How To Retire Before You Hit 30 (The Exact Math)

Hey everyone, Charlie Morgan here. And in this video, I'm going to show you how to make enough money so you can retire by 30 if you wanted to. Now, by 23 years old, I had enough money stacked from my businesses that if I wanted to, I could never work another day in my life and still be fine. And honestly, I'm nothing special. Um so, you can definitely do this in the same way that I did. Now, retiring doesn't necessarily mean stopping work, at least it doesn't for me. It means having the option to never work again in your life. And I still work every single day, okay? I'm still up and hustling cuz I love what I do. Um but that's because I want to, not because some bloke called Greg tells me to, all right? Maybe your boss's name isn't Greg, but you get the point. Now, I'm going to give you a fair warning. Um to do this and to achieve this, it's going to take between 5 to 10 years. I started at 17, 18, got it done by 23, 24. Um we do not want to rush. There's no hurry. Get-rich-quick schemes work for maybe 0.00001% of people. And honestly, you know, it's usually just the people selling them that actually get rich at the end of the day. So, this is the opposite. This is a sort of way to get rich, guaranteed, but it's going to take some time, okay? And by the way, I can tell you this that one decade of hard graft can honestly buy you a great life for the rest of your life, like 50, 60 years. It's a pretty fair trade. Very simple, nice five-step process. Step one is to put all of your savings into a meme I'm joking. I'm joking. I'm joking. I'm joking. Right. Step one is to decide what you actually want. Now, there are really three types of person um watching this video right now. You'll be one of these three people when it comes to retirement and deciding what you actually want out of your money and out of your life. The first person is the comfort person who just wants to make 50K a year passively. This is where your house is paid off. You you know, your your kids are taken care of. You've got zero financial stress. You're not rich. You're making 4,000 a month, but it's coming in passively and you're not working for it. Now, the second one is freedom, where you're making like 100K a year. This is where you've got the 50K to do everything that you need to do for your family, but another 50K typically um you know, in reserve as disposable income. And you can use this to travel, do what you want, have the dinners. Number three is status. This is where you might want to be on like 250k year passively. This is the watches, the cars, the Instagram, and this can go from anywhere from 250k year. I've got friends that have like, you know, 2 million dollars a year just to play with because they're so rich. Basically for free from interest. Now, I want you to imagine that number or any of those numbers hitting your bank account every single year after tax with zero hours of work, okay? I want you to write the number down. Like right now a paper and pen or if you haven't got a paper and pen or whatever, you can just if you're not being studious, I get it. We're on YouTube. You were watching a Sniperwolf video before this, so here we are. The duality of man continues. But just think about what your number is. Like how much would you want to make per month or per year passively without working for it. When I was 18, mine was $833 a month. Um so I'd suggest that you aim a little bit higher than that, okay? Now that you have an understanding of exactly how much you need to have to feel like you can retire comfortably at whatever age you fancy, um we need to calculate something called the stack. Now, the stack is your number multiplied by 25. And the reason we do this is because $50,000 a year passively means that you would have 1.25 million dollars stacked because this is about 4% of your stack, 4 5%. That's the average sort of very basic level return you're going to get on your money unless you're some sort of wiz investor, which I'm not. 100k year, you'd need 2.5 mil stacked. 250k, you'd need six over six mil stacked. And the reason behind this is because a pile of very low risk low return assets is going to pay out just maybe 3 to 5% every year forever without shrinking. And this is known as the 4% rule in finance. Now, a lot of nerds, and I say nerds, I'm also a nerd, so I can't really be particularly insulting to them. Um they tested the 4% rule against pretty much every 30-year retirement since um 1926 um including the poor souls that retired just before the Great Depression and it held. So, the average sort of return on these low-risk sort of low-return investments has been about 4%. You can hope for six. You can hope for seven. If you want to get some Gen Z, you know, language in there, you can go for a 6-7% return if you want to, but really 4% is where you're going to sit on average if even on a bad day, even during some sort of recession, right? But here's what nobody tells you. It was tested for 30-year retirements, okay? If