75. Financial Freedom isn't a Fairytale with Michael Gilmore

Hey, how's it going everybody? So today's guest is Michael Gilmore. And right now we're going to talk a little bit about how Michael got started as the $7 millionaire. So he had worked in finance for more than 20 years, selling billion dollar deals and managing the assets of some of the world's smartest investors. The concept was born when his teenage daughter asked him a question and he didn't know the answer to what's the smallest amount of money you can save every day to become a millionaire in your lifetime. He was genuinely surprised by the answer he calculated and redid the calculations over and over again. To double check, you only need to save $7 a day and invest them for 7% returns to become a millionaire over a 50 year career. So this is like a previously magical number that, million dollars, it's something that we all assume would require a jackpot or game show winnings was actually within reach for more than half the people in the world. So this is absolutely amazing. Awesome background, really excited to talk to you today, Michael. Thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me and thanks. You make my background, so I'm way more excited than I make it sound so that's super,

I get excited talking about it.

Yeah, it was, but it was exactly that moment. It was, I was, if I give you the back of my, I realized my daughter was 17. She's going to go to college next year and I've been working in finance, but I've not only been working in finance, but also been doing some training with like migrant workers and on financial literacy. And I realize she didn't know what they knew because no school had bothered to teach this. And so I was working with her step-by-step and we got to the point of, getting to a 4% rule 25 times a year spending. And she's okay what if I need a million dollars? How much do I need to save? I need to get that. I was like obviously you need to save a million dollars, but how do you get that? Cause that's that's an interesting part, right? Because a lot of people are like, I want to be a millionaire means they want to spend like a millionaire, but you have to save and through your saving an investment a million dollars. But just to, pull up the spreadsheet, calculated it. I was looking at it. I'm thinking, I think if I'd known this when I was 20, I'd have had a lot more money by now because either you just assume this kind of number is out of reach it's at $7. What is your daily decision that could put that away? It's tiny as a tiny daily decision that could give you an extra $7.

That's how the seven millionaire was born was from a simple question. But I'd like to talk a little bit more about you and your background, so how did you get to the point where, you know, before this question came up, and you started this journey, your own personal journey, tell us where it all started for you. Like how did you, besides that question become the $7 millionaire?

Yeah, that's a very good question. Where this began was I was a journalist before I worked in finance. So I've been in finance now almost 25 years. And the bit before that I was doing post-grad research, a little bit of freelance journalism, and I had a job offer and the job offer fell through. And I was actually, I kind of then moved into having another job offer from places like Bloomberg Dow Jones. And I was working on that and a friend of mine said to me, don't do that. You're going to get put on the finance desk. You're going to be talking to analysts. You can be asking them questions. You won't know what the answers mean because no financial journalists do sorry, finance journalists. But it was okay. You could become an analyst instead and you'll get paid five times more. And that last bit really resonated obviously. And so I thought, okay, I'll give it a go. I got a job as an analyst. And I thought I'd get like a two, three month period before I had to start work. And literally I got, I was told to start Monday. So I get to a book shop, grab, a couple of books. I remember one of them was called pocketbook MBA. I've never seen it again since I just digested the whole thing. That weekend went all the way through it showed up on the Monday. And then within a couple of weeks, I'm like, Hey, none of that stuff was actually as hard as I thought it was. I'm there, I'm doing this. There's obviously stuff I've learned in the last 20 years. But, I, the thing that I was scared of, I've learned in that a very short period of time and it wasn't very complicated. And then I started thinking, hold on, it's also really powerful. This is life-changing, I've learned things here that are going to change my life. And I knew it as I'd learned them and I was more comfortable, confident with them. I knew this was going to change the way I think about my money, about the job I do. Everything is going to change from what I've learned in the last couple of weeks at that point. And then I got angry because of the, how do I spend 15 years in education and no one bothered to teach. This, I just genuinely angry and that still sits with me today. I'm going to smile through it, but I'm genuinely still angry that my own daughter got through 15 years of education and no one bothered to teach her this stuff. And so that when I could, I started working in financial literacy. And as I mentioned earlier on that kind of kicked off with migrant workers because these are the people who've left their countries. They've left their families behind to try and change poverty, one family at a time. And if you can help them, you really changed the world. You can change their lives. And the research I've seen says that only 5% of them go home with the money they thought they were going to go home with. So you, if you can change that to 10% of doubling the impact, you can change it to 20%, again, so that was why I was working with them. And then it rolled into helping my daughter out because she needed to know the same stuff. They, she didn't know it.

That's powerful stuff right there, and it's something I've talked about on my show several times in the past is how, financial literacy is not something that's taught in schools. And it's absolutely mind boggling because, when we give our children education, the whole point is to get them set up, to go live in the real world. And here we are, day one in the real world after they finished school, they don't know how to write a check. They don't know how to balance a checkbook. They don't know how to pay bills. It's wild, it's one of those reasons why I homeschool my kids and financial literacy is part of their curriculum and they have to learn it. They have no choice, they're going to learn what compound interest is and why Einstein called it the eighth wonder of the world. It's, it's super important, and I want to point out a couple of things that you said, because I like to sit here and take notes while we're talking. It's not that hard. You're able to read a book over the weekend. You were looking at this job on a Friday. They told you to come to work on Monday and you read a book over the weekend, just completely digested. It showed up Monday and said, this really isn't that bad. So it's not complicated, but it's really powerful. And like you said, and then the other thing that you said that, that really stuck out to me, and this is the, this is one of the key things that I think every guest I've had on the show all say the same thing. You changed your way of thinking you changed your mindset, you changed how you look at money, right? That is the most important thing, because, if everybody just grew up the way, society has us grew up through the education system, you're basically indoctrinated to be a nine to five worker your entire life, right? So you got to break the mold somewhere. You gotta be able to retire. And to be able to do that. You need financial literacy, you need to learn. So I really appreciate the fact that you have such a strong passion for financial literacy. It's the same reason why I'm doing this podcast and have awesome people like you on the show.

