Anar Babaev

FIRE, investing, money psychology. Retired at 35 on $1M. Your worst enemy is in the mirror, not the market. Wealth is what you don't spend.

[Anar Babaev @anarbabaev]

Retired at 35 with $1M+. Here is what I write about, and what I actually believe:

Wealth is what you don't see — the money you never spent.

Your worst enemy isn't the market. It's your own brain.

Saving beats investing in the early years.

AI won't take the plumber's job. It'll take yours.

Follow if that lands.

What do you disagree with?

[Anar Babaev @anarbabaev]

An investor doesn't care what his cow weighs today. We keep cows for milk. If the crowd offers one bucket for a cow, that's their stupidity. That's when we buy more cows for pennies. If one cow stops producing (it happens), we've got ten more. Plus chickens, goats, and sheep.

[Anar Babaev @anarbabaev]

How to spot hype. If someone TELLS you it's a breakthrough, it isn't. Real breakthroughs go unnoticed at first. Nobody recognizes them. Then nobody can remember life before them. Neural networks: breakthrough. Blockchain: hype.

[Anar Babaev @anarbabaev]

Everyone has time. Some flush it down the toilet, others put it in a piggy bank. Two hours of TV a day for 10 years = 7,000 hours. Enough to learn two languages, write a book, or build a business.

[Anar Babaev @anarbabaev]

⚽️ Safonov Almost Lost His PSG Contract Over a Mistake Everyone Makes

Matvey Safonov won the Champions League this week. Congratulations. Brilliant result. But this post is about money, financial literacy, psychology, and legal smarts.

Summer 2024: Matvey signed with PSG through 2029. Champions League, Paris, trophies. His income jumped from €140,000 a month to €250,000.

Meanwhile, his personal life was falling apart. Court bailiffs banned him from leaving the country and hit him with a 64 million ruble child support bill that had been piling up for years.

The fight was with his ex-wife Anastasia Kazachek. Safonov and Nastya had been friends since school, got married, then divorced.

The court ordered him to pay 25% of his income for their daughter Maya. For a PSG player, a quarter of his salary is tens of millions of rubles a year.

Critical detail: Matvey's debt quietly grew because Safonov was making transfers without payment descriptions. The court doesn't count those as child support.

Then came parallel lawsuits over dividing assets: an expensive car, renovation costs, the daughter's apartment, a claim about 800,000 rubles stolen. The money war was escalating.

Where the Mechanism Broke Down

There's a conflict psychologist named Andrey Koenig. He was a guest on one of Anar's podcasts. Andrey breaks conflicts into levels.

Level one is a fight over resources: money, an apartment, time with the kid. This stage gets resolved through arguments.

Level two isn't about resources anymore—it's about being right. Questions like "Who's the good parent and who's the asshole?" At level two, the conflict doesn't stop on its own. Someone has to walk away first.

The Safonov case hit level two long ago. The markers are obvious: parallel lawsuits on multiple fronts, carefully crafted media images from both sides, theft allegations.

Safonov said in an interview: "I may have been a bad husband, but I wasn't a bad father." Sounds like reaching out. Actually, it's the same battle for righteousness, just through a different door. Koenig calls this defense through reception.

Real reconciliation starts with one phrase: "You're right." No "but," no explanations. Just say it and shut up, because everything after "but" is continuation of war.

Both Made Mistakes

Kazachek put 70% of child support into a separate account for the child. Formally flawless, but functionally it's the argument "I'm for the child, you're against." Hard to dispute.

Koenig is blunt about this: when one side builds their position through the child, the other side gets the same rights to the same argument. Then the war becomes endless.

Each new lawsuit doesn't solve the problem—it throws wood on a fire that's already burning.

Sound Familiar?

For Safonov it's a €250,000 monthly salary and a bailiff with a travel ban. For regular people it's child support via transfers without payment descriptions, verbal agreements instead of notarized ones, and shock when three years later the court says: "You paid nothing."

When one side cares about being right, money doesn't end the conflict. The "I'm Right" medal can't be bought. The only way out, per Koenig: surrender righteousness. Say "you're right" without conditions, shut up, let them vent. After that you can talk numbers and schedules.

Money doesn't end wars. It just makes them expensive.

[Anar Babaev @anarbabaev]

Wealth is a daily choice. Read or scroll. Think or whine. Learn or blame teachers. One choice changes nothing. A thousand choices over 10 years — that's a different life.

[Anar Babaev @anarbabaev]

🏀 Made $27 million, ended up broke. How is that even possible?

If someone earned $27 million over their career and $9 million in a single season, you'd think money would never be an issue again. Dennis Rodman would beg to differ.

