He’s the latest and greatest to continue down the venture of being a business owner. One thing you’ll notice from this erratic journey is that some people simply have the “bug”. It’s quite similar to BowTiedBroke who started something, didn’t work, started again, got over leveraged, started again and suddenly made it big.

As we’ve said time and time again, if you simply show up and try, eventually you’ll learn enough and the right idea will miraculously appear “luck”

The BowTiedBoat Story

What’s up Jungle? I’m BowTiedBoat, a day 1 silent reader and now I’m here to tell you my story.

Incredibly grateful to have this opportunity! Seeing the success of this community has been incredible. Being able to share the same space as Gator/Fawn/Calvin with NOBS, TJ with The Outgoing Co., Kobra with Morning Would, VampDeer with Presleep and countless others is a true honor. It’s insane how one X post can change your life.

I don’t consider myself an unlucky guy, but someone looking at my W2 employment history could make a good argument. I’ve lost my job 3 times in the last 8 years, 2 of them in the last 3. All despite being a high-quality employee and hitting my numbers. The way I view it, golden handcuffs have never been an option for me. I have no choice but to make it.

Along the way there were countless opportunities to give up. Following the principles BowTiedBull preaches let me not only survive these setbacks but thrive in the face of adversity. The difference in my attempts pre and post finding Bull is night and day.

My journey features 3 distinct businesses:

The Snow Business: A physical product company that is seasonal and depends on the weather. It was a failing business I bought into from a family member. Product was solid but the offer and marketing were trash. The goal was to use it as a training ground to learn and jump to something with bigger upside.

The Beer Bong Business: At my cousin’s wedding I turned the centerpiece into a beer bong and my next business was born.

Ariven: My Shopify SaaS business, my dream E-com app I’ve built over the last 2 years. It takes on-site personalization that previously only enterprise stores with huge dev teams could afford and makes it no-code and simple to run. Running the same playbook as Klaviyo by making expensive enterprise software user friendly and affordable.

Attempt 1 (2018)

In 2018 I got laid off from a sales job 6 months in despite being ahead of quota. It was a total shock and the one that hit the hardest. I was in year 3 of the snow business. Sales were low and growth was modest, so I knew it wasn’t my ticket to independence yet. During the gap, I did build out a website feature that is still the core piece of the funnel and was foundational to its success today.

My only shot in this brief window was getting the beer bong business to market and getting sales fast. The product had been stuck in manufacturing hell for the past 12 months. Found a new molder but it took longer than the window I gave myself, so I jumped into a new W2.

I did get it to go viral a few months later and sold $10k worth the first month. Problem was sales dove off a cliff shortly after. It’d require consistent viral videos to make it, and pre TikTok that is not sustainable.

I paused all marketing and sold the business. I framed it as an asset sale so I could recoup all the money I invested in the blow mold. I had a feeling it would never run again and would be worth near zero, so best to sell while it was hot. The mold has not run in the 7 years since the sale.

Lessons from Attempt 1:

This attempt was laughably far off from self-employment, but it instilled some deep lessons that set up my future success.

A W2 job is a mirage that appears stable. You can do all the right things and still get cut. I’ve had trust issues with employment ever since. I keep burn and debt to a minimum and always have enough runway to avoid desperation.

As BowTiedBull says, manufacturing in the US sucks, as much as I hate to say it. It’s expensive and the minimum order quantities are high. The majority are owned by private equity and don’t give care about your success.

Covid Panic (2020)

The W2 I was at got shaky for a second like many businesses. I got desperate and tried to rush into a new e-com business. I was viewing hundreds of e-com sites a day for idea inspiration, but the truth was my skillset wasn’t mature enough to take advantage.

I came out of the desperation fog and doubled down on building e-com skills at a rapid pace between the W2 and the snow business. Both businesses finished with record years online. I paused the search for a new e-com opportunity and doubled down on growing the snow business.

Attempt 2 (2023)

The 5 years between attempts were an insane contrast. The Covid bump the snow business got wasn’t temporary, it was an actual growth inflection point. It went from hobby business to a powerful side business, exceeding my W2 income at times.

I got married and had a family, so my burn rate went up. My philosophy didn’t change though, and the financial cushion grew even faster. I continued doing e-com full time at my W2, so I was getting paid to learn the skills to accelerate my business, and it worked!

The company I was at had their line of credit with Silicon Valley Bank. Shortly after the implosion the rounds of layoffs started. I was a key revenue generator, so I knew I wouldn’t get cut till the end.

It was a decent spot to be in. I only had to do the bare minimum to collect my W2 check and could put the majority of my time into the snow business to prepare for the jump.

The layoff came 6 months later and I was pumped and ready. I had revamped the site and brought new marketing channels online for my full court press.

The Tyson Punch

The first few months started strong and it was looking like I could make the jump. I already had the pressure of a pregnant wife, and one night in November I went to bed… and woke up with a dislocated shoulder.

Not a new problem, but one I had kept at bay, and I had decided years earlier that the next one equals surgery. I got under the knife as soon as possible so I’d be able to hold the baby in a few months. The injury and recovery sucked but was manageable. I was not going to let it derail my attempt!

Then the final blow came. That winter it never snowed.

January sales was decent, but the last week died off and dropped 60%. That’s when the market gave up on winter and moved on to spring, and I knew it was game over. We serve multiple regions and it’s not uncommon for one or two to have a bad snow year. Every single one being dry was unheard of, and sales stayed down over 50% most of the year.

The business is bootstrapped and run very conservatively with no debt, so no bankruptcy risk. But it couldn’t provide a livable income on its own. Back to the W2 I went…

Lessons from Attempt 2:

It’s all about timing, and the time was not right. The 2023 year end payout gave me runway to be picky on the next W2, and another W2 income was the best way to avoid the financial stress.

Double down on building your skillset. It drastically increases the surface area for finding a successful business, and the odds of building one. I read books like Cashvertising, went back through copywriting courses I’d taken, and reverse engineered high end sites.

Once you know what high quality looks like, you find the tier one operators and learn from what they do, not what they say. The courses were foundational, but the skills only turn into money when you put them to use in CRO, SEO, ads and more. Marketing channels constantly change, but the sales psychology behind them never does, so you can adapt much faster.

Keep yourself out of a desperate financial situation. I was taking big hits to income, but I had enough to comfortably get to the next round and keep pressure off the business. I see way too many people take money out of a business too early. It often leads to a desperate situation and taking on leverage.

I need to start another business to diversify income for down years. I’ll keep putting effort into growing the snow business, but I won’t be expanding the product line deeper into the niche.

Attempt 3 (2025)

We landed a solid ecom job shortly after my 2nd daughter was born, in a really competitive space where I would further expand my skill set. Shortly after getting the job, great business ideas started popping into my head unsolicited. BowTiedBull preaches that whenever you desperately want something you don’t get it. When you don’t need something, you get it in abundance. Funny how that works.

Picking the Next Business

I had three blue chip ideas in front of me: two ecom ideas and a Shopify SaaS app. The ecom ideas were layups with solid upside, more than the snow business.

But I was burnt out dealing with inventory problems, and the SaaS idea gave me chills in my bones. Why do we spend so much time personalizing and segmenting everything but the website? It just made so much sense.

I found a few companies already doing it, but they were all priced at enterprise level, complicated and required a technical team.

AI was making huge gains during this period as well. I had found the coding utility of ChatGPT early in 2023 and was making front end theme changes I previously had to outsource to developers. I used my time at the W2 to develop AI coding skills, building out sections and custom quizzes using Cursor and Windsurf. I was hooked! I got bored with front end pretty quickly and jumped to full stack development.

My timing worked out that I could build Ariven and own 100% of it. No dilution, no investor busy work, no having your vision watered down.

End of Employment

I had a feeling the W2 wouldn’t last much longer, but after a solid sales month I thought I was safe. Then Ariven hit what looked like a fatal flaw. The app’s initial core feature was the ability to use Klaviyo segments. We built out the feature only to find that we couldn’t use the Klaviyo cookie ID to identify user segments via their API. I was devastated.

Two days later, on the last Friday of the month, I got a calendar invite from someone I don’t meet with... I knew instantly it was game over. The whole team was let go.

My psyche was a bit roughed up on this one. My app looked dead, I was still shy of the 2x business to W2 income (about 1.5x), and it was a straight up bizarre experience at the company.

Days After The Job Loss

I’m so used to this by now that I bounce back quickly. I initially focused on the newly achievable AI improvements on the snow business. After a week of decompressing, I gave Ariven one deep session to survive or die. I found a way to do it, Ariven lives!

Ironically I ended up building out an analytics database that puts Klaviyo’s to shame. I almost killed it over a feature that’s now a modest nice to have...

The Sprint to Self-Employment

The plan was to work full time on the snow business as it’s the cash cow and work on Ariven as the side business. If I grew the snow business aggressively and hit 2x, I’d replace the lost W2 income and buy the runway to finish and launch Ariven the right way.

It was an all-out sprint. I needed to grow the business 30% in Q4 to lock in self-employment. It’s a seasonal business, so you only get one shot a year to hit the mark.

I ripped out the 3rd party apps that made the site fragile and moved those features native to the theme. This is where the AI coding paid off. The site became durable to changes, and I could finally redesign the key choke points so more users made it down the funnel. Then further improved Facebook ads took the site to its next gear.

I hit 50% growth in Q4. I overshot the mark and made it to the other side, with full ownership of my time and the runway to build and release Ariven!

