Podcast – Episode 022- Best Money Feeling
Podcast Transcript
Hey there, Genius Nation. I want to ask you a question. What are some of the best times of your life? Can you think of any? I guess it really depends on how old you are, right? If you’re younger, maybe the best time that you can remember was when you got your driver’s license and you went out for your first drive, right? Or maybe when you graduated high school, maybe when you graduated college. If you’re a little bit older, you probably remember the best day of your life was probably when you got married or you had a kid. If you’re a little bit older, maybe the day that you actually retired or started your own business or something like that.
How did that make you feel? We have those memories, we had these awesome experiences. Why are they awesome? Because the feelings that we had, when that happened, when that occurred and that’s what we remember, that’s the powerfulness of the feeling. How amazing was that feeling? Pretty good right? Pretty high, it’s like you were on drugs right? I remember when I got married, that’s the happiest day I’ve ever had. I was just super high. The world could have been crashing down burning, but I was so happy, nothing would bother me. Nothing could have touched me. I mean literally you’re high on drugs kind of thing.
Have you ever felt that way about money before? Because I know with money, if you don’t have it, it’s stressful. If you have it, it can be stressful, you know? The more you have, the more security you got to take, and the more you got to worry about investments and you worry about this and keeping it and getting not ripped off and it can be a very stressful thing, but have you ever had an amazing, awesome, awesome, awesome feeling about money? Most people don’t. That’s what this episode is about, because I want to tell you about the most amazing feeling that you can have when it comes to money. For that, I need to tell you a story.
The year was 2000, all right. My parents and I had just moved to Houston. We weren’t doing that well financially where we were in Miami, so my parents decided to start over fresh, new place, new town, new state, everything, so I moved over to Houston. We had an uncle living over here at the time, so moved here, got an apartment and at that time, my father was a mortgage broker back in Miami, so we came over here and we helped him start a mortgage company. That was the plan. We’ll start a mortgage company, I’ll help him with the marketing, that would be my expertise, I’ll do the marketing. I also had my mortgage and real estate license in Miami, but I didn’t want to get back into that. I just wanted to do the marketing, let him do all the leg work. I’ll hire the people, help him with that, train or whatever.
In the beginning, it takes time to build yourself up. We needed an income, so during the days, I’d be working at the mortgage company trying to get new leads, trying to get people in the door, getting loans and at night time, I would be busting my butt as a waiter at the Olive Garden. I did that for several months in a row, that’s really how I paid the rent for the family.
My mom was sick, she couldn’t work, and so that was our situation at the time, or at least for me. Get up in the morning, we had one car, she’d drive to the office 5:00, get dropped off at the Olive Garden, work my shift, get picked up at 10:30, 11, come home, eat something, go to sleep, do it again. Five days a week, then Saturdays and Sundays, be at the Olive Garden at open, work all the way to close, both Saturday and Sunday, so yeah, seven days a week, I mean it was tough.
After a while of me busting my butt and working hard and paying all the bills, me and my dad, got into some heated arguments and I realized that I think I need to be doing my own thing. He wanted to go in one direction, I thought we should need to do something else. I said, “You know what? You do your thing. We’ll be civil, we’ll still live together, but I need to find something that I can do on my own and stop working at this fricking restaurant.”
I kept looking and looking and then one day there was an ad in the newspaper for a gas station that had been shut down. We looked at it, went to talk to the landlord, and basically it was a gas station. It was a store that was converted into a gas station. Didn’t really need to be a store, I don’t know what it was before, but somebody converted it into a gas station. They had to put a couple of pumps and a canopy outside and this thing had been shut down four times in the last four years. If you can imagine somebody comes in, opens the store, signs a long term lease, right? Fills it up with inventory, he starts it going, grand opening, blah blah blah, and then they shut down and they leave.
Next guy comes, same thing then leaves. The last guy who was there was only there for six months. I mean, he opened and shut down in six months. I was going to be number five in the line of progression. The landlord didn’t really want to take a chance, but no one else was even renting the place because it had such a bad reputation, so she took a chance and she signed me the lease, and at that point I didn’t even have any money, so I borrowed $50,000 from credit cards and personal loans, and that uncle that I told you about earlier, he actually had a gas station which was about an hour and a half away from where we lived, so I went to go see him once to see if he could train me in running a gas station.
I was there for maybe three or four hours, and he didn’t really train me very much. He just told me, “You’re not cut out for this,” is what he told me. But anyway, I decided to do it, and I had, when we signed the lease, I didn’t have anything else. It was either do or die, so I borrowed as much money as I could for the inventory. The equipment in the station, in the gas station, everything worked. The pumps worked, the freezers worked, the counter was there. Everything was there. The only thing I had to have some stuff. There was some shelving there as well, but I had to get rid of some stuff that was in there.
We’d clean up the store and fill it up with merchandise, buy some gas to put in the tank so we could actually start selling gas. It took me about, I tried to get it done in about two weeks, to clean the store, to find the vendors, to buy the merchandise and then open the store. At this point, I was doing everything I could full time. I had no employees, I had no experience, I learned as I went, got taken advantage of a bunch of times. At this point I had never even run a register before, a cash register. That’s how I was at this, so I went over to Sam’s Club, got me a cash register, got me an open sign, just trying to learn as I went.
And it took me two weeks to get ready and open the store, and that was it. We were open. Put a banner outside, “Grand opening,” and it was actually … I didn’t even know what to have, so the first couple months was people coming in, “Hell, you’re open again? Is this store open? Are you open?” “Yes, we’re open.” “Oh, okay. Do you have this thing?” “Um, no sir, I don’t. Let me write that down and I’ll make sure I get it for you.” ‘Cause I didn’t know what to put in a gas station. I did what I could, I did the best I could.
“Hey, do you have this type of beer?” “No, I’ll order it for you.” “Oh, do you have this brand of cigarettes?” I didn’t smoke at the time, so I didn’t know … Do you know how many different types of cigarettes there are? Geez, and now there’s even more, but at that time, there was menthol and non-menthol and light and ultra-light, and the same goes for the beer. So many different types of stuff that I had to learn, all the pricing that I had to learn. Everything was different. It was really a very hard learning experience, but I worked through it.
I worked with no employees, I worked from open to close, usually opening around nine or 10 in the morning, and then closing at 10 or 11 at night, so I’d be the only one there, and if I had to go buy inventory, I would shut the store down for a couple hours, go buy some inventory at Sam’s Club, whatever, some vendor, and then come back, and most of the stuff I tried to get delivered so I wouldn’t have to leave. Couldn’t leave for lunch, so I had to either make lunch in the morning, a sandwich or whatever, or get something delivered like a pizza or Mexican or Chinese or something, and that was my life. Open the store, work all day long, close the store, go to Taco Bell for dinner, go home and eat, go to sleep, take a shower and go to sleep.
That was my life, and Taco Bell why? Because they were really the fastest thing open at the time, so yeah, I did have a lot of Taco Bell, so this went on for about eight months, eight months of me doing everything, open to close. After eight months, I was finally able to hire my first employee. This is somebody who just walked in, “Hey, you hiring?” And I was like, “I don’t know how to hire. I’m really scared. This is a cash business. I don’t know this person. Where’d he come from?” And top it off, he had no gas station experience, but I was burned out. I was tired and I could afford an employee at the time, and he seemed like an honest guy, so I took a chance, hired him.
It took me two weeks to train him, and then came the day when I left him alone to run the store. I was so scared to leave my store in somebody else’s hands. I had worked so hard to get that store profitable, worked for every single customer, every repeat customer that we had, be super nice to them, try to learn their names, try to tell them jokes and all that stuff, and if he said something in the wrong way, he might piss off one of my customers and they would leave, but that’s what I was so scared about, and I left everything in his hands.
But that afternoon, I went home and didn’t really know what to do with myself, ’cause I hadn’t ever been home for a long time at that time, in the day time. It was roughly three or four in the afternoon, and I just lay down on the sofa, and I’m just sitting there thinking, and maybe about 20-30 minutes went by and I couldn’t take it, so I had to call him, “Hey man, how’s everything going? You need anything? You need me to come back to the store?” He’s like, “No man, I got it. I got it.” And while I was talking to him on the phone, I heard a customer come in, ’cause we had a little chime when the door opens, “Ching ching!”
A customer comes in, you have the chime, so this customer comes in, went back, got something from the store, came, brought it to the table. They started chit-chatting, “Hey how you doing? What’s going on? Da da da, okay that’ll be …” Whatever it was. “$5.99,” whatever. The guy gave him the money and gave him change and the customer left, and that is when I had an epiphany. That is when the clouds parted for me and the sun shone on my face, and I realized that even though I was at home laying on the couch, my store was still open and making me money. I was making money without doing any work.
That was the most freeing feeling in the world, making money without working. My money, my asset, was earning more for me. It was mind-blowing. I was high on the feeling for at least a couple weeks. I had this smile on my face for a couple weeks. I was like, “Ah man, I’m so cool. I’m so smart, yeah man. I’m doing it, a ha ha!” I was so over-confident. Those were the days, that was awesome.
Those of you who have businesses, you know what I’m talking about. Automatic money, money on autopilot, so when you have an asset, whether you have a store or a website or a service that others are paying or and that you’re not the one working, you’re not the one selling, you’re not the one delivering that service, you just sit back, let the system do it all. That is freedom when it comes to money.
And that is probably, I think, one of the most amazing feelings you can have when it comes to money. Sure, it does take time and investment to set it up, but if done correctly, it is extremely profitable and exhilarating, and that is one of the reasons I sell options, because a sold option is working for me. Time decay is my employee, manning the register, making me money day after day, and I can make money without doing any more work.
Time decay, because that option that sold is losing value, and eventually hopefully it will expire worthless and go poofo and magically disappear, so I just need to do the work once, figure out which option to sell, sell it, boom, then it’s making money for me. If you want to feel this feeling that I’m talking about, and if you don’t have your own business, then go out and sell some options, and thing about them, but think about how they are freeing you up, how they’re your employees working for you, generating income for you, and you are at home on the couch relaxing or whatever you’re doing, but you’re not physically working.
You’re not trading dollars for hours, you’re not dealing with the stress of customers and vendors and all that stuff. Selling options is so much better than having a gas station, I’ve got to tell you, I really have to tell you. I was happy to sell that business after … I sold it after four years, but yeah, at first it was a happy ending, because I made enough from that business to pay off all my debts. I had about, when I started the store, I had $50,000 in debt, and then I borrowed $50,000 more for the store, so I had $100,000 in debt, paid all that off, bought my parents a house, furnished the house, paid for my wedding, paid for my honeymoon, and then had money left over to go do something else.
It was a very profitable venture. At one time, we had multiple employees, so I didn’t have to go there at all except for once or twice just to check on things, but I got to tell you that trading options, so much better, so much easier, so much less stress than that, because the one thing I’ll tell you about owning a gas station or … It’s a pretty dangerous job to own a gas station, because they get ripped off a lot, and those cashiers, they get killed. They get mugged, they get beat up, they get killed, and so even when I had the store, I was always fearful that I was going to get a call and it’d be from the police saying that my employee was shot and I had to come and run the store or identify his body because somebody had come in and shot him and robbed us.
And so that’s not something I ever want for anybody else, so with options, don’t have to deal with any of that. That stress is not there. The stress of having people work for you, if they’re going to show up, not show up. You business people that have a business, you know what I’m talking about. If you ever manage people and they don’t do what they’re supposed to do, you have to fire people, you’ve got to hire people new, train them. With options, you don’t have to do any of that stuff. It’s almost like the perfect business, and you do the work once and you get paid for it, and then every day, every day, right now, this very second, as you are listening, your options are decaying and you are getting wealthier. Pretty cool right?
You bet it is. All right folks, that’s it for me. Until next time, trade with the odds in your favor.
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