The Personal Finance Podcast - From House Hacking to Future Millionaire with John Eringham (Johnefinance)

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

In this episode of The Personal Finance Podcast, we’re going to JhonEFinance about how he started to build wealth.   Connect with John! John’s Tiktok John’s Instagram John’s Twitter John’s Youtube John’s Website   Book: Set for Life by Scott Trench     Join Our Newsletter here!   Checklist of relevant episodes:  How to Create Your Dream Life With Jamila Souffrant The Ladders of Wealth Creation: A Step-By-Step Roadmap to Building Wealth With Nathan Barry The Great Wealth Transfer Has STARTED (Here is How to Take Advantage of It) 5 Things You Need to Invest In to Build Wealth (That Aren't Stocks) with Jeff Rose How to Invest In Real Estate Without the Headaches (Fundrise VS REITS!) Real Estate Investing Vs. Stocks: Which Is Better Right Now?     Personal Finance Youtube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@thepersonalfinancepodcast    ============ Sponsors:     Thanks to Ka’Chava For Sponsoring the show! Go to kachava.com/pfp and get 10% off on your first order.  Thanks to Mint Mobile for supporting the show! Cut your phone bill to $15 a month by going to https://mintmobile.com/pfp Thanks to Policy Genius for Sponsoring the show! Go to policygenius.com to get your free life insurance quote. This episode is sponsored by/brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/pfp and get on your way to being your best self. Get 10% off your first month!   ============   Want to Support the Show? Follow on Spotify or Follow and Leave a 5-Star Review on Apple Podcasts!   ============   Check out all the Stuff I Recommend!  Check out all my favorite Credit Cards https://milevalue.com/top-offers-mastermoney/    USEFUL RESOURCES: Best Place to Open a Roth IRA: https://m1finance.8bxp97.net/5vzD1 My Favorite Free Net Worth and Budget Tool: https://fxo.co/905L Best High Yield Savings Account: https://bit.ly/3HpPjAr  Get a $10 Free Bonus with Acorns: https://bit.ly/3lV0LLE Best Bank and Debit Card for Kids: https://bit.ly/3pJeI09  Get $5 Free Bitcoin at Coinbase: https://bit.ly/3oIQOml Best Credit Building Tool: https://bit.ly/3rmBuwZ  Best Personal Finance Books: https://kit.co/MasterMoney/best-personal-finance-books    ============     DISCLAIMER: I am not a financial adviser. This Podcast is for educational purposes only. Investing of any kind involves risk. While it is possible to minimize risk, your investments are solely your responsibility. It is imperative that you conduct your own research. I am sharing my opinion.    AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE: Some of the links on this channel are affiliate links, meaning, at NO additional cost to you, I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase and/or subscribe. However, this does not impact my opinion.   ============     Check us out on social fam!    Twitter   Tiktok   www.thepersonalfinancepodcast.com   www.mastermoney.co Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm your host, Andrew Founder of MasterMoney.com. And today on the Personal Finance podcast, we're going to be talking to John E. Finance on how he started to build wealth. If you guys have any questions, make sure you hit us up on Instagram or TikTok at Master Money Co. and follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whatever podcast player you love listening to this podcast tune. If you want to hop out the show, leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. So today, we are talking to John from John E. Finance, and he has 1.2 million followers on TikTok, and he has some incredible information on his TikTok page about building wealth and finance. But we're going to go through a bunch of different things that John did, first of which

He did something we talk about in this podcast all the time, which is house hacking. We're going to walk through his house hack step by step, how he found tenants, how he actually found the house hack, what his loan type looked like, all of those different things. In addition, we're going to go through the different ways that John likes to invest, what his future plans are with investing his money. Is he going to continue house hacking and a bunch of other things about how he built wealth as well? And then we're also going to talk about TikTok and how to grow a following on social media because he has multiple platforms where he has a very large following. he's going to talk about how he did that, some of the ways that he makes money, and how this has helped him increase his income over time as well.

So this is a fantastic interview. I'm so incredibly excited for you guys to listen to this one. So without further ado, let's welcome John to the Personal Finance Podcast. So John, welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. Thank you for having me, Andrew. I'm super excited to get into it. So you have an amazing TikTok with over 1.3 million followers to date. I'm so incredibly excited to talk to you today

because we've been following it for a little while. and I think it is some amazing personal finance information that you put out on that TikTok. And one cool thing is you graduated in 2018 with a finance degree. And you started to do something that we talk about on this podcast all the time, which is house hacking. And I think house hacking is one of the best things that you can do early on with your personal finance, especially when you're looking at housing and how to save money on housing, because obviously housing is one of our greatest costs that we incur. So I kind of want to walk through this process with you with someone who has actually done this.

