Saved 97% of My Income... and Became a Millionaire

hey everyone my name is mike candies on this channel i talk about business investing and growing your wealth today i'm going to be talking about how i saved 98 of my income and from that have become on paper and in reality a millionaire using different stocks real estate as well as my personal businesses so i'm going to show you the diagram of kind of the pyramid that i make in my mind and it's not to say that's the right diagram but it's definitely a framework i think you can use and build your own framework for as you grow your wealth and so before i kind of build draw that out on the whiteboard for you i want to kind of just give context if you haven't watched my channel or know much about me and that is right now i own several businesses so i started uh you know with a bunch of random businesses but most of it was mowing lawns when i was 11 years old now augusta lawn care has 50 locations 47 of those are franchised and three of them i own personally in washington state new york and north carolina the ones that i own i also own anytime fitness so i purchased this about three and a half four years ago before franchising i guess just to learn their systems and everything and it's been a really successful we're in the top uh three percent i wanna say you know two percent top two percent of all clubs in the anytime fitness system i also own some real estate so i currently have 10 properties and in a few weeks i'll be at 20. and i've had my stock portfolio go as high as a million dollars a little over a million i've cut that back into half of that now over the past few weeks as i'm gearing up to fund this new real estate deal and pulling some of my money out of the market and putting into more uh secure assets you might say so i also have other businesses online in terms of books course sales web design uh podcasts and a whole bunch of other things so that's from a business standpoint just kind of give a framework of comm where i'm at and now i'm going to show to you kind of what i call my wealth diagram so i actually actually built this sort of when i was about i guess i'd be about sixteen or seventeen and kind of fr and staccato tried to build out what my future was gonna look like for my personal wealth and um you know before you say you know money hungry and all the rest of it just wait till the end kind of i'll explain why at 15 16 i was thinking about this it really comes down to why you want to make the money i think that's the thing that drives me every single day and keeps me moving along this diagram and working hard is the end result and i'll get to that in a second so how i did this and this is not how everyone should do it but how you can potentially use this framework is business number one and i think a lot of times people think like oh great i'll move on for the diagram this might take five to ten years before you should be moving on from this first stage that is your investing time energy money your attention your weekends your evening your holidays into this business number one trying to make it work okay trying to figure it out and over time hopefully by you know year three or four it becomes pretty profitable again this is not a short term uh thing by no means to say this wealth diagrams like oh you're going to happen a couple days no it's not happening just drawing this out does not mean anything for you um you've got this might take years like i said to figure this out then it becomes profitable potentially in year three to five typically when most businesses do become more profitable and then what you're going to do from that profit if this is your you know sole source of income you're going to have to have personal expenses okay and this is the part where i sort of have an advantage and that is because i am single i literally live in my office basically everything that i do in terms of expenses is right i can write off because i drive a company vehicle i everything i do basically revolves around my businesses i can write off most of them as business expenses and so the goal though here regardless of whether you know where you're at personally in your finances if you have family obviously you're gonna have more expenses with a house uh personal cars clothing food et cetera but the goal really is just lit as little as possible the sooner you can get past this part of the diagram the faster you'll be able to build real wealth and i feel like a lot of times people they will get stuck here their personal financials is complete they're complete their personal expenses will keep inflating as their business becomes more profitable and therefore they'll never actually keep going on in the wealth journey the wealth diagram uh so this is where most people stop and they would be considered successful and you can be really successful you can become a millionaire easily doing this you you run a business for 10 years you can become a millionaire and just you know stay here that's fine and as we want that's okay b after this um is when you're gonna start thinking about okay well i'm gonna take the the profit that's still remaining after my personal expenses and that's gonna go into business number two all right so now you're starting to diversify i made a different video about the four different ways to grow and expand business in terms of whether it be multiple locations whether it be investing into assets that are passive et cetera but business number two we're gonna assume you're an entrepreneur you want to start another business well it could be a second location it could be a completely different business in a completely different industry it could be a different uh delivery mechanism like online versus in-person for example but you start a second business in some way shape or form and from that second business again this could take some time or it could be more even quicker because you figured things out in business number one and now you're a little bit more savvy in terms of business therefore you get profit you know in the day hopefully you get profit out of business number two and then for me like i have multiple businesses now right the gym uh multiple things i've done online the books the podcast the course web design marketing material stuff that we do i have multiple business right so i can keep going down here but i just want to give you the framework and so from here you're going to usually do one of three things and this is kind of for me at least there you can do 100 different things probably if you invest in nfts and bitcoin and things like that if you want to you're going to want three one of a few things typically you're going to invest these profits into business number three uh you're going to invest into stocks you know the equity market i can you could really just say any sort of equities or bonds uh you could even throw stock crypto if you wanted into there or gold like really stocks equities bonds et cetera i kind of throw into that stocks but i'm just going to put stocks for now and then real estate and if anyone wants to know because everyone always asks me do you have anything in crypto i bought five percent of my stock portfolio or like that asset class in cryptocurrency bitcoin and ethereum so then over here you got real estate right and so for me this is kind of how my mind sort of works when it comes to this wealth diagram and that is so obviously for me i have multiple businesses and then i kind of kind of come over here at the end of this trail though i'm going to then invest my profits i'm just gonna put p profits from this my last business into the stock market okay at the end of the day this is like i don't