Steps You Need To Take For Financial Independence

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the Land Geek for their favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com and I'm really excited for today's podcast guest for a number of reasons, but I do remiss I didn't properly introduce my co host, Six Sigma. You know him, you love him. The automation guru himself, Scott Todd from Scott Todd.net landmodo.com and most importantly, if not automating your Craigslist postings, postingdomination.com thelandgeek and by the way, you can automate your Facebook postings as well. Today's podcast is sponsored by GeekPay IO the only set it and forget it automated financial CRM to manage your borrowers payments. Today's guest is really pretty cool guy. He does a lot Scott Allen Turner went from a money moron at age 22 to self made millionaire 13 years later by using a number of savvy financial ideas. He's basically a financial rock star. And you can see the. Well, you can't see it, but Scott and I can see it. He's got a guitar in the back there. Scott Allen Turner as featured on Forbes US News Business Insider Money how are you?

I'm doing awesome. Thank you guys for having me on.

Tell us about your money moron days and how you got out of it.

Sure thing. I grew up not getting a good financial education, which I guess would say pretty common for most people. Learn a lot from my parents, didn't learn it from high school, college, got out of college, had some student loan debt, got into credit card debt, got into a auto payment, not knowing anything about interest rates or getting insurance from a car. So I had a lot of debt coming out of school and that went on for a number of years. Got into too much house at the recommendation of one of my bosses. He said buy as much house as the bank will let you, which I almost did. And then my mid-20s, I got my financial awakening from a guy named Clark Howard. He's a slave. Syndicated radio host back in Atlanta. Started listening to him a lot, picking up on his tips and made that switch from being a money moron now to being better at money.

We'll say, well that's incredible. So you're a self made millionaire. How did you make your money there?

I have an IT background. I came from the corporate world, worked for a couple startup companies, then grew in employment there, got raises from there, branched out on my own, started a business with some guys that approached me. So for me it was getting the Corporate world got a late start in marriage with kids. So if you're single and not blowing all your money, you can put away a little bit. And then getting into investing, passive investing, index funds. I lost a lot of money in the stock market, so I was getting money more on days investing in those the wrong way and entrepreneurship has been a part of it. But really budgeting, saving, and living a somewhat frugal life and other aspects has helped as well.

Phenomenal. Scott Todd, what are your thoughts about this financial rock star?

I mean, you know, obviously he's done something right, you know, like I can't really. Can't, can't really like poke holes in him. I would just say that I must have missed the class in high school where they talked about money management as well, because I don't see it anywhere. My children aren't going through it. It's really something that you have to teach at home. And you know, I would think that we would have a change by now, don't you think?

Yeah. Scott Alan Turner why are we so deprived of a good financial education for our children?

Do you want to get into just government education, period, by morale? At least here in America, we're teaching to a test. I mean, if you want to go down to the root level, we're not spending time on how to balance a checkbook, how to go out and get an auto loan, the pros and cons of credit card use and all this stuff, how to get a mortgage. Instead, we want to go through and teach vocabulary for SAT words that you're never going to use in life. And teaching to a test is what it comes down to. Teachers have their hands tied. Unfortunately. They do as good of a job as they can, but it all stems back to them. And then also it's parents involvement. What did you learn from your parents? For me, I learned how to save. They said save. But my parents never owned a home. They rented their entire lives. My dad had a pension. My mom didn't have any type of work to a coffee shop most of her life or in the laundromat. They didn't have car loans, they couldn't teach me about interest. They didn't have student loans, they didn't go to college. And all those things you would hope you could learn from your elders. We didn't get it.

Sure, sure. You know, what about a.

I mean.

What about like an abundance mentality versus scarcity mentality? Did your parents have. That is what I mean. Did they have an abundance mentality or did you hear growing up. Money doesn't grow on trees, you know, that kind of thing.

It wasn't necessarily abundance. They lived a very. I grew up in a small town, 2,000 people. They lived a very simple. My dad worked for the town. I mean, they had my mom still in that town. She never travels. She has had the same friends for going on 65 years now. She's almost 80. And so I think that environment of not having a lot of wants, not having a lot of needs, having lower incomes, not going to college and getting a higher education contributed to a very simple lifestyle, which I picked up on some of that. But then as soon as I get away home, it's like, all right, I want to spend, spend, spend, now that I can.

Right, right. So tell us about the 99 Minute Millionaire in your book.

