The 3 MONEY MYTHS That Keep You Poor! (How To Build Wealth) | Jaspreet Singh & Jay Shetty

Jaspreet Singh 0:00 Every day that you save your money in the bank, you are slowly becoming poorer each and every day, and most of us never see it happen. Now, this doesn't mean you shouldn't save any money. This just means you have to understand how to save your money strategically, because wealthy people do not wanna save all their money. [upbeat music]

Jay Shetty 0:19 Hey, everyone. Welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every single one of you that come back every week to listen, learn, and grow. Now, the fun that I've been having with this show recently is, what we've done since the beginning is we've talked about mental health and wellbeing much more broadly than just the mind. Often we think that mental health, and living a positive life, and living a healthy life is all about just the mind. For a long time, we thought it was just the body. Then we kind of upgraded, but what we haven't realized is that every part of our life informs our wellbeing. How we make money, how we spend money, how we use money, and even deeper than that, how we think about money impacts our wellbeing. We have a relationship with every form of energy in this world, and money or our financial wellbeing is an integral part of it. And so today I'm really honored and really grateful because I reached out to someone who I believe is truly talking about this in a way that I can align with, someone that I feel has incredible values around his own mission. I'm talking about the one and only Jaspreet Singh, who's a serial entrepreneur and licensed attorney. Although he didn't receive any formal financial education, he's on a mission to make financial education fun and accessible, and he's winning at it. Jaspreet is the Chief Executive Money Nerd at the Minority Mindset Companies, and the host of the Minority Mindset YouTube channel, which I highly recommend you go and subscribe to while you're listening or watching this. Welcome to the show, Jaspreet Singh. Jaspreet, thank you for doing this.

Jaspreet Singh 1:58 Wow, Jay, what an introduction, man. I appreciate you, I appreciate being here, and thank you for the opportunity.

Jay Shetty 2:03 No, I'm so grateful I get to have this conversation with you. I was just saying to you offline

Jay Shetty 2:07 that one of the things I really appreciate about the way you talk about wealth, when I was watching your channel and hearing your work, was that I realized that money wasn't an obsession or it didn't sound like the goal, but you'd created these really healthy habits around how all of us, no matter what our financial situation is, can create really a deep, meaningful connection to our wealth and finances. Would you say that's fair? How does that sound? You can totally-

Jaspreet Singh 2:36 No

Jay Shetty 2:36 ... disagree with me too.

Jaspreet Singh 2:37 100%. I mean, the things that I grew up learning just didn't make sense because growing up, my parents are immigrants from a state in India called Punjab, and I saw my parents work their butt off. My parents came to this country with very little. And growing up, if my dad had a Saturday and a Sunday off, it was considered a long weekend. So he was working long hours every day, on weekends, all the time. And at the same time, they would say, "You need to study hard so you can get a good job and become successful." And at the same time, they would also say, "Don't worry about money. Don't stress about money. Don't talk about money, 'cause money's bad. Money's taboo. Money's evil." And something didn't make sense because even as a kid, I had this entrepreneurial bug where I was like, "I wanna do something different." I started by mowing my neighbor's lawns, and my parents were like, "Don't do that. Don't worry about trying to get money by doing that. Just study hard to become a doctor." And I was like, "Well, something's not making sense because on one hand you're working your butt off to get paid, and on the other hand you're talking about how money is bad, how you shouldn't talk about money." As I went through this, like, emotional and kind of a tough financial education journey, I realized that the reason why so many people create this smokescreen, taboo culture around money is because we're insecure about our money. And the reason why is because we don't understand how money plays a part in our lives. Money is just one part of our lives. You're right. Money is not gonna make you happier. Money is not gonna make you a better person. Money's not gonna make you a good person. However, if you don't have money and if you don't understand money, well, that lack of money can impact your mental health. It can make you stressed, anxious, depressed. It is one of the leading causes of divorce. If you don't have money, you can start eating bad. You can't afford healthier food. You can't have the right gym membership. You don't have time to take care of your family. If you don't have money, you can't buy your spouse that nice vacation that they keep asking about. You can't take care of your kids the way that you might have wanted to. You can't give your kids the vacations. You can't give your kids the opportunities that maybe you want. Maybe you can't even buy the healthcare that you want because the reality, and this is, you know, unfortunate or fortunate, the reality of the way the system is, is money talks. And if you don't understand money, then you're gonna be at the mercy of people who have money. And this is where I had to understand how money plays a part in my life.

Jaspreet Singh 4:55 Because I came to this something that I call the QuadraFit theory, and the way that I put it is there's four aspects of life. If you wanna live a happy and fulfilled life, you have to be healthy in these four aspects. First, you have to be physically fit. Second, you have to be mentally fit. Third, you have to be spiritually fit, and fourth is financially fit. And the way I put it in this order is because physically, if you're not physically fit, if you're morbidly obese, you're on your deathbed, it doesn't matter if you have $10 million. The only thing you care about is being healthy again. Second, mentally fit. If you are depressed, if you're anxious, if you are not surrounded by people that you love, if you're not happy, having more money is just gonna make you more miserable. And this is a big misconception out there where I, I know people in my own personal life, I'm sure you do too, where people are like, "If I just make a million dollars, you know, I'm gonna have- find the love of my life. I'm gonna be liked. People are gonna wanna talk to me. I'm gonna..." You start to imagine this world where money is gonna solve the mental aspect of your life, but that's not the case. It's its own aspect. So more money will not make you mentally happy. Then there's the spiritual aspect, and this doesn't have to be religious. This is your purpose. For me it's what, what is the reason why you're on this earth? What are you- Waking up for every single day. If you don't have a purpose, you're not gonna have a reason to get out of bed, no matter how much money you have. After you have the physical fitness, the mental fitness, the spiritual fitness, that's where the financial fitness has the biggest impact and the most power to help you live the most fulfilled life because now money is just the icing on the cake, man. It allows you to live a more fulfilled and a happy life because now you can do more of the things that make you happy. You can give more. You can buy more food for homeless people. You can do more things that give you happiness. Maybe it is writing books. Maybe it's traveling. Maybe it is giving. Maybe it is starting businesses. Whatever it is for you, you have the resources and the ability to do that, but that requires you to have that financial education and be willing to now go out of the way to talk about money and learn about money and understand that, hey, money is something that I need to understand. Money is something that I need to be willing to talk about. Money is something that I need to be willing to learn about because most of us are never taught to think about money, myself included.

Jay Shetty 7:13 Yeah. I, I mean, I love that thesis, and I would agree with you because I had similar rhetoric in my language growing up. So when we talked about money, it was we always had just enough.

Jaspreet Singh 7:27 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 7:28 So I grew up-

Jaspreet Singh 7:29 Yeah

Jay Shetty 7:29 ... when I had zero in my bank accounts on plenty days, and that was just, we had just enough. Or we often talked about money as if we went to a place where someone had a nice home or someone had a nice car-

Jaspreet Singh 7:43 Yeah

Jay Shetty 7:43 ... the conversation would be, "Oh, well, that person does some sketchy stuff."

Jaspreet Singh 7:47 Exactly.

Jay Shetty 7:47 Or, "They must have done something that was stabbing someone in the back-

Jaspreet Singh 7:51 Right

Jay Shetty 7:52 ... or causing someone pain to be in that position." And so you start creating this very negative, toxic view towards money.

Jaspreet Singh 7:59 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 7:59 And like you said, at the same time, you need access to it.

Jay Shetty 8:03 Have you ever figured out what it was for your parents that you think created that disparity in their relationship with money? Have you ever probed that? Have you ever understood that?

Jaspreet Singh 8:12 Well, I think it's-

Jay Shetty 8:13 Because it comes from somewhere, right?

Jaspreet Singh 8:14 Yeah, I think it's a cultural thing, you know? I- I- I think across the Indian culture, my parents are from a state in India called Punjab.

Jay Shetty 8:20 Yeah.

