Hey guys, it's Sasha. In an interview with CNBC in 2010, Warren Buffett said there are 309 million people out there that are trying to improve their lot in life and we've got a system that allows them to do it now. You might be sitting there thinking that capitalism is not on your side right now and the system is very much not helping you improve your finances Because a recent study showed that 61 of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. and in the next two to three weeks, the total credit card debt in the United States is going to take over the one trillion dollar mark.

It was just under a 991 billion dollars at the end of May, which is seven and a half thousand dollars per household on average. And the weird thing is that living paycheck to paycheck is not a prerogative of the poor. 49 of the people earning more than a hundred thousand dollars a year said that they were also living paycheck to paycheck. That's up from 42 last year.

High inflation has meant that real wages and wages adjusted for inflation. wages that allow you to buy things fell at the sharpest rate in 43 years, and in the last 12 months, the FED has raised interest rates from just above zero to 5.25 percent. So the money that you earn doesn't go as far because of inflation, which is hard enough already. But at the same time, you are getting a kick in the nuts from the higher interest rates on your credit cards, higher interest rates on loans and mortgages going through the roof all at the same time.

You're sitting there looking at this random guy on YouTube telling you that you are going to be rich, but that doesn't tie up with the reality that you can see out of your window because first, we had covered, millions of small businesses were wiped out, People found it tough, many people lost their jobs, the economy dived into a severe recession, and just when you thought that they ran out of Greek letters to name the variants, We had the financial crash last year in 2022. U.S Inflation went up to 9.1 percent in the UK. We got it up to 11. Food in the shop skyrocketed by as much as 50 or 60 percent.

Over that last two years, the stock market dived 25. YouTubers were doing their very best constipated faces and thumbnails telling you the world is about to collapse back in January the worst ever Financial crashes coming. Then a bunch of banks that you've never heard of before started to collapse in. March.

So I Know that you're probably not feeling great about money right now because well, we've all been smacked in the face by money issues a few too many times recently and we have a perverse disease in our society where flaunting wealth has become a good thing. And we look at the people who've flown their wealth and we compare ourselves to them. People who show off money are celebrated. Social media has blown this trend into an epidemic because only a very small minority of rich people are dumb or fickle enough to drive a gold-plated McLaren Public showing off of wealth used to be seen as ostentatious as vulgar, but in the age of Andrew Tate it is now something that is widely celebrated.

We have a weird culture where Finance content creators earn clout with teenagers and young people by making videos sat in front of a sports car parked inside their house something that would be seen as Vain and the sign of probably having some kind of debilitating mental issue back when I was a teenager. but it's now kind of a mandatory part of perceiving of people perceiving you as being rich I Get told multiple times a day on my channel in the comments that I am a failed Finance content creator because instead of a Lamborghini my background consists of Ikea units. Yeah, so perhaps it is not surprising that living in this world it is easy to feel financially inferior. Look at all of this and you feel like you're really not doing well because none of us like to think of ourselves as average.

None of us are average in our own minds. We compare ourselves to Impossible standards that we see and Tick Tock many of which are fake and the ones that are not are not necessarily there because of Merit or because of any kind of attainable or reasonable reason. In many cases, it leads people to lead a life of keeping up with the Joneses. You buy a new iPhone to replace a perfectly working two-year-old iPhone for seemingly no particular reason whatsoever.

You then go and stick that brand new iPhone and a silicon cover so that nobody can even tell that you just dropped a thousand dollars. But you know and it makes you feel warm inside. Maybe I Guess for some weird reason, the average household is already sitting on that seven and a half thousand dollars worth of credit card debt. so why not throw another grand on there? It doesn't really matter but money.

Works Differently to social trends because the popularity you see on Tick Tock every day right now will be long gone and forgotten. In 20 years time, nobody will remember any of these idiots. Tick Tock itself probably won't exist because that's what happens with technology. But the financial decisions that you make today will stay with you.

And the reality is that there has never been a better time for someone to decide that they will be rich and actually go out and do it. Whenever you look back at periods of financial turmoil in the past, you always hear the same thing over and over. Imagine if you just happen to invest in stocks during an immediate aftermath of the financial crash. Imagine if you got in at the bottom.

Imagine if you weren't panicking after the.com crash and instead bought Amazon stock for 5.51 in 2001. We live in a world where making your own luck has never been this easy. Just a few years ago, if you wanted to invest your money, you had to have at least five thousand dollars or twenty five thousand dollars or whatever to open a broker account. You wouldn't be allowed to open one without having a giant wad of cash, and you would have to pay astronomical trading fees.

