How to generate wealth in 2022

I recorded this as a three-step formula for getting rich. There is no trick in it. The goal, for me, is financial freedom: I can do and buy the things I want. A pile of cash is not the point.

Everyone who actually accumulated wealth went through some version of this. Earn. Spend less than that. Put the surplus to work. The rest is discipline.

$10,000 a month is the floor. Passive income comes later

If I am not earning $10,000 a month, that is where all of my time goes. Below that I treat myself as in a bad place. I do not spend that season on passive-income theory.

$10k a month looks far off if you only know the job-and-degree ladder. Online it is not that hard. There are hundreds of paths. A few I would actually learn: copywriting, programming, design, Google Ads, Facebook Ads — you can take a cut of someone's return. Dropshipping works; I am not a fan. Building a business works. Learning Make.com — then still called Integromat — and selling that as a consultant on Upwork works. Demand is there.

The job is to acquire a skill and deliver value with it. Charge on the value, not on the hours. That is why I invest in myself: books, learning, experiences. More skill, more value, more you can charge. Get to $10k. Scale to $25k, $50k, $100k later. First number first.

A 20–30% guilt-free budget, then invest the rest

If you do not manage the money, you will spend it. I learned that first hand.

I take 20–30% of income as a guilt-free budget and blow it on whatever I want. The rest is invested. Further down the ladder I would be stricter. Once income is real, the 20–30% is how I stay human without eating the surplus.

$10k or $25k a month used to sound huge. A few years before this video, $25k was about my yearly salary. Then I had months at $25k and spent $25k. In Portugal I spent well over 25 grand in a month. Good memories. I could have had the same fun, or 10% less, and kept about 80% of that budget. That is 80/20 in real life.

I now set a budget on everything. The system that made me record this is a Notion finance tracker: transactions pulled in, categorised, income per business, investments, the lot. You can use any personal-finance app that imports the same feed. You only see the leak after it is labelled. I was spending about $2,000 a month eating out while I owned a healthy meal-prep company that delivered food every day. In Georgia the restaurant service often left me more annoyed than when I walked in. I cut it.

Without a budget you will reward yourself every month because you "worked hard." At hundreds of millions maybe that is fine. At these levels it is not. Two ways to spend less than you earn: earn more, or spend less. Do both.

Bank interest is 0.5%. Index funds and yield exist

A bank owner told me years ago: money sitting in a bank you may as well give to them. You get about 0.5%, depending on the country. An index fund has historically been more like 6–8%.

Warren Buffett's version, not word for word: on his death the wealth goes into the top 500 companies. You do not check stocks. Over a run of years that is about an 8% return. The description on this video said 90% into index funds. Same idea. You do not need to become a stock picker or a landlord.

I do very little in stocks and very little in real estate. Real estate ties capital up and takes time to sell. At the time I recorded this I thought crypto had the better opportunity. That is a preference, not a law. You still do not need to be an expert in any of those rooms to get a return.

Nexo, in early 2022, paid about 10–12% a year for holding a USD, GBP, or euro token pegged to the currency. They said they were insured up to about $375 million. BlockFi ran a similar product. Holding dollars at 10% beats 0.5% in a current account while you wait for a better deployment. I only keep day-to-day spend in a bank — a couple of thousand a month, budgeted — plus an emergency fund. The rest is working.

Cash in a bank also loses to inflation. A lot of money had been printed in the two years of the pandemic. Inflation was already printing in the reports. People I knew in that space expected it to keep rising. Capital belongs in things that at least keep up.

Compounding is the part school skipped. One penny doubled every day for 31 days is $10 million. Put your own surplus into a compound-interest calculator at 10% a year and look at the number. That is the whole point of step three. Do not overcomplicate it.

Never borrow for an asset that falls in price

You repay the principal. The thing is worth less. You also pay interest. You always lose.

Only borrow for assets that rise. A mortgage is the usual example of good debt: property generally goes up over a long stretch. A credit-card loan for Gucci is the other kind.

