Financial Freedom In Your Twenties | Nick True of Mapped Out Money

How would you like to be financially independent at age 24? That would be the definition of retire early if I ever heard of one.

Today, I am excited to have Nick True on this podcast. When Nick was 24 years old, he became successfully unemployed and left his corporate 9 to 5 J.O.B. (Just Over Broke).

He has built a fantastic business, and he is huge in the YouTube space. On top of that, he and his wife travel all over the place and they are completely location independent.

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Making Money Without A Job with Youtube, Side Hustles, and Businesses

What Nick does is two-fold. He has freelance work in digital marketing, which means he helps small business owners with their websites, bring leads to them and sell their products, and he also does that for himself.

He has his own business, off the back of YouTube, where he teaches people how to manage their money and create a budget. He does some coaching and other things around that. He also does some YouTube advertising.

Leaving the Corporate 9 to 5 Job to Travel America

Nick grew up in a home with a father that was successfully unemployed since 1997. His dad left his job to start a business and he has always told Nick that working for somebody else wasn’t for him and he couldn’t go back to that.

Nick saw that freedom and it gave him the confidence to strike out on his own.

He went to school for a mechanical engineering degree, and he got the most stereotypical, Office Space/Dilbert type of job and he really didn’t like it.

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While working that job, he became interested in personal finance and managing his money. He learned how to deal with a 401(k) and all of the other things as a W-2 employee.

Coming across this information, he found there were a lot of people who built location-independent businesses and worked for themselves, because of the internet.

Nick worked that engineering job for a couple of years and built up a resume of doing freelance work. He did that on nights and weekends.

In late 2016, after two years of planning, Nick and his wife bought a 2007, 27 foot Airstream travel trailer and they bought a truck to go with it. They spent the next nine months building his business, renovating the Airstream, and his wife was getting ready to graduate and take a travel physical therapy position.

In August 2017, Nick quit his job and they moved into the Airstream and started traveling. It took about another year for their business to do well enough for his wife, Hannah, to leave her job as a traveling physical therapist to work with Nick in the business doing graphic design and video editing.

For the past year and a half, they have been successfully unemployed, traveling around, visiting with family, seeing the country, and working online.

Mapped Out Money Youtube Channel and How to Make Money Youtubing

Nick’s channel is called Mapped Out Money. They hyper focus on the day-to-day money management piece of actually building a budget and working on that.

About once a week, Nick releases videos to help people understand and manage their money.

They make money a variety of ways, including YouTube advertising revenue. YouTube splits the revenue with the creator of the video on the ads you see before a video starts playing. Nick gets a cut of every ad that is played on his videos.

They make a little bit of money from affiliate marketing, from a couple of tools he recommends for budgeting and managing your money. He gets kickbacks if anybody uses his links.

He also does one-on-one budget coaching for people who have the money to afford him, but they are in a place where they need personalized help to build a budget they can stick with. YouTube feeds that business.

Watch the Entire Episode Here:

The Future of Mapped Out Money

Nick wants Mapped Out Money to take over and stop doing freelance work for others.

Often times, it is not a linear jump. Sometimes there needs to be stepping stones in the middle.

Ultimately, he wants to teach people how to manage their money, but he didn’t have the skillset when he started to build that sort of business, and he didn’t have the audience to feed that sort of business.

When Nick was trying to get out of his job to work for himself, he didn’t have five years to wait, while he built up Mapped Out Money to a sustainable level. He wanted to get out quicker than that.

Doing freelance work and getting paid by the hour helped him quit his job earlier, while also teaching him the skillset he needed to build up his business.

Nick is in a transition period right now. Over the next year and a half, he hopes to transition to less freelance work and more with Mapped Out Money.

The Same Content Everywhere to Reach Even More People

Nick started Mapped Out Money as a blog. He started writing articles in 2015, because he saw other people be successful in it.

It wasn’t a bad strategy, but he found it wasn’t the best strategy for him. He didn’t take into account his personal strengths.

He blogged for a year and a half with almost no results.

In mid-2016, he reevaluated his strengths and how to get his content out that plays to those strengths.

Nick started a YouTube channel in late 2017, and, almost immediately, he realized he was on to something. His first video wasn’t amazing, but it was better than any of the blog posts he had done.

YouTube is the hub, but they have a website that points people to their channel.

Think through how your medium feeds your long-term plan. Nick wanted to do coaching and courses, and he found that he could build the know and like factor faster through videos. Videos are hard to beat.

Frugality helped Nick be successfully unemployed

When you are thinking through what you do that makes you money and how much you need, the lower you can get your monthly expenses, the quicker you can make that jump to quit your job.

Nick made really good money at his engineering job and he lived in a low cost of living area. Because they were frugal, Nick and his wife could take a pay cut and they didn’t need make the same amount they did at their regular jobs.

Long term, they are looking at getting into rental properties. Nick wants to grow the business, but they can take the initial hit on income. Ever increasing consumption is not going to make for any extra happiness.

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Nick’s focused frugality and spending money where it’s needed

Nick and Hannah have a lot of conversations about their spending values. When they travel without the Airstream, they really only care about a hot shower. They are very frugal when they travel and they have figured out how to make their truck bed comfortable to sleep in.

They sleep in the truck bed at either a campground or for free in a Walmart parking lot, and then the next morning they will pay $10 at a truck stop for a hot shower. They save $100 a night.

On the other hand, Nick will pay big money on nice backpacks. The most recent backpack he bought was $300 and he is looking at selling it next year and buying one that is $400.

Another thing they spend a lot on is pets. They have two cats and two dogs and they are spoiled and eat like kings and queens.

Dustin will spend big money on firearms, and he is frugal with anything that is consumable and can be thrown away. He is not frugal on things that will last a while, like shoes or a mattress. He also doesn’t like spending money on food and eating out.

If you can incorporate frugality into your life, it will benefit you and you will be able to quit your job quicker.

Teaching others to retire early and be passionate about what you do

If you are working a job that you want to get out of, you need to identify what type of industry you want to play in. Nick wanted to be in the personal finance sandbox.

Start looking at how people are making money in that industry. Nick started following Smart Passive Income, with Pat Flynn, and listened to stories of the opportunities that were out there.

After that, take a lot of introspection and dive deep into self awareness. Three things helped Nick the most were:

Strengths Finder test by Gallup. It walks you through your top five strengths out of 32, and how those can be applied in a work setting.

Asking people who are close to you what they perceive your strengths and weaknesses are, as it relates to work.

Personally, think about your job and your hobbies and your strengths.

Put all of these things together and start to get ideas of what you are good at.

Nick is very analytical and he is good at placing things in order and executing a process. He also has strengths around teaching. Producing content around something he is interested in works for him.

Once you hone in on the strengths, go back to the industry and figure out the opportunities. Focus on what you are good at.

What Nick is doing to make the world a better place

Nick and Hannah have not been traveling as much as they anticipated, because they have been helping out some family members.

Over the last year and a half, they have had family members get sick and they’ve limited their travel to stay in more rural areas to help. They wouldn’t be able to do that, if they were not location independent.