56 Minutes of Money Wisdom for High-Earning Couples

50% of couples who talk to me do not know their household income. Money for most is not a source of connection. It's a wedge.

I want to go deep on this. This is actually cool.

In most relationships, there is one money person, and this is a huge mistake.

How do you get someone who's a worrier to start spending?

You need to learn the skill of managing money, but you also need to learn the skill of spending money meaningfully.

Tell me what to do.

I have 7 quick steps. It's very easy.

First off, All right, we're live. Uh, Ramit, so the reason I wanted to have you on was because Sean and I were talking the other day, and at the end of the episode, at like minute 55, we got to the total end, and somehow it came up that my wife Sarah and I, we do this thing that we just call our monthly money meeting. And the way it works is that we like break down our monthly expenses, our income, and we also look at our net worth and we talk about how can we spend the next month to like make ourselves happier? Like what, how can we use like money as a tool? And are we happy with our consumption and whatever the, the previous month? And Sean made fun of me and he was like, that's the right, you're running that like a corporation, like a business. And at first I was embarrassed to say that I'm running my marriage like a business. And then afterwards I was like, actually, no, like I can love my wife and that's the number one reason why I do this. And also in order to make it run effectively, you kind of have to run a tight ship like a business or have like business attributes. And you have this book, uh, Money for Couples, and you tweet all about this, the stuff with your relationships and running it like a business. And I thought you should come on and kind of talk about the other stuff of a relationship other than love, which requires running it a little bit like a business.

Well, first of all, I appreciate that Sean makes fun of you. That's one of my favorite parts of this pod. But when you are married, you are running a business. It is the business of running a household together. And it's only in the last 100 or so years that Americans became infatuated with this idea of love as the only reason to get married. That's ahistorical. That's not been the case for a long time. And just to give you an example, it's so culturally dependent. My parents knew each other 7 days before they got married. So you have to remember that it's not unromantic to talk about money. I actually find it very romantic that you are building a connection. And there's a whole bunch of other benefits that I'm sure you and I both experience because we talk about money regularly.

And you got this amazing podcast and a lot of the people, you have some like really wealthy people. I think you had someone who was making like $2 or $3 million a year and they talked about spending. But I think your typical bread and butter is low-ish six figures. But our audience makes like, I'm gonna just make up this avatar of like $200,000 to $400,000 a year and they work at tech companies.

I think this topic is so fascinating to me because it cuts across psychology, numbers, communication, and I personally think it's underexplored. I think there's a lot of people online who talk about how to make money, how to invest money. Very few people talk about how to spend it meaningfully, and even fewer talk about how to do it in a relationship. So if you're listening and you're single or dating, or you've been married for 20 years, odds are very likely that you have not substantively talked about money with your partner. And it's important. It is. It's one of the core things in a relationship. That's why I love talking about this.

Do you remember Tim Ferriss in The 4-Hour Workweek? He had this thing called like the dream scenario or something. It's very similar to the stuff that you do. It's something like, write down all of the things you want to own and then like reverse engineer it to figure out how much do you have to earn in order to afford this? And like, like just like be intentional about what you want and specifically say it and work backwards towards that. So I used to do that as a 22-year-old. I think I had like, uh, at one point I've owned everything that was on that list and I was like, oh, like half that list I don't really give a shit about even after I owned it. But I remember a year into dating my wife, it was like, hey, this is promising. It appears we're going to like, this is going towards marriage, which is great. And we did that dreamlining together and we used to do it all the time where it was like, tell me, like, what's your ideal, like, life scenario? Like, what would you— how would you like to live? And like, let's like, how much would that require? Like, what responsibilities are you willing to take and what should I take on? It was so helpful to do that early on in a relationship. And it sounds weird, but it was like a great conversation.

I love that. It's amazing that the two of you did that early on because it's one thing to do it solo. It's entirely another thing to do it with a partner. But what is amazing is that you two were on the same page of even talking about that. You have to remember, most couples, they're not like that. They're not sitting down to dream. One person is probably a worrier. Another person might be an avoider, or probably for the people listening, they're optimizers, spreadsheet freaks who love to look at compound interest all the time. And they're not even communicating in the same way. So one person's like, look at our, Returns, look at our net worth. And the other's like, why are you talking about this? Like, I don't think we're gonna have enough. Why did you spend $20 at the gas station? So you guys were speaking the same language. Most couples, not even in the same planet when it comes to money.

Optimizers, what is that?

Oh, there's 4 money types. I talk about 'em in my book. I talked to thousands and thousands of people and I found these 4 types that describe A lot of people, first avoider, this is the most common. They avoid money. They do a series of conscious and unconscious techniques to do it. If they're in a relationship, they'll say stuff like, you're just better at money. I'm not good at math. Sometimes they even sabotage conversations by saying stuff like, why do you always have to talk about money? Can't we just have a good time? That's an avoider. And there's a whole bunch of techniques that you can use to not be an avoider or to have a partner that's an avoider. Um, then we have, uh, optimizer. That is me. That's you. That's a lot of people listening. Optimizers, you know, they, they can do a lot of good because they're saving, they're investing. The problem is you take it to the logical extreme and they become incredibly boring and cheap, and all they care about is like the cost and how much is it gonna— we shouldn't buy this Coke can because if we compounded that for 45 years, it would actually be $1,200. It's like, get a life. Optimizers are really hard to be partners with because they always go, how much does it cost? That's all they're concerned with. But they can change as well. We have Worriers. Worriers worry about everything. Uh, in fact, many of them saw that growing up. And when I asked them, what would it look like if you didn't worry about money? They have no idea because that's all they have ever known. And finally, Dreamers. Dreamers believe that success is just around the corner. Dreamers, it's, it's the next gig, it's the next deal. These are the folks who typically fall into get-rich-quick schemes, and they are incredibly difficult to be partners with. They're not listening, they're not reading my book, let's put it that way. And the only reason they can live in la-la land is that they are often subsidized by someone else, often their partner. Those are the 4 money types.

