8 Secrets I Learned Coaching Rich People

Uh, you guys want to hear about annoying rich people? Because I know a lot of them. Let me tell you about some of the stuff rich people would never admit publicly because they would get roasted for it. Now, I've spent over 20 years coaching millionaires, founders, couples on my Netflix show, How to Get Rich. And what I've seen behind closed doors will surprise you. Lots of people are doing things so smart, so counterintuitive that it will completely change the way you think about money. Some people are doing things that still shock me, stuff that is not talked about publicly, but I can talk about them because I'm not going to tell you their names. So today I'm pulling back the curtain on 8 secrets I learned coaching rich people, the stuff they actually do, not the polished stories that they tell you. And number 5, you really won't believe it. Secret number 1: They are okay wasting a little money. Rich people waste money all the time and they're okay with it. Let me tell you why. Once in a while, for example, they can't take an Amazon box to the UPS store and they'll go, "Okay, fine, I'm just going to donate this thing." The more they are earning, the more likely they are going to let unwanted subscriptions renew for months. That's because they are not carefully looking at every single expense. And the key is they actually accept it. They know that, sure, they might be overpaying for a $10 subscription, maybe even a $100 a month subscription. But in the grand scheme of things, they are typically focused on other areas. Now, let me tell you what surprised me about this. It's not that they are lazy or careless. They know what they are doing. They are strategic. One client told me, if it costs less than $500 to solve, I don't think twice. $500 is nothing to them because they are often focusing on moves that are tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions of dollars. Naturally, if you were in that same situation, you would probably do the same thing. If you're watching this right now saying, no, I wouldn't, that's insane. I'm always going to track the price of tomatoes. You might not be the kind of person who has the ability to make moves that make millions of dollars. That's just being candid. The wealthy people I'm talking to are not obsessed with optimizing every last dollar because they know that their time is extremely valuable. And that is the mindset shift. They have realized you cannot track the same things when you are making a very high income that you did when you were starting out. You actually have to focus on the bigger moves. The lesson for all of us: stop focusing on $5 coffees. Start focusing on the $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 decisions this year. Your salary, your housing costs, how much you are charging for your business, and put your energy there. Now, this next one is something that all rich people do, and I think it's probably one of the most valuable moves that they make. Secret number 2: they buy back their time, not just things. Contrary to popular belief or what Instagram tells us, rich people are not always spending money on beautiful cars and clothes. I don't mind it. I love nice clothes. But it's important to know that the people that I work with who are wealthy typically focus more on buying back their time than others. They'll pay for convenience. That could be a personal chef. That could be somebody to help come up with ideas for date night with their spouse. It also could help in accompanying things like the cost of a babysitter, and it often does not have to be that expensive. At smaller levels, it's the same idea, an extra iPhone charger or grocery delivery. The question that these rich people are often asking is, what can I pay for so I do not have to think about this again? Touch once, never touch it again. That is the idea, because if you are constantly facing a problem in your life, Rich people want it solved and they never want to think about it again. That's because they have more money than time. So here's how you can apply this same thinking. Think about a way that you could spend $20, $50, $100 to buy back a little bit of time. You don't have to do this for your entire life, but just try it. See how it feels for a week. See how it affects your finances. And then you will start to build the habit of buying back your time. Time. Now, I got to tell you, not all the items on this list are about how smart and glamorous rich people are. Sometimes they do some really dumb stuff like the next one. And before we go further, one of the most powerful ways to buy back your time is fixing the systems that quietly drain it. If you are a business owner, one of the biggest time and energy leaks is dealing with taxes reactively, like when you're scrambling at deadlines and never feeling fully clear on your numbers. That is where Gelt, the sponsor of this video, comes in. Gelt is a modern CPA firm built specifically for business owners who want clarity and control instead of chaos. They work with you year-round to create a proactive tax plan tied to your goals, cash flow, and P&L. They give you guidance on credits, deductions, and entity setup to optimize your structure. and they stay organized and on track with a clean, modern platform. If you are a business owner and you want to stop dreading taxes and start feeling confident about your numbers, check out Gelt. Go to joingelt.com/ramitsethi or click the link in the description below. All right. Now let's talk