If You Have Less Than $10,000 Saved. Please Watch This Video...

Summary

In this insightful video, Alex Hormozi offers a practical roadmap for those who find themselves with less than $10,000 in savings, or who are struggling to break out of poverty. He begins by highlighting shocking statistics about Americans' financial health and asserts that poverty is a choice. With a holistic approach, Alex lays out six actionable steps to take control of your finances, debunking myths about debt, spending, and the real keys to growing wealthy. Through personal anecdotes and logical reasoning, he emphasizes the importance of saving, strategic debt management, and maximizing one's earning potential without being swayed by societal pressures to flaunt wealth. His message revolves around discipline, informed spending, and investing thoughtfully for a stable and prosperous future.

Highlights

• Average Americans often have negative net worths, meaning babies could be wealthier than adults! 👶
• Save an emergency fund first; prioritize building a financial cushion before tackling debt. 💰
• Emphasize spending habits: maintaining a conservative lifestyle relative to earnings is crucial. 👛
• Taking calculated risks, especially in business, can significantly enhance wealth. 📈
• Maximize earning capacity and minimize unnecessary expenses for financial freedom! 🌱

Key Takeaways

• Wealth Building Decision: Deciding to become wealthy is a choice and it's under your control. 💪
• No More Victim Mentality: Shift from a victim mindset to a victor mentality to control your finances. 🎯
• Say Goodbye to Debt: Avoid compounding debt—focus on paying off high-interest debts first. 💳
• Frugality as a Foundation: Spending less than you earn is the bedrock of financial success. 🏦
• Invisible Benefits of Saving: Creates space for strategic financial opportunities and emotional peace. 🧘‍♂️

Overview

Alex Hormozi opens the conversation with some startling statistics about Americans’ financial status. Can you believe the average American has a negative net worth? That means babies are technically wealthier than many adults, purely because they're debt-free! Facing such stark truths, Alex stresses that remaining in poverty is often a decision, because earning multiple millions over a lifetime is possible with a change in mindset and strategy.

One interesting, albeit simple, challenge Alex pushes is the 'Buy Nothing Challenge.' It's about pressing pause on your spendthrift ways to redirect your money towards what truly matters—saving and investing. What’s cool is that Alex leads by example. He narrates his experiences of living in austere conditions even while earning substantial money. The takeaway? Wealth is all about how much you keep, not how much you earn.

Here's the kicker: Alex suggests working on a financial plan that shifts your risk profile to manageable levels, especially concerning personal expenses, so you can take bigger, bolder business risks. He passionately explains saving as a gateway to seeing new opportunities, urging everyone to achieve a stage where your finances are so secure that your decision-making can be aggressive and growth-oriented. His steps and stories are a testament to a disciplined approach rooted in pragmatic personal finance.