You seem like, you know, you teach us stuff. So I assume, and I know you, so I know it's true that you have your act together when it comes to money. And if you are, you're an optimizer now, you said. What flaws do you still have and how do they present itself like on a daily basis?

Yeah, like for everyone listening, Sam was like, we were texting and Sam was like, hey, what are you getting on Black Friday? And I was like, I don't shop any place that does Black Friday sales. And that's like, that's a difference. But the fact is like, you're an optimizer. So am I. They just manifest in different ways.

So where do yours manifest in ways that are good, but also in annoying ways?

Dude, the annoying ways are the ones that when I was 22, it was like all about like, look at these numbers. You just need to do this. It's so easy. It's so clear. And then I could see people's eyes glazing over. But I didn't know why. And once you get a little bit older, a little bit more mature, a little bit better skilled at communicating, you realize nobody wants to be talked to like that. And in fact, like in the areas where I have been really weak, like fitness, where I didn't grow up knowing what protein was until my late 20s, if someone was like, dude, it's so simple, duh duh duh duh duh duh, it would have been overwhelming and it would have made me feel stupid. So I learned how to slow down, become a little bit more emotionally connective. But dude, it's still there. When I, when I'm talking about money, sometimes I'm like, like, okay, I get it. Let's, let's get to the part where we do the numbers. And it happens regularly. My wife and I have monthly money meetings. We have our annual Rich Life Review, and I can see it in myself. I just want to get to the end. Because for me, you know, I was raised like efficiency is a virtue. Getting to that part is a virtue. And I've had to really try to learn, and I'm still learning, sometimes slow it down, take the journey, have fun along the way. We'll get there, but don't be in a rush to get where we're gonna get anyway.

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What's this, uh, you know, it's December 30th when we're filming this. What's the annual review?

Oh man, we're, we're in the middle of it right now. So this is like one of my favorite times of the year. So in every December, we have an annual Rich Life Review, and I would encourage everybody to do this. So we sit down and we do it over several days. We're in no rush. And we start off by just going through our photos from the year and we go like, what were our most memorable things that happened this year? And a lot of them are favorites, but some of them are not so good. You know, things that just bring up visceral memories.

You're talking about like a death or something like that. Yeah.

Yeah. Something bad that happened, but a lot of good things that travel we did, family we saw, things like that. And you just know it when you see it. You just know it. And looking over our photos, what we do is we just put like 10, 20, and we text them to each other and then we talk about them.

What's this look like though? Actually look like, is it like in the evening or you're just hanging out over dinner? What are you guys doing?

What if I'm like Sam, I told you we're running a freaking business. We're in a conference room. What do you think?

Yeah.

No, okay. The truth is when we did this just recently, we were sitting across from each other, like basically on our couch chilling. But most of the time we have these conversations, we're actually traveling. So we love to do this in a place that is different than our normal place. It's expansive. Usually we try to surround ourself with beauty, but you know, that's not always possible. So the point, setting helps, but it's just about the two of us having time and space. So here I am looking at my photos and it becomes very obvious to me the photos I chose, like out of 20, 18 of them were with friends and family. Wow. Like that really tells me something about what's important to me. And so we start off there like, wow, what was memorable? We then talk about, we have this little exercise that we did this year. I came up with these, um, questions. Which was, what if 2025, next year, was incredibly generous? And we started there and we're just like, what would we do if we were incredibly generous? And we just like came up with ideas back and forth. Next, adventurous. So it was like, uh, like a wilderness course, you know, I don't even know how to start a fire. What if I went to a 3-day wilderness course? And my wife was like, go on your own. I'm not trying to go to that. but that's cool too. You find out what you like, what you don't like. Next was luxurious. That was cool. Relaxed and then social. So we're just dreaming. We're just like coming up with ideas and we're writing 'em down and that's it. Then we start getting into a little bit more specific stuff. What did we love this year? What do we want to do more of? These would be things like take a trip with friends, spend time with our parents, that kind of thing. And then we're like, what do we not like? What do we want to do less of? Oh, we tried to eat at this, we got this reservation at this restaurant and it was a big deal and we actually don't really care about that type of stuff. And then the last thing we do is we get into the numbers.

You don't need to say your numbers, but tell me the title of the numbers. So for example, you look at like your, like your personal family's annual burn, your personal family's income. What else?

We're talking at the expense level now. So we're talking line item, but these are like the major categories in my conscious spending plan. So things like, um, housing, uh, travel for us is a big discretionary expense. All the clothes, fitness, those are the items we're talking about. And we're like, okay, we projected this, we hit this, why did we diverge? And so then it's like, do we need to tweak it next year? Do we need to add more income? This is the type of stuff where we're talking about like, what are our distributions? I don't know if we can handle that next year, et cetera.

And when you, this is like, I want to go deep on this. So you're setting the budget for the next year as well. And when you're doing the review, what percentage on track are you typically? Are you typically over? What is your family, over or under?

That's a very good question. We're never exactly on, never. We are definitely over in certain categories. Travel, almost always over. So we adjust it every year. The dream is like you're going to nail it, but We never will. We leave buffer. We always leave buffer.

You add 20%. Oh yeah.

I have like handy guidelines for buffers. So for example, for, uh, like a wedding, you 2.5x, like right there.

Yeah.

