How To Make $80,000 PER MONTH | Ep. 10 Feat Linguamarina

yeah welcome back to the iced coffee hour cheers smash the like button away i'm jack this is marina hey this is our guest for the 10th ever episode of the iced coffee hour thank you so much for tuning in yeah you picked a good episode to be a part of today it's a special one so just to give everyone an overview of who you are you have three youtube channels if i'm correct and between all three channels you have over four million subscribers right correct yeah so i started my first youtube channel back in 2014 uh when i was trying to get admitted to us university and i realized there's not an information there's not enough information in russian um so starting my russian channel it's over 1 million followers now and i talk about everything like life in the u.s investing started sharing my experience then the second channel is called lingua marina this is where i teach people languages has over 2 million followers and the latest channel is silicon valley girl started at two two years ago to talk about business and life in silicon valley it's funny enough that's the channel that i knew i didn't even know you had two other channels yeah i just need silicon it's just so different yeah that's the thing because i wanted to target different people because with lingua marina i realized i live in the us but i talk to people from all over the world but i really want to talk to people in the u.s so it had to be a different channel yeah but yeah i started watching your channel about maybe two years ago because the algorithm the algorithm kept pushing your stuff oh nice yeah i love it your videos just kept coming up recommended so yeah good good job algorithm oh yeah thank you how did you do that did you have like a marketer or did you just work on the thumbnails and study it nothing yeah i just i just experimented and tried things and i think whenever you do a video top 10 whatever the algorithm just loves those videos oh we don't we should do a top 10 podcast now that we've had 10 episodes oh yeah you could do the top 10 iced coffee hours we could make it 10 hours long that's smart so giving a little introduction about yourself you also have a course correct yeah i have a youtube course um actually two youtube courses how to start on youtube and how to grow on youtube but apart from that i think that my most most of my time goes to my company called linguatrip it's a silicon valley startup backed by silicon valley investors it's like a study abroad booking platform for a language travel and we also have an online part where we teach people languages online i didn't know you had another youtube creator academy because that's what i have linked down below in the description so you are you competition how much you sell it for uh 199. oh wow well mine if that with the discount is 197. so maybe we just throw in the discount here the longer kite you let's hear the link down below for 197. we'll do it 200 off there you go i think i have a slightly different approach i see a lot of youtubers who are trying to be bilingual um enroll my course because they speak two languages and they want to be famous and both demographics so yeah imagine that when when fame is not enough in one language you're like you know what how many other languages are i need to be known in all languages exactly i got to learn another language i tried learning spanish and i had three years of spanish and uh i don't remember a single thing high school not a single thing not a single thing you speak four languages i speak russian english german and a little italian that's impressive this is what you do when you come from a foreign country not english-speaking country because you just have to where were you born russia russia and when did you move over here um 2016. wow that'll do it yeah because i was never really forced to speak another language except in like a 50-minute class in high school and that was it yeah you know did it take you a long time to learn all those languages or was it kind of just no yeah i started learning english at the age of four and then it was just a long process and then was german i started at the age of 12 and italian was just for fun it's impressive yeah you're never ended with learning a language you just learn and learn and learn wow so how are the the courses going i've actually stopped calling them courses i call them programs now oh because all the amazon fba people ruined the word course i think because there's so many of those courses the first thing you think course is like ah it's a scam so i start program yeah that sounds better yeah i like it so you have a program you have two programs you sell yeah and then after that someone's gonna ruin program and then it's gonna be something else so we gotta think we gotta be ahead of this one and think what's what do we call it after pro mentorship everything could just be a mentorship mentorship is also like this kind of work it's taught in english for people who just produce courses and do nothing scam artist a scammer yeah it's a nice word right yes this is bad not at all yeah because we have a special word in russia and i i just got interviewed by a major russian magazine on how to tell if a person is a good course producer or a bad course producer this is a good spot for an ad break i think so how how do you how do you tell um so basically when somebody produces a course about a thing he's not an expert in like for example if you didn't have any followers on youtube but you started your pro program makes sense yeah okay and we have like i see a lot of people who are teaching business but their only business is producing horses and teaching other people oh yeah oh it's it's the people that teach you how to make money online and they sell of course but how they make all their money online is the course exactly so it's a course on how to build the course it's smart yeah it is it works yeah yeah to to some time as long as it's an effective course like imagine i go to you and i'll be like i'm gonna teach you how you can make a dollar it's only going to cost one dollar so you pay me a dollar i'm going to teach you how to make that dollar back yeah so to sum it all up essentially what you are is just an entrepreneur because you have many different business ventures what started it all like how did you start out what was your first venture uh linguatrip uh it was it didn't have this name when we started so we were both dimitri and i my husband was studying together in one university uh we started dating dating data for one year and then he said we need to start something together because you're so good at languages and there are so many people who want to travel and learn languages because this is the reality for europe and we decided to start our first company we only had three hundred dollars invested three hundred dollars sent our first client to the uk and then we only had three clients in a year but then it just kind of started growing and uh yeah it grew too how do you invest three hundred dollars what do you what is what is that incorporated okay made a cpa too so you just got incorporated and then the rest was just your time exactly okay and then what about did you grow up was it referrals and stuff like that we started sending our friends abroad so the first three clients are our close friend and then what did you do before that i just studied at a university so i tried working for avon when i was like 12 i think that was my first event cosmetics you're asking the wrong people about god yeah cosmetics or macy's it's like like this pyramid oh i know amway yeah it's very similar oh okay so it's it's a multi-level marketing exactly yeah not pyramid it's multi-level marketing so you would get