Episode 339: Go Ahead: 300 Years of Financial Advice That Worked (and Didn't) with Joseph Moore, PhD

Historian and investor Joseph Moore, PhD, spent over a decade digging through 300 years of American financial advice to find out what actually worked, and what everyday people, not just the Rockefellers of the world, were told to do with their money.

In this conversation with Melissa Joy, CFP®, Joseph explains why Americans used to say “go ahead” instead of “get ahead,” what that shift in language reveals about self-reliance and the American dream, and why perspective on how hard life used to be (one and a half shirts per person in 1870, no flush toilets well into the twentieth century) can reframe how we think about today's challenges.

They also dig into a subject close to Melissa's heart: the long, well-documented history of women managing, investing, and building wealth, from Ladies' Home Journal financial columns to Abigail Adams quietly out-investing John Adams. Joseph shares what his own real estate investing taught him about the myths of passive income, makes an unlikely defense of personal finance gurus, and reflects on how his working-class upbringing in rural South Carolina shaped a book that became a national bestseller.

What You'll Learn

• Why Americans historically said “go ahead” instead of “get ahead,” and what that language reveals about self-reliance versus collective pessimism
• How dramatically material life has improved in the last 150 years, and why that context matters when comparing today's challenges to the past
• Why the idea of a long history of stay-at-home moms is a myth, and how women's self-employment and part-time income kept most American families afloat
• The overlooked history of women investing in mortgages, securities, and real estate going back to the 1700s, including Abigail Adams's investment returns
• Why real estate is not always a passive investment, and what it actually takes to make money owning it
• A historian's case for what personal finance gurus get right, and where their advice tends to fall short
• Why saving a percentage of every paycheck in the stock market is newer advice than most people realize
• The power of living on one income and investing the other, a strategy with roots stretching back generations

Guest Bio

Joseph Moore, PhD, is a national bestselling author, historian, and investor whose self-experimentation with history's wildest financial strategies made him financially independent in his mid-40s. His writing has appeared in The New York Times and through HarperCollins and Oxford University Press. His new book, How to Get Rich in American History: 300 Years of Financial Advice That Worked (and Didn't), is an instant USA Today bestseller. You can find his free newsletter and more of his writing at josephmoorebooks.com, and follow him on Instagram.

The previous presentation by PEARL PLANNING was intended for general information purposes only.  No portion of the presentation serves as the receipt of, or as a substitute for, personalized investment advice from PEARL PLANNING or any other investment professional of your choosing. Different types of investments involve varying degrees of risk, and it should not be assumed that future performance of any specific investment or investment strategy, or any non-investment related or planning services, discussion or content, will be profitable, be suitable for your portfolio or individual situation, or prove successful. Neither PEARL PLANNING’s investment adviser registration status, nor any amount of prior experience or success, should be construed that a certain level of results or satisfaction will be achieved if PEARL PLANNING is engaged, or continues to be engaged, to provide investment advisory services. PEARL PLANNING is neither a law firm nor accounting firm, and no portion of its services should be construed as legal or accounting advice. No portion of the video content should be construed by a client or prospective client as a guarantee that he/she will experience a certain level of results if PEARL PLANNING is engaged, or continues to be engaged, to provide investment advisory services. A copy of PEARL PLANNING’s current written disclosure Brochure discussing our advisory services and fees is available upon request or at https...

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Welcome And Set The Goal

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome to the Women's Money Wisdom Podcast. I'm Melissa Joy, a certified financial planner and the founder of Perl Planning. My goal is to help you streamline and organize your finances, navigate big money decisions with confidence, and be strategic in order to grow your wealth. As a woman, you work hard for your money, and I'm here to help you make the most of it. Now let's get into the show. He's

Why Write A Financial History

SPEAKER_02 0:52

formerly a college professor. His self-experimentation with history's wisest and wildest financial strategies let him become financially independent in his mid-40s. And now we're going to talk all about this book that I would recommend to everyone to consider reading. Joseph, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Well, so so glad to be here. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02 1:14

Well, for the listeners, I've already told you, Joseph, that I absolutely love the book. I listened to the audio book, tore right through it. It was a fantastic listen. I learned a lot. And, you know, just to get started, let's give a little taste to those for the uninitiated about what you're trying to do with this book.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Yeah. So I wanted to try to figure out what everyday people have been told to do with their money and whether or not it worked. Because we have a lot of histories of rich people, right? Like we have all the Rockefeller books that we need and more. Uh, and we have some, some, some books on poverty, a lot a good bit of books on poverty, but like everyday people's lives. People in America for 300 years have been trying to do what everybody listening to this is trying to do. Do the best for themselves and their family, get ahead from where they are to where they want to be, put their kids in a good spot for their kids to have a great life. And I thought maybe there'd just be like one timeless set of wisdom that you know, wisdoms that made sense. And actually, as it turns out, what always worked was always changing. And so uh the whole idea of the book was to figure out what have Americans been told to do? Does it work? How does it change? When does it change and how? And how can we then take those lessons and apply them in our life?

