Living Off My $756,321 Margin Portfolio

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]I built a $756,321 margin portfolio into income in just 5 years. In this video, I'm going to show you my holdings, why I have them, why most people stay stuck and never make any real progress, exactly how I manage my money, and why this is the best way to build wealth while still enjoying it along the way.

[00:00:26]Let's dive in.

[00:00:27]Let's start with my portfolio and holdings. Here you can see that when I started in 2022, I had quickly scaled up hundreds of thousands of dollars, basically every single year.

[00:00:40]How did I do that?

[00:00:42]I'll show you in just a minute. Let's take a look at my holdings. Here are the companies that I hold, and I'll show you in a moment why I pick each one of them.

[00:00:50]First off, my biggest position is VGT.

[00:00:52]This is about 73% of my entire portfolio.

[00:00:56]Next, I treat VOO sort of like a bond, and I like to have anywhere from 10 to maybe 20% in VOO.

[00:01:05]Then, we have SPMO. This will probably be my second biggest position soon as I continue to add shares to it. Next, we have XLK. I have this because I discovered it before VGT.

[00:01:19]I have about 4% here.

[00:01:21]Then, we have QQQM. This will probably be somewhere around the amount of VOO that I have in the foreseeable future.

[00:01:30]When I'm deciding what I want to hold, there's really four things that I'm looking at, and I'll dive into each of them in just a moment.

[00:01:38]I'm looking at growth, the holdings, the expense ratio, and lastly, dividends.

[00:01:46]Now, dividends are just a cherry on top.

[00:01:48]They don't really matter very much. When taking a look at these, let's look at SPMO and use this as our guinea pig.

[00:01:56]I don't care about anything less than year when looking at growth. So, when I look at growth, I'm looking at 1 year to start, and I want to see a graph that's up into the right. If it's not, it's not really a big deal. There will be times when it's not up into the right. Next would be 5 years. I also want to see a graph that's up into the right. What I would not like to see is something that's up, down, up, down, up, down.

[00:02:20]Like maybe Bitcoin or another example might be Tesla. That looks too cyclical for me and it varies too much, making it difficult to use margin. Later, I'm going to dive into why I don't need the biggest or best returns, but why it's better to get consistent steady returns that are solid and then bundle that with margin. Lastly, I care about the max timeline. Of course, this is probably the most important. Again, I want to see something that's up into the right and there will be some speed bumps along the way, but in general, you'll see that all of the graphs that I care about look very much like this. So, VGT looks very much like this.

[00:03:01]VOO will have the least amount of growth, but again, I treat it more like a bond and it still does have speed bumps.

[00:03:07]QQQM is going to be sort of the same story with some bigger dips just just because it doesn't have as much time in its graph. If you were to look at QQQ, it is basically the same thing and it will have a little more of a smooth-looking ride, which 2022 still looks pretty bumpy.

[00:03:29]Now, contrast this again with something like Tesla or with Bitcoin and you can see why I would not want to use margin in the same account as this.

[00:03:39]When you have these massive drops, that type of thing could get you margin called pretty easily. Next, let's look at holdings. Now, I would love to also see number of holdings and And you can see that they have over 100 companies.

[00:03:52]The more the better, but it's okay if it's a little bit less. Maybe 100 is typically the least that I would like to see. But upwards of 300 or 500 can be fine. Just remember that concentration is what builds wealth and diversification is what keeps wealth.

[00:04:09]So, you want to see some well-known companies when you're looking at holdings and companies that have graphs that look up into the right. Technology is my favorite sector and it is the one that has done the best in the past, but I foresee that AI is the future and I think that things have really changed since Warren Buffett's time frame up until today's time frame.

[00:04:33]So, here you can see that SPMO is going to be a little more diverse than something like VGT. If I were to pull up VGT and look at its holdings, you would see that it is 99% technology. Now, that being said, it is still a little bit more diversified than something like SMH or like SOXX, which are very niche focused in technology focusing on AI chips. SPMO is a momentum fund meaning that as other sectors will start to do really well, more of my holdings will get shifted to those sectors. Next would be expense ratio. So, I like to see anything that's less than 0.15%.

[00:05:13]It doesn't mean I would never pick something that's higher, but the lower your expense ratio, the better. VGT is going to be 0.09. VOO is going to be the lowest out of what I hold and it's 0.03.

[00:05:25]It's 0.03%, which means that for every $1,000 that you have invested, you'd only lose 30 cents to fees.

[00:05:33]Over time, fees really add up. So, if you see something that's like 0.75% or even above 1%, I would be a little bit skeptical about buying that and I would try try find a better fund if you can.

[00:05:47]You'll find that a lot of Vanguard and Fidelity funds have really low expense ratios.

[00:05:52]Next step would be dividends. You can just look up something like SPMO ex-dividend date, and you can see what it pays roughly for quarterly dividends. You can see that it paid 32 cents per share on March 27th, and they're going to vary from time to time, especially momentum funds like this, but you can see that it was 19 cents in December, and now it's up to 32 cents.

