Words can't really explain how free I feel now that I don't have any debt. I believe in this philosophy of what doesn't get measured doesn't get
managed, so I make sure I'm tracking my money. Money by itself really won't make you happy. My experience with money was seeing my family hustle and now everyone's
doing really well. Ever since I was a little kid, I saw people on TV and I saw people living
great lives and I said, why can they have it and why can't I? Like, what makes them so special? Hi, my name is Alex Sanchez. I'm 24 years old and I make $230,000. I didn't have to go to college to become a lineman, but I just had to pass
preliminary objectives and prerequisites and just a bunch of climbing and physical assessments. Being in this field, you're away from family a lot, you will miss the
birthday parties, you will miss the special occasions, but it's part of the job and that's why it's so rewarding, because you get multiple weeks where
you put in multiple hours of overtime, and that definitely helps out a lot. I used to budget precisely, like I would write down all my expenses, like
what I spend money on for the month, but it was just taking too much energy. I didn't think it really made sense for me to, like, nickel
and dime everything. I don't spend money on things that have no meaning. I live in West Chicago, it's a suburb 40 minutes west of Chicago. I've lived here my whole life. I'm perfectly content with living where I'm at right now. It's a win-win, I get to help out my mom, and I can also help myself out by
saving more money. Food is definitely one of my biggest expenses, even though most of the food
is actually groceries. Live in the suburbs, I don't use any public transportation. I pretty much drive everywhere. I only have a 15 minute drive to work, but my girlfriend does live about
forty five minutes to an hour away from me. So I do have to drive a lot to go see her. A recent splurge was this tattoo. I started a few months ago. It's only about a third done. I still have a lot more to go. But so far I've spent about $500 on this tattoo and I still have probably
$750 to $1,000 more to spend on it. But it's just something that means a lot to me because it's actually going
to be a memorial for one of my best friends that passed away last year. So I'm not going to penny pinch on something that's really important to
me. One of my side hustles is a business I started two years ago. It's a lawn care business and I started off just doing it myself and
decided to hire my brother. And he definitely helped me a lot on growing the business. Excel Lawn Care gross is about $10,000 a month, but after insurance, gas
maintenance on the equipment and paying my guys, I keep about $1,500 to $2,000 a month. The idea of getting passive income and just having the paychecks show up
every month, just really fascinates me. The thing about rental properties is that they make so much sense just
because someone always needs a place to live. I bought my first property last fall. I paid cash for that one. It was a $68,000 condo. The second property I bought, it was $92,000 and that was paid cash. My mom actually helped me on that one. I put in about 65% of the money on that. And then plus I had to put in the money to fix up the place. My third property is financed with 20% down, a down payment of $15,000. I knew that if I was going to invest in real estate, I knew that I would
need a lot of money. So I took on side hustles. I worked as much overtime as I could at work and I just kept my expenses
as low as I could. I definitely try to save as much as I can. It could vary month to month, but I try to save at least $7,000 a month. One of my big goals is I want to be become a millionaire by the age of 30,
which I still think it's going to happen, and just because I have a plan and of
acquiring four properties per year for the next five years. So by the age of 30, I want to have 20 units. I think with my income and with my savings rate and investments, I think I
will be at that. I feel like I have to give back to my parents because, you know, they came
here as immigrants and they came here to give us, their kids, a better life. So I know all the sacrifice and pain that they went through. And it's just, it's my duty to give back to them. Everything I do is pretty much for them. I think part of the reason why I save so much comes from what I've learned
from my parents. We never took vacations. We only went to the library. That was our vacation. They were basically just very frugal. And that carried on to me. I try to be pretty frugal. Hi, my name is Bukola Ayodele. I'm 25 years old and I make $210,000 every year and live in New York City. I'm a software engineer working in the fintech space and building tools
and applications for engineers. So I'm actually obsessed with tracking things, like I track my calories, I
track my workouts and I also track my money. I believe in this philosophy of what doesn't get measured, doesn't get
managed. So I make sure I'm tracking my money every single month. And how I track my money is I use YNAB and I also use Personal Capital. I also have spreadsheets for my long term goals. So I just make sure that every single month I'm allocating a little bit of
money to hit those long term goals. The total rent for the apartment is about $4,000 and my room costs about
$1,400. This is actually the most I've ever spent on rent and I was a little mad
