In this episode, Jason Hartman advises a listener on the best way to invest his inheritance. Then, Jason welcomes Shaun McCloskey to the show to discuss the Lifeonaire philosophy. This philosophy blends your vision of the life you want and trades your money for time. He explains where the 40 hour week came from, the four stages of lifeonaire, and using your extra time for living your vision.
Announcer 0:00
This show is produced by the Hartman media company. For more information and links to all our great podcasts, visit Hartman media.com.
Announcer 0:13
Welcome to the creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You’re about to learn a new slant on investing some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world’s most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine self made multi millionaire who’s actually been there and done it. He’s a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who’s owned properties in 11 states had hundreds of tenants and been involved in 1000s of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason’s footsteps on the road to your financial independence day, you really can do it. And now here’s your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.
Jason Hartman 1:03
Hey, welcome to the creating wealth Show Episode Number 590 590. Where we do a 10th episode show we do this network wide, where we talk about something of general life interest, life success, not just about personal finance or real estate investing or that kind of stuff, but the broader issues in all of our lives and how we can tackle them more successfully and more effectively. And we’ll do that today with Sean McCluskey who will talk about life in air. You don’t just want to be a millionaire or a deca millionaire. That’s 10 million plus or a cent a millionaire 100 million plus, or even a billionaire. I don’t think we have any billionaire listeners. We’ve had a couple billionaire guests on the show. Jim Rogers, Steve Forbes, formerly john McAfee. I don’t think he’s a billionaire anymore. But he was at the time of the sale of his software company or the IPO I can’t remember which. So yeah, billionaire millionaire, deca millionaire, sent a millionaire, it’s all good. But 1,000,008 what it used to be, you gotta be more than a millionaire nowadays, especially depending on where you live. And you know, I’ve talked before about the happiness studies, whether or not money actually buys happiness? I can tell you, it does not. I’m not pretending that it does. And I don’t think anybody should. But it buys a lot more happiness than poverty. I’ll tell you that for sure. Because I grew up not in abject poverty, but didn’t have too much in the way of money or resources. And, and that was no fun. You know, you remember the store? pickin save? Yes, it’s now called Big Lots. That’s where we used to buy my clothes when I was a kid pick and save. And they didn’t fit very well. And the kids at school even noticed that and never failed to remind me. But you know, you can either be motivated by desperation or inspiration. And so I was motivated by both of those things. And hopefully you’ll use those motivators in your own life. And they will motivate you as well. That was Jim Rohn. Yeah, he said, you can either be motivated by desperation or inspiration. The late great Jim Rohn. Great guy, obviously.
So yeah, today’s the 10th episode show. Couple things. I’m going to take a listener and anonymous listener question here in a moment, and I’ll play that audio for you and answer her question. But wanted to tell you our Orlando property tour, basically sold out. But then we were able to get well, this isn’t confirmed totally, as of the time of this recording today on Wednesday morning. But then we were able to get it looks like we’re gonna get it a much larger room. So we got like a big huge room. Now. That’s I mean, we went from, you know, a room that would hold 50 people, and we’ve got 50 I think we have 57 people now registered for the Orlando property tour to a ginormous room. That’s like 6500 square feet. That holds way too many people. It’s going to be interesting. We’re going to have ample space, I think at this bigger in this bigger room. We were able to do that at the Orlando property tour coming up just next week. So if you want to register for that, it looks like we do have additional capacity. We’re going to have at one of the properties, our local market specialists because this tour is too big, you know, we do this traditional thing. Okay, I have, I have a few addictions. One of them is coffee. I share that addiction with a lot of people actually billions of people around the world. I remember my girlfriend at the time, Jennifer, about 20 years ago got me addicted to coffee. She took me to a Starbucks. I don’t know if I’d ever even been to a Starbucks when Jennifer took me to one of those. Ever since then. I’ve been drinking this stuff for better or worse. Some say it’s bad for you, some say it’s great. For you, it’s a superfood. Dave Asprey, the bulletproof executive will tell you it’s a superfood. I don’t know, I don’t know what it is. But anyway, so we usually have this tradition on our property tours after lunch, I will take everybody to Starbucks. But this tour is too big. It will. I mean, it’s always I always like, try to, you know, buy the coffee or buy by treat the person in line behind us, because we take so long, but this tour, it’s too big. So our local market specialist has offered I thought this was really cool to have a barista come to one of the properties we’re touring right after lunch, and make coffee drinks for us. At the property. I thought that was just super cool. I love this idea. It’s very gourmet. Now I don’t know how complex these drinks can get. But you know, the very least we’ll have, we’ll have our caffeine after lunch, which we need. Because we’re going to be looking at properties on the tour, we’re going to be going to dinner that night. And then Sunday morning, we’re going to be getting up and we’re going to be tackling the new, the new creating wealth in today’s economy boot camp. And we’ve revised