SPEAKER_02 2:34

Well, I think you did a great job of that. And I'll tell you everybody that's listening that in the narrative, there's a lot of history. So if you're a history junkie, you're gonna really enjoy the nooks and crannies of an American story of wealth and money. Um, and there's also a lot of personal, like you you're actually sharing with being vulnerable and sharing with readers, you know, like your origin story as well as where you are

Testing Old Money Recipes Today

SPEAKER_02 3:03

today.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

Yeah, I, you know, it occurred to me somewhere along the line that what I was doing was putting together a recipe book, right? Like here's all the recipes that Americans uh tried to mix together to get themselves financially ahead. And by the way, that recipe analogy is particularly prone, uh particularly apt for women because if you actually want to know where financial advice was in the 1800s, a whole lot of it was when what's called housewife manuals, which is like young mothers, young women like trying to figure out how to manage a household in the 1840s or whatever. And there was a shocking amount of financial advice in those books. Like women were the ones who were thinking about finance. And so I was, and by the way, in those books, you'll flip over, and the next chapter will be about how to dress a snake bite if your child is bitten. And then the next one is like, and here's recipes that will work with only these ingredients. It was like the internet of the 1840s, right? So I was putting together a recipe book of financial ideas, and what I wanted to do was see, well, how does it taste now? Right. If I mix these up and apply them in today's world, doing the things people used to do, does it still work? Um, and some of those ideas were crazier than others, right? Um, I uh I Airbnb beat all the rooms in my house. Um, because in the in the late 1800s, the most common way people tried to pay out their mortgage was by buying a house and then renting out the rooms to others. Now that sounds crazy, crazy to us, but this was very, very common. One in three Americans were doing it at any given time. And so, you know, things like that. Uh, I bought land on the moon because there was a big craze to see who could own lunar land. But, you know, I tried these things out and um I didn't come from money. So, like people ask, where are you from? And I'll say, not where the money's from. You know, I I I come from rural South Carolina. No one in my family had my family did not go to college, nobody, nobody I knew had money. So it didn't, there was no reason to talk about it. Um, and so I was taking all this as a self-experiment just to see what it was like for people to try to get ahead. Uh, and as things turned out, uh, many of those ideas do still work today. And if you learn some of the basic ideas and tenets, you can apply them. And it worked out very well for me. And I'm incredibly fortunate to end up in a good place. Um, also sometimes scary.

SPEAKER_02 5:18

It's not always easy, but um, but yeah, your path to success, and we'll talk about it a little bit more during the conversation, but you took risks, right? Like yes, you didn't just um 401k and put it away

How New Modern Investing Advice Is

SPEAKER_02 5:32

in the 401k and save.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

Yeah, and I talk about in the book how recent that advice is. The idea that just save a small percentage of your paycheck in the stock market is advice literally no one followed for most of American history because, again, literally, the way the word was was meant to be used, literally no one could. Like you, it wasn't something you could have done for most of history. So a lot of the advice we've we hear today is pretty new. It doesn't make it wrong, by the way, it just makes it new. And so we want to think through how things change in their lifetime, how they change in our lifetime, and and can we see those changes coming?

Go Ahead Versus Get Ahead

SPEAKER_02 6:03

Well, you start out the book by um uh clarifying between get ahead, um, which is kind of how Americans measure themselves. It's like a benchmark of like, am I better than my neighbors versus go ahead, which was the original, you know, whether it was front frontierism or the original way that America told people to succeed. What did you learn about, or or maybe you were teaching this in your classes all along, but what did you learn about the differences between the two?

SPEAKER_00 6:35

Well, the irony is that in most of back when I was a humanities professor, I was kind of a lefty humanities professor who said capitalism didn't work. So uh I've had some students reach out to me and be like, didn't you teach me that all this was a scam? I'm like, sorry about that. Uh, but no, uh you so let's talk about that. So most people say nobody can get ahead, right? Somebody's gonna get ahead. Like it happens to you, like it's a thing that you know, you're just rushed along in one direction or the other.

SPEAKER_02 7:01

Yeah, society is pushing me down and yeah, a lot of collective pessimism.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

Or I wish I could get ahead, by which me people often mean they wish like some tide would just push them over, you know, to wherever the money is. And that is not how people used to talk about getting ahead. They didn't say get ahead, they said go ahead. They said the goal is to go ahead. And there was the impetus of that verb was on the individual to get up and go. And this was an I cannot tell you how common this phrase was. It was like an internet meme of the 1800s that people would just say, go ahead. One of my examples that's um, it's a little bit of a sports analogy, but I uh my brother played uh minor league baseball. And everybody who plays minor league baseball wants to play major league baseball. So everybody on that bus going through North Dakota to play for peanuts wishes they were in the big leagues, right? And he said there was a phrase that you would use when people would say, you know, man, I'm not getting my shot, or man, they need to give me more play time, or I really should be up in AAA or in the like everybody would say the same thing, play better. And like, because at the nobody has any sympathy for you because we all want to be in the major leagues, so play better. And I think there's something about that in the 1800s, people said, Go ahead. You want to get, you want to go from where you are to where you dream you could be. Go ahead. You can do it. It's up to you, but you can do it. And there was this spirit in in America for most of history that you could go ahead and that it was there for you to do if you were willing to do what it takes. Now, what it takes isn't always easy, right? The trade-offs are not always, you know, there's there is a trade-off. And uh the the bat the the other side of that trade-off involves sometimes things that are unpleasant. And are you willing to do it? Then go ahead. My favorite example of this is Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist, his most famous speech, What to the slave, is the fourth of July. It is one of the most famous speeches in American history. We assign it in schools, I've assigned it for years. That is not his most famous speech in his own life. That was after his lifetime that it became famous. In his own life, everywhere he would go, people would ask him to give the speech, self-made men. Now it was a gender neutral term back then, meaning self-made people. And the crescendo line of that speech is our motto as Americans is go ahead. I may not be president. Now think about who Frederick Douglass is in the 1870s. I may not be president, but I can be prosperous. And you got to remember, like people hollering out, please give the speech self-made men, like it's a rock concert, you know, do the hits.