Okay. For a trip, for travel, add 50% right off the bat. So if you think your trip is going to be $3,000, it's actually going to be $4,500.

Got it. So it's not like unilaterally, like, all right, we budgeted. $100, just assume that our in— or whatever, $100,000 for the year, for our whole life, assume that it's going to be $120,000.

We would do that for fixed costs. So fixed costs, which are like your rent, your auto, you know, your fixed things. Typically, I would say add 15% because there are things that people forget about. That's just a good guideline.

By the way, that's what I do with my businesses. I like whatever we say the budget is, in my head, I'm like 30% over.

Okay, let me tell you why. I think there are so many different ways with money you can internalize lessons like fitness, luxury. I had this experience. We stayed in a hotel in Thailand. It's a high-end hotel. And whenever I go to one of these hotels, I always ask to see the general manager and I go on a walk on the property with him, him or her. And I go, why are you laughing? It's weird.

It's just, that's a really Karen thing to do, but you're doing it for a positive thing.

No, what the hell are you talking about? I'm not saying like, here are all the things that are wrong. I ask them, Tell me how you run this hotel. Like, what are the clientele?

So if you do that at the front desk or does your assistant or you send an email, I'll be checking in like, dude, I want to get busy because let me explain. All right, here's why. Ramit said, hey, do you want to come to New York City and hang out with me? I'm going to plan for something for us to do. And I was like, hell yeah. And he was like, what do you want to do? And I was like, whatever you're interested in, because I know you're super into it. Take me along. And so we went to the Aman Giri or Aman New York. Is that what it's called? Aman New York.

Yeah.

Like the fanciest hotel in New York City. And the general manager or some, like some manager type gave us this like 1-hour specialty tour of this like $3,000 or $4,000 a night hotel. And I was like, dude, how do you, who did you email to get this?

So I like hotels. I like hospitality. And whenever I go to these hotels, the manager will, when you're staying there, the manager will come up to you at a certain point and greet you. So I'm always like, hey, I'd love to learn more about the property. Do you have any time? And they love it. They love it. So we went on a walk and it was December at the time. So I said, what's your occupancy? And they had something like 40 keys or 40 hotel rooms. He said, it's about to get busy. Christmas is our busiest of all, but we always keep one room off market. And I'm like, why would you do that when it's the busiest most high demand, most expensive time of the year. He goes, luxury is about always having something in your back pocket. He goes, maybe our regular guests who come every year for the last decade bring an extra family member. We need to be able to accommodate that. So I will hold it off market. And I'm like, ah, that's a very expensive thing. But I think about my mom growing up. She always had extra food if we brought a friend over. Luxury, just at a different level. So same thing with money. I want to always build in a buffer so that if something happens, we're good, no sweat.

And how much— what percentage do you, um, like, do you, do you assume that every year your spending is going to go up like 5%, 10%?

Uh, no, that I probably should, but I don't do that. That would be good. We, we look at what we're gonna do next year, and typically like we have like certain things don't really change. For example, rent or whatever, it won't change that much. But if there are big life events, those might change. So we're not doing it on a percentage basis. We're looking at big discrete events because we already have the foundation kind of laid out.

And then do you assume, and you guys are both entrepreneurs, and so let's do it for the question of like you and me entrepreneurs, and also let's do this for like a Facebook employee. Do you assume that your income is flat, up or down?

Great question. My wife and I are both entrepreneurs, so we, we assume, we take a standard salary, which we talk about at that annual Rich Life Review. What is our salary going to be? And it's typically the same salary. I didn't change my salary for like 13 years, but we talk about distributions. So are we playing, how does the business look next year? What numbers are we going for? What do we think our distributions will be? And we use distributions, which makes our system a little bit complex. We get them on a quarterly basis if we take them, and then we have a determination. We have a percentage, like where does it go? How does it get split up? All that stuff is all documented. We look at the document once a year in December and we decide, is this fair? Does this feel good? Do we need to tweak anything? But it's once a year.

Yeah. And that's where it gets complicated. Cause I do this with Sarah and I'm like, well, if business goes good, then it could be this. If it, if something happened, you know, shit happens, you know, like if you run an SEO-based company, Google makes a change and like my, my situation has just changed.

Um, I don't, I have to tell you, this is maybe a strength, also a weakness. I don't want to have to go backwards. Right. So like it, that appeal to me, that's true in a lot of parts of life. For example, Speaking of hotels, if I stayed at one hotel room one time, I'm not going to a lower level hotel room. I want to stay at the same level or go higher. Why? Just because for me, that's a point of pride and something I value. For other people, it might be their car. You know, they finally got a, whatever's a nice car, and they don't want to go back to the Honda Civic that they grew up driving, whatever. Say, I feel the same with money. If we decide we want something, I'm going to be very, very careful before I commit to spending on something that is probably something we don't want to go backwards on. Otherwise, I just wouldn't do it. As an example, if somebody starts to fly, well, I know you've talked about flying private, you know, for a lot of entrepreneurs, it's like one of the things they want to do. Great. If that's a goal, I wouldn't do that until I knew I have no financial chance of ever going backwards because that's actually really hard for me.

And that's, but that's rooted in your business, which means like my business is stable enough that it's likely going to continue to grow at some, even if it's a small 5 or 10%, but it's like a stable recurring-ish revenue business, that type of thing.

Yeah. Or you have enough net worth to float it.

Yeah.

But what I'm really encouraging people to do is you don't have to do this for everything. You know, like some years you have a splurge on some restaurant, maybe you're going to go back, maybe not, whatever. But if it's really important to you, it might be we're sending kids to this school or we're going to decide that we're flying business class or whatever. Be very, very careful before you make a purchase that is recurring and you don't want to go back. Once you do it, make sure you're solid forever.

