Afford Anything, Escape the 9-5, Passive Income and More with Paula Pant
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I'm your host, Chris Hutchins, and I am excited to have you on my journey to find all the hacks. And today we're talking to Paula Pan, the founder and creator of Afford Anything, where she runs an award-winning personal finance website, a monthly newsletter with almost 100,000 subscribers, a top 50 podcast. She has an amazing story starting her career as a journalist making only $21,000 in building up her business and a portfolio of rental properties from scratch.

We'll talk about breaking free from a traditional nine to five job. We'll talk about learning to value your time, taking many retirements throughout your life, setting up streams of passive income, and how life is just one big set of trade-offs that allow you to afford anything you want. And at the end, I'll make sure to get some of Paula's favorite hacks.

So let's jump in. Well, after I remind you that. Chris Hutchins works at Wealthfront. All opinions expressed by Chris and his guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Wealthfront. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions.

Paula, thank you for being here. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, so I have to start with afford anything. So to some, I think it could sound like a get rich quick infomercial. I know it's so much more than that. Can you let people know what you mean when you say you can afford anything? Sure. The whole philosophy behind afford anything is that you can afford anything but not everything. So every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else.

And that doesn't just apply to your money. That applies to any limited resource that you need to manage, like your time, your focus, your energy, your attention. Fundamentally, the concept of afford anything is the concept of opportunity costs. It's so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that life is an endless series of ands when in fact life is a series of ors. And are there specific things you think most people get wrong when they think about all of these trade-offs?

oh God, people do so much wrong. Where do I even begin? In terms of spending the money that you currently have, we'll start there. People often will, when they want to cut back on their spending, they chase money

The discretionary items which provide a psychological victory of easy wins, but don't actually move the needle. So if you, for example, buy a cheap beer instead of a $14 martini, you can pat yourself on the back for the fact that you spent only three bucks on the beer instead of 14 on the martini, right? But what you're doing in that one instance is

in that isolated incident is you're giving yourself a veneer or a facade of having made a frugal decision without actually doing something substantive that would move the needle in the long run.

Right. If you were to put that same level of cognitive effort into, let's say, putting more effort into a search for your next apartment so that you are renting something that is three hundred and fifty dollars a month cheaper with a similar square footage. Or if you were to put that same level of effort into being more aggressive about.

finding discounts on the types of insurances that you have, for example, right? The non-sexy stuff. If you were to put that same level of effort into weatherproofing your home, you know, weatherstripping and caulk, like that sort of thing actually moves the needle, but it doesn't provide the psychological victory. And so much of the time we're chasing the buzz, we're chasing the dopamine hit rather than the efficacy. Yeah, I've heard you call this fake frugality at times. And it's something that I've definitely struggled with.

Is there a way that you...

would recommend people, myself included, get over it. Because sometimes it's not as easy as just saying, well, yeah, of course, it makes more rational sense to spend time on these big decisions. But I feel like saving money and optimizing at every point is so ingrained in my being that it's hard to not compare the prices of the beers at a restaurant and think, oh, maybe I should get the $7 one instead of the $9 one and save a couple dollars, even though it doesn't move the needle.

Exactly. Exactly. It's difficult to do. I mean, fundamentally, you're asking a question about self-awareness, right? And it's difficult. Actually, really what you're asking is how to translate self-awareness into action, like how to bridge the awareness action gap, which is the question that has plagued mankind since the dawn of history. So I don't expect us to have it solved by lunch. But...

Where I would start would be in terms of saving money to focus on the big three, housing, transportation and food.

Those are the areas where you're likely to have the biggest wins. And in fact, if we want to extend that to the big four, it would be housing, transportation, food, taxes, right? If you can just nail those four things, you can get a lot of stuff wrong as long as you get those four things right. Beyond that, there's also, I think for most of the people who are listening to this podcast,

A very strong argument that perhaps saving money is not the side of the spectrum that they should be focused on. One of the philosophies that I like to teach is a philosophy called grow the gap. And what grow the gap means is that what we ultimately care about is the gap between what you earn and what you spend. And there are only two ways to grow that gap. You can either earn more, you can spend less, or you can do a combination of the two. And I would

venture to say that the majority of people who are listening to this podcast are probably educated enough, skilled enough, experienced enough that their bigger win could be found on the earning side of that equation.

Yeah. I think I've heard a lot of people say there's a lot more upside to earning than downside to cutting costs because most people can't spend an unlimited amount of money, though I've seen people try. You can't shrink your way to greatness. I know. And I think sometimes if you're really not spending mindfully, there might be a lot of opportunity to cut there. But once you've done that, there's not that much more to go. And there's a lot more creativity...

that you can apply towards earning more. And I know you talk a lot about financial freedom. How do you think that applies to this equation of earning more, having to work to make money and cut costs? So as I see it, financial freedom gives you the ability to no longer have to do something purely for the paycheck and gives you the ability to choose the type of work that you do so that you can do the work that is most aligned with

your skills, your talents, and what the world needs. For all of us, there was a time in our lives where we had to do stuff for a paycheck. I mean, I was 15 when I got my first job at the drive-thru of McDonald's, right? Like, the vast majority of us, unless you come from a very wealthy family, there's a time in your life, even if it's high school, college, maybe your early 20s, where the

So there's just stuff that you have to do. You got to do what you got to do, right? Like you do what you need to in order to pay the bills. You do what you need to in order to survive. Financial independence, as I see it, is building enough of a safety net such that your business

Basic survival is taken care of. That doesn't necessarily mean that you are quote unquote retired, as you call it, the cessation of work, right? Which is a beautiful way of describing it. It is not the cessation of income producing activity. It is simply building enough of a safety net that if everything goes to hell, you know that you can survive, you know that you can be okay. When you have that confidence, when you have that safety net built underneath you,

then you no longer have to worry about keeping the lights on and you're free to take bigger risks. I know you talk a lot about breaking free from this kind of nine to five life where you're working for 40 years straight, getting a couple weeks of vacation. Do you think that you can obtain this kind of freedom that lets you live life on your own terms while you're still working a job for someone else? Or do you have to work for yourself to do this?

