How International Teachers Can Build Real Wealth With Andrew Hallam

A higher salary abroad can hide a brutal truth: many international teachers quietly fall behind on retirement cash flow. We unpack why with former teacher and financial educator Andrew Hallam, author of The Millionaire Expat, Millionaire Teacher, and Balance. From missing defined-benefit pension years to overestimating what “saving” can do against inflation, we talk honestly about the risks expats in the UAE and the wider Middle East face and what to do before another year slips by.

We get practical about retirement planning for expats: how to work backwards to your real number, how to factor in state pension or Social Security forecasts, and why there is no universal target that fits everyone.

 Andrew explains how lifestyle creep and “expatitis” can sabotage even good intentions, and why tracking spending is the lowest-effort habit with the biggest payoff.

Bio: Andrew Hallam is a financial author, educator and speaker who taught high school and middle school English, as well as Personal Finance. 

We are helping Andrew raise funds for the Al Jalila Foundation as he cycles across Europe. Please donate here: https://www.hopasports.com/en/andrewhallam

Transcript

Welcome And Why Andrew Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:04

You are listening to the Teach Middle East podcast. Connecting, developing, and empowering educators.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Hey everyone, Lisa Grace here, welcoming you back to the Teach Middle East podcast, or welcoming you if this is your first time listening to the podcast. I always ask, where have you been? We've been going for five years now. We've got tens of thousands, if not close to 100,000 listeners by now, and you've been missing people. I have the extreme, extreme pleasure of having Andrew Hallam on the podcast with me. I hounded him. You guys know I will stalk anyone who I want to get. I think I stalked him on Facebook if of all the places. Andrew, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_02 0:49

Thanks, Lisa.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

Now, by way of introduction, Andrew is a former teacher, now a financial educator who wrote the book and another book and another book. But the book I'm talking about is not Balance, it's not the other one. The Millionaire Expat. That book changed my actual life. I'm not a millionaire yet, but believe me, it has put me on a path that if I stick to it until I'm 65, I should get there. I didn't start early enough, Andrew, unfortunately, to get the fire number before. And I

From UK To Singapore Teaching

SPEAKER_01 1:30

also have two kids, so that's you know, that's a whole other story. Andrew, let us know a little bit about your story because you started also as a teacher.

SPEAKER_02 1:40

Yeah. So I was born in the UK and raised in Canada. And I taught at a middle school and then a high school on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. And then I took a year off to do a deferred, it was a deferred salary leave, which was which was amazing. I'm I'm surprised more people don't take advantage of these things, but it was the the school district would give me a year off uh with full pay because in the years previous, what would happen is I would take uh basically the school district would take a percentage of my salary and they would keep it. And then they did that for three years. And then in the fourth year, they gave me a year off and they basically paid it back with interest. So I got paid on a monthly basis and I traveled. And although my job was guaranteed when I got back to British Columbia, I chose not to go back. So, principal at a school that I had been working at in DC, in British Columbia, had got a job at Singapore American School. And so he ended up sending me an email. I was in Morocco, and this was the days when you had internet cafes. And I went into the internet cafe, and I got an email from him, and he said, This is this international teaching gig is amazing, great professional development, great kids, um, really good pay. And so I ended up meeting the superintendent. I ended up uh in Boston and then ended up working at Singapore American School from 2003 to 2014. And that's where I met my wife, who's uh a Spanish teacher. She was teaching Spanish there. And then in 2014, we thought we would take a year off to travel. But then, you know, my wife said to me, Well, you know, if we take a year off, halfway through that year, we're going to be applying for jobs for the following year. So why don't we take two years off? So we figured, okay, we'll take two years off. And now two years has extended to, I guess, 12. And so the uh I'd mentioned you had mentioned that I'd written some books. So this was a you know major incentive for writing these books was first of all, I had two co sort of two careers running concurrently. One was, of course, I was a public school teacher. And then what I did was when I was in Canada, I was writing for uh a finance magazine called Money Sense. And uh it was a it was the most popular finance business magazine in Canada at the time. So it was a really cool thing to be writing articles for them. And then when I moved to Singapore, and I would see that there would be certain financial service companies that would come to the school, and they weren't as bad as the ones that come to the Middle East. If you've had one that's coming to your school and you're in the Middle East, you're dealing with absolute snakes, absolute vermin, bottom of the barrel. These weren't as bad, but they were and had hidden fees associated with the product, such that you know you're going to be missing out on a massive overall potential for your retirement portfolio, given the hidden fees that would compound over time. So I wanted to educate the faculty and help in ways. So uh I put on a like a an after-school workshop, and there were a lot of people that attended,

