Once You Get Money, Buy These 10 Things Immediately

The hard part isn't always making money, it's knowing what to do with it and how to keep it. Most financial advice tells you what not to buy and what assets to invest in. I am going to do that in this video, but I'm also going to tell you the 10 things that you should actually upgrade today. Because if you make more money, you should be able to enjoy it, and also sometimes spending it makes you even more. And number 3 is the one almost nobody spends on, but I will never go back. But there is one thing we need to get straight first. Before you buy anything that feels like a lifestyle upgrade, ask one question: does this buy back my life, or does it try to make me look richer without a reason? To answer that, you need what I call your buyback rate. If I can actually pay someone less than half of what my hour is worth to take a task off my plate, I usually should. Here's why. If you take your net income and you divide it by the total number of hours worked, there are about 2,000 or so working hours in a year, which will give you your hourly income. Now I want you to take that and divide it by 2. That's how you get your 50% margin. Any task you can give to somebody else under that number is a let's go. So let's say you make $100,000. If we have $100K, what are we going to do? Your hourly rate is about $50, which means if we cut it in half, your buyback rate is $25. So if you can pay somebody anything less, $10 an hour, then you Really should do that. So this is the first thing you should upgrade. Spend more on the things that make you more money. A lot of people say upgrade your wardrobe, get fancier. I actually don't buy into all of that at all. I think you need one expensive as shit thing to wear consistently. Why? You're signaling rich, especially if you do things like sell real estate or try to get people to invest in your company or even try to show your boss that you want to get promoted. I like having one super nice purse. that I wear with every outfit. This one's called Schiaparelli. It's an expensive brand. But the moral of the story is you don't need a ton of these. You need one. If you're a dude, you need one nice watch. It could be fake. Nobody needs to know. Not only that, if we have the rule of one, which is spend money on one nice thing because it'll actually make you more money, I think the next thing you got to do is the rule of 3. Right now, get rid of 3 things in your closet that don't fit anymore, and are kind of gnarly and replace them. That way you're pulling in the wealthy things and getting rid of the things that actually keep you looking like you don't belong at this level of the game. I like doing this on a weekly basis. If I'm going to bring anything new, I usually get rid of something else. I think there's just like human psychology to that winning. Next, I want to talk to you about why I made $1 million before I was 30 and one of my smarter, better coworkers didn't. It's actually one word, and the word is Proximity. If you want to get rich fast, you actually want to pay to have time back in your day because you are not commuting far. Why? When I was at Goldman Sachs back in the day, I had to be in the office at 7:30 every single day. I had a 2-minute walk from my office to Goldman Sachs. My best colleague, smarter than me, better than me, better pedigree, better at Excel. Well, he had to be in the office at 7:30 as well, but he hadn't saved as much money as I had. So he had to be 45 minutes from the office. He missed every single morning where I got there before him. He missed all the times that he left and couldn't come back where I could. Proximity will make you more money. In this case, it might be actually the better gym where the classes are full of people that you might actually meet somebody who wants to invest in your business, wants to hire you, whatever. My friend Sahil Bloom became very close with the former head of Apple for that exact reason. I also think joining a coworking space instead of your kitchen table, it costs you money not to be in the room with other winners. I think I joined 3 or 4 masterminds before I made all my cash because you're paying for who else paid to be in the exact same room and stealing their 10,000 hours. This isn't just me. A Harvard economist studied millions of people and he basically mapped billions of friendships using Facebook data. You know what's crazy? If you think about it like this, the single strongest predictor of whether someone climbs out of their economic bracket wasn't their school, their neighborhood, or their income. In fact, if you thought about the clusters of what happened, it was actually who did they know? that had a lot of money. It was whether their social circle actually touched people, not just at their same socioeconomic level, but did they climb a rung and another rung and another rung? What's the translation here? Your network is a measurable input to your income. You know that saying, like, your network is your net worth? It turns out that the data actually shows this is true. It's a lot easier to change your environment than it is to change your habits. So I would start here. Actually, I have something for you. Knowing how valuable proximity can be, I'm going to do something I've never done before. I'm putting together one of the largest events