Ninja here. I hope you’re doing well. Got a story out of fortune, and it’s very interesting. It’s about millennials and how much they are obsessed with money. I believe that millennials are going to find themselves in a world of hurt here pretty soon, because they have not ever been part of the reality that is an economic downturn. And they are, a lot of them, this study shows, are completely obsessed with faking it until they make it looking rich.

And I believe a lot of this is due in part to social media. Social media has really distorted the reality of finance and how important it is to save money. But instead, social media hetch, that aspect of everybody is always showing off their best life. It blows me away. Not with millennials, but the generation before them, or, I’m sorry, after them that are sitting around taking selfies of themselves in public.

Everybody has a filter these days when it comes to their looks. They can take their acne away with a simple filter. They can give themselves a tan. And so everybody looks amazing. And the millennials still are a part of that as well, even though they’re a little bit older. Check out this study. But again, I want to stress this. I believe that if you are a millennial or you’re younger, that you are about to experience something way worse than what you’re seeing right now with raising prices.

Because, yeah, as much as rising prices on your mortgage rates, your interest, insurance, gasoline, food, and all that stuff sucks. The serious reality that’s about to follow, that which has already started, is mass layoffs. And either losing your job or because everyone else around you lost their job, the economy turns down, and now your retirement isn’t what you thought it was. Your home value isn’t what it thought it was.

And if you don’t take action now and start saving or starting your own business, you’re going to find yourself in a lot of trouble. So, here we go. The story is out of fortune. Also, remember, everyone, last eight days, that the side hustle course will be $199. It’s down below if you want to check it out. The story is entitled fake it till you make it. Millennials are obsessed with looking rich.

Wells Fargo study shows it says, fraught with worry over high housing costs, impending student loan payments, and compounding credit card debt, millennials face financial challenges unlike other generations. Yet they’re still the generation that’s most money obsessed and the one that wants to show it off. Again, I blame a lot of social media on this. When people want to have money or show off their money or make it look like they have money.

It’s because everyone else around them, it seems like, has money. They’re taking photos around fancy cars, all these amazing lifestyle pics of everybody going skiing in Aspen, and they’re being bombarded with this. But you have to understand that it’s not about looking rich. I have to be honest. There is a book called the Millionaire next Door. I highly recommend anybody that wants to be successful and rich read this book, because it will really show you the realities of millionaires and what they look like or live like.

All right. I don’t got them. I’d show you if I do, but I still wear $20 sneakers from big five. Okay. Yeah. Are there some aspects of my life in my late forty s where I look like I have money? I guess you could say that. But by and large, most people wouldn’t think by looking at me or how I act in public that I have money. Okay.

And yes, it did take me a lifetime to get there in my mid 20s as a real estate investor. Really kicked it off. But again, I want to preach the opposite of looking wealthy. I want to preach being meek, having the money, and not showing it, being able to do something powerful with it. Now, it says here in the story, while more than half of affluent millennials say they’ve been greatly affected by the cost of living crisis, 59% feel it is important to look or appear financially successful to others.

According to a recent Wall street study, this is yet another sign of money dysmorphia, in which people obsess over the kind of being rich so much that they lose sight of the actual state of their finances. What’s even more telling is that the Wells Fargo study actually focuses on affluent millennials who make at least $250,000 a year. Which means it’s not just lower income young people who feel the need to keep up with the Joneses, so to speak.

Let me real quick speak to that whole $250,000 threshold, because by and large, that’s not a lot of people. All right? Way less than more people make 250,000 or more. All right? I never, ever, until just in the last couple of years, made 250,000 in wages, all right? I was a full time firefighter, and I was making $100,000. That’s including overtime. So I was gone more than half of my life from my family making $100,000.

My wife made between 20 and $30,000 a year. So together, on good years, we would make about $130,000. On lean years, we’d be making around $97,000. And that was from the year I was 22 years old. I’m sorry, 20? Yeah, 22, 23 years old until just a few years ago. Okay. In that amount of time, I became a multimillionaire in my early twenty s. Now, I’m not saying this to brag.

I’m just trying to teach some people something. I had friends all over that would make a couple hundred, $300,000 a year. And there was a big difference between how I spent my money and how they did. And as rough as it was watching people go on these lavish vacations, drive fancy cars, the whole time I was paying down my debt, paying cash for my vehicles, and investing in my money, I had multiple side hustles making money.

All right? Even when I was 25, 26 years old, and we hit that $1 million threshold in our net worth, and we became accredited investors, we didn’t show what we knew or how much we had even back then. Okay. And it really taught me an amazing lesson about sociology and how people are affected by money and how it can snowball into big financial crisis. I saw people lose their homes in my life.

Lots of friends lost their homes during 2008 while I was trying at the same time to buy up positions in businesses, or portions of businesses, their inventory. I wasn’t the fun person at the dinner parties. And now I’m watching this cycle repeat with millennials, where they’re going out and getting massive loans. Some of them can’t even get loans on their homes. They’re getting co signers. They’re having to move in with friends.

They’re trying to do anything they can again, to have that appearance. Rather than buying a low end home, a small home, a starter home, they’re buying these mcmansions, and it’s going to bite them in the butt because they feel like they’re doing good financially right now, but they don’t understand the business cycle. And what happens when businesses start laying off. And even if they don’t get laid off, what happens to the economy and how they get swallowed up in that? Because there’s a credit crisis.

We’ve already begun that portion of the credit crisis, but most millennials do not understand it, because all they see, again is appearances. So they see the prices going up on things like homes and online cars, and they don’t understand why. And that’s what’s so very vital for them to understand, because it’s going to cause them to lose a lot of their financial status here pretty shortly in 2008, 2009, social media was in its infancy.

But I can tell you that I do remember people going completely silent, them just going from showing off and bragging, being braggadocious to you don’t hear from them anymore. Divorces happened, marriages were split up, friendships were lost, because there was definitely a divide between the people that were meek and successful and the people that appear to be successful. And it was all just like that book, the emperor has no clothes.

Remember? We all remember that as children, right? Look at this. So that’s why I wanted to speak to that $250,000 mark, because it doesn’t matter how much you make. It matters how much you save and invest your money, grow your money. That’s what matters. It doesn’t matter how much you make. As a matter of fact, wage earners, when they talk about in this story, $250,000. Wage earners, on a percentage basis, pay way more in taxes than those that are investing and paying, dealing with capital gains taxes, or those that earn their money through business, through investing, like in real estate, or owning their own business.

That’s why it’s so important to understand these things. Now, it says here more than 40% of the approximately 1000 respondents to this study that Wells Fargo did said it’s important to have visible signs of wealth, whether it be purchasing a fancy car, clothing, or a place to live. By comparison, just 21% of Gen Xers, 8% of baby boomers, and 7% of the silent generation feel the same. There’s something else I got to tell you to my normal subscribers.

They know this story probably pretty well, but I have to say it again. My dream was to own a Ferrari 1997 355 spider. And the reason why I wanted it, not only because I thought it was one of the most beautiful cars ever built, but it was a status symbol. And I wanted it for all the wrong reasons. And I wanted to show off. Well, I saved up enough cash when I was 26 years old to pay cash for one.

And back then they were $50,000. During the crash of 2008, 2009, I saw them bottom around $35,000. Today they’re sitting at around $100 to $120,000. We’re going to see them slide again, by the way. Well, instead of paying cash for one, because I had a one and a half year old son, which has now crashed out of the couch. He’s almost 21. I didn’t buy one. Instead, I bought an f 350 diesel truck, cash, one that was only two years old, for my construction business, my home flipping business.

And then I bought a replica 355 that was built for a movie, a b movie. It looked identical. But again, why did I buy it? It was for status. It was for the wrong thing. But what I found, too, and I used to tell my wife this all the time. At one point, I had enough to buy ten Ferraris cash before I was 30. And at the same time, my bank account told me that.

I never told my friends that. And I would give friends and family financial advice, and they would treat me like I was the dumbest person ever, right? But I used to tell my wife, I said, yeah, but if I drove up in a Ferrari, everybody would be begging me for information. The reason why I knew that to be true was because in the peak of the financial boom, in the early two thousand s, I was flipping houses like crazy.

And in the wine industry. My wife worked in the wine industry in California. And most people would say affluential people, but I would say that they were like this study of people that want to appear wealthy, right? They knew me as the big house flipper. Nobody was flipping homes back then. Like I said, we were approached for one of the first ever home flipping shows. Me and my wife, at one point, because of these wine socials we’d go to, right? There are all these young and up and coming millionaires, people looking rich.

They’re all in social media or the media, and they would come up to our hometown where we had wine, and they would be showing off and flaunting. But everybody wanted to talk to me at these events, because word got out that I was just flipping home after home. Tons of homes and real estate was in the news. So I knew what it was like for people to think or know that we were successful.

And it made me feel sick to my stomach, to be honest with you. At one point in my life, I gave all of that up and said, I don’t want anybody knowing anything that we do. We got super quiet, super silent. Hence the reason why I called this channel the economic ninja. And we hid. We hid our success. As a matter of fact, I would say borderline ashamed of it.

Not to the point where I didn’t want to be successful for me and my family, but we didn’t want anybody knowing. And it wasn’t until four years ago that we came out and said, all right. Even my friends and family today still actually have a hard time believing what we’ve done in our past, because we did such a good job of hiding it, because we didn’t like the reaction we got.

Millennials are about to come smashing into reality, and they’re going to blame the generations before them, my generation, Generation X or the baby boomers. And it’s always a blame game, right? But really, the blame comes on the inability for us as human beings to define reality as what it really is. And that is that all of those photos of people on their fancy vacations and all of those people with fancy cars, they have a credit card bill that’s due at the end of the month that you don’t realize.

And the reality is, if you go Google how much people are in debt right now to credit cards, to homes, to student loans, you’ll find that even doctors that you look up to and they drive a fancy car have so much debt, they’re in debt up to their eyeballs. They’re not successful, and that means they’re not happy. And so, as millennials come racing into this, I would encourage people.

I have a buddy, a millennial named Luke, and he is actually pretty impressive to me. I don’t know if he’ll be watching this or not, but he owns a junk hauling business, and he went from being able to take over his father’s very successful business. He said, I don’t want to do that. He had all the opportunity his father wanted him to take over his very success. We’re talking very successfully.

He goes, no, I want to make it on my own. And he went out and he started a junk hauling business, and he’s crushing it, not only because he’s making money and he’s hiring people and he’s adding to society, but it’s because what he’s doing is he’s adding to his own mind and in his heart. And he, I can guarantee you, gets up and looks in the mirror and smiles every time he leaves for work because he’s making a difference in this world where, quite frankly, people in his sphere of influence would not choose the path that he has, they would have chosen the easier path.

And he’s out making his own life. And to be honest with you, I’m very proud to know him because I think he’s an amazing american, raising his children as they should go, a good, solid foundation of morals and of sound mind. But he’s the exception. He’s not the norm. And that’s what concerns me. So if you find yourself, if you’re younger than Generation X and you find yourself caught in that web of always having to impress people, and, you know, if you are or not, I was.

You need to find new friends. You need to find a new moral compass. I think yours may be broken. And I’m not saying that to hurt your feelings. I’m saying that from experience. And at the same time, I will say, the way I lived my life, it wasn’t the best. I went too extreme. Some people would call me cheap. I called myself frugal, right? Which I still believe to this day.

But at the same time, I do regret not taking certain risks, certain liberties with what we had done. But the thing is, at the end of the day, I have to answer to myself, my family, ultimately, God, what did I do with my finances? And so I can tell you that, looking back, I would have rather been meek and humble with my finances than braggadocious. Because if you’re like that, all you do is attract people you don’t or should not be friends with.

I hope you guys got something out of this. To all the millennials, sound off down below, because I love, especially the gen Z’s, I love hearing about people in their late teens, early twenty s that are watching this channel. Because I can guarantee you, I’m not saying that I’m smart, okay? I’m not saying that I’m brilliant. But I will tell you this. I definitely think different. And if you’re thinking different like I am, you are going to absolutely crush it.

During this next economic collapse. When all these people on social media are pretending they’re rich, you’re going to actually be wealthy, and you’re going to be absolutely dominating it. I don’t care how poor you think you are. Now, wait till this crash happens. And if you have that mentality of sitting on the sidelines, saving, investing, you’re going to absolutely dominate this crash. I hope you got something out of this.

Everyone, the economic ninja is out. Oh, remember last eight days before the price goes up if you want that side hustle? Course. Thank you again. See you guys later. Bye. .

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