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Hala Taha: Young and profiters, welcome back to the show and today we're dusting off, and I really mean dusting layers of dust off, this super oldie but goodie episode with Dan Dan Xu. This is one of my first episodes I ever recorded. Dan Dan is a self made millionaire who achieved financial independence by the young age of 28.

She's a former headhunter, real estate investor, and entrepreneur who now helps others achieve financial freedom. In this episode, Dandan shares her personal story from being the daughter of Chinese immigrants to becoming a millionaire before the age of 30. She'll walk us through strategies that she used to earn, save, and invest her way into financial independence.

And she's got opinions, and man, was she frugal. [00:01:00] Whether you're looking to increase your income, build a business, or make smart investments, this episode is packed with actionable advice to help you get there. Before we get into it, please remember that even though Dandan shares her investment strategy, this is not financial advice.

 Conduct your own due diligence and consult a licensed financial advisor before you make any investment decisions. Well, if you're ready for some wealth building wisdom, here's Dandan Zhu

Hala Taha: So tell us, Dandan, how did you manage to become a self made millionaire before you hit 30? What's your story? 

Dandan Zhu: I was the daughter of Chinese immigrants who came to this country with nothing in the mid 90s. And I grew up in a really nice area in Massachusetts.

So I think self made is always a really interesting term. Of course, no one is ever self made, but in the sense that, yes, I came from nothing. That is absolutely the case. So my family, we were the babysitters for a very rich family. That set me up very nicely in terms of a cultural [00:02:00] standpoint. I was able to understand how rich people behaved and how they became rich.

And so was my family. So very early on in our relationship. Um, family life, we were able to emulate the behaviors of rich people because we were living in their home and their third floor and we were watching their children and I was going to school with the children of rich people. So I grew up my whole life looking at wealth.

Seeing it all around me, knowing that why not me? Why not me? It's a big priority for me. And it was always a target for me from a very young age. So as I grew up into adulthood, got a finance degree, hated it, interned at a ton of different opportunities. I also had my own Um, side hustles as people call them today.

I was selling eBay products, teaching Chinese, just anything I could do to make money. And this was when like internet, e commerce, everything was a bit infant and eBay was running the game. So I became an eBay power seller. I was doing all these things to basically try to get money. And when I became an actual adult, I was thinking [00:03:00] what kind of job can actually make me money?

Like a lot of it. Cause I don't have money. My family does not give me money. I have to support myself. So the only thing I cared about as a professional is just money. So I figured, let me get into sales. Sales is going to make me a lot of money. That's the only job that gives you an opportunity to make more money than normal.

Because I did not want to be normal. I fell into the career of headhunting and recruitment. So it's a sales job where you work with companies that you prospect, that you bring to the table from a sales perspective. Clients, usually these clients are hiring managers who are double my age. I was 23 when I started in headhunting.

Got into headhunting, made six figures, pretty much year two. Year one, I made like almost 90, 000. And that was great. what we call this is, it's my first pot of gold. So I earned active income from my job, which was recruiting and staffing, and I plowed it into real estate. So when I was 25, I [00:04:00] bought my first condo in New York, in Brooklyn.

And that was right when everything was just about starting to boom. I sold it in 2016 and I parlayed it into three more properties. So I got into the whole real estate game in terms of an investment. Perspective. In the meantime, I'm making money actively through stock trading, as well as my recruitment job eventually got to a point where I didn't have to work anymore because I had garnered enough appreciation and assets that I really had pretty much a million in assets.

Dandan Zhu: So at age 29 30, I started The recruiting business for my own industry. That's DG Recruit. Recruitment is a very, very lucrative sales business that's very low cost to set up if you know what you're doing.

So that's kind of how I got to where I am today. Long story short, it was recruitment and real estate. 

Hala Taha: That's a very interesting story. In my opinion, financial health really stems from three main pillars. Earning, saving, and investing. So I figured we could touch on each one of these points, [00:05:00] starting with earning.

 How do you recommend going about increasing the amount of income we're bringing in as is? 

Dandan Zhu: That's a tough question to answer. Reason is everybody does such disparate jobs, right?

So it depends on what professional you're talking about. You're talking about your regular office worker, nine to fiver. That's just never going to make you rich. I created my coaching business Donna Global when I quit corporate. And one of the things we talk about is the four S's. So four S's, you can Google this four S's matrix.

