Roaming Returns

061 - Why Saying "I Can't" Is Derailing Your Financial Success

• Tim & Carmela • Episode 61

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Ever seen someone doing something amazing and as soon as they tell you how, you immediately say “I can’t so that”

This one phrase can literally be the thing holding you back from achieving whatever your heart desires, not just in finance but everything else life. 

How you talk whether out loud or in your head, makes all the difference. 

Today we’re going to discuss what happens when you say I can’t and what you can do instead that will actually help get you moving towards the things you want to do. 

If you found value in our episode today and you're interested in the two books we mentioned, you can help support this podcast by purchasing through our links.  We'll receive a small commission at no cost to you.

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Welcome to Roaming Returns, a podcast about generating a passive income through investing so that you don't have to wait til retirement to live your passions. Ever seen someone doing something absolutely amazing and as soon as they tell you how, you immediately say, “I can’t so that”.

This one phrase can literally be the thing holding you back from achieving whatever your heart desires, and not just in finance but everywhere in life. 

How you talk whether out loud or in your head, makes all the difference. 

So today we’re going to discuss what happens when you say I can’t and what you can do instead that will actually help you get moving towards the things you really want to do. 

You have no idea how hard it is to find seltzer water outside the northeast.
Tim is back this week. Finally left me stranded high and dry for almost four weeks. And I didn't feel bad about it at all.
Not at all. I was out in New Mexico, a family gathering. Could be the final gathering for my grandma.
So I made sure to get out there just in case. No regrets. The interesting part was after, you know, I haven't seen him like in 20 years.
So like after the whole, what have you been doing? What's been going on? Look at you. You look amazing. You know, the normal stuff, the family, families placate with each other.
We got to talking and they were really interested in what we got going on here at, uh, in the podcast and in the emails so much so that I spent probably, I want to say maybe a quarter of my time talking to different family members about investing and how the income invest and what to look for and things like that. But they kept bringing up a phrase that literally is like nails on a chalkboard to me. I like, I hate it so much and I'm sure I can't be the only one.
Other people probably use it as. I just recently have kind of had an out with a friend, a cohort, a colleague because she says the same thing and it started, it also started grating on my nerves because it's like, I may, anything is possible if you set your mind to it and can do it. And when people are like, I can't.
I can't. The worst phrase in the human language. Normally I'm tolerable about everything.
I don't care who you love, who you like, what your religion is, if you're gay or straight, black or white. I don't care about any of that crap, rich or poor. I don't care.
But like I can't, I literally judge you. I judge the shed. You like, as soon as you say that, especially whenever it's like a, it's something that's feasible.
Like I can't save or I can't take time off from work to do that or I can't live the life that you live, but I really want to. I can't eat healthy. I can't, I can't quit drinking Coke.
All the, just the, the things that, what they mean to say is I, I'm unwilling. I'm unwilling. Cause we've noticed that like when somebody says I wish or I can't, it essentially means they are unwilling to do what it takes.
I heard that a lot in the family stuff is I wish I could take time off like you or I wish I could save or I wish I can invest like you, but I can't. So it was started with, I wish and it ended with, I can't. And I'm like, Oh God, no.
Well, and we noticed too, we were analyzing our speech patterns and like, I don't think I ever say I wish like if somebody has a cooler life, I'd be like, damn, that's cool. Or how do I get that? Or must be nice. I just know myself and I know my goals and I know where I want to, I know what I want to do.
And I know what I like and I know what I don't like. Um, if you know yourself, you should have no problems getting rid of the, I can't phrase if you actually use it. If you, well, the thing with, I can't, we were talking about mindset or I was talking about mindset without Tim being present in the frugal thing.
And it really does boil down to like your mindset and how you talk to yourself. If you talk to yourself in ways that are very limiting that book, Carol Dweck's book on mindset. We're going to get to that.
You literally just ruined everything. Oh, I'm sorry. God, I can't do podcasts with you anymore.
Well, that's what happens when you don't tell me what the hell is going on. I will show what, what, what basically what I can't is, is it's you're setting limitations for yourself right at the gate. And whatever you say in your brain, you're using your past, you're using, um, your emotion, you're using whatever, like most of the time what happens is you have rules established in your childhood that you can't be like a basketball player or you can't be a, you can't be a politician or you can't be a lawyer.
You can't be rich. You can't, you can't travel. Like that's all that's established in your childhood from your surroundings.
And you rather than, um, take the time to correct it in your childhood or in your teens, you just go with it and then it becomes set in stone. They become set in stone beliefs. And then those beliefs hijack your current ability to do certain things.
But if you actually, if you pay attention, I don't know, like if a lot, I'm, I'm assuming a lot of people use, um, um, Instagram and, uh, Facebook. I don't know. Do they, if you, if you follow the most successful people, they never say I can't.
Yeah, they definitely don't. They say, how can I do that? Exactly. And that's the thing.
If you start feeling that, oh, but, oh, but, oh, but things popping up in your brain, instead of being like, no, I can't do that. No, I wish no this dad. No, that's not possible.
All you have to do is flip that phrase and say, how can I? And as soon as you say that your brain is like, let's figure out how we can make this happen. If you say I can't, you're telling your brain basically to like find reasons why you can't to prove that thought process to make you feel better. So like the things are congruent, but as soon as you say, how can I, the brain is like, okay, what resources do we have available? Who can we go and talk to? Well, how can we finagle this? Like blah, blah, blah, blah.
