I sold everything

Summary

• I sold two businesses for just under $50 million along with some exotic cars and a house in Austin to reset my life.
• My goal was to live with minimal belongings, travel, and determine where I wanted to settle down.
• I prefer living in a location where nature, restaurants, a quality gym, and a grocery store are within walking distance.
• The ideal house for me includes a view of water or mountains, super-fast Wi-Fi, a hot tub or pool, an office, a studio, a minimum of three bedrooms, and a spacious balcony or patio.
• I look for homes in zero-tax states and in areas easily accessible by Amazon Prime.
• Having lived in many cities, I know that experiences are largely based on specific neighborhoods and the people around you.
• After selling everything, I traveled with my wife and realized that having belongings and a stable home is important for maintaining relationships and having a sense of familiarity.
• Hedonic adaptation teaches us that the novelty of new acquisitions wears off, and I experienced it with cars and temporarily swapping them.
• I've learned that status symbols like a Bentley for $300,000 don't bring lasting happiness; they're not worth the investment for me.
• For travel, private jets make the experience positive by reducing transit hassles and recovery time, making sense to me given my income.
• My unifying decision-making theory for material goods is to prioritize function over form.
• I wear simple cotton tank tops for comfort and prefer expensive flannels that fit me well.
• To reduce clutter, I only add new clothing if it has high utility and replaces something of lower value.
• My long-term plan is to have 2-3 homes in different climates to enjoy variety without feeling nomadic.
• The "middle path" of balanced material possessions works best for me, where the utility of an item is the main criterion for choosing whether to own it.
• By having a decision-making algorithm like this, I save mental bandwidth for new choices rather than reevaluating old ones.

Video

How To Take Action

A good way of doing things is to start small and easy. Here are some steps you could use from what I've learned:

1. Make a Must-Have List: Write down what's most important in your life like I did. If a good gym or certain foods matter to you, put them on the list. This helps you know what you really need.

2. Choose Function Over Form: When you buy things, think more about how they'll help you, not just how they look. Get clothes or tools that work well, not just fancy ones.

3. Declutter Your Space: Try living with less. If you get something new, maybe give away something you don't use anymore. It can make you feel better and less crowded.

4. Plan for Comfort: While traveling is fun, having a home base is nice too. It gives you a place to come back to and keeps you connected with friends and family.

5. Adapt to Happiness: Remember that new stuff is exciting at first, but the feeling doesn't last. Only keep things that make you happy over time.

6. Be Smart with Money: If you're doing well with money, it's okay to spend some for good experiences like faster travel, but only if it makes sense for you. Don't waste money on things just for status.

7. Think About Location: If you're moving or setting up a business, choose a place with the things you want close by. A good environment can change your whole experience.

By having this kind of plan, you can save time thinking about what to do. You use that saved time to make new choices instead of going back to old ones.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"I've lived my life in seasons"

– Alex Hormozi

"I wanted things to be walking distance from me"

– Alex Hormozi

"Having a grocery store really nearby… it's actually very convenient"

– Alex Hormozi

"I wanted to have a way to meet lots of neighbors that were interesting"

– Alex Hormozi

"Form over function… improved function is what I make all my decisions based on"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

