Minimalist Habits That Quietly Made Me Rich

Since becoming a minimalist, I've never had more coffee and I have never built more wealth. Now, the two have absolutely nothing to do with each other. However, as you get more into minimalism, you become a coffee addict. It's just how it works. But these tiny minimalist habits actually completely changed my finances. The 77% rule. Now, according to Thomas Cordley's research in Rich Habits, 67% of wealthy individuals watch TV for one hour or less every day. Whereas 77% of people who struggle financially watch TV for more than one hour a day. Now, this is one of the first times I realized that wealthy people and a lot of fulfilled people and happy people create more than they consume. And the world is literally built to make you consume. But I kind of made this habit for myself where if I want to play an hour of video games or I want to watch an hour of TV, I have to create for at least an hour before that. Because it's very easy to get caught up in this trap of constantly consuming. You're consuming food, you're consuming media, you're consuming music, you're consuming TV shows, you're consuming just content and you're never building anything. The most enjoyment, most fulfillment and most of the wealth that gets generated on a large scale comes when you contribute to society, when you make other people's lives better, when you build things, when you create things. That is where wealth comes from and most of the opposite, which is, you know, your money going away, you getting depressed, all that type of stuff comes when you're just consuming. You're giving all your money away, you're giving all your attention away, you're giving all your time away, you're giving all your focus away. And that leads us into the one category rule. Now, when I first started decluttering my house, I kind of attacked everything at once. I tried to get rid of my digital clutter. I was going through all the house at once and it just turned out to be a wreck at one point. We were like swimming in clothing. It was bad. After years of learning about minimalism and simplifying my life, I realized that it is best to pick one area of your house and attack that and then move on to the next area and then the next area. So, your whole house is in a wreck. You don't get overwhelmed and freak out and decide it's just not worth it. And the same thing is true with wealth creation and also your finances. Your finances feel out of control and you need to get a hold of them, then don't try to do everything at once. Start off with one thing and have all of your focus and attention go on that one thing. Maybe it's creating a budget. Maybe it's going through all your subscriptions and getting rid of a bunch of stuff. Maybe it's starting and focusing on a business. I like to take three-month blocks of time where I can focus all my energy and attention but even one area of my finances and make real progress for three months and then move to something else as opposed to trying to do everything at once. So, it's kind of applying the same rules of minimalism and decluttering but to your finances. Whether that's decluttering parts of your finances, organizing them or even earning more. Trying to do all of them at the same time is most likely going to lead to burnout and in like three weeks you're going to be exactly where you were before. Just more stressed and you know thinking you can't make a change. And that leads me to being an intentional spender. Most people spend money on stuff because they want it or it's on sale or they got an ad for it. But minimalism has really taught me to be intentional and really this whole idea of living a life by design and not by default. So, just because I see something doesn't mean I have to do it. Everything I do is with intentionality. It's being like an intentionalist if that's a word. Is that a word? So, I kind of developed a habit to categorize all my expenses into three things. We have fundamentals which is my essentials to be alive. We have fun which is maybe travel, clothes, whatever it might be. And then we have my future. And my future this is generally like investing. And when I just break it down into the the simplest of forms I can realize that like okay if 95% of my stuff is just going to the fundamentals then either I have too many fundamentals or I don't have enough money coming in. So, one of those two needs to change. It just makes it very simple. Or if I have a lot of going to fun and fundamentals and nothing's going to my future then I know exactly where I need to make those shifts. So, if you just categorize your budget into three simple things it makes it very easy to realize like okay what's important to me having a financial future and being stable and ever having to go back to a nine to five whatever it is. And therefore I'm willing to give up some of my fun category and optimize my fundamental category in order to build my future category which has worked out well. And one of the best ways I have found to do that which is to invest in very cheap things that make a big impact. For instance the sponsor of this video Masterclass. They have plans starting at just 10 bucks a month billed annually. So, for very very cheap you can learn something that can change the trajectory of your life. And for everybody who always asks me how to invest, investing into very cheap things that can make you better and have an impact literally for the next 20, 30, 50 years of your life there's almost no better investment. You could put 100 bucks in the stock market it's not going to change your life. You could spend 100 bucks learning things and it can make you more money at your job. It could give you a business idea it can make you happier and that's why I love and I have partnered with Masterclass. If you don't know what Masterclass is, it is a membership to classes from the world's best. Like people you or me would never be able to talk to who are at the absolute top of their game and are going to break it down for you in like an hour or in three hours into actionable steps on how you can make your life better. They have a wide range of topics that they cover from arts and entertainment to business