Oh, no, you don't have to work for yourself. You mean in order to reach financial independence? Yeah. And and have that freedom.

You don't have to work for yourself in order to do it. I think oftentimes when, even when I talk about escaping the nine to five, the nine to five is a metaphor, right? The nine to five, or when I talk about escaping the cubicle, or, you know, those are metaphors for sucky jobs that you're in, not because you want to be in them, but because you feel like you have to in order to pay the bills. I have no objection to,

to working your dream job at a company or a nonprofit or some sort of enterprise that genuinely thrills you and makes optimum use of your talent and time and skills. You know, something where you know that you are building a legacy and you know that you are leaving an asset behind. Like that type of work, it

The ownership is less important than whether or not you are achieving autonomy, mastery and purpose through the work that you do. And what research shows is that if you have that sense of autonomy, mastery and purpose in your work, then you are highly likely to enjoy that form of work.

And so when I talk about escaping the nine to five, I'm using nine to five as a metaphor for those jobs that don't give you proper autonomy. Perhaps they micromanage you. They don't give you mastery. Perhaps they're a poor fit for your skill set and they don't give you a sense of purpose. You know, you're not in alignment with the type of legacy that you want to be leaving behind.

Yeah, I think I'm fortunate that after many years of discovery and searching, I found something where I actually really enjoy working for someone else and fulfilling autonomy, mastery, and purpose. But I know it seems to be, and this is unfortunate, but...

The norm when I talk to people is that they haven't found a job that they all love in that way. And that working for yourself is something so many people seem to aspire to. So what advice would you give to someone who's at a job that kind of falls into that metaphor of a nine to five, something they're not loving and fulfilled by?

If the goal is to grow a sufficient safety net such that they then have more options, more flexibility, the first thing that I would ask that person is, what is the most effective way for you to grow that gap, grow the gap between what you earn and what you spend? Now, for some people, particularly if you're already a high income earner and you live in a large home, you drive a newer car,

If there's obvious low-hanging fruit that you can cut from your lifestyle, then cut the low-hanging fruit first because it does give you that initial win and that initial win does provide that psychological motivation to continue on the path.

So particularly for high income earners, I would start with downsizing to a less expensive home, downsizing to vehicles or transportation that is functional rather than luxurious. I would start there.

Once that's done, I would not endlessly iterate that because that I think is where a lot of people go wrong, where they get so caught up in over optimizing that they, you know, when you hit the point where you're like unscrewing the oven light to save like, you know, two cents worth of electricity, you've gone you've gone too far. Before that, you've gone too far. Yeah.

Exactly. Exactly. And I use that example because that's literally an example that I read on a website once. The same person who also recommended tearing dryer sheets in half in order to make a box go twice as far. You know, like when you're bisecting your dryer sheet, you know, you've crossed the line. So don't become obsessive about extreme frugality. Pick the low hanging fruit and then shift your focus and...

find a way that you can earn more. Now, depending on the career that you're currently in, this could come in three different forms. Either you look for a promotion in your current line of work, whether that means getting promoted in your own company or creating a bidding war amongst many employers so that, you know, making a lateral move or even a vertical move into another company, right? So it could be a promotion within your own line of work. That's option number one. It could be

So retraining into a career change and retraining into a different line of work, ideally without going to grad school or without going back to grad school. And the reason that I say ideally without grad school, it's not because of grad school itself. It's because of student debt avoidance. Right. So retraining with a new skill set in a way that does not incur student debt. That would be option number two or retrain.

starting some type of entrepreneurial enterprise, some sort of side hustle, that would be option number three. So depending on your current line of work, one of those three options would be ideal for you. And which one is right for you depends on what you're doing. If you're an anesthesiologist,

Obviously, picking up a few extra shifts at the hospital is going to be a much better use of your time than selling candles on Etsy. Right. So this one size fits all that a lot of personal finance gurus out there, a spouse where they're like, everybody should start a side hustle is far too much of a blanket statement.

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Yeah. So we had Nick Loper on the show from Side Hustle Nation, and we talked a lot about some of the side hustles you can do to earn some extra income. But I don't think we spend as much time on how to transition side hustles into working for yourself and how to actually start a business. And I know that's something you've done. That's something you've talked about. You've interviewed lots of people. When someone has that idea in their mind of, I think I want to work for myself at some point,

Do you have a plan that you would share with them or a path or a process that someone should go through to try to make that happen? Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, when we talk about the world of side hustles, I want to distinguish between two forms of side hustles. First, you've got what I refer to as gig economy side hustles, things like driving for Uber, driving for DoorDash, walking dogs. This is the low hanging fruit of side hustles because you can start earning money immediately and

but you're fundamentally not really growing your own business, right? You are fundamentally a dog walker on Rover or a driver for Uber. Great if you need a quick hit of cash, but it's not something that's, I think, scalable for the long term. So I want to distinguish between that gig economy form of side hustle versus...

starting your own business. And when you start your own business, you can either sell a service or sell a product. A lot of people start as service providers because there's a low cost of capital in doing so. And...

So for example, perhaps you have a skill that you can sell as a freelancer, right? Whether that skill is writing, web design, coding, logo design, whatever that skill may be. Perhaps there's a skill that you can sell as a freelancer or as a consultant that is a low cost of capital way to start. And a lot of people begin there

And that will allow you to become self-employed. But there's a distinction between being self-employed versus being an entrepreneur. And if you do your job well,

and you are successful at selling the service that you are offering, there will eventually come a point where you have to make the decision, do I want to become an agency? Meaning, do I want to be an agency that sells this service? Or do I want to transition into product development and sales? And by the time that happens, you will be far enough into self-employment. You will be far enough into selling the service that you offer.

that I think you'll have a clear idea of which of the two paths you want to go in. I'll give you an example from my own life. So I used to be a newspaper reporter. I made $21,000 a year. And those are $2,005, right? That's not like in 1942, I made $21,000. So I graduated from college 2005. I first job out of school, I made $21,000 a year as an entry level newspaper reporter.

