Okay, I've now transferred all my files from the camera onto the computer and organized them into these four folders, bias frames, dark frames, flats, and lights. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to open up the free program deep sky stacker, which you can download from the web. And then I'm just going to follow along here on the left hand side, starting with open picture files. And I'm going to start by opening up all of my lights. So I'm just going to go into the lights folder, click on one, and then press control A to select all of them and click open. Okay, they come in right here. You can see that we have a long list of light frames, but for some reason it says light frame zero. So that's just because by default it doesn't check them. So we're just going to click check all over here on the left hand side. And now we can see we have 992 light frames. I did take a thousand, but just looking through them a little bit on the camera, I noticed at least eight that had clouds or other problems like focus problems. So I've already deleted those and we have 992. And then I'm just going to add the calibration files that we took. So starting with dark files, we'll go into my darks folder here. Press control A, click open. So we've added 50 darks. Then I'm going to click on flat files, go into my flats folder again, press control A and open, 46 flats.  And we brought in 74 bias files. So now that we have everything loaded, we can go down to this command that's highlighted in red right here that says register checked pictures. I'm just going to click into advanced and click compute the number of detected stars. It tells me 75 stars were detected. And usually what I do is I'm going to lower the threshold a little bit until that number gets up over 100. So at 14%, it got up to 116 stars. That sounds good. And you might have to keep lowering your threshold.  Okay, I'm going to leave automatic detection of hot pixels turned on. I'm going to check stack after registering and say select the best 95% of pictures and stack them. If you wanted to look through the quality of your different pictures before stacking them, you could uncheck that. And then it will give every picture a quality score and you can do some extra work based on that. But I'm going to leave that part out in this video just because this is going to be, I'm just trying to keep it as simple as possible. I would recommend clicking on recommended settings and just looking through this and make sure that there's nothing that stands out that you have to do. You want to make sure that all the settings are set and then you'll see that all these things show in green based on what's recommended. And that's it. Then we're going to go ahead and click OK. And it will go through this whole process of registering the pictures, meaning looking at the star patterns and matching them up so that all of the pictures are lined up in terms of the stars. And then once it's done that, it can stack them, meaning averaging them. And by averaging them, it pays attention to where the signal is in the picture. So the stars and the Andromeda Galaxy. But the noise will be more random from picture to picture. And so by applying what's called Kappa Sigma Clipping, we throw out that random noise because it's so inconsistent. So that's how stacking works. One other thing is because there's not much room left on my laptop here, I am using a temp folder on an external drive. So if you do need to do that, you just click into stacking parameters here and then you can pick an external drive or USB thumb drive to hold your temporary files folder because for this picture, it's going to be quite large. So I'm going to click OK. And tells me we're stacking a thousand pictures at one second each. So that's equivalent to about 16 minutes total exposure. We can see everything was taken at ISO 3200. And it tells me that this process will temporarily use 109 or close to 110 gigabytes on the D drive. And I only have 169 gigabytes free. So getting close there, but I have just enough free that that should work. So let's go ahead and click OK and let it do its thing here. This is going to take a long time. So I'm just going to probably leave it overnight and we'll check up on it in the morning. This estimated remaining time, that's just for the current process. So I don't feel like it's going to be done in four minutes. It's really going to take hours and hours to do all this since we're dealing with so many frames. So this three minutes is just to stack the bias frames. Then it goes through a bunch of different things because it creates masters for each calibration file. It calibrates all the lights, it lights, it registers all the lights, which takes a really long time and it stacks all the lights, which again takes a lot of time. So I'm just going to leave this. And then when it's all done, we'll pick up there. OK, it's finished. It actually took it almost 22 hours to complete this whole stacking process, calibration, registration and stacking. This is what you want to see when it's done, meaning it's going to be in a linear state, meaning that the picture should be mostly black. You might see a few little white spots. These are bright star cores, but you don't really want to see anything too bright at this point. If everything went correctly, it should look pretty black like this. And it does do an autosave file. So in your lights folder, you should find an autosave.tif. I will warn you that that's a 32 bit file. So if you are using older versions of Photoshop or GIMP that don't have 32 bit support, you may not want to use that file. Otherwise, it's fine to use. But just to be safe, I'm going to show you how to save off a 16 bit tif file under the processing section right here.  Make sure that it said is save as type tif image, 16 bits per channel. We'll give it a name. I'm just going to call it m31-dss. And under options, you want this option to be selected. Embed adjustments in the saved image, but do not apply them. Compression, I leave set to none. And so I'm just going to save this to my desktop. Click save. Here it is. And so this is what I'm going to bring into my next step into the post processing program. I've moved over to my Mac, but you should be able to follow along no matter what operating system you're on because the GNU image manipulation program is cross platform. So I'm just going to open it up here and I'm running version 2.10, which is what I recommend or just whatever is the latest when you watch this. And I'm going to go to file open and open the DSS file, the one that we stacked so carefully. OK, there it is to zoom in and out. You can use the minus and plus keys on the keyboard. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this. So I'm just going to right click and choose duplicate layer. And I'm just going to keep this one below it as a safety. For this one right above, I'm going to go ahead and rename that first stretch. And on the first stretch layer, I'm going to start by opening up a levels command. But before I do that, if you don't see histograms up here and over in the upper right, go to windows, dockable dialogues and just turn it on right there. And then I would suggest switching the histogram mode from value to RGB. And we'll refer back to this while we're using the levels. OK, now to open up levels, I'm going to go to colors in the menu up here at the top and go down to levels. All right. And I'm just going to position this so that I can see my histogram up here and the image over here.  This represents all of the information in the image from shadows to pure white areas. And you can see right now that most of the information is all the way over here on the left in a very linear state. And so by stretching it, we make the image less linear or nonlinear and bring all the information out here. And then we can actually see what we're working on. And so to do that, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my mid tones slider, this arrow in the middle. And you have to sort of grab it by the very top of it. And I'm going to take that mid tones slider, this little arrow right in the middle, and I'm going to drag it over to the left here until the image looks something like this. If you're looking up here at the histogram, you can just try to get these peaks about to the first line here or so. OK, and then I'm going to go ahead and click OK. And now we can zoom in a little bit and see that here's the galaxy. Doesn't look like much yet, but we're going to keep stretching the image and by adding contrast by making the sky darker and the galaxy brighter, it will really start coming out from the background. So I'm going to do another stretch, just the exact same thing I did. Just open up colors levels and take that mid tone slider again and move it once again to the to the left. But this time I'm also going to take the shadow slider, this arrow over here on the far left and drag that a little bit to the right. So I just want to take the mid tone slider, move it to the left, take the shadow slider and move it to the right. And this is how we stretch out the image. You'll see that this histogram peak gets wider and wider as we add, as we stretch out the values and add more shadow information, more mid tones information and more highlights information. We're not literally adding more information. We're just exposing it by stretching the values, making the curve less linear. OK, so I'm going to go ahead and keep doing that a little bit. That looks good. Click OK. Now, the next thing is if we look up here at the histogram information now, you can see that we have some interesting things going on where the green, blue and red peaks are hitting at different spots. And what's happening then in the image is it doesn't look, the colors don't look quite right. They don't look very neutral. And so what we're going to do is try to even these out a little bit. Again, with that levels command, so I'm going to go to colors, levels. And this time, instead of just jumping right in here with the sliders, I'm going to change the channel first to blue. And I'm just going to take that blue shadow slider and do something like that with it. And you'll see that right away our blue peak jumps way down here. Then I'm going to do the same thing with green. I'm going to grab that shadow slider. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to look up here and I'm going to try to basically have the left edge of the green peak and the left edge of the blue peak line up, something like that. And then I'm going to do the same thing with red. I'm going to take the shadows slider for red and move it over. I'm just going to do this little by little until it's in the right spot here. There we go. All right, and I'll click OK. So now if I zoom back out, we can see this sky looks fairly neutral. It doesn't look overly red or overly green because we have basically lined up the color channels. Now, there is a bit more green information, which is why the galaxy especially still looks a little bit green, but we'll fix that a little bit later on. I'm going to do another levels stretch this time just with the value as the channel, meaning stretching all three at the same time, R, G and B. And at this point, I'm going to make a few small cosmetic changes. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to crop because I think that this image will look better a little bit zoomed in on the galaxy rather than this wide field. So I'm going to take my crop tool and I'm just going to draw out a crop keeping Andromeda centered something like that and hit Enter. I'll zoom back in. I'm just going to duplicate this first stretch layer. I'm going to right click on it and choose duplicate layer. And I'll call this saturation and to the saturation layer here, I'm going to go back up to colors. And this time, instead of choosing levels, I'm going to choose saturation and just apply something like a 1.5 boost. And at this point, what we can see and you can see it up here in the histogram display, too, but it's quite obvious right in the image as well is that green is a little bit dominant. So to this saturation layer, I'm going to open up a new curves adjustment under the colors menu. And I'm going to take the green channel and just. Take it down. So basically just make a point right in the middle and drag that down. And then I'm going to take a blue channel and drag it up in the middle, but drag it down in the shadows. So now the galaxy is coming out a little bit more. I'm going to maybe just do one more curves layer this time, not using individual color channels, but just doing an S curve right on all three color channels with the channel set to value. OK, and that's looking really nice. Now, one thing you may not have realized is that when you shoot Andromeda in the northern hemisphere, this is actually what Andromeda looks like with north up in the image, meaning the top of the image is pointing towards the Polestar, the Polaris. And so but in most images that you see of Andromeda, it's flipped the other way around. And I like it flipped the other way around probably just because I've seen it that way so many more times. And so I'm going to go ahead and flip it. To do that in the new image manipulation program, you go to tools, transform tools, rotate.  So if you did 90, it would do 90 degrees clockwise. I'm going to do 180 to do a full flip and then click rotate. And then I can close that. OK, we're. Going right along here. One thing that I noticed now, though, is because I took out green out of the. The galaxy, the background sky is looking quite red now. And so I'm going to go ahead and just open up another curves. So I go to colors, curves. And I'm going to take a red curve and just take the black point. And move it over until that looks more neutral and then click OK. And at this point, this is what I would call just a very naturalistic DSLR picture of Andromeda. And so if you want more, just sort of a quick edit, you could stop right here and save it off and be done. But I'm going to push it a bit further just to really see what we could do with a little bit more manipulation. So to do that, I can't push it too much further just because of the noise levels and things without separating out the stars, the background and the galaxy. And it's much easier to work on the background and the galaxy if you remove the stars from the image completely. And luckily there is a free program called StarNet++ that will do this work for us using a machine learning model. So we're going to save off what we have here to use in StarNet++ and I'll also show you downloading the program. But to do that, we need a flattened image. But just in case I want to come back to this one, let's go ahead and save it as a XCF file. So I'll just save that to the desktop. That means we can go back into the GNU image manipulation program and keep working on it. And then I'm going to go to image, flatten image. And the reason we have to do this is if we look at the channels right now, you can see that there's an alpha channel. We don't want that alpha channel because it will confuse StarNet++, which only expects three channels, red, green and blue. So we're going to go ahead and flatten the image. It brings it down into one layer. And now if we look at channels, that alpha channel is gone. And now we can save it off as a 16 bit TIF file. We do that with the export command.  Click export. It'll ask me if I want to do any compression on the file. I don't. So I'm just going to leave that set to none and then click export again. And now we have the stars.tif file on our desktop and we can remove the stars in StarNet++ and save it to the desktop. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to Google StarNet++. This is a standalone program that's useful for removing stars from astrophotography. And I'm going to download it from this source forage page. And if you go to files up here at the top and then go into version 1.1, they have a nice zip file for each main type of operating system. So since I'm on a Mac, I'm going to download the Mac version. OK, once that's downloaded, I'm just going to move the entire StarNet macOS folder onto my desktop here and open it up. And then I'm just going to open up this run RGB StarNet.sh file with a text editor. I'm just going to change these two file names, the first one being the input file. So we called that stars.tif. And then I'm going to change the output file to m31starless.tif. This number is the stride. And typically I use a lower stride when I'm at a lower focal length and a higher stride when I'm at a higher focal length. It starts at 128, but you can go down to 16. I'm going to change it to 64 for this image. And typically the lower the stride number, the longer the process takes. So if you wanted to see what will happen, if you run it quicker, you can leave it on the default 128. OK, then I just have to move this stars.tif into the same directory. OK, with that shell file edited like this and the stars.tif file in the same directory, we now just have to run this file from a terminal command. So I'm just going to open up terminal and we have to get into this folder. So the command for that is cd for change directory space. And then I'm just going to drag this folder over and hit Enter. And then we just want to run this command or this sorry, this shell script, which calls on the actual program. So to run it, all I have to do is just drag it over and hit Enter. And it starts running. It gives us a little information about the file. It tells us how many different tiles. It's going to break it, the image up into to analyze. That's what the stride number is. So the slower the stride number, the more tiles that will break the image up into and then the longer it will take. And then it gives us a percentage finished. So this will take some time. Probably 20 to 30 minutes on my laptop with an image this size. With that done, I'm going to go ahead and open that image, the starless image back up into the new image manipulation program with file open. Click on the m31starless.tif and click open. It opens that image up into a new tab. You can see that we have two tabs now up here at the top. This is our star image and this is our starless image. After we are done changing the levels and the saturation a little bit on the starless image, we'll add the stars back in. So to do that, we're going to first duplicate it, is what I always like to start doing. So I'm going to right click and choose duplicate layer and I'll just call this curves. And like the name suggests, we're going to do some curves work on it. So go to colors, curves. And the first thing that I want to do is just basically add an S curve. So an S curve, you just sort of take the the left side of the histogram peak here and bring it down a little bit and then you make a point on the right side and bring that up a bit. OK, and then I would like to see the galaxy saturated a bit more. So I'm going to go ahead and add some more saturation just with colors, saturation and I'll bring it up to 1.2 OK, that's looking good. I can see some of the blue in the outer parts now, but that also brought up the saturation globally. So we don't like how saturated the background is now. It really brought out all the noise and artifacts from removing the stars. So I want to de-saturate just the background and also darken it. And to do that, we have to do something a little bit complicated, which is create a mask and specifically a luminance mask, which will protect the galaxy. There's actually three galaxies here. You can see one, two, three will protect the galaxies, but would not protect the background. And so to do that, we're going to duplicate again. So I'll just duplicate the curves layer. Right click, duplicate, and I'll call this mask. And the first thing I'm going to do the mask is I'm going to completely de-saturate it. So I'm going to take out all the color to make it grayscale. We can just do that with, again, the saturation. Command and just take it all the way down to zero.  