How I Saved $100k in 5 Years

So a few years ago, I made a video detailing how I managed to save $100,000 by the age of 25 while only earning around minimum wage the entire time. Though the process was pretty time consuming, it was actually very simple. I started working when I was 17 and had very few expenses, and I stayed living at home just paying a really cheap rent pretty much equivalent to what I would have been paying had I split a place with two or three roommates. I didn't go to university, so I didn't have any student loans. I drove a $4,000 car, so I didn't have a car payment, and I only used my credit card for things that I could pay off entirely by the end of the billing cycle, so I stayed 100% debt-free the entire time. I definitely allowed myself to splurge on a few things here and there, the most notable of which was that I got Levi around that time, and of course I was fully financially responsible for him and all of his needs, and of course I still am. I also got a MacBook, I bought a few guitars, I went to a handful of concerts every year, but other than those things, I saved pretty much every single dollar that I made, enough so that even though I was only earning around $25,000 a year, after eight years I was able to save up $100,000. Now that sounds like a lot of money, and it is a lot of money, especially for a 25 year old, but when you break down $100,000 over eight years, it's actually just a little more than $1,000 a month, which is not that crazy at all, and should actually be quite doable for most young people who are working full-time, especially if they're living at home for cheap or even for free, or even if they're renting a cheap place with a few friends. In fact, if I had invested that $1,000 every month, I would have hit $100,000 way faster, but I had no idea how to invest back then. Finally, at the age of 26, my income started to increase, and I was able to take that $100,000 and use it as a down payment for a townhouse. I lived in that townhouse for two and a half years before selling it for a pretty big profit, which I rolled into the down payment on this house, and I guess the rest is history, as they say. All along, while I was saving up that money, my intention was fully to use it to buy a house, but once I finally did, I felt like I was right back to square one. I had this house that I loved, but no money in the bank for the first time since high school, which was unsettling to say the least. I'd become accustomed to having this gigantic safety net behind me, and for the first time in a long time, I didn't, and I was also facing, at the exact same time, a major increase in my cost of living because I was now out on my own and had a mortgage I was responsible for. Oh, I have three kids and no money. Why can't I have no kids and three money? I wondered if I'd ever be able to save up that kind of money again, but now, less than five years later, I can say that I did it again. I saved up $100,000, but this time, the process was a little different. Here's what I did. I gotta get off the floor first, though, because my foot is completely asleep. Oh my goodness. All right, that is better. So the very first thing I did should be no surprise to anyone, and that is that I increased my income. As I mentioned, by the time I was 26, my income finally started to increase from that $25,000 I had been making pretty much every year up to that point. I still wasn't making a ton of money by anyone's standards, but it felt like so much more because I had been used to living on so little for so long. In the time since, I've continued to In my day job, I have the ability to regularly raise my rates as I need to. For anybody who isn't self-employed, switching jobs every one to two years is generally going to be the most powerful way to dramatically increase your income if you're already working in a reasonably lucrative industry. And if you're not, you gotta go out and get yourself a new skill and get the credentials needed to get yourself into one. There's obviously a few ways you can do this. You can go through a conventional college degree program, but that takes at least in my opinion, it's not always the most practical way to go about it. In a lot of cases, you're going to be much better off going for something like an online certification through a platform like Course Careers. It's way less expensive. It's much faster. You can get all the skills and qualifications you need to land yourself a high-paying tech job. I'll leave a link in the description box down below if you guys want to check out their free introductory course. As you guys know, I'm also a huge fan of side hustles. My goal has always been to be able to cover all of my basic living expenses through my regular day job so that anything I can earn over and above that is money that I can save. For the last number of years, my biggest side hustle has been buying and selling things online, flipping things on like Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist. I know I've talked about that on this channel in the past. I've bought and sold a lot of musical instruments predominantly, but I've also sold other things like computers, camera gear, kids' toys, housewares, realistically pretty much anything you can find a good deal on, you can flip online for a profit. Of course, I also started this YouTube channel which, for the first two years, generated a grand total for me of zero dollars and zero cents and actually cost me money when you consider that I had to buy a camera, a microphone, some lights, not to mention the thousands of hours that I poured into this channel that I otherwise could have spent working at a job and earning money. But I told myself early on that I was going to give it three full years of effort to see if anything happened before I'd allow myself to quit, and at the end of the two-year mark, I finally got monetized and in the time since, this has blossomed into a nice little