63 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and more than half of Americans earning between 100 000 to 150 000 also live paycheck to paycheck and we also see stories of lottery winners and athletes who have millions of dollars but then go broke so this tells us that more money is not always the answer a few years ago when I was 24 I was able to leave my day job my brother just left his day job and I know a bunch of other people who have done the same I was keeping the rat race
is hard but it's not complicated it's not impossible almost anybody can achieve it you just need to know a few things that Unfortunately they don't teach you in school in the simplest terms money is a medium of exchanged used universally to Value things well your perception of value might be different than somebody else's the market as a whole decides what the value of an item is there are a ton of different ways that you can value something from Scare City to use but really the more those line up the higher the perceived value of those
goods or services will be now taking a look at my own life and I always like to share the things that I've learned and the stupid stuff that I did really wrong which is a lot of things I realized that if I wanted to leave my nine to five and multiple other jobs that I was working I couldn't just continue trading time for money which is what most people encourage you to do it's what most people do I couldn't really have a great standard of living when I was working my job cleaning Office Buildings and
the other side jobs I had going on I was just working constantly for not all that much money what I really didn't know at that time was that money wasn't equal to the time spent working now in school we spend a lot of time working on projects studying and taking tests to try to get the best results that we can and I think this really installs in us that hard work equals better results if you study and work really hard on a project you'll probably get a good test score on that project which is not
a bad thing and while that's true in many cases it's not relevant this project you spent five hours on could still get a bad Mark all the studying that you did for a test they could have different answers on the test it happens all the time and you can still get a bad grade this also happens a lot at work where your boss and you might not be on the same page or you put in a lot of effort but the other people on your team don't put in as much effort as you do I
think another thing a lot of people don't think about with money is the opportunity cost that goes along with earning it and pretty much everything about it like while you're working on a project you could have spent that same time maybe looking for new clients or networking and most people really never consider that they waste hours every day doing miscellaneous things that don't really add anything to the bottom line and that really just comes back to the idea of opportunity cost because you're doing yes to one thing you're automatically saying no to something else and
that is costing you money that you could have earned now this brings us to Value creation we are generally paid for creating value of some sort so if we want to up how much we're earning we also need to up how much value we are creating for people so you got to think about how can you create value for others for example at work you could try to learn a new skill you could educate yourself more on your area of expertise or simply eliminate some distractions and try to get more done in the day when
I create my YouTube videos the first thing I really look at is what can I do to give the most value that I possibly can inside a short period of time in an area that you guys are interested in and that I'm also interested in as well then I go through and I learn as much as I possibly can and think about and study that subject or sometimes I hire other people to do it for me I've also spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours taking classes going to seminars reading books actually editing and
talking to a camera and really trying to perfect my craft so that I can be as good at it as as I possibly can be and as I've gotten better at being a Storyteller and conveying the things that I am learning in turn more people have watched my stuff like a lot more people which is strange but it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't have been working on my craft for the past like four years now these videos honestly take an insane amount of work up front but they continue to pay me pretty much indefinitely
which happens with a ton of different businesses that people have once you create this legwork once you put in all the work learning this skill you'll make more money pretty much indefinitely as long as you're using that skill or that business is still running and I actually haven't gotten a chance to thank you guys for 250 000 subscribers which we're well past that now which is insane if you continue to enjoy all the work I put into these then subscribing is a great way to help me out and dropping a like and even just saying
what's up in the comments I love talking to you guys anyways Michael personally for this year is to create a system so that I can make two high quality videos hopefully every week and hopefully that will lead to getting close to a million subscribers by the end of the year your goal could be completely different it could be to finally start that business to get a raise at work to save ten thousand dollars and whatever your goal is it's important to do a few steps for me the more small goals that I've hit in turn
the more money I have earned and that seems to be true with very many areas of earning money you have to create a goal that is achievable to up your skills to save money whatever it is and then write that goal down share it with somebody get an accountability partner have a specific time frame that's laid out and have actionable things that you can actually do and Achieve things that are inside of your control a lot of times we get stuck because we don't have a growth mindset consumption and social norms before the 1930s most
of American society thought about shopping as a way to get necessities and maybe a present once in a while items were actually bought because they were needed and they were used until you actually couldn't use them anymore now this was until Edward Bernays came along the dude is amazing I could do a whole video on him he also invented breakfast true story he is considered like the father of public relations and really created a lot of the consumerism that we have going on today working for various companies and politicians and even countries Bernays was actually
amazing at changing the way people thought he changed the narrative on women smoking making sure that it was seen in a positive light what a great guy he also got doctors to recommend bacon as part of a healthy breakfast and most importantly how we shop for example cars used to be bought for practical purposes and you'd only upgrade to a family car because you actually needed the space however he kind of changed the way cars were sold and really made them become a symbol of wealth and status that you needed to upgrade because your old
one is worse and you deserve this and you should treat yourself to new things often and most importantly it is your National Duty because it supports the economy which is still something that I hear today the economy is going to be fine if you don't buy a bunch of crap you don't need it's true and ever since then we've had a major problem with consumption always wanting to earn newer better and honestly just more expensive things we just start comparing ourselves with others and really stopped thinking about the long-term effects of buying things and instead
just focus on the short-term dopamine high of clicking the Buy It Now button now will earning more money is important and we're going to talk about that in a minute it's also just as important to learn how to save money specifically to know how much is going in how much is going out where it's going how many subscriptions you have for a lot of people the answer is not more money it's spending less than we're earning and not getting caught up in lifestyle inflation and really focusing on saving money without a specific reason a lot
of people will save money so they can spend it on something but it's important to have just a saving money mindset because that will create a world of opportunities and a ton of Freedom down the road and the first step of this before you think about investing or earning more is really paying off high interest debt now Mark Cuban said if you use your credit cards you do not want to be rich now when he says credit cards he talks about people who aren't paying their cards off at the end of the month people who
are in high interest Consumer Debt that is draining them and keeping them in this trap in essence if you can pay off that credit card debt you are earning thirty percent on that money or at least saving yourself 30 or whatever your credit card interest is I think another thing we don't really focus on when saving money is the little things and the compound effects of those we all know the coffee or latte factor that if you spend 250 a day on coffee it'll be like 900 bucks at the end of the year which I'm
not saying don't buy coffee I buy nice coffee but I also don't spend money on a million other things so those few things that I really love to do and enjoy doing I could spend a little bit of money on but if you are living paycheck to paycheck and you can cut out five different things that are costing you two bucks a day that thousands of dollars at the end of the year just for making a few small decisions over a long period of time and that's how you start to change your life at this
point I think it's important to point out that it's almost impossible to save your way to Financial Freedom unless you're making an insane amount of money it's extremely hard to do first of all inflation is going to eat up money that you are saving and your ability to continue a decent quality of living without ever running out of money is just extremely hard if you're just saving so to escape the rat race early you really need to do a few different things you need to either invest money or to start some type of business that
will earn you relatively passive cash flow so that you can at least hire somebody else to run that business and still collect a check like we talked about before finding a way that you can put in work up front that will pay you pretty much indefinitely but either way really putting your money to work for you is probably the most important step towards Financial Independence for me I got my expenses as low as I possibly could and then took that money after years of saving invested in real estate and that started to create passive income
for me even though it still takes work that that was able to offset those extremely low living costs for instance my brother and his wife just left their day jobs off of like two rentals and actually starting a t-shirt business that will eventually once they get it up and running not actually take them putting in all that much effort but will hopefully continue to pay them for a long time if you guys want to support them I'll I'll leave a link down below but whatever path you decide it's important to realize they're going to be
UPS they're going to be down it takes an extreme amount of hard work for a long period of time to create any type of wealth and if you never take the chance of investing or starting a business or putting yourself out there for whatever reason you don't deserve and you will not receive the reward that goes along with that risk whether it's the risk of failure or the risk of losing your money thems the rules I also did a video on how to say 10K fast that you can check out right here if you enjoyed
this video don't forget to subscribe and I'll see you guys next week
