Episode 17 - Getting Excited About Saving – The Passion Savings Mindset and Methodology Part 1 with Rob Bennett

Getting Excited About Saving – The Passion Savings Mindset and Methodology Part 1 with Rob Bennett

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This is part 1 of a two-part program.

Mike Michael Lewis:  Welcome to Money, mission and meaning – passion at work, purpose at play, where we explore how we can integrate our personal values and professional skills to create pleasure and profit in the business of life.

I am your host Mark Michael Lewis, CEO of Smart Energy Enterprises Inc. CEE Inc, a beautiful feature now, maker of smart power energy drinks.  Today’s guest is Rob Bennett, the author of ‘Passion saving- the path of wonderful free time and soul-satisfying work’, a brilliant new way of approaching how we spend and save money such that we’re actually inspired to use money to purchase the freedom and choice what you really want through saving.

So join us as we term ‘what it means to save on its head’ and learn a new perspective that will transform your relationship with money forever.  But first, a few highlights on the show.

Rob Bennett:  When you’re standing there saying, “Do I want to buy this sweater for $80”, you know the benefit of a spending and if the benefit of saving is this thing when you’re 65, it just does not influence your thinking.  So it doesn’t work.  So your goals is I want to run a marathon, do you go out and try to run 26 miles?  You go out and try to run 26 miles, you’re going to fail because you’re going to hate it and you’ll see that’s going to be full of blisters and you’re never going to grab a second time.  That’s what you’re trying to do when you start out trying to save on age 65 retirement.

The point is you got to be saving and in order to be saving, you need to be saving for something you care about today, not when you’re 60 and it’s a freedom, it’s fantastic.  It’s exciting, why is it people think saving is boring, if the thing you’re getting with it is financial freedom?  So that’s the goal of this whole approach.

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Mike Michael Lewis:  So welcome Rob, it’s a pleasure to have you on Money, Mission and Meaning.

Rob Bennett:  Now it’s a pleasure to be here Mark, thanks very much.

Mike Michael Lewis:  Great, well first, I want to say straight out that I think you’ve accomplished something radical with your idea of passion savings.  From my perspective, you’ve really created not just another ‘how to money’ book, where you show people how to invest or a motivational book that had just people to do the things they already know to do.

You actually offer a whole new way of thinking about saving money that tapped into our human psychology and desire.  Now, I am going to have you highlight each of the key ideas in passion savings for my listeners so that they can have their minds blown like mine was but first, about you, how did you come up with this idea for passion savings?

Rob Bennett:  Well, first of all thanks for your kind words Mark.  It’s very encouraging to hear that and it is a totally different approach, you know, I very much agree with what you’re saying.  I got started in this back in really 1991.  I had  a job writing a column for a newsletter that I worked with and it was my dream job, I had spent years trying to get this and I lost it in a recession of the early 1990s and I found another job very quickly and the new job actually paid more but it left me very unsatisfied because it wasn’t my dream job and I spent a lot of time thinking how do I stop this from ever happening again in the rest of my life and it comes down to money.

The reason, when I talk to people, I talk to people about this all the time, you know cocktail parties and things, every middle class person has ideas of what they want to do with their life and the main vehicle you have for realizing your vision is the work you do.  So everybody has these ideas of some day I would like to do this, almost all of us can’t start doing the dream job.  We have to make compromises and the reason is because you need money.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with doing that, when you’re young, when you’re getting started, that’s what you have to do, that’s just the way it is.  As you advance in years, I believe you should be advancing in your level of financial freedom and what that means is you should have more choices, you should really have more power.

You should be empowered to saying no to the types of work you want to leave behind and to find the types of work you want to do.  So that was the answer to the puzzle that I was struggling with, it was I had always chosen my jobs based on what seemed good and what I wanted to do but I didn’t have the power to control my future and when I lost that job I realized that’s what I needed and what that meant was putting money in the bank so that down the road when a job turned bad, you get a new boss, there’s an economic recession…whatever, you have enough money behind you so that you are not desperate for that paycheck.  So that’s the basic concept.

