I lived on $0 income for 3 years growing my business…

Summary

• I believe wealth equates to freedom, not necessarily happiness, and managing living expenses is crucial to acquire material wealth.
• As an entrepreneur, controlling spending is vital for growth, but balance is key for a fulfilling life.
• Initially, I had minimal living costs, slept on the gym floor, ate primarily at Chipotle, and drove a paid-off car, enabling me to reinvest in my business.
• Over time, I cautiously scaled my expenses relative to income growth; for example, sharing a rented room to minimize personal expenses while expanding my gym business.
• Investing in growth instead of taking dividends taught me to focus on the importance of securing personal wealth and creating a safety net.
• Living frugally has been a priority; even after income reached millions per month, my lifestyle costs remained relatively low, which was crucial for rapid wealth accumulation.
• Spending decisions were always made by measuring personal value against societal expectations, such as choosing efficient transportation options over luxury for practicality.
• Wealth is about the income-expense ratio; lowering personal expenses increases material wealth accumulation, and I reached my FU number quickly to gain peace of mind.
• The journey is about playing "the game" for passion, not possessions, because wealth provides the ability to pursue genuine interests free from financial pressure.
• I advocate for consistently evaluating the true value of purchases and prioritizing skills development to increase earning capacity, leading to a greater wealth gap and peace of mind.
• I'm driven to reach a billion dollars as a challenge and for enjoyment, maintaining a security-focused mindset without sacrificing the enjoyment of the entrepreneurial journey.

Video

How To Take Action

To manage your money better and grow wealth, here are some steps to follow:

1. Live below your means. Lower your living costs whenever you can. If you can eat out less and cook more, do it. If you can share a place and split rent, that's smart.
2. Reinvest in your business instead of just spending. More money into your work means it can grow and make even more later on.
3. Save up a safety net. Have money set aside so you're secure even if something goes wrong. It feels good to know you're okay no matter what.
4. Think hard about what you buy. Ask yourself if you really need it or just want it because it's cool or others have it. Spend on stuff that matters to you, not what everyone else says is important.
5. Learn new skills. The more you can do, the more chances you have to make money. Use your free time to get better at your work or learn something that can help you earn more.

Remember, the goal is to make more money than you spend. It's about being smart with what you have and not just trying to show off or buy the fanciest things. It's okay to treat yourself sometimes, but saving and investing should come first so you can be free to do what you love without worrying about money.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"Become wealthy the moment you decide you are"

– Alex Hormozi

"Money will buy you freedom will not buy you happiness"

– Alex Hormozi

"Wealth is the ratio between income and expenses"

– Alex Hormozi

"Wealth occurs or you become wealthy the moment you decide you are"

– Alex Hormozi

"Spend money on the things that you value rather than what society's told us to value"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

