I Read 100 Books On Money… Here’s What I Learned
The Amplified Impact Podcast
October 24th, 2023
Today, I’m diving into three invaluable lessons I’ve learned from reading stacks of money, finance, and investment books.
Why am I so into books, you ask? Well, it’s because they make you think. They require your full attention.
1. Money is a game.
You need to understand the rules, and the first rule is to stop attaching your self-worth to your net worth. Money is a tool, not a measure of your goodness or badness.
2. To win the money game, you’ve got to understand the rules.
Yet, financial literacy is often missing from our education. So, take control of your finances. Track your daily spending and earnings.
3. With money, you can only spend it, save it, or invest it.
Saving alone won’t make you rich, thanks to inflation. Build a cash-generating machine (like a business) and invest the proceeds into assets that generate cash or appreciate (like real estate).
These lessons may not work for everyone, but I hope they inspire you.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Net worth does not dictate your self worth.”
– Anthony Vicino
LEAVE A REVIEW if you liked this episode!!
Let’s Connect On Social Media!
instagram.com/theanthonyvicino
Join an exclusive community of peak performers at Beyond the Apex University learning how to build a business, invest in real estate, and develop hyperfocus.
Learn More About Investing With Anthony
Invictus Capital: www.invictusmultifamily.com
Multifamily Investing Made Simple Podcast
Passive Investing Made Simple Book: www.thepassiveinvestingbook.com
Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
What’s up, all you beautiful, hyper focused people? Welcome back to the podcast. Today we’re gonna break down three critical lessons that I’ve learned. Having read hundreds and hundreds of books on the topic of money, personal finance, investing, entrepreneurship, business. I’m gonna break it down because I love books. I love reading. I think reading is one of the most powerful activities that any of us can engage in. Not because not just because it’s a great way of consuming information and learning new things, but because reading is a form of thinking and it is so difficult and time consuming and laborious to take the words from the page and insert them into your brain. It’s a very active process, unlike listening to a podcast or watching a YouTube video, where right now you’re listening to me, but you’re not maybe attending to what I’m saying, right? Like, you might be multitasking, maybe you’re driving, maybe you’re doing something on the computer, maybe you’re on the treadmill.
Anthony Vicino:
But you can’t really do that while reading, right? Like, if your eyes aren’t on the page, you’re not getting the words into your brain. And what I find is that struggle and difficulty are precursors of learning. And so if something is easy and very passive, you’re not going to learn it. Or at least learn it quickly or learn it well. That’s one of the reasons why I think reading is so powerful. But with that said, because reading is so slow, it can take a long time, a very long time. And because there are so many books out there on the topic of whatever that you’re trying to learn, you can, if you’re not careful, spin your wheels and waste a whole lot of time reading things that are not going to serve you or move you forward towards your goals as quickly as possible. So my goal in this podcast today is just to break down three of the money lessons that I’ve learned.
Anthony Vicino:
Having read hundreds of books on money that can kind of maybe, hopefully fast track you on your path of pursuing financial security or freedom or whatever your financial goal is. So lesson number one is this money is a game. And I find this interesting because when I grew up, I did not think of it this way. Now nobody in my family did either. If your family is anything like mine, you maybe didn’t grow up talking about money, not because it was, like, taboo. It just never came up in normal conversation. And as you go through life, you start to realize, okay, talking about money maybe is taboo. It’s very strange to talk to a person at the coffee shop or to a friend or a colleague about their net worth or the liquidity or what they’re investing in, or, like, their financial situation, how much debt they have, right? Those are awkward conversations.
Anthony Vicino:
And in my experience, the people who are winning the money game and playing it the best are the ones who recognize that money is not a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just a tool. And the way that you learn how to wield any tool is by using it, by talking about it, right? And you don’t feel shame and guilt about talking about it. And this is interesting because our society simultaneously puts people who have money up onto a pedestal. But then we say things like money is the root of all evil or that rich people are greedy. And so a lot of people just they end up playing the status game and positioning themselves and saying, oh, I don’t want money. If you’re seeking money, you’re a bad person. I would rather help people, right? And in my experience, the people who are in a position to actually help the most people and change the world are the ones that have won the money game, right, because it’s from their overflowing cup.
Anthony Vicino:
They can fill others. And I tweeted about this the other day is that if you really want to change the world, you need to first be able to fill your own cup, because you’re not doing anybody you’re not doing any of us any favors if we have to be filling your cup for you while you’re out there trying to help the world. It’s not sustainable is the big issue. And this is one of the reasons why I like capitalism in general, is that ideas, they survive and live and thrive typically based on the merit of the idea or the execution. And so they tend to be self sustaining ideas. Anyways, let’s get kind of into the weeds. But the takeaway here is that money is a game. And if you can just look at the score, like the amount of dollars that you have in the bank account as the score, then you can start showing up and playing it a little bit differently.
