Know Thyself - E101 - Jaspreet Singh: Follow This Wealth Formula to GROW RICH with Peace of Mind

Episode Date: June 18, 2024

Financial expert Jaspreet Singh lays out the blueprint for rewiring your money mindset and building wealth over time. He reveals the biggest money myths and societal programming that keeps us poor and how we can break out of those self-limiting beliefs.  He unpacks his childhood conditioning around money being raised in an immigrant family (hence minority mindset) and how he transcended his family's expectations and carved his own path. He lays a foundation for anyone looking to better understand the financial system and how they can use it to their advantage to build wealth over time. Discussing compounding interest, investments, assets vs liabilities, and getting out of debt. He also reveals the biggest game changer when it comes to building wealth: having time in silence for self reflection and clarity of mind.  André's Book Recommendations: https://www.knowthyself.one/books ___________ Timecodes: 0:00 Intro  2:40 The Mindset Making Your Poor 11:19 Being Raised in an Immigrant Mentality  18:42 Money = Happiness? 3 Steps to Fulfillment 25:59 The Biggest Money Myth 30:47 Investing In Yourself & Facing Failure 41:05 Beat the System Keeping You Poor 49:35 5 Steps for Building Wealth  1:01:59 Ins & Outs of Compound Interest/ Investments 1:10:20 Getting Out of Debt 1:14:08 Automating Your Investments 1:15:38 What The Wealthy Do: Personal Reflection & Stillness 1:25:33 One Thing You Need to Know 1:28:01 Buying vs Renting 1:35:30 Incorporating Yourself vs Being an Employee 1:39:30 Take Action & Get Started Today 1:41:05 Conclusion ___________ Jaspreet “The Minority Mindset” Singh is a serial entrepreneur and licensed attorney on a mission to spread financial education. His YouTube Channel has over one million subscribers.  Jaspreet is self-taught. His parents are immigrants from the state of Punjab, India. Like many of his second generation Indians, Jaspreet grew up thinking that he needed to become a doctor. But he found a new path – he’s on a mission to make financial education fun and accessible. His brand has helped countless people get out of debt, start investing, and create a plan towards building wealth. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/minoritymindset/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MinorityMindset Website: https://theminoritymindset.com ___________ Looking to Start a Podcast? Podcasting Course: https://www.podcastpurpose.com/ Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg Listen to all episodes on Audio:  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927 André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ Meraki Media https://merakimedia.com https://www.instagram.com/merakimedia/

Our economic system is designed to keep the majority of people poor. Now, I want you to take a deep breath. And now let's flip the script a little bit. The majority of Americans are broke, unhappy, and unfulfilled. One of the biggest reasons why poverty is generational is because we take our broke mindset and we pass it on to the next generation. But in order for you to break out of that system, you got to change the way you think, you got to change what you learn, and you got to change what you do.

And that's going to allow you to live a completely different life. Have a system that allows you to grow your investment. investments, your savings, but also allows you to grow your spending. I'll break down the playbook step by step, and I'm going to make it very simple and basic. Because building wealth really is not rocket science. So now, step number one, if you look at some of the wealthiest people, this is what they do. You have the ability to control some of these financial constraints by understanding money, understanding how to use your money, understanding how to invest your money, because you can do everything to take care of her body.

You can do everything to take care of your mind. But if you can't pay your bills, good luck. What's up everyone? Welcome back to Know Thyself. Since the beginning of the show, we've really focused on mental health, spiritual self-realization. And as I've grown, as is shown, has grown, we've really seen how inter-correlated, seemingly disparate areas of life really are and how they all kind of affect each other in our overall well-being. How our relationships affect our physical health, how our physical health affects our mental health. In this episode, we're going to be exploring how our financial well-being affects so many different areas of life. We see how directly correlated, how our physical health, how our physical health affects our mental health. We see how our financial well-being affects how. how we think an act around money affects our overall well-being and really can unlock us to give more in this life. And I really want to focus in this podcast through that lens, through that frame. I don't see the drive for more financial prosperity as a means for, you know, material obsessions. But to really amplify what we're here to do and how we can serve and supporting our loved ones. And I think mastering your money is an area of life that can be uncomfortable to talk about sometimes.

but it's really important because like I said, it really can amplify so much of how we're here to share ourselves in this world. And so our guest today is a serial entrepreneur and licensed attorney, created the YouTube channel Minority Mindset, and he's really on a mission to empower us and have fun and really educate us all around the financial world. And so Jaspreet Singh, thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me. It's really an honor to be here. Yeah. The honor is mine, man. I'm really excited to dive in this conversation. We haven't had a podcast specifically focused around money and financial education. I'm happy to be the first one. Yeah.

You know, I think we all consciously assert that we want more money or we'd like more money in our life. But I think the reality is there's so much societal programming and conditioning around money in a negative connotation. These phrases that are deeply embedded that like money's the root of all evil, money doesn't grow on trees. And so as much as we hear that people want more money, how much do you think that we really have a negative connotation when it comes to money. Well, it depends who you ask. Because what you'll see is that the majority of people have a negative connotation around money. And that's why the majority people tend to stay broke, near poor, and never can see anything beyond the middle class. Versus some people will call them the financially educated or wealthy. They grow up with a very different connotation

and mindset around money. So you've probably heard people say poverty is generational. And there's a lot of reasons why people say that. But what I've come to learn after teaching and talking about financial education for years now is that one of the biggest reasons, not the only reason, but one of the biggest reasons why poverty is generational is because we take our broke mindset and we pass it on to the next generation. And I'll show you exactly what I mean. So if you grew up in a house where you hear from your parents that we can't afford this vacation because it's too much money.

We can't have that nice home. Oh, those rich people, they must have done something bad, something sleazy, something negative, which is why they have that money. Well, what ends up happening now is you kind of think that's normal, right? When you're a kid, because that's what you hear. You hear that from your family, that you can't afford nice things, that these things are out of grasp for you, that you can't have these nice things,

and the people that have the nice things did something bad to get there. Well, then you go to school, you get a degree, you go to get your job, and now you start making a little bit of money. You start dealing with the forces of life, right? You want to get married. You want to have a kid. You want to buy a house. You want to buy a car.

And you start to realize life is expensive. And you start putting money out and you're not making enough money. Maybe you're investing a little bit of money. And now you start to have kids. And now you kids say, well, I want to buy this. I want to go to Disneyland. I want to do that. And now all of a sudden you start saying the same things.

Oh, we can't have that. We can't afford it. we can't have these nice things, the people that have it must have this, this bad gene, this bad selfishness, this bad greediness, and we start to pass it on. And very quickly, your ability to become wealthy becomes generational because of the way that you talk and the way that you think. Because what I've learned is if you can change the way you think about money, you'll change what you attract about money. And what I mean by that is, is if we think about this from a flow chart. We all want the same outcome. We want to be financially free. And you can put whatever

term you want there, whether I want to be wealthy, I want to be rich, I want to be comfortable, say whatever you want, right? This is the outcome that we want. In order to achieve the outcome, we have to take certain actions. There's things we have to do with our money. There's things we have to do to get the money. That's the action. But now if we back up, how do we take these actions? Well, we have to have a thought which then entices us to make this action. And so this is where a lot of say think and grow rich, that if you manifest, if you want to manifest money, you have to think positively about money and you have to do these things about money. But that's not true. Because if in the back of your mind, you know somebody like me can't do it. I can't become rich. It's not

right for me. You have the voice in the back of your mind and then you're verbally saying, I'm going to become rich. I'm going to become successful. I'm going to become all these things. You're telling this to the world, but you know in the back of your mind, that's not true. When you do that, you're just lying to yourself. And that's where what you have to do is work before the thought, right? So we come up, we want the outcome, which means you have to take an action. For the action, you have to have a thought. But for the thought to actually work, you have to think about your subconscious thought,

which is another way to call it your pre-thought. Before you actually have that thought, is that what you're actually going to deeply believe? Are you just saying this to lie to yourself? Because the book said, you've got to think rich and you're going to be rich. That doesn't cover the whole story. And so this is where you gotta back up a little bit and think about now your subconscious and really rewire the way you think about money. Because if you can do that, if you can change your subconscious thinking about money,

your thoughts start to change about money. You start to think about more opportunities, you see more opportunities, you can take actions to capitalize on the opportunities, and when you can capitalize on the opportunities, you start to have now that outcome, which is the financial success that you want. But then it ultimately is to the same thing. Ultimately, this is the same question. Is that good or is it evil?

Is it good to have a million dollars? Or is it evil to have a million dollars? And I'll just give you a story. So we're in California right now. Last year, when I was in California, I was doing a little bit of a tour, speaking tour. And I was going from L.A. to Sacramento. And I took a plane from L.A. to Sacramento for an interview that I had to do.

I landed in Sacramento, and I had a little bit of free time. I think I had like an hour before my next show. So I was like, I'm going to get some Chapo Alto. I pull into the parking lot. There was a grocery store in a Chipotle, and there was a lady, I believe she was from Mexico, and her two sons, and she had a sign there saying, I'm hungry. Do you have anything to help? Now, I had some extra time.

So pull over to Chipotle, and I just walk over to her, and I tried to speak to her with my broken Spanish, and essentially I said, you know, can I buy you some groceries? Eventually, she understood what I said, and she almost. started crying out of happiness because she said, please. I said, go buy whatever you want. Her and her two kids run around and she comes up to me with one of her kids asking if she could buy her son a chocolate bar. And I could see him like jumping around. I'm like, yeah, buy whatever you want. And again, I'm not very good at Spanish. Okay. So I got it across. And he was probably like five years old. He's like jumping in joy because he can buy this little

candy bar. I mean, it probably costs $2.00. but the ability now to go out and help others cost money. Sure, you can spend time, but if you want to feed somebody, it costs money at the end of the day. That's why one of the things I always say is it costs money to eat and it costs money to feed other people. If you think having money is evil, that's a very selfish way to look at money because that means that you're just planning on hoarding the money. But no one says having money is about hoarding money. You can also help others with that money. And this is where understanding now

how to have a holistic view of life can allow you to live a much more fulfilled life because guess what? It's a lot easier we don't got to stress a bunch of bills. It's a lot easier when you don't have to stress on how you're going to pay for that vacation. It's a lot easier when you have investments to help fund your lifestyle.