that a lot. So if you’ve been before this is this is different. We’ve reordered a lot of the things. I’ve taken some of the principles of true learning specialists, people that actually have, you know, credentials in this field, instructional design, and reformulated that seminar a bit and got new workbooks and all kinds of stuff. So it’s going to be great Orlando property tour, meet the Masters coming up in January in San Diego, be sure to register for meet the Masters both of these at Jason hartman.com in the events section. And then venture Alliance mastermind, that’s venture Alliance mastermind.com separate website for that, because it’s special. If you want to join us for Dubai, as well as the VIP dinner at meet the Masters with Garrett Sutton, Rich Dad, advisor and multiple best selling author, he will be joining us for the VIP dinner for venture Alliance on Friday evening, it masters and should be a great time. So register for all that stuff, check it all out, let’s take our listener question. And at the end of this message is sort of an anonymous portion. So I’m going to end it early. But I just want to get the question in here. Here we go. And then we’ll get to our guest.
Listener Question 7:23
Hi, Jason. I have been a longtime listener of your show. And I am just calling in for the first time. And although I’ve been a longtime listener, I’m now actually ready to invest. And I wanted to get your professional opinion on a couple of things. So I’m in a position now where I can invest. I’m looking to invest in possibly two real estate properties, or two rental properties. But I’m also interested in your venture Alliance group. But I want to know what you think is the best way to invest what I have. And I roughly have about $120, $120 to invest.
Jason Hartman 8:10
That’s thousand dollars, by the way. It was cut out.
Listener Question 8:13
I was thinking of doing properties that inheritance. Right now, that those funds are sitting in an IRA account. And I wanted to know, would it be best to invest in two properties with that, with those funds? Or would it be possible to invest in one rental property? And also the venture Alliance group? I know that’s completely different from your podcast. So yeah, those were the questions that I had. And also, if there are any tax benefits, excuse me, or any, anything that you would caution me against when taking the funds out of the IRA account? Yeah, and that’s it, I would like to stay anonymous. Although I can give you my information.
Jason Hartman 9:10
Okay, so that’s the rest of that is anonymous. So thank you for the question. I appreciate it. First of all, I do not have a deep knowledge of how the inheritance laws work, and the tax implications of that. So you know, check with your advisor on that your CPA, whatever. But if you have $120,000, you can definitely buy a few properties with that, if that money is in an IRA Now, depending on whether it’s a Roth or a regular IRA, you know, you you if you pull it out all at once, you’ll have some tax liability, but you could do the investing within the IRA, make it self directed, do the investments inside of the IRA. And that would be another option too. Of course if you do them inside of the IRA, you won’t have access to the best financing opportunities, you do have access to financing inside of an IRA. But it’s definitely not as desirable as the traditional, what’s known as agency financing, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, secondary market type of financing that’s available out there, which is far more desirable than you’ll get inside of an IRA. So there are some questions there. And without being able to actually ask you questions directly in real time, I won’t be able to really deeply answer that question for you. Just suffice it to say, there are definitely a couple things to consider. I believe you’re talking with one of our investment counselors, and they can help you more, they can refer you to some good advisors that we’ve used for many years if you don’t have your own in the lines of accounting and tax planning, asset protection and legal issues, and also the self directed IRA issues as well. So there’s really sort of, and and also a lender in terms of financing. So there’s really like four different potential experts you need to bring together to help you figure out the best way to do this. But I will say, with $120,000, if you were to buy properties that were, say, $25,000, down, and you could do traditional outside of the IRA type financing on them, you could purchase for properties subject to qualifying, of course, then you’d have about $20,000 left over, you could join the venture Alliance, which would be $10,000. And then you could go from there. So that would be pretty good. But I would definitely say the properties are more important than the venture Alliance. Okay. Venture Alliance is like a higher level group for people that want to take things to the next level in terms of their investments and, and life in general. So, you know, do your properties first. And don’t worry about the venture Alliance, it might not be for you yet, it may be I don’t know without talking to you and knowing what else is going on in your life. But from just this question alone, I would say just worry about the properties, get those properties under your belt, and get them working for you and producing a nice return. Our investment counselors are available, of course, Jason hartman.com, you can fill out the contact us form, if you haven’t done so already. And one of our investment counselors will definitely contact you. But I think you might be working with someone I can’t remember. For sure. So that’s it. Let’s get to our guests. Thank you for the question. We always appreciate you going to Jason hartman.com. Clicking on the Send voicemail button and asking a question on the show because your question is one that undoubtedly many other listeners have. So go to Jason hartman.com. Click on Send Voicemail send us more messages. I’d love to answer those questions on the air. Let’s get to our guest 10th episode show. And let’s talk about Lifeonaire.
