Transcription
After reaching financial freedom in my 20s by pretty much being different than everybody else that I knew, I realized that most of the advice people hear is wrong. So these are 50 small ways to improve your finances even just by 1%. And I know that's a big list. So even if you just pick a couple of them, your finances can look totally different a year from now by just doing small things consistently.
All right. So, number one is small, but it really made a big difference for me. And that is to replace the phrase "I can't afford it" with, "How can I afford it?" Because when you say "I can't afford that," you give yourself like the biggest out of jail free card possible to not try for it. This is what I did for a really long time with like ever having a nice car or nice house. I just assumed since I dropped out of high school and I had no real skills, I'll just never have a nice life. So when you replace that mindset, you're forced to problem-solve. You're forced to come up with ideas to earn more money to save more money. And just that one switch, just changing that one question in my head unlocked a lot of really cool things for me, like being able to use frying pans as tripods.
Next up, you need to change your idea of risk. See, a lot of people I know don't invest. They don't leave their job. They don't move. They don't do whatever because it's risky, which it's true. If you invest your money, you could totally lose your money. But through reading a couple books, I really changed my philosophy on risk. You see, the biggest risk to me is not taking action. If you never start that business, if you never change your finances, you never reset them, you never get them under control, you will 100% guaranteed work at a job that you do not like way longer than you want to. You'll waste the best parts of every day for the best years of your life working for money because it's too risky to try to escape the rat race. So for me, I don't think it's at all risky to take shots at bettering your life, to try things even if they fail. I think the incredible huge risk is not taking action of playing it safe. That is guaranteed yourself that you're going to never live the dream life that you want. It's just never going to happen. And that's like 100% chance that if you're not like pretty different than everybody else that you know, you're going to get what everybody else gets. What everybody else gets is horrible. Look at these stats. Average is very bad.
Follow a proven path. If you don't know how to improve your life, you don't know how to get financially free, you don't know how to get in shape, whatever it is that you're trying to do, honestly, but specifically with finances, don't be creative. Just copy somebody. Just steal what worked for somebody else. I literally did exactly that and was able to leave my day job at 24, become a millionaire in my 20s simply through stealing from other people, stealing like an artist. I read book after book after book, listened to podcast after podcast. I stole ideas from people who had done it before. I copied exactly what worked and it became kind of a combination of a couple different things. But none of it was like creative. None of it I didn't invent anything. I just found what was proven to work for people and stole it. And it worked for me and it worked for family members and other people. It's like don't create your own budget. Just use a budget that's proven. Don't create your own rules of finances. Just use ones that are proven. Don't overthink investing. Just use the ones that are, you know, proven to work for a lot of people. And find somebody that you resonate with that you want to be like and just copy what they did. It's literally what I did to Tim Ferriss. Like, thanks Tim.
Use the five-minute rule. This could also be the one-page rule. So, the past 12 years, I have read a page or listened to a podcast or watched a video on money. I would say 95% of the days, almost every single day, I am learning something about my finances. And the thing is, if you do that for literally one year, you'll probably be ahead of like 80% of people. You do that for 10 years, you're ahead of like 99% of people. And I think the problem is most people don't know that there are options. We've been told that you go to college, you get a good education, you get a good job, and then, you know, you try to raise your way up the ladder, get a nice house, a nice car, whatever. Like that's like the pattern that everybody wants you to do. But people don't know that there are other paths. It's like I reached freedom by the time most people were finishing college with 100k worth of debt just because I found out there were other paths that you can take. I read a bunch of books. And so you need to find the path that works for you. Are you an entrepreneur? Are you interested in real estate investing? Are you interested in the stock market? Do you want to retire early? Do you want to start your own business? Like what are the things that interest you? And know that there are other options. You don't have to go to college to be successful anymore. You don't have to do what almost anybody tells you to do. You can find a path that is proven, that works, that is different than everybody else that you know.
A little bit of a quicker one here is to unfollow some accounts. If there are accounts on Instagram or on YouTube or whatever that encourage you to spend money, maybe you follow clothing brands or you follow specific people that encourage you to live a lavish lifestyle that's kind of unrealistic for most people. Just go ahead and unfollow those people. What comes into your brain is very, very important. You want to curate it to people who are where you want to be, who are encouraging you and motivating you. And you don't want to get caught up in the motivation trap either, but like you want to surround yourself with positive inputs that are making you a better person, not wanting you to spend more money. But you have to curate that.
