TONY BRADSHAW | The Millionaire Choice

I caught up with Tony Bradshaw in this episode to discuss the steps that you need to take to get ahead financially. It was partly inspired by a message I received from a listener who asked "how can I start investing when I'm living paycheck to paycheck?"

The Millionaire Choice is about encouraging people to make the choice to become millionaires and equipping them with the right knowledge, tools and assistance to reach their millionaire goal. Tony believes that everyone who wants to become a millionaire can do it if they make the right choices. Millionaire or Not. You Can Choose.

Tony Bradshaw - the builder of future millionaires. He is on a mission to battle poverty by providing financial hope, education, and inspiration. He grew up in a lower-income neighborhood in Nashville, TN, and in his early 20's, he realized he was mismanaging his money and knew something needed to change. That’s when he set out to learn how to handle money better. After learning how to handle money at age 25, Tony made his millionaire choice and created his millionaire plan. He accomplished his goal of becoming a millionaire by age 40. Now he's helping everyone he can make the choice and create their own millionaire plan. Tony also has years of financial experience by running business development for Dave Ramsey.

TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS AFTER THIS BRIEF MESSAGE

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Phil Muscatello (28s):

Hi and welcome back to Stocks for Beginners. I'm Phil Muscatello. For many struggling with poverty, financial training, isn't available for one simple reason. There's no money to be made. You can't make money off people who don't have money. My guest today has a mission and vision to find ways to help and serve people in poverty with financial education. Hello Tony

Tony Bradshaw (49s):

Hey Philip. Thanks for having me on the show.

Phil Muscatello (51s):

No worries. Thank you. Tony Bradshaw is the author of the Millionaire Choice and the host of the Millionaire Choice podcast. Tony sums up his work as the Millionaire's Manifesto, aspiring to create a movement of financially educated and wealthy people who will make it their mission to fight poverty and help those in need. Tony, you were raised in a financially messy home in Nashville, which I believe that's where you still live. Is that right?

Tony Bradshaw (1m 17s):

Absolutely. Yeah. I'm 50 years old, 51 actually just a few days raised in Nashville. My parents, my dad still lives in the same home that he grew up, that I grew up in and they bought it when I was about a year old. And these a little bit of work had a tree that fell on it. This, this from the tornadoes. If you watch the news, we get tornados here in Nashville. So, and but yeah, it's definitely a financially messy home.

Phil Muscatello (1m 38s):

They didn't teach you the play the guitar. Did you learn guitar as a kid? I mean, I thought they would've taught that in elementary school.

Tony Bradshaw (1m 44s):

No. I learned how to swing a hammer. Okay.

Phil Muscatello (1m 47s):

So tell us about growing up and about your family and obviously you love your family, but they weren't very good with money.

Tony Bradshaw (1m 55s):

No, you know, it's interesting. I think kids are so resilient that we don't really realize what's going on around us at the ages, you know, unless it's really, really bad then it does. But my parents both grew up in broken homes. My dad basically had to take care of himself from 10th grade on. He dropped out of school in the 10th grade. So he didn't have a role model, a father figure, or even really a mother figure in his life that was dependable. My mom on the other hand was raised in a single parent household. My father, a grandfather was a alcoholic womanizer. And so they split up pretty, pretty early, I think. And then my, my grandmother had raised three or four kids. So my mom really didn't have anybody to pattern. Like she didn't have a healthy home life. I think that's very important for stability, but my parents, because they didn't have those things, they went above and beyond and trying to provide those for me and my sister.

Tony Bradshaw (2m 46s):

And, and it was really interesting to see that because they, they did that in spades, right. They, they gave us, they probably gave us too much. Right. It's not that we had a lot of things, but the things that they could provide for us, they didn't hold back. You, there was a one Christmas. I remember my mom, they didn't have good Christmases growing up. So they would spend. They spent like a thousand dollars. They wanted to have a blowout Christmas. So they spend a thousand dollars on each of us for Christmas, got us, waterbeds got us, all these things and looking back I'm like, that was the dumbest thing that you could have ever done with your money. It's like, you know, kids get, you know, it's like, Hey, you know, you don't have to spend that much on kids to have a good Christmas is what you make of the time.