Five-time NBA champion. A defender that forwards across the league feared. A name even people who'd never watched basketball knew.

Tattoos, dyed hair, Las Vegas, friendship with Kim Jong Un. A character Hollywood couldn't have invented.

In 2011, his company Rodman LLC filed for bankruptcy. The main villain: Peggy Fulford, his financial manager.

She claimed she was working for free out of love for him and convinced him to hand over all his passwords and full access to his accounts.

Then she blocked Rodman's own debit card, citing his "out-of-control spending."

While the NBA legend couldn't pay for a meal at a restaurant, Fulford was draining his accounts into her own.

She stole about $2 million. In 2018, a court gave her 10 years. He never saw the money.

Rodman walked into another trap. In the '90s, a court set his child support at peak income. His income dropped. He never filed for a modification. The debt grew every month, hitting $809,000 by 2012.

To stay out of jail, he settled for $500,000. Half a million for not filing one piece of paper on time. Along with the money, Rodman lost control.

He had no idea how much was in his accounts or who was moving his cash where.

While courts piled up debts and his assistant robbed him blind, Dennis was busy with his image.😎

Sound familiar?

For Rodman it was a manager with account access and $2 million in her pocket. For us it's a bank "consultant" selling what the bank needs because we don't read contracts. Or a business partner we gave signing authority to and forgot to check on.

The check amount differs. The mechanism doesn't. Big money doesn't cure financial blindness.

The story didn't end with bankruptcy

Rodman's daughter, Trinity, signed a contract in the NWSL in 2022 for over $1.1 million, becoming the highest-paid female soccer player in league history.

The name that nearly got buried with the money is back on the scoreboard.

And Rodman himself remains a legend.

P.S. Don't hand over control of your capital to someone else. That's your responsibility. Or at least hire multiple sets of hands.

[Anar Babaev @anarbabaev]

Talk of 'responsible credit use' sounds like talk of 'responsible drinking.' Sure, some people can handle it. In practice, most get hooked. A bottle once a year is one thing. Every night is another.

[Anar Babaev @anarbabaev]

👊 $7 million per film. Then 8 cents an hour washing pots in prison.

This isn't a movie plot. This is Robert Downey Jr.'s actual life.

1992: Oscar nomination for Chaplin. $7 million per film.

1999: Prison kitchen. 8 cents an hour. Seven years to lose everything.

Hollywood has a word worse than any scandal: uninsurable. When insurance won't cover you, producers can't hire you. No one risks a $100 million budget on an actor who might not show up to set.

After arrests between 1996 and 2001, Robert got that label. The market closed.

At the same time, he owed the IRS $2 million. His divorce from Deborah Falconer ate the rest: lawyers, alimony. His fees had already dropped 75%. The money was gone and nothing new was coming in.

How does someone making $7 million a year end up here?

Robert paid taxes by the residual principle — meaning he didn't pay them. Money flowed through managers with no oversight. Each new contract patched holes from the last one.

Sound familiar?

Mortgage based on income you'll "definitely have." Car loan because you "earned it." Utility bills ignored for years.

Then one day: a $2 million surprise from the IRS.

How he came back

In 2003, Mel Gibson paid the insurance bond out of his own pocket. Robert did The Singing Detective for almost nothing by his old standards.

Then Marvel called. First Iron Man: $500,000 base. After $7 million per film, this was a step back. He signed without negotiating.

Total haul from Marvel: $345–600 million. One of the highest-grossing actors in history.

Money doesn't solve money problems. It amplifies what's already inside you. If what's inside is a rake, you just get very expensive rakes.

[Anar Babaev @anarbabaev]

🏀Allen Iverson made $200 million. Then he sat in a courthouse hallway, waiting for his ex-wife to hand him $61 so he could eat.
Make that kind of money and the money question is closed forever. That's what regular people assume.
Iverson spent his whole life proving the opposite.

You can be an NBA legend. Millions of fans. Pulling in more than an entire factory. And then wake up one day without enough cash for a cheeseburger.
Iverson wasn't just a basketball player. They called him The Answer. Six feet flat, going at seven-foot centers and beating them.

League MVP. Eleven-time All-Star. Around $155 million in salary alone over 14 seasons. Plus the Reebok deal. Plus the endorsements. By most accounts, north of $200 million.
All of it gone.

HOW DOES THAT EVEN HAPPEN?

Iverson carried one rule out of the rough parts of Virginia: you don't leave your people behind. So he started feeding an entourage of about 50 straight out of his own pocket.
They didn't just get fed. Cars, hotels, jewelry, whatever they wanted. He couldn't say no to the people who were there before the fame.

