If You Have Less Than $50,000 Saved, This Advice Could Change Your Life

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]If you got less than $50,000 to your name, you're [ __ ] broke anyway. So, why not take the risk? Why not start that business? Why not do the things that you've been putting off doing?

[00:00:15]And just try.

[00:00:18]That's going to be the point of this video.

[00:00:20]I see a lot of people online talking about personal finance, making money.

[00:00:24]I'm also in this space of making money specifically on Twitter.

[00:00:29]And it makes me really angry when I see people all over say the same things.

[00:00:36]Save your money. Uh go and make sure you invest in your 401k.

[00:00:42]Make sure you invest your extra $500 a month. Make sure you buy real estate and get a loan on that real estate in order to go and maybe turn a profit and you can pay down the equity of the house and you end up making money when you sell the asset. It's a joke.

[00:01:04]It's not smart.

[00:01:06]And I know by saying this I contradict every single bit of personal finance advice that has ever been given anywhere in books, online, from rich people, everything like that.

[00:01:20]And some people might say, "Oh, well, you know, David, you're not even worth $50 million yet. You're not qualified to give personal finance information." Now, I say this as someone who has been a young man, who has gone out into the world, started with absolutely nothing, and made something of themselves, and became a millionaire after leaving corporate, and screwed my money up, and made money, and spent money, and done everything that there is to do.

[00:01:48]Basically, um except buy a boat or a yacht. I've done everything and a jet. There's I've done basically everything there is to do.

[00:01:57]I've lived all over the world. I've traveled almost 30 countries in the past just few short years. I've made millions of dollars. I've spent millions of dollars. I've lost millions of dollars.

[00:02:05]I've started very successful businesses and I've been unsuccessful in other businesses that I've started. The worst thing that you can possibly do is think that whatever threshold or amount of money that you have is the number that is going to change your life.

[00:02:26]If you have less than 50 grand, you are one emergency away from it going to [ __ ] zero.

[00:02:33]Zero.

[00:02:35]And I thought this. And the reason I'm qualified to speak on this is because I [ __ ] experienced it.

[00:02:43]When I quit my job, when I quit PayPal, for those who don't know, I was an account executive at PayPal from the time I was 22 years old to 2020 to 24. I was very good at what I did.

[00:02:52]It taught me everything about sales and making money and I really value that experience because I got to talk to business owners who were making way more money than I was and I even got to talk to business owners who were making less money than I was as a sales rep when I was 22 years old.

[00:03:07]And these were full-grown adults.

[00:03:09]And a perspective that I had was that when I have $50,000, $100,000 saved. I remember the first time I saw over $10,000 in my bank account when I was 22. A lot of you young guys that are out here 22 years old making hundreds and thousands of dollars a month or $10,000 a month at 22 comparatively to where I was when I was 22, you guys make more money than me. I was only making about $13,000 a month.

[00:03:36]And I had a job and you guys are doing it with your own businesses. And the game has changed. The world is full of so much more opportunity.

[00:03:43]But I remember I took a trip, me and my best friend, we went to Europe and I took a trip and I spent half of what I had. And then when I came back to Philly cuz I had about $100,000 saved up and I lost a bunch of money from unvested stock that I lost when I quit.

[00:04:00]And I remember I sold my stock and and I spent all my money and I ended up moving to LA with one of my best friends who's a famous record producer, famous music producer.

[00:04:11]And we lived spartan we lived bare-bones and I said, "I'm going to come out to LA and I'm going to do everything in my power to start a business." And part of me starting that business was I had to [ __ ] figure out how to start that business and make money with no money.

[00:04:30]I had to take a risk. I burned the boats. I knew that I said, "Okay, I have this ability to sell products. I have this ability to do sales and call people over the phone, which is what I did every single day." And I moved out there and I remember being in my car, my Mazda CX-5 that I had that I I had a lease on and I paid $358.58 per month for it on my lease.

[00:04:55]And I had shipped the car out to LA and by the time I was done buying furniture, by the time I had my security deposit by uh paid, by the time I paid my first months of rent, by the time I bought food and got all of my stuff and flights out to my new apartment in LA that me and my friend were splitting for like $1,700 a month, I had like 25 grand left.