Jaspreet Singh 8:21 Culturally, you know, money is just one of those things, like, even in my culture and my religion, like, there's this concept called kirat karo, which means earn an honest living. Now, many people have interpreted that, you know, in, in many different ways of, oh, don't worry about money. Don't talk about money. And, and in the Sikh religion, there's also this big concept of seva, which means selfless service, giving back. And so there's this kind of, like, real giving aspect, which is great, and I agree with. But many times we overlook the idea of, how about the earning aspect? How do we earn? How do we take care of ourselves? Because the way I look at it is, if you wanna be able to fill somebody else's cup, you wanna feed somebody else, you have to be able to feed yourself first, and this is a lesson that my grandfather taught me. My grandparents are immigrants, or they were refugees before they came and lived with me. They were refugees because the state of Punjab, uh, used to be much larger. 1947, the state was severed, and if you were a Sikh and you were on the west side of Punjab, you had to migrate east. Otherwise, you were gonna be killed. And it was a very brutal, very rough, very, like, bad time, and my grandparents were on the west side. And so immediately, they had to leave their homes, leave their lands, leave family members, leave their friends behind, and migrate and run east. And my grandfather, I hear this story a lot, and, uh, he'd actually just moved back to America. But when he started the migration proc- the, the process moving east, all he had was a sword in his hand and the clothes on his back. Nothing else. Left all the money, left all the land, left everything behind. Even left his parents behind and started running. And during that process, he got attacked by a mob, and he had to defend himself, and he saw his uncle get killed right in front of him. His uncle got a, a knife, a s- a sword right to his head, cut his head open in half, and that was the last time he saw him. Now he comes over to the new east inside of Punjab, the new India. He lost his shoes along the way, doesn't have a home, doesn't have any family, doesn't have any friends. He's, he's here just trying to figure it out himself and now has to figure out, how do you make life work? And what he tells me from that time is poorness is the worst disease, and the reason why is because when you're at that level of poverty, that level of poorness, you can't even think about feeding somebody else. You can't think about helping another person because the only thing on your mind is, how can I feed myself? How can you feed your family? When that's the only thing that you're trying to do, you can't worry about feeding other people, and that's where, you know, for me it was I wanna become successful so I can give back to my family, to my parents, give back to my community, and be able to do more things. Money at its core is just a tool. It allows you to do more of the things that you want. If you give a good person money, they have a tool to do more good. If you give a bad person more money, they have a tool to do more bad. So money, at the end of the day, it's just like gasoline. It amplifies whoever you are, which is why we need more good people with money. So now going back to your question of why, I, I really think it's just a lot of insecurity. You know, i- if we feel like we did everything right, we're working hard, but we don't have what somebody else has, something must be wrong. They must have done something bad. They must have done something that, you know, we didn't see. So we create excuses. We create smoke screens. But the thing that we

Jaspreet Singh 11:42 don't understand is the financial education aspect because that is the thing that can make or break your finances. It does not matter how much money you make, what degree you have, who your parents are, where you went to school. None of that matters. It's what you do with the money you make, and this is one of those things that it can be very hard for you to understand unless you actually see it. I was actually just reading a study last week. It said that seven out of 10 Americans across the board are living paycheck to paycheck. And then it said that- 50% of Americans, or just about 50% of Americans making six figures or more are also living paycheck to paycheck. The majority of Americans across the board, doesn't matter the income, are broke. They have little to no savings. They have little to no investments, regardless of how much money you're making. And the reason is not just because of what salary or job or, or what degree you have or who your parents are, but because of what financial education you have. And none of us are taught to think about money, which is the craziest thing.

Jay Shetty 12:40 Yeah. I, I, I really appreciate you going in that direction because I think everyone thinks that when we do have a conversation about money, because of our conditioning, it has to be this obsession-

Jaspreet Singh 12:50 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 12:50 ... or it has to be this goal. And you're like, "Well, actually it's just about education."

Jaspreet Singh 12:54 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 12:54 It's just about you have to make this thing, and you're going to do something with it.

Jaspreet Singh 12:58 Right.

Jay Shetty 12:58 We better learn how it goes in and goes out and where it goes. And even for me, I'm, I'm reflecting on my own experience. I, I interviewed my mom recently, not on the podcast, and I want to do that. But I interviewed my mom recently at a dinner. We were at a dinner for my sister's birthday, and I thought, "You know what? I'm gonna interview my mom like a podcast guest-

Jaspreet Singh 13:14 Yeah

Jay Shetty 13:14 ... at dinner."

Jaspreet Singh 13:15 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 13:15 And so I started asking her questions. I was like, "Mom, like, how did you get your first job?" And, like, especially I find, like, Indian South Asian parents, they don't really talk about-

Jaspreet Singh 13:23 Yeah

Jay Shetty 13:23 ... I don't know, at least mine don't. They don't talk about the struggles they went through or the hardships-

Jaspreet Singh 13:27 Yeah

Jay Shetty 13:27 ... or the journey.

Jaspreet Singh 13:27 You never talk about the problems.

Jay Shetty 13:29 You never talk about the problems. And so I was asking my mom. She told me that she was from Yemen. So my mom was born and raised in Yemen. She speaks Arabic. Unfortunately, she did not teach me, uh, but she's of Indian descent and Indian origin. And in Yemen, there was a war going on between the people of Yemen and the Brits because the Brits were in control at the time. So my mom said she was studying for her exams while there were Yemeni soldiers on her roof-

Jaspreet Singh 13:55 Wow

Jay Shetty 13:55 ... trying to protect Yemen, and they had to study for their school exams.

Jaspreet Singh 13:58 Crazy.

Jay Shetty 13:58 And, like, that's what she was going through. And so, and then when she moved to London, she kept her British passport by moving to London at the time because Yemen got its independence. They moved with, like, eight pounds, which is like $10. Like, you know, and, and at that time, that's not bad.

Jaspreet Singh 14:13 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 14:13 But it's ... I mean, that's practically nothing. And of course, they built up from scratch and, and, you know, for themselves did really well. But the idea still comes to we have no financial education.

Jaspreet Singh 14:25 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 14:26 What are... If you could s- start with, and we'll dive into each of these deeper.

Jaspreet Singh 14:31 Sure.

Jay Shetty 14:31 If you could tell me, what are the three habits that keep us in that poor or poverty mindset, as you said?

Jaspreet Singh 14:38 Sure.

Jay Shetty 14:39 And what are the healthy habits that bring us into the wealthy mindset?

Jaspreet Singh 14:43 Sure. So the three, I think, biggest bad habits when it comes to money, first, probably the most obvious, I would say, is people following the two S's, where you're spending or saving all of your money. You'll never become wealthy if you do that. Number two would be you blindly follow the system without questioning the way the system works. And number three is you don't understand how money works. So if we start with number one, the two S's, save and spend. Now, it's interesting. If you look at the financial statements for the majority of people in America or even across the world, the way it looks is you make money, you pay taxes, you spend money, and then you wonder where all your money went. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 15:25 Literally.

Jaspreet Singh 15:26 A- a- and so people, the majority of people don't have any plan for their money, and that's why the majority of people have little to no savings, and the majority of Americans have little to no investments. Right now, about half of America has zero investments. And I'm talking about zero 401ks, zero IRAs, zero stock market accounts, zero real estate investments, zero gold investments, nothing. And then out of the next half of Americans that have an investment, only half of those have an investment outside of their 401k or IRA. So you have a very small percent, about a quarter of America, working America, that's any investments on their own. When you go back

Jaspreet Singh 16:08 to the saving and spending, we're in a spending culture. America has a consumerism culture. And I joke about this, but, uh, the way I like to say it is traditionally Indian people make a dollar to spend 20 cents. American people make a dollar to spend $2.

Jay Shetty 16:23 Yeah.

Jaspreet Singh 16:23 Thanks to the help of credit-

Jay Shetty 16:24 Credit, yeah

Jaspreet Singh 16:24 ... lines of credit. This is just the culture that we're in, where it's very okay and normalized to spend money even if you can't afford something.

Jay Shetty 16:32 You don't have it.

Jaspreet Singh 16:32 And what are you doing? Well, you're spending all your money making everybody else around you rich, but you yourself, you might look rich, but you're actually broke. There's a reason why the owner and CEO of Louis Vuitton is the richest person in the world, whereas the majority of people who wear Louis Vuitton are broke. The people who are wearing Louis Vuitton are trying to look rich. And how are you doing that? Well, you're making the owner of Louis Vuitton rich by doing that. And so this is where you gotta understand. There's nothing wrong with wearing designer stuff. There's nothing wrong with having nice stuff. There's nothing wrong with wanting nice things, but you have to be able to afford it first. I used to guest teach in Detroit public schools. And when I used to teach there, it's a, it's a rough school district. I would talk to the kids about life, you know, motivation and entrepreneurship and money and success, and one of the things that I would ask is, "How many of you have a job?" Almost all of them raised their hand saying that they had a job. My next follow-up question was, "How many of you have a bank account?" Nobody raised their hand. So I asked, you know, "What do you do with your paycheck?" They said, "Well, we get a physical check, then we go to the liquor store. We get it cashed. The liquor store owner takes 1 to 10%. Then you buy pop, candy, a bunch of junk on the way out. And by the time you're out of the store, you've already given away half of your paycheck." I call it a net zero thinking, where we think in terms of spending. If I have $1,000, I can go out and buy this handbag, this nice thing. If I have 10 grand, I can go on this nice vacation. If I have 50 grand, I can go out and buy this nice car. We think in terms of spending because we think, "If I have this money, how can I spend it?" Now, if you break away from that, and now you start creating a buffer and you don't spend all of your money, the next problem is

Jaspreet Singh 18:10 we save our money, because for me, the only financial education that I was given was save your money. Because if you're not spending it, now you are building up a big bank account, and if you have a big bank account, you'll be wealthy. But the reality is you will never be able to become wealthy through your savings. Your savings will never make you wealthy. And if you don't believe me, I'll give you just a mathematical term. Your savings right now are growing by essentially nothing, but let's just say 1%, and I'm being very, very generous here. If your savings grow by 1% and inflation is higher than 1%, and we can see now inflation is extremely high, but even before the 2020 pandemic, inflation was still higher than 1%. We were 2 or 3%. Inflation means that the value of your savings are dropping. So if inflation is higher than your savings, that means that your savings are losing value each and every day. Every day that you're saving money in the bank, you are slowly becoming poorer each and every day, and most of us never see it happen. Now, this doesn't mean you shouldn't save any money. This just means you have to understand how to save your money strategically, because wealthy people do not wanna save all their money. They wanna save their money for an emergency, they save their money for an investment, or they save their money for a big purchase. If it doesn't fall into one of those three things, you don't wanna save your money because now you're saving money, your savings are just making you poorer each and every day. This

Jaspreet Singh 19:30 brings me to then the second aspect, which is blindly following and trusting the system. And this one was the most difficult one for me because growing up, most of us, myself included, are always told that if you wanna become successful, go to school, get good grades, get a good job, climb the corporate ladder. For me, it was go to school, get good grades, get into medical school, become a doctor. I know you've heard similar stories before.

