Podcast Episode 62: Fame, Fortune, and Broke Part 2 with Marcus Bell of Bellringer Productions

Welcome to Sound Financial Bites, where we help you with bite-sized pieces of financial and life knowledge to help you design and build a good life. The knowledge that has been shared from stages at conferences, pages of national business magazines, and clients living across America, our host, Paul Adams, now brings directly to you.

Hello and welcome back to Sound Financial Bites. I’m Paul Adams, your host. I’m here to introduce you to Part 2 of Marcus Bell of Bellringer Music, sharing with us what he went through personally after being successful, and then spending again, and then getting successful the second time around, maintaining it, and doing a better job of building his balance sheet.

Now, what he does with his invitation-only program called Star Boot Camp and how that — and the discoveries he has there around mindset shift for celebrities, I think, will be valuable for all of you. I hope you enjoy part 2 of “Fame, Fortune, and Broke”.

Let’s talk about what changes when they’re making this much money and who’s around then. You refer to it as the Jones Effect, which I think is apt. But, when you’re famous now, you’re not really hanging with people that make a 100 or 200 thousand dollars a year. Who are the people outside of the music and entertainment business that get access to these folks?

Right. So, the more fame you have or the more, I guess, recognition or clout that you have in any profession, that automatically starts to open you up to exposure into top of fields and other professions. So, you have a Kanye hanging out with the tech executives, or you have a billionaire interacting with a music pop star, a movie actor star, all of a sudden, our circles start to change as we become more influential, as we become more affluent.

I was at a lunch with a billionaire a few days ago, for example. I’m not a billionaire, right? I’m far from being a billionaire, but if I’m in Bel Air and I saw that there were some houses for sale in Bel Air, the level of spending that’s possible from a billionaire is a lot different than someone that is in that 10 million zone. I saw one of the houses had a helicopter pad on top of the house with the helicopter there.

Yeah, of course. You got to have a helicopter that goes with the helipad.

Exactly. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if I’m a new celebrity that has — I have new money and now I see that helicopter pad in my neighborhood, the temptation to say, “Okay, why don’t I get a helicopter?” This is never going to end, right? “I’m going to get a helicopter too and that way, I don’t have to take a plane to my shows,” or something like that. And so, that’s the Jones Effect. All of a sudden, you are now in with old money, or tech money, or people that have real estate tycoon money, or ore money, and you have music money.

I was going to say, almost anybody in Hollywood, a guy like Mark Cuban or Mark Zuckerberg could hang out with, and spending amount of money they don’t think is a big deal, and they’re bankrupting their new friend.

Absolutely.

And not realizing because it’s not transparent.

What happens is the pressure to look good, the pressure to — there’s a competition, right? It took a competition for them to become successful in music, and then all of a sudden, there’s competition for the trappings of it. So, it’s very important to have, surrounding you, advisors and people to keep in check those human tendencies. There’s a human tendency to want to compete, but understand what game you’re actually playing and that your only competition that could be of significance is that of your net worth.

Which kind of lands us on that last issue which is they’re not think about their net worth at all, typically after they start making good income. It almost seems like from the outside, let me just ask, Marcus, it might not even really occur this way to too many of our listeners is it’s almost like these stars have to survive their first run at making a ton of money, and then not make a ton of money for a little while, get their head financially handed to them, either full bankruptcy or close to it, and then they need another album to hit or another great movie, something else have to happened that now they get their head screwed on straight, and then they got a shot at building wealth.

Yes, that sounds like my story. Here we go.

Sounds like the story you tell in Star Boot Camp, I’d imagine.

That sounds like my journey right there. It’s like for years, I was not earning enough income to really support myself as a music producer. So, fortunately for me, I was able to play the piano and my mother used to tell me, “The piano man will always work.” because there’s always a church looking for a piano player, there’s always a singer that needs someone to accompany them. There’s a lot of options, so as long as I can play a piano, I can always earn income. It wasn’t until — I’d say 10 to 20 years to become an overnight success. For a long time, it was a real struggle, and I would invest money that I would make, into equipment.

