The Personal Finance Podcast - 19 Things I Wish I Knew In My 20's (That I know In My 30s!)

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

In this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to talk about we're going to be talking through 19 things I wish I knew in my 20’s (That I now know in my 30’s).  How Andrew Can Help You:  Don't let another year pass by without making significant strides toward your dreams. "Master Your Money Goals" is your pathway to a future where your aspirations are not just wishes but realities. Enroll now and make this year count! Join The Master Money Newsletter where you will become smarter with your money in 5 minutes or less per week Here! Learn to invest by joining  Index Fund Pro! This is Andrew’s course teaching you how to invest!  Watch The Master Money Youtube Channel! , Ask Andrew a question on Instagram or TikTok.  Learn how to get out of Debt by joining our Free Course  Leave Feedback or Episode Requests here.  Thanks to Our Amazing Sponsors for supporting The Personal Finance Podcast. Shopify: Shopify makes it so easy to sell. Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at  shopify.com/pfp Monarch Money: Get an extended 30 day free trial at monarchmoney/pfp Thanks to Fundrise for Sponsoring the show! Invest in real estate going to fundrise.com/pfp Indeed: Start hiring NOW with a SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLAR SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to upgrade your job post at Indeed.com/personalfinance Thanks to Policy Genius for Sponsoring the show! Go to policygenius.com to get your free life insurance quote. Chime: Start your credit journey with Chime. Sign-up takes only two minutes and doesn’t affect your credit score. Get started at chime.com/ Delete Me: Use Promo Code PFP for 20% off!   Links Mentioned in This Episode:  How to Negotiate Your Salary and Get a Raise (The Step-By-Step System!) How to Negotiate Your New Job Offer to Get The Most Money and Benefits! How to Skyrocket Your Net Worth By Building an Amazing Network with Jordan Harbinger How We Travel The World Completely Free! (Travel Hacking 101) How to Quit Your Job and Travel The World with Brian Luebben How to Maximize Your Travel and Get the Most Out of Your Credit Card Points Points with Chris Hutchins Connect With Andrew on Social Media:  Instagram  TikTok Twitter  Master Money Website  Master Money Youtube Channel   Free Guides:   The Stairway to Wealth: The Order of Operations for your Money  How to Negotiate Your Salary  The 75 Day Money Challenge  Get out Of Debt Fast  Take the Money Personality Quiz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Find your advisor at IG Private Wealth.com. On this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, 19 things I wish I knew in my 20s that I now know in my 30s. What's up, everybody, and welcome to the personal finance podcast. I'm your host, Andrew founder of MasterMoney.com. And today on the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to be talking through 19 things I wish I knew in my 20s that I now know in my 30s. If you guys have any questions, make sure you join the Master Money. money newsletter by going to mastermoney.com slash newsletter. And you can respond to any of those newsletters that we send out every single week so that you'll be able to get your questions answered.

And if you're enjoying the show where you get value out of the show, please consider following the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or whatever podcast player you love listening to this podcast on. And if you're really getting value, consider leaving us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify as well. Can I thank you guys enough for following and leaving those five star ratings and reviews. Now today, what I'm going to be doing is we are going to be diving into 19 things I wish I knew in my 20s that I now know in my 30s. And there was a lot of things in my 20s that I figured out later on that just were not true. And so I want to go through 19 different things. Some of these are related to money. A couple of these are related to life. But for the most part,

this is an episode that's supposed to motivate you. I want to motivate you as much as possible. and as we enter a time frame where a lot of people need to reinvigorate their goals. We're halfway through the year at the time I'm recording this. We need to make sure that we are really keeping that motivation and pushing forward towards our financial goals and our life goals. Because if you've ever got the gist of this podcast, we're trying to teach you how to optimize your finances as much as you possibly can. But we also want you to optimize life.

And your finances and life go hand in hand, meaning your health, your wealth, your wisdom, all of these different things all go hand in hand. We want to make sure that you were optimizing this on every single level in your life. So if you want to be that best human you can possibly be, then this is the episode for you. So without further ado, let's get into it. Number one, and if you're a long time listener, you've heard me talk through this, is that income is the most important driver to building wealth. I cannot stress this enough to you all how important it is to make sure that you prioritize your

income over everything else, especially when you are early on in your 20s. Your 20s is a time to build up a bunch of different skills and a bunch of different relationships so that you are able to grow your income. Because when you get to your 30s, you want to accelerate that income. And you have to have this baseline where you're starting to grow your income in your 30s so that you can absolutely change the trajectory of your life once you get going. Listen, everybody in their 20s, we start. out with jobs where we're not making much money. Everybody around you, for the most part, is not making as much money as they make it seem. In fact, for most people, they're just trying

