 Welcome everybody back to the Independent Investor Channel. These are 10 simple strategies that you can use. I deploy myself and you know for a lot of people out there they can they can help you accumulate wealth and people ask me what would qualify me to sit across from a YouTube audience and declare this. I do these things. I do all 10 of them and it's helped me accumulate better than average wealth. I sit on over a half a million dollars and I'm a blue collar worker. I haven't been a self-directed investor just shy of 10 years here and these strategies work and I think they escape a lot of people. They really do. I think there's a lot of different schools of thought. Look man if you come from money you can spend money extravagantly then go ahead. I'll tip my hat to you. No big deal. Teach a zone. I don't chalk up success that way. I think there's a lot of successful people out there that don't have a lot of money. I think there's people out there that have money that spend crazy and they're frivolous and they'll end up being unhappy. I think true happiness is really putting yourself on a program to where you don't have to think about money very often. Show a little bit of discipline. I just think unfortunately with right now the newest statistic is that about half of U.S. households are drowning in debt. Drowning was the word that came out of it. I stopped tracking it at around 14,000 of cumulative unsecured credit card debt in the average household. I just think that's astronomical. I don't know where that lack of discipline comes from except for that I might presume that people are succumbing to the consumer-driven temptations that are out there and not really taking one second to acknowledge maybe that a little bit of discipline is in order. So these 10 will rip through them. These are to help all investors. My message is tailored toward those regular folks out there that don't know a whole lot about the stock market may think that it's unreachable. I'm here to make it that much more reachable for you, break down those barriers to entry for you in discussing the method and the ways that you can enter into the stock market that maybe don't seem so daunting when you have somebody like myself break it down for you. So let's get started. Number one, man, you've got to stop spending so much money. It's that simple. People get into this habitual back and forth of making huge inflows of money or paycheck to paycheck. And in either case, man, they spend everything they have. They live paycheck to paycheck. The bills come in, they pay where they feel like they can introduce a new expenditure and put something else on financing. They go ahead and do that. Most people will justify their expenditures this way. We make 2,500. It looks like we have two or 300 left in the budget. Let's go buy something else. And by doing that, you actually end up overspending what your budget is with regard to your inflow per month. Really tough, really sad to be honest with you. Your quality of life does not have to be dictated by how much you buy. I think a lot of people get hit with that first shot of dopamine when they buy something, gives them a few minutes, if not a few hours of pleasure. And then it's gone again. And you look and you seek out that excitement again by buying things. And that's not really where true happiness lies. And it can really lend itself to a much grander picture in that it is number one on my list. Stop spending so much money. It will prepare you and prepare your mind to put yourself on a path to riches going forward. Number two, you pay yourself first. Pay yourself first. You need to intercept your money from you because you are, in fact, your worst enemy. You need to intercept your money. And you say, Ryan, I live paycheck to paycheck. I can't do that. I beg to differ. I started accumulating my path to wealth and riches some many moons ago, $25. $25 a month is what I did. That's what I could afford. And I was paying $600 in rent and bringing in $1,500 a month. And that was my starting salary when I first got my first real stable job that I was proud to call my employment now at the time. But everybody makes those concessions on the onset. But I didn't have any problem. And I do contend that there's a lot of people out there that if they just look, they can find that little bit of surplus capital to pay yourself first and to justify doing that. And you might say, well, what do I do with the money, Ryan? I pay myself. And then what? We'll get to it. I'm going to declare in this video, man, the 10 things that you need to do to get wealthy. And wealthy can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. If you're out for a million bucks, the tried and true methods that I talk about on the Independent Investor channel will absolutely create many, many million millionaires out there. I'll be one of them. I'll be an advocate for those people who have started with nothing, jack nothing, and ended up with something in this life. No doubt about it. That's not where I put success. I'll be a millionaire. Most people would say, man, I'd kill to be a millionaire, but they're not willing to do the first freaking thing to step in that direction. And I think paying yourself first is one of the most strategic mind bends that you can get yourself convinced of in this life. Because if you don't, you end up in this habitual of inflow and outflow, you end up spending, living paycheck to paycheck. And it's really, really unfortunate that you don't take that little bit of surplus capital, find it in the budget and insist on paying yourself first. Super important. Number three, you want to learn about the magic of compounding interest. And this is an interesting one. I remember to the day sitting at my kitchen table, I was 15 years old, we had a financial planner come to the house, explain the rule of 72. Fascinating. Fascinating that given, you know, an interest rate year over year divided by 72 will give you the number of years that an investment will take to double. What does this mean? Well, you can take and you can anticipate at an 8% rate of return divided by 72 and get the projected number of years that it will take for that investment to double at a 10% rate of return. It would take 7.2 years, assuming that you would get that 10% rate of return per year. You might think, well, I terrible at math. Leave me alone, Ryan, you suck. How does this help me get rich? I want to know how to get rich and buy my Lamborghini tomorrow. Stand by. You can get rich by this. As a matter of fact, the masses can get rich by this. But where this becomes credible is when you start to look at those investing vehicles that have turned back a 10% rate of return over the