have i don't have any more business to put this money into i'm gonna put in the stock market and at the end of the day as as the stock market grows i make more uh you know yield or make more dividends back or i grow and i sell the stocks and get more profits from that i'm eventually going to move it over into real estate that's what i'm currently doing right now as we speak i've moved about 550 000 out of my stock portfolio and i'm putting that down on a 1.85 million 10 unit apartment complex so i'm moving that money over into real estate so then from here it's like well what did he do from here and again i kind of made this when i was really young because my goal has i've always looked at money as a tool to do good in the world whether that be for my family whether that be for the causes that i'm interested in or for people that i want to help or i feel are in need and so over here is the really cool part in my opinion like on my uh on my diagram of wealth this is where i i started writing the things that i want to fund and so this is what i i do again you don't have to do this but i have certain things that i want to fund philanthropically for my family personally etc over here very little of it has anything with my personal expenses i don't really i don't need anything uh super fancy that's just not who i am i'll splurge occasionally probably down the road i'll buy something nice probably maybe but uh i'm not super motivated by that i'm motivated by what happens here so as the real estate grows i'm not super even passionate real estate i'm passionate about creating four things out of real estate are three things mainly cash flow uh every single month from the tenants appreciation of the value of the asset itself and then also depreciation on my asset on my taxes to be able to pay less taxes and therefore keep more money in the diagram because at the end of the day the more money i can keep circulating the better the more profitable this business becomes the money flows to the businesses and eventually ends up in real estate and i've said it before and that is my businesses exist to fund my real estate but really this is this is at the end of the equation it's come through all these different businesses it's come through stock the stock market and then i finally invested into real estate and then from there it's like well you either a build a massive net worth and uh cash cow from real estate passively for me i kind of do a little bit differently because i and this would be a great framework for most people by the way if you love entrepreneurship and you love passive investing this would be an awesome framework for you to use for myself i'm not super interested in like having a ton of money sitting around uh it doesn't do any any good so for me personally i will take even the profits that i get from my real estate the cash flow and i'll actually do this i'll literally just keep pouring money into the business so like for example like right now this is augusta franchise for me right pouring money back in we're spending 20 000 almost every single month in uh software development it'll be exceeding that uh here in the next couple months as we keep ramping up more software that we won't even see in production for another year and a half in terms of people seeing it and us being being useful but it's gonna give us a massive edge so i see this as hey if i can take these profits into real estate keep throwing in the the business up top here it will keep feeding the system over and over and that's where momentum comes into play that's when you talk to like an elon musk and i'm not making any sort of you know i'm not even on his pay grade not even close but i'm just saying you look at elon musk but for years his his uh net worth looks something like this right you know he stole paypal and everything and then literally in 2020 it went like this to where now it's like 200 billion dollars uh and and some people would say well you know one year it basically 10xed right in one year but the bottom line is what's happened what was happening is he took his paypal investment after he after er money after he sold that business he took all these different monies as it was growing and he kept just throwing it back into the businesses and eventually it catches up to the point where it just spits off a ton of cash um my goal is to do two things with that one fun keep finding money back into the businesses and keep growing them making them just where they're absolutely impregnable uh and for me augusta franchise is that passion kind of passion slash business to just keep making it better and better and better and then secondarily for me is i want to fund other projects i've never shared those i never ever will share that you know what those type of projects are again this is something i made when i was really young and this is the part that drives me every single day as much as i love business absolutely through and through the part over here that my why why i do all the work i do the things that i'm really passionate about i want to give back to um you know going over africa back when i was 18 really reset my framework of what needs to be on this list and that the amount of joy and satisfaction i get in life is a lot greater if i'm able to produce something really good in the world outside of just an economic engine which you can create and then take those things and you know a billionaire that's trying to do good can typically get more done more good done than someone with 100 in their pocket that's just my opinion you might say it's wrong um obviously there's intangible things outside of money but i truly believe someone with a lot of money just tons of cash flow tons of net worth great connections um and they can do a lot of good things and that's what i'm very passionate about a few of these things i've been able to knock off already that i wanted to since a young age and i'm going to keep working on those but obviously this is kind of the framework diagram i use i save 98 of my income so 98 gets past this stage right here and the goal is to keep it that way as long as possible by you know not necessarily reducing how much i spend but if i can keep growing enough the businesses even if i send spend two percent of it down the road that'll be plenty enough to live a comfortable life and i'm willing to sacrifice for the you know i have for the past you know quite a few years uh and then i for the next five or 10 years if i can just keep this as low as possible this engine will become so big where you really can't spend enough um personally even if you were extravagant but i don't really have any plans to i don't get any joy out of that my goal is really driven by this why so hope this framework was helpful for you again this might take you five or ten years it might take you a while to actually get to the point where you're getting profits after expenses your personal expenses then you create a second business then you have profit from that business and then you keep going to another business another business another business perhaps then you start investing the stock market and to do assets that are more passive and then you might start investing in things that actually have cash flow appreciation and appreciation and then from there the opportunities are limitless whether it be giving back whether it be pumping that money back into businesses making moats around them making them absolutely impress impenetrable that is the goal that is the wealth diagram that i have used and i hope it was helpful comment below what you learned and potentially what is different with your wealth diagram and i hope you will earn money fastly.