I Will Teach You to Be Rich | Ramit Sethi | Talks at Google

How's everybody doing? Alright, a few months ago, I got a DM from somebody on Instagram, and she was asking for help with a financial question she had. And she wanted to know what to do about her husband spending way too much on iced tea. I said, let's do it. Tell me, how much does he buy? How much iced tea? She goes, it's crazy. Every day before he goes to work, he buys iced tea 20 times a month. I said, oh my God, how much does this iced tea cost? She said, $3 every time. We could make it at home. And then I said, out of curiosity, what's your household income? Dead silence. And anyone who's ever chatted with anyone online knows what 20 minutes of no response feels like. It's a lifetime. Finally, she writes back. She says, I'm not comfortable sharing that number with you. Period. She hit me with the period. I said, look, I don't need the number. Just give me the ballpark. Anyone want to guess how much their household income is? $300? Okay. Anybody else? $500? Wow. People at Google, their guesses are a little higher than average. Got it. I see the room that I'm in. Okay, gotcha. She and her husband's household income is $600,000 per year. Few gasps in the room. Maybe a few of us saying, so stupid. Why is she worrying about $3 iced teas? But I actually think this story tells us so much about money and psychology. I think it first tells me how easy it is to judge other people for spending on ridiculous things or for judging other people. I think it tells us how most of us are asking $3 questions in life when really we should be asking $30,000 questions. And as we'll talk about today, we should actually go even one level higher to be asking even more important questions. And I think it also shows how many of us have never thought about what our rich life is. And if we have a partner, we've never really talked about it with them. This conversation was so revealing, and I've had millions of them through emails. How many people here have read my emails before? Cool. Through social media, through in-person meetings like this, and I've learned so much about why we do the things we do with money. So if I were to ask you, what does a rich life mean to you? What would you say? In fact, who's willing to share what a rich life means to them? Just raise your hand. I'll toss this to you. It's okay. There's no right or wrong answer. Yes. I'm going to toss this. Comfort. Okay, great. Who else? Toss it to somebody else whose hand is up. Anybody else? Yes. What does it mean to you? Keep it going. Options. Very good. Who else? Toss it around to anyone who's got their hand up. Comfort. Options. Who else? Shout it out. Don't worry. I can hear you. Happiness. Good. What else? Balance. No stress. I like it. Okay, very good. Man, these answers are actually very positive and I love that. When I ask this question around the country and to my readers, I typically get three answers that encompass about 95% of the common responses. The first one is freedom. And I say, that sounds great. What does freedom mean? Comfort. Options. I always say, what does that mean? And when I say, what does freedom mean to you? The answer is always the same. I want to do what I want, when I want. And I say, okay, that's fine. Man, a little aggressive. What do you want to do? And then they go like this. They've never thought about what they actually want to do. What does their rich life mean? The next common answer is a million dollars. No regard given to whether they live in Kansas or Manhattan. Just a million dollars. I don't even bother asking what they're going to do with the million dollars, because if that's the answer, they haven't thought about what it actually means. The third answer on what does a rich life mean to you? The most common one is, I want to pay off my debt. I actually find this to be the most haunting of all. It's no surprise that if the entirety of your rich life is the dream of paying off debt, it's no surprise that you're not living it. Because nobody wakes up in the morning and says, yeah, I'm going to get this debt. It's not motivational. It's not inspirational. It's not aspirational. It's just a task. It's like a to-do item on your calendar. And what I want to talk about is going beyond the simplistic answers. When I moved to New York, my rich life was being able to buy an appetizer at a restaurant. That specific. That small. Because growing up, I never could order appetizers. We couldn't afford it. Then it was being able to take a taxi to go to a meeting like this and not have to go on the subway because I didn't want to arrive sweaty. I mean, look at this body hair. I'm coming. I'm sweaty if I get on the subway. So I wanted to get in that. It doesn't cost that much money. But that was a rich life to me. Notice again, the specificity. When I ask people what their rich life is, I want to hear answers like that. Now, they could be bigger. Mine have certainly gotten bigger. But I want to hear the specific answers of what a rich life means to you. That's what we're going to talk about today. This became more important for me as I was starting out learning about money. And I discovered that the most popular word for financial experts is the word no. No, you can't buy lattes. No, you can't go on vacation. In fact, no, you can't do anything with your money. Just take it. Go hide in a cave for 75 years and maybe you can spend a little bit of it. I just looked around at my friends and I did not want to live that kind of life. I wanted to go out. I wanted to buy a round of drinks without having to feel guilty. And as I got older, I wanted to experience different things using