SPEAKER_02 9:30

That's the favorite album. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Yeah. And the people in that crowd, many of them were impoverished, probably half of them used to be slaves. So the steepness of their climb is so real. But the American dream was there on offer for everyone to go ahead if you were willing to take the initiative to do it. Now it wasn't easy. No one was saying it. He's a Frederick Douglass, especially not saying it's easy, but it was doable and it still is today.

SPEAKER_02 9:53

That's fantastic. I think that like setting the narrative for perspective that I hope people keep from this book if they're willing to take a dive, goes right in from that, like, hey, this is the way America is really in um framed success when it comes to prosperity.

Abundance Then And Now

SPEAKER_02 10:10

Going right from there to opening the book to say, like, you think this is bad, like things are much better now than you think they are. And um, you know, this is one of the things that when I'm talking about um investing today and going forward, there's a thousand reasons to complain. And like do not complain when you compare now versus history. Um so thank you for that, you know, like opening, um, you know, kind of salvo of like things are not so bad.

SPEAKER_00 10:43

There's there's nothing like learning that in 1870, the average American, this is an actual historical statistic. The average American owned one and a half shirts. That's male and female, by the way. So the which means that like there's a bunch of people walking around with three shirts that they own in total, and a bunch of people walk around with one, right? Because like it's one and a half shirts is the actual statistic. So just walk in your closet and just start counting or pull out your drawers and start counting. You live in a world of abundance, but it's it's it is just the water we swim in. So we don't think about it. And so part of the role of history is to show you like if you think life is hard now, well, let's go look and see, not just any where, but any when. And let's compare our win today to their when and see if we would rather be 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 today versus then. And uh, once I show people what it was like to live then, most everybody's very happy to live now.

SPEAKER_02 11:39

Yeah, I I look at like my grandparents and for my grandfather's um one's only international expedition, or it wasn't a plane ride because he was in World War I, he was a little bit older. Wow, was a boat ride to Europe um from a farm voyage in Oklahoma. And I'm sure my other grandfather's only plane ride was uh, and well, it probably was a boat too to for World War II to again serve in Europe. And you compare that with, you know, most people nowadays, if they haven't been on a flight by their teens, are atypical of like a kind of a middle class heritage in terms of your access to the world, access to education. There's just so many distinctions um between now and you know, when America was great.

SPEAKER_00 12:22

I think people have lost have lost sight of how recent that past was, how recent it used to be very hard. And I tell the story in the book, uh, not of me, but of my mother, and not so much of my mother even, but of my grandfather, who was a farmer in the Carolinas. My mother was the sixth child, she was one of seven children. She was the sixth child brought home to a farmhouse that did not have a flush toilet. My mother. And you know, that that wasn't that long ago. Now, my grandfather ordered a toilet and a uh sink and uh and a tub, all of which were delivered from Sears Robuck and say it has to be the Sears catalog on a train that he had to then get someone to help him get some kind of way to haul it from the train station to his farmhouse, and then he installed it himself with his brothers in a house he had built himself with his brothers. If I go to 1950, 19, which I mean, I know that sounds like a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

SPEAKER_02 13:25

That was years before I was born.

SPEAKER_00 13:27

Yeah, so it's not that long ago, right? 1950, the best-selling personal finance book in America. And it was a runaway bestseller. So many printings for this book is one no one today remembers. It was called Your Dream House, How to Build It Yourself for $3,500. Now, when I tell people that, they go, $3,500. You know, first of all, it's it you got to adjust for inflation. It wasn't that, it's still cheaper than today, but $3,500 to the part here is optimal, the operationalist, build it yourself.

SPEAKER_02 13:58

Yeah, is you're the general contractor and the subcontractor.

SPEAKER_00 14:02

This was a huge phase of people who are like, I can't afford a house. By the way, they were having a housing crisis too, almost statistically double what ours is today. And so there was this fad to like order the lumber and build the house yourself on your weekends and nights. And I cannot tell you how popular this was. My grandfather, that house I just mentioned, the reason it had no toilet, because he built it himself and he ran out of money for building a toilet on the back end until he could save more money. And so this was extremely common. So uh, all that to say, uh, we forget how recent it was to understand that life was so as difficult as it used to be, and how relatively recent it's gotten so much easier.

SPEAKER_02 14:41

So, yeah, and um we've all, you know, kind of a rising tide lifts all ships. Like we've we've all had um improvements, um, you know, poverty, what it means here in America relative to the rest of the world, access to um resources that are kind of standard access, you know, uh same as you, Joseph. My dad um didn't have electricity until he was um, you know, third or fourth grade when they moved to the city because the farm they were on just, you know, like it no running water either. It's just, you know, um kind of uh that we're farming dirt. But um these are things that I think are helpful to keep perspective when you know you're our standard of like there's a house, our kids can't afford houses. They don't want the houses that are the starter homes that were built in the 1940s and 50s to um deal with the baby boom.

SPEAKER_00 15:40

Yeah, there let's be clear because I don't want people to hear this and go, oh, you know, this this guy who you know got lucky with money is is now telling people it's not so hard. Uh it it is hard. Like I'm not it if the the challenges you are up against are your challenges. So they're really the kind of the only ones you see and look at. Absolutely. And so, but let's look, but if we step back, there is a housing crisis in this country. I'm really passionate about that issue because real estate's made me a lot of money. And I wrote an essay on Substack fairly recently saying, I wish I were poorer because I wish there were more homes and that the slice of the pie that I owned was a bigger, a smaller slice of a bigger pie. Um, but it is neither the first housing crisis in America, nor is it even close to the worst. The worst housing crisis, probably 1948, when statistically there was a shortage about twice what today's is, which is that's which is why in 1950 that book was such a bestseller, is like people like, I'll just build it myself. I don't know what else to do. Um, but in the 1870s, the 1890s, there's been plenty of housing shortages in American history. Um, and so we can learn from the past what people did to navigate them. Like you're up against a real challenge, but there are people who faced that challenge before. You're not alone. And so, what is it you're gonna do to because you do have the climb to make, whether even if this this climb is not as steep as previous generations, it's still your climb. And so there's hopefully ways you can learn to climb a little better, faster, smarter.

SPEAKER_02 17:03

That's

Women Have Always Talked Money

SPEAKER_02 17:04

great. When I first reached out to you and was starting the book, but I'd heard about this book on a podcast, and I was like, ah, I would love to have you on Women's Money Wisdom. You said, Hey, I worked really hard to make sure that women were included in this book. And I was only on chapter two, and I could already tell, even though the chapter, well, there's several areas of focus on um women in American economic history. Um, but I am a hard a tough critic on personal finance authors because I've read some fabulous books that have very few references or perspectives that are relatable for women, or is, you know, like here's the 99 ways that men got rich. And then the one example of like uh failure is like um Rihanna, who uh, you know, like is a very successful businesswoman who also had a failure with personal managers earlier in her career. So anyway, I'm um I I saw and heard your seeking and representation of women in the book and just want to thank you first before we talk about how you how what you learned about women in economic history.

SPEAKER_00 18:18

Well, thank you for saying that, but I will give all the credit to the actual women of the past because it wasn't really hard to do. So like if you really go looking and you look with open eyes, you don't walk in with an assumption about who's going to talk about money, and you just look for people talking about money and finances. Who's most concerned about this? It's the person who has eyes on everyday transactions who understands the relationship between what's going in and what's going out in the future in the past and how we're moving forward. It's largely women who are very much eyes on this. And this mythology that we've developed that I've that kind of as a historian doesn't make sense to me, that somehow finance and money was a male domain and that it women occasionally would be aware of it, but rarely, it just doesn't make any historical sense because that's not what people's lives were like. Um, when I went looking for personal finance, I kind of started in today and went backwards. And at some point, I was just gonna back, you know, kind of backtracking almost like a murder mystery, right? You know, trade trying to find the the the criminal. And the trail went cold. I mean, the trail went completely cold. Like I lost around the 19 teens any sense of financial advice. I couldn't find it anywhere. And then where I found it was in women's manuals, like, you know, woman to woman, talking woman to woman. It was like I had found a treasure trove. It was everywhere. Women were talking to other women about money all the time. And so we have these books that pop up, or these articles, or these viral videos that say, like, I know women are just getting into money these days. I'm like, that is not true at all. You know, like women have been into money for a long time. And you find just these incredibly thoughtful financial strategies, financial conversations, uh, and real-world applications of what it actually takes to live a financial life. And you can find these all the way back to the 1700s. And it's it's women talking to other women.

SPEAKER_02 20:13

I love that. I think, you know, the um a couple things that might be surprising to our listeners. I was mentored by a woman who um grew up in academy academia in the home economics department of a Midwestern college. And home economics was like legit, like you needed to nail that. If you were um the woman in the household often, you did need to sew most of the clothes, the two shirts, but also like make the money work, have money at the end of the month. And you you really had to be a jack of all trades. And some of that is in, you know, our profession, the certified financial planner profession today. Um, and the ladies' home journal had just as much like, you know, how to make the stretch the money as anything else.

SPEAKER_00 21:01

Um, ladies' home journal is a wonderful resource for a financial historian, which is not a probably the first human being to ever utter that sentence. Right. Like, and but probably right now, we just made history by saying it for the first time. But it is, it is because if you go through the articles, about once every two or three up uh articles, they they had someone on kind of the financial beat, and they would discuss financial issues uh from women's perspectives, all types of issues. Some of them were about managing the household, some of them were about what to invest in, some of them were about one of my favorite examples is like a short story about basically the way you can start to think about a little thing you want, and then the next thing you know, you have to upgrade your whole life. You know, what we call lifestyle inflation or moving the goalposts.

