The 6-Step Formula To Become A MILLIONAIRE In 2023 (How To Build Wealth) | Jaspreet Singh

So this is where you want to create a financial system and start investing your money because your savings will never make you wealthy. You cannot save your way to wealth. You have to, I think you got.

To have a dream.

The School of Greatness. Really? Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes. So someone wants to become financially free to be able to retire within 15 years.

Yeah.

I want to talk about that.

Sure.

I want to talk about it at different stages of life. If you're in your 20s to your 30s, if you're in your 30s to your 40s, I want to talk about that. what would be like a step by step approach from first the mindset standpoint, which is your thing. Thinking of the mindset, okay, I want to retire in 15 years. How do I have to think to then the actual actions that people need to take in order to get there? And what does retirement actually look like?

That's a good question. So let me, I'm gonna give you a quick formula and then I'm gonna break it down because I have created, it's not very complex, but I created this wealth formula which breaks it down into a very simple almost mathematical thing where it's you take your income, you subtract your expenses and that equals your investments plus your savings. Income plus income minus expenses equals your investments plus your savings. So if you want to become wealthy it ultimately comes down to having more investments. Your savings are not there to make you wealthy, they're there to protect you against an emergency. your investments are what make you wealthy. So if you want to become wealthy sooner or if you want to become a wealthy-er- you- need more investments. You need more investments. How do you do that? Well, if it's your income minus your expenses, it's basic math. Either increase your income, decrease your expenses, or do both. So that's the ultimate formula. So now if we talk about, let's break it down step by step on how do you actually do it. Six steps. And this is, no matter what age.

You are, these are the six steps that you want to follow. Before you get into the six steps.

What is the mindset that someone needs to think about? Step number one is build the mindset. so step number one is you need to have the right mindset. Okay. So this is why I call myself the minority mindset and, you know, the brand minority mindset, because it's all about thinking differently than the majority of people. Because if you follow what the majority of people do in 80 to 90 of situations, you're probably doing something wrong. And you'll be in debt and you'll.

Be paying off debts and loans for the rest of your life.

The majority of people are broke. The majority of people are living paycheck to paycheck. The majority of people are drowning in debt. The majority of people have zero to no Investments. The majority of people are unhappy, the majority of people are miserable, and the majority of people do not like their jobs. This is not me exaggerating. These are all statistical numbers where more than 50% of people feel this way. And so if now you keep doing what everybody else does, you're going to end up like everybody else. And so this is where now you want to think a little bit different and try to find what's right for you and start to get educated yourself. Because when it comes to the mindset, the first thing you have to understand is that it is possible. Because if you're sitting there saying, it's not possible for someone like me, somebody who has my background, my parents, my whatever, I can't become successful, I 100% guarantee that you will not be able to become successful. You cannot change your outcome without changing your mindset.

Oh, that's big.

And in the previous interview we had, we talked about mindset versus toolset, where most of the times we assume that the reason why we can't become successful is because we lack the toolset, when in reality for 90% of people it's lacking the right mindset. Because when you have the right mindset, you'll discover that the toolset is right around you. So it's first believing that you can do it. Because once you know and believe that you can do it, that belief is going to then impact your decisions. Because now you can say, you know what, yeah, maybe I can become successful. What are you going to do? You're going to go into YouTube, watch videos. How do I become successful? Then you start watching videos, maybe start binging bitchy videos. And now you start to realize, oh, okay, I can start to do this. I can change this about my life. I need to change the way I think. I need to change my actions. I need to do more things in my day. I need to stop watching so much Netflix. I need to do this. Then maybe you start reading books and now you start reading business books because I have read a lot of business books and there's so much wealth in a $20 business book. Just go on to Audible, look at some of the top business books and just start reading them and you will learn so much. Now you start reading. Now maybe you start doing a little bit. Maybe you don't succeed too much, but you start taking some action and you start to learn even more because your experiences are some of the best teachers teachers in the world, even if you make mistakes. I have learned from my mistakes. I didn't have a mentor. I didn't have guidance. I didn't have investment family members. I didn't have people telling me how entrepreneurship works. I screwed up a ton, just like you. We made a ton of mistakes and that's how we learned. And then maybe you go and take a class. Now you're like, okay, I want to learn how to do this. I'm trying to build this business. I'm doing something wrong. I'm trying to get a better job or I'm trying to get a raise. I keep doing something wrong. you've read books, now maybe you find a class, you invest some money in this class, and now you have more education, now you try more, and now you start to see over time, oh my God, 12 months ago I had no idea, I didn't even believe that I can do it. Now that I believe that I can do it, I started watching YouTube videos, I started reading books, I started taking classes, I started taking action, and then you keep doing it. Maybe you hire a coach, maybe you hire a consultant. I mean, the list goes on and on and on of what you can do, but it all first starts with the mindset, because if you tell yourself you can't, your mindset does that. down and you're never gonna find an opportunity. You're never gonna look for the opportunity. So that's where the mindset is the most important thing. And if you don't have the right mindset, this is where the first thing you want to do is start learning how do I build self-esteem? How do I build my confidence? How do I believe in myself? And there's, I don't have a ton of videos on this. I know you have a ton of videos on this. Watch Lewis's stuff, right? So start there. Then we go a little bit deeper now for focusing on finances.

Mindset is number one.

Mindset is number one. The second thing now, once you build the right mindset is you want to create your financial base. And the best way to understand this is just to think, if you wanted to build a house, what do you do first? Well, you gotta- Foundation. You gotta build the foundation. If you want to build a bigger house, if you want to build a bigger house, you want to dig a deeper foundation. You want to build a tall building, you need an even deeper foundation. So you have to start by building your financial base. And what that means, financially is first you want to save $2,000 at the very least you want to put aside some cash for savings as fast as possible because right now it's something like 40 to 70% of Americans don't have, well 40% of Americans don't have $1,000 to put aside and something close to 70% of Americans don't even have 400% $400 put aside to protect them against an emergency so the you know most Americans don't have $1,000 put aside get.

A $2,000 bet get a two grade.

As fast as possible and then you need to cut the financial bleeding. That means your high interest debts, your credit card debts, your hard money loans, your 0% APR loans, which are now charging you 20% to 25%. These need to be paid off as fast as possible because these are loans that are skinning you alive financially.

So, I mean, it seems like credit cards are one of the biggest things that hold people back.

Look, credit cards are a tool. They are a tool.

If you're not educated with them, you can get stuck.

If you have this tool without the education, it will burn you. I only spend with a credit card. I spend with a credit card because.

I know how to use a tool.

And now because I know how to use my credit card, what happens? Well, I don't spend more than I would otherwise because I use my credit card just as a medium of exchange. I'm gonna spend this money anyways. I might as well use my credit card. When my credit card gives me gives me perks, it gives me cash back, it gives me fraud protection, it gives me free insurance, it gives me hotel upgrades, it gives me all these things just because I use my credit card instead of paying with cash. And so now again, it's the financial education because now some people will say, oh my God, these credit card companies are scams. Well, the reason why they're looked at as scams is because we don't have the right education on how to use them. It's a tool without the education on how to use it. And this is where now you have to build that financial education and money times you're going to have to go out and do it yourself because your credit card company is not incentivized to give you the financial education because they're going to make less money. Right? It's profitable to keep people poor. It's profitable to keep people financially uneducated because now if you just keep spending money in your credit card because you have no idea what you're doing, now your credit card company is going to get rich. The average household in America has $6,200 with the credit card debt. So if you have credit card debt in America, you probably have an average of $6,200. Wow. Now, let's talk about that. Because if-- and what's the interest on that? Well, that's at 15 to 25, 28%. Every month-- so every month you're paying that.

You're paying it every month.

So it's not 6,000 a month.

It's really, you know, over years if you never fully pay it off, you're just paying more and more and more.

And the interest rate on your credit card isn't fixed rate, it's variable interest rate. So as the Federal Reserve Bank raises interest rates, the interest rate on your credit card also goes up. So if you are 21 years old right now, and you invested $6,200, which is the average household credit card debt right now, if you invest $6,200 right now and you got a 20% return on your money, and you did that for the next 45, 46 years, you are going to retire with $20 million. $20 million. And you never invest another penny again.

Say it more times.

If you invest $6,200 today, and you never invest another penny again, At 21. At 21 and you get a 20% return on your money, you're gonna retire with 20 million. Wow. And you're gonna say, Just please, where in the world am I gonna get 20% return on my money year after year? You're right, but your credit card company is doing it every single day. Wow. They're charging you. And so when you have that sort of credit card debt, that's you making your credit card company richer. Now, you know, whether or not you think it's a scam, look, let's move past and understand what's going on. That way now you can use it to your advantage, because I get tens of thousands of dollars worth of cash back every year from my credit card company because I use it as a tool and I understand how to use it. And this is where, look, if you don't want to use a credit card, it doesn't matter. But just don't, if you have credit card debt, you have to pay that off because that is skinning you alive right now. Understand the financial education aspect. So that's the first thing you want to do is create your financial base. So you got to save some cash, then you got to pay that credit card debt off. Cut the financial bleeding. Cut the financial bleeding.

What's the strategy? If you got three credit cards, what's.

The strategy to to getting rid of that debt. So Dave Ramsey is going to tell you to do something called the snowball method. The smallest first.

Smallest first to the biggest.

Because you're building momentum, right? A financial advisor may tell you the opposite, do the debt avalanche, which is now pay the highest interest rate first and then go down because now you're going to pay off the most interest first, so it costs you the most money in the long term. The reason why Dave Ramsey recommends the snowball method is because psychologically, when you get those small wins of paying something off, you feel like you're winning and you can pay it off faster. A advisor is going to look at the math and say, hey, look, these numbers are telling me that pay off the higher interest rate first because it's going to save you the most money over the long term. Which one's right? Again, I'm not going to say which one. Do what's best for you because I know if I was in the situation, I'm not. I like the idea of paying down the heavy interest rate first because that's how my brain works. I don't need the small wins like that. I can work for the long term. I think, you know, the entrepreneurial mindset where, you know, I know how my mind works, so I understand myself. And this is just honestly being open and honest with yourself. If you can't stay true with it, then do with the snowball. It does not matter. Screw painted off a few months early. Just get it away and pay it off as fast as possible.

