“We’re worth $87M, Why are we arguing over credit card bills?”

I'm coming to a city near you this January. Tickets are now available for my Money for Couples Live book tour. If you enjoy these videos and you want to connect with hundreds of other people who are interested in improving their relationships with money, I want to see you there. Go to iwt.com booktour to get your tickets now and I can tell you nothing beats being in the room. You'll get to see me working with real couples on stage who want to improve their relationship. I'm coming to Boston, D.C. chicago, New York, SF&LA. Get your tickets now at iwt.com booktour on today's episode. This is by far the biggest net worth ever seen on this show. Meet David and Victoria.

I've learned how to save and not how to spend.

I am not allowing myself to enjoy life.

David is 36 and Victoria's 35. They've been married for two years. Yeah. Yet their finances are largely separate.

We feel like we're just roommates sharing joint expenses on groceries and utilities.

David is a startup founder. He's cash strapped. He optimizes his monthly take home pay, leaving him with little cash.

There's been times where she's requested a Venmo from me and I'm like, I don't have that in my checkings account.

Victoria is a wildly successful entrepreneur who struggles to appreciate her accomplishments.

I don't take enough time to look back on where we are and what we have achieved. It's kind of toxic, huh? It's my Korean DNA to torture myself now.

Despite their immense wealth, David and Victoria's money psychology is holding them back.

There's always this fear that tomorrow may not come or tomorrow may not have what we have today.

Can they ditch their old money mindsets and embrace their rich life?

There's definitely a scarcity mindset and some extension of frugality that was taught and that was instilled in our upbringings both together. So I think that's definitely pulling us back.

Let's meet David and Victoria. Welcome to the Money for Couples show. This is a special episode sponsored by our partners at Delete Me. Victoria and David reached out for help, but their privacy is very important. You're going to see why. They have by far the highest net worth we have ever seen on this show. And in the past, she's been burned financially by business partners. We partnered with Delete Me on this episode to keep them completely anonymous. And you should know that privacy is important to me. I have personally used Delete me for for years to get my personal data removed from search results, and I've even signed my friends and family up for it. Now, even if you don't have an immense net worth like David and Victoria, you don't want your personal information out there for anyone to find. I want to thank Deleteme for sponsoring this episode. You can check them out@joindeleteme.com RAMIT I highly recommend them. I use them myself. Again, joindeleteme.com RAMit or all right, I've got David and Victoria CSP in front of me. I'm getting ready for our conversation. Check out what I noticed. Victoria and David as entrepreneurs, my husband and I lead busy lives. I own a skincare brand that generates 20 million in annual revenue, and I'm the sole owner. In addition, I have supplemental income from influencer work. He runs an advisory firm which is in its building phase. He has a trust and some real estate holdings that aren't immediately accessible. So I tend to cover our travel. I feel resentment or annoyance when I see him use our joint credit card for things like uber trips while I'm using my own credit card for the same. Let's take a look at the CSP. Oh, what?

Oh.

Assets. $84,830,000. I've never seen a number this big in any CSP on this podcast. This is amazing. $84 million in assets. That's obviously business. Investments, 1.4 million. Look at that ratio. Savings, $809,000 and debt is 174,000. Let's take a total look at the total net worth. $87,216,874. Wow. But I can already estimate that they have some interesting dynamics. With so much of their net worth locked up in. In businesses, this often means that, you know, somebody like me is like, oh, my God, you're incredibly wealthy. But they're like, not really. It's all locked up in my business or in real estate, and it doesn't necessarily mean I have the cash flow to support it. Now, there are lots of ways to take money off the table. I'm almost certainly going to talk about this with them, especially with her. But just overall, I just want to say this is incredible. I mean, it's amazing. Let's take a look at the rest. Gross monthly income is $35,000. Okay, so they're making 425,000 dol thousand dollars a year. I noticed that she makes about three times what he makes. Okay, fine. She mentioned that he's starting his business up. You know what's interesting is that he actually has more, like, liquid cash than she does. If you look at their holdings, he has $1.5 million. She has $712,000. So what a fascinating dynamic. She makes more than he does on a monthly basis. He has more cash or even investments. But then she, quote, trumps it all with an $80 million valuation on her business. I mean, wow. The cool part about this is that as a team, they are incredibly successful. What I can see from their application is that they might be treating things separately. And in fact, even within their fixed costs of 32%, she's paying 25%. That's because her income is so high, and he's paying 47%. So you can start to see that they're not quite working as a team. I don't understand why they haven't simply combined their money. Overall, this is a very fascinating conversation. I mean, if we're going to talk to some wealthy people, let's just talk to somebody who has an $80 million business. I cannot wait to learn more about her business, about his business, and about the way that they interact with their money together.