Mike, it, one of things I love about this sector, this subject I love about it is like most subjects, most sectors you get into everyone's in competition with each other. None of us are in competition with each other. We know that this is like the whole wellness notice where we're in the 1%, the 2%, I don't believe there's data that say that half the world or a third of the world is financially literate. Then not. Then that the questions that are being asked are on numeracy questions more than they are lit financial literacy questions. If you threw in the question, what is your opportunity cost into those questions? 99% of the world is going to have a blank look on it. Right? You know, the answer to what your opportunity cost is. I know the answer to my opportunity costs. That's the fundamental building block of investing is okay, I could do this, but that would be better done. This is how you learn to invest. And that's where I feel that, that's where this, if that were taught in schools, people would be making decisions about the whole lives better because opportunity cost is actually how we should think, but we're not taught that. And the ideal place would be to teach them financial literacy classes. Yeah, I love this space too, because I just feel like we've got, we all know we've got the rest of the planet to talk to, and we're not in competition. And the more we help each other, the more people find out this stuff and we just, we grow the game.

Yeah, absolutely like you said it's not a competition. And one of the things that I love since, really diving into this this niche or this sector is just everyone I've come across is always willing to help, always willing to teach, always willing to help people learn. It's just, it's amazing. There's, there's other things like if you were going into like specific career fields where a competition is fierce and everyone's trying to get to the top. When it comes to investing and taking care of your own finances, that there is no end. There is no top. Not everybody can be Jeffrey Bezos, right? Not everybody could be the world's richest man or woman, but what you can be is somebody who always strives to get better every day, and just keep working at it and keep working at it. You don't need to be super rich to live a good life. The key thing is financial independence. You don't need to be, a multimillionaire, but if you are at a point in your life where you can have all of your expenses covered without having to do anything because of your passive income and because of the actions you took earlier in life, It just, it puts you at a spot where you're financially independent and you, and that's true freedom. Cause financial independence is true independence because you don't have to worry about going to work. You don't have to worry about struggling to put food on the table or things like that. You can go and enjoy life because you've set yourself up that way. So that's, that's one of the key things why it's super important and actually that's one of the things I want to ask you too, is for you personally, I know we talk about we've talked about this a little bit about, financial literacy being so important, but why do you think financial literacy is so important?

Mike, there's a couple of reasons the first one I'm going to touch on. Cause I think you've helped me. Like I'm actually in the process of writing the next book and I was a bit, I was working on today literally before we spoke is a section on how much is enough. And one of the things about how much is enough, we talk about had tonic adaptation, lifestyle creep, whatever you want to call it. Our entire human history. We've never had a school of philosophy that says that much is enough. Unless you're excluding Buddhism, Buddhism said nothing is enough. She's hard. And actually one of the things I love about Buddhism is it that actual, the maths on that is they're the only ones that can explain what heaven is. Heaven is infinite, happiness. That's something divided by nothing. If you want nothing, impossibly happy, the key word being impossible. But the, I was actually working on that because I feel like financial fire or particularly financial independence for the first time in human history. We answer that question. How much is enough, 25 times your spending? That is enough. That's all you need to get. Now you're independent. You can go with it. You've got income coming in. That's amazing. That's such a powerful answer for humanity. That one thing I want to say. The second thing I'd say that I think is crucial with where we are in the world today. And I don't think it matters. What side of the political spectrum you're on. I think we all know that the inequality is just increasing and increasing. There was a story in the financial times, right? So we know, it's in the financial times, this is not talking to the poor people, their wellness, not talking Marxism. There was a story about how the parents of the kids in the most elite richest school in the UK are complaining that they can't guarantee getting their kids into the best university anymore. I think this is the school that educated 21 of the UKs 60 prime minister, 70 prime ministers, right? It's that school I think. And even these people are complaining about inequality. And you think through, why would that happen? Why would the rich people complaining about inequality? It's because of the income curve has become a cliff. We are all on a cliff. Now you, me people in the fire movement, we've worked out how to live on that cliff. You take a few steps back with your fire move and you say, okay, I only need this much to live on. And then I need 25 times that much. And then I'm good. Away from the cliff edge, everyone else who's spending every penny, they get to maintain a lifestyle they're on there with their fingernails. Like the middle-class has almost vanished from the US and from the UK and from the Western world, like the old fashioned middle-class like, we grew up with our parents where our grandparents were just like, you get a nice job, white collar you'll make enough. You'll have a nice lifestyle now because things have become since Thatcher Reagan things have become so efficient, that steep curve is super efficient, but. Everyone's just desperate. We have to give people the tools to live in that world. We can't just create that world, not give them the tools to live on it. And the tools for that world is financial literacy. You gotta know how to exist in this world. There's no point having Dhabi, doc, if you haven't taught your dogs to fight, just give people the tools. And that will level the curve a little bit because you and me, we feel okay being in this world because we've learned these lessons and all that 1% that is maybe properly financially illiterate. We've learned those lessons. Now I could get out there and campaign for universal basic income or socialism or whatever. But what I say there, isn't going to have any impact on anyone's live on one guy, but what can I do? I can give you the tools, right? This is, and that's, I can give my own daughter the tools and then publish the book and give everyone's daughter the tools. This is how you step away from the edge of that cliff. And that to me is what I feel is financially literate. It's just, it is so important. Just give people the tools for the world. We actually live. Not the world. We think we live in the world. We actually live in needs these tools.

Yeah. That's huge. And it's amazing, like you said, like throughout all this time, where the steep curve came from, that we still have not got to the point where it's become a basic education, that this is something that should be taught to children, and one of the reasons why I teach this to my children, because I want them to grow up and do better than me in the future, or at least have the tools to do it if they don't want to. That's fine. I want to know that I gave them everything in my power to, to go and build, whatever they want to build in life. And I think, this is the biggest thing is giving them the tools and the know-how on how to do things like this. So with that being said, so you've really like stomped how powerful and why financial literacy is so important, but what is it that got you started on your own journey right now to teaching people about money and financial literacy?

