What Vivan Tu is Doing to Make $25 Million in 10 years

0:01All right. Marketing school listeners, and this is a 20 to 30 minute segment of a full interview. I've done with an amazing founder, entrepreneur, creative, visionary. You're going to get a ton of insights from this. And if you want to listen to the entire thing, go search for Leveling Up with Eric Hsu. That's the entire podcast that you're going to find. So you get 20 to 30 minutes here. And if you want the whole thing, you can just search for Leveling Up with Eric Hsu. And without further ado, enjoy the episode. My first year of making money was certainly not a lot of money. It was just something part-time that I was doing in the summer as a club promoter.

0:40But all the way to the very end of like, you know, every single year I was leveling up. Every single year I was making more money. And when I made the leap to, you know, a full-time Wall Street job, you saw that number jump. Of course, you're going from a part-time job to a full-time job after I graduated. But what people don't even realize is that everybody thinks I made all of my money on Wall Street. Absolutely not. Okay? I was on Wall Street for two and a half years, and I was making an analyst salary and bonus. It's not that exciting. The base was$80 ,000. You got a$10 ,000 signing bonus.

1:14And then when I left Wall Street and moved into tech and media sales, that's when I started to really make the big bucks because, you know, my salary was still roughly the same. But now I ate what I killed. for every extra email I would send, for every extra call I would be willing to take over the guy sitting next to me, I knew I was going to make more money. And my very first year, I made slightly more than I did on Wall Street. My second year, I made some, it was like a six-figure income, something with a three-handle on it. And by the very last year of working at BuzzFeed, I made all in roughly$625 ,000.

1:59And when people hear that number, the immediate assumption is I made that trading equities, but I made it because I was a really good salesperson. Got it. And by the way, it's when you're working in, I think it was iBanking, right? I was on the trading side of the house. Trading side, okay, got it. So, but also you were getting grinded to the bone too, right? Yeah, yeah. You're working in 70, 80 hours a week? I mean, I was waking up at 5. My butt had to be in the seat at 545. And then I would leave the office every day roughly 6. But typically on Tuesdays through Thursdays, I had a client event to go to.

2:37So it wasn't like at 6, I got to go home. I then had to go to drinks or go to dinner. and when you first sign up for the job, that sounds amazing, right? Because you're 22, you have no money. There's no way you can afford to eat at this really fancy steakhouse. You get to go to this dinner, but you have to realize like, you're not hanging out with your friends. You're hanging out with people that you need to be on around. And I had to talk shop. I had to, you know, hang out with clients that maybe I liked, maybe I didn't. Maybe they weren't particularly nice. It's work. So, you know, I probably get home around eight, nine.

3:12sometimes closer to midnight if it was a really late night. And so every week I'm working 80 hours a week to, what, make$100 ,000 a year? Like, at a 40-hour work week, that's$50 ,000, which is below what the median American makes. Right. That's nuts. I mean, that's like, what, probably$20-ish,$30-ish an hour, something like that. To be doing really mentally taxing work. Like from the hours of 9.30 to 4 p.m., it's not like I got to freely go take a bathroom break. If I had to go to the bathroom, I would have to yell out to the trader next to me, be like, can you watch my screens while I go to the bathroom?

3:53And I had to hustle, go as quickly as I could and come back. And I don't think people realize that. This is not a normal corporate job where you are allowed to go to the water cooler. Like when you are in a trading seat 9.30 to 4, you are tethered to your desk. And it's hard. How rich do you want to be? What would be ideal? Because I think you made a comment about how billionaires shouldn't exist, right? So like, what does that cap out at? So I think this ties back to like my FU number. I think I have multiple tiers of FU number. I think the FU number in my head right now as it stands is$25 million because at$25 million invested, that backs into about a million a year if I'm able to get a 4 % return on that $25 million, which is very conservative.

4:39Got it. and at a mill year, I can do everything that I want in my life. I have my, you know, primary home. I have a vacation home. I'm going to be able to help put my kids through any sort of education they want to do, any sort of vacations our family wants to have. We'll be able to afford a car. It's going to cover every expense that I need. I wouldn't have to work anymore, and at that point, I would say that my priorities would severely change based on the fact that my financial needs and my family's future financial needs, not just my own, but my family's future financial needs would all be met.

5:16Mark my words, by 2034, so let's call it in 10 years, Vivian will have more than 25 million. You really, you have a lot of confidence. We're going to come back to this. Okay, we'll come back to this. We'll see. We'll see. I hope I do it in like next year, and then we have to come back early. Yeah, well, that would be even better. So, okay, what do people get wrong with their money? You know, I think a lot of us really focus on the scrimping and the saving. And so people are like, I'm not buying that avocado toast. I'm not buying that Starbucks. I'm not, you know, doing anything that brings me joy.

