#106 What’s In Your Dream Bucket?

Welcome to the Passive Income MD Podcast, where we talk about creating your ideal life through multiple streams of income. I'm your host, Peter Kim. If you enjoy hearing about this stuff, make sure to hit subscribe so I can bring it to you every week. Now let's get on with the show. Hey everyone. Hope you're having another great week. Last week I had a quick shout out to everyone listening to this podcast in their cars. This week I want to give a quick shout out to everyone finding little cracks in their day to listen to this podcast. Maybe you're walking your dogs, maybe doing some errands around the house, you're working out, whatever it might be. I just want to honor you for taking the time to invest in yourself and spend that time with me. And I don't take that lightly. So hopefully you're going to enjoy this episode where I'm going to be talking about my dream bucket. Now, I don't know if all of you have something called a dream bucket. It's something in your mind where you put stuff where you're like, if I had all the extra money out there that I'm not limited by what I need to spend on my daily life, how would you be spending that money? I've talked about asset allocation before in the past, and I've talked about having multiple buckets to put your investments in. In particular, I've had a security bucket where I put things which are really rock solid, stable type investments, slow growth, but really secure. I've talked about a bucket where I've called it the risk or the growth bucket, where, you know, I expect that money to grow over time, things like real estate and things like that. And then there's a last bucket called the dream bucket. Again, it's my favorite bucket of the three. It's probably everyone's favorite bucket of the three. And I have a question for you. How many of you know what you do with money if you won the lottery, for example? Well, the dream bucket is something along those lines. It's something that's money that's free to spend on things you really want to do and experiences you want to enjoy. Now, you don't have to win the lottery for that. You've put in the work, you've gotten a nice job, you've taken that income and you place it in those other buckets, security risk, growth buckets, to secure your financial today and your financial future for yourself and your family. Maybe you've been able to create that financial freedom. Then what's next? You still want to enjoy your life. You want to enjoy some of the fruits of your hard labor and then you want to use it to really enhance and optimize the lives of the people that you love. Both ones you know, and maybe ones you don't know. And you want to make a global impact. Well, personally, I'm not in that mindset where I want to wait 20 years to begin enjoying life. I don't know if you like that. You, you're happy to just put everything aside and in 20, 30 years, if that day comes, that's when you'll enjoy life and kind of take it easy. Personally, I don't want that for my life. I believe that if you can responsibly utilize your funds now, be smart with it whenever you might start, then you'll have income and you should be free to use that money and that income now to make the most of your life today. Again, I've read an awesome book in the past called Die with Zero. I'm a big believer in that. Our prime, at least my prime in my life is what's happening now. And I'm not okay with giving this time up completely for someday in the future that might come. I don't know where you stand on this, but I believe that I got to make the most of today and I got to optimize it and I got to be smart about it, but just really squeeze as much enjoyment, you know, try to live the most extraordinary life possible today. And so part of having that life includes thinking about this dream bucket. It's filled with fun and fulfilling stuff. Many of us, I don't think that we allow ourselves to dream enough when it comes to these kind of things. I don't know whether we think it's not possible, whether we think it might be wasteful, whether we have to think about our, you know, our daily lives and security first. Yeah, those things need to be get taken care of. But why not think big? I mean, kids are great at doing this. I have a five year old, I have an eight year old. And they think about all the amazing things they want to do. Life has no limits. It's fun to hear how, how they think. And we used to all think like that, but at some point we kind of cut that off and we became practical and realistic. But for today, for this week's episode, let's talk about this dream bucket. I think everyone's different and everyone's dream bucket, it's going to include different things with different priorities and that's totally fine. I think actually you learn a lot about people, about what they place in their dream bucket. You learn what their desires are, what they have, you know, what's priority in their lives, what they appreciate, and ultimately what they strive for. Personally, I like to think of my dream bucket in terms of like, emotions. Like how do I want to feel? For me, spending money. Yes, you got to get the practical things in order and it helps you live that baseline life. But ultimately I want to spend money so that I feel a certain way. Right. There's certain emotions that I want to think about. I mean, happiness, fun, excitement, fulfillment. When I feel like I'm