 Hey, John Crestani here, internet marketer, tech entrepreneur, multi-millionaire. And in this video, I'm going to be going over some of my biggest financial regrets. Being a self-employed business person. I'm just going to go over the biggest mistakes I've made and hopefully you can take away some ways to avoid those yourself. I'm going to be talking about 4 topics particularly. And I'm going to be going over those topics in detail and how I could have possibly avoided them and how you can avoid making the same mistakes I have. Let's get it. Hey, John Crestani here. And many of you may know about me because I teach marketing on the internet. And I teach how to start internet businesses and use marketing to get exposure for those. But it's been a long journey to get to the place where I am. I've had a lot of ups and downs. And I've made a lot of bad decisions which were disastrous and potentially would have taken me out of doing business at all. I'm going to be going over some of these problems that I've gone over. So, hopefully you can avoid them. This is a very important video simply because many of you are going through the trials of starting your own business. But there are major obstacles along the way. And there are many points of decision which you can make in how you manage your business day to day or how you manage your time or your money day to day. And many opportunities you may get which you could take up on or not take up on and understanding what to do and what not to do will help you greatly. So, the first thing I'm going to speak about is retirement. My first biggest financial regret I'm going to go over for is for many years, I didn't save up a dime for retirement. I didn't put any money away in retirement accounts particularly. In America, we have a particular type of entity where you can put money away for retirement. But you can't touch it until you are 65 years old. And I always avoided putting money away in an account where I couldn't touch it because I wanted to be in control of all my money. And I didn't mind that I didn't save money on taxes. I would just put some money away into investments and I'd call it, oh, this is my retirement fund. But it wasn't actually a retirement account. And what happened was a few years ago, I didn't have any money saved up for retirement. I never put any money away. And what ended up happening is my business was going through a bad period. And I started using money from my other savings accounts to help fund my business during times which were harder. When my business started coming back, I keep using that money in the business or to fund my lifestyle instead of actually saving up money for retirement. And this left me in a really prickly situation because I was what I'd say 30 years old. And I had zero savings for my retirement when in reality what I should have been doing all along is I should have been saving up a portion of what I earned for retirement all along. And if I were to go back in time, I would have consistently set aside a percentage at least 10% of everything I earned each year into a retirement account where I couldn't touch it. Where it was there until I hit the age of 65 in America so that I could actually use that for to be retired. Not have to work again. I'm happy to say I fund my retirement more. I max out. I contributed at least a quarter of a million dollars a year to my retirement. And my retirement spent growing very fast as well as my wife's retirement so that I'm able to put a lot of money away tax-free. I save a lot of money in the process. And I'm able to work towards retiring very young. Which is really exciting for me. Now, my magical number for retirement is just to give you an idea is 6 million dollars. And the reason why it's 6 million dollars is because at a 4% return on investment, I will be able to live off 240,000 dollars a year. About 20,000 dollars a month when I'm retired. This way I can live a nice lifestyle making quarter million a year and be completely retired. So, that's the goal for me. And I'm working very aggressively. Now that I've set a goal because I never had a retirement goal, I'm aggressively working towards getting that retirement goal. So, what I would suggest to you is if you aren't saving up for retirement, figure out how much money you will need to retire. And then work towards that goal. Make it a game. To come up with your own number for retirement based on 4% a year, if you can save up 1 million dollars in your retirement account by the time you're retired, right? Then you will be receiving 40,000 dollars a year just on interest, right? Without touching any of your principle. So, that's passive income. That's true passive income. And you know what? If you want to live off of 80,000 dollars a year, you just double the number. So, you need to save up 2 million dollars in your retirement account. And I'd be interested to hear from you. What is your retirement goal? How much money do you need saved up in your retirement account in order to live the lifestyle you want with passive income? Type it in the comments below. I'd love to see what your retirement goals are. Now, this one I got to sit down for because this is just incredibly embarrassing. And probably one of the biggest financial mistakes I ever made was not paying taxes. For years, I didn't really know about how to pay taxes. And in 2015, my business made roughly a million dollars profit. And I owed about, I don't know, 400,000 dollars in taxes. I thought I had paid them. I had hired an accounting firm that year that was supposed to do my taxes. They did my taxes based on the what I earned. But moving up to earning a million dollars a year, you know, I just assumed that my financial people figured out all the money stuff for a long time. You know, this is in my 20s. You know, I didn't like numbers. I didn't like financial stuff. I liked marketing and sales. So, I didn't focus on numbers. I thought I'd off sourced it to a good company. But when I realized that my accounting firm had not paid my taxes because I wasn't really looking over their shoulder and that I owed 400,000 dollars that I didn't have, it was really, really big problem. Imagine having 80 to 100,000 dollars in my bank accounts at the time because I figured everything in my bank accounts was profit. And then I get a tax bill for 400,000 dollars. That was really scary. This is the same time I got married. So, literally, I thought I was doing fine in life. I had, you know, money in the bank, etc. And I was being told I was not only I didn't have money but I owed the government over 400,000 dollars that I didn't have. My wife was also pregnant at the time with our first kid. It was just a really scary situation going into this. And my business was failing in 2016 which will lead into my next point. But if I were to do everything all over again, I would have paid my quarterly taxes. I would have been more involved in understanding how much I owed my government. So, I wasn't stuck at the end of the year with a monster bill that I had not paid