3 Life Changing Money Mindsets

I will teach you to be rich. And tonight we are talking about money mindsets. What are your money mindsets if you had to describe them? Well, a good way to answer that question is to think about what were the messages that your family talked about when you were sitting around the dinner table and it came to money. Notice I said money because I was not talking about you delinquent students who never did your homework. What the hell is wrong with you? That's a larger problem than we have time to discuss tonight. Okay, we're not here to talk about that. I'm talking about money people. What did your mom or dad say to you when you were sitting around the dinner table at the age of 5 or 7? Was it phrases like we don't talk about money in this household, Little Timmy, was it easy come, easy go, or we're not like those people, they got a little too big for their britches? These are all phrases that at some point in time, some of us have heard. And so what I would like to do before we get to the mindset is I would like everybody to pull out their phone right now and text the your mom, dad, whoever it is you grew up with and ask them this. When we were growing up, how would you describe your feelings towards money in three or four words? Yes, pull out your phone right now. Yes, this is live. And yes, this is a real fire. I got this question yesterday. Oh, my God. I've been watching all your Fireside chats. I just realized this fire is real. Dude, what do you think I've been doing for five minutes every day before this thing? I sit there, I get my fingers all dirty. This is a real fire, people. Alright, pull out your phone, text your family, parents, siblings, whoever, because we're going to use your answers later on in today's Fireside Fireside Chat. So the question you're going to ask him is when we were growing up, how would you describe your feelings towards money? Cass, I'm going to ask you about this as well. All right?

Okay.

So today's money mindsets that I'm going to cover, I'm just going to cover three. They're excerpted from one of our programs on money mindsets, which is called Wealth Triggers. And I think that money mindsets are something that are not talked about enough because you could go from wherever you are today to tripling your income. Tripling. And would your money mindsets magically change? No. In fact, we have a lot of people, some of whom are notable. Well, they're in a lot of Financial communities. And they have increased their earnings, but they still obsess over pennies. And you look at them and you say, ah, that must be sad. Or wow, like, they're so cheap. These are words that we use. But the fact is that once you figure out how to make more money, and there is a process for making more money, I've been teaching it for 15 years. This doesn't just come along magically. You have to engineer this just as much as you engineer your income. That is why everyone has a cheap ass uncle who has a lot of money but still checks everybody's expenses when it comes to settling up the tap, everybody. Okay, that person learned how to make money, but they did not learn that accompanying skills of changing their money mindset. You also have a lot of $30,000 millionaires. This is a great term I learned from a Dallas article about seven years ago. They make 30,000 bucks, but they spend like they're millionaires. So their money mindset is also warped, but in the opposite direction. They're spending. They're buying all kinds of fancy stuff, but their finances cannot sustain it. There's also a phrase called house poor. So they buy a big house, but inside they sleep on a mattress and eat ramen. We definitely don't want that. Perhaps we'll talk about real estate in a future fireside chat.

Wow.

Realtors, please don't watch. You already hate me. You should hate me. The feeling is mutual. For most, not all. I know three trustworthy realtors in my life. The rest I trust as far as I can throw them. We'll discuss that another time, my friends, especially to my friends at the narrative, you suck. Okay, what were we talking about? Money mindsets. Wow. Anytime the NAR comes up, I get a little off track. So, Cas, what are some people saying in terms of what they grew up with?

Some of the phrases hoard money.

Oh, wow.

Especially for the bad times. A man never reveals his income. Okay. The stock market is like gambling.

Yes.

You have to work very hard to get rich.

Oh, interesting. Oh, just. Just take that one for a second. So interesting, because if you dig into the layers of what that means, it means that if you are making money and it seems easy, you must be doing something wrong. I see this in my students all the time. They use earnable or a program like it, and suddenly they're. Well, earnable just came out like two days ago. So it's not earnable, but ZTL earn 1k, our other business programs and. And they learn the skill of making money and suddenly they made $30,000 more. In many cases $300,000 more. But they feel racked with guilt. Why? Because it's supposed to be hard. If I'm not toiling and sweating, then I'm not really working hard enough, am I? What else did they say?

People who make a lot of money lose it all.

Oh, probably came from the child of a parent who was feast or famine, made a lot, spent it all, did it again and again. And so now they're risk averse. I've seen it a million times.

There's a few people that said they never talked about it with their parents. Another person said, we're not cheap, just smart.

Oh, listen to that one. We're not cheap, just smart. I love that. So here's a person whose family or perhaps related others, you know, they might obsess over the price of gas. We don't want to pay 232 for gas. We're going to drive 10 miles because it's 230. We're not cheap, just smart. That self righteousness is what enables people to continue focusing on three dollar questions when they really should be asking thirty thousand dollar questions. All right, anything else?

No, that's it.

All right, so let's start off by talking about my first money mindset that I'd like to share tonight. And this happened when I started writing I will teach you to be rich in 2004. In 2004 I wrote, I started writing and I started writing about everything. Budgeting, banking, saving, investing, all kinds of stuff. To tell you the truth, I took a lot of pride in what I wrote. But looking back, some of those posts were not as good as now. And that kind of makes sense, right? I've been doing this for like 15, 20 years, so my stuff better be better than it was when I was starting. But I remember the first post I ever wrote was banking, Budgeting, saving and investing. I hate budgeting. And I, I don't really think you should be talking about banking in your first post. Like really, who cares? There's other things that people care about. And so eventually I started writing more and I got a little bit more savvy and sophisticated and at a certain point I realized I did not want to talk about cutting back.

