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I'm your host, Chris Hutchins, and I am excited to have you on my journey. Today, I'm talking to Jaspreet Singh, who I just met last month at a conference called FinCon, where he was one of the keynote speakers. He's a first-generation American, a licensed attorney, and he's been an entrepreneur his whole life. But in 2015, he decided he wanted to help others avoid the business and financial mistakes he made. So with zero subscribers, he posted his first video on YouTube about what he called the minority mindset.
Well, it resonated deeply, and he's since turned the minority mindset into a full-on financial media company and YouTube channel with over a million subscribers. In our conversation, we'll talk about what a minority mindset is and how you can have one yourself.
We'll hear some of the mistakes and learnings Jaspreet's had and his advice for getting through the tough early days of any entrepreneurial project. And finally, some of his favorite financial tips and hacks. So I hope you enjoy this interview with Jaspreet Singh. Chris Hutchins works at Wealthfront. All opinions expressed by Chris and his guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Wealthfront. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions.
Jaspreet, thank you for being here. Chris, that was an amazing introduction, man. I'm honored to be here. Yeah. So I'm just going to jump in and ask, how do you define the minority mindset?
The minority mindset is literally just a mindset. It is the mindset of thinking differently than the majority of people. It has nothing to do with the way you look, your ethnicity, or your skin color. And so for us now talking about that, we focus in on the financial side of the minority mindset. That means thinking differently than the majority of people when it comes to your money. Can you talk a little bit about what led you to start thinking this way and build an entire brand about it? Was it your background or how did you come to this?
Yeah, I mean, I grew up in a very traditional Indian house where entrepreneurship, financial education, investing were all topics that I never grew up learning about. Not only did I not grow up learning about them, but they were actively discouraged in my house because, you know, like you said, my parents are immigrants.
and my dad came to this country with less than 100 bucks. He bust his butt, worked every single day, and for him, when he wanted me and my brother to become successful the way that
They did that, in their mind, was by having us become doctors. So since I was a kid, I was always told that I needed to study hard in school so I can become a doctor. And anything that wasn't going to help me on my path of becoming a doctor was a waste of time. So even sports weren't that much encouraged when I was a kid because why would you go out and play football when you could be studying to become a doctor? And doing anything that wasn't really directly correlated...
But becoming a doctor was a waste of time. And so I always had this entrepreneurial bug. I always thought differently. I always wanted to create value. When I was a kid, I was mowing my neighbor's lawns. I was delivering newspapers for my neighbors. And then when I got into middle school, early high school, I started playing a drum called the dhol, an Indian drum at weddings. And I was also working at Auntie Anne's Pretzels. I was making like $5.85 an hour.
When I worked at Auntie Anne's Pretzels because I was under 18 so they could pay me below minimum wage.
And then when I started playing this drum at weddings, at first I was charging like 50, 60 bucks an hour. But then I got a little bit better because I sucked when I first started. And then I would charge somewhere between $200 to $300 an hour. And now I'm like, wait, I got to work for two weeks at the pretzel shop to make two to 300 bucks, but I can make the same money in an hour at a wedding. So things started to click. And so that's when I really started to think differently than the majority of people. And
And my junior and senior year in high school, I started hosting teen parties for kids in my school because I knew a lot of the DJs. Then the real shift happened when I went to college because I didn't really have any guidance on what college was like in America and what to expect in college. I thought that everybody went to college to study and become super successful because if you study hard in college, you are guaranteed to become successful.
Well, I go to college and everybody around me is partying. I thought you spent your Friday nights in the chemistry lab doing reactions. And I got there and I could not believe that people were partying. First off, none of you have any money because all y'all are here with student loans. So you're blowing your student loans at these parties. And I couldn't believe it. So I was like, you know what?
I never drank. I never got into the party scene like myself partying. But I was like, instead of me being like the majority of people and going to all these parties, how about I start hosting the parties? I was knocking on every club and bar and restaurant at my college, asking them if I can host parties there. And I don't have money to go and buy a venue or rent out a venue. So I would ask them to see if we could work something creative out where they wouldn't charge me anything. They would get to keep all the revenue from the bar. And then they would take like
50% of the cover that I charged. And then I started learning about investing. I started reading books. I started diving into more of real estate investing. When I was 19, I bought my first rental property. It was funny because it was the day after I took my MCAT, which is the test you take to get into medical school.