Lessons from Attempt 3:

Skills and effort compound but the results will lag. That lag is the timing, and trying to force opportunity usually doesn’t work.

Swallowing my pride and going back to the W2 after being so close opened up an incredible amount of opportunity. It eliminated desperation and allowed the good ideas to flow. TAKE THE PRESSURE OFF!

Be outcome independent. I never tied my identity to my attempts. If it worked, awesome. If not, we know the drill and we’ll try again next time.

Put it all out on the field. These windows close fast. Suffering for a short time is much better than suffering the rest of your life knowing you didn’t push hard enough. I’ve seen people close to me not push hard enough when they had the opportunity, and the regret has broken them.

New Business: Eating Glass Round 2!

I’ve been through the eating glass phase once before with the snow business. It’s seasonal, so it was more like 5 years! Making it through the rejection, despair and fear once is a superpower going forward, but this round won’t be easy.

Not to mention the metric ton of noise I need to cut through in this space. I’m a Shopify site owner too and get solicited constantly. Now I’m one of them... but I actually have something valuable! Add in everyone saying SaaS is dead, record Shopify approval backups and agents being the only ones shopping. The emotional roller coaster is still there and believe me I ride it every day.

The biggest way to silence those emotions is early wins, and the snow business site has been Ariven’s testing ground and generating wins since day 1.

So what the heck is Ariven? It’s like Klaviyo meets conversion optimization. It’s proven that segmenting and personalizing email, ads and more greatly increases sales, yet every visitor still gets the same website... WHY?!?!

Landing pages are the only real attempt at matching intent, and that fades the second a user clicks off or comes back.

Ariven lets you segment users and serve an alternative version of your site that matches their intent, like the ad they clicked or the product they viewed. It holds that message across repeat visits. Clicked an ad with a specific angle? The home and product pages can match that angle. Showed interest in a product that isn’t your hero? Make it the home page hero next time they visit.

The Results so Far

We are seeing a near universal pattern of first-time visitors landing on a collection or product page convert worse than those landing on the homepage. You’re hitting them with decision overwhelm from the start.

On the snow business I’m running a 50/50 test of landing page versions of collection and product pages vs standard for first time visitors landing on them. It’s literally 3 sections from my homepage on top of the normal collection and product pages. We’re seeing double the conversion for those visitors. Three flows are adding 9% to total store revenue on half the traffic, which projects to around 18% gain fully rolled out!

My target for every store is at least 15%, and I have no doubt some of you psychos could hit 30%. I want to be your store’s top ROI!

Ariven’s Current Status

Ariven is launched and live on the Shopify App Store. The jungle helped me get here, so I want to give back! For the BowTid community, I’ll do white glove onboarding to get it running and making you money. We’ll extend the free trial till you see a proven return, plus a lifetime discounted rate. To take me up on the offer info@ariven.ai, DM me @bowtiedboat or book a demo on Ariven.ai.

Thanks again to BowTiedBull for the opportunity to share this journey. If someone with this many setbacks can make it, so can you! As my friend Joe Dirt said, “You can’t have ‘no’ in your heart. ‘No’ is not an option, brother…”

BTB Notes

Tons of interesting stuff and similar consistent story lines as well. In no particular order.

• Working in sales and having a quota forced BowTiedBoat to learn one of the most important skills which is sales. IE. transferring emotion. While the industries were all different, sales is the most transferable skill

• Layoffs are part of the W-2 life. Especially as you get older. Not surprising that he had a wild last 8-years. This is pretty much how it goes as you get older as expensive people move the operating profit line even if you’re hitting your numbers

• The Snow based business unironically made him more prepared to survive the ups and downs. A cyclical industry based on the weather makes you understand that not every single year will be good. Understanding the difference between a bad year for the company and a bad year for the industry is paramount to surviving and keeping your effort at max level

  • The business was also legacy. He didn’t need to come up with some new wild adventure to get to 1.5x W-2. Reading about how difficult it was made it seem like it was worse than it was! This is because the emotions of working for yourself make you go through the rollercoaster “I’m going to be broke” wake up “I am going to be rich” wake up “I am going to be broke”. For better or worse, this feeling never goes away

• The less you need the more you get. Never put yourself in a desperate situation where if it is a zero, it means you lose everything. Once he was stable, his thought process cleared up and now he’s sitting on multiple ideas that will generate a profit if any current venture is weaker than expected

• It took years to understand that being outcome agnostic is the key to success. If you’re putting in the reps, that’s what matters. If the weather is bad, nothing you can do. If you quit though, that lasts forever. Do the right things consistently and eventually the pay off shows up. Having some mathematical day that you need to make it is unhealthy. Oddly, if you don’t have a mathematical day, we’d wager you get “there” faster than expected

• We’ve got a huge range in the jungle at this point. People naturally scale up and expand. Everything from SaaS to SEO to MedSpas to Real Estate to Sleep formulas to social drinks to language learning… the list is hard to keep up with

  • Just like with anything else, we know a lot of people are working in the background and suddenly someone else will escape the claws of the W-2. The battle is never won (emotionally) however, getting control of your time is what people are really looking for in the first place. Outside of the 0.1% exceptions to the rule, you’ll always work on something and build once you get the adrenaline from your first real win

On that note, keep grinding. By the time you’re running multiple projects you’ll find that you have a list of other good ideas anyway (as you’re seeing from this post). Open one door and suddenly you see all the other doors.

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

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From what we’ve seen a lot of people are finding value in a data centric approach (allowing you to make your own models/conclusions as well). Since everyone has access to charts online, the value is shifting to interpreting data + figuring out long-term winners and losers in advance. A ton of innovation is happening now (AI or “SI” ADs starting to inflect + slow death of old system of transportation) we think it makes sense to do some bigger picture posting as well.

TL;DR expect additional posting on Friday which will have much wider range - stocks/tech/crypto data/and even some health related stuff similar to our HRT post.

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We’re entirely aware that housing is a consumption asset. IE. saying to invest the rental difference is hilariously misinformed because control of the asset + zip code + being able to do as you wish = part of the value. There is practically no other asset in the world that you use every single day that goes up in value. Watches, cars, weird niche items still go down if you use them daily (wear and tear). If your stock portfolio is up 2% that day, it might impact your mood but it does get consumed in any way on a daily basis.

So. We’re going to go through all the important points in this post.

Starting with the good news: luxury is fine.

Part 1 : An 8% Mortgage Doesn’t Impact the Rich

If you’re already rich, the stated mortgage rate does not impact you. As many of you know, we’re already on buy, borrow, die which illustrates the point (source). If you have assets, you can open up a much wider range of funding options. You can borrow some money from a heavily over-collateralized stock portfolio.

Simple Example You Can Look Up Right Now on IB (Source)

General Real Estate Trends Also Showing the Same (Source)

Simple Explainer: In the real luxury areas (rough cutoff for luxury is 3x median single family house value in any city), the funding options are not the same. Wealthy people can: 1) buy cash, 2) already have 3% rates from 2021 that they won’t touch and 3) can also use various other options to get the rate down - or a hybrid of higher down payment and shorter duration loan.

These are all the financial tools available to the wealthy. Beyond that there is also the consumption value you get by being in the nice neighborhood. You get access to a much higher quality peer group, safety, better schools and memories/utility out of the asset as well. There is no way to put that into a spread sheet. Just know that it is certainly not worth “zero”.

If you attempted to rent in the same place, you can’t really decorate the house or make any changes. You’re still at the whim of the owner who could sell it, move someone else in and boom you’re out of the school district and need to move again.

From what we’ve seen most people who argue that you should “always” invest the difference in the stock market do not have families. If you don’t have kids and you are single, we’d actually agree with the renting crowd. There is limited value in public goods if you’re single (which is why most young people live in major cities which are notoriously designed for hustle and bustle)

The Rich Can Borrow Later: Most just think about down payments and the maximum monthly outlay they can afford. The rich think in a completely different way. Unless something extreme happens, they do not sell. They sit on the asset for years and years until they can get the price they want. Or. The valuation goes up enough and rates are low. This leads to cheap “land banking”

Crash Bros = Doesn’t apply to Luxury as Much: While you can always find exceptions to the rule, even during the massive financial crisis in 2008, luxury held up better. The typical median house went down about 30%, the luxury market only went down about 15% (some markets were only down 10%). To keep it simple just say 1/2 of the downside vs. the median.

Simple Summary

While we always get blasted for short posts that get taken out of context. We’ll continue to do it.

If you want a simple decision tree for wealthy/luxury/higher end decisions it is pretty simple. If you’re going to buy you should be certain that you are there for 10+years. In addition, you should be starting a family or already have one. You do not want to get kicked out of the right school district/region/neighborhood.

If you’re single the decision tree suggests you rent. You could invest in stocks and other assets that will keep pace with home price growth. (Hint: if any member of the opposite sex is upset that you live in a 1BR apartment as a single person, you are better off ditching them anyway!)

We’re sure there are exceptions to the rule but that’s the simple heuristic.

Real estate isn’t some stock you can trade every year. Transaction fees, carrying costs etc. You want to stay for a long time. Let inflation eat away at the debt and enjoy the asset you will sleep in for 10+ years.

Part 2 : Explaining Why the Middle Is Ugly

This post is blowing up like the Middle East. Not sure why but that’s how the internet works. Since 2022 we’ve said much of the same “K-shape” economy where rich get richer and middle gets pressed/squeezed into lower socioeconomic status. This is also why we said that middle of road real estate was a bad buy.