Jay Shetty 19:57 Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Jaspreet Singh 19:58 That was all that I was told. Since I was, like, a little baby, my parents would tell everybody, "Jaspreet is gonna become a doctor. He's gonna go out and do medicine," this and that. And that's what I was always told, and I was not really against it because I wanted to be successful. I saw how hard my parents worked since I was a kid. I always wanted to give back, and I always assumed that, okay, if I got good grades, I'll get into a good medical school, and if I do good in medical school, I'll be able to get a good job as a doctor, and if I get a good job as a doctor, I'll be able to make more money. I thought it was all just linearly correlated.

Jay Shetty 20:27 Yeah.

Jaspreet Singh 20:28 Your grades, your income. Your grades, your success. That was one of the reasons why growing up, anything that was not medical or academic related, it was completely discouraged. And sometimes I think it's very difficult for someone to understand what does it mean that, like, you know, your parents really wanted you to be a doctor, because it wasn't, like, an option. Like, this was the only option.

Jay Shetty 20:47 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jaspreet Singh 20:47 And I think the best example that I can give of that was when I was in eighth grade, I was like, you know, 12 years old. My parents got me a tutor, not for the English class that I was on the verge of failing, not for the other stuff that I was studying for in eighth grade, but for the medical college admission test. The test you take in college to get into medical school, my parents got me a tutor for when I was in 12th grade. We didn't spend money on a lot of things. The only thing that parents were willing to spend money on were things related to academics to get me into medical school. And so here I am in 12th grade. I have a MTE- MCAT tutor coming to my house, and he's like, "Wait, this is the kid that I'm teaching about medical school to get him into medical school?" And, like, that's how strict it was in my house. So I was checking all the boxes. I was doing good in school. I was studying hard. I was getting good grades. But then along the way, I realized that something wasn't adding up. When I was in high school, I was working at Indian weddings. I was playing a drum called the dhol, and I got to meet a lot of the local Indian DJs that work at Indian weddings, and we ca- we became friends. And they would say, "You know, you have a lot of friends in high school. How about we start hosting teen parties in high school?" Now, I couldn't tell my parents this because, again, anything that's not-

Jay Shetty 21:57 [laughs]

Jaspreet Singh 21:58 ... you know, medicine related, gonna get me into medical school, I can't tell them. So I would do this all on the side. Even going to work at weddings, I had to kinda keep it all secret. And I was like, "Okay, let's do it." You know, I- I, it was fun for me. So I was 16 years old, and I started hosting these teen parties at a local restaurant that just opened up, and they wanted some exposure, so they let us do it there for free. And it was fun, but then I was like, you know, I know this is a hobby. I'm gonna go to college, and I'm gonna become a doctor, and this is all gonna s- become history. Well, I go to college. I'm 17. I don't know what to expect because my parents didn't go to university here. And I think that everybody goes to college. They spend their Friday nights in the chemistry lab. They all wanna become this big thing, and they wanna spend all their time studying in college. And I get there, and everybody is partying, drinking, blowing money they don't have on all this stuff. Like, I don't party. I don't drink. I, I, I never drank. I didn't smoke. So for me, it was, like, a big shock. And I was like, "This is weird. Like, this is not what I expected, but I still need something to do on Friday nights." So that entrepreneur side of my brain kicked in again. It was like, "Oh, let's bring this party business back to college," [laughs] 'cause that's all I knew. So I was like, "Oh, okay." So I'm 17. I start knocking on the doors of all the clubs, venues, bars, restaurants, um, asking if I can host party here. And again, I'm not a party person. I don't drink. I don't smoke, but this was the only hustle that I knew, and, uh, you know, I just didn't know much else. So eventually, I found a club that would work with me, and they didn't wanna charge me anything. They would let me work on a, essentially a commission basis, that they'll take a percentage of the revenue that I bring in. And I said, "Okay." It doesn't cost me any money, 'cause I didn't have a lot of money. I started hosting these parties, but I still knew that this was just a hobby, something I'm doing because I was bored on weekends. Then I started studying to go into medical school, and this is where things really shifted because I had some cash saved up in the bank. And now this is, like, the bottom of the 2008 crash because I was in high school when the 2008 crash happened. Um, around 2012 was when I was studying for the MCAT. So real estate prices are at rock bottom, and the markets are still really shaky. And I'm starting to study for the MCAT, and I am bored out of my mind trying to study for this because I just wasn't very passionate about it. And so during my breaks, I would read business books, and I would go on the Yahoo Finance, and I would study what's going on in the markets just for fun. And I kept hearing about how real estate is at rock bottom on the news. And the business books that I read always said that wealthy people invested in real estate. I had no idea what that meant. I didn't know any real estate investors. I didn't know what real estate investing was. I didn't have investor people in my family, so I didn't know what that meant. Uh, so I was like, well, if wealthy people invest in real estate, maybe I should invest in real estate. So I brought up the idea to my dad. I was like, "Dad, I wanna invest in real estate." He's like, "Shut up. You're stupid. Go study and become a doctor. You can worry about all this other stuff after you become a doctor." And I was like, "Okay." Now I just wanna say, you know, I love my dad to death, my parents. This was just all they knew. They didn't have that financial education. But in the back of my mind, you know, I'm always like, you know, "Okay, what can I do? Maybe I don't gotta tell my parents. I'll just do something else."

Jay Shetty 25:04 [laughs]

Jaspreet Singh 25:04 I had a little bit of cash saved up in the bank from the party business that I was running. So I started looking at rental properties to buy, and I found this small condo on sale for $8,400. That was the price of the condo.

Jay Shetty 25:18 That's... Wow.

Jaspreet Singh 25:19 And that same condo a few years prior had sold for 150 grand. So the 2008 crash really decimated the real estate market in Michigan because Ford, GM, Chrysler were just hit so hard. And so I was like, okay, well, this is not a bad price. I can afford this. So I made an offer for $4,000, and it was in foreclosure. The bank countered with 7,000, and then I said, "Mm, how about we settle at six grand?" And we were trying to go back and forth, and then they said, "Well, we have another offer on the table." I didn't wanna lose this deal because I'd already looked at a few, so I was like, "Okay, well, I'll make an offer for eight grand." So it was a bidding war. The other person offered less than eight grand, so I got the condo. So I bought the condo for $8,000, put a little bit of work into it. It was in pretty good shape, and I got it rented out for $600 a month. Now I'm 19 years old, and I had no idea what I was doing, but all of a sudden, once I got it a little bit figured out, I was like, wait, this condo is paying me every single month, and I don't have to go and host a party. I don't gotta go to work. I was working at Auntie Anne's Pretzels a little bit before that. I was like, I don't gotta flip pretzels. I don't gotta host this party. I don't gotta work at a wedding, and it's paying me. Something doesn't make sense. Like how come I was never told about this? Like I, I was doing good in school. Like I'm... I, I thought I was like smart. I thought I knew what I was doing. Turns out that there's a whole world of financial education that we're never taught. So now the traditional system is go to school, study hard, get good grades, get a good job, climb the corporate ladder. And now I'm starting to realize, wait, there's a different system here that none of us are ever taught, where the goal isn't to just get a job and climb the corporate ladder. What wealthy people are doing is they're working to own the corporate ladder. And I was like, I didn't even know that you could do that. Because now if you can own investments, if you can own assets, you own things that are going to be paying you without you having to physically work. And this is what wealthy people are working for. Yet none of us are ever taught this. None of us are ever taught in school, how do you manage money? None of us are ever taught, how do you invest your money? None of us are ever taught, how do you build wealth? None of us are ever taught, how do you generate passive income? Yet wealthy people are teaching their kids this, and they're able to figure it out because they have that education. But for the majority of us, we're not taught this unless you're willing to go out of your way. Now, YouTube has made it a lot more accessible, thank God.