It's a lot easier we don't have to stress about going to work. It's a lot easier we don't have to stress about buying your wife or your husband that gift that they've been asking about. It's a lot easier when you, And you can live your life without that financial stress because a lot of mental issues want to believe it or not, the reality is a lot of mental issues are caused by financial issues.

One of the leading causes of divorce, financial issues. One of the leading causes of suicide, financial issues. Now if you eliminate the financial issues, that doesn't mean that your life is going to suddenly be sunshine and rainbows, but you can remove some of the issues. And those are controllable. And that's what everything that I try to do on the financial legislation. education side and say, look, you have the ability to control some of these financial constraints by understanding money, understanding how to use your money, understanding how to invest

your money, and as you build your wealth, now you can eliminate some of the financial stresses and work on some of the other stresses, work on being physically fit, work on being mentally fit, work on being spiritually fit. But you also got to be financially fit. That way you can live a holistic life because you can do everything to take care of body. You can do everything to take care of your mind. You can take everything to take care of spiritual health. But if you can't pay your bills, good luck. I love that perspective. That money is simply a tool, not positively or negatively charged, but if leveraged wisely, you can just like I said, like you said, amplify things that really are aligned with your core values. And you can serve the world at a bigger scale. And so I just think

there are so many deeply conditioned beliefs that prethought, like in the subconscious, around our worthiness about money that inform you could have the positive thoughts all day, but if you really believe you're inherently not worthy of it, you're not deserving of it, it's going to be fighting up an uphill battle the whole time. And that worthiness is so true because it gets taught to us at a young age. And it's, it's, you don't really have control over the way you're raised, over the things that you see as a child. I grew up in a house where money was taboo. In my culture, the traditional Punjabi culture,

Punjab is a state in India. In our culture, money, especially growing up, was a very, like, you don't talk about money, you don't stress about money, you don't worry about money, but you got to become a doctor. Why do you become a doctor? So you can make a lot of money, but don't talk about the money you make.

It just didn't make sense. But this is, it is conditioned into a lot of people. In my house, I mean, the Indian culture, the traditional Indian culture puts a lot of stereotypes on certain things. Like, for example, your career. A lot of you see Indian people go out to become doctors because, number one, it gives you the financial stability, but number two, you have the doctor in front of your name, the DR. And that gives you status, which means you're going to be able to get married, which means

number two, you're going to be able to go and tell all of your friends, I'm a doctor. and it gives you that sense of pride. But then I started to think about that and I said, that's a bunch of stupidness because if I was going down that route for the wrong reasons, I wanted to make my parents happy and I wanted to give back to my parents.

And they had all, I mean, good intentions because they gave up everything, came to a new country with very little, didn't know the language, didn't know the culture, didn't know the people, and really worked their butts off, just to survive.

Now, they do very well, but it's this whole, like, that immigrant mentality, when you go through that shock, you want your kids to have a better life. You want your kids to have more stability. And for the Indian culture, that means go become a doctor,

go become an engineer, go become an attorney. Like, that's really it. In my house, it was to become a doctor. That was it. Or a failure. Or a failure, exactly. They gave me two options. You'd be a doctor,

you can become a failure. choose. I chose, obviously, the latter. But, you know, it's one of those things where when you realize that you have more control than what is told to you or what you might think, the world becomes a world of opportunity, as opposed to being this kind of like, I talk about having tunnel vision where you have like blinders on. That's what I kind of lived by because I thought this was the way that things are done. This is the way I have to do things. And when you start breaking those barriers, And this can be with any part of your life. It could be with money, your physical health, your mental health, your spiritual health.

You realize, whoa, there's a whole world of opportunity. I just have to go out and seize it. We can dive into this just a little bit because obviously with minority mindset being the name of kind of your brand and channel, also similar stories. Parents came overseas, first generation, so immigrant. And I think there's just so much overlap also within Indian and. Arabic culture and similar programmings around money. Oh yeah. Thankfully, my parents, you know, they came over here, they started their own business, and, you know, we, we had money. It was like middle, like middle class. But you see how hard they work and there can also be a lot of scarcity around

how money is made. And of course, like the best intentions of wanting your kids to be most successful, and if you believe that's going to be in the traditional sense of a doctor or lawyer, which will make most money, which will, you know, land a wife and like a happy life. Of course, they want that. It's genuine, beautiful intention. And yet it doesn't leave as much room for us to breathe and find what we really want to align with, which will, you know, bring so much fulfillment. I'm just curious what other advantages and disadvantages do you think come from that kind of immigrant mindset. So like you, you know, I never had to worry about money or food growing up. We were very comfortable.

But my parents had a very much a scarcity mindset because when you're an immigrant, you learn to work, but you also want to protect those dollars. So in the traditional Indian culture, I say it's a save-heavy culture that the traditional Indian person makes a dollar to spend 20 cents, while an American makes a dollar to spend $2 with credit cards

and lines of credit. It's I want to protect myself and I don't want to risk that money because I've already risked everything to come to this new country and I don't want to lose that opportunity. But I think in terms of like, you know, growing up in an immigrant household, some of the biggest blessings I could ask for because it really, number one, it taught me the value of hard work because my parents worked a lot.

It taught me the value of wanting to give because in our culture, you know, I'm sure the Arabiculture is the same. It's a very give, it's a community-based culture. But in addition to that, it's also like, when you can break the mold of like, I don't care about that status, I'm going to do something else, it gives you a little bit of pressure as well. Because for me, I knew the clock was ticking that, are you going to bring any pride to the family or not?

And it gave me pressure. And, you know, for some people, A.L.E. to make you or some people that will break you. For me, I like that pressure. That was a fuel for me because I knew when I was in college, I'm like, I got to do something because I know when I'm done with school, all eyes are going to be on what the heck I'm doing. And so that was something that really drove me. When I was finishing college, I told my parents, or getting close to the end of college,

I told my parents that I didn't want to be a doctor. And that was when, you know, it was a big shock. I mean, a huge, huge, like, earthquake hit my house. And my dad essentially said, Jasiprit, if you don't go and at least become an attorney, you're going to destroy the pride. You're not going to have any pride in the family. So you have to at least become an attorney

to bring some pride to the family. So I said, okay, I'll go to law school because I know I can go to law school part-time and work in my business full-time. And so for me, you know, it didn't seem, weird. It's funny because I only realized that people thought this was an interesting story when I started talking about it. At the time, that was considered normal because I was, yeah, you know, that's my dad and that's, you know, what I need to do. But that pressure really helped me. And it also

gave me, you know, tough and thick skin. If you want to build anything in this world, you got to have some tough skin because people will hate you for anything and everything. People will criticize me because I like guacamole. People will criticize me for the way that I speak. People will criticize me, for the color, the clothes that I wear. I mean, people criticize if for anything you can imagine. So you got to have thick skin to make it in this world. What do you think about the correlation between money and happiness, fulfillment, and others are two different things?

You know, I certainly don't believe you need money to find true presence and fulfillment in life. But at the same time, if money is a tool and you can leverage it and you find fulfillment out of sharing your gifts with, the world and sharing and serving in a bigger way than like we're saying, the money can support you in that process. But what do you think about the correlation between having money and that happiness of fulfillment? You can't have happiness or fulfillment without money. It's impossible. I'll tell you why. My grandparents... I wouldn't say it's impossible. It is impossible.

What about renunciants that don't... I mean, I guess the ashrums, maybe they live, have money. They have food, don't they? Yeah. My grandfather had no money. Actually, no money. My grandmother actually had no money. In 1947, my home stayed at Punjab was severed. And so if you were sick, which is the religion that I am, and you were on the west side of Punjab, which is where my grandparents were,

you had to migrate east where you're going to be killed. And that wasn't a glorified, get on this nice bus and will migrate. No, you have a sword in your hand, the clothes on your back and you move east otherwise you get killed my grandfather on this journey got attacked

by a mob he saw his uncle get his head cut in half he put his uncle on a horse that was the last he saw of him he made it to the east side he had no shoes on his feet

because he lost him along the way he had no friends no family he had a sword in his hand no place to sleep, no money to eat. He slept on the ground. And in our religion, the sick religion, we have a fundamental tenant called Seva,

which is some people call it community service, but it really means selfless service to help others. And what he tells me is, during that time, I see lots of hungry people. He would talk about how there's corpses everywhere. I walk around and I see hungry kids. he was 18. I see hungry people. I see hungry kids. I can't do anything. I can't even feed myself. How am I supposed to feed them? And he talks about during that time where he literally had no money.

This is not like, oh, I'm in some nice hashroom and someone's feeding me these nice, no, I'm talking no money. You can't live happy because he had nothing. And what he tells me from that time is, he says this in Punjabi that poverty is the worst disease. You can't think of helping somebody else if you can't help yourself. You have to have money because our world has money. Now, you might say, well, I can live in the forest and I can eat berries. Well, you got to live on somebody's land. I mean, if you're really going to live in the forest, fine. I haven't done that. But if you want to live in any sort of modern society, you got to have money. But now, how does that money play a part in your life? And I think that's the big thing because people get caught up in this idea of, I need millions of dollars to be

happy. No, that's not what I said. You got to have money. You have to be able to eat. You have to be able to put a roof over your head. I guess maybe you don't need a roof, but you need food. Like, there are basic essentials that you need. And so now, I think we have to now back up a little bit and understand how does money play a part in our life. And we kind of hinted at this. But one of the things that I've kind of learned is if you really want to live a happy and fulfilled life, I think there's four aspects to that, called us a quadrifice theory, where you have to be physically fit, mentally fit, spiritually fit, and then financially fit. If you can find the four fitnesses together, if you can be fit in those four areas, you will have the ability to live a truly

happy, fulfilled, and fit life. And you put them in that order. And I put them in that order. Because a lot of people, they assume that if I can make a lot of money, oh, now I can and go out and be happy because everyone's gonna wanna be my friend. Everyone's gonna want to talk to me. I'm gonna be the most attractive person. But then you quickly realize if you get there, people don't really care. Maybe some people might, the superficial people that want to get something out of you, they might. There's that saying spending money you don't have to buy things you don't need to impress people you don't like.

Exactly. Exactly. And when you know, the funny thing is once you start having money, you start to realize that a lot of that is just a bunch of crap. My wife grew up with very little where she grew up in a house where it was a single mom raising her and they had a lot of financial struggles. I grew up very comfortable financially. My wife had a lot of financial struggles where it was difficult getting by and my wife did not have nice things growing up.

Before we got married, you know, my wife had a time. about I want all these brand name. I would love to have these brand name things. I would love to have this type of purse and these things. And I was like, you know, whatever. I never cared about that, but you know, I understood she wanted those things. We got married and now she has the ability to to buy pretty much whatever she wanted. And so in the beginning, she goes, she gets a YSL purse or whatever and some other things. And she gets it and then a few months later, six months later, she realizes, you know, this stuff really is not that important. It really doesn't matter. I remember her telling me, she's like, I thought I was going to feel happier when I bought this.

But honestly, it just creates more stress because you go and buy this purse. Now you're going to worry about somebody stealing it. Versus when you have that cheap little coin pouch, you don't think about anybody stealing it when you go to the beach. And so it was just funny. And we came to the realization. And she was like, I would rather just spend this money on making memories going on a vocation. going traveling or doing something. You have to kind of sometimes go through the process to learn, right? Because it's the same thing in business. When I talk to people about some of the things you should do,

I say, you know, just go try it. Because I can tell you not to do this a hundred times. But until you do it and you get smacked in the face, you don't realize I shouldn't do this until you actually experience it for yourself. And so there's a lot of experiential learning that's involved with money as well, where you got to realize, you know, money is important. You don't realize money is important until you don't have money.

And then when you have money, you realize, okay, what do I do with the money instead of just making myself look rich? And if you're constantly just chasing that shiny thing, there's a shallowness that's related with that. And you got to realize, why do you really want the nice thing? Do you like having something that is made nice? Like, I want a nice knit suit because it fits nice. Sure.

But if I want to be able to show it off on Instagram, you've got to dig a little bit deeper as to what is the drive for those things. So on that token, what do you think is the biggest money myth that we all carry? Man, there's a lot of those. If we're talking about people in the sense of the average person, the biggest money myth is that I can't become financially successful. Going back to that worthiness, deserves everything, yeah. We'll look at America today. Somewhere between six to seven out of ten Americans have less than

a thousand dollars saved up for an emergency, which means if you were driving down the street today and your car breaks down, you're going to have to put it on your credit card debt to fix that situation. The average American is not happy with their career. More than half of Americans say that they're unhappy with the job that they're working. More than half of Americans say that they're unfulfilled with what they're doing. That means statistically, not just general terms, statistically, the majority of Americans are broke, unhappy, and unfulfilled. And we often think that we can't get out of this situation.

When in reality, it's not that you can't. It's that you believe you can't. And now you have to change the way that you think. If you believe you can, what are you going to do? If you believed, if somebody who was, struggling, really truly believed. And I'm not talking about the thinking growing rich. I mean, actually believed I can become successful.

What are they going to do? Well, instead of watching two hours of Netflix every day, which is what the average American is doing, the average American watches more than two hours of Netflix every single day. Instead of watching Netflix, I'm going to go on to YouTube. I'm going to podcast. I'm going to start absorbing some financial education. I'm going to start absorbing some business education.

I'm going to start absorbing some business education. I'm going to start absorbing some. money education. And then I'm going to start applying. Maybe I start working on a side hustle. I start working on a business idea. I start working on how do I make more money? Maybe I start tracking my money. I start seeing, I'm spending way too much money here, here and here. And you start changing what you do. And then maybe you start seeing a little bit of success and now you start investing your money instead of into a new pair of shoes into a book. And you start reading some books about money management, financial education, building a business. And now you start

to see a little bit more success. And now instead of investing your money into a car, you invest your money into a rental property, or into stocks, or into your own business idea, or into your friend's business idea. But you've got to be careful with that. I don't want to say, go give your money to your bro, cousin Bundy. Just be cautious with that. But now you're using your money as a tool as opposed to as a fool because I was that guy. When I started the learning about entrepreneurship. When I started, I worked in the party promotion business. I was hosting club parties in college. I don't drink, and I didn't drink. I wasn't into partying, but to me, that was the avenue that I saw to make money because I was working in the wedding industry when I was

in high school. And I saw everybody blowing money they didn't have when they were in college. And I said, well, this is a way for me to make some money. So I started hosting these college parties. I started making money and I quickly realized the money wasn't enough to do something I hated because I hated the industry on one hand I'm sitting here

telling people why alcohol is bad why I don't party Friday nights I'm the first one at the club because I got to set up the club and I got to host the party and I got so sick of it I just stopped I remember somebody was telling me

that I could sell the business when I was like in the prime and I don't even know what that meant at the time. I don't think I could have really sold it. I mean, it wasn't that established of a business, but it was like one of those things where for me, I just wanted to get out and I just stopped. But you got to learn, right? You got to go through the realization that I can do more, I can achieve more. And when you believe you can do it, you will try different things because you're going to screw up. You're going to fail. I don't care who you are. You're going to

screw up. I've screwed up more than anybody I know. I have made so many mistakes. And if I walked you through my mistakes, you would realize, Just Pritha's really not that smart. You're 100% right. When you can learn from your mistakes the first time, that's a good thing. It takes me three times. I'm making the same mistake before I learned something.

You were going to screw up. You're going to have bad things happen. But it's all about now what do you do when those bad things happen that can help you get to the next level, especially when it comes to money. So I want to keep diving a little bit into the psychology of things and we'll transition into our really tangible, practical things that people can do with their actions that can make a huge difference in the, you know,

decades to come up their life. One thing that has been extremely crucial for me, like, when you look at that quadrufit theory that you kind of broke down from financial to mental to physical to financial well-being, I have always seen the best investment we can make is in ourselves. And to, like, way back 10 years ago, I would spend, you know, it's not something that maybe would be recommended, but I would spend money I didn't have to really like become as physically vibrant, mentally clear, sharp, and aligned with like the direction I was going because we can always be confident in a direction that we're going in life,

but it's not aligned with where we want to go. We're not to take a course correct. It's kind of energy at some point we're going to have to spend. You know, I just really have always invested myself so much money over the past 10 years, learning more immersing myself in different courses and experiences, learning from different teachers, reading different books and podcasts. And, you know, I think there's really inexpensive ways to be able to invest in yourself nowadays with YouTube University and all these podcasts.

So it's incredible what we have access to now. But I would just love for you to speak into the value of investing into yourself and the dividends that pays for the rest of your life. Yeah. So, you know, the funny thing about investing in yourself is the question is what does that mean? And that's, I think, a tougher question to answer because it evolved. depending on where you are in your journey. So when I grew up and I wanted to get into entrepreneurship,

this was discouraged in my house. When I started my party promotion business, my parents didn't know this. I couldn't tell them because they would have lost their mind. The only time they learned about this was like when I started getting on podcasts and TV, and then they heard me talk about it there. And I'm like in my late 20s, 30s.

So, you know, I had to do it in secret. at that time, me investing in myself was screwing up because I didn't know how else to learn. I mean, I just did it. Then I started reading books. I didn't like reading for the first 18 years a month, 17 years of my life. Until I found a book that I actually liked. Until I started reading books about financial education and business, I actually started reading voluntarily and listening to audio CDs.

that was the next way I started investing in myself. So I started by making mistakes. Then I started reading books. And then it was going out and trying things. And not just mistakes, but I mean trying new things. So what I mean by that was, and I started to realize, like, this party promotion business is not for me.

I need to find a real career. I got involved with real estate. First it was real estate investing. But then I was like, I want to learn more about this because I feel like I could make a career out of real estate. So I got my real estate salesperson's license. Then I realized, you know, this is not for me.

I'm not the best salesperson. I don't really like showing people homes. I don't think I can do this as a career. So then I started doing more things. I started buying classes. I started taking coaching programs. Some of them were complete crap. Some of them were really good.

And eventually, as it started to grow, I started to realize, okay, I have built some investments, which is good. I've started investing in real estate. I'm seeing some success here. This is me investing in myself because I made a lot of mistakes. I'm reading books. I'm not seeing some success. I'm trying a lot of business ideas.

Some of them work. Some of them don't work. But I need something that's scalable, something that I can actually build. Because I really liked the idea of building a business. That was something that was interesting to me. You don't have to like that. That was just something that was interesting to me. And so then I went on investing myself.

to figuring out what business I'm going to build. So one of the first real businesses that are really invested in was I'm going to build a blog. I'm going to build, because I started saying some traction on the internet, I'm going to build a blog on the internet on Google that you can search things related to investing and we're going to make money through affiliates and sponsorships and advertisers and whatnot.

But I don't have a lot of time to manage it. I'm busy running my own business, other stuff that I'm doing. So I'm going to hire some smart people. I'm going to hire one of the best blog consultants out there. I'm going to hire people to write the content and it'll be all good. Well, two years and half a million dollars later, it was shut down because it was a complete horrible transaction because I thought I was investing in myself trying to build it, but it went nowhere.

We were making no money, seeing no traction, seeing no success, and I was dumping money into it. So I stopped that two years later. Probably should have stopped it sooner, but that's how long it took me. And then I started my journey again. All right, how do I figure out what I want to do for business?

And so now I kind of go back to the drawing board. What is interesting to me? And what do I like and what am I passionate about? I know I'm interested and passionate about this financial space. It was something that I had to learn on my own, which really made me passionate because I realized I went through all this school and never learned a thing about money. And yet the wealthiest people understand money versus everybody else doesn't. That kind of really got me intrigued by it.

I really enjoyed studying what's happening in the financial markets. I didn't do good in econ, but I enjoyed studying it. So I enjoy this, I'm passionate about this. Is this a monetizable industry? Well, yeah, the financial industry is obviously very monetizable. What type of service can I provide to people? And during the pandemic time, obviously the financial markets got flipped upside down. The whole economy was shut down.

No one knows what was happening. I went from making a few YouTube videos a week to making seven YouTube videos a week. YouTube video every day because things were changing so quickly. And I needed a way to stay on top of what was happening because it's a lot of work required, especially with everything else that I was doing. So I asked my team, hey, can you give me a daily briefing of what's happening in the markets? Just give me an email breaking down what's happening in the markets. That way I know what to talk about. So they started doing that. And then I started mentioning this on my YouTube channel. Like, hey, if you want a daily briefing of what's happening, just join this news editor. I was not very

I called it the minority mindset newsletter because generally think much of it. I started to grow a little bit just organically and people said, Just believe this is really cool. I'm really appreciating your newsletter. So, okay, people are actually reading it. And that was when we then had the idea of maybe this can be what we're searching for because people are getting a lot of value out of this free newsletter that's breaking down the markets because the goal for us,

was to explain what's happening in the news in a way that anybody can understand. We follow what's called a 16-year-old rule because if a 16-year-old can't understand it is too complicated. And the reason why was because when I used to tune into the financial news, I had no idea what's happening. I turned on CNBC and they talk about the 10-year yield is falling. What does that mean? I mean, it's so confusing that you're catering to like 0.5% of the country. And so I wanted to make it a little bit more accessible and understandable. So that then became what we call market briefs, which is our free financial news editor as a way to now serve people that wanted to learn

about money. But again, we weren't making money because it was a free news editor. We didn't have a monetization plan. But I knew, okay, people are interested in this. People are liking this. People are getting value out of this. Let's see where this goes. So now this becomes the Market Briefs Newsletter.

I'm going to start promoting this a little bit more aggressively. So I start promoting my. market briefs more. It starts to grow more. Now we have a larger audience. Another question is, well, okay, we're seeing interest in this newsletter. People are liking it. People are reading it. We just not making any money. How do we do that? So that's when we started investing to figure out how can we monetize it while also keeping this free. So we learned about, okay, we can use advertising to provide native advertisements to our audience. that where we now have money so we can continue funding growth.

And that then became Briefs Media, which is the business that I run now. So it was, you talk about what is investing in you, right? Start up I making mistakes. Then I read books. Then I tried things. I invested in different programs to learn things. And then I just kept doing.

And at the end of the day, investing in you has to have some sort of action involved, that way you can keep learning and growing. And whether that's through trying things, reading books, taking classes, taking coaching, making mistakes. But you have to keep experimenting and trying things because that's ultimately what investing in you is all about because you don't know what's going to work. Yeah, totally. And like you said, it's on a case-by-case basis.

Somebody maybe really needs to invest in their physical health because if your financial status, your spiritual or mental status kind of go out the window if you're deathly ill, you know? It's like that becomes a forefront of everything. And then, you know, same with your mindset, like exploring these deep-seated programs that we were talking about earlier. Like, we need to sometimes in our journey often really like go extract, excavate, what are those things, look at them and plant new stories, start to act in a way and then go and learn through experience by failing and trying. And, you know, I think that's a really important perspective on it. Now, as we start to dive into some more of the money myths and then also how this translates

into what we can practically do to be able to set ourselves up to be in a position where we're making money, we're keeping money, we're growing money in our life. I would love for you to share first, how do you think that institutions profit from our financial uneducation? Well, I think the system, our economic system is designed to keep the majority people poor. and our economic system is designed to profit off of when people are financially poor. Now, you might say,

Joseph, but you do sound like a conspiracy theorist. Well, I'm not trying to be conspiracy theorist, D. I'm just trying to explain, after learning about how money works, you start to see why certain things work the way that they do. I'll explain exactly what I mean. Banks profit when you're in debt. If you have credit card debt, your bank is making money.

If you're overdrafting, your bank is making money. If you're overdrafting, your bank is making money. If you are spending money on cars that you can't afford, your bank is making money. When you go out and buy a home, you can't afford, you're borrowing more money. And at the end of the day, the more debt you take on, the more your lender makes. The second thing is corporations profit when you're in debt. What does that mean? Well, corporations love it when you spend money.

Corporations want you to buy their stuff. So if they can get you to buy something through their marketing, because remember they're hiring the smartest, marketers and MBAs in the world to get you to want to buy things. They're making money. What if you can't afford it? Well, they can then sell you the financing to buy their products and now they make even more money because now they get to sell more stuff.

So corporations love it when you're financially uneducated because now they can sell more of their things. Governments love it when you're financially uneducated because, well, number one, if you're financially uneducated, that means you're going to be an employee and you're going to be a consumer. As an attorney, who's not your attorney, where I can tell you, there's our tax code in the United States,

taxes income differently. When I make money from my investments, I say I sell my stocks and I make a million dollars, and you make a million dollars as a doctor, a surgeon, you go to work every single day to make the million dollars. you're going to pay half of that in taxes depending on where you live. If you're in California,

half of that's going to taxes. As an investor, I'm paying 20% in taxes. So people who are employees pay the highest tax rates. It's called ordinary tax rates versus investors pay less in taxes. That's part one of how governments profit. But also on the flip side,

which is consumption. And what I mean by that is, But if you look at now the United States government's balance sheet, and I don't want to get too technical, but what a balance sheet shows you, every single company has a balance sheet that shows the assets and liabilities. The number one asset on the United States government balance sheet are student loans. Now, this one is interesting because obviously there's a lot of talk about student loans and how they're keeping the average person back from buying a home, buying a car, and building wealth. well, student loans are also funding the government's spending. They are the largest asset on the United States balance sheet.

And if you don't believe me, just go to Google and search the largest asset on the United States balance sheet. And you'll see. So there's this talk of student loans are hurting our citizens. But at the same time, the government loves the student loans that they're selling you because they keep funding the government spending. Now, I'm not going to get into if the government spending is good or bad. is up to you to decide. But one of the biggest assets there are student loans.

This then creates naturally a sense of anger. Banks are evil, corporations are evil, the governments are evil. And now I want you to take a deep breath. And now let's flip the script a little bit. Because I want you to understand the way that this works. That way you can use the system and learn how to win in the system. because there are some people that learn how to use banks and they use the bank's money to make them money.

What do I mean by that? They use debt to buy businesses or to buy rental properties to make them money. You don't have to use debt. I'm not advocating for it, but I'm saying that's an alternative way to look at it. Or you can use banks as a place to hold your money and pay you interest as opposed to just paying the bank's interest. Like when I keep my money in a high interest savings account, the banks are paying me interest as they hold on to my cash.

and I'm not sending them a check because I don't have any credit card debt. Corporations. I like some nice things. There's nothing wrong with having nice things. You want to be able to buy nice things. You just don't want to be buying them when you can't afford them. So that means corporations want to sell you stuff. Fine.

I mean, that's what every corporation in the world wants to do. If anybody starts a business, they want to sell their product. The problem is people get really negative about it because they feel like they keep buying things that they don't want. And so now you've got to have that filter. Okay, corporations want to sell me things. That's a fact. Now, I don't have to buy it.

Oh, okay. When you realize that you don't have to spend money, now you are in control, as opposed to letting them be in control. So just because Macy's has a sale doesn't mean you have to go out and spend at Macy's. And now when you have your money and you know how to use your money, you can use corporations because guess what? Now when you want to buy something nice, you can benefit because you can enjoy the value that you're purchasing.

I have nothing against somebody buying nice things, buying a nice home, buying a nice car, buying nice clothes, buying nice stuff. Just make sure you can afford it and make sure something that you want instead of letting the corporation decide that you need to spend your money. It's the same with the government.

You know, hate or to love it, the United States is the best place in the world to be. And they have the strongest military, the strongest economy, and our system, hated or love it. This one took me a long time because this one made me really angry. but I'll just lay it out.

Our IRS tax code and our government incentivizes and is designed to benefit the financial, the educated, the wealthy, and the business owners. Period. Now, you can hear that, get angry, kick, scream, cry, complain, where you can learn and use it. I will let you decide what you do with that information. But our system benefits certain people more than others.

if you are an investor, you qualify for lower potential tax rates. If you are a business owner, you qualify for higher potential tax deductions. If you are an employee, you don't. If you are in debt to the government, you're going to keep paying the government. If you're not, you get to benefit from the government services.

And so this is where now, I want you to understand the game, learn the rules to the game, that way you can win in the game. Because what happens to most people is they're playing in this system, but they don't know the rules. They don't know how money works.

It's like playing football. You go to the NFL and you're playing without a helmet on. You don't know the rules. You're obviously going to get hurt. And that's how the majority of people in America particularly are playing. They have no idea how the system works. Yet they're grinding every single day, wondering why I have no money left over,

wondering why I have no ability to have any freedom, wondering why that rich person, your rich boss, that greedy person is taking all over money. They're exploiting your hard work. And you're sitting here trying to figure how you can feed your family. but in order for you to break out of that system, you've got to change the way you think, you've got to change what you learn,

and you've got to change what you do. And that's going to allow you to live a completely different life because this system allows for that too. But most of us never learn that because schools don't teach that either. The rabbit hole goes deep. And does. And, you know, I just love how you shared about,

it's really like a bug in our code of this consumerist mentality that thinks we always need these things that we don't need and programming things to want things and think that we need them. And it runs so deep. I too enjoy nice things. I enjoy fine quality things.

And at the same time, you're sharing how important it is to be able to still, just make sure that you can afford it and make sure that it really is enhancing your life and that you really value it. And encouraging that delayed gratification to be able to invest in things that will give you much more financial freedom and mobility down the line than just the compulsive spending that society really rewards right now. And so our listeners, I'm sure, are on the spectrum from people just starting out, they don't have any money, they're just starting to figure out what their careers or how they're going to go on and make money in the world, to people that are, you know, riding the horse of their

career and they're building momentum and they're growing to people that are, you know, extremely well off. When you look at advice, that can be the fundamentals principles that support everybody no matter or where they're at, what are the baselines? I know you kind of briefly mentioned assets versus liabilities. Like what are the kind of principle, fundamental things that everybody should know when it comes to money? So I'll break down the playbook, step by step, and I'm going to make it very simple and basic.

Because building wealth really is not rocket science. You don't have to be a genius, but you have to be able to, number one, invest in your financial education and be willing to make sacrifice. If you can do those two things, you have the ability to build wealth, especially if you're in the first world country.

Number one, he's got to earn money. How do you earn money? Doesn't matter. Assuming it's legal. If it's illegal, don't tell me about it. But you can make money from your job, make money from your business, make money from side hustles, I don't care.

You've got to just start making some money. Number two is when you make money, don't spend all your money. And now, when you don't spend all your money, the reason why this is difficult is because most people assume that if I have $1,000 in my pocket, I can buy a $1,000 TV. No.

You got to stop spending all your money. The more you keep the wealthier you'll become, Because then number three, you take the money, don't spend. You buy assets, not liabilities. So a liability is something that I buy that takes away my money. Your car is a liability. Your clothes are your liabilities. Your vacations are liabilities.

Your home is a liability. Every time I say that this is going to make people angry, so let me explain what I mean. An asset is something that puts money in your pocket. So when I say your vacation is a liability, this is the first thing that really gets people upset because they say, no, Jasprith. when I went on vacation, it was a way for me to relax and recharge so I can make more money.

Sure, but how much the trip from Cancun make you? It cost you. It cost me $6,000. Okay. Did Cancun put any money back in your bank account? No, but if I, no. If Cancun is not the direct depositing money in your bank account, it is a liability. I'm not saying don't spend on it, but you got to understand the difference between an asset and a liability.

That way you can have more assets to buy more liabilities. The second thing is I say your home is a liability. And the reason why is because I got started investing in real estate during the 2008 real estate crash. And I'm from Detroit, Michigan. And Metro Detroit. No way. I grew up in Livonia. No way.

20 minutes from you. There you go. Our office is downtown Detroit. So you remember then Detroit was extremely hard. Livonia was very hard by the 2008 crash. Homes in Livonia were selling for 80. percent off of what they were selling for before. It was crazy.

And prior to that, everybody assumed home values only go up. The reason why everybody says your home is an asset is because, number one, your realtor, and I'll tell you this because I wasn't a realtor, you're trained as a realtor to say, your home is the biggest investment you're going to make. And when you think your home is the biggest investment you're going to make, guess what? Oh, well, if I'm going to be able to pass down this home to my kids, maybe I should buy a little bit bigger. Maybe I should buy a little bit nicer because I'm going to build wealth with this home.

I'm going to pay it off and I'm going to have this equity in my home. Then what happens is you move it to the home, you want to upgrade the kitchen. You want to finish the basement, right? I mean, you want to have a nice man cave in the basement. And then a few years later, something's going to happen to the bathroom.

Now you want to upgrade the bathroom. It turns into a money pit. So now you're paying every year to maintain the home. You're paying every few years to upgrade the home. You've got to pay for the property taxes. You've got to pay for the insurance. but at least your home is going up in value, right? Maybe.

I mean, it only really matters when it comes time for you to sell. Because if it comes time for you to sell and you can sell it for how much you bought it for, which is what has happened in the past, then it's not, I mean, you're losing money. And even if it is worth more than what you bought it for, that means you have to sell your home to actually make any money. So that's why I want you to think of your home as a liability. Even if you financially have it as an asset because there's equity in the money, your home, whatever. Think of it like a liability because those dollars that you put in into your

home for your maintenance, for your upgrades, for your taxes, for your insurance, for your mortgage, you're not getting any of the money back until it comes time for you to sell. And there's no guarantee that you're going to be able to sell it for a profit. And if you say, but Jasperit, I can refinance money out of the home. You have to pay that money back plus interest. Okay, so if you're going to have to use debt to use your own money, I don't like that idea. So that's why I like to look at these things like liabilities. And instead of spending all my money here, I would rather send my money on something that's actually going to make me money. What are real assets? This might be your own business. This might be stocks. This might be real estate. Now you might say, well,

Jasprey, the stock market can crash. You might not make money in real estate. You might see your business fail. Sure. But what was my mindset going in to buy these assets? When I invest in a business, in a stock or real estate, I'm buying it with the sole purpose of making money. When I go and buy a home to live in, I'm buying it to make memories, to live in. I'm buying it for the experience, not for the financial reasons. When I go on and buy a rental property, I'm buying it. That way the cash flow, the rental income can pay for the expenses and put some money in my pocket. When I buy stocks, I'm buying it because I believe that this is going to go up in value

or it's going to pay me dividends, meaning cash. Literally deposit cash into my bank account every three months because some companies pay dividends. It's a very different mindset. And you're going to screw up with this. Sometimes these assets are going to lose your money. It's a part of the process. Okay, you are going to lose money at some point. Every good investor does.

But that's also how you learn. And that's what's going to allow you to make even more money if you continue investing. So now, step number one, make money. Step number two, don't spend all in money. Step number three, buy more assets than liabilities. A simple rule of thumb here is if you're paying $500 a month for your car, you better be paying at least $500 a month for your investments. Step number four, when you start making your money from your investments,

reinvest the cash flow. So let's say now you start putting some money into stocks and to real estate and you start making some money. Well, the first thing that can be very exciting to do is, oh my God, I'm making some money. Let me go buy a new vacation. Let me go buy a new car. Let me go buy some new shoes. What I want you to do now is take the money that your money made you and buy a

more of that asset. And the goal right now is to stack your assets. When you're trying to build wealth, you got to start by stacking the assets. That way you can build your wealth first, because I want you to make yourself rich before you make Gucci rich, before you make Louis Vuitton rich, before you make everybody else rich, make yourself rich first. There's a lot of joy that comes from that financial discipline too, because of course you want to increase your lifestyle as you make more money. But if you apply that discipline, the delayed gratification is much more satisfying. It is once you get to that. And I don't always follow this. Like I'm preaching right now. You know, I've definitely invested in my lifestyle a lot over the years that I do believe has,

you know, returned back to me and the connections that I build and like lots of different things. But, you know, continue. I am a big believer of make yourself rich before you make everybody else rich because that's going to lay the foundation for the rest of your life. I call it a decade of sacrifice that if you're willing to spend less and earn more so you can invest like crazy, the rest of your life, you can now spend more money and not have to worry about the price tag because now you have the investments and the assets to pay for it. And that's why the, you're from Livonia, right? In Michigan, we get snow. And if you ever built a snowman before, you start off with this little pile of snow, right? And then you put it on the ground and

start rolling it. In the beginning, you're not seeing any progress because you want to build this big ball of snow. But in the beginning, you don't see anything. But if you keep rolling, It's going to get bigger and bigger. And if you keep rolling, it gets bigger faster. Like, every time you turn it, it gets even bigger. That's how your wealth works. It's called the compound effect. That in the beginning, you start saving and investing, you see no returns.

Right? A 10% return on $1,000 is $100. It's nothing. But a 10% return on $100,000 is $10,000. And a 10% return on a million dollars is $100,000. So it's the same return. It's the same percentage. But the amount of dollars you can get,

As you invest more money, it's a whole lot more. And that's why in the beginning, I say you got to be aggressive. You got to spend less, earn more, invest more. When your investments make you money, reinvest it. Just keep dumping it in because for that beginning, you got to get aggressive for you to build that big wealth pile. So we talked about, number one, earn money. Number two, don't spend all your money.

Number three is you buy more assets than liabilities. Number four, when your assets make money, buy more assets. Number five, figure out how you can make more money. And the reason why I say this is because what ends up happening, I went down this, is you start investing your money and you realize, whoa, I can make money without me having to do this thing. Like, I can make money. My investments can make me money and I can be out on the beach. I can be out running my business.

I can be out doing whatever. And I'm still making some money. I want to own more investments. And so now the first thing that I did was I started to spend. spending less money. Because if I spend less money, I have more money to invest, which is fine in the beginning. And I went to an extreme. Like I stopped spending money on everything you can imagine. I mean, I was really cutting back on everything that I could. But there's a limit to how many pennies you can squeeze out of their paycheck, how much money you're making. Like there's really a limited

pie. Eventually, you won't be able to squeeze more pennies out. And that's when I realized that, wait, if I earn more money, now I can also have more money to invest. And if I'm working to earn more money, there's no limit now to how much money I can make. Because there's a limit to how many pennies I can squeeze out of my paycheck, but there's no limit to how big I can grow my paycheck. And this is where now understanding what are the different ways that I can earn money. If I'm working a job, maybe that means I see if I can get a raise. I get a bonus.

Maybe I work to get a promotion. If I can't do it in this job, maybe I've got to get a new career. maybe I have to go get a certificate. Maybe I have to go and go back to school. Maybe I have to go and get a second job. Maybe you have to go and do something else. Yes, it requires more work in the beginning especially, but you can change the trajectory of your career.

Maybe that means you start a side hustle. Maybe that means you start a business. Maybe that means you invest more in your business, right? I mean, there's so many ways to go about doing it, but now it's really diverting some attention and energy and focus and maybe even money on how you can earn more money. so you can buy more assets, not liabilities. And when you do that, that's going to allow you to build more wealth.

Now, the thing that I like to mention about this is have a system that allows you to grow your investments with how much money you're making, that allows you to grow your savings with how much money you're making, but also allows you to grow your spending with how much money you're making. So a simple rule of way to kind of look about this is, one of the things I talk about is a 75, 15, 10 plan, which says for every dollar that you earn, 75 cents is the maximum that you can spend. 15 cents is the minimum that you're investing.

10 cents is the minimum that you're saving. Now, what happens is if you're making $5,000, you know that there's a limited amount of money that you can spend. If you make $50,000, you can spend more, but you're still investing your money more. You're still saving your money more. That way, hey, you want to go out and buy more nice stuff? Cool.

You can, but you're also investing at the same time. Because at the key, right, the goal is just to buy more assets. It doesn't mean that you can't buy some nice things, but just make sure you're also prioritizing the assets. Make yourself rich before you prioritize making BMW, Louis Vuitton, and everybody else rich. So one thing that you brought up, which has been coined as another wonder of the world, is compound interest. And, you know, many of us have heard that famous analogy of like a penny doubling every day for 31 days versus a million dollars.

Like I've already given you a million dollars right now or a penny doubling every day for 31 days. Which would you pick? Most would grab the million. The penny doubling turns into over 10 million. Right. It's because of that magic of compound interest. And I'm really interested how we can systematize this to be a frictionless experience where every month our paycheck, a percentage goes into utilizing compound interest and the compound effect. to an investment portfolio. So I would love to get into the practicality of how we can make this automated and then just speak more to the power

of compound interest. Yeah. And I think if we talk about the financial side of things, compounding is more than just compounding money. You can compound your money. You can compound your knowledge. It can also compound your skills. But let's talk about talking about the money.

So this is going to be maybe a more theoretical answer, also give the actual technical. When you invest your money into a stock, I'll just give an example of Amazon, because everybody knows or most people know what Amazon is. What you're doing is you're buying a piece of ownership in the Amazon company.

Now, what you're doing is you buy the ownership of Amazon, but Amazon is working to grow the company. That means they're working to hire more employees. They're working to expand what they do. And it takes time for that compounding to happen inside of the company. because now when Amazon makes a profit, they're reinvesting some of that profit back into the company.

They might open another warehouse. They might open a new facility. They might invest in more employees. They might do a whole bunch of things. And so that is a form of compounding by investing your money into a company because that company should be working to grow their money, to grow their profit, to grow everything that they're doing. So how do you go about doing this?

Well, one of the simplest things to do is just created, there's a lot of brokerages that allow you. you to do this. Just Google it. Create an automatic investment where money is automatically invested auto checkings account. Like for me, I have a system where every Wednesday cash is pulled out of my checkings account and it's automatically invested into a portfolio of funds. So whether the market's up, whether the market's down, whether the market's sideways, it does not matter. Money is automatically invested every single Wednesday. Now these funds are invested into big baskets of companies. Each one of these companies should be working to reinvest their

profits and compound their growth. But in addition to that, many of these funds are also paying me with cash flow. They're paying me with dividends. So every three months, I get a check. It's not actually a check. It's money deposited into my account because I own shares of these funds and companies. So now, instead of me taking this cash and going out to a nice dinner, I take this cash and I reinvest it to buy more of those funds. So every Wednesday, I'm investing money. I'm investing money to buy cash flow. These funds pay me with cash flow and that cash flows automatically working to buy more cash flow. So I'm working to make the pie bigger by investing more money.

But every time the pie pays me, I'm reinvesting that money back into the pie. that's one form of compound investing. And that's ultimately the whole concept, which is you make money, that money gets reinvested. You make money, that money gets reinvested. But if you keep adding more money to it, it keeps growing. Like you talk about the example of if you double a penny every single day for 31 days, it's going to turn into more than $10 million over 31 days. But now what if you start with one penny on day one, you add another penny on day two,

you add another penny in day three, you had another penny in day four, you add two more pennies on day five, you had three more pennies on day six, now you're amplifying the compounding. And that's what you're doing when you keep investing in money, but also let your money make money and reinvest it.

It's also the same thing if you just invest like a penny every other day, like how much smaller that amount is, it's crazy. Exactly. But it's still more than starting with one penny. Right? And so you don't need to beat yourself up But if you can't, you know, if you can't invest $1,000 a month, it's okay. Start with $500.

I don't have $500. Start with $100. I don't have $200. Start with $25. I don't have $25. Start with $10. Just get started. That's really the key with any of this is you got to get started.

Whether you're investing a penny a day, a dollar a day, $10 a day, $1,000, you just got to get started because compounding doesn't happen unless you start the compounding process. So that's how you compound your money. It's your money is going to be invested and your money when it makes money gets reinvested and you keep adding more money to it, which amplifies the compounding process. The second thing is what about compounding you're learning? And this is where now understand it takes discipline. But if you are in a situation where you're saying, I want to have more wealth or I want to have more money,

I want to have more whatever, I want to do this thing. well, a little bit every single day starts to add up. Because if you set a goal of reading 10 pages a day, that means after a month you've read 300 pages, you will read a book. After a year, you'll read 12 whole books. But what ends up happening to a lot of people is to say, I want to learn more.

I'll read every day. But then on Tuesday, you come home late from work, so you don't read on Tuesday. Then, you know, Thursdays, Fridays, you want to spend it with your wife, your husband, and it's a date night. So I'm not going to read that days. And Saturday, you went out with your friends. I'm not going to read Saturday.

And then Sunday, you just get ready for work. The kids are running around. So now you end up reading, instead of 300 pages a month, you're reading, 100 pages a month. Now it takes you three months to read the same amount of content. So while person one who said, yeah, I'm going to read 10 pages a day, no matter what, I read 12 books a month. The other person reads... A year, yeah. Oh, sorry, a year.

Yeah. The other person reads three or four books over the course of a year. And now when you compound that over five years, you start to see. Person one reads 60 books. Person two reads maybe 12. And so now your knowledge has grown so much faster because you continue to keep applying that learning versus the other person does not. And that's really where that discipline is, is if you can just keep learning,

even if it's a little bit every single day, it compounds because a little bit every single day adds up when you look at day after day after day, week after week after week, month after month, year after year. And that's where you can compound your knowledge, which that learning can also impact every aspect of your life. I mean, it can change your spiritual part of your life because you understand different ways that you can be more accepting of the world, different ways that you can be more happy and fulfilled in the world.

It can change how you build a business. It can change how you use your money. You can change how you invest your money. You can change a lot of different things. It's the same thing with compounding your skills. If you keep working towards something, you're going to get better at it. You know, if people talk about, oh, just to breathe, how do I learn to be better with money? You've got to learn how to be bad with money.

And the more you do, the more you're going to learn. And some of you are going to be very smart. And you can make one mistake and learn from it. You can read one book and learn from it. Some of you are like me and you need a lot of mistakes. You need a lot of time to learn it. In any case, the faster you can learn, the faster you can do, the faster you're going to get those skills. And that just means trying and doing and sticking with it day after day, even when it's tough.

And the reason why that's hard is because you're going to screw up. You're going to lose money. You're going to feel like you failed. You're going to go through that emotional turtle. But if you just keep going, you're going to be able to get it. get to the other side, but you just gotta keep going. And that's the hard part. If somebody is in a lot of debt,

do you still recommend them to be investing consistently into an ETF or into an investment account instead of just putting all the money they would into it paying off their debt first? There's a couple things here. Number one, paying down your debt is an investment. Yeah. Because if I have student loans at 6%

and I can pay off my student loans one year early, that's a guaranteed 6% return. If I bought my money on the stock market, I'm shooting for a 7% to 10% return, but it's not guaranteed. Maybe it'll go up by 15%. Maybe it'll go up by 0%. Maybe it'll go down by 5%.

I don't know. And so it's a guaranteed return to pay down your debt early. But the second question you want to ask also here is what kind of debts are they? Because it's a very different question if it's student loans at 6% or a mortgage at 4%

versus a credit card at 24% because now when you have that sort of high-interest debts, don't even think about investing your money in stocks or real estate, pay down that credit card debt as fast as possible. Because that credit card debt, that's high-interest debts, well, just to do a math, if you can pay down your credit card debt one year early, you're getting a 25% return.

But if you invest your money in stocks, you're shooting for maybe a 10% return, 25 is bigger than 10. So if you have credit card debt, don't worry about stocks. Don't worry about investing in real estate. Pay down the stocks first before you think about anything else. And just to really hammer this home, the average credit card debt, household credit card debt today in America is $6,500. I mean, somebody who has credit card debt, the average is $6,500.

The average APR in America today is right around 27%. that means if you're making the minimum payments on that credit card debt, you're going to pay about $18,000 in interest on that $6,500 of debt. And this is going to cost you close to $25,000 to pay off $6,500. Which means you are the reason those credit card companies get to live in the nice big buildings, get to fly around in the private jets, is because you're the one paying those interest. I mean, we talk about, oh my God, the stock market, 10%.

How do I get that? You're paying the credit card company is 25%. And this is where it really takes, again, the self-realization of accepting, all right, I got a problem. I got to stop that problem. I got to stop using the credit cards. Cut them up, do what Dave Ramsey says, right? Get rid of the credit cards. Pay them off and now be smart.

And then you decide once you realize you don't have that credit card debt. Should you use a credit card? I love using credit cards. I don't carry a credit card balance, but I like the perks. I like the benefits. I like the rewards. I flew here from Detroit to California. I got a rental car upgrade because my credit card gave me one.

I didn't get a seed upgrade this time, but many times I get a seat upgrade because I'm a credit card. I get hotel upgrades. I get to go into the lounge. Credit cards can be valuable if you know how to use them, but if you have credit card debt, what the heck are you thinking about? using a credit card for. If you have credit card debt,

you're using it the wrong way. You are making the credit card company rich. Again, use the system, right? Either you're paying for it or they're paying for you. If you're paying for it, stop. If they're paying for you, make sure you're not overpaying. Because the problem, it's crazy that some people do this,

but they spend money because they think about, I'm going to get 2% cash back. That's one of the silliest, and I'm using a nice word here. One of the silliest things that you can do. So don't be so silly, okay? Diving into a little bit more of the practical side of things. you spoke the different ways to invest in yourself, one being yourself, one being your business,

you know, buying cameras for this podcast studios and investment. You know, investing in yourself can look like many different courses and books and different things. When it comes to the, you know, going for a 7 to 10% return in the stock market and, you know, exploring ETFs and different things where you're looking for the financial return, what is the best way to automate? And any ways that you could share, like, companies, the websites, the actual how-to for people to get that set up and have the consistency kind of built into their day-to-day life so they don't have to think about it and create friction around it. Well, I think that's just relatively simple with the technology that there is today. There's so many brokerages that can automate this for you that you don't really have to do anything. Have different bank accounts.

Have a bank account for your spending money. Have a bank account for your investing money. have a bank account for your spending money, please create different bank accounts. And the nice thing is now because of technology, most banks for free, if they're charging you, get a different bank. They're going to allow you to move money seamlessly so you can create an automatic withdrawal. Every time you get paid, some money goes into your investment money bank account, some money goes into your savings account.

That way you separate the money. You don't accidentally spend your investment money. You don't accidentally spend your savings money. And then you figure out how you want to invest your money. And then you can find a brokerage that does that. But one of the things I do want to add to what you were saying, which is going back to how do you invest in yourself, one thing that I do want to mention as well,

because we talked a lot about the hard work of investing in yourself and putting in these things. Sometimes investing in yourself is the opposite as well, which is not doing anything. And taking a step away. And an example of this was the first time I did this, I went on a thinking trip. I don't know why.

I just knew there's a lot of things happening with work. and my wife and I went to Florida. And my wife wanted to do her own things. I knew she was going to be busy, which was actually great because I wanted to have just a long time with me, a notepad on the beach. You don't have to be on the beach, okay? I know I was very fortunate to do this.

But for me, I was like, I'm going to be on the beach. I just want to go there and think. And so I would wake up and I told myself, I didn't want technology. I don't know. I do some interesting things. but I would ride my bike, bicycle, to the beach with my backpack. I had my notepad in there and some pencils and pens.

And I would go sit on the beach and just think. Now you're going to say, well, what did you think about? Anything. Like, I talked that I wrote about myself. You know, what do I, what am I happy about? My family. What do I want? And then also business.

And I didn't set rules for myself, but I just went there and just thought. Like, what am I, what are we doing? What do we want to achieve? What are our products? What can we do? What can we innovate? And I did this for multiple days. I didn't sit on the beach all day long.

But like, I would spend a few hours on the beach every day. And I just gave myself that opportunity to think. And it was really valuable because it allowed me to really put in perspective what we're doing. And it allowed me to now think of new ideas. Okay, what are we going to do in briefs media? What are new products that we can get? What are new things that we can innovate? And that was the spark for things like Briefs Pro and other products that we were

creating. It was literally just thinking, giving myself that freedom to think. And so I would also say that that is a way to invest in yourself as to sometimes. And, you know, there's limitations. I get it. You know, you're working. You got responsibilities in life. Maybe it starts with like 15 minute bits. If you can wake up 15 minutes earlier or if you have 15 minutes in the day, I highly recommend you put your phone and computer away and just think. And, you know, Maybe you call it meditation, I don't know, but keep a notepad with you and just write down whatever comes in your mind, especially if you're working on the financial side, think. And I would say definitely that is a way to invest in yourself because it allows you to better

understand your goals, your intentions, and get to where you want to go. Probably during the most pivotal changes, at least in my personal life, I've taken those like time away from, you know, even before this podcast, like went away for six weeks and just like in silence, you know, and allowing the space to give the opportunity for something to be birthed or to arise within you, whether it's in the form of a thought, an idea for how you're going to pivot or, you know, I think we underestimate the power that that really does have because we want, you know, we live in a frantic society that is like into the next thing, into the next thing and giving yourself, I feel like that space really does provide the opportunity for some

amazing things to come through you. And so I love that. I feel like in the society, it's so much more about addition by subtraction. Yeah. If you look at some of the wealthiest people, this is what they do. If you look at what Warren Buffett does, one of the most successful and wealthiest people in the world, how does he structure his days? Most of his day is just reading. It's just thinking. I think it was Bill Gates. Hate him or love him. He's made a lot of wealth.

One of the things that he does is he goes on thinking trips where he goes into, I think it's a cabin, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and he just takes a stack of books and he just reads and just thinks. Like, there's definitely a lot of value to be gained. And I don't know where I heard this. But there was a saying that I heard one time,

which is if you spend all your time making money, you're never going to have a chance to actually make any real money. And the reason was when you're constantly just in that grind, just working, working, working, working, you can't look at the bigger picture and see how you can actually grow what you're doing because you're just constantly in the trenches doing. And sometimes you've got to just take a step back and see how can you now expand and really amplify the efforts that you're putting in.

Yeah, I feel like if you stay stuck within your logic about how you're going to make money, it can be this intellectual way to move through life. which can give you incremental progress and growth spurts in your finances and whatnot. But for me, it's like when you find alignment with what you're here to be doing, the universe will just give you

exponential amounts of resources to support you in that process. At least that's been my own discovery and what I feel like is within my life. When you found the alignment between what you're good at, your skill set, what the world needs and creating your YouTube channel,

that become a way for you personally to exponentially impact more people and by virtue attract much more financial abundance as well. So it's like really finding that balance between people that are struggling, you know, that are paycheck to paycheck. Maybe they have responsibilities, kids to take care of and, in, you know, focusing on that. And at the same time, working towards creating more space for yourself to see,

like we were speaking to, what wants to come through you. Yeah. And sometimes I think also reflect on your thoughts on things. because I think what also happens to, because I've seen this many times, is if we go back to the example of somebody who's struggling with money, you're living paycheck to paycheck.

What is your relationship with money? Because many times in that situation, you say money is bad, money is evil, money's taboo, and money is all these bad and negative things. Why are you saying that? Because I'm struggling with money. Okay, so because you're struggling with money,

you're putting up the smokescreen that money is bad, taboo, and evil. Would you like an additional? $10,000 a month? Oh, of course I would. Well, if it's bad and even, why do you want more of that thing? And so I think it's that self-reflection as well of now what got you to those thoughts and now dissecting them and understanding, yeah, it's bad because you don't have it. But if you had more, you'd have more freedom and less stress. So how can you do it in a way that aligns with their morals and values.

Because, you know, the next thing people say is, oh, well, there's a lot of evil that comes from money. People are selling tobacco and these bad things which are hurting society. No one's telling you to go out and do something immoral, right? There are ways that are moral for you to make money. And, you know, I say, you got to look at the financial, you got to look at the legal, and you got to look at the moral. And what's moral for you is not going to be necessarily moral for me, vice versa.

what's moral for me, may or not be moral for you. But you have to do something that aligns, you got to build a triangle, what gives you the financial success, what's legal, right? I got to say this as an attorney, but also what's moral and what aligns with your beliefs.

Because you don't want to go out and do something that you don't, I mean, I did the party business. I hated it. I don't want to do that ever again, right? And it's, you learn by doing, but that's really where that you can find, oh, wow, money is just a piece of paper.

it doesn't make me a good person, doesn't make me a bad person. It just removes the financial stresses from my life. And that's where if you can have more money, you can have less financial stress and think more about now my spiritual fulfillment, my mental happiness, and my physical health. Oh, not so bad now. Yeah, and I think it's so much easier to connect the dots looking backwards to see how all those things you stumbled on and failed at informed the next chapter of your journey, which gave you a new skill set, which informed the next chapter,

your journey, which coming all together now is what you're doing and how your ability to create content and YouTube videos and educate and write newsletters and manage individuals for events or like all these things come together in like your purpose for how you're going to share yourself with the world. And I think it's very, very rare that somebody just like comes with clarity and they're like, they hit their thing right off the right off the bat. It's like it's so much more the 10 year, 15 year overnight success. Yeah, and you know, they say passion comes from pain, which is you got sometimes, you know, you go through that hardship, which helps you realize the other side too. And, you know, wisdom doesn't come easy, right? So, you know, you look at elder people in our culture, you know, we call a term for older people is also wise people. It's the kind of go hand in hand.

comes with a lot of hardship. You know, the calluses, the pain, the scars, they teach a lot. And it's difficult going through them, but that's also how you learn. Yeah, and I think that, you know, what I strive,

at least with this podcast, is that the more that we discover who we really are and what our values are, the less calluses, maybe we have to build up because the more alignment and clarity of vision,

we can kind of go into that. But regardless, like, the reality is we're going to face resistance in this life. and to help us refine who we ultimately are. Like you said, that pressure that you felt culturally from your family became the pressure that forges the diamond. And so it is very valuable to have that resistance in our life.

Okay, before we start to move towards wrapping up, I just want to, again, any other very practical things to lay out. We kind of went over the fundamentals. But where else do you see people go wrong in terms of their beliefs or actions around money that we should, you know, really focus on. I think really just go back and ask the question of, is it an asset versus the liability before you can spend money on it?

Especially if we don't have the money. And then really dissect, can you afford it? Because if you put the emphasis on buying investments or assets, you're going to set a different trajectory for your life, right? We think about compounding. Compounding works both ways. You can either compound your wealth or you can compound your brokenness. So if you're putting the emphasis on the other side,

you're just going to keep going deeper and deeper into the hole, especially for financing things, whether it's 0% APR, whether you're using credit card debt, those things will keep you broke and it'll make you broke er. Which means now if you want to compound the wealth, first you've got to get to zero, it's hard, but it is possible, and then you start rolling.

No matter what you do, the beginning is the most difficult part, right? You've got to start snowball, start small, but slowly you can start building and building and building but you got to get started. The key to any success is you just got to start. You're going to make mistakes. There's no person in the world that hasn't made mistakes. I've made mistakes.

You made mistakes. Every single person in the world has made mistakes. Don't beat yourself up. You're going to screw up. You're going to lose money. You're going to do something bad. It's a part of the process. But you've just got to get back up.

The most successful people have made more failures and more screw-ups than the people that are not successful. Most of the time, the people that have become successful have screwed up more times than other people have even tried. And it's that understanding that you've got to screw up a lot. And it's hard because no one likes screwing up. But you've got to go through. I mean, I can tell you story after story

about how many silly things I have done. But yeah, I mean, it's how you learn. Yeah, and I think it just keeps coming back to that why, you know, to really develop financial sovereignty. I've just always wanted to do what I want, when I want, with who I want. And like you're speaking to, money talks. It makes those things viable and possible in your life. And so one other thing there is do you,

when it comes to buying versus renting, do you think renting is like ever smart in terms of like if you're, I guess you could look at it from any different things, from a house to a car. But when it comes to renting a house or a property, if you could take that money that you would have bought the property into another investment thing

that would make more financial sense to actually rent where you live, what do you think about that? Depends on the person. Yeah. I rent right now. I own a good chunk of rent their properties. But I rent where I live.

Now you're going to say, what the heck you're talking about? Well, because I have been very focused on dumping money into buy more rental properties to buying stocks, into building briefs media, investing in startups, investing in a lot of different places. Now, yeah, my wife and I are looking at buying a place now, but I rent where I live. We rent our office because that's, you know, what we wanted to do. Now, we don't live in a dump. We have a very nice luxury townhome, but we rent. It costs a lot of money every month. And it's, yeah, it's paying off their mortgage

but I think the first thing is to, let's talk about the taboo of renting first because I think that taboo of renting is a little overdone. The reason why it's because people say when you rent, you're paying your landlord's mortgage. Okay, let's talk about that for a second. When you go to Amazon and you buy, I don't know, a glass, glasses off of Amazon,

do you think that you're paying that glasses, manufacturers mortgage because you are? Do you think that you're paying for the executives at Amazon's mortgages? Because you are. When you go out to eat at a restaurant, do you think that you're paying the restaurant owner's mortgage? Because you are. Do you think that you're paying the tenant's mortgage for the property? Because you are.

Anytime you buy something, you're paying for a service. When you rent, you're paying for a service. You're paying for the service, which is you have a place to live or you have a place to work. Now, the second thing is, well, if I'm putting this money into, my mortgage, I'm building equity. I agree. That's great. But let's also be very practical about this. If you go and get a 30-year fixed rate mortgage, you have to understand how much money is going to equity versus interest as well. Because banks are smart. And when I say that, what I mean by that is banks front load your mortgages, meaning if I pay $1,000 a month,

that doesn't mean $500 is going to equity, $500 is going to interest. For the first 14, $1,000,000,000, almost 15 years of my mortgage, of a 30-year mortgage, more than half of my monthly payment is going directly into my bank's pocket as interest. It isn't until 15 years into the mortgage that half of my monthly payment is going towards my equity, which means for the first few years, out of that $1,000 that I'm paying every month,

almost all of it is going directly into my bank's pocket as interest. And I'm getting almost zero equity. So now, let's ask the same question. Is it better to rent or buy? It just depends where you are in your financial situation. And what I say by that, it's not like a really nilly, uh, is what I'm saying is, if you can afford to buy, buy if you want to. If you can't, then rent.

And it just depends on what is your use for the money. So let me break that down so you know what I mean. So when it comes to buying, if you want to afford a home, you got to afford three things. You got to afford the down payment. You got to afford the monthly payment. And you've got to afford the moving costs. To afford the down payment, what I like to recommend. And I can't tell you what to do.

I'm not a financial advisor. But I like to see at least 20%. Why 20%? Because you're paying under 20%. You've got to pay PMI. You're not going to get the best mortgage rates. It's going to cost you more money. Second, you've got to afford,

and I should also say for number one, that you also got some skin in the game. Because if home prices go down and, you know, you had to sell during that time, you want to have some equity, you want to have some skin in the game so you don't get hurt. in bad times. I always like to prepare for the worst. Number two is you got to afford the monthly

payment. That means your mortgage payment that you're paying plus property taxes plus insurance that has to be covered through your income, but you also still have money left over to save and invest. Because what happens to a lot of people is I'm going to go own a home because I want to be a homeowner. Everybody says it's a good thing. I want to build equity. I'm going to build wealth. I'm going to build generational wealth. But then I have no money left over to put into stocks. I have no money left over to put into real estate. I have no money left over to build a business because I'm living paycheck to paycheck because I have this huge mortgage. Don't do that. So understand that your mortgage has got to fit within your spending budget and you still got to have money to invest and save.

Third, you got to afford the moving costs. Now, what does that mean? Well, if you want to go and buy a home and move in, number one, movers are expensive. Number two, I want you to think about this practically. If you know you're going to upgrade the kitchen, the bathroom, finish the basement, how much is that going to cost? Because there's a cost to the construction. Think about that. And you want to make sure you have the cash to pay it, not finance the construction. You also want to think about the furniture. Because when you move into a home and your wife says, we've got to buy this nice sofa, we've got to buy this nice dining table, we've got to buy these nice things that costs money. You don't want to go out and finance it. So think about those three things. If you can afford it and you

find a home that you like, go out and buy. Otherwise, you can rent. Now, are you saying renting is for people that can't afford to buy? No, renting is, again, it's just a service and a value. My wife and I have spent a lot of time in Airbnb's over the last number of years. So we were living in many different parts of the country. We lived in Europe. We lived in San Diego. We lived in Manhattan. We lived in Chicago. So it was more practical. Plus, that meant we had more capital to go out and buy more investments. Do you feel bad for me because I'm renting? I mean, I hope you don't, right?

Renting has a lot of taboo because people assume that if you can't rent, if you're renting, that means you can't afford to buy. But that's not the case. I want you to think about renting as just another service. And if you want to own, fine. If you want to rent, fine. Whatever you do, make sure you can afford it.

Just like with renting. If you're going to rent, make sure you can afford where you live. If you are stretching paycheck to paycheck because you're renting too high, you're going to live in a smaller place. Just make sure you can afford it. I don't like setting hard and fast rules

that this is what you got to do. You have to own a home. You have to do this. I want you to be financially educated so you can make smart decisions. I don't want you to be a sheep. Be a lion. Be educated to make your own decisions

based up of what's right for you. I always say, I'm just a random guy on YouTube. Don't blindly listen to what I do because I'm a random person. Come up with your own decisions, right? I can teach. I love the accent comes in heavy with that. I don't even realize it.

Look, you just got to look, it really just kills me. People say, give me the blueprint. There's no blueprint. I mean, the process is simple, right? We talked about the five steps. But at the end of the day, you got to learn what's right for you. Your risk tolerance, your goals, your financial habits are different than mine. What you're willing to do is different than me.

And just understand the financial approach and then make the decision that's right for you. Another thing, do you think that most people should be incorporating themselves? as in building a side hustle and yourself, your personality. Or even if they could be contracted instead of an employee, you know, I'm just thinking of the tax benefits of being able to

do that. Well, I think there's a lot of tax benefits associated with that. Now, do I think everybody should do it? No, but I think the right people can do it. I'll give an example. I talked about this with my tax advisor on my channel because this is always

such an interesting topic. Let's assume that you're making money. Okay. What ends up happening now, especially as you start to make more money, people realize this FICA person has taken a lot of taxes, right? Your state taxes, your federal income taxes, your FICA taxes, they're expensive. And so people ask the natural question of how can I pay less money in taxes. And when you have a W2 income, you're generally very limited. You are limited because there's a limited number of deductions you can take and there's limited things you can do when the taxes are already taken. When you're a contract,

you have a little bit more control. You can qualify for more deductions. Now, not everybody is built or made to be a contractor. Not everybody cares, which is fine. Now, when you talk about, well, what if you yourself become a entrepreneur in addition to your job or something to take advantage of some of these tax benefits? Well, let's assume now that I work a job and I'm making good money, but, you know, I want to, I like cooking or my wife likes cooking. my wife does like cooking. And she wants to start a cooking blog, something. Not really sure exactly, but she wants to build a cooking business in some instance,

a personality, a thing. Well, what that means now is you can make investments in that business. And if the business doesn't make enough money, then you could potentially offset some of her income. So let's assume now my wife wants to start a cooking channel. And we want to upgrade our kitchen because, well, we need a nicer kitchen. kitchen for this cooking channel. And it just happens to be the kitchen where my wife also makes me dinner. Well, now, we renovate this kitchen. It costs $20,000. That's an expense on the business.

And let's assume that this cooking business that my wife starts doesn't make enough money to run a profit. I mean, there's a loss in this business. This cooking business, which happened to renovate the kitchen that we use, has a loss. I'm making money for my job. Some of this loss can be used to offset my income from my job. But before you go and do this, talk to a tax advisor. There's a lot of regulations and rules around this, but I'm speaking as general as possible to understand the importance and how some of these things can work. But as you become a contractor or become self-employed or become a business owner or a side hustler, you open up the door to a lot more potential tax benefits, but you need a tax advisor to make sure do things correctly, because if you don't,

you can pay penalties, fines, or even end up in jail. So it just makes you do it legally, and that's where, you know, get a tax advisor. Yeah. Amazing. Just thinking about the conversation that we've had up until today at this point, which I think has just provided a lot of, like, groundwork for just basic financial literacy and then also a lot of the psychology around things that I think can really empower people. What do you think is potentially missing in our conversation that would help rounded out for our listeners, if anything. You know, I think the main thing is if you get a spark of, okay, yeah, I can go and do this, then it's really the next step is going out and doing it.

Because what I like to say is no amount of education can bypass the experience. Now, education can help lower that mistake curve, the learning curve, the time that it takes. But you got to go out and do it as well. And I think that's where, you know, the implementation, obviously have a lot of content on my channel that goes deeper into it. But somebody's going to say, I want to learn more about investing in stocks. Somebody's going to say, I want to learn more about building a business. Someone's going to say, I want to learn more about investing in real estate. And that's okay.

I mean, you know, what's right for you is it's right for you. But you got to do it and then, then, you know, dive deeper and learn. And maybe you realize, oh, no, this is not what I want to do. I want to do this instead because I've learned more. And it's, it's the action that, you know, you can't bypass that action. You've got to do it. And, you know, I've posted things on my Instagram saying, all right, this is your notice. Close Instagram.

Go do something. Right. It's just, it's just, it's just, sometimes just got to do something. Incredible, man. Thank you so much for coming on today. I think this is a really important conversation. for all people, in all walks of life. I think especially within the spiritual community,

you know, there can be sometimes as a version about around the conversation of money. And we spoke to this many times how it really truly can and needs to be. If you want to be able to scale your Dharma in this world and scale your impact and how you can show up on the planet, then it's really wise to be able to understand a lot of this stuff so that you can use your finances as a tool and not have the institutions

continue to use us, you know? So just where can people find you? Anything that you have going on? You'd like to share before we start to wrap up. Well, thank you again, man. Great questions. Awesome conversation. I have a lot of videos on my YouTube channel, Minority Mindset. You can check out if you want to learn more about what's happening in the financial markets. We have a free newsletter called Market Briefs. That's briefs.c.c.com slash market. Briefs.com slash market to learn more about market briefs. And yeah, I think that's pretty much it, man.

Amazing. Thank you so much for coming out today. I hope your time in L.A. is fun. And you're doing more podcasts while you're out here. I got a handful more. Yeah. I know some beautiful out here, man. I was telling Chelsea, the hills, that nature,

you just can't get tired of, especially when you're from Michigan, right? LaVonia, Flat. They come out here and it's beauty. They're both beautiful in their own ways. Yeah, I would say, I mean, Michigan, the summer is beautiful. The winter's dude, freaking brutal. You know, it hasn't been as cold.

Come by to Detroit. I'll show you around the new Detroit. It's beautiful now. All right, I probably won't take you up on that. But thanks, Rob. You got to come. I'm telling you, if you're watching this, check out Detroit. It's under, don't sleep on Detroit.

No, no, I love it. I mean, just, I can also feel the Midwestern mentality, especially with the immigrant family and everything. man, I really enjoyed this combo. So thanks for coming out. Likewise. Thank you, man. And everybody that's tuning into this episode, let us know.

I'd be really curious to hear your thoughts about the conversation today and where you're currently at and your own journey, what you found useful and impactful for your own life. Until next time, be well.