So far, accurate.

Source

Stocks vs. Real Estate: We’re not even going to do the blah blah math. On paper and in excel, if you were to invest in stocks and rent you did better. Everyone knows that if you just put it into excel. The main issue is that life isn’t a spreadsheet and if you plan on having kids/starting a family, the decision tree doesn’t have you raising 4 kids in a studio apartment to save money. Homes shouldn’t go up as much as stocks because there is utility/consumption in the asset (returns are also levered for a reason).

Now that we’ve beaten that to death, here is the wild part.

The bank underwriting the debt gets access to: 1) stock market returns off your debt and 2) ability to simply take your house if you can’t pay. This is attempted asset stripping (source).

Asset Stripping of the Middle Class: Right now we’re reaching a point where bills are consuming the entire paycheck. This is happening in upper middle type income ranges as well. Since wages didn’t go up significantly, savings get depleted.

Slow bleed out in Savings Rate - Suggests a lot of people are in the Red

Once that happens, the middle is forced to liquidate assets and reduce their quality of life. This could result in selling the house and moving into a condo. It could result in selling cars, jewelry, collectables etc. Point is the same. Assets get sold to make up for the gap.

Under The Hood: The middle is a completely different beast. In this general zone, there are two groups: 1) low mortgage rate from the 2020/2021 era or earlier and 2) people who do not have that luxury. The second group is entering into forced selling mode as soon as there is a tiny economic blip. We can see this as the prices remain flat (stagnant market) and unemployment hasn’t cracked. Unlike the wealthy, a job loss leads to forced selling.

A Great Parallel

If you want a pretty good comparison how about 1995 to 2000. This is probably a great example.

• 1995 Inflation was 2.8%, 2000 inflation was 3.3% - sounds familiar!

• 1995 to 2000 was a major tech wave - sounds familiar!

• 1995 to 2000 mortgage rate was around 8% - sounds familiar again!

• Debt/GDP in the same era was only 55-65% vs. 100%+ today (important as yields can go even higher if bond market thinks risk is elevated)

Now here is the other major difference:

• 2026 Price/Annual income of a house is about 4.7x. In 1995 and 2000 it was around 4.0-4.1x

This means the typical buyer today has to shell out even more money (relative to income) when compared to the 1995-2000 tech boom when we had similar inflation and mortgage rates. This is why we keep saying “middle will struggle”

If you think that we’re in the middle of another mega tech run (1995) then prices should be lower and if you think we’re at the peak of a bubble (2000) then prices should be lower. The only tricky part is all the frozen inventory from the ZIRP policy from 2010-2021 or so.

Part 3 : Put It Together

Housing is always an emotional topic. The majority of homeowners are not liquid millionaires and their wealth is largely tied into the house.

Source

This is why it always gets a visceral reaction. That said recognize what high interest rates represent. It now represents stock market type returns (for the bank) with the ability to seize if payment is not met (asset stripping is the new goal)

General Rule

If you’re single, you really shouldn’t care much about buying a house. You’re not going to fill it with kids so there is no real point. You can mimic the return with a wide range of financial products (REITs, general stocks etc.). While it won’t be perfect it’ll be good enough.

If you’re deciding to buy and stay somewhere for 10+ years, here is the general idea with ~8% mortgage rates:

• Under no circumstances do you assume rates will go down. You only buy if you are comfortable with the interest rate written on the contract. If you can refinance later that is a bonus it is not part of your buying strategy. Similar to purchasing a company, you never buy based on what will “improve later”. Price is based on status quo

• Don’t buy assuming you’ll leave in about 5-years. You should really focus on that 10+ year horizon. The transaction costs + loan origination fees will kill your returns. Long-term holdings open up huge tax benefits $250K and $500K for married couples = 0% cap gain for primary residence sale

• The house needs to be big picture lifestyle design. Since we’re suggesting single people rent, we assume that you have a family if you want to buy. In that case, the lifestyle value needs to be estimated: 1) school, 2) value of peer, 3) safety, 4) general quality of life and 5) work/income optionality if applicable. Renting is 100x harder with kids who are going to school because switching to a different neighborhood may require new friends/teachers/options. If you become a parent, best of luck telling a 7 year old that he’ll be leaving his best friend next year!

• Once the transaction is done, delete zillow/redfin/propwire and all those websites immediately. Since you’ll be locked in for 10-years it is unhealthy to watch your net worth fluctuate like a stock

• Bonus: While the focus is always on the luxury areas (best school districts/community/network), if you can get some forced appreciation that is extremely valuable. Worst house in the best neighborhood is a great strategy for a reason. You can’t change the price and you can’t change the zipcode

On that note big welcome to the new people who found this side of the web. Despite this post being about real estate we actually don’t care much about it vs. tech/crypto/e-com businesses.

People wonder how these homes are being purchased and you’ve stumbled onto the right place. They are being purchased by the digital realm. The way people make it up the socioeconomic ladder is by utilizing new technology (E-com, AI, software, etc.).

Our prediction is that the “new money” will continue to tilt towards small business owners. While SpaceX and early OpenAI/Anthropic employees will always get the headlines, the majority will get their step function from a small business. It is awful and requires 3-years of suffering, but the other option is being forced into the bottom of the K.

The rest is up to you.

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

• Old Books: Are available by clicking here for paid subs. Don’t support scammers selling our old stuff

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Instead of just belaboring that point we’re actually going to walk through how fast it can blow up. Not only will this be useful now, but in the future. After you solve your own first win, you can revisit this one and make sure you don’t blow it all up for no reason.

By The End of this Post You’ll Understand Why This is Less Risky Than a Blind Buy

Source

Example Business

You are willing to pay $900K for a E-com business. The math shows it earns $300K. 3x earnings (33% yield). Sound juicy as you’ll get everything back by 2029.

Then you start to dig and realize the owner is still the active manager. He claims to work 10 hours a week and if you replace him, the profit will still be there. This is classic “passive income” selling.

You decide to bite anyway “I’ll just run it myself”. Since you’re willing to work 40 hours a week and he was only working 10-hours a week, it should be a layup.

While the listing is showing accurate information on the financials. It is unlikely showing accurate information on how the ROI is generated. Those are completely different things. People are not going to lie about things that are verifiable. If they claim it makes $300K in profit it probably does. There is no way to verify the hours or how the customers are retained (in great detail) especially for a small business.

We’re going to create a simple example to avoid the common pitfalls. In addition, since this is a legit path once you’re savvy, we’ll explain how it can be a home run.

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Last cycle we got absolutely hammered for not selling anything and…

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“Issuing short term debt” just means … Printing money.

At this point, our working theory is that the Government has decided to give up on the debt issue entirely. Hindsight is 20/20 but Musk’s meltdown was likely a signal in the noise. A guy who survived bankruptcy many times was kindly shown the door when it came to fixing the budget/spending/debt issue.

This means a few things: 1) it isn’t politically tenable to raise taxes or cut spending and 2) they have a general plan to inflate GDP at a faster rate than the debt. This is the goal. Like anything related to politicians/government, it is unlikely going to work (but they will try).

Quick Math Behind Financial Repression

If a government has a ton of debt. The typical assumption is that you’ll increase revenue (taxes) and try to cut spending (use the cost saving to pay debt down). Since neither of these are politically liked (job losses/higher taxes all but guarantee societal push back), there is a third option.

Increase GDP faster than the debt can grow.

Quick Math on Nominal GDP Number to Beat:

• Debt vs. GDP in the USA is about 125%. We’ll just call it $40T (Debt)/$32T (GDP). This is a good proxy for what is actually happening

• In 2025 we added $2.17T in debt and in 2026 another $2.45T (so far)

• Keep it simple and just say we will add about $2.4T per year, this year being worse due to war costs/middle east

• Add that number to the debt and we get $42.4/$40 = 6.0%.

Remember that number. The goal is for the government to increase nominal GDP by 6.0%. If it can sustain nominal GDP growth of 6.0%, the debt burden is decreasing (Nominal GDP = Inflation + Stated GDP)

Current Set Up Lines Up:

• Total debt growing at roughly 6%.

• Nominal GDP of… 8.0% (3.5%+4.5% = 8%)

Source

Compound All of It: Since we don’t know what they will print for the next 10 years, we’re just going to assume it is constant. We’ve got 6% debt growth and 8% GDP growth. What happens after a decade?

$40T (1.06^10) Divided by $32T (1.08^10) = $71.6T/$69T = 103% debt to GDP vs. 125%

Summary

The USA has basically given up on paying down the debt (along with a whole host of other countries). Instead of pretending it is possible by suggesting tax hikes and cutting government spending, the plan is to get GDP to outpace the debt growth.

If successful, the US can silently kick the can down the road for an absurd amount of time. In addition to that, it is now in their interest to control the yield curve to keep rates below their nominal GDP numbers.

What This Means for You

If you’ve been reading us for a long time you already know the main characteristics and plans: 1) spin up a internet native business, 2) invest in tech/crypto and 3) use the W-2 as the funding to slowly escape and keep the lights on. Quit when you’re making about 2x W-2 net income from the business (always exceptions to the rule, this is the general guideline)

While that hasn’t changed, the interesting thing that has changed? You can’t trust anything from stated inflation and real interest rates anymore.

This is pretty severe to be blunt about it. If the narrative is that we will grow out of debt, what they are really saying is “we are incentivized to lie about inflation numbers and control the yield curve”

Calculate a New Hurdle Rate

In typical financial text books you’ll see something like this.

