Delayed Gratification to Seven Figures

This is a guest post written by Ben, who writes at BlueDollarBull.com, about building and maintaining wealth that will last for generations. I think that Generational Wealth is an important concept to think about, especially for those of us with kids! 

Ben also has a YouTube Channel with a lot of great videos on it (including his 0 to $1,000 Challenge). Definitely check out his website and subscribe to his YouTube Channel. You will find a lot of interesting and helpful content on there.

Thanks, Ben, for sharing your story with us!

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Hey, I’m Ben I write & produce videos about Generational Wealth on my corners of the internet. I’d like to thank Nathan for the opportunity to write for Life Before Budget.

Delayed Gratification

Delaying gratification is a key strategy for most wealth building. It is giving up that instant satisfaction for a greater, more beneficial result at a later date. The results of delaying gratification are staggering.

Delayed gratification may mean you don’t eat junk food so you can lose weight or get in shape. Or maybe it’s when you don’t buy those coffees and instead make them at home to save enough to reduce (bad) debt. Or it can even be applied if you’re building an asset through entrepreneurship, there is a delay of gratification while you push through the massive undertaking of building an asset.

No matter how you look at it, delaying gratification has major benefits. But it isn’t always the solution and doesn’t always fit into every aspect of your life. And that’s what Nathan has asked me to share with you in this post. Let’s go into how delaying gratification has helped me in a big way and hindered me in certain areas too.

Seven Figures, 20 something.

Personally, managed to reach FI by age 26 and get to 7 figures in net worth at 27 through delayed gratification. I didn’t take the most direct route to millionaire status, perhaps, but I got there in my own way and have a journey to share none the less.

A Shaky Start

I started out my working life at 17, leaving college to work as a vacuum cleaner sale rep, where I lasted half a day in training and caught the train home at lunchtime. Eh, it wasn’t for me. I wasn’t willing to practice, nor was I even aware of delayed gratification at this point. Sure I had some hustles at school, but all of that cash was invested into video games, as most dumb tend to teens do.

My father actually offered me an apprenticeship as an electrician under him (in a transfer of Intellectual Capital), which I took up and promptly proceeded to waste the pittance I made each week on things I couldn’t even tell you.

The First Delay

I wanted to upgrade my car. I looked at going into debt, but in another transfer of intellectual capital, my father told me about the real costs of debt. So I got to saving. I spent nothing and rapidly saved for a car. Hitting $5000 I blew it all on a car.

But if a few months of saving was a car then what could I get with even more of a delay?

The Second Delay

I got back to saving, I wasn’t sure for what, but I had notions of a life of living off the fat of the land, so something hippie-esque no doubt. I saved and saved, I delayed gratification in the right way. And one day, shortly after my 18th birthday, I heard somebody talking about a stock. And I asked them about it.

Quick side tangent here: I remember my parents when I was younger explaining a stock of the airport is like owning a lightbulb at the airport(it isn’t like this at all really), and the airport pays you to use it(they don’t). And being incredibly enthusiastic about the concept of owning something like this. I was never taught much more than this, though.

Anyway, they told me about it and why they thought it was a good investment. I asked them how to buy it. And long story short, they said look to a broker.

So I asked Uncle Google, opened up an account and put my entire $4000 savings into one stock.

And then something terrible happened. It went up. A lot.

I delayed gratification, saving a tonne and I kept putting my pay into it and it went up and up. Starting at about 40c, It reached $1.40 when I sold. Why? I can’t remember, honestly.

Big Growth was…Bad?

Why was this sudden growth bad? It made me COCKY. It went straight to my head. I had read a couple of books on stocks, but was nowhere near the level I am today. I was delaying gratification in one sense, by saving, but not in another. I was blindly buying. I bought a few other companies with mixed results. One had me losing 40k in a single move. Still hurts.

But as I grew in experience, I found myself practicing delayed gratification more and more – I dropped fast food, video games, TV, etc, and spent more time focusing on saving and learning about investing. I took up gardening and archery as low-cost hobbies. I put more effort into learning more about my trade and studying, trying to improve my skill set overall.

I remember spending a week learning about power factor, something my classmates deemed worthless. I got 100% in my test and put this knowledge into my father’s business. I built a spreadsheet and quoted customers on their power factor correction requirement’s netting us over $50,000 in revenue in a few weeks. My dad generously gave me a bonus for this.

