Ramit Sethi: Never Split The Bill, It's A Red Flag & Renting Isn't Wasting Money!
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How can you talk about renting? You're just throwing money away. BS. Should I just dismantle these arguments once and for all? Because there's some shocking math behind a mortgage. And most people don't know this stuff. Let's get into it. The financial expert and entrepreneur is back to teach you how to take control of your money and confront the financial problems that hold us back. Most people fall into four money types that I've identified. Number one is avoiders, and they'd hate talking about them.

about money. But if your partner simply will not talk about money, that's a huge red flag because 50% of the people I talk to do not know their household income. 90% who are in debt do not know how much debt they're in. And 100% of the people I talk to in credit card debt also have trouble with money. That is shocking. Next up, Optimizer. They can get you to a very good place. They'll be investing. We love to live in a spreadsheet, but it can be taken too far.

And then the dreamer, who believes that success is one deal away. And they tend to fall into crypto coin scams. Like all this BS. Finally, worriers. They love to worry. Are we going to have enough? What if we run out of money? Typically, they picked up worrying from their parents, who said stuff like, money doesn't grow on trees. And the problem is, you can take it a little too far. And they become cheap and become so obsessed with $3 questions. Like agonizing over buying a coffee. But everybody listen closely, because I want to break down how you can change any of these types. So...

Rameeth, the only investment most couples make is buying a house. What is the alternative? This is where real wealth is for you. Let's simplify the whole thing. And I have four numbers that everyone should be talking about. The first stop is your... Rameeth, if someone's just clicked on this conversation, please explain to me exactly why they should stay and listen to what we're about to discuss on the basis that we're about to talk about the things you've written in this book. If you are single and dating...

If you are engaged or if you have been married for 25 years, money is one of the central parts of our lives. And most of us think about money as something to be avoided. It's something we only talk about when things have gone wrong. What a terrible way to live. And there is a different way, which is we can use money as a source of connection, possibility, and joy. And that is what we're going to talk about today.

I had a conversation a couple of days ago, actually, with James Saxton, who's the divorce expert. He's a divorce lawyer by trade, but he knows more about divorce than anybody else. And he said to me, there's two things which cause people to end up in his office going through a divorce. Number one is cheating, infidelity. And the second thing is money problems in the relationship. So I find it especially sort of pertinent to have this conversation with you about couples' relationship with money.

because clearly one of the things that is most likely to end my relationship or I guess prevent me getting into one is this financial avoidance that most of us engage in. You've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of couples about money on your podcast. What have you learned about our relationship with money in relationships from that? I've learned that 50% of the people I talk to do not know their household income. 90% of the people I talk to who are in debt do not know how much debt they're in.

And 100% of the people I talk to in credit card debt also have trouble saying no to their children. Isn't that shocking? Each of those things, 50% do not know how much income they make because most of us are simply living by looking at our checking account and that's it. The debt part kind of makes sense. Why would you want to know how much debt you owe? You don't really want to think about it. So you ignore those emails and envelopes and the credit card debt part.

That is really interesting. The idea that if you can't say no to spending, so you've racked up a bunch of credit card debt, the same principle applies to saying no to kids. For me, when I discover these, I find them absolutely fascinating. But the good news is you can also change these things. And what's the difference between men and women in terms of spending habits in a relationship, secrecy, avoidance, arguments?

Well, let's start with the roles. Men always describe themselves as providers. Always. That's what we are taught. It exists in culture. The problem is, of course, what happens when they are not the top earner, which is happening increasingly more now. So when I often ask them, who are you, financially speaking, if you're not a provider? And they're just stumped.

But there's got to be something more than simply being a provider. You can be a provider and you can be a nurturer. You can be a provider and you can be a helper, a leader. There's so many different ways. Often what you'll see with women is discussions about a secret bank account. Keep a little money aside just in case. We have to remember that in the U.S., many grandmothers were not allowed to open up their own bank.

bank accounts. That happened in two generations ago. And so there has been a rightful message that has been passed down orally, keep a little bit of money aside just in case, whether it be physical abuse, financial abuse, divorce, etc. And I totally respect that message. I don't think you should have a secret account. I do think you should have an account that is yours only and

but no secrets in a relationship. What about arguments as it relates to money and relationships? What are the cause of the arguments? Is it someone spending too much? Is it hiding money? Is it something else? It's usually not hiding money. That's very small extreme. The biggest phrase that I get from couples is, he or she's a spender and I'm a saver.

So it's creating this identity that they're a spender, I'm a saver, or they don't want to talk about money ever. Why can't I get them to finally sit down with me and get on the same page? That's a phrase that's tossed around everywhere. When I ask them, what is getting on the same page?

The answer is, I don't know. I just want to talk about it. So when it comes to money, yes, there are the numbers that we need to understand, of course. But what I often tell people, the way you feel about money is highly uncorrelated to the amount in your bank account. That is why I speak to so many multimillionaires who still worry about money. They think if I just have $50,000 more, $500,000 more, $5 million more. Well, guess what? I've had all those folks on my podcast and they still worry about money.

That means there's two things you need to do to master your relationship with money. One, you got to know your numbers. This is a language you have to learn the basics of personal finance. Two, you have to master your money psychology. That means you need to change the way that you talk about money and behave with money so that you can ultimately change the way you feel about money. You do those two things, you're going to have a very healthy relationship with money.

We'll go into all of those things and how you do them. On this point of gender roles, obviously society has changed in the last couple of decades in terms of equality and more women are in work, higher level positions in corporations, in the C-suite, earning much more money. This has caused a shift, I should say, in society.

the sort of typical gender roles and assumptions of what each gender is supposed to be doing in couples. And I'm wondering now with more women earning more money, in many cases, they're going to be earning more than their husband in heterosexual relationships. Have you seen new dynamics and new issues created because of this in terms of like,

I know insecure men feeling emasculated or the woman not being happy that she's contributing more. And I asked this because I had someone on my podcast a couple of months back who said to me that I think it's 70 or 80% of women expect that their romantic partner will earn more than them. But that gap is closing now because women are earning more and more money. I'm just wondering if you've seen in those couples scenarios where the woman earns more and it's causing problems. I've seen it all the time.

I've seen it all the time. I think that we see different gender dynamics. I recall one episode where I spoke to a young woman and her boyfriend. She was around 40 years old. She made way more than her boyfriend. Care to guess how much she makes per month? $20,000? $200,000 per month.

She has a business. It's doing very well. She's around the age of 40. Now, her boyfriend was never taught about money when he was growing up. Most people are not. He never learned about investing. Certainly no one was telling him about a Roth IRA when he was 12 years old. And he had started his own business and he was on the upswing. He's making a few thousand dollars a month. Good for him. She's making 200 grand a month. Her parents started talking to her about investing when she was five years old.

So here we already see a difference, not just in gender, but in socioeconomic status. OK. And over time, that progressed. So they come to me and she says, I want him to pay for dinner occasionally. Fine. Super reasonable. He even said, no problem. I want to. So he would take his credit card out and he would offer to pay. And she would say, no, I want you to contribute more to your IRA.

So in many ways, she wanted him to pay. She wanted to feel taken care of, which is totally reasonable. But when he offered, she said no. So this is the kind of thing that I often see, which is I think I want one thing, but when I get that thing, I don't actually want it. It doesn't make me feel the way I thought it would. I want to earn 50K more. I think that'll make me feel safe. Oh my God, I am earning 50K more. It doesn't actually change the way I feel. So I worked with this couple.

And I helped them understand why they both felt this way about money. And, you know, from the outside, it's like, this is so irrational. If you make more, just pay more. If I were in that situation, et cetera, et cetera, none of that stuff matters. When you are in the couple in that relationship, you will feel a certain way. And we got to work with you individually, not what everybody else says.

In the end, the conclusion that they came to was she wanted him to occasionally pay for dinner, but she also wanted him to fill up his IRA. So this is what they did. Every so often before they went out to dinner, she would give him her credit card and she would say, here, I want you to pay for tonight.

And he said, cool. He understood it. They went out and that's what they did. Now to us sitting here, we're like, this dance makes no sense. Why don't they just do it this way or that way? Guess what? Every single one of us has some irrational thing we do with money. Every single one of us.

And I think that we are ready to actually have conversations about how we are irrational. Money is not just dollars and cents on a page. That's why you don't feel good about money even when you have more than you ever thought you would. That's why you worry about money, but you have never read a single book on personal finance. We are all irrational, including me. And when you get into a relationship,

You've got to acknowledge that. And then you've got to say, hey, what is our vision of a rich life together? Let's build that. If it means we do a little dance about the credit card once every two months, fine. Do we both feel good? Is it fair? Then I'm good with it.

What's going on there with her? Because it sounds like there's this battle between her mind and maybe her heart, or it's almost like the social expectation is coming in, but then her brain is saying, no, invest in the IRA. And an IRA, for anyone that doesn't know, in other parts of the world. It's a retirement account. A retirement account. So she's saying, invest in the future, but also buy my dinner. Well, it's the same. We all have these things that society has told us, but then we don't quite agree and we're not sure what to do.

Last time I was here, we talked about how you don't necessarily need to buy a house in order to live a rich life. And in my case, I have rented for the last 20 years by choice, and I made more money renting and investing the difference than I would have by buying a house. And this is shocking to people. Like, we saw the comments last time. People went, berserk. How can you talk about renting? You're just throwing money away on rent. And this is something we have been fed today.

constantly for generations that in order to be successful, you must buy a house. So when somebody like me comes around and says, actually, you should run the numbers because sometimes renting can be better, people are shocked. Same thing with if you want to be taken care of or you want someone to treat you or you want someone to pay for the first date. Same thing when men come and they talk about being a provider, but in certain relationships where they actually earn less, I'll say to them,

If we look at the numbers, you're not the provider. So who are you? And they're stumped. And that is when we need to start grappling with the idea that maybe what we were told is not exactly true for us in our situation today. And that's okay. Do you think it causes more problems when the, in terms of the relationship dynamics and that sort of emasculation and, you know, the man not feeling like a provider when the woman earns more money than the man, from what you've seen? Not necessarily. I think that it is a different relationship

framework than we're used to. Yeah. When we think about my parents, for example, my mom stayed home with us. My dad went to work, single earner, simple. Everybody knew where they stood, what the rules were. It was very simple. It's very difficult to do that today. Housing is historically expensive. Healthcare is expensive, especially in the US. And so you have two people earning. In urban cities, you have young women earning more than men in their 20s.