I was investing in myself and investing in the tools for the craft, and at that time, back in the 90s, the technology wasn’t as advanced as it is now. I would spend $5,000 here, $5,000 there, $3,000 here, use this credit card for this new machine that came out, and so forth. All this was so that I could create music that eventually would earn income, so the first time that I got out of debt I was like $50,000 in debt off of recording equipment and so forth. I wasn’t one to spend money on jewelry or cars or you know — I think I may have spent $300 on a car.

Right on! My kind of guy.

It wasn’t that, it was all about the music equipment, having the latest technology.

All of us need to be back in the business, yeah.

Exactly, and so I remember the day, the first time I got out of debt, the people that you surround yourself with are so important. At the time, I was dating a woman and I was sharing with her, “Oh yeah! I’m about to get out of debt with tech that I just got for producing something,” and she’s like “Oh, that’s great!” So, I got out of debt and I didn’t know what to do next. So, I’m out of debt and I’m at zero, there was this piece of equipment that I always wanted, I was out of credit card debt, and I was talking with the girl I was dating at the time, my girlfriend, and she’s like “You know what? You should just go for it. You wanted that, you should go for it,” and then boom, 24 hours later, I was $5,000 in the hole again.

Yeah!

So, the second time I was out of debt, I was $75,000 in debt and the woman I was with then, same situation, I was about to click the button on paying off $7,500 on a credit card, it’s my last credit card. I created a plan to get out of debt, and here it is, I’m at that moment I’m about to hit the button, I’m looking over at the woman I was with, and I’m like, “Should I share this with her? I remember what happened last time.”

Yeah, yeah.

“Honey, I’m about to — I’ve been pulling myself out of debt and I’m about to press my button on my last bill,” and she says, “Go for it!” Then I hit the button and that was it but this time, and that person is my wife now, this time, it was a different story, it was now that I’m out of debt, now I just get this check for $60,000, now I got this check for $80,000, now I’m going to do something different.

Now, I’m going to, one, start talking to people. It’s like talking to people and say “Okay, if you got $50,000,” and these were people that had a wealth in business, understood the money game, what would you do with $50,000 and so forth. I was fortunate enough to have, at that point, the second time, been surrounded with people that were fit at the money game. So, I had to acquire those skills myself.

That’s great. So Marcus, you shared about you had money stuff. Everybody goes through that where they make a lot of money, they’re making more money than they made before, probably made some decisions during that cost them a bunch of money, and if they’re lucky enough, they get the second wind and start making enough money the second time around, and they learned, and they had better decisions. But, what we found, and it sounds that you found as well, is all the things that are money problems are not money problems at all. That everything, when people say “Here’s the financial solution to the money problem,” it’s not always the case, it’s oftentimes something different. So, can you share how you work with these folks and start to build the fame, and income, and what you do to get them around them.

Sure, there’s a friend of mine. His name is Daniel Burrus, and he is a futurist. One of the things that he like to say, which I’ve adapted, is the problem that you’re looking at is not your problem, so look at how can skip that problem. So, when people talk about, “I have a money problem,” skip that, they have a saving problem. Skip that. You actually have, maybe, a spending problem, right? If you have a money problem, maybe it’s not a money problem, skip that. It may be a mindset problem, or it may be a relationship problem, or it may be an access problem, or it may be a skill set issue.

The first identified problem that you think you have is just isn’t it.

Exactly. So, if you’re operating from that then it allows for you to dig a little bit deeper and say “Okay, well it’s a decision making problem.” So, part of my process with recording artist or celebrity and developing is to sort through the trees and the forest of that of, “Okay, so it’s looking at what relationship do you have with money?” What was your parents’ relationship with money, and how does that impact your thinking. Do you see that they’re good with it or they’re not good with it, or what have you adapted that you’re not aware that you adapted in your own life.

