저자: Kevin · 외국인
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2026년 초보 재테크 실수 15가지를 소개하며, 큰 집 대신 작은 집부터 시작해 단계적으로 갈아타는 'bank hacking', 라이프스타일 크리프 경계, 단일주식 집중 위험과 세금 회피 대안, 경기 사이클상 리스크 관리 필요성, 부엌 리모델링 과투자 지양 등을 다룬다. 중간에 본인 부동산 스타트업과 금융 상품 홍보가 포함되어 있다. 2026년 증시는 통계적으로 횡보하거나 하락할 가능성이 크다고 주장하며, AI 지출이 GDP를 떠받치고 있어 그것이 꺼지면 위험하다고 경고한다.
다듬은 글
avoid making these top 15 newbie money mistakes in 2026 and take it from somebody who's done almost all of the mistakes that you can possibly imagine and has had great fortune and still being able to make it. So, in other words, take it from me. Don't make these mistakes because I've been at both ends of this from broke working at Jamba Juice to flying my own PJ around.
None of that matters now though. What matters is the top 15 tips for you. Here we go. Number one, every noob makes this mistake and you want to avoid this in 2026, especially with how high interest rates are. Buying the biggest possible home you possibly can afford because you want your forever home and you need the square footage or whatever your freaking excuse is.
It is a mistake. See, the pros understand that there's a hack to doing something known as bank hacking. Now, obviously with how high interest rates are, you don't necessarily want to get the lowest down payment loan anyway to get into a loan or a home, but this can actually also help you accelerate your path to home ownership and in the long-term real estate wealth.
The strategy that I call bank hacking works really well if you don't have children. You can still do it if you have children, but here we go. buy a smaller home than you actually want. So, think about it. Maybe you want a fourbedroom, 2 and 1 half bath with a pool or like a six-bedroom house with 10,000 square ft.
Great. Put that on the vision board for the future. But now, especially earlier in your life, or depending on where you are, you can kind of try to jump in, right? Start with something smaller on purpose. a townhouse, a condo, a two-bedroom, one bath, a three-bedroom, two bath, something that you know you're going to outgrow or maybe can even barely fit into.
Now, this way, when it's time to upgrade and you go get your next house, your next big good deal, the pro knows two things happen. Number one, the bank's actually going to give you a loan. See, no bank is going to give you a loan for your next house if you're going from a five- bedroomedroom, two and a half bath with a pool to a twoin- one.
They're going to be like, "Yeah, sure you're a homeowner. You're just trying to get yourself a rental property." But if you do the reverse, you can get a homeowner loan for that, a two-bedroom, one bath or three and two or whatever it is, and easily get to that next level and kind of keep moving up in size.
And the excuse is, hey, we need more space. We need a home office. We have children or whatever. And it's a reasonable way for them to put in their file, okay, this is why they're getting a homeowner occupied loan. And then you get better rates and better terms. Makes sense. Second big pro benefit of doing this strategy that the pro really knows.
The pro knows if they're constantly going to be moving every few years, doesn't have to be every year, right? But every call it four or five years, you just sort of plan for that. You don't always have to blow money on these timeless upgrades. See, people do this. As soon as they believe they're in their forever home, they spend money on that better quality kitchen.
They're spending a h 100red grand on a kitchen instead of what they should be spending like 20 grand because it's their forever home. It's a great way to always keep yourself broke. So, bank hack and don't make the big house mistake early in your career. Now, to really nail this point home, because I think there's a a real value in this one, I want to show you one of the benefits of starting early, especially if you could put more money down because rates are higher these days, for owning real estate.
Watch this. If you bought a home, let's say for h we'll call it $400,000 because, you know, things are a little bit more expensive right now. Rates are a lot higher, right? So, let's say at 25 years old, and again, you could jump in wherever your age is. You buy a home for $400,000, smaller starter home, something just to get, you know, going in, right?
And then every 7 years. Come on, everybody can commit to moving seven years, you know, once every seven years because, frankly, that's the average. Most people move every seven years anyway. If you're a tenant, you probably move more often than that. But anyway, let's write down every seven years here.
So, what would that be? 32, 39, 46, 53, 60, 67. We'll call that retirement age. Let's say every seven years you buy a house for a little bit more money than what we've previously had. There we go. Get that background noise out of there. So, we'll go with $600,000 next. And we'll call it 200k per property more, right?
