10 EASY Rules To Never Be Broke Again.

0:00 Laying the Groundwork for Lasting Financial Security I was broke for years. It is one of the worst experiences. It is insanely stressful, feel like you're juggling more balls than you actually have. It is absolutely horrible. So today I want to give you 10 rules that took me from being broke to knowing that I will never be broke again. 0:17 The best part is, they're pretty easy. The first step was to plan for emergencies because especially when I was paycheck to paycheck, there always seem to be things that came up out of nowhere that threw everything off. You do good for a couple months and then you get a flat tire or something goes wrong with your car. You have to buy something for your apartment or your house. 0:33 And every time you think you're a little bit ahead, you just get dragged back to where you were before. And that can even cause the spiral of debt and everything else. So making what started with $1000, then $2000 and then one month and then three month and then six month emergency fund was literally one of the best financial decisions I've ever made because it gave me financial piece. 0:52 It opened up more opportunities to earn more money because I could take a lesser paying job and live off some of that emergency fund. It gave me room that that when things went wrong, they didn't destroy my finances and get me in a hole. If you do not have an emergency fund, you're really playing with fire. 1:07 It is such a stress reliever. I just keep mine in a high interest savings account. Leave a link to the one that I use down below. You can use whatever you want, but at least to earn something. And then I just pretend that it never exists and I just have this endless Peace of Mind and it's amazing. Find discipline or just trick yourself. 1:23 Everybody knows that they should save money or they should start investing or they should do something, but it's really hard to actually make yourself do it for more than like a week or month, Extremely hard to do it for a year. And even though everybody thinks that I have like good self-control and self-discipline, I really don't. And I actually have to trick myself into doing the things that I want to do. 1:42 And there's a couple ways that I did this. Like I literally brainwashed and tricked myself into saving money and investing and doing stuff that I don't know how to do. So I just want to share that with you. First of all, I've run out of motivation extremely fast. So pretty much every day for three years, I was listening to a financial book, reading a financial book, listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos like this one every single day to keep myself excited and motivated about my goals. 2:05 And that goes to the second point, which is I actually made and wrote down goals and those kind of gave me a reason to say no to those things, to say yes to other things like all those hard choices when I, when I don't have any more left to give, I could always go back to that, that big why of why am I doing this in the 1st place? 2:22 Leaving your job, doing something that you love, whatever it is for you. If you don't have those, you're probably just going to fall off your budget. You're not going to stick to your plans. You're not going to work the nights and weekends. If you don't have like this big purpose behind what you're doing, you're just going to burn yourself out. That really, really helped me. And that kind of leads into the the next point, which is to simplify your finance. 2:41 This is, this is something that I love doing, which is again, stealing from myself or tricking myself by putting things on autopay, whether that's to invest or to save, have a certain amount that gets automatically taken out of my check every time I get a check and it goes directly into my savings account. And that once that reaches a high enough number, it goes into my investing accounts. 2:59 And that is this a whole idea of paying yourself 1st. And for me, it's just like stealing from myself to make sure that I have my financial future before anything else happens. I need to make sure that my future is taken care of. And it also, this simplifies your finance is if you can set everything up as simply as possible on auto pay, whether that's for your bills so that you're never late and get late fees or for your savings so that you never skimp out on the thing that's important, which is actually like saving money and bettering your finances. 3:23 Those things really have made a big difference. I keep my investing pretty simple. I have read a lot of books on investing and finances and I have realized it comes down to the simplest things are usually the best things. So I pretty much do a few different things. One, I invest in index funds. 3:39 I totally stop trying to pick stocks after I've this book called A Simple Path to Wealth. Turns out like investing in the S&P 500 outperforms like people picking stocks or especially you individually picking your own stocks, in which case you normally lose. So I pretty much just do that when it comes to the stock market. 3:54 And then I invest in real estate because it's something I understand. I have this rule of never investing in something that I don't understand. So real estate's been kind of my other pillar. My third one is beginning to start investing in business. That kind of leads me into another point and that is that there are a ton of really cool things you can do with real estate and for a lot of people it can actually just review options like using Figure, the sponsor of this video, to get a HELOC. 