Brett Tanner flies solo and inverts Charlie Munger's advice: instead of teaching you how to get rich, he walks through 10 decisions that guarantee you stay poor. He checks five viral money stats against the real data, including the claim that 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency, and shows the personal savings rate has fallen to 2.7% today from 7% to 8% before the pandemic.
Brett TannerHost, founder of Be WealthyThe personal savings rate was 2.7% of after tax income as of June 2026, Brett says, down from 7% to 8% before the pandemic. He ties the drop to hedonistic adaptation: a raise stops feeling like a raise after about 4 years, so spending creeps up to match it.
Jump to 6:20Credit card balances are at a record $1.26 trillion with an average rate of 22%, against a national savings rate of 2.7%. Brett argues there is no investment on earth that safely pays 22% a year after tax, so paying off a card is the best guaranteed return you will ever get.
Jump to 10:33The claim that 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency is a misread of a federal survey, Brett says. The real numbers show 63% can cover a $400 surprise and 13% cannot, but only about half of Americans can cover a $1,000 emergency, and one in four adults has zero savings at all.
Jump to 13:42Brett challenged a coaching client who had read one book a year for three years straight to read three books a month instead, 36 books in a year, all picked around his biggest business opportunity. The client's income jumped more than 100% the following year.
Jump to 20:01The claim that 70% of lottery winners go broke and 78% of NFL players go bankrupt within two years has no real research behind it, Brett says. Peer reviewed data on Florida lottery winners found a different pattern: winners of $50,000 to $150,000 were 50% less likely to go bankrupt in the first two years, then 50% more likely in years three through five.
Jump to 21:05Brett points out the top 10% of households own 90% of the wealth sitting in the stock market, while the bottom 50% own less than 1%. He also notes self-employed people make up less than 20% of the workforce but two thirds of millionaires, which is his case for owning assets instead of staying only an earner.
Jump to 23:09Saving $200 a month at a 7% return from age 25 to 65 grows to about $525,000, Brett says. Wait 10 years and start at 35 instead, and that same $200 a month only grows to $244,000, a $280,000 difference even though the extra contributions were just $24,000.
Jump to 27:24Wealth is actually not what you earn. It's the gap between you earn and what you spend.Brett Tanner · at 6:20
Brett compares five viral money stats to the real research during the episode.
| The myth | What people believe | What the data actually shows |
|---|---|---|
| Emergency savings | 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency | 63% can cover it and 13% cannot, but only about half can cover a $1,000 emergency |
| Paycheck to paycheck | 62% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck | Only 24% actually spend 95% or more of their income on necessities, per Bank of America data |
| Lottery winners | 70% of lottery winners go broke within a few years | Winners of $50,000 to $150,000 were 50% less likely to go bankrupt in years one and two, then 50% more likely in years three through five |
| NFL bankruptcies | 78% of NFL players go broke within two years of retirement | About one in six players filed for bankruptcy, and how much he earned or how long he played didn't change that |
| Family wealth across generations | 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation | Brett says there is no real data behind the shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations claim |
Tap any chapter and the video starts right there.
“You can't out earn a zero savings rate. If your savings rate today is zero, you are on the path for 10, 20, or 30 years from now, your world looking much worse than it is today.”
Brett Tanner at 9:30Plug in your own savings rate and start age to see the gap Brett describes between starting to save at 25 versus at 35.
Brett says that stat misreads a federal survey, which asked people how they would pay for a $400 surprise. The real numbers show 63% of Americans can cover a $400 surprise and 13% cannot, though things get harder at $1,000, where only about half of Americans can cover it.
Brett cites Bureau of Economic Analysis data showing the personal savings rate was 2.7% of after tax income as of June 2026. Before the pandemic, the norm was closer to 7% to 8%, so Brett says Americans are saving less than half of what they used to.