We're both entrepreneurs, and we never got to talk about how should we combine our finances or what should we be spending and what should we be saving on. There's definitely a little bit of discomfort knowing that we haven't really had a chance to properly sit down and map out our entire financials together. We only have one joint credit card that's basically used for utilities. So I think we just lived very individually within one household. As a married couple, I'm not really allowing myself to also spend on things that matter to us or that are better off kind of delegating to other people or, you know, freeing up my time, per se. I would love to kind of unleash whatever restrictions or limiting beliefs that I have with my conservative spending habits. So that's why we wanted to start a conversation about what do we want out of our financial goal and what does that mean to us, and what kind of rich life do we want to live together, and how much would that take to live that rich life?

So beautiful.

That's why I applied.

All right, I'd like to know where you are financially. What do each of you do? And let's get a very high level. How much you make per year and how much you have. Uh, let's start with you, David.

I am the founder and CEO of a company. It's bootstrapped, 100% owned by myself. It's north of now, at least 1.4 million annual revenue. My salary started off with me just writing off every expense that I could in 2021, and it slowly moved up to roughly 120,000, give or take before tax.

Your holdings. Gimme the high level.

If you include the valuation of my company plus a property that I own, about close to $5 million. Investments of 1.2 million across 401k to private equity, angel investments, savings of about 300,000 and a slight debt from that investment property of 174,000. But it's offset by my cash in my mortgage loans.

How'd you make. How'd you get all that money?

I started off in corporate, and I remember saving every dime to basically invest into my first property and then additionally to that, a small amount of trust from my parents, which I then invested into stocks and private equity and different instruments to be a steward of that money.

Got it. Okay, great. Okay, thank you very much. That's very helpful. Victoria, let's same numbers from your perspective.

I basically have two large income streams. One being a content creator, and then on top of that, I do have a skincare brand. All in together, my yearly salary before tax would be around 350,000 a year. In terms of the liquid cash and investments that I have that I can liquidate immediately would probably be around 700k. And then I guess everything else is tied with my business. So if I were to sell my business tomorrow, I think the valuation would be around $80 million.

Wow, that's amazing. So here you are, both having succeeded, growing large businesses and both being on here shielding your identities. I'm curious about that. Why? Why are we not seeing your full identities today?

I've always taught to be humble, not flaunt things. And so for me particularly, owning this story doesn't need to be done in a this is me kind of standpoint. I'm still coming to terms with this idea of being well off, even if mentally it doesn't show up that way. And so I do try to reconcile those two, but struggle a bit.

You are struggling with the idea of being well off, although you do have millions of dollars.

Yeah.

Would you agree that objectively you are financially well off?

Yes and no. We're both immigrants here in the United States and we're both on visas. We had to fight our way to get here. I spent every dollar in my bank account to start my company, and it's been a grind running a bootstrap company with no investors. Yes, we're great now, but I think I'm still living the trauma of just focusing on the salary of what's incoming like right now that I can see, and forgetting about all this great investing that I did in the past, feeling like it needs to be tucked away as a nest egg and not used. I think I'm slowly coming to that terms now that my salary is a bit more reasonable. I think why I'm also here is to learn how to repurpose my full wealth in a way that I feel is healthy and comfortable. And I'm struggling with that a bit.

Just so you know, David, most people get their information and feelings about their financial status literally from their checking account. And that is essentially what you're telling me. You're like, hey, put aside the $1.5 million that I invested and saved. Oh, that doesn't count. That's, that's like play money. But it's my salary that determines how well off I am. Of course that's completely wrong, illogical, self protective, some would say delusional.

Yeah, but.

But the good news is a lot of people do that and there are ways to, to help give you a full picture of your finances. Victoria, what about you? Why are we not seeing your full picture today?

I feel kind of conflicted because I think on one side I can show how everyone can be self made because I didn't come here just by luck. But on the flip side, I think there's a certain relevancy that I want to maintain. So I think that's the part that is kind of holding me back on becoming fully transparent about the situation. And the relationship that I built with my audience is so, so special that I do not want to compromise by introducing to a new, certain lifestyle that I suddenly have.

It would be easy to dismiss David and Victoria as rich people who are out of touch. Boo hoo. That's the easy narrative that we follow in America, which I find ironic because American culture loves wealth, but as soon as someone achieves it, they are not allowed to talk about their problems. Notice the layers here. David has considerable wealth himself, but he says he's, quote, still coming to terms with, with being wealthy. We have the cultural issues of being raised Korean and being from different countries. We have gender issues. And we have the very real issue of Victoria's immense wealth, most of which is locked up in her company. Listen closely as I ask her about her $80 million valuation.

