Ramit Sethi — Automating Finances, Negotiating Prenups, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show

Well hello guys and gals, I'm Tim Ferriss, welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show where my job is to interview and analyze world class artists and funny people as my guest today and I'm going to butcher your name even. Although I have known him for a thousand years Ramiz says T, that is RA my T se e this author of the New York Times bestseller I Will Teach You to Be Rich has become a financial guru for millions of readers between 20 and 40 years old. Surely I won't disqualify myself soon, he started his website I'll Teach You How to Be Rich.

Don't worry, he's a 2004 Stanford student and now gets over a million readers a month on his blog, newsletter, and social media. team of dozens of employees creates premium digital products on personal finance, entrepreneurship, psychology, careers and personal development for the best. The IWT community includes 1 million monthly readers,

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than 400,000 newsletter subscribers and 35,000 premium customers. He has written about personal finance for The Wall Street Journal. New York Times and has been interviewed on dozens of media outlets, including NPR ABC News, CNBC and The Tim Ferriss Show. Welcome back to the program. We remain thank you very much.

It's great to be here. You can find Stay if you want to say hello. Make a question. or yell at him on Twitter on repeat RI MIT and Instagram on roommate so I thought we could start with mats maybe you could tell me about your dad and the mats you want to start with there yeah okay so you know how you grow 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 because that's what my dad would do.

My mom would stay home. My dad would take us. I would take a couple of the kids from my family, including myself, and we would go to the dealership, it was always Honda or Toyota, you know, and we would start looking around and my dad would act very innocent, like he didn't know anything about cars. Dad knew everything, he knew how much the dealership was paying, how much the retainer was, so we'd go try it, he wouldn't be safe dead, uh, and then we'd stay there for four or five hours and he. I'd say okay, I'll think about it, car dealers spent like five hours with my dad, he's like, no thanks, this price isn't good.

I'm going to go there like that, so we literally left and then came back the next day. We were basically having breakfast at the dealership and I remember one time we were buying a car for our family and it was like day four. Well, again I thought this was normal and we were already at the last part, where the dealers pull out the numbers, you know, and tell you, well, it's actually a very good business and my dad, you know, he knows mathematics, he's an engineer, of course, and finally we closed the deal and my dad says, you're going to shoot. on free mats, right, these are 50 bucks and the guys like to sift, we're losing money on this car, how can we throw these away?

Flora and my dad says I'm leaving here and we just walked and we left and I was like a Vietnam Vet I'm in shock walking out, my eyes are glassy and I feel like we just spent a week buying this car and we got out of here about $50 mats so that's where I learned to negotiate the most elite negotiation ever now where are your parents from are they from India and are first generation immigrated to the US yeah they came here in the 70s my father actually came here to study he returned to India and it was known that he was going to return, he was single and you know they arranged things for him to meet people when he returned and it was spread around the community that this bachelor came back and ended up knowing my mom, they met when both families came over. together in a living room and talking and they met the families decided it was a good thing seven days later they got married my mom got on a plane and flew to the US for the first time and they have been married for about 40 incredible years we have a lot to talk about and a lot to catch up on so many questions I want to ask but I thought we could start and we certainly will we will bounce all over the place but you said before that I started recording because you have a new edition of your book I will teach you how be rich.

A barefoot photo of you is noticeably missing from the cover and you have some incredible quotes, testimonials, I should say, even from Burton Malkiel, author of Random Walk Down Wall Street, but you told me because I hadn't read the introduction that you should have started it or that you started it I was right, could you explain to me? just get rid of 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 career and I just learned to accept it guys it's a strange 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

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your money and using psychology against you to get positive results now, if you had followed that advice, it turns out that when the book came out in March 2009 that was the absolute bottom of the recession, it's crazy enough, now I don't believe in market timing, but if you had followed the advice in this $10 book you would be ready for all the life, so I started to say that he was right.

I tell you all the things that would have happened if you had used this book. I was wrong about a couple of things. I had to change one of them. The biggest mistake of my life was putting interest rates in the book, as if it were okay. Remember how it sounds like I'm market testing magazines? So I put at that time the savings rates were 5%. Remember these banks were paying 5% so I was like guys 5% dah dah dah here are the calculations and then like the time the book came out they went down to 4 3 2 and then point 5 percent now the point is that you don't earn money in your savings account anyway we're talking about 21 dollars a year or a month versus four dollars as if it's irrelevant. small details every day for the last decade.

I have received like 10 ml per day, which is like you, where is the 5% you talked about, you liar? That's why I think I will never put interest rates in your book again. I deleted it, clarified it, fixed a couple of things I wanted to update, and added like 80 new pages of stuff, so things have changed a bit, but the good advice really shouldn't change that much now that I've had it. a chance to observe you as a kind of animal in the wild for over 10 years and part of the reason I enjoy having our conversations but also sharing your tactics and scripts etc is that I have seen you use them and follow the path . which is

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than I can say for many financial experts or commentators in the world and I want to mention maybe just an upsell, and not really an upsell, maybe a secondary upsell, which is if anyone wants to be well informed about the arts of negotiation or if you're just looking for outrageous porn to get really angry if that's your current sport of choice, you can find a guest post you put up on my blog a few years ago called how to negotiate like an Indian, which Which I can only imagine the answer to that title if I were to post it, I have no idea, but it will stay as is, folks, so there you have it, if you want to Google that Tim's blog, you can find it, but let's talk. about some of the perhaps counterintuitive things that you do because 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 bullet points that I was hoping to explore and one is You mentioned you've lived in the same apartment for 10 years, why do you keep renting?

Yeah, I get this question a lot because in America real estate is religion and if you're successful then you're supposed to buy well and the old tax deduction and they're not making more land and all these things we say we don't really understand. I rent intentionally. I could go buy a place in Manhattan tomorrow with cash, but I don't. I want to, it doesn't make sense for me financially and I also enjoy the flexibility just to give you an example. I love that the building I live in has amazing amenities. I love that anything that goes wrong I make a phone call to someone who was there.

It started raining last winter and water started coming in through my window sill so I made a phone call and they came and took a look and said we actually have to replace this part of the roof because it connects and we have to Sending someone out of the building, I said, that sounds good to me, I don't care. I'll be out of town for the next few days, so have fun. I estimate that that repair will probably cost in Manhattan on a weekend probably twenty-five thousand maybe thirty-five thousand dollars. I didn't pay it well, so that's a financial problem as well as flexibility, which is that I don't know where I'll be in five years and if you're going to buy.

And you do the numbers, it makes sense to plan to be there at least seven to ten years at a minimum to be able to absorb the cost of transaction fees, but I think the biggest thing that really surprises people is that in the United States we have been. It has been said so many times that real estate is the best investment and, in my opinion, that is not true many times. I don't think it's always a bad investment, but I always say you have to do the numbers and when I do the numbers in Manhattan, it just doesn't make sense.

I would rather take that money and put it in the stock market and consistently know what the long-term outcome will be. I don't have to make any repairs and as we can, I really hate anything that affects my convenience, so I think for a lot of people I just want people to think, "Hey, is it really true that real estate is the best investment for me? It's not a cost and I'm happy to be able to do it. pay the cautious like I'm happy to pay the cost of, you know, a basket of strawberries that I'm going to eat.

I don't think I'm wasting money on strawberries and I think I'm wasting money on rent so you said real estate is religion or can be and I think it's worth digging into this for a second because there are a lot of claims that in certain Circumstances can be conditionally true, like real estate is the best investment, asterisk in fine print if yes, ABCDE, okay, and there are things that are patently false, like you need money to make money. False, it's who you know, not what you know, yes, false dichotomy, not mutually exclusive. Investing is only for the rich, ironically.

Getting rich is investing and there are a lot of different ways to invest correctly, so maybe there's a backstory or a bit of context that I think is worth talking about because I've been thinking about this a lot myself over the last few years. ten years is that there are investments that you make to optimize the financial return on investment and then there are investments that you make that are decisions about allocating resources to optimize other things correctly, so I'll give just one seemingly perfectly opposite example, which is I. I have bought real estate. I also got my ass kicked a year and a half before his book came out.

In fact, hello, it's just a rate mortgage, first home buyer. Yes, that was ugly, but I bought it. I have used mortgages of various types and I had a friend of mine a different Indian who was also first generation who is this guy we all know each other Naveen 2 cars oh okay yeah so thanks Naveen for this advice by the way , who? I've known a brilliant engineer for a long time and we were looking at different financial decisions because I want to talk about what got you here and what won't get you where you want to go.

Write the changes correctly because I imagine so. very different things than your parents, totally despite the fact that his behavior makes a lot of sense, yes, and his conditioning and his experience, what he told me, looking at my balance sheet, there is a small amount of principal left to pay on a mortgage and he said, just for your peace. mental for this primary residence, it doesn't make financial sense, you should pay this so you feel like no matter what you have, it's almost like a farm, right, you have something that on many levels can't be taken away from you, that's how it feels and I did it without saying this is the advice everyone should follow, by the way, but for me at the time there was so much uncertainty in my life to make a decision that apparently didn't allow the numbers to line up.

In fact, it is the right thing to do. I completely agree. I'm so glad we're talking about nuance because I think there are some underlying beliefs when it comes to money and I think first of all, most people are the same and that's profoundly different. that a lot of people who believe that we are all individuals, we have different situations, no, I think that most of us are pretty much the same and if we can optimize, if we can basically follow good advice ninety-five percent of the way, then we earn the right to take advantage of our specialties and individual differences, so for theFor most people that means saving a certain percentage, investing a certain percentage, etc., but I think once you do the basics, you earn the right to say: what are the nuances here?

Where the rules don't necessarily apply to me? So, for you, yes, you have the beginning. Maybe it didn't make sense financially, but it just felt good or gave me security in an uncertain world at the time. I have my own examples. life where I pay for things that make no rational sense. I've heard from a personal trainer for the last few years that it doesn't make any sense. In theory, I could find the same workouts on YouTube and you know, they're all in print or I could just stop doing them. I go to my trainer, because he's giving me all the workouts, but there's something else I get out of this and when I started when I was 22, I wish I could go back and shake it up because he was very utilitarian and very critical. how other people spent their money and I would scoff, say you know how to fly business class, stupid, we're all getting to the same place, I'm only paying 20% ​​of what that person pays and what I really should have done is say for that.

