8 Money Lessons I Wish I Learned Sooner

this video is sponsored by google pixel 4a the financial advice in this video reflects my personal opinions only and is not endorsed by google or any of its affiliates in the past three years i've made over 100 videos on this channel sharing some of my experiences and things that i've learned thus far in life and in this video i want to share with you eight of the most important and practical lessons that i have learned about money whether we like it or not money plays a crucial role in our livelihoods it decides what we eat for dinner how we vacation and even how we raise our children so let's get started so the first lesson is that money is not the end goal in life now i've spoken to dozens of millionaires and i've asked them some of the mistakes that they've made in the past or things that they would have done differently and one of the biggest things the thing that kept recurring every time that i ask somebody is they told me that sometimes money would skew their decision-making process a little bit more than what they in hindsight would have liked it to do so this is something that you really do need to understand because sometimes we we put money too high on the list for things that are important to us and we can make bad decisions you know for example um if you're looking at two different jobs and one job might pay you five percent more or ten percent more even though you know it's not going to be a very fulfilling job you're not going to like it versus a job that maybe pays you a little bit less but you know it's going to be a fulfilling job you know that you're very passionate about that job many of us still choose that higher paying job even though it's not as exciting it's not something that's fulfilling and so just those little decisions especially those life decisions that are important to think about and make sure that you're not letting money affect some of those decisions even though it is important it's also important to make sure that you're having fun and being happy in life now the next lesson that i've learned is something known as the 80 20 principle and you can use this 80 20 principle and apply it to certain areas of life or certain expenses that traditionally would be large expenses but if you use this correctly we can actually end up saving a lot of money that's why the sponsor for today's video is google pixel 4a the new google phone it's available from 349 which is an unheard of price for a premium phone you can end up saving the bank without sacrificing quality it's packed with tons of added value three months of youtube premium google one and google play pass that's fifty six dollars an added value that comes with the phone so you can listen to music ad free you also get a hundred gigabytes for three months in storage on drive support and fire up premium games with play pass so personally i think this is a worthy investment you've probably experienced a phone with battery life that gets worse over time as you update its software but pixel 4a has an all-day battery and your phone will get better over time with feature drops which bring you new features without needing to buy a new phone so this phone has tons of incredible features something like top-notch security the new google assistant but arguably my favorite is the premium camera so thank you google pixel 4a for sponsoring this video you can buy it on google store i'll leave some links below in the description if you want to learn more about it and let's continue on with the video number three is to realize that cash flow can be much more powerful or just as powerful as assets so let's say that maybe you own 10 000 acres of land you own a massive plot of forest somewhere in the world and although this might be worth say two million dollars if it's not pulling in any money it's not making you any money this actually might end up being a liability and so you have to pay taxes on this you might have to pay for various different expenses for this land and if it's not bringing in cash if you're not making money off of uh something that you own it can end up actually hurting you quite a bit you could use this as well thinking about a house you own a million dollar house but you have no money coming in how are you going to pay your mortgage how are you going to pay for your water bill how are you going to pay for your property taxes right so just because you have assets doesn't mean that you are raking in the money it doesn't actually mean that you're wealthy there's a term that's called house poor and this actually happens to a lot of people where they buy a house that's too large and they can barely afford it and they end up not having any money left over because it's all going into the house and they're almost poor in a sense and that point actually leads us into the fourth lesson that i've learned which is that your house is not always an asset now if you've read a number of real estate books maybe you've heard this idea being thrown around that your house might actually be a liability it does depend how you look at it but i do like to not treat a house solely as an asset there's a couple of reasons for this one is because you can't always count on appreciation of a home value now maybe over a very long period of time perhaps you can factor that in but over a span of a decade assuming that you can buy a house and then sell it for more three years later that might not always be the best route to take your house is not necessarily an asset in my opinion we can dispute this feel free to comment down below on your opinions but if you have outgoing expenses if you own a home look there's always going to be a cost of putting a roof over your head regardless of whether you rent or you own a home and some people actually asked me this just last week because i just moved in my new apartment a couple weeks ago and they said nate why are you renting still why don't you just buy a house and it's because there's always a cost of putting a roof over your head your property tax mortgage insurance you have a lot of expenses with owning a home and with an apartment you don't have those expenses now we can even them out and we can look at the the actual cost of homes and still statistically yes over the long term it's still probably better off buying a house than renting we can talk about that in a separate video but i just want you to think about that a little bit more realizing that there's still