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"Rich people have lots of assets. Wealthy people have freedom.""Without a ceiling, you end up on an endless treadmill. $1 million becomes $10 million becomes $100 million. It never stops, and it makes your life miserable.""Before any major purchase now, I ask myself: 'Would I buy this if no one else knew about it?' If the answer is no, it's a status purchase.""When we had 14 employees, I thought we looked like a 'real company.' The reality? It was chaos. Now we're back to 5 people and we ship faster.""As entrepreneurs, we control both sides of the equation: how much we earn AND how much we spend. Most founders optimize for earning. Few optimize for spending.""Wealth isn't about how much you make. It's about how much control you have. And spending is where you either build that control or destroy it."
Founder Reality with George Pu. Real talk from a technical founder building AI-powered businesses in the trenches. No highlight reel, no startup theater – just honest insights from someone who codes, ships, and scales.
Every week, George breaks down the messy, unfiltered decisions behind building a bootstrap software company. From saying yes to projects you don't know how to build, to navigating AI hype vs. reality, to the mental models that actually matter for technical founders.
Whether you're a developer thinking about starting a company, a founder scaling your first product, or a technical leader building AI features, this show gives you the frameworks and hard-won lessons you won't find in the startup content circus.
George Pu is a software engineer turned founder building multiple AI-powered businesses. He's bootstrapped companies, shipped products that matter, and learned the hard way what works and what's just noise.
Follow along as he builds in public and shares what's really happening behind the scenes.
New episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
George Pu (00:00)
Welcome back to another episode of the founder reality podcast. I'm your host George Poo. Happy Friday. And this week I have just read, I think for the past week read a new book that's pretty interesting. So I think I would like to share that with you. And the book is called the art of spending money by Morgan hustle. And then, you know, ironically, five years ago, when I was not going to win money, I read his first book, the psychology of bunny, which has changed a way of a lot of things, the way I think about spending money.
And I just finished this book. pick it up initially. I was actually anticipating it, but you know, I pick it up because I realized I personally don't actually have a lot of frameworks about like spending decisions. I just go with the flow. Like most of you all the times, two of my ventures, you know, simple direct the SaaS company. Obviously it's profitable. It's doing okay. ANC is growing. It's a growth engine. So it's growing. and you know, as a result in the past couple of years, ⁓ you know, the past three years, I think more, more accurately to three years.
Um, we have made a lot more money than we have before. Um, but you know, as a 27 year old, still young and living in Toronto and technically, you know, with the business as it is, I could move to a lot of more new places. And many of my friends have recently moved to different places, South America, you know, Europe, things like that America. Um, and the question actually for me, it's like, I spent, I think about it's quite a lot.
It's like, should I spend more money on lifestyle? You know, should I reinvest everything into the business or should I save aggressively? Right. And I personally know that there's no right or wrong answer. Of course, everyone is different, but I personally don't have a system of making this decision. And I think if I just go ahead and ask AI, like what you think, I think that is disingenuous. So I think I need to have a system for making those decisions. And this book, fortunately did give me one and here's why I clicked. So I'll tell you more about it shortly.
So I think he made a bunch of the author made a bunch of points in the book. I do think the three hit hardest for me as a founder after reading it. The first is actually suggesting that true wealth is autonomy. That's the first big idea, right? And his arguments that the highest return on money is not luxury goods, not the Gucci's or you know, it's not the luxury goods. It's actually control over your time and your independence. The author thinks that the ability to choose
what you do and when you do it, that is real wealth, right? And he actually used the example of like, think about someone who's rich and think about someone who has wealth. The richest has a lot of assets, but the wealthier ones actually has freedom. So that one, I think has personally hit me a lot because, know, for the longest time in my college years, which is not that far from here, you know, college already started years, money was tight, really tight, right? And it was tight because
I have decided to run a startup company. So obviously there's a lot of risk involved and I wouldn't personally get paid until the business worked. Right. But for all other reasons as well. And, you know, just like very briefly, I think two, three years ago, ⁓ you know, we moved to consulting first instead of product first, we started generating real revenue and building a system. And now suddenly, like I just said, there is money, right? There's a huge mental shift. A few years ago, we were struggling with even credit card bills and different things as a business. And.
