[00:01:24] Patrick Donley: I am really happy to have you.

[00:01:26] Patrick Donley: We’ve already been talking a half hour before the show, you know, started recording. So I wanted to jump in and talk about your early days growing up in South Bend, Indiana. Your dad was a financial planner. I just wanted to hear a little bit about what it was like growing up around finances and investing.

[00:01:41] Patrick Donley: Talked about at the dinner table, just kind of like some of the mental models or blueprints that you inherited from your family. 

[00:01:49] Rachael Camp: Yeah. So, you know, my family’s, we’re very big into finance. So my dad obviously is a financial planner. I’m in finance, but then I have two older brothers that are in finance and investing as well.

[00:01:58] Rachael Camp: So I definitely think there’s a genetic component to it. But as far as, you know, how we grew up, this might be surprising, but there wasn’t a lot of technical discussions around investing and personal finance. You know, it wasn’t like save 20 percent of your income or this is the power of, of compounding interest.

[00:02:16] Rachael Camp: But instead, you know, my dad is, Very entrepreneurial and the discussion was more of find a way to find something you love and make money from it. And he never understood the point of somebody working really hard just to make somebody else rich. So those were the kind of things ingrained into me. And, you know, it’s funny because my dad, he’s pretty conservative guy, but all of my childhood, I think he saw I had an interest and I was really ambitious and had an interest.

[00:02:46] Rachael Camp: And. Maybe not business, but just kind of pushing myself a bit. And he saw that and he’s always telling me that I could do, you know, anything that I want to do. And just because men dominate a field doesn’t mean you can do it. In fact, he would always tell me you can do anything you see the boys doing and you can do it better.

[00:03:04] Rachael Camp: That was the kind of mindset really that I grew up around. Very heavy on entrepreneurship, very competitive too. And, you know, at times that’s, that was good at other times, I don’t know if it was the healthiest dynamic, you know, between me and my siblings, but I grew up in that competitive environment, very big on independence, both of my parents, when we wanted to do something, they really saw that it was on us to kind of figure out how to do it, figure out what needs to be done to get it done.

[00:03:32] Rachael Camp: And that was just the mindset that they instilled into us, which was a very interesting time to be going through that. Cause I really think I grew up during the era of like helicopter parents and I saw my parents operating this way. And then my friend’s parents, and it was so different. I remember thinking like something was wrong with my parents and this was not right.

[00:03:54] Rachael Camp: And, you know, in hindsight, as an adult, I’m really grateful for that upbringing. I’m really grateful that they Pushed us to be independent and to think for ourselves too. 

[00:04:04] Patrick Donley: So you mentioned that he was very entrepreneurial as a kid. Did you have any entrepreneurial side hustles or little ventures that you did?

[00:04:12] Rachael Camp: Yeah. Yeah, I did. Like dog sitting, dog walking would go around and pass out those flyers. Yeah. A lot of like, you know, door to door sales, which a lot of little kids do, but I was always encouraged to like, just go out on my own and do it. And I remember how terrifying that was, but I think is a really.

[00:04:28] Rachael Camp: Important skill to have to be able to go up to somebody and pitch yourself or pitch whatever your product is. So I did a lot of that growing up and I always, again, with my dad, I always wanted to have control over my income and that was something that he was a huge proponent of. So from a very young age, that was the skill that I was thinking about.

[00:04:47] Rachael Camp: And I was thinking about the business I would have when I was older, where a lot of my. Friends were thinking about like, what, you know, profession will I have or how will I be an employee? I was thinking about what am I going to build when I’m older? 

[00:04:59] Patrick Donley: That’s a huge gift actually, I think, for a parent to instill that kind of mentality in a kid.

[00:05:04] Patrick Donley: For a lot of people, it takes a long time to develop that. If ever, and I don’t know, I just think that’s a, a real gift that your parents gave you. Like in your high school years and like going into college, did you think you were going to get into finance and investing and financial planning? 

[00:05:21] Rachael Camp: No, not at all.

[00:05:22] Rachael Camp: In fact, I would say I rebelled against it a little bit. Yeah, because you know, my, of course, my dad had his own business, he’s in finance. And I remember thinking, I’m not doing that. And I don’t know exactly why other than I just was super rebelling against it. And I was really creative too. And so I kind of was looking at different fields that were really opposite of finance.

[00:05:43] Rachael Camp: You know, I was interested in international studies and writing and things like that. And then when I got to college, I went to IU at Deanna university, this kind of competitive spirit came out of me. Everybody was trying to get into the business school. You know, IU has a pretty good business school. And I saw a lot of my friends like taking these classes that would admit them into the business school and for just that alone made me really interested in it.

[00:06:08] Rachael Camp: So I sat down with my counselor and I asked them what classes would I need to take to see if I could get into the business school. They laid it out for me and then the next semester I started taking those classes and that’s when it hit me, you know, it’s like accounting and finance and computers and business business presentations, things like that.

[00:06:23] Rachael Camp: I started taking those classes and started shortly after, like, tutoring some of the people that were already in the business school, helping them out in the classes. So it was this quick realization of, oh, this is what I should be doing. This is something that matches my skill set, but I also, I love doing it.

[00:06:40] Rachael Camp: And so it was an easy. 

[00:06:43] Patrick Donley: It’s almost like you picked up a lot by osmosis probably growing up and, you know, like you said, there’s some genetic component I think that may be there, right? Was it something that your dad pushed at all, like to learn finance, accounting, investing? Was that something that he Really pushed or did he give you the autonomy to make your own decisions?

[00:07:02] Rachael Camp: He did push it. He wanted somebody to kind of enter his field, what he was doing. So my brother was interested in finance for a little bit in the very beginning. And so he pushed it there and he saw I was interested in finance. So yeah, anytime he would see that he would kind of latch onto it and say, Yeah, you should go in this direction and would give us guidance on that.

[00:07:21] Rachael Camp: So he would get really excited when we saw we were going in that direction. 

[00:07:26] Patrick Donley: So you ended up graduating with a degree in finance from Indiana. So what happened next? You got a job at JP Morgan, I think. Can you talk to us about that transition from college into the professional world? 

[00:07:37] Rachael Camp: Yeah, so I went out to Chicago, worked for JP Morgan, you know, my goal at the time I knew I was going into wealth management.

[00:07:45] Rachael Camp: Again, that was a push from my dad. So I had my securities licenses and everything at that point. So that was the segment of finance that I was going into. And my goal was to just kind of find the best Team or mentors. I could and learn everything I could from them in this profession. If you want to be a financial planner, they have a lot of programs that you can go through, but they are very sink or swim.

[00:08:07] Rachael Camp: Most people don’t make it. It’s not a great introduction to the field. So instead, I wanted to learn as much as I could before I fully became a financial planner. So the team I worked with at JP Morgan, they managed over a billion in assets. So they, we specialized in, uh, liquidity events. So people going through exit sale of their business, you know, or even receiving a large inheritance or, you know, going through and selling out of their real estate, you know, anything where all of a sudden they came into a large sum of cash.

[00:08:38] Rachael Camp: And there is a ton of planning that goes with that. So I was on a great team with five other guys. All older than me, so that dynamic is very interesting, but I got to learn a lot from them. They’re really intelligent and there’s really no limits as far as what I was able to do. If I found something interesting, my team encouraged me to.

[00:08:59] Rachael Camp: Really dive into that and learn more about it and, you know, take control of that aspect of our team. So that was great. It was a very entrepreneurial environment within our team, outside of our team, not so much. JPMorgan’s a really big company, but still a great experience and a great team to learn from.

[00:09:16] Rachael Camp: And that was my goal when I first started out. 

[00:09:19] Patrick Donley: That sounds awesome. That’s, I think, a really good strategy too. It was just like. Taking a job that you can learn a lot and it sounded like you had that leeway to pursue like the things that you were interested in and very entrepreneurial at what stage of the game.

[00:09:32] Patrick Donley: Did you start looking around and thinking? What’s my next step? What’s the next chapter going to look like? 