Tony Bradshaw (3m 29s):

And what's really important. But I do appreciate that. They did that. And my mom, I think her love language, if you know, the five love languages by Gary Chapman is probably gifts. You know, she likes to give gifts. And so she, that's how she kinda express love. And that's what she did. But at the same time, you know, you're, you're giving these kind of gifts and letting your kids have things when your power is getting cut off or your water's getting cut off or you're bouncing checks regularly, you know, those kinds of things that, that didn't kind of jive. Right? And so you're sacrificing one thing for this other thing that really maybe isn't as important or isn't important, but you know, that's, that's the life that we grew up in and not making great financial choices, but doing the best you can.

Tony Bradshaw (4m 14s):

Right. And then at 25, I was kind of doing the same thing, right. So you kind of mirror what you've been shown. And I was kind of doing the same thing, but fortunately I kind of woke up from that. So I got my first W2 out of college, made 0,39 grand, but I was $16,000 in debt. And that math just didn't add up for me. Thank God I had calculus three, right. Because I understood numbers and math and I'm like that math isn't working and I got to make a change. That's a big deal. And that's what I began my financial journey.

Phil Muscatello (4m 42s):

And what happened. Let's go back to 25 year old. Tony, what changed and what was the process you went through and was it all self-generated

Tony Bradshaw (4m 50s):

Yes, it was, you know, I think the things that when I think back to my mindset at 25, you know, I was making more money than my mom was making. So I was pretty prideful about that. I'm like, here I am making, you know, 24, 25 years old making $39,000. My mom's making 35 grand. She's been working at this for, you know, 25 years. She's, you know, 20 years older than me. I'm like, man, I'm doing pretty good, a little bit full of myself. I mean, most 20 year olds are 20 something year olds are right. And, and I thought felt pretty good about myself. And then I got the W2. I looked at that $39,000 and I thought about it. I'm like, man, I am $16,000 in debt. What do I have like that money?

Tony Bradshaw (5m 31s):

Like I've only got 500 bucks in my checking account. I made 39 grand last year. I've never seen that much money in my lifetime. And fortunately I had that thought because I looked around, I was living in a studio bedroom apartment at my parents' house. I looked at that and I'm like, man, I've got $13,000 car debt. So I financed a car. I've got probably about two grand on a computer that I financed and a thousand dollars miscellaneous consumer debt on credit cards. And like, that's not a good, that's not a good form. I made 39 grand. I'm 16 grand in debt. That's a 50, $55,000 move in the wrong direction. Like that's not going to work. So that's what caused me to go, you know what? I've got to shift, I've got to change. I can't what I did last year.

Tony Bradshaw (6m 12s):

I could never do again. And that's really the simplicity of how I looked at it. Fortunately, that was the, it was a small hole to dig out of not a large hole. And so I started learning what I call getting money smart. Now I started learning everything I could about money, you know, reading magazines, but you know, it was pre-internet, there weren't a lot of resources on the internet back then, but learned everything I could. And, and I really realized, you know, money is really not that complicated. Phillip is, it's just not, it's, it's, it's a numbers game. Right. And it's a little bit more than that, but its simplest form for me, it was a numbers game and I did the math and I went, you know what? I think I can be a millionaire at age 40. So I went from being this broke guy, not managing his money, not even knowing what money was really just spending it to believing that I could be a millionaire by age 40.

Tony Bradshaw (6m 58s):

And, and the transition there for me was really this wake up call. And I think some people have that wake-up call when they have a lot of pain. So, you know, if you're having money fights with your wife, you have to shift. Right. And so what I find is that people shift when I have a lot of pain or they shift when they want something different. And for me it was something different, like an opportunity, my pain wasn't that bad, but I knew that it wasn't working. And I, and I think what happens it did for me was you get you latch onto this vision. Right? And so in up here, you know, Dave Ramsey is a big name that runs around appearing in a America and his mindset is, you know, get debt free. So he provides people with a debt free vision.