And the whole time that I was studying, anytime I took a break, I would go on to Yahoo Finance and every article talked about how the real estate market is crashing. It's at rock bottom because this was after the 2008 crash. And I knew nothing about real estate investing. The books that I read said that every wealthy person invests in real estate and
And I knew I wanted to invest in real estate, but I had no one to ask how it worked or what the process was. So like in my breaks of studying for the medical college admission test, I would look at properties online and go see some. And I took my MCAT on August 22nd. On August 23rd, I closed on my first property. It was a 1,000 square foot condo that the owners had originally bought for like $120,000 to $150,000, somewhere in that range.
The crash happened. The bank took it over. Now the bank was selling this property for eight grand. So I purchased it for $8,000, rented it out. And that's where the whole shift really started. Wow. And at this point, you said you're still taking your MCAT. Did you still think at this time you were going to be a doctor? Yes. And then no. It was through the MCAT. I thought I was going to be a doctor. I was...
I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I learned the word entrepreneurship when I was in college and I really related with that.
But I never thought that I could not be a doctor because I felt like I was too deep into it. And it's funny saying that now because I was only 18, 19 years old. But I was like, you know, I did all these volunteering hours in high school. I did all this job shadowing where I shadowed a whole bunch of doctors. I did these pre-med clubs. I went to these conferences. I took all the pre-med classes, did the prereqs, all the way into pre-med. I don't know anything else, so I have to become a doctor.
So I didn't know that I had other opportunities or options. And it wasn't until after I got this property really taken care of and started to rent out that I was like, you know, I like this. I like the whole idea of financial education and entrepreneurship. This is what I want to do. And then I also had this dilemma in my mind because if you become a doctor, the way you make money is by treating patients. And
And if I'm trying to just maximize the dollars that I can earn, I'm trying to see as many patients as possible. So something just didn't make sense to me. Like, if you want to be a doctor, you should be a doctor because you love medicine. But I felt like I was going down it for the wrong reasons because I felt like I was becoming a doctor because I wanted to make money. And I could not be okay with that. So that was when I made the decision that I don't want to be a doctor because I was doing it for all the wrong reasons.
Wow. So even though you might have had that minority mindset on your personal kind of
college experience, starting parties and that kind of stuff, it was still there on the doctor until you cross that threshold, which I think is something I thought about when I was preparing for this was it's easy to say, I want to think differently. I want to not be what everyone else is. How do you hold yourself accountable to that? Well, it really just goes down to what is your reason for doing whatever it is that you do? What is your purpose? And for me, my purpose was really
giving myself, my parents, my family, the things that we never had. My grandparents were refugees in India. The state of Punjab where we're from was severed in 1947. When that happened, my grandparents were kicked out of their homes, lost their homes, their family members, their friends. They lost everything. All they had was the clothes on their back and a sword in their hands. And they had to literally now migrate to the new east side of India. And if you did not, you were going to be killed.
And my grandfather saw his uncle get killed in front of him because they got attacked by a mob, came to a new country and had to hustle to make it work.
Then my parents came to this country with next to nothing. And my grandparents came here and they helped raise me. So I was instilled with these cultural values of understanding the struggle that my grandparents went through, seeing the struggle that my parents went through. So I wanted to make sure that I could take care of them. I always had that instilled in me, which was why I felt like I worked really hard in school. I wasn't always the best student, but I always wanted to do the right thing because I wanted to give back to my parents and my family.
And then the next thing was when I decided to be an entrepreneur, I lost all support. Everyone thought I was like, lost my mind. My parents told me that I was stupid. I was throwing everything away. I had family members, uncles and aunts calling me saying, oh, are you sure you want to do this? You're throwing away the opportunity to become successful. We have these community centers called Gurdwaras, our version of a temple, and
I would go there and the people would be making fun of me like, oh, so you were going to be a doctor, but now you're doing these little businesses and stuff. And it's like, you know, they were like, just like poke jabs at you. So that was like the next thing where I was like, you know what? Screw you. I'm going to prove everybody wrong because I want to be successful, not only to take care of my family, but now to show the world that, hey, that you can do what you love and be successful doing it if you understand how money works and if you are passionate about it. So for me, it was,
knowing my purpose or, you know, they say don't do something out of spite, but this all started out of spite. I wanted to prove everybody wrong because I was just so angry at how I got no support and how I never learned about money. I mean, it just, it angered me so much that when I started learning about financial education and money that I had gone through so much schooling, but I didn't learn a thing about building wealth.