Source

The idea that you can get a positive return with no risk/low risk is no longer a real scenario. The reality is that the risk free rate is at best matching inflation. If you don’t need the money for multiple years, the risk free rate (treasuries) have no real value to you.

Note: this does not mean markets will have zero corrections forever. Rather, it means that a 5-year holding period or so, chances are extremely slim that you’ll be happy sitting in any government issued bond/t-bill (beyond a standard emergency fund).

New Hurdle Rate: Depending on who you are, you should calculate a new hurdle rate based on a combination of inflation + GDP. If you want the easiest way to do it, do not invest in anything that you think loses to Nominal GDP. In an alternative scenario, you should take total National Debt growth + 2%.

This is a pretty decent way to create the new long-term return needed to move up the socioeconomic ladder.

Lets say that nominal GDP normalizes at around 7% (3% inflation + 4% GDP growth). On the other side of the ledger the national debt grows at say 4%. This would mean your new hurdle is around 6-7% depending on which methodology you use (Nominal GDP at 7% or debt + 2% would be 6%)

What Asset Class is the New Proxy

Stocks. Anyone under the age of 30 or so should assume that the S&P is the new 21st century savings account (Trump Accounts are created suggesting this in the first place!). If you don’t do anything and left all your earnings in the S&P you’re up 13% YTD. If you’ve been around for about 15 years it has gone up ~9x in value (wages are not up 9x in 15 years)

Source

Source

Even if you double the performance of real wage growth (assumes prices 2x’d from 2011 to 2026), you’re not even close to the 9x change we saw in the S&P 500 alone.

For anyone in the weeds, you know that we’re being nice by using the S&P. If you simply invested in tech and didn’t even touch higher beta stuff (Mag 7, Crypto, Semis etc.) you’re up an enormous ~15x over the same period.

Source

Expectations: If you can hold and remain unemotional, stocks in general should get you 2-5% above the real hurdle rate. The hurdle rate is going to move since the government will pull every trick out of the book to help the debt/gdp ratio (yield curve control, changing the components of inflation etc.)

This means all your income going into these standard ETFs are going to give you a small boost up the socioeconomic ladder.

By default this also means you should really become your own money manager. Paying 1-2% management fees (wealth management, asset management, hedge fund etc.) is not going to work if they are losing to the S&P 500. Giving up control and handing the keys to one of the most important aspects of life (health, relationships, wealth) should come with a massive premium/tax on it. If they are not beating the market by at least 3x their management fee, you’re better off being your own portfolio manager or simply buying the S&P/QQQ.

Who Loses in Financial Repression

Like any government policy, this is a zero sum game. Since money is being taxed and distributed, it means someone is getting a bad deal.

Clear answers are: 1) bond/t-bill holders, 2) fixed income streams - pensions and insurance companies and 3) anyone who has assets < annual income [rough proxy]

1. Self explanatory. If the goal is financial repression, they will pay out on the debt but it’ll be below the real inflation rate. To keep people locked into them they will claim that inflation is below the treasury rate - as you’re seeing this year the bond market is calling the bluff as war needs to be paid for

2. Fund Rules. Pensions/Insurance are required to carry certain amounts of govt/risk free product. Many money management funds are also in this camp (think target fund type mutual funds in a 401K). Pensions/insurance is still the most obvious

3. Assets < Income: This is a good back of the envelope way to think about it. If someone makes $100,000 a year, they need to penny pinch, coupon clip, sleep on an air mattress, bike to work and generally live like garbage until they can get to about $100,000 in investable assets. At that point at least a full year of income is outpacing inflation. The salary is not going to keep pace as we’ve seen for the past 15 years. This is also why the advice of “saving 10% and waiting 40 years to retire” is absolutely terrible. It takes too long to have inflation working as a tailwind for you vs. a headwind

Will people buy? We’ll find out. The odd thing about the whole thing is that it doesn’t even matter. If the govt pulls it off, debt/gdp remains okay for a long, long, long time. If they fail and people stop buying treasuries rates will go to 6, 7 or 8%. At that point the message is clear (monetary debasement and inflation is out of control) which means… you guessed it… owning the index is still pretty safe. All the pricing power is going to be held by the top 50 or so companies in the USA

The Rest is Now Up to You

You can come up with your own framework for calculating the real hurdle rate. We gave out our own simplified overview and asset minimums.

If you think that Tech or S&P or another sector will beat the hurdle rate you need to invest at least 1 year of gross annual income into it. If you don’t then you’re underexposed or you don’t believe in the asset in the first place.

The best tell for what someone believes in is always “what they own” not what they think they understand.

Take a long hard look at your investments and decide 1) if your under allocated or over allocated and 2) if you can hold it through a worst case scenario - job loss, short term market scare, etc.

Good luck anon! Don’t believe any of the data anymore, their mandate is clear. Jack up nominal GDP, keep debt growth as low as possible and give out a rosy inflation number (make it barely believable).

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

• Old Books: Are available by clicking here for paid subs. Don’t support scammers selling our old stuff

• How ETH is Staked: Covered (here)

• Crypto: The DeFi Team built a full course on crypto that will get you up to speed (Click Here)

• Crypto Taxes: We have a suggested Tax Partner and 25% discount code, for information see this post.

• Security: Our official views on how to store Crypto correctly (Click Here)

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More importantly, if you look at this, it suggests that 3% is the new normal for fed funds rate. They are essentially throwing in the towel on 2% until 2030 or so. This is fascinating because long-term inflation would be structurally higher in this scenario.

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Yep, that guy can actually be replicated. Some people do it since birth, however, much like all other aspects of life… it can be replicated.

Part 1: General Summary

Putting in the work, result agnostic. That is the simplest way to manufacture luck.

You can also work backward and see the qualities that unlucky people have.

A starting point? The overly intense and uptight person always fails. Now you might know someone like this. They are doing well financially or in one particular sector. That’s the key: one. It only works in a narrow sense and all other categories in life fall off dramatically.

Being ultra uptight and intense about everything leads to failure in multiple categories while becoming wildly successful in just one.

If you understand this, you’ll see it everywhere.

One guy who seems to only make money (always miserable). One guy who seems to be popular no mater where he goes (but is broke). One guy who is always in the top 1% of fitness (but struggles socially).

All of them have the same thing in common. They’ve over indexed into one category and if they don’t figure it out, they are pigeon holed for life.

Working extremely hard does not mean you have to be rigid and stressed. Try to convince the guy stressing over tick-marks on a graph and it’ll fall on deaf ears. He’ll never get it.

Grab a Couple of Examples

Recently, Alexander Zverev has completely reversed his luck. Back in 2020 he was known as a choke artist after blowing a 2-0 set lead in the 2020 US open. Dominic Thiem ended up winning by coming back in the final 3 sets.

Today? He has put in the work consistently and has become unemotional and smooth. That last part is key. Before he had a temper/intensity that surrounded him. Not useful for long and drawn out battles since intensity/stress drain energy from the system.

Source

How About Some Presidential Examples

Sounds oddly familiar to Trump!

Like him or not, think both sides can agree that Trump is also quite lucky (almost got shot, has had success in various businesses and was popular enough to be a reality TV personality).

“I am Not a Pro Athlete or Future President”

That doesn’t matter. Around 80% of millionaires are first generation. Statistically, you’re already in the right camp anyway (lesson one: spin everything as a positive)

Source

Summarize the Commonalities

• Lucky people do not spend time thinking. They spend time doing. Instead of wasting hours and hours ruminating about the past, they are busy doing something productive. Could be practicing a tennis serve, doing laundry, reading a book on manufacturing or testing a new AD. The key is doing something to maintain momentum

• None of these people live in the past. If you watched the tennis match, it was clear he didn’t even remember the 2020 finals. Similarly, people like Trump just move onto the next item on the board. After the attempted shooting he was out playing golf. Didn’t dwell on it

• Elon Musk is another great example of this. Spaceship/rocket blows up? Yep, instantly working. Not crying or thinking about what went wrong. Unemotional because it doesn’t help the ball move forward

With those big picture ones we can now work towards implementation on your end. We’ve written out several things that “lucky” people do on a daily basis.

Part 2: Actions that Create Luck

#1 Journals Create Luck

Mantras and manifestation get a lot of hate. Deservedly so. They are used incorrectly. In fact, if you’ve read us for a long time, you know that we actually believe in them. Just in a different way.

For decades now we have had a three sentence journal structure. Yes. Decades later we still do three sentences once per day. It takes less than a minute.

• What is the main thing you’re trying to achieve? One sentence answer on what you did

• What is the second most important thing you’re trying to achieve. One sentence answer on what you did

• What is the primary personal life item you are working on? One sentence answer on what you did

• Full post here

It’s really that simple. Three sentences.

It gets difficult to write “want to start an online business - spent time researching” every single day for a month. You start to feel physically sick and that’s the point. Once you can fill in all three sentences with real actions, your anxiety goes down 90%.

Example Good One. 1) main goal is to scale an online business, started building second ad to test, 2) trying to reduce caffeine intake - exact amount of coffee and 3) trying to gain 5lbs of muscle - lifted for X minutes today.

Simple as that. If you fill it in like this, you already know the results are going to show up. The timeline is irrelevant “it takes as long as it takes”.

Most will laugh and say “only three things”. Yep. Most people cannot improve at more than three things at once. It is extremely difficult. Multi-tasking and trying to do it all just leads to poor performance.