Jay Shetty 27:41 Yeah.

Jaspreet Singh 27:41 But before YouTube, you had to go out of your way to read books and take classes and, and it's tough. It's a... I mean, it's much harder to read a 300-page book than it is to watch a 10-minute YouTube video.

Jay Shetty 27:51 Yeah, definitely.

Jaspreet Singh 27:52 So that was a big turning factor for me because that's when I started to realize that there's something different that you can do. So the second

Jaspreet Singh 27:59 habit that we talk about, you know, breaking away from that traditional system-

Jay Shetty 28:02 System

Jaspreet Singh 28:02 ... asking the question why. And then the third thing is understanding what money is. And this is a very tough concept to understand. And I guess the best example that I can give of this is kind of going back to the traditional Indian culture, because in India, it's a very common thing that when somebody has extra cash, extra rupees, they wanna convert these rupees to gold. Uh, it's why in India, a lot of gold is transacted-

Jay Shetty 28:28 Yeah

Jaspreet Singh 28:28 ... during weddings because they wanna, they wanna give money. And the way that they do that is through gold, because inherently, people understand that the rupee loses value. And I don't think that people understand the why or the ins and out. It's just normal. That's just the culture.

Jay Shetty 28:43 Yeah.

Jaspreet Singh 28:43 So people take the cash and they buy gold. And the reason why now we need to understand this here in our culture is because when we think of money, there's two different aspects to it. There's a currency, which means something that we use to buy and sell things in exchange, and then there is the store of value. And many of us assume that our money is supposed to be a store of value. It's supposed to keep its worth. But now, because of the 2020 pandemic and the 2021 inflation and the 2022 inflation, we're seeing that, oh my God, my savings don't buy me as much. My earnings are not stretching as far. And so we're starting to really realize here that maybe my dollars don't hold the same value. And so now it's understanding what is money? Well, there's two aspects. You have the currency aspect to buy and sell things, and then there's the store of value. What wealthy people understand is that money doesn't act as a very good store of value in today's day and age. So you wanna take your money and convert it to something that is a store of value or maybe something that's actually gonna produce you income. This is like something that's so important for everyone to understand. And what's interesting is my first video to go viral was back in 2016. And in that video on my Minority Mindset channel, the reason why I think it went viral was because I talked about this whole idea of when you save all of your cash in the bank, you're becoming poorer each and every day, because back then, inflation was between 2 and 3%, while your bank was paying you half a percent. So I said was, "Look, you're losing 2 to 3% of your cash's value every single day, so you need to do something with this money because your money is losing value. In 10 years, it's gonna be worth less than it is today." Well, I didn't expect this 2020 pandemic to happen. I didn't expect all this craziness to happen, but now here we are with inflation significantly higher than 2% to 3%, and now people are really starting to understand that, whoa, what is my money? And you have to be able to understand this because this is the driving reason for why wealthy people don't want to save all their extra cash. You wanna put your cash to work, which brings

Jaspreet Singh 30:53 us now to the second side, right? What do wealthy people do? Well, the first thing, you have to understand how money plays a part in your life, like we discussed, right? How does money impact your life? That way you don't go out and just start chasing money. Because one of the things that I realized was I started making way more money [laughs] when I stopped chasing money, because when you're chasing money, you're chasing something that's illusory. It's just fake. It's just... I- it, it doesn't even feel good, and you're, you're not gonna be able to put your full self into it. But then the second thing, on the more financial side, is what do you do with that money? And one of the things that I realized is what wealthy people want is this thing called equity, and this is where you have a lot of benefits in America because you can't do this in a lot of countries. See, if you think about the traditional American dream, which is changing now, but the traditional American dream was you can work hard, buy a home, have a car. But the whole idea of buying a home, the reason why this was the American dream, was because if you can buy a home, you can work over the years to pay it off, and now you have equity in your home, and now you have the sort of generational wealth that you can pass down. You have an asset. Well, the traditional American dream is now an American nightmare with the high cost of homeownership, with wages not keeping up with the cost of living. However, that doesn't mean that the American dream is dead. It's just changed. So what is this new idea of the American dream? Well, if you go back to the root core of equity, this is the real dream of wealth, and something that you can build for yourself and for your family and for generations is if you have equity. Now, how do I explain this? Well, if you think about any company, uh, especially in a bigger company, it's easy to understand. There's two people, two types of people that are involved. You have the workers, and you have the owners. The workers are working for a salary. You go to work every single day. You get a paycheck. You're getting a salary. The owners of the company are not getting paid a salary. They're getting paid in profits. They want the company to make bigger profits so that they can make more money. Now, there is some overlap between the workers and the owners. If you are a founder, you're probably an owner as well. The CEO might have some ownership, and some newer companies, you'll give equity to the workers as well.

Jay Shetty 33:14 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jaspreet Singh 33:14 But when you have equity, you're getting the profits of a company. Everybody in America in this system needs to be a business owner if you wanna become successful. Now, the one thing that I wanna caveat that with is the majority of people should not try to start a business, and the majority of people should not try to operate a business. Now, you might say, "Jaspreet, you just said everybody should be a business owner."

Jay Shetty 33:38 [laughs]

Jaspreet Singh 33:38 "How does that make any sense?" Well, you can own a business without working for the business, and now this is the question of what are you doing with your salary? What are you doing with your income? You can either build the equity by starting a company yourself or by building a home, or you can buy the equity. Now, how do you do that? Well, you have to understand

Jaspreet Singh 33:58 the wealth formula. The wealth formula that I come up, that I've come up with is you take your income minus your expenses, and that equals your investments plus your savings. So if you take your income, the amount of money that you make, and now you subtract all the things that you buy, your rent, your mortgage, your car payment, your groceries, your gas, you take away all of your expenses, and if you have a margin, well, now you have extra cash. Now, you can save all or some of this money, but if you don't save some of it, then that money can be put to work in your investments. These investments, like I've been hinting at, is what makes wealthy people wealthy, and it's what keep wealthy people wealthy. These investments can be in the stock market because anytime you buy a share of any company, if you go out and buy a share of, say, Amazon, you become one of the owners of the Amazon corporation. You get to share in the profits. If the Amazon valuation goes up, your stock price goes up. The second way would be through real estate, not through your home, but through a real estate investment, buying a rental property that you're buying for the sole purpose of making money. This is something that can pay you every week, or every year, every month. Uh, then it can be through your own business, or if you don't wanna build your own business, you can invest in startups. It's much more accessible now. You can own physical gold. You can invest in cryptocurrency if that's something that you believe in. So there's a lot of different ways to build this equity, but this is where now you need to be putting your money to work-

Jay Shetty 35:22 Mm

Jaspreet Singh 35:22 ... to actually buy and own and build this equity.

Jay Shetty 35:26 Yeah, those are... I mean, I-- First of all, I just wanna say I love how structured your thinking is, and it's so great to break things down. And so anyone who's been listening or watching so far, make sure you go back and ask yourself which of those habits you're struggling with. Are you someone who's in the two S's, choosing to either spend or save? Are you someone who's being slowed down by systemic thinking and, like, being controlled about where that goes? Like, really take a moment to reflect in this episode while you're listening which part you wanna work on, because I know right now some of you may be tempted to just turn this off and go, "I'm overwhelmed. I don't wanna hear about this. I'm scared about my money already. I don't wanna talk about it." But I'm hoping that this is creating space for you to really sit down, introspect, and reflect. Going

Jay Shetty 36:10 into that, I think one of the biggest issues that people have when they hear this, and I know that I had a long time ago when I first heard this, was I don't have enough to, uh, do anything with. And so I remember when I started hearing about crypto specifically, like very early on, like, I probably heard about it, like, maybe, like- 13 years ago, probably the first time

Jaspreet Singh 36:31 Wow

Jay Shetty 36:31 Yeah, I was v- very early heard about cryptocurrencies, about 12, 13 years ago, and I had just come out of the monastery, so I didn't have any money. Like, I didn't, I didn't have anything to invest. And probably in about a year, I probably would've had, like, 1,000 to invest. In my head I go, "That's not anything. [laughs] What's that gonna do?"

Jaspreet Singh 36:51 Yeah

Jay Shetty 36:51 Right? And I think a lot of people have that mindset where they're like, "I only have $500. I only have $1,000. Like, what can I do with that? I might as well spend it on whatever it is because... Or I'm gonna save it because I need it for a rainy day." What does someone do when they have that mindset, when they're like, "I don't have enough"? How, how do you approach that?

