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The podcast for aspiring entrepreneurs who have families. If you're a dad looking to escape the rat and quit your 9 to 5 while keeping food on the table for the family in the process then this show is for you. We discuss the challenges, tips, tricks and hacks to help you make the leap into freedom.
Brendan Ryan:
right place. I created this podcast for you because I am you. I am your host, Brendan Ryan, and I am making that transition myself. And today I want to talk about something that I call the middle-class trap. Now I thought I actually stole this phrase from somebody else, but it turns out that there isn't a lot out there about it, right? So if you were to go into Google right now and type in middle-class trap, it'll correct you and say that did you mean middle income trap. And that is a macro economic concept that talks about countries who get stuck in a middle income standard of living countries like China or Brazil or Mexico or India. And they're not able to make that economic leap to get to a higher standard of living. That is not what I am talking about. What I am talking about is something very different. It's more on a micro scale and specifically with regards to the American lifestyle. I made a short form video a couple weeks ago that performed very well. And in it I talked about how the American dream is not what you think it is. What I mean by that is when most people think of the American dream, they think of 2.1 kids, medium sized house in suburbia with a white picket fence, happy family, you know, good job, good life, that kind of thing. And while that's a nice image, it's not really a dream. And what I mean by that is it's not something that, at least if you're in the United States, it's not something super inspiring. Meaning it doesn't want you, it doesn't make you want to get up and beat the sun to the punch every day. It doesn't give you goosebumps. It doesn't really inspire you. And therefore it's not a dream. It's actually more of a societal norm, an average even, if you will, that we are pressured into doing. And it's not something that I think... most Americans want anymore. They want something bigger and better. And you might argue that, you know, that's greedy or something like that, but I would argue that most people don't have big enough dreams. That most people, if you were to ask most people what their dreams are, most of them wouldn't even be able to tell you. And then the ones that did tell you would be, you know, medium sized dreams at best. So. There aren't a lot of people out there that really truly dream big, that really want to actually change the world. And if you do have dreams that big, a lot of times what happens is you get a lot of pushback from your friends and family. A lot of, oh, you should probably be more realistic. If you've ever studied goal setting, there's a very common methodology called SMART goals. And the R in SMART stands for realistic. I think that's hogwash. I think that's BS, honestly. I think that we need to train people and encourage people to dream much, much, much bigger. There are so many problems in the world that need strong people to come and solve them. And the only way that's going to ever happen is if people believe that they can do it. If you think about some of the greatest figures throughout history, people like a Gandhi or somebody like a Martin Luther King. Do you think that they had small dreams? They had huge dreams. And I'm sure, I'm 100% positive that they heard from their friends and families or maybe even close associates that they probably should scale it back a little bit. Maybe you need to make it a little bit more realistic. I don't really know if we can end all this. all this racism and all that, this kind of stuff. Maybe we should aim a little lower. And I don't think that they listened, right? And that's what made them great. They were not willing to settle. They were not willing to be realistic. And so that's where I'm coming from with that short form video that I even said in the video, I might lose some followers over this opinion because I'm sure some people will hear that and think. Geez, this guy's kind of ridiculous or a little bit, a little bit greedy even maybe, right? So to get back to our topic of the day, the middle class trap, that American dream is the middle class trap. And so what I'm trying to say is, our society pressures us into going to college to get a degree, to work a job as a W-2 employee so that you can... put five to 10% of your pay check into retirement every month and just hope that that's enough when you turn 65 so that you can enjoy your life and travel the world when you're 65 years old. Hopefully you'll still be healthy then. Hopefully you'll still be alive then. And hopefully social security will still be around, right? Which it probably won't by the way, but that's neither here nor there. That's a totally different episode. Not going to go down that rabbit hole, but suffice to say that there's a lot of doubt whether or not that will be sufficiently funded for a lot of people, say, 30 years from now. If you're a millennial listening to