They do that? If we are listening to you right now saying that you paid capital when in reality it was not necessary. You could have dripped it. You're not paying much interest. Why and for you was that security? Significant to me I like flexibility and convenience, so I'm not saying I'll never buy real estate or buy it or pay for it tomorrow, but what are the circumstances under which people who are otherwise probably Be quite thoughtful, do you do the same? Certain decisions and mistake that, in retrospect, I made a lot when I was younger and I think that's also partly because I grew up with necessarily very, very frugal parents.

It sounds a lot like you. I would scoff and look down. about a lot of behaviors there I actually looked closer and said what am I missing right okay a bunch of rich people are doing acts yeah they must know something now I'm like saint I can't believe I missed it lost for like 20 or 30 years, it actually makes a lot of sense, okay, so let's talk about some examples, yeah, what are some things that you made fun of in your teens or your 20s and now you're like, oh, what? I understand well? and you know, I don't want this to sound unpleasant to people because we're going to start knitting, we've been through a lot of kinds of checkpoints, just like we've had you and I've been very fortunate and we've made some good decisions.

I had a good dose of luck, but I'll give you an example because you just mentioned business class. Just like my assistant. I have my main full-time assistant today. He still remembers when Tim, this wasn't that long ago. from the middle seat in economy class to the last ticket, because I remember the first time people approached me about paid speaking engagements, which seemed completely absurd at the time, I said yes to everything, so I thought: What are people going to pay me to speak? Yes, of course, yes to all of the above, Molly, and one of the options that I realized was available at one point was that they could buy the tickets from me, which was if it was negotiated by speaking Asian or something generally business or first class class, or they could give me the cash. expected for a first class ticket and then I could put it in my pocket and buy a middle class economy seat, which I did once in Australia, yeah, for a concert, that was, I mean, at the time, my highest mark, as if it were a At a very important concert, it was essential that I did the speaking task well and I sat like you knew I could turn 90 degrees at the hip in a middle seat with my arms pushed in front of me like a corpse like a Dracula for whatever.

Like 18 hours and I got there and they hit me with hamburger meat for about three days and I was like, well, that was very petty and extremely dumb, so that would be an example and I think that's the broader category of physical asset protection. . Yes, what I like about these examples is that I don't find them superficial to discuss. I think each of us, regardless of level of success, has gone from a certain place in life when you're in your early 20s to a different place. right, I used to read PC Mag and think about what parts to build my own computer, now I'm just going to 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 and it doesn't matter if you're buying first class tickets internationally or if you're going to a restaurant instead of cooking for yourself one night, you know, one night a week or a month, we all know intuitively that as you change in life, your spending will change, so I really don't think anyone should listen to your example of a middle seat and say, "Oh my gosh, that must be nice." know Tim or for me, you know I also have an assistant must be nice, it's nice, but you may have money and you don't choose to spend it like that, you choose to spend it on something else.

I have a student of mine in this book, who used the book, he told me he retired at 35 and his wife got tired there at 35 and 36 and they kept driving in a motor home that's his rich life, that's not my life rich, but to him that's his rich life, so when I came back When I was 20, what I wish I had done was look at the people who had succeeded in the way that I could imagine myself succeeding in a way I never would have. seen in a motor home, so maybe he didn't have something to learn from that person.

But if I were really introspective and if I was very curious I would have said: how did you do it? Yes, what did you do and why did you choose of all things to experience traveling in an RV? that he would have left me aside and all these things that we love to define ourselves are which, by the way, are interesting. People love to define themselves by what's not you, as opposed to what they want, so you see it on dating profiles everywhere. don't text 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 because when you define yourself by what you are not you won't get there when you choose what you would want to do now , everything is fine, great, I want this, I want that, how can I work towards it?

I wish I had reframed the way I thought before about money and psychology, about how frameworks work. or rules, guidelines, whatever you use to make financial decisions differs from what you absorbed from your parents or other people when you were younger and there are several different ways to approach it correctly, like we can see the approaches that you used to use. you mention a million dollars to get to your first million compared to what you used after that point, because if it's anything like my experience, it's totally different, but I'll let you address that however you want because I think what if Could people take one?

The most important thing in this conversation would be to test your assumptions and try to be aware, and it takes a lot of effort and practice to know what rules you are following or biases that you have that you arrived at through logic and reasoning rather than simply having absorbed the process. course on how to bounce like a pinball in a pinball machine in this thing we call life for the last 20 30 40 years because those are not your rules, there is someone else, yes, I call them invisible scripts, these are the scripts that direct our lives and They're so deeply ingrained in us that they're invisible to us and you see, you know, an invisible script that I grew up with was that education is always good and I think I think that's a positive invisible script.

I think it's really good. I'm all for educational self-development, that's what I do for my business and in my life I also grew up with things like you shouldn't pay for that, we could do it ourselves, yes, me too, yes, and so on, and it really drips . in a lot of quirky ways so there are a few that I really loved when we used to take vacations, our vacations consisted mainly of driving from where we lived in Northern California to Los Angeles, we would visit family, my mom would make lunch and we would stop at the way. and eating, and you know, what I love about it is that we didn't need any fancy food, like we were a family, we spent time together, that was a vacation to us.

I didn't know what it was like to stay in a fancy hotel in In fact, I never ordered room service until I was 20 on an interview trip for Microsoft, so I like that, I like knowing that I grew up a little hungry, not physically , but knowing that, oh, great, that we were happy that we were okay. there's another level, you know we can't do it now, but we're happy, but I think I also grew up with some beliefs that I got rid of or changed, some of them would be like being very conservative with my work, like I had followed all the paths In life, I'd be sitting here wearing an oversized Cisco engineer t-shirt and, you know, I'd be telling you about my sales engineering stuff like I'm conservative, looking for a good job, etc.

As I got older and started making different decisions, my parents were supportive, but 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. by Dan Kennedy says why pay less when you can pay more, a complete change of the equation, so if that applies, who is Dan Kennedy? Dan Kennedy is a famous marketing consultant and he has a great book on marketing that flows, if you read it. It can be a little abrasive, but it's also like a shocking and eye-opening book because what he points out is that most people go for life with glasses (I call it money glasses), they put on a pair of glasses and look at the world.

Through the lens of frugality, how can I save money? And you see it in a lot of ways if you say, "Oh, that's a really nice jacket, where did you get it? They'll tell you and they'll say, 'I've got it on sale,' or 'I've got it' for 50% off, that's interesting, but if you talk to someone who bought something absolute, something they love, they went to Italy and got this perfect handmade jacket, they would never say that I bought it for 50% off, they have such a different jacket. once craftsmanship I grew up with the lens of frugality it was all about costs growing up now it's also about value so as Dan Kennedy says, why pay less when you can pay more if you're going to have an amazing anniversary dinner, maybe that be the place where You don't need to save fifty percent, maybe you really want to spend more to create a memory you'll never forget Dan Kennedy, interesting guy I never met him, but I'm scratching his name from one of his books. . in Tim's

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notes, that four bar blog podcast, but it's something like million dollar ideas or how to make the most of or find your own million dollar ideas and as I remember it, it was. a collection of different business ideas and examples that was really helpful. to also remove the financial lens that I would have had at the time, which was to make money by doing a B or C, which were the three things that I had maybe seen around me, and to

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how flexible the approaches can be. and I'd love to hear a little bit, since you have such a great sample set of students, and what are some of the psychological blind spots or rules that are most holding people back from achieving their financial goals and I want to touch on those, so think about I want to touch on one thing you said was frugality and having grown up with a definite lens of frugality, I think it's worth commenting that frugality has its place, like you don't want to fly blind because you know what a fool is and his money soon does it separate?

I mean it's you, it doesn't matter how much money you have, you can spend it all and I've seen it many times, it's not difficult so you have to have a means of evaluating what is worth spending money on and what isn't, however if you win , let's say 20 30 40 $50,000 a year, fill in the number, but let's just say $50,000 a year if you want to achieve all your financial goals by cutting costs the maximum amount you can cut is 50 thousand, at which point you have like a t-shirt and you're a wandering ascetic, you know, begging for food and stuff, so by definition there's a limit to the Delta. you can create between the money you spend and the money you have, whereas if you have the same focus on generating income or even a disproportionate to focus on generating income, the limit is in some sense correct, so that would be one where, like I was trained like cut cut cut cut cut, but if you're not simultaneously looking at revenue generation or revenue growth, it can be really problematic 100 percent, that's why most of the United States and the Most of the world has the frugality lens on, there's a limit to how much you can cut back, but there's no limit, as to how much you can earn, and if you think about typical financial advice, it's a very direct question why none of thisSo-called financial experts in the newspapers talk about how to make more money. and the answer is that they don't know how that's not their job, they're writers, so in order to understand that you need to manage your costs, for example, there are a lot of things that I do in my life that are very frugal. especially because of the income that I have and I just don't care, but I like what my wife makes fun of me because she runs my entire business on a MacBook Air and you know, I put my feet up on the table that I have. my thing on my lap and she tells me, she looks at how you get a new computer, that fan is so loud and I had to know how long you've had it, so that's what I wanted to know.

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 it still works so I don't want another one and also when I grew up this comes from my childhood we didn't buy a new computer unless the other one didn't turn it on so I've kept it with me and I like it having little places in my life where I intentionally impose scarcity. I think it's healthy. I think it's healthy to have moderation. 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 fast track to a bad place you're also aware that you're doing it yeah yeah exactly exactly another example is you almost never I eat away from home in everything and that's a big change from tenure while I was single and it was perfect, like my receipts were perfect, like they were through the roof.

Seamless is an online delivery service in New York, everyone uses it and now for health reasons and also just because of the cost. Reasons why we like to cut back on that too, yes, but I spend more on things, so I always like to spend extravagantly on the things I love, but I cut costs mercilessly on the things I don't, so I like, I think I really would. Many people try to cut back a little here and a little there and generally end up unhappy with it. In fact, I would encourage people to choose the area that I call money dial, choose the area of ​​your life that you really love to spend money on things like let's do a quick exercise what is the area of ​​life that you love?

It gives you joy to spend money on trips, trips and food. Perth says if I cook at home or go out, he would say and now I you. This morning I had a breakfast taco in Veracruz, yes, which was amazing, not expensive, no, I looked but it was delicious at the same time. I could go say San Francisco to say Sanh there and that way, as an experience, those would be two travel areas and n. perfect food so let's do this now many people say that traveling is one of the most common my thing is convenience I like my life to be super convenient so I have spent a lot of money and time on engineering, now let's take your money mark trips and, like a stereo dial, let's turn it up, let's just say for easy math you spend a hundred dollars a month on travel again, easy math, what if you multiplied that amount by 10 or let's say a hundred times more than you would travel would it be different for you? that what you're doing now, let's see, would probably mean that I have something that I honestly have to think about because I've had some of the twisted and crazy places that I go.