my money. It's funny. We live in this paradoxical culture that on one hand, it's very puritanical. A lot of finger wagging experts telling us what we can't do with our money. No, no, no. On the other hand, what's the first thing we do when we wake up in the morning? We roll over. We open up our phone, start scrolling Instagram and find our annoying friend who's posting from Bora Bora on a Wednesday. How does he do it? I don't know. Which one wins? Is it the puritanical side or the consumer side? Of course, it's the side that's going to let us buy whatever's in front of us. We live in a society that's engineered to get us to buy more, usually unthinkingly. And so what do we do? We follow that. We buy it, whether it's the trip, the clothes, whatever. And by the way, I'm not here to judge anyone for spending on anything you like. And if anything, I'm going to encourage you to spend more. But we feel guilty because after we buy that, we go back and what do we see? Some person telling us what we shouldn't be doing with our money. I think people are smart. I think that people don't need another article telling us not to buy $3 purchases. I think we don't need another article telling us to unscrew our oven light because we can save $0.13 per year. We don't need it. What I've learned, whether it's with politics, money, fitness, food, is people are smart and people crave the truth. They don't just want to know generic problem, generic guidelines. They want to know the specifics. Tell me, where do you invest your money? What are the fees you pay? How did you afford to go on that vacation? Tell me the percentages of your asset allocation. Get that specific. And I think people crave the truth about money in a way that has not been addressed. That's one of the reasons that I wrote this book. So, as you can see, most of the, well, as you can see, first of all, this is a room that's very atypical when it comes to a money talk. Typically, what happens with money is in our 20s, we ignore it. Whatever, later. In our 30s, we're like, oh, I have a little bit of money sitting around. Maybe I should probably do something with it. And then 40, uh-oh. Maybe we have kids. Maybe we have a mortgage. Certainly, life has started to catch up with us. And we say, uh-oh, I better do something about this. Now, this is an atypical room. We know that from the amounts you guys tossed out for household income. Fine. But also for everybody watching, it doesn't matter if you live in this city or that. It doesn't matter if your income is this or that. Again, most of us have been taught, most of us have been told over and over how to save. But no one has actually taught us how to spend. Most of us, like I said, are asking $3 questions. No one has pushed us to go beyond that. What's next? I'd like to start off today by showing, not telling, showing everyone in the room how money can be something that brings us joy, not anxiety, embarrassment, guilt, and shame. Classic. I would like to ask, I'm going to make this a little dynamic, because I love hearing answers when you get a chance to talk to the person next to you. So if you're in the room, get ready to talk to the person next to you. Introduce yourself. If you're watching, just play along. What I would like you to answer, turn to the person next to you, introduce yourself. And in just 60 seconds, I'm going to come back. I want to know the answer to this question. What is something you spent money on in the last two weeks that made you smile? Something you look back on and it made you smile. It could be going out to a nice restaurant. It could be hopping in a taxi instead of the subway on a hot day. Anything in the last two weeks. Let's take 60 seconds and then I'll bring you all back. Okay, please pass that mic around. If you want to share your answer, please raise your hand. We will get a mic over to you. I want to hear from you. What is something you spent in the last two weeks? Let's get those mics going around the room. What is something you spent in the last two weeks that just made you smile? Go ahead. Staycation. Beautiful. A staycation. Where'd you stay? In the city? You went to a hotel? In Dumbo. Great. Okay, who's next? Surfing lesson. Awesome. Who's next? Awesome. Beautiful. Do we have somebody over here? Okay, let's get one more. We got some up here in the front. If you've got a mic, just shout it out. I bought a phone for my mom's birthday. Love it. All right, let's get one more. All right. Maybe wince too, but a ring. A ring. All right, congratulations. Beautiful. Okay. This is a totally different... Man, you guys are good. Did you hear the energy in the room when we were talking about what we like? I was planning to come in here and talk about some boring compound interest. You guys are more fun than that. We're not talking about compound interest today. We're going to talk about a rich life. Okay. Look at the joy. Look at the happiness. Just with this two-week thing of what do you like, what made you smile. Everybody teaches you how to save. Nobody talks about how to spend. People want the truth. They want to know how to think about bigger, more important things with their money than saving $3. Yes, you should save money. Yes, you should automate your investments. Low cost, long-term investment. Yes. I'm not saying don't do that, but there's so much more to talk about with money than how to scrape $3 here and there. So that's what we are going to talk about, how to use money to create our rich lives. Now, 10 years ago, I wrote this book. I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Came out in March 2009. Did anybody buy this book, first edition? Okay. Anybody buy