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💰Wellthy Living: Personal Finance, Fitness, and Fulfillment! | Brad Finn 🏃♂️
1.2k Plays2 months ago
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🤑 Wellthy Living is all about balancing personal finance, fitness, and fulfillment to create a life of true wealth and happiness. 🏋️♂️
Brad Finn shares his journey from paying off $190,000 in debt to achieving financial independence, while maintaining a focus on physical fitness and mental well-being.
In this episode, we discuss:
1️⃣ Brad Finn’s Financial Independence Journey: Learn how Brad leveraged Dave Ramsey’s principles to eliminate debt and build a strong financial foundation.
2️⃣ Fitness and Finance: Discover how Brad’s commitment to physical fitness complements his financial goals, creating a balanced and fulfilling life.
3️⃣ Entrepreneurship and Side Hustles: Explore how Brad turned his hobbies into profitable ventures, including his success on YouTube and in options trading.
4️⃣ Mindset for Success: Understand the importance of optimism and a growth mindset in overcoming challenges and achieving both financial and personal goals.
5️⃣ Real Estate and Hard Money Lending: Get insights into Brad’s approach to real estate investing and why he chose hard money lending as part of his strategy.
🔗 Brad's Links:
📘 Brad's Book The Wheel Strategy: Earn Passive Income Selling Calls and Put: Full Guide & Journal
📐 Brad's Physics & Math Channel
🏃♂️ Brad's Ultrarunning Channel
🎧 Brad Finn's 50k Ready Podcast
🔗 David's Links:
🎧 Forget About Money on Apple Podcasts
🎧 Forget About Money on Spotify
📜 Brad Finn Quotes:
💡 "Paying off debt wasn’t just about money—it was about freeing my mind and creating the life I truly wanted." — Brad Finn
💪 "Fitness and finance go hand in hand. When you’re disciplined in one area, it spills over into others." — Brad Finn
🚀 "Turning my hobbies into income streams wasn’t just about making money; it was about living a life that I’m passionate about." — Brad Finn
📝 Episode Highlights:
💸 Brad Finn’s Financial Independence Story
💪 How Fitness Fuels Financial Success
🚀 Turning Hobbies into Income Streams
🧠 Mindset for a Balanced and Happy Life
🏡 Real Estate Strategies Beyond Ownership
#financialindependence #personalfinance #fitnessjourney #entrepreneurship #mindsetmatters #debtfreeliving
🎧 Listen & Subscribe: Don't forget to subscribe to "Forget About Money" for more inspiring episodes with guests like Brad Finn. Hit the bell icon 🔔 to stay updated on new episodes!
Disclaimer: The content in this episode is for educational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or investment advice.
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Transcript
Introduction to Guests and Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Dave Ramsey, options trader, financial independence fan, entrepreneur, ultra runner, high school physics teacher, and family man, all in one guest. Here we go.
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome to the Forget About Money podcast, where we encourage you to take action today so that you can focus on what matters most to you. Today, we're joined by Brad Fenn, an entrepreneur, a YouTube creator, an options trader, and a high school physics teacher who started his financial journey with Dave Ramsey's teaching. Welcome, Brad. David, thank you so much. It's been too long since I've seen you, and I gotta say, I'm kind of impressed you nailed that intro first take. Very rarely do they nail it first take and you smoked it.
00:00:41
Speaker
Well, it's only gonna be a matter of time if I screw something up here.
Financial and Entrepreneurial Journey
00:00:44
Speaker
Brad has built a successful career across multiple ventures, and he's here to discuss his entrepreneurial journey, his financial independence journey, and how he thinks about investing.
00:00:59
Speaker
Let's get right into it, Brad. Yeah, right on. Yeah, no, those are the things I like talking about most. Good. Dave Ramsey. You either love him or hate him, but that's how you got your foot in the door with getting your Financial Personal Finance Act together. What initially drew you to Dave Ramsey's teachings and how did his principles shape your early financial journey?
00:01:20
Speaker
So I think like a lot of people that found out about David for the record, i'm I don't even think he's love hate. I think you can find a middle ground. I just think it takes many, many years before you find a middle ground. Cause that's, that's kind of where I'm at. I kind of just like him. I don't love him or hate him. I kind of just like him, but I think what happened was i I had those conversations about student loans with my father and every once in a while when you when you're into math and data like I am, over time student loans, you're going to sit down and you're going to realize like how terrible it is and how detrimental it really is. and
00:01:57
Speaker
Every once in a while, I'd have that conversation with my dad on the phone like, how did you let me do this? like why did you Why did you let me take these loans out? And you know with that came, how do I get rid of them? yeah How do I get rid of these loans? how do And unfortunately, you you really can't unless you pay them off. Now, this was 2016 when I did it before stimulus checks and before possible loan forgiveness and so things like that. I think the only way to get your loans forgiven back then was to like teach in a ah really high need area and you teach there for a couple of years and they'd give you ah a little bit on your fed and loans. But fact of the matter was, you just you had to pay them off. You had to go through the grind, you had to pay them off. And as I'm looking like, all right, well, what's the fastest way? Because I'm a math guy, I want the math way.
Debt Management and Financial Independence
00:02:44
Speaker
I want to make sure that I'm being efficient when I pay these things off if if I'm going to do it." and The guy that just kept coming up over and over again was Dave Ramsey. and In the beginning, when I first started listening to him,
00:02:57
Speaker
Oh my God, this is a little bit ridiculous. you know i learned I learned the baby steps and I'm like, this is unrealistic. And I found out you know the people that really dive into that unrealistic side of Dave Ramsey, they're just not willing to put in the work because it is not easy. It does take a lot of sacrifice.
00:03:15
Speaker
And I had ah luckily a very supportive wife who is a lot better with money than me. And when I kind of brought this upon her and was like, hey, we're going to try this. We're going to go super frugal. And I started having her listen to all the podcasts and we both kind of dove straight in. I tend to be a little bit more obsessive than her. So she was like, okay.
00:03:35
Speaker
Can we drive somewhere without listening to a Dave Ramsey podcast? And yeah, that's really how I got on it. And once I started listening, I'm but i'm like, I'll hate on anything, but I want to try it first. So let me set up a debt snowball. Let me try baby step one. Let me just try these things. And if in six months, my personal finance isn't better, then I'll go look somewhere else. And it turned out six months later, I was better than I was six months before.
00:04:05
Speaker
And a year later, I was even better than I was even then. So i although I learned other ways or other teachings outside Dave Ramsey over that time, especially being a YouTuber during that time, for me, it was always like, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. like the The early things of you know When i was I was a Dave Ramsey debt snowball guy and people were like, you should do the debt avalanche because interest in this, that and the other thing. And I'm like, well, my debts are getting crushed. I do like to check boxes. I personally like the the debt snowball. So like why why am I going to change? Why am I going to do all these things if everything's working? And yeah, I rode Dave Ramsey for I think three years. It took me to pay off $189, $190,000 worth of debt. And
00:04:52
Speaker
he was he I can't deny even my opinions of him now in hindsight, I can't deny that he was a major, major driving factor and he's still a guy that I at least for certain things when it comes to personal finance, I still direct people to him and you kind of Kind of got to say though, it's it's going to be work. like those Those times, I am the cliche story of, did not go out to eat, did not go on vacation, did not buy new clothes, drove a crappy car. like I was one of those guys. But you know he says, if you if you try that and you do that, you're probably going to come out successfully on the other side. And I'm a true testament of that.