A lot of us are trying to figure out what does this role mean for me and for my partner and for our relationship? That makes it tricky. I wonder if a lot of men are just choosing to remain single until they've kind of worked on themselves. Because I think actually that's probably the path I would have taken if I'm being completely honest. And what I kind of did take is I didn't have a relationship until I was able to

Really provide. Oh, the P word. Yeah. And where did that word come from? Provide. Like watching my father, watching movies, everything. Exactly. Yeah. No one ever says like, you are a provider, but we learn it from a million different perspectives. And yeah, I hear a lot of guys. I mean, when I was living in New York and I had a lot of single friends, topic of conversation was, I'm not ready to get married. I need to get to a certain point in my career first. We have all these words for it.

And deep down, there's a feeling that we're often expressing. Maybe I'm not ready. Maybe I'm not enough. Maybe I need to do X, Y, Z before I do the thing that I want.

And so part of what we talk about when it comes to relationships and money is like, let's actually shine a light on that. Let's not be shy about it. If you want someone to pay for your dinner, fine. That's totally fine. Let's have that conversation. If you want to be the sole earner in your household, okay, let's see what it would take. And too often, we don't have those conversations. We just dance around them for 50 years. Who should pay for the first date then?

My answer is doesn't matter. It would be nice if the person who suggested the date pays, but I think we spend way too much time focusing on the first date and way too little time thinking about the next 14,625 days. It's like a couple who's obsessed with the wedding, right?

Fine, you want a nice wedding, great. What about the marriage? Same thing with money. First date, okay, we can have that conversation. But aren't you more interested in how your partner thinks about money and talks about money? Are they a cheapskate? Are they generous? Are they abundant? Did they grow up the same or different than you? That is something we don't talk about. Meanwhile, we have 5 million YouTube videos on who's going to pay on the first date.

We are missing the real point. The point of money in a relationship is not just about the first date. That's fun for clicks, but it's about do we see money the same way? Do we connect? Are we going to be rowing in the same direction or are you going to be doing that and I'm doing this and we can never get aligned? You can only make a first impression once, right?

And if you are a guy, this is just how I feel anyway. If I go on a date, a first date with a woman and we have a wonderful date, you know, it's a nice restaurant and then it gets to the end of the day. And then I turn to her and say, should we split the bill? I couldn't even say it with a straight face, frankly. I couldn't, I definitely couldn't ask her to pay. I just, I just could never. And,

I think if you anonymously polled 10 of my female friends and said, how would you feel if on the first date the guy asked you to pay? I think privately they would say, that's a bit of a turnoff. That's a red flag. That's an ick. I think probably that's true. And again, goes to the power of socialization, right? Like culture is very difficult to change.

We got to admit that. We got to acknowledge that. And when I was dating, I paid for dates. So I don't have a problem with it. I like to be generous. I think that when you are in a relationship, you like to know that your partner is generous too. Now, generous comes in lots of ways. It could be paying for dates. It could be planning a trip. It could be being thoughtful and, you know, buying extra toothpaste because we're running low. There's so many different ways to be generous. But generosity for me would be a value.

Paying for a date, sure, I paid for dates. I'm happy to. I like to do it. But generosity to me is way more important to talk about that in a relationship versus the date itself. Because chivalry, you know, this idea that the man is to lead in that regard and to, you know,

open the door and open the car door and pull out the chair. Yeah, but think about it. I agree with all that stuff. I support it. But think about what message that sends when you tell men you're supposed to be chivalrous, but there's no real context, no real teaching around it. And let's say you have a 26-year-old guy now who's earning less than his girlfriend. So he wants to be chivalrous and

But for him, he's like, well, look at our bank accounts. And so what I want to emphasize to people is you can be chivalrous. You could be generous. Money is just a small part of that. Let's not over fixate on who's paying for tapas. Okay. And let's actually think about the important things. When it comes to money, we are so obsessed with $3 questions. People are obsessing over, should I buy this coffee? Can I afford this appetizer? On and on and on about $3 questions.

We totally neglect the $30,000 questions or the $300,000 questions. Is this person financially aligned with me? How do I even find out? Am I investing 5% to 10% of take-home pay every month? Are we doing it together? Do we talk about money regularly and proactively and positively?

Those things matter, and they're actually worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. These $3 questions, including who's paying for appetizers or should I buy a latte, irrelevant. In fact, get the big answers in life right, and you can buy all the appetizers you ever want. What are the financial red flags in a relationship then? Number one is they don't want to talk about money.

If you don't want to talk about money, red flag, the biggest red flag of all, because we could differ on how we see money. We can even have different values for a few things. But if your partner simply will not talk about money, you have a huge problem. Why? If you can't talk about money, then you can't even understand where they're coming from and they are not curious about what you want. So how are you ever going to get on the same page? Think about this.

A lot of people think we need to have the conversation about money, as if it's one conversation. Would you have the conversation about raising kids? No. You'll have thousands in your life. That's the way it should be. Money is very much like parenting, not like, should we play pickleball or tennis today? Irrelevant.

So we want to have lots of conversations about money. And that means we need to, first of all, be willing to talk about it. And then we need to find a way to have fun doing it. Why don't we? And who doesn't? Is it men? Is it women that don't do it more? Or who's not talking about money and why aren't they talking about it? It's not about gender. It has nothing to do with gender in terms of who does or doesn't talk about money. There are avoiders. That's one of four categories, money types that I've identified. Avoiders hate talking about money.

And they will use a series of conscious and unconscious techniques to avoid talking about money. They'll say things like, why do you always have to talk about money? Can't we just have a nice night out? Or you're so much better at this. You just handle it. You're just so much savvier at this stuff. That's an avoider. Do they know their own financial situation? No. So they don't know their own financial situation and they don't want to talk about it. Correct.

And by the way, we all have something like this. It could be our fitness. It could be our relationship with our parents. There's something in our life that we know we should deep down, but we avoid it. Yeah. And there's no –

There's no immediate consequence. Like if I don't call my college friend, it's fine. I could probably call him tomorrow and you can go on and on and on like that until one day you can't. Same thing with our fitness. It's very easy to procrastinate on fitness or money because it's not like your house is being taken away or even your cable's being shut off. You'll probably be fine until one day you hit this brick wall and it's not.

So that's the avoider. That's the first money type. Yeah. Next up, optimizer. I have a soft spot because I am an optimizer. Optimizers, we love to live in the spreadsheet. It's like, let me sit and calculate this. And what if I run a compound interest calculation, a Monte Carlo calculation? And what if we do this, but not that? I love calculating everything. And left alone, I would sit there and do that for the rest of my life. Okay. The problem is you can take it a little too far.

I don't think I've taken it too far. I think I'm perfect on my spreadsheets, but my wife has taught me

Enough's enough. We've won that part of life. Let's focus on another part, connection and fun and experience. Are these people often thought of as boring? Yes, they are. They are. Deep down, they are boring. I was boring when I was sitting there thinking money is only about numbers. It's not. Money is about adventure and possibility and generosity. And you will often find optimizers. I'll give them a challenge. I'll give them a $100 challenge. Also, you have to take $100 in the next week and spend it on yourself.

They cannot do it. They will spend it on their dog. They'll spend it on their kid. They'll spend it on their partner, but they will not do it for themselves. And I go, why didn't you do it? They go, Ramit, do you know that if you put $100 in the S&P 500 and you compound that for the next 45 years, it'll turn into this much? I go, I don't give a shit. Spend the money. Because money is not simply meant to be hoarded, right? It's meant to create a rich life. And when you have optimizers...

The thing is, they can get you to a very good place. They will probably have your account set up, dialed in. They'll be investing. Great. They're going to be very proud. Look at the compound interest returns. All that is fantastic.

But it can be taken too far. These are the people that die and then you figure out that they had like $9 million in some saving account. What a waste. They never tasted the caviar, but they've got. Yeah, like people send these newspaper articles around like, oh, local librarian discovered to have $9 million. And I go, what a tragedy. What a tragedy to live a smaller life than you have to.

I want you to save. I want you to invest. But I also want you to try a nice meal. Or if you don't like nice food or you don't want a nice t-shirt, also fine. Get super generous. Give that money. Surprise the people around you. Tip 50%. So those are optimizers. The third category is worriers. They love to worry. Typically, they picked up worrying from their parents almost always. And their entire relationship with money is worry.

Are we going to have enough? What if we run out of money? What if we don't have enough to pay at the gas station? And oftentimes it's very surprising because I told you that 50% of couples don't know how much they make, right? So they'll say like, we need more. We don't have enough right now. And I'll ask them, how much do you think you make? This just happened a couple of weeks ago on a podcast episode. They thought they made around $70,000 a year. Okay. We add up all their stuff. They make $120,000 a year.

So I go, well, here you go. You wanted to make an extra 40K. You actually make 50K more than you thought. Do you feel any better? And she goes, no.

because the way you feel about money is highly uncorrelated to the amount in your bank account. So worriers worry. That's how they relate. They can't imagine any other relationship to money. And my job is to help them realize, first of all, let's actually look at your numbers. Let me help you understand what it means. Do you have enough? What does it take to have enough? And then can you start to develop a new relationship with money? It's almost like a new...

taste bud. I'm never going to tell you to eat tomatoes if you hate tomatoes, but I am going to teach you, maybe you like okra and we can develop a new taste for that. Finally, the dreamer. The dreamer believes that success is one deal away. If we just close this deal, if I just get this thing and they tend to fall into get rich quick schemes, lots of scams, MLMs, a lot of crypto shit coin scams, like all this BS,

But they are extremely resistant to...

calm, low cost, long term investing. In other words, the way that most people build real wealth. They think it's boring. They even have little phrases like, I don't want to be stuck in a nine to five like those suckers. I'm like, that sucker makes 10 times what you make. What are you talking about? But they have simply been surrounded with the idea, one more deal and I'll finally make it. They must be hard to be married to. It's impossible. It's really, really difficult. The

not only do they not want to talk about money, when they finally do talk about money, they're almost living in a different world. Often you will find that dreamers can only dream because they are being subsidized by someone in their life, usually their partner. And if their partner were to leave, for example, the house of cards would collapse. And actually that's

usually the only thing that gets them to truly change. So if we've got these four money types, the avoider, the optimizer, the warrior, the dreamer, in your view, who lives a happier life?

