100 Money Tips That Will Change Your Life

I retired at 24 using these 100 money tips. Most people use about five in their entire life. Now, I know that 100 is a little bit crazy, but you never know what one tip can literally change your life and change your finances. So really just try to take a couple out of this and actually use them, actually put them into your life. I also broke it down into different sections. So if there's one area of your life you really want to work on, you can switch to that. But honestly, just one of these tips could change everything. Believe that financial freedom is actually possible. If you don't believe that it's possible, you're never going to change your behaviors or your habits. You're never going to invest in yourself. If you just think it's a pipe dream, then it is never going to happen for you. So that's why you have to define your why. Not going to lie, what I went through to get freedom at 24 was really hard. And if I didn't have a really strong reason behind it, one of them having freedom to spend time with my kids and have a farm and be able to travel the world, whatever it is for you, if you don't have a strong reason, you're probably also not going to make it. Then, of course, you could calculate your freedom number. Your freedom number is not like a million dollars so that you can live on $40,000 a year indefinitely. It is calculating all your living expenses, seeing how much that is per month, lowering them as much as possible. And then once you have that number, you just need to figure out different ways to earn that amount of money, which we'll talk about later in this video. We generally get paid for how much value we give to society. Like when you give a lot of value to a lot of people, you make a lot of money. When I was cleaning office buildings, I made no money because nobody cares. So if you can front load a couple of years of your life with extreme hard effort and giving a lot of value, you can earn five years worth of money in one year's worth of time if you front load all the paint. Now, you also want to never follow the crowd. I just kind of assume that everything popular is wrong. The average American is overweight. They're depressed. They're broke. They retire at 65. They have just a few years to enjoy their retirement before they die. It's really kind of stupid. So in your finances, just assume that everything popular is probably wrong. If your goal is to have different finances than everybody else. In other words, a good finance. I don't know how I'm going to pick up the camera now. More coffee cups there. I'll be right back. And this is where you should embrace being different. Not only do you want to just avoid the things that most people are doing, but you want to actually look for them. Like for years, I only wore clothes from the thrift store, had a cheap old beater car, lived in different location. I eat differently than most people. I work differently than most people. I sleep differently than most people. And that's how I like it. I don't want to fit in. I don't want to be normal anymore. Build systems instead of goals. If you have a goal to like save $10,000 within a year, it's totally possible. This is the math on that. If you don't have systems in your life and especially in your finances, you're most likely not going to have long term changes. One way to fix that is to learn consistently. Like I said at the beginning of this video, one of these tips could totally change your life. That's how I learned all of these tips was by reading books, listening to podcasts, going to seminars, talking to people. Nobody just inherently knows how to budget well or how to earn a lot of money or. That's not good. I have to go inside. Or how to invest. And just reading one or two books generally isn't enough. You have to really make learning a staple in your life. Take the low hanging fruit. There are very simple ways to save money. You can compare car insurances, switch grocery stores, or my personal favorite, stop overpaying for your phone plan. For real, the sponsor of this video, Tello Mobile, has flexible and affordable plans up to $25 a month. And it is built on the nation's largest network. You're probably not even going to notice a difference in the service, but you can save an insane amount of money just from making a little switch. And their unlimited plan just got even better with 50 gigabytes of high speed data for just $25 a month. Plus, they doubled their hotspot from five gigs to 10 gigs. Again, all for the same price. You get unlimited talk and text. Honestly, this is just a no brainer. Spending like 50 or 100 bucks for a phone plan is just like kind of silly at this point when you can just bring your own phone to Tello, get all this awesome stuff for just 25 bucks a month with no long term commitments or lock ins or like they're not just trying to take you to the bank. This is just one of those small switches that if you make this decision once, you could save money for, well, as long as you stay with them, I guess, every single month without ever having to do anything else. So check them out. There is a link down in the description. And thank you to Tello for sponsoring this video. Tomorrow never comes. Life is always now. If you're one of those people who are like, oh, I'm going to start budgeting next week, I'm going to get on a diet after New Year's. This is like scientifically backed that you're not going to do that. You're just wasting your time. Like literally don't even bother. Maybe it's because you don't have a strong enough why. But if you want to make