Roadmap for Life: A Guide to Mindset, a Practice, and a 15-year Sprint to a Life of Wealth

Dedication

To Sara, you have played and continue to play a very important part in our success. You are one of a kind (intelligent and driven, a beautiful person inside and out, with the greatest personality). You have a stringent workout regimen, and it shows. You work hard to keep our family’s needs satisfied. I have always been amazed at how you work hard, work out hard, and then still have time to perform all of the jobs that a mom and wife do to make life easy for a family. It has been said many times that being a stay-at-home mom is a full-time job. You have been able to have a successful professional career while being the best and most successful at doing all stay-at-home mom jobs. You are also the foundation of our great relationship. I could go on but will simply say thanks for being my life partner and best friend.

To RT and B, I wrote this book in a series of books for you to get a better understanding of me and my thinking while teaching you the cliff notes of what I’ve learned through both my traditional and self-directed education, with a heavy dose of my personal perspective. My hope is to inspire you to do more, dream big, and live the wealthiest life that can be attained.

I hope you will view me as a tough parent who guided you down the right path, loved you, and became your greatest friend and mentor as you transitioned into adulthood and for the rest of your life.

I will provide some insight into things that I have gotten right, and also totally failed at, with the intention of helping you get a head-start in life. In these pages, I will show you what I’d do the same and what I’d do differently if I could have a do-over. It is not to tell you how to live your life.

To all readers, I originally wrote this just for my kids. As a family, we thought others may learn and benefit from this, too. We thought, maybe it’s the financial guidance and conversation we all wish our father had with us when we were in our late teens or early 20s, or even beyond that. I have kept the original tone and voice directly talking to my kids totally candidly, with no filters. I invite you to imagine you are at our kitchen table, listening in on our conversation.

Please note, in no way do I think my way is the only way, but my language is at times, direct. Feel free to take what applies or resonates with you and leave the rest behind. My goal is to share my authentic journey from my early 20s with $300k in debt to my early 40s and financially free (and by that, I mean very financially free) and am now on the path to $300M with an ultimate goal of $1B in wealth.

Whatever your age or stage of life, whatever your gender, race, or identity, this book is for everyone. Welcome.

Introduction

I used to joke that I read only one book before I was 25. Sad. But true.

I struggled in school from day one. I always felt behind. I never felt like being a good student (at anything) was possible for me. Frankly, the construct of the school itself seemed largely like a waste of time.

What changed? It was not a lightning bolt of inspiration or a teacher who spent extra time with me (my mom tried, it didn’t work), or a magical moment where the angels wept and the choirs sang and the heavens opened. Rather, it was a circuit breaker box that needed to be relocated. More specifically, it was me not having the money to pay an electrician and the desperate need and desire to do it myself.

Mom and I bought a fixer-upper. We were committed to remodeling it the way we wanted, so that meant a new kitchen and converting the garage into a primary bedroom. To do that, we had to update the plumbing and install new electricity, which meant moving the circuit breaker box. Really almost everything one would do in a complete renovation or addition.

I could do the basics, but I needed much more knowledge to understand things like structural load for taking out walls, advanced electrical and plumbing, and other big-ticket remodel items. So there I was, caught between a book and a hard place—the hard place being a contractor we could not afford. I went to The Home Depot and grabbed three thick how to hardcover books.

And the story of me versus the circuit breaker box, I become victorious. That’s where I made friends with reading.

Hard Work from the Get-Go

My family was a traditional middle-class family. Both of my parents worked hard: my mother was a teacher and librarian, and my father was a utility company employee. I was taught from a young age that I had to put in long hours to make a good living. My parents left the house at 5:30-6 in the morning and got home at 5:30 or 6 in the evening.

Our middle school playground led to our grandparents’ backyard. Mamaw and Papaw would watch us after school. Papaw was a hard worker, and they both had multiple jobs and side hustles to make ends meet. When I was eight or so, Papaw taught me how to trap and fish, as he sold fish and furs. He also sold vegetables from the garden at a local farmer’s market. He was always active.

As a teen, I was like Papaw in many ways. I liked to do different things and I liked to be busy. Papaw and I would go hunting and fishing often. He also taught me how to scale fish and skin animals. He was an intriguing person to be around. One of my favorite side trips was going to the grocery store with Papaw and my brother. He’d ask for 2 small one-pound paper sacks and he’d tell us to fill ‘em with candy. So we loved going with him.

There was always something interesting to do. My grand­parents always got by with different, smaller jobs, and were always busy with their hands.

They took care of all of us kids, plus our great-grandmother, who was frail and needed full-time care. And even with all that work, all the hunting, fishing, and gardening, they barely made ends meet. I don’t think it ever occurred to them to have great-grandma in a facility. It wasn’t an option.

I Wanted More—and Different, And You Probably Do, Too

As a teenager, I worked between two and four jobs, just like Papaw—bussing tables in a restaurant, cashier at a gas station, mowing and landscaping at a church, working on a line in a print factory, monitoring cardiac telemetry in a hospital, couriering for a bank, and TV production for a pilot high school TV class, plus construction work. This was in addition to yard work and chores required of me at home. I also woke many mornings when not working or when school was out to go hunting or fishing.

So, my work ethic and initiative were ingrained in me.

I quickly learned that I did not want to work any of these jobs long-term. I got bored doing the same thing at a job day in and day out.

