Book Club Series: "Just Keep Buying" with Nick Maggiulli

Today we kick off this book club series. I wanna find a book that's interesting to me, bring it to you and give you access to the author.  So that is what we're doing today. I have Nick Maggiulli with me. He is @ dollarsandata on Twitter and also on Instagram. 

And what he does especially well, is interpret data in a meaningful and relevant way. But what he's done recently is compile a lot of his blog posts into a book called "Just Keep Buying." And this book is really special because it takes the concepts of finance and puts them into a format where it's not just learning the concepts themselves, but it's learning the math and the formulas behind it so that you can see some real data for yourself on things like, should I go back and get that Master's degree? So some of these things that we aren't sure if we need to do, he's got some answers for them,  not just from a conceptual standpoint, but from a practical standpoint. And then the other thing that you'll hear us chat about in the show is  this hope that he's inspired for people who may be behind on their financial savings who may feel like there's time that they can't capture back for themselves and are feeling a little lost and defeated about what they can do this late in life. So thanks again for tuning in. So excited to have Nick with me here on the show today.

For full disclosure statement, visit www.alphaarchitect.com/disclosures/

Transcript

[00:00:00] JB: Hey friends. Welcome back to the Breakthrough Factor. Thank you so much for continuing to listen in. My goal is to bring you some of the most real and vulnerable people to share with you their story of how they got from where they were to where they are now, and the breakthrough moments that they experienced along the way and for that to be something that you can find yourself in and you can see for yourself, Hey, I might be stuck here, but that person was also stuck in a similar place and now I'm inspired with a little bit of hope for myself too. 

Today we kick off this book club series. I wanna find a book that's interesting to me, bring it to you and give you access to the author. So that is what we're doing today. I have Nick Maggiulli with me. He is @ dollarsandata on Twitter and also on Instagram. 

And what he does especially well, is interpret data in a meaningful and relevant way. But what he's done recently is compile a lot of his blog posts into a book called "Just Keep Buying." And this book is really special because it takes the concepts of finance and puts them into a format where it's not just learning the concepts themselves, but it's learning the math and the formulas behind it so that you can see some real data for yourself on things like, should I go back and get that Master's degree? So some of these things that we aren't sure if we need to do, he's got some answers for them, not just from a conceptual standpoint, but from a practical standpoint. And then the other thing that you'll hear us chat about in the show is this hope that he's inspired for people who may be behind on their financial savings who may feel like there's time that they can't capture back for themselves and are feeling a little lost and defeated about what they can do this late in life. So thanks again for tuning in. So excited to have Nick with me here on the show today.

What I wanna hear from you about this book is, and you alluded to it in the beginning of the book, here's how I grew up, here's what I understood, here's what I wish I'd known.

But if you don't mind, wrapping back around to that kind of life story that brought you to finance and what made you wanna write this book? 

[00:02:23] NM: Yeah, my parents divorced when I was six years old, and at the time I didn't know this, but they also declared bankruptcy. I found out years later, I mean I was probably like 12 or 13, I found out about this and we never really had a ton of money.

I never went hungry, I'll be honest. So I wasn't in abject poverty or anything like that, but I was always working off the dollar menu. I had a very you know, specific way of my relationship with money. Yeah. As a result of that, I said, "Hey, if I want to get this right one day, I wanna make sure I do this properly."

And specifically because I believed at the time, which I later found out was incorrect, that if my parents hadn't had money problems maybe they'd still be together cuz Yeah.

It's so funny cuz to this day they still get along very well. My grandmother on my mom's side, so it would be my father's mother-in-law when they were married, she still calls him every year on his birthday, and they still have a good relationship. So no one in my mom's side like dislikes my father.

And it's the same on the other side. My mother hangs out with my dad's sisters, right? So it's almost like we're still in a family, but we're not. And so it's been very interesting just personally to go through that and say okay, if they got along, like why did they, you know, and I always thought it was money.

And so for me, I was like, I wanna make sure I get this right. I was very fortunate. I studied very hard, got very good grades and everything. Got into a good school. After that, I graduated, I said, I'm gonna do everything right. 