Now I think it opened up options that we didn't have before. And of course, I, like I just said, I can move to different places. are two tiers that you can think about the first one to years I can upgrade. So freedom routes. you can go to like New York city. I have many friends that they're of course, it's expensive in Manhattan. And I can also move to like SF. I have like, you know, the tech community there is obviously I've been to both places many, many times and I love both places. so I have not decided to do that yet. Right. And then there's another route, which is like.
You know, lead a stressful environment of like North America, you know, in general move to like Thailand, Sri Lanka, Portugal, different places. ⁓ I also have traveled to like majority of those places as well on a trip. And, know, obviously has low cost of living, greater lifestyle and your mood is probably a lot better. There's like wildlife in many of those places like Sri Lanka. And it's a complete different experience. Right. So like for me, and I'm sure for, for all of you who are listening, who's an entrepreneur, there's always a choice of.
you know, what, which route to make. it's, you know, it could be a huge choice, but you know, after seeing my friends moving to like Panama, my friend moving to the U S different places, I chose to stay in Toronto. And the reason behind it is not really because I love it here, right? Even though it's fine. but I think because staying gives me the freedom to choose, right? This is my base. So in the future, I might have multiple bases.
And that's actually the plan in the future. Just like have the freedom of like, okay, let's say if Canada is too cold, can actually move somewhere else for a few months. Right. Many people actually cannot do that. they moved to Florida when it gets too hot, too cold. And I think personally, I would like to have that optionality as well. Right. The, the ability to move, even though it's not a luxury, but it's definitely an option, the option to go somewhere else when where you are now doesn't suit you. personally, I was just in London a few weeks ago. I really loved it there.
First time actually. know, overall, I think that is my option. I want to have the options to choose. And even though right now, A, I don't think I have that much assets in order to make these decisions anyways, to pretty permanently move into somewhere else. And B, I think I want to have that option later. I want to, you know, make more money hopefully, and then, you know, eventually make it come true that I can have the optionality to do even more. Although technically, yes, if I want to do it right now, I could.
And I think, and I think the thing about like for most people who are still working traditional jobs, this is different, right? This is harder. You are tied up, right? And if you're listening and you're working for someone, yes, unfortunately it means that you do have to go to the office whenever the bosses say so, right? The freedom just feels different. And I personally have also experienced with this. I take the subway, almost every time I have to go to the office. It's not, it's not a long ride, but it is a little bit.
And every morning I'll see people who are ⁓ basically like sleep deprived or some people are like depressed a little bit. They're like hesitant. They don't want to go to work. And I can tell. And the thing is, you know, even sometimes I go at very odd hours, like 7 a.m., 6 a.m. sometimes, you know, you see it, right? And it's those people are very stressful. So that's the thing. That's the freedom. It's just very different. And I personally think freedom is something that's being undervalued. I've talked about on the pod and my Twitter a lot of times about freedom.
And, you know, also like Neval has talked about himself as well, about how much importance he personally placed in having freedom about everything else. think personally, that's the way I'm going as well, instead of like crunching and working for money, which, which even in entrepreneurship, you do fall into traps as well. It's not like when you're in entrepreneurship, you're not working for money. A lot of us still do. So I'm transitioning more towards that thinking and transitioning more.
into just more about working for freedom, working for options, optionalities. And I think that is considerably my current goal at the time.