Cut the financial bleeding and have a $2,000 base. That's step two.

Okay. That's step two. Now the next thing you want to do is what I call lead your money. So this is where you want to create a financial system and start investing your money because your savings will never make you wealthy. You cannot save your way to wealth. You have to invest your money. Your savings won't make you wealthy because of what we've talked about in previous interviews, inflation.

You're losing money in the savings.

If inflation is higher than the interest rate you're getting at the bank, then your savings are effectively making you poorer each and every day because your savings are losing value to inflation. Now, does this mean you should not save any money? No. It means you need to save your money strategically. So you want to save your money for three reasons and three reasons only. Save your money for an emergency. Save your money for a big purchase. If you want to buy a car, you want to buy a house, you want to buy a nice watch, whatever you want to buy, you need cash in order to do that. And then three, save your money for an investment. If you're not saving your money for one of these three reasons, you're saving your money the wrong way. and it is making you poorer by saving that money. So now we focus on the first aspect of saving your money for an emergency, how much do you save? This is now again going to depend on your risk tolerance. You want to save somewhere between three to 12 months worth of your expenses. And the amount of money you save is going to depend on where you are in life and how much risk you're willing to take on. If you're like, hey dude, I'm 25 years old, I don't have any financial responsibilities, I don't need that much savings, fine. save a few months worth of savings and that's it. Invest more aggressively. If you're like, hey, I have a family, I have kids, I have a spouse, I don't want to take on all this risk, then save six months, nine months, a year's worth of savings because now it will give you that peace of mind that you have some extra cash put aside. So it's going to depend on your risk tolerance and what you want. But this, in this Legion money step, this is where you want to understand that there's more to putting your money aside than just saving your money. You also want to be putting your money to work. And the best way to do this is to create a system where no matter how much money you're making, you are going to proportionately continually invest and save based off your income. So what does that mean? Well, one of the simplest things you can do is follow something like percentage, my 75 1510 plan, which means for every dollar that you earn, 75 cents is the maximum that you can spend. 15 cents is the minimum that you invest and 10 cents is the minimum that you save. And this never changes with your income. The only thing that you would ever change is after you hit that savings goal for your emergency savings, you don't keep saving your money for the emergency because you built that whatever months you want, you put that towards your investments. Yes. And now whether you're making 40 grand 400 grand, 4 million, 40 million. You just keep following the same thing and you're living below your means and now you're constantly putting money aside for investments. Now again, we talked about this before. This investment money can either be passively invested, all of it, or you can put this money aside to be invested. So you can put this money into a bank account, you're looking for a rental property, you're looking for a business to buy, you're looking for a cheap stock to buy. This now depends on your investment goals. Right? Where do you want to be invested? How do you want to invest your money? And this is that financial education now of, you know, what do you want to do and your personal goals? If you don't want to be involved with your money, you don't want to be, hey, day-to-day investing or paying attention to the markets, you hate that idea, just passively invest it. Right. Put it into low-cost ETFs, index funds, and don't even worry about it and let it do its thing. You don't change it whether the market's up or down. So this is where now you're putting your money to work. leading your money because real wealth is built through your investments, not through your savings, because you don't want to be spending all your money either, because if you're spending all your money on the Gucci, the Louis Vuitton, the Beamers and the extra guac, well, guess what? Gucci's making money, Louis Vuitton's making money, Chipotle's making money, BMW's making money, but you're the one that's making all them rich. And so if you say, I want to become wealthy, but you have no savings, and yet you have all this nice stuff, you look rich, but the stuff that's looking rich is making you broke.

Making you broke, yeah.

So, you know, you're paying the price to look rich, which there's nothing wrong with that, but you just have to understand what your goals are. If you say, hey, I don't really care about building wealth, I just wanna have nice stuff, it's a free country, it's your choice. But if you say, I wanna have wealth, you have no investments, and you're spending money on all this stuff, this is where you wanna rethink what you're doing. and understand what it is that you want and make sure that your actions are aligning with your goals. Your lifestyle is aligning with what you want to do.

I mean, you can't keep lying to yourself. That's why you should put your money.

Not in buying the bag, but in buying the stock every week. Exactly. Exactly. Right. Own the company, own the places where you're spending your money. And, you know, again, there's nothing wrong with having nice stuff. Right. What I'm trying to say, what I'm trying to. Just. Just be able to afford it. Yeah. You know what? Don't go to a credit card with it. Don't go into a credit card with it. If you want. you want a nice watch, you want a nice house, you want a nice car, fine. Just make sure you can afford it first. And this brings me now to the next step, which I call interest-free living. And now this is where we're gonna go a little bit deeper of how do you actually spend your money. Because in the American culture, it is very normal to be in debt. It's very normal to buy things that you can't afford. And before it was with credit cards, now it's with this new thing called buy now pay later. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm very much involved in the financial space. I'm very much involved in the fintech space. Buy now pay later with the last couple of years is arguably the fastest growing sector in fintech.

They're crushing it, right?

They're crushing it. I have not invested any money into buy now pay later apps because I don't believe in it.

However, it's putting more people in the debt kind of.

The way that they work is you can buy something now and worry about the price later. Now, the pitch to consumers, to people is, well, you don't have to pay any interest. It's kind of like the housing market back in the day.

It rhymes, it rhymes.

History rhymes, right? But the whole idea that they say is you don't got to pay any interest, just pay it off over, say, 12 months or six months, which doesn't seem like a bad idea. Why would I want to pay $1,000 for a laptop today if I could just pay it off in installments and not pay any interest for the next 12 months? Yeah. Well, if that's the case, why is it such a fast growing industry? I mean, no one's going to invest billions of dollars into something if they're not going to see any sort of financial return. I mean, they've got to, the most expensive kind of money is free money. So if they're giving you money for free, how are they going to make money from it? Well, let's where we dig a little bit deeper.

If you don't get past your, if you don't pay in your 12 months, then what?

So that's the first part. If you don't pay it off, Now you get slapped with a very, very hefty, hefty fine, a very, very hefty fee where now you're paying a massive interest rate, essentially like a credit card. And they're just acting like a credit card. It's the same concept where you get a little bit of a grace period. But the second aspect is, if you want to buy a laptop for $1,000 and you need $1,000 to buy it.

Well, you got to have $1,000.

But if you don't have to pay for it now, you still have the $1,000 in your bank account, maybe 900. And now what happens? I can go buy more stuff for.

100 bucks a month. That's a thousand dollars and more and more.

So it allows people to spend even more to lock in all the stuff. So you have a whole bunch of stuff and all your money is going out to pay for the stuff that you bought yesterday. A year ago now. A year ago.

And then if you can't pay it.

Off in time because that's ultimately, oh man, you know, their goal. If you can't pay it off in time, now you get slapped with all that interest, all these fees, and now you're the one that's got to pay it off. So this is where you have to understand the spending aspect of how do you spend your money because again, these things are tools.

I wonder how many people, you know, this is going into our previous interview. I wonder how many people signed up for more credit cards since 2020 and also signed up for more, bought more things with this Buy Now Pay Later. I wonder if there's data out there.

On this, which will give us a.

More indication, hey, 12 to 24 months from now, man, people need to either make double the money or they're going to be going into a lot more debt.

So in terms of the number of credit cards, I don't have an answer off the top of my head, but what I do know is the amount of money spent on the credit cards, because in 2020, when the pandemic hit, we saw the fastest pay down of credit card debt ever. Really? Which was great because now you're sitting at home, you have very little expenses. You don't got to pay a mortgage, mortgages and forbearance, a lot of people are not paying their rent, you don't got to pay student loans, you're not going out to- you-'re not going drinking. You-'re not going out, right? So you have very little expenses and then many people are now getting unemployment checks, you're getting stimulus checks, you have more money coming in and many people actually became wealthier because of this situation. So it's extra cash, some people spent it, Some people invested it, some people paid down their debt. And we saw the biggest credit card debt paid down in the history of.

Time in 2020, which is-- It's all.

From free money though. Well, at the end of the day, at least you're using it for the right purpose. That's true. So that was great. It's great. People paid down their debt. Well, then what happened towards the end of 2021 into 2022 was the economy opened back up. People started spending. You wanted to go out and this pent up demand, you want to start traveling, you want to eat out again, you want to have fun again. Fine, but then we were also hit with inflation. Everything is so expensive. Now you've been waiting to travel, you've been waiting to eat out, you've been waiting to do all this stuff. And it costs so much more expensive. So now what do you do? Well, I don't got any credit card debt. Let me go put it on my credit card. And so over the last number of months, we have seen the fastest growth of credit card debt in the history of time. And this is the situation where we paid it off. And now we're going right back into it. Maybe because you're like, hey, I got room to spend. And second, because everything is so expensive, I can't afford groceries, I can't afford gas. And so it's this whole mindset.

It all goes back to point number one, mindset.

The mindset, the education. It is so, so, so crucial. And this is where now, in this step, you can make that decision. First, you have to understand how to spend your money. And then you can understand now, what do you do? with the rest? Do you want to pay down the mortgage? Right. Do you want to pay off something like that? Or do you want to invest your money? And this is really an individualized question because the simple math is if your mortgage is costing you, say, 5% a year and you can get an 8% return on your investment, you can invest your money, get a better return, pay off your mortgage and have some money in your pocket. It's a no-brainer. So if you can invest your money, get a better return, why would you not do that? Well, because investing comes with risk versus paying off your mortgage does not. Because when you pay off your mortgage, you get a guaranteed 5% return on your money because now if you pay it off a year early, you get a guaranteed 5% return versus when you invest your money, it comes with risk.

Might go up, might go down.

Might go up, might go down. And so now the question again is what type of life do you want to live? Do you want to say, you know what? I just don't want to have to worry about my mortgage payment. I just want to be financially free, never have to stress about money and just be okay. Then pay down the mortgage. Because now once you pay down the mortgage, your biggest expense is gone. You own your house free and clear. You still got to pay property taxes, but at least now the biggest expense is gone and you're going to breathe so much easier when you don't have a mortgage to pay. But if you say, you know what, Jaspreet, I want to live big. I want to have the nice stuff. I want to have the big things. I want to be flashy. Nothing wrong with that. I want to have it all. Okay, that's fine. Then you don't want to be trying to get a 5% return. You want to invest this money in the markets. You want to invest this in your business. You want to invest this in your education. You want to invest this in yourself because now you can get a much better return. Is it riskier? Absolutely. But your mindset is somewhere else, right? You want to get a different type of return. And this is why you're investing into the things that can give you a better return because that's what you want. Right. But you just have to understand that it comes with risk. and if you're not comfortable with that, then do the first. So this is where you just have to understand you and understand what type of life you want to live. But the key here is you don't want to put yourself back into the situation that got you here in the first place, where if you have the credit card debt, you gotta know how to spend your money that way you don't end up there again. One of the simplest things to do is now to understand the difference between being able to buy something and being able to afford something. And one of the things that I like to say is just follow my rule of five. if you can't buy five of them, you can't afford one of them.

