How I Went from Broke and In Debt to Financial Independence in 10 Years

Get 30% off Heresy Financial University with code YOUTUBE30: https://bit.ly/hrsymbr 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ten years ago, almost to the day, I was broke.
I had no money in my bank account, I made
less than minimum wage, and I owed thirty thousand dollars
in student loan debt. I was broke. Today, I have
a multimillion dollar net worth, I have a personal income
over six figures per month, and I work about twenty
hours per week. I'm going to tell you exactly how

(00:21):
I did this over the last ten years. So I
had a very rocky journey here. I made a ton
of mistakes along the way. And if I can do it,
you can do it faster. And just like most people,
my financial troubles started all the way back in childhood. Now,
I actually had a fantastic childhood, great parents, great family,
three siblings, the four of us kids. My dad always
had a great job, my mom stayed home, we stayed
in school, we got good grades, we went to church

(00:43):
on Sunday. But like most American families, we had a
lot of problems, and like most problems, they were money problems.
For most of the years growing up, my parents had
a lot of credit card debt that put a lot
of stress on the family, and in the financial crisis,
my parents lost almost everything including our childhood home. As
a result, I didn't learn much about money growing up,
and the stuff that I did learn, most of it
was wrong. And the one thing I thought I knew

(01:05):
for sure was that if you wanted to make good money,
you had to go to college, get good grades, go
to college, get a degree that you could get a job.
So I decided to go to college and get the
one degree in something that wouldn't help me out with
any job, which was actually to become a pastor. My
degrees in Christian ministries with the minor in biblical studies. Now,
Throughout most of my life I was taught that money
is evil. Christians are taught that you're just supposed to

(01:26):
trust God and he'll provide everything that you need. But
slowly I started to learn about what it actually says
about money, which is not that money is evil, but
that the love of money is the root of all evil,
and that the antidote to greed and envy is not
to despise wealth, but it is generosity, and to be
generous and give you have to make more money and
own wealth in order to give it away. That we're
not supposed to just forget and hope everything will be okay,

(01:47):
and pray and trust that God will take care of us.
In fact, the Bible actually says that if you do
not provide for your own household, you're worse than the
non believer. Bible tells you to work hard, to save,
to invest wisely, to give generously. These are all things
that you can do more and more, better and better
than more money you make. The more I learned about this,
the more I realized that I was very interested in
personal finance and investing. But the problem was I had

(02:10):
number one, absolutely no skills to do anything with this,
to get a job or to start a business. And
number two, I had put myself in a financial situation
that I was not able to help anybody out. I
worked for a nonprofit organization at the time throughout college,
making less than minimum wage because I had to fundraise
to raise my own salary and I was not very
good at it. So I made about four dollars an hour.

(02:31):
And despite the fact that I did work, and despite
the fact that I had a scholarship, I still took
out all the student loans that I could because I
wanted extra money to spend it. So I graduated with
zero dollars in my bank account, a negative thirty thousand
dollars net worth from my student loans, and a monthly
income that basically was just enough to filp my gas tank. Thankfully,
despite all that, my wife still agreed to marry me.

(02:52):
So we got married in twenty fourteen, and she was
making about thirty five thousand dollars a year, which to
me seemed like she was rich. We discover whatever Dave
Ramsey learned about the debt snowball, and I started learning
about budgeting and personal finance, and I realized I need
to make some more money. So I had to go
get a real job, and so I got a desk
job with Amazon, making forty thousand dollars per year. It

(03:14):
was not a fun job at all, but we were
able to start putting away her entire salary to getting
out of debt. We lived on rice and beans, lived
in a terrible part of town, paid six hundred and
fifty dollars a month for our rent. We didn't go anywhere,
see anybody, do anything, and within one year we were
able to pay off the entire thirty thousand dollars of debt.
Now I'll notice the theme here because Right about this point,
things were starting to look great. We had paid off

(03:34):
our debt. Now we had a ton of disposable income.
Things were looking great. So a curve ball's about to hit.
At this point, I was really enjoying learning about money,
personal finance investing, and so I had a friend who
was a stockbroker. I was trying to learn from him,
and he said, you know what, if you really enjoy
this stuff, I can get you a job in our
broker training program. And so I jumped at the chance.

