Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight and encouragement you need, live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

Today on the show, I'm going to tell you a story about a man I think of as the

accidental millionaire. This story comes from my background and experience working as a financial

advisor. One of the great benefits of that business is you wind up meeting

with hundreds and hundreds of people and talking about money with them. And if you talk to enough people

about money and you keep your ears open, you can quickly find out what works and what doesn't work.

But every now and then somebody will surprise you.

Usually you get pretty good as a professional of pegging people.

You start to see a couple of clues or hear a couple of clues and pretty quickly you start to put people into boxes.

But the accidental millionaire was a man who didn't particularly fit into any of my preconceived boxes. I met him on a

Friday. He came into my office for a meeting and I had never known him. Somebody

referred me to him. I called him up, asked him if he wanted to meet with me. And he said, sure, and he wound up coming into my office. And so he came in, he didn't know me, I didn't know him. And we went through the standard procedure, which was basically a conversation.

We would call it in the business a fact-finding interview.

And I would ask him about what his goals were for the future.

I would ask him about all of the things that he'd done, ask him about his money and his income, etc.

And interestingly, he didn't have a lot of specifics on his situation.

He didn't remember a lot of the numbers.

He wasn't 100% sure about how much money he made

he wasn't 100% sure about how much money he had but as we start going through the numbers

they just started climbing and climbing and climbing.

And by the time we got to the end of his statement of financial condition where we calculated

out his net worth, we both discovered that he was a millionaire and I'm pretty confident that he was well on his way to being a multi-millionaire.

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