Wow. And how were you feeling during this kind of family is, you know, on top of you? Like, how did you get through that? I mean, in terms of feelings, I've had a lot of anxiety at that time. And I'm not gonna lie, because I
there was that feeling where I was not putting that much time as I could have been in school. I went to law school when my parents found out that I wasn't going to be a doctor. They're like, you have to at least become an attorney. And I settled with that. I was like, that's okay because at least with law school, I can go part-time and I can build my businesses, the other part. So I was doing that. And when I knew that
I wasn't putting in my time into school to get a traditional job. I knew that I have to be able to support myself. And that risk of me potentially failing used to keep me up at night because I'm like, you know, what am I going to do if things don't work out? What am I going to do if I can't make money? What if I do if my businesses fail? What if I do if everything goes wrong? And I used to have a lot of anxiety. But
to kind of counterbalance that I worked as much as I could. I mean, I worked my butt off when I was like in college, I was sleeping very, very little. I used to joke that if I got four hours of sleep, that was a good night.
I'm not saying that you need to do that, but it was just the only option that I had because I did my business in secret. I was going to school all day. I was studying. Then I would run my business in the evenings and early mornings. And then I have to host parties Thursday nights, Friday nights. I'd be at the club or venue until 2 a.m. And then I got to sit there and make sure everything is good. So I'd be there after 2 a.m. until 3, 3.30, get home by 4, then start everything back up the next morning. So it's rough. There's a lot of risk there.
How do you kind of balance that? You work your butt off. Wow. Yeah. We've all been there, starting companies, doing projects. It's a lot of work. What advice do you have for someone who feels like they're stuck in that kind of traditional rat race where they're like, gosh, I've always assumed that I have to take this job and get this house and have this family and have these kids. And is there any tactics for just jumpstarting or kicking off the thinking, as you say, as a minority mindset?
Yeah, I mean, there's two aspects to that. First is the mindset aspect. And then you have the financial aspect. On the mindset side of things, once you decide that, hey, I don't want to live like this anymore, you got to figure out whatever it is that you want. Do you want to start a business? Do you want to start investing? Or what is it that you want to do that is going to change your life? I mean, you have to understand that, you know, you have to make that decision for yourself that you want to change your life financially.
And you have to believe that it's possible for you. And you have to be willing to do whatever it takes. And you have to start learning. I used to read books to learn. Now you have so much education on YouTube or podcasts or wherever. You can just start learning from people that have done what it is that you want to do and really start shifting your mindset to understand that this is possible. The next thing is the financial side. Because the reason why so many people are scared to make a change is
It's because it's fear. What happens if I start this business and it fails and now I lose my job and I can't get another job? Now how am I going to support my family? And it's that fear. But you're worried about the risk of you starting something new or doing something new. But what about the risk if you don't start something new? Then you're going to be stuck in that same position for the rest of your life. So there's a risk both ways.
One of them has more immediate risk. One of them is more long-term risk. And so you got to understand that everything you do has risk. But now, if you want to mitigate that risk of doing something different, whether it's investing or starting something of your own, the way you mitigate that risk is just building yourself a financial cushion. And so that means cut out the crap when it comes to spending. Build a savings cushion.
build some extra reserves so that way now if things go wrong, you have some money to fall back on.
buy some assets, build investments, and now you can pick and choose. Like I had a conversation with a buddy of mine. He was like, okay, you know, if I have $50,000 right now, what do I do with it? It's not such an easy question to answer because you have to understand, where are you in life? Do you have a spouse? Do you have kids you got to take care of? Or are you young and you can take as much risk as possible? Because if you're young, you're 22 years old, you don't have any responsibilities, do the riskiest things possible.