become wealthy the moment you decide you are because you will realize at some point that money will buy you freedom will not buy you happiness i was talking to an entrepreneur the other day and we were talking about living expenses and one of the things that a lot of our portfolio companies struggle with is when to decide to start spending money right it's very difficult because we a lot of times as entrepreneurs especially those that that grow their businesses many times they've been taught not to spend money which i think is the right you know lesson overall to get to get started right if you define that as like the optimal convert material wealth you know on the flip side there's also some people who struggle to ever get ahead and they're always living paycheck to paycheck even when they have a lot of money and i know i have some friends who uh you know they're in their 50s and uh have always made very very high incomes and have spent virtually every dollar and now they regret it and so i don't think there's anything wrong with spending all the money that you have i do think that it is not ideal for material wealth accumulation if that is the goal but you may enjoy your life that way so it's really i think a balancing act between those things and so i thought it might be fun to make a video um about how my living expenses changed from you know dollar zero uh to now we do you know over 100 million dollars a year at acquisition.com um and if you're new to the channel i make these videos just because i want to help and i hope that these things can help you get to three million dollars more so potentially partner with your business and help you get to 30 and beyond all right but otherwise i have no coaching mentorships or anything like that that i sell and i make these videos because i enjoy doing it okay let's dive in so you know season one here was alex quitting his job and sleeping on the floor all right and so i tried to write out each of these phases or seasons of my life kind of like the outcome the income and kind of the the expenses i was incurring at the time all right so i slept on the gym floor so i had no rent besides my business rent but i know personal rent uh my car payment i was not existing because i had my car in cash um and i actually only lived exclusively on the cash sales from the business that was actually my living money which for me was a combination of eating in and out in chipotle and that was it uh my accountant actually told me that my i did done 500 over 500 transactions at chipotle uh that first year and he was like that's insane i was like well i don't buy groceries and i don't cook so i just i ate out always and that worked out for me so it was actually for me cheaper than all the time and i just stayed at work and i slept there and that was kind of it right and so anyways even during that time i was able to increase my income to about 15 000 a month but i i tend to be very security driven and i've noticed that by myself so i like to make a lot more than i'm spending right and the reason i'm making this video too is that like some people will see us you know fly private or they'll see us eat out you know many many many or every night of the week and think oh that's what i should do now i should emulate that i think i wanted to actually show kind of the come up of what kind of expenses you know expenses income ratio looked like for me over the last 10 years uh to hopefully you know provide some clarity uh for those of you who at least are trying to emulate the path um and if you're not then don't emulate this path but this is what worked for me okay now at this point i had two partners into the scene and we stopped taking dividends and we started investing in the growth of the business overall so you can see here that's when i went from you know one to six gyms and i really took no dividends in that period of time and i had saved this up for about six months so i had about seventy thousand dollars total saved up after taxes from that first you know six to nine months of doing business and at that point that was it and i lived on that for three years that cash lasted me for three years which is again probably why i'm so security driven um because i know what it's like to live on nothing and so my my car was still in cash so i had no car payments and i did up my lifestyle uh to renting a room and uh it wasn't actually me running a room for contacts i actually had a true roommate so it was a house there were seven people lived in the house and i split one room and so this was in southern california and my rent was i think it was 700 a month it might have been 400. it was 400 to 700 in there and it was a house in costa mesa and i literally had another guy who slept in there with me and we split it all right so mind you like i'm reinvesting all my cash in growing these in this business but my personal expenses were virtually zero the only thing i spent money on was going out to ebola and that was it right that was literally all i spent money on and i had this shared room okay now i did that for three years all right so i can say three years really easily but it took three years of my life uh of this little season here now the next season that happened was i bought a condo and i bought a condo because i really liked the condo i thought it was you know well priced and whatnot and uh i lived there for a very short period of time and then i realized that i could rent it for 3 500 a month so that's what i ended up renting the condo for and then that's when layla and i started doing gym turnarounds so you used to fly around and do these launches right and so these launches at that time from business perspective got us to about 200 300 a month now that was uh revenue my income was still very very low uh and that's because again i didn't take distributions because i didn't learn that lesson yet all right so for those of you who are like taking notes at home there's multiple periods of those who know my story i've lost everything in between here multiple times and so that is why i'm so big on taking distributions as you grow because at the end of the day risk is a real thing and um i had spent years of my life building something only to lose it and i didn't want to make that mistake again and so this was yet again another one of those mistakes where i did um and i did these turnarounds and i lived at the extended stay here for 1800 a month all right so my rent expense was 1800 a month uh we lived uh we had a car that we owned in cash which was the prius during this period of time and that was it that was the only expenses was the extended stay and then us eating you know chipotle and stuff and layla was uh kind enough to deal with me eating chipotle during this entire period of time and so we got the business about 200 300 100 000 a month there was a bunch of logistical issues with the business it was low margin there's a lot of operational complexity i was learning right so then from there um we said you know what maybe we should settle down and that's when we switch to having sales teams fly out and do this stuff uh you know on our on our behalf and do the gym turnouts and we could stay central so that's where we moved to albuquerque because we had friends in albuquerque that we wanted to learn from and our rent there was 200 a month okay uh the car we owned in cash which was prius so aka hashtag mozymobiles those of you who are you know valuing uh your business over your uh personal expenditures and we ate out uh eight out out once a week and this is actually when we switched to um to meal prepping excuse me so uh leila started cooking because we had a kitchen uh that was like regular and it wasn't just like an extended steak kitchen so