How to Survive Trump's Tariffs When Everything Costs More (104% tariffs on China)

This is how you survive when the price of everything starts going up, when these tariffs really kick in and we actually see inflation starting to rise in a bigger way. And you do that by preparing now, not sitting here watching all this news and watching all these things about the effects of tariffs, not just watching all that and getting angry and mad and having an opinion on social media, but actually doing something in your own four walls so that you're ready, so that your family is ready. The key is to prepare now, right now. Guys, listen, I've been saying for several weeks now, these tariffs are going to cause everything to increase in price. Your prices from everything from new automobiles, used automobiles, automobile parts, the food you eat, the clothes you buy, in the next several months, you're going to see all these prices increase. And you may see a recession, some stagflation. So you'll probably see higher inflation. But what I want to do is tell you how to survive when you see the prices of everything going up, right? What should you be doing as a regular old consumer, the average American person who's trying to make it in this world, what should you be doing? I want to give you five quick things that I think you need to hear. Our economy is going in a direction, at least in the short term, where things are going to be more expensive to buy, everything. And we know it's happened in the last three or four years, but it's going to be even more, right? Whatever it can be, we know it's going to have an effect on your pocketbook. It's going to have an effect on your checking account, your savings account, and it'll have an effect on how far your dollar that you get paid every single week or two weeks is actually going to go. Now, the first thing is don't panic, right? The first thing is don't get all overly emotional. Don't get all overly angry or overly happy, right? Instead of getting emotional, get strategic. Instead of getting hyped up, mad, angry, sad, whatever, go ahead and come up with a plan, right? So that you can have some strategy moving into this thing. One thing you can do is you can begin to develop other streams of income. So you're not only relying on this job that may or may not be here in six months or two years. See, having one job is very, very risky. Now, I know that 20 and 30 and 40 years ago, having one job was okay. All was good. But today, having one job, you're putting yourself at more risk than the person who has several streams of income. I'm not telling you you got to have 20 and 30 streams of income. I'm not saying that, not even 10. But the point is don't rely on all your income from one source, a job, which is the highest tax source anyway, right? So have some other ways of making money. Be thinking, be creative about what you can produce, about what type of service you can offer, what type of value you can bring to other people and other people's lives, right? What can you do where you can actually generate some income? You know what? The internet nowadays, guys, it is so... I hate to say it like this because I don't want to make anybody feel bad. But it is very, very easy to generate income in various ways nowadays, right? Whether it's selling things online, coming up with digital products, growing a base in terms of your social media following and doing some affiliate marketing. There's so many different things out there that you can do and it doesn't have to be social media or internet based. It can be something you can do right around in your own city that offers value to other people that brings in other streams of income for you after you're nine to five every single day, right? So whatever that side hustle is, that side gig, that thing you've been thinking about doing on the side to make some extra money, do it, start it, get it going. Or at the very least, maybe you can take what you do in your job or you learn to do on jobs for years and you can start doing that. Or at the very least, if you don't have multiple streams of income, perhaps you can move up at the stream of income where you're at. Maybe, okay, you want to keep your job and you don't want to do anything on the side. Okay, cool, right? That's risky. But maybe if you make yourself more valuable on the job you're already at, that can be an idea too. Listen, I prefer you have other streams of income to set yourself up in case things go crazy or you lose a job or they're laying off or whatever. I prefer you to have other streams of income. But if you don't have other streams of income, the very least you can do is make sure the stream of income you do have is tightened up. In other words, maybe you can become more valuable on the job you have. And you may be saying, hey, you're telling me two different things. Get multiple streams of income and stay on the job. Look, whatever it takes to make sure you have income coming in, that's important. Yes, get multiple streams of income. But at the same time, there's some of you out here listening to me that ain't going to do that. And if you don't do that, then at least become the best at what you do at your job so you become a person that they can't get rid of. Maybe you just get really good on your job. Drop the attitude. Stop coming late. Get off the performance plan that they're trying to get you to get to before they fire you. Get off all that and start striving on the job. Change