Jaspreet Singh 37:07 So when I was in high school, I really wanted a Ford Mustang, but my dad was like, "No, you can't buy a Ford Mustang." I wasn't gonna get that car. Um, but this is, again, when stock prices had crashed. And the next best thing, if I couldn't buy a Ford Mustang, this... And I started reading the business books then, was how about I buy some of the Ford stock? Again, I didn't have a lot of money. My first investment in the Ford stock was $2 because that's how much the stock was trading for. Now it's much higher, but what I'm trying to get at is, you know, you can start with a very little amount of money. I mean, nowadays with the new age of stock brokerages, if you have $10, you can start buying this type of equity. You can start building this type of equity. But the key now is the consistency and how oft- like, doing it all the time, because when I say consistency, people say, "Oh, anytime I have $100." Well, okay, what you wanna do by consistency is make it automatic. Anytime you get paid, take a portion of that money and automatically invest it. Now, the next question is probably where do I put this money? Do I just throw it into Tesla or Amazon? Well, if you're not willing to do that level of research where you don't wanna try to find the best companies, you don't wanna invest in real estate, you don't wanna get into the more, you know, let's say, the more advanced type of stuff, you wanna just put your money to work, well, the simplest thing you can do is look at something called an ETF, which is an exchange-traded fund, which gives you exposure not to one company, but many companies. Maybe hundreds of companies. For example, there's something called the S&P 500, which is a group of the 500 biggest companies on the stock market. Essentially, the 500 biggest companies in America. You can invest in the S&P 500 by investing in just one symbol. So you invest in this one thing, and you're getting exposure to 500 different companies. Now you don't have to worry about what each of these 500 companies are doing. You're just investing essentially in America, the future of the American economy. If that's something you believe in, well, now every time you get paid, put in $100. And now you just do this for the long term, whether the market is up or down, does not matter. It should not change your strategy. Just keep passively investing your money. Make it automatic. Make it passive. That way you don't have to even worry about it, and now you just keep building it up because now it's the whole idea of compounding. You don't wanna just throw your money in at once. You wanna put a little bit of money and let that grow. Put more money in, let that grow. Put more money in and let that grow. I made a couple videos where I talked about two people. One was a janitor. One worked in a school. Both of them made very little income, yet both of them retired very wealthy. And the reason we- and I'm talking about in the millions of dollars, and the reason why they've been able to retire with a million dollars plus was because they took a little bit of money every time they got paid, and they just invested that money. It did not matter, you know, what else was going on in the world. They always paid themselves first. They always invested in assets before they started going out and buying things that made them look rich. Every single time. And when you put that little bit of money to work, whether you're starting with $25 or $250 or $1,000, when you put that money to work and you do that consistently, over time you can build real wealth. I mean, if you look at a compound calculator, a few hundred dollars a month compounded from the age of 21 to 65, getting an average rate of return, I mean, we, we're talking about millions. But it just starts with making a small investment first and being consistent with it, and always be willing to learn.

Jay Shetty 40:40 I love that, and I'm glad you brought that up because

Jay Shetty 40:42 I think the other option, so as I was saying there, is the issue is I don't have enough. It's not gonna matter, right? Like, that's one mindset. The other mindset is, and it's almost the opposite. It's the idea of like, but I wanna make money quick.

Jaspreet Singh 40:53 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 40:54 Right? And I feel like it's like, I don't know, but I want it now. And I think there's this mindset, especially what you keep saying about the, how the lifestyle's been portrayed-

Jaspreet Singh 41:01 Yeah

Jay Shetty 41:01 ... that we almost feel like people just change their lives overnight-

Jaspreet Singh 41:04 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 41:05 ... and that they all of a sudden have, like, a portfolio of rental properties-

Jaspreet Singh 41:08 Yeah

Jay Shetty 41:08 ... or they all of a sudden have the nice house or the nice car or whatever it may be, and all of a sudden we're wondering, well, how does it happen that quick for me? And then we get stuck in a get-rich-quick scheme-

Jaspreet Singh 41:17 [laughs] Yeah

Jay Shetty 41:17 ... or we get stuck in, like, some-

Jaspreet Singh 41:18 Yeah

Jay Shetty 41:18 ... quick win. How do... It sounds like to me that one of the biggest trainings is in the discipline of being able to postpone pleasure.

Jaspreet Singh 41:28 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 41:28 Because what you're saying in any market is it's gonna take time. Like, you had to save up four, 4 to 8,000 for your first condo that you bought.

Jaspreet Singh 41:38 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 41:38 First of all, you had to work for that money. You had to save that money-

Jaspreet Singh 41:41 Yeah

Jay Shetty 41:41 ... so that you could invest it.

Jaspreet Singh 41:42 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 41:42 Then you were able to buy this 8,000 condo, which, which obviously had, has had great, you know, growth I'm sure. But there was a lot that took to get to that, whereas I think right now people are like, "Oh, well, I'd rather spend the $100 on this."

Jaspreet Singh 41:56 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 41:56 Right?

Jaspreet Singh 41:57 It, it's, it's a real decade of sacrifice, and there's really no way around it if you want to fast-track your way. Now, the best investment you can make if you want the better returns, the bigger returns, is by investing your money in yourself. And the, the tough part is you gotta be willing to go through the time and the effort because you're right. It takes time. I'd... You know, unless you have that experience already there, you have the mentors, you have, you know, peer parents, people who can guide you through it, maybe you can shorten it, but I didn't have that. So for me, it took me a solid decade to figure it out, to go from business idea to business idea to business idea, to get f- Go through failure over failure, to get scammed after scammed. Those things are what teach you. And when you're going through it, it sucks. You don't realize that you're going through a lesson. You just feel like, "Dang, I just got screwed over."

Jay Shetty 42:43 Yeah, yeah.

Jaspreet Singh 42:43 [laughs] You know what I mean?

Jay Shetty 42:44 True, true.

Jaspreet Singh 42:45 But it's, it's, you gotta keep the goal, you know, in mind. And it's understanding what is more important to you right now. Because you're right, the last thing that you wanna do also is get into this idea of just pinching pennies, because at the end of the day, a penny saved is just a penny. And the, the thing that I can best do to illustrate that is if you make $40,000 a year and you're like, "Okay, I'm gonna put aside a quarter of my income. I'm gonna put aside $10,000 to save and invest," and then you start putting your money to work and you're like, "Oh my God, I love this. I wanna do more. I wanna get better results." So now you're like, "Well, I'm gonna try to put aside 30% of my income, 35% of my income," and you keep trying to squeeze this limited pie. But this is where now y- it's about building that growth mindset, and this is what wealthy people are able to do, where they say, "Okay, sure, I can try to squeeze more pennies out of the pie, but the other thing that I could do is I'm gonna try to grow the pie."

Jay Shetty 43:40 Mm.

Jaspreet Singh 43:40 How do I go from 40,000 to $400,000?

Jay Shetty 43:43 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jaspreet Singh 43:44 And, you know, you might hear that thinking, "How in the world am I gonna go from 40 to 400?" Like, it, it just sounds impossible and so far away. And a- at that point, yeah, it might seem that way, but the first step, like you said, it's that mindset. That's why I call Minority Mindset-

Jay Shetty 43:59 Yeah

Jaspreet Singh 43:59 ... Minority Mindset because all success starts with your mindset. You have to be wealthy here before you can be wealthy in your bank account, and you have to understand how your mindset plays a part in it. Because now if you tell yourself you can't do it, you can't.

Jay Shetty 44:11 Yeah.

Jaspreet Singh 44:11 But if you tell yourself you can, then the next thing you're gonna do is you're gonna say, "How do I go from 40 to 50?"

Jay Shetty 44:15 Yeah.

Jaspreet Singh 44:16 50 to 100. You're gonna start watching YouTube videos. You're gonna start putting in work. And as you start to make more money, now you're gonna be able to answer that question of, what do I wanna do with this money? Do I wanna go out and buy a new Beamer?

Jay Shetty 44:29 Yeah.

Jaspreet Singh 44:29 Or do I wanna go out and invest in my business? Do I wanna go out and buy a rental property? Do I wanna go out and invest in stocks? Do I wanna go out and invest in a startup? And now you can make these decisions because you have that financial education, and this is why, you know, any time I talk about the hows of, you know, things that I say you should do to become wealthy, I always talk about how you, uh, invest and grow your money last.

Jay Shetty 44:51 Yeah.

Jaspreet Singh 44:51 Because if you don't know how to save that money, if you don't know how to invest that money, earning more money doesn't do you any good until you know how to do that. Because now earning more money has the most impact because now you know how to put-

Jay Shetty 45:04 The system

Jaspreet Singh 45:04 ... that money to work. You have the system.

Jay Shetty 45:06 Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Jaspreet Singh 45:06 And I'll give you a quick example. Like, the first

Jaspreet Singh 45:09 time I made a million dollars in a year, my car was worth $500 that I was driving.

Jay Shetty 45:14 [laughs]

Jaspreet Singh 45:14 I still drive today that $500 car. Just last week before I came out here to California, my homeowner association called me and they said, "Hey, Jaspreet, uh, we have a, a number of complaints about a junk car sitting in your driveway."

