If You're ~30 And Have Less Than $100K. Watch This

If you have less than $100,000 and you're young, I will show you exactly how to get there as quickly as possible because the statistics in America are abysmal. The median savings amount for U.S. households as of the latest Federal Reserve survey was a mere $8,000, and we know that the gross personal savings rate in America has been on a downward trend ever since 2020. On this channel, our community aims to exceed those statistics by a large margin, so if that's what you're about, please stick around because in this video, I will show you exactly what I would do in order to hit the $100,000 mark quickly if I were starting all over again. Now, I realized 10 years ago that when I first hit $100,000 in net worth that the 100K number is where I was actually able to start investing and have the returns be quite meaningful. So many people these days want to start investing with $100, but even if you're able to get a phenomenal return of 20% in a single year, that's double the S&P market average return, by the way. You would have $20 in profit to show for it at the end of the year. 20 bucks is great, but that's still less than an hour's wage for most people, and so investing a sum of $100 is just not that exciting, especially after you factor in taxes. But pretend you had $100,000 invested. If you were able to get a 10% return after one year, that would amount to $10,000 in profit. That's much more powerful, and if you were working a job that, say, pays you 20 bucks an hour, that's the equivalent of 500 hours of work. So as you can see, capital scales really well, and rich people understand this concept. So what we want to really do is get to a point where our money is working for us at all times. Now, hitting 100K faster will come from a combination of two things. Number one, making more money, and number two, also saving more money. So if you're the age of 25, 30, heck, even 35 or 40 years old, and you still don't have $100,000, the first major framework to master in order to get 100K as quickly as possible is that you should be at least arbitraging your skills. I'll explain exactly what that is in just a minute, but I want you to realize that the advantage that you have if you're around the age of 30 is that you're technically in the sweet spot for starting to generate wealth. That's because you probably have between five to eight more years of work experience than someone who's fresh out of college. You can also leverage the fact that your network is stronger, your judgment is a little bit more sound than someone who's 22, and you still have 35 plus years until retirement. All these factors mean that you still have a lot of time and great decisions to make to compound your career and your wealth. So how do we actually capitalize on the fact that we are the age that we are? That's where the skill arbitrage framework or method comes in. We basically want to identify all the skills that we have and also what skills are currently undervalued in our current situation, but could be valued higher elsewhere in order to increase our income. So let me give you an example. Let's pretend you've worked in HR for the past five years for a midsize company, and you spent countless hours reviewing resumes and LinkedIn profiles. You're getting paid a great salary of $105,000 per year at your job, but you want to increase your income even further. Well, the skill that you've probably identified here is that you have an expert eye for what resumes stand out and what makes a good LinkedIn profile. I think at this point, you could easily start a side business or even just a side hustle where you charge $150, $200, or maybe even $300 reviewing resumes and helping people write better ones in order to get their dream jobs. If you just did 10 to 20 resumes a month, that's an extra $2,000 to $3,000 every month. So do you see what we did there? We took something that you were already experienced in, identified that it could be monetizable, and then we went to a different market and we arbitrage the skills that you already had for more income. And I think that you can do this with almost any job that you've actually been at. Regardless of who you are, you probably have some sort of domain expertise or specialized skill that you simply need to identify that could be valued in another market. This is exactly what I did when I first quit my gaming job. So for those of you that are new to the channel, one of the biggest roles of my personal career was working in gaming monetization. So if you think of a game like Candy Crush or Clash of Clans, whenever someone logs into the game, it was my job to figure out how to get users to buy more in-game items. Because of my experience of doing this for two years straight on one of the top grossing mobile games back in 2016 and 2017, I was able to monetize this skill by advertising my knowledge as a consultant to other apps and gaming companies. And whether you know it or not, you probably have more knowledge about some sort of topic than somebody else starting out or some other business, and you can help those people or other businesses with your skills and you're able to make money doing it. One more practical example for you, if you're someone who really likes to work on cars, like changing oil, replacing brake pads, diagnosing weird engine problems, you could probably create a whole range of products or services around car maintenance. You could offer mobile car maintenance services, going to people's homes or offices to do basic services like oil changes, tire rotations, or battery replacements, and you could probably charge between $75 to $150 per hour plus the parts. You could also start a YouTube channel or blog teaching people basic car maintenance tips and monetize it through affiliate marketing with auto part manufacturers and tool manufacturers as well. Or perhaps you could just partner with a local auto shop as someone who can do a virtual diagnostic for certain people that might need help that don't want to actually go into the actual auto shop. In all these cases, you might just think you're good with cars, but there's tons of people out there that are intimidated by car maintenance and would happily pay for someone's experience and expertise. All right. I hope that I drove the point home hard enough, but this entire method or framework here is about leveraging what you do have already in order to make more money to accelerate your wealth. Now, if you're someone who doesn't have a skill that we just talked about that you can leverage in another market, or perhaps you don't have any high income skill at all, then what you actually need to do at this point in time is to try to pick up a new skill that can actually generate you more money in the long run. This is where I would spend the next 12 to 18 months building a high income skill from scratch. And there are plenty of high income skills that you can build within this timeframe, as long as you're willing to commit. Now, there is a big disclaimer here, which is oftentimes that building a new skill can be really boring and you can burn out on it quite easily, especially if you aren't intrinsically interested in that said thing. For example, I wouldn't tell you to go get a CompTIA certification, which is an IT certification, especially if you're someone who's interested in something like interior design or gardening. However, if you are interested in IT, that is one of the certifications you can actually pursue to earn more money in the future. Anyway, that's besides the point. The goal here is that you want to find a skill that pays a decent amount of money around 40 to $50 an hour is the sweet spot, and hopefully is at the intersection of what you're actually interested in. This is easier said