[00:09:39] Rachael Camp: Yeah, you know, and honestly, my team knows this. I could talk freely about it. I was doing a lot of operations for the team and I, to be frank, don’t like operation. It was. Something that wasn’t exciting to me every day.

[00:09:50] Rachael Camp: So I knew pretty early on that this was not what I was going to be doing long term. And my team knew that I wanted to become a full financial planner. One of their, the big issues was just my age. I was really young. And again, being a young advisor, being a young planner is really hard in this industry.

[00:10:08] Rachael Camp: It’s not every day that people with a lot of money want to give that 24 year old millions of dollars. That’s the difficult component of it. And of course my dad is a CFP. Has his own business. So I’m very fortunate to have that. The whole time I met JP Morgan, he is pitching, partnering up with me and wanting me to start working with him.

[00:10:27] Rachael Camp: And, you know, that’s an opportunity. I talked to my mentors and they said, this is, this is a great opportunity and I think you should do it. So I did leave JP Morgan in the pandemic, moved back to South Bend, Indiana, and started partnering up with my dad. And at that point, I just adopted his client base, which is retirees.

[00:10:46] Rachael Camp: And we started, you know, working together. So we were a father daughter team. And to be honest, we’re really successful at it. So we increased the revenue of his business by 50 percent within two years when I came on. And a lot of it too, is just like, I had the, the hustle, you know, he was older. He, you know, didn’t really.

[00:11:07] Rachael Camp: Need to do that as much or have that drive as much, but he was still really excited about growing the business and things like that. So he encouraged everything that I wanted to try and do. And I just, you know, went crazy on researching, you know, how to grow the business and how to make it a better experience for the clients.

[00:11:25] Rachael Camp: And it worked really, really well. 

[00:11:27] Patrick Donley: So talk to me more about that in your research, what did you find? There’s a lot of different ways to do financial planning. Traditional financial planning sounds like what he was doing. But it sounds maybe like you may have gone off a little bit of a different direction.

[00:11:42] Rachael Camp: Yeah, he, again, he’s a traditional advisor, so focused primarily on investing. And I was coming off getting my CFP and I was really, you know, in love with the idea of focusing on financial planning. In addition to investing, you know, kind of bringing these other components to it. So that was something that I did that was a little honestly new to him.

[00:12:04] Rachael Camp: He even financial planning software was new to him. So those were all things that I introduced into the practice and made it a more holistic experience for clients. Now, as far as actually bringing a new business, when I got there, he handed me this old stack of papers. That was a bunch of leads. I think it was like.

[00:12:22] Rachael Camp: 500 leads or something. So these are old. They’re probably not gonna go well, but this will give you a start. And I just picked up the phone and started dialing. And after that, after the old leads, we found different ways to find names and phone numbers. But that is seriously how I grew. The business was picking up the phone every day and calling people and trying to get them to come in.

[00:12:41] Rachael Camp: I do a very different approach now, but that is how I started. 

[00:12:44] Patrick Donley: We had mentioned, I think before we started recording that you’re an introvert, so was that difficult for you to like do those kind of cold calls? 

[00:12:52] Rachael Camp: It was, there was a book I read at the time, I think it’s the book called Quiet in the Summer of, yeah, Susan Keen, I think.

[00:12:59] Rachael Camp: Yeah. Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking or something like that. Yeah, and I think it was this book that talked about how introverts are actually really good salespeople because I guess we’re, I can’t remember exactly, but I think there was something to do with persistence. And the ability to kind of sit there for long periods of time and just continue to do it.

[00:13:17] Rachael Camp: So I got that motivation and I told myself I’m actually better at this because otherwise it would have helped me back. I would have thought this is not go with my nature. This is not something I should be good at. But I, I read this book that told me the opposite, that introverts actually can make a really great salespeople.

[00:13:34] Rachael Camp: And that was really all the motivation I needed. I had a very simple, this is something we were talking about before we started recording, but a very simple practice of having a goal every day of how many phone calls I would make. And I wouldn’t stop until it was all checked off. Love it. And that is kind of been my, 

[00:13:50] Patrick Donley: so you had the red check mark share about that a little bit about, yeah.

[00:13:53] Patrick Donley: Your red check mark and how that idea came about. 

[00:13:56] Rachael Camp: Yeah. So when I first started writing on Twitter, I heard, uh, the story about Jerry Seinfeld. And somebody asked him, you know, how do you get the motivation to write every day? How do you stay on track? Jerry Seinfeld’s a very disciplined writer. He says, what I do is I sit down every day for 30 minutes and I have a pad of paper.

[00:14:14] Rachael Camp: I have a pen and I don’t have to write during that time, but I can’t do anything else. I have to sit there if I don’t have any motivation to write. And he said, I do that every day. After I do it, I cross out a red checkmark on a calendar and I just don’t break the streak. That’s the key. Don’t break the streak.

[00:14:29] Rachael Camp: So I take that into almost everything that I do. Every new goal that I have, every new habit that I want to form. I’ve just found that that checkmark, checking something off of a list, making it really visual. Really works for me. So I have a calendar right next to me and I still do it but with different things And it’s just a big red x every day so you can’t miss it 

[00:14:50] Patrick Donley: I love it And now you’re doing it for twitter and I will definitely get into twitter and how it’s grown your career quite a bit But before we do that I wanted to talk about money.

[00:14:58] Patrick Donley: Like what is money? There’s actually a podcast, I think that’s called what is money. And I know that you read sapiens, maybe it’s been a year or so ago, but talk to me a little bit about how sapiens talks about money and the idea of money and how we think about money. 

[00:15:12] Rachael Camp: Sapiens amazing books. I would say sapiens.

[00:15:16] Rachael Camp: And I have this book behind me, the psychology of money, both really influenced. The way that I view money and both of them kind of highlight how new money is to humankind and Morgan Household and the psychology of money says, you know, of course, we’re bad with money. It’s brand new to us. It’s not in our nature to be good with money.

[00:15:35] Rachael Camp: It’s this when you think about it, it’s this imaginary thing that we humans have made up. And if humans don’t exist anymore, money doesn’t exist. So it’s, you know, it’s a very high level zoom all the way out way to think about money, but I also think it’s really helpful in terms of psychology to think, well, my natural nature is not to be good at saving and investing.

[00:15:56] Rachael Camp: In fact, my natural nature is quite. The opposite. I’m not designed to be this long term thinker, somebody who is able to have discipline to put money away every month and then wait decades for the results, right? Like that’s not how we evolved. That’s not how we survived. And I think first acknowledging that and saying money isn’t a thing that we should even be good at.

[00:16:16] Rachael Camp: That’s step one. And then step two, how can I kind of work with my nature to start being Good with money since I’m naturally not able to do it, and there’s a lot of different ways you can do that. Automation is my favorite form, but I also think just education and understanding how our brains work is the first step and getting better with money and sapiens, you know, talks a lot about the beginning of money, how it came about.

[00:16:40] Rachael Camp: And when you learn that and you realize how new it is to us, it kind of takes the pressure off of it. 

[00:16:46] Patrick Donley: Well, I do think you’re right. People do tell that story to themselves that they’re not good with money. And I wanted to hear about how you do your financial planning. If I’m a young person and I’m coming to you, I’ve got great income.

[00:16:57] Patrick Donley: I’m saving a little bit, walk me through the steps with what it would look like working with you. And what are some of the initial questions you ask? Like it’s a long process. So I’m, I’ve never worked with a financial planner. I studied finance myself and I’m like, ah, I can just. Do this on my own, but I actually think there’s so much benefit to have.

[00:17:14] Patrick Donley: We talked about earlier that my wife was a therapist. I think there needs to be money therapists, right. To help people deal with their emotions around money. If it’s such a complex thing and it deals with our base level of like our neurology and physiology, and it’s just. But I want to hear about like your first steps with clients.

