Worth $10M at 57: “I Won’t Trade My Time”

0:00Shane Cultra: I mean, you kind of just do what you want. And you mentioned what you want happens to be cheap, but it doesn't mean it's less. But I'm curious, like, how did you end up here? I've always wanted freedom, and I'm willing to trade some zeros or some money. I'm not willing to trade time. What is your net worth today? My net worth is pretty much still around the 10 million mark. Do you want to be happy, or do you want to be wealthy, or do you want to be both? And all three can happen, but most people have one. Your health and your happiness are just two of the three parts of wealth, not just money.

0:29Shane Cultra: My guest on Money Wise today is Shane. A couple weeks before we recorded this, Shane ran a 100-mile race. His wife said it was like running from their house to Indianapolis. Shane is 57 years old, and he's been in the same house in Illinois for 23 years. He drives a car for about 10 years before he replaces it. Like many other guests on the show, he started on a trading floor, then spent decades at his family's plant nursery. The year he left the trading floor, the guys he traded with each made a million dollars, and he only made$18 ,000. Still today, he puts his net worth at around$10 million.

0:59Shane Cultra: And part of that is a third of the family nursery, which he can't really sell. In today's episode, you're going to hear all about how he sold 10 Bitcoin, how he optimizes life for health instead of money, how time really is his most valuable asset. You're going to hear some of his parenting philosophies and how he really chooses to live by example, by the way he loves his family and his wife, which is awesome. And ultimately, you're just going to hear from a really cool guy that is all about living a healthy, long, enriched, free life. And yeah, he has a lot of money, but life to him isn't about money.

1:28Shane Cultra: It's more about freedom. You'll find in this episode what's most important to him. Founders in Hampton talk a lot about the problem of money versus time, how to optimize for one over the other. Hampton's a private network for high growth founders and CEOs, and on average, they're doing around$25 million in revenue. Of all the things I've done in my career, being associated with Hampton has probably been the most impactful to my network in the shortest amount of time. If you're a founder or CEO doing at least$3 million in revenue, or you've exited already for$10 million or more, you have to check out joinhampton.com.

1:54Shane Cultra: I promise it's a community you don't want to miss. Now, let's get in the show. This is Money Wise. I'm Daniel Burke. Here's Shane. Money Wise guests and listeners know that when it comes to exit planning and selling your company, it's not about how much you make, but about how much you keep. For founders and investors of startups, the single biggest lever that exists to mitigate the drag of taxes after an acquisition is being able to claim QSBS, which stands for Qualified Small Business Stock. So one of the biggest problems that founders face when exploring whether QSBS is an option is realizing they don't meet the three to five year holding period requirement for their shares.

2:28Shane Cultra: You see, most liquidity events actually happen before the five year QSBS maturity window, leaving many founders just shy of QSBS status and on the hook for a huge tax bill. QSBS Rollover is the only full service QSBS advisory in the entire country, helping founders navigate liquidity at any stage of their startup journey and still maintain their QSBS status. So if you want real help navigating liquidity and want to keep more of your next exit or secondary sale, keep in touch with the founders at QSBSRollover by visiting QSBSRollover.com. That's QSBSRollover.com. Last time you were on Money Wise, you told Sam you barely spend money.

3:05Shane Cultra: And as I'm looking at your net worth and some of your portfolio that you divulged in the last Money Wise episode, it doesn't really add up to me that you don't ever spend money. So tell me more about your money spending philosophy. What's that all about? Yeah, I mean, in the Midwest, it's a little different than living on the coast. Like I was saying in our group or my family is most people go live on the outside of the country and make all their money and then move to the middle of the country and live like a king. I kind of did it the opposite. And I've stayed in the same house for 23 years.

3:36I drive a car until 10 years. I made an immediate decision to live a couple miles away from where I went into work. So I didn't have to drive very far. And then I only had one child. And children, I would have more children, but children definitely add up into the overall cost. So you combine all of that. And then I had a kid that got a scholarship, so I didn't have to pay for education. Those little things start adding up to the point where you don't have a house bill. You don't have very much insurance because you don't drive. You just don't have any bills. So it comes down to travel or any other things that you buy.

4:13and you'll see through this conversation that the things I like are pretty cheap. Hiking, running, traveling with friends. It's just not an expensive lifestyle. It's super fulfilled lifestyle. And I have found that people now tell me that at 57, I'm living the life that they're working towards and it makes me feel pretty good.

4:34Shane Cultra: Yeah, and I've been connected with you on Twitter X for a while now and I admire the life that you live. I, you know, I'm just now in the very beginning of my running journey. I just did my first marathon and I tell people, you know, my goal is to finish. But looking at people like you, I mean, you're doing 50Ks, you've done Ironmans. I just finished a hundred miler a couple of weeks ago. That's unbelievable, but super inspiring to me because three years ago, if you had asked me, even if I had ever accomplished a marathon, I would have absolutely said no. but the idea of running a hundred miles, even for me, 20 years from now, insane.

5:12Same with me. Yeah. I mean, even myself, I've said this to other people since I've done it, it's the most rewarding thing I've done. Like even I have been super proud of myself, which I just, I don't get like that very often. I'm fairly humble. I do talk a lot about the things I do because I want others to see and what they can experience. But yeah, I mean, just like you're, I know you are proud of your marathon as you should be. I was. The 100 miler was the same way. I was like, it doesn't make any sense. Like if my wife said, you know, it's like leaving our house and running to Indianapolis.

5:47That's stupid.

5:48Shane Cultra: I literally can't comprehend doing four times what I did in Chicago. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. But you break it down. You break it down. And that's what I did the whole race. Run seven minutes, walk three minutes. And you just break it down into pieces. And it just like at the end of it, I've said this during the race. And I said after, you can really do anything if you break it into pieces and don't think of the overall thing that you have to do. It just becomes overwhelming to think of the pie, to build a business and think, oh, my God, I'm going to have to work 30 years to make this happen or 10 years.