The houses are expensive though.

Well, houses are an exception. It's different. So we're talking everything else. More our liabilities. You want to buy a Gucci belt? You want to buy a $200 Gucci belt? Fine. Can't buy five, don't buy one. Can't buy five, don't buy one. Gotcha. The house is different. The house is an exception. That's the only thing. Oh, houses is the one exception here where, you know, when it comes to your liabilities, that's the only liability that would say it's okay to finance. because everything else, you know, your Gucci belts, your clothes, your vacations, you should not be financing that because it's not putting any money in your pocket and that's a clear liability. You don't want to be financing that stuff.

Right, right.

So that's where now you want to understand how to spend your money and then where to put your money towards.

Interest free living.

Yes. And then this brings me now to the next part, which is what I call multiplier income, where, you know, going back to the wealth formula, whereas income minus expenses equal your investments plus your savings. We talked about how to save your money. We talked about how to invest your money. We talked about how to manage your expenses. But now let's talk about the income because if now you understand how to live below your means, you understand how to put your money to work, if you want to put fuel on the fire, you just got to earn more money. Now if you earn $100,000, you earn a million dollars, you earn whatever, you earn more money, Now, you know how to put this money through your system, through your funnel, whether 75, 15, 10 or whatever else, you know how to take this extra money, put it to work, that way you have more money to invest, more money to save, more money to live your life. But the key is you don't want to 100% increase your lifestyle to match your income. You want to increase your income with your investments.

And keep expenses the same.

Keep it ideally. Now you can marginally increase your expenses, but the key is you want to be increasing your income and your investments way more. So the question is how do you do that? Well, this is where again, understand you. If you are an employee, you don't want to start a business, you don't want to start a side hustle, fine, nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with being an employee, you just have to understand you. But that means now how can you earn more money? If you like your job, look for ways to get a raise. to get a promotion, see how you can get a bonus, just be open with your boss, say, hey, look, I want to be able to contribute more. I want to earn more money. What can I do? Most people are going to be very open and honest, say, hey, I would like you to attack on this, this and this, do this, and then we will help raise your salary. Maybe if you don't like your job, you go and get a certificate, you go and do something else. You need to figure out now how.

You can earn your increase your income, maybe you can get a raise. What value can you bring to the business to bring in more money for the business? or save more time or create some system so that the business can say, okay, cool, let's give you more opportunities for growth.

Exactly. I mean, if you can bring in an extra $10,000 a year to the business of profit, they're not going to have a problem paying you $5,000 or whatever it might be. Right? And this is where you just want to be open because every business is different. Maybe take on a second job and, you know, it's just figuring out how can you earn more money there. Now, if you say, well, I want to do something outside of my job, Fine. Well, the first thing you can do is start a side hustle. So much more accessible now than ever before. I mean, you can go on to the internet, become a virtual assistant, you can become a copywriter, you can become a designer, you can become a video editor. I have paid, so Upwork, they're not paying me. Upwork is a platform that I use to hire freelancers. And I did a video on this, so I looked this up. In the last two years or three years, I have spent more than a quarter million dollars on Upwork alone.

Wow. On different individuals.

Different individuals. just hiring people in different areas who don't work for me. They work on their own schedule because now this freelancing business has grown so much. And so there's a lot of opportunity there where now you can, if you can present a service, you can make money doing that. Yeah.

They might be working an extra 5, 10, 20 hours a week on the side, or they might just be full-time freelancers.

Yeah. Yeah. And you get to set your hours for the most part. You can really do something that you like, that you enjoy, that you're good at. So there's a lot of opportunity there where now you can be a freelancer or start your own side hustle. you have an idea, one of my buddies, his mom is really good at making cakes. And she started this, what is it called, carrot cake business. They're making a good, I don't know how much, maybe I think it's like 700 or $1,000 a month selling carrot cakes from Instagram. He markets on Instagram, people say, Hey, can you make me a cake? His mom makes the cake and he delivers it. Sure, sure. It's just the number of opportunities, now of course as an attorney, I should say there are liabilities to selling food, get insurance and all that, but this is where there are so many opportunities, right? Just being a hustler, just getting yourself out there, figuring it out, and there's an unlimited amount of possibilities and opportunities out there. Now, if you want to take it one step further, you could try to build your own business. Your side hustle can turn into your own business. If you have a business idea, invest in it. First, invest in your mind, invest in your education, and then try to do it. You want to invest as little money as possible until you start generating revenue. Like again, mindset versus tool set. We assume that we need all these tools to start doing it, but the reality is the first thing you need is your mind because there's a lot of alternatives on how you can do it. Like when I started, I started as a sock company a number of years ago when I was trying to figure things out and it was a water resistant sock. Yeah, yeah. And the interesting thing was I knew nothing about socks. How do you manufacture socks? How do you make them waterproof? And so I was working with textile engineers. I was working with manufacturing companies. I was working with a lot of different people. I didn't have a lot of money. And they wanted, and now we're talking about a real product. So I learned to talk and essentially I did not, I think my total cost to build my first round of socks was $3,500. It's not a lot of money, but relative to what if you want a manufacturer products and create a product to go through the prototype after prototype to prototype. It costs typically $100,000 plus. I did it for under four grand because I was able to talk to them. I used to talk about the potential and I worked with them to build out these special deals where, Hey, work with me here and, you know, I'll work with you in the future. Exactly. And we were able to get it going. So it's the ability to hustle, be willing to find a way and that's that mindset that sometimes too much money can be a disease, especially if you want to be a side hustler or a business, because now you just start spending money. I've been a victim of that too. I'll just give examples like the minority mindset blog. I didn't know how to build a blog and my time was so eaten up with things like market briefs, talking about building this tax business, although that's much newer, but building my companies, building my YouTube channel, doing all these other things, investing in real estate that I didn't really care about building a blog, like I cared about it, but I didn't have the brain capacity and the time to sit here and come up with a strategy to do it. So I outsourced it. I hired some of literally the top blog managers in the world and they charged me a lot of money, like as in six figures plus, $100,000 plus to manage the blog and they promised all this stuff. I was like, fine, do it. So $100,000 for the blog manager, at least another $100,000 on blog content over the course of 12 months. And guess what?

No results.

Zero. Nothing. The worst. What did I do? Too much money problem. I said, I don't got the time, just gonna throw money at it. Hopefully that will fix the problem. Because if you can get the top blog manager, you can hire people to write. It's easy, right? Well, after those 12 months, the contract was over. fired them. And this is where I was like, all right, you know what? Let me figure this out. Because I do want to build a blog. And so we build a brand new strategy. It costs us a fraction, like a teeny tiny fraction of what we were paying before.

We get bigger results.

And our blog is growing, we're generating revenue now. I mean, it's a complete turnaround, but it's that mindset versus tool set.

Yes.

And these are real stories, real things that I have gone through. So you need to know now how do you multiply your income and understand that you don't need thousands of dollars. My first business, I started with nothing. Essentially, when I started my event planning company, I started a minority mindset with under a few hundred dollars. Yeah. When I was making videos off my cell phone, you just need some hustle.

Some creativity, some actions, some consistency, some relationships, some communication, and just making stuff happen.

The hustle, man. That's why I always say keep Hustling at the end of my videos because that hustle mentality is so crucial and you can't teach that you can't read that in books yous have to actually live it. Yes. And so this is right now if you want to really do that you have to understand the hustle mentality in order to put it to work. And this brings me now to the be great aspect. The last part now, speaking my language. Exactly right. Exactly greatness. So you've built the base you're putting some money to work, you're leading your money, you are either paying off your home or you're understanding how to use your extra cash the right way, you're increasing your income, that way you can build your wealth even faster. Now it's all about being great. And there's two aspects to this. The first aspect that I want to talk about is protecting yourself, because the reality is when people realize that you have money, they're going to try to take their hand, put it in your pocket and keep some for themselves.

You know, to pause on you there, I remember hearing Oprah talk about this one time years ago. I heard her on some podcast or somewhere she said something like as she started to rise to fame with her talk show and started to make a lot more money. What do you think happened? Everyone's reaching out with a handout, right? Oh, you got money now. Can you help me with the thousand dollars here? Can you help me with this? Well, you've made the money. Can you help me? Yeah, she said. I'm paraphrasing this, but after, like, I don't know, a decade of this or something, it just felt like everyone was using her.

Yeah.

As opposed to just being in a relationship with her and having an actual friendship or relationship. And she said that she decided after a period of time, she was tired of just giving, giving, giving, giving to people who had a handout. And so she said, I'm gonna do a big dinner and I'm gonna invite everyone. Friends, family, everyone, third cousins, twice removed, everyone who's been asked for a handout, I'm gonna invite them.

All.

And she said, like, she gave out, she had this massive dinner for everyone, like all of everything you could eat. And she started giving out envelopes and gifts and cars and cash. And just like, she gave out gifts based on what she wanted to give to each person.

Yeah.

Everyone got something. And she said, she gave a speech at the end and said, this is all I'm going to give you. Don't ask for anything else from me after this. and she said, still people were complaining, oh, you gave this person 10 grand. I only got 5, 000. It's like you got to learn to protect yourself mentally, psychologically, financially, because you could just be giving and giving and giving. It can never end. Right.

Right. 100.

And so how do you do this?

That's. That's a huge relationship aspect. I'm gonna take it one step a little bit deeper on the legal side because. you're absolutely right. You know, I struggle with that relationship side as well because...

I'm not saying don't be generous, but also it's like when you feel like you're being taken advantage of, then it becomes challenging.

