60. “My health is in question, but I don’t want to stop making money” (Part 1)

If you've recently discovered this podcast and you've wondered, how can I get Ramit to answer my specific money question? There are two ways to do it. Number one, you can apply to be on this podcast, although we are already full for the rest of the year. Number two, you can join my Money Coaching membership in this program. We do a ton of cool stuff I want to make sure you know about it. We do a monthly live call with me where I cover some of my favorite money topics that I can't go into publicly in as much detail as and I break down our members conscious spending plans. Plus I answer your questions live. We also have tons of virtual events coming up that cover every aspect of living a rich life. For example, our new event Money for Aging Parents is coming up at the end of October that is included for all Money Coaching members. You get access to our library of all past calls like how to Find an Extra Thousand Dollars a Month and how to Do a Rich Life annual review. Plus we have a Money Coaching community group where you can see inspiration how other people are spending their money and get your own questions answered if you want to get help. If you want to meet amazing other people in Money Coaching and you want to build your rich life faster and bigger, you should check out Money Coaching today. Go to iwt.commoneycoaching to join right now. That's iwt.com moneycoaching.

I like to go out to eat, so I'll say, hey Julie, should we go out to dinner? And she'll often reply, can we afford it?

But I'm joking.

But you're really not joking. That's the part that kind of like.

Worries me and Julie, what is your net worth?

If you include our primary residence, it's in the ballpark of 12 million.

$12 million. How would you describe yourself socioeconomically?

Upper middle class?

Take out the upper part and you're right.

Oh boy.

Another couple worth over $10 million who cannot admit that they are wealthy. And in a rich life, as I always say, you have to be honest. Honest with yourself, honest with the people around you. If you cannot be honest with yourself that you are wealthy, it causes all kinds of peculiar challenges. Today you're going to hear that from Tom and Julie. They're in their early 50s, they have.

Two children, and as you just heard.

They have a net worth of about $12 million. Julie is wondering if she should quit her job to spend more time with her family, but she likes the income from her job. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that today's episode will shock you. That's why I want you to listen to the entire thing. Julie thinks of money in terms of safety and security. But how much is enough? And what happens when you have to make tough decisions relating to your money and your life? Welcome to I Will Teach youh to Be Rich.

Julie, when you think about money, what words come to mind for you?

Oh, like protection is a word that comes to mind. And safety and security. My view of money is you never want to run out.

Okay. Okay. And can you think of a time where you behaved out of sync with how much money you actually had?

After I finished my second master's degree, I went to Southeast Asia for 10 weeks and I didn't have any money to speak of. I had no cushion. It was on maybe $35 a day or something. Very conservative or very, very frugal. But. But I chose to have that experience versus going right to work.

Did you catch that? Did you catch how she interpreted my question? My question was, can you think of a time where you behaved out of sync with the money you actually had?

Kind of getting at. Can you think of an example where.

You had a lot of money but you behaved like you didn't? That's the obvious thing that's going on here. She's got $12 million and she's agonizing over potentially quitting her job. But her answer was to share proudly a time where she was extremely frugal. I find her interpretation of my question to be fascinating.

What about more recently in the last 10 years? Can you think of an example? Now you're laughing. Okay, I can't wait to hear this. Where you acted out of sync with.

Your financial status and did something really decadent, you mean?

Nope, that's not what I mean. I mean that here's your financial status. I'm holding one hand up and the way you behaved did not match your financial status.

I shop at Target a lot because they have the drive up thing and they have these little rewards. Like if you buy, if you spend $50 three times in this amount of time, you get a $20 gift card. And I'll always try and plan my spending so I get those rewards. And Tom feels like Tom is just laughing at me being like, why you shouldn't waste your time on $20.

Some of the things that Julie will do is wait for coupons to come before she will buy something or hope the coupons come in the mail.

Julie, you're cutting coupons still?

What for what I love this store called Bowdoin, which is just like middle aged women's clothes with a lot of prints. They're from England. It's all super cute. And. But. But I will wait till, like, they send me a $10 off for $25.

