It’s been said that the best way to build wealth is to invest early and often then let time and compound interest take over. It’s a solid plan but takes years, decades even. But what if there’s a way to accelerate your path to wealth by investing in yourself? My guest this week is Jeff Rose, a longtime financial planner and the founder of Wealth Hacker and the Good Financial Sense blog. For years, Jeff followed the traditional path to wealth until he realized his biggest returns came when he invested in himself.

Welcome to the Maple Money Show, the podcast that helps Canadians improve their personal finances to create lasting financial freedom. Do you prefer to invest in companies that are socially responsible? If so, our sponsor Wealthsimple will help you build a portfolio that focuses on low-carbon, clean tech, human rights and the environment. Get started with socially responsible investing by visiting maplemoney.com/wealthsimple. Now, let’s chat with Jeff…

Tom: Hi Jeff, welcome to Maple Money Show.

Jeff: Thanks for having me on, Tom.

Tom: I wanted to have you on because we were talking a bit about this idea of accelerated wealth building. I want to go through it with you so let’s get the big long question out of the way, what is accelerated wealth building?

Jeff: Thanks for asking. A simple, yet a long winded response; for those that don’t know about my background, I’ve been a financial planner for 16 years now. I just recently sold that business but I’m also certified financial planner. When you start in the financial services industry, you hear all the same advice like investing for the future. That’s investing into a 401k, into some sort of retirement account, the stock market. And from there, compounding interest. Eventually, over time you will accumulate a lot of money as long as you are consistent and do so for a considerable period of time. I think that advice is great. For those that aren’t investing, that’s something you need to get started in. But as I continued my journey, owning my own business and then eventually starting my blog, Good Financial Sense, that’s when my wealth accumulation really took off. What I realized through that whole process was me doing something different. Me going against the status quo and building what started off as a side-hustle into its own lucrative business to where it has now surpassed my other business almost to the point my financial planning practice actually was a distraction on what I was doing. It just kind of began this journey of looking at my own path and also seeing others who did not all do online business but did something against the status quo. And because of that, because they took certain risks, because they took certain chances and we’re going to put themselves out there they have accumulated an amount of wealth a whole lot faster than someone that’s waiting until 60, 65, or 70 to finally retire. That’s become my new stated mission; just teaching others that can replicate my process and other people’s process, but hopefully at a whole much faster clip.

Tom: You mentioned side-hustles. I think that’s a huge thing that everybody should get into to some degree. Will they all turn into six figure or more businesses? No. But even if you’re kind of making that $500, $1,000 a month it makes a big difference over just doing the grind of a career and hoping for a raise. In my career it was often raises that were barely keeping up with inflation. So it’s not really a raise when you look at it. These are things where you can kind of go out and do your own thing, right?

Jeff: Yeah. That’s so the case. For me, in my own personal experience, it all kind of goes back to reading the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. When I read that book—I mean that was a total mindset shift for me because I only knew the go to college, get a degree, get a good job. That’s all my parents knew to pass on to me. And what I loved about that book was it gave me this newfound hope that there was something else out there but it didn’t give me the step-by-step blueprint on how to go out and do this and that. Much like Dave Ramsey has his baby steps which are very simple, Kiyosaki gave me the motivation and the inspiration but I didn’t know what to do so I just went out there and started doing things. The first several things didn’t work. That’s the resiliency and what it takes for a lot of entrepreneurs; you start a side-hustle… You try something but it may not work. It may become a six figure business. It may be a complete bust. But the more you take action and try new things and experiment—That really kind ties in to the brand I’ve been working on; the whole Wealth Hacker brand, is that we’re not afraid to try new things. We’re not afraid to experiment. I wouldn’t say I enjoy failing but I enjoy trying new things because I know it gets me closer to something new, something else, something that’s going to work and actually make money.

Tom: Something I need to share with people more is, despite having this blog for over 10 years, I’ve probably spent about 10 years before that online doing all sorts of random little things that never really made money. I was trying to sell or resell these private label rights eBooks on eBay and things like that never really went anywhere. It’s like, “Wow, I made $5,” and it was motivating. And it probably got me to that stage of starting a website but there are all sorts of these attempts and then you have failures at the same time.

Jeff: Absolutely.