What it says is that There are two types of jobs that make you flexible income, and that's either self employment or that is some sort of business or it's sales. Every other type of job, it's capped. Every other type of job is financially capped. So if you're making 50, 000 as an admin assistant, I don't care how hard you work, you're not going to really make it rich.

 if you stay in a low paying vertical, there's just not so much you can make because there's a ceiling.

There always is. So like [00:06:00] if you're an admin assistant, you want to be rich. The answer is to stop doing admin and do something else or build a side business that eventually takes off because certain careers will just simply not make you the money you want. So I think it comes down to what you do for a living.

You have to seriously consider is this actually going to take me where I want to go? And if not, then you better change. And that's the hard part. The hard part is what are you going to do to change your earning style? Because here's the thing. If you do nine to five admin assistant or whatever, X, I'm just saying admin assistants because I know that's, that's a very ceiling, ceiling job.

I mean, obviously that could be any job. A lot of jobs cap out at around 150, 200 like HR. If you're an HR person, you're probably going to make like 60, 50, then maybe 80, 90. The goal is if you want to accelerate, yes, move jobs every two, three years. But guess what? That's very manual. And that's going to take a long time.

So it just depends on your horizon, your time horizon as well. Because if the more you want to do something [00:07:00] faster, the bigger risks you'll need to take and the harder you'll have to work. So it's just up to how much money do you want to make in this living? How much money do you want to make by X year?

You have to decide that because it's all about sacrifice. Life is all about sacrifice. It's just, what am I doing with the time I have today? For the future. I want tomorrow. If your future you want tomorrow is I want to have 20, 000 by the end of this year, you don't have to do anything too crazy. You can save a little here, you know, make a little side money there because it's not a big number.

But if you want to have 100 grand in your pocket by the end of this year, then you have to do something drastically different. So again, it just comes down to you, your timeline, your goals and what you're willing to do to get that money. Okay. And 

I don't really believe in side hustles as an adult because I find that it's too risky. And this is the reason why side hustles take a lot of time out of your day to day. So you're trying to manage a [00:08:00] career.

I've never seen side hustles to be how a lot of entrepreneurs get uber successful. Again, it comes down to how big your dream is. Right. If you wanna start an e-commerce business and you take your time and you side hustle outside of work, it's just gonna take you longer because you're only doing it part-time.

So side hustles are very dangerous. The reality is, is a lot of people will not have the strength, the control, the discipline to work a side hustle as hard as they work their main hustle. So my advice is, why don't you align. Your main hustle with your side hustle. Make your side hustle your main hustle.

You actually probably have a better chance. I think anybody who wants to get rich and has the time to do a side hustle needs to question themselves. I'm not a big fan of side hustles. 

It's very unlikely that your side hustle is patentable and is something of a high value. Chances are your side hustle is what a lot of people are doing at the very same time with the same ideas. And all of you guys are too scared to go for it a [00:09:00] hundred percent, which is why there's like mom and pops.

So the goal is if you're happy, just getting some side income, you're doing it for fun, go for it, do your thing. But if you really try to make a big business and be like rich, then again, it just calls for another level of commitment and expertise that puts you at a competitive advantage against other people who are most likely doing the same exact hustle you are doing.

To succeed, there's always a level of commitment that cannot be dodged no matter how you slice and dice it. 

Hala Taha: What about people who, you know, want to stay in their current job, they enjoy what they're doing, but they want to negotiate a higher salary. What's your advice on that? 

Dandan Zhu: Well, there's always two ways.

And the one is negotiate directly with your employer or number two, get other offers. So that's really it. Negotiate with your direct boss or look externally and bring forth your options. Obviously, without an intent to force a counteroffer, that is not ethical. Certainly, that's just not right and it doesn't make sense for you.

[00:10:00] That's going to hurt you long term, if that's your game. You're not doing it to just Push your current employer to give you more. If you want to push your current employer to give you more, the only way to do it is to bring it up to them and make it a sticking point and make us think about it. And that's the only way you're going to get up into the ranks or you schmooze and you politically advance.

That's just playing the corporate game. The second one is obviously go external, get a few offers, pick the one that gives you the best money, come out super strong. And the trick there is negotiate from a point of power. If you're unhappy with your pay, if you know you're being underpaid, Do it while you're in a good spot at your career.

