The 4 Greatest Money (And Life) Lessons I Have Ever Learned

Tyler Gardner (0:00)

The richest people I know, in the sense of feeling rich, are not the wealthiest. They're the ones who have figured out their list. They've spent deliberately on the things on it, they underspend mercilessly on the things that aren't on it, and they almost never compare their list to anyone else's. Because they understand that the list is the entire game, and the size of the list is not the point.

Hello, friends. This is Tyler Gardner welcoming you to another episode of Your Money Guide on the Side, where it is my job to simplify what seems complex, add nuance to what seems simple, and learn from and alongside some of the brightest minds in money, finance, and investing. So let's get started and get you one step closer to where you need to be.

Quick note before we dive in. August's pre-order incentive for my book Real Wealth is now live, and this one is my favorite so far. Pre-order this month. Tell me you did at tylergardner.com/book, and I will send you a draft chapter of a new book that I'm already working on. And no, not even my editor at Norton has seen this writing yet. This sneak peek is yours to keep, delivered to your inbox in early September. Pre-order today, and you're locked in for every monthly incentive through December 1st. tylergardner.com/book. Now let's get into it. Good morning or good afternoon, and welcome back. Thank you as always for choosing to spend some time thinking about money with me. Today's episode is going to be, I would say a little different, but also a little similar. I've been getting more notes than usual lately from listeners saying they like the episodes where I stop talking about expense ratios for 15 minutes and instead try to figure out what we're actually doing here. The Sedona episode was the most listened to thing I've put out this year, and the Cavafy episode was actually a close second. There seems to be an appetite among the people who listen to personal finance podcasts for the personal finance podcast to occasionally, and I'm using a technical term here, chill out about the technical material, and instead grapple with the philosophy, the why behind the how. So today is one of those episodes. I want to explore four money lessons. These are the four greatest I've learned to date. I'm hesitant to say greatest because I'm 43 years old, which is exactly the age at which a man begins to think he's figured out more than he actually has. But these four are genuinely the ones I keep coming back to. They're the ones that, when I sit on the porch with the bloodhound at 6 in the morning and try to think about what I actually believe about life and money, are the ones that hold up time and again. A small caveat, since I'm trying to be honest about my voice today, I figured most of these out in the way one figures out anything important, which is slowly, badly, and against my will. I would like to claim I arrived at them through some elegant program of reading and reflection. But the truth is I learned them by getting things wrong for 20 plus years and then finally noticing the pattern. My credentials for offering these to you are not that I figured them out gracefully. My credentials are that I'm willing to admit how I figured them out, which I will do as we go. And familiar ask before we get into it, if the show has been useful to you in any way. If you've ever listened to an episode and thought about money or life in a different way, a review on Apple or Spotify would genuinely be the best thing you could do for the show. It's how new listeners find the show, and it's how I know that this entire endeavor, me walking around the woods of Vermont talking into a phone about money, my bloodhound looking at me with slight concern in their eyes, is actually reaching anyone besides the deer and the squirrels. Alright, let's get into it.

Lesson 1

Time is not your greatest asset, knowing what to do with it is.

I want to start with a lesson that has, I think, gotten me the most pushback from listeners over the years, because it cuts directly against one of the most popular ideas in modern personal finance, which is the idea that time is the asset, and that the entire game is to free up as much of it as possible, and that freeing up the time, buying back the time, that is the end in and of itself. I do not fundamentally agree with that framing, or rather, I agree with it about 10% of the way, and then I think the framing leads people directly off a cliff of anxiety and staring into the great and endless ennui.