changes, start like right now. Don't wait. Please don't wait. All right. Let's talk about saving money. You should be targeting a 75% savings rate. And if that sounds ridiculous, it kind of is. Again, we're not shooting for normal. For me, this took years and huge life changes to get to. But I was able to get to it and it completely changed my life. Focus on the big three. That's going to be your housing, transportation and food. It's where most of your money goes before you cut out the lattes. Focus on that. One way to do that is by house hacking. Buy a two to four unit multifamily with the first time home buyer loan. Live in one unit. Rent the other ones out. Rinse and repeat the process. Then, of course, for transportation, get like a 10 year old car. Buy it used in cash, drive it for one to three years and then try to sell it for roughly what you paid for it. I've done this quite a few times. It's pretty much like getting free cars. Then, of course, you should be meal planning like your freedom depends on it. Again, food is going to be one of your biggest expenses. If you're routinely throwing stuff away, you're just literally burning money and your life and your freedom. Start making a plan. Cancel reoccurring expenses like subscriptions. If you're serious about reaching freedom, then maybe you should be watching less TV anyways. Buy generic everything. A lot of name brands are literally made in the same factory. It's kind of just a marketing scheme. Don't fall for it. Use credit card rewards. I've gotten like a dozen free flights by kind of gaming the credit card system, signing up for different bonuses, hitting the minimum spend and then just kind of down the road, canceling those cards. Pretty sweet. Don't pay bank fees. Americans pay on average three hundred and twenty nine dollars a year on bank fees. It's a total waste. Use credit cards the right way. If you cannot pay your credit card at the end of every month, literally cut it up, throw it in the trash, burn it, do anything. The best you can hope for in the stock market is like 10 percent on average. So if you're losing 30 percent, take drastic measures. Switch to black coffee. Not only is it healthier for you, but if you're in the habit of having like a latte and you can save five bucks a day, that's like eighteen hundred bucks a year. Plus, you're going to be healthier. You're like paying money to hurt yourself. But you do have to get good coffee and like a Chemex and just become a snob and hate yourself a little bit. But it's totally worth it. Pack your own lunch. Eating out generally costs two to three times more. So just take the time. Meal prep once a week. Be prepared. Don't buy sale items. Instead, buy things that you love. If you get to the point where everything you have is your favorite, you no longer need to buy things. So unless something's like a 90 plus, like you absolutely love it. Don't buy it. And that leads into the cost per use. If you have a shirt that's like $50, but you wear it 50 times, that's a dollar per use. But if you have a shirt that's $10 that you got on sale, but you don't really like it that much and you wear it once, that $10 shirt is actually 10 times more expensive per use. Avoid extended warranties. Retailers make about 80 percent profit margin on extend warranties. It's a scam. It's not a good idea. Please stop buying bottled water. Invest in a filter or something like that. It's generally about 2000 times more expensive to get bottled water. Of course, you should be negotiating everything. It turns out if you call your internet provider trying to cancel, they will offer you everything under the sun to keep you on. Make it frustratingly hard to cancel. Literally offered me half price for better service just to keep me. But the internet sucks, so I still wouldn't do it. Use the 30 day rule. If you want something that is not a necessity to be alive, which is pretty much food, leave it, write it down on a list, have a running list or leave it in your cart for 30 days. And if you still want it, go ahead and buy it. Most likely you'll forget about it by then. I guess that one's more of a minimalist rule, which I have like a list of 50 other ones down below. If you're into minimalism, invest in quality things between you and the ground. So this is like your mattress and shoes, things that can impact your health are a good thing to spend money on. Even like gym memberships. And of course, you can set up automatic savings. If you're not robbing yourself every time you get a paycheck, you're probably not saving as much money as you could be. I love to kind of steal for myself, so I don't have the opportunity to waste money or seem like I have money. If you have bad self-control, just steal from yourself. Now let's talk about debt management. There is good debt and there is bad debt. People who understand and use good debt are generally people who build large amounts of wealth. And the people who get taken advantage of with bad debt are most Americans. If you do have debt, pay off the highest interest first. If you have a car loan at 16% and a house loan at 5%, mathematically, you should always pay the highest first. And sometimes it can be good to not pay off your mortgage. You have a three or 4% mortgage and you can earn 10% plus in the stock market on average. Mathematically, it makes absolutely no sense to pay off your mortgage. However, don't always follow the math. For some people, the mental stress of having a mortgage, having debt, having whatever can change their lives and like ruin things. So you have to understand your risk tolerance, what type of