Day In The Life of a Millennial Millionaire

What's up guys, it's Graham here! So this is a video that I've been meaning to make for over two years now because so many of you guys have asked me to film a day in the lifestyle vlog. Well, I guess now is the perfect time to film that video because with the stay-at-home order in effect right now in California, I felt like this would be a great way to show you my normal workday, how I make money, and how I spend my time since I work primarily from home and I don't really leave the house much anyway.

And for anyone who's brand new to the channel, my name is Graham Stefan. I built my career working as a real estate agent starting at the age of 18 years old. I used all that money to go and buy rental properties. I lived extremely frugally to then maximize the amount of money that I could save and then reinvest back into more real estate. And after almost a decade of doing that, I created this YouTube channel to share my passions towards investing, personal finance, credit cards, saving money, living below your means, and trying to find really creative ways to get you guys to smash the like button for the YouTube algorithm.

But seriously, here's an inside look into my average day, and I gotta make this so much more than just a vlog. I'll give you my thoughts on the current situation right now, what's been going on with my rental properties, and what it's like to stay inside pretty much non-stop and everything else under the roof. No, I was gonna say everything else under the sun, but since we're inside, I'm gonna say roof. Don't worry! I've got plenty of time to work on my comedy routine. Anyway, we'll begin this vlog as soon as I get out of bed in the morning, and that would be about 6:00 a.m.

And as I snap my fingers, I'm gonna be going to bed and waking up in the morning, and that will be at the time where we start the vlog. So let's do it!

Good morning guys! So it's 6 o'clock in the morning, and usually what I've noticed is that when I first wake up, I gotta do something that gets the juices going that doesn't take a lot of mental energy. So for me, in this case, it's usually going and editing. So what I'll usually do is make sure the night before I film something that I could just edit the next day. But in this case right now, I'm editing a video on the second channel of The Graham Stefan Show. So if you're watching this right now, the video is really live on that channel.

So if you want to go and check the video out that I'm editing right now, because it's now posted, because it's the future when you're seeing this, feel free to link it down below in the description. I also got to figure out and edit a thumbnail for my video "Why I'm Not Leaving California." It's just like one of these Q&A videos where I'm answering comments. I'm basically going and answering all the questions that don't deserve their own specific video because it's just a really quick answer. So instead, I've just bundled all of those together in one video. So that is what I also have to do this morning.

Alright, so I just finished editing and went to grab another cup of iced coffee, and I just realized I got some really exciting news for everybody. Just got this in the mail! Didn't realize that Emma Chamberlain apparently is a grillian iced coffee. So I went ahead and I ordered some Chamberlain iced coffee just to see what this is like, and now I could go and review it from my second channel. Because when you're at home and you really don't have much to do, what do you do? Well, I guess you review Emma Chamberlain's coffee and then you ask people to smash the like button!

So anyway, I noticed this thought I would mention it here, so you heard it here first before you see it anywhere else. Throw this over there, and then now I'm gonna be walking out to the backyard and starting to do some more research to see what's going on with the markets and how much money I've lost today. So let's go and see.

And then, of course, we have Ramsey—he has no idea what's going on right now. No, but in all honesty, I probably spend about 2-3 hours every single day just researching what's going on with the markets, the updates on the stimulus packages, what people are talking about, if Robinhood has any more drama lately, and really anything else that I think is worth discussing on YouTube.

I really try my best not to read too many headlines about this illness because once I do, I end up going down this endless rabbit hole that just scares and worries me into oblivion. And I'm sure most of you don't know, but I have asthma. It's mostly cleared up now as an adult, but still, I'm really worried that if I get it, I'm more prone to any sort of complications because of that. So I'm really trying my best not to worry about things.

I'm trying to stay upbeat; I'm really doing everything I can to stay indoors and practice social distancing. Then I just continue what I'm doing to stay focused and as productive as possible. But right now, as of this morning, I'm reading that the Fed just announced unlimited quantitative easing in order to support the markets. Or in other words, the Federal Reserve is pretty much just printing money and guaranteeing to the banks and people that they will have money and liquidity available to them whenever they need it.

They're the ones basically saying, "Oh, you're running out of money? Not a problem. How much money do you need? Oh, that's it? Well, how about this? Here's just a blank check. Tell us how much money you need, and we got you. Don't worry about it." By doing so, the Fed is trying to make our financial worries as soft as possible. But all actions like this come at a cost. And when the Fed begins printing almost unlimited money, we start to see hyperinflation, which means the value of our dollar could be worth less and less every single day.

