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Transcript

How I Went from 9-5 to Financially Free in my 30s · Felix Nikolas Prehn's Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Felix, here In this video I want to do something a little bit different.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: I want to actually walk you through how I turned from being a 9 to 5 corporate wage slave to being financially free in my 30s and I'm now 43.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: And I see a lot of people in the same predicament and I think by sharing this story and actually giving you actionable advice, I might accelerate your escape from your 9 to 5 hell.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: So let me get into it.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: How did it really start out?
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: So my proper job was as an investment banker and it was miserable in many ways 7am morning meetings, 12-14 hour days but it was also incredibly eye-opening because I learned how to manage money and I met people not the smartest people in the world, but just people like you and me who were making 100% plus on their capital every year.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: And to me that was eye-opening because if I'd met some like super genius, some like maths, quant, and he told me he made 100%, I'd be like, okay, he can do that because he's a super genius.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: But I just met these guys and they were really nice, but they were mostly sozzled on alcohol or other substances and they were just like normal people who had learned it because the bank had taught them how to make money.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: So I was able to absorb that knowledge and that gave me a tremendous head start in life and I'm very, very grateful for that.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: But I still quit because I just didn't feel like giving my life away.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: I didn't feel like having to ask somebody for permission when I wanted to take a holiday, because that's kind of like bonded slavery, isn't it?
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: I just think that's such a humiliating thing to have to do is go excuse you mind, a fire in three weeks time, take off three days and they go.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: Why?
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: Where you going?
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: Can you make it less?
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: We're very busy that time of the year and all of that.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: I just really hated that power position.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: So that was, for me, really, why I got out.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: And before we jump further, let me just say one thing I put out about 90% of all my knowledge and everything I do completely for free.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: If you head over to our Facebook group, you can find a tan there.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: It's go to academyorg slash Facebook group.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: I'll put the link down below Join free courses, free resources, documents with walkthroughs and everything else.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: So my whole mission is to make people financially free.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: I want to make a million people financially free, and for that we do need to give away the vast majority of it, and I'm very, very happy to do that.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: So check it out Now.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: As I say, I quit my banking job because I couldn't handle the sort of slavery situation and I started a business because I thought that's freedom.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: I didn't want another job, but I worked much harder for myself than I had ever for a corporate and I therefore wasn't really a business owner.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: I was self employed, which is one step up from being a wage slave.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: Yes, I'm in charge in theory, but really it was my clients who were in charge of me and I had to work those hours to bring the money in.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: And then this was 2013,.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: I got a massive back injury, like I literally collapsed in my apartment.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: I couldn't get up to hospital and it was horrible, and they wanted to put perform surgery on me the next morning with the nastiest tricks of the medical industry of how to hard sell you surgery.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: And again, I was stroppy and I said no.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: So I spent the next nine months basically lying flat horizontally doing my physio exercises six times a day and hoping I'd get better, and it was a miserable, stressful period of my life because I didn't have any income, I didn't have a salary, I didn't have a backup.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: It was just me in my business which was not doing well because I wasn't able to travel and bring in the money and therefore I had to figure out a way to pay for the medical bills, for rent and everything else, and the only thing I could do apart from meet people and run my business was trade, because I'd learned that.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: So I lay literally on the floor and in my bed for nine months with a laptop on my knees and I figured out how I could make more money from my money with the help, the very, very kind help of people I knew in the industry investment bankers, traders who very kindly would offer me snippets of advice, and it's those guys who really got me out of that rut.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: And when I got to consistent profits and those nine months were not easy I was losing a lot of money.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: I was making a bit of money, I was losing a lot of money.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: It was kind of misery.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: And then eventually, each time I lost money and I got some advice and I made my system better, my structures better, I made my automations better.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: I was able to actually bring enough money to pay rent, to bring in the money I could pay off the medical bills, and suddenly I also started to recover because I was no longer that stressed guy with the one income stream.
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: I was now a guy with two income streams who was feeling a lot more chilled and relaxed and loose.
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: And then your back gets better and that's how it works.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: It's all in the mind, which is one of the reasons I'm in this beautiful place here, because this is really a beautiful sanctuary of where they combine and understand that the mind and the body work together and it's important we work on both and so often in life we don't the beauty that came out of that horrible period of my life, and I think often it is an adversity that we really excel because we're forced to be pushed to.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: We just get comfortable right, we come home and we watch a movie and we have a nice meal no-transcript we go on two holidays a year and it all sounds very good.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: But really we're living kind of on a cliff edge.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: I certainly was for years.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: I just didn't have enough money stashed away and the money wasn't working for me, so it was always relying on me.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: But, as I say, out of that came my trading protocol and I use it every week.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: You know, we made money this week, we made money this month and last month, we made 105% last year, 126% the year before on capital employed and I love seeing the people I teach that do as well or better than me.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: That's really the tremendous thing for me that I can make that impact now.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: And that kind of came out of COVID and having a lot more time suddenly because I wasn't traveling, I wasn't doing the things I would usually be doing because we were basically locked down and I thought let's see if people wanna learn this, let's share this knowledge that I have that I know is only available through Investor and Bank Trading Floors and Hedge Funds Trading Floors.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: Let's see if people wanna learn this, if people are open to learning it and if they can implement it like I can.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: And that was three years ago and we are about 10,000 students in now and it's glorious, it's tremendous, and we've built a whole team of retired Investor and Bankers guys who've worked at Merrill and Bear Stearns on the Chicago Bollow Options Exchange and Hedge Funds and managed billions and billions of dollars and who have the same mindset as me.