I think the book was also very good about comparing freedom with luxury goods because we all know people in our lives who are very eager and motivated by luxury goods. And I'm sure you know many. And the thing is, when I was in college,
George Pu (00:00)
And I think the author did a really good job about analyzing the behavior of purchasing luxury goods versus people who are not buying luxury goods and pursuing on personal freedom. So I'm sure all of us know someone in our lives who are all about pursuing, not all about, but you know, some somewhat or all about pursuing luxury goods is all about the looks is all about status. And it's, and I think it's not just about like luxury goods. It's about social status, right? So like spending on social status, a better car.
a bigger, a bigger house and different things like the, you know, the Gucci sand, you know, the Hermes and whatever. So it's all about that for some people. And I think I personally, I think it has been a habit that I used to think about it quite a lot because it's obviously social symbols. I remember in middle school, I will actually try to wear the no sneakiest, the most, you know, beautiful sneaker, ⁓ in middle school, just to compete with my classmate at a time. So obviously I was falling into that all the time.
And then when I was in college, you know, I was spending my parents' money. So I spent lavishly, you know, I even bought like a expensive car at one point, which I'm not proud of and absolutely stupid. ⁓ and honestly, because at a time I wasn't making money for myself and I don't, when you're not making money for yourself, money spent feels different, right? And I think the difficult part is I didn't, I didn't actually know I was doing it for the social circles. I guess now thinking back, I was trying to impress some of my
I started making my own money and subsequently, you know, actually making my own money when I was running a startup, is even harder because you're not always going to be successful. realized how dumb it was and I changed immediately. So I think his point about money makes sense. I felt it right. The money doesn't really matter if it doesn't buy you the ability to choose what you do with your time.
I remember reading the book and it was actually talking about, I think investment bankers, which I actually know a few, a few of my classmates from, you know, back, back then in bachelor's who actually ended up going to investment banking when they graduate. I'm not sure if they're still there, but obviously crunching a hundred, 120 hours per week. Um, I still don't, I cannot imagine why you spend that much on these, um, things, but you know, they spend that much time on and all they do pursue at the end is that bonus is that year end bonus.
And as soon as they get that bonus, they spend it lavishly and usually they spend it all right. For most people on Wall Street or otherwise who are working on investment banking. And the point is like, it's not really about the bonus itself. It's about I work so damn hard every single week. I got so stressful. I aged for years every single year. So now I need to prove to the world that it's freaking worth it. So the book actually told me that was the.
mentality of people who are actually spending lavishly. Everyone has their own reasons, you know, so, but those investment bankers, unfortunately don't have autonomy and the money doesn't really matter. Like I said, because you do not have the ability to choose what you do with your time. So that is in some ways of why I choose to bootstrap and bootstrapping obviously I've spoke about it many times. The good thing about what it bought you is that you are free from your investors and there are actually so many things about, about having an investor, having multiple investors on board.
And it diminishes your freedom as well. The more you have, the more investors you have, the more board members you have. It's different, right? And then you run out quickly, run out of options. You cannot make a huge decision without your board say so. And when you have, you know, more and more shareholders, it's even harder to get their buy-ins as well. That is like a hell in itself. I do see the pros and cons of it, but it's just not for me. I choose bootstrap. So, and then I also personally have like, as I mentioned many episodes ago,
I ended a partnership as soon as it didn't feel right. So there was guaranteed revenue in that partnership. There was a brand name client. There was a multi-year commitments, but you know, my gut tells me to run because that would like taking that deal. Would I reduce my autonomy? I would have been locked into, you know, the partners priorities, their timelines and their visions. And I'd have more money for sure. Yes. But I have less control.
You know, so those are all the things and you know, even for geographical reasons, moving many times is because like grass is green on the other side. I always see people who move just because, know, a certain States like Washington State, Texas, Florida doesn't have state income tax. So I know people who are living completely opposite in the U S have to move to those States and immediately regret it after, because their friends are not there. They're saving their, you know, state income tax, which at the end of day, it's not worth the cost of moving.
So there's all those different decisions, I think make idea one super important for me. And idea two, it's more about like spending actually reveals your values. And the author actually says spending like your spending in particular is the clearest window into what you actually value. When spending actually, I think reflects your personal values, internal values, it's resilient. When it's driven by actually external approvals, your values are actually very fragile.