$10.

And then it'll be like my excuse to.

Oh, my God. Okay. All right. Okay. Thank you, Tom.

Tom's got it.

Hold on. Tom's about to pull out a long papyrus scroll of all the stories he's been waiting to share. Go ahead, Tom, what else you got?

Yeah, I'm not going to get through all of them. But. But just, just as another example, it will be like, I will often, I like to go out to eat. So I'll say, hey, Julie, should we go out to dinner? And she'll often reply, can we afford it?

But. I'm joking.

But, but, but you're really not joking. That's the part that kind of like worries me.

And Julie, out of curiosity, what is your net worth?

If you include our primary residence, it's in the ballpark of 12 million.

$12 million?

Yeah. Yes. But it feels so satisfying and so concrete to save 20.

Okay. Have you ever said that number out loud?

No. It makes me really uncomfortable.

How would you describe yourself socioeconomically?

Upper middle class.

Take out the upper part. And you're right in terms of how.

Take out the middle class upper part. Take it all out. You're not upper middle class. Okay, now tell me, why did you say that though, before we talk about what you really are?

That's what I feel like reflects our value in our lifestyles. We only have one residence. We only have one house. We send our kids to public school. Right now I just feel like we don't do a lot of things that rich people do.

And what do rich people do in this metaphor?

The first thing that comes to mind for me is boarding school, multiple home, private jets, club memberships, elaborate clothes. That is my stereotype of what people who are truly rich.

This idea of rich has a lot of roots in our richy, rich version of wealth. Sitting on long tables, eating food that's served under those big silver things, being chauffeured around, only living in dark wood paneled houses. My goal is to show you that your rich life is yours. That's everything that I do in my business, my book, this podcast, my, my programs. I want to show you that your rich life can be traveling six months a year, it can be tipping 50%, it can be camping one week every quarter. Your rich life is yours. But we also need to be honest. At $12 million, you are not middle class. You're not upper middle class. You are wealthy, plain and simple. And if you don't admit that, you're doing a disservice to yourself and to the people around you. It's not a virtue to live a smaller life than you have to. So my challenge to you is to define your rich life in extremely vivid details. And the more you define it, the more different it should become from anyone else around you. In fact, the more bewildering it should actually become. Now, as for Tom and Julie, we skip over how they amassed their huge wealth. She basically calls it boring tactics at one point.

That's the best way to do it.

They lived under their means. They saved and accumulated money, the classic I will teach you to be rich way. They invested consistently every single month, and they grew their wealth to millions and millions of dollars. In fact, it was around 8 or so million dollars that they accumulated. And recently, they received a $3 million inheritance. But remember, they only received that after they were already multimillionaires. So I want to share all that with you to let you know that the I will teach you be rich method works. It takes time, but it is sustainable and it allows you to accumulate a large amount of wealth. But that's not the end. The real challenge is what do you do with your money and how do you use it to create a rich life?

Where did this idea of protection and safety when it comes to money come from?

My mom grew up in a situation where she didn't have. It was just her and my grandmother and her little brother. And things were quite rough for them. And they, they were literally living hand to mouth and in one of my mom's aunt's attics. And I think it like, had my aunt not taken them in, they would have been homeless. I remember a lot of stories about, well, I couldn't have this, or all the girls at school had. I'm just making this particular example up, but fancy white gloves to wear to the dances. But we, we couldn't afford them. And I remember it seemed like stories of scarcity or of not being good enough in ways that manifested themselves through not having things. And I feel like money was tied to that. In addition, and my mom didn't talk much about those early, rough, rough years, But I do feel like there was an amount of wistfulness tied to money, about, I wish I could have been like the other people or it being like a gap. It was a Pretty dire situation. And so I think because of that and my mom's early experience with money she has inculcated into my sibling and I that. That you always want to be prepared for whatever eventuality there. And that was her lived experience. So that that really made sense for her.

Why do you think she didn't talk about those tough times?

