6 Frugal Habits That Made Me Rich

When it comes to building wealth, you have to be a little bit extreme and that means paying attention to the little things from the basics like turning off lights and making coffee at home and everybody already knows the math on that, to a little bit more extreme ways like growing your own food, bundling up instead of turning on the heat. Now while part of this obviously is a bit of a joke, I have done some pretty extreme things that have allowed me to not only save a decent amount of money, but actually start making money and investing. And I was able to reach lean financial independence while making under the median salary. I started at like $10.00 an hour work mode after $20.00 an hour. But I like, I wasn't making a lot of money, but these habits did allow me to have a lot of freedom. Embracing a minimalist mindset About five years ago, I started embracing minimalism and kind of like this whole idea of simplifying my life. And not only did I get rid of a bunch of like crap and clutter that was in my house, which led to like mental clarity and reduce stress and all that type of stuff that I talked about. But it also made a shift in my life where I stopped buying as much stuff. I stopped being attached to my possessions. And I really kind of created some categories where like, if this doesn't add value to my life, it doesn't make me happier, doesn't make my life easier in some way, save me time or money, then I'm just not going to buy this thing. And like, actually just having those criterias and asking before you buy anything, like, will this improve my life in some way? Yes, I need to eat. OK, then I'll buy that thing. But like, no, it won't really change a lot, but I kind of want it. It's like, that's not a good reason to bring something into your house. And by doing that, I started spending a lot less. But this actually had like, bigger shifts because when I stopped being attached to my stuff and really identifying with it, I started actually shifting what success meant to me. And it turned out wasn't like, you know, a flashy house, flashy car, you know, all that type of stuff. That's not what I wanted my life to be about. And it kind of like stopped this race to the bottom of, you know, everybody working more so that they can spend more, so that they have to work more, so they have to spend more. And like, your entire life is just built around buying more stuff And just like working, working, working constantly. And instead I shifted to, I want my life to be, you know, about gaining freedom. And I would rather have freedom than stuff. And so then every time I go to spend money on something, I ask, would I give up some freedom for this thing? And you can do that with the little things. But if you look at like the big things like a house or a car or a trip, like would I give up six months of my life, you know, working in order to have this trip or this car or this house or whatever? And when you look at it that way, I was like, no, I would not. I value my freedom and not having to show up somewhere 40 hours a week or 60 hours a week just to survive. Like I value that so much more over everything that it made so many decisions for me of like I don't have to have the nicest house we started in like this small one bedroom house hacking. And I would rather have done that and have freedom than had a nicer house right from the get go. Or have a cheaper car for years then have a nice one right from the get go but have to work a lot longer. The same thing with trips. I just really realized that for me, the option of working for the rest of my life was not an option and therefore I was willing to have a lot less and spend a lot less in order to gain back a decent amount of my life. And I guess that brings us to go going too far. I'll admit that I kind of screwed up when it comes to frugal living. And I went, I think too extreme with this whole thing. It's like for the first year, 2 years me and my wife were married, I don't think we went out to dinner more than maybe 3 or 4 times that we actually paid for and only got food from like this restaurant supply place where you're like buying food in bulk or if it was like on sale at the cheapest supermarket around us. And like, it was literally like just buying 10 lbs of chicken breast at a time and like rice and beans and stuff like that to the point where I can't really eat chicken anymore because we've literally had that every single day, two or three times a day. It's just like meat, beans, rice, oatmeal, like the cheapest food absolutely possible for the first couple of years of our life, never really going out and spending money and enjoying ourselves, hardly traveling, hardly ever even like going out to dinner or the movies or like doing anything. And I feel like I did learn some valuable lessons from going through that time. But I do think I would have been OK with slowing down a little bit and enjoying the process a little bit more. And maybe it takes three to six months longer for me and her to leave our jobs. I think I would have been OK with that. But I don't, you know, actually regret it. I do think most things happen for a reason. And kind of looking back, I learned that in order to make real progress, at least for me, I have to become unbalanced. Like if I was just middle of the road, not super extreme and obsessed about, you know, being able to, to leave my job and frugal living and house hacking and all this stuff. And that kind of got me here. If I was more relaxed, I think it would have been easy for me to kind of fall off the bandwagon to lose motivation, be content with the first house hack that we got, which is a, you know, a multi family, live in one unit, rent the other ones out and you live more or less for