Tony Bradshaw (7m 38s):

Well, I went and I did debt free, but also did millionaire vision at the same time. So the shift that happened for me is I went from spending every penny I made to going, Hey, let's simply, let's see, get our cash flowing in the right direction. Like I don't want to budget every dollar. So I started living off about a thousand dollars a month. So I sh I shaved back then my living expenses to a thousand, so 200 to my mom, 800 to me. And then I started paying on debt. So about a third of my money, went to debt. And then the third of it started going into investing. So about 1,000, 1 thousand and 1000, that's the, roughly the ratio I was working with. And within about 18 months, I was able to pay off all my debt and also have about $18,000 in, you know, investment funds, mostly mutual funds.

Tony Bradshaw (8m 20s):

I was doing, half of mine was going into mutual funds. Half of it was going into stocks. I was trading tech stocks at the time and entails series IMD, micron technologies. And I think Dell computer might've been one, maybe I think those were the four or five I was jumping between and make it pretty good and doing pretty well with that, you know, for a starter, a starter investing startup investor. And, and yeah, that was kind of my plan. And I just kinda rolled on that until my wife came into the picture and she shifted my financial goals a little bit

Phil Muscatello (8m 52s):

And started having kids.

Tony Bradshaw (8m 54s):

Yeah. Just food for thought for a, you know, when you don't, you don't understand how much, how expensive kids are. Right? Yeah. I was trying my best to convince my wife to do cloth diapers, man. Cause I didn't want to pay that $1,500 a month for, for $1,500 per kid, per kid, for those disposable diapers

Phil Muscatello (9m 15s):

This week, I received a message from a listener who was asking about how to get ahead when you're just living from paycheck to paycheck and from the sound of things, she was on minimum wage. I mean, it's very hard for some people because you know, you sort of started from a reasonable level with a reasonable job, but there are many people living in absolute close to near poverty aren't there.

Tony Bradshaw (9m 40s):

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean 77, over 70% of people up here in America are living paycheck to paycheck, you know? And, and it's, it's not good. Now a lot of those are that self-inflicted right. So it's not 77% are living paycheck to paycheck because they're that broke or they don't have enough money. It's just, they're mismanaging what they do have. But there is another group of people who just don't have the level of income they need to meet their basic needs.

Phil Muscatello (10m 4s):

Any thoughts on advice for them?

Tony Bradshaw (10m 7s):

Yeah. I mean, I think it's the same. So when you go back to, I have to rewind the clock later. So, you know, when I was at 25, I had a pretty decent wage for the day. Now that that, that wage today is not that great, right? It's not a, an astounding amount of money, but what I have to do is rewind the clock back to when I started my working career, you know, at age like 10, 11, 12, 13, because my mom put me to work at her convenience store. So she was a manager at a convenience store and she was a really good manager. So they gave her three convenience stores to manage and a very transient work style. You know, employees coming and going and employees stealing from you. My mom was working 80 to a hundred hours. Some of the weeks she would go up at 2:00 AM in the night just to catch her employees stealing beer, out of the, out of the thing, like literally their friends would pull their cars up to the door, back up and then open the trunk.

Tony Bradshaw (10m 56s):

And they would just start loading cases of beer in from the store and she'd catch him and fire him on the spot. You know, getting robbed by gunpoint. That was the life that my mother grew up trying to provide for our family. But what happened at that point is when she was able to get me a job, I was making, I believe $3 and 35 cents an hour back then, of course, this was, you know, 30, 40 years ago. And, and I kept thinking like, if I could just make another dollar an hour, like things are gonna change, you know? And then I made another dollar an hour and nothing changed. And then you start thinking, well, if I could just make another dollar an hour, things will change and it doesn't change. So you have to, what you have to do is get ahead of that kind of thinking, because that's an hourly wage based thinking.

Tony Bradshaw (11m 40s):

And the problem with that is, is we are limited with what we can accomplish by our own thinking. So the first thing you have to do is change your mindset and your thinking, Hey, these are my circumstances today, but don't have to be my circumstances tomorrow. What am I going to do to change my circumstances for tomorrow? And the way you do that is it comes down to using one of your most valuable assets you have, which is your mind, right? You have to train your mind, both in the financial world, you have to learn about finances, but you also have to learn about career sets, right? So if you're going to use a job type ma model to increase your standard of living, you have to increase your value in the marketplace.