You can live a happy life with any of these. Also, you can change any of these types. But on average, one person's going to probably love leading. Well, I mean, I'm the optimizer and I'm pretty happy. So is that the answer? Yeah. Optimizers are great. They love their spreadsheet. I think that... The warrior clearly is not going to live the happiest life. The dreamer is actually quite happy. Yeah. The dreamer is quite happy. They live in optimism. Yeah, they're living in a world that's not real. It's subsidized by somebody else. They're always...

optimistic about what's going to happen next week, next month, next year, never realizing the catastrophe that they are leaving behind them. That's the whole issue. That's the reason I wrote the book is it's one thing to treat money in a certain way on your own when you're single. You can be irresponsible. You can be an optimizer. But when you're in a relationship, it's not about you anymore. It's about the two of you as a unit. And so you have to deeply understand yourself and

And then you have to be willing to communicate with your partner and really create a rich life vision for the two of you. Most couples I talk to have no vision for their money. That's why they fight over who spent $50 at Target. I go, who gives a shit about Target? Financial problems are almost never about overspending at Target.

The biggest problem with couples and money is they have no rich life vision. What is money to us? What do we want to use money for? How do we want to feel about it? So they're confronted with a thousand different decisions with their money every week. And they have no vision to guide them. This is for us. This is not for us. One of the things I've always wondered in relationships is

how many couples know how much money the other couple has in their savings account and their total sort of investment portfolio? Because I've never been in a relationship where, I mean, I've only really been in two relationships, you could say. But I've been with, you know, dated people over the years. Been with my current partner for many, many, many years. But even my current partner has no idea how much money I have. Zero idea. When will you have that conversation? Probably never. Should we bring him out right now? Let's bring him out.

I've just never had the conversation. If we, if you need something, we can get it. Yeah. And it's just always been like that in my life. Okay. So I, I made a mistake in my own relationship. I was, uh,

dating my now wife for many years. And at one point she had asked some question about her 401k or something. And I said, well, there is a book called I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Here's a copy of it. And I was joking around with her. And so I ended up learning all about her finances. So I knew about her entire financial picture. It didn't occur to me to talk about my own. And a little while later, she

She very assertively said, this doesn't feel fair. You know everything about my finances, but I don't know about yours. And I realized I violated my own rule in chapter nine of my first book, which is talk about money early on. Talk about it regularly. So we talked about it. We talked about

It's actually one of the most memorable conversations we had because talked about the numbers, talked about my pride in how hard I had worked to build my business and invest for 20 years, 25 years. And then we talked about what it meant for us. Like, what kind of life do we want to have?

Do we want to live here? Do we want to live there? Do we want to have kids? Do we want to eat this type of food? Travel. Like that conversation about possibility is the conversation I want every couple to have because it's about possibility and you can start to dream. And that dream is important. You can get to the logistics. Of course, we'll get to that. But so few of us still dream with our money.

But I think for someone like you who is the optimizer and who's probably quite proud of the system you've created. I love systems. But there's going to be so many people listening now that are in a relationship and they are maybe early in the dating process and maybe they've been with a person six months and

They've taken them out on lots of nice dates and they have $1,000 in their savings account. And their partner has no idea. And they're thinking, Rami, if I tell my partner what's in this bank account, she is going to be shocked or he is going to be shocked and they are going to leave me. So I'm keeping this shit a secret because they are living under an illusion. That I have more than I actually have. But remember this.

just because you don't have as much money as you want doesn't mean that you are less of a person. What could be more... I completely agree. Yeah. I completely agree. What could be more appealing than saying, you know what? Would you be open to talk about our finances? We're getting a little bit serious. You know, I know we're kind of talking about taking the next step.

I think money is going to be an important part of it. I know it is for me. And I wonder if we could sit down and talk about it. First, just being proactive. How many people watching and listening are like, I wish my partner, whether they're dating or my partner of 20 years, would come to me and say, can we sit down and talk about money? But the part of that is shameful about their financial situation. Yes. If I run it back 10 years, just over 10 years ago, I was living in an area called Rush Holm.

I was in a shared house living with a few people who had come to the UK illegally. Okay. I didn't have a carpet in my room. I was in a single bed, didn't have duvets or bed sheets or anything. And every day I woke up and thought to myself, how am I going to eat today? So I'd find different ways to find food. At the same time, I was dating this girl called Ruby.

This girl called Ruby had no idea. She'd never seen where I lived. She wasn't aware that I was looking behind sofas in takeaways for pound coins. There is no possibility in the world that I would have ever told Ruby the financial situation I was in. So I don't know what to do in that situation. And I'm sure I would assert that maybe...

30% of people listening right now don't want to tell their partner their financial situation because they're deeply embarrassed or shameful to the point that they think their partner might leave, like them less, be less attracted to them if they really knew the truth. I totally agree. I totally agree. It's crazy how much shame we have around money. And it's

young guy not having enough. It's a young woman who has $18,000 of credit card debt. It's all over the spectrum. That's the second point, which is if you want to talk about money, talk about money. Don't wait for your partner to do it. Bring it up yourself, even if you feel embarrassed or ashamed. Okay. If you're planning to make a life with this partner,

You've got to be able to talk about this because you're going to be talking about a lot of other personal sensitive things over the course of your life. The second thing is what could be more attractive than somebody saying, you know, when I was in my 20s, I moved to the city. I spent a lot of money going out and I wasn't super responsible. I racked up a lot of credit card debt. I've paid it down from $18,000 to $6,000. It's going to be paid off next year. And I just know that I'm never going back there again.

Oh my God. Someone who acknowledges what they did, has a good reason for it, and then most importantly has a plan, huge turn on. So what I'm begging all of us to do is to realize just because you have more or less money does not make you a better or worse person. I want to take shame away because we all have something that we are ashamed of, but not talking about it and

Putting it in the corner in the darkness, that doesn't solve it. That's why I love talking about the most taboo of taboo subjects. Money, gender, prenups, dating. These are things that nobody's talking about. So when you hear couples on the podcast and they're talking about being married for 15 years and they've never actually had one conversation about money, I want you and everyone watching to be inspired because stuff doesn't have to be shameful and doesn't have to be kept in the dark.

And what do you think about prenups then? Do you think they are a good thing for all couples? Do you think all couples should initiate a prenup? No, no, not all couples. There are some couples who should have one. My wife and I have one. So we went through this process. And who should get a prenup is if one or both partners are bringing substantial benefits

premarital assets to the marriage, meaning before they get married, they have a large investment portfolio, a business, rental property or a house. Like you should have a prenup.

But most people should not. Because when most people get married, they don't have substantial assets. What if your partner turns around? If I turn to my partner, I say, babe, Ramit told me to go get a prenup. Yeah. And she goes, absolutely not. Well, that's not a good introduction. I wouldn't say that. Although I don't mind if you throw me under the bus. Oh, this guy, Ramit, he said this thing. Fine.

How to bring it up is an art. So when I was deciding on a prenup, I asked for lots of advice from lots of friends. And some of the advice out there, especially online, is not great. One of the most common pieces of advice is blame it on your lawyer. I'm like, get real. You're about to build a life with your partner and you can't be honest about this thing. This in the grand scheme is a minor topic. So I'll tell you exactly what I said.

to my wife. We sat down and I said, I want to talk to you about something. You know that because of how long I've been in business, I've been very lucky. I've been fortunate. I worked hard. I've built this business up and I'm really proud of what I've accomplished and saved. And you also know my lifestyle. I don't drive around in a Lamborghini. I like to travel. I like to wear nice clothes and I like to save money. And

It's important to me that as we are getting closer in our relationship to getting married, that we talk about a prenup. And my heart was pounding. I had planned it. I had thought about it. I had talked to so many people. What I knew is I wanted to take responsibility. It's not some lawyer that wants it. It's me. It's important to me. I wanted to bring up the topic and I wanted to reassure my wife that

I'm not going to change overnight when we get married into someone who's blowing all of our money. It's just important because of the business that I built. And her response, I was like, how is she going to respond? Because bringing up a prenup is very fraught. She's the best. She said, OK, I wasn't expecting that, but I'm willing to learn more about it.

That's as good of a response as I could have hoped. So we started the series of conversations. We both had lawyers. It was going well at first until it wasn't. And we were talking about numbers that to me seemed astronomical. I started to feel resentful. She didn't feel listened to. She didn't feel heard. She started to feel resentful. And these conversations were like so difficult. I would say they were some of the most difficult conversations of our relationship.

At one point, she said, we should go see a therapist because these conversations are not good. And I was like, you're right. So we went to see a therapist. We sat in that therapist's office. I still remember. Therapist asked us a bunch of questions, including how do you see money? And she turned to me. I was like, how do I see money? Growth. I could literally see numbers floating in front of my eyes. The optimizer in me was talking about the rule of 72. It was like so obvious. What an obvious question.

Then she turns to my wife, "How do you see money?" And she said, "Safety." I said, "What? Safety?" To me, that was like saying charcoal. Like the two words don't relate at all.

But it started us on a new path of realizing that we were seeing money completely differently. And that was exactly when I realized I wish there were other couples talking about money from behind closed doors. That exactly was the genesis of me doing my podcast and my Netflix show to show people, not just tell them, but to show them how real couples deal with money. What was the resistance between you two? In sort of more specific terms, she wanted...

A different arrangement to the one that you wanted? Yeah, the terms are super technical in prenups. So with a prenup, you have a variety of different rules or technicalities, which would be like, what if you separate in six months? What if you separate in 25 years, but there are children involved?

Who gets the house? What if you have a house? What if you have two houses? What if you have this much in your joint investment, but each of you has this much in individual investment? And so what happens is it's not even just the numbers themselves. It's the fact that the process is set up to be adversarial. So they have a lawyer. We have a lawyer. We're communicating through lawyers when it comes to this topic, when normally you're just talking to your fiance or your girlfriend. And...

There's an art to also managing the lawyers. See, the lawyers want, there's nothing bad. We had great lawyers. I'm happy with them. But lawyer's job is to look over every freaking contingency and make sure that nothing is left to chance. And I think a good reminder for anyone considering a prenup is to remember you manage your lawyers and your job is to come to an agreement with your partner for the rest of your life. So sometimes you can be generous. You can be willing to let up on a few things here and there.

As long as you are looking at the North Star, we're going to be together. We want these premarital assets to be protected. And in case something goes wrong, we both want to feel good about what the arrangement is. And there is a...

60% chance that you will break up if you look at the marriage statistics. Well, those statistics are a little skewed. That includes second marriages. That also includes all different socioeconomic, all everybody else. If you break it down, for example, just by having a bachelor's degree or certainly an advanced degree, that goes way down. First marriage goes down. And in fact, the divorce rate has been decreasing for decades. So this 50, 60% thing that's kind of tossed around, not quite accurate, but I think

whatever the statistic is, what's more important is if you should always think about how can things go right and also how can they go wrong. And I think with money, a lot of times we only think about one or the other. We buy a house, never asking ourselves like, what if one of us loses our job? And we get married without ever asking like, what if we separate?