Jay Shetty 45:27 [laughs]

Jaspreet Singh 45:27 And this is a true story. They said, "It's been sitting there," because I was in California for a long time. They said, "It's been sitting there, and, uh, people say that you should take these junk cars and put them in storage." And I was like, "Well, for your information, it's not a junk car. That is my car that I take to and from work every single day. It doesn't have a bumper on it, um, but it works." And they were like, "Well, you have to put it higher, or further in the driveway so people don't see it." And I was just like, oh my God, you don't get it. Like, you know, and it's not that I can't go out and buy another car. I, I... The way I look at it is, well, if I wanna go out and buy a $150,000 car, which I can, I can go out and take this cash and buy a car, or I can take this $150,000 and put it back either into real estate or into stocks or into my business, because that's something that I've been investing heavily in now. I started a company called Market Briefs, which is a financial newsletter company, and we're trying to grow aggressively because I wanna make financial news more accessible, because this is something, like, I look at the things that were very hard for me to understand. Like, CNBC used to be something I used to like watching-

Jay Shetty 46:29 Yeah, yeah, right

Jaspreet Singh 46:29 ... but it, it was just so complex. None of the things made sense. There's just so many things happening. And so now you might watch and say, "I wanna be better with my money," and so now you start watching the financial news because-

Jay Shetty 46:39 Yeah

Jaspreet Singh 46:39 ... where, where do you go next? And then all of a sudden you get hit with all these complex terms and things that don't make any sense.

Jay Shetty 46:44 And then you switch it off.

Jaspreet Singh 46:44 You turn it off. And so I created Market Briefs as a way to make financial news more accessible and easy to understand. And 2022 was the real first year that we became Market Briefs an actual company. So I'm like, well, I can take this cash and go out and buy a car, or I can hire more employees. We can buy better software. We can buy better infrastructure. My employees have a better car than I do.

Jay Shetty 47:06 Yeah.

Jaspreet Singh 47:06 But I'm focused on, you know, that, the long term. I wanna build this into something bigger. I wanna make it something better. Now, I'm gonna buy a nice car one day. I'm gonna buy a better car. I'm not saying that I won't. But it's that level of, you know, how much are you willing to sacrifice today for something bigger tomorrow? I am not driven by materialistic things. I don't really care about name brand stuff. It doesn't really bother me. I, I, I mean, I think it's, it's cool if you like it, but it's just not for me. I, I buy a lot of my clothes, my suits from India. I get them-

Jay Shetty 47:35 Yeah

Jaspreet Singh 47:35 ... made for $100. I get them custom made. A lot of my clothes are relatively inexpensive. Uh, but for me it's, it's, I enjoy what I do and, and I'm driven more by the purpose of I wanna help people with the things that I wish I would have had help with.

Jay Shetty 47:52 Mm-hmm.

Jaspreet Singh 47:52 Because the more and more that I have seen growth, the more and more that I talk to people, I keep hearing, "I wish I would have learned this sooner. I wish I would have learned this younger."

Jay Shetty 48:00 Yeah.

Jaspreet Singh 48:01 And that's where, you know, Minority Mindset, I'm trying to help provide that financial education with my channel and the Market Brief, trying to make that news more accessible for anybody who wants to be aware of what's happening in the real estate market, the stock market, the crypto market, inflation, without being overwhelmed with that sensationalism and the craziness of what happens in the traditional financial news.

Jay Shetty 48:18 Yeah, absolutely. And I love how you said that ultimately the best investment is an investment in yourself, which, you know, we've heard time and time again, but what you are ultimately saying, and that was for me too, like, for me, the first things I started investing in were my health. And so I remember reading that, there was that article where Conor McGregor- ... was talking about LeBron James. And Conor McGregor was saying that he didn't realize until he saw an interview with LeBron James where LeBron said that his health bill is, like, a million dollars or something a year-

Jaspreet Singh 48:48 Yeah

Jay Shetty 48:48 ... to, to maintain his health to be a high-performing athlete. And I saw Conor McGregor's interview that [laughs] he's talking about, and I was like, "I wanna be high-performing. Like, you know, what do I need to do?"

Jaspreet Singh 48:58 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 48:58 And, and so I started researching. And then I remember I've always been a big soccer fan, football fan, because of coming from England.

Jaspreet Singh 49:04 Right.

Jay Shetty 49:05 And there was this interview again with two soccer stars, and they were talking about how they went to Cristiano Ronaldo's home when he just moved to Manchester. So he was bought by Manchester United when he was, like, 17 years old, 18.

Jaspreet Singh 49:18 Wow.

Jay Shetty 49:18 Like, young talent. And when they went to his house, he had his trainer, he had his chef, he had his coach. And all the other players were like, "W- what is this?"

Jaspreet Singh 49:26 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 49:27 And he was like, "That's my chef, that's my trainer, and that's my coach." And they were like, "What are you doing?"

Jaspreet Singh 49:30 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 49:30 And he's like, "I'm gonna be the number one player in the world." Like, that was his mentality. And so he knew what to invest in. While all the other players were buying cars or going out for parties-

Jaspreet Singh 49:39 Right

Jay Shetty 49:39 ... he was building that. And so I remember for me what started to happen was like, okay,

Jay Shetty 49:43 well, what do I need to invest in to create a mindset from which I can fully serve-

Jaspreet Singh 49:48 Right

Jay Shetty 49:49 ... and give myself to others, and take care of myself and my family?

Jaspreet Singh 49:52 Right.

Jay Shetty 49:53 Because if I'm not investing in those things-

Jaspreet Singh 49:55 Yeah

Jay Shetty 49:55 ... then all of this is gonna fall apart.

Jaspreet Singh 49:57 100%.

Jay Shetty 49:57 Which is why when you walk through the four things at the beginning-

Jaspreet Singh 50:00 Yeah

Jay Shetty 50:00 ... when you talked about physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing, spiritual wellbeing, and financial wellbeing, like, that recipe makes a lot of sense to me.

Jaspreet Singh 50:09 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 50:09 And w- I guess what you're trying to do is trying to give people financial confidence rather than financial survival.

Jaspreet Singh 50:16 Yeah. It's, it's the basics of the education, right?

Jay Shetty 50:19 Yeah.

Jaspreet Singh 50:19 And one of the things that I try to do is I never... Or that I don't try to do is I don't want to say, "This is what you need to do."

Jay Shetty 50:27 Of course.

Jaspreet Singh 50:27 "Go put your money here."

Jay Shetty 50:27 Yeah, yeah, of course.

Jaspreet Singh 50:28 Don't-

Jay Shetty 50:28 And that's why I'm not asking you that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jaspreet Singh 50:29 Yeah. And, and but the reason why is because I did listen to those people. Uh, when, you know, you talk about the get rich quick schemes, uh, I bought a lot of classes trying to learn about entrepreneurship and money, and some of them were very good. Some of them were really bad. And the issue that I had was, you know, the people that are like, "This is the only thing you have to do," whether it's buy this type of ETFs-

Jay Shetty 50:50 [laughs]

Jaspreet Singh 50:50 ... buy this type of real estate, invest in this type of business. It worked for them, but I have a different goal than them. I have a different background than them. I have a different experience than them. I have a different risk tolerance than them. And everybody that watches this is, again, gonna be different. And so my whole goal is to give you the education so you can make a better decision for yourself rather than to tell you what to do.

Jay Shetty 51:13 Yes.

Jaspreet Singh 51:13 Is teaching you to learn rather than telling you what to do.

Jay Shetty 51:16 Yes, yes. And I'm, and I'm, I'm really glad that that's the conversation we're having because... And that's why I'm not asking you, "Oh, what should we do with this?" You know?

Jaspreet Singh 51:22 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 51:22 Because you're absolutely right. Times are different. Years are different. I guess one of the

Jay Shetty 51:27 biggest things that I know is on people's minds right now is people are scared of this crash they keep hearing about.

Jaspreet Singh 51:31 Sure.

Jay Shetty 51:31 Right? So there's a lot of fear, and there's a lot of insecurity, and a lot of anxiety. And the challenge is that forces us to shut down even more about money-

Jaspreet Singh 51:39 Yeah

Jay Shetty 51:39 ... because now we're all scared.

Jaspreet Singh 51:40 Right.

Jay Shetty 51:40 And no one wants to admit saying, "Yeah, I've wasted all my savings," or, "I've done this."

Jaspreet Singh 51:45 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 51:45 How, how, again, not what to do-

Jaspreet Singh 51:47 No, great

Jay Shetty 51:47 ... but how should people think about this?

Jaspreet Singh 51:49 I'm very glad you brought that up-

Jay Shetty 51:50 Yeah

Jaspreet Singh 51:50 ... because this is something that we need to talk about, because you have to, again, ask the question of why and start questioning things. Because I'm just gonna give you a little bit of a timeline because it helps me understand where we are, and I think it'll help the listeners understand where we're going. If you want to know where to find the most opportunity because the reality is more millionaires are made during recessions and crashes than any other time. And the reason why is because when you have these types of recessions and crashes, assets go on discount. They go on sale. It's almost like Black Friday shopping for investors. And so you need to know how to find these opportunities. But this also requires you to not just blindly trust or listen to what anyone else says. So I started asking the question of why and started losing a lot of trust in the system when I started realizing, oh my God, like, I was lied to about the school system and this and that and this and that. It was very painful for me. But if we go back a little bit and understand where we are in the economy and what might be coming, that will help you understand where to find the most opportunity. And I think that we are in store for a correction. The Fed is gonna determine how bad it is, and there's a lot of factors that you want to pay attention to because there are real concerns and real issues in our economy and with inflation that we cannot ignore. The way that I can best explain that, because I'm kind of just, like, beating on a brush on this right now, is before the 2008 crash happened, the government and the Federal Reserve Bank kept saying that there's no real estate crash, the real estate market is very strong. And then once the real estate market started to go down in 2007, the Federal Reserve Bank, I'll explain what they are in just a second, they said that real estate is going down a little bit, but there's gonna be no real estate crash and it's not going to affect any other aspect of our economy. And they made that statement publicly and said it again and again and again. And then what we saw happen was the entire real estate market imploded. Wall Street was on the brink of collapse. The entire financial system was on the verge of coming down. And after all of that, the Federal Reserve chairman then came out and said, "I had to say what I said because I did not want to incite panic, and because of the political issues where I was told not to say certain things." So that was then. Now, before I go into 2020 and now, let me just explain what the Federal Reserve Bank is. The Federal Reserve Bank is known as the central bank in the United States. They control the monetary policy, meaning that they have the ability to print money, give this money to the government, and they also have the ability to in- influence and control interest rates. So they are the entity that can increase interest rates. That's the reason why we're seeing mortgage rates go up right now. They're the entity that can cut interest rates. And although they're called the Federal Reserve Bank, they're not federal. They say so on their website. They're not a reserve. They don't keep cash reserves anywhere. They're not a bank. You and I can't go there to deposit money. So now that we have that, let's, let's kind of fast-forward to where we are now. In 2020- The economy shut down due to the pandemic, but the government started spending money like crazy, and they were spending money that they didn't have. Where were they spending money? Well, they were giving out money in the form of unemployment checks. They were giving out stimulus checks. They were giving out big money to corporations. They were giving out big loans to corporations, and money was just being printed at free will. So the government was spending trillions of dollars that they didn't have, and this gave money to people and businesses, so people and businesses could buy things. You can spend money and buy whatever you wanted because some people were making more money in unemployment than they were while they were working a job. And some businesses had so much cash in the bank because they got this huge check from the government from these business loans that they were giving that they were just able to spend money like crazy. So people and businesses were buying things, although nothing was being produced. But the thing that was being produced was money. So this started to create supply chain issues because now you go to the store and you keep buying all the clothes, you keep buying all the stuff that's there. However, no clothes are being produced, no items are being produced because the manufacturing plants are closed. People are not going to work. So what is that gonna do? It creates a supply chain shortage because now people are buying things, but nothing's being made. How is this possible? What happens if you can print money without creating wealth? Because that's what was happening. We were printing money, trillions of dollars, without actually increasing the amount of wealth. Well, this is what the definition of inflation is. You're inflating the monetary supply. You're increasing the amount of dollars out there. And the cost of that is you make the value of each individual dollar go down, because now you're just printing money without increasing wealth. And so in turn, the value of each individual dollar has to go down. And as soon as that started happening, I started making videos in twenty twenty talking about how the concern right now is deflation, meaning the value of the dollar is dropping, your savings are becoming more valuable, your earnings are becoming more valuable. However, be wary of inflation coming in the future because that's the definition of inflation. You're printing more money. The value of a dollar will go down. It's, it's just-- I mean, it's almost like simple math. However, when this was happening, the Federal Reserve Bank was printing the money, and they kept saying, "We're not worried about inflation. There's no concerns of inflation. There's no reason we would have inflation because we can do that." Now, just think about that for a second. If the government and the Fed can print money on command, why do we have to pay for a mortgage? Can't they just pay that? Why, why do we even have to pay for taxes? They can just print that money out of thin air. The reason why they can't do that is the same reason why they can't give everybody a million dollars and expect everybody to have a Lamborghini, is because when you print this money, the value of the dollar drops. So fast-forward to twenty twenty-one, the early part of twenty twenty-one, that was when the first glimpses of high inflation were being seen. And in the early part of twenty twenty-one, the Federal Reserve Bank, who's in charge of the monetary system, said, "There's no real inflation, nothing to be worried about. This is just a little blimp." And then came March, April, and that's when inflation didn't go away. It grew a little bit, and inflation, uh, the Fed came out and they said, "Okay, inflation is getting a little bit worse. However, it's temporary." They said it was transitory. Nothing to worry about. It'll be gone by the end of twenty twenty-one. Well, fast-forward to the end of twenty twenty-one, inflation got worse, and that's when they admitted inflation is not transitory. This is gonna be around for a while. And during the whole period, I kept saying, "Don't expect this to be transitory. This is the-- it doesn't just magically go away." Then comes twenty twenty-two, and that's when some of the stimulus started to go away and inflation did not slow down, and then came the fears of a recession. And I was talking about this, about how the high inflation is causing a slowdown in the economy, because when you have the prices of things go up so much, more of your income is being used to pay for your rent and your gas and your groceries, so you have less money to go out and buy other things. And if you have less money to buy anything else, if you have less money to go to Chipotle, then Chipotle is making less money. If Chipotle is making less money, they don't have money to hire more employees. They don't have money to open more stores. That's what contributes to an economic slowdown. And that's what was going on. And from January, February, March, all you kept hearing from the government and the Fed is the economy is so strong, there's no possible way we could see an economic slowdown. That continued April, May, June. Even at the time I was recording this video, I read an article this morning, the Federal Reserve Bank said, "We're not gonna enter a recession. It's not-- There's no reason why we should." The government even said our economy is so strong, we're not seeing any signs of a slowdown. Everybody is doing very well. And it doesn't make any sense because, I mean, depending on when this airs, maybe things will change, but if people are struggling paying their rent, paying their gas, buying their groceries, yeah, people are spending money, but the reason why they're spending money is because you have to pay more money for your groceries.

Jay Shetty 1:00:03 Yeah. Yeah.

Jaspreet Singh 1:00:04 And now, I mean, if you just think about this from a practical level, people are having less ability to now go out and shop and be able to just buy things, which means businesses are hurting. So my thoughts are, unless this inflation magically goes away like the Fed says it will, it is gonna contribute to a, a economic slowdown. And now how bad will it be? Well, it depends on what the Federal Reserve Bank does, because the Fed now is trying to reverse what they did in twenty twenty and twenty twenty-one, where these trillions of dollars were printed and entered our economic circulation, which caused the value of our savings and earnings to drop. It created more inflation. So if you wanna reverse inflation, you have to do the opposite. You have to literally burn cash. You have to take it out of the system. So that's why they're working to increase interest rates. If they keep increasing interest rates to fight inflation, we are going to enter a recession And that means the economy will slow down. It means people will lose their jobs. It means that businesses will go under. And the question then is, what will the Federal Reserve Bank do next? Will they then say, "Okay, inflation is under control," even though it's, maybe it's not, but the economy needs help- Yeah ... so we're gonna start inflating? Because that's what happened at every previous crash. You cut interest rates and you print money to help the economy boost. Well, if they do that now, when we entered a recession because of inflation, you make the root cause of the recession even worse. Mm-hmm. So this is where I don't know what the Fed is gonna do, and it's, it is a tough situation, and this is where you wanna be aware, because there are ways for you to take advantage of this. But what you wanna understand is the lesser of two evils is to cause a recession. Mm. Because that means you're raising interest rates, markets go down, and some businesses will go under. However, this will cause a refresh, and things will be able to get better. This creates opportunity for you to go and buy some assets. You can find stocks that are on sale. Uh, you can potentially find some cryptocurrencies on sale, uh, maybe real estate you'll find better opportunities. However, if the Federal Reserve Bank changes course, and they say, "Okay, inflation is a little bit better than where it was, and it's stabilizing even though it's much higher than what it was before. But we're worried about this recession," and they start inflating, meaning they start printing money, they start cutting interest rates, well, that means now the inflation gets worse, and now you risk something like a currency crisis, and this is significantly worse. Because now the trust- Yeah, yeah ... and the value of the dollar goes down. Yeah. And that's where, you know, the type of assets that you want are different. That's where things like physical gold, uh, become more valuable, because that can protect you, um, from those types of things. So now what do you do, right? [laughs] That's the