Yeah, let me say that it sat inside me and I was, I described to you on that anger. I think it came out a little bit that talking about the incumbent stuff as well. I normally hide that a little bit better than that. But the, so that had always sat inside me and then a really good friend of mine. Jesse runs a initiative now runs a university. And in, in the U S she's principal there, but she was, she'd gone to the board of this migrant worker organization. She's a Filipino lady. This was mainly migrant workers that she was helping with mainly Filipinos in Singapore. And she asked me to just take a look at the courses. And say, look, come in and teach them. Tell me if they're good, because, by that point I was a fund manager. I'd been working in finance for 15 years and she just wanted my eye over whether this was the right thing to be teaching. There was a lot of stuff that was good. It was okay. But a lot of stuff was wrong. And then she moved me towards looking at the entrepreneurial side of things and doing their entrepreneurship classes. And I devised a whole course, which I still think is my best work. It's still stuck in a drawer somewhere, but my best work was on the kind of basic entrepreneurship. One day it'll come out. I think it's really good. But the, so we were, I was teaching that and I taught like a couple of groups of classes that, and then at one class I'm looking at one of the nice things about teaching face-to-face is you can really see when people go dead behind the eyes, you can't see over zoom right you know, when someone's not listening in a real time class. And I was realized like half the class just isn't listening. And it's just bad because these are migrant workers again, one day off a week, they're giving up this day to come and get taught by me and something I'm saying just isn't landing properly. So asking a bunch of questions, why is this not landing, trying to get to the bottom of that? And I realized half the class, isn't saving money, I'm teaching entrepreneurship and they're not saving. And at least I said, no, I'm not doing this. I'm not teaching you how to become an entrepreneur. If you don't know what saving is, because it's just dangerous. It's a line I use about financial inclusion. And I shouldn't say it to Americans because obviously I'm a Brit, you know how we feel about gun control. But I say like financial inclusion without financial education is like gun inclusion without gun education. If you have financial inclusion, it just, if you don't educate people, it's just going to lead to credit card debt, consumer debt, because that's where the money is for institutions. That's what it's going to lead to. And I say, I'm not gonna teach you entrepreneurship. If you're not saving, you've got to know the basics. First, I went back and looked at what was wrong with the cause these people had all been through that basic personal finance courses. The people I was teaching something wasn't landing in there, they weren't changing their behavior. So that's where I really went back and said, okay, what is it? And I realized it's not enough to talk to people about financial literacy. Financial literacy is missing. A lot of financial lists. Literacy is missing a very big gap and it's psychology. The stuff we talk about in financial literacy is really simple. Most of it is you go from zero to one. It's really simple, but the psychologist. Actually understanding why someone would make fat move and change their life and creating that aha moment where people get it. That's the tough part. And one of the kinds of analogies I have in life with this is I feel like we're in a, we're in a school. And like financial literacy is being taught on one side of the corridor and the people that, the guy in that class, like I'm teaching really easy stuff. Why is no one getting this? And he's not looking across the corridor to this class on the other side, which is teaching marketing 101 and the guy financial literacy saying this is what financial literacy does. And the guy in the marketing 101 second. Don't talk about what it does. Talk about the benefits. Talk about how the customer. Give them what they want. And that's what I realized we had to do. And that's why that's one of the reasons I use the term non. My name is the $7 millionaire. Yeah. It's true. Where we sat there and we came up with that with my daughter and I, when she asked me that question, but equally $7 millionaire mean something, it's yeah, millionaire, right? That's the big dream. If you're not a millionaire that should drink $7 at a time, it can be done. This is what, so what we've got in there is we've got a big long-term goal and a daily goal, but you can't explain the two going together without thinking about compounding. Cause you have to use compounding to get in that. So what I've gotten there is a message, but I've got the dream built-in with the baby step on the way there that's marketing basic marketing. And if I look at financial literacy, some of them do it really well. And I have to take my hat off in some ways to like a guy like Ramit Setty. Cause what he's done is he's taken all the tricks of the scam trade and actually wrapped it into a financial literacy. I don't feel, some of his courses are a little bit expensive. What is giving? Yeah. But the most of like his book, that's the kind of stuff that people use to sell you for $200, $300, a thousand dollars, and then walk away. I will teach you to be rich as a perfect scam marketing title. But you know what the reason scams are repeat themselves is because they work people that it appeals to people and we need to use that. And that I think is probably the most important part of my journey was realizing it's psychology. The fact that I think the math is easy, isn't relevant, it's psychology all the way.

No, that's huge. That's huge. I definitely wrote that down. How important psychology is, right. And how important it is for people to have that aha moment, like you said, right? Because you could sit here and teach financial literacy all day. Actually what you were doing is teaching entrepreneurship, right? And you're teaching it to someone who's not financially literate. So if they're getting them, getting their stuff together and they're going to start a business, but they don't know how to save. They don't know how to invest their money. They're not going to be able to grow that business. It'll fail every time because they're not going to know what to do with the money. They're going to take their profits and they're going to go live their life and then realize, Hey, why are we under water? Because while you didn't invest, you didn't do ads. You didn't do what you were supposed to do to keep this business afloat. So yeah, little things like that. But the psychology piece, huge, absolutely huge. Because like you said, you can sit here and talk to somebody until they're blue in the face and they'll just, yes you to death. Yes you to death, but. If they're not truly understanding it because their mind's not there. It's just, it's not going to work, and what you're talking about too, with with a lot of the stuff with scams nowadays, and how appealing it is, when you see all these things online, you Google how to make money online or how to make money from home. And all these things pop up and say, oh, buy my course for $997. They always put that seven on the end because it feels like it's not too much, not too small whatever the psychology behind it is. Like you said. But th the reason why things like that happen, and the reason why a lot of these people that have peoples that have these courses are millionaires it's from the course, it's not from the actual investing or the action that they've taken. It's because they built this product that keeps roping people back in which, to their credit, it's a very smart way, but a very not so kind thing to do, right? Because the people that are come into you or the people that are coming to you for help. Having something, like what would I do here with this podcast? You can listen to a podcast on any platform and it's free, and we bring people on like you, that can talk intelligently about these different topics. Anybody can come listen to the show. Anybody can come here and listen to Michael, explain, where the $7 millionaire came from and why $7 a day, how you know how that can get you there over 50 years. And if you put a little more than that, you could even, you could start cutting those years down. So it's super important to understand that, there's resources out there that are free and there's different things you could do. There's different Facebook groups, you can join. There's different, mentorship groups that are free. There's some that you pay for too that are absolutely worth the money. Cause it's also the people that you come together with, it's building that network, right? Your network is your net worth type deal, but at the same time, to get there, you've got to build yourself up. So there's plenty of free resources out there that can help get you there.