Originally, I went to school to be an engineer, but then I found economics and fell in love with it. And particularly I took financial economics in my junior year and it just clicked. I just got it right away. Optimal portfolio theory, Markowitz, efficient frontier, all that... That's just how I was wired I guess. So I said, Hey, I like this stuff, but I still loved economics and so I went into economics consulting after I graduated. And economics consulting, for those that don't know, it's also called litigation consulting.

And basically I wanted to really build my analytical skills cause I had attended this seminar thing. This guy who worked at Palantir is like, the most important thing you need to do is build technical skills, cause those things are gonna be worth so much. Most people don't have technical skills. If you have that, you're gonna be able to milk that the rest of your career.

[00:04:14] JB: The engineer side of you, I'm sure just loved it anyway, right? 

[00:04:17] NM: Yeah, exactly. And so for me, I was like, I need to build technical skills. This guy, I think he knows what he's talking about. I believe it completely. I was debating like, do I wanna do management consulting or do I wanna do this economics consulting. 

Management consulting, it's very forward looking. It's hey, here's a business they're trying to improve profitability. What actions should they take to improve their future operations. 

Now, economics consulting is backward looking. It's about litigation. It's saying, Hey, something happened in the past and there's damages owed. It's not whether they did something wrong, the question is, okay, how much should they have to pay for that? And so we have to go back and look through the past and analyze data. And so it's very backward looking, right? 

And so that dichotomy between forward looking and backward looking. I didn't like the forward looking stuff cause I'm like, you can't predict the future stuff. I'd rather look at the past and analyze the past and so 

[00:04:58] JB: Give me the data. 

[00:04:58] NM: Yeah, gimme data, let me do data analysis. And that's how I got really good at data. I really enjoyed the job. It was great, but at some point I was like, Hey, I'm hitting basically a plateau at this point. Like I would just be a data scientist forever and I didn't wanna do that. So I said, Hey. I like finance. I'm gonna start blogging. So I started blogging once a week. That was my year's resolution in 2017. And I did that. Eventually I linked up with the Ritholtz guys. They found my work online. We all connected. And I ended up joining their company as a data scientist. And I've worked there for a while and now I'm the Chief Operating Officer there. That's been very interesting, just the whole thing there. It's been quite a, 

[00:05:31] JB: Yeah. Your trajectory. Because you liked writing, right?

[00:05:35] NM: Mm-hmm. 

[00:05:35] JB: When you started blogging, that was fun for you? Or is that, was that work? 

[00:05:38] NM: I always hated writing, but I realized the reason I hated writing was because I wasn't writing about what I wanted to write about. When someone says, Hey, you have to write a five page essay on the Scarlet Letter, that doesn't really get me as riled up as writing about the S&P500 or dollar cost averaging or whatever I was writing about at the time and so for me, I think it was the freedom of, hey, you get to write about whatever you wanna write about. That's what really kind of made me love writing. It made me love blogging. 

And so I still write every week on the blog and I put out the book and everything, but my main job at Ritholtz is not the writing. I'm there to do the operations part of things and basically like everyone's my boss at the firm is how I think about it. Even though I have a chief title, whatever, it's like I really am in service to every single person. I wanna leverage their talents and make it easier for them so they can do more work.

If you think of a company like a ship analogy. The CEO's the one setting the vision. Hey, we have to go that direction. And it's the advisors and the operations team, the CSAs that are rowing, they're the ones who are pushing us forward, they're talking to clients. All that stuff's happening. What my role is, I'm trying to make better oars, right? I'm trying to make more efficient oars.

That's what I'm doing. Because if I can do that properly, if I can make scalable systems, it adds value to everyone at once, right? And so that's what I'm trying to do there and what I've been trying to do for the last few years. And it's been a fun process. 

[00:06:49] JB: That's cool. And yeah, obviously sounds like you love it and it's a good fit.

It's interesting. There's several folks in finance that I feel have found their good fit through writing. They just started writing about something they were passionate about or something they loved and that writing was found by someone. I talked to Treyton. That was kind of his start as well. And he actually mentioned you whenever I talked to him as someone that he kinda looked at this is, this is an inspiration to me. If I can just write and put my creative out there into the world, then that gives me a better opportunity to connect with people. And Justin Castelli is another one of those 

[00:07:24] NM: Mm-hmm. . 