about where rich people get it wrong. Secret number 3, they ignore big fees and it costs them millions. I don't like this idea that in American culture, rich people are glamorized and lauded as being so smart. Just because this guy has billions of dollars, we should listen to his stupid right-wing opinions on politics. Shut the fuck up, rich guy. You would think that rich people are financial geniuses, but often they are just good at making money. Managing it, they are not that good. For example, a lot of wealthy people pay an AUM fee to a financial advisor. This is something like 1% on their investments. They often will sign up for these larded-up private equity investments that are illiquid for a decade, and they don't even beat the S&P 500. Also, wealthy people, when they buy and sell cars, which can happen frequently, there are massive transaction costs. They don't even know them, nor do they really care. I think you can do better than this. You can actually beat the returns of lots of wealthy people by paying attention to how much your fees will cost you over time. For example, never pay a percentage of your portfolio to an advisor. If you decide to hire an advisor, pay a flat fee, an hourly rate, or a project basis if you need help. Run the numbers on buying and selling big-ticket items like cars and houses. A general guideline is that it's a better financial decision to buy quality and hold it for a long time. As an example, I drove the same car for 19 years. The next secret takes care of something that many of us suffer from. Secret 4: They use money to reduce stress. Now, I knew this wealthy guy who once told me that he always books Uber Black, and I was really confused, like, why? I'm perfectly fine with UberX. What's the point? And he told me, he said it's basically irrelevant to him from a cost perspective. It's not about luxury. He told me it was about certainty. He knew that he could just click at the top of the app. He didn't even have to scroll down. He didn't have to think about price. He knew that a nice clean car would show up. They would drive professionally. And most importantly, he just didn't have to think about it. At the time, I thought he was crazy. Even though we're only talking about $10 or $20, I just didn't understand it. A few years later, I came to understand what he meant. Rich people use money to smooth out friction. and they will stay at nicer hotels, for example, not just for the status, although sometimes that's the case, but for a reliable, healthy breakfast. They know that they're gonna be able to get exactly what they want without even having to look at the menu. A quiet room. They know that they're gonna be able to sleep well without somebody partying next door and a concierge who can help take their bags and arrange their dinner reservations, et cetera. Some people pay for a personal stylist like my wife Cassandra at Next Level Wardrobe so they don't have to spend their entire day going to 5 different stores and trying things on and then returning them. What they are buying is calm. They are buying certainty that the task is taken care of and that they're going to look and feel great. Now, you don't need millions of dollars to do this. Sometimes you can reduce stress from spending $5 or $20. I'll give you a simple example from my own life. I always used to have to wake up and wash my French press, the one that I make coffee in, from the prior day. So you know what I did? I just bought 2. It was like $20, and it has brought me so much peace knowing that every morning I wake You wake up, the French press is clean and ready to go. Can you think of a way that you can spend money to reduce stress right now? Think about this. How many videos on personal finance have you watched? How many times have you thought to yourself, I need to start investing? I don't know where all my money's going. How do I know if I'm saving enough? That is stressful with the uncertainty. I have a way for you to reduce that stress and make an actual plan with your money. It's called my money coaching program. I'm going to put the link in the description below. You can join. You will get a personalized plan for your money, whether you are paying off debt, whether you want to invest your first investment or your next million dollars, and you will have a community of people you can talk to right now. Join my money coaching program. The link below. The next secret comes from a big misconception that people have about rich people. Secret number 5, they're actually not great investors. A lot of wealthy people think that because they've made money through their business or through their career, that they happen to be super sophisticated investors. Honestly, rich people invest in all kinds of dumb dog shit investments. They chase exclusive deals, private equity, angel investing that often massively underperform the S&P 500. And the classic example is dentists and doctors. Horrible at investing, often seen as prey by Wall Street. As high-income earners, they are frequently targeted by financial advisors working for shit Primerica and scammers, high-commission products, whole life insurance. They're basically just sitting there as marks for everyone on Wall Street. Again, just because people made money does not mean they know how to manage it or grow it. It just means they have a lot of money. That does not make you a skilled investor. Meanwhile, the boring investors, the Bogleheads, the ones investing in index funds, automation with a long-term focus, They quietly