I'm going to share with you the untold truth about money. I personally use all these principles

to go from broke 17 year old to making my first million at 27 years old. And I still use these

principles to generate wealth and create abundance in my life today. Welcome to the Martel method.

I went from rehab at 17 to building a $100 million empire and being a Wall Street Journal best-selling

author. In this podcast, I'll

show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate. My bestselling book,

Buy Back Your Time is out now. Grab a copy at buybackyourtime.com or at any of your preferred

online retailers. The first principle is to pay yourself first. My first company, the paycheck came in and I put 60 to 70% in savings and forced myself to live off the rest. It was a forcing function for me to pay myself and to then try to find ways to reinvest and grow. I remember one of my companies I started with my co-founder, Ethan, he wasn't paying himself enough and then he didn't have the time to do business stuff. I remember one time I asked him to come to the office and he said he was too busy doing laundry. The CEO of a company couldn't come to the office to brainstorm, to whiteboard with me because he couldn't pay for wash and fold. When you pay yourself first, it then forces you to cut your costs that aren't efficient because you need

the capital to grow. If you just keep pouring everything back into the business and you're paying

yourself nothing, you actually have a fake business. It's not real. You're not paying yourself

what you deserve for the value you've created. So you want to take the profit out of the business

first, then operate from the rest. I know a lot of people say,

no, leave the money in the business. It doesn't force you to put your prices up, to figure out

your cost structure, to be more efficient in your workflows. I know this might be controversial,

but constraints breed creativity. All the best innovations came from constraints, not having all

the resources in the world. When you're starting out, you want to put the most amount of money aside for the next principle. You are the most important asset, not a house, a car, a watch, an investment, you. Which leads us directly into principle number two, which is to invest in your skill set, not your lifestyle. It's not your salary that makes you rich. It's your spending habits. My dad used to say this to me a long time

ago. It's not what you make. It's what you spend. If you spend a million and one dollars and you make a

million dollars a year, you are one dollars poor. 25% of millionaires actually live month to month.

But rich people don't just save money. The untold truth is they reinvest that money in themselves to get better.

The world will pay you based on the value you create. The way you become more valuable is to invest in

your skill set so you can solve bigger problems. If you're an accountant managing people's books,

that's not very valuable. If you're an FP&A, financial planning and analyst, that's more valuable. If you're a tax

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