So can you explain what house hacking is for those who don't know? And can you give us how you actually had the idea to start house hacking originally? Yeah, absolutely. So I came out of college, like you said, in 2018. And I got my hands on a book called Set for Life by Scott Trench. And so, yeah, I was a finance major and I was reading some finance books. And this book, Set for Life, it truly changed my perspective on how, like, the world works. It's like he talks about financial independence and lowering your three biggest expenses.

and he introduces the concept of house hacking. And so that kind of just like flip the switch in my head. I was like, wow, you can actually lower your housing expense by house hacking. And for those who don't know, house hacking is basically you buy a multi-unit property or you buy a property with multiple bedrooms. You live in one unit or bedroom and then you rent out the other rooms or units. And so that's exactly what I wanted to do. I was like, oh my gosh, this is amazing.

I can lower my housing expense by renting out a part of the house. And so I learned about house hacking luckily while I was in college. So I ended up graduating in 2018. And I came to a fork in the road where I basically needed to find a place to live. And so this fork in the road was, one side was going to live downtown in a studio apartment, spending $1,200 per month on rent. The other fork in the road, I thought I could potentially move back home, my parents. And so I was like, okay, do I really want to move back home with my parents? Do I want to,

you know, stay in downtown and enjoy the bachelor life or whatever? So I intentionally made the decision to move in with my parents so that I could save up so much money to get into my house hack. So that's kind of the direction I went. It was a very intentional move after college. And I do feel privileged that I was able to move in with my parents. Not everyone can do that. So I made the intentional move to, you know, move back home with my parents. And I did that for an entire year. And I did that because I knew I wanted to house hack. I wanted to buy my first property so I could rent it out. So it was all like calculated in my mind. And so I moved in with my parents. I saved up probably like $20,000 within that first year of living with them, which again was crazy because I was only making like, I think it was $46,000 at the time. But because my housing was so low because thankfully I was living with parents, you know, I was able to save.

up a lot. And so using that $20,000 that I had saved up in the first year, that was the down payment. And that's how I was able to get into my first house hack shortly. I guess it was a year after I had graduated and intentional. And it was because of that book Set for Life that really changed my perspective on everything. Set for Life is one of the most incredible books. I remember the first time I read that as well. And Scott is someone who is just an amazing thinker in a personal finance space, but he kind of opened up house hacking, I think, more for a lot of people. And I absolutely love that you mentioned that book just because it's one of the best books to read. So if somebody has not read that book, we'll link it up in the show notes down below so that you can check it out as well.

Because it is absolutely fantastic. And I love the idea of how you actually moved in with your parents with a set plan in place. Like you were doing this for a reason. I think a lot of people will go and move back in and they don't really have a plan in place. But if you have a plan in place of what exactly you want to do, it is the perfect situation. So you can start to save up those dollars for exactly what that plan is. you have a why of exactly why you're actually doing this. So I kind of want to walk through the process of how you found that property. So how did you find that first house hacked property? And what type of

property is it? Yeah. So it's funny. So again, this was all taking place really fast. And, you know, so I moved with my parents and I was saving up money. And so I had like $20,000. And I knew, you know, I could probably get into a house with, you know, less than that. But basically what happened was the pandemic happened in 2020, March of 2020. And so that. So now I have $20,000 and I have all this kind of doom and gloom where it's like, oh, the housing market's crashing, like stay away from real estate, stay away from stocks, all this stuff. And I was like, man, I really just saved up for an entire year all to just like wait to see like

what's going to happen because there's this pandemic. And ultimately I decide like, no, I'm not going to let a pandemic, you know, ruin my house hacking moment. Because again, I committed so much money, so much time and money to this. I was like, I'm not going to let the pandemic stop me from getting into my first house hack. So I was literally touring houses like in the depths of the pandemic in March, in April, in May, touring houses. I made a few offers.

But again, it was very like no one knew what was going to happen then. And, you know, I still went with it despite all the naysayers. I ended up closing on a duplex, which is a two-unit property. I closed on a duplex in July of 2020. and I was able to move into the top unit and rented out the bottom unit. And I can definitely go in depth with that too. It was a two-bed, one bathroom up top, and it was a one-bed, one bathroom down below. And so I moved into the top, the two-bedroom one bath, and I rented out the downstairs while doing that.