And this is the piece that people mostly forget about. When they're having a good time on their job, people are enjoying life. They're not really thinking ahead. They're not really worried. That's exactly how you miss out on opportunities. Complacency is the breeding of normality. You're just not going to get anywhere if that's your mindset.

If you want to make more money, then you have to do it from a position of comfort. You have to be in a good situation to negotiate [00:11:00] for the best deal because you will have the The best cars in your pocket, bargaining chips. So that would be my advice there is to do it before you need to do it. If you are starting to feel a little unhappy, address the issue ASAP.

Don't wait until it snowballs into a real problem because that emotions get involved and then you're going to be willing to take less salary or you're not going to negotiate as hard as you would if you were almost like a hundred percent happy. 

Hala Taha: Moving on to saving, what's your take on that?

Like what are the best practices to save money in your twenties? And does it change when you hit 30 and beyond? 

Dandan Zhu: Yeah. Saving is really cool. I think it's something that I did very well because when I moved to the city and I started my headhunting job, what's normal in our industry is that the base salaries are quite low.

This was 2011. I was 23. My base was 35 grand. After taxes, that's not a lot of money. So what I did was I had a simple Excel sheet where [00:12:00] I wrote down kind of what that net monthly looks like. So 35 minus taxes. And here's the really confusing thing with saving. And my first tip for saving is think about money like this.

Every dollar that you earn is actually not a full month. Dollar in your pocket because of taxes. So you're really only earning anywhere from 60 to 65 percent of what you're pulling in. Most of us have five figure incomes. You know, out of college, that's just kind of how it is. So you're going to get about 60 to 65 percent.

So my rule of thumb is think about it in halves. If I earn a dollar in my pocket, that actually is two dollars that I had to manually earn that from the man. That's Right. For my job, I need to earn 2 to actually be able to have 1. So that should sober you up a little bit. So the people who have six figure jobs, the people who think they make a lot of money in reality, you don't because everything that you earn is taxed at basically 50 percent when you're at the sort of six figure range.

So that's very misleading. People think, ah, I'm making this [00:13:00] much. I can do X really. You're making a lot less. Then when you're spending. You're spending basically that whole dollar. That should again just remind people that it's probably not a good idea to overload on things like rental costs. So what I first did was I calculated exactly how much I was willing to do for rent and no more, no less.

So I was like 800 bucks. That's my cap. So I looked for places that had cheap rent. Rent is the biggest cost expense that if you're up to it, you can really skim here. A lot of people that I meet who can't save, they fail because the first thing they want to do is live in Manhattan and they want to rent and they get a guarantor and blah biddy blah biddy.

That's just not how you're going to make money. Like if you want to save, the biggest cost that's easiest to cut down is rent. So figure out how you're going to do that. You could choose Airbnb, you can get roommates, you can live in a cheaper area, but certainly getting your own place, spending four figures on rent is just not the way, again, it's just what are you willing to sacrifice?

So for me, I've sacrificed my privacy, [00:14:00] right? And in New York, I live in an apartment, a two bedroom with three people. I rent out the two rooms and I live in the living room. That's what I'm willing to do to ensure that my cost is basically as low as it could possibly be because I'm an entrepreneur.

I don't want high overhead. And I'm willing to do that. I'm very happy to do that. And then, you know, certainly you can have other properties that are earning you income. And you do this on the rental basis as well. Everything else, you know, food, that's your own choice. You determine, again, where you are in your life.

If you're starting to earn more money, in the beginning when I was Like 35 grand base. I did not use taxis back in the day. We didn't even have Uber. So I was just like straight up. I'm not going to use taxis. Just a point blank rule. I don't care what happens. I'm going to walk or take the train. And I never broke that rule.

And I don't really drink. If I do go drink, I'll buy one round of drinks for everyone I'm with. And that'll be that. And I won't do any more in young people's lives. The biggest cost is going out. Going out, partying, [00:15:00] drinking, eating out. This is the biggest way to burn through your checkbook. So you have to be very careful how you select your socializing time.

That's the easiest way to spend money, like water. And then on a daily basis, I only ate cheap foods. So like I was eating Subway pretty much three or four times a week. I would memorize all the spots that had half off after a certain hour. I was never good at budgeting groceries and cooking because that wastes a lot of time too.