And that's essentially what I do all the time. I know Tim does it all the time. I, I really just, I've loathed it.
Or what am I missing? I say that a lot. I'm like, what am I missing? What, like what data am I missing? Am I looking at this wrong? Another area where like it applies to finance and budgeting and saving, but it's not extensive to this. Like it basically, it pours out into every aspect of your life.
If you literally let negative thoughts or rules constrain yourselves due to your childhood or due to your teen years or due to something that happened in your twenties, like what, it's something that happened in the past and you don't examine yourself and think about it. It basically, it diminishes your lives in every aspect of your life. I'm literally thinking of my cousin who can't drive over bridges.
But they actually have had scientific studies that people that have negative negativity rule their lives, IE, I can't, they, um, they have higher anxiety, higher depression, higher of a multitude of other afflictions because they're like, they just negativities that like negativity might be the most toxic thing that you can easily get rid of as opposed to actual toxins. Well, do you know the, I actually was just reading a book about success and they talked about the whole, I can't. So the reason the anxiety comes into play here is because if you believe that you have to, but you also believe that you can't, that are, those are two completely opposing things that cannot coexist.
And when things cannot coexist, anxiety ratchets up. So if you're like, I need to save, but I can't like instant anxiety, instant worry, instant fear, instant, all of these things, instant inferiority. And then that's where that whole, if you go into victim mindset, you'll tend to blame the economy or blame the, I don't know, people running the, the, the presidency or your family or your friends or your situation, you'll go into an external blame mode.
And that's, that actually you give up even more power, which I think creates even more anxiety because then you feel out of control even more. And it just becomes this vicious downward spiral. It's like we, I know we did a psychological bias a hot minute ago.
I don't remember how long ago it was. They filter right into this. But like, this is another psychological component that basically can, if you can master, like I'm going to give you a couple of ideas here later on how to master this.
If it's something that you suffer from, but we're going to go into a little bit right now. Now you can talk about the psychologist. Well, since I'm the book reader, I was surprised Tim even knew about this whole Carol Dweck thing.
If anybody who's looked into money making or getting into new things or business or blah, blah, blah, blah, Carol Dweck's always comes up for that book about mindset. It's all about the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset. And if you have a fixed mindset, you can actually adopt a growth mindset.
So you're not screwed, but a fixed mindset is just what it sounds like. Like you can't get out of your own way. It's, it's characterized by the belief that your abilities and intelligence are fixed traits, leading people generally to avoid challenges and view failures, failures as reflections of their limitations.
So basically if you have a fixed mindset and you tell yourself that I can't save money, when you, whenever you don't save money, that basically is just reflecting that your limitation in life is that you can't save money. And honestly, one of the best we Tim doesn't have is written here as this book, but I love this book by, uh, crap. His name is something Bishop.
He's a Scottish dude. Hardcore accent. Walter Bishop.
No, it's not Walter Bishop. We are not talking about fringe. Crap.
What is it? Gary? It might be Gary. Samuel, Samuel Bishop. Anyway.
Anyway. Oh, Unfuck Yourself. I think it's Gary Bishop.
One of the things that he talks about with, which was a correlates to that is you are wired to win whatever you believe or whatever you're trying to prove, you're actually winning at proving that thing. And it sounds kind of counterintuitive, but if you look at it through what Tim just said, where he said that if you tell yourself you can't save, you're literally trying to prove to everybody else that you've told this to and to yourself that you can't save. So you're, you're performing actions and behaviors that essentially back that up.
And it's the exact same thing I was talking about before, but I liked his lens through that because wired to win makes so much sense because I know so many people that are like, I'm wired to be a train wreck or I am a train wreck or nothing goes right for me or this, that and that. And then it's like, well, you're proving all of these things by rose colored glasses, looking for the stuff to back up that, that belief. Right.
And basically a growth mindset is kind of like, it sounds like it's a belief that your abilities can be developed through dedication, effort, and learning. If you embrace a growth mindset, it opens up a world of opportunities because you basically are continuously trying to improve yourself, whatever area that you are trying to grow in, whether it be personal life, whether it be professional life, whether it be investing, whether it be saving, whatever, like if you have a growth mindset, you basically will study it and find out how to make it happen. And even if you slip and fall and fail, you get back up, you try again because you're actually enjoying the challenge or you know the challenge is part of the process.
Failure is part of the process. Failure is a learning mechanism. I think we did, I touched this, I forget if it was a podcast or an email.
I'm pretty sure it was an email. I've failed so many times. But we really are conditioned to like hate failure or see failure as painful because when you're in traditional schooling, like you get an F, you failed and that's like a huge bad thing.
So we're wired to essentially hate failure. But in the real world, failure is literally... I never actually used what I learned in school for anything, so I never really put any merit into like the grading system in schools. From what I understand from psychology wise, like a lot of people fall into that, they get programmed essentially to fear failure, fear the F. Well, a lot of people have a fear of failure and that leads to the analysis paralysis that we discussed.
I know, which means they're scared to try and until you try... Yeah, it's easier. You can't course correct. It's easier to not try, that way you don't fail, you just stay in the status quo.