It’s my pleasure to welcome Shawn McCluskey to the show. I know him through the real estate business. And he has a fantastic book called Lifeonaire, which is really about real prosperity and about designing a life. So that’s what I want to talk about today. Sean, welcome. How are you?
Shaun McCloskey 13:17
I’m great, man. Thanks for having me.
Jason Hartman 13:18
Good to have you give our listeners a sense of geography by telling us where you’re located.
Shaun McCloskey 13:23
I am in beautiful St. Louis, Missouri right now.
Jason Hartman 13:26
Fantastic. Well, so you know, you’re an active real estate investor, you’re an author, obviously, you’re a coach, you’ve got a rags to riches story, you know, tell us how this came to be I, I don’t know what you’re gonna say. But I have a feeling you’re gonna say a common story, which is the first goal in life when you became of age was to go out and be successful and make money. But that’s not really what it’s all about, is it?
Shaun McCloskey 13:52
Well, no. And you know, there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, that’s certainly fantastic. But the problem is a lot of people make that the goal of their life. And a lot of times people pursue that so much that they forget about in the pursuit, they forget about the other things that they’re doing it for. And so, you know, starting out in real estate here, oh my gosh, it’s been 12 years ago that I got started. And I’ve flipped about 300 deals since then. But after starting to get asked to speak and teach other people how to do what I was doing, what I learned pretty quickly I was I was teaching other people how to have this really successful business. And within a year or two of them learning from me initially, they were getting divorced. And they hadn’t gone on vacation in two years. And they were making really good money hand over fist. But they were doing kind of what I was doing, which was putting work first. And so it got to a point where I almost didn’t even want to teach anymore because I felt bad when one of my very good friends and students ended up committing so much of his time in life to work that he literally went through a divorce. And I felt partially responsible for that. And I obviously they had other problems besides just the work but the fact of the matter is he was so dedicated to work doing exactly what I was teaching him to do back then, that I had to take some ownership of that. And I thought, Man, I do not want to have people going out and doing what I’m teaching them and sacrificing life like I have been doing. And so some radical shifts had to happen.
Jason Hartman 15:14
Is it possible that, you know, everybody talks about work-life balance. I mean, you know, you there are these, I think it was maybe Edison who said something like, you know, every day he goes to play, he doesn’t work. So every day, what people call work is really just play. That’s how he plays by tinkering in the lab and so forth. Is that true? I mean, you know, I love what I do, a lot of people love what they do. Is it so bad if you if you just want to work a lot, because you like it or
Shaun McCloskey 15:45
No, matter of fact, if you found something that is not work for you, God bless you, man, you are doing way better than about 99% of people out there cuz most people view what they do for their living or for their vocation as work. And I’m glad you brought that up. Because I do a lot of coaching today, I do a lot of speaking, I still do I’m active in the real estate investment world. Although now I’m doing a lot more joint ventures with people than I am actually doing the work in the labor myself. But I love what I do. The difference is, I also love other stuff, too. And I think sometimes people get so caught up in loving what they do, or working to earn a living, that they forget about some of the things that they used to do. I’ll give an example. One of the things we take people through is a process of creating vision for your life first. And as corny and cheese balls that sounds, we start with what you want life to look like first, because there is no way that you can design a business that’s supposed to serve your life unless you know what life looks like once the business is where it needs to be. And so what a lot of people do is they start with a business plan, and they don’t start with a life vision. And I know that sounds corny, but when we don’t do it that way, we end up saying what most people say, which is one day when the business is doing really well, then I’ll have time for all my hobbies and all my travel and all my fun and all this stuff. And all I’m saying is why don’t we do both? You know, why can’t we love what we do. But why can’t we also love some other things and make time for some of those other things too. As much as I love what I do. I’m also a father of three and I love spending time with my kids.