she started cooking which was awesome and uh we ate out once a week for like a date night because that's what we believed what we had to do then was have a date night which we have since uh changed the way we do things but at that time that was the one kind of big expense of the week because we would eat out car was in cash 1200 a month was our rent and here's what's crazy during this period of time the business went from the turnaround business at 300 000 a month to 1.5 million a month all right and these were my living expenses so i was saving and this is really saving i was adding a million dollars to my personal bank account every month all right uh and by i i mean we all right and so this is when we started to really create a lot of wealth very quickly and mind you like we didn't live on a lot of money still all right and i think when we had about i wanna say we had like shoot i wanna say we had four to six million saved up after taxes at this point and that's when in cash we bought a 1.8 million house we bought the 120 million dollar house in cash uh in austin which uh was a really good deal at the time for that particular house we still split one car it was she owned in cash and this car now got upgraded it was an i8 which was a gift from clickfunnels for being an affiliate um so i got the car for free and they basically paid us to buy the car it doesn't matter but the point is i didn't have i didn't have car payments um for the car and this time we still ate out actually less frequently than in albuquerque because we were like super intense in work mode this is where we overindexed on trying to build the enterprise and build the business during that period of time and um i don't want to say i regret that i think it was a necessary lesson i think we did not have nearly as much fun as we probably could have but layla and i were so afraid of losing what we had built and so you know we it was just like we just didn't want to mess it up and so we just wanted to work all the time because we were just so afraid it was very fear drivens though now two or three years in uh at this point we brought we uh we bought an additional car which was a bentley um i talked to bradley and i talked to berkustio friends of ours and uh they were like dude you gotta spend some money and i was like alright so we bought a fancy car and i realized quickly that we uh didn't care and so we sold it within six months we lost money on the car and uh we were happier for it and so uh it's just we realized it just didn't matter to us it just sat in the driveway and getting uh an expensive car fixed we had a teenager ding the thing the bumper and it was you know in the shop for three months of the six and it was ultimately just a pain in the ass now that being said still during this period of time uh you know the the bentley was the only really expensive thing we bought the house was in cash so i had no house payment the car was in cash there no car payment and the only real expenses we had it at that that period of time was eating out one to two times a month that was literally it all right and during that time our revenue increased from 1.5 million a month to over four million a month in that period of time and our wealth continued to uh to grow because everything that was in excess from the income perspective just poured straight into our savings all right so that was for context during that period of time i think we accumulated around i want to say 30 million dollars after taxes in in cash and assets or you know cash equivalents things like that and so it was really just savings right we didn't sell anything at that point that's kind of where we're at at that chapter all right now at that point now mind you this was like cash stuff there's the equities in the business that obviously uh were worth more than that um but that was just straight dividends and i think an important part there is like i i learned to take dividends because i realized that i was giving myself an excuse by reinvesting every dollar of cash flow into the business which a lot of times meant that i just wasn't really focused on profitability and um i think that sometimes that's a business strategy it's very rarely the right one um and a lot of times just having a sustainable growth path where you can de-risk yourself by taking cash off the table because let's say uh covid happened for example and you know our companies had gone down which they did and thankfully we had very strong businesses that were able to sustain that even though they were in heavily hit industries this gave us a very good peace of mind to know that we could cash for the company if we needed to and we could keep everything alive for as long as it lasted and you know we thought it was going to be 12 weeks and then it was two years right and so that's why i'm a big fan of de-risking and living cheap now you're like well that's not living cheap alex thing is that relative to my income and this is why i wanted to make these videos for context right yes we lived in a 1.8 million dollar house and yes you know we sold the house for 4 million two and a half years later like so it was an expensive it was a nice house in a nice neighborhood but like we could buy our house in cash every month off of our income all right so like this is what i feel like is lost sometimes in the podcasts and interviews that i talk about and sometimes like oh you eat now you eat out oh you private and it's like yes but like i'm so security driven and i just want to convey that i'm not saying you have to be i'm saying this is work for me all right and so we were able to accumulate about 30 million bucks in cash between like real estate and stocks i would say like non-business equities um or non-public market equities uh during that period of time all right now after that um those of you some of you know is that in 2021 uh we sold everything so we sold our three businesses we sold two cars we sold the house we sold everything actually we sold one car we were going to sell the other car i think we kept it so excuse that so that should just be one we were planning on selling two we sold one was the belly sorry to interrupt if you guys have been joining the content and have any questions about what you've seen so far go ahead and drop the questions in the comments below so that i can answer them in future videos and provide more value to you keep enjoying the video continue all right so we sold everything so we had no personal assets all right we had business assets and investment assets we know personal assets at that time and so then we started running a condyle the one that we are currently in for 15 grand a month we spend about 15 000 a month on food and eating out we don't cook much and that's just from a time perspective and it's also for us the end of the day is kind of like where we unwind and so we work from pretty early morning until about four or five o'clock then we got to dinner at six we get back home at 7 30. lately and i probably watch a show and then we go to bed and we do it all over again and so that's that's our day that's what we do it might be like that's really boring yeah probably i don't know we like it and so that's what we do so we spend 15 15 a month on food probably fifteen thousand dollars a month on travel i will say this i flew private more during this season that's a plane there you go there's my plane uh we flew private more during this season than we do now and that's because we found something that i think uh gives us confers from a benefit to cost ratio many of the advantages of private uh but it's uh it's public so we actually fight jsx now for anything that is on the west coast which is basically like semi-private travel it's cool it's