 Hey, welcome back to the channel. So in this video, I want to talk about how being cheap ruined my life and negatively impacted my life in many different ways and how it can ruin your life too if you grew up cheap and you're staying cheap throughout your lifetime. So real quick story time so that you have some context into why I can talk about this topic. I grew up in Hawaii on the island of Oahu and I have three other siblings. I have both of my parents and we have a great family relationship with my siblings and my parents. And we grew up not poor but we grew up very cheap, right? So my mom handled all the finances and her number one mission and goal with all the money that we had was to save every single penny at any expense. So she raised this with this really cheap mentality of saving money is more important than anything else, whether that's quality or time or value, saving money was above all else. So a few examples of this she would sit in traffic and drive across the island just to find a gas station that where she could save a few cents on gas. Another example is she would buy really unhealthy food and unprocessed foods just because it was super cheap. And she'd also spend hours and hours on the phone with customer service to get discounts and refunds on the different products and things that she was buying. And I love my mom. I have a great relationship with my family and my parents and my siblings. But growing up with these cheap tendencies and this cheap mindset negatively affected me in many different ways, which I'm going to talk about in this video. So yeah, in this video, I just want to share how it's negatively affected my life, how it's ruined my life in a few different ways and also how you can avoid this, how you can avoid this cheap mindset and cheap mentality. Even if you don't have a ton of money, how do you avoid this mindset of being cheap and the tendencies of being cheap? So I will get to that in a second. But if you are enjoying the content, make sure you hit the subscribe and like button that helps me out. It also helps to show to other people who can benefit from this content as well. So again, make sure you hit the subscribe and like button if you're enjoying the content here. And with that said, let's jump into first the five different ways that being cheap ruin my life and how you can avoid doing these things as well. So number one, being cheap made me very unhealthy. So up until about age 24, I sacrificed my health and my fitness just so that I could save money. So I was basically just buying the crappiest, cheapest food I can find. And I would go to Costco and buy those huge boxes of top ramen. I would eat six packs of those a day, not even joking. And those are really bad for you, right? So I don't mind top ramen actually, like eating top ramen. But I was eating six packs of those a day and that's pretty bad for you. And so I was gaining weight at a really rapid pace. I wasn't going to the gym because I was trying to save money on a gym membership. And I was just getting fatter and fatter and unhealthier and unhealthier. And I was feeling tired all the time. I didn't have any energy. I was grumpy. And it was because I was putting all this crap into my body. So I sacrificed my health because I was being cheap. I was looking for the cheapest food and not thinking about quality or what the food is going to do to me if I keep eating crappy stuff. And I was just looking for the cheapest food I could get. So that's the first way being cheap ruined my life. It made me very unhealthy and out of shape. And it was because I was just looking for the cheapest things to buy and not wanting to spend money on exercising or the gym either. So the second way it affected me was it literally made me miserable. So I was thinking all the time about money and whenever I would spend it, I'd get super stressed out and always be thinking about it. And I can remember this one story where I was going back to visit my college at Washington State University and I had bought, we stopped at a gas station, I bought this bag of chips for $5 or something around there. And I remember we drove for a few more hours, we stopped at another gas station and I sought for $350 or $4, just a little cheaper than what I bought it for. And that literally bothered me for days. Like that's how miserable I was and anytime I was spending money and I saw something cheaper somewhere else, I would let it bother me. And it's because I had this scarcity mindset of whenever I spend this money, I'm never going to be able to make it back. I'm never going to be able to get it back. So I had this scarcity mindset and it made me miserable because every time I spent money, I was getting super stressed out about it. And that's a pretty crappy way to live where you're stressed out about every penny that leaves your bank account. So that's the second way. It made me miserable. It made living my life and spending money very stressful and ever. So the third way it negatively affected my life was it gave me a bad reputation. So for years in my friend groups, in my various different friend groups, I was known as the cheap guy. And it's because I used to do things like I would inconvenience my friends. Whenever there was something that I thought was too expensive, like a restaurant or a gas station to fill up gas and I want to save some money, I try to look up a cheaper place and have them go there even though the group didn't want to go there. I'd also be that guy that would send out a Venmo request for something like two bucks for like a shared Uber or Lyft. And doing these kinds of things gave me that tag of the cheap guy. And even after I finally did start making money and have money, it took me years to shake that tag. There's still friends that call me the cheap guy. So it ruined my reputation. I'm lucky it didn't ruin any friendships. Like people just made fun of me for it. They didn't want to stop being my friend over it, luckily for me. But it very well could have, right? Being that cheap and inconveniencing other people and sacrificing my relationships to save a few bucks. That's what could have happened here. I'm lucky it didn't. So that's the third way. Give me a bad reputation and it took me a long time to shake that cheap guy tag even after I was no longer cheap. So the fourth way it affected me was that it kept me poor. And there's this saying that where your focus goes, energy flows. And I was so focused on just saving money and being cheap and saving every dollar that I had no focus or energy left for how do I make more money? How do I increase my income? So whether it was at my nine to five or whether it was when I was starting my online business, I was always so focused on how do I save every dollar that I can instead of how do I make more money? And this kept me poor because you're not going to get rich saving money. The best way to get rich is to continue to increase your income. And of course you want to spend less than what you make. But you need to continue to increase your income. You're not going to get rich by just saving every dollar that you have. So I was so focused on the wrong side of the equation that I had no energy left for the side that really mattered, which was increasing my income and moving myself forward in life. And that kept me poor for the longest time for years because I was only focused on just saving money. So that's the fourth way it kept me poor because it kept me focusing on the wrong thing, which is saving versus making more and earning more. So the fifth way that it affected my life was it made me intensely afraid to take risks. I was so afraid of losing money that I didn't want to do anything that could jeopardize my chance of losing money without getting a return. So for example, I could have probably started my online business years earlier. I could have probably started at around 21 or 22. But instead I pushed it back years because I was afraid of taking risks and I was living this cheap mindset. So I didn't start it until I was around 25 years old and I quit my job when I was 26 years old, but I could have done that a lot sooner if I wasn't so afraid of taking risks. And the truth is if you want to move forward in life and move faster in life, you need to be okay with taking risks. Not everything's going to have a payoff, especially not right away. So once I got rid of this fear of not being able to take risks, I was able to move a lot faster and build my online business and start making more money. But up until that point, those years in between of having that cheap mindset, I was so afraid of taking risks that I could have got things done a lot sooner, but I waited years instead to do it. So that's the fifth way it affected my life was it made me really afraid to take any risks because I had this cheap mentality of losing money and not being able to get it back. So we just talked about the five ways that being cheap negatively affected maybe even ruin my life. And so now I want to talk about the three things that you should be doing instead. What should you be doing or focusing on instead of being cheap? The first thing and probably the most important thing here is to spend on things that will give you an ROI or return on investment. So for example, health and exercise, those are two things that you need, right? So your health without your health, you're nothing. So I'm going to invest in foods that make me feel better, increase my energy and make me feel good and look good and increase my lifespan. That's a great ROI. If I'm dead, I can't do anything. So I want to eat food that's healthy and you don't have to go out and buy organic premium foods and spend a million dollars. But you do want to buy whole foods and unprocessed foods and things that make you feel good and give you fuel instead of things that make you feel like crap. You also want to be exercising, right? So if that means a gym pass or if that means working out at home, I guess which costs nothing. You also want to be putting money into things that make your body better or look better or feel better. And these are all things that have a positive ROI, right? You live longer. You feel better and you look better and you're going to be a better person to be around. Another example is I'm always investing in valuable skills and courses and learnings and education that are going to pay me back 10, 100, 1000X over my lifetime. So I invest around 50K every year in masterminds and coaching and courses and info products. And I do that without hesitation now because I know when I invest in the right things, I'm going to learn things and skills and I'm going to connect with other people that can give me opportunities and help me move forward in life even faster and in bigger steps. So that's the first thing, is spend money on things that are going to give you an ROI like your health and your fitness and skills that are going to pay you back over your lifetime. These are always good investments because they're going to pay you back over and over again. The second thing you should do is to ditch the scarcity mindset. So I used to have this fear that anytime I spent money, I couldn't make more of it. And I knew that wasn't true because I had a job and you can always make more money because money is a replenishable resource but I always had this fear that once I spent the money, I wouldn't get it back. But money is a replenishable resource and you can always make more of it whether it's through a job, whether it's through some projects that you're working on, whether it's because you're learning a skill and you're getting paid for it by clients, which I talk a lot about on this channel, you can always make more money. What you can't make more of is time and you also can't get back relationships that you've burned. So if you're sacrificing all of your relationships and your time and your quality and your happiness, just to save a few bucks, that's not a good way to live, right? If you think about my mom and myself when I was cheap sitting in traffic driving across town to spend a few or to save a few dollars on gas or we're spending hours on the phone with customer service just to save some money on a discount, that's just not worth it, right? Why would you want to spend your entire life prioritizing money just so you can save a few bucks when you're wasting your time, you're wasting your relationships and the time with loved ones? What also happens is when you ditch the scarcity mindset, you'll find that you're actually going to start making more money because now you can focus on making more money. So when you ditch the scarcity mindset, you can focus on making more money, increasing your income, which in turn is going to give you more opportunities to buy back your time and be happier in your life and of course work more on your relationships instead of worrying about money all the time. So that's the second thing, ditch that scarcity mindset because you can always make more money. And the third thing is to focus on being frugal instead of just being cheap. Cheap people are driven to save money no matter what the sacrifice for the cost is, right? Even if it's at the expense of others or their health or their time, giving up all their happiness or their quality of life, they will sacrifice all of that just to save money. Frugal people are intentional with their spending and they balance it more with their time, with their relationships, with their happiness, with quality, with value. They're looking for the right places to spend their money and not just looking to save at any costs. So focus on being more frugal instead of being cheap. So to wrap up this video, I shared with you the five different ways that being cheap ruined my life and I'm hoping that you don't go down that path as well and if you already are on that path, how you can fix it. And I shared three things that you should do instead of being cheap. You need a reminder, you need to spend things that give you an ROI, ditch that scarcity mindset because you can always make more money and focus on being frugal more than being cheap. Cheap people sacrifice everything in their life just to save some money. Frugal people are more intentional about it. They look for areas to maximize every dollar that they have and they're not going to just save money just to save money at the expense of others. Now it took me years to stop being cheap and get rid of these cheap mindsets and tendencies and even get rid of this label of being the cheap guy, which some of my friends still joke about it, which I don't blame them. But once I finally stopped being cheap, I, my life got better in so many ways in every single way. My relationships with my friend and with Jackie got way better. My health and fitness improved. I lost a ton of weight. I got stronger. I felt better and was able to work better. And also I made more money because of all these areas where my life was improving. So once I stopped being cheap, all those things improved. My health, my wealth, relationships, and the money I was making all improved because I just got rid of this mindset. And once I stopped being cheap, I was able to focus more on becoming better. When you're so focused on being cheap, you're not focused on improving yourself. You're just focused on saving money. So get rid of this mindset if you already have it and if you are not there yet, make sure you don't go down this path, right? Watch this video again. Look out for the things to avoid and don't be the cheap guy that I was. Now, if you want to learn more about what I do now, which is making money online with email, which helps me to avoid being cheap because it makes me a decent living, go to emailrainmaker.com that's going to take you to my free group and my email list where I talk a lot more about that. And that's it for this video. If you guys liked it, hit the like button and subscribe button and I'll see you in the next one. Take it easy.