[00:17:33] Rachael Camp: Yeah, it’s the very first step before we ever look into the numbers before I ever ask for statements or tax returns or anything like that. As we sit down and we have a goals and values meeting and intentionally, I don’t really want to know the numbers yet. So I will ask things like. What is important about money to you?

[00:17:51] Rachael Camp: That’s a very popular question in my field. But also, what does an ideal day look like to you? And people, I want, I always want people to get really detailed with it because it signals to me, okay, this is free, but this will cost something. And how is this different from the day that you’re living today?

[00:18:07] Rachael Camp: And then, you know, questions like, what do you want that you don’t have? What do you have that you no longer want? You know, if I just ask somebody, you What are your goals? What are your objectives? No one ever. Usually people look at me very blankly and they don’t know what to say. But if I ask somebody what’s important to you, who are the people in your life that are important to you?

[00:18:24] Rachael Camp: How do you want to help other people in a way that can be financial or non financial? We start to create goals. And especially when I hear the same things over and over and over again, it helps me to understand, okay, this is really Important to you, and that maybe this is second, but that’s the way that I prefer to create financial goals is just to say, what is our ideal day?

[00:18:43] Rachael Camp: What are the experiences that we want to have? What are the ways that we want to help other people? What’s our legacy? And then we work backwards. We say, okay, this is how we can start. To achieve those goals, but I don’t understand how anyone can do proper financial planning without understanding that and understanding to how people view money and their, their childhood experiences with money even.

[00:19:05] Patrick Donley: Yeah, so this is not a one time meeting, right? That you’re sitting down with them. Do you give them homework? Do you, I mean, these are thoughtful questions that a lot of people don’t. Ask themselves or don’t take the time to answer for themselves. What is the process look like and how long does it take before like you’ve come to some resolution about now these are the next steps I need to take with my money?

[00:19:27] Rachael Camp: Yeah. I mean, we reevaluate it all the time. So there are times I’ll ask somebody a question and they’ll, they’ll have a little bit of an answer, but they’ll say that they want to think about it more. And so we’ll revisit that question at another time. But after we’ve kind of honed in on the initial goals and values, we do get into all of the data of their financial life.

[00:19:45] Rachael Camp: So that’s at the point where I do ask for the tax returns, the pay statements, the employee benefits handbook, really the insurance policies, everything that would impact your financial life. And we have a data organization meeting and then we have a cash flow meeting to understand where is our money going.

[00:20:00] Rachael Camp: Currently, and if we wanted to meet these goals, how would we change that? But for my ongoing clients, you know, we, we meet beginning of every year and we’re creating this new financial plan, but that is the point where we revisit our goals, our values. We see, did we Meet those goals last year. And if we did it, is there a reason why?

[00:20:20] Rachael Camp: So it’s a regular check in to make sure that our goals and values are still accurate. And then are we on track to actually hit them? 

[00:20:29] Patrick Donley: So how does the fee structure work? Is this like a subscription thing that it’s a monthly fee that they pay or is it a one time fee? How does the fee structure work? 

[00:20:38] Rachael Camp: Yeah, there’s two models.

[00:20:39] Rachael Camp: So one of them is a one time financial plan, and that’s so they pay 50 percent of the plan when they signed the agreement and the remaining 50 percent when I present the plan to them, that takes about three months that we work together and develop the plan. And then we don’t work together after that point.

[00:20:56] Rachael Camp: And then I have ongoing clients, which yeah. Similar flat fee structure, but they pay it monthly and that just continues. And usually, you know, at this point forever, but at any point to where they say, okay, you know, I think maybe I’ve got it from here and there’s no. Defined end date with that plan. 

[00:21:17] Patrick Donley: They can take the training wheels off and ride the bike on their own at that point.

[00:21:20] Patrick Donley: Right. So I’m glad you mentioned the psychology of money by Morgan household. That is one of my favorite books as well. And my favorite chapter is. The last one called confessions, where he goes into what he does personally with his own money and kind of like takes the lid off and just says, here’s what I do.

[00:21:37] Patrick Donley: I wanted to go into that a little bit with you is do you kind of follow traditional savings and investing advice for yourself? Or is there anything differently that you might do in your own financial life? 

[00:21:48] Rachael Camp: Yeah, I actually think I’m a pretty decent planner because a lot of the way that I work and the way that I help clients is.

[00:21:56] Rachael Camp: I asked myself, how would I want somebody to help me with money and I’ve had struggled with money and that I have a pretty bad scarcity mindset around it. I am the type of person that will over save who thinks I need to have. Crazy high income and a crazy high net worth, but I likely will never spend through it.

[00:22:15] Rachael Camp: So, and this is why I think really anybody could benefit from a financial planner because I can be really realistic with somebody else and say, you really don’t need to save this money. But when it comes to myself, you know, that’s a much harder discussion to have and it’s a much harder thing to get over.

[00:22:30] Rachael Camp: So. In my early twenties, you know, straight out of college, I started saving about 20 percent right away. I got really into the FIRE community shortly after that, which for those who don’t know. 

[00:22:41] Patrick Donley: Yeah. Explain that what FIRE stands for. A lot of our listeners might not be familiar with that. 

[00:22:47] Rachael Camp: Yep. That’s financial independence, retire early.

[00:22:49] Rachael Camp: So the idea is that you save. A very large portion of your income so you can retire or be financially independent as soon as possible. So it often involves living far, far below your means and really saving and investing the difference. So I got really into that and started saving a very large portion of my income for a few years.

[00:23:11] Rachael Camp: I was the highest point saving about. 50, 50, 50 percent of my income. Yeah. Last year I was still pretty high. I want to say 35%. And so this is very strange, but my goal this year is to save less money. And one of my, my issues is I really value travel and experiences and I track my expenses. And I looked at my expenses for 2023 and it’s really disappointed and how little I spent on travel.

[00:23:38] Rachael Camp: And so I can say that all day long, but again, if you, if I don’t have somebody there who is holding me accountable and saying, you say, this is important to you, but you’re the way you spend your money does not show that it’s important to you. So I was able to sit down and, you know, I can’t. Argue with cold numbers there.

[00:23:52] Rachael Camp: And so for 2024, I created a financial plan that actually prioritizes travel and experiences. Still going to save money. I can’t completely eliminate that, but I have saved so much money to this point that I’ve reached what they call in the fire community Coast FI. What that means is you’ve saved enough money to where you don’t have to save another dollar, and you’re going to hit your freedom number by traditional retirement.

[00:24:18] Rachael Camp: It did so well saving so much money that I’ve hit that point, and that’s a really good feeling. I can’t deny that, but I recently read the book, Die With Zero, and that was a very eye opening book for me that actually has a lot of influence on the way that I’m viewing money now. 

[00:24:35] Patrick Donley: So let’s get into that because I told you I interviewed Dickie Bush a couple days ago and he mentioned that book as well, Die With Zero.

[00:24:41] Patrick Donley: I’ve got it on my Audible. I’ve listened to like the first chapter and I’ve got so many books. I just, I’ve never returned back to it. So tell me about the ideas with Die With Zero. 

[00:24:51] Rachael Camp: Yeah, Die With Zero is all about maximizing your life experiences. So I really feel like this book was written to the Financial independence community, because most people still have a problem with not saving enough money.

[00:25:03] Rachael Camp: You know, this isn’t really a book for the masses. It’s kind of for those people who are actually pretty diligent savers. And so I’m reading the book and it feels like it’s, it’s written for me and it really emphasizes that, you know, while our money is sitting in our respective accounts compounding. And earning interest and dividends, our health and our energy are doing the opposite.

[00:25:26] Rachael Camp: So there are things that you can do in your life or things you want to do in your life that you may only be able to do when you have the energy for it. And obviously, money and resources is a factor here. So he kind of talks about that balance. In your early 20 or in your 20s, you have the most time you have the most energy, but money is kind of an issue and you get into your 30s and now you have a little bit more money.

[00:25:49] Rachael Camp: The health is great and energy is great. And so 30s are, you know, he argues a really great time to kind of enjoy some of those experiences. But the idea is that we should not delay all gratification and that the risk here is that we don’t take the time to enjoy the present day and take advantage of the things that.

