John Hope Bryant (22:31)
So it should be inspiring to people that you actually technically get become a millionaire in the third quartile of your life or if you live a very long life at the, you know, little over the 60% mark. Right? So you're not too late. We're going to unpack why wealth comes later and how you can start building it right now. Rich looks good on Instagram, but it's often smoke and mirrors. That's why the word personality comes from a Latin root word to Persona, which means you perform. Our personality is often the performance we put on for the world. Riches described in this podcast as high income, flash and lifestyle, but rarely backed by assets. Typically the assets are on people's ass. No pun intended. Rich depends on the next check, contract or client. Are you starting to get it? You start to understand what I'm saying? You're also often cashing somebody else's check, not writing your own. Including social media influencers who are cashing a check from social media companies that are paying them for clicks and views, which is why people are making content that is often a lie just to drag people to their site and hold them there for three minutes so they can get credit for that. So they're telling a lie, promoting a lie in order to live a lie. Only 8%, only 18% of Americans earn over a hundred thousand dollars. 18%. About 10% of black households, I believe. Households. That's out of my. Off my head. Black households earn $100,000 a year. See, they're individuals or households. It's still not. It's not a big number. But you'd see from the. You think from the social media stuff that it is everybody, and it is not. It's not. It's mostly not anybody. In fact, 70% of people in this country living paycheck to paycheck, half of those making $100,000 a year living from paycheck to paycheck. If you're doing that, a quarter of those making $250,000 a year are living from paycheck to paycheck. If you're living in New York City, where I am today, 100,000 feels like 37, $39,000. So even that is not rich, but it is bigger income than the majority of Americans. So we all need to calm down and stop lying about what we're doing. And I don't want you to feel bad that somehow you're not succeeding. It's just not true. In fact, you deserve a Nobel Peace Prize because you've been doing. If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably doing so much but so little for so long. You can almost do anything with nothing. And I commend you, you probably have too much month at the end of your money. A single mother deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. Raising children and doing all that while working, etc. Among people in their 20s, fewer than 10% earn $100,000 a year or more. On social media, over 90% of influencers make less than 100,000 annually, yet almost project a luxury lifestyle. I'm gonna repeat that. On social media, over 90% of influencers make less than $100,000 a year, and many of them earn 20 or $30,000. And a lot of what you're seeing are literally them renting a life for a day to promote to you as success for a lifetime. Social media is a lot of folks renting. The appearance of wealth they don't yet own. Pro athletes and entertainers who make millions early but lose it when the contract ends is an example of not giving the memo on financial literacy and confusing making a living with building a life again. Making a living doesn't matter whether you're making a living at $20,000 a year, $50,000 a year, $500,000 a year, $5 million every year. You can still, if your outflow exceeds your inflow, then your overhead will be your downfall. You can still lose it all. Being rich means you make money. Being wealthy means your money makes money. Did you get that one? When you're wealthy, your money makes more money on money than money can ever make on labor. Hello, drop the mic. Wealth is ownership is what happens when you stop working and your money doesn't. This is making smart sexy, by the way. We've been making dumb sexy for way too long. We've dumbed down and celebrated it. It's time to make smart sexy again. Here are the three core wealth building vehicles. Please write these down because these are not what I think you've been told. Number one, real estate. It involves appreciation of value in the asset. They're not growing any more land plus rental income if it's an income producing property. But the number one way you do wealth in America is homeownership. Just know that that's why 75% of my white counterparts own a home. And unfortunately 44% of my black brothers and sisters own a home. And that 30% gaps, call it a delta. The difference is generational wealth or the lack thereof. Number two, business ownership is the second way people build wealth. Equity, not just income. I've already talked a little bit about that. You make money during the day, you build wealth in your sleep. It's not making a living. Business is that real big step outside of the corporate or structured job environment. Using a traditional existing business model, I break down the difference between being a business person and an entrepreneur and a hustler and self employed. I break down all these things. The steps of capitalism in another podcast episode. Go back and watch and listen to that. Number three, way to build wealth in America or anyplace else in the world. By the way, investments that compound over time and no, cryptocurrency is not part of a basic investment portfolio. Cryptocurrency, which you can strike it rich with, is speculation. You can also get rich going to Las Vegas. You can win the lottery, by the way. You can also lose it all. And that is until they regulate crypto and all that stuff, give structure around it, and hopefully it happens soon. You can make it all, you can lose it all. There's no asset base under cryptocurrency. Okay? The, frankly, even bitcoin, it's hype and promotion and everybody sort of popping. You know, it is sort of bidding the price up. And theoretically there's a finite, finite number of bitcoins. So that actually because of the finite, finite amount of bitcoin, that creates scarcity. So supply and demand. So there's some legitimacy there. But blockchain technology, need, that is the real magic. But thousands of cryptocurrencies have gone poof. People lost every dime they have. So I tell people, you want to do cryptocurrency, that's great. Just don't use your rent money. So you should have a, should have a living budget, an investment budget, and a flossing budget. If you're in your investment budget, you want to take 10% and do speculative, speculative investments. And you want to do cryptocurrency and that, fantastic. Knock yourself out. But the traditional investment should be things that you use every day and are not going to go out of vogue. And if the company even goes bankrupt, their assets underneath it, like stocks, not, sorry, like real estate and client list and brand and, you know, cash flows and things like that. So real, traditional, boring investments, okay? So three ways that you build wealth. Primary ways, real estate, business ownership, traditional investments. You can't be wealthy until your money works harder than you do. You can't be wealthy unless your money works harder than you do. I just said that twice because I like the way it sounded. It was real cool. I just love truths like that are so simple. It's like, boom, right? Then you're so smart, that's going to just literally light all the endorphins up in your head. The median net worth by age 30 to 34, let's just break all this stuff down, is about $88,000, okay? These are people who are working and doing things by 50 to 54. The median, the median client, median net worth. These are, by the way, Caucasian. These are the best numbers you've got, right? So these are not minority wealth creation. These are like, you know, the median for the country. But, but really reality. I'm talking about the sort of the best example of each of these categories. 30 to 34, $88,000, 50 to 54 years of age, climbs at $266,000. By the way, blacks are typically 10% of that number Latinos not much. Far ahead of blacks by 60 years. Plus, many households cross into millionaire territory if they have a discipline of investing. If you take $200 a month at age 25 and invest it in the top rated stocks and just leave it there and let it compound, you'll be worth a million dollars by the age of retirement. Do nothing else. Just do that. Let's talk about patience. The compounding curve takes 20 to 30 years to bend upward. That's what I just told you. $200 a month. Wealth is not a spirit. It's compound interest with good behavior. Right? It's time to make smart sexy again. We make it dumb sexy for way too long. We've dumbed down and celebrated it. It's time to make my quote, my friend Bishop TD Jakes boring sexy again. I want us to get the basics right. I'm not telling you not to do this or that right against crypto. I want you to get the basics right. Right? I want you to have a life insurance policy and a will and a home and income. Got to get an amen. I just want you to get the basics right and then you can do whatever you like. This is why wealth normally comes in your 50s. It requires patience and maturity and consistency to turn income into independence. Wealth is what patience looks like on a spreadsheet. Drop the mic. Wealth is what patience looks like on a spreadsheet. Here's hard data. 18 to 29 years of age, 1% of households are millionaires. So so much with this live that all these folks run around here with fancy cars and fancy bags and fancy lifestyles. And millionaires, they're probably just renting. All this on high interest credit cards. 30 to 39 year olds, 5% are millionaires. 40 to 49 years of age, 15% of millionaires. This includes, by the way, their primary home, 50 to 59 years of age. 25% of everybody are millionaires. But again, as I said earlier, this tends to skew toward to mainstream American numbers. Those are certainly not the numbers in black America. Not even close. The average US millionaire gets there at age 57. It's compounding time, debt payoffs, kids that grow up, not on your debt anymore, on your dime anymore and wiser spending. The millionaire next door lives modestly, invests quietly, owns assets that cash flow. In your 20s you learn. In your 30s you earn. In your 40s you build. In your 50s you harvest. Hello. Let's shift now from chasing rich to building wealth. I want you to, number one, live below your means margin. Equals freedom margin equals freedom live below your means. I'd rather underestimate and overperform than overestimate and underperform. Number two, own something that grows. Property, a business, an index fund, a stock index fund. Number three, automate wealth, automate savings, automate investing. Rinse and repeat. Set it and forget about it. Go on to something else. Do not do day trading. Do that stuff. Gone about your life. Set it and let it compound. Don't mess with it. I put the money in a an account and the market timing was horrible. Lost money and pulled some money out. I tell people, don't make investment decisions emotionally. And this was one where I admittedly did it emotionally because this was money I did not want to lose. It was some safety net money. I did this, I covered this in another podcast. When I talk about my own mistakes, you go back and watch that. And I put this money in this account. It dropped in value. I took the money out of the account, or, sorry, I took myself out of the market, the stock market. And later on, I asked my asset manager for investments, what would have happened if I left it here. He said, oh, you'd have lost more money. And I said, well, what would have happened now? He said, well, you would have made the money you lost back and doubled it. So if I just stay with a good investment and let it grow, it would have recovered the losses and doubled the return on top of the recovered, recovered losses. I'm cool with it because I was not trying to grow that investment. I was trying to preserve capital. But it's just a lesson about the power of markets.