Right. In the meantime, the real trick again is income accumulation is growing income faster. But yeah, in terms of saving, those are all the hacks that I personally employed, just setting up very disciplined approaches to each scenario, having a contingency plan. What if my friend invites me to a fancy restaurant?

What do I do? The answer is I don't go. That's what I do. I don't go. Because I just don't want to spend it. I can see them somewhere else. We can go get coffee. We can go do something else. If it's like some special plan where it's like somebody's my best friend's birthday, absolutely. I will shell out, but for casual, [00:16:00] like meaningless social interactions, I'm not going to invest that much money because I got to focus on my success.

That was my mentality when I was making pretty much craps based salary. 

Hala Taha: Yeah. I think that's a pretty good advice, but how about those of us who are making like over a hundred grand a year? What's your advice on. You know, having a well balanced life where we, we take advantage of our luxuries and the fact that we've made it to a certain point, but also our savings so that we can accumulate wealth.

Like, is there any balance that you can speak about? 

Dandan Zhu: I mean, it's up to each individual. Again, it's just how big is your dream for yourself? How long do you want to work in the workforce? That's the question you really have to answer for yourself today. And a lot of times people don't even think about this stuff.

 They just live day to day. Yearly, they don't do any goal setting. Monthly, they don't really care. They don't really have a financial target. It's just like, oh, I made a paycheck. I have money to spend. Yay, I'm going to buy stuff. I'm going to travel. I'm going to do this. I can afford it. So six figures is not a lot of money.

If you're making in the [00:17:00] 100s, in any metropolitan city, that's not a lot of money, even for a single person. Because people in our demographic, in this millennial age, that are college educated, we have too much socialization. It's just too much. Like, nobody really invests. In self-development. Most people I know don't do it at all.

Everyone around me, like whether you're making 50 or a hundred or 150 or 200, the general trend is that people are outspending in general, like social media. They're social peer pressure. There's a lot of reasons. So it comes down to you isolating yourself. For perhaps a day or two and just sitting there and going, what the hell am I doing right now?

How many more years do I want to live this life? Because I only worked in the workforce for five years before I retired because I lived my life and I had a certain mentality. So the goal is, when do you want to retire? Do you want to retire when you're 45? In my 20s, I just worked my butt off in terms of income generation, saving, and like doing some crazy investing.

I'm very [00:18:00] uber risky. So at any given time, I'd only keep a little bit of cash on hand. Everything else I put into stocks. Right? And obviously that was a good stock market. Either way, there's money to be made in stocks in good or bad days. There's just always fluctuations. You can make money any day. You can lose money any day.

If it was me today, I'd probably put a little bit, just a little bit, in crypto. A lot of young people, they're down to spend thousands on X, Burning Man, traveling to Bali, XYZ. They're down for that. But they're not down to spend 1, 000 on crypto. For some reason, that's risky.

Oh, okay. So you went to Bali for a week and spent two grand. And you didn't think that that two grand could have also been worth it to also put it into a tool that could potentially actually earn you money? So you can spend two grand on your leisure and leisure is worth it and it's not risky, but somehow investing is risky.

So to me, I never could wrap my head around that concept. If I'm going to go out and travel and eat and spend money, I better spend money and learn. On investing as well. Ever takes risks [00:19:00] there too, because if I'm willing to just have that money go to zero, I'm also willing to have that money potentially go up.

When you spend money on leisure, you know exactly what's going to happen to it. You're going to get zero from it, except a fleeting moment of happiness. Right? But in reality, if you invest it, you can learn a lot more through the journey of that dollar and how it moves. So it's just about experimentation and picking your poison.

Obviously real estate was always my goal. Yeah. Chinese people, immigrants, we love real estate. So I'm like, let me get into that game. So every weekend I would study and read, go to the library. Again, sacrifice. 

 if I save up money, I just need 30, 40 grand to like get another purchase and then I can start doing like cash out refis. So real estate is my interest now. And moving forward, it's going to be international real estate. 

Hala Taha: So you mentioned once you have 30, 40 grand, what kind of loans are you taking out?

Are you suggesting that [00:20:00] traditionally they say, you know, put 20 percent down. Are you saying that, you know, you could get away with 5%? Can you talk about that a little bit? 