ever for owners on September 18th. It's completely free. I'm giving away millions of dollars of prizes, and you get to be online with owners looking to scale their businesses live. You can sign up here in the description. Like I said, completely free. I'm going to teach you everything I know about building profitable businesses. This is how you change your life. Research shows that how you take care of yourself and your presentation actually makes you more money. People who are rated as attractive actually earned— this shocked me— 20% more on average. So the way you look matters. I think, like, don't hate the player, hate the game. Ridiculously expensive beauty things I do that are actually worth it. I'll start high, then we'll go low. First, like, this is for chicks, but you can get it for your girl. PRP. This is like where they microneedle your own blood, or now they actually microneedle crazy things in your face like salmon semen and other stuff. So I think that's probably like $5K depending on what level, if you do peptides inside of it. Next, something called Halo. That's like $3K to $5K, super intense laser. lasers that laser your face but genuinely make you look 5 years younger. Then stuff like Sculptra. This basically pulls back your face, kind of like fill in collagen. I'm not a doctor. I don't know. I'm just telling you the stuff I do to try to not look 40. Sculptra is going to run you a couple K. And then like a facial, which is basically on the cheaper side, that's going to be a couple hundred. But maybe the really inexpensive things that I do, you can get these red lights that are amazing for your face. This one literally sits on my desk every day. I also have one that I lay down with because most of what actually works isn't expensive at all. Like, I use the red lights. I highly recommend that. I use a lot of organic products like OSEA. I really like their stuff and all their oils pretty much across the board. As much organic makeup as you can. Now, for dudes, you can actually these days do all these same things that chicks do. And I think it's actually an underrated hack. For men to look hotter. Don't look weird though. Don't do like shiny, don't do fillers, don't get crazy unless you're going for the RuPaul look. And then, you know, good for you. Most people at this point say that you should have a financial advisor. I actually say no. I think you should have a tax advisor. So once you've made, in my opinion, at least a couple hundred K a year, you're probably overpaying in taxes. And especially if you're an employee, you need to figure out a way For the IRS to take less from you legally, because nobody looks good in orange. What's the difference between a tax advisor and a financial advisor? A financial advisor, well, they get paid differently. They usually take a percentage cut on every single dollar they have sitting with them that you go and invest with them. I don't actually love that. If I was you, I would just put it in a van— if I was me, I won't tell you what to do. I'd just put it in a Vanguard or a Fidelity, some sort of cheap structure, dollar-cost averaged, continue to invest over the long time, allow it to compound. But that doesn't help you at all with your earned income. So a tax advisor will actually tell you, okay, why don't we structure this LLC, have these earnings go through it so that we can use that to decrease your actual cost basis, the amount of money that you give to the IRS each year. Tax sounds fancy, but it's actually just the way that most people stay rich. People actually have a fund for getting into things like a down payment fund, a start the business fund. Almost nobody has a fund for getting out of it. This is important because the exit is almost always more expensive than the entry, and it's the one cost nobody budgets for until they're already trapped and paying it in a panic. For the exit fund, this is a separate account whose only job is buying your way out. This is how you break your lease, You eat a cancellation fee. You pay a kill fee to walk away from a client or vendor that's quietly draining you. You don't touch it for anything else. Why? The truth is, most of us are too scared of the exit cost to admit things aren't working out. So we just stay and pay a slower, quieter price instead. Before you commit to anything, price out exactly what it costs to undo it, not just what it costs to start it. So before you sign that lease, that contract, or that 12-month vendor agreement, ask what walking away costs in month 6. Put that number aside before you sign. Some of the most disciplined companies on earth, they're going to pay people to quit on purpose, which is wild. Like Amazon offers warehouse employees an actual cash payment to leave. In Jeff's own words, the goal is making people stop and think about what they really want, because an employee who stays somewhere they don't want to be, that's unhealthy for you or the business. If a big company is willing to pay 5 figures just to buy back the option of a clean exit, that tells you something about what staying trapped costs you. So before the end of the day, write a list of your 3 to 5 expenses you want to kill. Name it something that keeps you honest. I like exit fund. I also like the fuck you fund, meaning you can walk out at any point if you don't like them and say, you know