But then you get agitated because the stagnation is bad too. Like I'm the type of person where the status quo is a failure. I need to learn from it and just improve and grow and do something and be doing something cool.
Yeah, I am not content with stagnation. I don't understand people that just live to basically the same day, every day, over and over and over and over. That doesn't compute to me.
Some of you do that, reach out and tell me what I'm missing because to me that's not living. I don't think that's part when they're talking... On my way driving out to New Mexico, I was jamming to Lord Huron and they have a line in the song, what good is the life you're given if you just stand in one place? Well, the first time I heard that, I was like, whoa, shit, that's deep. And for real, but it is, you are blessed.
We went through this before. The math of you being here is just phenomenal math. It's like one in 52 trillion or some shit like that.
It's a gift. Life is a gift. You're given a gift and what is the point of the gift if you literally don't do anything other than just stand still? Exist.
Existing is not thriving. So to go back to when I was talking to the family out there and they were into what I've been preaching to you guys forever. I said, well, I understand that you think that you can't do this.
But I found that there are two separate ways that I actually got through to them. And then I didn't know the psychology of it. I actually had to look it up.
But if you say, I can't save, add the word yet to the end of it. I can't save yet. Because that doesn't mean that I can't save is a final... Finite thing, yeah.
Whereas I can't save yet means that it's a work in progress. Or the other one is don't. I don't want to save because then if I can't save is like a rule, whereas I don't want to save is a choice, an option.
Yeah. And sometimes there's freedom in the choice. Going back to Gary Bishop's book, he talks about how once you realize that you're... One of the other ones he had was being unwilling to do things.
If you acknowledge and realize that you're actually unwilling when you're saying, I wish or I can't, and you acknowledge... Like one of the examples he used was like the six pack, but you're unwilling to give up the crappy foods that will get you there. Well, if you actually realize that you're unwilling to do that, you might actually be like, okay, well, then maybe I really don't want these six pack abs. And then you actually release that strain and anxiety.
It's okay if that's your choice. But if it's like... Yes, I would rather people that I know say I haven't invested yet or I don't want to invest yet as opposed to I can't because I can't means that you never will invest. Whereas I haven't invested yet or I don't want to invest basically means that... You've at least thought about it.
You've gone through all the yeses and nos. Yeah. You've gone through all the yeses and nos and you've realized that you don't want to.
And then when I was talking to them, we were talking about... They're like, how did this come about? How did you get to where you got? And I was explaining some of the failures. Going back to the failure again, I was like, well, do we invest in growth stocks? And I sucked so bad at it. And we invested in a Ponzi scheme and I sucked bad at keeping up with that.
And we invested in crypto and I sucked at that. I mean, I went through and I made sure to mention every time that I have tried to get to where I'm at, I had lots of failures leading up to it. And I wanted them to basically understand that I use the failures because you're not going to succeed every time you invest.
It's impossible. And I want them to know that if you can tweak your mind to use the failures as learning. I mean, I can't stress that enough.
Rather than dwelling on what went wrong with the investments, I've looked at each of them. I said, well, what went right? What can I learn from what I did? I mean, other than the Ponzi scheme, don't invest in Ponzi schemes. That seems pretty self-explanatory.
Don't set it and forget it for years and forget that it's there. And I think because I was trying to... They had never invested before. So it literally was like starting with, I don't know, a teenager.
I said, what you want to do then is you want to take like 50 bucks or 100 bucks a month and you want to put it into whatever you do your research on, whatever metrics you come up with. That's where you guys are way ahead of them that have been listening to this because we've given you so many different ideas and metrics and things to look at. And so I said, you probably should listen to the podcast or at least sign up for the email.
That way you're getting some details that will maybe stir the thought process. I don't know. But it takes time.
It takes iterations to go through and realize what doesn't work for you and what does work for you. And that's why it is kind of cool if you can. Well, another prime example was my cousin.
Last time we were out there in 2022, we were pretty big on this thing called StepN. It was basically a play to earn, walk to earn, walk or play to earn on the Solana network. And we introduced it to her.
So we transferred a bunch of money over and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So as soon as we left, she stopped walking. So she wasn't earning any money.
And I kept texting or having Carmela text her and say, hey, take your the money you earned and step in and put it into Solana. And they were paying it out in a specific token that wasn't. It was part of the game.
It was the game token. And we were converting it back to the actual Jesus, lower, higher, higher adapted developed token. So if you've been following crypto at all, like I'm sure Solana is going to pop up.
I think Solana was like one of the cheaper gas tokens that is going around, especially with the NFTs. And we kept converting our walking because there was this massive spike in the price of the stuff in the game where there was like people were buying more shoes to upgrade their shoes to do all these things to get more money out of the actual purchase they did to recoup their costs. And we were selectively choosing to get our money out.
We talked about this even with our real max ETFs. This is one of the reasons we actually came up with this strategy. We're getting our money out because you never know when these things crypto is known for Ponzi schemes.
And it's not necessarily Ponzi schemes for all of them, but they don't always last long term either. So you want to get your initial investment out. We got our initial investment out.
And his cousin, like I was even sending her screenshots and walkthroughs of how to actually convert it back, how to move it over, taking all the legwork out so she didn't have to research it because she didn't know anything about crypto going into this. So I was like holding her hand with all of that. And then like as soon as we left, she wasn't really converting anything back to Solana.
Had she done that, she'd be loaded. Solana took off. Yeah, like Solana was at the time, I think it was 70 bucks and they went up to like 200 recently.
So had she listened to us, she would have thousands upon thousands of dollars to put into something else that gives her dividends, whatever. But she didn't, and that was because she didn't like, um, some stuff's hard to keep up with. I definitely can sympathize with that. That's my problem.
What she said though, when I brought it up, she's like, I can't, um, I can't figure out how to navigate the wallets or I can't, I couldn't walk when there was no one else around. I mean, it was, it was just lame excuses. I was like, geez, okay.
Um, well, and these would be good things to know about yourself before you actually pull the trigger on something. So if you aren't motivated to walk with by yourself, then I tried to simplify for her. I said, okay, look, um, I grew up like the, cause the rest of the family does the same stuff.
Uh, we drink a Coke or Mountain Dew or Pepsi or whatever pop. We just drink pop like by the, by the case. Uh, when I got there, uh, there was, I think I'm going to say eight or nine cases of pop.
Like that was before anyone showed up. But I said, let's reflect, I'm going to reflect this back to pop. Cause you're, you're, you're familiar with that and you'd like it.
I said, I personally said, I don't, I can't drink pop anymore. It's bad for me. And I never stopped drinking pop because at that point it was just, I was like, ah, it was horrible.
Like telling myself I can't do something. I was like, I'm going to do it because that's just the type of person I am. I said, but once I tweaked my mind to say, I don't want to drink pop and I've listed a bunch of reasons why pop was bad for me.
Tim's like I am where basically we're the opposite that if you tell us we can't do something, we basically will do everything possible to prove you wrong. I've caught myself going after things that I really didn't give a shit about just cause somebody told me I couldn't do it. And then later I found out they were psychologically like warfaring me.
And I was like, God damn it. I totally got had on that one. So you, we even like screw ourselves over by thinking I can't drink this or I can't eat this anymore.
And then that makes us want it all the more. So that can happen too, depending if you're a type like us that is like that. So what did you say? You tweaked it to, you're saying, I don't, I don't want to drink pop.
And the reason why is because here's I had like five or six different things that were just really bad for me. Like the sugar was bad. They died and it was bad.
The, uh, the caramel was bad. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, once I changed, I, once I tweaked it to, I don't want to drink pop anymore.
Then I found ways to still have like, um, bubbly, like a seltzer water. But then I found Bobelo and I haven't, I haven't had a pop now in like probably two years. And he had all that temptation with the cases of soda.
Root beer was one of his favorites and Dr. Pepper was the other one. And he said they had tons of them. He didn't touch a single one while he was there.
I'm so proud of you. But like I'm just said, like, and I said, that's a prime example of just tweaking what you say to yourself makes all the difference. Because I, I don't know this.
Like I'm not a psychologist. I wish I was, I studied psychology. I studied a little bit, not everybody's is exactly the same, but I'm telling you it's because I don't is a choice.
I can't is basically, basically pony trigger. It basically undermines your sense of freedom and autonomy. And I think that is what messes some people up too.
Cause it's like, I can't, but I have to. So you get stuck in that, that place where you're like, Oh, what do I do? I found two studies. Um, they weren't a lot.
There was like, um, 80 people and then like 60 people. But just to prove that I'm not pulling shit out of my ass. Uh, and one study students with a healthy eating goal were instructed when they faced, when faced with the temptations, they should say to themselves either I don't do that food or I can't do that food.
For example, I don't eat candy versus I can't eat candy. I'm 64% who said they don't compared to 39 who said they can't stuck to the whole, not eating the food. So it was like a 25%.
That's like a double that's double from the results. That's pretty cool. Oh, this one here was only 20.
I was, um, okay. The second site. Okay.
I thought it was 20, uh, the 20 adult women were working toward a health and fitness goals. Then they were encouraged to either use. I don't or I can't when they attempted to let her to relapse, to lapse, like skip the gym, eat crap food on each of the next 10 days.
These women checked in via email to report on whether it's so obviously it can't be, it's not, um, exact science because they reported via email, self-reporting anyway, eight out of the 10 women saying, I don't, I don't want to skip the gym or I don't want to eat a donut. Still stuck to the diet and the exercise plan. Whereas only one of the 10 who used, I can't. Wow.
That's huge. That's 80% to 10%. Wow.
Wow. Wow. I didn't even realize that.
I mean, there's probably other studies, but like I was just, um, like I was, like I was getting this all together right before I left. I think the difference here, again, I read a lot of psych stuff. I think the difference here is when you say you don't, it's a self identity identifier.
And when you identify with something, you're more likely to actually like that role versus the, I can't is a belief, but the belief can hijack that freedom control thing. I think that one actually agitates different stressors. Whereas the, I don't or I'm not the kind of person that does X, Y, Z, you're identifying with that.
And a lot of people really love those like identity labels. Like I talk about personality types all the time and people identify with being all sorts of things. And it's like they're more apt to stick to those rules or, or, um, criteria within those, those labels.
Okay. So like, but then I circled back to investing basically, just because that's what I'm pretty good at. Um, basically I said, you're done.
You're not going to pick winners every time you're going to find a, you're going to ship the bed, like icon medical properties. Well, that's one of the reasons you have to diversify camping world. I'm not half, I have examples out the ass.
