Ryan Begelman's Net Worth is $60M. His Goal? Help Others Find Endurance Through Coaching.

We spoke to Ryan Begelman in this week's episode of Moneywise.

Ryan is a former investment banker and private equity professional who made his fortune by growing and selling Bisnow, a commercial real estate media company. After exiting, he discovered his true passion in coaching and completely transformed his relationship with money.

Like all Moneywise episodes, Ryan breaks down his net worth, income, portfolio, and monthly expenses and then I, your humble host, pick it all apart. We also went deep on: how his father's financial struggles shaped his money mindset, his shocking realization about retirement planning, and why he spent six figures annually on life coaching.

And by the way...this podcast, the concept of it came from Hampton, which is a community for founders and CEOs and people who generally have a really high net worth. I was seeing all types of private conversations about money, and I thought, this should be public. So if you want to be part of these conversations—ones that happen amongst people who run businesses that are doing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue, check it out. But until you join or until you get there, you have this podcast. New Moneywise episodes come out weekly.

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The Numbers

• Net Worth: Approximately $60M+
  • Made $13M in cash flow while running Bisnow
  • Got $51M from selling Bisnow in 2016
  • Small seven-figure sums from selling stakes in Summit and Powder Mountain
• Current Income: ~$600K/year from coaching
  • 12 clients at approximately $4,000/month
• Monthly Spending:
  • Peak: $67K/month (~$800K/year)
  • Current: ($360-420K/year)
    • $120K/year on home (property taxes, insurance, repairs)
    • $105K/year on coaching business (including $40-50K on his own coaches)
    • $140K/year on personal expenses
• Major Financial Mistakes:
  • Kept 80%+ of wealth in cash/high-yield savings accounts instead of investing
  • Failed to track spending until recent years
  • Engaged in unsustainable luxury spending post-exit

From Private Equity to Commercial Real Estate Media

Ryan's path to wealth started conventionally enough—in finance. "I was obsessed with being a businessperson and being an entrepreneur since I was little," he explains. Ryan began in investment banking before landing at the Carlyle Group, working in their US real estate fund.

After about a decade of climbing the corporate ladder, Ryan was ready for something different. He had saved around $250,000 and took a massive risk: "When I left Carlyle, I put all of my money into Bisnow and this other company that Mark's son and I started called Summit."

The risk paid off handsomely. Ryan didn't found Bisnow—it was created by Mark Bisnow—but Ryan helped grow it substantially: "I put initially $46,500 into Bisnow and the business generated $64 million in distributions over seven and a half years."

Under Ryan's leadership, Bisnow grew from $1.5 million in revenue to over $20 million, with $6.5 million in EBITDA, before selling to a private equity firm for $51 million. "It kind of felt like a miracle," Ryan says.

The Hidden Financial Dangers of Success

Despite his massive windfall, Ryan made a critical mistake that many successful entrepreneurs make—he failed to properly manage his newfound wealth.

"I didn't have any idea what I was spending," Ryan admits. "The only thing I tracked was my net worth. I had a spreadsheet...but I had absolutely no idea what my spending was."

His spending escalated dramatically: "My peak spending since I started tracking it was about not including taxes and depreciation and non-cash—just cash out the door that's not tax—was like over $800,000 in a year."

Ryan started indulging in luxury experiences: "What is it like to stay for $3,000 a night at BlackBerry Farm in Tennessee? What's it like to have a chef come over and cook dinner for you and your friends on a Saturday night or have a mariachi band come play just for fun in your living room?"

But an even bigger mistake was what he wasn't doing with his money: "The biggest mistake in pre-epiphany Ryan is he was just severely over invested in cash, i.e., underinvested in the market." Ryan kept approximately 80% of his wealth in cash and his house, missing out on significant market gains.

The Financial Epiphany

Ryan's wake-up call came when he started consulting financial advisors about retirement planning. He had created his own Excel model that made his financial future look secure. But when professionals ran more sophisticated Monte Carlo simulations, the results shocked him.

"I started interviewing financial advisors to see if they could help me double-check that I was on the right path. And in that process, I learned more about how they use software models to analyze all this," Ryan explains. "They ran the analysis and it was more pessimistic and presumably more accurate."

This revelation led to what Ryan calls his "epiphany"—that he was spending too much and needed to either reduce his burn rate or generate more income.

Part of his motivation came from witnessing what happened to his grandparents: "I watched my grandparents on both sides run out of money before they died and have to be supported by their children... I saw the shame of that and the struggle of that."

Finding Purpose Through Coaching

Around the time of his financial epiphany, Ryan discovered life coaching. Initially attracted by the business model—"I charge $4,000 a month... I do two 80-minute calls a month"—Ryan soon found it aligned perfectly with his interests and values.

"I loved mentoring people," Ryan says. He invested heavily in his coaching education, spending nearly $200,000 some years on "hiring other coaches and therapists and going to classes."

