60. “My health is in question, but I don’t want to stop making money” (Part 1)
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Before we start today's show, I have a really exciting announcement that I've been wanting to share for a long time. On January 1st, 2025, I'm releasing a new book called Money for Couples. For the last three years, you've heard me on this podcast speaking to different couples every single Tuesday. I've spoken to over 170 couples on this show about their money psychology, the money messages they heard from their family, the peculiar dynamics that they have around money and where they get stuck.

and how they can get on the same page. Well, behind the scenes, I've been working on the definitive book to help couples get on the same page with money, and that's what I wrote for you. It's coming out January 1st, and in the book, I'm going to share how to talk about money, including the exact words to use, when to talk about it, how to teach your kids about money, even the exact agenda and account setup that my wife and I use in our finances.

I'm going to show the tactics to make instant improvements, like how to set up your accounts to automatically work together and how to assess your financial health.

And finally, you're going to get a deeper understanding of money psychology in your relationship. And you're going to discover why you and your partner see money differently and how to get on the same page. Now, it's one thing to listen to couples or watch couples every single week. I love doing that for you. But it's a whole different thing to be able to have the book and to be able to work through it with your partner. Okay?

I'm so excited to get this book in your hands. You can pre-order it using the link IWT.com slash money for couples and stay tuned for a lot more on this book this year. Again, go to IWT.com slash money for couples to pre-order my new book about getting on the same financial page as your partner.

Um, what the hell is going on on this podcast that like 80% of the people who come on here go through massive screening, fill out applications, they never actually read my book. Is anyone else puzzled by this? Look, a lot of the questions that you ask me about money are answered directly in I Will Teach You To Be Rich. How do you pay off your student loans? How do you automate your finances? Where do you start investing and how do you handle big purchases?

I wrote this book as a six-week program so you can follow along on your own or with a partner. If you want to improve your finances, I recommend you get the I Will Teach You To Be Rich book. It has over 18,000 reviews on Amazon. Get it at iwt.com slash book. I like to go out to eat, so I'll say, hey, Julie, should we go out to dinner? And she'll often reply, can we afford it?

But I'm joking. But you're really not joking. That's the part that kind of like worries me. And Julie, what is your net worth? If you include our primary residence, it's in the ballpark of $12 million. $12 million. How would you describe yourself socioeconomically? Upper middle class. Take out the upper part and you're right.

Oh boy. Another couple worth over $10 million who cannot admit that they are wealthy.

And in a rich life, as I always say, you have to be honest. Honest with yourself, honest with the people around you. If you cannot be honest with yourself that you are wealthy, it causes all kinds of peculiar challenges. Today, you're going to hear that from Tom and Julie. They're in their early 50s. They have two children. And as you just heard, they have a net worth of about $12 million. Julie is wondering if she should quit her job to spend more time with her family instead

but she likes the income from her job. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that today's episode will shock you. That's why I want you to listen to the entire thing. Julie thinks of money in terms of safety and security, but how much is enough? And what happens when you have to make tough decisions relating to your money and your life? Welcome to I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

Julie, when you think about money, what words come to mind for you? Oh, like protection is a word that comes to mind and safety and security. My view of money is you never want to run out. Okay. Okay. And can you think of a time where you behaved out of sync with how much money you actually had? After I finished college,

My second master's degree, I went to Southeast Asia for 10 weeks and I didn't have any money to speak of. I had no cushion. It was on maybe $35 a day or something very conservative or very, very frugal. But I chose to have that experience versus going right to work. Did you catch that?

Did you catch how she interpreted my question? My question was, can you think of a time where you behaved out of sync with the money you actually had? Kind of getting at, can you think of an example where you had a lot of money, but you behaved like you didn't? That's the obvious thing that's going on here. She's got $12 million and she's agonizing over potentially quitting her job. But her answer was to share proudly that

a time where she was extremely frugal. I find her interpretation of my question to be fascinating. What about more recently in the last 10 years? Can you think of an example? Now you're laughing. Okay. I can't wait to hear this. Where you acted out of sync with your financial status. And did something really decadent, you mean?