If You Have Less Than $10,000 Saved. Please Watch This Video... Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 if you're broke and you don't want to be anymore I'm going to reach you some stats I'm going to blow your mind and then I'm going to give you six steps so you don't have to be anymore the average American has a literal negative net worth means that babies are richer than people who are not babies because babies haven't gone into debt number two the average US minimum wage employee will make over a million dollars in their entire lifetime in earnings and if you were the median of US income you would earn $3 million over the course of your life so the reason staying poor is the decision is because you know as long as
• 00:30 - 01:00 you continue to work you are going to make 1 million millions of dollars and most of the time it's going in places that don't make sense so challenge number one is the buy nothing challenge it's very simple you just buy nothing so disconnect your credit card from Amazon leave your wallet at home when you go to work have no way to pay for stuff if your gas if your insurance rent car payment if buy food at discount grocery stores you pack your lunch that's all if you buy nothing it is as austere or hard
• 01:00 - 01:30 core as my recommendations may appear I do not ask people to do things that I haven't done and so like when I was taking $2,000 a month me personally I was in a house with six roommates and I split my bedroom with one roommate and so like yeah two beds two dudes looking at each other like every night when I was making a million dollars a month I was living on less than 15 and so the key takeaway that shifted how I thought about making money and more importantly keeping money is that well wealth is
• 01:30 - 02:00 actually a ratio between what you earn and what you need and the number one rule of money is spend less than you make and so I always like being super super conservative with my expenses relative to what I make because I don't like spending money that I feel like I do those of you who the the three YouTube uh odd commenters uh who think that this is a prop set you get just look out the window it's all AI the first thing you
• 02:00 - 02:30 have to do to become wealthy is that you have to decide to become wealthy and you have to decide that it's under your control you have to switch from victim to Victor so as much as you may have had a disadvantage or maybe you found a Deb or you made poor decision you have to be the person who's most powerful in your life around money now the third thing and this is the one that really kills me is that in the US 35% of every paycheck goes towards paying one thing you know it is Banks lenders for debt 35%
• 02:30 - 03:00 that's because people don't think about their mortgage as debt they don't think about their car payment as debt they don't think about their credit cards as debt there's a reason that banks are 100 plus years old because they don't go out of business they make so much money on money money is their product and you keep buying their money from them at a bad price man at a compounding price that goes up every single year and those people don't do the math on compounding but like right now so many people are trying to get 10% 9% returns in stock
• 03:00 - 03:30 market with their credit cards 24% against them and so the easiest thing you can do right at the beginning will pay off the things that are guaranteed 24% negative returns they're guaranteed it's amazing they're guaranteed returns against you being wealthy compound interest is the Eighth Wonder in Charlie M and you want to face off head-to-head against the Eighth Wonder World against your gos bad idea so the thing is that if you're earning enough money and then you have the right habits being broke is a
• 03:30 - 04:00 temporary status so step one save for an emergency fund and so these steps are similar to D Ram's baby steps because I think he's permanent 100 times over and it's worth modeling success so number one sa for your work fund which is basically between $1,000 and $55,000 so reason that so many people don't hit their savings goals is because something happens right and so it's like have a wor for when your AC breaks or when your carburetor needs to be replaced the thing is is that things that are unexpected you can expect them to happen
• 04:00 - 04:30 you just don't know which one it's going to be because if you look at a year it's like about once a month they'll have something unexpected her and you know it's going to cost you and so it's just preparing for the expense not which expense it is but what about like dead should i p it on first no learn to save money first and just watch the amount go up get to that L but I say this because I'm not trying to make your life difficult they trying to tell you what I did to get here and for those of you who find that useful you can model whatever
• 04:30 - 05:00 you want that habit has stuck with me so even when I was making a million dollars a month early Ro in my career our rent was 1,200 bucks a month so then we ball out and get appetizers and we get the Bang Bang Shrimp at bone bone so you know sh out to V I took like $100 felt like a like a rich guy so I say this cuz some people just immediately change how they live when they make more money even the fact I was able to start in 23 was because I saved every dollar I made so I
• 05:00 - 05:30 could have 50,000 something it wasn't like I was I was making crazy money I think I I think I made 55,000 or 60,000 I think my first year out of college and then I made I want to say 70 or 80 something like that the next year and I save 50 after taxes so I'm going to show you something really quick if you have a $200 pair of Jordans that you really want to buy now you might want to buy them today and let's