That, you know, you believe in that they could have future returns. But, you know, you can take a whole lot more risk when you're 22 than you can when you're 45. And so it's understanding where you are in life and then taking action to get out of that.
Yeah, two things that come to mind when I think about this. One, when you start a company or start a project or like you did start a site on YouTube, you don't have to quit your job to do that, right? There's a lot of ways to get started on the side. I know you've talked a lot about how people should start stacking income and building multiple streams. So that's one. And the other is,
was I was talking to someone who worked at one of these cushy six-figure tech jobs and had an entrepreneurial bug and felt like they really needed to quit to do it. But I pointed out that they weren't giving up their six-figure job for their whole life. It doesn't take 10 years to find out if a business is going to be on a good track. You can usually get a good sense in six months, nine months, sometimes even two or three months. So I always tell people, don't think about the
cost of starting a business as not having your salary forever. It's the cost of not having your salary for maybe six months, maybe nine months, which for many people is really hard, which is why I really suggest starting things on the side. But don't think about it as a forever thing, because it's an experiment that you can usually get data on soon.
Yeah, start it on the side and start it with as little expenses as possible. I mean, you talk about YouTube. It kills me when I hear people telling me that they're going to start a YouTube channel and they just invested $5,000 in equipment, cameras, lighting, microphones, and you haven't even made a single video. What the heck are you spending money on before you do that?
Start, hustle, be creative. I mean, this is the trait that every successful entrepreneur has because if you have too much money, then what do you do? You're gonna spend it on dumb things before you realize really that money needs to go.
And there's so many ways to be creative. And it doesn't matter what the business is. It doesn't have to be a YouTube channel or a content creation business. You know, I've created products. I built a water-resistant sock company. And I spent very little money starting it because I don't have that much money, but I was creative. I had to work with textile engineers and manufacturers and...
So how do you do that when you don't have a lot of money to create products and create technology? Well, you get on the phone and you call a lot of people and you see how many of them are willing to work out creative deals where they're willing to get paid after you start selling your product or they're willing to do it in exchange for some sort of revenue share of your product or they're willing to do something creative where you don't have to front all the cash.
And it's that creativity which really separates the successful entrepreneur from a wantrepreneur who's like, I need $100,000 to start a business because otherwise I can't. It doesn't work like that. You got to be able to find a way to make things happen. And it's all about being creative, asking different questions and putting in the extra work to find somebody who's willing to work with you. Yeah.
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Don't miss the chance to maximize your happiness and save money. Join over 37,000 people getting my newsletter by going to allthehacks.com slash email and signing up for free. Again, that's allthehacks.com slash email. And I'll go back to your YouTube example because there's something I heard you say at FinCon was when you posted your first video, there weren't a lot of views. And I think that continued for your second, third, fourth video. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
I even heard you say that a lot of the views in your early days were just you refreshing the page. But I said the refresh button a hundred times on all of my early videos because I used to post a video and nobody would watch it. So I was like, well, I don't want to have a video with six views on it. So I used to go there, watch the video and hit refresh a hundred times on each video. That way, at least looks like I got three digits worth of views, a hundred views.
And so I know there's a lot of people listening who have some topic that they're passionate about. It's the thing that, you know, people light up at the dinner table when they're talking about. And whether the medium is YouTube or Instagram or TikTok or anything, there's so many options starting a blog. When you get started, and I remember this myself,
Nobody's really listening at the beginning. What did you say to yourself or how did you commit to yourself to keep going knowing that that early part is so hard and feels like there's no traction? But clearly, the message you had when you started and were getting no views, that message was about the minority mindset and that's your brand now. So that message resonated. It
How did you push through that hard part where nobody was watching, but you thought what you were saying was interesting? I mean, this is where you have to be a little bit crazy. This is why they say all entrepreneurs are a little bit crazy because you have to do it for more than just financial reward.
I did not start a YouTube channel to make money. I started it because I wanted to spread this education on first how to launch a business without getting screwed over, which eventually transitioned into the financial education I wish I would have learned when I was getting started. And so for me, it was more about the message of getting this information out there than it was about how much money can I make.
