607: 10 Rules to Get Rich and Build Wealth

We've got 10 Rules to Get Rich. What's up? What's up, Nick? Loper here. Welcome to The Side Hustle Show, part of the Octo-Mewer Podcast Network, because you're 9-5, and you make your living, but your 5-9 makes you alive. And, important note, you can use any combination of those 24 hours that we'll dealt with to build wealth, to get rich. There's nothing wrong with that gold, there's no shame in that. So today we've got 10 Rules to Get There Inspired by Mr. Robert Therrington from the College of

Investors.com. He's a fan favorite, a frequent guest on the show starting in our first episode together, almost 11 years ago. Have a look and believe that. So Robert, welcome back to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. I cannot believe that it goes back to Episode 10, and now you're at like Episode 600 Plus. This is exciting. Yeah, we'll link up all of Robert's past episodes for you in the show notes, but we've got 10 Rules to Get Rich and Build Wealth. Inspired by an article that Robert wrote, so rule number one for us is

you have to earn it. You have to earn your money, you have to earn your wealth. And I'll kick it over to you to explain what that means. Yeah, I mean this one's pretty darn straightforward, but I do think that a lot of people want to get to the next step beyond earning it. You have to start with just earning your money. Whether that's your day job, with a side hustle, combination of both, starting a business, you have to earn your money so that you have something to build on. If you are just not earning any money, like we can't even have this conversation, like we stop here.

We can't get to the fun stuff. You have to start there. So you're going to say like in contrast to chasing passive income, is that where you're going with this? Well, all of it, it starts with just earning money. So like I talked to a lot of young adults, they don't necessarily earn any money yet. They're in college, they don't necessarily are going to go with their lives, like go out, start working, start earning money. And then we can get to the other stuff of saving, investing, earning more money, a side hustle, a side job, but you've got to start. And I think that's if you want to change the reason to

rule out of you have to earn it, it's just start start earning start doing something, start making that money come into the coffers. Yeah, and this is probably the proactive one we're going to realize nobody else is going to do this for you. So you got to focus on increasing income. And this is the whole reason. Side hustle nation exists. Right. Like there's two ways to get rich. You can make more or you could spend less. And the spending side is finite. Like you're never going to spend less than zero. And probably your lifestyle costs a little bit more than zero. Even if you cut to the bottom,

you're going to get a loan. But meanwhile, the income side, the other side is infinite in the limit on how much you can earn. So I think it makes way more sense to focus on that side of the equation. And it's honestly it's a lot more fun than trying to figure out ways how to make more money than to figure out how to squeeze an extra 100 bucks out of your budget. One point of contrast, yes, you got to earn it. Most people are going to start out trading hours for dollars. One of the biggest differentiators that I see, and maybe this is like separating an entrepreneurial side hustle.

Side hustle from a second job, like yes, second job, your earning income, but like an entrepreneurial side hustle is like, I'm working for near term cashflow, but I'm also working for equity. I have some ownership in that thing and that could go for employees stock options that whatever company you're at, but like having some ownership or equity in the thing is really what we see fast track some wealth building.

Absolutely, and I think you can take this whole list and you can kind of put it into different time frames. So I have it pretty broad when I wrote this article is how to get rich and grow wealth and it's not like by 30 or by 40 like this is also over the lifetime.

Because I'm also seeing a lot of older people, they don't know how they're going to retire and granted my market is families and college and stuff, but like I see these parents and they're like, I'm almost 60 and my kids are going to go to college. I don't know how to afford college because I also don't know how I'm going to afford my own retirement.

They went that whole life of 20 to 50 and grew no wealth. You could fast track it and I completely agree that we are in a conversation, Nick, of how do you want to become a millionaire by 35 or 40. I think entrepreneurial ventures, equity, building a business is probably going to be the vast majority of people that achieve that goal at an early age.

But if you're talking about also just building wealth over a lifetime, you can do it the slow side hustle, second job or just your regular job. If you hit the next like nine rules that we cover, you'll still get there, but you got to go out, you got to earn it. And I think really it starts with rule one is that you just can't get to anywhere else on this list in the wealth building without earning money. Like you just can't do it.

You're not going to get it living on welfare. You're not going to give it living with your parents in the basement still your whole life. It's not going to happen. But if you go out and earn money in whatever way that looks, you can start going down the rest of this list, going on your path to building wealth. I remember this like realization in college, the dream of like living off interest basically my first like I and G account, which turned into capital one or whatever.

And at that time, they're paying 5% probably similar now actually, you know, with all the fluctuations in interest rates. And it was like, okay, how much would I need to have to just live off of the interest and at that time, of course, expenses were super, super low.

But as a college student, you still going to have to go out and earn it. So important time horizons are going to be longer shorter depending on what you have in mind. If you listen into this, I imagine you'd prefer to accelerate things a little bit. There was this article in Forbes that really, really got me fired up and normally like pretty calm guy. The headline was like seven ways to get rich fast or something.

And it was ridiculous. It was like high yield savings account is like the only way you're getting rich from a high yield savings account is if you're already rich. It pissed me off. They had like credit card rewards. It's like nobody's ever gotten rich from 1% credit card rewards. Like I'm all for the travel hacking points and miles and stuff like I'll take that free money all day.

But it's not going to go well. It's not even going to cover you like one month of like your expenses. Like if you're lucky, you get a free couple nights at a hotel. Like it's not for most people going to really help you. Yeah, I completely agree. So that one got me fired up. All right. What's the rule number two? Number two is one of my personal rules save until it hurts. So this comes from a lot of conversations I've had with people of well, how much should I save?

I earn this money and I want to be wealthy and I want to build wealth. Well, what's the number? Is it 10% of my income, 5% of my income, 50% of my income?

And my answer is it needs to hurt. And that's how you know you have saved enough. So what does that actually mean? It's like when you are like get it a little bit of stress that like you don't know because you put so much into your savings account that or your investment account or whatever that looks like for you that you don't know if you can pay the rest of your monthly bills.

That's what saving till it hurts is and grand you of course you have the savings buffer and I'm not advocating you get yourself in financial trouble. But like when you have that little like, oh, I might have put too much into my savings and investment accounts this month because I got some bills coming due. That's how you know that you are saving enough for the future. And I've heard variations of this over the years. One of them that's kind of popular that I've seen and it goes on social media.