Brett says the popular stats, 70% of lottery winners broke within a few years and 78% of NFL players bankrupt within two years of retirement, have no real research behind them. Peer reviewed data on Florida lottery winners instead found winners of $50,000 to $150,000 were 50% less likely to go bankrupt in the first two years, then 50% more likely in years three through five.
Brett says he has never met a wealthy person who doesn't read a lot, and points to a coaching client who read one book a year for three years, then switched to three books a month aimed at his biggest business opportunity. That client's income jumped more than 100% the following year.
Brett explains Munger's method as solving a problem backwards: instead of asking how to get rich, ask what guarantees you stay poor, then avoid doing those things. Munger used the same idea on life itself, saying he only wanted to know where he would die so he could make sure never to go there.
0:00If you want to be poor, number one, the best way to do it, spend everything you got, spend the surplus. If you get a raise, torch it, go big and go all out. The best way to be rich is to understand what makes people poor. When we have financial pressure, we don't make the best decisions. I lived way below my means. In my 20s and 30s, my friends all believed I was poor, even though I owned rental properties. You can't out earn a zero savings rate. If your savings rate today is zero, you are on the path for 10, 20, or 30 years from now. Your world looking much worse than it is today. Welcome back to the Be Wealthy podcast. Today I am flying solo. I'm out here without my co-pilot Katelyn. She is on site at one of our properties running those. And so I am doing a little fireside chat. And today's episode is how to be poor. And I realize that is a controversial topic on a be wealthy podcast where normally we talk about your wealth, but to honor the late great Charlie Munger who passed away a little
1:03over a year ago at 99 years old and had some of the best advice. If you haven't read Poor Charlie's Almanack or gone and read some of the quotes that he does at Berkshire Hathaway's uh annual conventioner that he did or there's been books written about his quotes. I have read all of them about Munger and I'm a huge fan. But one of his things is that we should always invert every idea. So I don't want to throw this out there that you should actually be poor. But actually the best way to be rich is to understand what makes people poor. And so there's 10 different things I want to go through 10 cautionary tales of today. And we're going to go backwards and talk about those different things. And so while I'm going to teach you how to be poor today, we're flipping it over and it's how to be rich. And it's what I call future casting. What I want people to do in their lives is to go cast yourself at some future destination always in decades. So you could use 10 years out, 20 years out or 30 years out from today. And then you can play the results of different actions in your life. If you continue to run your
2:06marriage and build that relationship with your partner the way you do today for the next 30 years, are you going to end up in a dream scenario with your partner with all these dividend memories or are you going to end up divorced with three more people because you never solved the core issue? And so future casting with your money, your decisions, your relationship, your business choices is a way that I've always thought about it. And I think about what is the cost of my current actions, right? What's the cost of doing it? Like I would love to sit in bed nearly all day with my wife and watch the latest Netflix episode and talk to her and that's what I'd love to do. And that would land me dead broke where the average American is today. And so we don't want to do that. We want to think differently. And so if we're going to do that, we've got to go through these different things that I'm going to discuss today. The different the 10 cautionary tales of how to be poor. The reality of is none of these that I'm talking to you about are painless in a single month. None of these are going to cause you pain this month, but they're devastating. Absolutely devastating over 10 years. There's a great book by Darren