what? Every time you sign something recurring, basically add its kill fee to the total you're saving towards. So I want to talk about the food. I don't think clean eating is just like a signal. This stuff really matters. Like actual food, the stuff a plant or an animal would recognize prepared by a human instead of a drive-thru. There's so many studies on this, you guys. Young adults and older adults show the same pattern. Every meaningful increase in ultra-processed food tracks to worse memory and concentration. You cannot make a ton of money, negotiate a deal, or show up for your kid's game right on a brain that's been running on gas station calories all day forever. There's a bunch of studies that also show people spend an average of 7 hours a week cooking. So I don't know, like maybe use a healthy meal prep service. I use one. It gets delivered to your door every week. You can skip the expensive shopping trip. Like also interesting, there are all these Prepared food companies like Factor Meals or Tempo, they're like $200, $300 a week for 21 meals. So for some people, this is a no-brainer. Others, the buyback rate doesn't work out. Do the math, see what works for you. We have a chef that cooks for us, costs about $60 an hour, and in about 3 hours they can cook enough food for us for 3 days. So actually, when you look at that cost, it's sort of a no-brainer. People assume eating well is really expensive. expensive automatically. And 2 fast food meals a day for a household actually adds up faster than a grocery run. Before the end of the day, what's your one action? Throw out that old stuff that's in your desk drawer that you probably shouldn't be eating anyway and restock it with something that's going to go bad if you don't eat it today. This is really unpopular advice. I will not invest in a founder unless they already have an assistant. People hate this advice, but I got it given to me by a billionaire. And when I saw the data, I was actually like, Pretty shocked on this. Harvard Business found that execs who work with a skilled assistant have 20 to 30% higher productivity and make more money. A good assistant actually doesn't cost you money in the long term. They make you money because of all the hours you waste on your own admin previously. Okay, I have 2 things I want you to tattoo on your forehead if you want to make more money. First is what's called CADO. I think I originally stole this from Tim Ferriss, and I might have updated it slightly myself. What does this mean? Cut, automate, delegate, outsource. So what I do first is I obsess on all the things that I should not do. Obviously Netflix and chill, but other things like, do I really need to be organizing my email list? Like, should I just not do that? So those are my kill items. Second, automate. Hey, I have to read email. Okay, well, can I use something like Superhuman, which is the software I use, that automates all of my email inbox management better. Great. Okay, if Zoomer to Human isn't sufficient, this is when I bring in usually a virtual assistant. They can cost you like a couple hundred bucks to a couple thousand bucks a month, and they will actually do anything that you want to delegate. And fully outsourcing might mean hiring an EA or another member of your team to do this job entirely. They're not even reporting back to you. They're just executing on it. You start with the lowest level tasks from a dollar perspective, and you climb to the highest level tasks from a dollar perspective. Now, let's say that you're listening to me and you're like, Codie, I want to make more money and I need more time to focus on selling things. Let me show you how to scale up the assistant ladder. The assistant ladder essentially has 3 rungs on it. Rung 1 is a virtual assistant. This is part-time, overseas, cheap. You can basically get this for $200, $1,000 to $3,000 a month. $3,000 is full-time, by the way. You use this for any inbox scheduling, repetitive tasks. This clears the buyback rate for almost everybody watching. Rung 2 is actually an assistant. This person is in-house, more trustworthy. They could still be remote, but they know more about you, and they can be used to filter out unimportant daily life tasks. Then we've got the chief of staff. This runs projects end to end. Makes the calls you'd make, walks into a room and can actually brief them on it and say, Codie's not going to like that. Codie is going to like this. You know, this— I like to train them up to be my duplicate. Be my duplicate. This is the top of the ladder. Most of you aren't there yet, but you don't know where you're going to go unless you start here. So let's say this one costs $2,000 to $3,000. Let's say this one costs $50,000 a year, all the way up to $250,000 a year. And let's say a chief of staff probably costs somewhere around $125K. These people can earn a lot. They can earn $300K a year being a chief of staff. This is really important because you need to let go of the 10 hours you're white-knuckling because it's faster if you just do it. That line, it's faster if you just do it, is probably why you're not where you want to be at monetarily. And it's usually why most people stay broke. Yeah, everybody's faster once. I'm 100 times faster than most of my employees. But you're not faster the 51st time. So the upgrade here is more free time doing the things