to spend this much on rent, but the area's really nice and it's even closer to work. So I kind of save time in my commute. I was born in Nigeria and I moved here when I was six years old and we
moved into like an inner city neighborhood when we first got here. And my parents really like hustled and worked hard to get us to a better
neighborhood. Growing up, my parents really valued education and they really pushed my
sister and I to pursue a very traditional career path in our house. We had a saying that you could either be a doctor or a lawyer or a
disgrace. I actually majored in political science in college with the hopes of
becoming a lawyer. But after working in a law-related field, I realized that this was not for
me. So I look back at classes in college I really liked and one of the classes
I really loved in college were my computer science classes. I decided to quit my job and do a sabbatical. During my time doing a sabbatical, I joined the Recurse Center. The Recurse Center is sort of like an engineering retreat where you can
learn how to program and just sort of build new projects. It was totally free and it took three months. And then after that, three months later, I got a job. I got so many rejections like rejections left and right, and I just had to
like, learn to just be a little bit more persistent and to keep pushing. We're getting our account balance and then we're just returning self dot
accountant. So it's just easy. It can be kind of a little isolating to be the only Black woman. But I really just try to connect with other Black women and people of
color in the software engineering space. I've been stopped like a bunch of times from entering my job because,
like, they thought I just didn't work in the building. It's just crazy that things like that happen. Tech and software engineering is a really great career path. You get to work on really amazing projects and you can earn a really good
living doing this. $200 goes towards groceries and $100 for eating out. I grew up on meal prep. My mom always made us some jollof rice in the house, so I usually meal
prep my meals. OK, good. Me and my friends, we do other things other than just like going
out for dinner and like brunch. So instead of grabbing dinner, we'll just do a ClassPass instead and like
go to a dance class or I just invite friends over. Sometimes I'll just cook together. It's just the way for all of us to save money. I only left school with about $7,000 =in student loans was because of two
factors, the first factor was the fact that I got needs-based financial aid for my college so that my tuition and room and board, half of it was paid
and covered for by my school. The other half was covered for by my parents. And they gave me probably one of the best gifts that I've ever gotten,
which is the gift of a free education. They took on the burden of carrying like our loans, but they were able to
pay it off through just being really frugal. My parents just always donated like 10 percent of their salary. They see that as like a gift to God. So they've really encouraged me to do the same thing. So some of that money goes back to my parents because they've done a lot
for me and the remaining goes to other organizations that I really care about. I love exercising so much. Exercising has helped me live in New York City. It's honestly one of the most stressful places to live in. But maintaining an exercise routine really helps me reduce my stress and
really helps me with my mental health. So I really love spending money on beauty. For me, my beauty budget entails, like sometimes I get my nails done,
sometimes I get sugared. I also really like hair extensions and buying new clothes. So I try to keep my beauty budget about $300 every month. I try to be pretty frugal. It's funny because, like when I first graduated from college, I was living
paycheck to paycheck on my first salary, and it wasn't because I was making, like, too little, it was just because I wasn't being smart with my
money. And it wasn't until I wanted to leave my job that I realized the
importance and the power of having savings. One of my long-term financial goals is to FIRE. I'm a huge fan of the Financial Independence Retire Early movement. I think it's a really amazing movement. I don't necessarily know if I want to retire early, but it would be great
to be financially independent. One of my goals is also to maybe own an apartment. I know in New York it can be crazy. Like in my neighborhood, a one-bedroom goes for like $700-$800,000. And that's just for a one-bedroom. Something that I'm really passionate about is my YouTube channel called The
Come Up. It's sort of a channel that I created to sort of give people the resources
I didn't have when I was starting this journey. Hey, guys, welcome back to the channel. There are not that many Black women in tech. So I just wanted to sort of show that there are Black women in tech and
just sort of provide as many resources as possible. I didn't really grow up getting to take international trips, we only
traveled, like to the library, so I kind of like do it to the max now. So I try to take one international trip every year with my boyfriend. I take girls trips with my friends. I'm also in a long distance relationship so that, like flying back and
forth from New York to L.A. also adds a little bit more to my travel budget. Basically, all of my family is in Nigeria, like all of my family, except
