Since you’re reading this post on a blog about military financial independence, here’s a question for you: have you ever thought about drafting your Millionaire Interview on ESIMoney?
Simply thinking through a series of interview questions (while telling your story) is a compelling exercise. Maybe you’d even want to publish your stories on the site– anonymously. “Publishing” on that site is part of the reason I’ve written this post, but the introspection seems far more valuable to the writer than to their audience. Maybe you don’t need to share it in the first place, let alone publish it.
If you’re a millionaire, then how did you get there? What do you do all day? What will you do next? What advice do you have for future millionaires?
If you’re not (yet) a millionaire, then how will you get there? What are your obstacles and your plans? What questions are you figuring out?
My Millionaire Interview Backstory…
I wrote my interview after years of ‘getting around to it’. The questions were an incredibly valuable self-audit experience which forced me to think about what we’d done. They also forced me to reflect on our oversights and our flat-out mistakes. I felt obligated to share timelines and numbers, and to back up my assertions by showing our math.
After I drafted my responses (to about 40 questions) I handed a printout to my supervising editor (my spouse) for us to discuss. Her first sentence of feedback: “Boooooring!” And even worse, she’d been there for the whole journey.
Pro tip: an interview is supposed to share stories while educating the audience. It’s not a short-answers essay for clicks & advertising revenue.
My second draft took a good bit more effort than my first, but it was way more interesting– and probably more useful for an audience. In other news, my spouse and I have continued our discussion for years. We’ll be working through those questions for the rest of our lives.
… And The Millionaire Money Mentors Forum
“Please join us!”
Ironically, I wrote my Millionaire Interview after joining the Millionaire Money Mentors forum.
I was skeptical about joining the forum. “Who pays money for that?!?” I was sure that I could get better advice from thousands of free Internet sites. In fact, I was already online three decades earlier when The Motley Fool website inadvertently jumpstarted the 1990s financial independence blogging industry (including John Greaney among others) by trying to charge money for their Retire Early forum. Tens of thousands of people ditched TMF to build their own communities instead of further enriching the Gardner brothers.
I recognize what some of us are already thinking:
“But Nords… the Millionaire Interview site owner charges hundreds of dollars for people to join his forum! Of course he wants more people to write their free interviews. It’s how he became a millionaire!!”
You’d hate to get suckered into handing our money to a millionaire– only to learn that he became one by charging $500 each from 2000 people. Per year.
I completely understand the reflex. In reality, he earned his money from a corporate career which happened to include a couple decades of blogging as a side hobby. (“20 years to an overnight success.”) He’s a millionaire from his saving & investing, not from our forum membership fees. I’m pretty sure that most of the revenue goes right back into the monthly payments for the forum software and the hosting bandwidth. It’s one of the fastest and most uptime forums I’ve ever used.
Five years ago when I joined the forum, I also had insider knowledge from years of reading ESIMoney’s first successful site (Free Money Finance). Later I’d met John at FinCons, and I enjoyed watching his management of Rockstar Finance during its glory days. The forum admin, Steve (founder of ThinkSaveRetire), also has a great reputation for creating websites & content.
Yet the fact is that– even as a submarine veteran– I had to resort to taunting myself into joining the Millionaire Money Mentors forum. After all, I could certainly afford the experiment and I might get a good blog post out of it. If I didn’t like the experience, then I’d still get full value for the price I paid to learn from it.
Thankfully, within days of spending my money I realized the true value of a paid forum: no advertising, no spam, no haters, and no trolls. Just dozens of people who’d become millionaires through various combinations of earning, saving, and investing– and who were now sharing their peer-tutoring experience in a polite and professional environment. Along with photos of their pets.
I started writing my interview in late 2020, a few weeks after joining the forum. I was already feeling introspective because my spouse and I had recently become rookie grandparents. In addition, billions of our fellow humans were grappling with our own mortality in the throes of a global pandemic.
More importantly, the writing redirected my thoughts to where my spouse and I were going with our wealth.
Our daughter (a rookie parent) and I had just published our book, too, so the interview questions made our entire family reflect on our legacy, philanthropy, estate planning, and next-generation FI. Unsurprisingly, the MMM forum is filled with long and detailed threads on those topics.
Your Millionaire Interview Opportunity
John & Steve don’t need anyone’s help with the millionaire forum or ESIMoney, but they have a goal: 500 Millionaire Interviews. As of this post’s publication, they’ve just released MI 461.
Ironically, over the last decade ESIMoney has already had several thousand people ask him to send them the interview questions. Sadly his response rate has consistently hovered around 10%. Getting to MI 500 is going to take nearly 400 more inquiries, but fortunately John has decades of sales experience and knows how to motivate customers.
Here’s his latest offer, quoted directly from his site:
“Anyone who completes a millionaire interview becomes eligible to apply as a mentor in the Millionaire Money Mentors (MMM) forums — and receive free access — by following these steps:
– Complete a millionaire interview on ESI Money.
– Agree to introduce yourself in the forums.
– Agree to minimum posting requirements (because we want active mentors, not passive observers).”
You can read more about that free access at ESIMoney’s “Help Us Reach 500 Millionaire Interviews.”
As an unintended consequence accidental bonus of your free forum mentorship, you get extensive access to the explicit personal details of three generations of Ohana Nords (and our personal wealth-management tactics) that I’ve never shared on any public site. I’m one of the more active members of the Millionaire Money Mentors forum (far more than my participation in any other forums or Facebook groups) but I’m learning more alongside hundreds of other millionaires.
When you search ESIMoney for keywords like “Nords” and “submarine”, you’ll find my Millionaire Interview… as well as a few updates and a handful of sea stories financial posts with a military theme.
“Um, Nords, I’m Not A Millionaire Yet…”
If you’re not already a millionaire then you’re still going to be one someday from compounding, right? Maybe it seems exceptionally difficult right now because you’re already earning, saving, & investing– especially when you’re in the boring middle of the financial independence journey. You’re not in the Two-Comma Club yet, but the boring part means it’s working.
Believe it or not, a few members of the forum are from military families– active duty as well as Reserves, National Guard, retirees, and veterans. Military families are present in the same percentages of the forum membership as the rest of America’s military demographics. We shouldn’t be surprised that veterans (with or without military pensions) have figured out how to build millionaire wealth.
I’m not going to suggest that you spend hundreds of dollars on joining the forum as a member. It’s not currently open to paid membership, and I’m not sure whether it’s ever going to reopen for any price.
But you can still read the Millionaire Interviews on ESIMoney. You can still copy & paste the questions from the latest interviews and put the effort into drafting your own interview. (It’s straightforward– and it’s valuable– but it is not easy.) We can contact me here to talk about your path to financial independence, in the comments or in your own guest post.
Read a Millionaire Interview (or two) every week, and keep learning. Your financial wisdom will compound even more quickly than your financial investments.
There are no affiliate links or paid ads in this post. Try your military base library or local public library before you pay money for these books– in any format.
Military Financial Independence on Amazon:
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Raising Your Money-Savvy Family on Amazon:
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Related articles:
“Hey, Nords: How’s Your Net Worth?!?”
“But Nords, You Have A Pension!”
20 Years Of Financial Independence & Military Retirement
Fear And The Just One More Year Syndrome
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