How I Save 100% Of My Income

What's up you guys? It's Graham here. Sir, yes, the Tyler you read is correct. For the last several years, I have been able to save 100 percent of my income. Now, let me explain because I don't live in a cardboard box off the one-on-one freeway. I don't eat food out of the garbage can, and I don't live off the grid. I just take a bicycle everywhere. In fact, I own where I live. I go out to eat at restaurants once or twice a week, and I daily drive a Mercedes. You can too, if you get a sugar mama. Just kidding about that last part!

But seriously though, let's break down how I'm able to do this and how this is even possible in the first place. Now, I understand the topics and claims like this tend to get rather, let's say, unusual comments, so just go into this with an open mind and just hear me out. Annoyingly, what I did was the exact same strategy that Jay Leno used when he was building up his 350 million dollar fortunes. So, let me explain.

So anyway, here's how this is even possible in the first place. For those that have stuck around for quite some time or watched my older videos, you know that I preach and practice a few basic things. The first thing is to live below your means, cut back on your spending, and save as much as possible. Then, from there, invest as much of those savings as you possibly can. Doing this consistently long-term is really what leads to financial independence.

Now, this is something that I've been doing since I was 18 years old. I was really the weird type of kid who got more enjoyment from saving and investing his money than I ever did by spending it. For me, saving was something that was not only like a monetary benefit, but it also turned into being more like a personal challenge. It really became like a game to me to see how much money I could save and how much money I could just not spend. This was my weird idea of fun; like I get I was weird.

Now, after about three and a half to four years of doing this, working as a real estate agent full-time, I basically just had a chunk of cash that was just sitting in a savings account. So, I decided at that time I should really do something with it. Now, working as a real estate agent, I felt like the logical choice from that is just to go and invest in real estate and buy rental properties. It was really after that point in 2013 where I really took my saving and spending to an extreme.

Because I meticulously started tracking every dollar that went in my account and every dollar that went out of my account, I knew exactly where my money was going and how much was coming in and exactly where I could cut back and budget. Then, in 2015, after seven years of doing all of this, I noticed something unique happening when I was tracking my income and expenses. I realized that I was actually saving 100 percent of the money I made for my day job, which was working as a real estate agent. Basically, my rental income grew to a point that it was enough to cover all of my living expenses, which allowed me to pretty much save 100 percent of the money I made elsewhere.

Now, keep in mind at the time I wasn't living like a baller by any means. It wasn't like I was going out every night to like 5-star restaurants. I wasn't getting bottle service; I wasn't traveling first-class. I would even park a few blocks away and walk to where I was going if that meant I didn't have to pay for parking and it was free. I would even go and wait for sales at H&M for the five-dollar rack instead of spending money at Gucci.

Regardless of this, I never felt deprived or anything like that, and I really took enjoyment in just saying how much money I could save and invest instead. But it was really being able to see that I was able to save 100 percent of the income that I made as a real estate agent that was super encouraging to me. Knowing that the first seven years of saving as much as I could, living below my means, and just investing everything was really starting to pay off.

So, what I'd end up doing is just simply dumping all of the money I had saved up from working as a real estate agent back into investments. Then all of a sudden, those investments would start generating a little bit more money. That meant that every month, I was making a little bit more money, and I'd spend a little bit more money. Every single month, I would spend basically just enough to know that I could still save 100 percent of the income I made working as a real estate agent and pretty much just rely on whatever the rental properties or investments generated. That way, I would still be able to save 100 percent of my income and do the same thing the next year.

Flash-forward to today, and I decided to move into my duplex so I can rent out one side and live in the other. Now, after the rent I receive on that, the equity I get from paying down the mortgage, and all the tax write-offs, this duplex is pretty much an entirely free place for me to live. Now, my thinking here is that I could basically keep my spending on par with whatever the rental properties generate, which then allows me to go and reinvest everything else I make into making more rental income, which just increases my lifestyle a little bit each and every year.

This is also the strategy that I would like to begin calling the Jay Leno savings method, and here's why. When Jay Leno first began working, he'd always have two sources of income. He would decide to save one of those sources and spend the other, and he always chose to spend the lower income source. By the time he was working at a car dealership, his comedy career began taking off, and all of a sudden he was earning way more money from his comedy career than he ever was at the car dealership. But despite this, his saving strategy didn't change. He would save all the money he made on his comedy career and would only spend what he made from working at the car dealership.

