 I'd love to welcome everybody back to the Independent Investor Channel. I get asked all the time why I do this project and I think when it comes down to it, I think it has a lot to do with just having a voice. And I'm one of those kind of introspectual people that pay attention. I talk to a lot of people. I travel all over. I started traveling when I was 19. I left my hometown. I really couldn't wait to leave. I went to the same suite of high schools. I went to some country schools and then basically a country high school. And I couldn't wait to get out and get to college. But my opportunity took me a lot further than that. I had the opportunity to break in to the Alaska commercial fishing vessel fleet and actually work up there for seven years. I fit in college in the same time. I didn't have the money to go to college. So I actually went on some academic scholarships and that helped get me through my first couple of years of college. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the scholarships actually went away. And I learned right away how difficult it was going to be to make money. See, I'm not of the belief that you're just going to get lucky in life. And I think now in 2023, I think with the availability of social media and so many people that through whatever conduits they work, I think your chances of getting lucky are much more pronounced now. Because anybody can buy a GoPro, anybody can start a YouTube channel. There's not anybody out there that doesn't have a smartphone that doesn't have the opportunity to start a social media presence. Now that's not to suggest that all people who start social media are going to inevitably find success. I would actually contend that it's probably a lot less of a success ratio than people think. Or when they get involved with social media, they just think it's an automatic path to riches. I can tell you I've been doing social media for six years and it's been a labor of love. Nothing in pursuit of just financial ends would have kept me motivated through the hundreds of times that I wanted to quit social media altogether because it's a huge learning curve. It's a huge endeavor. It is a cost endeavor. And you really have to believe what it is that you're looking to share with people. And I think that all too often people think that what they have to share with people is so special that there are just going to be thousands and thousands of people to come in and consume their message. And although I do believe that the access to information has improved, I'm not necessarily sure that people's reliance upon others relinquishes their responsibility to find their own personal motivation. And therein lies the struggle with people and understanding that if you're not willing to make certain changes or to fight certain predispositions that you have in life and or buy into those predispositions, which look like I will never make myself into something because I don't come from something or I'm not. I didn't start out with any type of advantage. I didn't have my college paid for. I wasn't given any type of infusion to start a business and fall on my face. I think those predispositions are all barriers that people could probably do themselves a favor and just wipe the slate clean in understanding that everybody has a fair and equitable shot. Some probably more than others with the opportunity that they're provided. Everything that I've been able to build on the independent investor channel over the last six years on YouTube, if I were to go back and say here's where I envision myself six years from now, there's no way that I would have been able to envision where we are. So you start on this journey and you set off for a place that you really can't put your thumb on in understanding where you're going to end up and especially how you're going to get there. I can't tell you the number of connections that I've been able to meet through social media. It's been an absolutely wonderful ride and I think that's really where the inherent value for me lies. I do make a few dollars through social media and that actually helps kind of augment what I feel like is a very high cost of living now. We're in an era right now where groceries and gasoline are our topics of discussion in the news media. Supply chain issues are driving up the cost and I do think there's a great separation between the haves and the have nots. In other words, the upper class and the upper wealthy middle class and the lower class of people who are just struggling to get by who hear a message of empowerment and it really seems like a distant far cry from what they could potentially achieve in life and I think that's really, really unfortunate. And so when I speak about the voice on social media that I'm trying to convey to people, it's to understand that no matter where you come from, no matter what your socioeconomic background is, no matter where and how you define in your life as to where you are, you can always look to evolve to a place where you can change your dynamic. And I think that's a super empowering message to people when they can understand and perhaps maybe relate with somebody like myself who didn't start from zero. I started from the negative. I tell this story all the time on the channel because I think it's important to understand that if I was provided an accelerated head start, I probably would end up through my own initiative where I am today or probably beyond because I've always had an affinity for attempting to get ahead and identifying in life what it is that you could use to get ahead and a lot of people do that through their profession. They do that through their side hustles now. I've talked to a lot of people who buy and sell real estate, a lot of people who buy and sell autos and resell those. A lot of people will take somebody's evidently their problem and turn it into their fortune just by running a diagnostic on an automobile that somebody just doesn't want to spend the time to fix and they resell those. So the opportunities out there are absolutely available to you. I just think when we talk on a deeper level, it's important for people to understand that there is always