Latest / Money Grows on Trees / #339 - I’m A Millionaire. Here’s How I Built Financial Freedom.
Transcript
- 0:00How do you build financial freedom? How do you build or
- 0:03develop a million dollar net worth? Most people think that
- 0:06becoming a millionaire requires a massive inheritance, a
- 0:10tech startup, getting lucky on crypto. But the
- 0:13reality is true financial freedom is built through a slow
- 0:16repeatable mathematical process that anyone can follow if
- 0:20they have discipline and patience. I'm Lord J.
- 0:23Ross, seven-figure investor and entrepreneur, and I've helped thousands of everyday Aussies, Americans,
- 0:27New Zealanders, and Canadians get out of debt and build real wealth. And in this video, I'm going to show
- 0:30you my exact financial journey, the mistakes
- 0:33I made along the way, and the blueprint I used to build total
- 0:37financial freedom. So if you're someone who wants financial freedom
- 0:41and you've always wanted to figure out how it works in detail by someone who's done it,
- 0:44then let me regale you with exactly what happened to me and how
- 0:47you can do it too. So going right back to my early 20s,
- 0:51I went to university. I was very lucky to have my parents pay for my university, so
- 0:54I didn't actually get any HECS debt, which is great. Had that not have
- 0:57been the case, I probably wouldn't have gone. I probably would have just started
- 1:01working. But In those days, back then, there was no YouTube, there
- 1:04was no Instagram, there was no Facebook. You had really two options back then. You either
- 1:08went to university or you went to get a trade. And a lot of my friends who went to
- 1:11get a trade, which turned out to be a really good decision, were making a shit
- 1:14ton more money than me when I was in university. Because I was mowing lawns and cleaning pools
- 1:18and all that stuff. To make a little bit of money, I could in university. I wasn't,
- 1:21you know. But I had supportive parents and I had the ability, they paid for
- 1:24my education. So, but I
- 1:27didn't make any money. That's the benefit of having a trade.
- 1:31You need to go out, even if you're an apprentice, you do make a small
- 1:34amount, like you make a lot more money, right? So anyway, you could do
- 1:37a trade or you could go to university. So I went to university and got a
- 1:40couple degrees. I actually got a law degree, became a lawyer. Some of my
- 1:43ads you'll see running around like, I'm a property lawyer and I'm a lawyer. And God, it
- 1:47was boring. So I ended up, I actually ended up getting a, going
- 1:50for a job in Abu Dhabi, incidentally. Because when
- 1:54I came out of the university, it was like the worst time in history to
- 1:57get a job. I actually flew to Sydney to get a job. I had a couple of interviews in
- 2:00Macquarie Bank. And then at that time, it was just like the worst time
- 2:04in history to get into investment banking. So, kind of like my opportunities
- 2:07dried up. I was in Sydney, going to see recruiters. I could have got a gig but it
- 2:11was just dead. It was like tumbleweed down the street in
- 2:14terms of the banking industry in Sydney. So, I was like, well, what am
- 2:17I going to do? And through a friend, He got
- 2:21me this gig, certainly a couple of interviews, phone interviews for
- 2:24Abu Dhabi. So, I went and joined the largest real estate developer in Abu Dhabi. In
- 2:28fact, it was the largest real estate developer in the world as an assistant development manager.
- 2:32And so, it wasn't a huge salary, it was probably 60 or 70 grand a year but
- 2:35there was no tax, right? Because Dubai, I was a non-tax resident of Australia. So,
- 2:39that's why I'm a big proponent of young people doing what's called geo-arbitrage where
- 2:43you can actually live in another place, pay a lot less in costs. or
- 2:47in tax and save a lot of money. And that's what I did. Like I
- 2:50was 23 and I remember jumping on the plane. I didn't even
- 2:53know where Abu Dhabi was on the map. But I was like, I'm flipping getting
- 2:57out of here. So I left and went over there. And here's what I did
- 3:00from that point on. Part of the gig was they gave you this furniture package, which
- 3:04is kind of cool. It's like 50,000 dirhams, which was about, I guess, 15,000 Australian
- 3:09dollars. And I went ham. Like I went to all the best stores. I
- 3:12was seeing this girl at the time and she was an interior decorator. And it's
- 3:15like the worst combination. She took
- 3:18me to these stores and we bought all this shit and blew it all.
