Jordan Grumet

The main ideas from this conversation are: - The importance of focusing on things that have meaning and purpose in life, and avoiding regrets by working on them when there is still time. - The need to invest in education, knowledge, relationships, physical and mental health, as these investments compound and pay dividends. - The taboo nature of discussing death and money, as they often make people feel bad and uncomfortable. - The idea of reverse engineering life by starting with purpose and limited time, and then building a financial future around it. - The misconception that work stops when one retires, when in reality there is always work to be done, whether it's for oneself or for others. - The importance of finding work that is meaningful and fulfilling, rather than trying to escape work altogether. - The stories of Bobby and Tony, who symbolize the journey of work and the need to find purpose in it. Throughout this conversation you're going to find that the goal is limited time that's unchangeable, so let's subtract out as many things we don't like doing out of that time and let's replace it with things that have meaning and purpose. And really that's the whole point of all this. People tend to have regrets when they die and they tend to have these regrets because they didn't work on these things when they had more time. So that when a doctor like me walks into your room and gives you a prognosis of six months you can say, well that's not so great but I feel at peace with what I've done in my life. If you were to die tomorrow what would you regret and let's start working on whatever that is now. It's trying to invest in the rest of life that I think is hard but just like your monetary investments if you invest appropriately in life, in education, knowledge, relationships, physical and mental health, if you invest in those things they compound and pay dividends. I think he said something to the extent of dying is the easy part, the hard part was learning how to live. Hi and welcome to Catching Up to Five, a podcast on mindset, money, life, on the journey to financial independence. I'm Bill and I'm a life starter. I'm Becky and I'm also a life starter and we're your hosts. We're here to help you with your journey to financial independence no matter where you're starting from. We're going to talk to other life starters, experts and we'll explore topics related to our mission. Join us as we catch up to five together. Hello and welcome back to Catching Up to Five. I'm Bill Yount with my co-host Becky Heftig and today we have an exciting guest for you. How are you doing today Becky? I'm doing great Bill. What's up in your world? Not a lot. Today we're going to talk about death and dying, something I see day in, day out in the ER and finances, which I also see in the ER. Our guest today, however, is Jordan Grumet and he's lived many lives and probably needs little introduction, but here goes anyway. For a long time, most of us in our financial independence world have known him as Doc G or Doc Green. With his first book, he shed his cape and burst out of the internet closet of anonymity into the light. In his present life, I think he would consider himself a communicator. I often like to think of him as a time money philosopher, as an admitted and biased long time fanboy and friend. I can see how some of you might even see him as a superhero. In reality, Jordan has evolved from an eight-year-old child profoundly influenced by the premature death of his physician father, to a student charged with overcoming a learning disability, to a young adult driven to be a doctor, to a burned out internist looking for an escape, to a refined and distilled hospice doctor focused on his patient's transition to death. Now if being doctor is part art and science, so too is being human. Some might argue that Jordan's migration from boy Jordan to Doc G and back again is confusing. I see it as inevitable. Jordan has explored his creative and entrepreneurial sides both inside and outside of medicine his entire life. He has also evolved from an art dealer to a medical and then financial blogger, to an award winning podcaster on the What's Up Next, now the Earn and Invest podcast, to an inspirational public speaker. Now he's the author of the book, Taking Stock, a hospice doctor's advice on financial independence, building wealth and living a regret free life. I would argue that this book is really a series of short stories and vignettes of the dying woven into the fabric of financial independence. I would also argue that in as many iterations to date that Jordan has always been a doctor, the Latin origins of which are teacher. Lastly I would argue that if Jordan died tomorrow, he would have lived many full regret free lives. Most important to me, Jordan is a friend to many of us in the financial independence movement. Welcome to Catching Up to Five, Jordan. Thank you for taking your time to be with us here today. Jordan Mechner Thank you very much, Bill. You joke and say that you're a fanboy of mine, but in many ways for many years we've been collaborators and it's been really a privilege to bounce ideas off of you to have you on my podcast and now to be on yours. It's really been a good relationship for me in a way that I develop my ideas as well as a friendship. Bill Mott Everybody needs a mentor. I think I've been on your show about four times, so this would be technically the first time you've been on our show, right Becky? Becky Smith That's right and we're really glad to have you here today, Jordan. Let's jump in. We want to talk about your book today and there's three sections or three big ideas to your book. One would be what do financial experts get wrong about life and death? Second, what are the many paths of financial independence? And third, what is the one thing the dying wish they had more of? Bill Mott So, Jordan, I see the biggest concept of your book as inverting the typical approach, the focus on math and money related to financial independence to the value of time as it applies to typical financial principles. Would that be correct? Jordan Peck Yeah, I think time and purpose are really the big aspects of the book and I always say that we do it backwards. We always focus on the math and the money first and what I'm really gently or not so gently trying to do is push people to start thinking about purpose and their limited time on this earth. Start with that lens and then build a financial future around it. Bill Mott So why are death and money so taboo? Jordan Peck I think they're the kind of things that we just don't like talking about because they make us feel bad. When we talk about money, we either worry that we don't have enough or we feel bad because someone has more or it's the old problem with money. The more you have, the more you want. When you ask a person how much money will be enough, they usually say about double what they have. So we have all these bad feelings and that's not even to mention the generational trauma that's handed down from our parents about money and our thoughts about what money is and what it can do for us. Death is the same way to think about death is to think about life being finite and we don't like to do that. It's a scary thought, a thought that we could die one day and not reach our goals, those deep important things to us. So instead of diving in and thinking about it and talking about it and then helping those goals and that idea of purpose come to fruition, we do the exact opposite. We hide behind the mirage of career or what society tells us to do or even occasionally money and net worth, we hide behind those so that we don't have to think about the tougher, deeper questions like who am I and what does meaning look like in my life and what am I supposed to be doing here on this earth? Well, it seems to me that we need to teach our youth in this movement or in general that we need to reverse engineer life. I see your book as kind of the end to the simple path to wealth. So J.L. Collins may begin at the beginning and take us through money to the end of life. You take us from the end of life backwards to money. Is that true and would you consider your book an anti-fire book? In some ways, it is anti-fire but not really. So I think the traditional financial independence retire early movement focused too much on money and grinding it out and getting there and too little on lifestyle design and purpose. Now that has changed as you can tell with things like Coase-Fye and Slo-Fye and Barista-Fye. People are really now starting to look at lifestyle design and building it into their financial pathway. So I very much