So I say to myself that I will do my own spending, you know, monthly. So I do do it monthly. Sometimes, sometimes I forget. So I do it every two months, three months. And I posted on Twitter recently, you know, like my personal expenses and how much I get paid for my company are $4,000 after tax. And that's basically how much I get paid after tax. say, I find it hard to save a little bit of that. I do save a little bit of that, but you know, finding savings usually hard. So some people commented on Twitter. So how is that enough?
You know, what about a hospital bill or something or like your car breaks down in the middle of a road and you need to bring it to repair? What do you do? Right? So the interesting thing is like, you know, first of all, I'm in Canada and there's no hospital bill per se.
George Pu (00:00)
And second, I think I keep it intentionally lean because I can keep most of the profits compounding the company. So obviously as a business owner.
I can decide how much I pay myself. when people see that it's 4,000 for tax, they freak out. I get it. But you know, it's my personal decision to retain most earnings in the company and then compound that, reinvest that and grow that. Right. I don't have to pay myself more or I spend lavishly. So, and of course I understand that everyone spends their money differently. And I personally respect how other people choose to spend. The book itself talk a lot about like everyone has different circumstances and they're how they grew up, different things. You know, for me, I choose to.
spend on essentials, the things I absolutely need. And beyond that, it's really like, think case by case basis.
I don't buy stuff just to enjoy stuff, you know, so, I do buy stuff that I personally do enjoy, which is like reading and learning a lot of things. So I personally subscribe to a lot of newspapers. A lot of people I know don't have absolutely not. Um, sometimes magazines, sometimes like books and Kindles, right. And I always have people complaining like George have too many, too many books, but you know, that's obviously specific to me. Not everyone. It's like loves reading books these days, especially with the information being so available. Right. But I personally enjoy
I personally invest in it a lot and I'm happy doing it.
So personally, that's my version of Alliance spending. My spending reflects what I value, which is basically learning, building and compounding. When I look at my spending breakdown, which I do put into a Google sheet and Excel sheet, and 60 % of my spending, I think, or my business spending in general, it's reinvested into the business. 20 % is covering living costs or whatever, and 15 % is about tools and learning. And Fabricants is about entertainment, Netflix,
subscriptions whatnot. that's the case. If that's, obviously it tells me what the truth that I care about and I'm sure you can do the same as well. that's number tells me that I'm genuinely happy and value building the process, the building something over just consuming. Right. So I'm not saying that's the right way. I'm just only saying that's my way of doing it. If those numbers flip,
For example, I'm spending like 40, 50 % of lifestyle. That's a signal as well. Either my value have changed this month or I'm lying to myself about what I really care about. So your money spending reflects exactly who you are as a person and your way of spending. So I think that's very true. And compare that obviously what I just said to the founders will say they value freedom, but it's spent tens of thousands of dollars a month on SF rent and different things is because they say that's where you have to be. They're spending actually reveals they actually value proximity to VCs and start
startups more right and money more.
Then actually freedom. So what you say versus what you do, we do. So we say that say do ratio. think in this case is, you know, a little bit different. And I think that's fine. The SF thing, everyone's different, right? But let's just be honest about it. And I think even when we're talking to ourselves about what we value, sometimes we actually lie quite, quite blatantly, even to ourselves about what we value. I've called myself a little few times as well. So your spending actually shows what you actually value, not just like what you say you value. So try to like, you know, explore your credit card statements, explore your like checking,
saving statements and just to see if you can manually put those together or child chat, HPD or Claude to make a CSV statement, you know, based on what you, what the statements that you can give them to save your time. So there's no excuse of not doing it, but I think your spending does show you what you actually value. So do analysis, see where you're spending money and you know, and you know, that's a very good idea. So idea three,
It's basically something I've been saying for a while, but I personally think it's important. It's basically saying that the pursuit of status is a trap.
