 Investing is, yes, about buying the right stock, but even more important is to find the money to buy the right stock. In this video, I want to share my personal story that got me far away, I'm very well off, but I'm a normal person, I did this. I did it slowly, normally, piece by piece. Good day, fellow investors. I recently made a video about dividend growth stock and Reksy the Hound asked for my subscription service to be cheaper for long-term funds. Now, this triggered me to do a video on how to make more money, because I think that if you are proactive, if you look for opportunities, if you want to grow in life, the result, the return on investment is exponentially. Instead of looking for bargains, looking for cheap stuff, looking for discounts, because that's what you get then in life. And by sharing my story, because I believe that I come from a background that 95% of you watching this now, have it and had it much better by sharing my story and the five steps that really help when you invest and you think and you live your financial life for the long-term can really make you millions with small, small steps. In this video, I want to discuss my background. So when I discuss my background, you'll see that yours doesn't really matter. That's the motivation I hope to give. Then we'll discuss why we need to have patience, why we need to start now, why a side hustle is very, very helpful and makes you much more than to look for small discounts. And the key thing of investing constantly, even if it's small amounts, because the opportunities will be there and when those come, you'll have to take advantage of them. Let's start. So I was born in a communist country in the Eastern Bloc, the former Republic of Yugoslavia. The country didn't even have a stock market. So no stocks, it was a communist country. I was born there. English wasn't a priority, nothing. So compare that living in a country with no stock market to the United States of America where the stock market has been existing since practically the country was formed. So $1 invested in 1800s is now more than 700,000. Compare that to no stock market, little private ownership where I come from. To add to the picture from when I was eight to 14, there was a war in my country. This picture is Dubrovnik, the famous walled city now a mecca for tourists. But 25 years ago, it unfortunately looked like this. Now it looks a little bit better, this and this, but that is what tourism brings. And fortunately, it's all well and safe now. But this gives you a perspective on background. Then my salary as a high school teacher from when I was 24 to 28, 29 was about $700 a month. You can't do much on that. So in 2013, we decided to explore the world, move from low income country to a higher income country and see how it works. I went to London, started looking for jobs and then I figured out that I can't speak English. The first job interview I went, I got a piece of paper with 20 words to check the spelling. They never called me back, my English was terrible. But then fortunately, after 1200 job applications, I got a job at Bloomberg because I spoke Italian and Slavic languages, not for the English. But this allowed me to learn more and more English. Then we decided that London was too crazy. We moved to the Netherlands, where I got another teaching job as an assistant professor at the Amsterdam School of International Business. I was teaching accounting and finance. And suddenly from the 700 per month, I went to 70,000 per year. So 10 times my income almost. But that's not all. However, this is really the message that if you're flexible in your life and if you look for opportunities, if you dare to search, and I bet there are a lot of young people watching this, if you dare to explore, be flexible, you can really change a lot in your life. Then you can always come back but with a huge experience and a nice bag of money. Further, when you get to such a country, when you start getting money, don't do dumb shit with the money. Don't buy dumb shit because I see a lot of people, my colleagues, all my colleagues when I was working at Bloomberg, we weren't paid a lot. It was an entry level job. It was there for the experience but they would run out for lunch and spend seven, 10, 11 pounds on lunch every day. 10 pounds, $10 a day, if you spend it on Starbucks or something, cumulates over the long term and is enough to make you millions and you'll see more about that later. So in 2014, when we moved to the Netherlands, I needed a car. I bought the Hyundai Accel Accent, however you want to call it. I paid 600 euros for that. We had it for two years. We made 50,000 kilometers with it. Everybody was looking at me on the street, moving away from me because they were scared that I scratched them or something. Then when we got the kid 2016, we upgraded to a really, really expensive car. I paid 1600 euros for another Hyundai that we again made 50,000 kilometers and had it for two, three years. So that's very important because that allowed us to buy a house without down payment, without crazy investments. We got a huge loan because I didn't have other loans. We bought a house and if you want to see my story on how we purchased the real estate, how it looked, what we did with it and how we sold it later, you can check the video in the card here above. It's really another motivating story as this is a motivating video. The key is that money is opportunity. If you have it, you can take advantage of opportunity. Be it resigning from your job, doing something else, exploring opportunities, investing when the real opportunity is there. And one of the great opportunities or one thing that leads to other opportunities is having a side hustle. Today, if you speak English, if you come from a developed market, but even if you come from an emerging or a frontier market like I did, the internet is a big equalizer. So everybody can do, everybody can make money and I guarantee you that each one of you viewers can make more than 10 bucks a day somehow by some extra work on the internet. I pay a few bucks for the tumps that somebody's making now to make it look more professional and this guy coming from, I think it's Greece, he makes a few bucks, he makes more of those thumbnails. That's his talent. With, by using your talent, you can make it too. And that's in my side hustle from, since when I was, what, 16 really made me a lot and really changed my life. Not the job that I had that I had to have to pay the bills, et cetera. The side hustle made it happen. When I was 16, I started a small export business. I was born in Croatia on the coast. I was diving and I was catching these bobbit worms and I was exporting them to Italy for the Italian fishermen that went fishing on a weekend. So after school, I would run to the sea, dive, catch these worms and sell them for a few bucks. This allowed me to start because I was coming from zero war, nobody had any money to start accumulating some capital the first few thousands that I later invested over time. And there is another video that discusses my investments over the last 20 years. However, that diving, et cetera, when we moved to the Netherlands, I started, okay, I have a little bit of time, let's improve my English, let's learn more, let's start writing articles. And I saw that seeking alpha is paying for articles. I think they were paying 35 bucks per an article plus one cent per click or something. So I wrote an article, the first article got rejected four times. The fifth time I wrote it, they accepted my grammar errors, my construction, my everything. It was terrible, but I kept doing it. And two months later, I was making 400 bucks for writing 10 articles a month. And that was really, again, a great business. They fired me. They said, okay, we'll just give you one cent per click because you don't have enough clicks to pay you 35 bucks. But that led to the second hustle, a side hustle. An investor from Utah said, okay, Sven, write me some reports, I'll pay you. Okay, then it turned out, okay, can you write an article for my website on a daily basis? And I thought of asking 100 bucks per article. Then I asked 150, he was happily paying. And over two, three years, I wrote more than 700 articles for him. And he paid perfectly. So that was a side hustle. I was a teacher making dollars, 70K, 60K euros. I was making 40K from writing reports and articles there. And that was already a big amount of money. That step number five will explain you why it was big and it was really important for me. But before that, it shows you what side hustle can create. Later I asked the guy, how many subscribers do we have on this newsletter that I'm writing for? He said 120,000. And then I said, okay, it's time to go buy myself, start a YouTube channel and develop a research platform that I am now doing. But it was really something that the idea came from my side hustle of hoping to make 300, 400 bucks a month. And that's something you have to see what's your passion, what you can do because 10 bucks a day, 300 per month, 3600 per year makes a huge difference and can make you millionaire. Because when you invest those 10 bucks, if you invest in great businesses, you will have great returns over time. This is my return from this year. Okay, this is an exceptional year, 50% on my portfolio on the invested money over the year. That's great, but this shows what can happen and if you are invested, it will happen here and there to your portfolio. And that's an opportunity you have to seize no matter how much money you have because even small amounts of money compound over time. And if you invest 10 bucks a day, 300 a month, over 30 years and you get just a 10% return, which is gettable if you focus on the opportunities you constantly invest and analyze the market and are patient, then you can get to 600,000 over 30 years. Let's say if year 31 is a 50% return and then puff, like that you are at a million from just a small side hustle of making 70 bucks a week. You might teach somewhere at evening school, you will get 70 bucks every week for two hours lesson, maybe even for one and that's the difference. And how can I explain that a few bucks here and there turn out in millions after a few decades, even more if you have a higher return on investment than 10%. And five, the most important thing is that you constantly invest no matter how much money you have, even if you have just 10 or $5 per day or even less $50 per month, the key is that you invest, why? Because when you invest, you will constantly have an eye on the opportunities out there, real estate, stocks, businesses, paying off your student debt, whatever, and you'll constantly examine them and you'll have a trained investment brain. You can now go play basketball with LeBron James, it wouldn't help you if you just start. But if you train for years, years, when you get the opportunity, you might just have fun, not beat him, but just have fun. So even when it comes to investing, if you constantly train over time, you'll do great. And we have seen what just a little bit of money makes. And then everybody, especially in the abundance of money this world has now, will get some windfalls, you get some inheritance, you buy something, you sell something, and I don't know, if something happens, you get fired, you get a nice severance check, and that money can be reinvested. But the key is to start small so that when you get the big money, you know how to invest it and not make stupid stupid things with it. For example, real estate was cheap in 2013, 14 when I bought in the Netherlands or 2002, three. And it's always about comparing real estate, stocks, other markets. If we look now globally, stock markets, I don't know, in Russia, China, Brazil was cheap two years ago when we made videos about it. And now it's a little bit more expensive, but if you constantly compare the returns on investment, you can over time diversify, 2017 I buy Brazil, 2018 I buy Russia, 2019, 20 I'll buy something in Hong Kong, then 2021 maybe the US will be cheap or something in the US will be cheap. You diversify there, you build a great portfolio over time and even the small amounts you add compound over the long term and you do greatly. So keep in mind, be flexible, have patience, compound your returns, find the side hustle, it really exponentially improves your returns on investment and then invest smartly over the long term and I guarantee you that you will be a millionaire in the next decade, two decades for sure. Thank you, looking forward to your comments subscribe to this, click that notification bell so that you get notified when there is an important video for you coming out that really adds value to your investment needs. Thank you and I'll see you in the next video.