Because we'll focus on YouTube, but this goes across any business idea. If you start a YouTube channel for the purposes of making money and getting rich, you are going to fail. It is so hard to build any sort of business, brand, channel for the sole purpose of making money.
But if you're doing it with the passion and with purpose because you love what you do, people are going to see that and they're going to believe you more and they're going to listen to you because they're going to feel it. The thing that makes YouTube so cool is it is controlled and watched by people because people can watch you and they'll say, this is
This guy's not talking about good stuff. I don't like this or, you know, I don't, whatever. And they can leave because they feel like you just, you're just trying to make money off of them. But if they feel you're passionate, they love what you're saying, that they will watch you. And so it has to go down to what is it that you're doing it for? And for me, I mean, everything that I say, I can tell you this. I speak from my heart. Everything I say I'm passionate about. The reason why I'm so passionate is because, you know, I'm confident about what I say because I've lived through this and,
I love what I do and what I talk about. I mean, everything is coming straight from my heart because this is important to me.
Yeah. Well, this is a perfect segue. So money, financial, everything, that's important to you. And it's something I really want to dive into because it's a topic I'm also really passionate about. So as long as we're two money nerds, as I've seen you call yourself, and I know I call myself, how do you manage your own finances? What do you do that is in the minority in terms of how you manage that's different from other people? Well, I don't work in minority mindset to make money.
I work to buy assets. And so the way that our income works, my income, if you want to look more on the business side is I follow what I call an 80-20 rule, where if I make $10,000, me personally from Minority Mindset, whether it's through ads or sponsors or whatever, 80% of that goes right back into the company.
And that will be used to now build software or expand on our website or hire more team members. We have an amazing team here of people that are way smarter than I am, people who run our newsletter, our blog, our academy. So we have an amazing team of people that I'm now investing in there. And then the other 20% that comes to me
Most of that is now being invested into other assets, things like real estate, things like stocks, things like startups and cryptocurrency and gold. So I'm investing in a lot of different places. And so that's the way I look at it is I'm not working for money, I'm working for assets. And so for me, I save cash because you have to have cash for emergencies. I understand that. But I also, I want to own assets. I want to own assets.
Real estate because real estate pays me with cash flow. I love real estate because I can revitalize properties. I'm an entrepreneur. I love buying distressed properties.
because I want to be able to fix it up. I can make neighborhoods more lively, make it look better. I love that aspect of it. Plus, you can create that predictable cash flow and you get tax breaks. Real estate has some of the best legal tax breaks that our tax code has to offer. Second, I invest in the stock market because I believe in the American economy. Like I said, we have the strongest economy in the world. So the stock market is a way for you to get exposure to the American economy.
Third, I invest in startups because I'm an entrepreneur. I love entrepreneurship and I want to support entrepreneurs in as many ways that I can. So I invest in startups. Then I invest in cryptocurrency because people are trying to take control over their own money. This is a new movement literally being created by people from the bottom up. And then I own gold.
Because in case I'm wrong about the economy, I invest in stocks because I believe in the economy. If I'm wrong, I own gold. It's not like a 20, 20, 20, 20, 20% spread. Gold is my smallest. That's my insurance. Is this physical gold? Physical gold. And so it's that diversification for me because I can't predict the future. I can't predict what's going to win, but I can allocate my resources accordingly.
Yeah, I'm a fan of a similar diversification strategy. But one interesting thing I've heard you say, which is a little bit more minority mindset is that you don't think one job will be enough for most people. And that, you know, I read that as you don't just need to diversify where you put your money, but you need to diversify where you get your money.
So I'm curious to hear why you think people will need multiple streams of income beyond just their job and what you think some of the best ways for people to get started to stack their income beyond their job. So if we look a few decades ago, we used to live in an economy where households were supported by one income. It was a man going to work. And in most cases, the woman of the house did not go to work. Not saying that's what's right. This is just how it was.
And in that one income household case, that one income was able to support buying a home, buying a car, and putting kids through school and vacations and retirement. And it was enough to live. Now, we're in a generation where we have two income households. I mean, it's dumb that we didn't have equality before, but it's great that we're moving towards equality now.