for one of my uncles and my sister, my mom and my dad. And the opportunities I have here are significantly more than the
opportunities that my cousins have. So that's something that I always remember when I'm feeling like down is
how lucky I am to be here and how many opportunities I have here than having like in Nigeria. The most important lesson I've learned about money is that money can just
give you a lot of opportunities, a lot of options, like in New York City, you're just constantly surrounded by people who are extremely wealthy, but
also people who are extremely poor. And then going to the college I went to, I went to school with kids whose
parents were millionaires and billionaires so I could actually see how money can give me options and opportunities and the things we don't have
to think about when you have a higher income. So that's part of the reason I'm like I try to work as hard as I can just
so I can also give myself and my family those opportunities. Words can't really explain how free I feel now that I don't have any debt,
I feel like a new person. I feel as if I can do anything. My name is Roy Patterson, I'm 31 years old, I make $118,000 a year and I
live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I think about money and finances about 90 percent of the time, mainly how
can I make more money? How can I save more money and what can I do with the money? Self care is very, very important. And because of that, I spend a lot of money on skin care. As you can see, it looks good. Money plays a big part in my relationship with my girlfriend, I would say
that she is more frugal than I am. So there will be times where we want to do things. But she doesn't want to spend the money on it. And I'm very cognizant of the things that we talk about and how we budget
our money. I try to help her as much as I can, but I also know that she has to go
through her own journey as well. I tend to take on the more of the 60 percent to 40 percent tactic where
I'll pay 60 percent of the bills and she'll take on 40 percent depending on what it is. I decided to get serious about paying off my debt, I would say in my senior
year in college. I felt that my parents did the ultimate sacrifice by putting their names
on these student loans. And so if I didn't pay that off, that's something that they would be
straddled with. I used to watch The Suze Orman Show every Saturday at night. You know, I really took that to heart and kind of used her as my
unofficial mentor to really stay focused and stay motivated to really start my debt repayment. One person who was by my side the entire time was my mom. We started watching Suze Orman together. She was looking to pay off her credit card debt, mortgage, car bills and
just miscellaneous items. We really held each other accountable in order to make sure that we
accomplished getting rid of all this debt together. So growing up, I played a lot of The Sims on my laptop. And one day I found out that it came out for my Xbox One. So I ended up buying it and falling in love with that game all over again. So that's my little girl. They have money trees. Once they sell the fruit, they get about $8,000 per fruit. I actually spent a lot of money buying the expansion packs for the game. My girlfriend loves The Sims more than I do. She will play in eight-hour sprints. During the week. Obviously we have work and we try to be as productive as
possible, but if it's a long weekend and we don't have anything to do, The Sims is on and we're going to play it. So being a child of immigrant parents definitely affected the way that I
saw money, because I know how hard my parents had to work to make the money that they did have. Every need that we had was met, every one. We had a discussion about it. Why did you really want it? How valuable is this? That really shaped my relationship with money. One of the things that I really got into recently was cooking a lot of
Jamaican dishes, being from a Jamaican background, and my dad did a lot of cooking for us and we didn't really go out as a kid. And that's one of the things that I hold near and dear to my heart. So I started this career actually by accident. I went to school for business management and I had a friend who started an
internship at Cigna and she told me about this program called the Technology Early Career Development Program. I grew up in Connecticut and I actually started working at Cigna in
Connecticut. And then around 2015, I felt the need to kind of expand my wings and try
something new. And I knew that Cigna had a big presence in Philadelphia and so it seemed
like a good fit. My salary has gone up about I'd say almost 80 percent since I started
about seven years ago. In order to help with the move to New York, I put in a budget of about ten
thousand dollars to help with that. Work is also going to provide a relocation package as well. With the relocation package, I will also have my savings to pad the move
to New York. Now that I'm debt free, some of the goals that I have is to start really
diversifying my portfolio. One of the things that I'm working on right now is saving up enough money
to buy my first rental property. One of them is Personal Capital. It's an app that I subscribe to where it allows me to track all my
investment accounts and all my bank accounts, and then I also use Mint to track my day to day expenses. I think that I'm good with money. I believe I'm good with money. No, I know that I'm good with money. My friends look at me as their financial guru, where they come to me with
