A Million Dollars Is Not Enough | Ep 937

Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast, you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned and will learn on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth. Wanna scale your business? ⁠⁠Click here.⁠⁠ Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials: ⁠⁠LinkedIn ⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠YouTube ⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Acquisition ⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Alex Hormozi?

  Your money goals are too small and I will prove it to you. So in this video, I'm going to explain how you need to rethink your income, your investments and savings goals and timelines. And so here's the problem. A lot of financial gurus, even people on this platform, right? And I have no shade, right? Will tell you to save $100 a month. And they'll tell you that if you do that from the time you're 18 until the time you retire at 67, you'll retire with a million bucks at a 9% compounding rate. And that all sounds great until you realize that when you're 67, that $1 million is going to only be worth $170,000. So why is that? Just $1 in 1975, right? 50 years ago, has today's equivalent purchasing power of $6.02. That's a 6X difference in 50 years. The main reason? Inflation. The dollar. They don't make them like they used to, right?

• 0:48Alex Hormozi?

  And or rather, they make too many of them. And if you push back on that, then I'd like to ask you to think and study late-stage capitalism. So like, look if in late-stage capitalism and countries that are in it, which I would say America is in late-stage capitalism, look if inflation goes up or down. And I'll give you a hint. It goes up. So this measurement is conservative. This is based on the last 50 years, not necessarily the next 50. And so if that's the problem, how do we solve it? So this is kind of the new way I think about your goal. Let's say that you had the goal to have a million dollars. Obviously, add or remove zeros as it suits you, right? Some of you might be 10, or 100, or a billion, whatever you want. Let your heart, you know, go wild. But let's say that you wanted a million dollars when you retire. So you could live passively on $50,000 a year

• 1:31Alex Hormozi?

  from investing it in a bonds or something that's relatively low risk. Well, you have to realize that in 50 years, that $1 million will only buy you $170,000 of stuff. And that $50,000 of passive income? Oh yeah, that's only going to get you about $8,000 worth of stuff. Tough to live on that. Per year. So let's say that you were a little more ambitious and you said you wanted $4 million. Well, just to be clear, that was my lifetime goal when I was in high school. Because I figured if I could do that, I could live passively on like $1.60 to $200,000 a year, which is 4% to 5% of that, which means that I could live indefinitely. I could keep the principal and just kind of live on that 4% or 5% interest. And if that was your goal, like it was for me, you might want to adjust it and take into account the inflationary reality. So if you want that four million bucks when you retire,

• 2:13Alex Hormozi?

  you probably need 24 million. If you wanted 200,000 in dividends that you could live passively on from interest, you probably need closer to like 1.2 million per year in distributions. I know, that's a big difference. Again, that's just because you're thinking in today's dollars, not future dollars. Now, before you lose your mind and just throw in the towel and say that you'll never make it, I want to give you some good news. Compounding is still a thing and it still matters. You probably just need to do more of it and do four important things. So think of this as your strategy to mitigate that so that you can actually get where you want in terms of your savings, your investment, and ultimately the freedom that you're looking for. So consider this the new strategy. So I'll give you the quick and obvious ones that you've probably heard, but in a new way, and then I'll wrap up with what I've actually done to achieve

• 2:57Alex Hormozi?

  it. Okay. So number one is you have to increase your income. So a lot of people think about this in terms of savings. I think it's much more powerful to think about in terms of income. Because like, if you're, if you're not making a lot right now, there's not a lot of room between zero and you. There's an infinite amount above that. Right? And so like, you can only get your, your spending down to zero. Right? So that delta is not going to be that big, but you can totally increase the upside. So let me put this in real world terms. Even if you don't think that extra thousand bucks a month from, you know, flipping stuff online or making content and just getting some AdSense revenue, or, you know, promoting school and online platform to help people start communities and getting commissions from that, it won't matter. Right? If you don't do anything with it. Right? But if you take that extra thousand bucks a month, which might not seem like a lot,

• 3:40Alex Hormozi?

  depending on where you're at, that work might not seem worthy. But like, oh, that's a lot of hustle. I gotta Uber more. I gotta DoorDash or whatever. Right? You invest that extra thousand dollars a month in that same equation, you get $10 million by the time you retire. So a thousand dollars a day, hold, like, you ready for this? This is, this is gonna be juicy. A thousand dollars today, if you're 18 years old, is $80,000 in 50 years. So the money that you make and spend now counts 80x. Why? Because 9% compounding. Right? The bigger, it's bigger than inflation compounding. Over 50 years, 9% over 50 years is 80x.