two businesses for just under 50 million and two cars that were both exotic cars and a four million dollar house in austin and that left me with really no i would say i mean i did have like equities and stocks and stuff but i didn't really have like material belongings and i did that because i wanted to have a reset and so what i want to do in this video is talk to you about one um what life was like or why i made the decision two what life was like after i made the decision what i learned and then some of the realizations i had along the way and what i'm doing now and so if you don't know who i am my name's alex mozy i own acquisition.com we have a portfolio of companies that's about 85 million a year make these videos because i just want to transfer whatever lessons i have learned along the way to hopefully help some other people let's dive in so why did i go and sell everything last year i think the biggest thing is it felt very heavy i felt like i had all these material things that were weighing me down and taking my attention and i have lived my life in seasons and what i mean by that is like i look back on my life and i've had like three to five year seasons i had a season where i went to college and then became a management consultant i had a season of running gyms i had a season of licensing gyms and starting three kind of bigger companies which is what we just sold last year and the season that we're in now which is now we just full time you know find uh service-based businesses or e-learning businesses that are doing like one to ten million a year um in profit and invest in them right that's what we do now i thought that i wanted to have and i said this often my dream state going into this was i want to have an unlimited credit card and just consume my lifestyle with one bag and my wife and i more or less did that after we sold so i basically got rid of all my clothing with the exception of like one bag's worth and we set off and spent a bunch of time in different areas and part of this was because we wanted to figure out where we wanted to live and i have a the the requirements for what i was looking for i have this big list that i made uh before we did this journey and i'll tell you where we went in a second but i wanted something and this might be useful for you to like you know think through i wanted things to be walking distance from me so having lived in a handful of different areas very expensive areas very cheap areas um i realized that 90 of like my life is really just predicated on the things that are in my immediate walkable distance and so i wanted nature to be in walkable distance because we like layla and i walk probably an hour or two every day um i wanted restaurants because we got to eat a lot and having the convenience of just something that we can go eat regularly is really you know useful and has high utility for us number three is i wanted to have a very sick gym in like the immediate vicinity and that's because for me i've realized that that's a very important part of my life in terms of like things that bring me joy and then number four having a grocery store really nearby that sounds silly but like it's actually very convenient to have growth so those are like my big walking distance things that either have to be inside the building or within like walkable distance in terms of like things that the home that i wanted to have requirements was a view of either the ocean lake or mountain like that was important to me because at least for me when i look out the window like it's nice super fast wi-fi a hot tub slash pool with a view an office and studio three bedrooms minimum ideally more um and a big balcony or patio all right those are like kind of the house things and then additional features were kind of like more area specific so it has to be reachable by amazon prime i want it to be in a zero tax state because for me uh the difference between two different areas is much more dependent on the sub market that you are in so like for example people like to say that they love a certain city but i think if you really think about it there's just a handful of tiny little neighborhoods because like you as one human probably are like oh i visited nashville one weekend nashville's awesome and what you're making a judgment on like nashville is the three to ten people that you spent time with and the you know six places that you went when nashville has a thousand places and so it's like we take these we make these snap judgments on areas based on such limited data they're almost irrelevant you could have a terrible experience in nashville because you had the wrong people or the wrong three to five locations that you visited and an amazing one in cincinnati because you were in a very wealthy area and that was the microcosm and you probably wouldn't even know the difference if you were in the suburbs of cincinnati versus the suburbs of whatever you know what i mean and so i've realized this because layla and i actually spent two years on the road before we settled down to start the three bigger businesses doing gym turnarounds and so we actually were in 33 cities in 18 months and we spent like two to three weeks in each one of them and so we got a lot of feel for what america feels like and what's interesting is there was a couple times where i was i was walking through like a target and i remember thinking to myself i knew the target like the back of my hand because almost all of them are set up the same way and i was like what city am i in again and the thing is is like most cities especially in like the higher end areas if that's what you're trying to get into they have the whole foods they have a target they have the same chains of rust like it's all so similar that we have these like super strong beliefs about like one city versus another and they're almost identical when you get into like the sub markets right and so for me that's why and i've made videos about why i don't think you should make decisions based on tax i have no marginal difference in living and so since there is no marginal difference i then say okay well if there's no difference then i would rather pay less in taxes and so that is why zero percent tax was one of the the requirements or preferences rather i wanted to have a way to meet lots of neighbors that were interesting and so this is one of those like i prefer to live in a wealthy area because then and ideally ultra wealthy and i say that because i've lived in quote wealthy areas and you get a lot of upper middle class and there's nothing wrong with that it's just that those people don't necessarily understand like my lifestyle or the things that i find important they just had very different priorities than me and it it became very difficult to have any kind of meaningful