So I'm just going to go to colors levels. And I'm just going to drag the shadow slider way over to make this part of the image dark and then take the mid-tone slider and bring that over like that and just keep playing around with that a little bit. Until we have a result, something like this. And then I'm just going to switch my foreground color to black, grab my paintbrush, make a nice big brush and just darken out these corners here. OK, so this mask is pretty good now. We can now work on applying it. Before I do that, though, I'm going to duplicate the curves layer again. So I'm going to right-click on it and choose duplicate layer and call this duplicated layer dsatbg, short for desaturate the background. And to that desaturate bg layer, I'm going to right-click and choose add a layer mask. And this is how we apply the mask that we just created to this new layer. We add the layer mask, click add. And then we want to make a copy of what is currently visible. So that we can paste it into here. So to do that, we're going to do edit, copy visible. I'm then going to turn off the visibility of that mask layer and right-click on the layer mask and choose show layer mask. This selects it and you can now see there's a green outline around it. And then we're going to paste in what we have. It comes in as a floating selection and then you just click the anchor to anchor it down into the layer mask. OK, and since we want to desaturate the background with this layer mask, this is actually opposite of what we want, because right now white is selecting, black is protecting. And so if we applied the desaturation to this with this layer mask on, it would desaturate and drama to Galaxy and keep the background exactly the same. So we actually want to invert this, which is very easy to do. You just go to colors, invert. Great. OK, and now I can go ahead and right-click and turn off show layer mask. Click on the image part of the layer so that it's selected in white and we can now apply our desaturation with this layer mask applied and it should only apply to the background. So to do that, we go back to colors, go to saturation. And when we turn down the scale of the saturation, what you should see is that the Galaxy stays nice and saturated. But the background is losing all of that color noise. And I'm not going to bring it all the way down to zero. I think something like point two would look pretty good. OK, and then I'm going to on that same layer. I'm going to darken the background with colors, levels and just grab my black point, drag it over a little bit, grab my midpoint and drag that a little bit to the right as well. OK, very nice. So now we have something pretty good here. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate the curves layer. No, actually, I'm going to make a new from visible. So I'm going to just going to do layer new from visible. I'm going to add a layer mask to that one. Just do right click, add layer mask, add. And I'm going to once again apply this mask. The way we do that is just turn that layer back on. Click, edit, copy visible. Then you can turn the layer back off. Right click on the visible layer and choose show layer mask. It's now selected in green, then paste. Edit, paste and anchor it down. OK, so now we have the layer mask applied to this visible layer. I'll go ahead and turn that back off. At least the I'll go ahead and uncheck show layer mask. And I'm going to call this one set Galaxy for let's saturate the galaxy a little bit more. OK, and then we just do the colors, saturation and apply a little bit of a scale adjustment to the galaxy. And now really the only thing left to do is the center looks a little bit green when it should look a little bit warmer. So I'm just going to duplicate this whole set Galaxy layer and I'm going to show the layer mask. And I just want to paint in black everything but the core. So I want to paint out these arms because I don't want it to apply to that. I'm just going to use a nice soft brush like this. OK, and then we can turn the show layer mask back off. OK, I'm going to go up to colors color balance and I'm just going to subtly wait too much. Shift away from blues and greens a little bit in the center here just to warm that up a little bit. OK, so I'm going to turn the visibility of that off and on and you can see it went from a sort of cyan green to a warmer gold in the center there, which is what we want to see while the while the outer arms, which weren't part of that mask are still nice and blue. OK, this is looking good. We're ready now to add in our stars. So we're going to go back to this tab and do edit copy and edit paste. Actually, I'll do edit paste as new layer. Perfect. You can call this stars. And on that stars layer, you know, see right now it's just completely covering up all that work we did. So what we want actually to do is apply a screen blend mode, which takes away all the darker parts of the image and lets the brighter parts below shine through. So we'll just go up here to mode and change it to screen. And when we change it to screen, the whole image gets too bright. It really reveals a lot of noise, but also detail. And so we now want to apply a curves adjustment again. Instead of applying it to the stars layer, though, I want to make a new from visible layer. So I'm going to do layer new from visible. And on that one, I'm going to do colors, curves. And I'm going to start with a midpoint and bring the whole midpoint down. And then I'm going to take the shadow point and drag that over to the right, something like that. I'm noticing that there's a lot of red in the background. So I'm going to go ahead and open up a red curve and just take the shadow point and move it over to the right a little bit.  So I'm just going to change the black point a little bit to take out some of that red, a little bit more even. There we go. OK, so that looks pretty good. The only thing is when we brought back in the stars layer, I see that the core is still pretty green there. So I'm going to make yet another new from visible. We'll call this one core. And I'm going to add a new layer mask to that core layer and initialize the layer mask to black. And then I'm just going to take a soft brush. I don't want it... Yeah, the hardness should be set to zero. I'm going to take down the opacity of it a little bit too. Take the opacity down to like 60. And I'm just going to brush in where it's too green here. And now I'm just going to apply another color balance adjustment under colors. All right. So now after the color balance, this is before very green, sort of a teal green, and then just taking that away with a color balance shift, the galaxy looks a lot more natural. And the only other thing I'm seeing here is this top corner. The top corners are a little bit red. So I'm just going to make once again a new from visible. So layer new from visible. I'll call this corners. I'm going to add a layer mask. Right click, add layer mask. I'm going to initialize it to black. Then I'm going to take a brush, take a nice big brush with like a 50% opacity. And I'm just going to get these corners here a little bit on the top. Okay. And I'm going to click back onto the visible layer and go to curves. And just take my red point a little bit and drop it over to the right until I don't see that red color noise up in the top anymore. And then speaking of noise. We can try to reduce it a little bit. We'll have to make once one more new from visible layer. I think this is the last one. We'll just call this nr for noise reduction. And in the new image manipulation program, the noise reduction is under filters enhance. And there's a noise reduction filter. And with a strength of four, it is taking two layers. And with a strength of four, it is taking too much out of the picture, I think. So I'm going to take that strength down to maybe one. I'll try two. And let me try zooming in on the picture. And just turning that preview off and on. Okay. I think two was even still a little bit too much for my taste. So I'm going to knock that all the way down to one and just apply noise reduction of one and click okay. And then we can see what it did just by turning it off and on. And I think the main thing it did is it took away a lot of the color noise in the background, which does look good. I think on that noise reduction layer, though, I'm just going to reset the black point one more time. Just because I noticed it's a little bit, still a little bit too much for me. So I'm just going to go to curves one more time and just take the black point over just a little bit. And that's it. We have now successfully edited our Andromeda image in the Deep Sky Stacker program, which is free and also GNU image manipulation program, which is also free and open source. So the only thing left to do is to save and export with whatever format you want to use. Of course, TIFF is good for long-term storage, but for saving for the web or for social media, PNG or JPEG would be better. So I'm going to use JPEG just by typing in m31.jpg and clicking export. It gives me some options. I'm just going to do full quality. Okay, and here is our final result. It does look a little bit noisy still, so maybe I was a little bit too hesitant to apply noise reduction. Maybe we should have increased that a little bit or not pushed it quite this far. But I do think it shows you what you can do with just a DSLR and a tripod and a lens using free programs to process your image. So hopefully this was helpful for you. You can always leave comments with suggestions, and if you want to support this channel, please consider subscribing, liking this video, leaving comments, and I also have a Patreon that starts at just $1 a month. Until next time, this has been Nico Carver from NebulaFotos.com. Clear skies. Thanks for watching.