But now, you would assume that if we have two people working in a house, households should be twice as wealthy, right? Because people are making more money. But that's not the case. We have two income households, yet people are broker than ever. Why? Because one, it goes back to everything that we just talked about, the cost of living has been skyrocketing relative to wages.
Part of that has to do with the fact that our dollar values have been diluted over the last hundred or so years. And wages have gone up, but not relative to our cost of living. In addition to that, we also have a higher standard of living. You know, back in the day, you didn't have an iPhone and a MacBook and smartwatches and all these other fancy things that we have now that everybody wants to have.
Couple that with the growth of technology, which allows you to buy now, pay later. And so this is the change in our spending culture where prices of things are higher. We want more things and we're financing our things. And now you have two incomes that are struggling to support this. Plus you have student loans, which are interestingly the biggest liability for young people, millennials.
but it's also the biggest asset for the United States government. So now if you want to be able to afford this life and build wealth, you're going to need more money. And the way I look at it is, you know, saving is important. When I say saving, I mean living below your means. Living below your means is important where you have extra cash.
But there's only so much that you can cut. There's only so many expenses that you can cut down. And yeah, some people are going to be more aggressive than others. But at the end of the day, if you're making $100,000 a year, there's only so much that you can cut. Even if it's $30,000, there's only so much that you can cut. But there's no limit to how much you can earn.
And so this is the growth mindset of understanding, okay, yes, I need to live below my means. I need to put some extra money aside for my pay down my credit card debt to start investing, to build wealth, to invest in my business, whatever it is. But now I need to earn more money. That way I can actually accelerate my path to wealth. And thanks to technology, it is more accessible than ever to be able to earn more income.
I mean, you can drive for Uber. You can drive for Lyft. You can deliver groceries for Amazon Fresh. You can deliver food for Grubhub. You can deliver food for Uber Eats.
or if you want to be more involved with physical labor type of stuff, there are apps out there that allow you to help people move. You can lift heavy things. If you have a truck, you can transport stuff in your truck, or you can come onto things like Upwork and Fiverr, and now you can offer your services, your thinking, your skills. You can be a writer. You can be a graphic designer. You can be a video editor. You can be a voiceover artist. There's so many things that you can do where if you have a skill,
Now you can market it. And it has become so much more accessible because now you can go to one of these platforms, market your skill, and have somebody else who's looking for your skill pay you in order to do that. And these are things that you can do on your own time, on your own schedule. Like here at the Minority Mindset, we have our core team in the office. And then we have like a couple dozen or so freelancers that work with us.
A dozen of them are writers and they write on their own time, on their own schedule. And we send them topics, we give them deadlines, and then they can work their own job and write in the evenings or in the mornings or the lunch break. It doesn't matter to us when you write it, as long as you get it to us by the deadline and it's a win-win. Now you're providing value for the business or whoever you're working with.
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I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com slash deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. I want to switch gears a little bit. So we talked a lot about earning money. We talked about investing. But when I searched your YouTube channel, there were a ton of videos about hacks. And a lot of them were money hacks and side hustle hacks and that kind of thing.
One of the categories that we haven't spent much time on is spending less money. What are some of your favorite tips or maybe contrarian minority mindset pieces of advice for people to look to save a little bit more money? So the interesting thing about this is
There has to be a reason for why you are saving your money. Because I grew up in a traditional Indian house and the Indian culture is a save first culture. And I joke around about this, but Indian people make a dollar every
to spend 20 cents. American people earn a dollar to spend $2. And so Indian people are bred with this save first mentality where they want to save as much money as possible. So the question first is, why are you living below your means? Because if it's just to save money to save it, well, you know, there's better things that you can do. So for me, it's really understanding why. Because you have this debate in the financial industry of people arguing over Starbucks and
Oh my God, you spent $4 on a latte? Are you serious? If you compounded that $4 at 7% a year, do you know how much that would be worth? Now people are arguing, is Starbucks a good or bad purchase? But that's the wrong question. The question is why are you spending or not spending money at Starbucks? Because if you're not spending money at Starbucks just so you can save an extra $4,
what is that going to do for you? But if you have a reason for not spending your money, because right now you're trying to build your business and you don't have any extra money because you're trying to invest every extra penny possible, you're trying to buy your first rental property, this is where you can start to ask the question of, why am I cutting back? For me...