- 3:22Whereas my roommates, a bit more smarter than me, one of my roommates, he
- 3:25had this, he just had one couch, secondhand couch and
- 3:29a shitty TV in his apartment. I went to see him one day, I'm like,
- 3:32you have nothing in your unit. And that was pretty smart, Ikea furniture. So
- 3:36I blew mine, he saved his. And then I made another mistake. I
- 3:40moved into, my HR manager at the time said, hey, he used to call
- 3:43me Rosser, hey Rosser, Why are you living in that shithole, mate? You should
- 3:46live in a nice beautiful apartment on the niche, on the corniche. I
- 3:50was like, okay. And buy
- 3:53a Range Rover. I was like, alright. So, I moved into this apartment, two
- 3:56bedroom. And at the time, I was making about $28,000 a month. which
- 4:00is probably about, I don't know, eight grand a month or something, I don't know, Aussie
- 4:04now, maybe less, 7,000 Aussie a month or something. And
- 4:09I moved to this two-bedroom apartment and it was 17,000 rooms a month. Now
- 4:13in those days, you couldn't, I don't know what it's like now, but you couldn't room share in Abu Dhabi,
- 4:16even with men, you couldn't, they just would not allow it. And
- 4:19so I had this big two-bedroom apartment and I had no flipping, I
- 4:23have 17,000, like over 60% of my income was going to rent. Dumb.
- 4:29So I figured out that was pretty dumb because I started racking up credit card debt and I was like, what
- 4:32am I doing? You know, I've read all the books. I'm like, you know better than this. So
- 4:37I went into DEF CON 5. I went into lockdown. How are we going to do a 90 day
- 4:41financial turnaround story? So I rented a Toyota Yaris. I
- 4:45went through seven of them when I was in Dubai. I broke
- 4:48our lease, jumped, drove up the highway chasing the key,
- 4:51because you had to get out of that one before you get this one in Dubai. And we moved to Dubai. And
- 4:55I grabbed two roommates, shucked him there, and then got a fourth one and put
- 4:58it in the media room. So I started renting. We rented out all the rooms. And we
- 5:01took our rent right down. And I dropped it way down. And then
- 5:04I kept my cost low, didn't buy any travel, didn't buy any furniture, just left, didn't
- 5:08do anything. And I just hunkered down and worked. Boom, boom,
- 5:11boom, boom. And that was when I got
- 5:15my first taste of getting a big emergency fund again. In
- 5:18fact, I built up around about $40,000. Now, back at
- 5:21that time too, I made another mistake. I had some cash
- 5:25and I knew I needed to buy assets, so I wanted to get into shares because I didn't
- 5:28want to get into property and get all this debt, particularly in an area I didn't even know
- 5:32where I was going to live long term. You know, and
- 5:35now it's getting bombed. I mean, it's crazy. But back
- 5:39then, the GFC had decimated the real estate market. So,
- 5:43I was working on the Formula One Grand Prix and the Ferrari World Team, some cool projects. But
- 5:47I thought, you know what, I don't know if I'm gonna be here long term, so should I buy? And in Dubai,
- 5:51it's not, you know, there's not the same level of regulation. It
- 5:55was a bit wild westy still, and it just seemed
- 5:58a lot more risky. So, I thought, you know what, I wanna get into shares. So, I saw a financial advisor,
- 6:03This is why I beat up financial advisors so much. And, you know,
- 6:07the loveliest guy puts me in this close, sorry,
- 6:10front-end loaded managed fund, which is where you put in more
- 6:13money at the front and they match it, so to speak, with certain
- 6:17number of shares, et cetera, with money, and you front
- 6:20load it. And then there's a lock-in period, you can't take your money out. And
- 6:24I thought that's just how managed funds work, and they were by all accounts, that's how it was. Now
- 6:27he was gonna obviously sell me something to make himself a nice, tidy commission,
- 6:31and so I put my, my money in there. Now, I started off
- 6:34small and I built it up, but I was putting money in there, 20, 30, 40,000. And
- 6:38then absolute destruction, the mining industry, the
- 6:42resource industry just collapsed. And it was all in resources. My
- 6:46portfolio was falling and I was like, oh my God. And I
- 6:49was like, I didn't really know what I owned. And so that's what prompted
- 6:53me to get into learning more about shares and financial