And welcome to the independent investor channel for a Friday live stream here. It is nine o'clock eastern standard time little prior to a kickoff a little bit early and I want to pose a question for you guys in deliberating around the financial topic in really questioning what it takes to Gain financial security in this life and even challenge the idea that Does does everybody end up rich? You know the market here and monitoring over the last four months has been on fire Okay, so for you guys that are tuning into the channel this evening I'd like you to deliberate around the idea of whether or not you have participated and in what capacity I always think about the idea and challenge the notion that Getting some level of financial wealth is difficult. It escapes a lot of people Why is that if I could pose the question of suggesting a Specific set of rules or philosophies to obtain wealth in this life what would those rules be and I do in fact even challenge the idea that I Think a lot of people Pursue wealth. I think they think that there is a a a way of Saving over the course of their lives But I really do challenge what people would Consider in in pursuing wealth. I think there's a misconception that Wealth is just something that is bestowed upon you. Okay My program does require work. So when I look at the the grander populace out there I can go one of two ways with this I Can run the independent investor channel with the perspective that no need to worry Society has got your back society will have your best interest in mind and You will be taken care of Or I can run it in the capacity that I choose to run this channel and that is from an independent perspective I rely on nobody if social security is there down their line great if it's not What have I done to prepare over the course of my life to set up for that eventual end?  Yeah, Ryan's on man. Let's have a drink right on This is kick-ass So be it This is social media. It's a conduit to an opinion and a philosophy and perspective that I actually abide by in my day-to-day living But Make no mistake. I'm not here to judge I would be more apt to put the grander Ideology about how to get ahead On the chopping block as opposed to piecemeal your individual habits that May contribute or detract from your financial future or evolving to a better place in your in your finances. Okay, I Also suggest that there are many other things that will contribute to that end But we don't get too much on that topic and that I'm not a relationship specialist. Okay.  I'm not a physical fitness trainer. I was in the gym every single day this week again I mentioned that because it's real One day I had to cut short a little bit by an hour I was a little disappointed in that but hey more than the average bear Why do I share that with the group?  Why not get ahead fighting? Let me pose a scarier question to you If you're Some time later on in life and you're reflect reflecting back on your life Would you like to uh deem yourself in most cases a fighter Somewhat that who remained aggressive made mistakes Uh took successes along that road of life. Okay um, it is it is the very ideology that The second that you can number one identify that you're in charge of your own life number two start to identify um, some of those attributes about yourself that may be Barriers to entry to allowing yourself and I'm going to go over some specifics Tonight you're in for a real treat. Okay. This would be the last live stream for a couple of weeks here I've put professional obligation. I'll be flying out Sunday, I'll be up on the Great Lakes again One of my favorite places. I feel home when I'm up there. Absolutely. So if you're in the Detroit area Look me up, but we won't be doing the live stream. This will be it but you're in for a real treat in understanding that you know where people want to get rich overnight I Really do presume that people need to buy into and understand the reality In that building wealth takes time No, Ryan, you can really do it. You can hit that right trade and you can make money overnight I've got six youtubers who tell me that they can do all that. I've got 25 youtubers I've got 50 youtubers that I've subscribed to And they all tell me that they can help me get rich overnight.  Uh, I have reality Coming right smack out my ears and that's what I share with you guys in that I haven't amassed the small fortune that I have by Seeking out every pie in this guy idea out there To the contrary If I was going to convey to the group here what has actually worked for me over the many many years of investing I'm 46 now I started investing when I was, you know, young 15 16 Researching and then real dollars committed somewhere, you know in my late teens early 20s, right? Really not very serious because you don't know what you don't know Bought mutual funds sold them got into tax implication with them Went with brokers that were subpar Only learned about self-directed investing in my early 30s and have been doing it ever since about 15 years That really is where the accelerated pace picked up. Okay, so what I'm going to do tonight We're going to do the portfolio review. We're going to talk about concepts to live by Okay, things that you Might want to consider looking at and if you look at some of these ideas that I throw out there And they don't fit with you That's okay All right, there's not one human being on this earth That is exactly the same as the other. I guess unless you're identical twins or You get my point. All right, everybody's different. Everybody brings different attributes to the table You know, I say all the time I work with Some of the coolest people in my profession some of them. I know much smarter than me And you can only offer what you can offer with regard to your intelligence your skill your work ethic Which is my strongest attribute Your ability to help others and train Okay But what you bring to the table is super super important and and in bringing, you know, your best attributes forward When you can bring your best attributes forward it makes it easier to identify Whatever weaknesses Might be keeping you back. Okay Pick two or three Don't be self-deprecating.  I can't invest Investing is gambling. I can't do it. I've invested before and I've failed I don't have the intelligence to invest You have to know this this this and this because I'm telling you that this this this and this That you think you need to don't know about owning the smp 500 Is is wrong Okay, you can invest in the stock market And if I were to pose it in a way to suggest that if you could put some of these fundamentals to work You really do set yourself up for the best Opportunity going forward to really amass Some nice wealth. I don't predict where stock markets are going Nobody in their right mind should Uh, I find it interesting how many people do And I always chalk it up as futile There should be some people that are coming on and apologizing to the grander masses out there And if you succumb to the recession talk Through last year you would have missed 20 games If you would have succumbed to the recession talks in 2024 You would have missed out on some massive gains an analyst came on to cmbc just this week and admitted I've been you know, kind of out of the market since january and look at this run here halfway through march It's been on fire Um, what if you were one of those investors that succumbed to the idea that the bond market Was the place that you wanted to shift your entire port? Do you guys remember this? Am I the only one that heard this information now? Everybody's conveniently forgot it. Oh, yeah I don't need to see just buy nvidia and and bitcoin Right. These are the waves that we ride right now And we don't have any common sense about us to take a step back and really look at Sentiment is good. I get it I'll I'll convey that look. I'll tell you when sentiment is bad Um, I've done a whole hell of a lot this decade starting in 2020 conveying How bad sentiment has been across a lot of different markets the micro cap market The the the broader market the the values have really been bad The last three years has saw us incur a significant downturn in technology Within the last couple of years and and people have a short memory About those things and I find it interesting how the rhetoric Is so rampant when it is convenient to offer that but then it is quickly dissolved the way When it is less convenient or conducive to the actual markets that are going on right now And what is going on right now? things are robust if you were independent in your thought and operate on an island like myself and I would suspect that you guys are also Charged with operating it with that same independent lens Stay invested in the market right adhere to some of these awesome philosophies and discipline These shouldn't flux with the market. These should be rigid as a board You can get better at these things that i'm going to discuss tonight Okay, but you certainly don't need to be wishy washy all over the place with regard to your financial application One day you're all in on nvidia Um nvidia traded like a penny stock today at the end of the market Did you guys notice that lost 10 percent? In a matter of 30 minutes Um a 2.1 trillion or 2.2 2.3 trillion dollar company should not behave that way Markets are fickle They are not perfect and if you're going to play in the stock market in 2024 You need to adhere to these principles now more than ever because I tell you what if you don't You're going to be all over the place with your application and your application should quite frankly be very very rigid It should be steadfast It should be business-like Calm coolant collected not emotional. Yes um Utilize the stock market for what it is ask yourself over the last four months. Have you maximized your Opportunity in the market to participate in some capacity in this upward mobility that the market has presented itself with And I'll tell you what going into this upswing Nobody Nobody forecasted it I will admit to this and I don't mean to be braggadocious But for those that I conveyed when it was very inconvenient to convey That I was buying markets when the market was down I am in fact benefiting now from up markets. Did I know that the markets were going to be up? Reporting out to you on march 7th over the last four months. No, I never presumed to but if you invest with the idea That you can be long financial markets and understanding the buying markets at little bits Over the long term Will help get you to an end Far greater than trying to buy into the rhetoric of the day over here Or the the rhetoric of the day over here and just owning financial markets were up a couple thousand dollars week over week If I looked at the up and ups and downs and swings in the market what happened this this uh this week I would say that we're appreciating slow drift To the upwards and to the right That's exactly what we want to do and we want to do that over the long term But guys, I appreciate you tuning in with me man for this live stream. It's going to be a special one I'm going to try to give you my very very best effort stick around Uh pick up a drink for yourself. Let's have some fun. Leave your comments in the comment section here I'll try to get to you guys and try to highlight what it is that you guys are thinking What's on your mind with regard to what has been a very very robust financial market be back with you in just a moment Oh Fantastic welcome back. I appreciate the like-minded people in the group here. I salute you Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm one of those rare birds that Really do kind of scoff at the notion so for you guys that are new to the channel I welcome you to the channel. You're getting a very very down to earth perspective here in that the independent investor channel is It's sacred to me. Okay. It's sacred to me The subscriber growth has been very very slow the last couple of years. I'm totally cool with that. Here's why I would do what it is that I talk about whether or not I had this project or not Okay, so if there are detractors to the message No problem. If the project is slow to grow or even detract detract No problem.  