their specific problems and I help them break it down into a manageable portion. The most important thing that I learned about money is that money doesn't
make who you are. Money brings out either the best or worst and what's already in you. Coming from a family that's a family of immigrants where we were three
families in a one-bedroom in Brooklyn, I didn't learn about money growing up. My experience with money was seeing my family hustle and now
everyone's doing really well. Hi, my name is Dijana Ilieva, I'm 34, I make $150,000 a year and I live in
Manhattan, New York City. I started my agency after getting laid off from a corporate job. I've been pretty fortunate. It really ranges when you're freelancing and working for yourself. I mean, I would say my biggest expense every month is my rent. I do have health insurance. I pay about $400 a month for it. But even with that $400, you know, prescriptions are a ton if I just have
to have health insurance. Especially when you're in your mid-30s. The challenges of having your own agency...there's so many. One, just being used to that Friday direct deposit, having to really know
where every single dollar is coming from. Another challenge is just money management for me, putting aside money to
pay your taxes every year and also just knowing your worth, I think that was something that I learned a lot. You start doing designs for like two or three hundred dollars and then you
realize there's people that are doing this for hedge funds that are charging like $100,000 just for a logo. My experience with crypto, I have to thank my little brother, Eitan. He was on it very early on and he told me to invest in Bitcoin a couple of
years ago when it was about a thousand dollars, maybe a little less, and I liquidated at $19,000. He called me and said, "Get out." And I was like, "What do you mean?" And he said, "You will never see a
return on anything like this in your life again." Putting a little bit of money into it here and there and kind of having a very diverse portfolio. I have a 401(k), I have a retirement plan throughout college, I actually
worked at Safeway for five years when they were union and the number two company to work for behind Starbucks. So that's all been building since then. And every time I have taken a corporate job, whether it's been for a
little bit or been on my own, I'm always putting into that fund. If I do an event and, you know, I bring in 20 grand from it, obviously
I'llput aside a portion of that and then there's months where I'm not putting anything aside. I was just so fortunate to be a hustler, like finding ways to save on
everything. I do go to a very expensive gym and provide them liquor for their monthly
mixers. And I'm fortunate enough to get a comped membership there. And I think just that hustle growing up here in New York and coming from a
family that's a family of immigrants, all of that was instilled in me at such a young age and really preparing yourself. Right now, we are going to see Kristen, who is my partner in Hashtag
Lunchbag, because we have a meeting about this weekend's event. You know, you make sandwiches, we distribute them to the homeless. We started with just making a hundred, now we're making almost a thousand
every month. It's just nice to be able to do something that can put a smile on
someone's face, but we take for granted. Every dollar I spend, I think of how I can make like three dollars to
cover it, you know, and that's always in my head. I buy a purse for two hundred and I'm like, where am I going to make five
hundred dollars tomorrow? My goal is to retire by 40. I always say, if you live in Manhattan, you have to hate yourself a little
bit. You know, it's not easy to live here. So I'm really working up to taking everything I made here and enjoying the
rest of my life somewhere else. So I never felt like I was great with money and the more I talk about it,
the more I realize here where you can do better and where you can spend less. The fact that I am debt-free and live alone in New York,
I've been pretty good with money in the last couple of years. My name is Todd Baldwin. I'm 27 years old. I live in Seattle, Washington, and I make $615,000 per year. Money by itself really won't make you happy. All it is, is a tool, it's to get you what you need. It's security and it can provide you a great life, but it doesn't buy you
happiness like people think it does. Out of the $615,000 we bring in, we invest almost all of that just back
intothe business, back into more real estate or into different brokerage accounts. So we don't actually see a lot of that because it's
all invested out. But, yes, it's a very comfortable lifestyle and it helps that we're
incredibly frugal. All for free. I earn the bulk of my money through real estate investing. We bring in about $460,000 per year doing that and about $150,000 is
profit. And that is after living completely for free and all expenses are paid. We bought our first house at age 23. We are now 27 and we have $4.4 million worth of real estate. So some people think that the hardest thing about real estate will be
either insurance or taxes. Luckily, I work in insurance and my wife is a CPA working in tax. So my wife and I live completely for free by house-hacking and having
roommates. So we live in a brand new duplex and we have the other half of that duplex