SPEAKER_02 21:47

Lifestyle creep, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:48

Yes, yeah. They were discussing it then in like the 1880s. It's it's wonderful. But then you flip to the back, and there's the advertising section where all the ads were placed. And what I love about This is when money's on the line, people do what works. If someone is advertising financial investments in Ladies' Home Journal, it's because, especially if they're doing it year after year after year after year, it's because women are investing in these things, right? This is you wouldn't advertise where you don't have customers. And the you'd be blown away by how interesting, complex, thorough the investing advertisements directed at women were in the 1800s, early 1900s. Women are investing in mortgages. Like, could you I mean like private mortgages, like private mortgages, private lending, or or they're investing in mortgage companies that are going out and lending on like Minnesota farmland with seven and a half percent returns. And like women know how to how to like send off for the prospectus and read it over and decide which of these lending companies they're gonna go with. This is normal. Women were investing all the time.

SPEAKER_02 22:53

And I think one of the like getting even into stock trading, you mentioned there were so many different exchanges. When we look the New York Stock Exchange is, you know, what most people think about, but there were exchanges all over the country. They were not hyper, you know, focused on a few parts of the country. And while there were fewer women on um, or no women on the like the broadest, most famous exchanges until a certain point in time, there were women trading stocks over this history. When we have the roaring 20s, women were participating, like the that like blind spot we have for women in and money um is is seeing a light with your book.

SPEAKER_00 23:36

Yeah. So there's so yeah, the first of all is we do have a lot of kind of a Wall Street uh center of gravity in the way we talk about finance, right? Because that's true today. It wasn't actually true in the past. Wall Street was there, it was important, but there were stock exchanges in Philadelphia, Connecticut. There was one in Nanchez, Mississippi, like Charleston, South Carolina. There were all these places where there were stock exchanges, places to go and exchange stock. Perfectly normal, not a big deal. The way we think of it today is like a ooh, only the people on the inside on you know on Wall Street. Uh they just existed all over the place. For women, women were investing in securities all the time. One of my favorite examples is Abigail Adams, uh, first lady of the United States, married to John Adams, second president of the United States. And Abigail was wildly better at money than her husband was. Like John is status obsessed because he's a little short. He's not a little short, he's really short. He's he's short and he grew up near people with money. And so as soon as he gets some, he's trying to show how much he has. So he's like buying crappy farmland because he wants Jan John Hancock to notice how much land he has. And the land is like a terrible investment with bad returns. And Abigail tries to tell him this. We have the letters, but their letters are fascinating. And Woody Holton is the historian who wrote the biography of Abigail Adams, and it is just filled with financial ideas where she is discussing uh her financial life. Her lifetime investment returns were 17, right at the edge of 18%. In fact, I mean they were right at 17 to 18%. Warren Buffett's was 19%. Like Abigail Adams may indeed have been the most successful paper investor of her entire generation, full stop. And we we blow past this, like that's somehow a footnote. But women were doing this kind of thing all the time. Abigail was incredibly successful, she's also very well connected, so she knew what you know what news to follow. Um, but but it was it was very common. The way I talk about in the book, the women of Charleston, South Carolina, and it was like elite women, middle class women, and poor women were investing in mortgages. And if you ever go to Charleston, beautiful city, by the way, highly recommend, gorgeous place to get away for vacation. You walk the historical areas, they will they will mention all these crazy stories about half of which are true, about these beautiful homes like Rainbow Row. And they what they won't tell you is the money that was lent to build those houses was from women. So women were investing upper class, middle class, working class, all of American history.

SPEAKER_02 26:02

Fantastic. Again, like there's so much in this that you really need to read to see all the anecdotes. And for me, it hearkened to a family history as well. Um, I describe my dad grew up on a farm without electricity. His mom went to the city to be a textile worker. She um was it worked at O Levi's factory, and she was the breadwinner that got the family the money they could afford to afford to live in a house with electricity in the city because she wanted my dad

Work Myths And The Two-Income Edge

SPEAKER_02 26:33

to have a better public education because she saw a promise in him. Um and I think like, you know, so many of those stories are kind of maybe you know them in your family's narrative, but you don't realize that this was um not an isolated incident.

SPEAKER_00 26:48

That is, that is, that is moving. I mean, and the number of women who men and women really, like people who have pursued the best interest of, you know, their family at great willingness to go through hardship themselves. It's really, it's the inspiring part of the go-ahead story, right? People, again, the trade-off was not without the trade-off, right? You had to actually give something up in order for that upward mobility to occur. Um, no, I think what you're talking about is incredibly inspiring. It was also really common. Like people were willing to do these things. And you do what you it takes given the circumstances you and so one of the things I talk about in the book is one of the another one of these mythologies that is just totally false, is this idea that we had we had a whole long history of stay-at-home moms, and then the 1960s happened, and women started to go back to work, and then Stigorney Weaver went to work, and men, then they got after it, right? Like, no, not true. It's just not true. There was a segment of the middle class for whom that was true. But as I try to point out to you to especially like students, the middle class is not the middle third. It's like the top 10 to 15% below the ultra wealthy. So it might have been true for them, but for most American families, that was not true. For most American families, you survived on the husband's income, which is to say what he made in his occupation paid for the base level of subsistence, the way your family survived, and you thrived on the wife's income. Women were working all the time. Now they were working in different ways. A lot of the ways they got income was what we would call today self-employment income or part-time work. We have letters to um supposedly in the history books, married women did not work in the factories, except for the part where we now have the letters from women to managers of factories saying, I'm not getting enough hours. Like women expected to get part-time hours at the local factory. Um, women were churning butter, which sounds very quaint and like, oh, we're taking the kids to a history play, a history park to see how people used to live.