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: They see the unfairness in the system that very, very few people know this.
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's probably the 0.0001% of people, or something like that, that know this, and then everybody else hasn't got a fricken idea and it's just out there hoping to buy the right ETF.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: I think we can do better than that.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: So what are the actionable takeaways here?
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: Because I wanna obviously make this as useful for you as possible and not just tell you my whole life story.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: There are really two parts to this.
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: The first is stop being scared of financial markets.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: The industry wants you to be scared.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: No, you will not lose all your money if you make one wrong move.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: Provide it.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: You do it in the right way.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: What's the right way?
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: The first thing is get yourself a paper trading account for you in the US.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: Think or swim.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: Does it really well?
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: We both does it decently.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: If you're anywhere else in the world, interactive brokers does a pretty good job, and those are free brokerages.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: Sign up.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: You might have to put $100 into the account so they give you access, and then you just use their simulated paper trading.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: When I'm getting eaten alive here by the flies, that's the first thing, and then what we do is every trade we set up is what we call hedged.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: It has a limited risk, so we don't go and just sort of yolo some money away.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: We say this is a trade and the most I could possibly lose on this trade is $1,000.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: Can't be any more than that.
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: And then what we do is we actually set a stop loss and we automate all the exits.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: And if you wanna know more about that I mean, I run life trading trainings for this frequently.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: So come and come and join one of those.
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: And that's the first mindset pull.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: And you have to think about everything you consume with regards to the financial industry is they want you to be scared, they want you to say this is too complicated, I can't do this, I'm not smart enough, and therefore you're going to work all your life Eight, 10, 12 hours a day, if you include commuting, and the fruits of that work you're gonna hand it over to some guy in a shiny suit who underperforms the market 95% of the time, which tells you that he is a dumbo and he is no smarter than you.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: He's probably a lot less smart than you and he's got zero incentive to make money for you.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: Funds, banks, generally have zero incentive to make money for you.
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: Why are you giving them your money?
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: That's really what you have to ask yourself.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: You really think your money is worth so little to you that you shouldn't learn what to do with it?
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: And if that's you, then you have to also think well, why do you go to work?
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: Maybe you seek fulfillment in your job, but most people don't actually get fulfillment from their job.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: They do it because they need to pay the mortgage, right?
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: So that would be my first thing is you have to shift out of that mindset.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: You've been conditioned with that.
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: Managing your money is a crazy thing to do Because the industry wants you to believe that so they can keep collecting your fees.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: The second thing is find a teacher.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: If you think about, how did you learn to read and write?
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: A teacher taught you.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: Maybe your parents.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: That's a teacher.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: How did you learn to play football?
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: Did you have a coach?
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: By any chance, I did.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: And let me ask you do you think football or how you're going to spend the rest of your life is more important?
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: And okay, okay, I get there are some people out there who will say football is more important than anything in life, but let's be real for a moment how you will spend your life, whether you will worry about paying the bills, whether you will live in your dream house, whether you will go on second holiday in the year and it's February as I'm filming this because you thought about coming here three days ago and you just booked it those little freedoms are what separates the hard average life from let's really enjoy ourselves, let's really have some fun here, and therefore it seems to me absolutely insane that we don't all have a money teacher.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: It's just.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: It's just the weirdest thing.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: It shouldn't be like oh, what are you going to study in college, son?
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: It should be like you're going to study money, right, because otherwise you won't know what to do with the money you're going to spend all your life making.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: And I just think we've been programmed, and I blame the finance industry for this.
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: They want you to not understand how to manage money.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: They want you to be scared of it, because that way you will hand it over to them and they can make money out of you.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: Very simple you can get out how to make money out of your money.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: All you need to do is figure out how to make money out of your money.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: You see what I'm saying it's actually easier, it's already yours, you don't need to, you know.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: So that would be the key thing.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: Now.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: Number three bonus tip Be patient and rush Slightly contradictory.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: Let me explain.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: To make money in financial markets, you need patience.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: That's why we teach people how to trade in a simulator, zero risk.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: And I had somebody literally today right on one of my YouTube videos Felix, I know you put a lot of your money into FUN Smith, which is a British fund run by a guy called Terry Smith who's super smart.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: You can, unfortunately, only access him if you're in the UK or in Europe and he said are you underperform the market last year?