So my family is from a state in India called Punjab. And what happens a lot of people is you come here to America or to somewhere like Canada. My family came to America and your family is in India and they think, oh my God, you're wealthy in America, so you're working your butt off here. while sending money back to India. So, you know, my parents did this, my dad did this a lot where especially when we were young, he wasn't making a lot of money, but he was always sending money back to his siblings or people just to help take care of them because that's our culture, to help take care of people. And it becomes difficult because, you know, it's that for at least for me, that cultural aspect of giving, which I like taking care of family, but then also not making them reliant on you because now once you start giving, then this thing, well, I'm telling you to step up. Yeah. And so it's a very tough balance. And I don't have a good answer for you here because, you know, I do like taking care of people. I like helping people, especially, you know, within my family. I, you know, I want to make sure I can take care of everyone. That's why I work hard, because I want to make sure that I can give you. And so when I, because I, I have given money to people around me, my family and my friends, the way that I look at it is I don't want that money back. I know when I give you money, I'm never gonna ask for it back and I don't want it back. If you give it back to me, maybe I'll take it, but I'm never gonna ask for it back and I will give based off of what I can. But I know that's money in my mind. I'm never getting back and I have to be okay with that for myself. And if I'm okay with that, that's fine. And I think that's one of those things where I don't. Because I don't want to mess up the relationship. Right. With my family, that's more important to me. And so, look. if I'm okay giving you $1,000, here's $1,000. Never talk to me about it again. Right. And really that's it. And if I see you blow that money in dumb ways, that's what when you ask me for another grand, you're not getting it. Yeah. You know, it's as simple as that. I'm going to forget about it. I don't like arguing over money. I think that's very dirty and evil. So, you know, I am generous in that sense.

But, you know, I'm also very straightforward.

Where if I feel like, hey, I'm not going to give it to you, I'm not going to do it. Yeah. But I also don't sit here and ask for it back. But you're talking about protecting yourself legally. Legally. which means now having the right advisors, accountants, and insurance to protect you. And so when you start earning money, people are going to try to reach into your pockets and get it. Also legally, I had a tenant in one of my properties, Suma Real Estate Company, because they said that the bathtub got too slippery when the water was on. Geez. And because it was so slippery when the water was on, It caused them to slip and fall, which then- It's a bathtub. It's a bathtub with water. And because of that, they wanted damages for injuries.

But you just have to defend yourself even if it's not your problem.

And so this is where how do you protect yourself? So I had a couple things. One, I had an LLC. Second, I had- Renters insurance or yeah. And third, I had a property manager company. Property management company. And so I'll go through the different layers so you can see all the different levels of insurance and how they worked because now The first thing that happens is my property management company documented everything because prior to them slipping, they made a complaint that there was about a quarter inch by quarter inch chip in the bathtub. And they said, oh, there's a little paint chip. We want to get this fixed. So my contractor goes out there. He says, okay, yeah, we can fix this. And my contractor said, you know, the tenants here are kind of old. Let's install them a handicap pool just to be nice. We weren't required to do this. We were fully licensed by the city, but my contractor offered to do this. So now they go back to do the work. The tenants say, We don't want you to do it. We're tired. He goes back to do it again. They said, We don't want you to do it. The tenant slipped and fell at a barbecue. They go back and said, no, he's still injured from the barbecue. So we have notes of all this. Sure. And then they go and say that they slipped and fell in the bathtub. We have records of all this where they said they slipped and fell at a barbecue. And now they're saying they slipped and fell in the bathtub. Why are they doing that? Well, maybe they can try to get some money out of the quote unquote rich landlord. I was a very young kid at this time. I was still in college trying to dig into those pockets thinking that, oh, if he's a real estate investor, he must have a lot of money. And so they used one of those free attorneys to go after my insurance. So now I have insurance. So now my insurance company gives me an attorney to protect me through this process. And the judge laughed at the case. Even the attorney laughed at the case. He was like, look, man, this is just, they're just trying to grab money. There's nothing here. It's a frivolous so we just have to do it. And the insurance company wants to settle because it's cheaper to settle than to pay $350 to $400 an hour to the attorney to fight it and actually win the case. And so that's where the insurance came in and protected me, they fought me for me and defended me and then paid out the settlement. Now, if it had escalated further, that's where the LLC protects me, just where you want to have a good attorney there to recommend what's best for you. because that LLC then kind of creates a shield where you can only take what the LLC owns and you can't go after my personal assets. So if the LLC only owns that property, you can't go after anything that I own because the LLC is what owns the real estate. So you want to make sure you protect yourself there. Right. So this is where having those right shields to protect you are so important because especially in America, we are the most litigious country in the world. and you want to make sure you protect yourself against that. And there's a funny saying in real estate that if you haven't been sued as a real estate investor, you haven't been in business long enough.

Wow.

So it's just one of those things where you want to protect yourself.

I think people also gotta also understand this is a full contact sport, you know, learning how to follow these six steps that you've laid out, which I think are great. But learning how to be an investor, it doesn't come easy for everyone right away. You're going to make some mistakes, there's going to be some challenges to face, and the longer you're in it, you just have to deal with stuff that's not fun. This is something you had to deal with. There's probably months of a back and forth thing, and there's some stress, there's some worry, there's conversation, it's time, it's energy with insurance, with lawyers, just to deal with something that even isn't your fault. 100%.

And you know, this is just one of the realities of being an investor and entrepreneur where, you know, understanding the aspects and there are going to be some things that are not fun. Like I talked about in our previous podcast, the tax issue. Oh, no. It was a, where my accountant calls me up saying that, hey, just briefly, this is nine in the morning. You owe $100,000 by the end of the day. Sucks. Send it into the IRS. That sucks. And now I have to go figure out how to do this, send it in. And then he tells me that I also have to to pay a penalty on this because he did something wrong. So it's one of those things that's not fun. It's a problem. But then as an entrepreneur, how do you find the opportunity? Well, first I fired the accountant. I go on the hunt for a new accountant, a new tax advisor. I start working with this new tax advisor and I see the difference between a bad accountant and a good accountant. I start learning, wow, you're telling me that every month we can meet and you can advise me on what I can do with my money. That way I can legally limit my tax liability, and you're going to do all this work in advance, and I don't have to worry about this ever. I love that. Now, with my entrepreneurial brain, I'm like, let's start working together, because there's so many small businesses that need this. It is a real problem because there's a lot of bad accountants out there, and we need more good accountants. We need more good tax advisors who's going to help people, especially in this new age where we have more IRS agents joining the workforce. We have a lot of things changing. We're probably going to see a change in tax laws, so you want to make sure that you're taking care of yourself. So this is one of the things that I'm working on with him is to fix that. We don't have a website or anything, so if you want to learn more, shoot me a DM on Instagram@minoritymindset or email me at team@themminoritymindset.com But this is just one of those things where you want to make sure you have the right resources there to first be great to protect yourself for your family, and I'm going to take that one step further because as an attorney, you also want to make sure you have the right estate planning in place because this is one of those things that is really not fun. but so crucial if you build any sort of wealth, you want to tell.

The world and when I die, where's it go?

Where's it gonna go? Because if you don't, your family is gonna fight over it.

Oh, man.

And it's not fun because no one wants to think about what happens after I die. But it is so, so, so important because when you die, you don't want your family fighting at your funeral. And so create a will. create a trust, have an estate planning attorney that can help guide you there because you never want to have to worry about that. And the second aspect of being great is being great for the world where the more you have, the more you can do. You can give back, Norah. You can do more things, whether it's your money, whether it's your time, whether it's your education, because when you can light a candle, well, you can light one candle, but that one candle can also light a million other candles. And this is where now as you're on this journey to build wealth, you have lit your own candle. Now, you can help light someone else. You can help give someone a helping hand, whether you help someone financially, whether you help them with your time, whether you help them through your expertise, because now you've learned the process, because information is meant to be shared. I talk about this stuff on YouTube, not because I wanted to get rich, but because I was so frustrated by the system. I never knew that I could even make money on YouTube. I started making videos Before even turning advertisements on, I didn't know that you could do that until someone showed me, Hey, you can make money from these videos. And so it's the whole idea of helping to spread because, you know, like we've talked about in this video, this podcast, there's so much misinformation out there. There's so much lack of information out there. And financially, like if you don't understand money, if you don't have money, it can ruin so many other aspects of your life. Because if you don't have money, if you're stressing about money, now you can't take your spouse on the vacation that they want. You can't pay for your kids education. You can't fund your retirement. You can't buy that gift that you want. You can't do anything. And now you're stressing. It makes your mental health worse. It can put you into depression. It can make you start eating bad. It can make your physical health worse. It can make you feel so unfulfilled. It can make you feel so spiritually beat. So this is where understanding, hey, more money isn't gonna fix every aspect of your life. But if you don't have money, it can impact every aspect of your life. And this is that financial education now where, okay, I'm starting to learn this, help spread the message. You can help people out. And again, through your money, through your time, through your education. There are so many ways that you can do this because the more you have, the more you can do. And now you've built this wealth and this is where now you wanna be great for the world. not just for yourself. Yeah, man.

If you guys want more of this information, check out MinorityMindset, YouTube, themindoritymindset.com, market briefs as well, which is your newsletter which is teaching more of this financial education which I think a lot of people should be subscribing to. And if you guys want more from myself and Jaspreet, then make sure to leave a yes below on this video, subscribe, subscribe to both channels, and let us know what you want to hear more on. We've done some incredible interviews so far, some incredible content. I want to keep doing more with you. So, let's do it, man. Just be. This is inspiring teaching people how to the wealth formula. I love teaching people how to get into the mindset of being able to retire at some point in their life if they want to. You mentioned what is it the fire concept for a minute. But if you guys want more, subscribe to both the channels. check it out.

Thank you for helping spread the word, man.

Appreciate you. Appreciate you. If you enjoyed that interview, then I know you'll love what we have coming up right now. What do you recommend someone to do, whether they're an employee or maybe they have some extra cash? Sure. So I would say, you know, this.

