BROKE to Making $100K at 22 | My Story & Side Hustles

0:00I turned $1.75 into $100,000 by age 22. Here's how I did it through drop shipping, day trading, and selling courses online with Tai Lopez. Okay, that's not what happened. My story involves none of those get-rich quick schemes and is much more realistic. Today, I'm going to share with you every job I worked, every investment I made, and every business that I built that got me to my first 100K. My story begins at

0:19age 16 when I got my first job. Hi, I'm from University Painters. Have you considered painting your home recently? Back then, I had just completed grade 11 and wasn't doing much that summer. So, when my friend asked me if I wanted a job, I said, "Sure." My job was to go door todoor, sell painting services, and collect phone numbers. I was paid around $10 an hour, and for every phone number I'd get, I get a bonus of $5. For a shy 16-year-old kid

0:42like me, I didn't get that bonus often. I was barked at by dogs, screamed at by humans, and burned in the summer sun. It was tough, but it did teach me a lot about sales and communication. I also think that the constant rejection that I faced made me a more resilient person overall. So, why does the story start off with $1.75? It's because that was the cost of the bus ticket to go to the first houses I had to knock on. By the end of that summer, I had around $400 in my bank account. I'm now 17 in grade 12, my last year of high school. After

1:10having my first taste of self-made money, I thought maybe I should try to work a job during school. And so, I officially became a produce service clerk. Every weekend, I was paid minimum wage to cut fruits and vegetables and put them on display. It was like Fruit Ninja, but much more tiring. I think working these labor jobs early in my career really humbled me and taught me

1:28to never take a dollar for granted. After working at the grocery store for a year, I remember seeing $10,000 in my bank account and feeling so proud of myself. To celebrate, I bought my first camera, the one that I still use to this day, for $2,500, leaving $7,500 in my bank account. I'm now 18 in university studying business. I wanted to start building my video portfolio in hopes to become a freelance videographer. So, I began volunteering and filming videos for university clubs. One of those videos changed my life and led me to making tens of thousands of dollars later on. It's crazy. Here's what happened. There's a club that hosts a

2:04business conference every year. Students go to learn about different industries and meet professionals working in those industries. I really wanted to go, but I didn't want to pay $40. So, I made a deal with the club. In exchange for a free ticket, I would film a promotional video for them. At the same time, I had something else on my mind. You see, during the conference, there's a networking portion where all students and professionals sit together in one big room and eat lunch. During negotiations, I requested that the club play my video during this networking portion in front of everyone. My hope was that there was a professional there

2:34that would like the video enough to hire me as a videographer or marketing intern. I got really, really lucky because that's exactly what happened. That summer, I worked as a marketing intern for a product development company. I was responsible for making marketing materials, taking photos and videos, graphic design, social media, all of that stuff. I worked there for four months full-time, and by the end of that summer, I had around $17,500 in my bank account. I'm now 19 in my second year of university. At the end of my summer internship, I was actually asked if I could be a contractor for the company in my spare time. I was down

3:05because this was what I was working towards the whole time, becoming a freelance videographer. That year, I made around $2,500 from freelancing. When the summer came around again, I began searching for another summer internship. This time, I wanted to work for a video production agency. I asked my manager at the product development company if she knew anyone who worked in video production, and surprisingly, she did. I was able to connect with that person, which I later learned was the

3:29boss of a whole video production agency. I really wanted to work there. So, what I did when I got home was email him not only my resume, but a two-page document listing out every single way I could provide value to the agency. I wrote that I could edit them videos, I could find them new clients, I could reorganize their equipment, literally anything I could think of. I crossed my fingers and a few days later, he responded. He said he'd take a chance on me and I would become their first intern. My internship at the video production company was awesome. I got to help out on commercial shoots. I got to

4:00go on trips. Now, they only needed me 2 days a week. So on the other three week days, I actually worked at the product development company. Both of those internships netted me around $10,000. If two internships wasn't enough on my plate, my brother and I also started a real estate marketing company that summer. Let me give you some context. Here in Vancouver, real estate is a big industry. And when I mean big, I mean the city is kind of famous for super expensive houses. Because real estate here is so popular, there is a large

4:26demand for real estate videographers. Our plan was to film videos for luxury homes and provide other marketing services. We were so excited. We bought a big drone. We bought a gimbal. We were ready to make some real estate money. The first step was to have a portfolio. At that time, I had never filmed any real estate videos before. So, to create a portfolio, we emailed random realtors and asked if we could film for them for free. Two of them agreed, and I filmed two of their properties. It's funny because after filming the second home, I then realized that I did not like

4:54filming houses. It was kind of boring. No matter how much potential money there was on the table, I just couldn't envision a career out of it. So, I ended the business. I'm sharing this experience with you to show that not all of my business decisions have been the right decisions. I have my failures. We've now entered my 20s. This was when I really started to get into personal finance. When I hit 20, I realized that in order for me to live a life of freedom and be able to pursue my passions of film making and art, I would have to be in control of my finances. I