Writing A Book Teachers Understand

SPEAKER_02 5:10

a lot of people. So I thought, well, this is pretty cool. And then I decided I was going to buy a bunch of books for people. So I went down, this is before I'd written a book. So I went down to a local bookstore, and at the time I bought the little common sense guide to investing. It's a John Vogle book. And I thought, now this is the simplest book that I could find. And I'll buy, you know, 50 of these things and bring them to the school and basically say, hey, they're in my classroom on a table at the back, they'll be there the whole day, the door is open. Anyone just come in and grab it, come and grab the book. And they were gone within like an hour and a half. They were gone, which was pretty cool. Cause I think I put the email out at like 7:30 in the morning. And then I thought, well, that was super cool. And I it felt good. Um, and I think as educators, that's probably one of our prime directives is we want, we want to teach, we want to help. So I went down to the bookstore the the following week, and my wife just thought it was crazy. Um, that I had read, at, you know, I had read more than 450 personal finance books by the time I was 35. And so most of the books that were in that bookstore I had read. And so I went, again, I wanted to pick a series of what I thought were really well-communicated books that were clear. So I ended up picking up about 12 different titles, 12 different books, basically explaining the same premise that was in the previous book. And written by these are written by 12 different authors. And I bought, you know, I bought, I spent a couple thousand dollars in that bookstore buying a whole bunch of these things. And I did the same thing, put them in the classroom, stuck them in the back, sent out an email at 7:30, and they were gone within an hour. And I realized, wow, people are really hungry for this. But then I wanted to see, like, okay, sort of a month later, what was the level of understanding? And so I had a book, I decided to have a book club. And I had it after school in my classroom. And there were probably about 40 teachers that showed up, which was pretty amazing. Like I had to bring in desks because we didn't have 40 desks in there. So it was jam-packed. And I asked the teachers, like, okay, so did you understand the books? Were they clear? And everybody nodded and said, yes, they did. But then, you know, often if we do that with our students, they might do the same thing. And then so I started to ask some questions. And I soon found that, and in these books too, I'd created glossaries for terms that I didn't think that I thought might be complicated, especially with that first batch of books. I created a glossary in the back and I typed it and I'd, you know, I'd paste it in the back of all of those little books. So what this term means, like putting it into language it should be put into in the first place. And I realized there were massive gaps. Like then people got really honest with me. They're like, well, you know, this part I didn't understand, and that part I didn't understand. And so that night I was talking to my editor at Money Sense Magazine, the Canadian magazine in Canada. I was still writing for them. And I said, Ian, like I've I've spent like so much money on these books. And I don't think people really got it. And he said to me, Well, you know, you got one option then. Write your own book. And then use these people as a test. Like, P use people who have never read a finance book of any kind. And so that's how I ended up writing, or what I did when I ended up writing Millionaire Teacher, was I thought, okay, I'll write this. That's not the title that I chose, it's the title that the publisher chose. Um, I would have preferred something much more humble, but um it worked out really, really well. So I would write a chapter, and I had loads of volunteers who hadn't read any of those finance books even that I'd sent out, and people were keen, and it was really great just to get a real grip on what people understood and tried my best to write it in language that was really clear. And, you know, some some of you listening may think, oh, okay, so you you dumb it down. It isn't dumbing it down. If you can write something clearly, if you're a good, clear writer, you can explain anything. It's not it's not dumbing it down, it's actually bringing it up, it's making it better writing. Academic writing is garbage, it's garbage writing. Because the ultimate purpose of us when we're writing is to communicate ideas and concepts, whether they're complex or whether they're simple, it's to communicate ideas and concepts. And if we lose people, we just haven't done a good job in that writing process. And I needed the people to help me do that. I wasn't able to do that on my own. I actually needed my colleagues at Singapore American School to help me do that because I wasn't capable of doing that. So they actually helped me elevate the writing instead. So yeah, that was the uh that was sort of the the genesis for this whole movement. That and of course, then there were loads of people that wanted me to speak about this. And so then during our one year off, two years off, three years off, it just ended up extending into invitations to come and speak at businesses, speak at schools. And so that's what we've been able to do since then. It's been a really cool, rewarding 12 years.

SPEAKER_01 10:44

It's interesting that you didn't even set out to do this. Because sometimes when you see the books, I've read the books, I've read Millionaire Expat, I've read Millionaire Teacher, um, I haven't read Balance. I've seen it though, but I haven't read it yet. Um, I don't know if it's available. Is it out yet, Balance?

SPEAKER_02 11:02

Oh, yeah, yeah. It's um yeah, it's been out since 2022. Actually, quite a few teachers, quite a few teachers would actually have a copy because SARWA, that company in the Middle East. Yes, financial services company, they bought 7,000 copies of Balance and they donated them to teachers that work for the Gems Network. So they basically went to every Gems teacher who worked in the Middle East in 2022.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

Oh, that's interesting. I saw the title, but I've never I didn't buy it. I don't even know when it came out. Um, but that's on my list. I will get that for sure. My question is when you were thinking about writing this book, what were you hoping that it would do for? I'm talking about Millionaire Expat. Because you wrote Millionaire Teacher first. So let's go up to Millionaire Teacher. What were you hoping that it would do for teachers? And why were you so concerned specifically

The Hidden Pension Risk Abroad

SPEAKER_01 12:00

about teachers, apart from the fact that you were a Yeah, I think we get a bit deluded when we move overseas.

