#371: Ramit Sethi — Automating Finances, Negotiating Prenups, Disagreeing with Tim, and More

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Check it out. Terms and conditions do apply. Well hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to interview and dissect world class performers and all around funny people like my guest today, and I'm gonna butcher his name even though I've known him for a thousand years, Ramith Seti. That's

R A M I T S E T H I, author of the New York Times bestseller I Will Teach You to Be Rich has become a financial guru to millions of readers in their twenties, thirties, and forties. Gotta make sure I don't disqualify myself soon. He started his website, I will teach you to be rich dot com, is a Stanford undergrad in two thousand four, and he now hosts More than a million readers per month on his blog, newsletter, and social media. Ramit and his team of dozens of employees build premium digital products about personal finance, entrepreneurship, psychology, careers, and personal development for top performers. The IWT community

includes one million monthly readers, four hundred thousand plus newsletter subscribers, and thirty five thousand premium customers. He has written about personal finance for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times. And has been interviewed on dozens of media outlets, including NPR, ABC News. C N B C and The Tim Ferris Show. Welcome.

Back to the show. Rame. Thanks a lot. And uh you can find Rameet if you want to uh say hello, ask a question, or yell at him on Twitter at Remid R A M I T and Instagram at Remid. So I thought we could start with the floor mats. Maybe you could tell me about your dad and the floor mat. You wanna start there? Yeah. All right. So You know how you grow up and you discover that Your parents did things a little differently and you just thought it was normal.

I thought it was normal. To take five days to buy a car. 'Cause that's what my dad would do. My mom would stay home, my dad would take us, he would take a couple of the kids in my family, including me, and we would go to the dealer.

It was always Honda or Toyota, you know that. And we would start looking around and my dad would play very innocent, like he didn't know anything about cars. My dad knew everything. He knew how much the dealer was paying, how much the holdback was, everything.

So we'd go, we'd test drive it, he wouldn't be sure, da And then we'd stay there for four or five hours and he'd say, Okay, I'm gonna think about it. The car dealer spent like five hours with my dad. He goes No thanks, this price isn't good. I'm gonna go. They're like what? So we literally left.

Then we go back the next day. Like we're basically having breakfast at the dealership. And I remember one time we were buying a car for our family. And it was Like the fourth day. Okay, again I thought this was normal.

And we're down to the last bit. We're The part where the dealer's drawing the numbers, you know, and telling you like, Well, it's actually a really good deal. And my dad, uh you know, he knows the math, he's an engineer, of course, and And finally we we've Close the deal.

And my dad goes. You're gonna throw in free floor mats, right? These are fifty bucks. And the guy's like, Sir, we're losing money on this car. How can we throw these floor and my dad says, I'm outta here and we just walked up and left. And I was like a Vietnam vet. I'm just shell shocked walking out. My eyes are just glazed over.

And I'm like We just spent a week buying this car. And we walked out of here over fifty dollar floor mats. So that's where I learned to negotiate in uh in the most elite negotiation of all. Now where Where are your parents from?

They're from India. And are they first generation they emigrated to the US? Yep, they came here in the seventies. My dad came here actually to study He went back to India. And it was known that he was coming back, he was a bachelor And you know, they sort of arrange things so that he meets people when he comes back and it w passed around the community that this bachelor's coming back and

He ended up meeting my mom. They met by both families coming together in a living room and talking. And They Met each other

The families decided it was a good thing. Seven days later they were married. My mom got on a plane and flew to the US For the first time and they've been uh married for about forty years now. Amazing. We have so much to talk about.

And so much to catch up on. And so many questions that I want to ask. But I thought we could we could start and certainly we'll we'll bounce all over the place. But you said before we start recording, because you have a new edition of your book, I will teach you to be rich. Noticably lacking. A photograph of you barefoot on the cover. Uh and you have some incredible.

uh quotes testimonials, I should say, including from uh Burton Malkiel. Author of a random walk. that you either should have started it or you did start it with, I was right. C could you explain?

Uh Please explain. Okay. So This book

I Will Teach Be Rich originally came out in March two thousand nine. And let's just dispense with the idea. The name sounds like a scam. We both know we write books that sound like scams, but they're not. I mean it's like a running and I've just learned to embrace it. Guys, it's the weird sounding book, but it's actually good advice. And in the first edition, I talked about long term investing, low cost investing, thinking about really automating your money and using psychology against yourself for for positive results. Now, if you had followed that advice, it turns out that when the book came out in March two thousand nine, that was the absolute bottom of the recession. Crazy enough.

Now I don't believe in market timing, but if you had used the advice in the book, this ten dollar book. You would be set for life. So I started book off by saying Well I was right. Let me tell you all the things that would have happened if you'd used this book.

I did get a couple of things wrong I had to change. Uh one of'em man, the biggest mistake of my life was putting in interest rates in the book. Like the Okay. Do you remember what sounds like me putting uh doing market testing with magazines in the book. Okay, so I put in back then savings rates were five percent. Remember these banks were paying five percent? So I was like guys five percent, da da da here's the math. And then Like the minute The book came out, they dropped

Now But the point of it is you don't make money on your savings account anyway. We're talking about$21 a year or a month versus$4. Like it's irrelevant, it's tiny details. Every day for the last decade I've gotten like Ten emails a day.

That are like Fuck you. Where's the five percent you talked about, you liar? And so I'm like never again. I'm never putting interest rates in this book again. So I took them out, I clarified it, I corrected a couple of things that I wanted to update and I added like eighty new pages of material. So things have changed a bit. But good advice really shouldn't change that much. На I've I've had a chance. to observe You as sort of an animal in the wild for

Ten plus years and part of the reason I enjoy having our conversations Uh but also sharing your tactics and scripts and so on is that I've seen you use them and walk the walk, which is more than I can say for a lot of financial pundits or commentators uh out there in the world. I wanted to

To perhaps Just mention a uh Uh and not really an upsell, maybe a side cell, which is if somebody wants to be Either greatly informed on the arts of negotiating, or if you're just looking for outrage porn to get really angry if if that's your current sport of choice, you can find a guest post that uh you put on my blog

Uh quite a few years ago called How to Negotiate Like an Indian Wh which I can only imagine the the response to that title if if I were to publish it. Probably not a good idea. But It's staying it's staying the way it is, folks. So there you have it. If you want to Google that on Tim Dotblog, you can find it. But let's talk about Some of the perhaps counterintuitive Uh

We talk about all sorts of aspects of finance and investing in life in general on the phone, just the two of us. But I'm looking at a number of different Bullets. that I was hoping to e explore. And one is

You've mentioned that you've lived in the same apartment for ten years. Why do you still rent? Yeah. I get this question a lot because In America, real estate is religion.

And if you're successful than you're supposed to buy, right? And the old tax deduction and they're not making any more land and all these things that we say that we don't really understand. I rent Intentionally.

I could go buy a place in Manhattan tomorrow. With cash. But I don't want to. It doesn't make sense for me financially. And also I enjoy the flexibility. Just to give you an example.

Um I love that the building that I live in has awesome services. I love that anything that goes wrong I make a phone call. Somebody there there was a it started raining. last winter and water started coming through my window sill. So I made a phone call and they came up and they took a look and they were like we actually have to

replace this part of the roof because it connects and we have to send someone to the outside of the building. I said, sounds good to me. It doesn't matter to me. I'm gonna be out of town for the next few days, so have a blast. I would estimate that that repair probably costs in Manhattan On a weekend. Probably twenty five.

thousand, maybe thirty five thousand dollars. I didn't pay it. Right. So that's financial. Also a flexibility issue, which is I don't know where I'm gonna be five years from now.

And if you're gonna buy and you run the numbers, it makes sense to plan on being there at least seven to ten years minimum. So that you can sort of Eat the cost of the f transaction fees. But I think the biggest thing that really surprises people is that in America we have been told so many times Real estate is the best investment.

And In my opinion, that's just not true a lot of the time. Now I don't think it's a bad investment always, but I always say you should run the numbers. And when I run the numbers in Manhattan, it just makes no sense. I would rather take that money and I would put it in a stock market. And I know consistently what that outcome is gonna be over the long term. I don't have to do any repairs and I as we may talk about, I really hate anything that affects my convenience. So I think for a lot of people I just want people to think like

Hey, is it really True. That real estate Is the best investment. For me it's not. Um it's a cost.

And I'm happy to pay the cost just like I'm happy to pay the cost of you know, a basket of strawberries that I'm gonna eat. I don't think I'm throwing money away on strawberries, I don't think I'm throwing money away on rent. So he said uh Real estate is is religion or it can be. And I think this is worth digging into for a second because There are a lot of statements that in

certain circumstances can be conditionally true, right? Like real estate is the best investment asterisk fine print if A B C D E. Right. And there are then there are things that are just patently, I think, untrue, right? Like you need money to make money. False. It's who you know, not what you know.

Yep. Uh false dichotomy, not mutually exclusive. Investing is only for the rich. Right. Ironically, the way you get rich is by investing. And there are a lot of different ways to invest, right? So it's so the one Perhaps uh Undertone or Uh portion of context that I think is is worth talking about because I've been thinking a lot about this myself in the last ten years is that there are

There are investments that you make to optimize for financial ROI. And then there are investments that you make. Sure. Which are decisions about

Allocating resources. For optimizing other things, right? So I'll give just a perfect opposite example, which is I have bought real estate. I've also had my ass handed to me, uh year and a half before your book came out, in fact. Uh

Hello, adjustable rate mortgage, first home buyer. Oh yeah, that was that was ugly. But I have I have bought real estate typically I have used mortgages of various types and I had a friend of mine A Different Indian. uh who is also first generation who is this guy we all know each other Naveen Takaro thank you Naveen for this advice by the way uh who I've known for ages also an engineer uh brilliant guy

And We were looking through different financial decisions because uh and and I wanna talk about kind of what got you here won't get you where you want to go. type changes, right? Because I imagine you do things very differently from your parents. Totally. Even though their behavior makes perfect sense based on their conditioning and their experience. What he said to me looking at my balance sheet there's a small amount of Principle left.

To pay. On a mortgage, and he said just for your peace of mind. For this primary residence. It doesn't make financial sense. You should pay this off.

So that you feel As though no matter what You have that and uh it's almost like a Homestead, right? You have something that on many levels cannot be taken away. That's how you feel.

And I did that. Not saying this is the advice that everybody should take, by the way, but for me in that moment, there was there was so much uncertainty in my life. To make a Decision that seemingly did not let the numbers line up. was in fact the right thing to do.

I completely agree. I'm so glad we're talking about the nuance because I believe There's a few underlying beliefs when it comes to money. And I believe that number one Most people are mostly the same.

That's profoundly different than a lot of people who believe that we're all individual and we have different situations. No, I believe that most of us are mostly the same. And if we can optimize, if we can basically just follow good advice for ninety, ninety five percent of the way. Then we earn the right. To take advantage of our individual specialties and differences. So for most people, that means saving a certain percentage, investing a certain percentage, et cetera. But I do think once you do the basics, then you earn the right to say, Hey, what are the nuances here? Where are do the rules not necessarily apply to me? So for you.

Yeah, you have the principle, maybe financially it didn't make sense, but it just felt good or it It provided safety in an uncertain world at that moment. I've got examples in my own life where I pay for stuff that makes no rational sense. I I hired a personal trainer uh f for the last many years. That doesn't make any sense. I could theoretically find the same workouts on YouTube. I don't know

You know, they're all printed out, or I could just stop going with my trainer. Why? He's given me all the workouts. But there's something more that I get out of it. And when I was starting out, when I was like twenty-two, I wish I could go back and shake myself. Because I was very utilitarian and really judgmental about how other people spent their money. And I would scoff. I would say, you know, flying business class is so stupid. We're all getting to the same place. I'm just paying twenty percent of what that person's paying. And what I really should have done is say, Why do they do that? Like if we're listening to you right now saying you paid off a principle where you really didn't have to, you could have just

Dripped it out, you're not paying much in interest. Why? And for you that safety was miningful. For me. I like the flexibility and convenience. So I'm not saying don't ever buy real estate and you're not saying buy Or pay it off tomorrow.

But what are the circumstances in which People who are otherwise probably pretty thoughtful. make certain decisions. And The The mistake that I

In retrospect, made a lot. when I was younger and I think that's also in in part because I grew up with By necessity very, very frugal parents. Is Sounds like much like yourself, I would scoff at

Uh And sort of look down upon a lot of behaviors. That Had I actually looked closer and said, What am I missing? Right? All right, a bunch of wealthy people are doing X. Yeah. They must know something. Now I'm like, holy shit, I can't believe it.

I've missed it for like twenty or thirty years. Like it actually makes a whole lot of sense. Okay. So let's talk about what are some examples. What are some things that you scoffed at. In your early, let's say teens or twenties, that now you're like, oh, I get it. Well I th and I you know I don't want this to sound obnoxious to folks because we're gonna start to I we've we've gone through many kind of checkpoints, right? Like we've we've you and I have been very fortunate and we've made some good decisions, had a healthy dose of luck, but I'll give you an example because you just mentioned business class. All right. Like my assistant I have today, my primary

Full time assistant, still remembers when Tim, this is not that long ago, would get a middle seat economy. Class ticket. Right. Because uh I remember when I first had people reach out to me about paid speaking engagements, which seemed completely absurd at the time.

Number one, I said yes to everything. So I was like, What, people are gonna pay me to speak? Yeah, sure. Yes. To everything. All of the above. And one of the options that uh I realized was available at one point was they could buy

The Tickets for me. Which was if negotiated by a speaking agent or something, usually business or first class, or they could give me The cash expected For a first class ticket.

And then I could just pocket it and buy a middle class economy seat, which I did once. to Australia. for a speaking gig that was an ex I mean at the time kind of my high water mark, right? Like it was a very important gig. I it was critical that I do well at the speaking engagement. And I sat Like you know, a my hinged at ninety degrees at the hip in a middle seat with like my arms thrust in front of me like a a cadaver or like a Dracula for whatever, right? Like eighteen hours and got there and I was just pounded.

Hamburger meat for like three days. And I said, Okay. That was That was very penny wise and extremely pound foolish. So that would be one example, and I think that's the broader category of Protecting the physical asset.

Yeah. What I like about these examples, like I don't find them shallow to discuss. I think that Each of us, no matter what level of your success, has gone from a certain place in life when you're in your early twenties to a different place. Right? I used to read PC Mag and think about what parts to build my own computer. Now I just go buy a Mac.

Like it's as simple as that. And you know, I haven't kept up and it's just not a good use of my time. I just want someone else to make the decision for me.

Um And it doesn't matter whether you're buying first class tickets internationally or you're going to a restaurant instead of cooking food for yourself one night. You know, one night a week or a month. We all intuitively know that as you change in life you're gonna your spending is gonna change. So I actually don't think anyone should

listen to your example of uh a middle middle seat and say like, oh my God, like must be nice to be Tim, or for me, you know, I have an assistant as well, must be nice. It is nice. you might have money and you don't choose to spend it like that. You choose to spend it on something else. Uh I have a st student of mine in this book Who Use the book.

He told me he retired at thirty five and his wife retired. They're thirty five and thirty six and they drive her on in an R V That's their rich life. That is not my rich life. But to him that's his rich life. So When I was back in my twenties, what I wish I would have done

was to look at people who had succeeded in the ways that I could conceive myself succeeding. Like I would have never seen myself in an R V, so maybe I didn't have something to learn from that person. But if I was really introspective and if I were really curious, I would have said to him, like, how'd you do it? Yeah. And why did you choose of all the things To Live to travel in an RV. If I had done that, I would have put myself aside, and all these things that we love to define ourselves are, which by the way is interesting. People love to define themselves by what they're not.

As opposed to what they want. So you see it on dating profiles everywhere. Don't message me if Or people say I would never do that if I had a million dollars. Well, you don't have to worry about having a million dollars'cause when you define yourself by what you're not, you won't get there. When you choose what you would want to do, now it becomes okay, cool. Like I want this, I want that. How can I work to get it? So I wish I would have reframed the way that I thought about money and psychology earlier on. How do the frameworks or rules

guidelines, anything that you use for financial decisions. uh differ from those you absorbed from your parents or other people when you were younger. Uh and and there are a number of different ways to approach that, right? Like we could look at sort of the approaches you used to you mentioned a million bucks to get to your first million versus What you used

After that point. Right, because if it's anything like my experience, very different. Totally. Uh But I'll I'll let you tackle that any way you like because I I think what's If people could take one thing from this conversation, it would be

Test your assumptions. And be try to be aware and it takes a lot of effort and practice. of what rules you're following or biases you have. that you arrived at through logic and reasoning versus having simply absorbed over the course of

Like bouncing around like a pinball. in a pinball machine in this thing we call life for the last twenty, thirty, forty years because those are not your rules. There's somebody else's. Yeah. I call them invisible scripts. These are the scripts that run our lives, and they're so deeply embedded in us that they are invisible to us.

And you see it like you know, one invisible script that I grew up with was Education Is always good. And and I believe that. I believe that's a positive, invisible script. I think that's a really good one. I'm all for in education, self development. That's what I do for my business and in my life. I also grew up with things like

Um You shouldn't pay for that. we could do it ourselves. Yeah. Me too. Right. Yeah. And so and it really trickles down in lots of peculiar ways. So there's some ways that I really love. When we used to take vacations, our vacation was mostly driving from where we lived in Northern California to LA. We would visit family, my mom would pack lunches and we would stop on the way and eat. And

You know, what I love about that is Like we didn't need any fancy food. Like we were a family. We spent time together. That was vacation for us. I didn't know what it was like to stay at a fancy hotel. In fact I never ordered room service until I was like twenty years old on an interviewing trip for Microsoft. Um I like that. I like knowing that I grew up a little hungry.

Not physically, but just knowing like oh cool, like we're happy, we're good. There's another level uh you know, we can't quite do it right now, but we're happy. Um but I think I also grew up with some beliefs that I've shed or changed. Um would be Uh

Like being really conservative with my job. Like if I had followed all the path in life, I'd be sitting here wearing like a very oversized Cisco engineer t shirt and just You know I'd be telling you about my sales engineering stuff. Like it's a conservative Go get a good job, et cetera. And

As I got older and I started making different choices My parents were supportive, but they were a little surprised. I think on the financial side I didn't really understand why people would pay more.

Why pay more when you can pay less? But there's a famous quote from Dan Kennedy, he says Why pay less when you can pay more? Total flip of the equation. So whether that applies to Who's Dan Kennedy? Dan Kennedy is a famous marketing consultant and he has a great book out about marketing to the affluent. Which if you read it It can be a bit abrasive, but it's also like

A very eye opening, shocking book because What he points out, see, most people go through life with a lens, I call it a money lens. They put a pair of glasses on and they look at the world. Through a frugality lens. How can I save money?

And you see this in lots of ways. Uh if you say, Oh, that's a really nice jacket, uh, where'd you get it? They'll tell you and they'll say, I I got it on sale. Or I got it for fifty percent off. That's interesting. But if you talk to somebody who bought like a absolute s like a something they love, this they went to Italy and got this perfect jacket that was handcrafted. They would never say, I got it for fifty percent off. They have a different lens, maybe craftsmanship. I grew up with the frugality lens. Everything was about cost.

Growing up now. It's also about value. So as Dan Kennedy says, why pay less when you can pay more? If you're gonna have an amazing anniversary dinner. Perhaps you that's the place you don't need to save fifty percent. Perhaps you actually want to spend more to create a memory you will never forget.

Dan Kennedy, uh interesting guy. I've never met him, but uh one of his books I'm blanking on the name, we'll put it in the show notes. Uh at uh Tim dot blog forward slash podcast. But it's something like million dollar ideas or how to make the most or find your own million dollar ideas. And it was as I recall it, a collection of different business ideas and examples. Which was really useful for also

removing the financial lens that I would have had on at the time, which was you make money doing A, B, or C, which were that happened to be whatever three things I had seen maybe around me. And Uh to show just how flexible the approach is. Can be. And uh

Uh I'd love to here a bit since you have such a great sample set of students. Wha what are some of the S psychological Uh

blind spots or rules that most prevent people from reaching their financial goals. And and I want to touch on So think about that. I wanna touch on one thing you said, which was frugality. And and and having grown up with a a definite frugality lens.

I think this is this is worth commenting on. That is Reality has its place. Like you don't want to just be flying blind because you know, uh what is it if a fool and his money are soon separated? I mean it's like you no matter how much money you have, you can spend it all. And I've seen this a lot. It's not hard. So you have to have A a a means of assessing what is worth spending money on and what is not.

However, if you make let's just say Uh twenty, thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars a year. Fill in the number, but let's just say fifty thousand dollars a year. If you want to reach all of your financial goals by By cutting costs the maximum amount that you can cut. is fifty thousand.

At which point you are you've got like a T shirt and you're a you're a wandering ascetic, you know, begging for food and and so on. Uh so there is By definition. A limit. to the delta you can create between

The money you spend. and the money you have. Whereas if you if you have an equal focus on income generation or even disproportionate focus on income generation. Uh Sky's the limit.

In in a sense, right? So that would be one where like I was trained to like cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. But uh if you're not simultaneously looking at income generation or increasing income, it can be really problematic. Trevor Burrus That's why most of America and most of the world has the frugality lens on, right? There's a limit to how much you can cut, but no limit to how much you can earn. And if you think about the typical financial advice It's a very Pointed question to ask.

Why don't any of these so called financial experts in the newspapers talk about how to earn more money? And the answer is They don't know how. That's not their job. They're writers. So To be able to

understand that you do need to manage your costs. For example, there are a lot of things I do in my life that are highly frugal. Highly. Especially for the income that I have, and I just It's not of interest to me. But

I also Like m um My wife makes fun of me because I run my entire business on a MacBook Air. And you know, I put my feet up on the table, I got my thing on my lap

And she's like, Why don't you get a new computer? Like that fan is so loud. And I had to update it. How long have you had it? So I that's what I I wanted to find out. I went to the Apple thing in the top left corner and it shows you when you bought it. It's seven years old. But like it still works. So I don't want another one. And I also when I grew up this comes

From my childhood. We didn't buy a new computer. Unless the other one did not turn on. So I've kept that with me and I like having little

places in my life where I intentionally uh impose scarcity. I think it's healthy. I think it's healthy to have restraint. I think it's healthy to build that discipline. If you just go out and buy everything you can, I think you're on a quick path to a bad place. You're also aware that you're doing it. Yeah. Yes, exactly. So exactly. Another example is

I hardly ever eat out. At all. And um And that's a big change from ten year well, I was single. And I was seamless like my seamless receipts are just like

through the roof. Seamless is an online delivery service in New York. Everybody there uses it. And now for health reasons and also just For cost reasons as well. We like to cut back on that. I spend more on things. So I always like to spend extravagantly on the things I love.

But cut costs mercilessly on the things I don't mercilessly. So I like that. I actually would I think a lot of people kind of try to cut back a little bit here and a little bit there, and they just end up generally unhappy about it. I would actually encourage people to pick the area. I call it a money dial. Pick the area of your life that you truly love spending money on. Like let's do a quick exercise. What's the area of life that you love? It gives you joy to spend money on. Travel.

Travel and food. Perfect. Whether I cook at home or I I go out, I would say. Uh now I You had a Veracruz breakfast taco this morning. Yeah. Which was amazing. Not expensive. No, I love it but delicious. At the same time I could go to say San Francisco to like Saison.

And enjoy that as So those would be two areas, travel and and food. Perfect. So Let's let's do this now. A lot of people say travel, it's one of the most common ones. Mine is convenience. I like my life to be super convenient. So I've spent a lot of money and time engineering that. Now let's take your money dial, travel, and like a stereo dial, let's turn it up. Let's say just for easy math that you spend a hundred dollars a month on travel. Again, easy math.

What if you Ten X that. Or let's say you hundred X that, what would travel look like for you different than what you do now? Uh let's see. Well

I w I w it would probably mean that I have Which quite honestly I've thought about because I've had some Given some of the gnarly, crazy places I go. I've had some Castrophes and near catastrophes.

I would probably have a fixer on the ground each place I went. I would have somebody who is on call and available. to Uh Mm effectively fix

Any problem or Tackle anyway uh challenge or want that came up. I love that. Anything else? That's the one that comes to mind. Okay. Uh because it it's yeah, that's that's that's the one that comes that's the one that comes to mind. All right. Now what's something in your life that you spend money on but you don't really care? It doesn't make that much of a meaningful difference to you. Clothing.

Perfect. So this is you'll find this My fans have given me unending grief for it. You know my wife is a personal stylist. Oh man. She won't like my talk about this. So I love this exercise. There are about 10 money dials that I've identified. Uh travel is a big one. Convenience is very rare. There's health and fitness. There's relationships. There's a few more. What I like to see people doing is actually spending more on the thing they love. Health and fitness is the one where I would ratchet it up. Okay. That's where I'll that's where I would turn the dial the hard. What would you do?

Uh I would actually get A Trainer. Which I do not have currently. I have different trainers for different things, but it's all a la carte. Nothing has been prepaid or pre scheduled, which is an issue, right? I suspect that part of the reason, tell me if I'm wrong, that you like having a trainer is the accountability and the regularity. Hundred percent.

And I would like to do that. Okay. I love this. By the way, whenever you ask someone about their money dial, you can just see their face light up. Right. Cause they love it. I loved, I love, I'm obsessed talking about how I have built my life around convenience. I'll take you through every last detail. You can see the joy in my eyes. So What I love to do is for people to th dream big. If it's travel.

It's not just like adding an extra 10%. It's like 10xing it. What would that look like? And then in order to get there, whether it's two X, five X, 10X, What would you be willing to cut back on? And suddenly people start to realize that money actually should be bifurcated. It should be highly bifurcated. It's spending Very little on the things you don't like.

and going extravagant on the things you do. And when you start to think this way, now your rich life becomes way more specific and meaningful to you as opposed to me, I don't need a fixer because I don't travel at those kind of places and I don't do the kind of traveling you do. But for me, I want even more convenience. And now, you know, I want a different type of travel now that I'm married. So these are things that I want everyone to think about. What's your money dial? And what if you could ten X it? It and this is valuable also just for people who may be listening and going, Ugh like waste of time. I don't have the money to spend ten X on it, whatever, whatever the pushback might be. As a thought.

This is very very valuable. book, I asked myself if I only had a month, actually for the last two books, you know if I only had a month to write this book How would I do it? Oh really? What would it look like? And and ninety percent of the ideas were terrible.