Jason Hartman 17:15
Yeah. And the other thing is sometimes if you’re too engaged in any one thing, whether it be family time, vacationing, slacking or working, you know, it could be anything, it doesn’t need to be work. Okay, although I have a feeling you aim a lot at, you know, that sort of workaholic entrepreneur, right? But it could be anything. And if you’re if you’re so caught up in any one thing, you know, you might love something else that you haven’t even explored yet, because you haven’t given yourself any time to do it. Right?
Shaun McCloskey 17:41
That’s so true, man. I had a student of mine just tell me about two weeks ago, he said, if you would have contacted me five years ago, he had this multi-million dollar mortgage company maybe six years ago, at this point, multi-million dollar a year. Mortgage company. The guy’s probably doing I don’t know, I’m guessing 15 to $18 million a year. A lot of that was profit for him. And he said, if you were to ask me back, then I would have told you life is great. And I’m loving every bit of it. But he said I was also at the office 60 to 70 hours a week. And now I look out I was making great money back then. But I look at all the other things I was missing out on. Yes, I love my business. Yes, I’d love to grow it and build it. I want to go out and kick butt and take names. But I was given up a lot of other things that I forgot that I even loved. And so the key is to not forget what those things are. Matter of fact, some people have worked to schedule like that for so long. They don’t even know. Like you just said they don’t know what they love. Because they’ve never taken the time to explore anything else except work.
Jason Hartman 18:36
Right? Yeah, yeah. Fair. It’s a fair question for sure. So sum up the Lifeonaire philosophy, if he would, you know, what’s the what’s the 32nd explanation of that?
Shaun McCloskey 18:46
Well, quickly, we start with single word lifeonaire. Like the word millionaire, you know, only with a life? How many millionaires have we heard of that have a lot of money seemingly have everything and yet they’re miserable. And you think how in the world could these people be miserable, they have everything. And yet they’re unfulfilled. So Lifeonaire is all about deciding in advance. What does life look like for you? And I always say, Man, this sounds so corny. But when we decide what we want that to look like, then we can go forward making some very specific decisions about what we do or won’t do. We can put boundaries in place, we can start to say no, when we need to say no, we can say yes, when it fits what we’ve decided our vision needs to look like. And then we wrap all of that up into some financial training where, obviously, if we’re going to live this vision, it’s important to make money. That’s a huge component of this too. But there’s another component called time. And so we can make all the money in the world. But if we give up all the time in the world to get there, we’re not fulfilled, or if we have all the time in the world, but we’re totally broke, that sucks too. And so what we do is we teach people how to come up with a vision for their life. We don’t tell you what it is. We help you to extract the information or an ask the questions that we need to ask so you come up with it yourself. And then we help people with a financial sort of plan to get there. And we take people through a series of four stages to help them, which I’m happy to share in a minute, if you want to go there.
Jason Hartman 20:09
Yes, that would be my next question. What are the four?
