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Episode 7: Adam Carroll: Build a Bigger Life, not a Bigger Lifestyle
570 Plays8 years ago
Too often we expect people entering college or even into their 20’s to know what they want to do vocationally, now through the end of their days. But we all know life doesn’t work that way.
In this episode of the Uncommon Life Project podcast we talk with Adam Carroll, a financial literacy expert who helps young adults (and anyone else) gain a better understanding of money and building wealth.
You’ll learn how Adam has leveraged his passion for public speaking and financial planning into multiple projects and ventures.
Adam Carroll is a nationally recognized financial literacy expert, TED Talk speaker and documentary filmmaker. He's the author of three books on money, the most recent being "The Money Savvy Student." He speaks in schools throughout the US and has developed a widely used money curriculum. Adam founded masteryofmoney.com as a source for high-quality financial resources for those in pursuit of mastery in these critically important topics. What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- Paying attention to those small or potentially life-changing “this is what you are supposed to do” moments
- Success is never a straight line. Be ready to zig and zag until you get there
- How to turn your knowledge or skill (like speaking or writing) into passive income
- Lessons learned from losing money
- Amortization isn’t just for mortgages. How to understand your debt load
- There are many, many paths to the Seven Sources of Residual Income
- Specific ways to sacrifice in the short term to prepare for long term financial stability
- How to teach your kids about money – have them interact with real money from a young age
- Creative ways of leveraging your skills to maximize earning potential
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to The Uncommon Life Project
00:00:02
Speaker
Everyone dreams about living an uncommon life, but how we define that dream is very different for each of us. And for most, it's a lifelong pursuit. Welcome to the Uncommon Life Project podcast. We're going to introduce you to people who are living that life or enjoying the journey to get there. We're going to also give you some tools, tricks, and tips for starting or accelerating your own efforts to live an uncommon life.
00:00:27
Speaker
A life worth celebrating and savoring.
Meet Adam Carroll: Financial Literacy Expert
00:00:30
Speaker
Please welcome your hosts, Brian Dewhurst and Phillip Ramsey. Okay, welcome to the show. My name is Phillip Ramsey. And I'm Brian Dewhurst. Thank you so much for that great intro, Marge. We really appreciate it. Actually, that's not her name, but we thought we'd name her, so she's gotta have a name. She's gotta have a name.
00:00:46
Speaker
You guys, I'm so excited for this guest. A little bit nervous because every time we get together, we always spend about two or three hours. So, his name is Adam Carroll, one of our close friends and just kind of entrepreneur, I would say, coaches for Brian and
Adam Carroll's Journey to Financial Mastery
00:01:02
Speaker
I. We've known him for quite some time. Definitely. So, a little background on Adam. Adam Carroll is a nationally recognized financial literacy expert. A two-time, two, two, two, two, two time.
00:01:13
Speaker
Ted Talk speaker and documentary filmmaker. He's the author of three books on money. The most recent being the money savvy student. He's used as a curriculum in schools all across the country. And Adam founded the mastery of money.com as a source for high quality financial resources for those in pursuit of mastery in these critically important topics.
00:01:32
Speaker
Welcome to the show, Adam Carroll. You guys, I'm so pumped to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah. I wish we had, uh, like one of those applause can applause, you know? Up our budget on this whole season two season two. All right. So let's just jump right in. And have you always been this money savvy professional thinking about money different or, or have you had to come through kind of a journey of your own?
00:02:01
Speaker
Well, it's been a journey, no doubt. Part of the reason that the website that I have been writing on for some time now is Mastery of Money. I heard from a speaker at one point that all of us should be pursuing mastery in something. I chose two things. One was speaking, which has been my profession for the better part of 18 or 19 years, and money. I figured if you're going to pursue mastery of something, why not pursue mastery of the thing that
00:02:31
Speaker
Is basically ranks right up there with oxygen as Zig Ziglar says So so it's been a journey Philip and and you know, I was not the most intelligent money guy early on in my life But I've learned a lot of really hard lessons. I've asked a lot of really great questions along the way Yeah, definitely so and we know a lot about you so if you could share with our our listeners kind of how you were at a job and
00:02:58
Speaker
You got out of college, you did the job, you're married. You started having kids. If you can shed light on kind of where your story forked, I think that will dovetail for the rest of our conversation.
00:03:10
Speaker
You know, for me, it was a number of jobs. I mean, I was in my turbulent 20s, just like most of us, where I bounced from job to job trying to figure out, is this me? Is this me? And this is a total sidebar comment. But I think that whole notion that young people have to know exactly what they want to do with their life is probably the most dangerous thing you could tell a kid. Preach it.
00:03:37
Speaker
At eighteen or twenty two or twenty five in some cases they don't know for me it was twenty seven.
From Layoff to Passion: Carroll's Career Shift
00:03:43
Speaker
I knew exactly what I wanted to do it hit me like a ton of bricks and I realized that speaking was my thing that I wanted to go out and I want to teach and train and deliver great content to big audiences and small audiences and.
00:03:57
Speaker
So in, in, I guess I was, I was 27. That thing hit me. I got a job doing that thing with a division of monster.com, the job search company. And, um, and then nine 11 happened and I lost my job, but I had that taste of wanting to do that. And I never lost that taste. I went through another two job changes. Um, one I learned all about small business and coaching and development.