• 4:17Alex Hormozi?

  But we can't be one sided. We also need to realize that 80K in 50 years is only worth $13,000 today. So in reality, every $1 you save today is worth $13 when you retire. So for me, this makes making that extra $200 for a gig where you do a DJ thing, right? Or helping your buddy move or whatever is actually a $2,600 investment. And it makes it far more worth it for me. Or at least when I was thinking through my saving stuff when I was starting out, that made saving 100 bucks, 500 bucks, 1,000 bucks, when it was 13 grand, way more worth it. So number one, we got to increase income. Number two, and it kind of naturally leads to is that you got to stop spending so much money. Now, on the other hand, right? If you think, you know, the $500 belt that you wanted to splurge on doesn't matter, just remember that it's 40 grand in 50 years, right?

• 5:01Alex Hormozi?

  That $500 belt with compounding reversed back to the present is 6,500 bucks. That makes it hurt a lot more, right? And so here's something that's even worse. A $500 a month car payment, that's a lease. That three year lease is 18 grand. That 18 grand in today's dollars, when you retire, is $234,000.

• 5:23Alex Hormozi?

  And if you want to say it in future dollars, it's $1.4 million in future dollars. Wild. 50 years, obviously. And that's just one lease. So even if you make less, it doesn't, it doesn't mean less when you're young. And this is the point that I think really discourages a lot of younger people is they're like, I'm not making as much money as I want. You know, I wish I could make more, blah, blah. They want to like, they want to flex the small amount of money that they've got because they like, first off, never flex when you're young because everybody who's older has way more money. It's just like, you just have more time to accumulate it. Just, you just do, number one, you have more time to accumulate it. Number two, you earn more when you're older because you have more skills. So don't, don't like, don't get weird about this. But the thing that really matters that people who are older don't have is you have time.

• 6:07Alex Hormozi?

  And so the value of the money that you make, even if it's half as much, the difference of that last 10 years of compounding when you started at 18 versus starting at 28, is the difference between a 30X, 33X, and an 80X. Think about that for a second. A thirty-three X and an eighty X in terms of that ten-year difference. And so just because you make half as much or a third as much as you want to make right now, it doesn't mean that those dollars aren't worth more to you. And so I just, I say this to encourage you to like, make the extra few bucks here and there. Spend like, don't spend as much, you know, you go out to the club, just get the, like, just pregame a little harder. And, and, and get a, get a soda with lime, alright? Like, you don't have to go crazy with it. And anyways, any girl that's gonna just like you because of the money you're spending is not the girl you want to be with anyways.

• 6:52Alex Hormozi?

  Alright, so number one, increase income. Number two, stop spending as much and then putting it in future dollars relative to today's dollars hopefully should soften that blow for you. The third is try and make it and save it faster, right? Because the money you make now versus the money you make when you're ten years older hits harder. So there's obviously a time value to money. So three quick strategies. One, set a watermark, invest the rest. So it's like, I need to have five thousand dollars in my bank account. Everything above five thousand dollars, I invest, period. Or an alternative way of doing it is saying, I have to invest two thousand dollars every month, no matter what, and I gotta make it happen, and then I'll live on the rest. I will tell you that the richest people I know think in terms of the second way more than the first way.

• 7:34Alex Hormozi?

