David Bach

He is an ordinary man with an extraordinary millionaire’s plan. He is author of “The Automatic Millionaire,” a powerful one step plan to live and finish rich. He has developed the “Latte Factor.” A method of becoming a millionaire in your own personal and spiritual life. David is the author of four New York Times number one best sellers and is working on his 6th book; “Start Late Finish Rich”. He’s a weekly financial contributor to CNN’s American Morning and has been featured in People Magazine, Readers Digest, USA Today and twice on Oprah.
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RAS: Robert Anthony Schuller
DB: David Bach

RAS:
David Bach is an ordinary man with an extraordinary millionaire’s plan. He is author of “The Automatic Millionaire,” a powerful one step plan to live and finish rich. Do you drink Lattes?

DB:
I do. I drink free coffee though. The coffee I got back stage, which was free.

RAS:
That’s not a latte.

DB:
No I’m not. I used to be a latte drinker. I can’t drink lattes now, ‘cause I go all over the world and say stop drinking lattes. The truth is I’m not trying to take away people’s coffee. The truth is that the Latte Factor’s a metaphor. And it’s a metaphor for how we all spend small amounts of money on little things. Like literally waking up in the morning and going and getting a latte and a muffin. You spend five bucks. By the end of the month, if you do it every day, you spend almost $200.00. And by the end of the year you spent $2,000.00, and take it out a decade you spent $20,000.00. So the Latte Factor says, hey if you have $5.00 a day and instead of wasting it on little things, like bottled water. Remember where water used to come from? It used to be free. Cigarettes, lattes, if you saved that money, paid yourself first, you did that automatically, over your lifetime you could build complete financial freedom, and you could also start giving more.

RAS:
You know it’s an interesting thing, I was with a bunch of young people recently. They all went out to coffee, I went along with them, and everyone ordered a latte of some sort, and I pulled out a five dollar bill and I got a couple of bucks back. They all pulled out their ATM cards, without exception. And they paid with their ATM cards.

DB:
I’ll tell you the credit cards today are really hurting our kids. We did these shows with Oprah and we did makeovers on six different couples, and one of the couples had $35,000 in credit card debt. And we actually...it was a young couple in their early 30’s. We actually got them to cut their credit cards up on camera. And the 4-year-old daughter, who was as they say out of the camera shot, came running in and when she saw her mom cutting up the credit cards she started crying. Four years old, because our kids think that money comes from a piece of plastic. And what they don’t see is the pain that that can create in your life, because what it creates is families that live paycheck to paycheck.

And so the book of “The Automatic Millionaire,” is how do we get out of that paycheck to paycheck living and start paying ourselves first, but also start giving some of that money back. Whether you give that money back to God, religion, church, charity that you give some of what you bring in back. It’s so important.

RAS:
And you talk about the society being, really encouraging people to be go-getters.

DB:
Yeah, we’re raised to be go-getters.

RAS:
You know, really motivated. I mean I was raised that way. My possibility thinking family. If you’ve got the power, you know, if you’ve got the will, God’s got the power and just do it. And you take it a step further from go-getting to go giving.

DB:
I actually and visually heard this from John Templeton, a great philanthroper. And he said, “The world is about giving.” We’re raised to be go-getters, but we need to be go-givers. And I just think that there’s a great truth in that. And what we see when you actually study the rich, I’ve been raised with a family of financial advisors, if you go out and you study what they call high net worth individuals, people who have over a 10 million dollar net worth. If you look for a common link, the only common link you can find among really wealthy people is that they gave money at a very young age before they became rich. And when you look at research you see two things: people who give more money, money that comes in they give pro-actively. They become wealthier and they live longer.

Someone says there’s a magic pill to living longer, or being wealthy what would it be? You would tithe. Now the great truth is that you shouldn’t tithe just because you’re hoping to live longer and be wealthier. But the great truth is that if you give, the moment you give you open yourself up to the world of unlimited abundance. And we see it time and time again on any income level, whether it’s a dollar a day, 5 dollars a day, a hundred dollars a day. When you give automatically you start to get more.

RAS: Talk about giving automatically. What’s the difference between giving periodically and giving automatically?

DB: Well, it’s the same thing with savings. If you try to get to the end of the year and then save money, the realistic is you get to the end of the year and there’s no money to save. I mean just that’s what happens. Right? Have you all experienced this? You get to the end of the year, you get through the holidays and you haven’t any money to save. That’s why people don’t save money. So we see that the only way people really save money is when they save automatically.