- 6:56education. So I whipped myself into the CFA charter program, which is the hardest financial,
- 7:01training in the world. It's closed book six-hour exam offered
- 7:05once a year effectively except for level one and it's brutal. And you have
- 7:08to like it's the number, it's more sought after than MBA. So
- 7:12I went through that process for five years, got up to level three and
- 7:15left to pursue business after that. But that really taught me how
- 7:19to, pretty brutal way to learn it, but it's
- 7:23what gave me the impetus. Making that mistake gave me the
- 7:26impetus to learn about finances. So I had, I
- 7:29clawed my way out of that, I paid the penalty, got some back and I
- 7:32had about $40,000, $50,000 USD of cash that
- 7:36I saved up. And then I decided that it wasn't good
- 7:39for me in the Middle East and I repatriated back to Australia. Now here's what's interesting
- 7:42about building financial independence. Straight away you can see some things starting
- 7:46to happen and merge. One, I understood what happened to my
- 7:49life when I let my costs get out of control and I reined it back in. That's
- 7:53the first thing. So if you want to get financial independence, you have to first be
- 7:56at financial peace, which means if you're in chaos, go through 90 days
- 8:00of winding back to financial peace. That's the first thing I did.
- 8:03Next, you need to build a big buffer. So 10, 20, $30,000, just
- 8:07get in front of it. It's a very good idea. You'll have most
- 8:10of your financial freedom and most financial peace
- 8:14literally when you've got 20 to 30 grand cash and no debt. You'll
- 8:18be pretty much at peace then. It doesn't take
- 8:21long to get to peace. And I think that's what most people say
- 8:25when they say freedom, they mean peace. When I say freedom, I mean, you
- 8:28know, when your income from your assets is exceeding your living expenses,
- 8:31that's when you got freedom. So anyway, that was my objective. I'm like, I wanna
- 8:35make sure I've got most of my money in assets, and I want to
- 8:38have the income paying me so I can never work again. And that was my whole
- 8:41objective. So at 28, I had saved up, say, 40,000 cash, I think, 50,000 cash, I forget. I
- 8:48was like, I'm out of here. And so, I repatriated back to Australia with my now wife,
- 8:52Alicia, and we came back. She got a job as a paralegal, you
- 8:55know, $800 a week, and I was in real estate, got into real estate. Now,
- 8:59I beat up real estate, but I got into selling off-the-plan property
- 9:02investments with my dad. We basically rebuilt
- 9:06a family property business that just absolutely got fucking decimated by
- 9:10the GFC, like it was cooked. So, I came in at the very, very
- 9:13worst time possible and we, together, rekindled and
- 9:16rebuilt it. Now, it does millions of dollars a year. It's a great turnaround story. Anyway,
- 9:20so I built my... What I did to get out of my job, I knew if
- 9:24I wanted financial independence and freedom, a job wasn't going to do it. So,
- 9:27I had the cash. I had learned how not to invest in shares. I
- 9:30had then trained myself financially to open my own brokerage account and
- 9:34buy my own shares, which I still do to this day because I felt like
- 9:37I could do a better job than the financial advisors, which I feel like Ken and I do. and
- 9:41because I care about my money the most. No one's gonna care about your money more
- 9:44than you. No one, I'm telling you. That's why it's important to get
- 9:47financial education and start with even one of our books, whatever. At
- 9:50least you listen to this podcast. And then, so I was like, okay, we've got a brokerage
- 9:54account. My objective is to build this thing to a million bucks. I want a million dollar
- 9:57portfolio, because I knew it'd pay us 50 to 60 grand a year in passive income,
- 10:01it'd cover our rent, cover out a lot of living expenses, and that was a good first
- 10:05goal to financial freedom. So that was my objective, bang. So what
- 10:08do I do? I left my job to get into real estate because I needed to increase my
- 10:12income. I thought, you know what, if I stay in this flipping job, I'm
- 10:15gonna have to be here for years and years and years to double my income. So
- 10:18I got out of there, I took a risk. I was in my 20s, I was 28. I was like,
- 10:22I'm taking a social risk and I'm leaving this secure job.
