I convinced it not to ignore any data…
"usage": {
"prompt_tokens": 12055,
"completion_tokens": 4150,
"total_tokens": 16205
System
“”“You an English copy writing assistant. Take user’s unstructured text and rewrite to create paragraphs and format and create sections and section headings for topics using markdown.”“”
Now you just need to use phrasing that doesn’t look like fine-tuning’s “summarize” following instructions, that WILL be short. Even “condense” collapses to 300 tokens.
The problem with that big of a context is the symptom of chat models now in general, which I call “hung up”: it will not improve, it will not restructure, it will not rewrite, it will not correct its errors, not even the courtesy of the requested markdown or paragraphs…
Title: The Path to Financial Wealth: Investing for a Rich Life
Introduction:
Ah, this is driving me insane! To make a lot of money, you don’t need to be a genius. You just need to remember a few key things. Ramit Sethi, financial expert. The money man. New York Times bestseller. Has more than 20,000 documented success stories. This is your chance to never worry about money again. You can live a rich life regardless of where you came from, regardless of your income. How many people are clear on what their rich life looks like? Less than 1%. When I talk to people who have a spending problem, 100% of the time, they always say the same thing. I just need to earn more. If you doubled your income today, do you think your problems would disappear? No. Some of the stats I pulled out from your book, about 25% of people who make $100,000 a year plus are still living paycheck to paycheck. Makes us realize that maybe the things we think we need are things that we have been socially taught are important. For example, owning a house is the best investment. It means you are successful, but it can be a very bad financial decision. There are far better, far simpler investments. So I’ve got a hundred pounds that I want to invest. Where do I start? I love that we’re getting into the nuts and bolts. Let’s do this exercise together and everyone can do it with us. First off, and then. Got it. Now there’s just one more thing you have to do. Do you know the math? I would have 736,000 in my account. Yeah. Ramit’s 10 money rules. This is where the real wealth is created. Number one. This episode changed my perspective on money. I’m an investor. I’ve been investing for the last six, seven years at different levels. Big companies, small companies, the S&P 500, funds, you name it. But Ramit changed my mind. He changed my mind on money, spending, investing. And he changed my mind on something that I think 95% of you that are listening to this podcast and they’re about to listen to this need to have your mind changed on too. That if you have the right philosophy towards money, the right perspective and mindset towards money, then there is a path to living our rich life, to becoming rich that enough people are not talking about. He debunks the myths of money, the limiting beliefs about money. And he confronts all of the unhelpful advice about money that stands in the way of you becoming rich. There’s an app on my phone that I now have installed because of this conversation. And there are three big investments that I’ve now made in my life because of this conversation. And there is one key idea that I now believe will make me 10 times more wealthy over the next three decades because of this conversation. You’re gonna love it. Enjoy. \u266a\u266a\u266a Ramit, someone’s just clicked on this podcast on YouTube, on Spotify, on Apple, and they saw the title, they saw the thumbnail, they thought that sounds interesting. Tell me why you think they should stay and listen to what we’re going to talk about today, what they stand to gain if they give us their time. Whenever someone hears someone talking about money, they get rigid. They instantly think that someone’s gonna come in and tell them, you can’t spend money on lattes, you can’t go on vacation, you can’t buy any new clothes, save all your money until you’re 90 years old, and maybe, just maybe, then you can spend it. And I don’t believe in any of that. I think you should spend extravagantly on the things you love as long as you cut costs mercilessly on the things you don’t. I think you should live a rich life today and an even richer life tomorrow. And so when you combine money and psychology, you start to understand that there is more to a rich life than just some number in a spreadsheet. People already know they should be saving more. They know about compound interest. They may not know the intricacies, but they understand if they invest some now, they’re gonna have more later. So what’s stopping them? That’s been the central question that I’m fascinated with for the last 20 years. That’s why when I studied human behavior and persuasion and psychology, I was obsessed with this question of what are the things we know we should do, but we still don’t? You can live a rich life regardless of where you came from. You can live a rich life regardless of your income. Now, of course, having a higher income dramatically helps, but just like fitness, we can all improve where we are. And that’s what we get to talk about today. When you talk about the language of money, what do you mean? I mean, understanding the nuts and bolts of money. So just the same way that we all learn how to drive. We learn the rules of the road, when to use our turn signals. Most of us do not have even the equivalent knowledge of money. For example, the basic language of money would be what percentage of your income are you saving and why? What percentage are you investing and why? When will you have $100,000 or 500,000 or a million dollars? And what will that money get you? Because just having a million dollars in the bank is pointless. What does it get you specifically? This is the basic language of money. You’ve got to know your key four, six numbers in your life. Not many, just a few. But once you understand those numbers, it’s like understanding the speed limit. Understanding the speed limit means you understand a lot. There’s a rule of the road. If you go too fast, what’s gonna happen? Why