I think it pops off once a year as Grant Cardone's out there and he's like every year I look at all the money in my bank accounts and I write a check and I invested all my money so that on January 1st I have nothing. And when that first mortgage payment comes due I'm like shoot I need to go out and hustle and make work and get some more money into my accounts.

And I think that's kind of where this all comes from is that you know you're saving and investing enough when you have a little bit of inkling inside of yourself. It's like oh, in my current checking account do I have enough. This is the single biggest lever that you can pull to accelerate your path to financial independence right is your personal profitability. And it's easier when you have a big gap between your income and your expenses right.

Let big the gap the more you can save the more you can invest and that makes a lot of sense like my mother-in-law was really really good at this because you I don't know if there's a term for this type of budgeting. But basically she would do exactly what you're describing like I'm going to pull out exactly how much I need for my fixed monthly expenses and groceries and stuff and everything else is getting into savings and investments and she's done really well with that.

I mean there's so many strategies I say there's like the pay yourself first like people say that like pay yourself first and you put that into your savings account and then you try to live off the rest. There's just different variations but like you nail it though is it's easier to save more when you go back to lesson one is go earn it right don't earn more and then that delta's bigger and then you can save it but I'm a true believer that you can save it almost every level.

There's definitely a level at the very very bottom where it can be a challenge but once you kind of scrape off that bottom five to 10% and like you get to that next one you can put five dollars away. Like you're telling me that you can't find five dollars this month to put into a savings account I think you can. If there's a balance between you know kind of torn about this because like lifestyle creep lifestyle inflation is kind of the point like if I'm anymore like I want to enjoy it.

I'm only here once life is short is similar between that and then the habit of not spending that dollar is super or delaying spending that dollar like that even though on its own that dollar is meaningless but like the habit of holding on to it saving and investing it like that's everything for my wife and I early on in our career is like trying to be super frugal.

And never really budgeted per se but kind of instinctively lived below our means so I don't know if we ever saved until it hurts but there were definitely purchases that we delayed or didn't make because we're trying to pay our future selves. Well and I think that comes to rule three and I'll kind of jump there is optimizing your spending.

There's so many again variations of this remit safety does his like money levers but like there are things that matter to you and then we spend a lot of money on things that like literally do not matter to us at all and we waste it and it's just gone.

That money really could have been helpful and the number two of saving until it hurts so I really like to encourage people to optimize their spending so if travel is important to you maybe it is that you use a travel rewards card and then you only stay at that.

Hotel brand and you focus on optimizing travel that's important to you around that and you minimize other spending or optimize it to do that if TV is not important to you are you paying for a bunch of streaming services and you're all like oh Robert like I'm not here to cut my lattes out and stuff but it's like you can be spend a hundred bucks a month if you have hulu and Netflix and HBO and Disney and all these other things like was cut cable it's supposed to be cheaper but that yeah it's death by a thousand paper cuts.

I mean I heard this amazing joke the other day and it was like we used to have this thing called cable where you'd bundle all the channels together for one monthly fee and now it's like we have all of them and it's like you're still paying the same amount as cable individually for each channel.

Yeah it started out maybe is yeah who knows but I mean that's the thing is like what matters to you when you're spending and what doesn't and then when you know you're going to make a purchase take some time see if you can get a good deal see if you can maximize that deal.

Whether it's what if you use a service like Rakuten or Ebates or cashback monitor whatever see if you get a rebate on that same purchase that you are already going to make then you combo that with a credit card reward then you combo that with like a coupon like it sounds silly but all of a sudden you're getting hundreds of dollars back into your monthly budget that you can just revert into rule number two and start saving that money and building wealth and as you get wealthier you do want to spend more you want to earn more money.

But like one thing I found especially talking to millionaires is a lot of them still optimize their spending now granted it might be a different level of optimization but a lot of them don't lose that mindset of trying to get a good deal trying to find the best way to pay a lot of them view it like a game and it's almost like a game

vacation of like how can I get the best deal or how can I get this thing I want and save money and do it and it might be a different level than you're at today but they're still optimizing and that's my key take away on this rule is optimize how you're spending your money.

I remember hearing our mutual friends Mindy and Carl from Mindy from bigger pockets money Carl from 1500 days or Mister 1500 they did this episode with repeat on his show and he's like look you guys are multi millionaires what are you saving for when is then it's right now like I need you to remove the word optimize from your vocabulary it does not matter

that definitely stood out to me but it's funny because you'll even hear remeat talk about optimizing and he calls it his money dials or as money levers I forget exactly his phrasing for but he's like you spend on things you care about and you don't spend on all this other stuff you don't care about right now that is a level of optimization that I think people don't take into consideration.

I remember an example from you this is several several years ago we're like we got rid of one of our cars and I just bought like the lift monthly past and it was like 300 bucks a month like I didn't care to have that sitting in the driveway depreciating pain insurance on it like I get a car at the push of a button and we still think about that all the time so we are to car family now but I went about seven years as a one car family and I used ride sharing and different things and it cost me a couple hundred dollars a month but on the same token it was less than I'd probably be paying on a car.

Now our kids got older we had to be at two different places at once it started making sense to have a second vehicle but honestly we're like we go back to one vehicle like we love that time period it was so convenient easy and it optimizes around what we cared about that point time.

Yeah nationwide average savings rate this is like personal household profitability I don't know if it's pre tax pre investment whatever 3.8% at the time of this recording so I'm very confident you can do better than 3.8% because again this is your most important financial lever that you can pull.

I've got five things that you can buy were on the topic of rule number three how to optimize your spending or you need to optimize your spending when you do is just play the substitution game like I'm already paying for this is there a better faster cheaper alternative that's easy to do done this with cell phones and a whole bunch of other types of services but I've got five things that you can buy that are proven to improve your happiness talking about those money levers it's comes from actually my brothers site becoming better dot org and he guesses on what's on the top five here.

I mean I don't know I don't know I'm really curious what is it throw it my way number one was helping others like spending money to improve the lives of others so that was an interesting one eliminating a pain point not surprising I gave the example on a recent episode of our robo vacuum eliminated the pain point of me like feeling like I needed to sweep multiple times a day I get that that is on me but it totally eliminated that pain point so spending money to solve like these recurring problems number three was experiencing a lot of things that I was going to do.