So you want to be able to play both. What happens if things go right? Incredibly right. And what happens if things go wrong? Let's make a plan. What are the other red flags then? We mentioned the first being they don't want to talk about money. Ah, they have a money guy. A money guy is so common. Everybody talks about, oh, I have this money guy. Your money guy is probably a whole life insurance salesman charging you 1.25% AUM. Let me explain what that means.

So many people in America do not want to learn the basics of money. And so they hire a financial advisor. Now, I don't have anything against financial advisors in general, but a money guy that they're typically referring to is someone who charges them a percentage of their assets. So if I have a $100,000 portfolio, they'll charge, or let's say a million dollar portfolio, I might be paying 1%. Now, 1% doesn't sound like a lot.

But if you actually run the math, you will pay about 28% of your lifetime investment returns in fees. That's not $10 or $100. That's tens of thousands or sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. So it's a red flag if someone has an advisor that they're paying a percentage-based fee to. I would much rather you pay an hourly or project or that type of fee to. They're cheap.

I can help a lot of people, but I can't help cheap. Cheap is... Cost is the first and last thing they always consider. So you might come home, you're so happy. "Oh my gosh, look at this beautiful thing I got for the kids." How much was that? And it just sucks the life out of every room. Cheap people are obsessed with cost. Cheap people rarely recognize the effect they are having on their loved ones. And cheap people find it very, very difficult to change.

They don't want to change. They actually reinterpret their behavior and call it a virtue. Oh, I'm not that. I don't need that fancy wine. I'm perfectly happy with this. Well, what if your partner wants one glass of wine? They seem like a miserable group. Yeah, I don't like cheap people. I don't like cheap people. I don't like cheap tippers. And their partners don't like them. So it's one. I'm not saying everybody has to go out and spend a million dollars, but

You got to use money to live your rich life. The point of money is not to just hoard it and save it. That's why when you create a rich life vision, you ask yourself, what do we want to spend extravagantly on? Not just a little bit, but extravagantly. And what do we want to cut costs mercilessly on? You have to be able to play different notes like you're in a symphony. If your only note is spend less, that's a miserable existence.

Are there any more red flags? I want to go into why people and where they develop these relationships with money. But are there any other sort of standout red flags that we should be looking for? Well, if they follow Robert Kiyosaki, that's a huge fucking red flag. I mean, the guy once, Robert Kiyosaki wrote this well-known personal finance book, and the guy has really lost it in the last few years. He literally, I'm not joking, he literally told people the best investment you can have is a can of tuna. Yeah.

I'm not joking. And I replied to him, Robert, I sold everything in my portfolio and bought three million cans of tuna. Is this a good investment? But sadly, I never heard back. So beware of beware of charlatans. Let me put it that way. Personal finance and money is filled with people who will promise you get rich quick, who will tell you that the sky is falling.

And when it comes to money, we want to be balanced. We want to have fun. We want to be, have a healthy relationship with money. It's very similar to fitness. Lots of people making promises and,

You want to find the people who are giving you long-term advice. You know these cheap people that you mentioned? You know any of them? A couple come to mind. Tell the camera who they are right now so we know. Who are these cheap people? They also fit into the category of the warriors, in my experience. So someone who's a bit of a warrior can also be quite cheap. And I was just wondering, in the hundreds of couples that you've sat down with and interviewed, does there tend to be an origin story where

Which links to their frugalness with money and their penny pinching. Yes. Okay. Always when I talk to people, I ask them, what do you remember your parents saying about money when you grew up? Always. And they'll tell me. They are very conversant. They remember. And usually the parents said stuff like, we can't afford it.

And money doesn't grow on trees. We don't talk about money in this family. These are the type of things that people said. But you will often find, usually when kids are teenagers, when there's something really tragic that happens, and it's often that dad lost his job.

And that meant that they completely changed socioeconomically. Often they had a big house, they had to shift into grandma's apartment, that kind of thing. That affects people in a huge way. Now, it affects people in one of two ways, and you cannot predict how. Some people go, I'm never going to let that happen to me. Therefore, I'm going to have a high savings rate. I'm going to invest. I'm going to start a business. And they develop a really healthy relationship with money.

Others go the direction you're suggesting, which is they become incredibly cheap, incredibly worried about money. Anxiety is common. And they often do not see the connection at all until I point it out to them. And when you talk about making this rich life vision together, what exactly does that mean? We start off in the book just talking about

let's have our first positive conversation about money. You have to remember, most people have never had a positive conversation about money. Money is the only way it comes up is why did you spend that much at the gas station last week? That's it. So we start off by just saying, I give them an agenda, literally an agenda. You can read off these words and start it off. It's like, why this is going to be awesome. Here's how I feel about money today. How do you feel? Here's how I want to feel about money. How about you? High five. I love you. We're good. That's it.

Part of having conversations about money is this philosophy of declare victory and go home. You don't need to talk about it all at once. Make it short, make it fun. And at the end, always say, I love you. That's it. Over time, you're going to associate talking about money with positivity. And that's what we want. When it comes to a Rich Life Vision,

This is where it's really fun. So I have some fill in the blanks where you fill it in like, "I wish we spent more money on..." and then you fill it in. "I think we could probably cut back on..." and then you fill it in and you compare your notes. My wife and I did this really fun exercise which I would encourage everyone to do and it is the 10-year bucket list. So imagine you sit down with your partner and you go, "Let's each take a piece of paper

Write down what would make the next 10 years incredibly rich, meaningful to me and to us. So you write it down and then you compare notes. This is exactly what we did. And you get excited. Oh, you want to learn Spanish? Amazing. Do you want to do it online or do you want to go to Mexico City? Oh, you want to go skydiving?

That one's not for me, but I'll meet you at the ground, right? Have fun. And you just get excited. You encourage the other person and then you find one that you both want to do. That's meaningful for both of you. So maybe it is we want to create an art studio in the garage. Love it. Maybe it is we want to take a round the world trip at some point in the next change. Okay, great. The difference with this exercise is you're actually going to make it happen.

So right there on the spot, you estimate how much it would cost. Take five minutes. Don't take more than that. You can estimate it within 80% like that. Decide when you want to do it. Maybe if there's kids involved, you're going to want to go in summer or winter, etc. And then all you do is take the rough amount, divide it by the number of months, and that's how you know how much you have to save for it.

We did this. And for us, what was really meaningful is to have a 10-year wedding anniversary. So we know where we want to do it. We know the exact place. We know all the friends and family we want to have with us. And we knew when it was going to happen. So we had a funny experience because we each sat down and estimated the cost. And I think the number I picked was something like three times bigger than hers. And in those cases, I say go with the bigger number. Okay. It helps you dream a little bigger. If you can't save that much money per month, that's okay. Okay.

shrink the dream a little bit, right? Narrow the scope or maybe extend it a little longer until you have to do it. But suddenly every single month when you sit down and talk about money, it's like a video game. You're like, oh, we're 3% closer to that goal.

That is how you start to build a vision for money and have fun along the way. And do you subscribe to this idea that you should have like a joint bank account and then separate bank accounts? Because right now I just have my bank account. How does it work? How does it work for you? So do you just, you just pay for most things? I have to give context on what my partner's like. She really doesn't care about material things. So she's... Avoid her? She just doesn't, she...

She doesn't care about whether we fly first class or economy. She doesn't care about if we stay in that hotel or this hotel. She doesn't care if we stay in the 70th floor penthouse we live there or if she stays in a studio. She doesn't care. What does she care about? She cares about quality time with me. She likes having nice experiences. She likes going to places. She doesn't care how she gets there or where she stays. She likes traveling and exploring.

And she likes her simple things. She's a very simple person. If I didn't get her a birthday present or a Valentine's Day present or a Christmas present, or if I just made her a scrapbook every year, she'd be thrilled. Okay. So I am the one that wants the nicer things. Okay, I'm the same to a large extent. But we have a lot with it. You know, life, it costs money. So...

I pay for most things. Okay. And you're cool with that? It's fine, right? Yeah, I've always been cool with it. Okay, cool. I'm particularly cool with it because she doesn't care. Right. Does that make sense? Yes, it makes sense. There's no resentment because she doesn't care. I'm the one that's making sure she travels this way. Yeah. I have to intervene and I have to fight to make sure that her plane ticket is booked here or that the hotel she's staying in isn't going to...

be dangerous. I've got so many stories of her booking it herself and then me having to rescue her because it's super dangerous. So you and I have a similar dynamic, at least in this way. I think my wife does have her money dials. Money dials are the things you love to spend money on and you can turn that dial up. But when we met,

She was not into hotels at all. I'm a hotel guy. I love hotels. And so we had to have some conversations. At first, I'm just like, oh, yeah, like, of course I'm paying. And then when we merged our finances, which I recommend couples do, we were like, oh,

Well, suddenly it's not my money. It's our money. And so now we are forced to talk about that stuff and come up with a way. Like she's like, I don't need to stay there. And like personally, I don't really think it's worth it for our money. And I'm like, well, like, have you seen the suite at this place? And do you know what type of wood they use in that? She doesn't care.

So how does that work? You said you merge your finances. When you say you merge your finances, you mean you're paying into the same bank account? Correct. And this is what I recommend for almost all couples. You take your paychecks, or if we're both business owners, you take...

whatever money comes in, put it in the joint checking account. That joint checking account then pays a variety of different accounts. It pays our joint expenses like our rent. And if we eat out, it pays for our joint credit card bill. The money also is paid out from the joint checking to her individual checking and individual savings, which she has her money. No questions asked. If she wants to spend it on something like she loves self-care, what am I going to ask? It's her money.

It also sends some money over to me. That's no questions asked money. The same money. Yeah, the money that came in from us two together is processed in the joint checking account and an amount goes to each of us.

The same amount goes to both of you. Good question. It could be the same. 50-50, I think, is actually great. But once in a while, if you have somebody who's earning, like, let's say 10 times more, okay, you may decide to make it proportional, right? So, like, one, the higher earning partner might get more. Because imagine, just for argument's sake, imagine you're earning a million dollars a month, easy math. And suddenly you're getting, like,

$2,000 a month for guilt-free spending. You're like, what the hell? This doesn't make sense. Usually partners are totally cool with that. But I will tell you this. I used to be on the proportionality train, meaning everything's proportional, et cetera. My wife and I did this for many years. It's really complicated.