Dandan Zhu: Yeah. So all of my loans have been done traditionally. So 30 year fixed, 20 percent down. And basically every time I earned a certain amount of money that I had down payment, I would go out and buy a house.

In the meantime, I would identify markets that I'm comfortable with that I feel could be good real estate markets. So the easiest way to start in real estate as many people do is buy in their neighborhood. So I bought in Brooklyn to start and I was lucky enough that that was 2013. Today, it's obviously a different story.

And what I bought. I thought to myself for sure I did not buy to save on rental costs because remember my rental cost is low like my rental cost is actually lower than if I were to own a house and pay mortgage in terms of outpocket expense Oh, should you buy for primary residence?

My answer is absolutely hell. No, real estate is not to shirk the cost. rental cost. Like that's not the reason why you should be going into real estate. [00:21:00] It is an investment. You have to look at it from a third party perspective, not a, Oh, I'm going to live in there. That makes it not an investment that makes it a personal decision.

And personal decisions are not good investment philosophies. It's just not a good way to get invested. So first of all, I'd say before you get into real estate, understand that if you're going to think about living in it. Then unless your rental cost is so much higher and you'd be significantly reducing your rental cost, that makes sense.

You're trying to reduce your cost of living to like zero, right? So like if you buy a house and you rent out the rooms and the rental value of those rooms now cover your mortgage, Then yes, that is a smart investment. That most likely is actually just about right. But in a major metropolitan cities, that's impossible.

It's like hard to do. The mortgage value is so much significantly higher than the potential rent role. So the first thing to do is to understand how it works. Valuation. Valuation is all about looking at the average price of rentals minus [00:22:00] the potential mortgage cost of a like kind property. So that's the first step is looking at markets and determining.

where you're going to invest. My other strategy is to buy in B tier cities within the A tier city. So Manhattan is the A tier city. A B tier city close to Manhattan is Jersey city. Now, Jersey city already experienced a lot of growth. However, at the outskirts, the last stop in journal square, the last stop on the path train.

 You'd be much more better off buying there. Okay. Then you will be buying in the A City, ironically. Because this gravy train is not going to keep going. There's only so much people can do from an appreciation perspective.

So I, I buy condos in those locations. Because mall ties are too expensive. Then I got into mall ties. I got into mall ties. In what I call C tier cities, like real C or D tier cities, real crap cities that nobody wants to live in. Nobody wants to be there. There's a very local population. You're not going to get like the yuppies that come in to work there.

So there's [00:23:00] like C and D tier cities that there's a lot of potential. And these are more in the middle of the country slash like certain pockets of each coast in the less populous areas. And that's where you can afford to get multis and single homes. 

Hala Taha: Yeah, this is all really great advice. Very practical.

Dandan Zhu: Yeah, I think investing yourself again comes down to like your goals. Like, what do you want to invest yourself in and for what purpose?

A lot of people have bad habits, really bad habits accumulated from years and years. Like myself, I have an overeating habit. So a thing that I have to really work on is a like health wise. It's a holistic thing. It's not just like, Oh, just the money. So like a, if you have problems with health, you have to start addressing your lifestyle and your living.

If you're an alcoholic, like a lot of people in our generation, I think are or drug users. Yeah, think about why you're doing that stuff. These are life choices habits that you have to determine what's the actual value of me doing those activities. That's the first step is self-reflection. It's like, okay, what am I doing on a daily basis that is making me question my development?[00:24:00] 

Am I this person that works then goes and grab drinks, then goes and gets dinner? Repeat. And then on Sunday and Saturday, am I doing brunch? Then I'm hanging out at the beach. If you're doing all those things, you have no time to invest in yourself because you did not budget any time to invest in yourself.

The majority of people are short term people. They only look at today, tomorrow, next month, and this year. They're not thinking. By the time I'm X years old, I need to have done Y. And even then if they do, it's not a sincere thought, it's a general thought. It's not really like that detailed, they're not really gonna commit to it.

So the first thing is, you gotta A, realize what are the things you lack in your life, and B, you gotta start setting some serious goals for yourself. It's very hard to drive yourself to a question mark. Question marks are very hard to aspire to. There's no vision in a question mark. It's gotta be like a real thing that you inherently, truly want for yourself because that's the only thing that's gonna then connect to point A which is self reflect and go [00:25:00] which aspects of my life am I gonna now forsake?