(03:55):
So he helped me out, got me through the interview process.
I started the broker training program. Number one, I had
to get licensed. After that, I was basically a runt.
I was a glorified customer service representative. That job again
started off at only forty thousand dollars a year. And
to make matters worse, my wife and I had just
had our first kid, so we were back to money problems,

(04:16):
making very little money now with a wife and a
baby at home. But this time it was a little
bit different because we had already been through the tough
time before. We had the experience living on nothing when
we were getting out of debt, so we knew how
to do it this time. But also now I had
some more skills. Also, I had a new path ahead
of me. So we still had the problems, but the
knowledge and the financial education made it a little bit

(04:39):
easier to get through those problems this time. I spent
the next few years working up the ranks as a stockbroker,
getting into different positions and learning everything I could. I
became a trader, learned about options and technical analysis, and
got into positions to learn about portfolio allocation and long
term wealth management, learning the inside and outs of how
the stock market, how ETF's mutual funds, retirement accounts, everything

(05:01):
how it all works. And my appetite was unsatiable. I
really enjoy learning about this stuff, and so once I
got through everything I could from the inside, I started
reading books and studying about things like economics and monetary
policy and fiscal policy and interest rates and the money
supply and the Federal Reserve. So I use that knowledge
and those additional skills that I was learning to work
my way up the ranks, and I got myself into

(05:22):
a sales position. Getting into this sales position was a
huge step up for me, and it meant that within
five years I had gone from making less than minimum
wage with a negative net worth and no money in
my bank account to making two hundred and fifty thousand
dollars a year in sales in finance with no relevant
degree to support that. Now, a lot of this probably
comes across as if I'm bragging intoting my own horn,

(05:44):
but I want to be very clear about what it takes,
and especially what it doesn't take to succeed, because given
my childhood and my education, I had absolutely no business
making two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year, let alone
in sales in finance. And if I can do it,
you can do it faster. Now, from the outside, things
looked great, great job, great benefits, great work life balance.
But I was miserable. Again. You can sense the theme here.

(06:06):
Every time something gets great, problems come in. I was
making two hundred cold calls a day. It was monotonous.
My role was to just move assets into the company,
and so it was repetitive, felt meaningless, and I absolutely
dreaded going into work every day. And even worse than that,
I began to have somewhat of a crisis of faith
because I told you before I had started learning and

(06:27):
researching and studying how money actually worked. I had found
about people about like Peter Schiff and studied Ray dally O,
and I started to realize the stuff that I was
selling I didn't actually believe in anymore at that point,
really didn't think that what I was helping people do
was the best thing for them financially. And I had
always dreamed about working for myself, starting my own business,
but I had never been in a position where I

(06:48):
had that chance to do that before. But suddenly that
dream became a reality, and in June of twenty nineteen,
I pulled the plug and I quit my job. For
anybody who's on the edge of your seat right now
wondering if that's something that you should consider, all, let
you know. There were two things that broke the camel's
back to final straws. One was I read The Four
Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, and it opened my mind
up and it made me realize there are far more

(07:10):
ways to skin a cat than I believed. There are
way more ways to make money than I thought possible.
The second thing that happened was I had a friend
who had a friend who was involved in a multi
level marketing company Primerica. It was a financial company where
they come to you and they say invest with me,
and also get licensed and try and get your friends
and family to invest with a company. And you're under me,

(07:31):
and I'll get paid for everything that you bring in,
and you bring in other people, and you know, the
classical multi level marketing scheme. And so he was training
my friend how to do this, and so he asked
if he could do a fake shpiel on me so
that he could practice and see how it went. So
this guy sits down with me to show my friend
how the sales pitch happens, and he starts telling me
all about the company, how they invest and how they

(07:52):
recruit people. That was very curious because this is what
I do for a living. So I was asking him
things like what kind of investments do you put people in?
What kind of account do you have? Like what is
the process here? What are the fees really digging in?
And I learned two things. Number One, this guy made
a lot of money. He was close to seven figures
a year. Number Two, he had absolutely no clue how

(08:12):
anything in the financial system worked at all. He could
barely answer my questions. I walked away from that meeting,
realizing if this guy can make close to seven figures
doing what he's doing for that terrible company, I can
do anything I want and I can make more. And
so in June of twenty nineteen, I handed in my
two weeks to my boss and I quit my job

(08:32):
to start Heresy Financial. By this point, my wife and
I had two kids, and just so you're aware, my
wife was fully on board with this. All of the
financial stress and the responsibility and the worrying has always
been something that I've carried and she's always one hundred
percent trusted me. And it's not normal. And so if
you're sitting there and thinking, man, my wife would probably
never let me do that if we had, you know,

(08:54):
rent to pay mortgage, to pay kids at home, just
walk away from a great paying job. I understand this
is not a normal situation, but I'm very very thankful
for it, because without that support, I never would have
been able to launch out on my own and start
Heresy Financial. So we sat down, we talked about and
I gave myself six months to start making money or
else I would just go get another job. Because my

(09:14):
prior role was a sales job, I still had commission
checks coming in for the next five months, which definitely
helped out to pay the bills. Obviously, we also had
a rental property that we had bought because we had
been making good money, so we started making some investments
and I started saving money as well, so we had savings,
investment income, and some commission checks. So we gave ourselves
six months and I said, if it doesn't work out,

(09:36):
I'll just go get another job. And I tried everything
under the sun in order to make money. I tried
self publishing books. I started a podcast, I started a blog.
I did one on one financial consultations in person with people.
I created a course that I tried selling online, and
I started a YouTube channel. Despite everything that I tried,

(09:56):
nothing was working. After five and a half months, I
had still not made a single dollar from anything that
I was trying to do. I was crushed. I was
stressed out because the time was closing in, the money
was running out. I didn't know how we were going
to pay the bills. I was starting to feel worthless
because I can't even go out and make a single
dollar on my own, where there are other entrepreneurs who

(10:18):
are going out there and making tons of money, and
I couldn't bear the thought of having to go get
another job again. I even talked with a very successful
business mentor of mine and he told me to hang
it up, throw in the towel, or at least go
get a side job to pay the bills. While I
kept on trying, I was very very close to quitting.
But December of twenty nineteen, I finally had a video

(10:39):
that got tons of views for the first time, and
the best part was that put me over one thousand subscribers,
which on YouTube is the mark that you need to
be able to turn on monetization on your channel. And
even though the money I was making at the time
was only a couple of dollars per day, I was
finally making money. If that's where it ended, if that's
all that happened, probably wouldn't been an to keep on going.

(11:00):
But a second thing happened to push me over the
edge and convinced me to persist. In December of twenty nineteen,
my family and I were up north visiting some friends,
and then on our way back, we decided to get
gas before we started our two hour drive back to
the city. While I was filling up the gas tank.
I pulled up my phone like I always do, checked
my email, and a sale came through. I got a
notification in my email that somebody had purchased one of

(11:22):
my courses. It was only three hundred bucks. Obviously, that
is nothing in the grand scheme of things, not enough
to pay the bills, but certainly enough to convince me
that I can keep on going and I can do this.
To this day, that is one of the most relieving
things financially that has ever happened to me, because I
finally had evidence that this could work. Within the next
couple of weeks, I went all in on YouTube. I

(11:44):
canceled and stopped doing literally everything else that I was
trying to do to make money. I started making a
YouTube video every single day. I learned everything I could
about graphic design, making thumbnails, video editing. I was terrible
at it, but I knew I had to go all
in and focus all my fas on YouTube because that
was going to be the thing that could start paying
me soonest and for the next year it was just practice, practice, practice, practice,