00:05:32
Speaker
And luckily, I have the whole journey documented on YouTube too, which kind of helps when people call BS on it. I'm like, go back and look, go back and look at how crabby it once was. you know So for context, when did this start? And you said it took you three years, but what year did you look at that balance and say, $190,000, I've got to do something now. And you said you were already married at that point. like how How was that conversation with your... First off, were you married before or after you had $190,000 in debt?
00:06:02
Speaker
I was, at the debt the p student loan debt's kind of funny because my wife, most of it was mine, and my wife, she got a full ride to her undergrad.
00:06:14
Speaker
And she was in a five-year program, so she was also going to get her master's paid for for free. And she went to a local private school. she got she Her ride was academic and athletics. She played lacrosse. But in her last year, the year that would have been for her master's, she's like, Brad, I always dreamed of going Ivy League. And I'm an academic All-American. I have a 4.0. I just want to try it out. And she applied to Columbia and she got in. And at the time, i'm the I'm the new husband that's like, I'm not going to keep you from your dreams. You know, I'm going to make you happy, whatever you want to do. And she ended up taking out like 140 grand to get her master's at Columbia.
00:06:54
Speaker
where two years later after she graduated, like, ah, why didn't we just stay at Adelphi? That would have been you know a bunch of that, that would have been off. But yeah, we brought that both in. and We had that conversation and I remember it like it was yesterday because I'm actually going through the same exact thing right
Budgeting and Family Finances
00:07:12
Speaker
now. Even even years later, as a school teacher, we don't get paid over the summer.
00:07:17
Speaker
So usually when we finish our school year, the bank accounts great. you know And then we have 10 weeks off to just spend money and go on vacation. And if you don't know how to budget and if you don't know how to manage your money, this could be very, very difficult for teachers. And in there' there was this particular year where we budgeted or we at least put money aside for July and August. That's our summer break.
00:07:43
Speaker
without realizing that we don't get paid. We start set September 1st, but we don't get paid until almost the second week. So we owed September mortgage. We owed September bills right at that first of the month. And that's really what led me to believe because we got married the November before and we got our wedding gifts and stuff. So the bank account was kind of good. And we never even thought about it because we had all this money. And then it was like July and we started getting like low balance on your bank account.
00:08:11
Speaker
notifications and warnings were like, there's no way at Christmas time we had 25, 30 grand in the bank. And then we realized, holy cow, we went through 30 grand in six months. And it started off as like, how are we going to pay the mortgage? you know Because we weren't really big credit card people. we We had credit cards for points and things like that, but it was pretty much ours was mostly a truck payment and and student loans, but how are we going to pay the mortgage?
00:08:39
Speaker
And then it was like, we need to budget better for next year. And then it just it snowballed and into, well, if we're going to budget for next year and we're going to try and get a little bit better with our money. And we started just doing things like she's a math major as well. She teaches math in high school. And we just started thinking, and I think at the time, my my debt minimums for the month were like $3,100. And back then on two teacher salaries, we were making a lot of money.
00:09:04
Speaker
And we said to ourselves, could you imagine, and it's crazy in hindsight now we think about it because we're investing over $10,000 a month right now. We're like, could you imagine if we had just $3,000 free and clear and we printed out the amortization table with the snowball and we're like, if we do this in three years, four years, we'll have ah three thousand that's a,000 raise we'll have.
00:09:30
Speaker
And we truly believed it and we worked towards it. And when we didn't go on vacations, we said, listen, when we're making we're making an extra $3,000 a month that right now we're paying the government, that we can start paying ourselves, ah shit we can go on a $3,000 vacation every single month.
00:09:46
Speaker
and And we'd be living the exact same lifestyle. And it was conversations like that. And it was monthly meetings and it was tough conversations. It was all the cliche things that Dave or Andy talks about. But we knew that we were going to have... These were tough conversations that were going to bring less stress to our marriage in the future when we started to want kids and things like that. Because Little did we know then daycare costs would be, I think I pay like $3,000 a month now in just daycare costs. I never would have been able to do that. So we knew if we had those tough conversations early, that would be better than tough conversations later when you know we would have more at risk.
00:10:26
Speaker
in our relationship later on. and it it just I was blessed. We made a video. It's on my YouTube channel. i didn't As my YouTube channel evolved, I definitely unlisted a lot of things, but the video of me and my wife sitting in this very spot, the day that we paid off our student loan, it was a truck payment and it was $3,000. I had $3,000 left.
00:10:45
Speaker
And we paid it off and we sat right here and I go back. We go back and look at that that my payoff this September 19th was September 19th, 2019, the day after my son was born. So we brought my son into this world, into a debt-free family. That's how I remember all these dates off the top of my head.
00:11:03
Speaker
But now we watch that, we watch just like our wedding anniversary, we watch that video and we watch how we've aged. We watched how so many things with our belief in money has stayed the same, how we've evolved, how we've changed, and how we are able to do so many people. like We just got back from a three week trip to like, how did you, how do you, you're on teacher salary. How'd you go to Montana for three and a half weeks? Like, I don't have a debt. I don't have any mortgage. Like yeah my cost of living is eating my phone bill and my daycare. Like that's it, you know? So it's kind of, it's kind of nice.
Investment Philosophy and Strategies
00:11:35
Speaker
So Dave Ramsey is a big believer in paying off your mortgage. So is that why you paid off your mortgage? And can you just talk about that? Cause we talked about your student loan debt and which is, yeah, that was a pretty big deal. $190,000 combined for both you and your wife and only what three years you paid all that off. I'm not really sure how you did it, but I'll tell you, did you still have your kidneys? I started small businesses, man. Well, we're going to talk about entrepreneurship in a second, but, um, well oh you did why, why do we pay the mortgage off?
00:12:02
Speaker
Yeah. Or how just how'd that go? Yeah. So I was against it for a while and I have to give credit to my my buddy JJ Buckner. He's also ah a huge personal finance guy on YouTube and he lived in Missouri and he wanted his mortgage gone. And his reason for wanting his mortgage gone was he had he was just a YouTuber. And he's like, if something happened in YouTube, I want to make sure that I have the least amount of living expenses possible. He understood the math. He understood that he had a low, but he just wanted that relief. And I was on the other side where I'm like, ah I'm a tenured teacher. I know my income for the ah for the foreseeable future. I know my wife's income. like I don't have a fickle salary. I don't have a fickle income. I'm not in i'm not a seasonal worker. i'm not it you know like You know what I mean? and
00:12:57
Speaker
I think that there's a lot of people that are like, all right, well, with that low interest rate, i can I can essentially just keep my mortgage. And it would have been fine. My mortgage wasn't a lot to begin with. I think it was like $300,000, something like that. And it was just seeing him just never regret it. like He never, ever regretted it. And I said, all right, well, we can start taking some pretty big chunks out of this thing. And essentially, I had i was investing in VTI and for the same reasons, not because Dave Ramsey, because I was far removed from Dave Ramsey when I finally paid it off. The only reason that I did it was because I said, well, in times like this, it's hard to be a teacher sometimes. And a guy like me that walks the fine line, I got a big mouth, things like that. I'm like, let's just say I got canceled and I made somebody, I pissed somebody off. Our life would be a lot better. I could go work at the local pizzeria to give our family a future.
00:13:53
Speaker
if I got fired from my job now, it would be a lot harder if we had this $3,000 mortgage. So why don't I just pay this off, have that just relief that just off my shoulders and not care so much about, oh well, you know the efficiency of like in 10 years, the return on that with this, i just I didn't care about that. I did it strictly for relief. I just didn't want that payment.