I've had some catastrophes in New York, trees attached. I'd probably have someone fix it every place I went. You would have someone who is available and available to effectively solve any problems or address any challenges or desires that arise. I love that whatever else comes to mind is fine because it's yeah, that's that, that's what's coming, that's what's coming to your mind right now, what's something in your life that you you spend money but you really don't care? It doesn't make a big significant difference, your clothes are perfect. Okay, so this is what you'll find in college.

My fans have given me infinitely great, you know, my wife is a personal stylist. It's okay, oh man. Okay, she's not going to like what you're saying about this. Okay, so I love this exercise. I have identified about ten money dials. Traveling is very important. Convenience is very rare. There is health and fitness. There are relationships. There are some more. What I like to see people do is actually spend more. Nothing they love is health and fitness. I would increase it, okay, that's where I would turn the dial, but what would you do? I would actually get a trainer that I don't currently have.

I have different coaches for different things, but everything is Alec Hart, nothing has been prepaid or pre-scheduled, which is a problem, right, I suspect part of the reason, tell me if I'm wrong, is that you like having a coach, is 100% responsibility and regularity and I would like to do it, okay? By the way I love this every time you ask someone about their money dial you can see their face light up because they love it I loved it I love it I'm obsessed talking about how I've built my life around convenience I'll explain every last bit to you detail, you can see the joy in my eyes, so what I love to do is make people dream big if it comes to travel, it's not just adding an extra ten percent, it's like 10 Xing, what that would look like and then , to get there, if it's 2 X 5.

X 10 things you don't like and become extravagant in the things you do and When you start thinking this way, your rich life becomes much more specific and meaningful to you. You know, unlike me, I don't need a fixer because I don't travel to those kinds of places and I don't do the kind of trips that you do, but for me I want even more comfort and now you know I want a different kind of trips now that I'm married , so these are things that I want everyone to think about what is your money and if you could 10 get out of it and this is valuable too just for people who may be listening and going like a waste of time.

I don't have the money to spend 10 times on it, whatever the rejection, it's a thought exercise, this is very, very valuable in the same way that when I wrote my last book I asked myself if I only had a month for the last two books, you know, I only had a month to write this book, how would I do it? Oh really, what would it be like? and 90% of the ideas were terrible, but then there were ten that made the process I was planning already 2 3 4 5 times more efficient, so the question itself may seem absurd, but many of the ideas end up being extremely practical and let's talk. about convenience, so what are some of the things that you do or have found disproportionately rewarding in the morning from a convenience standpoint?

Well, okay, I'll tell you, but it will sound strange because, to me, this is really joyful. and to other people I'm going to sound like a lunatic, but this is my rich life, so I'm going to break it down. I wake up in the morning and when I wake up early we start waking up at 6:00 after We went on our honeymoon, we woke up early for a safari and then we both looked at each other and thought, "You want to keep doing this," so we do. We slept around 9:30. 10:00. We woke up at 6:00. 00 and when I start work, I just open my calendar and double click on whatever is in the morning.

Generally it is written in the morning and everything is perfectly organized. The link is there. I click on the link. The document is ready. to go with exactly the right information, everything is organized as if nothing is left to chance, there are no documents here, there are no files there, everything is in its place, you have prepared it in advance, my assistant and my team, so everything has been designed and I think the best morning routine is decided the day before the week before even the year before, so when I get there it's ready to go, it's like a chef walks inside me with something more exactly and everything is in place so I love that on a day to day basis things like scheduling my assistant Jill takes care of it she is fantastic and even when I came here I went out to take a super taxi and I didn't even know which airport I was going to.

I just knew that when I double-clicked on my calendar it would alert me, so finally everything is resolved. A couple more examples when I travel, especially for an extended period of time, we have something called travel protocol and Jill activates the travel protocol which means my plants are watered if necessary that means she handles email in a way different that means all these details that I normally take care of when I'm in the office are now taken care of by someone else, let's get super boring, not for me, not for you, but maybe for some people, this is a checklist found on a Google document, where is that protocol? needs to be completed, we don't have to go into that complexity if necessary, but the instructions do, they are in a Google document.

There is a Google document that has about 25 pages of preferences, like when I travel if I travel. five hours I want to sit in this kind of seat, everything is alive there and updated, so it is a living document. One thing I updated recently was that when I travel for a longer period of time I want food delivered to my hotel, so I can try to stay on a diet in general, so I'll get to the hotel and they'll have a bag of whole foods that they deliver me with food that I know I can eat while traveling and it also has a spoon 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 big number of iterations, but for me I don't find it annoying.

In fact, I love it because I kind of crack the code of what it takes for me to be really efficient so that it lives in a Google document. If my assistant was sick for some reason, I would transfer it to someone else and therefore it's accessible to anyone in the company and we just go from I want to mention something. I'm extremely particular about travel preferences so the hotel room is not close to an ice machine, it's not close to the elevators, very particular idea about it being a trendy modern hotel with a very noisy lobby , certain maximum heights, but please note.

Fire escapes count, so I mean I have a whole set of preferences. I love this, but when you say someone's listening, the thought exercise had increased their travel money, you realize that in some cases things that you would expect to be expensive or problems that you would expect to be expensive to fix are not expensive. like the Whole Foods example, it's Sochi, so you could do whole foods, you can do your own delivery, if not maybe instacart, if it's not somewhere like Austin, you might need a favor there. There are really cheap ways to do this, to give an example, so I used to do it.

I still do ice baths and I didn't have what I have now, which is this somewhat risky MacGyver, cold immersion and I designed it, which you have to make sure of. you logged out before entering, but before that, when I lived in San Francisco, they delivered ice to me wherever they picked it up. I usually stopped at a gas station after the gym and filled my trunk with ice, which was a huge pain in the butt and then I realized wait a second when Instacart will deliver like 60 pounds of ice for five dollars and I thought I'm the guy who says: Can I order kettlebells on Amazon Prime for free so I don't have to pay double the cost, yeah, and lo and behold I was able to do it, so the solutions, Even if you brainstorm a wealth exercise, they don't always end up being 100% expensive, which is why I'm so glad you said a few minutes ago not to make fun of the mental exercise like, oh, I don't have enough money. , like dreaming big, dreaming, dreaming about what your money is marked at 10x, but the solutions are usually very simple every time.

I travel, I'll post a video on Instagram of the food they delivered to me and it's like something classic, it's like yogurt, it's something we all eat, it's yogurt, it's some almonds, maybe some peanut butter and people like what service you used, that's the question. what service and I say service doesn't matter, you can find someone on Craigslist, this is like a $20 purchase, $20 that can change your life and to get there you just have to start with the dream, it's money. really the latter so this is $20 so I have a really good assistant and it takes quite a bit of time and it's not something that you necessarily get right away and you don't need an assistant. for this, but she told me at one point that she's like Tim.

I don't know when this was not too long ago. She's like Tim. She just travels with a roll of 20 bills and you can solve almost any problem. And I thought it was a good idea. and I will give another example of a lifestyle improvement that doesn't cost a lot of money if you go to restaurants you choose a restaurant that you think you will really like you go to that restaurant not on the weekend, say between Monday and Thursday Go early, preferably right when They start serving dinner, sit alone and, again, this is kind ofthat. because you know you're going to invest more, but really for any of these numbers, whether it's post or pre, you're usually in a good place anyway, so that money gets saved and invested and investing is how I try to do it. be more aggressive in investing because we're young, so I put it into things like a target date fund and you know, I love Vanguard and I recommend them.

I don't have any agreement with them, but I think they are the best. where I put what is the target date of the target fund, I understand all the words separately, but I don't really know what is right, so very quickly everyone thinks that investing is about picking stocks and they like to sit and look at this screen that looks like a minority. Report that investing is not investing is very simple low cost funds and these cost you almost nothing these days, we are talking about a point one percent expense ratio, it is very, very low cost, what it does is something as well as a target date fund, if you choose a target date. that you're going to retire, so if you're thirty and you're going to break, presumably you're going to retire at 65, that's 35 years from now, so there's a target date fund called the Vanguard 2060 fund, okay and what that does It's like a pie chart.

It's pretty aggressive at 30 because 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 automatically put money in every month. I love this because a great, easy, low cost way to invest and most of my portfolio is in target date funds or individual index funds to get the money in there. I have some money in savings subaccounts. I have some goals as you know. I saved for my wedding before, before I even met my wife, I saved for an engagement ring.

I like to plan ahead, so I have those same numbers for a down payment on a house I'll eventually buy even if it's not enough. It makes sense to me right now, but I still plan for the holidays as well, so as medium-term goals, you're talking about one to five years or so. How do you keep these things separate or are they just separated on a sheet of paper? calculation where do you keep track? You know how they don't mix? Yeah, I like to keep them separate because I think it's like separate, I mean, separate bank accounts, well, you.

You can have secondary savings on the Kelly subsidy, yes, so you need capital as an authorized employee on a credit card account or something like exactly just for tracking purposes and I also think it's good if you have an account big and old that you don't really know. for what, but what I would encourage everyone to do is think about what they want to save for one to five years and during a year there are things like Christmas gifts, as you know, it's a known irregular expense or a known regular expense. It comes every December, so if it's $500, you might as well start saving now.

Then there are things like an anniversary dinner. There are also errors. I used to have a stupid mistake count because I used to get a lot of parking tickets. I do not do it. That already, thank God, so I don't need to plan for that, but then there are things like a down payment, maybe getting married, things like that, beyond five or seven years, I just put it on the market because I don't need it. and it just grows, so you put it in the market with a target date fund, target date fund, yeah, and those long term ones throughout history have returned about 8%, so if you do the math and go to one of these calculators like a bank rate or something like that you can plug in the numbers and you'll see that your money roughly doubles every time it's the rule of 72 72 divided by 10 it's going to double roughly every seven years that's why compounding is so powerful if you start now and you put in even a hundred dollars a month and that number goes up very quickly, so that's the power of investing the rest of the money pays my fixed expenses like rent, things like that and finally it comes out spending guilt free, this It's my favorite part the sweater account the sweater account that's basically what leads me to my two things which are variable trips.

I tend to overspend a little bit on travel and clothing and I've set up this system because I've now advanced in my financial system where a lot of this is automated I have a meeting once a month I have a personal CFO, we looked at it and I basically said I want have my document prepared this way I want an executive summary I want the expenses to be classified as such and I just want you to check the following because these are the ones I'm variable on, like I really don't care if I spend 20 dollars more on deodorant than It doesn't move the needle, but I like trips too much.