(12:07):
Wake up, figure out what to make a video about.
Once I figured it out, then script the video, then
film the video, then edit the video. By that time
it was dinner time. I'm not finished, so I go
hang out with the kids for a couple hours till
they go to bed. Once they go to bed, go
back into the office, finish editing, also doing some editing,
and some work on weekends while the kids were doing

(12:27):
nap time. It was crazy, but it was all worth it,
and it wasn't because I was making any money. This
was now the entire year of twenty twenty, and you
can see that throughout twenty twenty, I was still only
making a couple of dollars per day. Breaking it down
by month, you can see that most of the months
during twenty twenty, I was only making a couple hundred
dollars from YouTube. So even though there was growth, there

(12:50):
was still not enough money coming in to pay the bills.
We sold one of our cars, my wife and kids
started going to Facebook marketplace, picking stuff up for free
and trying to resell it online. We were still drawing
down on our savings and investments, but in the end
I knew it was all going to be worth it
because the metrics that mattered. The foundation was still growing.
We didn't have a lot of fruit yet, but we

(13:11):
were still planting a ton of seeds. And just so
you know, all of my friends and family all knew
we still weren't making any money at this point, and
almost all of them were still lovingly trying to get
me to quit and go do something else. Go get
my real estate license, become a real estate agent, become
a notary, and start traveling around and making twenty thirty
forty dollars an hour. But I knew, even though I

(13:31):
wasn't making money now everything I was doing was planting
seeds for more fruit in the future, that it was
way worth it as long as I could just stick
with it. This is why. If you've ever heard the
old adage that to get something you've never had, you
have to do something you've never done, well, that's actually
not always true. Sometimes you just have to do the
right thing enough times in a row and over a

(13:53):
long enough period of time before you see the results
of those things. And if you keep on jumping to
a new thing so that you can get something you've
never had before, well then you'll never see the results
of the compounding interest from the right thing. And by
the end of that year November of twenty twenty, that
was the very first month since I had quit my
job that I finally made enough money to pay the bills.
YouTube pay me two thousand, eight hundred and sixty six

(14:15):
dollars and thirty cents. My original plan was that it
would go six months. It actually took a year and
a half. But now that I had gotten there and
had enough money to cover my expenses, my runway was infinite.
I could keep doing this forever and never had to
worry about whether I was going to have to go
get another job again in the future. Business exploded from there,
and at the end of twenty twenty, I had about
twenty thousand subscribers, but over the course of the next year.

(14:38):
Over twenty twenty one, my subscriber base grew to about
one hundred twenty five thousand subscribers. My views exploded too,
ending twenty twenty with about one hundred eighty eight thousand
views total in that month to almost one and a
half million by the end of twenty twenty one, and obviously,
the revenue that YouTube was paying me from all those
views exploded as well, peaking at thirteen thousand dollars in

(15:00):
October of twenty twenty one. Things were looking amazing but
that also means curveball was about to hit hard. I
decided I was smart, I had worked hard. I was
ready to change things up. So in twenty twenty two,
I began integrating sponsored ad spots into my YouTube videos.
I went from averaging ten thousand dollars a month of

(15:22):
income to about fifty thousand dollars a month of income.
I used that extra money to hire an editing team
so that I didn't have to make my thumbnails where
I'd hit my videos anymore. Instead of working sixty to
eighty hours a week, I was able to go down
to working only twenty or thirty hours a week, spent
a lot more time with my wife and kids, started
working out every day, and I was making more each
month than just seven years earlier I had been making

(15:45):
in an entire year. And the craziest part was that year.
In twenty twenty two, I finally became a millionaire on paper,
just a couple months before my thirtieth birthday. Now I
say on paper because it was in illiquid investments. I
didn't actually have it in my bank account, but it
was still technical net worth. I could check off on
my box that I hit that goal, that I had
set for years prior, but all of these changes brought

(16:07):
about a huge set of problems that would take me
a long time to recover from. Number One, when I
hired my editing team, I stopped paying attention. I took
my foot off the gas, I stopped working as hard,
stopped focusing on the things that needed focusing on, and
over the course of the second half of twenty twenty two,
my views on my YouTube channel went from a peak

(16:27):
of one point seven million views in one month down
to half of that by the end of the year,
to eight hundred and fifty one thousand views. Every single
video I made had tons of people complaining in the
comments about my sponsors that I've been putting in the videos. Now,
I personally hated putting sponsored ads in my videos, but
at this point I couldn't stop because I had a

(16:49):
team of editors that I had to pay to continue
making my videos for me, and if I did decide
to fire them, then I'd have to start doing that again,
going back to working sixty eighty hours a week, and
I was burned out by January of twenty twenty three.
Just one year ago, my channel views hit seven hundred
and forty thousand views in one month, and I thought
my channel had died. I thought I had killed it.

(17:10):
So I had to have a tough conversation with my team.
We completely changed things up in a last ditch effort
to turn things around. Over the course of twenty twenty three,
starting in January, I was doing ten to twelve videos
a week. We started reducing the frequency. We went from
ten to twelve down to seven videos a week, down
to five videos a week, down to four videos a week,
than down to three videos a week. Every time we

(17:31):
reduced the frequency, I gave my editing team more time
to make higher quality graphics and animations, and I also
gave myself more time to make better quality videos and
again especially make videos that you actually wanted to watch.
And by the end of the year, in November of
twenty twenty three, I had hit a new all time
record of one point seven to four million views in

(17:54):
one month, and their revenue had hit a brand new
record as well the same month, sixteen thousand, five hundred
dollars just from YouTube. Now, that was not the only
change that I made last year, because at the beginning
of last year I was so terrified that I had
killed my business. That I realized that if for some
reason YouTube shut off or they banned me or cut

(18:15):
me off or something happened, then I had worked all
those years and I had nothing outside of somebody else's control.
I knew I had to create something else of value
outside of YouTube, a separate business vehicle, and so in
June of last year, I started building Haresy Financial University.
Harcy Financial University is literally the best place you can

(18:36):
go for in depth financial education about all things making
more money, increasing your wealth, and protecting your wealth. And
it's all sourced from number one, my own journey, my
own mistakes, everything that I've learned in my career or
things that I've had to pay for to learn. I
teach people number one, how to get out of debt
the fastest and best way possible, because guess what, I

(18:58):
had to do that, and if I can do it,
you can do it faster. You just have to have
somebody point you in the right direction and follow the
right steps. I teach members how to build a six
figure side hustle because I did it the wrong way.
If you can build a business on the side scale
to six figures, that'll give you the escape patch. To
quit your business and then jump into something that's already
producing income. Making six figures a year in a side

(19:19):
hustle is actually very easy. You just need to know
the right things to do. From my time as a stockbroker,
I also learned a lot about trading and options at
technical analysis and fundamental analysis and how to allocate the
assets in your portfolio and long term wealth management and
all of that. I have training material to teach people
how to do this all the right way, so you

(19:40):
make a lot more money over your investing career and
lose a lot less. Risk management is key to this,
the biggest missing part, so I include and teach all
of this to all members of Harisy Financial University. There's
literally nothing like this out there. I've personally spent close
to six figures on courses and consulting and financial education
and and coaching, and there is nothing like this out there.

