what's up you guys it's Graham here so this is something I've never directly addressed before I'm gonna be getting a lot deeper than I usually go in these types of videos so let's just get right into it this video is being made because several of you have sent me a Facebook post mentioning me by Alex Becker he's the one you probably see showing up on all the ads in the YouTube videos they just give me 45 seconds guy although he also happens to be someone I look up to and would frequently watch on YouTube for
inspiration even way before I started making videos so seeing this post coming from him was rather surprising I'm not gonna read the entire post it's pretty long but here's just the gist of it I was watching Graham Stephen a video where he was discussing how he basically lives rent-free in one of his duplexes and spends no money yeah it takes in over a million a year the real point is that true power and control comes from having nothing to lose and nothing to gain financially you can afford to save you to anything you can afford
to burn bridges or take things you don't think of the best long-term play you can afford to pursue things that won't make money for decades but will make billions after and overall the message of the entire post is really just this going and buying things and living a consumerist lifestyle and living to impress other people is always going to be a losing battle so instead we should really strive to reduce our expenses and reducer extravagances to really get back to the basics of what matters the most to us which is freedom and not things and
give it all that I felt like this would be a really insightful video to make so I can share my thoughts on the topic firsthand because yes I now make well over a million dollars a year I still live in the same 850 square foot 1-bedroom the side of the duplex I still wear $3.00 H&M t-shirts I still refuse to buy $4 iced coffee from Starbucks because it's too expensive and I still make sure to always smash the like button if you have not done that already the most people hear this and they think that
I'm absolutely crazy and to be honest I'm certainly a little bit eccentric when it comes to this I realized that I'm definitely an extreme by far on two totally opposite ends of the spectrum on the one hand my income is absurdly high and on the other my expenses are just stupidly low that's not normal and I don't expect everyone to try to emulate that or live as though they're constantly pinching pennies but I do also believe that there's a sense of tranquility that comes with having pretty much no overhead saving all of your money and
having very little clutter to weigh you down and let me explain I think a big mortgage payments are having a big car payment or having anything that I need to be financially obligated to just makes me feel trapped as though I'm a hamster on a wheel just running to keep it going having that type of stress really just causes me to resent the work I do and really stifles my own creativity when it comes to pursuing my own passions because it really just drains the fun out of it like what's the point of going and
buying a four million dollar home if the only way you could afford it is by obligating yourself to working 80 hours a week every single week for the next thirty years is to pay for it but to me that just never made sense it would feel like a prison that's why I have always just really preferred a financially minimalist lifestyle see the less financial obligation I have the more freedom I have and the more freedom I have and less stressed I am and the less stressed I am the happier I am to pursue a more
creative and fulfilling work now with someone who's raised without having money to then going from that and making a lot of it I will tell you what all of that saved money really brings you and that is options that's it money is not for the purpose of flaunting it's not for the purpose of trying to impress random strangers it's not for the purpose of measuring your own self-worth or feeling a sense of superiority over someone else but it does give you options and that is worth so much more than I could have ever imagined see
for me that option was never having to work a job I absolutely loved it meant that I had the option to do something that gave me purpose and meaning to my life and that never would have been the case if I had to sacrifice those values by working a soul-sucking job I hated just to afford the cars and houses and the luxuries that I never needed in the first place from that I knew that going and buying a Gucci outfit was not going to give me options I knew that going out and blowing my money
every single weekend was not going to give me the freedom that I wanted going and buying a mansion is not gonna make me feel any more fulfilled than where I am now in a one-bedroom duplex so I just chose to save and invest all the money I could knowing that one day I could slowly build that up and live off those investments indefinitely this is really at its core the entire culture of the fire movement and for those who haven't heard of this before and aren't aware fired stands for financially independent retired early it's an
entire community and mindset that you don't need to be 65 years old to retire if you save your money reduce your expenses and grow your worth to the point where your investments just cover all of your expense indefinitely I discovered this whole community and mentality shortly after turning 20 years old and once I found it something just immediately clicked in my mind it was this entire community of like-minded people who thought exactly the same way as I did and I no longer felt crazy for wanting to save like almost all of my income and achieve
financial independence at a really young age it also gave me a really strong goal and objective to want to work towards I wanted my investments to be able to cover all of my expenses and from that point on that became my entire motivation for investing I remember after I bought my first rental property I was making about thirty dollars a day and net rental income and I remember thinking to myself that works out to be the equivalent of five dollars and 62 cents per hour if I worked a nine-to-five job Monday through Friday and I
also thought to myself $30 a day was enough to cover an all-you-can-eat sushi dinner every single night for the rest of my life just from the one property and thinking that way about sushi just for some reason lifts the fire underneath me just to keep going soon after that I wanted to cover my gym payment with rental income my phone payment with rental income my insurance payment with rental income my housing payment with rental income anything you could think of I just wanted my investments to pay for it and really from that point forward money
took on an entirely different meaning like if I got a real estate commission for $15,000 I never viewed that as $15,000 that amount meant absolutely nothing to me instead my entire focus was that the $15,000 was really worth eighty seven dollars a month in passive income indefinitely if I invested it at a 7% return and that eighty seven dollars a month is enough to pay for my high-speed Internet bill and definitely as long as spectrum stops raising their internet prices they've done this to me twice now and I'm tired of it but really from that
point forward every single check I received was really viewed as how much money can this make me passively every single month and what expense can this cover and then I kept doing that year after year after year until eventually it did end up covering all of my expenses and when that happened things just really took off for one and became a lot of fun to see how much money I could save by cutting back on all my expenses like I realized if I found a way to reduce my spending by $100 a month that means
I would need $20,000 less invested to cover it so to me spending $100 a month less had net value of $20,000 invested so what I did isn't went through all of my expenses to find anything that I didn't absolutely need so that that way I would have more money to save and more money to invest and at that point I was actually making money by still choosing to save everything and at that point it was really just like a fun game to play with myself secondly doing all of this took a lot of the pressure
off not just work but life in general because I knew money wouldn't necessarily be a huge factor in what I did it really allowed me to focus on the aspects of work I enjoyed the most and could do really just for fun as a real estate agent I became so much less stressed and less worried about whether or not a client would buy a house or whether or not the home would inspect well or whether or not an investment opportunity would fall through not to say I wouldn't be disappointed if something like that happens but
it just took the pressure off needing something to happen and oddly enough that type of attitude actually helped me make more money because clients didn't feel pressured by me to close a deal and knew that I cared more about the long term relationship than I did about making a very quick Commission the third you might have also noticed that I run this sort of minimalist mindset in more than just my finances but also here on YouTube as well because they operate it very much the same way this channel doesn't have any employees there's no corporate
headquarters there's no fancy office somewhere it's just me filming in my garage or my kitchen and then editing in my dining room my total overhead to run this channel which is now doing well over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a month in profits it's just a few hundred dollars that's it and having that type of profit margin means I'm really free to make content on whatever I feel like without money dictating what I make a video on or what I don't make a video on and at this point any dollar amount that someone pays
me it's not going to make a big difference in my lifestyle so I do the videos that I like to because I have fun doing them not because I'm necessarily chasing after dollar signs which oddly enough just helps you end up making more money because people really value that type of transparency and honesty unless of course someone wants to go and pay me ten million dollars in cash in which case you know just let me know where to sign and I'm all yours but seriously though going after a life of financial independence really means that
you have the power to say no to things that you don't believe in not because of money but because you just don't believe in them and that's who you are so where does the duplex come into all of this and I really believe it's all about just living with what you need see this is a place that I could call home that has enough room for what I need right now and also pays for itself so I could focus my time and resources on bigger and better things like this YouTube channel would absolutely not be
where it is today if I had high overhead three years ago that I needed to support back then I worked full time as a real estate agent and if I was spending $10,000 a month on useless stuff just inflating my lifestyle I could have never taken the risk to pursue this which ended up becoming my real passion and exceeding all of my expectations of what I ever thought was possible that also meant I had more money left over for other opportunities that I could seize whenever they came up like going and buying a Tesla because
that was a good deal and then it ended up just paying for itself we're going and buying another duplex because it walked in one morning and just absolutely loved it and who knows what other opportunities the future might have in store because of a voided meaning of spending and instead pursued what has meant the most to me like 20 cent iced coffee obviously now that is not to say I'm gonna be living in this new place forever because that is not gonna be the case and one day I want to go and buy a house
I want a place that's big enough so that I can play the drums without annoying the neighbor and a place that I can have a dedicated room to for a Reef Aquarium and I also want a bigger garage so that it could build out more YouTube studio sets and have different designs and expand that a little bit further so where I'm living right now is absolutely not going to be permanent but I'm also not going to be going and buying a four million dollar mansions so that I could be flexing on the Internet I've got
to buy the type of home that I know my investments will cover or home that will make me money or home that will just pay for itself without me having to come out of pocket and then I could just continue my current lifestyle of investing everything else and having those investments pay for whatever other endeavors I choose to pursue because I totally believe it's okay to spend more money it's okay to get nicer things it's okay to accumulate more stuff it's okay to give in to some lifestyle inflation if it's sustainable that your investments can
cover long-term and for me stepping it up each and every year as my investments grow and throw off just a little bit more money it's totally fine to do as long as I keep my spending at that level that is the entire point of financial independence it's spending money on things that really matter the most to you and bring the most amount of value to your life and saving money with the intention of building a lifestyle that will support that and while financial independence certainly doesn't happen overnight it can absolutely be a goal that you
work towards and one day achieved because the less money is spent the faster it's going to take you to get there and one day smash the like button if you have not done that the first time so what that said you guys thank you so much for watching I really appreciate it as always if you have not already destroyed the subscribe button destroy it destroy the notification bell go ahead and add me on instagram I post here pretty much daily so if you want to be a part of it there feel free to add me
there also feel free to add me on my second channel it is called the Graham Stefan show I post there every single day I don't post here so that means if you want to see me now every single day brand new video go and add me on that second channel as well and then finally if you want to free stocks all you got to do is sign up for the Weeble link in the description you deposit $100 get two free stocks you may as well just go to Boz 100 bucks get two free stocks you
want to sell out after that do it but they're free so if you want free stuff that's that's how you get free stuff so anyway with that said thank you so much for watching and until next time