any of and being put in a situation where I owed a lot of back money on taxes. I had more anxiety attacks that year than I ever had before. If you have anxiety attacks about money, you know, real anxiety attacks or panic attacks, type in me in the comments below or type in just I do. Because that year, even though I had a successful business, I was written about in Forbes, it just was really scary. And I don't ever want to go back to that time where I was that stressed out. But just pay your taxes, folks. Pay your quarter lease. Pay to every 3 months. Pay what you expect to taxes. Don't wait to the end of the year. Pay it soon if you're running your own business. The third biggest financial regret for me was a company I started named Neutrist or otherwise known as How to Lose $750,000 in a year. The business I started, I thought I was really smart. I just come off of 2015. This Neutrist happened in 2016. And I just come off of a year where as a 20-something year old, my business had made $3 million but I personally made a million dollars. And I thought I just had the Midas touch. I thought I was a king among men. I could do anything and make money. And I started getting a big ego about things. I started a company, an affiliate network which I knew nothing about running. I hired people who are inexperienced for the job, not all of them. And I ended up losing $750,000. Ultimately, I was a bad manager. Ultimately, I was bad at managing finances. Ultimately, I was bad at understanding legal contracts. And all of these things added up to result in what ended up happening which was non-payments from clients, fraudulent activities from our business partners as well as employee embezzlement. So, I got hit by a number of different things which resulted in and just bad management which resulted in me losing a lot of money in a year. The same year 2016 where I got hit with a tax bill of $400,000, I also lost almost a million dollars in my business that I had started. And that was a pretty tough hole to get out of. I was in deep debt. And it was really scary. And I had no savings. I hadn't saved up for retirement at the time. Nothing. You know? And I was having my first child. I just got married. It was a really scary time. And what I would have done if I had gotten back in time is first off, I wouldn't have started a business that I didn't know anything about. Second off, if I'm running a business that is cash flow negative which is an affiliate network, I'm not going to explain what negative cash flow is. But basically, it's when you're spending money before you're receiving money. This is similar to e-commerce. When you do business with Amazon, you have to buy the product. You have to buy the inventory. If you're going to sell, for instance, hats. You have to produce and buy and pay the people for the hats before you actually send them to Amazon. So, in order to do that, you're losing money in order to hopefully gain a lot more. If you want to grow the business, you have to continually lose larger and larger amounts of money in order to potentially gain more. And if I were to start a cash flow negative business, I would either raise investment or get funding or I wouldn't start the business at all. Because that's the only way these sorts of businesses make sense is if you have investors. So, I probably would have not started that business at the time if I were to go back in time. My fourth biggest financial regret takes us back to an earlier time and that is actually... I'm not going to name the name of the person. This is a fake name. But overpaying Travis. What happened in 2013 through 2015, I had a number of people working with me on a commission-only basis. They were essentially... They're called media buyers. They're essentially affiliates that were working under me. And I overpaid everybody. I took much of my profits. I took the large deal of my profits and I just handed out freely to all my employees. All my employees really liked me. And I was making a lot of money too. So, I thought it was cool. I'll just pass more money out to more people. One of my employees, Travis, I paid over a hundred thousand dollars in a single month. And he took zero risk on anything. So, I paid one of my employees a hundred some thousand dollars. He might say, okay, well, if he did good work, great. But what I should have done if I went back in time, I would have paid less commissions. I would have paid less of my profits to my employees and taken more of my business income and saved it or reinvested it into the business to grow into new areas. I ended up cutting myself off at the knees by not allowing my business to be more profitable and expand into more... You know, maybe software projects or more ad channels. But allow me to take more risk. Paying out my employees a hundred thousand dollars a month was not the best investment for my business. And what ended up happening was Travis after a couple months of making a lot of money, he just ended up leaving because he had more money than he had ever dreamed of. And he didn't want to work for me. But I ultimately created the situation because I allowed myself to overpay my employees instead of believing in my own vision for the company and putting my money behind my vision for growing the company rather than just overpaying employees. So, there's a limit. Pay people well but don't overpay. Overpaying people is just a big of a problem as underpaying them. So, I hope that was insightful to you. I hope you learned a little something about what to avoid. And hopefully my own experience helps inform your experience. And let me know what was the most useful thing to understand, the most useful concept. Was it the retirement story? Was it taxes? Was it nutritionist? Or was it overpaying people? Let me know in the comments below. Also, let me know if my speed on this video was too fast, if I just went through things, if I should have given more detail. Or if I went too slow, if I maybe dragged on with my stories or repeated myself too much. Or if it was actually just right. So, let me know in the comments. Also, subscribe to my channel if you'd like more videos on marketing and making money on the internet. And join one of our communities. We have a chat, Discord chat channel. We have a Facebook group. And we also have a subreddit where you can interact with other people, kind of learn from each other. I encourage you to join those. Let's create a community. I get 2 trillion messages a day. So, I can't answer people. I have people saying, can you email me and like, you know, John, can you be my mentor? Dude, you know, if I have free time, I'm going to spend it with my daughters. So, I bet you're nice, you know, some person from Morocco or wherever. And you know, I could help you. But you know, I can't help everybody. I'm going to help my daughters, okay? So, that's where I'm going. And looking forward to seeing you in future videos, releasing new videos every single day. Same time every day. Looking forward to seeing you as a regular on this channel. Talk soon.