My 2024 Financial Position and Investing Goals Explained.

So I've been battling with something over the past year. Part of my content from a year or two ago used to be periodic updates on my own financial goals, my personal finances, and the different ways that I'm trying to make money. Generally, those videos were well received in terms of views, but I stopped doing them because honestly, I didn't like the idea of showing too much of the channel's success. I mean, the goal of the channel was always supposed to be around helping people, and it got to a point where it kind of felt like making content around how successful the channel was doing wasn't really really helping. It almost felt as if it was boasting to the very people that helped create that success.

Maybe it's just me, but it just didn't quite feel right. But anyway, last week I actually went on a trip to Sydney to go to a talk by Sir Richard Branson, and one of the speakers before him was a woman called Britney Saunders, who was a YouTuber who started a company called Fate, which is a clothing label, and then grew it into a $10 million plus business. It was very interesting actually because she said that she battled with this as well, but ultimately she decided to share everything as her clothing business grew well into the millions.

Long story short, I think she's convinced me to keep sharing my stuff as well. So I really don't want to come across as flexing or anything like that; if it comes across that way, please absolutely roast me in the comments. But in this video, let's look at my old financial goals, whether I've hit them, how my businesses are doing right now, and what my goals are for the next year.

So my last personal finance update was back in late 2021, and it looked a little something like this. I had 32% of my cash saved up for a house deposit, a deposit for the apartment I'm now living in. Then I had 32% of my net worth, which was the cash in Profit F's business account. For those that are new to the channel, Profit Full was the OG course platform that I created with my business partner Cameron a year or so ago.

Our financial regulator here in Australia changed the interpretation of some laws around financial advice on the internet, which unfortunately meant that we had to close down that business. Some people think there was some big story behind that, but there really wasn't. Just some laws got updated, and we decided to stop operating. But this is actually what led to me hitting the books, doing my certifications, and becoming licensed as an authorized representative here in Australia, which now allows me to provide general financial advice in Australia.

In partnering with my lens, La, who's called Guideway Financial Services, allowed me to create essentially Profitable 2.0, which is new money education. Anyway, it's a long story and quite frankly, it's pretty boring, but that's where the 32% of my 2021 net worth was.

Then if we turn to my stock investments: 4% in ETFs and 21% in individual stocks. That looks very misleading, I promise. I am a passive investor too. The reason the individual stocks portion had blown up so much is just because of Tesla, who were right at the tippy top of an enormous run, which definitely boosted my individual stock portfolio quite a bit. So overall, 25% in stocks and then 11% of my cash was lying around in my other bank accounts.

So that was the breakdown of my net worth. Before we talk about my financial goals then versus now, one life goal that I've been working on recently is speaking another language, which Babel has been helping me do. The reason I chose Babel is because it's been proven to help you start learning a new language in as little as 3 weeks. Now I choose to try out French, and obviously, while mastery takes a very long time, I've really liked that I can get a decent handle on some of the really key phrases and conversation points in less than a month.

That's also why I like Babel; it teaches you real-world conversations. Their lessons prep you to have practical conversations about travel, business, relationships, and a whole lot more. It's also put together by real language teachers, and they even offer live classes, and you get two free classes with your subscription.

Speaking about subscription, Babel has a few different subscription options to choose from, including a lifetime subscription, which is actually decent value. So I encourage you to check which one might be right for you. As a bonus, if you sign up with the link in the description, you can score 60% off your subscription. So sign up with that unique link; it's risk-free with a 20-day money-back guarantee. Thanks to Beel for sponsoring this video.

Now let's get back to the finances and let's revisit what my goals were at the end of 2021 and whether I achieved them. Now, I don't set goals that are too specific because, especially in business, a lot of the metrics are mostly out of your control. You know, you can take YouTube for example. Sometimes you hit a viral video, you might gain 50,000 subscribers in a month; other times, the algorithm is completely against you, and you go absolutely nowhere.

So my goals back then were to finally buy and move into my apartment. I really wanted to invest a lot more into high-quality businesses, although I noted that the probability I was going to be able to do that was reasonably limited due to overvaluation. Lastly, I wanted to take a risk and invest more into my YouTube channel and associated businesses.