3:08Hardy that I read every single year called the compound effect. And he talks, we all understand that money compounds, but he really talked about how our decisions compound. And he talked about two people over a seven-year period of time. And you the compounding works both ways. The person making the right decisions, life goes like goes up, right? And the other person's going down. So the gap isn't just we're both neutral at seven years. Someone's living way up here and someone's living way way worse because of the negative compounding. And I think people radically underestimate the negative compounding decisions they make in their life. You know again Munger's quote was invert always always invert every problem. And he always talked about this. All I want to know is where I'm going to die. So I'll never go there again. by inverting where he would die and not going there, he's not going to die. So, if we want to if we wanted to find how to have a terrible marriage, we could probably all come up with the 10 things that would make it absolutely terrible. Well, if you took the opposite of those 10 things, it might be how to have a fantastic marriage. Fun fact about that, those quotes from Charlie,
4:12they say that he gave a speech in 1986 at Harvard, which was true. It was Harvard School, which was a prep school in Los Angeles, not the Harvard University. And so a lot of the things that we're going to cover today are actually myths that we've heard about finances that are actually incorrect. And so without further ado, I want to jump into a few numbers prior to getting into the 10 mistakes people make. So first, the average American family's net worth today is right at just over a million dollars. That's the average American family's net worth. The median family's net worth, right, the one right in the middle is $192,000. If you want to be the average family in the top 10% of all Americans today, they have a net worth of roughly 7.8 million. And if you want to be in the top 1% today, your net worth needs to be $40 million. And so those are all all big numbers. But the middle of the country to the top 10% that's a 40x jump to the top 1% from the middle it's a about
5:16200x. And so there's a group of people that are doing the exact opposite of this. They're doing the how to be rich, not the how to be poor. If you need help in your business right now, you've got a challenge or an opportunity that you really want to hone in and capitalize on it and make a gamechanging breakthrough in your business, come out to our one-day workshop. This is something we've never done before. We're now doing them at the resorts we've bought. So they could be at Apple Mountain, Georgia. They could be in Northern Arizona. Um they might even be in Bise in the future. But you get to come to a one day where there I'm not going to present slides. It's literally you and your business and you're going to leave with an action plan you can implement in your business. Go to bewealthypodcast.com and you can click on our upcoming events and see where we'll be and book to come. We have the room is limited. We have no more than 15 people in the room. Go to be b wealthyodcast.com and you can book our one-day workshop coming up. And so with that, let's jump in. If you want to be poor, number one, the best way to do it, spend everything you got. Spend the surplus. If you get a raise, torch it. Go big and go all out. Wealth is
6:20actually not what you earn. It's the gap between you earn and what you spend. Right? No gap, no wealth at any income. And so, we've got to stop. We've got to change that. No matter how much money I've made my entire life when I was waiting tables, I was able to save a portion of what I had. I always understood that I had to save a portion. The richest man in Babylon, that book, right? A portion of what you earn is yours to keep. And if you embrace that over your entire life, your earnings will go up over time, right? We all go back to our first job. We're likely earning more today. The question is, how much has your income gone up and how much has your savings gone up? And I'll give you some data today. The June data, the personal savings rate from the Bureau of Economic Analysis right now, June of 2026, the personal savings rate 2.7% of after tax income. That's literally less than 3 cents of every dollar. Before the pandemic, the norm was about 7 to 8 cents. We've actually gone backwards by more than half on the
7:23savings rate. You probably heard this myth here. 62% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. That's half myth. Okay. And the survey is a bit of pe of feelings. People self-reporting that nothing's left at the end of the month. Bank of America actually went and looked at what customers spend who genuinely use 95 plus% of their income on necessities and that number is 24%. So 24% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. There is a mechanism for this. It's called hedonistic adaptation. In a raise, when we get a raise and we have a newfound income or our incomes increased, it stops feeling like a raise in about four years for most of us, right? The treadmill speeds up to match you forever. And sadly, as humans, we're built to consume. We want more things. We're on social media scrolling, seeing a life that someone else has that may not be portrayed correctly, and we think that we want it. And so we're designed as people and the marketers are designed to extract our dollars and we've got to
