Well, you piqued my interest, @Nords. I hopped over, expecting there would be some barrier to entry, but the $599 annual fee stopped me cold. Do they ever offer Black Friday deals?
My 1100-word response here is going to resemble a values debate of frugal versus cheap. That forum is a highly individual decision, and it’s not for everyone. It might not be for anyone here, but please ask me questions or send me a PM. I’ll skip over the marketing hype.
At the end of this essay I’ll mention a way to get a free membership, but it has to be earned. Very few of this forum’s members will see the value in it. Others won’t want to share personal numbers or risk the doxxing.
I’m guessing that the Millionaire Money Mentor founders (John Nardini & Steve Adcock) will open the forum to new members when the traffic from the current members dies down. I’m sure that members drop out, but I don’t know what the churn rate may be. Over the last three years, memberships have been sold during 4th of July, Labor Day, and the end of the year. Right now the forum is pretty busy... a lot like the early growth of Early-Retirement .org, or like this forum was during its early years.
John hasn’t said anything yet, but he may have one more membership offer before the end of 2023. I can’t predict a date. Possibly January 2024. The easiest way to track the offer is to subscribe to ESIMoney .com and wait for the announcement there.
Holy crap! It's 600 bucks a year to play with the ESI club.
Back in October 2020, I reacted the same way when the membership was $490/year. Who in the world
pays for a forum?!? Suckers.
The free products that come with the first year’s membership are cool in the sense of “Here’s a bunch of things that I wouldn’t pay for individually but are interesting to read as a package deal.” It’s like buying a copy of a book instead of borrowing it from the library, or buying the boxed set of a series at a discount. I no longer remember what free products I got when I signed up three years ago, and at least 95% of Mustachians can replicate them on their own.
I’m at a stage of my life where $1000 is an experiment, not a commitment. I joined because my inner Ramit Sethi asked me why I couldn’t give myself permission to try out a potentially valuable product with a seven-day money-back guarantee. I could certainly afford it out of our entertainment budget, let alone our travel or investing categories. Well, we’re no longer budgeting, but I digress.
After reading for a few days, I was hooked by the fact that paid forums have no trolls, no haters, no scammers, and no spammers. This might seem like a big “Well, DUH, Nords”, but I’ve been moderating forums for nearly two decades. (Even the Mustache forums have their problem members, right?) I never noticed this benefit until the problems were absent.
Everyone on the Millionaires forum can do math. Everyone has real-life experience in building wealth. Everyone has been fired, or dealt with hostile work environments, or faced adversity. Everyone has a healthy ego (including me) yet has been challenged on it before (including me) and maintains enough humility (probably me) to admit that they might be mistaken in their opinions.
There are still arguments, yet they’re civil. There are rants but no ad hominem attacks. The forum is almost self-moderating. Once John had to actually step in and chill a poster, later refunding his money and canceling his account. (The poster was a foul-mouthed, paranoid, conspiracy-theory extremist... who also happened to be a millionaire.) Other than him, the most vigorous arguments I can recall have ended in consensus that we’ll always have different perspectives.
Those last three paragraphs are the primary reason that I’m on the Millionaire Money Mentors forum nearly every day-- usually for an hour or two. I get tremendous inspiration from answering the thoughtful questions, for sharing my stories, for writing a better blog post, and for writing the next book. They’re also the reason that now I only check in with other forums weekly or when I’m tagged.
My biggest wins from the forum have been learning about:
- the details of real estate syndications,
- the gossipy analysis of the teams who are running various real estate syndications,
- the due diligence of commercial real estate (many buildings, millions of square feet),
- the workload of landlording thousands of doors of residential multifamily real estate,
- having so many rentals that you start your own property-management company,
- the logistics of running a family private bank,
- having two (retired) billionaires as golfing buddies,
- estate planning (at the $10M level),
- gifting (at the $50M level),
- trusts for dealing with estate planning, tax avoidance, owning assets, and other legal issues,
- entrepreneurship (on steroids),
- negotiating a higher salary (or fewer hours) when you’re already earning $250K/year,
- six-figure consulting contracts,
- financial planning when you earn more than $250K/year (I get this question from some military vets),
- donating over $100K/year to charity,
- philanthropy (as in, establishing your own charitable foundation),
- concierge medicine (like detailed annual physicals or joint replacements), and
- lifestyle. So much on lifestyle.
I’ve made better decisions with information that has saved me tens of thousands of dollars. We also resolved a family estate-planning question that would have cost us $2500 just to learn what questions to ask the lawyers. Now we’re educated enough to pay the lawyers to debate the solutions and do the paperwork.
The forum is also a valuable insight into the emotions of behavioral financial psychology. I’m the guy who explains the tiny important details of the 4% SWR to the rest of the members, and that guy who challenges smart rich people on their Just One More Year syndrome. Whether you have $600K or $50M:
“... the money has to last me for the rest of my life and I might need it someday! Besides, I like my boss, and they pay me well for stuff that I enjoy doing anyway, and I’d have to buy my own health insurance, and Social Security might not be there in 2035, and I want to travel, and I want long-term care insurance, and...”https://militaryfinancialindependence.com/2023/04/11/fear-and-the-just-one-more-year-syndrome/We Millionaire forum members still have problems with our aging parents who don’t want to let us help manage their assets. We still have questions about the value of college or finding good liability insurance. We still worry (a lot) about raising money-savvy kids while building their grit, motivation, & initiative. We still have perpetual debates about paying off the mortgage (or investing). We still discuss vocabulary like value, frugal, and cheap.
That had better be extramarital sex and key swapping for that price!
At our meetup a few months ago, I had an incredible weekend learning more about forum members (and their spouses) and talking about life.
During that weekend I had an entire new audience for my sea stories. Some of us learned not to play poker with a psychologist who earns over $1M/year in textbook royalties. We heard from another member who engineered their severance package and has been travel-hacking the world. A general partner of a real-estate syndicator gave a short talk on the economics of storage facilities and then let us interrogate him for over an hour on analysis, fees, and pandemic failures.
I found myself tutoring a friend on backdoor Roth IRAs in the 37% income-tax bracket. They’re burning out on their career in their early 30s but it’s hard to give up the money and they might not have enough yet. (Spoiler: they have more than enough.)
Coincidentally our meetup was held in The Villages (the retirement community in central Florida), and I’ve learned a lot about that place too. I’m going back there for our meetup in 2024.
The closest comparison to this Millionaire meetup is CampFI or Camp Mustache, but with no Mt. Si hikes-- and in the luxurious accommodations of the Brownwood Hotel & Spa.
Hacking the free membership: when I joined in 2020 and met all the other people who’d written their Millionaire Interviews, I forced myself to finally write my mine. (I’d been intrigued by it for several years but never made it a priority.) Every interview is the same questions every time, and if you’ve read a dozen other interviews then writing yours is mainly an exercise of introspection & persistence. When mine was published, John refunded my pro-rated portion of my annual membership. I’m not charged for annual renewals as long as I share in the forum discussions at least weekly.
My first draft of my MI was 4000 words: Question, Answer, Question, Answer, The End. When I showed my draft to my spouse (who always reads my first drafts) her feedback was: “Booooooooring!” I started all over again and shared stories instead of answering questions... and ended at over 7000 words. Next, my Retiree Interview will be published in September-- it’s 16,000 words. In my defense, it covers over 20 years of retiree.
Contact John if you’re interested in writing your MI. However he’s mentioned many times that fewer than 10% of the people who’ve
volunteered to write a MI for ESIMoney have actually followed through on their personal commitment.
Topic: Race from $2M to $4M...and Beyond! (Read 1411321 times)