Is that television watching? Is that shopping? Retail addiction? Is that drinking? On a three to four times a week basis. Is that smoking weed? I don't know how many successful people smoke weed. I think a lot of people do, but that's just not me. 

These are things that, again, you have to look at on a macro level. Like, what, what do most successful people do? Are most successful people hanging out with their friends and smoking weed and eating out and drinking every day? And partying on the weekends? Probably not. Most likely not. I read. I'm an avid reader.

The majority of what I read is, like, business. Related. Wealth related. So Rich Dad Poor Dad was one of the first books I read. Um, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. These are like the cornerstones of success. How to make friends and influence people. Think and grow rich. These are things that I've read since my early 20s.

And I would just sit there and read. And like I told you, on weekends, I just study real estate. So it's just spending the time, making the time, making it a [00:26:00] priority to read. I've read biographies of like Hillary Clinton and Warren Buffett. These are biographies that I really enjoyed reading because they gave me inspiration in some way, right?

So reading about other great people, um, studying these things, making friends with really great people, very successful people, that's the easiest way to get successful. And that is another tip that I think a lot of young people today don't want to do is you have to cut out the dead weight in your life.

You have to cut them out, whether it's family. Or friends, they gotta go. If you try to make money, you trying to get somewhere, and you got someone pulling on you, that person has got to go. You gotta put them into what we call the cold palace. You know, like in Chinese, you put someone on freeze.

That's what I do. If someone does not align to my goals and where I'm headed and don't support me and get my way being dramatic and wanting this and that, Oh, you're not doing this, or B, you're not doing that, I'm out. I have a lot of friends, a lot of acquaintances, a huge network, but I do [00:27:00] not party with people.

Because the requirements of socializing with people who are on a hamster wheel, that does not fulfill my lifestyle, and that's a decision I made at a very young age. 

Hala Taha: Very interesting. If you could have millennials change one thing after listening to this show, what would it be? 

Dandan Zhu: I think everything starts off with a vision, a dream.

And I think a lot of millennials in our day and age, they're experiencing pain and suffering. And I see the problem with my peers and the problem with my colleagues and people that I've worked with in the past is that there's so much pessimism, I'd say overall, there's a lot of pessimism on what's possible and what's capable.

And it's because of the system. It's because of school student loans. It's because, you know, um, romantically, it's hard for me to date because I got these student loans and like my job doesn't pay a lot. Blah, blah. There's so many excuses being made. So I think in general for us specifically, it's probably just [00:28:00] to Honestly, start, like, believing that you can do more, that you can be more than you think you can be, and really just kind of, like, take a break from social media.

Take a break from all this distraction. That's not really going to take you anywhere. I think every generation today is suffering from the over inundation of social media and technology and how that's changing our lives in a way that's distracting and not productive. So I think the biggest thing I wish that millennials would do is take a step back, read and adjust and just be slow.

Selfish, but less selfish at the same time. Being selfish about your time, being selfish about what you do on a day to day basis to garner success, being selfish about giving yourself the time you need to get your life in order. But at the same time, being not selfish and thinking about the impact that you can make on a bigger scale.

That's what drives me is thinking that. Me being selfish today on my time, on what I need to do to be the  person I need to be to [00:29:00] organize my life the way it needs to be organized. I will become a person that can change and move mountains. I can change entire demographics. I can give inspiration to people that normally I wouldn't be able to if I wasn't selfish in the beginning.

I have to be selfish to get to a level where I am today. The long story short is if you can start sacrificing on a short term basis, I think you'll get a lot closer to success and happiness. Through the long term. 

Hala Taha: Awesome. And where can listeners go to find out more about everything that you do? 

Dandan Zhu: 

You can check out dgrecruit. com. That's my headhunting business that specifically helps young people, professionals transition into a sales role in headhunting. 

Quora you can read. Lots of articles that basically say what I said today in more or less different ways and in a little bit more detail 

 And then. Yeah, you can also find me on LinkedIn. 

Hala Taha: Well, it was such a pleasure. And I really think all this advice on gaining financial independence will be super helpful for our listeners as they consider [00:30:00] how to become young and profiting. So thank you so much. 

Dandan Zhu: Awesome. Thanks for having me. Holla. 

Hala Taha: