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Should I buy a house now or should I wait for rates to drop? Should I lease, finance or buy a vehicle outright? How are we going to handle our finances if we get married? Can we afford a kid, a dog? These aren't questions of how much will this cost me? But questions of is it worth it to me. That's what this book is all about. We end up spending money on the wrong things, not spending money on things that could really benefit us in the long run, and generally failing to get what we really want when it comes to our financial goals and our life. Well, not anymore. Hi besties. Welcome back to Net Worth and Chill with me, your host, Vivian Tu, AKA Urich, bff and your favorite Wall street girly. And today we have an incredibly special episode. It is new Year, new me time and I'm sure you are thinking about your money because let's be honest, maybe we overspent a little in December. Maybe we are feeling like we have no idea what's going to happen this year with our financial journey, but we want to make sure it's better than last. Well, you have come to the right place. Today we are actually going to be doing a exclusive reading of my book, well Endowed. This is so perfectly timed because I feel like right now there's a lot of uncertainty around the economy and just generally everything. And this book is really going to help the next generation better understand how to actually navigate this consumeristic society, while also helping you buy a home or a car, get insurance, even when things may feel like they're stacked against you. It'll help you navigate money with your relationships, both romantic but also just for friends and family. It'll help you overcome those hard moments like divorce, but also plan for happy moments like weddings or big celebrations. It'll also teach you how to set your kids up for financial success, whether through a series of investments, how to pay for college, things like that. And last but not least, the most important piece of all, how to use estate planning to build generational wealth. We are going to be going over trusts and wills and plans, power of attorney and healthcare directives, and exactly how to set up your money so that it can stay in your family tree. And today we are going to be reading the first, I would say the introduction and maybe a couple extra pages past there. I want to give you a taste of what this book is like and then I'm hoping that you will go out and pre order a copy. It releases on February 3rd. You can get it wherever books are sold or you can just go to richbff book.com it's so special to me. This was a labor of love. And also on top of that, getting pre orders in is so important because it just means more independent bookstores are willing to carry and stock the book. So please, if you are interested in leveling up your money this year, making a change and setting up your future generations, your family tree for financial success, please grab a copy. It's called well Endowed by Vivian Tu and you can get a copy@richbff book.com but let's jump into our reading.
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If you get mad every time you pick up your phone and start scrolling, it's not just you.
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Rage bait is kind of the currency or the power that's behind a lot.
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Of the content we might see this.
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Week on Explain it to me from Vox why the Internet is pissing you off on purpose. New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts.
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So this is the COVID If you're watching you can see it. It's well Endowed the Secrets to Strategic Building a financial foundation for you and your family and creating lasting generational wealth by Vivian Tu. And I do want to read you guys my dedications because anybody who's gotten my first book knows that the dedications are some of the most fun. So it's again dedicated to three different entities. First and foremost to my immigrant parents. Thank you for leaving the only life you ever knew behind to give me a future you could only dream of. Your sacrifices became the foundation of the opportunities I was given. Every story I tell and every half baked idea I dare to chase. This book and all that I am exists because you believe that your only child could carry the weight of two hearts worth of ambition. I love you. To my husband, AKA Boo. You are the greatest man I have ever met. You are my fiercest advocate and most trusted confidant who sees greatness in me and even when I cannot see it in myself. You push me to play bigger, dream louder and never settle for anything less than extraordinary. Thank you for holding my hand in every triumph and through every challenge. Marrying you is the best decision I've ever made. I love you and to my future kid. And then in parentheses S potentially kids. I didn't have rich parents but you will. I love you. So now into the introduction. In the fifth grade I got a part in the school play we were putting on Annie and young Vivian II was cast in the role of Orphan Duffy and I was pumped understand this play was the hot ticket in town. Kids were desperate to get apart to the point of crying and getting their parents to call the school and complain when they were cast as random orphan number five with no lines. But not me, because I, Vivian Tu, was lucky and talented enough to get a speaking role. Ironically, I don't remember a single line of dialogue or any of the songs, but I do remember what happened after the show. Everybody's parents showed up with flowers, a camcorder, and a big mom and dad hug at the end. Everyone's parents but mine. That is because they had work. For my parents, being Chinese immigrants coming to this country and not speaking the language at first meant jumping into an environment where they felt that they were in constant survival mode. They had worked hard to get here and they kept working hard and often to make ends meet and provide for our family. Certainly their prioritization of money bought me some creature comforts. They kept a roof over my head and food on the table and eventually even paid for my education. My parents did not spend money on themselves, but they did on me. They would buy me the newest Neopets game, Fruit roll ups from the grocery store, and even an MP3 player when they first came out. Whatever little things I wanted. Sometimes it seemed as though