free. We could have been fine after the first one and then got a nice car and just kind of kept living our lives that way and saved up money. And 10 years later, maybe we'll be at freedom. But instead we kind of kept this hunger, this extreme unbalance in our lives in order to get the next one and then the next one. And the next thing you know, it's like 4 years later and both of us are out of our jobs because of this extreme, extreme unbalanced and obsession about one goal and not trying to, you know, take it easy and enjoy yourself and treat yourself. And, and looking back like yes, maybe we could have gone a little bit slower, but we don't know if like if we had gone slower, maybe we would have fallen off the bandwagon. And I know for me, if I'm not really extreme with myself, I just lose every habit so easily. I stopped reading books, I stopped going to the gym, I stopped eating healthy. Like if I don't have stricter rules that I follow, I just fall off the bandwagon. And so for me, I need to obsess about things for six months, a year, five years in order to actually achieve them because if I don't, you know, I lose interest. So well, it was a little bit of a negative and I did mess up a little bit and I kind of regret some of it. I do think that overall I learned some really valuable lessons about being OK with unbalanced in order to achieve amazing things. And I think that's what's allowed me to have a successful, you know, career with this YouTube thing of, you know, obsessing that I'll never miss a week or I'll die and I haven't missed a week in six years. That's crazy. It doesn't need to be that way, but I know if I miss one week, I'll two weeks, I'll miss a month and this whole dream thing that I love to do could disappear because I don't follow the rules that I I set up for myself to ensure, you know, some success. By the way, if you're enjoying this, drop a like subscribe. I never asked for that, but I think it helps the algorithm. We'll see. I guess because I never asked. Investing is risky. Frugal living first made me kind of believe this and I eventually kind of had to move past that mindset. Now, yes, I know that every type of investment does carry some type of risk. That is why there is reward involved is because you were risking that there could be something negative that whether it's real estate, stocks, investing into a business or yourself, there's always going to be some risk. But it's not until we start moving past that fear of failure, the fear of losing money, that you can actually start to build wealth. And this is especially important because a lot of us are going to need to invest in order to be comfortable, especially when most Americans think that they need to save $1.4 million in order to be able to retire. According to a Northwest Mutual study, 1.4 million. That's up 50% from just four years ago. That's insane. So that kind of led me to the question of what are the newer generation of investors doing in order to get ahead in time. A whopping 83% of multimillionaire respondents 43 and younger told Bank of America that they currently collect art or would like to. And here's the best part. 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You can check out some important Regulation A disclosures at masterworks.com/CD finding my own path when it comes to saving money. I can be super, super creative. And this is one of the reasons why I like for a living so much. It's almost like a bit of a game where you're like, OK, I need new shoes. Can I find a thrift store that has these shoes? I know Meredith got like a bunch of Birkenstock shoes or whatever that are like maybe 80 or $100 for like 3 bucks. And we find like baby clothes this way where, you know, once people don't have a baby anymore, they get rid of it for wicked cheap. So you never buy new stuff. Same thing with toys. You can do the same thing with clothes, but kind of having this creativity that you release into saving money actually helped me in other ways, which I'll mention in a second. But like when our refrigerator went or our washer or dryer went, instead of just going to the store and paying for it or you know, doing payments because you can't afford it. As we realized that stuff was slowly dying, we started looking and I realized that, you know, in the back of Lowe's on Fridays, they put out all the dented and Dings things and you can get them for like 50% off. And then if you ask a manager, you can get another like, you know, 50 or $100 off just by asking. And we were able to get things at like half the price everybody else pays for them just by being creative and saying, I know I can just buy to fix my problem, but I'm sure there's another way in looking. And so like we found that at our, you know, local Lowe's or we also found that there are people that buy dented and dinged appliances from like Lowe's and Home Depot that got rejected and they sell them for like 50% off. They're brand new. They just have a Ding in the side. And again, you can get them for like way cheaper. And so that type of mindset of like there's got to be a different way than whatever everybody else is doing led to a lot of success in my finances in positive ways. Besides all the saving money aspects of it. Like instead of buying a small house or renting an apartment, like I mentioned, we did house hacking where I bought this multifamily when I was 22, lived in one unit, rented the other ones out and then just rinsed and repeat the process like three times. And that was a huge thing that really helped our finances. Also just looking at most people spend 4 years not working for money, going to school and most of them end up with another year's salary, 50K or something of debt. And so while most people are 5 to 10 years in until they get to