So, we'll go with 800K over here. We'll go with 1 mil over here. 1.2 1.4 4 1.6. If you had no real estate today, it would seem really daunting to say, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to buy a $1.6 million home." And you know, obviously, this is not assuming inflation. Prices are going to change over time, so adjust for that.
But consider this. If you buy a property every 7 years on this road map, by the time you're 67, if you started at 25, 42 years would have gone by. You'd have $7 million of real estate. Your first million dollar of property would have no debt, assuming you got a 30-year fixed rate mortgage. This would be 2 years from being paid off.
This right here would be 11 years from being paid off. Uh and the others, well, you would have just acquired this one, right? But you'd be in that final retirement home. You'd be in that $ 1.6 million home. Now, obviously, if you add market appreciation to this, you probably have over $10 to $15 million worth of real estate over that time frame, if not more.
But the point is, people generally don't start at a $1.6 million home. They usually start somewhere. Utilize that like a pro to your advantage. Both psychologically so you don't overspend on the home that you're in, but also practically so you could bank hack your way up. That's the difference between how a noob thinks and how a pro thinks.
Lesson number two, lifestyle creep. Now, we know this, but folks, there is no better definition than lifestyle creep than this guy right here. Watch this and look at somebody who wins tens of millions of dollars from fights. Basically panicking over DD to sell his Pokemon card to raise cash for his wedding.
Bro, what the hell, man? Get a financial advisor. This guy is the epitome of our failed school system. As soon as you make money, you upgrade your lifestyle on nicer houses, cars, boats, planes, or gadgets. Even as all of your costs and bills keep going up, then you're stuck making massive payments because somebody told you to take a loan out on it because you're going to get a tax write off.
And then you got to make the monthly payments every freaking month. So, every month you're like, "Damn, what am I going to do this month, honey, just to pay the bills?" You get so freaking fearful about debt, you don't even want to go to the mailbox anymore. This is what this is the epitome of lifestyle creep creep listen to this.
You happy walking out of here layw with today? Right now. Right now. You will write the check right now? Yes. He's so desperate for money. He's like, "Wait, you're going to give me an advance on selling my Pokémon card right now?" And listen to his thought process when he tells you why it would be nice to get a check right now.
So it may need to be a little higher. What would make you happy walking out of here to lay with today? Right now. Right now. You will write the check right now? Yes. Got an expensive wedding 3 million. So they end up negotiating. The guy writes a check. They go for something around 2 and a half. But the point here is the guy's literally as part of his financial decisionmaking saying, "I've got an expensive wedding coming up.
How do you not have the cash to pay that bill to you need to where you need to start liquidating assets?" Is the definition of lifestyle creep. The noob sees it. The noob does it. The pro sees it from a mile away. And this is the thing. The pro looks at a situation like this and says, "Don't be relative to your neighbors or your peers." So, the problem with the Paul brothers is they're relative against each other.
Oh, he got a new house. I need a new house. He got a jet. I need a jet. In fact, statistically, the pro knows the following. The pro knows that if your neighbor wins the lottery or somehow gets a lot of income suddenly, for every extra $1,000 they earn, you are 2% more likely to go bankrupt. That is a proven statistic for this toxicity of relativity.
The more your friends or neighbors win big, the more money you're going to blow taking on new payments for butter, butter, butter. Butter assets are things that melt away. You don't want butter. You want things that go up in value and appreciate over time. A pro knows this. But I'm telling you, as you make more money, this affects everyone.
And it doesn't matter if your income is going from $100,000 to $120,000 or $50 to $80,000 or a million to 1.5 million. It hits all of us because our society with Instagram and Tik Tok is really relative. And the pro at least is aware of it and tries to avoid this new mistake. Number three, single stocks.
Now, I hate to say it because I have been in this boat. I've made millions of dollars on Tesla. Knock on wood, very fortunate and grateful for that. Investing in Tesla back in 2018 and 19 or Nvidia in 2022 when nobody wanted them. But why didn't I sell at the tops of prices? Well, frequently because I didn't want to pay taxes.
I was so worried about paying capital gains taxes that I refused to let myself diversify and do the financially correct thing. And as a result, I ended up having to hold Tesla through 60 to 70% declines in value, sometimes in a matter of mere months because Elon Musk had to go sell to raise money or whatever.
And I hate to say it, but those days will come again. And unfortunately, the noob is so worried about paying those long-term capital gains that they end up suffering through substantially worse losses. And then those can sometimes compound into them selling at exactly the wrong time. And this is where there's this new product.