Yeah, absolutely. I host my own show, the Scott Alan Turner show, and I answer listener questions on there from anything from how to get started starting a business, beginning investing, beginning budgeting, earning more. And one of the most common questions I kept hearing over and over again is how do I get started investing? What do I do with that? And that came down to I don't know what a stock is, I don't know what a bond is, what is the market? And all these different things. Terms I tasked myself, I want to teach someone who knows absolutely nothing about investing why you should invest, even down to why the compounding power of that over time. In 99 minutes, take them from I don't know any of that stuff to your beginning investor and you're investing the smart way.

So what is the smart way to invest?

For me, I'm what I call a boring investor. After losing $40,000 in the stock market, picking high flyers like Yahoo, Cisco, Home Depot, some biotech technology companies I knew absolutely nothing about. Then I got into index funds, low cost, the Vanguard philosophy, buy and hold, buying all the market. So that's my investing philosophy that I follow and I teach, and that's based on academic research. It's based on guys who have PhDs, Nobel Prize, won the Nobel Prize in economics, guys who, they're not out to make money. They, they're just like, here's a research paper. I've done all this data crunching and here's what I think is the right investing philosophy. It works most of the time if you follow this philosophy compared to what I used to do, trying to time the market, picked companies I knew nothing about and all that stuff. So that's kind of what I try to teach people.

What do you believe about Personal finance that other people think is crazy.

For me, I do what I like to call value based spending. Some people, there's two different camps. Some people will say, don't ever have a Starbucks. It's five bucks a day and if you just didn't spend that money, you'd have a million dollars in 30 years. And then there's other people say, forget about the Starbucks, don't pay attention to spending. All go out, make another 20, 30 grand a year and that'll get you where you want to go. What I found is you can never out earn poor spending habits. So if you can recognize what makes me happy, what is the value I put into my different purchases and track those very simply and direct your money towards things that are important to you. In my own life, like spending money on vacation, like money spending money on going out to eat really nice meals occasionally. I don't care much about clothes. Those of you, well, you guys can see me got a T shirt on. This is my standard fare for most days of the week. Shorts, T shirt. And so I don't spend a lot of that money on that area of my life, but I direct it to others. And that's why I try to teach people, finding out what you want, what makes you happy, put the money there, cut back on the things that don't, and then you can come out ahead.

Scott Todd, what are your thoughts?

Well, I mean, I do kind of like lean towards the school of thought of like, look, if I want to drink from, from Starbucks, you know, my, my problem is, would probably be a, an income problem more so than a, than an expense problem. But if I'm, if I'm just out buying everything and buying every, you know, going to Starbucks and saying hey, every drinks are on me today, well, that's the fastest way to the poorhouse.

Right?

And I do agree in a hybrid approach, like what you're saying is if something brings value or joy to you, then there's nothing wrong with it. You know, like if Starbucks is what brings joy to your day, you know, and you have the $5, great, go do it. But I think that you can solve a lot of problems by generating more revenue, more so than you can. I mean, you can get rich, in my opinion, you can get rich quicker by generating more revenue than you can by skipping the Starbucks.

Right?

Yeah. I think that if you wanted to really find out what's important in your life, look at your credit card bill and see what you're spending your money on, because that'll tell you exactly what's really important in your life, then you can look back and be like, wait, is this really what I value or is this just, am I just on autopilot? And so I think the, you know, what Scott's making an argument about is being conscious of what you're really where you're putting your money. So he's making a conscious choice that, hey, look, vacation is important to me, but vacation is probably not that important to him. It's probably spending time with his family in a relaxed environment. That's really what's important. You know, it's probably not a fancy foodie meal, it's probably spending time with his family, you know, in, in an environment where, you know, they're having an interesting sort of gastronomic experience, if you will. So experiences is where Scott is saying, hey, this is where I want to put my money.

Yeah.

And I guess I don't put words in your mouth, Scott, but I think you're kind of making the argument that, you know, it doesn't matter how much money you make if you're not conscious of where your money's going.

Yeah, exactly. Paula Pant, she has her own show and she's got a good quote. You can afford anything, you just can't afford everything. And we live in a very consumer oriented society. And don't get me wrong, I love stuff, I love buying stuff, I mean, stuff in the background that I got. But I'm also aware of I can't afford everything. So I try to prioritize. And since most people, half of people in their mid-40s have no money saved towards retirement, they've obviously spent a lot of money, which I did early on till I changed that mentality. And when you start recognizing, alright, I'm spending every dollar and a lot of people carry credit card debt, so they're spending more than their income allows. It's a bad place. When retirement door approaches and you haven't saved anything.