you retire at 30 and your money has to last at least um 60 years, the safe rate drops to like 3.5%. So, you need to 25x your number. Whatever you want to make per year needs to be multiplied by 25 and that's how much you need to hold in cash, actual like liquid assets to just generate that return. Now, if you times it by 30, you're literally unbreakble. It's impossible for you to go wrong if you times it by 30. You can just pick your paranoia level. Um I'd suggest 25 to 30x where you want that. Now, this is a bucket for those of you that can't tell. Um your net worth is a bucket. What do you think about that, Ollie? Do you like it? You like the color? Yeah, it looks great, doesn't it? Thank you. Um your market is basically a reservoir. Now, the thing the question then becomes like, "Okay, well, I've I've got my monthly income or yearly income, like the dream situation. Now I know how much I need to make." The question is like, "Well, how much do I make it?" And the answer is you need a pretty [ __ ] big bucket because a market is a reservoir and the only way to really achieve such an income is to start a business or some sort of entrepreneur endeavor which I'll explain in just a second there. But when you start a business, what you're really doing is scooping water from the reservoir into your bucket. So, your business or, you know, whatever you want to call it, is like the bucket, your net worth is the bucket. You're going to dip into the water, take a bunch of water out, and that is in essence business in a nutshell. It's extraction of value in exchange for value, okay? When the bucket is full, let's say at 2.5 mil, the bucket magically spits out 4% of its liquids or, you know, contents every year into your bank account and by some [ __ ] miracle it refills itself. The miracle is actually just called the economy and that's basically retirement. That is how you retire. Now, the problem is that most people's buckets have holes in them. Okay, just real quick and before you skip, if you want to get access to my $3,000 course completely for free, that is right, completely for free, that will show you how to build an AI agency from scratch. If you're a beginner with no experience all the way to 10K a month, click the first link in the description. It's completely free. You fill out a real quick form. A member of my team will give you a call. You can be set up with the entire course in the next couple of minutes here. It's completely free, no catch. Go and do it now. The problem is it doesn't matter how much you earn or like how much you make, it really matters how much you keep. There are two big holes in the bucket, tax and psychological tax. Plug the holes. So, the first hole is tax. Um, every percentage that you pay means that it's going to take longer for you to retire, okay? Now, a 40% tax burden turns a 10-year retirement plan into a 14 to 16 to maybe even 20-year plan depending on where you're living and what the jurisdiction is. Uh, I lived in Dubai for 2 years um, to offset this and then I made so much money tax-free that now I don't have to worry, so I moved back to the UK and now I pay tax again, which is fine because I can have the means to do that. Um, the first option is to leave your high-tax country. The second option is to stay and just use the cheat codes. Now, the cool thing is that like a lot of these European or Western countries have very, very strict tax rules and you can't get away with much, but there are ways to, you know, mitigate your tax bill legally legally in a way that is not going to get you into trouble. Your high interest savings accounts, you know, if you're paying like if you're getting 4%, 5% on a high interest bank account, um, well, you're going to get absolutely murdered by income tax or capital gains tax or whatever, so you don't want to do that. But, you can use something like this is this is a I'm just going to give you some like very specific example for the UK. Um, if you use something called a low coupon gilt, um, these are actually exempt from capital gains tax, so the interest is slightly reduced, but you pay no tax on them. It's like a UK government bond. The thing is is there's lots of little things like this that you can do that you just have to become a little bit more aware of. Financial literacy is not that difficult to learn. Um it's just a question of actually doing your research and doing your homework and getting a good accountant. If you get a good accountant, you'll you'll save a lot of money in tax. The one that really cuts the cake is a psychological tax. Now, imagine this. Every dollar you make is taxed by the government, but it's also taxed by your ego. It's a very important thing to understand, right? Every time your ego wants something and you buy it, you are being basically psychologically taxed by your own identity, right? Every dollar you spend either goes to your retirement or to your ego. Now, that's not binarily always true. Maybe you're paying for, you know, your daughter's nails or