Millionaire Reacts: Living On 1 Million Dollars In The Silicon Valley | Millennial Money

so recently i was featured on the hit cnbc show make it and we ended up filming for two days straight but it only ended up with an eight minute video and obviously a bunch of things had to get cut out for that final video so what i'm going to do today is i'm going to do a reaction to the video that was released on cnbc i encourage you guys to watch this first and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to fill in some of the blanks and some of the details that were left out during editing so let's get started if you enjoyed this video don't forget to hit the subscribe button and be sure to hit the bell button to be notified when new videos come out [Music] i'm 100 happier now than if i stayed with my traditional nine-to-five job in this episode how i make seven figures every single year running my businesses without our businesses there would be all right so real quick the book i'm reading on this couch is my all-time favorite marketing book it is called influence psychology persuasion by robert cialdini it is literally the book that changed my life and i encourage all of you guys to read it no way that we could live the lifestyle that we could live today i don't actually even know how other parents do it they have to hire help and with our businesses we can always be present in our child's lives whenever they need us so a couple of you guys commented that i shoot pretty well but let's just say that this clip of the video took a couple of takes the flexibility that is so important to me so that we can be very very active in our kids lives [Music] so just a quick note on that my kids have been taking chinese since they were i think four years old my chinese is horrible like i literally speak at a preschool level whenever i go to the canton fair and i actually try to speak to the vendor in chinese they end up replying to me in english because my accent is so bad but my kids are actually really good at chinese having them speak chinese is important to us because i feel like in the future a whole lot more people are going to be speaking chinese and it's going to be a very important language my name is steve chu and i'm 46 and i'm jen two and i'm 45 and together we make over one million dollars in the silicon valley so a couple of you guys commented on this one million dollar number whereas in previous youtube videos i had my number at 2 million it's 2 million revenue and it's 1 million of profit and i just want to talk a little bit about that number real quick this is actually taken straight from the tax return so it literally accounts for all of our expenses including eating out all the computer equipment that i buy and that sort of thing and you also want to keep in mind that this number was from 2020 during the downturn for our business for our ecommerce store we primarily cater to wedding customers and no one was getting married during covid so march and april of 2020 was actually the worst months of the entire history of our business i want to say and we quickly pivoted and everything ended up recovering so 2020 was kind of an anomaly in terms of revenue years [Applause] so i just want to mention this here a lot of people in the comments were outraged that we're not millennials and it's true technically we're not millennials i actually went up to the producers and said hey we're old [Music] we're technically not millennials is that okay and they said oh yeah it's okay you're only off by a couple of years so just wanted to clear that up i'm a blogger podcaster youtuber ticktacker and i also teach an online class on e-commerce combined our businesses make over 2 million in revenue but our net income is around 1 million million dollars anywhere it sounds like a lot of money and it's more than enough we don't even spend a fraction of that amount we don't budget per say but we definitely spend less than we make and really there's not that much that we really splurge on so what's funny about this budget uh pie chart here is that it adds up to 25 000 so people are asking me what we do with the money outside of this 25k because clearly we make more than 25k so we invest in companies we put money in stocks we also keep some amount in just savings just in case right now i feel like the economy is a little bit frothy so what we're doing actually we're we're in a lot of cash to be honest with you right now because we're waiting for things to turn a little bit and just in my experience the periods where i made the most amount of money in my life was after a downturn so for example after 2009 when everything crashed we bought a lot of stocks we bought a property and it's just worked really well for us so that's why we always keep a certain amount of money on the sidelines just in case for opportunities that arise my wife and i we are an extravagant people so even if our businesses were to just completely dry up overnight we would still be able to live 20 plus years given our current expenses [Music] so i just want to add a quick note there i am super thankful that my wife and i we have similar philosophies on money now i'm pretty frugal i would classify myself as very frugal but my wife is just as frugal if not more frugal so it works out i mean we have peace of mind because the money that we've saved we could literally live for 20 plus years even more than that probably just given our current expenditures our kids are literally the most expensive expense that we have [Music] so some of you guys asked about our embroidery machines that we use we actually have five machines in the office and each of them costs between eight to ten thousand dollars we didn't buy all those machines all at once obviously we started out with one and it just kind of gradually accumulated more as a demand increased so our oldest machine we probably got it in 2008 and it's which means it's 13 years old and it's still humming like a champ when we first started the business i was massively pregnant and we were running the business out of our house we started the business for 630 by the end of the year we made over a hundred thousand dollars in profit i think it was 102k so there's a funny story behind this picture my wife for