The only way to stop being broke

There's a very good chance that if you're watching this video and you are a person who lives in the year 2023, you don't have as much money as you probably want to have. It's difficult times right now. I've always been pretty good at making money. I've always found a way to somehow acquire money, but I've always been horrible at keeping it. No matter how much money I made, I always found a way to live paycheck to paycheck. Somehow, I just couldn't figure out how people accumulate wealth.

And that is until first year of university when I read this book called "The Richest Man in Babylon." I'd have one earbud in during my downtime at work listening to "The Richest Man in Babylon," and I remember my mind slowly being blown. It completely shifted my mindset towards how money even works. It really acted as the catalyst, the game changer that shifted the trajectory of my financial reality and helped me end up where I am today.

So I want to share with you guys some of the key takeaways that I learned from "The Richest Man in Babylon" so that hopefully by the end of this year, you will have more money in your bank account and your financial future will end up looking a lot more optimistic. The only way that you're going to work your way out of financial misery is if you stop falling for the biggest money mistake. What is the biggest money mistake? Well, it's not this cute little thing. It's not this little mistake that, you know, haha silly me. It's so much bigger than you think.

So let me paint a picture. It's kind of the only way of understanding it. Let's pretend that you are a little kid again. You're nine years old, and you really lucked out because it's your full-time job to play Chuck E. Cheese games. You go to Chuck E. Cheese, you play whack-a-mole, you drain the hoops, shoot the guys. I don't know what you do at Chuck E. Cheese; I haven't been there since I was nine years old. But that is now your full-time job. As a nine-year-old, you work there all day, nine to five, Monday through Friday.

At the end of each day, you're given the Chuck E. Cheese tickets, and as a nine-year-old, you're probably very excited. You're thinking, "Man, I'm making so much damn ticket money. I can afford all of these cool prizes at the Chuck E. Cheese prize counter." Your entire mind is occupied by this. It's occupied by the amount of tickets that you have and what you can purchase at the prize counter with the tickets that you have. Everybody in the world is playing this game with money. We are all in Chuck E. Cheese. We are under the illusion that we are getting paid with Chuck E. Cheese tickets, and the only thing to do with the Chuck E. Cheese tickets is to buy Chuck E. Cheese prizes.

But when you think this way, you are living in The Matrix. You are not aware of the fact that you're actually getting paid in cash, and you can step outside of Chuck E. Cheese and spend money on whatever you want. You know, it sounds overly simple and kind of ridiculous when I put it this way, but this is exactly what keeps people financially stuck. It's because they slave away for ten dollars an hour, eight hours a day, forty hours a week at the trinket shop, and then they come home. We start thinking about all these cool trinkets that we can buy with our money that we earned from working at the trinket shop.

And this is extra sinister because the trinket shop actually makes more money off of you than you make off of them. Because when you work at the trinket shop, you are worth more than ten dollars an hour to them. Otherwise, they wouldn't pay you; you would be a net loss to them. So for all of the time and effort and sweat you invest into the trinket shop, they give you a little bit in return, and then you somehow fall for the ruse and convince yourself to give the money right back to the trinket shop by buying trinkets.

Everything that you watch on the TV when you get home, every billboard that you see on your drive home from work is just talking about trinkets again. Ooh, look at this little trinket you can buy even though you just spent all day serving the trinket shop, and the trinket owners ask you to give your money back to the trinket shop. That's how you get stuck.

The question is, how do we break free of this cycle? There's only one way, really, and that is to pay yourself first. This is one of the biggest takeaways from "The Richest Man in Babylon." If you pay yourself first, you make ten dollars from working at the trinket shop every day. Just take one. This one is for you and for you alone. Okay? You take this, you put it in a different account first, and then you use this to buy trinkets. Do whatever the hell you want with this; you got to pay rent, right? You know, rent's like all of it. There's like internet and phone bill, and you're out again.