[00:07:24] JB: Also from your book, part of that was the inspiration for the, "Just Keep Buying" Right? 

[00:07:30] NM: Yeah, yeah. So basically, long story short, I had seen this YouTube video from a guy named Casey Neistat, and the video was called "the three words that got me to 3 million subs."

And the three words were "just keep uploading." And he got that advice from another YouTuber named Roman Atwood. And so his whole idea was like, just keep uploading every day, upload a video and you'll see success as long as it's somewhat good. 

And so he kept doing that and he did, and he got very popular and everything. And so I was like, you can apply that, that logic of "just keep X" right? And just, just keep buying, just keep investing, whatever you wanna call it. 

I think buying's a little bit more palatable than just keep investing so because of that, that's, that's why I think it worked. Right. 

It's funny, I this inside little inside baseball, but my, my publisher originally... 

So how the book works, just a little context... every chapter, I basically answer a question like "How much did you save? How much lifestyle creeps? Okay? Should you buy the dip?" All these types of questions I just answer 'em one by one basically with data. 

And originally my publisher wanted to call the book like, "A Data Scientist Answers the 15 Biggest Questions in Finance." 

And I'm just like, that is a terrible title. I'm sorry, that's one of the worst titles I've ever heard. So my publisher's great, by the way. I'm just saying that that title, selection comment was not my favorite. But they have been amazing editors and they've done an incredible job with helping with the book and everything. And so I love them to death. 

But yeah, so I, I think that's a funny thing. I was like, No, I'll come up with a better title. So "Just Keep Buying" was the thing. And actually, ironically, because of supply chain issues, the book got pushed, got delayed by two months. It's supposed to come out in February of 2022. It came out on April 12th. And that by chance was literally five years to the day after I wrote that first blog post, "Just Keep Buying." 

[00:08:59] JB: COol. 

[00:09:00] NM: Yeah, it's just kind of a weird coincidence and I think it was just a great anniversary date and it just, it couldn't have gone better.

[00:09:05] JB: Yeah. I love when those things line up. And those are the moments that you look back on. You're like, Yes, I'm on the right path. It just gives you that confirmation that what you're doing is right. 

 The thing I love about that, and it immediately clicked with me, was "Just Keep Lifting." So many times when people ask "How do you get better at lifting? How do you build strength?" You just, you just keep doing it. And it's that compounding kind of similar effort over time of A) you're learning the skill and you're feeling more confident in doing more with it. But B) just the practice of it compounds over time, and builds your muscular strength to be able to do more. So it's it's a very relevant concept in the lifting world for me as well. 

[00:09:51] NM: Yeah, completely. It's so interesting to me. I've been doing more Nordic curls, which is like the hamstring activation when you're like, your ankles are basically tied up and you're kind of trying to fall forward like this, forward like your knees are here.

Yeah. And when I first did it, I couldn't do it. Like I could do nothing. Your brain has to make this connection with your hamstring, which you're not used to doing. And I'm slowly getting better now. I can slowly kind of fall and now, at some point I wanna be able to control the whole motion down. And then at I wanna be able to go down and then get myself back up, which is even harder. So eventually, I think I'll get there, but it's one of those things where it really isa skill just like anything else. And your brain has to make those connections and your body has to get used to recruiting more muscle fibers as you start to run out of energy to do something. So it's super interesting to me from, from that perspective. 

[00:10:32] JB: Yeah. Cause you may have all the strength that you actually need right now, in this moment today, but that neurological connection just isn't fully there yet and that to me is a lot of the issue, and you talked about this in the book too, with folks when it comes to investing, when it comes to figuring out what to do with their money, they may have enough income to be able to save. A lot of the folks that I intercept in life and start working with are ones that go, "I mean, I have x amount per month, but I just dunno what to do with it." And the question becomes not, do I physically have the capability of saving and investing, but do I understand well enough how to do it or do I feel like I understand enough to trust myself to do it?

And that's one of the things I feel like your book answered so well. The concepts were still very high level, but it was the applicability of what you talked about was immediately there, immediately understood I can take this concept that I just learned and apply it in this way. 