Number three was experiences and what you might find is you get the anticipation benefit of that experience plus you get the memory of having done that thing number four was buying back your time something that business owners really spend a lot of time and energy and attention on like how do I remove myself from particular processes and stuff but we don't think about it so much on our personal lives maybe as much and maybe that's hiring a cleaning service or meal delivery service like how do I buy back some hours in the week.

Maybe it's to focus on your side hustle and then number five was self development it could be therapy it could be personal training at the gym it could be a nutritionist it could be tennis lessons it could be I think that is having that self development self improvements fear.

All right that was rule and number three you need to optimize your spending the first two or you have to earn it and number two you needed to save until it hurts we've got more rules to get rich and build wealth with Robert right after this.

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So you're not going to support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed dot com slash side hustle show terms and conditions apply need to hire you need indeed. All right rule number four is you must put your money to work for you this is the investment piece this is the how do I get paid over and over again from money that comes in once exactly so hopefully now by roll for you got a little

bit of money there to do it you got to make it work for you and we were kind of just joking earlier about the high yield savings account and savings accounts are great but they're going to cap out it may be four or five percent interest and that's the total return you're going to get.

That's not bad that's also rare the average like lifetime average of savings accounts is like one to two percent we will see these savings rates go down in the next few years I can't tell you when I don't have a crystal ball but it's not going to stay there. So consistently return a better amount over the years is investing investing a stock market or different asset classes and that gets up to like nine to 10 percent so double what you're going to earn the savings account.

And you got to put your money to work if you want to see it grow because there's a risk and everyone's like oh there's a risk to investing because you know your money could go down in the short term right and that's very true but you know there's also a risk that your money never grows for you and that you don't have enough when you need it down the road.

So that just keeps getting eaten away by inflation. Yeah exactly and I saw this firsthand with my mom and she was very risk adverse for a lot of years and she had her 401k at work but you know she kept it in the stable value savings account for like 20 years and I didn't see this until she was like in her late 50s she contributed like 250 thousand dollars over her like career to that point to this 401k.

And she had grown to 300 thousand dollars 50 thousand over 20 plus years because it was only earning like 1 to 2 percent. You mean one of the market tripled in that time more than triple like you would have had substantial and now and she was able to course crack but she had to work five years longer as a result of this because her money did not go to work for her it just stayed there and you right you know she didn't lose any of it.

That was wonderful was safe but it did not grow and I think that's the real thing is that there's a risk here that if you don't let your money grow for you over time it's cool you have it but it's not necessarily going to work for you and help you when you need it because it hasn't grown. What's your asset allocation pie chart look like today.

Today I am 70 percent stocks like 20 percent bonds like 10 percent real estate still very aggressive I actually had more bonds for a while but it just wasn't growing as well and I viewed my business actually is my biggest asset and so I was more risk adverse on the equity side and like the investment side but you got to a point where we did have enough we keep a little more cash reserve probably then we need to but it's earned 5 percent these days so really keeping the rest of it 70 percent stocks.

Now we keep more cash than we need to but at least it's getting a decent yield now but what do you do for real estate is rental properties I do have rental and then also we have some reets in OK OK one of our accounts but yes Daba rental as well and I just view that as an asset.

So my again feeling feisty is like my beef with personal finance media is everybody says the way to build wealth is through low cost index funds just buy the S&P 500 and let it ride VTSA X and chill but it's like the majority of the people that like the talking heads on TV and the people saying that that's not how they built their wealth they built their wealth through like business asset class through media like I don't know it just runs me the wrong way when I see people and even people who are super transparent about how they got money.

They're giving this other advice it's like that wasn't your path you know what I think there's a difference though the media and talking heads like us we also built a business and we have different things but when you are starting out you have a choice it's a competition for dollars is how I like to view this right your dollars can get deployed in certain ways and you don't have much left because like you're starting out right you might have $10,000 and that's what you have in that situation going to be a lot of money.

The situation going into low cost index finally in that grow is probably the best answer and sometimes you might not even have a choice Nick maybe your biggest asset when you're 28 years old is your 401k because you got to put 5% in and your employer matched you 5% your growth in that is your asset and so low cost index funds is the way to go and I talk to a lot of financial planners and I've seen it myself and if you get back to Main Street and you get outside the talking heads a lot of people really did build their wealth.

Through saving investing in a low cost index fund some people might have had a pension or something and they rolled it over into an IRA things like that and that's where a lot of people's wealth are and they have a lot of wealth in their primary residents which may or may not be a good thing but it's there you know it's kind of a forced savings account for a lot of people.

I don't disagree it works it's just it works over a really long time horizon and it's hard to get excited about even a 10% annualized return when you have $10,000 you're like you know I have another $1,000 but it's like OK over the course of 20 years now that's grown to a million because you keep adding more into it and it's like OK now my 10% was $100,000 and all of a sudden it's like OK I start to see the value of compound interest and letting the stuff stack up you nailed it and that's the hardest thing I have.

When I talk to a lot of young adults it's like they'll have $500 in their Robinhood account and they're like I only went up to $550 and I was like that's a 10% return that's solid. Yeah you do that. But when they see the dollar value it's really demoralizing and they're like why should I put another $500 in. Well because then you have $100 the next year if it did it but like it's really hard for them to see that growth when the dollar values are so small.

And then if you're looking at our article you've heard the analogy of the penny that doubles every day. It's one of my favorite ones so if you had a penny that doubles every day I'll fast forward the whole story but after 30 days you'd have $5.3 million. But do you know that you don't even cross $100 until day 15? Yeah it's like so slow at the beginning. It's so slow at the beginning and then by the end of it it's just you're running on all four cylinders.

And that's how our investments work when you compound it's really slow at first and you just got to keep adding it in but like 15 years down the road. You really start seeing it magnify and it gets a lot more exciting but that's really a hard sell when you're 22. Was there an income milestone or a net worth milestone where you considered yourself to be rich? I really had the goal of being a millionaire by 30 and I hit it at 31. So it was still a solid milestone.

How that all played out was the business help, the side hustle help but I was working my day job and I had a bunch in my 401k and things like that. So it's like all those different things compile then and so that was a way to accelerate my wealth and I felt pretty good.