resonate with what you say about kind of J.L. Collins book being the beginning of the discussion and mine being the end. I'm just trying to say, hey, let's get these ideas of purpose and identity up front. Let's decide what connections we want in this world and then let's go to J.L.'s book and build that financial structure that will support that. So very much so and I do think it is somewhat reverse engineering and that's my experience because dealing with end of life and seeing the dying, I get to hear about all the things they would have done differently. So how can we take those messages and help the young, the living, the people who have decades to go? Michael Munger Yeah. There's Vicki Robin wrote your forward I believe and she has an interesting quote that I'd like to bring up here. She states, perhaps after reading this book, fire will transit into financial integrity and retire eventually or maybe respond with empathy, realize enlightenment, rescue the earth, restore equity or reflect on eternity. I think she has a significant grain of truth there. What about you? J.L. Collins Yeah. I mean, again, it's bringing it back to purpose, identity and connections. The problem with the original fire movement is it really didn't bring those into play. It was this idea of let's make a lot of money so we don't have to work but not having to work is not a purpose in life. It can be a goal and it can be a healthy goal if there are other things you want to do but it can't be the only goal and it certainly can't be the main goal and I think that's what we're realizing and why Vicki's words resonate so much is she's really talking about bringing purpose into that fire slogan, bringing some meaning into it as opposed to being just a set of numbers. Vicki Burke So Jordan, what do financial independence experts get wrong about life and death? J.L. Collins Well, I think what they really get wrong is that they spend too much time talking about money and spend too little time talking about life goals. So they make the overall purpose of life the attainment of this financial number or even the attainment of retirement. I think that's what they really get wrong. I think what they need to do to get this right is to do what Bill was just talking about is a little bit more of that reverse engineering which is to say let's not look at your finances yet but let's look at what the end goal is and I'm not talking about a net worth but I'm talking about what do you see your life looking like in the future, what feels purposeful, what has meaning for you and then let's go to the finances and build your pathway there and more importantly let's even try to build that purpose and meaning into your life today while you're building your financial path because ultimately and this gets back to this whole idea of time, we have a set amount of time on this earth and we have no control over that but we do have control of how we spend that time or what activities we do when that time passes and so how can we start bringing this idea of purpose and meaning and identity into our lives now because time is passing and we want to fill up those periods of time with stuff that's meaningful for us as well as make money and build a living and maybe even provide a legacy for our kids. All of that goes together. David Apsley, Co-Founder & CEO, The Big Game Hunter Network, Inc. You know you use characters or patients or people you've had the privilege to hold their hands on their deathbeds. One of the characters you bring up that illustrates some of these examples is Sam. Can you tell us a little bit about Sam so we understand his journey? Sam was a very interesting character in my life and I took care of him for a number of years and eventually he got a terminal cancer diagnosis but he was different than a lot of cancer patients because he still had some vibrance and energy and Sam had lived a life that was good but he had left a lot on the table. He had always dreamed of traveling and doing all these things and he had never done them and when he gave him his terminal diagnosis, it was like all of a sudden it gave him permission to do all the things he had been putting off because he never had time or he never had money or he never deserved to take these trips or do these things. So in the little time he had left, every time we tried to contact him, we find that he was taking another trip. He went to Mardi Gras once. He went all sorts of places and one day his girlfriend went to his house and found him dead in bed and he had a packed suitcase right by his bed and this idea of always having our bags packed. Sam was really good at that at the end of his life but can we imagine a world where he started doing that way earlier where he built that love of travel and adventure into his life 10 years prior, 20 years prior if that could have been the way he lived his whole life instead of just at the end. How powerful would that have been? And so again this whole idea of when we're given that terminal diagnosis, it all of a sudden clears our glasses, it defogs the future. Instead of not knowing when our end is coming, we know exactly when the end is coming and it lets us look much more clearly at about what's important to us. Sam knew when he got that diagnosis what was important to him. The question is why are we leaving that clarity of mind until something bad happens? Why are we leaving it to the end of life? Sam was a great example begging us to start trying to be more clear about these things earlier and yet giving us hope that even if we haven't done it right yet, even if we get to that terminal diagnosis, there might still be a little time to not have regrets and to do those things we want to do. So for me he was a very powerful character and not only in my career but in my life when I think about how I want to structure things that I do for myself. I seemed to always have a bag packed when I was young. I was going here, I was going there and I didn't pay attention to money. That's what led in some ways to my being a late starter. I didn't care about saving, I cared about traveling. I had a bag packed and I didn't realize that money is like oxygen. Jim Dolley, one of our mentors as well states that, I think it's easy to get on your high horse when you're already financially independent and sit there and say that money doesn't matter. But guess what? If there's nothing in the bank account or your kid is hungry or you need to go down to see the doctor or the car just dropped his transmission like mine almost did, you know what? Money matters a lot. He compared money to oxygen. Do you think that's true? So I think it is but this gets back to Maslow's Pyramid. So if you think about Maslow's Pyramid at the bottom are basic needs. You need shelter and you need clothing in the modern day. You need a transmission that works. You need a car, those kind of things. And then after you get through those basic steps, we get all the way to the top which is self-actualization which is the purpose and the meaning and the identity and all that good stuff, right? That connectedness. Yes, you need to have oxygen, enough oxygen to live. You need enough money for the basics but I think we make a mistake in thinking that Maslow's Pyramid is sequential and that we have to use them as building blocks. We have to both look at our personal needs and self-actualization at the same time that we're also looking at our financial needs. And so Bill, if I was to take a look at your trajectory, I'd say you actually got the first part completely right. You knew what was meaningful for you, the experiences and the travel and all that kind of stuff. The problem was you didn't do the second part which is also build the financial framework around it. And so you are managing actually the higher levels of Maslow's Pyramid but not doing a good job of the lower levels. And so instead of looking at it as again this sequential pyramid we have to climb up, what I'm really trying to get people to do is look at them all together at the same time. And I think you're doing that now. You could have probably started a little bit earlier so that you could have had all that meaning and purpose when you were younger but also build a slightly stronger financial framework so that you wouldn't have to work so hard now. That is kind of the journey of the late starter I think often. There's an unconscious nature to what we do where we don't balance that flattened Maslow's Pyramid where we look at our needs and the oxygen as well as the actualization and the journey. I was journeying without purpose or without really security. When we get further down the road and we are