Four years and approximately 1,800 coaching hours later, Ryan has found a new purpose: "It became this really beautiful, virtuous cycle where the more I coach, it sort of forces me to become a better, more virtuous version of myself."

Coaching has also provided the financial security Ryan craved: "That was the first time I actually felt financially secure in my whole life... the combination of having this nest egg of assets that I started to finally invest and having this coaching income."

Learning to Respect Money

Post-epiphany, Ryan has cut his spending roughly in half, from around $67,000 monthly to about $30-35,000. The reduced burn rate has become "a really fun game" for Ryan, who now views money differently.

"I think the way I like to think about it now is that money is sort of like its own entity, almost like a person or an energy," he reflects. "In the same way that I want to respect my energy... I want to be a little bit more respectful."

His cuts include flying economy instead of business class, reducing his Burning Man budget, eliminating his handyman, and implementing a one-week waiting period for Amazon purchases. He's even considering selling his Williamsburg townhome, despite loving its "epic steam shower" and home spa.

The Importance of Endurance

Perhaps the most valuable insight from Ryan's journey is his emphasis on endurance: "One thing I would say that I've noticed with the people I work with is I really think people need help with endurance. I think life is hard, and I think in many ways it's harder than we almost want to admit."

Ryan defines endurance as "the ability to sort of have some well-being over a really long period of time and sort of stay in the game, hang around the hoop because they're going to go through a lot of hard stuff and to not burn out."

His advice to entrepreneurs includes being more assertive about your needs, maintaining better boundaries, and practicing self-kindness. "I wish I would have done a bit better is just take it a little easier on myself. I was very self-critical, very pushing myself very hard to be sort of perfect in a lot of ways."

Other Key Quotes

"I sort of thought, oh, it's maybe like kind of like this because my credit card looks like this some months. But what you forget is that like, oh, you also spent like $15,000 on Burning Man in August, and that's not on your credit card in September, October, November."

"The more I coach, it sort of forces me to become a better, more virtuous version of myself and to explore and get to know myself because you have to show up and be really unfuckwithable and triggerable when you're holding space for someone."

"My dad's from like, a working-class Long Island family. His dad was a mechanic, and my dad thought he was rich because, like, he could play tennis. He belonged to, like, a country club... But in truth, when she met him, he just had income."

"I put every last dollar I had into the businesses and it was amazing. I mean, Bisnow is an amazing story because I put initially $46,500 into Bisnow and, you know, the business generated $64 million in distributions over seven and a half years."

"I didn't really respect money... I think the way I like to think about it now is that money is sort of like its own entity, like almost like a person or it's like an energy."

Links You Might Like

• Ryan's Website
• Powder Mountain

Full Transcript

[00:00:05] Ryan Begelman: I didn't have any idea what I was spending.

[00:00:08] Sam Parr: In 2016, Ryan Begelman made about $13 million. With that amount, he was sure that his days of worrying about money were over, but he wasn't as comfortable as he thought.

[00:00:22] Ryan Begelman: I think I suffered from thinking I knew everything.

[00:00:26] Sam Parr: A few years back, Ryan set out on a self-improvement journey that also meant a financial improvement journey, and he quickly learned something that changed his view on money completely.

[00:00:37] Ryan Begelman: In that process, I learned, oh, they use these software models, and there's a bunch of things I'm not taking into account that I really should be taking into account.

[00:00:45] Sam Parr: In today's episode, we're gonna get into how much he was spending on different stuff and what his models were showing and all of his financial stuff. We're also going to talk about how he got into life coaching and how it changed his life.

[00:01:03] Sam Parr: I'm Sam Parr, and this is Moneywise. You can scroll through Instagram for just a few minutes, and you're gonna see so much content on how to make money, but there's not a lot of stuff on what to do, how to live, how to think after you've already made a little bit of wealth. And the reason I know this is I'm the co-founder of a company called Hampton. You can check it out at Join Hampton. Com. It's a community for CEOs and business owners and people like that. And I'm able to see all these amazing conversations about money that typically only happen in private. And these are conversations with high-net-worth people. And I thought, you know what? That would be amazing if this stuff was done in public and hence this podcast Moneywise. With Moneywise, we're going to talk to people who have made a ton of money and they've changed their lives. And we're going to talk about how they've changed their lives, and they're also going to be brutally honest about all their finances, their expenses, their portfolios, and more importantly, the personal challenges that come with being successful. And by the way, if you're the CEO of a startup, the founder of a startup, you got to check it out.