I have not used this before, so I want to be clear about this. This is not a paid promotion, but I found this because I've read the law on this before and I see a lot of pros starting to use this. And what the product is is the following. It's called cash. And they pitch this as is your financial future writing on one or two stocks.
Nvidia, Tesla, Amazon. They really cater to like a tech audience here. And what they do is they say you could use the 721 exchange kind of like a 1031 exchange to diversify into an ETF to get out of that single stock risk. And obviously, you know, there are asset management fees for doing this. And so there are terms and conditions you should read about on this.
But I found it very interesting because you could protect your hard-earned wealth with a cash exchange fund, blah blah blah blah, whatever. It just basically lets you move from one large stock, single stock concentrated position into a diversified position in an exchangeraded fund that is exposed to dozens or hundreds of different stocks.
So, I thought this was really cool because it lets you do this without paying taxes. I like that a lot. Now, what I think is really interesting as well is because they have that asset management fee, I actually made an account because I I've never used them before. So, fair disclaimer. I made an account solely to help you get this.
It says, "When you introduce your friends to Smarter Diversification, you both get $200,000 managed free for one year." So, I don't use the service, but at the very least, if you don't have somebody else's affiliate link, you could use mine. I'll link it down below in the description. Now, let's go on to the next big mistake that people end up making.
And I'll tell you, there are a lot of mistakes. But the new mistake number four that people make is not actually paying attention to where we are in the economic cycle. The business cycle is extremely important to pay attention to because it helps you understand when you should be a little bit more careful and when you should take on a little bit more risk.
For example, when I started my career as a real estate agent, I created something called the real estate cycle chart. Not many people have made real estate cycle charts before. Uh but I made this because I would go to open houses and I would say things in 2011 like, "Wow, we're actually in a place right now where it might make sense to take on a little bit more risk because we're probably closer to the bottom of a cycle." Now, this real estate cycle chart that I have, it's a little bit blurry, but it gives you a little bit of an idea of how the business cycle functions.
That's just an old PNG that's been saved too many times. AI could probably make me a new one. But anyway, this has to do with the real estate cycle, how you go from uh increased rent in prices, like you saw in Austin and Texas, uh to accelerated new construction, you build too many homes, then you have an over supply of homes, you can't rent out properties, and then prices come down.
This is exactly what's happened in Austin, Texas. And from peak, Austin, Texas, real estate prices are down about 25%. Now, the noob ignores the real estate cycle. In fact, the noob tends to jump into buying uh real estate or stocks when we're at tops of markets when it's the worst time to potentially buy certain assets.
I mean, consider this for a moment. We're just looking at the stock market, for example. Stock markets rarely sustain two standard deviations above average returns for four years straight. That means in English there is a statistical 85% chance the market moves sideways or down in 2026. And here we are December 25th, 2025 making this warning.
So basically we've only got a 15% chance that there's going to be another green year just based on history. Now obviously maybe this time will be different but understanding the economic cycle can help us say okay are we in a place now where we want to take extra risks or be a little bit more conservative.
I'm not here to fear monger and say sell everything and I'm not going to tell you to go all in on margin at the bottom of the market because obviously there could be other risks. Maybe we'll get big green market. Maybe at the bottom of the market we'll end up getting another double dip, right? And that's why you always have to balance this.
But when you pay attention to what's going on in the market, like the noob does, or I'm sorry, what the pro does, of course, when you pay attention to what's going on in the economy, you understand that even though our government is telling us GDP is booming at over 4%. You should know that GDP right now is driven almost entirely by artificial intelligence spending.
And if that goes away, we are negative on GDP. And that's a really big risk factor because all of a sudden if artificial intelligence spending for whatever reason it is evaporates. Then there's nothing left and we have negative GDP. Every other category of our economy is in contraction. That's a big problem because it should prepare you by paying attention not just to what's going on in AI spending and debt spending.
But the pro, in addition to paying attention to these things, looks at the labor market and realizes that, hey, maybe it's time to be a little bit more conservative and just take on a little bit less risk. I'm a big fan of that. I disagree with a lot of folks out there who say the labor market is fine.
I'll give you a quick example and we'll move on from this. David Saxs has been yapping about this idea that the labor market is actually doing fine. that the AI job loss hoax has been exposed by him. He says it's been exposed because occupations quote most exposed to artificial intelligence are actually outperforming the rest of the labor market in terms of job growth.