• 05:30 - 06:00 say you're 25 years old you're like I I deserve these I work really hard for them okay fine but that $200 invested just in the S&P 500 we're not even getting to s& 500 I'll talk about that later between now and the time you retire do you want to know what that actually is yeah $200 per shoes and we're going to give it 40 years we're going to make our return 9% additional cation zero instead of
• 06:00 - 06:30 buying that $200 pair of shoes when you were 65 it could be over $6,000 if you just invested in the S&P so if you wouldn't buy those shoes for $6,000 then maybe don't buy them today for $200 when you buy Jordans it's not there's no upside that money is gone it's just $6,000 that could have been something that's just going to be zero and that's a big loss when you do it over and over and over again right like 6,000 $7,000 does take a lot of those to
• 06:30 - 07:00 add up to a million 130 of those purchases is a million you probably do that in a couple years and so that's personal risk now business risk if you take good business risk there's upside the thing is is that sometimes you can't take this business risk because your personal risk is too high and so for me my whole life I've tried to jam this risk as low as I possible good so that I can go on the offensive on the business side I saved as much as I could when I had my job so start a gy that was a big
• 07:00 - 07:30 Ritz but I had I lived almost nothing in Baltimore so that I could take that swing and if I hadn't had the basics there I would not have been able to take that shot and I sold those businesses that lost everything two more times if I had had to go into debt just to live then I would have never been able to take their second and third shots and so the whole point is is like you will increase your shots on gooll by living risk-free or low risk in your personal life you'll be able to fail more like I failed more times than it I'm telling
• 07:30 - 08:00 you I had nine failed businesses I seven failed Partnerships like I have many failures but the only reason I can get back up is because I don't have this big thing that I have to take care of it's like I know that I can live on peanut butter sandwiches and and egg whites mixing uh protein protein powder from the gas station with water I I can do that I because I have I've already done and I flipped [ __ ] them right now like I've had these like I like them they're fine they're perable so I live with almost nothing
• 08:00 - 08:30 and it doesn't bother me cuz I know how I was pretty content when I was Bor I'm pretty content now right I like the game more now so I'm bringing all these points up because saving money won't make you money but it will allow you to think further out and make bigger bets which absolutely will make you more money if I had not done that I wouldn't have a gym if I hadn't been the gym I wouldn't have done the gym turnour if I done the gym turn around I wouldn't have done gym launch didn't do gym launch I would have been able to do Prestige Labs Prestige Labs I would able to sell do Allen from there wouldn't be able to do
• 08:30 - 09:00 acis.com so like it sounds small but it's a tiny Domino that you could control all right step two which is you can begin paying off debt there's two ways of thinking about paying off debt there's The Logical way and the psychological way I would recommend the psychological way so let's say that you've got three different uh you know cards than you owe you've got one that's 20% one that's 15% almost 10% okay logic would state that you should go after the 20% but psychology would state that you should go after the one that you can pay off fastest
• 09:00 - 09:30 so my recommendation despite the fact that the math would say oh I should pay off the the bigger the one that cost you the most first you're going to pay them all off eventually and you've been dealing with all three of them for like years now so chill maybe just follow the process which is get a win faster that's the whole pointy and so pay them off in reverse order of speed and paying them off so it's like boom I knock going out might knock went out like you want to have those little like jackpots but organize them so you have more of them sooner in your process now if the one that you have the highest in on is also
• 09:30 - 10:00 the fastest off that definitely that's a double wi like you can have like three quick wins and you're just waiting like n months to do that because you have to pay this big net off it's like just get the win and to be clear when I'm talking about paying off debt I'm talking primarily on Consumer Debt and credit cards and things like that the de that we're not going to deal with it is going to be like House St like you're more dtic if you have a car I would recommend getting rid of that uh and trading it down easiest way to pay off your car is pay off a chaper car and trade in the one that you have just just you're
• 10:00 - 10:30 you're living beyond your means it's just that you thought your means were higher than they are but that's okay that's why you're watching this I would give you one mental image that should hopefully drag through why this is so important so you got to save about 10 bucks a day for you to get a million dollars in 40 years so the ma is $250 a month that you would put away and the compounds at 9% then you can be a million in 40 years that feels so so easy to do the only thing easier is not
• 10:30 - 11:00 doing and if you were to just put $500 a month away at $500 a month you'd be at 2.1 million in 40 years now to be clear most people can live on about 4ish per and that's with never touching the principle at some point you can start unwinding it and spending the money right but at 4% which is very safe amount that you can that you can spend off that you can live 80 grand a year this is the gameification that I would want you to think about which is that for every $250 that you save every month
