11 Unpopular Opinions That Will Make You Very Rich

Transcript:

On this episode of the Personal Finance podcast, we're going to talk about 11 unpopular opinions that will make you a very rich What's up everybody?

Welcome to D Personal Finance podcast. I'm your host, Andrew, founder of Master money.co. And today on the personal finance podcast, we're going to be talking about 11 unpopular opinions that'll make you very rich. If you have any questions, make sure you are subscribed to the Master Money newsletter and you can respond to that newsletter and ask questions there.

And in addition, when you shoot over those questions, we may read some of them on the podcast as well. And don't forget to follow us on social at master money code that's on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter. And in addition, if you haven't already, please consider leaving a five star rating and review on Apple podcasts or Spotify.

It truly does help out the show and helps us grow this message on teaching people how to build wealth. So today I want to talk through a couple of unpopular opinions that can make you wealthy. Because the reason why we're doing this and the reason why we want to do this is so that you can see sometimes contrarian thinking is going to help you build wealth.

And so when you listen to every opinion that everybody throws out at you, you got to actually think through and see if that's actually active. So we are going to get into some of these so that we can have some time to talk through each one. So without further ado, let's get into it #1 getting rich is a habit.

So habits are the things that we do without thinking about them. But the real thing that habits and how you create a habit that actually works is to build systems around that habit. And in fact, if you don't have rich habits, it's really difficult to build wealth. So putting those habits into place where it's something that you do without even having to think about it is something that absolutely will help you build wealth.

This is why on this podcast all the time we talk about automating your finances because it takes the willpower out of you having to go out and do that. So automating it every single time you get paid, you automate your investments, for example, where if you automate your investments, that means you're paying yourself 1st every single time you get paid.

And by doing that automation, by making sure that you are automating those investments, your willpower is taken out of the equation. Why does this matter? Because as we know, the majority of people, they struggle with their willpower. So taking that out of the equation means that you can build wealth on autopilot.

The same thing goes for saving for your emergency fund or paying your bills. If you automate everything, you can make sure that your financial system is running smoothly. But there are other habits that rich people have that most people do not have. And #1 and this is a massive 1, is thinking long term.

For example, at the time of recording this, the S&P 501 of my favorite investments out there, which is in an index fund and ETF, the S&P 500 is down 24%. And what I'm getting is messages from people panicking and saying what is going on? What do I do? Should I sell my investment?

Should I not invest anymore more? What should I do? Long term investors do not care what is happening short term in the market. Long term investors care what's going to happen over the course of the next 30 years. And wealthy people, the majority of wealthy people think long term.

They build businesses long term. Thinking of the long term, what is the next thing I can do for my business so that this is a long term investment that matters over time. They think about their investments long term. If you look at an investment chart, you can turn your phone sideways to the longest time horizon than there is in your stock market app.

And what's going to happen is you're going to see the chart going in One Direction and that direction is up. Short term things should not impact your long term decision making. You need to understand this as an investor, you have to think long term. And the majority of people who listen to this podcast, the majority of people who are on master money, they know that long term investing is the way.

But I see this a lot with the younger generation and inexperienced investors as well. Experience makes you understand that long term is the way. Warren Buffet, long term investor, he's the greatest investor of all time and he made the majority of his wealth after the age of 60. So if you know things like this, you know that long term investing is the way.

The next thing that rich people do is they have tangible goals. This is another habit that they have. So those tangible goals, and we've talked about goal setting a lot on this podcast. We'll link up a couple of those episodes down below in the show notes. But having tangible goals where you can know day in and day out what you need to be doing to achieve your five year, 10 year, 1520 year goal is something you definitely should be doing.

Wealthy people believe time is money. That's the third thing. Now, what does this mean? What this means is that you don't just trade every single hour to work on something. Let me give you an example. If you're working on rental properties, see a wealthy person who invests in rental properties, they don't go inside of their properties and renovate the whole property and take all of this time on non income producing activities.