00:14:20
Speaker
And yeah, it's not something I regret. If anything, it made me maybe a little too frugal. like now like we'll have to like I need to redo my deck. And I'm like, I don't want to like go into the HELOC for that. like Where if I had maybe a $200,000 mortgage, I might hit the HELOC for 60 grand and like do the back nice and do some pavers around the pool and things like that. But now, ah said with essentially, just my property taxes, insurance, food, and my cell phone,
00:14:50
Speaker
Like i I can't do it. So it's a blessing and a curse, but I've never met, and these are what people will tell you, a no mortgage. I've never met anybody that regretted paying their mortgage off early. Never. Yeah. ah A few years ago when interest rates were at 2.3 or 3.1 or whatever people were lucky enough to get, I think the argument was stronger than to not pay it off. But now the interest rates are seven and a half, eight eight plus. I mean, now it's just really just like,
00:15:19
Speaker
I think mine was like... Then that is less important now. Yeah. Yeah. I think it was just under four when I did it. But you also said that back to that double-edged sword, those people that have those really low interest rates, are they trapped at their houses right now? If they want to sell, if you had that low interest rate for so long, you're thinking to yourself,
00:15:39
Speaker
How do I get rid of this house and go to a house with seven? Well, the fact of the matter is if you go up to that house with seven, you might be forced to pay off your mortgage a little bit faster, which you might not be comfortable with. Me, regardless of what my interest rate was, if I want to move, I'm getting 100% equity off the sale of my house.
00:15:58
Speaker
so But like let's say my house is worth $700,000 in the state of New York right now. Even if I wanted to go up to a million, I could put $600,000 down and have a $400,000 mortgage, even at a high interest rate that I've already attacked a mortgage once before.
00:16:16
Speaker
I know how to attack it again, and that's probably what I would do, and it wouldn't be the end of the world for me. It would still be a 15 year fixed rate mortgage, just like Dave Ramsey says, and I would pay it every two weeks instead of monthly to get that extra payment every single month, and it would be gone in seven years, and that'd be the end of the day.
00:16:34
Speaker
Yeah, so the two leading things that Dave Ramsey pushes for or endorses is or advocates is paying off a mortgage and staying out of debt. Right. It's been five years since you've paid off your student loans. Right. How has your opinion of Dave Ramsey and or personal finance, rules, thumbs, guidelines, right, wrong. How has that shifted in the last five years? You want me to go against the Dave Ramsey crowd? Get ready. Let's do it. Yeah. I mean, there's there's a couple of things. Number one, I think first and foremost, I think is emergency fund needs to go up. um i I think it was a thousand dollar emergency fund or whatever it was.
00:17:20
Speaker
I think that people should probably look at their monthly expenses and I think you should have a month's worth of expenses in the bank as an emergency fund. That's for me. like now my emergency When we made my emergency fund, which is still in a capital one savings account, like that we made years ago, I went around and I said, everything I need in this house to live, if it all broke today, how much was it? I literally went around and itemized my dishwasher, not my dishwasher, my clothes washer, my furnace, my heater, my air conditioners, and said, if all this crap's out today, how much do I need? And that's how I made my emergency fund. But I think that $1,000 is a little light, especially now then when he made that what was probably in the 80s, maybe even the 70s.
00:18:02
Speaker
I think that's like one thing that um I definitely disagree with. I definitely think there needs to be a little bit of a talk of the debt avalanche and how high interest rate could really benefit somebody. um i think now I think when he started, there was a lot less credit card debt. I think a lot of it was student loans and car payments and things like that.
00:18:23
Speaker
where in the last decade or so people have really racked up these high interest. And I know that he's speaking to the masses and I know that yeah that snowball is pretty much you're not requiring people to do any math except for like adding numbers.
00:18:36
Speaker
But I think if you know we leaned into that and he taught both and he and he did the pros and the cons of both and and how attacking high interest rates might be beneficial. And um I tell you, like if it's over 20, that's when I would start thinking about Avalanche. Anything under 20, it's one way or the other. In both ways, you're doing great, but that's somewhere where I differ from him.
00:18:57
Speaker
Another place that we differ big is I think his baby step five is invest 15% of your income. ah Why stop at 15? If you got 20% to invest, I think people, especially if you when you understand compound interest and you're young, I think you should be throwing and everything at investments. And I think a common misconception is that All investments are going to type your money and you're never going to get to it. so like i never really I don't have any money in my checking account. like It's just an inbox for me and then that it gets sprayed everywhere. I don't even have a debit card. like I can't be held up at gunpoint. It's all in a money market account or a savings account.
00:19:39
Speaker
And when I can invest 50% of my income, I do it. And I learned about that when we got to like Mr. Money Mustache and things like, well, I can invest 15, yeah, but if I can invest 70, why not? you know In some minds, it's 40. So I think there's a difference of opinions there. And then um I think the last one really that were really, really different is he talks about like the three different mutual funds that he would invest in. I think one's domestic, one's foreign, and one's a little...
00:20:07
Speaker
i am a a simple path to wealth. And I am a big psychology of money. I'm a Bogle head.
Global Investment Perspectives
00:20:15
Speaker
And I now can speak from five years of experience through a down market. We just got kind of out of a bear market for a year or so and now just a raging bull market, at all-time highs.
00:20:27
Speaker
I think VTI is just the way to go. The S&P 500 is the way to go. And if you're a fidelity person, FSKAX is just the way to go. You don't need to worry about your foreign exposure. People are like, oh, but are you exposed in foreign markets? And I'm like, if you don't think that Apple is generating revenue overseas, then you don't know much. So I am. I am investing overseas. I'm just doing it through companies that maybe are based here in the United States. So I think if you put all those together, maybe a little bit bigger emergency fund, a little bit bigger cash cushion, invest as much money as you can, stay a little bit on high interest debts if you really, really can, and don't over complicate things, VTI or life. you know The S&P 500, if you don't want the total market, every every retirement
00:21:18
Speaker
ah fun, like even your 401ks, your 403Bs, all these things have some sort of ah S and&P 500 index fund and that's the only route you really need to go. What are your thoughts on credit cards?
Credit Card Hacking and Financial Discipline
00:21:30
Speaker
Love them. I love credit card hacking and actually learned that through the Fi community. and ah When I was fortunate enough to come to Camp Fi and hear people that there's there's some credit card hackers out there, I'm i'm not that hardcore, but I'll tell you, I have an airline card. I have a ah hotel card. I haven't paid for a Hyatt in four years. i I haven't paid for a flight in a very, very long time and I've gone through all the airlines. I've i've had an Alaska credit card. I've had a JetBlue credit card. I've had a Delta credit card. I've had a mall.
00:22:09
Speaker
and But I think, because Dave Ramsey hates credit cards, I was actually supposed to do my debt-free scream on Dave Ramsey and when they onboarded me, I was honest. and i was like Because I knew it was on the internet. I had videos on my favorite credit cards and I'm not going to lie to people.
00:22:24
Speaker
And you know I spoke to Kelly at the time she was the producer and she's like, Brad, I can't let you on. like Even if we don't talk credit cards, it just goes against our philosophies. And yeah, I was scheduled to do my debt-free scream um and never got to do it for that reason. But I i understand, like I said, he talks to the masses.
00:22:44
Speaker
And as I mentioned earlier, I never really had a lot of credit card debt. When I told my wife, Dave Ramsey said, we need to cut up our credit card. She's like, why? We don't carry a balance. And I'm like, no, we need to do it. I think that's one of the major problems with Dave Ramsey. so There's no gray area. It's all or nothing. But like he has to because he it's it's easy for him to appeal to the masses and know that he's not going to have any liability in there than to give some people rope. Because when you give some people rope, sometimes they hang themselves and you don't want that blood on your hands.
00:23:14
Speaker
So, I love them. I don't have a debit card. Everything I pay for, even so, like credit card, just the protection. like How many times have you ever bought something and realized you're a scam that's on your debit card and you you call a Bank of America and try and get your money back? You're going to have to jump through hoops for weeks.