Okay I know in fact in my heart if I share and convey Just some iota of what I do it can help people I know that Could I be wrong in the um In the realm of of of perfection Sure, sure. Am I causing more harm to people than good? I don't know It only speaks to the results that are being rendered by the very patrons that are catching the message Okay, and if you're catching the message with unfair expectations of me giving you answers to the promised land to become A multi-millionaire overnight You're you're at the wrong place And and and if you're searching that out, I bid you all the best In your search for said outlet. I'm just here to tell you that it doesn't exist It doesn't exist There are certain themes and philosophies that will be mentioned across the financial youtube audience And and financial youtube creation pool But what I what I will say is that The more edgy and the more charismatic that you are Could potentially garner more views to your channel But it's the very merits of the message that count If if you can take some of these things that i'm going to go over put them to rigor and they actually Generate wealth for you Then who cares if i'm wearing socks or a suit and tie Or I stutter with my words or I say um three times during my live stream. Who cares Who cares if you don't like me you cannot like me find your way to the message Deploy the strategies and earn wealth for yourself Eventually you may come back and give me a fist bump and be like right on ryan. I get I get it I get what you're trying to do But the independent investor channel is the project that's on my sleeve the project that we convey every friday Is that opportunity for you guys to come in and get a little bit of a little bit of armor? Okay Guys you guys the mandaloreans man you get to add an extra set of armor every friday and and hopefully you look at it that way It is allowing you to be part of a community that I Really do try to trim out some of the Some of the misdirection in stock market investing Uh, you know the access to good information is some of the simplest simple information And we revolve around that and and also try to separate that information from what I feel like is Rampant and very very misguiding for a lot of people who might be finding their way to financial markets And are very very confused as to where to start Okay So i'm gonna put the portfolio on hold i'm gonna get into some of these concepts to live by All right, if look if you're new to the channel You want to understand what i'm about this is what i'm about this is the project Some of the folks in the group get it. They've been with me for a long long time But concepts to live by when I look out there on the brand broad landscape and I see an oasis I see a desert sky of of public perception okay I think that people are so caught up in their day-to-day activity They're caught up in this and you know jen johnny's needs lunch this peanut peanut butter jelly And he's got the sniffles and needs some antibiotics and the car's broken down and we need to fix that We need to worry about this and that we need to worry about the united states, man Right gives you everything to to worry about.   All right If you want me to sit here and tell you the a's and b's and c's there's a there's a lot of people out Especially I find comical the young kids that come on and do financial youtube and financial Tick tock. There's a lot of financial that they're blowing up, right? They're blowing up again. I separate that Intrigue with the merits of the message that they're conveying to people Because on its fundamental root and base There only are a a half a dozen things that actually work over the long term in stock market investing The analyst very very smart talked about missing this market And that's the problem with money managers is You know trying to inject and trying to buy that next best thing or try to sell the next best thing To have clients Understand that you may have an edge where somebody else doesn't have that said edge I'm here to tell you that the market Is just as in front of your face as it is the analysts out there, okay? and your ability to pay attention to How it is you are going to participate in that is going to separate you From the masses who are that wishy washy? Always going with that next best thing. I guarantee there are people right now that rode into This downturn in in video and I think the downturn is going to be Fairly prolonged. I think nvidia is a great company But did you did you chase it on the way up? Did you chase bitcoin on the way up? I don't know and maybe it works out for you. Maybe it doesn't I don't know I don't really care. I'm on the sideline abiding with my philosophy. I'm paying attention To what works for me. Okay The next is don't succumb to temptation There's a difference between evaluating an opportunity and jumping on every opportunity that comes your way Hey, hey, have you heard about this anybody? We got this over here and again. Oh my goodness I got to buy into this.  This is the smartest person I've ever seen Okay, that sounds great. I buy into that. All right five months later two months later one month later The thesis doesn't work. It sounded really really awesome at the time But it does not work out Okay It is incumbent upon every independent investor to evaluate Extrapolate the the good The marrow of the message And discredit the rest Most of what I see is discreditable Right on the onset. Okay, so You will be tempted. It's human nature. It's human nature to want to jump on certain opportunities But please be mindful of the program that you have And keep the program simple enough to where when those outside influences come in And they don't align with your Attributes that you have built for your specific program Then you can very very easily deflect that temptation away and stay core to your fundamentals. All right The next is manage credit Um, how many of you guys in the audience you can just raise your hand have credit out there that is unused right now Love credit cards not a fan of Dave Ramsey Credit cards are not evil People who use them improperly are evil. Okay Excuse me credit cards can actually be one of those tools that she can utilize that can actually pay you to use them okay if in the right hands and the Proper administration and discipline is adhered to in Proper use of credit cards be very very powerful. Okay I've got A current of 1200 bucks on my credit card right now That's the monthly expense month comes around we pay it off. We make multiple payments to the credit card Usually twice per month to get it down to as close to zero as possible. We don't pay interest on our credit card We have other credit cards that have Massive massive amounts of credit that are that's unused Um, so there is potential to use that credit Sometimes I'm awarded more credit than I actually want but If everybody was tuned in into the independent investor channel and they could say hey Ryan, we're good as a society We're not strapped with that Then I wouldn't touch on this topic but I know there will be at least A handful of people by nature of statistics make their way to the channel and hear me out on this and again I don't mean to be judging. I used to be there. I get it. I I used to have debt I've dealt with debt. I paid it down and eventually off and If you want to talk about an attribute or a philosophy that lends itself to building wealth over time It is the very adherence to credit discipline That will make the difference in your ability to achieve or fail at that end And for the people out there that spend like crazies Okay, and they they are over levered and there's a difference between those two um a house that you can't afford and a car that you can't afford is a is a is a an um an example of being over levered Credit card debt where you've just bought all kinds of crap.  You have to buy it and you feel good when you buy it and you just you have accumulated this huge huge pile of Stuff Okay, you've also acquired a huge huge pile of debt Which if not managed properly can really really consume you I would just assume that you adhere to a rule of keeping the debt at zero Secured debt for the home loan. I give you a little bit of leniency on that and secured debt with regard to an auto loan I yield in that capacity But if you want to come to me and try to sell me on the idea that leasing a car I'm going to offend some people lease synonymous with rent Renting a car is absurd I'll talk about that a little bit and some of The next lesson here and that is to keep cars a long time Okay, keep them a long time If you're going to buy a car buy a car that's i can buy a car that you like I had a colleague of mine about 15 years ago He was like, you know people really do try to scamp and they'll buy a car that does not meet their needs They'll buy something that they don't like and it doesn't give them pleasure to drive it or there is no type of utility The utility I get with my Tacoma is proven true every single time it snows and I can put it into four wheel drive and I can go anywhere It's just phenomenal product. I pay a little bit of premium for that. All right, but hey treat yourself a little bit That's a piece of secured debt in there But are you one of those people that cycle through automobiles every couple of years because oh my god You have to like I don't know wash your car once in a while or oh my god I got to take it in the the oil changes do ryan I've got to take it into the lot and and trade it in and buy a new one No, there's going to be there's going to need to be some level of Responsibility taking the maintenance category to maintain that asset to lend itself to the greater whole Okay, so a very very simple concept to live by is just that Okay, buy your transportation asset. It's