6:18So that's why people are anxious and they move too fast because the picture in life of trying to accomplish something is in a whole. It's just too overwhelming. And it's a race. It's building a business. There's just so many metaphors in there that, um, I just, man, I got done from that race and I've had like a new energy that I haven't had in a decade. It's just amazing. And I know you feel the same way. Like I can see it in your posts. I can see it in your energy. Like that marathon really doesn't mean anything for business, but for you, it was like, dude, I did something pretty special.

6:49Shane Cultra: Well, and I think even to push back a little bit, I think it does mean something for business. If people who operate businesses can do hard things just for the sake of accomplishing them. Yeah. There's a lot to say about that, the resilience of actually building a business. Obviously, there's a lot of nuances and parallels there. When I look at your life and listening to your past episode and following you from afar on X, and you've mentioned this yourself, you live a life right now that a lot of people who are listening to this episode right now, and maybe many of your peers aspire to live. It's a free life.

7:21Shane Cultra: You just do what you want. You mentioned what you want happens to be cheap, but it doesn't mean it's less. It's just, you love hiking and running and those are, you know, relatively cheap things, but I'm curious, like, how did you end up here? I mean, you never had my understanding. You never had a liquidity event. You just kind of built wealth over however many years. Walk me through that. Like what led to you today in this seat? Yeah. It's, um, I've always been, you know, the stories I listened to your podcast and I listened to my first million and the stories are all pretty similar in my journey and theirs, except there's a lot more zeros to theirs, right?

8:01So trade or like I've listened to the last couple of my first million, there's a similarity. We start as a runner on the trading floor. We become a phone broker. Then we become a pit broker. Then we become a trader. And then we explore these things. And it's not the trading that is a similarity. It's the willing to work your way up in everything to get to where you're at. That's what all of us did. It happened to be the same way through the pits, but all of us were willing to take a job for no money to get into something and explore something that we knew we wanted to try. And then that led to other things.

8:40And so for my life, I never really thought when I was younger, what do I want to be doing when I was 50 or what do I want to, but I knew I didn't want somebody telling me what to do all the time. I wanted to be, I wanted to explore and I wanted to create my own way. I was born with no envy and it's not something I ever realized, but my mom lives down the street and she told me recently, when you were young, I had to explain to your teachers that it's not that you didn't care. It's just that you were not going to be inspired by many things because you just wanted to do your own thing.

9:15Shane Cultra: Why was that? Do you think? I have no idea. It's just some, it's my personality. I just, when I see, you know, we in our town, we have Jimmy John, who's a billionaire. We have Shad Khan, who's a billionaire. And I've never been envious. I've just looked at them and thought, man, they're lucky they get to do whatever they want to do. It's not the money. It's not the cars. It's like they can get to buy the cars and they can get to travel. They get choices. So when you ask me about this freedom that I have, it's just I've always wanted freedom and I'm willing to trade some zeros or some money. I'm not willing to trade time.

9:53I don't mind putting a ton of time into something, but it's my choice to put that time into it. When did that start?

9:59Shane Cultra: I talk to a lot of people who look retroactively at their life and realize they spent more time than they wish they had. And that time is the most valuable thing now, kind of toward the end of their life. But you've actually done the opposite. You've optimized for time far earlier than a lot of these people. Walk me through how you came to that decision, what that was like. Um, I'm a, I am a type A where maybe you could say early that I didn't listen well, or I didn't work well with others. But, but again, the reality is I just, I always felt like I could do anything I want. I just never felt, and it's still today, which is, you know, it's a little scarier today.

10:41and I had a great conversation yesterday with a person and we're the same way and that we always feel that if everything goes wrong, we could pick up tomorrow and start right back again and do well fine. Like every single point in our life, but I'm 57 and that's a stupid situation to think that I could lose everything and start over and be fine. But yet I still have that same thought. So even when I was 18, I always knew I'd be fine at 21. And so that ability to fail and not worry about it, I think it comes from my parents. And I've said this several times is privilege, the privilege that I grew up with and the privilege that my daughter grew up with is not the money side of it.

11:23It's the ability to go ahead and fail and try things and really not worry that you're going to be sleeping on the streets. And a lot of men and women can't say that because you have, like for yourself, you've got young children. You feel a little bit more responsibility to be successful because you don't want to hurt your family. Yep. I surrounded myself with people that didn't care, that knew that I was, my wife has always, I've been married 30 years. She's always known that I would not hurt the family long-term. I was going to fail, but we'd still be fine, even when I retired. So, you know, just kind of rolling this all together.

12:00I just felt like I could always shoot my shot. And if it didn't work, I could shoot another shot. And if that didn't work, and eventually something's going to hit. So I was always shooting shots on my own terms. And the result is some of them did really well.

12:14Shane Cultra: That's cool. I had a conversation about five, six months ago when I left corporate, kind of bet on myself. And I was confusing the term uncertainty with risk. And I was talking to Sam actually, and I was like, I just feel like there's a lot of risk and I'm not exactly sure what the next 12, 24, 36 months look like. and he kind of stopped me. He said, there's a difference between risk and uncertainty. What you're talking about is uncertainty. There's actually not that much risk because you betting on yourself is a great bet. Like I would take that bet. And what you've done in the last 15 years, it kind of speaks for itself.

12:50Shane Cultra: So you're going to be fine. You just don't exactly know how it's going to work out. So there's not risk, there's uncertainty. I think people confuse the two. And so that's an interesting thought. It's such an exact statement. It's so correct. And I mean, if it's certain, that means there's not a lot of opportunity, to be honest with you. Like that's, if everybody knows what the result's going to be, we're talking wrestling. It becomes entertainment. It's not. That's right. It's not opportunity. So uncertainty is what makes it fun, right? Volatility is how we all make money. That's, as a trader, you learned that volatility is what you want.

13:25It's how you make the most money. Most people can't take that kind of risk. I mean, we're presently sitting here in a market day that's horrible, that everything in AI is getting dumped. My wife is looking at me and just going, you're enjoying this. And I'm like, no, I probably lost half a million dollars. But I'm smart enough to know that things will come around. And this is just part of a cycle in volatility. Volatility is good. But most people don't like that. We like patterns. We like consistency. People like control. I tell this story all the time. and this is how I explain it to my child.

14:00If I come home and every day a man punches me in the stomach or when I come in the door,

14:05Shane Cultra: I'm pretty much going to be used to it. By the end of the year, I know that I'm going to get punched in the stomach. But if he only does it three times a year or every once in a while, that's kind of a, that's a worse situation because you just don't know when it's coming. It works every single day. That's funny. Yeah. That's a good analogy. Well, that's a good segue to talk about the numbers. I'd love to understand from the last episode to now, We can start with net worth, total net worth, and we can maybe break that down to liquid and illiquid. And I'd love to talk about some of the things that I think make you unique.

14:36Shane Cultra: But let's start with the numbers. What is your net worth today? Yeah, so my net worth is pretty much still around the 10 million mark. I've actually started working on a better trust. In Illinois, we have a little issue that our state only caps you at 4 million and taxes the heck out of you. So we're trying to figure out one, that's what a trust is all about. That's why you hire lawyers. I'm not a huge lawyer person, but when you start really drilling down the numbers, you find a couple of things. And one, we found we've got money all over the place. Two, my businesses are all over the place. I've done so many crazy things explaining to a lawyer about domain names and social media handles.

15:20Shane Cultra: Correct me if I'm wrong. You do about 300 a year with domain revenue, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That's so random to me, but pretty cool. Yeah. Nobody really understands that business. I try to explain it to a lawyer. So she's like, when you pass, it's just going to be liquidated. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. We would never sell at wholesale. We want retail. My daughter has heard me for 15 years. I don't even know what any of that means. Yeah. And same thing with her. So describing my assets, even 20 years ago with my financial advisor, he just shakes his head. Then when crypto came wrong, same thing.

15:54So my 10 million is there. What changed between that segment are a couple things. One, I did sell all my Bitcoin. It's not that I don't believe - Interesting. Yeah. So I sold all my Bitcoin. Can you tell me how much you had? I actually had 10, which at the time was 1.2 million.

16:11Shane Cultra: And you sold it all at once? I sold it all. Why is that? um i just felt i just personally didn't believe that it was the best store of value that i could get with my money i felt that the stock market would still have a better return than bitcoin i felt the sentiment changing a little bit and i had done pretty well with it and it was a pretty good opportunity for taxes the problem was i sold it and put it into ai stocks and then i had a really big tax problem. And then as of the last couple of months, it doesn't look quite as pretty. I was a genius last year when I started moving, when I sold it and moved it over.

16:57I look like a genius. I was probably five, five X where Bitcoin was. And then when we got into spring, I was probably 15 X what my original, I mean, I was up millions and millions of dollars. It's come back to earth. It's still been a great trade, but I think I'm going to get a lot of quarterlies back from this year. Yeah, that'll be fun. Yeah, it's been one of those trades, but that has affected my net worth. It was probably up a couple million dollars if you'd asked me this three months ago, four months ago. What also has changed is my business with my family. When we go through the trust process, we realized it is the most illiquid asset that any human could ever have because it's family business that really can't be sold.

17:46So walk me through that.

17:48Shane Cultra: What's the family business and what's the actual value of it? We have four owners and a family business that's been around for, this one's been around for two generations. And I love my brother and And I love my father, but it just got to the point where it came to the realization for me that I wanted to leave and do other things, maybe concentrate on more remote lifestyle. Because I was in a retail business working 50, 60 hours a week. My choice loved every minute of it, but it is something that I had to stay here. It's like having a farm. It literally is a farm with plants. And I just wanted to maybe see some of the things I hadn't seen, have a remote lifestyle.

18:27and my wife had a remote job and I could have a remote job with the main names and the other things that were successful. So I chose to leave and it's not something that you could sell. Like my, my family probably could not afford to buy my percentage out. So there's not cash. They would have to borrow money. Were you a quarter percent or sorry, quarter. Yeah, I own a third of the business. I don't want to force anything. I really don't want them to force buy me out because there's really not a pathway for that. So it's kind of a situation where I didn't do a great job making sure what an exit looked like.

19:07Because when you join a family business, there is no thought of exit. You should think of it. You should have your paperwork all set in stone. You should have a buy-sell agreement. You should everything you know in case things don't work out. But my father was so generous in giving me the business over the years, but I never felt right asking him how to sell it. And that's the honest truth. And I think a lot of people fall into that.

19:32Shane Cultra: And this is a second generation business or how many generations? This one's only a second generation. Our other business is a five generation business. So we came to Illinois in 1865 and my grandfather's grandfather set up the business. My father split off because he did struggle working with his brother and his father. So he said, I'll just, I love this business, but I'd rather do it myself. And so he did that and I joined him and, and again, loved every minute of it, but, but you don't really set up the paperwork and the finance is right when your father kind of gives you the business. And essentially that's what he did.

20:12I traded equity for 30 years of hard work. And it's not something you can just trade in. My father's in his 80s. My brother now runs a business. And again, I love them both, but essentially walked away. There's some retained earnings and some other things. but essentially uh think about that decision on paper it's worth millions and millions of dollars no there's really no way to to take advantage of that in any way and and is that included in your

20:43Shane Cultra: total net worth it is included in there yeah and it has to be in my taxes because i pay taxes on it it's in my trust it's in all the things on paperwork but it's not very liquid and i feel a lot of people face those kinds of things where, you know, you have to look at your finances and on paper, you look really good, but how liquid is that? If, if something goes wrong, what does that mean to you? And, and so, um, I love the money wise where the people are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but the reality, most of the, the people that are quote wealthy are in the five to$10 million range and they're facing what does life look like from here on in?

21:25What does my spend look like? What is my, when am I going to start drawing on this? What is the liquidity of each one? There's, after going through the trust, you can really see the importance of drilling down on your money situation. Most people don't because it's too scary. How do you manage all that?

21:43Shane Cultra: What is liquid? And how do you think through the next 25, 30 years of your life with your current net worth, the fact that you've left the family business? And then obviously you have some of the diversified assets you've mentioned. Like, how do you think through, you know, pulling out some of the money and spending it? A hundred percent. Catastrophe, I imagine there's, you know, some thought at least of what if catastrophe strikes. I mean, I'd love to understand this. Yeah. So my wife had a lot of dictation on what this looks like. so which is good good for you your wife should always be involved is my the most successful people you ever meet will have an incredible spouse look at sahil bloom his wife is his anchor you can tell in his post you can tell everything that's it doesn't mean that you have to have a spouse it it doesn't mean that you have to have a partner but i can promise you if you have one that supports you there's that that takes all the uncertainty out right so I agree.

22:42Shane Cultra: I say that every day. Yeah. So that's where I've always had that ability to fall back. That's what I've had is my wife. And so the reason I felt comfortable is because of my domain names, because of my ability to trade, because of my ability to do business and just an extra cash over the years. So I don't have a retirement. I don't get a paycheck. Like when they asked me for my W-2, I don't have one. They asked me for a pension. I don't have one. Do you pay really low taxes because your technical income is so low? How does that work? Well, the problem is I sell the domain names and I have to pay those and then my trading.

23:25So I'm fortunate to still be in the 33 % tax bracket. Nice.

23:31Shane Cultra: Fist bump, virtual fist bump. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, people complain about taxes. Trust me, brother. You'd much rather to be complaining about paying taxes than not. Yeah, yeah. But what my wife said to me when I retired is she said, you know, we still as a family have a goal to contribute income to this family and to her 62. That's just a number we picked because that's when Social Security. And she said, you don't have to work at the nursery anymore. but you still have to bring in the same paycheck and give it to me every month as you did when you were working. I don't care where it comes from.

24:09Shane Cultra: It doesn't have to come from the nursery. So I still pay her the exact amount that I paid that I was drawing as a salary from the nursery. Wow. And I take a lot of pride out of that because I'm still doing that. But if you ask me, Like it's such an odd combination of websites and lead generation and domain names. And like, it's just all over the board of how that income comes in, but it still comes in and our family is still banking hundreds of thousands of dollars in our family's, you know, assets. And yet we, we, I don't have a job now. I didn't, I broker domain names. Like I do have a job. It's just a free job that's, that lets me have an open day that doesn't look like work.

24:56And that's.

24:56Shane Cultra: And when you, like, when you think of commitments in time, let's say you're, you're doing a hundred mile and you're training and you're in a heavy training block and you would go hiking, you take away, you know, a few weeks. Yeah. Like, are there any people relying on you for consistent work or are those domains just on sale and you can kind of get back to it when you want? Like, what's, what's your time commitment day to day or week to week? Yeah. So I still consider myself a 40 hour a week person, maybe even 60 hours, but it is 24 hours a day. So somebody may say, you're always working, but I'll also say I'm always also doing whatever I want.

25:37It just depends on how people's schedules on the other side look. I'm so flexible. Like when somebody, like the only thing that I do every week, and this sounds like all shocks, but I take my mom to breakfast or lunch on Fridays. That's a no. That's awesome. That's it. She has given me the flexibility to not be lunch and to be breakfast. Before it was lunch every Friday at noon. You're just not going to break that. Now we've changed it because sometimes there's just some meetings, but that's the only thing on my calendar that's a no. That's great. It's not going to change. Running, it can come in the morning.

26:13It can come in the afternoon. I go lift weights every day. It can come. When I wake up, I check my emails and go over there. We all know, we've talked about this, that agents have made life. The one thing that I've been terrible at my entire life is organizing. I have so many things organizing it. With agents, every morning, all the things I need to respond to, all the people that haven't responded to an email that I need to get back to, like everything's organized and I feel like superhuman. That's one thing where at this age, I feel like I'm 30 again because I took all the things that I struggle with most and agents have really helped me with that.

26:47And it's opened my day more than ever, more than ever. Because when you're organized, you seem like you have 50 times more hours than you did when you're unorganized. So that's what's really changed. So it is a free day, but I'm always working. I'm always checking. I'm always taking phone calls. I still have meetings during the day, but they're pretty flexible. Like, you know, I don't, my schedule is never full. I don't want it to be full, but it's always active. It's always active.

27:16Shane Cultra: Take me back 20 years. You chose, whether you knew it or not at the time, not to chase 100, 200, 500 million because of freedom and optimizing for time. What was that like? What's it been like building wealth and freedom from money without the threshold number that some money was? Guests would give 10x of$10 million, maybe$100 million, or they're still in the game because they need a billion before they're happy. How do you balance what you have now and what you could have if you went really and tried to 10x your net worth today? Yeah, I mean, I think it gets back. I ask every guest on this show what their net worth is.

27:59Shane Cultra: Most of them have to think about it. And it's not because they're hiding something. It's because their money is in dozens of different places. Two brokerages, a business account, some real estate, a crypto wallet they forgot about, a syndicate, and so much more. But we know that personal finance really is not that simple. Sylvia fixes that. Sylvia is an AI built for one very specific and important job, managing your money. You connect your bank accounts, your brokerage, your credit cards, your crypto, you add your real estate and whatever else you own, and now it knows your entire financial picture.

28:31Shane Cultra: And you can just ask it questions in plain English, like, should I refinance? Or how do I lower my tax rate? Or what's actually risky in my portfolio? Or you can ask, what's the smartest way to pass this to my kids? You could ask ChatGPT those questions, but ChatGPT doesn't know what you own. It also isn't trained on personal finance. Sylvia is. In accuracy tests on tax, mortgages, and credit cards, it beat ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok. In all three categories, Sylvia won. The more complicated your money is, the better Sylvia gets. Their data shows people who use Sylvia regularly grow their network faster than people who don't.

29:11Shane Cultra: And this is the case at every income level and net worth bracket. Go to Sylvia.com, connect to your accounts, ask it the question you've been avoiding, and start understanding your personal finance more accurately than you ever have. So again, I came from the trading world. When I left the trading world and came into the nursery, the group that I was trading with the next year, everyone made a million dollars. I made$18 ,000. I'll never forget that. Like you would look at it and say, God, if I had just stayed, I could have made a million dollars. but the reality is I wasn't that good a trader at the time and they didn't want me to be part of it so I can look at it that way and say oh well I wouldn't have gotten it because they were going to let me go because I wasn't trading well or you can look at it as you know I made the choice to do what I want so 20 years ago I come from a wealthy suburb from great families and smart intelligent friends and they all were doing great right out of the gate.

30:17And I was building a business, but they just had something that I didn't have. There's a reason why tech people make hundreds of millions of dollars. And what do they do? They want to buy a farm. They want to go and do what I was doing for a living, growing plants. I just reversed it. And I had the security of, you know, I knew the business would be fine. I knew I'd always make enough to live. So I could always build a house on the property if I had, like I had the security of having my own business and property and doing well enough. But that envy that I talked about before has just kept me from, what they're looking for in life was the same thing I already had and that's freedom.

31:01Like what's the money going to give them that I didn't already have a piece of? They're working hard to buy into the mental status, the health status. You know, I work outside every day. I was moving every day. I was breathing fresh air every day. I was touching plants. What they're working for every day was to get the money to be there. I was already there. And I've always felt like that. Like nobody's better than me. If anything, they hope to get to where I'm at from a health standpoint. I just, again, I try not to judge others in that way, but I do look at someone and say, you're not as great as you think you are because you're not X or Y.

31:45You're not healthy. You're not in a great relationship. You don't have enough people around you that love you. Those are the measurements of wealth. And that's so cliche, but it's incredibly true. Like, do you want to be happy or do you want to be wealthy or do you want to be both? And all three can happen, but most people have one.

32:05Shane Cultra: Yeah. And I think that probably resonates with a lot of the listeners. It resonates with me, certainly. I'm always wrestling with what do I optimize for right now? I have three kids under five and I run a company and I hosted this podcast. So time is slim and time is also very valuable. I'm painfully aware of what being present as a father and a husband looks like in this stage of life. And commitments make me, you know, away from the house sometimes. Like right now I'm in the studio and I know my newborn and the kids are at home. And it's like, that's just the stage of life I'm in. I'm curious, like, what was your liquid net worth when you stopped caring about having more?

32:46Shane Cultra: Like the threshold number, we call it money-wise. How much money did you have when you thought, I'm free now. I don't have to chase anymore. I never, ever felt that I didn't have to chase because that's how I've always kept score, right? So it's not, I don't consider it a chase. I've kept score in life by how much money I make. That's the chips. That's really how I measure the game. It's kind of like your marathon is only a measurement of your training, right? It's not, a race is a run. It's not a race. We're not winning anything. So we don't even need to call it a race. It's a run and it's just a measurement of training.

33:21the effort was in the training that's where your fun came that's where your learning came the race is just to tell you how it went that's how money is money to me just measures how well the event went so I've really never never felt that I wouldn't have enough I've always felt like I could have better than what I have so I've always had enough since the day I started working I knew I would have a home I knew I would have a vehicle that worked and I knew that that would be enough to somebody. And I knew it was enough to me. When I go to Kenya and work, we have a mission, I go to Kenya. I look at Kenya and the thing I think, I could move here and live for$20 a week and be fine the rest of my life.

34:08This is an option. So I've had that thought all along, but what I have always is searching for more. Do I want to fly business class when I go to the conference next week? Yeah, I do.

34:20Shane Cultra: do I yearn to have a nicer car or an extra car? Yes, I have all those goals, but it's not, I don't have to have any of it. It's just part of kind of the challenge of business. So I knew it out of the gate that I would have enough. And so I never worried about that. I've never worried about bills. Again, when you have a spouse that has a good job, you know, the only thing I think you find yourself is college. Everybody tells you how expensive it's going to be in taking hundreds of thousands of dollars away from your net worth or not being able to give your child the education and making them take on debt.

35:00Those are the things I did consider early. But again, I think I'm just a little different. And this is also the difference of the Midwest and the hometown is there's farmers. Farmers are wealthy, but you just don't tell. You can't tell who has money in our town. Everybody's dirty. Everybody looks broke. You can tell by the$100 ,000 truck. But same thing. You pull into a parking lot at the nursery, a guy pulls in a Porsche and everybody's like, whoa, look at that car. There's 70 other Ford trucks that cost as much as that Porsche.

35:33Shane Cultra: Yeah, yeah. You just don't realize it. There's some expensive trucks. Yeah, Charleston too. I mean, shoot. Yeah. A lot of expensive trucks here. Yeah. You own, one of your domains is uncomfortable.com. Yeah. What is uncomfortable.com all about? It's everything in life. Like it's, again, it's become so popular lately, but I have felt for my entire life that the only way to get better at something is to get uncomfortable because that's where all the progress is made. If you're comfortable every day, it's routine it's not progress it's routine so uncomfortable pushing yourself you know previous generations were forced into uncomfortable my grandfather had to go to war at 18 and fly a plane and try and survive my father had vietnam and other types of war you know some had depression we kind of force our own uncomfortable uh because we have to right we have to force ourselves into situations because life has become pretty easy as a generation.

36:40That's why we call it the snowflake generation, participation trophies. But you have to get uncomfortable. I tell a story. I used to give, I still give speeches all the time, but I become really good at it. The point where I almost didn't even need to practice or take notes. I could give a commencement speech and kill it by barely having just a couple of notes because I've become such a good speech speaker. But then I got so comfortable. I gave a speech that I thought I had prepared and I bombed it because I wasn't nervous about it. I didn't have any anxiety and I did a terrible job. If I was nervous, prepared, excited, I would have done so much better.

37:21And public speaking, like my daughter, if you ask her these same questions about me, she will tell you that I've told her this the whole life. Like if you do this and it's hard, awesome. You're going to do, it's going to be a great story. If you do something and you fail, great. What a great story. She told me, dad, what'd I do on the race? I say, go out as hard as you can. And if you come in last place, guess what? It's going to be the best story we ever told. Remember the time Libby went out, was in first place at the half. And at the end, she was very last. Like if you fail, you're going to get a great story.

37:56People love great stories. That's really what it's all about, right? Like get a good story about it. If it's not going to, if it doesn't work out, at least grab a memory. That's going to be way more valuable than anything else I got out of it.

38:09Shane Cultra: Man, I have plenty of memories from my, uh, you know, 52 ,000th place run Chicago. So, uh, I, I, I love it. I agree with that. Uh, you mentioned your daughter a couple of times. How do you think about life legacy and passing on some of what your wealth does look like, particularly in light of the family business, when you think of like the next generation. This is something we battle. One of the things that I really hate is the mistreatment of Nepo babies and children that had come from wealth. And, you know, they kind of disregard anything that they do because they come from a family that gave them wealth.

38:49And that part has always bothered me because I think the goal of every parent is to have their child with a better life and more opportunity and to put them down. That's never made any sense to me. You can certainly judge them on what they do with it and how they approach life on it. But I'm a privilege, again, comes from two parents that love them, the money is the opportunity side. So from that side, I, you know, I always have taught her that, um, don't worry about what people say about how you've earned your things. Like if you've gotten it through opportunity that I've gotten, be proud of that.

39:28Like be proud that your father worked hard because that's what, that's what people come to the United States to do, right. To provide a better life for their family. So, so that's a thought that's always, always gotten deep inside of me. The other one is, um, your kids are based on your actions, right? So I've never sat my daughter out and given her this beat.

39:51Shane Cultra: I need a placard that on the top of my wall. Yeah. Not to interrupt you. That just gets me. I, I, every time someone says that it gets me. Yeah. It's they, the norms that you set are what your daughter or your son think is how life should be. If you come home from work, if you're an architect and you come home from work and every night you're tired and you don't pay attention to them, you complain a little bit, your daughter now thinks that an architect's job is horrible. Like I would never be an architect because I know that's what my daddy does. Your only job as a parent is to, as a father is to love their mother, whether you're divorced or married, your kid doesn't care that you're fighting.

40:36I had this talk with another person that was divorced. I said, when you go over to your ex's house, at least pretend like you love that person because they're the father of your daughter. That kid does not care how much you argue, just show them that you love their other parent because they're not participating in this fight. They have two parents that they love. Show some love to that person. That kid will love you more than ever because of the way you treated their parent. So that's an important part. So by showing by showing my daughter what norm looks like loving her mother laughing having fun having an atmosphere around the house that shows that life is good is better than any story you will read them any any little lesson you give them you don't have to say a word to raise a good kid you don't have to say anything you just be happy and show them what life can look like and they're going to follow that path.

41:33There's no doubt in my mind that that's true. My daughter, Ryan, for Syracuse, I don't know that she was a great runner, but she saw mom and dad getting up every morning at 4.30 in the morning and going to run. And she thought, that's what parents do. They must get up and exercise. So that's what I'm going to do. I didn't say you need to run. I didn't even care if she ran. That was her choice. But she saw two parents doing one thing and she thinks they look happy. maybe I'll do that.

42:02Shane Cultra: That's huge. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like we could, we could clip that and just make it an episode in itself. People say, yeah, I'm a great dad. And I said, no, I'm a happy person. I love my life. All the things that you and I - And a great dad by extension, really. Yeah. A good dad is somebody that, that makes their child feel safe and comfortable and gives them goals. My daughter thinks I'm cool. She loves the fact I do a million things, talk to great people, uh you know do these podcasts friends with people that she sees on the internet and it's because we all are hard working like if you're a runner you're you know you're a grinder like the there's a reason the top gpa in all of college sports is women's like running that's they're all crazy they all run i didn't even know that that's wild there's a reason so you know i i again i think that just setting that example of having a driven parent, a parent that laughs off the hard times.

43:02And again, I realize that life is not that easy for a lot of people in smaller communities. And there are people that are struggling paycheck to paycheck, but there's some people that are truly struggling paycheck to paycheck, meaning they're not spending their whole paycheck on excess. We're living paycheck to paycheck. Well, let me look at your paycheck and see what you spend it on and see if you have to live that. Like there's a lot of things that people, you know, we in America, and again, I won't go on a tangent here. We in America have houses that are way too big. We just don't need these houses.

43:33Even I'm guilty of it. Like if you look at the size of a house 50 years ago and now we're so excess, maybe you could scale the house down and do other things and travel more, but we just, we really, we really like nice cars. We really like big homes. We really love living in suburban and close to other people. So the thing that, again, you're teaching my child that I think is so important is what's important and then showing that. We've lived in the same house for 23 years. My daughter isn't part of having to switch schools 500 times, change houses because daddy's trying to buy a bigger house.

44:15This house is enough. and she thinks that's kind of a goal, like to find a house you really like and stay in it.

44:22Shane Cultra: Yeah, that's cool. You're 57 years old. You've said that a couple of times. Yeah. When do you settle down? What does that mean for you? When do you stop operating these, you know, trillion different things you have going on? You know, so I've already whittled down some of the things. Like I do realize that I can only do so much, right? So, you know, the first year that I came out of the nursery business, all I did is just try to find my identity. Like, who am I? Because, you know, I was the nursery guy to everybody. Like that's what I did. And that was my routine. So really the first year is I said, who am I and what am I going to do?

45:07And so over the last year or so, since we've talked on the podcast, I've kind of narrowed it down. I love domain brokerage. I'm going to do buy and sell domains. I'm going to help other people buy and sell domains. I'm going to run and do as hard of things as I can do while I can. There's only so many years we have left of this hundred mile mountain races and 200 mile races and running three hour marathons. There's only so much of that body, but I will say that, um, peptides and other things, uh, you know, have definitely made, I think the extension of what I'll be able to do longer. I think medicine and where we are in exercise.

45:49So, so basically that's what my life looks like is trying to build the domain business and help other build, build their businesses. Um, I'll continue to trade. Uh, I'm doing some social media stuff. So I own with a partner runner.com, but we also have the runner Instagram handle and TikTok handle. And I've decided why not showcase some of the things I'm doing as a runner and just go ahead and put them on the social media. So I've kind of added that. But then that's really about it. The rest is good conversations. Those things alone will be able to keep my income coming in to the level that I need.

46:26And I feel like when does a draw come? That's the question is when in life do you start removing money from your savings and not adding to them? And my goal is probably till I'm 65, I'll continue hopefully to be adding money to it. But it could be eternally. That's what my wife said. She's like, I think you'll be earning income until you're 85 years old on the stuff you do because that's what you do. You love making money. That's your hobby. That's my hobby. My hobby is creating revenue. I mean, I still have websites I'm working on. I have no business doing them, but I really like working on websites to see if I can monetize them.

47:11Can I get AI sightings now? I built drugtrials.org because I was really interested in peptides and I couldn't get all the trials together. I wanted to see the Russian trials and the Chinese trials and the American trials. So I had AI build all the trials. And then I thought, well, people like to sign up for trials. Like if you have cancer, they're always looking for a new drug. Well, maybe we should put all those on there so people can find where the trial is. Now I got a little business going of drug trials. That's what my life looks like. I think that life continues forever. My father's brain is, my brother's 87.

47:50No, sorry, 83. I was thinking of my, and his brain is unbelievable. He's the most sponge brain smartest human being.

47:57Shane Cultra: It's good. It's absolutely incredible. I compare them to other men of that age and they're living in the past and they complain about how expensive things are and they talk about what they used to do. My dad wants to know about tomorrow still. I hope that's what I look like. I hope when I'm 83, I'm asking you what the future looks like instead of reminiscing about the past. When people listen to this episode, I think a lot of them will resonate with you and aspiring to live a similar life that you have lived and are living. And you mentioned, you know, there's a lot more five to 10 millionaires than there are a hundred to billionaire.

48:35Shane Cultra: Do you have any regrets or do you do it all over again? Go back 30 years. Would you do this the same way as you have? Yeah, that's such an easy answer I give every time. When you love where you're at, you can't regret anything that happened. That's a question, rather than ask if they have regrets, you just ask, do you love where you're at? Because if they love where they're at, you don't have to ask the other question. And I just couldn't be happier. I mean, what's not to love about where I'm at? And there's just, again, any of the bad stuff is just a great story. My worst marathon ever, 4.30, I collapsed at mile 25 at Boston, had to have a paramedic walk me across the finish line.

49:22It's by far my worst marathon ever. It's my best story. So saying the regrets, no, no, I need it to really just bomb things to have great stories and to know what looks good. I remind my running friends every morning is like, if you ask them, they're going to tell you, I tell them this. We are doing things today that people train all year to do. So we run a half marathon every weekend just for training to talk. People train all year to be able to do this. People would give so much to be able to do what we do and to run and exercise. people would do anything to have a home that's paid for if they they don't have to worry about a payment there's so many things that you have that people would be grateful for and as long as you understand that during the entire process it it really makes the chasing a lot easier so no regrets like i mean i don't if i would have been younger and had money and travel more i don't think I'd have been ready, right?

50:29Like I would have been too young and naive and I would have done stupid stuff. So it's good that I was older when I decided I had time to do things. Like money, you know, they always say what the youth is wasted on the young. And that's, that's not true. I would have been stupid. Like if you'd give me all that money when I was young, I'd have done stupid stuff. I'd have gambled it. I'd have maybe done something stupid and had to get a divorce. Like it just, it worked out really well. But I do think, you know, saying that I think there's, what did I say the other way? You, you either inspire people or you be someone that they aspire to be, or you show your perspiration to get there.

51:11So inspire, aspire, or perspire are really the ways that you can show people what, what they can do, what they can be.

51:19Shane Cultra: So I want to bring the plane in for a landing. Two different questions. The first one is someone's listening to the show and let's say they're sub one million net worth and they listen to guests like you and they, you know, they're still aspiring to be someone like you or someone like any of the past guests. what advice do you have when they listen to your story and then maybe put that against someone who's had a you know 10 billion dollar exit type of story and you know they have hundreds of millions of dollars you know two kind of sides of the spectrum of what wealth might look like what advice do you have for that person of things to consider as they do kind of plan the next few years of their lives yeah i mean i think i would be a horrible financial advisor and the fact that I remind people is the longer you can keep from taking from that 1 million, time will make that, you know, based on averages every seven or eight years, that's going to double.

52:12Right. So when you have a million dollars, if you can make it seven years and not take away from that or even contribute it, realistically, you'll probably have$2 million if it's in the markets or in something that appreciates. if you, you probably, almost everybody probably has more than they think they, they need. Right. So people just feel like they never have enough. Everybody you talk to is, it doesn't really matter enough. If you talk to my wife, she's still not comfortable that we have enough money. That's how most people think. So I'm not really telling people that, Hey, you're going to be okay.

52:51You have enough money, but I can promise most people, once you're in a million dollars and you're under 50, you're probably going to be okay if you can just not touch that money and let it keep rolling. It's great to have hundreds of million dollars. And of course we all want to be there and you should all work hard hoping that the business that you build gets to that level someday. But it's also okay to feel comfortable when you're not that person and you have other things. So, you know, for that person with a million dollars, you're doing great. That's a really good start. Now let's not touch that for a while, as long as we can and get that up and let's watch what our spend is and let's budget for a life that allows you to keep saving for as long as you can and still find happiness.

53:46And that's what most people struggle with. They just can't find happiness, it doesn't cost a ton of money. Plain and simple. Just can't for whatever reason that is. And that's where most of a wealthy America is though, in a period where they don't know if they have enough, they're continuing saving, they're calling Dave Ramsey to ask questions about, 99 % of the questions that come to Dave Ramsey are such easy answers. Like, Yeah. You have credit card debt. If you have credit card debt - Spend less, make more. You're done. Just saying the word credit card debt means you have big problems, right?

54:25Shane Cultra: Yes. So now the other side of the spectrum where people maybe are listening to the show and who have tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars or guests who are listening to the show, they've already made life-changing amounts of money. What would you say to them, given that you have optimized really for time, happiness and relationships and health. I mean, advice and maybe some thoughts that they can take away with them, given to your point, it's a lot harder to optimize for those things when you have, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah. I mean, since I don't have it, it's obviously a little harder to say, but I do have friends that had that type of money.

55:05And I do find there are certain people that I've seen that are living their dreams at a higher level. Like Shad Khan's dream was always to buy a sports team. Even when he wasn't very wealthy and he's living his dream buying a sports team. Well, there's what, a couple hundred people in the world that own a sports team. But my advice is happiness is something that your money won't necessarily buy you. So find the thing that makes you happy, but it shouldn't always be the money that creates it. Like if everything you do is only derived from the ability to pay for it, to me, that's just not a life I'm looking for.

55:49Like there's just, I know again, this is all cliche, but the best things that I have found only are improved in the way you get there and how you do them. It's not the money that bought the experience. So for me, I love climbing a mountain. Yes, I can pay guides to get there. I can fly first class to get to the mountain. I can pay for the training to be in better shape to climb the mountain. But climbing the mountain, getting to the top and looking at the sunrise was really the experience that I was looking for. And that being said, that's what I look at. Yes, how I got there is better and all those things.

56:29But when you're wealthy, you tend to forget the basis of everything, of everything you do, because everything becomes easy. It just becomes easy. And so, again, that's why you're seeing wealthy people do uncomfortable things because they feel like they have to force uncomfortable into a life that has become quite easy. So you see them running marathons and you see them climbing. And I went the opposite. I did all those things before. I just made them better with money. So that's kind of a long-winded answer.

57:03Shane Cultra: I love that. I mean, this has been such a cool episode because I think there's different ways of looking at wealth. I think we focus on one of them a lot on Money Wise, but we don't always focus on like, hey, money is good and money can help optimize some of these things that make you happy. But like going after happiness and life and comfort and freedom without the need to have money backing it, I think is what I'm gathering from some of what you've said. Absolutely. That's huge. That's huge. I think that's going to really sit with a lot of people. And I keep thinking Domain Shane. Your name is Shane.

57:39Shane Cultra: I know you're from Twitter, Domain Shane. Shane, this has been a great episode. I appreciate you coming on Money Wise a second time. Well, I appreciate it. I'm glad we got to talk more about, again, money is what pays the bills. When we talk about how bills are paid, obviously it's from a paycheck or for profit. But when it comes down to it, if you don't have your health and you don't have your happiness, the paycheck, it just, and again, if you don't have money, it can be quite often and affect the rest of things. but it is. Wealth is another part. Your health and your happiness are this two of the three parts of wealth, not just money.

58:17Shane Cultra: That was Shane. I've had a lot of these conversations and what stuck out to me about this one is about how Shane thinks about privilege. To him, privilege means you can fail and still know that you're going to be okay. He got that bit from his parents and he's now giving it to his daughter. Second, he seems to treat the worst things that happen in his life like material because they're going to be good stories. For example, he collapsed at mile 25 with the Boston Marathon and a paramedic had to walk him across the finish line. He calls it his worst marathon, but his best story. And he tells his daughter the same thing.

58:46Shane Cultra: If you go for it and fail, at least you're going to get a great story. The other thing that got me was as a dad, Shane never really sat his daughter down and gave her the speech. He says kids learn from what they watch you do. Something else he said got me as a dad myself. Shane never really tells his daughter how to live her life. He more so really leans into the fact that kids learn from what they watch their parents do. And according to Shane, their only job as a father is to love their mother. His daughter watched her parents get up at about 4.30 every morning to run. Nobody told her to run.

59:17Shane Cultra: She just ended up running because she saw her parents doing that. What's obvious to me after talking to Shane is he doesn't really regret any of the decisions he've made in life. He's got tons of freedom. He's got plenty of money and he just loves life. He's just a genuinely happy dude. What Shane said that I love that I'm going to ask next time instead of asking people if they regret anything is do you love where you're at? And if they do, you know, they don't regret anything because ultimately, like a lot of the things in life that you might choose to regret are what make you who you are, what brought you to where you are now.

59:46Shane Cultra: Look, I've got three kids under five, including a newborn. I recorded this in the studio while the newborn was at home. Listening to Shane, I keep thinking all about what my boys see when I walk in the door. I want them to see a guy who loves his life. So this week, I'm specifically going to pay attention to what I'm doing for the first 10 minutes after I get home from being in the studio. I know from my experience in Hampton that a lot of founders in Hampton are working through the same things. How much to chase, what it costs back at home, whether to defer relationships for money or to defer money for relationships.

1:00:16Shane Cultra: Hampton is an amazing community. It's a private community for founders and CEOs, and they're doing on average$25 million in revenue. I highly recommend that if you're in that similar seat as a founder, an operator, CEO, you've got to go check it out and consider joining. Go to joinhampton.com. If that sounds like the right room for you, it probably is. Shane said health and happiness are two of the three parts of wealth. Money is only one of them. This is Money Wise. I'm Daniel Burke. I'll see you next week.