I still don't know the full story. I never will because she's passed away, but I think she didn't because it's something that she was. I think they really troubled her and it's just something that she would rather. I don't think she wanted to burden us with it. Like, I remember I gave her this book about. It was for a grandmother to fill out for their grandkids and it was a way to get. For them to get to know you. And my mom was like, I just can't do this. It's too painful and I don't want to. A lot of it was about her background and what things were like when she was growing up.

Wow.

So. So I think that that all that weighed heavily on her.

What a story. What effect do you think it has on Julie to have grown up seeing what she saw, to have recognized that her mom would have almost been homeless if not for the help of her family. And notice that Julie, decades later, still carries those messages with her. Safety, security, will I have enough? And think about it as she says those things out loud, half jokingly. You think her daughters pick up on that?

I do.

I think that's exactly why whenever I speak to people who have some sort of affliction with money, about 80 to 85% of the time, there is something distinctly vivid in their childhood that they are now living. And when they're living it today, they're also passing it on to the next generation. I want Julie to understand the roots of where her beliefs about money come from. That's not going to change it, but it is the first step to acknowledging it and then deciding if she wants to make a change.

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So coming from a family where your mom was nearly homeless to you having a joint net worth of $12 million, what does that feel like?

I feel proud of us that we have built this, these assets by investing over time and largely by doing these very boring tactical things. And I've always looked at it this way, but like anything that you spend, there's the opportunity cost of what you could have gotten if you.

Don'T buy that latte when you're young. Because.

So.

So okay, I mean there's some truth to that. You could take that thousand dollars at per SE or $5 at a coffee shop and you could invest it or you could spend it on something else. That is true in your mind, Julie, Is that a philosophy you live with for the rest of your life? The opportunity cost philosophy?

Intellectually, I realize that that philosophy that helped us build our. Establish the financial situation we have today. I realized that philosophy is no longer working for me. But what is hard is to change my behavior. Like I'm. I do little changes, which is the beginning of an evolution. But that's how you evolve, right? Through little changes. But I feel that there. I feel like I need to make. I need bigger change. There's an opportunity for me to make bigger changes. I think part of me feels somewhat like. I know not all my friends have this. This amount of assets. Even people who do more trips or have other things that you might associate with assets. I'm a little embarrassed of it that way. And then I think there's also this other frame of reference of, well, but there's people who get paid that in a year who I like. I know I used to work with them. I used to go to school with them. And so I think there's this other frame of reference and that leads to this feeling of. And this seems illogical, but like, oh, whoever has the most when they die wins. And I know that is not true. I know it's not a game, and when you expire, it is game over. But I still somehow constantly find myself, say, telling myself that is not the right model to be working with.

It sounds like this inter. Tension of what you tell yourself logically versus what you feel about money.

Yes, I would say that is very accurate. I feel like there's some cognitive dissonance with that and just trying to create a plan forward for us because of those two different poles.

What if we just didn't even need a plan at all?

Well, I like a plan.

Of course you like a plan. That's what you want from today's call, right? A plan.

I guess what I'm looking for from today's call would be a different perspective because we, Tom and I will often joke, what would Ramit say? So just now we get to. To hear another perspective that I feel like is the voice of reason. In some ways, I think you two.

Are very reasonable on your own. You did a great job accumulating a lot of wealth. But maybe my voice can be something totally different today. Maybe we don't need reason.

They don't need a voice of reason. They need a voice of intuition. And they need somebody to just help them have some fun. In many ways, I see so much of myself in the way that Julie processes these things. She loves logic. She loves control. She loves to have it in the spreadsheet. And I totally get that. In fact, those things can be adaptive. They can be helpful. Obviously, she and Tom have been very successful following this methodology. It's made them multimillionaires. But the problem is, as we've heard, too much of anything is bad. Everybody nods. Oh, yeah, yeah. Everything in balance, everything in moderation. But when it comes to their own lives, they totally disregard it. I think it's possible Julie is too logical. And that's what I want to find out.

Now. Where in your life are you intuitive? Where do you go with your feelings?

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by that.