00:04:23
Speaker
from a guy named Michael Gerber who wrote a book called The E-Myth Revisited and I felt super lucky to be able to train under a guy like that. And then I had one more job and it was very entrepreneurial in nature but I was working for a guy who was very much an entrepreneur. He had created
00:04:44
Speaker
written material content training modules and was selling those to HR professionals who had left their job and wanted to kind of hang their own shingle and do their own thing. And in the midst of that, it kept coming to me that had this money thing is just still there. It's still like, you know, it's like a residual aftertaste of great ice cream or chocolate. Like,
00:05:06
Speaker
I just want some more of that." And so a friend of mine was working in Los Angeles at the time and he was sick of his job. And we were talking every week on the phone and he said, do you still have that idea for that money program that we talked about years ago, back when we were working with Monster? And I said, I do. In fact, I have it written. I have the whole thing mapped out. And he said, I think we need to write a book
00:05:33
Speaker
I think we need to create a program and I think we need to go sell that into high schools and colleges. And that was in 2004. Wow. And that's where, for me, that's where everything took off on a different trajectory. And what age were you then, Adam? So 2004, I would have been 31. Okay. 29. I'm sorry, 29.
00:05:54
Speaker
Yeah, so two or three years went by there. Talk to me about the ton of bricks that hit you because I think there's a lot of people out there today that are hoping that those ton of bricks hit them. Yeah. Tell me about that thought process, that transition for you. I was driving around at the time when I had this epiphany.
00:06:14
Speaker
I was working for a company called Tom James, which is a clothing company. I was a clothier. I went and called on upper level executives like you two in your offices. I would sell custom made suits and shirts and sport coats and all of that. And it was a great gig because I got to meet a lot of really important business people.
00:06:34
Speaker
Uh, great for me in terms of learning how to take rejection and hear no and not, you know, just shrug my shoulders. No big deal. But where I think the real value for me was I drove around Denver, Colorado, where I was working every day going from client to client. And in the middle of the day, I was listening to CDs.
00:06:53
Speaker
in my car of Jack Canfield and Zig Ziglar and Mark Victor Hansen and Les Brown and Tony Robbins and all of these well-known guys like Andy Andrews, who's a phenomenal speaker.
00:07:07
Speaker
Larry Wingett, I could go on and on. So I'm listening to all these, and I think it was Mark Victor Hansen made a comment in one of the recordings. He said, public speaking is one of the most noble professions because you can change people's lives, you get to travel the world, and you get paid really well to do it. And I'm like, that is the trifecta. That is what I want to do, all three of those things.
00:07:31
Speaker
And when I did it, it was like I had come from a background of having had done a lot of that. You know, I was in drama in high school. I keynoted our graduation ceremony. I was on radio and TV in college.
00:07:46
Speaker
And I just knew that this was part of who I was in my core. I wanted to go do it. And there was this voice. It was just like, this is your calling. This is what you're supposed to go do. And I immediately reached out to a friend of mine who's kind of one of my stable rock kind of partners in life. And I said, dude, I just got hit with this. I think this is what I need to do. And he said, well, don't you know, we used to work with this girl who works now at Monster.com. And let's just connect the two of you and make it happen.
00:08:15
Speaker
and literally within, you know, 60 days.
00:08:20
Speaker
everything had changed.
The Mission of Financial Education
00:08:21
Speaker
I was on my way to Cincinnati to interview with these guys and do a demo. And within two weeks I was hired. Um, I started traveling all across the country. I did, I spoke to like 200,000 people in a year and a half. Wow. I mean, it was just, it was wild, but that was the, it was a voice ultimately, Phillip and answer your question. Yeah. You guys, you can see why I'm a little nervous about this conversation because we're about five minutes in and I could make this thing go at least, we could go for a long.
00:08:49
Speaker
So our goal here is to try to condense this thing. Let me ask you this quickly. Top of your head, what are your top three strengths, you would say? Oh, man. So that stops me in my tracks. I think my ability to communicate a simple concept
00:09:07
Speaker
in a way that, or maybe a complex concept in a simple way so that people get it. I have a really high and always have, I have a really high emotional intelligence. My parents had pinned me on that years and years and years ago. I could walk into a room and I knew who was hurting and who was happy and who was needing consolation or whatever. The same is true today. You know, I can go into a room and I know, I just, I have a way of reading people. I think that's a skill set.
00:09:37
Speaker
And last is I have a really sickeningly creative mind, I think, that is always going, which is both a blessing and a curse. And so I have the ability to create content in a really rapid way and almost connect dots where people would not be able to see there were dots. So I've helped a lot of business owners that say, I'm just struggling with this part of my business.
00:10:03
Speaker
We have an hour-long conversation at the end. They're like, I can't believe we just got through all of that in an hour. Yeah, we've had those ones with you too. Personally, a test of that. Okay, so let's move back. Monster.com 2009, no more job, and you decide to write a book in 2004. Yes. What was the book called?
00:10:24
Speaker
The book was winning the money game. And it was a rule book to achieving financial success for young people. The premise of it was basically that there is a game that we all play with money. And at any given time in our lives, we are either winning the game or we are losing the game. And our notion in the book was that most people just have never learned the rules of how to play the game.
00:10:44
Speaker
They don't know that they're playing it. They're playing it wrong. They're losing by nature the fact that that's how our society is basically setting people up right now. So we wrote this book and it was a very, very slim book. The joke that we use when we talk about the book is that the average college graduate reads 0.9 books a year.
00:11:09
Speaker
0.9. Wow. So we wrote 0.6 of a book. It's like this. Slice this in there. Anyone can read this book.
00:11:18
Speaker
And it was our first go, it was our freshman effort. I learned how to self-publish for this book. So it was one of those questions where we said, how do we do this? And my co-author Chad Carden, who is a dear, dear friend of mine and a brilliant guy, he said, well, we don't know how to do this, but if we did know, what would we do?
00:11:41
Speaker
And we just kept asking that question. If this were easy, what would it look like? And we started going down that path of, let's assume it's easy, what does this look like? And then before we knew it, we had a finished product. And I think we've sold 40 or 45,000 copies of that book.