#2 Forced New Paths Create Luck

Most people make the exact same trips every single day. They drive the same streets. They go to the same places at the exact same time +/- 15 mins.

This isn’t a good strategy for luck. If you are not meeting new people it is a lot harder to stumble upon new information. If you think about your lucky friend, the chances are extremely high that he/she operates just like this.

There is no real cost in randomizing part of your routine. Sometimes you lift at 10am, other times at 6pm. Instead of driving the same route to the restaurant, you take the scenic one. Or you bike to the coffee shop instead of driving. So on and so forth.

The reason why cities generate a lot of wealth is because the density of people. If you’re out consistently, you’ll have millions of micro-interactions which increases the surface area for luck to occur.

By varying the times, locations and paths to get there, you’re increasing the surface area at no real additional cost.

#3 If Emotions are Tied to Actions: Luck is a Default Result

This is probably the hardest one for people to do. The luckiest people are not worried about the result. Seriously. They are happiest and most thrilled when they are constantly making the right actions and know it.

Similar to brushing your teeth. You know that if you brush your teeth consistently and floss consistently the chances of having any real cavities is low. Like anything in life, there is always a chance but by doing the right thing, you know the results will be fine. Do you sit at home and worry about cavities? Nope, you are doing everything correctly. Applies to quite literally everything

This is how you should view ALL aspects of your life. If you are constantly working on your business for 6 hours a week, lifting for 1 hour a week and out meeting new people every Thursday and Saturday… Are you really worried about the end result? You know that the result is going to come eventually. Why waste time and energy worrying about it?

#4 Completely Fine With Embarrassment? Luck Shows Up

If you study lucky people closely, you’ll realize that they quickly laugh at themselves. If they make a comment that is clearly foolish, they’ll laugh about it later and admit it was terrible. They don’t get defensive and uptight. Instead they embrace the bad moment with laughter. They quite literally laugh in the face of adversity.

This is something you have to train. The human mind is based on herd mentality. For centuries we were taught that if you didn’t stay in the pack, you were doomed. Those days are long gone. In 2026, if you do what everyone else does, you’re doomed. This is largely due to huge political and technological influence. Since the majority end up in a bad situation, the consensus should be mocking you. Get used to public embarrassment, it is one of the rare signs that you’re actually on the right track.

If you haven’t been laughed at recently, you’re definitely not edgy enough. Yes. We’re serious.

#5 Weak Contacts Are Actually Lucky Contacts

Yes. We know, we know. The five people you talk to the most are a representation of who you are. True. That isn’t how luck works though.

Luck is largely derived on loose meetings that become large. If you’ve been in business for a long time, you know that your biggest supporters are silent and deeply disconnected from your primary social circle. In fact, your primary social circle rarely amounts to anything. They already know exactly what you do and why. Everyone they know already knows about you (majority just gossip).

Weak ties are different. If you go to a wide range of places in an erratic manner, you’ll develop 20, 30, 40 acquaintances. Then kaboom. One day you meet the right person you needed at the right time.

If you want a good signal amongst the noise, if people are constantly giving you tons of personal information it means they like you a lot more than you might imagine. Those same people will happily link you to the right contact if the stars align for what you’re trying to accomplish. Chances are actually lower that someone in your “top 5” end up being the missing link

Note: The jungle is living proof of this. Loose acquaintance type network and has spawned dozens of successful businesses over the past few years. If you’ve got something of value, it eventually lands on the right timeline.

#6 Something New Every Quarter - Lucky Acquaintances

Try to do something new at least once every quarter. This does not mean you will order a flat white instead of a latte. It means something legitimately new where you will be forced to meet new people.

If you have never learned basic dance, you’ll take 10 classes for one day a week. This guarantees a new acquaintance forms. If you already play tennis, you’ll join a completely new league for 10 weeks. So on and so forth.

This is a low risk, high quality way to increase your contact list.

From a business perspective it could be something simple as well. For a full quarter you’ll post on TikTok. There is basically no downside and the audience is different. If you were on TikTok already, then it might be X. Who knows. The point is to do something low risk, high asymmetric upside every three months. The downside is practically zero.

#7 Say Yes to First Meetings for Vast Majority

Some of you are beyond this. You’re already pretty big and have a rolodex. This doesn’t apply to you. If you’re under the age of 30 or so? Best to meet people from all walks of life.

This isn’t related to dating and you certainly wouldn’t meet someone who is blatantly trying to take advantage of you.

If you go to the local Equinox and meet someone who says they are hosting a party, you just go. The typical way this works? You go, meet someone else and that person ends up being the closer contact.

Now that you’ve read that sentence it should hit like a ton of bricks. Your closest friends were likely derived from that same formula. You went to some sort of event and ended up meeting a different person that stuck for years. Relying solely on work, school or the exact same 4-block radius isn’t a winning formula.

Summary

From this alone we’d wager that 99.99% are doing less than three of them. The journal alone is enormous.

We’d say that less than 1 out of 10,000 people will ever do it consistently. Most do it for a month and quit. If they can’t even write three sentences down for a month, the first real headache from WiFi money will put them 6-ft under.

Part 3: Actions that Destroy Luck

#1 Anxiety? Kills Luck

Anxiety and worry is just your body saying “you didn’t do enough work on your main project”. If you want a perfect example of this, just look at how you feel when you skip a workout. If you generally workout five days a week and skip four in a row, you know how terrible you feel. The split second you get into the gym and start, your mood improves.

This is how everything in your mind works. If you’re anxious about something, it means you need to do something productive to solve the problem. Ruminating/thinking is not going to displace actual action.

If you can sit down at 6pm or so and say “I did this” to fix the main issue i am trying to solve… the anxiety simply dies. If it’s 6pm and you say “I thought about this”, you will feel horrible. This is why it is critical to write out exactly what you will do to progress on the main objective.

#2 Having a Strict Timeline - Kills Luck

We give people the rough timeline because they always ask for it. Three years of eating glass. That is the average.

The people who fail? They expect year three to magically change them forever. Average does not mean guarantee.

The weird part about luck? If you go into it and say “I don’t care if it takes three years, five years or 100 years, i am going to get this done” you end up doing it faster than three years!

This type of mentality creates a constant work flow/process that makes success come faster. Instead of staring at the calendar waiting for the days to turn over, you’re optimizing your own work flow. Test ad, buy inventory, go through emails, check shipping, update website, check balances, break, start building next ad… so on and so forth. Your process gets more repetitions

#3 Constantly Looking at Other People? Kills Luck

Don’t recreate the wheel. You will look at what works, that’s the template and start grinding. Anything beyond that is an absurd waste of time.

If the industry you are in is growing 5% and you are up 10% it does not matter if someone else is up 15%. You take one single look 1x a quarter and see if they are doing something different. Unless it is massively different, go back to the same process you have. The difference is likely something uncontrollable (they landed a few more whale customers than you did, big whoop, part of probabilities)

Think about the typical NPC. They actually gossip and compare 24/7/365. Looking up addresses, asking about salaries/income directly. So on and so forth. This is a sure fire way to destroy luck. Envy is not conducive to luck

#4 Expecting More of Others Than Yourself - Worst Possible Form of Luck Destruction

This is the fastest way to kill all of your luck. Have higher standards for other people.

If around 80% of your decisions are good, you should not expect 100% hit rates from everyone else. No matter what.

We all know this internally. The people who grave dance and say “OMG HE WAS WRONG ABOUT THIS” are actually highlighting the opposite. It means that it is such a rare occurrence that it became a scandal.

Musk is a great example of this. People dunk on him for not hitting his exact timelines and being overly optimistic. Think about it though. Have you ever hired a contractor to fix your house and they hit the deadline? Yeah exactly. Life happens.

Try to zoom out and ask “could I actually do this better myself”, if the answer is yes then you have a right to be upset and learned a lesson in who to trust. If the answer is no, better to roll with the punches.

#5 Thinking Linearly vs. Exponentially - Kills your momentum

The big winners in life think exponentially. People who do not make it think linearly.

Over a five year span, your life is going to get better. Absurdly better. During that five year period? You will have horrific days/weeks. You will even have a full negative down year. It happens. Even billionaires have huge down years and stare down the barrel of bankruptcy. Expecting linear growth in your life is asinine.

Linear thinking also makes you quit. You lose momentum and once that is gone the clock restarts again. If you were working 40 hours a week on a project and it hits a snag (industry takes a hit), you are better off doing 30 hours a week and continuing vs. quitting for a “few months”. The key is to keep the momentum going even during the down periods.

If you can do this, everyone will notice. You survived the horrible year and are still consistent. That means a lot in a world where people hunt from new widget to new widget every 6-12 months.

As you scale up, you’ll learn the art of momentum. Just like a professional athlete who knows when to take it easy vs. hitting the redline, you’ll know when to keep it in 4th gear and when it’s time to hit 6th gear with the Turbo boost. The smart ones never turn the engine off, they just change gears to match the environment.

Summary

The consistent theme in luck destruction is: rigid, linear, comparisons and low self-awareness.

By being linear and rigid, surface area is reduced. By burning time with comparisons you simply lose time and attention.

All of these are common “deadly sins” for Lady Luck.

Put It All Together

Hopefully this was a good summary for you. You’ll notice that all of your lucky friends will hit the vast majority of these traits.

You don’t need to do more work. You need your brain to acknowledge that you did all the right work. After that you’re going to put yourself in a position to make hundreds/thousands/millions of loose connections until the right one crosses your inbox.

