why i don't spend money

These are five ways that I'm able to save a lot of money:

Reuse grocery bags as trash bags instead of buying them from Costco. Only do laundry after 9 PM on weekdays when electricity is the cheapest. Skip the bottled water and drink right from the tap. You could also split your toilet paper in half so it'll last twice as long.

Okay, even though I'm not that extreme, I think it's important that I open up and be completely honest about why I've become so fixated on saving money. This is a topic that is way more in-depth and way more personal than I expected to get in a video like this. But given the state of our economy, with unprecedented spending and record unhappiness, I thought this might lend some perspective on why I've just been so extreme when it comes to finances. Because this is something that I wish more people understood.

First of all, let's get this out of the way: I tend to believe that buying things, getting caught up in a consumerist lifestyle, and living to impress others is always going to be a losing battle. So instead, we should strive to reduce our expenses, reduce our extravagances, and get back to the basics of what we value the most, which for me is freedom, not things. I know it's kind of weird coming from someone like myself because, throughout the last five years, I've made more money than I ever thought was imaginable. But throughout that time, I still have not spent any money buying new clothing. I still get 15 haircuts from Great Clips. I still buy generic over name brand at the grocery store, and I still make coffee at home. Not to mention, I still smash the like button for the YouTube algorithm.

Okay, I gotta put it somewhere, so I'm putting it here: If you haven't done it already, it helps out a lot. Thank you! Anyway, I'm sure most people hear this and they think I'm a bit crazy. And to be honest, I'm certainly eccentric when it comes to finances. I am by far an extreme on both sides of the spectrum. Because, on the one hand, my income is really high, and on the other hand, I do everything possible to keep my personal expenses as low as I can. That's not normal, and I don't expect everyone to live as though they're constantly pinching pennies for the rest of their life.

But I do also believe that there's a sense of tranquility that comes with having really low overhead, saving money, and not having a lot of clutter that's weighing you down. And throughout the last few years of operating like this, I have learned a lot. Let me explain.

First of all, having any type of financial overhead just stresses me out. Like having a huge mortgage, or giant car payments, or anything else that I'm financially obligated to makes me feel trapped and like I'm on a hamster wheel just running to keep it going. It's almost as though the joy just gets zapped away when the moment sinks in that you realize you're signing away years or even decades of your life just to pay for a lifestyle that you never really needed in the first place.

Having that type of stress causes me to resent the work I do, and it stifles my creativity of pursuing my passions. It just takes the fun out of it. Like, what's the point of owning all of these things if you're obligated to work the next 30 years, 80 hours a week, just to pay for it? To me, that idea just never made any sense. It would feel like a prison.

That's why I've always preferred a financially minimalist lifestyle where I never personally spend any more money than my investments make. That way, anything that I purchase is sustainable. The less financial obligation I have, the more freedom I have. The more freedom I have, the less stress I have. The less stress I have, the happier I am to pursue more fulfilling and creative work.

Now, as somebody who grew up without money to then going and making a lot of it, I'll tell you what all of those savings get you: It's options, that's it. Money is not for the purpose of flaunting. It's not for the purpose of trying to impress people on the Internet. It's not for the purpose of trying to fill your self-worth or feeling a sense of superiority because you have more of it. But it does give you options, and that's worth more than I ever could have imagined.

For me, that was the option of never being tied down to a job that I hated. It was having the ability to pursue the things that meant the most for me, or do the things that make me the happiest, which lately is working out in the backyard, drinking iced coffee, and watching the birds hatch. That's something that never would have been possible if I had to work a job I despised just to keep up with the luxuries that I had grown accustomed to.

From that, I knew that going and buying luxury items is not going to give me more options. Going out on weekends, blowing all of my money is not going to give me more freedom. And splurging on a home I could barely afford was not going to give me the flexibility to be able to walk away as soon as it became unenjoyable. That's why I chose to save as much as I could, knowing that each and every day I'm stacking the odds in my favor of being able to take advantage of whatever comes my way and deciding to take whatever path that I feel is best.

This is really at the core of the entire culture of the FIRE movement, which stands for Financially Independent, Retired Early. This is a community and a mindset that you don't need to be 65 years old to retire. If you track your expenses, live below your means, save as much income as you can, and build your wealth to the point where eventually you could live off your investments forever, something about that was really intriguing to me. Because when I first came across that concept at 20 years old, it just clicked that this was the path to eventually living life on your own terms, around your own schedule, doing things that you want to do when you want to do them.

And all of a sudden it was no longer crazy to want to save all of my income, because every dollar that I saved got me one dollar closer to eventually making that a reality. This also gave me a really strong objective to work towards. Like, I knew that one day I wanted all of my investments to cover my overhead, and from that point on, that became my entire motivation for investing.

Like, I remember after I bought my first rental property, I started making about thirty dollars a day in net income. And I thought to myself that worked out to be the equivalent of 5.62 cents every single hour if I worked a nine to five job Monday through Friday. I know it sounds kind of funny, but I also thought to myself that that thirty dollars a day also works out to be a free all-you-can-eat sushi every single day for the rest of my life, which was really cool to think about. And that lit the fire underneath me just to keep going.

Pretty soon, I wanted to expand my investments to eventually cover the cost of my gym membership, my phone bill, car insurance, groceries, you name it. At the time, I literally made a list of every single one of my monthly expenses, and then I came up with a plan of how I was able to make enough money to buy investments to pay for all of them. All of a sudden from that point on, money took on a slightly different meaning.

Like, if I got a commission check for fifteen thousand dollars, I never really saw that as fifteen thousand dollars anymore. Instead, my entire focus was that fifteen thousand dollars could buy me eighty-seven dollars a year for the rest of my life if I invested it at a seven percent return in a rental property. That was enough to pay for my high-speed internet bill forever, and that was one more item that I could check off the list, and then I could move on to the next one.

For me moving forward, every check that I received was simply viewed as, "How much money would this make me if I invested it, and what item could I check off the list?" I then continued to grow that amount until eventually I covered all of my expenses, which back then at the time was about thirty-two hundred dollars a month. And once that happens, things really began to take off.

For one, it became very fun seeing how much money I could save by reducing my expenses. I rationalized that if I could find a way to reduce my spending by a hundred dollars a month, that meant that I needed twenty thousand dollars less invested to be able to cover it. Once that hit me, I began scouring everything I could to find what I didn't absolutely need or anything that I could find at a cheaper price. And I quickly found the basics in terms of what makes me the happiest.

Second, doing all of that took the pressure off of not only work but just life. All of a sudden, all these doors began to open up because it allowed me to focus on the parts of my work that I enjoyed the most and wanted to do just because it was fun. Like, as a real estate agent, I became so much less stressed in terms of whether or not a client was going to buy a home or if a deal fell through because the home didn't inspect well, or if an investment opportunity just didn't pan out.

Now, don't get the wrong idea because that didn't mean I wasn't disappointed, but it took the pressure off of needing something to happen. It all be enough. That type of attitude helped me make more money because all of a sudden those clients didn't feel the pressure of me having to make something work. They could just sense that I enjoyed working with them. I was really happy for the opportunity to be there and that was it. There was no ulterior motive.

This also allowed me to be more aggressive in terms of pursuing good real estate deals and not being afraid to walk away if it just didn't pencil out. I didn't care.

And third, without that type of financial freedom, I never would have created this YouTube channel or pursued it to the degree that made it successful. You know, I've never really gotten into the full story, but for years I've wanted to make YouTube videos. There was something so special about the idea of being able to creatively express yourself anywhere in the world, no matter who you were. That just sounded amazing.

And after a long time of putting it off, in late 2016, I posted my first video about how I got started in real estate. No joke, from that moment on, I just intuitively felt that this was the path that I should be pursuing. Even though at the time it made absolutely no money, it was purely a passion project that I wanted to work on because I enjoyed it. It was just my idea of fun to hyper-fixate on creating assistant videos, talking about the topics I was interested in, and learning what did well with the algorithm, even if that meant being financially irresponsible by not taking on extra business as a real estate agent. But I could afford to do that since money wasn't the driving force.

Now, on the other hand, had I been spending ten thousand dollars a month on this luxurious lifestyle that everyone else was getting accustomed to, I wouldn't have been able to risk my entire real estate career to pursue something else. But because I lived so frugally, because I didn't have all of those things, I didn't have to worry about the financial repercussions of pursuing a passion project because I wanted to.

And for those next six years, I continued saving everything that I possibly could, knowing that whenever the next thing came around, I would be able to follow it because frugality has always given me those choices in the past.

Now, that is not to say that I still split toilet paper to save a few cents. I've certainly loosened up my spending in the last few years, but I've been able to focus on things that add the most internal value to my life for myself. Now I'm happy to spend money on my acquire, happy hour sushi, a movie, heating up the jacuzzi, getting plants for the backyard, a fun weekend trip, or paying for the convenience of being able to have more time.

The way I see it is that frugality is all about cutting back on things that don't make a difference and putting those towards things that you value the most. For each of us, that's going to be different than what matters to me; you might not care about at all and vice versa. But if you could learn to live on less, cut back on what you don't need, spend more on the things that you do find the best value possible for the experience, and invest the difference, I think you could easily set yourself up for a future where you could do whatever you want whenever you want.

And the way I see it is that that's the entire goal of financial minimalism and frugality. So with that said, you guys, thank you so much for watching. As always, feel free to add me on Snapchat or Instagram, and don't forget that you could get a free stock worth all the way up to a thousand dollars with their paid sponsor of public.com down below in the description with the code Graham.

Enjoy! Let me know what stock you get. Thank you so much for watching and until next time.