  Alright, which is like, I'm gonna go make that money to get that thing or to make that investment, rather than I'm gonna take it out what I got. Just something that I've noticed. Now, either way, just pick a strategy. And the thing is, is you can always change it. So don't have this idea like it has to be perfect. You can change the strategy over time, as long as you're still always investing more than you're spending, you're on the right path. We're talking about a thousand dollars a month in the example. You can always make that number go up. Like, you can always start investing two thousand dollars when you're thirty and four thousand dollars when you're, when you're forty, whatever. Now, the next one is that my examples assumed a thousand dollars per month didn't go up by three percent a year to adjust for inflation and an increase in earning power. So you can absolutely run a separate model for that with your own Excel sheet or your own, you know, whatever AI you use to run a model on that.

• 8:18Alex Hormozi?

  So if you're like, a thousand dollars a month, if I do that from eighteen until I am sixty-seven, I'll have ten million bucks. It's like, yeah, but if you actually increase it by three percent, it'd be a significantly larger number at the end. And so you could probably hit your goal or beyond that with just that tiny piece. Now, I said I had four strategies, um, so I just gave you three, right? Invest the rest, invest first and spend the rest, or invest the same amount every single month and then increase it over time. All three of those are fine. Totally fine. And honestly, I see entrepreneurs, I see people all the time. Like, people want to know if they're gonna be successful. Watching these videos and actually taking action. Ninety-nine percent of the time, like, that, that's all that actually matters. Like, the fact that you care enough to actually change your behavior is the big green flag indicator. You're gonna tweak over time, you're gonna learn other stuff, but actually doing something about it

• 9:03Alex Hormozi?

  is what will separate you from everyone else. Let me give you the, the fourth strategy. All right, which is

• 9:10Alex Hormozi?

  what I actually did. All right, so I'm obviously not sixty-seven, and I have more than ten million dollars. I made my living expenses as small as humanly possible. All right, so protein shakes, Chipotle, I split a bedroom. All right, so I, I lived in a house, and I had six roommates. And then within one of the rooms, I split the room, like college style, like dorm style, with another guy, like, we're staring at each other at night across beds, like, like that. All right? Because it was cheaper. Right? And I was never there anyways, I was working all the time. I owned a used car that I paid, I paid for outright, so the only thing I had was my car insurance. That was it. I haven't had car payments in a very long time. Like, buy a used car that's ten years old, that's in good condition, pay ten grand for it, and then just, like, never have a car payment again.

• 9:56Alex Hormozi?

  And then I invested my money, pause, in learning to make more money. So I said the first thing was that, the very, very, very first point I made today was that you want to increase your income. Right?

• 10:09Alex Hormozi?

  But how do you really do that? Because when you factor in that it's one of the only things strong enough to break the cycle is that you just have to make more. So think about it. Like, if you spend two thousand dollars having someone help you learn how to sell, ideally, a place with some sort of, you know, placement assistance. Um, and if you can't find one, you're never gonna make it anyways, just look on the internet. All right? I remember for me, I spent seven hundred and fifty dollars per hour, which is, which was like, all the money to me at the time, for eight hours to have a guy who really knew how to do ads at a higher level. Because remember, this is a guy who was gonna charge seven fifty, not your buddy. Or you might be able to just buy him Chipotle and he'll do it for you. Right? But to have somebody who actually taught me how to run ads at a high level. That, those eight hours, that tutoring,

• 10:50Alex Hormozi?

  that skill that I was able to learn from that one-on-one tutoring made me hundreds of millions. Not just hundreds of millions, literally.

• 10:59Alex Hormozi?

  And so these are where you can get absurd returns that counteract the leak of that 3% compounding inflation. And so part of the reason for that, there's twofold. The first is that skills will always trade in today's nominations. So whether we're trading, you know, dollars or bitcoins or, you know, seashells, it doesn't matter. Because if you have something valuable to exchange, you will be able to exchange it at the present value in whatever denomination exists. And so that's why skills are always the ultimate hedge against inflation. Now, let's take the other example I had a little further. Let's say you invest that $2,000 in learning that skill. And that $2,000 takes you from a $30,000 a year income to a $90,000 a year income,

• 11:40Alex Hormozi?

  which is probably about what an average-ish salesperson makes, not at like a supreme one, just like an average of a salesperson. And post taxes, at least in the US, that's about $75,000 a year, assuming you live on, let's say, 2,500 bucks a month because you're living lean. That's $35,000 per year after taxes, after expenses, that you can invest on for the rest of your life. So that $2,000 one time gave you a permanent $35,000 per year increase in investable income.