We have a lot of duds in the portfolio where I've messed up, but we're still up because our other picks are good picks. So it's like, you're always going to have the odds. You can't win.
But I didn't, I didn't like pick, I don't know if I'm just blessed. I don't have the mindset. Like if I fail once, I'm just like, Oh, I, I'm not, I can't do this anymore.
I'm going to throw in the towel. This one failure is determining my entire identity for the rest of my life. But like, it was amazing to me how many of them had the mindset.
They can't save, they can't invest, they can't budget, they can't retire early. They can't travel like they want to. Like it was just amazing to me that they never took the time to actually identify that you can, you just have to do, you have to do the work.
You have to do the research. You have to, you have to put the foundation in place. And that's one of the biggest things that people are missing.
We'll probably do an episode on this. Cause I came up with this really cool, like it looks like a food pyramid and it's like most people just, I, I, so the bottom is all about like your mindset, getting your goals in alignment and like educating yourself. And the second thing is about setting up your systems and habits.
I don't really recall. It's essentially getting that in and which makes you automatically become disciplined because if you just like will power your way through discipline, like you fall off the frigging wagon quite a bit. But then when you're in phase three, that's when you're trying to starting to pay off debt and you're starting to save money.
And phase four is investing and exponentially growing your savings. Well, the thing is when most people start to do these financial things, they jump straight to phase three and phase four and they really, really skip and don't dial in their foundational pieces. So they're kind of sitting on quicksand or a house of cards.
And the problem with investing is if you put all your eggs in one basket and it goes kaput, you're out all of your seed money, which means that you actually can't try again until you save more money to put more money in. And we've been there a couple of times where I've had to actually like work extra to give to more money because it was like poof, 30 grand went away, poof, there goes 60. It was a lot of pleasant.
I failed and I took my retirement and I just cashed it out early to pay off one of the failures. We didn't have a system in place now that we do. But once I've actually, the, the, the, the funny part was once I actually pulled up the portfolio so they could like kind of look through it and try to digest what I was saying, they were like, wow, you're doing all that with just that amount of money.
Like what we've been preaching for months and months and months. Like I actually saw it in real time and it was fascinating like that cause they were like, Oh, that's only like, that's only like 160,000. You're making that much a month.
It's like, yeah. This is what we were talking about back in the very beginning of this podcast is that you be probably half or more or even less than half of what you think you do to actually retire using this dividend income strategy. Cause we only have about a hundred thousand.
We were, we finally were like celebrating. We're like, yeah, we've been up above a hundred thousand a couple of months in a row. And then bloody, bloody August.
We lost six, we lost 6.2% in two days in August. Yep. We had a five grand drop, dropped us back down below the a hundred thousand mark, but we started with 70,000 three years ago.
Once we settled into the strategy, well then now come on now I was like, I know like we were on Twitter trying like buy the dip, buy the dip, buy the dip. But then at the same time you have to be cautious about like, August is just a month for investing and September is a shit show. Normally the concept, you don't panic.
You buy the debt. When the metrics fall in, I found somewhere August literally yields nothing. It's a 0.0. Yeah.
On average, August is basically the last 10 years and the last 10 years, September was negative 2.3 when I think, what did they say? Friday the second August 2nd this year was like the worst day in the markets in some day in 2020. Yeah, it was pretty bad. So it was like we, it was a pretty bloody red.
And again, usually August is down. Usually September is down right now is the time to sit on cash, watch your watch list and then get in when things go into your buy rate. You have your, you have your watch list.
Like I hope you all do by now. Basically when things are looking super awesome, like the beauty of the dividend stocks is to say you found you have one that you've been waiting to drop down to 18. Well, it dropped down to 18.
Now you could hold off and hope that it goes down to 16, but you could put part of your money at the same time. You literally could just do half your investment into 18 and then if it drops down to 17, put the other half in or whatever, because you're what the, you're going to be accumulating dividends, which will then be more shares. So like once the market goes up, which it always does, like there's 150 years of research that the market always goes up in the long term.
It doesn't go up in a straight line. And I think that's a lot of the the young people and the newbies to investing thinking like we're all, we're in a bull market or we're in an economic climate where the markets just go straight up and that's not how it works. And if you think that's how it works, you need to really, when a bear comes, you're going to be like literally walking off a bridge.
You need to really do some more research and identify that that's not how it works. It doesn't go straight up. But at the same time, the beauty, I love whenever the market tanks like that because then I'm like, well, I can pick up some more of that or I could pick up some more of that or I could pick up some more of that.
Like I got Nvidia like dirt cheap and I got Chipotle at dirt cheap. I was just going to say like we keep talking and I, if you've been listening to the podcast, you know, like we've been trashing the hot, the big tech stocks and what is happening right now during earning seasons. Amazon Mr. Earnings, Google, Mr. Earnings, Tesla, Mr. Earnings, Nvidia, Mr. Earnings reports next week.
Okay. Excuse me. But like all the big ones and then like Chipotle dinner or a stock split and then Nvidia did a stock split.
So it's like these prices are crashing. Like all this stuff is coming back down to earth. ABGO just did a stock split.
So that one's probably going to crash a little bit. So if you were chasing these growth stocks though, you would not be sitting in a good position now once their earnings are out and everybody's in fear mode. Like the fear and greed index is insane and the fear side right now.
