Summary

The video reveals a key financial habit that the wealthy keep private: they prioritize paying themselves first before covering other expenses.

Highlights

•  The rich treat savings like a non-negotiable expense by setting aside money for themselves before paying bills or debts.
•  This habit builds long-term wealth by ensuring consistent investment and growth of their capital.
•  Most people do the opposite, spending first and saving what’s left, which limits financial progress.
•  Mindset matters—the wealthy view money as a tool to generate more wealth rather than something to consume.
• ️‍♂️ This rule remains secret because it’s a simple but powerful strategy that, if widely followed, would disrupt traditional spending habits.

Most people spend most of their lives working for money, but they never once stop and ask, “What does money actually do for me?” If you’re chasing paychecks or trading time for dollars or saving money for some imaginary rainy day, you’ve already lost. The rich just don’t think like that.
So today, I’m going to walk you through exactly how wealthy investors think, how they think about money, and how they think about the use of money, and the mindset shift that helped me buy over 10,000 apartments and become financially free. And I’m telling you right now, it all starts in your mind.
When I was 34, I bought my first rental property. It was a two-bedroom, two bath condo, and I put about 30 grand down. It was all I had. It was my entire savings and it cash flowed about $50 to $100 a month. That was it. But what I was trying to do is I was trying to get out of the financial services market because prior to that, I’d put all my money with wealth managers and I tried all these different things.
I like there has to be a better way. There has to be a better way. And so I started investing in real estate, but not till I was 34 years old. What I realized quickly is that my tenant was actually paying off the mortgage for me. It’s important to understand that I was not trying to get rich overnight.
I was buying financial freedom. And at the time, I was trying to do it through passive income, one condo at a time. But here’s the difference. Most people think money is something that you keep. The wealthy see money as something that they need to deploy. That’s the main difference. As you know, I always say cash flow is king.
I didn’t buy that property for status. I bought it so someone else would pay my mortgage for me and then of course I would keep the spread. But how many people do you really know that got rich quick? This is a slow process. If your money is sitting in a bank account then you are losing money and you are going backwards financially whether you know it or not.
You see the middle class what they do is they trade time for money. The wealthy, they trade debt for cash flow. Here’s the trick. I didn’t buy 10,000 units because I had millions of dollars of money in the bank. I did it understanding about OPM or other people’s money and using debt the right way.
I’ve got about $800 million in debt right now. And guess what? I sleep just fine. Why? Because my 10,000 tenants, they pay it off for me. You must know the difference between good debt and bad debt. Bad debt costs you and good debt makes you rich. So if you think about it, it makes complete sense. When you deposit money into a bank, it’s a problem for the bank.
It’s a liability for them because they pay you interest on the money that’s your money. And then in turn, they lend it out to people like me at a higher rate to make money. See, banks make money when they lend. And they’re using your money as the way to do it. You’re depositing that money into the bank and then they lend it back out.
I never bought for short-term gains. I bought for 10-year outcomes. I played the long game and I still do. Every single thing I buy, I let the market do its thing. I let inflation work. I let the tenants pay it off and I use the bank’s money to refinance what I already use in the first place. It’s the same system over and over.
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It’s worth over $60 million today, but that didn’t happen overnight. We were playing the long game and we waited for the property to appreciate over time with the tenants paying off the original debt. And then, of course, we refinanced it and the property was the collateral for the bank. The poor, they think about Friday.
The middle class, they think about next month. That’s why they like to do quick deals, stock market, and things that go up fast. They like to trade. I’m the exact opposite. The wealthy, they think in 10-year blocks because they also know that there are many, many cycles in all markets, not just real estate.
And you got to understand the cycles and let them work for you. When I buy real estate, I ask, “Will this cash flow now? Will it protect me from inflation later? And will it appreciate with the right strategy? And that’s how you build real wealth. Here’s a truth bomb. The government doesn’t want you to pay more taxes.
They want you to invest in things like real estate. The tax code is set up for people to invest and get tax benefits from that. The way that you should be thinking is that the tax code is actually written for investors. It’s a road map that the government is giving you to tell you where they want the money to go. That’s what the tax code should be to you.
When I first started, I didn’t know any of this. But once I started to learn about depreciation, things like cost segregation, bonus depreciation, it all started to make sense. And it changed the game for me. Not only from a building wealth standpoint and a cash flow standpoint, how do I keep legally the money that I’m making by using the tax code? That’s how the wealthy keep more than they earn, not by cheating, by understanding the rules.
If you’re paying too much in tax, then you’re investing wrong. Because there is one thing for certain, the biggest expense in your entire life will be tax. So if you can figure out legally how to defer or offset some of that by using the system for you, then automatically you’re just keeping more of what you earn. And that is how you do it.
And that’s why real estate is so good. They give you credits for when you provide things like housing. Everybody wants more money, but if you don’t have control over it, it will control you. I see this all the time. People toss their money into retirement accounts and meet with their financial advisor maybe one time a year when they get their financial statements only if they get a call generally.
And then when they meet with them, they don’t always even know like what am I really investing in? because various funds and stocks and all the things that they put you in are very complicated and often times they have massive fees that are not even disclosed. They hope that a financial adviser is doing the right thing and the market is trending in the right direction. Hope is not a strategy.
Real wealth means owning the asset and controlling the cash flow. And you can do this. It’s not that hard. You need to know where your money is and where it’s heading. And if you know this, then you can control it and maximize your own personal cash flow or your own wealth. I’d rather own one duplex that pays me $500 a month than rely on the S&P 500 over my lifetime.
That to me is just simply gambling. So, let’s break this down. Money is a tool, not a goal. Use good debt to create cash flow. Think in decades, not paychecks. Taxes are just a game, so you need to learn the rules and focus on control of your capital. Don’t just give it up to somebody else. That’s how wealthy people think.