required mandatory distribution. So the government realized that this was a problem and they created this thing called the RMD. And at 73, you have to take money out of your IRA account or you have a 25% penalty now on what you don't remove. And for our age, it's going to be 75. Okay? That's the problem. So people aren't using the money. They're retiring. There's 73 million baby boomers and they're not using their retirement money because they don't want to pay tax. Literally. There are some people who would rather die than pay taxes. It's crazy, but it's true. So here's my idea. I'm going to share this idea like I was if our President Trump was in this room, because I think that this is not a how, this is a who idea. So I will start with this. We've had some things happen in the last few years which are remarkable. We had a person at an event with Trump say, hey, why do we have to tax tips? And he's like, you know what? That's a great question. Why don't we do no tax on tips? We'll do that. Someone said, hey, why do we have to pay tax on Social Security? I mean, why are you penalizing me for working if I take Social Security? They said, you know what? That's a great idea. Let's do no tax on Social Security. We're almost there. Completely. Even the Democrats are now talking about new legislation to make it 100% no tax on Social Security. Someone sat in a room with Trump, the car industry, and said, you know, you give deductions for home loans. Why don't you have deductions for car loans? Hey, that's a great idea. Why don't we look into that? Now we have that on the first $10,000. So here's my idea. Mr. Trump, President Trump, or the next president that becomes behind him, why don't we have an eight year tax holiday? I'm going to call it the Great American Freedom Tax. You could change the name if you want. And it's an eight year tax policy. And that eight year tax policy will take Ordinary income on taking money out of your IRA account, stepping ordinary income, you pay a low tax. And so we ran this through all the different language models, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity. And we tested it at 10% flat tax, 12% flat tax and 15% flat tax. So I just wanted to see from the models what would happen if we took ordinary income tax, Mr. President, and you dropped it to let's use 12%. And by the way, let me give you my website. It's literally just gone live today because I wrote, there's a white paper, there's all kinds of white papers on this now. I created, there's a podcast, there's an entire. I'm open sourcing this idea. The website is iraflatax.com that's IRA flat tax. So 12% in the middle. What happens if President Trump says it is time for our baby boomers to enjoy retirement? We're going to make America rich again, starting with our retirees. I, Donald J. Trump, want this country to look at having a 12% flat tax on IRA accounts for eight years. By the way, why eight years? The last tax law was done for eight years. So it's not permanent and it's temporary. And it's designed to be temporary because if you do it for an eight year window, specifically targeting the baby boomers, of which there's $73 million and $11 trillion of this money is for sure baby boomer money. Some people say it's as high as 20 trillion. What will happen is this. First of all, you will completely re energize 73 million baby boomers because you are literally just giving them their money back at a huge discount. They will be fricking thrilled. What will they do with this money? Some of them will not be creative at all. They will simply take their balanced portfolio and they'll move it in their taxable account. But guess what? Some of them will start to use the money. They'll do things. They'll improve their home. They'll help their kid or their grandchild buy their first home. Which, by the way, is important. You know, it's taking down payments from parents to help kids buy their first house. It'll go into paying down debt, it'll go into the local community. My grandma had this great line. She'd say money's like manure. If you leave it in one place, it starts to smell. If you spread it around, things start to grow. So if you start to spread this money around, what happens is people will take out trillions of dollars. The Government specific numbers here. And you'll see this in the white paper. GDP is estimated, it could go up by a quarter of 1% to 1% annually. It pulls a trillion dollars of tax revenue into the government early. And then again, the most important thing it does is it stirs the economy and improves retirees lives at the most critical decade that they should be enjoying their life to the fullest. And one more thing it does or could do, it may help save Social Security and push back the date of Social Security's insolvency a little bit. So Social Security, if you go run all your, run it through any AI engine you want, everybody agrees Social Security is going into trouble in 2033. They call it insolvency. It's not going away, but it's going down. They're going to cut the benefits on Social Security if they don't do anything by 20%. This is a way that if you implement this idea now, Mr. President, you can give baby boomers, 73 million baby boomers a huge carrot, a huge gift before the government has got to come back and talk about Social Security. Some people will work longer because they can take a little bit of money out of the retirement account. So they'll work part time. Some people may retire earlier. But it doesn't just help baby boomers, it helps people in their 50s. Why? Because it's tax arbitrage. If you are, if this got implemented next year, it'll take probably more than a year. Because, because, because the President can't do this on his own. Right? It's got to come top down. It's got to go from Trump and then it's got to be bipartisan and you've got to have the Congress and the Senate put this through. But by the way, it happened bipartisan before with the Roth ira. That's a very important point. But that was like a major bipartisan initiative was the Roth IRA account. So why does it help people in their 50s? Because it'll make people in their 50s want to put more money away for retirement. So if you're 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, and you have an eight year window, you're going to want to cram as much money into a retirement account as possible, knowing that your tax bracket now is 35%, but you're going to get to take it out at 12%. Everything's tax arbitrage. Everything we have done in this country is a result of taxes. People buy homes because of taxes. People buy investment property because of Taxes, it's tax avoidance. So this simple idea is let's change the tax laws for eight years, take it from an ordinary income to a flat tax and see what happens. That's the idea. Oh, and one more bonus idea. I'll give this to you, Mr. President, you could do the Trump IRA. Let me explain, let me explain this as the little cherry on top. So the Roth ira, I don't think most people know this, but it was named after somebody, Senator Joseph Roth. Bill, what's that? Was it Bill Roth? Was it Bill Roth? Do I have his name wrong? Okay, I'm from Delaware. The last name of the guy was Roth and nobody remembers him. I'm sorry, but they remember the name. So you could do a Trump ira and what you could do is you could take money out of your IRA account, you could pay a flat tax, you could roll it into the new Trump Iraq, you could create another 10 year IRA account that the money goes into that and after 10 years it's got to come out. Part of this whole idea is let's give retirees access to their money, easier, simpler and cheaper. And let's circulate this money because I don't think we thought this all through. We're going to have $100 trillion in retirement accounts in 10 years. That's a lot of money. And that is a lot of money that could go to a lot of places and businesses and opportunities and a better life if we could figure out a reasonable way to release this money that doesn't create a greater deficit. That's the idea. Thank you. Thank you. So I don't know Mr. President Donald Trump personally. And so if anybody does this idea, I need to get the idea in front of him.