Mike Michael Lewis:  Yeah, and in a sense, you know I’ve read tons of books on money, a lot of my listeners have, a lot of people talk about having kind of an emergency fund so if you add a work for three months, you’re covered and I want to be clear, that’s not what you’re talking about.

Rob Bennett:  No.

Mike Michael Lewis:  You, for example, you were saying that you talk with a lot of people who have dreams about what they want to do.  I know a lot of my listeners have dreams, I’ve had dreams, I’ve made the sacrifices in order to work on my dreams and you actually, they want that but they don’t have the time or the money to do that, that’s your saying, you actually did it.  You had the dream of writing a book and then you used the principles in the book to make it happen even though it took you what like four years to write it.  Question, how could you take four years off of your normal work without income to write this book?

Rob Bennett:  Well we are, I saved like a man during this time.  What happened was, when I was, when I lost that job I was 35.  I had really no savings.  I had $5000.00 in a checking account and that was the so-called emergency thing, you know.  It was a very small emergency fund that’s all I had.

Starting then, I started researching these questions and reading everything I could get my hands on and my wife and I, we did our first budget.  Once I realized that the key to me being able to do the work I wanted to do was believing myself of dependence on a paycheck, all of the obstacles to saving, that it helped me back before, just disappeared.

If you talk to people about why you don’t save, you’re always going to get the same answer.  They’re going to say well, there’s just not enough money coming in, you know, I can only barely pay the bills.  The problem is not there’s not enough money coming in because we have a lot more money coming in today than our parents and grandparents had and we save a lot less.

So the problem is not that the money is not coming in, the problem is, when you make a decision to buy something, you’re always looking at the benefits and the benefits of spending today are fantastic, ok?  There are new products and services being developed every day and a lot of them are very exciting stuff.

So you could weigh the magic one and double everybody’s income and you wouldn’t change the saving rate of that, they would find new things to spend money on.  What changes with the passion saving approach is you don’t save for an age 65 retirement because that does not motivate saving.  When you’re standing there saying do I want to buy this sweater for $80.00 you know the benefit of spending and it’s the benefit of saving is this thing when you’re 65 it just does not influence your thinking so it doesn’t work.

Mike Michael Lewis:  Right, and you, you made the choice to start saving for your own capacity to choose the work you love.

Rob Bennett:  Yes.

Mike Michael Lewis:  So question, when did you start that and then when did you start writing the book?

Rob Bennett:  Well, now the book came after, I started this approach to saving the very beginning was, it was January 92, that’s when we wrote the first budget but that was very rough time.  I think in that first budget, we were saving like 10% and we were just trying to follow the basic rule but what happen is I counted from the budget, I said how many years is it going to be before I can leave the job I am at and say right, do what I want to do.

I was overjoyed planning to start my own newsletter, it wasn’t originally to write a book.  So I counted how many years, well it was a lot of years, you know, it’s gone way way out and I said I am not happy about this.  So let me circle back and see if I can cut some more things and every six months, I was so motivated for the saving goal that I would circle back and make new cuts and what would also happen during this time is I got raises.

Now in the old days, when I would get a raise, you know, at best maybe I’d save 10% of the increased income, perhaps I spent it all.

Mike Michael Lewis:  Right.

Rob Bennett:  That’s not what I was doing now.  I was putting it all into saving, you know, it was all going into saving.  So my saving numbers were just skyrocketing and I literally would measure this in terms of if I cut ‘x’ category by five dollars, how many weeks, you know sooner can I leave my job or how many months sooner, you know, whatever it happen to be.

When I started thinking about it in those terms, I mentioned I never saved a penny really, before age 35 except by accident.  After I started doing it this other way, I was thinking about saving every, all day long, I was thinking, you know waiting for the bus I’d be thinking of new places to cut my budget, taking a shower or riding a bike, I just always thinking about.