that might have been in exchange for feeling bad about missing the ballet recitals and the soccer matches, all because they had scrimped and saved and worked all the time. That's why they missed Annie. They missed my stage debut as Orphan Duffy. When the performance was over and all the other parents were mobbing the hallways and congratulating their kids, my parents were waiting outside in the car to pick me up and take me home. In that moment, I made a mental note. I'll never do this to my kid, because to young Vivian too, nothing was more valuable than having that time with her parents. Fast forward to more recent times. I had just treated my parents to a luxury vacation overseas. And when I say luxury, I mean I spared no expense. We're talking first class tickets from the United States to Asia. The baller suite at every hotel, prepaid Michelin star meals. As the final leg of their trip, I'd booked them flights to come visit me in New York on their way home. Their first morning here, after they took a little jet lag nap, we went out for dim sum. By the time we wrapped up, I still had another hour or so free before my next meeting. And what did I do in that moment? As my parents, whom I rarely get to see now that I was an adult, were hanging out in my living room, I opened my laptop to answer emails. Thankfully, halfway through Checking my inbox, I paused and had a little what the hell am I doing? Moment. Yes, I'd spent all that money on gifting them a vacation, one I knew they'd enjoyed and had been thrilled to receive. And I'd earned that money by working hard, which was what I was about to pick right back up doing on my laptop. But I failed to realize that the most valuable part of the grand voyage probably wasn't the plane tickets, the 18 course tasting menu, or any of the other things I had leveraged my monetary wealth to obtain. It was my time with them, the thing young Vivian2 had been so desperate to have. You could choose to see this as a story about toxic hustle culture, but it's actually a story about value. Not just getting or having money, but using it to get what you really want out of life. It's about what it means to apply that wealth to something that actually matters. Not fancy stuff or a ton of zeros in your bank account, but security, stability, and time for us and for the people we care about. The conclusion I came to in that moment was this. I know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. As someone who prides myself on being financially savvy, whose entire brand and business is built on expertise in that area, that was kind of an alarming conclusion to reach as your rich bff, I teach people how to be smart with money. I'm an ex Wall street trader and financial educator, after all, and I'm the bestie to a community of over 10 million people online and around the world who are helping one another get rich and stay rich. I firmly believe that not only can everyone learn the basics of financial literacy, they should. In my first book, I laid out the essentials of how money earning it, banking it, investing it, borrowing it, and alas, paying taxes on it works. I taught you how to maximize your income, grow your savings, wind down your debt, and more. I taught you basically everything I know about how to be smart with money. And being smart with money is great. It's crucial, really. But to get the most out of your money, to put your money to work creating a life in which you and your loved ones are safe, secure and stable. You need to be wise with money. You need to spend strategically. That's what this book is all about. If richaf was about how to maximize your money, well Endowed is about how to maximize your life using that money. It's the essential manual for how to spend your money in a way that builds wealth and aligns with your larger long term life goals. After all, it's not enough to have money, you need to leverage it. You need a strategy for how to use it wisely so that you can secure the life you want, spend time with those you want to and pass down a financial legacy. You need to understand the value of your dollars, your time and the people in your life. If all that sounds intense, I get it. This stuff is important. But with me it's not going to be boring or serious. I mean, I made the title a dick joke. I'm basically a 12 year old boy. So jokes about family jewels aside, I do want you to become well endowed. In this book, I'll give you the behind the scenes inside track intel on how to navigate big ticket money decisions. Think of it not just as the insider's guide to things such as sharing finances with a partner, kicking the tires on major purchases, literally, and setting up retirement and end of life plans, but also as a guide to optimizing your mindset. Now I am one of the least woo woo people you will ever meet. I am not talking about manifesting wealth with your thoughts or cleansing your money aura or whatever. I'm talking about understanding what you want, why you want it, and what you're willing to do to get it. Because ultimately, value is nothing more than a measure of how you feel about the money you spend and no spreadsheet is going to be able to total that up for you. Yet, even though money exists to bring us that value in life, strategically using that money is a basic life skill we tend to write off or aren't taught in the first place. I know that people can master the financial basics and still struggle. Not struggle to pay their bills or make ends meet so much, but struggle with the bigger, lifeier decisions that can't necessarily be solved with a good budget or a better understanding of investing. It's these often overlooked decisions that are the key to obtaining true wealth in the physical and emotional sense. They have long term repercussions and almost no one talks about how important it is to get them right from the get go. Should I buy a house now or should I wait for rates to drop? Can I justify car payments and should I lease finance or buy a vehicle outright? How are we going to handle our finances if we get married? Can we afford a kid? A dog? What is a trust and should I get one? What will happen to the people I love most if I get sick and can't work? These aren't questions of how much will this cost me? But questions of is it worth it to me, and that's a much harder kind of question to answer. Anyone can read a price tag and see how much something costs. Maybe there's a little fancy math involved. If there's a loan, maybe there are some terms and conditions to pick apart, but at the end of the day, it's