it and then you'd sell it to someone else and then it trickles down yeah people can make a lot of money from that if they if they're at the top of the pyramid you just always want to be at the top of the pyramid you're going to do it you may as well just do it right have you seen this uh documentary on netflix or herbalife john what was it yeah herbal live oh that's yeah there's some yeah it's a good i i saw one a while ago about some clothing company that did that where people were spending thousands of dollars to get started with this clothing brand oh my god and they would have these managers that would just yell at these people be like you're not selling enough product like the only way to move up is you need like this special thing and this is why you're not selling enough and they'll sell you like another two thousand dollar thing and it's it's a lot of these like a lot of people who are like out of work or whatever just like going and credit oh oh yeah they were telling people to open up credit cards who didn't have the money to pay for their open up zero percent interest credit card put it on the credit card you'll make it all back classic that's terrible yeah uh i almost got involved with one of those before i started working with you because i was looking at craigslist ads for for jobs and because i i just hated my current my you know my past job so much i was like what can i do to get out of here and i found one it was called cutco and it was it's the knives exactly and it was like 20 an hour and i was like okay this isn't so bad and it seemed like pretty decent and then i just i was like okay but there's no way that they would just accept some random person you don't need to have any sort of like you know history doing something similar it was just anybody could do it and i was like this sounds too good to be true so i just looked up is cutco a scam like you know endless results just saying like yeah i don't trust this company that happened to me too in high school i was 17 and i went same thing craigslist and i went on craigslist and there was something about like you know being in sales and working your own hours and being your own boss and i remember emailing back and forth with the guy and saying like i just wanted to learn like i didn't even want to get paid i just wanted to shadow this guy and figure out like what he does all day that's all i wanted but he ended up meeting me to starbucks which is the the number one sign that's probably mlm is they're meeting you at a starbucks so i actually wore like a suit oh my god suit to this thing and this dude was sitting there with his computer trying to sell me i kid you not i'm sure we could look for a screenshot of this online uh but it was it was a phone it was like facetime before there was facetime it was a phone with the camera on it and then if someone else had the phone with the camera on it you guys could see each other as you're talking on the phone and it hooked up to the internet and anyway i would i would have been selling those and that's what it was but he didn't he had no intention of like mentoring me or anything that's what i wanted but uh yeah i'm sure we could i'm sure we could find that yeah my experience was better my mom had to sign the contract because i was 12. uh you're 12. yes this is when i started experimenting wait wow you were still i was still russia yeah in russia at school and i sold everything to my teachers uh but yeah i didn't need a lot of money to start up front they just gave me the catalogs and i started that was my first selling experience and then um i did some singing for like five years a song or something like that um but then yeah i had some oh yeah and i had an internship at a souvenir store where i could practice my english with um tourists but then that was it and then we started a company wow but working at 12 what prompted you to figure i need to make money i just wanted to try you just want to make my own yeah i was dreaming about doing making money from earlier on and i was just thinking what can i do at the age of 12. so you've always had that mindset like you work hard yeah exactly smart to market teachers yeah that's smart because they they you have a lower likelihood of them saying no right right like girl scouts yeah it's but those are that's so good yeah and you can't just say no to like a cute little nose because you want to encourage that type of behavior you don't want to be like no get out get a scam yeah because then you then you then they're ruined for the rest so how many teachers said yes oh a lot i think that yeah out of you and then actually making like a deal oh yeah well like a hundred dollars was the maximum that i could make in a month why was it capped at 100 no this is this is what i could do i mean in terms of like myself okay um it wasn't a lot of money but russia was a lot so what would that be equivalent to in the us today like a hundred a month would be a thousand there's a thirty thousand million yeah so you barely afford so in russia we have this different situation like in the us we pay taxes on things we own like right property in russia you don't really pay if you do pay tax they're really really small so if you own something you can just survive on like fifty dollars or a hundred dollars because you don't have all the fees so i'm earning a hundred dollars at 12 years old it wasn't in russia was it's got to be thousands basically like the equivalent well equivalent of a thousand dollars a month i would say wow yeah oh my god yeah a 12 if i had like 50 bucks whoa i gotta do i gotta just get on a plane and go to russia and start doing that wow good gig impressive geez that is cool so all of that stuff is what ultimately led up to you starting your own business yeah and uh and it started off slowly for about a year very slowly for about a year and then it started accelerating and then we decided that we don't want to have this offline business we want to build an online platform and uh dmitry my husband had this idea of you know raising money in silicon valley and i was like why would people in silicon valley give us money because we're a no-name company in russia but we just started reaching out to people and then we had a meeting with a guy who was forbes 30 under 30. saw this company here in the us and he was traveling around europe to just meet startups and we had a meeting and he was like wow i'm going to introduce you to y combinator and 500 startups top two accelerators um here and he introduced us and the next night i had an interview and then i think it was tuesday morning i wake up and you should understand our situation we're running out of money we had a lot of debts we didn't know how to market the product and then one morning i wake up and i see this email from 500 startups we're offering you a hundred thousand dollars in investment wow it's a four-month program so we just backed and um came here that's incredible what did it take for you to be able to get the investors to like invest in you like a lot of meetings a lot of knows i remember uh being on a stage in russia in front of russian investors and pitching my startup and then the guy who's considered like a really good investor in russia he stands up and says the best thing you can do right now is shut down your company because we've already worked with a similar company and they couldn't make any profit so i think you know you just need to find a job or do something else and i was there like standing on the stage nearly crying because you know the pressure and a [ __ ] yeah yeah exactly yeah that was kevin o'leary who said that yeah and then for that reason i'm barbara yeah and then you know just a lot of bitching a lot of meetings that's horrifying yeah but props to