The Beauty of Stealth Wealth

What’s up, all you beautiful people? Welcome back to the podcast. So I just did a video a couple days ago talking about how I got trolled in the comments of a video. This was a video that I did a long time ago. It’s one of our most popular, most viral videos of all time. The millionaire in three years video where laid out the journey that we. That I followed to go from being in a really desperate place to being, you know, financially secure for the rest of my life. And people take to the comments in those types of videos, and rightfully so. There’s a lot of scammers, there’s a lot of imposters, a lot of people posing.

But people, they glom onto the wrong identifiers. Sometimes they use the wrong filters to distinguish between hucksters and the actual legitimate people out there. And one of the things it’s really interesting, one of the things that people look to is our status, the things that we do to signal our status, right? Fancy watches, fancy cars, fancy houses. A lot of. A lot of times, these are just status symbols that tell people how we’re doing relative to other people. At least that’s the idea behind it, right? And so people will take to Instagram, they’ll take to social media as an influencer, as a guru, and they will use these tools, these accessories, to posture, to signal I am high status and therefore high wealth. Right? And we know that that’s not necessarily the case. Like, intuitively, we understand that the people who are posing in front of those rented jets and rented lamborghinis and the rented watches, all that stuff, like, it can all be rented or it can be subsidized with credit card debt.

So you never really know what the financial situation is of the person on the other side of it. And so it’s really important that we don’t fall into the trap of equating the status symbols with indicators of true wealth, because a lot of times, the people that have the most money, that are the most secure, that are killing it on that side of the game, they have what I call stealth wealth. That is, you would never really, you never really suspect that they’re worth millions or even billions in some cases. They don’t drive the fanciest cars, they don’t have the fanciest toys. And a lot of that is due to the fact that, for the most part, the best items that you can get from industry at large, whether that’s your phone, whether that’s your computer, whether that’s a camera, whatever it is, the devices that I have access to as a multimillionaire are probably the same that Jeff Bezos has as a multi billionaire, and maybe the same that you have if you’re not quite there yet. My iPhone is not any better. It’s the same iPhone that Jeff Bezos has. Same iPhone that you have.

Right. This camera that I’m using right now, same camera that you have access to now. There’s, like, different gradations, right? Like, I might have the nicer version of it, but it’s not saying, like, billionaires have better cell phones than you do or anything like that. So often we use these. These status symbols then of, like, the watches, the cars, and things like that. That there definitely is, like, a tier level to that. But you gotta be careful that you don’t fall into the trap of equating one to the other because it doesn’t transfer. And a lot of people think that if you don’t have the one to signal, then you definitely don’t have the other on the backside of it.

And in my instance, at least in my experience of dealing with a ton of affluent people, at this point, you would never suspect it in 99% of cases. With that troll in the comments the other day, his takeaway was, yeah, I don’t like to take financial advice from people who are wearing cheap t shirts and I like missing a tooth or, you know, using in a crappy background. Right, whatever. And the point there is just to understand what game are you playing? You playing the status game? Are you trying to play the wealth game? Because they’re different games and people think playing the one will lead to winning the other. The reality is that’s just not the case. So just make sure that whatever game it is that you’re choosing to play, that you’re playing it on your terms, you’re playing it for the reasons that you want to play it, and that it’s actually leading you to the desired end state that you hope for your life. In a lot of cases, the status game is not going to get you where you want to go. It’s just a hierarchy.

It’s a hierarchy that for you to move up, somebody else has to move down. It’s a lot of posturing, it’s not a lot of fun, and it doesn’t actually get you any closer to what the end state the end goal of money is, which is to just be able to buy back your time, your freedom, have the luxury to do things on your terms with the people that you want, when you want, where you want, to do it. So just get really clear that the inputs match the desired output and that’s the takeaway from here. So ask yourself, what is it in your life that leads to the accumulation of the items that will actually lead you to the goals that you have? Like, is it the fancy things? Is the fancy watch, fancy card? If that’s you, if that’s what you enjoy, there’s nothing wrong with that. Just understand your motivations for it and understand that it doesn’t equate to the other thing. And get that into alignment, you’re going to find yourself making a whole lot more progress. So hope this brings you guys a little bit of, I’m sorry, a little bit of value, a little bit of insight, a little bit of something to chew on here that’s a little bit different than the norm, right? Like, a lot of people don’t think this way. They think like, oh, nice things equals nice life.

In my experience, that has not been the case. So take this, run with it. I’ll catch you guys in the next podcast, but until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.