SPEAKER_02 12:08

There are certain things that we don't understand. One thing that we don't understand is that we may we've taken a massive financial risk, most of us. And so some of you listening to this right now might say, What are you talking about? I might, I might, I get my you might even get your housing paid for. You might get uh you've got tax-free income and your income is higher. What's what's Andrew, what's Andrew talking about? It's a massive financial risk. Because when you leave your home country, whether it's the UK, Australia, Canada, the US, you are not contributing to your home country social platform. And this is massive. We often massively underestimate how valuable that is. Now I'm going to give you an example. So for an American, let's assume that you're an American school teacher and you've taught your entire career in the US. And let's assume that you don't qualify for a defined benefit pension. And let's assume that you're 65 years old now, so you're retired and you're starting to collect Social Security and you don't have a penny saved. Zero. Let's assume you've got zero saved. The money you would get from Social Security would be equivalent to an investment portfolio worth about $750,000. And so what we what we end what ends up happening is the vast majority of international educators end up retiring with far, far less cash flow than the people they left behind in their home countries. Why because of the fine benefit pension schemes and things like Social Security payments. So I'll give you an example as a Canadian. Now, this is different if you're you're an Argentinian or you know you're from Peru or something where they don't have really solid um government pension schemes. But I'll give you an example of of my case as a Canadian. So I started teaching in British Columbia, and I started at the same time as I'll just use examples of my friends Rob and Teresa. So Rob and Teresa and I were roommates, and they stayed in British Columbia and they were teaching, and they're ready to retire now. So they're uh they're about 55. So they're about the same age as me. So they're they're ready to retire. So what they'll end up getting in terms of government defined benefit pension, so they paid into a pension the entire time as they were working. And when I say they paid into a pension, Lisa, it a lot of people who are British are thinking, oh, pension equals investments. No, no, no, no, no. Defined benefit pension, such as this, is basically think of it as money that you pay into like almost a government type of thing. So it's a government entity in this case. And then what the British Columbia School District does, and they do the same in the UK, it's the same in Australia, the same in New Zealand, same in about 40% of U.S. uh school districts still. They'll look at what your best earnings years were, how long you contributed, how long you were working, and they'll calculate a percentage of your wage that they will give you indexed to inflation in perpetuity until you die. And so in the case of Rob and Teresa, you know, they are going to get a defined combined benefit pension for the two of them of about $95,000 when we combine both of theirs. So Rob stayed full-time. Teresa at a time did uh raise the kids, and so she took some time off work. But their defined benefit pension will give them $95,000 a year. Now, as an expat teacher who's been overseas their entire career, let's assume that you've been spent your entire career overseas and you're not going to qualify for something like Rob and Teresa. In that case, you're going to need several mortgage-free rental properties to create that kind of cash flow. Or you're going to need an investment portfolio that's worth about $2.4 million. And now that's if you're retired today. If you're going to be retiring in 10 years' time, you're not going to need $2.4 million. You're going to need something like $3.4 million because of inflation. And so, granted, not every school district is going to be as generous as Robin Teresa's, but what a lot of people do, uh, including a lot of Europeans too, like when they are living and working in Europe and paying European taxes, they're contributing to their country's social platform. They will get money back. And people often dramatically underestimate how much money they'll get back. So they teach overseas and they may be really proud of how much they've actually saved for their retirement. But the reality is they haven't planned it, they haven't really thought it out, and they haven't known why they've saved as as much as they saved or what they actually need. They haven't worked out like a backward design model. Like, what do I need at a given date? This, if if you're listening to this right now and you haven't done this, this has got to be your first task. Like you've got to do this this week. Otherwise, you're operating in a total vacuum. And I do know that we've done studies where uh each year a friend of mine, Jeff Devons and I, we've uh we've sent out, and many of the people listening to this have actually filled out our financial preparedness study. So we've sent out a study last year. I think we ended up getting 1,500 international teachers fill it out from all different parts of the world. And it was pretty interesting because we can, of course, isolate sections like Southeast Asia, Middle East, we can isolate Africa, we can isolate uh Central to South America. And what we found is it it doesn't really matter where you are, the vast majority, the vast majority will have far less cash flow upon retirement than the teachers they left behind in their home countries. So it should be a massive wake-up call. So not only do we need to save more, so when we actually look at the data on what international educators are saving, it's not enough. In most cases, it's not even close to getting enough. To equal, now I'm not saying that we have to have that either. You might decide that you want to retire in Thailand andor that you may never really want to retire. You may continue to work part-time online while living in a low-cost country like Thailand. I totally get it. Totally get it. But when we're doing an apples to apples comparison, the vast majority of international educators will have far less cash flow than the teachers left behind in their home countries. Unless, unless they plan efficiently, they invest intelligently, and they don't get swept up in what I call expat itis, which is keeping up with the Joneses and having the norm rise. So whatever is normal to you isn't always necessarily normal. We determine norm based on what we see in terms

Work Backwards To Your Number

SPEAKER_02 19:20

of the spending around us, in terms of our colleagues. But if our colleagues aren't saving enough money, then that's a dangerous norm to follow.

SPEAKER_01 19:28

Yeah. We're gonna get in the weeds here, Andrew. When you talk about planning and talk about knowing the number, knowing exactly what you need, what do they need to do? When they sit down, what are they thinking about?