• 11:00 - 11:30 it's a million doll in just basically just use that as your map and you're like wait so if I save 1,000 they're like right that's 4 million you're like if I save 2,000 like that's 8 million right and so the thing is is that's where you're going to get into this game we're going to be like Fiji Water you're like screw Fiji Water right like I I'll use the spigot in the back now if you're watching this you're like well then didn't you spend all this money on this yeah there's levels right but we got to get from level one first which is we got to spend less than we make we got to we
• 11:30 - 12:00 got to save what we're keeping okay step three is you're actually going to kind of like double down on step one which is this is that you expand your emergency savings $1 to $5,000 is not real emergency savings that's like just to prove to yourself that you've learn how to save money the real emergency savings is really having like 3 to 6 months of living expenses saved up so you can just like leave it in an interest uh bearing account which there's plenty of places that'll give you 5 or 6% at least today I'm making you this video on the money you put in there the magic of of this is
• 12:00 - 12:30 that when you put that cash there your level of anxiety around everything else in life will go down and this will then snowball in being able to actually take your eyes from paycheck to paycheck and look up then this is where saving money makes you money is that it allows you to see the opportunities around you because you actually can go on the offense now be clear we're not going to invest this money this money is just your brick of safety that you always have because you don't know what's going to happen next so that seems the way to step forward which is eliminate risky spending so if
• 12:30 - 13:00 you have a car lease turn it in all right and then buy a $5,000 cler all right so 5 Grand 10 grand in cash again we're we're at step four now all right so you've already you've already saved some money you've learned how to save you paid off some debt now trade that thing in had own every car we had in cash and all we had bought and used I think my first few cars all had uh over 100,000 W that was just how I thought everyone bought cars negotiate look for a car that's 100,000 years old look at Carfax to have something that has low insurance and low
• 13:00 - 13:30 uh repairs and a lot of that stuff you can look at average cost for repair by different Vehicles next thing is if you have multiple cars downgrade to one I mean l I've lived with one car for years I just have a great story about I haven't told the story forever so the first time I drove up to a gym launch event so we had I think like 30 or 40 by of the time we had an event for all the gym owners to come out to this was an Alber C New Mexico that's where Le and I CH at the time and as I pulled up I pulled up at lela's car now his was how C there was no other car and it had a
• 13:30 - 14:00 crack in the windshield and a dead in the door see me and one of the ladies who's in the group was like H I thought you were supposed to be rich I was like oh you should see my backing here I know what game I'm playing the game you're judging me on is a stupid game you know if you have kids maybe there's considerations there but even then like is there a way that you can just use foresight and say how will we share one car because there are many families that do have kids and just share one car and so if they can do it so can do and what you're doing is you're paying for convenience but that convenience is
• 14:00 - 14:30 costing remember $500 a month what's that that's $2 million that's for that convenience is it is it is it $2 million worth it probably not and so what I want to push on is like what's your what's your Vice some people like they love going down to e people love shoes that's guys anrs right uh some people love clothes some people love vacation so some people just like live in a neighborh that shouldn't be it you've got to look at how that translates into time it translates into future money so there's the two big measuring sticks I
• 14:30 - 15:00 want you to use is if you can translate all the stuff you have so like that car is a $600 a month lease that you have right that means that let's say that you make $100 a day right say 12250 hour okay let's say and that's let's say that's post tax so you're at 15 or something like that okay that means that if you work 4 weeks a month 22 days of work days in a month you're working six of your 22 days for the car that you drive to work
• 15:00 - 15:30 with Okay like people aren't translating the money into the time and let's say that you spend you know $1,200 a month on on your lease and maybe you know wherever you live right okay well now you got 12 days so we got 6 and 12 we're at 18 of our 22 days you sh you don't have W left right it's like how much of each of these days am I am I using up to just do my fixed cost and these are the ones that you can
• 15:30 - 16:00 completely Jam down only thing that people hate is your ego and when I said earlier that I'm not going to ask you to do something I haven't done I was a white color consultant who saved $50,000 and I had a condom and I then got rid of that and then basically moved into my far drove across the country didn't have a place to live uh had a guy like basically allow me to rent my bedroom for $400 a month and then I like I my my gym R which is $5,000 but I was like