00:23:31
Speaker
I call up my Visa card and I'm like, hey, this is fishy. They refund that money. They apologize to me that it happened. They do the investigation. They do all the phone calls. And then I just get an email that says we're good to go. So for the protection of my money, and then the points.
00:23:48
Speaker
i Yeah, and just I never hold it for more than a year though. I never hold a card. a lot of They used to waive that first $95 fee early in the year, but I don't think they do it so. But my TSA pre-check, that was a perk of the Capital One Venture Card. I'm on TSA pre-check for that. So if if you use them responsibly, I have all mine on auto pay. I haven't had a credit card balance in a really long time and but that's a slippery slope. It it really, it can be a slippery slope, but if you have a little bit of discipline, and I said, it's easy for me to say doing it now for you you know five, six, seven years now, um I couldn't just do that in the beginning. you know I had to learn how to manage that, start with one card.
00:24:30
Speaker
and then start with then go to two and you just learn. you know You learn from speaking to people and knowing that you're not the smartest person in the room and that you can learn from others and get some unsolicited advice sometimes and it might actually help out.
Entrepreneurial Ventures and Success
00:24:43
Speaker
Well, I think you're pretty smart. And even if you're not the smartest person in the room, you are smart enough to have started how many entrepreneurial ventures? Can you just list them right off the bat and then we'll get into each one?
00:24:54
Speaker
So I mean, I guess I never thought YouTube was going to be a business, but I think that was really besides like selling soda in high school and doing that sort of thing. But ah YouTube, I started the YouTube as really just an accountability partner. I'm a big like, say it out loud. So people, especially the internet, they'll call BS on you. And I knew that if I just said to myself, I'm going to pay off my debt.
00:25:15
Speaker
you know, then I probably could do it for a week or so and I'd fall off. And it really started as I never even knew you could make money on YouTube. And then you talk to people and you're like, Oh, and I've made a lot, a lot of money on YouTube. But my, my speech actually at campfire when I got to speak there a couple of years ago was all about monetizing my hobbies. And that's something also I've always wanted to do. And I get a little bit of that from my parents. Like my dad was always like,
00:25:42
Speaker
Hey, how can we barter this with somebody? In his day, it was more bartering. What do I have to offer people that I can offer them? And then they'll give me some service in return so that I can do things, they can do things and everyone's happy. Well, to me, that just translated into let's let's try and monetize our hobby. So the first thing that I monetized was ah I was doing triathlons and a buddy of mine was like, I'm a good programmer. And I hopped in with him and we started timing triathlons.
00:26:11
Speaker
And then I started cross fitting and I was like, I'm walking to this crossfit gym and I'm like, the business side of me is like, this there's no overhead here. So i I quickly, I was like, I'm going to do this a little bit better. It was an early days of crossfit. I think there was like three of them on Long Island. I must've been the fourth.
00:26:26
Speaker
And we opened that gym in like 2013 or so, and it's still open to this day I've exited. um I exited that business to open a brewery. I loved drinking back in the day, ah is so much so that I don't drink anymore. But ah that was another business that's grown into a multimillion dollar business. We have two properties. We have a two-acre farm, upstate New York with pumpkin picking and apple picking and a lake and a restaurant. and I've exited that business and moved on from that. And now really my my main side business besides coaching is maintaining that YouTube channel. And I coach a lot of ultra runners. So yeah, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. But I think my my biggest exit from my company was definitely the brewery um and CrossFit.
00:27:13
Speaker
was a fair amount of money too. But now I'm getting old. I don't have time for that. The kids are taking too much out of me. So just now YouTube, I have about four or five monetized YouTube channels that I maintain and operate on a regular basis as well as my coaching business. I coach about 25 athletes as well.
00:27:33
Speaker
You bring up the coaching business and I'm going to make a plug for you personally. You and I have not spoken. And as of the time of this recording, you and I have not spoken for a year and a half, two years, two years, I think, i say right? yeah two Yeah. I want to say even, was it three?
00:27:49
Speaker
It's been a long time. It's been a long time. And so when you're watching this on YouTube... i ah It was three years ago because I take my family away for the summer every year and last year we did Oregon and the year before that we did we did Colorado and I ended up parlaying that trip to Colorado campfire into a family. Just three summers ago, three years.
00:28:11
Speaker
ah Yeah, time does fly, but in those three years, you've made significant changes so much so that I hardly recognize you whenever I was on YouTube and I somehow stumbled across one of your videos and I was like, is that Brad? He looks familiar. And I know it people may have never heard of you who are listening to the podcast right now.
00:28:31
Speaker
And we'll we'll put your, you know, link to your YouTube and the show notes. But what captured my attention was when we met in Camp Phi in Colorado three years ago, I'm looking at you right now and I'm going to guess. I have no, I don't know how tall you are. I think you're maybe just a few inches shorter than me. I'm six too. So I'm going to guess around 5.11. And at that time, my guess for your weight was probably, and I'm gonna just be flat out 240. 240 on the dot, man. That's a guess. My yeah, I was 245, 250, and I'm 5'11 at that time, man. And I'm gonna guess right now.
00:29:11
Speaker
one 181. Nah, I'm lighter now. i'm not Yeah. And I've actually gained a little weight. I actually, I did a hundred mile ultra marathon in April and I reached that race at 150. So hundred about a hundred pounds and I'm walking around right now at like 165. Good Lord, man. Congratulations. That's awesome.
00:29:31
Speaker
And I'll tell you, it's it it it might sound cliche, but I think financial independence has helped that. I mean, yeah two to take care of yourself, and I'm 42 years old, I'll be 43 in March, to take care of yourself and maintain good health, you you need to have the least amount of stress in your life as possible. And I am a man. I'm um'm a stoic. I love the stoic philosophies and I love happiness and joy. And I really, I can take care of myself because I'm so happy and a lot i not having to worry about money, is it's nice. And I'm not like,
00:30:15
Speaker
I'm not like a a yacht guy. i drive I drive an old Toyota still. All the cliche things Dave Ramsey. I drive an old truck. My wife drives an even older RAV4. I'm in a 1,400 square foot house. three Nothing crazy. ah We're school teachers, but we are so happy.
00:30:33
Speaker
And I look back at those times and when I got to 240, 250, because that was never me. I i was a collegiate athlete. like That was never me. And I realized that leading into that was a very stressful. was That was when we were on the on the grind. It was right when we finished up being on that grind. and you know those were Those were, like I mentioned, tough couple of years, a lot of hard conversations with the wife you know and starting businesses and the brewery definitely didn't help. That was definitely not a healthy lifestyle for me. And I hid a lot of that stress and anxiety through alcoholism. And when i finally got when I exited the brewery and I relieved that stress from my life and I got rid of that toxicity, not the business, but the actual toxicity of drinking,
00:31:19
Speaker
I was able to really, really focus on myself again and and find who I was. And I never set out to lose weight. I was never i never even i never really knew how big I was. like When you gain weight like that and you and you're bubbly and fun, like I and never knew. And it wasn't until I like look at pictures now, I say to my wife, like you still love me through that? like How did you let me get? like Because I think I was wearing actually in the picture I took with all the guests that they had speaking that week and I'm in a bigger pockets t-shirt and I still have that exact same t-shirt and I look at myself now wearing that shirt standing next to Rachel and she's a ah smaller petite ah smaller girl and I'm like,
00:32:01
Speaker
I just look like I'm like a bear in golfing. I was like, holy cow, I can't even believe it. and and i yeah it's i do I owe some of that to money. I really, really do. I so owe a lot of that to FI because without it, i wouldn't have I wouldn't have been able to put enough time and energy into focusing on on myself and my sobriety and things like that. and Thank you for noticing that Because I don't post as much on YouTube anymore. i I probably post on that main money channel maybe once a month now. It's kind of like an evergreen channel. It's a Google search kind of channel. And when I do post ill that, people that haven't seen a video in a couple of months and some people are like, her are you okay?
