STEVEN BARTLETT Shares His Journey with Money and How He Uses Complementary Skills to Level Up | IMO

I've never actually said this before, but I when I got my student loan, I took half of it and I bet it on a football game.

You know, one of the things

Oh, a game. A game.

Honestly, it wasn't even a good game.

It wasn't a good game, but it was just it was just it was Stoke. I don't even I don't even like the team.

Hello.

Hey there.

How you doing?

I'm I'm I'm great. We got a good one today.

Oh, I cannot wait.

I cannot wait. I'm very excited to talk to our our guest.

But to to kick it off, we were going to because we're going to be talking about finance, finances, we're going to be talking about how do you manage money.

These economic times are really a little scary out there, and I know a lot of people have questions, but we were talking before the show, just trying to think of how did we think about money when we were growing up, and we talked a little bit about this in some of our other podcasts, but we we've said that our our we grew up pretty, I would say we grew up poor.

Right, but the the poor but not knowing we were poor.

Exactly.

That was a that was a real testament to our parents because we didn't have disposable income and they were managing paycheck by paycheck, but we didn't know that.

And and uh when when Stephen gets out here, we should talk about the how dad taught us the value of money, you know, because that was uh that was a real a real great lesson, but um

But our father worked as a he was a city worker, um in in uh for the city of Chicago, worked in the water filtration plant, blue collar worker. He was the sole breadwinner because he and mom made a decision to uh for her to stay home so that, you know, she'd be able to be an involved and engaged parent in our school, which she was. She was very active in the PTA. So we sort of had that typical, we came home for lunch every day.

Right.

So him being the sole breadwinner afforded her the luxury of being more engaged in our upbringing, but it meant that we were, you know, we had to sacrifice a lot. And it just sacrifice just became a habit, you know, little things like, you know, um, Christmas was you got three gifts.

You got you could ask for three.

You could ask for three things. And another thing dad uh focused on was never um uh stretching or using credit.

Yeah.

Right, he he paid his bills at the end of the month.

He never carried balances on his credit cards.

He never bought things on time.

I mean, he never used the system that way.

When you say bought things on time, what do you mean by that?

So back in the day, you could buy things on layaway, similar to what you can do now, but it was called layaway.

So you'd put $20 down on a $100 couch and then you'd pay $5 a month.

And you eventually you'd own that.

He would never he thought that was that was like quicksand.

That was financial quicksand to him.

And so he never did that.

He never carried a balance on his credit cards.

And and um and I think the only time he actually went into debt was when it was time for us to go to college.