Some people come from backgrounds where there’s a weak relationship with money. So, once you get into the discovery of where does your money mindset makeup come from. Is it coming from what you’re getting from the people around you or your family? Because, we are influenced by the people around us, and if we’re not aware, then we can be drawn and pulled into behaviors that are not healthy for our financial well-being.

So, part of my task with recording artists is to uncover that relationship and then from that standpoint of what exists, if what exists is not working, then what now can be created. What can the new behavior be? What can the new mindset be? What kind of new ethic or value can be put in place of that which hasn’t worked or is not working, or is not going to work?

If I may, I imagine that’s — here, we’re kind of talking about somebody’s stuff but let’s step away from that for a moment. I would imagine there’s similar kinds of things that happen that this invitation-only program you have to Star Boot Camp, if somebody hasn’t heard about it, this is you talking about it publicly that’s not normally talked about publicly. Though, there’s other issues like how might you view partying, or drinking, or what it means to have a good time, or who should you have around you. Can you talk to some other things that you helped people work their way through?

Sure. So, I believe in a life by design. The only way that life can be designed is to be aware and conscious of the decisions that we make. So, how we spend our time, where we put our attention, who we give our time and attention to, where we put our resources, all of those kinds of things. When it comes to partying or looking at the spoils of the money coming in, whether that’s consumerism at an extreme, or the pool for people to invite you into places, and then having that sense of, “We’ll have to prove something so I’m going to pay for everybody’s dinner, or I’m going to buy drinks for everyone,” and all of that oftentimes, that comes out of not thinking out the design of how you, as an influencer, and I believe that we are influencers, that you, as an influencer, in your own life, how you’re designing that kind of activity. So, how you’re going to be when the check comes or when these invitations to go out and spend happen.

So, thinking that through is very valuable so that you have a response. I can’t remember, it seems that you have response that you have where there’s a situation where you’re about to spend outside of your budget and what you say to people, what was that phrase?

Yeah, so it’s that, one, if the conversation starts with, “I can’t afford that,” that means you’re already playing by everybody else’s rules because they think that it matters what’s important is, “Can I afford it? Can I not afford it?” because that’s the game everybody else plays. People are trying to sell you stuff all the way up to the limit of what you can afford, and instead what we have to do is, what we talk about is design and build a good life. So, if you’re designing and building a good life, you set strategy. When somebody says, “Hey, we can go to Hawaii. Hey man, you make a lot of money, you can go. You got a successful company, I heard the stock is up with the company.”

Or you just got to hit, or you just won a championship.

Yeah, and just be able to say “I’d love to, but that would break strategy for us.” So, what’s the first question you have to ask if you invite me somewhere and I’d say, “Marcus, I’d love to, but that would break strategy for me,” what’s the first question you have to ask me?

What strategy? Okay, tell me more.

Now, it’s like you walked onto a big grass field where I drew the lines of that game. So, I’m not playing the game everybody else is. I draw them off that field, and that’s what you teach your clients is that if what they can do instead is just say that would break strategy, then people have to step onto your field of play.

Yes.

You no longer have to play by the other field of the play, but what I love is you’re helping them think through that if these fans throw themselves at you, or if your friends say, or your mom says, or your cousin says, “I got a great business,” you’re helping them think about what the responses are ahead of time because they’re, otherwise, literally shocked at what life looks like when they cross over a certain income threshold. Am I getting understood?

Here’s the thing about a celebrity. It’s no different than being very successful at any job where you have money coming in. The thing that celebrity brings is a little bit different than someone that’s working at Google, and all of a sudden, they are bringing a lot of income is that it’s more public. In the minds of people, they have a perception about your influence and your fortune. Then, there are maybe sites that people type in what’s the net worth of Britney Spears or whoever, Drake, and then it comes up, it’s 80 million dollars or it’s something like that.

You may not be able to do that for a Facebook employee, right? So, you have that element, but at the core of it with celebrity or not, influencer or not, Facebook employee or not, we’re, at core, human beings. We’re human beings that like to socialize, we’re social animals, we’re social beings. Inside of that, there’s the development of relationship, and maintaining relationship, and growing relationship.