• 16:00 - 16:30 Jesus I'm not I'm not try get anymore r on so I lived in my gym I I lived on zero I was hopeless I lived inside my gym like it was fine it was just not legal I had a client say like oh my God you should be taking better care of this car it was like dirty and I had like washed it or whatever that tiny action was representative of hundreds and thousands of smaller actions I hope you get to where I'm at right now and so I'm very grateful for that man at that time who was going to take that sacrifice for me to do what what I can do now so a great question that I have
• 16:30 - 17:00 for you is what are you willing to give up to be a milia rather than what are you willing to do because a lot of times in the beginning it's about it's about elimination not addition the people that you're going to get out of your life it's the expenses that you're going to get out of your life it's the postur it's going to be the the showing off if you aren't willing to sacrifice anything to become a millionaire you never will become uh the dormant of my building started fall some steps and he went from
• 17:00 - 17:30 having a $600 month lease to buying a car in cash that he now own that's a big downgrade for what he had but he's paying off his debt and now he's like just seeing every month my debt go down he's like it's so like reinforcing I was like in my company when I found out that some of the highest earners were living paycheck to paycheck I like talk to more of them about this I really wanted to figure out what it was and so what was interesting about it was that the people who were the wealthiest the ones who had the most saved up the most invested were
• 17:30 - 18:00 not offering the highest earners again it's this this misconception that people think make a lot of money have a lot of money and often times that's not the case at all and I don't know about you I would rather be underestimated for how much money I got and so the real question is do you want to look rich or do you want to be rich and I think a lot of you guys if you're being honest with yourselves want to look rich you want people to give your dabs on being rich you don't actually want to have the security me I'm actually very risky person I hate I hate the feeling of needing money I hate
• 18:00 - 18:30 the feeling of needing money more than you do that's why I did everything in my life so that I wouldn't have to feel that way real F your tolerance for poverty is higher you've accustomed to that feeling you're willing to deal with that stress I'm be clear you got a family things like that yeah it's just a spouse conversation is the neighbor we need to be we farle like you have to be real about this and you're not going to keep up with the Jones today but you will
• 18:30 - 19:00 pass the Jones eventually if you want to look rich long term the best way to do that is to actually be rich because you will be stressfree or less stressed about money and I think that does have material change and how your life feels so I'll just read you a quote from Charlie W he said the first 100 Grand is a [ __ ] but you got to do it I don't care what you have to do if it means walking everywhere not eating anything that wasn't purchased like a coupon find a way to get your hands on a underr after today e off the gas a little bit
• 19:00 - 19:30 you mind you he said this years ago so it's probably close to150 maybe $200,000 today and so I say this because you want to make it fun and so I gave you my little story about the doorm earlier put it on an excelion if I save this much every month if I save this much every month and see how quickly you can knock it down right so the next one is uh is around mortgages if you're renting you want to downgrade to something that's cheaper as cheap as you possibly can if you have a mortgage that you can afford
• 19:30 - 20:00 uh harder to get out of that and so you can refinance if they're if the rates are lower if they're not lower then you want to try and get a 15-year fixed and that way you can just try and pay it down as fast as possible the idea is that you just want to pay the house off and now we don't have to worry about it unless the government comes after for problem with taxes well I can tell you that living in a cash B for house uh is very chill but you're learing okay my car is paid forign cash my house is paid forign cash what happens is that your earning capacity start snowballing because if you don't have this car
• 20:00 - 20:30 payment and you don't have a mortgage all of a sudden you're like whoa I'm only working 2 days a month for my normal expenses in the other 20 I have now for going all in on investments in either myself or assets that about overti so step five is invest 15% of pre-tax income pre-tax income into stuff that's going to go up over time now the way that I like to think about this is automate Investments frictional lie spending so basically you
• 20:30 - 21:00 make it hard to spend easy to save easy to invest and so I like to take the things that have to get have to get saved have to get invested off the top before I begin everything else right now I still would have another bucket there that would be education that I would invest in if you're like man let's talk about the S&P 500 I don't know if I have the the money for that right and to be to do educational stuff it's like well spend less and if like I can't spend less you can always spend less right um but you can still split it and say okay
• 21:00 - 21:30 I'll put 15% pre tax into investing I'll put another 15% pre- tax into my education cuz that going to increase your capacity cuz listen as soon as you can replace what it cost you in education for that investment everything else is gravy it's like house money and so like the whole goal of the first educational investment is to cover itself once that happens like it's all doubling down after that and that's my recommendation is like the day that you stop investing with in your education getting more skills is that that you