Shaun McCloskey 20:12
Yeah, so the four quickly is, stage number one is you must create vision. And sounds simple, but it must be created, it must be in writing. Otherwise, what happens is, most people sit here and say, I know what I want out of life. But it changes depending on your mood, or depending on how much money you have in your bank account. Or depending on the obligations that you have committed to already or maybe amount of free time you have or don’t have. So we take people through a full three-day event where we teach people how to come up with a vision, that’s stage one. And I’m oversimplifying it. But the bottom line is, you got to know what you want personal life to look like if you’re ever going to have a business that serves it. So we start with personal. Then stage two, you got to get your needs met. And so when I say needs, I mean your monthly expenses. So now’s where we’re starting to get into finances. So if I have a life that is requiring me to make a lot of money every single month just to get by, it becomes a little bit more difficult to get beyond stage two, that doesn’t mean I don’t want you to have the nice house and the cars and you know everything, I want you to have all that, but I want you to do it in the right order. And so stage two is about getting your needs met. So the simpler your needs are. And when I say needs, I mean whatever money you need to make every month just to get by, the simpler your needs are, the easier it is to get beyond stage to where some freedom starts to happen. Because stage three is about earning excess. That’s money above and beyond what you need every single month. Now’s when you can start having some fun. Now, if you want to go out and buy a car, you go buy a car, you don’t lease a car, you don’t get a payment on a car. Because what I didn’t mention before is in stage two, you are actually trading time for dollars. So you’re not free yet. You don’t have investments that are spitting out money for you, you are having to trade time for dollars in stage two. And stage three, when you’re making excess, it starts to get fun, because now you have extra money to go do the fun stuff. You want to buy the nice stuff if you want that. To go on vacations to do other fun things, but you’re still not totally free. The freedom comes from stage four. And stage four is where we take the excess income from stage three, and we start to reinvest it into assets that spit out money for us. So that we might have a little bit of maintenance involved in some stage for assets. But we don’t have to go out and physically work for our living now. Now stage four is spitting off money to where we really got the finance part of our of our life kind of figured out. I’m really oversimplifying this just for the sake of this being a podcast, but you know, does that make sense?
Jason Hartman 22:45
Yeah, yeah. How does one find their vision or creative vision? Yeah, you know, a lot of it is easy to do around things like money that are really quantifiable, you know, they happen to have numbers on them. So it’s pretty easy. You know, it’s pretty easy to do it with things you can count, right? But it’s hard to do it with some of the more intangible things, isn’t it?
Shaun McCloskey 23:08
Oh, yeah. And those are the questions that we ask. So when we take people through this process, we, first of all, we ask some questions that most people don’t ever get asked. Like, this sounds kind of morbid. But we might ask, listen, if you have six months to live, would you be doing what you’re doing right now? How differently would you be living life? What would be important to you? For me, I would always say that my kids and my family are important to me. But I also had something that I call my default. And so the default is something like any time you have free time, most people go to their default. For some people, their default is work. For some people, it’s Facebook, for some people, it’s working out. For some people, it’s a hobby, or you know, hanging out with friends, or whatever. But most of us when we get free time, we default to our default. And what most people do, especially entrepreneurs are really, really bad with this, is when they get free time. They say Man, I wish I would have more free time, then they get some and what do they do? They think of another project they can do at work and they fill it up with work.
Jason Hartman 24:09
There’s always another project
Shaun McCloskey 24:11
That’s right. And again, nothing wrong with work. But you know that sometimes they don’t take enough time to just relax and say, okay, when I do have free time, I say I want some more free time. But when I get it, I constantly fill it up. What do I want that free time to be filled with, if not work? And so that’s why we have to start with personal first. If I want to be a good father, to my kids, that obviously takes time. So I have to identify what does it mean for me to be a good father and how much, not just how much money does that take? We can put money goals to everything. Everybody does that. But how much time does that take? We actually take people through a process where once their vision starts to get figured out. So if I said good father, for example, we actually have you assign all the things that you wrote in your calendar, or I’m sorry, in your vision to a calendar as though you were living it today just to see if you were living everything that you wrote down that was important to you, how much time would it take? Not just money. How much time would it take? And what’s interesting about that is we find that most people who do this, don’t have more than 30 hours a week left to work, if they’re also living the rest of their vision. And so I’m all about going out and kicking butt and taking names. But I also don’t want to forget the other aspects of my vision, too. So now,
Jason Hartman 25:22
So what are they doing? I mean, you got 168 hours in every week, you’re going to sleep for, you know, maybe seven hours per night. So there goes 50 hours. You got 128, roughly hours left. What are you doing with all that time? Maybe subtract 30? That’s 98 hours for Lifeonaire? Yeah,
Shaun McCloskey 25:43
I mean, here, sometimes by the time we just add up brushing teeth, taking a shower, getting ready to heading out the door. You know, I don’t know about you. But I’ve never looked at somebody’s vision so far. That said, they have a vision where they sit in traffic for an hour every day, yet most people do. You know, I don’t have anybody that ever has submitted a vision to me that says, I have a vision of being in all this debt, yet most people have debt. You know, most people are doing a lot of things in that extra time that they don’t necessarily care about. So you’re right. It can be a lot of extra time. If that’s the case, why don’t most people feel like they have any free time anymore?