I would assert that when you use a strategy like you just mentioned, Paul, about, “That breaks my strategy,” and that brings then that conversation of, “Okay, well what is that strategy?” Then, what happens is by that design, it opens up an opportunity for that person to share their design, to share their mindset, to share their thinking about how they’re interacting with their relationship with money, and then, in that moment, that’s when things can go viral. That’s when the philosophy of money, or the mindset can be spread from one person that has influence to another person that also has influence in their communities, right?

So, through that invitation, there’s a, “Well actually, my strategy is X,” and the reason why I did it that way is because this what’s important to me and this is what I value. I’m playing a long game, I’m looking at not the money that’s happening right now, but I’m looking at my future, and I’m looking at compounding. So, when I’m getting this drink, and the drink is $14. That’s not $14, that’s a $100,000 because that drink, in my mind, can be compounded.

Yeah, and I think that when you talk about that, oftentimes, people go viral. It’s like that invitation can become contagion.

Yes.

One person connects to the next and they can pass it along, and almost like certain vaccines, if you look at what they’re trying to go with medical technology and that the vaccine themselves would become contagious, that we almost vaccinate the next person from what is a very public, “Here’s how people live after they have a big hit, etcetera.”

One of the things that we’ve noticed, and this is something that’s like an undercurrent I don’t think a lot of people are thinking about, not only is it not as public if you’re Google etcetera, but because it’s not public, many people who have very high incomes and are choosing radically within their means, don’t talk about it.

That’s true.

The only reason my wife and I talk about it is because we want to affect that next person with the conversation, let it be contagious.

Yes.

And I don’t besmirch any of my friends who live radically within their means but make absolutely no commitment to tell anybody else that they’re making over a million dollars a year.

Right, and the idea is spread, and if, in the side of conversation, I think if we are more open in conversation about money with our friends, our family, people that we impact, then what happens is community start to shift. Like, the way the community around you starts to shift and you won’t get those same kinds of invitations or requests because everyone is operating from that same thing. So, the conversation becomes what’s the cheapest way for us to go out and have a good time.

Yeah, and it becomes okay to do that and you’ve — there’s something called herd immunity in the medical world and it’s like not everybody has to have the smallpox vaccine to prevent a pandemic. There’s just a percentage of our society that needs to take the vaccine that keeps a disease from wiping everybody out. I think the same thing in our networks whether it’s —

So, let’s take the person that’s going to your Star Boot Camp. They’re learning these things, they’re having conversations. Definitely, they start making more money because the other conversations around spending all that could also be massively self-reinforcing, because if I buy a huge house I can’t now pull up in a 1993 Honda Accord even if I don’t value the car because everybody just knows I had another hit and I got this big house. It was just publicized somewhere, and I can’t drive up in an old car. So, take each of those decisions that are spending related compound for the celebrity and further diminish their capacity to accumulate wealth.

One of the things that I promise you we would touch on a topic is I think the same things happens — it’s not as big to use Google as your example. It’s not as big for everybody to know that you’re making over two million a year working for Google, except one spending decision people make, and the late Dr. Thomas Stanley talk about this in his book, The Millionaire Next Door and the book Stop Acting Rich and that was unknowingly when you buy that house it’s the people that you’re now around in your couple that draw your consumption higher.

Exactly. It’s now you’ve put yourself in an environment where you are going to be impacted by other people’s spending.

Yes, and it’s one of the things that we talk with our clients to begin to do as they learn more about their money is you should be talking to the people in your life about it. I would say there’s two things that people do not talk about and they want to get better at, and it’s sex and money. Now, we only help with one. But, to be able to begin to talk about what’s going on financially, or what’s going on maybe with — I mean, the celebrity challenges are off the chart from like not being awkwardly seen with somebody that’s not your spouse in public in a way that somebody could snap on their cell phone. Everything is big thing.