And then when I left my day job, did anything like the moment you saw that account like crossover this of a figure threshold you're like, all right, it's official now I'm rich, you know, you get this like it's official and then you realize none of it actually matters like it's like I can't do it's all my 401k like okay and like what does that mean for groceries tomorrow. Yeah, I still got to go to cash flow.

You realize it's cool, but like it doesn't actually change your day to day life and I do think there are various inflection points and I want to say our friend JD Roth has it and he's got like is a chart of the levels of fire. But I think it applies to anything like it's like you have subsistence level of wealth and then you have like I'm doing okay and I'm totally botching it.

But you get to this level where it's like you're financially independent, you're not retired early so because you maybe don't have to work, but then you get to like the fat fire level where you could like fly on a private jet, but like that range to get to like a real change in your lifestyle.

You got to go from like being a millionaire to being like a 30 millionaire and that's extremely rare and hard to do and I think most people in this range they don't really have much of a different lifestyle than most Americans in the upper class.

One concept that was interesting and inspiring to me was the concept of coast fire so we're not barista fire lean fire you know without fat fire, but like this coast fire idea was really interested and I first thought I was like we have to live on the coast.

Yeah, it's like oh it's like you kind of front load your investments you were trying to accounts and then you say well okay given whatever even 7% market returns like in a double every 10 years like okay at the time of retirement it'll be worth X like we can take the foot off the gas and don't need to contribute as heavily to those accounts we can enjoy more life today.

And so we've got a plan on income in the near term like you know immediate plans to stop working so it's like well let's enjoy a little bit more while we have it while the kids are young and embrace the coast fire lifestyle inspired by our mutual friend Andy Hill marriage kids and money and Marco from my board finance they both had some good videos on the stuff.

And that's the whole premise right so they put all this money into their investment accounts and it just works for them and it grows and it compounds over the year so they can coast into financial independence retire really but. If that money wasn't working for them they only left it in a high yield savings account they would not achieve their coast by gold they got to get that investments going right.

So that is rule number four you got to put your money to work for you rule number five this might be a controversial one is you need to marry smart talking about this one. Yeah so we've talked four rules of how to build well but the number one destroyer of wealth in America is divorce.

The recent study found that divorce destroy 75% of the family wealth nest egg but as a destroyer just split it in half now but then you have lawyer fees legal fees extra housing expenses like you all start draining all this stuff out transportation costs moving costs like none of it is cost effective and yes you hear wonderful stories of people that like have amically moved and like they live together who knows there's weird ways to get around it but in general.

You're spending money drain it out on the layers you drain it out on extra now you went from one set of housing expenses to two sets of housing expenses two sets of grocery bills potentially different forms of transportation more transportation. Moving expenses like it really can destroy it so Mary smart or I would say one that's become less controversial now with the gen wires is don't marry like be long term boyfriend and girlfriend forever and ever.

Combining expenses like you still might have some expenses of course if you split up but like there's ways to get around this you can get into it smarter and whatnot but I mean statistically divorce destroys a lot of wealth did you have a prenup you know we did not but we also didn't have any wealth before we were married that's my answer to that question to

you know we were pretty young we were very young and we didn't have any wealth if we were to split up it would be her right to have half of it all like granted it would still cost us a lot and just it would destroy wealth but like you know that's. Why try not to do it if you don't have to yeah I'm with you and I know this will be super romantic to say but finding a partner in life is a great life hack and one thing.

That was really helpful for us was kind of the switch that flipped and it was around the time of discovering Mr. money mustache and the concept of early retirement is like this is a team sport like prior to that we had like one joint checking account we pay like our community bills and stuff from and by groceries from.

Everything else was separate and we kind of looked at it as your bucket in my bucket and realizing that this is a team sport and having her with one steady job and me doing my entrepreneurial stuff to some of which work to some of it didn't work like it was really helpful to live off one income to minimize risk but then also swing for some bigger upside and I don't know if you have similar setup in your house absolutely but I also want to kind of add to so we talked about the negative right to force destroys wealth but like you hit the other nail on the head.

It's a team sport and let's just say you're both young one of you is making fifty thousand dollars what if the other ones also making fifty thousand dollars and you're both saving a little bit each month well now you doubled your savings amount and then the interest in the compound grow then all of that is now going to be more because you're on more money it's easier to live off of two incomes and one income like it all just magnifies so we definitely found that we're both working together my wife helped me pay off my car loan.

And my student loans even though I had income to we're both working but it's like we put it in one pot and we paid off the debt she didn't have that kind of debt we built well together to like we're both throwing it into our ira we're both throwing it into our 401k's like it compounded together on more money right.

And as always on the same page when it came to saving like we're both relatively frugal people or you have to have some hard conversations on what what's really the end game here what's the goal of all this I think we both share a lot of the same money values my wife's probably a little more frugal than I am but I honestly think it's like we're frugal in different ways.

So she has things that she would spend money on that I think are weird and I have things that I would spend money on that she would think are weird but we're just different people I think we both came into our lives with I was very big into investing I started the college investor like I was all about talking about these money topics inside hustles and different things.

My wife loves to save loves to invest but she's on the more like deal hacker travel hacking points like she likes to maximize the deal and find the best way to do it which her mind works on a little different way that mine does like if I want to buy something like I will historically would have just bought it I wouldn't have thought twice and she's like did you check racqueton and see if you can get 3% cash back before you did it and I was like no but like she will every single time and I think that's hugely valuable.

Yeah we definitely do that for big purchases or try and is it worth one sign up for new credit card if you know you have some big expenses coming out just to get that bonus and get that cash back but I like that idea of the shared money values got to get on the same page here is really really tough if one person is a spender and one person is a saver like you just can be butting heads like why what are we try to accomplish here.

Our kids are similar age minor 8 and 6 and I think your couple years ahead of me like what are the key financial lessons you hope that they're picking up on well we've always shared that like if our kids are good people and they're good with money like they will be successful in life really we want to teach him the same kind of mindsets of how to save my son is now at the age he's 10 he's like how do we start investing like what is investing and things like that and so we're showing him a lot of money.

So we're showing him that kind of thing and then a lot of it's like money conversations like for my younger daughter it's like she's like kind of $5 and Robux or something else like well the other day we had this conversation like do you really want to like $5 and Robux and like and making her spend her own money.