[00:11:31] NM: I think most people are smart and most people can understand this stuff. They just haven't maybe had it explained in a certain way. And so there's a lot of different ways you can explain this stuff. And I try to do it in a way that makes it like somewhat entertaining. And I try and come up with concepts and analogies that make it easy for people. I wanna write so that even my grandmother could understand it, as we were talking about earlier, my grandmother's 76 now? Yeah. She's just turned 76. She's a baby boomer born in 1946 and, even she understood about 70% of the book. Someone who's never invested, was a housewife her whole life. And if she can get most of the material, that's good. I understand there's parts where I'm talking about volatility and dollar cost averaging, or buying the dip and stuff like that, which is a little more technical for her, but she got most of it.

If my grandmother can understand most of it, I think I'm doing a decent job there. 

[00:12:15] JB: Yeah. I was talking to Bob Seawright the other day. He's venturing out into the book-writing land and in that conversation we were talking about how intimidating it is to put work out into the world, not knowing whether or not it's something that another person will benefit from, will need or will find unique in its value apart from something else that's already been written about it.

There's been at least hundreds of books written on how to invest. And so approaching this kind of topic where people have written about it before is there something that compelled you to write this book as opposed to other books inside the topic of finance. 

[00:13:06] NM: So I think it was a little less intimidating for me to write this book because 60% of the material is stuff I've already blogged about. I know what people have liked and not liked and so this for me was just expanding my audience. I did include new material. I talked about buy vs rent, which is something I've never talked about on my blog. I've talked about a handful of other things, which I didn't talk about. So took some of the old stories.

I spiced it up a little bit, made, made it more entertaining. I had an official editor go over it. So it's a much better product than what I put on the internet every week. 

 And so why did I write this book?

This was end of 2020, I think was the Delta variant or something that happened for Covid. At that point, I started getting very pessimistic. I was like, I don't know if we're ever gonna get out of this. 

Cuz I was very optimistic early okay, flatten the curve, right? So we had the big curve in New York, then it came down. Oh guys, it's over. Right? And then, nope, then the rest of the country got it. So it's like, okay, that was, that's where I was wrong. Cause the rest of the country had get it. Now we flatten the curve and then I thought it was over and then that last curve happened in December, 2020. And then I was like, my gosh, this thing's gonna happen forever. 

So I said I need to capitalize on this. 2020 I didn't, because I thought we would be out of this sooner. I was really looking ahead and saying, We're gonna be outta this, we're gonna be good. Especially cuz the markets rallied too. So I'm like, okay, maybe this is over, the markets are up, but once that whole thing happened in December 2020, that changed everything. I said, I need to really take advantage of this.

So I basically spent every weekend for the first six months of 2021 compiling all my best work and writing the book. After I'd kind of written most of it, I had a conversation with James Clear, "Atomic Habits" author. He endorsed the book. He's incredible writer and one of the best thinkers I've ever met, and he was like whatever you do, just make sure you put your best ideas to the front of the book, because not everyone's gonna read the book, so you wanted to at least give them some value at the beginning. And if they stop reading, who cares? But you gave them something worthwhile. And I was like, James, what do you think is my best idea? And he said, you had this idea of "Saving's for the poor, Investing's for the rich," where it depends on how you focus your attention based on where you are.

And I was like, by chance, James, that's the first chapter of the book. And it's actually the basis for the entire book. So when he said that, I was like, my gosh, I somehow did exactly what he thought I would've done. 

That for me was a huge moment where I'm like, I think this is gonna do well. Because if someone who's very critical has seen everything under the sun and he said that's probably one of your best ideas upfront in the book. I thought that's very helpful.

[00:15:10] JB: Well, I happen to agree with James Clear uh, for the record out there and the way that you set up the book is, "Hey, please skip chapters if these don't apply to you. Hey, please move around and find the things that do apply to you the most and spend your time there. Don't feel like you have to read every single word that I write in order to take away from this book the full value of the book." I appreciated that because that gave me permission. I actually wanted to read the entire thing even more then, because I didn't feel like I needed it. And then also the outline at the end. So all those things were really intuitive and different, and I appreciated that about your book. 

"Saving is for the poor, buying is for the rich." I wanna spend a minute there with you on that because when I first read it, I was like, Oh, I'm offended by that. So can you give us just a little bit from words what you mean by saving is for the poor, investing is for the rich.