• 12:10Alex Hormozi?

  That is how you get the absurd returns that can get you out of the cycle. And so, put this in perspective, that alone would, like, just that one change alone, if you did nothing else, and you invested the $3,000 a month, roughly, that alone would get you to $31 million in 50 years. And that's with zero raises, zero new skills, and zero increase in opportunity. You're literally just doing the exact same thing for 50 years.

• 12:36Alex Hormozi?

  So, the idea here is like, you want to use compounding to your advantage, but the biggest thing is how much you can invest over time. And the way to increase how much you can invest is to make more, spend less. And in the short term, where you will get the highest returns, actually, over the long term, where you get the highest returns in the short term, is in skills. But people are so afraid of investing money in skills, and I really want to dive into this because I really, I truly want to help. So, yes, you can absolutely achieve financial freedom if you live under your means, you invest the difference into increasing your income. And then, once you have the amount that you need to compound to your number, you can just let the compounding work.

• 13:15Alex Hormozi?

  And if you're a maniac, my preference, my people, you'll realize quickly that you get higher return on learning skills than anything else. So then you put as much as you possibly can into it. And so for many of you who haven't had that reinforcing cycle, that one time where you spent money and you made more money back. I was very fortunate that the first thing I ever spent money on, I made more back. And the next thing I spent money on, I made more back. And so I got very addicted to buying money, basically trading money for skills that I would immediately be able to make more money and increase my income. Right? And so as much as alternative education has its share of scummy people, because it does, don't get me wrong. It's, I mean, in a lot of places it's cesspool. It's still a cheaper alternative to learning realistic, real world skills than like higher education.

• 13:59Alex Hormozi?

  So if you were to spend a hundred thousand dollars on courses and coaching, for example, or tutoring, which is how I prefer to do it, by the way. After doing some research, as in like, look online, like, make sure people have good reputations, make sure they have testimonials that are people like you, and they have many, many of them, they don't promise too much. Right? I'm convinced that your life would change far more than a hundred thousand dollars of higher education. And I do think you can learn a lot of stuff your own, to be very clear. YouTube didn't like really exist the way it does now when I was coming up. But the thing is, like, this is me trying to provide whatever value I can in terms of like my path, is that I was just always willing to pay for speed. Right? Speed and the time value of money is something that I think people just wildly underestimate.

• 14:40Alex Hormozi?

  Right? Like, if you can increase your income, like you get your five year increase in income in one year, the difference is the value of that learning. And I just, I don't know why people don't get this. I am like, I'm like, I think Charlie Munger, you know, and Warren Buffett had a little moment where he was like,

• 14:59Alex Hormozi?

  you know, it's really not that complicated. And I think Munger was like,

• 15:04Alex Hormozi?

  If people weren't wrong so much, we wouldn't be so rich. And I think, so I'm trying to like, I've never really understood it. And so maybe you guys can help me understand it. I think the big reason is that people are afraid of spending money and not getting anything back. I think that's the big fear. But I think another part of it is ego saying, I don't need anyone's help. I can figure it out on my own. And here's the reality, it's like, you can figure it out on your own. The question is whether you want to figure it out in the amount of time it would take to figure out. Like, I don't need to try and derive calculus like Sir Isaac Newton. I'd rather just have somebody who already derived or driven, devoted or deroded, deroted, derided, who knows? Right? Who had already derived a calculus to just teach me how to do it. Right?

• 15:49Alex Hormozi?

