The richest people I know live the simplest lives.

In my twenties I kept meeting people who had obviously made it, and then lived like they had nothing to prove to anyone.

Men twenty years older than me, pulling the kind of money I was breaking myself to reach. And their lives were almost boring. A nice enough house. A respectable car, and nothing flashier than that. No boat, no jet skis. No private schools, none of the trophies I had assumed were the entire point of getting there. It made no sense to me. So I asked one of them straight out. Why don’t you have any of this? You could buy all of it tomorrow.

The answer came back more or less the same every time I asked it. He’d spent decades working like a dog to get where he was standing, and he had already proven whatever he set out to prove. The only thing he wanted now was a life that stayed simple. I want what I want, he said, and I don’t need what I don’t need. I’m not spending a single dollar to look a certain way for anyone. I make my decisions around my family and what’s actually good for us. Past that, I don’t keep score.

It stuck with me even though I didn’t fully understand it yet. So I went and learned it the long way, by buying everything those men hadn’t.

Before the crash I had the cars, the watches, the toys. I’d grown up with very little, so making real money and finally buying the things I never had felt like the whole reward. It felt like proof.

But underneath the toys I was careful, and that is the part that actually mattered. No crazy leverage. Real money down on every property, at least twenty percent. The cars and the toys paid for, not financed. The rental properties cash flowing. I had a media company, a tech firm, and a restaurant, all healthy going in.

Then the recession came, and it cost me. Keeping the businesses alive and everyone on payroll, while still carrying my own life through it, ran straight out of my pocket month after month. I didn’t lose a property or a business, and not one person lost their job on my watch. But none of that was free. I felt every dollar of it.

And that is exactly when I cut the B.S., on purpose, and never looked back. I did not need three cars. I did not need the toys. I finally saw all of it for what it was, a pile of things to store and insure and maintain and eventually dump at a loss, in exchange for almost no real joy. I had thought it was cool. It was dumb. Now if I want to ride a jet ski or a motorcycle for an afternoon, I rent one, take the whole experience, and hand the headache back when I’m done.

Can I afford all of it again today? Absolutely. Do I want it? Hell no. It would not add one thing to my life that I actually care about.

And here is what living below my means really bought me, the part almost nobody talks about. While the overleveraged were getting margin called on their entire lives, the people who kept it simple had cash and a clear head when there was blood in the streets. They bought. They came out the other side stronger while everyone else rode it all the way to the bottom. We appreciate the upside. We get excited about the downside. That second half is only ever available to people who left themselves the room.

But the real reason I let all of it go was never strategy. It was that the noise had been quietly crowding out what actually matters. I still work hard, building companies I love and helping people I care about, and I will never cut a minute of that. What I cut was everything else, the stuff that was only ever taking up space. And the room it opened up, the money and the hours that used to disappear into things I never needed, now goes where it always should have. To my daughter, my family, and my friends. The people who were the whole point before I had a dollar, and the only ones who still are.

I am not telling you to deprive yourself, or the people you love, of anything that genuinely matters. Keep all of it. Every bit you actually love and use and feel better for having. I am only talking about the rest, the things you carry out of habit, or to look a certain way for people who are not even watching. I have spent a career sitting inside other people’s money and the lives wrapped around it, and every single one of us is carrying some of it. Things we could stop buying tomorrow and never miss, except in our cash flow, our investments, and the wealth that finally starts to build the moment we quit bleeding money on what we never needed. You included. Me included.

That is the way out of the cage, and it is why it was never the one you’d guess. It was never about a bigger number, and it was never about having less. It was about knowing exactly what is yours, and refusing to keep paying for what never was.

It took a recession and a garage full of things I never needed before I finally understood those men from my twenties. For years I thought the win was being able to afford all of it. The real win was the day I stopped wanting it.

Talk Friday.

— Mateo