person you are. For me, I have like over a million dollars in good debt for like rentals and stuff. And that has zero effect on my mind space. But for other people, it would stress them out. So just because something works for one person doesn't mean it's going to work for everybody. Don't consolidate your debt unless you want to. A lot of people, when they consolidate their debt, they don't change their behaviors. And therefore they have this big consolidation loan and then they just build up the other debt again anyways. So until you change your behaviors, don't just consolidate your debt to try to get rid of the problem without addressing the root of the problem, which is you. Then, of course, if you're younger, don't go to college. Don't get student loan debt. Obviously, this is a little bit too much of a blanket statement. But if you have no idea what you want to go to school for, don't just go and get in tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt for I don't know what. An incredibly high percentage of people don't use their degree. They can literally destroy your life before you ever get started. Never use payday loans. These are just like financial traps that charge 400 percent interest and can trap you in terrible cycles. Just try to avoid them like the plague. What we should be trying to do is build a three to six month emergency fund. For the most part, you should never have to use bad debt again. All right, let's start making money. Avoid unscalable side hustles. If you're trying to make more money, there's a place for side hustling, for hourly wage, cleaning office buildings at night or doing door dash. But if you ever want to make a decent amount of money from it, you need to start a scalable side hustle that makes nothing at the beginning, but has a lot of upside later on. Do you want a list of seven scalable side hustles? I will leave a link to that as well down below. Try random crap. I have recently been posting text posts to YouTube and that have been reaching about ninety nine percent non followers. And one post, just like last week, made me over one hundred and fifty dollars. One of the more random things that I've ever tried. But literally anything can work if you actually try it. People make a living doing this stupid stuff. Work to learn instead of to earn. This is one of the things I'm most grateful to Rich Dad Poor Dad for teaching me. And that is literally just to work to learn valuable skills, because if you actually learn valuable skills long term, you're going to make way more money. Build multiple streams of income. If you have your W2 plus rental properties, plus investment income, plus side hustle income, you lose your job. The world doesn't end. Makes life way easier. Negotiate your salary annually. Most people leave thousands of dollars on the table every year because they don't ask for raises. Budget your time, not just your money. A lot of us nerdy finance people track our finances like crazy, but we don't track our time. And if you value your time because it's literally our most valuable thing that we have, then you should keep track of it. See where you're losing it. See what part of it is making you money and giving you more life back, which part of it like destroying your life. Then, of course, you should give yourself a higher hourly value. I recommend anywhere between 100 and $1,000 an hour. If you start to really believe that you are worth that much, you'll probably stop watching TV, start working harder and start really just trying to enjoy your life more and be more productive. Avoid your weaknesses. School taught us to avoid our strengths. But when it comes to making money, that's kind of stupid. And it's why a lot of successful kids in school end up working for the people who were bad in school because school has nothing to do with like life. So lean into your strengths and just avoid your weaknesses. Outsource them. Create content around your expertise. YouTube, blogging, courses, Instagram, text posts on Facebook. These things work. And even if you fail at them, you learn a lot about yourself. You learn a lot of valuable skills. I think most people should at least try it for a little bit, even if you don't want to do it as a career. When you try to teach people, you learn so much yourself. For me, it's made me such a better person. Network with purpose. We all know that you're the average of the five people you hang around with most. So be really intentional with who you're spending your time with, because it'll literally make a difference in how much you earn. Take a lot of risks, not like too many risks. But if you're always trying to play things as safe as humanly possible, you'll probably never succeed, because in order to succeed, you need to actually take chances and do things. Again, unlike school teachers, in the real world, failure is an awesome thing and we should embrace it. Learn sales and marketing. Pretty much everything in the world is a funnel. A lot of making money comes down to sales in some aspect. It's a great thing to learn. Read a couple of books. It's super fun. And that's where a lot of money is. Try to go remote. This might take years to actually make happen, but if you can figure out either how to gain skills that will let you work remotely or how to get your job to let you work remotely, you generally unlock a lot of time that you would have spent driving to work or like wasting time at work. Plus, you can even unlock like location freedom. Speaking of which, on top of your emergency fund, build a three to six month freedom fund where if you have that as