Now, if you think his strategy ends there because now Jay Leno just makes it sound of money from everything, think again. Even though he was making upwards of thirty million dollars a year hosting the Tonight Show on NBC, he still made sure to do one hundred and fifty comedy gigs a year so he would never have to touch that income. Even today, he claims that he has never touched a dime of that Tonight Show principle. This is pretty much the exact same strategy that I have used as well, except my side gig is basically investing in rental property, and my main gig is working as a real estate agent.

Now, even though I now make several hundred thousand dollars per year plus whatever I make off YouTube, I still keep my expenses the exact same as pretty much just a few years ago. Regardless of how much money I make elsewhere, as long as my rental properties can cover it 100 percent, here's a quick breakdown of my current expenses just to give you an idea of how I live. I lease a Mercedes as a daily driver for four hundred and eighty dollars per month. The insurance for that Mercedes and my Lotus Exige, which is sitting right here, runs about one hundred and eighty dollars per month. I also pay health insurance at one hundred and eighty dollars per month. My cell phone every single month is eighty-two dollars a month. I spend fifty dollars a month for internet. My utilities every single month run about one hundred dollars for gas, water, and electricity. My gym membership is about two hundred dollars per month. My food bill runs about three hundred dollars every single month, give or take. Let's just throw in another four hundred dollars for just random stuff that might come up throughout the month. This brings my monthly personal expenses to really just about twenty-one hundred dollars per month, which my rental properties easily cover, plus plenty of extra profit leftover on top of that.

Anything else that I buy at this point is purely discretionary, and it's enough for my rental properties to generate. Then, everything I don't spend, I just save that extra money, and it builds up. Then, I just end up reinvesting it. I also end up using credit card churning and credit card points to travel for free. For instance, I booked a one-week trip to Hawaii in October that is paid for entirely with credit card bonus points.

Now, keep in mind I'm not counting my realtor expenses in that figure because simply that is a cost of just making money in that business. If for whatever reason I stopped working as a real estate agent, those costs would disappear entirely. So, that's why I count that entirely separately as just an actual business expense. Because of that, I'm really just focused on my personal expenses that I can directly control, and these are expenses that are not out there to make me even more money.

So for all of you watching, it's very important to do these few things if you want to begin replicating exactly what I've done as well. The first thing is to track everything that you spend. Most people never do this, and it's often those very small five to twenty dollar daily charges that add up to a huge amount over time. I personally end up using personalcapital.com or mint.com to track everything. I know every dollar that comes in, every dollar that I spend, where it's going, what it's for, why I've spent the money on what I've spent. It's so important to first, beyond anything else, track your expenses.

Now, the second thing you need to do after you've tracked all of your expenses is to review all of those and figure out what you don't need and what you can cut back on. For instance, I don't need to pay for cable or TV as long as I have an internet connection; that's good enough for me. I don't need to go to Starbucks for anything; instead, I make coffee at home, and personally, I think I make it way better than what Starbucks makes. I also don't run the air conditioner anytime I'm not home. I don't leave lights on when I'm not around or don't need to, and I wait for sales any time I want to buy clothes or I want to buy something. I'll wait for it to go on sale rather than spend full price on something if I really didn't need it right then and there. It's all of these little tiny things that just add up and multiply to a much greater amount long-term, over time.

Now, the third thing you then need to do once you've tracked your expenses and cut back on as much as you can is now focusing on increasing your income. The reality is that sometimes cutting back isn't enough if you're simply not making enough money in the first place. If this is the case and it looks like you need to make more money, then there's no way around it; like you need to make more money. Now, my entire channel is pretty much geared around making money, so I won't go into too much detail on this topic, but I highly recommend you guys check out some of my other videos. There are plenty of opportunities out there if you want to take on a side gig, if you want to start an online business, if you want to increase your skills to work more hours, if you want to get a higher paying job, whatever it might be. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of ways out there that you can work to increase your income to make more money.

So, number four: If you don't think you have enough time to make more money, then you really need to audit how productive you actually are during the day. In most cases, you're wasting your time somewhere. It's either spent watching TV, watching wasteful YouTube videos, sleeping a little bit longer than you should, or doing things that don't really add or benefit your day. I guarantee if you really looked at how you spent each and every hour, you would find out during the average day that you don't get nearly as much done as you think you do, and you're wasting a lot of time doing stuff that doesn't really benefit you long-term.