Right. And the author's point is that spending to impress others is the fastest path to having less money and being miserable. And he has done his case studies and his personal experiences to show that. I personally think, yeah, like LinkedIn, think, you know, I don't like to trash it again, but LinkedIn personally, it's a very real example, right? It's pure gibberish. A lot of times, like people are posting selfies about themselves and posting about their lives. And it's supposed to like mean something like specifically, I have no idea what is supposed to like take
and what it's supposed to take away from it's very bizarre. It's very crazy. But some people post stuff like that on LinkedIn, for example, like that absolutely has no meaning, other than pumping up themselves are then like, it's a performance, right? And at end of the day, I realized like those people just want to fit into a club. They want to fit into the VC club. They want to fit a consulting club, whatever club founders club, whatever club, and they're just performing to reach it. They're performing. So people actually think they belong to that club except when you they don't, you know, it's hilarious, right? And it's pathetic.
And honestly, I don't want to judge people for like what they do, but you know, when I see that much on LinkedIn, just don't, you know, I just don't really want to take it anymore. And then, you know, nowadays I basically don't use it anymore. So I just don't align with the values of some people posting there as well. Right. So that is what I call performance. And my
trading firm a few years ago. Of course, I started a quant trading firm a few years ago and bird the hundreds of thousand dollars. It was also very sales driven because I saw a few shows. saw like billions of other shows when I got super pumped up about becoming a quant trader, becoming, getting quant and investing money. Except, you know, I I'm not actually bill for it. It's not my passion. And also looking back at like, just wanted to look sophisticated and want to say, ⁓ I have algorithms. I'm trading like big firms. I'm on wall street or different things.
Right? At the end of the day, I really believe it's a waste of money and a waste of time.
the story I'm sure you guys all know that is that after shutting that down, after taking hundreds of thousand dollars in losses, I simply turn to the bull go heads approach and investing simply and buying once and never worry about it. So I've been doing that since May and my results of 12 % speaking for itself, right? So it's only been like five months and it's already up 12 % and it's diversified and I do not check it at all. You know, I just bought it. I did not check it up and that has beat my quantity for him. So that's just, you know, a different idea about like where
things really are, right? So every time, you know, I make a potential purchase decision, I always ask, look, am I buying it just for the utility of this thing? Or am I buying status? If it's a status, and then I really, really skip it, you know, simple as that. And I'm sure you as a reader can do the same thing. So, you know, let's now move to more essentials cover from the book, right? The,
Basically, I think the author wrote the book for general audiences, but I think there are specific implications for founders, both track founders, business owners, entrepreneurs, that he doesn't really explicitly call out that, but I think it's really helpful for founders to know that. The first thing is lifestyle creep is your enemy, you know, and as revenue grows, it's very tempting to scale your lifestyle proportionately. And we've seen that from TV shows. We've seen that from real people and
It's tempting and some of us do do it, right? We buy new cars, we buy bigger apartments, we get business class flights. And the author's point about defining enough actually does matter here, right? Because when you are on that growth trajectory, you are going to have to make those decisions about how you spend your money. know, so I was doing the thought exercise with AI very recently and I basically was asking about, know, someone I was like, I was asking when someone gets to a hundred million dollars, isn't it true that all they think about is to get to 200 million and then five
$500
million and then a billion and then whoever has a billion will see someone with 10 billion and whoever sees someone with 10 billion will see Bezos and they'll see Elon Musk with 400 billion and I'll say like geez I really want to get there and I think that is true mentality
that is lifestyle creep even at the very top of the food chain. It never ends, right? It doesn't end now in your daily life with your neighbors, with your friends and your family. And it doesn't really stop when you get rich as well. And that's a trap, right? And many of us think that, once I hit this amount of money, I'll be satisfied. I'll be, you know, I'll be happy. I hear that from my family quite a lot, you know, throughout the years. And the truth of course is that you won't be right unless you have defined enough for yourself. And I personally have learned this and I do not compare myself to
others, it's not a habit in my mind. I try to benchmark myself against myself. So today I want to be better than who I was yesterday and tomorrow I want to be better than who I was today and that's it right and learning obviously comes a lot from that but you know different things like health like you know mental health, physical health, know learning and just like abilities in general so that's why I'm trying to benchmark against myself instead of folding like a livestock creep.