it in March 2009? I don't believe in market timing, but that was awesome time for a book to come out. Bottom of the recession. If you bought that book and followed the advice, you are set for life. Okay. So my publisher started emailing me and they were like, let's do an update. And I was like, why? I write something to be timeless. I don't. Good advice is timeless. In fact, some of my favorite books are decades, decades or even centuries old. I resisted for a long time. But meanwhile, I have these bookmarks that I save online. I was saving all these bookmarks about what was changing in the financial industry. And there was a lot. There are new accounts. Robo advisors didn't exist back then. I had switched my own credit card for extra perks and I'd switched my accounts. Things had changed in my own life as well. I had grown my business to dozens of employees and 40,000 customers. And I got married, which was amazing and also challenging from a financial perspective, really having those conversations. And I think I thought about, I realized that I had started to think about money differently. And this was, this is a realization that continues to unfold for me. When I was 22, if you asked me, what does money mean to me? I would have said it's good and I want more. That's pretty much the level of intellectual rigor that I brought to the table on that one. And actually, I think a lot of people, if you put a challenge in front of them and they are achievement oriented, they're just going to go get it. They may not think about why or how does this fit into the context of my rich life. They're like, you said a KPI, I'm going to get that KPI. What I have learned now along my financial journey, as my business has grown, as I've gotten married, as I have talked to even more people about debt, earning more salary negotiation, finding a dream job, starting a business, is that I liken my journey with money to the journey that I took with fitness. About 10 years ago, I decided to get into, get more fit. And I started with a very simple reason, which was pure vanity. I was like, I want to look like that. And I think vanity can be a good reason to get started with something. But I think if any of us have done something that we got good at, whether it be an instrument or programming or a different language, you might start for one reason. What I found is that I ended up falling in love with the craft and the discipline to go every single day. And to know that, yeah, you might look a certain way, but that's actually a byproduct of all the work that you've put in every single day and perfecting that craft. Same with money. Whereas I used to go after money, now I realize that money is the byproduct of doing all the right things. And I actually remember this as recently as six months ago, we're on our honeymoon and I love hotels. I keep a list of hotels that I want to go to and like, I love them. And I remember we were staying at the last place on our honeymoon and we were already happy because we're on our honeymoon and just having the time of our lives. But I remember being even more happy because I was at this dream hotel that I'd been wanting to stay at for years. And I was trying to figure out why am I so happy, even happier than the baseline. And what I realized was being able to be there with my wife, but also be able to be there and not have to worry about, can we afford this? Or can we order room service? That meant that I had done all the right things for years. I'd showed up at work. I got a team, which is an amazingly talented team. We made the right decisions. We recovered when we made the wrong ones. And now this is the payoff. This is one of the rewards of our rich life. I would have never thought like that at 22. I would have said like, what's in my Excel spreadsheet and what's in my account? That's just a number. But to be able to get in a taxi and avoid the sweat, or now to be able to dream bigger and go to a dream hotel with my wife, way more meaningful. So I learned to go beyond just the dollar amount. And that is one of the key things that I want to encourage everyone here to take away. I'm going to show you how we do that. Remember how I said, one of my philosophies is to spend extravagantly on the things you love, as long as you cut costs mercilessly on the things you don't. It's a word that you don't hear too much in the financial industry. Spend extravagantly? What are you talking about? You got to cut back. You know, again, three cents here, three dollars there. That's a rich life somehow. That's what most say. But I don't believe that. I haven't found that to be true in my life. So I would like now to ask you to turn to the person next to you in just a second. And I'd like to ask you to answer this question. What is something you love spending money on? Not like, not it gave you a smile, but something specific that you love spending money on. Tell them why. And for those of you who are willing to tell them how much you spend on it. Let's do 60 seconds. I'll bring you back. All right. Let's bring it back. I want to hear from you. The room wants to hear from you. Put your hand up if you're willing to share. Please. We've got mics going around. I want to hear what is something you love spending money on. Let's get those hands up. Don't be shy. There's literally no wrong answer. It is only what you love. So we're going to get a mic over here. Meanwhile, let's get the mics. We've got one over there. Let's keep your hands up. We'll get the mics going around. Okay. Over here. What do you love spending money on? Books. Tell me more. Why? Because I feel like I'm getting knowledge every time I buy one. I'm