[00:16:05] NM: Yeah, so I think the easiest way to explain this is with the story. And in the book, I tell the story of when I was 23 years old and I just started working. I saved up about a thousand dollars and I had all these spreadsheets of trying to project my net worth, my asset allocation, my returns, all this stuff I had in spreadsheets, right?

But at the time I only had a thousand dollars saved up, right? So let's say I would've got a 10% return, which is a little bit generous, right? So let's say I get a 10% return on my portfolio.

On a thousand dollars, 10% return is a hundred bucks, right? At the same time that I was making all these spreadsheets. Every single weekend I was going out with friends and doing rounds of shots, getting dinner, getting Uber home, et cetera. I was easily blowing that hundred dollars, multiple times a week, every single week for the first few years, when I was living in San Francisco.

I only later realized all those spreadsheets were irrelevant. It didn't matter what I was doing. The most important thing for me was my savings rate and how much money I could physically save and get invested, right? And so when I say savings for the poor, investings for the rich, it's understanding that where you are in your journey impacts where you should focus, right?

So now let's take the flip side. Imagine someone who's I dunno, 65 years old has 10 million in assets. If they get a 10% return, that's a million dollars. Unless they have a really, really high paying job and a very good savings rate, there's basically no way they're gonna save a million dollars in a year, right. So that kind of shows this dichotomy on the extremes. And so that's why I said savings for the poor, investings for the rich. It's saying when you're poor and don't have a lot of. It's not that your asset allocation, is not important at all. No, it's just, it matters far less. It doesn't matter if you're 60/40 or 80/20 when you have a thousand dollars to your name. It really doesn't now. 

As you get more assets, it matters a ton. And so people, some people have misinterpreted this to say, "Oh, you don't need to invest your money when you're young. Who cares? Just put it all on savings account." That's not what I'm saying at all. The book's called, "Just Keep Buying." I'm all about investing in income producing assets. I would never recommend that to somebody. 

So that concept "saving is for the poor, investing is for the rich" is just a high level way of understanding like, "Where you focus depends on where you are." And I kind of go into things like, like "Why don't you cut spending?" Well, I think you can cut spending. It depends where your current level is, but I think it's not a long term solution. I think it's very difficult to do that cuz you're always beating yourself up. I think the better thing to do is just get enough income such that you don't have to worry as much. 

And I'm not saying that's easy. That can take years. For example, on my blog, in three years, I made no money, working 10 hours a week, made basically $0. But now I run ads, I have other email sponsorships and stuff like that. Now I, I do make a considerable amount of money on it. But the difference is, if you look at my hourly rate, my average hourly rate's going up, even those three years of zero now, my average hourly rate, even for those years, if I backdate it, like you're building equity in something, you're building something that's gonna end up making you money. And so it doesn't have to be a blog, obviously, you can find some other side hustle or some other thing you do, and if you do it right, you can make a decent little income on the side.

So that's kind of the thing I tell people to focus on. It doesn't have to be a side hustle. You could just really go all in on your career too, on your nine to five. I'm not against that at all. There's different ways of doing it, but it's about raising your income. The base pillar of most wealth is built off of that.

[00:19:04] JB: When your side hustle supports your overall career trajectory, it can be extremely additive and even multiply where your income goes if you were to stay in that full-time career, like for example, for you, your blog was very additive. Even though it's a side hustle, it's not entirely different. Those side hustle pieces that aren't additive to your career, those can detract from that ability to really build your income over time.

[00:19:31] NM: It's all about maximizing these margins, right? So if you were to add something to your life, or if you're gonna pull back in some area of your life, what kind of margin does that create for you to be able to buy so that down the road you're actually doing as much for yourself as you possibly can be. 

Yeah, exactly. It's like thinking about what levers you can pull, right? When you're young, the, your biggest lever for most people is you have tons of time and you can use that time and convert it into dollars through working right? Of some sort or goods and services, whatever, however you wanna call it.

But as you get older, that time lever gets shorter and shorter. But what, in theory, if you've done this properly, what lever gets bigger? That's gonna be your assets, your capital, right? And so that's the lever that you need to pull. And what that means is investing that properly and getting good returns and being tax efficient and all that stuff.

