Nick Maggiulli: Climbing the Wealth Ladder

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**Christine Benz** (0:27)
Hi Long View listeners, it's Christine Benz. I hope that you're enjoying these waning summer days.
For this week's episode, we're rerunning one of our favorite conversations from the past year with author and blogger Nick Maggiulli. We hope you enjoy the discussion and we'll be back next week with a brand new episode.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:45)
Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.

**Christine Benz** (0:51)
Hi and welcome to The Long View. I'm Christine Benz, Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning for Morningstar.

**Amy Arnott** (0:58)
And I'm Amy Arnott, Portfolio Strategist with Morningstar.

**Christine Benz** (1:02)
Today on the podcast, we welcome back Nick Maggiulli. He's the author of a new book called The Wealth Ladder, Proven Strategies for Every Step of Your Financial Life. His first book was called Just Keep Buying.
In addition, Nick writes a wonderful blog called Of Dollars and Data, which is focused on the intersection between data and personal finance. In his day job, Nick is the Chief Operating Officer and Data Scientist at Ritholtz Wealth Management. He received his bachelor's degree in economics from Stanford University. Nick, welcome back to The Long View.

**Nick Maggiulli** (1:34)
Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

**Christine Benz** (1:36)
Well, we appreciate you being here and congratulations on the book. We often hear that if someone had a successful first book, writing the second one can create some angst. Did you find that to be the case that writing The Wealth Ladder was harder than Just Keep Buying was?

**Nick Maggiulli** (1:54)
In some ways, yes. In some ways, no.
The only part that was easier was that I had obviously written a book before, so I didn't have that existential dread of like, will I finish it? What's going to happen? I knew I would get through it eventually. I think the part that was actually harder, it was a harder book to write all SQL because my writing process was just very different. When I wrote Just Keep Buying, I had so much prior material from my blog that I was just using again. So like I would say 70% of Just Keep Buying was like old blog posts that I kind of, you know, re-polished and like restructured to create Just Keep Buying. But with The Wealth Ladder, I had to just focus exclusively on one idea. So I ended up writing so much more new stuff. I'd say 80% of The Wealth Ladder is new material. Like the idea I've talked about previously on one blog post, but it was a very like, hey, here's this blog post, whatever. And then I'm like, hey, I actually have to like think about this much more deeply and really kind of do a lot more research to bring this idea to life. And so it's much newer and that's why it was harder.

**Amy Arnott** (2:54)
You also describe yourself as a writer who used to hate writing. How did you kind of get over that hurdle?

**Nick Maggiulli** (3:01)
I think you just have to write about what you want to write about. I think that's the big thing. Like, you know, I think if you guys remember back to grade school and stuff, it's like, OK, you need to write a 1000 word essay on the Scarlet Letter. And maybe you guys love that book or you didn't or whatever. You have to write a 1000 word essay on Catcher in the Rye, whatever it is.
You have to write about stuff that someone else wants you to write about. And I think that makes it very difficult to be passionate about writing when you're writing about something else that you don't maybe don't necessarily care for. So once it's like, hey, here's a topic I really like writing about personal finance, investing, et cetera, I find it's much easier to kind of keep writing and do something that, you know, I used to hate it because I wasn't writing about what I wanted to. Now that I get to write about what I want to, I enjoy it.

**Christine Benz** (3:44)
So a basic premise of your new book, The Wealth Ladder, is that financial strategies that worked for us earlier on our lives don't necessarily work when we've amassed more money. And so to use a simple example, if I have $10 million, I probably don't need to be clipping coupons anymore. So was there a specific catalyst for this thesis? Was there kind of an example or a series of examples in your life that lent themselves to wanting to write a book on this thesis?