I worked at that newspaper for three years. And at the time that I quit, my ending salary was $31,000 per year. So that is what my honors diploma got me. And 2008, I was like the last person to get the memo that print newspapers are not the way of the future. I was going to conferences and...

Everyone at newspaper conferences back in 2008, like people were showing photos of Craig Newmark, I think the guy who invented Craigslist. People would show his photos on slide decks and they'd be like, this guy killed newspapers. You know, this guy destroyed classified ad revenue. And so it was clear that the whole industry was collapsing. A lot of major newspapers were shutting down. McClatchy was on a hiring freeze. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer had gone to online only, I believe. Rocky Mountain News shut down.

So it was clear to me that the future was going to be freelance and online. And so my thinking in 2008 was I've got to transition into being an independent journalist. I need to be freelance. I need to be online. I wasn't thinking about starting a business. I wasn't yet aware that there was a distinction between self-employment and entrepreneurship. And so my thought process at the time was simply, can I create a job for myself?

And so I began my career as a freelance personal finance writer, freelance personal finance journalist. I specialized in that niche, knowing that like specializing in a niche would be the key to getting freelance gigs. And I did that for a number of years. And I eventually just hit the point where the work that I was getting wasn't just coming from news organizations. A lot of it was coming from fintech companies.

Because fintech companies needed content on their websites and they didn't necessarily have enough staffing to have an in-house content creator. And so they would have some harried, overworked marketing person who would contract with me to write articles. So I began doing that. And then I realized that this harried, overworked marketing person didn't really have the bandwidth to even manage me.

And so then I just scaled up and was like, tell you what, I will provide turnkey content management services. And I became an agency and I started hiring writers under me and became content management for hire for certified financial planners, for accountants, for small fintech companies. This was maybe 2012, 2013. And that was...

the transition from self-employment to entrepreneurship. And it happened very organically. There was never a plan. It was never a goal. I just sort of kept seeing where the needs were and what the pain points were in the market.

And then continually responded to those. And then in parallel, I was also building out Afford Anything. And I was growing this audience at Afford Anything. And this audience kept asking me questions about investing, specifically real estate investing, because I was doing that with the money that I was making. And so there were enough questions coming from the Afford Anything audience that it was clear that there was demand for an online course. And I hit the point where I was like, I can't do both. I can't.

be a service agency and also develop a product, I'm going to have to do one of the two. And neither of these are built out enough that I could sell either company. So one of them, I'm just going to have to pull the plug on. And that was terrifying to grow a six figure business and then just pull the plug on it was like absolutely terrifying. But I pulled the plug on the service agency, cut all of that.

And went entirely into product development and built this course for Afford Anything. And I assume the course when you first made that decision wasn't already generating six figures that it could easily replace the service business. Is that fair? Correct. Correct. Yeah, it was not.

So I feel like that decision might be very similar to the decision of many people who are working at a six-figure job and thinking about a business they could run, thinking about starting something on their own, and are terrified with the idea of basically losing their income and starting something and taking a risk. Yeah.

Is there anything you learned from going through that that you would tell someone facing that same kind of terrifying decision of giving up the known for the higher upside, more enjoyment unknown? Yeah, absolutely. So I was absolutely terrified and I probably delayed making that transition by a year longer than I should have.

What gave me a lot of peace was knowing that if I could do it once, I could do it again. So I wanted to take this moon shot. I wanted to see if I could grow for anything to become as big as it could be. And I knew that if it flopped, if it didn't work out, I had already grown a six-figure service business once.

There's nothing stopping me from being able to do it again. I was talking to a friend who worked at Google and they were considering whether they left to start a business on the side. And I gave them kind of a similar piece of advice, which was...

do you think that if this didn't work and you went back, you could get hired again? And their answer was like, of course, like everyone is trying to hire talented people. My performance reviews have been great. I'm sure that any year, if I left this job and things didn't work out and I reached out to my manager and said, hey, could I come back? They would absolutely say yes.

And what it did was it changed the perspective of it's not giving up my career to go try something. It's taking a year off and knowing that the downside isn't a career. It's however many months of income I would lose by taking this risk. And so they'd saved enough money that, you know, they could do that. And they said, OK, I'm going to take a year off. And if it doesn't work, I might know after three months. I might know after six months. So it's a relatively low risk.

And some companies, if you're transparent, might even just let you take a sabbatical. You might not even have to leave to go explore this if you work in a field where your services are so in demand that companies would kind of

of do all kinds of things to try to make sure that they accommodate you. So you can do this even if you've never started a business before, you've got hired before. So it could be that that is your opportunity cost as well. Absolutely. Absolutely. And what I love about the opportunity cost, as you just described, when you have a runway, then fundamentally, the only thing that you're risking is that you are living more frugally than you otherwise would be.

And when that's the worst case scenario, that's not that bad. No, especially if you're doing something you're passionate about. It is so hard if you're working a job you hate to maybe give up a few of the joys you have in life. But if you're giving up the job you hate to go do something you're incredibly passionate about...

And every day you're excited to be doing what you're doing. It's way easier to maybe give up the vacation that year or a nicer car because you have this thing you're so passionate about to focus on. And so I think it's easier to be frugal in your life when you're doing it because you get to do something that fulfills you more. Exactly. Exactly.

So one of the things you mentioned was that you had started investing in real estate. And earlier, we talked about how you could

get a promotion, you could find a new career, you could start a business or generate your own income. We didn't talk much about the idea of passive income, but I know you sometimes talk about the long game, about ways that you can start to apply your time, skills, and money towards generating kind of really sustaining long-term financial returns. Yeah.