Is a lot going to depend on you because I'll be very personal with what I'm doing because I'm an entrepreneur, so I look for different types of opportunities and somebody else might. So if you are an employee, there's going to be different opportunities for you. If you're a business owner, there's going to be different opportunities for if you're an entrepreneur, there's different opportunities for you. So I invest my money in five places. Invest my money into my own business. I talked about market briefs. I invest my money into real estate, invest my money into stocks, invest my money into crypto, then I invest my money into physical gold. This is the order that I invest my money into. This is my type of diversification. Now, I understand what's going on and I do have some cash. I always have some cash put aside for, like, you know, things going wrong Investments. I always have some cash putting aside there. And what I've been doing is I passively invest my money, meaning no matter what's happening in the markets, whether the market is up, whether the market's down, it's automatically every month.

You have a certain amount going in. Yeah.

And this is happening into stocks, into crypto and into physical gold. That does not change. That never changes. So I get paid. Money is automatically invested no matter what. Then in the past, I've had my more active strategy where I would take money and actively go out and buy real estate, actively go out and buy stocks. And in this situation, I'm looking for good deals, meaning a good price. So I haven't been doing that as much recently, not because of what's happening in the market, but because I see more opportunities for me in the entrepreneurial business side. So I've been investing money into market briefs like I talked about.

Hiring more people on your team.

Building infrastructure. And then I'm also working on a tax firm. So I'm going to talk about tax for one second, if that's okay, because there's a very interesting thing happening right now because going off of inflation, President Biden just signed something called the Inflation Reduction Act.

Was it 80 billion or something?

It was a huge, it was a huge, huge, I think it's even bigger than that. 80 billion is just the IRS. The IRS.

So the tax side. So they're hiring, They're investing 80 billion in the IRS to start auditing more people essentially. Exactly.

To start trying to get more money from people. And that's only one part of the Inflation Reduction Act. So let's go big to go small because the Inflation Reduction Act is supposed to reduce inflation. That's what the name says. I'm laughing because it's kind of silly because how do you reduce inflation? You spend less money because the government has spent so much money they didn't have, which caused money printing. You tax more people, bro. You collect more. Exactly. how do you now pay off all this debt? Remember, the government doesn't make money. They tax you, they tax me, they collect taxes, and then that's what they use to pay off their expenses. Now, it's not surprising that the government is running into an issue because they have 31 almost trillion dollars of national debt that they need to pay off. This is not fixed rate debt. So as interest rates go up, their payments on this debt go up as well. So we talked about what happened in the housing market. Imagine that on a $30 trillion level now. So the payments are getting bigger. So what does it mean? Well, if they have this pool of money, either they're going to need to inject more money into the government, the Fed has to print more money, but they can't do that anymore because of inflation, or they're going to need more tax dollars. So that's one of the reasons why, through this inflation reduction act, one of the things they want to do, which is one of the most, like, financially interesting topics, is they want to invest very heavily, billions of dollars, into the IRS to help them beef up and collect more tax dollars and past tax dollars. Now, I do want to clear up some of the false information out there because the act is working to hire 87,000 more IRS workers.

That's crazy.

It is crazy, especially considering that today there are about 80,000 IRS workers.

There are a devil.

Yes, and no. So the 87,000 people that they're hiring are not all IRS agents. and they're not all being hired today. They're gonna be hired over the course of 10 years. And the whole idea is, this is what they say again, this is what they're saying. What might happen is it could be a little bit different. So I wanna be just completely transparent because I don't wanna mislead people. I want to make sure everyone's fully understanding what's happening. You have about, what's scheduled is about 50,000 or so people in the IRS are scheduled to retire over the next 10 years. So these 87,000 people are supposed to replace them and beef up the agents that are actually going to be doing the auditing to go and collect more money. Now, even if 50,000 people retire, that's still adding almost 50% more people to the IRS. Who are they going after? Well, they say the wealthy, the super rich. And there's about a thousand billionaires in the United States. Do you need tens of thousands of people to go after them? No. So you go a little bit deeper. Now again, what do we look at? History. I look at history to answer the question because they keep saying that we're not going saying it's not in the bill, it's not written anywhere. This is what they say that we're not going to go after middle income people or anything like that. Well, in 2021, 50% of IRS audits were on people earning less than $75,000 a year.

Come on.

50%. 50%.

How do they know? How do they Is that public information?

Go search it on Google. Google has a lot of information.

50% of the audits were on people.

That were making less than $75,000 a year.

And why are they doing that?

Well, probably because if you're making less money, you're not going to have the resources to hire a good accountant and hire a good attorney to represent you. So it's a little bit easier. Less cost. I mean, it's just easier, right? I mean, you're maybe less financially savvy than somebody who's making half a million dollars a year or $2 million a year because now you probably have more resources to defend yourself. So that's a bigger fight for the IRS. And you're probably more protected because you have good advisors who've told you what to do. Because now let's say you're making your.

Filing your taxes, you're doing all the.

Right steps and maybe if you make a million, once you start making a lot of money, like if you're making over a million dollars a year, you're not trying to play the game of trying to hide $10,000 because now you're already under scrutiny. Yes. The IRS is trying to see you do something wrong. And so if you try to get $10,000 under the table, it's a bad idea because you already know you're being watched.

So you're trying to, you do everything.

By the book, you're trying to do the best. You try to do the best. And you have good advisors to guide you to do everything legal so you can pay the least amount of taxes possible legally. Now, if you're making 50 grand a year and you have a side hustle making you $1,000 a year, you might take that in cash because you might say, this is a grand a year. It's just the reality, right? You're taking pictures at people's weddings, you're doing whatever, you're making some cash and you're just doing it under the table.

And the IRS wants that thousand bucks.

And this is one of those things where it's not surprising because if you look at what's been happening over the last couple of years, this has almost like been a foreshadow of things to come because you remember over the last couple of years we've seen this new rule on Venmo, right? On Venmo transactions where they want all Venmo transactions over $600 or something like that where now if you're, you know, let's say you're a photographer and you're taking pictures at your friend's wedding and he pays you $700 and Venmo has to report that, they want to know that. They never said why, but now you're starting to see all these things start to add up where if you're doing these small things, you know, it's just like things starting to fall into place where, oh, no wonder they started wanting all these details for this. No wonder they started really going after cryptocurrency brokerages. No wonder they really started doing all of this stuff, maybe creating a digital dollar because they want to be able to see every transaction, which means they want to be able to tax every transaction. Of course, I can't validate this, but I mean, it's just like puzzle pieces starting to come together. And so this is where the tax thing, why is it so important? Because of inflation, because of the national debt. The government needs more tax dollars to be able to go and fund their payments. And so what are they going to do? Well, they're going to try to find the easiest hanging fruit. Is it going after a billionaire? Probably not, because the billionaire is going to say, come after me.

I have my resources, I have my.

Army, my accountants, they've done everything. We have everything there. Everything is documented because we want to play by the books, because we know you're already watching. Now, I'm not saying that everything always is right, right? There's of course exceptions to this, but this is where you just have to understand, you know, they say that they're not going to go after anyone making middle income, whatever. But after you go, after you look.

At the thousand or so billionaires, okay, you gotta look at everyone else. I mean, so again, right? That's what we would have to do.

You got 8,000 people working on it. It's like, all right.

It's just looking at history, right?

I mean, this history is the best indicator for what's coming. I keep saying that, I'm sure your audience is getting very bored on the way to be saying this, but I mean, it's the best indicator because I can't look into the future and see what's going to happen, but I can look in the past and see what has happened. And I see that, hey, this is what happened in 2021. This is what's been happening because this is just the situation. And so for me, I've also seen a big difference between good tax advisors and bad tax advisors because that's why.

You'Re starting a tax.

That's why. Because I, you know, it's the entrepreneurial mind where When I get scammed, I get screwed over, I get these things happen, it makes me want to find a new solution. That's how I started a minority mindset. I got scammed when I started a minority mindset. I got screwed over when I started my event planning company. I got completely screwed over my first real estate investment deal. Pretty much every part of me had to do with something really bad happening. So I had a really bad tax advisor. He was really just an accountant who filed my taxes and was never on time. And I got this call. It's horrible. It was just a mess. I got a call from my accountant one day. I'm in the office. This is right before my morning huddle. So we have a 9:30 a.m. morning huddle. Calls me, I think it was like 8:45 in the morning. I'm in the office. He says, Hey Jasprit, how are you? I said, Good, how you doing? He says, Hey, listen, I need you to do me something. Can you wire or send the IRS $100,000 by the end of the day today? And can you also send about $15,000 to the state government by the end of the day today? I was like, what? He says, sorry, we had some miscalculations. We did something wrong. We missed this and you need to send us by tonight. And I was like, geez, are you serious? He's like, oh yeah, one more thing. You're probably gonna have to pay a penalty on this as well. Oh my gosh. And this is a completely true story. Like- When was this? This is not, I mean, this is less than a year ago. Oh my gosh. And so it's, I mean, it's- that's painful. It's very painful. And so I'm like, okay, like I was very frustrated because I'm like, what did I do wrong? Like, what are you talking about? You didn't do anything wrong. And I was like, Well, if I'm the one that has to pay this and I'm the one who has to pay the penalty, something's not right here. And so I paid it, then I fired him pretty quickly. Because that's not the way I like to do business. I want everything to be clean, but I also want people who care about what they do. And he was a cheaper accountant. I got what I paid for. And so I went on the hunt to find a new accountant. top of the line accountant and I pay a lot more than what I used to. However, the situation scenario is extremely different because he has a very different personality about different persona and the way it works now is, one, he manages all my books on time and handles schedule. So every month he meets with me and he shows me, Hey, Justplet, here's your profit. Sorry, we'll start from the top. Here's your revenue. Here's your expenses. Here's what your expenses look like. Here's how they changed. Here's your profit. Here's your tax liability and here are the things that you can do to limit your tax liability.

That's cool.

