The Savings Expert: Are You Under 45? You Won't Get A Pension! Don't Buy A House! - Jaspreet Singh

we have to get over these money myths that you can't build wealth if you rent where you live you can't build wealth if you don't have access to millions of dollars that's not true and there's one he think has given much better returns than any real estate and any stock and even any cryptocurrency so let's talk about the real way to build true wealth Jas bre Singh is the non-nonsense financial Guru realtor and entrepreneur whose methods have help millions of people solve their crippling money problems and unlock Financial Freedom people don't like when I say

this but I don't say what I say to make friends I say what I say to help people be better with money there's a lot of people that are lacking Financial education and we're Tau study hard get a good job and if you continue working down that path you're going to become successful that most people buy a house they can't afford and statistically are living paycheck to paycheck in fact that's 78% of Americans because ironically the key thing that keeps so many people poor for the rest of their life is they're scared to look broke

so what do they do they're driving around in nicer cars going on better vacations went to the or restaurants but they no longer have money to save they no longer have money to invest and the problem is we need about $1.8 million to comfortably wow so if you are in the financial danger zone which is you don't have $2,000 saved up for an emergency and you have credit card debt you have to make drastic changes today so what do I do well the first thing you got to understand is a 75151 plan which is but

now let's dig this a little bit deeper and let's talk about making money I put my money in five places that has been proven to win number one this has always blown my mind a little bit 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show so could I ask you for a favor before we start if you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the Subscribe button and my

commitment to you is if you do that then I'll do everything in my power me and my team to make sure that this show is better for you every single week we'll listen your feedback we'll find the guest that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do thank you so much [Music] just PR who should care about your message and why should they care anybody who uses money which is everybody the interesting thing about money is we use money every single day it costs money to eat and it costs

money to feed other people yeah most of us are never taught about money so most people say money doesn't matter I shouldn't think about money I shouldn't have to worry about money money's bad money's evil when in reality it cost money to eat and it cost money to feed other people and when you don't understand that now you're the one that's going to be paying the highest taxes you're the one that's going to be struggling to pay your bills you're the one that's not going to be able to go to Disney World you're the one

that can't pay for that amazing gift for your wife for your husband and you're the one that can't pay for the health care for your parents and you wonder why and in this economic system that we all live in Money talks and unless you understand that you're never going to be able to win in the system what is the difference between people who figure out how to make themselves wealthy and those that don't if we put all objective advantages aside Rich parents inherited lots of money all these kinds of things what is like the fundamental

difference that you've seen from the many many hundreds of thousands of people that you've worked with and taught and that have consumed your content what is the fundamental there's one difference one key difference people that become wealthy understand how money works and everybody else does not and I'll tell you where I came to this conclusion I checked all the boxes I studied hard in school I went through high school I went to college I spent one year in graduate school and then I went through law school but I never once learned a thing about money

I never once learned to think about Building Wealth I never once learned to think about investing I never once learned to think about passive income but if you look at the wealthiest people in the world they don't get there by working a job and getting a raise they don't get there by working to climb the corporate ladder they get there because they understand how money works and they understand how to win in the economic system and the crazy thing about that is we're all taught to trust the system my parents are immigrants from a state

in India called Punjab and like many other traditional Indian immigrants they wanted me to become successful now in my house that definition of success was very simple they gave me two options I can guess well option number one was just you can be a doctor yeah option two was just prit you can be a failure okay and they said they get to pick which one and this is me when I'm like one-year-old that since the day I could start talking my parents told everybody not just people around us they called my family in India my

family all around the country that J is going to grow up and become a doctor because he's going to become successful now I had nothing against that because I wanted to become successful too I saw how hard my parents worked my dad if he got a Saturday on a Sunday off was considered a long weekend I mean my parents bust their butt and I wanted to become successful so I could give back to them and they told me that if I wanted to become successful the way I do that is by becoming a doctor which

makes sense because when you're in school you get those like pamphlets those career pamphlets and they show you the different career options you have and anytime you look at that the top of the list is always doctor and so they said just if you want to become successful you have to become a doctor and because we came to this country you have to become successful so you have to become a doctor now I didn't think anything wrong with it because I liked the idea of becoming successful so when went down that path now along the

way I realized I didn't want to be a doctor I told my parents that I'm not going to be a doctor my mom almost had a heart attack my dad couldn't believe it and so my dad essentially told me that just if you want to keep any pride in the family you have to at least become an attorney so I said okay I went to law school parttime worked on my business full-time now today I am a licensed attorney but I've never worked a day as an attorney and the reason why I've never worked as

an attorney is because it's just not worth my time and it's not where my passion is and along that way that's when I learned that we're taught this is how you win go to school study hard get good grades get a good job and if you continue working down that path you're going to become successful but if you look at the successful people that's not the path that they followed and if we take a look at the three things that have built more wealth than anything else over the last century it's starting a business investing

in real estate and investing in stocks yet along my entire educational path I was never taught that we're focus on how do you get a good job but our wealthy people are focused on is how do I grow my assets and that's the key difference here as wealthy people are working to own the corporate letter everybody else is working to climb the corporate letter and then the next thing I'm going to go back to what you said assuming that you don't have Rich parents because most people assume that you have to be rich in order

to do this you need millions of dollars you need access to all this money but that's not true you can start now with $100 $10 but you have to get started the problem is most of us are never taught how to do this but unless you start doing this you're never going to build wealth and that's the way that you win in this economic system so I want to go through all of those three things you've just said I want to talk about starting businesses I want to talk about investing in stocks and also want

to talk about real estate but I'm curious in your own personal story there when did the penny drop because it's so interesting in my life there's key moments where I got to see behind the curtain and when I say see behind the curtain I I'll refer to my friends when we we're speaking uh privately I'll say I'll refer to it as money games like the day where I saw these billionaires playing money games that I was I didn't know existed and I was there working my butt off working in call centers or building whatever and

then I got to meet a billionaire got to spend time with them got to see behind the curtain and was like oh they just play these money games which nobody else has been told about right um when was the penny drop moment for you you qualified as a lawyer why didn't you end up pursuing that some some something happened yeah so when I was in grade school I began working at Indian weddings I played a drum called the toll it's a Punjabi drum that's where my family is from in India and I used to play

this drum at weddings now my parents didn't like that I did this because anything that was not math or science was like you don't do this so I had to play this drum uh in secret but I played at weddings and I started to make a little bit of money and by a little bit of money I mean $50 per wedding when I was in Middle School then maybe $100 $200 in high school and one of the DJs that I was working with said J you know a lot of kids in high school uh how

about we host a teen party for some of these kids in your school I was like okay why not so we hosted this teen party and it was a big success and at the end of the night uh the DJ then starts paying out all the costs because we were going to go in 50/50 on this business venture and then we pay out the money for the security for the venue for the marketing and then he says all right let's count our profits and he has four bills in his hand one two three four there's

four singles left $2 for him $2 for me and I saw that we put in so much work into this business venture into this idea into this this first party and we made $4 of profit which we split 50/50 and at that moment he was really upset but I was really not upset at all because I was like this was fun you know it was it was it was a lot of fun putting this together but in my mind it was just one of those hobbies that I was doing because I needed to become a

doctor well I did a few of those teen parties when I was in high school and now it was time for me to go to college I was 17 years old and I get there and I see everybody partying drinking blowing money they don't have and I was shocked I had no idea that people went to college to party and I had no idea people got the money to spend money on all this alcohol I don't drink I'm not into partying but now I needed something to do on Friday nights and so now I'm thinking

what do I do how about I take this teen party business concept that I had in high school and now do it in college so I was 17 and I started knocking on the doors of all the bars venues restaurants trying to see if anybody would let me host a party there and in the beginning some said sure you can host a party here we just need a $10,000 deposit I don't have $10,000 I was 17 years old so I kept going some said I need a $20,000 deposit but eventually I found this one club

that said yeah you can host a party here you don't got to pay us anything just pay us half of the cover charge that you generate pay has 50% of whatever Revenue you generate now I'm in business I made the same arrangement with my DJ I said look how about you DJ for me for free and I'll split whatever profits I make with you and that was the beginning of my first real business it was this party promotion company which then became an event planning company and it grew pretty big in college I mean I

started off by hosting these one-off parties then I was contracted by one of the largest clubs on campus to host their weekly college night so I was hosting their parties every week we were hosting official shows and After parties and it grew pretty large and now as this business starts to make money the first thing that I realized is I don't need a license or degree to make money I thought that was something that I needed because I thought I needed these good grades to qualify for this thing to make money so that was the

first kind of shock and realization the second realization that I had was I knew nothing about money I was making a little bit of money and I was very fortunate that I started reading books about money and business and I started reading these books and the first thing I learned was the difference between an asset and a liability which were things I had never heard of before an asset is something that puts money in your pocket a liability is something that takes money out of your pocket wealthy people want to own assets I was buying

a whole lot of liabilities because I was working in this party promotion business and I wanted to look the part so I would make a little bit of money buy a nice watch make a little bit more money put some new rims on my car put a new sound system in my car put a new uh subwoofer in my car I mean I was blowing money and all these dumb things to look like I was rich when in reality I was just making a lot of other people rich and then I learned about this thing

called investing which really started to upset me because I thought I was doing everything right and I'm reading these books that are talking about how every wealthy person invests in real estate I have no idea what that means nobody in my family is a real estate investor I had never heard of this concept of real estate investing before I don't know what it is is but if wealthy people are Real Estate Investors and I want to become wealthy maybe I should invest in real estate so when I was 19 I'm now studying to get into

medical school because I still think that I'm going to become a doctor and I was bored out of my mind because I would spend all day 10 to 12 hours a day in the library studying and this was around 2011 and the reason why I say the year is because if you remember 2008 was was the great financial crisis that was when we had the real estate collapse in America so real estate prices were decimated and they didn't hit rock bottom until 2012 that's why I'm saying this so in 2011 I'm studying to take the

Medical College ad Mission test the MCAT and I'm reading these books talking about how wealthy people invest in real estate and now I'm making a little bit of money from this party business and have a little bit of cash in the bank so during my breaks when I'm studying for the test I start looking on the internet websites of finance and they all talk about how real estate prices have hit rock bottom how real estate is being decimated in America and so I was like well maybe I start looking to buy real estate and so

on August 22nd I took the Medical College admission test and then on August 23rd I purchased my first real estate investment property it was a small condo that I purchased out of foreclosure a few years prior it had sold for a little bit over $150,000 and then like many properties it went through foreclosure the banks couldn't sell it and it was listed on sale for $8,400 that was a total price of the condo so I came in with an offer of $4,000 because I don't know what how this real estate investing stuff works and we

were back and forth with the bank the bank said will sell it to you for $7,000 I tried to negotiate them even lower and then the bank said that they had another offer on the table so now it's a bidding war and I had to pay offer my highest and best price so I said I'm willing to offer $8,000 to buy the condo no more and they accepted my bid so I purchased this condo for $88,000 I put in a few thousand worth the work and then I rented it out for $600 a month and

now I start start to question things why did nobody tell me about this this condo is putting money into my pocket without me having to do something because I own this asset we're all taught to trade our time for dollars we're all taught to work to get paid because that's what we're taught to do but wealthy people are not working for a bigger salary they're working for more assets because that can continue to pay you even when you're not working and that's that shift when I saw that that really sparked a fire under me and

really made me angry and I don't know why I got so angry but I got angry because I felt like I was checking all the boxes I was doing good in school I bust my butt in school I was going to do all the right things become a doctor and do everything that I was told but what I didn't realize is those boxes weren't my boxes who created these boxes and why is there this whole world of financial education that were never taught because if this is how wealthy people build and grow their wealth why

is everybody else not taught this so I want to make a distinction here are you saying that in order to build wealth people should buy a house no if you want to build wealth you have to buy assets when people say buy a house what does that mean to most people's eyes it means buy my home yeah I want to buy this nice place for me to live which is what most people do when they get a bit of money they take their salary from work and then they go and buy a house to live

in and then they pay into the mortgage which means that they are now building an asset right they're building what many people call generational wealth which is one of the biggest lies when it comes to money the reason why is because your house is actually a money pit and that's why I want you to think of your house as a liability but I want you to hear me clearly I'm not saying you shouldn't buy a house I'm not saying it's bad to buy a house you have to treat your house like a liability this suit

that I'm wearing is a liability this watch is a liability my shoes are liabilities should I not buy them no I got to make sure I can afford them so when people think about buying a house what do they think of they think I'm going to build generational wealth I'm going to build wealth I'm going to pay it off and I'm going to be able to have more freedom in my life because I can own this house let's go with the best case scenario you buy a home for let's call it $300,000 you pay it

off and throughout your lifetime this $300,000 home grows in value to a million dollar and now you're going to say just PR I showed you this is an asset my house tripled in value more than tripled in value and now I'm going to pass it down to my kids so now yeah your kids got a million dollar house but unless they have the income to support paying for a million dollar house they might have to find some more cash now would what do they do because you can't just pull cash out of this house right

I mean it's not an ATM unless you go to the bank the bank will give you the cash because the bank says oh you have a million dollar house how about we loan you $800,000 but that's not an ATM because you have to pay that money back plus interest and unless your kids have the income to pay for the property tax to pay for the insurance to pay for the upgrades to pay for the maintenance and the mortgage they can't afford that house so maybe now they have to sell okay now you sell it you

got a million dollars great we're not even going to talk about taxes right now but you got a million dollar you're rich but if they don't have any Financial education and you have a million dollars what's going to happen well let's think about this if you had a million dollars what would you do with it if I went down the street and I asked the average person if I wrote you a check for a million dollars today what would you do what are people going to say I'm going to go to the Bahamas I'm going

to buy myself a nice house I'm going buy myself a nice car buy myself some nice clothes go to the Gucci store go to the Louis Vuitton store and buy myself the extra guaca Chipotle that's what the average person will do now maybe you're a little bit more financially smart you say I'm just going to live off of $50,000 a year but after 20 years you have nothing left not to mention the fact that 10 years from now that $50,000 a year lifestyle is going to buy you half of what it can today so now

let's go back to that situation you thought you built generation of wealth you did a good thing about paying off the mortgage because you don't have to pay the mortgage payment but is that really the type of generational wealth that you want and now to fully Hammer this home I'm not saying it's bad to own a house it's actually very great it's an amazing thing to own your house free and clear because now you can rest assured you don't have to worry about the mortgage payments if you have the financial education that's great but let's

talk about now the real way to do this and build true wealth when I buy my real estate investment properties and my property values go up the rental values also go up the rent is what pays for the maintenance the rent is what pays for the upgrades the rent is what's paying for the property taxes and the insurance the rent is putting money in my pocket and this is cash flow that I can use I can use this cash flow to buy a vacation I can use this cash flow to buy food I can use

this cash flow to pay for my lifestyle but your house doesn't do that you have to pay to live in your house but people think you know they're getting their mortgage payments they're spending whatever they are you know spending on their mortgage payments they they think they're well we're kind of told that that mortgage payment is an investment into an asset your mortgage payment is a payment to your bank banks are not stupid in fact they're very smart Banks do something called front front loading your mortgage what that means is if you go out and

get a 30-year mortgage which is what many people do in America and you pay $3,000 a month on your mortgage you're not paying $1,500 to your interest your bank and $1,500 to your principal your Equity the way it works is Banks frontload your mortgage which means for the first almost 15 years it's about 14 years and 8 months or so but for almost 15 years of your mortgage the first 15 years the majority of your mortgage payment is going directly into your Banker's pocket in the form of Interest which means if you're paying $33,000 a

month on your mortgage for the first part of your mortgage maybe $100 is going out of the $3,000 into your Equity the other $2,900 is going right into your Banker's pocket with interest and now yeah after 15 years now half of your mortgage payment is going to your equity and half is going to interest but if you refinance before that 15year Mark that starts over and so this is where Banks understand the gain again I'm not against buying a house but you got to understand the game of money and most people don't understand that and

so the mistake that people make is they buy a house they can't afford and now they're paying all this money into their mortgage thinking that I'm Building Wealth they no longer have money to save they no longer have money to invest into other real assets and their money is just going to pay down their mortgage thinking that this is going to build my wealth but you've been sold a lie this term opportunity cost most people don't know what this term opportunity cost means but it appears to be very pertinent to what you're saying especially when

you just said this is money that you can't then invest in assets can you explain what opportunity cost is and how it's impacted if you if you buy a house sure if you have let's let's make the numbers very simple you want to buy a $100,000 home and let's say the banks require a 20% down payment $20,000 you could do a few things number one you can take that $20,000 and go out and buy this house and now that's how that money has been used but if you use that money to buy the house you

lose the opportunity to take that $20,000 and say use it to buy a rental property you lose the opportunity to use that $20,000 to inv in the stock market you lose the opportunity to take that $20,000 and maybe build a business now the question is what is going to give you the best and most growth now hopefully this house that you buy will go up in value it's not guaranteed we know the houses don't always go up in value no matter what your Banker says no matter what your real estate agent says because we saw

what happened after the 2008 crash where real estate prices were slashed in half it was as much as is 93% real estate values dropping in the state of Michigan where I am so we know real estate prices don't always go up stock prices don't always go up businesses don't always work everything has a risk but now the question is which risk do you want to take and which risk do you want to take first are you in a situation now where you're ready to go out and buy a house or do you want to build

your wealth first a little bit more and that's the question that I want people to start thinking is am I ready to buy a house and then people say well if I go out and invest my money the problem is housing prices keep going up I'm chasing this housing market it keeps getting more and more and more expensive and you're 100% right it's a risk but there's also a risk the housing prices could fall I think one of the biases that makes people want to buy house is that they're currently renting and they see that

as just giving money away so they think listen I could spend this money on a mortgage and I'll own this thing one day or I could spend this same $2,000 whatever it is on rent and I'm never going to own this thing well I'm here in Los Angeles right now I had to stay in a hotel that hotel payment is paying somebody's mortgage it's paying somebody's College tuition it's paying for somebody's stuff when I go to a restaurant and I eat out I'm paying for somebody's mortgage I'm paying for somebody's College tuition I'm paying for

somebody's bills because when you go out and your rent that's what everybody says I making my landlord Rich well when you eat at a restaurant you're making that restaurant owner Rich when you go to a hotel you're making the the hotel owner Rich when I go and buy a mug I'm making the mug owner rich and the reality is yeah it's good for to own a house but are you ready to own a house can you afford to own a house and what do you want to own first I rent where I live right now

I am making my landlord Rich today I also rent for my offices I am making my off office landlord very wrch because my office rent is very expensive do you feel bad for me I hope not and this is where we have to get over these these money myths that many people keep selling you that you can't build wealth if you rent where you live you can't build wealth if you don't get a good degree that's not the way that the system works see there's the traditional rules and then there's the real Financial education Money

Rules and again I'm not saying it's bad to own a house but it's bad to own a house you can't afford how do you know if you can afford one well there's three parts to afford in a house you have to afford the down payment you have to afford the monthly payment and you have to afford the moving costs I'm going to go start from the simplest one which is the moving costs because many people don't Factor this in when you buy a house you got to move in and I'm not talking about the the

closing costs you might have to hire movers which are expensive you might have to upgrade your furniture which which is expensive you might have to upgrade the house which is expensive factor that in then I want to talk about your down payment people don't like when I say this but I don't say what I say to make friends I say what I say to help people be better with money if you want to afford the house you have to have at least a 20% down payment that way you actually have some Equity some skin in

the game that way you can actually afford the house the third part is you have to afford the monthly payments now every bank is going to have a different rule for you banks have like the 28% Rule and these other rules I have sorry just on that last Point why do people not like it when you say that because it's very hard to pay a 20% down payment housing is expensive you want to buy a $500,000 house you have to have $100,000 as a minimum for your down payment and that's extra cash okay now if

we talk about the monthly costs the simple way that I like to follow it is you have to have a system for yourself you have to know how much money you are allowed to spend how much money you need to be investing and how much money you have to be saving every single month then just Factor it in so the way I like to look at it a simple rule of thumb is something like a 75151 plan which says for every dollar that you earn from here on out 75 cents is the maximum that you

can spend 15 cents is the minimum that you invest 10 cents is the minimum that you save now let's do the math if you know that you make let's call it $100,000 a year that means the max you can spend out of the $100,000 is $75,000 so if out of that $75,000 you can afford your mortgage costs you can afford your food you can afford your vacations and Life Style then sure you can afford it but if you can't afford that then you can't afford that mortgage and the reason why I like to go by

this rule is because some people are going to say I can live in a small house I just want an expensive car and some nice vacations other people are going to say I want a beautiful home I don't care about the car and Vacations so now you can Factor it all in there how much can you afford out of that 75% of what you make do you think people even know how much money they spend no I was thinking I wonder how many people listening right now know over the last 6 months the exact figure

that they spend every single month most people statistically are living paycheck to paycheck so they're basically spending everything or more okay 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck which means I make some money and I spend all of it or more there's a there's a joke that I like to make which is in the traditional Indian culture people make a dollar to spend 20 in the traditional American culture people make a dollar to spend $2 through the help of lines of credit credit cards and other forms of debt and the reason why I'm going

to take it a step back I don't think you wanted me to go this way I'm I'm going to go anywhere anyway we live in what's called a credit based economy which means if you make $50,000 a year you don't live off of $50,000 a year at least most Americans don't we live in what's called a credit-based economy which means you have the ability to spend the $50,000 you earned plus debt because as you make more money as you have a good job you become more credit worthy and so as you show the bank hey

I made $50,000 they'll give you credit cards they'll give you lines of credit they'll give you whatever types of debt that they can that way now you can go out and spend 60,000 70,000 $80,000 because that's what grows the economy the more money you spend the Richer somebody else gets and so now when you live in this credit based economy with no Financial education people spend spend spend the economy grows grows grows and most people have no idea what hit them do you know what's really interesting is two days ago I was having a conversation

with one of my friends it was actually I did a podcast about Finance um recently and in there I mentioned some of my friends and then they messaged me on Whatsapp and we were having a chat in our group chat and I for the first time ever one of them asked me to guess we're very close friends we talk about money we talk about how much money we have Etc they said guess who has the most money in the group so I went through and I did I think this is this person's net worth of

my five best friends and I think this is how much cash they have now one of my friends who is very what's the word I guess Frugal lives a very very simple life as I was going through I go you know what this friend is this like highflying guy lives in this aming apartment this person has all these wonderful things this person's been successful in business this person's successful in crypto but you know what I bet my M and I won't say his name I bet he's richer than everyone else in that chat um all

of my other friends in the chat and so I did my little prediction and I said I bet you've got X figure and he replied and go and said this is my current cash position he was richer than everyone in the chat in terms of cash combined this guy lives so he lives in like a studio apartment he never balls he doesn't have like a fancy car doesn't have fancy clothes and he's richer than the entire lot of my friendship group and I thought God there's something really important here in terms of and it's it's

so crazy if you if you know the context of what I'm saying because I've got a friend in that chat who's built like a big business I've got a friend like everyone in that chat runs businesses is successful but they're living in different ways and the one friend who runs the smallest business who like probably has the least income is the richest and over the last couple of days it's it's so funny I was thinking about all the dinners I bought this guy and I'm like I didn't know you were a millionaire like I I

would have been paying for everything but this is really I mean if we ignore your friends it's very easy to look fake Rich yeah because everybody will give you a line of credit if I want a Gucci person I can't afford the Gucci guess what I can buy now pay later I can open up a credit card and buy the Gucci and look like I'm rich when in reality I'm just making Gucci rich in fact one of the richest people in the world in 2023 he was the richest person in the world is Bernard arnal

he's the founder and CEO of lvm or he's the founder and CEO of the company that owns Louis Vuitton and why because millions of people pay him to look rich when in reality he's the one that's getting rich and we assume that when you make some more money you got to start looking the part and this is that mindset shift that we have to make and you know a lot of people resonate who come from the Indian traditional families they messaged me saying jit I became a doctor or my wife and I are doctors we

make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year we make a great income but we have no savings and no Investments and I don't know what to do and the reason why is we have a Range Rover and a b we have a nice house we go on the doctor vacations we have to look the part but we don't have any money left over at the end of our paychecks and it's a very easy thing to get caught up in because when you make more money you become more credit worthy banks will give you bigger loans

when you make more money you want to spend more money and it's very easy and you have to understand how do you control that spending and that's why if you follow something like 75 15 10 one of the simplest things you can do to start is just always no matter what whether you're making $110,000 a year or $10 million a year you always put money aside to invest you always put money aside to save and you spend whatever's left my friend doesn't invest the friend I'm talking about doesn't actually invest he just doesn't spend he

like just doesn't spend money and he's just stacked up like a million dollars in cash whilst earning less than everyone else of my five friends in that chat and it's it didn't take a long time like it took him four years or something four 5 years of just running this small business with a couple of people when I say a small business I mean a really like a small business like a business of maybe four or five employees and he's built up a million million dollars in cash for himself because he just doesn't spend money

and he lives at he doesn't have like a an ego doesn't care if people what people think of him yet my other friends who are rning maybe five times more a month have five times less cash than him it's like it's it was so inspiring it was honestly so spiring because it it says something about the importance of saving but who the hell wants to save if I titled this podcast today this something about saving no one's going to click it's not fun saving isn't exciting who wants to go out and save $2,000 who wants

to spend less money we want to buy more nice things but unless he can control the spending unless you know how to save you will never build wealth do you know for people that are in that paycheck to paycheck cycle which I was in for many many years of my life where I'd get paid for my call center I'd go and spend the money I'd pretty much spend all the money within the first couple of days of getting the paycheck and I was just waiting the next three weeks for the next paycheck what advice would

you give them about getting out of that cycle because it because you almost feel imprisoned by that cycle if you're absolutely well before I give the advice I want to explain to that person what's happening because you are the Prime customer for our economic system Banks love you because they can sell you payday loans they can sell you credit cards they can sell you lines of credit and they can keep you in debt for the rest of your life which means you keep making the bank Rich corporations love you because you're not going to think

twice when we show you this nice bag when we show you this nice vacation you're going to want the stuff and so we love selling you the stuff the government loves you because you're going to pay the highest taxes employees pay the highest taxes and so when you're in that situation you are making everybody else Rich at your expense and so if you want to break out of this the first thing you got to understand you need to make yourself rich before you make everybody else Rich because when you're spending all your money you are

putting your money into their pockets and you have to stop that you got to keep that money for yourself you're in a boat think of it this way you're in a boat and this boat has water just flowing in and you are sinking and you got to start by sealing the holes you got to stop the water leaving this you got to stop the water coming in you got to stop the bleeding and that means you got to stop the spending so if you are in what I call the financial danger zone which is you

don't have $2,000 saved up for an emergency and you have credit card debt if you are in that situation you are in the financial danger zone and you have to make drastic changes that means right now no more eating at restaurants no more vacations no more doing anything that doesn't put money in your pocket and no more Netflix no and the reason why I say this isn't because you're going to save $15 a month it's so you can save two hours of your time a day the average American is watching more than two hours of

Television a day and if you don't have $2,000 saved up if you have credit card debt you cannot afford those 2 hours a day being wasted on TV and that means right now you have to go out and start using the time to learn start using the time to work and start using the time to make some extra dollars so what do you do start selling stuff stop spending money selling stuff you own selling stuff you own so if you have a TV that you're not using sell it you have a car that you can't

afford sell it if you're living in a house that you can't afford sell it downgrade move smaller and then work to earn more money I've got to say the couple of things that I came to mind is you were saying that and funnily enough I put myself in the shoes of 18-year-old Steven Bartlett when I was in that small apartment with three or four immigrants in Mosside rush home and I was you know my rent was nothing my rent was a 1 15 a month which I could not afford and I could not pay and

I was intermittently working between call center jobs and whatever money I got I spent and part of the reason I spent it just pre is because like many people watching especially men who sometimes feel the need because of the way Society is I was trying to get laid at the same time and it's hard yeah when you're a young man and I say young men in particular because the stats do support the fact that there is an expectation that men pay um when you're a young man it's particularly difficult to do all of these things

to cut back and also get laid and what am I going to do defer getting laid for 10 years when I say laid I'm really saying meeting someone and falling in love and having a having a life so what do I if I if I'm living in a shoe box which I was I can't bring anyone back there I can't take anyone for dinner I can't take anyone to the movies so what do I do and this is why every Indian parents tell their kids to become a doctor so their son can get married it's

the same concept but here's the thing you have to pick your hard either life's going to be hard now or it's going to be hard for the rest of your life and you have to pick what's more important to you right now and you know if we talk about balance if you want to have a balance of everything where you wna find a girl and you want to make money and you want to stay healthy you are dividing your attention everywhere not saying it's impossible but very few people can actually do everything all at once

and if your number one goal is to become wealthy if your number one goal is to turn your finances around you have to get serious about it because where you put your attention is where you get the results and so if you want to be in a better financial situation you are going to have to make sacrifices and difficult I can't come here and tell you it's going to be easy yeah because that's going to be me lying to you I got to be honest I did make a sacrifice and for me the sacrifice was

I started a business and frankly that meant that I didn't have time to be going out getting laid or meeting people or socializing but it's it my story arc ends with it going well and then the Romantic situation taking care of itself many years later once it had gone well because I was so focused on myself and it's funny there is a bit of a paradox to life that the more you actually Focus inward the more you become a magnet yeah um and the more I focused outward the more I pursued and chased and sort

of neglected myself the the more harder it was to get people interested in me yeah and you know I I also want to say that when I talk about Building Wealth I'm not talking about becoming a money hungry just money greedy this is evil person that just cares about money that's not what I'm talking about because I want you to live a holistic life because money is just one part of your life but the second part to that yes I'm not telling you to never enjoy life I'm telling you to make a sacrifice for a

period of your life that way you can enjoy the rest of your life and never have to worry about money again it's hard for us to naturally see life for Seasons especially when we're looking forward when we're looking back it's very easy to say oh that was that season like I can sit here now and say oh that 20 to 25 was that sacrifice everything in my life to make myself something season and then 25 to 30 was like building and learning and then I I now you know can can think of it's easier actually

now to think forward in Seasons now that I've been through some Seasons but for someone that's hasn't been through seasons in life it's hard to think about life in those terms I now think of my life in these fiveyear Seasons MH and that helps me to say to you even have conversation with my partner where I go this is the season I'm in um and it'll last probably roughly this this long and I'm going to sacrifice these things and prioritize these things in this season mhm but um it's hard for people to understand this idea

it's difficult and that sacrifice is difficult especially during a time where everybody's showing off everything on Instagram you look at your friends who have a crappy job but they're driving around in nicer cars going on better vacations going to the nicer restaurants and you're thinking what did I do wrong and then especially if you're a guy you have a girlfriend you have a wife she's going to say how come they keep get to go can they keep getting go to Cancun they keep going to these nice restaurants how come you can't take me to these

nice places and now you feel like you're doing something wrong because where is this discrepancy the reason why I call my show the minority mindset is because I'm a big advocate of not doing what the majority of people do the first time I made a million dollars in a year I was in my 20s I was driving a car worth $500 it didn't have a bumper on it it was not pretty my wife sat in the car with me and my employees drove better cars than I did so you know you got to be confident

and you got to work for something bigger and you want a partner that's going to understand that that's my belief which is not the easy thing it's interesting because confidence is such a internal thing and I just feel like I just probably just didn't have it then cuz I I I think I was scared for someone to know that I was broke I was so scared to know for someone to know that I was broke that I just didn't entertain romantic relationships and that is the reason why so many people will go into debt to

buy vacations to buy things to buy stuff to look rich and ironically that's the thing that keeps so many people poor for the rest of their life is because they're scared to look broke and now when you try to look rich that's the thing that's actually keeping you broke there's another element to this which is my life was pretty miserable so when you have a relatively miserable life when you don't have many nice things CU you're working in a call center as I was until 11:00 at night time doing overtime every overtime hour I could

get then because you're all so lonely you're going home alone walking home because you can't afford the bus anything that gives you a little dopamine hit gambling this is why all the gambling shop are in the areas that struggle the worst financially because those I mean a lot of people say because those people are looking for that you know that big payday that dopamine hit from a Payday um my TV in my tiny tiny little bedsit room was like half the size of the wall I was making Reckless spending decisions because I think it gave

me some kind of hit that I I was missing in my life it gave me like a dopamine Rush that was and there wasn't many things giving me a dopamine hit at that point in my life and see here's the thing during that time you are making emotional decisions yes as many people are and it's very difficult to speak logic to emotion but this is where now you have to be able to understand the difference because if you're listening to this and you're in that situation you have to understand that if you want to continue

being able to live that lifestyle you're going to have to make some changes today otherwise you're going to be stuck in this lifestyle for the rest of your life and it's only going to get more difficult and that's the thing is if you want to become wealthy the first part is just your own mindset it's your own discipline and until tell you can conquer that I can tell you everything about investing I can tell you different ETFs and index funds to invest in I can tell you different investment institutions out there I can tell you

which stock brokerages to use I can tell you just invest 15% of your income into this for the next 10 20 30 years and you're going to become wealthy but until you can get over that mindset you're never going to become wealthy because then what happens in that sit a is when you're in that state of I just want to look rich I just want to have that dopamine I just want to have some nice things because I deserve it I work hard you know what happens next you the one that gets caught up in

all the get-rich quick schemes because someone's going to say look put $1,000 into this you'll have $10,000 in the next three months or I'm going to show you you can live the laptop lifestyle you can work 5 hours a week make $10,000 a month $10,000 a week you're never going to have to worry about money again just buy this program and now you're a prime candidate because now you were driven by this emotion of I want that I can't imagine if I had an extra $10,000 a month and I don't even have to work for

it because you can't see past it you're all you're doing is being sold by emotion and So you you're the one that's going to get caught up in the get-rich quick schemes you're the one that's going to make the bank Rich because you're going to get stay stuck in debt corporations are going to love you because they can keep selling you the nicest the newest stuff because you want to look rich you want to show it off to your friends you want to show it off to the girls and you get stuck in that cycle

so I want to talk about what the money mindset is but just on that thing you just said there you said get rich quick schemes crypto what's your point of view on cryptocurrencies and investing in crypto so I'll tell you where I invest my money so you can understand I put my money in five places I put my money into my own business I invest my money into real estate and inv my money into stocks I invest my money into speculative assets which includes cryptocurrency and then I own some physical gold so starting with my

own business I run a company called briefs media we're probably most known for our Market briefs newsletter where we break down what's happening in the financial markets so that's briefs media number two is I invest in physical real estate so I'm going out to buy rental properties that I can use to generate cash flow number three I invest in stocks this is in the form of investing in in individual companies and investing in funds funds are ETFs index funds mutual funds where you can get investment into a broad basket of companies number four is my

speculative Investments notice how I said number four this is one of the smallest pieces now which are things that I believe can go up very quickly but can also fall just as fast so the speculative assets which make up a small piece of my portfolio include things like startups that I invest in it also includes things like cryptocurrency and then I own a little bit of physical gold physical gold makes up about 2% of my portfolio but going back to cryptocurrency because that's what you asked I think it is a speculative investment I have made

a ton of money in cryptocurrency uh and I started buying cryptocurrency before it was as popular as it is today I began buying it in uh 2016 or so when Bitcoin was around 3,000 maybe 2016 2017 when Bitcoin was around $3,000 a coin and I have sold some and for me I understand it can go up very fast but it can fall just as fast and the issue that I have is when people now want to get into this idea of investing because now they're in this tough situation I'm living paycheck to paycheck and I

hear about this financial education and investing if I just dump my money into Bitcoin or crypto maybe it'll 10x and it'll have Financial Freedom and that that's where I have issue because you're taking your money and you're going for your long-term investments into a speculative asset that hasn't been proven maybe it will work and you'll become a multi-millionaire maybe you'll lose everything but I don't want to gamble with my wealth I want to build my wealth with something established and then use the speculative assets as something that is speculative and treated as such in terms

of your net worth then how is it broken down in terms of percentage between these five things so if we look at real estate real estate is probably close to almost 50% of my investments okay stocks make up probably right around 30% speculative is about 18% of my portfolio soorry just the 30% how much of that is into individual company stocks versus ETFs it's about half and half okay so 15% each okay cool and then versus startups it was a lot more crypto now it's a lot more startups I sold a chunk of Bitcoin when

it was breaking record highs and I'm going to be using that money to buy some more rental properties okay and gold about 2% of my portfolio Okay and the reason why I buy gold I don't myself don't consider gold an investment I look at gold as a way of saving hard money because my theory is if I take $10,000 of cash and I take 10 ,000 worth of physical gold and I bury both of these things in my backyard today in 10 years what's going to have more buying power my theory is that the gold

is going to have more buying power and so that's why I own some physical gold for me it's this way of saving Hard Cash I look at it as a insurance against doomsday against something really bad happening against something bad happening to our currency something bad happening to the economy that's why I own a little bit of physical gold but the problem with gold is when I own my physical gold it just sits there in a vault it doesn't produce cash flow it doesn't create new value it just sits there when I invest in real

estate it produces cash flow when I invest in stocks the companies are working to produce a better product to grow the profits the gold doesn't do anything what about cash do you keep a lot of cash on hand uh cash is definitely position I I don't know about percentage but I always keep cash and I'm going to break this down a few ways because I have one let's call it bucket of cash which is my emergency savings this is cash that is there to protect me against an emergency my personal life I also have a

separate bucket of cash which is my business emergency savings then I have a bucket of cash which is their to be invested money this is money that's waiting to be invested in real estate and then I have and stocks and then I also have another little piece of cash that's waiting to be invested more into speculative assets so I have cash waiting to be invested in speculative assets cash waiting to be invested in real estate cash waiting to be invested in stocks and then I have my emergency cash so I like to separate it all

out a second ago you said that unless you have a money mindset you're never going to be wealthy what is the money mindset the mindset is number one you have to believe that you're going to become wealthy what I like to say is you have to say I will become wealthy why because if you don't believe you're going to become wealthy it is going to be impossible for you why I used to guest to teach in Detroit public schools so Detroit is a um it was a very rough and it still is rough area certain

parts of it our office is in downtown Detroit but there are parts of Detroit which are still very rough and I suggest teach in some of the public schools there and these are kids good kids who were not exposed to some of the best things and what I mean by that is when I would go into these classrooms you'd first have to go through multiple metal detectors there'd be police there you might have to be pat down and when I get into the classroom I'd ask the kids how many of you have two parents in

a home almost nobody would raise their hand I would then ask how many of you work a job almost everybody would raise their hand and as I got to know the students better I also started to realize that these kids high school kids some of them are already in gangs some of them already have been arrested by the police some have already been involved in these what we consider bad things and they are bad things but to the kids that's just normal because when I talk to them about these gangs what they'll tell me is

I don't have parents at home I don't have a dad I don't know my Dad my mom is working how am I going to eat my brothers this gang provide me some comfort because there's people that are around me they give me food they help give me money it's not a bad thing in their eyes and so when you grow up in that mindset it's very hard for you to think bigger and so when I would come into these classrooms I would talk about life motivation money all things and and so one of the things

I'd like to do an exercise that I would do is try to get you to think about successful things what are things that kids want a nice car so I would ask these kids what is your dream car and the responses that I would get were things like a Ford Mustang or a Dodge Challenger and you know these these nice cars but I would follow up with why not a Bugatti why not a Lamborghini why not a Rolls-Royce and they would say somebody like me can never have something like that so I can't even dream

about having these nice things and that was really shocking to me I mean that you are kind of suppressed to the point but not only do you not think that you can achieve it but you can't even dream that you can achieve it you can't even achieve it in your own dreams and so when you don't believe that you are worthy of anything more than a Ford Mustang how in the world are you going to work for something nicer and I'm not saying you have to work just for materialistic things but this is that mindset

shift that if you don't believe that you can do it you are never going to be able to do it and so this is where the first thing is you have to say I will become wealthy and sometimes you have to be able to find a taste of success and see what that looks like and there are many ways to go by doing it I mean you can just go on to Instagram and see what success looks like to some people but you start to Define what is that success and tell yourself I will become

wealthy not that I might not that I can but I will become wealthy the second thing is money is a tool and the reason why I say that is because we've been kind of hinting at this throughout this entire discussion but the reason why many people are so scared to talk about money the reason why money is such a taboo topic is because we are insecure about our own money I just want to pause there before we carry on on the money as a tour Point um it's so interesting what you're saying about those kids

so interesting because I was thinking as you were speaking about stereotype threats and in my previous book I I spent some time talking about self-belief and confidence and this idea of stereotype threats and some of the studies I came across showed that if there's a stereotype that people like you let's say black people like me are bad at a certain thing let's say maths before they do a math test if they reminded a black person that they were black just got them to tick a box saying that they were black their performance on that test

would drop and they did the same with women so if there's a stereotype surrounding your ability and something if they remind you of that part of you before you do a test your performance drops and really importantly in the studies when they don't remind the black person or the woman about that particular feature of themselves their performance is the same as everybody else and it's it's interesting that you say that when you're talking about money that we have a stereotype threat there we we exist in a world where we think people like us make a

certain amount of money and if the stereotype threat studies are true that means that I'm going to show up in the world in such a way yes that's going to bring that amount of money about but it's not easy to genuinely believe outside of your stereotype 100% outside of the context in which you were raised I went undercover in a school in a rough area in Liverpool that was doing very poorly and I was undercover as a school teacher so I was getting to know the kids and I met this one kid and I I

remember him saying to me um about his plans for the future and I sat there and I said do you know any millionaires he was like no there's no no millionaires around here I was like have you ever met one he goes I've never ever met one and in that moment I his mom which it's on video it was a channel four documentary I did um he then goes but I think I want to be a millionaire and his mom burst out laughing she was on the sofa next to him and she burst out laughing

and I remember asking her on I remember asking her on camera saying why are you laughing and she goes no there's no CH there's no chance so it's like indoctrinated into your context your family your roots your friendship networks that you can't make it so it's hard it is 100% difficult and it it doesn't stop in any level if for example when I told my parents that I didn't want to be a doctor I was told by everybody I'm throwing my parent sacrifice away and that somebody like me can never make it in business because

I don't know anything about business no one in my family is a business person no my family is an investor no one in my family does this you've never learned this stuff before you didn't get into business school you how are you going to do this and I'm not saying this to compare I'm saying this to explain that there are so many levels to this mindset BL block that if you cannot break out of this invisible barrier you will never become successful when when any employee joins my team the first day we make every employee

every single one regardless of a role do this exercise it's called the nine dots exercise and you have these nine dots on the screen and if you go to Google you can see the nine dots exercise or nine dots trivia where it's nine dots we'll put it on the screen yes and I'm not going to spoil it but I will actually that's the only way I can get it across but the way that this Exercise Works is you have to in four lines touch every dot on the screen without picking up your pen you have

to touch every dot all of these nine dots without picking up your pen and so when you do that you might say well uh there it's impossible how do you do that and so this is where now oh okay not going over a previous line right not well you can go over a previous line but you cannot pick up your pen so if there's nine dots one 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 nine yeah you have to connect all four dots sorry all nine dots with four lines you can't curve the pen and

you can't pick up your pen and people will say this is impossible and the reason why you say it's impossible is because you have just created an invisible barrier because now if you go outside of the box if you extend the pen a little bit further then you can start to connect all of these dots and now you realize oh it is possible if I don't create these invisible walls around myself if I don't put myself in this invisible box and that's what we do we're all conditioned to do this to some extent if you

grow up in poverty it might be that you can never become any level of successful if you grow up thinking that you're going to beig be this thing it might be that you can never start a business you can never become an investor if you have become an engineer and now in your 30s you want to go out and do something different it might be that somebody like you can never do something different but these are all invisible boxes you see it right there and that is that's why we make every team member every employee

do that on the first day because what we say is look we got to come here and innovate and if you want to be able to innovate and do something big you have to get out of your own mind and you have to be able to break out of these invisible barriers and so now when you go back to your question it's very difficult it is difficult and so how do you do it and so this goes into now your personal development what I would recommend is read five books on self-development personal development and really

now try to implement these things into your life because until you can start to think a little bit different and you can start to see the world a little bit bigger you're never going to be able to achieve the maximum level of wealth that you deserve I've just uh Gone on Google and found this nine dots thing which I've got here this is the nine dots you got it so you're telling me I've got to connect all of the dots without lifting up my pen exactly okay let me try you have only four L and

you can't curve I can I can only do four lines only four lines four straight lines it's not as easy as it looks come on Stephen show me how to do it so what most people do is they start going like this this and then now we freeze up because I don't know where I can go next but the way that you do it is we're going to break the invisible barrier so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to start the same way I did before but in instead of creating the same

cut that I did last time I'm going to break the invisible barrier go a little bit further down and now I'm going to come up like this then I'm going to go this way and then I'm going to finish it up like that you break the invisible barrier you go beyond what you think you can do because you blew past your own expectations we have this invisible box around ourselves and this is what you want to be able to break out of this is that mindset shift that you have to be able to make and

that's the first part of becoming wealthy when you talked about invisible barriers it reminded me of a video that actually changed my life and it was a video of an ant some people have heard me talk about this video before this is the video shows an ant and they get a Sharpie pen and draw a circle around it and the Ant now believes that it's trapped in the circle no matter what it does it goes around and it checks all the to the circle it thinks that it's it's trapped we can see that that circle

is a figment of its imagination and when I see this I think oh my God we've all got this sort of imaginary Circle drawn around us and then I watched this video of a spider so they can do the same thing with a spider but the key moment in this video that really inspired me is the spider's currently trapped by this pen right but in this video there's a moment where the spider accidentally steps over the pen and when it steps over the pen it can never ever be trapped by the pen again you'll see

it in a second it's running towards WS it so this is like an imagin imaginary barrier in its mind um and then if I just bring it forward a little bit this is the moment here where it gets wow it's like a real wall it thinks it's a real wall and then it gets too tight here it runs over it and it can never be trapped again I love that because once you break it you can't be stabed after that you realize that it's an illusion that was trapping you the whole time and this kind

of feeds into what we've been saying about these stereotypes for me when I at a very young age when I was able to make my first money or start start a business or turn an idea into a thing that put money in my pocket that illusion was broken forever the illusion that the only way to become successful you said the same thing was to go to school get a degree get a job um and you can't you can't unsee it you can't unlearn it yeah you can't ever go and follow that same traditional path and

do that again because you saw the other side and until you get a taste of it you're going to be stuck and that's where again all success starts with their mindset and that's why I say I will become wealthy that first point though of awareness just knowing the fact that you're trapped by something and it's it's not to say that I've broken out of all of my psychological barriers now I'm just in a new one I'm just in a new set of barriers I think that I can be I can have nine figures I don't

I probably don't think I could be a billionaire or or whatever at this moment and all of us no matter how successful we think we are are in some kind of circles in every stage of your life you're in some sort of barrier and you [Music] know everything that you do now has to be constantly working to shock yourself when I started my YouTube channel it's kind of funny uh I I didn't start my YouTube channel thinking that it was going to be big and the funny thing was I always thought that I thought big

I think big I'm going to start a business I'm going to prove everybody wrong I didn't start my YouTube channel to make money this was kind of a hobby for me but I remember and I laugh at this now I told my brother when I started my YouTube channel if I hit 100,000 subscribers I don't know what I'm going to do but if I had a million subscribers I'm going to shut my channel down because there's no way it's impossible that my channel is going to hit 1 million subscribers like there's not 1 million weirdos

in the world I going to want to watch this random guy on YouTube talk about guacamole and money right and the funny thing is I started making these videos I started enjoying making these videos because I started talking about the things that I wish somebody would have told me before and people started to watch and people started to actually enjoy it and share it with their friends and then we hit 100,000 subscribers and I couldn't believe it we hit 500,000 subscribers and I couldn't believe it and then one day we hit a million subscribers and

I was like oh crap I hope my brother doesn't remember this promise because I don't want to shut this down but then we continued growing and here I was this guy who had been successful I'm already investing in real estate I've had some business success I broke out of this idea of becoming a doctor and started a business and I'm still putting these limitations on myself that I can't start a YouTube channel mhm why did I do that because I had never done that before I had never seen this happen for somebody like me before

so is there anything practical that someone who's currently trapped in some kind of psychological barriers can do practically to help them be more expansive with how they think about their life what I do and I don't know if I recommend this to anybody else is I'm a little stubborn I'm going to kind of preface it with that is I do things to stick out and be different so what I mean by this I'm going to go back to what I said before the first time I made a million dollars in a year I thought originally

that I would be flying in private jets and balling out and doing all this stuff but I knew that I wanted something different I I wanted to build this wealth but I didn't want to now start living like everybody else I wanted to do something different so I continued living small that's why I continued driving around in this car because everybody questioned what the heck I was doing people were wondering is just PR actually successful or is this guy a hoax is Just Breath broke can you not afford a nicer car and so I kind

of put myself in this position of like hearing the stuff and wanted to really you talked about confidence I wanted to really build my confidence to be that person that did something different and I I don't know I get joy I'm a weirdo I get joy out of that when I graduated law school I told my dad before I graduated law school even before that I'm only doing this for you and so when when it was my graduation day everybody you know you wear a nice suit and tie and you kind of get all dressed

up to go I told my dad look I told you I'm going to get you the diploma but I'm going to do it on my terms so I decided not to wear a suit I decided to wear a very traditional Punjabi outfit called a c pajama which is a a long shirt and pants and I wore traditional it's called a Punjabi jti meaning Indian shoes and for me I just wanted to do that because it gave me this confidence and yeah I mean people will say what the heck are you wearing but for me I

needed that burst of confidence that I'm doing this for me and I I get fueled by people questioning me and you have to find what fuels you I'm not first point of it's my duty to become wealthy is that just something you say out loud is there a way you can remind yourself of this so I I'm not a big fan of you know meditating on this idea of you become wealthy I'm not a big fan of this woo woo idea of I'm G become wealthy I'm going come wealthy and that's not how it works

but what I do believe is you have to keep reminding yourself and giving yourself the motivation and discipline in the beginning as to why you started some fuel as to why you started so one of the things I like to talk about is what is your why who are you doing this for and so in our office everybody has next to their desk this this tackboard where you can put pictures or whatever it might be to remind you of why you're working hard and in the beginning for me it was I was pissed off I

wanted to prove people wrong and I was angry and I don't try to cuss on camera that often but here we go uh I was angry and the reason I was angry is because when I made that decision to not become a doctor the thing that I was told was I'm throwing away the sacrifice that my parents made and I started a business at the time I was working in the e-commerce world and I started a sock company and so then the comments that we get was so just PR you were going to become a

doctor now you're selling socks and it was just very just reoccurring just like ah you gave up your dream dreams you gave up all the sacrifices that your family did you don't even appreciate the things the sacrifices and now you're just going to sell socks on the internet and that was my fuel because I knew I don't know how but I knew I was going to prove you wrong toxic fuel it 100% you know it was just anger just pure just anger I'm going to prove you wrong and uh slowly the business started to grow

I started to be seen on TV and all these things started to happen and and so I was fortunate that my business also flipped that now I'm not selling socks I'm you know building this financial Media Company briefs media and now for me it's there is a purpose for what I do there's a lot of people that are lacking Financial education there's a lot of people that are working really hard that have no idea why they can't build any wealth they keep hearing about how people are becoming so wealthy investment levels are skyrocketing billionares are

becoming even richer and they don't understand and people just get angry when in reality you can participate in that same game and win in this game because our economic system is designed to benefit investors and if you don't understand that you will never be able to win in the system Point number two in your money mindset is that money is a tool what do you mean by money is a tool and how is that different from how everyone else thinks about money you have to understand how money plays a part in your life when I

say money is a tool what I mean by that is money doesn't make you a good person money doesn't make you a bad person it amplifies who you are and what I'd like to say is that there are four fitnesses in your life if you want to live a happy and fulfilled life you have to be physically fit mentally fit spiritually fit and financially fit if you're physically fit you're on your deathbed you're morbidly obese having $10 million is not going to make you happy all you want to do is be healthy again mentally fit

is about being happy if you're surrounded by toxic people if you're unhappy if you're depressed if you're anxious if you're just miserable you're never going to be able to really enjoy life having more money is not going to fulfill that hole spiritually fit does not mean religious it means having a purpose what is the reason for getting out of bed every day what is the reason for wanting to go out and Achieve and do something because if you have $10 million what's the reason for wanting to get up and Conquer at the very top this

financial Fitness and once you have the bottom three having Financial Fitness gives you the most power and ability to live the best life possible because this is all about now being able to solve solve your financial problems being able to not worry about paying your bills being able to have the nicer stuff when you want and not have to worry about the price and the thing about this that I want to really Hammer home is if you don't have this financial Fitness now your physical fitness can get hurt because you can't afford the nice gym

membership you can't afford the healthy food you can't afford to take care of your body if you don't have the financial Fitness your mental Fitness can get hurt financial problems are one of the leading causes of suicide and divorce financial problems can really stress you out and they can cause a whole lot of anxiety and depression financial problems can also ruin your spiritual Fitness because if you can't pay your bills you can easily lose your sense of purpose so yes being financially fit is its own part but it all comes together in your life number

three to this money mindset money is abundant and what I mean by that is you have to be willing to think bigger because often times what happens is we start to think about the dollars that I'm giving as opposed to the dollars that I'm getting if I pay you a dollar you are getting rich off of me but I'm not looking at what I'm getting if I'm getting $2 from you well is it bad that I pay you $1 no and this is right now we not just we need to start to understand there's a

lot of money in the world just because somebody gets Rich that doesn't mean somebody else can't get rich and the reason why we get this confused is because we assume that money is scarce and this comes from our childhood because when you grow up you're fighting for your parents attention and there's a limited attention span that your parents have if you have siblings now it's divided and so you can't have all attention so if they're giving your parents are giving their attention to somebody else that means you're not getting attention it's is it's a yes

or no it's a black and white but with money that's not the case you can be rich and I can be rich but we have to understand that there's a lot of money in the world I mean the United States government has 35 some trillion dollars of debt it's a lot of money and so if you just take a small piece of that a small piece of the dollars out there you can build wealth and somebody else can build wealth and why is that that particular point in this m money mindset so critical why is

it important to know that there's so much money out there how does that change you so if you make $50,000 a year right now what you might start doing if you become financially smart is you might say all right I'm going to start living off of 75% of what I make and I'm going to invest the other 15% that means I'm going to live off of uh 30 ,000 and save and invest we'll call it $20,000 you might now say ah I like this idea of investing I'm seeing the potential what do I do I

make $50,000 a year how about I keep cutting back now I'm going to live off of 25,000 23,000 there's a limited number of dollars that you can squeeze out of this pie but there's no limit to how much you can earn so what if I say let's flip it up a little bit how about instead of trying to squeeze more pennies out of this $50,000 you have let's try to earn $500,000 a year now and the first thing that's going to happen is you're going to say whoa whoa whoa $500,000 a year my boss is

not going to give me a $500,000 a year salary what are you talking about J well okay let's break this down if you want to make more money how do you do it I don't know well let's start learning where you going to to learn I don't know Google YouTube okay let's go to Google and YouTube how can I make more money maybe you start by learning how to ask for raise maybe you learn to get a career change maybe you learn to change jobs or maybe now you start to think a little bit different

and you say maybe you start to build a side business or a side hustle that way you can start earning more money but until you realize that it's possible to instead of trying to go from 50,000 to 55,000 58,000 to 65,000 let's try to go a little bit bigger how about 50,000 to 500,000 and that's going to require number one you break out of that mindset shift that that that invisible barrier but also understanding there's a lot of money out there and the last Point here is I will become wealthy which is different to the

first point which is it's my duty to become wealthy so we discussed the first one which is I will become wealthy the last one is it is my duty to become wealthy oh okay why is it your duty to become wealthy because I believe that it's up to you to take care of your family to be the one that take cares that takes care of yourself that we can also help take care of your community that is my belief that it is your duty to do so and if you rely on the government or somebody

else to do it well you are asking for problems and you know we've seen this in many instances where you might have heard in the United States Social Security is drying up it's never going to dry up because the government can just print more money and pay it out but it's never going to be enough to live a great life people that relied on pensions well pensions are becoming a thing of the past some pensions have gone bankrupt and people have lost that so it is more important than ever for you to become financially sufficient

and financially stable through your own Financial education Trump has just been elected the new president of the United States of America and when you saw that news did it change your thesis as it relates to wealth creation is there anything you're now going to be doing differently is there any new opportunities that you now see are you shifting your Capital allocation towards more risky assets or less risky assets or real estate if we take a look at the last 15 presidents in the United States some have been Democrat some have been Republican the stock market

has gone up under democratic presidents it's also Fallen under democratic presidents the stock market has gone up under Republican presidents it's also Fallen under Republican presidents so what does that mean well if you just investing for the long term who cares but for some investors that we'll call it a little bit more sophisticated you might want to understand what the president is going to do in terms of Shifting government spending now I'm going to make this a little bit technical but let me kind of break this down our economy is measured through a number called

GDP and GDP is a measure of all spending that happens in our economy in the United States the largest spender is the government 30% of our GDP our economy is government spending which means that there are certain entities certain businesses that will benefit depending on where the government spends money and that can then impact those stocks it can impact those Industries and it can impact those businesses so now let's break this down if you're a long-term investor you're investing in the S&P 500 you're investing in just general ETFs and index funds and mutual funds it

does not matter but if you are let's say a little bit more sophisticated you want to understand the government shifts that are happening now we can dig a little bit deeper so prior to the election we published a whole report in Market briefs Pro on this where what we talked about is if Trump is elected president here are the things that he has said that he's going to do number one he wants to deregulate Oil and Gas number two he wants to deregulate the financial service industry and number three he wants to invest in the

military so if you're break this down oil and gas these are companies that are investing and drilling oil and so if these companies have less regulations and more ability to produce product and sell more product they could see bigger revenues and bigger profits number two with Financial Service Industries things like the companies on wall Street if you deregulate them and give them the ability to do more things they can make bigger revenues and bigger profits and crypto as well and crypto crypto since the news that he's been he's going to be inaugurated the prices have

just skyrocketed exactly and number three is investing in the military now what does it mean to invest in the military well if we're investing in the military that means that we're going to be practicing shooting more guns shooting more bullets having artillery having planes and other machinery and these are then done by private companies and so if the government can spend and choose where to spend money and the government then decides that they want to spend more money or allow companies to be more free to do whatever they want in these industries those Industries then

have the ability to potentially grow the revenues grow their profits grow the stock prices these can then create what we call a government shift because the government spending shifts and that can create an investment opportunity for investors that want to be a little bit more sophisticated but I'm going to say this again as a long-term investor forget the collection Cycles you're investing for the long term for those less sophisticated investors as you were when you were 19 years old you chose to invest in real estate as a cash generating asset now if I want to

invest in real estate it's my first investment as you did what are the things that I should be looking out for if I'm someone that knows nothing about real estate what kind of properties should I be looking for how big doesn't matter how how much those properties cost am I looking for family rentals studio apartments what kind of things matter what you invest in is going to depend on what's best for you but the way I like to look at it for me cuz I can't tell you what to do is for me when I

invest in real estate is I look for a 7% cash on cash return minimum what does that mean so if I invested a dollar today I want 7 cents of cash flow after expenses every year for my dollar that I invest so if I buy let's just call it a $100,000 house and I'm going to keep it very simple we're going to have no debt I take a $100,000 out of my bank account and I buy this $100,000 house that I then rent out that rent after all the expenses should then put at least $7,000

into my pocket and every year that's what a 7% cash on cash return means now for me I prefer single family houses or multif Family Apartments because that's kind of where I got started and I've found more success there and it's a little bit more Innovation proof because we know that offices can go up and down if companies are working from home offices can be affected the retail sector can be impacted if companies are moving online and we see that there's a lot of shifts happening in the retail spaces but uh at the end of

the day you got to find what's right for you and how involved you want to be when I invest in real estate I want it to be passive for me that after I find a property after we do the renovations I want to give the keys over to a property manager I don't want to have to worry about it okay so you don't you don't become the landlord yourself and deal with the tenants directly I do not and the reason why is I have all the things that I need to do and I don't want

to spend my time managing the prop property I want to spend my time acquiring I want to spend my time investing but I don't want to spend my time managing what's the best investment you ever made the best investment I ever made is the investment of myself that has given me a much better return than any real estate than any stock and even than any cryptocurrency and when I say best investment in myself is two things number one is the investment that I have made in my own education outside of school so books podcasts classes

coaching number two the failures I have made a lot of mistakes they have caused me a lot of stress a lot of headache a lot of money but they have taught me a ton so we'll talk about real estate for a second if we go back to the first condo the sunshine and rainbows is I rent this property up for $600 a month but the downfall or the risky part and the bad part is that I made every mistake possible number one I hired a bad contractor number two I hired a property manager which I

didn't realize was a fake property manager we didn't even sign a lease with the tenant I didn't even sign a contract with the property manager they weren't working with the tenants and they gave the tenant my phone number so here I am sitting in my organic chemistry class getting calls from my tenant ten saying the property is going to implode because the light bulb fused then we hired brought in a bad tenant can I ask you a question then how could you have avoided all of this well I could have either number one had a

real estate investor that I could have talked to which I didn't have access to I read a lot of real estate books so if you say what could I have done differently to avoid it because there's people listening right now that are going Jesus I I want to get into this real estate game but I don't want to go through you can learn as much as you want you're going to make mistakes it is a part of the process you can learn as everything you want but every real estate deal is unique you are going

to screw up and I have made a lot of screw-ups but once you get through the screw-ups it becomes a lot easier I call it the hurdle but then things get even more exciting because now I bring on a new property manager and the tennants move out and then we think everything is good and now I get a letter Del to me hand delivered well this is a nice gift it says Just Breath sing you are being sued and I said what those tenants then sued me because they claimed that the bathtub was too slippery

when the water was on true story and now here I have this lawsuit I'm 2122 I have no idea what's going on just bre was the bathtubs do slippery well I'll tell you exactly what happened there was a chip about the size of a quarter in the bathtub the paint had chipped they filed a complaint with my new property manager thank God I switched property managers because what a good property manager does is they're going to document everything that happens so my property manager documents that okay tenant complains of a chip in their bathtub we

send out the contractor so the property manager sends out the contractor they go there to fix the chip in the bathtub and you know what the and says can you come back a different time my husband slipped and fell at a friend's barbecue and so we don't want you to fix that chip today the contractor says okay we note this down he tries to then fix the chip three more times but the tenant denies it every single time and so we thought okay just let us know when you want the chip fixed the contractor is

waiting they never brought it up again then we get this lawsuit saying that we were negligent that I'm this evil greedy human being because I refused to fix this chip in the bathtub which made the bathtub slippery when the water was on which caused this person to slip and fall and break their hip and so now we go through the lawsuit process thankfully I had insurance but the insurance company still has to pay for the attorney I still have to be involved through all the proceedings and now they're claiming that because I didn't fix this

chip it made the bathtub slippery and that's what caused this tenant to get hurt but we had the documentation saying that they slipped and fell at a friend's barbecue and then we go through the hospital records and we found out that this person slipped and fell at a barbecue but they wanted to get some money out of this Rich landlord I'm a 22y old kid a 21- year old kid I have no idea what's going on and so the insurance company had to settle they paid $144,000 to make the case go away it's interesting because

even when people hear all of that they think gosh I really don't want to go through that so J PR please tell me something to avoid some of those things and and you know as you were talking I was I was writing down some principles yeah and what the first principle that I wrote down which could have avoided you a lot of that heartache is to really really really really take time when picking people 100% And we no one does it no one does it and I have an Investment Portfolio where I have 40 50

companies now and that if there was one piece of advice that I'd give to all of those portfolio companies which I know they are not going to listen to No matter how passionately I say it no matter if I bang on the desk no matter if I scream or show them my scars the one piece of advice I'd say to them is that recruitment is the single most important thing and and you can say that to people but they still rush the process they still will just go with their Vibes and bias they'll still just

go with the person who sounds the smartest they won't acknowledge the fact that they don't know what good looks like you don't don't know what good looks like if you start with this base premise which most people don't start with which is I am really really bad at recruitment if you start with that then you'll put systems in place to alleviate the downsides of you being really bad at Recruitment and if you had started with that when you were I don't know 20 years old or whatever it might have been you would have gone to

seek out someone else's opinion on which contractor to hire which tenants to bring in and that could have alleviated a lot of this pain it seems like I was in a rush in a rush yes I wanted to get it done and so I find the cheapest and fastest contractor the cheapest and fastest property manager the cheapest and fastest or not the cheapest but you know the fastest tenant that I could bring in because I wanted to do it quickly I wanted to get there fast it reminds me of people picking romantic Partners I was

in a rush so I ignored the red flags and it's funny because you said the cheapest this is actually what plays out in business all of the time is I speak to these young Founders that are starting businesses and they go Steve yeah I know you say like take time and hire great people but look at the salary this person costs $100,000 and this one's $50,000 so I'm going to go for the one that saves me money and that is the Trap one of the most expensive things that you can do is be cheap and

I learned that the hard way because I was born to be cheap you know I talked about how Indian people make a dollar to spend 20 cents that was my family growing up and that was the way that I was raised that if you become a doctor you'll make a nice sixf figure salary you can live off of $30,000 a year and save a whole lot of money and I never questioned it but this is a very kind of just don't spend money that's how you build wealth because if I give you money that means

I'm taking my wealth and giving it to you and I'm getting nothing in return and that's it goes back to the in that mindset money is abundant and that scarcity thinking is one of the most expensive things that you can do so true and I'll give you a story of this I told you I have if you want to talk about mistakes we can go for hours and days about my mistakes because I screwed up a lot I had an accountant and I figured that if I'm paying less money in accounting fees I am saving

money so my business can keep more money act and build more wealth right but one of the most expensive things that you can do is be cheap so I had this accountant that was cheap and all he did was file my taxes kind of I mean he was late and whatever but he was cheap the monthly payment was cheap so I didn't really care too much because I got the taxes done and then I always wondered why we don't like talk about tax planning what should I do it's just like at the end of the

year I get this like big email send me all of your stuff and then I don't hear from him for a long time and then he says sign this paperwork and I didn't really think much of it but then one year it was January I'm in my office and I get a call Early in the Morning from my accountant and if you get a call from your accountant early morning in January it's never a good sign I didn't know that he calls me says justbu how are you doing I said I'm good how are you

thinking I'm going to get some good news he said hey uh I made a little mistake on the taxes could you do me a favor and uh wire $18,000 to the state of Michigan by the end of the day said excuse me he said oh uh also could you also by the end of the day please wire $100,000 to the federal IRS by the end of the day excuse me oh and the last part you're going to have pay penalties and interest on this to and it took me a minute to really absorb all this

information so you want me to send a hundred some thousand dos by the end of the day whose fault is this and I remember this response he said it's nobody's fault and you know I I didn't really process what he said but I had to think through this I said whose fault was it it's my fault that's whose fault it was I wanted to blame him but it was my fault because I was being cheap and I learned I hired a new accountant who cost me many many many multiples more than what I was paying

before but you know the crazy thing is it's actually saving me more money now because we do these tax strategizing which then allows me to pay less money in taxes legally even though I'm pay more money to my accountant this is one of the most pivotal things that I learned in the last sort of three to four years my care I've been in business for maybe well my first business maybe 15 years ago but in the last three years in particular I just got overly obsessed about hiring in Recruitment and really how much the the

exceptional person costs is inconsequential to the long-term net impact I'll have on my business I remember I spoke to Jay Jason who's my older brother who works in my company now he's like super smart lsse actal scientist he's like a calculator um and I I'd said to him can you tell me where my net worth has originated from he said your net worth is X hundreds of millions or whatever I said can you like go upstream and tell me where it came from and he he didn't come back and say oh you made this great

bet or this investment he said effectively what happened is you hired six or seven good people and those six or seven good people ended up hiring a couple more good people and making a couple of good decisions and those people made a couple more hires and made a couple more good decisions and it propagated and it reminded me of something Steve Jobs said Steve Jobs said people think I've built this you know multi-billion Dollar business because I'm so smart and he says in that interview I've built my career by doing the really really hard work

of finding truly exceptional people and it propagates I a players High a players b players High b b players C players high C players so the game of business I mean the definition of the word company is group of people but the game of business is to assemble the best group of people and if you're cheap that mission is not possible yeah and and you you'll get a shortterm win but the long-term pain which is that January phone call from your accountant when they say I up you get what you paid for just and and

you know it goes back to we talked about touching the fire right becoming successful means you're going to make mistakes you have to make mistakes you cannot bypass the mistakes you ask me how does somebody do this without the mistakes you're going to make your own but the difference between somebody who becomes successful and somebody who does not become successful is they are willing to make those mistakes see most people say I don't want to try to touch the fire I don't want to risk it but until you touch it until you screw up you're

not going to know it's hot and You' got to be willing to screw up I want to add something to that as well which I noticed in you you just said that unless you're willing to make mistakes you're not going to become successful but there was a question I asked you I said whose mistake was it when I was talking about your accountant and I was testing you because I was I was trying to see where you put responsibility today and I think that point of taking responsibility is actually the biggest indicator that that mistake

turns into a lesson so your your accountant up clearly incompetent but when I asked you whose fault was it you said it was my fault and that immediately tells me that you don't have an internal locus of control are you the control of that decision and your belief of where the control lies is within you so in the future you can do something about it but when I speak to people about bad relationships about bad hires or about any sort of bad personal decision they've made maybe a bad friend 99% of the time they will

blame the person that was a bad person and what you did is what I think is the most important thing and actually the science cooperates that if you have this internal locus of control internal responsibility for what happens you're much more likely to be successful much more likely to learn from it much more likely to be happy much more likely to be rich which as you went it was my fault can I tie that together now with wealth when people ask me why is it that so many people are poor and struggling with money I

say there's two things at fault and there's two ways you can look at it there's the it's your fault and the my fault and I always like to talk about both of these because you have to understand this because it ties in very well and I appreciate all the kind words because I I really do appreciate that but when I say it's your fault look our economic system is designed to profit off of people being financially stupid period Banks profit when you're financially stupid because that means you stay in debt and they keep making interest

for the rest of your life corporations profit when you're financially illiterate because that means you're going to keep buying their stuff and not think twice and they're going to hire the best and smartest mbas to get you to open up their wallets to open up your wallets number three the government is going to profit when you're financially illiterate because that means you don't do anything outside of your W2 job and you're going to pay the highest tax rates you profit when you're financially educated so now what can you do you can say they're the reason

I'm broke this company is the reason why I'm broke my company is the reason why I'm broke the government's the reason why I'm broke the banks are the reason why I'm broke well that's not what I'm saying that's just part one the second part to part one before I get to part two is once you understand this you can learn how to win you can learn how to use the bank you can learn how to use corporations because you want to have nice stuff you can learn how to use the resources that the government has

but now let's flip the script the second part to this that you need to understand it's your own responsibility because if you spend every dollar that you earn you're never going to become wealthy if every time you make money you go on a nice vacation you're never going to build wealth if you can't afford it if you just make money and you make everybody else around you rich before you make yourself rich that's your choice people don't want to take personal responsibility though you know it's a topic I always talk about um because that's like

holding a mirror up to yourself it doesn't feel good does it to say that it was my mistake I'm the reason why I don't have money I'm the reason why I'm living in this you know this little bedsit with these four strange guys when I was 18 years old and I didn't have car Carpets on the floor and I was shoplifting food to feed myself I'm you know that hurts to say that it was me it's my deficiencies the self-esteem doesn't want to to take such an attack and you know what here's the thing it

might not be all your fault there might be a lot of reasons why you're in that crappy situation there might be a lot of reasons why you're struggling with money today you might have grown up in a very crappy situation you might have had horrible parents you might have had a horrible upbringing you might have had horrible surroundings you might have been dealt a horrible set of cards okay now what now what you were now the question is are you going to take that responsibility today going forward or not and you have to take that

drastic responsibility you have to take that drastic mindset shift and that's what you have to do and it's difficult who wants to blame themselves but if you want to change where you are they're not going to do it your Banker is not gonna say Hey Stephen you know you can't afford this car don't take this debt don't take this house because if they can sign you up they're going to want to get paid they're in the business of making money not for you but for them Gucci is not going to say maybe you should buy

some stocks instead of this purse because they're going to want you to buy their stuff the government's not going to say hey why don't you take a look at our balance sheet I'm gonna get I'm gonna take this little tangent the government says student loans are a problem we've all heard that Millennials can't buy houses they can't buy their home they can't invest because they have student loans the government says student loans are a problem really let's take a look at the United States balance sheet your balance sheet is your asset and liability statement the

number one largest asset on the United States government balance sheet are student loans so here we keep saying oh student loans are bad we keep hearing this from the government but on the other hand the government is so rich because of the student loans because so many people are stuck in these student loans and guess what you pay the highest tax rates when you were just an employee I'm an attorney I'm not your attorney but I am a licensed attorney and I spent a lot of time studying the tax law and what I can tell

you is that the tax law rewards you when you are an investor in 2024 the CEO of Coca-Cola James Quincy is going to make about $8 million in cash compensation he'll also get Equity but about $8 million in cash compensation his top tax rate on that $8 million is going to be 37% on the federal taxes in the US Warren Buffett is going to make over $700 million from Coca-Cola dividends in 2024 his his top tax rate is going to be 20% he's making way more than the CEO but he's going to pay less in

taxes on a percentage level because he made that money as an investor we're never taught that this goes one step further though doesn't it because if you look at someone like an Elon Musk they never even take a salary these people and people don't know about this thing called loaning against your assets I didn't know about it and I think it's a big secret that people need to know about Elon Musk is interesting because he's a risk taker and he chose to get paid not in salary and if we look at the tax benefit from

this is because you are taxed not on your income that's not what the tax code says you are taxed based on your taxable income so now what every accountant every smart accountant every every smart accountant is going to focus on reducing your taxable income and so what Elon Musk did is when he was building TX Tesla he negotiated with the investors and the board that I want to get paid not with a salary I want to get paid with stock options a stock option gives you the right to buy that stock and he was awarded

these Tesla stock options at about $6 a share which means if the Tesla stock goes up to to $7 a share he could sell the stock option for $6 and profit $1 for each stock option now he was given millions and millions and millions of these stock options and so now when the Tesla stock goes up to $100 a share now he is Rich on paper he doesn't have any money in his bank he hasn't gotten a salary so he has no taxable income because he hasn't actually received any money he has the option to

sell this stock for six and in return get $100 so net 94 but if he sold that stock he would have $94 of income now you have a tax because you have taxable income so instead what he does is he goes to the bank and he says Hey bank I have these millions and millions of stock options that are worth billions of dollars would you like to loan me a million $10 million $100 million at three four or 5% interest no bank is going to say no because the collateral is so valuable what's the collateral

the collateral is the company it's his assets the stock options which is Tesla in this which is Tesla in this instance so then he gets let's call it a $10 million loan from the bank now he has $10 million in his bank account but it's not an income it's debt debt is not taxed if you go out and get a mortgage for a half a million dollars you're not taxed if you do a Cash out refinance you're not taxed because that's debt so now he gets this $10 million of loans that he can spend to

buy a house to buy a car to buy food to buy vacations to buy whatever you want buy Twitter to buy Twitter and pay no money in taxes and it's 100% legal now you're going to say well just prit how does he pay it back well let's just assume that you're going to get a 5% interest on this if the value of Tesla goes up by say 7% he made a profit so now he can go back to the bank and say how about you give me an additional $10 million and he can pay back

the old loan because the value keeps going up and as long as the value keeps going up no problem but you can start to see where this gets risky because if Tesla goes bankrupt now we're talking about a house of cards that can collapse and now you have all this debt that you've already spent and no more collateral but in his case he could if Tesla starts to fall in value then the bank will call payment so if it say it might be I don't know Tesla Falls from let's say 100 to $10 a share

they're going to call payment he's going to get what what's that called he's going to get a um Margin Call a margin call which means that they're going to say give me the money back quick yes and or they're going to sell off the asset and to get their money back quick and it's a losing transaction the bank will lose because if they Banks do not profit from margin calls because once you start making margin calls that's in panic hits yeah and now you have to scramble to sell and now the bank is just trying

to get pennies back out of every dollar that they lent out I'm going to get old someday and um I think a lot about making sure I'm wealthy enough so that I can take care of myself when I probably can't work a lot of people talk about this retirement crisis MH that the UK and the US are in what is the retirement crisis and why why does it matter to any of us and what do we do about it this is a multifaceted issue the first issue is we have this huge population of old people

Baby Boomers that are retired or entering retirement that have not enough money this is not just the US this is also the UK like you said which creates a few issues number one who's going to take care of them number two who's going to fund that taking care of them the government doesn't have that money and the people that are going into retirement don't have that money and their kids many times don't have that money that's the first issue and now as we start to dig into that we have people that are working longer and

it creates now now this problem in the future that we can see today if you're in your 50s 40s 30s 20s teens you can see that there's this problem that's happening how do we prevent that today because I don't know what the solution is for this retirement crisis I don't have a solution for that the average retirement savings for Americans age 60 is roughly $500,000 and the average age of death in the US is 77 years old so if you retire at 67 years old which is the average age of retirement in the United States

then for the next 10 years you're going to have to live off about $50,000 um and the stats say that well I actually got this from your YouTube channel the minority mindset YouTube channel said that the average American needs between1 to2 million to retire comfortably according to USA Today We need about $1.8 million to comfortably wow and the reason why is every year we have inflation so if you live off of $50,000 this year you're going to need maybe 52 53 $54,000 next year more the year after that more the year after that and $50,000

doesn't buy you what it did 30 years ago and so now when we take a look at all these issues happening the question question is what do you do today to prevent these issues in the future and starting with in the United States we have what's called Social Security which is a government check that you get when you retire the first problem with Social Security because Social Security is drying up this is a fact that if you read the headlines they'll say social security is going to be dry by 20134 if nothing changes the problem

is people are paying money in but the government is paying out more than what's going in so from any business perspective if you have more cash outflows and cash inflows you have a problem and the reason for that is well number one the math was wrong and number two people are living longer so when the government keeps paying your social security check longer and longer and longer because people are living longer life expectancy is getting higher that means they have to keep paying that's not good for the government now on the plan right here to

La I sat next to somebody who was telling me I didn't verify this but he told me that the government knew that this was going to be a problem from the get-go because he told me that the first recipient of the Social Security program lived to a 100 I don't know if that's true or not but you can Google that to see but that's the problem right now Social Security is is running out of money and this is where everyone says Social Security is going to run dry you're never going to get a social security

check that's not true either the reason why I say that is because because the government won't let it fail they'll either raise your taxes or they'll just print that money but the problem with it is you will never be able to live comfortably off of Social Security that was never the intention but many people are looking at it as I'm going to be able to live comfortably from this government check but here's the problem let's take a look at what's happening today between 2024 to 2025 social security recipients are going to receive a 2.5% raise

for inflation what they're saying is we have this inflation in 2024 and because of this inflation in 2024 you're going to get a 2 and a half% raise there two problems with that number one that raise is not enough things are getting a lot more expensive even though the rate of inflation is falling I mean 2 and a half% raise is not going to keep up over the real cost of living growth that most people feel the second problem is it's a delayed raise the government gives you a raise in 2025 based off of the

inflation you had in 2024 so we already had this price growth and then you get the raise next year and guess what we're going to have more inflation in 2025 so relying on social security is a losing proposition which brings the next part of this three-legged stool see have social security then you have pensions pensions have become a thing of the P I mean if you're under the age of 45 chances are you're not getting a pension and even if you're over the age of 45 and you're promised a pension you better cross your fingers

to hope that that pension fund does not go bankrupt because there have been many Pension funds that have gone bankrupt and people are left with nothing which leaves number three your own savings and Investments and this is where we have so much a lack of understanding because people are not doing enough this goes back to the whole financial education we make money to spend money that's what the American culture is I make $1,000 I'm going spend $1,000 maybe $1,200 but you're never going to be able to retire with that sort of mindset and here's the

second problem with that I'm just going to lay the problem so we'll come up with a solution you might say well I need a financial adviser no good financial adviser nowadays wants to work with anybody under $500,000 in assets maybe $250,000 in assets maybe if you get lucky $100,000 in assets but if you have under that they don't want to work with you because they want people to have some money to actually make money off of right the financial advisers got to eat too so if you don't have the Investments you don't have the education

now you're stuck and this is where now your Financial education comes in because if you want to build wealth you want to have quote unquote retirement you got to do something different you can't keep doing what the majority of people do because if you keep doing what the majority of people do you're going to end up like the majority people and right now that's broke in debt living paycheck to paycheck fat and unhappy and I'm not saying this as a general term I mean statistically that's what the majority of people are especially in America so

now let's come up with the solution cuz we have laid out the problem the first solution is Define what is retirement because I'm going to get a little philosophical here but I have my issues with traditional retirement there's a saying that says Those Who retire early die early the reason why is because if you work from the age of 21 to 65 maybe 67 at a job you hate but you work every single day and all you're looking forward to is retire at 67 you retired 67 you have this great big retirement party now you

come home and you sit on the sofa and you start watching TV you start to lose your sense of purpose and I've seen this very closely with people in my not my family but close to my family where I've seen people who were healthy energetic maybe didn't love their work but they had a reason to get up every day go to work retire and literally go insane I mean you you have nothing to do and now you start to see health issues that you didn't have before you start to have mental health issues which you

didn't have before and all these things just start to happen when you were going to enter your golden years even if you have the money to do things so when we talk about what is retirement I want to caution everybody or if you have parents to start thinking about what do you want to do during retirement because if your goal is to do nothing you might enjoy it for the first few weeks maybe 6 months but eventually you're going to get bored so you got to have something to do then is the financial side of

retirement what is retirement and I have a different definition than most people most financial advisers don't like me for the things that I say but my definition of retirement is the same as my definition of wealth wealth is for me when my cash flow from my investments exceeds my expenses it's very simple if my expenses are $4,000 a month and my cash flow from my stocks and my real estate and everything else is paying me $4,000 And1 a month I am wealthy so now the question is how do you actually achieve this type of wealth

retirement the reason why I don't like the word retirement as well besides the connotation of I'm going to do nothing is they assume there's I got to be 67 years old to hit this retirement when you can achieve this wealth way sooner and now you have more options so retirement Is wealth wealth is when your cash flow from your assets exceeds your expenses how do you actually do this now well you got to buy the assets and in order to do that you have to have the money and many people assume that the way you

get rich is by Investing For passive income you get rich by investing in real estate you get rich by buying this cash flow that's a lie you have to have the money first you have to have the money to invest in real estate you have to have the money to buy the cash flow so if we just make the numbers very round and simple if I need $70,000 a year to live my life and I can get a 7% cash cash flow on my investments I need to invest a million dollar to have that $70,000

a year to fund my lifestyle now you're going to say where in the world are you going to get a million dollars you don't need it today it can happen over time right when people talk about retirement planning they're thinking about 45 years so when we talk about wealth why can't we talk about the long term it's not going to happen in two days but it can happen if you put in that work so now you have to put aside this amount of cash to buy certain Investments that can pay you this type of cash

flow the second thing is well what about inflation jit you talk about this all the time the buying power of my dollar is going down $70,000 when I'm 65 years old in a few decades is not going to have the same buying power as today you're right but here's the thing when you invest your money into dividend paying stocks which are stocks that pay you or into strong real estate these are inflation adjusted Investments which means generally as inflation happens rental prices go up as inflation happens stock values and dividends also go up and this

is where now if we start to understand this you'll understand the power of this because it's actually a little bit more extreme we've probably heard about you know the wealth Gap in America and how the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer well the reason why that happens is because investment values grow faster than incomes and inflation benefits investors so you see how we start to tie this all together because wealth is about owning Investments the way you become wealthy by owning Investments our economic system is designed to benefit investors if we

take a look at 2019 to 2024 over those 5 years household incomes the median household income grew by around 18% during those 5 years the S&P 500 the stock market has grown by almost 100% which means that the wealth for investors has grown almost five times or about five times faster than incomes this is why you can't earn your way to wealth you can't save your way to wealth you have to invest your way to wealth and remember wealth is retirement and you might say well despy that's just because of the pandemic and everything that

after happened after the pandemic well let's go back in time let's look at it a little bit broader let's look at the five decades between 1971 and 20 21 over those five decades household income increased by around 600% now mind you that between 1971 and 2021 we also saw the number of workers in a household increase between in 1971 the average household had one person that went to work the man went to work and the woman didn't that's how life was in early 1970s in 2021 many households are two household incomes so 1971 to 2021

the median household income grew by around 600% the S&P 500 the largest 500 companies in the stock market grew by around 4,000% so again inflation happens inflation benefits the investor how do you become wealthy it's by investing your money so if you want to retire if you want to build wealth you have to be an investor and you have to calculate what is that wealth number for you for me the way that I do it is I do it through cash flow most of my investments my real estate Investments pay me cash flow when I

buy a property I buy it for the cash flow most of my stock market Investments are dividend paying assets meaning they pay me cash flow dividends just for owning the stock some of my investments grow in value they're more appreciative they're more appreciation but when I think about retirement for me it's cash flow exceeding my expenses what about starting a company should people become entrepreneurs well I think everybody in America needs to be business owner but the majority people should not operate a business when you invest in a stock you become a business owner you

don't operate the business if I go out and buy a share of Amazon I'm not working in the company I'm not operating the company but I own some of it some people should start a business I'm a huge advocate for entrepreneurship for the right person who's the right person I used to think everybody needs to become an entrepreneur because when I started to see success as an entrepreneur I crossed that invisible barrier I said oh my God people need to see this you have to become an entrepreneur you can do things on your own and

I was preaching this to my friend friends I got one friend of mine who was an engineer to quit his job and to then join me he would come to my office and I would talk to him about things and I said you know different ways you can do this and I realized pretty quickly he is not meant to be an entrepreneur the work ethic was different when he would go home he didn't want to work and that did not click to me what do you mean you don't want to work after 5:00 like that

there's no stop point when you're starting a business you got to start the second thing was the way you think about risk it's oh well if I invest $100 how fast I'm going to make the money back am I going to make this money back it became all these like little analysises before you've even done anything you got to start and then it's the innovation of what are you going to do it's asking for a blueprint tell me exactly what to do tell me exactly what to sell tell me exactly how how to sell it

I don't know what you are good at I don't know what problem you can solve I don't know what Innovation you can create and this is where I go back to I am a big advocate for entrepreneurship for the right person who is that right person somebody who has this entrepreneurial itch that you have this this I need to create something this I can't work for somebody else's feeling this I want to build something it's a very much like I don't care what it takes I don't care what I have to do this is what

is my calling and as you say there you're going to have to tolerate uncertainty and when I say uncertainty I mean comfort as well the lack of a blueprint the lack of certainty about how much you're going to make this month or how quickly you're going to make money or if you're going to make money risk which is you might have to put a lot of things on the line including your reputation and you said hard work as well so are you willing to work seven days a week and you're right you know when people

say that they think it's super toxic but like in my own experiences of starting businesses but then on every friend that I have that started a business they'll all tell you that there's absolutely no such thing as 9 to-5 you work you work whenever you have to work and if you're at a bar mitzvah or a wedding or a anniversary meal with your partner at any moment you might get a horrible email and you have to act upon it you can't say I'm going to save that till Monday or not my problem oh yeah and

I'm going to add one more to that list the willingness to be criticized oh yeah any business you start you are going to upset a lot of people at every stage of the business I mean this is really important because much of the reason why people want to be entrepreneurs is because they want to be their own boss but what's so interesting about the story you told about that tenant is you became her boss whenever I speak to entrepreneurs there's one problem that always comes up but today's sponsor LinkedIn has a solution and I think

you'll want to hear it connecting your business with the Right audience can be tough you can spend a lot of time and money trying to get it right and still regardless fall short of that especially when it comes to B2B marketing where you're not doing business with one person you're dealing with teams making decisions together through Linkedin ads you can connect with an extensive Professional Network of over a billion members including 10 million seite Executives you can also Target specifically by job title industry company and more it's no surprise to me that LinkedIn is reported

to be the highest returning paid social platform in the world to help you get started LinkedIn is offering a $100 credit to launch your first campaign on the platform just go to linkedin.com doac 24 to claim your credit now that's linkedin.com doac c24 terms and conditions apply this diary won't change your life but the Habit it teaches you definitely will the most unhelpful advice that I ever received was don't sweat the small stuff you have to sweat the small stuff I sweat the small stuff I always have and I always proudly will because small things

that are easy to do are also easy not to do it is easy to save a dollar so it's also easy not to it is easy to brush your teeth so it's also easy not to it is easy to make a 1% Improvement so it's also easy not to understanding the power of compounding 1% you can absolutely change your outcomes in your life it isn't about drastic Transformations or quick wins it's about the small consistent actions that have a lasting change in your outcomes so two years ago we started the process of creating this beautiful

diary and it's truly beautiful inside there's lots of pictures lots of inspiration and motivation as well some Interac Dev elements and the purpose of this diary is to help you identify stay focused on develop consistency with the one perents that will ultimately change life we're only going to do a limited run of these Diaries so if you want one for yourself or for a friend or for a colleague or for your team then head to the diary.com right now I'll link it below one one of the things I really wanted to to talk to you

about as well is just a word that I think is so pertinent to everything we've talked about today which which I think is important which is the word patience because there's some areas of my it goes to what I said about my friend my friend who's been in our group chat who's made more C than all of my other friends in that group chat and he's done it by being boring impatient like he's he's just flown under the radar and when I think about my life and many of the Investments I'm making now I'm like

oh God what is it I'm looking over there my friends buying some like crypto meme coin and he's told me it's gone up 150x this month I'm looking over there and people are investing in I don't know the the they're picking stocks and stock trading whatever and they're telling me it's gone up 50% but in my wisdom as I've gotten older I've realized like the tortois in the hair that boring and patient is such a wonderful investment strategy it's such like a paradoxical way to think I have so many seeds that I've planted that are

taking forever to grow but I just now know because I've got enough case studies in my brain that that boring impatient approach to wealth will put me in a better position at the end of the game yes and you have to be sometimes impatiently patient so if we talk about Building Wealth through investing your money the numbers have shown that over the last century the stock market has gone up by an average of 10% a year historically but many people lose money when investing in stocks I mean if you go around talking people have you

invested in stocks yes yes yes how many of you have made money the hands start dropping well if the stock market has gone up by around 10% a year on average every year for the last 100 years why why are so many people losing money because we start playing the wrong game and so now what happens if you invest your money into the stock market and by the stock market I mean let's just say you buy the S&P 500 which is a basket of the 500 largest companies in the stock market for example not Financial

advice if you invest in spy that is an ETF that gives you exposure to the 500 largest companies we know that historically that's gone up by 10% a year but that's not enough for a lot of people so now I'm going to play this game of I'm going to try to beat the market and some people will most won't so now some people are going to try to get into the game of investing in individual companies or maybe trading companies because even investing in individual companies if you invest for the long enough period of time

you're probably going to win but many people now want a quicker solution so now we start trading we start finding hot companies the next Tesla the next Amazon we see what Reddit says see what Google says and we start buying these things because we're excited but that excitement is what's killing your wealth because you're investing On Emotion instead of investing on financials and so this is where you talk about what's boring just keep doing the market keep investing in the market when the Market's up when the Market's down when the market sideways just keep investing

because that has been proven to win we know that if you invest a $100 a mon month from the age of 21 until your retirement 6566 and you can get that same 10% return you're going to retire a millionaire assuming you only invest $100 a month from the age of 21 to 65 or 66 it's so interesting because when I asked you earlier what the best investment you ever made was you said the investment you made in yourself and maybe we've not spent enough time really talking about how critical Knowledge and Skills are to wealth

generation maybe that is the first principle of wealth creation maybe that is the furthest thing Upstream is Knowledge and Skills um and you can you know dabble in stocks and whatever else but really over a 50-year Time Horizon your Knowledge and Skills and you know your knowledge might be of patience your knowledge might be of real estate investing your knowledge might be of whatever your knowledge might be of a philosophy towards investing really it's your Knowledge and Skills they're going to determine where you end up so as it relates to getting those Knowledge and Skills

where's the best place to people to go other than obviously the Dio you know but outside of this podcast where is the best place for people to go to get Knowledge and Skills that they can trust without getting scammed without having to pay for some call from some YouTuber who's charging $3,000 a month for like a you know to tell them something that reading off chat GPT what is like the best place well the best best place is to go out and do it screw up make mistakes but along with that start with what's free

YouTube podcasts best book you've ever read the first book I'll start with that because the best is it changes yeah the first book I ever read cover to cover was Rich Dad pad the second book was Total Money Makeover Rich Dad pad is by Robert kosaki Total Money Makeover is by Dave Ramsey the third book is a book called uh the creature from Jackal Island which talks about the Federal Reserve Bank those three books are going to give you a foundation of money and different perspectives of it so start by learning for free even before

books start by watch a YouTube video start by listening to podcasts then you take the next step and you start reading books and what I talk about is if you go out and over the next 12 months you read five books on money management and investing I just gave three read five books on personal development and self-development read five books on how to start a business read five books on leadership and then read five books on how to scale market and build grow your business you're going to have an MBA level education for a fraction

of the cost start with that and then go out and make mistakes and as you grow that's when you can start buying classes and other things because you'll find people that you might want to get Consulting from but start with that what is the most important thing we didn't talk about today as it relates to wealth creation the most important thing that I think we did not talk about is we we talked about the economic system we talked about the principles but I think we didn't get into the actual steps now of how do you

preserve and protect your wealth and how do you now continue to use wealth protection tools because there's a lot of that that every single wealthy person is investing a huge amount of time effort and money into that most people have no idea even exists we started to touch on taxes but there's so much more so on those wealth preservation tools what exactly are you referring to starting with first your accounting and taxes then we get into the legal your estate planning what types of attorneys what types of legal protection and Shields and tools can you

use to structure your business your Investments to protect you but also amplify your wealth and then things like insurance but then also you're estate planning because you talk about generational wealth well generational wealth isn't just the money it's what your money does after you die and you can control that when you're alive we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for and the question that's been left for you is what wakes you up every morning oh I'm excited I

don't use an alarm I'm I'm I'm get up by the purpose I'm excited by the mission I mean I I love what I do uh the purpose the mission that's what gets me up every morning what about yourself and your own happiness and mental health and you know you know I I am happy I I've been so fortunate I've always been one of those people you could put me in a box and I'd have a great time I would turn that box into an airplane and I'd be flying it around before I came here my

wife recorded a video I found this so we were in a hotel um and they gave these cans of water okay these two cans of water I took them I said record this video I went on the balcony and I did a Stone Cold Steve Austin mock video where I opened up the cans of water and just dumped it on myself just I don't know why and I sent it to my cousins I've been very blessed to uh I can have a good time with anything I'm a pretty light-hearted guy I know I talk about

serious stuff but I I've been very fortunate on that and uh I can have fun in a lot of situations I'm not driven by materialistic things um there are some certain things that are like I will spend money on luxuries uh my wife got me into that into like like nicer hotels and nicer travel and those conveniences I like uh and I want to keep my wife happy so whatever you know she likes but I I'm not driven by fancy cars fancy clothes uh that to me is not as important I I I like to

see change and I want to help Empower people people and that gets me excited uh if you had to bring it down to five things that are driving you then what are those five things number one taking care of my family yep number two is my own purpose and Mission and feeling excited like my personal excitement yeah number three is the mission yeah is to continue help people number four is to bring light to the community number five is to continue giv him back and to help just PR thank you thank you so much for

being so generous with your time and I've learned so much um about so many things and I've had so many sort of ideas reinforced and sometimes that's it you know I do these conversations because I've been out there in the world and I've met people who have listened to these conversations about wealth and finance and money and sometimes in life all it is is just a little seed of information that can absolutely change the trajectory of not just you but the generations that come after you and that's exactly what you're doing that's exactly what you've

done on your YouTube channel for so many people that probably will never get to say thank you to you but it's to give these little seeds of inspiration and information and you never really know which seed is going to change someone's life but what you do is you just continue to plant them and hopefully those people will water them for themselves so thank you so much for what you do thank you for being so generous with your time today and please do keep doing it because our education system is a bit of a cookie cutter

and optimizes for creating people that are part of of a system which doesn't seem to be designed with their best long-term interests in mind and that's why we have these problems that's why we live in this credit Society that's why we have these retirement issues and that's probably why we have so much mental health issues and depression but it's people like you out there that are giving us the information that gives us a chance a chance to live a different life so thank you for that JRE I really appreciate you thank you for having me

on it was really a pleasure Chuck me that perfect Ted one of the things that I think about all the time because my life is quite hectic and busy is how to manage my energy load and as a podcast you kind of have to manage your energy in such a way that you can have these articulate conversations with experts on subjects you don't understand and this is why perfect head has become so important in my life because previously when it came to Energy Products I had to make a tradeoff that I wasn't happy with typically

if I wanted the energy I had to deal with high sugar I had to deal with Jitters and crashes that come along with a lot of the mainstream energy prod s and I also just had to tolerate the fact that if I want energy I have to put up with a lot of artificial ingredients which my body didn't like and that's why I invested in perfect Ted and why they're one of the sponsors of this podcast it has changed not just my life but my entire team's life and for me it's drastically improved my cognitive

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