244 | 5 Books That Made Me a Millionaire

Having access to the right information can add multiple zeroes to your net worth.

In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on the 5 transformative books that propelled me to millionaire status.

• • the 5 books that transformed my finances
  • the gem that I pulled from each book

• I Will Teach You to Be Rich – Ramit Sethi
• The Simple Path to Wealth – JL Collins
• Your Money or Your Life – Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez
• The Millionaire Next Door – Thomas J. Stanley
• Essentialism – Greg McKeown

You’re listening to Personal Finance for Lawyers. I’m Rho Thomas, and as a busy wife, mom, and former Biglaw associate, I know all too well the tension between the culture of the legal profession and pretty much everything else you want to do in life. That’s why each week, I’m bringing you the information and tools you need to improve your money mindset and manage your money to create true wealth. Because ultimately, it’s not about the money. It’s about the freedom and flexibility the money affords.

Hey friend. Welcome back to the show. I hope you’re doing well and having an amazing day so far. Today, we are talking about the five books that made me a millionaire. We live in such an amazing time where we have access to a wealth of information, and we can see how other people are managing their money, how other people think about money, and we can apply those things to our own finances. So I’m going to share five books that really impacted me on my money journey, and hopefully you can get some insights from them as well. Number one, I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi. This is actually the very first money book that I ever read. It was a summer after my senior year of college, and I think my cousin had the book, and I was reading it just learning about money, because I didn’t know anything about it. And I was now on my own. I was an adult, and I was going to be having my own apartment and handling bills for the first time and all of that. So I read this book, and one of the biggest things that I took from this book was the idea of spending money on things that you love and cutting the things that you don’t. This is something that Ramit talked about in the book, and it was the first that I had ever heard of it, because what I thought managing your money well was all about, was the scrimping and the cutting and the deprivation, and you can’t do this and you can’t do that, but really money is about being intentional with how you use it. And so there were some really interesting examples in this book. Like one was a guy who lived in, like, a really cheap apartment, because he didn’t care where he lived, but he spent five figures going out to eat and going out to bars and all that kind of stuff, because he cared about that, but he didn’t care about his apartment. So that is something that I took from this book, and it has carried into how I manage my money and how I teach my clients to manage money. So definitely check out. I Will Teach You To Be Rich, by Ramit Sethi. The second one is The Simple Path to Wealth, by JL Collins. So this book actually started as a blog. The author created a blog because he wanted to teach his daughter about money. She was headed off to college or something like that, and she just wasn’t interested. And so he created a blog sharing the things that he wanted to teach her, and other people picked it up, started learning about money from his perspective, and loved it. And ultimately, he made it into a book. So what I love about this book is it’s written literally for someone who does not care about money, someone who is not interested in learning about money at all, and it’s written for a teenager. So it’s something that’s really easy to understand. It’s really easy to follow, and he’s just got great tips on how to manage your money to build wealth. So I highly recommend The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins. Number three is your money or your life, by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez. So this book is actually something that was written in the 90s. I want to say it was the first time that it was released, and it was re released within the last, say, five to 10 years. And the concept of the book, or the premise of the book, is equating the money that you spend with the hours that it takes you to make that money. And the authors suggest that you not only look at the amount of time you spend actively working, but look at the time that is otherwise dedicated to work as well. So getting ready for work, commuting to your job, commuting home, decompressing at the end of the day, if you’ve got other like networking type events or mixers or things like that, like all of this time that you spend around work, and you take all of that time and you divide it into the amount of money that you make, so your salary, right? Divide it by the number of hours total that you spend devoted to work, and that gives you what they call your true hourly rate. And then from there, you’re looking at your purchases against this true hourly rate. So if my true hourly rate was $100 an hour, now, when I’m looking to buy something, that’s $500 it’s not just $500 it’s five hours of my life. Is this thing worth five hours of my life? I thought it was a really interesting way to think about your money, because often we don’t associate the dollars with anything in particular. It’s