NICK MAGGIULLI, successful author of “Just Keep Buying” has a new book out called “THE WEALTH LADDER.” It’s a well done framework on how one’s relationship with money has to change as they move up the different strata of money and spending. We get into the book, how major life changes can shape our views, and the writing process.

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OUTLINE

• What does this book seek to accomplish?


• How was the experience different from the last book?


• Surprises in your findings?


• Has getting engaged and married change your lens on any of these topics?

THE SIX LEVELS OF THE WEALTH LADDER

• Level 1: Less Than $10,000


• Level 2: $10,000 – $100,000


• Level 3: $100,000- $1M


• Level 4: $1M-$10M


• Level 5: $10M-$100M


• Level 6: $100M and beyond

TRANSCRIPT

Frazer Rice (00:02 .178)
Welcome aboard, Nick.

Nick Maggiulli (00:04 .138)
Thanks for having me back, Frazer. Appreciate it.

Frazer Rice (00:04 .911)
Easy to have you back and congratulations on two fronts. You just got married and you’ve also in a sense given birth to a new publication here. Tell us about the last few months and what it’s been like.

Nick Maggiulli (00:14 .41)

It’s just been very busy, lots of things. We were doing wedding planning. We got engaged late last year and so wedding planning did that, had a few small celebrations. And now it’s book launch time. We’re delaying our honeymoon until the end of August because the book’s coming out now and the book’s out, so going from there. So it’s been fun.

Frazer Rice (00:38 .094)
Big things happen in three, so it’s all coming together in a couple of months there. So I’ve been watching this book getting written over the course of last, I guess, two years now. What was the gist of the book for the audience here? What got you into the wealth ladder concept, having written Just Keep Buying?

Nick Maggiulli (00:41 .374)
Yeah. So the gist of the book is that your financial strategy needs to change over time. I think it’s very easy to get caught in a certain set of habits and you can follow those to their logical conclusion. But if you’re trying to kind of go to the next level, so to speak, as I say in the wealth ladder, you might need to change your strategy. And there’s a ton of examples of this and it really depends where you want to go, how much wealth you want to accumulate, etc. Knowing all those things will help you better determine which strategy you should follow. That’s the high level of the wealth ladder.

Frazer Rice (01:30 .574)
So as you were sort of getting into the research on it and you take a lot from your personal experiences, you’ve moved up the wealth ladder and have had to have a little self-discovery on that. What would have been the interesting findings in your own experience and in the research that you’ve had and maybe things that were surprising?

Nick Maggiulli (01:51 .338) the Origins of the Wealth Ladder
I think this is something that I’m hoping a lot of people who have built wealth have come to the same conclusions, which is like as you build more wealth and have more money, like money doesn’t mean the same thing to you anymore. It doesn’t have the same value. Like I remember still being a, you know, semi-broke college student, you know, and then being a, you know, semi-broke just graduated college student, just started earning money and stuff. And I remember not wanting to pay for a beer at a festival because it was $9. And now that beer is probably 15 or 20 bucks.

But at the time I was like, this is crazy. I can’t pay for this. But looking back now, it was because I just didn’t have a lot of money and I was trying to be very careful about my spending today. Looking back, if I had known everything I know now, I’d be like, I can, I can buy the beer. I’ll be okay. Right. I don’t have to sneak these little mini liquor bottles and all the crazy stuff I used to do. Right. That’s like an example of like over time, just money changes.

Because of that, you’re like, yeah, I shouldn’t have been as, you know, I shouldn’t have cut back as much when I was younger. also just how you view it. I view it more as a tool now and less from like as a scarce resource. Like it’s a tool I can use to do things. I can help my family with it or travel with it. I can donate.

There’s all sorts of different things you can do with your money. And I think seeing it as a tool is really the important part. And lastly, it’s just how like the amount of money I need to change my lifestyle just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Right. We’re like, you know, ten thousand dollars back when I was 22 would have been like, wow, that’s like a ton of safety. I wouldn’t worry as much about money.

Today, $10,000 just doesn’t mean as much as it used to. And so it’s great. would still be, used, hand me a $10,000 check. That’s great. I’d be happy, but not even close to as happy or wouldn’t have as, as big of an impact on my life as it would have when I was 23. Right. I think everyone understands that, you know, what’s $10,000 to someone with a million. It’s not as big of a deal compared to someone with close to nothing. And so, yeah.

Frazer Rice (03:36 .14)
Yeah, one of the things that, you know, as was reading the book, super interesting is the idea that as you move up the wealth ladder and more and more people become involved and are part of your responsibility umbrella in many ways. And it gets back to something I wrote in mind where I talk about how the liabilities increase geometrically even though the assets may increase linearly. Is there a process around when you start thinking less about yourself and wealth than you start thinking about a family unit and then… intergenerationally and beyond. It’s something that I think gets lost in many times in the sort of the financial planning shuffle, but it’s something that I think your book covers well.

Nick Maggiulli (04:23 .454)
Yeah, I think the big error that people make in that front is thinking too much about the monetary and the financial piece of that and not the non-financial piece of it. So it’s like, Hey, my gosh, I accumulated, say $20 million and I’m going to have this for three generations and I’m planning this and I’ve trust and all this stuff. And you can set up all these structures and do everything perfectly right. But if you don’t have the right relationship with your kids, if you guys don’t have a shared set of values to build off of going forward,

It’s going to derail as soon as you’re gone because you know, maybe they’re just following your wishes while you’re here and as soon as you’ve passed, how do you know that those things are going to live on? You don’t at all, right?

At the end of the day, I think what’s more important is having a stronger relationship with your children so that you can talk about these things and listen to them, get their feedback and then plan your money more together instead of just doing it completely on your own and trying to create this control beyond the grave, right? And I think that’s what can create other issues within the family.

It’s the thing that people overlook because I think everyone’s just like, if I just get the wealth and it’ll last. And I don’t think the second part is true unless you have the value set up. You’ve thought about all these other things that people tend to overlook.

Frazer Rice (05:35 .883) the Wealth Ladder and Couples
Joelle and Doug Bonaparte have come out with a book about wealth and marriage and money and you’re going through it right now having just been married. What’s been sort of the first takeaway in getting married and sort of the principles of the wealth ladder? And I guess another different way of asking that is how do you merge your way of thinking about these wealth concepts with what your wife is thinking about?

It’s not pinning you down specifically, you’ve been buried above. But at the same time, I’m sure you saw that where when you’re merging different views on wealth and as you sort of put a timeframe and a ladder frame to it, what have you found interesting in your re