Over 40? How To Retire in 10 Years With $50K

Hey, so are you 35, 40, 45, or maybe even 50 years old and you feel behind with investing? You know that you should be investing, but you're just trying to figure out how to catch up. Or maybe you're someone with a larger sum of money. Maybe you have around like, I don't know, 50, 100, or maybe even $200,000 of cash just sitting in a low-interest bank accounts and it's being eaten away by inflation. Or maybe you're someone who wants to start investing, but this whole investing world, all this lingo about stock market, all these buttons flashing around at you, it seems very overwhelming, it seems confusing. Well, you're in the right place because in this video, I'm going to show you a step-by-step process on how you can figure out how to retire for yourself, for your spouse in, say, 10, 15, 20 years. I'm going to help you figure out how to get to your freedom number much faster. So, for those of you who don't know me, my name is Steve. I used to be a public school teacher and I truly believe that if I can teach little 11, 12-year-olds linear equations and quadratic formulas, I can also teach you how to invest too because it's not as complicated as the world [music] makes it seem like. So, if you haven't done so already, you can download this study guide that I'm showing on my screen down below along with the other study guides. Or if you just want to take screenshots of this video, that's okay too. But by the end of this video, I'm going to show you four steps that you can take today, tonight with your partner, with your spouse. So, this way you can plan for retirement in the next 10, 15, or 20 years, okay? So, first of all, let's talk about step number one, which is to acknowledge the problem. I think this is the biggest step that most people kind of skip over because I talk to a lot of 20 and maybe even like 25, early 30-year-olds individuals where when I ask them about their finances, they say things like, "Oh, Steve, I just want a yellow. It's okay. I don't need to think about money. I'm always going to have a job. I am secure. Or they'll say something like, "Hey, I don't even know if I'm going to be alive at 50 years old." Or they'll say, just give me some other reason of why they shouldn't start today, right? So, a lot of these answers are a little bit more of the doom and gloom side, but you know, like just by looking at the details or looking at the statistics here, it is very important that we start planning ahead if we want to make sure that we are able to comfortably retire or become work optional so that we can hit our freedom number, right? So, we need to acknowledge the problem. So, why do we need to start investing, right? Especially like at this age right now, if you're like around 40 years old. It's because what we need to catch up, right? We probably acknowledge the issue or we maybe have looked at our 401k or 403b and we've noticed that if we continue on this route, there is absolutely no way for us to become financially free in the next 10, 20 years or so, right? So, why do we need to start investing? I always talk about these statistics here. You can also look them up on Google, but this is from Yahoo Finance where it says millions of Americans retire with little or zero dollars in their savings. This is another article where it says 40% of adults worry that they don't have enough for retirement or fear that they won't be able to retire. If you take a look at Reddit, if you're a big Reddit user, I mean, you've probably seen a lot of these threads where it says majority of Americans over like 40, 50 years old worry that they won't have enough. This is from Investopedia where it talks about how there is a lot of me figures that reveal how many Americans lack any retirement savings. And of course, this is the one that is very scary for me whenever I see statistics like this where it says 64% of Americans aren't prepared for retirement and 48% of them don't care. We need to care, folks. We need to care because I I know there are a lot of people online that say money doesn't bring happiness, but I I am I'm going to tell you right now, money does bring you happiness. Money brings you happiness, right? It helps pay for your food, your bills, the roof on top of your head. You're able to take care of your kids, your parents, like I take care of my parents. So, you need to make sure that you are financially secure right now, like at this moment, right now, by making sure that you have a plan, okay? Because in the end, I mean, I don't want to digress off of the money topic, but if you want to be happy in life, we need to make sure that we have purpose in life. And in order to have purpose, it really comes down to of course, one, being able to take care of ourselves, and then two, being able to serve others. But how can we serve other people? How can we pour into someone else's cup if our cups aren't filled ourselves? Does that make sense? So, we need to make sure that we are financially independent and that we have money, we're good to go with our finances, all right? So, the next point I want to make is for those of you who have a larger sum of money, because I work with a lot of individuals who are in their 40s and 50s, and they are really good savers. They have around like 100, 200, sometimes even like $300,000 saved in a bank account like with Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, where they barely give you any interest. So, this is where a lot of people have the biggest risk, which is inflation risk. Because if you take a look at the data back all the way in 2000s, if you were to save, just say $100,000, and you were just to leave it in the bank and it didn't do anything at all, well, of course, your bank will still show you that you have $100,000, but your buying power is going to naturally decrease over time. Why is this? Because of inflation, because prices of goods and services will always increase in the future, always. This is a natural thing, because the Federal Reserve will always print out money, which will then decrease the value of each dollar. So, if you were to have $100,000 and just left it in there, fast forward to the next 25 years, this would decrease to about 51, 52,000 dollars of buying power, right? So, that's why if you see my shorts, that's why I always say we need to make sure that once your credit card debts are paid off, you have your emergency funds already saved up, you have your emergency fund built in the Ohio savings account, something like that. The next step is we got to stop saving. We need to start investing because in order to become wealthy, you need to own assets. Assets that appreciate over time and that pay you some sort of cash flow because that's what's going to sustain you in the future. Okay, this makes sense here. So, the number one thing that you need to do tonight with your partner with your spouse if you have one, right? Is to acknowledge the problem. The second thing is you're going to create a FIRE plan. So, I'm going to walk you through this step-by-step. I promise it's going to be very easy. You're going to have 100% clarity by the end of this video. So, what does FIRE mean? Well, FIRE stands for Financial Independence Retire Early. Okay, so if you take a look at, you know, a lot of these online forums, a lot of people are able to retire before the age of, you know, the benchmark 65 or 60 years old or whatever it is, right? They're able to become financially independent, financially free, become work optional maybe at 55, 50, 45, 40 years old. And how is it that they're doing this? Well, it's because they invested, which I'm going to talk about in a little bit. But, all of these individuals, they all had a FIRE plan. Financial Independence Retire Early. They knew exactly where they were going. They knew exactly what their goal is. So, I've talked about this in my live streams a couple weeks ago where I'm getting married in the next couple of months, right? And I bought my suit a couple of months prior to this. So, I gained a little bit of weight. So, I now I can't really fit into my suit anymore. It's a little bit snug on me. So, I said, "Okay, I need to make a plan for myself. I need to lose seven more pounds, which means that I can work backwards from that. I can start eating less calories, maybe two or 300 calories less per day, and that's going to help me reach my goals by October when I get married." So, it's the same thing with you because the biggest problem that a lot of people have is that they don't know what their goals are. So that they are just randomly investing, putting a little bit of money into their 401k or 403b, or they don't even know what it is that they're doing, and they just pray and hope that it's going to turn out okay in the next 10 or 20 years. And that is something that you do not want to do. You need to make sure that you have a goal. So this way you can work backwards from it. Does that make sense? Okay, so how do you determine your FIRE plan? Well, there are a lot of different types of FIRE. I'm not going to go through every single one, but the ones that I find the most popular within my community that I work with, with the people that I talk to online, on YouTube, on Instagram, on TikTok, they usually come down to these three. The first is traditional FIRE. And this is essentially the classic version. You'll read a lot about traditional FIRE in the online space, where people are able to build their portfolio where it reaches 25 X of their annual expenses. So they basically are able to build this really big portfolio, and then by that time, once they hit that goal, they are able to withdraw 4% using the 4% rule, right? 4% of their portfolio each year, while allowing their portfolio continue to grow. So a perfect analogy for this is kind of like planting an apple tree in your backyard, where you grow your apple tree, and then you're watering it, you give a lot of sunshine, give a lot of love, and towards maybe like 50 years old or so, you're like, "Okay, I have this really big apple tree. I want to finally eat from the apple tree. I want to start eating apples." However, you notice that the apple tree is producing so much fruit that even though that you're eating so much apples, the apple tree continues to grow over time, no matter how many of the apples that you eat every day, every month, every year. So traditional FIRE is something like that, where you're basically growing your portfolio where you're able to eat from it, right? While you're letting the portfolio itself continue to grow over time. Does that make sense? So, generally, typically, you can multiply by 25x, maybe 20, maybe 30, somewhere around that range. It depends on how the market conditions are, inflation, and these other variables that, of course, we can't control. We're not fortune tellers or anything like that. But, generally, the ballpark number is around 25x your expenses. Now, the next FIRE is barista FIRE, and this is one of my favorite ones, too, because this is a more relaxed approach where if you're someone who says, "Okay, 25x your annual expenses is a little bit too high." Then, that's totally okay, right? So, this is where you can build a portfolio that reaches 10 to 20x your annual expenses, depending on your part-time job. So, basically, this is where you're going to retire from your main career, and then you're going to pick up a part-time job, something that you enjoy doing, maybe working at a coffee shop, hence barista FIRE. So, for me, I never had the opportunity to work at a boba shop. I find that that's kind of fun for me because I really love drinking boba. When I was in college, I worked at American Eagle. I was a tutor. I did a whole bunch of other gigs. But, one thing that I kind of wish that I did back in my early 20s was work at a coffee shop or a boba shop. So, this is something that I might do. Or, I might even continue to serve my community, right? So, in the next 20 years or so, so I'm currently 39 years old. So, I'm planning that by the time I'm like 59, 60 years old, I do want to continue to give back to my community, whether going back to school to teach students or maybe going back to college to teach students about fitness and finance because that's what I'm most passionate about. So, this is barista FIRE. If this is for you, if you want to continue to work later on because you still want to have a sense of purpose in your community, give back to your community, so you're still earn money from that, and your portfolio is able to fund your extra, you know, the other part of your lifestyle. That makes sense. The third one is geo FIRE, and I also love this one, too, because geo FIRE is basically when you're able to build your portfolio to again around 10 to 20x your annual expenses, depending on where you live in the future. There are a lot of people that I see on the online space where they will build a portfolio in the United States and then move to a different country where the living expenses are much lower. So for example, I went to Bali a couple of years ago. Bali is a beautiful place. I highly encourage everyone to go there to check it out. But Bali, it's like super super cheap there. I remember just getting a meal there for like there was like a lot of rice, chicken, steak, a side of vegetables. All of that was like $1.50 or $2 USD. Compared to here where I live in SoCal, I live very close to Los Angeles and a plate like that would be around 15, 20, 25 dollars, depending on which restaurant you go to, right? So it's much much cheaper there. So what you can do is you can build your portfolio here and then you can move to another country and then you can just live like a king or queen there, okay? And another place that I will probably go to and I I've said this in a lot of my live streams is that I will probably move to Taiwan for a couple years because all my aunties and uncles, my grandparents are all there. So it would be kind of nice if I could live there and spend more time with them. But go ahead, take a pause right here and try to see which FIRE you are most comfortable with and what you want to cure towards. Okay, does that make sense? All right. So what is the next natural step? The next natural step is you need to then calculate your annual expenses. And I know a lot of people are going to say, "Oh, this is the boring part, the math part." But I promise you, if you take the time to do this now, you will thank yourself later on. All you really need right now is a ballpark awareness of where your money is going on a monthly or quarterly or annual basis. Where are you spending your money and how much do you have left over? Because a lot of people that I work with, I will tell you right now, a lot of 40-year-olds, they do not know how much they're spending each year. That's why they're just kind of going around this hamster wheel of like, "Okay, why is it that I am not able to escape out of this whole rat race? I can't move to a different job. I can't become financially free. Right? So, you need to have clarity on this. Okay? So, work with your partner with this. There are three ways that you can do this. Okay? I outlined it here for you to make it very easy. The first thing is you can use an app. Uh there are a lot of great apps out there. There's like Rocket Money, YNAB, which just stands for You Need a Budget, and then PocketGuard. Okay, you don't have to use these. You can use whatever ones that you want. But, you just need to make sure that you plug in your connect your bank accounts and just see where your money is going. The second part is to do it old-school way. Just create your own budgeting sheet on a piece of paper, a graph piece of paper, a notebook, whatever it is. Do it yourself. Do it on Excel. Do it on Google Sheets. Or, if you just want to use my budgeting sheet, this is all free, by the way. I put a link right here in the study guide. If you haven't downloaded already, it's down below. And you can just plug in your numbers, rough ballpark numbers. So, this way you have clarity on how much it is that you're spending each month, each quarter, each year. Okay? Because once you have this number, then awesome. You can then go to step number three, which is to say, multiply this by 10 to 30x, depending on what which FIRE that you want to achieve. So, if you're someone you recognize, you find out that oh, okay. I spend around $50,000 a year. And I'm projected to continue to spend around $50,000 in the future, or $60,000, or whatever it is a year. You're going to multiply this by 10, 20, or 30. Okay? So, this is going to help you calculate your freedom number. So, this is step number three. So, what is your freedom number? This is the number, like what I just mentioned before. This is the number that will allow you to become free. So, this way you don't have to be attached to your work anymore. You can finally leave your job, work at a coffee shop, serve in your community, whatever it is that you want, right? So, this is your goal number that you want to achieve. So, some people, if they need, say, $50,000, and they multiply by 20, that's going to tell them how much money they need. Some people might need a million dollars, two million dollars, five million dollars, if you're living in higher cost areas, or maybe if you want to do barista fire or geo fire, maybe you don't even need that much. Maybe you just need like $500,000 or over $300,000. It really depends on what your situation is. Now, if you want to calculate this, okay? Or once you calculate this, the next step is you need to then work backwards. If you already know where your goal is, cool. Then you're going to work backwards to figure out how much money you need to invest each month to get to your goal number. Does that make sense? It's like, I know my goal weight. Now I know how many pounds I need to lose per week or per 2 weeks, okay? So I need to lose, for me, I need to lose like 1 lb every 2 weeks or so, which is not too bad, okay? So I hope I can fit into my suit. So this is what you're going to do, okay? You're going to use two different calculators here. The first calculator is the compound interest calculator. You don't need to use the one that I have. There is a whole bunch of other ones. There's one on investor.gov. This is the one that I usually use in my videos, in my green screen. Or you can use NerdWallet. This is a good one, too. There's a retirement calculator. Or if you just want to use the one in my sheet, my $1 million investing roadmap sheet, you can use that, too. It's totally fine, okay? And then you're going to use the Net Worthify calculator. So let's talk about the first compound interest calculator, okay? So let's say that I go to my sheet right here, and I'm going to go to this tab. So this is all on Google Sheets, by the way. I'm going to click on tab 5A. So I'm going to type in how much money I currently have. So if you're someone with a larger amounts, right? Because this is what the video is for. You have around $100,000 or $50,000, go ahead and punch that in. So you're going to say current balance $100,000. Then we're going to say that the projected annual growth is around 10% because this is typically what the stock market has given us over many, many, many decades. Over the last couple decades, I know it has been a little bit higher, around that 12, 13, 15% area, but let's just be a little bit more conservative and say that this is around 10%. And then we're going to say that our monthly contributions, let's just start off low and say that we want to contribute $300 a month. So, for me, being at 39 years old, and I want to, you know, hit my freedom number and say that I want to hit this number by 65 years old, okay? Then, I have around 25, 26 years ahead of me. Cool. So, I'll type in 25 just to keep the numbers nice and round. That means that once I punch in all the numbers, that means that in 25 years, if I were to keep doing this and I contribute $300 each month and invest that, I would have a balance of $1.6 million. Okay? So, then I'm going to ask myself, is this my freedom number that I just calculated before, where I got my annual expenses and multiplied it by, say, 20 or 25 or 30 or whatever it is for you? Okay? If it is lower, then you're going to have to do one of three things. First, you can manipulate this number here. So, if you have more money that you would like to invest right away, then you can increase this to maybe $110,000 or $120,000, right? So, this is going to compound even more later on. So, you see how it went from 1.6 to 1.8 million dollars. Or, if you say, "Okay, you know what? I don't have the money right now." So, I'll just say I have $100,000, but I know that I'm going to be working really hard with budgeting. I have more awareness now. I'm going to be picking up a side hustle. So, for me, when I was a public school teacher, I also tutored every day after school and even on the weekends to increase my income. I learned a whole bunch of skills on YouTube, on Yahoo Answers. I don't know if anyone still uses Yahoo Answers now that we have ChatGPT and Claude. But, I learned a lot online and from all these books. I'm like, "Okay, how do I market myself? How do I teach? How do I become a good tutor?" And then, I increased my income, and I was able to contribute more money. So, let's say that I manipulate this, change this number, and then I make it into $800. Look what happens. Just because of that, I now have a future balance of $2.2 million, right? Now, another lever, the third lever that you can pull is, "Okay, let's just keep this at $500." Cool. And let's say that, you know, you don't really want to touch your money for necessarily the next 25 years. Of course, you can always take out your money before. You can take out your money whenever you want, really. Because I know there are a lot of these finance influencers that say, "Don't touch your money." You can always take out your money, okay? Especially if it's in a taxable brokerage account. There's no shame of using your money. It's your money, okay? But let's say that you want to let it grow for the next 30 years. Okay, you don't really want to touch the majority of it. Maybe you take out a little bit of it, but sure. If we were to increase the time horizon, the x-axis, [music] you see how it just went up, shot up to $3.1 million, right? So, the three variables that you can change with you and your partner right now is to change our current balance, how much money that you can put in as a lump sum now. Second is to see how much money that you can contribute on a monthly basis. And then third, you can see how many years you would like to have your portfolio grow over time. The longer, the better. Mathematically, it's going to be better because the money that you put in right now, the seeds that in right now, it's going to grow. And then that money is going to grow on top of the new money that it just produced for yourself. So, money is stacking on top of each other year after year after year. That's why whenever you look at all of these wealthy people, and I know a lot of people are very confused. Like, how is it that they became so wealthy? And that their net worth is in this J curve that you see here. It's because every wealthy person invested. Every wealthy person invested, okay? If you think that you can save your money to wealth, okay, you're going to be in for a rude awakening here. Nobody saves their money to wealth. They all invested it. Because here's the thing, folks. For me, this was a tough lesson that I had to learn, too, and something that I never learned. But you have to shift your mindset from working for your money to letting your money work for you. Okay, in the beginning, of course, it is natural. Because I know there are a lot of these finance gurus out there that says, "Oh yeah, you shouldn't be working for your money. Your money You should never work for your money." That's ridiculous. Everybody has a job, right, in the beginning. A 9-5 job. Everyone just a regular human being. We need to utilize that time to work for our money, yes, but we're going to aggressively save and invest a percentage of our paycheck every month and put that towards our investment portfolio so that we can transition from that place to a place where our money is working for us. Amen. Does that make sense, everyone? Okay. So, this is the step right here where you're going to use the compound interest calculator. The second most important calculator that you want to use is this one right here, okay? So, everyone pay attention cuz this is going to blow your mind. It's to use the Net Worthy Fi calculator. I even linked it here to make it easy for you. So, it's going to take you to a website, a calculator that looks like this. So, let's say that you have an annual income of $70,000, okay? And you are able to save $0, right? So, I'm going to help you calculate what percentage of your paycheck it is necessary for you to invest each month, okay? So, maybe it's not the dollar amount, maybe you gravitate towards the percentage, right? So, maybe it's like, okay, sure, I find out that I need around five or six hundred dollars to invest, okay, but what's the percentage of that? So, this is going to help you give clarity on that. So, let's say you make $70,000, great. Your annual expenses are also $70,000. You spend everything. You spend every single dollar. Your current savings rate is 0% and we're going to say that you have no money in your current portfolio value. Hit crunch the numbers. Look what happens. You can retire in how many years? Infinity years. I know you're going to think, Steve, well, obviously it's infinity years, but I will tell you right now. I talk to a lot of young individuals, people in their 20s, early 30s, and this concept to them it it doesn't sink in. It does not sink in. I say, if you make a hundred dollars and you spend $100, I will tell you straight to your face right now, you will never retire. Mathematically, logically, you will never retire. You will always have to be stuck to your job. You will always have to, because you have nothing else to survive off of, right? So, I know I sound very passionate right now. I I get very heated up when I say this, but this is a warning to all the young people right now. For some reason, you're watching this video. It shouldn't even be for you. It's for 40-year-olds and above. But, if you're not investing, saving your money right now, you will learn a very hard lesson later on. I guarantee you, okay? But, it's okay. You're watching this, so you're going to take some action here, okay? But, let's take a look at this. If you say, "Okay, I have this awareness, Steve. I I went through all the steps I you just talked about." Cool. "What if I am able to save 10% of my portfolio?" 10%. Hit crunch the numbers. Cool. Guess what? You're able to retire in the next 33 years. Not bad. Pretty good. Just 10%, right? That's why starting early, starting young is so, so important. But, what if you were to save and invest 20%, okay? And using average stock market returns, well, this goes down to around 25.2 years. Not bad. What if you were to say, save and invest 45 or 40% of your income, your paycheck. This drops down to 16.3 years. So, that's your timeline. That's your goal. Just know that you want to start saving and investing 40% of your income, your paycheck right now. And this is assuming that you have no money right now, which is not really true, because if you take a look at the averages, most people have money in their retirement accounts already. I'll even link this somewhere in the study guide later on after I'm done with this video. But, if you're Gen Z, this is probably you right here. You probably have around 13.5 thousand in your 401k, 6,000, 7,000 in your IRA. If you're a millennial, you kind of see where you are with this, right? For myself, millennials, $67,000 in your 401k, around $25,000 in your IRA. And then if you're a Gen X, that means you probably have around $192,000 in your 401k or around $103 in your IRA. And then these are the numbers for a baby boomers, okay? And of course, the higher up, the older you are, the higher, the more money you have just because of compound interest. That's how math works, okay? Hopefully that makes sense. Now, let's take a look back at the net worth the FI calculator here. So, what if we were to save and invest 60%? Okay, so this is where it gets interesting. You ready? If you were able to save and invest 60% of your paycheck every month, every 2 weeks or so, this means that you can potentially retire in around 10.3 years, okay? I'm not calculating inflation or everything or, you know, like taxes or anything like that, but just a rough ballpark, it's going to be around 10.3 years, okay? So, what's the lesson here? We need to make sure that we save and invest a percentage of our paycheck every month. Now, if you are not starting at zero, which you most likely are not, so right? Because this video is for people who actually have more cash. So, let's say that you have $100,000. Awesome. Let's see what happens. If I crunch the numbers, cool. This drops down even more, right? So, go ahead, take some time tonight with your partner, your wife, your husband, punch in some of your numbers here and see what is attainable for you. And then you're going to say, "Okay, got it. I probably need to save and invest around 30% of my paycheck every month or maybe around $1,000 every month or $600 every month, okay? You need to have a plan. You need to have clarity on how much money you need to put away, otherwise you're just going to, you know, the last 10 years of you doing what you did with your finances is going to continue on in the next 10, 20, 30 years or so. So, we want to make sure that we have clarity. And for you, being able to watch this right now, you should be very proud of yourself because a lot of people never learn about money, okay? So, go ahead, punch in these numbers yourself. Now, I'm going to go back to this part right here. The next question is, okay Steve, got you. I need to put away around $600 or whatever it is. Awesome. The next step is you actually need to take action and you need to start investing. I'm going to tell you right now, the number one problem that I see most people have is that they get a lot of education, right? They learn a lot. They're scrolling on TikTok. Maybe you're watching this on YouTube. You're watching Instagram videos. You're scrolling, scrolling, you follow all these finance content creators. Cool, okay, finance coaches. Awesome. But then, it doesn't make a difference. Because if you don't take any action, you're just again, just simply scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. So, the education is not really the main issue here because education is free for everyone, especially now with AI and everything. You can find the answer online. The main problem is execution. Execution. You need to execute on your plan. Okay, it's like you buying a gym membership. So, how many of you are guilty of this? You buy a gym membership in January, but you never go. And you wonder, why did I not lose weight? Or why am I not stronger, right? This happens to a lot of people, right? Because it's very easy for them to become comfortable, right? If there's no accountability. So, you need to make sure you need to make sure that you start taking action. And one of the best ways that I found for myself for you to take action is to have a partner to be in line with you on this, okay? So, I work out with a gym partner every Monday. Shout out to Andrew. I don't even know if he's going to watch this, but we encourage each other to to lift heavier, to to bench press, to to do our shoulder presses, to do our cable flies, all that stuff, right? And we show up for each other because if we don't show up, we're going to call each other and say, "Hey, how come you're not here? I'm at the gym already." So, you want to make sure that you have a partner that will make sure that they keep you accountable and that you keep them accountable, too. You can ask them, "Hey, did you invest? Did you actually put away $500 into your Roth IRA, right?" You need to make sure that you take action. So, what can you actually take action on? Well, you can start investing in a whole bunch of things. Now, remember, this isn't financial advice or anything like that. So, you can invest in whatever you want to do. You can do whatever it is that you want. I'm just sharing with you what I do with my community members and what I did for myself that made me become a millionaire as a former public school teacher, right? So, if I can do it, I guarantee you you can do this, too. All right? So, this is what you're going to do. There are a lot of things that you can invest in. I don't want to overcomplicate things because I noticed that when I give a whole bunch of different options, people get decision fatigue, and then they don't take any action. And that's not what we want to do at all. So, there are two things that we can focus on today. The first thing, and which I think is the lowest-hanging fruit, is to just put your money into a money market fund. This is so, so easy, everyone, okay? And it has the least amount of risk. Why? Because this fund basically helps you invest in short-term, low-risk debt securities, like T-bills and CDs, things that give you around 2, 3, 4% interest, depending on what the Federal Reserve gives you. Okay, so, if you were to leave your money, again, in a regular checking account that doesn't give you any interest at all, right? You leave $100,000 in a bank that gives you 0% interest, in 10 years, you're still going to have $100,000, right? $100,000 now will still be $100,000 later, but with less buying power. However, if you were to put it into a money market fund, $100,000 now with a 3.5% return, that means that you can grow your money around $141,000 in the next 10 years, assuming that the rates are still the same, right? So, big difference here, $141,000 versus $100,000. I know this isn't life-changing or anything like that, but you see, just by moving your money into a money market fund, you are already one step ahead from all these other Americans who have no financial literacy at all. Does that make sense? So, make sure that you put your money into the right vehicle so that it's not just being eaten away by inflation. All right. So, what can you invest in? What are some money market fund examples cuz I know you're going to ask me that. So, these examples include SPAXX, okay? So, very easy. This is if you want to use Fidelity or SWVXX if you want to use Schwab or VMFXX if you want to use Vanguard. All right. So, make sure, okay, that you just choose whatever you're comfortable with and then you can put it into invest it into a money market fund. I personally use Fidelity and Schwab. All my other community members, they all I want to say that 90% of them all use Fidelity and Schwab also, but Vanguard is also really good, too. I have a lot of family friends who also use Vanguard and their customer service is very very good, okay? So, you don't want to go with these other brokerages that have just been around for the last 3 years. Go with a reliable one with good customer service. If you're building wealth, I don't feel comfortable putting my millions in like a weird trading app that just has been around for the last 3 years or 4 years or so. I want to make sure that I can call someone. I'm old-school like that. I want to make sure I can call someone if I have any questions, okay? And and the customer service is really really good and the brokerages are very robust in what they can do. Okay. Now, let's talk about next steps. If you were to increase your risk, right? If you want to invest in the actual stock market, you can then invest in something called an exchange-traded fund. Now, here's the thing, folks, okay? I know that there's a lot of social media content out there. A lot of people promoting these stocks that are going to quote-unquote 10x, 20x, 30x, 100x and make you a millionaire overnight. Do not believe in these get-rich-quick schemes. Do not fall into these traps, okay? A lot of these people, they do that because, of course, they want to get views on YouTube and they also do this thing called pump and dump where they will trick you into buying this thing, it'll make the stock itself or whatever asset itself go up in price and then they'll sell their shares while the share price for you will drop, and then you lose a lot of money. So, you don't want to be in this risky scenario. So, make sure that instead of investing in these risky assets, maybe like instead of investing in individual companies, I mean you can, but maybe later on, or investing in penny stocks, or if you're investing in meme stocks, or IPOs, right? There are some IPOs out there that are very popular right now that are just, you know, everyone's talking about them right now, or any speculative cryptocurrencies, stay away from them right now. Because as a 40-year-old, 50-year-old, you don't want to introduce too much risk. You have people to take care of, you have yourself to take care of, maybe you have parents to take care of. So, make sure that you are not doing anything crazy, okay? But again, of course, this isn't financial advice, you can do whatever it is that you want, but I will tell you right now, I work with a lot of people, and a lot of people who are in financial, like, they're in ruins right now, they tried to invest in these penny stocks long time ago, couple of years ago, they tried to invest in GME, AMC back in 2020. I don't know if you guys remember that, with GameStop and AMC, and they lost a lot of money, okay? Or they invested in like something like Dogecoin or something like that. Stay away from them. So, instead, you can invest in something that is lower risk, which are exchange-traded funds, or ETFs. I talk about this in a lot of my shorts already. So, you're going to focus on two things. One, they must be low cost, okay? And then two, you want to have a fund that is a broad-based index, that follows a broad-based index. So, what does that mean? It's cheap to have, so you're not paying a money manager like 1% or 2%, which I'll talk about in another video how they eat away a lot of your portfolio value just by giving your money to a money manager to invest. Like, you can just invest yourself at a much, much lower cost, right? And you're investing in an index that all these other institutions, these Wall Street investors, are also putting their billions of dollars into, as well, okay? So, invest that is tried and true, actual companies that are actually making money, not meme stocks or whatever's trending right now. So, what are some of these ETFs? I put a huge list of them right here. You can pick and choose. Just see it as Chipotle or Cava. You can pick and choose and whatever it is that you want to put into your boat, put into your portfolio. But, if you are someone who wants to invest in the S&P 500 or the Standard & Poor's 500, the top 500 companies in the United States, you can invest in SWPPX, VOO, SPY, SPYM, IVV. Or if you're in Fidelity and you want to invest in a mutual fund, there's FX EIX, too. Okay? So, there are a whole bunch. If you want to invest in dividend-paying focused ETFs, right? There's SCHD, VYM, SPYD. The list goes on and on and on. So, go ahead and screenshot this or you can download the road map down below. You can get this whole thing. But, this will allow you to kind of pick and choose what your goals are. Okay? I'll do another video on portfolio allocation depending on your goals in the future if that's something that you want to see, maybe you can give me a thumbs up. You know, let me know in the comments and I'll make it. I'll really make it. I'll read your comments. So, this is what you can invest in, okay? And this is a table of the ETF expense ratios and how you can compare them with each other. So, ideally, you want to choose an expense ratio that is under 0.50%. I've done the calculations myself where anything above that it's more of on the danger zone where you're going to pay a lot of fees, unnecessary fees. So, generally, if you want to invest in something that is like VOO, something from Vanguard right or State Street, you want to choose something around like 0.2, 0.09, 0.03, somewhere around there. The lowest ones right now are around 0.02, 0.03, sometimes even 0.05% expense ratio. So, go ahead and take a look at this, shop around, see what you like. But, just to give you some transparency, I personally invest in SCHD. I have shares of SPYM and QQQM. I know I have SPY and QQQ, too. This is for more of covered calls. That's how I generate some income on the side. I don't want to get into that because this is a beginner's video, but again, this is what I invest in, not doesn't mean that you need to invest in this too or you should invest in this. I'm just giving you some full transparency here, okay? Hopefully this makes sense. All right. So, when you are picking your ETF, you generally want to look at a couple of things, five things. Are you ready? So, one, of course, you want to avoid the following, this right here. Two, you want to make sure that the expense ratio is low, okay? Below 0.5%. Three, if you want to take a look at the long-term performance, you can. Just check the one-year, five-year, and then the 10-plus year chart. If you see that it's been going up for every single chart, most likely it is a good index to invest in or a good fund to invest in. That's how I usually analyze an ETF. Or, you can even look at the performance here. If you go to Yahoo Finance, and on the left side, it's going to show you a button right here where it says performance. You can see what the one-year performance is, five-year, and 10-year performance. And typically, you want to make sure that is above 7 to 12% because that's the average benchmark for the stock market. If it's around like 2%, 3%, that's a little bit suspicious. I would not touch it, okay? So, you want to make sure that it's between around those averages, okay? So, if you take a look at VOO, which is an S&P 500 fund from Vanguard, they gave around a 31, 13, and 15% average annual return over the last one, five, and 10 years, respectively. Again, I talk about the expense ratio here, below 0.5%. And if you want to invest in dividend-paying assets, right? Maybe you just want that cash flow, I generally want to choose something that's between 0.50 to 4%. Anything lower, anything more, it's a little bit on the danger zone. I'll make another video on why it is from a mathematical perspective, okay? But, and the last part is right here. You want to make sure that the funds that you're investing in are holding companies that are actually making money, and it's not just an influencer that just thinks the stock is going to like 10 or 30X in a month or anything like that. They're actually responsible companies that have been around for a very, very long time, and they continue to make money like through every single storm, okay? So, if you take a look at VOO, you can see that the companies in here include Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google. You can check this out on Yahoo Finance yourself. Just click on holdings on the left, and then you can do this yourself, okay? So, here's the thing, folks. I like to teach autonomy here, right? So, I want to make sure that you're able to invest yourself so that one, you don't need to give your money to a money manager to invest for you. You don't have to pay these high fees. And then two, you're not just letting your money just sit in a regular checking accounts where inflation just eats away at it every single year, okay? Because you're at the most highest risk, I would say. If all of this is still confusing, you still need my help here, this is what I can do for you. If you haven't done so already, I know a lot of you have already downloaded my road map. It's already helped out a lot of people. I have a whole bunch of reviews online that you can even check out yourself, where it talks about the road map and how helpful, how useful it is. I literally update I spent hours and hours and hours making all of these study guides for you, and these sheets for you here, just based on your feedback. And all of this is 100% free. So, please make use of it. If you find it useful, you can just leave a review for me or just drop a comment in one of my shorts or something like that. If you DM me, I might lose your DM. I might not see it. But if you comment, I will most likely see it. Um, but just shows me a little bit of appreciation. I just to know that I'm actually or my team and I are doing something right and that we're moving you forward. But if you're someone who has more money, you have more than 50,000, 100,000 dollars that you want to put to work, and you want me and my team to really help you out, you can join my five-day investing challenge. I just launched this a couple of days ago. I'm super excited about this, and this is where you get access to my entire videos, all my quizzes. I'm still a teacher, so I'm going to still quiz you. Just make sure that you have good understanding before you move on to the next topic. I've all my videos here that show you step-by-step on how to do everything and you can even join my private live chat where you can talk to me personally every Thursday. Well, right now it's every Thursday at 5:00 p.m. Pacific time. So, this is only for you. Okay, if you want to join the 5-day challenge, this is only for you if you are actually serious about this because I'm going to tell you right now, if you're someone who you're not very serious, you just like to kind of like you're not going to take it to take any action, don't join because I have to personally pay $1 to $2 for every account that I make for you and if I have like 100 people in there, like 1,000 people in there, I don't think I'm going to get 1,000, but if I have a lot of people in there, I'm going to have to pay a lot of money, okay? And you're potentially going to take a seat away from someone else who needs to join this live chat, who it's actually going to benefit, if that makes sense, okay? But if you're someone who says, "Okay, I have a larger sum of money. I want to actually put it to work. I am I'm ready to go, right?" Then you can join this. You can fill out this application here. Say that you have more than $50,000 that you want to start right away and then I will give you the invitation. All my automations, I don't know how the all the tech works, but the automations will send you an email so that you can join the 5-day challenge so you can talk to me, my team members, and you can talk to the rest of the community, okay? And if you're interested, my team and I will invite you to a one-on-one strategy call. If you're someone who says, "Okay, I still need even more help even with all of the community, all the free stuff that I give you, you're still a little bit confused." It's okay. We'll invite you to a strategy call and then we'll see where you are with your finances and then we'll point you to the next right steps and we might even potentially invite you to join our coaching program if that's something that you're interested in. All right, so hopefully this video helped. If you haven't done so already, get the road map down below. You're going to love it. You're going to get all of these resources here, all my ebooks that I put my heart and soul into. This is not written by AI, folks, okay? This is all pre-AI. I literally typed it with my fingers here. So, everything here, it's all for you and I really hope this helps. And yeah, I will see you all in the next video. Bye, everyone.