getting something very valuable in return. Amazing. Do you have a bookshelf in your house? Yes. That's my dream. One of my dreams is to have a massive bookshelf in my apartment or house. I have something called a book buying rule. Ramit's book buying rule is if you ever think about buying a book, just buy it. Don't agonize. Don't debate. $10. Yes, it's self-serving. Somebody asked me in the back, they're like, were you rich before you wrote the book? I'm like, I make like 50 cents per book. That's not making anybody rich. That's not the point. I love that. And I love that books are your love and joy. They're one of mine as well. I also love taking the things that I love and putting simple rules around it. Why should you even debate for two seconds a $10 purchase which can have an author's lifetime of work in it and that can measurably change your life? Never think about it. There are things that we should think about when it comes to the biggest purchases of our lives. Yes, we need to build models and understand it. But a $10 purchase that could change your life and clearly has, love it. Who's next? Let's go over here. Yes, please. Cleaning lady and a nanny. Okay. Tell me why. With the nanny, I love, I mean, it's so expensive, but I love not to have to worry for when the kids have a day off at school, when they're sick. We used to so stress out about it. And now with the guilt of paying that huge sums of money every month comes with this relaxation of, okay, they're sick. We can still, you know, they have a person that they love that's taking care of them. We can still go off to work and do our thing. And same with the cleaning lady. It's just such a luxury to come back to a clean house and, you know, and not have to do it ourselves. Thank you. Thank you for being so candid. Did you hear the words that she used? Relaxation, relief, luxury. Not words you typically hear when you're talking about personal finance. I really love that. I think we probably share the same money dial. We'll get to that in one second. You and I have a lot in common. Although I don't have kids at this point, I hear what you're saying and I can feel, I can see the smile on your face and feel the relief in what you're saying to know that your child is safe and that you can also do what is fulfilling to use. Amazing. Thank you for sharing that. Who's got another one? Yes. Who's got the mic? Oh, here. Go ahead. I love buying vinyl records for sure. Vinyl records. Okay. Why? And would you just raise your hand high so I can see? Thank you. Why do you love them? I really like the process of finding them. Sometimes it's not about money. It's just kind of discovering them. It's not about money? What do you mean? Yeah. What do you mean? Well, what do I mean? I think I get excitement from when I see it and I don't think of the price tag at that point. I think about what its quality is and what it sounds like. And then money is just this factor of me getting it to my house. And I like the allocated time I have to listen to it and pick up the needle and kind of take myself to listen to an album fully. Wow. A very interesting journey. A very tactile experience too, by the way. Putting it down. Almost like the equivalent of making coffee. Someone who really loves coffee. I want to smell the beans. I want to grind it myself. I love the way you talk about it. You know, it's funny. We teach people how to start a business. And one of the things we talk about, people are petrified to charge money. And we talk about when you understand your customer and when you find the right customer, price is a mere triviality. And you demonstrate that. When you say you love buying vinyl, you mentioned that you like to go through the journey, the process of finding it. That's very much like when I travel, I want to research it all. And I almost get half the joy from just finding out where we can go. And then being there is an added bonus. So thank you for sharing that. Let's get one more. Yes, sir. I'm a collector. I've always been a collector. My current collecting thing are military, high-end military miniatures, because they remind me of history. Most of my collections have always been about things that relate to history. And they help me learn. They help me put things in perspective, things like that. Wow. Is it expensive? Yeah. Do you care? A little bit. That must be very expensive. Okay, I like it. You know what's interesting? I don't know if you live in your living situation. But I can almost imagine painting a picture of you going in this area in your living space of having this history where you go. And like you said, it gives you perspective. It's a respite in your apartment or your house that gives you a bigger picture, a bigger vision of what you're doing. Priceless. 20 years from now, you're going to look back and say, oh, I wish I hadn't spent that extra X dollars. No, this is something you live, probably live and enjoy every day. So thank you for sharing that. I call these money dials. Every one of us has at least one money dial. We all intuitively know what our money dial is. It didn't take long for anyone to turn to the person next to them and share what you love. A money dial is the thing you love spending money on. It gives you joy. You actually want to spend more on it. Price is a mere triviality. And if I asked you, what would you do with the next $10,000 beyond the people give a lot of B.S. answers when you ask that question to like, I'd pay off all my debt. I'm like, then why haven't you already? If you had $10,000 more, you would happily put it towards this thing. That's a money down. Why is it called a money down? Because like a radio