than done, but just like in the previous section, think about all the things that you're interested in and actually good at. If you want something concrete for a high income skill, I would personally consider starting a service-based business around digital marketing. I personally watch a lot of social media in my free time, so I would know what types of content perform best, and I could learn TikTok and Facebook ads in order to help clients with their marketing efforts. I also personally think I'm good at writing, so I think I would be really good at writing email campaigns and helping manage a small business's Instagram page. Now, if you don't want something in the digital space, but you want something more tangible, you could start a service-based business like mowing lawns, cleaning gutters, window cleaning, car detailing, stuff that anybody can do, but maybe they don't really necessarily want to specialize in. I want to point out that in this process, you are basically building out the skills required to generate more income and even start a business in the future if you want, so all of these things are really good positives. So in everything that I've just covered, these are just ways to make more money, but we also have to figure out the other side of the equation, which is how do we save more money, because making more money is one thing, but if we can save more money, then we're going to get to the $100,000 mark as quickly as possible. If you've watched some of the other videos on my channel, you would know that the first $100,000 is usually not made from investment gains, so if we take a look at the calculator from the 4 Pillar Freedom blog, if you're able to save $15,000 a year for six years and you're able to attain a modest 4.5% return on your savings, you would be at $105,000 after six years. However, 85% of that would have been comprised of savings and 15% is actually interest or investment returns. So that is personally a crazy statistic that 85% of your $100,000 is from saving money, it's not actually from investing. You have to realize that saving is a key factor and key habit that we actually need to ingrain in ourselves from a very young age in order to actually accelerate our wealth and make the money that we actually make work for us. So here's how I would personally save money faster, and this helped me get to $100,000 in net worth by the time I was age 27. The first thing that you must do is to track your expenses. I know that this sounds really boring, but this can be a rough approximation or even just to the exact dollar. You want to write down your expenses at the end of each day, or you can put it in your notes app on your phone, or I personally just use a free app like Spending Tracker. Basically, every time you spend money, you want to manually input each expense into some sort of tracking notepad or tracking app. I personally don't put any recurring expenses in my daily log or my daily app. Rather, I will track those in a separate spreadsheet, and then I summarize that at the end of the month. The idea here is really simple. You really want to track your expenses for a period of time just to be aware of how much money you're actually spending, and if you're aware of how much you're spending, you will actually naturally spend less of it. The challenge that I give everyone, even some of my friends, is that if you're able to track your expenses for a minimum of 30 days, you'll have a really good understanding of what your behaviors are when it comes to spending money. Now, I did mention that at the end of every month, I log my monthly spend into a spreadsheet, so the method in which you summarize your expenses doesn't matter, but the main point is what you're looking for is a place to record your progress and have a visual representation of your financial habits. This is kind of like a journal, and then what you can do at the end of every month or perhaps at the end of every quarter is you can then analyze your expenses and see how you can improve on a weekly or even a monthly basis. You're going to find some really crazy things about yourself. Like I had a friend that did this, and they realized that they spend $800 a month on Uber, and he just realized that that was a really dumb decision, so he fixed that by getting a used car. And so many people don't track their expenses, but it's kind of like trying to lose weight at the gym. If you don't know what your starting weight is, then how are you going to get to your goal weight? Finances in the gym are actually quite similar, so the first tip I have for you guys is to actually track your expenses. Even if it's just an approximation, it'll at least give you a really good idea of how much you're spending. The second thing you can do to save more money is to practice frugality. Now, you can do this to an extent. You don't have to be frugal forever, but I would say in the beginning when you're starting to generate wealth, you actually need to be thinking critically about all your decisions around money, no matter how small they might seem. So one of my favorite Reddit posts ever is called The Beginner's Guide to Living Frugal, and in this post, you can actually find eight practical tips to live a more frugal life. For example, when it comes to eating out, the guide suggests that, quote, stop eating out. This means no fast food, no pizza delivery, and no DoorDash. Eating out is usually the single biggest waste of people's money. And, quote, if you go outside to socialize, eat at home first and just go out for drinks during happy hours. There's a ton of useful and practical tips in this guide that I will link down below in the description, but being frugal is just one way to really amplify your savings, especially in the beginning. Now, does this mean you have to be cheap? No. I think there is still enough room for select times where you can be generous in giving to others, but being frugal with your own personal spending is a mindset that you can adopt whenever you are about to spend money. If there's a less costly alternative to doing something, you should probably go for the alternative. And the reason is that these tiny lifestyle changes can really start to compound and help you save a ton of money if you're mindful about them. Now, a third actionable item to save more money is to simply automate your savings and pay yourself first. An easy way to do this is that if you know when you're getting paid, just set up automatic withdrawals from your main bank account to a separate savings account. That way, the savings goes into your savings account and you don't touch that, and then you can spend the rest of the money left over. So let's say you make $2,000 every two weeks. Perhaps you save $400 automatically every pay period, and that will go into your separate savings account. And then at the end of the month, that's at least $800 per month that you have to work with when it comes to saving or investing. That way, you're not really treating that $800 as real income or income that you can spend. It's just put towards your savings and hopefully increasing your net worth closer to $100,000. Trust me, guys, you want to pay yourself first. It's one of the best things that you can do, and it's completely mindless once you set it up. All right, so those were most of my tips on how to hit $100,000 as quickly as possible. I hope you enjoyed this video. I'm going to leave up my video right here on how the rich really like to think about money. It has some really great mindset tips on how to build your wealth as quickly as possible. I'll see you guys in that video or a future one on the channel. Let me know in the comments what you guys thought of this video, what your net worth is, and what your age is. I would love to hear it all below. All right. Peace.