Christian Osgood explains how companies trap employees with lifestyle inflation: promotions fund bigger houses and cars that make leaving impossible. His counter-strategy is to stay modest while working, build a real-estate side business on stable income, then upgrade your life once you've scaled to seven figures.
Chapters
Here's how corporations trap you in your job. This is the 9-to-5 trap right here. So I was part of a Fortune 500 sales company. I was one of their top sales reps. Actually, Fortune 100 company, CoStar Group, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Naturally, as you start to do really well, they start talking about, hey, we should promote you to manager. You should look at getting a nicer car. You can afford a bigger house now. If you add to the expenses, you can no longer afford to leave the job. You're now stuck in the company and you're a slave to the 9-to-5. What I did instead is I kept my little 1,300-square-foot house in Renton, Washington. I have a tiny little house. I upgrading the cars, kept expenses low. I started a side hustle buying real estate, scaled that side hustle into multiple 7-figure businesses, and now finally I'm buying the bigger house and have a slightly nicer car. Wait just a little bit of time to increase those expenses. If you keep expenses low while you have the 9-to-5 and build a business, you're now free. That's how you play the game.