Okay, that's. That's a big tell right there. Okay, let me try to explain. I know that you're intellectual with your finances. I know that you are intellectual with your planning, even deciding when to go shopping at that store with the coupons. But is there a part of your life where you operate on instinct or feelings where you don't intellectualize it?

No.

Okay, kids.

I'm pretty. I'm pretty. Like, we do piano lessons, and we don't do piano lessons because I want them to be great musicians. We do piano lessons because I believe it teaches them these skills.

Okay, great. So you have. You have a plan. I totally get it. Food.

I tend to view that as more functional.

Functional. Okay. Totally fine. I get it. Tom, is there anything where you would say Julie operates on instinct or emotion, not on intellect?

I don't. That's a really tough question to answer. I think she's been pretty accurate, and she is pretty intellectual about all that stuff. I mean, for me, I have so many answers to that question that I could give because that's a part of me. But, like, it's. I don't see it as much with Julie, for sure. I mean, obviously, she. I would have hoped she would have said, oh, yeah. When I. When I think about the first time I met Tom, like, that was one of my answers that I could give, but that didn't come up.

So.

You guys are great. You know what? There's nothing wrong with that, Julie.

Not at all. What I.

What I appreciate is that you're just being honest. You're like, hey, even for my kids, this is why I have them in piano. This is why I eat what I eat. I don't mind it at all. It's I'm just trying to understand your worldview, how you view certain things. Let's talk about a few other things, just so I. I get a sense of how you spend your money. You shop at Target. Where do you go out to eat? What type of place?

Super casual, like which? I think. Oh, gosh, a place called the Sunshine Factory, which is.

Is it like an American restaurant? Like, how much do things cost at this place?

15 or 20 bucks for an entree.

Okay, fine. And would you ever go out for, like, a special dinner or anniversary type thing? What would you do for that?

I would say that Tom was very reluctant to getting a babysitter. About getting a babysitter. So.

Tom, was that because. Was that because you didn't want to be away from the baby, or was it a cost issue? What was it?

I'd like to say it was the first, but it's more accurately the latter.

It was a cost issue.

Yeah.

How many years ago was this?

Oh, this is probably eight or nine years ago.

So a babysitter there costs how much?

Like 15 bucks an hour.

Okay. Is that expensive for the two of you? A lot of silence on this call. Suddenly. Well, everybody got very quiet.

I think we both have similar personalities as far as, like, always saving money as much as we possibly could and being frugal about things. And I feel like I've come a long way in that. And I feel like Julie maybe isn't as far along as I think she should be, given our financial situation.

Just so I understand when you say you've come a long way, can you clarify that?

Yeah. I no longer walk out of grocery stores without everything I went to buy because it seems a little more expensive than I think it should be. And that's something four years ago, I would have done easily. I'm buying whatever I need. It doesn't matter. I know it doesn't matter. I'm not worried about the small costs and things. I just get what I need.

Four years ago, when your net worth was around seven and a half million dollars. Yeah, that's probably accurate for everybody listening. $7.5 million is when you can stop checking your receipt at the grocery store and splurge for the extra bottle of, you know, Topo Chico. All right, you heard it here first.

Another rich person agonizing over grocery spending. This really shows you how hard it is to rewire your money psychology. It also shows that Tom and Julie are both deeply embedded in this frugality dynamic. That dynamic becomes comfortable. It becomes an identity. And for the Two of them. It's an identity they've actually been very successful at, but they're here talking to me because they want to change that identity. In order to do that, you've got to rewire your money psychology and that is challenging. Whether you make $50,000 a year or $500,000 a year. If you want to change your money psychology, I put together a free mindset mini course. This walks you through the steps to identify your invisible scripts around money and then change them and you can get it for free@iwt.com Episode 60 Now I'm glad that Tom is feeling free at the grocery store, but we're talking about $12 million and a lot more than that as it continues to compound. I've got to have them thinking bigger than the grocery store. So I'm curious what Tom thinks the problem is and what role he has played in it.

