Why does this guy worth $17 billion literally owe nothing? Why? Well, because for me, my number one priority in life is my freedom.
When most people say that they want to become millionaires, what they mean is that they want to spend a million dollars. They want the lifestyle that social media tells them is like successful and being a millionaire. But people who are actually wealthy are adapting this new idea of quiet wealth and sometimes go out of their way in order to look poor.
And this trend has really changed a lot of things. The founder of IKEA, a $60 billion company, flew economy his entire life. CEO of Telegram, one of the world's biggest messaging apps, only wears black, owns no property, and kind of like lives like a ghost.
Warren Buffett lives in the same house that he bought in 1938 for $31,000. And I used to think these guys were just a little bit weird and eccentric. But now, as I've started to understand what I'm about to share in this video, it has completely changed my mindset on success, on money, and what the goal should be.
So, this is where you might be thinking, "Yeah, that's fine for billionaires. " Some of them are a little weird. And we know stuff about millionaires from like the book The Millionaire Next Door, that statistically people worth over a million dollars aren't actually the people who buy luxury houses, luxury cars, luxury watches.
The people who do that are actually generally in debt. Like there's a quote from the millionaire store that says, "Many people who live in expensive homes and drive luxury cars do not actually have much wealth because they live above their means and prioritize status over savings. " But if you aren't close to being a millionaire, why does that matter to you?
Well, the crisis isn't just that 43% of Americans can't cover a $1,000 emergency or that people making six figures are still generally living paycheck to paycheck. The real problem is is that we have changed the idea of what normal is. We celebrate making it.
If you get a promotion, something happens in your life, you get a raise, you are expected to celebrate it, to flaunt it, to buy drinks for everybody, to go on a vacation, to get a nicer car. Even if you're relying on every bit of that next paycheck just to cover your monthly expenses. I think a huge part of this is that we have lost the script on what wealth actually means.
We think of wealth as stuff. It's the nice house, the nice car, the shiny whatevers. When most people think of wealth, that's instantly what they think about.
But real wealth is about having options. It's about being able to say no to things that you don't want to do. It's about not having to stress because your car breaks down or a medical bill comes up.
And it's about having time to spend how you want. If you want to spend it with your family, if you want to travel, if you want to wake up at 10:00 a. m.
and then go to the beach on the Thursday, that is wealth. And the way you get there has nothing to do with how much money you make and everything to do with how much money that you keep. And I learned that the oldfashioned way when I was able to leave my job at 24.
I ended up spending a lot of time playing video games to be honest with you. But that was a different mistake. That's for another video.
It wasn't because I made a bunch of money. I was cleaning office buildings. I was a failed real estate agent.
I was doing construction. Wasn't making a lot of money, but I was keeping almost all of my money because my expenses were very low. And so without ever having the flashy house and car and clothes and everything, I was able to have freedom for me and my family that was able to to be slowly grown into having, you know, freedom for the rest of my life without ever having all the things that society tells you makes you rich.
So here's the difference and why some of those billionaires get you screwed up. And it's because of percentages. Like Hermosi said that he doesn't even look at prices of things anymore because relative to his income, something that costs $100 for him is equal to it costing like $1 for us.
That perspective shift is key with ratios, not raw dollars. For example, of this, if you earn $200,000 a year and you spend $100,000 a year on a house, that's 50% of your income. But if you earn half a million dollars a year, that's only 20%.
If you earn a million a year, that's only 10%. So when you see somebody having those expensive things that you attribute with wealth, there's generally one of two options here. One is that they earned 10 20 times more than you and therefore to them it is not actually making an impact on their numbers or two that they are going into debt and they are just lifestyle inflating away their life.
They still don't have freedom. They now have the nice house, the nice car, the nice watches, the nice whatever but they will be stuck going to a job for the rest of their life that they probably don't like. Probably working 60 hours and maybe being in half a million dollars worth of debt or a million dollars worth of debt in order to have that stuff.
So that is generally the two things that are happening that we don't do the math on. I think this is really where the idea of stealth wealth comes in. This really changed a lot of things for me.
In this age of social media and everybody knowing a lot more than they should about your lives and you knowing a lot more than you should about everybody else's life, you feel this pressure to perform. I know I do. And to live up to my friends, I have friends who make literally 10 times 20 times more than me.
And it's shocking to see. But when they get a brand new car a couple times a year, that's like $100,000. was like, "Man, I'm a loser.
I should at least get like a, you know, $50,000 car once every other year or like whatever. " And you feel this pressure to show that you're not a failure compared to other people, especially on social media. And therefore, you spend money to make you not feel that way.
Whether that's to show it to yourself or to other people that you know you are kind of successful, it gives you like story arc for that year. But that is again not how you build that freedom lifestyle which is what real wealth is. And so that's where this idea of stealth wealth comes in that's really been getting popular more in the last couple years where you have money but you don't feel the need to show it.
It's what people call quiet millionaires. And this is something that I've finally been able to get to I think in the past year or two where you feel secure enough in yourself, in your decisions, even in your finances where you don't have to show it off. You don't need to prove to anybody else that you are successful.
And that's why you see a lot of those billionaires if you look at more extreme levels where they don't need to have a house or a car cuz they could buy anything. They're choosing not to. They don't need to get their self-worth in stuff in status.
They don't need to do that. And if you take that down to a lower level, if you can get to that point where you know that you're making the right financial decisions, your family is going to be all set, you're slowly building wealth for the long term, you don't need to impress anybody around you. You don't need to show off your address.
You don't need to flash a watch to make people think cuz you are secure in yourself. And that is something that we should all be striving to instead of outwardly showing that we are successful, right? And as a kind of more personal example of this, when I got to half a million subscribers and I got a Tesla, which was always my dream car, it was like this goal that we all kind of went through together.
I never thought I'd be able to get that and and then I got it and a couple weeks later I was like, "Cool, this is a car. It's not totally different than the Honda Civic that I had before. Gets me from point A to point B.
" Like, I think it's fun. It's nice. I'm super grateful to have it, but it didn't change my life.
It didn't make me any better of a person. People don't value me more as a friend. Like, it it literally changes nothing about your life.
Whatever your dream thing to have is, within a couple weeks of having it, you generally realize that like, oh, it's just a house. Every time we've moved, we've moved four times in the past five or six years. And each time it's been a slightly nicer house as we've grown and had kids and whatever, but each time within a couple weeks of being there, sometimes a month if you if you're lucky, you realize that I'm not any happier.
I still wake up. I still have the same problems. I'm still tired.
I still have to, you know, do whatever I have to do. I have to take care of it. And ultimately, your house just becomes a house.
Your shoes just become shoes. Your car just becomes a car. That stuff that everybody's chasing because they don't have it.
The people who have it all have realized that it's not it. The founder of IKEA still driving an old Volvo. Mark Zuckerberg pretty much wore the same t-shirt like all the time and now he's looking more stylish.
Questionable. He I I don't I don't know about him. But Warren Buffett, all these huge people that you see that don't have all the flashy stuff.
They have figured that out. And those are just the ones that you see publicly. Most of these quiet millionaires that maybe you would meet in life, you're not going to see on social media cuz they're not flaunting it.
So the only people that you see are the people who are the extremes, the outliers. So how I'm kind of applying all this stuff to my own life is not to never buy anything. I went through that phase for a really long time when I was extremely frugal and it kind of messed me up psychologically.
So that's not like a bad thing to have a nice car. It's not a bad thing to have a nice house or anything like that. But what I'm really searching for and trying to actively spend my money on is figuring out what things add value to my life and having enough money where I can continually do those things.
So if you think of what add value to your life, it's different for every single person. Maybe for you it's like having a great gym membership versus a cheap one. Maybe for you it's having clothes that actually fit instead of thrift store clothes.
For me a big one is the ability to just go travel whenever I want to and having as much time freedom as I can be able to spend with my kids doing whatever I want. And so I feel like the reason why a large majority of millionaires live this way, it's not cuz they don't know how to enjoy their money or anything like that. It's not cuz they hate nice stuff.
It's because they have figured out that past a certain point of enoughness, it adds nothing to your life. In fact, it sometimes adds stress to your life. It adds something you have to take care of, something you have to clean, something you have to worry about.
If you get in a car accident with a 4 million car versus a $5,000 beater, you don't really care about the car. You care a lot less when it's something cheaper. And so everything that you own, as you buy more and more stuff, nicer and nicer stuff, it starts to have a little bit more pressure on you, a little bit more stress on you.
What happens if you scratch the watch? What happens if this shirt gets a stain on it? Every one of those things that you buy as nicer and nicer, a lot of times having the reverse effect on you psychologically, maybe outwardly, everybody sees you as successful, but inwardly it takes up more and more space in your brain to not only keep up that perception, but now you're getting your self worth out of something that's nothing.
And you have to think about all these things. Even if it's the smallest thing, you still have to think about it for a second, and that's time that you could have been spending doing something else, worrying about anything else. If there's one thing that you shouldn't worry about, it's about not knowing enough about your finances.
So, I put together a free ebook with 50 ways to improve your finances by 1%. It's completely free down in the description. You can download it.
You can see, oo, this idea gives me a way to save money. Or if you have some money and you're looking to get some returns on that money, you can check out a highinterest savings account. I linked uh all the best ones right now down below.
If you have money just sitting in a regular checking or savings account, it's probably earning next to nothing. You can at least earn some money this way. So, feel free to check either of those out down below.
Thank you for watching this video.