hope and it is important for people to understand that hope can be really, really dwindled if your mental psyche always tells yourself that you can't get ahead. What I find all the time on social media is that people will tune in to certain channels and they'll deploy blindly what it is the social media influencer or life coach. We've thrown these terms out there is telling them to do and they do not relate with the material that's being put down and they blindly put that information to work and they monitor it and they scrutinize it and they scrutinize it from a perspective to say if this doesn't work out I'm going to blame that individual. Now you might go through some regret and you might go through some depression because all too often from what I've seen is even if it does work out for a short amount of time, if people cannot relate with the program that they're putting in play, it's probably doomed to failure over time because even the euphoria even the euphoria that you can get from getting involved in something and finding that one little thing that kind of gives you some excitement and re-infuses that hope that you have, albeit based on false pretenses in a lot of cases, will accelerate that especially if that idea or that thesis really looks like it's turning out to be something really, really well. The problem is that most of those ideas that people are looking to sell to you are relatively short-lived and the inability of those solutions to be long-standing in your life just don't hold muster when people are truly looking to find good information and people aren't robots, people have feelings, they get tired of hearing the next best thing in every opportunity that they go to and they get tired of constantly deploying a program here and a program here. All of the programs are asking for a small monetary contribution and they get tired of seeing those solutions fall to the wayside and not materializing in their life and it's really, really tough and in today's society those opportunities are in front of your face on a daily basis. You cannot escape them. There's always somebody out there with an angle trying to sell you on one thing or another. So when I come back to the importance of the voice on the independent investor channel, the word independent means an awful lot to me. And let me explain something to the viewing audience. I do what it is that I do because I have merit in what I do and it's amazing to me with all the mistakes that I've made that I still am where I am and the truth of the matter is that in reflection of not incorporating financial discipline in my life there's no way that I would be where I am today and so from the perspective of sharing a tutorial for somebody who didn't start from zero who started in the negative and when I'm talking in the negative I'm talking about the worst of the worst. I'm talking about IRS debts times two which I have cleaned up. I'm now debt free. I have no debt. My debt to income ratio is zero. I carry no debt and I carry a portfolio value north of $500,000 and I do so on a blue collar salary. That to me is extremely important now to share with people. Yes, but I think people misconstrue sometimes the message and understanding that I'm not done. My plan now as a snapshot that I share with social media is just a snapshot in time and understanding that I didn't just end up in this place. It was a calculated decision that I made many many years ago around in my teens that I would break out of my predisposition to living a life that did not involve personal wealth. It was a personal decision of mine. When you make a personal decision like that, it does a couple of things. It holds your own feet to the fire and it puts yourself up against an idea that you will have to deploy that over the long term. It is a lifelong goal not to be misconstrued, not to be motivated against or not to be encouraged away from by anybody. The only person that can allow you to trip up on your own personal goals is yourself. You hold yourself 100% accountable for putting yourself on this path to your idea, your vision of what it is that you want to accomplish and it transcends. Mine was personal security and personal wealth. If you wanted to learn an instrument, if you wanted to put yourself on an exercise regime for the rest of your life, you could do certain things like that. But for me, personal wealth was always something that just absolutely fascinated me. I grew up in the country. We got what was called the news review and every Sunday it would have the stock tickers in one section of the paper. I always remember taking that section of the paper and just being absolutely enthralled by what it is that I was seeing. I would track certain stocks from week to week and it just fascinated me. Fast forward a few years and the first opportunity that I had to actually get involved with financial markets was with a financial planner. Now this financial planner made a living of making house calls. It was the only access that we would have to introduction to this elusive Wall Street, that of which many, many years later I lived 20 minutes away from, ironically now living where I live here in New York City. But the distance that we've traveled from then, having access to financial markets was absolutely fascinating. Having access to the ability to buy into a mutual fund was absolutely fascinating to me. So much so that I poured my entire life savings into this mutual fund that I was sold by this financial planner, irrespective of what I needed to live, where I was in my life, how much flux and transition I would go through at that particular time in my life. And it was a real learning curve for me. And I would engage over the next 20 years of learnings with the financial planning institution. I would go through four. I would go through some interesting scenarios where, you know, when I took my last commercial fishing vessel check of $10,000, I said, you know what, I'm not going to blow this like everybody else does. I'm going to put this to work. And I put it to work with a financial advisor with Smith Barney at the time. And now it's its city. But at the time it was Smith Barney. And