this, you're looking at three decades of hopefully, you know, it still being there and hopefully inflation not being as bad as it is right now and hopefully you making more money over time. So there's a lot of hopefullys there, right? Doesn't sound like a good plan. It really sounds like outdated information to me. Back in the day, when the standard of living was much lower, before the internet, before we had all the resources that we have now, the idea of going and getting a job and working for somebody in a factory with benefits, in a union, and all that kind of stuff was good advice. And maybe when our parents were growing up, the boomer generation, if you will, The idea that you go to college to get a good job, get a good degree, would set you up for a good life. They had a bit of a different economic landscape as opposed to what we see today. Today, college degrees are a dime a dozen. They don't mean as much as they used to, and they cost a heck of a lot more than they used to. So there's a huge, huge opportunity cost there. A massive opportunity cost that we really need to take a step back. and really evaluate. I personally don't really want my kids to go to college. Now, I think that things could be quite different 10, 15 years from now because the inflation rate of tuition in particular is just completely unsustainable. If there's anything that's inflated more than tuition, I don't know what it is, but I am willing to support my kids to do whatever they want to do, whether that's college. or going to the military or become an entrepreneur, which is what I would like them to do, because I think that if you are interested in business ownership and entrepreneurship, the best time to do that is when you're young, when you have very little at stake, right? You could go out and start multiple businesses when you're 18 years old, and even if all of them declare bankruptcy and start over again, you have nothing to lose. It's the perfect time to experiment and try new things. There's infinite upside. And almost no downside other than lost time, which is what people are dealing with anyway in this system that we've groomed them to do, which is that go to college system, right? And so the middle-class trap, I still haven't exactly told you what I mean by the trap, right? The trap is this. When you're in the middle class, you are boxed in much more so than anybody that's on either end of the extremes of their income, right? So the rich are very free. They're financially free. Obviously they can hire anybody to do anything for them, fix their car, mow their lawn, cook for them, clean for them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When you're in the middle class, you don't necessarily have that option. You might have to do a lot of those jobs yourself. It takes up a lot of your time because you can't afford to pay somebody else for all of those things. And the other thing is, the financially free, the rich, the truly wealthy, are free not just in terms of that, but they're also free in terms of their location. They're free in terms of their time. So they're much more free than the middle classes. But what about the opposite end of the spectrum, the poor? The people that are literally impoverished. Those people are actually more free than what middle class is too. They have way more time. They're not... beholden to a job. They are somebody that could go wander out in nature all day if they wanted to. And a lot of times they even have government assistance and food stamps and all that kind of stuff coming in too. When you're in the middle class, you're forced to constantly be saving here and there and there's just something soul crushing about having to go cancel this subscription for $50 a month. because you're pinching pennies essentially, you're living paycheck to paycheck. And that's really the difference, is that so many people in the middle class are living paycheck to paycheck. And in a way, that's not even their fault, that sounds bad, that sounds like, you know, they're bad money managers or something like that, but there is literally laws that state that income rises to meet expenses over time. It's just a natural thing that occurs. But when you are at a certain level of income, over time, those expenses rise and rise and rise because you start to experience other things and things that used to be luxuries eventually become a necessity for you. Take for instance, all kinds of the bells and whistles that you might see in your car for instance, whether that's an electric vehicle or self-start or. swarming seats or whatever, you might have spent a lot of time not using those things, but as soon as you started using them, you got used to them, and now you always have to buy that type of thing. That's what I mean about the luxury. Having used to be a luxury eventually becomes a necessity. And so people in this middle class are trapped. They feel trapped. I know I felt trapped. I felt like I needed to let my dreams die. I needed to let them go and just be thankful that I had the pharmacy job that I had because it had relatively good benefits. I was paid well, even though there's kind of this glass