dial, you can turn that dial way up. You can spend extravagantly on the things you love. How extravagantly? Well, we're about to find out. I would like you to turn to the person next to you. And this time, here's the question. What if you could quadruple your spending on that thing you love? What would your life look like? And what would your life feel like? 60 seconds. Put your hand up. We'll get the mics to you. And I want to hear from you. Yes. If you could quadruple your spending on the thing you love. So I said travel. It's like the one thing I will just spend whatever on. But if I could quadruple spending, I'd probably not fly Norwegian economy. And not stay at hostels or Airbnbs. I'd probably kind of amp up the luxury aspect. Tell us what amping it up would be for you. Yeah. So if I could buy a first class ticket, I would like to have that option. I'd probably go places further away that I've never been to. Or flights that I've kind of ruled out because they're too expensive. I would take them anyway. And do you have a sense? Do you have a secret list? What's the place you would go to? Well, before they're underwater, I'd love to go to the Maldives. So that is probably number one on my bucket list. Thank you for sharing. Thank you. Yes, yes. The mind's not very deep. But I would be the most fit person you've ever met. Because I love fitness and I love fitness classes. And I do close my eyes to my monthly bill on that because I spend what I want. OK. But if I was very rich, it would be great. OK. I heard a lot there. You mind if I ask you a couple of questions? I'm a little nervous. Don't be nervous. Don't be nervous because I share the same. That's one of my money dials as well. Fitness. And so thank you for sharing that. How come you started off by saying mine's not that deep? People are talking about their family. I know she set the bar a little high. She's like talking about my kids are safe. And you're over here saying, like, I want to go work, you know, work out at Rumble. I get it. Yeah. OK. But what's behind it? Why do you love fitness? And hold that up. I love fitness for a number of reasons. But from what you said, I do like the discipline of it and having that routine. And it helps to clear my head and keep me balanced. But then also through it, I've met a whole community of people. And that has become a really big part of it. Because when you go often and you're seeing the same people at 7 a.m. in the morning. Yeah. You kind of have a connection with that, too. Does anybody in this room feel that a community and discipline is actually a very deep set of concepts? Thank you for sharing that. We often talk ourselves out of the things we love. We often minimize them as if they're just vain. But your rich life is yours. It's not mine. It's not your family's or parents. It's yours. And what I want to encourage everybody here is to really dial in on that and to be unapologetic about it. The most common money dials, by the way, are food, travel, health and fitness. And then there's roughly there's a bunch more. Mine is convenience. I love every single thing to be like a ballet. I want to wake up in the morning. Everything is just moving. My calendar is like perfectly organized. When I travel, my assistant activates our travel protocol. And I'm not kidding. I know it sounds like a serial killer, but it works. It's so good. Most of the people here are like, this guy's insane. But that's what I love. And I don't apologize for it. On the other hand, there are things I just don't care about. We'll talk about cutting costs mercilessly in a second. But I want to hear more. I want to hear what else would it look like if you quadrupled your spending on the things you love? We got a hand up here. Yes. Oh, so I'm really into personal growth books. So I think that if I had a lot of money, I'd sign up for direct mentoring with maybe with the authors. I'm like that. But those are really expensive. Usually, how expensive could go up to like 10k? I think. Cool for a session. Love that self development. I love that. That's my whole business. I love that you invest in yourself. But I also live it. I don't just sell it to other people. I also attend a bunch of classes, conferences that I don't need to. But I love it. Right. So I truly believe in that. And I appreciate you saying that. What I really loved about your answer is what most people do when they answer the quadruple question is they think very linearly. They say one of the I had somebody in D.C. who said, I love to eat out. I said, OK, you quadruple your spending. He's like, I'd eat out four times a week. Like, that's it, man. Come on. So I had to do a little work with him, right? Meanwhile, the whole crowd's like, this guy's answer is so obvious. He what he came to the resolution on is I had to push him to think big. Most of us don't. We've spent all our lives being told what we can't spend money on, that when we actually think about what we love, we don't actually know how to spend more on it. So what turned out for him, he loves nice restaurants. Why? Because he never could eat there when he was a kid. He loves the experience. He loves the ambiance. He loves the artisanship or craftsmanship of the food being presented. So what would he do? He would he made a list of every Michelin starred restaurant in D.C. And I said, love it. Who are you going to take with you? And he didn't miss a beat. So I'm taking my family with me. That is not thinking linearly. That's really thinking in a multidimensional way about what your rich life is. One of my favorite examples of this was a young woman in Pasadena, and she had the whole crowd on her side. They loved her