So if you didn't already have a pile of money in your bank account, you didn't have the option to invest in the stock market. and you could only invest in the stock market by phoning this guy during working hours, probably not being able to get hold of them, and only being able to invest in things that you can work through with them over the phone. You didn't get to play the greatest money making game of all time. Today you can go and open an investing account for free.

stick ten dollars in it, and buy whatever you want. You can start today. You probably have ten dollars sat in your bank account that can be spare. I've got links to my personal favorite investing accounts in my description.

You can go and open one of those accounts in the next five minutes if you wanted to. I'm guessing that the fact that you're watching this video already puts you into the top fraction of a percent of people who are taking an active step forward in improving your finances. And there has never been an easier or a better time to do it. Twenty years ago, the average kid coming out into the real world from college didn't know how a credit card Works what it was, what a stock was today.

You can get information that wasn't available when I was graduating University and you can get it immediately and you can get it for free. And this means that people can take advantage of financial products like they have never been able to before. Up until the 1990s, credit was seen as a dirty word. Borrowing money was something that was frowned upon.

It still isn't any parts of the world because it suggested that you were spending beyond your me. But then Along Came The commercial push to make everyone borrow money so that the bankers can go and earn a ridiculous racket. Credit cards became the way that you can buy whatever you want, even if you don't actually have any money. And when you're buying a pair of jeans for 20 bucks in the shop, you get asked if you want to pay for them in monthly installments.

and suddenly credit became so incredibly popular and kind of seen as a good thing because you know what, we all do it. But now 30 years later I attitudes are beginning to shift back, suddenly being indebted to your teeth because your neighbors will think less of you if your car is older than three years old, so you must replace it. It's beginning to not be seen as okay. The fact that interest rates are going up are certainly not helping with that.

The age of being able to move your credit card debt around on zero percent deals, get free credit here. Free credit There when interest rates were sitting at zero percent and everyone was printing money. Those days have now gone, but at the same time people are waking up to the power of combining Financial products and managing their finances in a different way in a smarter way. Instead of thinking of your debt as a noose around your neck, you can now take advantage of that through leverage, which can be if used right.

a very powerful accelerator of Building Wealth When you look at the balance sheet of a business, it doesn't make any sense to just look at the liabilities, line by themselves, and ignore everything else. The debts only makes sense when you compare them against the assets, and that includes the non-tangible assets that maybe don't have immediate value against them. A bunch of numpties on social media will tell you that University Education, for example, is a giant waste of money. Nobody should go there.

You should skip it instead. Maybe go and buy their course on how to trade pictures of monkeys wearing funny hats but training Your Mind Investing In yourself learning things is the very best investment you will ever make in your life. and you will learn things that you don't anticipate or you don't even understand that you've learned until you've learned them back in the 19th entry, Much of the world was operating in a form of feudalism where most people would go out work in the fields from when they were 12 or whatever and then they would go out and work in the factories. and Along Came Collective farming.

Suddenly you didn't need an army of people plowing the fields and a bunch of people lost their jobs. they went to work in the factories instead. Then, Along Came machinery and Automation and factories became more and more automated and those people began losing their jobs again. and Along Came cars replacing the entire horse carriage industry.

And the Industrial Revolution resulted in the biggest GDP growth in history. The BBC talks about AI anxiety. apparently workers fear losing their jobs to. AI The Guardian says that AI will take some jobs, but mass unemployment isn't inevitable, so there is a chance it's not inevitable.

so it's extremely likely. but maybe we will be lucky. The Internet only really turned up for the masses in the mid 90s and even in 2001, only 50 percent of people in North America used the Internet. That wasn't very long ago.

We are only about 25 years into this new thing and only just beginning to enter the next generation of applications including AI. That is all the rage at the moment. We're still at the beginning of the mass adoption S-curve and you have a choice to make. The numbers tell you that it has never been a better time to improve your finances.

It has never been a better time to learn and invest in yourself. It has never been easier to do these things. It has never been a better time to invest in the stock market. It has never been a better time to build wealth and the pool of opportunity has never been this fast.

It has never been this easy to go and start to start a side hustle or to earn money in a different job. The number of jobs in the United States has been increasing at a record Pace 339 000 new jobs were added in May according to laser data and there are currently over 10 million job openings out there looking for people. You have a choice. You can look at the situation and take advantage.

You can improve your finances, pay off debt, and invest to build wealth that wasn't an option for your parents, and if you're still watching I am guessing that there is a very good chance that that is exactly what you will end up doing. You can take the bull by the horns and build a career where technology only increases demand for your skills instead of waving your hands in the air and panicking about AI coming to take your job and the economic cycle just happens to be turning over a new Leaf After four years of pain which is a quite long period, it wasn't the same pain. The kind nature of the pain changed. But 13 years ago in that interview with CNBC Warren Buffett said there are 309 million people out there that are trying to improve their lot in life and we have a system that allows them to do it well.

That system just got upgraded. The odds are you are going to be richer than you think. Have fun.