Nope, that's not what I mean. I mean that here's your financial status. I'm holding one hand up and the way you behaved did not match your financial status. I shop at Target a lot because they have the drive-up thing and they have these little rewards. Like if you buy...

If you spend $50 three times in this amount of time, you get a $20 gift card. And I'll always try and plan my spending so I get those rewards. And Tom feels like Tom is just laughing at me. Like, why you shouldn't waste your time on $20? Some of the things that Julie will do is...

wait for coupons to come before she will buy something or hope the coupons come in the mail. Julie, you're cutting coupons still? For what? I love this store called Bowdoin, which is just like middle-aged women's clothes with a lot of prints. They're from England. It's all super cute. But I will wait till they send me a $10 off or $25 off. $10? $25.

And then it'll be like my excuse to buy something. Oh my God. Okay. All right. Okay. Thank you, Tom. Tom's got it. Hold on. Tom's about to pull out a long papyrus scroll of all the stories he's been waiting to share. Go ahead, Tom. What else you got? Yeah, I'm not going to get through all of them, but just as another example, it will be like

I will often, I like to go out to eat. So I'll say, hey, Julie, should we go out to dinner? And she'll often reply, can we afford it? But I'm joking. But you're really not joking. That's the part that kind of like worries me. And Julie, out of curiosity, what is your net worth? If you include our primary residence, it's in the ballpark of $12 million. $12 million. Wow.

Yeah, but it feels so satisfying and so concrete to save 20. Okay. Have you ever said that number out loud?

No, it makes me really uncomfortable. How would you describe yourself socioeconomically? Upper middle class. Take out the upper part and you're right. Take it all out. You're not upper middle class. Okay. Now, tell me why did you say that though, before we talk about what you really are? That's what I feel like reflects our value and our lifestyles. We only have one residence. We only have one house. We...

send our kids to public school right now. I just feel like we don't do a lot of things that rich people do. And what do rich people do in this metaphor? The first thing that comes to mind for me is boarding schools, multiple homes, private jets, club memberships, elaborate clothes. That is my stereotype of what people who...

are truly rich. This idea of rich has a lot of roots in our richy rich version of wealth. Sitting on long tables, eating food that's served under those big silver things, being chauffeured around, only living in dark wood paneled houses. My goal is to show you that your rich life is yours.

That's everything that I do in my business, my book, this podcast, my programs. I want to show you that your rich life can be traveling six months a year. It can be tipping 50%. It can be camping one week every quarter. Your rich life is yours. But we also need to be honest.

At $12 million, you are not middle class. You're not upper middle class. You are wealthy, plain and simple. And if you don't admit that, you're doing a disservice to yourself and to the people around you. It's not a virtue to live a smaller life than you have to.

So my challenge to you is to define your rich life in extremely vivid details. And the more you define it, the more different it should become from anyone else around you. In fact, the more bewildering it should actually become. Now, as for Tom and Julie, we skip over how they amassed their huge wealth. She basically calls it boring tactics at one point. That's the best way to do it. They lived under their means. They

They saved and accumulated money, the classic I will teach you to be rich way. They invested consistently every single month, and they grew their wealth to millions and millions of dollars. In fact, it was around eight or so million dollars that they accumulated. And recently, they received a $3 million inheritance. But remember, they only received that after they were already multimillionaires.

So I want to share all that with you to let you know that the I Will Teach You To Be Rich method works. It takes time, but it is sustainable. And it allows you to accumulate a large amount of wealth. But that's not the end. The real challenge is what do you do with your money? And how do you use it to create a rich life? Where did this idea of protection and safety when it comes to money come from? My mom grew up in...

a situation where she didn't have, it was just her and my grandmother and her little brother and, and things were quite rough for them. And, and they didn't, they were literally living hand to mouth and in one of my mom's aunt's attics. And I think it like had my aunt not taken them in, they would have been homeless. I remember a lot of stories about

I couldn't have this or all the girls at school had, I'm just making this particular example up, but fancy white gloves to wear to the dances, but we, we couldn't afford them. And so I remember it seemed like stories of scarcity or of, of not being good enough in ways that manifested themselves it through, um,

through not having things. And I feel like money was tied to that in addition. And my mom didn't talk much about like those early rough, rough years, but I, I do feel like there was an amount of wistfulness tied to money about, I wish I could have been like the other people or it'd be like a gap. It was a pretty dire situation. And so I think that,

Because of that and my mom's early experience with money, she has inculcated into my sibling and I that you always want to be prepared for whatever eventuality there is. And that was her lived experience. So that really made sense for her. Why do you think she didn't talk about those tough times?

I still don't know the full story. I never will because she's passed away. But I think she didn't because it's something that she was, I think they really troubled her. And it's just something that she would rather, I don't think she wanted to burden us with it. Like I remember I gave her this book about,

It was for a grandmother to fill out for their grandkids. And it was a way to get for them to get to know you. And my mom was like, I just can't do this. It's too painful. And I don't want a lot of it was about her background and what things were like when she was growing up. Wow. So I think that all that weighed heavily on her. What a story.

What effect do you think it has on Julie to have grown up seeing what she saw? To have recognized that her mom would have almost been homeless if not for the help of her family. And notice that Julie, decades later, still carries those messages with her. Safety, security, will I have enough? And think about it. As she says those things out loud, half-jokingly,

You think her daughters pick up on that? I do. I think that's exactly why whenever I speak to people who have some sort of affliction with money, about 80 to 85% of the time, there is something distinctly vivid in their childhood that they are now living. And when they're living it today, they're also passing it on to the next generation. I want Julie to understand the roots of where her beliefs about money come from.

That's not going to change it, but it is the first step to acknowledging it and then deciding if she wants to make a change. You know how many people's conscious spending plans I see every week? What's fascinating is the categories of spending, especially the ones where people spend way more than they think they do. For example, subscriptions. Let's take a look at some recent numbers on how much people spend on subscriptions. $100 a month on subscriptions. $205 a month. That's from someone spending 76% of their take home each month on fixed costs.

costs. $211 a month, $147 a month, and $487 a month. This is literally thousands of dollars a year, and most of us have forgotten about all the subscriptions we are actually paying for.

Thank you.

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My team and I create tons of material every single day. Scripts, voiceovers, emails, all kinds of material that we need to be good and we need it to happen fast. And one of the things we use is Grammarly, especially their new AI tool. For example, every Saturday, we send out my podcast newsletter. I break down an anonymous person's conscious spending plan. And I like going really deep to break down the numbers and show you things you might have missed in your own finances.

Well, guess what? That is a lot of copy. Before, it would take my team a ton of time to work through everything I had written and edit it and make it right for email. Now, Grammarly does it for us in seconds. Grammarly Premium actually gives us suggestions on how to make our writing more impactful for you. It identifies gaps in the writing and shows personalized suggestions to improve the whole thing. And it can even add images like that.

So coming from a family where your mom was nearly homeless,

to you having a joint net worth of $12 million. What does that feel like? I feel proud of us that we have built these assets by investing over time and largely by doing these very boring tactical things.

And I've always looked at it this way, but like anything that you spend, there's the opportunity cost of what you could have gotten if you... Don't buy that latte when you're young because... So, okay. I mean, there's some truth to that. You could take that $1,000 at Per Se or $5 at a coffee shop and you could invest it or you could spend it on something else. That is true. In your mind, Julie...

Is that a philosophy you live with for the rest of your life? The opportunity cost philosophy. Intellectually, I realized that that philosophy that helped us build our, establish the financial situation we have today. I realized that philosophy is no longer working for me, but what is hard is to, uh,

change my behavior. Like I do little changes, which is the beginning of an evolution, but that's how you evolve, right? Through little changes. But I feel like I need bigger change. There's an opportunity for me to make bigger changes. I think part of me feels somewhat...

Like, I know not all my friends have this amount of assets. Even people who do more trips or have other things that you might associate with assets. So I'm a little embarrassed of it that way. And then I think there's also this other frame of reference of...

but there's people who get paid that in a year who are like, I know I used to work with them. Like I used to go to school with them. And so I think there's this other frame of reference and that leads to this feeling of,

And this seems illogical, but like, oh, whoever has the most when they die wins. And I know that is not true. I know it's not a game. And when you expire, it is game over. But I still somehow constantly find myself telling myself that is not the right model to be working with.

It sounds like this inner tension of what you tell yourself logically versus what you feel about money. Yes, I would say that is very accurate. I feel like there's some cognitive dissonance with that and just trying to create a plan forward for us because of those two different poles. What if we just didn't even need a plan at all?

Well, I like a plan. Of course you like a plan. That's what you want from today's call, right? A plan. I guess what I'm looking for from today's call would be a different perspective because Tom and I will often joke, what would Ramit say? So just now we get to hear another...

perspective that I feel like is the voice of reason in some ways. I think you two are very reasonable on your own. You did a great job accumulating a lot of wealth. But maybe my voice can be something totally different today. Maybe we don't need reason. They don't need a voice of reason. They need a voice of intuition. They need somebody to just help them have some fun.

In many ways, I see so much of myself in the way that Julie processes these things. She loves logic. She loves control. She loves to have it in the spreadsheet. And I totally get that. In fact, those things can be adaptive. They can be helpful. Obviously, she and Tom have been very successful following this methodology. It's made them multimillionaires.

But the problem is, as we've heard, too much of anything is bad. Everybody nods. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything in balance, everything in moderation. But when it comes to their own lives, they totally disregard it. I think it's possible Julie is too logical. And that's what I want to find out now. Where in your life are you intuitive? Where do you go with your feelings? I'm not sure I understand what you mean by that.

Okay, that's a big tell right there. Okay, let me try to explain. I know that you're intellectual with your finances. I know that you are intellectual with your planning, even deciding when to go shopping at that store with the coupons. But is there a part of your life where you operate on instinct or feelings where you don't intellectualize it? No. Okay. Kids? I'm pretty...

I'm pretty like we do piano lessons and we don't do piano lessons because I want them to be great musicians. We do piano lessons because I believe it teaches them these skills. Okay, great. So you have a plan. I totally get it. Food? I tend to view that as more functional. Functional. Okay, totally fine. I get it. Tom, is there anything where you would say Julie operates on instinct or emotion?

not on intellect? I don't, that's a really tough question to answer. I think she's been pretty accurate and she is pretty intellectual about all that stuff. Um,

I mean, for me, I have so many answers to that question that I could give because that's a part of me. But I don't see it as much with Julie, for sure. I mean, obviously, I would have hoped she would have said, oh, yeah, when I think about the first time I met Tom, that was one of my answers that I could give. But that didn't come up. You guys are great.

You know what? There's nothing wrong with that, Julie. Not at all. What I appreciate is that you're just being honest. You're like, hey, even for my kids, this is why I have them in piano. This is why I eat what I eat. I don't mind it at all. I'm just trying to understand your worldview, how you view certain things. Let's talk about a few other things just so I get a sense of how you spend your money. You shop at Target. Where do you go out to eat? What type of place?

Super casual. Like? Which I think, oh gosh, a place called the Sunshine Factory, which is- Is it like an American restaurant? How much do you think it's cost at this place? 15 or 20 bucks for an entree. Okay, fine. And would you ever go out for a special dinner or anniversary type thing? What would you do for that?

I would say that Tom was very reluctant to getting a babysitter or about getting a babysitter. Tom, was that because you didn't want to be away from the baby or was it a cost issue? What was it? I'd like to say it was the first, but it's more accurately the latter. It was a cost issue? Yeah. How many years ago was this?

Oh, this is probably eight or nine years ago. So a babysitter there costs how much? Like 15 bucks an hour. Okay. Is that expensive for the two of you? A lot of silence on this call suddenly. Boy, everybody got very quiet. I think we both have similar personalities as far as always saving money as much as we possibly could and being frugal about things. And I feel like I've come a long way in that.