a backup, you now have the opportunity to move across the country for a job, to take a pay cut and work at a startup, which has incredible potential. When you have a freedom fund, you actually have a lot more opportunities and a better chance to get lucky than somebody who doesn't. Maximize your employee match. I'm not a big fan of retirement accounts myself. However, if a company is offering a match on like a 401k, it's literally free money. Learn AI. AI is here. It is not going anywhere. It is a complete game changer. You can either avoid it. The people who are taking advantage of it are going to be miles ahead of everybody else in just the next couple of years. Develop a personal brand. Your Instagram, your Facebook, whether you decide to be a creator or not, they are now something that your future employer is going to look at. If you have any skills, it can be a way to monetize. If you're a weird person like me, building a personal brand is literally just getting paid to be alive and talk about the things that you're interested in. For me, I'm like so, so happy that I've gone down this road and like so blessed to be able to do this because I literally just get to talk about things that I love all the time and get paid for it. Start before you're ready. If you're thinking about starting a business, taking a class, better your skills to try to get a raise, making a life move, diving into your finances, going on a diet, whatever it is, you're never, ever, ever going to be ready. Do it anyways. Invest in low-cost index funds. The S&P 500 has an expense ratio of under 0.1 and also beat most actively managed funds long-term. So pretty much just keep it simple. Also, automate your investing. Investing weekly or monthly can be a great way to kind of force yourself to build wealth. Don't try to time the market. Obviously, it sounds good to buy low and sell high. If you could do that, you'd be like a billionaire. It's really hard. By the way, if you're enjoying this video and getting any value out of it, feel free to drop a like and subscribe. It really helps out the channel. Take advantage of compound interest. Just $1,000 invested for 30 years at a 10% return will be about $17,000. Look into real estate investing. If this is something that you've thought about, check out things like BiggerPockets. I've read pretty much all of their books. It's what helped me get my first rental and that rental really made a big impact in my finances. Try the three-step hack. This is house hacking, which we talked about before, doing that two to three times. And then on the third one, you can have a house and the first couple of rentals, so the past maybe three to five years of your life that you sacrificed living in those places and fixing them up and whatever, will now pay for your dream home for the rest of your life. That's kind of what our plan was and exactly what happened, and I think it was pretty cool. It was one of the better decisions that I've made. Dollar cost average. This is pretty much just investing the same amount of money over and over again. And instead of trying to buy the dips or do whatever, just get a certain percentage in every day, every week, every month, and over time, it'll just average out. Avoid emotional investing. Most people who try to trade will actually lose money and a lot of investors get very emotional. If that's you, just don't check the stock market. Just be aware of your emotions and realize that you're in this for the long run or you might need some help with it. Understand your risk tolerance and stage of life. I invest very different now than I would 10 years from now, than I would 20 years from now because I'm further from retirement. I have more things to fall back on. So your situation will change how you invest. Just because one person that you follow invests one way, doesn't mean that's the way everybody should do it. Some people do great in real estate. Some people do great in crypto. Some people do great in index funds. Some people do great starting businesses. They all work. Just try to figure out which one is right for you. Learn about taxes and try to figure out how to pay less of them. There are ways to do that, especially as a business owner with investment income. You don't want to give extra to the government. They don't know how to use it. They really don't. They don't need more of you much. Don't chase performance. A lot of people will buy a stock because they see it going up, but they want to catch the ride. And then they end up being the people holding the bag and the smart people sell and they get losing money. It happens all the time. Generally, if you're hearing about something, you're probably too late. The big companies, the people who do this for a living are kind of just waiting for you to buy their stuff so that they can cash out. When it comes to especially investing in stocks, don't chase trends. Understand inflation. If your money's just sitting in account, earning nothing, you're losing a lot of money. Like $100,000 salary in January of 2020 has the same buying power of $124,000 salary in April of 2025. It's like if your money's just sitting there, if you haven't gotten a 25% raise in the past five years, you just lost like 25% of your money. So invest in yourself first. Before you invest into any of these other things, buy some $20 books, get an Audible subscription, watch a bunch of YouTube videos and do like free stuff. Even investing $1,000 into yourself versus $1,000 in the stock market. Like if you were in 10% in the stock market, you've just gained $100. But if you invest $1,000 and