conversations or relationships in general because there's just not a lot of common ground the next one is i ideally and i cover good entrepreneurship a central airport close by and so i'm sharing these things so that maybe these you can add them to your own personal list as you're looking for houses and and where you want to set up shop a central airport close by because i do travel a lot and or people travel to me you know if you're in a you know b or c market sometimes you have to have always connections to get everywhere and for me that's a massive pain and so i prefer to have a big airport that i can get direct anywhere i want to go or people can have direct to me i wanted to also lock it and leave it flexibility so because i travel and because i like flexibility and that is what i kind of optimized for i wanted to be able to lock the house and leave it and then come back and not have like a ton of stuff that i had to like figure out i wanted to also be in a market that i could attract talent so if i was going to hire people which is probably certain i wanted to be in a market that um i could attract the best talent and if i was going to have a an office i would want the office to be within 15 minutes of my house and part of that is predicated on the idea of if if you're going to have something that you have a business where you have in-person employees then that would be a function i currently don't have this um and i think that we made the decision um over the last year to go remote and i'll walk through that um in a second but sold everything these are the requirements that i had and then layla and i spent basically the last nine months living all over the place and so we went to just for an idea we spent a month in cabo which was awesome by the way really sick like really really like cabo personally and maybe that's just the microcosm that i experienced but the microcosm that i experienced in san jose and san lucas we spent two weeks in each was really nice and i actually really enjoyed it a lot it was totally americanized you could like you could get around not speaking spanish with like zero problems and everything was really cheap which is also a nice benefit and like the real estate there like you can get an ocean front infinity pool you know six thousand eight thousand square foot mansion for like five million dollars which you know in the us would probably be like 20. so i mean like there's still just a massive price difference and if you did choose to live there six months or more of the year you actually functionally pay no state income tax as well as a fun side benefit so we went to cabo we went to scottsdale we went to flagstaff we went to bear lake in utah which is like a beautiful mountain lake set up highly recommend really nice and then uh we went to vegas and there's a couple we went to southern california uh for a while we we went all over you know what i mean and you're like that's a lot of pacific southwest and that's true so i guess it's not that all over um but for us those are kind of a lot of different it had a lot of different feels to it and so after going through that where we basically owned nothing just had the bags and traveled and just you know leased the lifestyle for for for lack of a better term and i would say to give you an idea in terms of like the scale of what we were renting we were probably renting stuff in the neighborhood of like 50 to 100 000 a month in terms of cost so like they were high high-end places that were nice and this is kind of this is kind of what i learned now a year later from that kind of process the first one is that i i think the idea that i had of wanting to have an unlimited credit card and just consume my lifestyle lease the lifestyle and then walk away from wherever i was and just leave it behind the cool part about it was like we could go we're like where do we want to go next but i think that after having done it i really did miss the elements of familiarity of having people who knew you all around having social circles you know like you can't stay somewhere for a month and then and really get to know people or build any kind of meaningful relationships so that was kind of not as expected i just didn't think through it the other one that was kind of interesting for me was was i didn't have all my stuff around me like i have gone very accustomed to having like my little spots where i have all the stuff that i like and you're like well alex you're in a closet right now and that's because i'm in a tiny condo and i actually don't like windows where i work because for me i get super easily distracted and i'll just start out the window and like 30 minutes will go by and i wouldn't even realize it and so that is why i'm in a closet for those who are like why do you have so much money and why do you have such a shitty office that's why beyond that you can't really make changes to long-term rentals the way you can a house you will probably like things a certain way and i think the more the more money you have and the more you learn about yourself the more particular you sometimes become because you've just realized that these are things that add attention back in your life so you get more bandwidth and so i have a lot of particulars you know what i mean in terms of like how i like i like having a recording studio i don't have one right now that's why we're here but i like having recording studio i like having a gym that's like in my house that's commercial level or within walking distance from me because i just like being able to work out when i want to work out and not have it be like a thing i like i like the mess the you know the sweet views but it's also like i like all my stuff in the kitchen you know what i mean like i like my sauces and my my my supplements and just the stuff that i it's just my stuff you know what i mean and in the least your lifestyle thing like i think there's there's i over corrected for like i don't like having stuff to going all the way the other way where i had nothing and i think that it's probably more in the middle and so i'll tell you what we ended up settling on i think that as you as you become more you know ultra wealthy whatever you want to call it like as you as you level up and the reason i'm making this is because like i didn't know this as i was going into it so hopefully i can just help someone avoid the over correction that i made is that i think the ideal setup is having two to three maybe four primary homes that you actually stock with all your stuff in the meantime so you can just basically pick up and leave so you have the flexibility of moving but you have the familiarity of like your things and then in the meantime you can still go travel but you still have like a home base not having a home base uh was not advisable i felt kind of like uh i felt like a nomad but like free-floating in a way that i didn't like and i realized that over time as we were kind of going through this process one of the other realizations that i had was around hedonic adaptation which is basically like as you get exposed to new cool stuff eventually you get used to it and it no longer confers any value and so like people get this you know can this can this can be real for you in terms of like if you've ever bought a new car um it's really cool for the first however long and then within like a month or two it's just like that's the car i have right and some people are like car super enthusiasts but even then they buy another car and buy other cars because they kind of get used to hedonic adaptation the things that you had and so um layla and i did this like uh pooled leasing thing where we like can swap out our car whenever we want so it's like you pay a fixed price i think it's like a thousand bucks a month and then you can like swap your car whenever you want uh but you pay for like you but you commit to like a year so anyways kind of interesting you think that you're going to switch cars up but then you never want to do the pain in the ass and so i've actually had the exact same car since day one um so it's like some of these things you think you're going to do and then you don't actually end up doing it which for me was like a fun uh interesting thing and my uh my videographer was like hey man you should answer this question so he sent me these questions for this video which was like how do you how do you see materialism and so i having you know having had the ability to buy pretty much whatever i want you know including private jets and things like that i know that for me not only do most of those things not bring me joy but i actually feel a certain amount of like wastefulness and maybe that's just something that's internalized to me uh but like i just i don't like waste in general and so to me it just it actually it's almost net negative and buying things for the sake of status i've gotten over that a long long time ago i don't really the only thing i ever bought that would i think i would consider like a status symbol was i got a bentley which is one of the cars i sold last year it was a flying spur it was brand new it was like 300 and something thousand and i got it because a lot of people were like dude you never spend money like you should live a little bit and so i was like okay i'll try it and i i used it and i'll say the benefits of having the exotic car this is the only benefit that i think functionally helped is that when you pull up to places people do treat you better and so i enjoyed the higher level of service but i think there was kind of a taint to it because i knew that i didn't get that treatment when i would have just a normal car and then it made me like see people in a worse way which is which is crappy i probably shouldn't have made that conclusion but i like flying under the radar and just doing my own thing um and that definitely attracted attention so there's there's elements that were good there was elements that were bad uh was it worth the money absolutely not i don't really care about cars at all um and i did it definitely for the wrong reason but in some ways i'm glad i did so that i can just say like i now know that for me it's useless so maybe that'll save you three hundred thousand dollars in a waste of a car and then you know what do i think about jets uh private jet wise i think it's really nice for travel to be honest with you like it's one of the few things that i still spend money on uh because there's a there's a lot of function for it right like and people are like how can you not like waste and then do that well the jet is already there and it's either sitting there it's being used so in some ways i'm actually less wasteful as i'm using it but the relative cost and people really have to understand this is like i've taken home more than a million dollars a month for the last half decade so like just imagine like a million dollars hits your bank account and then a month goes by and another million dollars hits your bank account and then another month goes by and then another million dollars and then you do that for years and then all of a sudden like the cost of things relative to your income becomes very very low i'll give you a math example to explain this but like let's say you just did 10 million dollars which is less than a million dollars a month fyi if you took on 10 million dollars a year and the average american family takes home 50 000 a year then everything so it's 200 times more money than the average american family and so if something costs let's say 10 000 right divide that by 200 and you've got 50 and so it costs 50 bucks for me relatively to take a private flight if you if you're not at that income level yet i'm trying to make it relative so it makes sense but like if you had the option of immediately pulling your car up getting on the plane having no one else on the plane getting to your destination having a car there already packed with your stuff you get out of the plane into the car on the runway so it's literally like you drive two hours and then you drive again and so it's like literally just the transit time is the transit time which makes all of the us way more accessible to you and for me i don't waste days i'm not exhausted i don't have like a recovery period and i am more likely to travel because the hassle is low and what it does do and this is the biggest thing that i can communicate of flying private is that it it it shifts it transforms transport from a negative experience to a positive experience it's not even like i would say like traveling first class still overall a negative experience just less negative but uh but flying private is almost i would say a positive experience and so that is really the biggest transformation that happens when you fly private which is why i still do it but i just wanted to give you guys an example but like if that if you were able to transform the experience from negative to positive not have the the the drain the men the mental and emotional drain the energy drain the the recovery time that would have to occur the prep time the getting your documents the defining the flights and all that kind of stuff if you got if you got to skip all that um would you pay 50 for that rather than paying a dollar right most people would make that difference right if it's like it's a buck for normal normal flight and 50 for the for the private one like a lot of people i think would make that trade and so that's the reason that people you know why people who have more do make that trade is because like relative to income it makes more sense okay so the the last