to show off. And if they have a bunch of fancy cars and they're taking on all these different car payments because they have their big boy or big girl job, and now they are out in the world taking on all this additional debt, what they're really doing is they are actually broke when it comes to their net worth. Most people who are taking on payments who have the flashy house or have the flashy cars or have the amazing apartment with the high-rise view, all of those people for the most part, unless they are making a massive amount of money, all those people for the most part are in debt. And how do you know this? Because we can look at the statistics and the data of households out there and see, most people are in debt. And they're in a significant amount

of debt, in fact. And we're at the highest debt level we have ever been at at the time of recording this. So it's really important to know that and know that income is the most important driver to build wealth. See, when I was in my 20s, I used to think, hey, the first thing I would do is I would cut back on stuff. And it really did help me at least learn how to manage my money. But what you really need to be doing is you need to learn how to earn. And learning how to earn is a skill. And over time, you will develop this skill and this muscle to earn more income. Now, if you're just starting out, you're like, I don't know how to make more money. I don't even know where to start. We have a couple of side hustle episodes that we just came out with. I have another one

coming out, we talk through side hustles that can turn into a full-time business. But the real place that I want you to start is at your day job. And we have a recent episode talking through how to negotiate your salary and how to negotiate your salary at your day job as well. And so I want you to listen to those two episodes as a starting point to learn how to negotiate your salary at your day job because this is the number one skill that I want you to learn to earn more money going forward. So that's number one. And the second thing I did, like we talked about, was we started side hustles, which ended up turning into some of them full-time businesses. Now, there are a number of reasons why this is going to change your life, is as you increase your income, you are going to be able to do so many different things.

And growing your income increases the gap. And if you don't know what the gap is, it's the difference between your income and your expenses. And as that gap starts to grow, that is where wealth is built. because it's the excess cash that you have left over after you have paid all your bills. And what can you do with this cash? Well, A, you can set up first your financial foundation. Your financial foundation is going to be the first flight in something like the stairway to wealth where you can see, hey, I got to have an emergency fund set up. I want to get my 401k match.

I want to make sure that I am taking care of any high interest debt and getting rid of that and becoming high interest debt free. That's what we want. Is any debt above a 6% interest rate? we want you paying that down. And so you have this financial foundation set up where now you are starting to become financially bulletproof, meaning that you have six months of cash saved up, and you have that high interest debt paid off. And so not many things can happen to you where it would throw you off financially. Then once you have that foundation set up, you can take some of

this extra income and start putting it towards things like building wealth. And so you can invest those dollars into stocks, things like the Roth IRA, the HSA, the 401K, a taxable brokerage account. In addition, you can start to invest extra dollars into things like real estate if you're interested in that. And there's so many different areas of real estate where you can grow your wealth. You can start to invest in businesses, which I think is one of the biggest opportunities out there overall, is investing more money into small businesses because you can grow your

wealth so fast by doing some of this stuff. And so as time goes on, your income growing means you have less stress and worry around your personal finances so that you can, focus on either growing your wealth your way. And I want you to learn how to grow your wealth your way. Maybe some people don't want to own a business, so they don't want to own real estate whatsoever. They just want to throw it into index funds so they can just enjoy life. That is absolutely an amazing way to spend your dollars. In addition, you can also buy more things that you love, you can spend more money on your hobbies, you can spend more on time with your family, you can spend

more on vacations, you can get the luxury hotel, you can upgrade to first class. All of this stuff is amazing, and it is absolutely amazing what you can do with your money as you start to grow your income. I want you to spend money on this stuff. I want you to spend more on these types of things. And so being able to grow your income is going to give you that opportunity so that you have opportunity for growth, you have financial security, you have the foundation of your personal finances so that you can become bulletproof and you are able to really start to take on more responsibility as time goes on here. So it's so powerful to grow your income. Income growth is number one. Number two, this goes hands in hand with income growth, is your 20s should be a time

that you are focusing on building skills and relationships as early as possible. Now, I fell into building skills. It was not something I really understood how powerful skills can be. In fact, I really want you to invest as much time and energy as possible in your 20s, building as many valuable skills as you possibly can. Now, what do I mean by valuable skills? There are some skills, out there that will make you so much more money than other very specific skills. If you can play the guitar, that's absolutely great and it's a really cool skill to have. But for most people, that's more so a hobby and it's not going to earn you a ton of money. Whereas if you are a really good negotiator, you can earn millions and millions of dollars per year just by having that absolutely amazing skill.

For the basic negotiator, just learning the basic skills of negotiation, you'll be able to negotiate your salary, which will allow you to earn millions of dollars over the business. the course of your career more. This is a multi-million dollar skill just by learning one skill in negotiation. The same goes for something like sales. People who want to really grow their income need to focus their time on sales. Sales is going to allow you, A, to make more money because everything in life is a sale. It doesn't matter if you are going out there and you're trying to sell yourself on a brand new job. You might be trying to sell your product to a new client. You may be running a business and you may be trying to sell your offer to someone out there when you're

trying to buy a business. There's so many different things where you need to understand sales and how it works. That's another high value activity. Now, there are other skills out there. Learning how to code, for example, or understanding different ways to scale businesses. These are all high value skills. In addition, when I worked in the corporate world, if you're working a nine to five, you're listening to me right now in your office or you're in a cubicle or wherever else you're working. And if you are working in the corporate world, think through. I want you to look at the people above you. And now some of them may be incompetent. We all think that when we're working in the corporate world. But what are the people above you have? What skills do they have and how did they get there?

