Guided by his own life experiences and education, Milan Singh teaches his more than 1.6 million Instagram followers how to better earn, save, and manage their money. He shared some tips on how to be better with money and the importance of establishing a brand.
Can you share a little bit about your background and expertise in finance?
Coming from an immigrant family, I’ve always had the importance of money in my mind, just to create a better life, ever since I was young. So, when I was young, I was very keen on finances and saving and figuring out ways of making money.
I’ve been doing side hustles and other ventures ever since high school — fixing iPhone screens on the side, just seeing a lot of e-commerce resources online. From there, I naturally started to learn more about finance and business, and learn more about the logistics of everything, as I was talking to suppliers on Alibaba to get products and get into e-commerce.
College was when I really started to learn more about the personal finance aspect of it. I discovered a YouTube channel on finance and I was like, “Oh, wow, okay. There are all these resources out there. Let me just continue to learn and apply that stuff.” Also, I started getting into books at the time. I think my first one was “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
Before that, I had learned a fundamental concept of saving and not just spending all your money, but in college, you want to really start to learn “How do I properly allocate this money? How do I start investing? How do I start doing stuff?” I remember my first ever investment. I took a $3,000 loan from my school at the time, and I don’t recommend this for anybody, but that’s what I did. And I was able to invest that into the market and make around $1,000.
So, you know, now I have all these experiences. I’m learning. Not to mention that I’m also studying finance. My major going into college was financial mathematics, and then I switched to stats and data science with it. I still had a heavy focus on finance, but I learned all the technical aspects of finance as well that people don’t necessarily apply in real life. And then after college, I basically I knew I wanted to have my own business.
What inspired you to start sharing financial education tips on social media?
I remember my family buying my first car in high school, and I remember not knowing how to buy it and knowing that we ended up overpaying like a few thousand dollars for it because we didn’t negotiate down. I didn’t know as much.
I knew at the time that I felt bad about not negotiating, not getting the best price. So, I started off with personal experience and making videos on that. But then, obviously, once I ran out of my own experiences to talk about how people can save and make money, then I just was just consistently educating myself — constantly educating myself like I do now so I can keep making content. I must keep growing to help other people.
From your perspective, why do you think it’s important to build a loyal base as a brand or an influencer?
Everybody is on social media, and I think it’s one of the best ways to connect with your customers and your clients. And building a loyal base can help you grow your business. It can help you grow no matter what you’re doing, no matter what it is in your career, your personal brand, or if you’re selling products and are looking to promote that, social media helps with everything.
And once you have a loyal audience that trusts you, they’re going to be willing to buy your product or be behind you or listen to you. And building that loyal audience with good content that provides value is important, right?
So, for every person that’s building that loyal client on social media, you must provide value. If it’s a business that’s selling a product, they must provide value by solving a problem through that product. If it’s somebody that’s educating like me, I’m providing value by solving their money problems, by helping educate them so that they can solve their problems. So, there’s value there.
It’s just so important to get on it and start building your niche with valuable content, which will drive more loyalty, which will drive more sales and more impact for your business.
Are there any other finance tips you recommend for those looking to save or increase their wealth?
Figure out ways to earn more. That means doing side work and testing a lot of stuff out and seeing if it will work, and then if something does work out, capitalizing on that and continuing to pursue it further in order to keep making a few extra hundred or thousand a month. Or maybe you can go full time into that venture and make a business out of it.
That’s my biggest thing is just to try testing ventures, earn more money, and then once you start earning more, you can start saving more. And then once you start saving more, you can start investing that money into building generational wealth.