And so kind of, I guess, going back to the property itself was I was able to buy this property with a 5% down conventional loan. It was owner occupied. I was going to live in it. And so it was a 5% conventional. And so all in, I think it was like maybe $12,000 for a down payment, maybe $3,000 to $4,000 for closing costs. So I had saved this $20,000 and then all in,

I was probably like $15,000 to $16,000 all in to purchase this property. And I can dive more into the mortgage numbers as well, but I just want to stop there and see if you have any questions on it. Absolutely. I think that's fantastic. So for a lot of people listening, if you haven't heard of house hacking, what you see from what John is doing here is he is literally either reducing the amount of money he has to pay every single month or even making money just for living in his house. And it's for the same amount that you would go out and go buy a house. And the pandemic is one of the most amazing things. That's actually when I built my house as well. And a lot of people were really nervous like what's going to happen, what's going on. And there was a lot of great real estate deals that actually came out during that time because a lot of investors went into play and you could be able to kind of figure out, you know, where the best deals are and all that stuff as well. So that was an amazing time to buy for you as well. I'm sure you got a great interest rate on that mortgage as well. So when you first started to rent this out, what was it like living next door to your tenant or having a tenant live below you? Was there any issues there or did it work out pretty well? Yeah, I'll definitely go into that. I just want

to say, like for the audience, just to get some perspective of how much it reduces your housing to house hack. So I purchased the property. Like I said, it was about like 15 or 16 all in to purchase his property. My mortgage payment, and you're right, I got a very lucky interest rate. My mortgage payment is about $1,600 all in. That's principal interest taxes, insurance. So $1,600 all in. And my interest rate was only 3% at the time, 3.0 at the time. And we're recording now, interest rates are above seven. So it's crazy. Very, very lucky timing with the whole thing. Anyway, so my mortgage payment is $1,600 all in. I was able to rent the downstairs for 1250. So that significantly lowered the liability that I had per month that I had to, you know, pay for housing.

So I was living for, what is that, like, $3 or $400 per month was my housing cost because I was renting out the downstairs. So I was able to save up much more money because of that. So it's almost like a snowball because I was saving money by renting it out. I was able to save even more money by doing so. So for anyone listening to this, if you are young, if you're young, you're like just out of college, I have not found anything more impactful than house hacking to do. If you're young, you're out of college. It's one of the best return on investments that your money can do. And there's just so many benefits to that. I'm sure you've talked about it on the show

before. But definitely, if you can do some sort of house hacking, I definitely recommend it. But going back to your original question, Andrew, how was it like living next to my tenant? And honestly, I had no problems. I actually liked the peace of mind of living, right on top of my rental property because if anything went wrong, you know, I was there to fix it. I knew the house was not going to burn down because I'm there, you know. So it was that piece of mind, that comfort, like the garbage disposal broke one time. And I just like popped downstairs, fixed it on Friday night and it was all good. Like, I'm not worrying about this rental property on the other side of the country if something goes wrong. So house hacking is just such a great way to

get into the real estate game. People have said it's like real estate on training wheels. And so I truly believe that, yeah, it's one. one of the best investments you can do with your money. And I had no problem living above my tenants. I was quiet. They were quiet. It's a good idea for anyone, really. I love that. You talk about some of the amazing numbers that you have there where you're only living on a couple hundred dollars. You only have to spend a couple hundred dollars every single month on housing, which is absolutely amazing. And the biggest perk to house hacking. What type of loan did you get on that house hack? Did you get a conventional loan? Did you go FHA loan? What type of loan do you think is best for house hacking as well?

Yeah, traditionally FHA is usually the way to go because you could do three and a half percent down. but this one I did 5% down. I had the cash to do so. It was a 5% conventional loan. I was able to get that because I was an owner-occupied loan, meaning I lived in the property myself. I have to live in it for a whole year before I could move out. But yeah, it was a 5% owner-occupied loan. And the purchase price was $252,000. So think about 5%, that's like $12,000. Like I said, plus closing costs. It's not an exorbitant amount of money to get into your first house sack. And like I said, I was able to save with a year just living at home. Love that.

So the big part is you had a good tenant downstairs. You had a tenant that really did not give you any issues. And I think a big part of that is the screening process. I remember my first rental property that we bought. When we bought that first property, I had to figure out a whole entire system and a whole entire process to find good tenants, actually put systems into place,

figure out what lease I need to use, all those different things. And we found a book by Brandon Turner from Bigger Pockets, him and Scott obviously know each other from back in the day. And we used his book like, It's the exact processes that we used over time there. So how did you kind of figure out your tenant screening process and how did you put your systems into place to actually find that tenant?

Yeah, absolutely. And just like you, I was reading in self-education, you know, I was doing everything I could to, you know, I was hopping on bigger pockets. I was learning from podcasts. I was reading books. I mean, I was just a self-education machine at this point. And so doing everything I could to try and figure out what systems are best.

I actually inherited this tenant, which is sometimes, you know, it's hit or miss when you inherit a tenant. Basically, the tenant was already placed when I purchased the property. But luckily, like, she was good and I actually was proactive about, I made her do another background check and credit check just to make sure like things weren't, you know, sketchy with this tenant. But she was great. She, you know, passed all the checks with, you know, flying colors. So, but for those of you who are getting a new tenant, which I've gotten, you know, new tenant. before. I use Apartments.com for a lot of my software and they do credit checks and background checks on Apartments.com. That's how my leases are created as well on Apartments.com. But I will say, if you want to find tenants, like my house is more of a kind of like young professional, like just

out of college, I found almost all of my tenants through Facebook Marketplace, which is traditionally, you know, you might not find people through Facebook Marketplace. But I found that people like millennials and Gen Z like to browse on Facebook Marketplace or if they're looking for an apartment to rent. So I think that's a good place to look when you're trying to find tenants is Facebook marketplace. That's fantastic that you got a great tenant moving

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Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IDPrivatewealth.com. So I know from buying that original duplex, you've since moved out. I've seen you talk about that before. So what type of cash flow are you seeing now on that first property? And did you find another tenant to put into that property? Yeah. So after about a year and a half, I decided to move in with my girlfriend at the time, but she's not my fiance. So we moved into an apartment together and I was able to rent out both sides of the duplex. So now I was getting $1,000 per month from both sides. So what is that, $2,500 per month in revenue from the duplex. My expenses are like maybe,

you know, with maintenance and other costs, maybe like up to $1,800 now. But I'm still cash flowing, I would say near $700 per month on this duplex, which is for me, I mean, I am over the moon with $700 per month on my first duplex. You know, I expected to be like break even when I first bought it. But yeah, I mean, it's been a great investment. It's kind of. It's cash flowing now $700 a month. And yeah, it's just really cool to see how like over time these investments slowly start to build up. I was able to find my tenant who replaced my unit through Facebook marketplace as well. So that's just another thing that I kind of like doing. And that's incredible. So for people listening, look what John did here. So he made a decision to save up enough money

to start house hacking. And then once he lived there for a year, I'm sure your loan allowed you to stay there for a year and then you can kind of keep that loan. then once you left, now you're cash flowing over $700 just by making this decision. And it's such an incredibly powerful thing that you can do early on because now you have $700 of additional income every single month that you can do whatever you want. Maybe you cash flow it into another rental property. Maybe you invest into other things. But this is one of the most powerful things that you can do with your money over time.

So now that you've left that house hack, you're living with your fiancé and apartment. Now, are you looking to house hack again in the future? Or are you guys looking for maybe just like a standard single family house? Or what are you going to do next? Yeah, so actually, I've convinced my fiance to house hack one more time. So I think we're going to buy another duplex because she wasn't in on the first one. I was still single at the time when I got my first one. But yeah, we're going to buy a duplex. Hopefully in 2023 we're looking at buying a duplex. And like you said, we use the $700 per month in cash flow to really just roll it into our

next down payment is what we're going to do. So keep snowballing that. Eventually, I think we want to own maybe a handful of properties, maybe like four or five. We definitely don't want to be some real estate moguls with like hundreds of units or anything like that. But yeah, we definitely want to get into another house hack because that just lowers our costs of living even more. We can save quicker. And that's really the goal of financial independence. So that's what we're looking to do. That's incredible because you can do this over and over again. And obviously as you start to build a family and things start to happen, things will change. But you can do this over and over again and be able to build a great rental property and a great rental portfolio just by doing this over and over

again. So from your videos, I know real estate isn't the only way you invest. So what are some other ways that you like to invest your money? Yeah. And this sounds really cliche, but I truly believe that investing in yourself, investing in your skills, your knowledge, anything that can improve yourself, like self-development, I think is one of the, I mean, if not the best investment you can make, right? If you can learn a new skill, that's going to increase your income. If you can get a new job, you know, that's going to increase your income, do a side hustle, whatever. There's so many different things that you can invest your time and money into, like developing yourself and developing your skills and learning new things. I truly think that, you know, that's the best investment.

