The Game with Alex Hormozi· Folge 946

You’re 28 Minutes Away From Never Being Broke Again | Ep 946

Donnerstag, 12. Februar 2026 · 28 min

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Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast, you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned and will learn on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.
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Your money goals are too small and I will prove it to you. My name is Okshamosi. I'm a portfolio of companies at Acquisition.com. It generates over $250 million per year in revenue. I did a book launched 12 weeks ago. I did $106 million in a weekend and I broke a Guinness World Record for the fastest selling nonfiction book of all time. So in this video I'm going to explain how you need to rethink your income, your investments, and savings goals, and timelines. And so here's the problem. A lot of financial gurus, even people on this platform, right? And I have no shade, right?

We'll tell you to save $100 a month and they'll tell you that if you do that from the time you're 18 until the time you retire at 67, or retire with a million bucks at a 9% compounding rate. And that all sounds great until you realize that when you're 67, that $1 million is going to only be worth $170,000. So why is that? So just $1 in 1975, right, 50 years ago, has today's equivalent purchasing power of $6.02 cents. That's a 6x difference in 50 years. The main reason, inflation, the dollar, they don't make them like they used to, right? And I'll give you a hint.

It goes up. So this measurement is conservative. This is based on the last 50 years, not necessarily next 50. And so if that's the problem, how do we solve it? So this is kind of the new way I think about your goal. Let's say that you had the goal to have a million dollars. Obviously, Adder removes yours as it suits you, right? So some of you might be 10 or 100 or a billion, whatever you want. Let your heart go wild. But let's say that you wanted a million dollars when you retire. So you could live passively on $50,000 a year from investing in a bonds or something that's relatively low risk and that $50,000 of passive income. Oh, yeah, that's only going to get you about $8,000 worth of stuff. Tough to live on that per year. So let's say that you were a little

more ambitious and you said you wanted $4 million. If that was your goal, like it was for me, you might want to adjust it and take into account the inflationary audit. So if you want that $4 million bucks when you retire, you probably need 24 million. That's a big difference. Again, that's just because you're thinking it today's dollars, not future dollars. I want to give you some good news.

Compounding is still a thing and it still matters. You probably just need to do more of it and do four important things. So think of this as your strategy to mitigate that so that you can actually get where you want in terms of your savings, your investment and ultimately the freedom that you're looking for. So consider this the new strategy. So I'll give you the quick and obvious ones that you've probably heard, but in a new way and then I'll wrap up with what I've actually done to achieve it. Okay. So number one is you have to increase your income. So a lot of people think about this in terms of savings. I think it's much more powerful to think about in terms of income because like if you're not making a lot right now, there's not a lot of room between zero and you.

There's an infinite amount above that. Let me put this in real world terms. Even if you don't think that extra thousand bucks a month from flipping stuff online or making content and just getting some adsense revenue or promoting school and online platform to help people start communities and getting commissions from that, it won't matter. If you don't do anything with it, but if you take that extra thousand bucks a month, which might not seem like a lot, depending on where you're at, that work might not seem worth. You'd be like, oh, that's a lot of hustle. I got Uber more. I got a door dash or whatever. If you invest that extra thousand dollars a month in that same equation, you get ten million dollars by the time you retire. This is me juicy. A thousand dollars today,

if you're 18 years old, is $80,000 in 50 years. So the money that you make and spend now counts ADX. But we can't be one sided. We also need to realize that ADK in 50 years is only worth $13,000 today. So in reality, every one dollar you save today is worth $13 when you retire. So for me, this makes making that extra $200 for a gig where you do a DJ thing or helping your buddy move or whatever is actually a $2600 investment and it makes it far more worth it for me or at least when I was thinking through my saving stuff when I was starting out. So number one, we got an increase income. Number two, an account of natural leads to is that you got to stop spending so much money.

Now, on the other hand, if you think the $500 belt that you wanted to splurge on doesn't matter, just remember that it's fully grand in 50 years, right? And it's today's dollars. It's $6,500. That $500 belt with compounding versus back to the present is $6,500. And so here's something that's even worse. A $500 month car payment, that's a lease. That three year lease is 18 grand.