Yeah, well, I've only met him once, so I don't know him. But I do know a lot of people that do know Trump. And we'll be in D.C. next week.

Because there's Kevin Bacon, seven degrees of separation and there's Joe Polish, which is one degree of separation.

So thank you for sharing that and we will do a follow up and send everyone the links so you can read the white paper. Also, as soon as David's book is available, you will all get it in the mail. And, and for those of you, for the genius youth kids that are watching through Livestream in another room, you definitely wanna read this. So, you know, there's a lot of things I can share with you, but they're gonna get you about money. But I wanna ask you, with the remaining time we have in 2013, you were here at a Genius network annual event and you gave a 10 minute talk on a one year Sabbatic.

Yeah.

And it took me seven years until I actually really did take an entire year. Now both of us have taken one year sabbaticals. I have a friend Eben who, you know that he said to me, when he goes, you know Joe, he goes, all the people that are in this space, like book authors, you know that space, he says that have said they've taken one year sabbaticals. He said, my understanding of it from knowing is only when they go bankrupt or something just blows up. It wasn't like chosen and let's talk about that. Why did you do it? What did it do for you? I mean we could spend an hour on this. We don't have an hour. So we're gonna do the flyover version of it. But there's in that time, Dan has a great line. He has a million great lines. There's books written about Dan's quotes. Cause Dan is a very quotable person. Entrepreneurs that are too tightly scheduled cannot transform themselves. And what happened when you took your sabbatical? Why'd you do it?