SPEAKER_02 19:45

Yeah, it's um I mean I did go through this in in chapter 14 of that third edition of Millionaire Expat. Without it would actually be really hard for me to do it and just explain it simply. Um, I think a really simple, poor explanation is worse than no explanation at all. So at one point I had a YouTube video that I created, which was awesome. And I mean, you say awesome in that there were lots of views, and I was super excited about it. And it takes people through the process, and it was about a 45-minute process. So, I mean, it it brings in all kinds of special factors like have you contributed to a defined benefit pension? Did you work in the UK for a certain number of years? And how much money will you get on a monthly or annual basis? You can go to these government sites and you can actually see it, and it will be a post-inflation number. So it might look kind of impressive, but it might be like this is what you'll get in the year 2042. And so you have to be a little bit careful about that. So it's gonna look much better than it actually is. So you're gonna have to shave, mentally shave a portion of that off. Likewise, with Social Security for Americans, you can actually go to a government site and you can see, okay, what will I be entitled to if I retire in X year? We have to figure out like what is it that we could actually be living on? And are we going to have a mortgage? Are we going to be renting? Where are we going to be living? And that's why if anyone gives you a number and a super simple explanation, walk away. There's no number for everybody. It all depends on you, your lifestyle, when you're going to choose to retire, and what additional benefits you'll get from what might be Social Security, might be a defined benefit pension, it might be real estate. You might have two or more properties. And so they're going to produce cash flow. So uh I did my best to go through that process in chapter 14 of Milliar Expat. And I typically, it's the first thing I do when I go into a school is we go through this process step by step. Simple solution for now, if you haven't read that book, save as much as you freaking can.

SPEAKER_01 22:02

But we don't just save, right? Because I read the book twice, three times. We don't just save. What do we do? Talk specifically to the people who are starting late. And listen, my listeners know I'm fully transparent. I came out here in 2010. I came out here with my good friend. I can't call her name, but if you know me, you know we're Psyche and Trim. She got bamboozled into one of the schemes by a particular finely dressed gentleman in a suit in Dubai. Um and I didn't take it up. But I didn't do much better than her. So I can't even say, oh, she got bamboozled, I didn't, haha. No, I wasn't investing, I was simply saving. So I was good, and I was sending money back home into my savings account, which was earning me peanuts. And full transparency, I didn't start investing until I read that book. And that is just full transparency. I didn't know what the whole shebang was because I was always taught to save. And my family are very much big on property. So I had rental income and rental properties, and I still do, because that's what May taught me. And you can't learn what you don't know. It was when I read the book, I was like, oh, ETF stuff, stock market, the hell is that? Okay, gotta go figure this out. But I was already in my 40s. So

Save Versus Invest The Key Difference

SPEAKER_01 23:40

it's not just about saving. What should they be doing? Give them Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:45

Yeah, if you put the money in a savings account, it will lose to inflation. So it's not going to grow. And and whatever you do, never invest with someone who asks you to invest with them. So they may be endorsed by your school, they may come into your school, they may be well dressed, incredibly articulate, learn your birthday, your children's names, and use them, send you cards, send you tickets to a football match. Never invest with these people. Never invest with these people. The vast majority of them in the UAE, for example, or in the Middle East, for example, are selling products that aren't even legal in jurisdictions like the United States, Canada, Australia, or the UK based on how their commission-based structure is. So they make such massive commissions on those products. Who pays the commission? You do if you invest in it. You don't see it, but it comes off in the form of hidden fees forever on your account. And so these are the things that we want to avoid at all costs. Make sure we avoid these. You don't have to have that, but that's fabulous. It all depends on if that's your thing and you just love finding great properties that have great cash flow. Great. Great. You might be able to retire on that, on the cash flow there. If you can theoretically live on your property income today, you can live on the same properties five years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now, because you'll be able to increase the rent along with inflation. So another great inflation fighter, of course, is the stock market. But the stock market, if you think about it, a lot of people say, well, that's risky. It's not risky if you fully diversify. So globally diversify across the world's stock markets and pay the lowest possible fees. And you have time and you can actually harness your emotions. So if you buy a single product, which is a global stock market ETF, for example, it stands for Exchange Traded Fund. You will own more than 7,000 stocks from around the world. And just by owning those passively, you will outperform the vast majority of professional financial advisors over your lifetime. Not just professional financial advisors, professional institutional investors. You will outperform the vast majority of them over your lifetime. That's not an opinion, it's a peer-reviewed academic fact. It's a reality. It's kind of like gravity. I drop shoe, shoe falls to the floor, right? And so there are some products that are fabulous for people to purchase, and that they can be all-in-one products that include a global stock market ETF and a global bond market ETF. And those I love. So you could buy one that has 80% allocated to global stocks and 20% allocated to global bonds. An example of this is one that trades on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the symbol V80A. It's a Vanguard-based product. Even simpler, if you are like, I don't want to do any of this, I really do not want to manage my own money at all. If that's the case, there's only one firm in the Middle East that I would suggest for you. And it's called SARWA. So SARWA has two divisions: SARWA Trade and SARWA Invest. Don't open an account with SARWATRA. That's a trading account. Open an account with SARWA Invest, and they will build you a ready-made, globally diversified portfolio of ETFs. And yes, they will charge you a hidden fee. They'll tell you what that fee is up front. And the higher your allocation or the higher your investment portfolio grows, the more money you add to it, the lower percentage that they will charge. So it's uh it's fabulous with respect to it is far lower cost than you're going to get anywhere else in the Middle East that's built it for you. So it's basically a financial advisory type of firm. And you can end up contacting a real human being in this process, too. If you want to go it alone and you're like, no, I don't even want to pay SARWA's small fee, and you're thinking, hmm, Andrew did talk about this ETF thing.

ETFs Low Fees And Avoiding Salespeople

SPEAKER_02 28:40

How do I actually do it? If that's you and you'd like a money coach, there's a firm called Planned Vision. They'll charge about $300 a year. And what Planned Vision will do is they'll take you through the process to show you what to buy, how to buy it. They'll do a screen share process with you. And when I talked about that, how much money do you need to be putting away for retirement? And here's probably, you know, I probably should have answered with this. Spend $300, get an account with planned vision. They don't invest your money for you. They just act as a coach, spend $300 and say to them, okay, even if you, even if you already know how to actually invest your money, you know how to open a brokerage account, you know what to buy. Maybe you've read my book, you know what to do. Even if you haven't done, even if you've done, you know all that, but you don't know how much you should be saving, speak to them at Plan Vision. And for that, you know, a little bit more, I think it's a little bit more than $300, they'll do a comprehensive plan for you. But it's probably the it would be the best money you've ever spent. And they'll show you how much you actually need to be putting away.

SPEAKER_01 29:54

It's interesting because um it looks difficult, and I am no by no means any kind of financial guru. But I did go through the book, I joined the Simplify Facebook group. Um, I opened my own IDKR account. I transferred my money myself, okay, with my husband, but yeah. Um, I bought my own um bonds and my own vanguard ETF. Myself, and I am no, when I say I am no guru on these things, believe me, I am no guru. But I think if you can get some help from Planned Vision or wherever, that will be an assurance that you have somebody to hold your hand through the process. I say do it. A lot of times what happens is that people they get afraid because they get intimidated by the look of these platforms. I've to be honest, when I went onto IBKR first, I was like, what in the world is this thing? Like, what is this? What am I doing? Where am I bidding to buy this and da-da-da-da? And but eventually you get used to it. And I think the first time I tried to buy, it gave me a warning. You are buying without, what did it say, without market um crisis? Something, something came up. Um, and I was like, uh-oh, my money's gonna disappear or something. But once you keep doing it every month, it works. You talked about expertitis. Should someone who's come out here and amassed debt should they still be investing? How do they handle the two? How do they grapple with consumer debt versus investing or both?

SPEAKER_02 31:39

Yeah, great question, Lisa. In most cases, consumer debt's gonna charge you an interest rate that's act that's actually higher than what you'll earn in the markets. So if you have a car loan, um, in many

Debt First Or Investing First

SPEAKER_02 31:50

cases, even student loans. So I would say if there's something that's charging you 7% a year or more, so credit cards, generally it's oh my goodness, especially credit cards in the UAE, they can charge like 35% plus per year. A lot of people don't even know that. They don't even know how much their credit cards in the UAE are charging if they don't pay off the full balance at the end of the month. But yeah, definitely pay the high interest debts off before investing. So I would say, like, for sure, anything that is, you know, 7% or even close to 7% plus in interest that's being charged, pay that off because paying that off is equivalent to an after-tax guaranteed return of 7%. And nobody in the world can guarantee you an after-tax guaranteed return of 7% plus. So yeah, certainly do that. Pay that off first. If it's a mortgage on a home and it may be charging you 5%, then that's up to you. You can decide, well, you know, that's not as much. Plus, unlike a retail purchase, you know, a home is an appreciating asset. So that's better than you, you know, borrowing a bunch of money to buy a bunch of clothes and paying interest on that. In that case, now it's entirely up to your comfort level. But what you might want to do is say, okay, let's say you have, you know, $3,000 that you can invest each month, but you also have this mortgage. What you might want to do is say, okay, well, maybe, you know, I'll split that. Um, I'll say I'll invest $1,500 a month and I'll put an extra $1,500 on my mortgage, extra beyond the payments that you're actually making. This, of course, is entirely up to you. So I'm not saying that you necessarily have to do that, that that this is prudent. Whatever choice you make is going to make some sense here. Whether you decide in some people's cases, psychologically, they may be paying off a mortgage, and it's so important for them to be mortgage free and that they they would sleep so much better at night to be mortgage free. So they want to, in some cases, pay off the mortgage before investing. There is nothing wrong with that. So this is why you know personal finance is personal. It's not about necessarily just spreadsheets. I mean, you could say to me, wait, Andrew, you know, if I'm going to make eight and a half or nine percent a year in the markets and my mortgage is charging me six percent a year, then it makes more sense to put as much as I can in the markets and be slow paying off my mortgage. That's a mathematical spreadsheet analysis, but that's not a human analysis. We have real emotions and our emotions, not spreadsheets, but our emotions and how we feel about things is what really drives our life satisfaction. So again, you have to then ask yourself that that question. Whatever decision you choose to make in that case um will be a good one because whether you're paying off this debt or you're building your assets to the stock market, you are moving forward.