like you know you can have like three to you know 15 other people on the plane with you and you and it has all the same benefits of private which is you roll up straight to the plane 10 minutes before it takes off you literally get right into the plane and then it lands and then you walk straight to a car uh so it just saves so much time and it's marginally more expensive than a normal ticket i think some of the tickets are like 200 to 400 bucks it's not expensive and so we have opted to do it to flying on that airline rather than private um and this is not sponsored by jsx but i you know i would endorse them because they're great and so we stopped we stopped flying private because you know spending 50 000 on a plane flight if i can get basically the same benefit for 400 uh is worth it and so again this is one of those like we flew private because it saved us time and it turned travel from a negative into a positive but jsx i think accomplishes all that and i never cared about having other people on the plane i just cared about getting places faster not having to get hassled um and jsx accomplishes that so i mean we're we we pretty much always fly those now um everywhere we go and almost if anything uh we we try and fly places where they go which is wonderful and you know during this period of time where we're currently at you know uh acquisition.com i say in the videos you know we're doing over a hundred million dollars a year but right now we're over 150 but just for the sake of you know not making the number change every time the businesses grow we grew from about seven million dollars a month to uh 13 million a month between the portfolio companies in that period of time and so i show this to show that you know i don't think our lifestyles have increased at the proportion that our income has and i think that's because layla are both very security driven um as individuals and that works for us and i want to have kind of one final point that i'll make here that uh hopefully you can take away from this is that if the goal is material wealth accumulation then the lower your personal expense is the more you will accumulate right and your peace of mind will be predicated on the ratio between your income and your expenses right if you can make enough in a month or a year to give yourself another multiple years of living then you go towards your fu number as fast as possible so you know there's two variables there how much you make and how much you spend now at some point people are like well i'd like to increase my expenditures i think that's natural and i think that's normal and i think the thing that i would push against which is why we have uh you know a hashtag that went pretty uh pretty viral which is mosey mobiles uh we'll probably have mosey mansions too i'll probably start that one uh maybe i'll show an image of what our 1200 apartment looked like but it's it's really less about living cheap and more about spending money on the things that you value rather than what society's told us to value right and so for me the equity growth of my businesses i valued more than having a lambo or having a bentley and for me i just don't get a lot of value from it now some people might and that's okay i just think that it's really good to think consciously am i buying this because i want status from other people or because i really think that this thing converts value right same thing with flying private for example at least for us the decision calculus has changed recently just because i just discovered this um for the last few months we've been flying jsx and honestly i love it it's great i you know i the benefits of value ratio uh has diminished now that i have an alternative that is you know 1 100th of the price of private and confers almost all the benefits that i enjoyed i say this to say i am all about wealth and wealth is the ratio between income and expenses and the peace of mind that you have from knowing that you have enough and so for me my goal was to get to enough as fast as possible so that i could feel that peace of mind um everything we do now is just for love of the game which is why the podcast is called the game which is why i make these videos and just to see like what would it look like to get to a billion uh because that sounds really exciting and epic and fun and at the same time as i'm super invested and motivated to get there i'm okay if we never do uh and i don't even want to say that because i do 100 believe that we're gonna get there but it's it's really about playing the game and i think that that has been i think the goal if i have for mozzie nation is that everyone can get to a point where they're just playing the game for the love of the game not for the lambo or for the mansion or for the whatever because i can tell you that those are moments and those are fleeting and so i think it's much more of a process of becoming rather than obtaining and i think that if we can make that switch we get to experience a lot of the benefits of the wealth because wealth occurs or you become wealthy the moment you decide you are because you will realize at some point that money will buy you freedom will not buy you happiness and so if the goal is you know first the goal is freedom short but then you're free to experience the feelings that you have and you'll realize that it was not that thing but it can absolutely decrease pain and inconvenience in your life and so i can obviously i am somebody who's gone after material wealth accumulation in my life so i don't want to say that like it's not something that i find interesting fun and stimulating i don't even know what i would do if this game didn't exist but it's really just to take pause and think like are these things that i'm buying really adding more value than the price that i'm incurring to purchase them and i think many times people purchase things without thinking that extra taking that extra second to pause and say like am i really getting 500 value from this shoe am i really getting 2 000 from this belt am i really getting xyz now you can do this relative to your income right like it's not unreasonable to live on a million dollars a year if you make 15 million a year right it's not it's actually less and here's what's crazy it's less to live on a million dollars a year when you make 15 than it is to live on 100 when you make 400 right it's about the ratio between income and expenses and so we can control our expenses into it and also we can control our income based on getting more skills which is why i've been a very loud advocate for spending as much of your extra dollars on acquiring more skills so that you can increase your capacity to earn and when you do that you can accelerate towards that wealth discrepancy between income and expenses at a faster rate and then ultimately achieve the peace of mind that i think most of us are after anyways mosey nation um i love you guys i appreciate you i don't deserve this audience that you guys have come together you guys are amazing and i just i'm so grateful that this channel and the other you know social media accounts and things like that thank you guys for all the support you guys are just awesome i just didn't even know so many of people like you know me existed out there and it definitely makes me feel less alone so appreciate you guys keep being awesome and i'll see you guys in the next money making madness video we have on this channel mozination if you enjoyed that video smash the subscribe button and hit the little notification bell the reason for that is because i don't actually have a cadence when i make these videos so if you want to make sure you don't miss the next one that comes out go subscribe notify and i'll see you the next one you