My past life before the fitness industry

[Fiskevatten]

Damn our countries are different regarding success (making money)!

Awesome to see some of your past man!

[GearHeaded]

Damn our countries are different regarding success (making money)!

Awesome to see some of your past man!

whats it like in your country ? you can't become a self made millionaire by just being an independent blue collar work with your own hands contractor ?

the most successful people I know here do two things .. they generally own a small contracting type business and they own real estate investments. thats the quickest and easiest way to have a net worth of over a million.

I was on the fast track from the start .. two days after I graduated high school I was in the pipe fitters union and working hvac construction (installing large commercial boilers and chiller systems).

I saved my money and lived in a shitty little apartment. I also studied the crap out of my trade in my spare time. I had stacks of books on hvac. I saved installation manuals and controls manuals on everything I had installed and basically memorized that shit.
my co workers , who were all older guys having been in the trade for years, and I was a 20 year old kid, called me the "whiz kid".
if there was a 5 story office building that had no AC because of some sort of glitch in the building automation system ,, no one could figure it out and fix it but me.
needless to say I was compensated well for my skills and abilities and my employers valued me as a key man in their business. I was making $34 per hour (which was a lot of money back then) as a kid.

well living in that shitty apartment and making that kind of money it did not take long or me to save up and buy my first house at 21 years old . I wanted to get into real estate as fast as possible. I bought a nice little fairly new custom built home in the mountains on 3 acres at about 9000 feet elevation about 15 miles west of Golden Colorado. the Rocky Mountains were my back yard.

so at 21 I own my own beautiful mountain home. have a very well paying career. a hot wife. and plenty of money in the bank .. while all my friends from high school are trying to make ends meet working at fast food joints and partying they way through college. a few of them eventually graduate but don't get jobs and still work fast food.
I took the fast track and got into the blue collar trades.

anyhow. being a fairly business minded person. I knew my employers were paying me well but they were still making money off of me and my skills . so I decided to start my own commercial HVAC business. I bought a truck and I bought a bunch of tools and ladders and outfitted it. I then used my amazing sales skills and cold called businesses until eventually I had a bunch of my own customers.
so at 22 I was a small business owner and a real estate owner.

the money was coming in and I was my own business . I bought a bigger house in the same area. made money off the other house. lived in that house maybe 2 years and did some fix up on it and sold that for a profit why I was having another house built.. moved into the house I had built and continued to thrive running my business. so I was making money off my contracting company plus was making money as the real estate market was taking off.

work was too much for me to handle . so had to start hiring employees.. I also couldn't work out of my garage anymore so needed to have a shop and office in the city. so I had to rent a commercial office warehouse space..
real estate in golden area was taking off. I wanted to move closer to the city though because of work. I bought land this time on the east side and had a house built. sold my house in the mountains for a good profit.

more work. more business.. more employees. now I have a whole crew of about 5 guys outfitted in trucks working for me.. I have a full time secretary in the office and a sales manager. and heck I'm no longer in a crappy little office warehouse space , I'm in an executive commercial space in the upper end of town with its own private golf course..

still making bank. still working my ass off . and now instead of buying houses for me to live in,, I'm buying houses to rent out. I start with a couple of condos and get those rented . then I buy a 4 bedroom home in a nice area but the home needs work.. I put about 30k into a remodeling job on the home and then do a lease to own on it.
I then move into my mini mansion on the golf course BUT I don't sell the previous home I had built. I rent that out.
so now heck I'm making thousands of dollars per month in real estate and rentals .. on top of that my contracting business is doing 800k per year.
now I'm living life. I'm driving luxury cars. I'm conducting a lot of my business from my iPhone while on the golf course..


that all started two days after I graduated high school and got a blue collar trade job. heck my first day on that job my boss gave me a shovel and gave me the task of digging a 4 foot deep by 40 foot long ditch between two buildings so we could lay some chiller lines down.. they could of just rented a damn tractor. but instead they wanted to see what I was made out of. I dug 8 hours per day every single day for 2 weeks straight until that damn ditch was perfect. without a single complaint.
after that my boss promoted me to be his assistant and I got respect even as a young kid fresh out of high school.

becoming a self made millionaire at 33 years old all started with that shovel and the work ethic to just fucking dig if I needed to


heck this is why people move to this country and have nothing and end up becoming rich . all it takes is the desire to work and use your hands

[Fiskevatten]

whats it like in your country ? you can't become a self made millionaire by just being an independent blue collar work with your own hands contractor ?

I live in Sweden:
- The land of the neutrals (this is actually what we say as well, but in swedish)
- Always on the radar for our politics, women and social security world over right now

To limit the discussion as much as possible to money and opportunity.
We have it safe in Sweden compared to the rest of the world, and this is what the tax is for.
We pay A TON of tax.
Not just from income, but on everything we buy and use as well basically.
This is great for a safe life, but hard to achieve anything noteworthy with.

It's very easy to get a job here that pays between 12 - 16 USD/ hour and we usually have 40hr weeks.
This sums up around 95% of all the work we have in Sweden.
On that amount by the end of the month we pay around 33% tax, which is ok for the above.

Here is where the tricky part comes in = earning more.
- The remaining 5% is a mix of everything you could imagine you would earn a lot from. Most of these positions won't still earn anything near 4 - 5000 USD/ month
regardless of education, not even a VD position usually earn that much.
The small percentage that earn more are extremely specific fields of expertise, high political or state positions, great salesmen in high commission companies, successful lawyers
and/ or the like.
The people who make it here are very very few.
These people earn a lot and usually have ways to receive "bonuses" that doesn't really exist, or company privileges.
The most famous people are an exception to all of these rules.
E.g. Zlatan.

If you earn more than:
- 50 000 USD/ year you pay around 53% tax.
- 70 000 USD/ year you pay around 58% tax.

So to earn here you need to go around the tax-system and earn around the regular income, without breaking the law.
The taxation body in Sweden loves to check everything and mistakes are dreadful, prison and extreme debts are common.
If they can prove you have done something wrong but not by how much, they can "guess" and sue you with that.

If you start a company you could earn more, but you will pay around 50% in tax of everything already from the start.
The good thing is that you can receive VAT-refunds (25%) on physical products (cars, tools, wood etc).
We also have certain goverment bonuses that e.g. help a customers order certain help (e.g. carpentry) much cheaper from a company and by that
the company can receive more customers (the company itself get some money from client and some from goverment).
This is mostly for home-help of some sort, nothing else.

Now, that doesn't mean the salary go up by much.
You can ask for more (usually around 30 - 100 USD/ hour), but you also have to pay more.
Not just tax, but everything you use, buy or stay at.
If you are great at what you do and have tons of clients, GREAT, but most don't and have to end the company within a few years.


Or they use that to live safe, like my dad.

To earn here you need to go outside of Sweden, know someone special or be extremely niche.

Investments certainly is an option and real estate WAS an amazing opportunity, people made crazy money a few decades back.
However, the prices have gone up so much its rediculous and the avarage Joe can't join in anymore.
Sure, the prices are below e.g. NY, but the salary here is not enough to buy a small 30sqm condo for 300 000 USD in the suburbs.
Then sell it for the same (some fluctuation).

To sum it down.
To earn here as someone who is not exceptional but hard working and have most braincells left:
- High commission sales
- Overseas jobs/ freelance overseas
- Start a company in expert fields
- Start a niche website
- Become a star on social media
- Expert consultant
- Invent something useful

All in all, it's fun to compare money in America and Sweden.
When you talk about a million it's a million dollars, in Sweden it's SEK (kronor).
1 000 000 USD is about 9 600 000 SEK, that is fantasy money for us. ^^

I believe that it's mostly not about the tax that I portraint above that we have it hard to earn from, but the extreme difference in amount of population and it's demands.
That is why I'm looking elsewhere outside Sweden.

I'm very creative and very good at talking and building trust, but I'm also very insecure in what might work and stick with it.
Will be fun to see where I'm at in a few years, but it's awesome to read you guys stories as it inspires!