And I used to do this exercise over and over and over again in the corporate world. And this taught me to look for skills that they had, try to build those skills in my own life. And then I could negotiate my salary so much easier because I had these skills available because I could see what people ahead of me had. And in addition, when you start to negotiate your salary, go back to that episode and I teach you how to do this, but talk to your boss and say, hey, what additional skills would help me so that I could actually be able to get promoted and ask them what skills they want you to have? That's going to help you so much more over time.

And I think it's one of the most important things. Now, relationships. This is the other side of this coin, is learning how to build relationships is by far one of the most powerful things I ever did, and I really didn't know the impact until I actually started to do this. And so this can be done in a number of different ways. One, you can go to conferences. Conferences are a great way to build relationships with other people because most people at conferences, that's all they're there to try to do, is they're trying to learn and they're trying to build relationships. And so that's an easy way to do it where you can just walk up to

random people, start talking to them. And it's not really weird. Like you can't go in a coffee shop and start talking to some random person. They're going to be like, what the heck are you talking to me for I'm just trying to get work done or drink coffee or whatever else. Instead, you need to make sure that when you go and try to build relationships, you are doing this in a systematic way. Now, we had an episode a couple of years ago with Jordan Harbinger where he kind of talked through his networking and relationship building system. And he takes like five to seven minutes a day to build relationships. Love that system because I think it's the easiest way that anybody can implement. And you're going to be 10x ahead of anybody else who doesn't implement that

system. At the same time, if you're working a 9 to 5, if you're working a blue call or job. Start to network with people in your industry. Are there industry meetups that you go to so that you can start to meet people in that industry? Because the more people you know and the more people that you meet, the more powerful your network becomes. And the more powerful that network becomes, the more money you're going to make. I promise you, things are just going to start to happen. Action breeds money. So you've got to take more action and start to meet more people and what's going to happen over time is some things are just going to happen. And I don't know, it depends on what your industry is. So let me give you a couple examples of this.

When I was heavily buying real estate, I used to be a real estate investor who would try to buy as much real estate as I possibly could. Still love real estate. Just don't focus as heavily on real estate as I used to. And when I used to do this, I would go to real estate meetups and I would find local investors because I didn't know where to start in terms of finding properties and deals off market. I could find stuff on the MLS all the time. I have my license and all that kind of stuff where I could find MLS deals. I wanted off market properties. And so what I need to do was talk to.

more people so that I could find more off market properties. And so when I started this process, I started to just go to real estate meetups and the purpose of those is to meet other people and learn. And so I went to those meetups, started to shake hands, started to just talk to people. And over time, I started develop relationships with people who would help me, A, with the real real estate meetups, which were, we would go to this place and you wouldn't know what is here unless you're invited in the back of a Denny's, okay? In the back of this Denny's, there was a group of about 30 to 40 different people, all these people looked like regular people.

In fact, some of the wealthiest ones looked like they were almost homeless. And you'd go into this room, and it'd be 40 millionaires in this room. And everybody is doing real estate deals and negotiating in the back of a Denny's. And you would have no idea that was there or that group meetup was there

unless you started to network with people. All of a sudden, deals started to fall in my lap because I knew people. And this is just one quick example of countless examples that I have, of how networking can really, really help you in just meeting people, shaking hands, talking through. In a world where most people are trying to shy away from other people, and I understand it, I'm an introvert, I get it. You need to try to network as much as you possibly can.

Network with people in your industry. If you're a nurse, network with other nurses. It's going to at least help you land a job where you make more money. If you're in a blue collar industry, network with other people in that same industry. It's going to land you more work. I promise you. Number three is learning the skill of separating income from time. So most people who work in nine to five, you work a certain amount of hours per day. And if you're on salary, most of you are. If you're on salary, you're working within a lot of time frame for the most part. Sometimes you may be answering emails on the weekends or at nighttime or whatever else. And so what you're really doing is you're working for a specific wage based on working

a certain amount of time. So most people have to work a minimum of 40 hours. And if you work that 40 hours, you earn a specific income. What you want to do over time is try to find ways to separate your income from your time. Now, this is one thing we do for most people. You can start off by just investing your dollars into index funds, ETFs, that type of stuff. And you can work towards financial independence and work towards your freedom number. And you're starting to separate your income from your time because now your dollars are earning dollars while you're sleeping. Just because you invested that money. That's the purpose of investing is so that your money can grow. your dollars can work so much harder than you ever could. And once you understand compound interest,