What do you think about passive income versus active income? And should everyone be focused on it to some extent? So the first thing that I would say about passive income is I want to emphasize that passive income is not a euphemism for free money. Passive income, or its synonym, residual income, is...

front-loading the workload. And it refers to the type of income that you make from any project in which you do a ton of work upfront,

So that you can enjoy that residual stream later. That could be writing a piece of software or a book or a piece of music that provides royalties. That could be building out a YouTube channel or a website or a podcast where you're still monetizing the back catalog.

making money off of episodes that you created or articles that you created years ago, right? It could be buying rental properties where you front load that workload of searching for the property, renovating it, getting it rent ready for those first tenants, finding a great property manager, building out the systems and putting that in place.

That is another example of passive or residual income. But I do think it's important to emphasize that it is it is in no way a euphemism for free money and building out streams of passive income requires a significant amount of work.

That said, what I love about passive income is that it separates time from money. So much of the time we frame money in the context of time. So we might say, I charge X per hour or he or she makes Y per year.

And so this link between time and money is very held together in our minds. And what I think is beautiful about passive income is that it destroys that link and allows money to flow in independent of our input of time.

Yeah. And I think if you're able to set those streams of income up, then it makes it easier to have the flexibility to maybe pursue a new business down the road. Obviously, if the business is the passive income, then that's a little different. But one of the forms of passive income I know you're passionate about, or at least you've spent a lot of time on, is rental properties. And I think one of the interesting characteristics of it

is that unlike maybe writing a piece of software or creating a piece of music, it's a bit more accessible in that if you don't know an instrument or you aren't able to write software, those other ones are pretty difficult. Not that you can't learn and train up, but I think they feel less approachable. But

buying rental properties is something that I think many people see as much more approachable. Do you think that it could be something as a first step in passive income for almost anyone? Or do you recommend it for certain types of people? I would say that the first thing is that you have to actually want to do it. Right now, rental properties have enough buzz that there are people who are FOMOing into it, doing it because everyone else on the internet is.

And if that's your motivation, then that's the wrong reason to do it. And in any endeavor that you pursue, whether it's your career, your investments, your relationships, like there will be tough times. And if you don't actually want it in the first place, you're not going to be able to hang on through the tough times. So don't invest in rental properties unless your desire to do so is genuine.

That's the first thing I'd say to anyone. That being said, I do believe that if the desire is genuine, any middle class person in the United States would be able to do it.

You don't need to be handy. You don't need to live in a low cost of living area. I'm a firm believer in investing out of state for people who live in high cost areas. In fact, I prefer out of state investing over local investing for a variety of reasons. The big one being that it forces you to treat it like a business, forces you to develop systems, it forces you to build a team. You can't just...

swing by and replace the batteries and the smoke alarm. And so the forcing function of living far away from your properties, I think, absolves you from the need to be handy, forces you to treat it like a business, and gives a lot of geographic arbitrage power to people who are high-income earners living in high-cost cities.

I know you have a course that talks a lot about getting into this, and we'll definitely link to that course in the show notes for people who are interested. But at a high level, is there anything you would recommend someone do to start to say, am I passionate about this? Can I make this work? Do I have enough money saved? Are there a few criteria you'd check off that would make someone a good fit for buying a rental property? Well, if you have credit card debt, pay off the credit card debt first.

Don't do anything until you've done that first. Now, that doesn't apply to student loans. It doesn't apply to, of course, if you have a primary residence mortgage. If you've got that lower interest single digit interest rate debt, I'm less concerned about that. But certainly pay off your credit cards. Make sure that you have an adequate emergency fund. Take care of those financial basics first.

And if you are offered a 401k match or a 403b match at work, make sure that you're contributing enough to your retirement accounts that you're at least getting that match. So those are the first steps. That's what I refer to as financial basics.

after those financial basics are taken care of, then the world is your oyster in terms of what types of investments you want to go into. And if your interest is going into rental properties, then it is time to dive in and learn about it. I think the mistake that a lot of people make is they go in unknowingly. They make assumptions. They assume that as long as the

rent covers the mortgage, they'll be okay. That's one of the worst beginner assumptions that you can make. And so a lot of people, because they, I call this the error of the apparent similar, where because they have experience doing something at the amateur level, they believe that they can do it at the professional level. You know, just because you can hit a ball around a tennis court does not mean that you have the skillset of a Wimbledon player. Just because you can make dinner for yourself at home doesn't

It does not mean that you have the skill set of Gordon Ramsay, right? And so just because you've been able to purchase a personal residence for yourself does not mean you know how to look for properties, how to analyze properties, how to think about renovating properties. It doesn't mean that you know how to think like an investor. And the mistake that a lot of people make is that because they've done this at a personal level,

They believe that they know how to do it at a professional level. And that's the reason why I think it's so important to learn how to properly analyze, find, finance, and make renovation decisions. I don't mean pick up the hammer yourself. I mean, create a scope of work. How to do that from the lens of an investor.

And when you got started, you didn't know any of this. How did you learn all of it? It was a combination of trial and error, reading as many books as I could get my hands on and going to investor meetup after investor meetup after investor meetup, you know, like repeated exposure to the point where I could eventually separate the wheat from the chaff, like the signal from the noise. The...

unfortunate reality in the world of real estate is that there are a lot of what I call like the scammer gurus, you know, Lamber gurus driving scamborghinis. You know, you have a lot of ego in real estate. You have a lot of people who are flashy and they are promoting high risk, high leverage strategies. And frankly, I think a lot of what they're saying is dangerous. And they say it because they have

a vested interest in selling their idea to you. When you think about the world of real estate, most of the people that you deal with, real estate agents, lenders, these people don't get paid until you make a purchase. And so their incentive structure is to get you to buy. And oftentimes they will not give you the full picture. They're not fiduciaries in your corner.

And so I think what's unfortunate about the world of real estate is that it's so easy to be led astray. And oftentimes, the people who are led astray are being led astray with leverage, meaning the magnitude of your mistake is amplified. I got lucky in that when I started, I didn't know what I was doing and happened to make good decisions. But it was a roll of the dice and easily could have gone the other way.

I guess that's why I'm such an advocate for people taking the time. And I don't want people to get stuck in analysis paralysis, but I do feel that it's prudent to take the time to do your due diligence before you jump in because I didn't do that. And it is only by the grace of God that I happened to get lucky. And the fact that I did not do my proper due diligence before getting started happened to work out for me, not through any skill of my own, but through sheer luck.

I'm very glad that you were lucky for your sake and for the sake that you can now share all this with us. I know a lot of people just kind of grew up with that belief that owning real estate is really important. And in today's age, I know a lot of people also love the idea of flexibility and not necessarily being tied down. So...

owning a rental property, I see people often coming at it because they say, well, I'm not ready to buy a house where I live. Maybe it's too expensive. Maybe I want the flexibility. But also, I want to own property, so I should get a rental property. And if that evolves to a true passion, I think that can be a really interesting opportunity for them.

But what do you think of some of these alternative ways to kind of own a piece of real estate, whether it's online platforms to buy parts of homes or even just investing in a REIT index fund as an alternative to buying rental property? How do you think of those as options?

I think a REIT index fund is fine. It's not going to be as low correlation. So oftentimes when you're diversifying a portfolio, you want low correlation assets, meaning that as one asset class moves, you want to be in different asset classes that don't move in tandem with that one given asset class. So if equities are moving in one direction, you want other asset classes within your overall portfolio that aren't necessarily moving hand in hand with the way the equities are.

When you own specific individual pieces of property, you have what is essentially a hybrid between a business and an investment. You know, you have direct managerial authority over that piece of property. You get to make the decisions around it.

And it has low correlation to other aspects, other elements of your portfolio. If you have a REIT, there's greater correlation between that REIT and the overall equities, greater than if you were to own properties directly yourself. That said, I'm a much bigger fan of REITs than I am these crowdsource investing platforms. The reason that I don't like crowdsourced investing is that it is fundamentally...

the actively managed mutual fund of real estate, right? If you're picking an actively managed mutual fund, and I don't recommend that people do that, but if you were to do that, then your job is to pick an excellent fund manager. And having the knowledge and the level of due diligence to be able to pick an amazing fund manager is itself a skill, right? There are people in the finance industry

whose sole career is picking good managers. So what makes you think that you can do that better? And to be more specific or more clear about what I'm talking about, if you look at some of these crowdfunded real estate investing platforms, they might say, hey, look, check this out. Here's a 250 unit apartment complex in Gainesville, Florida. And here is a commercial shopping center in Raleigh, North Carolina, right? Right.

How do you as an individual investor know anything about the location of that apartment complex in Gainesville or that commercial shopping center in Raleigh? Like, how do you understand the location? How do you understand...

whether or not it's a good idea. How well do you understand the people who are managing that project? How good of a job do they do at managing said project? You know, there's a ton of due diligence that you yourself would need to do in order to know that that is a viable investment. And yet so many people

believe that a crowdsource platform absolves them of due diligence. It's like a get out of due diligence free card. So I know a lot of times when people think about getting into this and whether it's passive income like real estate or starting a company, the most often heard complaint or kind of objection is that people don't have enough time.

And I've thought about this a lot because I kind of have struggled with valuing my own time. And I know it's something that you have spent time thinking about and trying to kind of get over as well. So...

How do you think people can start to value their time more so that they can spend it on the things that they care about, the things that are going to drive that long-term kind of impact on their life? So the best advice that I heard about this came from a writer named Laura Vanderkam, who I know has been a guest on both of our podcasts. And Laura's advice was to first fill your schedule with all of the things that cannot be outsourced.

And only after you've done that, can you then start to fill your schedule with the things that could be outsourced. So for example, exercise is something that you can't outsource. As much as I would love to pay somebody to run on the treadmill for an hour on my behalf,

I just can't like, hey, can you can you weightlift on my behalf? That would be great, by the way. I would love to be able to do that. Exactly. But, you know, exercise can't be outsourced. Sleep cannot be outsourced. Calling your mom cannot be outsourced. Right. So you first fill your schedule with all of those activities and only after that.

You filled your schedule with that. Do you then take a look at everything else that you could potentially delegate and ask the question, what of this should I delegate? What of this should I just straight up eliminate? And what of this should I actually do? Is there a way you found to get more comfortable with spending money on things that save you time? I know for me...

I go back to all these examples like, wow, I'd rather drive an extra 30 minutes to get this thing that's $5 cheaper. And that's a terrible use of my time. But I've just always struggled. And no matter how much I divide my salary into hours, it still makes it very difficult to pay someone to do something that you could otherwise do yourself. And it almost seems at odds with the idea of saving. Yeah.

Right, right. Exactly. So I've struggled with this a lot because it used to be many years ago when I first started hiring and delegating, I kept telling myself, if only I were more productive, if only I put in more hours, if only I was more productive during the hours that I worked, right? Couldn't I save this money? There's so many people online who will say,

Yeah, but your hourly rate is, you know, X. Like, let's say your hourly rate is, I don't know, $100 an hour. And so if you can pay somebody $30 an hour to do this thing, your time is valued at $100 an hour, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Except that I'm aware of all of the hours

that I am unloading the dishwasher. I'm aware of all of the hours that I'm clipping my toenails, right? Like I'm aware of all of the hours that I'm not actively making that money. And so when you take that to its logical conclusion, right, then it feels as though like, well, geez, if I just cut back on like clipping the clipping my toenails hours, I could do it all, right?

And so I've learned not to try to take that line to its logical conclusion because then you end up in a logically extreme situation. I've learned instead to put boundaries around the number of hours that I am willing to theoretically work. So I might say, hey,

I'm willing to work a maximum of 45 or 50 hours a week. What can I do within that container? And everything has to fit inside of that container. And if it doesn't fit in that container, then it has to be either delegated or eliminated. Yep.