Scott, let me ask you a question, just to pivot a little bit. What is your, I mean, because you went through corporate environment, you, you went through like what, like four rounds of layoff layoffs at your company. You survived, right? You saw an IT staff window from 50 jobs down to four. You know, most recently I heard like Lowe's, I worked in IT as well, okay? Like when I left my corporate job, I was a VP of IT for a Fortune 300 company. You see even IT jobs like, you know, these in demand jobs, that you see them getting outsourced more and more and more. What Is your thought about the safety around the corporate job myth, is it real? What do you think?

I think it's a myth. There is no such thing as job security unless you're the owner of the company and you don't have to report to a board because then you're not going to get fired, you're not going to fire yourself. Everyone has to be acutely aware of that in no matter what industry that you're, especially in those industries that are. The writing is on the wall. If you were making Blu Ray players years ago, all right, everything's going to Internet be streamed, you can kind of see that your job is going to go away. We're all about Tesla stock right now and self driving automated cars. So if you're in the auto industry and start thinking about that maybe 10, 15, 20 years somewhere down the road, the entire auto industry is going to look a lot different than it does today. The writing is on the wall and that's something that people need to be prepared. So I'm a firm believer there's no such thing as a job security. But man, if you are a rockstar employee, you've kept up with your education, you're a good worker, you get along with your co workers, the opportunities are always going to be there for great employees. Maybe not necessarily at that company, but somewhere else.

Scott, if I had to give you put you on a desert island besides your own book, and you can only have one personal finance book, right? And you're on the island for like three months, let's say, and you got to read it over and over again, over again and really, really take everything kind of to heart. What personal finance book would you pick and why?

My favorite one is called the Millionaire Next Door. It was written by a guy from George, Georgia, University of Georgia, years ago. It's about 20 years old, I think. And he went out and had this perception of what is a millionaire. And it's normally what Hollywood makes it out to be. All right, they're wearing fancy clothes, Rolex watches, awesome Louis Vuitton purses, drinking Grey Goose all the time. He went out and rounded them all up across the United States, got them in a room and started to figure out what are these guys really like? Oh, they're drinking Budweiser. They rarely buy expensive wines, normally 10 or 20 bucks. They've got blue jeans on, polo shirts. They're just, they're the millionaire next door. You never know who's who. These guys are. They didn't inherit. Their money is a big thing. We Think rich people, they get all the breaks. They've got all their money from their parents. Now it's about 8% of millionaires have inherited some type of money from their parents. They budget a lot. I think 60, maybe 80% of millionaires budgeted. And they budgeted to become millionaires. They didn't start budgeting after they became millionaires. And they drive used cars. They're not out in Mercedes. I mean, this guy broke down. What are they driving? What percentage of these people are driving trucks versus Mercedes or BMW or used cars? They don't lease cars. And it's an eye opener because it gives you this whole new outlook on here's how you build wealth. That's essentially what the book is about. You don't consume every dollar or more than every dollar you save and then you can become that millionaire. If that's one of your goals in life.

Yeah, I love it. I had somebody on the podcast, he said, mark, my rule of thumb is if you want a car, right, then it should be 1% of your gross income. So if you want a BMW, make $500,000 a year, right? Great, go get your car, right? But otherwise he's like, you know, it's, it's like one of the worst money eating things on the planet. What do you, what would you say about, you know, the future of investing? Because now, today more than ever, we have artificial intelligence. So I can buy an index fund, but I could buy a fund of funds and I could have something like Betterment. Just Robo sort of invest for me. Is this a good idea or would you say maybe talk to a human being about it still?

I think if you're just getting started, Robo advisors are a great opportunity. I like Betterment Acorns, I think Clink is another one. And all three of those, and there's some other ones as well. Vanguard, one of the big, big brokerage houses, has their own stuff, but they're all, again, based on that academic philosophy of buying a little bit of everything. Low cost, proper risk tolerance for whatever your investment horizon is. And I think that's a great place to start. As you start accumulating more, getting closer towards retirement, your family situation changes, your wealth situation increases. That introduces a lot more complexity. You start asking the question, am I going to have enough for retirement? And the question is, well, I don't know. So sitting down with somebody at that point, trying to figure out 10, 20, even 25 years ahead of whatever your projected retirement date is, can be very helpful because they can run all the simulations, here's your saving rate. Here's what your expenditures are. Here's how we think you're going to live. My wife and I talk about this quite frequently. It freaks people out. It's like, how long are you going to live? When are you going to die? What happens if I die? Are you going to get married or not? What's going to happen with the kids? Those are conversations that are normal in our house, but a lot of people treat them as, no, I don't want to talk about dying or anything like that. Well, sorry to say, you're going to die. Everybody's going to die. So you must talk about it and get it out there in the open and start planning for it. So I think getting started, to answer your question, yeah, robots are great. Moving on down the line. As you accumulate more wealth, a human can help you out and help you maximize your investments.