That is how it has worked for us. We’ve had months/years where we think absolutely nothing good will happen again (Hint: if you haven’t though about shutting down your company at least once, it is still early!).

Instead of sitting in that state, just keep grinding away. Next thing you know Lady Luck shows up. Could be a month, could be a couple years. Doesn’t matter, she’s showing up and you’ll laugh at the absurdity (always out of the blue)

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

• Old Books: Are available by clicking here for paid subs. Don’t support scammers selling our old stuff

• How ETH is Staked: Covered (here)

• Crypto: The DeFi Team built a full course on crypto that will get you up to speed (Click Here)

• Crypto Taxes: We have a suggested Tax Partner and 25% discount code, for information see this post.

• Security: Our official views on how to store Crypto correctly (Click Here)

• Social Media: Check out our Instagram in case we get banned for lifestyle type stuff. Twitter will be for money

Currently No Real Fear Anyw…

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This post is going to make you question a lot of the compounding numbers. Once you get past this cliff, you’ll ask yourself why it matters if you’re worth $100M or $150M on your deathbed. Answer: it doesn’t.

Part 1: Life Goes in Phases

We’ll keep it simple and just list it in decades:

• 10-19: Finding what you’re naturally talents are. Then getting a general idea of where it will pay the most

• 20-29: Trying and failing a trillion things. Getting new information until you see promise in at least one business idea. Juggling this + career + standard dating/personal life stuff

• 30-39: Start making real money and decide if you want to have a family or not. Biggest decision you’ll make in your life

• 40s: Earning a ton due to scaling things in your 30s. Focusing more on capital allocation, nature type activities as you recognize your body is slowing

• 50s+: Typically just family oriented items and close friends. Perhaps travel if you didn’t get sick of it in your 20s/30s

• 60s: Basically just retirement. Capital allocation and a fun income to keep your mind sharp. Time is basically dedicated to legacy planning/family otherwise we have no idea what is being done

Most Focus on $ Numbers. Focus on the Age More.

Lets say you’re on track to $50,000,000 in today’s money by age 65. The question is pretty clear… what exactly are you going to spend $50,000,000 on when you’re that old? It doesn’t make any sense at all. Money Compounds. Age Doesn’t.

If you could choose to be 40 years old and have a few million or be 65 and $50M, everyone is choosing to be 40. The main reason is quality of life. There isn’t much out there beyond fancy restaurants, some expensive toys like cars/watches and travel. Even then it will be difficult/impossible to blow through $2M per year with ease (again in today’s dollars just to avoid the entire inflation argument).

The Sweet Spot is Provided in This Meme. You want to Free up your ***TIME*** in the adult phase as fast as possible

How it Works Directionally

Hopefully we can agree on the general point, having money at 65 isn’t really as important as the 401K crowd will make you believe. Yes you need enough money to live a basic life in retirement. Big whoop. Beyond that the real hurdle is freeing up time in adulthood (25-50 is the rough range). If you can maximize those 25 years, that’s when the maximum spending will show up anyway.

• 20s: When you’re building a name for yourself and learning as much as possible. You really don’t need much money. Lets be honest, a couple drinks at a cheaper place isn’t going to break your bank account. You’re also not meeting your soul mate on Spring Break in Mexico

• 30s: You spend quite a bit. You need to spend on your biz. You need to save for a house. You are starting to build the foundation for a family (if that is your plan). You are also investing aggressively

• 40s: You spend about the same as 30s! Despite what people tell you, unless you do foolish things, it should be similar. All your partying, going out, drinking a ton? It’s basically done here. No one really minds if a 40+ year old doesn’t drink so the work + alcohol combo is just an excuse at this age band. Your spending is the same because you replace travel/party with two kids (typical set up, largely offsetting)

• 50s: Outside of college for kids/other major pre-adult expenses, there isn’t much left. You’re not going to be in clubs popping bottles (you already did it and don’t have an interest - guys like Bezos are the exception as he didn’t “live that life” before)

• 60s: Once again just retirement. You will spend far less than you expect.

Big Picture: This means your spending is actually going to go down. Think about it like that. If you are working like mad, career/WiFi money etc. The big spending actually peaks out in 30s. By then your earnings are elevated. Read that twice!

If you build simple businesses, then your earnings are multiples higher than your spending.

This is a weird feeling and takes years to get used to. You hit this point where you can live off your investments but you’re still earning significantly more from your E-com portfolio. If you want some rough math, typically your investment income starts covering all living expenses. Then you realize your earned income is 4-5x higher than your investment income.

This is exactly why you will overshoot your net worth targets, your cash flow targets and your “retirement” targets. Since you’re time rich (working for yourself), you don’t have the same issues as your peers.

All the expensive add ons don’t apply as you can do them yourself (who needs after school care if you’re hanging out with them when they are out? Who needs a private school if you live in the right zip code and are not forced to live in the major city? You don’t even need landscaping since you can do it for light exercise. So on and so forth)

All Signs Point to an Age Target of 35-45

Here is the sweet spot for 99% of you. Some of you are absurdly talented and will hit escape velocity before 30. Congrats, you’re the exception to the rule. Some people will start extremely late, too many nights and weekends partying with push-up bra Susan. This results in escape velocity closer to 45.

Doesn’t really matter how it all shakes out, just matters that you land the golf ball on this wide fairway. If you barely miss it, or beat it, the long-term implication isn’t as bad as you might imagine.

Calculate Your Max Burn: Take all the costs you have now. Estimate where peak spending will be (somewhere around age 40). Throw in two kids, take out the weekend party benders and math it all out. What you’ll find is that number is already an over-shoot.

That number is your peak spending, peak expenditure time frame. It just goes down from there no matter what the haters say. If you did well in your business you will have close friends who throw in $1,000 or $2,000 into 529 plans/Trump Accounts etc. All these small gifts end up cushioning the blow dramatically. It’s not like you want to give an 18 year old $1M in a brokerage account. Makes little sense.

Hit FI? Start Spending: Yes, seriously. For illustrative purposes, if you can live on say $200,000 a year because you’re in an expensive coastal city but your portfolio generates $250,000 per year… It’s time to spend every single cent you make beyond that. You’re already putting away another $50,000. The earned income from all your business lines (consulting, real estate, e-com, SaaS, MedSpas, whatever you got going) should be used on something you value.

Easy answers:

• Life/Longevity health extension. Could be for you, parents, siblings, whoever

• Local scholarships/community involvement. We don’t believe in mega charities as we’ve learned they are complete scams. You could offer benefits to talented people in your city though. Since you’re vetting them, you decide who gets the award

• Bucket list items: Make a serious list of things you can’t do at 60+. Go find every single one of those things and knock them off. Do it as soon as possible because the window slowly closes

Yep. That is the list. Realistically, you already know how to set up basic trusts and moved enough money to make sure your kids are set for life. If you are set for life at age 35-45, compounding + doing your own work will ensure that all of them are set as well (unless you decide to go full Nick Cannon mode and blow it up). The only tricky part is the constant psychological operation to convince them that if they don’t try their best they may lose it all!

Part 2: Now Devise a Plan

One of the main reasons we’ve been writing so long is that all of our decisions have actually had the same consistent theme: choose the most mobility

While some think that we went into E-com/Internet based businesses due to Wall Street computer culture, it is actually deeper than that. While Wall Street restricts you to internet businesses (until you’re late 20s to early 30s and have some freedom), the real underlying reason was mobility.

Value of Time

Realizing that time is much more valuable than money, the logic was pretty simple. “If we fail what income stream allows the most freedom”

Yep. The answer is in your hand right now. Computer, Tablet or Smartphone. With that singular device you can move your entire business to any location you like. If you want to move states? Done. If you want to move cities? Done. If you want to work at night instead of in the morning? In most cases… Done!

This is incredibly powerful. One of the big lightbulbs went off decades ago. When you make your first $50,000 online, you realize you cherish that more than your entire W-2 income. You could be earning $200,000 or $500,000 a year… but that first $50,000 hits different. You know that you have value outside of someone else deciding that is true.

For the first time you have direct proof that you can survive without a boss/manager determining your value with a set paycheck + bonus.

If you look at it from this lens it is quite motivating. Even if you don’t make tens of millions from the internet, you will at least make enough money to survive on your own. We’ve been around for a long time and have not seen a single person fail after 3-years of truly eating glass and going all out. We don’t associate with extremely low IQ or low talent people (some selection bias) but the point stands anyway. We have seen hundreds of peopel quit (usually 6-12 months), however, pushing through the full 3-years? Haven’t seen it.

Good Example of How It Goes With No Technology Background. Throw some spaghetti against the wall, most initial ideas don’t work. Keep at it as you learn more. One clicks, it’s obvious, scale scale scale. Look back and say “woah shoulda started earlier”

Source

As usual, they deserve all the credit for actually trying. That’s the message we’ll always stick with. People really have no clue how horrible the three years is. You learn that friends and even family members secretly want you to fail. Some sort of envy/ego/jealous genetics that get passed on from human to human for centuries. Ignore all of them and simply try to make it through those 3 years no matter how awful it is and how many times you consider shutting it all down. In fact, if you haven’t thought about shutting it down 3-4 times, you haven’t tried hard enough!

Avoid Fixed Costs/Lock Down Impact

Until you are entirely certain that you will be setting up shop in a city, there is no reason to ever have a large recurring housing payment. You should throw in car payment as well while we’re at it.