I'm like you could have this or like next time like your mom goes to target like you could buy a shirt with that and she was like what. Oh yeah shirts are like the same price as this and like really help understand the value and it's like you can have a shirt that you wear for a long long time or you have this like thing and Robux that like you're going to like stop caring about like 20 minutes.

And then she like really pause and was like okay I'm not going to buy the Robux on a I'm going to keep my money it's like okay but like helping them understand like that there is a finite amount of resources even when you're wealthy and like how you devote that really can you can't just spend it all on everything what is Paula pants say I feel like you can afford anything you can't afford everything and I really want to make sure that they understand that as well because like it is easy for us to just give our kids everything it is like a lot of their wants and needs aren't a lot.

But like I think it's important for us to like kind of like rain in that lesson a little bit and say like hey let's think about this a little bit yeah it's a big fear of mine to raise entitled brats and like so every day like these like a little micro teaching moments and yesterday my son had to go to the dentist and it's like okay that's kind of a nobody likes doing that you had to get a painful filling procedure done so we'll go to jamba juice afterwards it was kind of a proud moment is like dang is like a $10 smoothie or something is like that's pretty expensive like yeah I thank you for a pretty good.

Thank you for appreciating that that's pretty expensive for some of these little micro moments really grateful to have been raised similarly like just because you can't afford something doesn't mean you're going to get it and you're going to have to work for that stuff.

I agree and it's like now I'm a son's getting a little older to it's like trying to instill a little bit of work ethic I plan on making sure that they go get jobs at 15 at like a real place like a Walmart target chick filet fast food like I think all those things are very important my biggest fear is a parent is raising failure to launch children is like literally like my biggest fear like I felt about my wife's like you know it really sucks because like if we do it right as parents they leave and that kind of stuff right

but like if we do it wrong as parents they're sucky and they never leave. I think you poison yeah. I think you're poison it sucks it's like you're working so hard and it's like they're going to leave like that also is the goal like I do want to be like empowered know what to do have some motivation to go out and do things yeah the motivation is super important there's a line probably butcher the back story but one of shacks daughters is coming up with daddy we're rich is like time out. I'm rich.

We're not rich I'm rich is like yeah you're going to have to go out into the world and figure out how to earn this there was another this was Christopher from refined by fire and he was describing giving his kids allowances and is like you just you have to be okay with just lighting the $20 on fire every month or whatever it is because you're hoping that they learn for these $20 mistakes so they don't make the $20,000 mistakes and it's like sometimes painful to work with them.

Sometimes painful to watch what they want to spend it on really use it set up some guidelines around what that is going to be in different spending buckets and saving buckets that just you got to be prepared for that give them some practice with money in low consequential amounts so they don't make bigger mistakes later on.

That's rule number five you need to marry smart and we got D. Ray talking about kids and stuff number six is you need to minimize your taxes this is our single biggest annual expense I imagine it is for you to probably even worse being in California but any strategies advice on this front yeah so again it all depends on your level and where you're at but even starting off it's like let's look at things that can save us taxes put money in your 401k for a 3B put money in an IRA put money in a health spending account.

These are accounts that will grow your wealth going back to our earlier rules but they also save you on taxes and the money grows tax deferred if you have a business or you're starting to earn a little bit more money it can make sense to pay a tax prepare not necessarily for the tax preparation but in the summertime or in the fall get some actual advice understand how our tax system works because the IRS literally has like 30,000 pages of making it hard for you to understand how it works because they're trying to make money.

But you have to know the rules of the game educate yourself understand how it works potentially pay for professional advice again lot of people mix tax preparation with like tax advice and they're two different things and a tax prepare is super busy in January to April and they're not going to take the time to be like hey let's have an hour sit down and talk about this now and at that point it might be too light to do anything for the previous year anyways exactly but that's what you do with a tax prepare or a tax professional in the same way

or tax professional in the summer or fall. And then you get some advice, and then maybe you can set yourself up for next year. The good news is as a side hustler, as a small business owner, the world of deductions really opens up to you. And so it's kind of a matter of being diligent about tracking those expenses, tracking your mileage, tracking your computer, and all sorts of business-related expenses, just being organized about that can really help you save there.

And then the other thing that was kind of a little bit of a hack for me getting started was doing the LLC and corporation, which on its own, not gonna save you any money, because it's a pass-through entity, but choosing the S-Corp election, where you pay yourself a salary,

and then the rest of the business earnings flow through to you anyways, but you don't have to pay self-employment taxes on, so I'm like, talk to your accountant, there's gonna be some differing levers to pull on what makes sense there, but huge, huge annual expense on the tax front, so make sure you're doing everything you can to minimize those.

Definitely, and then there's more obscure levers too, but you said business ownership is huge, real estate ownership has the potential for it as well, but even if you have a W2 job, don't dismiss these tax deferred accounts and ways that you can save for yourself as well. I don't dismiss the value of that IRA when you're younger, and you put your money in that.

It doesn't seem like a lot, that five, six thousand bucks that you can put it every year, but it saves you a little bit in taxes, but that money can grow for you over all the years, so that you get to take it out in the future potentially with less tax consequences. And that's the hope. All right, that's rule number six, minimize your taxes. We've got more rules to get rich and build a wealth with Robert right after this.

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This isn't a fun one, but you do need to protect your family, especially as you start having kids and a spouse. You need to have all that insurance locked in. Health insurance, of course, but life insurance, potentially likely short-term disability insurance, and look at these products to ensure yourself because you might have people to depend on you. And I want to put an asterisk here that I am not talking about using insurance products and as an investment.

These are literally as insurance products to ensure it if something were to happen to you. And the reason this came about is I've had a couple of people I've known and oh my gosh, like I'm 39. And in the last year, I've gone to two funerals for people under 45. These people have families and kids. And like weird things happen. One person had like colon cancer and one person got in an accident, fell off a ladder. Like weird things can happen to you. And you like to short.

I do short, that's for scary. It's really scary, right? And you never want to think about it, but like you can go buy a term life insurance policy these days for like 20 bucks a month, like super cheap, for like a million dollars. If you're healthy, go get the insurance because there's nothing worse than like leaving family with potentially young kids. Like not only have they lost you, but like what's gonna happen to them financially? Yeah, remember, this old like Jeff Fox really bit.