- 10:26I'm going to real estate. I had no experience there, never sold anything in my life, and
- 10:30just went at it. It took me six months to get my first deal. Flipping heck.
- 10:34My ability to manage my cash flow was so important because I didn't know where
- 10:37my next meal was coming from. I didn't know where my next commission check was coming from.
- 10:41Plus, we had to turn the business around. It was like a baptism of fire. For
- 10:44seven years, I scrapped with my dad to do that, and we
- 10:48built it and got it going. Did I increase my
- 10:51income? Yes. Did I increase my skill set? Yes. Did I increase my risk? It was riskier
- 10:54than a paycheck, but I was able to increase my income by
- 10:58taking a chance, taking a risk. And I wasn't so impatient that
- 11:01I thought, oh, where's my deal? I'm here in the new job. Where's my money? I'm not
- 11:05an idiot. Of course, it's going to take me time to learn skills. People
- 11:08are like, where's money? I'm like, you don't have any skills. Give yourself time, patience.
- 11:12And anytime you're learning a new skill, it's where you work and don't get paid. That's
- 11:16how you build skills, when you work and don't get paid. And so
- 11:19I did that, so I increased my income, and every time I did a deal, I'd
- 11:22do one deal, pay myself, that's about $10,000, and then I'd
- 11:25do another deal, and put it into Berkshire Hathaway stock. That's what I did, so that was
- 11:28my chosen index one at the time, was Berkshire Hathaway shares. You could buy them for $85 a share,
- 11:32they're now, what's a Berkshire Hathaway share now, 470. So I was buying them for
- 11:35$85 a share. Warren
- 11:39Buffett's company. So I put $10,000 in it, and then
- 11:43$10,000 to myself. $10,000 to Warren, $10,000 to me. $10,000 to
- 11:47Warren, $10,000 to me. And I played that game. It's a fucking boring game,
- 11:50right? And all around me, these guys who were working in the building, they're rolling
- 11:54up in their brand new black Range Rover Sports. They're making
- 11:58some money. And little did I know that they had no
- 12:02money left. Like, they were buying these nice cars all on borrowed
- 12:06money, and they were just blowing their money. Some of the guys, they would take, like, ran
- 12:09to the pokies and did what? Now they were in my building, they weren't in our business, but
- 12:12they were there and I could see the behavior coming in. And I was like,
- 12:16well, I'm not gonna play that game. I'm gonna keep giving my money to Warren Buffett. And
- 12:19just over time, what happened when playing that game is I got the portfolio to
- 12:24400,000 because Berkshire Hathaway flipping just went off, it was
- 12:28cranking. And I did that for seven years. And
- 12:33what I realized at the time was, yes, I'm making more income. I
- 12:37probably doubled my income, I think, from when I was at my job to when I was in real estate.