And we're like, let's pick up Chipotle and Nvidia. As much as I can't stand Warren Buffett, I don't like a lot of his sayings and like a lot of the shit he invests in and a lot of the stuff that he owns. He does have some good quotes.
But like, yeah, dude, when everyone's selling, buy, buy, buy, buy. Best time to buy is when everybody's fearful. And then that's the problem with new investors though, is that they, like, they just, they get panicked.
They're like, Oh my God, I went from 50,000 down to 40,000. I'm out of this. I'm going to put this like into CDs or some nonsense.
Let's see these are a good option. Like if you have say $10 million cause you're making $500,000 a year or some nonsense on it. But I know my family won't invest because they're going to be scared off of the market.
They'll be like, Oh, the market, the market's too, uh, it's too volatile. I don't like that. This is, this is my retirement.
And I mean, whatever, if that's what they do. If that's your mindset, then you're never going to have money in the markets, which means you're going to be working until the day you die. Because the biggest thing that Einstein talks about it, Warren Buffett talks about it, all the freaking great minds, financial experts.
If you are not invested in the stock market, you literally will never become wealthy. I don't think you'll be able to retire or be able to retire. You'll never be able to retire.
You'll never be able to come well. And I say that because you can't take advantage of compounding. Most of the, most of the people that are retiring currently have their 401k or a pension and social security.
I not saying social security is going to be go belly up, but it's good. There's going to be alterations to it and your social security payment is going to be like 500 bucks a month or something, something, some pittance like that. If you rely on things that are outside of yourself, you will be disappointed when things change.
I was literally just having this conversation with somebody. I forget who it was. And I said, I don't really think that I don't think social security is going to go away, but I don't think it's going to be the same form that it is.
It's going to be a form where you get like 500 maybe $750 a month and then you're going to be trying to fit your lifestyle into a 401k that you basically don't. We've went over this before in a podcast where like 80% of people don't have or 60% I forget the percentages, but 60% don't have anything and like 20% only have like 50,000 in their 401k. So like 80% of the population is going to have to be living on 50,000 or less plus 500 or maybe $750 from social security and they're not going to be able to do it.
And those are probably all the people that have the, I can't mindset, I can't invest, I can't save, I can't whatever. I'm just going to rely on the government. But the interesting part about all this circling back to like talking with the family was that they were mesmerized by the fact that they had extra rooms and they had running water and they had toilets and all this stuff.
And I was just like tickled pink to be in a minivan parked under a tree peeing on a tree. Like, so I understand that that lifestyle is not for everybody, but that's kind of like we had the discussion months ago. Do we want this to be like a financial podcast or we want it to be more like a nomadic? And I said, I'm really, I really think my people are people that are going to be living on minimal money because they're traveling in a van or an RV or a tent camping or traveling in a car.
And I, that's, that's who I relate to. Well, we want the people who are curious and usually people who are curious explore a lot because like we're just driven, we're driven for experiences, not things. I literally just found a study about that.
And happiness. What did, what did the study say? The study said that the happier people, they did a, they did a, sir, like they did a study of all about 3000 people at the university of Texas. Look it up.
I mean, I don't have the link and they found that materialistic people are not near as happy as people that use their, use their money for experiences. Like whether it be going to a concert, going out to eat, uh, traveling, camping, whatever the, whatever the experience, the reason behind it makes perfect sense once you think about it because the psychology of it is if you have a great time, say you went to a Taylor Swift, she's big, I guess. Say you went to a Taylor Swift concert.
Every time you hear Taylor Swift on the radio, your mind will automatically take you back to the concert where you had a blast at. Whereas if you bought the Taylor Swift CD and say it wasn't one of your favorites, every time that you listen to the CD, you'll have a negative reaction to it and the dopamine wears off and then you have to buy something else. Fascinating psychology behind it.
It's true. It's true. So, but that's like whenever you're materialistic and you buy stuff, the dopamine wears off and then you're stuck in the same exact situation you were before you got the dopamine hit, which means you need more and more with less money.
There's tiny, tiny things. There's tiny, tiny dopamine hits. Whereas every time you have the spirits, and that's why I take a lot of pictures because then I can actually remember the hikes.
Remember, you still get the dopamine hit from the experience. You big dopamine head. But what you don't, what you get more, that's more important is you get a something in your longterm memory where you, every time that you think of that experience, you're happy.
Yeah, it associates, it like roots in your emotions. And I think that's like one of the big keys. So anyway, the whole reason that we ended up going into the van life thing was because how, cause we were like, we don't want to live the materialistic consumption normal lifestyle anymore.
Like how can we, there's that word instead of, I can't do this now. But do you see how she phrased it? I don't want to live this current lifestyle anymore. We made a choice that we didn't want to live in the current lifestyle.
I don't want to do that. How can I make it possible? How can we? And that was when we were like, Oh, and then when that happens, like your mind is looking for solutions. And that was right around the time that we went to the Smokies and Tim had that hypothermia scare and we ended up sleeping in the trunk.
And then we were like, I'll be damned sleeping in the trunk actually works. And then we were like, what if we upgrade to a van? Which we did. I mean, that came months and months later, but then we did.
And then we were like, Oh my God, this is feasible. And then we were like, Oh my God, we don't actually need as much because there's all these places you can stay for free. BLM land, a lot of stuff.