Okay.

I didn't want to talk about saving money and coupon cutting and you can disable your oven light and save 7 cents every two years. No, I'd rather be dead. I don't want to do that. That's just not the kind of life I Want to lead. It's not the kind of people I wanted reading my site. And this kind of meant that I had attracted a lot of people, some of whom were interested in, like, automation, money, psychology, but just in general. In general, when it comes to money in America, the vast majority of people know and, like, frugally, that is what they know, that's what they grew up with, and that is what they expect. So when I started talking, after years of writing about money stuff, I started writing about earning more. A lot of people did not like it. And they started saying, this seems like a scam, because earning more to a lot of people seems like a scam. Why? Because they've been raised by. With the money. Mindset of, this is all we have. We should be happy and we better protect it. Don't let anybody tax us. That's evil socialism, fucking lunatics. But they never think about expanding the size of the pie. Okay? So when I started talking about this, it was very uncomfortable. It's like a whole different worldview. People started unsubscribing. They started leaving, first in trickles, then in hordes. At that time, I had about 50,000 email subscribers. Over the course of the next few years, I would lose approximately 35 to 40,000 of those subscribers. Let me say that again in case you didn't catch it. I had 50,000 subscribers. Over the course of the next few years, I would lose approximately 3,35,000 of those subscribers. Do you understand what that feels like? And do you understand that at the time, I used an email service provider that allowed people to write why they were unsubscribing? So every day I'm getting 50 to 100 things that say, used to enjoy your stuff, but now it seems like you're a scam. And that went on for years. How do you think you would feel if you had actually built something up where people liked you and you were enjoying it, but then you decided to take a different turn, and a lot of them said, you suck. I'm out of here. Not good. It really did not feel good. But at that moment, I realized a principle. And that principle is, my future is bigger than my past. And I truly believe this. I believe that at the time, I'd been writing about, I don't know, four or five years, something like that. And I knew that I had decades to work on this little site I called I will teach you to be rich and decades to explore all kinds of stuff I could never even imagine at the time. But I knew that the 35,000 people who were unsubscribing in the grand scheme were just a drop in the bucket. Now I don't fault them. I actually respect when people say, you know what? This is not for me. I appreciate what you've done, but I think I'm go somewhere else. I respect that. I do the same with my clients as well. I think that having that principle is the one of the only things that allowed me to keep going. Because if I had simply looked at 50,000 going down every single day, I would have given up. But I knew that my future was bigger than my past. And so I see this principle now applied everywhere. I see people who come and sometimes they see some of my fitness posts and they're like, I'm 47 or I'm 57. Is it too late for me? Fitness wise, they ask the same thing about money 10 times more. I'm 50. I didn't start investing at 22 like that. One example in your book, is it too late for me? My answer is it's never too late. It's never too late to start. But we need to be candid about how much we can achieve. I had something like a 65 year old woman write me and said, I need to make $100,000 in the next one year and I'm on a fixed income, so I need to make it through investments. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen. And sometimes we need to hear the candid truth. I had to be very gentle about that message. So you won't make $100,000 off investments in one year, but the second best thing you can do is to start now because, you know, what else can you do? You're just going to give up? No, let's start today. It's never too late. We can adjust what our expectations are, but let's start. So principle number one, your future is bigger than your past. Okay, principle number two for this one, I would like to show you some real life props. Cas, do you recognize this?

Yes.

What, what do you. Let's just get a close up here of the side of this thing. Okay. What do you, what do you recognize about this laptop? What is this?

It's the laptop you use every single day.

Okay. And have you ever had any comments about this laptop?

Why yes, I have.

What might those comments have been?

You should get a new laptop.

Why'd you tell me that?

Because you've had it for so long. It also has, I think, about 3 pounds of chicken stuck in the keyboard.

I do eat my lunch over. Over my keyboard. So if things get really bad, I'm just planning to dump it upside down and then just collect a chicken on a spot on a spoon and just go. Go to town. People find that really disgusting when I joke about that. But, you know, we don't know. So this is a MacBook Air from eight years ago. And you. You've walked by me as my feet were on the table. You know, I'm, like, doing my work stuff. And you're like, it sounded like an airplane was taking off because it was really. The fan was going crazy. And you're like, why don't you get a new computer? And then what did I say?

You said, no, it's fine.

Okay. Exhibit two, your honor. These are my work headphones. Let me. Let me demonstrate how I actually look on Zoom Calls. Has anyone ever seen me on a podcast, like a video interview, and wondered, why does this guy only have one earpod? Well, let me show you what the other one is.

There's no headphone. It's wires.

Okay, so, Cass, can you tell everyone what happened with your. With these headphones?

One day, I thought I would surprise you with a new pair of headphones. So went to Best Buy, bought you beautiful new pair of headphones, came back. I was so excited to surprise you, hand you the headphone package, and then you go, thanks.

That's how you're gonna end the story.