SPEAKER_01 35:00

Is it ever too late? Let's say you wake up like me, it's 2026 and you're 50, um, and you do not have a lot of money

Starting Late And Rethinking Retirement

SPEAKER_01 35:10

saved. Okay, well, let's preface that. You don't have a lot of money saved for your retirement, nor do you have income generating assets, because people do think you need a million in the bank. When really, if you've got real estate that is spitting off, you know, five or six thousand pounds a month that you can spend, you're good. But you have none of that, but you're 50. What what do you do?

SPEAKER_02 35:36

You know, oh, first of all, to back up, you said a million in the bank. We don't want a million in the bank, right? You corrected me on that earlier. That's yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:44

You know, when I fed the bank, I mean in your investment.

SPEAKER_02 35:48

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, you corrected me on that earlier when I talked about savings. You're like, wait, wait, where do we put it? The bank, we invest it. No matter where you are at, so you could be 60 years old and you would love to retire at 65, 66, and you might not have much of anything at all. Starting now is better than not starting. No matter what you do, you are going to, if you start, you are going to better your future situation by starting now. So there's no such thing as it's too late, I'm not gonna do this. Basically, that means that means you're basically saying, I I don't want to make life even, you know, I don't want to make life better for me in the future. I've decided I'm not gonna save it all because it's too late for me. It's like that's crazy. So start now, regardless of your age, it will make your future better. And and too, coming back to this, and I think one of the the risks too, and and I'm and I'm sure that there are probably some elevated heart rates, especially from the very beginning, when I said most international teachers won't have anywhere near the cash flow, and they've got to save far harder than they're currently saving. That's true. If you want equal cash flow of the teachers that you've left behind in your home countries in the vast majority of cases, that's true. However, and this is something I talked about in my book Balance, and I did see a LinkedIn post that you did that made me go, yes, yes. We retirement is a new concept. Retirement in its concept, it hasn't been around forever. Like a generation. If that, if that, it's a fairly new concept. Historically, people worked until they simply couldn't work anymore. And at that point, generally, it would be family that would be supporting us. But we now, we've put this illusion of grandeur behind the idea of retiring early. And you mentioned the fire movement, financial independence retire early. And you were saying on that LinkedIn post, oh, you know, I don't think I'm gonna be able to make it to fire, this financial independence retire early. Here's the reality. And I wrote about this in the book Balance. Generally speaking, and of course it's not going to apply to everybody, but when we look at aggregate data, people who retire earlier die earlier. Why? They're not using their minds to the extent that they are when they're working. They're not socializing. And when you're in a classroom, it is full-on social. You're engaging with every kid. You're trying to figure them out. You're engaging with colleagues, you're trying to figure them out. You're working together. This sort of thing wards off dementia and Alzheimer's. Doesn't necessarily prevent it, but it can push it. Research suggests it pushes it back. However, predisposed you might be, you'll get more years with a clear thinking mind. That social aspect and that sense of purpose is massive for longevity. Why do you think trust funders tend to be miserable and often addicts? It's because they don't typically have the sense of purpose. We can see that too with movie stars. We can see that with um, you know, we see that with actors, we see that with often with musicians. They've got to be so careful because they come into so much money so early, they're in a place where, you know, they don't really have to do much of anything. And if you do that, it can really hammer the self-esteem. And so in the book Balance, what I suggested was, yeah, sure, make a goal to become, if you want, financially independent at a young age. Great, that might alleviate some stress. But if you can continue to keep working in some capacity, it's far healthier for you to do that. It's something that I certainly want to continue to do. So I'm continuing to write articles, I'm continuing to speak, I'm continuing to engage, and I'm continuing to learn. So I guess a big part of what I'm saying to you is also this whole concept of an all or none. Just throw that out, about concept out. You you might not have enough money to retire at 60, but it might not matter. It might not matter. You might have enough money, build up enough to dial it back, work part-time, work some other projects, but keep keep the brain engaged and keep socially engaged. And your life will be fuller as a result of that.

SPEAKER_01 40:42

I do agree with you. I did, I did, I did go myself, throw myself down a crazy rabbit hole. Um, the art the post you're referring to was written, I think it was the middle of the night, and I was in a reddit rabbit hole. It literally was, Andrew, reading about all these 40-odd-year-old um people who were financially independent, retired early. And I kept going, what would I have been doing at that time if I had no need to work? I would have completely lost my mind because I'm a busybody, I'm everywhere. And I just think, you know what? I don't I don't necessarily want to retire. I I just want to have options. I just want to be able to choose what I do and when I do it, but I still want to do stuff. I've got a question for you that a lot of teachers ask. They they ask it because they don't earn necessarily. Okay, international teachers earn more than teachers in the UK, but they always say, cost of living, Lisa, it's going high, and we are we are facing increased prices every day. How do we how do we

Track Every Penny To Save More

SPEAKER_01 41:55

manage to save when everything is going up? Do you have any tips on how they can organize their finances to ensure that they don't neglect one part or the other?