But at least you paid yourself first. Ten percent may sound like such a small amount, but if you save ten percent, you will be doing more than most people do. Most people don't save anything because they feel like they can't. But in reality, most people have a Netflix subscription, a Disney Plus subscription, blah blah blah, right? And they go to Starbucks or they go to Tim Hortons here in Canada, McDonald's. Everybody manages to hemorrhage money. It's because if you are an average person, then you fall right into the demographic of buying things that you don't need. Your money is going to go to the emperors of the world no matter what; it's just gonna happen. It's the way the world is structured.

But if you pay yourself first, you will find a way to save a little bit on groceries, a little bit on coffee. Human beings are super adaptable. If you learned that, okay, next month you're going to make 90 of what you normally make, you would find a way to make it work. You always do. You're still here; we are survivors. We're in a situation economically where you really have to bet on yourself because nobody's going to do it for you.

It's crucial that you pay yourself one dollar for every ten dollars that you make. You put it into an account that you cannot and will not spend on anything other than things that can potentially yield a return. We'll get into that later, but at the very least, it sits in an account that you don't touch. You don't waste it away on everything else. That money is for you; it's yours and yours to keep.

Okay, so let's summarize what we've learned so far, and then let's move on to the next most important thing. Number one, we are not at Chuck E. Cheese. Number two, the only way to escape the nightmare of the trinket shop tyranny is to pay yourself first. Then the next most important thing is to increase your ability to earn. Once you've gotten into the habit of continually saving as much as you can, paying yourself first before you pay anyone else, then the only way to increase your wealth or to increase the rate in which you accumulate this stack of cash that you have and you don't touch, is to increase the income coming in.

So how do you do that? The easiest way is through education. Now, I don't mean you have to spend four years and tens of thousands of dollars getting a college degree because we live in the information age. There are so many marketable skills that you can learn online for free without the need to pay a cent. A perfect example of this is video editing. So I know a guy who I know quite well. I might even be watching this video and be like, "Hey, that's me!" He just learned video editing basically this year, you know, dabbled a little bit in the past and it led to, you know, a four to six month stint working as a video editor for some company.

Now he has that on his resume, and now he can go get another video editing job. People want things that are popular. Video content is extremely popular. You'll learn how to do Photoshop; you can pose as a thumbnail expert. People are hitting up my DMs all the time saying, "Hey, do you want YouTube Shorts?" People pay money for that kind of thing. You know, you look around you. You're here on YouTube; you're watching a video. Someone edits video; someone makes videos. Be the guy who knows a little bit more than your average person on how to produce video content and boom, you have a job that's in demand.

Learn how to do things. Okay? Learn how to make things, how to build things, and monitor what you're consuming with whatever you input into your brain on a daily basis. You have to ask yourself, is this helping me grow? Is this helping me expand my expertise and my usefulness to the world and the value that I can add to people, or is it just keeping me distracted and entertained? Because the bar is so low.

Like if you don't fill your time constantly with TikTok and YouTube, you are so far ahead of the pack in 2023. Just find ways to just not be on these platforms all the time, and you're well ahead of everybody else. And then have the added upgrade of educating yourself on, you know, how certain creative things work. How to start copywriting. Maybe how to leverage AI to make creative content. Stick your finger in the air, analyze where the wind is blowing, start working on what's popular and figure out more about it, and you'll be surprised as to how many people want to pay money for people like you who know what to do.

And also ask yourself and reflect on what is occupying your mind. Like what are you excited by, motivated by? And that might sound like meaningless mindset gobbledygook, but it really is everything. What you are preoccupied with and excited by reveals what your incentive structure is. You know, are you excited about the new Bethesda game that's never going to come out, or are you excited about financial freedom, spending time with people you care about, you know, your spiritual well-being, your social well-being? Like, where is your mind at? Because the answers to these questions often reveal where you're gonna end up months and years down the line.

Okay, before we dive into the next takeaway, I just want to give a big thank you to Audible for sponsoring this video. And I'm extremely excited that this video is sponsored by Audible specifically because an Audible subscription is exactly what I'm talking about in terms of like a high value return on investment. Like instead of spending the exact same amount of money on your sixth streaming service subscription where you can watch 68 episodes of a poorly written show that's going down the gutter, why not spend that on something that gives you access to some of the greatest insights ever recorded?