Tony Bradshaw (12m 22s):

And the only way you're going to do that is by learning a new skill or learning, learn sales, right? So if you're trapped in a minimum wage job, well, that's probably not a sales job, right? Because sales typically is, if you can become a good salesperson, which anybody can do sales, anyone can do sales, but if you can master that skill set, you know, you have a lot more opportunity. Sales jobs typically pay on average a lot more than, you know, obviously fast food, right? So you have to, you have to invest in yourself and I've got some, you know, I started doing that at a very young age. Like if I did anything right at a young age, that was it. But that's, if I was talking to that lady that you mentioned, that's what I would tell her. I would say, Hey, this is where you are today, but it doesn't mean you have to be there tomorrow.

Tony Bradshaw (13m 5s):

You know, invest in yourself, grow yourself, you know, go to the library, learn something new. And the other one would be attach yourself to people that are where you want to go. Right? So I let go of a lot of my friendships because my friends were not going where I wanted to go. And so you have to let go of some of those relationships and attach yourself to other relationships that are going to go where you want to be.

Phil Muscatello (13m 24s):

So what makes you believe that anyone can become a millionaire?

Tony Bradshaw (13m 27s):

Well, you know, I've got a show called the Millionaire Choice and I, I'm not a genius man, no way. You know, I kind of laugh like this poor boy from Tennessee. He can figure out how to be a millionaire. Anybody can figure out how to be a millionaire, but the more in the interviews I've done, I have just come to the realization like man, that all the stories are like, wow, you know, they're all the same. It's, they're all the same. Some of them, most of them are, have it harder than I had it. Like I just did an interview for my show, his dad, his father. So he did not come from a silver spoon. His dad was alcoholic, gotten a wonderful guy, young man, 38 years old. And I say, young Bryce Henson, his dad was an alcoholic drug addict and womanizer.

Tony Bradshaw (14m 12s):

And, and he, at 10 years old, his mom separated from his dad. And they had nothing like that family. They had to split because it was so bad, the relationship so bad. And that, that guy's 38 years old and he's a millionaire. I've got other people who were five years old and their mom told them in the grocery store, you can't, don't ask me for a candy bar, JV Crum of the Conscious Millionaire. Don't ask me for a candy bar. Cause I don't want people to think that I don't have, we don't have money. And he goes home. He goes, this is a problem. Why can't I buy a candy bar? Five-year-old young boy. And he goes, he goes, I know what the problem is. I'm going to be a millionaire. When I grow up and by age 25, he was a millionaire. And so, and that's, I made the more of those stories I hear and they're there.

Tony Bradshaw (14m 54s):

And they, some of them are even worse than that. Like it's just like some of the horrendous circumstances that people grow up in, but yet they are able to transcend that. And I think it's a mindset shift because those people, all, you know, whether you believe you can or you can't, you're true, right. Both things are right. If you believe you can't do it, then you won't do it. If you believe you can do it, then you will do it. And that's what is true about all the people I've interviewed is that they decided to believe that they can and they broke from their family's way of doing things and they were able to accomplish something great. And in many cases became the first millionaires in their family.

Phil Muscatello (15m 27s):

So you've got some budgeting tips. Can you share them with dealer listeners please?

Tony Bradshaw (15m 31s):

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I break my budget. I don't think budgeting needs to be overly complicated. So a lot of people say budget every penny. And if you're that type of person go for it, you know that if that's what excites

Phil Muscatello (15m 44s):

You do

Tony Bradshaw (15m 45s):

It. And I've done that, I've done that. But I believe more in the cashflow plan, which is going, Hey, as a mindset, I don't have to manage every penny. What I have to do is get my cash, my money flowing to things that are beneficial to me. So, but you do have to have a lay of the land, right? So I just break the budget down into four simple categories, which is living money. So how much money does it take you to live on? What do I need to eat, sleep? You know, bathe, you know, electricity, water, food, what are those things that I have to pay every month just to, to exist on the planet, right? The next category would be wealth, money. You know, what am I investing for the future? And then play money and other money. Cause you gotta have some fun in life.