Now let’s go to giving. When you’re asked to give at the end of the year, which is so often when we’re asked to give. And again it’s the same problem. So how do you give throughout the year, you give automatically. You earn money every two weeks. The best way to give, in my opinion, choose a number and set it up to give automatically. So your money comes right from your checking account directly to the charity of your choice, every two weeks when you get paid. That way as money comes in, money goes back out. Tithing is really about giving a percentage of what comes in back out. It’s not about being asked to give and then write a check. It’s about doing it pro-actively.

RAS:
So that’s what you do like that?

DB:
That is what I do. And we give a percentage of the revenue of our company in addition to personal. So that it just comes in goes out. Comes in goes out.

You shouldn’t actually have to think about your giving. Your giving should be made automatically. But so should your savings. And as you said, when you save more, you’re positioned to give more. So if we could get everybody around the world to both save automatically and give automatically, we’d make the world a better place.

RAS:
I like that a lot. This is not your first time in the Crystal Cathedral, is it?

DB:
No, I told you this is an amazing story. My grandmother who’s been my mentor throughout my life, in 1990 I went to visit my grandmother. Leisure World, California. I went to school at USC and I drive all the way down there and all of this traffic and I get there and my grandmother says ‘I’m going to take you somewhere. I have a surprise for you.’ I go, ‘okay where are we going?’ We get in the car, we’re driving, we’re driving, we’re driving. ‘Grandma, are we going to Disneyland? You know I’m a senior in college, where are we going?’ She says, ‘no you’ll see when we get there.’ And we drive up and we drive to the church. I go, ‘grandma, it’s a church.’ She says, ‘yeah, I know come on in. Wait till you see this place.’ I said, ‘grandma, we’re Jewish.’ ‘What are we going to a church for?’ She says ‘you’ll understand when you get here.’

So we start coming through the church and I said “I don’t understand.’ She says, ‘David, God is everywhere. God is in this church. God doesn’t just show up at temple, He’s everywhere and God is showing up in this church.’ And we weren’t here on the day of the service so we got to do the whole tour and I just told Dr. Schuller here we did the tour of your.. it wasn’t the big brand new building you have here, but I got to see the whole tour of how this church was built and I was given two books and one of the books was yours. And he had written a book, I don’t remember what the title was but it was a book on financial planning. And so I read your father’s book in 1990 on financial planning, before I ever thought I would be doing this. So, to be back here 14 years later, is just an incredible thing. I know my grandmother’s watching from up in heaven today and she told me before I got there that I better make sure I leave you guys with a check. I was here 14 years ago with my grandmother.

RAS:
Thank you. So, how is your relationship with God influenced what you’re doing today?

DB:
It’s really been the whole path. I don’t tell this story a lot but I was a financial advisor for 9 years. I was a senior vice president of Morgan Stanley and at 30 I was making over a million dollars a year in income. And I was making that money working with really wealthy people. So I was sitting in an office with a client of mine, who was self made. Saved six million dollars and I was helping them get their dividend checks in Europe, on vacation because they were going to go travel for six months. You know I had, I don’t know if you ever had an out of body experience, but I sort of had that out of body experience where I looked down at myself doing this meeting and I heard the question: is God going to be proud of you 20 years from now or 30 years from now or 40 years from now when you meet Him, hopefully, and you say well I helped 50 rich people during their lifetime manage their money. Or does God want you to go teach other people, millions of people, about how to do this. And I went home that day and I said to my wife, I don’t think I can keep doing this job. I think I need to go and.. and I had written two books but I said I think I need to go write full time. And there wasn’t money in writing books by the way. And my wife said David I want you to be happy. If you think you need to go do this, let’s go do it. And “The Automatic Millionaire” book truthfully, the vision for that book came to me after I read a book called “The Prayer of Jabez,” which I’m sure a lot of you have read. And I went for a walk on the beach and I said what do I do with this? And I heard, go help ten million people with this message. Go free ten million people.

And the chapter on tithing, the book was finished. But it didn’t feel finished and I had a dream that what needed to go in the back of the book was tithing. And I woke up at five in the morning and I went to my computer and I had to research tithing because it wasn't something I had been really heard a lot about growing up. And I went and did all the research and I was at the computer for eight hours and my wife comes in and what are you doing? And I’m still in my robe, I said, I’m putting a chapter in this book on tithing. And I gave the book to my publisher and they said you’re a money guy. You’re not supposed to put a chapter in your book on tithing. I said no I feel like it has to go here. And I think that that came from God.

RAS:
I absolutely know it came from God. There’s no question. And God ordained you to do that. And you’ve done it and we want to say thank you. Thank you for teaching people how to manage their money and most importantly how to give their money.