I was always big on investing into me and my real estate and my business. And the first time I made $100,000 a year, I was in school and I was a student and I was making good money. You know, 100 grand a year when you're a student is really good and you can show off a lot of nice things when you're in college with that type of money. But I lived in an apartment
where I was paying less than $400 a month. And that included my parking, my cable, my internet, my heat, and my electric because I slept on the living room floor. I kept a mattress in the hallway.
And every night I would come there, drag the mattress into the living room, lay it down, put down my sheets, go to sleep, wake up, fold my sheets, put them away, lift up the mattress and put it back in the hallway. Now, I was making good money. I could have afforded a much nicer apartment. But the reason why I didn't do that was because I wanted to spend every penny possible and invest that right back into my business and to buy real estate. And so you got to ask the question of why. Now, when it comes to hacks, you
It's really just that discipline, man. Like I used to guest teach in Detroit Public Schools. And Detroit Public Schools, for those of you who don't know, it is a rougher school district where these kids, they grow up around a lot of rough things that the teachers have had a rough time teaching there. And it's just a rougher area. So I wanted to volunteer and kind of help out. I was guest speaking here and I would just talk about life, motivation, money management, a whole bunch of different things.
And I was talking to the kids at one of the classes. I asked them, how many of y'all are working a job? And a lot of them raised their hands.
Then I asked him, how many guys have a bank account? And almost nobody raised their hands. So, you know, I got to talk to them. I was like, you know, what do y'all do with your money? So what would happen is these kids, high school kids would work at a job. They would get a physical check. Then they would walk into a liquor store or a convenience store, cash the check where they would pay one to 10% in fees to cash that check. Then they will go out and buy chips, pop, soda, candy. And on the way out, they'd only be left with half of their check.
And so this is where I was like, "All right, we need to change the way that we're using our money." So I created what I call the rule of five. And what that says is if you cannot buy five of them, you cannot afford one of them. So now we're talking about liabilities, things that you don't need to survive, where there's a big difference between being able to buy something and being able to afford something. Because when I was talking to these kids, everyone said, "If I had $100 in my bank account, I can afford $100 pair of shoes."
But that's not the case. Just because you can buy a $100 pair of shoes does not mean that you can afford it. Nowadays, if you want to buy a $100 pair of shoes, you don't even need $100. All you need is a credit card or access to these buy now, pay later platforms. But what you have to understand is there's a huge difference between being able to buy something and being able to afford something. And now when we talk about using your money the right way, you have to know the difference. So I like to follow the rule of five.
If you can't buy five of them, you can't afford one of them. If you want a $100 pair of shoes, you better be able to buy at least five of them before you can afford one of them. I love it. That's a great rule of thumb that I think I could probably find some purchases in my past history that wouldn't have applied and now hopefully less.
You know, we've all been there. We've all been there though. When I was younger, I used to make a lot of dumb purchases. It's that shift, right? You start to their mindset. When I was younger, I used to spend my money on a whole bunch of dumb things because that's what's normal. When I was in high school and I was making money,
I wanted to look rich. So the first time I had a gig that I did and I made $1,000. I was like, oh my God, I made $1,000. It's a lot of money when you're in high school. So I went out and I bought a $1,000 watch. Like literally spent all $1,000 on one watch and it was like lined up with crystals all around it. It was supposed to look like diamonds and it was just like super flashy and blingy just because I wanted to look rich. I mean, back then it was like,
Anytime I made some extra cash, I upgraded my car. I was driving this Toyota and I put tents on my windows. I upgraded the rims, put on some custom rims. I put in two 12-inch subwoofers in the trunk. I upgraded my sound system. I put in HID lights. I mean, I used to watch a lot of Pitman Ride in case you couldn't tell. So I wanted to have the coolest car and I would quote unquote invest my money into my car to look rich. But then when I started learning about money,
And I started understanding, okay, I want to become wealthy. I want to be able to take care of my family. I want something better.
