Have you ever wondered what the wealthy teach their kids?
What makes rich kids different from everyone else?
How can we teach our kids the same?
If you are curious about this like I was, then tune in to Tom Corley, best selling author of “Rich Habits”, as he discusses his recent book “Rich Kids”, to find out exactly what the rich kids know that others don’t!
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Listen to the podcast here
Raising Rich Kids (Interview With Tom Corley)
Excited to have everybody on here and excited to have our guests as well. You remember the Money Ripple show that we have here, it’s all about how to create, how to find free up cash, how to have more money, how to have more wealth and freedom and a better quality of life now. The big purpose we have with Money Ripples, with my company, is it’s all about creating that ripple effect through generations, through communities and countries and even across the world.
As you start to prosper yourself, others can be on their prosper as well. I’m super excited about this topic because this is talking about one of those ripples. We’re talking about generations. We’re talking about what we do with our children. How do we help them prosper? I’ve got Tom Corley here. Tom, how are you doing?
Chris, thanks for having me in your program. I appreciate it.
You bet. Now let me introduce Tom for a second. Remind me, Tom. What was the last book that came out before Rich Kids?
That’s right. I know that’s available on Amazon, isn’t it?
It’s all over the place. It’s a pretty popular book. I got bestseller status three or four times in 2021 on Amazon, which is pretty cool.
That’s amazing too. I’ve seen the best settles to go into action. It’s not an easy feat to do. That’s for sure. It takes a lot of effort.
It takes a lot of effort and I got a great team behind me. It’s not just me but my publicist, Lori, who you probably know. She’s been amazing in steering me in the right direction and importantly, keeping my head on straight and keeping staying positive about this because it is, Chris, about getting 3,000 rejections.
I love Lori too. For those of you that don’t know who Lori is, Lori was the first TV I’ve ever done. I did her TV show almost years ago and she is an amazing lady. You give her special mention in your book and the reality is, if you haven’t heard of Tom yet, you probably will pretty quickly. He’s been featured in Success Magazine. An article on this book Rich Kids.
It’s getting a lot of acclaim, great deals, and fire drills with us because it’s timely. Working in the financial world myself, I can tell you many people are all the time asking, “This is great for me but how about my kids? How do I teach my kids and get this to pass on beyond me? How do I create a legacy that goes beyond me?” Tom, that’s what you address here, isn’t it?
The whole reason I wrote Rich Kids is that when I went through as a kid, I started out, we were very wealthy, then my dad lost his entire business in one night. I think I was nine years old. As a kid, it affected me going from rich to poor. It would have been a lot easier to deal with if we were poor forever. Chris, you don’t know what you don’t have. When you go from rich to poor, then you realize, “My life stinks compared to the way it used to be.” I wrote Rich Kids because I wanted to help parents be able to mentor their kids in doing certain things that successful parents have done in my research and enabled their kids to grow up and become multimillionaires.
That’s awesome. Tell me like, what first inspired you to do this one? You have that backstory but why did you go from Rich Habits to then Rich Kids?
I was going back and forth writing a lot and doing a little bit of battling with the media, particularly CNN and something that Dave Ramsey posted on his website that caught fire and what I started seeing.
I’m curious. What was that post?
It was twenty things that wealthy people do every day.
Do you believe it?
That was it. CNN took that and they spun it into Dave and I hate poor people. I don’t know how they got there but it’s what they do. I said, “I do know what the problem is and why there’s a wealth gap and why so many are struggling in society.” Chris, it boils down to parenting. I don’t want to be critical and say they’re not doing their job. They don’t know what they should be doing. It’s a generational cycle thing.
Parents need to put a stop sign when they see their kids exhibiting bad behaviors or habits. Click To TweetIf you are poor and pick up certain habits from your parents and from the environment you’re in, but primarily from the parents, those habits stay with you all through your adult life. If those habits are poverty habits, as many of them are, then there’s this generational cycle of poverty that perpetuates itself from one generation to the next. That’s why I wrote Rich Kids. I wanted to try and break that cycle.
Especially when we had the depression era parents, it is passed on from generation to generation to the point where we’re all saying things, especially with 2007, where we had. You have different belief systems and things that come out and even if you try to teach them well. I’ve noticed even the world around them. Even my kids would come home from school and they’ll say things.
I remember one time my kid was trying to talk us into something that I thought was completely a waste of time and money. He said, “Was it because we can’t afford it?” I said, “No, we can afford it. I don’t prioritize it.” I was like, “Who taught you that?” We’re anti saying you can’t afford it. We don’t like to talk that way in our home.