If you’re still in grind mode, that means you shouldn’t need more than a basic 1 bedroom. While people think they need an office or some fancy set up, it’s really just a chair, desk and some terrible lighting in a corner somewhere that starts it all.

Really doubt any of these dudes were doing mortgage calculations.

Source

Once you accept that portable/mobile income is the way forward, it’s extremely hard for you to commit to long-term overhead. This actually makes your life easier from a business perspective as well. You’re always running lean. Besides, if any girlfriend cares that you only have a 1-bedroom while single… she ain’t a catch anyway.

Set the FI Number Aside and Spend

This is going to be psychologically brutal for every single one of you. When you hit the inflection you simply know it. You have to do a full 180 degree turn at this point. Your entire goal was to build, sell, build, scale, sell… over and over.

Now that you’ve done that to a point where investments > than all your living expenses, you’re actually entering real wealth. The following quote from Felix Dennis will hit like a ton of bricks later on:

"Loneliness. And rage that you have only so many years left to enjoy rolling in the sand you have piled up."

What he is saying here is that the majority of people just chase digits. They insulate themselves from society and find out that the sand (money) is never going to run out. It lines up with his older comments about the foolishness of working 12 hour days to get another $50-100M when there was no shot he’d ever spend the $50-100M.

Summary of What This Looks Like

Generally speaking it looks like this:

• You need to value dollars made remotely/globally/portable as 2x, 3x or even 5x more valuable than income generated from your W-2. This will massively increase your motivation to keep going. $3K a month might not sound like much until you realize you could live on that in some cheap third world countries if the world goes completely bonkers tomorrow. Once you’re doing 2x your W-2 you should leave in general. Conceptually trick your brain into viewing portable income as multiples of W-2 income

• Set the “retirement age” to 45. Sounds foolish? It isn’t. If you make the timeframe shorter your brain is going to decide and find ways to get there. Similar to giving the lazy person the logistics project. If someone is lazy they’ll find the fastest way to do it which is the goal of anything logistics related. Once you say “retired at 45” you start to ignore your 401K and IRA which is also part of the exercise

• If you’re serious about maximizing your time on this planet. You should do everything you can to keep mobility at 100%. New W-2 across the country? Gone next month. Your biz scales and you can move to a 0% tax state? Gone instantly. Everything is a discretionary until you’ve decided where to live

  • Note: this is why young people don’t trust middle aged men who complain about where they live. By that point you should live where you like… which implies you’re not successful if you hate where you live!

• When you start to hit the inflection you’ll know it. Come back to this post and read some Felix Dennis again. You do not want to die with tens of millions you didn’t even need. You want enough to allow your kids (if you have them) work on what ever they like. You don’t want them to fight over the 20th brokerage account you have in Malaysia

Hilariously, if you look at our investment themes over the last 10-15 years or so, it has had this undertone as well. Crypto allows you to have a portable bank. Technology removes human friction freeing up more time and location independence. Big Tech companies all earn their money in the digital world (okay not every penny but practically speaking it is true).

Become Time Rich as fast as you can. That’s the real game.

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

• Old Books: Are available by clicking here for paid subs. Don’t support scammers selling our old stuff

• How ETH is Staked: Covered (here)

• Crypto: The DeFi Team built a full course on crypto that will get you up to speed (Click Here)

• Crypto Taxes: We have a suggested Tax Partner and 25% discount code, for information see this post.

• Security: Our official views on how to store Crypto correctly (Click Here)

• Social Media: Check out our Instagram in case we get banned for lifestyle type stuff. Twitter will be for money

Despite being one of the most recognized Entrepreneurs in our lifetime (along with Jensen, Zuck, Bezos, Jobs and Gates), any period where Tesla is doing worse than the S&P 500 is considered an utter failure. To us, we view these periods as amazing, you can accumulate while everyone else ignores the asset.

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Source

Essentially, the world is pretty inverted from the advice given out in the 1990s. You don’t get a home by saving part of your salary in a bank account and then dumping it all into a down payment.

It’s actually not like that at all (anymore!)

The people who end up becoming homeowners are consistently doing something entirely different. They create an equity upside (stock/private company they started), have that outpace inflation + housing costs then use the money to de-risk. Housing is basically better than a basic bank account and worse than stocks over a long time horizon.

In a particular year it might not be true. However. If you measure trends in decades what we noted there is generally accurate: Savings account goes up less than houses, which go up less than stocks (ignore leverage to avoid that long debate as well)

Source

Part 1: Is This Fair and Right?

For fun we’ll answer the moral question. Our answer is actually yes!

• Savings account = you are contributing nothing to society, the returns should be minimal

• House = you are buying a consumption and an asset. It is a hybrid. If you spend $20K to renovate a bathroom, you are not losing $20K. Part of it will show up in investment return and if you’re ultra savvy the return will be higher than $20K! Not by much but it’s possible. Also. When you use it, the experience is significantly better. There is value created there

• Stocks/Equity/Private businesses. You are defacto creating jobs/opportunities. This is not easy and is by far the most difficult skill you need to learn in 2026. You should get rewarded for improving the world with better products and services

  • Note, if anyone says companies are evil just “smile nod and agree”. There is no convincing these types of people. They are making a moral excuse to never try while drum roll… working for a company

Directionally, over decades, if the USA continues to be the best place on earth, the incentives are correct.

Part 2: An Uncomfortable Conclusion

If you rely entirely on someone else for your adult life, you are by definition making someone else richer. This is a simplistic explanation. We know that there are loads of back office type positions that add $0 to the revenue line. However, if you’re a brand new company there is essentially no need for a back office/non-production role.

“Would you hire someone who does not generate any value for you or the company?” answer of course is no.

If you agree with that broad and simple statement (doesn’t need to be perfect) then the below chart makes intuitive sense. Once KPIs came out to determine who was actually generating money for the Company, head counts went down while revenues stayed elevated. Unsurprisingly, the value of the company (IE. stock prices) go up in that scenario.

Source

Weird Period Before 1990: Everything changed due to the computer, internet and software. Before all of that, the only way to scale was with headcount. This is why the older companies obsessed around the topic of hiring “people need to know we’re growing!".

After the computer/internet, the need for human labor dropped dramatically and is continuing to drop. One person can now do 10 jobs. Just give them the right tools and suddenly all the non-revenue generating roles are redundant. (this also helps explain the rise of people working multiple remote jobs)

If you worked for a large company (Bulge Bracket, Big Law, Large conglomerate - Coca Cola, J&J etc.) you would notice all of this pretty quickly. Tons of people are simply collecting paychecks while adding nothing to the top or bottom line.

To steal a line from BowTiedBroke “You’re an L on my P&L”

In this interview with Calvin (CEO of NOBS and probably the most famous biz originated from the Jungle years ago), he suggests that in big business most people are useless. Brutal language. Also true.

Source

In the 2020s, you’re now in an environment where the CEOs know this. They know that their need for back office is declining. They know that there are people who can do 10 jobs for the price of say three. All of this is no longer theory but reality.

Tether Remains as a Poster Child

Source

Part 3: No Guiding Force to Change This

Here is an uncomfortable question. If someone adds $0 to the revenue line, $0 to the profit line and does not contribute to the product being sold (at all) why should this person accumulate wealth?

Not a fun thing to say publicly (definitely don’t do that) ask it to yourself privately and make your own conclusions.

The way the world works now? If you are providing a service/product that improves the lives of people, you get rewarded 5x more than you did 10-20 years ago. Is that a bad thing? As you can see, we’re suggesting it isn’t a bad thing. It is only bad if you have no interest in creating a product/service that is of value to American people.

Guiding Forces

• AI/Tech/Automation is simply getting better. This means any redundant task can be done with a click of a button. While you shouldn’t use AI to make major decisions, if you ask it to scrape the internet to find the cheapest place to buy a product… it is basically done

• The same technology advances make the top 10% more productive. If you could get 10 tasks done in a day, that number is going to go to 15-20 tasks within a few short years

• Companies no longer look at headcount as a vanity metric, the new metrics are revenue per employee and profit per employee. This changed over the past 3-5 years or so

• Too much money printing already occurred and there is too much debt. The long-term outcome is more money printing which means an underlying bid for assets. There is no underlying bid for wages/wage growth because technology makes headcount go down (not up)

This only sounds like a bad thing if you’re expecting someone else to make you rich. If you’re a self reliant person, you will realize that you can easily be the CEO/CFO/COO/Product Person/Sales Person all at once if you’re starting a small business today. You don’t need to hire anyone. Even better? Once you start making your first $10-20K per month, you can freelance hire via 1099s! The people who think they can work to get rich will take side gigs working for you. As long as they are generating enough revenue/income to justify the cost, you can actually pay them a bit more than they expect (keeping your company ahead of everyone else when they decide who they will give their best hours to)

Part 4: If You’re One of the High Performers

Since we can agree that back office/non-revenue generating roles are going the way of the dinosaur, this means a good performer is ironically being groomed to leave. If you have a flatter headcount and smaller number of employees, it means that the high performers will know the ins and outs of the business. In fact, they will likely have at least two of the three Ps (People, Product, Process).

Keep collecting the large paycheck and start learning the third P. If you’re in sales and being asked to streamline the entire operations, you only need to learn the product side. If you’re the product person and constantly being asked to make the team leaner and more efficient, you only need to learn the distribution process side.