Jason Hartman 26:19
Well, that’s a good question, you know.
Shaun McCloskey 26:21
You know, so what’s interesting about that is, for a lot of people, this is a difficult thing to work through. Because a lot of people been working a lot of hours for a long time, or been really committed to their business, especially entrepreneurs. So I struggled with this when I first started going through it. And but I have to decide, okay, if I want to be a good husband, for example, I love my wife more than anything on Earth, but I don’t want to spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week with my wife, either as much as I love or say with my kids, you know, so, but I also want to be a good father. So how much time does it take to be a good father an hour a week, or 24 hours a day? You know, probably somewhere in the middle. But at least now I get to consciously decide where I’m going to spend my time, rather than just fitting it in when there’s not any work leftover. Does that make sense?
Jason Hartman 27:10
Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, good. Good. You know, it’s just sort of interesting. When you talk about the time and the free time issue. How is it that we got to this point where, you know, we used to have time, and now we’ve got all this technology, and all these tools. And I remember the old predictions, you know, in the in the early 70s, people were saying, oh, we’re, you know, people are only going to need to work three hours a week, or three days a week with all this automation that’s coming. You know, and this is decades ago, they said that. And it’s it’s been completely the opposite. Is it that we’re so inundated with information, or we keep striving for more or something has just dramatically changed in the psyche? You know?
Shaun McCloskey 27:50
Yeah. You know, it’s interesting, it’s not like that everywhere. I went to Guatemala about a year and a half ago. And granted, Guatemala is a very poor country, but they don’t work. They don’t work 40 hours a week over there at all. Now, some people would say, well, no wonder if it’s a poor country. There’s might be some truth.
Jason Hartman 28:06
And same with France and Greece. And you know, they don’t want to work either.
Shaun McCloskey 28:11
But, you know, I, I don’t know that I have the exact answer. But I will tell you where the 40-hour Workweek came from. And I think that stems a lot of this. You know, back in the industrial revolution, when a lot of manufacturing was starting to happen a lot in this country. There were factories and plants. Ford was a perfect example. Where Ford said, we want to manufacture cars 24 hours a day, we need to keep these machines going. There’s no sense in having the machines in this huge building, and paying for heat and air conditioning, all this stuff when we could be manufacturing cars. So let’s come up with a 24 hour day cycle. And we can’t get people to work seven days a week, no one would go for that. Let’s get them to work five days a week. And if we do eight hour shifts each day, then there’s 24 hours in a day, we can have three shifts every single day. And this plant can be running 24 hours a day. And so all of a sudden, the 40 Hour Workweek was born. And now here we are 100 years later. And it’s the norm now. Matter of fact, it’s such the norm, that most people that I talked to, they want to most people first of all work certainly a lot more than 40 hours a week. But even when they don’t, most people when they don’t specially if they’re entrepreneurs running their own business, they feel guilty. They feel like I should be at work right now. I’m not being productive.
Jason Hartman 29:26
But 40 hours is an understatement for most people nowadays, I was reading that the average corporate work week is about 55 hours. You know, entrepreneurs if they’re, you know, really crazy about, you know, making their business work. They’re working more than that. Right?
Shaun McCloskey 29:40
Well, and you’re not even talking about drive time to and from the office. So yeah, you start adding all that stuff up. It’s really difficult to live your vision when you’ve already promised it all the way to somebody else.
Jason Hartman 29:50
Okay, so what do we do? Any other solutions? Did we cover the four parts in there? I mean, that was kind of so convoluted. I don’t know.
Shaun McCloskey 29:56
Yeah, I’m sorry. I kind of went over them.
Jason Hartman 29:58
No, no, no. It’s fine.