Tom: Can we go into how you set up this idea? How do you build these income streams?

Jeff: Wanting to try to simplify the process and give something that was comparable to Dave Ramsey’s baby steps, I went back to my own journey and started seeing what the pivotal steps or occurrences in my life were that allowed me to get here. From there I came up with what I called the “more” method and just tried to simplify the whole process. What the more method is; for the first “M” we start with a mentor. I know I’ve talked a lot about this on my YouTube channel and I get people all the time asking me if I could mentor them. I can only mentor so many people. I’ve got four kids right now so they desire a lot of my mentoring time. But sometimes we think we have to go out and be able to press the flesh with a multimillionaire or a billionaire, thinking that’s what you need as a mentor. Going back to Robert Kiyosaki, he was a mentor of mine. We’ve never met in person. I don’t think we’ve even chatted on social media or tweeted at each other but he has been a mentor of mine for a number of years. And along the way, reading different books, listening to certain podcasts, reading blogs… Tim Ferris’s I would consider a mentor. Dave Ramsey is a mentor. You can get mentorship from all these different sources. You don’t have to have somebody in-person, initially. Enough to least get the ideas and the framework. Now, you may have somebody local that you look to as a mentor. Someone you think may have what you want, whether it is career, family, and lifestyle— whatever that is, if they’re willing to meet you for a cup of coffee then awesome! Take advantage of that. But you’ve got to be bold enough to ask and make sure that you can offer some value in return. And then the other part of M which is something I think you can relate to is eventually joining a mastermind group. I’m so used to saying that because I’ve been in a mastermind group for a considerable amount of time. But for somebody who’s never heard that before they immediately think that there’s like some weird cult or we have some weird handshake or we meet in like basements in shady neighborhoods. But really, all a mastermind group is means you are surrounding yourself with other peers that usually have some sort of similar interests or similar goal. Most of my mastermind group surrounded me with other men that were mostly online business entrepreneurs. They also were family focused and wanted to grow their business. That was just kind of the general theme that I noticed about the people I surrounded myself with. Most of these people were not local to me. So we would hop on, Skype, Zoom, Google hangouts (when that was a thing) conference calls. Anything we could. And that could be weekly, monthly. We would sometimes have an in-person meet-up maybe once or twice a year. Just having that common bond. When I started my journey I lived in a small town. There weren’t a lot of—I mean, I don’t think there were any… But I don’t think there were any online entrepreneurs that were in driving distance to me so it can be a very lonely place. And to find other people that get what you are going through struggle-wise, challenge-wise but also success-wise; it’s just a safe place to share what you’re going through.

Tom: With mastermind groups it can apply beyond business. I’ve got the Maple Money Show community on Facebook but there’s also the ChooseFI community that has these local meet-ups. I’ve been to a local meet-up here in Calgary where you meet all these people trying to go debt-free, save towards retirement, retiring early. So you can always find someone where you’re at. Like you mentioned, you often found yourself meeting with men your age with families. You kind of find people that are similar to you because you need that commonality to find where you’re going with it. Say you’re an Uber driver. There’s Facebook groups, forums and everything else for Uber drivers so you can find that person who is very similar to you. And yeah, hop on a Skype call or something and talk with them. There is always someone like you somewhere. They might not be in your small town. They may not be meeting in basements but they’re out there. Can you go on to the next letter?

Jeff: The second part of this is “O.” There are a few different things here. One is to open some sort of investment account. I share that because I come across a lot of people that are starting their journey and want to build wealth yet they haven’t started investing yet. And usually it’s because of the common misconception that you have to have tons of money get started. I think about my own journey. When I started investing way back when, I was investing $25 a month into some mutual funds. Sure, compounding interest over a 40 year period is going to amount to something. But that wasn’t the big takeaway for me. The big takeaway was I went from never investing to investing and now I’m getting statements. I’m looking at the stock market. I’m looking at investments I own. I learned through that process. After I owned them for three to six months I realized these mutual funds actually aren’t that good. Whoever recommended these to me, I’m not sure what they’re thinking. It forced me to look at other things. I just learned so much more through that process as opposed to listening to an audio book on investing, listening to a podcast or reading a blog post. You learn so much more by actually taking action. I think that’s such a pivotal step people need to take but sometimes don’t take just because they’re so fearful. They’re like, “Oh my gosh! I have to put $100 a month in? What happens if I lose it all?” What else do you waste $100 a month on that you’re never going to see again? That’s one part of it. The second part is what I call a personal equity fund—opening a personal equity fund. If you’re familiar with Dave Ramsey and the baby steps I made reference earlier, his first step is to have $1,000 in some sort of savings or emergency fund which I think is phenomenal. I think everybody needs that. But as far as wealth-building goes, we’re not talking about going bankrupt. We’re looking more about growing money, not so much losing money. What a personal equity fund is we are putting money aside and looking for opportunities we can invest into ourselves. That could be personal coaching, attending a conference, buying an online course, buying books. It could be paying for a personal coach. Sometimes people get wrapped up saying, “Oh, I don’t know if I can afford that. I don’t know if I should do that.” They view it as a cost versus an investment. And that’s just a mindset shift that it takes a little bit time to get there. For me personally, when I look back, where did I get the most of the money I’ve invested? Yes, I’ve made money on stocks in the stock market, no doubt. But when I look at the biggest bang for my buck, it has been investing into myself. By far, the largest investment I did into myself was joining a business coaching program. This would have been almost eight years ago. It could be nine years ago. At the time it was a lot of money for me. I think it was about $8,000 for a one-year coaching program. I had never done anything like that at all. After talking to some mentors and other people that had been through similar types of coaching programs, I thought, if these successful businessmen and entrepreneurs are investing into coaching programs and I’m seeing what they’re doing and the success they have, why do I think I’m different? So I did it. I was in that program for five years. I had so many people ask me what was the ROI? You have those the super analytical people who want the numbers. You could talk about experiences all day long and all these great things but they want to see the numbers. I finally had to put a pencil to it. After in that being that program for three years—that was $8,000 times three, so $24,000 on top of hotels and time out of the office, when I looked at what the ROI was, my gross income revenue was around $250,000. And after three years of being in that program it more than tripled or just about tripled. I invested $24,000 to make $500,000 gross more—and reoccurring because I never dipped below that amount. I’ve only gone up since then. That is the ROI. Putting that into a stock—unless you just happened to buy Google and it happens to… Even Google didn’t make that much money that quick. That even take it took time. That is why I’m such an advocate for investing into yourself and opening that personal equity fund.

Tom: I like the idea of investing into yourself. I mean, literally investing by opening an account because you’re not building wealth if you’re making money and spending it. I’ve seen real estate agents making really decent money who can’t pay their bills at the end of the month. So yeah, you’re not actually wealth building if you’re not saving it. Then the idea of investing in yourself with courses and stuff, the only thing I’d add to that is I’ve had a bad habit in the past of buying courses and not finishing them.

Jeff: I’m raising my hand on that one too.

Tom: Buying the course doesn’t magically make you better. But you’ve got to act on it. And the same with your coaching. I remember when you were in the weeds with that. I was one of those people asking you if it was worth spending that much money on it. And at the time you only had a gut feeling at that point. But the fact that you took those actions based on that is part of what got you there. I’m sure there are probably people that could take coaching and not benefit from it at all. It’s just a matter of going all-in on these, right?

Jeff: Yes, that’s the whole thing. If you join a coaching program or a mentor it’s telling you to do something and your responses is, “That worked for you but I don’t think it’s going to work for me,” and you’re not willing to receive guidance and advice then you’re really not going to grow at all. You’ve got to be willing to go out of your comfort zone for sure.

Tom: Great. Can we go on to the next step?

Jeff: Yeah. Actually, I think this is a perfect segue way. When you mentioned about buying courses and not do anything with it, the “R” is research but research with boundaries. You’ve got to set limits. I am one of those people who, when I want to know something, I feel like I have to know everything about it. To my benefit, as a financial planner, that was one of my greatest gifts because when a client was coming in—whatever their situation, I wanted to make sure I knew every different possibility we could go with in regards to whatever they were trying to accomplish. I would research the crap out of everything. And now I look back and oftentimes I over research things but that made me feel comfortable and also allowed me to earn a lot. But there have been times I’ve recognized that I only need to know so much. I only need to know so much before I can take action. Just going back to the example I talked about with opening that investment account, I could read 27 books on how to buy a stock. That’s great, but eventually I’ve got to buy a stock. I can only take in so much information before I actually take action on that. I have purchased courses that I have not completed. And recognizing that now, when I see something and I start having that “shiny object” syndrome where I think I want or need to know something, I don’t need to know it right now. If I’m creating a course and eventually I need to do Facebook ads to that course, I need to finish the course first. I don’t need to buy a course on Facebook ads before I even finished the first lesson on the course. Just make sure you do the necessary research. If you want to start a side-hustle, do some research. There are podcasts, blogs and Facebook groups. Make sure you get enough information but be willing to actually do something next. Whether that puts something else out there like a minimum viable product or some sort of small offering where you’re actually getting people to pay for something that you’re going to offer. That’s where you’re going to get even more information. Even more research.

Tom: Another thing I’m guilty of is over researching. There have been times in my business or even things like investing where I look into things and have learned so much but haven’t got to the stage of acting. And I’ll even start passing these tips on to other people. I’ll say, “This is what you should do. I’m not doing it yet but you should.” Then they go and do it and it benefits them which is great but I still haven’t taken action because I’m so busy acquiring all this extra information.

Jeff: Sometimes it’s helpful when you actually are mentoring others and hear yourself saying the advice that you know you need take. Sometimes for me it’s even helpful where I say, “Oh gosh. I’m telling them to do that and I really haven’t finished that step myself,” so it actually gives me encouragement to go back and put my money where my mouth is.

Tom: Okay, what’s the final step?

Jeff: The last step of “E” is execute and enjoy. That’s really just getting to the point where I’ve done enough research. I have something that I can start and at least put something out there and just execute that. Whether that’s putting it on social media. Or if you have some sort of email list—even if you’re not even at that point but you’re collecting email addresses, where can I go—like in networking where I can try to do something? Even if you’re trying a side-hustle. There was a kid in our neighborhood (with the help of his parents) who was repainting the numbers on mailboxes in our neighborhood. So where do they go? They went to our community Facebook group to see if anybody had interests. That is executing. They had an idea so they put it out there to see if anybody was interested. From there, they—Now, I didn’t raise my hand to say I wanted my mailbox painted but I did see several people say they’d love to. That kid with help from the parents was able to execute. The next part is enjoy. Enjoy the process. Chances are—and I don’t mean to be Debbie Downer but it’s probably going to be a big fat fail. But a true fail is only if that’s where you stop. If something is working or even not working that’s when you stop and reflect, “Alright, what worked and what didn’t? What do I need to change? What improvements can I do on the next iteration?” What I love about enjoy part—and I know this is something that you can relate to because, when you start the process it’s important to celebrate certain milestones. I think for any side-hustle, whether it is an online business or offline business is to have some sort of milestone that you can hang your hat on. The same joy and excitement that having $1,000 in your emergency fund is like. For me, a milestone I encourage others, is when you start your side-hustle and make your first $100. I know that might seem totally trivial for most people. It may not even pay your electricity bill and it’s probably only half of your grocery bill—I mean, not for our household because we have four kids. Once again, going back on my journey, I had my financial planning practice. I’m more than making six figures a year and at that point time I start my blog as purely a marketing tool for the financial planning practice. And I discover you can make money with blogging. Starting off it was primarily Google ads with Google AdSense. The first milestone for me was when I got that Google AdSense check for $152.44. I remember getting that check in the mail. It was from Google. So I get this check for $152.44 and I am just I’m blown away. I’m like staring at this check thinking, “This is so amazing!” But this was just a fraction of what I was making a month for my other business, my main business. But yet this gave me so much joy, so much so much excitement and even more so much hope because I just did something when I had no idea what I was doing. I started this side-hustle and I made $152.44. I think that’s an important milestone you want to celebrate. If you don’t celebrate the small wins it’s just so much harder to celebrate all the big wins along the way. And also, you’re going to have a lot of losses, a lot of heartache. You’re going to have a lot of things that you think are going to work out and they don’t. So that’s the first milestone. The second milestone, can you start a side-hustle, make the $100 and then create something that can generate $100 without you actively working on it? And that is the shift. When you can create something whether that be a product or a process that allows you to utilize other people’s time, other people’s resources, or just using technology that allow you to make money while you’re not actively engaged, that my friends, is when you hear about passive income. That’s when you hear about making money while you sleep. I know for me, I think it’s cool; to be clocked out (and not actually sitting on my computer) yet I’m still making money. It’s so hard to put into words but when you finally figure that out and feel that for the first time, it just propels you to want to figure out how you can grow more. And it’s a fun process.