All right, I love it. What is the most frequently asked question you get on the podcast?

Probably number one is how do I get out of debt? Is the first one. And number two was the basis of the book how do I get started investing? So how do I get out of debt? That gets back into having a spending plan, writing down where is your money going so that you can direct whatever free money is left over towards paying down the debts as quickly as possible. If you got high interest credit cards, high interest car loans, student loans, paying those off has a guaranteed rate of return compared to investing in the stock market. Even though it's flying high right now and it has been for a while, that's going to come down and it'll come down to reality or negative. So the return may not be there like you can get with paying off a 12% credit card.

Yeah, absolutely. Scott. Todd, have you ever been in debt, like consumer debt? Credit. Credit cards?

Yeah, I've had credit cards.

You had credit card debt?

Yeah, yeah.

On stuff. I can't imagine you having real debt.

No, no, no, I, yeah, stuff like, you know, I, Mark, I had to move twice in my corporate job and sometimes in doing so, you'd put the stuff on the credit card just sitting by the house. Right. You know, you move into a house and, man, you got to furnish the house and, you know, I had to do that twice. And, you know, yeah, you take. You take your stuff with you. But still there, you know, the house, like my last house in down in southwest Florida, you know, like, it was a larger house than what we had. It was in a completely different area. We needed things in order to even live there because it was a brand new house, blinds, etc. So you know, that's a huge expense all at one time. I mean you've moved into a house and so some of that stuff gets added up. But then you got to attack it very quickly too.

Yeah, I like the Dave Ramsey approach of debt where you just like the easiest thing, right. It's like, it's called, what is the avalanche effect. Is that what it's called?

Snowball. The snowball effect.

Yeah. Yeah. You like that Scott?

I think it works for the vast majority of people, have been a lot of studies on it. There's some math people out there which I've had right in my show with actual examples in the paying off the higher interest loans first saved them money and got them out of debt quicker than what they would have done if they paid off the lower balance credit cards and worked through that way. So it's very situation dependent, it's very personal whether you're gonna get exceed one plan or the other. But overall, yeah, debt snowball works for the vast majority of people. Compared to paying off a $50,000 student loan at 8% and then you've got a $10,000 car loan at 3%.

Yeah, I mean, you know, education is becoming an almost untenable debt. Right. So only debt you can't get rid of and you can make the argument the return on investment is lousy. Unless, guess you're gonna become a plastic surgeon or you know, something, you know, real high earning. But let's say that you're gonna get a liberal arts degree.

Right.

What would you say to that kid that, that wants to, you know, go to college and, and study, you know, Liberal arts.

Yeah.

For somebody who's just thinking about getting started, hopefully they've planned out, all right, I want to get this degree. Here's what I'm going to do with it. Collegescorecard.com you can go to that particular website, type in here's where I want to go to school, here's what I want to graduate with, and here's what my potential earning is based on that specific degree coming out of that specific school and you can get an idea of all right, it's going to pay or take me 60 years to make this back. That's obviously not a good investment. But for somebody else, all right, we're paying 10,000 a year for four years that come out be making 35, 40 grand more reasonable. Certainly starting out at community college is a way to cut down on costs. I've had relatives that were in their senior year of high school, and they would knock out some of those core college classes that could then transfer. So they end up starting in their sophomore year at college just by doing college courses in high school.

Yeah. I mean, Scott, do you ever see a time where the degree won't ever matter? You know, you can go on itunes right now and take a Stanford class. You can go on lynda.com and learn how to do almost anything. I mean, today, education is abundant. Why do I need a degree? Do I still need a degree?

It depends on who you ask. In the corporate world, Fortune 500 companies, a lot of them, they're still in that old mindset. My wife went to school, get her master's degree. She got her MBA because that was necessary for her career path. She wanted to get commercial real estate development. I had a friend who had to get his. Well, he wanted to be in finance. It's one of the checkerboxes on the resumes and the hr. Do you have your mba? Yes. I've got this piece of paper. Nobody cares what your GPA is. Nobody cares about your school. It's just the check a box thing. And a lot of people still have that mentality. If you talk to entrepreneurs and serial or small business owners, they're like, I don't care what your degree is. If you can come here and do the job, it's yours.

Yeah. Yeah. Scott Todd, does the cost of education bother you?