you thank you and then because of that you decided to start uh your youtube channel yeah so two factors first i was preparing for gmat and i realized all the info is in english and i wanted to start a russian channel and then we moved to the us and uh we got a retired police interceptor for 2700 on craigslist that's cool because this is like a car we could afford and that looked decent and i made a video about that and it went viral in russia because you know a girl driving a police car yeah in america and then i realized youtube is something six months after starting a youtube channel i got my first hundred dollars and i was like wow that's kind of cool yeah yeah that first little bit that you make from youtube is the most exciting money anybody's ever going to make really it's it's like getting introduced to like a drug i i don't i don't do drugs let's make it clear i'm imagining that's what doesn't do drugs or but like i would imagine like people say like they get hooked on yeah like i remember even earning like 10 cents on youtube this beginning few days it's so it was so cool for me i was like oh wow how do i get more of this how big was your first check uh it was no checks it's direct deposit i think the minimum is a hundred so um yeah i mean i don't know probably a few hundred bucks for that first it was like i don't know the first the first actual month of being monetized i think i made like 1100 or something like that for that first full month yeah that's pretty cool though yeah how about you a hundred because that was like accumulated for a couple months oh right i didn't even withdraw that so it took a while yeah wow that was pretty fast yeah it was beautiful and have you found that youtube is better to use as a way to get more people to go to your business or it's good in itself with like adsense and stuff like that so first it was the way to get more customers for a lingua trip and then i think when i started a channel in english this is when i started seeing good adsense revenue because if you're blogging in russian you don't get a lot of i think the cpm in russian is so much two dollars it seems like almost every other country is just a fraction at least right now what the united states is but i think give it like a few years other countries are going to start ramping because i don't think they're are they catching on to youtube do they do they know about it are there enough advertisers it's just people earn less money in those countries okay they have a lot of advertisers matches just how much they can pay per click i guess uh that makes sense yeah now we have a very monetizable audience your view right now you watch it you have a valuable view your view is probably worth two cents believe it or not so thank you really thank you do you get a lot of views from uh countries like india not so much i think for us it's about 65 united states and then canada and then there's so much australia a lot of australia and then some of you a uk it's a big one and then it just it goes down from there it's like it's really good norway's like even higher than the us i think it's 2x compared to the us i guess we know what we're going to be doing exactly so you found it was best to to use it in the beginning to market to yeah get a better audience yeah and then i started vlogging in english and i realized this is a completely different check that's coming in every month yeah how many streams of income do you have if you're willing to disclose this oh sure so language have number one uh google adsense number two paid partnerships affiliate programs um my youtube course investment income oh investment income just edit that oh instagram ads when people buy ads for me on instagram oh yeah that's familiar how does that work oh like sponsored like sponsorships oh i'm like wait instagram has ads what yeah sponsorships um oh and i have my workbooks this is an amazing income source because you produce it's like a books like a pdf i call them handbooks and workbooks and they sell for like seven dollars and the one that i made was for english language learners it has 180 pages and in the first month we made 25 000 selling it um wait what is it exactly it's like you know it's a lot of things in one handbook so we have like a thousand words that every english language learner should know tv shows that you should watch like a lot of information about the english language youtube channels you should watch uh the iced coffee hour graham stefan exactly oh and imagine imagine if if people could sponsor themselves in there sort of like the best tv shows and it's like it's all paid getting there best youtuber the bet the best programs to buy best coffee to drink that's smart so you have this like book the workbook and that's another form of income yeah so you have like seven or so yeah quite a few yeah are you able to disclose percentages or numbers or no we want to know number i mean number is ideal we don't we don't have to okay so yeah sure i think uh google adsense this month is around 17 000. for which for all combined okay compared to you yeah i wish you yesterday oh wait which one the uh the net worth oh wow yeah yeah yeah a lot of people watch that yeah um then so workbooks around 10k every month uh paid partnerships uh 30k a month wow wait what what kind of paid partnerships do you do so like companies that we work with like product placements in my videos what companies audible skillshare uh we got it we got to talk about this afterwards because yeah i'm not doing anywhere close to that wow maybe i'm getting yeah really who are you working with all of them uh what are you talking about for a sponsor yeah like you mentioned a sponsored chat well not all of them uh let's see which one is it audible skillshare uh blinkist no i i i just did morning brew which is an online newsletter investment newsletter which seems like a really cool company um trade coffee which has been awesome i like them a lot uh can you just close how much you charge i can't not on the pod i'll disclose that separately but i said i'll just cut it out it'll bleep it out yeah is that i mean is that about on average really but you just do more uh yeah and my channel's a lot smaller but that's the thing that's oh yeah you should have charged a lot more be confident oh yeah and then they'll be like wow people like you charge like are you serious just bleep out the numbers like for this part like the part just bleep those out i mean i do i do yeah i mean yeah i'm getting shortchanged i mean person maybe because i hired a salesperson and she was able to secure all the deals people reach out to us all the time and they're from agencies that link people agencies are not good because agencies are going to take part of your profit fair enough so if you have a sales person who's reaching out to companies that you like um so we have this strategy where um you know crunchbase is a website that says how much the company has raised so if i tell kate for example i want to advertise somebody in education she goes to crunch base sees who recently raised series or series b that means they have a lot of marketing budget she reaches out to them says hey we have this amazing channel do you want to collaborate and if they have an ongoing program sometimes they reach out themselves but there's also i'd be interested and let me know on that i'm see this is it you're getting a real conversation i mean that's the thing like we would be grounded in two years my net worth do you know what we need wow honey to sponsor us oh honey honey i think honey may be an offer but uh believe it or not i wanted like i wanted more for them and they were gr i love it but they're they did they barely offered they were paying less than almost anybody else but like h3 and