looking towards retirement, I think there's so many of us that think even if we've done it right in the beginning, we make it to this magic moment and then we're done. We don't have to do anything else anymore. But you make the comment that work does not stop when you retire. And I have to say that I have discovered that myself. So what do you mean by that? So the traditional idea of work is that work is basically a trading of goods and services, right? So we do work in exchange for goods and services. When it comes to employment, we think of that as, okay, I provide this work and the employer gives me money and money is that holder of goods and services which we can then take and spend to get ice cream at the grocery store, right? And then we give money to the store owner which now has that holder of goods and services. So work is just an exchange of goods and services and we actually exchange goods and services all our lives. Sometimes we do it for ourselves. So if you can imagine you're retired and you're on a set budget because you're retired because you did all your financial independence calculations and you said, boy, I can retire a few years earlier but I'm going to have to clean my own house. So now you're retired. Supposedly you're not quote unquote working anymore but part of doing this is you have to exchange goods and services with yourself. You now have a dirty house and someone has to clean that house which means you're going to do some work to clean that house. Now if you had worked an extra few years for your employer and maybe had a bigger nest egg, a bigger holder of goods and services, more money, maybe when you retired instead of cleaning your house yourself, you could hire a housekeeper and then you give that housekeeper money, right, the holder of goods and services so that they could provide a good and service for you. The point of all this is you are doing work your whole life and it's really limiting to say I want to get to financial independence so I can stop working. It's a better way to say I want to get to financial independence so I can spend more time doing the kind of work that's important to me because what I feel is really self-actualized people, people who have a sense of purpose, identity and connections don't want to just sit around and watch TV. Most of the time they want to build something, create something, connect with people, pursue a passion that was lifelong for them that had interest and so you're going to be doing that work whether that is to travel around the country going to coin shows to look for that really rare coin that you've always dreamed of owning. That's a hobby but that's work too. So again I just want to reframe this idea. Let's not try to escape work. Let's try to just do more work that is meaningful to us. You have a couple of characters in your book that actually symbolize this journey of work. One of them is Bobby and the other one is Tony. Can you tell us their stories? So Bobby and Tony, I don't even know if I remember who Bobby is. Tony was the dishwasher and this gets back to the idea of Tony was a dishwasher. He was hoping to retire. He had been a dishwasher his whole life. He finally made up enough money. He left. He went home and what did he do? Well he cooked and cleaned for himself and eventually he had to do his own dishes. So in a sense he was doing the same work he was doing for his employer but he was doing it at home but one of the things that was interesting was he found that his connection to the people at his work was now gone and he was lonely. Again we get to this idea of what work means to us and in his case leaving the traditional job which is what he thought he wanted didn't provide him with doing any less work but it did take away some of those connections that were important to him. Getting back to Bobby, if I remember correctly, I use pseudonyms for everyone. So they're not the actual patients and actually the circumstances have been changed because I had to be fair and write in the book. I needed to make sure that it was anonymous. So if I remember correctly Bobby owned the store where he bought and sold trucks and that was the love of his life. In fact that's what he loved doing. He had built his business out of nothing. I took care of him in hospice as he got progressively sick with congestive heart failure but Bobby was strange maybe to some of us early fire practitioners because he didn't want to escape work. All he wanted to do was live another day so he could make another deal and in fact he died at his desk with a set of sales sitting on the table ready to be signed off but to him that was an amazing life. So think about that for all those people who are trying to escape their jobs. Here was a guy who all he wanted was to have a few extra days, months or years at his job and so it really flips the conversation and makes us look at what we consider work and what we consider play or purpose or identity and it really pushes to confound those a little bit and say hey it can be work and it also can be my joy and passion. I think that's something that was a new message especially a few years ago to the fire community. I've had that trouble myself in my own life. I'm still a fully employed emergency physician and I have time off. I'm either off or I'm on and when I'm off, there's only so many books you can read. There's only so many TV shows you can watch. There's only so many times you can walk the dog and then through this journey, I found this podcast which I can see extending beyond my work journey into another full job. It's turned into a part-time job and it is a passion for both Becky and I and I can see how life beyond that finish line or that proverbial finish line of retirement can look for me now. Exploring the creative juices that seems to be where our passions lie outside of the nine to five. Has that been what it's been for you with transitioning from being a physician to a communicator? Oh most definitely and again this helps us understand those kind of blurred lines right. So I left traditional work, medical work to pursue communication. What that ended up being is writing a blog, public speaking and eventually to earn and invest podcast. For most of the time I've done the earn and invest podcast, I haven't made any money. So is that a hobby? Is that work? On the other hand, I spend 20 to 30 hours a week doing it and it is deep intellectual, sometimes even busy work and then I started advertising and I started doing a mastermind. So maybe I'm making a little money at it. So now is it work? Now that I'm making money but I'm not making nearly what I made as a doctor so is it not work? Again we can kind of play these scripts over and over again but what it finally comes down to is when I realized I had enough money, I started to say how am I going to spend my time doing things I truly want to do and that becomes the litmus test. Not whether I make money, not whether it's work or not work. The real litmus test is, is this a good use of my time? Does it feel purposeful? Does it give me a sense of meaning and connection? Is it synonymous with my identity? Another way of saying that is would I be doing this even if I wasn't being paid for it? And if the answer is yes, then it's probably something important in my life and the money issue is just not important. So is this what you mean in your book when you talk about the art of subtraction? It definitely is because if you find yourself, there are two ways of thinking of subtraction. One is when you're like me who found himself financially independent and so I could get rid of all those things in my life I didn't like doing especially those things I was being paid for and only leave the things I did like doing. Now that's really easy when you're financially independent but there are a lot of people listening right now who are like I'm nowhere near financial independence. How do I use the art of subtraction in my life? Well, the way you do this when you're not financially independent is you start building meaning and purpose into your life now and sometimes that creates extra revenue and if it does, you can subtract out the things you don't like doing in your work or employment environment. And if it doesn't create extra revenue, you still filled your time doing things that have meaning and purpose to you and that's good enough. In the meantime, as you build your financial framework and get to a stronger, more stable financial place, you can start looking at your workplace and saying what are the things that really don't add to my life? Now I have some stability. Can I subtract out some of those things and be okay? And