Tony Bradshaw (16m 26s):

You've gotta, you know, experienced. But the problem is most people have way too much living expense, money and way too much play money and not enough in the wealth money or the other's money. Right? And so I'm a big believer that you need to look at that and go, okay, my percentages are off, right? If you're 90% living money, 10% play money and zero in wealth and zero in others, it's obvious you're off. And I try to get people to start thinking like, how can I get, you know, 10%, 20%, 30% of my income, 40%, 50% of my income into that wealth money bucket. Right? So when people start changing their mindset, when they get a dollar in or you know, some cash in, they don't automatically think to spend it.

Tony Bradshaw (17m 8s):

They think where they can invest it. And I've got a great guy, just listened to a friend of mine. Now I just met him. I've known him for a year, a guy named Jeremy Newsome. And he made his first investment when he was, I believe, six years old. And he invested in talk to his dad into buying Apple Stock in like 1996 after watching Forrest Gump, right with Tom Hanks. So now he's 32 years old and he's a multi multimillionaire owns his own island in the British Virgin islands. But he thinks about the world in a different light too. So instead of thinking about earning money, like he goes, if I want to go to Starbucks, I go, I want Starbucks. So I go invest in Starbucks.

Tony Bradshaw (17m 48s):

I go make money off Starbucks. And then I go buy Starbucks with my Starbucks money that I made from the investments I made in Starbucks. So that's how, if I want a Tesla, he drives Tesla. If I want a Tesla, I go invest in Tesla. I make money off Tesla. And then I go buy a Tesla with Tesla money. So he thinks about the world and the financial place in a totally different realm, even than I do. He kind of changed my thinking a little bit this weekend. So, but you know, but your original question was budgeting. And I think all of those things play in together. It's really about getting your cash into the, spinning it all, figuring out how to put it to work for you. So it's sort of working for your money, make your money work for you.

Phil Muscatello (18m 28s):

But that is an interesting thought, isn't it? That the, the kind of products and services that you spend your money on, you can also invest in them as well. Is this virtuous cycle there isn't there and investing really needs to be part of people's mindset to achieve financial independence. Yeah.

Tony Bradshaw (18m 47s):

I think the thing is, is, and I'm guilty of this too, because you know, I think originally my, my 25 year old mindset was like, get out of debt that's bad and then invest in re and live off your wealth at age 40. I didn't do it at age 40, but I did do it at age 46. So I've been living off my investments now for four years. And, you know, I probably could have done it sooner if I didn't have six kids. If I wasn't paying for private school, if I wasn't paying for college, I could have done it a little bit sooner and lived a little bit more, you know, luxuriously. Right. But that's not where I'm at. So, but what has changed in my thinking is to go, you know what? I just need to be more disciplined to go every dollar I get, where can I put it?

Tony Bradshaw (19m 30s):

Where can I put it where it multiplies? And I think that's the mindset shift is where can I put this money, this extra money I have so that it multiplies. And that should become part of your mindset and your vernacular every time. And I don't think that I really thought that way for the last, you know, 15, 20, well, 25 years, I was thinking about how to live off wealth, but I wasn't thinking about every dollar can be multiplied. And I think that's new, new thinking for me. And, and it really is changing the change in the way that I look at investing to you as well.

Phil Muscatello (20m 1s):

And especially for someone who's young, if you can start thinking that way, putting your money away, you've got such a head start because it's going to compound over many decades.

Tony Bradshaw (20m 11s):

Yeah. And you know, and I'm a, I'm a cryptocurrency investor. I don't know if you are, but I've been playing with cryptocurrencies now for three or four years, but there's probably a half a dozen to a dozen cryptocurrencies this year that if you had studied it and been in it, $10,000 would now be a million dollars like Doge Coin is one, Shiba's one. There's a lot more than those, that tail coins one, like there's quite a few cryptocurrencies. So this is a season right now. That is it's very similar in the financial world to what happened with, you know, the internet with email, with e-commerce, with Amazon, with iTunes and music, where you're looking at these transformative things that were happening in these industries, that technology had a profound impact on that's, what's really happening with the financial world.