something. I'm sure that your ego isn't attached to the color of her nails, but my point is that like, you know, for the most part it's binary. Anything that transcends basic needs and survival or taking care of responsibilities is probably going to your ego. If you start making good money, you will start to feel, you know, the natural response of buying expensive [ __ ] right? Um now I've made $40 million and I still wear a a Casio watch and this island was like 15 pounds. This island this t-shirt from River Island was like, you know, 15 pounds. You want to take pride in frugality. Now, you'll get to a point with your frugality and this happened to me recently where you'll be frugal and that'll be great and then you get to virtue signal how amazing you are. But then what happens is like you'll have enough money to do stupid [ __ ] like buy supercars, buy penthouses, and I'm able to do that now, but only because I saved so hard and was so frugal for so long that I now have the means to do those things without having to worry about them. General rule of thumb, if you can't buy something in cash 10 times over, 30 times over, just don't [ __ ] buy it. It's just stupid. Um yeah, we all got to have some cope, right? I live in like a penthouse in Kensington. I have a McLaren. It's great. Anyway, you shouldn't do it until you're rich. Until your earning potential massively exceeds your spending, don't spend a thing, okay? So, unless the money that you have saved up can pay with interest for the thing that you want, you really shouldn't buy it. And and it takes a lot of discipline to do that. It can take like 10 years of making money and having like 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 million stacked for you to be able to, you know, be making like maybe a million a year passively to then be able to warrant paying for stupid things. Or even 500k a year passively, then you can start getting away with stupid [ __ ] But number four, step number four is to fix your earning potential. Let's do the maths on a good career, right? Let's objectively speaking like a good bloody career. If you are a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer and you spent, you know, 7 to 10 years qualifying, getting your degrees, doing the internships, doing all the textbooks, the reading, the exams, you know, after 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, you might make, you know, a 100k a year. Maybe a little bit more, 200, 300k. But let's say you're on a 100k a year after trying to do this for like 10 years. Um Now, if you work for 10 years at 100k a year, you're obviously going to make about a million dollars. And that's gross. You you you Because you cannot do the low coupon gilt [ __ ] You can't do the tax [ __ ] You can't do the limited company [ __ ] You can't do the dividends, the capital gains taxes. All of You lose that ability. And so, it's impossible to retire with a good, great career. You have to sort of transcend that. It's not even close. To fill a 2.5 million dollar bucket in 10 years, um you'd need to earn 3 to 500k a year without spending a dollar. So, you're going to be [ __ ] homeless, which you probably don't want to do, right? A normal job is not going to pay this. So, we need to build a job. Um the way money works is very simple. Like to to increase your earning potential, you really just need to understand one statement. Money is made when value is created. Value is created when pain is alleviated. And pain is alleviated when problems are solved. It's just problems. Like if you can find a group of people, find a painful problem, make sure they've got money to pay to solve the problem, then go and sell them a solution, your earning potential has just gone up beyond what you would have got if you were like a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer. I'll tell you about the sandwich test. Imagine you've just gone 2 days without food and, you know, you're in the desert and you stumble upon a sandwich shop. They can charge you anything they want because you're [ __ ] starving. The more pain you're in, the bigger the problem, the more someone can charge you to solve that problem, right? Pain sets the price. And so, the formula to really increasing your earning potential is very simple. You pick a group of people or a niche, people with affinity. You find their most painful problem, the most painful problem, not just a little one, like a big one. And then you become the best in the world at solving it and then you just charge them to solve it. That's it. And the reason you want to become number one is because price compresses time. You know, at a 2K client, um you need half the customers of the guy charging 1K. So, the better you are at the thing, the better you are at, you know, the scale in solving the problem, the more money you can command to solve the problem. Um and, you know, it's a lot easier to sign, you know, one person for $10,000 than 10 people for $1,000. And the only reason someone will pay $10,000 is because you're 