then substitute in things you like to do or have meaning and purpose for you. So that's the goal. Throughout this conversation, you're going to find that the goal is limited time that's unchangeable. So let's subtract out as many things we don't like doing out of that time and let's replace it with things that have meaning and purpose. And really that's the whole point of all this. And so when we talk about this being a financial book, it's a financial book because I want to help people build the financial framework to do that. Okay. There's a parable that you say and I'm sure many of our listeners have heard in your podcast journey but it bears hearing again with a twist for us late starters. Can you take us through the parable of three brothers so that we may understand your concept of the financial independence movement and then how can we expand upon that when we include late starters? So if you go back to the idea or the premise that first we have to think about purpose and identity, that's step one. Step two once you started doing that is to build a financial framework. So a lot of people ask me, well, how do I build that financial framework? And I often say, well, we think of financial independence as one thing but actually financial independence is many things. And to help explain that I use the parable of the three brothers. And the short form of that parable is there once three brothers who are embarking on the trip of a lifetime but because each of the brothers was quite unique, they took varying paths. You had the eldest brother who basically didn't like the journey or the path at all. In fact, he was always struggling to get finished as fast as possible. So the eldest brother grinds it out. They work really hard. They get to the point where they've not slept, they skipped meals, and they get to the path as fast as possible. When they get to the end, they find themselves fairly tired but they have a huge amount of time to explore their freedom and do whatever they want. That's the eldest brother. Then you have the middle brother who doesn't like the path anymore than the eldest brother does but doesn't have the strength or stamina to grind it out the way the eldest brother does. So what the middle brother does is when they get tired, they take a flight of fancy, go out into the fields, go rest and relax. They climb a mountain. Then they come back and then they grind it out again. So the middle brother gets to the end of the path slightly later than the eldest brother. They have a little bit less time to enjoy their freedom but they have a lot more energy. And finally, you have the youngest brother. The youngest brother is different from the other two brothers because the youngest brother loves the path. So the youngest brother takes as much time as they want. They notice the trees and the sun shining down on their head and they're just enjoying the walk through this journey. And when the youngest brother gets there, they do something that neither of these other brothers can quite understand. The youngest brother turns around and walks back the way they came. So what I'm trying to get people to do is use this parable and think about how they look at their finances and work and try to figure out which brother they are. So that eldest brother, the first brother is really that traditional financial independence retire early practitioner, the person who didn't like work, who puts off purpose and identity and meaning today to grind it out, get to a certain net worth, quit work, and then live a life of purpose and meaning. And for some people, especially people who make lots of money in their job and they think they're going to live for a long time, that is a great path. Middle brothers are people who don't want to wait forever, 10, 15 years to get to meaning and purpose. They want to start building it into their life now instead of thinking of a net worth that will support them for the rest of their life as financial independent. Middle brothers look at passive income or side hustles and they try to create enough passive income or side hustle income to cover their monthly needs. And so what they find is that they front load a little bit of the work, they can create these recurring or semi-passive income streams that after two or three years, they can live off of and yes, those income streams require maintenance. So it's not like they're completely retired, but they have a lot more time to enjoy themselves and pursue meaning and purpose. It's a little bit faster path to financial independence than the traditional fire eldest brother way. And then finally, there's the youngest brother. If you imagine what financial independence really is, is having enough money to pursue purpose, identity, and connections immediately. Well what if you love your job? What if you find a job that you would do even if you weren't making money at it? That's the passion play. If you can find a job you're passionate about and it pays the bills, you're kind of financially independent from day one. You might be working a lot longer, right? Especially if you're not saving for retirement, you might have to work to your 70s or 80s. But hey, if you're loving your job, you're like the youngest brother. You get to the end of the path and you do something the other brothers can't understand, you turn around and walk back the way you came. So these three parables or this parable, these three brothers are an archetype or different archetypes of financial independence. There's grinding it out, front-loading the sacrifice, which was the traditional fire pathway. There's passive income and side hustles or there's the passion play. And so how can we then take that structure and use it to build more purpose and meaning into our lives and build that financial framework that will get us to where we want to go? And the caveat to all this is you may be different brothers at different times of your life or you may be multiple brothers at the same time. That's fine. The idea again is to build this framework so you know how to build that financial life for yourself as well as maximize the time where you're going to be doing things you really like to do. Are we missing a fourth brother? Are we missing those that backload the sacrifice and did we get it wrong? I don't know if there is any wrong. I'll tell you and I'll start there because I think we need to give everybody grace. You're at where you are in life because you need to be and that's where life took you. And a lot of times when people end up backloading the sacrifices because they had stuff to deal with, right? There's generational money trauma. There's financial need. Some people have health issues. Some people just were never taught and so they have to wait until the 30s or 40s to start getting that financial education so that maybe they're not ready to really pursue it until their 50s and 60s. So I don't know if there's such thing as wrong. There's just different ways of doing it. And certainly I think you could add in a parable or a fourth brother of backloading the sacrifice. Part of what I like about this framework is I don't think it's ever too late, right? So if you are thinking about backloading the sacrifice, one option might be the passion play. Maybe at the age of 55, you're getting tired of let's say emergency medicine but find occupational health and it's something you can do all day and you enjoy and you like counseling people and it doesn't stress you out. In a sense, you can get to financial independence fairly fast by finding an occupational health job and then yes, you still have to work but you've already really made a lot of the headway. So yes, I think there is that path. There are people who get to 50 or 60 and say, oh boy, I need to really grind it out for five more years so that I can then be financial free at 65 or 70. But I think there are options there and I don't think it's ever too late. I guess that's really the key. Just like it's never too late of my dying patients when they have six months left to make some of those changes in their lives that help them have less regret, it's never too late to get your finances in order. What I've actually seen is these amazing stories and I think Becky is one of them of people who when they put their mind to getting their finances in order, the trajectory is a lot faster than they thought it would be. That's true. That's true. You talked about the regrets of the dying and this is something that I really hadn't heard until just a year or two ago and when I heard them, it really made me stop and think and probably because of the age that I am. In fact, it makes me wonder what