Mike Michael Lewis:  And we’re going to get into how you did that and I am really asking this specific question.  So it was 1992 that you started this and then when was it that you actually said you know what, I am going to start working on this book full time?

Rob Bennett:  Oh, I left my corporate employment in August 2000, so that’s roughly when I started the book.  In August 2000 I was working, I was doing work preparing my selling list special report, I wrote a special report on how to retire early called ‘Secrets of retiring early’.

The company where that was being sold went out of business in early 2001 and when they went out of business I said I am going to expand this into a book so I started working on the book in early 2001.

Mike Michael Lewis:  Ok, great.  So basically you were at a point where you didn’t have savings, you were caught in a job that paid well but was not what you wanted to do, got the realization, you shifted your thinking and then in the course of about seven or eight years, you actually got to the point where you could take off and decide this is what I want to do and I am going to do it, is that about that?

Rob Bennett:  Yeah, that is correct, it was about nine and a half years, it was less than ten years.

Mike Michael Lewis:  Ok great, I mean personally I find that just inspiring and so I want to get into exactly how you did that, what was the mind shift, and here’s the thing I want to talk about with my listeners, you know, let’s get real about this, about this whole idea of money, right?  We all know that we need to be saving a portion of our income so that we can retire some day, right?  We know this, it’s not optional, it’s not a surprise, right, but most of us either don’t save anything, in fact we spend more than we have, or we save that in a sense of obligation or will power and we get virtually no joy from it.

So Rob, you start off passion saving for the chapter entitled ‘Three reasons not to save for your retirements’.

Rob Bennett:  Yes.

Mike Michael Lewis:  Patsy Mod did a book on saving money, so let’s address why does the conventional wisdom about saving for retirement not work?

Rob Bennett:  I’ll get right to the core of it.

Mike Michael Lewis:  Excellent.

Rob Bennett:  When you want to accomplish any other goal than life, how do you do it?  Say you wanted to run a marathon, say your goal is ‘I want to run a marathon’.  Do you go out and try to run 26 miles?  You go out and try to run 26 miles, you’re going to fail because you’re going to hate it and you’ll see that’s going to be full of blisters and you’ll never going to grab a second time, that’s what you’re trying to do when you start out trying to save an age 65 retirement.

Say that you determined you need a million dollars, you can’t save a million dollars.  It’s this awesome task, it’s so imposing, now what happens in life when you’re faced with a task that’s overwhelming?

Mike Michael Lewis:  You avoid it.

Rob Bennett:  You’ll avoid it, and that’s what everyone’s doing.  You can’t do it that way.  Now of course what happens is, you know, you save a little bit here and you save a little bit there and by the time you get to age 60 you’re terrified and you’re saving a lot but it’s really a horrible way of going about it.

What you want to do when you’re running a marathon is you say, “I am going to go out Saturday and I am going to try to run three miles”, and then if you accomplish that, you feel good and maybe two weeks later, you say I am going to run five miles and you just keep upping it and then you get to a point four or five months down the road, you can run 26 miles with these, but you can’t start out with that.

The point is, you got to be saving and in order to be saving, you need to be saving for something you care about today, not when you’re 60.  If you’re 30, you should be saving for the things you care about in your life when you’re 30 because everybody wants an old age retirement but all of us, it’s about priority 15, you know. 

You want to meet somebody, you’re going to marry, you want to advance in your career, you want to get in better shape, you want to learn an instrument, all these things are high priority, those are the things where your mental energy is going.  So you’ve got to take savings from priority 15 and you’ve got to somehow push it into the top 5 and for me, being able to write a non-fiction book is my life’s dream.

So you tell me to saving money, let me do that and you’ve got priority 1.