SPEAKER_02 28:42

That butter was painful to me, honestly.

SPEAKER_00 28:44

Yeah, that butter was money. There's periods of American history where women's butter churning is about one-fifth to one-third of the family's income on the farm. She's taking that butter and selling it in town. And she, they're using that money to pay off the house. They're using that money to buy education for the kids, they're using that money to buy luxury items. Like it is the difference between surviving and thriving. And by the way, still is today. One of the, I talk about the book, one of the real takeaways that people have missed, if you want to learn lessons from the past and apply it, is, and nobody wants to necessarily do it, but if you do it, it's a superpower, is live on one income and invest the other. Like if you have a couple, a married couple who like, we're gonna live on this income and everything the other one makes is how we're gonna go ahead. It doesn't take long for that to compound to something really powerful, whether it's paying off house, whether it's, you know, starting a business, whether it's you know, whatever that investment is, it doesn't have to be in the stock market. But it's a it's a powerful lesson from the past that still works today.

SPEAKER_02 29:42

Yeah, it I agree. And um it's it's always helpful to have a strategy that you can kind of hold on to if you're like, this is the this is where we're gonna spend the money, is easily bifurcated.

What Gurus Get Right

SPEAKER_02 29:54

Well, speaking about modern history, the concept of financial advice, not trading stocks or going to a stock exchange to um be a trader, is a relatively new one. And you bring up that it was um, you know, uh it's a very novel concept um to be a certified financial planner or financial advisor. Um, really emerged in the 70s and wasn't um uh expanding until the 80s. Um, and there's been also like um there's a lot of other, you know, kind of wonks that our um financial personal finance experts and gurus. You mentioned that um Dave Ramsey probably often hated by people like me, but also has brought a ton of great results um for people. And I do not disagree.

SPEAKER_00 30:43

So, yeah, hating on gurus is very popular. Uh, and does it really matter who you're with? Because if you're in academia like I was, uh I can find an anti-Dave Ramsey paper in literally every academic discipline: sociology, finance, economics, history. I mean, just it goes on and on. Uh, and you can find some of that pretty much about every other guru, too. Now, to be fair, occasionally they deserve it. Napoleon Hill was perhaps the most, the biggest fraudster in American history. Uh, I could do a whole episode on the craziness that is Napoleon's Hill, the guy who wrote Think and Grow Rich. Uh, he was neither, you know, he was neither thinking nor was he rich when he wrote that book. Uh, but somehow it made him famous for both. Uh, but all that to be said, we have this tendency to think, oh no, there's real professionals for this. And these gurus are really just selling kind of products. Okay, well, to some extent they are, but let's look at the evidence. Uh finance professors have incredible equations that work very well on spreadsheets for how to live, you know, to optimize a financial life. But the moment it has to leave the spreadsheet and hit the messiness of the real world, a lot of that falls apart. You know, gurus understand that Super Bowl ads work, birthday sex leads to baby number three. I have yet to see a personal finance equation that models a midlife crisis or a child with special needs. But so, what a guru is good for is the ability to take life's complexity and boil it down to some simple rules of thumb that you can act on when you don't know what else to do. And that's what most people actually take away from gurus. But I simply's like, listen to their podcasts, at most buy their books, do not buy their seminars. There is nothing that they are doing that is worthwhile that isn't already free. And if you take away those free nuggets and tidbits, you probably are going to do pretty well just applying those to a life in a world that if you work hard and go after it, you're highly likely to succeed. Um, Dave Ramsey, my favorite example of this, whatever you think of him, that it is he is a love him or hate him kind of dude, right? But whatever you think of him, uh, a German economist who had no dog in the fight, he was just like an economist looking for a paper to write, overlaid credit card spending data in America with where the Ramsey show appeared when it first like gets picked up in a metro in a new in a new city.

SPEAKER_02 33:00

And he found that's like radio waves, right?

SPEAKER_00 33:02

Radio waves, yeah. And he found that credit card spending immediately went down 1.3% in those zip codes. To prove that it wasn't called a correlation, he realized that the radio waves couldn't get through mountains. So wherever the mountains blocked the signal, the credit card spending stayed the same. So if you aggregate those numbers across the years that Ramsey has been doing, he does, he has saved America the GDP of a mid-sized nation state. Now, whatever you think of him, that's a powerful effect. And what I think people need to understand is that we really do need financial first responders. And I think for certified financial advisors, who are especially important in this, being present for people for their actual day-to-day problems, uh, not their spreadsheet problems. Because most of the problems they actually have aren't on a spreadsheet. And if you can help people understand the rules of thumb to act on when they're tempted to panic, you know, when your client just went on a business trip and chose to watch the big short on the flight home and now thinks everything's gonna crash, how do you talk to them about it? And so yeah, that's that hopefully that a small defense of gurus is is in order.