He's like, yeah, you want to make sure you're, you're gonna get enough life insurance to make sure your family's covered. But not so much that you have a bounty on your head. And it's like it makes me chuckle when I think about life insurance. We may even have a ladder as a sponsor on this episode. I've got a recent insurance experience. So like first I'm really dealing with car insurance as an adult driver. So we're coming back from skiing. This is a couple months ago. Let's dusk.

There's this semi truck in front of us and out from underneath this semi is an object in the center of the lane. And you're like, oh, is that a chunk of snow? Is that a plastic bag? By the time you realize it was a pretty good size rock boulder. Like the car is already going over it. Like, you jump. Like, uh, and everybody, okay, everybody okay? The car is still operable. Like continue our drive home.

But as we pull into the driveway, you can definitely hear like part of the undercarriage is like scraping on the bottom. And we're like, oh, this is not gonna be good. This is not gonna be good. And it just goes back and forth with the, oh, we can fix it and they'd up totaling the car over this. Wow. And now we're going back because they're like, well, we owe you the cash value of the vehicle. And of course, that's lower than what you'd like it to be. Like 40 years old.

This is my first experience like ever buying a new car. And this is what happens like a year into owning it. Or like really, this is just a slap in the face. Like go back to your frugal habits and just buy used. Because it's just like, we're taking such a huge bath on that. But you take more of a bath without the insurance, too. Could have been worse. Could have been worse. You know, could have had to pay for it completely out of pocket.

So the insurance wasn't an amazing experience, so it was glad to have it. They paid for a rental car for a little while. It's still a challenge. What do you do on the health insurance side as a self-employed professional or a business owner? So it's funny because that was one of the scariest questions before making the lead to first like being self-employed. It's like, what are we going to do for health insurance? And it's like a common one.

And honestly, we just went to the covered California, ACA Exchange, and bought health insurance policy. My wife and I joke that it is not health insurance. It's bankruptcy insurance because we have the privilege of paying $1,500 a month for our family of four. And that is for a high deductible plan. So every time we go to the doctor, we pay out a pocket until like, I think $12,000, too. You pay your premium every month, so $18,000 a year.

And you're gonna pay another 12 grand before you see any benefit from this plan. Yeah, and granted, the benefit is that my cash pay price is a negotiated cash pay. That's so nice of them. It's so nice of them. But on the flip side, it does protect you if you are in like a catastrophic, like where you're really getting the benefit of this insurance is theoretically, if you had a really bad medical problem, right? And then like millions of dollars and bills.

But for it really sucks on the day to day, where a healthy family knock on wood, and like we pay a lot for not much. Yeah, that's unfortunately the reality of the situation there. That's rule number seven, protect yourself with insurance. And this is whether it's insurance or whether it's starting a business. It's like, it's protecting the downside, right? As entrepreneurs, we're gonna swing for the upside, but we're gonna protect our downside. And that's really all insurances.

Like in case things go bad, I just wanna be protected and make sure I'm not gonna be in a financial hardship as a result of that. It makes sense to pay a little bit every month, like in my case, to prevent having to essentially eat the loss of an entire car. That's rule number seven, rule number eight, you need to take care of yourself first. What's going on with this one?

Yeah, so I always think of this one is like when you're on the airplane and they have to put your oxygen mask on yourself first before you help your kids. Cause if you pass out, you're useless to everybody. You're not gonna be able to help your kids. So again, when it comes to building wealth, dealing with your family, you gotta make sure that you're on solid ground first. So this could be financially, emotionally, physically, take care of yourself first.

Because if you get yourself in a financial problem, you're just gonna burden your family. If you get yourself, you can take care of yourself physically and you're ill, you're not gonna be able to work. You're not gonna be able to earn that money. You're not gonna be able to take care of your family. So you gotta take care of yourself first, even when it's hard to do. Like just remember that, like gotta take care of yourself. And if you let yourself fall off, it spirals.

Yeah, what's the James Cleary thing? And like don't miss two days in a row. Get back on that horse. It's okay to miss one, but if you screw up that habit a second day, like you said, it's slippery slope. Slippery slope. I think you're onto something here that self-care isn't selfish, right? You gotta show up as your best self. Like eating well, exercising, for me, like prioritizing that workout for a stay in the morning is kinda like the lead domino for a positive day.

I was in Colorado for a mastermind event and got wrecked by the altitude. Like we're up at like 11,000 feet, wreck and ridge. And it was worthless. It was like the worst hanging over your life except without the fun part before. It was like made me really, really aware. Like if you don't feel well, you're not gonna perform well. And it's something, and maybe hopefully your experience isn't that extreme, but take care of yourself first as a rule number eight.

Rule number nine, surround yourself with people better than you. Talk to me about this one. There's this cliche out there. Like what you are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with. And like when I was like 18 years old, like how's that the dumbest thing I've ever heard of? But like now looking back on it from 39, and it's like holy crap. You really are a kind of a sum of the people around you.

And what this means is like whether or not you believe it, the people around you have an influence on you. They're either gonna like motivate you, they're gonna give you ideas or they could be holding you back. And this includes family. This includes close friends. This includes co-workers. This includes people and organizations that you spend time with, whether that's church or volunteering or whatever. Who you spend a lot of time with. Like they are all rubbing off on you.

You're gonna pick up words they say and ideas they say. You're gonna see their habits. You might mimic them. You might take some of them. Like and that could be good or bad. Yeah, goes both ways. Yeah. It goes both ways. Like as you mature, I really, really, really strongly think you need to surround yourself with people that are better than you as much as you can. And what I mean by this is at work aspirationally try to find the people above you. People that are better with their money.

People that are doing things that you want to do. People that are motivating and inspiring to you. They're not holding you back or criticizing you. Asking those like kind of sarcastic questions. Like why are you doing that or why not? Like all those things kind of cut at you and you might not feel it in the moment, but they all build. It could either hold you back or it could be like this massive springboard that pushes you forward.

Was there a time where you found yourself with the wrong circle of friends? I did have some wrong friends, especially in high school. But like I actually am kind of glad I did at the same time. I had enough good stuff like I was working and I was doing things, but it's like I kind of learned what not to do as well. And I was like, I don't really want to do that. I want to go do other things. But it really took me a long time.