10 times better than the person that charges one. Simple as that, okay? Scale two is sales or marketing. You can be really good at your thing in solving the problem that alleviates the pain for the person and charge them to do it, but being the best in the world is worthless if nobody knows you exist and nobody has some level of awareness that you even can do the thing. You can basically have like the best product on Earth, but if you have no distribution engine, no sales, no marketing skills, it's obsolete and there's no point. So, every product on Earth is sold one way or another, either through sales or marketing. Um you just got to master that. It's very simple. And no, your niche doesn't need to be sexy. I made $2 million a year at 23 getting leads from micro gyms in America. So, my business, my first business, I went to micro gyms, so small, tiny, individual gyms um in deep state America, whatever, and I just called them up and said, "Hey, like I know that you're like a small gym and no one knows who you are, so let me put you on the map and get you people in the door." And they were like, "Yeah, sure, we'll pay you like $2,000 a month to do that." And then before I knew it I had like 100 gyms paying me like, you know, $2 million a year just to do that. And I was just this spotty, weird 23-year-old kid that, you know, didn't really know anything and because I got good at that, and because I had some degree of articulate ability, I was able to make more money than, you know, four or five really good doctors combined, which doesn't make any sense, but for some reason that's how it [ __ ] works. And a friend of mine makes $30,000 a month. He's like 18. And he basically provides virtual assistance to divorce lawyers to do one specific type of paperwork that divorce lawyers hate to do. And, you know, he's integrated AI with this, and he's got all these documents and stuff. You don't need to be Elon Musk. You don't need to be some hotshot massive successful smart entrepreneur. You just need one problem and to be really [ __ ] good at it. Number five is where the money goes. Now, the stack itself, just having the money, you don't necessarily want to just hold this in cash cuz inflation will just absolutely terrorize your stack. Um long-term passive investments, [ __ ] the boring [ __ ] all right? I wish I could sit here and tell you that I'd found some miracle fund that delivers a 15% return year-on-year. We're not Warren Buffett, all right? It's a lot easier to focus on the business and focus on making money and increasing your earning potential than it is to be actively investing and trying to pick the right stock. It's just Just do the do the boring thing. Index funds, S&P 500 or global will give you a 6-7% return average. You can buy these through Vanguard, VGO, whatever. Um government bonds are fine. High-interest cash is also fine. You can get like private banks that will pay you decent interest returns. But really, the best thing is to sort of blend all three of these things together. Index funds are boring and reliable. Governments, we all know they're not very reliable, but very [ __ ] boring. And it cash is a Again, it fluctuates a little bit, but at the end of the day, like I've got a account with Barclays International, and I've got like lockup investments for like 35-day terms, and they can give me like a 3 to 4% yield. And it's just It's It's having like three, four, five places to park your money in boring places, and you're just going to average like a 4 to 5% return. And this is all we want because if the earning potential is high enough, we don't need a massive return because even then, if you get like a 20% return, you're going to have more leverage by having 2 million and focusing on making the 2 million than trying to focus on picking the right stock and then losing all your money cuz we're all [ __ ] stupid anyway, myself included. Do not buy rental property. Do not buy rental. I'm going to say it again, do not buy rental property. You might get a 7 to 8% to 9% to 10% return on, you know, real estate, but the problem with buying rental property is now you own a second business. Right? So, I did this. I thought I was clever. I bought a bunch of rental property. I bought a holiday cottage. I was like my flats and like [ __ ] yeah, all these things. Oh, yeah, it's going to appreciate and I'm going to make money. And then the the UK changed the renters' rights anyway, so I'm glad I sold it before that happened cuz that's a nightmare for landlords. But the thing is is like if just learn from my mistake. If you buy rental property, you now have tenants, you now have agents, you now have [ __ ] tradesmen. It's it's a business and that business takes away from the skill which is actually paying for the rental property. And so, it's not worth getting a 7 to 8 to 9% return on a house when 15% of your mental capacity is going towards it because that's money that's mental capacity going to the business which could be improving your skill and making