So now you mix that mindset with the right financial education. And all of a sudden, my spending changed. I stopped spending money on things because I wanted to buy assets. And now it's like you want to buy as many assets as you can because you want to take care of yourself. You want to be able to live off your assets. And then you want to take care of your family. That way, you never have to worry about money. That way, you can live your life and do whatever you want because wealth ultimately is freedom.
And everything that we do is, you know, you want to have freedom to live your life and do whatever it is that you want because when you have the freedom, it's much easier to do things that you love and do the things that you want.
Yeah. Are there any things now that you think you spend money on that people would love to hear about? It doesn't have to be anything big. When you have more money, it's nice to be able to afford luxury things. And everybody likes that. But it really starts with the small stuff because I love working out. I'm a gym guy. And I have a gym bag that I keep with me. And before, what I used to do is I used to have my deodorant, my toothbrush, my body wash,
All my stuff, I had one of each of these things and I kept it in my home. Then I would go to the gym every day. I'd take these things from my bathroom, put it in my gym bag, walk over to the gym, work out, shower, do all my stuff in the gym, use my toiletries, come home, take all this stuff out, put it back in my bathroom. And it was a pain. Then you start trying to make some money.
And then I was like, you know what? I'm going to make my life a little bit easier. So then I bought a second deodorant, a second body wash, a second beard comb. And you start buying. It's convenience. And now all of a sudden when I go to the gym, I don't got to take it out of my bathroom. I just pick up my gym bag and I go. And it's like, wow, I made it in life. You know what I mean? It starts with the little things and you're able to buy more convenience. And this is where money...
has the ability to buy convenience for you, but you got to pick and choose what it is that you want. And for some people, it's going to be some things, and for others, it's going to be other things. I go to India pretty often because my family is in India. And when we used to go to India, I used to sit in economy class. And oh my God, going to India, an 18-hour flight, sitting in an economy class, you're sitting like a sardine.
You sit there. You can't move. You got someone on your left. You got someone on your right. You can't extend your legs. You got someone in front of you. You can recline like three inches and you sit there and you wait for the flight attendant to serve you some food and then you can't eat with your elbows to your shoulders and you're stuck. And it is so uncomfortable. I mean, it's such a long flight and then...
When you walk in, it's funny that they do this because when you walk in, you're going to walk past the business class seats. And these business class seats, they're huge. And I used to always walk past them like, I wonder what these people do. How do you afford these seats? Because it's like three to five times more to sit in business than it does in economy. I was like, how do these people afford this? Because their seats are like, you get your own cabin, you get your own like,
little compartment and your seat turns into a bed and you have this flight attendant that comes and serves you and talks to you and they call you sir and ma'am. And I was like, oh my God, that's so cool. And so, you know, in terms of luxuries, the first time I flew business to India, oh my God, my life changed. I could not believe it. I could not believe what it was like to sit in a seat like that for 18 hours. I'm like, man, time flies. Life becomes more convenient.
That's amazing. Awesome. Well, this has been so fantastic. I appreciate you sharing all these things. What are you working on right now? Where can people find it? Man, we're really just working on helping to spread that financial education. And this is across different platforms. Obviously, we have our YouTube channel, Minority Mindset. We recently launched a new YouTube channel called Minority Mindset News, where we publish
daily news updates in the top finance and business world. We have all of our socials at Minority Mindset. You can check out our website, theminoritymindset.com.
Everything on our website is free. It's free content, man. Go check it out. Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing. I've checked it out. Hopefully people will too. Really appreciate you being here. I'm a little sad we didn't end up talking about guacamole since I know that's a big thing for you. And I also share the passion. But oh man, I dig it. I dig it. Yeah, me too. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Chris. This is a lot of fun.
That was great. If you watch any of Jaspreet's videos, you'll see how passionate he is about everything he does. And speaking of videos, I've actually been recording most of the videos of these interviews, and I'm going to be putting them all up on YouTube. So I'll share more when they're up there.
Also, thank you to everyone who's emailed questions, feedback, hacks, and so much more. Please keep them coming for the next Q&A episode and especially keep sharing your favorite hacks because I'm going to start including them in this soon-to-be-relaunched weekly newsletter. Finally, thank you so much for listening. You can find me at chris at allthehacks.com and I'll see you next week.