How long does this annual meeting, annual review last? And what's the homework to prepare for it?

It lasts several days. We're in no rush. So it's like, we'll talk for a couple of hours and then we're off doing whatever we're doing, whether we're traveling.

Is it on your calendar?

Yeah, it's on the calendar, has a link to all of our docs, the one from last year, we review it. Some of it is, so some of it is structured, like we're talking about, we have these questions, what do we want to change, et cetera. And some of it though is really organic. And I think that is the part that might surprise people. So in my life, I'm an optimizer. And so I'm, I love structure.

I love it.

And I think That has become a weakness of mine where I always want the black or white answer and I need to like make sure it fits in these cells. And so I've been trying to become more intuitive and I find that I'm most intuitive when I'm traveling because I'm like, what do I feel like seeing? Where do I feel like going? What about us? And I'm trying to bring that to these meetings. So like this question about like, generous and adventurous. That was an intuitive thing that I was thinking about. And then we started talking about it and there was a lot of energy. So we spent like a few hours talking about that. That is how I love to approach this, a combination of literal and also intuitive.

What's the monthly meetings look like? Ours usually looks like we use Monarch. Do you know Monarch Money? That's just like a cool thing. In my opinion, that's my favorite tool for tracking monthly expenses. So we go over that and then we say like, all right, next month, like what adventures or things do we have planned? And is there any like deviation or alterations that we want to make for that? We also talk about different goals that we have throughout the year. Like it could be we want to take family on trips. Well, it's like, all right, like, do we have that plan? And what went well last time? What didn't go well? Whatever. And then we talk about like, do you want to buy anything? Like, is there anything you want to buy?

I love that. I love every time I hear you guys talk about how you do money. It makes me really happy because like there's a lot of connection and I hope that's inspiring to other folks because money for most is not a source of connection. It's a wedge. It's actually something that's avoided. Most couples really substantively talk about money about 4 times in their entire life.

What does that mean? So like, Is there like a bunch of— I mean, I guess this is obvious. This is an obvious question, but I guess there's typically a bunch of wives out there who have no idea, like, what the income is. And like, is that like typically what it is?

50% of couples who talk to me do not know their household income. 5-0. They don't know their household income. As an example, this happens all the time. I had a couple recently who said, I think we would We would feel good if we made $120,000. And we're look— I'm looking at their numbers, which they prepared for me. And according to their preparation, they make $80K. Okay, so now I'm digging into this and I'm asking about bonuses. They go, oh yeah, we get a bonus once in a while. And I'm adding it all together. It turns out they make something like $121,000 and they just look completely dumbfounded.

Why?

Because for years they've been telling themselves, We'll stop worrying when we make $120K. They've been making it for years. And what it really shows is the way you feel about money is highly uncorrelated to the amount in your bank account. So no, they don't talk about money. Most see it as a negative thing. They see it as something to protect their partner from. They see it as something like, you do the dishes, I'll mow the lawn. But it's none of those. It's got to be a source of connection.

Which is the thing you talk about. But by the way, you were giving me credit for these meetings. Like they still like occasionally end in fighting. Like, like it's like it does. It always— it doesn't— they don't always end well, which is like there's not— we are on the same page to discuss it, but we are not always on the same page of our wants. Sometimes there's decisions where there's a winner and there's a loser. And so it's like, you know, how can we both win in one of these situations? But it definitely becomes like a who's the money person? And it's like not just like who's earning it, but who's driving I guess it's frustrating to have— if I'm the one driving all the time, I'm like, I want you to care about this as much as I care about this.

Sam, I'm with you. Okay, listen, so in most relationships, there is one money person, and this is a huge mistake. Again, most of us think of it as something that's just divided, like every couple does. We all divide tasks just on time, intuition, etc., or just habit. But money, when I got together with my wife, of course I was, it would have been natural for me to be the money person. This is what I do for a living. I think about it every day. And I very early on realized that would be a horrible mistake. And I told Cassandra, I said, we're going to do this together. I'll tell you why. Number one, one day I'm going to get hit by a bus. Some shithead from Goldman Sachs Wealth Management is going to call her. Oh, we'd love to help you be a steward of your portfolio. Fuck you, wealth management industry. So she knows exactly about expense ratios and fees. Otherwise I'd be looking up from hell saying, what's about to happen right now with this conversation? But I know she's an amazing manager of money. Then I wanted us to have a second set of eyes. No matter how good you are at money. It's always better to have another person make decisions together. And third is just way more fun, way more fun to be doing this together. Where do we want to go next year? Who do we want to be generous with? All those things. So it's a huge mistake to be the money person in a relationship or let your partner— and that is becoming bigger and bigger because a lot of men die early, leaving in, in heterosexual relationships, they leave their wife often defenseless. Dwight doesn't even know where the money is, much less how much, much less what to do with it. Bad, bad situation. So that is a big no-no.

Dude, I was telling Sarah the other day, ever since we had a kid, I have this weird dream. It sounds weird to even say it, but I have this dream that she dies. And like 3 weeks after her death, I'm like, I don't even— like, so the way my household works is I like focus on making the money. And she is in charge of like tracking and spending it. So it's like paying rent or mortgages and things like that. And like, I like when we— when I— when she died in my dream, I'm like, who do I pay this rent to? Or like, do you know what I mean? I was like, I literally don't know, like, what health insurance provider we have and how they get their money versus how, like, we— like, there's— or like, who's our dentist? You know what I mean? Like, I didn't even know, like, certain things like that. And it honestly freaked me out. And I couldn't imagine being on the other side of that, of like, How do we earn? Exactly.