00:11:58
Speaker
And you know, and you guys are math guys and business guys, it costs us a dollar 11 to produce each book. And we were selling the books for $10 a piece of events. So our profit margin was pretty good on the books. Yeah, pretty phenomenal. Yeah. So Adam, you've read our piece, the
Diverse Income Streams and Financial Security
00:12:18
Speaker
seven sources of residual income. So walk our listener through how you went from getting a paycheck from someone to creating your own paycheck.
00:12:26
Speaker
in speaking and books, kind of walk our listeners through that new trail of cashflow you had to create for you and your family. Yeah. Well, and I will say there were some diversions. I think people believe that success is a straight line, A to B, from here to here. Right. And in all reality, it zigs and zags and goes backwards and forwards and then takes a diversion and then eventually ends up where it's supposed to. In 2004, when I started the company,
00:12:56
Speaker
We were in Waco, Texas at the time. We moved back to Des Moines. My wife got her job back that she had left to go to Waco, so that was a blessing. She had a full-time income. I was at home, slanging and banging the phones, trying to get colleges and high schools to say yes to our crazy program.
00:13:17
Speaker
And through time and effort, it happened. We started getting booked. We were selling books. It was definitely a long-term play. It was two or three years before we had really, really solid traction. But what was interesting in that process was after the book was written, something crystallized for me in my mind that I had heard years before.
00:13:38
Speaker
And I don't remember, it may have been T. Harvecker in the book, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, but he was talking about don't just go to work and get paid. Go to work and get paid, go to work and get paid, which is kind of what we're conditioned to do in our society.
00:13:55
Speaker
But instead, go do the work and then get paid, get paid, get paid, get paid. And once the book was written, it was like, this is content, this is valuable, this is what licensing looks like. And being able to create something and then turn around and profit from it over and over and over again. And to this day, you know, I think we get
00:14:21
Speaker
We get orders from Amazon every week and every month it gets deposited into my account. I don't do anything for that money. That's real mailbox money. That's mailbox money and that's the stuff that I did. It was six weeks, three or four mornings a week at Starbucks from 5.30 to 7.30 in the morning writing.
00:14:41
Speaker
And then going and working with clients and doing the other thing which is selling my time for money. Which obviously is another stream but it's not necessarily passive. Yeah. But from a branding standpoint, it reinforced the message and
00:14:58
Speaker
identity of what you were trying to create. Totally. And I think that evolution, in answer to your question, Brian, was I invested in real estate in 2006. I did it, in all honesty, I did it at a poor period of time. I did it in 06 and late 07 or early 08.
00:15:18
Speaker
Now the 0708 purchase was a foreclosure, but I bought it at an auction and it was a terribly misinformed purchase, but a great learning opportunity. And sometimes you have to have those. You have to understand that you may lose money, but the lessons that you're paying for are very valuable.
00:15:38
Speaker
Yeah. Phillip talks about that all the time. I think, you know, you, you know, we're obviously help people put money in the stock market, but you know, a lot of times people go and do that on their own and they lose the money and they don't really learn anything. Like you still haven't learned anything because it's kind of not tangible. Right.
00:15:54
Speaker
So I think that's a great point. What do you think, because I know the answer to this, so I'm just kind of letting our listeners in on your life, is why the college? Why was that the pinnacle of kind of your focus? And it had to do with you and your wife talking to a financial planner, right? Yeah. And talking about that, how much it's going to cost thing.
00:16:17
Speaker
Totally and it was really twofold. I mean the college audience for me was one that I resonated with because I was there. I remember thinking what am I doing and what am I going to do and I don't know what this degree is worth or what I'm worth in the market. I remember thinking that and also thinking I have no one to talk to you about this.
00:16:39
Speaker
I don't know that anyone can relate to what I'm feeling. So when I started going on to college campuses, number one, I wanted to help those kids succeed faster. And succeeding faster to me is understanding that
00:16:54
Speaker
life is what you make of it, that you are the architect of your life, that relationships are worth more than money in most cases for those kids. And so I wanted to teach them that stuff. The other side and what you're referring to Phillip was my wife and I had gone to a financial planner who had some very fancy software and he said, let's do some planning. Let's figure out what college is going to cost. Where do you want your kids to go?
00:17:20
Speaker
And I said, well, I want them to go to my alma mater, of course, where my wife and I went. And I want them to have the exact same college experience that my wife did.
00:17:32
Speaker
Well played. So he plugs in, you know, where University of Northern Iowa, he plugs in the current cost of tuition, the cost of living increases, inflation, tuition increases, all that. And he's, you know, doing his calculation, spends his monitor around and the number is $750,000 for my three kids.
00:17:57
Speaker
to go to a state school. And I'm thinking, having purchased a duplex and looking at fourplexes, it was like, I can buy an apartment complex for that amount of money. Yes. And I could fund them for the rest of their lives on the income from that property. I don't know that this makes sense.
00:18:17
Speaker
And so, about that time, I was doing a lot of stuff on college campuses. I was asking students, how much do you have in debt? And their answer was like, no idea. I have no idea how much I've borrowed. And then I would say...
00:18:33
Speaker
It is, yeah. And part of it is they know that they borrowed the $6,500 or this $8,000 or $12,000, but they don't know how much interest that's accrued in a year. Yes. And then over four years, we have four years of accrued interest that's also capitalized into the debt. Yeah.
Strategies for Mortgage Efficiency
00:18:51
Speaker
And that's where these kids come out and they're like, I have no idea because I know I borrowed 40, but I'm pretty sure it's at 52 or 54. I have no idea how it got that high. Yup.
00:19:00
Speaker
Right. So true. So anyway, I was asking them questions like, well, how much will your payment be at graduation? No clue. No clue.
00:19:10
Speaker
And so, in talking to a friend of mine who's a creative video guy, I was telling him the story and I said, I really want to write a book called Broke Busted and Disgusted True Tales of Student Loan Borrowers. And I think I could sell a ton of copies. He's like, you know, that would make a great documentary. And in this brainstorm meeting, I said, that would make a great documentary. I don't know how to make a documentary.
00:19:34
Speaker
said, yeah, me neither. Let's do it. So, so we, we approached it as a, if we knew how to do this, what would we do first? And if this were easy, what would it look like? Go back to the Adam Carroll motto. Yeah, that's right. Right. And so it, it, that became broke bust and disgusted. We crowdfunded, you know, raise $67,000 in 45 days to shoot the film. And, and it's been on CNBC. It's in thousands of high schools. Like it's just been a raging success.
00:20:03
Speaker
Yeah. And it's an incredible, I think, cause that topic is so broad, right? I think you guys do a good job in that of really honing in on the people and just how these students don't understand what they're taking on. Right. Right. Yeah. The most pro I mean, I think the most pronounced thing for me out of it was when we sat with high school students and one young lady,
00:20:28
Speaker
who her educator that sort of escorted a bunch of them in said, well, one of them wants to go to Harvard. I would do your utmost to sort of dissuade that if you can, because she's not a Harvard student. And when I asked them, where do you want to go? And they had these, you know, they were in Colorado in Fort Collins and they wanted to go to California and Florida and Louisiana.
00:20:55
Speaker
Michigan State and I'm like, hang on a second, for what reason? And they would say beaches, I'm going to be on the beach, you know, in California and Florida. And knowing what I know now, my logic and my thought process is you could go live there after you graduate from the state school here or the community college and have a far better life
00:21:19
Speaker
than going to school there now for four years and then hating your life for the next 20 years as you pay off all that debt. Yes. So Adam, really clearly, so you're speaking now, you're getting paid by universities and high schools to speak to their students about money.
00:21:36
Speaker
So you really created a business, you know, which is one of the seven sources, which, you know, you're kind of saying you're trading time for money and speaking, but it was also elevating your other content, your website, your books. So it was a multi-pronged approach. Yeah.
00:21:53
Speaker
And then you had, it sounds like rental property. So you kind of activated the other source of rental property or rental income. Yep. And you had these books and this content you were creating. So you were kind of getting the, the licensing of the royalty stream as well. So you kind of have three different sources of income as you pave this path. Is that correct? That's exactly right. Perfect. Exactly right. Did you feel like that insulated you and your risk for you and your wife when you started adding those? What I will say is that,
00:22:22
Speaker
We for the longest time we've been somewhat a risk conscious couple When we first got married we agreed to live on one income for a period of two years My joke is it it was hers because she was my sugar mom at the time But she was making you know $400 more than I was a month. So her $3,200 a month went to pay for
00:22:45
Speaker
our mortgage and our utilities and our food bill. And mine went to blast away debt. So by the time we were 26, we were completely debt free. No student loans, no car loans, no credit cards, no consumer debt. And I think that alone sort of shields you from risk because when you know you can live on one income, it's highly unlikely that both of you will be unemployed at the same time.
00:23:09
Speaker
Wow. With that, though, as we layered on more and more pieces of revenue and income to the family, what happened was
00:23:18
Speaker
It eased the burden and the concern of things going bad or south. I mean, I will say that mailbox money is an amazing thing. And if I could encourage anyone to do anything, it would be to figure out how do you create a product, write content, write music, do something that allows you to turn that into revenue somehow. Definitely.
00:23:45
Speaker
Definitely. What were the sacrifices that you've had to make you and your wife to get to this point? Man, you know, clearly we don't do things like go out to eat three, four times a week. It's just not something we do. So we eat a lot at home. There's a lot of, I wouldn't say scrimping and saving or was early on, but we had a cold house for a long time.
00:24:15
Speaker
Let's save money in the heating bills. But we were trying to save it where we could and we had young kids and put that money away. And now, you know, I'm happy to say we have money tucked away for the kids college should they go and should they not get scholarships, which I fully intend and expect that they will. Sure. But we've made some of those sacrifices early on so that
00:24:40
Speaker
You know, I would say what we've sacrificed, Phillip, is our immediate term for the future us. And I think this is one of those things, if you want to build a bigger life, you really have to have a long-term outlook for what you're doing. So, you know, do I want a brand new BMW X5 in my driveway? Yes, so bad I can't see straight.
00:25:06
Speaker
Am I okay driving my 2014 Nissan Altima that has almost 70,000 miles? For sure. It's paid off. It has been since the day we bought it. So those are the kinds of sacrifices we make. But by and large, I think we've built a life that really works for us. And so the sacrifices don't seem that large. It just seems like this is our normal modus operandi.
00:25:34
Speaker
So Adam, looking at this path you've paved, you have three kids, right? Three kids. Yeah. They're obviously growing up and they're seeing their dad talk about money. You're interviewing all these kids around the country at college campuses, swimming in debt. I think it's easy to say like, don't do that. But I think you've done a tremendous job, not only with your website, but just your family of raising savvy kids. And I know you have quite a bit of content.
00:26:00
Speaker
Around helping families raise their kids to be more money savvy or and and master money at a younger age So could you shed light on just what that was like, you know in the kitchen around the dinner table and then also just
00:26:14
Speaker
Yeah, what you're kind of working on in terms of bridging those two things for families? Yeah, it really began during a summer. We spend lots of summers at the ball fields. My boys both were playing little league at the time. And so there's a park not too far from our house that we could literally ride our bikes or walk over to the park. And multiple nights a week were spent over at that ball diamond. And it seemed like every time we went,
Teaching Financial Literacy to Children
00:26:43
Speaker
It was a constant, dad, can I get a Powerade? Dad, can I have a popcorn? Dad, can I get a Ring Pop? And after a while, by Thursday, I'm like, Cripes, I've gone through $45 at this concession stand.
