6 Money Truths I Wish Someone Told Me Sooner

hey everyone welcome back to the channel so today I'm going to share six different truths about money that I wish somebody taught me at a younger age some of these I had to figure out on my own others somebody might have taught me at some point where I learn from some books over time but I want to share these with you today and I found that they ended up saving me more money making me more money and just helping me financially all around so if you want to improve your personal finance if you want to improve your wealth and increase wealth over your lifetime then make sure you hit the subscribe button we do our best to provide as many videos on these topics as possible we highly appreciate it so let's just get started at this video let's not beat around the bush here let's start with the first one which is sort of adopting sort of a minimalist type of lifestyle this is something that I've really been moving into in the past about six months or so really just cutting back on a lot of the clutter that you have in your house and things that you think that you need that you really don't need in order to be happy in life I found that for myself as I just moved everything out of my apartment just last week and I'm moving into my new one in a couple of days here and so in that process when you're cleaning out your apartment or if you've ever rented somewhere and you're cleaning it out you realize how much more stuff you actually have like you're filling up truckloads of stuff that you just didn't think you had and and I found myself in this position so really I'm gonna be focusing on cutting back on a lot of just materialistic things that you just don't need for example having a toaster oven and a toaster and a microwave and a conventional oven and just having all these different like things that you just don't really need and end up costing you more money because when something breaks you have to pay to fix it and then you go to the store you just end up buying so much more stuff and you know if you're ordering one thing per week on Amazon that's fifty two things per year and then they start to add up over the years and that's 500 things over a decade that are just sitting in your house sitting in your apartment that you just don't really need so that's the first one that I want to share with you and maybe I'll do some type of apartment tour if you'd like to see that let me know down below as I move into this new apartment to show you guys how I'm furnishing it and what how I really kind of go throughout my day so if you're interested let me know but the next one that I want to share with you is is an idea that I learned quite a while ago but it's still something that scares me that a lot of people don't realize and that's just avoiding debt and almost all costs now if you're fans of saying Dave Ramsey or chris hogan or some other people you'll know that debt in a lot of cases something that you want to avoid but if you look at the average amount of debt in america it's still very scary to see that people have credit card debt student loans home mortgages car payments personal loans the list goes on so americans have tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt and one thing that i just want to want you to remember after watching this video is just before you sign on the dotted line to really just think twice about it because i think especially this really goes for people who are buying cars it just seems like such a small payments and maybe say sign for a car and you're paying $300 a month for that car loan or four hundred dollars per month on that loan and it's just something that you don't really think about as much because you say you know it might be four percent interest five percent Interest six percent maybe and so a lot of people just sign on the dotted line it and this goes for people if you're considering going to college and i think it's a little bit kind of strange to see seventeen year olds literally signing for a hundred thousand dollars in student loans it's just kind of a weird situation but just be very aware of how much money you're actually signing to borrow because you're gonna have to pay that back and you're gonna be hit with a lot of interest rates especially if you don't have a good credit score so just just really think twice about it now there's a couple things that are hard to avoid when it comes to debt so for example if you want to buy a house in your 20s or 30s you're probably not gonna have a quarter million dollars on hand in cash to pay for that house so a lot of people get home mortgages which can be understandable but when it comes to cars for myself i like to buy them in cash and yeah some people argue that well with that money that you could have saved by maybe not putting a lump sum of fifteen thousand dollars down on a car and sending investing that in the stock market getting seven percent so that you could pay four percent on the car loan but to me it it's just I don't like having debt in my life it's just like this over looming dark cloud over top of you and say you're looking at your bank account one day and you have forty-three thousand dollars in your bank account but you have sixty eight thousand dollars of debt just looming overhead and it's it's just kind of this this feeling that's that's not a very good feeling that that I would get personally and I've had debt in the past but I've paid almost all of it off because I just really really am NOT a big proponent of it and it's it's also just not very necessary