8:26decide what kind of scorecard do we want to play to. And I've talked a lot about it. There's two scorecards in life and this came from Warren Buffett. There's the internal scorecard. What are the things and the beliefs that we have that we want to embrace to be the best version of us for our own happiness and enjoyment. And then there's that external scorecard, the mask we put on to go impress others. that cool car that we need to get, that new outfit, that new handbag, that thing that's really, really cool that we got to have that we're going to post online about. You know, ask yourself when you're buying that thing, if you couldn't post it online and share it with others, do you still want it? And if you can play for the internal scorecard, you can resist this hedonistic temptation, this hedonistic adaptation to constantly increase your spending. And so, you know who I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the agent that had their record- setting year or the business owner that had their record setting year in 21 2021 or 2022. Sure, we've all crushed it then, right? But you shouldn't spend your money based on your last best year, but your average of the last five years. You know, the there's a really really
9:30great book that came out all all a long time ago between Stanley and Danko, the millionaire next door. And I think that book was entirely underrated, but they named the person we're talking about here so well. And they called it the quote underaccumulator of wealth. High income, no net worth. They look rich. They are, you know, I'm from the country. They call this all hat, no cattle. So you can't out earn a zero savings rate. If your savings rate today is zero, you are on the path for 10, 20, or 30 years from now, your world looking much worse than it is today. So, you've got to switch that. You got to change it. Here's a crazy stat. When companies with 401ks changed the opt-in to automatic enrollment in the 401k plan, so it went from highly optional to automatic, the rate of participation went from 37% to 86%. That's all we need to know as people. The fact that they just threw us in there and money started coming out of our check in small amounts over time, we were okay with it. Then it grew into a nest egg and actually worked
10:33and it saved for retirement. And that's what you have to do here. Go automate something in your savings today that is meaningful that over the next 10, 20 or 30 years will put you where you want. Systems save money. Willpower does not. Pick a percentage, automate it, make it happen. All right. Number two, caution number two. If you want to be poor, the secret to doing it, pay 22% interest and earn 7%. Go ahead and compound backwards. So, everyone believes in compound interest. What the average American doesn't understand is they're compounding negatively the wrong way, right? Think about it. We're all trying to get a 10, 12, a dream 20% return on a one-off investment, right? But there are people paying 22% the wrong way, right? They're paying it in credit card interest. Credit card balances right now are the highest rate in history. I'll let you figure out why you think that is right now, but it's $1.26 trillion. Total household debt is roughly 19 trillion. That's also a record. The average rate of credit cards 22%.
11:37And I want to go back. The average savings rate 2.7% and then they're revolving. They're paying 22% on stuff to impress people with an external scorecard. It's a machine, right? It's beautifully engineered, mathematically perfect from stripping your wealth away from you. Same same type of compounding that would make you rich. It's just working against you. And nobody feels it, right? The card company engineers it so that $150 payment on the $8,000 balance doesn't feel like anything. So, you just forget it. The reality is when you invert the problem, there's no investment on Earth that safely and reliably pays 22% per year after tax guaranteed. There's only one actually there's only one your credit cards. You know, I don't believe in actually debt on anything that doesn't pay you that's attached to a mortgage outside of your primary residence. So, I don't believe on debt. I don't want to pay the debt. I want my tenants to pay. It's why I buy commercial buildings, single family real estate. I buy other things that pay me money. I don't want to pay the mortgage.
