I get asked the question a lot in comments in dms and in emails, and this is probably the most common question that i get asked before the person asking and goes and smashes the dislike button on one of my videos. It goes something like this. You make far more money from free shares than from investing you suck, so naturally enough, i thought that this warrants a little video with an appropriate title. That explains exactly how yes, i do do that.

In fact, i never hid it never made it a secret. In fact, in this video i will tell you exactly how much i make from the free shares and i'll tell you how much i make from the investing and i'll tell you why i'm really really happy with it. In actual fact, to tell you the absolute truth, a few days ago, i saw tom nash post something very similar to what i'm going to be talking about in his community on his youtube channel, and i thought i need to go a little bit more detailed on This so i thought, let's go and talk about it. So, let's dive right in, i have some of the numbers here and just so that we can get the facts straight.

Yes, it's true since starting this channel and talking about all things money, i have made a grand total of 5 433 pounds and 41 pence in free shares. The vast majority of these came since the beginning of this year, truth be told. I haven't actually kept any of the free shares that i got. What i do is whenever they turn up, i actually go and sell them, and then i reinvest the money in things i actually want to own shares in i get free shares from free trade and trading to one two trading.

2. Don't currently allow new accounts in, but back when they did, i would get free shares when people were going sign up using one of my links. The free shares come in at an average of 11 19 for trading 212 and six pounds 64 for free trade. So there's a lot of value in there when hundreds of people go and click my links and sign up for those accounts so that they can get a free share, letting me have one as well.

Now i have deposited 3932 pounds of my own money into the exact same portfolios on top of the 5433 pounds that i mentioned earlier in the same time frame in the investing accounts that i have talked about a lot and i have shown on my channel - and I have literally gone through the setting up of all these accounts on camera in several different videos um. I have made 1 954 pounds in the growth of these investments. That's about 20.1 percent growth on the money that i have put in. That is split between my own money and the free shares that i mentioned um and, although that doesn't sound great, i i'm pretty happy with it.

The majority of the money has been invested in my portfolios, actually came in in the last one and a half months because most of my free shares have turned up in that time period and that's when i opened the torah as well. So the majority of my money is very, very new, so it hasn't really had much time to actually earn money, so i'm pretty happy uh with a net return. And yes, it's true. I have started this channel when the first lockdown started, literally just a few days after is when i posted my first video on this channel, and this has been a period which is probably the biggest bull run in the markets we have ever seen.

So it is very difficult to not make money investing and i began making investing videos in the summer and the markets have been going massively high since then so yeah, it is true, but that is just the situation i'm in. I am not really saying anything. Otherwise, i'm not pretending that some kind of god of investing i'm just saying what i'm doing, i'm showing you what i'm doing and i'm talking about investments because i really enjoy it. But let me just do a bit of explanation.

Here's the thing! I wanted to really really talk about in this video. I am here to provide as much value as i can to you in building this channel, and i do this by talking about my personal perspective. The way i see it, the way i see the market the way i see investing the way i'm interested in it. I want this making these vid videos to be my full-time business, a business where i can go and provide value to you by talking about personal finance, using my background and hopefully get paid for it because, like you, i have a family.

I have bills to pay. I want to be able to devote 100 of my time to doing this, and in order for me to do this, i would like to be paid so that i can go and pay for all these things that i just mentioned. So there are a few different ways that you can go and get paid on youtube, and i listed some of the things that i do in order to earn money so that we can go and talk about them. I earn money from ads.

So whenever you go and view my youtube videos, youtube will and insert ads in various wonderful places and whenever you go and watch one, sometimes you get a little bit of money for it. I also earn money from affiliates which includes the free shares. There are other affiliates as well i own, a tiny bit of money from amazon. I earn a little bit of money from some other sources as well, sometimes on some old videos.

I linked something else: there's several different random things, but most of it almost all of it, is from the free shares, and i also have done a very small number, just three so far, um sponsored videos uh, that's where all my youtube money comes from, and i'm Really proud of this, i am not hiding behind anything, i'm not pretending it's otherwise. I am really proud, because my channel has grown to a point where people are prepared to pay me in order to get in front of my audience, because they think that the value that this channel brings and the types of people who watch it are worth it. When i first started out on this channel, i got paid nothing. I went and talked about lots of different topics about personal finance: lots of stuff about bank accounts, credit cards, building credit, investing all these kind of things and i got paid absolutely nothing in total from when i started in march at the end of march 2020.