crushed them. Here's how you can do it. Automate your contributions to an index fund or target date fund. Leave it alone. Consistency beats cleverness. In fact, a lot of you would do better to stop listening to all these freaking investing podcasts. Take the account you have for your 401(k), maybe your taxable account, lose the password for the next 45 years, and then come back and see how many millions of dollars you have. All right. You all don't want to listen to that, though, do you? Let's keep going then. The secret of rich people is not what they invest in. It is how little the successful ones have to think about their money. Secret number 6: They build systems for everything. There's this assumption that rich people must have complicated finances and the investments that they have to manage and track all day. Actually, not true at all. One of my clients runs a company with 400 employees. He spends 30 minutes a month on his personal finances because everything runs automatically. Bills are on autopay. Savings are automatically transferred. Investments automatically invest. Rich people do not want to have to keep looking at the weeds of every single decision in their life. They're building a system from childcare to workouts to nutrition, and they're moving on. Sometimes they use money to help, like having a personal trainer who can actually build the plan for them. Other times it's just good communication with their spouse or the people around them. They know that systems equal freedom. Systems are replicable, scalable. I remember I once spoke to a couple who had millions of dollars on my podcast and they could not spend it. They wanted time with each other, but they couldn't even hire someone to come in and do their laundry for them. I said, why? She goes, they can't fold the way I want it folded. A truly rich person who understands systems would fold their clothes, take photographs of them, and then put that into an SOP or standard operating procedure so that anyone they hire could look at the pictures and fold the clothes exactly how they want it. That is a system. The takeaway? You probably don't need a budgeting app. You definitely don't need to check your investments every morning. You can set up a system, set up a regular monitoring for it, not every day, and move on. Then let the system build your wealth while you sleep. Secret number 7: They don't always talk about money. I've seen millionaires that can't discuss spending with their spouse without it turning into a fight. What I have learned is that there's little correlation between how much money someone has and how frequently they talk about it. Many people think that when they make more money, their own habits are going to magically change. I'm going to magically feel better about money when I have $50,000 or $500,000 more. Never happens. I'm going to magically become better at communicating with my spouse when we have $100,000 more dollars. It's never going to happen. Money does not become magically easier just because you have more of it. If anything, the stakes get higher and the conversations become more fraught. So here's what you should do. Schedule a 10-minute money talk this week with your partner, a friend, your parents, even just to ask them, how did you think about money when we were younger? The earlier you start talking about money and the more you shine a light on this topic, the more comfortable you are going to be. Going to be. If you've made it this far, I want to keep showing you how to improve your relationship with money. So hit subscribe. And the final secret is my favorite. It completely flips the idea of being frugal. Secret number 8: they splurge unapologetically on what they love. There's this common myth that people who have a lot of money buy the best of everything, and I have not found that to be true, not even with myself. I remember being out with a friend and we were talking about how we spend our money, and I said that my wife and I We don't particularly buy the absolute most expensive meat there is. We are much more focused on the quantity we eat rather than spending an extra $20 a pound on chicken. He was shocked, and his phrase was, why would you not get the best? It couldn't hurt. In my experience, people who have a lot of money are pretty focused on spending in key categories. It might be travel, it might be childcare, it's probably housing, and on and on. But there are other things they just simply do not care about. Here's what I want you to do. Pick your one money dial, the thing that you love to spend money on, and turn that dial up this month. It could be food, travel, health and wellness, whatever lights you up. Spend extravagantly. Just try it once. Make sure you can afford it, but try it. Cut mercilessly everywhere else. That is what living a rich life looks like. Rich people are not this monolith. We need to stop glorifying them and actually tell the truth. Yes, oftentimes rich people have a different experience with money. Sometimes they have a better relationship with money. Sometimes it's fucking horrible. We need to be honest about that too. They are not meant to be put on a pedestal. They are simply like any other group. There are things we can learn, things that we may not like, and we can adapt it for our own situation. My favorite part is that you can do better for yourself. You can build systems, you can invest, You can design your rich life, and I will show you how in this next video, how to have better finances than 95% of people in 3 months.