There’s all kinds of considerations from how you walk out of a restaurant. I would never forget when I was in Turkey and I was with one of the pop stars there and there were cameras and people. It was an event, just us going to eat, and so the formation of where you sit in a restaurant and how you are seated so that to avoid camera to the positioning with the bodyguard, and so forth. There are other considerations at a certain level, and I would say that most people, the majority of people will never experience that kind of situation, but at the same time, because we’re in a social media kind of world, we also have to be conscious of those what we project out into the world, into the social media space.

People like taking picture of their food. There are people that also take pictures of their cars and their houses. There’s an artist that I’m aware of, this person took their Facebook Live and basically went around their house. So, what does that create for in social media, right? Then, now, people that are seeing that is, ”Oh, I want that. I want to have a house that big. I want to have a bowling alley in my house. I want to have a gym in my house.” What we’re exposed to opens up different kinds of wants.

Yeah, and it changes our whole set point, it changes the way we view money, relationships. I’ll never forget my dad when I was growing up, he told me about a period of time when he was in a really powerful role in a construction company. Now, this is like back in the 50s and 60s. He had a big expense account. My dad, though, was much older than me. He’s 88 years old as of January earlier this year. He was a pretty big deal in the construction industry in Colorado in the 60s and 70s, and it was amazing how when he was no longer in this big role how many people fell away and how much he told me – it’s just something small – but growing up it’s like you got to make sure that the reason people who want to be around you is because they want to be around you, and not that role, or not your role, which I think it equally applies to the business owners and executives. In this podcast that there are people that want to be around you because of your specific identity or role in society or because you pick up the check every single time, and as soon as you stop buying drinks, people don’t want to be around you. But, there are different versions of that throughout life that we have to pay attention to.

The other thing could be conscious of — so, when I say other wants open up. Its other wants open up unless you have designed your life a particular way inside of a plan with intention and settle for it. The other thing that occurs too, Paul, is that because someone may now all of a sudden have more money than they ever had, that opens up opportunity to do things that they’ve never done. If you’re in that position and then you have friends that are not in that position, and you want them to go out with you, they’re not able to necessarily afford the place that you are going to.

There’s that dynamic to where now that you’re in a different income level and the people that you’re with are not, they can’t necessarily play with you in those other places. Then, there’s a pressure of, “Okay, well I’m going to bring my friends with me, then we need to flip that bill.”

My wife and I have had that. But, what’s been key the times we have done that life, it’s all been really strategic, we’re very conscious of it, we’re not making habit of it. These folks are going to go on this vacation with us and here’s why. But, you’re right. It’s so easy for that to just tease out for it and not realize how much could be disappearing of the balance sheet, number one. But number two, you wouldn’t be helping those other people because you’re putting them in an atmosphere that they couldn’t afford to be in on their own, so unless you know they’re being responsible then they’re definitely not going to be able to be around you if you do manage to take your finances in your old age.

It’s complicated.

Yeah. What I hope everybody is able to kind of take away from this is that here you’ve got Marcus who I can’t thank you enough Marcus for just your candor and openness of really the kinds of things that no matter how much income somebody has they have what are perceived to them and certainly to the rest of the world as money problems. But, to get through that, yeah there are strategies, people can work with a firm like ours, and they can figure out and realize that, “Oh, there’s something different I should be doing with my money. As a result of doing something different with my money, I can be more successful with it, absolutely.”

I’ve got one more mindset thing that I want to ask though. How do you — in some of these situations you may have a spouse that, perhaps you get through Star Boot Camp, the star gets their head on straight, what if anything do you do to help the spouse who — like do you bring them through the same conversations so that they –?

Yeah, so part of the assignments for some other participants at Star Boot Camp is just that to get in conversation, talk to their family about money, and their thinking around money, and where did that come from? So, “Mom, what is your idea of money and to go about money income from.”

Because, I did the same thing for myself. I went to my grandmother when she was alive and had a conversation with her about how she deals with her finances, because I noticed that she seemed to be really great with how she was dealing with her money and she passed when she was in her 90’s, and she left an inheritance and property and all of that, and she had been making decisions over a long period of time. She was not famous, she used to be a maid, she went through that some difficult times in society. She was able to build up sufficiency where she wasn’t having to worry about money when she was in her 90’s. So, it’s not how much money you make; it’s the strategy that you operate from with what you have.