Anthony Vicino:
You stop feeling like this deep shame when you think about it. And it’s not a thing that makes you better or worse than anybody else, but it’s a thing that if you were to learn, you could play it better. And the thing about money as being a game is that, yes, some people are predisposed. They were born into a situation where they get to play the game a little bit better just as a consequence of fate, right? Luck. If I’m playing basketball against LeBron James, even if he’s never trained in a day in his life, he’s just going to be better suited to the game than I am. He’s just a giant and he’s a physical specimen. So I can’t control that. I can’t control the cards that I’m dealt.
Anthony Vicino:
All I can control is how I’m going to play the game and then I can control how I play each and every single hand so I can maximize my likelihood of winning that game. But the very first thing in my experience is just changing the paradigm and thinking about money as a game and not as this, I don’t know, existential thing that’s tied to your self worth, right? And net worth does not dictate your self worth. And I think that’s something that people get really caught up into when you’re in debt. Personally, when I was at my lowest, I felt a deep amount of shame because I felt like I was holding the world back. And the fact that I was in debt kind of implied that I had taken more than I’d given the world. And it’s really hard to separate those feelings. I’m sharing this because I know what it’s like to feel those feelings of shame and guilt, but just recognize that as you move through the levels of the wealth game, your value to the world isn’t necessarily going to intrinsically change. It’s just a matter of the impact that you can have that does change and that feels really good, if nothing else.
Anthony Vicino:
So number one lesson, treat money as a game. Lesson number two is that if money is a game, you cannot win it until you understand the rules, right? It’s remarkable to me that we don’t teach our kids, we don’t do a good job of teaching the rules of money, right? You maybe learn how to balance a checkbook and maybe a little bit about credit card and a little bit about debt, but nobody really sat you down to explain it, right? And so when you hear things like, okay, if I take my money and I put into a savings account like at the bank, they’re going to give me say, 2% interest. And for most people they’re like, cool, that’s great, right? Well, once you understand how the bank makes their money off of your money and how they actually make more off of your money than you do, and they do it in a less risky way, you start to go, wait a minute, that’s crap. So for all the deposits that you put into the bank that they’re going to give you, say, 2% interest on, they’re going to turn around and buy say, treasury bills for 4%. And just like that, they’re making just as much on your money as you are and all they’re doing is storing it for you, whereas you had to go out and earn it and do all this work and trade your time for it and all that stuff, right? And that seems very unfair, but it’s not. It’s just they’re playing by the rules. And the problem is you don’t understand the rules. Now, it is not necessarily your fault that you do not understand the rules because there’s a lot of money tied up in the financial industry in keeping it overwhelming and complex and making it seem as though you cannot manage this on your own.
Anthony Vicino:
Therefore, you need a stockbroker, a financial advisor. You need somebody else to hold your hand and to translate all this complicated jargon and lingo to protect you from yourself. And the reality is to understand why it’s made to seem so complicated and overwhelming. You just have to follow the incentives and say who stands to benefit from you feeling ignorant and overwhelmed? And it’s all the people that I just mentioned, right? The financial advisors, the banks, the stockbrokers, all of them. Wall street benefits when you feel too overwhelmed to take control of your own finances. But here’s the thing, is that the rules of the money game are actually fairly simple. There’s maybe a lot of them, but here’s the three that I find really impactful money goes to whoever pays it the most attention. That’s number one.
Anthony Vicino:
And truly in my personal financial life, it started rapidly improving for the better when I started doing a daily financial audit and started keeping a budget. Now, budgets are not super sexy, but it’s the game plan, right? It’s saying, this is what I’m going to do. And so without the budget, without the game plan, you’re just moving willy nilly through life with no stated strategy. So of course you’re going to lose the game. That’s number one. Keep a budget. Number two is the daily financial audit. And I recently posted a poll on YouTube and got thousands and thousands of people that responded.
Anthony Vicino:
I said, how often do you do a financial audit? Daily, weekly, monthly? Or what the heck is a financial audit? 50% of people said, what’s a financial audit? And really that was really telling because it’s so simple and so basic but really all it is. And I do this like literally right here, guys, if you’re watching this on YouTube, you can go to the YouTube channel Amplified Impact. This is my daily financial journal. Every single day. This is my 2023 journal. Every single day I sit down and that’s too far. Every day I sit down and I journal out. What did I buy the previous day and what did I earn the previous day? And just by tracking those numbers, I always have a finger on the pulse of where’s my money going, how much is coming in, how much is going out.
Anthony Vicino:
And if the money in the bank is your score, then of course this is going to be something that you need to keep track of because there’s literally no game I can think of where you don’t always know what the score is at any given moment, right? And that’s important because if you’re starting to fall behind from where you’re trying to get to, you can pivot, you can adjust a strategy, but if you don’t know the score, you can’t do that. And so just the simple practice of sitting down every single day and doing a financial audit, hugely powerful. The second rule of money that I found really impactful is that hoarders do not become wealthy. And the reason for this is that you cannot save your way to wealth. You cannot hoard your way to wealth. Because the main issue is that people who view the world this way are viewing it through a limited lens where everybody else is competition. And so they view money as a finite, limited, scarce resource. And as such, they play the game from this defensive position where everybody else is the competition and they’re afraid of sharing what they know or sharing what they do or sharing their money because every dollar that comes out of them or every idea that somebody else has that they could use to take the money away, right? So everybody has competition in this world and it’s impossible to win the Money Game if you view everybody else as the enemy.