I know so I can correct overtime, this is how I think about expenses, so next two topics I thought we would discuss prenuptial agreements, so this is a topic that is avoided a lot, it seems to be a big topic at least in the United States. and it's something that came up in a conversation recently and you joked that you might be willing to talk about it on the podcast. This is one of those topics that I think is neglected and I have seen a lot of difficulty, anguish and pain and discomfort faced as a result of I think the unwillingness to make it a more open conversation, so where should we start with the prenuptial agreements?

I am a man of open books. I'll tell you anything, so this is one of those. Things that when I came in I didn't know anything and I only know, I only knew what I had heard on TV, that

prenups

are bad or that they are for people who have inherited generational wealth like I didn't know anything. and then I found out, when I talked to friends, that there were a lot of people who had thought about this or been through it, but none of it is online, it's all behind closed doors, so prenup prenup, what is a prenup?

What is the purpose of a prenuptial agreement? The prenuptial agreement sets out the terms of what you are entering into as a marriage and is a recognition that certain people may have certain assets or interests such as a business or cash or investments, whatever the case may be, and it also sets out the terms in if the marriage ends. For some reason, what should be done with those assets, specifically premarital assets, that's what a prenup is about? Okay, so how did you think about this? Because I have heard some disastrous stories of this process being handled poorly or Maybe the terms are not reviewed as carefully and I should also point out that this is not a thing between men and women.

I've seen it in same-sex couples. I have seen it in cases where the woman arrives with significantly greater assets. than the future husband, so how did you think about this and what is one of the smartest ways to think about this? Well, I'll tell you what I did and I'll tell you some mistakes that I also made and The reason I want to talk about this is because I want to shed light on money topics that people don't talk about and I want people to be informed about that you can make your own decision, but I went in thinking about marrying I had a lot of preconceived notions about what a prenup was, who it was for and just to give you the feeling that no one around me signed a prenup growing up, I just wasn't part of it. of my culture, so I started thinking about getting engaged a few times. years ago and my girlfriend at the time, you know we were discussing that and discussing what, oh, the engagement, yeah, you also know what's going to happen eventually and you know we're going to be together long term, stuff like that and I started looking into it. and if you google how to sign a prenup, you'll find a lot of really generic, almost bad advice, it comes from disgruntled redditors and it comes from Ask Men or these magazines where they have this stuff.

This advice is like you should blame him. your lawyer or should you blame your parents or how do you manage not to convert your fiancee and I just thought this is not the way I want to start this relationship and this financial relationship as well because that's what marriage is, it's legal. financial, it's also love, it's on your team in every way, so I sat down, I did a lot of research, I talked to a lot of my friends and what surprised me was when I started talking about it with friends, many of them especially. The business people had a lot to say, so I'll fast forward to what happened when we had my girlfriend at the time we sat down, we had a very serious meeting like we actually had a Google agenda, we came with our bullet points and we had a meeting very adult meeting where we talk about just the two of you just with us, the legal counsel and so no, no, it was just the two of us that we talked about, you know, when would we like to be engaged and married? where we would live?

I have kids so to be clear this is a life logistics meeting and not a prenuptial meeting which can be part of it, yes it is a broader conversation. I hadn't even mentioned the prenup, yeah, okay, so we went through, you know, kids and me. I said, you know, I even mentioned it to my wife, I said, you know, let's talk about our kids' names because I never saw myself having a kid named Mike. I want Mike running around my house and she asks me: where is this coming from? I think I'm feeling particular about this, so then we went down the list and the good news is that we were generally on the same page, it's funny that she says, you know?

I would really like to be engaged on the first question of the next one. year, I say, oh my God, this is the girl of my dreams, she's talking about financial quarters, I say, I love you, baby, so at the end of that conversation, I said, you know, there's something else that's important, you know, It's really important to me that we talk about a prenup and she was a little taken aback and said, "Okay, 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 that I made because of my business and thanks to a lot of luck I was put in this fortunate position in which I have a business and have accumulated a certain amount of assets.

I said it's very important for me to talk about what that means before we get married and that we will sign a worst-case agreement if something bad happens and this really was it. I was nervous, very nervous because what will someone's reaction be? I have no idea, but I thought, anyway. It's going to be bad, but I felt really nervous, but I also felt safe because it was something I knew I wanted to do, like it was really important to me, so to her credit, she said, "You know what surprises me." . I don't expect it, but I'm open to it, let me educate myself on it and we can talk, okay, great, so that was as good a response as I could have hoped for.

She leaves and does her own research. She talks to her friends. and we began to argue more and more, we had about four or five months until I proposed that we start talking, the next step is to get lawyers, curiously you have to hire lawyers, each party has to hire lawyers and many times 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, so I said, "You know what I'll take care of," "I'm happy to do it," so she found her own lawyer and we started working on coming up with these basic terms now, the basic structure of a prenuptial agreement is that most people don't need a prenuptial agreement because most people marry with relatively similar assets in places where it starts to make sense or if you have a significant amount of assets, whether it's a house, a inheritance, a business, those kinds of things that start to make sense to think about.

I had to get the intellectual property of the site, yes, absolutely, I had to be comfortable with the idea that this was the case. It's not a bad thing that he 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 planning for it to go wrong. I intend to be married forever. I always want to emphasize that my wife and I make it clear that we are a team, but I also mentioned that for some reason I have accumulated these things and it is very important for me to plan for what could happen.

As we talked more and more about this, it became increasingly clear that in every other aspect of life, top performers plan, plan ahead, plan for good, plan for bad, plan but It's like in this situation in life that society has told everyone that no, that's wrong, you shouldn't plan anything, you should go into it like a mass with those mass eyes and you shouldn't think for a moment about what What would happen if something goes wrong, I mean you. get on a plane they give you some safety instructions they don't do it it's not because they expect the plane to crash into the water that's great exactly it's also a place just to jump where I've thought a lot about these fair relationships and marriage in general, that when you marry in an official capacity you are involving the state in your affairs, you aresigning certain contractual agreements and therefore in any well-planned agreement you will have contingencies about what will happen if things don't work out, there will be a termination clause, you will have a publishing agreement, you will have to in any number of dozens or hundreds of other contracts you will sign, you will always have a separation clause, the reason why this goes the way it does is such a hot topic for people.

I think there are two reasons: One, there's just a general ignorance of prenuptial agreements because it's inherently a private matter when assets are discussed, it happens behind closed doors, specifically lawyers, behind closed doors, it's not public, there's nothing good about it. guides or e-books on how to make a prenuptial agreement there is nothing, there are not even samples of prenuptial agreements out there they are very, very poor quality. The second thing is that it attacks our belief that in America a marriage is purely about love and I think a marriage is absolutely about love, but look at any parent or couple who has, let's say, children, look at them and look at their day to day life.

Yes, there is love, but there is also teamwork, there is this person who prepares dinner, this person takes out the trash, this person is changing the diaper, it is an agreement, it is a team and in any team you have to have a set of rules. and so I felt comfortable with that saying, you know what a love marriage is, we found each other, we met, we loved each other, but it's also we want to make sure it's a team and we're setting expectations, so we go through the process and we talked to our lawyers and the lawyers are

negotiating

it and this is where it started to get really difficult, everything was going great, but then once everything is great in concept and then you talk about real numbers, what are the if I'm like that ?

What are the basic terms you are agreeing to in a prenuptial agreement? The first thing is that you are exposing all the assets that each person has, yes, those could be assets and liabilities, by the way, you put them on the table, it was a good conversation we had. I forgot to follow 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 401k stuff and I said, yeah, I'll help you, but read my book first, so she reads my book and then said ok I still have this question so we looked into it. and I was able to understand her salary and everything and it was great, since we worked on 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 how I had made a huge mistake, by not telling her that she had put me in a very unbalanced position, she is not fair, so that afternoon we talked about it and we talked about my net worth, we talked of what it means to us and that.

It was, I would say, one of my most pleasant conversations, the most pleasant, yes, because we talked about what it means to us, like our rich life, now, what does it mean and does it mean that when we travel we can take our parents with us and we can ? spend more to stretch their legs, we can travel places or we can make certain investments or take risks that we normally wouldn't be able to do again as a team, so that was actually one of my favorite memories of talking about money in In the early days We had listed all of our assets and liabilities and now the basic structure of a prenuptial agreement is what happens in the event the marriage ends and there are many ways to reduce it.

Prenuptial agreements are similar. What happens if marriage? ends in three months on one end in many cases a check is written can you believe that if a marriage ends in three months someone could write a check to the other person why, just like pure goodwill severance pay, you could call it that and then both? Couples may still have a job, etc., but what happens if the marriage now ends? You know, 30 years later, let's say there are two or three children. Let's say one spouse left her job so she could take good care of the children. He is kind.

It is only fair that that person be compensated in some way because it would be unfair for someone to end the marriage with only this large amount of relative assets and the other person to be left with nothing. That's just not fair, it's not fair in my eyes personally. and it's not fair on the size of the state, neither in each of these cases nor in most prenuptial agreements, is it a one-time payment or is it like a new, continuous annuity that is paid every year was a big question, yes, how does it look? You can decide it however you want, but each lawyer will defend the size of it, so the person who would receive the payments will want everything to be upfront, so there are also other questions about what if you are living? in a house with children and the marriage ends, who leaves, how soon does it have to be properly dictated and then there are other questions about what happens, is there a limit on how much you can pay and that's important to understand although there are a couple of things?

The money I'm going to talk about in general now, the money you earn when you're together, is generally community property, so when you're married, generally the money you earn together is yours, there are certain exceptions, like if you have a business. this in that and you can eliminate them ahead of time, but generally we're talking about money that was accumulated before the marriage, that's really important to understand that children are definitely a complicating factor, but you're not really dictating the terms of the child. of what is called custody, escrow, escrow and also payments, the state will determine it, so it is very important to know.

You can't come up with a rule right now that says you know if we have three kids and this marriage ends like me. I'm going to write you a check for $1 or 1 million dollars a month that can't work. The state will decide according to the lifestyle. Let's use a question from my perspective. Yes, why get married? What is this? Because I really didn't like it. and this is something I usually talk about on first dates. I mean, I have a great girlfriend right now, but once we've got that covered, what do you want for your amount? your main course quite quickly the topic arises. like yes, marriage doesn't care to have some bureaucracy involved in my relationship, that's a great question and it's also like you're entering a relationship where the current earnings trajectory is hugely disproportionate, the idea of ​​having bureaucracy involved and having sort of everything after a certain day becoming community property doesn't have much appeal to me, so was it your reasons for getting married your desire your partner's desire your families families multiple expectations or your other reasons that's a great question and I think Only today, can this question really be asked?

Because just 25 years ago this question would never have been asked: "Of course you're getting married," and now you and I know a lot of people who are single or in live-in relationships or casual relationships or whatever the case may be and they're perfectly fine. happy not to be married. I think for me the answer is probably all of the above. It was a wish on my part, a wish on the part of my wife and also our families. Yes, and this could be an invisible script from my childhood, yes, I always saw myself as married, so there's a lot in there about how I thought about it.

I love my wife. I love when we are together. She makes me a better person. I think I do the same and together as a team we are amazing, I love laughing with her, I love how she challenges me and I want to deepen that relationship, the financial part for me was a part I wanted to address but I also felt confident knowing that we could resolve it, yes, we could reach an agreement and I didn't see it as something conflictive at least until the middle part, which I want to talk to you about, okay, but I approached it as very similar.

I can do, yes, it's like hiring someone, I'm going to make you an offer, I want to make you a great offer and I hope we have some exchanges, but generally it's about reaching an agreement that we can both work together now I know that sounds a little unromantic for a marriage, but I'm talking about the financial part of marriage, there's a whole, there's so many different layers and we in America only talk about love, which I'm trying. sharing it's like there are many other parts like being aware of it not putting your head in the sea you're also talking you're not talking about marriage as a concept you're talking about the marriage contract and if you get married, whether you're going to know whatever it is , it could be an erasure of the term, but like some office downtown to get stamped as if you were entering into a contract with multiple parties, yes, and then you can enter into a very nebulous contract or you can enter into a very clear contract.

I always say that for every major purchase in your life, every major purchase, every major decision, spend the time that most of us should spend less time on most decisions and we should spend a lot more time. on some key decisions like I want to take this seriously, my wife too, so we did it, we spent months, so now here we are, the lawyers are coming and going and it's starting to get a little slow, like they're arguing and now. We were talking about it and it got stressful and at some points pretty heated, okay, and I was like, I mean, there's so much going on during this time that we would just stop talking about it for weeks at a time because it was too stressful and never before We'd had these kinds of conversations about money and my perspective was like I've thought about money for 15 or 20 years every day, like this is my business and I'm really proud of what I do.

I've made it financially and I've met and I always love to come and I made a very fair, very fair offer, doing everything I could, that was my perspective, my wife's perspective was very different and I don't think I listened as much as I did. say I was going IIIi, I did this, I made this offer and she was saying something and I was saying like looking at the spreadsheet like looking at the numbers and she was like yes, but she was talking about something else in a completely different language and I was just as worried as mr. kind of spreadsheet, so she finally she said, you know we need to go talk to someone about this, we should go see a therapist and I was like, yeah, we really should.

I totally agree with her so you might be wondering where do you go to find a therapist and for us the answer was Yelp we literally opened up Yelp and typed in therapist and found one two blocks away that's how you do it guys We walked there, sat in this room and had a conversation like never before. I had before, this therapist was very good, she asked us how we grew up with money, what it meant and it turns out that for us it meant totally different things, like for me it meant being proud of what I have achieved, it meant all the work and for anyone who has built something, you know the sacrifices it took to build it, you look back, you can remember the Friday nights you didn't go out or you can remember X or Y or the risks you took and I was watching that and what my wife was . see was something different, money meant something different to her and this therapist helped us bring that out and we met, you know, we went one, two, three sessions, we found ourselves talking about our childhood and I, it's like a cartoon , As a joke. what you talk about in the therapy session, but we came out of each of those sessions like wow, that was pretty good, that was really helpful, so we still had the lawyers coming and going, but now we were connecting more with each other financially. . and this therapist reminded us that we are a team, this is just an agreement that we have to come to, but remember why you are together, remember why you are getting married, we finally came to an agreement and we signed it and it's funny. because one of my friends had an event called "You Should Sign a Prenup" and he invited about 20 or 25 people and one of his friends who was married and had made a prenup sent him a note and said he'd rather be dead.

After coming to this event and he was like, whoa whoa why and he's like a friend, 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 understand. that. Until I passed it, I would say in retrospect I learned a couple of things, number one. I should have talked to my wife about money much sooner, just as I violated my own advice much sooner and that was horrible. I should have talked about it. before - he should have stopped being mr. type of spreadsheet and he actually listened and said let's put the numbers aside and talk about what money means to me, like I told you, I'm proud of it, my wife wanted to feel secure, she wanted to know that if something turned out wrong, she would be careful and stuff and I didn't really internalize what that meant to her what does that mean?

I should have listened. She should have gone to see a therapist sooner and we shouldn't have let it go on as long as it did. That was really torture for both of us, how would you have speeded it up? Wow, therapy before, well that's why I'm here, that's what I want to share with people, I don't just hope theyresolve over time. everyone involved in the process wants this to extend to the lawyers, not only are they trying to 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 have to be aligned on that.

I definitely would have talked to a therapist ahead of time with my wife, we would have gone together faster and we would have kind of done it. I would have started without talking about money, but I rather like the meaning of that and that's something I hope to talk more about, but I hope that people listening to this, if you come in and you have a spreadsheet that you want to discuss , you were wrong. In turn, that's what I did. I should have talked about the meaning, fears and hopes about money instead of going over the numbers, the numbers are like the last part.

I was going to say that's not correct, it's a sequencing of both ends and you. I have to talk about the numbers, but once you line up the meaning, the numbers work themselves out, so when we talked about this, it happened in the past because I wanted to make sure we did it on the podcast, yeah, a couple of things have come up. stories. I'm not sure how to deal with that now. I'm at the point where I haven't had conversations with lawyers about this kind of thing either, although I do want to say that it makes sense to think about estate planning, yes, if your estate is small or medium. older makes a lot of sense to think about that and things can be really complicated speaking as someone who had grandparents who didn't think about anything and we're not, you know, rolling around on our backs and a pool full of coins like Scrooge.

McDuck, but still, when emotions are running high, kids can fight over anything, even if it's just table scraps and that was a disaster. I don't ever want that to affect if I have children to affect my children, so yes, you should think about it first, but the point. What I was going to say is that I haven't gone through the actual drafting of, say, a prenup, but I have seen marriages implode and I like numbers, if you like, let's try to take a cold, objective look at the numbers in the US. They're not that hot, so it makes sense to plan if it's like driving with your car's seat belt on, like you don't plan on having an accident but want to be covered if you do.

I've heard horrible stories, so I've heard stories from friends who had a prenuptial agreement and went through the same process and then I think it was a week after he married Shore or right before he got married, his wife to be his wife said that I signed the prenuptial agreement under duress. Oh my gosh no I don't feel good about that and I went back to the table that under duress for people who don't know is and this is not a legal definition but under extreme stress therefore the position of the person claiming the dress is that the contract is not valid because they pressured him and it turns out that this can apply to quite a few contracts and he was in a position where he had to come back and it was renegotiated and the numbers changed so that the balloon payments and so on were changed, and that's scary, it's scary, you could have an agreement and then end up in a situation like that, right? and point number one, whether it is imposed on you legally or simply. pretty much on a day to day basis you wonder where do we go from here and then we have to get back into negotiation mode and I've also heard about approaches, I'm not saying maybe this is getting too far into the topic. dark arts or something, but we're friends and we've thought okay, if I'm going to do it, if I'm trying to defend myself from the worst case scenario, would it make sense for me to hire X number of very high caliber divorce lawyers?

We're conflicted about whether we end up getting divorced later, like that's a bit Voldemort, but I can also see the practicality of this, so how do you think about what landmines you might need to avoid if there are any? It's a great question, but this gets complicated, you know? I would say I've talked to a lot of different lawyers, both in marriage matters and 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 employment lawyers.

I would be willing to bet the third party are divorce attorneys because the stories are out of this world. I didn't really get close to that. So, to tell you the truth, I did not plan the end of the marriage. I just wanted to take into account what could happen financially, so let me put it this way if at the point you're already thinking about letting me commit. all these divorce lawyers that I don't even know if they work or not. I've heard it's a rumor, but I feel like there's a bigger problem, a much bigger problem.

These lawyers are not stupid, they are all very good. They have seen it all and the thing is that to negotiate in good faith you have to remember that you are not trying to deceive your partner. If you were just trying to cheat on your partner, like a car dealer. We're trying to maximize it because it's a one-time transaction, this is the partner you're going to be with for the rest of your life, so it actually requires a different way of

negotiating

, like when I was talking to my lawyer and that lawyer was negotiating. With my wife's lawyer I had to make concessions on things that I normally wouldn't make concessions on and that, to put it bluntly, I haven't had to make financial concessions in the last 25 years, right, yeah, so I'm suddenly wondering what what.

It's this taste in my mouth. I haven't tried this flavor of compromised bile, yes, but that's why I think it's really important. A couple of principles emerged for me, one is go slow to go fast. I should have done a better job with this. how let's talk about the meaning with the right meaning, go slow to go fast and the second was always remember the North Star, the North Star here will not receive an extra dollar nor will it protect the extra two dollars, it is the day we will get married . To this day, for the rest of our lives, that's the North Star and I like to put that in perspective, like when lawyers would say this or that, I had to constantly remind myself that my wife did it too and so right, I just want to say that she was excited for me. coming here and talking about this she really encouraged me because I wrote about it in my book.

I wrote some more details and asked him. I said, are you okay if I share this? and we talked about it. We both realized that going through this we were both quite alone, no one was talking about this publicly and we are both big fans. You know, she's a stylist. I do what I do. We love shedding light on things that people don't talk about publicly because we're both very. I'm curious and we both want to get better, so if she had said no, she would never have written this. She would never have come here and talked about this, but she actually said yes.

Go ahead and tell them about our experience because other people should know. This, whether you do it or not, you should know. I have questions, so this is going to be a super awkward question. I've made myself ask more questions than you to answer because they're putting you on the spot, but I'm the one who has the option to ask whatever I want, so this is something that I've seen a lot of people struggle with what I'm dealing with. point to mention and I want to know if it affected you and if so, how you used mental jiu-jitsu. or contortionism to get over it and that's if you're entering into a negotiation, say, for a prenuptial agreement and you're the person who's bringing disparate assets and income and that might not necessarily be a 51/49 split, I'm talking about this. it could be like a 90/10 split, 99 1 split and very often it is.