And personal notes is that I think when you're comparing yourself with others, like you don't actually know other people's stories, right? You don't know their history. You don't know what I've gone through. You don't know what bad things are happening in their lives. You don't want you to know about all you see is the public version. All you see is a good version. Right? So I think that's also a good reason of trying to stop comparing yourself to the best versions of others. If you want to be them, you have to own all of them. Right. And I think that's something that Val said as well. I think really moved me because it's true.
to be them, you have to earn all of them. And is that something that you really want or you just want the best of them? Right. And that's a good reason to think about it.
And I think for founders is that the moment your life scales with revenue, right. And your lifestyle becomes more and more expensive. You're actually killing your freedom because you're trapped to earning to maintain the lifestyle. And eventually you become working for your lifestyle. So no freedom, but working for a lifestyle. So that is a scenario where you can't take risk. can say no to bad deals and you can't walk away from, you know, partnerships that are, that are shitty. So I personally keep my life so pretty flat and you know, ⁓ and I personally, it's for me, obviously.
is
not for everyone. of course, majority of the earnings that we have, I retain it and I keep compounded. So that's the first implication I think founders can take away from. And the second implication is that reinvestment, it's actually not always smart for founders, right? From this book, I think especially, especially talked about
that many founders actually assume that I need to reinvest everything back in my business. And sometimes of course it's right. I'm doing that myself. I'm not saying I'm right, but of course the mentality is that I need to reinvest in my business. But sometimes also I think.
You might be buying status, for example, like, I'm looking at me. I'm reinvesting my business. I'm so dedicated. Right. That can also be a trap of like buying status and not utility. So the author's framework actually applies here. Right. Is this spend creating autonomy or reducing it? Right. For example, I talk about it quite a lot, but like hiring employee number 15 employee number 16 might feel like growth per se, but it reduces your autonomy. Right. Because now you have more payroll, ⁓ you have more payroll expenses.
You have more obligations to pay and you have less freedom about what you can do. You actually have to make more money just to make up for that additional team member, right? More management, of course, more HR, more one-on-ones. So at least I personally think it's not for me and spending hundreds of $50,000 on salaries. It's not necessarily buying freedom, right? It's buying stress. So when you are growing your head count, it is also, of course, buying stress. Even if you're venture funding, it doesn't mean that you have to raise future balance. You have your money's running out faster.
So overall, think founders have a fallacy about bad spending. And I'm not saying hiring someone's bad spending, but it's just in general, when you're growing, you have to be very careful about where you do spend money at. Right. For me, myself, cutting from team of 14 to team of five was good spending, but even though at the time it was super, super difficult and it was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made. And it looked like contraction at the time. However, it helped because revenue per customer, revenue per employee, growing up, the stress of thinking about how to make payroll for the next couple
months went down, autonomy increased, and I was actually able to think about what's the future of the company and planning ahead. So that's very different. So before you as a founder reinvest in your business or want to spend something, right? Obviously, if you have some extra cash, do think about is this buying me a bit more control over my time or a bit less? Is it creating more freedom or is it creating more friction?
And I think the third implication for founders is that international arbitrage, think, you know, it's not covered by this book, but I think it's freedom spending, right? So this is my version of what the author said, money as a tool. So I spend money on structures quite a lot. So I spend money on, you know, sitting up dollar corporation and Canadian corporation, sitting up an Indian team and sitting, sitting up in Abu Dhabi as a corporation. So these are all the things I'm doing now. There's another consumption, right? And in hindsight, could be looked at as a very stupid thing.