5:48Think about how hard it is to cut$10 ,000 worth of expenses out of your life. Like, that's hard. You're giving up a lot of things you really enjoy. How easy is it to ask for a$10 ,000 raise? That is absolutely heard of, like heard of, as in happens all the time, happens to so many people. A$10 ,000 raise is really not that strange. And you can get one just by being responsible, making sure you come to the table with like quantifiable facts and like, you know, a good excuse for your boss of why you deserve one. So it's a lot easier to make more money than it is to cut out all of the things that bring you joy.

6:23So my advice is, hey, focus less on the coupon clipping and the little, you know, tiny things. Focus on the big stuff. Because if you're not asking for a raise every single year, it doesn't matter if you're trying to scrimp and save. Like, you're still not going to get ahead. At the end of the day, it's your earning power. And Charlie Munger likes to say, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome, right? And you certainly proved that. So I guess for practical advice for people, like, how can they go about increasing their earning power? Is it learning before you earn? Like, what is it?

6:52I think it's learning while you earn, right? Like in any job, you either need to be learning or earning, ideally both. And I think it's about being really, really selfish, right? Back in the day, our parents, our grandparents were incentivized to stay at companies for 30, 40 years because they had pensions. And pensions are this special little thing that help you prepare for retirement because your company would put money away for you and take care of you in old age. Now, most of us have something called a 401k, which is just a pension. but it's worse in literally every way because instead of your company contributing to it, you have to contribute to it.

7:37Instead of your company selecting investments, you have to select investments. And back in the day, if your company didn't select the right investments, come retirement, they still had to pay you out on what they owed you. And it got bigger and bigger and bigger the longer you stayed at some place. Now it's like, okay, well, it's my money going into this account. Maybe your company matches it. Maybe it doesn't. You have to pick investments. You better pick right, because if you don't, sorry, too bad, so sad. And we are no longer incentivized to stay at companies for 30, 40 years, because why should we?

8:10We have to put our own money into these accounts. The only way we can put more money into these accounts is by making more money. So my thing is, is be selfish. Forbes did a study. People who stay at jobs for longer than two years make less than, make essentially 50 % less their entire lifetime. So my thing is, is like you need to be either up or out every two years. Every two years, you need to be getting a 10 to 15 percent promotion at a minimum every two years. Otherwise, you need to leave. You need to go somewhere that's going to pay you. Because if you're not doing that, you're going to be making less.

8:46And people are like, well, the job market's bad and like, you know, it's not the great resignation anymore. I agree. I concur. It's not as easy as it was two, three years ago. But we have to take a long, hard look at ourselves and be like, am I actually doing a good job? Do I deserve a raise? Because the best people, the smartest people, the people who perform the best and have the best results and, you know, make sure their boss knows that they're doing a good job. They tell people what they're going to do. They do it. And then they tell everyone how they did it. Those people are going to get paid every year.

9:17And they always have since the dawn of time. I guess based on experience. And I think the same thing for you, too. It's like, yes, be selfish, but also don't be afraid to job hop. And us having Asian parents, it's like, no, you should stay. You should get pension and everything. 1 ,000%. Do you know how bad my mom yelled at me when I told her I was leaving JP Morgan? You lost the badge. I lost the badge. I lost the badge. So we were talking, you know, before the show started about how I am a native Shanghainese speaker, which is essentially a dialect of Mandarin. There's a phrase that all of her Asian auntie friends said to her about my getting to work there.

9:51basically if you want to work at a company like that you know long kit so essentially you have to crack your head open you know it not uh tank it so like you have to basically crack your head open to work somewhere like that meaning it's hyper competitive it's so hard to get a job there it's grueling physically emotionally mentally and it was like a point of pride that i had that type of grit and other people couldn't do it. So my leaving, in a sense, was not only a failure because I couldn't hack it, because people love to say that I couldn't hack it, and two, it felt like all of the investments my parents had put into me for, you know, two decades, they felt like they had wasted.

10:39So the extracurricular business clubs that I was in in high school, all the field trips that I went on to like debate competitions, going to a school like UChicago, which certainly is not cheap. That was a quarter of a million dollar education. And sure, I got some merit grants and I got some scholarships, but they also helped pay for a lot of it. And I always say that's like a huge privilege of mine. I don't have student debt. They chose to allow me to go to a school like UChicago knowing that it was a feeder school for lawyers, doctors, engineers, and financiers. And their thought was like, we accomplished that.