Which that's interesting. That means maybe we're not losing jobs from AI, right? Not necessarily. See, when you actually pull up the study like I did and I annotated, I found that their comparison period was a period where it took 5 years for the S&P 500 to grow 59%. We basically just did that in 2 years.
And we know that when companies get rich, especially ones that say they are AI related, they benefit more from the stock market going up and therefore they end up hiring more. But the reverse happens very quickly. So just be cautious. Now, number five. Ah, this is a good one. So, this one gets me excited because here is just a noob who talks about remodeling a kitchen.
Uh, and they go on uh X basically to complain about how they can't get a lower quote than $90,000 to remodel their kitchen and they're going to spend $20,000 on uh kitchen appliances, which is insane. Mind you, I personally spent $20,000 on the entire kitchen remodel, but whatever. This person says they've spent hours trying to get $9,000 kitchen quotes or he's contacted multiple contractors and he's frustrated that all of a sudden this kitchen cost is so high.
He says here, it's actually him talking about his buddy. My buddy wants to redo his kitchen. Contractor quoted him $90,000. He's 32 with a wife and two young kids. His options are heliloc, take a loan from his dad, or take $100,000 from high high yield savings. He was saving to buy a rental property.
How should he be pay for the kitchen? Well, the best advice, I hate to say it, but the noob is like, "Oh my gosh, $90,000. Maybe you could get another quote." and then they go get another quote from another contractor and it comes in at $110,000 and it's like, well, I guess I really need to do this kitchen and I'm just going to go with the 90k guy.
Here's the thing. Everybody overspends on real estate. And I absolutely hate this about real estate, but I also love it because I realize when so many people make dumb mistakes and investment decisions like blowing $90,000 on a kitchen, all they're really doing is creating a discount for the next buyer who's now getting that kitchen for maybe 30 cents on the dollar because the market value of the home is not going to go up by 90 grand.
The market value of your home is sucked down by the value of all of your neighbors. If I am in a $500,000 neighborhood and all my neighbors have $500,000 homes and I put in a $200,000 kitchen, is my house all of a sudden going to sell for $700,000? No. And the pro knows this. The pro knows maybe your house will sell for $520, but now you're taking a massive loss.
You're taking a 90% loss on that kitchen, right? And yeah, $200,000 kitchens do exist out there. Anyway, I'll give you advice in just a moment on what to do for this guy's scenario. But first, I think this is a fair opportunity to just make a pitch of our real estate artificial intelligence investment product.
We are uh creating this app called Reinvest AI where uh overtime in 2026, we're on pre-sale for this product now. Uh, and we also have a small window left where people can actually invest in the company at house hack.com or reinvest uh.ai. What we're creating is an option for you to actually upload photos of your kitchen.
We're calling it the renovation AI. And when you upload photos of that kitchen, we'll tell you what you should spend, how much of a market value increase you're going to actually see in your neighborhood based on the photos that you give us, the value of the property, and us looking at the comps with our artificial intelligence.
And then we calculate for you a net worth boost. So, for example, if in your market the market value of a kitchen is 40 grand and we could get you to spend 15 grand, you might actually see a net worth boost from that kitchen remodel of $25,000. Now, I'll go through the pro method in just a moment for actually getting a less expensive kitchen.
But let's understand this. Barbell Financial, who literally says they're, you know, what are this your daily dose of finance, fitness, and fatherhood, whatever. How does the home value not change with a new kitchen? This is the one few things that does add resale value. Well, no. It depends what you're replacing.
I've seen people tear out 2008 kitchens and put in a brand new kitchen because they want their style. And they actually put spend 100 grand putting in a custom kitchen that looks worse than the builder grade basic one that appeals to 90% of people. Their custom version appeals to 10% of people and they actually lower the value of the property.
So, it depends what you're starting with. If you're starting with a 1970s kitchen and it's ugly, funky wood, fine. Then what does the pro do? The pro calls a handy person, says, "Tear it out. Sketch out on the drywall the new box cabinets we need. Go down to the local hardware store, order them up a week later, pick them up, plop them in.
Then you call the countertop guy. They throw on the countertop in the sink. Then you call the plumber to hook it all up. You call the electrician. You call the painter to finish it up. Boom. you're done. You're not spending $90,000 on a kitchen. We've done like 10 of these in the last few months for House Hack, my real estate startup.