You know, audiobooks like "The Richest Man in Babylon" that will get you thinking about ways that you can change your financial situation. And for those of you who don't know, Audible is the leading provider of spoken word entertainment and audiobooks all in one place. Every single month, you receive one credit, which you can spend on any audiobook of your choice, regardless of price, and you get to keep that audiobook forever. And you also get access to a rapidly expanding catalog of Audible Originals, podcasts, and exclusive series.

So if you're interested in joining me in becoming big brain and expanding your mind, then if you use my link in the description below or text "better ideas" to 500-500, then you'll get a free 30-day trial. And also in August, I'll be going live here on YouTube discussing "The Charisma Myth." So if you head on over to Audible or if you already have an Audible account, download "The Charisma Myth" because we're going to be talking about that on the channel, and I think it'll just be a really good time. It's the first time I'm doing something like this here on YouTube. So once again, head on over to audible.com/betterideas or text "better ideas" to 500-500 to get your free 30-day trial.

Thanks again to Audible for sponsoring this video. Oh, hey, Joey from the future here. I totally forgot to film this part, so here we go. As we talked about earlier, you save your money, right? So as you're escaping The Matrix, you're starting to develop this pocket of wealth for yourself. You're saving one dollar for every ten dollars that you make so that you're slowly making your gold pouch fatter. What do you do with it? Do you just let it sit there? Well, you know what's funny is if you did nothing else and you just let the money sit there and you didn't invest it, you didn't let the money work for you, you would still be doing so much more than most people. Most people don't save anything.

But I do want to say that saving, while it is so much better than not saving, it's also the second worst thing you can do with your money. The worst thing is to not save at all. The second worst thing you can do is to just save it and do nothing with it. And the reason why that's bad—well, I mean, it's good—but the reason why it's not optimal is because when your money sits in the bank, you actually lose money over time. I mean, you gain money over time, assuming that you're, you know, saving it, but you actually lose a lot of money due to inflation year after year. Because of inflation, your dollar, even though the dollar amount is constant, the dollar value, the weight of the dollar, is going down over time; it's inevitable.

So you're actually losing money; you're slowly leaking it when it sits in the bank. Another important point to make is that when your money just sits in a savings account in the bank, it's not actually sitting in a savings account in the bank, right? This isn't the olden days where you had sacks of gold and you gave it to a bank and it's just sitting there. You know, you can open up the vault again and take your money out whenever you want. What's actually happening is you're loaning your money to the bank, and the bank is doing what you should be doing with your money, but they're doing it instead. And that's how they make a profit. That's how the banks make money; they borrow your money, and they invest it and grow the money, and they say, "Oh, yeah, you know what? We're just paying for security so when you want your money again, you can take it out."

But that's not always the case. You know, the Great Depression proved that. If you've ever seen the movie, "It's a Wonderful Life," you know, there could be a bank run, and you can't take your money out. The bank goes, "Sorry, we lost all of your money because the economy crashed." You can't do anything about it. So I think that's why it's crucial that while it is better than nothing to have your money sitting in the bank, you should start learning how to invest.

And I will never give you investment advice because I'm not an expert, but I will give you just a vague idea of what I'm doing. Essentially, what I do is I diversify. Right? So instead of having 100% of my money in the bank, I'm currently building a property where property value is high. I understand not everyone has the luxury to do that, but you know, I'll at least have some land that I can call my own that has no mortgage on it. I really want to get into buying some gold, you know, some actual, you know, tangible things that are out there, as well as put money in index funds and whatever. In the States, you have 401ks or whatever.

But the point being is that the only way that you're going to learn how to invest is by investing. You're going to lose your money because you're not a pro at it. But "The Richest Man in Babylon" has a lot of great advice about seeking advice. You'll start to gain a lot of wisdom about evaluating the types of people that have the highest probability of helping you out and giving you sound investment advice and sort of making yourself immune to "it's too good to be true" type situations.