because I asked her, what do you love spending money on? And she said, I love online shopping. I love it. And the whole crowd was like, oh, my God, this is insane. And I said, what do you like to buy? She's like, I shop at Topshop. I love it. I said, great. Quadruple your spending. What would you have? She goes, I would have boxes everywhere. I love her. And then I said, you know, is it possible that if you 2x, 4x, 10x your spending, you might not shop at Topshop? The whole room completely silent. She had never considered that she might not shop at Topshop. We laugh, but how many people in this room have done the exact same thing? We think linearly. And I said, if you turn that money dial up, maybe you shop at a different brand. If you turn it up even more, maybe you get something custom made for you. What if you turn it up even more? Maybe you fly to Italy and visit the factory of your favorite brand. Now, for 99% of people in this room, it sounds ridiculous, OK? But if she truly loves spending that much and she loves that topic, clothes, unapologetically, that might be what she wants to do. I loved how excited she got. I love, this is my favorite question in all of money, OK? Because people want to talk about what they love. They never get asked, and they've never been challenged to rethink the way they think about it. Now, I said spend extravagantly on the things you love, as long as you cut costs mercilessly on the things you don't. In my own life, there are several things I just don't care about. Don't have a TV. I use a MacBook Air that's seven years old. I know, like, I should probably work off a dual monitor setup, but I just don't care. And I've lived in the same apartment for 10 years, and I've rented. And I know the society tells you that renting is throwing money away. That's not true. These are things that I just don't care about. But on the other hand, convenience, I'll spend essentially anything. Hotels, I will spend essentially anything. And there's a few other examples. My wife and I, together, we're coming up with our own money dials. Relationships is a big one for us. So I would encourage everyone to really take this concept and think about it. And don't stay at the surface level. If it's fitness like yours, great. Really think about what that looks like. Another woman in DC, she was into fitness, too. And I said, what would your life look like if you quadrupled? She's like, I would be shredded. I was like, love it. Think big. Don't talk yourself out of it. So that is what I've learned about money dials. I was raised, where our money dials come from and the way we think about money has a lot to do with the way we were raised. The way that I looked at the world, imagine I'm putting on a pair of glasses. My money lens, the way I look at the world was frugality. Probably like some of the people in this room and some of the people watching. I was raised by two immigrant parents. My dad worked. My mom stayed at home with four kids. And I remember that when we would take a vacation, a vacation for us was driving from Northern California to Southern California and staying with family. And on the rare time we went to Disneyland, which I think was once or twice, we would wake up really early from our cousin's house, go to Disneyland. We would pack lunches because there's no way you can buy six lunches for a family at Disneyland. It's too expensive. We would stay until the end of the day, very end. Why? Because we're not coming back here. We got to get everything we can from this place. That was my money lens. And I think it served me in a lot of ways, right? I mentioned the computer. I don't need certain new things. If it works, I like to buy the best and keep it forever. But I also think that there are other money lenses, other ways to look at the world. We heard in the back from the woman who said that she loves to spend on convenience, which is my money dial. Feel safe, feel relief, feel luxury and fortunate. Safety is something that we all kind of intuitively get when it's for someone else. Oh, we'll spend extra so that our kids are safe? Never going to question that. But when it comes to our own spending, we put back that frugality lens so much of the time. It's been drilled into us by society. There are other money lenses. There's the money lens of results. I could get a workout on YouTube or I can pay a personal trainer for better and faster results. There's experience. Why do you think people go to a really nice restaurant, right? Five plus courses. The experience. There's pure luxury. This sweater is not going to last 10 times more longer than that sweater, but you just want it. And so sometimes we need to. I think of it almost like a musician. You want to have the note of frugality, but you don't want to be a one note player. Sometimes frugality is the perfect note, but sometimes there are other notes you want to put in security, luxury results, whatever your money lens is. I don't want anyone in this room and anyone watching to be a one note player. There are different notes to use at different times. So it's hard, especially for me. It was very hard to change my view. I would much rather in my early 20s judge other people. That's why I really love that iced tea example, because it took me back. When she first said iced tea, I was like, oh, this is so this is insane. It took me back to what I used to be like in my early 20s. I would walk onto a flight and pass the people in business class or first class, and I would laugh. So stupid. Why are they spending four times the money? We're all getting to the same place. What I should have done instead of disparagement was switch to curiosity. D