I mean, very often it can be when you look at the deal and the right amount, so it's very difficult for someone, let's say, who has made ten thousand dollars a day. year to imagine what it really means and what it takes to make a hundred thousand the same if someone makes like fifty grand a year, what does it mean in terms of sacrifice and planning and like losing Friday and the weekend worked and holiday to win a million? right dollars and all of a sudden you're going through a negotiation where someone who maybe hasn't made a decade or two of sacrifices is asking you for an amount that's greater than what you made in the first thirty years of your life, how?

Do you navigate that because there is viscerally? I know a lot of people and I'm one of them who is like that, it doesn't make sense and it also poses something like, wait a second, if that's the amount you pay, I would start to question myself. the other person's kind of motives are fine, well they were able to do whatever they wanted for above, how would I do it? That would make me feel very uncomfortable with myself too. I mean I think I 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 on a day to day basis I'm super I call it hot great I think most people or some people particularly those in debt money is like a ghost or a pixie it is a beast they are fighting well, they need to break the shackles of this debt.

I've gotten over those things for me, it's a tool and I use it for convenience, things like that, so I find myself going from nervousness about mentioning this to pride in being able to do it. I wanted to talk about the numbers and I was very proud of what I had accomplished and what it meant to us and then the resentment, you know, I definitely felt resentful because you know, for me, I look at the spreadsheet like I went up and more. there and how not to recognize that I found myself experiencing these emotions that I had honestly never felt about money and I think that's where a therapist helped me, but I should have done it sooner because it really wasn't healthy to just wallow in them for literally months and remember that we're like seeing each other day to day and that definitely affects you when you're planning a wedding with your partner, you can sequence it, you say, don't do that.

You know, I think it's a question that I don't have a good answer for. I think the bottom line is that there are certain things in life that just aren't fair, and one of them might be this, but that's not really the point. The point is not that I 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, but to win our marriage, which means that we will both come together as a team and if I have to compromise on some things that in business I would never have made a couple of the compromises that I made, but this is More important than my business, this is the person I will spend my last days with.

That really put things into perspective for me, it's like, oh, sometimes you learn about yourself just by watching what you do and I was like, Did I really agree to that 10th quarter that we've been discussing for a month? Yes, I do. Wow, my wife is so important to me and I realize that she is, so I don't know, I don't have a good answer for you about that, but I will tell you that I really felt emotions, I felt resentment and hatred. Feeling resentful is one of the most toxic emotions, but I think there's something bigger than being right about this now, maybe it's okay.

I mean, I think cutting off your nose to spite your face and be right doesn't make sense, yeah. I also think that it is possible to play not to lose or prepare for blind spots, why not try to win 100 at all costs, such as not being a and making a bunch of insistent demands based on the principle that there is practically no point. , that's fair, but walking up to something blindly and just offering yourself up like a piñata, yeah, that doesn't make sense either, okay, you know what's crazy about all this now, so once you sign it, it's actually done at the less in our country.

In case we're okay, thank God, we don't want to see this now as if we filed it. The real challenge, actually, since we got married about a year ago, has been spending day to day and now using. the tools that we learn from this therapist and also go slow to go fast like my dream, okay, my fantasy was to have this beautiful financial model, okay, that's what I wanted, like this model that we look at and everything is like going from one side to the other. What we have built has taken about eight or nine months.

What I realize now is emotions first. What does it mean? Who prepares dinner? Who takes out the trash? Let's do all that. The model part is like the last part and because we had In these difficult conversations before now we think, "Okay, let's start with the emotions that we have buffers," so if we spend a little bit more on eating out right now, it's well, we'll punch in the numbers later, as I've realized is the The numbers really come last, so we're both very grateful to have gone through the process, although I wish we could have.

I wish I had some guidance, but it's pretty funny,although once you sign it it's not like you're reviewing it every single one. day, yeah, it's the day to day, now it's literally the smallest things, like who picks up I will teach. being rich, the system is the idea that you don't really want to spend your valuable cognition on, for example, who buys deodorant or rice, have a system that automates it, boom, we were talking about how you spend a lot of time on it, but your relative who you thought was 65, you and your wife thought he was 65 or something, he ended up being 87 and uncle's and how regimented regiment is the wrong word how much of his life is routine right, he wakes up at the same time and we're just having coffee before and I said, I wonder how much of your longevity is that lifelong accumulation of avoiding decision fatigue, that just shouldn't consume your brain every day, so I think, like you have a playbook, I believe in a playbook for life.

Here are a couple of playbook rules, I have one, I call it queuing, it follows the book buying rule, if you ever see a book you're even remotely interested in, buy it, don't debate it, don't ask if it's the one. second best, just buy it. Ten dollars is the best money you have ever spent have a year of cash have it liquid available and if you don't have it accumulate it save for big expenses engagement ring wedding honeymoon all those things house subaccounts boom subaccounts when Now I eat in a restaurant my joy is that if I see something that looks good, I just order it and I also tell the people who eat with me to do the same, don't even think about it and my coworkers loved going out to eat with me. because I'm like a mess, like I got the bill, just a quick side note for anyone who hasn't seen it, it came out not too long ago from the time of this recording, but there's an amazing ESPN article about Coach Gregg Popovich and dinners. and Spurs wine is phenomenal, fantastic people can see it, they have a couple of areas in your life where you don't have any budget, it doesn't matter how much you spend, you just love it, unlimited, unlimited, there is 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 make any material difference in my life it's three dollars four dollars 5 dollars 6 dollars it doesn't matter buying it has something it could be so small like strawberries could be as big as anything eat the same thing this is for me personally a lot of people don't agree but eat the same thing almost the same thing every day I do it it's just decision fatigue.

I do the same, yes, and then also. This is what my wife and I have been talking about recently: Let's come up with some rules for our relationship. These are guidelines that we can change, but you know. planning a vacation we are going to stay with a friend for his birthday in Mexico City and we are looking at flights and I find ourselves deciding which flight should be economy, should be business, which hotel.this or that and I said, hey, let's go in In this, let's figure out where we like to travel together and in what style, but over the course of the next few months, let's come up with some ground rules, for example, if we travel more than five hours in business class or if we stay just the two of us, we don't We need a luxurious hotel, whatever the case, make a basic guideline so that you don't have to think about it all the time and even go down.

I like who took out the trash, let's just articulate that and be explicit so everything is on the table and that way any misconceptions are cleared up, so I love this general manual for life, especially what is this? What was your conclusion about the trash? oh man I took out the trash okay and it just revealed itself because she would notice the trash getting full and then she would take it out every once in a while but she was actually like would you mind taking out the trash? and it just became very clear in any relationship there are certain things that a person likes or doesn't like to do and the same goes for cooking, ironing clothes, yes, Cass cooks my iron.

A quick note on that, one thing I've found really helpful is whether it's with friends or your partner, but especially your partner agrees beforehand on a scale of 1 to 10 10 being absolutely honest you must have or you must not you must have no you can use a lot of tents so you only get a couple of tens in your pockets so don't spend it on nonsense but ask someone like zero who likes 1 to 10 how much you like doing this or 1 to 10 how much you hate it do this and it's okay if for you it's like you don't love taking out the trash but if so I'm five out of ten like six out of ten who cares like I don't really care she's like I grew up in such a way that I hate taking out Take out the trash, okay, well I'll take out the car, wait, so what's your ten on whether you like it or not, let's both go.

So, for example, I really like to cook, I don't have funds for cleaning, I love it, right, lassic, yeah, and what about something you hate? something I hate would be cleaning okay other things I hate would be for example me and much happier to pay for things if I can avoid decisions so if my partner is willing to handle the logistics we went to Burning Man , it was his first time and I. I knew what I was signing up for and I told him I'd go, but only if you handle the logistics, I'll pay for everything, but in terms of getting costumes and getting everything there, the bikes, the lights and everything. that thought, the thought that you need to be like this, the CEO of this operation and I'm happy to be like the controller, she approves the controls, I love it, but that's it, so I love that you're explicit and I love that . a 10 I have to think about that, I heard my wife talking to her parents and I grew up with my mom cooking food for us every night, every night, as if as soon as we came off the stove, she was giving us rotis or whatever. whatever he was doing. and we all ate together as a family and I really loved it, so every night my wife makes food or cooks it a couple of times and then she brings it to me and that's very meaningful. for me because it reminds me of my childhood and by the way the food we eat is extremely cheap, like we don't get the best cuts of meat, we don't care about that, but we carefully track all our macros and all that stuff , so we worry about that, but it's really about the meaning behind it macros 4p blue tone fat protein carbs yeah, the percentages of each, what the pie chart looks like I don't know the math on top of my head but it's like every week it changes depending on what my goals are and I think the meaning is really important and then there's a forecast of certainty that you know she likes it or she doesn't like it and I'll do crap is a perfect example.

I just found out that she doesn't really like picking up trash, no problem, it's easy for me to take it out, so get them on the same page and develop this manual of general rules of fair living that you're going to use especially. for things that aren't important, man, that really frees you up to really get into the things that are important, yeah, sure, so I know we don't have much time left, but I want to jump into one of these because I'm curious. what will you say in response to some of these questions and we may only have time for one or two, but these come from people on the internet, it's always a risky proposition, but they were upvoted or upvoted and they won.

Scott, no last name here indicates weirdos to me, I don't agree with what Tim teaches or preaches or Brian and I'll just rephrase it, but what do you think we disagree on? This is a good question, it could be anything but far away oh my gosh. I love this I think we disagree on morning routines Yes, I think they are overrated. Know. I think the best morning routine was decided about a year ago. It's about your psychology. It's about how much you sleep. It's about what you know. outlined on your calendar are all those softer details and I think you know, there are people who ask me every day what my morning routine is and I'm like, who likes it?

Do you think that if I ask Michael, I'm not saying that I? I'm not Michael Jordan, but if I ask Michael Jordan what shoes he wears or what his morning routine is, I won't be like Mike, and similarly, if you find out what kind of coffee I drink, you won't do what I do. do either but I know you're not saying that but that's what people are taking away and that drives me crazy well yeah I mean what the record was right in one person tries to impart and what people here are sometimes very different, thank you for yes. true, the gift that keeps on giving morning routines I think are number one for me, going back to what we just said, morning routines are an example of how to eliminate decisions, that's it, there's a little more for me in the sense that, as someone who had started with insomnia and had slept very poorly for several decades.