12:39I don't want to pay Yes, I buy new cars, but I pay for them with a passive income and then I save that up and I pay it in cash. And so this is no debt on cars, boats, student loans, or whatever else. Yes, I'm talking to you, the 200k student debt person that got that English lit degree. You shouldn't have gone $200,000 in debt on a degree that paid 50 grand a year. That makes no sense, right? You can't go into debt for things that make no sense. If you're carrying If you're carrying a balance on your credit card, you got to get out of it. Don't be an investor. Invest in yourself first and pay off your debt. It's the best risk-free rate of turn rate of return that you will absolutely ever see. Number three, if you want to be poor, skip the buffer. Have zero savings, have no margin, and be ready in case because nothing ever breaks, right? It's totally not reality. But here's another myth. You probably heard of this. 40% of Americans cannot cover a $400 emergency. That's a complete misread of the federal the federal
13:42government survey and the fed's economics have come out and said that. So the survey asked how people would pay, not whether they could. Here's the real numbers. 63% of Americans actually can cover a $400 surprise, but 13% cannot. One in eight people cannot handle a $400 surprise. Here's the problem. When you go from $400 to a,000, if you have a $1,000 emergency, only half of Americans can pay for that per bank rate. One in four adults has zero emergency savings, nothing. And the share of people who can cover three months of expenses fell to 46%. The first decline after 12 straight years of improvement, and that's from FINRA. What does all this mean? It means if you have no buffer in your life, no savings, right? automatically when that brake repair comes in, it's going on the 22% card. Again, further compounding you. The way you get here, you've got to start saving for what you've got. You got to push to get to at least three months of savings, then get to six. The
14:44magic number that I coach my private clients to is a minimum of 12 months of your active burn rate, whatever you spend monthly. So, when you avert the problem, you've got to get a buffer first. Get the six months and move on. And I want to tell you a story about one of my private coaching clients. And he had his 12 months saved up, quite a little bit more than that. The greatest deal of all time came up. It was an investment. And he he asked me on the call, should I use my savings? And I said, absolutely not. That's money to feed your family only in an emergency. An emergency fund is for what? That's right. An emergency, not an investment. So he went in there and did the investment and went bad. And all of a sudden, this guy who had a great world building an empire, all of a sudden he was thinking about fire selling an asset. He had a problem here. He had this other issue. And so out of nowhere, he goes from a guy that's absolutely crushing it to let's sell. We use our emergency reserves. We had no buffer. We started making bad decisions. The truth is, you put financial pressure in your life and it creates problems. When we have financial pressure, we don't make the best decisions and then we make the
15:48problem worse. And so number three, we got to have a buffer. You've got to have a savings.
Look, if you're out there and you're a real estate agent and you're having success, but yet you don't feel like you're successful, you're making $500,000, $700,000 a year, and you're asking yourself, "Where does the money go? I don't remember the time. I've got I'm trying to be at home. I'm trying to be with my kids. I'm trying to have a big career." And you just feel like there's you're missing something. I think it's because you are. And if you come to our one-day workshop, you can see the testimonials on our website. Go to bewealthypodcast.com. Come spend a day and let's show you a different way to play the real estate game that helps you hit your goals. Go to bewealthypodcast.com. All right, number four. Stop reading. Never grow yourself. Do not be a learning based person. You already know everything and the best advice is on your favorite social media platform. So if you want to be poor, stop reading and do not learn. Here's some stats on where we're at as a country. The this is from the TIAA and the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center. They give us
16:50US adults a 28 question money test every year. 49% the average score is 49%. On a money test that is not complicated when the score the index started in 2017 nearly 10 years ago it was 49%. In eight years with the information AI emerging and all access to information of fingertips and the average American the average score has improved zero less than three out of 10 Americans can answer three basic questions on interest inflation and diversification. And if you're under 35 years old it's about one in seven. You might be saying out there people are bad at money trivia. Does it matter? It's not trivia. The Journal of Political Economy, one of the top economic journals in the world, published the estimate in 2017, and this should hit hard. 30 to 40% of retirement of the retirement wealth gap in America is accounted for by the differences in financial knowledge. We're talking basic
17:55financial knowledge. 30 to 40% of the difference in the wealth gap for retirees was their personal financial knowledge. So, when you think about not reading, do you want to be 30 to 40% worse because you don't read a few books? That's crazy, right? Here's why the knowledge never arrives. So, we're going to go to reading now. The average American reads for personal interest. So, this is all things business and just fun 16 minutes a day. 20 years ago, that was 23 minutes a day. Never great. The average American though watches two and a half hours of TV today. over 10 times more than we read every single day. One in four Americans didn't even read a book last year. Not one in a whole year. The share of Americans who read for pleasure on a given day, 28% in 20 in 2004 and only 16% in 2023. And even fiction, which does not help you other than to relax, hit its lowest level in
18:58the 30-year plus history of the government's art survey. such and s we're we're reading less, earning less, we're less in debt. Do you think those things are related? If you went back and looked at the average savings rate 20 years ago, you would realize it's a straight decline right now, just like our knowledge base of the average American. Top income, right, reading, I mean, you can relate, you can just say this many different ways. The top income cortile is about 1.5 times more likely to read daily than the bottom quartile. What does that tell you? postgraduate degree holders are three times more likely than the high school or less graduates. I mean, the data goes on and on. Now, here's some data that's wrong, right? This whole myth that the average CEO reads 60 books a year. No study ever can actually prove that fact. You know, you hear 42% of college graduates never read another book. Completely fabricated. There's no data. Even Warren Buffett that who someone said reads 500 pages a day was taken out of context.