One of the best thing I mentioned here, cause I don't think anyone knows about this because this organization has classic financial literacy organization, so they do no marketing. But the CFA organization, the chartered financial analyst organization, now it costs money to become a charter financial as a financial analyst and it's detailed and I'm not one high backed out. So it's sufficiently hard that I have to put my hand up and say, it's too hard for me. But they have a fundamentals of investing course that is a hundred percent free. This is the organization that every single person who really wants to work in investing gets a CFA. I have in my industry, I promise you, we have way more respect for CFA than we do for an MBA. You can have an MBA from wherever you got a CFA your ahead. 'cause it's cheap and you've had to work in your spare time to do it. And it's more, and it's more detailed. The CFA organization has a fundamental investing course, which is a hundred percent free. You can just go on register. They'll send you the curriculum. They'll send you where you find that the details takes me. I think it takes maybe 40, 50 hours to complete something like that. But that's it. And that's a result, like you said, there are amazing resources out there. The one thing I'd say, and this is where we come back to why it should be in schools, the job you do, the job I do that we're all trying to do. We're trying to spread this information for free, which I love one of my, sorry, before I get to where it should be in schools. One things I love about it is I love marketing this because the marketing message actually is a little bit of education, right? If I tell you, you can, if part of my marketing is you can make a million dollars by saving $7 a day. And that's my marketing strap line. You just learned something that you didn't. It's there you go, that's actually straightforward into.

That's the hook to get somebody to come check it out.

But they've learned it. They've actually learned something right there. They know something they didn't know, which is part of financial literacy. And maybe it works as a hook, but even for the one who doesn't, they learned something they didn't know. But the second part to, to get into why it's so important for schools is unfortunately hearing like all this stuff that's free on the. All of it. Let's say the good stuff, all the well-intentioned stuff, right? All the people like you like me, like all these people that are trying to help other people, unfortunately, we're all providing different access points into this. And if you've got no grounding, if you've got no basics, you can come and come in and think, oh that's the right place to start. That's what I need to know. And this is how kids end up trading derivatives on Robin hood because they see that as their first piece of information. If they, if we got that in school and someone said to us, okay, this is how you do, this is how you combat. Okay, no one is going to learn the word in school with one of my favorite words, because it's so hard to say heteroscedasticity now no one's going to do that in school, but heteroskedasticity is a really important concept because it's the difference between compounding at an average of 7%. 'cause your max is maybe 30% plus year. Your minimum is maybe a minus 15%. Yeah. And you average out into that kind of seven, 8% return, but you're never taken out of the game. If you stay invested, you'll never take out the game. You'll never going to have a minus 100% there you are in options. You are going to have a minus a hundred percent year on options. What's gonna happen. It's just like tossing a coin. It's just like playing roulette. You're going to have a minus a hundred percent now, reality.

Options or anything like that. That's not something you can just go lightly into. You definitely need to do your research and due diligence before doing something like that.

Exactly. And the problem with it is if you put all your money in your average return is nowhere near 10%. It's zero. Because if you're taken out of the game, if you have the risk of being taken out of the game in one, let's say it's roulette, you're going to roll. You're going roll every hand. Your average return on roulette is 0. All right, because eventually you'll get taken you're taken out and you got no money and that's what heteroscedasticity and you could refer to it as asymmetric risk. But it's a very specific asymmetric risk of your actual return becomes zero because of how much of how uneven it is. Now, if you could learn something along those lines, maybe not that word in, in school, you're going to look at options. Okay. Options is my gambling money options is my hedge options is how I take a tiny little position and switch it. It's not where I put all my money, right? This is, and that's not where I take all my risk and I can never expose myself. So losing all my money on this, but let's say, I think, you know what? I've got all my money in the S&P and I'm thinking, it looks a little bit toppish, but I want to stay in. Do you want to have a little bit of money where I could say I could just get like a buyer really out of the money, put option on the S&P for a very short period of time. And you know what, then I've just hedged myself on that position. Something as simple as that, maybe it's you want to buy a property in a particular market and you're looking to go, okay. Yeah, I can't, I haven't got the down payment yet and I want to save up for it. Maybe I could buy a warrant on a REIT. And there just is like as sufficiently out of the money. So it's really cheap. And if property prices go up that rate's going to go up and my warrant is going to fly and I'll have more money in my deposit to do that. And I've hedged out my rest now. Okay. Those are a couple of jumps for people. Maybe that's less than like maybe that's not a level one financial list, level 10 it's level two, right? This is stuff that people can understand. If you can go to, if you can lay a bet on a horse race, you can understand this stuff. And that's where I feel if we taught it in schools and we get everyone from zero to one at school, then they'd be free and be confident to go from level one to two to three, to four to five. And that's where school I think is it needs to play this vital role of giving us that basics like they do with maths and language and everything else, they teach us. They give us that basic.

And having that basic education like that foundation, right? It's a foundational education. It's something you can build upon. It's something that even if they did nothing more or learned anything more, it's still a foundation that they can rest on that will put them in a good place to retire at a decent age. If you just stick to the foundational principles, you can go deeper, you can dig deeper, learn how to do different things. You talked a little bit about real estate, right? If you didn't have the money for the down payment, there's other options, you can look for a hard money lender. If you know what this, you've got the numbers work, and that rate of return is gonna be better and you could pay them back soon. It might be in your best interest to do something like that. But that is all based on you having the basics down, having that foundation laid before you start building the frame, the framework of what your investing is going to look like. So that's super important. And you touched on this a little bit and I want to ask you something else about especially when it comes to financial literacy what do you think most people are getting wrong when it comes to financial literacy?

Yeah. Okay. I know that, yeah. This is an interesting one because it's not what everyone thinks because it's tempting to say, oh there's this one thing everyone talks about. And there's this other thing that everyone talks about. I think what people most get wrong is that they forget that everyone else's journey, isn't their journey and their journey. Isn't everyone else's journey.