you learn a skill that lets you make $100 a month, well, now you get your money back within a year. Like it's kind of crazy not to invest in yourself first. Read all the books. There's a bunch of free resources as well. Pay for them. For me, it is always the best investment that you can make is into yourself. All right, let's talk about some advanced strategies. Use OPM or other people's money. This is pretty much good debt. When I was 22, I bought a $200,000 property with $6,500 of my own money. The rest was the bank's money or other people's money. That property has since doubled and I had almost no risk of the downside myself. Optimize for cashflow, not net worth. Monthly income matters so much more than paper wealth. If your goal is to reach freedom and be able to travel the world, leave your job, do whatever, monthly income is what it's all about. Create systems for everything. When it comes to your workout, when it comes to saving, investing, everything you do should have a system. So once you set it up, you no longer need to maintain those habits and your wealth grows automatically. Take advantage of business structures. We've recently moved from an LLC to an S Corp and that will end up saving me tens of thousands of dollars a year for just changing the structure of our business. I'm not an expert on this, but if you have some type of business, try consulting a professional. Use geo-arbitrage. If you can live in a low cost location while earning a high cost salary, you can kind of like sprint to freedom. If you need $10,000 a month to live where you live or you can move to a different country that's tropical and you only need a third of the amount of money, you might actually be financially free and not even know it if you just move your location. Plan your estates and your legacy. This is something that I just went through recently. You get a lot more peace of mind and you make sure that your family is not screwed over if you pass and have to go to court and all that type of stuff. It's worth doing. Consider alternative investments. Generally, the most popular things are gonna have the lowest returns and as you get more and more into it, you have higher risk of losing, but also sometimes a higher chance of upside. So it depends on your risk tolerance. I'm not gonna name any of these right now, but generally most of the ones that I've done that have been like pretty weird investments, a couple of them have failed, but a couple of them have worked out crazy well. Outsource some of your work. If you can use AI or a VA to do any of your job for you for like five or $10 an hour, kind of crazy not to. It's hard to get started with that, but once you figure it out, like your life changes, you get a bunch of free time back, you make more money, everything, it's awesome. So invest the time and energy it takes to figure that out. Let's talk about lifestyle. You wanna define your enough. When you have enough, you no longer have to chase more money, your stress levels go down, but if you never know what enough is, no matter how much money you make, you'll always feel like you don't have enough and you're always chasing more. Avoid lifestyle inflation. This is something that hits almost everybody as you get a raise, you get a bigger whatever, and sometimes your finances can actually be worse. Focus on experiences over things. For me, travel and time with family are huge things that I love, whereas stuff doesn't really matter. Don't try to impress other people. 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and most of those people get trapped in that cycle because they're trying to look wealthy and impress other people. Be grateful. Honestly, like the fact that you even watched this far into the video, you probably know a lot more about finances than most people probably ever will, which is again why 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. A lot of it's because some people know this stuff and they just don't take action on it, but a lot of people don't even know it. We live in an amazing time. We have so much opportunity. Being grateful and looking to serve people is a great way to be happier yourself and also better your finances because you're not looking for meaning in stock. Maintain your relationships. Money is the leading cause for divorce. Money without relationships isn't gonna be super rewarding, especially long-term, so as you're chasing bettering your finances, building a legacy, whatever it is for you, gaining freedom, don't sacrifice your family or your relationships to get there. Same thing goes with your health. If you're giving up your health in order to have more money, well, most people, once they get money, they just do the opposite and try to get their health back that they lost in order to get the money, so just maintain both along the way. It's okay to get there slightly slower and to be healthy. Remember that money is a tool. It could be a good tool, it could be a bad tool, but ultimately, it is a tool. And I'll also say that money can buy happiness. To a certain extent, it can buy freedom. Generally, a lot of people don't enjoy not having freedom and so, therefore, having freedom makes it more enjoyable, so money should be an important thing. We should think about it all the time. We should worry about it. We should stress about it. We should think about it all the time, so not worry or stress. We should learn about it. We should try to master it. We should try to get really good with this tool that is ours. And if you wanna learn more about money, check out this video right here. Totally free, it's true.