a while had this habit of inviting me out to lunch in the office and whenever she would invite me out to lunch it was like oh yeah yeah let's have lunch she'd be like oh since you're here would you mind moving a couple of boxes and so whatever whatever happening is i would go over there move a bunch of these heavy boxes and then have lunch with her but i'd be exhausted i remember one time she invited me over i moved a bunch of boxes for a while and then she said well you know actually i have a lot to work to do so i'll see you later bye so yes occasionally she uses me to come in the office just to move boxes my goal was to make maybe five thousand dollars to just help with bills steve's goal was to replace my entire income e-commerce was actually not our first choice but we found that starting those brick-and-mortar stores would cost us over five hundred thousand dollars to start whereas with e-commerce so i just wanted to add an aside here in case you guys were curious the other business models that we considered were opening at coumons akumans is like a training center for kids education and we were a firm believer i think jen actually used to work at akumans so that was our first choice but it would have cost us i think close to 500 thousand dollars to start that our other business idea that we were considering was opening up a dream dinner this is basically like a food prep place you go over there you pack your food and that's that and they those later became popular but they fizzled out actually in our area so i'm kind of glad that we didn't go into that business so bumblebee linens did much better than we expected and it allowed my wife to quit and then all of a sudden i had friends asking me how we did it because they wanted to quit their jobs and i got a little tired of answering the same questions over again so i decided to document that on a blog over at mywifequitterjob.com that blog served as the diary or a journal of our business none of my friends actually read it my mom didn't read it but it attracted a bunch of random strangers who were interested in what we were doing and from there the audience just grew so no joke none of my friends read my blog at all my mom didn't even read it my mom didn't even read it and even when it started making money my mom thought i was dealing drugs or something because she had never heard of how you can make money with just content and the way it makes money is a combination of advertising affiliate revenue course sales the blog actually led to a podcast and sponsorships which led to a training class which then led to an annual ecommerce event that actually run over at the seller summit i just want to add here that all the content related stuff just kind of happened by accident i started putting out content to build an audience and people were just asking for stuff like i didn't want to create a course but people asked for it and i remember when i launched it i said hey i don't have any content but if i get 10 people to sign up i'll go ahead and create a course and i ended up selling 35 seats at i think 300 a pop and then all of a sudden i was like oh crap i guess i gotta launch a course now same thing happened with the seller summit i had no intention of creating a conference but people wanted to meet in person i actually wanted to meet some of these people too and fortunately i met my partner tony anderson who's been running events for many many years so we partnered up and we ended up launching the seller summit which ended up being a really fun and good decision for my business as well as for my mental health as well because i got a chance to talk to other like-minded entrepreneurs i work probably about 20 to 30 hours a week i rely heavily on my employees i'm there just to help manage and to help basically support them if things are falling behind i start the workday at around eight and then i usually stop at around 12 30 and then the rest of the afternoon i'm actually a full-time uber driver chauffeur where i just shuttle my kids pick them up take them to basketball volleyball and all these other activities all right quick aside on that so people were asking me why we don't just like hire someone to shuttle the kids around and and whatnot this is what we like to do i actually really enjoy these car rides and let me tell you why whenever i'm shuttling my kids around especially with their friends i like to have my ears open and it's actually interesting because oftentimes when you're giving your kids a ride with their friends they don't even think that you're there they treat you as you're not there and you can hear all the gossip that's going on in their lives so just a note to all the parents out there this is like the best time to get to get information about what's going on in your kids lives i guess you could just ask them too but that usually doesn't work as well steve had a lot of suggestions on how to improve our business and i must tell you they were horrible because he had an idea of picking certain handkerchiefs that were but ugly just because they were cheaper and i was like absolutely not let the professionals do this and um i actually make all the product decisions for our business because he really has horrible taste he really has horrible taste [Music] all right so i'm pissed here because my wife and i we always joke around with each other and when she said that i had bad taste i had a comeback immediately in my mind and i said yeah poor taste in women but the editors cut that out and so but my my wife was like aha they didn't get your comeback line in there but i thought i'd just do it right now and let you know what that line was in the reaction video the way we have it now is actually really good she runs the day to day i do the marketing and we do not step on each other's toes we all have full control over our own domain i just want to mention that if you decide to work with your spouse well number one i actually don't recommend working with your spouse but if you do it is very important to separate out the responsibilities and make sure you are the main leader in your own domain too many chefs in the kitchen always leads to arguments in fact my wife and i we never used to argue until we started running our business