Here are, you know, three recommendations or whatever that we believe based off of what's happening right now to legally limit your tax liability. And he has given me so many interesting ideas because the tax code is over 2,000 pages long and you need, I'm an attorney. I studied a lot of tax. It takes a lot of knowledge and education to understand and read the tax code, but then things keep changing all the time. Like even this Inflation Reduction Act is changing corporate tax structure. So you need somebody who literally eats, breathes, and all they care about is tax. And this is this guy, right? And I'm like, dude, like, this is amazing. Like, I love this because I don't have the time. I don't want to spend my time thinking about taxes and all the cash flow stuff. I want to build my business. And so I got to know him. got to build, see how we worked. I really liked it. And after a number of months of working with him and seeing him in action, I was like, hey, man, like, you have nothing on social media. Like, can we work together? Like, let's, like, he's very good at what he does. But I was like, let me work with you. Like, I think we can create a lot of things here because there's a lot of small businesses that need what you have to offer, because there's a lot of small businesses who have bad accountants who all they do is file their taxes, and you need a tax advisor, especially now as We're gonna see a big change. You need an advisor who's gonna guide you on what to do with your money, how to document what you do, like just to make it completely seamless. That way you don't have to stress about it. Right. And he was like, I'm down. So over the last couple of months, we've been working to build this together. It's not launched yet. We were just talking about it because it came a conversation. But that's something that I've been really working on. So, you know, if you're listening to this and you want a good tax advisor, just email me. There you go. Team@theminiorymindset.com or send me a DM on Instagram, Minority Mindset, and I will connect you. But these are, I mean, this is where, what am I doing? I like entrepreneurship. I like this stuff because it gets me excited. It's the way that my brain works. It's the way that gets, it gives me my purpose. Right. And so I do that. I like investing in real estate. I like investing in stocks. I'm passively doing it in stocks. But right now I just see more opportunity for me to invest in things like market briefs. to invest in things like this tax firm because I see the opportunity, it's fun, I have a blast doing it, I get to meet really cool people. So it's a matter of now what is that lifestyle? Now if I didn't, if I wasn't an entrepreneur, what would I be doing? Yeah, I'd be stacking up cash to find good investments either in the stock market or the real estate market or to buy a startup because it's very accessible now thanks to the internet, thanks to all the crowdfunding sites out there. and I'd be passively investing. Like, I would not change that. So, I mean, I think everybody should be doing.

You can put a hundred bucks a month away into stocks or into, into an automated account that is investing for you.

Did you know if you're 21 and you start investing a hundred dollars a month and you never change that and you just get a 10 return on your money, which is the average stock market return, and you do that until you're 65. you will retire a millionaire. Come on. We're talking about less than $4 a day.

In your opinion, would you buy a home when interest rates is over or I mean, yeah, when interest rates is over 10% or you feel like even though you're getting in a massive discount, you're paying more every month, would you consider that or you just wait until interest rates go down?

So I look at home buying very differently than the majority of people. I look at buying a home the way I buy a shirt. For me, a home is not an asset, it's a liability. So what does that mean? I want to buy a home because I want to create memories. I want to buy an investment property or an investment because I want to make money. So if you're buying a home because you think, oh, I want to get rich because of my home, I think you're looking at it the wrong way. Because you should be looking at your home as, I want to make memories here. I want to live here and I want to grow my family here and I want to spend time here. If that's the reason why you want to buy a home, what you should be paying attention to is not what's going on in the markets, not what's going on with interest rates, but instead what you should do is say, Can I afford it? Right. And what does that mean? Can I afford the down payment? Can I afford the monthly payment? Property taxes. Can I afford the property taxes? The fix ups. The move in costs.

And then you know, you move in.

Like, I mean, the furniture, the upgrades, all that. So if you can afford it, then you buy. If you can't afford it, if you're stretching yourself too thin, you don't buy. Because what happens to so many people is you get sucked into trying to time the market. But again, if interest rates drop and you own a home, you can refinance. Right. And so remember, it's understanding the value of the home.

It's almost good to buy it when interest rates are high if you can get the house on discount. And then if in a year or two the interest rates drop in half, you can refinance. Just make sure you can afford it.

That's the biggest thing. You have to be able to afford it because if you are stretching yourself too thin, going paycheck to paycheck to live in a home, you're hurting yourself because now what you're doing, you don't.

Have the ability to invest in other places. You cannot invest your money. Do you think people will be able to actually buy a home in five to seven years?

It depends on what the Fed does. If the Fed cuts interest rates when we go into a recession, if so our economy slows down, the Fed starts cutting interest rates, mortgage rates go back down, you're going to see a bigger flood of cash into the housing market and that will create a bigger wealth gap and it will make it significantly more difficult for the regular person to buy a home. Homeownership will become a real American nightmare because it will be so difficult for the regular person. We will turn into essentially a renter nation. Wow. Where homes are owned, not even by regular investors. Corporations.

Corporations.

They've been buying up, I was reading about this. BlackRock's been buying up a ton of homes. Yeah, BlackRock's buying like, BlackRock's buying so many homes. They're buying one out of every four.

Homes in certain neighborhoods. That's crazy.

Yeah.

And so, which means they believe people.

Aren'T gonna be able to afford them and they're gonna have to rent. from them. Yes. And so it's, it's a, it's a crazy time to understand that, which is why, again, I look at the home like a liability. Can you afford it? Yes. Then buy. If not, then don't start yourself to thin. I used to be a real estate salesperson. And the reason why this is so important is because when I was a salesperson, you know, what they say is, you know, you want to tell people this is their biggest investment of their life. So buy a home that you love. Now, again, real estate agents are not bad people. Banks are not, bankers are not necessarily bad people. However, you have to understand the messaging. If I tell you this is the biggest investment of your life, what are you going to say? I want something bigger. I'm willing to stretch a little bit thinner. I'm willing to go a little bit further because I want that home. And so, what does that do? Well, it makes the banker richer. It makes the real estate agent a bigger commission check. And they walk away and now you have to deal with it. If you can afford it, great. But if you start to struggle with it, you're the one that has to deal with the problem by yourself. And so, what happens for so many people, is your home is a money pit until you sell it. And then you have to hope that you sell it for a profit because there's no guarantee, right? We don't know where home prices are going to be in five years or 10 years. I can't predict that. I don't know what the Fed is going to do. And so the main thing that you have to understand if you're thinking about buying a home is ignore the markets, ignore what's going on in the world. Can you afford it today? And please do me a favor. Okay. I very rarely try to tell people what to do because I feel like, you know, I try to, I want you to be educated so you can make smart decisions for yourself. But the one time that I really tried to give people, like I say, don't do this, is when it comes to adjustable rate mortgages, because they've been making a huge comeback now. Because now the interest rates are 5.5%. People say, I missed out on the opportunity to get a low mortgage. And now I have been seeing a huge growth of adjustable rate mortgages because now banks will say, don't pay 5.5% on a home. pay 3.7% today and it's a 5/1 arm, meaning after five years it's going to readjust and then your mortgage payments will readjust and if it goes higher, don't worry, you can just refinance out. And it is so risky because we don't know where interest rates are going to be. If they go up and they go up significantly and now you're like, oh my God, let's just say mortgage rates are 10% I don't want to pay three times more for my mortgage from $800 a month to $2,400 a month. I can't afford that. So let me refinance. Well, if you do that and home prices have dropped and you can't refinance because the bank says, well, you don't have enough equity in the home. I'm not going to refinance you. And then you can't sell because you're underwater. Well, now you're in a tough situation. So pay a little bit more, get that fixed rate mortgage. Because if mortgage rates do drop, refinance, right, and lock it in. Because, you know, other countries in the world don't always even have the option to do a 30-year fixed.

Right.

We do. But a, an arm and adjustable rate mortgage is significantly more risky. The only time that I would say an arm is okay is if you are like 100 confident that you're going to be able to pay off the home during that initial teaser rate. Because if you cannot, then you are taking on a huge gamble with the home that you live in. with your family's livelihood. You know, it's one thing if you do it with an investment, but with the home that you live in, avoid that extra risk and just lock in the rate, please. Right.

I'm curious, here's a question we got from people on YouTube. If someone has between $1,000 and $10,000 today to invest, they can spend on whatever they want.

Yeah.

And they had to turn it into $100,000 within three years.

Okay.

What steps would they should they take? And obviously this is a, you know, not a guarantee, but if you're like you have to turn this 1000 into 100,000 or 10,000 to 100,000, what would you invest in right now? And how would you manage it over the next couple of years?

So I'm going to give you kind of a longer answer than maybe you were hoping for on this one.

Give it to me.

I'm going to start by telling you what you should not do. Okay. Because the first time I remember, I had $1,000 extra on my bank account. I was in high school. And what I did with that is I took the $1,000 and I went out and I bought a watch. Mm, no, don't do that. Yeah, and this watch was very studded up. It was all crystals and I was like, Ooh, it's a nice watch. Clean. So what happened with, yeah? What happened with that watch? Well, I made that watch company richer. I made the jewelry store owner richer. And now that $1,000 watch today is made worth maybe 50 bucks, right? It was just a show. So my value of my investment dropped like a rock, but now these companies made money, which now they could take that and invest in more products, more inventory, more marketing, more whatever. so the first thing is you got to understand that you want to put it in something that's gonna help make you more money. So I'll give you my personal experience because I saw the biggest returns by investing in me, but that will be more of an active investment and then you have the opportunity for a passive investment, which is why it's a longer answer than what you were probably hoping for, but I'll try to get to all the answers there. So I feel like everybody who especially if you have the entrepreneurial mindset, you go through these phases where you first go through this like, I'm a hustler, side hustler phase. And maybe you become like a solopreneur, and then you become an entrepreneur, and then you become a small business owner, and then you kind of go to that business owner role. So you kind of go through these phases because initially when I first started as a side hustler, I didn't know what entrepreneurship was.

I was just trying to make some.

Cash on the side. Exactly. You just started off. For me, I started off in the event planning space. So I was in college. I started hosting teen parties for other kids in college and I didn't really have any money to spend. I was 17 years old when I started. So I was like making very not attractive deals to me, but it was only where I could get started because what I did was I would go to venues to host a party and I wanted a venue that wouldn't charge me any money upfront. And in exchange they would say, just give us 50% of every dollar that you earn. So if I made $1,000 in revenue from COVID charge, right? $10 to come in. I give the venue, the club, whatever, $500. And then I didn't have money for a DJ. So I said, look, DJ, I need someone to play music. Let's work out a deal. They took 50% of what I was left with.

Oh, man.

So I would give them, you know, left for $500, they would take $250. Now, luckily, the business was able to grow where, you know, we were making on the low end a couple grand a night. And then what was I able to, I was able to negotiate better deals. And then I was able to start investing my money into marketing. so I started taking some money and I remember the first thing that we did was I started investing money into flyers. It was $100 at the time to print 5,000 small flyers. And so I got creative and I was like, look, before the event, we need to distribute all 5,000 flyers. We cannot have them in our possession anymore. And I can't do this myself, so I need salespeople, essentially. But I don't wanna pay for salespeople.

