An Evening with Phroogal

I nev­er thought I’d be the per­son with a book titled “YOLO” on my book­shelf, and yet here I am. What’s more, I’ll prob­a­bly even buy a few more copies and hand them out as Christ­mas and grad­u­a­tion gifts! I received a free copy of the book from the author him­self, Jason Vitug, when he dropped by on his road­tip: The Path to Finan­cial Wellness.

Jason is a Mil­len­ni­al like me, so I relat­ed to a lot of what he had to say dur­ing his pre­sen­ta­tion. He’s also where I want to be in life, so I lis­tened hard and took lots of notes. #nerd

He start­ed off in life like so many do these days: ‘nor­mal’ upbring­ing, 4 year uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion, stu­dent and con­sumer debt. Then he saw the light one day when he got the pro­mo­tion of a life­time to CEO of the cred­it union he worked at. Pret­ty impres­sive when he start­ed out as a teller!

After turn­ing down the pro­mo­tion (and the 6 fig­ure salary that came with it), Jason sold his belong­ings, paid off his debt, and back­packed around the world. Then he start­ed Phroo­gal and start­ing writ­ing. It’s kind of turned into a Q&A plat­form for finances and has over 65k mem­bers! I def­i­nite­ly rec­om­mend tak­ing a look around!

Jason’s pre­sen­ta­tion was about Finan­cial Well­ness. It sounds like just anoth­er talk about finances, but it was more than that. It’s about health and wealth. If you don’t have health, you won’t enjoy any wealth you accu­mu­late as much, or have as long to enjoy it. Yes, it’s good to have finan­cial goals, but those should help you achieve your life goals. Mon­ey isn’t the end of the path: it’s a tool to help you on the path of life.

He brought up a lot of points that made me think. For instance, his first con­ver­sa­tion about mon­ey with his par­ents came when he was 17. 17!! That’s crazy to me. I was hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions about mon­ey as soon as I was old enough to talk and ask ques­tions. Most­ly in the form of me ask­ing for things, and Mom hav­ing to explain we could­n’t afford it. Then when I got old­er, the con­ver­sa­tions shift­ed to what to do with the mon­ey I did get: allowance, Christ­mas and birth­day mon­ey, babysit­ting mon­ey, lawn mow­ing mon­ey and mon­ey earned help­ing my Mom with her clean­ing busi­ness. The rule in my house was you have to save the first 50%, and then you can blow the oth­er half on what­ev­er my lit­tle heart desired. Which was basi­cal­ly can­dy, house key and library card replace­ments, and Poke­mon games.

As I approached dri­ving age, I start­ed to ask more ques­tions. Would I be get­ting a car? Would they help me cosign for a car if they would­n’t buy one for me? Would they put me on their insur­ance? Would they add a line to their phone plan for me? How were we going to pay for col­lege? It soon became obvi­ous my par­ents weren’t going to do more than the bare min­i­mum of feed­ing me and pro­vid­ing shel­ter (and even that they revoked when I was 18). If I want­ed a car, a phone, clothes, or a col­lege edu­ca­tion, I was going to have to pay for it all by myself. So I did. It sucked hard­core then, but now I’m grate­ful for the expe­ri­ence as it taught me a lot about mon­ey and liv­ing when fail­ing would­n’t have quite so big an impact.

Going back to Jason’s pre­sen­ta­tion, he also had a lot to say about the direc­tion life can take. One line I real­ly liked was, “You can’t get where you want to go if you don’t know where you want to be.” That’s deep. So many peo­ple just wan­der aim­less­ly through their life and then look around in their 50’s going “what hap­pened to my life?” They don’t use their time mind­ful­ly. Jason said, and I agree, that our time is our most valu­able thing we own. Hence the title of his book. YOLO. You only live once. And you can’t get that time back. Com­pa­nies pay us for that time! Only prob­lem is, I val­ue my time more than any com­pa­ny can pay me, so I want to get out of the cor­po­rate life and live it how I want.

He held a bit of a Q&A ses­sion at the end, and the thing that sur­prised me the most was how basic the ques­tions were. Should we have an emer­gency fund? What to do when it’s con­stant­ly being used? It makes me sad that grown adults don’t know even the most basic of finan­cial fun­da­men­tals. It would seem to me there’s a big mar­ket out there for finan­cial edu­ca­tion, if peo­ple want­ed to change their habits and behaviors.

All in all, I’m glad I went! The pre­sen­ta­tion was­n’t real­ly aimed for fel­low finan­cial inde­pen­dence blog­gers, but I’m hap­py I got a chance to con­nect with a fel­low blog­ger, meet oth­er finan­cial­ly mind­ed folks in the com­mu­ni­ty, and I even hand­ed a few of my new busi­ness cards!

Jason, if you’re read­ing this, I’ll see you in San Diego for FinCon!