[00:02:01] Sam Parr: JoinHampton.com. That's my company. That's where you're going to be able to connect with a lot of like-minded peers. You're going to have access to hundreds of events that we host throughout the country. And if you like this podcast, Moneywise, a lot of the people who I have on this podcast, not all, but a lot, I met them in Hampton. And so if you like the people who we have on this podcast, you like talking about money. You like having people on your side. You run a company and you're lonely. Check it out, join Hamptons.com. And of course we have to give a shout-out to Ryan. Ryan Begelman comm today's guest. So that first big check, that $13 million, it came from Ryan's exit and a company called Business to Business. By the way, it's basically a news and event company for people who work in commercial real estate. So they had newsletters, they hosted events, things like that. But there's something really interesting here. Ryan didn't actually found the business.

[00:02:53] Ryan Begelman: Mark Bisnow founded Bisnow. His last name is actually Bisnow, but I sort of later changed the company's name to biz now as I expanded it. So first of all, I want to give Mark a lot of credit. I mean, he and Elliot really built the initial business, and I cold reached-out to them to see if they would sell me the business and ultimately cut a deal where we would sort of grow it together and sort of bought into the business a bit, grew the business, bootstrapped it from when I joined. It was at 1.5 million inches revenue and grew it to over 20,000,000in revenue at about 6.5 million free cash flow, or EBITDA, and then sold the company for $51 million to a private equity firm.

[00:03:29] Sam Parr: That exit was a huge deal for Ryan, but as you probably gathered, based off the fact that he tried to first buy biz, now, Ryan already had a little bit of money, and at the time he carved out a comfortable career as a more typical one percenter.

[00:03:43] Ryan Begelman: I was obsessed with being a businessperson and being an entrepreneur since I was little, and my dad was of course a great inspiration. My mom too. But yeah, I went into finance. It seemed like the fastest place you could learn business. And it was. I went into investment banking, I interned during school and then eventually got myself into the Carlyle Group, which is this big private equity group, and I worked in the US real estate fund.

[00:04:08] Sam Parr: Ryan spent around a decade working his way up the corporate ladder, and although he already had a stable career and solid income, he was not satisfied. And so he risked it all.

[00:04:18] Ryan Begelman: I had built up like a quarter million dollars of savings when I left Carlyle, and when I left Carlyle, I put all of my money into business. And this other company that Mark's son and I started called Summit, which is like an ideas festival and community. And between those companies, I basically had put every last dollar I had.

[00:04:38] Sam Parr: How much did you have left of the two? 50.

[00:04:40] Ryan Begelman: I mean, there were many times where there was, you know, just enough basically to like, pay myself like 5000 left. Yeah, basically lived on. I figured out what's like, the least I could live on, which was $6,000 a month at the time. And I just put every last dollar I had into the businesses and it was amazing. I mean, business is an amazing story because I put initially $46,500 into business and, you know, the business generated $64 million in distributions over seven and a half years. It was like kind of felt like a miracle. You know, a lot of luck, but, you know, but it was it was amazing.

[00:05:13] Sam Parr: 64 million, including the 51 sale.

[00:05:16] Ryan Begelman: Yeah, exactly 13 million and cash flow while I was running the company and then 51 when I sold it.

[00:05:21] Sam Parr: And Summit is the story of that. That still is that story still going? You haven't seen liquidity yet?

[00:05:26] Ryan Begelman: No. I sold my stake in Summit, sort of like one and a half times, you could say, and even another time, because we ended up buying a ski resort in Utah called Powder Mountain. And Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix, he ended up buying the ski resort from us. So I'm out of that.

[00:05:45] Sam Parr: The sales of his stakes in Summit and Powder Mountain didn't bring in a lot, relatively, but aren't completely negligible. He described those sales as small seven.

[00:05:53] Ryan Begelman: Figure.

[00:05:53] Sam Parr: Sums. So let's talk about security because at this point Ryan is feeling pretty secure. He took some major risk by putting all of his savings into those businesses. And it paid off big time. Now, something that is amazing is that Ryan was incredibly adverse to traditional financial management, and that's something he now regrets. We're going to talk about that shortly. But first I want to connect another piece of his story here. We either become our parents or spend our lives trying not to. Ryan's dad was also a businessman, but his highs also came with a ton of lows.

[00:06:36] Ryan Begelman: Well, my mom likes to joke that she thought my dad was really rich when she met him because he was driving a convertible Jaguar, and he. And he thought he was rich because my dad's from, like, a working class Long Island family. His dad was a mechanic, and my dad thought he was rich because, like, he could play tennis. He belonged to, like, a country club. And. But in truth, when she met him, because he had income, he just had income. Yeah, he had an ice cream shop. He just he would go around picking up cash from registers, and he just always had a wad of cash. What my mom didn't appreciate.

[00:07:09] Sam Parr: Was where I grew up. We call that being hood rich.

[00:07:12] Ryan Begelman: That's exactly right. I think what my mom didn't appreciate is my dad didn't have much. He didn't have, like, a 401 K or equities or anything. But yeah, he just had like a gangster wad of cash, you know, and he had a bag of quarters from his shops, like in the trunk of his car. He could just take her out to ice cream and stuff, which.