It doesn't feel real. It feels like a virtual number because, you know, the company hasn't been sold. There wasn't a transaction at all. So it's just a number that you can only imagine, but it's not really there, and it could totally flop next year. Right. And I think because of that, I am trying to be as conservative as possible and try to save as much as possible, too, to future proof myself financially.

Okay, that's a bit of an odd response for someone who has an $80 million business. Everyone here is like, if I had a big business, I would be so happy.

I would.

And then, like, not once did you use the word proud. You're just like, yeah, it could all go to zero. So, like, my life could be horrible anyway. I don't know if I'm going to end up in a ditch one day. How long it take you to grow this business?

Seven years and counting.

That's amazing. Do you all talk about, like, the fact that you have achieved this?

Rarely, to be honest. I think for me, I have a tendency to be always thinking about tomorrow, and I don't take enough time to look back on where we are and what we have achieved. It's kind of toxic, huh? I should do a better job to acknowledge what it has become. But it is really hard for some reason.

Do you know why?

I really don't know why.

Did you ever see your parents model gratitude, taking a second, give yourself a pat on the back for how far you've come? Do you ever see that growing up?

To be honest, I think we were in a household where we had very little words of affirmation and acknowledgement. So I think that definitely influenced the way that I, you know, express things or acknowledge things for myself and for David as well.

Yeah. Is this a Korean thing, too?

Generally speaking? Just looking at a lot of my Korean friends, they are super hardworking, and they are very hard on themselves. And I think the mentality of Koreans definitely is like hustle and bustle, just like, grind, grind, grind, with there being, like, no looking back, no regret, but just, like, looking forward and thinking about, like, where should we move next?

Yeah. In a way, it's very constructive. It's very adaptive. It allows you to succeed. Like, my Korean friends are almost all very hardworking, very successful, technically defined. But you can also see that the cultural parts of that can become a weakness. You know, like. Like, what are we doing this for? Let's just grind and grind and then make our kids grind, and then their kids will grind and, like, what's the point? So, David, you're over here nodding too. What do you think?

Yeah, I mean, it's. It's interesting to hear it from her perspective. Both my grandfathers were successful entrepreneurs, but lost their businesses several times. And so I think there's a trauma in my family where it skipped a generation. My parents saw that were very, very discouraging of me starting a business. And I'm still slowly coming to terms with what that means for myself personally. So slightly different, but I can appreciate this feeling of just, it's a house of cards. It can topple over. It's not mine anyway. And so what's that going to mean for how I live a life that's intentional, ethical, but is right for myself and for Victoria?

And that, that is what I want to talk about now. How does money work in your relationship?

We're very independent on our finances. We are pretty much 50, 50 split on things like rent, our groceries. Whatever you think about the two things that are joint with us is a joint credit card, and we also have a joint savings account.

It's a given month. Who is handling money on a day to day basis? How often are you talking about it? What do the account setups look like? Walk me through it.

So the joint savings account, we both have $1,500 per month from our salaries that come into that. So $3,000 a month. We have a joint card, but Victoria pays off that fee and then Venmo's me the 50% of what we, what we spend.

There you go.

How long have you been married for almost two years.

Why are you doing this? This Venmo?

Like we have a.

We have a long list of Venmo transaction history.

Okay, all right, so you vent. So you have a 50, 50 split on expenses, you have a joint savings account. Victoria, you are paying off the credit card and then getting Venmoed from David. Okay, and then what about things like bigger things, taking a vacation, et cetera, how does that work?

I tend to pick a destination and then pick a hotel, then pick the logistics of flights or car rentals and go from there. It can be costly because I do have a certain quality or standard that I would like to stay in in terms of Airbnb or a hotel. We have been able to smartly use our cash plus credit card points enough to fund our vacation so it doesn't break our bank or it doesn't really make a dent in our savings.

Victoria has many more points generally than I do, and so therefore tends to prioritize comfort over cost. And so even in our London trip that we went to recently, she actually flew business class whilst I flew coach.

What? Hold on. So let's set the scene so she's sitting. She's already seated in business class and then. And she's got like the big headphones on and she's got a huge scarf and she's just sitting there drinking champagne and then what happens? You walk past her It'll literally walk.

Past her and then wave and then have like a bit of a smile and then I walk down to coach.

What do you guys think of this? It's kind of interesting well, I'm actually.

Quite okay with it if I don't feel like I'm getting a good deal on the flight I don't really see the problem in flying coach okay.

I would never sit here and tell someone you have to spend more on something you don't care about I am curious the way that you both talk about flying and taking vacations there was an assumption that you have to use points why is that?

I don't feel super comfortable spending over a thousand or two thousand dollars a night to.