The Young (and Miserable) Multimillionaire

Hi Scott,

My partner and I have followed your advice to a ‘T’ for the last 10 years. We started our own business, worked full time, flipped properties as our side hustle, and aggressively paid down our debt. And it’s worked — we now have $3.5 million dollars, all from nothing. But we hate our life! We are burnt out, stressed out and worn out — and we’re not yet 40. My question is: how much is enough?!

Ellen

Hi Ellen,

Congratulations!

If you own your own home and can live off $100,000 a year in dividends, I’d say you’ve passed the financial finish line.

If so, take a victory lap, spray some champagne around, and prepare to start playing a brand-new game.

You need to start thinking and playing not like a millionaire but like a billionaire.

The most important thing to a billionaire is not money – it’s time – the only thing they can’t buy.

Ellen, you’re already a time billionaire (and so is anyone under the age of 47 … you have, on average, more than one billion seconds left in your life).

In other words, flogging yourself to earn a lot more money from here won’t make you any happier.

So what will?

Having control over your time. That’s real freedom. Investing time in being with your family, in travelling, in trying new and interesting hobbies, and in helping your broader community.

Scott.

My Saturday night date with Lindsay Lohan

On Saturday night I was watching Herbie: Fully Loaded with the kids.

That’s the one starring Lindsay Lohan, when she was still sweet and innocent and doing Disney.

It’s a terrible movie.

So, while the kids munched on popcorn, I fired up my laptop and began looking through reader questions.

A new email pinged ... with the subject line ‘SOS - help me Scott’

Scott,

I should have listened, I read your articles about crypto and I sold mine before the rise. Then I got FOMO and invested $18,000. Now it has dropped ... MASSIVELY. I’m down $10,000. What do I do? I want to sell but I don’t want to lose my money. Seriously. I’m 22 and just quit my job!

Ben

Hang on a minute.

Of all the things a 22-year-old bloke could (or perhaps should) be doing on a Saturday night ... he’s sending a daggy dad a question on crypto?

Herbie goes bananas!

Still, Saturday night was a knife fight for crypto: some coins were slashed by half.

(However — and this is important — it was simply a marker in time. Since Ben sent the email, Bitcoin has rallied 25%, and Etherium 50%, so maybe he made his money back?)

In any event, I do have some advice for you, Ben:

STOP WASTING YOUR TIME.

The money you’ll make in crypto is chickenfeed compared to the life-changing gains you can make if you get serious.

You might think I’m talking about investing — and I am.

But it’s more than that.

See, Ben, you’ve got two things most people don’t have enough of:

Time … and energy.

Now you can waste that time betting on things you have no control over (like crypto) … or you can invest it in skills and habits that will compound for the rest of your life.

That could be finding a mentor, starting a side business, getting fit, or even just reading some good books (my pick: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds — no talk of crypto, though, it was published in 1841).

In other words, anything that you master now will compound over your life and make things exponentially better.

When you’re 22, you think you’ll always be young and that you’ve got plenty of time to get around to all that stuff.

However, I reckon you have just 10, maybe 15, years to really focus on the hustle.

After that, your time and a lot of your energy will likely be diverted by a partner, kids, a mortgage.

I don’t want to scare you, Ben, but one day you’re going to wake up. You’ll have three kids on your lap, popcorn in your pants ... and you'll be watching Lindsay Lohan pretending to talk to a car.

Beep, beep!

Tread Your Own Path!

Fear and Loathing in Lockdown

Scott,

We need your help! We implemented the Barefoot strategy a few years ago and since then have paid off all our debt, amassed a healthy Mojo and will soon tick over $100,000 in shares. The problem is --  is this really it!? We are desperately unhappy. We live in a tiny, affordable home because we do not want to be ‘postcode povvos’. Our car is a bit Pete Murray (it’s seen better days). And I’m getting sick of our card declining when we have blown our ‘Blow Bucket’ for the week. We are hustling, but to where? Maybe COVID lockdown is getting the better of me, but we kind of want to enjoy our one precious life.

Jane

Hi Jane,

I hear you, this lockdown has been rough.

As a result there are a lot of Victorians suffering with their mental health ... and it shows up in the questions they send me.

Personally I’ve got it good: I’m in regional Victoria with (slightly) more freedom, living on a farm where I can do a three-hour walk and not see anyone, and I can work from home. The toughest thing for me is that I haven’t had a haircut for five months. My sheep have better bangs than me!

I can only imagine what it’s like for you being locked down in a cramped house, with kids homeschooling for months while you try to work from home, or waiting on welfare to be allowed back to work.

It would totally suck.

So let’s make it not suck so much by playing a game:

I want you to imagine what 2020 would have been like for you before you read my book:

Lots of credit card debt. No emergency fund. No shares. 

It’d be awful, right?

Instead, you two have single-handedly eliminated the number one stress that families have. 

That’s bloody amazing!

Now we all suffer from what psychologists call ‘hedonic adaptation’, which is a fancy way of saying we get used to things quickly, and eventually feel no better than we did before. (It’s as true for getting out of debt as it is for trading in Pete Murray’s car.)

Still, I’m all for doing a (socially distanced) Date Night (when it’s allowed) and coming up with a new and exciting plan: it could be a house, a holiday, whatever. Everyone needs something to look forward to, and you guys have proven that you can nail your financial goals. You are absolutely right, life is for the living!

The NutriBullet of the Bedroom?

Today I’m going to talk to you about something really weird: investing in sleep.

Here’s the thing: you probably spend, at best, two hours a day in your car, but eight hours a day in the sack … yet you’re likely still sleeping on the equivalent of a Datsun 180B, right?

Honk! Honk!

Seriously, when was the last time you upgraded your ride, Captain Snooze?

Look, I’ve got form on this: in my bestseller I wrote about investing in the Rolls-Royce of pillows, the Dunlopillo, so you could “sleep like a billionaire”. (And yes, I’m the only finance guy who moonlights as a bedroom furnishing advisor. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Alan Kohler!)

Well, today, I have an update for you. It all started a few months ago when a friend recommended I try sleeping with a new type of blanket.

“It’s the new thing … they’re called weighted blankets … they weigh, like, 10 kilos … and they’re scientifically proven to release endorphins and help you sleep”, she gushed.

And I thought to myself: “You are crazy.”

Then, a few weeks ago, another friend was raving about hers.

So I went online and found thousands of glowing reviews, and decided to try one myself.

(To be fair there’s also a bunch of pseudoscience written about the benefits of weighted blankets, which left me very skeptical.)

And so I ordered the cheapest one I could find, fully prepared for it to be the NutriBullet of the bedroom (i.e. destined to end up in the back of a cupboard and eventually thrown out in 2032).

BUT OH MY GOD.

True dinks, the very first night I used it … I slept like it was 2012 (pre-kids, post-marriage).

So how does it work?

Well, it’s pretty simple really: it’s just a standard blanket with 10 kilos of small beads sewn into it. It weighs you down — but in a good, calming way, and I quickly nod off.

Well, that’s my description (and how it works for me). My father would probably describe it as “sleeping with a hessian bag full of sand on you”. And he’s kind of right: it makes absolutely no sense … but it’s helping me sleep soundly in these trying times, so for me it’s a great investment.

Tread Your Own Path!