Yeah, one thing I've realized thinking through delegation, and this is a recent discovery, is there are things that you might think are wildly expensive to delegate that maybe aren't. And so my wife and I were talking about what's something in our week that is taking up a lot of time and preventing us from spending it on other things.

And we realized that now that we started eating with our daughter, who's only 12 months old, we're spending a lot of time trying to get dinner ready for her meal time, which was 530. And we were like, gosh, I'm sure it would be so expensive to hire a chef to come into our house and cook for us every night. And the short answer is, yeah, it's really expensive to hire a chef to come in for a couple hours every night and cook for you.

What it turns out it's not as expensive to do is hire someone who's not a professional chef, but who cooks just like I cook. And they'll prepare your entire week of meals in advance and bring them over one day of the week, put them in your fridge, and then you just have to either reheat or throw something in the oven. And the difference in that ends up being far less expensive than ordering out, much more control over health. In fact...

I think in advance, I make much healthier decisions. So I'm actually eating healthier than I normally would be and not spending that time. But at first glance, I thought it was impossible because it would cost thousands of dollars to have someone cook every meal. And I love to cook, but...

it became a chore to have to cook by 5.30 every night and it wasn't as enjoyable. So I just challenge you, if you think there are things that you want to delegate and you don't think it's possible, for us, it was the difference between searching online for private chef and meal prep. And it turns out that when you search for meal prep, you find something far less expensive than private chef. So I think there are ways to delegate your time that you might not have expected. Right, right, exactly.

So I'm curious, and this is a total non sequitur, but in the email that you sent me when we set up this interview, you mentioned that you flew to Egypt on a one-way ticket. I did the same. And you're the first person I know, other than my travel companions, to also fly to Egypt on a one-way ticket. Tell me about that.

Yeah. So one of the most exciting things about talking to you is that I feel like there are these weird things that the more I researched your background, we're very similar. So just to give everyone a full long story, we've both spent time in our lives worried about being able to make money in the future.

We both went to a state school in Colorado. We both traveled the world from 2009 to 2010, mostly staying in really, really inexpensive countries. And as you mentioned, we both started with a one-way ticket to Egypt.

Now, I think I'm going to disappoint you with this answer. But my wife and I decided we're going to take a trip around the world. Where do we start? What do we do? And we're like, wow, it is really cheap to go to Cairo. Let's go to Cairo. And so we bought this one-way ticket to Cairo. And about a week before, I was talking to someone and they said, you know what would be really cool? I read this book called

about traveling overland from South Africa all the way through Africa up to Egypt. And I thought, wow, that's what I want to do. And then they asked, well, okay, what are you going to do after that? And I said, well, I also want to go through the Middle East and we want to go to India. And they said, well, you're going the wrong way.

So about a week before we took off on our one-way ticket to Cairo, we were like, we need to start at the other end. So we bought another ticket, but it turns out that the market for flying into

internationally within Africa is almost exclusively business travelers. And so it is incredibly expensive. So we found a cheap flight going from Cairo through Kenya down to South Africa, and we bought that, but it left the next day. So we started the trip in Cairo. I visited a friend who I'd worked with who happened to live in Cairo for a day, maybe it was two days.

We quickly went down to South Africa. We actually started in Cape Town and we worked our way overland all the way back up to Cairo, with the exception that we tried so hard to get a visa to go to Sudan and couldn't. And so we ended up having to buy a ticket from Uganda back up to Egypt. Wow. How long did that trip take? And what were you driving?

So we were actually taking mostly trains. So we, we started in South Africa, uh,

We went on a forum on the internet and met two Swedish grad students who were about to start medical, like a medical externship at a hospital in South Africa. And the four of us rented a car and made it all the way up to Zambia. They came back and we took a 52-hour train ride through Tanzania, which if anyone ever...

has time on their hands in Africa, the Tazara train was like the coolest experience because it basically goes through the middle of Tanzania, places you never would go on a car. And the train stops randomly. Sometimes it breaks down and you've got to wait for them to fix something. But you get to see a side of Africa that it would take hours and hours to drive to.

And mostly trained around buses and everything. And then finally had to fly. The whole trip was about eight months. And I think we did it on about $30 a day. So about $1,000 a month. And it was one of those amazing things that you never get the opportunity to do until you force yourself to do it. And I'm so glad we did back then. That's awesome.

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I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com slash deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. Well, so for context and for people listening, so as you mentioned, this is something that we have in common. I also traveled. I traveled for 27 months from 2008 to 2010, visited...

17 countries over the span of 27 months, starting with a one-way ticket to Cairo, just as you did. And what did you learn? What was your kind of macro takeaway from doing that? Oof, jeez. You know, the idea of Afford Anything actually came to me when I was in Indonesia. I don't think I've ever told anyone that before. You heard it here first on this podcast.

But the actual phrase afford anything came in Bali. I was thinking through what I wanted to do next because I had just in 2008, I quit the newspaper. And that was a really ballsy move. Like who voluntarily quits a declining industry during a recession? Absolutely no one.

And so everyone told me that I was committing career suicide, that I would never get a job again. And in hindsight, they were right. I never did get a job again. And it was during that trip that I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to do next. You know, I had a sense I was going to be a freelance writer, but...

I also knew that I wanted to build an asset. There's a difference between writing for other people's publications versus starting your own publication or starting your own platform. And so I had a sense that there was an asset, there was a platform, a publication that I wanted to create. And the name Afford Anything came to me during that trip. That's amazing. I think travel is something that

kind of opens your eyes, changes your perspective in so many ways that if you're lacking creativity in your life, I think there's nothing more inspiring than visiting a place you've never been, meeting people you don't know that speak a different language and seeing where that takes you and changes your state of being and state of mind. Yeah.

