The Biggest Lies You've Been Told About Money, Debt & Building Wealth w/ Jaspreet Singh (Minority Mindset) EP 1257

And the more I learned, the more I realized I was lied to. We're taught to go to school, to get a degree, to get a job, so we can then get a job and climb the corporate ladder. But wealthy people don't do that. Wealthy people are not working to climb the corporate ladder.

They're working to Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome back everyone in the School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest, Jaspreet Singh in the house. My man.

Hey, Louis, how you doing?

Good to see you, brother. Very excited about this. You've been teaching the world about money, mindset, and all things figuring out and understanding their money for a long time now. You've got over a million subscribers on YouTube. you're a lawyer, but as you're also an entrepreneur in a big way, content creator. And I'm curious, we were talking about this beforehand about the different things we wish we would have known about money growing up, because I didn't know anything about money that much growing up. You made some mistakes financially when you were getting into the entrepreneur business. You talk about this on your channel. What is the, the big thing that you wish everyone knew about money before they started making it?

Oh, man. Well, It goes back to, I guess, just the basics because most of us, myself included, are never taught a thing, a thing about money. We're told go to school, get a degree, get a job, and now you figure it out. And then what happens for the majority of people is you end up broke, you end up struggling financially, and you can never figure out why. So the first thing is, what is it that you want to achieve? in your life financially. And then you have to go out and figure it out yourself because unfortunately school will never teach you this stuff. So you didn't learn this in high.

School or University of Michigan or law school that didn't teach you any of this stuff?

I went through high school, I went through college, I went through one year of grad school and then I went through law school and I never once learned to think about money, never once learned to think about budgeting, never once learned to think about building wealth, never once learned to think about investing my money and never once learned to think about passive income. Here I am today with a law degree and I haven't worked a single day as an attorney.

Why not?

Well, it doesn't make sense for me financially and it's not my purpose. So, I grew up in a traditional Indian house.

Doctor, lawyer?

Well, for me, I had two options. Doctor or failure. Those are the two options that I had. My parents are immigrants from a state in India called Punjab. just came to the country with very little. And so, you know, I saw my parents work their butt off every single day. If my dad got a Saturday and a Sunday off, it was considered a long weekend. And so I didn't get to spend a lot of time with my parents growing up, and they would always tell me that, you know, you have to go out and become successful. And I completely agreed because I wanted to give back to my parents. I wanted to help support them. And I figured, okay, if I want to become successful, I should follow the steps that we're told to become successful. What are those steps? Go to school, get a good degree, get a good job. For me, in my case, it was become a doctor. And along that way, it was in college, I realized that something's wrong, something's not adding up. And it actually happened, I was studying to get into medical school. And as I was studying, I started reading other business books and financial books. And I remember this, I was in the library studying, and I went on to Google. and I searched the richest people in America. And then you see people like Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg. And I was like, huh, none of these people are doctors. None of these people went down that traditional route of getting a degree, doing a good job. Am I missing something? Because I thought that if you go to school, get a good degree, you can make a lot of money. And if you work harder in school, get better grades, you'll make even more money. So I thought it was just directly correlated, your grades, your income. And that's when I started questioning things. And I realized, oh, maybe this isn't right. And as you start to go down deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, you start to realize, oh my God, everything that I've been told is a lie. And so that kind of pushed me into this whole painful, emotional journey of learning about money. learning about entrepreneurship, learning about what does it mean to become wealthy and how do you actually do it?

Right.

So that was kind of the initial phase for me and then I had to go out and actually start learning it. Yeah. And the first real experience of that for me was I had this event planning company that I started in college and the reason why I started it was because when I was in high school, I worked at Indian weddings. So I got to know a lot of the DJs.

Right.

And when I was in high school, these DJs were like, Hey man, you know a lot of people in high school. How about we host a teen party for your friends in high school? I was like, All right, that's fine. You know, why not? Started this little teen party business in high school and I go to college. Don't know what to expect because my parents didn't go to university here. I think everybody goes to college to study hard and become this big thing in college. I get to college and everybody is partying. They're blowing their money that they don't have on alcohol. They're drinking. I don't drink. I don't smoke. I'm not into that party scene, but I need something to do on Friday nights. So I was like, why don't I just take this teen party business that I had in high school, bring it to college? And that's what I did. My freshman year, I was 17 years old, just had a knocking on the door of every club, venue, bar, restaurant, asking if I could host a party here. Some would say, yeah, it's gonna cost you $10,000. Some would say, yeah, it's gonna cost you 20 grand. I don't have that money. Right. But then one or two said, you can do it here. We're not gonna charge you a penny. Just give us half of the COVID charge, half of the money that you bring in. I said, okay, now I'm in business. So I started making a little bit of money doing this, and I had some cash saved up. And I'm starting to read these business books, and every business book said wealthy people invest in real estate. I don't know what that means. I don't know any real estate investors. My parents aren't investors. And so I was like, okay, if wealthy people invest in real estate, maybe I should invest in real estate. And this was right after the 2008 crash, and I'm in Michigan, where real estate was hit extremely hard. So I was like, all right, you know, I would like to invest in real estate. I'm studying for my medical college admission test. I start going to Google because I'm bored while I'm studying for this exam. I'm reading about the Forbes richest people. None of them are doctors. None of them are people that work the traditional path. And, you know, I have this idea to start investing in real estate. So I started looking at real estate in between my study sessions. And on August 22nd, I took the Medical College Admission Test, the MCAT. On August 23rd, I closed on my first real estate investment property. Wow. How old were you? I was 19.

Holy cow.

It was $8,000. Was the investment. Was the price of the condo. The condo was eight grand. Eight grand.

How did you get a condo for eight grand?

This is right after the 2008 crash. Wow. You got it on foreclosure or what? It was out of foreclosure. That same condo was selling for about 150 grand. just a few years prior.

Come on.

Yeah, and so I came in, it was actually listed on sale for $8,400. I made an offer for $4,000. They came down to $7,000 and I was still trying to push them lower, but then they said they had another offer on the table. I didn't wanna lose it, so I said, I'll give you eight grand, right? So I bought it for eight grand, put in a few thousand dollars worth of work, and I leased it for $600 a month. And now all of a sudden, my mind was blown because I kind of had this idea of what entrepreneurship was. I had never heard that term until I came to college. But I was running this event planning company. And I'm starting to learn about this thing called entrepreneurship. And now I have this condo that's generating me this like almost passive income. I say almost because I was making a lot of mistakes in the beginning. But now I'm like, wow, this investing thing is very unique because I never learned this in school. My teachers never taught me this. But why am I working so hard in school? I mean, I wanna become a doctor so I can ultimately make money. Now I start having this, you know, I talk about an emotional dilemma. Why am I becoming a doctor? Okay, I want to make my parents happy. Check. I want to be successful. Check. Do I really want to be a doctor? Maybe. And now I'm starting to question my actual beliefs. Because if I become a doctor, how do you make money? You treat people. I kind of have this entrepreneurial mind. I want to become successful. How do you make more money? You treat more people. So it's like this kind of runs into a dilemma because if I'm trying to maximize my income as a doctor, I gotta maximize how many patients I see. Maybe that means I don't get to give the best value to each individual patient. But as a human, I want to provide the most value possible. So I start to kind of face this dilemma where maybe I'm becoming a doctor for the wrong reasons.

Interesting.

And then I run this idea by my parents. I don't want to be a doctor. And they're like, Absolutely not. My dad was angry. My mom was furious. It took my mom about a year and a half to believe that her son was not gonna be a doctor.

Oh man.

And I had, I mean, when I say it was tough, like my parents would tell all their friends, Just become a doctor. Oh, wow. You're not becoming one.

I'm not going to become one.

Now I'm getting calls from my family. And maybe I'm getting calls from my.

Family across the country. What are you doing?

You're disgracing your family. Exactly. Exactly. I heard that again and again and again. But I was like, this is not for me. And I started to realize that there's more to this thing. So now I started to go down this financial education journey. and the more I learned, the more I realized I was lied to. Like, we're taught to go to school to get a degree, to get a job so we can then get a job and climb the corporate ladder. But wealthy people don't do that. Wealthy people are not working to climb the corporate ladder. They're working to own the corporate ladder. I didn't even realize that you could do that. Now, you can climb the corporate ladder and work to own the corporate ladder at the same time, but it's a different mindset, right? Most of us are taught to get that degree so we can do one thing, climb the corporate ladder, earn a bigger salary. But if you only rely on your salary, you're just one step away from being broke. Because if you lose your job, something happens to you, you can't work or your company goes down, you lost your salary and now you have no income coming in and now what? You're scrambling for a job, maybe you have some savings to help take care of you.

Or if you haven't been saving and you just spend on things all the.

Time and you have no savings, then you're really screwed. Yeah, you're going into credit card debt. And now you're trying to figure out how do you make things work? And by then it's too late. This is where you gotta be proactive. And now I'm just like, this is crazy. Why was I never taught this? I was never taught about wealth. I was never taught about investing. I was never taught about this sort of financial education. But why aren't we taught this? And that's when I realized it's very profitable to keep people financially uneducated. It's profitable to keep people poor.

Interesting. What would you say is the main system that keeps people poor then?

It goes down to so many different things. The banks profit when you're financially uneducated because they'll keep you saving money in the bank. They'll keep you in consumer debt. If the banks lived by their own advice, which is save money, the banks would be losing money. When you go and deposit $1,000 in the bank, that cash that you deposited, is a liability for the bank. An asset is something that puts money in your pocket. A liability is something that takes money away from your pocket. So when the bank has your cash, it's a liability for them. They want to get rid of it as fast as possible. And the way they do that is by lending it out because it's an investment for the bank. They don't want to hold on to cash, but they want you to save your money.

You want you to give them cash, right? And just leave it there.

Leave it there. And what's happening to your cash while it's there? It's losing value to inflation each and every day. Every day that you keep your cash in the bank, you're becoming poorer each and every day. Now it's funny, I made a video on this in 2016. It was my first video to go viral. It was called, you,'re Guaranteed to Go Broke if you Do this. And I was talking about inflation at 2 to 3%. If you keep your cash in the bank, you're going broke every single day. Now here we are- 8.5% 8.5%. And now people are starting to realize, wow, this inflation is a real problem. And so now when you keep your cash in the bank, the bank is paying you 0.01%, maybe 0.5% if you're lucky, and they're turning around lending it for 5%, 6%. And so the bank does not want to keep the cash and savings because it's a liability for them. They want to keep you spending money on their credit card because now they'll get to earn 18 to 25% in interest every time you spend a dollar. Governments want you to be financially uneducated. Because when you're financially uneducated, guess what? You are an employee and you're a consumer. Who pays the highest taxes? Employees and consumers. Everybody knows that rich people don't pay taxes. It makes people angry, but a lot of times we don't understand why. Right. And we get angry at the wrong things and the wrong reasons.

Yeah, but the more you make as a business owner, until you're like uber rich, I feel like you're spending a lot on taxes.

You are. And there's a lot of things that you can do legally to pay less money in taxes and there's different ways that you can invest your money to pay less money in taxes. So I'll give you a couple examples. Let's start with this. Tax avoidance and tax evading are two similar words with two very different outcomes. This is one of the first things that you learn in law school. Tax evading is illegal. You go to jail. Tax avoiding is illegal and then you get hated for doing that. But this is the way it works.

But you're playing within the rules of the system.

And if you learn the IRS code, it's a rule book. And the people who understand the rule book are the people who have the money to hire the good accountants and the good attorneys.

But you're not an accountant, but have you studied the law?

I have studied a lot of tax law.

Really?

Yeah. And so what happens is wealthy people will understand how this works, play within that system and pay little to no money in taxes.

What are three things that people who are making half a million and above should be doing to avoid taxes better?

So let's start with, I'm gonna assume that you have either some sort of your own income, you're a side hustler or you are a business owner. Yes. So if you make half a million dollars, let's assume that's profit. You are taxed on income. So if you take out a salary that's gonna be taxed. Now the question is, what is a tax deduction? Or the better question is, how can you make something a tax deduction? Because anything can be a tax deduction if you know how to make it a deduction. So that's the question that you have to ask yourself because if you don't have an income, you don't have any tax. So this is what wealthy people are doing. So I'll give you an example of it being done, then I'll show you how people can do it on a potentially smaller scale. Elon Musk, he is probably the biggest example of this. He never got paid a salary running and owning Tesla. He got paid in stock options. So these stock options were-- Is this.

Even before it was public?

This is, I think it was around the time that it was public or maybe a little bit before.

Okay.

But he's been getting stock options for a long time. Sure. But the stock options that he gets were originally got were at $6 a share. So when the stock went up to $1,000 a share and he was given millions of these stock options, now he has on paper a lot of money, but that money isn't in his bank account. So what he does is instead of selling it and having an income, he goes to the bank and says, Hey, I have these stock options which are worth billions of dollars. How about you give me a loan at 3, 4, 5% interest? No bank is gonna say no to that. because the value of this is so much, billions of dollars. I mean, you can make the number smaller, but no bank is going to say no. He takes that loan, pays 3% to 4% to 5% interest on it, and if his company grows, his stock value grows by 6%, he just made a profit on it. He didn't have to take any money out, never took an income, doesn't pay any taxes, and is able to now spend his money, live free, buy whatever he wants, live rich, and not pay a penny in tax.

So he didn't have to sell any of the stock, because if he sold it, he'd pay an income tax right when you sell it. Instead, you get a loan out from the bank, and you don't have to.

Pay tax on that loan. When you go and get a mortgage, you're going to have debt. It's debt. It's not taxable. It's not income. If you go and refinance your home, it's not income. It's cash that you have in your pocket, but it's not income. You're taxed on income. So now your job now, as a business owner, is strategically How do you not have an income? Now you might say, well, I need money to spend. Sure, of course you do. But how can you now strategically use your income to pay for your lifestyle? Now again, it's got to be within the rules, so talk to a tax advisor. But right now, after the pandemic, one of the things that the presidential administration wants to do is encourage people to eat out, eat at restaurants, because restaurants were hit so hard by the pandemic. So what do they do? They created a 100% deduction on food through 2022. So if you go out to eat with your team, it's a 100% deduction. It's all write offs.

It's a write off.

I'm here in San Diego. Well, we're in LA right now, but I'm here on a two month business trip to San Diego with my business partner. I have to rent a car. I actually got a Ford Mustang because I always wanted a Ford Mustang when I was a kid. That was like my dream car. So I got one here with a convertible. Nice. And you know, we have to go to business meetings. We have to go out and explore San Diego, do these things. My business partner is my wife. We're staying in an Airbnb in beautiful San Diego. Guess what? These things are tax deductions against my business. I'm here working. When you're an entrepreneur, everything is work. Now the question is, how do you spend your money in a way that is going to give you a tax write-off? But you have to be smart here because you don't wanna just blow $500,000 so you don't have to pay 150 grand in taxes, right? Like my accountant called me up last year and said, you need to go out and buy a G-Wagon. I said, what? I don't want to buy a G-Wagon. Why? He said, you know, there's this tax deduction going on saying if you go out and buy a heavy car, it's still going on right now. If you go out and buy a heavy car, you can deduct up to 100% of that value of that vehicle right now. Really? And because you're an influencer, you can potentially claim that as an influencer you need a G-Wagon to help you support your lifestyle. the tax code allows this. And I was like, well, I don't want to go out and spend 150 grand for a car that I don't necessarily need just so I can save, let's just say 50 grand on those taxes. So you have to be smart here and know what's right for you and not just spend your money to spend a dollar to save 25 cents. Right. So you just need to know the right strategies that can work for you. And these things change over time, which is why the best thing that you can do is go out and hire a tax accountant, a tax advisor, somebody that isn't just going to file your taxes, but someone that's going to help guide you and say, all right, you know, here are some things that you could potentially spend your money on. Here are where there are more benefits coming this year, next year, things that you want to do. And so there's going to be times where it's going to be more beneficial for you to spend money. There's going to be times where it's going to be more beneficial for you to take in money. And, you know, it's all game. Yeah. And this is what wealthy people understand. It's all a game. And a lot of people hate that, oh, this person's not paying taxes, that person's not paying taxes. But at the end of the day, what you have to remember is somebody else wrote the tax code. All that people are doing is they're trying to learn, okay, this is what the tax code is. What do I do? And then you kind of get into the other philosophical questions. Who's going to do better with a hundred grand, the government or me? if I have 100 grand in my pocket, I can go hire an employee or two. The government's gonna, you know, spend that money wherever they spend it, and pennies will end up actually going to help people. I'm all for helping people. I think that's very important. As soon as we hit a million subscribers on YouTube, what we did was took my team, we went out to a teacher store, and essentially I asked them, hey, can we buy everything in your store? Wow. Because, you know, the, the whole, during the pandemic, People weren't going to class in person and so a lot of these businesses were hurt. I said, Can I buy everything? And she said, well, we need some of this stuff for our teachers. I said, what can we buy? So then we went out and bought a big chunk of the store. Mr.

Beast style.

Mr. Beast style. It was a fun video. Took the team out kind of as a celebration. We bought a big chunk, took it out to a school in Detroit, gave it to them for free. And then I asked the principal there, who's a friend of mine, I said, How many teachers do you have? Okay, and I gave every one of his teachers a $500 check to help them help support their students. Giving is important, but you know, it goes back to the tax question of who does a better job with their money? Right. Entrepreneurs who are working to create more jobs, who are working to produce more value, or the government, which, you know, may not be so good with their money.

Absolutely, yeah. So you started doing the real estate thing early. Are you still massive investor in real estate? Or what's your approach on it now?

Yeah, yeah. So this is an interesting question that you asked, especially right after the tax question. So real estate is one of the best tax games for investors. That's one of the reasons why wealthy people love investing in real estate because not only can you get cash flow, but you also get tax benefits. I started investing in real estate when I was 19 on accident. I went through a lot of pain. I remember when I told my dad first, Hey dad, I want to go invest in real estate. he was like, you,'re stupid. Go study, go become a doctor. So I started investing in real estate then and I continued to buy homes. And I remember, because remember, this is right after the 2008 crash. I was buying homes for like 30 grand in good areas. I remember home prices went up to $50,000 and I was like, that's a lot of money for a home. I didn't know anything else, right? That's all I saw. And so to me, I was like, that's expensive. But I continued buying and I still am buying. but not as much as I was before because now I've been working on a couple other businesses. And so what I'm realizing is, okay, when I invest my money in real estate, my goal is to get a seven percent cash on cash return on my money, meaning for every dollar I invest, I want to get seven cents back in cash flow, positive cash flow every year. If I invest 100 grand, I want seven thousand dollars of profit every single year. Well, I'm an entrepreneur, right? So I'm working on a couple of different companies, one of which is market briefs. And so now I'm in this position where what do I do with this cash? I can take this money, put it in real estate, get a 7-8% return on my money, or I can put it in market briefs, which would be a bigger tax deduction. Because now, you know, if I spend money in advertising, I spend money in marketing, I hire more employees, we have a smaller profit, but then I can grow the company significantly faster than 7% a year. So, what I've been doing now is investing more of my money into market briefs because it's something that I'm super passionate about. Like, I love real estate. I love revitalizing homes and buildings and really helping to build the neighborhoods through that. But market briefs had such a different value in the sense that we're making financial news accessible because, you know, I didn't grow up learning about money.

Right.

And CNBC looked cool, but I never understood anything that was happening there. They have all these confusing terms that are going on. It's a way to make financial education and what's going on with money more accessible to people because I'm realizing how important that is to me because the more and more I talk to people, the more the people listen to what I say, the more I hear, oh my God, I wish I would have learned this when I was younger. Like, yeah, I know, me too. And so it's like, it's important for me to help get that message out there because it's so needed. You know, we talk about especially in Detroit, food deserts, where there's areas people can't get access to healthy food. But this money desert, this financial education desert, it's so widespread. It's global. None of us are thinking about money. And it makes me angry because if I didn't accidentally start reading these business books, if I didn't accidentally start investing in real estate, I would be somewhere completely different. You know, I have a lot of friends who are doctors now. They're working their butt off. They're also paying the highest taxes. They're also trying to figure out how to afford my lifestyle because when you go and become a doctor, you make a good salary.

But guess what?

Now you have big student loans you got to pay back. And now a lot of times you want to live that doctor lifestyle. You want to have the G-Wagon, you want to have the Ranger over, you want to have the nice car, you want to have the nice home. So now you graduate, you're 28, 29 years old, you have half a million dollars of student loans you got to pay back. You're making a few hundred grand a year, but you're working your butt off. It's very stressful and now you have all these new expenses, your homes, your cars.

And how much does that $500,000 in student loan actually become after 30 years of paying it off?

Oh man, yeah, over a million.

Really?

Yeah.

So it's really, it's not a half a million dollars in loans, it's a million dollars in loans that you're paying off for 30 years.

Yeah, right? Exactly.

With the interest.

And let me, I want to add on that point because the thing about student loans, you know, we talk about who do you trust, where do you get your information from, right? Everybody, the system says go to school, get a degree. If you don't have money to get a degree, what do you do? Get student loans. I started looking deeper, right? You start asking the question why. The number one liability for young people nowadays are student loans. And the government always talks about how we have this huge student loan epidemic, this huge student loan problem. But the number one asset on the United States balance sheet are student loans.

Really?

This blew my mind. You go to Google search this, the assets on the United States balance sheet number one asset. You'll see student loans are their number one asset. So on one hand, we have people talking about the importance of higher education, the importance of going into debt to get your degree. And then at the same time, that's your number one asset. It's holding so many people back from buying a home, from living their lives, from doing things, investing their money, yet at the same time it's keeping the government rich. This is where that mindset, you have to start thinking a little bit differently and start asking questions to the status quo, to the system, to the way things are done. And if you're like me, you're going to get a little angry. You're going to get frustrated because you're going to realize, what the heck? Why are people not taught this? Why are we not taught how to use our money? Because nowadays, people are paying 50 grand a year to get a good college degree, but at the same time now, YouTube is decentralizing education.

Free.

For free. And you can learn from anybody you want. If you don't like the way that I sound, hit the X button, go to somebody else, right? Exactly. And it doesn't cost you a penny. You can learn from anybody, people who are actually doing what they teach. and you can learn the comfort of your home.

Now, Jesper, you've been, your channel is really inspiring and you've interviewed and also just done your own research individually on a lot of these different topics about money. You've interviewed the top people on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, investing in gold and stock trading and real estate and starting your own business and all these different things with all the information that you've brought into your life. All the mistakes around money, the successes around money, the wisdom you've learned, the things you've tried, maybe things you haven't tried. If you could share five things you wish we all taught when we were younger about money. With all this information that seems a little overwhelming and confusing, especially today with the NFT world and the crypto and all these different things. What do you wish we taught everyone from the ages of 10 to 20? Five different things around money.

First thing would be, what is money? Because money as we know it is fake. Our dollars are just pieces of paper. I grew up thinking that our paper dollars are like the holy grail. You want to save this money because it is the most valuable thing there is. As I became older, I started to realize that that's not the case. Our paper dollars are just pieces of paper. It's fiat currency. which means it's issued by the government and the value is backed through the strength of the government. Now we're lucky here that the United States is the world's superpower. We have the world's strongest military, we have the world's strongest economy, but we can't stay on top forever. And you know inflation is when the value of a dollar goes down. So these dollars, which many of us think that if we hoard this, we'll become wealthy saving money to wealth, is actually keeping you poor and it's making you poorer each and every day. So the first thing you have to understand is what is money? Second thing you have to understand is what do wealthy people work for? And most of us, the majority of us are taught to work to get a job and climb that corporate ladder. But wealthy people are doing something completely different. They're working to own the corporate ladder. They're working for something called equity. And this thing really blew my mind because Wealthy people are not working for that paycheck. They're working to own a piece of the company. That way they can get a piece of the profits. So the best way to understand this is, you know, a lot of times people complain about how much money I'm making. I wish my boss paid me more. And this is where if you start to understand the system, you'll start to ask the right questions. See, a big company, you have to ask the question, who are they working for? Are they working to take care of their employees? Are they working to take care of their customers? Neither. They're working to take care of one person. They're shareholders. It's this concept called fiduciary duty. I learned this in law school. The executives of a company have a fiduciary duty not towards the employees, not towards the customers, but towards the shareholders, the owners of the company. Now what that means, an easy example of this, is you're going out to dinner with your girlfriend or your wife, and you're on a date, and you get a text from one of your good friends, Hey, let's go play Fortnite right now. Your fiduciary duty at the moment is to be with a girlfriend, to be with a wife, to be with a partner, to spend time with him or her. If you go out and leave, you're gonna get in trouble, right? Yeah, yeah. So it's who is your alliance to? And the shareholders, the executives, the CEO and the executives company, their fiduciary duty is to the shareholders, the owners of the company. So what are they trying to do? they're working to drive up the valuation of the company. So once you start to understand that, you'll realize why this big discrepancy between what people are paid and what people want to be paid. And when you start to understand that, you're going to change what you do with the money. That's why I said a minute ago or a little bit ago, wealthy people are working to climb, not climb the corporate ladder, but own the corporate ladder. So how do you get the equity, the ownership? You have to own a piece of the corporate ladder. Now, if you work for a public company, that means now you can take some of your income and you can buy stock in the company. Maybe they pay you with equity, maybe they give you some sort of revenue share, that's what we do in my companies. Or if your company doesn't do that, then you have to start taking this money that you're earning and you have to start investing it into a place where you're getting equity. Maybe that means stocks, maybe that means real estate. It could be a number of different investments, but you have to work towards that equity. The third thing is that you have to think bigger. I know I grew up thinking that somebody who looks like me, somebody who's brown, somebody who wears a turban, somebody who didn't have entrepreneur investor parents could go out and do this. Because you think that somebody like me can't do this. My parents also told me that I couldn't do it. I didn't know anybody doing it. I didn't know any investors, but. you have to be the one to take that first step. And once you start to take that first step, you're gonna learn and see the second step. Then you take the second step and you're like, oh, I can start a $100 investment here. You don't have to start with, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Start with $100. Apps on the internet make it so much more accessible. Anything is possible. If you live in America, you speak English, you have more opportunities than really anybody else in the world. people will literally risk their lives, risk their lives to come to this country because there's opportunity here. And so if you're here, you have the ability to understand what you and I are saying, and you have that technology to do it, you're blessed. Now, what do you do with this?

Right?

You have to go out and start learning. You have to go out and start doing. And then the next thing that you have to do.

Number four.

Number four is you have to understand the concept of debt, because we live in this consumer culture. And it's interesting where, you know, we want to live this flex lifestyle, right? I want to show off on Instagram. I want to show off my new car, my new Chanel Gucci purse. And we kind of get caught up where I need to live a certain lifestyle that way people can think that I'm rich. But what you're doing now is you're living broke, right? making everybody else rich, so people think you're rich. Your product rich, you have a lot of nice stuff, but you're broke. And so when you live that type of lifestyle, you are the reason why Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Chanel are making so much money, but it's keeping you broke. The richest person in the world, sometimes he's the second, sometimes he's the third, is the CEO of Louis Vuitton.

No, why? Really?

Yeah. Bernard Arnault, and why? How did he get there? Because everybody wants to look rich. Everybody wants the Louis Vuitton. You know, I saw this in the pandemic especially. We were in a recession in 2021, but luxury sale products were breaking new records.

Come on, really?

They're breaking records in 2021.

Why is that?

Stimulus checks went out, people had cash, and some people use that money to save, some people use that money to pay down debt, some people invested that money, but a big chunk of people took that money to places like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and now you go and spend it.

You would think when the economy is-- well, I guess when people are losing their jobs and there's financial uncertainty of the future, you'd think people would be saving or investing, not spending on luxury goods. Especially if you can't even go outside to flex it. You can only do it on social media in the comfort of your own.

You don't need to go outside anymore. You can just do it on social media. And so if you don't have the cash to do it, people are going into debt to buy it and it's becoming easier and easier because of now things like buy now, pay later. It is one of the fastest growing industries in FinTech. I love financial technology, but it breaks my heart. I mean, it just, it rips my heartstrings when I see the growth of this buy now, pay later because what does that mean? I can go out and buy anything I want. not pay for it today, pay it off over three months, and then if I don't, I get slapped with 25% interest. And if you are 18, or let's just say 21, I gave you $6,500. You never invested another penny, but you invested those $6,500, and you could get an 18% return on that money, and you retired at 65, and you look at this investment portfolio, you would have over $11 million. Wow. Now, everyone watching this thing, where the heck am I going to get 18% on my money?

Exactly.

But your credit card company is doing it every single day. $6,500 is what the average American household has in credit card debt right now. And you're turning around paying these companies 18%, 20%, 25% a year, and they're the ones that are getting rich, not you. So what's happening? You're going into debt to buy liabilities, which are things that lose your money, and then you're paying interest on top of that, which is making everybody else rich, which leaves no money in your pocket, to make yourself rich. And you have to break out of that mindset.

So what do we need to know about debt then? How do people get comfortable understanding about debt, either using it in the right ways and eliminating the debts that don't support our financial growth?

Yeah, so the first thing is never finance anything that isn't gonna pay you. Give me an example. Gucci, your vacations, your car, Stop financing these things that aren't paying you. And people are gonna get upset when I say your car, because they're gonna say, Wait, how am I supposed to.

Buy a car without a car payment? Don't buy a $100,000 car unless you've got the money in the bank to buy it.

Go and plus more. Buy a used car for six grand. Exactly.

Go buy a used car, good working.

Condition car, with cash. And ride it for 10 years. Exactly. The first time I made a million dollars in a year, my car, was 500 bucks. My employees had better cars than I did.

I had a $4,000 car for the first five years living in Los Angeles. $4,000 car, used car, 1997.

I love it.

Was the car when it was made. And that thing was great. It was comfortable, got me from A to B. It didn't break down.

Exactly.

I didn't need to be flashy.

Exactly. I still have my $500 car. I still drive. And it's one of those things where You know, because I fell into this trap where the first time I started making money, you know, in my culture, cars are a big thing. The Punjabi culture, people really want to put money in their cars. They want to look cool, right? So when I was 17, 16, 17, I started making a little bit of money because I was doing my side hustles. The first thing I did was I put new rims on my car. Then I put tints on my car. Then I put HID's on my car. I had two 12-inch subwoofers in my trunk.

Right?

I put the tints on, I put a new sound system in there.

Lights around, glow in the dark, yeah?

I had a Toyota, right? And then the next thing I was gonna do is I called up my cousin, I said, Guess what? I got three grand in the bank. I'm about to put Lamborghini doors on my Toyota. That's crazy, man. And he's like, Just mean, you're stupid. Don't do that. And so he sat on the phone with me for like 20 minutes convincing me not to do it. Luckily I didn't. I'm really glad I didn't. But that's where all my money was going. I looked cool, my car was cool. and that's where all my money was going. I had $1,000 in my bank and I went out and I bought a $1,000 watch. I was like 18 years old, right? Because it was like, I was in that industry, the entertainment industry, I wanted to look cool. And then, you know, I start to read these money books and my mindset starts to shift. And now all of a sudden, it's the comp, like I went from one polar extreme to the other polar extreme.

I don't wanna spend a penny.

On anything. On anything. Unless it's making me money. Exactly. I don't want to spend anything unless it's making money. So now I'm saving as much money as I can. I'm investing my money as much as I can. I'm trying to build my business. And I mean, I'm talking like, I'm running my shoes into the ground. They have holes in them. I put a piece of tape, wrap it up, I'm going to school. I got rental properties, but I got my shoes that are taped up, right? And it's like, I realized that I'm going to go, I'm not going to make those same mistakes again. And you have to break out of that mindset. The first time I made a hundred grand a year, school. And I was living in an apartment paying $400 a month including my water, my electricity, my cable, my gas, my internet, everything. And the reason was because I didn't have a room. I slept on the living room floor. I had a little mattress. I used to pull that into the living room, put that down, go to sleep at night, wake up, fold up the sheets, put them away, drag the mattress back into the hallway because I'm like, you know, I realized that the power of compounding your money, I realized the power of putting your money into the right assets. And I'm like, this is my time to build. I've been blowing this money that I'm earning on things that are making everybody else rich. I'll spend money on that stuff a little bit later. Right now, I want to make myself rich. And so, you know, you have to just first understand what it is that's worth spending money on and what's not. And then, you know, if you do have that debt, You've got to come up with a strategy to pay it down as fast as possible. First thing you can do, if you have a lot of credit card debt, call up the companies. See if they're going to be willing to just give you a lower amount. See if they're willing to work with you. Say, look, I got $10,000 worth of debt. I'm never going to pay this off. It's not going to happen. How about you work with me and give me $5,000 and I will work to pay that off. You start to work with them, see if you can do something. Then you can consider moving some of that money to a 0% APR card if you have 12 to 18 months to do that. That way now you can aggressively, you got to do the smart because if you're just going to keep doing the same things they were before, don't do it. But you have to start aggressively paying it down. You stop spending money. That way now you can pay down this debt as fast as possible and then you work to earn more money. And the money has to go somewhere as you're earning more money. You live the same lifestyle, if not smaller, and you take all this extra money and you use it to pay down your debt. That way now you can start building, right?

You got to lay that foundation. You got to start working to grow.

Upwards, but you have to get aggressive.

Is there ever a time where people should go into debt, the right type of debt? The credit card debt, student loan debt, buying a car and going in debt on that, those things I'm understanding is not helping your financial future. When is the right time or is there a right time in your mind to take money out and spend interest on that money. Depends, right?

If it's something that's gonna make you income and you can manage the debt, then yes. But it's not for everybody. Some people don't have it in them to manage the debt. Some people don't have it in them to manage investments. Some people don't have it in them to run a business. If you're not the entrepreneurial investor type and you don't like looking at numbers, you don't like managing money, you don't like trying to grow this, stay away from it. Now you go up, maybe you can get debt to buy a home. But that's it. But if you are more the entrepreneurial type, you have it in you that you want to grow. Now, if you're using debt, you should only be using debt to buy something that's paying you with income, something that's going to make you more money.

Do you have any debt out right now?

Right now, I do not. I have people paying me loans, but I personally don't have any debt right now. And I kind of went through this phase where I have all this real estate. but I have no debt on it. And the reason is, is because I'm waiting for the right opportunity. I will. I will have more debt. Really? Yeah. It's waiting for the right opportunity because.

Right now all my real estate is paid off.

You've paid off all the real estate. How many properties do you have? Units in the dozens, a number of units.

But now I'm just waiting for the right opportunity.

And it's all paid off.

All paid off.

So now it's just cash coming in. It's cash coming in. And, you know, do you still have that?

I still got that.

That's rented for 850 a month.

That eight $8,000 place.

$8,000 place. That's just bringing in 800 bucks a month.

$850 a month.

Clear and free. Yeah, you got to pay your expenses, your property taxes, insurance, your maintenance, your management fees.

But right now, I have no debt on it.

And so now what I'm waiting for is-- and how much could you sell that for now? Probably a hundred thousand, hundred twenty. I mean, I don't know the exact-- something that ranges. It's not bad. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy because I never-- when I buy real estate, I never look at-- what can I sell this property for? I'm looking for one thing. Cash flow. Cash flow, yeah. And so this is a big mistake that leads people into a lot of problems in real estate. Because when you start buying real estate, hoping that you'll be able to sell it for a higher price in the future and things don't go as planned, then what? Yeah, you're screwed. Now you're screwed. So, you know, for me, I look at one thing, cash flow. And will I be able to see more growth in this area? So I look where businesses are moving. Where's money moving? to, and then that's where I want to invest because I know if property prices go up, hey, it's icing. Property prices go down, it's okay. That's like I'm gonna rent, which is covering my costs.

So what's your goal, right, with the dozens of units for the opportunity for something bigger or what's the plan?

Something, yeah, it can be anything. Something bigger in real estate and I'm looking for the right opportunity. But again, my focus now isn't in real estate like it was before. A few years ago, I was heavy in real I was doing everything that I can there, and a lot more opportunities were there. I bought a property in 2021, haven't bought anything in 2022 yet, but my focus now is building my business because I see a bigger opportunity there for me than real estate. That's why I've been kind of, I'm still involved in real estate, but not the way that I was a few years ago.

Because you can earn more with your business if you put the attention and the energy and the money into building the team and the resources and technology and those things.

And it's more, it's more fun because it's a lot more active for me. And then, you know, once this gets bigger, then I'll go back to real estate. But right now, like for the last few years, I've been kind of phasing slowly away from real estate as I can transition more into the business because, you know, it's just more fun for me. Yeah.

Okay, so understanding debt was the fourth thing. What was the fifth thing you wish people learned from 10 to 20 years old about money?

You have to be willing to make mistakes, take risks, and start. And this one is hard and it sounds simple, but a lot of people that I know, a lot of people, they are so hesitant to making that first investment because what if I do something wrong? What if I make a mistake? What if my investment goes down? And so the simple thing is- that's.

Happened to me multiple times.

Yeah, but you learn every time, right? It's your tuition. It's your real tuition. And you have to be willing to try things because if you don't, you're going to get stuck in game a what if? What if I lose money? What if it doesn't work out? But what if it goes up? What if you learn? I have made a lot of mistakes. I made a video on my YouTube channel where I went through my worst real estate deal ever. It was my third property that I ever bought. It was a home in the city of Detroit. And I made every mistake possible. Now, I'm still in college, right? I don't know what's going on exactly with real estate investing. And I mean, I bought the property. and I bought it because my contractor at the time told me that we can make a lot of money on this deal. We'll be able to rent it out. We could flip it if I wanted to. And he was like, don't even worry about getting a home inspection. Now, when I buy a property now, the first thing I do is I get a property inspection where somebody walks through the deal, makes sure a third party, an independent person, and they tell me anything wrong with the property in the foundation, in the plumbing, in really anything with the property. So I know what I'm getting. himself into. And so he told me, don't do that. He said, don't worry, I already walked through. He's a contractor. So I figured he knows what he's talking about. All you have to do is spend 5 500 and I will make sure this property is ready to go.

Wow.

So I said, okay, let's do it. So I bought the home. I gave him a check for half, maybe 2500 or three, something around there, 3 000. And a week goes by, nothing starts. Two weeks go by, nothing starts, and I call him, I said, Hey man, what's going on? I thought we were gonna have this done in two weeks. Here we are two weeks later and you haven't even brought your materials here. So I got caught up with something, something's going wrong. And so now two more weeks go by, he brought some materials there, he started painting one wall and that was it. And so, you know, I'm getting upset because now it's like, you know, every day that this property is now leased out, it's costing you money. It's costing you money. And still nothing's getting done. Another two weeks go by and now I'm like, okay, look, what's going on? We got to get this taken care of because now we're six weeks into this deal. You haven't done a single thing. You keep putting me off. You took my money and nothing's happened. And so long story short on that, he ran away. He was having financial difficulties. That's why he wanted me to close on this deal because he needed some cash and now he's gone. So now I have another property that somebody was working on, a manager, and he was having some issues at my property. He was causing some problems. So I figured he's causing problems there. How about you come work at this property and you need a home. You can live in this home for free. Fix it up. Just fix it up.

And so he said, okay.

So now I thought, all right, you know, I found a good deal here. I've got somebody who'll fix it up. He'll live there, take care of it, and it's going to cost me less money. And so now he's living in this property. And he's like, how about this? How about you just open up a charge account at Home Depot and I'll just go buy stuff and take care of it at the home. I said, okay. So I go open up the charge account. He starts buying materials not to work in my home, but to work on other people's properties. Oh my gosh. So now I'm like, dude, like you're spending my money to go work on other people's properties so you can make double profits over there. You haven't started any work on my home. You're not paying me rent. you have a dog that you're not taking care of who's pooping everywhere in the property and it's not being taken care of. And so now how do I get somebody out of this home? I got to evict him out of my own property. There's no lease in place. So now we're going into all these legal issues of how do we get this person out of the home? We get him out of the home. It took me months to get him out. The property now is destroyed.

Oh, man.

There's crap, little crap, all over the home. He damaged the place, did not take care of it. And now it's like we have to start all over from negative to start fixing this property up. So now we start fixing it. I've got a licensed and insured contractor. We're months into the deal and he wants, I don't know, like a lot more money, at least 10 grand, if not more, to start doing the renovations. And we started digging deep and we start to see problem after problem after problem. So now it, you know, every cost keeps adding up, now the home is ready to go. And I'm like, all right, fine. And everybody told me, just please, don't license this home with the city of Detroit as a rental because nobody does it. And this is, you know, again, after the 2008 crash, Detroit went through its bankruptcy. They were having their own issues, but I don't like to play games. I want to play by the rules. So I said, I'm going to get a rent, I'm going to get a license for rental. When you get a license for rental, They're gonna send their own property inspectors out to the property and they're gonna inspect it and make sure that it's okay. So now the property inspectors come out and they say, I need to lift up the home. So, what do you mean lift up the home? They're like, yeah, we need to raise the home. I don't even know that you could do that. Apparently you can and it's very expensive. So, I lift up the home and then we start running the water in the property and it turns out that the water is not draining to the main city line. apparently somebody previously living in this property had poured cement down the main drain. Now in order to get this property working we have to bust out the cement in the basement, take out this pipe, put in a new pipe, repour the cement, and then these property inspectors start disagreeing with one another. One person says that you need a 10 foot electrical riser. So we make it 10 feet. The next one comes says why is it 10 feet? It needs to be 13 feet. I'm like your first person said 10 and now they start fighting with each other and we have to keep paying for these inspectors to come back. They keep charging me permit fees for everything. If I want to paint the window sills, it's a hundred dollar permit fee. Change the smoke detectors, 75 permanent fee. So this goes on and on and on and on for months. Finally now we're approved for rental. I was like, oh my God, like this is the biggest headache of my life. We get a tenant in the property, we get licensed, tenants in the property, and now We have the license and the property inspectors just decides to go back to the property. They don't tell us. They just go back there. Even though we're fully licensed, they had no reason to go there. They knock on the door and apparently we didn't know this, the tenant was having a babysitting operation in a property. So now the inspector sees this that the tenant is running an illegal babysitting operation. He tells us, he finds us, tells us we need to evict the tenant. And now we have to start this process all over again. So after that point, I was like, you know what? Just sell this property. Wow. Because this is the biggest headache and that was the only deal I ever lost money on. But I learned a lot.

It was my tuition.

So you have to be willing to learn, be willing to make mistakes, and then be willing to grow from those mistakes, go on and, you know, keep willing to go. Because the thing that I kept telling myself is, you know, there's a lot of real estate investors out there that have thousands of units. There's no way they're dealing with this with every single one. They have a team. I just gotta figure out how to do it. So that's the only way that I could get through that.

I think people, I also don't think people understand that investing can feel like a full contact sport at times. It can feel like you get punched in the gut, in the face, in the ribs over and over again like you did for almost a year it sounds like with this one property. What if that was your first property? You might have said, Screw this real estate investing thing. I'm never doing this again. I lost all my money. I'm just gonna go back into doing something that is safe and that I know is not going to punch me in the mouth every day with another fine fee and penalty or whatever it might be. So I think people also need to understand this is a risky thing. I've lost a lot of money. I've made a lot of money, lost a lot of money. It never feels good to lose money.

It does.

It emotionally charging. It psychologically can mess with you if you're not mentally and spiritually prepared to understand, okay, it doesn't feel good to go from from a few hundred thousand dollars to zero. In weeks, like some people did with the stock market or something in the last year, real estate, whatever it might be, or crypto going up and coming down, it's a big psychological high and low if you're not prepared for it. And so what have you done psychologically, mentally and emotionally to prepare for the big swings when you see, oh, my money just went up 10x in the last three months. Oh, I'm negative hundreds of thousands in a few weeks or millions. What have you done to prepare for that mentally and spiritually and psychologically?

I actually brought that up because one of the things that I say is that the psychology of investing is just as, if not more important than the actual how-to's of investing. And that's especially true when it comes to something like the stock market. In real estate, it's tough, but the difference between real estate and the stock market is if you buy a, say, $200,000 home, it's not going to go to zero next week, next month, or really ever, because you have some land, you have a physical property, and the stock market, it can happen. And so there's a couple things that.

You- invest in stocks too?

I invest, so I invest my money in five places. Real estate, stocks, startups, cryptocurrency, and physical gold.

So that descending order of value from the most to the least?

Yeah, I would say so. you know, if you want to put my business in there, then that would be number one.

Startups, number one.

Your business and startups, number one. Yeah. But I also invest in other startups as well. But kind of, I would say in that order, yes. But in the stock market particularly, it is a liquid investment, meaning you can easily buy, you can easily sell. And that's what becomes a big psychological game because every day people are watching that ticker. Ah, I just made money. I just lost money. Ah. What's Tesla doing today? Tesla's up $2, that's us down $4 and it can really drain you. And I think most people who start off investing their money, they get sucked into that rat race. I did too because when I first started investing my money in the stock market, I was like, wow, this is fun. This is exciting. Oh my God, it becomes like a drug. You become addicted to it because I was waking up every morning, I was like, I'm gonna become a day trader. I got it. And so, you know, I took a summer of when I was in college and that's all I did. I would wake up before the market and I would I would read these stock charts and I would trade these penny stocks and some days I would make $1,000, other days I would lose $1,000 and by the end of the summer, I don't think I made any money. You just spent all this time. I spent all my time and I realized this is not for me. I became so addicted to it, all you're doing is watching the numbers go up and down and ticker symbols and you're reading these forums. So the first thing is you have to understand that your psychology is important. What I do is I understand I'm not a trader. I don't trade, I don't flip, even when it comes to real estate, really any of my investments.

You invest.

I invest long term. Long term. So what does that mean? So I have two strategies when it comes to investing my money. I have an active strategy and I have a passive strategy. I'll start with the passive strategy because that's easy to understand. Every month I passively invest my money into stocks, physical gold and cryptocurrency. Really. And so what that means is it's automatic.

Automatic payment going in each one. Yeah.

All the time. So you're doing index funds with stocks or what stocks? I do ETFs, low cost ETFs, and I have ETFs to give me exposure to the S&P 500. That's kind of your safe and your value. S&P 500 are the biggest 500 companies in the stock market. So that's the kind of the safe value play. I have some ETFs that give me exposure to innovation, startups, growth, because I like that space much more risky, but you could see more potential upside. Risk means you could also see more downside. And then I also have ETFs that give me exposure to emerging markets. These are countries that are overseas, countries like China, India, Korea, Brazil, countries that are up and coming to give you some diversification, not just in companies, but also in dollars, right? Diversifying out of the dollar, so Canada gives me that protection. So every week I have money that's leaving my account and being invested into these different ETFs. I don't care whether the market's up or down. It happens every week. In physical gold, every month, I use an app for this. There's apps that allow you to do this. I have money that's withdrawn out of a bank account that buys me physical gold. Now, people are going to say, why gold? For me, it's real money. It's another way of saving real money because now if I have 50 grand of cash, would I rather save and bury that 50 grand of cash in my backyard or bury 50 grand of gold in my backyard. I'd rather bury the gold because I know that 50 grand of cash is guaranteed to lose value every single day. Gold is a store of value because it takes time, effort, and labor to mine physical gold. And that time, effort, and labor is represented through the physical piece of gold. So that's why I own it. It's not a huge piece of my portfolio, but it's kind of that insurance. That's the way I look at it. It's protection in case everything else goes wrong. that I have some physical gold. So I have that and then I have my cryptocurrencies. Now, I'm mainly in Bitcoin. I have some Ethereum, a couple other coins, but mainly Bitcoin and every day I buy a little bit of cryptocurrency. Again, I know it's volatile. I know you can see big swings up, big swings down. I don't care. I'm buying it every single day. So that's my passive strategy where it doesn't matter what's going on in the market. I'm just going to keep buying no matter what's going on. Then my active strategy is now where I do more of the fundamental analysis where I understand where am I actually investing my money. So this requires much more time and more effort on my end. So on the real estate side, I'm looking for deals that are paying me that 7% cash on cash return. And so I'm going to be analyzing the numbers, looking at properties, walk through a lot of deals, and when I find something, I will go out and buy it. In the stock market, relatively similar. I'm looking for companies that I believe in, that I believe are good fundamentally, fundamentally means looking at the numbers, right? What are the revenues look like? Have the revenues been growing? How fast are they growing? 10% a year, 20% a year? What about the profits? But you also have to look a little bit deeper than just the profits because you want to see what's going on with the expenses. Where are they investing? Are their expenses going up because the cost of business is becoming more expensive? or are the expenses rising because they're investing more in their company? So you gotta do a little bit of digging in there and then in startups, obviously invest in my own companies, but I also invest in startup companies. I love entrepreneurship. I am a huge fan of entrepreneurs. I love supporting other entrepreneurs because I never had that support when I was getting started as an entrepreneur. So one of the ways I can provide the support is through money, through investing in some of these entrepreneurs. So I invest in these startups, fourth cryptocurrency. If a big cryptocurrency crash happens, well, I already know what I want to own. I'll just come in and buy more. And with gold, I don't really actively buy gold, but that's the four ways that I actively invest my money. Sure.

And where are the three biggest revenue streams coming from for you?

Well, obviously business, you know, and that's across the different businesses. And then the second one, I would say, is real estate. that gives me that passive cash flow. And those are my two real, when I talk about income cash in my pocket, it comes from my business and it comes from real estate. That's where my cash comes from. Nice.

Yeah, it's pretty simple. And what's the number one revenue generator in your business? Is it from YouTube? Is it from the newsletter?

Is it from some other course or coaching? So the business is divide up. I have my personal brand, which is Minority Mindset, right? That's me on YouTube. That's my blog. And then I have market briefs, and market insiders. So number one would probably be my personal brand. And now, I don't think that's gonna last very long though. My personal brand is doing well because I built up this big following on YouTube, which was completely, it's funny, it's accidental. I never wanted to be a celebrity. I never wanted to be famous. I never wanted to be known. I started YouTube on accident. You know, we talk about risks, making mistakes, I've always been an entrepreneur and I went through a lot of different business ideas. And one idea that I had, it was in the year of my grad school, I was taking a class on public speaking and my friend, my roommate at the time, he was like, you gotta watch this show called Shark Tank. I was like, okay, whatever. I don't watch TV. He said, But watch this show called Shark Tank. And it's all about people pitching business ideas and this class that I was taking, we had a project where I was supposed to pitch a product to the class, kind of like Shark Tank. I was like, that's easy. I do this with my friends all day and night long. That can't be hard. So I kept putting it off, putting it off, putting it off. I'm a procrastinator, especially when it came to school, because my mind was always somewhere else. And so now, one day I was late to class, like normal. I pick up my backpack and I start running because I was like, oh, I'm a couple minutes late. And it's raining this day. And as I'm running to my class, I stepped in a pothole filled with water. Now my foot is soaked. I sit down, I'm like, oh, I'm wet, my socks are wet, I'm uncomfortable. And the teacher goes, Jasprit, it's your day. Your day for what? She's like, it's your day to present. And I was like, oh my God, I forgot. And so, you know, obviously I don't tell her this, but I go stand in front of the class, and I'm like, Jasprit, think of something, anything, anything, just think of something. And so the first thing that comes to my mind my wet socks. So I go up in front of the class, no practice, no preparation, and I pitch this idea of water resistant socks, that way now you can be an athlete, you can walk around and not have to worry about stepping in puddles. I sit down, I was like nice job, Jaap Spruit, but that's actually kind of a cool idea. So I go home and I start googling, you know, water resistant socks, and they had these like really thick, uncomfortable looking things that people wore when they go fishing and stuff, but nothing made for like athletes. people to wear in their regular life. So I was like, oh, maybe I'm on to something. So then I spent a lot of time trying to develop this technology, working with textile engineers, working with sock manufacturers, and I. And I created a water resistant sock. And now I go to launch this company, and I got approached by a marketing company, quote unquote marketing company, and they said they're gonna help me blow up my sales. They're gonna help me do all this stuff. They're gonna help me make all this money, and. I was really skeptical. And then they said, don't worry, we have a 100% money back guarantee. If you're not completely satisfied, if we don't make our money back, you can get all of your money back. I said, okay, that sounds pretty good. So I gave them money. It was a few grand. I think it was like $3,500, which is a lot of money. And the next day, after I gave them the money, I had a bad feeling in my stomach. I was like, you know, I'm a marketer. I like the way I can promote products. Just something didn't seem right. So I call up the guy and I say, Hey man, I know that we haven't started yet. Look, I just want to have my money back. I want to end this on amicable terms before you guys spend any money. Let's just end it now. And he said, okay, no problem. What's been hold? And I was in the gym at the time and I was really frustrated because I was between sets and he puts me on hold for a long time. And then all of a sudden the phone line goes beep. And I was like, oh, something's not right. So then I call up the other number I have. They don't pick up. I start emailing them and I never hear from them again. Found out I got scammed. They were a fake company. Ooh. So now I was irritated. I launched the company. We had an amazing launch, I think. I don't remember exactly, but in the first 30 days, we did over either 17,000 or $20,000 in sales right off of the gate. And I was still, I had this like kind of chip on my shoulder. I was like, that's not cool. Like nobody supported me as an entrepreneur. Nobody wanted me to do especially when it came to the sock business. I mean, there were so many jokes thrown at me because they're like, oh, you left medicine to go sell socks? Right. You know, I was just so frustrated by it. And I was like, you know, people don't see what I see. They don't have my vision. I want to do something to help other people like me. So I put out this course on Udemy, seven books, on how to launch a business without getting screwed over. I didn't really care about making money. I just wanted to help people. because I was so angry. And people loved it. And they were like, dude, can you please start a social media page? Start an Instagram page. And I did it under the alias Minority Mindset. The whole idea being just thinking differently than the majority of people, because that's what I thought I always did. From the point where I started hosting parties instead of going to the parties to then buying real estate when everybody was out blowing their money they didn't have in college to now starting this company. I was like, yeah, I have this thing, minority mindset. So I called it that. And then I said, okay, I'll start an Instagram page. Just posting the same stuff, like just here and there, like things that I wish I would have learned, known about starting a business and about investing and money that somebody, I wish someone would have taught me. And then everyone says, Jaspreet, I like this. Can you make long-form content? Can you create a blog? I was like, well, English is my second language. You're not gonna like my writing. So, no, I can't start a blog. but I don't mind talking, so I'll start a YouTube channel. So then I started this YouTube channel called Minority Mindset, and that slowly, organically started to grow. And I never started it with the intention of making money. And, you know, it's funny. I I tell that to people now, and they're like, there's no way that's true. Like, you have to have some idea of trying to make money. And I really didn't. I was recording the videos off my phone, so I had really no expenses. I think I spent, like, 30 bucks. on a tripod. That was it. I had no lights, I had no fancy equipment. And then I think we were close to 10,000 subscribers and my buddy comes up to me. He says, Hey, how much money are you making from Minority Mindset? I'm like, I'm not making any money. He said, from your YouTube advertisements. I'm like, what are you talking about? He's like, you know you can have advertisements on your YouTube channel? I said, I have no idea what you're talking about. So he goes onto my YouTube channel with me. goes into the back end, the settings, and he's like, Dude. Just click one button. Turn your monetization on. I said, I don't even know that you could do that. This is before that there was even monetization requirements. Anybody could monetize any videos, no matter how many subscribers, how many videos you had. So I was like, oh, I didn't know that I could do this. So I really started it just kind of with that goal of, I want to put out that information that I wish somebody would have told me, kind of just like that helping hand that, Hey, it's okay. You're not the only one that thinks like this. it's okay to think a little bit differently. It's okay to try something different. So that was my whole goal. And then it started to grow. And then it became this kind of this bigger thing. And around a half a million or 600,000 subscribers, I was like, wait, I can actually like turn this into a business. I went through this like, you know, I'm an entrepreneur. I was like, okay, minority mindset, I'm gonna turn it into a business. So I started these other products under minority mindset. I started this newsletter in the minority mindset. I started these other educational things. And it started to get really confusing to me because I was like, what is minority mindset? I'd be walking down the street and people would come up to me and say, dude, your minority mindset, man, you really helped me out. You saved my life. You helped me get out of debt. And it made me feel really good. Like, I could not believe people knew who I was. I remember one time I was with my dad. We were in Arizona. and we were getting acai bowls, which are absolutely delicious, by the way. And we're in line, and this guy sees me walk into the store. He was riding his bicycle, and he races across the street to come inside of me, and he goes, Just Pretend Minority Miles, is that you? And I was like, yeah, and my dad's right there. And he just puts his arms around me, hugs me, and he's like, Dude, you changed my life. You helped me out so much. You got me out of this position. And I was like, oh my God, no way.

And my dad looks at me, He's.

Like, people watch you.

You're not a doctor and that's okay. Yeah, and so it was like, that.

Was like that realization that, oh my God, like people are actually paying attention. You don't, obviously you know, you see the comments, you see the subscribers.

Until you meet people in person, you really don't know.

Exactly, and that like, it's a crazy feeling. And you know, that time especially just because, you know, I saw my dad light up and he was like, I can't, like he was shocked. that's when I was, you know, I can actually do something with this. So I was creating these products under it, but I was getting confused because what is minority mindset? Is it a company or is it me? And, you know, as the entrepreneur, I was like, I'm gonna build a company. I'm gonna turn this into something. But everybody assumed I'm minority mindset, which made it very hard to build a company out of it. And so this was 2021 in December. I decided to go on a thinking trip, and I've never done this before, and I really recommend this to anybody who can. this. I went to Boca Raton, Florida, and I was there for about a week. And I separated myself from technology, people, everything. And I lived in this, like, really tiny little apartment, and all I had was a bicycle and my notebook. I've done this before. It's a game changer.

Oh, my God. And so what I would do is.

I ride my bike to the beach in the mornings. I sat there for a couple hours with my notepad and started writing down my thoughts. And from everything, not just business. you know, my mental health, spiritually, what do I want out of life? What's important to me? What's happiness? Just starting writing things down. And, you know, I would get to the business financial stuff and I started asking minority mindset, question mark. What is it? Who is it? And it was at that week I realized I am minority mindset. That's what everybody identifies me as. And it makes sense because that is who I've always been. But these companies, they're getting intertwined into something that's, They're being overshadowed. I can't give them the attention that they want. So after that, I came back to the office. This is the complete end of 2022. When I tell the team, sorry, 2021, I tell the team, as soon as we come back in 2022, we're gonna change some things around. So the first week of 2022, we have an all-hands meeting. I was like, here's what we're gonna do. We're changing everything. We're gonna take our newsletter, turn it into market briefs. We're gonna launch this app, Market Insiders. We're gonna do all this stuff and everyone was like, where did this come from? And so we implemented all that and then this is now early 2022. It took some time to implement. Market Briefs now becomes its own company, its own news that we're providing financial news that's accessible. I talk about accessibility of financial education. For me, that is the biggest thing because I never understood those big terms. What does the 10-year yield going up 40 basis points means? It doesn't make any sense to somebody who's getting started. Yeah. So I want to make things accessible. So that's what we do. We break it down in a fun, witty email that you're actually going to want to read. You're going to look forward to reading this email and it's completely free. And so we're going to take this into our own company and we went through a lot of, I mean, it was a painful transition because we had issues with the email service providers. We had a company saying that, yeah, it'll work. We spent months transitioning over. The first week that we're working with this company, They say, oh, sorry, you're promoting financial content. We don't allow financial education. We don't allow stock market. We don't allow cryptocurrency. We don't allow anything related to finance on our platform. I'm like, Dude, you've been working with us for two months. I've talked to five people on your team. They know exactly what we're doing. And now you're telling us this? So we're gonna start the whole process over. So it was a big, you know, it was a part of an entrepreneur. You're touching them out. Big mess. somewhere else. And now, like, it was April of 2022 where things finally, like, all right, we got it situated. Now let's not. We're going all in. So, you know, you'd ask, where is most of the revenue coming from? It was YouTube, and it is. But I won't be long because, you know, I talk about how YouTube funded my business. I take the revenue from YouTube. I'm investing all of it back into my companies. because I want to turn market briefs into something big, man. Because it is needed. It is so important because if you're an investor, you need to know what's happening and you want to be aware of what's happening. You don't have time to go through Yahoo Finance, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, CNBC, all these different companies. And then you have to parse through all these headlines, see what's important, then you have to dissect what's actually happening. We break it down in five minutes or less. We have really smart people working on this. And then also just making it aware to people who were never given this financial education.

It's beautiful, man.

And so that's, you know, it's important to me.

In terms of the financial education side, what do you think is the difference between an abundance mindset and a poor mindset?

I'll give you an example. Okay. I used to, when I was, I bought my first real estate property when I was 19. Right after that, I was like, I want to be able to look at my own deals. You have to use a real estate agent to go look at properties. So when I Right after that, I was 20 years old, I went out, I got my real estate salesperson's license.

Nice.

I went to college. So now I start helping people buy and sell homes. And I had this one couple that I worked with, they were looking for between a $400,000, $500,000 home. And so I helped them for months go from property to property to property. They were very picky. So I spent months just going through this We finally found them a property. It was somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000. Within their budget, it had everything they wanted. It was facing the right direction, it had the right color door, the rooms were the right sizes. It was perfect. So now they're like, oh Jaspreet, you did it. You found a property. Let's enter into a contract. And I said, okay. And I remember this because they sat me down in one of the bedrooms and said, we want to talk. So we want to put an offer on this property. We're ready to go forward, but there's only one condition. We want you to put half of your commission in the deal. I said, why? They said, well, you're 20 years old. And typically you get 3% on the buyer's side. So if it's a $500,000 property, that's 15 grand in commission, between 12 and 15 grand. And so they were like, we don't think that 12 to 15 grand is worth it for just signing the papers to help us buy this home. Plus you're only in college and I was like okay, and I'm a hard head right especially 20 years old I was like, huh okay, so they're like yeah, we think if you just put six grand into the deal we'll Move forward to the property and ready to buy it and I was like no, I'm not doing it. Wow you can do it with somebody else and I walked away and A month later they weren't they didn't were not able to get the home because they weren't able to do the paperwork fast enough. They called me back up the wife calls me she says, Jaspreet, we weren't able to make it work, but we found another property. Would you be willing to show it to us? I was like, no. So that was, you know, what a limiting mindset is. The first thing is you're looking at what somebody else is making instead of looking at what you could get. You're counting someone else's money instead of seeing what you can get do yourself. So you're jumping over dollars to pick up pennies. Right. And that's the first idea is you're so worried about what's going on around you, but instead you should be focusing on you. What value do you get? The second part of that is a growth mindset. So, you know, I talk about living below your means, which is important, especially when you're in the early phases of trying to build your wealth, right? You need to be saving your money, investing your money. You too, you know, we were kind of extreme, right? Where it's like every penny we have is going to be invested, it's going to be put back into us because this is our time to grind. Yeah. But, you know, you don't have to be super extreme, but, you know, let's just say you're putting aside 25% five percent of your income. So if you're making 40 grand a year, that's $10,000 put towards savings and your investments. Now, what happens to most people is you say, okay, I realize this whole financial education thing, I'm learning about this investing thing, I want to get more aggressive, I want to do more of this. How can I do more? Well, that's when you're trying to now squeeze more pennies out of your pie. You try to go from saving and investing 25% to 30% and 35%, but there's a limited pie, right? So what you should be doing is thinking, okay, I'm making 40 grand, saving and putting aside 25%. Fine, maybe I can do more if you're into that, like, I'm gonna do whatever it takes to extreme, right? Which is fine. But the bigger thing is, how do I go from 40 grand to 400 grand and keep doing what I'm doing rounds? Because now if you get to from 40 to 400 and you save and invest 25%, that's $100,000. A lot more than the 10 grand you had before. You're still only living off of 75%. You have the same, you know, that same percentage, but it's so much bigger. It's that growth mindset. It's thinking bigger. And now everyone's gonna say, hear this saying, how am I supposed to go from 40 to 400? Well, the first step is understanding it's possible. Then you start learning, then you start doing, you start making mistakes, and then you learn from mistakes, fix them. But until you break through that mindset and you realize that it is possible, I can do this no matter where I come from, what I look like, what my background is, it's possible. But I need the right education. YouTube has made it so much more accessible. Read books, you know, start learning, and then you start taking steps. It's not going to happen overnight, but you'll start taking steps towards that.

Right.

And so it's about building that growth mindset of understanding that it is something that you can do.

I love this, man. So much good information here. Lots of more questions I could ask about these things, but you've also got so many great topics that you cover over on YouTube, MinorityMindset over on YouTube and themindoritymindset.com, also marketbriefs.com is the newsletter for people who want to sign up and learn more about these things, making complex ideas interesting and accessible, which is something we all want. I've got a couple final questions for you.

Yeah.

This one is something I asked him at the end. It's called the three truths. So imagine a hypothetical scenario. It's your last day on Earth. You've actually made your parents proud, even though you weren't a doctor. But you've been, you've been doing the thing that you love doing for the rest of your life. But eventually it's the last day for you, many years away. And you've got to take all of your information with you, all of your content, your newsletter, your YouTube, anything you create, it's got to with you. So no one has access to your information anymore. Your written words, your video, your audio message. But you have three lessons you could share with the world. And this is all we would have to remember you by. Three truths. What would you say would be those for you?

Yeah, first I want to get to that. My parents are very happy now.

I'm sure that.

My mom actually works with me now too.

That's great, yeah.

But getting onto that.

Now they can brag about you.

Yeah, exactly. The first thing is, think bigger. And the reason why I say that is because a lot of times we hear that, think big. But when you're thinking big, you're probably 99% of the time not thinking big enough. You can think bigger, cross it off, think even bigger. When I started YouTube, I never thought that we would hit 10,000 subscribers, let alone 100,000 subscribers, let alone a million subscribers. I used to joke around with my friends that if we hit 100,000 subscribers, subscribers, I made it. If I hit a million subscribers, I'm gonna shut the channel down. Because it's not possible that a million people are gonna watch this weirdo on YouTube talking about guacamole, talking about financial education. There's not a million people that want to do that. I'm a big thinker. I'm an entrepreneur. I've always thought big. Yet here I am with these limiting beliefs of myself. And I think I'm this person who thinks crazy, who thinks big. So if you're thinking big, you're not thinking big enough. Because that's gonna be your own limiting beliefs. Second, learn the rules to the game. The reason why so many people suck with money is because they don't understand the rules to the game. And this is why a lot of people get so angry. They get so angry about what other people achieve. They get so angry about everything else going on. But what you need to do, the best thing to do is learn the system. You know, I talk about how rich people don't pay taxes and how you can work to own the corporate ladder and it makes people angry, but the reality is this is the opportunity for you to figure out how can you do it yourself. This is what the system is. You can hate it, you can cry, you can scream, you can complain. That's what I used to do. I thought it was horrible. Money was a taboo topic when I was growing up and I was like, it's unfair that people are doing this. And then I realized, what if I learned the rules and you can apply it to yourself? And third, be willing to make mistakes. Try. Anything is possible, but you have to be willing to try and make mistakes and keep getting better each and every day.

I love that, man.

It's a grind, but it's everything is possible, man.

Jess, I want to acknowledge you for a moment, man, for taking this mission on. I think a lot of people are scared to think about money, to talk about money, to save and invest. I think people are just scared of money in general. And the fact that you're diving into this, making this a part of your mission to educate, to entertain, to inspire, inform people through many different formats, again, from YouTube to social media to your newsletter and everything else you'll be creating in the future. I think it's really inspiring to see someone, again, from your background, who may be someone who people wouldn't think would be talking about these things. And you're diving in and you're making it accessible with your unique perspective and personality. So I want to acknowledge you for making the minority mindset, really something that people can grasp and understand and start applying small steps and hopefully making it bigger over time.

And you know, the thing is, money is a taboo topic, not just in my culture, but a lot of cultures. And the reason why it becomes so taboo is because we're insecure about our own money. And so we create these smoke screens. Don't talk about it, don't worry about it. But at the end of the day, we're all working for a check. And if you don't think that's true, tell your boss not to pay you, right? But the thing that you have to understand is how money plays a part in our lives. Because I'm not saying money is the most important thing or the only thing. It's one factor of our lives. You have to be physically healthy, mentally healthy, spiritually healthy. And when you have these things, that's when being financially healthy, being financially fit can have the biggest impact. Call them a quadrifed triangle. And it kind of goes in that order. Because if you are physically, if you're on your deathbed, you're morbidly obese, it doesn't matter if you have $10 million in the bank, the only thing you care about is being healthy. If you are mentally depressed, you're anxious, you're struggling with these mental issues, dude, more money is gonna make you more miserable. You gotta do whatever it takes. Go into rehab, go get a therapist, go do whatever it takes at whatever cost, because more money is not gonna fix that. And people try to I think that I'm struggling with these mental health issues. If I go make a million dollars, I'll be happy. People will like me. That's a big lie. You're gonna be more miserable. Then you have to be spiritually healthy. Spiritual health does not mean you have to be religious. For me, it's what is your purpose? Why are you getting up every single day? What's the reason of getting out of the bed? And that's gonna keep driving you to live a fulfilling life, whether it's for 10 grand or a million or 10 million, it doesn't matter. once you have those three things, that's when being financially healthy has the biggest impact and the biggest power. Because now you can live a fulfilled and a happy life and the money is just icing, man. It's just icing on the cake. The cake is everything else. You can't take good icing, put it on a crappy cake and expect the cake to taste good. You gotta build a good cake first and then the icing just makes it that much better.

That's good principles, good foundation. I love that.

It's all about food. I love food.

Okay, final question for you. What's your definition of greatness?

Always striving for better. Always wanting to be a little bit better every single day.

Jaspal, thanks man. Appreciate it. Good stuff, man. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple podcast as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.