- 12:41And then, when I doubled my income, I could put more in shares, which I did,
- 12:44so I was building that. And it was on its way, and I could have just stayed there doing that, but I
- 12:48wanted to get there faster. So, when my sister told me about an opportunity in
- 12:51network marketing, which everyone turns their nose up at, for some weird
- 12:55reason, I don't know why. She said, hey,
- 12:58would you like to learn how to make some extra money? I was like, hell yeah, what do we do? She said, we use these products,
- 13:02give it a go, if it works, then you can refer to us. I'm like, done. And I
- 13:05was open to that. I was like, you know what, this is a fun new area to learn,
- 13:09there's new skills, I'm gonna do that. And so Alicia, who's my wife and I,
- 13:13with my sister, while I was working, this is very important, if
- 13:17you wanna build financial independence, I was working six days a week in
- 13:20my property business. I was saving money and investing
- 13:23it in shares. We were keeping our costs low. We had a car that
- 13:27was fully paid off. We were renting a place with, Alicia's sister was living with
- 13:30us at the time, three of us there paying rent. So it kept costs low. All throughout
- 13:33this journey, I'm keeping costs low. Yes, this
- 13:36is, and I'm putting the free cashflow that I'm building into assets
- 13:40that happen to be shares. Not real estate, didn't buy real, you
- 13:43know. Looking back, should I have probably bought an apartment we
- 13:47live in now? Maybe, because, but I didn't know I was gonna live
- 13:50there for 14 years. And I, you know, I
- 13:53didn't, and right now I probably wouldn't want to pay the $300 a week in body corporate. Like,
- 13:57so I think it's worked out really well, but at the time you just don't know, right? And
- 14:01so, and little did I know that we'd go through the greatest property boom in the history of the
- 14:04Australian property market ever. But you just don't know those things.
- 14:08But it worked out anyway, because it was focused on a strategy that I stayed
- 14:12consistent with, which I do to this day. And my strategy has always been
- 14:16make more money, keep costs low, put
- 14:19the balance or the extra into shares. It hasn't changed.
- 14:23So when we started the network marketing side business, the objective was to get that
- 14:26to 500 a week because I knew if I could get that to 500 a
- 14:30week with our effort, we could put that into the portfolio at
- 14:3325 grand a year extra. And I knew and I did the sums as to if
- 14:36we did that, we could get to our million dollar net worth a lot faster. In
- 14:40fact, we could get there in like seven years instead of 15 years. So, it
- 14:43made a lot of sense to have a side hustle to develop. Now, what
- 14:47I didn't realize was when we were doing that, the amount of skills that
- 14:50I would build and how much money we did make. So,
- 14:53we ended up getting that to about, you know, three grand a week, three,
- 14:56four grand a week extra cash flow while we're in our other
- 15:00jobs. And so, we had this massive amount of cash flow coming in.
- 15:04And so, we put that in the portfolio and before I knew it, The
- 15:07portfolio was probably oscillating around 600,000, 700,000. It was
- 15:12getting up there. And at that point, the 700,000 from the
- 15:16share portfolio was producing, because I had owned a lot of Commonwealth Bank shares and
- 15:19some others that were paying dividends. I actually ended up selling my Berkshire Hathaway shares, sadly, because
- 15:23I wanted to leave the property business. So, I was like, okay, I've got 700,000 in shares, no
- 15:26debt. We've got this great side hustle earning 200,000 plus a
- 15:30year. Why am I in property? I didn't
- 15:33like it, didn't want to be in it, didn't like what I was selling. I mean, it's fine, but it
- 15:36just misaligned with me, right? So I was like, okay, well,
- 15:40here's a chance to be free. And I left there,
- 15:43we took our whole network marketing income and
- 15:46we had about 35 grand a year income from the shares.
- 15:50That was paying for half of the rent and
- 15:53we had a paid off car. So that was it. And so that was the day
- 15:56that I left traditional office work. It was in 2018, which is 8 years ago.