20:01So, but here's the truth, right? The 88% of the rich read plus minutes per day. And I will tell you in my life, I've never met someone that was ridiculously wealthy that didn't read a lot. You know, again, I'm giving you examples. I had a client that I challenged him. He had read one book each year the three years prior. And the first year we coached together, I said, "What would happen to your life if you read three books a month? 36 books a year. The next year his income jumped over 100%. I asked him, "Was it my coaching? What what was it? This that was a joke." And he said, "Honestly, if I had to point to one thing, it would be the fact that I read 36 books that were on purpose about the biggest opportunity in my life. I focused on what would double my income, read the books on that, applied what I learned, and stopped traffic. He doubles his income." So reading's real. If you want to stay poor, you already know everything you need to know. If you want to be rich, you may have to read some things that you don't want. Number five, cautionary tale. People are
21:05waiting for the windfall. They're wait all you have to do if you want to be poor, wait for the windfall. Wait for someone to come save you. No problem at all. Right? We all hear this data and there's these myths that are all broken. Right? Myth one is 70% of lottery owners go broke within a few years. Actually, no publication shows that research. It's not real. My second favorite myth about money, 78% of NFL players go broke within two years of retirement. Also completely false. There's no data that backs it. Myth three, 70% of wealthy families lose wealth by the second generation. There's this whole estate attorneys love the quote short sleeves to short sleeves in three generations. One generation makes the money, the next generation torches it, and the next generation they're right back where they started. There's actually no data that shows that. So you might be sitting there, Brett. So should I wait for the windfall? Is someone coming to save me? No. The data is actually worse, but in a different way. So economist studied Florida lot of winners. Real prize data matched to real bankruptcy filing that were peer-reviewed.
22:07Winners of 50 to to 150,000 were 50% less likely to go bankrupt in the first two years of winning and 50% more likely in years three through five. Five years out, same place as the people who'd won a few hundred bucks. The money didn't fix anything. It only buys a delay. The one in six NFL bankruptcy number, researchers found something worse than the rate. How much a player earned, how long he played, none of that changed it. More money did not mean more protection. The same amount of people filed bankruptcy reg in the NFL regardless of their income. So, one sentence explains every number you just heard. And maybe it's the important sense of this entire episode. A windfall will arrive for you. And it arrives at every skill level. Each of us in life are absolutely going to have a windfall, you know. So the inversion here is stop waiting. Stop waiting for the commission windfall, the market run, your Tesla or AMD stock that's going to go through the roof, the
23:09inheritance. None of it changes your trajectory. It just multiplies it. Fix this first. Build the skills before you get the money, and the money will matter. When I was dating my wife, my father-in-law took me out to play golf at a really nice course that I could have never afforded to play at this point in time. And we're out on the golf course, there's these beautiful three, four, $5 million homes sitting along the golf course. And right then, about 20 yards away from us, the cart guy was pulling up or the cart was pulling up. And I asked my father-in-law, "Gosh, what do you got to do to be one of those guys on the top of the hill?" And he goes, "Brett, it's super simple. It's super easy. That guy said yes to opportunity and the cart girl or cart guy didn't say yes to the opportunity yet. In life, we all get the same amount of opportunities, but you got to have the skills, the money, and be in the right place so you can say yes when it comes. Opportunity will come for you. Make sure that you're ready for it. All right, we're moving to the wealth side of money, right? So, cautionary tale number six. If you want to be poor, stay an earner forever, and never own a thing