cold hard numbers. Anyone can master the basics once they know the rules, but learning the rules to figure out the value something has to you where you can spend your money to get the most of what you want in the future and the least of what you don't, that's a lot trickier. For one thing, a lot of us are living in very different environments from the ones we grew up in, but we're still holding onto the values we learned through osmosis in childhood. I don't mean values such as treat people with respect and stand up for what you believe in. I mean the value of a dollar to you. Unfortunately, very few of us have frank money conversations with our families at all. No one taught us things such as how and when it's worth the money to buy versus rent or have one, two or no cars or kids. If our parents did give us advice about getting your money's worth, it might not be relevant to us by the time we need it. Your parents may have been able to have two kids in a home by age 25, but you might be 35 and struggling to make the rent. Conversely, you might have grown up in a paycheck to paycheck house and now pull in a healthy six figures. Even if you're still chilling in the same tax bracket you were raised in, odds are that your relationships, home, job, friend group and and or general lifestyle don't exactly map to those of your family of origin. Bottom line, more often than not we don't end up getting the guidance we need on how to use our dollars wisely. For another, the odds are good that you've run into a life scenario that you just didn't know was a thing. For example, when it comes to strategic money planning stuff such as trust funds, prenups, owning multiple properties, making an estate plan, and so on. Things that not coincidentally have been low key gatekept by rich people for years, you might straight up not know what your options are. And even if you've heard of them, they can be exhausting or intimidating to figure out. Finally, there are those big lifey things you know are worth it that you might intellectually understand, have value, but just never got around to doing you feel too fill in the blank. Poor old unimportant, stupid to fill in the blank, Make a will, get a mortgage, plan your retirement, or you feel as though you're too far down the road with whatever choices you already made and are too embarrassed to course correct. Or you're just plain avoiding the inescapable reality of death. Sorry if I'm the one to break it to you, but you will die one day. Rip My point is, it's no wonder most people don't have a real meaningful understanding of how to leverage their money to get the most value. Leveraging those life decisions well can result in long term growth of your assets, your money, your time and your life. If we don't know how to spend strategically, we get in over our head or stick our head into the sand. And when we don't know what to do, we default to what we learned while growing up. In my case, that was when in doubt, work we don't know about or fully understand the legal and financial tools at our disposal to safeguard the money we've earned. The result Work. We end up spending money on the wrong things, not spending money on things that could really benefit us in the long run, and generally failing to get what we really want when it comes to our financial goals and our life. Well, not anymore. Here's how this book can help. I'll start off here with a little value system detox, breaking down how and why we got to this place of confusion, mixed messaging and downright ignorance about what is actually worth our hard earned money. Then I'll show you how to get the most value from yourself by evaluating how and why you buy things, understanding how to calibrate your internal sense of time spent versus money spent, and more. After that, we'll dive into the big life decisions from buying a car or a home to tying the knot and having some kiddos to planning for the future of yourself and your loved ones. I'll give you the strategic tools and tricks you need to make the best decision for you and your future every time. I'll show you how smart value based spending on on almost every life decision can grow your money in a way that will enable you to have the time and the ability to secure your future and your legacy, which will allow you to secure the most valuable thing there is. And spoiler alert, it's not a thing at all. It's people. The time to be with them and the ability to take care of them. That is the best and most critical way to deploy your dollars in life. Yes, the traditional markers of wealth luxe vacations VIP dining experiences, shopping sprees, and bottle services are great. Trust me, they are. But tell me that you wouldn't trade all of that in a heartbeat to get a few more good years with someone you lost too soon. Or even just another few good years for yourself. I know it's hard or morbid to future cast and think in those terms, especially when there's all that good stuff to spend it on within reach right now. But I guarantee that before you realize it, one day will become now. And the diagnosis, the accident, the natural disaster will be real and right in front of you. And you don't want to wait until then to realize what's truly valuable. The one thing you can't get more of. Time. Young Vivian too knew that when she desperately wished her parents weren't so busy with work. Present day Vivian too, I'm happy to report, got the memo and shut her laptop to spend some more Quality time with her parents. Having the people you love together, healthy, happy and secure. What else do you want from life? When it comes down to it, what else could be more worth your hard earned cash? That besties is value. That is ultimately what every dollar you spend should be working toward. That sense of security, stability and time with the people you love. Because that is truly priceless.
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For most of the history of television, if you missed a show, you just missed it. It was over, it was gone. But then this little company called TiVo came along and gave people superpowers. You could pause live television, you could rewind it, you could save it and watch it later. It was incredible. And the people who had it could not stop talking about it. This week on Version History, a new chat show about old technology, we talk about the history of TiVo and how it is that a company whose products actually no one ever really had or used became one of the most iconic stories in tech. All that on Version history, wherever you get podcasts.