Tony Bradshaw (20m 55s):

And I think if people can realize that they can take advantage of it, but you know, there's only like 23 million cryptocurrency investors in the United States, but there's 340 million people. So we have less than less than 10% of the US population is investing in cryptocurrency. And I haven't looked at the rest of the worldwide stats. I don't have them at the top of my top of mind, but you have to understand, you know, in the financial world, if you can recognize those opportunities, you can take advantage of them. Tesla was another great example, right? Tesla's up like now 900% over the last 18 months or something, but I've been, Tesla's been out there for 15 years, right? So it's doing very much like an Amazon thing. Amazon was losing money, losing money, losing money, losing money, losing money.

Tony Bradshaw (21m 37s):

And then after 10 or 12 years, all of a sudden it turned a profit. And now it's like, you know, world domination, right. And I think Tesla's following that same model. So if you're looking for these opportunities and can train yourself to, you know, turn off the television, turn off Facebook, turn off all these distractions and then repurpose your time. Then you can turn your time. Cause I always say, right, time is money, right? And this is one manifestation of that. Where how you use your time will turn into money or will turn, or it will turn into whatever you're investing in. Some of that's going to be beneficial for you for the future. Some of it is not.

Phil Muscatello (22m 14s):

That's so true how you use your time is so important and learning, improving yourself, adding new skills. And it's interesting what you say about crypto because yeah, I have some small investments in crypto, but there's a lot of people who find it intimidating. They just have no idea what's going on. Another guest that I was speaking to this week was talking about investing, not so much directly in crypto, but directly in the companies that deal with crypto is Coinbase for example, the idea is that you're investing in the picks and the shovels. You're not the miner going and trying to dig the gold itself, but you're investing in those picks and shovels. So there's, there's many ways of looking at this and the ways of looking at investing and how it suits you personally as well.

Phil Muscatello (22m 58s):

Yeah.

Tony Bradshaw (22m 58s):

I think if we got one dimensional, that's the dangerous thing, right? If you get, become a one dimensional investor, you know, and I'm, I'm still learning about this whole thing about finance, but I like to look at it as the, I guess the best way to say it is real money and then fake money. So for me, real money is the same thing. It's been for three or 4,000 years, right? It's gold, silver it's land, real estate and business, right? Those are real, tangible things that exist in the physical world that produce revenue or let you accumulate wealth. Right? If you go into the paperworld, you've got cash stocks and bonds where you, you think you're an owner of a company, but it's still paper, right.

Tony Bradshaw (23m 39s):

Cause paper burns and you know, even crypto, like I like crypto, but crypto is kind of still more of the same, right? If you look at the stock market, if everybody in the stock market tried to sell their stock at the same time, well, it would implode the whole market would implode. Same thing would happen in crypto. So you're only your wealth only exists as long as the numbers stay up, you know, in those kind of in those models or those systems. Whereas if you go to real-world wealth, you're looking at, you know, like I said before, gold, silver land, real estate and business. So I'm a big believer that you can use the paper system or the other systems to build wealth, but you should look at your distribution of that wealth.

Tony Bradshaw (24m 21s):

So don't be like 90% of the stock market and 10% in real estate. You know, look at, look at maybe balancing those a little bit more so that if one implodes you can fall back on, you know, the other one and just work those systems together,

Phil Muscatello (24m 35s):

That is part of learning about it is the asset allocation. I mean, there's a lot of people that I speak to who are gold and silver bugs, and they're sort of looking at the way inflation's going at the moment and saying, well, look, actually just consider having part of your portfolio in gold and silver for those tangible assets.

Tony Bradshaw (24m 53s):

Yeah. And I'm a big believer in that too. I think, you know, during my Dave Ramsey days, Dave's not a big gold silver guy. And I was not because of that because, you know, I was kinda like, you know, doing the teaching, following, you know, being the good little student, but the reality is gold and silver has been money for over 3,000 years and, and they're going to continue to be money for 3000 more, but paper money on average only lasts about 75 years. So every currency, every paper currency in history has imploded. So if you had a hundred thousand dollars, so to speak in gold and silver, well, you can go to any country in the world and it's going to have value.