And all that stuff matters, especially, once you have more money. And then figuring out like, well, how do I know where I'm at, Nick? Well, just need two numbers from you. 

First number is how much could you save in the next year? Oh, I can save, a thousand bucks a month. Okay, that's 12 grand a year. That's one number 12 grand. 

The next question is, how much can your investments earn you in the next year? I use a 5% return to make it easy. So let's say you add 20 grand, invested 5%, that's a thousand dollars a year, right? 

First number was 12,000. That's how much you can save. Second number is 1000. That's how much your investments can earn you. As you can see, because your savings number is bigger, you need to get those savings, get them invested to raise the other number over time. And if you do this properly, you'll find that at some point that investment number is gonna start catching up to you, and at some point it should actually pass.

Yeah. 

So at some point, the amount you can earn from your investment should pass how much you can earn from savings in a year. I'm at a point now, the market's down quite a bit, but like I was at a point, let's say the end of 2021 where my investments could earn me basically the same as what I could earn just from working.

And so when I saw that, it's " Hey, I'm at that, that middle point." And then when you're in the middle point, you need to care about both. You need to care about your investments being efficient, you need to care about your career. But at some point, I would assume 20 years from now, all else equal, I would assume my capital base will be much larger and it's gonna be able to make a bigger difference in my financial life than anything I can do in terms of my earnings. So that's the thing to keep in mind there. 

[00:21:32] JB: And that answers a question so many people that I've worked with have asked, which is, how do I create this passive income. Don't skip the hard work in the beginning of saving.

Mm-hmm.

You functionally do passive investing that supports a lifestyle at $20,000 in the investment account. So your work there it's on making sure that you get every possible dollar that you can into your investments so that you can continue to work toward this ability to create that passive income .

[00:22:01] NM: Yeah, I think there's a lot of investment books out there that tell you what to do, and I don't. I don't tell you this is the exact allocation you should have. I provide some recommendations in terms of breakdown between income producing and non-income producing assets. 

But instead of telling you what to do, I'm trying to teach you how to think about the problem. And I think that's more important because the information's gonna change. 

So it's always a relative system and I'm trying to provide people with the best frameworks to understand how to navigate a changing environment. 

You can find the optimal portfolio going back. I remember I ran this a couple years ago and the optimal portfolio from I don't know, 2010 onward until 2020 whenever I wrote it was like 55% stocks, 43% bonds and 2% Bitcoin or something. 

Yeah. 

But like owning that portfolio would've been crazy cuz your Bitcoin would've been going everywhere and you'd be like, why do I own this thing? It's up, it's down. And so because of just that, how much the price appreciation went up, like it would've been crazy to own it. But that was the best, that was the highest risk adjusted return you could have had in any portfolio of the, I looked at a bunch of different asset class, I had emerging stocks, international stocks, corporate bonds, every, I threw a bunch of stuff in the solver and it basically spit out this answer like, this is the best portfolio you could have had from 2010 to the end of 2020 basically. And despite all that, it would've been hard to hold. It would've been very difficult. 

Yeah. 

So you see the point I giving you the exact solution is not the answer. The the answer is teaching you how to think about this problem and, and you're gonna use that to then come find a decent solution. I don't need you to find the perfect solution. I need you to find a decent solution. 

[00:23:24] JB: Along those same lines, from a psychological standpoint, it's not just thinking about it analytically, which you did so well, like for example, there was a conversation in a chapter on real estate, should you own or rent and you provided equations that you could use to figure out, should I do this or should I do that? You provided math about figuring out college degrees or going back to get your masters or.... Those things are so practical and so helpful. The immediate takeaway value of those concepts is one of the things that I love the most about the book. 

On the flip side of it, this whole psychological behavioral, like you can't really get it wrong as long as you just keep doing the fundamentals correct. And you provided that behavioral approach so that if I had a 40 year old client that came to me and had saved nothing, this would still be a book that I would hand them and so I appreciated that there was a starting point for everybody here, so 

[00:24:24] NM: Yeah, appreciate, appreciate you saying that. It's funny, I actually have a new take on, oh, hey, I haven't started saving until I'm 40 or 45 or whatever...what should I do? 

Historically I would've told you The math's not in your favor; yeah, you're kind of screwed, cuz you lose the compounding. And that's semi true. 

[00:24:40] JB: Yeah. 

[00:24:41] NM: I have a new take, which is actually not a financial take on this problem, and my take is... start exercising and get as healthy as you can. And the reason for that, besides the benefits of the health and all that, is it's gonna get you that time back that that means you're gonna have to work more if we're being frank, right? If you can't save extra what you can do, since you don't have time, you need to build time. And the only way to build time is to literally extend your life. And so my take on this is exercise enough so you get an extra six to eight years of life and health span too, so you're actually healthy while you're living in old age. And that is gonna give you more time to work, which is gonna give you more time for your investments to compound. 

That's the only way you can do it. Cuz obviously the only other solution is you're screwed. So you either have to say, I'm screwed, or I'm gonna work out, extend my life and I'm gonna work for more years. So instead of retiring at, let's say 65, you're now retiring at 70 or maybe 75. So you have to extend your time a little, but that gives you another 5, 6, 7 years where you can work and you can let your investments compound. 

It's a non-financial solution to a financial problem. And it's something I wrote about recently on the blog. It's not in the book, but it's a different way of looking at it. I think it's a way that can help a lot of people. And I think it's, especially you, it's like very pro your brand. So I feel you should say this all the time.

Yeah. I endorse. 

The issue is the problem with someone who's waited so long to save is their time lever has shrunk a little bit and they haven't done anything to increase their capital lever.

 And so in theory, every time your time lever decreases, your capital lever should be going up is to offset. But they haven't done that. So the only way they can get back is to add some time leverage. If they don't work out and they just live a typical American lifestyle, they'll die whenever they're gonna die. But in theory, if they work out, they can get another, six to eight years and that's to eight years could be enough. Cuz oh hey, you're 40? Now let's imagine you're 33 and you haven't saved. That's a lot easier problem, right? Yeah. So you add that six to eight years and now the problem seems a lot less demanding or a lot less difficult in, in the long run. 

Yeah. I fully endorse. I love that. Do what you can with what you have. And there are so many practical concepts and so many pieces inside your book that a 40 year old could look at and go, That's where I start. Cause I assume most people at that point, If they haven't saved, it's because life has demanded every single dollar that they've had coming in, in one way or another. And so what they're then looking at is if my career can't level up to the point where I can start saving, what do I do? So then it goes back to these questions in the book of, do I go get another degree?

So then they can answer that question through solving the math inside that part of your book, or maybe interest rates are through the roof and they don't have a home yet. They can solve the question of should I be putting money in my investments or should I be buying a house? What do I do with that money right now? What's the best use of it, again, equation in your book. And so I think it's relevant to the 20 year olds who are just trying to start figuring out how to think about money. I think it's relevant to 40 year olds and obviously even to your grandmother, many things that she could understand inside the book.

And and yeah, it hit every angle for me. The psychological, the practical, the fact that you speak as if somebody is intelligent, but it's in words that, that anyone can understand.

And those are a lot of rare things to find all in the same book. From someone who is working with people to help them improve their finances. This is a book that I feel like I would give to any of them and hope that they read. This is something that could support what we're trying to do here and help you learn how to think about it. So thank you. 

I appreciate that. Thank you. 

Yeah. 

[00:28:02] Jess: Listeners, if you've loved this episode of The Breakthrough Factor, don't forget to hit the subscribe button. And if you know someone who has had a breakthrough moment in their life or their business, or if you are the person who's had a breakthrough moment in your life, business, or other, please reach out, let me know. I'd love to have a conversation about bringing you on the podcast. And finally, I appreciate your reviews, your feedback, anything that you have to say that helps us get better on our end so that we can bring you a show that truly educates and encourages, it challenges you, and then ultimately helps you break through those moments in your life that are difficult and standing in the way of what you want. Cheers, friends, as always, go lift heavy and be kind. 

Jess Bost is a Retirement Income Certified Professional and the Vice President of Brand Partnerships at Alpha Architect. Due to industry regulations, Jess will not discuss any of Alpha Architect’s funds on this podcast. All opinions expressed by Jess and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Alpha Architect or its affiliates. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. For more information, please visit w w w dot alpha architect dot com