Shaun McCloskey 29:59
But yeah, you know, if I could simplify it, I would say it starts with a vision, it starts with putting it in writing. And you mentioned something earlier that is so important. We do not put numbers and dollar signs in our vision. Because what happens is, is our vision starts to get clouded by goals. And goals and vision are two different things, you can have a goal and hit a goal that takes you in the opposite direction of your vision. And for a moment, you can feel great. And what you just realize is that, you know, we use the analogy of if you live in New York, and your vision says that I want to live in LA, you’re, you’re a long way away from LA, right. So you might have a goal that says, I’m going to go, I’m going to get in the car, and I’m going to start on my way to LA, and you just start driving. And you might hit your goal of driving, let’s say 500 miles today. And all of a sudden, you look and you realize that you went north instead of Southwest, you hit your goal, but it took you in the wrong direction. And that’s what people do a lot of times, so they’ll put goals in place. And they’ll put numbers and dollar signs in place when they forgot about what they really want. Perfect example for that is, most people say that they want to give more and donate more. And so when most people think of donating more or being charitable, they put a number to it, not what they’re hoping the charitable giving will actually do. And so two things happen. One, they never get to experience the joy of what the money they made that they donated actually went to, and to the you know, they’re kind of disconnected from it to where now it becomes a number to them not making a difference in somebody’s life, or not, you know, helping with this research project or whatever, it becomes something that they’re unattached to. And now they’re so focused on hitting the number that they forget why they’re doing the place, sometimes you might be able to accomplish the exact same thing without the number that you had in mind. quick example, quick example. I get people all time it’s a man. In our stand, I’m getting my business started. I don’t have the money right now, to take my kids and my family on a vacation. You know, Disney World costs a lot of money. And I’ll say Well, yeah, but so most people do that. And they put off living life until someday when they make money. Listen, camping is $8 a night. So don’t tell me you can’t do that until someday when you have more money. If your vision says that I want to spend time and you know, be with my kids and go on vacation with my kids, there might be more than one way to do it. It might not just require you to go to Disney World, there might be something that instead of waiting five years from now, you might be able to do right now. That’s why we start with vision.
Jason Hartman 32:27
Mm hmm. Good point. Good point. Well, Shawn, what what else would you like people to know about the Lifeonaire philosophy?
Shaun McCloskey 32:36
Well, I think I hate to hammer on the vision so much. But I just want to encourage everybody on the call. I mean, obviously, we take people through this in three days. But if you can, and I don’t mean this to be just a plug for a book either. But start with the life in our book, go out to amazon.com look at Lifeonaire. look that up. There’s a book that we share with you guys. So far, everybody that’s read it, it hits him right between the eyes, because you will see yourself in the characters of the story. It’s actually a fictional story. And it takes you through some it’s a fictional story. But it’s real stories infused into some fictional characters, because you’re going to hear about yourself in there, you’re going to hear about people you know, in there. I am in there, I struggled so much with this work life thing. I struggled so much with having huge expenses to where, you know, I had to make a ton of money every month just to meet the needs of my business, the expenses of my business before I got to make $1. And so I had all kinds of pressure and things going on there. And that pressure sucks. You know, when when you’re when you’re in a real estate business, for example. And you know, just a few years before, I’m sitting here praying to God help me make five grand, and I’ll be set. And then four years later, I make $100,000 on a deal. And it’s not enough, something’s wrong.
Jason Hartman 33:53
Something has really shifted. Yeah.
Shaun McCloskey 33:55
And something shifted because my expenses went from, you know, a grand, or two or three a month to now I’ve got what everybody else told me to do. I’ve got all marketing expenses, I’ve got staff, I’ve got all this stuff. I’ve got this beautiful office. And now every single month, I got to make 35 grand a month just before I break even, which might not be the end of the world. But now all of a sudden, you know, a few years later, I’m making $100,000 on a deal. And I’m thinking oh my gosh, this just bought me. Five years ago, I would have been set for life for 100 grand and now it’s just bought me three months to live.
Jason Hartman 34:26
Very interesting. Very good point. Shawn. Do you have a website as well that you want to give out?
Shaun McCloskey 34:32
We do Lifeonaire.com and it’s just like the word millionaire Li f e o n a i r e.com. Guys check it out there.
Jason Hartman 34:39
Fantastic. Sean McCluskey. Thank you so much for joining us.
Shaun McCloskey 34:42
Thanks a lot, man. Appreciate you having me.
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