But then there were ten that made the process I was planning on already. Two, three, four, five times more efficient. And so the question itself might seem absurd. But many of the ideas end up being extremely practical. And uh uh let's talk about convenience. So what are what are some of the what are some of the things that you do or

have found disproportionately Uh rewarding, gratifying from a convenience standpoint. But this is my rich life, so I'm gonna break it down. I wake up in the morning And

By the time I wake up early, uh we started waking up at six after we went on our honeymoon. Uh, we were waking up early for Safari and then we both kinda looked at each other and were like, Do you wanna keep doing this? And so we do. We sleep around nine thirty, ten. Wake up at six. And Uh by the time I get

Start working. I just open up my calendar. and I double click on whatever's in the morning, it's usually in the morning. And everything is like perfectly organized. The link is there. I click the link. The document is ready to go with exactly the right information. It's all organized, like there's nothing left to chance. There's no documents over here, there's no files over there. It's all in its place. You've prepared this in advance? My assistant has.

And my team has. So that has all been engineer. And I do believe that the best morning routine is decided the day before, the week before, even the year before. So by the time I get there, it's just ready to go. It's like uh a chef walking in. Exactly. And everything's in its place. So I love that. Then um On a day to day basis.

Uh things like scheduling. My assistant Jill handles it. She's fantastic. And even when I was coming here I Walked outside to get it. uh Uber or taxi.

And I didn't even know what airport I was going to. I just knew that when I double clicked my calendar, it would tell me. Finally. Uh a a couple of other examples. When I travel Especially for a extended period of time.

We have something called the travel protocol. And Jill activates the travel protocol. That means my plants get watered if they need to be. That means that she handles email in a different way. That means that all these details that I normally attend to when I'm in the office Let's get super Boring. Uh not for me.

Is this a checklist that lives in a Google document? Where where does that protocol once you When once you click on Go Go Gadget travel. Yeah. Uh Where the inst where do the instructions live?

Sick. Yeah. And somebody needs to fill in. Uh we we don't have to get into that complexity if if if necessary, but the The instructions. Yeah, they're in a Google Doc. There's a Google Doc that's roughly twenty five or so pages of preferences, like when I travel. If I'm traveling over five hours, I want to sit in this type of seat.

Um it's all lives there and it's updated. So it's a live living document. Uh one recent thing that I updated was when I travel for a longer period of time I wanna have food delivered to my hotel. So I can try to stay generally on diet. So I'll get to the hotel and they'll have uh a whole foods bag there delivered with food that I know that I can kinda eat on the go. And it's got a spoon too, because the first time we did it, there was no spoon and there are no spoons in a hotel room, which I had to learn myself. So it's like a lot of iteration, but to me, I don't find it annoying. I actually love it because I'm like cracking the code of what it takes for me to be really efficient.

So it lives in a Google Doc. If my assistant were sick for some reason, she would transition it to someone else. Um and so it's accessible to anyone at the company and we just go from there. I I want to mention something'cause I'm I'm extremely particular about uh Preferences for travel. So hotel room not near an ice machine, not near the elevators. I've very particular thoughts on if if it's a hip cool hotel with a really loud lobby.

certain max heights, but take into account fire escapes and so I mean I've a whole set of preferences. I love this. But when you let's just say that somebody listening as a thought exercise had dialed up their travel. Money dial. What you realize is that in some cases the things you would expect to be expensive or problems you would expect to be expensive to fix are not expensive. Like the Whole Foods example. It's so cheap. So you could do y Whole Foods may do its own delivery, if not

Perhaps Instacart, if not in a place like Austin, you could use Favor. There are really inexpensive ways to do this. To give an example, Uh So I used to I still do. Ice baths. And

Uh I didn't have what I have now, which is this Uh somewhat uh risky McGyver cold plunge that I've engineered, uh, which you have to make sure you've unplugged before you get in. But before that, when I was living in San Francisco, I had uh Ice delivered.

Or I would have ice picked up. I would usually stop at a gas station after the gym and like pack my trunk full of ice. Which was a huge pain in the ass. And uh then I realized, Wait a second. At the time. Instacart will deliver like sixty pounds of ice for five bucks. And I was like, I am that asshole. I'm the guy who's like, Can I order kettlebells on Amazon Prime and get them shipped for free so I don't have to pay for like

twice the cost. Yeah. And lo and behold, I was able to do it. So the solutions Even if you brainstorm them in a wealth exercise do not always end up being expensive. Hundred percent. That's why I'm so glad you said a few minutes ago, don't scoff at the mental exercise like oh I don't have enough money. Like dream big. Dream the dream of what your money dial is at 10x, but the solutions are often so simple. Every time I travel,

I will post a video on Instagram of the food that was delivered. And it's like classic stuff. It's like yogurt. It's stuff that we all eat. It's yogurt, it's some almonds, maybe a peanut butter thing. And People like

What service did you use? That's the question. What service? And I'm like, the service doesn't matter. You could find somebody on Craigslist. This is like a twenty dollar purchase. Twenty dollars that can change your life. And In order to get there, you just have to start with the dream. It's The money is like really the last of it. So uh this twenty dollars this is uh so my my I've a very good assistant it and it's it's taken It's taken uh

quite a bit of time and right off the bat. And you don't need an assistant for this. But she said to me at one point, she's like, Tim I don't know when this was. It was not that long ago. She's like Tim. Just travel.

With a roll of twenties. And you can solve almost any problem. And I was like That's a good idea. And I'll give another example of a lifestyle upgrade that does not cost a lot of money. If you go out to restaurants.

Choose a restaurant. You think you're really gonna like. Go to that restaurant. Not on the weekend. So say between

Monday and Thursday. Go either early Preferably like right when they start for uh dinner service. Sit by yourself.

And again, this is this is This is kind of a one time investment. Go there for a week. This is also stuff I picked up when I was riding the four hour shaft. Because I would go in with a little notebook. And I would order a bunch of stuff.

And I would take little notes and they're like, Who the fuck is this guy? Right? Number one, but they uh the chef typically at that point is not gonna be as as loaded. Uh, not on booze, although that happens too. Uh, but on uh like fifty two menus open at once. That's not gonna happen at five or five thirty. So they they might take an interest and the Metro D might take an interest in in you. Order all sorts of stuff to to to try. And then tip like forty percent. Mm-hmm.

And do that three days in a row. And you are forever a V I P at that restaurant. Oh wow, so th I like that little insight. The forty percent's not that surprising, but the three days in a row do it a couple of days in a row so people get to know you, you get to know them. Wow. And like your VIP for life. Okay. And sit at the pass if you can. So if there's a chef's table or a counter where you can see the kitchen, sit there because most people will never ask for that. I love this. Okay. I love

How to take a mundane experience like a restaurant and turn it into something special. So Thank you for sharing that. Let me share a couple of my own. I I had two experiences, one where we I think we we got something magical in the second where we didn't do it, but we got an idea. We were on our honeymoon.

And we were just having the most amazing time. We went to four different countries and we started in Italy, then Kenya, India, and then Thailand. And the hospitality was just like on another level, right? We're on a different planet and I Said to my wife If there's

Anything. You think of or you want. Just ask because at these hotels they really, really, really want to say yes. And We were at one hotel in Thailand and

My wife loved The spring rolls. And so the uh the manager comes out and he said, Hello, you know, how's your meal? Da da da And she said, you know, I was wondering she was kinda nervous. I was wondering if we could have the recipe for these spring rolls'cause these are the best I've ever tasted. He goes, You know what? Give me just a minute. He goes to the back

He comes out with the chef. Chef in his hat. And the chef says Um I heard that you're interested in the recipe and he goes I would actually love to arrange a cooking class for you. Amazing. What time are you available tomorrow? She's like she's like I can come any time. So she goes to this cooking class.

Private. In the back in the kitchen. Not only did they make four different dishes They even said okay, you know, your stove doesn't have as much flame as ours, so you want to adjust the recipe Etc.

So she sends me these photos. I'm just sitting in the room. I was doing some writing and she sends me these photos of four full dishes and then they were like, Here you go, compliments of the of the kitchen. Like she will never forget that. Never. And it was just about asking. How do you do this?

She didn't even ask for the the class. So I I I learned from that and I thought that was magical. The second experience is uh A new thing that I've added to my playbook, which is my buddy Nick took me, he's like, Hey, do you want to go to a tea tasting in New York? I was like, Yeah, let's go. Green tea. I thought it would be a typical tea tasting, you know, you go some a typical tea tasting. I don't know. Just one tea tasting. New York who like tea, they do it.

We go there, okay, there's like six people from Japan There's a translator and there's a photographer. We're like, what is going on right now? We're like there's something happening but we don't understand what's going on. So we're sitting there and then This

This person comes and starts speaking and the translator's translating And they basically say this is the best tea in Japan and it's being brought to the US for the first time. And we're like Okay. Like How good can good be? It's T, you know, like

We didn't understand. quality at this level. Okay. So the way that we truly understood it, they told us, you know, they only grow it on a certain part of the mountain and they use these types of things, and we were like, Okay, okay. The way that we truly understood it was when They put the tea leaves in and they said okay

Steep it for a second and they said drink. One drop. One drop. And we're like What? And so we drink one drop, it was amazing, it was really good I've never tasted anything like it. And then there was a little thing that said

The prices. We looked at each other, my friend Nick and I and We said Ounce for ounce this is the most expensive thing we've ever had to drink. If we were to buy. It was like

Seventy dollars Hm. Sip. I mean I've crazy, right? And we didn't pay that much for the tasting, but What we learned from that was number one, sometimes quality

You can you can only tell it By certain Attributes. Two, I wasn't at the level of being able to appreciate it. And three, and this was the real key. What we should have done.

And what I'm going to do from now on is whenever I go to a cool whether it's uh tea tasting or any I'm I have a little playbook now. I asked my assistant Jill to put it together. We're gonna make the reservation. Of course I'm gonna pay. I'm not asking for anything free.

But she's gonna send a note ahead of time that says, you know, hey Ramit's coming in. He would love to be able to take a kitchen tour. If you have if you have fifteen minutes ahead of time, he would love to be able to take it. And if possible, he'd love to post it on Instagram or whatever. Again, not asking for anything free, but like What I've learned is people who are the best Love to share it. So I there's this phrase, you know, those who can't do teach. That's totally incorrect. Never believe that. The very best love Wait, those who can do those who can't teach. Or they say those who can't do comedy. And like that's a total misnomer. The the very best people like here you are, you're the best in the world at what you do and you love to teach.

Everyone who's the best, whether it's a chef or uh a a T master. They love it. So I'm gonna try to do that when I go to these places. And I I'm just like every one of us can do that. So anyway, that was my exciting experience. So you said you said that one oh that's the one that gave you the idea? Yeah. I didn't execute that yet. And the The

Well, there are many things that that one could to take from what you just said. One I want to underscore is The importance of asking. And

I think that Yeah, what I would hope for myself, because I'm still developing my thinking and priorities will change and worldviews will change. As it relates to money. Right.

Money's an interesting thing. We could talk about like what the fuck money is to begin with. Uh But that's a separate thing. Um It's part of the reason why I have a$100 trillion note from Zimbabwe framed that I put up on a wall, because it's important to remember just how conceptual a lot of this is. Uh My thinking will change but

to stress test your own assumptions. Uh it's very valuable to not just do thought exercises but certain Real life exercises. So one could be

Asking for a kitchen tour. And don't by the way, don't do it unless you're interested. So it and if you're not interested, go watch Chef's Table like Francis Mallman or one of those. Like get excited about it and have some basic vocabulary so you can appreciate what the hell is being shown to you if you're gonna do it. Don't do it just to do it. But that is A question. Right. Uh and we know someone who lives here in Austin also, and Noah Kagan, who has his coffee challenge, right? So walk into a coffee shop, ask for ten percent off, and you can't tell them you're doing an experiment. You can't tell them that so and so told you to do it. Uh doesn't matter what they say. So it could be a Starbucks, it could be an indie. Doesn't matter. And if they're what if I bought what if I don't like coffee? It's like p I don't care.

Get a water. Get a you know, order a Pellegrino order a tea, but ask for ten percent off. Uh cultivating the muscle used for asking for things.

Uh is so incredible. And I d you you're talking about uh you know those who Those who can't teach and how there are these these common sayings that are that are taken as true. I do th there is one that I like, which I do think is generally true, and that is

in life you don't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate. I agree. And sometimes negotiating is just asking for what you want. Right. So are there any exercises that you would suggest or Practices, phone calls. Questions.

to people who are listening that might help them kind of stress test some of the things they've accepted. Yes. I love this. So I'm gonna give you A small one and I'm gonna give you a big one. The small one is If you have any sort of late fee

You should just Use the scripts in my book, or you can Google for them and you should call up your financial institution. Usually it's a credit card. What should they Google specifically? Um If you don't if you don't well get the book. But if you don't get the book, you can just Google Remit Sati negotiation scripts. Okay. And You're gonna see there

Uh Y this is how it's gonna go. You call up the credit card and you say Hi, uh I just wanted to confirm that I've been a member for the last four years and they're gonna say yes, I see that, two thousand whatever year. Okay, great. I noticed that there's a late fee here of thirty seven dollars from last month.

Um I'd like to get that waved, please. And they're gonna say by the way, notice my tonality. I'd like to get that waived. Please. Why, sir?