That 18 grand in today's dollars when you retire is $234,000 wild 50 years, obviously. And that's just one lease. So even if you make less, it doesn't, it doesn't mean less when you're young. And this is the point that I think really discourages a lot of younger people is they're like, I'm not making as much money as I want. You know, I wish I could make more. Bubble, they want to like, they want to flex the small amount of money that they've got because they like, first off, never flex when you're young because everybody who's older has way more money. It's just like, you just got more time to accumulate. Just you just do number one, you're more time to accumulate.

Number two, you earn more when you're older because you have more skills. But the thing that really matters that people who are older don't have is you have time. And so the value of the money that you make, even if it's half as much, the difference of that last 10 years of compounding when you start at 18 versus starting at 28 is the difference between a 30X, 33X and an 80X. Think about that for a second, a 33X and an 80X in terms of that 10 year difference. And so just because you make half as much or third as much as you want to make right now, it doesn't mean that those dollars aren't worth more to you. And so I just, I say this to encourage you to like make the extra few bucks here and there, spend like, don't spend as much. You know, you go out to the club,

just get the like, just pregame a little harder and and and get to get a soda with lime. All right, like you don't have to go crazy with it. All right. So number one, increase income, number two, stop spending as much and then putting it in future dollars we'll have to today, dollars hopefully should soften that blow for you. The third is try and make it and save it faster, right? Because the money you make now for us, the money you make when you're 10 years older, hits harder. So there's obviously a time value to money. So three quick strategies. One, set a watermark, invest the rest. So it's like, I need to have $5,000 in my bank account.

Everything about $5,000 I invest. Period. Or an alternative way of doing it is say, I have to invest $2,000 every month, no matter what, and I got to make it happen. And then I'll live on the rest. I will tell you that the richest people I know think in terms of the second way more than the first way. All right, which is like, I'm going to go make that money to get that thing or to make that investment rather than I'm going to take it out when I got just something that I've noticed.

Now, either way, just pick a strategy. Now, the next one is that my examples assumed $1,000 per month didn't go up by 3% a year to adjust for inflation and did increase in earning power. So you can absolutely run a separate model for that with your own Excel sheet or your own, you know, whatever AI you use to run a model on that. So if you're like $1,000 a month, if I do that from 18 until I am 67 off 10 million bucks. So you could probably hit your goal or beyond that with just that tiny piece. Now, I gave you, I said I had a three strategy. I gave you two of them. I said, invest the rest, right, or invest first and then live on the rest.

Either way, it works. Invest first and spend the rest or invest the same amount every single month and then increase it over time. All three of those are fine, totally fine. And honestly, if you just pick any of them, no problem. It's like, if you're literally the type of person, what's funny is that like I see entrepreneurs that see people all the time, like people will know they're going to be successful watching these videos and actually taking action 99% of the time, like that, that's all that actually meant like the fact that you care enough to actually change your behavior is the big green flag indicator. You're going to tweak over time, you're going to learn other stuff, but actually doing something about it is what will separate you from everyone else.

Let me give you the fourth strategy, all right, which is what I actually did. All right. So I'm obviously not 67 and I have more than 10 million dollars. I made my living expenses as small as humanly possible. All right, so protein shakes, Chipotle, I split a bedroom. All right, so I lived in a house and I had six roommates. And then within one of the rooms, I split the room like college style, like dorm style because it was cheaper, right, and I was never there anyways.

I was working on one time. I owned a used car that I paid I paid for outright. So the only thing I had was my car insurance. That was it. But the actually I had no car payments. I haven't had car payments in a very long time. Like by a used car, this 10 years old, that's in good condition, pay 10 grand for it, and then just like never have a car payment again. And then I invested my money pause in learning to make more money. You want to increase your income, right?

But how do you really do that? Because when you factor in that it's one of the only things strong enough to break the cycle is that you just have to make more. So think about it. Like if you spend $2,000 having someone help you learn how to sell, ideally a place with some sort of, you know, placement assistance, I remember for me, I spent $750 per hour for eight hours to have a guy who really knew how to do ads at a higher level. Because remember, this is a guy who's going to charge some fees. Not your buddy, or you might be able to just buy him Chipotle and I'll do it for you, right? But to ask somebody who actually taught me how to run ads at a high level, those eight hours, that tutoring, that skill that I was able to learn from that one one tutoring made me hundreds of millions,

not just hundreds of millions, literally. Now let's take the other example I had a little further. Let's say you invest that $2,000 in learning that skill and that $2,000 takes you from a $30,000 year income to a $90,000 year income. And post taxes, at least in the US, that's about $75,000 a year assuming you live on, let's say, $2,500 a month because you're living in lean. That's $35,000 per year after taxes, after expenses that you can invest on for the rest of your life.

So that $2,000 one time gave you a permanent $35,000 per year increase in investible income. That is how you get the absurd returns that can get you out of the cycle. And so, put this in perspective, if you did nothing else and you invested the $3,000 a month roughly, that alone would get you to $31,000 in 50 years. And that's with zero races, zero new skills, and zero increase in opportunity. You literally just doing the exact same thing for 50 years.

And so, the idea here is like you want to use compounding to your advantage and the way to increase how much you can invest is to make more spend less. And in the short term, where you will get the highest returns, actually over the larger, where you get the highest returns and the short term, is in skills. But people are so afraid of investing money in skills and I really want to dive into this because I really, I truly want to help. So, yes, you can absolutely achieve financial freedom if you live under your means. You invest the difference into increasing your income. And then once you have the amount that you need to compound to your number, you can just let the compounding work. You'll realize quickly that you get higher return on learning skills than anything else.

So then you put as much as you possibly can into it. And so, for many of you haven't had that reinforcing cycle that one time you spent money and you made more money back. I was very fortunate that the first thing I ever spent money on, I made more back. And so, I got very addicted to buying money, basically trading money for skills that I would immediately be able to make more money and increase my income. Because it does. Don't give me wrong. I mean, in a lot of places, it's successful. It's still a cheaper alternative to learning realistic real world skills than like higher education. So, if you were to spend $100,000 on courses in coaching, for example, or tutoring, which is how I prefer to do it, by the way, after doing some research isn't like look online,

like make sure people have good reputations, make sure they have testimonials or people like you, and many, many of them, they don't promise too much, right? I'm convinced that your life would change far more than $100,000 of higher education. And I do think you can learn a lot of stuff you're on. It'd be very clear when I was coming up. But the thing is that like this is me trying to provide whatever value I can in terms of like my path is that I was just always willing to pay for speed, right? Speed and the time value of money is something that I think people just wildly underestimate, right? Like if you can increase your income for like you get your five-year increase in income in one year, the difference is the value of that learning. And I just I don't know why

people don't get this. I think Charlie Munger and Worbuffet had a little moment where he was like, if people weren't wrong so much, we wouldn't be so rich. And I think so I'm trying to like I've never really understood it. And so maybe you guys can help me understand it. I think the big reason is that people are afraid of spending money and not getting anything back. I think that's the big fear. I think another part of it is ego saying I don't need anyone's help. I can figure out my own.

And here's the reality is like you can figure it out on your own. The question is whether you want to figure it out in the amount of time it would take to figure out. Like I'd rather just have somebody already derived calculus to just teach me how to do it, right? And the thing is is that with good feedback you can get your goals significantly faster. You will always lose until you learn.

Then you win. That's how winning works. But you have to be willing to lose in order to win. And so I have a relatively extreme stance on this which is that I will spend what I was coming up, I lived on basically nothing. And I spent all of my money and it essentially meant like I almost had no savings for like years and years and years because all my excess cash I just gave to people.

And for sure I had people who are like that wasn't worth it, that wasn't worth it. But I tend to always come from the perspective of like how can this make me better? How can like how can I get an ROI on this? Do the opposite of that. And so this is like you will make mistakes and you will buy things that don't immediately work. But I think of skill acquisition like a bridge. So let's say that you're on this side and you're sad because that's how bridges work. You're always sad on one side. And then on this side you have dollar signs for eyes which means you're happy because money brings happiness obviously. And so here you're sad. Maybe we'll cross your arms because you're super sad. Most people will look at this bridge and say well I bought this one and I know how to

do this one already and this one. Why can't I get across? It's because you got missing links. And so let's say you buy something else and you get some tutoring and then adds this brick. Was it a waste of money? Well you still can't get across. It's a waste of money. No. Just like your arithmetic teacher wasn't a waste of time before you learned calculus or before you learned algebra you need one in order to get there. You need their stepping stones. And so what happens is is that you get this other one from the sixth thing you buy and then the seventh and then the eighth and then the ninth and then what happens is you say oh this guy who taught me this ninth thing that guy is the truth. But the reality is that the reason that some people get outcomes and some

people don't by going through the same thing is the skill gaps that exist in someone's skill set are what create different outcomes with the same education. And so the problem with an inexperienced teacher and this is very common in the alternative education world is that they will accept money no matter what. But if I were to teach you Spanish six and I'm very good at Spanish but you've never taken Spanish one through five. Am I a bad Spanish teacher or are you just not good at Spanish one through five? What should have happened is I should have said to buy Spanish six you got to go through Spanish one through five. But the thing is as many of these alternative education businesses only know Spanish six. They don't even know how to teach Spanish one through five or they have

ever had before and never thought about it because they get one out of five people get a result so they say this is good enough everyone else didn't try and to be clear there's definitely people who don't try. I don't want to say that's not true for sure. But there are also people who do try but just didn't have the missing links. And so part of the process of going through the alternative education world is having the perspective of a collector of skills and as long as I see myself as the asset I'm always going up. And once I have all the pieces together guess what follows the dollar start walking across the bridge and they keep going into your pocket there's your pocket there you go. And so to me this is what I mean when I say like invest your money into income

earning skills if you can trade the skill for money and you can learn it can you imagine something that's more valuable we just did the math on like getting $3,000 a month extra from one skill. Imagine adding 10 skills imagine that sales guy says you know what that $3,000 a month extra instead of saying I'm going to invest that three I'm going to spend six my next two months of it and I'm going to spend it on learning how to write ads. And you know what I'm going to spend another two months on learning how to do that like I just always saw the money that was left over a month is like what skills at the store where do I need to go buy and then I would just go buy them. One of the big unlocks that I had in my career was that I went to I went to an event and there

was a guy who was there. The event was for everybody who was doing over eight figures was what it was for. So everybody's 10 billion up and at the time Layland I had just started making money I'm talking like within the last 12 weeks and everything just started taking off right I finally got the last piece of the connect. And so we were doing three or four hundred thousand dollars a month I can't remember but it was almost all taken because we just me Layla and I had one assistant over a kitchen table like that was the business and we just got married I always like live in large I and when I say live in large like I spent no money but I just felt not poor anymore which was great.

So when I was like go to this thing I was like I don't even know if I should be here I'm definitely not making that they're like oh no you're gonna you're gonna be way past that and I was like I'm glad one of those believes that I was just you know trying to ride this rocket with both hands and so anyways everyone goes you know goes through their presentation and the first guy who got up because I remember he was like busy and so he like he either want to go first or last doesn't matter and he gets up there and he and he starts by saying like so we did 35 million dollars in revenue last year and I was like what 35 million dollars like I was like one is dope you know I mean like I was three months into making you know pacing higher than that but I never actually like

really had to have it at least from an income perspective he he gets up there and after he gives us some presentation he was in the e-commerce world someone asked him so where you're at now like what are you doing to invest in your education like what are you doing to invest in learning and he said I made a decision a long time ago that I would have a learning budget and so every month whatever percentage you're comfortable with he's like you know maybe 12% maybe 5% maybe 10% of my income he said I force myself to spend it and I spend it in a way that's testing something that I think is cool and so that might mean like he's like I'll test a new ad strategy knowing that it probably won't work but I'm willing to lose that money to continue to experiment stay ahead

what's crazy is that I took I went to that thing I heard him and then for me I was like okay well I'm gonna go experiment with my income and so remember I wasn't spending much money and I had a lot of income and so I took like you know 10% so I think it was like 300,000 a month so 10% would be 30,000 and so I was like I'm gonna increase our ad spend by a thousand dollars a day and we were spending like 400 at the time so I went for like 400 like 1400 a day ad spend and that is when Jim launch went from 300 to 480 to 70 to a million to 1.2 to 1.5 to 1.7 something to 2 million 2.2 that was months because as soon as I saw that happened it was like oh my god and so part of me literally just being willing to lose the money unlocked my ability to spend more money

which scaled the company and so once I had that obviously a very reinforcing event for me I was like where else can I spend money like this like where can I can I buy access to a room can I can I pay for somebody's time on one can I can I go to the event like I date everything because every time I went I made more and that's what I want for you that's really it is that like you're gonna need to make more money than you think it's gonna take longer than you think but you can make it happen significantly faster if you learn skills that pay today and I'm willing to pull cash from my future forward and even though I know that $1,000 is worth $13,000 in 50 years I know that that $2,000 if it can make me an extra $2,000 a month will be worth

something like well just let's just say a lot head up to a lot of zeros a lot more than 13x in 50 years I think people don't want to spend money on skills because there's lots of pain on both sides it's like I have to I know what I'm giving up so I'm giving up money I am giving a certain money way that I have immediate utility for for the hope that after I give up even more time in effort and go through failure to learn this thing I will have something that I'm not sure of will be better than I cannot define yet so it's just a lot of uncertainty and I will say this that if you want to get in the entrepreneur game like you just got to get comfortable with uncertainty because the game of entrepreneurship is risk and time that is the game so if you're like where do I

where do I look to find these skills all right so I'm gonna just give you places so number one is like let's just start with with let's let's go up the the money ladder all right so at your base level what's what stuff's free and only cost time all right this is where you've got school communities that are online that are free to join you've got you know you got forums online that you can go look through where people are you know teaching each other stuff you've got YouTube videos like this where plenty of people have done deep dives master classes etc like if you want to learn sales like you can probably go through my sales I think it's like eight hours or something like that of just all my sales trainings you just go through it's free you will

get more help and you will move faster if you have someone who can give you feedback right like effort plus feedback is the loop right because if you have feedback only from the environment you might take very little action because you're so unsure but if you can take lots of action in an artificial environment and get feedback you can go through a hundred loops rather than one a week you can do a hundred a day and that's where you get so much better so much faster like the reason that I got so good at sales was because I started selling in the early days of Facebook ads and so I was doing 20 plus in-person consults per day and I did that for years and so that kind of exposure that kind of feedback loop like I got good the first sales training I actually bought

and purchased I actually purchased from my team because I was like I don't know how to teach this stuff right and it took many years for me to get that and then when I saw their teaching they was like I can make a better version of this and then that's what got me into learning like basically learning how to teach but that's the first year here the next year is like I would say call it you know $10 to probably like $200 per month type programs again school has stuff on this programs out there that are kind of like they call them like load ticket communities these are great because like communities already aggregate a lot of the information for you and so these are places to go they usually have some education and some sort of feedback mechanism

and you might not be able to get individualized feedback but you will be able to see people getting feedback from the same position as you and you'll be able to extrapolate a lot of that information. The next is kind of like I would say the next year is kind of in that in that called 500 to call it $2,000 maybe $3,000 this is where you're going to like typically go through a DIY or DIY plus some sort of feedback right so this is kind of like your lower level coaching ish type stuff that's there this is the beginning of where things become a little bit more valuable my preference like when you get like at 5k and up you know 5k to call it you know 35k this is where you're going to get the vast majority of kind of your in-depth stuff you're going to have some

level of in-person that'll typically be included in something like this where you actually like meet people there's also going to be some sort of education plus feedback and this is where honestly this is where I spent almost all of my money and so I spent up the ladder because I wanted to get there faster and so I think in some ways my impatience decreased my action threshold enough that I was I ended up being a high ticket buyer and that wasn't I didn't have high ticket money but this is kind of just an idea of of and like these sometimes also come with like kind of like communities and I think the big thing that really like what helped me more than anything when I spent this kind of money was getting around people who were way ahead of me like I just

have this fundamental belief and maybe I can give it to you that if another human can do something I can do it and so when I saw these people that was like I don't think they work harder than me I don't think they're like smarter than me from a I mean sure there's plenty of people smarter than me but like just like it's not like they're doing you know advanced calculus here like the like they might be smarter but the work that is required that they're doing to make more money than me does not require superior intellect and so when seeing them and like like like physically being like these are real people it took a lot of the magic away and then I was like okay I just got to learn more like I got to figure out these guys are doing and then me being around them and me like I made more

money from these experiences by serving everyone else in the community and trying to basically treat all of them as my teachers and so I'd pay my 30 grand or whatever it is to get in and again this takes time to get there but I paid 30 grand to get in and I would just say like I'm good at sales let me review your sales scripts let me review your sales calls and I'll show you like our sales process that might help and I would just do that to everybody I'd do four or five six hours of work and people were like dude this is way too much like that's what I wanted to reaction me I want people to be like dude this is way too much you didn't have to do that and I'm like of course I didn't have to do that but I want to learn what you got so like the thing is it's like always new

that if I gave six hours somebody might give me one the thing is is there one hour was still more I already know my stuff so six hours to me it's just like okay it's six hours whatever but if I get one hour that guy's time and he can teach me one little thing that I could use like I was just a collector I was just a little golem of skills I was like this guy does affiliate marketing I was like I don't know what that is let me go learn about that right then that was the way that I approached these things and so most people are too cheap with their time even though they're poor and so it's like you aren't making any money I'm like what else are you doing right like what are you doing with your time if you've got the time give it to somebody else

and they'll probably give you something back and the thing is is in that time they give you back they're going to compress a year of learning into an hour or two right like I had years and years of sales and I was able to dramatically improve someone sales process because I could just apply that and they would get the benefit and it was free for them so they loved it but for me when they take a year of of AdSense training and say hey this is how I would apply it to your business I was like thank you amazing and then I could just skip and I could ask those people hey of all the different programs are out there all the different courses all the different I was like who's got the best stuff and they're like oh well this guy's things okay this thing is a really good

impression event this and so they would already sift through the mess for me I would just take and I'd be like great I'm gonna go to that guy and I'll go learn that thing and I think as long as you don't get disenfranchised with an early loss or like hey you buy something and it doesn't work out the way you hope to would like no one of these things will make you rich but consistently choosing to invest in learning skills and giving first in those communities and getting as much out as you possibly can by giving more than everyone else is how I think you'll get whatever you want my books are free on my podcast so you don't have to spend any money but if you want hardbacks because these are men's reference copies you can have all three of my hardbacks for free because

a lot of entrepreneurs at my book launch donated 3.6 million books and so they donated these guys I will match or double their donation of books anybody who wants to learn but that's for all three books all right so if you want that that's my gift to you so you can just go grab them while the supplies last if you feel like spending dollars if you don't it's fine go watch the rest of my stuff and the books are free on my podcast so you don't have to like spend anything and if you are a business owner and you're more like I'm stuck I'm stuck what do I do next like that's the big scope efficiency it's probably more complex than one thing or one like you know tiny tactic it might be a strategic thing that we have to do and so looking at our portfolio companies and the

companies we advise we basically broke it into 10 stages of scaling across each different functions you got product marketing sales customer service IT recruiting HR and finance and with each one of these levels there's a clear problem and a clear way to solve it and what what it needs to look like to graduate to the next level and so our little system will take in your information and then basically match you to this and then give you the customized robot for your current level this is free this is a free gift and if you want to have one of these kind of more in-person experiences you're welcome to come out to our headquarters and book them on the thank you page because we're really going to what we do just look at the reviews online and I want to help so that's that and

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