• 21:30 - 22:00 decide that you don't want to make any more money than you probably are by the way this isn't investment advice you can do whatever the hell you want this is just be telling you what I told my team so next one is a little money habit still underneath step five is you want to check your accounts daily so this is something that I recommend for everybody who's basically before your savings schol um I stop looking at my accounts every day once we cross like 20 million that was when I literally stopped checking every day cuz the volatility sto making sense it make sense anymore but you want want to have a pulse for your money and so you want to know you
• 22:00 - 22:30 want to you want to know what's coming in what's going out like you want to you want to feel that and when you're looking at expension like that's a lot for me cuz you know how much that hits your account and like that that was a good inflow you're willing to to to to spend more in some areas that you're like I'm getting returns there but like you can't know that unless you be account every day you have that flow so if you want to know something wild so if you were 20 years old right now and you do the thing that I'm about to tell you it's going to sound insane but you would
• 22:30 - 23:00 have $50 million saved up at the end so here's how it works you take on an extra job you work an extra shift you make an extra $2,500 a month that means you drive Uber you you say you go to your boss and say I have more time can I do someone else's job or can I look at other jobs and take portions of that for more pay and a lot of times if you just offer to work more businesses will pay you more because they have more work to do and so you can make an extra ,000 $2,000 $3,000 a month
• 23:00 - 23:30 but if you made an extra $2,500 a month and you put that every single month towards just investing into the S&P 5 again not s just S&P all the other stuff we said stays we're just doing this on top and we're not touching it so then you would have 55 years of compounding at 99.7% and let's say you're starting amount with zero and you're going to put $2,500 a month away you did that for 55 years you'd have $52 million at the
• 23:30 - 24:00 end like you'd be ultra high net worth and so I I say this because wealth is a decision it's something that you can control and it starts with spending less than what you make it's about increasing your earning capacity segmenting and paying off the things that are that are that are dumb to be paying for locking in the negative compounding against you and blocking those so that you you can start the positive compounding developing the
• 24:00 - 24:30 simple habit of saving something then paying off smaller ones then saving up bigger ones then getting a little bit more on the offensive restructuring house debt so that you can pay it off faster once you're there then start snowballing then you go more aggressively into you work the extra shifts you invest the 15 pre-tax maybe invest another 15 pre-tax into yourself if I to pick between the two Bar None not even close I'd invest in me because your ability to earn more using money is going to always be higher than the S&P 500 even know so let's say that you put
• 24:30 - 25:00 $10,000 into the S&P 500 and it grows 10% you have 1,000 bucks great let's say instead you take the $10,000 and I said that working that extra shift well maybe instead of uh uh shoveling snow you buy a snowblower and now the snowblower takes you from doing three driveways a day to doing 20 when you knock doors and say Hey you know snow blow your your driveway for you with 7ex your earning capacity will that make you more than an extra ,000 this year yes buy a lot buy a long shot and so the key is not thinking
• 25:00 - 25:30 about uh what you can do passively with the money although I I like having this understanding of it especially in the beginning it's about increasing your active income so here's the craziest thing that $52 million that you would have that's being made by someone no matter what think about this for a second if you didn't change your habits you'd more or less make the same amount of money but that 35% % of the American paycheck is going to someone and not someone is
• 25:30 - 26:00 taking that money and putting into something that Couts and they're doing it for the entirety of your life and so the question just comes down to who do you want that $50 million to belong to do you want it to belong to the banks and their shareholders or do you want it to belong to you but either way that money is being made it's just whether it's going to be you who pass it at the end so the last step just to be clear is that you pay off your mortgage then all of your basic living expenses are are covered your fixed costs are done and now all of that unlocks even more
• 26:00 - 26:30 investment into your long-term Legacy now this works really well when paired with the the uh the 30 by2 all right so 30X 12 working challenge is basically you work 30 days straight no weekends 12 hours a day and you don't take days off now what happens is now everyone like that's not sustainable that's why I said 30 days not the rest of your life the point is is that you'll realize at the end of days that you can work harder than you thought you could you can go a
• 26:30 - 27:00 week or two without taking a day off and you're not going to die cuz Believe It or Not thousands of years we didn't have weekends weekends are A New Concept that's happened as soon as factories were invented and I think it was a way to get even more something out of people I can't even remember what it was the point is is that if you stop spending all your money and then you take all the time when you normally would spend money and then make money you get a double you reduce the negative and add to the positive and see how much damage you can can do in 30 days and then then you
• 27:00 - 27:30 could say is it worth it for me to get what I want