Mike Michael Lewis:  Right, now one of the way that you talk about this because the book is full of metaphors that basically take the things that we already know, whether we think we know and shape the perspective in such a way that it’s almost like when you’re driving down a road and you’re passing a field, a farming field, there’s a point where when you’re looking down the road, it’s just all just trees, it’s just all a mess and then you hit that one spot where all of the trees line up, right, and you see the pattern and you’ve got these different stories in your book and your different metaphors to do that, one of the ones that I like the best is at the core of the book as you talk about the freedom store.

Rob Bennett:  Yes.

Mike Michael Lewis:  What does it mean to buy something at the freedom store?

Rob Bennett:  Well, I spent a long time thinking why don’t people save?  We hear this over and over again.  People don’t save, people don’t save…well why don’t they save, and I thought about what is it that you’re thought, what is it that you’re getting when you save and the answer is, you know, people use this phrase all the time, financial freedom.  Well, financial freedom, it’s fantastic, it’s exciting, why is it people think saving is boring if the thing you’re getting with it is financial freedom?  So that’s the goal of this whole approach, the goal was to make saving exciting and positive not a negative.

People think of it as, you have to force yourself to save.  Look, you come out with that mindset, you’ve lost before you start.  It’s got to be thought as a positive.  The freedom store means if saving is really just another form of spending, it’s two usage you can make of your money, with spending you get goods and services and goods and services are great, I got nothing against it.

With saving, you get freedom and opportunity.  Freedom and opportunity are also great and nobody needs to force me to save because I wake up in the morning saying, what goods and services do I want to buy today, after something good out there, I’ll buy it and I also am thinking, what would I like to gain some more freedom for today or what opportunities would I like to buy for myself today, and you get those things by saving.

It’s just another way of using your money, not out of a sense of off duty or responsibility or obligation or sacrifice, it’s something you do to enhance your enjoyment of life.

Mike Michael Lewis:  Right, so you say if there’s a store and that store has your freedom in it and not just freedom in some kind of abstract sense of ok, when I am 65 I am not going to have to work, it’s like if you really had all the time and all the money that you wanted, what would you most loved to do in your life.

Rob Bennett:  Yes.

Mike Michael Lewis:  That’s what the freedom store offers.  When you’re saying what you’re doing is you’re saying I am buying a piece of the thing that I want to do most with my life because all have the choice and all have the opportunity.

Rob Bennett:  Now, that your, that hits it right on the head and when you’re talking about saving for when you’re 65, I don’t mean this in any derogatory way to our people that are over 65 but there’s a sense in which your life is over at that stage, ok?  Obviously you still have value to your, you know, your grandchildren and there are a lot of exciting things people do after 65 but retirement is viewed as sort of you’re in the last stages of life and you’re slowing down.

Mike Michael Lewis:  Yeah, what is the fun in that?

Rob Bennett:  Those are the things that are going to motivate you, the things that are going to motivate you are the things you can do in your 30s, in your 40s, in your 50s.  For my wife, it was being able to stay home and raise our kids when they’re young.  So she has no interest in writing a book, you know that means nothing to her but being able to stay home with those kids, that motivated her. 

Mike Michael Lewis:  That’s in her freedom store.

Rob Bennett:  That’s in her freedom store, right.

Mike Michael Lewis:  Every time you save, she got to buy a piece of that vision, that dream for herself.

Rob Bennett:  Well right, we were working together and she would do the things she was good at and I would do the things I was good at for totally different reasons but we were both highly motivated.  I had a woman who wrote me after reading the book and the first thing she said, she said my mind is on fire and I loved that expression because that’s how I felt about it.

Her dream, and she had this dream in the back of her head, I don’t think she ever told anybody about it.  She said her dream was to take her family on in a round-the-world trip.  She wanted to explore different parts of the world before she got real hope and she said, I was afraid to even tell anybody about it because it’s crazy you can’t do it but she said I read your book and I am thinking maybe if I make changes I can do it, and so see that’s the motivator for her.

Mike Michael Lewis:  Yeah, now she has got that vision in her freedom store and every time she save, she is not sacrificing…

Rob Bennett:  Correct.