that make you more money. My action for you is pretty simple. Before the end of the day, write down the 3 tasks eating your week that don't require you specifically using Cato. That list is your job for getting to rung 1. All right, the next one I want to talk about is sleep. So this economist actually found that the more sleep you have, it's associated with higher earnings. And that kind of makes sense, right? Because tired people make expensive decisions. So like, if you really zoom out Chronic short-term sleep costs the US economy $411 billion a year in lost productivity. That is wild. It's basically a giant liability. So what do I do to improve my sleep? Really, really simple. One, a hard mattress. There's a lot of studies that show these are better and not like an old mattress. And if you have an old mattress, you really need to replace it every 5 to 10 years. Two, I hyper believe in this one, but it is expensive. It's expensive. Eight Sleep. I got a discount code for you guys. You can click the link below. I don't even think I make money on this anymore. So you guys just take the $600 or whatever it is off this. This has been a game changer for my sleep. You want to go way cheaper than this? Earplugs and a face mask. This is the whole list. Like, you don't need an Oura Ring. You don't need a Whoop. You don't need sleep tracking. You don't really need the Eight Sleep. It's just sick if you have the couple thousand bucks to spend on it. So let's run the buyback rate on this. If Eight Sleep is about $5K, for instance, to get the whole thing, plus like de minimis, like let's call it like $100 for everything else that I just mentioned, the face mask, the earplugs, maybe a little bit better of a pillow, what are you looking at? At 2,500 hours a year, that's like a $2 buyback rate. So that's kind of a no-brainer. If you've ever underslept and that decision has cost you in a negotiation, in your business, or in your life. Next, I want to think about— wow. And my favorite thing to upgrade is always YOU, but I have a really particular way to do it. I call this the repeat rule. And here's how I like to think about it. How many times, if you acquire this skill, will you repeat its use? So if it's sales, that's probably 1,000 times. It's going to keep showing up in your paycheck. If it's negotiation, that's probably at least 100 times. So the higher the number of times you're going to repeat it, the more you're going to want it. Sometimes I also think about something called the tattoo rule. Like if I could take this skill, tattoo it on my body or my brain so I would never forget it, would I rather have that or the money back to learn it? Pretty quickly you're going to realize the things that you'd use again and again and again, you wish that you could tattoo on your brain. And that's when you decide the skills that stick. My most important skills ever? Negotiation. That's why I obsess on people learning how to buy businesses. Sales, because CEO is Chief Sales Officer. Operations and processes. That's why we actually run an entire event learning how to run a business. Because even if you're the best salesperson, if you don't understand profitability, you're going to go out of business, which is actually what we're teaching live at our event on September 18th. It will be every single step I've used to buy a business. I can promise you, If you learn the game of business, which is really the game of money, it's really hard to go broke. The most important thing to upgrade going forward, we've talked about it before, is your time. I want you to think about the most unhinged things you could do right now to buy back your time. For me, that's like my nail lady comes to my office every single time I get it done. I never go to the nail salon. By the way, so does my hair and makeup artist. So does the person who even dyes my hair comes into the office. So does my Stylist who brings me clothes. Oh, by the way, so does my chef who drops off my food here. I know I sound like a really high-maintenance broad, but how else do you build a 9-figure company plus have a husband that you love and hang out with, plus be pregnant, plus like want to have friends and family and travel around? Like, this is where I buy back all my time from all the nonsense. And I swear to God, you guys, somebody is going to tell you, this is so dumb, must be nice. And I'm going to tell you, that's why that person will never be as successful as you want to be. I know a lot of people don't like to hear this, but you are the biggest reason why you aren't successful. And it is typically because you are not valuing your time properly. And the second you break through that and you get out of your head what I used to think too, which is this is so elitist having all this stuff like this is kind of gross buying all of that. Can't you do anything for yourself? It's like the FIRE movement infected our brains and made us think that In order to have a good life, we had to be minimal and be in the FIRE movement and save every penny. No, no, guys, the world's hugely abundant. There's more money and opportunity and wealth than you can ever imagine out here. And the best thing is, at a certain point, it doesn't have to cost you more time to do it all. In fact, you can work less, have more fun, and make more once you learn this thing that only rich people do.