4:15 Episode Break Let's say that you want to undertake a home improvement project, you have bad credit card debt that you want to pay off or consolidate, or maybe you even want to fund a business. You can apply online in as little as 5 minutes and get funding in as little as five days with Figure, and they are the number one non bank HELOC in the US. 4:34 The average homeowner can actually save up to $80,000 with a HELOC as opposed to a cash out refinance, which is why it's a really cool tool. In fact, I was actually just talking to my dad about figuring and he might be using a HELOC in order to finance the siding project on a rental property, which will raise the value and it'll end up making money from it. 4:52 It really can just open up opportunities to either save money or make more money. So find out your rate right now with figure. You can check the link down in the description, check them out. 5:00 Boost Your Income, Avoid High-Interest Debt Make yourself valuable. I think we all know this, that like, oh, the best investment you can make is into yourself and blah, blah, blah, blah. It was actually when I had this realization that you were pretty much directly paid in proportion to the amount that you impact other people's lives. This is a idea from the Almanac. 5:15 This really changed everything for me because I realized that the jobs that I've had before didn't really impact a lot of people's lives. You know, it's cleaning offices or doing different things where I just like wasn't actually changing people's lives at all. And therefore I wasn't making any money. And this isn't like necessarily fair or maybe how it should be. But this is kind of how the world works where if you can impact a million of people's lives in a little bit, you can make them happier, sadder, inform them, educate them, do whatever. 5:38 You will make a decent amount of money if you can change one person's life incredibly amount. You can save their life by doing heart surgery, you'll make a lot of money. So when I realized that I just focused all of my free time when I wasn't working into gaining valuable skills that would drastically change somebody's life. 5:55 It'll make their business easier, it'll make them more money. It'll, you know, make their days better, whatever it is. And as I started to gain valuable skills, I started to make more money. And as you make more money, as long as your expenses don't change and you always have those skills to fall back on, then you shouldn't be broke again. By the way, if you're enjoying this video, don't forget to drop a like and change its color. 6:12 It's super fun, it's free. Avoid debt. So I have been super lucky that I've never really had debt besides few times for a short period of time by choice, except for the debt that I have on my rentals, which is almost like $1,000,000 worth of debt. But that debt makes me money every single month and will ultimately kind of be my retirement. 6:31 So some debt is good, but I'm talking about like credit card debt, student loan debt, high interest debt, car debt, anything like that. Well, there are times where it kind of makes sense you have to go to College in order to do whatever career you're trying to do. But for the most part, if you don't have debt, your life will just be like a billion times easier. 6:47 Like if your house is paid off, your car is paid off, you never carry any balances on your credit card, you're going to have a much easier time staying away from broke and actually building wealth. Then if you have massive payments every single month and everything in your home is financed. It's just a completely different lifestyle. 7:03 Like personally, I'm really glad that I didn't go to college and get the debt from that. I know a ton of people who it's worked out great for, but also it equal amount who have gone to college, spent 10s of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars and don't actually use their degree, which is actually like a super high percentage of people. So just staying away from that and actually working during those years instead and actually building wealth was a huge thing for me that kept me from that paycheck to paycheck cycle that so many other people get trapped into because they have this debt looming over their head that heats into anything that they decide to do in the future. 7:32 Leverage Compound Interest and Diverse Income Streams The eighth wonder of the world's according to Einstein, which is of course compound interest. If this does not change how you spend on a day-to-day basis, then I don't know what will. Watch this. If you invested $100 a week into the S&P 500 from the ages of 22 till 65, that money will be worth about $5,000,000 or about 22 times more than what you put into it. 7:57 When I realized this and how important it was to start investing as early as possible because of compound interest, it was like completely life changing for me. I looked at every dollar that I spent of like, oh, that could have been, you know, $20 in the future. Even real estate. I realized if I bought a rental at 22, which is when I bought my first one, by the time I am 52, I will have a completely paid off rental that I only put under $10,000 into, you know, 30 years ago at that point. 