literally square one of being profitable, I decided to skip that entire process by not going to school and working to gain skills instead of working for money and also trying to avoid the 9:00 to 5:00 by starting my own businesses. And that was what really let me, you know, be able to leave my job and do what I enjoy to do for, you know, not a ton of hours every week. It's because I kind of just rejected this path that most people are going to say there's got to be a better way. I'm sure that's great for a lot of people. I just knew that for me, I, I, I really want to, to not work for somebody forever and going to school would almost force me to do that. So that was kind of that, that frugal mindset combined with like entrepreneurial spirit, which actually ended up being one of the best decisions that I ever made. Money is not money. When I started my frugal living journey, I looked at money as this thing, it was like I traded, you know, an hour of my time for this $20 or whatever it is. And I looked at money this way that like this dollar that I'm getting rid of, this 10 bucks that I'm wasting here, that's half an hour of my life, an hour of my life. And I kind of looked at money that way for a very long time. And that was extremely useful, especially when I was starting my frugal living journey, which did make a huge impact in my life. However, when I had that, that very rigid mindset that money was this incredibly important thing. It's something to obsess about. It's something that it's very limited. It's something that, you know, like it represents so much for me. It was something that I always kind of thought about was trying to, to maximize in every way possible. It kind of gave me this, you know, kind of scarcity mindset, which especially back when I was frugal, I kind of, you know, heard of this idea of a scarcity mindset and you don't want to have a scarcity mindset. You want to have a abundance mindset and all this stuff. And when you're in your, your frugal living journey, you don't have a lot of money. That doesn't really make sense, or at least it didn't make sense to me at the time. And as I've kind of been doing this for 10 years now or whatever it's been, I've realized that being extremely focused on only the saving money and optimizing every single dollar and just being, being as frugal as humanly possible kind of was not the best use of my finances for years. I mostly only focused on saving money and optimizing everything that I had. And I spent very little time actually focusing on making money. But I had to go through that, you know, that kind of obsession about saving and frugal living in order to get to, I think the next stage, which is realizing that there is a lot of opportunity and resources out there and I just need to be in a position to look for them. Because I was so focused on saving money and, you know, working as much as possible that it kind of took me hitting that place where, OK, I can't save any more money. I, I literally can't save any more money. Like maybe if I move some things around, we could save an extra $57.00 a month, but like, I can't save anymore. And then I had to focus on like, OK, well, if I want to get out of where I am right now, what's the next logical thing to do? Start making money? So I started to look at different things. I'm like, OK, well, well, what are some ways that I can make money? How can I optimize things? How can I invest for the future? How can I invest into myself and learn valuable skills? And when I kind of moved past that point of like, not rock bottom, but like hitting perfection of Virgo living where like you can't save anymore, that's when I was able to get to the next point, which is like, OK, I've now, you know, realized that there is a lot of ways to make way more money than $57.00 a month. And I've met people who are making $57,000 a month. And I'm like, OK, well, maybe what I thought was the limit, which at the time I was making around $5000 a month, was actually just the baseline. And if I focused on gaining some valuable skills, which I spent years doing, and it's like, it's mostly what I do, then instead of focusing on these small things, I can focus on things that make a huge impact and kind of think bigger for myself. Which I'm going to be honest, like a lot of this didn't make sense for me when I was going through the whole frugal living stage because I was almost like taking pride and like, I don't want to say worshipping, but like, that was just my thing. I was like, oh, I don't waste money on that. I'm not that type of person. You know, I would never do such a thing. I wouldn't waste money on a brand new car. That's ridiculous. I wouldn't go out to dinner. That's just the complete waste. I would never order a drink out. I would never buy a new piece of clothing. And it was like this identity and defense thing instead of looking for like, OK, well how can I take my income? Instead of going up 3% a year, how can I go up 30% next year? How can I go up 300% over the next five years? Because that will make a billion times more impact than being as frugal as humanly possible. So that was kind of like a mindset shift that I had to kind of capture. And when I did get there, that was one of the things that started to unlock a lot of freedom and options for my life. And that's why I'm about to go on a first class trip. To be fair, I'm getting flown out somewhere for business. So I did not pay for this. But it's cool to know that people do pay for this. And for them, it's not a lot of money because they're focused on different things that I was focused on. If you enjoyed this video, you will love this video right here on some minimalist habits that made me wealthy. It's very good and I think I think you'll like it, so check it out.