5:23started reading up on personal finance on Google and Reddit, as well as ask my friends what they were doing. I quickly realized that I barely knew anything. There was a world of investing that I had yet to tap into. The first thing I did was invest in index funds and ETFs. These are a large basket of stocks or bonds that you can invest in and are considered lowrisk because of their diversified nature. The key to making a lot of money from them is to invest in them as early as possible as the investment compounds over time. With that checked off, I began looking into another popular investment. If you're

5:51around December of 2017, you probably know what I'm talking about. This Bitcoin thing is taking over the news. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are booming. Bitcoin. [Music] Wow. With all the hype going on, I decided to FOMO in. I took out $5,000 of my hard-earned money, which was around 15% of my net worth at that time, and sent it to a sketchy crypto exchange in Vancouver to buy Bitcoin. By the way, that exchange doesn't exist anymore because they ran away with everyone's money. Luckily, I got out there before they did that, but that's a story for another day. So, I bought Bitcoin, something I barely knew about at that

6:30time, and it average around $17,000. I was ready to get my Lambo. And then the whole market crashed. Practically overnight, my $5,000 basically turned into nothing. There was no point in selling, so I just left it and forgot about it. Looking back, that was the best decision I could have ever made. But to be honest, I didn't really have a choice. Bitcoin didn't discourage me from hustling more that year. Throughout the school year, just like the year prior, I continued to freelance and make videos for companies, restaurants, and events. I made around $4,000 in freelancing. During the summer, I also worked at the two companies I interned

7:03at last year, the product development company and the video production agency. At the end of that summer, I had around $37,750 in my bank account. I am now 21 in my fourth year of university. This year, I wanted to enjoy life a little bit. So, I decided to go on exchange to Singapore for a semester. I'll admit making money was the last thing on my mind. I just wanted to travel and film YouTube videos for fun. It's funny how life played out because despite not seeking success in Singapore, I found the most success in Singapore. There, I made my first viral YouTube video. Before that, I was

7:36posting videos, but they didn't get many views. It was this video that gave me the confidence to see YouTube as not only a hobby of mine, but something that could actually become a business and job for me in the future. It was also in Singapore where I discovered my next career opportunity. I had no plans to apply to jobs there, but when my friend shared with me a job posting from SAP, a big international software company, I decided to give it a chance. This particular job, I actually applied to it the previous year and got rejected. But I surprisingly got the interview and ended up doing it at 1:00 a.m. through

8:06Skype wearing a suit in 30° C weather. When I came back from Singapore, I went straight to work in my new full-time role as a product marketing specialist. I did a lot of marketing and content creation. I met a lot of cool people there that I still talk to to this day. It was an awesome time. I worked there for 8 months from January to August and earned around $30,000 there. While

8:27working at SAP, I was still freelancing. Not much, just a few jobs here and there, but that added around $1,500 to my bank account. At the same time, my brother and I started another business. It was around the time I had just come back from Singapore when my brother told me about his idea for storage hotel. The concept was a full-ervice storage and moving company that made storage convenient by picking up, storing, and delivering people's items. Usually, he comes up with a lot of ideas, but we don't act on them. However, this idea we immediately saw the potential in. That night, we bought the domain name to our

8:59website and went straight to work. When deciding on a target customer to focus on, we chose university students as we noticed that many needed storage when they moved out of their dorms. We also noticed that they typically don't have cars and are in a time crunch problems that our service solves. Being that students move out at the end of the school year, we now had a deadline, April. That meant we had 4 months to build storage hotels. Every spare second I had was spent working on this business. From trying to figure out real estate and logistics to building our website to advertising through Facebook to secretly answering customer phone

9:32calls in the washroom at work. It was hectic. When you start your own business, the biggest fear is spending lots of time and money building something to then realize that no one wants it. I remember the day we got our first booking and just feeling so relieved. Soon after, the customers started rolling in. Moveout season had begun and my brother, some friends, and I began picking up items with a U-Haul truck to store at our facility. Being a scrappy startup, we had to get our hands dirty, but it was well worth it. We had a running business that was making money. At the end of that summer, at age

10:0521, I had around $80,000 in my bank account. I'm now at age 22. My internship had just ended and I'm in my fifth and final year. All the work I had done so far had led up to this point in my life. The entire time I was in university, my plan after graduation was to work a regular 9 to-ive job. But as my graduation date got closer and closer, I started to reflect on what I'd been doing over the years in my free time, creating businesses and multiple income streams for myself. When co hit that same year, I made up my mind. I decided to pursue entrepreneurship

10:36full-time with my three businesses, my freelance work, storage hotel, and YouTube. Around May of 2020, I hit $100,000 in my bank account. If there is one key lesson you should take away from this video if you want to improve your finances, it is to practice consistency. You have to show up every day. There are no shortcuts. I didn't pursue any get-rich quick schemes. I didn't gamble my life savings away. I just stuck to a few things that I was passionate about, worked hard, and never gave up. That's all it took. Fast forward to today. I'm now 24. And in the past 2 years, my finances have changed once again. Leave

11:12a comment below if you want to know where my bank account sits at now. Otherwise, thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to like it. Subscribe if you haven't already. Consider checking out my other videos.