huge youtubers do honey and i feel like they probably get like a lot i think honey is such a good app and they're so safe that anybody would just their audience wouldn't be upset because like sponsors are one of those things at least on my channel where i'm afraid if i do it too often then it just kind of ruins the message so you gotta sprinkle it in every now and there's that trade-off but honey i feel like if i mention honey to my audience you'd be like oh thank you so much graham thank you for mentioning honey and they're not going to be upset versus maybe somebody else yeah so wow i'm learning a lot yeah okay find something new yeah so we got to do that sponsorships um yes some of them are on instagram but youtube is a bigger chunk um workbooks um last month it was around 9k what else well language of salary i don't want to disclose it what else do we have oh courses last month i made around 30k on courses that's good that's really good what have we averaged this month like 50 60 yeah maybe around there a month i think you do a little bit less than that a little less than that a little bit well it's it's it's staggered because everyone waits until i have a sale and then and then it goes down the average yeah yeah because i only really will do like a like a sale push like maybe twice a year mm-hmm uh do you do any marketing no oh that's the thing so if people want to buy one of my programs programs in the description i never really market i never push it so it's there if people want to get it and if they don't want to get it that's fine too so i never i never push it because we have marketing okay marketing okay webinars and stuff oh yeah so i've never done that it's just the occasional just link in the video swipe up story and that's it so i purposely tried to not push it because i feel like i don't want to be too pushy gosh i'm under charging on on sponsorship anyway that's going to ruin my i'm going to be up if you know you know that meme where the the the girlfriend is uh what was it oh what's that what's he thinking yeah what's he thinking and he's like he looks all concerned that's gonna be me tonight yeah like three o'clock in the morning how much do they leave on the table for sponsorships wow so i i was adding it up in my head it's almost a hundred thousand a month it is about yeah about wow so that's there's your title right there yeah so let's talk about being a business owner how is your time allocated throughout your average day and what's it like to just be a business owner yeah that's a great question um so i start working in the morning around 8 a.m whenever my baby wakes up so um from 9am to 10am i think it's just back and forth with uh with the team then uh light lunch breakfast time with my baby then she goes to sleep and i film my videos and she wakes up then maybe so it's you know back and forth sometimes i have days when i just film so today uh all that came over my camera guy and we just filmed the whole day because i'm leaving tomorrow and i need a lot of content before i go uh but i would say per day i spend like a couple of hours on my companies in a couple of hours on creating content so four days i try to you know work for four days uh four hours a day yeah i was having a child in the middle of all that congratulations thank you yeah she's that oh my goodness yeah she's eight months old uh yeah it's it's pretty cool i have my mom here she came over from russia to help out because otherwise i don't know how are you going back to russia uh so we're going there for a couple months and then we're going to come back probably with a nanny because my mom can't be here for so long is that where you live i used to live there yeah but you currently like you're oh so i've lived in san francisco since 2016. um and then we just got tired of the city because we lived in one of the high rises and then the lockdown started and you know going down an elevator with like 10 people and uh every every walk was a struggle and we don't have a lot of parks and the city everything is closed and you can't really use the city's benefits and we decided to move out and we moved out in may and we just traveled throughout california we've been to dillon beach malibu malibu is our favorite location so far um palo alto with a baby with a baby wow and that was the perfect time i feel the travel oh yeah exactly kind of with everything shut down so many deals the first trip that we took was in may and we stayed at this airbnb in malibu for 200 a night now it's renting out for 1 600 a night because they just realized people started traveling so we got a lot of great deals in maine june now it's not that well i was thinking for traffic like almost anywhere you drive right because that's the first thing from l.a it's like what's the traffic light yeah traffic there's no traffic right now which is which is a benefit yeah and not a lot of tourists which is great yeah on being a business owner how many employees do you have so we um we have a lot of contractors this is the way we structure the company because there are a lot of things people can do from all over the world and we have a team in several countries we have 55 people on the team we used to have 80 but then uh with the illness the illness you know we just say the illness yeah because you don't get demonetized you no longer get no yeah i heard it was no longer i don't believe it really i don't think okay i don't know just in case okay just the illness let's talk about spending money what percent of your income do you save so last month's month was it was a bad month because i spent 50 of my income that's a lot of money that's a lot truck because we're traveling we're traveling i got flights to russia i got you know just thing oh that includes my team my personal team that includes my personal assistant salesperson marketing person so i i still consider it my personal income so uh that's why but yeah normally i try to spend 20 to 30 percent of my income that's that's that's good yeah that's good but you spend one less than one percent something like that i mean it's absurdly though well now i got the house so it's it's a little bit more but the net the net you know i do some creative numbers there to make it lower counting the rent to my other place but anyway yeah it's something like that yeah and what do you think about living frugally i don't like it oh get out you know what i know what i started doing this month whenever i buy something from a company that means i trust this company so for example when i got my first iphone if i bought apple stocks as well i would have afforded like three iphones with one stock today so this is what i thought if i trust a company if i like it if i make a purchase uh then i would invest the same amount of money into stocks because if i believe in it it will probably grow so i'm trying to follow this rule this month we'll see it's a good way of thinking yeah but yeah i i don't like to live really because i think i'm missing out on things like travel i love traveling and i just can't and when you have a family like i have my mom and my daughter travel with me and i need you know a nice house because we need space and film there that costs money uh i want a nicer car because i like get a tesla travel do you drive a nice car we ordered cyber truck i have unfortunately whenever that happens yeah porsche which one uh okay km oh the suv yeah yeah okay i forgot what i was about to say i was about to say something and i was like this is a group you know i watched some of your videos about living for gillian they're like should i try it and then like that nah it's just like saving you're pretty good yeah i'm trying but i really because i feel people have created so many things i want to try like different hotels i want to stay in or you know jewelry that is nice or cars that are piece pieces of art um i just want to test it out because there is one life you know yeah i mean there's ways to get the same experiences for the less that's right like like your porsche by the same car a few years old yeah exactly travel you could you could just do credit card churning it's credit card sign up bonuses a lot of ways to get the same experience like like food go to the happy hour stuff like that that's easy i think it all just comes down to what you really want out of life and if you because as long as you're not stupid with it because obviously you aren't because you're still saving a decent amount of money and if you just want you know to spend that extra 15 or whatever yeah and the mindset also because uh when i was at the university i spent a lot of my mental energy on how do i save money how do i have lunch for you know uh the light do we need to fix it no oh oh it's not plugged in all the way oh it must have come undone it's our rinky dink studio yeah everything in the bottom wasn't plugged in all the way it just came out yes got the electric in this place it's going and it's gonna blow in a moment oh my gosh yes at some point i realized i spent too much of my mental energy on figuring out how i saved money yeah and then i thought okay if i end up spending 15 more 20 more um i just saved that mental energy that and invested into something like business or another youtube video yeah and uh this is why i stopped doing like you know calculations all the time like oh my god i need to shop here because it's cheaper i find it fun though that that to me is a bit it's just like a sport you know it's like oh it's like two dollars i i got him i won yes i won this time yeah yeah i i see where you're coming from and i've always kind of thought that in the back of my head with graham because you and i have spent a crazy amount of time sometimes just doing stupid things like when we were like trying to put in that light in the guest unit like how long did we spend on that an hour yeah at least like we put in a light right it's like your timers were so much more than that and that was a stress remember how frustrated we were i got angry standing on like the piano those are memories those are memories that you remember that's true yeah same with this i installed this this is like i installed myself i think that the guy wanted like 80 bucks to install this uh we did it in like an hour only 90 minutes whenever i look at it every every morning every night i get home it's like you look at the light you're like i did that yeah as long as you don't get frustrated because i get frustrated if i have to clean the whole house and i realize i could have paid somebody to do that and could have you know spend time with my child instead i just get frustrated yeah what might be different if you have a family yeah you know that's true like like a kid and then but but then but then you could teach your child how to do stuff like that you know she does all the stuff yeah old enough to like wire something together with electricity and at four or five whatever and then they can you could get them to pay for themselves it's a marketable trait and then you could then you could figure out some infinite monetization loop where you react to them reacting to sesame street or something like that some weird stuff and uh yeah you're good yeah market your children that's always a great thing to do but yeah i mean we've strung up the lights in the backyard i mean that took like two and a half hours yeah two and a half hours me and graham so five hours between our time stringing up lights in the backyard using like a broom and like literally tying the extension cord to a rock and trying to throw it over it yeah there's a tree out in the back that's like 30 feet tall and we wanted to get these cool like edison lights around the tree that was 30 feet tall we had no way of getting up there jack tried to climb the tree that didn't work we didn't have a ladder we couldn't hire a professional but i wanted it done that night so yeah we got creative two and a half hours later we just stung the light around i mean it's perfect yeah so oh by the way if i mean if anyone needs lights strung up you know in l.a area we're a good duo we'll take hours yeah installing those lights but we'll do it we'll get it right we'll have the good memories yeah that was a fun night though i think we got uh did we get sushi that night i think we rewarded ourselves i think so no you see that our thing is that if we get the agreement was that if we post a video and that video is a one out of ten meaning it's the best performing video out of the last ten we get sushi and that's our celebration to get a one out of ten so i think that day we got a one out of ten and then we installed the lights here yeah nice we do reward ourselves yeah on occasion but that's good that yeah you know you you found your balance and i think it's totally somewhere like reasonable so yeah but i still feel that i have to make more money in order not to end up spending 50 of my income and uh what are some of the things that you've spent money on that you think graham would just like disagree with to afford the car not necessarily because porsches have good resale value uh i mean what did you buy it for 50k 50 games how long have you had it for uh a year and a half what year is it 2016. i think it's probably worth 35 40. that's not terrible yeah it's pretty much the same calculator pretty much the same as uh leasing but you're releasing a new one but i don't really like the new one because i like the older one with all the buttons leasing could be better for you as a write-off though oh yeah that's true but that car i think would be better as a writer nothing about write-offs when i started when i when i bought the car i mean it's good you own it now but in the future for i would probably lease a car like that is it better he's a tesla are you leasing a tesla it's terrible terrible uh lease rates on teslas but are you leasing or 78 dollars a month 78 dollars a month so yeah it was worth it to buy it yeah you didn't see that video that's 78 dollars it's one of your best performing videos yeah it was yeah i didn't see it yeah no tesla offers so many rebates we should put a referral link for the tesla in the district let's actually do this uh but they have so many rebates available and at the time i think there was a 3750 dollar federal tax credit there was a california tax credit on top of that uh there was i was able to depreciate the car there's so many things with tesla that just it made so much sense to get the car into the first year it only cost me 78 a month and then after that i mean it was really just the cost of insurance which was nothing anyway and um there's no gas electricity was a dollar a day so it just was so cheap it was cheaper than any other car i can get nice so alongside the porsche is there anything else that you think um that's not that bad flying business class you would just hit pro is business never done something at first uh on some flights yes and sometimes no uh but yeah when you fly for 13 hours i flew economy a lot of times and you just come to a place where you're traveling completely you know sleepless and you're jet lagged and then we started flying business and it's a completely different experience because you can you know sleep when you fly and then you come rested yeah i've never flown for more than like five hours six hours the most have you ever flown business or first no you haven't no even with the miles that you're getting i don't know i i i'm in a terrible habit of saving my miles at this point for i don't know what uh you're just avoiding so many months