That is so good and I can’t imagine how many people look, and I’ve even seen it when we talk about, from my wife and I, we’re going to choose to live on personally was how can you raise a family on what you are saying you want to live on? Except, you look around like most of society is raising families on much, much less than many of the people listening to this podcast. In fact, if you’re just in United States, I think the number is if you’re making over $7,500 a year, it’s just incredibly low, you’re on the top 1% in the world. Just by living in this country and making somewhat like right at or below $10,000 a year, you’re on the top 1% in the world, which means 99% of the world manages to survive, at least, or a lot less than what we’re blessed with here and how much of it that we get drawn up and are spending by.

I was thinking about the story of your mom and how sometimes that will hit the paper, and there’ll be somebody who dies with $20 million who was a UPS driver or whatever they did, and that will get a blurb and be in a couple publications for a day or two, and that’s a pretty crowning achievement. But then, you’ll — I don’t mean to pick on the Kardashians, but they always seem to be in the news about something, that there’s this incredibly opulent lifestyle that’s being lived that is in the news every single day. There aren’t enough of those little stories unless, to your point, you sit back with your spouse, design it, have a conversation, and then start — once you settle on some strategies, having conversations with those closest to you so that you can create this barrier or immunity to your primary conversations.

We do something near the end of our process we call the relationship model that helps people do that. It’s funny how I didn’t know this before having you on the podcast, but how much it sounds like some of what you’re doing with Star Boot Camp and what we do just in our design, build process really seems to run very much in parallel. We don’t have to worry about what people are doing on Twitter.

Right. You mentioned a book that I oftentimes have my clients read, which is Stop Acting Rich. A few months back, one of my clients called and said, “Oh my god, just reading that book kept me from buying a Mercedes. I’m not buying a Mercedes. I’m forcing it up. I’m living in an area where I don’t have to compete in that kind of way and I’m going to do something different with my money.”

Yeah, and it’s just the pause of — if you all haven’t read Stop Acting Rich, you can go back in our past podcast. In fact, I’m on it. I will pull up and be able to tell you which podcast we’ve gone in detail on that book. Though, I will tell you, that book really peels back what is the actual likelihood that people who look like they’re consuming large amounts of money actually have the balance sheet to prove it. Dr. Stanley did such an amazing job of pulling that out not just to talk about people that have over a million dollars, but also going into just people who drive all these late model cars that look awesome and are luxurious.

The episode is number 33 and 34 of our podcast, so you can scroll back to those and maybe listen to them after this. That’s the mindset that has to change is realizing that that’s not what it is. I hope a YouTube video that we’re going to release, I think, in the next couple of weeks, all the attorneys and compliant are looking at it today, but it’s when 22 and a half million is not enough, and we talk about how much money it really takes on your balance sheet to support these lifestyles you see people lead and why they can’t maintain it for the long run.

I want to add one more thing because you were talking about the Kardashians and what we see. If we are aware of entertainment, there is a design. If you don’t have a design for how you’re moving with your finances and planning for the future and using the wonders of the world like compound interest and so forth, or how to invest in all those things that you’re expert at.

But, if you’re not operating from that kind of plan and you’re just opening yourself to what you’re seeing in the media. If you’re opening yourself to what you’re seeing people like the Kardashians and whoever else are doing, there’s a design, a larger design in the world about that consumers that the desire inside of the system that we’re resisting here in the U.S. is that you spend that you are inspired by those kinds of images and behaviors of other people that you’re exposed to in the media so that you can start spending in that way. If you’re spending in that way and if you’re working hard to maintain a certain image, then your attention is there and your attention being there keeps your attention off of things that make a difference for society, or politically, or in other areas is by design in that way.