24:10that pays you. Buy crap. buy stuff and things never earn anything that would pay you money tomorrow. The reality is that the 10% the top 10% of households own 90% of the wealth in the entire stock market. 10% of the people own 90% of the stocks. The bottom 50% of America own less than 1%. So, we've got to have some sort of forced savings, leverage, and appreciation. That's what your home does. It's why there's such a difference in the net worth of the average American that owns a home and one that doesn't. It's not because they were smarter, but that home just did its thing. It was forced savings over time. And we've got to think differently about it. The millionaire data agrees on which side of the table the wealth sits. Right? The self-employed were less than 20% of the workforce. They're twothirds of the millionaires. But you don't have to be self-employed to be wealthy. Right? The key is you've got to start buying things that will pay you in the future. I don't care if it's a stock, a piece of real estate, something. You've got to get your money to work for you while you
25:14sleep. So, you've got to institute a personal when you invert that problem, you've got to have a personal savings rate. Some percentage you've got to put into things that adjust for inflation, that grow every year, and that pay you over time. Most of us make massive investments in our business, and some of those investments don't pay off. So, you could come spend a day with me for $997. You come into one of our resorts. You're going to spend a day. Bring your challenge. Bring your opportunities. And let's work through it in a one-on-one coaching session. You're going to be in a room of your peers. No more than 15 people are going to be there. And I'm going to coach you personally to tackle your challenge and your opportunity. Go to bewealthypodcast.com to see the next dates for our event. Number seven. If you want to be poor, flinch as soon as you feel weird. Sell stuff. Sell sell scared. Chase hot things. Sell. Be trading all the time. Be trying to trade up. you know, definitely do those things, right? I mean, here's the hardest part, and we've all seen this stat in the stock market. If you take JP Morgan's guide to retirement and invested $10,000 in the S&P 500 from years 2005 to 2024, which is about 5,000 trading days, okay? If
26:21you invested $10,000 and you were invested the entire time, you have $71,000. If you missed the top 10 days in the market, you've got just $32,000. Seven of the best 10 days happened within two weeks of the 10 worst. The reality is you can't outthink the market. The market's irrational. And so the key to getting wealthy is buying things and owning them as long as you can. Warren Buffett's ideal whole time is forever. So we can't be in and out of things. So instead, right, what's the inverse of this? Build a system. You can't flinch out of automatic contributions. Use dollar cost averaging. If you're in the stock market, realize that in real estate, you can't buy at sell at the top and buy at the bottom. It doesn't work that way. You're going to sell at the top and most likely you're going to buy at the top. The key is to hold it long enough and make sure the economics work that you were paid to do it. You built the right reserve so you could hold it throughout. You don't have to be brilliant. You've got to be unshakable. All right. Cautionary tale number eight. If you
27:24want to be poor, start late and quit early. the definite plan to be poor. Start late, quit early. So again, if you look at data and if you started at putting $200 away per month at a 7% rate and you start at age 25 and you want to retire at 65, if you do that at a 7% return, you'll have about $525,000. Again, 25 years old to 65, you're putting away $200 a month at a 7% return, $525,000. What's the cost of waiting? If you wait till you're 35 years old, that same $200 a month, you only have $244,000. That delay cost you $280,000 and the extra money you put in was only $24,000. In other words, you got 10 times more money, 10 times return on your money by starting 10 times earlier. You could say it that way. And so, starting early roughly doubles the outcome. So, the earlier you start, the better. Now, the best time to plant a tree the tree was 20 years ago. The second best time happens to be today.