And that's where most of my extra money goes to is self-development, whether it's courses or events or networking or whatever, trips or whatever, like doing those things that slowly levels you up over time, I think, is the best investment. I also invest in the stock market. I invest in real estate like we've talked about. And with the stock market, it's just index funds and ETSs, very, very simple stuff, passive stuff. But I found that, you know, if the average return of the S&P 500 is, let's say, 8 or 10%, I feel like I can invest my money into learning something new or honing in my skills. And I can get a much higher return than just 8%. You know, I could potentially double my income, which is like,

100% return, right? So there's a bunch of things that you can do to increase your income. And so, yeah, that's why I do invest in the stock market. I always advocate for the stock market as a good investment. Real estate as well, I think is a great investment for the long term. But then also just investing in yourself, I think that's like, people underestimate that a lot. I could not agree more because investing in yourself is one of those things, like you said, where you can learn all these new skills and skills are going to allow you to increase your income all the time. And we talk about this on this podcast all the time, where increase your income is going to solve a lot of problems for you. And, you know, income is obviously a major

factor to building wealth. So what are some things that you have done to increase your income over time? That's a great question. I love talking about it too. So when I graduated to college, I was an accountant, basically like an analyst kind of just doing overall like database management and all that. So I was making around, you know, $50,000 a year. But what I did was I spent all my time and resources and money into learning a new skill, which was actually like social media. So I was posting on like YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and creating like a brand for myself really and learning as I go. And so by doing that, I've learned so many new things just by investing my nights and weekends into learning like social media rather than spending my nights and weekends, you know, out partying or out at

bars or stuff like that. So yeah, I've, you know, nearly doubled my income now because I've invested so much time and resources into learning social media and creating this Johnny finance brand that we can talk about to. And it doesn't have to be social media. That's the thing. Like if you are in a 50,000 per year job, you could definitely, you know, use your nights and weekends to learn some type of high value skill, whether that's sales or real estate or coding or social media. Like one of those high leverage skills that's going to be in demand for a while. I think that's a much better use of your time than trying to do other sorts of, I guess, side hustles or whatever. So yeah, just investing your time and resources into learning new skills, it's so massively valuable to your

career. I absolutely love that. I could not agree more because just building up those skills helps you increase your income. And I've seen the same thing in my own career is just the more skills that I learn. It's just your income just naturally starts to increase over time because there's so many more things that you can do. So as you started to build up these skills, as you started Johnny Finance and all these other things and your income had increased. over time. How did you see your savings rate increase? Because a lot of people will go out there and as their income increases, they'll obviously spend it all. Lifestyle creep kind of gets in the way. So have you seen your savings rate increase as your income has increased? Yeah, 100%. And because

I'm financially literate and I know that it's important to increase your savings as well, like once you're increasing your income, I know that the lifestyle creep isn't coming too steadily on my lifestyle. So I know people who have doubled their income, but they are spending it all on vacations. I still think it's important to spend a little bit more as you earn a little bit more just so you can reap the benefits and see the fruits of your labor. But you should do it proportionally, right? So if you get, let's say you get a $10,000 raise, maybe you spend, you know, 3,000 of it and then save 7,000 of it. I think that's a good way to, you know, still treat yourself, but then also save and increase your savings rate as well. So when I was first starting out,

my savings rate. It was still pretty high because I was house hacking and doing all these things. But I mean, yeah, it's over 50% now that I've increased my income and I've kept my lifestyle pretty minimal. I have a 2013 Hyundai that's paid off. I drive every single day. I live in a modest apartment. It's maybe like 800 bucks a month. And I'm still living frugally. So I think that's one of the best things you can do rather than going to the big apartments and buying the new cars. I mean, we talk about it all the time. I'm sure you talk about it on your show as well. is that just increasing your lifestyle is detrimental to trying to build wealth. It's just going to hinder you a lot. It is. It's an absolute wealth killer, but it's one of those things where I agree

with you. You can increase your spending as well, especially spending on things that truly bring you value so that you can feel the effects and be motivated to continue to press on with your finances. This is so important to be able to have that spending plan dialed down as well. So as you start to build up this wealth, obviously you're accelerating your path to wealth by increasing your income and all these other things. Do you have retirement goals? And are you trying to do you have financial independence goals? What is your next step there? Yeah, so my ultimate goal when I like read SEP for Life, I got the financial independence bug that I just wanted to retire as as possible. I was just head down. I'm going to, you know, do everything I can possible to retire early.

But now I've kind of reeled that in a little bit. I enjoy my job now. So I don't feel the pressure to kind of like go all in on financial independence. Obviously I'm advocating for financial independence, but I don't really have a set like, oh, I'm going to retire at 31 or something like that. I'm not like set very strict on my goals. Just because I see myself doing what I do right now, which is social media and advocating for personal finance and financial literacy, I see myself doing that for the next decade or two. And so I know I'm going to hit financial independence within the next decade or two. And so I'm not really like in a like death march to fire or anything like that, you know.

So I really love my job. I love teaching about it and I love coming on these podcasts. And so I'm going to do that for the next decade or so. And so I don't have a set retirement goal. Once I'm financially independent, you know, just everything is so much easier. And so I'm sure I'll treat myself then, you know, to some vacation or whatever. But yeah, there's no specific goal on fire yet. And I love that because I think part of the stage of getting to fire, especially for people who work a corporate job, but then they figure out what they love is now you have flexible work that you love. And that is one of the things where if you're doing what you love, you're not ever really truly working a day in your life.