To now i have spent thousands of hours without exaggerating thousands of hours just on this channel, so doing all the work to do with setting things up, thinking of topics, filming editing, engaging literally many thousands of hours, and when i did some really brief maths in the Run-Up to doing this, video the total amount of money that i've earned from this channel so far, if i went and divided it by the amount of time i've invested, i've probably earned less than one third of the uk minimum wage or maybe actually even less. I didn't really make a good estimate of exactly how much time i spent, but if that is around about how much i've been earning for the time invested so far, and yes, it is true - i don't have a 100 000 portfolio or a 10 million dollar portfolio To talk about, i don't have many hundreds of shares of tesla or something else. I don't pretend to fly in private planes. I don't take pictures in front of a lamborghini because i don't have one.

I don't really want to have one, but that's a whole different type of conversation. I have one i have. I have my youtube channel. I have the stuff that i do in the little bits of research that i do and i love talking about investing topics as well as other money topics that i cover as well.

I have worked in the finance industry for my entire career and i also studied maths at university and i'm trying to go and combine all of these different bits of my background or my experience of my knowledge, whatever i have into something that hopefully will provide just Some value maybe to some people who maybe are interested in watching those videos. I don't hide this fact. I i have a whole separate channel that you may want to go and check out if you're interested it's very new. It has very little content on there at the moment.

It's called the sasha yamchan story, where i literally go through my story of building an online business which includes this channel, so there is nothing really being hidden there. I invest all the money that i do have to invest in building my business sure i've put a small amount of money investments, but the majority of my money, and certainly all my time, i'm putting into building my business in order to improve the quality of these Videos i went and bought the camera that i'm filming this video on it's quite expensive. It's a sony, a6600, it's not as expensive as some, but it is certainly a lot more expensive than others. I went and bought some lenses.

I bought a load of other kits. The lens i'm filming this on now is a sigma 16 mil. I love it. It's really great bought a screen.

There's lights up here here that all cost money, lots of wires, um, recording gear and stuff, there's a ton of things, and on top of that i then went and spent a whole load more money. Oh yeah, there's a microphone up here! Sd cards i built a computer so that i can go and edit videos and put them out and put them online as quickly as possible, and some parts in this computer cost more than a second hand car. So i have invested a ton of money in my business, but you know nobody is particularly interested in that and it doesn't make for a particularly good video either. So i haven't really been talking about it.

I actually have bills to pay and i have living expenses. So, yes, i don't have a huge investment in portfolio. Investment is quite modest. In fact, most of my investing portfolio is made up of free shares, not the free shares, but the money.

I got from the free shares that i got from people clicking on the links in my description and i am really upfront in saying that um every single time. I do a video where i cover that. I pretty much say that i show you uh where my money comes from. I show you all my screens, i don't try to to flex.

I don't try to pretend - and i haven't had much time yet because of the time that i've been doing this channel to actually have long term gains to actually talk through stuff. That's happened over several years because i'm not in that position because i've been investing and prioritizing my money spend elsewhere. Up to this point, i love talking about investments. I love laying out my rationale, my view on things, my investing preferences and how i make decisions which are slightly different to maybe how some other people do, and i'm going to be doing a lot more of that content in the future, where i dive deep into How i actually do the valuations - which is something i haven't really talked about before, and this is sort of combining my maths and my finance background and the topic of investing that i was talking about and hopefully some people will enjoy it.

If you want to watch it, hey, go and subscribe to this channel. If you haven't done so already, you'll get a lot of this kind of stuff uh in the coming weeks and months. But if you don't that's fine, there are plenty of other youtube channels. You can go and find to talk about their 200 000 portfolio uh.

There is lots of good stuff out there make sure you go and find it and enjoy it. So that's that now i have a video that i can go and point people to whenever they next ask me one of these questions. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to film it and i hope you guys enjoyed this completely rant based video. Thank you.

So much for watching really really appreciate it and i'll see you guys later.