Yeah, I think it's. I think it's extremely high. I read an article the other day that said that, you know, economists, if you will, are saying that in. In 10 years, education will be free. That the biggest. The biggest kind of resistance to that will be the universities who will scoff at the idea that you can get an education for free. But, you know, you're seeing there are signs out there that major employers, Ernst and Young, a very big accounting firm, for example, in 2015, basically said that they would not require a college degree as an entry requirement to their firm. You know, so I think that as companies begin to become aware that there's a lot of talent that you can have even though you don't have a college degree. When companies realize this, they're going to start to remove that barrier. And the companies. I think that the companies that do that will probably be the companies that rise to the top, because there's a lot of untapped talent out there that don't have college degrees. However, doesn't mean that they're not very intelligent I mean I've seen people with, with college degrees. You guys know people like this, they've got college degrees and they're like blank, you know, like you can't even have a conversation with them. Then you take someone who maybe barely even, I mean like you know, my father in law for example and my dad too. Both of them, neither one of them went to college. However, they are very strong, self taught men who basically they will study a manual and they will, they will plow down until they're successful. That's the kind of people that I think that you really want.

Yeah, absolutely. So Scott Alan Turner, before we get to the tip of the week, any last words of wisdom for us as far as personal finance is concerned?

Yeah, since we were talking about Robo Advisors earlier, I just would like to encourage anybody who has not started investing yet. Check out one of those options. You can get started investing with as little as a couple bucks in 10 minutes your way onto building wealth over the long term.

All right, I love it. All right, well now we're going to put you on the spot and ask you for your tip of the week. A website resource, a book, something actionable where the auto passive income listeners can go right now. Improve the businesses, improve their lives. What have you got?

Yeah, I've started using this new tool called Boomerang for email. I don't know if you guys have heard it or not of it.

Love Boomerang, although I will, I'm going to save you some money when we're after your tip though.

I love that application because when I'm answering listener questions, I like to give them a notification when the show goes live. I can schedule that in advance. It's a big time saver for me. And coupled with that, there's another one called text Expander. It can refill emails for you responses. Then you customize a little bit. Also very helpful. So I'm big into the email tools right now. They've saved me a ton of time.

I love it, I love it. Okay, I'm going to save you some money because right now I bet you're paying 50 bucks a month for the premium Boomerang plan, correct?

I'm not sure. I just signed up for a couple weeks ago.

Oh, okay.

Well, season free. Now I'm up to the new one.

Okay, so if you go to mixmax. Com, it's a chrome extension for Gmail and you can do all the things that Boomerang does for free.

Ooh, I'll check that out.

So check it out very Very cool. Great tip. Great tip, Scott. Todd, what's your tip of the week?

Okay, so, you know, we like to save time. We don't like to. And we like to save money too, right? So check out this website watcher, W A A T C H E R. And basically you can take a an Amazon URL for something that you want to buy on Amazon. And basically you can. You can set a target price, and when Amazon drops the price to what you want to pay, it will automatically buy the item for you. So you know when something goes on sale or you think it's going to go on sale. And we all know that Amazon's prices, they swing just like anything else, supply and demand. So set your price that you're willing to pay and buy it at the strike price. It's like investing on your spending.

Oh, that's a great tip. How'd you find this?

I'm good, man. I'm good.

You are good. Wow, that's really good, huh? Son of a gun. All right, well, my tips better because my tip is gonna get you out of debt, show you how to invest, and all that good stuff. Go to Scott AlanTurner.com and learn more. He's got a iTunes show, Google Play podcast. He's got a podcast, resources, articles on making extra money, getting out of debt, budgeting, insurance, investing, personal finance, and even how to avoid scams. It's awesome. Go to scottalantre.com I will have a link to his site. Scott, are we good?

Yeah. One last thing. I'm going to give you guys a special URL at my domain. Art listeners will be able to pick up a free audio version of my book, 99 Minute Millionaire.

Oh, that's really generous. I love it. My second favorite word after automation. So, scottalanturner.com art.

Yes.

Art. Awesome. Awesome. Scott. Todd, are we good?

We are good, Mark.

All right, well, I just want to remind the listeners the only way we're going to get the quality of guests like a Scott Alan Turner to come on this podcast is if you do us three little favors. You got to subscribe, you got a rate, you got to review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of the review to support@thelangeek.com we're gonna send you for free the passive income launch kit again. Today's podcast is sponsored by GeekPay IO. Go ahead, sign up. We'll send you a way to get a free demo and see if it's for you. Start automating your payments. Scott, should we do it?

I think we just sign off gently, Mark.

We're just gonna start off gently. Let's.

Freedom.

Ring.

Ring.

Thanks, everybody.