Staying in Motion

I wound up buying a rental, delayed gratification in moving out to stay with my parents(and paying them a fraction of the rent I would for a property).

Life was good. I had a  good group of friends, I was great at archery, my garden was…alive. I was learning about investing & I was growing an asset pool. I had side hustles running a smoke shop, a small importing business and selling worms and was pretty happy in general.

But I was always moving. You know, an object in motion tends to stay in motion. I didn’t take breaks, I worked my butt off. I delayed most gratification.

When my father’s company work slowed down, I found other work through friends, outsourcing myself to them to get new experience and skills. And this paid off in more ways than one.

Reputational Currency

Social Capital is another type of capital I talk about over on my site. It is the connections and bonds, reputation and relationships you form outside of your family. And all of this hard work paid dividends to my reputation.

Work with my father was getting slow. I didn’t have much business sense at this point, honestly. I wasn’t good at getting new customers or keeping the work flowing all the time. But my reputation earned me a golden ticket. Another job with a company I formerly subcontracted to.

The bonus was the hours lined up so I could still help my dad if he needed it (leading me to start a subcontracting business of my own) and I could work 3 nights and 2 days for this other company, plus take overflow work if they needed it.

I was in. All in.

The Big One

Things started off great. I worked Friday and Saturday nights, Sunday afternoons for a few hours and the Monday and Tuesday days. Helped my dad for a day or two a week, and was making decent money. I kept up with my hobbies and still spent time with my friends and girlfriend at the time.

Then my Dad had a big job on…so I worked Wednesday, Thursday, Friday with him, then the Friday night and a little bit on Saturday afternoon and Saturday night, and Sunday afternoon, and Monday, and Tuesday…etc. A little bit of delayed gratification never hurts, but a lot can destroy you.

He Knows!

So…my new boss noticed what I was doing, and when my dads work slowed down, he offered me more work to replace it. Thing was that over 40 hours was time and a half, and after 5 pm was time and a half, so 2-3 night shifts PLUS over 40 hours meant some serious money. But I had a taste of big money, so I took it. Every hour that passed, every move I made I thought to myself “I’ve already done the toughest part! I can do it again.”

My weeks, for a long while, were as follows:

• Monday: 4am-4pm
• Tuesday: 4am-4pm
• Wednesday: 6am-6pm
• Thursday 6am-6pm
• Friday 6am-….4am ON SATURDAY
• Saturday: 6am – 4am (ON MONDAY)

Legal? Not really. Do you think I gave a mothertruck? Le nope. I was working. On average 90 hours a week, but for a time it was 116 hours. When I was covering somebody elses nightshift and running another site and reprograming a machine, I literally slept in the workshop or in my van, only returning home every few days to shower.

The Price

This cost me dearly. Years added to my face(and waistline). My relationship deteriorated. I lost my passion for gardening, my side hustles fell to the…side. As in away.

To cram more in, I designed an earpiece that fit inside my ear muffs so I could listen to audio books and I listened to dozens and dozens. I read books in my lunch breaks, I read them on my phone while walking between machines. I learned as much as I can. If I was going to do this, I didn’t want to waste the fruits of my efforts.

Obsession

I became immersed in earning, obsessed even, and it became all I cared about.

I became a zombie. A relatively rich zombie, but a zombie none the less. I spent nothing on myself and saved every little cent I could.

These were…

The Lost Years

I did this ‘delayed gratification’ on steroids for 2 years, most of which I barely remember. It kind of feels like it happened to somebody else when I think about it. After reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad, when I did manage a day off, I used it to drive, wearily, down to a city that I was snatching up property in.

I had a VA looking for the best deals(thanks Tim Ferris) The 4-hour Workweek, booking viewings and was going down there to look at them. I knew I needed to be smart about what I did with this sacrifice. I knew I was going to burn out and needed a way to make more and work less.

I built a bigger stock portfolio, and a rental portfolio(I had 8 at the peak of it). And this let me take my foot off the gas a little bit. These produced cash flow and helped build the coffers even more, and I could take a breath every now and then

A Step Too Far

But, I had delayed gratification to the point of loneliness and an empty life devoid of pleasure.

I had no friends, my girlfriend left me, barely saw my family, my coworkers despised me(in some ways) for doing triple the work one of them could do. I had delayed all gratification and lost the ability to enjoy myself.

