my life goal is what Scott Trench said financial freedom is the opportunity to choose how you spend the best part of your day during the best weeks of the year during the best years of your life welcome back to my channel where we're all about building wealth to live life on our own terms one money move at a time today I'm sharing three of my money mentors and how they changed my life if you're ready to take control of your financial future you're in the right place i'm Remy a real estate investor on track to retire in my early 40s and I'm sharing all of my knowledge and tips to achieve financial freedom without sacrificing the little luxuries along the way so let's get into [Music] it so first and foremost is my parents they really set the foundation for everything that I believe about money which I'm super grateful for if you're the child of immigrants you understand that there's a certain financial mentality that this comes with immigrants are known for aggressive saving because they live below their means and they're super ambitious because they have this belief that they can achieve anything that they set their mind to and my parents were really no different one of the things that stuck with me from growing up was that their money was never my money we were comfortable but I never felt entitled to what they had worked so hard to build and it's because they taught me the value of a dollar from a young age so for most of my childhood my parents had a small business they ran a pharmacy and at the age of 13 I started working there after school and on summer break i was the cashier i would stock the medicine stock the snacks i had to treat it like a real job and I would use that money to buy my clothes for the next school year or if I wanted to go to the movies with my friends they would still pay for larger things that I needed of course but they taught me that I had to manage what I had based on what I wanted to do and I needed to make trade-offs that taught me the importance of stretching a dollar and making trade-offs in terms of how to manage my money so maybe I couldn't go to the movies with my friends every weekend or I needed to shop at Ross or Kohl's to buy my back to school clothes versus going to like Nordstrom for example it taught me how to prioritize what was important and spend within my means what I respect most is that they could have actually paid for everything we were comfortable enough for them to be able to afford a lot of the things that I wanted but I wouldn't have the same mindset around money if they did that they knew that they were setting me up well for the future i still weigh what I'm giving up to buy something to this day for example for the longest time I wanted to buy myself a Mercedes even though I could have afforded it after different pay raises in the past I decided to delay gratification and actually pursue investments because that was more meaningful to me being able to weigh what I was giving up in terms of setting myself back on my pursuit of financial freedom is a skill that I credit my parents for and it's a skill that's changed my life so maybe 13-year-old me was upset about having to ride with my mom to the pharmacy to go run the cash register but 32-year-old me is so grateful for those experiences and how they've shaped my outlook around finances the second money mentor that changed my life is Scott Trench he's the CEO of Bigger Pockets and he wrote a book called Set for Life that I read recently which altered my perspective around my pursuit of early retirement the interesting thing about him is that he challenges a lot of mainstream ideas that we hold around money so for example we know that in calculating your net worth you take your total assets or what you own minus your total liabilities or what you owe but there isn't a lot of context or nuance given beyond that in most scenarios in his book he talks about the importance of excluding your equity from your primary residence from your net worth calculation because you can't live off of that and that's an important exclusion and distinction to make if you want to retire early he has a really great way of taking concepts that you've heard of and diving a click deeper to make them more relatable for someone who's pursuing early financial freedom he also famously said financial freedom was the opportunity to choose how you spend the best part of your day during the best weeks of the year during the best years of your life and that's something that I resonate with deeply because if I think about it I want to give the people that matter most to me the best of me i want to know that I have control over how I spend my time before I'm 65 another awesome thing about Scott is that he built this platform called Bigger Pockets that connects you to like-minded people that are also pursuing financial freedom and general wealth building i've been a part of that community for the last 6 years not only have I been able to increase my wealth-b buildinging knowledge through that community I've also been able to accelerate my wealth building in general because of like-minded people that are further ahead on the journey and last but not least Wall-E Miller so I know you guys remember Clubhouse during the pandemic a ton of people were tuning in to different rooms like I've mentioned before one of my best friends and I were obsessed with building wealth and figuring out how to retire early so we were in one of the rooms where Wall-E was talking about how she had almost a million dollars invested in the stock market and was on track to retire before 40 which really caught my attention she had a wealth-b buildinging program where she would coach people one-on-one and I decided to sign up the principles that she shared around understanding how all of my money was allocated what was coming in what was going out and where it was going to really helped me not only organize but also develop a plan so that I wasn't aimlessly just moving forward working with her also gave me a level of representation that I didn't even know that I needed she retired at 39 in a high cost of living city as a woman of color a firstgen college student and the first millionaire in her family which is super inspiring and what it does is it tells my brain that it's possible her coaching really helped me refine my why understand what was important to me and set me on the path to where I am now so those are my three money mentors and those are the ways that they've shaped me and ultimately changed my life i'd love to hear one tip that you've learned from a money mentor in the comments if you want to shave years off your retirement journey hit that subscribe button so you don't miss my weekly tips