00:26:58
Speaker
And the whole notion of people being their kid's ATM machine is overplayed, but it definitely happens and we were feeling that. And so my kids love to play games. So one Saturday morning we were playing a marathon game of Monopoly and they were playing this game and my kids each have a personality when they play the game. So my daughter's the luck strategy. She just wants chance at community chess cards.
00:27:25
Speaker
My middle son is very strategic. He buys all the railroads and all the utilities, and then he buys boardwalk and park place. And then my youngest son buys everything that he lands on with no exception. So they're playing, but they were doing things like buying each other out of jail. They were loaning each other money to buy properties. And I'm looking around going, this is not how you play this game.
00:27:48
Speaker
A reason why it takes us six hours to play the game. You're all being way too nice. Sure. Now, I appreciated the socialistic nature at which they were playing. But I started thinking, I wonder if they're doing this because it's just slips of paper. Sure. What if it was actual money and then I'm making the connection that it's just slips of paper now anyway to them. Yeah. They have no tangible reality of what that money is when I hand it to them or how long it took to make or any of that.
00:28:15
Speaker
Sure. So that started an exercise that became the TED Talk that I delivered at the London Business School, which is I played a game of Monopoly with my kids with $10,000 in cash on the kitchen table. And we played just like the game says. We're trying to bankrupt each other and the money is real, right? And this is how we're going to play.
00:28:40
Speaker
And the magic is in the debrief after everything happened and my middle son won and he had 37 properties and $6,800 in cash. We started saying, what did you learn? What came out of this? And my daughter said, I was making different decisions because I was really conscious of how much I had.
00:29:00
Speaker
And my youngest son who normally buys everything was looking ahead at spaces where his siblings or his mom or I own spots. And he was calculating, did he have enough if he landed on that spot to both be there and pay rent and keep going and buy more properties? Sure. And so what came out of it from my wife and I was, we said, you know, we have to be different about how we handle money with them. It needs to be their decision.
00:29:28
Speaker
They they need to handle money and they need to make money decisions on a daily basis Because I don't know about you guys, but my kids are more than willing to spend my money But not so much theirs not so much theirs
00:29:44
Speaker
So we started an allowance process that I map out in a course now called the Raising Kids Who Thrive With Money course, which is all available at masteryofmoney.com forward slash courses. And the course itself basically teaches you that your kids need a weekly installment of funds. Ideally, they should be doing work for it, whether you call that chores or commission or whatever. I think they need to get money every week.
00:30:12
Speaker
and that it's mandated that they do that work. So it's not optional. It's not like, well, you can do the dishes and you get 50 cents, but if you don't want to, you don't get 50 cents. That's BS in my opinion. It's like, no, this is what has to be done and you will be compensated for it, but this is your job.
00:30:29
Speaker
And if you want anything during the week, that's your money. So you take your money, you do what you need to do. My son just went to a show choir competition tonight and I said, when he left, do you have any money with you? He said, yep, I have $15. I was like, that seems pretty rich.
00:30:51
Speaker
He rolls hard. He rolls hard. Lots of sugar. Let me ask you this question. Quick one. Follow up on the Monopoly. How old were your children when you were playing that Monopoly game with the real $10,000? So we played that game, uh, it would have been three years ago. So my youngest was seven, probably just not even quite seven. He was six and a half. Okay. Um, so we had a probably six and a half, nine and 11.
00:31:16
Speaker
Okay. Perfect. Okay. Thanks for that follow-up. Very cool. You know, looking at this transition, this is, we just hit on so many things I want to touch on. One, paying your kids weekly. I think we're conditioned as a society to get like a monthly paycheck. But I kind of tell people, especially business owners and entrepreneurs, like you look at Apple, I mean, they get paid every second.
00:31:40
Speaker
And do you have any color just around that of like just the psychological of just your own entrepreneurial track and experience of seeing that money come in faster, faster, faster and how that relates to you and maybe what you're seeing in your kids?
00:31:56
Speaker
Well, I always heard the first million is the hardest and then it gets easier after that. Um, and it takes a long people, a long time for people to hit that first number. And then, and then after that it gets easier and easier. I think there's a mindset shift that happens in that process. Um, for me, Brian, one of the, one of the big ahas was reading the book, the four hour work week by Tim Ferriss. Sure. And,
00:32:21
Speaker
And there's been a number of pivotal moments, one of which I'll talk about too, I'm sure. But that was one of them. And in it, he described the new rich. And the new rich are, if you contrast the two, the old rich says, this person makes $100,000 a year and works 60 hours a week, right? And then the new rich
00:32:43
Speaker
The idea is this person makes $50,000 a year, but they only have to work 20 hours a week to make it. Sure. In your opinion, who's wealthier,
The Four Legacies of Financial Freedom
00:32:52
Speaker
right? Right. And so I started thinking through that of, okay, how do, and the question that I posed really was this, how do I, how do I make more money per hour than most people make in a month?
00:33:05
Speaker
And when I asked that question and I posed it, just put it up on my wall in front of me and looked at it every day, ideas started generating like, is it content? Is it the documentary? Is it increasing my speaking fees? Is it going to, you know, investing $20,000 in a training course that makes me more valuable to go out and do that?
00:33:25
Speaker
And I think what happened was my kids started noticing that I was around more, but we were also doing better. And they were asking questions like, dad, shouldn't you be gone? Shouldn't you have a gig this weekend? And I was like, are you trying to get rid of me or what's the deal? But I said, no, you know, things are going well. They see books being shipped out of our house every week and they know that that's revenue.
00:33:51
Speaker
So yeah, I don't know if that answers your question, Brian, but yeah, no, it's helpful. Yeah. That's great. Let's talk. Um, let's go back. I just want to touch up on that. Let's talk about the pivotal moments of your life. You said there was a couple, there was one that you just talked about. What are the others? So the other one was I met a guy at a conference. Um, and there's a common theme here. I do a lot of conferences. Um, but I was at this conference as a participant and it was all, it was four speakers. It was all about sort of increasing your, your marketability and profitability in the speaking world.
