Andrei Jikh has a strange background. Born and raised in Las Vegas, his parents were Cirque du Soleil acrobats. Being around that scene, it makes sense then, that, as he got older, Andrei began performing magic. In 2002, he helped create a new, magic-adjacent form of entertainment called “cardistry.” Basically, he did really cool sh*t with a deck of cards.
On the side, he was dabbling in filmmaking. Eventually, he gets a job with an online startup company, teaching others how to do magic tricks. But how’s he make the jump to teaching personal finance on YouTube? Read on.
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“My parents really sucked with money,” Andrei explained. “They were immigrants when they came here. They didn’t know what a credit card was. And, when they came here [to the U.S.], they just bought so much crap. Like, on credit.”
“But yeah. So my parents were just terrible with money; and I just saw them fighting about it all the time—so bad, to the point where, there were months that I thought that we’d be living on the streets ’cause they couldn’t come up with the bills, ya know?” he continued.
So basically, from age 10 on, Andrei’s been worried about money. How to get more of it. How to hold onto it. How to never have that feeling of helplessness again. And that’s what led him to switch gears, from magic over to moo-la-lah (yayo).
It was January 2019 that Andrei uploaded his first YouTube video. He thought, with no money and no Lambo, nobody’d watch his stuff. But, encouraged by his friends, he decided he’d give it a try: “I was like, I’ll give myself a year to do YouTube. And that’s it,” he recalls.
Luckily, well within that timeframe—about six months after his first upload—it really took off. “What I realized is that, as long as you have a voice and you have a unique way of saying it, that, no matter what industry you wanna attempt, there will be space for your voice.”
These days, Andrei’s making “stupid money” on YouTube, but he knows he needs to focus on his passive income streams. At the time of writing this, he’s sitting on a milli in cash. Once he decides where to put it—be it stocks, rental properties, a new luxury home to film videos out of, or perhaps more Pokémon cards—I’m sure he’ll document it on his channel.
Nevertheless, Andrei Jikh is officially a millionaire. After he pays a big tax bill that’s coming up, he’ll have a net worth of about $1.3 million dollars.
When asked what he does for fun, he laughed: “Fun? I don’t have any fun. I have no life. All I do is work.” That, and hang out with his girlfriend, Corey, who he met on Tinder, believe it or not.
Other ‘n’ that, here’s a pretty watchable interview he gave on The Iced Coffee Hour podcast. If nothing else, tune in to the end, about 51 minutes in, where Andrei (and Jack and Graham, the hosts) get super vulnerable and reveal their biggest insecurities.
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