Work on delayed gratification. I credit this to most of the success that I've had in my life when it comes to investing, when it comes to getting in shape, when it comes to talking to somebody that you're interested in. Generally, you have to do something hard now in order to have something good later. I feel like life and especially finances are delayed gratification. Like if you want your money to double every whatever the math equals out to, then you have to have money to double and therefore you can't spend that money on stuff. So one way that I practice delayed gratification is like either a 30-day rule, a 10-minute rule, whatever it is, where if I want something, whether it's a watch, whether it's a car, whether it's clothing, I don't even like watches, whatever. Whatever that thing is for you, practice not buying it, practice putting it on a list for 30 days. Practice putting it in your cart and then going away. Practice not always giving yourself what you want and instead saying like, "I'm choosing my future self over my present self" because I know that if I spend the money on this thing for me, it will probably not change my life at all, but in the future, this could buy me freedom. So, I'm taking this money, this life that I worked for, instead of buying stuff with it, I'm going to buy my future freedom with it. I have never once regretted that.
I feel like on a similar vein, you should try to be unreasonable. Cuz if you're reasonable, you wouldn't start a YouTube channel. You wouldn't buy a rental when you're 22 and kind of an idiot. You wouldn't have a goal to be a millionaire by 30. You wouldn't want to be the 1% of men above 30 who have abs. Like if you're being realistic and reasonable all the time, your life is going to suck most likely. And I can tell you every time I am unreasonable, my life gets better. Like if we take the millionaire goal, I had this crazy goal to be a millionaire by 30. I didn't know how it was going to happen, but that was just my goal since I was like 18. And at 29, I hit that. This is not to brag or anything. It's just saying that because I had this lofty crazy thing that I was shooting for, I had to change a lot of things. I had this so much fun chasing it. I had to change the person I was in order to get to the place where I want to go. If I just always shoot for average, like the realistic stuff, I'm never going to be excited about anything. I'm never going to have to push myself. But when I'm chasing something, when I'm excited, that's when cool things can really happen.
All right, let's move on to some money habits. Move your savings to a different bank. I like to hide money for myself. So, I always keep my money in a high-interest savings account. So, whether it's at a different bank, I'll link some resources down below if you want to check them out. But, I never like to have it in my regular checking or even in the same bank where I keep the rest of my stuff unless it's like very separated because I don't want to ever have easy access to grabbing it. I always want to force myself to save it for a real emergency and never draw from it from anything else. Plus, if it's in a high-interest savings of some sort, it's going to actually earn money instead of like inflation eating away at it or whatever. Also don't know why I'm in a swing for this whole video. Starting to feel weird. It's honestly like the best investment we've ever made. The kids use this for like an hour a day.
But try rounding up every purchase. If you have a problem saving money, I've been using Acorns for a while. I think I've rounded up purchases for like $1,000 over the course of the last 6 months or something. And you don't even notice that money. It's like stealing from yourself. But just rounding up purchases over the course of years can really, really change your finances. And you can up that a little bit. It can grow and start investing in it. It's really cool.
Then, of course, you should review your subscriptions. We live in a subscription economy. Most of them suck. Some of them are actually pretty good, but if you haven't been through your expense sheet recently, if you haven't looked at like your credit cards or your subscriptions and go through that, you cut one of them and you can literally save hundreds of dollars a year if you cut a couple of them. It can actually make a big difference over time. So, check some subscriptions.
Practice being poor. I actually use this two different ways. One of them is to take a no-spend day, maybe once a week. Do a no-spend week, maybe once every couple months, or a no-spend month, maybe once a year. We generally do that. This gets you out of the habits of impulse buying, of just spending a lot of money on yourself or whatever, and kind of forces you to realize that all this money that you're spending doesn't really improve your life. And you practice being super grateful for what you have. And also, it helps in the way of fear setting where if you think of like, "Oh, if I start this business, I could lose my house. I could like like all the worst-case scenarios." This is something I stole from Tim Ferriss. And then you like actually live out that experience like, "Oh, what if I just slept on the couch for a week?" Cuz that's like literally worst-case scenario. It's like, "Oh, you realize that you're still happy. You're still yourself. Like nothing really changes all that much." And therefore, it's okay to try to better your life. Like worst-case scenario is generally not all that bad unless you're like really being dumb. Like the Bible says, you can learn to be content with a little or with a lot. A lot of it is just how you frame it in your mindset.
