Why Looking Poor is actually Smart

When I was a wee lad, a young man, I lived on $1,500 a month. And believe it or not, during that period of time while splitting a room, sleeping on the floor with another dude, I was taking home about $15$2,000 a month. And the reason that I lived like that is cuz A, I'm incredibly riskaverse, but B because I wanted to have money to go on the offensive later. If you don't know who I am, my name is Alex. I own. com. It's a portfolio of companies. There's over $200 million a year. I make these videos cuz I want you to make shitloads of money and make a big company so that someday we can partner together and take it to $100 million and beyond. For me, making 20 grand a month was never an amount of money that I wanted to brag about or feel like I had made it. I wanted to shoot really, really big. This was only stuff that was going to be stepping stones for me to achieve what I wanted to later. What I want to do in this video is I'm going to break down how I was able to live for so cheap. This is for all the single guys, all the single ladies. Now, if you can live with your parents, even better. For me, somebody would have died. It was for the best that I didn't have to live at home. This is what I actually did in order to live at $1,500 a month or less. And I did that eating out every day. There's three big cost centers. You got transportation, you got living, and you got food. So, food-wise, some of you guys have seen Mosy Meals, meal hacks, the things that I do at these chain restaurants. And I did it that way because I don't like cooking and I wanted to have more time to make money. It made more financial sense for me to not take 8 hours on a Sunday to go grocery shopping and prep all my food versus me getting Chipotle twice a day, which is what I did at the time. Then, $15 a day. Today, 20 bucks a day, 30 days in a row, it's $600 a month. You can also go to Panda Express, which has a phenomenal 110 g of protein hacked with extra chicken, so you can have 200 g of protein every day. Recommend it. Third best option is Chick-fil-A is one of my favorites. They are on the pricier side. Just go with two 20 packs of chicken nuggets and get in close to 12 bucks, which is a shitload of meat, or two sandwiches. Either way, you'll end up in that $10 to12 range, and you'll be at that $600, $700 a month range. And if you're like, "Huh, did he really do that? " I sure did. That's all I did. I picked between Chick-fil-A, Panda Express, and Chipotle. And that's what I lived on. So much to this point that Leila didn't know that we were going on dates. But for me, these were the fine establishments that I was frequenting on a regular basis. They knew me by name, and they knew that I knew how to work the menu. So, first step was Mosy Meals. And that for me, time to moneywise was worth it. When I would go to the grocery store and I would get all the fixings and all that stuff, I spent $150 in a week. And I ended up spending almost $600 a month as a single guy when I went grocery shopping and did all the prep and all the clean versus me running out next door, grabbing the food, eating it, and heading back. And it was a nice mental break for me. I ate cheap. And as crazy as this may seem, it is easier to figure out how to get all of your calories in. Eating out stuff ahead of time. The absolute cheapest route, which I'll tell you right now, loaves of bread, peanut butter. Cheapest thing in the world. And if you really want to make sure that you're covered in your bases, get a multiit. You can live on it. If you want to add a third staple in there, you can add lactade milk if you're dairy sensitive. You'll get your protein. You'll get your carbs. You get your fat in. If you want to be extreme on it, you can be extreme. For me, I didn't want to live on peanut butter sandwiches. I did eat them when I was trying to bulk up, but I did those in addition to my normal calorie intake. And to that degree, you might want to do one of those mossy meals and then do peanut butter and milk is the other one, which is a nice cheap in between. The reason this is so important for everybody who's watching this, you got to know how to live cheap so you can save up to build the business you want so you can invest in the skills and the experiences that are going to make you money. Number two is transportation. This is where Mosymobiles came in. There's lots of M's when it comes to mobiles, meals, and mansions. From the mobile standpoint, the most efficient way to own a vehicle is to purchase it in cash. A used vehicle that is ideally between 5 and 10 years old. Any place in America right now today, you can find a used four-door vehicle that is between five and 10 years old for $10,000. You don't want to have car payments. The only thing you really have to manage is car insurance, which is not too expensive. And here's the cool part. The cheaper your car, less the insurance. You're young and you're living on $600 a month for mosy meals and you live on $100 a month after you've made your onetime capital expense of actually getting the car, which I recommend doing and not taking a loan for it. All you have is your mansion, your chateau, where you going to rest your head at night. I lived in Southern California, one of, if not the most expensive markets in the United States. I was in Costa Mesa was where I lived. And after I slept on the floor of my gym, which is the first place, which technically was zero, but at the same time, it was $5,000 a month cuz it was my actual rent for my business. I then really splurged. I ended up having a member at my gym say, "Are you really sleeping here? " Said, "I sure am. " Another member was having me sleep at their place for free. I was able to move from the free place to my own place, which is really in quotes here. We split a single bedroom in a sevenbedroom house. He and I were roommates, not housemates, roommates. And I had one mattress that I got off Craigslist and put on the floor. Fan next to my face because it's really loud, by the way, so you can not have to hear what someone else is doing. Every other bedroom had a couple. There were three dogs in the house. My roommate had a dog. Another couple had a dog. And dog and one of the couples had two dogs and they were both big. So there was marking of territory.