just money to spend, right? I’ve got it in my account. I can spend it, but when you’re able to associate it with the time that it actually takes you to make that money and thinking about like, is this thing right? Is this thing that I want to buy worth that amount of time you might make some different purchasing decisions. And I’ll say, I don’t necessarily think about money in that way, like I’m not going through and making that determination of how many hours of my life is this thing worth. But it was really a big illustration of the concept of the trade offs that you’re making with your money. Like, is this thing worth it to me? Is it worth the five hours that I spent making this money. For me, the way that I’ve used that in my finances is not so much. Is this thing worth the five hours of my life, but I’m thinking about the $500 that I’m spending on this thing, and how I then can’t use it for my own goals or for something else that I want. So that concept of equating the money that you’re spending with something else, something that is more meaningful to you, is kind of what I gleaned from this book, so your money, or your life, by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez is the third book on my list. All right. Number four, The Millionaire Next Door, by Thomas J Stanley. So this book just sheds a light into what it truly means to be a millionaire in America. I think we often get these images of the fancy celebrities and the a list actors and, you know, whatever else, the businessman, all these people with the big houses and the fancy cars and whatever, whatever. And yes, there are wealthy people who have those things, but there are also a lot of wealthy people who are kind of flying under the radar. They live normal lives, they live in a modest house, they drive a regular car, but they have built wealth. And so the idea behind this book is to kind of debunk the images, the ideas that we have about what wealthy people look like, and understand that there are a lot of wealthy people who are flying under the radar, and sometimes the people who have the big house, the fancy car, all of that have those things, they’re projecting this image of wealth, but they don’t actually have wealth. So that book made me think differently about wealth and about what it means to be wealthy and what wealthy people do with their money. The final book is Essentialism by Greg McKeown. Now this one isn’t actually a finance book. It is all about how we manage our time. But I found the principles that he talks about with respect to time are equally applicable with respect to money. The biggest one being the way that we typically spread our time and our energy across so many different things. So we’re on all the different committees, and we’ve said yes to this thing, we’ve said yes to that thing. And he talks about how you’re only able to make a little bit of progress on each thing, and what would happen if instead of making a little bit of progress on a bunch of different things, you made a bunch of progress on the one thing that matters. And so I took that same concept into my finances. So instead of making a little bit of progress on a bunch of different financial goals, we choose the one that’s most important to us, and we direct the bulk of our money there. And it’s not necessarily to say that we don’t also pursue other goals, but we make it so that the majority of the money is going to whatever goal is the most important to us. The biggest example of this that I have is that during our journey of getting out of debt, we continued to invest, we continued to put money into our retirement accounts. We also continued to invest in a taxable brokerage account, but we did each of those on a very constrained basis. So we were putting about 3% into our retirement accounts to get the match, and then we put $100 $150 into a taxable brokerage account. And that was actually a compromise, because my husband wanted to continue saving while we were paying off debt, but we had these savings accounts that were 1% that’s what high yield savings accounts were paying back when we started. And so that just didn’t make sense to me to put money into this savings account at 1% when we had all of this debt, that was much higher. So the compromise was that we would put a little bit into the brokerage account and invest, and that way we could still make a little bit of money on it, but we also satisfy that desire that he had to save you. So by approaching our goals in that way, we were able to make significant progress on paying off our debt, because the majority 90 to 95% of the extra money that we had went to that goal, but we were but we were still able to put some money for other things as well. So those are the five books that made me a millionaire. I hope that those are helpful for you, and that you’re able to glean some insights from them if you decide to read them. Please take a second and subscribe to the show. Leave a review if you have not done so already. Both of those things help us to get this information in the hands of more lawyers. And as always, I appreciate your support. As we close out friend, I pray that you take the information you learn here, apply it in your life and open up to the realization that wealth is available to you. As you do that consistently, week after week, you’ll continue to take steps to regain control of your time, build wealth and live the life of freedom and choice you deserve. Talk to you later.