is it that keeps us from thinking of these things when we're younger. I know that you can't tell that to a 20-year-old or a 30-year-old sometimes. They're 60 years old and 80 years old is too far away for them to even conceptualize it. Talk to us about the five regrets of the dying. The five regrets of the dying actually was a book by Bronnie Ware where she was a palliative care nurse and interviewed palliative care and hospice patients before they died, got all their answers together and came up with these five regrets. They run the gamut from I wish I was more myself, I wish I spent more time with my friends, etc., etc. I find it interesting and yet I think it's everyone's experience that you cannot talk about these things with young people usually. So there's this idea of memento mori, this idea of carrying our mortality with us as we live life. It's not something we like to do. Young people or even older people don't like to talk about death because it's hard. It makes us remember that life is finite and when you start thinking about life being finite, you also start thinking about there's these important things in life that maybe I should be doing but I'm not doing them yet and if I realize that the end of life will hit me one day, I better start working on them and working on these things is really, really hard so we put it off. It's much easier for a young person to say I can't think about that now. I have to build a career or I have to get married or I have to have kids. So we put all these things that are low hanging fruit and a lot of them are easier. So it's not easy to become financial independent. It's not easy to become a partner at your law firm but I'll tell you, the steps are known and we can make a series of actions that will probably get us there. It will probably get us married, probably get have us children, probably get us a house, probably have us move up in our job. All of those things are knowable. It's a lot harder to say I want you to start thinking about living a life of purpose and identity connections now so that you won't have regrets when you're dying. That's really deep hard work and most people emotionally will run away from it as fast as possible and the way they do that is they get caught up in what's going on in their life now. They get caught up in that knowable stuff because it feels so much safer and easier and so I think we don't want to talk about it and that's why people have these regrets. This is a common thing. That's why Bronnie Ware wrote the book. That's why I wrote my book is people tend to have regrets when they die and they tend to have these regrets because they didn't work on these things when they had more time and so again, this gets back to reverse engineering. How can we take that knowledge and start working on them today so that we don't have those regrets so that when a doctor like me walks into your room and gives you a prognosis of six months, you can say, well, that's not so great but I feel at peace with what I've done in my life and that's the goal. That's what I want everyone to get to. I want everyone to have that non-regretting life and I hate to use the word regrets because even regret is a negative thing. We talk about the regrets of the dying not because we want you to think about how not to have regrets. We talk about the regrets of the dying because we want you to live a purposeful life filled with identity and connections. So it's not even about regrets. It's just the people who do that tend to have less regrets and using the lens of regrets helps us focus on those things earlier in life. So just so we know what Bonnie Ware's regrets were for purposes of discussion, she talks about number one, I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. Number two, I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Number three, I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. Number four, I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends. Number five, I wish I'd let myself be happier. These are profound regrets but you like to talk about it in terms of investments. You have a different way of looking at this that I found really illuminating. You talk about things like the power of reconciliation, the courage to fail, living in the moment and regret of investing in chasing false gods. So you have a couple of stories here that illustrate these investments. One of them is Paul's story. Can you tell us his story please? Early in my hospice career, I took care of Paul and Paul came out to his family, I think it was in his 20s and they pretty much ended communication with him. And so he went and built a life of his own. I was in medical school right in the 90s and this was right when the AIDS pandemic was really, really taking many lives. Paul was gay and had a partner and eventually got HIV and AIDS and I interacted with him on the inpatient hospice unit. As we talked about his regrets, one of them was that him and his family hadn't talked in a decade. And so he eventually, with the help of the chaplain, called his family and his family actually came and at the end of his life, they were there present with his lover and his friends and all the people that were important to him, that community that his family would never accept before. And they were there too, all holding hands, sitting vigil as he died. And so what is that? So the literary term for what that is, it's called the deus ex machina, this idea that at the end, right at the end, you can have the last minute plot twist that fixes everything. Right? And we see this in movies all the time where everything's going wrong and all of a sudden there's a switch right at the end and everyone's happily ever after. We see this in hospice. We do. People come to terms with their regrets. They only have a short period of time left and they do reconcile with important people. They do accomplish things that are important to them. They do have the deus ex machina. But that's not likely. That's difficult. That's really hard. So my goal with this book, my goal with thinking about purpose and identity and building a financial framework is that I can stop you from needing the last minute plot twist that fixes everything. I'd rather address this stuff much earlier. And so that's really what Paul taught me is that yes, we can resolve everything at the end. But think about all those great years Paul could have had with his family if he had reconciled 10 years earlier. Think about the richness of the connection if they could have been at his wedding or if they could have met his friends or they could have known what his life really was like. And so that's my goal is how do we keep people from needing that last minute plot twist. And the answer gets back to what you were talking about. It's not regrets. It's investing. It's investing in things like Paul could have invested in reconciliation much earlier. It's investing in failing, going and putting yourself out there and not succeeding. It's about knowledge and friends and love and all these investments and education, all these things that make life meaningful and purposeful, which eventually lead to not needing that last minute reconciliation. When you say that there's a regret of investing and chasing false gods, I don't entirely understand what you mean. You use a couple of stories of Connor who was a wealthy man who I believe had got a hospital wing named in his name and then there was Anne, also a poet as contradistinctions. Can you tell us their stories to help us understand what false gods are? Sure. The false gods are fame and fortune and all those things that we think are important to us but probably are not. So Connor was a great example. He was an avid business person. He ran a huge multi-conglomerate that made lots and lots of money and that was the most important thing in his life. And because he lived that way, his connection to his family and friends wasn't that deep. In fact, his family members, many of them worked with him, saw him more as the holder of the wealth or the leader of the company but not the beloved family member. And so when he got to his deathbed, he was surrounded by people but not people who cared for him or loved him or had a deep connection. They were waiting for him to die so they could take over his business. And so he had prayed at the false god of wealth and status and at the end of life, it hadn't served him. On the other hand, Ann was a patient who left her job as a university professor and pursued poetry. Her husband had died. She was in an apartment all by herself and poetry became the purpose in her life and she would write these poems and she would