the investment dollars went into the account and it never got invested. The market went up and they actually retroed me the money that I would have made had the financial planner did what we discussed that they needed to do and just forgot or didn't do it. And that was a real interesting awakening for me in understanding, you know, what the financial planner did in their capacity to connect regular people to the stock market. Fast forward through my time with Edward Jones, understanding a lot more in actually for the first time, reading the disclosures and statements that really outlined what it is that they received in way of compensation and starting to challenge this idea of is there a better way? Is regular people, is there only access to financial markets through a financial planner? And I will say that over the last five years, things have transitioned and the industry has been really turned on its ear. And we have started to define in the industry what I feel like are those retail investors out there that are being introduced for the first time with this idea of taking control over your own money. Now the financial institutions would scoff at that idea and they will provide all kinds of statistics to you as to how that is not a lucrative decision point that you need to go on with your life. You need to continue just taking the kids to stock or practice and living your nominal life with your white picket fence and your home that you're over levered and your two nice cars in the driveway and leave the financial planning up to the financial institutions that are managing your money. That's what they would have you believe. In some cases, that could very much be the case because I do not give all people the ample credit that they would need to succeed in financial markets by becoming an independent investor. However, not everybody, not everybody out there needs to put their head in the sand with a financial planner. You can probably end up building well through a financial planner and be just as happy doing so if you do not have the ability to make investing more essential to your lifestyle. It has to be part of a holistic program. It has to be something that you adhere to. It has to impact your spending decisions. It has to it has to influence what it is that you do every single day because you're not looking at your inflow and outflow as just a mechanism to your own happiness day to day. Rather, you're looking at it as an impact to your total overall long-term program going forward. It's something that I take very, very serious. It's something that I want to impress upon people to take it more seriously as well. For those that want to, the path is there for you. The path is aligned with a very, very simple strategy of using the tax-protected vehicle of a Roth IRA that's available to all people out there that make less than $130,000 as a single person. I believe it's $250 for a married couple somewhere along that lines. It doesn't really matter because the majority of people fail to meet those maximum benchmarks every year anyway, so we start there. If the majority of our retail investing community, that of which I think get the raw end of the deal, can just acknowledge how important it is to start that Roth IRA, then they will set themselves up for the premier pillar in self-directed investing, and that's to understand tax protection and how much it means. Now, if you get to that maximum cap of $6,500 going forward, then you can talk about adding different layers onto your strategy going forward like I have, and I've done for many, many years. I've been able to max fund my Roth IRA for myself and my wife for the last 10 years. Handily. It's a piece of cake. I transfer over $13,000 this year, no problem. We fund it, we'll do the same next year. We'll continue to fund toward those caps throughout the year, and I make sure and fund those Roth IRAs at the first of every year. No problem. If you're not there, look at it like an opportunity because you don't need any money to start a Roth IRA. There might be a 500 minimum, there might be a 1,000 minimum, whatever those minimums are. If you can't prove to yourself that you can't save those fundings or those initial amounts, then what are we doing conversing with each other? The idea here is that we move people from non-investor status to investor status. That doesn't mean going from non-investor to millionaire overnight. That's not what it means. What it means is taking people and psychologically getting them on this path of empowerment, understanding that they do have the ability to change their life on a whim like this. They can change their life with the decisions. I'm telling you, the opportunities that exist now in the marketplace are more available than ever before. I talked about my time with Edward Jones and I talked about some of the interactions that I've had through spending $50 on a transaction. Now you can buy products to fund your accounts free of charge. You can actually enjoy passive investing with ETFs, exchange traded funds, and or index funds which are very similar in nature with very low cost and in some cases no cost to the investor. You can become that participant. You can start to understand how that compounding interest that we all should be striving for is attainable no matter what you make, no matter what your monthly contributions are, you can participate. Those two things, income and contributions per month, are going to be the single greatest contributors to where you end up with your number down the line into your future. But I would contend that people who would just normally have went through life and not invested as opposed to those in the same circumstance that do opt to invest and end up with a quarter million dollars of wealth down the line is a success story in and of itself. No, did they become millionaires? No. Did they seek out to become millionaires? No. Did they engage in a program that they could adhere to for the rest of their life? Yes. And they have X number of dollars to show for it down the line, which a quarter million dollars as opposed to zero in my mind for people in general who could look at that and say I would rather opt for the 250 or the 300 or the 150 or whatever their number is in the future as opposed to taking the convenient route now and what I contend is the biggest mistake that people can make in not adhering to a strategy, in not opting to participate in financial markets. That is the key, right? So when we talk about having a voice on the channel and really trying to reach people, I've been able to reach people over the last six years through my network all over the world. We're talking about Eastern Europe. We're talking about New Zealand. We're talking about a large conglomerate from India. We're talking about a large conglomerate from North America, both Canada and the United States, which is the predominant place for my message and the patrons that enjoy the message because the United States is an interesting place in that sometimes I think people don't acknowledge how many opportunities are here and getting people to just put one foot in front of the other sometimes is a lot more difficult than getting somebody in another culture that has more barriers, has more struggle, that has to go through that mental deliberation of overcoming those barriers, to seek out that wealth. I find all the time that people that are abroad sometimes make better investors than the ones here domestically that are provided all the opportunity in the world and don't take advantage of said opportunities. And so I don't discriminate between offering opportunity globally because it really does come down to the individual choice. And there are people who would look at YouTube and say, there's no way I would ever go on YouTube and accept anything in way of recommendations with the topic of money. It is faux pas. It is not a place where people come to seek out information, tutorials, etc., like mine. The sheer reality is I will continue to do what it is that I do without the compliments of social media. I'm a funny guy. I don't do this for a living. I do the project because I want to. I do it when I want to. I do not put daily uploads. If I did, I would probably explode on social media. I'm waiting until I have more bandwidth into the future, more time to devote to the craft, and get it to a point where I actually have the ability to put down the product that I want to put down to really, really reach the masses. For those of you guys who subscribe to the channel free of charge, you're getting a phenomenal insight to somebody who has come from nothing and has mentally deployed a strategy. I can continue to you this. The sheer reason why I've been able to find the success that I've found in financial markets is due to my perspective and my drive on financial markets. It has nothing to do with my financial makeup, where I come from, my current profession, which again is a nominal salary at that. It is all about the discipline. It is all about the program. It is all about finding happiness outside of financial markets and understanding that financial markets and the portfolio that defines your pledge to financial markets is just that. It doesn't define you. I don't allow it to define me. I'm always constantly evolving my portfolio. I run my portfolio. My portfolio does not run me. I run my personal finance, and I work really, really hard at always fine-tuning the organization within my financial application, which I feel like is a very simple intangible benefit for a lot of people out there in that what I see, they are just disorganized, and they need to get organized. And it can come down to a very, very simple adherence to understanding the strategic goals over the accounts that you deploy. Why did you start a checking in a savings account? Do you use them to full capacity? Do you know what your strategic goals over those accounts are? Do you have that Roth IRA that I talked about? Do you want to gain financial security into your future? Do you want to take the necessary steps that are necessary to achieve that financial security into the future? And I will say, do you have the confidence and do you have the courage that it takes to take that initial step to do what most people cannot do? And that is change and change for the better and continue to evolve as your process and your application evolves into the future. This is a little different of a video that I typically put out guys, but I think there's been a lot of people who have evolved with me over the course of the channel who will never go anywhere. I think there's people who have come into the channel and they've since left the channel, hopefully empowered with an idea that they can do it too. But if you're new to the independent investor channel in 2023, I would invite you to visit at independent investor on YouTube. It is one of the most unique experiences that you will have on social media. Okay, I do a live stream every single Friday. It's to engage with a group and allow people to come in and speak with somebody with myself who is on the road to success. What you define success to be is really up to you. I'm not there yet. I'm progressing along that road. And when I get there, it will not be as obvious as most people say to say, you're a millionaire, you're automatically successful. It will be contained in the very personal definition that I set out for myself many, many years ago to embark on this journey to achieve financial security into my future. And when we get there guys, it's going to be absolutely imperative that you're with me along this journey for those of the community members that are also empowered members of the community. They are also growing wealth. They've adhered to my thresholds of wealth, which going from 500 to 1000 to 2500 to 5000 to 10,000 to 25,000 to 50,000 to 100 to 250 to 500 to 1 million. There are 11 stages to wealth building. And if you can adhere to those and you can ask yourself where you are in the pursuit of those goals, the better off you'll be guys. Find me at independent investor on YouTube. I'm also on Twitter, Instagram. I'd invite you to subscribe to the empowering message and I'd invite you to join us on our Friday livestream guys. That's all I have for today's video and good luck in your investment future.