8:20 And that rental will probably be worth over $1,000,000. It will have made me 10s of thousands or hundreds of thousands over the time of that 30 years. And I would start making way more money once the notes paid off. So that's why I think investing as early as possible is just like completely life changing. It's crazy when you start to run the numbers and that made that decision so easy for me to try to earn as much as I could as early as I could and spend as little as I can so that I could buy myself freedom as soon as possible. 8:47 If you haven't tried this, try screwing around with like a calculator like this. It will completely like change your mindset and outlook on money. It was crazy. Build multiple streams of income. Honestly, I am kind of conflicted on this one. You see, when I talk to most wealthy people, they actually made most of their wealth from one thing. 9:04 Like they made it through real estate, they made it through starting a business, they made it through selling a business, something like that. And then eventually they take that money and they diversify a little bit. And most people think like, oh average millionaire, 7 streams of income. I got to have 7 streams. Like they got to be a millionaire by one thing and then they diversified. So that's one point. 9:20 The second point would be multiple streams of income can be a good thing. For instance, I used to live off of of one stream of income, which is my main job, and then I had about two other jobs plus investing in real estate. In all of those, I never touched the money that I earned from that. It went directly into working for myself to to savings or to investing again. 9:40 And therefore, for me, having multiple streams of income allowed me to buy some of these investments that allowed me to build my wealth. So there's kind of two ways to look at that. But if you're not having enough money, just doing what you're doing, it might be worth sacrificing a year or two years of your life working extra and saving all of that money and just buying your future with it. 9:56 At least that's what really worked for me. And after those couple years of sacrifice, the rest of my life has been way easier because I've never had to stress about money again because I, I took a year or two and extremely stressed about money. 10:06 Make Informed Choices and Continuously Learn About Money Golden Law, which is pretty much don't try to get rich quick. And this doesn't apply to trying to start your own business and, you know, maybe selling it in five years and actually making some money. This more applies to the get rich quick things that we are sold everywhere where I tried this for two months and now I'm making $60,000 a month doing this faceless Instagram thing. 10:24 I don't whatever they claim, it's more talking about that and MLM's and whatever that you see one person doing really well and most of the people below them don't make any money. So to quote a book, the richest man in Babylon that was made over 100 years ago, gold flees the man who wood forest it to impossible earnings or who followeth the alluring advice of tricksters and schemers or who trusts it to his own inexperience and romantic desires and investment, which basically means don't fall for get rich quick schemes art. 10:53 The last one here is to study money. And everybody's always asking for book recommendation. So I'm going to give you a few. But first, if you are going to read some books, make sure you're taking action on something that you learned from each book. Otherwise you're just kind of like wasting your time and something else. But there are a few here that should cover most things. The first one is like psychology of money, kind of like the basics of money. 11:11 Interesting stuff, very thought out. It will definitely change your mind set about money. I've also, I've also done a full book review on this that I'll leave linked down below. Next one is set for life. This is similar to the approach that I took when it comes to financial independence. I have now shifted away from some of the things in here, but it's a great baseline for the FIRE movement and retiring early and kind of being a little extreme, but it's more meant for like single people, people in their 20s and 30s. 11:33 So it's pretty good. The simple path to wealth. This one right here is about how to invest in like VTi, so like index funds and retire early and pretty much retire through nothing but that it'll make you never try to pick a stock again. So this one's definitely good. 11:49 There's a bunch more that I can mention. This is a 4 hour work week. This is what kind of got me excited about being an entrepreneur. He's very like forward and aggressive. And the main thing that I learned from this, all these businesses that you see other people start or these people that you see working on the on the beach or travelling. That's not just for other people. 12:05 You can do it too. And it's actually pretty attainable if you are willing to make extreme sacrifices in order to get it. Really good jump start again. I think I did a video on this one as well. If you enjoyed this video, don't forget to subscribe. Also check out figure with the link down below. See you next week.