SPEAKER_02 42:07

Yeah, we can talk about the lowest hanging fruit here. And it's something that everybody walks past. It's almost like they're looking for some kind of secret, and there's this tree of fruit, and it's like the watermelons are hanging at the bottom, but they're getting onto a ladder because they want to get you know, some of the cherries at the top, but you can't miss the watermelon. So every teacher, every professional, everyone with a job should track every penny they earn and every penny they spend. And when I'm speaking to an audience of teachers and I ask how many people do that, fewer than 10% of the people actually treat their household like a business. If you don't, you will not be as efficient. No matter how efficient you might be, you will be more efficient. And most people aren't that efficient with their household spending. And so the idea of a budget can be kind of daunting and frankly, kind of boring and restrictive. I've never really recommended budgets for things. I mean, sometimes I'll have like a travel budget and I'll say, okay, this is how much I'm going to spend on travel, and that's it. And that's cool. That's cool. But having a budget for everything can get really restrictive. And so the idea of tracking everything you make, and the moment you earn your income, put it in your phone. Like it could be uh an app like Pocket Expense, which is what my wife and I use. It doesn't matter what it is. It's not like many people ask, well, what's the best, what's the best tracking app? Forget that. Don't get complicated about it. Um, you're also going to be spending money in a lot of different currencies. Just transfer whatever your income is and whatever your expenses are into the same currency, just keeping it mathematically super simple. So for my wife and I, I'm Canadian, she's American. And we're spending all we're spending euros, we're spending British pounds, we're spending Canadian dollars. We're all over the place. We're spending Thai bot. You know, we travel all over. If I buy something in Thailand, and let's say it costs 300 Thai baht for a foot massage, I will just go, what's that in US dollars? Okay, it's 22 US dollars and I'll enter massage. $22 enter and it's categorized. Some people will say, well, my credit card does that automatically for me. Uh-uh. That's not the same thing. It's like taking that moment when you are making yourself accountable for tracking every spending, every penny you spend, you're going to see certain patterns. You get to see certain charts, pie charts, and you'll see things that don't align with your values. And when I say that, or your goals, so when I say that, it's it might be Starbucks. And you might go, I like going to Starbucks, but I had no idea I spent that much in a month at Starbucks. And I promise every single one of you will have one of those oh my goodness moments when you look at that pie at the end of the month. My recommendation is to do this for the rest of your life. Track every penny that comes in, track and categorize every penny that goes out. You will become more accountable. You will spend less. It will enable you to save more. That's the lowest hanging fruit and the biggest impact anyone can make.

SPEAKER_01 45:42

I probably need to. I'd probably need to. I sure. I think what happens is we we we sometimes don't want to see. And I my biggest, my biggest one is my kids will ask me for things. Oh mom, can we have can we eat out? Can we eat out? And I'll sometimes relent. And I think if I tracked it, I probably will be able to turn the tracker around and show them and go. Because they're teenagers. I'm like, do you really think that we should be spending this? Because I've got them on board now. I show them, listen, this 100 pounds that we're using to buy these Jordans or whatever, in five years' time, if we were earning 8% compound on this, because you already have trainers, you already have trainers, boy. This will become 300 pounds, or in seven years it would have doubled, or whatever. Like, and but I I I I think tracking, yeah, is super important. We're winding down. You said you no longer teach. How do you spend your time? Because first you said to me you were in Panama for six months, and now you're in the state. How do you spend your time? What are you doing in your in this phase of your life? Inspire us.

SPEAKER_02 47:00

So one of the things that I talked about in the book Balance

Purpose Learning And Time Perception

SPEAKER_02 47:05

is one, continue to work and challenge yourself and continue to learn. So that's something. Dial back the work for sure, but continue to keep active and social. But also, we can't necessarily control how long we live. Okay, we can eat, we can eat well, exercise, sleep well, right? And that can potentially extend our lifestyle or lifetime. But we can control our perception of time by creating alternative stimuli and challenging us ourselves in different ways. So I'll give you just a super quick example of the uh uh the perception of time. Let's assume that you go, you travel somewhere, you have four days, and you travel somewhere you've never been before. And you're not going to resort and laying around in a chair and just, you know, drinking and laying laying by the beach that entire time. Let's assume that it's it's legitimately something really different. So you're going somewhere and you're immersing yourself in that culture. Three days after you've flown there or driven there, you say to yourself, Was it just three days ago that I left? That's the perception of time. It stretches based on alternative stimuli because within that time period, you would have done so many different things, seen so many different things, learned so many different things that your perception of that time will expand. So for us to truly get the most out of life, it's to try to continue to learn new things. We don't have to travel somewhere, but it's pick up a guitar, learn a different language, like create alternative stimuli, and we will expand our perception. And so, I mean, I've done all kinds of fun, crazy things, but uh, but I will share what I have been doing for the last little bit. From January to June, my wife and I were in Panama, in the mountains of Panama, and she loves it there. We she does all kinds of really cool volunteer activities. She keeps so busy and she loves it. For me, my purpose this time was training for um a challenging fundraising event that I'll be doing July the 1st. So I'm gonna be joining um 14 other cyclists, and we are gonna start in Barcelona and we are gonna ride our bikes 3,300 kilometers. That's where the Tour de France actually starts this year, is in Barcelona. But we are gonna ride 3,300 kilometers, we are gonna end in Paris, and we are gonna climb 54,000 vertical meters. And so since January, we've all been trying to raise money. And we're raising money for the Al Jalila Foundation, which is in Dubai.