ceiling above which I couldn't really break through. And it was relatively low stress. There were some good things about the pharmacy job. There really were. And I felt bad sometimes even thinking about how I wanted to do something else or that I really felt in my soul when I was sitting there in the pharmacy at night that this just ain't it. There's got to be something else. I just can't imagine that this is what God created me to do, that this is my purpose in life, that this is what I am supposed to do and what I'm supposed to contribute to the world. And I know, I know the Gallup polls prove it. That most people do not like their job, and most people are not engaged with their job and they don't find fulfillment in it. And so this podcast that I've made is for those people, specifically the family men, right? The millennials with some children, and I'm targeting you guys because I am you guys, and I know what it feels like to feel like you're trapped by that job. You're trapped, but you have a responsibility, you have an obligation. to your family and there is no way you're gonna let them down. And that's something that a lot of young entrepreneurs don't have, right? And that's why I mentioned like the best time to jump into entrepreneurship is when you're 18, 19 years old and you don't have any responsibilities. You don't have a house, you don't have wife, kids, anything. Probably don't even have a dog, right? You have no responsibilities. You have lots of energy, lots of time. No responsibilities. It's a lot harder to build a business when you do have responsibilities, when you do have a wife, when you do have a house, because the stakes are much higher. And the stakes are much higher. And in the past, say even 20 years ago, it would have probably been inconceivable. It would have been borderline impossible to build a business while... you were raising a family while you were working a nine to five job. But that's not the case anymore. You can build a business. Thanks to the internet, thanks to the information age. The information is out there if you're willing to go find it, if you're willing to put in the work. And even if you're limited by your time, I trust me, I know what you mean by that, right? Reach out to me. I'd love to point you in the right direction and I'd love to help you and mentor you because I am on a mission. to help a thousand dads become entrepreneurs and escape the rat race. Because I really believe in my soul that the world needs more entrepreneurs. And I really, I know for a fact that there's a lot of dads out there, just like me, that felt trapped. That felt like they're in their own middle-class trap. That it wasn't exactly how they drew it up, exactly how they dreamed it out to be. And maybe, you know, back when we were dreaming it up, things were a little bit different. Inflation wasn't as high. We didn't have things like the pandemic and life just looked a little bit more bright. The future just looked a little bit brighter. But I'm telling you that it is bright. The opportunity right now is ample. And someday we're gonna look back on this time as being one of the greatest times to build businesses or to invest in things, right? The opportunity to invest in Bitcoin, for instance, in my opinion, is a huge, huge opportunity. It's a generational opportunity. But so is building an online business. Our parents were not able to make money online. That was not an option presented to them. We are so lucky that we can do this. Heck, we don't even have to be in front of a computer most of the time. We can be on our phones. To explain that to a boomer. You know, somebody that grew up 50 plus years ago, it's just, it's hard for them to even wrap their head around that opportunity. And so many of us, too many of us, too many of us are leaving this opportunity on the table. I see the younger generations being more interested in it because they see their peers on social media killing it and building these online businesses. And so I think Gen Z in particular is going to be doing a great job starting businesses and becoming entrepreneurs. But I worry about mine, my generation, the millennials. Some of us did, and some of us are, like me, and I've talked to plenty of other millennials that are trying to do both, or either left their nine to five to pursue entrepreneurship full time. And in fact, I'll even have one of those guys on my podcast here in a couple weeks. So you'll be able to hear from him. But by and large, most of us are in that middle class trap. And I don't think it should be that way. I think that the world is going to change dramatically in the future in so many different ways. I think that you're gonna see a lot more people traveling and being able to work remotely from their laptops, from their computers, anywhere in the world. I think that you're gonna see more globalization, more cooperation between people of other countries. I think that you're gonna see healthcare change dramatically. I think that you're gonna see artificial intelligence kill a lot of the jobs that maybe a lot of you guys are working, including pharmacy. I think that pharmacists are in danger of their job