[00:07:28] Sam Parr: Like, it feels great, by the way, when you have, like, a wad of money and then you start realizing you're like, this is all of the money. This isn't just like my spending money. This is like every this is like all of my savings.

[00:07:39] Ryan Begelman: Totally.

[00:07:40] Sam Parr: And so his thing like, worked and then didn't work and then did it work again? What's that story? Yeah.

[00:07:46] Ryan Begelman: So my mom meets my dad. My mom was sort of broke. She meets my dad and she's sort of at the beginning of her career. And my dad went on to have a really good decade where his business grew and grew. He would buy one townhome, he'd renovate it. He'd take the cash flow from that. He'd borrow against it. He'd buy a second townhome and a third. He'd buy a pizza shop. He'd buy a third pizza shop, he'd expand. And he and his best friend from high school and their two tennis buddies built this, like, little empire. And then they overexpanded. And then the late 80s recession happened, and they took on too much debt. And they spent a really long time a lot of my, my childhood sort of fighting off bankruptcy and taking on really high interest loans to pay off the lower interest loans and stay afloat. And during that time, my mom's career as a commercial leasing agent took off, and she had some really successful years where she was actually the top agent, like in our area. And that created a lot of strife in my household where my mom was, you know, upset with my dad. I think about the way he wasn't maybe taking certain steps to make decisions that she thought would maybe were less risky or were, you know, sort of wiser. And the whole power dynamic between them, I think, was sort of strained.

[00:09:08] Sam Parr: Did it work out for them or are they still clawing their way back?

[00:09:11] Ryan Begelman: So it took a long time, but really proud of my dad. And he's just been a real example of steadfastness. And he gradually he and his partners, you know, one foot in front of the other, they came back. And interestingly enough, my mom's career sort of wound down as she got older and my dad became sort of this hero of our family and became much more financially secure.

[00:09:37] Sam Parr: Ryan's path does not exactly look like that, but it's interesting to see how much of his dad's tendencies show up in his behavior. The first notable one is flashy Spending.

[00:09:48] Ryan Begelman: I started spending more and more towards the end of buys now. I had this attitude where I was like, oh, you know, what is it like to stay for, you know, 3000 a night at like, you know, BlackBerry Farm in Tennessee, you know, the nicest hotel in America, or, you know, what's it like to have a chef come over and, like, cook dinner for you and your friends, like, on a Saturday night or, you know, have a mariachi band come play just for fun, like in your living room or. I was sort of like playing, and I was just giving myself like a little bit of like, like, oh, I wouldn't do that. I'm not going to do that five times. But like, I could try a couple of times and then before you know it, it's like you start getting or I started getting hooked on like, oh, well, now that I've seen like a really nice hotel room, it's like, I don't really want to go back to staying the other way, you know?

[00:10:34] Sam Parr: Yeah, I'm not that way with hotels, but I am that way with flying. Yeah, I've never paid for a private flight, but I've been on someone else's private plane, and I'm like, it's hard to go back. I want to do this all the time. And so I understand that that sentiment. What were you spending before you sold the business? Do you know? Do you remember per month?

[00:10:53] Ryan Begelman: So this is part of the problem. I didn't have any idea what I was spending. The only thing I tracked was my net worth. I had a spreadsheet. You'd think I would know a lot more about this, because I was a banker and a private equity guy, and I knew a lot about modeling, but all I had was a stupid little spreadsheet where every like, like on random dates, I would go through all my various bank accounts and things and I would add up my net worth. But I had absolutely no idea what my spending was. And I sort of thought, oh, it's maybe like kind of like this because my credit card looks like this some months. But what you forget is that like, oh, you also spent like $15,000 on Burning Man in August, and that's not on your credit card in September, October, November, you know. Et cetera. Oh, you paid for your property insurance once a year, and that was $25,000 for your $5.5 million townhome. And it just wasn't tracking all that. And then things just grew and creeped up. It's like once you have a townhome, you have a handyman, and then it's like, oh, it's really nice to have the handyman, like, change the filters on your cold plunge. So like, you'll just have them come do that every month. And I wasn't tracking like, oh, I guess he charges 50 an hour and took him like two hours because he also changed like a light bulb while he's at the house. And I asked him to fix the refrigerator and it's like, shit just added up, you know? Yeah, I.

[00:12:07] Sam Parr: Know. I totally know. So pre tracking, what was your peak monthly like six month average of 60,000 a month.

[00:12:17] Ryan Begelman: Yeah. Yeah probably like what I do know is that my peak spending since I started tracking it was about not including taxes and depreciation and non-cash just cash money out the door. That's not tax was like over $800,000 in a year.