11:13Like she got the thing that she said she wanted to do because we got her into that. You know, she got into that school. We helped pay for it. She has this career. And now you want to piss it away. That was the attitude. You had a video on how to avoid paying taxes legally. So I figured we might as well talk about it again. Yeah, let's do it. Go for it. What do you got? So first and foremost is to open up retirement investment accounts. So things like a 401k or an IRA or a Roth 401k and a Roth IRA are a really easy way to avoid taxes legally. In a 401k or an IRA, the money you put into that account is tax-free.

11:51You get to save on your tax bill this year. In the future, when you take money out, you'll have to pay taxes on that. But hey, you're only paying taxes on one end of that transaction. On the flip side, a Roth 401k and a Roth IRA, you pay taxes on the front end. But when you take that money out, free of charge. So again, you're only paying taxes one way or the other. I would say another really mindful way is to write off your mortgage interest rate or your mortgage interest. Obviously, when you go out and get a mortgage, you are paying interest for the pleasure of borrowing that money. And if you're itemizing, you're able to write off some of that interest.

12:32So it's just like a little nice to have. There are certainly some amazing tax credits that you can take if – I don't know. I was looking at your keys earlier. But like if you go and get an electric vehicle, you can get a$7 ,500 tax credit. And that's great savings. That's avoiding taxes legally. And I think people need to remember that the tax code is written in a way that incentivizes, back to the Charlie Munger statement, like incentivizes you to do certain things. Our country wants us to be more green. It wants us to save for retirement and invest for retirement. Because guess what? If you don't, who has to take care of you?

13:16The government. They don't want to do that. They want you to have your own money. So that's why they're incentivizing you to do that. They want people to be homeowners. That's why you can have some of that written off. If you are a small business owner, you can write off and essentially get a tax break on expenses because they want people to start businesses and write off things like office space or travel or business meals. And again, these are all ways to avoid taxes legally, but it allows you to also do something that Uncle Sam wants you to do. Yeah. Actually, that's a good one. The tax code actually incentivizes people to do things.

13:53So businesses, real estate, and all that, right? Like the more you do, the more tax incentives you get. Correct. Yeah. Okay. He made a video on, I think, why do people actually like buying fake bags? Why do rich people like buying fake bags? So this came out of a piece, I believe, in The New Yorker. And it was basically this expose about how these women on the Upper East and Upper West side of Manhattan, you know, one of the most expensive zip codes in the country, were going and buying high-end fakes. And those are three words you would never think would be in the same sentence, because high-end and fake usually are a clash.

14:33But as it turns out, a lot of these women who are self-made, who make millions of dollars every year, who have supported themselves, built that nest egg on their own, they're saying, why do I need the real thing? I got it like that. People think it's the real thing. And if I'm buying a really, really well-made fake, nobody knows the difference. So what's the point? Why should I spend$25 ,000 on a bag when I can spend$1 ,000 on the bag, have the exact same result? And it almost to them felt like cheating the system of like the, you know, the mean girl scene of like, you can't sit with us unless you don't have a$25 ,000 bag.

15:15But it's like, I've got a bag that looks identical to your$25 ,000 bag. And I'm getting into this club, but I paid a 25th of the price. It's also, you know, a lot of it came down to them saying, like, the only women I know who buy the real thing are people whose husbands made all the money and they don't work and they chill and they don't actually have a concept of what it took to make that money. But I work. I'm not going to be able to build my wealth spending my money that way. I would rather pay$1 ,000 for the bag and invest the other$24 ,000. And, like, I think that speaks a lot to value systems.

15:52And I love it. I'm all about it. There's a lot of this red pill content on YouTube, right? Where it's like, yeah, women are supposed to just cook clean, blah, blah, blah. And there's a trad wife. Yeah. Yeah. Trad wife, just be, you know, just listen and then, you know, take orders from the man or whatever. Right. And I'm just like, okay, well, but that's to your point. It's like, no, there are like a lot of women out there that are providing for themselves. Right. They're investing. Also here is my hot take, but I think it's just a really rational take. If you want a traditional wife, then be a traditional man.

16:29And I'm talking about, obviously, heterosexual relationships here, but, like, you cannot ask for wifey privileges, like, stay-at-home wifey privileges, if you don't have stay-at-home wifey money, right? Like, you want me to clean the kitchen? I'm happy to clean the kitchen if I get to wake up at 10, I get to clean the kitchen, I get to go lounge by the pool, and then you come home at night. Like, sure, no problem. But if I'm waking up at the crack of dawn with you, we're both going to our two very demanding jobs and then coming home, don't ask me for anything you're not willing to do. Because this isn't even like a jab at men of like modern day men, but like more and more families cannot make the numbers work without two incomes coming into the house.

