My first real money went into cars. I was living in Vancouver, with more income than I knew what to do with, and a car was the most obvious way to show that it had happened.
Later I achieved a milestone and ordered a Porsche 911 Turbo. When it was delivered, I could not fit in it. I could not sit down or close the door. I weighed more than 450 pounds at the time, and that car is part of the reason I changed my life.
I tell that story because it holds the whole lesson of this piece. I could afford the car. I could not use it. Being rich and being well off in any real sense were two separate things, and I had only one of them.
Making a Million Is Not Saving One
By my late teens I had made more than a million dollars. The first million I had actually saved came at 21.
Those two numbers sit a few years apart, and the space between them is where I learned the most. Money came in fast from my early internet businesses. It went out just as fast. I have described that period before in plain words: “It was party life, gambling life, a lot of stuff. What comes in goes out.”
That is what being rich looks like when you are young. Income tells you how much moved through your hands. Wealth tells you how much stayed, and what it is doing now.
What I Got Right in Vancouver
Not everything went to cars. Even then, part of the money went into savings and into building inventory for my business. That part did not feel exciting. It was boxes and stock and balances, not something anyone would notice from the street.
It was also the part that kept working. Inventory let the business sell more the following month. Savings meant one bad stretch would not wipe me out. Later, with DreamWire, inventory meant container loads of coaxial and networking cable from China and Taiwan, for home installers and municipal government contracts in British Columbia. The habit started much smaller than that.
Looking back, those two habits were the beginning of wealth for me, years before I would have used the word.
Income Is Rented, Ownership Stays
The simplest way I can put the difference: income is paid to you for a period of time, and ownership is something that keeps producing whether you are in the room or not.
A salary, a commission or a good year in business is income. It is real, and it matters, but it stops when the work stops. A share of a company is different. When I co-founded Amarose with Amanda Saccomanno in 2020, we each took half of the company. That stake is part of something that exists apart from any single month.
This is also why I am wary of how money gets displayed online. Showing what you can spend is easy. I wrote about that in The Hype Economy, and I will not repeat it here, except to say that the most visible money is usually the least permanent.
What Wealth Has Cost Me
I do not want to make this sound tidy. Ambition has cost me tens of millions of dollars and a lot of sleepless nights. I have lost money on decisions I believed in. Building things of value means some of them will not work, and the losses are real.
The difference is in what remains afterward. When I spent on lifestyle, the money was gone and nothing was left behind it. When I lost money building something, I usually came away with a skill, a relationship or a business I understood better than before. I am not recommending losses. I am saying that where your money goes tells you which game you are playing.
My health was the most expensive version of this lesson. Being rich did nothing for my body. I lost more than 250 pounds, and no amount of income could have done that work for me. That story is told in Eat. Work. Win. Repeat.
The Question I Ask Now
When money comes in, I try to ask one question before anything else: will this still be working for me in five years, or will it be gone by next month?
Some things should be enjoyed, and I do. I am not against spending. But I have been rich without being wealthy, and I know how quickly the first one can disappear. If I could talk to myself in Vancouver, I would not tell him to stop buying cars. I would tell him to count what stayed.
Nothing in this post is investment advice.