[00:12:33] Sam Parr: Let's see 800 divided by 12. Yeah, 67 grand a month. Yeah. It's around this time that Ryan starts to question a lot of things in his life. And through that questioning, he discovers life coaching, which he poured around six figures a year into. We're going to get to that in a second. Now, $800,000 is a lot, but given that he had a net worth of around $60 million, it's not completely shocking. The problem, however, wasn't just the money going out, though, it was also the money coming in.

[00:13:04] Ryan Begelman: So the biggest mistake in pre-epiphany Ryan is he was just severely overinvested in cash i.e. underinvested in the market because I thought I'm going to start another company and this is where I underestimated how much I would be. I was burnt out and this is where I wish I had had help from a group like Hampton and a coach and other people who could have given me some help because I undertrusted experts and others, which is something I kind of learned a bit from my dad. I had, like most of my wealth in my house and in cash because I was making even though I had read every book about not timing the market and grew up, you know, obsessed with Warren Buffett. I was like, I'm going to start a new company. I don't want to be down 30, 40% because I was thinking about buying. My new company was likely going to be a company I bought, and I wanted every last dollar I need to, like, survive and buy this company and maybe put more money into the company. And what ended up happening was it's a longer story, but I ended up not doing that. So I woke up one day and I was like, shit, I have all this. The market's gone up a lot, like I'd be worth twice as much now if I had just been in the market.

[00:14:14] Sam Parr: Yeah, I think it grew. I'd have to do the math, but I think it has averaged since then, roughly 13% a year, which would mean it would double every five years, I think ballpark math. But so yeah. Yeah, you would be double.

[00:14:29] Ryan Begelman: Yeah. And I mean, and you know, I don't know what like my co-founder, you know, Elliot has done, but others I've seen around me also took advantage of like some amazing relationships we had through Summit and invested in some great startups and made even higher returns, you know. So regardless, yeah, I simply bought the Vanguard ETF like, you know, the S&P 500. There'd be less pressure to make money pre epiphany.

[00:14:57] Sam Parr: What percent was cash versus deployed.

[00:15:00] Ryan Begelman: 80 plus percent would be my guess.

[00:15:02] Sam Parr: Was it just sitting in a zero return savings account.

[00:15:06] Ryan Begelman: I opened like a dozen high yield i.e. like 1.5% 2% back then savings accounts and just spread it across all these savings accounts to keep them FDIC covered. And it was partially laziness, too. It was like it was sort of like, I'll get to that. I'm going to take a little time off and I'm going to study Buddhism, which was always like my passion full time. I'm going to actually spend like 9 a.m. to like 6 p.m. every day studying Buddhism and that learning how to cook where like the two things I wanted to do in my free time.

[00:15:39] Sam Parr: The Buddhist leader didn't have a chapter on why he was great, I guess, right? They were all in on cash.

[00:15:49] Ryan Begelman: I mean, this has been one of my great lessons is that one can spiritually bypass a lot of stuff. Stoicism. Mindfulness are great for gaining perspective, for being able to step back, zoom out and like, witness your own thoughts and emotions and be more sort of equanimous. But they're not great for actually getting closer to knowing elements of yourself, knowing about the parts of you that are anxious or sad or angry or disappointed or mourning something, or tired in my case.

[00:16:25] Sam Parr: Yeah. I mean, when I met you, I knew you were tired. And it's good that you kind of like found, which we'll talk about in a little bit. Found your thing. Another mistake that you made, that I make all the time that so many of my friends make. Which is. I think that in order to be an entrepreneur or if you want to be exceptionally successful in any field, by definition you think that you are the exception. But then oftentimes that mindset carries over into places where it probably shouldn't carry over. For example, you worked at Carlyle. You of all people know more about finance and IRR and all this type of stuff that I don't know anything about more than anyone. There's probably like less than 50,000 people in the world who, like, know more about it than you, right? And I have a lot of friends, myself included, were quite good at generating income via starting or selling companies. But then they think because they are great at that, therefore they are great at investing, which oftentimes is not the case. Partially because in order to be a great investor, you typically have to be patient and organized, and you have to be willing to sit for a long time. In order to be an exceptional entrepreneur and CEO, you need to be not patient. It's okay to be sloppy because you can have other people who can could help you, or you could make up for it in the end, and you don't want to sit on your hands for a long time. And this mistake is very common, I noticed. And even when you made that mistake, even when you knew, like potentially you were making that mistake. And I've done that as well. So many times. So many people do that.

[00:17:53] Ryan Begelman: Yeah, I think I suffered from thinking I knew everything and that this sounds self like I'm sort of like self-promoting my own because now I'm a coach. A big part of my epiphany happened because I got a coach.

[00:18:09] Sam Parr: And now we get to the point of the story where we learn about the epiphany and where it all came from, which ironically, started with some pretty crazy spending.

[00:18:18] Ryan Begelman: The biggest thing I spent my money on in the last four years was learning coaching, and like when I said I was spending like 800 grand, a lot of that, like almost a couple hundred grand of that some of those years was hiring other coaches and therapists and going to classes and like learning this, it's sort of a vocation. It's a craft, in my opinion.