00:34:21
Speaker
And the guy leading the training said, okay, I'd like someone to stand up and maybe four or five people tell me your credibility statement. What makes you credible?
00:34:31
Speaker
And keep in mind, I was 28 at the time, maybe sitting next to a guy who looked like he was 31, 32, had a rumpled button down shirt on, jeans looked like he'd just come out of the hamper. But he was buying every single book ever mentioned on stage. So every time someone would mention a book, he'd go to Amazon, hit one click ship.
00:34:51
Speaker
It was just like, shit, boom, shipped, done. After time, I'm just watching him. They just set a book. Is he going to order it? He did. Oh my gosh. They just set another book. He just ordered it. I'm thinking, who is this guy and how does he have time to read all these books?
00:35:09
Speaker
So he stood up as one of the suggestion, you know, one of the credibility speakers. And he said, my name is Matt. I'm from Phoenix, Arizona. I sold my first software company for $14 million.
00:35:23
Speaker
And then he sat down and at that point I leaned in and I was like, dude, can I buy you lunch today? I need to know everything you know. And when we went to lunch, he told me this, and this was the pivotal thing. He said, Adam, we have four legacies to leave future generations. The first is financial freedom. He said, I was lucky enough to find it at age 33 when I sold my company for 14 million. All of that money then got plowed into real estate that generates a monthly income for me on an ongoing basis.
00:35:52
Speaker
So financial freedom is important. We're all looking for that. But why it's important is it leads to time freedom so that when you have money, you have time.
00:36:02
Speaker
And for me, time freedom was what I was most craving. I wanted to spend time with my wife and kids and my grandparents and my parents and all of that. He said time freedom is important because of what you want, which is relationship freedom. And that is the power to spend time with the people you want to spend time with, not those you have to spend time with, which is what most people do in a JOB.
Mastery of Money: Carroll's Vision
00:36:25
Speaker
And he said last but not least, and this is where most people search and seek and struggle to find but rarely do, is to find service freedom. That's the fourth freedom. And if you find service freedom,
00:36:39
Speaker
I heard a speaker describe this one time is that we were not put on this earth to be employed. We were put on this earth to be deployed. And if you were put on this earth to be deployed, what is your deployment and are you doing it currently? Can you even do it currently? Or can you even do it?
00:36:57
Speaker
Yeah. And so for me, when I heard that part of my drive in speaking on college campuses and working with parents is I want to see the next generation be so well equipped to pursue service freedom right from day one that in our family, we want to create financial freedom for our kids, maybe not give it to them at 20 or 21, but know that they have it and know they can go pursue what they want to pursue that aligns with service freedom.
00:37:27
Speaker
And I ultimately want them to have financial and time and relationship freedom as well. But that last one is really critical and I think that for me was a huge epiphany. It's why I do what I do today.
00:37:40
Speaker
Yeah, that's such a brilliant way to think about that because that service freedom doesn't necessarily say that you have to have the other three in front of it. Correct. You can do that right away. If you're, you know, equipped to do that, if parents that kind of instill that in you, that's brilliant. That is absolutely brilliant.
00:38:01
Speaker
Well, it led to the build a bigger life, not a bigger lifestyle concept for me because I find that some people say, well, I give back, but gosh, it's got to work so much. What do you have to work for? I just got this new couch and a TV and I got to pay for every month. Oh, okay. So the reason you're not doing what your heart calls you to do is you need a more comfortable couch and a bigger TV. That sounds like a bigger lifestyle, not a bigger life.
00:38:26
Speaker
Typically, you find those things in a bigger house, right? Right. I think that dovetails to our final synergy maybe for just this time today. There's a whole other angle that you have in terms of personal finance and education and that is the mortgage. Your website, shredmymortgage.com is something that we've shown to a lot of clients and is a concept that we employ with our practice. I would just say shredding in general.
00:38:55
Speaker
Walked our listeners through because your backstory with terms of the mortgage is really powerful too and I think you just shed light on how that has played into your overall branding your overall message and You know kind of where you're moving forward. Yeah, I started a mortgage company in 2007 at the pit of the subprime mortgage crisis thought it was good timing nailed it nailed it hashtag winning
00:39:22
Speaker
And it actually went fairly well. We started a company that our goal, we were the first socially responsible mortgage company in the state of Iowa. We wanted to put people in a better position financially when they were done with us than when they started with us. So we coach and we counseled and we helped people get their budgets together and fix their credit and do all those things.
00:39:45
Speaker
And what occurred to me as I did that was just the level of naivete around the mortgage and the fact that it's a compound interest vehicle and that the amortization table that takes 30 years to pay off a mortgage, it's not until year 19 that you've paid half of your mortgage off. Wow. And in the first seven years, 93% of your payment goes to interest, not to principle. Can you say that again? Because I think that's just a very important point that you just said.
00:40:14
Speaker
Yeah. So a 30-year fixed mortgage in year 19, about halfway through year 19, that's when you have paid off half of your mortgage. So you've gone 19 plus years before you've even covered half of the principle. Wow. Yep. And it takes about the first seven years, 93% of your payment, give or take,
00:40:34
Speaker
is interest. It's not principal payment. So in our society today, most people stay in their home for, I don't know, what, four years, five years? Yeah, let's say seven at the longest. Five years at the seven, yeah. So they've sent in seven years of payments. Yep. And they're getting ready to go to that closing table thinking, this is going to be awesome. Yeah. I paid for seven years. I got a ton of equity. And then you have the realtor too. And they have the realtor fee. And then they get there and they're like, I owe how much? What? No way. Yeah.