contributing to the world. Let's talk about some of these things now. I don't know about you, but I feel like I've worked hard. You probably feel like you've worked hard. And so we want to be able to play hard too. I mean, that's the kind of fun balance in life. Work hard, play hard. We heard all about these things and I don't think that's a bad thing. I know that oftentimes a lot of us feel a lot of shame in talking about money or how we spend money. But if that thing or whatever, that life experience, whatever it is, it means a lot to you and it brings you true value. How can anybody judge and say that you spent too much on it? Maybe you want to spend money on travel and that means a lot to you. Maybe you want to travel, upgrade it, like up level your traveling. Yeah, I mean, it's nice to think about that. I mean, that's what it's been for me recently. I've loved to travel with my wife before we had kids. We travel quite a bit with kids, obviously with the pandemic, and things have changed quite a bit. But we love to travel and we definitely don't feel like we do it enough. If it brings so much enjoyment to our lives, these experiences, it creates memories that we'll have that I believe are absolutely priceless. I would say that money is usually not the limiting factor, though. It's like free time, or at least a perception of free time that limits how we travel, how much we travel. But I've been thinking about this dream bucket recently and how I would travel in an ideal world. Now, I don't know if you've ever heard of Slack and Flickr, these productivity tools and, you know, Flickrs for photographs. There's. There's someone named Stuart Butterfield. And I remember I was listening to an interview that he had and he described wealth and his. I mean, he has Significant amount of it. And he said it's not about the money. He talked that it's not about monetary value, but he thinks about wealth in the following three levels. Level one, he said, if I could just achieve this level of wealth, it means that I'm not stressed about debt. That's like level one wealth. They're not stressed about debt. Level two, it's. He doesn't care what stuff costs in restaurants. When you go to a meal, you just order whatever you want, whenever you want. You don't have to think about it. That's like level two wealth in his book. And then level three in his book is I don't care what a vacation costs to him. That's like the ultimate level. And if he reaches that level, and he does, I mean, he did, and that's where he's at, then everything else really doesn't matter. Money beyond that doesn't really change your life. And so I remember listening to this, and I thought about my dream bucket. And I told myself, I want to be at level three. I don't want to be stressed about debt. Yes. That's, to me, is not good enough. I don't. I don't want to care about, like, restaurants and what I eat and what I order, whether I have to choose a 30 item versus a 29 item. I want to be beyond that. And then level three, I didn't want to care what a vacation costs. Like, I want to stay in a hotel, pay for that experience, whatever it might be. Again, it's not about how much you spend on it. But really, if that is the experience that you want, then I don't want my budget to limit that. I mean, would that be amazing? I mean, be nice to travel first class, whatever it might be, or stay, you know, take the Disney cruise instead of, like a regular cruise, because those Disney cruises tend to be a little bit more expensive. Like, imagine not having to worry about what a vacation costs and doing it because you want that type of experience. Now, I know that might sound superficial, like I'm just talking about spending money, but let's be honest. If you're given the choice and you could dream, wouldn't you want the upgraded experience, whatever that might be, and not be limited by the dollar there? So that's in my dream bucket. That's probably the very first thing at least that I thought about in terms of my dream bucket. I want to be able to travel without limitation in terms of budget. Maybe you could think about that right now. If you could travel without budget, what Would you do? Where would you go? What's in that dream bucket? And it's a fun thing to think about. You know, I recognize I'm sharing all these things at the risk of signing almost superficial or thinking just. Maybe it feels like I'm thinking too big. But these are the things I've been thinking about. One thing that I've always wanted to do and I put in my dream bucket is to own part of a sports franchise. I'm a huge sports guy, and, you know, tons of. I'm a big Baltimore sports fan. But whether it's, you know, baseball, football, whatever it might be. And I just. I don't know why the thought of being a partial owner of a sports franchise in some way, it just seems great in so many ways. So I thought, why not? Why not put that in my dream bucket? By the way, all of these things I've written down, it is there on a piece of paper. Actually, for me, it's in my iPad. I sat there and I thought about my dream bucket because it's fun to dream. It's fun to have those goals. It's fun to have things for. Strive for. Because when it comes down to it, money is not just for the money. It's not just for that. It's for how make you feel a certain way is what I absolutely believe. What absolutely believe. And. And so it makes me fun and excited, and it gives