So how did I go? Well, after many, many delays thanks to the good old coronavirus, I have finally moved into my apartment. So yes, we can tick that one off the list finally. Then second, I actually haven't invested that much into the stock market besides passive investing, and that's because I haven't found too many good deals out there to jump on. That did leave me with a decent chunk of cash flow that I could sink into the YouTube business.

Now this is the interesting bit where you can have a little laugh at me. I got a little bit naive in 2021. The year leading up to my last update, I made $280,000 on YouTube ad revenue alone, and it was all just me at the time. Honestly, I felt like Richie Rich; I'll tell you that. I was doing I think one video a week, maybe two, and my thinking was, you know, if I can now get an editor or two, we can make more videos each week at a higher quality, and we'll be minting money thanks to this beautiful algorithm.

Then I learned that while the possibility of an economic recession was an interesting talking point on YouTube, it also meant heavily restricted advertising budgets of the world's biggest companies, and thus my revenue got hit quite a bit. I learned that YouTube can and will change its algorithm a lot. So in 2021, it was both easy to get views and the views were well paid. I got about $15 for every 1,000 views. Now in the last 365 days, I've made only $1,250 per 1,000 views—about 177% less.

YouTube has completely transitioned from a creator-first mentality to a viewer-first mentality, meaning instead of being suggested videos from the people that you subscribe to, YouTube now just guesses what you're warm for based on what you last watched. AKA, if you like watching my videos, but you've been looking up reviews of a new TV lately, the suggested videos just—they won't be my videos anymore; you're just going to get a whole lot of tech reviews.

Now my problem was that in 2022, I brought on an editor, and my YouTube revenue did actually rise to $318,000. So we saw a good ROI on that, considering it freed me up to do other things, but that might have gotten me a little bit overexcited. I ended up bringing on three more editors, which was at the exact time that YouTube implemented a whole lot of changes, and we went from making sometimes $40,000 to $50,000 in a month to about $10,000 to $15,000. Payroll costs went from about $80,000 to $280,000, and at the same time, we had to close down Profit Full, which was filling in the gaps.

That's what ultimately led me to start New Money Education. We needed to be less reliant on YouTube. As they say, the lord giveth and the lord taketh away, and it was at that point that I realized the YouTube business, in a way, had the opposite of a competitive advantage. We were reliant on another company to make our own revenue, and that had to change.

So it was tough. We actually had to draw editing resources away from YouTube for about nine months, which essentially meant less views and less YouTube revenue while we built our new course platform. Overall, on top of the YouTube videos we put out since March/April, we professionally edited 55 course videos, about 8 to 10 minutes a piece, which was honestly an incredible effort by the team. But it meant that over the past nine months, we were running in the red.

It was really stressful; honestly, it was by far the toughest time I've had so far as a business owner, which leads us to the eventual launch of New Money Education. Thank goodness we got there! So on Black Friday, we launched, and how did we go? Well, I calculated that in total, I'd invested around $130,000 into the creation of New Money Education, and when we released it on Black Friday, you guys really showed up. It was a big, big relief, I can tell you that.

We ended up doing $75,000 in sales just on that Black Friday week on the US site and then about another $14,000 on the Australian site, which is hosted by our lens, and I think now we're pretty much smack bang on $100,000 in sales since Black Friday. So that to me is absolutely amazing, and honestly, thank you guys just so, so much for the support. That money genuinely pays salaries and keeps people employed, and to have recovered over 70% of the investment cost in about three weeks is absolutely amazing.

I don't want to float my boat too much here, but actually, one of our beta testers, Bobby from Texas, he's actually a professor of stock valuation, and he told me the Introduction to Stock Analysis was the best course on stock valuation that he has ever seen, and he's actually recommending it to his university students. So we feel like we've got a really good thing going here.

The response from people that have taken the course so far has been absolutely awesome. It's honestly fantastic to see it doing so well, and from a financial perspective, hopefully, this drastically reduces our reliance on YouTube going forward. We've also signed up a marketing agency here in Australia to try and further increase the profitability of that business with paid advertising to further reduce our reliance on YouTube.

So hopefully going forward, we do get freed up to make more YouTube content, more just for fun, and not feel that constant pressure to make videos that we know will pay the bills. Also, the last thing I wanted to quickly say about New Money Education is that we are now offering a new product to start 2024. It is a six-week intensive program with me to sort out your financial life.