Street team interns, college students.

Yeah, yeah. So what do you do? I'll give you VIP entry into the party, which doesn't cost me a penny. And I will give you a shout out at the party. Doesn't cost me anything. Makes you feel cool, makes you feel exclusive. You get to walk past the line. You have this lanyard that says you're this, you know, VIP, whatever. And so now I have people at some of the biggest colleges in my area passing out flyers, trying to get everybody to come because now you want to be one of those people. So, you know, I got these free salespeople that are trying to promote it. Smart. You have to be creative. and that now starts to multiply the money. And that's when I realized that I'm just a side hustler. I will never be able to build a business like this. I don't want to build a business like this because it was a very dirty industry, which is why I got out of it. I did not like the scene. So I left that and started kind of going down more of the entrepreneurship route, not going more into innovation. So I started a sock company. So now I'm starting to invest money, my own dollars, into the sock company. That way now I can build a product, build inventory, build a website, build advertising, build marketing. and now I'm able to grow this much faster because now I have some skills that I learned from my mistakes because I screwed up a lot. My first event was a complete flop. I had some very bad failures. I had lost money on some occasions. It was, you know, when you deal with club owners, you're dealing with very interesting people and you learn very quickly, right? I'm a 17 year old going up to some of these club owners trying to figure out the game and they're.

Taking advantage of you.

They're taking advantage of you. And it's also, dangerous. I remember one time I went to a club to talk to the manager because we had a party the next week. And I said, where's the manager? He said, oh, we got stabbed last night. Oh, man. And so, you know, you learn very quickly to protect yourself, to protect your own interests. I mean, it's. You're literally. I mean, there was a lot of physical stuff that happened. I mean, I got. I was the bouncer. A lot of it. So I, you know, you learn to protect yourself physically, learn to protect yourself mentally. You learn to protect yourself financially. So I had to learn very quickly. And so now I take things I learn, I'm in a much safer, much smoother, much cleaner industry, the sock industry, but I start to learn and I start to apply some of the same marketing. How can I be creative in the marketing? How can I get people to learn? And you know, you can't learn this in a textbook. You just have to try, be willing to fail. And so same thing there. Now I kind of go to the entrepreneurship route and now I'm starting to learn and I start to sell and then I realize my passion isn't in socks. I like the stocks, I like the business idea, but my passion isn't there. My passion is more on the financial side. So now I was also doing minority mindset as a hobby. Minority mindset starts to grow. And then I start to build things like market briefs, which is our financial newsletter. So now I'm building market briefs and now I'm turning more into like from the entrepreneur to the small business side. Because in market briefs, I am not the only worker, right? On the minority mindset channel, it's my face, it's me talking. and it's, you know, we have video editors and all that, but it's mainly me. If I'm not working in minority mindset, we're not making any more content and it's not growing, which is okay, right? It's not for me, like as my business, for me it's my way of helping to pursue my passion and my mission to help spread this sort of financial education, the things that I was never taught. Yeah. But my business now, market briefs, we have a whole team, right? We have people that read the, that lead the creative side that write the news that every day we have the business development team, we have the operations people. So, you know, we have a full team that are doing it. And if I were to not go into work tomorrow or if I, you know, something were to happen to me, the business will continue without me. Right, right. And so, you know, it's a matter of flipping that money into the next thing to the next and being willing to invest the time, the education. So for me, it took me a solid decade. So I don't have a better three years. I couldn't figure out how to do it. You know, it took me a long time to figure it out.

And maybe you could do it now.

Now is the time.

Turn a thousand into a hundred.

I can do it in significantly faster than a year.

I think one of the things that I'm hearing you say is, you know, invest that thousand into a skill. Invest it into a skill.

You will get the best return.

And put it into, you know, that could be, okay, I'm gonna buy a camera and for the next two years master becoming great at using the camera, whether it be video or photography, and then start working with clients and making some side income and using that money to reinvest in more equipment.

Exactly.

Using that money to maybe have someone else help me. to scale my side business and then have that cash to invest in other things as well. It's like, and then develop new skills, new skill and new skill. And it takes that mindset though, and.

The willingness to take risk because, you know, I would also caution that because you have to be willing to just try. When I started a minority mindset, I didn't have a camera. I didn't have any fancy equipment. I started recording videos off of my phone. And I was like, you know, I'm not going to invest so much money into this when I'm trying to, you know, it's a hobby for me.

See where it goes.

See where it goes. But I did take an acting class. I was in law school. So I was in law school part-time, I was working on my business full-time, and then I took an acting class in the evenings, night school, because I was like, I've never talked in front of a camera before. I'm not even a good public speaker. I don't know how to present myself. I don't even know how to hit the on button on a camera. How am I supposed to do this? So I took an acting class because I was like, well, I'm willing to learn. I'm willing to try. So you have to be willing to get uncomfortable and you have to be willing to take that risk. this is gonna. I don't know if this is gonna offend people or I'm gonna say a bad word, but the reason why I think I've been able to become successful is because I'm stupid. My whole life, I've been told. Me and you both, man. I've been told just because they're stupid. Just because they're stupid. Why would you want to do that? And you know what? That's the reason why I am where I am today is because I'm stupid. Because I'm willing to. I never looked at the risk, and he called it stupidity. But for me, it was. I just saw the opportunity as I know I want to. achieve something bigger because I saw how hard my parents had. I saw how hard my grandparents had. My grandparents were refugees. They lost their homes. They lost everything. They had to fight for their lives. And so I saw the things that my family had to go through. My grandparents raised me. They lived with me. So I lived with my grandparents. I'm a parent. So I heard their stories, talked about the struggles. And that was where I started to get my basis of financial education because my grandfather would tell me, and he actually repeated this to me a couple weeks ago when I was on the phone with him and he was like, you know, the biggest and worst disease is poorness because he said, I grew up and I saw extreme poverty. So my family is from a state in India called Punjab. And in 1947, our home, the state of Punjab was severed by the government. And if you were a Sikh, a member of the religion that I am, and you're on the west side of Punjab, you had to migrate east, otherwise you were going to be killed. so my grandparents were on the west side and you literally had to like run. Like my grandfather, all he had was a clothes on his back and a sword in his hand. And as they were coming across, they got attacked by a mob and he saw his uncle get his head chopped open right in front of him.

No way.

They had a fight. And so he put his uncle on a horse and that was the end. Holy cow. He got to the new side of India now and he's there. he lost his shoes on the way. He has no home, no money, no anything. And so he says, I saw extreme poorness. And when you're in that level of poorness, forget helping other people. You can't even feed yourself. How can you feed your family? If you can't feed your family, you can't feed another hungry person.

What would you say? The three biggest myths about money that you've debunked over your time of learning about money, that maybe you grew up thinking it was one way, like you were talking about loans and banks and all these different things. What are three myths about money that you've found out were not true?

Well, the first thing that I would say, I don't know if it's a myth, but I would say that the first thing everyone has to understand is what money is. And I don't mean in terms of, like, in terms of wealth, but, like, money is just paper. It doesn't make you a good person. It doesn't make you a bad person. It just. It's paper. And we talk about all these insecurities people have with money. I grew up being told, don't talk about money, don't worry about money, don't stress about money. Yeah, here I am seeing my parents work their butt off every single day.

Trying to make money.

Trying to make money. And it doesn't make sense. How am I supposed to not worry about money? And you want me to become a doctor because you read those, if you go to those career fairs, they show you the different careers, right? And doctor is always number one, the highest income. So why am I doing this if it's because of the income instead of because I love it or do something that I love.

Why not? Because I want to help people.

Yeah. You want to save lives. Exactly. And what's crazy is if you understand money, you become financially educated, you're willing to talk about it. Well, now you can be financially stable doing whatever you want, and you can follow something you love and still be financially okay. Because we assume that you have to have this in order to make money. You have to have this job in order to make good money. You have to have this career if you want to be financially stable. But that's a complete lie. Yeah. But that goes down to not us being willing to talk about money. And I talked about this in our last interview, but you know, money is one part of our lives. And the reason why people are scared to talk about it is because we're insecure about it. And that's because we don't understand how money plays a part in our lives. It's one aspect. I say that there's four. You have to be physically healthy, mentally healthy, spiritually healthy, and then financially healthy. If you're not financially healthy, well, it can make everything else much more miserable because you can't pay your bills. but if you're financially healthy, you're rich, but you have nothing else, more money just makes you more miserable. So you need to live a holistic life and understand how money plays a part in your life. That way the finances can have the biggest power. And then you understand that more money just amplifies who you are. It's like fire. It's like fuel. It fuels your fire. If you're a good person and you have more money, you have a tool to do more good. If you're a bad person, you have more money, you have a tool to do more bad. Just why we need more good people with money.

Exactly.

If we do that.

Well, yeah, a lot of people just say that money money exposes who you really are. It amplifies who you are so people can see whether you're that good person or bad person or whatever it may be in between. But first off, understanding what money is is what you had to learn. It's kind of like this thing. What else around understanding it would you say? Maybe you thought it was one thing but then you realized it was something else.

Exactly. So now that's money. The second thing is how do you use money and value money because I'm going to say this in the nicest way possible, but traditionally Indian people can be very cheap. And, you know, I grew up seeing this. And what does that mean? It means that Indian, the traditional Indian house is a save heavy culture. And I can say that because I've seen this and I grew up in that where you, you make a dollar to spend 20 cents. And the traditional American culture is you make a dollar to spend two dollars. Right. And so it's a save heavy culture. So you're spending as little as possible to save it. Now, obviously we talked about inflation, so I'm not going to mention what that means with savings, but what I'm talking about here is you can use your money as a tool. And this is what wealthy people do because now what do they do with their money? You use your money to buy your time back because what so many of us do is we're exchanging our hours for dollars. You go to work every single day and you get paid, but what are wealthy people doing? They're not working just to use their money as a way to buy hours. They're using the money to to, to buy their time back.

Yes.

Because now you can build things and build processes and invest your money because now you can use your money as a tool instead of as a fool. That's what I like to say. But this is where it's, it's how do you now use your money to make your life better? Yeah. And, and you don't want to be now just, just buy a whole bunch of Gucci and Louis Vuitton. It's now actually improving your life and.