you will start to see this happening. But you want to do this over and over and over again as many different ways as you possibly can. Investing in real estate is another way you could do this, investing in businesses, but you've got to put a lot of time in with businesses. But all of these different ways starting to separate your income from time. Find ways that you can earn an income, maybe it's just a small amount of income at first. But you can earn income that is a little more passive than it was before. We'll have some episodes coming up with some passive income ideas, but I want you to start to think through this. And I want you to start to train your brain to start to see opportunities out there where you can start to earn an income passively. There's a bunch

of options out there, but you just have to take action on some of this stuff. Number four is success is personal. Now, what I mean by this is that most people think they need to be way farther ahead than they actually are in life right now. But you need to understand that success is a personal endeavor. This is something that most people get sidetracked and they get so worrying that their anxiety builds up because someone else is ahead of them. I want you to understand right now

and I want you to listen to me as I'm talking through this. Your personal journey, all you need to focus on is getting better every single day and beating where you were yesterday. This goes for health, this goes for wealth, this goes for personal growth. This goes for parenting. This goes for all different types of stuff.

You just need to beat yourself yesterday. You need to do it one step better than yesterday. And you need to progress a little more than yesterday. You're not competing with anybody else out there right now. It's just you against you. And your journey is an extremely personal journey. And you need to stop comparing yourselves to other people. Other people may have more privilege.

They may have opportunities pop up where they could kind of work towards that. your job is to focus on the things that you can control and take control of your journey. I want you to remember that as you go through each and every single day. If you start to get anxiety or worry about where you are in life, you're on your own personal journey and you want to make sure that you were to do everything in your power to grow. And then from there, stop comparing yourselves to other people. It is your journey. Maybe it takes a little longer, but you're going to get there.

I promise you. If you continuously follow principles and take steps in the right direction, you will get there. Why? Because time is going to be on your side in the long run. And before I wrap this one up, I just want you to know, because when I was in my 20s, I would compare myself. I didn't make a ton of money when I first started my first job. I saw my peers getting jobs where they were making more money than me. Well, very quickly, I started to focus on my own journey instead, and I started to focus on myself. And I earned a lot more money very quickly than they did because I focused on my skills

and building my own personal skills. When you start to focus on what other people are doing specifically some of your peers, especially if they're in different industries. There is no reason to focus on that whatsoever. You need to focus on your own personal journey, get one step better every single day, and then you can see where you land as time goes on. You want to make sure that you have goals, and we'll talk about that the next one, but you want to make sure that you are working towards your goals and not towards what somebody else has accomplished. I used to compare myself all the time, and that was the biggest mistake I ever made in my 20s. Do not do that. It is not worth of stress or anxiety or anything else that comes with it. Number five is making sure that you

have regular check-ins and you have a specific plan to evaluate your goals and your progress to ensure you're on track. So we're not going to compare ourselves to anybody else, but we are going to beat ourselves every day and we're going to track it because the things that we measure are going to be things that we can actually accomplish. And so we want to make sure that we can see progress by measuring specific things. This is the reason why we started with Master your Money Goals, which is a course that we created that teaches you how to measure your progress with your money goals, is because you have to make sure that you have your goals in place, and you have to measure those goals. So that means your goals when it comes to money, your goals when it comes to fitness,

your goals when it comes to specific personal growth things that you want to do. All of those truly, truly matter, but you have to measure them. And you have to have a system in place that is going to measure them. And we talk about a very specific system when I talk through that. So if you want to check that out, make sure you're going to mastermoney.com. You can check out master your money goals.

Number six is to fail fast and forward. So a big thing that I didn't learn early on and a big thing that I know now is I would try all these different side hustles or all these different businesses. And what I would quickly realize is I learned so much from the failures. It was actually incredible how much I learned

from failures that it was one of the most powerful things that ever happened to me in my life. Now, I would be very cautious with my failure. So I wasn't taking huge massive swings in my 20s. Even though that's a time you can probably do it more so than any other time, I didn't take huge massive swings. Let me give an example of this. For example, there was a time where when I was buying real estate, I'll give you another real estate example, and I'll give you a second example. And when I was buying real estate, I would go out there and I was very, very specific on how I ran the And so when I would run the numbers on my real estate transactions, I would go out there and make sure that my numbers fit my exact criteria. And so everything had to fit my criteria for me to purchase a property.

And so I would go through my criteria and I would look at some of these things and I would say, hey, the numbers work. So let's go ahead and buy this property. Well, there was one property in particular, and I've talked about this maybe once before in the past, where all the numbers worked. But the one criteria that didn't work was the exact location. where I wanted a specific class of properties, usually like a C class to a B class property. And this property was on a borderline of like a C minus to a D property.