I know it's a, we talked about that. Off-camera a little bit before, before we hit the record button and that's that's awesome. Yeah. I like that where we're synced up with that. That's really cool.

It's because it is exactly that. You see so many people it's and it's and it's well-meaning this is say that the biggest mistake that well-meaning people make with financial literacy is to say, Hey, what really worked for me was this was what gave me my aha moment. This is the thing that, you're the only thing you need to do. And then this'll be okay. And yeah, it's worked for you and it'll work for other people that might not work for the person you're talking to. And I'll give you a little bit of background on the stuff I was doing. Am I going to work as a why I ended up writing stuff for them rather than, taking out a Sunday and going teaching them in person. And that was because I don't look like a Filipino domestic worker. I'm not female, I'm not Filipino. It's just, they look at me and they go, what the hell can you tell me? The first lesson, every Filipino domestic work that needs to come to Singapore needs to learn is how do I not send money back to my uncle? When he tells me he needs some money to do X, Y, Z. And you're not, I can't answer that question for them. I got, I've heard answers, but they're not my answers. And you have to always like, okay, who again, back to marketing, who is my customer, understand who they are. Is it important that your teaching, or is it important that they learn? If it's important, they learn, then it's not matter so much. What I want to teach you, what matters is, okay, how are you going to get into this? What is the thing you're going to find? And that I think is that to me, that's the biggest mistake, too many people that they, the old line, they've discovered a hammer. So everything looks like a nail. I think the, I still love Charlie Munger's line. So out of everyone, it's you have to do this. If you work in investing, you have to love Buffett and Munger, but obvious, I'm one of the few that goes actually, you know what? I'm a Munger guy. I'm a Charlie Munger a hundred percent. And I love that. I'm that Charlie Munger instead about Warren Buffett's yeah, Warren is one of those guys. He's got a, he's got a hammer. His genius is identifying nails. He knows what a nail looks like.

And see what the big differences that you said there though, where, you know, somebody with a hammer starts looking at everything like a nail. But the difference there with Warren Buffett was he identified the nails. It wasn't, I'm just going to swing at everything. So I just want to point that out cause that's a super key point.

And that's Charlie Munger looking at his best mate and saying, that's, what's special about Warren and I, and that's what we all have to remember. We've all got a hammer. We all know we've got a hammer. We've this financial literacy is our hammer. And it might be one particular thing. We got to remember that not everyone is a nail, and that they might need a slightly different introduction to this, and it's, that's all that's what matters. And you just have to remember that we bring them in softly.

You mentioned earlier, every everyone's journey is different. The people that you're teaching right now. They're not looking to invest and get to the point where they're gonna make millions and millions of millions. They're saying, Hey, I need to be able to make enough money to take care of my family back home. I need to be able to send this money back home when needed, how do I get there? So that's their journey. That's how, that's what they need to focus on. But the thing is educating them on how to, put themselves in a better spot where maybe they build up some type of passive cashflow that just goes back home and helps them back there. And Hey, just put a little bit to the side. If you can do what you can do $7 a day, if that's what it is that you can do. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome.

And you'll love this. Okay. And they read, if like low income level, real estate and places like the Philippines can yield 12 to 15 percent. Now you imagine you can, you just need to buy a couple of little properties, right? And all of a sudden, you run those that you don't need to do fancy entrepreneurship. You just need to save enough to go a couple of little pieces of property that you can rent out to someone in the area. And then you're good. You're probably generating enough passive income to run the rest of your life. That it's that straightforward. And so sometimes when I hear from people, it's These lessons don't apply to most of the world. These are luxury problems. I'm talking to my, I'm a rich guy. I'm talking to my rich kid daughter about money. It's yeah, it's true. I can't deny that, but I've tried as much as I can to make the lessons are universal. And I know for a fact that the things I talk to the same lessons work with university students, they work with migrant workers. They work because I'm taking it down to that basic universal though. You can't ask me about a Roth IRA because I do not understand them. I don't get into the weeds because I've got no need to understand it. I'm not American. I don't own that. Other people can only be uniquely. You need to go from zero to one before you can start understanding what those things are, but the basics universals are the same from the Philippines to Nigeria, to the UK, to the US.

Right and what you do understand is compound interest and how it works and how you can use it to, make more money. Same thing works for somebody that is investing in a Roth IRA. It's all about the compound interest. It's about, building up from that foundation that we're talking about. I'd like to even say, I know we were talking about it being level one. I would almost say that's level zero, you're ground zero right there. Your foundation is that basic financial literacy level one is when you start, putting that money away into something and maybe getting a small return or just growth level two is where you're, you're starting to build that passive income, right? This you got the foundation down, you put the flooring in, and now you starting to build the framework on the side of the house. And that's when you're starting to see, Hey, this is going to be a shelter in the future, this is going to be something that I can live under this roof in the future. Now I just gotta work it up to the top and get to the roof. But it's a foundation, you're sitting in a spot where you're good.

You're in very dangerous grounds. You're talking a very good analogy. Someone who's in the middle of writing a book that might get stolen. So far I've been working, I've been working with the metaphor of a path rather than a foundations to house, but I can see that's going to come back. I'm going to be writing in a couple of days and that's going to come back in here.

That's awesome. That'd be cool. So yeah, that's, I like real estate, so it always comes back to that for me. But that's the way I've always talked about these things like these are foundations, like these principles that you have to follow. If you want to get yourself to a point where you're going to be financially free in the future it's not about, getting rich overnight. And I want, the next two years I want to be retired. Some people have actually done that in real estate in two years, got themselves to a point where they're making enough passive income. They can call it quits. Good for them, a lot is some people can do that. Not everybody. Can you still got to build it up over, a couple of years, some people take 5, 10, 15, some people do it for 20 years. It just, the point is. Like we said earlier, everyone's journey is different, but the thing is you have to be on a journey first, if you don't set a path and start walking down that path and you're just walking around without a compass and you don't know where you are, you're just walking through the woods. Eventually you're going to come to that cliff, or you're going to be just surrounded by trees and not know where you are and you're gonna be lost for the rest of your life.