Get rich quick schemes are schemes. The only way to get rich quick is to offer genuine value to people, to help people out. You either have to help a lot of people solve a small problem or help a few people solve a big problem. And if you really luck out, you help a lot of people solve a big problem, but it's not as easy as it sounds. So if you want to get rich, you know, maybe you help a few people solve a big problem or a medium-sized problem. Maybe you invest in a pressure washer for five hundred dollars. Maybe you knock door to door on people's doors because you knock on doors when you go door to door, and you say, "Hey, I notice your driveway is really dirty. I'll pressure wash it for a hundred bucks." And they'll say, "Oh, 100 bucks, that's super cheap!" or they'll say, "100 bucks, that's a rip-off! My driveway is super small." You never know until you try.

If you pressure wash four driveways during the summer, then you pay for your pressure washer back. See, investing doesn't always have to be into the stock market. There are ways where you can invest in yourself. You know, maybe you buy two pressure washers, three pressure washers. Maybe you start charging two hundred dollars. You start paying a friend to help you with the pressure washing company. You take a little bit of the cut because you invented the company, and you scale. You know, there are so many ways to invest in assets that will make you money. You just have to be creative, and you have to be engaged.

You have to fill your mind with good ideas from, you know, audiobooks, YouTube videos, online courses, talking with people who are knowledgeable. You know, start occupying your mind with inventive ideas and then go and take action on them. That's the most important thing. So step one, like I said, be aware that you're in The Matrix. Step two, or Chuck E. Cheese or whatever, step two is to escape Chuck E. Cheese. Start paying yourself first, developing a little money pouch on the side that's growing and growing and growing and adding and adding and adding. And all of a sudden, while you're living a very similar lifestyle—it's a lifestyle 90% similar to how you were living—except the only difference is that you have an accumulation of wealth growing.

And then with that wealth, start educating yourself on how to make the money work for you. Diversify so you're not just keeping everything in the bank. Maybe this is stuff you've heard a million times before, but if you are an average person, you're not doing it. Statistically, you're not doing these things. So really start with step one and step two and step three. It doesn't have to be perfect, but the enemy of good is perfect. Perfect is the enemy of good. Something like that.

Take care, guys. If you're investing, let me know in the comment section below what you're investing in. Are you banking everything on crypto, on a niche coin that you're hoping blows up? Why is that not a get-rich scheme? I want to know these things. I want to learn from you guys. Hopefully, this video gives you some ideas that, you know, hopefully it just simplifies things for you. Personal finance does not need to be super complicated. If you do the basics and you nail the basics, you're doing so much better than most people.

But most people fail at the basics, and then they look for the super complicated get-rich schemes while they're simultaneously hemorrhaging money due to lifestyle inflation and they're never saving anything or paying themselves first or developing any kind of wealth in the background. So nail the fundamentals and then go to the financial experts of YouTube and try to find the best way to help your money make you money. Other than that, though, guys, thank you so much for watching this video as per usual.

And I have a favor to ask of you. If you are on Instagram anyways, please follow the Better Ideas Instagram because I really want to start a podcast and I want to get the highest quality guests possible. But my presence is so small on Instagram because I barely use it. And, um, you know, I plan on using it more, but when I slide into people's DMs that I want to talk to, you know, I just get ignored because I have like no presence on Instagram. So merely as a tool to help me reach interesting people, go ahead and follow me on Instagram at Better Ideas so that I can secure the coolest, most badass and interesting guests on the secret podcast I am developing.

Other than that, guys, good luck. If you're in a bad financial place, it can get better. No matter how bad the economy is around you, there are always outliers, people who can change their situation through hard work and determination and just the right information. You know, maybe you've been given bad information, and hopefully this is kind of simplifying things for you and gives you encouragement to help you develop wealth slowly but surely so that you can escape whatever situation that you're in.

And if you think I'm completely oversimplifying things, fair enough. Let me know why in the comments section below. Because yeah, I'm not a finance guy, so maybe I just have a terrible take on all of this, but, um, you know, these overly simple methods are working really well for me. Recently, I just find that simplifying things just works better for my brain. So let me know all of these things. Looking forward to talking to you guys in the future, and uh, stay hungry. I don't know what do I usually say—that's all for today. Thank you so much for watching, and we'll catch you in the next video.