Cars and most designer clothes are how you stay at your current level while looking richer. Some watches hold or rise. Most status buys do not. I own two cars outright. They were rewards tied to specific goals. If I were strict, owning one of them outright does not make financial sense. That is me being hypocritical on camera.

If you put that money to work instead, a couple of years later you can afford the thing plus more, and you are actually wealthier. Impulse purchases are the tax you pay to look successful now.

The car of my dreams made me happy for a few months. Then I got used to it. It also came with its own problems. What still makes me happy is money arriving, and watching the pile grow. Progression. I would get more of that from the invested cash than from the car. If your money is not working for you, you will always be working for money.

Getting rich is a process. Overnight money does not stay

Get-rich-quick is a waste of time. Almost nobody gets there fast, and the ones who do usually cannot keep it.

The people I respect on wealth are the self-made ones. Lottery, inheritance, a divorce settlement — that is money, not the person who went through the work. High value here does not mean rich. It means they built the skills that produce the money. You earn about as much as you have developed yourself. When I first wanted those sports cars I was not the person who deserved them. I did not have the knowledge. I had not done the work. You grow into the bracket.

A fool and his money are quickly parted. Overnight rich usually means no capital management. Lottery winners who come into £6 million or $10 million and two years later are back at zero — that is the skip. Enjoy building it. That is how you learn to keep it.

Wealth has nothing to do with school or a degree. The Diary of a CEO is full of billionaires and multi-millionaires who hated school and did badly there. That is not stupidity. In some cases the people who were bored in a classroom are more likely to build a company. I have no qualifications. I sat the exams and wrote nothing. Stupid way to rebel. It has had no impact on my finances. The internet does not ask for the certificate. You can start a business and charge. Nobody is blocking that.

Three steps. Earn $10k a month. Spend less than that on purpose. Invest the rest so you are not donating a year of inflation to the bank. Every rich person you can point at did some version of this. The path you pick to the $10k is the only part that changes.

OFM Insider and Automation Academy if you want the communities from this video. Hustlers University was the $50/month skill community I linked at the time. Newsletter is Newsletter. A one-off session is Consultation. Monthly coaching is Monthly Coaching.

Transcript

Hey guys good morning today i wanted to make a little video on how to get rich i've broken this down into like a basically a three-step formula and it's nothing really uh it's just simplifying like all of the information i think there's so much noise out there about like finances and so on so this is no like um real innovation or anything like that it's just breaking down how how to become rich and how to achieve like financial freedom i should say because the goal shouldn't just to have as much money as possible at least in my case anyway

The goal is to have um like financial freedom within my life to be able to do and buy all of the things that i want so i've broken this down into three simple steps um let's get straight into it so the first goal in my opinion and your primary goal is to have an income obviously and you should have in my opinion a baseline of ten thousand dollars per month that is like the the minimum like if if you're not earning ten thousand dollars per month now all of your time and

Effort at least this is how i would approach it should be going into generating that level of income and for some of you this will seem like really far off you'll be thinking there's no way that i can earn like ten thousand dollars per month um in the digital world that we live in it's not really that difficult to do anymore if you're going through the um the normal system of going getting a job having to work your way up for a few years going down

The education route okay 10k per month it's going to take you a while to get there in the online world we live in it really doesn't there are hundreds of different like paths that lead to success like there's so many different avenues that you can take to get to get to 10k a month um a few ideas of skills you could learn copywriting programming design um google ads facebook ads there's huge demand um there at the moment and you could also charge a commission on someone's um

Return on investment um drop shipping like not i'm a massive fan of it but it's definitely a way to earn money um and of course learning how to build a business of course if you're here and watching my channel you're most likely involved in business in some some way um and yeah so like they're just like a couple of ideas there's hundreds of different ways to do it even just learning like Integromat and becoming an Integromat consultant like there's demand for it on on upwork um

Learning basic like programming skills design there's there's just so there's so many different ways that you can do so you should essentially like all we're really talking about is developing yourself acquiring a skill and as long as you have a way to deliver value to someone else through your skill as long as you have a way to deliver value to them you have a way to make money you can charge and you should charge based on how much money uh sorry on how much value you are able to deliver someone which is why it makes complete sense to invest in yourself in your own education through books learning experiences there's loads of ways to develop your your skill set as a person which comes back