you a lot more money, okay? So, focus. Um Now, a 1% platform fee, this is huge. When you're when you're investing, um whether it's with like a you know, like Vanguard or Hargreaves Lansdown or any specific sort of like investment platform eToro, negotiate your fees. Even if you're not investing much, be just ruthless with this and pit them against each other because a 1% platform fee sounds cute, but it will actually destroy your stack in the long term if you compound that little fee over 30, 40 years of compounding. Um you really just want to hold funds. I mean, 0.2% is very hard to achieve. I've been able to negotiate my platform fees ruthlessly down, but that's because I've got quite a bit of money in there now. Reduce the platform fee. It might not seem like much, but again, you've got to realize like small percentages with enough time and enough compounding applied become absolutely diabolically massive. So, be careful. Um Now, if you're buying the S&P 500 from the UK or from the EU, um you legally cannot buy American ETFs anyway. Um I would Well, I'm not a financial advisor, and this is not financial advice. Um but there's a really cool Irish thing you can buy. Um and these dividends can like drop up and down. I'm not here to give you like specific things to buy. I'm just saying buy the stupid boring [ __ ] that just you don't really want to buy. If you don't want to buy it, you probably should. It's a general rule of thumb. But like my point is that if you can't buy American ETFs, you can do this. Pretty cool. The funny thing is that if you die holding more than $60,000 of US-domiciled stocks or like just basically US company stocks, um the US government will tax your corpse up to 40%, which is pretty bad. It's like a death tax, right? Which is not very good. The Irish versions of that basically dodge this as well. That's just a little thing you can do. Just bear that in mind, all right? Again, not financial advice. I'm not a financial advisor. I'm just telling you what I do, okay? Um now, if you're holding cash in banks, which you probably should do, high-interest bank account rates, um you really want to have like five to seven banks, specifically especially in the UK. I'm not sure about US or EU, but a lot of banks are insured um to protect a certain amount of money. Now, this changes. I don't I think it's Last time I checked it was like 80K up to 120K sometimes. My point is that like if you're holding like a million dollars in cash um in the UK, you might want to have like 10 different bank accounts so that you're insured up to you know, the 80K or 100K 120K threshold or whatever it is across all of those banks. Cuz then if one of them gets shut down, then the the the insurance company will pay you for that. But if you hold If you hold a million dollars in [ __ ] Lloyds and Lloyds goes bankrupt, then they'll pay you 80 grand or 120 grand or whatever it is, but the rest of the money is gone forever. So, multiple bank accounts are very clever. You want to make sure that your money is insured as best as you can. As far as using brokers, Interactive Brokers, Trading 212, Fidelity, whatever, like just check the fees. Um you know, I am famously barely financially literate. I just do what my financial advisor tells me to do and I can communicate that to you because that's what I do and it works for me, but, you know, whatever. Um, little bonus for you, how to 10x your earning potential. Um, the second This is what I do. I'm such a little [ __ ] for this. The second your skill makes consistent money, teach the skill, okay? Um, you know, you'll see this on like people's like YouTube comments and like ads and [ __ ] where it's like, "Oh, well, if he's so good at doing what he does, why does he have a course on how to do it?" Well, because teaching people to make money is easier and more profitable than making it. And I know that to be true because I've been doing it for a long old time. Don't judge it, just use it, okay? In a gold rush, you don't want to be digging for gold, you want to be selling the shovels. I'm sure you've heard of this before. Um, there is no guarantee you find gold, but there's a guarantee that you will find people that are trying to find it, okay? And that's fine because the beautiful thing about internet marketing and the online space is if you possess knowledge that can push people forward, then you have every right to sell it and it's fine to do so, but just know that there's no guarantee you find gold, but there's always a guarantee you'll find people trying to find gold. Thanks for watching this video, guys. Again, if you want to get access to my entire paid training program that should be $3,000 completely for free, you can click the first thing in the description. It's an AI agency program that's going to show you how to build an AI agency from scratch if you're a beginner with no experience to 10k a month and actually replace a full-time income. It's pretty It's [ __ ] sick. Click on the thing. I'll show you how it works. Let's go.