Tom: I still remember my first check from Google as well. I also got a check and part of the reason was filling out the payment details didn’t even seem like a real thing because when you start out and the first month you make 10 cents, you’re not too worried about getting the payment information in. I got that first check and the first thing I did was reinvested it. I took that $100 and spent most of it on a theme for my website at the time. I like this idea of making at least $100 as a milestone because I’ve always kind of considered those to be building blocks. If you make this money you put it back into the business. Then you make a little more money and put it back into the business. You keep slowly working your way up. My first AdSense check from Google took five or six months before I was making any money. That’s a long time to go making nothing when nowadays you could at least become that Uber driver or Airbnb B—or any one of a billion apps out here that can help you make money. You can start making money immediately. The point still remains though; even if you get that first drive on Uber, save that money and figure out ways to put it back in. Maybe you want to start another income stream that is more passive. You can only drive for Uber for so many hours a day. I like where we’re headed with this passive income because if you don’t do that then you kind of run out of those building blocks if it’s all based on your time.

Jeff: I love that you just said Uber because those that have achieved the success that you and I have—a lot of our peers and people we know, a lot of them had to survive what I call the “BMW” stage. The BMW is not driving the three series or the five series but essentially, it is the “below minimum wage” stage where you willing to grow a business, grow a side-hustle and putting so much time and energy into it. We’re not even talking about the themes we bought or whatever we had to buy to actually get the website live, we’re talking about the time we are researching, networking and just executing. We are making well below minimum wage. I don’t even want to calculate how much I was making per hour. You said you did it for six months before you got your first AdSense check. I have to assume that you were working probably more than 10 hours a week trying to figure this blogging thing out. I’ll speak for me; know I was putting at least 15, 20 sometimes 30 hours a week because, once again, my research brain kicked in and I wanted to know everything about this. It took almost nine months because I didn’t have AdSense on my blog for the first six months or so. So it was nine months I was working more than part-time, more than 25 hours a week until I made my first $152.44 check. Surviving and pushing through that “BMW” stage, that below minimum wage stage is crucial for a lot people. Even in online space you can look at Elon Musk and how much time energy he put into growing PayPal. Then Tesla with SpaceX. He wasn’t making anything. I know at one point he was basically working for free trying to figure this out. Obviously, he had private equity investments and all that stuff… Anyway, it proves the point.

Tom: I was working with JD Roth and kind of made the joke that it’s a good thing we don’t value our time because you’ve got to put all this effort in to build something up and if you think in regular job mindset, you’re going to be disappointed quickly you spend 10 hours or more a week and make nothing at first.

Jeff: Yeah, absolutely.

Tom: How do we build this passive income? Obviously, there’s the investing side of it. It’s great that you can get gains and dividends and everything but on the income side of it, what are some ideas we can get towards passive income? How have you done it?