[00:06:15]That doesn't mean that this is going to go up forever. This could go down, and again, I would just treat dividends more like a cherry on top. I don't want to rely on them, and I don't want them to be a big part of my strategy. I want to be as efficient as possible when I get my income, and I do that with margin, not with dividends.

[00:06:33]Growth is what fuels your total return, and it is what is actually going to make you wealthy in just a few years. For income, you don't need dividends.

[00:06:44]And I'll explain what I mean in just a minute. But first, make sure to smash that like button. This is what it looks like for most people. They get paid, their money gets filtered over to rent, their money goes to their credit cards, their car payment, their insurance, their gas, their student loans, and they never had a chance to invest. Most of their money never gets to see the power of compounding.

[00:07:06]This keeps people stuck forever. It feels like a treadmill, where you're never actually making progress.

[00:07:14]Just a few years ago, back in 2022, is when I finally got off this treadmill.

[00:07:19]I had woke up one day, and I was wondering why I had been working since I was 14 years old, and I had a net worth of nothing.

[00:07:29]It was a sad day, and I had a conversation with a friend. We talked about money, and how to not be broke anymore, and what it was like just working for so long without having money, and he brought up Rich Dad Poor Dad. And I didn't know it at the time, but that moment had changed my entire life. Now, that was in 2018. The next moment was in 2022 when I had seen an Instagram reel from Daymond on Shark Tank, and he talked about how the rich will use assets, borrow against them, never selling, to buy more assets. I had heard things like Elon Musk buying Twitter and using his Tesla stock to do this. I had never thought much of it. I thought this was just something that the rich could do. I didn't realize that I could start doing this myself. So, when Daymond had said that, it sent me down a rabbit hole, and I started researching as much as I could to see how I could do this for myself.

[00:08:27]And I see that it's way easier than you might think. For most people, it looks like this. You save your money, you go on vacation, or you buy some four-wheeler or whatever little toy that you want, and then boom, your money's gone. And you have to start that process over. And this is just so painful that you save weeks or months of your life just to buy something, and your money is gone. It doesn't have to be like this.

[00:08:54]Enter the money filtration system. This is how I started managing my money back in 2022.

[00:09:01]Money comes in, and you earn a 10 to 12% return. It can be higher, sort of depends on what you buy and your timing.

[00:09:08]The return doesn't matter as long as it's higher than your borrowed cost.

[00:09:13]After you buy assets, you then spend money just like you're already doing, on credit cards, earning a 2% return. You then borrow money from your assets at low interest rates. Currently, it's 4.5% for me.

[00:09:28]You then use that money to pay back the money that you had borrowed on the credit card, never paying a dollar of credit card interest.

[00:09:36]And this allows you to stay fully invested forever without ever selling a share. This means you never pay taxes for selling and you get to keep the spread between the growth of your assets and the borrowed money. So, in this case, let's say 10% versus 4.5%.

[00:09:55]Your money gets to continue to grow at 5.5%.

[00:10:00]Not only that, but the rest of your money that you never even touched gets to grow with that full 10% versus if you would just put it in a high-yield savings account, you would be earning like a 3% interest rate. So, you see more than three times the growth. Now, just remember, if you can get a higher return than 10% safely, you can keep that extra spread.

[00:10:22]And that is what changes your life. So, when I talk about the money filtration system, I see so many people mistake what I'm saying. They think that you only buy assets with money that's coming in and you then borrow back all of the money right away.

[00:10:37]So, what I mean here is that let's say you get $4,000 in, you buy assets with all 4,000, and then you borrow back, I don't know, 3,500 to pay your bills, you will quickly get margin called if you do this.

[00:10:51]First, you need to build a strong foundation, which we're going to talk about in a few minutes. But, you're actually using the spread to invest the money, not every single dollar that's coming in. You can use every dollar that comes in in the future, but early on, you need to use just the spread. If you use every dollar that's coming in, you're going to get margin called so quickly. Now, when I talk about the spread, I mean one of two things. One is I mean the difference between your income and your expenses. So, in this example on my screen here, you can see that the income is $4,500 and the expenses are $3,000. This would be the spread or the cash flow. So, you get to keep that $1,500.

[00:11:35]So, you get to use all of that money instead of what you might be doing now, which is that $1,500 maybe goes to your savings, some of it to your checking, some to your emergency fund, some to your fun bucket, and then poof, you're out of money. That $1,500 should all be funneled to your investments. And you don't want to borrow it back right away, but in the future when you need it back, that is when you will borrow it back.

[00:12:01]Think of it as all of these buckets added together. And when you need money back, then you borrow it back.

[00:12:08]The spread can also mean your interest rates. So, it might mean the difference between 12% return and your 5% for borrowed money. This is what will make you rich, the spread being both a cash flow and the difference between your interest rate and borrowed money.