What that means is that when you're talking about these properties, that means that it was in a not as nice area of town. Okay? And so when I purchased this property, very quickly, when I took hold of it, it was a duplex. When I took over this property, I realized, oh boy, this is a mistake. It's not a mistake financially.

it is a major mistake in terms of how much time I have to spend managing this and chasing tenants down to get paid. And so this became an ongoing process where I was spending so much time. I was spending more time on one property than the rest of my entire portfolio that I had there. And so I realized very quickly I made a mistake here because I didn't meet every single point in my criteria. And so this failure taught me a ton of different lessons. Number one, it taught me I need to be ruthless in my criteria and make sure I am fitting

everything that I want, but specifically, operationally, I don't want any operation headaches. And this was definitely an operation headaches. And I sort of seen the red flags before I even purchased the property. But secondly, what it taught me was that it's okay to fail fast and fail forward. I sold that property after a year. And the reason why I sold it was A, it just was one of those things that I did not want to deal with after a year. We still made $40,000 by selling that property. And so we failed fast. We failed forward. It was still a failure to me, even though we made money. It was still a failure to me. And I just kind of got lucky, honestly, because the market has continuously been going up for years and years and years and years. And we sold it in 2018 or 2019,

something like that. Another example is I started so many different online internet businesses at first that would just fail over and over and over and over again. But it taught me lessons every single time of what went wrong. And so I would take what went wrong and I would use it for the next one. And then I would use it for the next one over and over again until some of those businesses became successful. And so the failures that I learned, from by starting some of these businesses allowed me to actually get to the point where I ran successful businesses online because of those failures. I learned from trial and error. And trial and error is going to help you in your 20s. It is okay to fail. In fact, you may fail

a dozen times, but it's that 13th time that's going to allow you to really propel your income forward and make a massive change. Let's jump to seven right after this. So lately, I've been noticing how fast things are changing at home. The kids are growing like crazy, clothes don't fit anymore, and routines are changing. And it just hits you. Life is expanding. And when your life grows, your responsibility grows with it. That's something I've been thinking about more this spring, making sure the safety net we have in place actually matches the life that we're building. And that's where PolicyGenius comes in. PolicyGenius is an insurance company. They're an online marketplace that helps you compare life insurance quotes from some of the top

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Or is it too late to start building wealth? I am in my late 20s and I say to them, that is absolutely crazy. You have so much time left in your late 20s. And if you're in your 30s, you have so much time left. And if you're in your 40s, You still have so much time left. And even if you're in your 50s, it is never too late to start building wealth.

And so I want you to remember this as you start to get these negative thoughts in your brain saying, ah, it's just too late. I started too late. I regret not starting earlier. Guess what? The time to get started is right now. You can do this. I truly believe that you can do this.

Anybody in this world can build wealth. You just have to have the discipline put in place in order to be able to do it. And so we teach you the skills here. you just have to go out and do it. That's all you have to do. And once you start to do it and you start to automate this process, it becomes so much easier. Which leads me to number eight, do what it takes. Certain things in life take a certain amount of effort. And most people are not willing to do what that effort is. And so this becomes very apparent, A, in the corporate world, go look around at your peers in the corporate world. I'm sure of it that all you see is people slacking off, they're using

mouse jigglers, they're doing all these different things in order to just get away with stuff. The people that try to get away with stuff may get ahead for some time, but they will not get really far ahead. And if you want to get really far ahead, you got to do what it takes. And if you want to get free from your day job, you got to save enough money and do what it takes. If you want to build a tremendous amount of wealth, you've got to put the discipline in and do what it takes. You have to have a budget in place. You have to make sure you're tracking your expenses. You have to make sure you are monitoring what is going on with your finances. You have to make sure that you set up automations ahead of time so that you don't have to lift a finger

anymore once you have those automations set up. And so once you start to do this and you do what it takes, it'll change your life. The same thing goes for business. Most people start a business and the reason why they fail is because they don't do what it takes. Now, some people work their butts off and they're just in the wrong industry or it's the wrong time or they don't have a competitive advantage or so many different factors there. but some people just aren't willing to do what it takes.

And sometimes you got to work weekends. Sometimes you got to work evenings. Sometimes you got to do both for a very long time. That's what I've been doing for a very long time. Your boy's tired. But at the same time, I'm willing to do what it takes because that is what actually brings me fulfillment in life. And so it's really important to learn this early

in understanding what it takes. When you're trying to figure out, hey, should I run a business, do a pro and con list. I want you to write this down. What does it actually take to achieve? this goal. And what do I need to do to ensure that I do what it takes to achieve this goal? Ask yourself that question. Write it down. It's a really good exercise. I try to do that at least once a year. Number nine is consider the source. So early on in my journey of learning,

there were a lot of sources out there that I started to listen to that I realized very quickly, they probably haven't done what they're talking about right now. And so I want you to only consider sources, people that you listen to, because there's something. And you're This is a world full of influencers now. But I want you to only take advice from those who have successfully done what you're trying to do. Here's a famous example. In the personal finance space, there is a ton of people out there trying to teach you

how to manage your finances. And the reason why they think they have credibility to manage your finances is because they got out of $100,000 in debt. So they got into massive amounts of credit card debt. And they said, hey, I got out of all this credit card debt. Let me show you how to manage your finances. Which nothing wrong with that. whatsoever. In fact, that's absolutely amazing. And the stories are so incredibly powerful.