Just assume that nobody is coming to save you. I don't assume that the government is going to pay me any money by the time I get to retirement. Mostly that's just based on like their rampant incompetence. But I don't assume I'm going to get bailed out. I don't assume friends are going to help. I don't assume family is going to help. I like to take all of that on myself because this is like an idea that I got from extreme ownership where if things go good or if things go bad, I want to have that all on me. I don't want to be like planning my life where I'm spending all my money. I don't have money for retirement cuz I'm planning on getting social security or whatever and then that falls apart in 20 years, 30 years, whatever it is by the time I get there. Like, I don't want to let anybody else have control over my future. I want to take that for myself and like never give myself an escape route. Just take all that accountability on myself, put all that pressure on me because I know if I work for something for 10 years, for 20 years, for 30 years, it would literally be insane for me not to have made an incredible amount of progress towards that. But if I'm just expecting somebody else to take care of it, it's just a recipe for disaster.
This one's more practical, but call one company and ask for a better rate. Like there's some car insurances linked down below if you want to check them out and see if you can save on your car insurance. Sometimes if you can save just $10 a month, that's over $100 a year. If you could save $100 a month, that's a thousand plus a year. You know, whether it's your internet or your phone bill, sometimes just getting on the phone can save you hundreds of dollars and is actually a really high-value use of your time to do like once or twice a year.
And then of course you should probably also try to get some free money for opening up accounts. Like there are different bank accounts that will offer you like $2 to $500 for just for opening up and funding an account, setting up direct deposit. I used to do this a lot actually and I would make between like $500 $1,000 every single year just opening new bank accounts like every 6 months or something moving some stuff around. So generally for maybe 20 minutes of my time I would make $500. I'm like, "Oh, it's like whatever $1,000 an hour." It's a pretty good use of time. So that's just a hack I've done a billion times.
Let me show you an example that is a no-brainer. If you go down in the description, there'll be like this link here. If you check out SoFi, which is also, you know, offering like 4% right now, you can hit "See Offer" and then you get up to $300 when you sign up and set up a direct deposit. This is generally going to take you, I don't know, anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes and you're going to get $300. Plus, you're getting that high savings account, which I talked about earlier. I literally did this. I have a SoFi account. I took advantage of this. Now, this is an affiliate link, which helps support the channel so that I don't have to take as many sponsors. Plus, you kind of get free money. So, if you do want to check this out, there's a link down below. There's also a link down below to check how much you could save on car insurance where you just kind of fill out a little thing and see if you can save money. It's a really good use of a few minutes.
And another way that could be even more money than either of those is if you check out Public, which is again linked down below, which is an investing platform. When you transfer your portfolio, you can earn a 1% match. That can be a lot of money. And if you look at the time that it takes, if it takes 20 minutes, if it takes an hour and you're earning a few hundred or a few thousand, that's an insane great use of time. So again, all these are linked down below. They do all help support the channel. Check them out.
All right, we're on to the earning more section, which I think is huge. And first off, you want to find an income stream that doesn't care if you wake up or not, doesn't care where you are, what you're doing, still pays you. Whether it's one extreme of like dividend stocks that pay you continuously or the other extreme of like a YouTube channel that pays you or just like some type of business where you can set it up, you put in a lot of upfront effort and then it continues to pay you for a long time with less and less effort coming in and isn't something that is directly tied to you go 8 hours, you get paid 8 hours. If you can get it done in 1 hour, you still get paid the same amount whether it takes 1 hour or 8 hours or 20 hours. It's all based on results. That's the type of income I love to earn.