Achieving Financial Independence and Personal Growth
00:32:42
Speaker
like You lost a lot of weight quick. and
00:32:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's it's nice to have that and with the coaching and it's nice to inspire others because there's one thing when you you have people giving you advice and you you don't think they've ever been where you've been. And that's even back to the Dave Ramsey thing. It's very easy for me to help people with their 401k at work.
00:33:03
Speaker
when they're like, no, you don't care. I'm trying to buy a house. We're thinking about having a baby. And I'm like, yeah, here's Brad in 2016. And they're like, wow, you you had that much debt? Yeah. you You really didn't go on vacation for three years? Yeah. you know And look at look at this smile on my face now. Can you can you put in three years?
00:33:22
Speaker
right now to have ah tab the rest of your life. is it i I was 40 when I became financially independent. like I teach for the love of the game. That's it. Why do you still teach? Because I love it. I teach seniors. They keep me young. They keep me you know and the all all money related. you know It's all these things. you You don't understand the ripple effect. It taught me discipline. you i wouldn't its hard i wouldn't be able It taught me to forego short-term gratification. If you want to find a path to sobriety and you know you have a problem, you know that you're not going to see the benefits for six months or a year, same as paying off debt. If you start paying off debt and think that you're going to be going on vacation and rolling around and it's going to be over, you know it's like how many years did it take you to get into debt? It's probably going to take you that many years plus more to get out of debt because you're paying interest. and It just taught me all these things about discipline and avoiding short-term gratification. and
00:34:19
Speaker
really just focusing on one goal, keeping it simple and yeah, moving forward. Thanks for noticing it. you yeah I feel better than I've ever felt and I really do and it's it's it's not a i'm not a cliche. This is not a mask I wear. I am i'm genuinely happy and proud of the work that I put in and I don't apologize for it and sometimes it comes off as arrogant and that's fine for me because I have i have the stack of work to back up my mouth. you know Yeah. Well, congratulations again. And you do look great. Thank you. And I think that's awesome. I think your kids are gonna be better for it. Your wife, she's gonna be better for it too. Yeah. And I'm gonna ask you offline, like, what was your wife thinking? And she didn't tell you straight to your face with Hey, man.
00:35:06
Speaker
You're a little bit heavier than you used to be. What's going on? Never once? What we're talking about now, she's like, well, I figured one day I'd probably gain some weight. And I knew ah she's about eight years younger than me. So she's like, if I started busting your chops for getting too heavy, and then she's like, I knew you could lose weight because i knew she knew that I was just being unhealthy. If I got healthy, I'd lose weight. She's like, and then a couple of years I start gaining weight. That would give you the green light to start making the gods of me.
00:35:30
Speaker
No, but i I think she knows that she married and she genuinely just like I love her unconditionally. She loves me unconditionally and it's kind of nice. you know she She went from being married to a ah literally
Current Economic Opportunities and Internet Business
00:35:44
Speaker
a morbidly obese drunk guy to a 150-pound no more dad bod walks around in his shirt, a 40-year-old and that runs ultra marathons and Yeah, we're but finding a a newfound love in our relationship, we'll just say that. Very good. But you did get through that stressful time as an entrepreneur, now starting and then selling off your businesses, looking at the economic conditions back then as compared to now. Now you've got credit card debt at an all time high. You've got student loans that continue to be a ah draw on people's finances. And sometimes you do need money to make money. So that could be keeping people from starting their entrepreneurial ventures.
00:36:26
Speaker
And you've got, you do have the the stock market all time high or very near it as we record this. I'm not sure exactly what happened today, but it's still within a couple percentage of the top and you got inflation. So is now a better time to start a business as an entrepreneur than it was for you back then or vice versa? How do you see it now? I am one of those people that believes that there's been no better time to make money than right now.
00:36:55
Speaker
There's never been an easier time to make money than right now. And I don't know if I'm supposed to say this as a school teacher, but I think school is is is dumb. And I think that at the end of the day, there's a lot of people that are outside looking in at at point at today's youth, even like the 20-somethings.
00:37:15
Speaker
And they think that they're lazy and they think that they you know they want higher wages. And I think the fact that, I think I heard Gary Vee, I don't know if you know what Gary Vee is, but yeah I've heard him say like, the kids aren't messed up, we are. like They don't want to sit in state, they don't need to go flip burgers. They can make money on the internet. They can be TikTokers. they can So why are you going to go to college?
00:37:38
Speaker
you know And I think there's just there needs to be a a flip of, you know we we you don't make money and and the world isn't the way it was. I think there definitely is a little bit of false sense of security. I think there's a lot of kids that think that everybody's going to make it on the internet.
00:37:58
Speaker
But I think what I tell my 18-year-olds, because they know that I have online businesses, I tell them like every single business that I ever started, I really had no intentions of really ever making money. I monetize hobbies. So first and foremost, they were always just to like break even on a hobby or get my hobby down a little bit less.
00:38:18
Speaker
And I think if you start there and you're genuine and you're authentic, um the money just comes to you. it it finds its If you build it, it will come. But if you start with the, like I need to make money, that's going to be stressed from the beginning. like Take my podcast, for example. I don't make any money on my podcast. That's a labor of love. I do it because I love it.
00:38:40
Speaker
Now, if I continue it and I'm consistent and I work hard, are sponsors going to come eventually? Yeah, probably most likely. But I never sit down at the podcast mic and I'm like, oh man, this is going to be the one that makes me a millionaire. And I never post an Instagram reel. And I'm like, this is going to be the one. It's always like if I post Instagram reels on a regular basis, I'm probably going to grow my following and brands are probably going to notice that. And I'm probably going to make a couple of bucks. And I I think even with all-time highs and inflation, there's it's so easy to scale with the internet that if you are, and this is part of my speech in the monetizing your hobbies, if you are the person that your friends call for something, like you are the go-to, there's no reason you should not be making money online doing that.
00:39:30
Speaker
And so many people want to think like, oh, that's saturated or somebody else is doing it or somebody's it's been done before. There's too many people. And I say like my YouTube channel at one point was generating over $150,000 a year. Do you think that people were going onto my YouTube channel because they needed me to tell them that they needed to pay off debt?
00:39:55
Speaker
Do you think they needed Brad Finn to tell them what the debt snowball was? They could have listened to the Dave Ramsey podcast. But what people wanted was my authenticity. They wanted to go on and be like, um I'm a school teacher. He's a school teacher. I can do this. They want to see like, oh, she he's running all of these ultra marathons. He's got two kids. I can i could probably find time as well. And everybody has that story.
00:40:20
Speaker
And if if you are going and you keep answering the phone and answering the same question for your friend as opposed to recording a video and then sending them the link to that video every single time they call you, I just think you're you're letting the best of this current world pass you by, especially as a 40 something year old guy. I go through imposter syndrome where I look at these influencers and these people on Instagram and I'm like, they're in their twenties. They don't have kids. They don't do this.
00:40:47
Speaker
And then I just go back to like, I i don't need to be 20. I don't need to be, I just need to be me and I'm just documenting it and yeahre you're going to make money. You will over time, but it comes with like anything, hard work and consistency. You mentioned you had like four or five different YouTube channels and I don't know if that's like right now or over the history. Can you just share the history of your YouTube channels and how they've evolved and what does success in YouTube mean to you in that context? So the first channel I ever made was The Personal Finance. It started as Baby Steps, Brad. That was me. And that was my journey of paying off debt. And I made a couple of videos a week.