But I suppose the Fed sees this as a lesser of two evils, and they would rather give too much money than too little. All I'm doing is reading up on everything going on. I check up on everything, and listen: not all the news out there is bad. Elon Musk just delivered 50,000 masks to a researcher's home; Daimler Volkswagen donated 110,000 masks, and many others are joining it to help.

Well, besides that, the early mornings are usually spent researching what's going on, trying to figure out what to talk about here on YouTube, and then planning it out. So I just finished up some planning and editing, and what I have to do right now is go and take a shower and get ready for my second channel phone calls at The Graham Stefan Show, where basically people call in, I answer their questions, I record it for the channel, and then people get to comment and watch that.

So yeah, so that's what I'm gonna be doing right now before I get back to other work after this. So yes—a shower and then answer phone calls. I will bring you guys along, but not to the shower, 'cause that would be weird! I'm not gonna bring you guys along to that.

So I'm just about to start these phone calls now, and my first one, his name is Matthew, and apparently he just bought his first house and then right afterward ended up losing his job. It's a pretty terrible situation, so he wants some advice on how to best navigate the situation. So anyway, give me a call, and see what's going on with this.

"Let me ask you this: how much savings do you have right now for something like this? Do you have the results?"

"No, I don't. Unfortunately, I graduated last May from college with my basic bachelor's, and I just didn't. The four years when I got out I was working for four months—I got a better offer, so I was with this next company for seven months. And I put any money that I had saved up going forward was put towards my down payment."

So I just finished the phone calls, and I'm gonna take a walk around the block. And that is really one of the things that I miss a lot is not being able to go to the gym right now and zone out and relax. So for the time being, I mean just going and taking a walk is going to have to do for my daily exercise.

Also, kind of funny, I started looking last night at buying gym equipment and getting adjustable dumbbells and stuff like that. I didn't realize that everywhere is sold out for at least like one, two, three months—it's crazy! So I guess everyone else had pretty much the same idea as me of basically going and trying to set up a home gym. So that's probably not gonna happen anytime soon.

For me, right now, it's basically gonna be two walks a day, usually for about five to ten minutes on block, and that'll be it. So I just got back from the walk, and I'm about to make myself a delicious breakfast of scrambled eggs, cheese, bagel, and cream cheese—all for the low price of just under three dollars. And then, after I finish this, I'm gonna get back to editing one of these videos that they filmed a little while ago that I'm hoping to post sometime next week.

That basically just entails me sitting there for a very long time until that finishes up. So in the middle of editing, I got a call from one of my tenants who just had his income cut in half, and because of that, he might need to end his lease a little bit early and move out sooner.

Now, in situations like this, I totally get it, and I really want to try to make it as win-win for everyone involved as possible. Although to be honest, I'm really curious how real estate is going to be affected by everything moving forward. Here's what I've noticed.

So as soon as I saw that the Fed was gonna be reducing interest rates, I went to the bank and I started the refinance process as soon as I could on one of my mortgages. At the time, I was offered to cash out a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at 2.875 percent, and as soon as I got that, I locked that in immediately.

However, within just a few days from that, the bank was completely backed up with refinance requests from everyone looking to take advantage of the really low rates, and now banks are looking at a three to four-month long waitlist for new applications. They're even turning down people who want to refinance their loans, and now because banks are having a difficult time reselling these loans, the interest rates have gone back up for new applications.

But as an owner now of seven rental properties, I gotta say it is a little bit concerning. Out of my seven properties, three of them I own outright, and the other four have a mortgage. I've always made sure to keep at least 25% in equity in every single property, and two of them have even more than 50% equity.

But still, in the event of a prolonged vacancy, it's a lot of money out of pocket every month. I have no doubt that this has the potential to get worse, and I have no idea how many people are gonna be out of a job and for how long. It definitely is a landlord, I want to do my best to keep it as happy of a resolution as possible for everyone involved, but I'm also concerned that there's a lot of landlords out there that don't have any reserves, that over-leveraged, that don't make any money—and not getting rent for a few months can completely shatter their business.

So it's definitely gonna be a very interesting time for all of us just to see how this unfolds. And now, to go into a little bit more detail with this, I'm going to be going inside because all of a sudden, it got really cold out, and yeah, I'm too cold—I'm not built for this sort of weather!

So we're gonna be going inside. For myself, I feel like I fall into a category somewhere between Grant Cardone, who loves to leverage as much as he possibly can and borrow other people's money, and Dave Ramsey, who is basically as anti-debt as you could possibly be.

See, I just believe that credit cards could be used responsibly without costing you any money out of pocket, and the benefit is just too good not to utilize. I also believe that you should buy a home using a fixed-rate 30-year mortgage so that way you could take advantage of cheap money and also keep your monthly payments down to a minimum—which really then in turn helps free up more cash flow to go and invest with.

But I also disagree with the methods that leverage your money too much, that run your profit margins too thin, and especially when you take out a lot of unnecessary risk just to try to inch out a few extra percentage points of profit.

Even though I went and took out 30-year mortgages on my properties, I made sure that I either had enough money in cash to buy the property outright or the mortgage value doesn't exceed a few years' worth of my income at the very most.

I also always make sure I have enough cash sitting on the sidelines so that if ever hits the fan, I could just continue carrying on as usual like what I'm kind of doing now. This is also one of the somewhat obsessive reasons why I like to cut back so much on expenses, save so much money, and live on so little.

It's because really at the end of the day, we don't need a lot of stuff; we don't need to waste it going and buying things we don't really need or don't really add value to our lives. And that allows us the flexibility just to weather through unpredictable storms.

But this is something I could get into in another video because seriously, odd timing with this one. As much as I'm saying you don't need to go and buy stuff, I finally went and bought something that I said I was gonna be doing for years now. For like the last six years, I've told myself this is gonna be the year I do it, and I've never done it! But I finally went and actually ordered a drum set, and it is here! Let me go and show you guys the drum set, and let's go do that now.

Alright, guys, so we're gonna be temporarily turning into an unboxing channel today because I ordered a whole bunch of stuff from Guitar Center to set up the drum set. This is something for me—like, I have not played the drums really for like the last eight to ten years. It's been something crazy. Every single year I have told myself I'm finally going to set up my drum set; I just haven't done it.

And now, with everything going on, I figured if I don't do it now, I'm never gonna do it! So here we go— we're gonna unbox some stuff from Guitar Center. I think we got two more packages coming, and then I could set up the drum set, and then after that, I could pretty much annoy my neighbors all the time!

So let's do it! What do we got here? What do we got here?

Okay, first box is—look at that! We got a Zildjian 18 inch crash cymbal right here! There we go! That's a good start! We got our DW snare drum stand—oh, that is awesome! Don't worry, none of this is gonna be going to waste because the cat absolutely loves to play in boxes. So these boxes now belong to the cat, Ramsey!

And then over here, we probably got some stands. Nice! Alright, so we've got a DW 9000 tom stand, and then we also have another DW 9000 tom stand with a cymbal thing on top of it. So yeah, this should be a lot of fun! Oh, and then I also got a little rack here for cymbals!

And I'm not sure if you could see here, but Ramsey is having fun in the boxes! I swear you could buy this cat like some $40 toy; he won't play with it, but he'll love to play with the box!

So I got completely sidetracked unboxing everything and putting this all together, but here it is! I'm missing one ride cymbal that was supposed to arrive today—it's not going to arrive until Friday, but I could pretty much make do with this right here.

And what's really cool about this set is that as a kid when I was learning to play the drums, I looked up to this drummer—his name is Tony Royster Jr. Like, I would watch videos of him playing, and then I would try to imitate what he was doing.

So when I started looking at used drum sets online to buy, I happened to come across his personal drum set. So when I saw that this was his set, I'm like, "What?! I have to go and get this!" So I got his set—it's a DW collector's series in black ice, which has this really cool shimmery glitter look to it when you get up close.

Though I have not played the drums in a long while, it's going to keep me busy here at home for the next month or so. So with this out of the way, it's almost 3:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, and that means my video's about to post, which means I am always available for the first hour after any video posts to basically go through and answer all the comments.

So if you're watching this video right now, and it's within the first hour, guess what? I'm doing—I'm sitting there responding to your comments! So feel free to comment down below, and I'm gonna be literally sitting right here just answering comments non-stop!

So let's go and do that right now! [Music]

Okay, so the video just posted, and now what I do is I sit here for the next hour—sometimes 90 minutes—and basically trying to answer as many comments as I possibly can. Eventually, I'm about to take my second walk of the day, and being able to do this is so nice to get out of the house and relax for a little bit and stretch my legs.

I can't imagine what I would do without my like two times-a-day walks. I just got to be back by about 5:40 or so so I can go and join the Discord group and answer anyone's questions on there. And for anyone curious about what that is exactly, the link is down below in the description.

Now I realized it's been quite a long time since I've had anything to eat, so I gotta go and make some dinner now. Usually on any normal night, my girlfriend would be getting home in the late afternoon; we would go and spend some time together, we'd cook some dinner together, and then we'd have a relaxing evening.

But tonight, she's off with her family, so that means I am resorting to eat whatever is in the refrigerator. Actually, let's see what's in the freezer today. I have a feeling my dinner is going to be consisting of—there we go, that looks pretty good!

So I'm gonna eat this and Ben and Jerry's for dessert! Oh, and also pretty cool news here—check this out! I went kind of crazy with a coffee creamer! We got cinnamon toast crunch, and then we got Bailey's real cream flavor! This stuff is so good! It makes the day so much better!

A few moments later, it's 5:50 p.m. and I'm about to hop in the Discord chat momentarily! So if any of you guys are curious what that's all about, I will include you in on a little bit of it! And by the way, if you're interested in joining the Discord group, the link is down below in the description.

Now I was trying to film a day in a life video, so I'm actually, if you guys want to be on it, this is gonna be on the day in the life video if you guys want to say hi to whoever watches right now!

12 seconds later. One, two, three—smash the like button! Alright, we tried!

Alright, guys, so now it's 7:00 p.m. We just finished, and I gotta get back to work at this point. I got to begin filming out the next video that I started planning this morning, which is kind of odd because I'm filming this video now at the same time I'm filming the other one. But my goal with this one is to finish up about 8:30 p.m. or so, so we'll see how this goes.

Well, guys, I just ended up finishing, and it's way later than I expected! It's one of those nights! This is not typical where you just like—you get in the zone, you get a whole bunch of stuff done, and then you check the time, and you guys are like, "Wait a second—it's like 1:16!"

So it's about to turn 1:17 in the morning. I feel like Gary Vee would be super proud of me today for just grinding and hustling all the time! Now this is certainly not typical. I don't usually end up working this late; most of the time, I'm done by like 6:00 p.m., give or take 30 minutes or so.

Today is really just one of those days where it's like, if you're in the zone and you're working and you want to keep going, you may as well just keep going—use that momentum! But I am exhausted! I can't even— I can't even figure out what to say anymore, so I'm gonna go to bed, and then I'll figure out a good ending for this video tomorrow because I'm just—I can't do it—I’m so tired!

So anyway, good night guys! Smash the like button for the YouTube algorithm and comment down below, and make sure to use the link down below in the description to get two free stocks from WeBull! No matter how tired I am, I'm always gonna be plug-in, plug-in the like button, and plugging the two free stocks from WeBull if you haven't gotten that already.

Yeah, okay, dumare.

Oh, okay, so now that's the next morning! I'm finally rested up, and I ended up getting a lot more work done yesterday than I initially thought. But just keep in mind that this is not necessarily a typical day in the life.

I mean, in a way it is, although most of the time I'm done with work way earlier. My girlfriend gets home in the early evening, we'll figure out what we cooked together for dinner, and then afterwards, we'll just binge-watch either Love is Blind or episodes of The Office.

It just so happened that yesterday was a pretty busy workday, but hey, at least on the bright side, you get to see exactly what my work process is like!

Now, definitely, it can feel overwhelming at times to run two YouTube channels, be a real estate agent, be a real estate investor, and then on top of all of that, manage seven rental properties. Because besides Jack, who helps edit the phone calls in the second channel, sort through my emails, and then run the private membership group, it's really just me for the majority of it; I'm just a one-man show!

Now, on the bright side, that definitely helps keep overhead low, but it's certainly tiring, and sometimes I get overwhelmed. This is why that schedule of 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. is definitely not sustainable at all, and usually I could only do that every now and then before I just crash from exhaustion.

But like I said, you've got an inside look into one of my days that just happened to be a very busy day, and if you guys enjoy videos like this and you want even more of them, maybe I could do different days, and maybe you could just watch my girlfriend and I binge-watch episodes of The Office.

So with that said, you guys, thank you so much for watching! I really appreciate it! As always, do you guys enjoy videos like this, make sure to subscribe, hit the like button, feel free to add me on Instagram—posts are pretty much daily, so if you want to be a part of it there, feel free to add me.

There, as on my second channel, The Graham Stefan Show, I post there every single day I'm not posting here! So if you want to see a brand new video from me every single day, make sure to add yourself to that!

And then lastly, if you guys want those two free stocks, use the link down below in the description. WeBull is going to be giving you two free stocks when you deposit $100 in the platform, with one of the stocks being valued up to $1,400!

So if you want your two free stocks, use that link down below! Let me know which two free stocks you get! Thank you so much for watching, and until next time!