Tony Bradshaw (25m 33s):

But in, you know, 50 years, 75 years, you may have a hundred thousand dollars, but it could be zero. It could be actually worth nothing. There's a lot of countries that have seen hyperinflation. I think Zimbabwe, you know, where it got into like the, I don't know, 5,000, 10000%, but it just gets kind of crazy after awhile. But yeah. Yeah. The diversified portfolio, I think is huge.

Phil Muscatello (25m 53s):

So tell us about the millionaire plan.

Tony Bradshaw (25m 55s):

Yeah. So when, when I was 25, I, when what I teach people today because you got to get, have people get simple concepts, right? And I think one of the biggest problems that people have financially is they don't have their own financial vision because no one taught them how to have one. Right? So, and I I've learned that from observing, you know, different people like Robert Kiyosaki gives people a vision of real estate. Like, Hey, you can be a multi-property owner to do leverage. And that's how you do it. But you can build wealth that way. Dave Ramsey teaches people a debt-free vision, right? He gives them a vision says, Hey, you can be debt free, you have money problems, but the money problems get rid of your debt, your money problems go away.

Tony Bradshaw (26m 35s):

The millionaire plan. And what I'm doing is, is what I would call giving people a millionaire vision. And I give them a millionaire vision because that's the first milestone. I know that when people go on that journey to become a millionaire, their mindset is going to shift and they're going to shift into a multi-millionaire mindset. But if you try to get them to pick up a multimillionaire mindset, when they're broke, it's almost impossible to do that because it's just too much to bite off. So I start with a millionaire, which is still very, very difficult people to go from from broke to believe. And you can be a millionaire. That's a big jump from going broke to just getting by. That's a smaller jump. But the millionaire plan, what I do is I teach people to do have the millionaire choice and they create a millionaire plan. And then in between those two principles is all the financial learning and life principles that you need to create, right?

Tony Bradshaw (27m 20s):

So I have, what's called the 10 keys of the millionaire and the first two have nothing to do with money at all. The first one is you have to develop strong character. If you want to build and keep wealth, you've got to have strong character, right? I focus on integrity, responsibility, work ethic, self-discipline and focus. So those are five things that my parents taught me. They didn't teach me about money, but they did teach me about character. And I was able to carry that the other one we already discussed, which was maximizing your time, right? Everybody has the same amount of time. It doesn't matter who you are. You got, you know, 40 hours a week if you're working or more, but you have, you know, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, how do you use that time to get ahead? And then the third key, which I think we kind of touched on, which is you got to get money smart, right?

Tony Bradshaw (28m 1s):

So I don't care if you're Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, everybody has to learn about money to be successful. Once you get those three things solidified. The fourth key is, is a money mentor, right? Finding somebody you can learn from I was a do it yourself guy. So I started learning from magazines. And so magazines were my mentor books where you're my mentor, but I wish I had learned to go find somebody who had already been on the journey I was on that I could mimic or follow or ask questions to. I didn't really get that until I was in my thirties. And, and I wish I had found that sooner. And this is very important because you can either learn from, you can learn from your own mistakes or you can learn from other people's mistakes.

Tony Bradshaw (28m 42s):

If you learn from other people's mistakes, you're gonna, you're gonna make less of your own mistakes. And that's a very important thing to go through. So the millionaire plan, once you, once you get all that and you do your learning and you start learning about, you know, how to increase your income, how to save and invest aggressively, how to avoid debt or get out of debt. You know, those are basic building blocks for financial plan. I just say, Hey, let's put this all together, man, because once you have that and you understand it, it is predictable on when you can become a millionaire, like you can get down to a date. And that's what I did. I did it at 25. I'm like, you know what? I believe based on the numbers, I can be a millionaire by age 40. And that's what I started working on. And a wonderful thing happened when I did that is because I was able to hit that, but it didn't happen the way I expected it to.