[00:12:28]Make sure to comment below so that I know that you understand what I'm talking about.

[00:12:33]I'm briefly going to touch on the surface of why dividend investing or the hybrid approach is less efficient and why this keeps people stuck. In a few weeks, I'm going to make a full video on it. First of all, when you're a dividend investor, that isn't just free money.

[00:12:50]That money is coming from somewhere and it's your future returns. I see that some people are very excited about CHPY.

[00:12:58]The reason is because it pays a massive dividend. Currently, while the price is appreciating very quickly anyway. That being said, if they were to put that same dollar into SMH, they would see three times the growth. It's not even close.

[00:13:13]Next would be Region, and it's the dollar value that you put in and what happens to it over time. So, think of it like you put $10,000 in. If you put it into something like a Cornerstone Fund or some of these covered calls or something like Misty or Alti, you're going to see that your net asset value goes down over time. What's happening is you're getting your own money back, sometimes with a return on capital, which they tell you is taxed more efficiently, but it's not.

[00:13:46]The key here is that when it's in an account with margin, which you're probably doing if you're watching people teach this, is that you're getting hit with rehypothecation, which means that you can be taxed up to 37% on every dollar that you receive.

[00:14:07]I haven't seen it be every dollar, but I've seen it be close to 60% of the dollars that come in being taxed at your income tax rate.

[00:14:16]This is a heavy drag on your returns, meaning that you're giving up upwards of say 30%, 37% of every dollar that you receive. You don't see this until the next year, and you might not think it really matters, but think of giving up not only 1/3 of your total return in growth, but you're also giving up almost 1/3 due to taxes. You've just given up almost 2/3 of your total return just so you can have a dollar in your pocket right now.

[00:14:49]With growth, you can get your dollars back with margin tax-free and get the full growth. Hopefully, you understand that the juice is not worth the squeeze when you're giving up so much of this money. Dividend investing and the hybrid approach are better than not investing at all, but you will never build F-U money with dividend investing.

[00:15:16]It is better than the Dave Ramsey approach.

[00:15:18]The Dave Ramsey method, of becoming debt-free, saving 6 months to a year in an emergency fund is a surefire way to make sure that you work until you're 70 years old.

[00:15:31]The reason this method is so powerful is that you maximize your total return safely, often upwards of 20% or higher if you stay fully invested and you're buying during the dips. Plus, you get to minimize your tax drag. Taxes are the biggest drag on wealth creation. Look it up. Doing this recycle your money approach, you will quickly build FU money.

[00:16:00]There's been around five people in the private Discord that have already passed their first $100,000.

[00:16:06]Not only that, you get to access your wealth tax-free by borrowing back at extremely low interest rates. At the time I'm recording this, it just costs 4.5%.

[00:16:18]But it's not the same as a principal and interest loan. When you're using margin, this $174,000 is only $666 per month.

[00:16:28]Let's look if I were to borrow to buy a new vehicle, instead of paying $500 a month through a dealership for 5 years, I would pay $112 a month. This would allow me to pay off the vehicle much, much more quickly and I could do it in cash with appreciating growth assets. Recycling your money like this means you get to keep the spread.

[00:16:50]Keeping the difference between your annual growth rate and 4.5% interest rate. You can see here that in the last 5 years, I've earned 163% in return and you would divide that by five, which is 32. When I account for interest, which is currently 4.5% but it's been higher sometimes in the past, my best estimate is I'm getting like a 26% or 27% CAGR.

[00:17:19]I'm not paying interest on every dollar that I have. I'm only paying interest on about 1/3 of my portfolio.

[00:17:26]Now, I don't expect this return forever, obviously, but the way that I manage my money allows for superior returns.

[00:17:34]Remember, I'm always doing one of two things. I'm either buying more shares or I'm paying down margin.

[00:17:41]It wasn't always this way. When I wasn't fully invested, you do things a little bit differently. Remember what I talked about a couple minutes ago in the video, where you don't just buy shares with every dollar that comes in and then borrow back all of the money to pay your bills. You have to use your cash flow or spread to invest early in your journey, and then during big dips is when you leverage up. Think of it kind of like building a home.

[00:18:07]During the bull market, I'm building a strong foundation, accumulating shares without margin, increasing the amount that I can borrow when I'm ready.

[00:18:16]When there's a market dip, I can then tap into much more borrowed money, which is kind of like hiring many more workers to help me build the rest of the home quickly and finish the job.

[00:18:29]I can get this borrowed money from all sorts of places, such as my paid-off truck, my portfolio using margin, a HELOC, even personal loans or credit cards. This allows me to buy tens of thousands of dollars all at once, over and over.

[00:18:47]When you do this during a market dip, you're locking in future gains. You're not buying at the top with large sums of money. You're just dollar cost averaging during those times. Using margin when the market is at all-time highs is risky, because you have the furthest to fall. You got value, make sure to like the video. See you next time.