You know, it's amazing because all roads go back to you too, Dan. I think you know, when I entered strategic coach, you had this thing called free days and you had to teach us what a free day was like. We're literally retarded. Like a free day is where you don't work and people are like, what do you mean? Like, you mean don't work? You're like, you don't do emails, you don't write in your journal, you don't. No, no, literally you had days after days of this, you don't work. What do you do on a free day? So we had to learn what to do on a free day. Classic entrepreneur dilemma. So you know, I sat in strategic coach at a 10x program because I had 25x my business and I was working on another 10x and I had the worksheets, I spent the whole day in this class. I paid for the class to try to 10x my income. And I asked myself, great, all this work is going to take 10 years and then what am I going to do? Well, then I will have an exit and I will sell the business, I'll have this much money and then what will I do? Well then I'll take a year off. And I went, huh, what if I took a year off now? And so I turned the worksheet over, literally instructed coach and said, what if I 10x my free time? Well, what would I do if I took a year off? I didn't even have a plan at that point. I was just like. It seemed like it would be a nice thing to do to take a year off. I'd worked all my life. I think I was 46. I was burnt out. I didn't know I was burnt out. I just knew things had stopped being fun the way they were. All the things that I dreamed of doing all my life, that had given me so much joy, I was doing them, but I wasn't feeling the joy. Now people will go, well, that's depression or it's burnout, or you're just fricking tired. And when you get burnt out as an entrepreneur, you sometimes can't sleep, so then you're more tired. So I was there. I was exhausted. And I would get up at 5am and go to the gym and do all the things that I do. And, you know, hadn't meditated yet. Thanks to my sabbatical. I learned to meditate because of you. But I was not getting the same joy. And I didn't know what was wrong with me. And so I decided to take a year off. And that changed my life. And God bless my son Jack over there in the corner. So I was like, you know what I'm doing? I'm going to take my kids to school. I'm going to go to the gym, I'm going to have lunch with my friends. I'm going to run a couple errands. I'm going to pick my kids up. Sounds like a lot of fun. So I was about three months into this break, and I'm walking him to school, and he says, dad, now that you're not working, do you ever worry like that no one's going to ever want to work with you again? Like, you won't be able to go back on the Today show, and you won't be able to speak and you won't be able to write books and, you know, maybe you'll even go broke. Do you ever worry about that? And it was literally like, I call my son Yoda. Every fear that I had was voiced out of my fifth grader. And I looked up at God and said, okay, that's hilarious. I get it. Yes, I've had all these fears. Cause taking a break is the scariest thing I've ever done. But as you know, because I then became like a preacher of this, taking a break fundamentally changed my life. Because the day he asked Me that question. I was walking down the street, taking him to school, just like the happiest I had been in a decade. Just total joy for no reason. Then he asked me the question, but I was so happy because all of a sudden I was sleeping, I was feeling good. And then, you know, the most amazing thing about entrepreneurs and creative people is that once you get quiet and you get still, you get creative again. And Arianna Huffington wrote that great book about recharging your battery. Thrive, Thrive. And I was with Ariana and I said, you know, when you take a sabbatical, you replace your battery. You just replace your battery. It's like buying a whole new phone. So I think, you know, I talked about this before. You don't have to take a year. You should take a month or two. My God, you know, average age of widowhood is 59. Smart when you finish rich. Average age of Woodhead's 59. I know we talk about longevity. I look at Dan. Dan's literally aging in reverse is the most remarkable thing I've ever seen. But the reality is the average American has a health issue starting at age 63. It's called health expectancy. At 63, you have your first health crisis that changes your life. Now, that's the average American. This is not an average room, but too many people wait too long. And so I would tell you, and I know so many of you in this room who are so successful. I've been living in Florence, Italy now for six years is like my third go around of taking breaks. And I have so many friends say to me, oh, I just wish I could do what you're doing. And then I say, well, then do it. And it's interesting that you said it took you seven years because that's typical, too. We have a few other friends here who I know are going to take sabbaticals, and they've been thinking about it for the same amount of time. And sometimes sabbaticals take planning, but it takes less plan. Didn't need you to take seven years, but I would imagine that sabbatical saved your life. Did it change your life? Would this exist?