00:41:31
Speaker
And the channel grew, I think it took maybe like two years to get to a thousand subscribers, which had allowed me to be monetized on YouTube. And after that, like it definitely makes it more, I guess, easier to make videos when you know you're probably going to get something in return.
00:41:48
Speaker
Um, but still not a lot of money. I think that the first time that I made like a thousand dollars on YouTube, I probably had, I would say between five and 10,000 subscribers was the first time I had like a thousand dollar a month. Um, maybe even more than that. It's, it's hard for me to really remember, but once I, once I realized that I could go on and just literally tell my story and make mistakes too, cause the internet will tell you and then you learn from them. Yeah. I said, well, I know a couple other things that I could make YouTube content about. So I'm a physics teacher. My wife is a math teacher.
00:42:23
Speaker
We pretty much was like, I can record each one of my lessons because we had a problem where kids would go on week long field trips or they'd have a sporting event or they'd be sick or have mono and I had to send work home for them and stuff because that's part of my job. I said, man, wouldn't it be great if a kid was absent and I could just spit them a YouTube video and they can get the whole lesson. They could watch it here and there and I would just slowly build it over time. My wife's like, that's it. And this is before COVID.
00:42:49
Speaker
Like but that was perfect this was when people were making fun of me for making videos. And then COVID came around where you needed videos and nobody had them. So that's when my channel, actually that channel blew up. I have a math and physics tutor channel and teachers from all over the country were using mine and my wife's things. Cause we had such a really, really good YouTube channel with good audio that I'd learned, microphones, things like that. So that was the second channel that we got to 10,000 followers. And then,
00:43:17
Speaker
I had a podcast with a great friend of mine that I mentioned before, JJ Buckner, and it's called Average Money. ah We monetized that YouTube channel. That podcast has since ah dwindled away to the wayside, and I've gone ah more on my own because JJ and I were in different time zones. It was very, very difficult.
00:43:34
Speaker
So we had that monetized YouTube channel and then my current podcast YouTube channel. And then I have a YouTube channel dedicated to coaching and ultra marathons and running weight loss sobriety and all that too. So yeah, besides the average money podcast, they're still um evolving YouTube channels and they still generate a pretty good income. i as If you Google how to make money on YouTube, theyre you're always going to hear the AdSense revenue is just a cherry on top.
00:44:04
Speaker
The real money that you're going to make is in sponsorships, and the real money that you're going to make is early on in affiliate marketing and things like that, or you know building to speaking engagements. and it it really It's a whole big network. i can see My LLC and my incorporation, they they're a media company.
00:44:23
Speaker
and everything that we do from editing videos to you know making thumbnails. and All the things you read about are really there and it just depends on how far you really want to take it. but i mean It's a rewarding business, but it does. ah For the first four years of my channel, I posted three videos a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, without fail. All the big guys on YouTube, Graham Stephan, Andre Jek, if you go back and look,
00:44:48
Speaker
They were posting three times a week and most of my videos, because I'm a school teacher and I love explaining things, a lot of my content was Google search. but i I have videos now that get a thousand views a day that are six years old. you know and like because The times haven't really changed how to do this, how to do that, how to figure this out, how to get yourself out of a jam, you know all of those videos. And I can go back and remake them, but you know they're they're still pretty good. And it's ah it's a very, very good business, the internet. And back to
00:45:21
Speaker
you know the should Is it hard to make money these days? or I think it's hard to be picky. I mean, if if you're going to be picky and you want to get rich quick, like you want to walk in McDonald's and make $40 an hour, like you're just flipping a burger, let's be honest. Is that worth $40 an hour? But if you learn something and you can charge whatever you want because it's you.
00:45:42
Speaker
you know the you can You can consult for whatever you want and you just you have to build up that reputation first. But once you have that reputation, it's very, very easy to make money on the internet these days. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. As if you don't have enough going on, you also have a particular hobby that some in the fire community might shun.
Options Trading Journey and Community
00:46:02
Speaker
That is options trading. Yeah.
00:46:05
Speaker
I am a day trader and um i I lost so many. the first I remember the first time I made a day trading video and I was like, I am going to get butchered. I'm going to get eviscerated in the comment section. come babies At that time, I was no longer Baby Steps Brad, I changed it, but I still had a lot of a core following. I think when I first made my first options video, I probably had like 75,000 subscribers, maybe 60 or 70,000 subscribers. I knew that I knew that two thirds of them were Dave Ramsey people. and I'll tell you that i didn't get I didn't get wrecked in the comments. They all just left. i my first options video My first options video, I think I lost 10,000 subscribers. so i went from i think it was I think I went from 70 to 60 literally overnight. That made me question so many things
00:47:00
Speaker
But it was something I wanted to do and i'm always ah I was always authentic and I always told people the highs and the lows and the feedback was kind of good. Like I lost a lot of subscribers, but the videos got a lot of views. And yeah once again, the comments section was engaged and they were asking me questions and I'm like, this is what I want.
00:47:21
Speaker
So how did I really got into it because i I am not an expert at anything, but I know a lot of things, done a lot of things, and I hate not knowing nothing about a subject.
00:47:36
Speaker
i I hate it. So when I finally got to that spot in money where this was you know when there's all these ways to scam money and they are get rich quick, there was AMC GameStops and there was Bitcoins and cryptocurrencies and From everyone I talked to, I was like, all right, well, you get 10% of your net worth to kind of mess around and kind of play around with your money and have some fun. And some people like to spend their money on vacations. Some people like to go out to eat. Some people have hobbies. like They like to build Legos or collect cars. I don't do any of that.
00:48:13
Speaker
I loved ah playing poker. I have a little bit of a gambler gamblers mentality, you know, and that kind of carried in. And I was like, yeah, day treating is kind of like gambling, but I understood that there are certain levels. Like i I gave this analogy once in a talk, I said, like saying you don't like options is like saying you don't like sports because the world of options, it's not one thing. And It's kind of like ignorance. like People don't know it, so it's just easier to hate it. and i I saw myself with a calling of, like yeah, is there really, really risky day trading with options? Of course. like The AMC GameStop, all of that where people were became millionaires overnight,
00:48:59
Speaker
That was a risk, but there's a far side to the other side that is very conservative, that with certain risk management can be somewhat safe, and that's the way that I went.
00:49:14
Speaker
and for the Still to this day, people still clump all of options trading and all the types of options trading with just one thing, danger and gambling. like said That's like saying you don't like sports. I i can't stay in basketball, but I love baseball. you know So am I not going to watch baseball because I hate basketball? No, I'm just going to focus on that and become really good at it. And that's really what happened with options. I said, okay, well,
00:49:44
Speaker
I see all these rich people and without diving too deep, I'll use something called the cash secure put. And I saw that many, many millionaires and billionaires were using this method of the cash secure put.
00:49:59
Speaker
essentially buying an options contract that would allow you to buy 100 shares of a stock at whatever price you wanted. You get to set that buy price. Now, the share price has to come down to it for it to happen. But in taking that chance, you made a little bit of money. And I'm like, all of these guys that have all of this cash on reserve, they're not it's not in money market accounts and stuff. It's in cash secure puts.