Well, I made a mistake. But I sent the payment in the next day. And I'd like to confirm that it can be removed and it won't affect my credit. Eighty percent of the time right there you're gonna get it removed. And there's a reason I put that in chapter one of my book, as well as with bank fees, overdrafts, et cetera. It's that most people have never proactively taken control of their money.

They just accept the world the way it is. Ah, the credit card screwed me again. No. You can get that back. And once you get that late fee back, you're like, oh my God, I can actually have control over this. These companies work for me. So that's that's the first thing I would say. The second exercise is a little bigger and it's more conceptual.

Right now I'm doing a small coaching program with like a hundred and fifty people go I'm walking him through my book. And it's like this private group and I'm just walking him through every chapter. And I asked him a thought exercise a couple of days ago. I said, If I gave you ten thousand dollars tomorrow. Or if you just found it, no obligation, no strings. What would you do with it? Okay, Tim, what do you think

They said they would do it. It's ten thousand dollars. Ten thousand dollars. This is just like right off the cuff. Pay down Mortgage. Or invest in

And in index fund, but I'm guessing closer to the former than the latter. I don't know. Pretty pretty close. So it turns out that according to these answers that they're all saints. We have a bunch of mother Teresa's in the group. They're like I would pay off my debt, I would Give ten percent to charity. I would do this and that. I'm like

You got twenty five thousand dollars of credit card debt. You're telling me that you would magically take this money and just pay it off. They what they were doing was they were having a very optimistic sense of their future selves. I would rather they say

I actually don't know what I would do with this money. Based on my past behavior, I'd probably just spend a lot of it. Or I have no system or way of thinking about what to do with my money. That would have been more honest. Yeah. Instead, when faced with what we're gonna do in the future, we're really optimistic. Oh, I'd work out four times a week, I'd pay this off, I'd What I would

Go through this exercise. Start with your optimistic self. And then Try your realistic self. If you say you're gonna pay off all your debt, why are you even in debt in the first place?

Clearly you didn't have a system. That would keep you out of it. So I I think for people, whether it's a hundred dollars, a thousand dollars, ten thousand dollars. Whether it's you know, you could even go as big as somebody just gives you a house. What are you gonna do with it? I haven't even done that myself, but you could play with the concept and then remember If you don't have a system

Like for me, the answer is I would put it straight into my system, put it into a checking account, and money would be withdrawn to certain places. Twenty percent would go here, ten percent would go there, some money would be spit out for guilt free spending, and I'd probably go buy a beautiful sweater. Where do That's where it always ends. You and your sweater. Well we're we're Do those funds go if you're comfortable talking about some of the places. Sure. So you get ten grand, you put it into the checking account. And then it gets

kind of put into this. Process. Yeah, it's like a pro it's a process map, basically like an email inbox and it gets filtered and shunted where it needs to go. So day to day, um, my spending is very consistent. Except for two areas.

Rent is the same. Food Basically the same. Um Everything is pretty stable.

I like To put my target is I start by saying I wanna save and invest at least twenty to thirty percent. And I think that's a good healthy number. If you're doing that The rest of your life is generally in control. twenty to thirty percent. And because we don't have kids right now, my wife and I have been talking about our numbers. We want that number to be towards the higher end. Twenty to thirty percent. Just technical question. Is this pre- tax or is this

Taking into account taxes. It can be either. Um if you I always like to be more conservative. Always. So Post tax is really good if you can do that because you're you know, you're gonna be putting more in.

But really for any of these numbers, if it's post or pre, you're generally in a good place anyway. Um So then that money is getting saved and invested. And investing is like I try to go more aggression because we're young. So I put that into things like a target date fund. And you know, I love Vanguard and I I recommend them. I don't have any deals with them, but I think they're the best. That's where I put it. I I I I understand all the separate words, but I don't actually I don't actually know what that is.

Very quickly, everybody thinks investing is about picking stocks and like sitting here and looking at this screen that looks like minority report. That's not investing. Investing is Very simple, low cost. F And these cost you almost nothing these days. We're talking a point one percent expense ratio. It's very, very low cost. What you do is something like a target date fund is you pick a target date that you're gonna retire. So if you're thirty and you're gonna reti uh you're gonna presumably retire at sixty-five, that's thirty five years from now. So there's a target date fund called

Vanguard two thousand sixty fund. Okay. And what that does is it's like a pie chart. It's pretty aggressive in your thirties'cause you're young and as you get older it gets a little more conservative. Basically what it means for you is that you don't need to do anything except put money into it automatically every month. I love this as a great simple low cost way to invest. Um and the bulk of my portfolio is either in target date funds or individual index funds.

So that money would go in there. I have some money in sub savings accounts. I've got some targets like Um, you know, I saved up for my wedding before I was before I even met my wife, saved up for an engagement ring. I like to plan ahead. So I have those numbers, same for a down payment on a house, which eventually I will buy, even though it doesn't make sense for me right now, but I still plan for it. Um

Also vacation. So like mid term goals you're talking about roughly one to five or so years. How do you keep these things separate, or is it are they only separate in a spreadsheet where you're keeping track? How do you not comminglear it Yeah I like keeping them separate because I think it's colour. Separate meaning separate bank accounts? Well you can have sub savings accounts. Oh I see subsavings employee on a credit card account or something like that. Exactly. Just for tracking purposes. For tracking purposes. And I also think it's nice. If you have one big old co-mingled account, you don't really know what's for what, but what I would encourage everyone to do is think about what do you want to save for between one to five years.

And for one year there are things like Christmas gifts. Like you know that's a known irregular expense or it's a known regular expense. It's coming every December. So if it's five hundred bucks you might as well start saving now. Then there are things like um An anniversary dinner. There's also mistakes. I used to have a stupid mistakes account because I used to get a lot of parking tickets.

I don't do that anymore, thank God. So I don't need to plan for that. But then there are things like a down payment. Uh maybe getting married, things like that. Above and beyond five or so seven years, I just put in the market. 'Cause I don't need it.

And it just grows. Um then you're putting it in the market with A target date fund. Target date fund. Yep. And those over the long term, over history have returned about

Eight percent. So if you do the math and you go to one of these calculators like a bank rate or something, you can plug in the numbers and you'll see that your money doubles roughly every It's the rule of seventy two. Seventy two divided by ten. It'll double about every seven years. That's why compounding is so powerful. If you start now and you put even a hundred bucks a month in, that number gets very large very fast. So that's the power of investing.

The rest of the money my fixed expenses like rent, things like that. And finally out pops out guilt free spending. This is my favorite part. The sweater account. The sweater account. That's basically so that that brings me to my two things that are variable. Travel. I tend to overspend on travel a bit. And clothing.

And I I've set up this system, uh'cause now I've sort of advanced my financial system Where a lot of it is automated. a meeting once a month. I have a personal CFO and we kinda look at it. And I basically told him I want my document prepared in this way. I want an executive summary. I want the expenses categorized as such.

And I only want you to flag the following ones because these are the ones I'm variable on. Like I don't really care if I spend twenty bucks more on deodorant. That doesn't move the needle. But like too much on travel, I gotta know about it so I can kinda correct over time. That's how I think about the spending. Okay, so to next topics. I thought we would discuss

Prenups. So this is a topic that uh is shied away from a lot Uh, it seems to be an important topic, at least in the US. And uh it's something that came up in conversation recently. And you joked that you might be willing to talk about it on the podcast. Uh this is one of those subject areas that

is I think neglected. Uh and I've seen a lot of difficulty and angst and pain and discomfort faced as a result of I think an unwillingness to to Mm-hmm. So

Where should we start with pre-ups? I'm an open book man. I'll tell you anything. All right. Uh this is one of those things that When I walked into it. I didn't know anything. And I only know I only knew what I had heard on TV.

That bad or they're for people who have generational wealth that's been inherited. Like I didn't know anything. And Then I discovered

When I talked to friends. There was so many people who have thought about this or gone through it. But none of it is online. It's all behind closed doors.

So prenup. Pre nuptial agreement. What is what is a prenup? What's the purpose of a prenup? Prenup uh sets the terms of what you are coming into a marriage with.

And it is a Acknowledgement that certain people might have certain assets or interests like a business or uh cash or investments, whatever the case may be. And it also sets the terms for if the marriage ends for whatever reason.

what is to be done with those assets, specifically the pre marital assets. That's what a Pre nap is about. Okay, so how did how did you think about this? Because I've I've heard some disaster stories of this process being handled poorly or terms not being

And I should point out also that I this is not a male female thing. I've seen this in uh same sex couples. I've seen this In cases where the woman is coming in with significantly greater assets. uh than uh the husband to be.

So what How did you think about this and uh What's one of the smarter ways to go about? Well I'll tell you what I did and I'll tell you Yeah.

And I'm the reason I want to talk about this is that I want to shine the light on money topics that people don't talk about. And uh I want people to be informed. You can make your own decision, but I walked in to thinking about getting married with a lot of preconceived notions about what a prenup was, who it was for.

And just Just to give you a sense, like nobody around me ever signed a prenup growing up. It just was not a part of my culture. So I started thinking about Getting engaged.

And my Uh girlfriend at the time. Yeah, we were discussing it and Discussing what the engagement what's going to happen eventually and you know, we're together for the long term, things like that. And I started looking into it, and if you Google

How to sign a pre nap. You're gonna find a lot of really generic and Borderline bad advice. It's from Disgruntled Redditors. And it's from like

Ask men or these just magazines where they have these things This advice like You should blame it on your lawyer. Or you should blame it on your parents. Or how do you get away with not making your fiance mad?

And I just thought this is not the way I want to start. this relationship and this financial relationship as well. Cause that's what marriage is. It's legal It's financial. It's also Love it's it's you're a team in every way. So I sat down, I did a lot of research, I talked to a lot of my friends. And the thing that shocked me was when I started bringing it up with friends,

So many of them, especially entrepreneurs. Had Lots to say. Lots. So I'll fast forward to what happened.

When we had M my uh girlfriend at the time, we sat down, we had a really serious meeting. Like we actually had a Google agenda. We came with our bullet points and And we had a very adult meeting where we talked about This is just the two of you. Just the two of us. Legal counseling anything like that. No, no, no. We were just the two of us. We talked about You know, when would we like to Be engaged and

Married. Where would we live? Uh do we want to have kids. So just to be clear, this is a life logistics meeting, not a prenup meeting. That may be part of it, but it's a broader conversation. I hadn't even brought the prenub up. So we go through, you know Kids and

And I told her You know. I even mentioned to my wife, I said, you know Let's talk about the names of our kids'cause I never saw myself having a some kid named Mike.

I don't want a mic running around in my house. She's like, What the hell, where's this coming from? I'm like, I just feel particular about this. So then it's thora or nothing. Thora or nothing. So we we go through the list and The good news is we were generally on the same page. It's funny thing she goes, you know, I'd really like to be Engaged by Q one of next year. I'm like Oh my God, this is the girl of my dreams. She's talking in financial quarters. I'm like, I love you, babe.

So so then at the end of that conversation I said You know, there's something else that's important. You know, I it's really important to me that we discuss A prenup. And she was

Surprised, kinda taken aback. She's like, Okay, like what do you mean? And I said Look. You and I grew up very similar. We both grew up in California. Our parents have similar jobs. And I said, because of certain decisions I've made, because of my business, and because of a lot of luck. I've been put in this fortunate position where I have a business and I've accumulated a certain amount of assets. I said it's really important for me that we

Talk what that means. before we get married and that we sign an agreement in the worst case if something bad happened. And This was really I was nervous, very nervous because Like what what is someone's reaction gonna be? I have no idea. But I thought if anything it's gonna be bad.

But I f I felt Very I was nervous, but I also felt confident'cause it was something that I knew that I wanted to do. Like it was really important to me. So To her credit, she said.

You know what? I'm surprised. I didn't expect it, but I'm open to it. Let me get educated about it and we can talk. Okay, great. So that was as good of a response as I could have hoped. She goes off and she does her own research. She talks to her friends.

And we start discussing more and more, right? We've got Oh, about four or five months until I proposed to her. We start talking. The next step is to get lawyers. Now

Interestingly. you have to retain counsel. Each side has to retain counsel. And oftentimes what happened is the person who has more assets will actually pay for the other person's lawyer, which I did. These lawyers are very expensive, right? So I said, you know what, I'll take care of that. Um I'm happy to do it. And

We start to Go through hammering. Basic terms out. Now the basic structure of a prenup is Most people don't need a prenap.

Because most people are coming into a marriage with relatively similar assets. The places where it starts to make sense Or if you have some major amount of assets, whether it be a house Uh, whether it be an inheritance

A business, those kinds of things it starts to make sense to think about. I had to get psyched. Yeah. Absolutely. I had to get comfortable with the idea that

This wasn't A bad thing. I wasn't planning for us to fail. And that's the most common objection people have to prenups, which is you're planning for it to go wrong. I'm not

I intend to be married forever. I want to. I always emphasize that with my wife, and I made it clear that We're a team. But I also

mentioned that I've, for whatever reasons, I've accumulated these things, and it's really important for me to plan for what might happen. As we talked more and more about it, it became even more and more clear that in every other part of life Top performers. Plan.