Instead, what they do is they focus their time on the income producing activities, which is means acquiring properties, acquiring financing. All of those things are six to seven for your decisions, whereas renovating a kitchen is a $1000 decision. You want to make sure that you are focusing your time on the largest income producing activities and you should do this with everything in life when it comes to business or building wealth, what is the biggest income producing activity I can do same thing for the big three.

You've heard us talk about the big three expenses. If you're trying to reduce your expenses, you're looking for that largest income activity. Now also, if you're trying to build a business and you know you have weaknesses in certain places and your business starts to make money, you need to hire folks who are better than you to cover that.

Reason being, is your company's going to grow so much faster if you do that? Another way to do this is to think through, OK, how valuable is my time? One example of this is for the longest time, I used to mow my own lawn and it would take me 5 to 6 hours every single weekend to mow my own lawn.

Then I realized I can hire somebody for $100 a month to come out and mow my lawn and take care of that for me. So I get that time back to utilize that time on things that matter to me. So all of these are examples on how to get time back and work on this time is money equation.

And then another rich habit is the majority of wealthy people actually try to exercise 30 minutes a day. There's a book called Rich Habits, and I encourage each and everyone of you to read it if you want to improve your rich habits. But exercise and diet really matter. Why? Because it improves your brain function. It improves how productive you are each and every day.

And you've heard people say health is wealth, and I absolutely believe that is true. We're going to have an episode coming up on that because it's something that is so incredibly valuable and has been something that has been valuable for me over the long term. The second unpopular opinion, and this is 1, where you have to change your mindset to actually think about this.

And the unpopular opinion is that making money can be easy now for a lot of people. If you struggled your whole life, you haven't seen that money is easy. In fact, money comes really hard for you. And that is something that is OK, because guess what? Figuring out how to make money a lot easier is a skill.

There's a hard way to earn money, and there's an easy way to earn money. And figuring out as many different ways to earn easy money as possible is way you can build wealth really, really fast. But how do you do that? How do you find the easier ways? Through two things, education is the biggest one and you hear people all the time talk about investing yourself.

I've heard Warren Buffett say this even recently. Some of the newer influencers like Alex Hormozi says this all the time. Invest in yourself upfront because that is what's going to give you the most money on the back end. And this is absolutely true. The more value that you have, the more skills that you have, the more money that you can earn.

Value sells. So all you need to do is figure out what skills do I need so that I can earn more money Because learning those skills and developing those skills, all of a sudden you're going to notice that making money is a lot easier than it once was. When I first had my first few jobs, I had no skills.

So I had to learn and develop those skills. So making money was hard. I was making minimum wage for a very long time. Even all the way through college I was making minimum wage. But then I understood, OK, if I add skills and as I build skills, I don't have to grind this hard anymore because now I have skills in place that I can use to build more wealth.

Skills equal higher income. So what you have to do is you have to identify what those skills are. This is your action plan for after this episode. What skills do you want to possess so that you can earn more money? It could be skills related to your field, which that's the first place I would start.

What is your job and what skills can you add so that you can earn more money? Maybe those skills you can learn online. Maybe those skills you have to get an additional certification, but which ones are out there? Which ones are available so that you can earn more money in a In addition, what skills can you acquire so that you can start doing client work for other people and starting to build wealth that way?

Because the more client work you have as a side hustle is going to help you building that wealth over time. So identify them first. Then once you identify them, I want you to develop them because once you develop these skills and master your craft and get better over time, then it becomes easy for you.

And then lastly, monetize them. So how can you monetize your skills? There's a bunch of different websites you can go on. We talked about about this in the framework on how to earn your first 100K and that is 1. Where you got to figure out how to market it and how to identify who needs those skills so that you can build wealth #3.

The third unpopular opinion is most millionaires are self-made. Now a lot of people don't know this but 79% of millionaires that are out there are first generation millionaires. Why does this matter for you? Why does this matter for me? Why does this matter for everybody out there? What that means is that it does not matter where you came from, you can still become a millionaire.

They are first generation millionaires. That means none of them came from millionaires. 8 out of 10 millionaires did not come from money. This is one of the most encouraging stats of all time. This is why I talk about this stat all the time because since that is the case, you can do this no matter where you came from. So the cool thing is, what do most self-made millionaires do?

Number one, they start a business. Now, starting a business is not for everyone. I firmly believe that there is a lot of emotional fortitude that you have to have in play. There's a lot of skills that you have to acquire, including organizational skills, financial skills, sales skills. There's a bunch of different things that you have to have in place before you actually start a business.

Otherwise you will struggle. But starting a business is one of the fastest ways to build wealth, bar none. It is one of the fastest, if not the fastest way to build wealth. Another way that a lot of millionaires become really wealthy is they invest in real estate. Now real estate is 1 where tons of millionaires hold real estate.

Now I'm not talking about your personal residence. What I'm talking about is investing in two properties, cash flowing rental properties. And we have another of episodes talking about how to do that because that is something I firmly believe in. I love investing in index funds and I love investing in rentals. So that's one of the things that you can think through as well is that a lot of millionaires, a ton of millionaires out there invested in real estate.

A lot of them also invested in their employee sponsored plants, meaning Ramsey Solutions did a study and eight out of 10 people who were millionaires in their millionaire study actually invested in their four O 1K plan as well. So that is an interesting stat that every time I read it, I just would never expect that, but a lot of millionaires, self-made millionaires invest in their company. 4 O 1K plan.

So if your company offers a four O 1K plan, make sure you're at least getting that employer match, whatever that employer match is. And then from there, you can add and you can utilize the Stairway to Wealth, which is the order to put your money that we have. And if you haven't heard that episode, we'll link it up down below. But in addition, from there, you want to just make sure that you are at least investing some dollars into either a Roth IRA41K or some retirement plan.

Now let's take a quick break and we're going to jump back in to #4 number four. You don't need to hustle 24/7. Now 1 big thing that I still struggle with is learning to shut it down. And what I notice is the more time that I take for myself, the better I perform later on.

The better I perform mentally, the better I perform physically when I'm doing my workouts and things like that. But in addition, the major factor here is your mental health because having that mental health into play and actually thinking clearly is how you can build a lot more wealth making good decisions when they are simple decisions.

And that's what wealth is. It's making good simple decisions is what is going to take you to the next level with your wealth building. We had Ryan Pineda on this podcast and what he talked about was he literally never works on the weekends. That is something I still struggle with, but he runs a massive multi $1,000,000 business and never works on the weekends.

Why? Because take taking that break helps them think clearly during the week, make better decisions during the week and be able to perform better when he is working at his job. So burnout, burnout is a real thing. And if you're working 24/7, if you're hustling, if you're grinding, hustle culture is going to teach you this.

They're going to say you got to work all the time 24/7. And sure, you got to work really hard. It's a lot harder to become really successful, especially when it comes to business and things like that, that a lot of people think. But if you hustle too hard, what happens is then you go out and you make poor decisions, you become more fatigued, you have less motivation.

And between those three things, you need those three things to become successful. So making sure that you take care of yourself and take the time you need. Have at least one rest day per week where you are not thinking about work, you're not hustling, you're not grinding or anything else. Take that rest day. It is incredibly important #5 is growing up poor doesn't mean that it's over for you.

So let's get real here. We all know that privilege is a real thing. A lot of people have an easier path than some other people. And maybe you grew up poor and you see that in your life. My family's been poor their entire life. My family has been poor for generations. What can I actually do?

Well, guess what? Your boy has got your back. Because one big thing about this podcast is I truly believe that anybody in this world can build wealth. And if you grew up poor, if you grew up with less privilege than a lot of people, we're addressing it now. It's real, it's there. But guess what, You can be the person who changes your family tree and you can be the person who changes your family's trajectory.

And this is one of the most amazing things that wealth can do. It can change the lives of your entire family. This is why we talk about generational wealth all the time on this podcast. What you have to do is have sound financial principles and start to earn money. Once you earn that money, you take that money and invest those dollars so that money starts working for you.

Now, how do you can invest those dollars? We talked about a couple of them already. I like index funds and ETFs. You can invest in real estate, you can invest in businesses, you can invest in all different types of things. But learning how to take that money and use it the right way is how you build wealth. Building wealth is incredibly simple.

You spend less than you make and you invest the difference. But you have to invest those dollars to get that freedom. And the cool thing is if you start investing your money and that money starts to grow and snowball, every dollar you invest is now your employee works for you can work so much harder than you can because over time, compound interest, it can grow so fast that you would absolutely be amazed how fast it can grow.

But you have to make the decision yourself. I am going to get a financial education. I'm going to listen to podcast like this. I'm going to read financial books. I'm going to understand how money works because nobody in my family obviously does because they've been poor their entire life. So how can I do this? I go through this process and I can change everything.

So we have a bunch of personal finance books down in the show notes that you can check out. Make sure you continue to listen to this podcast. Subscribe to this podcast. This is something where it is our passion to teach as many people as possible how to build wealth. I believe anybody in this world can build wealth. And then once you start to try to earn money, develop those skills so that you can continue to earn money, then money becomes easier to earn over time.

Number 7, and this is a big one, investing is not gambling. With gambling, your odds are not good. With investing, however, there has been a very Clear History over a century of what happens when you invest your money and it's made a lot of people very, very rich.

You know what does not make people filthy rich is your salary is 1 big one. So a lot of people, if you've ever reached rich dad, poor dad, a lot of poor or middle class people think that your salary is the way to get rich. The way to get rich is to invest your dollars. A lot of people think that saving and hoarding money into a savings account is the way to get rich.

The way to get rich is to invest your dollars and a lot of people think you have to be born rich to become rich. Well, we just addressed on the last one. What matters is taking your extra dollars, having that financial safety net and then investing your dollars. So we talked through a lot of that on this podcast as well. But making sure your money is getting put to work is what truly matters.

Investing is not gambling. And if you do not believe me, sure, there is always risk. There is absolutely always risk. And if anybody ever tells you that there is no risk investing, do not listen to that person. What I'm telling you here is there is a very clear long term history of what happens when you invest your money for the long term #8 your significant other matters when it comes to building wealth.

What you want to do is make sure that if you're going to get married, you need to find a loving, supporting spouse. And because if you do that, the two of you together have a much better chance of building incredible wealth. Now, this is one that a lot of people could say is controversial, but it's something that it will make it so much easier if you find a loving, supportive spouse.

It matters a lot more than you think #9 is you have more opportunities today than anyone in history. So one cool thing about the Internet, and the Internet is a big factor for this is that you have opportunities to talk to a lot more people. You have opportunities to make more money.

You can build a lot more businesses because the Internet exists. So people have never had as much opportunity as you do right now in terms of getting scholarships for college, for example, there's more scholarships than ever before. Now student loans are higher than they've ever been before, so you need to go after those scholarships, but there is more than ever before.

Mentorships. The cool thing about mentorships is your mentor does not have to be someone that you are looking at face to face. Listening to podcasts can be a mentor. You're listening to a podcast house for hours and hours and hours on end, and you're getting more information than any mentor would ever be able to give you. Nobody would be able to give you that much time.

But doing something like this, or watching YouTube videos or learning how to build a business or reading books, all of those things can be forms of mentorships. The next one is the Internet. Obviously the Internet is the biggest way to do this, but you can build businesses. We're going to have a lot of people coming on talking about how to build businesses on the Internet, so make sure you subscribe to that.

But this is one of the bigger ones that you need to be focusing on is focusing your time on either. Like we just talked about, you can go build up skills and offer your services to people on the Internet who are across the world. You were never able to do that in the 80s or the 70s or anything like that. You can only do that because the Internet exists.

In addition, you can build out websites and make money. You can build out content and make money. There's so many different things that you can do online. It's incredibly powerful. You can flip items on Amazon, you can flip items on eBay. There's so many different things. Don't let the excuse that other people have out there that it's a very difficult to make money.

Take advantage of the opportunity, opportunities that you have in front of you. That is what I want you to get. And that's why we talked about, if you listen to the episode with David Meltzer, we talked about this money is abundant. Money is everywhere. So it's one thing that you got to think through and figure out how can I make more of it? What skills can I put in to play #10 Now this is one that is definitely controversial, but your passions will not always pay the bills.

A lot of people are told to go pursue their passions, but what I like to do is teach people, hey go figure out what your skill set is. Utilize that skill set to make more money. Then pursue financial independence Oregon retiring early so that you can go after your passions.

Do your passions full time. This is the much easier and safer path to do this. Now sometimes your passions can pay the bills. Say for example your passion is financed. If your passion is financed and you go into investment banking, that will absolutely pay the bills. But for some situations, your passions will not always pay those bills.

So making sure this is the path. If you are really passionate about something that really doesn't pay you much money at all, this is my favorite path. What you want to do is go find a job that is relatable to your highest earning skills. So say for example, you love music and you want to make music, but at the same time you're a really good computer programmer.

Well, the computer programming is going to pay you a lot of money. So learning how to master that computer programming skill, earn a ton of money over the course of say the next next 10 years, save a large portion of that income, say it's 50% of your income. So that for the rest of your life, you can spend time making music.

And if the music takes off, that's absolutely fantastic. Or you can do the music on the side as a side hustle and use that. And if it starts to earn more than what you make at your day job computer programming, then more power to you. You did it, you did the Safeway and you did the reliable way. But doing it the opposite way is not always the most optimal way to do things.

Now this is the amazing thing about financial independence that allows you to get your more time back and time is so incredibly powerful because once you get that time back that you could utilize that time towards your passions. This is my favorite path to get to. That's why I love financial independence so much because it allows people to pursue time with their family or their passions or whatever else they want to do in life.

Financial independence gives you that freedom. And so that is the why we love to talk about this stuff because it is the thing that will get you to that point. So just remember this, your passions tend to be more creative and our strengths tend to be more marketable. That's how you got to think through this so that you can say, hey, what are my strengths?

Are these marketable? Are these something that I can use to make a lot more money so that I can pursue financial independence? And then #11 a fancy degree will not make you rich. This is another page out of the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which is something where you can see a lot of people believe that a degree will make you rich.

I can tell you I have learned so much more after being out of college than I did actually in college. So overpaying for college is something you definitely want to avoid. A lot of people think they need to go to a fancy shmancy school to make a lot of money. That's absolutely not true. One way to save money is to go in state.

You can go to Community College, but you want to choose a highly marketable degree. This is the key here. And the worst thing to do is go to a fancy school and choose a non highly marketable degree because then you're paying a lot of money and then it's going to take you a very long time to pay loans back or however else you're paying for it.

What you want to do is find degrees that pay more money because if you dig a hole too deep and you go to college and now you have a ton of student loan debt, it is going to take you a very long time to pay that off. And some people it takes lifetimes. We had an episode with Dan Sheiks and we talked about this a little bit.

Dan Sheik spent decades paying off his student loans. And so that's why he's so passionate about talking to young people about college and he talks to teens all the time about financial independence. And that is why he's so passionate about it because it took him so long to pay off those student loans that he figured out there's other ways.

In a lot of instances, you can go to college for cheaper, getting scholarships, going in state, going to Community College and then using that highly mark over degree to make a lot of money to pursue that financial independence. What would you rather have a fancy degree or would you rather have freedom? That is the question you have to ask yourself now.

Sure, it can help for your initial job, but once you start building your career and once you start to go through that whole process of building your career, your skills are going to show and they're going to shine through. And once you have those highly marketable skills, it's going to be something where you can earn so much money overtime.

Listen, I hope you guys learned a bunch about how to build out wealth. If you guys have any questions, make sure you're subscribed to that Master Money newsletter and reply to any of those newsletters. We would love to help you out with any financial problem that you are going through. And if you guys could leave a five star rating and review on this podcast, I truly appreciate each and every single one of you and we will see you on the next episode.