I would wake up and it wouldn't work for the most part, so by having a boot sequence that didn't require any thought, I'm not deciding what to have for breakfast. I'm not deciding. what's step number one: I do a b c d or e first no, I'll always do it right, well, whatever it is, it's been very helpful. I also know people equally or much more successful who have your answer, they are like I wake up, I have a cup of coffee, I realize that I know Instagram first, literally the first thing I do is go on Instagram while I'm in bed, it's the worst possible, but I like it, yes, and they are all cabins.

It's all cabins, I swear to God, the question that I think is also like a macro question worth asking is whether this person that you're looking for will be successful because of or in spite of what you're seeing, this is really important. It's especially important if you're studying people who have already reached escape velocity into some kind of success or financial freedom and are still moving up because hindsight isn't 20/20, a lot of people who are on top of the world and just They're putting together billion dollar deals every day, they don't remember very clearly what helped them when they were working in the office on Thanksgiving or whatever it was, this is a great point and by the way, very powerful, that's why I love your podcast because here We are two people who apparently don't agree on something, but now we're getting into the nuances and we can really crack a code of what the differences and similarities are.

I will totally agree with what you just said about the more successful you are or more. Every time you move away from something, the fewer details you remember. I will give you an example. My wife started. She used to be a senior buyer. Equinox left to start her own styling business about 18 months ago. I would listen to her making 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 have a business now, I have amazing employees, we have traffic coming in, you know, we have people coming in. and regular customers and all that, but when I started, that wasn't easy.

I would go weeks without a single person joining any of my shows and I forgot how emotional it is, the highs are so high and the lows are so low. and half the game in this is just living to fight another day, he just doesn't give up and he gets just a little bit better every day and I watched it and I listened to her and I watched her go through the ups and downs and it's amazing now this. month he told me how many clients he has made he has bookings for two or three more months it is amazing what he has achieved in eighteen months I would never have believed it but you forget and quickly forget the smallest details of what it means to wake up in the morning and I say: "wow , in the last four weeks I have not gotten a single client.

I will do it differently today, so I give a big shout out to every entrepreneur who is starting out, it is difficult and you always have to put the advice in context. what you hear and thank you for mentioning it because people need to know that not everything is rosy, it's hard when you start, it's hard for everyone, actually it should be hard, but if you keep going, hopefully, you're doing the right thing and you can achieve it . escape velocity so morning routines one thing we have somewhat different approaches to what else tools I think tools are super valuable people love to talk about tools but you know if you give Andre Agassi a wooden racket he will kick ass, so I think when I ask well if someone asked me what apps I use.

My apps are horrible. I do not use. Use as TripIt. That's all. But I think the most powerful things are the psychology, it's the systems that run through a Google Doc. My opinion on the tools and those are my two areas of disagreement. I'm curious to hear what you think about the tools and also if you disagree with me on anything. I provide a lot of tools because I think the details are useful, but it's the reasoning behind it, I figure we're probably on the same page and the tools are byproductsof principles or strategies, so, for example, I use TripIt.

I think it's underrated, yes, but people say, "Okay, great, I'll go." you take it away and that's going to be great, well yeah, but maybe, but what are the principles behind it? and it's to be able to avoid manual verification of things like door updates, it's to avoid a certain decision, certain manual activities that are being automated, right? It's so you don't have to go. I don't have to go to Google or anywhere else on my phone and search for fill-in-the-blank airline check-in, yes, because I can click a button and travel. do it and do it automatically, whether it's Delta United American, whatever all the rights are, the end of that principle, if you were to take it back, will allow you to figure out what tools to use or at least ask people for the right tools, but that's the way it is.

It's very easy to believe they say oh wow so-and-so is a great player so-and-so is a great businessman so-and-so is a great artist because he uses watercolors it's like not if they are oil watercolors Conte Crayons don't matter charcoal, graphite , you need to know the technique, the principles behind it and the process, then you can choose your tools. Yes, I think it's easy to become a tool fetishist without understanding why you're doing what you're doing. then you're like, where's the Solomon Islands, where they have the cargo cult or they have false leads and false towers and it's like, okay, cool, you've flown full of the best apps like you have 79 different rules for filtering of email and guess what you didn't do today, so okay, I agree with you on that, I think it's really good and I think the way you articulated what TripIt is and what the principles behind your Using TripIt is essential.

We use the same thing for the same reasons, but I also take the same principle and apply it to what I do in the morning and how I decide where to meet someone for coffee. All of that has been automated so I don't have to do it. Think again, so that's a good point, yes, and I would also say that it is possible, very possible, and in fact very common to procrastinate by searching for better and better tools. Oh, I do that all the time and I could do the vast majority of it. of what I do with a planner, yes, and in fact I think the finite nature is why I still use paper.

I still use note cards or little pieces of paper for to-do lists and things like that, because it's by nature finite. I can't have a list of 37 things I need to do, so in some ways I think putting restrictions on the tools you use in the same way that I had Neil Gaiman sitting right where you are on this podcast not too long ago and using very often a fountain pen and pads of paper to draw on and it sounds very romantic and it is in some ways but it also has a number of psychological and practical benefits but it looks very primitive it's not the ultimate cutting edge tool, okay, I love it, it's great explanation of the nuances behind the tools, yes yes I appreciate it and it's easy too.

I think for us we could disagree about tools all day, right? I mean, we could disagree with the implementation of several things, but here it is, I think one observation that is important is that you and I are not the same person, that is, like you. Since you like stylish sweaters , I'm wearing an $8 t-shirt that my mom bought me well, yeah, and they gave me these pants and these shoes and I'm not wearing socks, so we have different wishes that can be your vacation. different than mine your Indian family is different than my family on the east coast you know this country and that's okay that's cool and it also means that the way we approach problem solving will be different yeah that's a really good point and that but the principles, many of the principles, I think are very similar or similar, the values ​​and the principles are similar, otherwise I don't think we would have been friends as long as we totally agree and I think there is value in diversity How we think is also valuable to know that that will change over time, so when I got married, I'm like, oh wow, there's this whole world that I didn't understand before and now I'm learning that and I'm growing with my wife.

I think as we had relationships, we talked about how that changed us. Wow, and that's a pretty interesting topic and then you know if we had someone else here who might do it. If we didn't look alike or if we weren't our gender, we'd have different kinds of diversity of opinions, we'd have even more ways of thinking about how we approach problems, and I think what I've learned along the way, like when I wrote the book. For example, I was a little judgmental about what the rich life was in the first edition. I thought that's how you should invest, follow the principles and that's where you end up now, ten years later, there are a lot of people in the firefighting community. for example, that's financial independence, retiring early and a lot of people are happy to acquire enough to basically be able to live on 30 grand a year, live a very simple life and if they want to have a fun afternoon, maybe go to the park and We're like If we didn't need materialistic things, we are happy and back then I think I would have been quite critical about it now I have realized look, there is lean fire, there is fat fire, there are all kinds of different fire and some people don't.

In fact, most of Americans will never lay off, they will work until retirement age, but the rich life looks different for different people and part of that comes from how we were raised, where our parents tell us and then part of that. Do we want to change that story or do we just want to continue with that retirement question? I was going to ask this earlier, so I mean, you know, I wrote about this in my equally fraudulent-sounding book. hours a work week a thousand years ago, but this is the concept of retirement, replace it with financial freedom because I want to ask you what that means or how you think people should think about it because I think thinking too much about retirement is extremely porous in the Best case scenario, like it's super flawed and well, you're in your book, you had a great example of mini retirements and you want to buy a Ferrari, why don't you rent it for a week?

Yeah, great review o I think okay 20 years from now, everything I'll do is based on being able to buy a boat and I'll live on my boat and sail the Mediterranean for 20 years after that, it's like maybe you should get on a boat first. Yeah, and try it for a weekend, like going to take a sailing course, you might get out of that situation that sucks and I was the one who felt sick the whole time. Okay, it's good to know now and not when you've slaved away and finished. something you find disgusting for 20 years and people screw up math too, right?

I mean, they often don't calculate and end up having a very difficult time in retirement per se, so with your students, how do you encourage them to think about the goal? Yeah, well, I don't think most people are automatons who sit back and say here's my 50-year goal and let me reverse-engineer it into what I'm going to do this week. I know two people like that and they are 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 want to have a little fun, watching Netflix or having a good conversation with your partner or your friends and that's a good day and it's okay now to get people out of that and make them think a little bit bigger it might be taking a vacation that maybe they haven't taken it might be going To a tea event they may have never thought about going to, it's these experiences that people remember.

I would say your comment about retirement is really true for people our age. I don't hear anyone say like when I retire that my pension like those conversations aren't happening. with our generation, so there's more of what I want to do, there's more spending on things like wellness, vacations and experiences, and we're seeing that in the economy as well. What I tell people are a couple of things number one that you might not think about. Right now you want to retire, but when you look at what everyone else who reaches a certain age is doing, if everyone does something, it might be true, so plan it like you don't want to buy a house, but almost everyone else does.

I saved enough for the down payment. I don't need to use it, but it's there if I need to. Similarly, don't wait well and think big, so don't wait means taking a three-day trip and thinking big is like your retirement doesn't have to be just sitting around, it can actually be much bigger, that money dial, turn it to ten and you could travel with a repairman, it could last a month, a year or two months, but in order to do it, I need to build a muscle now to think big, people have this linear belief that once it happens this fork in retirement, then the curtain opens and I get to do all these cool things, man, if you haven't been doing it until you're 60.

You're not going to magically make it to sixty in one day, so I would encourage people to start building the muscle like you told him 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 in the city over the course of the last six months and thought I live in this amazing city and I'm not even taking advantage of it, so I put it on my calendar at least once per quarter, I will do a cultural event like a show or a tea tasting, in any case, something I could only do in New York, so it is now on the calendar and you can say that it sounds unromantic, but I think that it's what I needed to do to continue to strengthen my ability to try new things, so whatever works for people do it, but I would say don't wait until you're of retirement age, yeah, and I feel like there's a lot in our conversation. has come back to you making a decision that eliminates a thousand decisions in the sense that you put it on your calendar and to me, if it's not on the calendar, it's just not really right, so even what we call batch conversations with me and my girlfriend for discussing certain constant topics, not problems in the sense of problems, but we have regularly scheduled times to talk about certain things, we do the same thing and it's on the calendar, so it's true with certain types of similar dates. nights, it's true if we talk well about my relationships, it's true for taking trips together, yes, it's true for visiting my family, visiting his family and by making that decision and putting it on the calendar, you preserve your brain power and your emotional resilience, etc. other things that are less predictable, do you have anything consistent that you talk about in your records?