i want to get a million miles don't you want to try that yes lifestyle for once i'm curious but part of me part of me is afraid of uh liking it too much and then but i also don't want to waste all my miles income yeah but i look at the miles and i'm like i could get x amount of flights with those miles or i can get like three big flights i'd rather a whole bunch of little tiny ones i don't know i'm sure i'm sure i'll take a hundred hundred bucks yeah i mean i'll do it at some point big ones are like 3k or 4k and then you're just saving i'll do it at some point macy and i wanted for my birthday and obviously this didn't happen because of the illness that went around but we were going to be going through there's a place she tagged me on instagram as a joke uh called graham's place and we clicked it because it was actually a thing and clicked it it's an island it's called graham's place and it's just i don't it's somewhere off of um is it off of mexico or something so anyway it's it's it's somewhere it's like seven hours away but our plan was to go to graham's place for my birthday and yeah i would have used my miles on that i don't know if i would have gone like business class but maybe i don't know yeah i've always wondered what that would be like too but there's no way i would ever just such a completely different experience when you don't have to wait in line when you get into the airplane that's true waiting in line so you don't have to and you get a business lounge where you can take a shower oh but you but you have a priority if you have priority pass that does that though ah not really because uh for example sfo san francisco airport you have this pretty bus lounge which is not a lounge at all it's just an area where you rest but then you have the united lounge that you can use if you're flying business and it's uh i have united lounge access too oh you do yeah oh credit card credit card jpmorgan reserve oh of course that's good yeah i like united and then i have the centurion lounge oh nice okay then you have covered yeah yeah yeah and then maybe the last one would be like staying in five-star hotels like four seasons because i just like these yeah i stayed at the win the other week um for fourth of july that was a that was a cool one that was one of the first like that was probably the nicest hotel i've stayed at was it worth it probably not i mean it was it was nice but i'm not sure it was like nice night i don't know i i just i don't i'm not a huge fan of hotels i just like having my own space like an airbnb i think would be a much better value than a hotel plus it's like i hate having you park your car in a parking structure and it takes you 10 minutes to walk through the hotel like up to your room and i just i don't like it i like the park walk through door and then i'm there it's nice but it just yeah let's talk about investments so what's your investment portfolio look like do you manage it yourself or do you have an advisor yeah i manage it myself and that was by the way one of my questions so basically i have i don't have a lot investor right now because i'm still like maybe i should still have it on my la bank account or capital one savings account uh but i've invested in some uh index funds with vanguard um i think i have this uh the one that's mimicking five hundred the one x yeah and then international avtix i think and then the one that has bonds and blacks or whatever it is and uh oh the one that's um mimicking properties so it's like a that's like a reit okay all right and then i have some stocks um and so my goal is to have 2.5 million invested in five years okay and um so i'm thinking whether we should get something like a property but the the thing here is that i don't want to get something just for renting it out i want to get something that i would be comfortable living in with a family that's good school safe neighborhood and also a place where i can network so something like well silicon valley is impossible with this kind of money like malibu for example i really like the neighborhood close to l.a and then it's very quiet um so yeah but on the other hand you know you have those properties that you can buy for like 250k or 400k 500k but i won't live there so there's this trade of whether i should get investment property or something where i can live but that will be more expensive maybe not a good deal i don't think investment property is worth your time i mean if you're making that amount of money you going and researching properties and trying to like navigate a mortgage on those things and then renting it out and dealing with a property manager probably isn't worth it unless you get such a good deal where it's like you can't pass it up and there's so much equity in the property that you just basically walk into but you doing all the legwork yourself at this i just don't think it's worth it why why are you doing it because i've already done it yeah well two things one is because i mean that's just what i've known my entire life is just real estate real estate investing uh but even now i don't look at it the same way uh because a lot of that a lot of the legwork i did when like that was really worth my time like really going in there and making like 80 grand in equity i would do any like i managed all this project myself i was there every single morning just like figuring out contractors and it's just not worth my time anymore to do that because you're still buying you bought something this one yeah so i bought this i mean this was this was more so for myself but i also i liked it long term as an investment but um but yeah and we needed the space here but uh yeah i mean right now i'm looking for something else maybe as like an office space that i can get nearby here and then renovate and but but that's more so just mostly for yourself not notice right well well the office would be more for tax reasons but um yeah for me going and trying to get a property and renovate it it's like i wouldn't do it i wouldn't do it right now at least at least for me at this time okay got it yeah i think for you at your level it's just stick with something basically you don't even have to think about unless it's such a good deal where it's it makes sense and then obviously if you get something for yourself there's a price you'll pay for that obviously so who knows if that'll be a good investment long term but i think if you get something for yourself as long as you plan to live there for longer than like 10 15 years it's going to be way cheaper to buy something yeah that's that's also the thing we travel all the time one day we want to live in palo alto the next day we like san francisco so we're all over the place it's probably better and until you're looking for a place to really settle down for like 15 years it's probably better for you to rent and then you have the mobility to get up and move around as you please yeah not pay all the taxes right yeah on average how many hours do you think you work per week and what do you do to unwind and de-stress so in total i say i work four hours every day i don't really have a weekend because on the weekend i post on instagram and i think about content for the next week so i try to have one day off that's hard um to relax good question i watch other people's videos i read books i take courses take my programs buy programs and watch courses watch programs um yeah shop sometimes that's family that's not de-stressing that's stressful for me yeah i bought a bean bag today by the way did you really actually soak it like a big one or like yeah a six foot bean bag yeah i'm dead serious wow yeah that's a good boost yeah bean bags are really good that's what i thought because i wanted to be like sometimes i see these chairs and like everything is so neatly like place i want to think did you just kind of like toss down like i could work from there it's comfortable or i could work from over there i can move it around so yeah i bought a beanbag but i price shopped on amazon uh there was a beanbag for like 250 bucks and then i found the same bean bag on wayfair for like one 155 so i saved a hundred dollars versus search what's up reverse images classic nice nice that's a good purchase right now actually it might be bigger than six feet because they ordered the xxl they had an xl and then i ordered the xxx you're gonna be loving it yeah i think so i'm excited oh it comes on friday the 31st nice yeah so that's my splurge like that's what i like splurged on today was i bought a bean bag that's cool yeah that's cool yeah i tried doing that doesn't work for me no bean bags why no i mean when you call 150 purchases that's a big deal yeah that's a big deal for me i thought you meant a bean bag like i tried the bean bag didn't work i'm like what could that not be for cause i i've i've actually never had a bean bag before ever like my friends have had bean bags growing up yeah it's so cool just to jump in them um they're the best i've never had one so now i get down yeah all right so what i found really interesting is a trend i've noticed is that people that are very successful like you and graham in your free time to de-stress and unwind you do things that are productive and something that will like take you further in life like because i feel i feel bad whenever i don't do something that's productive yeah i i have hard hard time actually having rest and i think that comes from my childhood whenever it was weekend i wasn't allowed to go to parties i wasn't allowed to do bad stuff by my parents so i just had to stay at home and work and if i didn't work i felt like i'm missing out on something so i always need to do something otherwise i feel bad yeah yeah i'm the same way yeah for me the drums is a good way to de-stress really like towards yeah yeah exactly and you see the progress towards something like that same with gym tick-tock is a good way to de-stress i started doing videos for tick-tock and it's a lot of fun when you try and dance and graham you got to start that i thought oh i thought about doing it today believe it or not it's not too late i don't know i got i got caught up in something else but i'll do a tick-tock that's good yeah that's good moving in the right direction but yeah i think that's great because that's something i've been personally trying to work on is in my free time i'm always trying to find enjoyment out of things that'll be more productive in my life this guy wanted to be on the channel i've seen him before yeah wait really yeah he's trending yeah yeah this guy he reached out wow he's got 13.6 million followers now back when i looked at him he had maybe like a million two million and that was just a few months ago yeah you grow really fast wow have you have how's your growth been oh almost a million we forgot to mention that you're almost at a millionaire i feel like i'm missing on it so seriously between like there's so many things now that i'm and also for tick-tock there's a cool strategy because you can repurpose the content you already have for youtube i was telling graham what he should do is do like post a video and then the top comment on that video you know the top finance question comment he'll just make a video the next time the next one and it's super easy content because he already has exactly what he's gonna do in the top comment what's your what's your tick tock lingua marina t learn english oh so it's more language stuff yeah so basically what i do i haven't produced any single video for this tick tock wow um my team so i have an sms listen up okay and a videographer so they just take my videos they added them so it so they fit textual format and they just post them themselves so i haven't done anything for that it just grew all right it's smart it's good to have a team do you have any sponsorships or anything for your tick tock or not yet so far is it not yet profitable um i think they they've introduced monetization recently so you can go live and people can donate yeah and this is the way to monetize but i haven't got any any money out of it yet but people start so the company started asking how much the product placement would be on tiktok i gotta do it you gotta do it dude how did you get verified on tick tock um i i have a manager that's fixed you have a tick tock manager yeah how did they how did that how do they reach out they just reached out yeah they reached out on instagram i think and they said we saw you started on tiktok oh no they actually reached out on tick tock no they sent me a message on tick tock when i started and i think they're just tracking people who have um followers on other platforms yeah and they reach out and help it's given me so much to think about now i've resisted for months did you just i know me too me too i remember gary vee started talking about it like a year and a half ago and i was like you gotta listen to gary vee on this side i know it's not too late well until it gets banned it's not gonna get banned but what are your plans for the future and how do you make sure that every day you're growing and moving in the right direction that's a good one um so my plans want financial goals invest 2.5 million and have 2.5 million invested in five years um start a lot of companies like try out new things because i feel that we've been working on linguatrip for um what is it five years and uh i feel that we have an amazing team to try new things within the company and also outside the company so just launching new companies and tech companies growing my personal brand who do you aspire to be really i like my current really yeah you're currently you're my favorite youtuber and so the thing with me like with following people i follow somebody i try to learn as much as i can try to copy as much as i can and then i move on to the next person and this is the way i learn about things i'm learning about investment investing right now i'm learning i thought that was a joke at first i'm like oh no seriously no this is this is the way it does so before that it was like garyvee i learned a lot about social media started tick tock listened to his castle understood that it's not for me i can't do what he does like wake up every morning hustle and hustle um and so yeah it's like i have probably two people per year that i try to study uh yeah and this is the way it's an honor wow that's so cool thank you yeah thank you yeah but it goes like i'm learning from you today like there's there's things that i'm thinking like there's like three good things today yeah that uh extract from this i'm gonna be up late tonight i'm just gonna be thinking geez when did you first find out about graham or what video i think it was uh december last year and i think it was something about investing uh and i just started watching and december oh so that would have been about 18 months ago oh no so the first video that oh okay i remember it so your interview with a tech lead because he's from silicon valley you found that video so yeah i saw you i heard about your income on youtube and i was like wow that's crazy and then i watched your video about your monthly income breakdown and then they just started consuming because see those are the things that uh uh that i really believe that that's what gets people in or some of those like the surface level here's my income breakdown and then it gets people into investing it's just the bait i don't wanna say it's never like a bait and switch but it's like debate that gets you interested in so like for a lot of these kids they have no desire