Transcript
Sponsor Voice 1 (0:01)
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You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by gohighlevel.com for a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet, just go to gohighlevel.com travis
Travis (0:41)
is there such a thing as good debt or is all debt bad? That's what we're talking about here on the show today. Welcome back. This is one of my solo shows where it's just me, you and the mic talking about something that I've been wrestling with, thinking about, or learning about over the last last few years. And I have to say, my tune has changed a little bit on this over the years. When I first got started, it was basically like, yes, leverage debt as much as you can and there's a lot of good debt out there. And then I sort of went hard the opposite way where it was like, yeah, debt is not a good thing and you should be able to try to bootstrap whatever it is that you're trying to do and not get into a lot of debt. And now like, I feel like in most things in my life I've ended up somewhere in the middle. And so today I want to talk about some of the times where I've leveraged debt in my life and where it's, I feel like, worked out for me. And also just understand I'm not a financial advisor, this is not financial advice. And most of the stuff that I do, in fact, in this episode in particular, just understand that this is not me preaching at you to tell you what you should be doing. In fact, we just did this filming and Alex Shamozi came on and he was one of the guests there and one of the things that he said I really liked a lot, which was that my content is documenting what I'm doing. It's not a sermon. I'm not telling other people that they should do what I'm doing, but it's just documenting that if this is the path you also want to take, these are the things that I've found to be helpful and useful and that's how I feel about this particular topic because you'll hear, you'll hear from both sides in the online world. And as most areas are, whenever you get into a polarizing conversation, the people who get the most attention are the people who are on the opposite sides of each other in that conversation. So you get the Ramsey no debt ever. All debts, bad debt, don't even have a credit score. Don't even worry about that. And then you have the opposite, you know, cardone thing of expansion. Expansion, expansion at all costs. Leverage as much debt as you can. So I've ended up a little bit in the middle. And the first time that I did this, this was 2017, I want to say, and I was a door to door sales guy at the time. I was trying to become a podcaster and I knew nothing about making money online, but I knew that I wanted to learn about making money online because it allowed me the types of freedom that I really wanted in my. To me, true freedom was a mixture of, yes, financial freedom, you have enough money coming in time freedom, you can do what you want with your time for the most part. But also the third one was location freedom, which is that you can travel wherever you want and be wherever you are and still be able to make money when you're gone. And at the time when I was doing door to door, it did not check off all of those boxes to the degree that I wanted it to. So making money online was a big motivating factor for me. And I jumped into the space, really both feet. It was not a weight in the water type of a situation because the people that I was following, I looked at their journeys and saw that they were also people who just jumped in the deep end. And so I figured, why not just follow the path of the people who have already figured this thing out? Seemed to have worked well for them, see if it works well for me. So I, when I was starting my podcast, I went and pulled out a 0% credit card. And this is to me probably one of the, one of the sort of quote unquote debt hacks is that not all debt comes with an unbearable interest rate. Some debt you can get for if it's smaller dollar amounts. And which is another reason why I think having a good credit score is valuable in these situations, because even at that time I was only 24, 25, but I pulled out a 0%. I think it was a chase freedom. And it was $42,000 credit limit. And I remember the exact amount because I filled that baby up with basically everything that I possibly Could. And while I was doing door to door, and the one point, the total debt on that card was greater than the total cash balance in my bank account, which obviously did not make me feel super comfortable. However, at the time I was just like, I don't know anything about this world, so I'm going to do my best to learn as much as I possibly can. So it's important to note that that $42,000 of debt, none of it was for new equipment. It wasn't, oh, I need a new computer and I'm going to get a new tv, I'm going to get all this other stuff that you don't actually need to make this successful. Almost all of it was you. A couple, a couple actual assets like, you know, an LLC or a website, things like that, that I, that I had paid for. And I got like a $60 USB microphone that I could plug into my computer. So some things like that. But the, the vast majority of it was basically hiring a one on one coach, going to my first ever Mastermind experience, joining another Mastermind six months after that one, travel, going to events. I went to an event in Australia that year just because that was where that I wanted to hang out with, which ended up being a great decision, by the way, because it was, it was the largest podcasting event in that part of the world, but largest at that time was like a hundred people, 150 people. But this because it was in Australia and because they could reach out to the speakers and it was sort of a plus to go to Australia. They had a great speaker lineup. So that was the first time I got introduced to a few people who are still friends of mine to this day. And then I got invited back the next year as a speaker and got to go to their speaker retreat and stuff like that. So anyway, just to say that it was like it was travel, it was flights, it was hotels, it was entry fees for the events, it was the VIP ticket upgrade so I could meet more people who were serious about making this thing successful. And when I looked back over a 12 month period of time, I filled that thing all the way up, $42,000. But because I was only investing into knowledge and learning, what happened was by the end of that time period, I paid off the entire limit of that card without ever paying a point in interest. So it was basically 12 months, zero interest of. I hesitate to use the term free money because you have to pay it back. But free debt anyway, that I didn't get charged anything to have that debt. So I Was able to leverage that, to be able to get into the space, to be able to learn as much as I possibly could. And then the money that I started making at the beginning, I'd take all of it and just throw it down on the balance of the card. And then that enabled me to be able to switch from doing door to door to being full time online. Now it was a significant cut in pay. Not pretend like it was all sunshine and rainbows. It was basically going from making six figures in sales to making 3,4000 bucks a month on the podcast stuff. But I just loved doing it. So I broke a lease on a big nice house that we had. We moved into my brother in law's spare bedroom in his two bedroom apartment. We split rent there. Our expenses were almost nothing and enabled me to be able to start attacking this other thing that I really wanted to do with 100% effort, which then the first year in podcasting I made 50 grand, but then the next year it went up to like 200 grand and then it went up to 400 grand and it just kind of kept, kept scaling up from there. So the second time that I used debt was for another business which was a software startup which didn't end up going the way that I wanted it to go. But I still learned a lot from that experience. And I started that with, with also just taking on debt. And the same thing, I pulled out two or three different 0% interest credit cards. This time I got that up to like 90, 80, $100,000 credit limit spread across those cards and they probably had 70 to $80,000 of like so development, pitch decks, things like that. But then we were able, with the money that we made on the agency side of the software, plus some of the money that we were able to raise through a round of funding that we did again before we ever paid a diamond interest on that, on, on those cards. We were able to pay off all of the money that was on those cards with the money that we were earning from the new business. So there's that credit card situation, there's this credit card situation and then fast forward. My wife and I decide we want to get into the brick and mortar space. So we opened up an Acai bowl store that was, that's a franchise and we, we still have that.