And this is kind of the cool thing that you've done is you've landed in this spot where you can still pursue financial independence, but at the same time, every single day you're doing what you love. And the way that you did that was making these decisions along the way and being able to build up those skills so that you can build Johnny Finance and then kind of go from there. So that's the next thing I want to talk about is your business. So you have an amazing TikTok at Johnny Finance. We're going to link up your TikTok, your Instagram, obviously everything else down below. but what was your most viral TikTok video ever had?

And then what do you think is the most valuable video that you ever created for people who are interested in money? Yeah. So I want to start out just by like the context for people who are listening and haven't heard of me. Basically, I started a TikTok account while I was living with my parents back in 2020. I started a TikTok account about personal finance because I had read, you know, the book set for life and I got the financial independence bug.

So I wanted to start teaching about financial independence because I got that high of five where I just want to preach it from the rooftops, right? And you want to tell everyone you know. And so I started this TikTok account talking about personal finance and financial independence. And I just committed, I said, I'm going to post three times a week for the next year, just see what happens. And little to die, like, I did not expect this to turn into any sort of side hustle or job or anything like that. It was really just for fun. I really enjoyed it. But within the first three months, like I posted three days a week, you know, for three months, without like anything, any sort of like viral hit.

My first viral hit came, yeah, about three months into it. I was talking something about Jeff Bezos and his net worth. Like people really liked learning about that stuff. So that kind of went viral. And I'm like, wow, this is like pretty interesting because I can make one video and it can be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. That's what really struck accord to me. And so that's why like I just kept posting and posting and posting and making my videos better

and teaching about financial education. And this was all through 2020, the pandemic, 2021, all the, like, game stop, like random stuff. Like, I was very intentional with what I was teaching, you know. And so now I have 1.3 million followers on TikTok after, you know, three years of being into it. But my most viral video on TikTok was a TikTok talking about, like, it was a skit where this guy was like, hey, what's the best stock to pick? And I respond with, like, just pick all of them. Like, don't try and pick one. Just pick all of them, right?

And he's like, what do you mean pick all of them? Like, I can't pick every single stock. I'm like, no, you can pick every single stock and you should with VO or VTI or some sort of index fund, right? And so that, I think, just kind of open people's minds was like, whoa, like, you can actually buy every single publicly traded company on the stock market and you don't have to worry about trying to pick individual stocks. And that video got like 13 million views.

and it like propelled my account. I got a bunch of followers from it. And so that was definitely my most viral video. And I think because it was like something no one had really known before or the common public didn't really understand the idea of picking all the stocks, right? So that's what resonated with them. And then your other question was, what's the most valuable TikTok? I think, I mean, all my TikToks, like I try and provide as much value in as much context.

Obviously, you only have like 60 seconds. So it's sometimes hard to get into the nitty gritty. I think just my overall account is really just, you know, I'm practicing what I preach and I'm genuine in my content is I'm living below my means. I'm house hacking. I'm driving a used car. I'm investing in myself. I'm investing in the stock market. I'm doing all these things intentionally while I'm in my 20s. So in my 30s and 40s and 50s, I can kind of just ease off the gas and really relax and enjoy my life. So yeah, I just try and provide value in every TikTok. I'm not sure if there's a specific one, but it's just the overall practicing what I preach and being genuine

in my content is what I think provides value. Absolutely. I think your content is some of the most genuine content out there on TikTok specifically. And people are going to love that index fund one because there's a lot of index fund investors who listen to this podcast and that's a big thing that we talk about on this podcast as well. So we're going to link that one up as well down below in the show notes so people can check that out. One cool thing I want to talk about is your business here because now you have a full-fledged business. You're working full-time in this business. And A lot of people are curious how people make money online, specifically when people are working in social media and other things.

So what are some of the various income streams you have in this business? And how did you actually kind of figure out how to find those income streams? Yeah. I'll say that by creating a personal brand for yourself, like what you're doing with your podcast, what I'm doing with my TikTok and Instagram, I think creating a personal brand is just such a hack in life because you get so many opportunities just brought to you just because people know who you are and they trust you. and you just get way more opportunities by doing that.

And so, you know, a lot of people have come to me saying, hey, like, we love your content. We would love to advertise our product. You have a loyal audience and our product aligns with your audience. We would love to advertise. So I will say the majority of my income, of my revenue in my business comes from either sponsorships or affiliates where it's like the sponsorship is like, hey, I really love mint budgeting app, for example. and I do use that myself.