Even if that’s the case, with him and he said, “Great. How can we find the money?” It gets to the point where you could pay for your own deal since your mom and I don’t want to pay for it at all. What can you do? Much a different mindset but even as the kids that talked to him. He was only, I think, in second or third grade when he said that. I said, “Where did you learn that from?”
It’s what these kids pick up in their environment with other kids. That’s why parents need to put up a stop sign when they see their kids exhibiting certain behaviors and bad habits. I don’t think they do. You talk about the greatest generation at the post-World War II generation that created the Baby Boomer generation. It seems like the Baby Boomer generation is rolling out the red carpet for their kids. It’s like a cyclical thing there. Their parents were raised in the depression era. They were passing along to them.
They experienced something horrific in their life. They didn’t want to spend any money. It was going from one extreme to the next. What Rich Kids is all about is finding that happy medium where you’re teaching your kids certain good strategies and success habits like living below their means, saving 20% of their income and things like that.
What are some of those poverty habits that you feel hold the kids back? What are some of those habits?
I’ll tell you one of the worst poverty habits that I’ve seen in my five-year study on a poor group was they don’t read. They don’t teach their kids to read. The parents don’t read. The kids don’t read. In the wealthy group, the parents were making their kids read for 30 minutes or more every day. It was for self-education, self-improvement, learn about new things, and new facts. Even a few of the parents in my rich group, made their kids read and write a one-page report.
A couple of them even put it in a binder. I ended up calling it the fact-binder. You learn new facts. It was interesting that the parents who raised their kids to be wealthy and those were the ones that I was interviewing, they would say, “My parents made us do this stuff. They made us read. They made us write these reports. They didn’t allow us to watch TV. They turned off the TV.”
They made the kids do certain things. This is where I got into a little bit of a debate with the media because they don’t like the idea of forcing your kids to do anything. My argument was, it’s the parent’s responsibility to make their kids do what the kids don’t want to do for their own good. There’s an ideology out there that says, “You let the kids explore new things and be themselves and find their own talents.” That’s not how it works.
Interesting. I know we’re going to be asking that question later on, too, about finding those talents for sure. What are some other habits that are common that you find with most kids that are maybe even keeping them back? You mentioned studying and reading is a big one to help through that. What are some other things that maybe parents aren’t doing or maybe they could be doing that would help in raising their kids?
A lot of it is time management. Facebook has become a poverty habit or Instagram’s become a poverty habit. The kids are spending so much time watching YouTube videos. A couple of hours could go by in a day and you’ve accomplished nothing. Your kids have learned nothing. It’s the parents that have to put up that mentor stop sign and say, “Stop with the internet. Stop with the cell phone and stop with watching YouTube. The unicorn YouTube video. Put that down, stop that.”
The other thing is it’s not just about everything being learning and using your time. It’s also about making sure that your kids are healthy. In my study, the successful individuals exercise 30 minutes or more robotically every day. When I dug into that, it was interesting, Chris, because you say, “How does the aerobic activity have anything to do with wealth creation?” That’s the question I asked then I started studying neurology, neurogenesis and neuroplasticity.
I get a wake-up call on that. Aerobic exercise creates neurons. It makes your brain bigger. Whether these wealthy people knew it or not and I’ll be honest with you, they didn’t. They were taught these good habits, these rich habits by their parents. They exercised every day and they were growing their brain, adding new neural pathways. The hippocampus is where the neurons give birth to.
They were increasing the number of neurons that were born and they didn’t even know why they were smarter and their brains were working faster. It has a lot to do with aerobic exercise. The parents need to understand that if they want their kids to grow neurons and to keep their neurons growing throughout their lives and become smarter and release their genius, they’ve got to make sure that kids are exercising aerobically every single day.
Amen to that. That’s something they should be doing through adulthood too.
I think that’s the whole point is when you teach these things to your kids, as their kids and they become habits, then they take these habits with themselves as adults. It’s important that the parents have to be teaching these things. They have to make your kids do certain things because that forces it to become a habit. You don’t have to force it anymore. The kids are adults and they’re doing these things, then they’re scratching their heads. They’re saying, “I don’t know why I’m successful but I am.”
I’ve noticed that with a lot of wealthy people too. A lot of them have no clue why they do it. Some people study it to the point where they say, “There’s this secret and this secret.” Most of all, the people are saying, “Whatever. I just do it.”
If parents take the responsibility to mentor their kids, they will grow up with a greater chance of being successful in life. Click To TweetI’ll tell you, Chris. That’s the thing that I think I stumbled on the Holy Grail of success because these daily habits in my mind are the reason why you’re rich or you’re poor. What was interesting is none of the wealthy people understood why they were rich. To be honest, they didn’t know that they were part of a study. They weren’t even sure what the responses to the questions I was asking. They couldn’t put two and two together and say, “This is a study on wealth and poverty.” They answered it honestly.