You're back in my metaphors. Now I'm a hundred percent, a hundred, and it's interesting cause I love hearing real estate guys talk. I have done real estate. I don't know the places. And this is again why it's and real estate has a particular advantage as an asset class to us, the small guys, not the institutional guys real estate unit at a price point and other sort of renovation level and a fixer-upper, they don't work for a big organization. You can't, if you're the size of fidelity or, BlackRock, you cannot be buying up a third of the US which would be the size of your capital base and fixing it up in one go, it just, it's just not a scalable endeavor, whereas a single, single individual

And that would destroy the entire market.

Yeah. I'm saying I don't want to, I'm not trying to encourage them to either. It's actually practically impossible for them to do it. It's the scale just isn't right. Whereas at a single human scale, it's possible for us, the small guy to one go in recognize this piece of property is a good deal. Two actually, maybe even do the work themselves and three flip it. So it makes it an enormous amount of sense. And what's even better about that is it's improving the property stock. This is not making the world a worse place. Isn't making the world a better place when they do that. So this is one of the great things about real estate. One of the problems with real estate. I'm sorry to say this. And it's, it is that some people in it have that hammer and they think everything is a nail. And it's you know what? I, so I live in a country. Okay. My apartment, I calculate, I started rent it. I pay less than a 1% yield. Why would I own property in a market where it's a 1% yield? It's literally, I would have to double the amount of money I pay every month to pay the mortgage interest on where I live. It wouldn't make any sense. Now that's important because I know how to do that. Okay. Over 25, 30 years and make a wrong for me. Maybe the market will fly and it'll go wrong. But as it I know how to do that calculation. I'd like everyone to be that financially illiterate, where they can go, hold on. I borrow at 3% and the yield is 15 duh. It's just if it went the most people can't see the no-brainer, they can't see the no-brainer in either directions because they don't have that basic fundamental. So like I said, real estate is a great asset class, but again, it needs people to understand the basics of it. Okay. How do I assess if it's a great market or not?

Yeah. For me, I can't just go in there and buying, whatever, whatever you feel like without doing any type of research, like with any investment, right? You have to do some type of research. You have to do your due diligence. You have to learn and educate yourself, right? You can't just say, oh, this house looks like a good fixer upper, let me go buy it and fix it up. And it turns out you just spent, $400,000 on a house, in a neighborhood where houses around 400 to 450,000 and you just put 50,000 in it, renovating it. And you turn around and you got to put it on the market and you're selling it for a breakeven price or you're losing money. You have to be able to know you know what those key performance indicators are going to be. You need to know what it is you're going to identify to go in there and make it work. You can't just sit here and fudge the math in your head, and do napkin math and say, okay, this is going to work because if I do this, or maybe if I change this, or maybe if I do that, don't, if you have to like really tweak the numbers, to get yourself to a point where it's going to be profitable, then you're doing yourself a disservice and it's going to hurt. But if you can go in there and you could do like a basic calculation and just again, keep it very close to the foundation. If you can keep it there and it comes back with a profit, then you're probably in a really good spot. You want to try to be as conservative as possible when it comes to that. And, expect less, but if more happens, that's awesome. So let's put yourself in a spot where you're going to be safe and, don't sit here and take your life savings and dump it into one property that, and then it doesn't work out

Like the whole, like what, everyone in the world does. Everyone's buying their dream home. They're moving towards their dream home as a single property. It's one of the things I love about small real estate investors is they're buying garages, right? They're buying little rental places. They're buying commercial properties. They're buying little kind of units that they can, the fit your first unit. It should not be your bit, the biggest gamble you make in your life. That's insane. Which is 90% of the property market is people getting the biggest deposit they can so they can buy the house. They really like not thinking about all the maths that you just went through. That is the, that's the result of no financial literacy, good financial literacy people would say, okay, this is an asset class. I need to understand this asset class. Maybe I should do some small bites size experiments and learn where I get things wrong and where I get things right. Let me tell you those stories from my day job, because I think this is really instructive. Because it is from my day job. This is not in the book. So we got an investment wrong a few years back. Not that it lost us money. We didn't invest in it. We didn't like it. And it went up a lot and every time we went up, it obviously got more expensive and harder for us to buy it. And so we're looking at anything, what did we do? What do we do? And so we sat down, we literally sat down and we, we w what were the things we got wrong? And it even got to the point where I found the guy who'd been running the business, and then we're running one big part of it and left. And I got hold of him on LinkedIn. And he's yeah, I don't work there anymore. Why do you want to talk to me? And I said, I want to talk to you because I want to know how I got that investment wrong. Because it's not like I'm going to stop doing this. I can't just put my head in the sand and say, oh, next time I'll be smarter. But just can just by magic, I'll be smarter if I know how I was stupid last time. What did I get wrong? And so we literally wrote a paper in internally. So how did we miss this? What did we get wrong? What do we do differently next time? How do we identify what the next time of these things is? And so we know, and if we've got the remaining question marks around who, how do we answer those questions? It was a painful process, but you know what? I come up, I might still miss the next one, but at least I've done my homework, at least I know why I missed that one properly. And that's what everyone should be doing in every asset class they're in, right? Every time you lose money, this is a lesson. And and you start with a small one, you should not be doing okay. How much can I afford for down payment on the house of my dreams that are 90% mortgage. And then. That's the house for the rest of my life. Cause if it goes down 10%, you lose the money you saved the last 10 years you're out. And it happens to so many people. There's no opportunity to learn a lesson in what they're doing there. And that again, financial literacy, this is, these are the basics.