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It is that emotional component that we need to work on. I mean we, she's, that's one of the reasons why I love her is we're, we're similar. She's super smart. Like, she knows, she, she knows, she understands the time value of money. Understands like hey look, we could both quit our jobs today and we would not have to worry about money. We could live the same lifestyle. You know, I've, we've done those calculations but she just can't accept it. It's almost like. And the whole thing where we talked about too, like how would she describe herself? She would say that we're middle class full stop. Right?

Middle class.

That's what, that's what she would.

Whoa.

I feel a little bit similar. It's hard to talk about it and I totally know that there's a lot of people that we know that are way more money than we will ever have. And there's hundreds of thousands, millions of people who are way more net worth, whatever. But you're never going to win. You're never going to have the most. It's not a competition. But at some point you have to look at the numbers and just take the win and say we kind of. Because we Say, because we are fortunate, because we were lucky enough to have education, we are where we are, and just, like, take the win. It's almost. If I've ever been in a sales meeting and, like, there's a salesperson that just won't take yes for an answer, right? It's just like, take the win and, like, stop, right? And I feel like that's intellectually where. Where we need to get to just, like, take the win and, like, understand we have options because of where we're at, and we could be doing things differently. And it does kind of like when Jill was talking about back when our kids were younger and I didn't want to get a babysitter because I didn't want to pay $15 an hour, that breaks my heart. I mean, it's tough to hear, but. I've tried to change. I think we could make it happen. I think it's just making the decision to make it happen, and hopefully we can kind of expand it, do more and more. But I think the main thing, I think, is just both of us realizing, like, we can make that stuff happen. We kind of do have a magic wand, as we all know. All anybody is guaranteed is today, and. And it's just that. That hits a little closer to home for. For us than some people. So we just got to take advantage of. Of knowing that, being able to act on it.

Let's talk about the stakes. Julie, I understand you recently had a medical procedure. I wonder if you can share a little bit of that with me so I can understand it.

I had a double lung transplant in October of 2020, and by that time, I couldn't. I was, like, on oxygen all the time and could barely make it up the stairs. And it just seemed like it didn't really. There was not a lot of value in pursuing the diagnosis. But anyway, so I had this undetermined condition, and the. I mean, basically, like, these lung conditions, the only path forward after a point is a lung transplant. And so you go through this workup to get a lung transplant, and then you get put on this wait list. You have a score that is based on many things, but a key one of them is how long they anticipate you have left to live based on your lung function and some other inputs. And I was incredibly lucky to get a call from the transplant center a couple days after I was put on the transplant list. And I got a transplant. And my first six months were pretty rough. Roughly 50% of people who have a lung transplant survive five years, but roughly 30% survive 10 years. So. Well, there's. Well, my quality of life is very high right now, and there's things I can control, and I am controlling them. There's many things that I can't control at the cellular level, like rejection. Graft rejection is a big one. And so it's my. My time isn't. Nobody's time is unlimited. But I feel like my having an. A long life is. Is by no means a guarantee. And then also I feel like there's a question of quality. I know people who have lived for 20 years and bike all the time and just have a really full life with transplant. But then I know other people who are a year or two out and have had major setbacks. And so I feel extremely lucky to have this. This gift because if. If things had gone differently, my outcome could have been very different. But now I think I've had this. I've just been wrestling with, okay, how do I use this time for a while? According to my calculations, I have about a 67% chance of living five years post transplant, so another three and a half years, roughly. But I'm behaving like I was when I thought I might live to be 90, and there's, like, virtually no chance I'll live to be nine. So. But then to actually change my behavior to reflect that reality, I feel like, is really a hard. It's hard to go from, like, intellectually grasping that to making those changes.

This isn't just about having a lot of money and finding it difficult to spend it. Julia reveals that she knows of her own mortality, and she knows that statistically, in the next 10 years, she likely will die. This isn't just games. It's not just numbers on a spreadsheet. This is life. And so you can see why I wanted to speak to Tom and Julie. Because it's one thing to amass a large amount of money, but it's another thing to accumulate millions of dollars and have a husband and two daughters and want to create these experiences with them and know that you have a ticking clock before you die.