[00:26:08] Rachael Camp: We could only do today. So I have a goal of backpacking Southeast Asia. Got it for a really long time. And I’ve just keep putting it on the back burner. I read this book and it was, you know, that was something that was zero. Oh, that was there. 

[00:26:21] Patrick Donley: Okay. I thought it was a backpacking book or something. 

[00:26:23] Rachael Camp: Oh, no, no, no.

[00:26:24] Rachael Camp: But yeah, I mean, that was the thing. The first thing that came to mind that I really should do this now and stop putting it off. 

[00:26:32] Patrick Donley: So it’s interesting to me though, that like the people that are really good at saving and deferring gratification, it leads to a life of continuing to defer gratification and not going to go do the things that you’ve done.

[00:26:44] Patrick Donley: You know, the. Tragic stories of like the guys and people that retire with millions, but they never fulfilled any of their dreams, you know, it’s like super sad or they retire and they’ve got a big nest egg and then pop over. So it’s a real conundrum, like the balance between saving, deferring gratification and leading a life you want to lead Dickie had, and this might have been from the book, but he talked about.

[00:27:05] Patrick Donley: Having a memory dividend fund. And so I don’t know if that’s from the book, but what Dickie would do is like save a specific amount that would go strictly to largely creating great memories. And so that for him, it was like a helicopter ride above New York city, took his mom on a trip to Greece, you know, for you, it would be the backpacking to Asia.

[00:27:23] Patrick Donley: Is that something that you would recommend to people as like having a dedicated fund for creating great memories? 

[00:27:30] Rachael Camp: Oh, absolutely. That’s one of my favorite tactics to use in personal finance is when you create these goals like vacation goals, go ahead and create a separate savings account for them and label it that.

[00:27:41] Rachael Camp: So I have a Southeast Asia one. I have, you know, a wedding savings account and allies is a great company for this because they allow different savings buckets and you can have as many as you want. But not only is it. Great for actually reaching that goal, but it is really motivating as well because it’s really fun to send money to a Southeast Asia fund, you know, rather than just always sending it to your 401k it’s motivating and you can kind of see it slowly start to reach that goal and it just helps with the anticipation and the excitement of that trip as well.

[00:28:14] Rachael Camp: So that is it. One of my favorite techniques to use, I would say, create that savings account, label it what the goal is that you want it to be, and set up automated transfers to that account and just watch it grow. 

[00:28:28] Patrick Donley: I love it. And I love your dream too. I spent a couple, two years living and working in Vietnam, spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia.

[00:28:35] Patrick Donley: So maybe like after the show, we can talk about it. Yeah, I love talking that kind of stuff. So, and travel obviously such a good thing to do. So tell me how you first got into like the whole fire movement though. Like, was there a book, a blog post, something like a coworker? Like, how did you first realize like, I don’t want to work till 65.

[00:28:53] Patrick Donley: I want to create this financial independence. 

[00:28:57] Rachael Camp: I can’t remember what the first thing I saw was with the fire movement. I’ve always had this kind of. Obsession with money. And I’ve always viewed it as like the way that I can have control and freedom over my life. So it wasn’t something that I always needed a push in this direction, but it was the fire movement was something I naturally stumbled upon when researching about my own personal finances.

[00:29:20] Rachael Camp: So, you know, I have a degree in finance. I was working in wealth management, but still, and this is what I hear from my clients all the time. It’s hard to know what exactly applies to you. There’s so much information out there, which is great. The clients we were working with at the time, though, were worth 50 million to 1 billion.

[00:29:36] Rachael Camp: Like they were nowhere. Doesn’t apply, right. Does not apply to me. The strategies they’re using does not apply to me. So I started researching on my own. And honestly, I think the thing that really solidified the fire movement for me at that time was that I didn’t enjoy my job and I really did at that time have a goal of retiring early.

[00:29:56] Rachael Camp: That has transformed quite a bit. Now I have a goal to never retire, but at the time, I think a lot of people find the fire movement that way. They’re not enjoying their job. They don’t. Want to work for 40 years and then retire. They want to retire as soon as possible. So there’s one kind of issue with the fire movement.

[00:30:12] Rachael Camp: I think it appeals too much to that crowd. And instead, I’m a fan of not, you know, staying at a job that you hate for 40 years just because it pays you a really high income or anything like that. But rather Find something today that you enjoy more because 10 20 years or whatever it is until you hit your freedom number is just too long to not enjoy what you do most of the time.

[00:30:33] Rachael Camp: So I’m not a fan of that method anymore. 

[00:30:37] Patrick Donley: And I think to I’ve got an example. I’ve got a friend who talked about all the things he wanted to do, worked as a CFO at a fortune 500 company and in his fifties finally left. But at that point it was tough because he didn’t know what he’d like to do, you know?

[00:30:51] Patrick Donley: And so he’d spent all this time and energy In the financial world, but nothing outside of it, like to prepare himself for when you did have the financial freedom to do what he wanted to do. Is that something you find or how do you advise people on that? Like, that’s a tricky thing. 

[00:31:07] Rachael Camp: Yeah, I mean, it’s so my ultimate goal with my own money is just.

[00:31:11] Rachael Camp: To be able to chase my own interests. So as I find something interesting, I want to be able to obsess over it and really dive into it. And I do think there are different levels to financial freedom, financial independence. So it doesn’t have to be this big freedom number that you hit. And then, okay, now you’re financially free, but there are levels to it.

[00:31:29] Rachael Camp: Okay. Do we have a 12 month emergency fund that I could live off of? Well, I go and try a different job or try entrepreneurship. You can create a sort of short term. Financial freedom that gives you that ability to really try something else. And I always, always encourage people to do that, especially the younger you are, but really just because it’s a constant reminder, you know, as cliche as it is, this is the one life we have.

[00:31:54] Rachael Camp: And. The I think they say the number one regrets of the dying was that they wish they would have lived a life truer to themselves. Not what others thought of them. So I always keep that top of mind for me and for my clients that if they are in a situation that they find. Miserable or just not enjoyable.

[00:32:12] Rachael Camp: It’s just not worth it. It’s not worth the high income. It’s not, you know, your time is a very precious resource and how you spend it. We should put just as much energy towards that as we do towards savings and investing. So thinking about our future. Yeah, 

[00:32:27] Patrick Donley: I think you made a tweet. I think nobody would trade places with Warren Buffett with all the billions he has.

[00:32:32] Patrick Donley: His time is limited. So like time is, that’s always how I viewed wealth. It’s like time and optionality to do the things you want. Which brings me to your podcast that you’re launching. Let’s talk about that. Tell me about the title of it, what the impetus of it was and how you view it, what kind of guests you’re going to bring on that kind of thing.

[00:32:48] Rachael Camp: Yeah. So it’s called becoming work optional and it is, it’s the whole idea of it is an alternative to traditional retirement and also kind of an alternative to financial, the fire community too. So I think there’s, it’s kind of brings it into the balance. If you view traditional retirement at one end of the spectrum and The fire movement at the other end, I kind of like to view this as somewhere in the middle to where we’re not going to to either extremes.

[00:33:14] Rachael Camp: But the idea here is that a financial plan should allow for maximum options and flexibility and that. The truth is we probably have no idea what we want to be doing in 30 to 40 years. It’s kind of comical that we are creating a financial plan for somebody who is, you know, 50 year old us, but we have no idea what 50 or 60 year old us is going to want to do.

[00:33:36] Rachael Camp: So we talk a lot about creating a plan that maximizes for flexibility, that maximizes for options. That’s what it’s all about. So that when you hit a different phase of your life. And you suddenly want to do something else, well, you have the money for it, you have the plan for it, and you’re allowed to, to go after that.

[00:33:54] Rachael Camp: And that’s what being work optional is really about, that you don’t have to stay in that traditional 9 to 5, you are not reliant on a paycheck, necessarily, and you can Have the option to pursue other things. 