do these rules exist? And these rules are similar in money. You can break them. That’s okay. But you got to understand the rules first. What are those numbers that I need to know? There’s four numbers that I really like to track. I track these myself and these are the numbers I encourage. The first is your fixed costs. Those would be your rent or your mortgage, any debt payments, groceries, the money that you are spending every single month that is essentially fixed. And the number I recommend for that is 50 to 60% of your take-home pay. So that would be, if you’re spending 50 to 60% of what you make, what you take home on your rent, your groceries, any debt payments, your car, you’re in good shape. The next one is your savings. That would be roughly five to 10%. Savings would be things like an emergency fund, savings for a down payment for a car, things like that. Third is investments. This is where the real wealth is created. And for this, five to 10% of take-home is fine. Of course, the more you put in, the more you’re gonna have. And then the fourth category, the one I love the most is called guilt-free spending. This is going out for cocktails in New York. It’s buying a beautiful shirt. It’s treating your friends, whatever you love, yoga, 20 to 35% of your take-home pay. So if you’re watching or you’re listening to this, just take 15 minutes, back of the napkin, jot down your approximate numbers. You don’t even have to get them perfect. And you will be able to benchmark how you are spending compared to those numbers. I’ll tell you that those numbers tell me a lot. It’s almost, if you just show me those four numbers of your spending, I can tell so much. I can tell what you love spending on. I can tell what you don’t. I can tell what your priorities are. And I can also tell where you are out of alignment. So I’ll give you an example. When I ask people, what is your rich life? One of the common answers they say is, I wanna do what I want, when I want. I go, oh God, not this answer again. I hear it every day. I go, wow, that’s so interesting. So what do you want? They go, most people have never thought beyond a trite answer. So then the next answer I often get is freedom. I want freedom. I go, great, that sounds good. What is freedom? I wanna do what I want, when I want. I look at their numbers and I see a huge payment that they’re making to a 30-year mortgage. I see debt payments. I see car payments. And I go, now this is interesting. You want freedom, but you have essentially anchored yourself down to not be able to travel or to pivot or to move. How can those two be? How can you reconcile those two? And that dissonance is actually a fascinating moment. I love when we experience dissonance. We all do. I say that I wanna work out more, but I don’t work out more. Why? And what you’ll discover is people often, they simply have never thought about it. What our rich life is, these generic phrases, freedom, flexibility, it’s just words. What I really want somebody to say, I want them to go a lot deeper, is to say, I want to be able to travel for six weeks a year. I wanna go to London. I wanna go to New Delhi. I wanna go to Thailand because I wanna visit my family. That’s a good start. If we get even more specific, they tell me what seat on the airline they’re sitting on. They tell me where they’re eating. They tell me who they’re bringing with them. But to simply say, I want freedom is so vague that when I look at your numbers, there’s often a huge incongruity with how you’re spending versus what you claim your rich life is. How many people from your experience of interviewing people and doing this research are clear on what their rich life looks like down to what you described, that I wanna travel for a couple of months a year, and then even further down to which seat I’m gonna be in, which class I’m gonna be on as I travel? Less than 1%. Less than 1% of people know that? Most people literally say, I wanna do what I want when I want. That is the extent to which they’ve thought about a rich life. Why does it matter to be, what did that less than 1% of people that have that planned out have as an advantage or a benefit from that meticulous thought that the other 99% don’t have? Because they can craft their rich life that is uniquely theirs, almost like getting a handmade glove. And in fact, the more you craft your rich life, the more bewildering it looks to the outside world. So I’ll give you an example from my own life. I love to travel. I spend a lot of money when my wife and I, we go travel for months at a time. I love hotels. I love the hospitality. I love the details. I love it all. I don’t really care about cars. Not at this phase of my life. It’s just not that important to me. So when I talk about my money dials or the things that I love to spend money on, I might spend a crazy amount on a hotel per night, just because I love it. But I drive a car that’s almost 20 years old. It’s just not important to me. And I want that. I want to hear in your life what you spend extravagantly on, but then you cut costs mercilessly on, because I want that duality, which indicates you are intentional about your rich life. What if we’re buying things to impress other people and we don’t, because it’s hard to, looking in from the outside, especially, it’s hard to know if someone actually likes Lamborghinis or if they’re buying Lamborghinis because they were beat up when they were nine years old on the playground and they’re trying to overcompensate and make the world. And does it matter why they’re buying it? Does it matter? I don’t know. First of all, how would we even know? How would they know? Is there a difference, do you think, on the impact that that purchase has on us, whether we’re doing it intrinsically or we’re doing it extrinsically? Because I reflect on some of the things that I spend money on and I go, that was for someone else. Whereas there’s other things I spend money on, which are maybe health-related or travel-related, like convenience, flying in a nice class on a plane, which I go, no, that’s actually adding a lot of benefit to my life. Whereas that mansion I bought out in the countryside when I was 23 or whatever was a terrible decision. It took me away from my friends because it was an hour and a half outside of the city and none of my friends ever came to it. So I was just arriving at midnight after work in this ******* mansion with this tennis court by myself, sleeping for three hours and then driving another hour and a half back to the city where all my friends and work were. I go, that was a stupid ******* decision based on extrinsic external motivations. It’s a great question. And particularly in America, we love this idea of ownership. We are taught you’ve got to own. Owning a house is the best investment. It means you are successful. And if you’re renting, no one really says this, but what they deep down say is you’re a loser. This individualistic strain really runs deep and it has led a lot of people to make poor financial decisions. You might be surprised to hear my view is that owning can be a good financial decision, but it also can be a very bad financial decision. In fact, I rent by choice and living in New York, for example, I lived here for a long time, I knew that if I were to buy, I would be losing thousands of dollars every single month because it actually costs more than twice as much to own than to rent. But can you imagine the type of pressures even I got from people who would come over and say, oh, so do you own this place? The place that I was renting. I said, no, I rent. And there was this visible moment of confusion. They’re shaking my hand. They know that I’m the, I will teach to be rich guy, but I rent. How can you be teaching money, but you rent? Isn’t renting for losers? And I have to say, because I was rock solid confident in my decision, that pressure did not affect me. But I want to also say that a lot of us buy things based on status. The idea that we don’t buy things based on what people around us think is nonsense. We buy things based on status. To deny it is absurd. But I do think that for the big purchases in your life, like a house, a car, the big things, you’ve got to run the numbers. And if you decide, hey, you know what? I want to buy a house, even though it’s going to cost me an extra $600,000 in opportunity costs and phantom costs, but I’m going to do it because I like it or it makes me feel good. I say, God bless. But if you simply make decisions based on what other people around you do, then you will discover like you did, I thought I was going to feel a certain way and I don’t really feel that way. And that for me is an opportunity for you to interrogate your own beliefs. And money is like a personal zero-sum game, right? Like, so I can’t just spend indefinitely. So buying that ridiculous house out in the countryside takes away from something which might have genuinely brought me closer to happiness. Like, I don’t know, going away with my family or whatever it might have been. You talk there about buying property. I find that really curious because the popular narrative is for most people, the minute they get any decent amount of money is to buy your first house. And that’s what people do. They take a 10% deposit or 20% deposit, whatever it might be, and they buy a house. Why is that a poor investment? Why is that a bad thing to do? Because that does kind of sit counter to the popular narrative. Well, we have to remember, first of all, where the popular narrative came from. In America, if you ask people, what is the American dream? The answer is inextricably tied up with a single family home with a white picket fence. That’s not an accident. That is the result of decades of messaging. Some might call it propaganda. First of all, most people in the world do not live in single family homes like we do in America. That has caused a lot of issues. But to leave that part aside, this is how most people think about buying a house. They think grandma bought a house in Austin, Texas in 1970 for $100,000. Grandma just sold it 50 years later for $1 million. Grandma made $900,000. They go, it’s the most profitable thing you can do, buy a house. I go, okay, that sounds really nice. Did granny factor in how much she spent on maintenance for the past 50 years? No. Did granny factor in inflation and how that affected her return? No, what’s inflation? Did granny factor in the opportunity costs of what that down payment could have been used if invested in the S&P 500? No. And did granny look at all these phantom costs such as interest on the loan? No. It’s not simply the bigger number minus the smaller number. That’s wrong. That is simplistic. For the biggest purchase of your life, you’ve got to go deeper. Again, when I was living here, I kept a very close eye on real estate. The place right next to me, same square footage, same number of bedrooms, same everything, it would have cost 2.2 times what I was paying in rent. So just to give you an example, if I was paying $3,000 a month, it would have cost about $6,400 a month to own. I said, you know what? I like renting. If I have a problem, I just text my landlord. I took the $3,400 I would have spent owning when factoring in phantom costs, maintenance, interest, taxes, all that, and I simply invested it. And I made more money doing that than I would have owning. What about if you’re buying somewhere for the rental income? That can work. That can work. So owning real estate as an investment can be part of a well-diversified portfolio if you run the numbers. Right now, there’s a lot of hype. People go, I’m gonna buy a house and if I don’t like it or whatever, I’m just gonna rent it out. Okay, fine. But you’ve got to remember that if your mortgage is $1,000, that’s not just the amount you’re paying. There’s a lot more. In fact, in my estimations, I add 50% to that price. So $1,500 a month, which would include a roof repair happening 19 years from now. We’ve got to amortize that out. Labor costs, interest, all that. If you can rent it out and make a profit, fantastic. If you can make it cash flows, that’s awesome. What you discover is that most people who buy a primary residence, the place they wanna live in, they buy it because they want it and then they tell themselves it’s an investment. Buying a house can be an investment, but oftentimes it…