It's not that hard. You end up spending 15 grand on the kitchen. For appliances, people think you need like a $5,000 stove. This is frankly stupid. We end up buying from Lowe's like on, you know, Black Friday or Christmas sale a $599 GE fiveurner stove. And guess what? When we have 80 different units or a hundred different units at our company and we put all these stoves in, maybe out of a hundred units, maybe we have one stove go bad a year, if that.
Who cares? And then they're cheap to replace and we don't feel bad about throwing away a $600 stove when Lowe's will haul it out for free and install the new one for free. They just want your business getting you in the store and buying that appliance. They don't need to spend 20 grand on an appliance package.
But that's the difference between a noob and a pro. This is a big mistake that a lot of people make. Now, next mistake, number six, the heliloc. The noob doesn't even know what a heloc is or worse, they end up using a heliloc to pay off credit card debt. This is the worst possible move you could make as you'll almost always end up right back in debt on your credit cards.
And then you've got two payments to make, your credit card and your heliloc. This is a big mistake. So, the pro plays this a little differently. The pro opens a home equity line of credit, a second mortgage on their home, but they keep it paid off until there's a big opportunity or they need their money.
This really serves as like an emergency fund, right? Like imagine for a moment there's a huge dip in the stock market, a I worst case scenario like a terrorist attack or something that freaks people out. the market dips and you're like, "This is an opportunity to buy or there's a really good fix or upper that comes up." Having that home equity line of credit gives you opportunity at a very low cost.
A heliloc might only cost you 80 bucks a year to maintain. The problem is when we go into recession, sometimes banks start freezing credit lines. Now, pros know this and then what they'll do is they'll actually write a check to themselves at a different bank drawing on that credit line and then having that cash available.
Now, remember, the cool thing about the HELOC is you don't actually have to pay interest on the undrawn balances. Most noobs don't understand this. They hear, "Oh my gosh, taking out a second on my home, that sounds terrible." But the pro knows, "No, man. I'm not going to pay any interest because I'm not going to borrow on it unless there's some kind of really sick opportunity to take advantage of." So, go to your local credit union and try getting a home equity line of credit as soon as possible.
which does also bring up the mistake number seven which has to do with taxes and a cash emergency fund. I hate to say this but there are two noob mistakes under this category. Number one, the noob is the person who gets a tax refund. Yeah, let's just pause on that for a moment because a lot of people get a tax refund.
But you know what the reality is? If you're getting a tax refund, it means you gave the government an interestfree loan. Talk to a CPA about adjusting your dependence so you spread your tax refund out over each paycheck. This way you're getting a little bit more in your take-home pay every single month if you have steady employment.
And then this way you can actually budget appropriately. Try to get out of that paycheck to paycheck lifestyle. Just make sure you don't blow your money on butter purchases, which hate to say it, most people do with their tax refunds. They go into a bunch of credit card debt in the holidays and then they try to pay some of it off with their tax refund.
It's a bad thing to anticipate. Bad way to build your financial future. So, this is why the pro goes to their CPA and says, "You know what? I want to adjust this. So, I just even out what I owe. I don't owe the government anything at the end of the year, and they don't owe me anything at the end of the year or even.
Nobody's given interest free loans to anybody." Now, unfortunately, this brings up noob mistake number two. Those self-employed individuals who watch my channel. You know who you are. I've been in the boat myself. You don't end up saving any money to pay for taxes because we throw it all into buying the dip in stocks and then the dip keeps giving or you end up buying real estate and you stretch to go buy things with money that you're kind of borrowing from the government because at some point you're going to have to pay taxes.
Then tax time comes around. you're like, "Ah, let's just file an extension." And then you end up paying penalties on all the back taxes plus the back taxes. And you're like, "Crap, now I got to borrow or go into debt." The worst time to do this is in a macro environment that's potentially at a turning point.
And this is why I say, and the pros say it's important to pay attention to macro, not to try to perfectly time the market, just to know when it is even more risky to be risk, right? If you're near the top of the market, it's riskier to be risky. At the bottom of the market, it's actually less risky to be risky for what that's worth.
So anyway, I would say for 2026, it's probably not a bad idea. Reduce the stress a little bit. Actually try to start saving for some of your taxes earlier this year. Maybe actually file and pay off your taxes on time this year. Reduce that anxiety for self-employment taxes and just chillax a bit. Now, number eight, everybody's heard of this before, but statistically lumpsum investing is the best way to invest in the stock market.
