 I have money anxiety, man. I'm fixing to share a lot of stuff with you guys, just personal stuff. But I want to be completely transparent with you, right? This is going to be one of those get to know Ricky videos. And I want to do these kind of videos because I want you to know who I really am because I care about you and I want a lifelong relationship with you helping each other, collaborating, doing business, right? Me helping you be more efficient in your business. You helping me by selling more property, you sell more property, you're successful. I still have a business helping more agents be successful. That's what I'm excited about is the future for me and you working together. And that's why I want to do a video like this. Do you guys ever wonder why you see people that are so uber successful who continue to grind like they're completely broke, like they're, like, like they're, you know, they're working up nine to five, they're, they're, they don't even hardly see their families. And but yet they have millions or hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. Why? Why do they do this? And it's not true for everyone. It's not true for everyone. Um, but I believe that they have a level of money anxiety, money anxiety, right? It's money anxiety. And this is a real thing. And if you're, you know, even if you're living paycheck to paycheck, that's money anxiety, you're worried if you can pay your bills the next month. And if you have a billion dollars, you're worried about what? You're worried about losing it all. When you, when you get to where you have money, it never goes away. Like you could put money in a bunch of different places, but then you feel like there's still some way that you can lose it all, especially if you went through what I went through. So I have PTSD from what I went through back when I lost everything back in the 2008 is actually 2005. I saw my last condo in 2005, January. And I saw my first condo coming back in May of 08. So between 2005 and 2008, I sold nothing. And I was literally sleeping in my car. I was eating out of people's refrigerators. I was roofing houses. I was serving tables and I was working on an oil rig in Mississippi every other week. And just years before that, a couple years before that, I was a millionaire. In my early 20s, a millionaire, and I lost it all. Things were going so good. I had hummers, Cadillacs, houses, everything. And then all of a sudden out of nowhere, I get blindsided by the market. It crept up on me and before I knew it, there was nothing I could do. It was too late. And here it was. You're watching your fortune just vanish right before your eyes. And there's nothing you can do about it. It's one of the worst feelings in the world outside of losing a loved one, right? Money isn't everything. Money is not everything. It's not, it's not anything. Money is nothing. But you need it to live. That's the thing. You need it to live. I mean, you know, you could say, well, I don't need money in it. Well, you don't have a home. You don't have a car. You can't get gas. You can't eat the food that you want to eat, eat healthy, whatever. You do need money to live and you need money to support your family, give them the best life that they could possibly have. So that's where the anxiety comes from. It's not about the money. It's about being able to live. And I've been on both sides of it, not being able to afford the food that I want to eat, not being able to buy gas in my car or pay for a house. I've been there. And so now things are going a million times better than it was back then right before I lost everything. And I'm like, look it over my shoulder every day. Where's it coming from? Where's the blindside coming from? What's going to happen? And I had to take a step back and realize what was going on with me. So let me walk you through what was going on with me. And it's been going on with me for years. And I even know that it came back to money anxiety. Oh, man, this has been a breakthrough for me. And I hope it helps you what I'm explaining here. So I wake up. I've been waking up at 5 o'clock every day. Every, I haven't taken a day off in 10 years. Yes, I go on a vacation. Yeah, we'll travel places to speak. Those are work trips. Yes, I take off on the weekends. Yes, at 5 o'clock, I'm done. Yes, yes, yes. Monday through Friday, you know, from really 5 o'clock to 5 o'clock, I'm working. Never took a day off. Never said, oh, I'm just going to lay around today. I'm going to go hang out. I'm going to just watch movies. I'm going to, you know, chill. Never. I haven't taken a day off in 10 years, 20 years. And it comes from the fact that I feel like if I let my foot off the gas for a second, that could be the moment that I lose it all. It's not going to happen. That's just in my mind. I didn't realize I was worried about it until I actually got burned out. So get up at 5 o'clock, go to the gym at 6, working out like a Navy SEAL. By the way, I have lost 20 pounds. I don't know if you can realize that through the video, but from Thanksgiving to now, I've lost 20 pounds. So I'm 222. Now I'm 202. Eating right, taking care of myself, got serious about diet. You know, I always worked out hard, always worked out hard, but getting serious about diet was so critical for me. And I never could get a hold of it. And I finally said, you know what? I'm going to do this. It's kind of like, it's kind of like when I quit drinking and doing drugs. It was literally 10 years ago from about 20 days from now. It'll be 10 years. And I was addicted. I was addicted to drugs and I couldn't quit. I wanted to, I tried to, couldn't do it. And then one night, I almost died and I said, if I wake up, I'll never touch anything ever again. Well, I woke up, threw it all away, never touched it, never touched it. So we have to hit rock bottom sometimes and we have to get fed up with our current situation until we get fed up with our current situation. We're not going to change our current situation. It's like a lot of people that won't make calls to sell properties as real estate agents. You haven't got fed up enough with your situation enough to make a change in your life to go crush it, to go, to go, you know, really succeed at a high level. You're, you're satisfied. You're comfortable where you are until you get uncomfortable enough to make a change. Nothing's going to change. Um, but I was waking up at five, I go to the gym, work out, I come home and I'm like this on my computer, just grinding my face off. Now everybody knows and if you don't, now you do 80% of your actions produce 20% of your results. 20% of your actions produce 80% of your results. So 20% of what you do produces 80% of your results. So think about that. You could work just 20% of what you do, still produce 80% of what you do. Now, if you can become efficient on the 80% that doesn't produce, you know, that produces the 20%, you can get to 100% in about half the time that you're spending now. It's the problem is we're spending so much time doing things that don't move the needle. And that's me, right? And I overcompensate by working really hard to, you know, to, I'm chalking that up to, if I work really hard to keep the pedal to the metal, then maybe I can, you know, be in position to fight off whatever happens that comes along to swoop up my well. But the problem is, nothing's going to come through. If I lost everything, if we lost everything, our rental properties pays for our life. And we own those free and clear. We have very little debt at all, right? We owe about 10% of what our home is worth, this home that I'm in right now. I pay cash for rental properties. I've got a little debt out there on a few things. But overall, I don't buy, I don't leverage. I don't buy properties and then leverage those to buy other properties. I don't do that. What I like to do is buy properties, keep them for five, seven years, sell them 1031, that one property into three properties. I like to do that. I don't like to do it the other way around. But nevertheless, the grind. And like, I'm not even like spending a lot of time on my family. I'm in here like, I'm just like, it's like, when am I going to live my life? So I became burnout. I became incredibly burnout here recently. I like, it's been going on for a while. It's like, at 9 o'clock at night for years, it's like, I'm dead. I can't even like chill. My brain isn't working. Like it's not, it's not, this doesn't work anymore. So I went to the doctor. I got on testosterone. That's been great. But it hasn't been like the answer. Like it hasn't answered all my problems. I've taken vitamins. I drink more water. All kinds of things. Nothing has really worked, worked. And I started thinking about it and had a long talk with, with my friend Juan. And it's like, he's like, bro, like, if you, you know, if you like, slept in and like went to the gym, like mid-morning and like started working, getting new and your income wouldn't change at all. And he's right. Everything I have is passive. All my income is passive. You know, and I started thinking about everything that I do. And I'm like, oh man, he's right. Why am I living like this? I'm just taking you through the process here of having this money anxiety and what it will do to you and eat you alive. And I don't want it to eat you alive. I want, hopefully, you know, if you live paycheck to paycheck, realize that worrying is not going to solve any problems. If something bad is going to happen, it's going to happen. 95% of the stuff we worry about never happens. The 5% that does, you can work. You can deal with it when it happens. And I didn't live, I haven't been living like that. I didn't even know it. I didn't even know it. So I've just been putting a lot of pressure on myself. You know, why do I answer every single DM? It's because I'm scared I'm going to lose the brand equity that it took me. So I've given my soul to the real estate industry. I don't know if you realize that or not, but I have, tirelessly, coached for free for seven years, helped thousands of agents double and triple their volume, answered every single message, made countless videos, and done countless speeches for free. I pay travel. Like, I've given my soul, my heart and soul to the industry. And for a long, long time, I don't know anybody that's done what I've done as far as just pure manpower and just given back, you know, to the industry. And it's a lot. It's a lot. So I'm just like, this is kind of a testimony. This is me just venting to you and just giving you my thoughts. So again, hopefully it can help you. So I'm here. I'm getting up at five. I'm working out every morning. I come home. I'm just growing, growing, growing until five o'clock. And then I'm dead. Okay. Well, that can only last for so long. All right. That can only last for so long. So back in 2005 and seven and eight, I started reading books. I read about a hundred books over the course of about three years. And then I quit reading books. The knowledge from those books took me to be, to sell 100 properties a year for eight years in a row, took me to be the number one remix agent in Alabama for several years, number one in my MLS for all those eight years. It may, it got me to the point where I wrote a book. It got me to the point where I started doing social media and crushing social media and becoming one of the, one of the, you know, biggest names in North America when it comes to real estate agents. Those hundred books a decade and a half ago got me where I am today. But I've been stuck for several years and I'm just grinding, grinding, grinding, trying to get to the next level, grinding, grinding, grinding, trying to keep my pedal to the metal to make sure that I don't lose everything I worked so hard for. And it's not that I'm, I'm, I'm not only working because I'm trying to like make sure I don't lose it all, but I'm also working hard, always trying to get to the next level. But I've been stuck, been stuck for years, been stuck for a couple years in terms of income, just in terms of personal growth. And it all started to kind of hit me about this and came to the revelation of, of what's going on here. And now, guess what I'm doing? I sleep till six, six, 30, I think it's up to like 6.45 this morning. Oh man, it's been life changing now at, at nine o'clock at night, I'm not dead. I spend an extra hour and a half after I normally go to bed, like from nine to like 1030. I think he even stayed up till 11, which is like big for me, like 42. So I used to go out all night till three or four o'clock in the morning, sleep for two hours and go roof houses at seven o'clock. You should do that every day. All right. But, but now it's different. And the extra hour to two hours I spent last night with my family was euphoric, euphoric. Because my wife's been doing that. My wife's been hanging out with my mother daughter late at night while I'm asleep. You know, we chalk it up to, well, he's the breadwinner. He, I don't see breadwinner, like my wife is the breadwinner. Like she's the one that runs everything. I'm just the face of it. What I'm saying is, is like, you know, I'm just the face of it. What I'm saying is, is like Ricky's the workhorse and he's the one out there really, you know, grinding it and coming up with the ideas and executing on all this stuff. Like, let's let him sleep. But at the end of the day, it's wrong. So now I'm sleeping in, right? And guess what I do? I don't go to my DMs. I don't come in here and start making lists of what I need to do and priorities and everything else. No, no, no, no, no. What I'm saying is, you know, I'm just the face of it. What I do is I go straight to a book. Yeah. And for the last three weeks, I've been reading every day. And let me tell you something. My life has already completely changed because of that. The knowledge that I've gained over the last couple of two or three weeks has been life changing, enormously life changing. The way that I'm talking to people and communicating, the way that I'm carrying myself, the thoughts that I have, the things that trigger certain ideas in my mind is, is on a whole nother level. And I'm just getting started. And I actually went out there and you guys, you know that I'm the originally, right? I'm the original. I'm like, don't pay for coaching. You know, free coaching, you know, all this. I went out and wrote a check for $55,000, $55,000. For a coach. And what I've realized, I started charging for coaching back in December and I've been going down that path of understanding it. And what I've realized is that there's a lot of fake coaches, fake gurus out there. There's a lot of people that have not accomplished the things you want to accomplish that are selling courses. They're making a lot of money. They're selling regurgitated information they heard from somewhere else, et cetera. But when you find there are coaches that are the ones, there's the ones out there and the ones, oh, they're worth their weight and goal, whatever they charge it isn't enough. Whatever they charge is not enough. Like for example, I've helped hundreds and we've even tried to add it up. Like somewhere in the thousand plus agents that have doubled and tripled their volume through my free coaching program. And I have testimonials from agents who have made 3, 4, 500 extra thousand dollars. They say, I make 500 extra thousand dollars a year from your advice. Over 10 years, that's $5 million, 20 years, that's $10 million. Like I added $10 million to their life through my advice and that may grow to be even more. I've got agents that will tell me I make an extra one, two. I was talking to an agent today and I was like, I was like, let's just think about it. Do you make an extra like one to 200 extra more just based on what I taught you for free? And they were like, that's, no, that's low. That's low. And you start thinking about this and you start realizing, okay, because back then it fulfilled me to tell somebody some advice, they go execute and make 500,000 bucks. And that used to be, I used to be like, oh my God, this is amazing. And it was. And now, now that it's proven that what I do, that I am one of the ones, now that it's proven there's proof that what I do works and helps people multiply their income, now there's actually a quantifiable price to it. If I help someone make an extra 100,000 a year, is that not worth 10,000 bucks? A one-time fee of 10,000, you make 100 extra thousand the rest of your life. It's a million bucks every 10 years you made off of that $10,000 worth of advice. It's worth it. And so I understand this concept and I had to separate the thing that pissed me off about paid coaches is the fake coaches that never had a license, that never really sold property, that never had a license, never sold a property, or the ones that sold 19 properties in their selling courses for $3,000, people that were never top producers. You know, listen, it was envy, it was jealousy, really. Man, you know, like I was jealous, like you didn't even have to do the thing, but yet you're making millions of dollars off of teaching people to do the thing you didn't even do. You know, it enraged me not from a standpoint of, you know, hating on them necessarily, even though I did hate on people. But it was more just like, man, this is unreal, you know, and then I couldn't go out there and sell anything, anytime I tried to offer something, you know, for sale in terms of coaching programs, because I gave everything away for free, you already got everything for free, why are you going to pay? You already got it. I've already helped you double trip your income. What are you going to pay for something for? I've already given it to you. I get it, right? I've kind of brought that on myself. And that's fine. I understand. I understand how I dig myself out of that hole. But the point is, is that I understand the game now and what that charge is really for. So when I paid this man $55,000, I did it in full confidence that I'm going to make a million a year, a million a month, a million, like I'm going to make so much money off of the knowledge that I get from this guy, because he is one of the best in the world at what I want to do. And I'll make so much money from that $55,000 investment. So I did that. So I'm reading, I hired a coach and I'm in a much, much better place. I'm sleeping more. And everything is a complete 180 right now from where it was just a month ago, just a month ago. And I am changing, right? I'm transforming into Ricky 5.0. Reading more, oh my gosh, it has changed my life already. I'm communicating better. I'm helping people more. It's just, it's the quality of life. So anyway, I just wanted to share this. My dad sent me this text. I want to share that with you in just a second. He sent me a devotional, one of those daily devotionals about what we're talking about. But I just wanted to kind of recognize that I know there has to be other people that are going through this, money anxiety. Oh, it's a killer. It will rip you to shreds. And it's ripped me to shreds. And I still have it. It didn't like go away. Like I'm still like worried, but now I'm conscious of the fact that it's going on. I'm conscious of the fact that I have it. And it's a work in progress is what it is. And I've got to, like Juan said, bro, it's time for you to live your life. My dad said, he was like, I've been warned and warned about you, all the money you make. He was like, I've been wondering why you're not in Italy and in Africa and in Morocco. And like, he's like, I don't know why you're not traveling the world and just chilling. Like if I had your money, I would just be hanging loose. I wouldn't be grinding like a government mule every day. So anyway, but that's just who I've always been my whole life. That's all I know. Like in my mind, I'm still the teenager roofing houses trying to make a million dollars, even though I have the millions. In my mind, I don't. I'm still trying to get there. So, but I'll tell you this before I share the devotional that he shared with me. A lot of people think, okay, well, once you make a million, they want to go make 10 million. Once you make 10 million, you want to make 100 million. Once you make 100 million, you want to make a billion. Once you make 1 million, you want to make 2 billion, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And yes, I get that. I understand where you're coming from when you say that. But for me, what you have to understand is that I always itched for a nicer house. I always itched for a nicer car. I always itched for better life. Better life. And, you know, everywhere we lived, everywhere I lived and I live different places with Carlin, I've always wanted a nicer place, nicer car, etc. In 2020, we bought this house. I haven't had a single moment that I wanted a nicer house. So that did stop. It's not like I just wanted more and more and more and more. I wanted more and more and more until I got to a point and then I was good. I have zero interest in buying another house, moving, not because of interest rates and stuff, just because I don't have that itch. I'm not like, I want something new or nicer, bigger or better. My car, when I got my Tesla, I haven't, you know, I used to want a new truck. Every, I had Ford F-150s. I used to want a new one every year, every year, every year, not every year, every two years, every two years, I would get a new truck. And when I got my Tesla, that stopped. I haven't even had the single inkling of the feeling to want to get a new car or a truck or anything. My wife got an Escalade in 2011, a brand new one. Or maybe it's 22, 21 or 22, and it's 21. And we haven't had a single itch. We used to want another one. She had a Lexus SUV. We wanted another one. We got the Escalade. We haven't had an itch to want anything else. So what I'm saying to you is that, yes, I still have an itch to get to the next level of business and success and make more money. Yes, but I want you to understand it's, it will stop for me. I will get to a level where I'm like, okay, this is where I want to be. Just like my house, just like my car, this is where I want to be. I will get to a level of income where I'm like, okay, this, this feels good. This feels safe. This feels comfortable. This is where I've wanted to be. I don't know what that number is, but I will hit. I didn't know this house was going to be the house that made me stop wanting houses. I didn't know my Tesla was going to be the car that made me stop wanting new cars. I don't know what level of income I'm going to have to hit to where I'm like, okay, I feel great about this. But I know based on what's happened with my car, my house, my wife's car, that it will happen and I will get there. And now I'm just enjoying the process. I want to read this to you before we go. Let's see. Let me scroll up to his text message, share this with you. So we talked about this and like I said, he was like, man, I've been wondering about you is what he said. But he sent me this right after we left each other. We work out every day in the gym together every morning. And even since I switched over to doing later in the mornings, he still comes. So he came to date 10 o'clock. He went yesterday at 1230. So he sent me this. It says, I'm leading you step by step through your life. Hold my hand in trusting dependence, letting me guide you through this day. Your future looks uncertain and feels flimsy, even precarious. That is how it should be. It should be flimsy. It should, it should seem out of whack. Secret things belong to the Lord and future things are secret things. When you try to figure out the future, you're grasping at things that are mine. This, like all forms of worries and active rebellion, doubting my promises to care for you. Okay. Trying to figure out the future, right? You're grasping at things that you don't have any business grasping for, right? Live in the present. Whenever you find yourself worrying about the future, repent and return to me. I will show you the next step forward and the one after that and the one after that. Relax and enjoy the journey. Oh, relax and enjoy the journey in my presence. Trusting me to open up the way before you as you go. And there was a few scriptures in here, Deuteronomy 29, 29. The secret things belong to the Lord or God, but the things reveal belong to us and our children forever that we may follow the words of his law. Luke 12, 25 says, Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life since you cannot do this very little thing? Why do you worry about the rest? I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go. I will counsel you and watch over you. So, I just want to say that one sentence that really hit me. Relax and enjoy the journey. Oh, man. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. We go to church every Sunday. We're part of a really, really incredible church. And we enjoy going to church and being a part of that. But yeah, anyway, look, I just wanted to share this with you. I hope maybe you got something out of this. Maybe you didn't. I felt like, hey, let me let you get to know me a little bit more. There's a lot of things about me you don't know, but over time, I will share those type of things with you. And if you ever have any questions, man, if you guys ever have anything that you want to share with me, you can share with me in confidence. I'm happy to help in any way possible. All right. All right. You guys have a good rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Seem like everybody want to