I it needs to be emphasized again because I international arbitrage is the way to build in this era. I have employees and team members all over the world.
And to be honest, I love working with them, right? I also have the experience of working with only Canadian people, Canadian employees, and we are all together in a room. So I've tried different things and eventually I realized I love my team to be global, to bring different perspectives. I love the cost saving as well. That buys me more runway. And right now, like we have a real low drama team culture, right? Serious builders only comes to work with me and it works perfectly. And it requires a lot of autonomy and independence. I don't micromanage because I don't have to, because the team culture is there.
And the cost of course is a lot lower compared to hiring in the U S and Canada. It has worked incredibly well for me since we're both strapped, we're not VC funded. It's my choice and I'm really happy with it. Right. So those structures eventually will buy me into a graphical optionality. It will also bring maybe a little bit tax efficiency here and there cost of a trotch. Right. So spending tens of $10,000 to set up an entity in Abu Dhabi does look pretty stupid, but in hindsight to me, it's good spending, right? Spending tens of thousand dollars.
However, that same money on a fancy Toronto office, that is that spending. So I'm very clear to myself about exactly what I'm buying and whether that fits my value or not. And think about Abu Dhabi structure, Toronto fancy office, same amount of money, but one buys you freedom and one buys you good impressions. So have to be really careful. So with this book, I think here are the things I'm really changing about it. First of all, ⁓ I'm going to be doing a more detailed quarterly audit.
I know I was saying I do it monthly, but you know, at the end of the day, I realized last year, I probably just did it twice or three times. So I'm going to be more consistent and doing a personal audit about the business expenses and also the personal expenses every quarter. So every three months and business spending by category, personal spending, my category, I will probably use touch up and teach help me with like, you know, like, putting things together. And then, so I don't have to spend time copy and paste, copy and paste, copy and paste. And I only need to ask myself, does this align with freedom and autonomy?
And if not, I need to cut it, you know, that's that simple. But here's the more important part. I think it's also like requires new ones is that don't cut too much or too bizarrely, right? Be reasonable with yourself and be reasonable with your team. Don't cut everything. because it's not gonna, it's not gonna work if you just think about, I need to be like a cutter. need to cut everything or almost everything. It never, never works. I've tried that before. Don't be too harsh on your team, on yourself, but also of course, on the other high, on the other side, don't spend too lavishly.
and
never look back. like, think also like personal experience on this is like I personally have been in a hole before a few years ago when it was like really, really difficult.
to even pay the bills, to even pay credit cards. And I was there a few years ago, right? You tend not to care. I think once you're in that hole, you don't give a crap anymore, but I don't think that's the right way to go. Even though it's really, really hard when you're drowning in like credit card debt or different types of debt. And many of us currently still do. There's always room for optimization. There's always room to look back and say, yes, I'm struggling, but I can't do it now. What I can do now is actually to make my finances better. Even though I am drowning in credit card debt or whatever, there's always a room for me to be
better than who I was yesterday, Today better than yesterday. Follow that example and try to use that to make yourself better. I'm sure all of us can, all of us could, right? Financially. And here's the motivation part. I was listening to a Dave Ramsey podcast recently and people in that show, of course they have like, some of them have millions and millions of dollars in debt and in the worst of my days even, right? I wasn't that bad.
So at least like just like if you watch some of those or at least just hearing me talking about it I hope it gives a little bit comfort that there's always a way out. There's always a way out You know if people can get out on that show so can you so never never give up? Think about the approach I just said try to be better today than who you were yesterday Right, and if you keep doing that it compounds and you'll be a better place a month You know two months six months a year from now So and second thing what I'll do is actually
have to do the enough number exercise. I'm going to define my enough both for like business revenue and also for a personal lifestyle. It is a bit hard. I have to be honest, but you know, without that ceiling, I think I'm just going to be chasing and falling into that trap of like, you know, always counting to a next number, right? So that's chasing. So I never want to do that. I want to know when I made it and I can actually enjoy, you know, life and try to calm down and just celebrate the win instead of just say, Oh, you know, I, I can be that number.