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: He said, lucy, there's nobody's doing and you know how can you.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: And blah, blah, blah.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: And maybe that guy made a lot of money in Bitcoin this week or Nvidia or whatever it was.
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: But I've been in this long enough to know that to make money, in a year you can be lucky, or in a month you can get lucky, but you look at a longer horizon, you look like 10 years.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: It's actually skill and it's knowledge.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: Skill is actually secondary, it's knowledge.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: So our minds are just focused on making money today and with trading, to some extent we can do that.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: We can kind of make money pretty much every week, but we have to have the longer term focus.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: We have to be like this is going to be this journey and this is going to get me there.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: It's not going to happen this week, it's not going to happen by Friday.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: So, rather than yoloing into some triple leveraged ETF fund, hoping to get lucky, we actually learn why this may or may not be a good idea.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: That's what I want to say to you about you need some patience and then rush.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: You need to get started today on how to learn to make money.
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: How do you do that?
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: Well, you can buy books.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: It's not really gonna work.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: You can watch a lot of videos it's gonna give you some idea, but ultimately, I think you need a teacher.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: Hence point number two, because you will get confused.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: Things will happen in the market that you feel are risky or unpredictable, that you haven't seen before.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: So you wanna talk to somebody who's seen it before and he's seen it 10 and 20 and 30 years ago and therefore they're more relaxed, they have a longer term outlook.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: Much like that lovely man who left me that message probably been in the market very, very short period of time.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: I've been here a little bit longer and then got coaches in my program who have been there for 50 years, as in they've actually traded for hedge funds and then for 50 years and therefore have a much better reference point.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: How can you do that, honestly, if the one thing I can inspire you to do today is to book a call with us?
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: Not because you need to join my program that's not what this is about.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: But by making that call, you're doing two things.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: One, you get yourself out of your comfort zone box of I don't wanna talk to people about money.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: We're just where most of us came from.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: And secondly, by having the call, it'll trigger questions.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: It'll trigger thoughts about what you actually want and where you wanna get to and if this might be the right thing for you and if it isn't, it'll give you a huge lever to actually then go into the thing that you wanna do.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: The only way you find out what is the right path for you to talk to people about it.
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: Who knows something about money.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: So go to phelixfriendsorg slash call and just have a chat with my guys Super nice.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: Ask them all the difficult questions, tell them I said that and that'll get you way further ahead and it'll change your trajectory.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: So that's the one thing I wanna say to you.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: The hardest thing is to take the first step.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: For me, I didn't take it.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: It took me too long to take it, so I had to get injured.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: I had to get into a really dire strait to get there, and I don't think people need to go through that.
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: And after you've booked that call, I would do one more thing.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: I would sit down and I'd write out what you want in life.
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: And that's really hard.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: People said that to me, I don't know, 20 years ago and I was like man, that's really hard.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: Well, I then wrote down okay, I want this car, I want this house, I want this watch, I want this much money, and it was all sort of material stuff and that isn't actually what makes you happy.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: I hope the wind isn't gonna knock over this camera.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: So I have a little trick for that and I call it the hate list, and what you do is you write down all the things you hate.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: Now, that's easy, right, for me it used to be very easy.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: So you just write down what you hate about your job and your boss and your coworker and driving there and all the things that nag and bother you every day.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: Write them down.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: Nice long list.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: Once you've done that, next to it, write the opposite from each item.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: Don't ever think it.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: Just write what's the opposite.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: This was somebody else's list.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: Just write down what's the opposite.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: Now you've got your list of what you actually want, and that's typically less.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: I want this watch or this car.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: It's typically more.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: I don't wanna be yelled at at work.
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: I don't wanna have to ask somebody to take a vacation.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: I wanna be on vacation for longer.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: I wanna be able to stay in this beautiful place I am right now until I want to leave, which is fortunately what I can do, and it shifts it away from purely money to actually the outcomes that are going to inspire you to take action.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: So that's really, really important.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: And then remember to show up for that call with my guys and see whether managing your money the way we do might be the right thing for you.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: And if it isn't, at the end of that call you'd be like, ok, that wasn't for me.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: My mind sets more on this.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: Let me go and find somebody who does that.
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: Ok, and I think if you do that you're going to in a year's time.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: Look back at this silly little YouTube video and go this actually changed my life and if it does that, let me know, because I get a kick out of it and I wish you a glorious day.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: I wish you a glorious year and I hope this might help you to shift your trajectory to the freedom and the love and the life that you actually deserve to have.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: Thanks for tuning in.