Additionally, I realized that I wanted to make much more money than I could at any of the types of jobs I had in high school and most of the jobs that my parents and all those around me were making. The biggest realization that I had at a pretty young age was noticing how the middle-class people around me lived at retirement age and in their later years.

But I can tell you that seeing how hard and repetitive it was to work at a factory, working double shifts, working night shifts, and just seeing adults who worked these jobs their entire lives had a huge impact on my appetite for not wanting to do those jobs as an adult.

And then the real hammer came down. Mamaw and Papaw, who had lived a good, long, active life, had to go into a nursing home. It seemed more like a prison. They went from being always busy to just lying in a bed that was electronically raised and lowered. It was like low-income housing with not a lot of service. They were in bed full time. Someone checked on them twice a day. They’d raise the beds to talk to us, but otherwise, they didn’t move. In addition, they were financially helpless.

Papaw went in first, and then Mamaw followed six months later. She passed first, and he shortly after. Their rapid decline hit me hard. It was very disturbing to me.

This experience led me to an unusual obsession at a young age (17-22 years old): this is not how I want my life to be—I do not want to retire and live out the final days of my life the way most around me were living. I did not want to be dependent on others in the form of a retirement home, social security, or becoming a burden on my family. I was a bit different from other kids my age because this was my worry.

I was distraught over my grandparents. I never wanted that for myself, and began to wonder, "Why don’t I just take that whole piece out? Why don’t I work to not get to that stage?"

I believe that this set a foundation and gave me the thought and drive I needed to invest in my later life from the beginning of my adult life. So, my understanding of long-term thinking and planning helped me to overcome the instant gratification mindset that much of our society has embraced.

My Goal for Age 65 Reached 20 Years Early

It was not that I was smarter or better than anyone else, but instead, I was so frightened of living my life from age 65 to 85 in a poverty state, that I forced myself to think long-term—well, accidentally. This long-term thinking is what has been the underlying guide for me to do all the things that I do and discuss in this book. Not only was I thinking long-term, but I was ultra-focused on this goal.

As I reached my early forties, I achieved the financial free­dom that I set out to reach by age 65. As a result, I’ve been able to pivot and use those same goals, plans, and mindset to forge a path of leaving a legacy for my family generations after me. A legacy of financial freedom and hopefully a different way of viewing the world around me.

With my somewhat non-traditional success and how I’ve raised you kids, I have new concerns about how to ensure that you understand the importance of these qualities and mindsets so that you build on this legacy instead of taking it for granted and losing all that has been and will be provided to you.

The Most Important Takeaway

THE MOST IMPORTANT TAKEAWAY is very simple. Wealth IS NOT being rich, it’s not how much money you have, your status, others’ perception of you, or others’ perception of your life. Wealth is a mindset and a practice—all five aspects of it. More to come in Chapter 4.

If I give you $10,000,000 and you do not understand that wealth is a mindset and the philosophy behind it, then you will lose that money in a matter of months or years and be broke. Wealth is a mindset and a practice.

We’ve seen this happen with professional athletes, actors, music artists, and other celebrities all the time. We’ve also learned that inheritances are usually lost by the third genera­tion. The shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations adage, which describes the inability of grandchildren to manage the wealth passed down to them from their grand­parents and parents threatens the continuation of family legacies.

This is because there was never an understanding of the philosophy behind wealth. If I had a choice to give you an understanding of true wealth and the philosophy behind it or to give you $10,000,000, I would give you $0 and provide the understanding of wealth every time.

Wealth is a mindset and a practice—a way of thinking and understanding. My greatest wish for you is to understand this wealth mindset and to be able to teach and pass down this wealth to your children, them to their children, and so on. This is the only way that we can build a true family legacy and transfer financial wealth down generationally.

I know that working as a teen made it easy for me to work hard right out of college. I worry that my and your mom’s success and getting to a point where we did not have to work hard as you were growing up will make it harder for you to have a strong work ethic.

Based on what I’ve seen of my peers, being a child in a finan­cially wealthy household more often than not results in kids who lack motivation and drive as adults. I will say however, that I believe that the bulk of those kids did not have any direction from their parents and did not have any books written for them to explain the importance of a strong work ethic, setting goals, planning, and being successful.

To back up a bit, Mom and I had pretty much retired at ages 40 and 41. I actually used to say I retired at age 28 to be a stay-at-home dad, but then went back to work at age 30 and retired again at age 41 and have been retired ever since. Granted, I was driven by the fear of poverty and motivated by a deep desire for a better life.

On any given day—or almost every day—you’d leave for school at 7:30 to see me heading off to work out or doing something around the house in a t-shirt and shorts. You would later come home from school at 3:00 pm to see me sitting in a recliner and watching TV. Of course, you might not have realized that I was not actively watching TV, but instead had it as background noise as I worked on my laptop.

In contrast, I saw my parents leave for work as early as 5 am and return between 5 and 6:30 pm five days a week, while you saw two stay-at-home parents who looked as though they were living Saturdays every day of the week. And to be honest, we are living Saturdays seven days a week because we have retired and are doing work that we actually love.

Giving you this background is also a way for me to provide you with an example or roadmap for transitioning from a con­sumptive teen to a successful, wealthy, and productive adult. Playing the long game is the way to be successful—it’s part of the wealth mindset and practice, as you will see in the pages ahead.

My Solution to Getting More

My solution to getting