Absolutely. I think that so many people feel like they can't take a trip like that. And to be clear, 27 months is a very long time. Even my eight-month trip, everyone I know thought was an incredibly long time. But people think that you can't do that. You have to quit your job and go on career suicide. And it's just not possible until you retire. But...

I've heard you say something that I don't think anyone else has said. Mini-retirements, semi-retirements. What is that and how could someone do this in their 30s, in their 40s or 50s? Yeah. Yeah, it's funny. There is this assumption. It's a very binary, all or nothing thinking type of mentality where you're either working or you're not. You're either in your career or you are fully retired. Right.

I think that's an old and outdated model. And so let's first, I'll start by defining the difference between a mini-retirement versus a semi-retirement.

A mini-retirement is essentially a sabbatical. You take a designated period of time off of work. It could be three months, six months, eight months, as you did. So you take a limited period of time away from work, and you either do that by taking a leave of absence from your employer, or you do it when you are between jobs, between employment, or if you run your own business, you set up the systems, put the team in place, get everything running properly.

to such an extent that your business can operate independently of you for a temporary period of time. So that is what a mini retirement is. Semi-retirement is different. Semi-retirement is where you go on maintenance mode. So you're technically still checking in

But you're not working full days. You're doing just enough to keep your current projects alive, but not enough to have them grow. I've spent a lot of time, especially in the last 10 years, oscillating between periods of intense growth where I'm parked at home and focused on growing my business and periods of what I call maintenance mode where

where I'm intentionally not growing and I'm in that semi-retired state. And during that time, I'm off gallivanting in Slovenia or Croatia or, you know, I've been to Ecuador five times in the last couple of years. You know, I'm off elsewhere doing something fun. Not to say work isn't fun, but, you know, something different. And so that's the distinction between a mini-retirement versus semi-retirement. And depending on your situation, there will be phases of your life where one or the other is...

better or more applicable. When I took that 27-month trip, I had just quit working at a newspaper. And so given that I was between jobs, that was an ideal time to just take that mini-retirement, take a 27-month break.

and say, I'm going to travel the world full time for over two years. And I mostly lived off of savings that entire time. I did a little bit of freelancing, but I worked fewer than five hours a week. If that's not in the cards, and particularly if you run your own business, the semi-retire model is a fantastic one. You know, you might check in on Slack an hour a day. You do just enough to make sure that you're not the bottleneck and no more.

And that allows everything to continue running stateside while you're often in Iceland or, you know, Argentina or wherever you choose to be. Yeah, I think for people who've only ever taken a trip for a week or two weeks, it feels like, man, if you were working a few hours a day or even a few hours a week, it would really detract from the entire experience. But

But if you've never taken a trip for a month or spent the whole two weeks in one place, what happens is there's actually more downtime. And so I think whether you run your own business or even if you work for a company, if you could find a period of time where it would be okay for you to not put in everything... If you work in sales, it's not at the end of the quarter, but it's a time where you could go on work maintenance mode, as you said...

and take a longer trip, you can get the same number of things done and you can see all the sites, meet all the people, eat all the foods, but still be able to get some work done and not necessarily have to take it all off. And people often think they could never do that because it's so expensive, but...

But if you look at the cost to travel, the flights are often the biggest piece. And so if you're going somewhere for twice as long, it doesn't cost twice as much. And in many cases, renting an Airbnb for a month might be the same as renting a hotel for a week or a week and a half. So with all the flexibility that COVID has given many people with remote work, I would encourage people who haven't

ever taken a longer trip to maybe consider it and not feel like it's something you have to take an entire month off to do. Right. Well, and the thing is, longer trips are so economically efficient because particularly if you're taking a trip that's long enough that you can either rent out your home

Or if you are a renter yourself, do it at the end of your lease. Just don't renew your lease. Put all your stuff in storage and then go, you know, be a full-time traveler for a little while.

If you style it that way, then fundamentally, you're simply paying the cost of living in a different location. You know, if you're just taking a vacation, you're paying for two different lives. You're paying for your normal life. And then you're also paying for your hotel in some other location, right? So you're essentially paying two rents during that time.

If you take a longer trip, you're only paying for one life. And it's that one life that you have while you are riding the Trans-Siberian Railroad from Russia into Mongolia. And when you do that, then you compress your cost of living to only the costs incurred when you travel. And oftentimes, it's about the same or in some cases even cheaper than your cost of living in the U.S.,

Yeah, when we left for eight months, we rented our apartment out and we rented it out furnished because we had all this furniture and we actually got more than our monthly rent. And because we were in all these kind of much less expensive countries, I won't say it paid for the whole trip, but it certainly paid for a good part of the trip because we were actually making money at home. So, yeah, if you aren't paying two rents, as you said, the trip can be a lot cheaper. Exactly. So...

Sticking within the theme of the show, all the hacks, whether it's travel or life or anything you've learned, are there things that are your favorite tips, mindset shifts, tricks to either save money or just be happier in your life and traveling that you want to share? Mindset? Ooh, yeah.

I left it open because it's all the hacks. It's really take it anywhere you want. That's a very broad question. Okay. Mindset when it comes to happiness, I think the single biggest shift for me has been understanding that basically nothing matters and everything will be fine. Like when you get to the point where just nothing really phases you and you're not caught up in a lot of...

The small stuff that you used to think was important, I worried that that kind of cavalier attitude would make me less ambitious, make me less of a go-getter at work. I find it actually makes me more productive because I realize that there are only a few decisions that I make. When I say a few, like a couple a year that are big with a capital B decisions and everything else is like details.

And I think mindset wise, once I really stopped worrying about the details and just, yeah, do what you can, but don't really sweat it. It decreases my stress, increases my happiness. And I don't think it negatively affects my performance. It's either neutral or positive in terms of performance. I like it. One of my favorite savings hacks is being grateful.

so much of the time people frame savings as deprivation. Oh, I couldn't have this amazing pair of shoes or I chose not to have this fantastic restaurant meal, so I'm depriving myself, right? But if we reframe that thought and recognize how much we already have, I mean, everyone listening to this podcast has the ability to listen to a podcast, right? We've got

a smartphone and access to the internet on a global scale. Everyone listening to this podcast is among the globally richest people in the world. To go back to our conversation about traveling, travel certainly brings home just how wealthy, how relatively wealthy we are compared to the bottom billion.

When we deeply internalize that, it makes it very easy to not want a heck of a lot more because we already have so much. And then that means that saving money or reducing spending is no longer an act of deprivation. It's an act of acknowledging, hey, I'm good. I don't need any more. I've got more than enough already.

And are there habits to kind of embrace that grateful attitude that you like? I don't know if traveling would be considered a habit, but I certainly think that traveling, particularly to lesser developed areas, you know, I'm not just talking about traveling to Europe, traveling to to Bangladesh, traveling to Sri Lanka, traveling to Nepal, which is where I was born. I think that's really important to serve as a continual reminder.

I think having some involvement in philanthropy, in charity work, in volunteering, I think that also is a grounding and is a reminder of the fact that we don't need to be endlessly searching for more. People have talked about a gratitude practice. I go in and out of that habit. I won't claim that that's a habit that I have been able to consistently stick to. But from what I have heard, there is research that backs gratitude.

that a gratitude practice, a daily practice of writing down one to three things that you're grateful for can be effective at retraining your brain to see such details and to bring those details to the forefront of your cognition.

Yeah, I think I'm in a similar boat where, you know, one Thanksgiving, someone started going around the table talking about what they were grateful for. And it felt like such a great practice. It was like, let's keep that up a little bit. And it fades away and comes back. And I think it's helpful, but I've also found it hard to make it a daily habit. Was it you that has a hack for how to make it easier to build a new habit?

Yeah, so there's a few. One is habit stacking. So take an existing habit that you currently have and stack it onto that habit. So for example, do it right after you brush your teeth in the morning. Or for me, coffee is like a daily non-negotiable. So if I'm trying to form a morning habit, linking it to my coffee habit, because I know I'm never going to forget to brew a cup of coffee. So anything that's linked or chained to that.

has a much higher probability of sticking. So that's one way that sort of one hack around habit building. Building habits that have some element of immediate gratification. So there's a famous study in which the people who started, who invented Febreze, they were trying to figure out why nobody would use that product.

And it was because Febreze eliminated odors, but there was no immediate gratification to spraying the bottle. There was no immediate scent that people perceived. And because people didn't perceive that immediate gratification, the habit didn't stick. And so they artificially went back and added odors that are unnecessary for the efficacy of the product so that people would then get an immediate result from spraying the bottle.

which helped in habit formation. And so once I learned that, I started thinking through how I can incorporate some element of immediate gratification into any habit that I'm trying to build, particularly if it's a habit that has a good long-term effect, but doesn't have an immediate short-term effect. So lighting a candle,

At a time when I do a monthly financial review, right? Lighting a candle or eating some chocolate at the time that I'm doing that. Now I'm tethering these things that have like immediate sensory benefit with reviewing the spreadsheet for the month. And so I'm creating immediate gratification in that very act.

I used to ask my wife to help contribute towards our annual analysis. And it was like, can we go into Mint and recategorize all of our transactions to figure out where we spend money? And fortunately, we've stopped doing that both because it was too much time and it just wasn't as useful. But I think if I had gone back

in time and maybe lit a nice candle and brought in a bar of chocolate. I feel like that wouldn't have had such a horrible memory in my wife's mind thinking about having to go through and do that. So I wish I could go back and do that, but I will definitely use that tip in the future. I have a friend who he and his wife have a weekly money meeting and they always do it over wine. Nice. Yeah. I think anything over wine can make things good unless you go overboard and have to wake up early. Exactly.

Great. This was incredible. I really appreciate you being here. Any last things you want to share with anyone listening? I guess the final thing that I would share with anyone listening is given the wide range of topics that we've covered,

What one thing resonated with you and how do you translate that into something actionable? You know, whether it's in the arena of saving money, earning more, starting a side hustle, negotiating for a new position at work or negotiating for a raise, um,

planning a mini retirement, like we've talked about such a wide array of things. What one thing stood out to you and what one action will you take as a result of having listened to this? That's the question that I would leave to the listener.

Yeah. And if you have that, please share it with me, email, Twitter, or share it with Paula. Paula, where can people find you online and share things with you? So I would encourage everyone listening to open your favorite podcast player, which you're already using to listen to this show, and go follow the Afford Anything podcast. So that's my podcast. It's what I spend a lot of my time

honing. And the Afford Anything podcast is the number one way that you can hear more about my ideas, everything ranging from managing your money to living a better life. So Afford Anything podcast is where you find me. I've got a free ebook called Escape that you can download at affordanything.com slash escape. And that's all about escaping the nine to five, which we've talked about as a metaphor and living a better life. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me on the show. That's a wrap for this week's episode of All the Hacks. Thank you so much for listening. As I mentioned last week, we'll be doing a listener mailbag episode soon. So if you have any questions you'd like me to tackle or hacks to share with our audience, please send them to chris at allthehacks.com or I'm at Hutchins on Twitter.

Also, if you tuned in to episode nine with Ramit, do you remember him challenging me to take a vacation with an unlimited budget? Well, it was too last minute for him to plan that vacation, but I ended up trying to follow his advice on a trip to Greece where I am right now. So how'd I do? Well, from the outside, pretty good. We flew in business class and we're staying at some incredible five-star resorts.

That said, I paid for coach flights and upgraded, and we booked some of the hotels on points. So from that regard, maybe I failed to not optimize. However, my loss might be your gain. So if you have any questions about how to use your points and miles for an incredible vacation, just send me an email or find me on Twitter, and I'll do my best to help out. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you next week.