This isn’t something I share often, but I would frequently, on a rare evening off, drink alone and play video games until I fell asleep. Yep. I’m a different person now.

My boss loved me at least, he was making a fortune off me. But I was mostly alone, save for one person, who wound up becoming my wife.

Claimed Gratification

I took a trip to see my would-be-wife (I had known her since I was 20 at this point) and this changed my perspective. I got to sleep, do some different things, and began feeling like Ben again.

I learned you can’t practice delayed gratification perpetually, and you don’t have to delay everything. My would-be-wife moved back up to Auckland, we moved in together and life started to get better. I eased off the workload and began subcontracting and working for my boss less(which he hated!)

If I’d done it earlier…

A small sacrifice of a days work a week earlier would have probably let me keep going on this mass wealth building job for longer.

I got into an argument with my boss, and quit on the spot (dumb move – not delaying gratification there).

I had managed to buy a portfolio of websites, making about a quarter of what I did a week in my job. I woke the day after my last in my job to find my AdSense account was lost and that income gone. Doh!

None the less though, If I had done things any other way, I wouldn’t be who I am now, wouldn’t have my awesome wife and daughter and the life we have built for ourselves now off of the back of “Past-Ben”.

Results

So by the time I was 26, I was able to quit my job. I took a few days off working all together and it turns out…I hate not working! I had a little under 1M in net worth and was growing richer even when not working.

In the following years, I’ve tried a great many things as subcontracting is fairly flexible, I’ve built and sold websites, freelanced, owned a onesie company, built an importing business, built a Pokemon business, tried to build a vending business, owned and destroyed an apple syrup company, tried to build a business to sell to Amazon (and failed hard – ambitious much? lol) hmm there’s a lot.

But ultimately, I turned sub-contracting into a contracting business & started a family with my wife. I built a large investment portfolio, have paid off my mortgage early and enjoy the things that really matter in life.

Was it worth it?

Yes. I honestly think it was. If there were 4 main lessons I wanted to make here they would be:

1. Take a break every now and then. Burn out is real. I still need to remind myself of this from time to time. Nathan and I discussed this post not 12 hours ago and I’m finishing it off now. I’ve also worked 7 hours since then, bought more shares in a company I like, listed nearly a dozen things on my countries version of eBay, and put together a draft email for a silver deal I’m in the process of putting together(and still spent time with the fam!). I’m bad about this hah.
2. You don’t need to delay everything. I didn’t even go out with my friends, & gave up all my hobbies. You don’t need to go this far! Apply the Pareto Principle as you should in all things.
3. Work smart, not hard. Working for work’s sake on wages can be good. But if you can put the money you’re making into more leveraged income(like property, dividend stocks, p2p lending etc) then learn all you can about what interests you and go for it.
4. If you really want something and it is a core aspect to your meaning in life, don’t practice delayed gratification. My wife and I were friends for 7 years before we were partners we started our family in 2017. I wish we didn’t delay our relationship and started our family sooner. There’s never a perfect time to start some things and a family is one of them. You’re never going to be ready – if you want it, start now.

And Now?

Now, at age 29 I’m using my amassed skills to build BlueDollarBull, a brand that teaches others about personal finance through the lens of generational wealth. An approach that focuses on the long, long term to hand wealth in its various forms down through generations to establish a family dynasty that can withstand the test of time and use the accumulated wealth for the progression & improvement of the lives not lifestyles of your family, development of both comeptency and creativity, and even the good of the entire world.

I do independent study of old money families and wealth building concepts & distill information down to easily digestible content both on my site, BlueDollarBull.com and on my YouTube channel.

My Thanks

I’d like to thank you for taking the time to read this post on delayed gratification & how it impacted my life. And I’d like to thank Nathan once more for the opportunity to share my tale on his platform. I really do appreciate it.

Make sure you show him some love by dropping a comment below with something you’re doing to delay gratification. You can also follow him on twitter, and jump on his email list.

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Thanks again, Ben, for the great article. It is interesting to see how you used delayed gratification to build wealth, but also the price that you paid to do so!

Again, if you enjoyed Ben’s story, check out his site where you will find a lot more great content.

And thanks for reading!

~Nathan

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Let’s keep living a great life … with the help of money. So what’s next?

• You can travel for free by using rewards credit cards.
• You can get motivated and get out of debt.
• You can check out the next post or the previous post and continue to learn.

But no matter what you decide to do, let’s leave the ordinary behind and take action today!