28:28People don't want to pay the early entry. One of my keys to success was starting early. I lived way below my means. In my 20s and 30s, my friends all believed I was poor even though I owned rental property. But it's because I lived in the same house the entire time. And that house, by the way, wasn't impressive. All of my friends drove nicer cars, took nicer vacations, and and had I mean, they had everything else better lifestyles than I did while I was grinding it out. The difference though is I was buying things that compounded that had force savings. And over time, that built to a really great portfolio that I run today. So, start now at whatever size. Start saving, build a buffer, and start saving automatically. You've got you've got to start saving and you've got to own over the long haul and not sell when things get hard. All right, number nine. Start running everyone else's race. Play for an external scorecard. Look at social media and just do what the average person does. Munger quotes this and he quotes it often. He said, "It's not greed that drives the world, but envy." He even
29:32points out that envy is the only sin covered twice in the ten commandments and the only one was zero upside upside. So envy is why surplus never forms. Again, we're trying to impress people we don't know with things that we don't want and don't actually need. Right? If you stop playing that validation, you see it all the time. The pro the person that's driving the Gwagon instead of the F-150, right? It's not that that Gwagon's not cool. If you can afford it many times over and your passive income pays for it and it puts no stress on your life, I think that's awesome. However, you can afford it if you're using to sell some pitch course online. I don't think that's the best place for it. So, running someone else's race is a surefire way. Invert the problem. Comparison's a thief of thief of joy. Figure out what you want. Build your asset baits to live your ideal life and focus on that. Number 10, our last one. If you want to be poor, ask the barber and buy whatever is being sold. You know, he's got a joke. Charlie Munger says, "Never ask the barber whether you need a haircut, right?" Because the
30:34answer is always going to be yes. He has a vested interest in selling you that. In fact, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger believe so much in incentives. That's the only thing when they buy a company that they want to control, the incentive for the top guy or top girl. Because incentives drive the world. We are all whatever you incentivize, you encourage with your employees, what you incentivize in your own life, you also encourage. And so be careful what you're listening to. And anytime you get advice from someone else, the question you should be asking, what do they make or how do they benefit from that advice? If someone tells you this, the greatest investment on earth, and they get a 10% rip on the back end by selling it to you, okay, they have a vested interest in getting you something that doesn't benefit you. And so you always need to ask, how do they benefit here? So we went through, we futurecasted, we looked at the 10 ways to be poor 10 years from now, 20 years from now, and 30 years from now. If you go back and invert it, you could change everything. Now, your future's not set. You could be anywhere you want to be in five years. That statement is absolutely true. I look at
31:36what I was doing five years ago, which is probably a future episode, and I look at what I'm doing now, and it blows my mind. So, as human beings, we radically overestimate what we could do in a single year. And we radically underestimate what we could do over a fiveyear period. We we crazy so far underestimate what we could do in 30. It's laughable. And so if you want to go out there and you want to pursue your dreams and not keep them literally your dreams and you want to bring your dreams into reality, you've got to change, right? So number one, automate your surplus. When you get a raise, save the money. Number two, never carry bad debt on anything. Number three, create a buffer in your life. You've got to have margin between something happening to you and bad things. Number four, read 30 minutes a day. It's not too much of an ask. Turns out you'll love it. You'll be really smart. You'll be smarter than all your friends. Number five, stop waiting to be saved. No one's coming to save you. Number six, every year convert income into assets that pay you forever. Number seven, be unshakable. Don't try to sell at the top and just trade in and
32:38out of things and oh, you think you know so much about the economy. Buy the right play and stick in it forever. Number eight, start right now and get back up. Right? Do not start late and quit early. Start now and go forever. Number nine, run your own race. Quit chasing the opinions of others and living by an external scorecard trying to impress liv the lives of people that aren't that cool. Your life's cool. Live your life and figure out what you want. And number 10, look at the incentives out there and see if other people, the advice of the barber, the advice of your best friend, are they incentivized to tell it to you? And so, there's no genius here. This is all things we know, but by inverting the problem, I think we can see it differently. If this is hitting home with you, if you want advice, be wealthy. We have one-on-one coaching with myself or a member of my team to help you implement and crush it and get what you want out of your real estate team, out of your real estate business, and out of your real estate investment. My name is Brett Tanner. This is be wealthy.
CEO coaching for people who already make the money and want to turn it into things they own.