Not to make your life look better, but to actually improve it from the inside out.

Yeah. So the simplest example would be you start a YouTube channel. We talked about buying a camera. Well, one thing that you could do is you can hire a video editor. You know, you go on a freelance site, hire a freelance video editor. And now what are you doing? You can spend more time making more videos instead of spending all your time editing the content. So you can focus on your time. You can hire someone to mow the lawn. You bought your time back. You hire somebody to help get you your groceries, you buy your time back. It costs money. You spend money in order to do that. But you're getting something in an exchange and now you're buying your time back so you can use your money as a tool and you can use your money as a tool to buy your time back or you can use your money as a tool to make you and attract you more money. That's what wealthy people do. And so you want to be able to use money in that way. The third thing would be now to really, I mean, I know I talk about this a lot, but you have to understand the difference between something that makes you money and something that loses you money.

That's a liability, yeah.

A liability.

And what are the main liabilities that people spend on today?

The way you look, man. We have this Instagram flex culture, right? And it is very toxic if you do not know how to use it.

And unless you're investing your money wisely and you've got excess money and you're like, okay, I want to buy some stuff to flex, cool. There's nothing-- if you're not investing your money and you're just spending it on clothes and watches and shoes.

Yeah. If you look good, if you got the name brand stuff, but you got no savings, you got no investments, you're doing something wrong. Your priorities are in the wrong place. What are you doing? You're making Gucci rich, you're making Louis Vuitton rich, you're making all these companies rich, but you're keeping yourself broke. I talked about my watch. I spent a grand on a watch. I had no investments. I didn't even know what an investment was at the time. I didn't realize I could have taken that grand and invested it into a watch company and get a share of the profits. But that's what wealthy people are doing and they understand that. And there's nothing wrong with spending money. There's nothing wrong with having luxuries. There's nothing wrong with having the nice things. Yes. But it's a matter of when can you actually afford it? You have to know when the right time is for you to have it because you want to first make yourself.

Rich and then, hey, blow if you can afford it, do whatever you want. Grant Cardone is always talking about how he doesn't spend money on the cash he makes to buy watches or things. He only spends money on the watches and clothes and things on the passive income. That's great. From his investments.

You take the earned income, you're working every single day, you take this income and you use as much of that as possible to invest into assets. The assets pay you, live off the assets. Because now those assets don't need you to go to work every single day to get paid. So if you break your leg and you can't get paid, you're not getting that earned income, but that passive income from your assets still coming in and now if that's the money you're living off of, you are free. Your earned income is just buying you more assets. And so how do you start that? And so this is where you have to kind of build some sort of system for yourself. And the rule that I would always say is follow something like Marula 5. If you can't buy five of them, you can't afford one of them. So it's, you know, you want to buy a $1,000 phone, you want to buy a $1,000 watch, okay fine. And you buy five of them. and if you don't have the ability to buy five of them, if you can't afford to do that, then you can't afford one. If you can't buy five, you can't afford one. And then you want to create a system, like a system that automates your finances where now you have something going on with your money that is putting your money to work no matter what. And so one of the easiest things you can create your own is to follow something like a 75-1510 plan, which means that for every dollar you earn from now on, 75 cents is the maximum you can spend. 15 cents is the minimum you're investing, and 10 cents is the minimum that you're saving. Now, the savings is you want to build somewhere between three and 12 months worth of savings if you want to have that protection. Three months if you don't have a lot of liability, a lot of responsibilities, you don't have all that going on and you have a high risk tolerance. 12 months if you want to play it safe. you figure out what's right for you after you filled your savings, you fill up the savings, you don't want to put any more money into it because I'm just being eaten away by inflation. The savings is not there to make you wealthy, it's there just to protect you against an emergency. Then what you do is you take the money, put it into your investments, and now you just keep investing money. Now, what happens is as you grow your income, you don't change this ratio. So if you go from $40,000 a year to $400,000 a year, you keep the same ratio and you're still investing first, and then you keep saving your money, and then you know how much you can spend. Because now what you're doing, which is what wealthy people do, is you invest before you spend. The way that the finances will look for the majority of people is you make money, you pay taxes, you spend your money, and then you wonder where your money went. Well, wealthy people do, right? Wealthy people are, you make money-- Especially in California. Yeah. $7 gas and high taxes. But wealthy people are doing is you make money and then depending on how you make it, either you pay taxes first or after, ideally after, because there are ways to do that legally, but you make money and then you want to invest as much as possible and then you spend whatever's left. So wealthy people invest and spend what's left while the majority of people spend and invest whatever's left.

Here's one that I think a lot of people do and I think it hurts them in a big way. How does someone not make their net worth attached to their self-worth?

That's a good one.

Meaning how do they believe in themselves, have confidence, have love for themselves when they're not making that much. Maybe they're in a transition, maybe they lost their job, maybe they're just starting out. And how do they also, when they start making some cash, not tie their bank account number to their self-worth?

So when you fail at something, you don't become a failure as a person. You failed at a task. And in order to become successful at something, you have to fail at a lot of tasks. And so the first thing you have to understand that about yourself is that just because something didn't work, just because you failed at something does not mean that you are a failure. Maybe you failed at a task. I failed at a ton of things. I'm sure you have too. You have to screw up a lot. And that's how you find the good. So now when it comes to net worth, if you want to be completely honest, your net worth is pretty useless. It's a worthless number. It means nothing. It means less than nothing. Because what is net worth? It's a paper number. If I have a million dollars net worth in the stock market today, tomorrow it could be worth 400,000. If you are valuing your life, and even worse, if you are spending based off your net worth, you're living a very dangerous life. And some people do do this because they say, oh, I'm worth a million dollars. So I'm going to go out and live a million dollar lifestyle. you don't have a million dollars, you're just worth a million dollars. You don't have income coming in, you're just worth this amount of money. And so you go and borrow a ton of money and you start living this million dollar lifestyle and then things go down and now you're the first one to lose your shirt. So the thing that I want you to remember is first regarding the failure, you're not a failure. Just because you failed at a task does not mean you're a failure. It's actually a good thing you failed because that means you're one step closer to finding that success. And then second, regarding the actual net worth number, look, this is just temporary. Everything is temporary and you have the opportunity to build something a lot bigger. You have to have the right mindset. And if you are here in America, you're in a first world country, you have the opportunity to do that. But you have to be willing to learn and be willing to give it time. So you have to be patient, but also impatient at the same time. Patient in the sense that you have to understand that get rich quick is majority of time a big scam. It doesn't work. It makes the people selling to get rich quick rich.

And you broke.

So the first thing you got to understand is that. But then second is you want to be impatient where you got to, it's gonna fuel that drive, fuel that work ethic, fuel that discipline. And you have to be willing to keep going. You know, I don't, if you would have told me 15 years ago or 10 years ago, hey man, you're gonna be interviewing with Lewis on this show, I would never thought that's possible. you know, I grew up being told somebody like me can't do this. Somebody like, you know, I remember talking to my own family members that you can never be a CEO of a company. Somebody like you can't do that. You have no business background. You couldn't even get into business school. And it's funny. Nowadays, I'm like, well, there's a lot more value to be the owner of a company than a CEO of a company because the CEO is working for the owner. But anything is possible. And, you know, even if you just ignore the financial side, any, you can do anything you want. But you want to be a singer, you want to be an actor, you want to be an entrepreneur, you want to be a CEO, you want to be whatever you want to do. It is possible, but you have to believe it and you have to be willing to put in that work. You know, hard work beats talent. When talent doesn't work hard, that is the truest saying that you can make because I have so, you know, I work in the, I worked in the event planning space. I still know a lot of people in this place, space. I know a lot of people that manage singers, big time singers, especially in the, the Indian space. And some of these people are incredibly talented with no drive, no work ethic. And where are they going with their careers? They had this spike in the going down. I know these other people that are, you know, average singers, but they're putting out songs day after day after day. I mean, if you heard them sing, just like, you know, it's whatever, but.

You can produce it well, you can make the hooks, you can write cool.

Lyrics, improving, and they keep putting out content and they they keep improving every week. And it's like, dang, you got millions and millions and millions of views.

It's funny, man. I got a friend of mine I've had on the show, Andy Grammer, who was literally in Santa Monica busking for four years, five days a week, four years playing songs for just tips on the streets. But he, I think he said he did like, he wrote like over a thousand songs or something crazy like this in this four year period. He would sing the covers. to try to get people to come around and be like, oh, I like that song. Let me give you a dollar. And then he would throw in one of his own original songs to try to get people like, oh, he's got his own stuff. But he does this for four years before he actually got something that was on the radio and then touring and all these other things. Four years on the streets, just working really hard. Now he's got momentum, but he's got all these skills now developing over those years to write his own songs.

And I don't think people realize what four years means. Because you share four years. Oh, you know, college is four years. High school is four years. But you got to remember, during those four years, that's a long time. You go from January, February, March, April, May, do it again.

Every day.

Again and again. Steve Harvey, I love his story because he went through the same thing. He was homeless because he was like, I'm a janitor right now. I want to be a comedian. My friend who I grew up with is now on TV. we both had the same dreams. I didn't want to say it. He got laughed at for his dreams. And now he's the one on TV living my dream, and I'm working as a janitor, quit his job, moved into his car, and spent three years just trying to make it. Look at him. He's. He's on shows after shows after shows.

It's crushing it.

It's that discipline. Be willing to put in the work and just sticking with it is so hard. And that can help you with any. you know, forget the financial side, doing something you love, living a purposeful life. Because what's important to you is not what's necessarily important to me. And what's important to someone listening to this is going to be different than me. And we all have a different passion, a different purpose and a different mission. And so someone's going to care about climate change, someone's going to care about world hunger, someone's going to care about cancer in kids, someone's going to care about breast cancer, someone's going to care about financial education. And so we all come at this world. with different experiences, different pains. And each one of those pains are going to drive our motivations. But you have to, you have to be willing to work towards it because if you don't, who else is going to? Yeah. And you have to be willing to do that if you want to make that impact. Then you had the inflation, and in the beginning it swung. And then at the end of it, they said inflation will never end and everybody's position for it never ending.

And then of of course, what happens is it's so bad that then the central bank goes the opposite extreme, and.

Then they get surprised.