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Welcome back.
This will be a very short episode.
Not that my other episodes are long, necessarily.
I think I have one of the shortest podcasts out there.
But this one will be shorter than normal.
My new book, The Art of Spending Money, comes out in just about a month.
And look when you're writing a book.
The traditional way to do it is that you write one book about one topic.
And the problem with that, particularly in nonfiction and I think everyone who reads or has read a nonfiction book will relate to this the problem is that most topics nonfiction do not require 300 pages of explanation.
You can get your point across in a couple.
Many years ago, Joe Weisenthal, who's a great journalist he's at Bloomberg now.
He had this funny tweet where he said most books could be an article, most articles could be a tweet and every tweet should be a retweet.
And to that point, a lot of nonfiction business books out there could have been 10 pages or less.
And look, that's even true.
There's even some books that I love and recommend and say, oh, that is a great book.
You should read that book.
That I myself didn't make it to chapter five because I got the point.
And it was a great point.
It was a point that changed my thinking, but I don't need to read the rest.
I have always tried to get around that conundrum with nonfiction books by saying look, there is a cohesive theme to this book, but I'm going to tackle it from a dozen different angles.
And every chapter should be able to live independently.
Every chapter is not an extension on the previous chapter, just making the same point again.
It's a whole new point.
I tried to do that in Psychology of Money, my first book, and same as ever.
And in this book, The Art of Spending Money as well.
So this book, true to its title, is about the art of spending money.
It is not about the science of spending money because I do not think such a thing exists.
I don't think there's a science of spending money.
There are no ironclad black and white rules that work for me and you in the same way.
Everybody's different.
But true to that idea, I tried to tackle the art, the psychology of spending money in as many different angles and directions as I could.
In this book, you can start on chapter 18 if you want and read it backwards.
You can skip chapters.
Every short chapter should be able to live on its own.
I do that out of respect for your time.
Try not to waste your time by rambling on one topic.
And so what I want to do here for the next couple of minutes is share with you something that I wrote in the introduction of the book, which is, in broad strokes, the angles in which I'm going to tackle the art of spending money in this book, and maybe the six biggest takeaways from this book.
So I'm going to dive right into them.
Number one, there are two ways to use money.
One is as a tool to live a better life.
The other is as a yardstick of status to measure yourself against others.
Many people aspire for the former but spend their life chasing the latter.
You, I, of course, we all want to use money as a tool to live a better life.
But it is so much easier and so much common to use it as a measuring stick to say how am I doing relative to you?
Do you have more than I do?
Do I have more than I do?
Where do we sit in the pecking order?
Way more common to use that, even if we want to use it as a tool to be happier and more fulfilled and spend time with people who we enjoy, etc.
All right, number two.
Money is a tool that you can use, but if you are not careful, it will use you.
It will use you without mercy and often without you even knowing it.
And for many people, money is a financial asset but a psychological liability.
Having a blind lust for more can hijack your identity, control your personality and wedge out parts of your life that bring greater happiness.
I think, particularly once you get above, let's say, an average median income, the idea that money is a financial asset but a psychological liability.
It's controlling your identity.
It controls what you want.
It controls what... you buy, what you aspire to, what your goals are.
Rather than using it as a tool, it's like controlling you as a marionette doll and telling you what you should like, how often you should work, how hard you should work.
It's controlling you.
And if you're not careful with it, it will happen to you.
All right, number three.
Spending money can buy happiness, but it's often an indirect path.
Money itself does not buy happiness, but it can help you find independence and purpose, which are both key ingredients for a happier life, if you cultivate them.
Having a big, nice house might make you happier, but mostly because it makes it easier to have friends and family over, and the friends and family are actually what are making you happy.
One other way to think about that is spin it around.
Let's say, let's imagine that you or somebody else that you might know or can imagine is divorced and their kids hate them and they are in poor health and they hate their job and their neighbors hate them and they don't have any friends, but that person lives in a mansion.
Is that person happy?
Does the house make them happy?
Are they happier there than they would be in a little apartment?
Probably not.
And you can flip that around too.
And let's say you have an amazing marriage.
You have so much fun hanging out with your kids.
Your kids admire you.
You love your job.
You have a great set of friends.
And you live in a small little house.
Is that person happier than the other guy in the mansion?
Almost certainly.
And the sweet spot, if you put all those together, it's let's say you have a great marriage and great friends and great kids and you love what you do and you are in good health and you have a big house to have all your friends and family over for a barbecue on Friday night.
That's an awesome life.
That's how you could use money to be happier.
All right, number four.
Enduring happiness is found in contentment.
So those who are happiest with money tend to be those who have found a way to stop thinking about it.
Now, you can value money, you can appreciate it, you can even marvel at it, as I often do.
But if money never leaves your mind, it's likely that you found yourself with an obsession, maybe even an addiction, or it controls you.
The best use of money is as a tool to leverage who you are, but never to define who you are.
Number five if you're confused about what a better life would look like, saying one with more money is an easy assumption to make.
But that can sometimes mask deeper problems.
Money is so tangible that it's an easy goal to strive for.
And pursuing it can become the path of least resistance for those who haven't discovered what truly feeds their soul.
Let me explain to you what I mean.
I may have mentioned this example several times in this podcast, but I think about it so often in my own life.
If I were to say I want a 10% higher salary, I know exactly what that means.
I can tell you down to the dollar what that means and how I can get there.
But if I said, how can I become a 10% better dad?
I have no idea what that means.
How do I measure that?
It's a very noble goal, but because it's hard to measure, it's easy to ignore.
While saying, I want to be 10% richer is so much easier to contextualize and therefore we value it more than some things in your life that would probably make you happier.
All right, number six.
Everybody can spend money in a way that will make them happier, but there is no universal formula on how to do it.
The nice stuff that makes me happy might seem crazy to you and vice versa.
Debates over what kind of lifestyle you should live are often just people with different personalities talking over each other.
Author Luke Burgess puts it a different way.
He says, After meeting our basic needs as creatures, we enter into the human universe of desire.
And knowing what to want is much harder than knowing what to need.
I think about this myself all the time.
I have a lot of unique, quirky money habits, whether it's how I save, how I invest, how I earn, how I spend.
And, at various times, people who are close in my life.
My good friends have criticized me for some of my habits.
And often, 10 years ago, let's say, I would assume they were right and I was wrong.
And I was being naive or silly or stupid by not doing things better, not spending more than I could have, should have.
And over the years I think I've become much happier, much more comfortable with the idea of a lot of those habits just work for me and my wife and my family, and i understand why they wouldn't work for you.
It's not because i'm smarter than you.
It's because we're different and that's fine, that's okay.
I think it is deeply immature that's the right word.
It's immature to assume that if i like something, you should like it too, and if i don't like something, you should not either.
That's a very low-level form of thinking.
And once you become comfortable with that idea, it gives you permission to live a life that you want to live, even if it's not what other people tell you you should do.
And maybe this is more important, it makes you less cynical about others, makes you less judgmental about how others are managing their own life and what others value, makes it easier to empathize with other people and to ask a question such as.
Not why are you doing that thing, but what have you experienced your life that is making you do that and want that or avoid that?
And if I experienced what you have, would I want that too?
Would I think about money in the same way?
Those are, I think, pretty important questions to ask.
So those again are some of the angles in which I tackle the art of spending money in this book.
There's much, much more.
I just gave you six, but there's, you know, 20 chapters in this book.
If you want to pre-order the book, the link to do so is in the description of this episode, and it comes out October 7th.
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
And that's it for this episode.
Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time.
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