I'm saying like there's like you, the nomadic lifestyle can apply to whether it's a car, a camper, a van, or say you want to do what Karim brought up. I don't know if you brought up in the podcast or you're talking to someone. You said you met a couple of people that they work half the year and then they take where you basically can rent a Airbnb for like 700 bucks a month, which is going to be cheaper than you ever could.
Yeah. Cheaper than you ever could. It's furnished.
You don't have to worry about all that other stuff. And sure that's how you do your nomadic lifestyle. That's rock on once a month, once a year, like whatever you want to do.
Like nomadic doesn't have to be crazy like us pooping in a bucket in the woods. Tim's looking. I love it.
But I mean other people, we get it, but we're talking, we're looking for the freaking explorer souls and typically the explorer souls. Like you guys will understand what we're saying with this. I can't thing.
If you just shift your wording a little bit cause we know you guys like to try different things out, tweak that little thing and you were going to see big things unfold. Well, I'm saying at the same time, so say you only get like $75,000 in your investment account. So you're only getting like 1200 bucks a month.
That's what we started with. I'm put on. So let's say that you don't get that, that you're at your $1200 a month.
There's going to be two frames of thought. You're either going to say I can make that work or I can't make that work. What camp are you in? Well, and if you say I can't make that work, how do I get more? That's what we did.
I was like, that's not enough. How can we get more? And then I was like, Oh, we can save here. Oh, we can, you know, cut this back because we don't really care about this and we want to have that money compounding and investments.
And that's where it's like if you use, I can't in appropriate ways, it can motivate you to do and make things happen. But it was like, I thought it needed to be addressed because the family, like, as I said, newbies, no clue about anything. And I was going through it with them.
And they were just mesmerized by how possible anything is. Well, it's crazy. Cause most people are like, I can't do that.
And then they see somebody else doing it. Like, why can you do that? But I can't do that. It's because you don't believe you can.
I don't know. But like, yeah, I just, I just was looking into other, um, nomadic people and there's a lot of people that like Carm just brought up that they, they work like six months a year. And I came up with the brilliant thing that if they literally just banked all that money, they're living in a van to begin with.
They just banked all that money for six months, put it into a brokerage and then worked six additional months. They've literally could then be in the same situation that we're in. And with just six months, they were pro prolonging their travels by six months.
They literally would put it into like a yield max strategy. They could conceivably take more than six months off, if not potentially year after year for just that six months, instead of six months on six months off. So like there's ways like the, I think that is a symmetrical risk that is calculated.
The one area where I think that, um, I didn't get through them was that part, like the risk mitigation that we actually implement because they just were like deer in the headlights. Well, I think we want to do an episode on this last or next, next time is a, we were talking about, so I can't, is like one of the things, it's your mindset, but it, this is a component of successful, especially financial, successful, financially independent people. They have specific traits, they have specific hobbies.
And we were going to talk about what they actually do. So if you mimic those things, you're setting yourself up right now, they own Toyotas. Toyota Camry is the number one vehicle.
And let me tell you something. The bed was perfect. The size was perfect for one person.
Um, the gas mileage, I was getting 27, 28, 29 miles per gallon. Um, that's what the air conditioner on. I was cruise control cruise at 60.
Dude, you found out that was the most energy efficient. Well, I mean, I didn't want to spend more money than I had to. So like I was tinkering around the first day because it took multiple days to get out there.
And that's dialing the strategy and that's actually paying attention to the data that's coming at you and tweaking things. Well, that is what successful people do. I don't know.
I don't know if you can teach that. I don't know. Like for real.
Like I was just like, well, I mean, I'm sure you would probably, you probably could figure it out because for real, it took like 36 hours. You have nothing better to do than like, well, let's see what's my gas mileage. It's looking like this last guy, this last fill up.
But we are convinced that the speed limits keep going up and up and up. I kind of think it's a conspiracy theory to make people spend more on gas. Everybody's in a hurry to go nowhere.
Every state that I went through was 75 and people were doing at least 80 and I was doing 60 and they were just blown by me, blown by me, blown by me. But like when I had the cruise control on 60, I could see everything. Not that there was a lot to see in like some of the states, but I could see everything.
And it was just gas and it didn't even waste that much extra time. It wasn't that stressful. And I mean, I would recommend it to anybody that's traveling to do that.
But like most people won't. They are like they hop from flight to flight or from train to train or from bus to bus or they go as fast as they possibly can. I don't know if I said this when I came back from Greece back in February, but like the way that we travel, I love it.
But I hate traveling by plane and I hate traveling when I do not have like my own vehicle to get around. And it's not necessarily a control thing, but it's a freedom thing for me because it's like, I want the ability to go and do what I want to do. And I don't want to be like constrained by the schedule or like the boats, the ferries, all this stupid stuff and like just being in Greece on that timetable.
And that was one of the reasons we were like, we do not want to do this anymore. I was so tired of going on these trips and we were cramming so much stuff into a 10 day or two week period. And then we had to come back completely exhausted and go right back into work.
I was, yeah, I was exhausted. Like doing it. We love the experience, but we were like, we don't have to be doing life this way.
Like why can't we do 90% of our life what we want and like the 10% of what we have to. You could never say I can't to me or we won't be friends. I literally hate that almost as much.