I mean, it's kind of funny when you say it, but it's not funny if you're the person who doesn't know where the money comes from or how are things supposed to be paid. And it's actually terrifying and very, very bad situation to be. So, all right, let me talk about the monthly money meeting and how to do it.

It's quick.

It's 60 minutes. So you're kind of moving through these things. I have 6 quick, uh, 7 quick steps. It's very easy. All right, first off, appreciation. Kind of unexpected. Always start off with something you appreciate about your partner. Look at Sam's face right now. Sam's going, what the fuck is this woo-woo weirdo talking about? Move to LA, start talking about appreciation?

Where's the crystals? I laugh because we do that. What? And it's definitely still uncomfortable.

Oh yeah, okay, fine. Damn, impressed.

Like, I think you told me about it. Like, I've been doing— we've been doing these for years, but I'm like, I'll like, you or someone else like share something and I'm like, I'm going to add that.

Yeah, I'm thankful. I'm so, uh, I appreciate that whenever we travel as a family, you always make sure we get to the airport at the right time. Simple. I mean, you cannot say enough nice things. All right, so that's number 1. Number 2 is partner 1 updates. Quick things. Usually each partner will own one part of the financial system. It could be they own how much you spent on groceries last month, Or it could be making sure that this account flows to that and changing things. Just a quick update. If something has not gone right, like, hey, we agreed that we're going to spend $700 on groceries last month. I actually wasn't able to hit that. It was $850. Here's what I'm doing about it next month. Right? They own it. They get ahead of it. They talk about what they're doing as a plan. Um, take a shine, a light on it. Don't let it fester. Partner 2 does the same thing. 3, then you're doing joint updates. So are there any things we need to talk about together? Hey, what's up with your 401? Are you having the correct match? That kind of thing. 5, review our numbers. So like, are there any critical numbers? I actually don't look at many numbers on a monthly basis because we plan it on an annual basis and we look at it on a 6-month quick check-in because that gives us time to adapt if we need to. but I'm not trying to look at the freaking price of noodles in February. I don't want to talk about that. 6, open issues, anything open. And then 7, wrap it up. Always end with, I love you. I appreciate you. Give each other a hug. Start to align money with feeling good. And it might feel cheesy at first. You do it 4, 5, 10 times, you're going to actually start to feel it.

You tweeted out this thing, or I think it was from the book that you shared, but It had percentages for— it had like, like benchmark numbers of like save this percent, invest this percent, spend this amount on guilt-free things. Can you do those same percentages but for a couple that earns $300,000 or let's— we're actually going to round up for math, $500,000 a year. Okay.

I'll give you the standard numbers first quickly, and then let's talk about how things change if you earn more. So there are 4 key numbers you need to know in your financial infrastructure. I love it. Just 4. You don't need to track the price of pickles. The first is fixed costs. That's rent, mortgage, groceries, debt, uh, auto. That's 50 to 60% of take-home pay. Next up is investing. That's 5 to 10% of take-home pay. Of course, that's where real wealth is created. So I would prefer the higher, the better. Next is Saving. This is an emergency fund, saving for a down payment, even saving for a kid's activity or a vacation, 5 to 10%. And finally, my favorite one of all, guilt-free spending. This is eating out, travel, buying a round of drinks, whatever, 20 to 35%. So for me, the beautiful part is if you can fit it in like Tetris, fantastic. You can buy whatever you want as long as you're hitting these key numbers. It's very freeing. Now, when I look at couples or individuals who make a lot of money, $500K as an example, there's a couple of things that are common. The first is their fixed cost number tends to go lower because their income is higher. So instead of 60%, or in some cases people have 60, 70, 80%, their number is like 50%. It's on the lower end of that range. Once in a while, depending on where they live, it can even be lower than that. Their investing is typically higher. People who are making that kind of money typically, not always, but typically tend to be a little savvier with investing. And because the price of bread is basically the same, like, yeah, you might spend double the price on bread, but you're not going to spend 50 times more on bread. Therefore you have more money left over. Typically that goes into investing. Some of them save aggressively. So So, sorry, they, for investing, they might have 15% of take-home pay. If they're in the FIRE community or they're very aggressive, they might go 20, 25% of net pay. I like to see that number around 20% as your income gets up because you, when you have that kind of money, take it, make it work for you. You have the earlier you can do that, you can really let it ride and grow. Savings, 5 to 10%. Sometimes they go a little bit higher. You know what I often find with guilt-free spending? They can certainly be spending at the higher end of that. 35% of $500K is a lot of money, or 35% of the take-home.

Oh, these are all post-tax?

Correct. Post-tax. Um, sometimes I will see people who are investing like crazy. They're doing 40% or 30% of take-home pay, and I'm like, there's a lot of money. Your savings is really high. And then I get down to the bottom of the conscious spending plan and they're spending like 8% on guilt-free spending. And I'm like, what do you guys do for fun? And they're like, they always say the same thing. Well, you know, we like to go, we go to the park. We actually have money set aside. And then I go like this, do you actually spend it? And then they both look down because they wait till the end of the year. They don't spend their money. And then you know what they do with the money that's left over from guilt-free spending? They sweep it right into their investing. And they go, we're so good. We don't spend money. We invest it. That's a big mistake. You need to learn the skill of earning money. You need to learn the skill of managing money, but you also need to learn the skill of spending money meaningfully. So if you're making $500K, you should be learning how to spend that on the things that are meaningful to you.

How do you get someone who's a warrior to start spending?