And like you said too, even what you guys did with your company, just, figuring out what is it you missed and understanding it. That's super important because if same thing in real estate, right? If if you decided that you were going to go invest in a specific market but then you dropped out because you didn't do enough research. You didn't realize that, oh, Hey, they're actually building like an Amazon warehouse here. Or the next Tesla Gigafactory is going to be here. And because you missed a small detail like that property that you thought was too expensive, all of a sudden, five years later after the factories' up and running and that property has doubled or tripled or quadrupled in value, you're like, how the heck did I not see this coming? Because you didn't do your due diligence. You didn't research the area that you were trying to get into. And I think that's super important. That's why I like a lot of the real estate syndication companies that I deal with right now. They are very huge on that. Like they really researched their markets. And that's one of the things, that makes them successful because they know what their exit strategy is. They have a good exit plan, that they have multiple exit strategies, not just one. And that's part of the thing that's important too is having sure, what I was talking about before, like going down a path and walking down a path, that's great. A path is never a straight line. Never right. If it is then, Hey, you found the magical path, but there's always going to be, you're going to always come to a crossroad. You're always going to come to a part where it branches off, where you have to make a decision and you have to choose what path you're going to go down. So giving yourself an option where there's multiple, that all lead, no matter what, it's going to get you to the same goal at the end, the winding brick road while always bringing it to the Emerald palace, just what matters is, what path do you go down? One might be a little bit longer. One might be a little bit shorter, but a little more risky with a couple of cliffs on the side. That if you're not careful enough, you're going to fall off the edge. And then there might be that one, that's a straight shot, but it's just, really long and treacherous. So it just depends on what path are you gonna take? And just being able make an educated decision, not just any decision, but make an educated decision and understand what you're getting yourself into, because, I think we've both said this a bunch of times is no matter what it, any type of investment is a risk there's always risk involved. I think since we talked about nails a lot that kind of hits the nail on the head.

Yeah, exactly. It's actually, so one of the things in the book it's good fundamentals is the investment section. A couple of people said to me I don't talk about any specific investments at all in the investment section I want to talk about because I use, I actually just have an app, the new acronym in it, which is risk with two hours. I was just talking about risk. Through the whole investment section, because the whole point of investing is look, there is no such thing as taking no risk, putting your money on the mattress is the biggest risk of all, because we know there's inflation, right? So it's, that is a risk and it's just denial is a risk. You're just denying the rest of the town. So then you have to take risks. What risks do you take and how do you assess those risks? And that's the most important thing is how do you assess those risks and how do you become comfortable with risk and how do you take the right risks for you? This is the key to actually investing is taking the right risk for you.

Yup. The right risk and the right choice. Can I ask you what that acronym stands for? I love acronyms, so I wrote it down. R I S K

Okay. So yeah, so the R in R I S K is risk return. And then the I is for integrity. And a lot of, not a lot of people will talk about this, but it, what I mean by integrity is it's gotta be the right risk for you. Don't take risks that your life doesn't need you to take. You don't need, someone might tell you that Tokyo property is like the best market in the world. You don't need that risk, right? If you need that risk and you should take it, if you don't need that risk, don't take it. So taking the right risk for you, like the S&P 500 is the right risk for everyone. This is the biggest 500 companies in the world. So it's the right risk for everyone. We all need to be exposed to the global economy. And the global capital S is for spread, which is just another word for diversification. Spread it around. And K is for knowledge. That's how you really reduce your risks is by knowing more and keep knowing more. And you're never gonna, you're never gonna stop. You just heard that story. I told you about that company that was last year, 20, 23 years into my investing career. And I'm still going to a guy saying, how do I get your company? What did I do wrong? How do I get that wrong? And I've made investments where the D a, this annoys the crap out of my wife, we made an investment maybe 12 years ago and I'll refer to how we got it wrong. And she said, we didn't get it wrong. We love that place. We still own it. Yeah, I didn't do enough research. It's but we got Yeah, we got it right. But I didn't do enough research. I got the process wrong. I should've done more research. I might've made a different investment and got the investment worse. Luckily I got the investment. But that's not process, I got my process. And it still bothers me that I got it wrong. I'll never do that process ever again. And you have to have that again. You see what we're talking about here? If you go back to the beginning, none of this is complicated, and this is, so this is a word that you're using in the new book. It's very important to stress the difference between the word complex and complicated. Complicated is a thing that is inherently difficult to understand. The thing itself is difficult to understand. A complex thing is a thing that is made up of lots and lots of simple things. So it looks hard to understand, but everything in it is actually quite easy and that's investing, most things in it are actually pretty simple, but sometimes they get layered one on top and top on top of the top. And it looks like, oh, that's too hard to understand, particularly for anyone new coming in for someone new coming in. So there's all this stuff to know. How do I know that? Okay. Don't know it all. Just learn the basics and that'll give you enough to go, okay, what's next? And what comes after that? But that to me is is how we keep moving through this. You asked me another question because I completely lost it.

All. Good. So actually I have a, I'll just one more question I want to ask you cause we go, I think we've we hit everything I wanted to talk about. But for, let's say we have somebody who is, just looking to get started, they're getting ready to build that foundation. They're just about to finish up paying off their debt so they could start investing. Are there any tips or tricks that you would recommend for somebody who's getting started today?

Now I have to explain my entire book because that's what the book for my daughter was about. The thing that you, okay, so the most important thing you paid off debt, so you've actually already live. The most important lesson, which is you don't need to spend all the money in your salary or in your income. That's. One of the things I think is fascinating with people who achieve financial independence is the number of them that arrived there from a debt position and how the debt doesn't slow down their progress that much. And actually a lot of them get to FI faster than the people that didn't start with debt, because they've learned such an aggressive saving habit to get out of the debt and then they continue that through. So I'd say that's the first lesson is knowing that you don't have to spend all your income once you got there. You're just so far ahead of the rest of the world. The second thing is, I think it's so important to learn. Okay, so you need, we only need an emergency fund. So we tucked that away. Let's get that one. Talk to why pop back. You need to have an emergency fund. We know that now, particularly after 20, what happened in 2020, we all know why we need an emergency fund. If the next stage for me, I think is nearly always to understand what an index is and what it does and how that will probably do you find the most of your invest most of your equity investing needs. And this is again, another reason why I don't talk about what I do in the day job, because obviously I do the opposite of that in my day job, but in very specialized way, but an index for most people. Okay. What is it? Top 500 companies in the world. What does that mean? You buy one VTI and all of a sudden the 500 top paid CEOs in the world work for you. That's what that means. You've now tapped into the global economy in the best way possible. That's where you go before you start doing single stock. To me, you can learn so much about single stocks by understanding the index because in the end, it's how you allocate capital. That will make you the most money over time. There's so much risk in single stock that you really need to approach it from an index position. And honestly, I think that gets so many people at 80, 90% of the way there. I think real estate is worth learning. 'cause we're all going to have to own it. At some point we all live in it. We have to have somewhere to live. And so that to me is often because you can't put a, a $500 increment into a house that to start with an index so that it makes sense to be that stage. But then when you've got money in, in, you've got maybe a down payment that you can put in a small way into real estate, those two things you've now got such an enormous part of the global capital system, right? It's exposure to them that will get you there. The only other thing I'd add in is like one of the best tips I've ever heard, which is every time you gather, every, anytime you get an increase in income, 50% of the increase goes into. And what I love about that. Cause it's, it's, it reminds me, I grew up in the west of England and we'd go picking fruit, strawberries and stuff and the summer. And you had to pay for what you took out that you'd eat a ton while you were doing it as well. You're picking strawberries and it's and there's one for me, one for the guy, right? One for me, one for the basket, one for me, one for the basket and the same thing. It's such a simple rule, right? You get a 50, $50 raise 25 from a savings, 25 for me. Now, the reason that works is because the 25 is still a raise, right? It's still an improvement in your standard of living gradually you'd improve the 25 into your savings is going to boost your savings in a way that if you put 50 in your standard living is slowly going to come there. It's just going to happen. If