I'm not going to promote something I don't use. This is what I use to budget. You guys should check it out. So people, like the Mint will pay me for that. And then also like affiliates or signups, for example, like if Mint just wanted to get signups on their app, they might pay me like $5 per signup or $10 per signup that I drive. But think about like the law of large numbers.

If you can get a thousand people just because social media is so scalable, think about a thousand people signing up to Mint. I get, you know, $5 for every sign up. That's like $5,000 right there. So social media just brings so many opportunities. I encouraged everyone. It doesn't even matter like a niche. You don't have to like start with like some sort of niche.

Like just get on social media and build that personal brand for yourself because you'll get so many opportunities from that. And I will say another income stream that I'm looking at is digital products. So for example, I could create a like how to track your net worth. in Excel or Notion or some sort of like software like that. And I can sell that, you know, for like $10 a pop or something. So people will buy how to track your net worth. It saves them a ton of time.

Like they don't have to create the template themselves. I create it once and I can sell that an infinite number of times. So that's why digital products are so scalable. It's like you create it once and then you can sell it forever. Obviously you need to have a trustworthy audience and you need to provide value in those digital products. But yeah, there's so much opportunity, whether it's sponsors, Affiliates, digital products,

memberships on social media. There's so many different things, man. I'm just scratching the surface myself. Exactly. There is just an endless amount of opportunity out there. And I agree with John here. Like most people should look at at least starting a personal brand because there's so many things that you can do with it.

You can use it as a resume if you're trying to level up your career. You can do so many different things with it. In addition to making money as a side hustle and doing it online, because I think online is some of the best ways to make money. And you can leverage that and do a lot of things with it as well. So thank you for sharing that. I think that's some amazing examples of how you can actually make income online, specifically just starting a social media account.

And then once you get to the level where John is, I mean, it's a full-time income and more. So that's the really cool thing that you can do with social media. Yeah, can I just say one more point on that? With social media, when you're starting out, you really just want to provide as much value as you can to your audience and just provide your experiences through them because people will resonate with your story.

That's the thing. It's like, you know, maybe moms don't resonate with me, but those college students who are just graduating, they will resonate with me. So everyone has a different story. Everyone's going to resonate with different people, but sharing your story and sharing that personal brand is the best thing you can do.

Absolutely. I could not agree more. So if someone wants to start a TikTok or social media account, maybe they're on Instagram or YouTube or whatever else, what advice would you have for them? How should they grow that? What are some of the steps that you take when you create your content to make it maybe something where people would be interested in it? Yeah, so I'm definitely bullish on video platforms, whether it's YouTube, TikTok, Instagram,

but you can definitely have a lot of success with podcasting, with just audio, right? You can have a lot of success with blogs and, like, Twitter. I know a lot of people who are making money on Twitter. So I would first figure out what medium of social media do you want to do, whether that's like just text, which is blogs and Twitter. You could do pictures, like Instagram. You could do audio, like podcasting. And you could do video with, like, YouTube and TikTok.

So pick which medium best suits you. Maybe you have a good radio voice. Maybe you're good at writing. Then pick the medium that works best for you. And then figure out what sort of value can you provide and what are you interested in? So I was interested in financial independence. And so I was able to provide people with, hey, here's how you start a Roth IRA. Here's how you save money.

Here's how you budget. But there's so many opportunities out there. Like, let's say you enjoy cooking. Here's my best recipe for a Thanksgiving day, you know, pie. or whatever it is. You need to figure out what you're interested in and then provide value

to the audience for that. So yeah, pick your medium of social media, your medium of exchange or whatever, and then pick something that you're interested in that people will find valuable. I think it's really that simple.

I could not agree more. And what is some of your process? Like when you come out to create content, maybe you create a video and you're making content lists for the week of the month, you're creating your schedules in place. How do you figure out

what content you want to create? And in addition, what are some of the steps that you take to actually make that content interesting for people? Yeah. So there's two types of content that I make. One of them is evergreen content, whereas like it's timeless content. Like spend less than you earn, you know, save 20% of your paycheck. You know, this is how you budget.

Like that type of content will always perform well and it'll always resonate with people. But then I also, about 50% of the time, create relevant social media topics, whether that's like the stock market is going down or maybe. Maybe there's a new side hustle that's trending. Like my fiance is dog sitting right now with Rover and she's making some money doing that. And so that's a really cool side hustle to do. So that's like I try and split my content between what is kind of, I guess, trendy and what's relevant right now and also what is timeless.

What are these principles that people can always come back to? I feel like having a good mixture of both types of content is really the how that can, you know, you can drive that engine forward. I love that combination too because I think the evergreen is stuff that's always going to be there. You can always repurpose it. You can put it back out. There's a lot of things that you can do with it. And then that content that's right now.