In a wild twist of fate, the top people are getting access to enough information to go out on their own. Instead of being in the dark on parts of the Company, if you’re well liked, you’ll be in the right rooms when all the important decisions are being made. Once you’re in that room, you will begin seeing product gaps and service gaps. That’s Lady Luck pulling on your shoulder saying “go create that…” (after a demand test of course! - It really is just math at this point)

You Can Quickly See the Snowball

After seeing all parts of running a business you are going to see how 1) decisions are made and 2) why business owners get richer much faster than stocks/bonds/savings accounts/salaries etc.

• You see a company make $500,000 in profit

• Next year it goes to $1M in profit

• They set up to sell since they think the next 12 months will generate $2M and begin to flatline

• Assuming the valuation is flat at say 4x earnings it means: year 1 it was worth $2M, Year 2 it was worth $4M and Year 3 it is worth $8M (life changing)

Now you can take this and compare it to your own set up.

• You make $500,000. Rough math just say your total tax is 30% or $350K

• You make $1M off a huge year. Rough math your tax goes up to say 35% and you actually made $650K

• You make $2M off a lifetime best, over earning situation. Rough math your tax rate goes to 40% and you actually made $1.2M

After three straight years of earning, you are so far behind the business person that it hurts. The operator has income of $500K + $1M + $2M (at lower tax rates) and then also gets a long-term gain of $8M (or potentially 0% taxes from QSBS qualification)

We’re starting to get agitated with people debating all the rules at this point. The chances of a massive legal/tax overhaul is low. The rules are the rules and you just need to stack the cards in your favor.

If you know that you’re going to go into Entrepreneurship (huge chunks of society will be forced into it, if they like it or not!) then you need time maximization and adaptability. It’s the only way to give yourself the best possible shot at success.

Summary

If you’re the exception to the rule you already know it. If you’re asking if you should start the answer is already yes and it was yesterday. People who are up $10M+ off the latest hot tech IPO are not the norm. They already know they hit the lotto and are not asking if they should start something. The money is already in the bank, they knew they were the exceptions already.

For the rest of the world (99.9%), the question is if they want to accept the new economy/new reality or not.

We can pull up a million charts showing ownership is the path to Wealth creation and socio economic climbing. In fact, it isn’t even new. Uncle Felix was even more aggressive than us in his wording.

Source

So, anon. What is the most likely path to making it, staring at these charts and praying a 80 year old Politician changes things? Or. Gearing your entire life to generate ownership/equity at all costs?

Think we all know the answer!

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

• Old Books: Are available by clicking here for paid subs. Don’t support scammers selling our old stuff

• How ETH is Staked: Covered (here)

• Crypto: The DeFi Team built a full course on crypto that will get you up to speed (Click Here)

• Crypto Taxes: We have a suggested Tax Partner and 25% discount code, for information see this post.

• Security: Our official views on how to store Crypto correctly (Click Here)

• Social Media: Check out our Instagram in case we get banned for lifestyle type stuff. Twitter will be for money

In general, if you’re angry, you underestimated the amount of exposure you wanted to hold through the bear. If you don’t care, then just copy what we do. Think that’s the basic two camps. We use time based approaches to remove any feelings and emotion from it and will continue to do so next cycle as well.

On that note, we’ll jump in!

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Overview

Basically the new generation saw the prior generation fail. It is that simple. A lot of young adults live at home due to financial issues as they quickly learned the Old School financial advice doesn’t work anymore: Job, save 15%, 401K, starter home and compound.

Post COVID: This turned into a new nihilistic view “nothing matters, everything is too expensive”. Six figure salaries are not leading to a nice home + car anymore (after expenses, the savings rate is too low).

Result is max degeneracy, sports betting, 0 DTE options, meme pumps etc.

The lotto ticket mentality is just a way of purchasing hope. The majority don’t even expect to win, they just want a reason to think there is a chance.

The New World: This largely consists of 1) significant increase in housing costs, 2) much more student debt, 3) tech monopolies eating into profit margins of brick and mortar and 4) wild changes in new tech that results in a B-line to wealth or a B-line to irrelevancy. All of this encourages more risk taking because the reward for being responsible got delayed by years (perhaps decades in some cases).

Simplistically, if their income isn’t rising faster than asset prices, they feel like they are falling behind.

Always Look at Income vs. What it Can Buy (house, stocks etc.). People intuitively know this (hence the nihilism, however, if you quantify it the decision making for YOU will get massively, massively better).

Searching for Quality of Life Improvement

This is all people care about. If wage growth is low and inflation is high for a few years, people look at their quality of life and quickly realize the effort isn’t resulting in a material change. Similarly, it is why a millionaire will still live well below their means. $1M and $1.4M is not possible to see in your day to day living standards.

How It Gets Expressed:

• If it doesn’t have a 5x+ potential, people are not interested

• Popularizes options, pink sheets and anything high beta

• People want to get rich fast because they don’t believe their current path has a future lifestyle upgrade within the next 5-10 years. The conclusion is their life won’t change so may as well swing for nothing but grand slams

How it Helps You:

• If you are broad basket risk on, it means you’ll catch part of the wave without being forced to go into 0DTE ideas or pink sheet investing. Underlying bid is going up

• If you go down the path of biz ownership, the multiples on riskier items get bid up anyway. This means your small company actually gets valuation re-rating to the upside

• Every option/leverage blow up creates a time to either sell or buy. If it blew up to the downside buy more than usual. If it went up huge on the upside, just give it bit of time to let the options market and pricing to normalize

  • Basically by being unemotional you outperform without much thinking and use 99% of your time doing bullet two

Since there is so much demand for get rich type products, the financial industry made risk taking as easy as possible. Have a bad day? Instant pop up to gamble on your smartphone. Suddenly in two clicks you’re in some outrageously risky position to scratch the itch (buying hope)

Go Downstream Further

People will now finance the present instead of an unaffordable recurring expense. While people can still save some money, that amount isn’t being set aside for the Minivan, starter home and night nurse for the first year of newborn craziness.

Instead it is being put aside for: plane tickets, major events like Coachella and that new $200+ per person restaurant that just opened. There is a reason why ASMR eating type videos are still popular amongst the masses.

All part of the exact same trajectory. Delayed life transitions/responsibility which creates a clear loser.

Biggest Loser? Long-tail Middle of the Road Real Estate Businesses

US Existing Home Sales

While the luxury market isn’t impacted (can’t create beach front property), the middle of the road homes have expanded the rental market and decreased the turnover. Most just focus on the number of sales being low. There is a secondary dynamic at play as well. If people don’t buy until they are 40 (on average), that means the average rental period is expanding by a decade

Duration of a renter has doubled. A few years has turned into 6 years. Pretty huge for the land lord because the debt requires 5 renters to pay it off instead of 10. For the large number of you in E-com, it would be equivalent to someone telling you “only need to sell 50% of the units you normally do due to guaranteed LTV increase”. You’d fall on the floor instantly due to the stress relief.

Doomer Narrative Missed the Second Derivative: Prices can stay stable in a high interest rate environment if everyone wants to rent. Those rents do not need to hit risk free cap rates. They need to hit the rates that were issued in 2021 (3-4%). The owner simply says “alright if i don’t get the price i want, i can just rent it out and wait”. Exception to the rule is extreme building in the area ramping up supply or idiosyncratic changes with the city (COVID movement causing return to the office for example)

It’s Really Not Going To Change

Go look at other countries with huge wealth disparities. What we have in the USA is still nothing compared to parts of Asia and South America. In fact, this can last for decades

Asset inflation outpacing wage growth = lower relative wealth for people with no equity

Oddly, if you’re sharp you can actually get ahead faster than before. Think about it like this. Before, everyone basically participated in economic upside. This meant that there was no general sector outpacing everything. Now? Actually quite simplified.

Both sides of the wealth curve are coming to the same conclusion. The rich are saying “I don’t spend anything and can live off my portfolio so may as well swing for fences”

The poor are saying “Even with 7-10% returns for a decade my life won’t change, may as well swing for the fences”.

This means you can simply sit in a basket of higher risk but higher growth assets and wait out the terrible down years/months/weeks. This is easier said than done. However, with deep emotional control, if you hit singles/doubles you’ll slightly outpace the majority while you spend your time building equity (which we’ve already beaten to death, should outpace wage earnings for the foreseeable future).

Summary

We’re in a wild self fulfilling prophecy type stage. If someone is ultra rich or below the median, they are hyper gambling to increase their wealth. This creates immense long-term demand for risk assets. The only catch is the swings become much much more volatile. People say they can remain calm on an up 20% or down 20% day however the reality says otherwise (every year levered positions being blown up - short or long - get worse). In fact, every single year we get a wild event such as the Situational Awareness blow up.

This means you only really need a few things: 1) avoid leverage since the swings become much worse, 2) only care about increasing equity/ownership vs. dollars in a bank and 3) smile and nod when a random person tells you about their huge sports/prediction win.

Despite claims of hitting big gambling wins, those townhomes and rental leases are simply going to expand in duration + use. The money reveals the truth. Always follow the money.

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

• Old Books: Are available by clicking here for paid subs. Don’t support scammers selling our old stuff

• How ETH is Staked: Covered (here)

• Crypto: The DeFi Team built a full course on crypto that will get you up to speed (Click Here)

• Crypto Taxes: We have a suggested Tax Partner and 25% discount code, for information see this post.

• Security: Our official views on how to store Crypto correctly (Click Here)

• Social Media: Check out our Instagram in case we get banned for lifestyle type stuff. Twitter will be for money