  And the thing is, is that with good feedback, you can get to your goals significantly faster. Right? We already know tutoring, this is just in education research in general. Tutoring speeds up the assimilation of any subject significantly faster. Like huge differences, like talking like 8X differences in speeds, monster differences. And so it's not even like saying, oh, I can't do this on my own. Of course you do it on your own. It's just like you can just do it faster and do you value the difference in speed? For me, I always pay for speed. And so pay for tutors. Join free and paid communities on school to learn stuff. Right? Some people won't be good teachers, just like you had bad teachers when you were in high school, middle school and lower school. It doesn't mean that teachers are bad or that the subject is bad. It just means that you had a bad shake. It happens, move on. Right?

• 16:33Alex Hormozi?

  Like you will always lose until you learn. Then you win. That's how winning works. But you have to be willing to lose in order to win. And so I have a relatively extreme stance on this, which is that I will spend. When I was coming up, I lived on basically nothing. And I spent.

• 16:55Alex Hormozi?

  All of my money. And it essentially meant like I almost had no savings for like years and years and years. Because all my excess cash, I just gave to people. And for sure, I had people who I was like, that wasn't worth it, that wasn't worth it. But I tend to always come from the perspective of like, how can this make me better? How could like, how can I get an ROI on this? And so some of the best lessons I learned were from bad teachers of like, do the opposite of that. And so this is like, I, I, I really like wanna drive this now. I wanna be clear, like. You will make mistakes and you will buy things that don't immediately work. But.

• 17:36Alex Hormozi?

  I think of skill acquisition. Like a bridge. So let's say that you're, you know, you're on this side and you're sad because that's how bridges work. You're always sad on one side. And then on this side, you have dollar signs for eyes, which means you're happy because money brings happiness, obviously. All right. And so, and so here you're sad, maybe we'll cross your arms because you're super sad, right?

• 17:57Alex Hormozi?

  Most people will look at this bridge and say, well, I bought. This one. And I know how to do this one already and this one. Why can't I get across? It's because you got missing links. And so let's say you buy something else. And you get some tutoring and then it adds this brick. Was it a waste of money? Well, you still can't get across. It's a waste of money. No, just like your arithmetic teacher wasn't a waste of time before you learned calculus. Or before you learned algebra. You need one in order to get there. They are prerequisites. There's a reason prerequisites exist. You need their stepping stones. And so what happens is, is that you get this other one from the sixth thing you buy. And then the seventh, and then the eighth, and then the ninth.

• 18:41Alex Hormozi?

  And then what happens is you say, oh, this guy who taught me this ninth thing? That guy is the truth. But the reality is that the reason that some people get outcomes and some people don't by going through the same thing. Is that the, the, the skill gaps that exist in someone's skill set. Are what create different outcomes with the same education.

• 19:03Alex Hormozi?

  And so the problem with an inexperienced teacher, and this is very common in the alternative education world, is that they will accept money no matter what. But if I were to teach you Spanish six, and I'm very good at Spanish, but you've never taken Spanish one through five, am I a bad Spanish teacher? Or are you just not good at Spanish one through five? What should have happened is I should have said, to buy Spanish six, you gotta go through Spanish one through five. But the thing is, is many of these alternative education businesses only know Spanish six. They don't even know how to teach Spanish one through five, or they never had before, never thought about it. Because they get one out of five people get a result, so they say, this is good enough. Everyone else didn't try. And to be clear, there's definitely people who don't try. I don't want to say that's not true, for sure. But there are also people who do try, but just didn't have the missing links. And so part of the process

• 19:47Alex Hormozi?

  of going through the alternative education world is having the perspective of a collector of skills. All right? And so I don't know if I'm gonna be able to use this today, but I know I will be able to use this eventually. And as long as I see myself as the asset, I'm always going up. And once I have all the pieces together, guess what follows? The dollars start walking across the bridge, and they keep going into your pocket. And so to me, this is what I mean when I say like, invest your money into income-earning skills. If you can trade the skill for money, and you can learn it, can you imagine something that's more valuable? We just did the math on like, getting $3,000 a month extra from one skill. Imagine adding 10 skills. Imagine that sales guy says,

• 20:32Alex Hormozi?

  you know what that $3,000 a month extra? Instead of saying I'm gonna invest that three, I'm gonna spend six, my next two months of it, and I'm gonna spend it on learning how to run ads. And you know what? I learned how to run ads, but I don't know how to make offers or make landing pages and stuff. And so I'm gonna spend another two months on learning how to do that. Like, I just always saw the money that was left over every month as like, what skills at the store do I need to go buy? And then I would just go buy them. And so I think that in the early days, now I went through the brass tacks, the very simple version of this that you can use if you just have fixed income or you have a job and you choose not to make more than that. That's up to you. But one of the big unlocks that I had in my career was that I went to, I went to an event and there was a guy who was there.