a cost of putting a roof over your head if you own your house you still have a lot of expenses if you're a homeowner you know exactly what i'm talking about so this next one is arguably my favorite lesson in this video and it's understanding sales and sales strategy i suggest reading a few books about this because if you can understand how people sell to you and the strategies that they that they use to convince you to buy something whether this is buying a house whether this is buying a car at a car dealership whether this is buying a sofa at your local furniture store if you can understand the tactics or the strategies that people use to sell you something you can sort of reverse this on them i have a good friend of mine whose mother is an incredible sales woman and i've seen her do this when she goes somewhere and somebody tries to sell her something and she'll say you know what i'm a salesperson myself i know this strategy that you're using let's actually take this conversation in a different direction because i know what you're doing kind of exposes them sometimes i have a lot of friends who are sales people there's nothing wrong with that of course uh because you want to sell something right there's a strategy to selling but if you understand how they sell you can end up sometimes getting a better deal if you're really good at negotiating and picking apart sort of the strategy that some people use to sell you things so get really good at negotiating get really a understanding of how to sell and then use it in reverse to get a better deal and a better bargain for yourself number six pay yourself first this is a simple idea but many of us still don't do this in fact i actually did a recent poll on one of my social media accounts and i asked people whether they were paying themselves first and i had a lot of people who said that they still don't pay themselves first the best way to do this and i can't tell you how to manage your money but a simple strategy that i use for myself is to simply have money come into one checking account or one bank account and then you have automatic withdrawals that go into a separate account that you save money in or you invest money whatever you would like to do with your money so you have automatic withdrawals going from maybe your checking account to your other account like your savings account or your investment account so that you don't have to really think about saving money it almost automatically does it and then say that you make a thousand dollars per week and so you have automatically 200 per week withdrawn from your checking account goes into your other bank account so then you have 800 to work with you paid yourself first and now you can think about paying your bills now you can think about what you want to use as discretionary income so don't even treat that that extra money or that savings money as discretionary income put that towards savings and then see what you have left over so pay yourself first trust me it's one of the best things you can do discipline leads to freedom this actually applies to many areas of our lives but if you can have discipline we can end up getting freedom at some point now obviously this is not a paved path that everyone's going to follow it's there's going to be issues that arise along the way but if you are disciplined it's going to allow you to be more free in most areas this actually we can expand this much further than just finances if you want to become healthier you need to discipline yourself to eat healthier foods if you want to have better finances you need to discipline yourself to be able to say no to certain expenses and i think in part sort of becoming a no man or a no person where you're able to say no to things that maybe you don't want to do not being susceptible to peer pressure uh maybe if you have something important that you want to do but other people are pressuring you into doing something else being able to say you know what no this is the decision this is my discipline uh and i'm not going to do that activity that maybe i will regret in the future or i'm not very proud of as a person and so having that discipline very important it takes a lot of time to build up and you know i'm going to be honest i have a lot of problems i'm not perfect i'm not totally disciplined there's things where maybe i go astray a little bit but for the most part you know i do like to try to stay as disciplined as possible with certain areas of life that are important to me and the final lesson that i want to share with you is it's okay to spend money i actually spend quite a bit of money you don't want to be a cheap person you don't want to be somebody who pinches pennies and doesn't spend anything um because you know i think everybody has a different philosophy in life but one of mine is to make sure that i'm very happy and content and feeling good about my lifestyle and the things that i'm doing and so my goal if i'm trying to make money i'm making this money so that i can use it for something that's important to me whether this is something that's for myself or for other people or for community or for family or something else but it's okay to spend money you don't have to feel like you have to save every penny and so that's something that you know i think a lot of us sometimes do forget because we talk about saving money all the time we talk about finances all the time we think that we just have to squirrel all of our money away but there's really no point in doing that i know personally i'm not taking money to the grave with me i'm going to use it for certain things that i have and certain visions and ideas that i have in my life and so that's one of the reasons why i've been saving up and and thinking about it and taking it seriously for quite some time so thank you for watching the video thanks for google pixel 4a for sponsoring this video i'll leave some links to them down below and i'll see everybody in next week's video

Channel: Nate O'Brien

Views: 128,151

Rating: 4.9200959 out of 5

Keywords: Pixel, Pixel 4a, Google Pixel, Google Pixel 4a, smartphone, smartphone design, OLED display, google, Pixel imprint, smartphone fingerprint scanner, fingerprint scanner, smartphone battery, smartphone battery life, battery life, Night Sight, astrophotography, phone camera, astrophotography camera, Google Assistant, nate o'brien

Id: lYquwNlkcUU

Length: 10min 14sec (614 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2020