The problem with this is the noob ends up buying at all-time highs. They take on debt and they buy when the stock market is skyrocketing. This is great short-term feeloodism. Everybody loves buying a stock and seeing it go up right away. But the more you train your mind to buy a stock and then expect it to go up right away, the worse you're going to perform in a bare market.
See, in a bare market where the real money is made, like my biggest wins ever in the stock market have been during bare markets where I was buying and nobody else was buying. 2018 Tesla 2022 Nvidia 2020 during COVID buying like everything. You can go back and watch my videos. I was refinancing homes to buy stocks and it was great.
Nobody wanted to touch stocks during those times. Today, everybody wants to buy stocks. And that's the thing. My biggest losses were buying when everybody else was buying. And as a pro, I know that and I'm trying to teach that lesson. And so, here's the pro hack. Buy when things are at highs in very small increments.
And ideally, only buy when there's blood. when stocks are red or you have some kind of defensible position to say that this is actually undervalued. Now, I just sold a bunch of stocks and I'm slowly allocating just a little bit back in because of where I think we are in the macro cycle and I'm also diversifying to different stocks.
But I'll have a cash reserve so that way if the market falls I'll be able to buy bigger and keep buying as as things dip and I won't be psychologically disturbed that prices are falling because that's what I want. I want to increase my exposure to companies at lower costs. That's what I want because I'm in it for the very long term.
Now number nine, the wedge deal. Now, many of you already know about this, so skip to number 10 if you don't want to hear about it again, but I'll keep it short. My favorite favorite favorite house to buy, and we literally just did it. People always like to say, "Oh, Kevin, you know, I mean, we just did it like 10 times.
People are always like, "Kevin, you can't get deals anymore in the market." Okay, this is why I made my company, my real estate startup called House Hack or also known as Reinvest. We buy or we buy houses that are totally beat up because we know nobody else wants to buy this stuff. Now, yeah, we're also developing artificial intelligence real estate software because we know what people need in real estate.
And that's why we're really excited about the company. But what I want you to understand is we go buy houses that look like this for $600,000 in $800,000 neighborhoods. Now, it'll take us probably 80,000 bucks to redo the entire house, but then we'll be up 120 grand. So, we'll be into this deal for 680 and it'll probably it's probably about an $820,000 hood.
So, uh 820 is the new value. Uh divided into 680, that'll be about a 20.5% return or what I call a wedge. The reason we call it the wedge is because you can buy the property so cheaply because it's so gross in an area where people want the land and they want to live. I mean, look at this. This is disgusting, right?
So, we just tear the stuff out and do it new and we do it right, but we don't overspend. We know who to call. We know what to do. That's the point. But anyway, we don't want to buy properties at market value. We want insulation. If the market value now goes down in this neighborhood, the first 20% of declines cost us nothing because we are insulated by the wedge.
And in the meantime, our net worth goes up by 120 grand. Now, why is that cool? Well, if we end up going into a deal, like let's say you're a homeowner and you're like, "Okay, I'm going to go finance this." Obviously, you're going to have to do some things during escrow to actually get this to pass financing, but it's doable.
So, all in all, let's say you spend $80,000 fixing it up after putting 10% down. It'll cost you $140 grand to do all of that plus closing costs, call it 150 grand. But if in year 1 you get 120 back in equity, you've returned 80% instantly on that purchase. And that's what the pro does. See, the noob goes in and buys the nicest house on the street.
The pro goes in and buys the worst house on one of the nicest streets. That's how they get instant equity. And guess what? It's untaxed. That extra 120 grand we just generated. No tax. It's fantastic. And so that's what we do on a larger scale. Now then we take homes that people can't live in and we rent them out providing housing for people to actually live in.
Nobody wants to buy this. This is nasty. We fix it up. Make it great. What does that say? Clock. Oh yeah, they labeled where their clock was. Odd. Anyway, okay. Didn't even notice that. So, that is an example of a wedge deal. Now, noob mistake number 10. They hear that there is now a car interest deduction thanks to Donald Trump's big, beautiful bill, and they go buy a new car.
Yet, they don't realize that during the negotiations, they ended up negotiating for a 0% interest loan. And now they bought a car because they wanted the car interest deduction, but now they're actually paying no interest and so they don't get any deduction and they're stuck with an expensive car payment.
Oopsies. Yeah, that's because a lot of the car dealers are struggling right now. And so you got to be careful with this. The pro knows this. The pro says cars generally 99% of the time are really depreciating assets. Uh, as some like to say, if it flies, floats, drives, or there's another crude part to this, rent it.
