my goal is to look homeless and have a lot of money and it turns out that's actually a good strategy to have a lot of money I mean you don't have to look homeless but you shouldn't try to look rich because most likely if you do try to look rich you'll have way more stress way less money I think just be generally more unhappy first reason why it's important to look poor is because it's easier to catch up if you don't keep up you always have the newest phone the nicest clothes the brand new car
every year just cuz you like the smell of new leather and you deserve it it's going to be like wicked hard to actually become wealthy and it's not even the cost of those things that are like cripplingly expensive it's the reoccurring costs of those things it's because you get in this mindset of when the new thing comes out that you want and you deserve and you go treat yourself it's a cycle of spending decent chunks of money on the newest thing or even small chunks of money like a recent example still baffles me is these
like expensive water bottles that come out are they're like 50 60 bucks they're like the rage everybody goes get some they're they're the same water bottle as the $10 one and then a couple years later it's a different one and people fall for the exact same thing over over and over again doesn't make a lot of sense in fact if something's popular it's generally a a sign that I don't want to get that thing because everything popular is wrong like according to a survey 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck whatever they are doing
I do not want to do almost everything popular is wrong by the way if you've seen a couple of my videos at this point this is your sign that you should have subscribed because most of you are not subscribed so try it it's fun it's free practice contentment this was one of the biggest factors that allowed me to actually build up a little bit of wealth was this idea of just being okay with the things that I had it's also what led me into minimalism I realized I was falling into this trap of just constantly
wanting to buy stuff just so I could feel good for a few minutes get that little dopamine high or when I got into minimalism I ended up decluttering it and getting rid of it donating it selling it if you look around your house you probably have everything you need to be happy to thrive and a lot of times we aren't grateful and content for the things that we do have so a great practice is just to really appreciate everything that you do have you have house over your head you have shoes on your feet slippers
I'm so I just realized how unflexible I am as long as you're not starving and you have kind of the Baseline that even the poorest in America have you're richer than like most of people throughout all of history and being content with that will save you hundreds of thousands of dollars over your life or at least tens of thousands you don't need a lot you don't need more stuff to be happier another reason that it's important to try to look for is because then you don't have to try to impress others I think a lot
of us want to look rich to feel important to feel like we made it to kind of just ify our existence in the world is like look I'm not a failure I have this brand new car would a failure have that brand new car no see I did it maybe that's subconscious maybe it's not I know for me it took me years to be okay with driving a uh a crappy older Honda CRV for years and years while I was starting my wealth building journey I wanted to look a certain way so that people would
be impressed even though nobody cares but instead I was able to shift my mindset from wanting to have the stuff to show that I was successful to wanting to have Financial Freedom and that be the gauge of my own like mentally whether I've made it or not and then whatever anybody else cares I don't think too much cuz I know I have Financial Freedom I know I'll never have to miss a soccer game I won't have to go to a job that I don't like ever again in my life I won't have to stress about
bills and that for me is Success even if everybody else doesn't know it like I've got friends who maybe are 30 years old and you get a $5,000 bonus if you're living to impress others then you put that towards a new car you buy a nice vacation and Instagram the whole thing but that same 5 grand if you invested it into the S&P 500 made an average of 10 % until you reach retirement Agee would have been $140,000 so when you shift things that way that the price of that vacation or that slightly newer car
or that just going out and treat yourself is life-changing money was that really the best use I think that's something a lot of people get wrong when they talk about frugal living and this idea of looking poor is that you're not supposed to invest into yourself when I really think even despite that whole stock market analogy that investing in yourself is by far the best Roi you can ever make if you learn one skill that can help you get a better paying job like that's crazy Roi like recently I've been really diving into productivity and
just trying to find different tools and little tips to make things uh a little bit better I've been taking the class by Thomas Frank and just like actually you know processing of how to set my calendar and all this different stuff and it's actually made a difference and I've been taking a bunch of other classes like that for years actually with the partner of this video skillshare in fact I even made a a class over there on minimalism if you don't know where skillshare is it is the largest Learning Community for creatives it's got so
many different topics and categories you can go down from graphic design marketing photography of course for me productivity even finance and other topics so if you're a creative looking to up your skill in like any way skillshare has a lot of like really in-depth classes that are kind of like uh due as you go so it's not just like watching something and then hopefully you do it you can like submit stuff and all of these classes are really really well made the first 500 people who use my link down below can get a free one
Monon trial of skillshare so you can like dive into a topic see if the platform's for you I think you're really going to love it so check it out another reason to look for is because you can find joy and simplicity I've found that the simpler I make my life it almost exactly correlates to happiness the more I have going on the more stuff that happens the less happier I am cuz I'm just like stressed all the time you can probably relate but the more stuff that I get out of my house generally the more