[00:34:11] Patrick Donley: That’s awesome. So, and the podcast is launching soon, right? 

[00:34:15] Rachael Camp: Yeah, next week. So the time of recording this, it’ll be end of January.

[00:34:19] Rachael Camp: That’s coming out. That’s exciting. 

[00:34:20] Patrick Donley: So tell me about some of your guests that you’re having on and I definitely want to tune in and check it out. 

[00:34:26] Rachael Camp: Yeah, so right now it’s actually just my cohost and I, Matt Garrisick, and I were both financial planners. He works with a lot of individuals with equity compensation.

[00:34:35] Rachael Camp: So if that’s something you have, he’s an expert in that. So we’ll be talking quite a bit about that. And then I’ll talk to a lot of business owners and high earners on my side. And then eventually, right now, we’re just doing episodes with just Matt and I, but eventually we want to bring people on who are entrepreneurs who have hit work optional status or people with equity compensation that have hit work optional status and interview them about how they did it, the different strategies that they’ve used and for anybody that is, has hit that status where they no longer have to work anymore, just to kind of ask them about What their life looks like now and how that impacts their decision because it’s such a powerful mindset shift of most of the people that I work with.

[00:35:14] Rachael Camp: And a lot of people that this podcast will be speaking to are not people who want to fully retire, but instead just want to try something differently. So that’s, that’s really who we’re focusing on. 

[00:35:25] Patrick Donley: That’s cool. I love those kind of stories. So that I definitely would love to listen to some of those people that you have on.

[00:35:31] Patrick Donley: I want to talk about Twitter. You’ve been on Twitter. It’s like for a while now, not but relatively not that long. You’ve got over 20, 000 followers. I want to hear just about how Twitter has influenced your career, your practice and just like your experience of Twitter. We’re going to dive deep into this.

[00:35:47] Rachael Camp: Oh, yeah. I mean, Twitter built my business. So I have a camp. Wealth is my virtual financial planning business, and it is the way that I get all of my clients. It’s the way that I’m I get opportunities like this to be on podcast. It’s the platform that introduced me to a lot of my friends. A lot of the peers that I have and networking that I do has all stemmed from Twitter.

[00:36:12] Rachael Camp: So I really can’t emphasize enough the Impact it has had on my life. You know, I started off thinking I’ll use this for marketing. Maybe I’ll get a few clients and it has become way more than I ever could imagine. Even down to when I made my first hiring decisions, I felt like the field of people who are interested in working with me.

[00:36:34] Rachael Camp: In the caliber of these people was so high because they saw, they knew who I was, they knew my money philosophies, they knew how I was building my business, and that was something that they were really interested in, you know, being able to be behind the scenes of it. And so that was, you know, the employees and those things are all things I did not anticipate happening.

[00:36:52] Rachael Camp: It all came from Twitter. 

[00:36:55] Patrick Donley: So when you started, though. Did you explicitly know that, like, did you start off with Twitter thinking that it was going to be a huge, you know, boon to your career? Did you just kind of like check it out? You’re on there kind of lurking. There’s like, I kind of feel like I’m a lurker and I love it and I recognize the power of it, but definitely haven’t put the energy in to whatever, you know, post every day like you are.

[00:37:15] Patrick Donley: So I wanted to hear about that. Like, was it, was your mindset like such that you were using it? Specifically as a tool to grow your career. 

[00:37:22] Rachael Camp: I mean, that was the ultimate goal, but did I believe I was going to actually be able to do it not fully, you know, not really. I had a lot of imposter syndrome at that time, a lot of insecurity, a lot of fear of, of posting on Twitter at that time.

[00:37:36] Rachael Camp: And I remember thinking that I was going to commit to posting for one year. I wasn’t allowed to say, you know, up until that one year, I was not allowed to say this isn’t working. I should give up. I wasn’t allowed to reevaluate the decision. Until I hit the one year mark, and I think that’s the advice I would give almost everybody is dedicate yourself to doing this thing for a really long period of time.

[00:37:59] Rachael Camp: And of course, it’s easier to say than it is to do, but to the best of your ability, ignore the results and just obsess over the input. So, during this time, I was reading a lot of riot holiday, a lot about stoicism, and it was just perfect for that that time of my life because I was. Took such a long time to see any results.

[00:38:20] Rachael Camp: I really needed that Mindset to just obsess over the input and that was the goal not the results, but the goal was tweeting every day And that’s what I did 

[00:38:31] Patrick Donley: Not to be outcome dependent like not to have it blow up and have whatever a hundred thousand impressions or whatever You’re you know, like that can be real a danger.

[00:38:40] Patrick Donley: So you had a goal of Writing or tweeting every day for a year. Is that, did I hear that accurately? 

[00:38:46] Rachael Camp: Yep, and I was again, I was not allowed to give up on twitter I was not allowed to reevaluate the decision until I had done it for at least one year 

[00:38:55] Patrick Donley: And you’re doing the calendar thing with the red x the jerry seinfeld trick That’s awesome.

[00:38:59] Patrick Donley: And you said that you like writing, but did you were you studying writing? Were you studying people on twitter that? You know, to copy them or clone them. There’s some investors I like, like Monish Prabhrai is a guy. I don’t know if you know that name, but he’s all about cloning and he cloned Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.

[00:39:14] Patrick Donley: And the same thing can be applied to anything that you want to do well at. Was that something that you, you did with Twitter and like cloning people that were successful on it? 

[00:39:23] Rachael Camp: Yeah. And actually, one of my favorite strategies is to go completely outside of your industry and study other people. One of it is, you know, you could go to, I could go to somebody’s Twitter who’s, you know, doing what I’m doing, their financial planner, but it’s really hard to kind of come up with your own ideas when you’re in that same.

[00:39:38] Rachael Camp: So that feels just like copying. Right. But 

[00:39:41] Patrick Donley: I’m not saying like, yeah, I’m not saying like plagiarize. 

[00:39:44] Rachael Camp: But if I go to like a Justin Welch, who is focusing on solopreneurship and it’s really different. What I can do is like take his the way that he tweets his templates and just create a very similar tweet, but now it’s about personal finance.

[00:40:01] Rachael Camp: So that’s why I like to go outside of the industry a because you know, I think you should study the best people you can find not just the best people within your industry and a lot of. Creativity comes from seeing what somebody else is doing in a different industry really well and then trying to apply it to your own.

[00:40:15] Rachael Camp: But B, it’s just a little bit easier because if I go to a finance page and they’re tweeting something about a Roth IRA. Well, I’m probably going to tweet about, you know, a Roth IRA. It’s a little bit hard to be creative from that. But with a Justin Welch, who is Targeting a different audience and I can just look at the way that he tweets and I studied a lot of psychology at the time too.

[00:40:37] Rachael Camp: So I was thinking like, what, you know, emotion is he trying to generate here? What is the, what, how is this capturing attention? Those are all things that were top of mind for me. I mean, Consistency is really important and it’s something you have to have. But if you’re not increasing the skill, you’re just showing up every day and posting something.

[00:40:56] Rachael Camp: You’re not studying how to post better, how to use psychology and writing and things like that. You’re not probably not going to see results. So I think it’s the combination of the two showing up every day, but also a dedication to increasing the skill that you’re working on. 

[00:41:10] Patrick Donley: And what kind of time are you talking about?

[00:41:13] Patrick Donley: How long does it take you to do each day? 

[00:41:15] Rachael Camp: So today it’s, it’s much easier. I tell everybody that when you first start posting content, it’s going to be the most time consuming in the beginning because you know, you’re, you’re trying a whole bunch of different things. You’re just trying to see what works.

[00:41:28] Rachael Camp: Your skill is probably at The worst level it’s going to be. So in the beginning, it was a big chunk of my day, especially because, you know, social media is, can get a little bit addicting and that’s something you have to be very careful. But when I first started Twitter, I had a lot of time. Now I have not as much time and I have to be a bit more intentional.