Mike Michael Lewis:  We’re about to take a break. We’ll get back to this.  She is not sacrificing, she is actually buying, she is purchasing her freedom, she is purchasing that trip, that reality, every time she saves.  So again, we’re about to take a break to support our sponsors.  When we come back, I want to get into the psychology of passion saving, a little bit deeper, talk about demonstrating sacrifice saving a passion saving in a little bit more depth and how that shift turns the process of saving into a game we actually want to play.

Rob Bennett:  The same way.

Mike Michael Lewis:  I am Mark Michael Lewis, I am speaking with Rob Bennett, author of ‘Life on purpose’.  We will be right back.

Woman:  Listen to evolutionary sales integrating 21st century psychology with ethical sales techniques, a daily audio program to make your explosive success not just possible but predictable on PersonalLifeMedia.com.

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Mark Michael Lewis:  And we’re back with Rob Bennett talking about his book in financial perspective ‘Passion Saving’.  So Rob, you say that we have to be excited about saving to do it well.

Rob Bennett:  Yeah.

Mark Michael Lewis:  But most of this experience saving is a sacrifice, so we’re not excited about it.  The freedom store helps to shift from sacrifice saving to passion saving.  What’s the difference between sacrifice saving and passion saving?

Rob Bennett:  Well, the difference is sacrifice saving is all negative, it’s all about what do I deny myself, what do I force myself to do?  Passion saving is all positive, it’s like you know you’re caged up animal and you’ve got this energy and you want to go out there and find new ways to save.  So in the long term, the difference between the two approaches is incredible.

Again, if you ask people why they don’t save, they’ll say the money is not there, that’s an excuse but the only way you find out if the money is there or not is to have some kind of budget and to try different things and unless you want to do it, nobody can force you to do it.  That’s really what it comes down to.  All of these lectures and sermons that we hear about saving, nobody disagrees with them, everybody just shakes their head and say yeah yeah yeah, it sounds good.  Nobody axe on them.

Mark Michael Lewis:  Right, and this quite frankly is the reason I just love your book and I am recommending it so highly to everyone, ok?  The way we think about money determines how we spend it, end of story, you know, we all know that we could be smothered about our money and save more but we don’t because when it all comes down, we think other things are more important than saving.

Now as you were just saying, most money gurus, they tell us how to save money for our retirement and we listen to them and say, oh yes, I should do that and then we don’t, or they get us all motivated to save money for our retirement, they show us all the reason we go, yes, I am really going to do it this time and then we start and then a few months later or a few days later, either we see a DVD or a new jacket or a new car, we have to have and our saving plan basically goes up the window.

So passion savings is about changing about how we think about saving so that we actually want to save rather than doing it because we think that we should.

Rob Bennett:  Can I give an example?  In the drawn analogy to the eating area, say that you’re trying to lose weight, the standard thing people would say is where you, you have to cut out treats.  You have to cut up cookies or whatever.  I have always had to struggle doing that.  Now if I flip it, the one thing that has worked for me is exercise.  When I exercise it does two things, it takes up that free time so then you’re not walking around looking for something to eat and of course it burns up calories but what makes it work is that I enjoy exercise.

So instead of denying myself something, I am adding something.  I like exercise so I do it and then I lose weight naturally whereas if my whole weight program is, you can’t have any cookies, you can’t have any of the things you like – it doesn’t work because it can work for a day or two or three, but eventually you get tired of it and you break down but when it’s something you enjoy, you do more and more of it instead of running twice a week, you’re running three or four or five times a week because you want to.  So all of the power is on the side of success.

Mark Michael Lewis:  Exactly, I just had a show called ‘Seven minutes to success and satisfaction of goals’ and I said one of the challenges is that the part of us that makes the goal isn’t necessarily the part of us that’s actually there to execute it any time and that’s really what passion saving does it, have you shift your thinking so that when you’re actually at the moment of choice, not in the planning, right, but in the moment of choice, you actually think, you know what, it’s more important for me to save here than it is to spend money and so, if at that moment, you called the money allocation moments, right?

Rob Bennett:  Yes.

Mark Michael Lewis:  And your work is all that shifting how you approach that moment so that you enjoy the passion of saving more than the passion of spending.

Rob Bennett:  Now that’s exactly right.  It’s not something you can force, you cannot have this task master barking orders at you, that will work for a week and that’s all.  It’s going to break down.  There’s a section of the book where I talk about budget.

Mark Michael Lewis:  You call it the joy of budgeting which is I mean ‘duh’.

Rob Bennett:  Right, but see I don’t call it a budget.  I changed the terminology, I call it a life plan and I say, I call it the budget, learn to say yes and what I mean by that is we all think of a budget as the school ma’am that stands in front of this and shakes her finger at it and says, no no no, you can’t have that, you can’t have that, and as long as you think about your budget that way, you’re not going to keep a budget.

The way you should think about a budget is your budget is your best friend.  Your budget is the person that is going to help you, guide you to the things you most want to achieve with your life.

Mark Michael Lewis:  Your budget is the thing that reminds you that you can buy things from the freedom store rather than from the grocery store or from the electronic store.

Rob Bennett:  Yes, it reminds you and it shows you the way that all of those numbers when you look at those numbers from the sacrifice approach, they’re all just numbers on a page.  It’s all just a big pain in the neck, you know it’s going back to school.  When you look at it from the passion saving standpoint, those numbers are, be as a little guides that are going to get you to where you want to go quicker. 

You can, I literally will go through line son our budget, I will put out a possible cut and then I will calculate how much that reduces the amount that I need to save in order to be financially independent and then you can calculate how many years, how many years you have saved, how many years you have reduced, the time that will take you to be financially independent and when you see that, when you say well, if I cut back on the number of times I eat out, I can start living my dreams three years sooner.  Well that’s very concrete.

Mark Michael Lewis:  Right, and you add that.

Rob Bennett:  That’s very concrete, so you’re saying do I want to go out tonight?  If you want to go out enough, do it but if you want to get the three years sooner, do that and it’s your choice but it makes the choice between spending and saving a fair balance.  It’s a fair, you can see that there are benefits to saving.

Mark Michael Lewis:  Right, because if you’re comparing, should I go out tonight and enjoy this meal that I am imagining and yeah, that would be nice, if you’re comparing that or should I save so that when I am 65, I can have this nebulous thing called retirement, there’s no competition.  Well, I have what more the food, I mean come on, it’s a no-brainer but when it’s wow, three years earlier, three years more that I get to do what I really love, now you’ve got a real choice and then you can choose and you might choose dinner, or you might choose savings but at least it’s real, it’s fair.

Rob Bennett:  No, that’s right and an important part of this approach is that the standard approach is anti-spending.  The standard approach is always trying to find fault with spending and I do not buy that at all.  Spending is great, there’s a reason why want to spend, it’s not that we’re stupid and it’s not that we lack will power, it’s that money is meant to be spent, ok?  It’s meant to do things for you so I reject out a hand the idea that spending is bad.

What I say is you need tools to compare the benefits of spending versus the benefits of saving.  If you have those tools, most of us are smart enough to figure out which way to go, most of us know what we want with our lives.  We have not been given the tools to make this comparison because when the saving go, if something that doesn’t happen until 30, 40 years out in the future, it’s not possible to compare.  You’re comparing things that are so different, you can’t make sense out of it.

When you have a saving goal that you’re hoping to achieve within five years, it’s possible to make that comparison intelligently.  So in some cases, you really will spend and appropriately so but in other cases, most people will end up saving more than they save today if they go through the process in an intelligent rational way.

Mark Michael Lewis:  Right, and part of the simplicity of your book, of the ideas being involved in it and by the way on your blog where you go through and discuss these ideas on an ongoing basis and there’s a community of people who are interested in it so that they can study this stuff, is that you actually, when you really get down to breaking it down into what it does, you have a number of simple rules so that you can calculate, oh, if I save this amount of money, my groceries are paid for for the rest of my life.  I no longer have to worry about that, I bought that freedom.