Jaspreet Singh 1:02:56 real question, is- Yeah, yeah ... first thing is calm yourself, because nobody makes rational decisions out of panic. Nobody makes smart decisions out of fear. Understand that these things happen, and that things will be okay. So first thing you gotta do is just calm yourself, take a deep breath. Now, the second thing is you have to start taking that financial education. You wanna create that buffer now, because even now, while things look bad, yeah, gas prices are high, prices are high, but they are... they could be worse. So you wanna use this time to now put aside some cash, that way you have some money to take advantage of opportunities that might come your way. Now, the next thing is looking for what type of opportunities do you want. Do you wanna invest in stocks? Do you wanna invest in real estate? Do you wanna invest in cryptocurrency or, or multiple of on- things? Once you know what you wanna invest in, you make a list. You make a list of the things that you wanna own, and now you're just waiting for a good buying opportunity. Mm. And when you're waiting for a good buying opportunity, you do not wanna try to perfectly time the market. Buy things in phases. You can buy on the way down. You don't have to buy all at once. This is what I talked about in 2020 when the market was collapsing. I said, "Look, I'm buying in phases. I know what I wanna buy. I'm buying it on the way down. Every time it drops another 10 to 15%, I buy more, and I buy more aggressively." When that happens, people will think you lost your mind, because they're gonna say, "Why would you buy now? The market's collapsing. The world's gonna end. D- don't buy now." Look, you gotta, again, calm. There's gonna be a lot of emotion. There's gonna be a lot of panic, a lot of fear, but the smartest investors are not the ones that invest on emotion. It's the ones that invest on finances. Mm. And so cut through that noise. Just understand what you wanna buy, look for a good buying opportunity, and then understand that if we go the other way, where we start inflating, well, then, you could see the opposite happen. You could see asset prices crash upwards, because now we're inflating. We're printing more money, and that can mean more money flows into the markets, and that could push at- asset prices upwards. So it's knowing what you wanna buy. And in those situations, that's where things like gold can also be valuable. Now, the one thing that I wanna mention about gold is I don't look at gold like an investment. For me, it's just an alternative- Oh, yeah ... form of savings. Mm-hmm. It's just hard money. Holding, yeah. It's just holding something. Like, that's another way to save money. So it's just finding the right opportunity. But at the end of the day, the number one best investment that you can make in any situation is investing in yourself, and understanding what is the most important thing right now, your physical health, your mental health, your spiritual health, your, your financial health, and understanding that, you know, there's always gonna be opportunities to take care of yourself in all of these places, but you need to be prepared. And, you know, you put in that work now, that way you can find the best opportunities, that way you can take advantage of them. Because like I said earlier, the most millionaires are made during recessions and crashes than any other time. Yeah. But this means you have to think differently than the majority of people, going back to why I call it the minority mindset. It's not about the way you look or your ethnicity or your skin color. It's the mindset of thinking differently than the majority of people. And this is where a lot of people get upset. You get angry. You kick and cry and scream. But this is where you wanna think different. Look for the opportunity, because it is there. And the last thing that I wanna mention, huh, which is kind of sad and scary, but something you wanna be aware of, is when that 2020, the money printing happened, there was... it was known as the biggest financial fraud in the history of America. And, uh, this has just come to light in the middle part of 2022, where they said that so many business owners and people who are not business owners took advantage of the government, because there was such little oversight, where the government was just giving money to corporations and businesses and people, where it was the biggest fraud in the history of time. And even people, because so many people were taking this unemployment money that they shouldn't. And I remember, and I'll tell you from my personal experience, because I have a business, I kept being told, "Jaspreet, you have to take this..." It was called PPP. "This PPP money. It's free. You don't have to pay it back. The government is giving you this money. You should take it." And they were giving a lot of money. I don't remember the exact number, but it was quite a, I mean, tens of thousands of dollars. And, uh, you know, we had expenses. Like, my rent for our office was, like, $4,300 a month. We have employees. We had a lot of issues going on, because we didn't know where the economy was gonna go. But I told everyone, I said, "We're not taking that money." Told my banker, told my accountant, and they all thought that I was dumb because it's free money. But I was like, "You don't get it. The most expensive type of money in the world is free money."

Jay Shetty 1:07:24 Free money.

Jaspreet Singh 1:07:24 I know who's paying for it. Because when the government spends money, somebody has to pay for it. Either they raise your taxes to pay for it because, you know, that they need more income, or they cut their expenses, meaning they cut your Social Security, they cut their welfare, welfare, they cut their things that they're doing. Or-

Jay Shetty 1:07:42 Mm

Jaspreet Singh 1:07:43 ... they do the hidden tax, which is inflation, which means now people are gonna pay for it in the form of higher prices.

Jay Shetty 1:07:50 Yes.

Jaspreet Singh 1:07:51 And who pays the price? The poor and the financially uneducated.

Jay Shetty 1:07:55 Yeah.

Jaspreet Singh 1:07:56 And I was like, "I don't wanna be a part of that. I'm not contributing to this because I know-"

Jay Shetty 1:08:00 Wow. Wow

Jaspreet Singh 1:08:00 ... uh, myself, I know my values, and I don't wanna be a part of that. And so everyone thought that I was the dumb one, but here I am. Look, I'm, I'm not, I don't wanna contribute to this, and I, I, I know who's gonna pay the price.

Jay Shetty 1:08:11 Wow.

Jaspreet Singh 1:08:11 And, and I said the poor and the financially edu- uneducated, and I purposely did not say the middle class because when you have this type of high inflation, the middle class gets wiped out.

Jay Shetty 1:08:20 Yep.

Jaspreet Singh 1:08:20 And it's the people who understand money that become more wealthy. The people that don't understand money, that don't become wealthy, and it's very unfortunate. The reality, it's this is the way the system works, and you have to understand it because it is profitable to keep people poor.

Jay Shetty 1:08:35 Yeah.

Jaspreet Singh 1:08:36 And it's very sad, but this is why you have to get financially and, uh, financially educated.

Jay Shetty 1:08:41 Absolutely. And I think everyone who's listening, the way to do that is make sure you subscribe to Market Briefs, and make sure you subscribe to the Minority Mindset YouTube Channel as well. Uh, really, really important and powerful ways to make sure that you have the education and insight you need to make those important decisions. I think so many of us are making decisions, as Jaspreet rightly said, based on emotion or feeling or playing catch-up or FOMO or someone else is doing it, so I need to do it. You know, and those are not great decision-making tactics. Focus on getting the right insights, getting the right information, and make wise, calm decisions, as Jaspreet said. Uh, Jaspreet, we

Jay Shetty 1:09:22 end every On Purpose episode with the Final Five. These are five questions that have to be answered in one word or one sentence maximum. Uh, so Jaspreet Singh, these are your Final Five. You ready?

Jaspreet Singh 1:09:33 Let's do it.

Jay Shetty 1:09:34 Okay. So the first question is, what is the best financial advice you've ever received?

Jaspreet Singh 1:09:39 Invest in assets, not liabilities.

Jay Shetty 1:09:42 Second question, what is the worst financial advice you've ever received?

Jaspreet Singh 1:09:46 The way to build wealth is saving your money.

Jay Shetty 1:09:49 So true. Third question. These are br- yeah, very fiery. This is fantastic. Uh, third question, what is something you used to value that you don't anymore?

Jaspreet Singh 1:09:59 Material things.

Jay Shetty 1:10:00 Question number four, what is something that you think people think is important when it comes to money, but you realize that's not really the right focus?

Jaspreet Singh 1:10:09 Net worth. Net worth is a, uh, a crap indicator of real success.

Jay Shetty 1:10:16 Nice. That's a great answer. All right, and question five, if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?

Jaspreet Singh 1:10:25 Everybody has to learn about the quadrafit theory, about physical health, mental health, spiritual health, and financial health before they leave school.

Jay Shetty 1:10:33 I love that. Jaspreet Singh, everyone. Definitely a guest we're gonna ba- have back on Purpose many, many times. What I'd love for you to do if you've been listening and watching is make sure you tag Jaspreet and I on Instagram, on Twitter, on Facebook, uh, in the YouTube comments. Let us know what you gained, what insight you take away, what are you gonna put into practice, what are you gonna apply, what are you going to actually implement into your day-to-day? And let us know if you have any questions as well. So go ahead and send them away. I know we wanna see what resonated with you, what connected with you. Jaspreet, thank you so much for doing this episode today.

Jaspreet Singh 1:11:07 Man, it was an honor to be on with you.

Jay Shetty 1:11:08 Uh-

Jaspreet Singh 1:11:08 Thank you for having me.

Jay Shetty 1:11:09 No, you were incredible. This is gonna help so many people, and I know this is gonna be the first of many. So we already have an invite for you ready to have you back on.

Jaspreet Singh 1:11:16 I appreciate that.

Jay Shetty 1:11:17 Uh, and this, this was awesome. This was exactly what we needed right now, so thank you.

Jaspreet Singh 1:11:20 Thank you so much, man. I really appreciate it.

Jay Shetty 1:11:22 Thank you, man. If you want even more videos just like this one, make sure you subscribe and click on the boxes over here. I'm also excited to let you know that you can now get my book, Think Like a Monk, from thinklikeamonkbook.com. Check below in the description to make sure you order today.