you're keeping up with inflation at that point.

Yeah. But if you put 50 into your spending, you're never going to increase your savings. So 50 51 for me, one for them. That I think works for me. That's like the one that I think the, just the simplest little thing.

Yeah. I know people that will take a hundred percent of their pay raise and put it into a savings, but I liked the 50%. I think it's much more manageable because there, there is an expected quality of life increase when you get a pay raise and things like that. That's fantastic. All right. My,

sorry, I'm gonna interrupt you just cause it's all about the psychology. It's all about the psychology, like we said before, and the 50 50 works on the psychology.

Yep. Just like you were nailing down before psychology. It's it has to do a lot with your mental state, where it is that, you what flips that switch where you, like you even said it earlier. At the very beginning, when we first started talking about actually I have it here in my notes when we were talking about okay. So we were talking about how learning how to do this is not difficult, but it's very powerful. And the key thing that you did is you change your thought process. You change your mindset, and that might be the hardest, yet easiest thing for anybody to do, because to change your mindset, you're going to have to start breaking old habits, you're going to have to get past some of those spending habits that you might have and things like that. But once you do it and you realize how easy that was, that change just comes naturally. Okay. I have to ask you the most important question, and this is because, we've had an awesome, amazing conversation. I really enjoyed so much of it. My listeners. I'm sure they're loving it right now, too. And they're going to want to know a little bit more about Michael and where they could find some information about you. They're going to want to know more about who this $7 millionaire is or what they could find what the $7 millionaires all about. So if you could please share with us, do you have a website, a social media that people can check out? That'd be awesome.

Yeah. So the book that you can see right behind me, the happy ever after. So that's why the $7 millionaire there's seven that's because links to get to that on the website, which is sevendollarmillionaire.com occasionally active on Twitter. And I don't understand Instagram. The you'll see stuff on Instagram, but that's not me. That's that if there's stuff on Instagram that's an intern. The the, yeah, that, that's where you can find me and it's then there should be another book coming out middle of next year, which touch wood fingers crossed would be similar kinds of lessons, but looked at in a totally different way, because again, to try and get inside someone else's psychology, that one was getting inside my daughter's psychology. This will be the get inside someone else's psychology.

Yeah. Different paths. So it's this happy ever after financial freedom? Isn't a fairytale. Is that like a, is it a children's book?

It's literally the publisher Wiley was I laughing when they asked me like, who's the target market? I said my 17 year old daughter as a target market of one, I know exactly who it's for. I've seen it. I now know it's being read by 12 year olds, 13 year olds, 14 year olds, 25 year olds, 30 year olds, 40 year olds. Unfortunately when like a 50 year old reads it, they go, I wish I'd learned this earlier. It's if you go on Amazon and you read through reviews, like I think maybe three quarters of the reviews say, I wish I'd learned this 25 years ago. And I say to them, give the book to your kids, right? That's that's what it was written for. And so that's that it's aimed at that era, that age where, you know what you, if you're 18, 19, 20, you're going to be putting this to use really soon, but it's just written in a way that you can understand the whole thing. So my daughter art student writes plays. Going to need money cause she's never going to earn it. So she's going to have to save every penny she gets. So how do you take someone like that and get them all the way to understanding FI and that's the whole journey of the book is like from real basics, the whole journey of the book. So it can't really be like an eight year old cause they can't use it, but like someone who's 17, 18, they're going to use it soon.

Great stuff. So I wanted to ask because I've got my two daughters as they're getting getting up in age, I've got them reading different financial literacy books. So this one might have to get added to the curriculum when they get a little bit older. So that's they're going to be actually turning here soon, very soon, 12 and 10.

The 12 year old might be ready for it. She's read stuff online. Yeah. She might be ready for a very soon. It's got this, got fairytales woven through it. It's deliberately worked to just keep them interested.

Yeah. Fantastic. All right. I'm going to make sure I get all of those links in the show notes for everybody that's listening right now. If you're driving, don't write that stuff down. Wait til later and copy and paste it out of the the show notes. Or as you heard him say it's sevendollarmillionaire.com check it out, Michael, it was an absolute pleasure having this conversation with you today with you being in Singapore, and me being in Hawaii. Technology is amazing. This was an absolute treat.

It was wonderful to be on there. And I want to say, thank you as well for doing this. I think one of the biggest services I'd like I've written a book for target market of one, one of the great things about guys like you doing these podcasts is you're aggregating, which we need this industry needs us because we're not taught it in school. We need people like you that can talk to maybe, I don't know whether you talk to 50, a hundred, 200 people a year and gather that information for people and help people see it. So I think it's really important. So thanks for having me on.

Hey, thanks again. I really appreciate it. And we'll get this information out there for everybody. It's been an absolute pleasure. Like I said.

Thanks very much.