[00:18:37] Sam Parr: We're about to get more into that life coaching bit, but I want to give you a heads up on a really interesting thing of Ryan's story, and that's coming in a minute, which is the shock he got when he switched his retirement model from a basic sheet to some new software that he was using. But as I said, let's first get into how his life coaching fits into all of this. It came about shortly after he sold the business, so.

[00:19:01] Ryan Begelman: I only took a little time off because I went back to Summit to be CEO, and then I took 8 or 9 months, and I just obsessively called everyone I could think of and asked them, how do I make $1 million a year in income, working fewer than 20 hours a week? That was when I met you. You were one of the people I called. I mean, I called people who ran e-com companies who bought small blogs. I met with people who were doing like real estate, flipping houses, doing small private equity. I thought about running one conference a year, like, kind of like I did with Summit, like, oh, could I just do one of those a year and I'll just, you know, because I just did not want to work 80 hours a week anymore, 70 hours and be just up all night thinking about my, my company. And I was sort of burned out. So it was during that quest that someone said to me, hey, you're kind of like my weird spiritual friend. And I think he does this thing called coaching.

[00:19:56] Ryan Begelman: You should talk to him. And so I was like, okay, because I was like, I'll talk to anybody about how they're making money and, you know, how are they surviving? And is it fun? How many hours a week does it take? And I got on a call with this guy and he was like, yeah, I charge 4000 a month. And I was like, okay. And how does it work? He's like, oh, I do two 80-minute calls a month. I was like, really? Why 80 minutes? Like, oh, so I have ten minutes to go to the bathroom between calls. And I was like, okay, and how many? And I did the math and I was like, wait a minute. So that's like ten, 11 hours of calls a week to make like 600 grand. And if you're willing to do like, you know, 15, 20 hours a week, you could be making like closer to a million and you're doing something that sounds like actually like the thing I kind of love doing. Like, I loved mentoring people. And you're good.

[00:20:40] Sam Parr: At.

[00:20:41] Ryan Begelman: Thank you. I'm trying to be.

[00:20:43] Sam Parr: I guess you went all in on it. And what are you at now?

[00:20:47] Ryan Begelman: So I'm four years into coaching. I think I added it up for your show. I was just curious. I've done like almost like 1800 hours, I think, of being on zoom calls or in person with, you know, coaching clients. And it became this really beautiful, virtuous cycle where the more I coach like, it sort of forces me to become a better, more virtuous version of myself and to like, explore and get to know myself because you have to show up and be really unfuckwithable and triggerable when you're holding space for someone who's going through something and trying to explore their own thoughts or feelings about something, you can't be like interjecting your own perspective all the time and being easily triggered or wanting to fix them.

[00:21:29] Sam Parr: And in terms of income, how much has that brought in? Were you able to hit your goal?

[00:21:33] Ryan Begelman: So initially it grew really fast. When I started to do coaching pretty quickly, I got up to like 12, then 15. I think I peaked at one point at like 19 clients at a time. Now I'm way down because I just wanted more space and time. But that was the first time I actually felt financially secure in my whole life. It was in late 2020, early 21, because the combination of having this nest egg of assets that I started to finally invest and having this coaching income, which sort of blew my mind. It felt like finding like this, like Easter egg. It was like, wow, that's amazing. Like, this works and people pay quite a lot for it. I finally had like the numbers all worked. It was like, oh, as long as I can do this until I'm 65, which is questionable, I'll be okay. Which actually led to other existential problems, but it was really nice for a little while.

[00:22:24] Sam Parr: I want to ask about those problems, but what's the income now, like 600 grand a year?

[00:22:28] Ryan Begelman: Yeah, let's just say on average I average like 12 coaching clients. My clients typically pay like 4000 a month. Some pay less, some pay a bit more. So yeah, you can do the math on that. I think it's like about 600 grand or 500 and some odd thousand.

[00:22:44] Sam Parr: That existential problem Ryan just mentioned was a looming fear of running out of money. It was around this time that Ryan's spending and lack of growth in his net worth started to catch up with him mentally, and so he decided to do some modeling for his retirement. One method that he used, it showed that he was all good. Oh, and just a side note if you're wondering why his audio changed, it's not you, it's me. After I spoke with Ryan, we realized that there was actually some information we had to get from him. And so my producer, Jackie, she actually jumped on a second call with Ryan, and we were just using our laptop microphones. It was right before he got onto a plane to Italy.

[00:23:16] Ryan Begelman: What I was doing was I hired an Excel modeller, and together he and I made a projection of the rest of my life, including all my spending, my income from coaching and other things from investments, the way that my investments would grow over time. Having children and then having my children come off my payroll eventually, and then retiring and having no more income after retirement from my job and so on. That model made me feel pretty good.