I say I can't, but I say I can't do this until I do this. Oh, I hate it so much. Like there was people in my family said, I literally would just go out to the van.
I'm like, I'm done talking. Well, that's like the one girl I told you I've been talking to. She, uh, she's been saying, I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't.
And I like literally have been like viscerally repulsed. And I'm like, we can't be friends anymore. Like I can't surround myself with people who have that negative of a mindset because it's like, dude, again, these success books talk about you are the sum of the five people you hang out with the most.
So if the five people you hang out with the most are duds, you're going to like literally drop the follow suit. You want to surround yourself with people who are like, dude, like I came from shit and I never had a negative attitude. Like I literally came from shit.
But you, you came from shit and you basically were like, I refuse to accept this. I'm leaving as soon as I can. No, I said, I, I, I'm going, how can I get out of here as fast as possible? Yeah.
You didn't just say, I don't want to be here anymore. There's nothing I can do about this. And then you just like succumb to the situation.
You were like, no, how can I get out of here? How can I make this more tolerable until I can get out? I mean, there was times when I was probably five years old. I was like, I can't believe I'm stuck here. I can't live like this.
But then when I started getting older, I was like, well, how the hell can I get out of this situation? So you just said, and I can't believe I do that a lot where I'm like, I can't accept, or I refuse to accept this, this, and this. I will find a way I will do this. Like I use it in that sense where it's like, I can't accept there is no potential or there is no, but then we're trying something new.
I, I was thinking like the last, um, couple of minutes of each podcast, I'll just do like, um, housekeeping with the portfolios. I still keep up. The heck did we agree on that? I'm to drive back.
I didn't tell you. Yeah. That's what we're going to do.
I'm probably going to actually break this out into a second episode cause it went so long. Okay. My bad.
You get two for next week. I don't know what we're doing next week. I think we're gonna do the pyramid.
Um, yeah. We're kind of like in this limbo land where Tim just got back and he kind of has been off his kilter after driving so long. And I guess he got a touch of the COVID or something.
I was out in the middle of the wilderness and I felt perfect. My body was firing on all cylinders and I was breathing great. I was riding my bike like 30, 40 miles a day, loving life, eating healthy, didn't take a nap at all.
I wasn't tired. And as soon as I got back in the East, I don't know if it's five G's or chem trails or whatever, but like, well, I think we did talk about this for like, I'm fairly convinced Tim is an HSP, which means highly sensitive person. AKA you have a more acute response to smaller levels of input, meaning you're more toxin susceptible.
You're more, I've been saying this forever. Cause he's like, I'm the worst sleeper in the world. And I'm like, dude, I'm telling you, like you need to turn the wifi off.
Yeah. So he's, he got enough space and clarity and cognizance to have clear mind. And now he's back.
I had clear mind. I know what my purpose is in life. My purpose in life is what I do on the podcast, teaching people to be better.
And now he's like, Oh my God, we have to get out of here. ASAP. We do.
We have to get here as soon as possible. Cause my head was so clear and I had so many great ideas for things. And then like I've been doing nothing but sleeping since he's been back.
I've been back for three or four and I've slept every day. So blah. So if you guys have motivation issues, it might honestly be the fact that you live in the Northeast around cities.
Yeah. Or cities. I mean, I was in bumfuck.
There was like, the town has like 50 people in it. It's so awesome. But you're around natural forests, having the air purified.
There's no chemtrail crap. There's like no, and the water was like, I just got water out of the tap, which is something I couldn't ever do in the, in the East. And like it literally just out of the tab.
It was perfectly crystal clear in my cup. I was like, Oh my Lord, my water at home was contaminated. So what does Tim say? I can't live in the Northeast anymore.
I cannot do it. So how do I make this, this shit happen? So we're selling this condom as soon as possible. So like we might be on Twitter and all those other things sporadically because we got shit to do.
So we can get the fuck on the road. Um, we'll try to keep up. So if you send them tweets or emails or whatever, we'll definitely answer them when we can.
Like it's going to be hectic. I want to, I want to have this condo completed within a month so that we can have a month to sell it. That's the goal.
We have to make it happen. We keep pushing it back because I just, I'm over this. We, Tim wants the a hundred grand equity out of this.
So we didn't push it back. She pushed it back. Oh, it's all my fault.
You're like, this isn't my problem. It's not my problem. You created this fucking mess.
You created this fucking mess and you want me to be a team now? Yeah. You can't be free without it. Oh my God.
I can be free. Well you're the one that wants to wait for the money. Okay.
Quick poll. Do you sell the house as is and only get like 20,000 or do you work on it for a month and get anywhere between a hundred and 150,000 we'll let the, we'll let the fans decide. I want you to put the poll up there too.
All right. I'll do a poll on this one. Yeah.
Let us know what you guys think because I'm like literally to the point where I'm like, I don't even care anymore. I'm so freaking over being, because we sell as is we could probably get maybe, maybe 30,000 after all the fees and taxes and everything. If we do the work, it's going to be anywhere between a hundred and like 150, 160.
Are you going to help me? I told you I'm game. If you help me. I told you I would.
What have you been doing? Sleeping? I helped you the other day. What'd I do? I got you tools. I was your tool bitch.
I'll be my tool bitch every day and we'd get everything done. I am just not eye candy. All right guys, we'll see you next week.