depreciating asset from the onset you're not going to win out on Beating your head against the the the the beat of something that is futile Okay, buying a vehicle is a futile activity and if you're buying them every couple of years You're just exacerbating that problem buy a car and keep it ultra long Keep it ultra long. I've owned two cars in the last 25 years Okay, two Same vehicle Toyota Tacoma number one Toyota Tacoma number two. All right Save a little over long periods of time. This is a really good one The idea here is to earmark that surplus capital in the budget that can be injected Into your long-term program I look back over my program And there have been way way way too many injects as low as $25 As high as maybe injects of thousands of dollars into the market at any given time But if you looked cumulatively over my contribution schedule, you would see that my schedule is atypical Okay The majority of people cannot get their mind wrapped around this and it blows me away especially And I'm not a high-income earner I make enough to where I look at my salary and I'm like I can't spend all that all every month It's a good problem to have I don't mean to be braggadocious, but I've worked hard for this opportunity to Be comfortable But it's amazing to me how people I presume make significantly more And don't adhere to any of this because they feel like because they make let's say six figures I'm entitled to wealth. No, no, it doesn't work that way You really got to look at this thing as all right I'm happy that I make x amount for my income, but I'm also going to give my best Chance at setting myself up for my financial future down the line by adhering to some fundamentals principles Okay, if you make a hundred thousand and you spend 250 250 000 every year. Are you really that wealthy? I find that sometimes the people who are making money are probably operating on a lot more of a soap screen than it appears Okay, and they're probably in debt up to their eyeballs. They're probably leasing that Mercedes Just like 72 to people who drive Mercedes out there lease that vehicle Excuse me. They don't own it Okay, so don't buy into the soap screen that a lot of people want to portray What's going on below the surface for me? I mean, I'm confident enough again. No socks, baby I got my you know old iron side with my Nike just do it every friday. Why because I don't care I'm comfortable in my own skin. I don't care. I've got my shorts on. I'm comfortable. I'm chilling and I'm good It's just that simple. All right Who you're showing off for others or yourself? I'll let you answer that Yeah, that's really really good Yeah cat the house husband just increases credit limit from a thousand to ten thousand first time in his life because he said I feel like I'm an adult enough now. He makes over a hundred grand Yeah, I've taken those increases too and You know, you ask him and you increase that You know, it just sounds like cat and thank you for sharing that it goes in with that philosophy of Just being a good steward of what it is that you and your your husband have built up and I think that's wonderful A lot of these micro lessons that my audience can come in and share Is just gives one small insight to a specific category a micro topic within the total overall very very extensive but not very difficult concept of financial stewardship Okay, and managing the the credit limits and whatnot You know, I don't even know off the top of my head My primary card's got 50,000 And I I said, you know, I probably got a 1200 dollar, you know We're coming due on on making that next payment. We manage it and pay it down. This is what we do Um, and if you're out there and you're wondering what I what it is I do Hell I just told you cat's been nice enough to come on and actually share that with the grander audience about What it is that they do and it just speaks to my first point about paying attention. Okay If you're making over that hundred Right, it's a beautiful thing. It's an asset within your total comprehensive portfolio. It's not the holistic whole It is just a very important element of it and you in fact, I would presume have the luxury of properly managing that, okay Where I do contend that there's probably a lot of people out there That equally mismanage it. It's really really hard cat. I think and this is for the grander audience to succumb to that pressure In that boy, oh boy, all I've got to do is just swipe a card for the convenience of doing so and I get whatever I want I mean, I I could I could go buy with whatever I want And it's just the very discipline that I speak of but I think Has to be adhered to very very carefully. All right Have a purpose behind each of your investments as I was doing the calculations tonight on the portfolio Some of the investments are made up for the kids and the college funds the 529s the ugma's they have it all That's not my money. That's theirs. I earmarked that money for them I've built it up with that specific singular purpose my ira the wife's ira Joint accounts savings accounts checking account savings get the picture Each should have its own personality and earmarking for whatever philosophy Or intent that I expect over that account the etf portfolio, which I share openly the dividend portfolio All have their own kind of place in this Grander scheme of things. What is the personality Ryan of your Roth IRA? Well, it's simple It's holding a large position in a diversified dividend appreciation fund With a little bit of speculative growth and a mutual fund in there that gets some exposure to the semiconductor market That's a personality over mine. I just shared it with you I only I'm down to three holdings in my Roth IRA Totally fine with it. Most of the holdings are in vig Which is the vanguard's dividend appreciation fund to look at the top 10 I'm super happy. I can own a million dollars in each of those top holdings Microsoft Broadcom it Johnson and Johnson down the line the top 10 holdings which The top 30 percent of those dollars are committed to the top 10 In the vanguard's dividend appreciation fund and I'm good with it. It's diversified. It's low expense It's tax protected. Yada yada. We live to fight another day We take a moment to reflect cheers and we Celebrate paying attention mm-hmm Ties in the house people start earning a lot and they think that it will last forever And life happens Oh, how right you are my friend Um life can happen to anybody life does in some capacity You know, it's it's those medical shortcomings that I I really I am not worried about the most but I've heard most prevalent putting a real dent into financial security for people out there That just don't have a choice or have not prepared properly or It is such a large expense a hip replacement knee replacement, whatever it is Um that really does kind of put that dent in it. But but here's the thing look I'm not I'm not suggesting life's not going to happen to people because it is okay I think to remain on the positive side of the message Go at this thing hard with the idea that you know, what if life does happen? You're that much more prepared for it when it does happen Instead of always just rolling over or expecting that the government or the society that you grow up in or you know I'll be taken care of you know That mentality bothers me. I I don't get it. I don't I don't like it Yeah, and it doesn't make me any less or more immune to life happening to me But if I can look at it and and and take on those challenges in life with the idea that I have prepared in the best Best possible way that I'm good with that. Thank you for the comment. I appreciate it Um evaluate the risk in each of your holdings Okay, making sure that you're looking at the portfolio and you know, if you're a two Stock portfolio owner. So be it You're probably not adhering to all of the investment specific criteria that I talk about on the channel But just to make sure that you are always conditioning your ability to evaluate your risk I know it's easy right now to just take everything to dump in Nvidia I'm telling you with all of my years of experience I will probably just throw this out there and suggest that that's probably not a good idea Own Nvidia in in in a capacity that makes sense to you or not at all own it through the indexes You don't have to be a bandwagon player and you don't have to try to To buy this thing for fear of missing out. Okay Acknowledge the tax implication Use the tools free. That's a big one. We talk about brokers. We talk about establishing watch lists Use a little yahoo as much as I feel like the yahoo threads are about as sewer gassy As possible. I'm on you to yahoo all the time. That's my I just go there to check the market And I check at multiple times a day adhering to my pay attention more right? And also the last one is be part of a community That's where this small niche kind of fits in because look if you can get some level of small value from the channel great That that is the key of hearing different ideas and reading through some of these comments that are volunteered by the audience every single friday to get a little bit of Little bit of assurance that there are some like-minded people out there that really do conservatively approach Financial wealth building and they approach it with some real concrete fundamentals that I'm going to talk about next That that that anybody can adhere to and and look I mean you can discredit these you can You know go find those other 25 youtubers out there go find those tiktok followers and bounce in their head around and they're really really cutesy But they don't know the first definite thing about You know building wealth over the long term why because they're like 12 years old Um, but they're popular. I mean they've got you know millions of followers out there all looking to do the same thing Okay, and narya I would presume has anything to do with what i'm about to give you guys in way of The goods for what can apply to the masses If in regards to the attributes necessary to apply to building wealth properly in the stock market. All right Um diversify diversify your strategy. I own the total markets You know some attributes out there from some youtubers actually fit into this philosophy Strongman personal finance he rips on everybody on youtube But the one philosophy that he talks about he's dead right on and he