He never traveled with luggage. Land in a new city, buy a whole wardrobe, play the game, leave it all at the hotel. New city, new wardrobe.
In the clubs, the press reported, he could drop $40,000 in a night.

He didn't trust banks. Kept his cash at home — reportedly in trash bags.
The ending wrote itself. The money started vanishing inside his own circle.
Then he stopped opening the mail from the court.

A $375,000 jewelry debt ballooned to $860,000 — not from interest, but because Iverson just didn't show up to the hearings. In January 2012 a court pulled $859,896 straight out of his Wells Fargo account.

THE DIVORCE

He didn't go broke only because the money ran out, though that was part of it. His $4.5 million Atlanta mansion went to auction for $2.5 million in December 2013. The split from Tawanna Turner cost him $3 million in compensation, plus alimony.
The "blew it all" label stuck harder than any of his tattoos. The inner circle turned into a checkout line.
Here's why he wasn't all that different from the rest of us.

The average guy has a car loan so he looks right for the boys, DoorDash instead of a stocked fridge, unopened envelopes from collectors, and a running tab of "spot me twenty for a couple days." And it drags on for years.
Iverson had a 50-man entourage and a wardrobe in every city.

Same machine. The only thing that changes is the number on the check. Money doesn't cure financial immaturity. It just hands it a bigger stage.

WHAT ACTUALLY SAVED IVERSON WASN'T A DECISION HE MADE
It was his agents. Back in the 2000s they sewed a trust into the Reebok contract: $32 million he couldn't touch until June 7, 2030. Plus $800,000 a year for life. He couldn't get at that money if he tried.
The system held the line for him.

PEOPLE WROTE HIM OFF TOO EARLY

It didn't end at the auction. The Answer went back to Reebok, this time as a VP on the basketball side. His brand turned out to be tougher than his mistakes.
The Iverson who agreed to build a fence around his money in the 2000s saved the Iverson who didn't yet know he needed saving.
High income and real wealth are different sports. Surviving in the world of money is the hardest game there is.

[Anar Babaev @anarbabaev]

AI multiplies what you know. It multiplies what you don't, just as fast.
YouTube is full of "AI is coming for your job" videos. Most are made by people who haven't used it long enough to know better.

It's a multiplier, not a replacement.

A million times zero is still zero.

If you know nothing about a subject, the multiplier just scales up your nothing. You get a beautifully formatted zero. Still a zero.
If you know the subject cold, it scales that up instead.

I've studied money since 2008 and marketing since 2003. In those two, AI makes me sharper. I don't touch health and fitness with it — I'm a beginner there. And when I need something on spirituality, I call a guy who's spent twenty years on it.
Most of the big creators miss this completely.

I'll catch someone online holding forth about money, and within two sentences it's obvious they never studied it. Or that their bank balance is smaller than my grandmother's. The nonsense surfaces right away.
AI is a mirror.

A sharp person sees their blind spots in it. A fool sees proof he was right all along.

Your brain doesn't run like ChatGPT. Inside a single session your context window is wider. You've seen more. And you can do the one thing the model can't: check its work. You look at what it spat out and tell the difference between obvious garbage and the one useful seed buried in it.

That's what real expertise is. Feeling the exact moment the model stops thinking and starts predicting the most statistically likely nonsense.

The people who can't feel that moment are cranking out intellectual fast food. Fills you up instantly, not one real thought inside.

You can't outsource the thinking itself.

Hand the model the right to think for you and you pay with your own attention span, your ability to hold a long chain of reasoning in your head. Thinking isn't the output. It's the process. Throw out the process and you throw yourself out of your own growth.

Here's the simple rule.

A doctor should be the one talking about health. Fitness advice? That's the athlete's lane. Marketing and getting attention — mine. AI changes none of that. It just turns up the volume on real expertise and makes everyone else's ignorance louder too.

Use it where you're strong. Don't drag it into the rooms where you're weak.

[Anar Babaev @anarbabaev]

Every asset is a promise from some guy. Promises get broken. Always have, always will. The only defense: eggs in different baskets. Collect promises from DIFFERENT guys. And when possible, become the guy yourself.

[Anar Babaev @anarbabaev]

Anger and rage lower your cognitive abilities. Lower cognitive abilities always lead to poverty.

[Anar Babaev @anarbabaev]

Топ-состав друзей детства и юности.:)

[Anar Babaev @anarbabaev]

Франция 🇫🇷 - Хорватия 🇭🇷 Финал

[Anar Babaev @anarbabaev]

Испания 🇪🇸 - Россия 🇷🇺

[Anar Babaev @anarbabaev]

Бельгия 🇧🇪 - Тунис 🇹🇳