Round to you can deliver more value you have more experience so then you can charge more money numbers the first rule is have an income i and the baseline for me absolute minimum is ten thousand dollars per month if i'm not earning 10k per month i'm like i'm in a bad place and all of my effort will go into bringing up my um my income um and like so you shouldn't be worrying about like passive income and so on at that point i it's like for me 10k is

The baseline and you do what's necessary to get there step number two again sounds very simple even saying this but spend less than you earn whilst it sounds so basic if you don't manage your finances you will always overspend your money this is a lesson that i have learned first hand so what i do now i have a guilt-free spending budget um i will take like 20 30 of my income i'll spend it on whatever i want i'll waste it on things look like you you want to enjoy your life right um

We're not talking about just but being so strict that you don't get to enjoy yourself like when you're further down the financial ladder that may be the case and i would become a lot more strict but as you start to develop your income i sent myself a guilt-free which i'll blow on on whatever i want basically and the rest of it you invest and the thing that i've learned is for some of you like 10k per month for 25k per month is going to sound like a huge amount of money and

It did for me a few years ago that was almost my yearly salary in fact it was my 25k would have been my yearly salary and but if you don't control your finances i like if i have 25k come in on one month i can spend 25k and i i did last year in portugal i spent well over 25 grand in a month and it's a waste of money um i had like some great memories some great times for my friends like we had a really good laugh but

Um like set budgets for i could have had just the same amount of fun or maybe 10 less and saved like 80 of that budget you know again we're talking about 80 20 here so now i set budgets for everything i actually use a notion financial tracking system which i've built recently hence the inspiration to make this video where all of my transactions are pulled in i will actually make another video on this and i categorize them into each different section it goes over my income in each business my investments everything is all managed there but

There's loads of if you don't want to build up something yourself there's a ton of different personal finance applications where you can import your transactions to categorize them and then you'll actually see where your money is going and then from there that is then when i come in and assign a budget on things like when i realize i'm spending like two thousand dollars per month on eating out bearing in mind i own a healthy food delivery service that delivers food to me every day so i shouldn't need anywhere near that type of budget to eat out now like i i didn't even get much enjoyment from it like

The service in georgia takes away from the actual experience of enjoying a restaurant in my opinion you end up leaving more annoyed than when you went in um anyway like so now i'm like really tight tightly allocating my my budget so and i strongly suggest that you do too you should have budgets for everything if you don't you will just find you will spend the money like you feel that you've worked very hard this month you can get this reward you can get this here and

There and unless you're earning or worth hundreds of millions at that point okay you're going to struggle to get through it but in like for the levels that we're talking about you need to have budgets and you need to control your your finances have a guilt-free spending budget and invest the rest here are two ways that you can that you do this you either earn more money or you spend less money they're like the two ways to spend less than you earn right and ideally you want a mixture of of both um

Budget budget your wealth and invest the rest it's also very important to remember having money sitting in a bank i was actually told this by the owner of a bank a few years ago he said if you have your money sitting in a bank you may as well just give it to them you're getting what 0.5 percent interest depending where you're in the world okay it's going to be up or down slightly you can you just invest in index fund and take i think it's gonna be like six or eight percent um

And then there's other like more innovative um financial tools that are available at the moment like in in the DeFi world depending for example Nexo you can just hold a usd crypto token and you're going to get 10 or 12 interest per year just for holding something pegged to the US dollar you can also look at BlockFi they have like similar um services so just by holding dollars you can earn 10 interest so i wouldn't have you know the only money i have in in a bank account is like my day-to-day spending money uh which is like budgeted

So it'll be a couple of thousand dollars per month i'll have an emergency fund as well that's sitting in a bank and the money isn't working for me the rest of my my capital is all working it's working for me in one way or another and i think this is also where people get a little bit scared when we start talking about investing and talking about like yeah they're investing in general they think that they need to know stocks or they need to do real estate i do very little with stocks and