Jeff: That goes back to on to the execute part. Passive income does not exist at the beginning of your journey. There is no way you can generate passive income when you haven’t done any work. I feel like the most common investment used for passive income is real estate. You get some rental properties. You hire a property manager and then you just sit back and collect the checks. But you just don’t go out and buy a rental property and it works out the very first time. Unless you want to do it on your own you’re probably going to have some sort of mentor that’s going to show you what type of property you need to get, the tenants you need to get and all the rental agreements you to have in place. And to make sure you have an LLC set up so that you’re protected. There is all this time and energy. Once again, I’m sure you are working in that “BMW” stage before you get, but it’s execution. It’s starting to take those steps, starting to generate it. Then the next phase, for me, I had to start letting go. This is Robert Kiyosaki talk about the different quadrants; you go from employee to self-employed. Many people who are self-employed make the mistake of believing they are an entrepreneur but really they are just an employee of themselves. I come across business owners, self-employed where they are still trying to do everything. Joining the coaching program was huge for me because I started to let go. I started to recognize that I needed to be spending my time in the task and abilities that are going to produce the most money, but also the things that I just love doing. I think this can be referred to as your fulfillment zone, your unique ability, and your zone of genius. I’ve heard different people referred to it in different ways. For me it was finally hiring my first contractor, my independent contractor because as a business owner I was so terrified of hiring somebody. I thought I can’t afford that. I can’t afford to pay somebody a full-time salary and offer benefits and retirement. I just didn’t have that. Then reading Tim Ferris’ 4-Hour Work Week, once again, another mentor changed my mind-set. I don’t know if it was him personally or an example in his book of a person that hired a virtual assistant (from the Philippines) that was helping them with their travel itinerary; booking hotels and all that stuff. Then it evolved into buying gifts for their spouse—anniversary gifts. It was actually kind of funny how they presented the information. Long story short that changed my mind-set. So the very first thing that I did was I hired a Filipino virtual assistant to help with blog post images on my site because I was spending about four hours a week on trying to find the best blog post image. And I realized that was not a good use of my time. I can pay somebody $3, $4, or $5 an hour to find those images for me and insert them. The I can spend my time either researching new content, researching monetization and all that stuff. That began the process of letting go then executing on finding the right people, the right contractors that are going to do the work much better than I can. Then I can go out and do other things. When I talk about my passive income, last week I was completely unplugged. I was at a seven-day retreat with no iPhone, no laptop, no internet, no TV. I’m actually shocked I’m still alive right now. We did have running water and electricity so that was good. Several years ago there’s no way I could have done that. If I would’ve done that, I wouldn’t made any money. Now I have a team in place, a process in place, basically taking myself out and being able to share with others. Most people coming back from a seven-day, no communication retreat would have so much anxiety turning that phone on wondering if their bus or job was still there or how many fires they’ve got to put out. I didn’t have one single issue while I was gone because of executing on building out a team, building out my processes so that I didn’t have to be fully present. That is passive income.

Tom: That’s great because I normally fight the idea that blogging is passive income but with hiring, that’s how you get there. I’ve hired a virtual assistant out of the Philippines as well. And mentally, I’m not at the place where I could turn my laptop off for a whole week. I’ve been traveling a lot this year and know that things run pretty smoothly without me now. I just have to take care of content, basically. I write blog posts to record these podcasts and most of everything else is handled by other people. I know that if I’m a week or two ahead of schedule with my portion of the business, everything else runs pretty smooth without me. But mentally I cannot imagine turning my laptop off for even two days let alone seven days. So I’ll still have to get there.

Jeff: We can talk online about that but for me that was a part of the coaching program. It really advocated taking a dedicated, free day. It was basically was a 24-hour period of no email—none of that. That was such a foreign concept for me because I was working on my blog seven days a week. Whether it was replying to emails, social media, researching SEO, just anything. When I took my first free day and started taking more consecutive free days, I started taking inventory of what was I stressing out about. What things happened while I was disengaged? I started taking inventory of those items. Is that something I need to be stressed out about? Is that something that I absolutely need to do? And if it’s something that I needed to do but wasn’t really utilizing my God-given talent then it was how do I find somebody else? How do I delegate it? How do I outsource it? How do I hire somebody to take it off my plate? That was a constant thing. It’s something I still do. It’s something I’m still working on. And it’s funny because how much more can I take off my plate? I love the challenge. How can I work less and make more? That continues to be the fun process, fun journey for me. And that’s why I’m still enjoying it.

Tom: Well, this has been great. I think its given people a lot of a lot of inspiration to make that first $100 and build it from there. And invest it and truly be building wealth and not just making money. Can you let people know where they can find you online?

Jeff: Yeah, check me out on YouTube. You can find me by my name, Jeff Rose. Or the channel name is Wealth Hacker. I also have my blog. That is goodfinancialsense.com.

Tom: Thanks for being on the show.

Jeff: Thanks Tom.

Thanks Jeff, for giving us ways to think outside the box when it comes to building wealth. You can find the show notes for this episode at maplemoney.com/jeffrose. Have you joined Maple Money Facebook community? It’s a great place to ask money related questions or share your recent success to encourage others. Head over to maplemoney.com/community to join the group. And as always, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next week.