[00:41:47] Rachael Camp: So I spend about, I would say, four hours a week. For Twitter, creating the content, but I have a lot of content that I get to repurpose now or I get to draw from. So it’s not like I’m starting from scratch, which is the hardest place to be when you’re creating content. 

[00:42:03] Patrick Donley: And so you’re generating clients for financial planning through Twitter.

[00:42:08] Patrick Donley: Are there a lot of solopreneurs that, like you mentioned, Justin Welsh. Are you getting a lot of solopreneurs that want to work with you? 

[00:42:15] Rachael Camp: Yeah. Yeah. A lot of business owners. So some of them have a few employees, but a lot of one person businesses as well. And then a lot of high earners too. So physicians and even a little bit of people with equity compensation, I am starting to narrow down exactly who I work with and the type of person, but in the beginning it was, you know, Everybody accepting everybody.

[00:42:37] Rachael Camp: So I have a lot of different types of clients. I love working with solopreneurs. I love working with high earners. And honestly, it’s, it’s because that’s the position that I am in. And so I naturally like to study my own personal finances and what would help me. And so by extension of that, I can. More easily help other people.

[00:42:56] Patrick Donley: I love it. There’s a guy I interviewed peter lowman. Who’s a property manager Really thoughtful guy you would like him a big reader learner, but he had this idea of like niching down To scale up so like getting very specific on and it sounds like you’re doing that I want to dive into the tech stack.

[00:43:14] Patrick Donley: Let’s say I’m a solopreneur. I want to hear about like the tech stack you would recommend people use to manage their finances, whether it’s, you know, I just want to go into that because that’s something I’m really interested and curious about. 

[00:43:26] Rachael Camp: Yeah, I think people might be surprised how simple mine is.

[00:43:30] Rachael Camp: You can certainly get, you know, fancy with it. And I know a lot of tools that other people like to use, but I have been using Excel or I now use Google sheets to track my finances since I graduated college. You know, it was, it was kind of a natural extension of loving Excel anyway, being a finance major.

[00:43:47] Rachael Camp: And I really, you know, I’m a big proponent of customization in personal finance. So this is the way that I was able to fully customize the way that I want to track my expenses. I know there, there’s a lot of great. Other options out there, like you need a budget. People love that one. So if anybody is wanting to start tracking their expenses, I’d probably direct them there first.

[00:44:08] Rachael Camp: But outside of that, then it’s just about setting up, you know, automation. So you sit down and you look at your expenses, you look at your cash flow and at a very high level, you have to understand What percentage is going to my fixed expenses? So, you know, housing, food, utilities, what percentage is going to discretionary?

[00:44:27] Rachael Camp: So this is more of the like fun expenses, you know, eating out, entertainment, travel, and then what percentage is going to savings. So this is the part where I find. Almost nobody knows when I ask them, what percentage of your income are you saving? They almost never have a response or a good guess. So that’s the first thing I would do is have an awareness of your finances.

[00:44:49] Rachael Camp: And I don’t, again, maybe you need a budget would help with this, but I like to just print out statements and go through my expenses line by line and categorize them. So that’ll give you a lot of insight. And you do that manually on your own? Manually on my own that gives me a lot of insight. It’s exactly how I’m spending my money.

[00:45:07] Rachael Camp: I’m at this point where I would think I’d be able to stop doing it. But, you know, we talked about this earlier where I realized how little I was spending on travel, which I didn’t realize at the time. So I think there’s a good. Argument for always tracking your expenses because it can quickly get out of line, but I would look at, you know, what percentage of my income do I want to save?

[00:45:26] Rachael Camp: And a very easy rule of thumb is to be sure you’re saving at least 20 percent of your gross income. And then after that, you just set up automations. So if you’re a business owner, there’s a lot more automation you have to do. So as money hits your account, you know, this percentage or this dollar amount goes to my rough IRA.

[00:45:43] Rachael Camp: Or this percentage goes to my or dollar amount goes to my emergency fund. Just make sure that it’s set up automated. If you can, I know sometimes that’s hard with being a business owner, but if you’re an employee, it’s much easier. So you can set up automations to your 401k. You can set up, uh, automated money to your, to your Roth IRA.

[00:46:02] Rachael Camp: And you can just line it up with the day that your paycheck hits. So a lot of people, when they’re starting out and they’re interested in personal finance, they have a lot of motivation and they believe. That that’s going to stick around and it rarely does. So I’m such a huge fan of automation because it’s the thing that is going to keep you to your goals when the motivation has has died off because it will.

[00:46:23] Patrick Donley: I know you’re a big Jack Bogle fan. I think there’s some books on your bookshelf there of his. So I wanted to talk a little bit about index fund investing versus actively managing a portfolio. We’ve got a lot of listeners that they start to learn about the stock market. It’s fascinating. They want to try to beat the S& P, whatever.

[00:46:41] Patrick Donley: Talk to me about your thoughts on that. 

[00:46:43] Rachael Camp: Well, the biggest thing is I just don’t think it’s worth your time. It’s so hard to beat the market. We have professional analysts that all they do is pay attention to this stuff, and they really struggled to beat the market. So common sense on mutual funds is one of the books behind me by Jack Bogle.

[00:46:58] Rachael Camp: He’s the founder of Vanguard and the father of the index fund and his. If you look at the statistics, the studies, it shows how low a chance there is for an actively managed mutual fund to actually beat the index. So his argument is that we should be thrilled with just matching the index. And that’s the idea behind the index fund.

[00:47:18] Rachael Camp: And that’s my philosophy as well. I don’t want to risk. Paying an active manager to try to beat the index for me when over a 10 year time horizon, they have over 90 percent chance of not being able to do that. And on top of it, I’m paying them to not be the index for me. So it’s kind of a double whammy.

[00:47:37] Rachael Camp: So I believe in putting it in index funds and then outside of that, invest in yourself, invest in your skills. I mean, I just hate to think about all the time. Some people are spending. On trying to beat the market when it’s really hard to do, and you would make so much more money focusing on trying to increase your income or trying to focus on your skills.

[00:47:58] Rachael Camp: That’s I love index fund investing. I love Jack Bogle, but nothing beats investing in yourself. 

[00:48:04] Patrick Donley: That is such good advice. I know I was guilty of that my younger years, like just I love investing and love studying about the markets and it’s like a game. And, you know, I spent hours devoted to it and I think I would have been way better off like taking your advice, like just focusing on investing in myself and outside of investing and automating all this stuff.

[00:48:23] Patrick Donley: And I think I would have been better off. Is there anything in hindsight when you look at your own investing journey, like that you would have done differently in retrospect? 

[00:48:32] Rachael Camp: I mean, honestly, minor tweaks. The one thing I kind of beat myself up on is when I first started out, I contributed to a traditional 401k when I should have been doing a Roth 401k.

[00:48:42] Rachael Camp: You know, that’s something like when you just graduate college, you have your first job. Most likely that is going to be the lowest amount of money that you’re going to make in your career. So a Roth IRA or Roth 401k. Really make sense during that time. And this was before I started to really research my own personal finances.

[00:49:00] Rachael Camp: So I just went with the traditional 401k and in hindsight, I should have been putting everything into raw. But outside of that, I did a little bit of stock picking, nothing crazy, didn’t lose a ton of money or anything, but again, just wasn’t worth. My time and I wish I would have just stuck it in an index fund, forgot about it, and then spent my extra time focusing on increasing my income.

[00:49:21] Rachael Camp: When I, when you get into the fire community, you start really getting into personal finance. You start focusing on investing and optimizing your finances. And there’s a benefit to that. And I’m grateful for the younger me who did that because now I’m at this point where I have a good chunk of money saved and invested, but.

[00:49:38] Rachael Camp: Again, I still think it would have been better even during that time to be spending much more time focused on, you know, reading more books or taking courses or, you know, focusing on my CFP rather than tracking my expenses every day. And again, it speaks to figure out what percentage of your income you want to save.

[00:49:56] Rachael Camp: Automate it and then just forget about it and go do other things. 

