Episode 36: Abundance On Every Level: Creating Wealth And Cultivating Happiness With Thomas Tadlock
If you think about the ideal life, what would it be? Financial freedom, a happy family, great health, and the ability to give back just about covers it. That is the life Thomas Tadlock is living. Thomas is the author of Miracle Metabolism and co-founder of the Goodbye Lupus disease reversal platform, who managed to go from broke to multimillionaire in just a few years. He shares the inspiring story of how he started his business which has helped not only his wife but thousands of others as well. Thomas also talks about how he has planted seeds to become financially stable and valuable tips on how to live abundantly.
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Abundance On Every Level: Creating Wealth And Cultivating Happiness With Thomas Tadlock
Exponentially Scaling Happiness From Being Broke To Multimillion-Dollar Wealth Creation
Have you ever thought about what it would be like to live in absolute abundance on every level of your life? Having it all, being financially free, having the relationship and family life of your dreams, flowing in happiness and electric health, contributing positively to the lives of thousands of people, and having the freedom to choose how you want to spend every second of your life. Our guest is one of the most inspirational human beings I've ever met. He's going to tell us how he went from broke to millionaire and how to set up the life of your dreams. Meet Thomas Tadlock. He is the Founder of SmoothieShred.com, Cofounder of GoodbyeLupus.com, bestselling author of Miracle Metabolism and Corporate Wellness Trainer. He holds a Master's Degree in Exercise Science & Health Promotion and holds eight national fitness and health certifications. He is an internationally recognized trainer, educator and has authored the weight loss programs behind the hit TV show, The Biggest Loser. Together with his wife, Brooke Goldner, MD, he has helped countless clients rid themselves of autoimmune diseases with the leading disease reversal platform perhaps on the planet. Thomas, how are you doing? Welcome.
I'm doing great. It's wonderful despite all the COVID and the lockdown stuff, life couldn't be better.
It's been a while. It's been years since we last spoke. I'm excited to share the story of your life with our entire audience and then also find out what's new in your life. I know so much has changed since we last spoke. Let me ask you a question. What does living a limitless life mean to you?
I don't know if I've given it any meaning but I am living what I would consider a limitless life. Opportunities don't seem to stop coming in. The level of happiness I feel every single day seems to have no bounds. The amount of freedom that I have, the satisfaction that I get from my business, what I'm doing for people as a contribution to the world, and the relationship that I have with my family is unbelievable and it feels limitless. That would be the best way to ever describe it. I never exactly thought about that question before but I feel pretty damn blessed with everything that I've managed to create for my life.
That’s a beautiful inspiring story. To understand where you are, let's go into your background. Tell us a little bit about growing up, family life and how you got to the place you are now.
I've thought about this. I remember a long time ago when I tell my business story. It started all the way back in 2009 in October. That was the most broke that I've ever been. I was trying to be successful and be financially secure for my family but I was never trained how to do it. I was a personal trainer at the time. I remember working at a gym. I was so excited. I had a nice little gig going. There was a gym right by my house. My wife was doing her residency at Harbor-UCLA. That means she was a doctor in training making minimum wage for a doctor, but I had a great little thing going. I had a little fitness gig. It was my own little business. I made a relationship with the gym. I got to train all the newbies that came in. I had a good thing going. The best thing and the worst thing in my life happened at the same time. We got pregnant and we had our first baby.
While I was at the hospital for a week, the owners of the gym found another trainer that was willing to work for less money than me. They made a business decision. They brought in this new trainer and they let me go. We've got a new baby and my wife decided to take maternity leave without pay. I no longer have a source of income. This was scary. I didn't know exactly what to do. I had signed a non-compete. I couldn't train in that area. I couldn't train those clients. I took a shot at starting a business. At the time, this whole concept of doing fitness bootcamps was popular. I thought, "I can do this. I'm a good personal trainer. I could figure out how to do the bootcamp thing." I signed a lease with a local gymnastics center and I thought, "I'm going to crush this business."
I went out and started calling up people that I knew and inviting them to be part of my bootcamp. Long story short, after about 8.5 months, I was expecting to have hundreds of members that were going to more than meet the previous income that I had and maybe exceed that. I thought I had made a good decision because I could teach two classes, work 2 to 3 hours a day, and make the same as if I were a full-time personal trainer. None of that happened. I was working 8 to 11 hours a day because I was trying to hustle to convince people to join my bootcamp. At the same time, pay the rent and do better. After 8.5 months of hustling, I probably had only about fourteen clients. When you're getting only $75 per client living in Orange County, California, that wasn't even enough to pay the rent. This was bad. I was losing money pretty quickly. Brooke still hadn't got paid yet and hasn't got back to work.
We're in a bad situation. We had to file for unemployment. We had to file for anything we could get like disability to be able to survive and it still wasn't enough. We got this close to being completely wiped out in terms of our savings, which meant that we weren't going to be able to pay rent soon. We were going to be in big trouble if I didn't do something quickly. That's when I finally went to a business success seminar for the first time in my life. I have never been to one of those before. I know you have because that's where we met at one of those. You go there and you learn some stuff but they say, "If you want to learn the real stuff to learn how to be successful and get rich, you're going to have to buy the big program that costs five figures." It was the craziest decision I ever made because I had no money. Why would I do something like that? I signed up for it. I bought the whole damn thing.
Luckily for me, I was able to use the information I was being taught and make it work. Everything that was being taught to me was legit. I put it all into practice. Within two years, I became good at business, marketing, investing, managing myself, managing my time, being less of a pussy when it came to hustling in business. In two years, I turned my entire bootcamp business around and went from 14 members to over 1,500 members. I expanded to six locations. I became, at the time, one of the largest indoor fitness bootcamps in Orange County. Shortly after that, I was able to sell the business because we wanted freedom. I also learn how to invest. If I sold the business, I can take the profits. I knew exactly how to invest that in a number of different things including real estate. I could keep making the same amount of money but without having to have a bootcamp business.
Financial Freedom: We got to figure out what we did because it wasn’t just a miracle. There is something we did to create this.
That's what I did. I sold the business. I put the money into investments. That's when I purchased a bunch of real estates. I launched my real estate business out of Austin, Texas. That was a good move because that was late 2011 when the market there was at the absolute bottom. I started buying and flipping houses. I turned my fitness business into an online business. I use the same skills to help my wife. She had a psychiatric practice. I turned that into an online business. We eventually turned that into an online disease reversal business. Taking what we did there way back in 2012, we were able to scale that to what it is now. We have a multimillion-dollar business combined with all the different streams of income that we have.
When we first met, you were in one position where you were able to sell your practice, working inactively, all your time and effort is going into these bootcamps, sold that and then went into a more passive stream. It freed up your time and where you are now years later. Tell us a little bit about the transition.
A lot of this I learned while I was taking these courses. I had never heard of passive income until I started taking business courses. I remember one of the courses I took was talking about how to create your own passive income streams with digital information products. I thought that is so smart. I teach people how to get fit every single day, why don't I turn that into education that is digital and that people can consume? That's what I started doing. I started digitizing my workouts, creating little fat loss programs, muscle building programs, turning them into video courses, online electronic PDFs. I put them up for sale, and people started buying them. Right out the gate, my very first information product started earning me an extra $500 to $1,000 every single month.
I still have that product. It's still making me money. I thought this is amazing because I thought about when I was doing the worst on my bootcamp. That was how much money I was making when I was hustling and begging people to join my bootcamp every single day. Meanwhile, I create a little information product that I put zero time into once I put it up on a website and it's generating the same amount of money for me each month. I'm like, "Why don't I do more of that?" That was my first taste of passive income. I started creating lots of different digital information products. I got a lot better at doing that. I started helping my wife doing the same thing. That led to going into books to increase our cashflow coming in from passive income through digital products. I then started getting into real estate.
Another thing that I learned in this business course and investing course is how to invest in real estate. The problem was I didn't exactly have the money or know how to get access to the money that I needed to start investing in real estate. Once I started doing well with my bootcamp business, I started saving a lot more money and suddenly, I had my own capital. I had the funds to start investing. I remember buying three homes in three months while I was living in a small little 700 square foot piece of crap apartment in Southern California. I bought three-bedroom, two-bath houses in the Austin, Texas area, right at the absolute bottom of their real estate market. It’s the best real estate moves I've ever made. I bought those houses and I rented out two of them. I renovated and got them ready to be rented out. I found renters immediately.
The profit that I was making from those two houses paid for the mortgage on the third house. What we eventually did was, “Since we've got a house that's being paid for, let's move into that house.” That's when we moved from Southern California to Austin, Texas. We're living rent or housing cost-free because we've got two passive income streams paying for the third one. That was how it all started. What's great is the process that I use to acquire those three houses, I kept doing that. That's what helped me go from having a small little portfolio of houses to a multimillion-dollar portfolio of houses.
You mentioned your wife a couple of times. Knowing you, I know how much she means to you. When you find this type of relationship in life, it changes the dynamic and your destiny. Can you tell us a little bit about how you met and how you grew through the years together?
Brooke went to the same college that I did. We both went to Carnegie Mellon University. I remember seeing Brooke. I couldn't help but notice her. She was beautiful. I remember in college, she dated someone that was at our next-door neighbor's fraternity. She would sometimes cross our lawn at our fraternity house. I admire her every single day that she did that but we didn't talk much. We weren't friends. I knew her because the woman that I dated was in the same sorority as her. That's how we knew of each other but it wasn't until after college that we were at a bar randomly. It's a Thursday night. We never went out. I was a personal trainer at the time. I stayed totally clean all the time but a friend needed some company so I went to meet him out.
She happened to be out at the same bar on a date with somebody who didn't work out. We saw each other and she said, "Do I know you from somewhere?" I was like, "Yes. I know you because I dated your sorority sister." We sat down and we started chatting. All I remember is we chatted for the rest of the night, laughing, reminiscing and telling stories. I thought she was the coolest person I ever met in my life. That's what sparked an intense friendship, which turned into the most amazing relationship in my life. It was very clear after a few weeks that this woman was my soulmate, hands down. She felt the same way about me. Ever since then, we have been glued together, spending every minute we possibly can. We have two kids. We live in Houston together. We've designed our lives. Both of our businesses are at home so we can maximize the amount of time that we spend with each other. We're so happy spending all of our time together.
How we've grown? A lot of people ask us this. They ask us advice like, "How do you keep the relationship on a high level? How do you keep the fun going? How do you keep the love?" For us, it hasn't taken any effort. The only way I can describe it is when I met Brooke, I was a whole person myself. When I compare my relationship with Brooke versus my relationship with anybody else, I wasn't exactly a whole person. I was still insecure. I still had areas and aspects of my life that was broken. When I was in a relationship, I was choosing people and attracting people that saw those weaknesses in me. I saw how they could fulfill those areas in me and created these relationships where I was a little bit dependent on them. After being in a long, bad relationship, I broke free of that and decided I'm going to work on myself and what I want. I'm not going to do the relationship thing maybe for a long time.
Financial Freedom: That trained us to do was to take whatever we've got and make the most of it. All of this abundance and freedom and money and stuff like that – it's just gravy which just amplifies our level of happiness.
I focused on what fulfilled me and what I wanted out of life. That was working on my business, doing a job, which was personal training, which I got so much fulfillment, helping people achieve their dreams and goals, and focusing on the love of my friendships and my family. I got so involved with that. I wasn't dating anybody. I was totally single but I was so fulfilled. I remember being so happy that I told a friend, "I could die now. I was so happy.” I could die with no regrets, not needing to marry or have anybody. I have so much happiness with the quality of my friendships and my family. I was able to talk to my family every single day. With my business, I was feeling very successful. Even though I wasn't making a lot of money, I was so successful. I had my own business. I was helping people. It felt amazing.
Brooke was in a very similar boat. She had got accepted to the residency of her dreams. She's a medical doctor. It was a dream that she's always had. All she wanted out of life was happiness and fulfillment. She had achieved all those things. Two whole people coming together meant that our relationship needed nothing from the other person. There was nothing I needed from her. There was nothing she needed from me. All we did was add value to each other's lives but not in a way that was needed. We grew a beautiful relationship from that because we didn't need anything from the other. It's been pure bliss and happiness. It has been effortless.
The way you interact, everyone in the room can see it. There's so much love every time you look at each other's eyes. I've seen you on stage together. I've seen you personally when we're at dinner. It's incredible. I know you went through a challenge in terms of a health problem that she was going through. Can you share a little bit about the story with that?
That's our famous story. We've been featured in documentaries over this story. When Brooke and I fell in love, I remember it was fast. It went quickly. Three weeks into the relationship, we looked at each other deep in our eyes, and she said, "I'm madly in love with you. We got to keep this going." I said, "You're right. We can't let this end. This is too wonderful. Let's talk about getting married." She hesitated there and she said, "Are you sure you want to marry me?" I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "I haven't brought this up with you but I need to let you know that I have a disease. It's called lupus. It's a terrible disease. It means that by my late 30s, early 40s tops, I'm probably going to be dead. I'll never be able to have your children because if I get pregnant, pregnancies and childbirth usually kill people that have my disease. They usually take out the baby with it. Way before my late 30s, I'm going to be physically disabled. This disease is going to attack my body in a way that it's going to make it difficult, if not impossible for me to move. If you marry me, you're going to be the one having to take care of me."
I almost thought it was so outrageous to me. I never heard of this disease before but the fact that I meet the love of my life, my soulmate, and I find out that she's going to start getting destroyed physically and be dead, I only have ten years with her and then she's going to be gone, I thought this was the cruelest joke the universe has ever played on me. I was devastated inside. My heart shattered. I remember pausing in a mental state of limbo right there going, "What the hell is going on?" What a lot of people don't know about me is I had a best friend that died of testicular cancer. He died a few years before I met Brooke. It was a very similar situation. He was my buddy that saw me and knew me inside and out. I had never felt safer with anybody. We had so many plans to do so many things together. I remember getting a call one day with him informing that he's got testicular cancer and he was going to beat it. He was going to be fine. He was getting chemotherapy and all that stuff.
A couple of weeks later, I got an email saying that he's no longer with us. It killed me inside. I felt this was happening all over again. She's my favorite person in the world and I find out I'm going to lose her. I felt so much anger but I said I don't care. I would rather live a short life with Brooke than a lifetime with anybody else. If it's going to be a short life, it's going to be the best life she's ever had. I said, "I want to marry you. Let's get married. Let's make it the best life we possibly can." She was shocked. She couldn't believe it. Her dream was to always wear a white coat but she never thought that she would ever be able to wear a white dress because of this disease. Who would want to marry someone with lupus? I was so in love with Brooke. If you meet Brooke, you'll understand why. She's amazing and the greatest person I've ever known so we got married.
She said, "Since you're Mr. Fitness Guy, I want to get in the best shape of my life." Brooke was a vegetarian and I had never worked with a vegetarian before. I would usually put people on my standard, get ripped quick diet and workout plan. I put Brooke through my workout plan. It was high intense training, 1 to 1.5 hours every single day. The nutrition plan resembles modern-day paleo. She's vegetarian so I had to get rid of all of the animal-based proteins. We switched that with plant sources like soybeans, tofu, so on and so forth. Here's what happened. After about 90 days, Brooke got in the most insane shape of her life. She was ripped, lean and strong. She had never been more fit in her life. She looked amazing for all of our Hawaii wedding photos.
We get back to the mainland in Southern California. She gets her blood work done with a new set of doctors because we moved from Pittsburgh to California. The lab work comes up negative for lupus. Lupus, according to Western medicine, is an incurable disease. For the lab work to show there's no trace or evidence of lupus, it would only mean that the lab must have messed up. They must have got her blood mixed with somebody else's or they must have accidentally put her name on somebody else's test results. That's the only conclusion that any of the doctors could come up with. That made sense. You can't cure this disease so why would it show? She had lupus. She was diagnosed with lupus at a very young age when she was a child. She had to go through two years of aggressive chemotherapy to put her immune system into a weakened state so that this disease could go into a form of remission. She had to shoot herself with these medications every day to keep blood clots from forming in her brain.
What they did was they said, "We need to order you another set of labs so we can get this done." She did. A month later, she got a new set of blood work. The results came in totally negative for lupus. In fact, the doctor is like, "Your blood work is showing zero traces of lupus. Your health looks like the health of an elite athlete. I have no idea why you're even here. What's going on?" She didn't have it anymore. Long story short, we realized we have a gift on our hands. This lupus has gone. We were able to have two children that were supposed to bring lupus back and kill her. None of that happened. Our kids have been healthy. Brooke has never been healthier. We realized this is amazing. We got to figure out what we did. It wasn't just a miracle. There is something we did to create this. It happened to be the diet that I had created for her. It happened to be the most anti-inflammatory diet you could put somebody on.
We had to spend over 1.5 years reverse-engineering it to figure out that that's what was going. What Brooke and I did was decided that we got to give this gift to the world. I used my business training skills to turn this into a product that people can consume and learn. We made books, digital products, and coaching programs. We started testing it out on people with lupus and it started reversing their lupus. We partnered with The Lupus Foundation and we started reversing their member's lupus. It was unheard of. Nobody ever had done anything like this before.
Financial Freedom: People don't live as if they're there on this planet for a short period of time. They live like they've got all the time in the world and they don't really have to go after their dreams anytime soon.
This is where we birthed this beautiful, amazing disease reversal business out of this. We created a bestselling book. We're featured in documentaries. We decided to build a business model. We've got lives at stake here. What we're going to do is we're going to design this in a way where we're going to give the information away 100% for free. We created a protocol. We put our name on the protocol and gave it away to the general public. Thousands of people have been able to reverse their autoimmune disease using our protocol without having to pay as it's done. The only thing we'll charge for is if you try to use the protocol yourself and you can't figure out how to do it right. Maybe you need some additional coaching so we charged for coaching and support. That by itself has turned into a seven-figure a year business. That's our love story from the beginning to where it is now.
It's the power of love and belief. When a doctor tells somebody, "You have this. This is your diagnosis," then if somebody has a little bit of belief or they have something to look forward to, whether it's love, it's something moving forward, or a new career, you can automatically find a solution for everything as long as you don't give up and not listening to people's limiting beliefs on you that they're projecting. It's so beautiful to hear that story. Every time I hear it, tears come to my eyes. Also, when I heard it years ago, it inspired me so much because I knew what I wanted to do in my life in terms of creating a wellness center but after hearing that story, I was like, "What is my excuse for not moving forward and trying to make this a reality? One day when I have the money, resources, and a team." Along with a few other realizations that came to me, that put everything in perspective in life.
People that you've talked to years ago are still talking to you and telling you, "How much of an impact you've had on my life." It's the same with me. I tell people about the SmoothieShred all the time. Going through your program helped me in so many ways. I had a lot of issues like skin issues and eczema. I had a lot of dark circles under my eyes. I felt lethargic all the time. Ever since meeting you, I still do the smoothies every single day. It's religious for me. Who would have thought food is medicine? When you put the right things into your body and get into the right alignment then our life force or energy is going to be abundant.
Let me also bring up a couple of things. When the doctors told her that she was going to live, it wasn't like we were saying, "Screw you, doctors. I don't believe what you're saying." We totally believed what they were saying. Brooke herself went to med school. She's a medical doctor so she trusts Western medicine. In fact, Western medicine is what saved her life. When she originally got full-blown lupus, it started attacking her kidneys. She was in full-blown kidney failure. The treatments that she received saved her life but they didn't heal the disease. It kept her alive. She's so grateful for that. Instead of denying the information we were given or the opinions we were given from the doctors, we went all-in with taking as much value from the advice as possible. We were told, "Brooke has got a very short period to live." How do we react? We said, "If it's going to be a short life, we got to make this the highest quality life possible. We got to live to our fullest."
Brooke and I went on the most amazing adventures together. We overspent all the money we made, which was very little but we did it for the sake of having experiences and memories. What it did for us was it taught us how to treasure life and live it to its fullest with whatever money or no money that we had. We were so poor when we got together. There was a period of life where it was scary. I had a bootcamp business that failed. I had a personal training business that failed for a while. She was making no income. The idea that she was going to be dead soon, what that trained us to do was to take whatever we've got and make the most of it. That was where we started before we built all of our wealth, our money and our lives together.
We always are living from that state of being so happy and fulfilled with nothing. With all of this abundance, freedom, money and stuff like that, it's just gravy and bonus, which amplifies our level of happiness. What I see so many people do is that they don't live as if they're on this planet for a short period of time. They live like they've got all the time in the world and they don't have to go after their dreams anytime soon. They're going to somehow have all the time of eternity to be able to do that. We didn't do that. A lot of people are suffering from dissatisfaction and not being happy. Money doesn't solve those problems. You got to learn how to be happy with nothing like truly fulfilled and happy with nothing so that when you do have the money, it makes it amazing.
You hear the opposite story so many times where somebody is not happy. They get a lot of money and they have even more problems. They get into bad relationships, lose all their money, spent it on things that are outside of themselves rather than focusing on inward. A lot of this stuff that we went through in self-development, a lot of stuff that you teach in your training courses is all about that internal happiness plus the physical good health, and then you can grow from there in abundance. Let's move into a little bit about you becoming a trainer and educator for all things in life, the whole circle of life that you encompass in your teachings. Tell us a little bit about how you became a trainer and where you are now with it.
When I was deep into all of these business courses, I implemented everything I learned the minute that I learned it. I wasted no time. Being married to a woman that I was going to have a short life with, what that trained me to do is to not waste any time going after your dreams, as in zero time. The moment I learned something that was going to solve a problem for me, business problem and money problem, I went all in implementing it right away. I did that and I got results quickly. I started increasing my success in my business. It took exactly 25 months for me to go from totally broke to being completely financially free and being able to retire from my business.
I was asked to be a trainer because I was a poster child of all of these business courses. The company that put on all these courses were like, "Thomas, you're like a poster child for us. Would you mind teaching our courses? They think you'd be a perfect trainer. You went through the program. You succeeded in it. You're like a living example." I said, "I'll do it." That's how it all started. They put me through training. It took three years for me to earn the right to be able to train on stage and teach their courses. It was the most satisfying work that I had ever done. I had this healing business, which was so fulfilling and gratifying but I made Brooke the face of that. It makes more sense for Brooke to be the face of that business as a patient who became a doctor who is now the person teaching it. That makes more sense versus the random husband personal trainer that accidentally created this diet protocol. It was less appealing.
What I did was I started teaching people how to create financial freedom. That was so much more satisfying because that was my personal pain too. Being broke is the scariest thing besides inevitably losing your spouse, being broke to the point where I had to worry if my family was going to be homeless soon. That was terrifying to me. I wanted to help people either avoid that or pull them out of that situation if they were in it. That was amazing. I started teaching success principles and wealth principles. I started teaching investing and business. I loved it so much that I took every opportunity that they gave me. They had a lot of opportunities. They were doing a gig in some city in the United States every week to two weeks. I did that all the way up until the COVID lockdowns.
Financial Freedom: Where you started from is what made you who you are today. If you're in a much higher level in life, go ahead and invest a little bit of time and effort to reach down and help pull others up.
What's so telling about that is you had the freedom to do that. If you were involved in other businesses, actively doing these things, rather than passive income streams, real estate investing, you would not have had the opportunity to go out and influence more lives. Getting to that place of becoming financially free, you can only teach that if you become it.
I'm telling you that it was so funny. It paid squat. The amount that you got for pay is so low but I didn't care. I just loved being able to teach this to people. What would happen is I teach them something and they're like, "What you taught me was the missing piece in my head that I needed that has been holding me back in my business." I used to be that person where I didn't know how to be successful in business. I would learn a few key techniques, methods or principles that were mind-blowing. I was able to implement it the very next day, make more money and get results. I wanted to be the person to do that for the people sitting in the chair. It didn't matter to me what I got paid. All I cared about was as long as it doesn't cost me money and it doesn't inconvenience me too much, then I am all game. I could do this all day long. That's what I did. It was addicting for me. It was gratifying for me because I felt like I was making a difference to help people with something that I struggled with.
You've accomplished so much. How old are you? Are you in your early 40s?
Somebody asked me how old I was. It was 1976 so I'm going to be 45 in September 2021.
You look like you're 30. It takes a lifetime to achieve what you've achieved. Knowing everything you've gone through, experiencing all of it and having this success, what's next for you? What are you planning on doing with the second half of your life?
I took an inventory of where I was in my business, my net worth, and all that stuff. I've been pretty pedal to the metal for quite some time, especially during the lockdown. I had to do a lot of shifts during the lockdowns. I have several businesses. I have a real estate investing business. We have an online fitness business. We have an online disease reversal business. I've been going all-in on trying to build up the businesses that had the opportunity to thrive during the lockdowns and the shutdowns. What's going on with COVID is unprecedented. It's hard to know or predict what's going to happen to the world economies. A lot of things have changed and shifted against what everybody predicted was going to happen. I need to bulletproof my life. I'd done well but I wanted to make sure I continue doing well even during a pandemic.
I've been focusing on building our online businesses. They've skyrocketed in terms of success. Real estate has taken a weird term. I was thinking real estate was going to have this big crash so I went into liquidation mode. We've been in a seller's market and said, "I can't lose if I sell off everything. If there's a crash, I’ll just rebuy everything I want to snatch up for pennies on the dollar." Things have been shifting around. Once I got to the tail end of that, I looked at how well I'm doing. I realized, "I could pretty much cruise all the way until the end." I've been taking it easy. I don't have any big aspirations other than to keep what I've got going. I've got a good thing going. I've got several millions in assets. We're seven-figure a year earners. We're in the top 1% of earners in the country. Life is good.
We're closing on our dream home. Things are fantastic. I feel blessed. I love what's going on. I don't have any dying desire to do more but here's what's great. The way I've set everything up is that I'm going to get more, whether I like it or not. I've set up all of my businesses in a way where I can't stop them from growing. Life is fantastic. What's coming to me is all of the hard work that I've put in over the years is coming to fruition. That means I planted seeds deep into the ground many years ago and we have been able to harvest big time.
The fact that you've done everything that you've done and so happy with where you are. It’s not like you’re going, "I need to become a millionaire." That will come if you continue doing the things that you're doing. Everybody has to work hard these days. You could either work hard 30 years, 40 years at a job and then be over broke after paying taxes and paying all your expenses or you can invest for the future. It's investing in your relationships, health and passive income streams. You show everybody this is a way to do it. You're showing people that you don't have to slave away at something. In your mid-40s, you can get to a place where you're very satisfied. Everything is running on auto mode. You get to spend more time with your kids and your wife and create from the heart rather than creating from scarcity, "I need to make this money in order to pay for my lifestyle."
I'll tell you one thing that I did early on. I'm so glad that I did it. The primary driver for wanting to build a business and have a successful business had not much to do with having lots of wealth. What it was for me was security. That was all I wanted. I used to think that the path to security was to get a good job. You go up the corporate ladder. You progressively increase your income but you do it in a nice and secure way where it's virtually guaranteed. I had a job as a personal trainer. That was what my path was. I was making a little more every single year. I was becoming more and more of an asset to the company. I was climbing it up. I was going from making five figures. Eventually, I was going to make six figures, which to me was the most money I've ever even heard of making in my life. I was more than thrilled with that. It had afforded me a great lifestyle but I got laid off and fired because the company itself went under.
That shattered my dreams of using a nice corporate job to give me the security that I need. I realized this is a big fitness company and they went under. I thought, "Nobody is immune to bad economic conditions." Just because you have a job doesn't mean you can't lose it. That scared me. That shifted my whole perspective. I thought, "I can't rely on another company to give me that security that I want. I have to create it myself." That's why I've structured my businesses the way they are. I have so many different streams of a lot of income where I have it set up where anyone stream can pay for my entire lifestyle for the rest of my life. I have a large moat of safety and security for myself. Another thing that I did was I realized another way to feel secure was if I reduced my expenses super low. That makes me even more secure automatically because it costs so little for me to live a decent and happy lifestyle. I did those two things. I focused on being happy with very little money and then I focused on creating as many different income streams as I possibly could and building those up so that they themselves are nice big income streams.
I remember a couple of years ago when I heard one of your talks with Brooke. You were like, "We lived on $50,000 a year, two kids in an apartment in Orange County, one of the most expensive areas in the world and we were happy. Anytime we need to go back to that, if we do go back to that, we'll still be happy."
It's true. I wrote it all out right here. I was like, "I had to take another inventory of that." I remember before I took a good look at I had to get my finances in order and how to build my business right, our monthly expenses came out to under $8,000 a month. That's a lot and that's pretty much what we were making after taxes. There was no surplus money every month. I made a big change. We slashed our expenses in half. I remember the first run through all of that. We got to the point where Brooke, me and our two children could live happily off of $3,890 per month. With that amount of income, we do multiple times that with just our book sales from Amazon alone. Our Amazon books could sustain that lifestyle perpetually for the rest of our lives if we wanted to. My real estate rental income pays for that many times over. Two streams of income completely pay for that baseline of lifestyle but I didn't stop there because I realized I can figure out more ways to eliminate or reduce expenses without a reduction in lifestyle.
When we moved to Austin, that's when I did the little trick with the houses. I buy three houses and live in one of them. That's the same strategy that people take when they get a duplex. They rent out 1/2 of the duplex and then live in the other. It’s the same strategy. It's just three different units. It's the same thing. I got two houses that are paying for the third. That wiped out our living expenses. We moved to Austin and it was great. Our monthly expenses came out to $2,400 a month. Can you imagine? All you need to do is somehow pull together $2,400 a month, live very happily and very comfortably. Here's what happened. We're in Austin living off of only $2,400 a month. Our income skyrocketed as a result of that. There was no more pressure to have to make a ton of money. For some reason, it's taking the pressure off of our shoulders of having to make a lot of money.
Before we lived in California the first time, we somehow have to figure out how to come up with $8,000 a month. That was a lot of pressure versus only having to come up with $2,400 a month. The pressure is gone. We lost everything and I had to rebuild back. We got to a comfortable state at $5,000 a month. We were making $5,000 a month. It was costing $4,000 a month to do that when I was in California. We went from $5,000 to about $15,000 a month. When we then moved to Austin, we reduced our expenses down to $2,400 a month. That's what took us from $15,000 coming in a month to over $30,000 a month, still only living off of $2,400 a month. This is the key to what's made us very wealthy. When we were bringing in $30,000 a month, we were only spending $2,400 a month. We had over $25,000 coming in every month that was surplus money. I could use it for anything I wanted. What I did was I aggressively invested every dime of that.
I put it into stocks. I used it to buy more real estate. I got to the point where I was buying 5 to 10 properties a month because I had the cash. It was great because I could invest it. I knew in 30 days, all of those are coming right back. I see a lot of people, what they do is they spend all their lives. They save one little pile of money. Their set-up means it's not going to be rebuilt. It's gone if they invest it. They lose and they're wiped out, whereas I'm investing an amount of money that is getting replenished the very next month. These amounts started getting bigger. We moved to Houston. We went from $30,000 to $50,000 and then from $50,000 to over six figures every single month. The size of my investments got bigger, which meant the size of my rewards and the payoffs got bigger.
I learned how to invest in a way where no matter what I invested in, my risk was always teeny-tiny. It was very difficult for me to lose. If I ever did lose, which I've had some losing investments though my total loss was very small. We're talking 1% at the most every now and again on whatever I put into it. My risk was always small. My rewards were always big. I kept multiplying the size of my investments. That's what took me by the time we moved to Texas where my net worth was right around $50,000 or so when you pay off all of the mortgages versus all the money. It’s maybe $50,000 net worth to millions of net worth from that little strategy alone. Keep your expenses low and invest every single dime of all of your monthly surplus aggressively.
You're teaching people how to do this, right?
Yeah. It's an easy concept to get. It doesn't require a course to teach it. Get your expenses down to next to nothing. Eat crap for a couple of years knowing that you're doing that so you've got the money to invest to create the life of your dreams. Do you ever see rich people and judge them like, "They spent multiple six figures on a car. That's so irresponsible." I used to think that. I'd see someone driving a $200,000 car going, "What an idiot." In my mind, I'm thinking all they had was $200,000 and they blew it on the car. When I started to get to know rich people, I realized that $200,000 for them is less than the $2,000 that I put as a down payment on a piece of crap car. The $200,000 is a drop in the bucket for them. It wasn't until I had wealth myself that I realized that's what they've been doing all along. You can buy nice things and feel fine about it when it is an insignificant amount of money to you anymore. Who the hell would ever think that $200,000 was an insignificant amount of money? When you're generating that every month to every two months, it is an insignificant amount of money.
Tell us a little bit about the trainings that you have. I know you have the Facebook group, Learn From Thomas Tadlock, on some of the types of things that you're teaching.
Ever since the lockdown, I haven't been able to go and do training. I haven't been able to teach a seminar or give a talk anywhere. During the COVID lockdown, I was going crazy because I didn't realize how much I needed to keep doing that in my life. I decided, for fun, I'm going to start a Facebook group. I started recording training on topics of investing in a business like teaching people skills that I would normally teach and that people would pay $3,000 for a ticket to come to learn. I started recording them myself and putting them up for free in my private Facebook group as a way so I could get some semblance of what it's like to be able to teach and train again. I started doing that. I created a Facebook Group called Learn From Thomas Tadlock. I made it 100% free. I put all my trainings in there. I got over 1,000 people in it. I'm doing it for nothing other than fun. It's fun for me to be able to do that. All I want is for people to learn the stuff that I use to grow my businesses. I want them to learn that and grow theirs.
The happiest thing they can do for me is simply watching the training, implement it, then tell me how kick-ass it was for them and how it made a difference in their lives. That's it. It's on Facebook. You can go to ThomasTadlock.com and get a link to it or find it on Facebook. There's no money being charged for it. I get people that say, "Thomas, I need your help." What I'm good at because this is all I've done my entire life is take people from scratch, because it's what I did for myself, to creating a profitable business. I'm good at that, especially in this day and age where knowing how to do branding, marketing right away, how to produce and deliver results are super essential. I coach people on how to do that. In those cases where my time is 100% laser-focused on you, you have to pay me for that. It's the same with investing. I love teaching people how to invest in the stock market. COVID has created an insane opportunity to increase your wealth and net worth through the stock market alone. I give people coaching on how to invest in the stock market. I include the course from my mentor who taught me how to do it as well. People pay me for those things. I help them with their businesses and investing.
Thomas, I want to thank you so much for coming on. You live from a place of abundance and heart-opening. You're sharing all your gifts with the world without expecting anything in return. Based on that, so much more abundance is coming into your life. You're creating this whirlwind of financial freedom.
Don't make me up to be like a saint or someone who's out there. It might appear that I'm doing it for the greater good of the world and asking for nothing in return but that's not the truth. I am getting a lot in return for it. Number one, I'm getting a need fulfilled. I need to be able to teach this stuff because it's part of my heart. Whenever anybody starts talking about business, I always feel compelled to jump into the conversation. I almost feel responsible to make sure that everybody is given the best techniques or doesn't leave the conversation without some gold that can make them an extra 5 or 6 figures. I feel responsible that I need to do that.
The second thing is I am charging for my time. When people hire me or work for me, they're paying for it. They're paying a lot for the time and information that I'm getting. I love doing it. It's so much fun for me. I'm so good at it because I've done it for myself over and over again several times. I don't want anybody to get the impression that I'm some sort of saint. I am not. I'm doing all of this for selfish reasons. I'm creating these trainings for me, not for you. I need you to do my training and make a lot of money from it. Believe it or not, I get off on that. That tickles me. I get a kick out of it. You're fulfilling me as much as I might be fulfilling you.
You made a post on a very interesting topic. It's on mentorship and finding the right mentors. You said something about $500 clients. There's this whole email that this person wrote to you and then $5,000 client, "Here's the money. Thanks." Do you remember that?
I remember that. I'm on Instagram a lot. I connect with a lot of people that are in the business that's successful. Somebody put up a post showing a text message comparing the difference between a client who paid $500 for a program versus a client who's being charged $5,000 for it. The $500 one wrote this whole paragraph like, "I feel like you need to satisfy my sense of security because of this potential risk that I'm taking with you. I'm entrusting my $500 with you." There’s what appears to be a lot of drama versus the $5,000 client who's like, "Give me the instructions. That's it. I don't care." Everybody was like, "Screw the $500 client. They're all drama." I disagreed with that post. I was like, "Screw you. Before I became a $5,000 client, I had to become a $500 client. I completely relate and empathize with the $500 client.”
I remember paying around $500 for a program. At that time, it was all the money I had. It was a huge amount of money for me. I had never done anything like that before. If $500 is the most I ever paid for an education program, what that means is I haven't had the experience of doing a lot of education. I don't know what to expect. It's a very scary investment because, at that time, I never put $500 towards anything in my life. That was more than my car payment. That’s what, in some cases, my rent was. That was a lot of money. Once I got to the $5,000 mark, at that point, $5,000 is a smaller amount of money to me at that level than $500 was to me. My response to all of that was, “Have some compassion for crying out loud.” I don't know about the person who wrote that post, but don't you remember what it was like to be a $500 client where you're young and vulnerable? You don't know the lay of the land. You're afraid of getting screwed over because it took a lot of effort to make that extra $500. I wanted to express my compassion.
A lot of people need to exercise more compassion towards people that aren't used to paying a lot of money for coaching and education, especially people that have maybe had the experience of getting screwed by others. There are lots of scams. I've been scammed for way more than $500. $8,000 in one case and $11,000 in another but it came with the experience of doing that. I don't even know what would happen if my very first experience, even a $500 turned out to be a scam. I would probably think all education and coaching were scams and that I would never ever do it. If I didn't do it, I would never be where I am. My advice to anybody who agrees with the person who thinks you should screw the $500 client and only go after $5,000 ones is to have some compassion. Create some bulletproof programs at the $500 level. Give yourself an opportunity to step up for the little guy so you can turn them into the big guy that can eventually afford your $5,000 program.
It takes a lot of courage to do any kind of self-development word to put yourself out there. Recognize that you don't have what you want in life to expand and evolve into something better, not only for yourself but for your loved ones and the people around you.
Have the little guys back is what I'm saying. I see so many internet gurus where they start from nothing, they become something, and then suddenly, they resent where they started from. Don't do that. Where you started from is what made you into who you are. You got to respect that. If you're at a much higher level in life, go ahead and invest a little bit of time and effort to reach down and help pull others up.
Don't make it about ego, make it about service to other people. The more people that become financially free, the more people that are more evolved. The whole world becomes a better place when everybody is living from abundance rather than living from "I got to pay my bills and I'm stressed out about it." I want to thank you for coming on. I have a couple of questions. How can we learn more about you?
The easiest thing to do is you go to ThomasTadlock.com. From there, you can find my different websites. You can find my Facebook group from there and learn a little bit about me.
We learned so much from this conversation. I want to thank you for coming on. I know you're a very in-demand person. It's a pleasure having you on.
Lockdown has made me feel very lonely so I'm getting up there finally.
Tell Brooke and the kids I said hello. All the best to you. I'm sure we'll have you on soon.
Thanks so much. It's great chatting with you.
Important Links:
Instagram – Thomas Tadlock
Learn From Thomas Tadlock – Facebook Group
About Thomas Tadlock
Thomas Tadlock is the Founder of SmoothieShred.com, co-founder of GoodbyeLupus.com, Best Selling Author of Miracle Metabolism, and Corporate Wellness Trainer. He holds a master's degree in Exercise Science & Health Promotion and holds 8 national fitness and health certifications. He is an internationally recognized trainer educator and has authored the weight loss programs behind the hit TV show, "The Biggest Loser."
Together with his wife, Brooke Goldner, M.D., he has helped countless clients rid themselves of auto-immune diseases with the leading disease reversal platform, perhaps on the planet.
He went from broke to MULTI-Millionaire in a few short years with multiple streams of passive income. He owns several successful businesses in wellness, fitness, real estate, and finance, including one of his first fitness companies winning the "Best Of" award 7 years in a row.
He is an international speaker and trainer. And has shared the stage with legends like Anthony Robbins, T Harv Eker, and many more.