me a reason to continue to work hard. One of the other things that I put in my dream bucket years ago was to have a pool. I know many of you might have a pool. Maybe you don't think it's a big deal, but I remember growing up in the neighborhood that I grew up in, we had one kid who had a pool, and all summers and things like that, we spent so much time at his house, had just so many amazing experiences around that pool. And so for me, I always told myself that would be in my dream bucket. Growing up to give that kind of experience to myself, my kids, I always felt that that was part of a dream bucket for me. And so right now, I'm excited to say we're building our pool right now. I mean, this has been a dream of mine that we're absolutely fulfilling. Maybe if you guys are down here, come visit, hang out the pool, whatever it's built. But I'm excited for this, and that's something that's been on my dream bucket and I'm able to cross that off, and I'm super excited about that for my dream bucket. Not Only do I only feel fun and excitement, which is all part of that. I think that I want it to also feel like I'm making an impact in some way. I think having quality possessions and experiences are amazing. But there are so many people out there who seem to have everything, but they still lack fulfillment. And how's that the case? In my mind, I just couldn't understand how that would compete if they had everything available to them, but they still didn't feel full and fulfill, like meaningful, like life is meaningful. I mean, I think it's important to keep striving for something, but I think it's also absolutely important to. To feel like you're contributing in some way. So part of my dream bucket, and it may sound cliche, is that I want to make a global impact, whatever this is. And again, this is the dream bucket we're talking about, whether it comes to housing, food, clean water, these kind of things. You know, there are certain organizations that mean a lot to myself, my family, and. And I've gotten my kids involved in this stuff. It's nice to find something that you're passionate about and be able to contribute to that and feel good that you're making an impact. And it's not to tell other people about it, to put yourself on a pedestal. It's about feeling like you've been given this awesome opportunity, this really privilege of being able to create income, have access to the resources, and give that to other people. Now I've also created some really big goals when it comes to that financial goals for how I spend money in terms of contribution and not only percentages, but what I'm trying to accomplish overall. So we've been fortunate. Myself, my wife, be able to fund some really projects that were meaningful to us. And every time that happens, it only kind of motivates us to do more. So a big part of my dream bucket, which I wrote down there, it's to budget a portion of my income to give. And honestly, it does feel good, feels good, and also it allows for greater impact, but also know that I'm contributing in some greater way. So thinking about the idea of buckets, it's a really helpful way to visualize your finances. It not only helps you allocate your funds where you want them, but it can also help you achieve your goals. I absolutely believe that. So when I began utilizing this method, I made sure that I knew what assets that I had in each bucket, like goals and whether the current allocation was at my ideal amount. I discovered that I need to allocate a little bit more to Security Bucket, maybe a little less to the risk Growth Bucket. And then I found out I wanted to allocate more to the Dream Bucket. It made me feel good. It made me feel motivated to work harder, to make more impact, do these kinds of things. And honestly, when I look back, it's helped me grow my overall wealth. Actually, it's helped me get closer to where I want to be, make a larger impact. And honestly, it helps me feel happier and more fulfilled. And at the end of the day, isn't that a big part of what all this is about? Because I find that happy, fulfilled people are able to not only help themselves, but help other people as well. So I have a question for you. What's in your dream bucket? Have you spent the time thinking about it? Have you put it down on paper? At times it may feel like, hey, maybe even judge yourself for having these desires. But hey, that's what all of this is about. It's about having fun with it, being excited about it, seeing what kind of impact you can make. Put it on a piece of paper. That's my challenge to you this week. Think about that. What would be on there? Don't be afraid to dream big. And you'd be surprised, looking at it years down the road, what you've actually been able to accomplish. I hope that sharing some of the things in my Dream Bucket has been helpful in some way. In any case, have an amazing week and let's talk again soon. Enjoy the show. Let me know by dropping a review in the podcast app you're listening to us in. And if you haven't already, make sure to hit subscribe. Are you a part of our community yet? Join thousands of physicians who are also on this journey to creating their ideal lives through multiple streams of income. You can join us on our Facebook Facebook group Passive Income Docs, and you can always learn more at our website, passiveincomemd.com thanks again for allowing me to be a part of your journey. See you next time.