together so early on when we ran bumblebee linens we actually had the pedal down in the middle and after a while of this rapid growth my wife came to me and she's like this isn't fun anymore it was definitely not fun my goal initially for the business actually was i think 5 000 a month and so at the time i was like if i can just help pay the bills that would be awesome steve definitely wanted to push it a little bit faster and when we were pushing it faster and faster i was like i just can't handle all this stress all right so here's my philosophy on running an e-commerce business versus a based business because i get asked this question all the time if you want to make money sooner or later i would say within like a year or so i think e-commerce is your best bet but if you have like a three-year runway i would say a content business is better you won't make any money for those first three years but it'll shoot up like a hockey stick whereas with e-commerce you can start making money right away if you just want to replace a six-figure salary ecommerce is the way to go but if you have a much longer runway content is just something that grows exponential after you reach a certain threshold joke that we're going to move out of california as soon as the kids go to college because it would be so much cheaper to live out of state employees would be cheaper the location would be cheaper in terms of rent for our our office i think he would be all in right now like he'd be like hey let's move all right so we got a lot of questions on why we didn't move and the main reason why we're not moving actually is for the kids and people without kids might not understand this but when your kids have like a great friend group a great support network they love their schools they love their education you don't want to uproot all that and just move somewhere else just to save some money like we save much more than we spend as it is so having more money isn't really going to improve our lives whereas it's important for us for our kids to have a solid foundation so that's the main reason why we're not moving and once they go off to college we'll consider moving to a place that's tax-free like vegas when i used to be a finance analyst prior to this role i worked crazy crazy hours with this position at bumblebee linens having that creative freedom to do basically what i need to do i can work around my schedule in my past life i was an electrical engineering director in charge of microprocessor design that's a lot to take in there but basically i just stared at a monitor all day it was a pretty demanding job i used to work maybe 50 60 hours a week and it wasn't as flexible because i actually had to physically be in the office just a quick aside here uh people were commenting how like this whole monopoly game that we were doing was staged and you know to a certain extent whenever you film one of these things everything is staged but i will say that monopoly is our kids favorite board game and the reason why it's fun is it ends up it ends up being like this big bargain fist we all like strike up deals with one another and i think that's actually a valuable skill for them to have so i'm actually really happy that they like this game so much growing up i actually didn't see my parents as much as i would have liked they were first generation chinese they actually came to the us with no money at all so just a quick aside on my parents i have so much respect for my parents and i talked about this on the podcast before but my mom spent her life's work working on a cure for a disease it's a rare disease called glycogen storage disease and she actually ended up finding the cure and it's actually undergoing clinical trials right now super proud of her all that time that she spent at work i mean she came here with nothing she provided for both my brother and i and you know paid for our college education so i'm very grateful for what they've done for us since i'm really passionate about being really present for my kids is because my parents really worked really hard growing up but my mom also passed away when i was pretty young so now i just want to take that time back and make sure that i'm present for them so just a funny aside on that picture of us eating we actually don't make our kids breakfast so usually what happens is the kids wake up and we we actually tell them to just go down and make their own breakfast so they usually have cereal or granola bar it's definitely not like this in the morning it's usually really hectic the kids wake up late my daughter likes to sleep in and it's usually a mad rush to get out the door in the morning it's delicious right so i hope you enjoyed our reaction video to cnbc make it a couple things i just wanted to highlight here allison lau who's the producer of this show did a fantastic job of the editing and i actually had her on the podcast i encourage you to listen to that episode because allison has interviewed many people and it's just really interesting listening to her breakdown like the common habits uh the character traits of the successful people that she's interviewed i just want to give a quick shout out to tejas who did all the filming for this he did a fantastic job as well hope you enjoyed this video now if you like what you saw there's actually a lot more where that came from if you subscribe to my channel below and if you are interested in learning how to sell physical products online then click over here and take my free six day mini course where i'll walk you through everything that you need to know to get started in ecommerce thanks for watching

Channel: MyWifeQuitHerJob Ecommerce Channel

Views: 802

Keywords: investing, investing for beginners, how to invest, how to invest in your 20s, how to invest in stocks, how to invest in real estate, how to save money, how to save money fast, how to be a millionaire, best stock trading apps, stock market investing, stock market investing for beginners, investing 101, real estate investing, robinhood, how to build wealth, how to build wealth fast, passive income, millionaire reacts, what i spend in a week, millennial money, watching ads

Id: -SHh3VFQ08o

Length: 17min 8sec (1028 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021