part-time income for me. Even if this channel hadn't taken off, I would still be flipping things online and seeking out other sources of income. Nowadays, when it comes to side hustles, there are so many easy-to-access options, things like driving for Uber or DoorDash or walking dogs on Rover. I actually made an entire video just a few weeks ago going over seven different things you can do to increase your income dramatically. I'll leave a link to it up in the cards, but the point is if you want to save money, you got to find a way to increase your income. Now, the second thing I did, which was really important to help me reach this $100,000 saving mark, was that I avoided lifestyle inflation and stayed out of debt. Obviously, I have a mortgage now, so I'm not entirely debt-free, but I have still never paid a penny in credit card interest. Actually, that's not totally true. One time, like two years ago, I forgot to pay my credit card bill until like three minutes past midnight on the night it was due, and I wound up getting charged 11 cents in interest, and I was so mad. Not because of the 11 cents, just because of the principal, like I'd broken my perfect streak. So aside from paying that 11 cents, I've never paid any credit card interest. When my $4,000 car eventually died, I went and bought another pre-owned car that I could pay for entirely outright in cash and not need a car loan for. It's now 11 years old, and I'm still driving it, and I probably will for many years still to come. I think that car debt is so ubiquitous today that people don't even really put any thought into it. When they need to get a car, they just think about, hey, how much can I afford to pay every month? And it's really bizarre to me because it wasn't until a few years ago that I realized that that's how people buy cars. Obviously, I knew that car loans were a thing. I knew that people can finance cars. I just didn't know that almost everybody does. Even though I could technically afford to go out tomorrow and buy myself a brand new car of my dreams in cash, I just don't have any interest in doing that. I know that a car is not something that's going to dramatically improve the quality of my life, and therefore it's not something that I'm willing to overspend on or go into debt for. As my income has increased, I definitely allow myself to splurge on more things than I used to, but they're all things that are very well thought out, they're very intentional, and most importantly, they're things that I can actually afford so I'm not putting myself into debt for anything. I will be making an entire video very soon talking about how I plan for and budget for large purchases, so I know some of you guys have asked for that. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on it. The third thing that I've done, third thing that I've done which has been really important, is something I've touched on very briefly at the beginning of this video, but something that has really helped me to get to this $100,000 benchmark has been investing. When I saved that first $100k, every single dollar of it was a dollar that I had to earn by working very hard, because as I mentioned before, at that time I didn't know anything at all about investing. I was so scared to make the wrong choice, I didn't know where to invest or how to invest or what to invest into, and when you're only making like $10-$15 an hour, the prospect of losing say even $100 is gut-wrenching. I didn't know anything about stocks or index funds or ETFs or mutual funds, I didn't really know what any of that meant. I also didn't know what a risk tolerance was, and I didn't even know who to ask, because I kind of just assumed that all the people who work at the banks are just trying to sell you investments and they don't have a vested interest in you actually doing well, and well it turns out that was a good guess because that's entirely true. We can put that check in a money market mutual fund, then we'll reinvest the earnings into foreign currency accounts with compounding interest and it's gone. It's gone, it's all gone. But I just didn't know what to do, so I did nothing. Retrospectively, I wish so badly that I had taken the opportunity to educate myself about investing, because if I had, I could have hit $100,000 so much faster, or in that same amount of time, instead of having $100,000, I could have had $150,000. But I didn't know what to do, so I did nothing, and my savings grew at a snail's pace. This time, however, everything was different. Now that I know how to invest, I was able to actually take advantage of that opportunity and get to $100,000 much quicker, because of this $100,000 that I've now saved, I actually only earned from my work about $70,000 of it. The other $30,000 is money that I earned from my investments. My money earned it for me. I didn't have to work for it. It was basically free money. $30,000 of my money was earned by my money rather than by my labor, and damn, does that feel good. Personally, I do all my investing with Moomoo, who was also kind enough to sponsor this video. Moomoo is an all-in-one stock trading app that's available both here in Canada and in the US, and it's where I buy and trade all of my stocks and all of my ETFs. By using a registered account like a TFSA or an RRSP, not only is your money able to earn money for you, but you can actually benefit from the tax advantages that each account offers. Even in a non-registered account, capital gains are taxed at 50% compared to employment income here in Canada, which means that investing is one of the absolute best ways to not only increase your income, but to build long-term wealth. With Moomoo, you can buy and trade Canadian and US stocks and ETFs with some of the lowest fees around, so it's the best way to start investing in the largest and most profitable companies in the stock market. For new Moomoo users in Canada, if you sign up using my link in the description box