They plan ahead, they plan for good, they plan for bad, they plan. But it's like just in this one situation of life. that society has told everyone, No, that's wrong. You shouldn't plan at all. You should go into it um like a doe with, you know, these doe eyes And you shouldn't

Really think even for a moment about what would happen if something goes wrong. Yeah, I mean you get on an airplane, they give you a safety briefing, they don't it's not because they expect the plane to crash into the water. That's a great example. Uh it it's also a place just to jump in where'cause I've thought a good amount about this, just relationships and marriage in general, is that

When you get married in official capacity, you are involving The state. in your affairs. You are signing up for certain contractual agreements. And so in in any well planned agreement, you're going to have uh contingencies for what happens

Uh if things do not work out. There's gonna be a termination clause. You're gonna have that in a publishing agreement. You're gonna have that in any number of dozens or hundreds of other contracts you will sign. We'll always have A separation clause. The reason why this go this is such a heated topic for people, I think there's two reasons. One

There's just a general ignorance of prenups because it is inherently a private affair. Inherently when you have assets being discussed. It happens behind closed doors, specifically lawyers closed doors. It's not public. There are no good guides or no ebooks on how to do a prenup. There's nothing. There's not even any sample prenups out there. They're very, very poor quality. The second thing is it attacks our belief. That

In America a marriage is Purely about love. And I believe A marriage is absolutely about love. But go look at any

Parents. uh or or or any couple that has let's say kids Go look at them. and look at their day to day. Yes, there's love.

But there's also Teamwork. There's this person's doing dinner, this person's taking the trash out, this person's changing the diapers. It's an arrangement. It's a team. And on any team, you have to have a set of rules. And so I got comfortable with that saying, you know what, this is A a love marriage. We found each other, we met each other, we love each other. But it's also we wanna

Make sure that this is a team. And we're setting Expectations. So We went through the process and we talked to our lawyers and the lawyers are hammering it out. And this is where it started to get really tough.

Everything was going great. But then Once you everything's great. In concept. And then you talk about real numbers.

What are the if if I may, like s what's what are the basic terms that you're agreeing upon in a prenup? The first thing is you're laying out All the assets that each person has. Those could be assets, liabilities, you kind of put those all out on the table. By the way, that was a good conversation that we had. Um I

forgot to take my own advice about when to talk about money with your partner. So my wife had asked me years ago to help her with some four oh one K thing. And I was like, Yeah, I'll help you, but first read my book. So she reads my book and then she's like, Okay, I still have this one question. So we went through it. And I got to understand her pay and and all that stuff and it it was great. Like we work through it. Like a year or two later she said, You know

I feel a little unbalanced because You know everything about my finances, but I don't know anything about yours. And that was when I realized like I had made a huge mistake. I By not telling her. I had put myself

In a very unbal she had been placed in an unbalanced position. Just not fair. So that afternoon we talked about it. And we talked about Um My net worth. We talked about what it means for us.

And that was I would say one of My Most pleasant conversations. Um most pleasant. Yeah.

Because we talked about What does it mean for us? Like Our rich life now. What does it mean?

It means that When we travel we can take our parents with us. And we can spend extra for them to stretch their legs out. We can Travel to places or we can

make certain investments or r take risks that we might not normally be able to do. Again as a team. So That was actually one of my favorite memories of talking about money in the early days. Now Um We had listed out all our assets and liabilities.

And now the basic structure of a prenup is Um What happens in the case of The marriage ending.

And there are so many ways to cut it. No two prenups are alike. What happens if the marriage ends in Three months at an extreme. In many cases a check is written. Can you believe that? If a marriage ends in three months

Somebody might write a check to the other person. Why? Just like pure goodwill. Severance pay. You could call it that. And then and both partners might still have a job, et cetera. But what happens if the marriage now ends, you know, thirty years later? Let's say there's two or three kids. Let's say that one partner has stopped their job so that he or she can take care of the kids. Well, it it's kind of fair that that person should be compensated in some way. Because it would be unfair.

For somebody to walk out of the marriage. with Just as large amount of relative assets and the other person left with nothing. That's just not fair. It's not fair in my eyes personally, and it's not fair in the state's eyes either. In in each of these cases or in most prenups, is it a lump pa one time payment or is it like an ongoing anew annuity that

Gets paid each year. Yeah, what does it look like? It can be decided uh however you like, but Each lawyer is going to argue. for their side. So the person who would be receiving the payments is gonna want it all Up front. Right. Right. And and so there are also other questions about what if you're living in a house with kids

And the marriage ends. Who leaves? How soon? That has to be dictated, right? And s and then there are other questions about um

Uh what here a cap on how much Can be paid out. And that's important too. Understand though a couple of things. The money that I'm gonna speak generally now.

The money that is earned when you are together. is generally community property. Right. So when you are married, generally the money that is earned is Together, it's yours. There are certain exceptions, like if you have a business, there's this and that, uh, and you can kind of carve those out ahead of time. But in general, the we're talking about money that was accumulated before the marriage. That's really important to understand.

Um Kids are definitely a complicating factor, but you are not really dictating the terms of child uh Mm-hmm. Uh

What's it called? Custody. Custody. Custody and also um Payments. The state will determine that.

So that's really important to know as well. You can't come up with a rule right now that says, you know, if we have three kids and this marriage ends, like I'm gonna write you a check for one dollar. Or one million dollars a month. That can't work. The state will decide. Yeah. Why get married at all? What what is the reason? Because I di really dislike

And this is something that I talk about usually in the first few dates. I mean I have a great girlfriend right now, but like Is Yeah. Like once we've covered like what do you want for your your main course, like Pretty quickly.

the subject comes up it's like, yeah, marriage not keen on having some bureaucracy involved in my relationship. It's a great question. And also it's like if you're coming into a relationship where the Current trajectory of earnings is is vastly disproportionate.

Uh The idea of having a bureaucracy involved and having sort of everything past a certain date become community property. doesn't have a whole lot of appeal. Uh to me. So i i i were your reasons for getting married

uh your desire, your partner's desire, your family's multiple family's expectations, or are there other reasons? It's a great question. And I think only in this day and age Can this question really be asked? As recently as twenty five years ago, this question would have never been asked. It would be like Of course you're gonna get married. And now You and I both know.

Plenty of people who are Either single Or In cohabitating relationships or casual, whatever the case may be.

And they're perfectly happy not being married. Um I think for me the answer is probably all the above. It was A desire on my part. A desire on my wife's part and also our families. Yeah. Um, and this might be an invisible script from my childhood. Yeah. That I always saw myself as married. Um So there's a lot there. I what I the way I thought about it was

I love my wife. I love when we're together. She makes me a better person and I think I do the same, and together as a team we are like amazing. Like I love laughing with her. I love how she challenges me.

And I wanna deepen that relationship. Um the financial part of it for me Was A part that I wanted to address, but I also

felt confident knowing that We could solve it. Yeah. And um I didn't see it as adversarial. Um

At least until the middle part, which I want to tell you about. Okay. But but I I approached it like very much like can do. Yeah. It's like hiring someone, like I'm gonna make him an offer, I wanna make him a great offer Um And I I expect that we're gonna have some back and forth, but overall it's about coming to an agreement that we can both work in a capacity together. Now I know that sounds a bit unromantic for a marriage, but I'm talking about the financial part of a marriage. There's a whole there's so many different layers and we in America only talk about love. What I'm trying to share is like there are lots of other parts, like be aware of it. Don't put your head in the same way.

You're talking about the contract of marriage and if you get married It's a country. you know the uh whatever it might be, I'm blanking on the term, but like some office downtown to get rubber stamped, like you're entering into a contract with multiple parties. And so you can enter into a Very uh nebulous contract or you can enter into a very clear contract.

I I always say for every major purchase in your life Every major purchase and every major decision. Spend the time. Most of us should spend less time on most decisions and we should spend a lot more time on a few key decisions. Like I wanna take this seriously, so did my wife. So we did. We spent months, right? So now here we are, the lawyers are going back and forth, and it's starting to get A bit

Slow Like they're arguing and now we're talking about it and it became Stressful and at some points like pretty heated. Okay. And I was like,

I mean, I'm not sure. There are so many things that happened during this time. One, we would just stop talking about it for like Weeks at a time because it was just too stressful. And we had never had these kind of conversations before about money. And like my perspective was

Like I've thought about money for fifteen or twenty years every day. Like this is my business, and I'm really proud of what I've accomplished financially. And I've made and I always love to come And like I made a very fair Very fair offer bending over backwards. That was my perspective. My wife's perspective was very different.

And I think that I didn't Listen. As much as I should. I was like I, I, I. I came out, I did this, I made this offer.

And she would say something and I would say like Look at the spreadsheet. Like And she was like, Yeah, but and she was talking about something else in a completely different language. And I was so preoccupied with like Mr. Spreadsheet guy. So finally she said, You know, we got to go talk to somebody about this. We should go see a therapist.

And I was like, Yeah, we really should. I totally agree with her. So you might wonder like where do you go to find a therapist? And for us the answer was Yelp. We literally opened up Yelp and typed like therapist and we found one two blocks away. So that's how it's done, guys. And we walked over there.

And we sat down in this room. And We Had a conversation like we've never had before. This therapist was very good. She asked us

about how we grew up with money. what it meant and it turns out it meant totally different things to us. Like for me, it meant being proud of what I've accomplished. It meant all the work and for anyone who's built anything, you know the sacrifices it took to build that. You look back, you can remember Friday nights where you didn't go out, or you can remember X or Y or risks you took. And I was seeing that.

And what my wife was seeing was something different. Money meant something different to her. And this therapist helped us kind of bring that up. And we find ourselves, you know, we went one, two, three sessions. We find ourselves talking about And I it's kind of like a caricature, like a joke of what you talk about in therapy session.

But we walked out of each of those sessions like Wow, that was That was pretty good. That was pretty helpful. So We still

We're having the lawyers go back and forth, but now we were connecting more with each other financially. And we we we were reminded by this therapist, like we're a team, this is just an agreement we need to come to but remember why You are together, remember why you're getting married. We finally came to an agreement.

And we signed it. And Uh, it's funny because one of my buddies, he held an event called Um like Should you sign a prenup?

And he invited like twenty or twenty five people, right? And uh one of his friends who was married and had done a prenup Sent him a note and said, I'd rather be dead than come to this event. And he was like, Whoa, whoa, why? And he's like, dude, that was the worst six months of my life. Imagine you have someone you love and you're arguing about money with lawyers. For six months.

And I didn't get that. Until I'd gone through it. I would say that in retrospect I learned A couple of things.

Um Number one. I should have talked about money with my wife way earlier. Like way earlier. I violated my own advice And That was horrible. I should have talked about it earlier. Two

I should have stopped being Mr. Spreadsheet dude. And actually listened and said, Like, let's put the numbers aside and talk about what money means. For me Um Like I told you I'm proud of it.

My wife wanted to feel Safe. She wanted to know that if anything went wrong that she would be taken care of And that

And I didn't really internalize what that meant to her. Like what does that mean? Um, I should have listened. We should have gone to see a therapist earlier. And um We should have not let it stretch out for as long as it did.

That was really torturous for both of us. How would you have expedited it? Um therapy earlier and I mean that's why I'm here. I that's why I want to share with people Um Don't just hope that it will kind of work itself out over time.

It's Everybody involved in the process wants it to stretch out. The lawyers, they're not trying to just bill you more, but their incentive is to get you the best deal and the other lawyers to get the other one. You have to take control and manage the process, but both of you have to be aligned on that. Um, I would have Yeah, definitely talk to a therapist ahead of time.

with my wife we would have gone there together faster. And we kind of would have I would have started off not talking about money, but like rather about meaning. That and that's something that I'm hoping to be able to talk more about. But I hope from people listening to this If you go in and you've got a spreadsheet that you want to discuss, you've taken a wrong turn.

That's what I did. I should have talked about meaning and fears and hopes about money as opposed to like let's go through the numbers. The numbers are like the last part of the I was gonna say it's not either or, right? It's it's sequencing. Both and You gotta talk about the numbers, but once you get meaning aligned, The numbers work themselves out. So when we've uh chatted about this, sort of been passing in the past,'cause I wanted to make sure we did on the podcast, you know. A couple of stories have come up that Uh

I'm not sure how to grapple with. Now I'm at a point also where I haven't had conversations with Attorneys about this type of thing. Although I mean it it makes sense to think about estate planning. Whether your state is

Medium or large. It makes a lot of sense to think about that. And things can be really messy speaking as someone who had grandparents who didn't think about anything and were not uh you know rolling yeah doing backstroke in uh a pool full of coins like Scrooge McDuck, but nonetheless uh When emotions are heated. Kids can fight.

over anything, even if it's just table scraps. And that was a mess. Uh I don't want that to ever affect if I have kids to affect my kids. So yep, you you should think about it earlier. But the the point I was gonna make is I haven't gone through the actual drafting of Say a a prenup. And uh but I've seen marriages implode. And like the the the number is if you just like let's try to coldly

objectively look at the numbers in the US they're not that hot. Um so it makes makes sense to plan whether it's like driving with a seatbelt in your car, like you're not planning on getting an accident, but you want to be covered if you do. Yeah. Uh I've heard horrible stories, right? So I've heard stories of um

friend who had a prenup, went through all of the same process, and then I think it was a week after he got married or sh or or just before he got married. His wife to be your wife said, I signed the prep under duress. Oh my God. I don't I don't feel good about it. And it was back to the table. Now under duress for people who don't know is

Um And this is not a legal definition, but under extreme stress. Therefore the position of the person who's claiming duress. is that uh the contract is invalid because you they were pressured into it. And this can apply to quite a few contracts.

It it it turns out. Uh And uh he was he was in a position where he had to go back and it was renegotiated. And the numbers changed. So like the lump payments and so on were changed. Uh

And uh so that's that's fear inducing that you could have an agreement and then end up in a situation like that, right? Point number one. Whether it's legally forced upon you or just practically day to day, you're like, well, where the fuck do we go from here? And have to then step back into like negotiation mode. Uh And I've also heard of approaches. I'm not saying maybe this is getting too much into like the

the dark arts or something, but where friends of thought like all right if If I'm going to If I'm trying to defend against a worst case scenario Would it make sense for me to go engage X number of very high caliber divorce attorneys so that they are conflicted out.

If we end up having a divorce later. Like that's a that's a little Voldemort, but I can also see the practicality of it. So like how do you think about what landmines you might need to avoid.

Uh if there are any, right? Like Yeah. It's a big question, but it's like this shit gets messy. I would say that Um I've spoken to a lot of different attorneys both in in getting married, but also as a CEO. And

one of them told me something really interesting. They said that The people with The lawyers with the most interesting stories are criminal lawyers. Of course. The second most interesting lawyer stories are workplace attorneys. I would be willing to bet that the third is divorce attorneys because the stories are just

Like out of this world. I didn't really approach it like that, to tell you the truth. I I didn't plan on the marriage ending. I simply wanted to account for what might happen financially. So

Let me put it this way. If at the point where you're sort of already thinking about like let me engage all these divorce attorneys, which I don't even know if that works or not. I've heard it's a rumor but like I feel like there's a larger problem going on there. A much larger problem. These lawyers are not stupid. They're all very good. They've seen it all.

Um And the thing is to negotiate in good faith. You have to remember you're not trying to get one over on your partner. You're If you were just trying to get one over like a car dealer, you're trying to maximize it'cause it's a one time transaction. This is the partner you're gonna be with for the rest of your life. So that actually necessitates a different way of negotiating. Like when I

discussing with my attorney and that attorney was negotiating with my wife's attorney. I had to compromise on things that I normally would not compromise on. Yeah and that Just to put it bluntly, like I haven't had to compromise financially In the last twenty five years. Right.

At all. Yeah. So suddenly I'm like, what? What is this taste in my mouth? I haven't tasted this taste of compromise. Yeah, it's like but but That's why I think it's really important. A couple of principles came up for me. Go slow to go fast. I should have done a better job of this of like let's talk about the meaning. The meaning, right? Go slow to go fast. And the second one was always remember the North Star. The North Star here is not getting an extra

dollar or protecting the extra two dollars. It's We're gonna be married. Day to day. For the rest of our lives. That's the North Star. And like putting that in perspective, like As the lawyer saying this or that.

I had to constantly remind myself, so did my wife. And by the way, I just want to say She was excited for me to come here and talk about this. She actually encouraged me because I wrote about it in my book. I wrote some more details and I asked her, I said, Are you okay? If I share this.

And we talked about it. Um We both realised going through this. That both of us were pretty alone. No one

was talking about this publicly. And we're both big fans. You know, she's a stylist. I do what I do. We love shining the light on things that people are not really talking about publicly because we're both very curious and we both want to get better. So If she had said no. I would have never written this stuff. I would have never come on here and talked about this. But she actually said yes. Go on there and tell them our experience because other people should know this. Whether you do it or not, you should know. All right, I have I have questions. So this this is gonna be a super Awkward one, maybe for me to ask more than for you to answer,'cause you're being put on the spot, but I'm the one who has the option of asking whatever I want.

So this is something I've seen so many people struggle with, what I'm about to bring up. And I wanna hear If it affected you and if so, how you used mental jujitsu or

contortionism to get through it. And that is If you're coming into A negotiation, say for prenup. And you are The person who's bringing in

Disproportionately the And that could be Not necessarily a fifty one forty nine split, right? I mean, this could be like a ninety ten split. ninety nine one split. And it very often is. I mean it it can very often be. When you're looking at the settlement.

And the amount. Right. So f it's very hard for someone, let's just say, who's made ten thousand dollars a year to ever imagine what it really means And what it takes to s to make a hundred thousand. Ditto, if someone's making like fifty grand a year, what does it mean? in terms of sacrifice and planning and like Fridays missed and weekends worked and holidays skipped.

to make a million dollars. Right. And so all of a sudden then you're going through a negotiation where someone who has Mm. A decade or two decades of sacrifice.

Is asking for an amount. that is more than you made in the first thirty years of your life. W how do you navigate that?'Cause there's like viscerally I know a lot of people. And I'm one of them who's just like that makes No sense. And it also brings up like

Well, wait a second, if that's the amount that gets paid out. I would start questioning the sort of motives of the other person It's like okay, well they were able to kinda do whatever they want for X period of time, but now if we get divorced three years from now, they're set for life if they don't screw it up.

How do you I would f that would make me feel very uncomfortable. Me too. I mean I I think um Remember when I said that Like I was proud of what I had accomplished. And

You go through so many emotions. in this process. And the funny thing is when it comes to money, I'm not emotional at all. Like day to day, I'm super I call it hot to cool. I think most people or some people, particularly those in debt, Money is like a um a phantom or a gremlin. It's a beast that they're fighting, right? They need to break the shackles of this debt.

I've overcome those things. To me, it's a tool. And I use it for convenience, things like that. Going from nervousness in bringing this up.

To be Pride that I wanted to talk about the numbers and I was very proud of what I had accomplished and what it meant for us. And then resentment. Yeah. Because You know, to me I'm like, look at the spreadsheet.

Like I have gone above and beyond. And like how can you not acknowledge that? I found myself Like experiencing these emotions I hadn't honestly ever felt about money.

And um And I think that's where a therapist helped me. But I should have done it sooner because it really was not healthy to Just sort of soak in'em for literally months. Uh

And remember, we're like seeing each other day to day. And so that definitely affects You as your planning a wedding with your partner. I mean it's not it's like the worst opportune time. If you could sequence it out, you're like, don't do that.

You know, I think that Uh it's a question that I don't have a good answer to. I think that the the basic And There are certain things in life that are just not fair.

Okay. And one of them i i might be this, but really W that's not the point. The point is not for me to win. That's what I learned along the way. At least this is my lesson. Some people might think differently. My Point.

in retrospect was not to win this negotiation, it was to win our marriage, meaning both of us get there together as a team. And if I have to compromise a few things, which in business, I would never have made a couple of the compromises I made, but this is more important than my business, right? This is the person that I'm gonna spend my last days with. So that actually really put things in perspective for me. It's like oh shit. Sometimes you learn about yourself just by observing what you yourself do. And I was like Did I really just agree to that?

That one ten term we've been discussing for a month? Yes I did. Wow. Like My wife is that important to me, and I realize like yes, she is. So I don't know. I don't have a good answer for you on that, but I will tell you I really swung emotions. I felt resentful, and I hate feeling resentful. It's one of the most toxic emotions.

Um but I think there's something larger than like being right. Yes. Uh maybe that's just what I tell myself. Stuff I think f

cutting off your nose to spite your face to be right doesn't make sense. Yeah. I also think that I think it's possible to play not to lose or set yourself up for blind spots. While Not At all costs trying to win. A hundred.

Right. Don't be an asshole. and like make a bunch of insistent demands based on principle that don't practically make sense. Is fair, but walking into something blind. And just offering yourself as a pinata.

Yeah. Doesn't make sense either. Okay, you know what's crazy about this whole thing now? So once you sign it. Like it's done. In fact In at least in our case we're like all right, thank God we don't want to look at this now. Like file it away. Good.

The real challenge Actually since we got married just about a year ago. has been like day to day spending. And that now

the using the tools we learned from this therapist and also um going slow to go fast, like my dream, okay, my fantasy was to have this just Beautiful. Financial model. Okay, that's what I wanted. Like this model that we look at and everything's like going from side to side. We've built that. It's taken like Eight or nine months. What what I realize now is

Emotions first. What does it mean? Who's cooking dinner? Who's taking the trash out? Let's get all that stuff done. The model part is like the last part of it. And because We had these tough conversations earlier on. Now we're like, okay, let's let's start with the emotions. We have buffers, so if we overspend a little bit on eating out right now, that's okay. We'll dial in the numbers later. Like what I've realized is the numbers really come last. And um so we are both really thankful we went through the process, although I wish we could have been

Uh I wish you could have had some guidance, really. Um but Funny enough, though, once you sign it. It's not like you're reviewing it every single day. It's gone. Yeah. You're it's the day to day now. It's literally the littlest things like who's picking up X at the store. That's where day to day financial stuff comes in. And that's another area where I think you use the I will teach you to be rich stuff, the systems, the idea that you don't really want to be spend your valuable cognition on like who's buying

deodorant or rice. Like have a system Automate it. Boom. We were talking about we won't spend a lot of time on it, but your relative who you thought was sixty five, you and your wife thought it was sixty five or something, ended up being eighty seven. Yeah. And how regimented regimented is the wrong word. how much of his life is is rutinized, right? It wakes up at the same time and we were just grabbing coffee earlier and I said, I wonder how much of his longevity

is that lifetime accumulation of avoiding decision fatigue on shit that just shouldn't consume your brain every day. Just like you have a playbook, I believe in a playbook for life. Here's a couple.

One, I call it Ramit's book buying rule. If you ever see a book you're in even remotely interested in, buy it. Don't debate it. Don't ask if it's the second best just buy it. It's ten dollars is the best money you ever spent. Uh have a year of cash. Have it available. Liquid. Uh and if you don't have it, build up to it.

Save up for big expenses. Engagement ring, wedding, honeymoon. All that stuff. House sub accounts. Sub accounts. Boom. Uh when I eat at a restaurant now my joy Is If I see anything that looks good.

I just order it and I also tell the people eating with me Do the same. Don't even think about it. And so like my co workers love eating out with me because I'm like, just order it all. Like I got the bill. Um Just a quick side note for anyone who has not seen it. It it uh came out not long ago from

uh the the time of this recording, but there's a an incredible ESPN article on coach Greg Popovich. And the dinners. And the wine for the Spurs it is Phenomenal people can look that up anyway. Um

Have a couple of areas in your life where you have absolutely no budget. Doesn't matter how much you spend. You just love it. Unlimited. Unlimited. There's no if you love strawberries. Like when I grew up I loved strawberries, but we had a big family and strawberries were expensive. There is no amount of strawberries that will ever cause me any material difference in my life.

It's three bucks, four bucks, five bucks, six bucks, doesn't matter. Buy it. have something it could be as small as strawberries, it could be as big as whatever. Um Eat the same for this is for me personal, a lot of people

Don't agree, but eat the same thing. Mostly the same thing every single day. I do it, it's just easy decision fatigue. I do the same thing. Yeah. Um and then also So this is what my wife and I have been talking about recently is let's come up with some rules for our relationship too. These are guidelines. We can change'em. But you know, we were planning a vacation, we're gonna stay with a friend for their birthday in Mexico City and we're looking at flights.

And I find that we're deciding which flight should it be economy, should it be business, what hotel, this or that. And I said, like, hey, let's let's get into it. Let's kinda figure out where we like to travel together and what style. But Over the course of the next few months, let's kinda come up with some basic rules. For example, if you're traveling over five hours Business class. Or if we're staying

Just the two of us, we don't need a fancy hotel. Whatever the case. Make a basic guideline so that we don't have to think about it all the time. And even down to like who's taking out the trash. Like let's just kind of articulate that and be explicit so that it's all on the table. And that way it clears up any misconceptions. So I love

This general playbook for life. Oh, dude, I take the trash out. Okay. And it just got revealed because like I would notice the trash filling up and then she would take it out once in a while, but really she would say, like, would you mind taking the trash out? And it just became very clear in any relationship. There are certain things that one person does Or doesn't like to do it. And like the same thing true for cooking, ironing clothes. Yeah. Cast cooks, quick I ironed. Quick note on that. One thing that I found really helpful. is whether it's with friends or your significant other, but especially significant other is

Agreeing in advance from a scale of one to ten, ten being absolutely heartfelt. must have or must not have, you can't use a lot of tens. Like so like you only really get a couple of tens in your pocket, so don't spend them on nonsense, right? But asking someone like zero to like one to ten how much do you like doing this, or one to ten, how much do you hate doing this. And it's like all right, if if to you, it's like you don't love taking out the garbage, but if it's like, eh, I'm a five out of ten, like six out of ten, who cares? Like I don't it doesn't really matter. She's like I grew up in such such a way, I hate taking out the garbage. Like, okay, fine, I'll take out the garbage. Wait, so what's your ten?

Uh Uh let's go both. Uh so I for instance Uh Very fond of cooking.

Very unfond of cleanup. Love it, right? Classic. Yeah. And what about something you hate? Uh well something I hate would be the the the cleanup. Okay. Uh other things I hate would be uh for instance, I am much happier to Uh pay for things if I can avoid decisions. So if my partner is willing to handle logistics, we went to Burning Man, uh it was her first time

And I knew what I was signing up for. But and I told her I was like I will go, but only if you handle the logistics. I will pay for everything, but y in terms of like getting costumes and like getting everything there and the bikes and the lights and the dot that You need to be like the the COO of this operation and I'm happy to be like the controller who approves the checks. Love it. But that's it. Got it. So I love that you're explicit and I love that one to ten. I have to think about that. I've

Overheard. Um my wife talking to her parents. And W I grew up with my mom Cooking food for us every night.