It gets really, really complicated. And what's more important is you want to set your accounts up so that they drive the right behavior. Just like when you hire people, you set the right incentives to drive the right behavior. When our money was separate and we were doing all this proportionality calculation and all these different accounts,

We didn't see the money as ours. Now all the money goes into that pot. It's ours. So we sit down every month, we look at our numbers and we go, what's worth it? Do we care about this hotel? Do we care about that? Et cetera, et cetera. We really love that. Let's keep spending on that and find a way to do that. It's about us. And of course, we have our own individual money. So why didn't you just...

the money coming in, why didn't it just go to you individually? And then you pay into the joint account. Why did you make- That's what we did at first. And it became really complicated. So the money came into each of us. And then because we each run businesses that are each variable, we wanted it to be proportional. Well, guess what? If it changes every single month, we had to recalculate the proportionality every single quarter. What a mess. So we're literally calculating every three months and then it changes. And then at the end of the year, we have to reconcile all this stuff. We're like,

What is this, a marriage or a freaking multinational conglomerate? So part of a philosophy around a rich life vision is one of our values is fight for simplicity. Fight for it. Because I talk to couples who have more complicated financial setups than we do. Shouldn't be the case. Most people's setup should be very simple.

All your money comes into a joint checking account. From there, it pays out to individual accounts and it pays all your joint expenses. Your life is together. Your rich life is together. That's it. We're married. We're going to be married forever. Our future is together. So let's set our accounts up accordingly.

So then if you end up getting a divorce, that joint checking account, do you just split it in half? Yeah. So this is a good question. When you are married, the money that is earned is community property. So let's just say we put $100,000 in that checking account and we were to get separated tomorrow, 50-50. Yeah. And that's reasonable, right? It's community property. The prenup is only concerned with what happened before the marriage, right?

So you're in the camp of not caring too much about the small expenses, the coffee. It's a waste of time. Why is it a waste of time? Because they are $3 questions. If you actually added up how much they actually cost you, it's actually not that much. It's the simple joy that you enjoy in the morning. And you could spend your entire life agonizing over buying a coffee. But when I ask people, okay, so you stopped buying coffee for a month. How'd you feel? They go, oh, I felt okay. I go, what'd you do with the money you saved?

They go, I don't know. It's in my checking account. Not only do you have to make the decision every single day to save on these tiny little things, you then have to properly invest that money and you have to do this every single day for the rest of your life. What if we just got five critical decisions correct for the rest of our life and didn't have to worry about coffee? Why are we playing so small?

Oh, let's decide. Do we have enough money to buy this saran wrap? Who cares? Let's talk about are we investing properly? Do we have a target rate that we are doing? Watch this. I bet you so many couples watching this right now have had arguments about why did you spend so much at the grocery store? Why can't you stop spending so much on the kids and on and on? But have they ever had conversations like this?

What is our savings rate? Is it 4%, 6%, 7%? What is our investment rate? Is it 6%, 8%? Whatever the number is, let's make a rule that every December we increase it by 1%. If you just did that, if you increase your investment rate, meaning the percentage of your net income that you invest every single month,

I always recommend people start off at 5 to 10%. Let's say you're at 6. If you make a rule, every December we're going to increase that by 1%, it will be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to you. More than all the coffee you ever buy in your entire life. So why the hell would you focus on coffee when you can make one decision per year and make way more than all those coffees combined?

Most couples, when they think about investing or their investment rate, the only investment most couples make together is buying a house. Yeah. Well, and that's questionably not even an investment. Most people think renting is wasting money. Yeah. And the logic goes, well, if my rent is $2,000 a month or £2,000 a month, my mortgage is only going to be £2,000 a month. And

So we might as well buy a house because then we get to keep the asset. Are you trying to get me mad right now? I'm starting to sweat just hearing this because you're right. That's what they say. Should I just dismantle these arguments once and for all right now? Sure. Okay. Renting is not throwing away money. Just like going to a sushi restaurant is not throwing money away on sushi. You're paying for something. You're getting value. It's fantastic. The next argument they use is you're paying your landlord's mortgage.

I go, okay, aren't you paying the sushi owner's mortgage when you go there and get sushi? Funny, we never think about it like that. We only think about paying the landlord's mortgage. Finally, we have to understand that buying a house can be a good financial decision. It can be. But renting and investing the difference can also be a good decision. And right now in the U.S., in the top 50 U.S. metro cities, it is cheaper to rent than to buy.

So let me give you some math. Let's say, because I lived in New York close by, if the rent was, let's say, $3,000 a month, to own the equivalent property right next door would have been $6,600 a month. That's $3,600 per month more just to own. So most people don't know this. They don't factor in phantom costs like maintenance, taxes, transaction, opportunity costs. They simply look at a number that says $3,600 or whatever the number may be, and they go, great investment.

We have got to get more sophisticated with the biggest purchase of our lives. I'm just looking at some of the comments on our last conversation. Oh, yeah, what'd they say?

It's a balancing act. There's two groups of people here. There's a group of people who attest to the fact that they bought a house and it's the single best thing they did. Yep. This person said, I bought a house. It's the best thing I ever did. It's launched my mindset and new directions. Remember that having your own space has profound psychological impacts and can change your life. That's a good comment. Okay, let's talk about that first. I love that comment.

We have to remember that life is not just about a spreadsheet. It's not. So when it comes to a major purchase like a house or a car, we got to start with the numbers. Okay, we have to start by running a buy versus rent calculation, by running an amortization chart. I have a whole bunch of stuff on buy versus rent. And then we need to know, can we afford it? Is this part of our rich life vision? What if one of us loses our job and on and on and on? But then second, we need to say, what kind of lifestyle do we want?

If we love to decorate, that's probably worth something. We should, maybe we need to buy a house. If we want our kids to be in a particular area, maybe we need to buy. There's so many non-financial reasons to buy or to rent. And so we can't just do one or the other. But my main argument is this. Most of us never run the numbers. We will spend a million dollars in total cost of ownership for a house and we won't run one calculation. So we got to play multiple notes here.

doing the financial and non-financial parts. I think that's what a lot of people are actually saying. A lot of people are saying, you know, I bought a house and this person's saying, I used to be, I used to live in a caravan. I finally bought a house and I don't care about being rich necessarily, but having my own house means the world to me. Great, great non-financial reason. They want stability. I totally value that. I would also ask, did you run the numbers?

I think the key thing is most people when they buy the house, they see it as an investment and they see it as a good investment. I think in part because they don't really know any other way to invest. Totally right. So we grow up, we think, okay, the minute you get enough money, the first thing you have to do is buy a house. I mean, there's a real sequence of events in our lives that are given to us, which is go to school, go to college or university or something like that. They get the degree, get the job, buy the house, get married, have the kids. Yeah.

And then move to Florida, get skin cancer, die. Oh, retire. Okay. Have your pension, die. We don't have pensions anymore. That was the 60s. But yes. And actually, that's a pretty good life if you think about it. It's actually a very good life, especially the way that our parents' generation grew up where, you know, they could buy a house on a reasonable salary, one salary. But that doesn't exist right now.

Housing is historically expensive and not through any fault of young people, by the way. There's a lot of this stuff thrown around the media. Young people are buying too much avocado toast. They're always buying the new iPhone. That's not why housing is expensive. Housing is expensive because people who bought their houses in the 60s, 70s and 80s bought a house and then systematically prevented everyone else from building more housing.

So it is it's called nimbyism, not in my backyard. They have allowed almost no housing to be built, particularly in the US. That's why if you only have a limited supply, guess what happens to the price? It goes way up.

That's changing slowly. Housing prices will in certain cities like Austin, even Santa Monica have come down in certain areas. It's really important to be able to build more housing so that young people, middle class people, poor people can afford housing. We should not have people unable to afford rent or

or buying housing. It's a big problem. So are you saying that the average couple, if they're looking to make a financial return on their joint savings account, they shouldn't invest that money in a house? I personally would not consider my primary residence to be a great investment because it has massive costs, right? Massive.

maintenance, opportunity cost of that down payment. Let's say you put down 50K or 100K, that could have been invested. It has all kinds of phantom costs. And then you have to stay there for until you paid off, presumably 30 years. Most people don't stay for 30 years. There's some shocking math behind a mortgage. Like most people don't realize that they will be paying more towards their interest than towards principal for 21 years.

Let me say that again. Most people, when they take a 30-year mortgage right now with interest rates the way they are,

they will be paying more towards interest than they are towards the mortgage in year 1, 2, 5, 10, year 20, until finally year 21 when they are finally paying more towards their mortgage, their principal, rather than interest. So you know that phrase, I don't want to throw money away on rent? We might more aptly say, I don't want to throw money away on interest.

So if I'm in a couple, I'm in a relationship and me and my partner have managed to save, I don't know, 50K, what is a better use of that 50K to drive a financial return?

Okay, so let's simplify the whole thing. I have a conscious spending plan. I have four numbers that couples should be talking about, okay? The first off is your fixed costs. Those should be roughly 50 to 60% of your take-home pay. What's a fixed cost? Fixed cost includes your housing or that could be rent, mortgage, your utilities, your car payment, any debt payment, anything that is consistent

even groceries that you need to live every single month. So 50% of my monthly income goes straight to those fixed costs. Monthly take home. Post tax. Post tax. Okay. 50 to 60% is the number you want to be targeting. Right there is the crux of why couples are stressed out about money. It's because they are spending too much on fixed costs. And within that, there's two areas they spend too much on. You

Housing is number one because it's so expensive and they don't calculate. Number two is cars, usually trucks. We love trucks, trucks and SUVs. In America, the cultural script is, oh, we're having a kid. We need to get a big house and a big SUV because we do. So that right there is where people get stressed out about money.

Next number is your savings. This should be 5% to 10% minimum. This includes your emergency fund. This includes saving for a down payment. Anything you're saving for money you don't need for between one to five years, basically. Next up is investments. This would be 5% to 10% minimum. This is where real wealth is created. And this is where couples neglect. They talk about saving and they'll say, oh, we try to save.

I don't try to brush my teeth. I don't try to save. I make it automatic. That's what I want couples to do. That's what I cover in the book. And then finally, my favorite category of all, guilt-free spending. This is going out for drinks, concerts, travel, 20 to 35% of take-home pay. That's a lot. That's a lot. If you look at it, people go, wow, yes. And when you get down to that number and you're out and you're having drinks with your friends or you're out to a beautiful experience,

You don't have to worry about anything else. You don't have to feel guilty or anxious because you're already handling all these other three numbers. You know you're set and you have this money set aside and you can enjoy it guilt-free. So this sort of 10% that is automatically invested, would you set up some kind of...

system that automatically invests it? Always, always. You should not be doing any of this manually. So your investments should be happening automatically. And for a couple, you actually get to celebrate it every month. You have a monthly money meeting where you talk about money every month. Most couples don't do this.