SPEAKER_02 34:03

No, I'm I'm all good with it. And um I agree with you. There's so much for most gurus, there's a lot that is like good um rules of thumb. It's not personalized typically or customized. And um it's funny now in the age of Instagram reels, like I I love clicking on, you know, like the Ramsey show because I'm like, oh, what am I gonna hate here? And like about 80% of the time, I'm like, yes, yes. Like even um, you know, as a woman being concerned about misogyny and financial advice, like there's really good conversations in some cases where people call in and are in a financially abusive situation. It's like this is not acceptable. Um, and so it's just fun to talk about um, you know, kind of those topics that are uh third third rails when it comes to um personal finance um preferences as a professional in this space. Um, but also like, you know, this is uh having people like me who are looking through your personal, you know, your personal finance versus picking up the journals is relatively new. Um, but you know, kind of um hopefully bringing value to um current state of affairs. No, it's yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 35:22

No, I say I I have a uh I I've gotten to know a lot of certified financial advisors going through the process of researching and writing this book and then and talking about the book. And I I have grow only grown in my respect for how how challenging a job that is and how much good they they seek to do in the world. So uh no, it's uh it's it's actually really good. I say like now every town has people available to to everyday Americans who can distill that knowledge. And that's again something new. It's not something it was a you had to go to your banker. And the if 50, 80, 100 years ago, you went to your banker and your banker sold you what made money for your banker or your insurance, you know, agent sold what made money for your insurance agent. Uh, they didn't necessarily tell you it was best for you.

SPEAKER_02 36:02

It could be up and down the wealth gap, like insurance got um sold to um everybody, but especially that was like kind of the financial agent for lower socioeconomic communities or um yeah, insurance was hugely important to everyday people's lives, hugely important and what we've forgotten

Real Estate Myths And Reality

SPEAKER_02 36:20

today. Well, I want to pivot because in your personal narrative um that's interwoven into the story, you um became a successful real estate investor, not without your um lessons learned along the way so much today. And like, first of all, like this is a success story. This is how you made your uh a lot of how you made your millions. Um, but so many people today are like, oh, I want, you know, like I've read about it, like I need a bunch of houses in order to become wealthy. And um, I think, you know, for about one in five people who talk to me about this, I'm like, yeah, that sounds like a great fit for you. And the other four, I'm like, have you considered this, that, or the other? And I say that as an owner of a short-term rental that um is constantly bringing me like what's what's the next thing that could go wrong. Um, tell me a little bit about your passive income journey into real estate.

SPEAKER_00 37:15

Yeah, so I, you know, real estate has obviously been a very long-standing part of the American kind of wealth-building tradition. There's some myths that surround it. Uh generally they build out of three myths. Uh, real estate always goes up, investing in it is passive, and this is how the really wealthy people did it. Uh, no, it isn't. No, it no, it no, it didn't. No, it isn't, no, they didn't. Like it is not always destined to go up. It is not passive or rarely passive. And actually, of the top 100 fortunes in America, precisely zero were made in real estate. So it's it's hard for us to wrap our mind around that. So let's talk about it, doesn't always have to go up. In our lifetime, I'm pushing 50. I can, I'm a free throw from 50. And I I've not seen anything but real estate go up in my lifetime, except for a blip after 2008. Because we haven't built enough of it. But that is, believe it or not, the historical anomaly. There were investors in the 1700s who bought all of what is today West Virginia. Every one of them died without seeing a single dollar in profits. Uh, if you go to uh this one is the one I tell people, and people look at me like, oh, he's lying. This guy's just making stuff up. I'm like, I'll tell you exactly where to find this stat. It's at this, it's at the Central, I'm sorry, the uh Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's website.

unknown 38:35

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 38:36

They have a website that has this data set. It's very easy to use. Houses in most American cities, Houston, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, like not New York, not LA. Houses in America in the 1990s cost the same inflation adjusted adjusted as they had in the 1890s. For 100 years, homes in most American cities were basically the same as they used to be. And by the way, along the line, those houses got bigger. So they actually were kind of going down in price in a way. So homes do not have to go up. To illustrate this, I bought land on the moon, which was, believe it or not, a real uh investment craze at one point in America. Uh, and I bought an acre on the Sea of Serenity, now, which was I was told had phenomenal earth views. Like, well, if I ever go, I will, I will confirm. Now, my point in buying an acre on the land of the moon, oh, acre of land on the moon, was to say, okay, I own that. Now what? Can I is it gonna go up in value? And the answer is no, of course not. I need Elon to give me a ride. Someone has to oxygenate it at the cost of who knows how many billions or trillions. And that's just to make it habitable. So, no, that land is not gonna go up unless someone does something to make it more valuable. And that's the way most Americans thought about real estate investing. You're gonna buy this thing. Okay, how are you going to actively? This goes to the second myth, make it more valuable. Uh, I've owned millions of dollars of real estate, and I I've probably owned at this point, I know I've owned over 40 parcels of real estate, you know, across small apartments, houses, whatever. And it is anything but passive. If you want passive real estate returns, you can get them. They're called a REIT REIT.