The truth is often that when you want something bad enough, you will make the sacrifices to get what you want. If you don't end up making those sacrifices, then to you it wasn't really worth it in the first place and that you would rather watch TV or do something unproductive than do something that would better yourself because you simply enjoy doing those other things more. Now, there's nothing wrong with that; to each their own. But at the same time, you can't complain or you can't say that you don't have enough time and use that as an excuse when in reality just a few minor cutbacks and a few minor sacrifices would get you exactly what you want.

Now, the fifth thing you need to do is to be able to save and invest consistently long-term. This is not meant to be something where you do it for a few weeks or a few months and then you get tired of it and you stop, and then you revert back to the way you were. This is really meant to be a very long-term strategy, and it's really meant to be more like a lifestyle than really just like a temporary diet.

Now, I totally understand that this lifestyle isn't for everybody. For some reason, people tend to get very angry in the comments section when they see videos like this and see a 28-year-old saving 100 percent of his income, and then they get very vocal and basically yell over their keyboard like, "This is so stupid; you should live while you still can. You can die tomorrow; you should live it up in your 20s." Dislike unsaid and honestly, that's totally fine. We're each entitled to our own perspective of what we would do if we were in that situation. For some people, they might agree with me; other people might think it's very stupid to save all of their money. But to each their own, and I really believe there's no right or wrong.

If you want to end up doing what I'm doing, you really have to understand that this is really meant to be a lifestyle, not just a temporary phase. Doing this also doesn't come without a considerable amount of self-discipline to hold yourself back to think in the long term about delayed gratification. Imagine being 20 years old with like a hundred and eighty thousand dollars saved up in your bank account. How easy do you think it is to go and get a high-rise apartment, buy a Lamborghini, buy Gucci clothes, and live it up like no other 20-year-old and be the coolest 20-year-old on the planet? How hard do you think that was to hold back from doing that and instead throw all of that money in a rental property that no one could really see, but I know it would benefit me long-term?

You want the number six, and this is probably the most important from anything I talked about. Most people fall into this, including myself. This is probably the hardest thing to avoid, and that is lifestyle inflation. Typically, what I see happening is that people are living fairly comfortable, making, let's say, $40,000 per year, and from that, they're able to save four hundred dollars per month. But what ends up bending is that all of a sudden, maybe a year later, they get a raise to $60,000 per year. Does their savings increase for the difference? The answer is usually no. Instead, now they’re making $60,000 per year and somehow they’re spending whatever the difference is, and they’re still saving the same four hundred dollars every single month. Then let’s take that again to an extreme. Let’s say now they’re earning $90,000 per year.

Well, you would think that their salary has more than doubled, and because of that, they should be able to save an extra 35 or 40 thousand dollars per year; do they? No. For some reason, a lot of people end up still on the brink of living nearly paycheck to paycheck even though their income has doubled, and their savings usually just don't increase as much as their income has. So even though they're making now double the money, they're barely saving any more than they did when they were making $40,000 a year.

The important thing here is that if you get a raise or if you start making more money, live exactly as you have been, but just save the difference. If you live exactly how you have been, nothing changes except now you could accelerate your path to financial independence. Don’t get caught up in lifestyle inflation because once you do, it’s very easy to get sucked into it. I’ve made sure to keep my spending pretty much the same, regardless of how much money I make elsewhere.

Now lastly, even though these strategies work for everybody at any age, whether you're 16 years old or 60 years old, this is a special message for everyone who is young and watching. Now is the time to take this to an extreme while it's still socially acceptable for you to live like a broke college student. Your 20s were really such a great time to do this, because nobody questions it; they assume that you just had nothing to begin with. But little do they know, you were sitting there quietly building that investment empire.

So, with that said, that is exactly how I've been able to save 100 percent of my income and why I will continue to save 100 percent of my income for the long foreseeable future. So as always you guys, thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate it. If you guys enjoy videos like this, make sure before you click out of this video just smash that like button; it really means the world to me. If you guys enjoy content like this, it also tells me you want to see more like it. So make sure to smash that like button! Also, make sure to smash that subscribe button if you haven't already.

Then go over and smash that notification bell so you could be a part of the notification squad, and maybe one day you can be the first comment! Also, make sure to add me on Snapchat and Instagram. I post there pretty much daily, so if you want to be a part of it, feel free to add me there. Lastly, for anyone who's interested in real estate, real estate agent in real estate wholesaling, investing in real estate, if you want anything real estate related, I have a private Facebook group in the description. We're probably going to hit 10,000 members pretty soon, so if you want to be a part of that, just add yourself to that group. Thank you again for watching, and until next time!