Right, every night, like right off the stove, she would be giving us roties or whatever she was making. And we all ate together as a family. And I really love that. So Every night. my wife will either make food or it'll she'll have cooked it a couple times and then she'll bring it to me. And like That is so meaningful to me because it reminds me of my childhood. And by the way, the the food that we eat is extremely inexpensive. Like we're not getting the fanciest cuts of meat. We don't care about that.

But it's caref we we track all of our macros and all that stuff, so we care about that. But really it's about the meaning behind it. Um Macros for people who don't know, fat protein, carbohydrate. Yeah. What does the pie chart look like? Uh the I don't know the math off the top of my head, but it's like every week it changes depending on whatever my goals are.

And um Like I think the meaning there is really important. And then there're certain things for cast that, you know she likes or she doesn't like, and I'll do trash is a perfect example. I just kind of discovered like she really doesn't like taking the trash out. No problem. It's easy for me to take it out. So getting those on the same page and developing this just life playbook.

Uh general rules of thumb you're gonna use, especially for stuff that's not important, man, that really frees you up to to really get into the stuff that is important. Yeah. For sure. So I I I know we don't have too much time left, but I wanna jump into one of these because I'm curious what

what you will say in response to some of these uh questions. And we may only have time for one or two, but so these are from People on the interwebs. Always a risky proposition. But they were they were voted on or upvoted. And uh one this is from Scott, no last name here indicated.

Uh, where does Remit disagree with what Tim teaches or preaches? Or br and and I'll just rephrase that, but like what do you think we Disagree on. This is a gr this is one of my favorite questions. Far away. I think that we disagree on morning routines. Yeah. I think they're overrated. Yeah.

The best morning routine is decided a year ago. It's about your psychology, it's about how much you sleep. It's about Um what you know what have you outlined in your calendar It's all those softer details and

And I think that You know, I get people asking me every day what's my morning routine and I'm like Who gives a shit? Like you think you think if I ask Michael I'm not saying I'm Michael Jordan at all, but if I ask Michael Jordan what shoes he wears or what his morning routine is, am I gonna be like Mike? No. And similarly, if you find out what kind of coffee I drink, you're not gonna be

Doing what I do either. But I know that You're not saying that. But that's what people are taking away and it drives me insane. Yeah. I'm just like, okay, thanks for Yeah, right. The gift that keeps on giving. Uh morning routines I think are

Number number one for me Coming back to what we just said, morning routines are one example of removing decisions. That's it. Uh there there's there's a little bit more to it for me in the sense that Uh, as someone who had onset insomnia and slept very poorly for several decades.

I would wake up and be non functional, generally speaking. So having a boot up sequence Which didn't require any thought. I'm not deciding What to eat for breakfast. I'm not deciding What step number one is do I do A, B, C, D, or E first? No, I'm always gonna be doing

B. Right, or A, whatever it might be, has been very helpful. I also know equally or far more successful people who have your answer. They're like I wake up, I drink a fucking cup of coffee, I read I scroll Instagram. First literally the first thing I do is I get on Instagram while I'm in bed. It's like the worst possible thing, but I'm like, I like it. Yeah. It's all cabins. It's all cabins, I swear to God. The the question I think that is that is also just like a macro question's worth asking is

Is this person you're looking at succeeding because of Uh or despite What you're looking at. Right. This is really important. It's especially important if you're studying people who have already reached escape velocity. in some type of success or financial

uh freedom and you are still working your way up. Because uh hindsight is not twenty-twenty. A lot of folks who are on top of the world and are just crafting billion dollar deals every day do not remember. Very clearly. What Helped them when they were

working in the office on Thanksgiving or whatever it might have been. This is a great point and so powerful. By the way, this is why I love your podcast, because here we are, two people who seemingly disagree on something. But now we're getting into the nuances and we can really crack the code of what's what's the differences and similarities. I will totally agree with what you just said about The more successful you get, or the more time you get away from something, the less details you remember. I'll give you an example.

My wife started she used to be a senior buyer at Equinox. She left to start her own styling business about eighteen months ago. I would hear her. Doing sales calls. In our living room. And I would see her.

Sometimes closing a client And sometimes going Weeks without closing a client. And You know.

I've got a business now. I've got amazing employees. We've got uh traffic that's coming, you know, we've got people coming and regular customers and all that stuff. But when I started off That shit was not easy. I would go weeks.

without getting one person joining any of my programs. And I forgot. How emotional it is. You're the high are so high and the lows are so low. And half the game in this is just

Living to fight another day. It's just not giving up and improving just a tiny bit every day. And I watched it and I heard her and I saw her um go through the ups and the lows. And It's amazing now. This month she told me

how many clients she's done. She's totally booked up for two or three more months. It's amazing what she's accomplished in 18 months. She never would have believed it. But You forget. And you forget fast. the tiniest details of what it means to wake up in the morning and say, like, wow, the last four weeks I haven't gotten one client.

Am I gonna do it different today? So I just big shout out to every entrepreneur who's starting out out there. It's tough and you should always put in context the advice that you hear. And thanks for bringing it up because people need to know it's not all roses. Like shit is hard when you start. It's hard for everyone. It actually should be hard. But if you stick with it, hopefully you're doing the right thing, you can get escape velocity.

So Morning routines, one thing we have. Somewhat differing approaches to What else? Um

Tools. I think that tools are super valuable. People love to talk about tools, but You know, you give Andre Agassi a wooden racket, he's gonna kick my ass. So I think like when you ask well if somebody asks me like what apps do I use, like

My apps are horrible. I don't use I use like Trip it. That's it. It's the but I think the more powerful things are the psychology are the systems which are run through a Google Doc. Um That's my take on tools. I and and so that's those are my two areas of disagreement. what you think about the tools and also if you disagree with me on anything. Well I pr I provide a lot of tools because I I think the specifics are helpful, but it's The reasoning behind it, I would imagine, we're probably on the same page.

Uh With and and that is The Tools are Byproducts of principles or strategies.

Right, so for instance, I use Triput too. I think it's underrated. Yeah. But people are like, Okay, great, I'm gonna go use Trip it and uh life's gonna be grand. It's like well h yes, but Maybe, but What are the principles behind it? It's it's so that I can avoid manual checking of things like gate updates. It's so that I'm avoiding certain decisions, certain manual activities

uh that are being automated. Right. It's so that I don't have to go I don't have to go to Google or s or wherever on my phone and search Fill in the blank airline. Check in. Yeah.

Because I can click a button and trip it and do it automatically, whether it's Delta United, American, whatever. Right. So the and in that principle. If you were to s to pull it back will be will then allow you to deduce which tools to use or at least ask people. for the right tools. But it's it's it's very easy to believe that like oh wow So and so is a great player. So and so is a great business person. So and so is a great artist because they use

Watercolours. It's like no. Whether it's water colours Oil Conte crayons, doesn't matter. charcoal, graphite, you need to know the Technique.

And the principles behind it and the process. Then you can choose your tools. Yeah. I think it's easy to become uh a tool fetishist without understanding why you're doing what you're doing. And then you become kinda like, where is it? Solomon Islands where they have the cargo cult, where they have like the fake runways and the fake towers. And it's like, Okay, great, you have a phone full of the greatest apps. You've got seventy nine different rules for email filtering and guess what? You didn't do one fucking important thing today. So Okay, I agree with you on that. I think that's a really good and I think

The way you articulated Deduce. What trip it's a little bit. what the principles behind you using Trippet are is critical. I do the same thing, we use it for the same reasons, but I also take that same principle and apply it to what I do in the morning and w how I decide what place to meet someone for coffee.

All that stuff has been automated so I don't have to think about it ever again. Yeah, and I would say also that uh It is possible, very possible and actually very common to procrastinate by searching for incrementally better and better tools. Oh I do that all the time. I could do the vast majority of what I do with like a day planner. Yeah. And in fact, I think the finite nature this is why I still use paper.

I still use note cards or small pieces of paper for Mm. It is by its very nature finite. I cannot have a list of thirty seven things I need to do. Uh so the in some respects I think

applying constraints to the tools that you use. In the same way that I had Neil Gaiman actually sitting right where you are on this podcast not too long ago, and he uses very often a fountain pen And uh Pads of paper for drafting. And it sounds very romantic and it is in some respects, but it also

uh has a number of psychological and practical benefits. Uh but it seems very primitive. It's not the the latest cutting edge tool. All right. I love it. This is a great explanation of the nuances behind tools. Yeah. So yeah, I appreciate that.

Uh let's see, where else? Uh And and it's also easy, I think, for us, like we could disagree on tools all day long. Um right. I mean we could we could disagree on the implementation. of various things. But here's here's I I think one observation that is important, that is you and I are not the same person.

Meaning like Mike, you like f you like fancy sweaters, I'm wearing an eight dollar T shirt that my mom Got me, right? Yeah. And uh like the these pants and these shoes were both given to me and I'm not wearing socks. Uh And so we have different desires. Your vacation may look differently from mine. Your family in India is different from my family.

uh on the east coast of You know, this country and That's all fine. That's great. Uh And it also means that the way we approach problem solving Is going to be different. Yeah.

That's a really good point. And that uh but the principles a lot of the principles are I I do think are very similar. Like the values and the principles are similar. Otherwise I don't think we would have been friends for as long as we have. Totally agree. And I think there's um there's value in the diversity of how we think. There's also value in knowing that those will change over time, right? So as I've gotten married, I'm I'm like, oh wow, there's this whole world I didn't understand before. And now I'm learning that and I'm I'm growing with my wife. Um, I think as we've gotten in relationships, we've talked about how that's changed us. Wow. And that's like

And then you know, if we had um Like I if we had anybody else here who maybe didn't look like us, or w if we they weren't our gender, we had all different kinds of diversity opinions. We would have even more ways of thinking about how we approach problems. And um

I think what I have learned along the way, like w when I wrote the book, for example Yeah. I was a bit judgmental about what the rich life was in the first edition. I was like, this is how you should invest.

Follow the principles and like this is where you end up. Now, ten years later. There's a lot of people in the fire community, for example, this financial independents retire early. And Many people are happy to Acquire enough to basically be able to live on thirty K a year.

Live a very simple life. And if they want to have a fun afternoon, maybe they'll go to the park. And they're like We don't need materialistic stuff, we're happy. And Back then I think I would have been pretty judgmental about it. Now I've realized look there's

Lean fire, there's fat fire, there's all kinds of different fire. And some people don't want to fire'em. In fact, most Americans will never fire. They will work until they're of retirement age. But rich life looks different to different people and Part of that comes from how were we raised. Where what do our parents tell us? And then part of it is Do we wanna change that story or do we wanna just go with that? Question about retirement. I was gonna ask this.

So This uh I mean I've you know wrote about this as as far back as is my my equally scammy sounding book for our work week a thousand years ago. But the the this concept of retirement, right? Let's replace that with financial freedom. Cause I want to ask you what that means or what you th how you think people should think about it, because a lot of thinking about retirement I find to be extremely

Porous at best. And well your in your book you had a great example of uh mini retirements and like you wanna buy a Ferrari, why don't you just rent it for a week. Yeah, great example. Or you think like okay, twenty years from now everything I'm doing is predicated on being able to like buy a boat and I'm gonna live on my boat and sail around the M Mediterranean for twenty years after that's like maybe you should get on a boat first. Yes. And try that for a weekend.

Like go take a sailing course. You might come out of it being like that fucking sucks. And I was I felt sick the entire time. Okay. Good to know that now and not. when you've kind of slaved away and done something that you find distasteful for twenty years. Um

And uh People mess up the math too, right? I mean they they often miscalculate and uh end up having a very tough time in retirement per se. So with With your students. How do you encourage them to think about the objective?

Uh right. Yeah. Well, I don't believe that most people Or automatons that sit down and say, here's my fifty year goal, and let me break it down and reverse engineer it to what I'm gonna do this week. I know about two people like that.

And they're special on their own, but most people don't do that. Most people are Very simple. They want to wake up, they want to have a good day at work. Maybe they wanna have a little bit of fun or watch Netflix or have a good conversation with their partner or their friends. And that's a good day. And that's okay. Now

to kind of push people out of that and make them think a little bit bigger, it might be taking a vacation they may not have done. It might be going to a tea event that they may have never thought of going to. It's these experiences that people remember. I would say that your comment about retirement is really true for people our age. Like I don't hear anyone saying like when I retire this, that, my pension, like Those conversations are not happening with our generation. There's more of

Um What do I wanna do? There's more spending on things like wellness and vacations and experiences. And we're seeing that in the economy as well. What I tell people is a couple of things. Number one You may not think right now that you want to retire. But when you look at what everybody else

who reaches a certain age does, if everyone does something It might be true. And so plan for it. Like I don't wanna buy a house. But almost everybody else does. So I saved it up for a down payment. I don't need to use it, but it's there if I need to.

Um similarly Don't wait, right? And think bigger. So don't wait means Go take a trip for three days. And think bigger is like your retirement doesn't have to just be sitting around. It can actually be much bigger. That money dial, turn it to ten. And it could be traveling with a fixer. It could be going for a month a year or two months.

Um but in order to do that you need to build a muscle now of thinking bigger. People have this linear belief that once this bifurcation of retirement happens, then the curtain opens and I get to do all this cool stuff. Dude. If you haven't been doing it until you're sixty years old You're not gonna magically

do it at sixty years old and one day. So I would encourage people to start building the muscle just like you've told'em and realize that Doing creative things, trying different things. is a muscle.