being replaced by AI and automation in particular. In fact, I think that would be one of the first ones to go because pharmacists are compensated so well and because it's such an intellectual job and very little physical. work that the automation that we already have, the limited robotics that we already have, can easily replace that. And the AI is going to replace that clinical pharmacy role quite quickly. You'll see AIs rolled out into the EMR system, which is like the electronic medical record, right? And integrated into that system to help doctors just like a pharmacist would or help nurses. Nurses are probably the most safe, I would say, of all the healthcare workers because they are so hands-on. They are the ones literally in the trenches, even more so than doctors, right? They receive the orders from doctors and the nurses are the ones that go carry it out. They go start the lines, they go hang the meds, they do all little procedures and checks and all kinds of stuff like that. So if you're a nurse, you probably have a little bit more time than say if you're a pharmacist, right? But point is, things are changing. things are going to change quite, quite dramatically. And by the time you're 30, you know, years down the road from now, no matter how old you are and make my case, I would be about retirement age. Things are going to look so, so different. And so I don't think that using an old playbook, one that maybe your parents gave you of the boomer generation to just do this. Work your job, get the benefits, don't complain, and put some money into a retirement account and you'll be fine. I don't think that's true anymore. I really don't think that's true and I don't think you can depend on that. I don't think that it's wise to rely on that advice. And so I will pound the table. I'll continue to tell people that you gotta change, you gotta do something different because the writing on the wall is there. If we're reading the tea leaves, It doesn't look good. It really does not look good. So do not do that guys. You gotta at least start some side hustle, figure out how to create some passive income of some sort, even if that just means getting a rental property here and there over the years. It's not a great way to generate cashflow. You'll get plenty of equity and tax benefits, but you're only gonna cashflow a few hundred bucks a month that way. It's not gonna be something that is ever gonna be able to replace your income. So... Don't get me wrong guys, real estate's great. However, I think it's overrated. I think that business and entrepreneurship in general has gotten a bad rap as being so, so difficult because nine out of 10 startups fail or whatever. And that's true, it is hard. I'm not gonna lie, it's very difficult. You're gonna struggle in the beginning but it is so much more worth it. The upside is essentially infinite. It's essentially infinite and the cash flow you get is so much better than real estate will ever be. So much better. And that's really what you need is you need cash flow. You don't need an S-Tag. This is Robert Kiyosaki all the way. You need cash flow. You need to shift your mindset, start a side hustle, start a business so that you can get that cash flow so that you can be okay when it comes time to retire. And even before then, right? Because you don't really want to only be able to enjoy your life when you're 65 years old. The ideal would be to be able to enjoy your life now while you're young. while your kids are young, so that you can go travel the world when you don't have a bunch of health problems. And plus, tomorrow's not guaranteed to any of us anyway, right? So this whole idea that, you know, we should put stock money away, stock money away for when we're 65 or older, a lot of people are not gonna make it to 65 or older. Okay, so I don't think we should bank on that idea. But anyway, guys. I'm starting to rant a little bit here, so I'm gonna reel it back in just a tad, and say that, again, if you are a young male with a family out there, and you want to leave your nine to five, the most important thing is to just get started. It's gonna be hard, I'll tell you that right now, but I started this podcast, I started this community for you to inspire, to educate, and to support you. So please, please tell your friends about it if they feel the same way. And please, please reach out to me if you need help, if you need any type of help at all. We have a free newsletter that comes out every Monday at 7pm Eastern time. You can get that at employee, number two, entrepreneur.co. You can sign up for the newsletter there. You can find. This podcast on any podcasting platform at podcast.employee, the number two, entrepreneur.co, we're everywhere. We're on Google, we're on Amazon, we're on Apple. We are everywhere. And of course, YouTube is our main channel. And I'm also on pretty much every social media platform that you can think of. So please feel free to shoot me a DM and help, let me help you. make the transition from employee to entrepreneur. Join me, make the transition from employee to entrepreneur. It's worth it, guys. It's 100% worth it. And I will see you on the other side.