It's very difficult. Let me tell you why it's so hard. I frequently have multimillionaires who come on my show and, you know, Sometimes one or both of them's like, we want to learn how to spend more. And people listening are like, what kind of freaks don't know how to spend money? That doesn't make any sense.

I'm one of them.

Yes, it's a very common affliction and it is an affliction because there, there are a lot of reasons for it. Often people grew up financially insecure, family only said we can't afford it. The only way they've related to money is scarcity. But when the numbers change, they change faster than the psychology changes. The problem is that you can get to a point where you have more than enough, but you're unable to actually spend. And I see several things happening. One, I see people who realize at a certain point, like, this isn't— something's wrong. We have these numbers on a spreadsheet, but it doesn't feel real.

I went through this where it was like, as an entrepreneur who sold— so my business, I sold it and made, uh, I had a windfall. Leading up to that, it was like, like, I think, I think I ran the company for 4 years, but something like the first 3 years, for the first 2 years, I paid myself roughly $24,000 a year, which was so stupid. People should not do that because my business was doing fine. I could have paid myself more. And so the third year was more, but it was like $100,000 a year, which in San Francisco is not like crazy amounts of money. So, but so there was like a long period of like, not a lot, not a lot, not a lot, a lot. And then it took like another 3 years to acclimate to the reality.

I love that reality. It's pretty unusual. Most people don't get the windfall like you did, but it may as well be the same thing because they look at the numbers and they're still feeling the way they felt when they were 7 years old sitting around the dining table and their mom or dad said, How dare you ask for that? We can't afford that. And so I know you've been on a journey to spend more money. It's awesome to see you talking about menswear now, talking about taking your family traveling. Like, that's not easy. That is really not easy. What I find is the ultimate thing that happens with folks is they start to ask for help and they look around and they make two mistakes. One is they ask for help among a bunch of other frugal people. So I see this in the FIRE community every day. Hey everybody, I, I realize I've crossed my FIRE number, but I can't seem to know, like, I can't seem to bring myself to spend money. And then within 3 comments, people like, you don't actually need to spend money. It's actually better to save. You should save it because who knows what healthcare is going to cost in 2065. I'm like, you're asking a bunch of frugalistas How to spend money. You're asking the wrong community. Well, it's like asking me how to go camping. Don't ask me. I have no idea. Okay. That's the first. Second is they come around and they start to actually try something. Maybe they eat out at a restaurant, whatever. And the first time they do it, it's, it's not particularly great. Maybe they picked a bad restaurant. Maybe they don't have the palate for it. Maybe they hired somebody to come clean their apartment or house and they don't like how the person folds their clothes. Okay. That happens. So then they go, ha, this shit doesn't work. I actually, I'm a good person because I don't spend money. I don't need to do all this frivolous stuff that other people do. So they've created this self-contained tautology, which ensures that they're never going to change. There's a much better way to do it. It's to build the skills now. It's to start spending on little things, discover what you like, what you don't, become clear with your money dials, enjoy it, do it with a partner. And over time you learn that spending money as a skill is often as important as earning and managing it too.

And I think that like the important thing is figuring out what makes you happy because you like, there's been times where I'll talk to you or me to you and we force what makes us joyful onto the other person. Like for example, you like fancy hotels and you're like, you should go stay at this hotel. It's like, that's just not—

it's not your thing.

I'm not— I'm kind of— this is a fake story a little bit because you don't do this too much, but— or maybe even ever. But it's like, go stay at this like fancy hotel. You're going to love it. It's like, that's not my— I don't, I don't get joy out of that. But what I love is like services, like monthly services. Like, so for, for you, for example, you don't own a house because you're like, I just don't get joy from that. And I don't, I don't know what your apartment looks like there, but like, for all I know, it could be just like a very, very modest apartment because you get joy spending elsewhere. And I think that that's like a really— that's a really challenging thing for people to get over because, for example, they'll say like— here's a really easy one— they'll say like, buy a home, it's a great investment. And I'll say, well, it's typically not a great investment, or like, that's not the reason to buy it. And they're like, well, you're going to throw away money on rent. And I'm like, well, You're not throwing money away. I'm acquiring a service and it makes me happy. And I'm also like buying— I'm like, I'm— my money is now in a— in the index fund that's growing. So like, that's a good investment. And they'll be like, so you shouldn't buy a home? And it's like, well, no, no, definitely buy a house. Just like I bought a steak last night. I bought this steak last night because it brought me joy. And if like owning your home makes you happy, and by the way, it oftentimes could be a good store of value. Uh, but like, which is a, which is just a cherry on top, but do it because you work and this makes you happy. And that's a good reason to do it. It's hard for people to understand just doing something because it brings you joy. And, and I've been there too.

Yes. I love what you're saying and I love watching you on Twitter cuz you're one of the only people who actually understands buying a primary residence. Is sometimes, but often not, a great investment. Here's what I think. I think that people use the word investing way too much. Like, I have a personal trainer. That's not an investment. That's a luxury. If I were to buy a house today, that would not be an investment. That would be the most expensive luxury I have ever bought. I will lose millions one day when I buy a house. I guarantee it. I'm going to lose mil and I'm going to do it with a big smile.

And you're going to be ridiculed on the internet because people know you as the guy who has— they say, but Ramit, you said never buy a home.

Well, illiterate people who don't actually read what I've said. I never said don't buy a house. I said run the numbers, then consider the non-financial. And then, but yes, you're right. There's going to be a big problem when I buy a house. Anyway, we use the word investing a lot. To justify purchases. Like I've had people who literally said buying a mattress, a $2,000 mattress is an investment. That's not an investment. That's a luxury. So, and when I asked them, I, this got me very obsessed. How do you know if you can afford it? And do you know what people said to me? They were like, your back is the most important investment you can make. I was like, hey, when I ask a question about affordability, Your answer better have a number in it. Affordability is a number, not a feeling. And what I've realized is so many of us use investment to justify purchases.