00:50:23
Speaker
And these are people that analyze a stock and know that it's overvalued. But if it comes down to this price, it's going to be a good buy. So I might as well put in the order now to be able to buy it if it ever comes down there. And while I wait, I collect a little bit of money in premium for making that options contract. That's what I do. I sell options contracts. I don't buy options, I sell them. and But um I sell options contracts and I realized, wow, like this is a really, really conservative. I don't want to use the word safe because anything in investing has its as its risks, but it was very, very conservative. And I also made it clear for years, and I can't say it in every video now, but it's less than 10% of my net worth. My entire net worth is VTI. My 403b, my 401k, my solo 401k, my Roth IRA, everything is VTI. And this was just my little bit of extra money. and
00:51:17
Speaker
i I don't want to say like house money because that's also a bad term, but a lot of the money that I that a day trade with is money I earned from making videos on how to day trade. So that's another great thing about YouTube. but I make a video. That video makes me money. I can use that money. I think of it as like and excuse me investing it back into the business. I could use that money in the video I made.
00:51:41
Speaker
Now I can make bigger trades, which is going to be more of a wow factor, which is going to bring in more views, which is going to make me more money. And I have that endless cycle. And then for the last two years or so, I have a $50,000 Robinhood account and I trade in my Discord and I have a community there.
00:51:58
Speaker
And every single month at the end of the month, if it's over 50,000, I take the money out to keep me from getting into lifestyle creep. If it's below 50,000, because I lose some months, I just leave it alone. And yeah, I've been doing that with the $50,000 Robinhood account. I made a book about selling options, which was another source of income that's sold on Amazon. And I have a Discord community with a paywall, which has been a really, really good thing. And I think as long as you understand that Just like Dave Ramsey said, that money can be set on fire and it would not affect my life. And I hate talking numbers. I like to talk in percentages, but since I brought it up, $50,000 loss to me, it would sting. It would suck. And like I'd be probably be pretty upset with myself, but it wouldn't change my life or my future in any way, shape or form. And that's just where I'm at in my life. And going to percentages, like that's like less than 1% of my net worth at this point. so
00:52:56
Speaker
I can use it as discretion or it's entertainment for me. You go to the casino and you know you're going to lose. You can still have a great weekend in Vegas. I can still go on and potentially lose some money trading options and still have a great time because I don't travel and I don't do those things. And I've had a really, really great time on YouTube.
00:53:17
Speaker
and the community, talking with people with an open mind. It's kind of like back to the credit cards. When you learn that like credit cards aren't as evil as Dave Ramsey wants them to be and their strategy, and you can be conservative, not safe. You can be conservative with credit cards. You're like, man, these points are points are kind of awesome.
00:53:35
Speaker
Same thing with us. The people had an open mind. We're like, Brad, I trust you. Tell me, and then I'll make my decisions. And I show them. I give them a book. They enter the community. We do it together. I walk them through it. And they're like, wow, this is a great way to make a couple hundred bucks every single month. And I'm like, yeah.
00:53:50
Speaker
i've I've shown now for five years, I can make 2% consistently. And I did it in the down market. I'm doing it in the up market. It's great. you know That's 24% a year. that's Who doesn't want an extra 24%? But to get to that 24%, you have to overcome the stigma of like options are the worst thing ever.
00:54:10
Speaker
I love them. I love them. Well, I don't know if they're bad or not, because I just have never gotten involved with them, but I am going to check out your book. I'll send you one. But how much of the you not knowing about it is because the FI community has made you believe that it's not worth something to learn?
00:54:26
Speaker
Well, I don't even think it's talked about that much at all in the fight community. Other than I honestly, I think I was more, more intimidated by it before I ever even knew about the fight community. Just reading normal kind of books. i I think I tried to learn about it once. I'm like, I don't know all this terminology and you got to catch it before it gets this what and pis or whatever. but I don't know it is so there's vocab Yeah. So, so I'm going to check out your book and no, I'm going to pay for it. I'm going to get it on Amazon, but thank you for that. You never review. Yeah. one What the hell? So many grammatical errors. Good thing it's about money. Yeah. Oh no. That's that's so because I wrote it. So if you actually, the reviews are, I don't know. I don't know who edited this thing, but it's crap. Like there's, there's going to be some typos, but a physics teacher wrote it.
00:55:12
Speaker
and I wrote it like the way I speak. like i want When you read it, so many people have told me, like I read it and I can hear your voice. like get it I almost want to make it like an audio book so that people can like listen along because I'm sure grammatically, I don't think there's really any more spelling typos. I've tried to get most of those and had my Discord find most of them, but I'm sure grammatically, like we were like, you can't talk, I'm i'm um from New York, I can talk however I want.
00:55:38
Speaker
but ah Please do not expect there to be no typos or grammatical errors. or you will If you are an English major, you ah please don't read my book. You will be very, very upset by the end.
00:55:51
Speaker
So, so you're very, you're pro options. So, you know, you've got the open mind about things and and you're willing to take those steps.
Real Estate and Investment Approaches
00:55:58
Speaker
But there is one thing that I know you to be fairly closed minded about, or at least have been in the past at that campfire, Carl and Minnie Jensen gave a talk. And I think during their talk, they said, everybody wants to learn about real estate, except for Brad, something to that effect. I remember that comment.
00:56:13
Speaker
And then, ah because I think you'd already expressed your disdain towards real estate. However, since then, you still don't own real estate, but you have sort of dabbled in a tertiary way. yeah Hard money lending for people who purchase real estate. Yes. And I also will say, here's another hot take about real estate. I think that your primary residence can be an asset.
00:56:35
Speaker
Oh, hell. ah got it Can we stop recording right now? Because I've used my HELOC to make me a lot of money. I really have. Okay. but um yeah That's how you're funding your options trading, your HELOC? That's exactly it. Yeah. i I think what happened was I went to campfire and I knew ah friends with Mindy and Carl before. I think Carl's actually the guy that got me the gig. And so I knew bigger pockets and I always like looked into it because I always felt like everyone's doing it. I got it like the FOMO. I was always like, everybody's in real estate. And but those books over my shoulder, half of those are bigger pockets books. I've read them all. And then you know James and Emily were there and they did the short term rentals and like everyone was and and Rachel was there and she was killing it with syndicates. And I'm like, am I the donkey in the room?
00:57:25
Speaker
Maybe for other reasons. Yes, exactly. yeah I was drinking. But I realized like ah just it wasn't for me. like I love the TI for the simplicity. i I want to be said it and forget it. And I know there'll be the other side that's like, you only hear horrors in real estate, horror horror stories in real estate. It's all bad. you know and I was never that guy. I just, I didn't even want that one phone call at 3am. I just never wanted it. There was, there was just nothing in my eyes. And when the markets turned a little bit and went down, I was like, Oh man, cause real estate was still doing okay. And I was like, maybe, maybe I'm an idiot. But then the market started soaring again and my money started doing good again. And I just, I i know my personality and I think you have to know your personality. I'm not confrontational.
00:58:18
Speaker
So I could never knock on a door of somebody not paying rent. Or some people would be like, you owe me rent. That could never be me. Or I'm not even great at finding a handyman. The amount of weird projects I've just YouTubed and did in my own house because I was too... That anxiety. I just knew it wasn't for me. But I always knew there was ways to make money in real estate. And what I found out too, because I always said to the people that are doing it, like, hey, if you ever want to go in on a deal, let me know. And I realized they're always like, ah yeah, yeah, I'll let you know. But real estate people are very competitive and they're very secretive about their deals. It's kind of like um I live on the water and like fishermen, they don't give out their numbers. They don't tell you their coordinates or where they catch fish. You catch a fish, you post on Instagram, you do not tell anybody where you caught that fish. That is your spot. And
00:59:15
Speaker
I feel like real estate people are a lot like that. like Why am I going to split the deal with you, dude? like if If the deal's good and the numbers are good, I'm going to just fund it myself. like I don't need to bring you in so I can teach you how to teach real estate. and I feel like for the longest time, that was the pitch that I had. The pitch I had was like, hey, can I go in on a real estate deal with you so I can say that I have a property and that I can learn from you?
