Why I'm a Financial Minimalist

What's up you guys? It's Graham here. So this is something I've never directly addressed before. I'm gonna be getting a lot deeper than I usually go in these types of videos. So let's just get right into it.

This video is being made because several of you have sent me a Facebook post mentioning me by Alex Becker. He's the one you probably see showing up on all the ads in the YouTube videos—the "just give me 45 seconds" guy. Although he also happens to be someone I look up to and would frequently watch on YouTube for inspiration, even way before I started making videos.

So seeing this post coming from him was rather surprising. I'm not gonna read the entire post; it's pretty long, but here's just the gist of it: I was watching Graham Stephen's video where he was discussing how he basically lives rent-free in one of his duplexes and spends no money. Yeah, he takes in over a million a year.

The real point is that true power and control come from having nothing to lose and nothing to gain financially. You can afford to save; you can afford to burn bridges or take things you don't think of. The best long-term play—you can afford to pursue things that won't make money for decades but will make billions after. Overall, the message of the entire post is really just this: going and buying things and living a consumerist lifestyle and living to impress other people is always going to be a losing battle.

So instead, we should really strive to reduce our expenses and reduce our extravagances to really get back to the basics of what matters the most to us, which is freedom and not things. Given all that, I felt like this would be a really insightful video to make so I can share my thoughts on the topic firsthand because, yes, I now make well over a million dollars a year. I still live in the same 850 square foot, 1-bedroom side of the duplex.

I still wear $3.00 H&M t-shirts. I still refuse to buy $4 iced coffee from Starbucks because it's too expensive, and I still make sure to always smash the like button if you have not done that already. Most people hear this, and they think that I'm absolutely crazy. To be honest, I'm certainly a little bit eccentric when it comes to this. I realized that I'm definitely an extreme by far on two totally opposite ends of the spectrum: on the one hand, my income is absurdly high, and on the other, my expenses are just stupidly low.

That's not normal, and I don't expect everyone to try to emulate that or live as though they're constantly pinching pennies. But I do also believe that there's a sense of tranquility that comes with having pretty much no overhead, saving all of your money, and having very little clutter to weigh you down.

Let me explain: I think a big mortgage payment, or having a big car payment, or having anything that I need to be financially obligated to, just makes me feel trapped—as though I'm a hamster on a wheel just running to keep it going. Having that type of stress really just causes me to resent the work I do and really stifles my own creativity when it comes to pursuing my own passions because it really just drains the fun out of it.

Like, what's the point of going and buying a four million dollar home if the only way you could afford it is by obligating yourself to working 80 hours a week every single week for the next thirty years to pay for it? To me, that just never made sense. It would feel like a prison. That's why I have always just really preferred a financially minimalist lifestyle.

See, the less financial obligation I have, the more freedom I have, and the more freedom I have, the less stressed I am—and the less stressed I am, the happier I am to pursue more creative and fulfilling work. Now, with someone who's raised without having money to then going from that and making a lot of it, I will tell you what all of that saved money really brings you, and that is options. That's it.

Money is not for the purpose of flaunting; it's not for the purpose of trying to impress random strangers. It's not for the purpose of measuring your own self-worth or feeling a sense of superiority over someone else, but it does give you options, and that is worth so much more than I could have ever imagined.

See, for me, that option was never having to work a job I absolutely loathed. It meant that I had the option to do something that gave me purpose and meaning to my life, and that never would have been the case if I had to sacrifice those values by working a soul-sucking job I hated just to afford the cars, houses, and the luxuries that I never needed in the first place.

From that, I knew that going and buying a Gucci outfit was not going to give me options. I knew that going out and blowing my money every single weekend was not going to give me the freedom that I wanted. Going and buying a mansion is not gonna make me feel any more fulfilled than where I am now in a one-bedroom duplex. So I just chose to save and invest all the money I could, knowing that one day I could slowly build that up and live off those investments indefinitely.

This is really at its core the entire culture of the FIRE movement. For those who haven't heard of this before and aren't aware, FIRE stands for Financially Independent, Retired Early. It's an entire community and mindset that you don't need to be 65 years old to retire. If you save your money, reduce your expenses, and grow your worth to the point where your investments just cover all of your expenses indefinitely.

I discovered this whole community and mentality shortly after turning 20 years old, and once I found it, something just immediately clicked in my mind. It was this entire community of like-minded people who thought exactly the same way as I did, and I no longer felt crazy for wanting to save like almost all of my income and achieve financial independence at a really young age.

It also gave me a really strong goal and objective to want to work towards. I wanted my investments to be able to cover all of my expenses, and from that point on, that became my entire motivation for investing. I remember after I bought my first rental property, I was making about thirty dollars a day in net rental income.

I remember thinking to myself that works out to be the equivalent of five dollars and 62 cents per hour if I worked a nine-to-five job Monday through Friday. I also thought to myself, $30 a day was enough to cover an all-you-can-eat sushi dinner every single night for the rest of my life just from that one property.

Thinking that way about sushi just for some reason lit the fire underneath me just to keep going. Soon after that, I wanted to cover my gym payment with rental income, my phone payment with rental income, my insurance payment with rental income, my housing payment with rental income—anything you could think of.

I just wanted my investments to pay for it, and really from that point forward, money took on an entirely different meaning. Like, if I got a real estate commission for $15,000, I never viewed that as $15,000. That amount meant absolutely nothing to me.

Instead, my entire focus was that the $15,000 was really worth eighty-seven dollars a month in passive income indefinitely if I invested it at a 7% return. That eighty-seven dollars a month is enough to pay for my high-speed internet bill—definitely as long as Spectrum stops raising their internet prices. They've done this to me twice now, and I'm tired of it.