You will now after watching this and you talk about it, you look at how your investments are doing, you give each other a high five, a big hug, congratulations. And once you do this for six months, a year, you really start to see how it adds up fast. What if your partner wants to buy a house and you don't? Oh, that's tricky. How would you handle it? It depends on my level of conviction about the decision. I think you've got to pick your battles in relationships. But yeah,

I am probably more financially aware than my partner because my brother is, he's been an investment banker for 13 years. He works for me full time. He's my money guy. Yeah, okay. He's my older brother. What does he charge you? 1.5%? He doesn't charge me a percentage on my portfolio. I'm so happy. No, he works full time in the business. So he...

He manages much of my money, but he would make the case to me of pretty much the case you've made. So based on an opportunity cost basis, a lot of people don't even know what opportunity cost is. I'm going to hazard a guess. I'm going to try and explain it, which is essentially all the things you could have done with this money instead. Yes. So based on all the opportunities you have available to you, Steve, is buying this house a good use of that money? And the answer was actually no. When I bought my first house, it was no. Unless...

This is an emotional decision because you and your partner want a...

psychological feeling of safety to bring up the kids, whatever it might be, just that if it is, Steve, if that's why you want to buy it and you think you're going to stay there for a considerable amount of years, then go ahead. We're going to kind of section this as a different rationale than the rest of your investments. What did you do? I did exactly what he said. You bought it knowing it was an emotional decision. Yeah, I bought it knowing it was a bad decision. I love this. Yeah. Okay. This is amazing. Everybody listen closely because I want to break down what you just said in a different term.

First off, you got to run the numbers. Always for the biggest purchases in your life, you need to calculate carefully. What's my buy versus rent? What's my opportunity cost? What's it going to amortize at? All these things that most people are not familiar with. Learn it. It's not that complicated. Second, you need to factor in the non-financial. Hey, why am I doing this? Do I just feel this certain way? There's nothing wrong with feeling irrational about money. Nothing. You want to buy this thing and it's a bad financial decision? Okay. First, can I afford it? If so, we can continue the conversation.

And then you buy it eyes wide open saying, I know it's not an investment. I know it's not even a good financial. In fact, it's a terrible financial. And I'm still going to do it. Yeah. When I when my wife and I go to buy a house one day, it will be the worst financial decision of our lives. We already know that, but we will probably still do it anyway. Same as you, because there's more to life than just what's in a spreadsheet.

But you have to know all the pieces on the board before you make these big decisions. And you have to be able to do it with your partner. You know, it'd be very easy for you to do things unilaterally. It'd be very easy for me to do it as well. What I've learned and what I emphasize on my podcast every episode is just because you may be the higher earner or have more money, you

It's actually your obligation to bring your partner in and to get them involved. And they may not be as savvy or even as interested, but you have to find a way to bring them into this world and get them connected with you. With my wife and me,

Of course, I know more about investments. So I'm doing our investments, but we're still talking about them. We're saying like, hey, here's the numbers we chose. Are we still good with that? Let's take a look at it. High five. You know, here's what we're thinking for next year. That's the level we're talking about.

These are exactly the kind of conversations you want to have. And I'm actually really thrilled you shared that example because I celebrate that you made a bad financial investment because it wasn't an investment. It was just something you wanted and you could afford it. Yeah. And we're both aware, me and my partner, we had the conversation. We're both aware that this is

One of the worst things we could have spent the money on. If our objective, if our KPI, our key performance indicator was to make more money, this was a terrible decision to make. Yes. But we're also aware, we just didn't care. We thought, you know, there's a lot of non-monetary things that are going to be beneficial about this decision. And I think that's what most people don't realize, actually. And I just think about my friends. I think most of my friends believe that when they buy their house, they're doing so because...

They don't know any other way to invest. Society hasn't given us an alternative. So what is the alternative? Simple, low cost, long term index funds are fantastic ways to invest. I'll explain what they are.

The myth about investing is that you have to sit there and look at P.E. ratios and things like that. No, you pick often one fund. There's a simple example called a target date fund. You pick the year you're going to retire in. Like if I'm going to retire in 2050, I pick a Vanguard 2050 fund or Fidelity or Schwab 2050 fund.

All I do is literally send money every single month. I set it up so it happens automatically. It could be $50 a month, 500, 500,000 per month. And that's all I do. I just send it there. It automatically buys the stock market. It automatically diversifies and gets more conservative over time. And that's it. So, you know, the fitness world, you've, I've seen you training. You've learned about fitness. When you first start off,

so much information and so many different people giving you different pieces of advice, right? It's like, oh my God, how am I supposed to know? What about my genetics and this and that? And then over time you realize, oh, it's actually pretty simple once you cut through the noise. That's the same thing with money. That's the same thing with investing.

You have to cut through the noise and it actually becomes shockingly simple. Oh my God, this is the way that real wealth is created. It's about consistent investing. It's about time. It's about low fees. That's it. And you start to wonder what's all this stuff that they publish all the time in these magazines and newspapers and on TikTok. It's just noise. Do you know when you sat down with those 180 odd couples you've spoken to about money in their relationships,

Have you not had moments where one of the partners was shocked? Always. For better and for worse? Yeah, yeah. Actually, yes. Sometimes they are shocked before they meet me because I have them prepare their document with their financials and one of them has never actually looked at their financials. Sometimes both. And they realize it's much worse than they thought or it's much better. Sometimes we're talking and one of the partners will

actually talk about how they feel for the first time ever. And the other partner will be crying. Give me some examples of the moments that you remember that shocked you the most. I think about one of the most shocking examples was a woman who was around the age of mid-40s, maybe 50. And she had had a double lung transplant. And she had successfully had the transplant and she was alive. She was healthy, but

She knew that she would live five or 10 more years. That's what the doctors told her. And she said, I want to share this time with my daughters. They were around 11 and 12, her husband. And I want to do that. I said, okay, what's stopping you? And she said, well, I still have a job. And I looked at her financials. They were multimillionaires. They had saved consistently doing index funds over time, nothing fancy, just consistent investing. And

She could stop working tomorrow and they would have enough money forever. She couldn't stop. She said, I like to work. I like knowing that I have a job. I like the consistent income. So most people are used to getting an income. And that's why they find it so difficult to retire, among other reasons, because the income will stop. Even though I can point out to them, the investment portfolio you've built and social security and all these things will actually pay you

People are terrified of not seeing that money come into their checking account. In this case, she had a ticking clock. We all have a clock, but she knew how long hers would go for. She found it incredibly difficult to quit her job and spend time with her daughters. Now, if we're listening to this, it's like, just quit. It's so obvious to all of us. But we're not the ones making the decision. That was quite shocking to hear how difficult it can be, even in cases of life or death,

wanting to have a stable income can affect us. And what about earning? Like what role does earning play? Like just earning more money play in all of this stuff? Because I think I did, I'm going to be honest, I had a bias when I was 18, 19 years old. I was fairly reckless with money.

And I had these four credit cards. I maxed out the credit cards. I blew the money. I got two CCJs, which is a county court judgment in the UK. Okay. Had huge debts of thousands and thousands of pounds. And in my head, I thought, it will be fine. If I just earn more. No, because I'm going to earn so much money that I'll just outpace this problem.

And that was like my bias. My bias was like, I'll just earn loads of money. And when I figured out what a credit score was and that mine was destroyed, I thought that won't matter because I'll always pay in cash. Yeah. Classic. Every couple I speak to who has a spending problem, they always say the same thing. They go, we just need to earn more.

And these are the very same couples when we crunch their numbers, they'll often realize they were earning way more than they thought. And you can see their faces because I have the whole thing on YouTube. And it's this realization that, oh my God, the story I've been telling myself, if we just earn $25,000 more, and then they realize we actually are earning 25K more.

and they don't know what to do with it. What I tell them is you could be making $300,000 more right now, and it would not make one bit of difference because you have a hole in your bucket and all the money is going out. The next thing I ask overspenders is, do you want to make no change, small change, or big changes? 100% of them say big changes. I go, all right. I take them at their word. And then we start going down the list and they find it incredibly difficult to

to strip out even the most minor of spending. So we have a couple here that will be in literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. Okay, it's like I'm having a heart attack watching them and they're very calm. It's because I understand interest rates and I know what situation they're in. And so they go big changes. Suddenly, 10 minutes later, we're debating whether they can keep their Netflix subscription or not.

And I go, guys, I'm not here to berate you. I'm not the teacher who's telling the kid you've been a bad kid, which deep down a lot of them want. A lot of us want an authority figure to tell you, you've been bad. Now we got to be good. And that's just not what I do. I help them realize it themselves. And it goes slower. It takes a long time. But if they realize it themselves, they're able to make the change.

Every couple says they want to make big changes. When it gets down to the spending, it's really difficult. That's why you have to be incredibly careful which lifestyle purchases you make that are tied to your identity. So if you are a car person and you're driving a Rolls Royce, a really fancy car,

it will be incredibly difficult for you to downgrade that car because it's part of your identity, right? Meanwhile, like if you have to get cheaper paper towels, whatever, nobody cares. But you have to be very careful about what you allow to become part of your identity. I'm not saying don't buy nice things. And couples, you should buy nice things, but do it when you know that you can afford to do it forever. Don't just do it because, oh, we want to buy a private school this year, but we don't know how to pay for it next year.

So do you think that couples should make a budget? I don't like budgets. I don't think they work. I think they look backwards, whereas a conscious spending plan looks forward. But most couples think deep down,

We just need to create a budget. Isn't a budget the thing you gave me? No. 50%, 60%? Different. A budget is couples tracking every last line item. They're tracking how much they spent on corn. They're tracking how much they spent on diapers. Someone has to create and track this laborious spreadsheet. And then at the end of the month, they look at it and they go, I guess we spent that much. What are you supposed to do with that?

Most couples have no idea. Does this budget tell you when you're going to be a millionaire? Does it tell you what your net worth is? Does it tell you if you have enough? No, it doesn't stack up to anything. It's just a bunch of numbers tracking. Budgets look backwards. A conscious spending plan looks forward. So a conscious spending plan allows you to zoom out and say, what is the vision for our rich life?

How do we pick the things we want to spend extravagantly on and cut costs mercilessly on the things we don't? So I give you these numbers, 50 to 60% for fixed costs. It's up to you how you want to hit the number. If you love your house, you want to spend more on your house, do it. Maybe it means you spend less on your car payment. If you want to go to concerts, but you don't care about eating out, fantastic. Take the trip, go see Taylor Swift.

So it's up to you to make the Tetris pieces fit, but you decide and all your money flows for those four numbers. How do we go about teaching our kids about money? My older brother, the one that works in our company, he has three kids under the age of six. And I'm wondering, because he's such an optimizer, are they going to end up being optimizers? Is there a relationship between our parents and our kids? And if I want to, when I do have my kids, how do I make sure that they aren't worriers or avoiders?

The number one thing that the couples in financial trouble say is when they were growing up, their parents never talked about money. Never. There was an episode on our podcast with this couple living in Kansas in a low cost of living area. And they were making $130,000 a year. That's a very good income, especially for their area. They should have had

Tons of money, tons of savings. But their daughter came home one day with food from the school because she had told her school, "We don't have enough money to eat." Now, they had plenty of money. Why? Because her mom and dad were always saying, "We don't have enough. We can't afford it." Daughter took that message to school and was given free food. This was horrifying to the dad, horrifying.

And what he realized at that moment was the way that I'm communicating about money is not working. See, most parents deep down believe that money is something to protect kids from. They think it's bad. Deep down, most Americans, we have a love-hate relationship with money, but parents think their kids let them be kids. But you would never teach a kid how to ride a bike by saying, we don't talk about bikes in this family. You would

Get them a bike. You would get them on. You would show them how to do it. You would let them fall and then you would help them get up again. So imagine this with your kids. Imagine that they are three years old, young.

You pull them up, sit them. You say, look, can you help me push this button? We're going to pay for the rent. This is for our beautiful house. Help me push that button. Yay. Give them five. Okay. Getting them involved right from the get go. And this is if they're living with two parents, this is mom and dad. You want them to see both because too often people only see mom.

mom worrying about the bills. And so they come to associate mom with worrying. And therefore, if it's their daughter, they think they are supposed to worry as well. Now imagine the kid is eight, 10 years old. You say, hey, we have to go to the grocery store. Here's $100. We need to get all these things. How should we do it?

Let them. Let them make mistakes. They're going to forget about taxes. Let them learn, right? They get a little older. They're planning a pizza or a restaurant for the family. Here's $100 for dinner. Problem is they're going to pick someplace like Chili's. It's horrible, but you got to go let them learn their lesson. By the time they are 16 years old, they have planned a family vacation. They are aware of trade-offs, taxes, tips, all kinds of stuff. They have helped the family buy its new car.

This is how you prepare kids. You don't simply say, we don't talk about money in this family. You let them learn about money and you tell them what you've learned about money. That's how you teach them. I'm somewhat scared of my kids being sport brats. And I say to my partner sometimes, I'm like, if when we have kids, should we be putting the kids...

in like the back of the plane oh yeah you know what i mean or should we should they be up front with us like what's the deal well i'll tell you what i i um i went to public school uh my entire childhood and then i got a bunch of scholarships and went to a private school and for college and at that college i remember in the first week so many of the beliefs i had about money and kids were shattered

I had always assumed that if you went to a private school, you were spoiled and you didn't really like to work. Within three days, I realized that was totally untrue. Like some kids are spoiled, some are not. The correlation with private school, not really there. It's about...

It's about how they were taught. And it's also about some element of luck as well. But can you teach kids not to be spoiled? Yes. There are so many wealthy kids who grew up not entitled, appreciating what they have. And the parents were still like, hey, I want to go to a nice hotel. How? How do you raise kids that aren't spoiled, you think? So start at the very beginning when you're teaching them about let's do this together. Money is something that we all do together.

Now imagine that when you're talking to your family, just the same way we talk about creating a healthy relationship with food, right? How do you teach your kids to have a healthy relationship with food? You talk about it all the time. You go to the grocery store together, you cut carrots together and potatoes and you say, "This is why we're putting potatoes in this thing." But we never do that with money. So you have a healthy relationship with money by shining a light on it, by talking and asking them questions.

Do you know how we afford this house? What's a good thing to do with credit cards? And what's a bad thing to do with credit cards? Hey, what do you think that we have 200 bucks and we want to give it to a worthy cause? How should we do it? How should we pick? These are the kind of conversations that families should be having. And when kids start to engage with money and they see parents doing it and they realize it's not something to be ashamed of or hidden from,

They go, oh my gosh. Like I have some agency over this, some control. That's how you prevent them from being spoiled. Have you got kids yet? No. When you have kids, if your kids come to you and they say, dad, I want to be rich. Love it. Love it. I would say, what does rich mean to you? It means being able to have financial freedom. So not having to look at price tags when I go into restaurants or shops or when I'm browsing Amazon. I can just take care of myself. I can live somewhere nice, drive a nice car, go on holiday when I want. It's freedom, dad. Mm-hmm.

What is the most important thing that I should be thinking about to create that wealth and preserve it so that I can be rich? Well, you'll first notice that when this hypothetical kid said, I want to be rich, what was my response? What do you mean by rich? Yeah. Amazing. What do you mean by rich? So excitement and curiosity. The opposite would be

Why do you want to be rich? You don't need to be rich. That's not for people like us squashing those dreams. So when like my nephew, a few Thanksgivings ago, he was young and he said, I want to buy a Rolex.

Amazing. Where'd you get that? Tell me, what kind of Rolex? How are you going to do it? How much is it going to cost? How much do you have to save to put that aside? That's encouraging kids. Now they can figure out these trade-offs later, but just encouraging them first off is the first thing we do with kids when they talk about money. Kids are smart. They notice by age three, four or five, how their parents feel about money. I talk to parents all the time and I speak to my own family and their parents of younger kids.

they'll tell me my four-year-old is already worried about money every time she gets a little bit of money she puts it in an envelope and saves it because she's always worried about having enough i go wow that's tough um where do you think she got that from and then mom starts crying always i can have a very um difficult financial situation uh two parents they'll be in 150 000 of credit card debt

They're stoic about it. They ignore it. We talk about it. They engage. But the minute I bring up the kids, tears. And the reason for that is that you can take on a lot of burden yourself. But when you realize that your behavior is being passed on to your kids, you're

that is really difficult. And that's why couples can get on the same page and build a healthy relationship for their kids as well. So what would you say then to your kid says, dad, I want to be rich. You said amazing. Great. Love it. Yep. Tell me what it means. And they say, what are the principles for wealth creation, dad, and keeping that money so that I can be financially free? It would be number one, you have to find something you love to do work hard. You have to love to work. Okay. In your own way, whatever it is. Two,

automatically invest every single month, right? That's great. And number three, you have to enjoy money. Enjoy it, not just making it, not just managing it, but also spending it. And if they said, dad, should I get credit cards? I said, sure, of course. When the time is right, you should get a credit card. You should always pay it off every month, but you should get a credit card. And when you start to spend enough, probably get a rewards card. You can get some free trips or cash back out of it.

Notice that I'm not being restrictive. If they say, I want to buy coffee every day, I would say, fantastic. Let's talk about how you can earn enough so you never have to worry about coffee. If they even said to me, I want to buy a Lamborghini. I'm not a Lamborghini guy. I couldn't care less.

I would say, amazing. How do you think you could do that? And what if they said, oh, you know, I want to be a school teacher. I would say, okay, you know, have you talked to any school teachers and asked them how much they make? Then calculate how long it would take you to buy a Lamborghini. Kids are smart. They can do these things. We just have to challenge them. They say, dad, I've only got my pocket money. So how am I going to become an investor? I don't have enough money yet. How much do you need to invest?

I assume you need like thousands of pounds. Oh, what if I told you you only need to start with $100? I don't have $100. I have seven pounds pocket money. Have you asked anyone else how you could make an extra $93? No. Okay. What could you do to ask them to make $93? What could you do?

clean the cars in the street. Keep going. Paper round. And on and on and on. So here, I'm not giving them the answer. I'm challenging them to learn how to think for themselves. And to make $93 for a kid, you could do it. It won't happen in one day, but you could do it very, very quickly. How much money do you think you need to start investing? You should start investing as soon as you can. You could start investing with 50 bucks a month.

My dad helped me open up a custodial account when I was 14 years old. So I started investing then and my dad immigrated from India. So I was very lucky that he pushed me. But if you're a parent,

you should definitely be getting your kids to invest early. Even 50 bucks a month makes a huge difference. So you invested at 14? Yeah, and I've been investing ever since. And how did that do for you? Fantastic. You know why? Because I sold, I never sold almost anything. It just stayed.

every single investment, every single month. No magic, no random like amazing stock picks except for a couple of lucky ones. It's just basically almost all index funds, just every single month. What about crypto?

I mean, if you want to have it as 1% to 5% of your portfolio as speculation, fantastic. The problem is that crypto investors I talk to don't believe in diversification. They will often have all their money in it and they don't really, they don't follow classic principles of investing. And the worst part is it's hard to argue when it's done so well.

So people go like, what the fuck do you know? 7%? That sucks, grandpa. And I go, all right, fine. It has performed incredibly well, at least in certain parts of crypto.

But you do not want to have the majority of your assets in one thing. And that's the problem with crypto as well, is you only hear when it's doing well. Exactly. So whenever the bear market comes in, everybody goes quiet. They get very quiet. Where'd you go, guys? Sometimes I follow them on Twitter. Half the time their account is deleted. That's called survivorship bias. You only hear about things when they're good. The minute it's bad...

Account deleted, never heard from them again. What about gambling? You must see some gambling in relationships. I'm not sure how legal gambling is in every state over here in the USA, but in the UK, gambling is legal. So it's often an issue in relationships, a quiet issue. Yeah, it is a quiet issue. I think I don't hear about it too often. I suspect that gamblers simply don't want to talk about it, which is actually the worst of all.

Maybe I need to find a way to reach some gamblers. I mean, we do hear some really tragic stuff. We hear about folks who have lost money on bad investments late in life. We hear about parents whose kids are bleeding them dry. But we also hear about some really positive things. You know, couples who have quietly accumulated money over time and they just don't realize we made it. And sometimes I get to do the very pleasant thing of saying like, hey, you two clearly love each other.

You've done this together. You made it. Have you ever seen marriages fall apart because of these issues? We've had couples break up directly after our podcast. Marriages, of course, I get emails all the time. The reason that we broke up was money. But you know what's interesting? Research shows, which I cite in the book, that when couples fight, they don't fight about money. You know what they fight about? Kids, chores, and communication.

Money is rarely talked about. It's only talked about when there's a fight, but it's the least of what people are typically arguing about. Kids, chores, communication, that's what gets fought about. And romantic though, isn't it? Seen as being, you know...

There's a stigma. Don't talk about money. Yeah, which is crazy. I encourage couples to have a monthly money meeting. I even give them an exact agenda. Here's the Google Doc. Work it out. Adapt it for your own needs. Start off with a compliment. You know, I really appreciated that you planned that trip for us to the grandparents. Like, you did such a great job with flights. Start off like that. People look at me like I'm speaking Klingon to them.

an agenda for my wife or my husband? I go, what? They go, that's weird. I go, I think it's weird for you to go 40 years fighting about money, never talking about it, never creating a vision instead of using an agenda. It's so interesting because, you know, much of the issues in my household growing up were money related. So between my mother and father and

There is no way that my mother had any idea how much money my dad had or how much money the household had. Wow. And I really, as you were saying it now, I thought, God, if they just sat down once and had that conversation, like how much money do we actually have here? Our childhood would have been so drastically different. Let's pause for a minute to talk about today's sponsor, which is Whoop.

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Quick one, I want to say a few words from our sponsor, NetSuite. One of the most overwhelming parts of running your own business, as many of you entrepreneurs will be able to attest to, is staying on top of your operations and finances. Whether you're just starting out or whether you're managing a fast-growing company, the complexities only increase. So having the right systems in place is crucial. One which has helped me is one called NetSuite. They're also a sponsor of this podcast, and NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one fluid platform. We're

With this single source of truth, you'll have the visibility and control to make fast, informed decisions, which is crucial in business. I remember the chaos of scaling my first business and trying to keep everything in order. It was an absolute nightmare. And it's tools like NetSuite that make this easier. So if you're feeling the pressure, let NetSuite lighten the load. Head to netsuite.com slash Bartlett, and you can get a free download of the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning. That's netsuite.com slash Bartlett. Do you know you said you are at a point where you now think you have enough? Yeah.

But you're still striving for more and still investing and still earning and still waking up every day and driving. Then why? I like it. I love what I do. I love working. The more that I make, the more that it is a sign I'm creating value. That's it. But I systematically earn more. Like I have my rules. So for example, unexpected income that comes in, 70 to 90% of that will be invested.

Meaning like I'll take 10% and have a good time, but I'm primarily investing unexpected income. Question then, if you got a $100 million windfall, how would your life change? It's hard to say I have a very good life. $100 million comes in, what are you going to do with it? I mean, it's going to change almost nothing. It would accelerate some of my plans for charity, for a house because I would...

have the house drawn up, even though I don't even want to buy a house anytime soon. I would probably have the house drawn up. And then I would say, call me when it's ready to move in and don't call me before then. I want nothing to do with building it. I don't want to see a piece of wood go over there. Why would you buy a house? Purely because what else are you going to do with the money? Of course, give away

You got to spend the money somehow, but... It's a White House. What else are you going to do with it? Just save it. I already saved it. I already invested it. See, what happens is when you start to, as you know, you start to hit your numbers and exceed them bigger than you ever thought possible, you start to realize that so much of our life is spent playing defense with money. That's the relationship that most of us have with money. Will we have enough at the grocery store? Will we have enough to fix the window? Will we have enough to get a car?

And most people live that way. But if you start to save automatically and you start to invest and you really make it a focus to earn and understand how money works, at a certain point you go, oh, my gosh, objectively speaking, looking at our numbers, we don't ever have to worry about the price of a chicken bowl again. Yeah.

So then what? Then what is the point of it all? Give it away, I guess. This is where I think this is a real challenge. And, you know, a lot of retirees, they get to the point where they have accumulated money and but they never really thought about the point of it all. What is the point of it all? I'll tell you, sometimes people surprise me by how uncreative they are with money. I'll give you an example. I ask people, what is your money dial? What do you love to spend money on?

And, um, people, they usually have a pretty good answer. The most common answer is, um, food. The next common answer is, uh, travel, then health and wellness. And there's a bunch of other money dials. So one guy once told me, um, I like coffee. That that's his money dial coffee. I go, what do you mean? He goes, I order different beans from whatever I go.

Can I be honest with you? I'm bored. I'm bored by your answer. Because he was doing very well. I'm like, okay, you buy a $20 bag of coffee beans. All right, you have way more money. And he's just like, he was a little insulted that I said it, but I was trying to shake him because I was bored. Some person with that much money should not be telling me that the thing they love to spend money on only is coffee. So I go, listen, you like making your own coffee? He goes, yeah, I have my AeroPress and this and that. I go, okay.

What if you considered hiring the barista from your local place to come to your house and show you how to fine tune that coffee? What if you really learn how to spend money on that experience and deepen the experience? It's not about buying 10 more coffee bags. It's about going deeper.

a year later, two years later, we talked. He had done that and he got really into coffee. He was now traveling to go to different locations, Colombia, Rwanda, all these places where he had started to appreciate the coffee. So sometimes we need to get more creative. You don't have to spend thousands of dollars, but if you and your partner love this thing,

Think about how you can spend money to appreciate it even more. And your strategy is to then stop spending money on the things that you don't appreciate. Yeah. So this is why your rich life vision comes in. What do we care about? What do we want to spend extravagantly on? And then what do we want to cut costs mercilessly on? We always start with what do we want to spend more on? So when I ask people, I have a variety of exercises. I walk them through like, what's your perfect week? I'll tell you that, uh,

I've done this with many, many people. Not one person has ever said my perfect week involves doing laundry. Cool. Could we pay that out? And if you can't afford to do that today, that's okay. Put it on your vision and say, when we get to this number, we're never going to do laundry again. Fantastic. But it also gives you something to look forward to.

You know, it's thrown around that once household income equals X number, then people are happy or at least there's diminishing returns. That's bullshit. Is it? Yeah, that's $75,000 number. First of all, that was already like 10 years ago. So we have to factor in inflation. But second, more recent research has shown

shown that actually happiness continues increasing. There's also self-satisfaction. So there's a variety of different variables. Basically, don't believe that $75,000 number that's tossed around. It doesn't make any sense. What's more important is you create a vision together and you go, what would make this week, this year, this next 10 years amazing for us? Let's just put it all out there. It doesn't even matter if we know how we can afford it or not. Then let's talk about it. Do we know our numbers? Do we have enough?

Can we pay for our kids' college or not? Can we buy an extra iPhone charger so we don't have to run to the bedroom every day? And you start to create and design your rich life together. That's the way you do it.

Very interesting topic. And it's particularly pertinent to me because, you know, as I said, I spoke to a divorce lawyer the other week and he told me that it's the one of the top two reasons couples get divorced is because of money problems. And I really didn't know what he meant. I thought maybe it's one of the partners loses all of their money and it causes arguments. Or maybe it's just that there's a lot of resentment and frustration built up because there's

opaqueness surrounding the subject of money. And it's kind of like the elephant in the room that has never been addressed. And this is exactly what you try and do in this book. And you do it so masterfully. Your first book has sold, you know, seven figures worth of copies. And I understand why. And I have a sneaking suspicion that this book is going to be equally successful because it is the elephant in the room in most relationships. The fact that, you know, when I saw that you'd written a book about money for couples, it immediately made me realize, I go, Chris, we've never talked about that in our relationship. And why not?

And it's a whole complex myriad of reasons and trauma and emotions and insecurities and shame. But like all things in my relationship, the more talking I did about it, the better it became and the less of an issue it became. And, you know, there's almost a correlation in relationships, isn't there, between...

the amount you talk about an issue and how big the issue is. And that relates to all things, whether it's sex or if it's the in-laws or it's friendships or whatever it might be. So it's a really well-timed book and I've really not discovered one quite like it. So I highly recommend everybody goes and checks it out. It's out in December. The link is below. So if you're listening to this now, you should be able to pre-order this book right now. And hopefully this can form the foundation of a conversation that you very much need to have in your relationship. One that might just save your relationship.

Such a pleasure. We have a closing tradition on the podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next in the diary of the CEO. And the question that's been left for you is, what can you do to improve humanity and the life of people? I think in my world, the best thing I can do is set an example of someone who publicly speaks about the things that are important to them, who wakes up every day and has a great time teaching, loves what I do,

and models having a loving relationship with the people around me. Yeah. Leading by example in every sense of the word. Thank you so much. Such a pleasure to speak to you. And you've opened my eyes to so many things. And every time I have these conversations, I hope that I walk away with some kind of actionable insight into something that matters in my life. And that's certainly the case in those conversations. I thank you so much for coming back today. Thank you. Thank you.

As you guys know, I'm an investor in a company called Zoe. They're also a sponsor of this podcast. I always think that without our health, we have nothing. You've probably heard me on this podcast say that health is our first foundation. And I know because I previously struggled with low energy, it was partly the result of my body not getting enough nutrition. But in 2023, when I had one of the co-founders of Zoe on this podcast, Tim Spector, I discovered that my nutrition contributes more to my health than anything else.

And I think that was a light bulb moment for me. I've been a Zoe member ever since. They've released something called Daily 30, which is 30 different plants in one supplement. And what really sets that product and Zoe apart is it's science-backed. Daily 30 is no exception. It contains a natural source of copper, which contributes to normal energy-yielding metabolism. So it's no surprise that this product continues to sell out. So if you can get your hands on it, don't hesitate. And I'm going to give you a code to help you. Use code PODCAST10.

at zoe.com slash daily30 for an exclusive 10% off your first order. And once you try it, tag me in a photo and let me know how you get on.

Quick one. I want to say a few words from our sponsor, NetSuite. One of the most overwhelming parts of running your own business, as many of you entrepreneurs will be able to attest to, is staying on top of your operations and finances. Whether you're just starting out or whether you're managing a fast-growing company, the complexities only increase. So having the right systems in place is crucial. One which has helped me is one called NetSuite. They're also a sponsor of this podcast. And NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one fluid platform. They're also a sponsor of this podcast.

With this single source of truth, you'll have the visibility and control to make fast, informed decisions, which is crucial in business. I remember the chaos of scaling my first business and trying to keep everything in order. It was an absolute nightmare. And it's tools like NetSuite that make this easier. So if you're feeling the pressure, let NetSuite lighten the load. Head to netsuite.com slash Bartlett and you can get a free download of the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning. That's netsuite.com slash Bartlett.