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You know what I always remember is when my mom died, she died of cancer and she was in hospice and it was like very clearly the end. And she was. My sister and I were in the room and she was talking and she was saying, oh, I probably won't see any of your girls graduate from college. And my daughter was in kindergarten that year. And I just remember thinking like it was April and my mom was only going to make it another day or two, best case. But I just kept thinking like, you're not going to see your granddaughter graduate from kindergarten. What are you talking about? College. But I feel like that even in her mind there was like this hope or this, this like inability to come to terms with, with the finiteness of, of her life, of her, her situation. And I feel like that is my tension too. Like I understand. And earlier that day, you know, my mom had given us all her password and like she knew the end was coming, but she didn't. It's like she hadn't internalized it. And that's. My situation is different because I think I hopefully have more time than she had at that point. But also I think my time is very finite. When you look at survival rates for transplantees, it's not a great outlook. But yet I'm living like I'm planning to live to 120, need long term care and all this. And I feel like there's a big question in my mind about not only like the quantity of my life, but the quality of my life. And the quality of my life is pretty great now. Like I am like best case, or maybe not best case, but I have had a very successful outcome for the procedure that I had. But I'm not. And so I need to be taking like I understand intellectually I need to be taking advantage of this time, but yet I'm still stuck in worrying about the opportunity cost of what I spend.

Yeah. Julie, the story about your mom is so interesting and telling. And what is interesting to me most is about the way you tell that story. In that your mom in her last days intellectually knew that it was her time to go, but emotionally she wasn't ready to accept it. She had this tension. And when you tell the story, your first analysis of it is my situation is different. I have longer, but from my perspective, situation is quite similar. Your mom couldn't grapple with the Difference between intellectually what was going on, what she accepted, and emotionally, what she couldn't accept. Do you see any similarities to you?

I do. I feel like I'm having trouble acting. Like, If I would advise myself as a friend, like, I would say, oh, just enjoy this time. But then I find myself sucked into my spreadsheets all day.

Who taught the two of you what to do with your millions and millions of dollars?

Nobody. And that's where we're at and why we're living less of a life maybe, than we could be.

It's about experiences and getting out. Because what do I want my girls to remember? I would want them to have happy memories of me. I would want them to say, oh, gosh, I remember doing that with my mom.

Julie's mom was unable to face reality. But in many ways, Julie herself hasn't started to truly grapple with the reality of her situation. She has over $12 million, she has two young daughters, and she has a ticking clock on how long until she dies. You would think that it would be easy to make changes, but it's not. I remember studying psychology in college and we were studying human behavior, specifically around patients who received a terminal diagnosis. And if they did not take their medicine, and everybody kind of shrugs and laughs and says, of course they take their medicine, it's life or death.

Wrong.

About 50% of patients did not adhere to their medication even when they were facing death. And we can see here with Julie that she really wants to change. She's come to me, she's gone through an application process. She is here, but she still finds it incredibly difficult. In part two of this episode, I will continue my conversation with Tom and Julie. And I think you will be surprised at the direction the conversation takes. As you can hear from today's episode, so much of how we treat money involves our money mindset. So to get all the mindset material that I discussed, you can go to iwt.com episode60 and be sure to tune in next week to hear part two of this conversation with Tom and Julie. Here's a sneak peek of that conversation now.

I had a double lung transplant in October of 2020. According to my calculations, I have about like a 67% chance of living five years post transplant. So another three and a half years, roughly. But I'm behaving like I was when I thought I might live to be 90, and there's like, virtually no chance I'll live to be 90.

At some point, we're going to be looking back saying, why didn't we do the stuff we could do when we could do it, which is now.

There's no virtue in living a smaller life than you have to, but yet.

It does feel sort of satisfying in some way. I can't quite explain why.

Thanks for listening to I Will Teach youh to Be Rich. I'm Ramit Sethi. Please follow the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you haven't read I Will Teach youh to Be Rich my book. Pick up a copy. You can get it at any bookstore, store, or any library, and it will show you the specific tactics for how to build the I will teach you to be rich system into your personal finances.