your attitude, your outlook at the job that you actually do have. Listen, some of you don't want to have an extra side gig or extra multiple streams of income. That's cool if that's not what you want to do. But don't have one source of income and be messing up at that one source of income. Now you just added more risk on top of the risk of having one income. Now another important thing you got to do is control your expenses. In other words, control you because you are your expenses. Let me say that differently. What you spend is the one thing that you control today, right? You don't really control your income today. You can do things about having multiple streams of income like I just talked about. But the one thing you can do right now today is simply stop spending so much or change your spending habits. Look, maybe you spend a lot of money on mortgage or rent. Perhaps you got to change your living situation. I know that's drastic for most people. But most of us, the biggest expense we have on a monthly basis is housing, where we live, be it rent or mortgage. And guess what? Sometimes you got to make a drastic decision to make a drastic change in something that's taken up half of your income every single month. And that may be where you live and maybe how you buy food, right? I know food is something that we need, I get it, but you need food. You don't need McDonald's and Burger King and Wendy's every day. You need food. You don't need Cava and Chipotle four or five times a week. You need food. You don't need to spend $20 every single lunch going out to eat every single day with all your buddies at lunchtime, right? Change some of your spending behaviors. You have to kind of buckle down when things get crazy. You have to make a commitment to buckle down when the prices of everything is going up. And maybe for some of you, it means transportation. Maybe instead of getting the $30,000 car with a $700 payment every single month for the next 72 months, maybe you go ahead and save up $10,000 and get you a nice little used car that has 110,000 miles on it. Maybe you do that. I'm just throwing it out there in terms of controlling your expenses. In America, cars is the second biggest expense that most people have. Maybe you got to make some changes there. But the key word is changes, right? If the price of everything is going up, you got to do something different because you ain't changing prices, right? They're not going to be calling you asking you, hey, what should we charge for milk? Hey, what should we charge for meat? Hey, what should we charge for cars? They ain't calling you for that. So you're not changing that. That means you have to change you and your spending patterns, your spending behavior. And leave Amazon alone. You don't have to have somebody dropping off an Amazon package to your front door six days a week. There's people that do that and it's obsessive. Now the third thing you can do to sort of protect yourself against everything going up in price, everything getting higher and higher in terms of cost, maybe you can, instead of hoarding all your cash in a bank, maybe you can invest that money. Let me say it like this. There's a lot of people that keep too much money in the bank. Now in my opinion, you got to have enough to cover what you're comfortable with in terms of emergency in the bank. That's it, right? If you have $100,000 in the bank and you only spend about $3,000 a month, why do you need $100,000 sitting in a bank getting 0.0001% interest when that money could be working for you somewhere else? You could be employing that money somewhere else, but you're hoarding money because you're nervous. You're scared, right? You're emotional. Look, throw out the emotions when you're dealing with money. Banks is where you keep money that you need for emergencies. That's it. They just hold onto your money for when you need it in an emergency. You shouldn't have any more money in your bank other than your emergency fund money. Everything else on top of that should be growing, working in the background, building, money-making money. They call it currency because money is supposed to flow to make money, like a river, right? That's the current in the river. Money is a currency, right? But you kill money when you go stuffing $100,000 in a bank somewhere. You're destroying money because you're hoarding it. And what you should be doing with money is flipping it, getting the money and turning it into more money. But you can't do that when you're getting a lower percentage return on the money than inflation. So inflation eats at your money that sits in the bank, right? You're hoarding money thinking you're doing a great thing, but guess what? You're losing money in the long run. So you should be investing in the stock market, in real estate, somewhere where the money can grow. ETFs, index funds, individual stocks, commercial real estate, residential real estate. Look, gold and silver is better than putting your money in a bank because when your money is out working for you, even though one sector of the economy may be going bad, the other sector may not be going bad, right? We've seen gold have a really huge increase in the last six months. At the same time, we've seen the stock market be down. Think back to 2022 when the stock market was down. I think the S&P 500 over the course of the year 2022, I think it had a negative 18 or 19% return. But in the same year, real estate skyrocketed. So if you only had money