SPEAKER_01 49:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 49:55

They provide our big focus here is that if somebody went to the Al Jalila Foundation and they had cancer and they could not afford treatment, they don't have insurance, they can't afford treatment, the Al Jalila Foundation will open the doors and will give you treatment. But it's funded by entities that are giving to it. And so we have made this our mission to try to raise. I believe our goal, our goal has shifted because I think it was met and it's been pushed upwards. But uh, but I believe our goal is somewhere in the region of a million dollars that we want to donate to the Al Jalila Foundation. So, and we're doing it bit by bit. Um, I've actually put out like on LinkedIn that I'm available to do financial talks for schools or businesses. And so I was charging $2,000 and the money, well, essentially it was just having them send the money directly to the Al Jalila Foundation. And so, so on my end, I've I've raised $57,000 since January. A lot of big corporate donors, too. So obviously they really, really push the the uh push the donations upper, which is fabulous. But uh, but yeah, that's the sort of thing that I love to get into. It's gonna be a super hard challenge, Lisa. Like, oh my goodness, I've had to train really, really hard from from January until now. And I am somewhat intimidated by this major physical undertaking, but but I'm also like really, really pleased because things in life, unless we can make something hard, it's often the things that are hard that are most rewarding for us. The the challenging

Fundraising Ride Contacts And Closing

SPEAKER_02 51:40

things that we've, if our life isn't particularly challenging at the moment, kind of creating the challenge and pushing through it, you know, it can be can be super valuable.

SPEAKER_01 51:49

That is amazing. Listeners, if you are, do you still have a link that we can share? I'd love for our listeners to donate. Um, I will donate, and I'm sure many of our listeners will donate. The Algelina Foundation is a fantastic charity here in the UAE. Um, and anything that we can do to help, we'd love to be a part of that. That is so interesting. I was just kind of because I've been to Barcelona, I've been to Paris, and I was just trying to map, I'm like, I would not, I would give them money and I would pray for them and send them all the good wishes. I would not be cycling that far. Wow. That is really, really amazing.

SPEAKER_02 52:30

But this instance is one thing, but it's the elevation because what they what we what we've done is we've tried to find the most challenging routes. So we're doing up and over the Pyrenees, a whole bunch of different climbs, the Southern Alps, a whole bunch of different climbs. So we're trying to, we're trying to get to 54,000 vertical meters of climbing, which is just over six times up Mount Everest from sea level.

SPEAKER_01 52:52

That is amazing. Do you so now that you have the do you often do things like this? I mean, how do you spend your trying to you know restrict your own oxygen?

SPEAKER_02 53:04

Yeah, I do I do things. I do I do some crazy fun things. I try my best to do some crazy fun things. And balance that and balance that with work.

SPEAKER_01 53:13

Yeah. Yeah. So schools, if schools want to reach out to you to maybe do talks, are you still open to maybe coming over? This podcast will go out um, I think in another week or two. And so it will still be June. And schools will be planning for their back to school for their um induction weeks and stuff like. Are you still open to people inviting you over to speak?

SPEAKER_02 53:41

Yeah, so like for the following school year, yeah. So I'll be speaking at uh Igon College in Switzerland in October. And so I'll be spending a week there speaking to parents, doing one-on-one consultations with teachers, speaking to students. Uh, and then after that, uh, likely uh heading to the Middle East and probably do a a round of corporate and school talks there as well. So yeah, so if your school is interested in that, um they can certainly contact me at uh millionaire teacherspeaks at gmail.com.

SPEAKER_01 54:20

That is brilliant. I think schools tear some of the other PD things off your plate. If your teachers aren't financially well, they're unhappy anyway. So forget the assessment for learning. Bring someone like Andrew, bring Andrew in to talk to them about how they can become more financially prudent and prepare for whatever life they designed for themselves. I need to get balance. Balance sounds like my kind of book. So I'm gonna go look for that. Um is it on Amazon?

SPEAKER_02 54:50

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 54:51

Yeah, I saw it. Where did I see it? I think I might have seen it on your website some time ago, and I just didn't get it. But I need to go and get it. Thank you so much for being on the podcast, Andrew.

SPEAKER_02 55:02

Oh, my pleasure. And if you if you are interested in somebody locally to help you through a process, if you're like because I mentioned Plan Vision, but there's a woman named Blair Hoover who lives in the UAE, she's a former teacher, and she ah, she did live in the UAE. She's now a friend. Apologies. But uh she'd be very familiar with the UAE, and she's also somebody you could use. So instead of uh, if you want to use Plan Vision, you could use Plan Vision or you could use Blair. Um last name spelled H O O V E R. First name B-L-A-I-R. So she does a lot of consultations with expats as well.

SPEAKER_01 55:36

Okay, brilliant. Um, if you've got any links or anything like that, do send them over. We would be happy to include them in the show notes so that people can, you know, get their money right. It's time to get our money right. That's that's how I feel about it. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02 55:53

My pleasure, Lisa. Thank you.