https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1CtbsEqxW0

1 00:00:00.000 --\> 00:01:00.000 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

2 00:01:00.000 --\> 00:02:00.000 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

3 00:02:00.000 --\> 00:03:00.000 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

4 00:03:00.000 --\> 00:04:00.000 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

5 00:04:00.000 --\> 00:05:00.000 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

6 00:05:00.000 --\> 00:06:00.000 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

7 00:06:00.000 --\> 00:07:00.000 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

8 00:07:00.000 --\> 00:08:00.000 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

9 00:08:00.000 --\> 00:09:00.000 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

10 00:09:00.000 --\> 00:10:00.000 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

11 00:10:00.000 --\> 00:11:00.000 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

12 00:11:00.000 --\> 00:12:00.000 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

13 00:12:00.000 --\> 00:13:00.000 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

14 00:13:00.000 --\> 00:14:00.000 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

15 00:14:00.000 --\> 00:15:00.000 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

16 00:15:00.000 --\> 00:16:00.000 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

17 00:16:00.000 --\> 00:17:00.000 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
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