on Airbnb. And we live in the main half. We also converted one of the garages into a studio apartment. We have that on Airbnb as well. And in our main unit, the half that we live in, we have roommates, so we
rent out one bedroom for $1,200 and another bedroom for $850. After living in our duplex completely for free by renting out the other
half, the downstairs garage and the bedrooms on our side, we live completely for free. Plus we make $1,850 in profit. I was raised by a single mom and I watched her struggle working four jobs
to try to feed three kids and she was worried all the time about money. And I saw it and I could feel it. And it wasn't a good feeling. And from a very early age, about 12 years old, I told myself that that's
not something that I wanted in my later years, something that I wanted for my family. And I had to make a change and do something different. I got my first job literally shoveling manure for $3 an hour. And I came home one day and I think I counted up six dollars worth of
quarters. And at the time it was more money than I personally had ever seen. And ever since that moment, I was like, all right, I've got to make
millions of dollars. I've got to be successful. I got to get my money right. And I've been on that track ever since. I started making money online when I was 15. And then I started investing at age 19. But I really just through reading books, listening to podcasts, watching
YouTube videos, I really just kind of had to figure it out. And learn as I go. When I first got into the commercial insurance business, I had a salary of $50,000 and I was making 9% commission on sales. After my first month with that firm, I actually broke a record for the
most amount of appointments set via cold call. After about nine months with that firm and doing really well there, my
base salary went up by about $4,100 per month and my commissions went from 9% to 40%. When I was 12 years old, I had the goal that I wanted to become a
millionaire by the age of 30. And after working like crazy and investing and acquiring properties, our
net worth crossed $1.2 million when we were 25 years old. Some of the things I refuse to spend money on will probably be eating out
and movie theaters, but only because I know how to get paid for that. I'm so frugal that I can't fathom spending money on that stuff. So in my mind, it makes sense to get it for free and get paid to do it. They will hire mystery shopping firms to find independent contractors like
me to basically go pose at their establishments as a regular customer, buy their product or service, and then report on that product or service
when you get home on an online platform. And when you do that, you get reimbursed for whatever you bought. Plus, typically some profit on the top. We have a punch card, so our free coffee is adding up to an additional
three coffees. So it's like compound interest basically just on free stuff, which is mind
-blowing. When I was in college, I was completely broke and my wife now, but
girlfriend at the time, I wanted to take her out, but I didn't have any money. It took me two months of saving just to take her out on our first
date. And two weeks later I got a check in the mail. And ever since then, we've been going to different restaurants and hotels,
resorts, casinos, getting paid for all of that and getting reimbursed for what we spent. Life to date, we've made just over $30,000 by secret shopping. The best part is it's stuff we would otherwise do. I grew up in Washington State. I met my wife in college. Although our net worth is seven figures, we don't do a lot of the typical
things that most people envision millionaires doing. We share one car, which is a 2009 Ford Focus. We are super frugal and, you know, you're a real estate guy when you have
$4.5million of cash-flowing rental properties, but you spent $12 on your wedding ring made completely out of rubber. I am not a showy or flashy guy, but I do want the Tesla Roadster. I don't want it to go floss on Instagram or anything like that. I want it because it's the fastest car in the world. I got a lot of places to be and zero time to waste. Personally, I would be OK flying first class and doing stuff like that. My wife won't let us or she doesn't let us fly first class, even though we
could very easily. So we're just, we're very frugal. We're not cheap, but we would just rather spend money on things that also
make us money. We don't really like spending money on expenses. We could probably actually retire now if we wanted to, but our goals are
so much loftier than that. I want my six thousand apartments by the age of 60, so I don't know if I'm
ever the type of person to truly retire in the traditional sense. If anything, I want to spend a little bit more money on my wife to
surprise her or do something special for her, but she is so frugal that it usually doesn't go over well. So I ended up taking it back when I'm doing something else entirely. So this is going to freak a lot of you out and Dave Ramsey, if you're
watching, don't have a heart attack. I have 13 credit cards and I actually collect credit cards now. I don't carry balances on any of them. I use a strategy called credit card churning, which is basically opening
up a new credit card or taking advantage of that new account bonus, paying it off completely and then rinse and repeat with the next card. When we were converting our garage apartment into the Airbnb, I knew that
there was going to be some expenses with that. So I opened up a new credit card where if you spend a thousand dollars in