But you got to consider the source and make sure that they actually did that, A, and B, because I've heard stories of certain figures out there who have not done it, and they say they did. But B, also make sure that the system makes sense that they're putting into place. So just be weary of who you listen to. Guard your ears, guard your eyes, and make sure you understand who you're truly listening to. Number 10, this is one that a lot of people need to hear, is don't rush to find your niche. So you may be out there and what a lot of people struggle with is they struggle with understanding what they really want to do in life. Most of us out there, you know, you're in your 20s, you're going to feel lost in your 20s. You may be in your 30s and

you still feel lost. That's okay. You don't have to rush to find your niche. It's going to take some time to develop it over time. And so sometimes you may stray away from what you were actually called to do. And if you stray away from what you were actually called to do, a lot of times you're going to fall back into it. Sometimes we just don't know and we need to try. And we need to try a couple of different things before we understand what we actually like. And that is okay to go through that process. You may have people around in your life, your parents or your peers saying, hey, what are you doing here? You're not sticking to something or you're not really moving forward. And yeah, we got to stick to stuff. I mean, that's a huge, huge factor in terms of building wealth

and earning more money. But at the same time, we want to learn as we go. And then we're going to understand what we're actually called to do. And so over time, that is going to be something that is going to be massively, massively helpful for a lot of people. I think a lot of worry about this when they don't need to worry about it as much as they do. Number 11, rock bottom is just the beginning of your story. So you may have heard me talk about this story a couple of times. A lot of times when I go to other podcasts, I talk about this story because they ask me how I got started and all this kind of stuff. And I got started in personal finance. Originally, I am passionate about this stuff. And I was passionate about this stuff as a teenager. But I got started because I hit

rock bottom. So my first job that I ever had, I made $30,000 per year. And very quickly, you can realize, even though I had a college degree, I was in finance, and I was making $30,000 per year. Now, when this happened, I realized very quickly, it's pretty tough to stretch $30,000 per year. And this was over a decade ago, but it's pretty tough to stretch $30,000 per year and still make ends meet. And so as I started to realize this, there was a point in time a day where I went up to, I used to drive an old Chevy Suburban. And the reason why I drove that, it was a hand-me-down, my parents' box. it for me for like $2,000 when I was a teenager. Super grateful for that. I didn't have to go out and, you know, buy my own car. Super privilege for that. And so when I had this Chevy Suburban,

I had this old Chevy Suburban. It took a lot of gas. But there was one day I went to go fill it up. And when I went to fill up the gas tank, I did not have enough money in my bank account to fill up the entire gas tank. And I remember standing at that gas pump. And I'm trying to fill up this gas. And then I'm opening up my bank app because I always had to check my bank app when I would purchase stuff, which is just like crazy now to think about. And I would go and I would have to check my bank app before I purchased anything. And I'm sure some of you may be struggling with that right now. And that's why you found this podcast is because you're trying to find a change too. And I got so mad at myself. And I was just so frustrated with how I was managing my money. Even though I was

only making $30,000 per year, I said, today is the day that this changes. I am going to figure out a way to make all of this work. And I did. I went out there. And first thing I did was I started a budget. And I learned how to create a budget correctly. I always was an investor. Like I always love to invest. But on the personal finance side, this is the time that I really had to get my act together. And it all started there. It started at rock bottom. And I want you to know, if you're at rock bottom right now, if you're listening to this podcast right now, and you are at the very bottom that you've ever felt that you have been before. Maybe you have kids. Maybe you feel like you're not even being able to to give your kids what you want to give them in life,

and you feel so terrible about yourself. Rock bottom is just the beginning of your story. You can do this. If you could focus on the things that you can control, you can get yourself out of any situation. Sometimes it takes time. Sometimes it takes a ton of energy. It takes blood, sweat, and tears.

But I know you can do it. And I want this to be a motivation to you if you're at rock bottom right now, is to think through that. This is just the beginning of your story. Number 12 is to give generously. So this is, is one of my biggest passion projects overall is I truly believe that anybody in this world, if we all

started to give generously when it came to our money, once we started to earn money, like if you don't make money, obviously don't just give all your money away if you have no money income coming in, but as we start to earn money, if we all started to give a percentage of that income away, to causes we believe in, you know how much more we could do in this world? Let me give an example. I've always given away over 10% of my income. Usually it's more per month. Okay. So when I do that, There are so many different things that I want to do. And now we're actually working on a business level to give away money on a business level at a very high level as well. This is part of the reason why I build wealth and why my wealth building goals changed over time.