in a lot of cases now I'm gonna kind of flip you around here because this next idea might be a little bit confusing but I think you should stick with it because it's going to make a lot of sense once you can me out here and that's by realizing that credit cards can actually be used as tools to actually become more successful in life financially as well so credit cards as a general statement are going to be something that you should probably avoid that the overall population overall people consumers should probably avoid credit cards and that's because a lot of people are going to get credit cards they're gonna spend money that they don't have they're going to spend more money than what they thought they were going to spend or they just forget to pay their bill they're late on their payments and end up spending a lot more money on credit card interest now the reason why the credit cards can be used as a tool is because you can use these for rewards you can use these for signup bonuses so for example if you've been following me on Instagram you'll probably notice that I've been doing quite a bit of traveling or at least compared to what I used to do I never left the u.s. until just this year in 2019 but since then I've been on about 20-some flights and a good amount of those flights were actually funded by free credit card bonuses that I've gotten to essentially fly me places for signing up for credit cards now I've never paid a single penny in credit card interest there's a way to essentially game the system in a way where you can still actually reap thousands of dollars worth of rewards and and free things from credit card companies without actually spending a lot of money so I rarely use a lot of my credit cards I try not to spend too much money but I still get a lot of signup bonuses a lot of rewards as a whole as a whole so you know they can enable you to do certain things you can get round-trip flights to anywhere in the world if you have a credit card with the signup bonus but I really want you to caution you on that because not everybody is going to be in the best position to use credit cards I know for example one of my brothers he knows that he can't use credit cards he's just not he doesn't have the discipline to use a credit card and then pay it off and make sure that he's not spending too much money on that card so he just uses a debit card for him it works better but for someone like myself where I spend so much time tracking my finances it probably too much time almost an unhealthy amount of time tracking my finances where every penny comes in where every penny goes out I know exactly everything with my finances and because of that I'm able to use credit cards and you may be able to use credit cards as well without having any problems and actually end up winning and using them as a tool now they do have some other benefits as well one of them is that you do build your credit score and that can help with getting loans in the future which like I said I don't really like debt but if you have to get a home mortgage if you do want to borrow some money at some point in your life it's available to you at a lower interest rate than if you didn't have any type of loans in your life on top of that with a debit card versus a credit card or or a cash for example credit cards if somebody steals it and they buy something well in most cases credit card companies will cover that and you won't be liable for that versus debit cards or obviously cash in your wallet somebody could steal that and you're probably not going to get that back so that is another reason why I like them so something else that I wish I did learn sooner was that you don't have to pay money to learn essentially anything now I'm really kind of talking about like these online courses I see everywhere people are selling their courses the thousand dollar course to show you how to get better finances or how to build your credit score and you can buy the course for a thousand dollars but the truth is there's so much free information out there that you can learn an incredible amount for absolutely free at your local library you can learn it for maybe you know eight dollars for an Amazon book for example this book right here personal finance book right so sometimes people spend a thousand dollars on a full all day maybe it's a weekend seminar on personal finance and how to better your personal finances but you're spending a thousand dollars on that when you could read a book like this which is literally a textbook like they use this in classrooms if you read a book like this and you spent $20 on it on Amazon this is going to teach you ten times more information than anybody could in a two-day seminar that you paid an exorbitant amount of money for so just keep that in mind with a lot of stuff whether you think that you have to pay money to learn how to do it in most cases you just don't I mean I've really never paid to learn things because there's so much free info out there I mean I've paid ten dollars for you to me courses that I found to be very valuable I've paid for a lot of books but in a lot of cases I just go to my local library and there's many books I'll never be able to read all of them to learn so much now on the flip side there you know there are some courses there are some things that can actually be valuable I have some friends who do sell some online courses that will teach you a lot of things that can be valuable so they're not always going to be something that I would totally avoid but me personally I just know that there's