the first three months, you get $200 cash back. Now, I'm not telling anyone to go out of the way to spend a thousand
dollars to make $200. Otherwise that's an $800 loss. We would have spent that thousand dollars anyway, so we might as well take
advantage of the $200 we can get in cash back. I used to box in high school, I was a boxer for two years now, my wife
won't allow me to compete, but I still do training when I can. My M.A. gym is $100 per month and that's a little bit more. It's still well worth it for the training that I'm getting. Our L.A. fitness gym membership is $30 per month and that is well worth it
because your health is your wealth. It doesn't make sense to be the richest man in the graveyard. So we got to keep going to the gym and taking care of our bodies. You know, in the next couple of years, my wife and I do want to start a
family of our own and being in that position of just knowing that we can pay for their college wherever they go and we can go on the family
vacations. And the biggest thing is being able to be there and be a present father. I think it's huge. It's a huge blessing that we've been able to to accomplish everything that
we have so far. I'm a young father. It's not like I was given the silver spoon where I
could work $100k job. Found out to be that I was going to be a father by 18. So I had to choose whether I want to keep going to school or take care of
my son. My name is Jesus Campos, I am 24 years old and I live in Brooklyn, New
York. I was always having to work through my whole life, I've worked since I was
13 years old, back in the bakery of my grandparents. Then from there, school just started to fade away. And as soon as I was expecting a baby boy, I had to drop all the things
from school and just go straight to work, make sure I have enough money to cover the costs of a newborn child. I was able to go back to school, get my GED and then from there I just
started going application to application. I lived in a family where we really didn't know too much about money, but
we were really good at business. My grandfather knows how to do business and then my parents really didn't
know how to manage their money. My car payment is around $406. I normally use my car during the weekend when I go out with the family. I am saving up towards maybe $300, going towards 401(k) with my company. They do company match it by 50 percent and then they do cap me at $2,000. But hey, it's free money. So I currently live with my in-laws, mainly because I'm trying to save up
as much money as I can, move out of here, but because of the help of them, we're able to spend $400 a month in rent here in Brooklyn. The total cost of this apartment is $1,600. I prefer to stay here to minimize my expenses. Then from there, save up as much money as I can from the investments and
be able to put a down payment to a house. My mother was able to sustain herself because my grandparents had run a mom and pop shop. It's a Mexican bakery. They have pastries. So she would work there, make very, very delicious cakes. Ever since then, we've just been 20 years in and thank God that we have
the opportunities and lifestyle because of it. It's a type of program where you ship in merchandise to Amazon and then
from there they disperse it to the customers. My job is to buy things at low cost and sell them as high as I can. And then from there, Amazon takes the product, puts it on their shelves,
and as soon as someone clicks that buy button, Amazon wraps it up, puts it in a box and ships it out to the customer. So I normally come to Staples to buy business supplies, mainly for Amazon
labels, tape, ink, anything basic that I need for my company. This product right now in Amazon's $19.99 and I can price match that with
Staples at $19.99 instead of paying $32.99, which then you'll save $12. So currently, my wife hasn't been working because she had to take care of
the kids. Every day is different, it's never the same. But it's it's amazing. I get to watch my kids grow, you know, and I get to spend every milestone. It's fun, tiring, but it's all worth it. It's really, really hard to see someone else other than your mother in the
house. My dad wasn't around. Obviously, my mom didn't have a choice. So I would like to give that back to my children. Me and my wife met when we were 13 years old. We hated each other. She just didn't like me. I didn't like her. We just were like those type of rivals in school. But then all of a sudden she just became sweeter. And I guess I became sweeter, too. We started to hold hands, best feeling ever, and that's all it all began. We're high school, I guess, middle school lovebirds. And that's how my children are here. Currently, my financial goals is to obviously move out from this tiny
apartment. Living in Brooklyn, New York I've been accustomed to living in such a
small space where it doesn't really bother me, but my children will be getting older. So I do have to get a house pronto. So I'm considering of taking out maybe a loan from the 401(k) plan just to
buy a house. And my plans is to go moving forward to Connecticut. Real estate is my goal from above. Maybe until I become 28 is when I start doing real estate business. Right now I'm just focused on my Amazon business and my goal really is to
eventually I will expand and become an enterprise from there, give my businesses down to my children and my children's children as legacies.