piece i'm gonna hit on is kind of like my unifying theory in terms of how i make decisions around material goods because it's like okay i have i had a lot of stuff a lot a decent amount of stuff sold it all lived almost a year on the road uh with just a bag and now uh layla and i just bought a home a very nice home it's an eight-figure house so i'll just believe that's a really nice house and it's on a mountaintop and it's really cool and i like it a lot why why would i do that after this whole period so number one is i do think it's necessary or at least for me i don't want to speak that over you but like for me i prefer having a home base a headquarters where all my stuff is and so i think that from there we can do the travels we can do the consumption but then we have some place to come back to and so that's number one number two is that from a work season which is what i'm entering again now because i'm we're building up acquisition.com companies so we're taking all the portfolio companies actively as we speak right now that are in that you know e-learning and service space business service consumer services and growing those companies actively right now and it's a ton of fun and there's nothing that's more interesting to me and so for me like i don't need any stimulation from my exterior surroundings because i get so much stimulation from the work that i do and so that is that is paramount that is the the biggest priority and so that's where the home base becomes really helpful because i'm just more efficient and more productive when i have all the things that i already know that work well for me around me and so from a unifying theory standpoint it comes down to form over function and so i will spend money on things that are expensive i'll use quotes here if they have improved function and so i don't have one of my flannels with me but like the flannels that i wear are actually really expensive and it's just because they like fit me really well and i like them and so i buy them this on the other hand i get five packs from amazon for like 10 bucks and so like because i've had the really expensive like lululemon tank tops and stuff and like i like these cheap cotton ones better they breathe better and they don't they don't bother me and i they're interchangeable and they can get dirty when i go to the gym and if something tears i don't care right um and so that's that's why i wear these things right and so from a from a form perspective or sorry from a function perspective that is what i make all my decisions based on and so i think that for uh having kind of lived the entire spectrum if you can have a unifying theory around how you buy things i think it would be incredibly helpful and from a clothing perspective this is a nice one that i that i picked up is i've realized that lots of clothing actually decreases my quality of life and so when i walk into a closet and i see lots of clothes or lots of t-shirts i feel guilty um and maybe i could fix that about myself but for me it's much less effort to just fix the surrounding and so i realized when i gave away 90 of my clothing and just kept 10 for the bag that i actually felt better and i was like huh okay so this is something that i'm keeping with me even though i'm going to a headquarters that has all my stuff clothing is not among them that are meaningful to me and so if i'm going to buy something i have to in my mind i'll throw something else out so that way my my actual closet stays around stays the same size but the quality always increases in terms of like its net utility to me and so i have to take out something that's the lowest utility shirt or shorts and then replace it with something that has higher utility overall and as a fun side note i have found that for me if i find a shirt that i like i will buy six colors that i like in that shirt and i will usually replace in bulk the other t-shirts that i had prior to that that didn't fit me necessarily as well as these ones did um and so you're like are you really talking to me about these things well these are the things that you that you think through as you're trying to optimize different aspects of your life so that you can make better decisions and have more head space throughout the day so you can ultimately make more money uh or at least that's how i function that is the that is kind of where we landed was uh the one really really really nice home and we will probably buy another place that will be in the summer and winter and so weather which i should have mentioned earlier was a primary driving factor and so i figure that between two and three climates i can have the weather that i want year round with the novelty of change of environment without having the nomad feeling of not having any of my stuff and so that is kind of the plan that we are moving through right now is having two to three homes in different areas with different vibes so probably beach mountain and then probably lake uh would be like the baby desert just have different vibes and then like in the summers when it's really hot in you know like vegas then i'll go somewhere that's really cool and so that way i can kind of get the best of everything and not also have to be like on the track you know on the road all the time because to me that is also somewhat stressful now having done it for a year i made this video because i did not know this as i was coming up and i thought first i should have lots of stuff and i did that and that weighed me down and then i transitioned to selling everything and just leasing my lifestyle and when i did that i realized that i did like having some stuff maybe not all of it and so i think that like buddha the middle path is the way and so you can have the nothing and you can have everything and i think that everyone just has to figure out what the just right is for you but for me my unifying theory around it is form over function sorry function over form so what it does for me and the net utility it provides me in my life is the primary driving factor and then that gives me a decision-making process that makes my life easier because like we make thousands of decisions every day as entrepreneur and if you can have a unifying theory it's kind of a decision algorithm like if this than that then you can pre-make decisions and then you can always just run them through the algorithm without having to like use mental bandwidth and so in another video i'll walk you through like i've tons and tons of decision algorithms that i've already made to just make my life easier so that i can only so that i can allocate all of my time to making new decisions rather than remaking old ones um and so if you like this my name is alex mosey again welcome to mozy nation i hope you enjoyed the video and i'll see you in the next one