in the stock market in the year 2022, you saw things go down, sad, upset, mad, angry, you lost money. But if you also had real estate, you gained money, so you was able to hedge against some of those losses because you had your money working for you in various places. But overall, your money was working, so don't hoard money in a bank. Employ your money. Put it to work. Not in a bank, but somewhere else. Only keep your emergency money in the bank. Anything else, invest it. And then let me say this, going back to your emergency fund, have an emergency fund, right? Have some cash. I'm not telling you to have too much cash, but have some cash in case you need it, in case things go wrong, in case you have to pay your full set of bills, every single day, your monthly bills, in case you got to do that for six or seven months, or a little bit more if you feel comfortable with a little bit more. That's your choice. But you want to have some cash so you have a little bit of liquidity and you can actually take care of your daily needs on a regular basis for a while if you need to. And one of the big things you can do before the price of everything goes up, you need to be getting rid of all of this bad debt that you have. Now, when I say bad debt, I mean debt on things that are going down in value. So if you have debt on real estate that's going up in value, you're good, right? But if you have debt on student loans or you have debt on a car payment, a car that you're buying, or you have debt on credit cards, that's all bad debt because it's not growing for you. It's not going up in this direction. It's a liability that's hurting you. So what I'm telling you is before the price of everything goes up, you need to be preparing by getting rid of your debt, your bad debt. And then you want to stock up on essentials, okay? If you're trying to prepare and be ready for when the price of everything goes up, you need to stock up on the needs. Stock up on the things that you need to have right now. That's your toothpaste, toothbrush, detergents, canned goods, dry goods, whatever it could be that you use on a regular basis, you may want to stock up on it before the price of everything goes crazier than what it is right now. Now, I'm not a prepper, so I'm not telling you you got to stack your house full of all these. No, I'm not telling you that. But I'm telling you that if you want to be prepared, there's nothing wrong with stocking up and buying in bulk some of the things that you use on a regular basis and you know that you're going to need. And be ready to adjust your budget, right? I always stress do a written monthly budget somewhere. I usually do a zero-based budget, but you do what you want to do. But be ready to make adjustments to that budget, right? Be ready to make some changes in case things go wrong. You move money here and put a little more over there and you change this and you squeeze this in and you add this and you take that out, right? You've got to have a budget that is pliable, a budget that is flexible so that you can actually make changes as prices begin to rise. This is how you survive when the price of everything starts going up, when these tariffs really kick in and we actually see inflation starting to rise in a bigger way. Because I want you to thrive, not just survive, but actually thrive. And you do that by preparing now, not waiting, not sitting here watching all this news and watching all these things about the effects of tariffs and what effect they may have on our individual lives and on consumers. Not just watching all that and getting angry and mad and having an opinion on social media, but actually doing something in your own four walls so that you're ready, so that your family is ready, so that you're not caught off guard, you're not surprised, right? The key is to prepare now, right now. Don't wait. There's no better time. Look, map out your plan and start putting that thing to work for you. It's nobody else's responsibility to take care of you, but you, right? It's not the president. It's not the government. It's not Congress. It's not the mayor, the city manager, the city council member. It's not your kids, your grandkids, your great grandkids, the nursing home. It's none of that. It's you. It's all on you to take care of you. So the deal is, look, you got to get ahead of the plan. You already have been warned that there's going to be higher prices. Now, how are you going to actually get ahead of that before it actually happens in several months? And how are you going to continue to build wealth? Continue to not just keep your head above water, but how to actually swim this thing out just in case these prices of everything will continue to go and be absurd over the next several years? Hey, listen, I hope I was able to give you something of value on this quick video, giving you an idea that, hey, we know that there may be an increase in prices. It may be a slight increase. It may be a big increase. We don't know. But what we can do is get prepared in case, just in case, right? That's our responsibility. Drop me a comment. Let me know your thoughts. How are you getting prepared for when the price of everything goes up? Let me know in the comments below. Also, share this video with somebody who you think could use it. Listen, the absolute best person who's going to take care of the old you is the young you. Guys, take good care of yourself and take care of other people. Until the next video, peace.