A lot of people are really interested in that stuff and that's stuff that can also go viral as well. So that's really cool that you do that as well. And I will say, sorry, not to interrupt you. One more thing. When creating content, you need to think about educational content and entertaining content. So when I first started on TikTok, this is a funny story. I just talked about, hey, this is what a Roth IRA is. This is what a 401K is.

like I look at my past videos and like they were boring me. And so if you can't present it in educational and entertaining way, you're going to miss people and they're going to like miss the interest of it. So make sure your content is one, educational and two, entertaining at the same time. It's got to be a good combination of those two. So I remember some of my first podcast, for example, like the first podcast I ever recorded, I recorded it 40 times because I thought it had to be absolutely perfect. But then I realized, oh, you can kind of make a mistake and just keep moving on. And so that's one of those things where I cringe, kind of listening to some of those early ones as well.

It's just one of those things that you get better at, and it's a skill over time that you can kind of grow and help yourself. So that's amazing as well. So I want to shift gears here to some of the questions that we ask a lot of our guests. And we get some really cool answers out of these. So let's see, I would love to ask you some of these as well. So what part of your work or life makes you come alive?

I would say just creating something that can resonate and that can reach like thousands, if not millions of people. Like the fact that I can make one video sitting in my little office here and it can reach a million people is just so crazy to me. Like the scale of social media and the fact that not only does it reach people, but it adds value to their life. Like if I was just making random like whatever trendy topics and like they laughed at it but then like nothing actually changed of their life, that's a different story. But I feel like I'm truly making an impact on other people's lives because if I can help someone, you know, save a little bit more or increase their income or just flip a switch in their head that, hey,

like financial independence is accessible to nearly everyone in the United States. It's like, it's just such a powerful and driving factor of why I create content because I know I'm changing lives out there just from my little office here. So it's just, it's crazy. I love it. I love that answer. And I think it's so powerful when you can actually entertain people, but you can also help people along in their life. And there's so much that you can help people, especially in this space in finance, that you can absolutely change people's lives because money reduces their stress. It reduces their anxiety. There's so many things that happen when you actually get financially educated. So that's really, really cool. So what is the best advice about money you've

ever received? So there's a lot of good advice. There's a lot of bad advice out there as well. But one of the best things that I received, and I've heard it from a few different people, but there's a few big decisions you make in life that will really change the trajectory of your life. One of those is like when you buy a house, like that is a big purchase. Like you really have to make sure you know what you're doing. You need to put in the hours. You need to study and know you're buying a good sound house and investment. But the biggest thing with money is you need to know that you and your spouse, whoever you spend your life with, you guys need to be on the same page. So picking your spouse, I think is one of the best money lessons that I ever imagined is like when my girlfriend and I first got

together is like we had the same values, we had the same goals, we had the same vision of what we wanted our life to be. And so just picking a good life partner is seriously going to make your life a hundred million times better because it's the opposite side too. If you pick the wrong partner, it's going to make your life, you know, so much worse. So be sure who you spend your time with is like one of the most important just life lessons in general, but also money lessons too. Absolutely. It has a major impact on your wealth building ability. over time. It really does make a massive difference. So that is an amazing point to add into there. And the last one of my favorites, because we get a different answer every single time. So what does wealth

mean to you? Yeah, wealth to me, it just means that I have the freedom and flexibility to do what I want whenever I want. I think when you have a certain level of wealth, and it doesn't have to be like some extraordinary number. It can be something very simple. But when you have just a certain amount of wealth that allows you to maybe quit your full-time job or start a business or travel more or give back to your community. That's what I think, you know, financial independence is all about is like, you are given options in life and wealth gives you those options. When you're living paycheck to paycheck, you really have no choice but to go back to work the next day. And so when you have that buffer, when you first get your emergency fund fully funded and then you get your first $100,000

invested and then you start feeling the effects of financial independence like really snowball. It's like wealth just gives you so many options. And that's why I love helping people become financially independent because their world just opens up to something they couldn't even seen before. So it's amazing. Exactly. And that shines through in your content where what John's trying to unlock for people is the freedom that you can get with financial independence. And that's the most amazing thing that you can do. So John, thank you so much for coming on here. This was so much fun. Where can people learn about what you have going on and all your socials and everything else you have going on. Yeah, Andrew, thank you so much. I just really appreciate your platform and letting me

be on it and sharing my story. Obviously, we have the same intention as helping people become financially literate so they can live their best lives. Yeah, people can find me on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube at John E Finance. It's J-O-H-N-E, the letter E, finance. But yeah, Andrew, it's been a pleasure, man. Thank you so much. Awesome, perfect. We will link all those up down below. Thank you so much for coming on.