[00:23:53] Sam Parr: Now, Ryan's a finance guy, which means he knows a thing or two about modelling. And like he said, he felt good about the results, but he wanted to be sure. And that's when things became a bit worrying.

[00:24:04] Ryan Begelman: I started interviewing financial advisors to see if, like, they could help me double-check that I was on the right path. And in the process, I learned more about how they use software models to analyze all this. And I found that the financial advisors were really expensive. So I ended up finding a small firm that I'll work on that will build you a software model, sort of by the hour. And so I did that. And they ran the analysis and it was more pessimistic and presumably more accurate. And I don't know all the reasons why, but, you know, it's running like Monte Carlo analysis and looking at different probabilities and scenarios and different based on like the history of the stock market and, you know, different ways it could be up or down and taking into account more precisely things like taxes and what happens when you start withdrawing from your 401k or whatever. So when they did all the analysis, they came back. And that was like when I had this epiphany that, wow, I'm spending too much or I need to like really start generating more income or both.

[00:25:11] Sam Parr: By the way, I do this modeling all the time. I use Kubera, that's a free tool I use. That's a plug. They're not an advertiser right now. And what I try to do is a few things. The first thing I try to do is I set a budget for my wife and I for my household, and let's just say it's $30,000. I don't really care where the money goes as long as it's under $30,000. And each month we'll have a meeting, we'll discuss. Did we go over? Did we not go over? If we didn't go over, how do you want to spend that money? We should spend it. We should have fun. We should enjoy our life. The second thing is, I'm incredibly conservative with my income as well as my expenses. So whenever I set my monthly budget, I assume that it's more than I'm actually going to spend. But I'd rather be conservative there, and I assume I'm going to make less than I'm actually making because, again, I want to be conservative. And finally, I live by the 3% rule, which is I could spend 3% of my liquid net worth and basically never run out of money. Now I don't because I have income. I'm not drawing down on my liquid principle, but assuming I don't have any income, 3% of my liquid net worth, meaning my investable assets, that's things that are not my home, but things that are invested in the S&P 500, maybe cash flowing real estate, things like that. I can spend 3% of that. And I do this modeling all the time, because once I have these guardrails, it just makes me not worry. And speaking of worrying, the anxiety of running out of money was something that was already in Ryan's head. It was just dormant. He had seen it happen to other people in his life.

[00:26:28] Ryan Begelman: This has a lot to do with what shaped me and my life's obsession with financial security because I watched my grandparents on both sides run out of money before they died and have to be supported by their children, who thankfully were able to help them. But I saw the shame of that and the struggle of that, and because they were proud people, and I think it was hard to make that transition. Towards the end of life, when you're already quite vulnerable.

[00:26:56] Sam Parr: And this is where spending takes a big turn. He was spending roughly $67,000 a month, and today that's been cut to half.

[00:27:03] Ryan Begelman: And I'm still trying to reduce my burn. It's actually become a really fun game that I'm in the middle of. Like, I literally just went into a store last week and was buying a thing for my dog, and I got to the register and it was like $29. And I was like, yeah, sorry, I'm going to I got to the cash register. I'm like, apologies, I'm going to go put this back. And, you know, I could obviously afford that, but I'm trying to learn the discipline of being more. The way I think about it now is I didn't really respect money. That's interesting. I think the way I like to think about it now is that money is sort of like its own entity, like almost like a person or it's like an energy. And in the same way that like, I want to respect my energy, like I don't want to just like bleed energy and just, you know, be, you know, I want to be a little bit more respectful, which can include enjoying it, like spend it on, you know, upgrading to, you know, economy plus or, you know, go get a toy that you want. I know, like Andrew Wilkinson mentioned on the episode on Money Wise, you know, that he bought a really nice guitar and he sort of regretted it. But I was like, that's cool. Like, go, you're going to need to make some mistakes. Learning. I think, you know, you talk about this on the show like learning how to flex that muscle. But I also wish I had just been a little bit more respectful like I was just wasting. Like, if you think about it, you work hard, which takes a lot of energy, and you store the energy in money. It's like, kind of like I was just like pissing on all my prior work, you know, and luck.

[00:28:31] Sam Parr: So I'm looking at the list of things that you produced. So you cut from your life, some vacations, you cut summer home, you cut pet care, you cut some tutors. You had like tutors and stuff. You now fly economy instead of business. You go less hard on Burning Man. You don't buy as many clothes. You cut your handyman. You're decorating your home organizer and your Amazon cart. You now have a rule where you have to wait one week to buy it?

[00:29:04] Ryan Begelman: Right? Yeah.

[00:29:04] Ryan Begelman: It's not a hard and fast rule, but generally speaking, I'll put a bunch of stuff, like, because, you know, I'll be on like YouTube and I'll hear about like some cool thing and I'll add it to my Amazon cart and I'll just put it in my cart and I'll just wait a week or two and see if I'm still like, think that's worth it?