00:41:03
Speaker
How did my house not appreciate and see all the other things they'd say. So I started digging into other strategies. Like certainly there's got to be other ways to do this. Yeah.
00:41:16
Speaker
And one of my partners in the mortgage company brought a piece of software to my attention and the software allows you to essentially eradicate your mortgage faster than you thought possible. You just simply have to sort of revise how the income flows through your household. And effectively, not to get too deep in the woods on it with you guys or your audience, but
00:41:42
Speaker
It involves having a secondary account, ideally like a home equity line of credit, or it could be a life insurance policy with a cash value that you can borrow from. Your income, instead of going right into a checking account and then paying all your bills, it goes into that home equity line of credit or into the life insurance policy. And then you borrow chunks out of your HELOC or your life insurance policy to send lump sum payments into your mortgage.
00:42:11
Speaker
And what it's doing is if this is a 30 year fixed mortgage, this big long line, you're taking huge notches from the backend forward, which also reduces the overall amount of interest that you pay over time. Sure. So for an average family making a relatively average income, assuming there's a little bit of discretionary money at the end of the month, you could take a 30 year fixed mortgage and get it down to somewhere between six and 10 years paying off.
00:42:39
Speaker
In really radical extreme cases where someone might have $1,000 or $2,000 extra indiscretionary, we can knock out a solid $2,000, $3,000, $400,000 mortgage in about three and a half or four years.
00:42:52
Speaker
And it's that focus. It's that focus and doing something a little bit uncommon to get that where you want to go. Because at the end of the day, when you pay all that interest upfront, it's really de-risking who? The banks, right? It's not even de-risking you. It's actually making you more subject to catastrophic things when you go to sell it and like, wait, how much do I owe exactly?
00:43:15
Speaker
So this is a brilliant strategy for people that especially have good, like Dave Ramsey people that have really good cashflow and they're good at budgeting. They just have never heard of anything like this. And so we see a lot of those kind of clients, Dave Ramseyers, that get to the mortgage and then they just kind of putz out.
00:43:35
Speaker
because it's just such a big number. But I'm telling you, you guys have all the strategies in place and you have all the strengths to take down that mortgage in such a quick way. It's unreal. Yeah, I got it. So Adam, in relation to this now, going back to the seven sources, I just kind of want to keep building this out for our listeners.
00:43:55
Speaker
Yeah. This is a product that you offer, sharedmymortgage.com. It's a subscription model, which is another of our seven sources of residual income. Can you just talk real briefly about what that kind of cash flow has been? And you've been instrumental in us adopting a more of a subscription model. So yeah, I should someone on that force, please.
00:44:15
Speaker
Well, I think this, this was sort of highlighted for me by a friend of mine five or six years ago who he kept saying, Adam, you want to know the number one secret for business success, the number one secret. And I'm like, yes, tell me, what is it? He said, predictable, recurring revenue.
00:44:33
Speaker
Predictable recurring revenue, that's the key. If you want to grow, you want to keep building, whether it's a lifestyle business or you run it and you want to scale it and sell it, whatever it is, predictable, consistent revenue is the key. And another one of my favorite sayings of Mark Victor Hansen from way back was, if you want to really create true financial freedom, you must have massive, passive, permanent streams of income.
00:44:59
Speaker
massive, passive, and permanent. And so the software for me was just a chance to, you know, number one, educate people when I'm out and about doing gigs on college campuses or out in the public associations, trade groups, all of that, and give them something that would enhance their life. But it's totally, it's a valuable, valuable software. You know, it literally tells you what to do with your funds to make sure it's as efficient as possible.
00:45:29
Speaker
So, there is a fee to it. For a while, we did a monthly fee. Now, we have a lifetime fee. It's an upfront lifetime fee. Gotcha. We're beginning to talk about how do we create additional software that does something similar on the student loan side. This is just a tease. I'm not quite ready to release it yet, but that will be a monthly fee and a very modest monthly fee so that anyone with student loan debt can take advantage of that software as well. That's awesome.
00:45:57
Speaker
We'll definitely be looking into that. So, okay, we've got the business seven. So I'm just going to walk through the sources that you have that we've talked about businesses, real estate, royalties. Do you have any stocks and bonds quickly? I do. Yeah. All right. So chalk that up.
00:46:12
Speaker
Yeah, I'm a big believer in dividend paying stocks. Actually, I saw a kid at a high school financial literacy event do a presentation on why every kid should be buying dividend paying stocks when they're young. And I was like,
00:46:28
Speaker
I'm hooked, man. This kid. So my kids are all in dividend paying stocks. We have a handful of those in our portfolio. So yeah, very important. Stocks, you got subscription. You just talked about how about affiliate marketing? So this is interesting. The whole reason behind masteryofmoney.com was to build an audience and a network of people who are really passionate about learning how to take this path with me.
00:47:05
Speaker
They are bald, but they're generally sitting on a mountain. That's not me. I perceive myself as I'm in the pursuit of mastery. I ask a lot of really good questions and the path of the beginner is what I'm on always because the beginner has lots of questions. The expert has all the answers. I've asked a lot of great questions and I've posed them on masteryofmoney.com.
00:47:24
Speaker
I'm introduced sometimes as an expert or a, you know, I don't like the G word.
00:47:30
Speaker
one of the benefits of having a site like that is there's a lot of traffic and that traffic generates some affiliate revenue. So we do make money as an affiliate of a variety of different products and services. And candidly, I'm following a model on that site of a young lady who makes about, well, last year she made $1.5 million with her blog and that is all. So we're nowhere near that, but she was about five years in and we're about six to nine months in on the blog.