If you ever heard me talk about this, one of the real reasons why I changed from going from like lean fire, meaning I wanted to retire as fast as possible on the minimum amount that I needed in order to just be retired to fat fire, meaning having excess tons and tons of excess cash is because I want to give away money to causes I believe. believe in. Things like local churches can be one thing that you give your money away to. Things like true causes that you believe in like charity. So charity water is a great example. Or one big one that I really, really am focused on is the Tim Tebow Foundation, especially their arm that is going towards human trafficking in children. Where that's a huge, huge thing that's laid on my heart is that it breaks my heart that that even happens. There's children being

human trafficked, being taken away from their mothers and fathers, and how that must even feel for those children. I cannot even imagine it. I cannot even think through that. This is a huge, huge, huge deal to me. Okay? And so because of that, because it's such a huge deal to me, I want to make sure that I do something about it. And so because I want to do something about it, I need to earn more money so that I can take those dollars and start to utilize those dollars towards this cause. They go in, they actually have tactical teams go in and rescue children from human traffickers. Now, say, for example, we all felt this cause. We all felt in our hearts that this cause was a noble cause to give money to.

And if we started to give money to these causes, imagine if they had all these massive teams, how many children they could go out and save. And it's hard to comprehend when you're someone, if you're listening in like the U.S. or we have a lot of Canadian listeners. We have a lot of UK listeners. We have people across the entire world who listen to this podcast,

from Ireland, from Australia, all over. And imagine, just imagine, if there were certain causes like this that are just not, things that are happening in this world that are just not right. If we all just contributed money to those and we gave more dollars to those causes, how much more good we could do. Do good with your money.

And giving generously is one big plan. Have a plan for generosity. I truly, truly believe this is a huge thing to do because if you're just hoarding cash, all you're doing is serving yourself. But serving others is what makes this world go around in a positive way. And I want you to think through that. That's the original reason why we created this podcast. I think I believe every single person listening to this podcast can be.

wealth and I'm trying to teach you how. Number 13, going the other direction now is I think spending money on health and fitness should not be second guessed. So this is one area where I want to earn more income so they don't even have to think twice about spending on health and fitness. Meaning if it's going to help improve my fitness or if it's going to help me live longer, your boy wants to get that thing. Okay. Now this is not to say go into debt on health and fitness. I don't think you should do that at all. This is to say that spending more on your health and fitness in order to improve your health is one of the best investments that you can make, especially if you can do one or both of these things.

Increase your health span and increase your lifespan. So health span is different from lifespan. Lifespan is obviously like what age you live to. You know, if you want to live to 90, that's your lifespan. But health span is how healthy are you during those years. So let's say, for example, you can see one person who is, age 80 who is in a wheelchair, can't even walk, they're obese, they have been eating poorly for their entire life. And you can see another person who's 80 who just ran a marathon.

Their health span is going to be significantly better than someone who has been sitting in a wheelchair for their entire life. And so this is where you want to make sure that you're investing more in that health span going forward. And I am all for investing as much as I possibly can into health. Number 14. Gradually make changes over time. So one big thing you want to think through, and taking very, very seriously in your 20s is learning how to change and learning how to make changes in life. You are going to want to change over and over and over again.

You may think you are very sure of yourself right now and then what's going to happen is your ideas are going to change. When I was in my 20s, like I already just said earlier, I wanted to be financially independent as fast as possible and then I wanted to do nothing and focus on pursuing hobbies and things like that. Well, that changed real quickly as time went on

where I thought I had these goals. they changed my goalpost moved. I had kids. The goal post moved again. And so it continuously moves over time. And over time, you're going to start to gradually make changes. But when you start to change things, specifically when it comes to things that you need to be doing. Like, for example, if you spend too much money on something in your budget, say, for example,

we use this a lot. You spend too much on eating out. You need to gradually reduce the spending on eating out instead of reducing the spending all in one swoop from $800 a month to $200 a month. If you just overspend $800 a month, you would, want to spend $700 a month in month one, $600 a month in month two, $500 a month a month three, so that you can gradually get used to this instead of ripping off the band-aid and just making yourself miserable. The same thing goes for cutting weight. Most people understand in the health

industry that losing one to two pounds of body weight per week is the way to go. It's the healthy way to lose weight. And so it's a gradual change over time because if you need to lose 20 pounds, it's going to take you 10 to 20 weeks to lose 20 pounds. And so gradual change over time overall or better because you can sustain it for the long term. And all we're looking for is sustainability in life, especially we are trying to improve ourselves. And so this, my friends, is an amazing way to live your life and understand that gradually making changes is going to be a very, very powerful thing that you need to be doing. Number 15, this is going to be short and sweet, but you need to cut out negativity. If there is negativity in your life, people who are cutting you

down because your goals, dreams, or ambitions, or people cutting you down because you have a budget or you're spending less money. Cut them out. As Uncle Joey says in full house, and we don't have the YouTube camera on right now because we're moving studio. So I'm actually recording one of the non-video podcast episodes that we usually have. If you want to subscribe to our channel, to see the new studio, it is pretty sick, pretty sick. But if you want to check that out, make sure you go and go to the Androgen Kuala YouTube channel. We have all our podcasts on there. We're going to have a bunch of new YouTube content and some unique content. that we're about to put out. But if people are cutting you down, you need to cut them out.