When I have this amount of money, my entertainment, this type of entertainment is paid for, my vacations are paid for, for the rest of my life no matter how long I live, it’s paid for and that kind of motivation it becomes so tangible that it really you know, I don’t, I am all, say a little bit about this later, it’s just amazing to be that in all of the years that I’ve been studying this, I’ve never heard this particular way of putting it and how much it opens up.

Rob Bennett:  Mark, thanks for saying that and I do agree with what you’re saying.  When I was writing the book, I will tell you there were moments when I would, you know you write something out and the chapter you mentioned three reasons not to save for your old age retirement, I wrote those words down and I said, you can’t say this.  So you can’t put this in a book, and I made a decision, I really, I looked at it and I put all the arguments down and I said, can I say it.  Can I say it you know what, I have to say it because all the arguments fit that the case is there, nobody else has said it, it needs to be said.

I’ll tell you what I think happened, what people don’t realize is the concept of an age 65 retirement is a fairly recent development, that concept came to be popular in the 1930s.  What happened is, you know we were in the depression, the government was trying to think of ways of getting the economy moving and they adopted social security so that when people reach 65, they could stop working and before that, the standard thing for the middle class worker was, you didn’t retire at 65, you retired when you were too old to keep going, ok?

So this whole concept of retirement is fairly new and I think what happened is the first idea that entered people’s heads, what is it people should save for?  They said well they should save for retirement and that is sort of the first thing that enters your head because you don’t want to be tested to when you’re old but then what happened is we started making more and more money so that now we’re much richer people and it doesn’t make sense for today’s economy to be making that your primary goal.  You ultimately of course, you have to fund your old age retirement but the key is you got to get started.  You don’t want to wait until you’re 60 to start doing it, if you start saving at 25 for what’s going to happen to you at age 30, well by the time you get to 65, you’re going to be set.  You’re probably going to be set long before that and we have people in our community, they retire 40, 45, there are people out there and they’re doing this and part of the reason I was able to develop a lot of ideas that have not been written about in the literature is I started before, years before I wrote the book, talking on discussion boards where the real life people doing it.

See the internet allows us to reach all these people.  There was no way to reach them before.  They’re out there, they’re in all different countries, all different ages, all kinds of employment but there was no way to connect with them but now, we have a way to connect with them and our discussion boards are people that do this and I have spoken with thousands of them and every story is different because they all have a different goal but every story is similar, in that, they all are excited about saving.  You don’t find people retiring at 45 that think saving is a drag and a pain.

So that’s the common theme.  So what I am trying to do is say, how do we get what the people who are succeeding, how do we take what they did and put it into terms where all the other people that are missing out, understand it.

Mark Michael Lewis:  Right, and where it’s not, oh, here is a goal that Joe, John, Mary, Smith did and you can fit into their goal.  No, it’s what’s your goal?  What’s your passion and how can you begin to think about your passion, the thing that you most want to do with your life, if you had complete freedom and how can you leverage your savings such that you get that sooner, easier and actually be able to enjoy it more in such a way that like as you put it, you’ve got all this income coming in and you don’t have taxes, right, and I want to get into that, I want to get into like what are the practical results of this and what its like when you actually have a passion saving, it’s paying for your life and how even with less money, you can have twice the lifestyle and you’re doing what you really want.

So again, I am Mark Michael Lewis, we’re on Money, mission and meaning and I am speaking with Rob Bennett, author of ‘Passion Savings’.  Thank you so much for coming on to Money, mission and meaning Rob and I wish you all the best.

Rob Bennet :  No, it was a bless Mark, thanks so much.

Woman:  This concludes part 1.  The interview will be continued in the next episode of this show.

Announcer:  Find more great shows like this on personallifemedia.com