00:59:40
Speaker
And then it turned into like, that doesn't make any sense for them. yeah I understand why they're not doing it. How about this deal? How about I just be the bank? I don't own the property at all. I'll give you the money. I'll take some points on the top and I'll take a certain percentage that I want.
00:59:58
Speaker
And you can flip the house, you can do whatever you want. I'll take first lean on the property. And it turned out that like lending hard money was just it was was like an investment. It was much easier for me. I didn't have to worry about any of the stresses except for I had to do due diligence, obviously. And I work with now people that are very well trusted. You can't just give anybody 200 grand. you know yeah um But once I had trusted people that I worked with and was doing that, it's that's the way to do it.
01:00:25
Speaker
i I think you can make money in real estate like options trading a lot of different ways. and i just never wanted to I wanted to own properties, but for the wrong reasons. I wanted to own properties so I could tell people I had properties. hi I didn't want to own properties so that I could build wealth, which sounds ridiculous now in hindsight, but I can't believe how many years And I think Camp Phi was when I had the realization because we sit around and we talk and Camp Phi is amazing and people are open books and they they want to tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Personal Philosophy and Financial Outlook
01:00:58
Speaker
And I just didn't talk to anybody where I was like, yeah, you handled that amazing. like You handled that problem, no problem. I couldn't have done that.
01:01:07
Speaker
I'm not that guy. My buddy JJ, I keep bringing him up. He has two real estate properties in a different city from where he lives. He's got his manager. he's got his i couldn't so That's just not me. It's just not the person I am. And once I realized that, I don't i don't think you're ever going to see me own real estate. I think you're interesting because ah for anybody that knows you, they probably would agree with me that you have this huge personality. I remember meeting you and you just filled the room. everybody When you walked in, you knew you were in the room.
01:01:37
Speaker
ah You're loud, you're talkative, you're pleasant to be around, you're jovial, you're fun, and you're smart, and you're heartfelt at times. But you do have a big personality. And so and we talked you talked about the psychology of money and your personality. I do think something's interesting because you just said you'd like to set it and forget it.
01:01:55
Speaker
Says also the guy who has options trading, who does has four different businesses, who's got ah an entrepreneurial history that ah you know speaks for itself. That there ist mean doesn't sound to me like said it and forget it. but i And I understand, but it's it's interesting how we take certain aspects of our life and compartmentalize it. And yeah in your case, it's the your long-term financial planning as VTI. And all those other things are things that funnel into that plan. um am i Do I have that correct?
01:02:23
Speaker
Yeah. And I don't know if you ever heard the expression of like when people start businesses, like my W two funds, my business or my side hustle. And like when you start a side hustle, the one thing they say is do not quit your W two. I think that I can do all of those other wacky, crazy things, these eccentric things, because I have my money, right? Because I have a foundation, like all of that entrepreneur stuff and all like, that's just a trim on the roof, but under the roof,
01:02:52
Speaker
i can I can dance on the roof and jump and stomp on the roof because I know that I have that really, really strong base. I wouldn't have been able to start the CrossFit gym and take that risk if I didn't have a W2. And I wouldn't have been able to start the brewery if I didn't sell the CrossFit and learn things in the CrossFit and apply them to the new business. And I definitely wouldn't have any money to trade options if I never had my money right because I believe that that should be discretionary spending.
01:03:19
Speaker
so yeah that I do do a lot, but at the end of the day, I sleep soundly. like regardless of all the chaos, all that chaos is just scratch of the surface. And to the personality thing, like I am a quintessential New Yorker. Yeah, I'm loud. I'm actually going to pat myself on the back for not swearing nearly as much as I wanted to on this podcast, out of respect for you. But i and I am a very, very, I mentioned the stoic philosophy before. I am i' am a true gratitude person. I am not cliche.
01:03:54
Speaker
I am so filled with life and so happy to be alive. And I i get that now, even in in the running space, I have such a smaller presence there and people are getting to know me and they're like, they'll bump into me at a race and be like, wow, yeah you really when the camera goes down and you're still smiling, dancing, I'm the guy screaming in the woods at three in the clock in the morning, let's go, we got this up that hill. And um Because and there's just no reason, there's no reason to be upset. Like in sobriety, there's this thing called Rule 62 and it's don't take life too damn seriously. That's Rule 62 in AA. And a a and it it's so true. I just, I don't find a reason to have to take life too seriously. Once again, money is a big stressor in people's lives. So having that out helps.
01:04:44
Speaker
But yeah, when I walked into the room at Camp Fi, the amount of gratitude I had just to be invited there you know and knowing that I was going to meet some incredible people and we were going to have some drinks, we're going to have a good time. you know The best thing I loved about Camp Fi is it's not like a set fixed itinerary. There was a lot of you time. There was a lot of like, you want to go on a hike with these people? Go. You want to sit over here? Do that. like So that was just something just to be super excited about life. like That was a really, really amazing, amazing something that feels like yesterday, but holy cow, it was three years ago. and I've met i met friends at that campfire that I still text and talk to on a daily basis.
01:05:31
Speaker
And look at us right here, three years later, we're we're talking to each other on a podcast about it. Exactly. So like, those are the things I try and keep in hindsight to understand that like, I am, I am definitely blessed and I I've gone to unfortunate things and lose him i' have I lost a brother, I lost my parents and things like that. And I have tattooed on my arm up here. I don't know if you can see in the camera maybe, but it says memento mori, which is a stoic phrase. and And in a true sense, it means remember you must die. But in a less literal sense, it means live your life through the lens of a dying man. And seeing my dad's sick was an awful thing.
01:06:13
Speaker
But seeing how much he appreciated the littlest, tiniest things in life, and he made sure to tell us, you know, like he would say things like, I wonder if this is my last walk in the park.
01:06:28
Speaker
I wonder if this is the last Met game I'm ever going to watch. I wonder if I'm ever going to get Final Jeopardy ever right again. These little tiny things and and going through that sickness with him, it it really just made me live my life through the lens of a dying man.
01:06:44
Speaker
and i It very very seldomly fades away. It very seldomly falters. I had my good days in bed just like everybody else, but at the end of the day, I think if you talk to most people, definitely a loud mouth. Luckily, I'm sober now, so it's a different type of loud, but I i like to be known as as one of the happiest people in the room. I like to be known as that guy, and I like to be remembered as somebody that never took life too damn seriously.
01:07:15
Speaker
I know we've mentioned the term cliche a few times during this episode, either I'm not a cliche or I'm definitely the cliche, but I will say this, this is not a cliche. You are inspiring. I was inspired by your talk at campfire and I was inspired even more when I saw the images of you, your weight loss and learning more about your journey since then, whether it's your fitness, whether it's your finances, whether it's your running, whether it's your retirement.
01:07:41
Speaker
It's all impressive and I love how you have a zest for life. I know that for the people around you, you bring that and it's contagious. And so they're going to want to at least live a little bit bigger because they know you. So I appreciate it and thank you very much. I appreciate those kind words and yeah, it's it's a good circle to be in. We yeah we have a lot of fun and yeah, we're having we're having a really good time.
01:08:07
Speaker
Well, Brad, thank you very much for talking with me. I really do appreciate it. and And hopefully let's not let three years go go by before we do this again. Yeah, no, I appreciate your time. And the it's been it's been very nice. And yeah, I probably it won't be it won't be three years again. I promise you. Well, thanks again, Brad. And thank you all for watching and listening.