[00:50:01] Patrick Donley: What are some of the big mistakes when people come to you that you see them doing that you’re, you’re like, we need to put a stop to this. What are just some of the big mistakes that people are making? 

[00:50:10] Rachael Camp: One of the biggest ones I always see is market timing, even though people don’t classify what they’re doing as market timing.

[00:50:16] Rachael Camp: So I’ll hear all the time. I don’t believe in market timing. I know I can’t do that. But I am waiting to invest some of this cash and I want a good deal. I want to wait till the market drops. That’s market timing, whether in one of my, the phrases I actually dislike in personal finance is buy low, sell high, because it kind of pushes people to believe that they can market time.

[00:50:36] Rachael Camp: And when you’re really young and you have decades from touching this money, your focus should not be. I got to wait for a red day to get into the market, or I want to wait until the market pulls back. I see a dip and then I’ll go all in. The focus should be 20 years from now. When I look back at today, all of it is going to look cheap, you know, historically, that’s that’s what we see in the market.

[00:50:57] Rachael Camp: You give it 20 years of time and that Trends upward. So at this time, whether the market pulls back 5 percent or it is where it is today, this is going to be so cheap in 20 years. Just get in now and don’t try to time the market. There’s a lot of great graphs out there that show if you miss just five of the best market days over a 20 year time period, your return almost cuts in half.

[00:51:20] Rachael Camp: That graph should terrify anybody from being out of the market for any period of time. So some people are afraid of buying into the market and it dropping the next day. I, on the other hand, am terrified of not being in the market when it takes off. I think that’s the fear people should have. 

[00:51:38] Patrick Donley: I wanted to touch on the whole rent versus buying question with it.

[00:51:42] Patrick Donley: When it comes to housing, I believe you rent you’re in Denver now. So talk to me a little bit about that decision. Why you decided to rent? You know, you could have bought a house. Probably talk to me about I know a lot of this is context dependent, but how did you make that decision for yourself? 

[00:51:57] Rachael Camp: Yeah, so I’ve moved around my entire adult life.

[00:52:01] Rachael Camp: You know, I live Chicago, lived in Grand Rapids for a little bit. So, if I had bought at any of those times, you know, maybe it would have worked out. There was a recent market rally in the housing market that it could have worked out, but most likely not. There’s so many large transaction costs with buying and selling a home that it’s hard to recover those costs in just a short time frame.

[00:52:25] Rachael Camp: So, one of the big things is that I really value. Geographic flexibility. So being able to move around, you know, I just moved to Denver six months ago. I would have hated to have to sell a house before I did that. And moving to Denver, you know, I’m brand new to it. I want to explore it first. I want to understand the different neighborhoods and then maybe at some point buy a house, but I always say.

[00:52:46] Rachael Camp: When I do that, it’s going to be a lifestyle decision. It’s not going to be an investment decision primarily because I’m not a believer that your house is your primary residence is a great investment. It is an asset goes on the balance sheet, but I don’t. Most people do not make a decent return on their primary residence and investment.

[00:53:06] Rachael Camp: The mistake I see people make is they look at the cost of their mortgage, their monthly mortgage, and they compare that to their rent and they say, well, I can, my mortgage is cheaper. I should go buy that ignores all the other costs of homeownership. It ignores the fact that you have to put down a huge down payment on the house and that cash could have been spent or invested elsewhere where it could have earned more money.

[00:53:29] Rachael Camp: It ignores the fact that you have maintenance costs, that you have property taxes that you’ll never see again. You know, it’s, you have to invest in the house in order for it to maintain its value. So if you want your house to increase in value or at least maintain the value, your kitchen has to stay updated.

[00:53:45] Rachael Camp: Your bathrooms have to stay updated. Not to mention that, you know, you might have to replace your roof one day or your furnace goes out. It just ignores. All of the little costs that add up that you don’t have when you’re renting. And on top of that, as a business owner, I really prefer fixed, stable monthly costs.

[00:54:04] Rachael Camp: At this point in my life, I don’t want a large, unexpected expense because a lot of my cash is going into my business. And I want it to be that way. It should be that way right now. I should be investing a lot of it back into the business. I don’t want it going into my primary residence. So I hate the argument that renting is throwing your money away because for anybody who is a discipline saver or is an entrepreneur and is putting that cash into their business, you’re going to earn way more money on your business or in the stock market than you are in your primary residence.

[00:54:34] Rachael Camp: So that’s where you want to put the extra cash. And you certainly should do that. It’s not a simple. Equation at all, and people try to make it that way. 

[00:54:43] Patrick Donley: There’s so many costs to homeownership. We just got hit with a huge property tax bill increase every three years in Columbus, like property taxes are reassessed.

[00:54:50] Patrick Donley: And there was a massive increase this year across the board, residential commercial, which we, my wife and I own both. And it’s like, Whoa, it changes. It changes things. So yeah, definitely. That’s a really great points about the rent versus ownership. My background’s in real estate, so I’ve always kind of done like live in flips a little bit, but I think there’s so many benefits to renting.

[00:55:10] Patrick Donley: The problem aren’t yours, then if something happens. So, and the flexibility is huge. I was going to ask about like your, any like contrarian takes or controversial personal finance takes that you have. 

[00:55:21] Rachael Camp: It’s really the renting one. That’s okay. Well, I mean, I could think of some others, but that’s my biggest, my biggest one.

[00:55:27] Rachael Camp: Every time I tweet about it, people go crazy. 

[00:55:31] Patrick Donley: Right. It’s good. I mean, that kind of like controversy, like, whatever. 

[00:55:34] Rachael Camp: It’s good for you. It feels like a very simple statement to say that. You should run the numbers for yourself and that maybe you renting is the better financial decision for you, but people love to insist that there’s no way that renting can be the better financial decision because you’re throwing your money away.

[00:55:51] Rachael Camp: And again, you just mentioned property taxes. I could argue that’s throwing your money away, but I don’t think either of them are throwing your money away. You’re exchanging. Money for a place to live. So I hate that rhetoric in the buy versus rent field, but it also, I just hate blanket financial advice.

[00:56:08] Rachael Camp: So there’s a full few rules of thumb that are good for personal finance, but it’s where we really get into trouble because it should take. Into accounts, every person’s unique circumstances. And so if somebody were to look at me and not understand what I’m doing, they received that I was renting when I could afford to buy.

[00:56:25] Rachael Camp: They may say this person is throwing their money away. They could be building up an asset and their home and they don’t understand that I have a business that the return on my business is multiples of a return that I could get on my primary residence. You don’t understand that I value, you know, flexibility and that I might move around.

[00:56:42] Rachael Camp: You don’t understand that time is really important to me. So if something goes wrong in my house, I don’t want to spend any time or energy on that. I really value and protect my time. And I think about that. Even in the decision of being a homeowner versus being a renter, you know, landscaping and care for the home.

[00:57:00] Rachael Camp: Those all require time and I’m at a point in my life where I’m fiercely protective over my time and I’m willing to spend money to buy my time back. That’s something I’m doing a lot right now. 

[00:57:13] Patrick Donley: Say more about that. Like what are some of the things you’re doing to buy back time? 

[00:57:17] Rachael Camp: Yeah. So one of the, the big things is hiring cleaners every, as soon as I got to the point where I was able to do that, I knew that that was something that I should do.

[00:57:25] Rachael Camp: I evaluate a clean space. It helps me think, but on top of that, it’s just not worth. Me spending time cleaning when I could pay somebody, you know, a lower rate to do it and to talk about the almanac of Naval and the influence that has had, that has really reframed my view of time. And I love when Naval talks about that.

[00:57:44] Rachael Camp: He set himself a really high hourly rate. 

[00:57:47] Patrick Donley: It was like, what, 1000 an hour, I believe at the time. 

[00:57:50] Rachael Camp: In the very beginning. Now it’s much higher. But, you know, at a time where, like, I think he even said he couldn’t really afford it, but if he could outsource or pay somebody else to do something for less than 1, 000 an hour, he would do that.

[00:58:04] Patrick Donley: So 1 of the examples was if he bought something online and he needed to return the item, but. You know, that it didn’t equal a thousand dollars or more, he wouldn’t do it. It wasn’t worth his time. He was that fiercely protective of his time. As somebody who’s a big saver, that’s a little hard for me to wrap my mind around, but I have still adopted that and it’s influenced the way that I hire.

[00:58:27] Patrick Donley: You know, as soon as I started to see how much time I was spending just in putting data for a lot of my clients, I knew that I could afford to pay somebody else to do that. And that I should do that because my skills were really sitting down with the clients, having great conversations with marketing my business.

[00:58:44] Patrick Donley: And that was really the revenue drivers. So I need to buy back my time over here for things that weren’t increasing the revenue. It didn’t really require me to do it. And so that’s, that’s what I did is bought back my time so I could spend time. And these other areas that were more impactful to the business.

[00:59:02] Patrick Donley: Yeah. 

[00:59:02] Patrick Donley: I love that idea as well. I’ve got in the corner over here, Amazon item that I could return. It was a 35 item that doesn’t whatever it doesn’t fit. And I’m not going to return it. Like I specifically like you mentioned the novel thing. It’s like, it’s not worth my time. I’ll just, I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, but let’s give it away.

[00:59:20] Patrick Donley: But it’s such a good, were there any other ideas that were impactful in the Naval’s book?

[00:59:21] Rachael Camp: Yeah, the idea of leverage, you know, I’m in a period of my life where I am trading a lot of my time for money, but I understand that in order to really build wealth, you can’t do that. You have to start building leverage. And actually, I started posting on Twitter because of that. So I could spend You know, all day finding people talking to them one on one, or I can put out my thoughts on Twitter and I can talk to, I can build up this audience and talk to a lot of people.

[01:00:29] Rachael Camp: There’s no way I can sit down with 21, 000 people individually and talk to them. But if I, if I invest in the skills of writing and share what I believe are important messages online, then that’s a form of leverage. I can write, send out a tweet and it goes to 21, 000 plus people who might. See it. And so that was really impactful to me to understand that there’s a one to many approach that’s going to provide leverage, but also save you time.

[01:00:55] Rachael Camp: And again, it all comes back to saving yourself your time and your energy. 

[01:01:00] Patrick Donley: We said it before, but like that book is definitely one you could reread every year and get something valuable out of it. Are there any other books, whether finance? biographies. I know you’re a huge reader that you’d recommend to people or that have made a big impact on you.

[00:01:13] Rachael Camp: I really like Cal Newport’s deep work and his kind of thoughts around social media. It’s really funny because I think people would be surprised to know I don’t have any social media on my phone. I intentionally keep it off my phone. So when I go on Twitter or LinkedIn, wherever I am, I have to open it up on my desktop and I’m much more intentional with it.

[01:02:34] Rachael Camp: When I first started on Twitter, of course, it was on my phone and I was just every spare second. I was opening it up and looking at it. And the idea is I really wanted to protect my mind space and also just allow myself to get bored. When you look at people like. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. They understand the power of spending a large portion of your time thinking. So Warren Buffett, I love him. He has his calendar that has like nothing on it. Right. He says he spends like a majority of his days reading and thinking. That is, 

[01:03:06] Patrick Donley: that’s my ideal life. Yeah, exactly. 

[01:04:08] Rachael Camp: But social media distracts us. Some of us could have completely empty calendars and not spend a second thinking because we have these distractions.

[01:05:17] Rachael Camp: And so when I started to notice that I was constantly distracting myself and Cal Newport in his book, Deep Work goes into this quite a bit. I took social media off my phone. I try to be a lot more intentional when I go to look at emails and respond to emails as well. And really, I’m just protecting my deep thinking and my deep work.  I find if I can start a day working just three hours, no interruptions, a little bit of five minute breaks in there. I’m extremely productive in trying to find these little pockets of time. Instead, if you can really block out the time and focus on something for a good two to three hours. The amount of work you’ll get done is amazing.

[00:02:57] Rachael Camp: That book talks about that. Yeah. 

[00:02:59] Patrick Donley: Yeah. It’s a great book. We mentioned Dickie Bush. He does the same thing where he walks out the first, I think three or four hours of his day just doing deep work. And what in terms of any creative person, like to be able to have that time is huge. And like you said, there are so many distractions in our lives, whether it’s whatever, put it on Facebook or there’s just constantly things wanting our attention and distracting us to block that out as a.

[01:03:24] Patrick Donley: Really good practice. 

[01:03:30] Rachael Camp: And on that same note, The Creative Act, which I have up behind me here as well by Rick Rubin. Yeah. Yep. Great book for thinking about creativity and again, how to protect your creativity. So I would say deep work in The Creative Act if, and it’s funny because. I used to not view this field as creative at all, but as soon as I started labeling myself as a creator, writer, then I started to adopt some of the same habits that writers have, or that anybody in the creative space has, and the music space, and anything like that, and it really does help Make my content better and I think you almost have to dive into that identity and say, I’m a creator. I’m a writer and then study the habits of great writers and great creators and take your work very seriously. That’s something that I’ve started to do. I think somebody could look at a finance creator. Somebody just sends out some tweets and think that there’s not much that goes into it but As soon as I started taking it really seriously, I started viewing myself again as a writer and as a creator and valuing the quality of what I put out into the world. It helped a lot with the growth. 

[01:04:31] Patrick Donley: I also wanted to touch on 4, 000 weeks. I think that’s how I found out about you. Like, I think you had posted about the, like, your books that made the biggest impact.

[01:04:40] Patrick Donley: That was one. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin was one. I forget some of the others, but I was reading 4, 000 Weeks at the time. So I just wanted to hear like how that book impacted you too. 

[01:04:51] Rachael Camp: I love that book because I picked it up thinking here’s a productivity book. I had no idea what it was really about other than I thought it was about productivity.

[01:04:57] Rachael Camp: And it was anybody who’s really obsessive over productivity and trying to maximize their output and things like that should read this book. Because this book is about how hard it is for us to be productive and how humans were not meant to be productivity machines were not meant to maximize our output.

[01:05:16] Rachael Camp: And I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves of, I do this all the time where I feel like I could be more efficient with my days and why can’t I put. Get the output out that I want to. And this book, it takes that pressure off because it’s like, you’re not supposed to be that way. We are not machines.

[01:05:31] Rachael Camp: Rest is a very important part of our life. And I’ve been creating for almost two years now without much rest. And it’s something that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit. I look at what I’m trying to do here, what I’m trying to build as a marathon, so I can’t treat it like a sprint. And if I need rest or I need to slow down at any point in this marathon, then I want to do that.

[01:05:52] Rachael Camp: I want to give myself the permission to do that because it should be all about sustainability and doing this for a decade, not doing it for a few years and burning out. 

[01:06:01] Patrick Donley: Good place to put a pin in it here. It’s been a blast talking to you. I really have enjoyed this. For our listeners that aren’t familiar with you, what’s the best way to learn about you, get in touch with you, that kind of thing?

[01:06:12] Rachael Camp: Yeah, so we mentioned Twitter, most active there, it’s at camp underscore wealth. I also recently started a YouTube channel that’s at camp wealth. And then I’m on LinkedIn as well. If you like to LinkedIn, have a newsletter. too. They can find on my website. And then finally I have the Becoming Work Optional podcast coming out with my co host, Matt Garasik.

[01:06:32] Rachael Camp: That’ll be the end of January, 2024. 

[00:06:35] Patrick Donley: You got a lot of exciting stuff going on. I will put a link in the show notes to all of those that you mentioned, but I just want to thank you for your time and really enjoyed today. This was 

[01:06:44] Rachael Camp: great. Thank you so much, Patrick. 

[01:06:46] Patrick Donley: Okay, folks, that’s all I had for today’s episode.

[01:06:49] Patrick Donley: I hope you enjoyed the show and I’ll see you back here real soon.

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