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And now I want to give you a little sneak peek of part one. Optimizing for Value Real Talk the first step in securing true wealth is looking out for you. This starts with a value based detox to help you change your mindset. Only then can you learn to optimize how you think and live in order to maximize your income, your savings, yourself and your life. Not because you can't rely on other people, but because you are the only one who can know what you want, don't want and care about deep down inside. Not to mention that if you don't take care of yourself, yourself will fall apart. And then how will you be able to get any enjoyment out of life? Understanding what's worth your hard earned money, why and how you buy things requires reclaiming your mind from the con of consumerism and recalibrating it to recognize how to optimize the value of time spent versus money spent. So let's drill deep on what it means to get right, think right, and do right by yourself so that you can tackle the rest of your life, social, financial and otherwise, in the best possible shape and state of mind. Chapter one De Influencing your brain While I was growing up, my parents and I very rarely went out to eat. But when we did, we would go to a Chinese buffet. But that was not just dining out, it was a competitive sport. I as a child always wanted to start with carbs, which anyone who competitively all you can eats knows is not the correct sport strategy. So while I went right for the pizza and fried rice, which of course were right up front so as to lure you in, my parents would basically slap my hand away. That's not how you eat at a Chinese buffet. Instead, we had a system. We would stand next to the seafood section and wait for the server to bring out crabs, lobster, shrimp and fish from the back. We would stock up on those, then eat our way through them before moving on to the meats. After that, we were allowed to have vegetables, but only the expensive ones, such as snow peas, not salad. Finally, if we could still breathe or unbutton our pants at that point, we were allowed to have carbs. By the time we left the place, that buffet would have lost money on us. That was how ruthlessly efficient we were at eating. Looking back, those buffets were probably $23.99 per person, which might not seem like a lot now, but was a huge luxury for my parents back in the day. And while as a kid I never understood why I had to start with shrimp and work my way down to noodles, I now understand that my parents, given their financial situation, wanted to maximize the value for their money. For me, because of the life lessons I was taught at a Chinese buffet, optimization feels like a birthright. The idea of maximizing value for money, no matter what temptations are trying to lead you astray has been deeply ingrained in me. But it's important to acknowledge that most people don't receive an education on the difference between value and price, or how to see and ignore the signals that are trying to derail you from your prudent financial path. And when you don't have a strong and grounded inner sense of what's worth your money. It is easy, nay trivially so, for corporations and marketers to swoop in to try to convince you why their product is worth your money. So so here's the rewind. We didn't get to this point of misvaluing things out of nowhere. It wasn't an accident, but it also wasn't some kind of moral failing on our part. It has been a slow burn and it's been a long time coming. I'm going to unpack just why we tend to value the wrong shit, how consumerism became the bedrock of our modern society and how marketing manipulates us into using our money in ways that don't actually get us the life we want before we go any further, I'm going to give you a little lesson that is part economic history, part media studies, and part sociology, as well as some inside intel from my time in ad sales. I'll tell you this not to scare or shame you, but to lay the foundation for how you can optimize this money and find security and stability, even when this is the context you're operating in. Optimization is the bedrock of understanding how to get rich and stay rich, both in material items and in life. Without it, we cannot distinguish between needs, wants, and what will actually bring us value. These days I don't go to a ton of Chinese buffets, but the last time I was back home I went to one with my parents without thinking or asking. I got my first plate of food and returned with 18 oysters. You would have thought I had won the Nobel Peace Prize the way my dad was beaming at me when I sat back down. I've really only seen that kind of pride from him on a few occasions, such as my college graduation and when I got my first job. The point is, once you understand the forces in play around you, learn the rules of the game and understand how to use them to get what you want, you'll make optimization second nature. Thank you guys so much for listening to that early sneak peek reading of my book well Endowed. I hope you enjoyed it, I hope you learned something and I hope it's absolutely wet your pallet to continue reading this book. If you want to pre order a copy, please head to Rich BFFbook. I promise you it'll be well worth it. This book comes with a ton of checklists, digital resources, and really, really appeals to such a broad audience. I hope you grab a copy and you can find it wherever books are sold and@richbffbook.com I'll see you guys next week. Bye. Thanks for tuning into this week's episode of Net Worth and Chill, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you like the episode, make sure to leave a rating and review and subscribe so you never miss an episode. Don't to subscribe, forget. Got a burning financial question that you want covered in a future episode? Write to us via podcast at yourrichbff. Com, Follow Net Worth and chillpod on Instagram to stay up to date on all podcast related news and you can follow me at yourrichbff for even more financial know how. See you next week. Bye.