How I Made $300,000 at Age 18

So after the last video that I posted about buying a Tesla at 18, I had quite a bit of questions about how I was able to afford it, what I do for business, and just overall how I make money. So in today's video, I'm going to be going in depth into my story as to how I was able to go from zero to just around $300,000 in net worth from age 16 to 19 and was able to buy a house and a Tesla all before turning 19. Be sure to stick around to the end of the video, especially if you're young. This video is going to be of huge value to you because I'm going to be going in depth into the principles I learned and how you can app this to your situation to get ahead of most people financially and be in a position that you're happy with a few years down the line. So let's go ahead and get into the video.

So this story starts back in 2017. I just turned 16 and I was looking to get my first job and ended up getting a job at this Greek restaurant as a busboy. I was making $8 an hour plus tips, which was like 10 to 20 bucks a night. And basically my job was to clean the tables, refill drinks and take dishes to the back. I was making about $100 and I was saving pretty much all of it. Also around this time I discovered a business called dropshipping. I created my first dropshipping store after looking at a lot of videos on YouTube and doing some research on the business. Bought a shout out on an Instagram page and ran the shout out and made zero sales. So at this point I was kind of thinking, well, I spent like 50 bucks on a shout out, which was quite a bit of money for me back then, and I haven't received any results at all. So maybe this business is not for me. Maybe I should just kind of put it off to the side and just keep working at what I know is making me money right now. So for the next few months I just worked at the restaurant and continued to save pretty much all of my money. So after working at the restaurant for a few more months, I decided that I would have another crack at drop shipping. This time I made a store called Spiritual Planet. And this was going to be in the niche of like hippie, like spiritual type people. So with this one, I would buy shoutouts on Buddha themed Instagram pages to a little bracelet and a little necklace that I was selling. I was selling it with a free plus shipping offer, which basically means that you're advertising the product for free, but then the customer is supposed pay the shipping. And that was kind of the first success that I saw with E Commerce, not profit. But I actually did make sales and over the course of like two or three months, I did like $4,000 in sales, maybe a few hundred bucks in profit. So this was really just a proof of concept for me. I didn't really make much money, but it definitely proved that the business is possible. So I ended up selling this store. I listed it on an exchange and I sold it for $1,000. So I ended up coming out in the green on this whole venture and I learned quite a bit from that and it really just proved to me that is possible. So after selling that store, I actually hit up a marketing agency that was in my area. They do social media marketing and stuff like that. So I hit them up and I told them that I had some experience running Facebook ads and that I had done E Commerce and basically that I was just kind of interested in learning more about the business and that I would like to work for them. So they offered me an internship. And so that summer, summer of 2018, I worked at the internship with the marketing agency and then I worked at the restaurant. And between both of those, I was probably putting around like 40 to 50 hours a week over that summer working for them. So after working for quite a bit that summer, the internship actually turned into a job offer. So the marketing agency said that they would hire me out of high school and they offered me $35,000 a year, which is not that much, but coming right out of high school, it's better to make $35,000 a year than go $35,000 into debt going to college. So I was also promoted from a busser to a waiter at the restaurant. This meant that I would go from making roughly $100 to $200 a week to $100 a night on a good night. And this is for a four hour shift. So I continued working at the restaurant and the marketing agency throughout that school year, until in winter there was going to be a huge snowstorm in my town. And my friend and I were both worried that the restaurant would close due to the snowstorm, which was supposed to be like 13 inches or something of snow. It's going to be ridiculous. So we decided that we would supplement our income and we would shovel driveways. So we posted something on nextdoor.com which is basically like just Facebook for neighborhoods, and we had a huge respons. So over the next Five days or so we were spreading salt, shoveling driveways, we hired a bunch of people from our school and we ended up making each. We made like two and a half grand in like five days. It really kind of opened my mindset to like, okay, like this restaurant thing's cool and I'm making like a lot of money for a 16 year old, but I can put in the same amount of work and I can make 10x the amount of money. And so this is kind of when I decided that I was going to start doing outside work on the side. So now we're ending 2018, going to, to the start of 2019.

And in the year of 2019, I decided I was going to save $30,000 as a 17 year old. And the way I was going to do this was I was going to work at the restaurant, I was going to do the agency. And then the days that I wasn't working for either of those, I would go out and do landscaping work. And I calculated it out and basically I would have to save $82 per day for every single day of the year. And so I did this for, I'd say like to January till March. And then what I started to realize was that the money I was making from doing landscaping stuff, even only two or three days a week, was overtaking the money I was making from the restaurant. So at this point I decided to quit the restaurant and the agency and go full on into the landscaping and lawn care. And so I bought a truck and a bunch of lawn care equipment and started hiring my friends. And I ended up being able to make about $800 a week doing this. And I did this up until school let out. Now also around this time, I had a friend of mine who I had some classes with and he actually had quite a bit of success doing drop shipping. He had made a store and done like $90,000 in sales and made like 60k and bought a brand new BMW. It was insane. And so this really opened my eyes up again to the fact that dropshipping is actually possible. And so I decided I would take another crack at it. I would use the money I was making from lawn care and invest that into the E Commerce stuff so that I wouldn't be spending money that I didn't have. I would just be spending extra money that I made from lawn care into trying to get the other business off the ground. I probably ran the store for about a month, but I realized that this wasn't making me any money and was basically just draining money. From the lawn care, which was making me money. And I decided that I was not going to worry about the drop shipping store and just go full on into the lawn care and landscaping for that summer.

And So I bought 10,000 postcards, sent them all out, bought uniforms for my company and everything. And this marketing was actually really successful. It took us from doing like 20 to 25 yards a week to 50 per week, consistently with landscaping jobs on the weekend. I was working seven days a week, eight to 10 hours a day, and loving every single minute of it. I was making like two to three grand every single week and investing it back into the business, which really helped it grow. I also decided that I really love this business and I could see see the potential for it long term and how it could scale up. And I decided that I wanted to make a business that did like 10 million a year in revenue and be the biggest landscaping and lawn care business in my area. And so this was my goal now. Everything was going great, but there was one problem that loomed in the future. All of my employees were people that were in high school with me. And so once school came back, there was no way that they were going to be able to keep working with me at the amount that they were currently now. I knew that this next school year was not really going to matter for me because I wanted to continue to scale this lawn care business and take it to something huge. So August rolled around and school started back up again, and we weren't able to keep up and get all the yards done that we needed to. So I talked to my parents and I actually only needed two credits to graduate. I just needed English and then one other class, and they agreed to let me take it online as long as I did the classes and I could focus on the business all day and continue to scale it. So at this point, I semi dropped out of high school.

And just went fully into the business. I hired some older people. So my neighbor actually worked in landscaping, and I had known him for a while, so I hired him and then I hired another guy who I had met through a mutual friend. So everything went great at first and I was really able to get all of my work done and everything was going really well. And I actually sent out another 10,000 postcards. This time I was advertising aeration and advertising leaf service for the fall so that we would have work continuously throughout the entire year. And during the aeration season, I was actually able to make like $1,000 per day. It's a super profitable service to do and I was making, like $1,000 a day for at least a week straight. So everything was going really well for a while until some issues started happening with my employees. They were unreliable. They would show up late. And one of my employees, I actually could not mow in a straight line. So over the summer, my sister actually helped me. She could mow perfectly straight. Like, her lines were impeccable. This dude literally was zigzagging across people's yards and couldn't tell. So all of these problems culminated into me finding one of my employees drinking on the job. And he actually called one of my customers racist. And it just didn't go well at all. So after this whole situation, it really made me rethink whether or not I wanted to have a huge lawn care business with all the trouble with two employees. I did the math, and. And if I had a $10 million lawn care business, how many employees would I have? And the answer is hundreds, if not thousands. And the problems I was having with two would be magnified to a scale that I couldn't even think of at that time. And so this thought really made me fall out of love with the business. And the stress that I was going through with dealing with the employees and trying to get them to show up on time and not act a fool and drink on the job was really just kind of getting to me. I started to question, like, why did I even leave high school? Was this the right decision? And so what I decided to do was have another crack at E Commerce. So I made a store for these hexagon light tiles. I'll put a picture up right there so you can see. And this store didn't do too well. It actually failed. And I made a few sales, but nothing big. The next store I made was for these dog beds. I'll put another picture right there. And this one actually took off quite a bit. It was doing about 2k a day in sales at its peak, with around 200 to $300 in profit per day, which wasn't as much as I could make doing lawn care. But it was similar money without all the headache and all the stress. So I decided that, yes, E Commerce is something that I should pursue long term. And so I already kind of started to shut the door on lawn care. I lowered the amount of work that we were doing, and I stopped taking on as many new clients because it wasn't really something that I was enjoying doing anymore. And so this was all going pretty well with this new E Commerce store. And it ended up doing about $30,000 in its first month. What ended up happening is around Black Friday. If you don't know during Black Friday, ad costs go through the roof. So, unfortunately for me, my ad and my offer just weren't competitive enough. And. And compared to all the other Black Friday deals and everything else, the cost for me to run my ads just wasn't. It wasn't working anymore. It wasn't profitable. And the store actually started to die down. So I was making quite a bit less sales, But I'd still made profit from the sales previous until I started having problem with those. So the supplier that I trusted to ship all my products, they weren't shipping the products out on time. And when they did ship the products out, they would either be the wrong side of the bed, the wrong color, or they would ship it to the wrong place, or it simply just wouldn't even get to the customer. So with all the issues from my supplier, I ended up having a ton of chargebacks, and this ended up making the entire business venture in the red. So I lost money on this whole thing after all the chargebacks and all this stuff went through. So this was super demoralizing for me because I had already kind of pushed the lawn care to the side and said that this e Commerce thing is what I want to go on. And so I decided that I was gonna make this ecommerce thing work again. I was gonna create another store that was profitable. So for the next few weeks, I was trying to recreate this store. I had to make this thing work, and I had to make this thing succeed, or I wasn't gonna have any income. I had, like $10,000 saved up, and I was gonna use that to make a store make more money. So for the next few weeks, I was searching around for products, and I ended up finding one. The margin on it was good. It was easy to ship, and there was good potential for upsells in the future. So I made a whole funnel, a whole store for this product. And I spent at least two weeks just building this whole store out. And so just when I was about to launch this store and start running ads for it, maybe it was by fate or just by chance, but I saw an ad for a product that really caught my attention, and I really saw the potential in this particular product and in the way that it was being sold. And I decided that I really needed to test this. So what I did was I built the whole store for the product, the entire video ad. I did this all in one day. And then I launched the store.

So the very first day of being launched, the store did $390 in sales. About 200 of that would have been profit. I continued to scale it up, and in the first week, it did about 6 to $7,000 in sales. We actually went on a ski trip within the first week of this store being launched. I remember skiing down the hill and hearing the cha Ching sound in my ears. It was ridiculous. It was probably the highest that I've ever been in my entire life. The wind blowing in your hair as you're going down a mountain in Colorado and you're just making money, literally, while you're skiing and on a ski lift. It was ridiculous. So in that first month of January, the store ended up doing about 20k in sales. Now, at this point, if you recall, early 20, 20, 20, there was an issue that was in the brewing, which actually started in China, which is where my products were being shipped from. And so all of my orders, they were like 20 to 30 thousand dollars worth of orders that had not even been shipped out yet, and I was still making sales. So there was a big situation where all these orders were stuck in China and I couldn't get them out. And I had to balance all the customer service to make sure that I didn't get a ton of chargebacks, because I had already learned my lesson about chargebacks. And so every single day, instead of working on growing the business, I was working on messaging customers back and forth, making sure they knew where their product was. And what I learned from this whole situation is that I needed to hire VA's, which are virtual assistants. And basically what they would do is they would handle all the customer service for me, all the order fulfillment and everything, so I could focus more so on growing the business. And it actually ended up working out pretty well. So in February, we had about $80,000 in sales, 79,000, with 25,000 of that being profit, which was the most amount of money I'd ever made in a month ever, without doubt. So now we get into March. This month, we did 114,000, almost $15,000 in sales with $31,000 in profit, which, for somebody who's 18 years old, $30,000 in profit in one month was ridiculous. My mind was blown. I knew that this E Commerce thing was the future, and I was never going back to lawn care. So the next month, April was not as good as March, but. But still very good. We did $98,000 in sales with $29,000 in profit. So now we're in May, and in May, we did $110,000 in sales with actually $34,000 in profit. So even though I had less sales in March, it was more profitable because we were emailing our email list. A lot of the sales came from that, which definitely helped to boost this store during that month. Now, if you can see the sales during June, you'll see a little diploma in the middle. So what actually happened here was in the middle of June, just out of nowhere, for no reason, my Facebook page was shut down, which meant I couldn't run any ads at all. So in June, it was still $7,000 in profit, but coming from the $30,000 mark down to 7 was definitely disappointing. So, yeah, as you can see, with July, the same trend continued. It was still like around 6 to $7,000 in profit, but it was nothing ridiculous like we had seen before. So with all the profit that I had made from the store in the past few months, and this is a really important thing to think about, when you do start making money, what do you do with it? So what I did with it is I took all the profit from the store and put it into stocks.

And luckily for me, when I started making all this money, which was around March and February, there was a huge dip in the market. So I was able to buy in at a low point and kind of ride it back on the upper upswing. So all the money was all going into stock, in particular Tesla stock, which, if you know anything about Tesla, over the past year, performed insanely well. And so I was making a good bit of money on the back end from the profits that I invested into the stock. But then in late May, early June, I discovered something called stock options. And so I started doing some research on options and watched quite a bit of YouTube videos about it, and I decided to test it out for myself. So, on my first trade, I bought calls, which is basically betting that a stock will go up. And I made $3,500 in profit on my very first trade. And for me, this kind of made options seem easy. So on my second trade, I was buying a call on the S and P, which is like basically betting the broader market will go up. And over the course of that day, I lost $10,000 doing this. So I just made 3,500 in profit. And then I just lost $10,000 on something. I thought, oh, this is easy. And this guy that I was watching on YouTube recommended an options trade. He was basically buying calls on Spotify, betting that it would go up. And I put a few thousand dollars into this trade, and Spotify did go up and I had like thousand percent return. So I was basically 10xing my investment on this, and I ended up making $20,000 on this Spotify call trade. And I realized again that, but if I played this smart, there was a lot of money to make in stock options. And there's two ways that you can play options. You can either buy them or sell them. And that's what I was doing with Tesla. Since I own quite a bit of Tesla shares, I started selling some calls on Tesla. So there's a lot of money to be made selling options, because there's a lot of premium built in there. But the problem is, if it shoots up and you sold a call, you miss out on all the gain past the point at which you agreed to sell it. So I sold a call on Tesla and it actually shot up a bunch, and the call was exercise, which basically means I had to sell 200 shares of Tesla. So I had two options. One, I could either buy back in Tesla at the current price, or what I could do is make a huge risky bet on Tesla, which could lose me all of my money, or it could make me 10 times what I put in. So obviously, the degenerate that I am, I chose options option, too. So what I did is I decided to put $98,000 into a Tesla call option, which is betting that it's going to go up. So on July 6, I bought five 1210 Tesla call options expiring September 18. So basically, if the stock was at 12, 10 or above, then the option was good. If it was below that, then the option was worthless. So on July 8, the stock rocketed up and I was able to sell the five call options that I just bought for $97,000 for $137,000, giving me a $36,000 profit in one day. Then I decided to double down. I bought five of the exact same call options, again for $127,000. And then later in the same day, July 8th, I sold them for $149,000, giving me a $22,000 profit. So in one day on July 8th, I made $58,000 in profit from stock options. I made a similar trade. On July 13, I bought five Tesla call options. So later on in that day, I sold them for a $14,000 profit and then went back again and bought more calls and sold those again later that day for a $31,000 profit. Meaning on July 13, I made $44,000 in profit. @ this point, I had never seen this amount of money come this fast. With the E Commerce, it was still a ridiculous amount, but it was never huge sums. In one day I was making like what I would make in two months in one day doing these stock options. So at this point my net worth was approaching about $230,000. I had made around 130 from the e commerce and about 90 or so from the stock options. So in August I tried to replicate this and have a similar result as those days. In July. Tesla was kind of taking a dip after the huge run that it had had in the past month. And I was a little bit worried that it was going to keep going down. So I sold out of the options I had bought at about a $9,000 loss. Crazy enough, the day after I sold out of these options, literally that evening, Tesla announced that they were going to be splitting the stock. And it rocketed up insanely over the next week or so. I think it went up 30% within that month. It went up 70% at the most. If I would have held those options, they would have went from about $100,000 in value to $900,000 in value. I would have made 800k on these Tesla options. It would have been ridiculous. But anyway, towards the later part of August, I caught the tail end of the Tesla stock boost and was able to do an options play that netted me about $40,000 in profit.

So after all the options plays and making money from E Commerce, I had roughly about $250,000 in my Robinhood account. So what I decided to do was to diversify a little bit. I had been watching people like Graham Stephan for years who've been preaching real estate investing. And so this was definitely something that I was interested in, interested in doing is buying real estate. So I started looking for houses and ended up finding one that was coincidentally about a block away from where my parents live. It was listed for about $185,000. We put an offering on the house and luckily we got it. With the help of my parents co signing, I was able to get a mortgage. So I moved into this place on August 14th and I've been here since. So that's where we are now. I ended up buying the Tesla in July and I picked that up in September. So that's basically the entire story of how I was able to buy a house and a Tesla all before turning the age of 19. So I hope you enjoyed the video. I hope it provided some good value for you. If you enjoyed watching, be sure to drop a like down below and hit that notification bell and subscription button so that you can be notified every single time I post a video. I'm going to be starting to post two times a week about finance topics, e commerce, and just overall making money at a young age. If you guys have any questions or anything that you want to see me make a video on, be sure to drop it down in the comment section down below. And with that being said, thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one. Peace.