Absolutely. It's one of the most valuable, important things that I have ever done. And the weird thing was it was 2021. So we're right in the middle of the pandemic and what it did because the world was very stressed out and I was getting phone calls. I mean, one of the things that prompted friend Mark Schneider, who gave me the term elf. I literally got the term easy, lucrative Fun from him. He was 59 years old, worth about $300 million. And his son sends me a message asking if he could call me on WhatsApp, because they had a place in Panama. And I called him and he told me, he said, yeah, I found my father in bed dead this morning at 59 years old. And it just hit me, like, take a year off. The world is going in a really dark place. And so, you know, I. I would always say to people, you know, it's not like I was sitting in a hammock somewhere, traveling everywhere, because it was very difficult to travel there, but it became a inward journey, not an outward journey. And I was able to really just sit with a lot of things. And I had been complete workaholic, which I'm wired to be. I mean, I'm a driven, driven guy like most people here in this room. And so to slow that down, I mean, doing it now, I could go back and probably in six weeks, rejuvenate in levels. But I had to do the very first thing first because, you know, in my mind, I just. And it was. It gave me such a new perspective. I developed a relationship with Shereen. Probably never would have happened with that. It completely changed my business, extracted myself from relationships with people that I genuinely helped build and grow and become very wealthy. That today I look at who they are and what they've done and their ethics, which is garbage. And so I removed a lot of just relationships. You don't even notice it when you're so busy. You often, you know, I wrote down all these lessons in AHA's, and one of them, it was more motivating for me to not be on social media than it was to read motivational quotes on social media. And so I did no social media. I was completely like. And it was, yeah, the nervous system calms down. And when you're. When you're in a different. You're in a different state, you become a different person. And sitting here talking to you about this right now, it makes me realize that. And I will ask. Ask you to do this. Either come out to one of the. The meetings or 100k or what, or we do it on Zoom. Whatever. I'd love to do, like a longer. How to actually set this up? And even for some people here to start with, there's people in this room that have not taken a week off ever in their lives since they started working. Like, they may say, I took a week off and I went on vacation, but they're constantly busy. They're not, you know, and when I.

Not a free day. Yeah.

And I'll tell you, like, when I have sat at times when I was marred in addiction, where I was in beautiful beaches, beautiful locations, everything external. But there are a lot of people that just live in prisons with golden bars. They go to the nice, but they don't feel good. They don't feel connected. They're just so connected to work. So I would say, because of time, I would love to go, because it's now making me realize how damn important this would be for everyone here. And I think that's one thing I would like.

So, first of all, I will say absolutely, 100%, yes, I'm in. I think we could create something remarkable together. And I think you just said something that's really important, too, is that you just said, I realized I could do this again. Maybe it doesn't need to be a year, but you could do it again for six weeks or two months. And what I talk about in the update of the Automatic Millionaire is the idea that we need to take many, many retirements. So this whole idea that you should work your whole life and then take a break is a broken concept. And if you take mini retirements, just imagine in the next 20 years, if you took a mini retirement every five years, you took a break. You planned it. I mean, God, this is a room full of people who are so successful. If you can't plan your break, then the business is not working the way it should work. Right? So if instead of going home and your goals are all about growing your income and growing your impact, but you're also like, how do I grow the quality of my life? And it's. I'm taking a break in whatever it is. One year, two years, three years, I don't know. Is Tommy Mello here? He's coming later.

Tommy's right there.

Where's Tommy?

Right there.

All right. So I got to be a Tommy yesterday. We did a podcast together. So, Tommy, buddy, I loved meeting you, loved being with you. He said to me, well, I really want to go to Italy. I want to do this. I want to be living in Italy for a couple months Now, I'm going to hold you to that because you have the financial freedom to do that. So I'm just telling you as a friend, sitting up here, a new friend on stage, you should not wait 10 years. Like, if I talk to you in two years and you haven't gotten to Italy and come over and had some wine with me in Florence, and then the thing's broken. Right. So. And I think part of these breaks is actually, as entrepreneurs is if someone's saying, you know, I want to do that, then, like, having an accountability partner, like, you called me, and you're like, I want to do this, but I need. Can you talk? Can you coach me? And by the way, people, Joe just listened, too. Like, I think we talked for a couple hours in my kitchen. And you interviewed a bunch of people, and you planned. Yeah.

Dan Sullivan, Richard Rossi took a year. Peter Thomas here and Rita. I mean, these guys. This table right here has great examples of people. Shree just did a sabbatical from surgery. So, I mean, if we were to think of the sabbatical table and then lazy ask Dean Sullivan, it would be right here. Because, yeah, he prides himself in friction free stuff, so. And Elko over there.

