This episode is sponsored by my new book, Own Your Time. I wrote it for parents who are doing

everything right on paper, but still feel stretched thin. Own your time gives you a clear path

to take back control of your money, your work, and your family time. Find it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Own Your Time by Andy Hill. Your income is your greatest wealth building tool.

And so, you know, it's maybe not the most sexy thing finding a corporate job.

But if you can find something that fits your interest and your skills, if it, you know, pays well, then, you know, that's a great way.

I love talking about increasing your net worth. This is our barometer for wealth-building success.

Today we're going to speak with an investor who has grown his family's net worth to $1.8 million by 34 years old.

Ben Johnson is our guest today. He lives in Illinois with his wife and two daughters. And when he's not focused on building his family's wealth, he enjoys visiting local coffee shops and playing pinball with his friends. Welcome to the show, Ben. Yeah, thanks, Andy. It's great to be here today. And yeah, looking forward to sharing my story for everyone to hear. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for doing that and helping other people win like you have. Let's go back, Ben. Let's look at the story. What was your motivation for building your wealth in the first place? Oh, boy. So, yeah, I really didn't have any interest in personal finance until there's 2014. My wife and I were, well, girlfriend at the time, we were, you know, coming out of college,

just got married the week after graduating. I thought, hey, you know, we're starting the first jobs. Let's really start learning about this personal finance. We actually had a crash course

in Financial Peace University through our premarital counseling at our church. So that really

motivated us. We had about $80,000 in debt starting our marriage, most counseling at our church. So that really motivated us. We had about

$80,000 in debt starting our marriage, most of it student loans. So 70,000 in student loans,

10,000 on a car loan. That really lit a fire under us to pay that off quickly. And we ended up

doing that within about two years. So that's the start of our journey.

FPU was great. I ended up coaching that for a little

while and having some good time contributing back at our church as well, which was a great way to

connect with people. But that debt payoff can be the big thing in the beginning that's really

hard to do. Were there any secrets to your sauce there that helped you guys pay off that debt in

such a short period of time, maybe some collaboration between the two of you. Can you talk to me about that a little bit? So, I mean, the big thing, we had, you know, really nice incomes coming out of school, so that really helped. I said the big thing is we lived like college students for a couple of years there. And then we also, you know, had some longer term goals. So, you know, during that two-year time frame, we also you know had some longer term goals so you know during that

two-year time frame we also stumbled upon the mr. money mustache blog we also

read Simple Path to Wealth came out around the time we were paying off our debt

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