00:47:59
Speaker
But I will tell you it makes money So it's it's possible to make money with a blog. Yeah, and we're doing that through affiliate revenue So we'll check that box too. Good. So six of the seven last is network marketing. Just quickly. Do you network market? um, you know, I was a network marketer for a long time and I realized that my
00:48:20
Speaker
My drive to have multiple sources and create and all of that made me not a great network marketer. I think in network marketing, if you're really going to succeed, you have to be a great recruiter. Yeah, you do. And you have to be a phenomenal vision builder, helping people see the vision and go out and do it. I tend to run really hard and fast.
00:48:45
Speaker
And so to have 15 or 20 or 30 people behind me trying to bring them all or a thousand or 10,000 for me, it was like, I just, it takes me away from where I, where my passion and my skill sets are. Preaches. Is that a no for that one? That is a no. You can see why we had Adam Carillon today.
00:49:05
Speaker
So six out of the seven, I think that's incredible. And I think this, you know, shedding light on it now too, Adam, let's bring this full circle. You had some of these streams under different brands, different names. Can you talk our listener through just that recent convergence you've had in terms of branding and then leave our listener with kind of like what you're most excited about as you look forward, not only maybe yourself, but just as a,
00:49:31
Speaker
You know as a nation as the students and all the people that you're impacting. Well, we I'll tell you a failure story real quick first. I had this this epiphany Money savvy is one of the things that I say in my events You know, i'm always like if I say savvy you say savvy savvy and they all say savvy in the audience
00:49:51
Speaker
And I love the whole idea of being money savvy because it's not about like, I'm brilliant, I'm a fabulous money person. It's like, just be savvy about what you do with your money and life will be good. So I had bought moneysavvy.com, which was a premium domain. I paid a pretty penny for it. I wrote a book called The Money Savvy Student. It was the first in a series of books that were gonna come out in that line.
00:50:16
Speaker
and was building the pipeline and the site and all that stuff, and then got hit up with an intellectual property cease and desist. After reviewing it and going through my case and whether or not I had anything, I said, you know what, I'm good with them keeping it and they bought the domain from me and everything's good. I wish them the best of luck.
00:50:38
Speaker
But then I struggled for the better part of six to nine months about what was I going to do? How was I going to name this? What was he going to call it? And mastery of money was one that kept coming up for me because it is about just the pursuit of mastery. So I bought that domain. It was not a premium domain.
00:50:56
Speaker
I bought that one for $12 a year. Nailed it. Hashtag winning. And we started building it and I'm very excited about that. Although I will tell you that we will launch another three or four books under mastery of money for students, mastery of money for parents, mastery of money for couples, mastery of money for military. All of those are going to come out in the next two years.
00:51:21
Speaker
And then and yet we've talked about does it fit under that or is it the build a bigger life brand? So it's figuring out kind of where those mix and mingle and mutual friends of ours are helping us through that conversation. But I will tell you this a book that I read called the top 10 distinctions between millionaires in the middle class.
00:51:43
Speaker
had one chapter that was really impactful for me, and the chapter said that millionaires build intentionally congruent businesses. And when I recently divested out of real estate, and the reason I did it was it was taking time away from what I was truly passionate about doing. So we've taken one of those things out, though the money we made from that, we invested in a real estate investment trust. So we're still kind of in real estate, it's just not active. Yeah, that's more passive.
00:52:13
Speaker
And in building mastery of money and the build a bigger life mentality and the film and all of that, it all sort of funnels into people just getting really smart about what they do with their money. And I think I'm on
00:52:29
Speaker
I may not be the tip of the spear because there's a lot of people out there doing this, but I think I'm one of the soldiers in the battle leading a whole bunch of people behind me to make really good decisions with their money so they can live an uncommon life. Sure. What a beautiful analogy. I love it. So you guys can tell why we love Adam Carroll. So talk about how they can get ahold of you, where they can learn more about you. Let's talk about that.
00:52:52
Speaker
Yeah, well the easiest way is if you want info on Adam Carroll, go to adamcaroll.info. So 2R's, 2L's.info is a great place to go. If you go to masteryofmoney.com, there's a plethora of great articles almost all written by me. We're starting to take some guest contributors.
00:53:12
Speaker
And we'll probably do more of that as we go along. And obviously the courses that are available there like the Raising Kids Who Thrive With Money course is one that I highly, highly recommend if you want to raise a child that does not see you as their ATM machine.
00:53:28
Speaker
And I'm super proud of that. I think the work that went into that was a lot of time. It was a lot of attention. It was a lot of energy spent putting the best stuff out there. And then if somebody wants to see the documentary, going to BrokeBustedDisgusted.com is the best place to go for that. Sure. And then Adam, are you going to be on a stage anywhere soon that people might be able to see you at?
00:53:51
Speaker
Um, you know, there is an event happening. There's an event happening in Des Moines. I think it's in either April or May. Um, it's called the lead in 15 lead and 15. Um, so that'll be fun. It's kind of a Ted talk esque conference. Um, and then I'm, I'm at a number of places all over the country.
00:54:11
Speaker
but various associations and conferences and all that, not necessarily public events. Gotcha. But if you're on my mailing list, you'll get a listing of wherever I'm going to be and happy to say hi if you're there. Yeah. Totally. Thank you, thank you, thank you for being on our show. You've been listening to the Uncommon Life Project. This is your host, Philip Ramsey. This is Brian Dewhurst. And remember to like, subscribe, rate this thing as much as you guys can to get more and more people in this Uncommon Path.
00:54:39
Speaker
Yeah. And just want to say thank you so much to Adam Carroll and all that you do, not only for us, but just what you're doing, the message you're pushing to the country because it's just so needed and necessary right now. So thank you so much. Thanks, fellas. All right. Bye bye.
00:54:53
Speaker
That's all for this episode of The Uncommon Life Project, brought to you by Uncommon Wealth Partners. Be sure to visit uncommonwealth.com to learn more about our services. Don't miss an episode as we introduce you to inspiring people who are actively pursuing an uncommon life.