chooses to own vt That is the total market From vanguard. It's a global fund that owns the entire market He'll win with that philosophy. Why? Because he understands the very very simple simple philosophy of diversifying And diversifying your strategy is more mined by diversifying His strategy is multiple strategies within the same fund owning global assets owning domestic assets owning diversified assets And owning those assets at low cost Okay The next is dollar cost average. We talked about this and infusing what capital you can every month This is super important. What is it going to look like as a? Very clear picture in your life when you reflect back and say I had you know 3,712 injection points over the course of my financial wealth building career and therefore it has rendered 1.7 million dollars Do people end up later on in life and look back over the life and say I have zero Not this guy Won't be me It is a choice made out of free will to not be in that category of somebody who did not contribute over the course of their of their life and it's not going to be A one hit it and quit it. It's not going to be a five hundred thousand dollar investment Is it possible? Sure. Sure. I look play the game the way that you want to play the game Okay I just think that way too many people buy into This idea that it's a one hit it and quit it a big investment on a big You know opportunity and that big opportunity hits big and therefore I can write off into my chariots of fire into the the the realms and depths of happiness and and and and and happiness forever Yeah, I don't know you know Maybe that is maybe that is what's happening in my my corner of youtube Exists in a realm of people who are living day to day Gaining a little bit of financial security and doing so in What I deem to be a fairly responsible methodology going about this thing. All right um dividend reinvestment plan if you have the opportunity to set up some of your investments to reinvest back into themselves The the drip program is set over all of my assets no matter it be in the dividend portfolio the etf portfolio Um, you know the single holdings and the Roth IRA all of them are set to continue to fund themselves Okay, the drip is alive and well at 46 years old. I don't need the money that's rendered off of that portfolio I know people in the group. I saw becky pop in hi to you and the husband You guys are doing the complete opposite of me, right and that you want to render some of that income great It's your program. You can do what you want But for right now, I have that actually self funding the the portfolio To tax protect we talked about that wealth preserve to keep those fees down to a minimum Don't get in debt. We talked about that in the general principles Uh, don't overspend and don't over lever and I've given you some examples of what each of those look like with secured and unsecured debt and You know, I don't know maybe just taking a second to stop and take a time out and really ask yourself Whether or not you actually need that item that you're lusting over or drooling over or just absolutely think that you have to have Yeah, I don't know. I'm as guilty as the next man. I love amazon. I get it.  These are my own personal ones and I'm going to give them to you now Why not because it's interesting and it's the truth. Here it is Start a brand the independent investor channel is my project Okay, whether or not I had beautiful people like phenom coming on and supporting the channel every week or Jamie the viper in the group and horn dogs in the group. Hell. Yeah, right Support in the message and really kind of understanding what the project means It makes it that much easier to deliver the product But the independent investor channel exists whether or not I do youtube or not. This is me. This is it Okay, and this is my brand And it speaks to my ability to have taken a risk at some point eight years down the line Now the irony in the whole thing is that the subscriber count is interestingly going down I don't I don't know If you have a rationale for it youtube doesn't like me I don't need youtube's approval to be happy. Okay I I I would come on and do the message no matter what no matter how okay I ironically am looking at this thing to suggest this look if I'm make a million bucks before I get to 100 000 subscribers or 50 000 subscribers What's the difference? I'm still building wealth and I'm doing it my way whether or not people want to acknowledge the the um The value in the message or not that's not up to me I don't get to do that. I'm not charismatic enough to drive traffic.  I don't get it. I get results and that should be attractive enough uh I want to promote the brand we do that through the multiple ideas that we have We commit to a philosophy right so the philosophy now on the channel on the money side, which is I do the live stream For free. It's a cool product. I love doing it. This is my favorite thing to do by far But the money aspect that we make is doing some advertisement on the channel and that helps justify My time and doing what I do. I dig it. I I've bought into it. I like it I've honed in on a few companies if not one specifically that I really really like to cover And you guys will be in the beneficiary for it hill. I own the stock myself Um If you have the ability to offer a product or do a side hustle or make some side income I will tell you eight years of doing the independent investor channel has really positively impacted my bottom line It's helped immensely.  I'm plugged in with a network right now who get what I do Um, I don't care if I'm getting all the Till you can go follow tick tock for all I care.  Maybe you like my jokes and my charisma and my dry humor I I don't know but if you adhere to one message at your 20 30 40 or 50 whatever it is The very secret to my success over the last 20 years has been the ability to Have a job that allows me to enjoy benefits whether it be dental and health Okay, the ability to aspire to a pension down the line To be able to have some reasonable level of security and safety for the family In that if they fall ill I have those insurances and it's a buffer Between what I'm trying to build financially and the ability to make a consistent income over the course of my life Okay, am I making six figures? No if I was I would tell you with my mind I could get that much further ahead, but it don't All right, that's just the reality of it. It really does promote The um ability for me to get ahead It really does contribute to that end and if there's one thing that you can take away. It is that very thing. All right Get some comments here. I'm at the house. Great stuff. I'm glad to share And that's what what we roll with it's a day-to-day thing when i'm away from the channel when I walk away from the channel This is what is being deployed these are the philosophies that are being adhered to These are the philosophies that I convey through the channel that are Much more in line with life lessons and how to live not necessarily What's that quick inject that I can give you to make you a few bucks?  Oh boy. I probably there's probably other topics that That I've learned over the course of my life that have nothing to do with personal finance But personal finance just so happens to be the angle that we share because I'm pretty passionate about The topic and I presume that there's a lot of people out there that are You know that are there's they're struggling with this topic. They do succumb to temptation, you know, they have a hard time with spending discipline I'm going on 69 years old And I learned something from every one of your educational videos for these years That's really cool You know, I try to look at the different fundamentals from different angles and I guess I live this stuff So it's not like you can come on to the i2 and get your notepad and wait for that You know needle in a haystack. There it is ryan gave it away right on i'm going to make 100 bucks on this deal It doesn't work that way Yeah, if you want to deploy these it's going to take a little bit of adherence to Putting these things into rigor and and no less that it's just that's what it's going to take Very cool Jamie's in the house fidelity is good to set up and drip the way you want it. I agree It's still learning the aesthetics.  It's got all kinds of cool stuff. Thanks for sharing. Jamie. I appreciate it very cool We're in our early 30s. You got a couple of kids in the group. That's awesome, man I've set up a dollar cast average the sp500. We're feeling good about it Here in the right place I I just I I hopefully for what it's worth and I hope hopefully you're still in the live stream You are an example of somebody who gets it It it's not that hard Um What I suggest is the hardest the most difficult thing to do is look here It's easy and feeling good about it when the sp500 did what this week hit another record high another record high My friend here's the deal the sp500 doesn't go up all the time. It does in fact go down So if you can feel good about your program Okay Acknowledging when you're looking at the s&p. Maybe you're detracting a little bit and maybe even come over the top and suggest Look, we believe so much in this program for our financial future because by your admittance you're you're young You get all kinds of time into your future. We want to be here into our future then That's the type of discipline and excitement and you have every reason to be excited As you can tell I'm more excited for you Then you could even possibly be for yourself Because I know the possibilities of this program right here and what it could mean for you guys Down the line. It's just that simple.  You're probably already tax protected. I don't know how you own the s&p Whether you own ivv or spy or voo. I don't know. It doesn't matter. It's all the same Those are low cost assets that if housed in the right account can really take you to the promise land You can focus on being young Focus on your thing go on vacation. Have fun. The investments are awesome And you've got the independent investor channel as your community and your back pocket job Feel pretty good about that because I do in fact deliver the goods. I'm not a Type of fella. I'm not a tick tock fella I am on tick tock. It's a landscape of like I'm a pilgrim in an unholy land on tick tock. It's crazy But uh, thanks for sharing man. I really appreciate it very cool stuff Every thing you find this a landscape the points you to jump on a chance is to separate from your money I mean it could work out, you know Um, you know, I've been victim of this too. Jamie. I'm not perfect in this I know Um, and I just I live and learn too.   