But what's the Ramit-approved answer to that?

My, so my answer for an investment, I narrowly define it as something that can provide a financial return. Simple. Otherwise, here I am justifying a $3,000 a night hotel. Oh, their air conditioning is triple filtered. Therefore, the hair on my arm doesn't stand up. Therefore, I can write a new book that makes me $100,000. It's BS. Same for the face cream I use. It's not an investment. It's a, it's okay to say, I like this and I'm going to buy it because I like it. That's totally fine. Now the affordability question becomes more complicated. You have to know your numbers and you have to have your percentages dialed in. But affordability is a financial question. It is not about feelings. And for the optimizers listening, I will say sometimes when you're talking to a partner who's not an optimizer, they want to talk about feelings. And in the book, I emphasize how important feelings are. You've got to meet your partner where they are. You can't just talk about numbers alone, but sometimes you need to actually engage with the numbers. Feelings are good. You should spend a lot of time on them. But at a certain point, you're running a business, the business of a household, and you need to look at the numbers.

How do you get over disagreements? Like if you or your wife is complaining to each other?

The most common reason for these disagreements is there is no shared vision of a rich life. It's literally one episode after another of nitpicking. And the perfect example I have is a, a person who wrote me on Instagram DM. And said, can you convince my husband to stop buying iced tea every day? I said, okay, how much does it cost? She goes, it's $5 every single day. We can make it at home. I said, okay, interesting. Hey, out of curiosity, what's your household income? And she became very cagey, but I gently asked her to share it. She lives in New York, she and her husband. You want to guess what they make?

I don't know, what, $200,000 a year?

$600,000 a year. So what you could see is that it's really not about the $5. To him, it was like, Hey, we work hard. This is just a little treat that I enjoy every day. It's great. To her, it was values based on how she was raised. And why would you spend money outside? A couple of thoughts when couples have disagreements, whatever the scale. The first is I always ask them, what is your rich life? Couples don't know. They never talked about it. They've only talked about why'd you spend that much on a drink? So what do we want in our life? What's important to us? Do we want to travel? Do we want to send our kids to this Activity, get into all of that, which I go into detail on. The next is to have your accounts set up so that you don't have to have $3 conversations. Sam, you said that the audience we're talking about today makes $200K or so plus K per year. You should not be talking about $3 purchases if you're making $200,000 a year. If you are talking about $3 purchases, you have misaligned your money, uh, systems, and you probably don't have a rich life. So the way that you set up your accounts to be united in a marriage, I highly recommend all the money goes into a joint account, and from there you each have some of the money flow to a separate individual account, a no-questions-asked account, which both of you know about, but each of you only has access to your own. And if that person wants to buy the $5 lemonade or the $20 tip, it's totally up to them. That's their money, no questions asked. That is how you unify your financial relationship and also give each other a little bit of flexibility.

Yeah, I did that this year. I have like my own little, my own account.

How did it change things?

You know, I think that even though you called me an optimizer, I'm a little, I'm more of a worrier. And I definitely feel— I feel guilt oftentimes buying things if they're above a certain amount, maybe in the thousands of dollars range. And so I put $20,000 into an account because I was like, here, I'm newly into— somewhat newly into clothing. And I got interested in like the craftsmanship and a lot of like this Japanese shit that I love. It's like pretty expensive. Like, it's like, um, $600 for like a button-up shirt. But like, I'm just like deeply fascinated by what I'm reading and I just want to like feel and touch it. And it's interesting to me, but I would feel a sense of guilt around it. So I was like, look, I've allocated $20,000. I could spend this guilt-free. And so I will spend it. I still feel guilt, but it's, it's definitely less guilt. But now at least I know that like, I used to feel a little sense of I'm disappointing Sarah. Because even though she's like on board with it, I'm like, I'm taking money away from, from the shit that she could use for something else. And I was like, and I'm also like, I'm embarrassed to spend $600 on like a shirt and I don't want her to know. It came from all these just being raised poor shit that like, you know, it never goes away. You just like, it's just like any other like daddy issues anyone ever, ever has. It never goes away. You just try to manage it.

Yeah. I like what you said about, I used to feel that I was taking away from her.

Yeah.

And what I see in the way you talk about it and how curious you are, because we text about this stuff a lot, is it feels to me now you are actually adding to your own curiosity. Of course, your family finances should be dialed in. Of course, you should have all your ratios working and your money flowing. Of course. but we should remember that two partners have gotta be intellectually, financially fulfilled. It makes them better partners. And as long as you're managing your joint money, you should be spending on your own. One of the, one of the worst things I see, this happens a lot with men, is men become shells of who they used to be. So you talk to a guy in their 20s, they have all these hobbies and interests. You talk to them by their 50s and I go, what do you like to spend money on? They go, Whatever my wife does, I go, we're not doing that here. Answer my question. What do you like to spend money on? And a lot of times they've lost all hobbies. I see that in myself. I have to fight to, to try to find some new hobbies because if it were just up to me, I would simply shrink myself. And so this happens to, happens to a lot of people, but especially men. And I, I want to encourage us to try to fight against that.