I found myself getting lazy with this in New York. I looked at where I had gone to in the city. like over the course of the last six months. And I was like, I live in this amazing city and I'm not even taking advantage of it. So I put it into my calendar once a quarter minimum, I'm gonna do a cultural event. Like a show. Or a tea tasting, whatever the case be, something that I could only do in New York. And so now it's like on the calendar and

You can say it sounds unromantic, but I'm like, that's what I needed to to do that to keep building my muscle of trying new things. So whatever works for people, do it. But I would say don't wait until you are retirement age. Yeah, and I I feel like so much in our conversation has come back to You know, making one decision that removes a thousand decisions. In the sense that like you put it in your calendar. And for me, if it's not in the calendar, it's just not real. Right. So even

uh what we call batching conversations for uh with Me and my girlfriend for Discussing certain Like constant. Uh

Not not issues in the sense of problems, but like we have a we have regularly scheduled times to talk about certain things. We do the same thing. And it's in the calendar. Uh it's And that's true with uh certain types of Kind of like date nights, it's true if we're talking about relationships, right? It's true for

taking trips together. Yep. It's true for visiting my family, visiting her family. And by making that decision. and putting it in the calendar you preserve your brain power and emotional resilience and so on for other stuff that is less predictable. Do you have a consistent thing you talk about on your check ins. We do, yeah, we have a whole format and everything. Yeah. Okay. So this is amazing.

I love meeting smart people who apply Their intelligence to a different part of life. Like, for example, there's a book out by Gretchen Rubin, who we both know, and she's just so smart, and she decided to write a book about. keeping her house and work space organized. And I'm like, yep. Bought it. And the stuff she writes about in there is

Clever, interesting, it's exactly what you would think a smart person applying themselves to something for like a year would come up with. And the fact that you and your girlfriend. Have we call it a touch base or a check in. And you have a consistency It's on the calendar. Like I love that. And I want to know like what's on that. How d what what surprised you'cause we're going through building our own one and we're tweaking it. And I'm like this is awesome. She's much smarter about uh anything involving emotions. Oh God.

It's funny. My my wife is the one who suggested it for us too. It's like two cavemen talking to each other. So she uh she's much Yeah. Are we good? We're good? Okay, great. Like that would be our check in. We good, we fucking good,'cause I don't really feel like having this conversation. Uh yeah, we're good. Okay, great. Uh The so Uh

Well maybe this will be helpful for folks. We'll spend a few minutes on this. Uh We have a number of rituals and things in the calendar that I think are important. for the care and nurturing of the relationship. And One

epiphany that I think we both had uh at one point was that A, I have a tendency to emotionally shut off. Or get defensive with a lot of Questions. involving emotion or vul emotional vulnerability. It's just not something I was

Uh Growing up. Yeah. I mean there was uh or in school or with coaches. I mean really the feeling was I'm not gonna say in my family a as a whole, but

Uh come from a pretty uh the right word here. uh stoic and not in the the the the cool hip like Marcus Aurelius sense, but like a a fairly stoic Mm. Protestant like

Uh environment where The In school, for instance, you know, the and in coaching, the general feeling was like, Don't tell me the good stuff,'cause the good stuff takes care of itself. Like tell me what needs to be fixed. Yep. Turns out that's not, I've come to realize, uh the best approach for longevity in the relationship that that I want to have with my girlfriend. And which which had to be pointed out to me because I'm but this is amazing because just think about this. What got you here?

Yeah. Something got you here to a very elite level. And it would be easy to just be like Oh my God, I'll just keep doing what I'm doing because I I won that game. Well, you're playing a different game, didn't you? Well, I think the the the question I I didn't ask for a very long time is like what did it cost? Yes. And what what was the collateral damage? Wow.'Cause it's like, yeah, the Hulk's a great fucking superhero. He also makes a fucking mess. That's a good one. And I think that there was a lot of collateral damage that I

Probably didn't notice. And certainly didn't weigh very heavily because I was like, Yeah, but look what I did. Totally. Or yeah, but look what happened. And it excused a lot of mess. And uh so sh but the so what we what we realized after that was pointed out to me was Uh or what I then said to my girlfriend because she's curious about How to better word things. So that I wouldn't have a

A uh disproportionate like emotional response That's cool that she was curious about that. Yeah, she's very good at asking questions and probing. Uh because if I think I've a a sensitivity as someone who's

effectively worked as a freelancer for decades that if like I have my headphones on and I'm in the middle of like a project I don't wanna stop and have like a five minute conversation about something extraneous. It it I get I get Unnecessarily spun out over stuff like that.

Uh And she says, Well, how should I phrase things? So that's It's it's easier Unless

distracting for you. And I and I I remember saying I s it I said it it it has nothing to do with the content. It's all timing. And then uh and uh that was a real breakthrough for our relationship but not because we had the conversation. This is really fucking important. Cause like yeah, you can go to like fill in the blank seminar, you can read fill in the blank book. You can take fill in the blank drug and have this amazing epiphany.

And do nothing with it. w what we did from that point was then set up what we call these batching times once a week or once every two weeks where we sit down and uh she has a chance To talk to me when I am prepared. to talk about things that are going to make me uncomfortable.

And uh she can handle it whenever'cause she's more adaptable and resilient in that way. But I can blame it on my upbringing, I can blame it on being just a weirdo, who knows, uh or just you know, a heteronormative male who doesn't like talking about shit, who knows? Uh having that time blocked out where I can like steal myself and like warm myself up psychologically to talk about things that are gonna make me uncomfortable is very valuable. And the format the format that we currently have. So we couldn't find any real great Same.

Uh Yeah. And uh the so the format we have is we will Uh Well we take notes, we have like meeting notes after every one.

Mm. And it's and where we capture what in in kind of bullet points what was said. Uh one person will start and they'll s they'll say what they think they've been doing well.

Nice. Uh and it didn't start out this way, but it's ended up they they start with what they think they've been doing well or doing better. Uh then they talk about if they want where they think they've dropped the ball or or could focus more, which is very helpful for diffusing things. Yeah,'cause they bring it up themselves. Then

they will s they will tell the other person what they're doing well. And then they'll tell the other person we started off with like shit you need to fix, or that was probably my phrasing. And then it was growth opportunities. And now it's what I'd like what I would love to see more of. Nice. And that the phrasing turns out to be really important. Right. So it's like what I think I'm doing well since we last checked in, what I think I could do better. What you're doing well and then what I'd like to see more of. Yeah. And uh Then we take notes and

Each then like we forward it. To the the other person and uh we can we can take a look at it. And that's that's it. Amazing. And it usually takes an hour Uh, maybe two hours. And Is this in the morning or in the evening? Usually in The uh

afternoon or evening on a weekend. Oh okay, interesting. That's most common. Okay. Yeah. Um So the note part is also interesting. So you take notes Or she's saying No, one of us will take notes on the whole thing. There's kinda like one secretary or or minute keeper. For

That's cool. And so it could be me. I take notes in notebooks a lot. So I take notes in a notebook, then take a photo and send it to her. Or she'll take it in notepad on her phone and then send it. Interesting part of it too is like Each person. will have some skin in the game in terms of recording it. And then I have an Evernote file where I put all of our check ins in reverse chronological order. So the most recent as at the top. Yeah. So I can go back and look and see like all right, did

Did we And this is not to as a gotcha, it's just like all right, did I keep up my end of the bargain? Did I say I was gonna work on something three weeks ago and then I kinda forgot about it. But also later. Also not just from the avoiding bad, but doing the good. Yeah. Like imagine after a year, you go and you're like, Oh my God, like we have been Super consistent and like look at the things we used to talk about and look at the things we're talking about now. Yeah, the good the the highlighting what is being done well is really important. And that it's it's so against Every behavior and habit. that I've built over my entire life.

Um But I have come to realize that without that. it it it can really, really be tough. So one of the things that I love about this first of all, thanks for sharing those things. Super helpful as we are starting this ritual on our own. And I think this is a great example.

And by the way, my girl like I my girlfriend did ninety percent of that. So like I'm I'm along for the ride, but I wanna give her proper credit. Totally. I think that's an example where the ritual itself may be even more important than the content. Yeah. The ritual of having the time, having it on the calendar, respecting it, always showing up, being mentally present and tracking it. That is like ninety percent of the ball game. And that just shows this awesome mutual respect you both have for each other. And the fact that you take it seriously and it's not weird to write down an agenda. I think so many people are they think about things as weird. Oh it would be weird to have a Google agenda, or it'd be weird to save for an engagement ring.

I don't I'm not even dating anyone. Well I think it's weird to live life as most people. Yeah. I think that's weird. I would rather plan ahead, I would pick some things I want to do differently and just be unapologetic about it. So I think it's really cool that you're sharing that, including down to like what are the questions? Cause I'm gonna take some of those and take it back to my wife and we're gonna do those. It's it's been it's it's it's really been a big deal for us. And it like you said, I think the The intention.

In the act of calendaring it is uh is of great value. Aside from the implementation. Right. The fact that you are both setting aside time to keep the relationship on the rails and Yeah.

is in and of itself going to have an impact on the relationship. And there are times also when uh will put these batching sessions out. We'll schedule them out. Uh and she's better at this than I am. I'm

Uh I c actually find Enneagram pretty helpful, even though I'm not convinced it's More than like business acceptable uh astrology, basically. But in any case, Enneagram can kinda be interesting as as something to fit into this. Um we can we can talk about that on an another podcast. But Uh Very important to her to schedule things out.

Uh And Uh if you s if we schedule it out for say four or five Weeks. Uh there are times when we'll look at it, we'll know it's coming, it's like

Okay, are we gonna do this? And it's like no, we're good. Like there are times when we just we don't have a critical mass of stuff to talk about. It's like no, it can wait. Like we'll just do it. We can push it a week. Yep. And uh So it's it's a

But you you want to from my experience thus far. Better to have it on the calendar. Yeah. And then say, Hey, we can play hooking. Make it an opt out instead of opt in. Exactly. Then to not have it on the calendar and have to like hit Def Con five when things boil over. Dude, everything that's important in life should be opt out. Everything. It should be by default.

It's gonna happen. It's on the calendar. And whether that is um call your mom every Sunday evening, whether that is go train at the gym three, four, five times a week, whatever it is. put just that intentionality of writing it down and putting it on the calendar, even the intentionality of everyone listening and saying, What are the four things that I want to accomplish every week? I want to call my mom or dad. I wanna train, I wanna whatever. I wanna read a book for ten minutes. And then putting those down on your calendar. It doesn't matter if it's in the morning or night, whatever works for you. That

instantly separates you from Being uh opt in from being buffeted by the winds left and right and just going wherever the world takes you. You decide. Um don't let the world decide for you.

Here here. Ret Seti. Seti. How do you say your name correctly? Ramit Seti. Okay. So You have

Second edition of I Will Teach You to Be Rich. Available. Uh, and I'm sure it by the by the time people hear this, uh, it may be available. Uh it should be available. And it has eighty new pages of material. Yep. Tools. Insights about money and psychology, stories of readers who've used the book, uh, the scripts that we were talking about.

And Oh yeah, look at those. Real reader results. Yeah. We're looking at it. I wanted to show people that Rich a lot of people think Rich looks a certain way, but I wanted to put photos of these readers. Men, women, black, white, young, old. Every one of us has someone We want to see ourselves represented. You know, I saw an ad on the train.

For an Indian dad in Hindi. And I was like, you know what? Ten years ago that wouldn't have been meaningful to me, but now I'm actually appreciating So that's what I wanted in this book. And you you've tabbed a couple of things for me to check out later, which I'll I will check out. You got I I'm just gonna read the tabs, we don't have to go through all of them. Stories.

Next. victim culture, which I'm sure you're a huge fan of. I'm kidding. Uh word for word scripts. Ignit. Invisible scripts. Crypto, love and money. So you got a lot here. Uh, and as I mentioned earlier

Uh uh I'm just gonna read the first paragraph on the back of the book'cause I haven't seen this in ages. Just quick. Quick back Story note. I remember when you were writing this. Dude, I came to you for advice. And I gave you you were the the book I gave you, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamotte.

And but here's here's the first paragraph of the back copy. Buy as many lattes as you want. That's a reference to people who recommend you cut back on all these things like A latte. Spend extravagantly on the things you love, live your rich life instead of tracking every last expense. Uh and you know what I've what I've always enjoyed Observing. uh and learning from uh our The tests that you do, you experiment

you actually implement these things. and you provide scripts and actual like algorithms for achieving very specific results. So Uh awesome to see you. Thank you, dude. This has been a pleasure. I love catching up. And thanks for having me on. Yeah. People can find you.

On Twitter at Remeet, Instagram at Remeet. And website IWT dot com. Are there any other places Uh where people can Check you out, see what you're up to, or anything else that you would like to say before we wrap up this episode. Get the book. It's on Amazon and come visit me in any of these social places and the

the site and the newsletter and uh would love to talk more with everyone about their rich life. For me? Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks a lot. And uh to everyone who is listening. Thank you for joining in. You can find the show notes links to everything we've discussed at Tim.blog. Forward slash.

Podcast along with every other episode. And until next time. Track wisely. Calendar the important shit.

Yeah. Plan your batching sessions and uh thanks for tuning in and I will be in touch very soon. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share The coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up. in the uh the world of the esoteric as I do, it could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite.

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