past, you know, 10, 20, even more years, you start to look at what could potentially happen if you put some of these really good assets to work for yourself and actually start to realize some of these year over year compounding growth. Now, the magic in it is that once year one is complete and you've enjoyed becoming an investor for the first time in your life, the next year that money will grow on the year from grow on the money that was made the previous year, and so on and so forth. And as you start chalking up the years, chalking up the decades, this money will start to snowball on itself. Just like credit card debt does to the negative side, investing dollars can snowball to the positive side and you are in fact the beneficiary when that phenomenon starts to happen. So understanding the phenomenon of compounding interest is super, super important. You need to learn about the phenomenon of tax shelter. Okay, tax shelter is something that's whispered across the YouTube community. It's not talked about enough. We have to footstump the ability to keep Uncle Sam away from as much as our hard-earned dollars as we can. And I'm speaking to those retail investors out there that may not have the surplus capital to just not care or not acknowledge the ramifications of the tax implication over your dollars if you do seek out an investment opportunity. And I know there's a lot of people who invest in Coinbase and with no regard at all to the potential profits that they're making over the Bitcoin or Ethereum, for example, they will lose. They will lose because they did not take proper credence to tax acknowledgement here and the ability of certain accounts to provide that tax shelter over your money. So you might be thinking, well, how do I do this? How do I tax shelter? Very, very simple. We're going to talk about that in the account that you buy that can meet two of our strategic goals on this list to be coming wealthy down the line. Very, very simple. Just by nature of putting these things into play, you'll find riches that you never, ever knew was possible in your life. The next is to learn about fee reduction. The independent investor chart channel was started with one singular mission. And that was to empower one investor at a time to educate professors to understand that over the last decades, financial institutions have done nothing short of rob investors from potential profits going forward by a fixing management fees over accounts that could just as easily be invested upon yourself. And the times are changing and they know that they're changing. Investors like myself who are advocating for people and saying, you can do it. You absolutely can. And it really just takes an acknowledgement to those mutual funds out there with a point or a point and a half of expense every years, eating away at your hard earned appreciation is just not satisfactory anymore. And it's really time to throw the flag on the industry and start to understand if there are avenues out there to seek out broad market diversified exposure to markets that you can do so at a low cost. And ETFs and index funds are the answer. They are the low cost entry into the market to give you absolutely phenomenal rates of return, eight to 10% over the years that'll get it done. If you understand the compounding effect over your money and you can enter into those products at a very, very low cost. So understanding the importance of reducing that fee over your money doesn't do us any good to go through the 10 points if we don't understand how we can keep a lot of the money on our side that we're trying to accumulate going forward into the future. The account that you want to open is a self directed Roth IRA account that's number six on the list. Now opening a self directed individual Roth IRA account is something that applies to the masses. Now if you're ineligible, you make over $130,000 a year as a single or over the limit for a married couple out there. Obviously this does not apply to you insofar as you do not are not eligible to contribute to the individual Roth IRA account the Roth. But I contend that this does apply to the masses and there's two schools of thought, a lot of people are younger and they're like, well, I don't want to deal with retirement. I don't want to think about retirement. I don't want to put my money in hold until you're 59 and a half. That's exactly what you want to do. So you want to drop all that other garbage and schools of thought, look, you're going to be around at 59 and a half until you can max fund a Roth IRA account at $6,000 a year. Don't do anything else. When you can max fund that at $6,000 or if you're married and you and your spouse can max fund those at $12,000 a year with no problem, then great. Go do whatever you got to do to knock your socks off to invest in taxable brokerage accounts, cryptocurrency, whatever it is that you feel like you want to do. Go ahead and do it. It's no problem at all. But until then, this applies to the masses. Those out there, the individuals that are making less than 130 that are eligible to contribute to the Roth IRA, they need to start a Roth IRA and they need to do so with the designation of the self-directed Roth IRA account. It's going to take care of the fee reduction. It's going to take care of the tax shelter. And it's going to make sure that your money is housed in the very, very best account to wealth preserve over the long term. Number seven on the list, you're going to want to fund the account. You're going to want to buy the S&P 500. That is the large cap S&P 500. It's comprised of 500 of the large U.S. domestic companies here in the stock market. Why do I say that? It runs at an expense of .03. So the expense is super low. It meets one of our strategic goals. But one thing that a lot of people don't understand is that meeting the market is something that people give up all the time to outpace the market. And by nature of trying to outpace the market all the time, all too often, people underperform the market. So meeting the market year after year after year after year is the strategic benefit that will give you that edge over time. There's no doubt in my mind. By VOO, low expense, that can be your starting fund that you go with there and then DCA that up every single month, okay? So DCA is the dollar cost average. Take that $25 that you've identified through surplus capital by acknowledging strategic goal number one of stop spending so much money. And that's where that dollar cost average can go to every single month. And you might think, Ryan, $25, I can do 50. Fantastic. If you can do 400 or 500, fantastic. Go ahead and do that. Knock your socks off. Absolutely got the green light from me. I'm just telling you what I started with at $25. A lot of people out there can be like, man, I've got $25. I can do this. Ryan, sign me up. Fantastic. You don't need to sign up with me, man. You can empower yourself to do everything that I'm talking about on this list. People want to make investing out to be something that it is not. And investing and gaining exposure and putting your dollars to risk in the stock market is absolutely just as easy as following these 10 steps. The financial institutions want to make it difficult so that you can crawl to them and pay for their services. They don't want guys like me coming on and talking about the truth in the industry. This is easy. You put this stuff to sleep and it works for the rest of your life, guys. So very, very important. Number eight, very important, man. You want to live below your means. Look, man, if you're pulling in $400,000 or $500,000 a year, by all means, go and live a champagne life. No problem. If you're making $30,000, no problem. I don't look upon the person who makes $500,000 a year differently than I look at somebody who makes $30,000 a year. It's funny how I look at things. I'm a fickle applicator. I do not give credit just for the amount of wad that you've been able to accumulate over your life or even worse, probably that you were given in your life. It's no problem. You're probably a great person or a horrible person or somewhere in between. But here's the thing. If you make $30,000 a year or you're living on a budget that is a little bit tight, you do not need to be overspending. As a matter of fact, I will say that it is a staunch requirement to become an empowered investor, man, to live below your means. And I say a lot of people's means are hosed up. I don't need a whole lot. I shop at outlet malls. I rent right now, and I have a half a million dollars in the bank on a blue collar salary where I have never in my life broken the six-figure mark. How is that possible for somebody like myself who does not have a college degree, I might add, have that much wealth when it is that the society would say that I am stuck in a rut. I will be lower middle class the rest of my life. I do not have a college degree. I will not earn higher than average income. And the ability to beat the odds is my ability to live below what it is that I feel is necessary for happiness. And I'm happy all the time. There's no amount of things that I can buy to supplement in my life to somehow make me happy. I understand that. And it is an absolute critical piece to the pedigree and makeup of accumulating wealth over time. And the investing thesis as a whole for you should just be that pledge to yourself that you just don't need all the crap you think you need. You just don't. And to live below your means doesn't mean that you have to suffer. It doesn't mean that you can't have fun. But people let it go out of control all the time. And it becomes consuming in that it becomes a lifestyle. And living below your means is absolutely a discipline. And you can do it. It's easy enough. It's really easy. You'll find happiness and other things that don't cost so much money. Okay. Finding your entertainment in ways that doesn't cost money. You know, go hiking. It costs zero money. You know, go to a park. It costs nothing. Reading a book might cost you a couple of dollars. Read an online article if that's what you need to do. All kinds of different things. Go to a gym. Go run. Do things like that for your physical fitness. Focus on your dietary application. All fun things that can allow you to live below your means if you really do resonate with the things on this list. Number nine, you're going to have to be realistic. Okay. I've got a lot of people out here that just they come on the channel and they try to apply the strategies that I deploy and I absolutely adhere to and they try to morph it into something that it is not. I'm not going to tell you that if you make $30,000 a year that if you deploy this you're going to retire with 10 million. I'm not going to say that. Okay. Because the amount of truth that is rendered by there might only be represented in a couple of different scenarios. Okay. But for the masses out there, you can absolutely be realistic in saying that if you do all of the things that I'm talking about on this list, you deploy them, you put them to work for yourself, that you are going to be in a better place than you are now. That I can guarantee you. That I can guarantee you. And that my friends is powerful. It's powerful when it is scalable. It's something that as you sit across from me and you hear my tutorial on wealth building and you can say, you know what? I can do that too. I'm here to tell you man, you can. You absolutely can because these are the things that I have done in my life and they've made all the difference. If you were to take one element out of this top 10 list to become wealthy, I would not be in the position that I'm in right now communicating to you guys. The last thing on the list, man, and it's probably one of the most important things, but if you do everything that I'm talking about, starting the self-directed, starting that S&P 500 exposure, you know, dollar cost averaging at monthly and you're doing it religiously, number 10 is to stay the course no matter what. No matter what YouTuber comes on and tells you that they've got a better way, I'm here to tell you that they don't. No matter how much you have self-doubt set in on your program, I'm here to tell you it's not real. The more you second guess the program that you've put into place on the one that I've just outlined to you, the more you allow that self-doubt to set in, the worse off you will be. And the best thing you can possibly do for your wealth going forward is to absolutely stay the course. You want to stay the course no matter what through thick and thin. The market's going to go up and it's going to go down. It's going to go up and it's going to go down. That I can guarantee you, but over the long run, remember the goal. The goal is to become financially wealthy over time and you will be in a better position than you absolutely are now at the time of watching this video. Guys, thank you so much for tuning in to the message. Make sure and subscribe to the channel. Leave your comments at the bottom of the video. Share the message with those folks out there that need to hear this introduction. Yes, to the stock market. This is 25 years wrapped up into a nice little package for you. I give it to you on a silver platter free of charge. Take it, deploy it for the few that do will end up in a better place down the road. Guys, thank you so much for tuning in to the message and good luck in your investment future.