Don't buy it. And that's typically true because they go down in value. So, the pro says, "Well, if I'm going to buy something, fine. I'll get something cheaper that I know I could afford to pay for in cash or I'll get something used that I could pay off quickly and maybe then get my interest deduction because I'll actually pay some interest on it.
my total payment might be lower than that fancy new car that we know is just going to lose value when we drive it off the lot. Now, sometimes we can get lucky. Okay, I've been in that position. I've bought and sold assets before that I thought were going to go down in value. They actually ended up making money.
A plane is a perfect example of that. Usually go down in value. Sometimes the economy is weird and they actually go up in value. That's just lucky, but it's not the norm. And betting on luck is not a great way to bet on your future, especially in 2026. Now, new mistake number 11. I call it the momentum play.
Look, momentum, we all get it. We talk about momentum every single day. The market is open in our market open live streams. Uh these are uh our course member live streams. You could gain lifetime access to them over at meet.com. For example, MP material is a documented call that I made when we double rejected here at 80.
I suggested there was a psychological chance this was going to momentum up to $100, which it did. As soon as it did, we suggested the meme euphoria around you rare earths is going to fade and I expect this stock to go back down to $31 per share. So far, the stock has declined over 50% maybe closer to 42ish% because intraday it got to about $104 up here.
Uh, and it's on its way to 31. Now, how do you avoid as a pro? How do you avoid getting suckered into what seems like it has such a fundamentally good story? Trump's investing in in it, blah blah blah, whatever. Well, the best way is by setting a trailing stop. Now, the pro knows this and goes into their Robin Hood or their Weeble and they click sell and they set what's called a trailing stop and they'll sell their meme stock position, whether it's gold or silver or some stock that's flying high, flying high, and they'll set a trail amount of let's say 10%.
So, now if this stock ends up crashing to 49 bucks, another 10% pretty rapidly within usually 60 days, uh, and on some brokerages you'll be able to set a good cancel. On others, you'll have to set this regularly, which is really annoying. So, what some people do on Weeble, for example, is they just end up setting a good to cancel stop and they'll pick a price.
But trailing stops, which Robin Hood does better, are really nice because as the stock goes up, that 10% follows you up. So, if it goes up 5% and then drops 10%, you sell at about -5, which could be a takerit, right? And there's some approximation and rounding there. But take a look if your brokerage account does trailing stops.
Great way to protect yourself on those momentum plays that are so fun to be part of on the upside, but so rapidly bleed out on the downside. I hate to say it, but stocks like Coreweave, these were a great momentum play when Nvidia started buying them, but they're basically going full circle. And when they go full circle, sometimes they become fundamental buying opportunities.
Look at Circle for example. Circle literally went full circle. You know, your USDC stable coin issuer. They make a lot of money fundamentally. They actually look pretty decent at some of these low numbers, especially if you could get back to that level of 66 bucks a share, which is roughly where we uh started out on this one.
Nice. But look at some other ones. NBIS, just another example. We're just now starting to get some of the bleed. So, just be careful. Momentum trades tend to rocket up very quickly and then bleed out very over time, but people forget the bleed up. I know a lot of people who ended up buying Open Door at 10 bucks and now they're suffering down 40% because it's been slow bleeding and they keep getting convinced to hold on by these little pumps and that's exactly what ends up burying their net worth.
Now, number 12. Ah, this is a good one. Have a side hustle. Now, the noob never has a side hustle. They work their 8 to 5 job and they don't care. They go to Jamba Juice or Red Robin like I did. They put their hours in. They clock out. They're done. They don't want to study. They don't want to do anything else.
Well, the pro does this differently. The pro says, "I'm going to hedge my bets. I'm going to have a real estate license. I'm going to have a lending license. Maybe I'll even get a pilot license or I'll be an electrician on the side. Maybe if I make enough money on my side hustle, it'll end up becoming my main gig.
But if in the meantime it's a side hustle, then I get to write off other expenses that I wouldn't otherwise be able to write off. Maybe I could write off my laptop or my cell phone bill or a home office or part of my car or part of my utility bills. Now, you're saving money where you otherwise weren't saving money as a W2 employee.
So, always make sure you have some kind of side hustle that you could justify expensing things under to the IRS. Not only because they are necessary and ordinary in your business, obviously, iPad, iPhone, whatever, office, right? But also, you have the expectation of making a profit. Can't do this with hobbies.