What I found out is these wealthy people did not understand why they were successful in life and it’s their habits. When I compared the wealthy group to the poor group, it was like a world of difference. It was like Europe and North America. It was such a big vast ocean of difference between the two places. That’s why I wrote Rich Habits and that’s why I wrote Rich Kids is to get this information out there, so parents can become mentors for their kids.
Tell us more about that group. How’d you do this study? How did you get people together? What were you doing?
If your readers are interested, I posted the methodology on my blog on my website RichHabits.net, so they can go there. Essentially, what I did was I had this broad twenty-question list and I asked it to 200. I stopped at 233 wealthy people. I also stopped at 128 poor people. I asked them these twenty questions, and I gathered this information over a five-year period and was trying to identify what their behaviors were, their activities, their choices that they made and the way they thought about things.
I covered 288 data points that separate the rich from the poor. It was interesting to me because it was like a light bulb went off in my head. I said, “It’s their behaviors, choices, their activities, the way they think, the things that they do every day.” Basically, what wealthy people do from the minute that they put their feet up on the floor in the morning to the minute they put their head on the pillow and the same report people.
It became an obsession for me because I realized when I was doing this research, I had stumbled onto something that I didn’t think anybody was looking at. I then started applying it even way before I wrote the book Rich Habits. I came up with a weight tracking schedule because I was a little heavy back in ‘07 and I lost about 40 pounds in about 9 months from using the tracking schedule that I stumbled on in my research from another group of wealthy people.
A lot of these strategies, these weight loss strategies, these brain building strategies, these self-education strategies, they’re the reason. They’re habits and they’re the reason why that wealthy people are wealthy. They are the reason why poor people are poor. Eighty-seven percent of the wealthy were first-generation rich in my study. It’s interesting that it has nothing to do with your circumstances. It has everything to do with changing your circumstances.
How many of these people were business owners?
Fifty-one percent.
It’s about half.
Yes, and I have some data on that. I tracked quite a bit of information on that. The 18% were like a CEO or senior executive in their company or wherever they worked. Twenty eight percent were professionals, 13% were salesmen, and 51% were small business owners. I tried to track as much as I could. One of the reasons why the largest group is small business owners is because wealthy people are successful because they have more control over their lives.
They can make decisions. Their decisions. They’re not decisions that they have to pass along to somebody else. What happens, Chris is they learned through the school of hard knocks what not to do. When they’re hitting their stride, it’s usually in their 40s or 50s because they’ve learned so much by failing and making them making mistakes. They can use those mistakes to their advantage and become successful.
I heard from a business consultant once. He said he’d worked with hundreds if not thousands of business professionals. He said, “The ambition of our 20s catches up with us in the 30s but then we prosper in our 40s and 50s.”
It’s a good point because I think it’s all about the mistakes that you make. They’re like railroad tracks on the brain, especially if you’re a small business, because when you make mistakes, it costs you time and money, clients and customers. It’s like scars. It’s something that sticks with you forever.
These habits were pretty unanimous with their parents. Not only with parents. That’s the only thing with their kids too.
What I came to a conclusion was that, for the most part, these habits were picked up and learned from their parents. Even if they were born in a poor or middle-class household, it didn’t matter. The parents that taught these rich habits, their kids were the beneficiaries of and they grew up to be wildly successful in life.
I knew then I was onto something big. That’s why I decided to write Rich Kids because this is the stuff that every parent should be teaching your kids if they want their kids to be successful in life. If they don’t care and I know some people. The study said, “I’ll raise them. I’ll give them food and shelter. What they do with their life is up to them.”
The wealthy people said, “No, we’re going to mold our children so that they have the life that we want them to have, which is a successful and happy life.” There’s a difference between the way poor people look at raising their kids. I wrote a great article on it. I called it Parents Raise Kids Mentors Raise Millionaires. It’s the truth. Parents who would decide to take the responsibility to become successful mentors to their kids and not leave it up to their kids to be successful in life. Their kids will grow up and they’ll have a greater chance of being successful with.
When you find your passion, it unleashes your genius. Click To TweetThat’s brilliant and not just successful. It sounds like happy too, correct?
Money does not buy happiness. In fact, there are a couple of studies on it. We all have a happiness baseline. It represents about 50% of our happiness, overall happiness. The other 50% is 40% of it is our activities. The things that we do create happiness, only 10% are circumstances. If you’re rich, you’re 10% happier than a poor person. That’s why I incorporated it in Rich Kids. It’s not just about the money. You got to teach these kids how to engage in certain activities that will keep them happy for life.