to learn business or invest until they see a lamborghini and they're like oh i want the lamborghini how do i get there oh no i gotta i gotta work hard invest and save my money but but it gets them through the door so that's what a lot of those income videos do they they do the best yeah and i think it's important to be open about your income because for many people it's like a taboo topic you ask them i don't feel comfortable but when you're open people just realize that they can do that as well because they you show them the path yeah and that's super important yeah that's very true i wish more people were open about their income me too uh because i i was half expecting you to say like no we can't go over like numbers but what but we'll go over percentages so i was really happy to hear you go over now because then it's like we learn things about like our sponsors exactly i'm messing up there so i wonder i wonder what we could have learned from those percentages that they just don't i'll tell you did you always expect to be in some sort of work line like this or no oh no when i was like 16 or 17 my dream was to move to florida and start a bakery that was like my top dream but then i met my husband and things changed what would you bake cupcakes really yeah oh wow should have brought some cupcakes do you do baked cupcakes now i used to use them okay you can open up a cupcake business oh you make a program on how to bake cupcakes wow i bet if you did i seriously i bet if you spent like a day making a whole how-to tutorial about how to bake cupcakes one of my friends does it you know the thing on uh in russia with instagram like everyone who has over 10 000 followers has a program these days because this is one of the fastest ways to make money and that's the thing i can find a program when is it going to burn out it used to be ebooks that used to be the thing in like the the mid 2000s early 2000s it was always ebooks and people would make these ebooks and sell for like 20 30 and then now it's video courses so i'm curious what it's going to be i don't see a lot of like people in the us like american bloggers do that i see that everywhere in russia or like eastern europe but not here i bet they're all just giving money to each other though you know like jack will have a course 100 bucks i give jack 100 but he'll buy my course so so we're really just giving it to you so that's zero to everybody but it's like so i give out a hundred dollars but i'm receiving it's just a constant flow yeah do you have any advice for graham or i uh i think you should enjoy life a little more oh i do enjoy i do i do yeah the things that people have created enjoy places in the world travel more because you have the resources and i just think there's this part of your life that you haven't discovered yet yeah like traveling and stuff i'm open to doing it but i will find a way to monetize that i mean that's that's the thing so you can first of all if you're doing something in that location you can ride off part of your truck right yeah um then you can have hotels uh provide you free accommodation that's what i do a lot of times okay then you can review business class flights and you get uh good revenue from that there are many ways to monetize how about advice for jack oh curious here's the thing everyone that's on the phone jack has one year left of college but right he's been doing this kind of like full time kind of like as a cool test the last few months um i wanted to just go full time and just skip out of last year of college studying economics what do you think oh still get a bachelor's just in case just in case just in case what yeah [Music] but for what you do did you need a college degree not really but i needed my network but but what about this network here we got the same access to you without college degrees and your network different it's a different kind of network i don't academia i don't know it's a hierarchy like we don't belong to that upper what do you mean because we don't have a bachelor's nobody asks it's not about that i just think you know it's it's another step that you can take it's it's an easy step one year it's not like four years and then you have these opportunities i don't know but i'm telling you he could he could take a year off do it full-time and then decide then if you want to go because i just wanted to stay and when i got yes that's what it's about obviously like i think it's such a funny thing to think of like graham and i showing up at like thing or like some like event or something and like some people are looking at us from a file oh yeah those are the two guys that didn't go to college but at least like if i went to college it would be like one of us no i think it's uh people actually now in my opinion prefer it it's it's taken as a thing like they didn't finish college because they were that good they didn't have to it's like the dude walking into a high end like luxury boutique wearing sweatpants that's the dude with money because he doesn't have to dress up for anybody yeah i mean i like that thing yeah i like that the status thing now not to go to school that's the way i see it but you can take the advantage of current situation to study online that's can you take because i have upper divs is like what i really have left and you can't really do that online we should just leave it to the people in comments like just comment below i think the pieces you guys should decide but the thing is my backup plan would be to be a real estate appraiser which i does not require a college degree either but my backup backup plan i have one mcdonald's i i've never said this but i've always kind of thought it is to be a teacher which is really funny because my mom's a teacher and my dad is a real estate appraiser so i but like i would like to be a teacher if possible as a backup backup plan online teacher you need to have i wouldn't want to do that i like the chatting and the socializing teach everyone here i guarantee everyone here would would pay for your class oh man well i was still doing it right i forgot it's uh it's opposite day today so whatever you say jack has to do the opposite of it so that makes sense yeah yeah all right but finally for the last thing is graham and i want a little bit of a lesson in a different language oh you know um when i posted this story on um on my instagram asking people to ask you questions i have some followers who are russian who live in the us and there is a way to call you in russian which is like a nice way say hi to graham how do you say smash the like button um smash is it like like the video must have to like okay so how do you say hit the like button um all right we did it how do you say subscribe but piso is in the canal that's too long but but piso it is what but piso it is pizzerias oh man oh we got the cameras all right what is it i'm going to give it on a shot here okay what is it what pizza it is [Music] i don't know what is it what pizza it is what it's it's nice this is why you should say it again i don't know why my plans are confusing you can take pod pot no you can't do this that's okay good enough good enough guys so we're good all right so with that said you guys thank you so much for watching i really appreciate it thank you so much for thank you joining us on the iced coffee hour and i'll link to all of your information in the description i'll start a tick tock uh tomorrow of course and uh yeah guys make sure to subscribe uh get your two free stocks down below in the description for weeble if you haven't done that whoever's watching this who hasn't done that yet i've said it a million just now is your chance to do it and um yeah we're good yeah thanks guys thank you sometimes it's this weird behind the scenes stuff