I do very little on like real estate perhaps to my detriment um like perhaps i'm missing out on a big opportunity there but it's also like the time opportunity that's required for me on on real estate um and just for stocks personally i just feel that there's bigger opportunities in crypto at the moment nothing actively against the stock market but for real estate like um just to have the money like tied up it takes time to sell the property and so on um it's yeah it's just not something that i'm i'm actively working on

So you don't need to be an expert in any of these um realms to to make a return on investment you can look into Nexo i strongly suggest you to look into Nexo actually i'll put it in the in the description below and just for holding any currency like usd british pound euro you can earn 10 to 12 interest per year and they're insured up to about i think it's 375 million dollars so it's a very very easy way to and if you're not looking for high-risk investments it's a fantastic option um

And again you don't need to be you literally don't even need to look at it you don't even need to look at stocks i also remember and this isn't the exact quote but Warren Buffett said when he died um he would invest his wealth in the like top 500 companies and he just like you don't even need to bother checking stocks and it will just consistently over the average span of a number of years it will generate you like an eight percent return on investment and

Also the other thing is is that by holding your money just in a bank you're actually losing money just due to inflation purely due to inflation you are losing money and bearing in mind how much money has been printed over the past two years due to the the pandemic and everything going on there uh we're already seeing reports in fact of like rising inflation i i personally think like the people that i know who are more involved in this space they are fairly certain that it's going to continue to to spike up um

Which makes much more sense to have you or have your capital assigned in um even just in assets that combat inflation so yeah they are like literally the three rules i have an income you know 10k per month spend less than you earn so that means budget um and basically earn more money and also budget spend less finally invest your money you don't have to overco this is like the simplest process ever you don't have to over complicate anything at all you can also look at like um

The power of like compounding interest if anyone doesn't know you can invest one penny and if you double that penny every single day for 31 days you would end up with 10 million dollars which is insane it's absolutely insane and like i'll say that again if you started off with one penny if you double it 31 times you end up with 10 million which is yeah it's unbelievable so just you can put in like into a compounding calculator as well how much money would you end up with if you just invest um

If you save your income um and you just receive like a 10 return every single year like it's it's really not that hard so for whatever reason they don't teach the stuff in school at least i definitely wasn't taught that they don't teach you anything about managing your your finances or like how to actually generate wealth um a few other little rules and i guess like quick tips to finish up on never go in debt for assets that decrease in price this is just like the number one rule like it is a game that you will always lose at you have to pay back

The original amount and your asset has decreased in price plus you're going to be paying interest on your your debt as well it's just yeah you're always going to lose only ever borrow money for assets that increase for example a mortgage would be considered good debt um like generally real estate will increase in price over a period of time so don't be so worried about like if you're in debt for a mortgage and things like this um but never borrow money for any asset that decreases in price that loses value by buying things that make you look successful in cars designer clothes um

Watches in some cases but in fact watches can actually be an investment um but yeah definitely like on the cars and in most cases designer clothes you're actually stopping yourself from becoming rich so by wanting to appear to be this is hypocritical of me to say as well because i actually own two cars outright um but they were bought as rewards for myself linked to specific goals but if i was really strict it doesn't make financial sense to to own one of them outright let and

Yeah so by sort of trying to portray this image you're actually stopping yourself from becoming rich you will keep yourself in like the in that level whereas if you invested that money and let that money actually work for you and pay you back in a couple of years time you would be able to afford all of your stuff plus more and you would be a lot more wealthy so it's just like you have to overcome like the temptation of wanting of these like impulse purchases let's call them buying things also just gives me like temporary happiness um

Like i have like the car of my dreams and i've it just wears off after a few months like i was so happy for a few months and i still love the car but it just it doesn't bring happiness you just get used to it it's like the complete truth whereas one thing that does constantly make me happy is the feeling of having money coming into my bank account um the feeling of seeing like return on investment and seeing the growth of your wealth it's a feeling of progression and