I enjoy my house cluttered room is like a stressful room having so many clothes that I can't find the ones that I actually enjoy is not great I just want to have a few things things that serve their purpose really well really not much else to leave space for the things that are actually important to me like I'm totally okay with and almost proud of the fact that you know I never bought new furniture until I was 28 years old was the first time I've ever bought a new piece of furniture everything else has been
used or free or there's a few select things that I will pay money for when I know that the cost per use is going to be really low because let's say if I get a new shirt that I'm going to wear every single day for years but I only have X amount that's going to be much cheaper than just constantly cycling through new stuff to try to be better the same thing with phones where I never upgrade until the phone is literally dead as opposed to other people I know who upgrade every single year and
they never have money they're part of that 78% the goal of your stuff isn't to impress anybody it it's to do the job that it's supposed to do for some reason a lot of people don't see their stuff that way it's actually cheaper which obviously it's cheaper to look for but I don't think people realize some of the big decisions that will cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars that are huge swings in their life that can be decided on if you're living for other people or for your yourself like most people want to have
a bigger house and a bigger apartment and no matter what size they get they want the bigger one they want the pool they want the picky fence they want something above whatever they have but if you know that the more stuff you have the more you're going to have to work in order to pay for that stuff so the less you'll be able to enjoy it the more taxes you're going to have to pay on it the more upkeep there's going to be all of these things will determine that maybe instead of getting a bigger
house you actually would enjoy a smaller house more because you'll have more freedom in your life there'll be less to clean you'll have less stuff inside of it and you might actually be able to live and enjoy your life more by looking poor and choosing to have uh you know a house that's multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars cheaper and maybe you can work one less month a year because of that decision or you can get to Financial Freedom Way sooner when you look at the difference especially spread out over time of buying new car
of a year buying a a bigger house it's literally lifechanging money and you have to decide will that life-changing money actually change your life or is it just something that you feel like you should do or you want to do to make yourself feel you're worth it now another reason that you should try try to look poor is because of billionaires when you look at billionaires and multi-millionaires they don't have to try to look wealthy there are a few of them that do cuz they have ego problems but a lot of them just wear cheap
clothes they have an older car they have an older house because they don't need to impress anybody because they know what is important to them they know that they have made it so they don't need to prove it to anybody else and I think that's a great mindset to strive for that you know that you're on your journey to paying off debt you know that you're building up an emergency fund right now you know that you are investing for your future you don't need to prove to anybody else you're successful right now that you've made
it that you're doing whatever you know what is important to you that is a great mindset so when you look at the ultra successful they don't have to prove it they know it so that's why it's important to be budgeting to have a financial plan I actually just started really diving into setting up my own financial plan recently with an app called wisi not a sponsor is an affiliate link but like this has given me great perspective on I know that I'm on the right path so I don't need to prove anything to anybody cuz
I know that I am nearing you know Financial Freedom and that to me is what is important the ego check turns out that most people who try to look wealthy tend to have some ego issues when you're okay with looking poor then you also have to be okay with with yourself right you're not trying to hide behind anything you're just out there you're open you're raw and that could be rough to deal with but it can also make you happier when I used to do commercial office cleaning there was this guy that worked with me
that worked every night of the week five nights a week about 3 hours a night in order to pay for his new truck he had a day job and then he had this night job and this night job paid for his like $60,000 truck he literally chose to look flashy on the nights and weekends and have this truck that he did not need and he was willing to trade five nights a week of his life for that truck he's literally trading his life away for a stupid truck that's what most of us do if you
lowered your expenses a lot and you didn't care what anybody else thought of you you're okay with looking poor and actively trying to do it you could probably work one day less a week you could probably take one more week off a year you could literally trade this crap that we have all around us for your life who wouldn't want to make that trade and it just comes down to not having an ego this doesn't mean that you have to like actively look poor and be grungy and dirty it's just really finding your priorities and
this balance of thing that's going to work for you and really just living a life by Design and not by default not by what the advertisers want you to do not by what you think will help you fit in not by what the trends are but for what is important to you in your life will end up saving you tons of money buying back your time making you happier you know something that actually makes me happier is when people watch this video right here which YouTube knows that you're going to like so if you think
you should click it then you know I can I got to really like plan out these outros
