All right, all right. We got the man, the myth, the Cody Berman on Action Academy,

round two. Buddy, what is going on, man? How are you doing? A lot is going on. I am doing

incredibly well, very excited for our conversation today, and we can talk about all things,

financial independence, retiring early, and, you know, the things we jive on. Yeah, I'm super

excited. So for anybody that's checking in, tuning in for the first time, Cody and I have been friends for four or five years now. And you're one of my buddies that we made that because you also traveled around the world. Like you were somebody that was young, you were in shape, you cared about health, you cared about wealth, you're traveling. We haven't even gone and traveled together yet, which we should. We should absolutely do that. So it sounds like we're about to do that in Iceland here in October. But man, so tell people like who you are, what you are, what your story is and why we're here today. All right, SparkNotes version. I went into corporate America for seven months, quit, went all in

entrepreneurship, scaled my income like crazy, well-being extremely frugal, created a massive gap

between my income, my expenses, invested said massive gap into the stock market, into real

estate, built a small business. And by the time I was 25, I had 11 rental units that were

bringing in $3,700 a month. My digital products business was bringing in $10,000 a month.

And I had 500K in the stock market. And it was at that point, I was like, I don't really need to

work for money anymore. That was when I reached my financial freedom number.

Yeah. And then now here we are today, 30 years old. You are launching a book today as people are listed into this. The book is live on Amazon, retire by 30 by Cody Berman. So where are we at today? If that was you at 25, what transpired over the last five years to get us to this book today? No, it's funny. A lot of people have asked me this question,

like, what happened when you hit five? Honestly, nothing, because I had this deep ingrained scarcity

mindset and it really didn't set in like what that money had done for me until I was maybe 28 or

29 years old. Like, I didn't fully appreciate it. I just kind of kept earning more money blindly

because I just felt like I needed to.

And there was pressure from society to just make more money, make more money. I was so scared that I wasn't going to have enough, even though all the spreadsheets in the world said, Cody, you're going to be completely fine. You're actually probably going to have too much money when you retire. Like, can you just spend more? but I just could not kick that frugal bug,

that like scarcity mindset

that was just ingrained for me from childhood I mean nobody nobody talks about this stuff

that's why podcasts like ours are so rare nobody talks about financial independence or

building cash flow for freedom it's just it's so foreign to most people myself included so it took

me a long time to unlearn those

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