Transcription
I recently banned every single employee at my startup from contributing to their 401ks. I implemented this policy recently because one of my youngest employees, who's 19 years old, I caught him putting 50% of his salary into the 401k. And as soon as I saw this, I just banned the feature entirely.
If you are young, smart, and ambitious, the stupidest thing you can do is put money in a retirement fund. Understand that if you put all your money in the S&P 500, which returns maybe 7% annualized, and inflation is 6%, in effect, you are maybe making 1 to 3% every single year. So you're not actually making the 7% that everyone purports. Not only that, 7% annualized is only over the like the last two decades or something. You know, there's depressions that happen cyclically every few years.
The whole selling point of compound interest is that you'll make a lot of money later, even though it might not seem like a lot of money right now. And the huge counter to this is that I don't need money when I'm 65. I need money right now. Like the money, the dollar right now means so much more to me at 22 years old than it will ever mean to me at 65. I'd rather spend $1,000 getting shitfaced at the club with my boys than a million dollars when I'm 65 in a retirement home watching a bunch of grandma shake ass.
And right now is literally the single best time in history to go out and make some money. Every month there's a new youngest billionaire in the news because of AI is shaking up every single sector of the economy if you are young, ambitious, and smart right now. The dumbest thing you can do is expect a bunch of Fortune 500 CEOs to make you more money than you can go make yourself. So nobody at Cleul gets to put any money in their retirement funds cuz I think that's stupid as [ __ ] if you're young, smart, and ambitious. And that's the kind of person I try to hire.