Like I would tell you throughout my college experience, I did not find great people to surround myself with. I saw people at my work because I was working the management and I was like, oh, I kind of like that. But like my college cohort not so much. And it wasn't until later in life when at work I found some mentors and some people that were really great at leadership. And so I learned a lot from watching, observing. I had a great boss for a long time that taught me a lot of things.

And then from side hustling and connecting with people like you and other people in this community that I could learn a lot. I watched, it taught me. And then now you just continue to like perpetuate and push forward as well. So it took a long time. It's not like one day I got rid of all my other friends and found a bunch of new people to hang out with. Like you kind of just learn as you go, right? I'm with you. It's like an overused quote, but it's overused for a reason.

You know, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. There's something to that. I'm trying to elevate your peer group and hopefully not drag down the peer group of the people that you're hanging out with. It's like, well shoot. They said, rule over dying was to hang out with people better than you. And here's this bottom feeder covered in and trying to join our little circle here.

In the online space or like the entrepreneurial space, like I didn't have a great network locally. And so I had to go online for that. And the podcast was instrumental in building that network. But it's showing up at events. It's organizing masterminds. It's going to meet up. So it's maybe even investing in like a coaching or community. But like it's super, super powerful to be in the room with other people who have similar goals and aspirations or kind of going through the same struggles.

Because it's, and I remember, there's a couple of years. Like Fincon was in Florida or something like, dude, I really don't want to go to Florida like so far. Like to travel to get there and everything. Within 10 minutes of walking into lobby, like I'm so glad I'm here. Like these are my people. It's just the great feeling of being surrounded and supported by people who kind of get what you're working on or working through with you on this.

Any tactics that you found effective in finding mentors either at work or in business? Yeah, I mean, honestly, don't dismiss the work mentors. Like I said, some of the best leadership skills I learned was observation of really great leaders. I also had some really crappy bosses and really crappy people I worked with. But like seeing how good people handled that too was fascinating to me because let's be honest.

Like you're gonna encounter people that you do not jive with that are not doing things you agree with. But then watch how really great leaders and great people interact with them mind blowing. I would also say like, I think when I was like younger, I always viewed mentorship as like some formal thing. Like Nick, well, you'd be my mentor. You know, like you bow down is like a thing. But what I've learned over time is mentorship can also just be from visual from afar.

Like you like how someone operates and like you watch and you observe and you study how they do it. Doesn't even, they don't even know you there are mentor to you potentially. Like total can learn a lot from observation and how they handle situations. So don't dismiss work. You nailed it with online. I think we live in this cool day and age where the internet is like just, there's so much out there. My first online mentorships were in forums.

Like old school like forums about blogging and content creation. That's how long Robert has been doing this, by the way. Like forums were still a thing. They're back. I feel like forums are full on back today. The world just comes full circle. But forums were huge. And then going to an in person events was like really the next cracks going to a fincon. Walking in and at the registration table meeting, I met my first finconner ever met was Jim Doll from the White Code investor.

And I didn't know who he was. I didn't know what he looked like. He saw my badge. I saw his badge and we're like, oh my gosh. I followed your stuff online. And he's like, I followed your stuff online. And then you start chatting about it. And it's really a huge kind of thing to go do this. It takes a big leap. I remember I didn't go to two fincons because I couldn't get over myself. I was like, why would anyone go to an in person blogger conference?

This is like the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. And then I was on social media and I was like, man, I should have gone. That looks so cool. And then I did to myself again the second year. And I was like, I just can't do it. And then I was like, I'm just finally got a fire lit under me. It's like you just got to go and do it. I'm so glad I did. Yeah. Now my wife, she just knows it's always on the calendar. She's like, go have fun with your internet friends. It'll be fine.

But surrounding yourself with people better than you, that's rule number nine. Bring it home for us with rule number 10. Number 10 is it's OK to go slow. And we touched on this at the beginning. But like, do you want to achieve all these things by 30, but you're going to live to 80? It's OK to maybe coast five. It's OK to build well slowly. And I think especially for younger listeners and viewers and people, they want the job after this job or they want the thing after this thing.

It's like live, experience what you have, and just keep putting away a little bit. And it'll compound, it'll grow. But it's very rare to have wealth come overnight. It's very rare to achieve all your life goals overnight. And then it's interesting, people that do achieve it early on, a lot of them get super depressed too. Because I did everything I was to set out to achieve to. And then it's like, now what? And it's like, yeah, because you have a whole life. You have a whole life to live.

We all have seasons of life. Enjoy the season of life you're in. Realize that it's OK to take some time. Go slow. Just keep working away. Use the rules as a guide. Use what we're talking about as a guide. Chip away at it. But slow is so frustrating. Come on. It's like, I get that this is OK. It's going to be there tomorrow, breathe through it. It takes longer than you want it to. It does. There's the perpetual internet meme of how people think like building a business is.

And it's like this perfect charge. And then it's like how it actually is. And it's like this jagged, rough ups and downs and curves. And it's true. That's how it is. You got to get this into perspective. You got to put the perspective on everything. Because you can get super frustrated when it's a down here in the stock market. And you built this IRA. And it's down here. Like, why am I even doing this? And you might be frustrated at your job too. You got to have some perspective, though.

Now, it doesn't really happen by accident. So it's going to take longer than you want it to. And it has a general rule. And that was something I learned. My very first website development project, the guys are like, all right, it'll be done in three months. And this is what it's going to be. It's like probably eight months later. Like we finally had a working version that could go out to the public longer than you wanted to. But still faster than most.

Faster than the people who are sitting on the sidelines, faster than the people who aren't doing it with intention. And something I think about all the time is like the idea of 1% better and compound gains and like sticking with the thing and trying to improve myself and improve the business, making these little tweaks. And it seems slow in the moment. But he zoom out and he say, well, look how far I've come. And I think you've been in the game for five, 10, 20 years.

You can really look in that review. Say, look how far I've come and recognize that. What's the gap in the game book? Most people live in the gap. Like, oh, this is where I want to be ever not there. Yeah, I was like, no, no, no, recognize the game. Look at where you were. They have some gratitude in that. Well, and I think too, like we can kind of close on this. But like the average millionaire in the United States is 62 years old. So take what you will of that stat.