so many possibilities and so many things out there that there's really no reason for me personally to spend money on that and and this one's a little bit more of an opinion and I understand that people can I can disagree with that but it's just what I personally think the next one is is that realizing that looking rich really doesn't win in the long run for yourself you know I think when people start to see an increase in their income they like to start to try to show people that that they're doing well that they're making money especially in like this entrepreneurial area that I see where people maybe they'll make $200,000 in a year and they want to show people that because maybe they dropped out of college or they quit their job so they buy a Rolex they buy some really nice stuff maybe they buy a nice boat but that doesn't really help you win over the long term by kind of spending all this money on things I know just looking at people from my high school there was always like that one family that would pull up in the Escalade like the ninety thousand dollar car they had a really nice house I got the new 80 inch TVs in their house but then you look at them and you look at the job in the making maybe a hundred thousand dollars per year the total expenses are probably a hundred fifty thousand dollars per year and they're really not winning they might be appearing that they're winning and they might do something for their social status but they're really not winning so it's okay to look like you're not rich even if you are making money whether you're making a lot of money or not I think trying to be excessive with all that it's just foolish in a lot of cases and you don't need to to flash all that to be happy in life that's just something that I learned and there's people like for example there was a janitor I believe somewhere up in north about like New England area who had eight million dollars and he was a janitor and he did this through investing but he was very simple he lived in a very small house he wore just regular clothes but he was a multi-millionaire he didn't go showing it off everywhere I think his name was Ronald Reid very interesting story now there's a balance you don't want to just save all of your money and not never spend anything but don't go absolutely crazy but especially if at any point in your life you find yourself making a lot of money making six figures making half a million dollars a year I just think it's foolish to spend a lot of that to look cool to try to build your appearance and make everybody kind of jealous of you or think wow that person is doing so well in life and the final one here that I want to share with you it's just very brief and you know I probably mentioned this before on this channel but if you're not doing it already you really do want to consider it and that's by really taking a look at your retirement plans and your retirement fund so I was talking to my accountant a while back and I kind of had a lapse in judgment where I said to him I said you know I'm not sure how much money I want to put into my IRA accounts this year because you know I don't want to lock my money away in a retirement account that I can't really touch you know I can touch some of it but I can't touch all of it until I'm 59 and a half without withdrawing it with a penalty from the IRS and luckily my accountant kind of changed my mind on this if he's watching it right now how's it going but he changed my mind on this because he said you know what you're 21 now and it's hard to picture yourself retiring in 40 years 40 years from now I mean that's double the life that I've lived so far it just seems so far out that I had a lapse in judgment I said you know it's so far out I don't want to worry about it I'll think about it in my 30s but you really want to think about doing it now at the moment the younger you are the better to just save for retirement because when you're 37 years old and you're looking at your your retirement account you have $200,000 and then you're gonna feel so much better than if you find yourself in your 40s with no money in your IRAs no money in your 401ks because you just didn't opt into it and you were spending that money elsewhere on different things maybe going out partying in your 20s and 30s instead of putting the anterior retirement accounts gonna be a much better position to just do that in your life and if you live in a different country you probably have some type of retirement plans available to you most countries do if it's not a 401 K or an IRA they probably different terms in various other countries throughout the world so hopefully you found some value in this video I really try my best to you know just provide as much ideas as possible on this channel these videos aren't scripted these are just my opinions so if you found this video to be helpful make sure you drop a like appreciate it thanks everybody for helping this channel hit 200,000 subscribers I really never thought that would ever happen and yeah so I'm very thankful for that so thanks for watching the video and I'll see everybody in the next video

Channel: Nate O'Brien

Views: 231,379

Rating: 4.9629164 out of 5

Keywords: bank accounts, financial freedom, financial tips, how to save money, how to save money fast, manage money, money, money management, money saving tips, nate obrien, personal finance, save money, save money 2019, saving money, spend money, ways to save money, money truths

Id: 4YXhS3puZfA

Length: 13min 38sec (818 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 09 2019