Anthony Vicino:
And the reason for this is because money has no practical value without other humans being involved. So if you were just in the woods, you the bears and the bunnies, like money has no value, right? What would you do with it? But it’s only when you introduce another human into the equation that now money is a store of value, it’s a unit of exchange. And now it has utility. And so your ability to get more money or to use that money is predicated on your relationships. And so just by switching that paradigm and saying people are not the competition, they are not the thing that I’m fighting over this scarce resource for. But instead, money is infinite and abundant. And it is through people that I can build my wealth. That’s when you start to truly win the money game.
Anthony Vicino:
It is not just Michael Jordan out on the court. This is Michael Jordan with four of his best buddies and they win the team together, right? Michael Jordan, no matter how good he was, could not have beat five on one, right? He needed those teammates. It’s the same when it comes to the wealth game. All right? Rule number three is that you can only do three things with money. You can spend it, you can save it, or you can invest it. That’s it. Now, it’s really obvious that you cannot spend your way to wealth or winning the money game and that you can theoretically invest your way there, right? But that the one that I think confuses people is that you cannot save your way to winning the money game. And again, this goes back to the idea of inflation and that a dollar today is worth more than it’s going to be in ten years because things get more expensive the cost of goods and fulfillment, all that stuff.
Anthony Vicino:
So what that means is the idea of saving your way to wealth is actually an illusion because when you put your money into the checking account, you’re getting, say, 2%, or in your savings account you’re getting 2%. But if inflation is seven 8%, then you’re actually losing money each year. So what you’re doing is not actually saving. You are spending your money for the perceived liquidity and security of having access to that money when you need it. And when you start to look at putting money into the savings account as really just another way of spending it, you start to play the game a little bit differently. And we did a whole other video, we did a podcast, we’ve done a lot of articles on where you should be investing. Like there’s physical assets that we could talk about. But this leads us into lesson number three from reading all these books on money, which is that there are hundreds of ways to win the money game.
Anthony Vicino:
But I find one in particular is really valuable. But before I share what that is, or rather, the one that has the highest probability of success but before I share that one, just know this. Is that building wealth and playing these different strategies, they’re very context dependent. And it can be very easy for people like myself or other gurus who are talking about finance to share strategies and models that have worked for us. Like when I say this is how to get rich, really what I’m saying is this is how I got rich. And so you can take that with a big grain of salt because the strategies and tactics that work for me might not work for you. Again, LeBron can dunk. I cannot.
Anthony Vicino:
So just saying drive to the rim and jump over everybody, that won’t work for me right now. So you got to take everything through the lens of your unique perspective and situation. But the strategy that I’ve seen work the most frequently, not just for myself, but also in the lives of the people that I know who have been very successful, is that they built a cash generating machine. Either that’s through a business or a really high paying w two. And then they pour all those proceeds into cash generating assets. That could be stocks, it could be real estate, but they have some kind of cash generating machine and then they’re investing heavily into assets that are also generating cash or just appreciating. For me, this really breaks down to the strategy of build a business, invest in real estate. And that’s really been my game plan.
Anthony Vicino:
And I’m not saying stocks in the market and bonds or crypto. I’m not saying those aren’t good investments. I’m just saying this is the one that I’ve seen work time and time and time and time again is build a business and invest in real estate. So those are just three of the lessons. I’m not saying that these are the most important lessons. I’m saying these are three that have been very impactful for me and are a little bit counterintuitive and maybe you haven’t heard in a lot of other places. So I hope this brought you a little bit of value. If it did, do me a favor and share it with somebody that you think would get some value out of it, go post it on Instagram.
Anthony Vicino:
Go share it on Twitter. That’d be really rad. Don’t forget to tag me in it, because I love seeing that stuff. And I will guarantee to come in and engage in the comments with you on those posts. So, as always, guys, I appreciate you being here. Until tomorrow, stay hyper focused, my friend. Bye.
This Week On YouTube
These 3 Daily Habits Made Me A Millionaire in 3 Years
Whenever you’re ready, here are 3 ways I can help you:
1. Unleash your hyperfocused mind to dominate life, business, and everything in between? Here’s how:
→ The Hyperfocused Masterclass: the exact system I used to overcome ADHD, write 12 books, build 4 businesses, and acquire $70M of real estate.
There are a handful of spaces left in The Hyperfocus Masterclass for those who want to snag the early bird preorder special discount of $49.
Email anthony@anthonyvicino.com to let me know you want on the waitlist.
2. Learn to passively invest in commercial real estate with better returns, less risk, and zeo hassle.
→ Invictus Capital: my real estate private equity firm.
→ Multifamily Investing Made Simple: Top Apple Podcast.
→ Passive Investing Made Simple: Amazon Best Selling Book with 100 5 star reviews.
3. Want more like this? Check out these 3 popular articles from the vault:
