I joined this forum a few years ago back in 2014 when i was 23 years old. (now 25 y/o) . Prior to that, I was still taking classes at a community college. I took business classes in hopes it would prepare me to start a business but it only taught me how to be an employee "in" a business.
While i was taking classes, I worked online and made money through Amazon Mechanical Turk. I did not have a job back then, even though I should of applied for some part time job. Unfortunately at the time, I didn't know the process of how to apply for a job or create a resume.
I spent 5 years in community college absolutely lost, confused and broken. I was introverted. Also factor in the fact that I lived with an emotionally abusive mom who tore me into pieces which caused a lot of shame, guilt, low self-esteem, depression and anxiety inside of me. I had zero friends and zero network. Social media like Facebook, Instagram only made me feel like sh*t. I felt like I wasn't doing anything with my life while everyone else was having fun or doing well. Parents are living on welfare and struggling from paycheck to paycheck. The chances of succeeding in these circumstance seemed very slim.
When I was making money through Amazon Mechanical Turk, the money was slow and it took a majority of my time. Some days, I would only make 0.40 cents. Other days, I would work from 9AM to 5PM and make $10 a day. When good hits were available, I would make $30.00 a day. My best day was around $160. I eventually got a "Master Qualification" which allowed me to do better paying hits which cut the amount of time I spent and raised my pay slightly. If you would have seen the amount of work I put in, chances are you would of quit already or say this is not worth it. For me, I didn't quit. Why should I? There was nothing else better to do at the time anyways. I would of probably been playing games if I did. So while other people had part time jobs while going to college, I was grinding away on Turk. The most awesome part was I was free! While other were working a part time job, I was able to make money from home and set my own schedule. Despite my work hours being 24/7, I had the ability to make money whenever I felt like it. It didn't matter if it was 5AM in the morning or 9PM at night, hits were available and I had the opportunity to make money.
Fast forward a bit, I found out about Swagbucks (Refferal Link)/ Swagbucks (Non referral link). If you don't know what Swagbucks is, it essentially rewards members with free gift cards and cash for the everyday things they already do online. Since I was on the computer 24/7 anyways, I though this would be a great alternative to another source of income. Here is what I did. How to reddit link. At this point the money was pretty decent, at least from my perspective lol.
Then I found out about the Fastlane Forum. Here I learned how to resell on Craigslist. Two threads that really help me were A Hustler's Guide To Buying And Selling Anything (Part 1) and
A Hustler's Guide To Buying And Selling Anything (Part 2). In this thread, I flipped a bicycle which earned me a profit of $60. I was ecstatic. A forum member said if you can sell 1 you can sell 100. So that is what I did. I started selling everything you can think of. Bicycles, mini refrigerators, toys, games, textbooks, shoes etc. Then I started to also sell things around the house. So now I was selling a mixture of stuff I bought for resell and my own stuff. The money was great, I had a wad of cash at home and my parents was shocked of how fast I made the money. It got to the point I needed an excel sheet to keep track of all the sales. It was great.
Around this point, I finished my AS in Business Administration. I also just got around finishing reading The Millionaire Fastlane. I had nothing to lose at this point. It was either continue school or go all in on "business". So I choose the business route. At this time, I was also learning how to trade foreign currency.
So I took the money I made from Amazon Mechanical Turk and dumped it into a brokerage account. I put in $2000. After a lot of trial and error, I started to become profitable. I used software such as myfxbook.com and excel sheets to track my progress. Slow and steady, I started making $30.00 here, $60.00 there. Seeing my progressive growth, I decided to inject another $2000. Eventually I ended up putting in a total of $9000. Making money started to seem a bit easier. Instead of spending my entire day Turking, now I would wake up in the morning and literally make $120 in a day. I set stops and limit orders so all the work was done automatically.
Around the time my trading career was taking off, I found my first job in manual labor. The pay was $11/hr. The first couple of months was amazing. I thought to myself, why didn't I get a job sooner. The work was easy and it would help me fund all of my business ventures. While a lot of people would complain that manual labor job sucks, I felt blessed. I went from making 0.40 cents a day, to making $600-700 bucks in two week and it was consistent. Life started to get better. I saved every dime as I knew this job wouldn't last and it didn't.
With this job money, I took it and dumped it into WealthFront (referral Link) /Wealthfront (Non referral.) Wealthfront is an automatic way of building a diversified investment portfolio with little to no work at all. So I put in a total of $6000. The returns are amazing so far and it is making me money passively. WealthFront buys a mixtures of U.S stocks, bonds, foreign stocks, emerging markets, dividend growth stocks and natural resources. Most are ETF security such as VTI, SCHF, VEA, VWO, VIG, XLE, MUB. All you have to do is set a risk score from 1 being low risk to 10 being the riskiest. If you set it low, you will have more bonds than stock and if you set it high you will have more stocks than bonds.
So while I was doing all this, I still wasn't done. I was hungry. I found a thread on the Fastlane Forum called [AMA] Importing & wholesaling for resale on eBay. I started importing things from China and reselling them. It was an absolute struggle but eventually I found some good products that sold. Now I have products that sell 1-3 every week. However, the profit margins are terrible. I was only making around $5.00 profit per unit.
I also started a youtube channel and started investing into index funds. With all that being said, the journey was an absolute rocky one. But guess what? I got a glimpse of the Fastlane! I remember one particular day. It went something like this.
I woke up around 5 A.M to check my trades. Everything was going according to plan. I was about to bank $100 in profit before the day even started. I checked my Wealthfront, index funds and I was up a couple of hundreds there. I set my swagbucks on automatic and I would go back to sleep till around 7A.M. As I wake up, profits are already booked for the trades. Limit orders are hit. Wham! A voice in my head said "do I even need to go to my job today". Then my phone buzzed. I received an email of some guy wanting to meetup and buy a bike from me. Instantly that was another $120 in my pocket. Ebay sales were rolling in 1-2. I quickly packed the orders before I left for work. I drove to the post office and dropped off the packages. Then I went straight to work. That day, I received a paycheck for around $700 from my job. This was the best feeling ever. Money was rolling in from all directions!! I was on top of the world!
Then in 2017 it all came to an end. I was burnt physically and mentally. I was laid off from my manual labor job. Instantly my consistent stream of money disappeared. To make matters worst, my brokerage FXCM was banned from the U.S. Link here. Ebay sales dwindled after 4th quarter ended. Craigslist sales stopped as I fell off. And physically my body was deteriorating. At age 25, I had wrist pain, lower back pain, neck pain everything you can think of. My body was done. Depression, anxiety and low-self esteem set back in.
Luckily, I saved almost every single dollar I earned. I knew that each dollar was a freedom unit and I needed every single one of them to fight for me. I had zero social life so I didn't go out much. Because of my non social life existence, I manage to save about $38,000. No vacations, no toys, no cars, no fancy cloths, no expensive dinners, just straight saved cash.
Fast forward to the present, I just finish reading Unscripted. As I was at the absolute bottom of my career, this book couldn't have come at a better time. Absolutely unbelievable book. I didn't think @MJ DeMarco could of surprised me anymore, but he did. I was still living in many of the bullshit hyper realities. Now with new sense of purpose and invigorated soul my new goal was not to buy a brand new Lamborghini, but to buy my freedom. Freedom to say "F*ck YOU". Freedom to have control. Freedom to live unscripted . To leave a legacy. To create value in the world.
With that being said be on the look out for my new progress thread.
To be continue........
While i was taking classes, I worked online and made money through Amazon Mechanical Turk. I did not have a job back then, even though I should of applied for some part time job. Unfortunately at the time, I didn't know the process of how to apply for a job or create a resume.
I spent 5 years in community college absolutely lost, confused and broken. I was introverted. Also factor in the fact that I lived with an emotionally abusive mom who tore me into pieces which caused a lot of shame, guilt, low self-esteem, depression and anxiety inside of me. I had zero friends and zero network. Social media like Facebook, Instagram only made me feel like sh*t. I felt like I wasn't doing anything with my life while everyone else was having fun or doing well. Parents are living on welfare and struggling from paycheck to paycheck. The chances of succeeding in these circumstance seemed very slim.
When I was making money through Amazon Mechanical Turk, the money was slow and it took a majority of my time. Some days, I would only make 0.40 cents. Other days, I would work from 9AM to 5PM and make $10 a day. When good hits were available, I would make $30.00 a day. My best day was around $160. I eventually got a "Master Qualification" which allowed me to do better paying hits which cut the amount of time I spent and raised my pay slightly. If you would have seen the amount of work I put in, chances are you would of quit already or say this is not worth it. For me, I didn't quit. Why should I? There was nothing else better to do at the time anyways. I would of probably been playing games if I did. So while other people had part time jobs while going to college, I was grinding away on Turk. The most awesome part was I was free! While other were working a part time job, I was able to make money from home and set my own schedule. Despite my work hours being 24/7, I had the ability to make money whenever I felt like it. It didn't matter if it was 5AM in the morning or 9PM at night, hits were available and I had the opportunity to make money.
Fast forward a bit, I found out about Swagbucks (Refferal Link)/ Swagbucks (Non referral link). If you don't know what Swagbucks is, it essentially rewards members with free gift cards and cash for the everyday things they already do online. Since I was on the computer 24/7 anyways, I though this would be a great alternative to another source of income. Here is what I did. How to reddit link. At this point the money was pretty decent, at least from my perspective lol.
Then I found out about the Fastlane Forum. Here I learned how to resell on Craigslist. Two threads that really help me were A Hustler's Guide To Buying And Selling Anything (Part 1) and
A Hustler's Guide To Buying And Selling Anything (Part 2). In this thread, I flipped a bicycle which earned me a profit of $60. I was ecstatic. A forum member said if you can sell 1 you can sell 100. So that is what I did. I started selling everything you can think of. Bicycles, mini refrigerators, toys, games, textbooks, shoes etc. Then I started to also sell things around the house. So now I was selling a mixture of stuff I bought for resell and my own stuff. The money was great, I had a wad of cash at home and my parents was shocked of how fast I made the money. It got to the point I needed an excel sheet to keep track of all the sales. It was great.
Around this point, I finished my AS in Business Administration. I also just got around finishing reading The Millionaire Fastlane. I had nothing to lose at this point. It was either continue school or go all in on "business". So I choose the business route. At this time, I was also learning how to trade foreign currency.
So I took the money I made from Amazon Mechanical Turk and dumped it into a brokerage account. I put in $2000. After a lot of trial and error, I started to become profitable. I used software such as myfxbook.com and excel sheets to track my progress. Slow and steady, I started making $30.00 here, $60.00 there. Seeing my progressive growth, I decided to inject another $2000. Eventually I ended up putting in a total of $9000. Making money started to seem a bit easier. Instead of spending my entire day Turking, now I would wake up in the morning and literally make $120 in a day. I set stops and limit orders so all the work was done automatically.
Around the time my trading career was taking off, I found my first job in manual labor. The pay was $11/hr. The first couple of months was amazing. I thought to myself, why didn't I get a job sooner. The work was easy and it would help me fund all of my business ventures. While a lot of people would complain that manual labor job sucks, I felt blessed. I went from making 0.40 cents a day, to making $600-700 bucks in two week and it was consistent. Life started to get better. I saved every dime as I knew this job wouldn't last and it didn't.
With this job money, I took it and dumped it into WealthFront (referral Link) /Wealthfront (Non referral.) Wealthfront is an automatic way of building a diversified investment portfolio with little to no work at all. So I put in a total of $6000. The returns are amazing so far and it is making me money passively. WealthFront buys a mixtures of U.S stocks, bonds, foreign stocks, emerging markets, dividend growth stocks and natural resources. Most are ETF security such as VTI, SCHF, VEA, VWO, VIG, XLE, MUB. All you have to do is set a risk score from 1 being low risk to 10 being the riskiest. If you set it low, you will have more bonds than stock and if you set it high you will have more stocks than bonds.
So while I was doing all this, I still wasn't done. I was hungry. I found a thread on the Fastlane Forum called [AMA] Importing & wholesaling for resale on eBay. I started importing things from China and reselling them. It was an absolute struggle but eventually I found some good products that sold. Now I have products that sell 1-3 every week. However, the profit margins are terrible. I was only making around $5.00 profit per unit.
I also started a youtube channel and started investing into index funds. With all that being said, the journey was an absolute rocky one. But guess what? I got a glimpse of the Fastlane! I remember one particular day. It went something like this.
I woke up around 5 A.M to check my trades. Everything was going according to plan. I was about to bank $100 in profit before the day even started. I checked my Wealthfront, index funds and I was up a couple of hundreds there. I set my swagbucks on automatic and I would go back to sleep till around 7A.M. As I wake up, profits are already booked for the trades. Limit orders are hit. Wham! A voice in my head said "do I even need to go to my job today". Then my phone buzzed. I received an email of some guy wanting to meetup and buy a bike from me. Instantly that was another $120 in my pocket. Ebay sales were rolling in 1-2. I quickly packed the orders before I left for work. I drove to the post office and dropped off the packages. Then I went straight to work. That day, I received a paycheck for around $700 from my job. This was the best feeling ever. Money was rolling in from all directions!! I was on top of the world!
Then in 2017 it all came to an end. I was burnt physically and mentally. I was laid off from my manual labor job. Instantly my consistent stream of money disappeared. To make matters worst, my brokerage FXCM was banned from the U.S. Link here. Ebay sales dwindled after 4th quarter ended. Craigslist sales stopped as I fell off. And physically my body was deteriorating. At age 25, I had wrist pain, lower back pain, neck pain everything you can think of. My body was done. Depression, anxiety and low-self esteem set back in.
Luckily, I saved almost every single dollar I earned. I knew that each dollar was a freedom unit and I needed every single one of them to fight for me. I had zero social life so I didn't go out much. Because of my non social life existence, I manage to save about $38,000. No vacations, no toys, no cars, no fancy cloths, no expensive dinners, just straight saved cash.
Fast forward to the present, I just finish reading Unscripted. As I was at the absolute bottom of my career, this book couldn't have come at a better time. Absolutely unbelievable book. I didn't think @MJ DeMarco could of surprised me anymore, but he did. I was still living in many of the bullshit hyper realities. Now with new sense of purpose and invigorated soul my new goal was not to buy a brand new Lamborghini, but to buy my freedom. Freedom to say "F*ck YOU". Freedom to have control. Freedom to live unscripted . To leave a legacy. To create value in the world.
With that being said be on the look out for my new progress thread.
To be continue........
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