The Four Kinds of Rich Nobody Counts -- with Sahil Bloom [GREATEST HITS]

Paula Pant (0:00)

Most of us measure our financial wealth. We know our net worth, even though as we recently discussed in our interview with Joseph Moore, it's also a little bit of a meaningless number. Beyond financial wealth, what are four other types of wealth we should be tracking? In today's episode, our guest, Sahil Bloom, talks about mental wealth, social wealth, time wealth, and physical wealth. He argues that true wealth encompasses all five domains. The four that I just named plus financial, and we need to be investing in each one. Welcome to the Afford Anything Podcast, the show that knows you can afford anything, not everything. I'm your host, Paula Pant, and the episode that you're about to hear originally aired in February, 2025

It was one of our most popular episodes of last year, so we brought it from the Greatest Hits Vault to share it with you today. So if you didn't catch it the first time around, here's your chance. And if you did, it's worth another listen. Sahil Bloom is the founder and managing partner of an early stage venture fund with investments in more than 60 startups. He's also the author of a newsletter called The Curiosity Chronicle. His newsletter reaches more than a million readers worldwide. He joins us to discuss The 5 Types of Wealth.

Welcome, Sahil.

Sahil Bloom (1:19)

Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

Paula Pant (1:22)

Thank you for being here. But speaking of being places, Sahil, how often do you see your parents?

Sahil Bloom (1:28)

That's a great opening question. I see my parents several times a month.

Paula Pant (1:33)

That is a major change because there was once a time when you thought you would only see them probably 15 times in total before they pass away. Tell us about that.

Sahil Bloom (1:44)

Yeah. The real turning point, the inflection point in my life was a single conversation that I had with an old friend. I was living in California at the time. My wife and I were there, my family, and I had grown up on the East Coast, out here in the New York Boston area. And I was seeing my parents about once a year. COVID had happened, life had happened. We had built our whole life out on the West Coast. I had taken a job there. I was chasing financial success. I was chasing career success. All of these things that we're told we're supposed to chase. And along the way, I had really grown distant from the people that I was closest to, my parents, my sister, all on the East Coast. And I went out for a drink with an old friend in May of 2021 And we sat down and he asked me how I was doing. And I told him that it had started to get difficult being as far away from my parents as we were, very close with my parents growing up. And it had come to the time when I saw the chinks in the armor, if you will, in their health. They were getting to an age in their mid 60s where things start to happen. You start seeing parents or friends have health things happen. I'd started to see my parents slow down. And so it had started to become difficult being so far away. My friend asked how old are they? And I said, they're in their mid 60s. And he said, how often do you see them? I said, about once a year. And he just looked at me and said, okay, so you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die.

And I remember feeling like I had been punched in the gut.

The idea that the amount of time you have left with the people you love most in the world is so finite, so countable, that you can literally put it on a few hands, was just jarring to me.

The next morning, I woke up and told my wife that I thought we needed to make a change. And within 45 days, I had left my job on the West Coast. We had sold our house in California and moved back to the East Coast to live within driving distance of both of our sets of parents. And so now when I say that I get to see my parents several times a month, and they're such a huge part of my son's life, and I get to experience the joy that they have being grandparents and being so active in his life and get to be around them as much as I am, that is a representation of this entire idea of building a life around the things that matter to you most and taking actions to actually change the things that you don't like about where you're headed.