Well, I'm not I'm a good person I make all kinds of good investments and that that shows by the nature of the investment portfolio that we've built up, but Yeah, I'm not immune to mistakes and neither are you So You know at the end of the day, did you wind yourself and and circumvent as many mistakes as you could make and You know, maybe outweigh The the portfolio with some successes. Yeah, you know, that that's the whole idea Good stuff. I got on late. Appreciate you coming on brother. Good stuff. Thank you so much Scanning up here through the deal. I got matt in the house matt martin If you use my credit cards for necessary first pay it off every month Curing points along the way. That's the free money that I talk about matthew Right. Um, and in the hands of a good discipline, it's good pays for portion. If not all the vacations I've taken vacations on on points Don't mean to be braggadocious. You're sharing it. That's two of us To to get one more. We got a consensus You see the idea here behind the theme Yeah, you betcha those opportunities are out there. You just Again, it fits into the pay attention realm And if you come to the channel for the first time and it's like, whoa Ryan says I need to pay more attention Well, not only do you need to pay attention, but you need to identify the multiple categories where if you focus on credit You focus on spending focus on the budget focus on investing Focus on the type of investing the personality the philosophy the day-to-day adherence Blah blah blah I could go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about this topic That's why I love it so much. It is infinite. There's always fine tuning that can be done Thank you for sharing matthew. I really appreciate it Couldn't agree more cat says don't like it. You don't need to now.  So I don't use my debit card For reasons around security that maybe you're not thinking about maybe you have maybe you just choose to do it And and some people really do if you're you know, I've heard all kinds of stories come across my desk You know, if you've had family members that have got in hawk really really in a bad shape It's it's it's very difficult to look at a credit card as a good thing Right because you know, it can be somebody's worst nightmare absolutely and You know in the right hands it can be it can be worked if if not and you deal in cash or You know, the the building of the credit is not important for you guys. You guys are high-income earners so it may not be as necessary for you guys, but You know, I would consider to look at at it from all angles, you know Make a list of the pros and cons and I think if you really are Fair about it. You could come up with some on either side of it Good stuff And mitra dates in the house man. Good to see you my friend, but a good ai and evs use a lot of electricity All my electric utilities have gone up. Yeah, you and everybody else pretty crazy, man I'm glad to be currently renting For a lack of better terms Yeah, I get the memos in the house man. Thank you for stopping by. I really appreciate it There's jared's in the house, man jared's my brother from another mother Smash the like sure if you want to support the channel. No worries if not I no love lost. It's all good. I've already given my peace to that We're gonna go a little overtime tonight guys for sure Now we got becky's in the house becky's a good friend of mine through the channel very good very good stuff I'm glad to know this lady. She's solid Happy friday. Appreciate steve and vic victors in the house good evening All along we getting to the money on a daily. Yeah, it's been really really good, man I mean, you know, you make those investments when It's hard to make those investments and then I have the discipline to kind of acknowledge what's going on right now and Okay, this is what I expected to happen It's like cat, right? They came on and said hey, we're excited about our program now Well, it's when you go through those validations of understanding that in down markets It's okay to infuse more capital. You're just buying more at cheap shares And when the payoff comes later on You know, it gives you that little sense of validation to be like, all right, this works I mean, gosh, we were really pouring money into the s&p when it was awesome and we were excited, right But do you have the fortitude to invest into capital markets when the market is Is is in trouble and and and that rhetoric is going to hit you that temptation everything's terrible the Earth is going to stop spinning And the world's coming to an end and financial markets are going to cease to exist and All hell is breaking loose and the zombie apocalypse is imminent Okay, whatever Been around the block a few times with this exercise as you can tell happy friday And the like-minded people very cool stuff Let's go over the portfolio review right at the end of the live stream here And then guys then we'll wrap it up and let you guys get back to your Your weekend Wish you guys all the best. Please Remember that next friday and the friday after next We'll be taking a break on the independent investor channel. Okay But to give you guys some ideas here. This is the joint account the largest holding in here is vti Followed up by 12,500 shares of my favorite company aduro clean technology I'll be dropping some content tomorrow and then I'll be out of pocket with aduro content too So you'll have to monitor that landscape as well But I just added aduro was the only buy from this Week I bought one other stock I tried to buy jp morgan at the close of the bell But I missed it the buy order did not go through So the 5,000 shares of aduro clean technology was the only buy that I made this week Yes, indeedy Rock one healthily up above that hundred thousand 118 disney microsoft pepsi voo, which is the largest position at 99 shares vbk second biggest position. That's the small cap growth VNQ real estate. That's a smaller position. Pfizer procter and gamble realty income horizon And jp morgan. This is my Roth very streamlined Only three holdings in it right now with 104,320 dollars This is where the 5,000 share position was placed into aduro I've got a cool 30,000 shares of aduro clean technology in the roth right now The f s e l x is the semiconductor mutual fund and finally vig About 275 shares of vig Okay Very cool stuff etf portfolio Handily above the 30,000 mark very cool stuff for you guys that have been following me This was started in 2018 with the tune of $1,500 I have amassed this small fortune investing only in the sector etfs over that time frame Deploying a fundamental strategy that I have shared and conveyed with you tonight and that is uh frequent often injections to this portfolio So a couple of years we've built up a $30,000 bill happy with it This is the dividend portfolio Up above the $50,000 thresholds Didn't talk about thresholds this evening But the thresholds I speak about 500, 1000, 2500, 5000, 10,000, 25,000, 50,000 So you're going to go through a significant amount of thresholds to get to that Okay 100,000 250 500 and finally a million. Okay, so we're up above that 50,000 in that account very cool stuff The tsp up over a thousand within the last month the 100,000 mark So very happy i've spread out this allocation a little bit to put a little bit of contributions to the g fund To add a little bit to some safety here with the markets at an all-time high Want to segue some of those dollars to the government backed securities in there? very cool The sep account a little bit haven't funded this not sure what I want to do with it but for Sharing sake this the corporate account 32,000 20,000 shares of a duro And another 17,500 into foxter Okay Savings account building savings aggressively right now my friends at the mark with the market at an all-time high My aggressiveness turns down to about a neutral Okay, so you won't find me pouring huge amounts of capital into what I feel like are Well, they're stretched markets. Could it continue to run higher? Sure. I do I remain invested? Yes Does it mean that I want to be aggressive on my funding schedule? Not really if i'm going to give you my pulse of what i'm doing right now I'd be more apt to save to cash right here than to inject new capital into the markets in addition to What i'm already doing every single month Okay And we'll leave you on this this note here portfolio is at an all-time high here markets at an all-time high I too is coming through Five dollars and 78 cents. So we're doing well there It's a good note to leave on guys. I really appreciate you tuning into the message man. It's good stuff Um, it was a lot of fun tonight. Thanks for the contributions for the commenters cat and some of the others that That left their comments again guy in the house and Jamie and matt thank you for your guys's comments. They were highlighted on the live stream tonight But I want to wish you guys well for this weekend We'll be back in a couple of weeks on the independent investor channel live stream man Think about some of the philosophies And incorporating some of these into your day-to-day activity. Okay. I Really try to cross check these in that they are Right for the picking For application in your life Um, can you find good information with regard to financial savvy and stewardship on youtube? I think so And we're really trying to define that opportunity for people to start picking that low hanging fruit off And start to build some merit in their own portfolio and put some of the stuff to rigor Because the stuff works I've spent a lifetime Fine-tuning the half a dozen attributes that actually work in financial markets In a landscape where there is an infinite Amount of next best thing Pie in the sky needle in a haystack ideas that unfortunately spend a lot of their times Misleading new investors or would be investors to the message. Keep it simple Keep it straight guys. I appreciate your time and tune it into the fastest 60 minutes on youtube We'll catch you in a couple weeks On the live stream be well and we'll catch you in about three weeks. Cheers guys