But that's the 50% mark, right? It's 62. Yeah, side hustle show listeners, they're going to beat that average. We can go for it. Right? But that's the average. So beat the average, of course, or aspire to beat the average. And you'll still end up much better off than most Americans. That's right. Aim for the moon and you'll still land on the stars. Yeah. Those are our 10 rules inspired by the college investor.com. We'll link up the full article over there. That was rule number one.

You have to earn it. Number two, you have to save until it hurts. Number three, optimize your spending. Rule number four, put your money to work for you. How do I get paid over and over again? For more, I do once. Rule number five, Mary Smart. Number six, minimize your taxes. Number seven, ensure yourself, protect your family, protect against those downside risks. Number eight, take care of yourself. Remember self-care is in selfish.

Number nine, surround yourself with people better than you level up on that front. And number 10, it's okay to go slow. Have a little patience in there and something I struggle with constantly. What's the latest with the college investor? You guys doing okay, helpful content, updates. I know the Google world is throwing a lot of people for a loop these days. It is. You know, we're not down, we're not up. We are surviving.

So I know I've seen a lot of horror stories of people getting wiped out in Googleville. But now, you know, we're still doing good and we're seeing some uptick. You know, we're really seeing a lot of the growth and engagement these days is on the socials, right? So Facebook groups are really crushing it lately. I'm seeing a lot of the Reddit stuff, of course. And the video stuff still doing really well, the TikToks, the YouTube, the short format on YouTube as well.

So you know, if Google's not gonna give people what they want, people are still gonna go find the content out there that they want and they're just gonna find another platform. So my goal is to figure out where they're at and let's meet them where they are and hopefully educate, engage, and teach them what they need to know. Okay. Yeah, so Google is saying, well, we're gonna prioritize Reddit. So you're saying, well, I'm gonna go on to Reddit. Like what kind of stuff are you posting over there?

What's the strategy? I've been a Redditer for years. Reddit is my own personal, probably number one platform. And so this isn't new or foreign to me, but just like everything else, go be helpful, go engage, go answer questions, don't spam. It's really funny because Reddit is also a terrible place and I also think it's a terrible, they just went public as we recorded this and I think they're gonna do terribly as a publicly traded company. I know people are all excited about them.

The reason is, is like, for example, I'm a personal finance person. I've been talking about this thing for 15 years now. I know more about student loans and paying for college than most people ever should. And I've been banned from the personal finance sub-reddit because my Reddit profile says, I'm the founder of the college investor. I have never posted a link. I have never promoted myself.

I just go in there and I was answering people's questions and a moderator said, because you run the college investor, you cannot post in our sub-reddit. That's the problem with Reddit. Bring it a little experience to the game here. And I never self-promoted. I never dropped a link. I never did anything. I literally would just answer people's questions and be helpful.

But that's the problem as you get moderators like that and because it's a self-directed community, it doesn't work, but then there's plenty of other ones. Like I'm on the student loan forums, I'm a moderator on different ones. I have my own. Like you answer it, you're helpful. People figure it out because that's what Reddit's about. It's really hard though if you are a content creator and you want people to get off of Reddit to get to something else, that's a stretch.

You're not gonna be able to do that very well. So you're looking at it more as like a brand building, like reputation building. So hopefully when it comes time to pick that high yield savings account or student loan refi thing, like they're gonna seek you out and go through your site or go through your link. Yeah, hopefully. Or I'm also looking at what other people are saying about me on there too.

So if you have a brand, go to the search bar on Reddit, drop your URL and see if people have already shared your content, engage, upload it, promote your own stuff that other people have shared. But this is also why Facebook groups have come full circle for me, and they were dead for a lot of years. And I would say in the last six months, Facebook groups are rolling on like all four cylinders again, surprisingly.

Seeing a lot of community discussions, a lot of engagement and Facebook's much easier to put links and different things to get people's your tools and resources. This is inside your own group or this is inside other like student loan type of groups. My groups and other groups, yeah. Okay, cool. So just kind of keeping an eye on what conversations or what questions are being asked. Exactly. And then engaging with those.

Because again, I think we all know that Google search results are kind of crappy lately. I think Americans are relying less on it. Like they're not asking the questions there because people are not getting the results they want and the answers they want. And so they're going to the reddit, the group Facebook groups, to the other places to ask the same questions that historically would have been a search query.

And now they know that they're not necessarily getting the answer to the search query that they want. So you gotta go figure out what it is. Because people are not gonna stop asking questions and people are not gonna stop consuming content and people are not gonna stop doing this stuff. But how they do it is the big changing. And it'll be interesting to see what happens. And I think videos doing well too. So the TikToks and the video is great for that. That's right.

You gotta meet the people where they are. May not be Google forever. The collegeinvestor.com, Robert, thanks so much for joining me again. We'll link up the full article that inspired this conversation. If you're wondering what to listen to next and you're interested in online business, you want more Robert in your life. We got a whole series. Starts at episode 10, 2013, episode 10, at which point he was making $3,000 a month as a side hustle from his job at Target.

By the time we hit 166, episode 166, he's up to 10 grand a month, still a side hustle. And then in the most recent update, we took a lot of years off in the middle there. By that time, solid seven figure, online media business in episode 482, really, really cool blogging, online business journey. Like he said, 15 years in the making, you can find all those episodes in your archives of your podcast app of choice. Hopefully the feed goes back that far.

You're gonna have to scroll for a while to get down to episode 10 and 166. But if not, you can stream or you can listen to those directly on the website. I'll link those up in the show notes for you as well. And maybe online business isn't your thing. That's okay. There are other side hustles that might excite you more. And tell you what, you can build a personalized playlist of the side hustle show episodes that are gonna be most relevant to you.

We've literally got hundreds of examples in case studies to choose from. So how this works is you go to hustle.show, the answer a few short, multiple choice questions, and then it'll build you a custom list of the episodes based on your answers. You can add those to your device. You'll learn from all our awesome guests and go make some more money. That's at hustle.show. Big thanks to Robert for sharing his insight. Once again, number four, a four-peter on the show.

Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up sidehustle-nation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. And thanks for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That's it for me. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you find a value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. So do me a solid, do Robert a solid, fire off a text message or two, say, hey, check this out.

Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen, and I'll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show. Hustle on.