The pro knows this, but the pro always wants a little side hustle going on. Not necessarily because they're trying to undermine their main income. But frankly, to be able to write off things they otherwise couldn't write off as unreimbured employee expenses, those are limited to where you have to have unreimbured employee expenses of like 7% of your income anyway before you can start writing them off.
So that's lame. Have a side hustle. You solve all of that. Now, number 13 is a little bit more, how should I put it? It feels a little more dad mode. But something that I found is experiences over stuff. I've done private jet. I've been licensed as I am licensed as a private jet pilot. Uh you know, fancy cars, fancy stuff, fancy houses, whatever.
I'll tell you what matters the most isn't stuff ever. Spend money. I'm not saying don't spend money. I'm not trying to be the Grinch that's like, "No, no, no. Never spend money." instead. While the noob is out there buying stuff to make themselves look good to other people, the pro doesn't really care what they look like.
Obviously, if you're running a business, you know, you have to be presentable, right? You should have a presentable attire and look good. Uh but outside of that, the pro they go on vacation, what they care about most is an experience, not stuff. They're willing to pay for the front-of-the-line pass.
They're willing to pay for the room upgrade or they better experience because they're paying to live their life. And that's what it's all about after all. Big win right there. Now, number 14. We're almost done. Instead of getting a margin loan, where the noob doesn't even realize it, but the worst part about margin loans is well, obviously getting margin called.
This is why I hate margin loans. Not that I've been margin called, but even if you don't get margin called, you have the stress of getting a margin call. Like, oh my gosh, if the share go down another 20 bucks, I'm going to get a margin called. You end up getting so worried and you can't sleep at night and you end up selling the stock at the worst possible freaking time.
Happens all the time to people. So, the professional, they look at potentially these new, and I don't have all the details on this yet, but these caller advances. Yeah, this was something new I haven't seen before. So, this also goes back to cash. Again, I'll put my link in the description. This is not a paid promotion with this company.
And again, I I don't benefit from getting this referral link. I'm just putting it there for your purposes. But they have this other product. And I'm like, huh? Borrow against your concentrated stocks with no margin calls. And basically what they do is you can access up to 90% of your stock's value to do whatever you want.
You lock in a fixed rate loan. And then what they do is they let your stock move up up to 60% or down and your max loss on the downside is about 20%. Now, it's kind of complicated how they do it, and it's probably worth its own video, but basically, they end up going to buy derivative contracts to, yes, somewhat limit your upside, but also limit your downside, which is great.
Uh especially if you want access to cash without hitting those taxable uh sales, right? You start selling stock and then you have to pay taxes. It kind of sucks, right? And you don't have margin calls. So, Cash, honestly, they've got some pretty good products here. Like, I personally I care less about the product.
I'm I'm looking at this like, man, how could I go invest in this company, right? But anyway, that's also a topic for a different video. It's like a venture capital video. But anyway, uh this I think is a really cool pro strategy that you might look into. So, check it out. Again, link in the description.
Okay. Now, with all of that said, number 15, the noob does nothing to increase their productivity, happiness, or tax hacks on a daily basis. And I think that is a massive mistake. So, what I've done is I've created what I call the daily wealth email. Now, you can get this totally for free. The way you can get this is you go to meet Kevin.com/data.
If you just go to mekevin.com, you could see the alpha membership and my top 10 stocks to buy, all that good stuff. But if you type in data and scroll down, you'll actually see right here the daily wealth. You could type in your email and subscribe. Or if you'd prefer to have an app, we also offer the app known as the Meet Kevin app or the Reinvest app and you could get the daily wealth to you every single day.
You can also customize your notifications to only get notified about the things that you like. So, check that out. In summary, what did we learn today and what are our action items? Well, action item number one, if you want to invest in my real estate startup, the deadline is the end of the year and I can't wait to be done fundraising.
So, check that out at houseack.com. want to join the Reinvest AI software and buy lifetime access to that, you can do that over at houseack.com or reinvest.co co as well. So, same company. Want to join the Meet Kevin Alpha membership and get those top 10 stocks stock picks and join me every day when the market is open, talk about strategies for the stock market, do that at meetke.com.
If you want to check out those two cash products we talked about, you can go to usecash.com or use that link in the description. Makes no difference to me. It's not a paid partnership with the company. Now, last thing that you got to do, download that Mee Kevin app. get that daily wealth notification and improve your life a little bit every single d.
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