So it's not really about limiting personal ambition, it's about like knowing what that goal ultimately is. Because then you kind of end up in a treadmill. 100 million, 200 million, then a billion, it just never stops and it makes your life a bit miserable. So I'm going to try to write down my number and I need some time to do that.
I know I've been trying to do that for lot, for a long, time. Um, and I just need to be honest with myself at the end of the day, you know, so like, have to tell myself like, what does enough look like for a simple direct for ANC for personal income? What does net worth like an ideal net worth look like that? I can just say, okay, this is enough. can optimize the other things, you know? So what does financial independence actually mean to me in concrete numbers, right? Once I hit that number, once I hit that goal, everything else is choice. It's not necessity. And that is.
freedom. And that's something I should be doing. I probably won't be sharing the numbers with you guys here, but I hope you all make your own numbers and understand where you are. And you can always email me if you have any questions or want to know my number. Maybe I'll figure it out by then. And the third thing I'll do after reading this book, of course, is like the status purchasing rule. Before making a huge purchase, I will ask myself now, is this like for actual utility or is it for, is it just to show? And a question I'll be asking myself, it's like, would I
this if no one else knows about it? If the answer is no, then that is a status. Then I wouldn't do it.
Right. It's the same thing goes in business as well. It's not just personal. Are we buying this tool because it actually solves the problem or because everyone else is using it and using this tool make us look sophisticated. Right. Are we hiring because we're actually over capacity or just because 10 employees, some better than five, you know, those are all the examples that's actually possible. Right. So here's the bottom line. I really enjoy the book. I'm actually just on the urge of like almost finishing it up. So probably like I'll finish up in the next day or two, but I really enjoy it. I think it's not just about personal finance. It's also.
applicable for your business finance, but also of course more important for business finance. It's some really, really simple principles. think, you know, I just break it down the main things to you. If you're interested, definitely check out the book. But if not, you know, I hope this episode has created enough value for you to take away from. So do the exercises I mentioned.
Right. Think about like what is your actually optimizing is the status, it's autonomy, it's impression is a freedom. know, whatever it is, it matters, especially for founder, because we control both sides of the equation. We control as entrepreneurs, how much we personally earn and how we personally spend. Same goes for business. Most founders optimize for earning, right. But few optimize spending.
So just need to be very careful about that. That is the opportunity. And I think the book tells you a lot about how wealth is actually about how much control you have and spending is where you either build a control or destroy it.
So this week, you know, use CHPT, use whatever tool you have, do your own spending audit, right? For the last three months categorize every dollar, ask you to do it for you, you know, business and personal. And I'll be doing that myself and share with you guys what I find and ask yourself, which ones of those are for utility, which one does offer status and is it for freedom or for fiction? So see what you learn by yourself. I promise you, you'll be shocking and revealing because every time even like last year when I was doing it, it was very, very revealing and actually
a lot of money from just the credit card expenses. Like, you know, we always find those like subscriptions, but if you do it now, you can't just save probably $1,500 per month just by looking at your subscriptions and canceling them, you know? So there's always a value in doing it, but you'll, promise you, if you do this, you'll do, you'll get a lot more value than just saving on subscriptions. So next week, I will talk about something else, but I really hope you enjoy this episode. I hope you enjoyed the book and the breakdowns. So, you know, until next time, thank you so much.
to my weekly insights also at newsletter.foundedreality.com and the blog we're actually publishing more often foundedreality.com
And then for the schedule, we're trying actually publishing the first episode of the week on Tuesday, just to make it a little bit, you know, flexible for our editors and myself. So we don't have to like crunch it on the weekend. So of course, I hope you're enjoying the new format. Always let me know what you think. I'm george at founderofrond.com. If you have any feedback until then I'll see you next week. Have a great weekend.