But really from that point forward, every single check I received was really viewed as how much money can this make me passively every single month and what expense can this cover. Then I kept doing that, year after year after year, until eventually, it did end up covering all of my expenses. When that happened, things just really took off for one and became a lot of fun to see how much money I could save by cutting back on all my expenses.

Like, I realized if I found a way to reduce my spending by $100 a month, that meant I would need $20,000 less invested to cover it. So to me, spending $100 a month less had net value of $20,000 invested. So what I did is went through all of my expenses to find anything that I didn't absolutely need so that that way I would have more money to save and more money to invest.

At that point, I was actually making money by still choosing to save everything, and at that point, it was really just like a fun game to play with myself. Secondly, doing all of this took a lot of the pressure off—not just work but life in general—because I knew money wouldn't necessarily be a huge factor in what I did.

It really allowed me to focus on the aspects of work I enjoyed the most and could do really just for fun. As a real estate agent, I became so much less stressed and less worried about whether or not a client would buy a house or whether or not the home would inspect well or whether or not an investment opportunity would fall through.

Not to say I wouldn't be disappointed if something like that happens, but it just took the pressure off needing something to happen. Oddly enough, that type of attitude actually helped me make more money because clients didn't feel pressured by me to close a deal and knew that I cared more about the long-term relationship than I did about making a very quick commission.

The third, you might have also noticed that I run this sort of minimalist mindset in more than just my finances but also here on YouTube as well because I operate it very much the same way. This channel doesn't have any employees; there's no corporate headquarters; there's no fancy office somewhere. It's just me filming in my garage or my kitchen and then editing in my dining room.

My total overhead to run this channel—which is now doing well over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a month in profits—is just a few hundred dollars. That's it. Having that type of profit margin means I'm really free to make content on whatever I feel like without money dictating what I make a video on or what I don't make a video on.

At this point, any dollar amount that someone pays me is not going to make a big difference in my lifestyle, so I do the videos that I like to because I have fun doing them—not because I'm necessarily chasing after dollar signs—which oddly enough just helps you end up making more money because people really value that type of transparency and honesty.

Unless, of course, someone wants to go and pay me ten million dollars in cash; in which case, you know, just let me know where to sign, and I'm all yours! But seriously though, going after a life of financial independence really means that you have the power to say no to things that you don't believe in—not because of money but because you just don't believe in them, and that's who you are.

So where does the duplex come into all of this? I really believe it's all about just living with what you need. See, this is a place that I could call home that has enough room for what I need right now, and also pays for itself. So I could focus my time and resources on bigger and better things.

Like, this YouTube channel would absolutely not be where it is today if I had high overhead three years ago that I needed to support. Back then, I worked full time as a real estate agent, and if I was spending $10,000 a month on useless stuff just inflating my lifestyle, I could have never taken the risk to pursue this, which ended up becoming my real passion and exceeding all of my expectations of what I ever thought was possible.

That also meant I had more money left over for other opportunities that I could seize whenever they came up—like going and buying a Tesla because that was a good deal. Then it ended up just paying for itself. Or going and buying another duplex because I walked in one morning and just absolutely loved it. Who knows what other opportunities the future might have in store.

Because of a voided meaning of spending and instead pursuing what has meant the most to me, like 20 cent iced coffee. Obviously, now that is not to say I'm gonna be living in this new place forever; because that is not gonna be the case. One day I want to go and buy a house. I want a place that's big enough so that I can play the drums without annoying the neighbor, and a place that I can have a dedicated room for a reef aquarium.

I also want a bigger garage so that I could build out more YouTube studio sets and have different designs and expand that a little bit further. So where I'm living right now is absolutely not going to be permanent, but I'm also not going to be going and buying a four million dollar mansion so that I could be flexing on the Internet.

I've got to buy the type of home that I know my investments will cover, or a home that will make me money, or a home that will just pay for itself without me having to come out of pocket. Then I could just continue my current lifestyle of investing everything else and having those investments pay for whatever other endeavors I choose to pursue.

Because I totally believe it's okay to spend more money; it's okay to get nicer things; it's okay to accumulate more stuff; it's okay to give in to some lifestyle inflation if it's sustainable—that your investments can cover long-term. For me, stepping it up each and every year, as my investments grow and throw off just a little bit more money, it's totally fine to do as long as I keep my spending at that level.

That is the entire point of financial independence: spending money on things that really matter the most to you and bring the most amount of value to your life and saving money with the intention of building a lifestyle that will support that. While financial independence certainly doesn't happen overnight, it can absolutely be a goal that you work towards and one day achieve.

Because the less money you spend, the faster it's going to take you to get there. And one day, smash the like button if you have not done that the first time. So with that said, you guys, thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate it.

As always, if you have not already destroyed the subscribe button, destroy it. Destroy the notification bell. Go ahead and add me on Instagram; I post here pretty much daily, so if you want to be a part of it there, feel free to add me there. Also, feel free to add me on my second channel. It is called the Graham Stefan Show.

I post there every single day; I don't post here, so that means if you want to see me now every single day, brand new video, go and add me on that second channel as well. And then finally, if you want free stocks, all you got to do is sign up for the Weeble link in the description; you deposit $100, get two free stocks.

You may as well just go deposit 100 bucks, get two free stocks. You want to sell out after that? Do it, but they're free. So if you want free stuff, that's how you get free stuff. So anyway, with that said, thank you so much for watching, and until next time!