Because there is no reason for negativity to be in your life. It does not help you at all. You need to remove anyone who consistently belittles or hold you back. Now, if they make fun of you once in a while, as, you know, for all fun in games, that's a different thing. I'm talking about people who consistently are just beating you down and negative. So cut out all that negativity if you can. Number 16, one of the most important lessons that you need to learn in your 20s and you need to learn it now is, focus on the things that you can control. So one of the most important things that I talk about on this podcast is you need to focus on your personal finance issues that you can control.

There are certain things you cannot control. And so you can ask yourself a couple of questions. One, did this happen because of me? Two, can I change this situation? And if you can change the situation, how can I? You should always be asking yourself, how can I, instead of saying I can't, and making sure that you truly cannot do something. How can I is a very powerful phrase. And if you're on the Master Money newsletter, you heard me talk about this a couple of weeks ago when we had the newsletter come out talking through how can I and how powerful it helped me change a lot of things in my life. But you need to focus on the things that you can control and that should be your only focus. There are things out there that you can't control. You can't control the weather. You can't control

political issues. You can't control a lot of different things in life. But what you can't control, you need to focus on those things. Number 17 is spending should be based on your values. So learning how to become a person who spends based on their values is actually a skill. And spending is a skill. Because overtime, what a lot of people do is they try to keep up with the Joneses because they think that's what they're supposed to do. They take on debt for the brand new car even though they don't really care about cars. Or they'll go out and start to spend money on the big house, even though it really doesn't bring them fulfillment or value. They'd rather live in a smaller apartment and be able to travel more.

You need to learn how to spend on your values. And we have a lot of episodes talking about that so that you can learn really. how to get full fulfillment out of your life when it comes to your money. Spitting on values is going to change your life. We have more coming on that soon. Number 18, nobody is an overnight success. If you think that you will be or you think that you should have been, it is not the case. It takes time, effort, energy to be able, and usually years and years and years of hard work to really become a success, where a lot of people, it looks like they became an overnight success, but it took a lot of work to get there. And so you need to remind yourself of this over and over and over

again as time goes on. And then number 19, the last one, is I want you to make a list of things that you think you could possibly regret not doing on your deathbed one day. And what I mean by that is there are a lot of people in life who you'll meet. And if you haven't talked to older, wiser people, if you're not a person who listens to counsel, Proverbs says a wise person seeks counsel. If you're not a person who listens to counsel, meaning you don't take advice from other people and you don't listen to wise people, you're going to fall way, way behind compared to somebody else who listen to wise people. And people who are older have seen a lot more things and hey, they may have crazy opinions that you don't agree with. Doesn't matter. They also have a lot of experience. And what you

need to do is listen to counsel of people who have a lot of experience. And a lot of them will say, hey, there are some things that I regret not doing. And you need to listen to that stuff. Usually, it all comes down to a couple of different things. One is they regret not spending more time with their family and using their time wisely and said maybe they worked too much, maybe they were lazy and they didn't have enough time to spend it with their family. Maybe they just, you know, there's so many different things that could have happened there. But usually, the number one thing is they wish they would have spent more time with their family. If you don't spend enough time with your family, now's the time to change that and to focus on that stuff. Number two is earning more.

Why? Because earning more allows you to have time to do the things that you want. And so I'm not saying grind all day long, all night long. What I am saying, though, is learning how to earn more is going to help you in life and make life a whole lot easier and more fulfilling because you can do the things you actually want to do. Contrary to popular belief, money can improve your happiness. It's not the key to happiness, not even by a long shot, but it will improve your happiness because you can have more time to do the things that you want. Unless you become a slave to money and you become addicted to money and you're addicted to greed by earning more than you need, that's a different story. But money will improve your happiness if you figure out how much

you need. A lot of other people regret, not prioritizing health. And so you'll see a theme here. I'm talking usually about health, wealth, wisdom, spending time with family. All of these are really, really important stuff and making an impact in the world. And all of these different things, most people, when they're on their deathbed, say they regret. So make a list of what you think you could regret on your deathbed. And I want you to make sure that you actually do the things on that list instead of avoiding it. Because you have to consciously be thinking about this stuff in order to make it work. And that's what truly, truly changed my life is once I started to become conscious with my time, my energy, and the reasons why I did specific things. Listen, I hope this episode helps you out.

If you are someone who is looking to improve your life, these are some of the things that I wish I knew in my 20s, that I now know in my 30s. If you guys have any questions, you just want to reach out and vent or anything like that, feel free to join the Master Money newsletter. Shoot me an email. I read every single one of them. Sometimes I can't get back to all of them, but I read every single one of them. And if you have a question, that is the best way to get your question on the podcast on a money Q&A episode is to reach out on the Master Money Newsletter. Thank you guys, again, so much for listening to this podcast. I truly appreciate each and every single one of you. We want to bring you as much value as we possibly can. And I hope we did that for you today.

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