[00:05:20]I had $25,000.

[00:05:22]And I said, "How am I going to I need to figure this out. I need to figure this out very soon."

[00:05:30]And I knew that I was one emergency away from going to zero.

[00:05:37]Even if I spent $3,000, $4,000 a month, which is your bare-bones basic living expenses that basically everyone has, even if you're trying to save money, you end up somehow spending it.

[00:05:50]That I knew that I had around 6 months to figure it out.

[00:05:54]And that was me eating once a day Panda Express and driving a cheap car with a cheap car payment and cheap rent. I knew that I could feed myself and and do everything that I needed to do with my gym membership and everything for about three grand a month, bills, all that stuff.

[00:06:12]And I had to figure the [ __ ] [ __ ] out. I had to figure it all out. I was 24 years old and I knew all I needed to do was call people on the phone and sell them.

[00:06:24]And do outreach because that's what I knew. That's all I knew, actually. All I knew was to turn off my [ __ ] brain and go into a market and sell my services to clients. And I was I I had started an email marketing agency at the time. I had worked out what I was going to do and email was super hot back then. And I had already worked out what I was going to do. I already knew what business model it was, but I didn't have the time to actually go and scale the business model while I was still working at my job until I quit and I took that Euro Euro summer trip and I didn't work the entire Euro summer. I didn't give a [ __ ] of course. And I came back and I said, "Okay, I need to start really locking in on this business." And I had to figure it out.

[00:07:10]So, if you have no money or if you have credit cards, you have Now, now people might say, "Oh, debt is bad, whatever."

[00:07:18]You give yourself runway. You have to give yourself runway to figure it out.

[00:07:22]And there is nothing in this [ __ ] world that you can do for a long enough time horizon where you will not eventually become good at it.

[00:07:31]Doesn't matter what business it is. I don't care if it's e-commerce. I don't care if it's selling hamster wheels. I don't give a [ __ ] what it is.

[00:07:38]I don't care if it's AI. I don't care if it's some sort sort agency or Facebook ads or some sort of service or some sort of sales job, sales role, if you take it seriously enough for a long enough time frame and take the feedback that you get from your wins and from your losses, eventually on a long enough time frame you will be successful.

[00:08:00]I knew this starting out when I was working at PayPal and I knew I could apply that same sales process that I had at PayPal to the agency business and it worked out really well for me.

[00:08:10]Eventually I started teaching this sale It worked out so well I started teaching the sales process for free on Twitter and then people said, "Yo, wait, I can't believe you don't charge for this." And then I made millions of dollars selling that information and selling what I was doing for the marketing and sales and everything like that.

[00:08:28]I figured it out. But during that time, that was one of the most formative times of my life.

[00:08:34]I built my entire business. I had my bed on the floor. I couldn't even I I was like, "Okay, it's either 600 bucks for a bed frame or I just save my money and keep my bed on the floor." And I had a $200 IKEA bed, a [ __ ] folding chair, and a desk that I had and my desk that I had put in my car and shipped to Los Angeles.

[00:09:00]That's all I had. And that's where I built the entire business. I remember with sitting there with my phone doing voice memo outreach on Instagram to companies when I had made a new Instagram account with like 100 followers and making cold calls and sending emails. And all I knew was that I could only control the controllables. This is something one of my old managers briefly at at PayPal used to say it all the time. He used to say, "You can only control the controllables."

[00:09:30]And it never And I thought he was just talking [ __ ] Cuz I'm 22 at the time. Yeah, what Yeah, what's he saying? Control the controllables. Oh, and then, but you end up making excuses for yourself as to why you're not successful yet. You end up making excuses for yourself as to why you haven't made it yet. A what or why you're not rich yet after you've been trying so hard. And it turns out the things that you've been trying at are not the high-leverage things that are actually going to make you money.

[00:09:55]And so, when I started to realize, I said, "Oh, wait, maybe." When I got later on in my career, "Oh, wait, I know that I can control my emotional state and manage the stability of my emotional swings.

[00:10:07]And then, I can control my output on a day-to-day basis regardless of how I feel. Because that's the only thing that I'm in control of.

[00:10:15]And even if I have nothing, if I have no pipeline, I can create it. If I have no money, I can make it.

[00:10:21]Because that's the opportunity in front of you when you have a skill set.

[00:10:26]So, if you have less than 50 grand, start the business anyway.

[00:10:31]If you have two two grand, you're broke anyway. Invest in yourself.

[00:10:36]What I did was when I had that money, I invested it in myself. Now, I didn't buy courses or anything like that.

[00:10:45]Because it wasn't really prevalent as as super prevalent as as it was now or info or mentorships. I didn't do any of that.

[00:10:52]Okay? Could I have saved myself time if I did? Maybe.

[00:10:56]Cuz I didn't have anybody to really go to to think about, "Okay, well, who can I listen to?" Everything was just [ __ ] new to me. All I had was a Twitter account. But also, the way that I started doing all this stuff and even got on social media in the first place was I saw a bunch of people talking about things that they knew nothing about or they were pretending to know about.

[00:11:18]And I said, "I can't stand seeing this stuff anymore. I can't stand seeing these idiots on the internet talking about things that they don't [ __ ] know about."

[00:11:28]And so, I started, instead of lurking, cuz I lurked for years like many you.

[00:11:33]I lurked and I said, "Okay, I'm I'm tired of this. I know what I'm doing way better than all of these people and it's time for me to talk about it." So, I invested in myself.

[00:11:44]I eventually figured out how to run my entire business with very limited capital.

[00:11:53]The way that I invested myself was I set myself up for success with my living situation. My father and I used to have this conversation all the time when I was younger.

[00:12:03]And he said, "You have to make sure that the things you're doing are conducive to your environment or your environment is conducive to the things you want to do and the places that you want to go."

[00:12:16]Really important concept. If you don't know what conducive is, it means it benefits you. It's conductive, right?

[00:12:21]You can think of electrically electrical conductive material.

[00:12:27]So, you have to figure out, "Okay, I have a certain amount of money to live on. How can I maximize this amount of money?

[00:12:36]Whether it's invested in a business, whether it's run the [ __ ] advertising, you're going to go to zero anyway. If you even become a millionaire, you'll probably go to zero unless you somehow figure it out. You're going to do dumb [ __ ] with your money anyway. So, why not figure out how to use that money to maximize your chances of success in the future, which is exactly what I did. And when I invested in myself, I knew that I have this amount of money and I I know that I have to make this last. So, I'm going to make this investment and not Sometimes the best investment is to not spend any money.

[00:13:11]And I'm going to live on rotisserie chicken for $7 that I could get at the local supermarket at Ralphs or Gelson's was expensive, but I could go to Ralphs in LA and I could live on rotisserie chicken and rice and sometimes for a treat I could get Chipotle or Panda Express.

[00:13:29]Now, I was very fortunate. I knew that there was a certain amount of time because all I could do was control the controllables. All I could do was take that risk on myself to know with that money, that investment that I made by not spending the money, I was going to be able to bet on my future self.

[00:13:47]And once I figured that out, once I figured out how to bet on my future self, which was to say, "Okay, if I have this amount of capital, how can I not only last? How can I make it go the distance? How can I invest in things that are going to make me money?"

[00:14:01]Sometimes the things that are going to make you money is maybe just investing in the business and disregarding all of the other [ __ ] that you might want because you have a little bit of money.

[00:14:12]I for- for- I had foregone traveling.

[00:14:16]I had foregone partying, which I love to do.

[00:14:20]I had foregone everything that was not wake up 18 hours a day on the business that I was working on at the time.

[00:14:28]How can I make the business more effective? Now, luckily, I knew how to train and manage sales people, so I I brought on a couple people and we eventually found a pretty decent lane, which was at the time we were doing email marketing for e-commerce brands and we found that luxury furniture was a lane that we could go into and we found that people who were selling luxury furniture and luxury products on Etsy were taking a 20% um platform fee, essentially. And Etsy had DMs and we would pitch them in the DMs about how we can save them more money and make them more money because we we had learned that people on Etsy were also selling on Shopify and we figured out how to bring that audience over to Shopify and then sell them more products via email.

[00:15:16]I have never told that on camera before, but that was what we did. And eventually, my coaching side my business that I had created, um, we ended up just outpacing what we were doing in that business and it was also a lot more money for a lot less time, way more scalable, way better business model. And the entire thing kind of just came from how the [ __ ] can I start with nothing and be successful? How can I make this last 20,000? Cuz you think $25,000 is a lot of money or you think $20,000 is a lot of money. It's [ __ ] not. Now, I'm at the stage in my business where we can make hundreds of thousands of dollars and we're like, "Fuck, it's still not a lot of money."

[00:15:56]There's levels to the game. It never ends, guys. [clears throat] It never ends.

[00:16:01]And you're always going to feel a level of broke because of the comparison bias based on who you compare yourself to. If someone starting out compared themselves to me or one of my friends or even one of my younger friends who has lots of money, well, you're going to feel behind. You should feel behind because you are.

[00:16:19]You are.

[00:16:20]But if you're comparing yourself to the guys you went to college with who are never going to do anything, they're going to go work at JP Morgan Chase for 40,000, 50,000 bucks a year or they're going to go work at Vanguard or they're going to, you know, get a finance degree and go work at at EY or something like this and they're not going to take that risk on themselves and they're going to make their money, they're going to go out, they're going to party, then of course you're going to feel like a success. When I started working at PayPal and I was making four times what everybody else that I went me and my one of my best friends who I went to his wedding last year, we were making 150, 200,000 a year. My friend Jason used to make more than me, but he was in a different department. He was also very good, one of the most talented sales people I've ever met.

[00:17:04]And we both worked together, it was crazy, we went to high school together, we worked together and he has a very conservative mindset when it comes to money. He would save all of his money.

[00:17:14]Now, he is a person that I have to exclude from this. When we were making four times more, we would sit there on Friday nights or Saturday nights cuz we lived next to each other, and I'd go over to his apartment or he'd come over to my my apartment, and we lived in nice ass apartments. And we'd sit there and we're like, "Man, we're getting so much money. We're getting so much money compared to everybody who we are who we went to school with." Which was true.

[00:17:38]Looking back, I've made my yearly salary and commissions what I used to have there in a week.

[00:17:48]Now, looking back.

[00:17:50]And so, the game changes.

[00:17:55]So, if you have less than $50,000 in your bank account, whatever number it is, whether it's $20 or $20,000 or $10,000 or $5,000, just either figure out how to make it last or think that it doesn't exist, and use that as motivation to continue pushing the envelope of what you can do and what you can achieve.

[00:18:17]That's my lesson to you.

[00:18:19]Thinking that there's some arbitrary number, whether it's a million dollars, whether it's 100,000, whether it's a quarter million dollars in in your checking account. I used to have a rule back in the day, years ago, where I said, "I don't feel content with myself." And I would basically operate like my hair's on fire if I didn't have a quarter million dollars in cash just sitting in my personal checking account.

[00:18:40]So, regardless of which level that you're at, you have to understand what the game is that you're playing.

[00:18:53]You're broke.

[00:18:55]If you have a quarter million dollars in cash, you're closer to broke than being a millionaire. If you have $50,000 in cash, you're closer to being [ __ ] broke at zero than you are to having 100 grand. So, figure out either how to make it stretch, invest in yourself, run those ads, start that business, Whatever it is that you are thinking about doing or trying to do.

[00:19:18]Whatever ideas that you've had, take a little bit of that money and test it.

[00:19:23]Because you owe it to yourself to [ __ ] try. You owe it to yourself to take the risk on yourself. [ __ ] bet on yourself. And bet on yourself due to the fact that if you try hard enough, eventually you'll be successful.

[00:19:37]Eventually, future you 6 months from now, 1 year from now, will have had the relentlessness and the tenacity to have figured it out.

[00:19:53]That's my message to you.

[00:19:56]Wherever you are, good luck on your journey.

[00:20:00]And 6 months from now, if you follow this advice, you will be a completely different person.

[00:20:05]I hope this was helpful. My name is David Ryan Akie. Thank you very much.

[00:20:09]And I will see you in the next video.