And I feel like Julie maybe isn't as far along as I think she should be given our financial situation. Just so I understand, when you say you've come a long way, can you clarify that? Yeah. I no longer walk out of grocery stores without everything I went to buy because it seems a little more expensive than I think it should be. And that's something four years ago I would have done.

I'm buying whatever I need. It doesn't matter. I know it doesn't matter. I'm not worried about the small costs of things. I just get what I need. Four years ago when your net worth was around...

seven and a half million dollars. Yeah, that's probably accurate. For everybody listening, seven and a half million dollars is when you can stop checking your receipt at the grocery store and splurge for the extra bottle of Topo Chico. All right, you heard it here first. Another rich person agonizing over grocery spending. This really shows you how hard it is to rewire your money psychology.

It also shows that Tom and Julie are both deeply embedded in this frugality dynamic. That dynamic becomes comfortable. It becomes an identity. And for the two of them, it's an identity they've actually been very successful at. But they're here talking to me because they want to change that identity. In order to do that, you've got to rewire your money psychology. And that is challenging, whether you make $50,000 a year or $500,000 a year.

If you want to change your money psychology, I put together a free mindset mini course. This walks you through the steps to identify your invisible scripts around money and then change them. And you can get it for free at iwt.com slash episode 60. Now, I'm glad that Tom is feeling free at the grocery store, but we're talking about $12 million and a lot more than that as it continues to compound.

I've got to have them thinking bigger than the grocery store. So I'm curious what Tom thinks the problem is and what role he has played in it. One of the worst feelings in life is feeling stuck.

You hear it sometimes with podcast couples here. They feel stuck around their money. I felt stuck in my business. I had made a bunch of decisions years ago and I woke up feeling trapped. So after thinking about it, feeling stuck, not sure what to do, I went to a CEO council that I'm a part of and I just laid it out. And after listening to me, they were like, oh, it's so obvious. You need to change this. Move this person over here. Change this resource allocation. Boom.

I wish I had done it years earlier. If you feel stuck in your career and you also wish you had a group of peers who could help you get unstuck,

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and join thousands of top senior leaders from companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta who have taken the first step towards accelerating their careers. That's sidebar.com, S-I-D-E-B-A-R.com slash R-A-M-I-T. When I was in my early 20s, I was not into clothes. I wore free t-shirts from tech companies, and I really did not want to seem like I tried too hard.

But I started to realize that clothing is the first thing people see about you. They don't see how nice I am or how much I know about personal finance. They see what I'm wearing. And like it or not, that shapes a lot of how people perceive you.

Now, I take a lot of pride in the clothes I wear. And I love knowing that when I buy something, I'm going to keep it for years and I know that the people who made it were paid well. I actually hired my wife, who runs Next Level Wardrobe, a luxury personal styling company, to style me for my Netflix show and all of my events, including what I wear day to day for more casual outfits.

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Elevate your style using Next Level Wardrobe at nextlevelwardrobe.com slash Ramit. That's nextlevelwardrobe.com slash Ramit. It is that emotional component that we need to work on. I mean, we, she's, that's one of the reasons why I love her is we're similar. She's super smart. Like she knows, she knows, she understands the time value of money, understands like, hey, look, we could,

both quit our jobs today and we would not have to worry about money. We could live the same lifestyle. You know, I've, we've done those calculations, but she just can't accept it. It's almost like, and the whole thing where we talked about too, like how would she describe herself? She would say that we're middle class full stop, right? Middle class. That's what, that's what she would say. Whoa. And, and, and it's,

I feel a little bit similar. It's hard to talk about it. And I totally know that there's a lot of people that we know that are way more money than we will ever have. And there's hundreds of thousands, millions of people who are way more net worth, whatever. But you're never going to win. You're never going to have the most. It's not a competition. But at some point, you have to look at the numbers and just like,

take the win and say like we we kind of because we say because we are fortunate because we were lucky enough to have education we are where we are and just like take the win it's almost if you've ever been in a sales meeting and like there's a salesperson that just won't take yes for an answer right it's just like take the win and like stop right and i feel like that's intellectually where where we need to get to just like take the win and like understand um

we have options because of where we're at and we could be doing things differently. And it does kind of, like when Jill was talking about back when our kids were younger and I didn't want to get a babysitter because I didn't want to pay $15 an hour, that breaks my heart. I mean, it's tough to hear, but I've tried to change. I think we could make it happen. I think it's just

making the decision to make it happen and hopefully we can kind of expand it do more and more but i think the the main thing i think is just both of us realizing like we can we can make that stuff happen we kind of do have a magic wand

As we all know, all anybody is guaranteed is today. And it's just that that hits a little closer to home for us than some people. So we just got to take advantage of knowing that, being able to act on it. Let's talk about the stakes. Julie, I understand you recently had a medical procedure. I wonder if you can share a little bit of that with me so I can understand it.

I had a double lung transplant in October of 2020. And by that time I couldn't, I was like on oxygen all the time and could barely make it up the stairs. And it just seemed like it didn't really, there was not a lot of value in pursuing the diagnosis. But anyway, so I had this undetermined condition and

And the, I mean, basically like these lung conditions, it's, there's the only path forward after a point is a lung transplant. And so you go through this, this workup to get a lung transplant, and then you get put on this wait list. You have a score that,

is based on many things, but a key one of them is how long they anticipate you have left to live based on your lung function and some other inputs. And I was incredibly lucky to get a call from the transplant center a couple of days after I was put on the transplant list and I got a transplant and I was

My first six months were pretty rough. Roughly 50% of people who have a lung transplant survive five years. Roughly 30% survive 10 years. So while my quality of life is very high right now and there's things I can control and I am controlling them, there's many things that I can't control at the cellular level. Yeah.

Like rejection, graft rejection is a big one. And so my time isn't, nobody's time is unlimited, but I feel like...

my having an, a long life is, is by no means a guarantee. And then also I feel like there's a question of, of quality. I know people who have lived for 20 years and bike all the time and just have a really full life with transplant. But then I know other people who are a year or two out and have had major setbacks. And so I,

I feel extremely lucky to have this gift because if things had gone differently, my outcome could have been very different. But now I think I've had this, I've just been wrestling with, okay, how do I use this time for a while? According to my calculations, I have about like a 67% chance of living five years post-transplant. So another...

three and a half years roughly. And so, but I'm behaving like I was when I thought I might live to be 90 and there's like virtually no chance I'll live to be 90. So, but then to, to actually change my behavior and reflect that reality, I feel like is really a hard, it's hard to go from, from like intellectually grasping that to making those changes.

This isn't just about having a lot of money and finding it difficult to spend it. Julie reveals that she knows of her own mortality. And she knows that statistically, in the next 10 years, she likely will die. This isn't just games. It's not just numbers on a spreadsheet. This is life. And so you can see why I wanted to speak to Tom and Julie.

Because it's one thing to amass a large amount of money, but it's another thing to accumulate millions of dollars and have a husband and two daughters and want to create these experiences with them and know that you have a ticking clock before you die.

I was watching this masterclass with director Ron Howard, and he was talking about how he has a checklist for his movies. He's asking himself, are the characters interesting? Are they reactive or proactive? Is it a page turner? And the funny thing is, we do something similar for this very show. This podcast, we have our own checklist. Do we have great guests? Is there a great story? Does it have a beginning, middle, and the end with stakes?

And if you think about it, we are learning a lot from people like Ron Howard. Imagine if you could apply the lessons from the world's greatest instructors, Ron Howard, the creator of French laundry, Chris Voss, negotiation, and you could apply it to your own life. How much would it cost? Probably cost thousands of dollars just to take a one-on-one class if you could even get it.

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You know what I always remember is when my mom died, she died of cancer and she was in hospice and it was like very clearly the end. And she was, my sister and I were in the room and she was talking and she was saying,

oh, I probably won't see any of your girls graduate from college. And my daughter was in kindergarten that year. And I just remember thinking like, it was April and my mom was only going to make it another day or two, best case. But I just kept thinking, like, you're not going to see...

your granddaughter graduate from kindergarten. What are you talking about college? But I feel like that even in her mind, there was like this hope or this, this like inability to come to terms with the finiteness of, of her life, of her, her situation. And I feel like,

That is my tension too. Like I understand. And earlier that day, you know, my mom had given us all her password and like, she knew the end was coming, but she didn't, it's like she hadn't internalized it. And that's, my situation is different because I think I hopefully have more time than she had at that point. But also I think my time is very finite. Like there's,

when you look at survival rates for transplantees, it's not a great outlook, but yet I'm living, like I'm planning to live to a hundred and need long-term care and all this. And I feel like there's a big question in my mind about not only like the quantity of my life, but the quality of my life. And the quality of my life is pretty great now. Like I am like best case positive.

or maybe not best case, but I have had a very successful outcome for the procedure that I had. But I'm not... And so I need to be taking... I understand intellectually I need to be taking advantage of this time, but yet I'm still stuck and worried about the opportunity cost of what I... Yeah.

Julie, the story about your mom is so interesting and telling. And what is interesting to me most is about the way you tell that story in that your mom in her last days intellectually knew that it was her time to go. But emotionally, she wasn't ready to accept it. She had this tension. And when you tell the story, your first analysis of it is,

My situation is different. I have longer. But from my perspective, your situation is quite similar. Your mom couldn't grapple with the difference between intellectually what was going on, what she accepted, and emotionally what she couldn't accept. Do you see any similarities to you? I do. I feel like I'm having trouble acting like I should...

If I would advise myself as a friend, I would say, oh, just enjoy this time. But then I find myself sucked into my spreadsheets all day. Who taught the two of you what to do with your millions and millions of dollars? Nobody. That's where we're at and why we're

you know, living less of a life maybe than we could be. And it's about experiences and getting out because what do I want my girls to remember? I would want them to have happy memories of me. I would want them to say, Oh gosh, I remember doing that with my mom. Julie's mom was unable to face reality, but in many ways, Julie herself was.

hasn't started to truly grapple with the reality of her situation. She has over $12 million. She has two young daughters, and she has a ticking clock on how long until she dies. You would think that it would be easy to make changes, but it's not. I remember studying psychology in college, and we were studying human behavior

specifically around patients who received a terminal diagnosis if they did not take their medicine. And everybody kind of shrugs and laughs and says, of course they take their medicine. It's life or death. Wrong. About 50% of patients did not adhere to their medication, even when they were facing death. And we can see here with Julie that she really wants to change. She's come to me. She's gone through an application process. She is here now.

but she still finds it incredibly difficult. In part two of this episode, I will continue my conversation with Tom and Julie. And I think you will be surprised at the direction the conversation takes. As you can hear from today's episode,

So much of how we treat money involves our money mindset. So to get all the mindset material that I discussed, you can go to iwt.com slash episode 60. And be sure to tune in next week to hear part two of this conversation with Tom and Julie. Here's a sneak peek of that conversation now. I had a double lung transplant in October of 2020.

According to my calculations, I have about like a 67% chance of living five years post-transplant. So another three and a half years, roughly. But I'm behaving like I was when I thought I might live to be 90. And there's like virtually no chance I'll live to be 90. At some point, we're going to be looking back and saying, why didn't we do the stuff we could do when we could do it, which is now 90.

There's no virtue in living a smaller life than you have to. But yet it does feel sort of satisfying in some way. I can't quite explain why. Thanks for listening to I Will Teach You To Be Rich. I'm Ramit Sethi. Please follow the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you haven't read I Will Teach You To Be Rich, my book, pick up a copy. You can get it at any bookstore or any library, and it will show you the specific tactics,

for how to build the i will teach you to be rich system into your personal finances