Take your phone from a liability to an asset. I am telling you, you can make so much money from your phone in so many different ways. It is kind of crazy. I know this is not for everybody, but for me personally, I changed from creating content of any sort, whether it's faceless stuff like I do with my Facebook. I made a whole video about that. Or things like YouTube or Instagram. There's so many different ways that you can actually make money. Some of them are content creation. Some of them are working for other people. But if you can take this thing that sucks your life away and cost you money and turn it into something that helps you grow and actually generates you money, it can really change your lifestyle and give you so much more freedom. I've just seen it impact so many people's lives. I always feel like I need to mention it.
Focus on skill stacking. Generally, the more skills that you have, the more money that you will make as long as they're valuable skills. And some skills are just more valuable than ever. You could be the best at sweeping a floor in the entire world. You are literally the best floor sweeper in the world, but you will probably never make more than $20 an hour if you're doing that. Or you could be pretty good at design or sales or creating something. And even though you're not amazing at that because it is a high-value skill, you're going to earn way more than being the absolute best at something else. If you get really good at them, if you get in the top 5-10% of people in them, then you can earn a lot of money. Then you might need to start focusing on other skills. And I realized that a lot of my skills, I used to work at a cleaning company. I realized that no matter how good I got at this, no matter how hard I worked, I would never make more than like $60,000 a year. But I was really grateful to have that opportunity. But I just realized there was a cap to how much I could be the best ever and there was a cap. And so I started multiple businesses and some of them worked out, some of them didn't. But I realized that I needed more valuable skills that impacted more people's lives that changed people's lives more than cleaning. And just because that's what I had done for the past 10 years doesn't mean that that's what I need to continue to do. And so I started skill stacking.
Spend 30 minutes on a side hustle or a skill that will generate income every week. Preferably every day, but at minimum every week.
Practice saying yes to uncomfortable things every quarter. Whether it's a presentation, it's a speech. I recently preached at my church. Very uncomfortable doing that. But I've actually been saying yes to like speaking gigs and things that are just like I hate doing. I will earn no money. But because it's uncomfortable, I know I need to do it so I can grow as a person. And so if there's something that's uncomfortable you don't want to do, it's probably a good sign that you should do it.
Find your highest point of income generation. Generally, there's 20% of the things that you do that are going to lead to 80% of the income. Find that 20%, spend more time on that and less on literally everything else.
Let's move on to investing. Buy a book on alternative investing. One that comes to mind, there's a book called "How to Invest in Real Estate with Low to No Money Down." I think that's by uh Brandon Turner. Because of that book, I was literally able to buy multiple properties with low to no money down. and therefore was able to take, you know, $20,000 and over the course of 30 years that will turn into well over a million dollars because of that one book, which is literally insane. But if you don't know that exists, then you can't have that happen. I'll leave a link to a book recommendation list down below. Just find something that interests you. Everybody's different. I like real estate. Most people don't. And just look into it.
Increase your savings rate by 1%. If you don't know what your savings rate is, first of all, you need to figure that out. But then you want to up it. My goal is to always be at 50%. So if you have two incomes, try to live off one. For me, I have multiple income streams. We always live off one of them and then the other ones just go 100% go into savings or investing. But even if it takes you years to get there, see what changes you can make to improve your savings rate by 1%, then another percent, then another percent. Make small changes because your savings rate is directly tied to how long it will take to retire.
Set up weekly automatic investments. We all know that it's not about timing the market. It's about time in the market. So, if you have this problem where you're always waiting for it to dip and then like, "Oh, well, it dips. I'm going to wait." So if you're overthinking the stock market, just set up automatic investments and just have it continuously go in and go in and go in. Then you don't have to think about it.
Read one to four finance books per year. I would say minimum one. Obviously more would be better. And I know I keep talking on this, but I think learning, educating yourself, becoming financially literate is the thing that will make the biggest difference in your finances. Some of these habits and stuff are cool, but if you don't understand the big picture and why you're doing what you're doing, it's just it's not going to stick. It didn't for me.
This video is getting really long, so I'll leave a link to a free ebook down below that has the rest of the ways to improve your finances by 1%. It's a totally free ebook. It could just give you some more ideas to jump off of, but honestly, just pick one of these. I really hope it helps. There's some links down in the description to help save you money, make you money, all that kind of stuff. So, check them out. These are what I actually use or would use in certain situations. Thank you for watching this far end of the video. I really hope it helped.