• 21:15Alex Hormozi?

  The event was for everybody who was doing over eight figures is what it was for. So everybody's 10 million and up. And at the time, Leila and I had just started making money. I'm talking like within the last 12 weeks and everything just started taking off. Right. I finally got the last piece to connect. And so we were doing three or $400,000 a month. I can't remember, but it was almost all take up because it was just me, Leila, and I had one assistant over a kitchen table. Like that was the business. So I was, and we'd just gotten married. I was like living large and when I say living large, I think I spent no money, but I just felt not poor anymore, which was great. So anyways, I go to this thing. I was like, I don't even know if I should be here. I'm definitely not making that. They're like, oh no, you're gonna, you're gonna be way past that. And I was like, I'm glad one of us believes that. I was just, you know, trying to ride this rocket with both hands.

• 21:58Alex Hormozi?

  And so anyways, everyone goes, you know, goes through their presentation and the first guy who got up, because I remember he was like busy. And so he like, I can't, he either want to go first or last, doesn't matter. And he gets up there and he, and he starts by saying like, so we did $35 million in revenue last year. And I was like, what? $35 million? Like, I was like, one is dope. I was three months into making, you know, pacing higher than that, but I never actually like really had a habit, at least from an income perspective. And so anyways, he, he gets up there and after he gives this whole presentation, he was in the e-commerce world. Someone asked him, so where you're at now, like what are you doing to invest in your education? Like, what are you doing to invest in learning?

• 22:42Alex Hormozi?

  And he said, I made a decision a long time ago that I would have a learning budget. And so every month, whatever percentage you're comfortable with, he's like, you know, maybe it's 1%, maybe it's 5%, maybe it's 10% of my income. He said, I forced myself to spend it. And I spend it in a way that's testing something that I think is cool. And so that might mean like, he's like, I'll test a new ad strategy, knowing that it probably won't work, but I'm willing to lose that money to continue to experiment, stay ahead. And What's crazy is that I took, I went to that thing, I heard him. And then for me, I was like, okay, well, I'm gonna go experiment with my income. And so remember, I wasn't spending much money and I had a lot of income. And so I took like, you know, 10%, so I think it was like 300,000 a month. So 10% would be 30,000. And so I was like, I'm gonna increase our ad spend by a thousand dollars a day.

• 23:27Alex Hormozi?

  And we were spending like 400 at the time. So I went from like 400 to like 1,400 a day in ad spend. And that is when GymLaunch went from 300 to 480, to 780, to a million, to 1.2, to 1.5, to 1.7 something, to 2 million, 2.2. That was months. Because as soon as I saw that happen, it was like, oh my God. And so part of me, literally just being willing to lose the money, unlocked my ability to spend more money, which scaled the company. And so, once I had that, obviously a very reinforcing event for me, I was like, where else can I spend money like this? Like, where can I, can I, can I buy access to a room? Can I, can I pay for somebody's time 101? Can I, can I go to the event? Like, I did everything.

• 24:12Alex Hormozi?

  Because every time I went, I made more. And that's what I want for you. That's really it. Is that like, you're gonna need to make more money than you think. It's gonna take longer than you think. But you can make it happen significantly faster if you learn skills that pay today. And I'm willing to pool cash from my future forward. And even though I know that thousand dollars is worth 13,000 in 50 years, I know that, that 2,000, if it can make me an extra 2,000 a month, will be worth something like, well, just, let's just say a lot, a lot of zeros. A lot more than 13 X in 50 years. And so, that is my final takeaway. Be fruitful and multiply.