Tony Bradshaw (29m 28s):

Right. So I was basing my millionaire plan off of the $39,000 income, where that would go up slightly. What actually happened was, and I didn't have my wife's $20,000 in debt figured into it. Cause I didn't know her. I didn't have six kids with diapers and private school figured into the equation. Right. But what happened was because I said that that was my goal because that was my purpose and my direction it happened anyway. But it just, it happened in a slightly different method. So I'm a big believer that once you get moving, that is one of the most important things is to learn the lesson, the learn, the fundamental principles, and then just get moving in the right direction. And the other things will start to work out. At least they did for me.

Tony Bradshaw (30m 9s):

So a millionaire plan is going to deal with like three components. It's going to deal with your income. Like how much income do you have and how is your income going to grow? So you should, you should each year be thinking about how to increase your income. It's possible for people to increase their income, you know, 10, 15, 20, 30% a year over a period of time. Like those are realities. The other one is debt. Like what, how are you dealing with debt? Like, are you going to be a no debt person? Which I am, are you going to leverage debt like Robert Kiyosaki or, you know, Grant Cardone. Those guys are okay with a little bit more debt risk. I like a little bit more depth security. So I don't make, I didn't build my wealth through debt. I built my wealth through investing and hard work and income growth.

Tony Bradshaw (30m 54s):

And then the third one is obviously your investing strategies. Like how are you multiplying your money? Whether that's I've got one friend, he, he has shifted his brain. When he gets a dollar, he goes, what am I invested in he'll rest and race horses, dogs for dog racing. He'll do, you know, fractional ownership of horses. He's got Tesla. He's got like, he, he is wired to go, where am I sticking this money that I just got? And so he that's where he does. And he just goes, puts, puts money all over the place. He made some really good money on Shiba cryptocurrency. It jumped, I think a hundred X recently. And he made, I think, I don't know, $45,000 or something on it. And so he's wired to look for those.

Tony Bradshaw (31m 34s):

So when you put that, when you put that much out there, some of that's going to return back to you. And so you need those income debt and investing plan. And then once you have those three, you can actually come down to a predictive date. When you can say, Hey, I'm going to be a millionaire plus or minus a year. This is what I think I'm going to become a millionaire. And then what happens is with my clients is once you do that, your brain starts to work in new and different ways and you'll start figuring out ways to accelerate that date.

Phil Muscatello (32m 5s):

So Tony, it's been a great pleasure speaking with you today. How can listeners find out more about you, your podcast, your book, and the information about becoming a millionaire

Tony Bradshaw (32m 14s):

First? Let me thank you for having me on the show. I just really enjoy being able to share some of my vision. Yeah. I give away my book. I want to get this book in as many people's hands as possible. So it's a hundred percent free on my website. You can download it for free on an ebook format. There's also another book that I put out there called creating millionaire families. You know, because I'm not, I'm not just a millionaire. I'm trying to turn my little six kids into millionaires as well. So I've got some thoughts on that, but you can get both of those eBooks free www.themillionairechoice.com. And if you want my paperback, you can get that for free as well. Just pay shipping and handling. And then I do something that's kind of unique is that I carve out a day, an hour of my day, each day to do financial coaching for anybody that needs it, because I know there's a lot of single moms out there or people that need it, that would never talk to somebody on their own.

Tony Bradshaw (32m 60s):

So I just try to make myself available. And if anyone's interested, they can book that right through the millionaire choice.com It's a money mentor link, and it's just a free hour for money mentor coaching, and you should go check it out. That's the millionaire choice.com and the podcast. Yeah. So my podcast is called the millionaire choice, make the choice, create your plan, which is what I did at age 25. But you can get that on any of the platforms, Spotify. And, but yeah, it's available on all the major platforms and I've got, you know, 70 something episodes out there of, you know, Millie where I talked to millionaires and future millionaires about how to build wealth and then what to do with it once you have it, because I believe wealth has a purpose and that's to make the world a better place. Tony,

Phil Muscatello (33m 37s):

Thank you very much for joining

Tony Bradshaw (33m 37s):

Me today. Thanks Phillip. I really enjoyed it.

Stocks for Beginners is for information and educational purposes only. It isn’t financial advice, and you shouldn’t buy or sell any investments based on what you’ve heard here. Any opinion or commentary is the view of the speaker only not Stocks for Beginners. This podcast doesn’t replace professional advice regarding your personal financial needs, circumstances or current situation.