to C. Why are they doing that? Why might someone want to spend that crazy amount to me on a business class flight? What do they know that I don't? And I might discover that I don't actually agree. I don't value that. I don't care. I think it's not for me. But had I instead of closing the conversation disparaging, I should have gotten a lot more curious and said, why? Why does someone go to this restaurant? Why does someone want to go to the Maldives, which in my early 20s, I didn't even know what that was. Why? And that has really transformed the way that I look at money from one note of frugality to being able to play different notes at different times. One thing that I've learned is that most of us have never thought about what our rich life really is. So you ask people, what is your rich life? I told you, we actually had some great answers in here. Most common answers. I told you the three. Most people have complained about money, especially in their 40s. It becomes the number one thing they worry about, but they've never spent a weekend reading a good book. Most people talk about certain things about money. Oh, I wish I could have this, but they've never actually sat down and said, what is my rich life? Down to the level of, I want to be able to buy appetizers without looking at the price. If we did that, imagine how our spending would change. Imagine how our psychology around money would change. Now, this is important. I've learned this is increasingly important because in the first edition of the book, I had all this technical stuff about Roth IRAs and compound interest and all that. It's in there. It's updated. It's all there. How do you automate your money and what credit cards can you squeeze the perks out of? Yes, use it. What I realized is that if we don't tackle our money psychology, no compound interest chart is going to change anything. And from talking to people for a long time, one thing I learned about the way we treat money is it's almost like imagine you get on a raft and you're floating down this river. It's a nice day. The river is going to end up in a good place. It's a river of life. It's a pretty good life, especially for people watching this, people in the room. Life is going to be pretty good, right? You've sort of done well already. If the river goes left, we go left. What I have found is it's a lot more fun to pick up my paddle and row the direction that I want to go. Sometimes I might get wrong, but I've learned that it's a lot more fun to chart out what my rich life is. And interestingly, the more you really refine what your rich life is, for example, vinyl, and maybe you actually go to a vinyl making class from the original vinyl guy. I don't know. Some people around you might say, that's pretty weird. Why are you doing that? That's ridiculous. My favorite word. That's ridiculous. But the more I dialed in on my money dials in my rich life, the more I realized I really love unapologetically charting my path and going towards it. Okay, spending extravagantly on the things I love and cutting costs on the things that I don't. Now, it's one thing to do this yourself, to come up with your money rules. I've got 10 money rules. You can Google Ramit's money rules. And they're about spending and saving. And one of them is marry the right person, which I think is actually one of the most important money rules that you can possibly have. It's one thing to come up with your own money rules. It's another when you bring somebody else into this conversation. How many people here are in a relationship or have been in a relationship where money was a topic of discussion? Quite a few. I've had magical experiences and I've had challenging experiences. And I'd like to tell you a little bit about both. My wife is here in the room. I remember when we were engaged and we went out to dinner with two couples who are a little older than us. And they asked us where we were planning to go for our honeymoon. And we were excited. We were planning to go on a safari, eight or 10 days. We told them, never been and we can't wait. They were excited. Oh, my God, that's going to be amazing. And then one of them mentioned, yeah, when we went on our honeymoon, we took six months off and we traveled the world. What? And then the next couple who are, again, they're a little older than us, but we thought, you know, they're just they're not that much older. They said, oh, yeah, when we took our honeymoon, we went for a year. It was life changing. And we walked out of that restaurant. We look at each other like, did you hear that? Who are these people? It would have been easy for us to say, that's ridiculous. But together, we've we both love self-development. We both learned about the tools to use and we continue to learn about the tools to use to have these conversations. We went from this place of that's ridiculous to this magical question. What if we did that? And the first thing our minds do is try to talk us out. Well, we got a business. Can we afford it? What if we can't do it? And then we just said, like, what if we did that? And when you go from a place of can we do that to how can we do that becomes magical. So we fast forward a few months. We decided to take not a one year honeymoon, but a six week honeymoon. And one of our one of our money dials is relationships, our joint money dial. And we independently came to each other with this idea. We wanted to bring our parents with us to the first part of our honeymoon. So in Italy, we told our parents, just show up at the airport and don't worry about anything else. And we remember taking them to a farmer's market in Rome with a chef and we picked vegetables