Yeah, we have a full format and everything, yeah, okay, so this is amazing. I love meeting smart people who apply their intelligence to a different part of life, for example there is a book by Gretchen Rubin that we both know and she is very smart and decided to write a book on how to maintain your home and your workspace organized and I'm like, yeah, I bought it and the things you write about there. It's smart, it's interesting, it's exactly what you would think a smart person who does something for a year would come up with and the fact that you and your girlfriend have we call it a contact base or a registry and you have a consistency that is in the calendar I love it and yes, you know, I want to know what is in it, how to do it, what surprised you, because we are building ours and we are modifying it, and I say this is incredible, she is much smarter in anything that involves emotions, oh that's funny, my wife was the one who suggested that most do much more, much more observant than me, it's like two cavemen talking, yeah, she, it's a lot, yeah, we're fine, we're fine, that's fine, great, that's how it would be. be our chicken we could be good because I don't feel like having this conversation uh yeah we're good okay cool oh no maybe this will be useful to people we'll spend a few minutes on this we have a series of rituals and things on the calendar that I think are important to nurturing and nurturing the relationship and an epiphany that I think we both had at one point was that I have a tendency to shut down emotionally or get defensive with a lot of questions that involve emotion or vulnerability.

Emotional just isn't something I was really exposed to growing up, yeah, I mean, there was at school or with the coaches, I mean, really the feeling was and like I say, my family as a whole, but I come from a pretty one, it's the right thing to do. The word here stoic and not hip cool like Marcus is really a meaning, but as a fairly stoic environment as a Protestant, we are at school, for example, you know, and in training the general feeling was like don't tell me the good. things because good things take care of themselves, like telling me what needs to be fixed, yeah, turns out that's not the case.

I have reachedrealizing the best approach for longevity in the relationship I want to have with my girlfriend and that we are trying to be. I pointed out to explain why this is amazing because just think about what brought you here, yes, something brought you here on a very elite level and it would be easy to say, "Oh my God, I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing." doing because I won that game well they were playing a different game well I guess the question I didn't ask for a long time is how much did it cost yeah and what was the collateral damage wow it breaks it's like yeah Hulk. great superhero, quite a mess, it's good and I think there was a lot of collateral damage that I probably didn't notice and it certainly didn't weigh much because I thought, yeah, but look what I totally did or yeah, but look what happened and that excused a lot of mess 100% so she is, but what we realized after it was pointed out to me was or what I then told my girlfriend because I was curious how to phrase things better. that she wouldn't have a disproportionate emotional response, that's great, that she was curious about that, yes, she's very good at asking questions and probing because if I think I have sensitivity as someone who has been effectively self-employed for decades, I like that.

I have my headphones on and I'm in the middle of a project that I don't want to stop and have a five-minute conversation about something weird, and I'm unnecessarily rambling about things like that and she's like, well, how? Should she phrase things in a way that makes it easier and less distracting for you and I remember saying that it has nothing to do with the content, it's all about timing and that it was a real step forward for our relationship, not because we had the conversation? This is really important because yes, you can go fill in the blank seminar, you can read, fill in the blank book, you can take the drug, fill in the blank and have this incredible epiphany and not do anything with it, which we did.

From that point on it was then set up what we call these batch times once a week or once every two weeks where we sit down and she has the opportunity to talk to me when I'm ready to talk about things that I'm going to do. feel uncomfortable and she can handle it. every time she's more adaptable and resilient that way, but I can blame bringing, I can blame being just a weirdo who knows or just, you know, a heteronormative man who doesn't like to talk about who knows, having that blocked time where I like to steal and warm myself up psychologically to talk about things that are going to make me uncomfortable, it's very valuable and the format we currently have, so we couldn't find any great advice on it and Sephora that What we have is that we're going to take notes, we have meeting notes after everyone, yeah, and it's and where we capture what's in bullet points, what was said, so we start with one person, we'll start and they'll say. what they think they have been doing well is good and it didn't start this way but it ended, they start with what they think they have been doing well or better and then talk about what they want where they think they are.

I've dropped the ball or I could focus more, which is very helpful in calming things down because they bring it up, so yeah, then they'll tell the other person what they're doing right and then they'll tell the other person let's get started. with something like "you need to fix" or that was probably my writing and then it was opportunities for growth and now it's what I would like to see more beautiful and that the writing turns out to be really important, so it's like what I think I'm doing well since last time we reviewed what I think I could do better what you're doing well and then what I'd like to see more of, oh yeah, and then we make notes and we each forward it to the other person and we can take a look at it and that's awesome .

It usually takes an hour, maybe two hours, and this. in the morning or at night, usually in the afternoon or at night on a weekend, oh, okay, interest is the most common, okay, yes, then the note part is also interesting, like this that you take notes quickly and say that or she will know that one of us will take notes on the everything okay, okay, God, there is something like a secretary or a note taker for that session, that's great, so it could be me. I take notes in notebooks frequently, so I take notes in a notebook and then take a photo on the senator or her.

I'll take it in the Senate notepad, it's interesting, an interesting part too is that each person will have some involvement in the game in terms of recording it, yeah, and then I have an Evernote file where I put all of our chickens in reverse chronological order , so the most recent one is at the top, yeah, so I can go back and look and see if it's okay, we did it and this isn't, like it's a problem, it's like it's okay, I kept my end of the deal , I said I was going to work. on something three weeks ago and then I forgot about it, but also later, not only to avoid the bad, but to look good, yes, as you imagine, after a year, you go and say, oh my God, as if we would have been super. consistent and I like to look at the things we used to talk about and look at the things we are talking about now, yes, the good thing, highlighting what is being done well is really important and goes against all habitual behavior that I have built to throughout my entire life, but I've realized that without that, yeah, it can be really difficult, so one of the things that I love about this, first of all, thank you for sharing those things that are super useful, Ness as we start this ritual on our own and I think this is a great example and by the way my girl like me my girlfriend did 90% of it so I agree but you want to give her proper credit , I think it's an example where the ritual itself can be even more important than the content, yes, the ritual of having the time, having it on the calendar, respecting it, always being mentally present and following it, that's like the 90% of the game and that just shows this incredible mutual respect from both of them.

They have each other and the fact that they take it seriously and are no strangers to writing an agenda. I think a lot of people think that having a Google planner or saving for an engagement ring is such a weird or weird thing. No, I'm not even dating anyone? I think it's strange to live life like most people you know. I think it's strange. I would prefer to plan ahead. I would pick some things that I want to do differently and just not apologize for it, so I think it's really cool that you're sharing that, even to like, what are the questions?

Because I'm going to take some of them and take them to my wife and we'll make them, it's been, it really has been. It's a big deal for us, and like you said, I think the intention in the act of scheduling it is of great value, as well as the implementation, the fact that you're both setting aside time to keep the relationship on the rails and improve. in itself is going to have an impact on the relationship and there are times also when we batch these sessions and schedule them and she is better at this than me.

In fact, she could find any gram. Pretty useful, although I'm not convinced it's more than acceptable astrology for business, basically, but in any case, any of them might be interesting as something that fits into this, so we can talk about that in another podcast, but It is very important to her. schedule things and if you see if we schedule it for, say, four or five weeks, there are times when we'll see it and we'll know it's coming, okay, we're going to do this and it's like now we're good. There are times when we just don't have a critical mass of things to talk about, it's like now they can wait, like if we do it, we can delay it a week, yes, and it does, but you want My experience so far is much better have it on the calendar, yeah, and then say, hey, we can play hook and opt out instead of Alton exactly then so we don't have it on the calendar and have to hit DEFCON five when things boil over, buddy. everything that is important in life should be excluded everything that should be by default is going to happen is on the calendar and whether it is calling your mom every Sunday night whether it is going to train at the gym three, four or five times a week, whatever it is, just the intention of writing it down and putting it on the calendar, including the intention of everyone listening and saying what are the four things I want to achieve each week, I want to call my mom or my dad, I want to train, I want to do it.

Whether you want to read a book for 10 minutes and then put it on your calendar, it doesn't matter if it's in the morning or at night, whatever works for you and instantly separates you from being accepted, from being whipped by the winds that remain and well and simply going where the world takes you you decide don't let the world decide for you here here super feet put the security how do you say your name Franklin Ramiz say T ok then you have the second edition of I will teach you to be rich available and I'm sure, but by the time people hear this, it may be available, it should be available and it has new pages of AE material, yes, tools, ideas about money in psychology, stories from readers who have used the book, these scripts we were talking about yeah and oh yeah look at those actual reader results yeah yeah we're seeing what they look like right now.

I wanted to show people that rich people, a lot of people think rich people look a certain way, but I wanted to put pictures of them. readers men women black white young old we all have someone we want to see represented, you know, I saw an ad on the train for an Indian dad in Hindi and I thought, you know what? Ten years ago, that wouldn't have been meaningful to me, but now I'm really appreciating it and representing it, so that's what I wanted in this book and you've tagged a couple of things for me to review later, which I'll review.

I'm just going to read the tabs. you don't have to go through all the stories of the following victim culture, I'm sure you're a big fan of word for word joke scripts, ignore the invisible reddit scripts, crypto love and money, so you have a lot here and like me . mentioned above oh I'm just going to read the first paragraph at the back of the book because I haven't seen this in a while just a quick quick backstory note I remember when you were writing this oh I came to you for advice and I gave You, I Gave You a Bird for a Bird by Anne Lamott and here's the first paragraph of the copy above for as many lattes as you want.

It's a reference to people who recommend that you cut back on all these things as if you have a lot to spend. extravagantly on the things you love, live your rich life instead of tracking every last expense and you know what I've always enjoyed watching and learning from our testing that you do, you experiment, you actually implement these things and provide scripts. and real algorithms to achieve very specific results. It's amazing to see you, thanks mate, it's been a pleasure, I love catching up and thanks for having me. Yes, people can find you on Twitter, on the roommate, on Instagram, on the roommate and on the website, on WT comm, is there one? other places where people can see you, see what you're doing or anything else you want to say before I finish this episode, get the book, it's on Amazon and come visit me at any of these social places and the site and the newsletter and would love to talk more to everyone about your rich life ravit thank you so much for coming thank you so much and to everyone listening thank you for joining you can find the show notes links to everything we've discussed on the tim dot blog podcast slash along with everyone the rest of the episodes and until next time, keep a smart track of the schedule of the important plan that you are grouping into sessions and thank you for tuning in and I will get back to you very soon.