down below and deposit $100 into your account, Moomoo will instantly give you a $50 bonus. That's $50 totally for free, and if you deposit $5,000 into your account, Moomoo will give you $100 for free. Or you can receive an Apple gift card worth up to $1,200. And for everyone in the US, signing up for Moomoo with my link and depositing $100 will give you seven free fractional shares of a top stock bundle. Once again, that's free money. Just click the link in the description box down below to get started, and thank you very much to Moomoo for sponsoring this video. The best part of investing really starts to come when you fully understand compound interest. If I left my $100,000 invested and never touched it again, never added to it, just totally left it alone, in 30 years, it would be worth over a million dollars. And in 40 years, it'd be worth over $2.5 million, which means that as long as I never touch or spend this money, I am now basically guaranteed to retire a millionaire. That's really crazy under any circumstances, but especially when you remember that I only had to work for and save up $70,000 of this money, and now that $70,000 could potentially turn into $2.5 million. And once again, if you break up that $70,000 that I've saved over the last five years that I've saved it, it works out to a little bit more than $1,000 a month, which is not as out of reach as most people tend to think it is. More specifically, it's $14,000 a year, or $269 a week, or a little over $38 every day. If you can save just $38 a day every day for five years, you'll retire a millionaire. That's it. $38 a day will turn you into a multi-millionaire. And finally, the thing that I think is probably the most difficult, but also the most important, that has allowed me to save $100,000 not just once now, but twice, was setting very specific goals. I talked about this in the video about saving my first $100k, and it's every bit as relevant now as it was back then. I think the number one reason that people don't achieve their goals is because they don't actually have a goal, or their goal is arbitrary, but they don't have a why behind their goal to keep them motivated. Deciding that you're going to save a random amount of money is not going to keep you motivated unless you have a very specific idea of what you plan to do with that money, because otherwise, money in itself is just not that exciting. It's a number on a screen. The goal shouldn't be to save $1,000, or $10,000, or $100,000. The goal should be, I'm going to save this amount of money because I want to do this very specific thing with it. The first time around, for me, that was a house. And I wanted a house more than anything else in the world, which made it very easy for me to not spend my money on other things. At no point did I feel like I was depriving myself when I said no to spending money on something, because on the contrary, I felt like if I said yes to things, I was robbing myself of the opportunity to get a house, which is really all that I wanted. Saying no was easy. Despite the fact that I'm a natural saver, and despite the fact that I have, obviously, a whole YouTube channel about money, the truth of the matter is that I don't really care much about money at all. I see money as a tool. And tools aren't very useful if you don't actually plan to build things with them. My goal the first time was not to save $100,000. It was to buy a house. And this time, obviously, I have a house. But once again, my goal has not been to save $100,000. It's been to work towards an early retirement, or at least the option of an early retirement. I want to save up enough money that at some point in the next few years, I could decide to stop working full time if I wanted to. I'm not even necessarily saying that I will, but I want the option to do so. I want to be able to only take on projects that excite me. I don't want to feel obligated to do things I don't want to do just because I need the money. And I want to have the freedom to invest my time into the things that I like without being tied to a 40-hour workweek. And to be perfectly clear, $100,000 is not enough money to do that, at least not for any significant length of time. When I'm only in my early 30s right now, I would blow through that money very quickly if I decided to stop working. But that's why saving $100,000 has not been my goal. My goal has been to be able to wake up in the morning and decide in that moment how I want to spend my day without having any sort of obligation to anyone or anything else. And that, to me, is a strong motivator. That, to me, is so much more appealing than anything I could buy today. So whatever your financial goal is, whether it's to pay off your debt or buy a house or retire early or whatever outstokes your engine, know that you can do it. Learn a new skill, get a better job, start a side hustle. Do whatever you can do to increase your income. Once your income increases, avoid lifestyle inflation and stay out of debt. Educate yourself about investing and learn to leverage compound growth to your advantage. And most importantly, know your why. Think about it every day. Write it on your bathroom mirror. Tattoo it on your forehead. Keep it front and center in your mind. Think about how much better your life is going to be when you've accomplished that thing, whatever that thing is to you. And if you stick to this formula, you really can't lose. Drop me a comment down below and let me know what your goal is and why. What exactly is it that you're working towards and what steps are you taking to get there? All of the resources that I mentioned in this video will be linked in the description box down below for you guys to check out. If you enjoyed this video at all, please go ahead and hit that like button. Subscribe if you haven't done so yet. You can follow me on Instagram. All that normal good stuff. Take care. I'll see you next week. Go find your why. Have a good one guys.