SPEAKER_02 40:17

And that's what I was gonna say. There's a way to get that access.

SPEAKER_00 40:20

And that and I will tell you historically, for hundreds of years, the return on real estate is roughly four to six percent. That's the passive return on real estate. If you want it active, then you now own a bond with an HVAC system that goes out every now and again. So you have to be active to make real estate worth uh more. Now, can you do well owning a house? Can you do well owning real estate? Yes, you can if you're willing to be active and improve it and treat it like a job. And the reason I made money in real estate was I learned I had to treat it like a business and I ran it like a business. Uh so yeah, I'll I'll close out with just it's a I like to say real estate is actually a pretty terrible way to make money, but it is an okay way to build a modest fortune if you work at it.

SPEAKER_02 41:02

Well, I no shame on anyone who um focuses on real estate. I think that it is a great fit. It's just not something that everyone needs to do. Typically, you need to take on leverage in order to have success. You need a little luck along the way. Um, but it's always an interesting conversation because of course, real estate is something that we're all very familiar with, having, you know, typically living within um houses or apartments. And also, like, you know, you get tricked because you know your purchase price. You know, if I bought my house in 2005, we bought or I bought my first home in um with my husband in 2009. So, you know, like we bottom of the market, perfect timing. We know that number, it's locked in. You don't think about what you put into it along the way, and then you know what you sold it for 14 years later. And it's like, oh, that was a lot of money. But sometimes when you compare it to markets um in or balanced portfolios, it it actually ends up even in a great moment to invest, um, being a better investment to um have the returns of the market.

SPEAKER_00 42:10

Well, certainly over the last 20 years it has been. Uh now I you know what I tell people is the way to make money in real estate is you have to look at what real estate is. There's there's a handful of jobs all combined together. There is uh a realtor who put who finds the deals, right? There's a lender who lends the money and makes money off the lending. There's the maintenance person who rehabs or fixes or keeps up the home. There's the uh landlord who handles the billing and the tenant issues. And there's a few other jobs around it. But let's just say there's five or six jobs in real estate. In order to actually make money owning real estate, you have to replace at least one and preferly two of those jobs. You have to become one or two of those things. Either you're the person finding the deals, or you're the person who's the landlord managing everything, or you're the handyman, or you're the lender and you know how to get the money. Like, yeah. Yeah. You have to take somebody out of the equation for you to be the one that makes money in real estate actively. And that's something that, you know, nobody that's not in any of the how-to guides.

SPEAKER_02 43:08

Well, Joseph, thank you for sharing your personal story and all of this history that I I think is eye-opening and I know I'll be using in the advice and conversations I have on the podcast and with clients.

Where To Find Joseph’s Work

SPEAKER_02 43:20

Where can people find the book? And also where can people find, you know, other stuff you're working on?

SPEAKER_00 43:26

Thank you so much, Melissa, for having me. Um, it's uh such a joy, uh, which I'm realize, you know, it did not mean as the pun until it came out. It happens. Uh, but I really appreciate it. Uh, the book is on all the Amazons. It's on if it's if there's a website that sells books, then uh the book is available there uh in all the places people sell those. Uh I have a website, it's really a substack, which is totally free. I don't ask anybody to pay any money for for for that. That's just josephmorebooks.com. And there I write like an essay or month or so on some of these topics, like the one I talked about earlier. I wish I were poor, try to looking at what is a housing shortage and what do we have to do with it when we're living in one. Uh, I wrote one recently called Bitcoin is a Zeppelin that's gotten a good bit of buzz, like looking at like sometimes the first technology that that breaks open a field isn't actually the technology that survives for the day we all use it and being very careful about that. So just try try to use history to give us insights into living a life today financially and personally, and hopefully people can enjoy that. So look forward to hearing people's thoughts and uh hope they'll reach out and tell me what they think.

SPEAKER_02 44:32

Well, we'll make sure to have those in the show notes and just thanks so much for joining us.

SPEAKER_00 44:36

Melissa, truly a pleasure. I look forward to our next conversation. Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 44:50

Thank you for listening to the Women's Money Wisdom podcast. If you found value in this episode, the best way that you can support the podcast is to forward an episode to a friend or leave a review. Go to ProPlan.com and the podcast link to get all the resources and links mentioned. This presentation by Pro Planning is intended for general information purposes only. No portion of this presentation serves as the receipt of or substitute for personal investment advice from Pro Planning or any other investment professional of your choosing. Copies of Pro Planning's current rent and disclosure brochure and form CRS discussing our advisory services and fees are available upon request or on our website platform at PerlPlan.com. The information that we share is meant to educate and inspire, not serve as personalized financial advice. Everyone's situation is unique, so be sure to consult with your own financial professional for guidance that fits your life. And just so you know, the opinions shared in this podcast are Melissa's own and those of her guests. They don't necessarily represent any organizations with which Melissa is affiliated. For more important disclosures, please go to our webpage at proplan.com.