17:14Back in the day, there was, you know, this traditional like family. You had a man who was the breadwinner. The woman would stay at home. And a middle class income was enough for you to buy a white picket fence house. You would have your golden retriever, your two and a half kids. You would go on vacation twice a year. And by the time you turned 60, 65, you'd be able to retire. Great. That doesn't work for most people now because a normal income now is a lot harder to make ends meet. And suddenly your stay-at-home wifey has to go pick up a job. And she doesn't have the hours in the day to be doing those tasks, that household labor that was unpaid.

17:54And my thing is now is like, if you're both working, if you both have external responsibilities, you're both contributing to the financial well-being of the home. You also both need to contribute to the emotional well-being of the home. So it's not like I did my wife a favor by doing the dishes. It's like, those are your dishes. You wash them. Like split up the chores. And I will say that's something I am so grateful about my partner. When we first started dating, this is also very single child, like only child syndrome of me. I like barely knew how to do chores. Like because I was very studious, I would kind of like get out of them.

18:35And my mom would be like, you need to learn how to cook and clean if you want to keep a man around. I'll be like, whatever. Like, I'll figure it out later. Never figured it out. My fiancé taught me how to do a lot of those tours. What we try to do now is, like, our work ebbs and flows. So, like, right now, you know, I'm very busy. I'm, you know, about to launch Rich AF, my book, December 26th. I have to say it. You can preorder at richaf.me. I'm going on tour in January. I'm going to be doing a lot of travel in February. For that three-month stretch, he's probably going to have to pick up a little bit more of the household labor in our home.

19:10But there were times during COVID when, you know, my work really slowed down and his work really picked up. And so I was cooking every meal. I was cleaning the dishes. I was, you know, washing our laundry. I was the one going to the grocery store to physically pick out the vegetables and the fruit and whatever. Like, we just, I don't know, we're in tune. We talk about it. It's like, hey, I need a little bit more. And that's why I hate when partners say we're 50-50 partners. It's never 50-50. Some days it's 90-10. Some days it's 70-30. But if you want to be 50-50 all the time, you are going to come to a day where your partner can't give 50.

19:50And then you don't have 100. And that's bad. I look at it as like Batman and Robin. Sometimes you have to be Batman. Sometimes he has to be Batman. There's a couple that comes to mind. So two good friends, Alex and Layla Hormozzi. And I remember once Alex was asked on stage, it was like, yeah, you know, I just don't think it makes sense. Like all the things like cleaning the dishes and all that stuff, like that's just someone you can hire to help. And like you want to have someone that's a partner that can build something with you. And that's a lot more attractive to me and it seems a lot more fulfilling, which sounds like what you're doing too.

20:18Like I always say to my fiance, like I don't have some of these skills. Fortunately, we can outsource for a lot of these tasks that I'm not really good at that I don't enjoy doing. I would rather spend an hour that I could have been doing the dishes and folding the laundry and spend that extra hour doing something that's going to contribute to my business that'll then pay for services that can help us with that. Because one of them I enjoy doing and the other one I dread. And I'd rather do the one that I like. What's in your portfolio right now? And what are you most excited about in your portfolio as well?

20:52Listen, people want to hear that like there's something really exciting. It's pretty boring. I am consistently invested in index tracking ETFs. I've got some target date retirement funds in my retirement accounts. I think the only thing that is more exciting, a little bit riskier, because again, I'm still in my 20s. I'm young. I've got time to take some risks. My fiancé is employed at a private equity fund. So we are making some co-investments. For the most part, still the vast majority of our money is in public equities. And, you know, I think that's how it really should be for most people. It's just like that's slow and steady.

21:33There isn't some specific stock or ETF that you're going to buy and tomorrow suddenly you're a millionaire. Like that doesn't work like that. That's funny. I don't know if your parents did this, but growing up, they would always be talking about these random stocks. I was like, you guys don't know anything about these companies. And they're just buying and they're just trading, right? It's like going to your other, like your auntie and uncle's house, which, by the way, we're not related to. And they would literally play mahjong, gamble, and then talk about random stocks. And I'm like, none of you have ever actually researched any of this.

22:09So I think, you know, in Chinese culture, the concept of like luck and gambling is like a pretty big thing. And I think a lot of our parents and our older family members attribute investing to luck and gambling, which if you're actually a responsible investor, it's not anything like gambling. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started.

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