send them out to literary magazines and this was in the days where you had to wait for the mail, right? This was probably in the early 2000s. And so she would wait for the mail to come to see if any of her poetry was accepted. And in contrast to Connor, Ann died surrounded by people. The number of poets and creatives and artists that came in and out of her doors in those last few months when she ended up dying from cancer, she lived a rich life of deeper connection. And that's why I think the contrast of those two is so important. She didn't fall victim to praying to false gods and instead invested in her own sense of connection and identity and it made all the difference. And so in many ways, Ann was much more wealthy than Connor, although he might have died with billions of dollars. He was bereft when it came to what was important and Ann sitting in her little condo with old furniture and very little money to her name died with a wealth of connection and love and compassion in that room. And so it really flips this idea of what being wealthy means. And I think we have to keep that in mind as we think about what are we going to worship in life. Jordan, can you talk to us about time perception? I know that that is and I'm experiencing it where it feels like time speeds up the older you get. And I think that our audience may kind of be in this boat. So could you talk to us about that? Sure. We love to try to commoditize time. We say you can buy it, you can sell it, you can spend it. Even I do in this conversation will still use some of those words when describing time. But they're all kind of false, right? Because time passes and there's nothing you can do about it. Time is unchangeable, unmodifiable. It passes no matter what. So the only kind of levers we have to deal with time is we either can play around with our perception of time or we can choose more wisely what activities we place in those time slots of our lives, right? Whether the days, months, years, what have you, those time slots pass. And so all we can control is what activities are we doing as that time passes. So time perception is a little more slippery. We don't have as much control of it, but we do know that we perceive time differently at different times of our lives. Yes, when we're young, think about when you're young, the school year and the summer seem to last forever, like it would never be over. And yet as we get older, time seems to fly and the seasons pass. I love to give the example of if I give you your favorite book to read and I put you in the midst of your favorite chapter and I say, read that chapter for five minutes, those five minutes are going to fly by. On the other hand, if I take away the book and ask you to sit in the plank position, which most of us know what the plank position is nowadays, it's kind of uncomfortable. And I say, okay, let's wait five minutes and then you can get up. That second five minutes is going to be the longest five minutes of your life, especially if you're out of shape. Depending on what we're doing and what's going on in our life, we perceive time differently. And so we can use that to decide, for instance, if we go back to the parable of the three brothers, what's important to us. Like some people will tell me when I'm young, time is slow and when I'm old, time flies. So because of that, I'm going to want to be an Elvis brother. I'd rather grind it out when I'm young and there's tons of time so that I can buy my financial freedom so that when time is flying, I don't have to waste any of it working at things I don't want to do. On the other hand, you might have another person who says life is too short. I perceive it passing right away. I'm not even going to take a job unless I love it. So I'm going to be a younger brother. I'm going to go for the passion play because to me, I don't want to spend a single moment doing things I don't want to do. So we can play with the perception a little bit, but that's more tricky. What we do have control over, and this gets back to the art of subtraction and even the art of addition, adding in things we like doing, is we can try to take those time slots of our lives, get rid of the things we don't like doing and place as much things that we do like doing, things that feel purposeful for us into those time slots. And so that again goes back to this idea of realizing what importance means to us, what has purpose, identity and connections involved with it, and then building a financial framework that allows us to get rid of the loathsome stuff and place a lot more of those activities that are meaningful into those time slots because those time slots are so limited and they're unmodifiable. Do you feel guilty about wasting time in your own life? I don't because I think rest and downtime are very much a part of purpose, identity and connections. And I also realize that you can't be purposeful all the time. You can't spend every minute accomplishing something. It would be exhausting, or at least for me, it would be exhausting. I also think that we put way too much pressure on ourselves to make what I call big P purpose versus little P purpose. Big P purpose is like something I'm going to do that's going to change the life, that's going to change life, that's going to have impact and help millions of people, right? That's big P purpose. And a lot of people think that they have to go for big P purpose. And so they get anxious actually when they start thinking about what they're going to do with their lives. I'm a bigger fan of little P purpose. Purpose really is different for each person and it doesn't have to change everyone's lives. It just has to be something that you're passionate about. And ultimately, I think when we pursue little P purpose, eventually we start changing lives anyway. And I'll give you a perfect example, one I don't talk about in the book. I knew a guy when I was in middle school and elementary school who owned an antique store and he liked antiques. And one day he was buying some antiques and he got a whole stack of baseball cards with the antiques. Someone said, here, take these with it. You know, a smart ass teenager came in and said, how much you want for those cards? And the guy's like, I'll take five bucks from him. So hands out five bucks, takes the cards. And then that teenager looks and says, you know what? This one right here is worth 50 on its own. And this one here is worth 10 and this one here is worth five. And so the antique stealer was blown away by this and he really was became enthralled with baseball cards. In fact, he started buying and selling baseball cards in his antique store because he just loved it. And so in some senses you could say, well, that's little P-Purpose, right? He was making a living at it, but he was really just doing it because he loved it and it wasn't changing the world. But guess what? He started buying and selling baseball cards and geeky kids like me who didn't have a lot of friends and who felt left out in the world started showing up to that place because we loved baseball cards. And before you knew it, there was a crowd of teenagers who spent time there. And this guy ended up being a mentor, a friendly space in a turbulent world for teenagers who didn't feel like they belonged. And so I think like this gentleman, when you pursue little P-Purpose, you end up affecting people and creating a community anyway. And so that's why I think we have to let go of feeling guilty that we're not changing the world all the time. I think if we just focus on some of those things that are important to us, good things eventually happen. I have discovered recently that one of the things I want to try to keep in the front of my mind is to look for opportunities. We can live our lives without some grand scheme, but if we are mindful of the opportunities around us, just like that gentleman was, we can make a difference in someone else's life and with really not a whole lot of effort. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing. And I can just look at you two, Becky and Bill, sitting here, and I can say that pursuing my little P-Purpose of being interested in finances and writing and doing all these things has led to collaboration with both of you. It's led to life talks about things that were important to us. It's led to medical talks because thank God I actually have a medical degree and can speak about medicine and maybe help people. All of it flows from being your best self. And I think when you start going after those things that are important to you, you tend to shine. People who are pursuing things that are important to them tend to be giving and open and loving. They tend to have time for people who are in need. It's just part of the process. And so I love that. I love being open to new opportunities, to using whatever expertise you've accumulated in the world and sharing it with someone who might need it at that moment. It's very powerful. And it builds even better and more purpose, identity, and connections. It really kind of is cyclical and it builds on itself. Your book is about time and mindset so much more than money. Actually, you only pay homage to money, I think, in one chapter of your book. And you use a lot of terms that we find are synonymous with money or time. One of them is the time-efficient frontier. And we know the efficient frontier is sort of optimizing risk and reward. How do you look at the time-efficient frontier? I think it's the same idea, except instead of risk and reward, we're again talking about using those time slots or filling them as efficiently as possible with the most meaningful things. And again, this gets back, efficient frontier analysis is all about addition and subtraction, right? It's all about looking at your investment portfolio and adding things that decrease risk but increase return and subtracting things that decrease return or increase risk. Well, I think we should be looking at time the exact same way. How do we add and subtract to spend? And again, I'm using the word spend, but we know it's inappropriate. Spend more time doing things you like doing that fulfill your sense of purpose and identity and subtract or get rid of those things that are loathsome or don't add to your sense of purpose, identity, and connections. And so I think we have to use that same hypothesis and use that same framework with time as we use with investing. We're continuously modifying to get the outcomes we want. I've had a question I've always wanted to ask you because of your story with regards to your dad's untimely death. And it seems to me that that was such a pivotal moment with regards to time for you. So how has your concept of time evolved over time? And do you think the urgency of time or your urgency of time might stem from your father's premature death? And have you ever fully come to terms with time in your life? I don't know if any of us can ever really come to terms with time in our lives. I certainly can. I mean, I'm turning 50 next month. And so I'm very acutely aware of time and time passing. I think the lesson of my father when it comes to time is that you don't know when you'll die. You don't know how much time you have on this earth. So let's really start thinking about what those important things are today so that we don't have to worry about running out of time. And so I guess I'd rephrase it another way. If you were to die tomorrow, what would you regret? And let's start working on whatever that is now. Strangely enough, my father died when he was young and he always thought he was going to die when he was young. In fact, he told us that much. I've always felt that I was going to live long. So I don't fear so much that I'll die prematurely. But as I get older, I definitely become aware of the fact that my time on earth is dissipating. And that I don't know if you can age and not feel that acutely, especially if you have kids. Right. So I have kids and I'm seeing them get older and go to college and life change in that way. My awareness of the importance of time certainly stems from my father's death because I realized that it could be cut short so quickly. So I've always been a pretty serious kid. I've always been a fairly introverted and thoughtful kid. And I tend not to put things off that are important to me. And I don't know if that's changed at all. Time changes for me. Just the other day, I had a dear friend whose husband didn't come home from work, couldn't find him, couldn't find him. Lo and behold, the sheriff shows up at the door and he died in a car crash. They're married 18 years. They have four kids. It woke me up again. These kinds of events wake me up to the perception of time that I've been fortunate. I haven't had the premature death of a parent. I haven't had the premature death of friends. And since I've had loss in the sense of losing dear pets and a couple of close relatives, but I haven't experienced it. It's these experiences that really wake us up to the power of time, I think. Yeah. And I think there's got to be a point, too, where you throw your hands up in the air and you realize that you really just have no control. Losing my dad when I was seven, I realized again, we as human beings can't control these things and almost no one escapes this life unscathed, right? If you are a human being and you live to any reasonable age, you are going to deal with tragedy and sadness. You're going to see people you love profoundly die. And so you can sit and worry and fear about that. You can obsess over it to no end. Or you can realize that it's out of our control. But what is under our control, again, is what we do today. And I think that's exceedingly powerful. I can't change what's going to happen to my loved ones or what's going to happen to me. But I can certainly spend time with them. I can be giving and open. I can pursue those things that are important to me. And so maybe that's the antidote. The antidote to time is not trying to make it feel longer or it's not trying to live longer, although we should take care of ourselves, etc. I think the antidote is to be so busy doing those things that are important to you that you're kind of not even aware that it's passing, that it's going on its own and you're doing your thing. And I think, you know, that's that idea of being in the arena, the old Teddy Roosevelt, you know, speech about I'd rather be the guy in the arena than the one criticizing out in the stands. I think we want to spend our lives in the arena. And how long that bullfight's going to last? No one knows. But I'd rather be out there fighting than be in the stands watching or criticizing. And I guess that's that's my goal. And I think that's my that's my best way of dealing with time in a way that that doesn't cause me sadness or anxiety. Well, there's a quote you actually have in your book, I believe, that says, we are dying from the day we were born. We are living until the day that we die. I think that's so appropriate. Everybody's looking for investment tips, Jordan. Your hot investment tips come from an undertaker, I believe. And when undertaker talks, people have to listen. Do you have any investment tips for our audience in relation to time or money? I mean, there are many of them in the book. And so, again, this gets to why is investing and only one of the many actually deals with investing your monetary assets. Most of it is investing in the important stuff, right? It's investing in the people, the education, yourself, your body, your mind. It's investing in failing and trying and pursuing purpose. I think those are the wisest tips that you can get from an undertaker or hospice doctor, because we've seen the end so much that instead of focusing on the end, instead of looking at the end point, we're saying, go back and look at the beginning and the middle. Let's look at the process. Let's do what's important to us before we get to the end. Only one small part of that advice is about money. And the advice about money can be summed up in save as much as you can, put it in the index funds, and let it be so that it can grow, right? We all know that the basics of personal finance really comes down to some simple, straightforward strategies that anyone can understand. It's trying to invest in the rest of life that I think is hard. But just like your monetary investments, if you invest appropriately in life and education, knowledge, relationships, physical and mental health, if you invest in those things, they compound and pay dividends and lead to a life, hopefully, with much less regrets and a lot more peace. Yeah, the ever-present memory dividend for a guy with zero, that's an important one. There's lots of dividends that have nothing to do with money. I think in coming to the end of the show that late starters have got it right in time more than money. I think we have spent our time, if we can use the word spend again, in hopefully more productive ways and not push things off to the future. And we've increased our memory dividends as late starters, even if we didn't pay as much attention to our monetary dividends and we're catching up with those. Ideally, maybe we would have been balanced from the beginning, maybe the middle brother, where you're 50-50. A 50-50 approach to life, I think, is a great way to start. It's not self-focused. It's