The thing is, you know, the first thought process is, what am I gonna lose? And the second thought process should be, what am I gonna gain? Because I promise you, the gains of you taking some time off are so beyond anything that you could possibly lose. My entire. The things that I have done with my life since I took that break. That was 2013. I mean, my whole. I've impacted millions of more people because I got rejuvenated to keep going. I'm here on stage because I took that break.

Yeah. Yeah. So our late friend Kathy Colby has this great line. I've said it a million times. The time to quit working is when working is no longer working. And you can be working and you could be making money and things, but you're just not happy. You're just not connected. Your health is. There's something off, and you can't figure it out. That's when you stop working, and you actually stop working before that because that's usually a symptom of you who just hit burnout. So this is great. So what else did I. Any famous last where I'd love to go another half hour, but I just don't have the time. This has been awesome. And by the way, how many of you loved his idea? Okay, so let's.

Thank you.

Let's figure out how to get it in front of Trump. And I'll do my best to do that because I do know a couple people. But I'm so curious to see the domino effect of this idea in this presentation and where we can take this.

I am, too.

And so I appreciate you sharing it here live for the first time because I think this is really cool, because I'm just curious to see where it Goes well.

And I'm appreciative. First of all, I got the love on Dan. I love the love on you. Because, buddy, I love you. I'm deeply grateful for our friendship. It has been one of the. You are the true giver. You know, life favors the go giver. And one of the biggest gifts Joe gave me was Joe pushed me to do TM trans dental meditation. So when I took my sabbatical, I missed going to an event with you. And you were like, you bugged the shit out of me. You were like, texting, dude, you got to go to this. And then he would follow up like, six times. And then I finally went and did TM and I've meditated since 2013. That's one of the greatest gifts of my life. So when I meditate, I'm always, like, grateful to you, but I just deeply appreciate you. And when I brought you this idea and you're like, yeah, man, let's talk about it. I'm so grateful. So I'll just. If you want one, I know we've gone over. Can I give one more idea? All right, I'm going to give you the header to this idea. I call this the Good Job Project. And I'll get a little deep here for a second, but my dad passed away last August, and my dad was on hospice for a month. And I was with him at the very end of his life for those final hours. And my dad. I didn't have those experiences in the movies where you're actually getting to talk to the person, the person's talking back to you. My dad was not talking. My dad's eyes were closed. But I believe that my father could hear me. Actually, I know my father could hear me. And I spent two hours going through everything my father did in his life that was good. Basically, I said, dad, you did a good job. And I shared with my father everything I thought my dad had done over his life. That was a good job. And all the way back to him being a son and being a father and a grandfather and the things he had accomplished with his life and. And I put my hands on him and I said, you know, I love you, and you can go to the next place. You did a good job. And when I left, I thought to myself, wow, I wish I'd had that two hour conversation with my dad when he was there with his eyes open. I need to start having these conversations with everybody that I love saying, good job, because we like, good job, Joe. Fucking look what you've done. And I think that we don't do enough good jobs every day with people we used to. As a kid, you had a good job smile on your paper, right? So I am now making a conscious effort to look people in the eyes, those I love, let them know that I love them and tell them what the good job is that they're doing. And that can be a stranger that could be somebody who serves you lunch today. You know, they used to call this a kindness thing, but like, if you actually catch people and you say good job. By the way, I've never met anyone, no matter how successful they are, that doesn't want to be told good job.

Right.

You know? So I think if I could leave you with an idea that's free and cheap and easy to make the world a better place. Catch someone today doing a good job and then start the experiment. Try a 30 day experiment of catching one person a day for 30 days and think of yourself as the good job project.

And sir, good job to you. You've reached millions. Thank you so much. Don't miss another episode of the Joe Paulish Show. Subscribe today at the joe paulishow.com if you'd like access to the show notes to take action on what was discussed, please visit thejopaulishow.com don't miss another episode of the Joe Paulish show. Subscribe today@thejopolishow.com if you'd like access to the show notes to take action on what was discussed, please visit thejopolishow.com forward/40 16.