That is something that does consistently um give me happiness assuming that i continue to grow my wealth so it's actually debatable at least in my opinion that i would achieve more happiness from saving that money and investing it and having that money working for me generating more income than the car does because also the car just causes its own set of problems another nice little quote if your money isn't working for you you will always be working for money getting rich is a process get rich quick schemes are like a complete waste of time i completely um

Agree with that like these i don't know the things that you see online it's just it's all rubbish in my opinion there's there's very few ways to get rich um quickly and also you sort of want to to generate to build yourself up as a person both whilst you are generating this wealth the only people that i really have respect for in terms of wealth sorry i like the the self-made millionaires right they're the people that that you have respect for and you're interested to engage with a guy who's like won

The lottery or inherited the load of wealth for like someone who's like divorced and perhaps a woman who's divorced a rich husband and achieved a load of wealth that way this isn't a high value person and by high value i don't mean rich i mean as a person they just haven't been through the experiences required to become a millionaire multi-millionaire billionaire um so getting rich is like a process and it's a process of self-development for you as well and i really feel that you will always earn as much as you have developed yourself um

If that makes sense like for example when i first had like dreams of having my cars like these sports cars i i wasn't the type of person who deserved to own these sports cars i didn't have the the knowledge i hadn't worked hard enough like i i hadn't built myself up to be that type of person and you you grow into you grow into that and so just getting rich is a process like and you will if you will keep climbing the ladder and both developing yourself as a person um

Gaining more skills acquiring more knowledge and as you do that your wealth will grow grow alongside it um and add on to that point a fool and his money are very quickly parted anyone who does get rich overnight generally has no idea about capital management because they haven't been through that process and this is often why you hear in the news of these people who won the lottery came into 6 million pounds 10 million million dollars whatever it is after a couple of years they've blown for it on on whatever strippers cocaine alcohol having like a good time but

They've got no idea about capital management and they just find themselves back at square one so again you need to like it's about it's a process enjoy the process of building your your wealth um and the other thing to add to this for anyone with maybe like self-doubt or something wealth has nothing to do with your school education and university degrees just go out and watch all like the self-made millionaires almost all of them um at least like there's a podcast that i listened to called

The Diary of a CEO um if you don't know i strongly suggest listening to it they have some really interesting guests on there multiple billionaires and so on a lot of like multi-multi-millionaires and the one thing that you always find in common is they say they hated school they just didn't do well in school it doesn't mean that you're stupid wealth has absolutely nothing to do with that at all if anything um i like in some cases i think people who didn't do well in school and

Didn't find school interesting are more likely to be successful as entrepreneurs it's definitely a trending theme that you see the more books i read the more information i consume from billionaires um people like that they just didn't they didn't feel that they they just didn't do well in school they didn't enjoy it and um so yeah don't be your past has nothing to do with your future i have absolutely no qualifications at all um for like very stupid reasons but i was always very smart but

I just i didn't write anything in the in the exams i was very rebellious and for whatever reason i thought that was a way of rebelling against the against the system and looking back it was very stupid but again it's had no impact whatsoever on my financial wealth because of the world that we live in the internet you can take control you can go and set up your own business and earn your own own money there's no one there's no one restricting you in terms of of what to do which is like

The beauty of of the internet so you use it to your advantage yeah so that is like my like very quick free points on how to grow your wealth how to become rich um again i've like they're really three very very simple things there's nothing complicated it's just a case of in being disciplined and implementing them and they're they're quite like high level points right for example earn ten thousand dollars per month like i said there are tons of different ways that you can do that but

All of these paths lead to to the same to the same place so you can earn money in a different way but then you still the same every person has gone through this process who is rich they must have otherwise there's no way they could accumulate wealth you have to earn money earn more than you spend so make sure that you're managing your finances and invest your money because otherwise you're just losing money every year by having it in a bank so we will finish up there um

I would also any other like people's any other tips people have on like finance personal finance wealth management and so on i'm it's something i'm actively um exploring at the moment i'm reading a number of books on this and um just in terms of like managing my own capital and of course growing my wealth as well was always a primary goal of mine um so yeah i'd be really interested if any people have some points to add as well thank you for watching take care and have a great day