and we took it to a kitchen and we cooked a five course meal. And it turns out that none of us have ever the parents had never done a cooking class. Never. And we remember sitting there chopping vegetables in Rome and eating this amazing meal. I remember taking my mother in law to the Vatican, which was very meaningful to her, and she'd never been she never thought she would go. And when they left and we continued on our honeymoon, we just looked at each other and we didn't have to say a word. We knew we were creating memories right then that we would never forget. So that was our rich life. We also had challenging conversations when we sat down to talk about how does money work together for us? How are we going to spend? Like to me, this is so obvious. I have the most beautiful financial systems in the world. It's so flawless, all convenience oriented. It's perfect. I wanted to jump right to the spreadsheet. Look at this model. I'm going to build this model. The flow is going to be so crazy. Sell C3. It's so logical. That did not work. We we look at $10,000 or $1,000 or more and we see different things. I see growth, compound interest, investment. I see opportunities. I see a really nice hotel that's on my list. My wife sees that money and makes her feel safe. I had never thought of the word safe when it came to my never. Has anyone here thought of the word safe when you think about money? Yeah, look at that. A lot of people. It had never occurred to me. And so we were speaking completely different languages. And I wanted to jump right to the spreadsheet. But we actually had to go way back for both of us to talk about what did money mean? What were some of the phrases we heard from our parents growing up? And I would be willing to bet a lot of us heard phrases like we don't talk about money in this family. Money doesn't grow on trees. We can't afford that. Why would you buy that when we can do it at home? These are very common. Until we unwound those phrases that we've carried with us for so long, there was no way that this spreadsheet would ever mean anything to us. And that has taken us a long time, actually continues to happen. Maybe you guys can have me back in five years and I'll tell you what else I learned. But that is where money goes from a pure number in a spreadsheet to actually what's the meaning of it. And that meaning comes from how we grew up, how we spent it, who we surrounded ourselves with. Suddenly, that iced tea example made a lot more sense to me. Suddenly, the woman who wrote me, extremely frustrated enough to DM me for the first time she ever reached out to me and ask about $3 iced tea. Suddenly, it made a lot more sense. Every single day she wakes up and she sees her financial values being violated. But they've never talked about it. And based on her name, I would be willing to bet, I don't know for sure, but I'd be willing to bet that she grew up like I did, probably with immigrant parents. And I'd be willing to bet that the husband, who I don't know, probably, he looks at this $3 thing, he says, we earn a ton of money. This isn't even a rounding error. Why are we even talking about this? But they're down here discussing $3 questions. We've talked about $30,000 questions. And we've even talked about the highest level values. What is your money dial? How do you view the world through your money lens? And what is your partners if you have one? These are the kind of questions that I want to leave you with. I want you to think about what your rich life is. I want you to think about what your money dial is, that thing you love spending money on. I want you to think what life would be like if you spent extravagantly on the things you love. And of course, you cut costs mercilessly on the things you don't. And I'll leave you with just three things. First, your rich life matters. It really matters. Take it seriously. Don't talk yourself out of it. Don't minimize what you love. Intuitively, we all know what we love inside. Don't talk yourself out of it. If anything, make it bigger. Lean into it. You will start there. And that's way more aspirational than how do I cut $5 here and $10 there. The more you develop your rich life and articulate it, and perhaps even boil it down to 5 or 10 of your own money rules, the more that the people around you might find it surprising, even ridiculous. That's okay. Your rich life is yours. It's nobody else's. The second thing is when you're building your rich life, start from a place of possibility. It would have been so easy for us to walk out of that dinner with those two couples and say, that's ridiculous. Who does that? But we were fortunate enough to have really worked at having these conversations and to say, what if we did that? What if? Imagine you have a magic wand and your rich life is totally yours and maybe your partner's. What does it look like? How often do you travel? What do you wear? What's childcare like? Are you bringing anybody with you? These are the kind of questions that are $30,000, $300,000, $3 million questions, and even higher level. And finally, the last thing I want to leave you with is my personal dream. My dream is that if you're in this room or you're watching that you on page one of my book, I put my email address. I want you to read it and email me and tell me what your rich life is. That's my dream. Because it's my mission to go and stop people from talking about only cutting back and actually to talk more about what their rich life is. Use the tools, invest, grow, negotiate your salary. All that stuff is in there. But what I want to really hear from you on is what is your rich life? Thank you very much. I appreciate it.