design and style even sports and gaming. Again all for just 10 bucks a month billed annually and the cool thing is they just keep adding new classes and I've been absolutely loving them and it's already helped me in my business. I've been watching these for months actually. I've already watched things from the guy who wrote Atomic Habits, James Clear. I've watched different business and entrepreneur classes and right now I'm learning from Kevin Hart about how to use humor to help your business which is super super cool and it's something I've tried to add in more and using my own personal stories the positives and the negatives to help my business. So if you're serious about bettering your life and your business and learning some new skills so check out Masterclass right now. I can almost guarantee if you actually watch the stuff in there you will not regret it. You can scan the QR code or click the link in the description to get 15% off. It's a no-brainer. The buy once rule. When I built an office or bought clothes or yes even bought coffee believe it or not I was so scared that was going to go all over me. It was always always always based on the cheapest thing and that has cost me probably over $5,000 in the past 10 years. Just being cheap I realize I'm an idiot but I got to this point where I was like I can no longer always go with the cheapest option. I hated coffee from other places and yet that's what I drank every day and now I like spend a little bit more on coffee. I bought laptops and fried them immediately editing videos because it was the cheapest laptop instead of something that would actually work for me and now I just spend money and try to buy things once. I have a few hoodies that I wear all the time that are a little nicer. I don't have the cheapest one that I just never wear. When I buy furniture try to buy something I'm like you know I'm gonna have this for the next 10-20 years. I don't want to have something that's gonna have for the next two years and it's gonna fall apart. So a lot of decisions that I make now is kind of this buy once buy right and that has led me into buying a lot less stuff because I'm very very very intentional with everything I buy. It's not just like oh this was on sale I had to get something real quick. It was like okay I'm gonna spend a month or two about this researching it making sure I get a good thing that's gonna last for a really long time and over the long run that's almost always the cheaper option as opposed to just cycling through cheap junk. Tree thinking. Every roughly 90 days I pull out one of these journals been using this thing for like four stinking years just like a planner and at the beginning of it I write down an outcome goal. This is something specifically for my finances. This means if I want to save let's say you know $10,000 in the next three months then I have a clear outcome goal of something that I want to achieve and I am able to break that down reverse engineer and give myself actionable steps to actually get there as opposed to when I had no goals I made very little progress because I was just doing stuff. I wasn't actually forming a think tree which is pretty much like I have this main goal and then below that let's say you want to make $10,000 okay like well by week I need to save this amount of money and then that means by day I need to make this much money all right how am I gonna make that much money this day I'm gonna you know start a business or I'm gonna save you know cut out different expenses or whatever and you start with this main goal and off on one side you have all the ways you're gonna save money to get there on the other side you have all the ways you're gonna earn money in order to get there and then you have action steps to actually achieve your goals and it's not just randomly saying I want to save some money how you gonna do it I don't know I don't know I'd like to have more money though it's fun to have money so that's what I used to do it didn't work by the way for everybody who's about to comment these are finisher journals there's a discount code down below I've been using these things for literally years every single day huge help for me personally you can just use a sheet of paper if you want to do that too my unhealthy obsession I realize and I think it's time to admit that I have an unhealthy obsession but it's not the Kardashians it's not reality tv it's not drugs or alcohol and it's not even coffee well I guess some drugs regardless my main obsession is on this shelf it is learning about money and just leveling up and I've had this more or less unhealthy obsession about money for how old am I 12 years now and that has led me to reading over a hundred different books on money everything from building funnels which if you don't know what a funnel is congratulations to how to work four hours a week to thick books about Steve Jobs and how to fortify my mind by my my dear friend David Goggins if you're watching you most likely have some type of obsession and maybe it's eating maybe it's tiktok maybe it's your relationship I don't know what it is but if you can shift that into a different obsession that improves your life and your finances I think that is a great use of life and as I've become more minimalist and I've been thinking about things that are important to me one thing that's really important is being there for my family financially and never having to go back to a job it's like one of my main goals in life is like I left my day job at 24 I never want to have to think about having to think about going back to work I'm literally drinking coffee talking about my favorite stuff in the world so anyways I have had this obsession about learning everything that I can about money because we literally trade parts of our lives you know you probably trade eight hours of your day for x amount of money so it literally represents a little piece of yourself and I think that's something that is good to be obsessed about to learn about to master and so while maybe I have taken it a little more extreme than most people if you can take one unhealthy obsession cut it out of your life and add intentionally in another obsession that will improve your life whether it be money fitness whatever it is over a long period of time your life will completely change and if you're a minimalist everything you do is very intentional everything is very thought out about where I want to be what's important to me does this add value to my life video games reality tv all that type of stuff doesn't really matter to me whereas what does matter is that freedom so that's what I have channeled all that energy into I think made me a little bit of a happier person because I focus on positive things and growth constantly over kind of like consuming like we talked about so channel your obsession the yes trap we are generally programmed to say yes especially growing up it was rude to say no somebody asked for help it's rude to say no somebody invites you to something it's rude to say no but if you do that enough times you end up broke and have no time left to your life and saying no is extremely important especially saying no to things that are ongoing it's like if I say yes to a good thing playing pick a bowl every Saturday morning it's what I do well that means that I am saying no to everything else I could be doing Saturday morning ongoing unless I like choose to not go to pick a wall and the same thing applies to spending money on something saying yes to something on that how you spend your time when I realized that a yes isn't just a yes it is also a no to literally everything else when you're saying yes to watching this video you're saying no to literally anything else that you could be doing and I'm honestly super honored that you like even watching this far I hope it's valuable if it is you can drop a like and subscribe it super duper helps out the channel on the road to a million subscribers but for real when you're saying yes to one thing say no to something else if you think about every decision that way it's a game changer find your people most of the work that I do is me alone in my room with the kids playing outside I don't know if you can hear that and if you do anything like me then you might realize that isolation is a real thing and so over the first couple years of doing what I do now I just did it alone by myself everything is just by myself and when I started to branch out and meet other people and try to find people who bring me up it really helped me earn a lot more helped me focus it improved my productivity and it was just finding people who are in a better spot than me who I can learn from and surrounding myself with them going on I now have like a mastermind call that I've been doing monthly for like a couple years now with people who all make more money than me and are smarter than me and I can learn from and that really gives me inspiration and inspires me helps me earn more unlocks new ideas that I wouldn't have before and it all just comes from finding your group of people that you can all rise up together with as opposed to doing it on your own so if you don't have positive influences in your life for spending for fitness for productivity and everybody you know isn't really trying it's going to be really hard for you to stay motivated for the long term but if you find other people who are those kind of different people than everybody else who are really driven who are really trying to change their lives and better themselves that's where you can kind of get dragged along with them and really help yourself succeed just stick with the boring approach when it comes to money I've lost a decent amount of money on like meme coins shib doge things like that I thought I was smarter than I was and it turns out I'm not and so many people try to outsmart everybody else they try to do something different and unique and while there are ways to do that we can actually control it like starting a business real estate stuff like that when it comes to investing if you're trying to individually pick stocks or coins or anything like that most likely you're gonna lose and that's when I realized that like the research shows that the simplest way is almost always the best in anything that you do pretty much but especially in investing investing in the S&P 500 low-cost index funds beats individuals picking stocks like all the time and so that's why now I only invest in my business real estate bitcoin yeah bitcoin and pretty much like the S&P 500 and a few very select stocks that I truly understand I'll actually really focus on balancing my portfolio right now and investing more into stock so if you want to see exactly what I'm investing in you can check out blossom it's completely free app it's completely free like social media for investors it's actually like blowing up right now I'll leave a link down below totally free and you can see exactly what I invest into in real time but fair warning it's not going to be anything crazy it's just going to be what is proven mathematically to work live one behind this is something that has more or less kept me from some lifestyle inflation now there's two ways to do this one is like to live one pay raise behind so let's say you're wearing $30,000 a year you get a pay rise to $35,000 a year if you can keep your living expenses your lifestyle at that same $30,000 a year that's how you are able to build well start saving money start investing do all that type of stuff but if every time you get a raise you get a nicer house you get a car you get a newer clothes you go on an extra vacation then you end up staying at the same level like the stuff you have goes up a little bit but the stuff doesn't really matter so I've really tried to make decisions on what would two years ago me do in this situation and if I wouldn't spend the money on that thing two years ago me that I'm not going to do it with me me even though I might be making more money now or whatever if you always base your spending decisions on either a pay raise below you or a couple years ago you when hopefully you were earning less money it helps you never have to stress about money again because you're always staying behind lifestyle inflation if you enjoyed this video feel free to drop a like and subscribe super duper helps out the channel also let me know what habits have improved your wealth down below