That’s great. Here’s a final question I have for you. You talk in chapter five about how to help kids find their purpose. What are some ways that parents can go and help their kids find their purpose? You mentioned CNN said, “You should be free with the kids. You should let them discover their talents.” You’re obviously not saying you shouldn’t do that. You’re saying you should do it in a very different way. What is that?
Finding your main purpose in life, Chris, probably will make you the wealthiest you could possibly be because it represents finding your passion in life. When you find your passion, it unleashes all sorts of, I call it, unleashes your genius. I like to say unleashes your genius when you find your passion. I have an exercise in the book and basically, what it involves is sitting down with your kids. It works best, by the way, if they’re fourteen or older.
Twelve is pushing it but they have to have some experiences in their life in order for this exercise to have value to them. You list in one column all of the things that ever made you happy in life. You highlight those things that involve some type of marketable skill that you can make money off of. You rank in column 1 to 10. One being the thing that made you the happiest and ten being the thing that made you the least happy.
In another column, you rank 1 to 10, the thing that happiness skill that could make you the most money. What you have come up with, Chris, is at the end of this exercise, 4 or 5 items that represent potential main purpose in life, then you help mentor your kids to pursue those 4 or 5 activities. Six months is a good timetable. If after six months of following one of those activities, your kid is not absolutely obsessed, then it’s time to move on to the next thing.
This is the way you explore different activities in life. It’s important because you never know until you explore something that’s outside your comfort zone. You never know, Chris, if you’ve got some ability there. This is a great way for parents to find out if their kids have the ability in areas they never even dreamed of.
That’s great. Do you teach them how to take them through that, is that in your book?
It’s in the book. I call it the main purpose exercise, but it’s a really simple, fun thing. Another thing that I have in the book that I think is cool is two things, writing a future letter. Get your kids to write a future letter to themselves. It’s basically scripting their life. You go out 20 years and you have your kid pretend that he’s 20 years older, she’s 20 years older. They write about what their life is like and what the last 20 years have been like. The things that they have, that house that they own, the car that they drive, the job that they have and the other thing is to have your kids write their obituary.
It forces them to go into the future and see what they want their legacy to be when they die. What do they want people to think about them? All of this does, Chris, is it gets the imagination going. Kids have great imaginations. It also gets the reticular activating system, which is part of the lymphatic system. It toggles that on. Now you’re that whole RAS, the purpose of that is to identify. It opens and shuts the brain’s door to certain information.
You turn that RAS, the reticular activating system, on your kids’ brains. It’s like turning on their genius gene. It’s like flipping a switch and turning them into geniuses. They start to create goals. They start to see opportunities and it’s incredible to see it happen. I’m telling you, I’ve had readers that have told me their kids love the exercise. They are so pumped up and motivated after doing it.
That’s great. I’m excited to try that. Our motto is ten now but that sounds like a great, great tool to use. Tom, I know we’re wrapping up the show now but tell our readers how can they read your book Rich Kids: How to Raise Our Children to Be Happy and Successful in Life? Where would they find that?
They could find it wherever books are sold but a lot of people jump on Amazon and iTunes. RichHabits.net, which is my website. You can go and buy the book there and all the downloads, the different versions of the eBooks. What’s cool about RichHabits.net is I put all my research articles on there. It’s real-time stuff. I’m posting articles there now on my future book, Rich Thinking. As I do the research, I post it. There are also free eBooks they can download and free reports. There’s a lot of cool stuff on that website. I also posted the tip of the morning to you. A lot of fun stuff on that site.
That sounds great. Tom, it is an honor to have you on our show.
Thanks, Chris. I’m so glad that we got together. Let’s not be strangers. I’d love to do this again.
If there’s anything in wealth, I say this from time to time but no success in life cannot overcompensate for failure in the home. That’s the big key. What’s going to be your legacy beyond you? How are you going to create wealth beyond just you and yourself? Pass it on to the next generation. It’s such an important key factor here. I love how you have that mission and you’re driven. You’re making that happen. Thank you so much. This has been very valuable for our readers and for me too.
Thanks, Chris. I appreciate it.
Everyone, thank you so much for joining us. Again, this is Chris Miles Money Show. Be sure to make sure if you haven’t done so already, subscribe to us on iTunes. Check out this show, download some episodes. Use this as part of your weekly education and be able to get more education, to be able to get better at what you’re doing day after day. This is Chris Miles signing off. Everybody have a great and processed week.
Important Links
- Rich Kids
- Rich Habits
- Parents Raise Kids Mentors Raise Millionaires – LinkedIn
- Apple Books – Rich Habits
- iTunes – Money Ripples Podcast