- 16:02And that's the time when I could say to myself, you know what, you've
- 16:05got a business here that's mainly online, there's a lot of travel involved, there's
- 16:09little risk, it pays weekly, you've got this share
- 16:12portfolio producing money as well, so we had two income streams at that point, we had three, got
- 16:16rid of one, and we just had two. Some
- 16:20of that portfolio was producing income and then
- 16:24our network marketing business was producing income. And that
- 16:28really was, that's when we kind of hit it. We're like, okay, we're
- 16:31feeling very free here at this point. We didn't have to go on a commute. We
- 16:35didn't have to work with people we didn't like necessarily. And
- 16:39we were doing something we loved and we had assets that were producing money and we had no debt.
- 16:42And I think that's probably when we hit freedom. I think for
- 16:46most people that would feel pretty free. But I want you to know it
- 16:49wasn't done overnight. If you think about when I left, when
- 16:52I started in Abu Dhabi, this objective of doing
- 16:56my financial turnaround story, that was 2010. And
- 17:01when we had that freedom, it was 2018. So it was an 8-year and
- 17:05we got after it. Like, I didn't muck around. Like, it worked. But
- 17:10we had a strategy and we stuck to the strategy and we stayed patient and we didn't buy
- 17:14the Range Sport. We've got one now but we bought that for
- 17:17cash later which is good, no debt on that car. Love it, right? And
- 17:22so, that's when we got freedom. Now, the
- 17:25portfolio is scaled to millions. But
- 17:28what's interesting is we didn't stay with one business, now we have, we have a network, then
- 17:32we start an education business where we sell books, courses, coaching and mentoring. Then
- 17:36carved out some capital, bought a laundromat business that I've mentioned before. Borrowed
- 17:41all the money for that though because it was such an easy deal to make. That's almost,
- 17:45that's been paid off now. And what else did we do? Oh,
- 17:48an events business, my friend Morgan, Morgan Nelson. We got an
- 17:52events business, we call for mind and money. You may have been to one of our events. And
- 17:55then, just more recently, I have an accounting business. I started with two partners called
- 18:00Berkshire Advisory and Accounting. You can Google it.
- 18:06So that, there's now like five businesses, they're all
- 18:09still like building, right, they're in the building phase but then
- 18:12there's the portfolio that produces passive income as well. Not
- 18:17to mention the past, I've done speaking gigs to get paid and other things but I'm always open
- 18:22to opportunities to earn more income. So I think about Robert Kiyosaki's particular
- 18:29advice back when I was younger was invest for
- 18:32cash flow. So, I was like, what am I going to do to increase and improve my
- 18:36cash flow? And that's why I've stayed away from property because in
- 18:39my experience, property has generated not much cash flow. Even
- 18:43if you've got debt on it, all the money is used to pay that. So, I think
- 18:47the whole strategy has been if I can get immediate cash flow from
- 18:50something, I'll do it. So even look at our businesses, they're
- 18:53all very capital light, they're all very versatile, there's not
- 18:57a lot of fixed overhead in any of them, so there's not a lot of operating risk. And
- 19:01our share portfolio is much the same, it's spread across six positions, across
- 19:05multiple different industries, so non-correlated assets in the share portfolio, and
- 19:10protected in a trust, and it produces passive income, and
- 19:13it will just continue to scale. And our car's paid off, so
- 19:17I think about Charlie Mung has got this
- 19:20saying, he says take a simple idea and take it seriously. That's
- 19:24his quote and so I want to understand the simple idea of
- 19:28well I want to build a million dollar net worth in shares and I want to do it over time
- 19:32and not take on any debt. That's a pretty simple idea and
- 19:36we took it seriously. We then look at what else can we do to make money
- 19:39and we take simple ideas of partnerships and the ability to make money
- 19:43without a lot of heavy duty investment. Even the
- 19:46laundromat was only 250 grand, it wasn't heaps, there wasn't a ton of risk in
- 19:49that. That would be our most risky in terms of capital investment, but
- 19:54the risk is minimal compared to our net worth, so it's not that bad. And
- 19:58again, I'm not someone who has made the most money. I'm
- 20:02not the person who's made... There's tons of... A lot of my friends are flipping way wealthier than
- 20:05me. Like, they got tons, like, you know, tens of millions. And
- 20:09one of my mates has got like 50, 100 million. Another fellow's got, you know, more.
- 20:13I've even had Simon Beard on the show. We did an episode together. I went to school with him and
- 20:17he's worth 300 million more probably now. So, there's people
- 20:20out there my age in my city that's worth a ton more. But I think
- 20:23one of the things I'm super proud of is that we've decided on a strategy
- 20:27to be free and we implemented it. You know, and it wasn't
- 20:30through some big business build and exit. It wasn't through taking
- 20:34on stupid amounts of risk. It wasn't about leveraging into
- 20:37shit tons of property. It wasn't that. It was just methodical, simple
- 20:41things in place. So now where we're at, do I think we'll get to a hundred
- 20:44million dollars? Yeah. Now we're at for sure, because now we've really
- 20:47built a great foundation and now we can accelerate, right? But
- 20:51for most people, they're looking to accelerate straight away. And
- 20:54what I've noticed is if you want financial independence, you first have to hit financial peace.
- 20:58So for a lot of you watching this, that's just a decision to make a financial turnaround
- 21:02in the next 90 days and you can do it. Then the biggest jump is
- 21:05actually figuring out how to make money outside your job. You've got
- 21:09to learn how to make more income. And then having the
- 21:12discipline not to buy the Range Rover Sport too quickly, not to
- 21:15buy the Ferrari too quickly, not to buy the big mansion too quickly.
- 21:18Could we do those things? Yes, but it's not aligned with the strategy. So
- 21:23you can usually feel it in your gut what you should and shouldn't be doing. But
- 21:26you've got to play this repetitive game year in, year out,
- 21:30year in, year out, year in, year out. Think about that. From 2010 when
- 21:33I made the decision to now 2026, that's 16 years. That's
- 21:3816 years of the strategy, okay? And
- 21:41so my dad often says it takes 15 years to be an overnight success. And
- 21:45I would say absolutely it does. And I feel like I'm really now
- 21:49just at a point where we're really at a good foundation. So
- 21:53think about that. 16 years to get a really solid foundation from the decision
- 21:57in my 20s So when I do reels about you know, Gen Z
- 22:00shouldn't buy houses in their 20s I believe that because if
- 22:03I had done that I would not have been able to take the risks that I
- 22:07took The optionality would have disappeared because my whole focus would
- 22:10have been on I've got to pay this mortgage By the way, I saw some of my
- 22:13colleagues back in Abu Dhabi who did that and they couldn't
- 22:17leave their job. They had the golden handcuffs. They had got
- 22:20the car, the car loan, the mortgage and they couldn't go.
- 22:24Some of them are still there. I've optimized my
- 22:28life for, could I be a lot wealthier? Absolutely. But I've optimized my
- 22:31life for adventure. I've done so many cool things in my life. Like,
- 22:35man, I should do a flippin episode of all the cool shit we've done in the last even 10 years.
- 22:39But so I've optimized it for living a juicy life. I haven't
- 22:43optimized it for money. I haven't optimized it for assets.
- 22:47I haven't optimized it for safety. I've optimized it for
- 22:50living. That's how Alisha and I have optimized our
- 22:54life for living. So I only want financial freedom and independence because
- 22:58I want to live a great life. That's the only reason. Because by the
- 23:01end of your life, you get to the age of 80, whatever it is, and 85, die, you
- 23:05know, to read your eulogy for yourself. And Chandler Monger used to say,
- 23:08you know, write your eulogy and then live accordingly. Write your eulogy
- 23:11and live accordingly. So the eulogy is like someone who did this, they did
- 23:15this, he did this, he helped this person do this, become the best thing off, they did it. So many
- 23:18cool things in my fucking juicy life. That's what I want.
- 23:22I don't want to optimize for money. Could I have lived a more boring life and had 10, 15, 20 million?
- 23:26Yeah, of course. If I was a flippin' Scrooge and just, fuck it. But
- 23:29that's not what it's about. It's just not. I want
- 23:32to start launch award-winning podcasts. Financial independence and freedom is
- 23:35about having the ability to win back your time to
- 23:39then do the things you want to do to live a juicy life, which is why in that book,
- 23:42Become Time Rich, it talks about how to win back your time. So
- 23:46I guess the underlying message here is that Do your
- 23:49turnaround story to get out of financial chaos to peace. From peace to freedom
- 23:52is a strategy and one strategy approach
- 23:56that works and repeated over time. Be disciplined and don't give
- 23:59yourself the rewards too early. And as you're optimizing, optimize
- 24:03at the same time to do both where you can live your life and
- 24:07build financial independence, which is exactly what we've done. Because
- 24:11if you went and followed me on social media for the last 10, 15 years, right,
- 24:14from when I left Abu Dhabi in Dubai, if you followed that journey,
- 24:18you would see tremendous amounts of travel and adventure. Some of
- 24:21the things you couldn't even, I mean, I was on stage with Jesse Itzel last year in a keynoting to
- 24:252,000 people, like, keynoting to 5,000, 6,000, traveling around the world, I
- 24:29just got paid again, my wife and I had to be paid to go to Thailand for a week, which we're going to tomorrow
- 24:32night, we're leaving. Like, there's adventure in this as well. becoming
- 24:36an author, doing a book launch, running bodybuilding competitions, running ultra-marathons.
- 24:40We've done all that stuff at the same time. So one
- 24:44doesn't negate the other. And I think that's how people are trying to approach this
- 24:47wealth game. They're trying to, like, oh, when
- 24:50I get this, then I'll do that. Right? So
- 24:54are there ways? where you can live your life in
- 24:58a juicy way and build financial independence. And
- 25:01I think that's why I gravitated so closely to network mining because it's like whenever you
- 25:04have success there, you travel more. Whenever you have success there, you speak on
- 25:08massive stages. When you build an education business, you become a best-selling author.
- 25:11That's cool. When we're building businesses, the businesses force you
- 25:14to become a better person. The business is a
- 25:18personal development program with a compensation plan attached. So for
- 25:21you to do well financially in business requires you to become a
- 25:24better version of you in all areas, in your health, in your relationships, in
- 25:28your discipline. It just requires you to do more, to communicate
- 25:32better, right? Think about it. Building an events business,
- 25:36you've got to be good on stage. There's adventure built into business. So
- 25:39I wanted to leave you with this. You can do both at the same time. But
- 25:43what you can't do is have an expectation of financial freedom. that's
- 25:47detached completely from any plans. And it's just mental masturbation in
- 25:51your head going over and over and over again. So I hope this story of
- 25:54how we built it from the start to where we are now and where we're going has inspired
- 25:58you to make a decision today to do it, stick with a
- 26:01plan that works, and be patient, and it'll pay off. But remember,
- 26:05it does take 15 years to be an overnight success.
- 26:09But is it worth it? Flippin' absolutely. You bet your flippin' ass it is.
- 26:12It's the most fruitful way to live your life. because I've
- 26:16already got the juice. It's not where we have ended up, the old saying goes.
- 26:19It's the journey, not the destination. So go live a juicy life. Get on the journey.
- 26:23That's where the juice lives, in the journey itself. You'll have a flippin' ball. But
- 26:27don't sit there and tell yourself one thing and have no backup plan,
- 26:30no action plan to get after it because action takers are
- 26:33money makers. Alright, hit the subscribe button if you're inspired and
- 26:37I'll see you in the next episode of the Money Grows on Trees podcast. Thanks for listening to Money Grows
- 26:40on Trees. If you enjoyed the episode, leave a five-star review on Apple
- 26:44Podcasts and Spotify and subscribe to us on
- 26:47YouTube so you never miss an episode. And if you're serious about building wealth,
- 26:50make sure to check out the links in the show notes and follow me on all
- 26:54social media platforms, at LloydJamesRoss for