(20:02):
I've taken everything I've learned from all my mistakes and
all my larger wins and successes now and piled all
into one membership with a community live streams, and a
lot more content and features planned coming down the road
that I haven't revealed yet. All available to members of
Harisy Financial University. And I'm literally not joking when I

(20:23):
say that I wish every single person who watches my
YouTube videos would join and become a member, because if
you even implement a fraction of what you learn, it
will pay for itself. Thousands of times over. I get
messages from people all the time saying, hey, I just
did one thing here, and that one thing just paid
for my entire membership for the whole year. And so
I started building Harisey Financial University in June, and over

(20:47):
the course of the rest of twenty twenty three it
start to grow and grow and grow. So by the
end of twenty twenty three, I had three main income streams.
Number one YouTube paying on average ten thousand dollars a month.
Umber two. I still had sponsors, which would range from
thirty to fifty thousand dollars a month on average. But
by the end of twenty twenty three, I had reached

(21:09):
seventy thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue from Harrisey Financial University.
So in November, my total business revenue was one hundred
fifty two thousand dollars. In December it was ninety two
thousand dollars, and so far in January it's one hundred
twenty five thousand dollars. And yes, that is just revenue,
but currently my profit margins are in excess of ninety percent,

(21:33):
which is absolutely crazy. But I actually have a personal
income of over six figures per month as a result
starting this year, and you've probably already noticed already, but
starting in January first, I was finally able to do
something I've been wanting to do for over two years now.
I fired all my sponsors, and it's not because there's
anything wrong with them. I actually still love every single

(21:55):
one of them. You've heard me talk about Vaulted One, Gold,
I Trust, Capital, Monitor Metals, Swan Bitcoin, There's some others
over and over and over again, and they're great companies.
I still use them personally, I still recommend them, but
I don't like having sponsored ad spots in my videos.
The whole reason why I make YouTube videos is because

(22:16):
I want to make the best, most real, easiest to understand,
most accessible, most true financial education available to absolutely as
many people as possible. And my opinion is that having
a sponsored ad segment takes away from that. And now
I don't need to have sponsored ads anymore. With seventy
thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue from just Haresey Financial University,

(22:40):
there is more than enough to continue keeping my business
running without sponsors. So obviously I'm going to be taking
a big cut in revenue for the time being, but
ultimately I do think that this is going to translate
into much more income down the road because the market
has spoken about Haresy Financial University and the value there.
I've got hundreds of active monthly recurring members, and if

(23:02):
you join you'll see why. Now. Very obviously, my financial
journey has had some really really high highs and some
really really low lows. Multiple times in my life when
I had a bunch of debt and was making no money,
to when I didn't have any debt but I had
a baby and a wife at home and was making
no money, to when I quit my job and was
making no money and had two kids and a wife
at home. I've had plenty of times in my life

(23:24):
where I literally couldn't sleep fall asleep at night because
I was so stressed, feeling almost sick to my stomach
because I didn't know how we were going to pay
the bills, seeing how these money problems get in the
way of personal relationships, being able to help others, being
able to hire others, give people jobs, give generously to
those who are in need. Money can't solve every problem,

(23:45):
but it can solve every money problem. And most problems
are just money problems in disguise. And it took me
ten years to go from absolutely broke with a negative
net worth to multimillion dollar net worth making six figures
of month in personal income. But if I had learned
the right tools to use and the right steps to
take along the way, that path would have been a

(24:07):
lot shorter. And the biggest thing that I want to
communicate here is that if I can do this, anybody
can do it faster and better. I have no business
being in the position that I'm in today, with my
parents having credit card debt pretty much my entire life
and never getting ahead financially, to losing everything in the
financial crisis, and me having to go off to college
and pay my own way, graduating with a negative networth,

(24:29):
tons of student debt, nothing in my bank account, no degree,
no skills, no income, absolutely nothing that you need to
get started making money. But just because you come from
a circumstance that is broken from a family with no
money because you were taught the wrong things financially growing up.
That is no excuse. In fact, that burden you can

(24:50):
release that you are free to choose your own path.
And it might take five years, it might take ten
years like me, it might even take longer. But choosing
to get the financial education you need, choosing to learn
and use the right tools and follow the right steps
will get you there, no matter what you've done in
the past, and no matter how hard it's been for you.
So follow along, join me, We'll get there together.