Not to get in a politics here, but I think this is a viable insight of our conversation on Noam Chomsky has a documentary that kind of breaks down that type of destruction that is presented. So, if we’re not aware and if we don’t have a plan for how we’re going to deal with that destruction and create a support system around us, we can be taken away by that distraction current, if you will, and end up in a retirement position where there’s no retirement, that you’re working until you die.

Yeah, and all the people marketing to us, people who pay the Kardashians $30,000 to tweet something, they’re not against you having enough money one day when you retire. They just don’t think about it.

Oh yeah, that’s not a part of the conversation. The part of the conversation I work with this, part of my job is marketing. But, the thought process is to get you to consume, to get you to come out to a concert to get you to come stream this music and take these kinds of actions, which is good because the static of arts and all of that, that’s just part of our life and culture expression, our creative self-expression. If you can’t afford to go to a concert, then you shouldn’t be pawning your grandparents’ heirlooms so that you could go to a concert, right? That sort of thing.

Yeah, or just put it on the credit card and you are pawning your great grandkids’ inherence.

Stop right there.

Marcus, thanks you so much for being here with us today. I can’t thank you enough. This has been so wonderful, and I got to say one thing I would love for people to do, and Marcus, you just tell me if I shouldn’t this. On your website, you have, front and center at — I think it was the right one: Marcus Bell Music or Bellringer Music?

Yeah, Bellringer Music. Yeah, there’s Bellringer Music and then there’s BellringerProductions.com

The Michael Jackson Thriller Remix that you’ve got as front and center on your site is amazing where I’ve seen Marcus actually do what he does this live in front of a really amazing, intimate audience down in Southern California. It was really incredible to relive the experience where I saw you do it in person to see you do it on YouTube. So, I would encourage everybody to take some time, it’ll be in our show-notes. We’re also putting together a bit of —

And that video is on BellringerMusic.com

Perfect. BellringerMusic.com, that’ll be in the show-notes for all of you. We’re also putting together something I have shipped to your email. You’re going to be able to go to it from a link inside the description. But, it’s going to be just a list of some of these celebrities that went down in flames and how it didn’t work out for them, because I think the last thing for everybody to think about is the celebrities that are still doing fine in massive consumption, we’re still getting fed every single day. So, even if there were 50 celebrities that manage to massively consume, we’re going to hear about their lives for the next 20-30 years, and then there’s, let’s say, 500 celebrities went down in flames and they have nothing anymore. The ones that do it, it’s only a one-time new cycle event when they go to jail for a year for not paying their IRS bill, or if they claim bankruptcy, or they whatever. There’s just no news on them anymore.

When we look at that, there’s a survivorship bias that impacts us that makes us feel like it’s working out for most of them, when even on the celebrity side, it’s not working out for most of them. They’re different. And retirement is not working out for most of the people that are making 300, 400, 500, 600 million to a year at least not the level they worry at, and we’re not just present to it because everybody that doesn’t make it is no longer in your socio-economic circles — only those that still made it. So it fools our biology where we think there’s a lot more people making it than us. It’s so great having you here on the podcast to just kind of suss that out for us.

Paul, thanks for the invitation. It’s been a pleasure. I love talking about money and celebrity, and I look forward to continuing discerning with you.

Yeah, very good. Have a great rest of your day Marcus and everybody listening — just take some time, talk with somebody about this podcast. Forward it to them and have a conversation. Let that be a beginning of you insulating yourself from all of the conversations that are pushed at us every day about money. Instead, we want you to design and build a good life which starts with you designing and building the conversations that are had around you. Have a great day.

I want to acknowledge you for taking the time to tune into Sound Financial Bites. You stopped long enough in your busy day to reflect on your finances and your future to help you design and build a good life. Please take a moment to subscribe to this podcast and follow us on social media. You can find us on Facebook and LinkedIn. If you have a topic you would like to hear us discuss, please send us a note on Facebook, LinkedIn, SoundFinancialBites.com, or email us at [email protected]. Be sure to check out the show notes for links to any resources that were covered in each episode. For our full disclosure, please check the description of this episode, the description of this podcast series, or you can visit our website. Make it a great day.

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