not externally focused. It's a balance of focus, inside, outside, money and time. What do you think? I think that's very true. And what we have to remind late starters is Maslow's pyramid is flattened. And yes, maybe you're not at where you want to be with the monetary aspect, but you've probably covered a lot of other aspects. And I'll tell you, the monetary part is knowable. It's, again, not easy, but we can build those steps to help you improve your monetary life. If you are a late starter when it comes to purpose, identity and connections, that's a lot harder to fix. It really is. I agree. There's a little conversation you had with your daughter that I don't know if I can jog your memory to recall about life and death. Can you tell us that conversation, please? So when my daughter was very young, I was very interested in how she related to this idea of death. And I remember sitting with her one day in bed. You know, she was probably early elementary school, maybe even kindergarten. And she asked me that when people die, do we walk on them? Right. This whole idea that people are buried. And I had this kind of intense conversation with her about death. You know, and it's interesting talking to kids about death because they don't have any of these built in beliefs that adults eventually have. Right. We get emotional and intellectual and our conversation about death is a lot less present. And it's a lot more ephemeral as we get older. But kids have the basic questions like what happens to us? Where do we go? And as I was having this conversation with my daughter, I realized that to contemplate explaining death to her was such a huge leap because I was still trying to figure out how to live and I was still trying to figure out how to teach her how to live. And yet to have a good death, we have to have a good life. And to have a good life, we have to figure out how to live, which means we have to start looking at these things that are important to us and addressing them now and not putting them off. And only then do I think we get to the point where we have a life without regrets. And I think the conversation with her really drove home how confused we are about life and death and what they mean. Well, you have a story of Ronald and we can come back to him briefly to close out our show today. He was on his deathbed with all of his loved ones surrounding him, having gotten to the end of a life with pancreatic cancer. And he said something that was profound to you. I think he said something to the extent of dying is the easy part. The hard part was learning how to live, which again comes back to this idea that death is guaranteed. We're all going to die. And no matter how much of a screw up you are, you're going to get there. The living part, it's very variable. Yes, we live, but some people live again these open, joyous, passionate lives and some people don't. And so I don't worry too much about death. I worry about how I'm going to live this best life that I have. And I think that gets back to the themes of how we invest ourselves both monetarily and otherwise. I think that's one of the challenges that late starters have is because they may have been living their best life and hopefully not too lost in consumption doing so. But they get to the point where they have to frugal down. They get to the point where they have to grow their income. They get to the point where they have to save more. They have to tighten their belts. And how do they lose out on the purpose, identity, and connection of life while having to focus later in life on money? So you're tightening your belt, but you can't tighten it too hard because it hurts. We found, for example, in our lives that we went from an 8% savings rate to a 40, 45% savings rate. And that's where tightening the belt was comfortable. What about you, Becky? Well, we had a lot of choices to make later in life also. And, you know, I'm just sitting here thinking that probably most of our audience would be in what I would call the second half of their life. I mean, we do have some 30-year-olds in our audience, but I would say mostly we're 40s, 50s, maybe a few 60s. I think this conversation today was so important because to get things right later in life, you have to focus so much harder. You have to concentrate your efforts so much more than you would have earlier in life. If we had concentrated our efforts on purpose, connection, and identity in our 30s, if we had concentrated on saving money in our 30s, that work is so much less hard now in our 50s. But we didn't, and that's okay. So I think that's why today's conversation was so great because we've got folks that need to concentrate on a lot of different things at the same time. They need to think about their money. They need to think about their relationships. They need to think about what's important to them. And I think you've given us such a great framework to do that from. Thank you so much. And Bill and Becky, I think you both are great examples. I, knowing you guys both well enough, can say, look at the amount of purpose, identity, and connections you've built in your life after the age of 50. And I imagine you would have never imagined at the age of 40 or 30 how this new richness would have entered your life. And again, I'm talking about richness when it comes to purpose, identity, and connections and not money. But I've watched both of you build communities around yourselves and pursue passions that you probably had no idea were passions before the age of 50. No, that's absolutely true. This community, this podcast, it's all changed my life. The last five years, it's been exponential dividends of purpose, identity, and connection, especially the connection. That's where this is built. That's how this podcast is built. We appreciate our audience's attention today. We hope this has been a conversation. You've enjoyed as much as we have. Thank you, Jordan, for joining us today on Catching Up to Five. Oh, thank you so much for having me. Well, thank you, Bill. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, thanks, Jordan, for joining us today on Catching Up to Five. This has been an awesome conversation. Our folks, our listeners need to know where to reach you and how to get your book. Can you help us out with that? The easiest way is pretty much to go to jordangrumet.com. That's J-O-R-D-A-N-G-R-U-M-E-T.com. There, of course, you can learn about the book, but you can also find links to the three ways in which I produce content. For years, I wrote a medical blog, and that is there. It's called In My Humble Opinion, as well as my connections to my financial blog, Diversify. Last but not least, where I spend most of my time creating content today is the Earn and Invest podcast. JordanGrumet.com gets you all of that. I'm a big fan of the Earn and Invest podcast, and I hope everybody else is, too. It's been an excellent source of information for me for the last four to five years running. How many episodes do you have? How many downloads do you have? How much engagement do you have from your community? Oh, geez. We've got, I think, about 430, 435 episodes. Some of them are unnumbered, and that's why I waffle on the number. I've been at it now for, in a little bit, years, and we have just passed 2.5 million downloads. It keeps us busy and engaged. It's a fun community, and it's just fun interacting with people and creating something that people listen to. Well, that's an incredible amount of success, and kudos to you for that. I would encourage all our listeners today on Catching Up to Five to engage with Jordan and his community, to earn and invest, as well as listen to his podcast. Thanks again for being here with us today, Jordan. Thank you for having me. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Catching Up to Five. We would appreciate it if you could leave a five-star review so that our message can reach others. We are not lawyers, financial advisors, accountants, or tax experts. Please consult your own professional advisors before making any important decisions. This is a program that is designed to help you get the most out of your financial year. We are not lawyers, financial advisors, accountants, or tax experts. Please consult your own professional advisors before making any important decisions. This is a program that is designed to help you get the most out of your financial year. We are not lawyers, financial advisors, accountants, or tax experts. Please consult your own professional advisors before making any important decisions. Our content is for entertainment and education purposes only. We'll see you next time on Catching Up to Five.