So if one of your goals next year is to get started investing and start building your wealth, please check out the links in the description or the pinned comment. It's six weeks long; we do five group Zoom calls together, and you get lifetime access to Stock Market Investing for Beginners as well. So if you want to join me and get the ball rolling for next year, please come and sign up. But we are limiting the spots available to just 100. The group Zoom calls would be much smaller than that, but overall, the cohort will be 100, and then we'll just go from there. We want to keep it small the first time we do it, and then see how it goes and go from there.

But enough said about New Money Education. So we looked at where I was at the end of 2021 and what I've been up to since, and now we are at the end of 2023. So what are my finances looking like now? Well, I moved into my apartment finally! Hooray! And after paying the deposit and chucking some money into my offset account, about 31.5% of my current net worth is in that equity.

Then from there, the retained earnings from my YouTube channel make up 27% of my current net worth. New Money Education's blistering start makes up around 16%, and then my Australian shares are about 3.15%. My international shares make up about 18.43%, and lastly, my personal cash balance is very low to about 3% because obviously, I sit my personal cash just in my mortgage offset account. So that's the breakdown.

I know a lot of you are probably curious as well about what my actual net worth is, and to tell you the truth, it's honestly not that high. To be real, it's pretty impossible to calculate. I mean, the vast majority of my true net worth would be in whatever I could sell my businesses for, but even that is really, really hard to guess. So I personally don't try and guess those unknowable numbers, and for any business owner out there, I definitely recommend forgetting about net worth and just focusing on cash flow. That’s the number you have more control over, so focus on that.

Unfortunately for me, I'm in a really weird position right now as well where I don't even really know what a true monthly cash flow number is. I mean, if you look over the past nine months, it would have been negative cash flow, whereas I could sneakily warp the message and say, look, I'm printing $100,000 a month. But in reality, business is always fluctuating, and I'd be very skeptical of any YouTuber that tries to flex some net worth figure or cash flow number just to prove themselves.

At the end of the day, they're probably telling you the best number they've achieved and then just extrapolating, or they're making the video at the most convenient time possible for them. So I wouldn't read too much into that stuff. But with that said, what are my own financial goals for next year?

Well, I personally really like the idea of having a very low debt load, and with interest rates quite high at the moment, I really like to put a little bit more money into just lowering that debt load a little bit more. I'm very buffer-esque in that I like to reduce risk wherever possible, so I've still got about $500,000 to repay on that loan. I know a lot of people will tell me to do other things with that money, but honestly, I just kind of like the peace of mind of lowering liabilities. It feels good to lower your liabilities.

So I pay myself a salary of over $120,000 per year out of the business, and I imagine most of that would just head over into the offset account. Then in terms of YouTube, I'd really like to make two videos per week consistently and not have to stress about making the most optimal video for income generation. So that's my big goal for 2024. I really want my content to go back to the way it was, where there was a fair bit of variety.

I'd like to be able to cover the big news topics. You know, there's always a lot to talk about when it comes to the big super investors of the world, and I do like these more informal videos as well. I'm happy to make more of them if you guys are interested. But ultimately, two videos per week is the goal on YouTube. And then from there, I also just want to find a good balance of work and life where I don't get burnt out. Like 2023 was a big burnout year for me and the team while we were creating New Money Education, so reverting to a more normal workload is a high priority for 2024.

And then finally, on the New Money Education front, we do have big plans. We already have plans in place for our next two courses, which fingers crossed are going to be absolutely next level. I'm also hoping to achieve 1,000 customers in 2024. Now I'm not going to get super hung up on that number, but I think we already have around 175 customers. So in 2024, I really want to work hard and see if we can do 1,000 in the year. If we do 1,000, that would be around $600,000 in revenue, I think, which would really help our expansion plans both in terms of course offerings and also here on YouTube.

With that said, guys, that's really what I've been up to, and they are my three big goals moving forward. I'd also love to hear what you guys are up to and what you guys are hoping to achieve in 2024. Leave that stuff down in the comment section below; let's get a discussion going. Also, remember to check out New Money Education if you're interested in that six-week program with me. Links down in the description in the pinned comment; check it out if you want.

Otherwise, guys, leave a like on the video if you did enjoy it. Thanks very much for watching all the way through to the end, and I'll see you guys in the next one.