[00:29:20] Sam Parr: So what are you trying to reduce it to? Your monthly spend.

[00:29:24] Ryan Begelman: You said my spend is 360. I think about it as like 300 because it's net of my Airbnb revenue. Because I rent out my house. So it's like kind of my way of justifying my expensive house. And I am thinking about selling my house and downgrading into like a smaller place and just being like a renter. That's like the last really big switch I can pull that I haven't been courageous enough to pull.

[00:29:47] Sam Parr: But are you doing that because, like, will that make you happy because you literally don't want like, is that a financial decision or a this home is just too much to take care of decision.

[00:29:57] Ryan Begelman: So I love the hell out of my home. It's super central in Williamsburg. It's got this epic steam shower. I built basically like a bathhouse. I have a sauna, a cold plunge and a steam room. And people love to come over and, you know, and hang out in those spaces, and I love it. It's wonderful. It's been one of the wonderful things I invested in or bought. Having said that, it's a lot of home for, you know, someone who doesn't. I bought it, you know, partially to have kids. I don't have kids yet. I'm just curious to see what kind of freedom I'd have. Like, what would I do with my time? Could I be more contributing to society? Could I be a better, happier version of myself? Could I be more helpful to other people? Like for example, I coach and I'll discount people who can't afford my coaching sometimes. But like, it might be really nice to have like a, you know, half my clients be free or watch less and help people. But like, I don't do that right now because like I have to earn a certain amount.

[00:30:55] Sam Parr: So what does this burn consist of now?

[00:30:57] Ryan Begelman: Okay. So 120,000 of that is just paying for my home, which I own with no mortgage. But it's a big home in New York City. And so like property taxes and insurance and, you know, repairs and things like that add up to about 120,000 a year. And then coaching is about 105,000 a year. And some of that is still this money that I'm spending on people training me and helping me. About about 40 to 50,000 of that is from that. And then some is health insurance, accounting, professional liability insurance, etc. and then about $140,000 is personal expenses.

[00:31:45] Sam Parr: The thing about Ryan's spending problem is that in itself, it wasn't that dire. He was making a ton of money and he had made a bunch of money. And because of that, he was able to live a comfortable life. But there were a few mistakes that led to his spending becoming a real problem. One was his lack of trust in safe and traditional investments, which is something he's changed now. Two is that he got used to a lifestyle and didn't really question if it was contributing to him being happy or not. As you've heard, Ryan isn't completely averse to spending a lot of money when it's meaningful to him, for example, like having a coach, which accounts for almost a third of his spending. And that's okay because it's part of his passion and he gets meaning from it and it makes him happy. The third mistake is something we talked about earlier, which is assuming he could keep up with the pace that made him $13 million in the first place.

[00:32:37] Ryan Begelman: One thing I would say that I've noticed with the people I work with is I really think people need help with endurance. I think life is hard, and I think in many ways it's harder than we almost want to admit. And I think a lot of us struggle, as I know I do, with, you know, anxiety, you know, and sadness and disappointment and are trying hard to sort of fill their life and find well-being. And I think it's really hard to have endurance.

[00:33:03] Sam Parr: How do you define endurance? Is endurance defined as five years, 40 years? Can you bucket different levels of endurance?

[00:33:11] Ryan Begelman: I mean, I would just say, you know, the ability to sort of have some well-being over a really long period of time and sort of stay in the game. Hang around the hoop because they're going to go through a lot of hard stuff and to not burn out. You know, that's one of the things I think I wish I would have done a bit better is just take it a little easier on myself. I was very self-critical, very pushing myself very hard to be sort of perfect in a lot of ways and to put up with a lot of stuff that maybe I, you know, could have been a little bit more sensitive to myself about. I just wished that for other people to give themselves a little more space, a little more inner freedom.

[00:33:48] Sam Parr: What are the best ways to burn out? As someone who runs a company? Like, for example, I paid myself very little at my previous company. I paid myself $3,000 a month, even though we had plenty of money to pay myself a $100,000 or $200,000 a year. And I felt that that made me burn out. Do you have any examples like that where it's that is a really great way to burn out and only lasts three years?

[00:34:12] Ryan Begelman: Yeah, I would say not asserting oneself enough with their co-founders, with their key people, with their investors. Like in my case, I was trying to be equanimous, right? I wanted to be like the stoic, manly, even-keeled. Nothing bothers me, you know, because I'm the leader. I need to stay cool, calm and collected at all times when actually, like, things were bothered, you know, there would be things bothering me and I wished I had learned a little earlier to just have a little bit more self-kindness, to have more self-knowledge, to know some of what sort of I'm sensitive to some things that maybe don't bother other people, but bother me and then assert my needs a little more, have a little bit more boundaries around certain behaviors I don't want to put up with.