When I was kind of up and coming in my entrepreneurial journey, I used to make fun of self-development people. You fall in that category and so do I. I'm going to stop playing right now. Hold on. Well, no, but I wouldn't make fun of you, but just the idea of people would be like, I'm hiring an executive coach or I'm hiring a coach. I'm like, what? Man up. What are you doing? And then I started hiring a fitness coach and then a nutritionist. And by the way, a fitness coach could be like as cheap as like $50 or $100 a month with like Future or one of these things. But basically just someone to like answer questions and then also just tell me what to do. And I started doing that for so many different things. So I did for, it starts with fitness 'cause that's the easiest application. But then you're like, uh, we, we actually hired a, a home organization expert to come in and like teach us. And I'm like, dude, this is so much better way of learning to like read a book and also like, you know, the book, YouTube, whatever, all that stuff to get the general knowledge, but then have an expert come in and pay them money. It could be a small sum like you could, you could do a lot of this shit for $100, like a cooking class or something like really simple on Groupon if you really wanted to. But like simple coaches to come in to teach you. But then the best situation is like some type of ongoing like class, do you know what I mean? It's like the greatest way to learn.

I love that you said that. I also love that you said, I used to say man up, because just think about what's embedded in that phrase, right? That suffering is masculine and that if something is hard, it is therefore more valuable. I think there's some truth to some of that, but I also think that—

Yeah, yeah. Like there's grit. Grit's real.

Yeah, I agree. And I think that sometimes we make things too easy for ourselves and there is value in a challenge. but I also think that there's no prize given for living a smaller life than you have to. So I really want to inspire people to think about the things that you are interested in. There's probably somebody who can help you enjoy it more. I talked to a guy in the FIRE community and he was like, I just don't really like to spend money. Like, I'm good. So I asked him like, what do you like? And he gave me these generic answers. So I probe, I really like to ask, tell me more. He goes, I love coffee. And he goes, I buy these beans. Okay. And he's like, that's, that was the limit of what he thought he could do. I said, hey, what if you hired a barista to come to your house and teach you how to make your coffee in even better? It never occurred to him. And I love that he was receptive. He later went on to do that. Imagine that. That's $100, $200. Incredible. I had a book that I read about posture. I was like, I don't understand these freaking diagrams. How am I supposed to? I don't get it. So I hired them to come to my apartment and teach me how to improve my posture. That posture coach was transformative for me.

Did it work?

This—

that worked, dude.

It changed my life. When we think about posture, I had something that was going on. Like, when I would stand, I would find myself crossing my legs. It became uncomfortable on my back, and I'm like, this is weird. I'm like a young guy. Why? And I finally— going from problem orientation to solution orientation is like a major shift. We can complain about stuff all day long, but there's a certain point where some people go, I want to fix. I found her, she came to my house. The first thing that happened when I opened the door, she looked at me and she was like shocked. But she's like, what? And I was like, hey, why are you looking at me like that? And she said something to the equivalent of her average client is like 75 years old. And I was in my late 30s at the time. And I said, look, I've got a little weird thing, but really this is preventive. I want to learn how to be better at this before I have problems. And that is the dream of any coach, is for somebody to come to you before they have major problems. Proactively. We worked together, I think, 6 or 9 times. She taught me it's— posture is not just about putting your shoulders back. It starts from your feet and your knees and your glutes. The way I walk, she videotaped me walking and changed that. And the pain— there's no pain there. But more importantly, I can understand how the body works a little bit better than I used to.

Um, to wrap— the last question I want to wrap up, uh, this is funny that you put this on this doc that we had, but someone messaged me. He's a good friend of mine and I love him to death, so I'm making fun of him, but I, I, I, I love him. Um, he was like, I want to come in and talk about credit card hacks. And I was like, uh, you know, like ways that you could save, like get like 5% cash back and shit like that. And I'm like, I get why you, you like that. And like, Sometimes that's always fun to geek out on like cool puzzles and whatever, but like that's not needle moving to me or to a lot of people. Like I don't give a shit about like, you know, 2% cash back because that means I gotta have like 10 credit cards and that's like fucking complicated. And it's like just to make $1,000, it's like I'm gonna spend like 10 hours on this. I'm probably gonna forget to pay. Like it just, this is a fucking nightmare. And you have on here, you're like fight for simplicity. The more successful you get, the more you have to fight for simplicity. I have found that to be true, and this is definitely a champagne problem, but as like some things get, as you get a little, make a little bit more money, like you start thinking like, well, everyone else has a wealth advisor, or everyone else is doing this, or people, everyone else is investing in PE. Should we like do these things? Should we do that? And what's funny is like maybe there's some other level, I'm sure there is, like when you're worth hundreds or billions of dollars where it's like, yeah, like you actually do need to be a little complicated. But for the most part, for most everyone listening, simplicity is the answer, I think. Is that right?

I think so. I understand why when you're up and coming and young, it, it's fun to do credit card hacking. I get it. And it's fun to just learn new skills. I, I get that. But I have found that, um, it's very difficult to turn off the grind mindset and to become much more calm and run things like a CEO, not a hustler. I find this is true a lot with personal finance people. I know people who are worth a lot of money and they still do credit card hacks. And if we look at how much they make, it's a negligible amount. Like, I do it because I cannot turn the page on what got me here. And I don't realize that what got me here won't get me to the next level. So part of fighting for simplicity is that as you advance up, whether it be financially, relationally, et cetera, there are things that you simply cannot afford to do anymore. So I can't, I would not afford to be able to open up 10 new credit cards to save a total of $1,800 per year. That does not compute for what I'm trying to save and invest and my time. That's a— so that's very important to know as you advance. You've probably got to stop doing certain things that got you here and think about what is the new chapter of my life.

You're the man. Thank you for doing this.

Thanks, Sam. Always a pleasure, man.

When's the book officially out?

The book is officially out January 1st.

Oh, sick. All right. Two days, two or three days. Thank you for doing this. You're the man.

We appreciate you.