There was [ __ ] and piss in the house every day. Was [ __ ] horrible. My half was 400 bucks a month. If you're in like North Carolina or you're in Boise, Idaho, you can probably get a room for $400 a month without having to split it. Big picture here, I would recommend you go to the place where shit's happening. $400 a month that you'd spend to be in an area where things are going on and people are doing things with their lives. To get out of your area of the world where nothing's happening and your friends are still in the same place and your parents don't encourage you and think this internet [ __ ] is weird and tell you to stop watching videos on YouTube to try to better yourself and just tell you to get a job, whatever it is. If you want to get out of that environment, it is worth the $200 to $400 a month. The easiest thing to do is to connect with people online. Join communities, join Discord groups, join Facebook groups, whatever it is. try and figure out where there are pockets of them because people congregate. You can find pockets of people that have similar goals to you and get around them. Every move for the first few years of my career was only to be around people. As long as you're a person who's going to hustle and people see it, people will open doors for you. I moved from SoCal to Puerto Rico briefly. From there, we moved to Irvine and then Albuquerque, New Mexico because I had people there that I wanted to learn from and I didn't know anyone else besides this one couple. If you just say, "Hey, do you know anybody else who lives in this area? " And this is where like now the world's even more connected than it was a decade ago. See a lot in SoCal. You Miami. You'll see a lot of New York, a lot of Chicago. And a big thing here, if you see Cleveland rich is not the same as SoCal rich. New York. What happens is your standard of excellence raises. In some ways, you feel worse about yourself, but to the same degree, it shows you what's possible. My recommendation is to use that as inspiration. It is possible. They are made of the same flash and moan as I am. Therefore, I can too. And when you get around people like that, they start talking in different time increments and different money increments. You're hanging out with talking in terms of weeks, paychecks, talking in terms of $100, thousand investments. You got to be talking to people who are talking about $100,000 investments. We're talking about years, talking about decades. You can judge how wealthy people will be by how they talk about how they allocate resources, time, and money, and the increments that they measure those in. I've moved a lot faster in life through handshakes instead of hacks. It's who introduced me and opened way more doors than any what ever did. Getting around the who. A lot of times it's hard to measure, but when I look at all the big deals that I've done in my life, it's all been one or two degrees connected from people that I met. One recommendation that I have for you, don't turn down the first invite. You connect with somebody at a thing that's like, "Hey, let's grab dinner. " If you make that first one happen, the likelihood that you end up staying friends and connecting is significantly higher. If you turn down the first invite, it shows that you're not as interested. they also turned down your counter invite and it becomes this whole thing. And I'm just saying like one big move is just make it work on the first invite. When you go to that meeting, do some prep work. Do 30 minutes of research on the person you're going to meet with and try to bring something valuable to the table. Now, it might be your skill and you just apply it to them. And this is the thing. This is a [ __ ] hack at life. No one wants a free patio. Like, hey, you got a buddy who builds patios. You don't have a patio. You have a couple people bid for it and your buddy's like, "Hey, I'll build it for Right? He says he'll do it for free and you say, "Sure, cool. I'll save some money. " The other guy said they can do it in 4 weeks. He starts taking 4 weeks and it's, you know, a third of the way done. He's a sorry I'm working on some other jobs. I'll be around to work on it later this weekend. And now it's 8 weeks and it's still, you know, halfway done. And at 12 weeks now, you start to [ __ ] hate the guy. The thing is that if you want to do somebody a favor, if you really want them to take it as a favor, blow them away. Make them feel awkward for the amount of work that you did. And if you've never had this experience, I can promise you I've been on the receiving end and it is uncomfortable. [ __ ] I owe this guy something. And the nice thing about this, you just provide value. You go in and you don't just provide a little bit of value. You actually do what a full scope project would be for whatever it is that you're good at and you just set it up for the dude or you spend a whole day walking them through how you do this stuff. And you're like, "Well, how do you find the time for that? " You work all the time. That's how you do it. This is work. It's investing in the long-term relationships that going to pay dividends later. Does that mean that I'm going to give to somebody and I might not get anything back? Yes. Didn't you say you want to be an entrepreneur and make the world a better place? That's what it looks like at a micro level. The ultimate leverage that you can have in a relationship is not needing anything back. If you do that, you can be the guy that stacks IUS and then when you do need to make your move because you are going to do the next thing, then you've got all these blank checks ready to cash in. And then that is how you can propel yourself way faster. And you just load the deck early when you don't need anything. The time to dig the well is not when you're thirsty, but when you have enough water, so that when you are thirsty, it's there. Now, we can go on the offensive. My plan B was always strip at night, drive Uber during the day. And I'm dead serious. If you're making less than 60 70,000 a year, I don't understand why you wouldn't take that car that you saved up for that's got four doors, it's 15 years or younger, and has no visible damage on it, you got those three check marks, you can drive Uber. It is the most flexible job. You can make money immediately. There's no risk besides the

actual vehicle itself. You can work whatever hours you want. You can do it on separate apps. And when I say whatever hours, I said there's flexibility, but also how many hours you want. You work 12 hours a day if you feel like it living on 1500 bucks a month or less. Spend 20, make another 200, have saved up after taxes. So, I could go on the offensive again. If you know it doesn't cost you much to live, your risk tolerance goes up because you don't have other [ __ ] to worry about. real cost of the [ __ ] that you can't afford or shouldn't be affording right now. You're paying for the car, but you're sacrificing your dreams. You're paying for going out with the boys at the club, buying a table, getting bottle service, buying girls drinks. All of a sudden, boom, 100 bucks. Boom, 200 bucks in a night. Like, what just happened? That was half my rent. You become less dangerous because it's very hard to fight someone who has nothing to lose. And can live on nothing. If we had to pick between living on $10,000 a month and making $10,000 a month or living on $1,500 a month and then spending the spread, if you spend $5,000 a month, $3,000 a month, $2,000 a month on your education so that you can increase your earning capacity, it's hard to be stopped. Side note, if you can get competitive with yourself at how little you can spend, recommend. One of the other hacks that Dave Ramsey has that I'm a huge fan of is taking out the amount of money that you're going to spend for the entire month putting in your wallet and leaving it there. Don't spend more than that. Period. That's it. That's all you got. You are one of these people who wants to credit card hack. I get 2% here and I get 1% 3% here. You're focusing on the wrong [ __ ] percentage side. If you're trying to be financially disciplined, just [ __ ] be disciplined. So, I get asked a lot about the income to spending ratio. I never had one. That's because I just try to maximize both sides. How can I hack the game to spend as little as humanly possible, period? And then how can I hack the other side of the game and make as much money as I possibly can? I just saved every dollar that wasn't food, transportation, living. The other way of doing this is getting competitive with your bank account. One of the habits that I highly encourage you do is that every morning, what's the first thing you check? Is it Instagram? Is it YouTube? Is it your texts? I will tell you the first thing that I checked the mornings when I was in this period of my life. It was my bank account. Every day I would wake up and I would check my bank account. And what happens when you do that is you develop this muscle of kind of this understanding of the money flow. It might be uneventful to check your bank account every day, but if I can give you a habit that will make you a lot of money, it's just like weight loss. If you get on a scale every day and you're trying to lose weight and you don't do jack [ __ ] but you literally just get on the scale every day, people lose weight. Drawing and putting awareness to the problem or the thing that you're trying to change improves it. If you're in a business and you want sales to go up, start tracking everything. If you just start reporting publicly on close rates and put a leaderboard up, sales go up. Think about this from a human behavior standpoint. punish bad behavior with yourself as quickly as possible and you want to reward good behavior as fast as possible so you do more of it. That's why you check the bank account every day. You start seeing it go up and you get this little ticker. It goes up and if you really want to be a G about it, this is how I did it. You check your bank account and you have a Google sheet on your phone and every day I'd put my balance in. And if you can start getting addicted to getting personal records in your bank account, like if I can give you the one gift of this is to gamify it. The people who make the most money, they think about money as a game. And the best way to do that is early on. Track two things. You check your bank account and you put it in. And what's nice there is that you can start seeing long-term trends. When I would look at that trend, I got a tremendous amount of good feeling. I would look at it and be like, I [ __ ] did that. And every month get a little bit bigger, and you start feeling progress for the sacrifices that you make every day because you look at where you're at this month versus last month and you see progress. So if you want to improve your money situation, you got to check it. You got to look at it every day. And the first thing in the day, priority, it means it is happening prior. It's more important. So you wake up, you make money a priority, you check your bank account every day, you start get a pulse on what's going in and what's going out. What's going in, what's going out, you look at all of the pluses that go in, you look at all the minuses, and next month you try and make that column go up and that column go down. You keep running that cycle. And I promise you, if you actually look at your bank account every single day, even for 90 days, you will be amazed at what goes in there. They're like, "Huh, didn't even know I still had that app. " Most people get anxiety. They avoid the things that they don't like. Got to confront it. I'm [ __ ] poor. I don't want to be poor. I'm going to look at this money until eventually it starts paying attention back to me. Because money sticks to the person who pays it the most attention. This is how the economy works. The person in two parties who pays the most attention is where the money ends