Brandon Ganch, known online as the MadFientist, retired in 2016 at just 34 by saving aggressively and keeping his spending lean.

While he doesn’t regret the wealth built by his “hyper-focus” on saving 70% of his income, “I could have taken my foot off the gas knowing what I know now,” he told host Paula Pant on a recent episode of the “Afford Anything” podcast.

In the lead-up to early retirement, the software developer and his wife lived frugally “in the woods of Vermont” while they pursued financial independence. But during that time, “I got into deprivation and neither my wife nor I were happy,” Ganch said.

Now with two young children, his spending habits have shifted. Instead of being “hyper-frugal,” he prioritizes spending on things that improve his family’s quality of life, like buying a home in Scotland, where they now live — a decision he described as “a pure luxury,” compared with his earlier frugality.

“I’m enjoying homeownership for the first time in my life,” Ganch told Pant. “I don’t let it stress me out. I know that there’s going to be expenses,” so he doesn’t worry as much about “saving every penny.”

Ganch’s mindset shift came from reading “Die with Zero” by Bill Perkins, a book that emphasizes balancing financial independence with enjoying life’s experiences in the present, not just saving for the future.

Looking back, Ganch wishes he had embraced certain moments in his 20s, like bachelor parties he skipped to avoid pricey airfare.

“I wouldn’t want to go and have a drunk weekend right now in my 40s with my friends, but I’m sad that I missed that in my 20s, because it would have been a lot of fun — and we’d have great stories to tell,” he said.

He still appreciates the freedom of retiring early and aims to keep his savings intact, but he’s become more relaxed about spending. “You don’t maximize for net worth. You should maximize net fulfillment,” he said.

Like Ganch, Alex Trias wishes he hadn’t been so fixated on reaching his goal of early retirement. Before Trias retired at 41 and moved to Portugal with his wife, he spent years obsessing over his investments — a habit that, in hindsight, he wishes he had avoided.

“My greatest regret financially wasn’t my spending, it was my thinking,” Trias previously told CNBC Make It. “I used to think all the time about investing at a low price, waiting and then selling at a higher price. I cannot begin to explain the anxiety and waste this sort of mental framework caused.”

Looking back, “I think trying to pay attention [to your net worth] month to month or even year to year is probably counterproductive,” Trias said. “Focus not so much on the end result but on the habits that you’re forming.”

Sam Dogen, founder of Financial Samurai and author of the upcoming book, “Millionaire Milestones,” doesn’t regret his decision to retire early, but wishes he had spent a few more years in the workforce.

“I now realize how absurdly young I was when I retired,” Dogen, who retired at 34, wrote in a 2019 article for CNBC Make It. “Several people even commented on how irresponsible and reckless my decision was, especially because I was just entering my peak earning years.”

Dogen spent 13 years in investment banking before stepping away with a $3 million net worth that generated around $80,000 in annual passive income. But sticking around a bit longer would have allowed him to save even more for retirement and potentially explore new opportunities.

“Looking back, I could have stayed for at least another year and found a new role within the firm in a different office,” he wrote. “I had always wanted to work overseas — somewhere like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Beijing or London. Maybe it would have rejuvenated my interests and convinced me to work a few more years.”

Want to make extra money outside of your day job? Sign up for CNBC’s online course How to Earn Passive Income Online to learn about common passive income streams, tips to get started and real-life success stories.

Plus, sign up for CNBC Make It’s newsletter to get tips and tricks for success at work, with money and in life.

Having a glass of wine a day has been often touted as a healthy choice for your heart. While there are warnings against using other substances like cigarettes, alcohol in moderation is typically considered fine — but that may be changing.

The U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans encourages people to avoid large amounts of alcohol, and suggests sticking to two or fewer drinks daily for men and one or fewer drinks a day for women.

Yet, the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s newest Advisory suggests that even small amounts of alcohol could be harmful and may increase your risk of developing cancer.

“Alcohol is a well-established, preventable cause of cancer responsible for about 100,000 cases of cancer and 20,000 cancer deaths annually in the United States – greater than the 13,500 alcohol-associated traffic crash fatalities per year in the U.S. – yet the majority of Americans are unaware of this risk,” the Surgeon General’s Advisory states.

His Advisory points to studies that have found a clear link between alcohol consumption and a higher risk of developing seven types of cancers including breast cancer.

“We now know that there is no safe level for alcohol consumption, and that alcohol is a known carcinogen,” says Dr. Faiz Bhora, a professor of surgery and regional chair of surgery at Hackensack Meridian Health and Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine.

“Its mechanism of cellular damage has been well established. It causes oxidative stress and impairs DNA repair, amongst other mechanisms that lead to cell cycle dysregulation and cancer formation.”

The Surgeon General is calling for manufacturers of alcoholic beverages like beer and spirits to update warning labels to include cancer risk. Currently, beverages containing alcohol mainly warn against consumption by pregnant people and driving under the influence.

“It’s more social and political pressures that are preventing us from doing the right thing, which actually would be to put a warning label on a substance that is clearly toxic,” Bhora tells CNBC Make It.

“Shares of alcohol manufacturers including Molson-Coors and Anheuser-Busch initially dipped more than 1% following the advisory,” CNBC reported.

Even prior claims that there are positive effects of having a glass of red wine a day are in question. Previous studies that have shown a small amount of alcohol daily can lower risk of cardiovascular disease are being called out for their methodology, according to The New York Times.

“One would be hard pressed to find benefits from alcohol consumption,” Bhora says. “Perhaps stress reduction with impairment of some emotional faculties [but] I’m not even sure if that is necessarily a good thing.”

“We’ve always heard these tales of 80- and 90-year-olds living healthy lives and sort of attributing it to a glass of wine or scotch. I’m not sure that there is any true scientific correlation to that,” he adds.

Alcohol consumption is deeply ingrained in our culture, Bhora says, and “people use it as a crutch for social interactions [and] for emotional reasons.” Yet people are now “very comfortable refusing alcohol at a restaurant or a party for health reasons, and I think that is an avenue that should be encouraged and supported as a first step.”

For starters, Bhora suggests “moving away from the concept of one drink every day is good or safe,” he says. Try to only drink alcohol on weekends if you’re cutting back on your intake and slowly eliminate it from your diet completely if you feel inclined to, Bhora says.

“When a lot of my friends and colleagues who have either stopped drinking alcohol or reduced consumption significantly, [they] have found it liberating,” Bhora says.

“They no longer need it for social interactions, have much more clarity of thought, and in many cases, actually end up being a lot more productive.”

Want to make extra money outside of your day job? Sign up for CNBC’s online course How to Earn Passive Income Online to learn about common passive income streams, tips to get started and real-life success stories.

Plus, sign up for CNBC Make It’s newsletter to get tips and tricks for success at work, with money and in life.

A lot can change in 16 years.

In 2009, a drug conviction landed Coss Marte a seven-year prison sentence. This year, Marte expects to bring in as much as $12 million selling cannabis legally.

Marte, 39, is the founder and CEO of Conbud, one of the first businesses fully-licensed to sell recreational cannabis in Manhattan, and the first in the city’s Lower East Side. After first opening its doors in October 2023, Conbud added a second location in the Bronx last April.

Marte’s business currently brings in roughly $800,000 in sales per month, including nearly $100,000 in profit, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Marte projects a final tally of roughly $7 million for 2024, he says.

DON’T MISS: The ultimate guide to earning passive income online

After being granted an early release from prison in 2013, Marte launched a fitness business called Conbody, based on his workout regimen from behind bars. Then, in 2021, New York legalized the sale of recreational cannabis and expunged all past convictions for marijuana-related offenses.

A year later, the state announced that entrepreneurs with past marijuana convictions would be eligible to receive the first licenses for selling recreational weed. Given his experience running Conbody and the requirements laid out by the state for retail licensees, Marte saw a golden business opportunity, he says.

“I was following this law, and what they required was two years of a net profitable business and a conviction on your record,” says Marte. “Now, how many people have that to qualify for a cannabis license? Not many.”

Marte grew up on the Lower East Side, surrounded by an illicit drug trade that ensnared him at age 13, after he saw other teens making money that way, he says.

“When I was a kid, people would ask me: ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ And I would say: ‘I want to be rich,’” says Marte. “The first opportunity was through the world of drugs. So I started dealing weed.”

In prison, doctors told Marte that he was overweight with dangerously high cholesterol. He started working out intensely, using body-weight exercises that he could do in his cell. Upon his release from prison, Marte connected with Defy Ventures, a nonprofit program offering entrepreneurship training and business mentoring to the formerly incarcerated.

With a $10,000 grant from Defy, Marte launched Conbody — which now brings in around $1 million in annual revenue, he says — in 2014.

Eight years later, Marte paid $2,000 to apply for a retail cannabis license. He put roughly $50,000 of his own savings into Conbud, mostly from Conbody and paid speaking engagements, he says — and raised nearly $1.2 million in additional seed funding from friends and family, who are now part-owners of the business.

Marte owns 51%, as New York requires the “justice-impacted” license-holder to retain majority ownership.

Conbud’s startup funds paid for a $400,000 security deposit at the Lower East Side retail location, construction costs, payroll and inventory, says Marte. The business opened its doors in October 2023, and brought in roughly $250,000 in revenue per month — until authorities shut down hundreds of unlicensed operators selling cannabis illegally last year.

The New York crackdown was a helpful development for licensed retailers like Marte, who face an uphill battle establishing long-term industry footholds.

The state’s Office of Cannabis Management has touted its commitment to prioritizing “social and economic equity” while growing the legal cannabis market, but critics worry that smaller shops will eventually get squeezed out by larger corporations with nationwide reach.

Curaleaf, for example, is one of the largest dispensary owners in the U.S. with annual revenues over $1.3 billion. The company began adult-use sales in Queens, New York, in 2023.

Even the simple cost of doing business — particularly rent and labor costs — is high, leaving Marte with a relatively slim 13% profit margin, he says. Should cannabis become legal on a federal level, Marte could access federal tax deductions for payroll and other business expenses, and expanded banking options with lower fees.

“So, that 13% will [eventually] grow to 25% profit margins,” he says.

Both Conbud and Conbody almost exclusively hire workers who have been “justice impacted,” meaning either they or a family member were incarcerated for a past drug conviction, says Marte. Collectively, he employs 72 people who fit that criteria.

Marte himself left prison with $40 and a bus ticket, only to “end up on my mom’s couch” while trying to figure out how he could make a living with a drug conviction on his record, he says. Without his own second chance, he’d likely never have found himself in this position, he notes.

“It’s a big, big community that’s growing with us,” says Marte. “I feel blessed, man.”

Want to make extra money outside of your day job? Sign up for CNBC’s online course How to Earn Passive Income Online to learn about common passive income streams, tips to get started and real-life success stories.

Plus, sign up for CNBC Make It’s newsletter to get tips and tricks for success at work, with money and in life.

During a typical day at Jono Pandolfi’s Union City, New Jersey, pottery studio, he and his 30-person team unload over a thousand pieces out of their 13 kilns, and ship the plates, bowls and mugs to restaurants and home chefs around the world.

The multitextured dinnerware is sold to and used in hundreds of restaurants and FX’s TV series “The Bear.” Similar largescale collaborations pushed the company into profitability in 2012, but when the Covid-19 pandemic shut down restaurants, Jono Pandolfi Designs expanded its direct-to-consumer offerings, he says.

It was a lucrative move: Now, direct-to-consumer sales represent nearly half of the business’s revenue. At the end of December, the company projected it would bring in over $6.6 million in 2024, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

“I think it’s safe to say that it’s pretty hard for a ceramic artist or someone who studied clay to build a business that’s bringing in over $6 million per year,” says Pandolfi, 48. “I feel like I’m living the dream of a ceramic artist.”

Customers can now buy Pandolfi’s products — like four-piece settings, starting at $172 on its website — for themselves. The studio charges $51 for an 8-inch pasta bowl, which is made from about $1 worth of clay, but far more in labor expenses, says Pandolfi, who declined to share the company’s overall profit margins.

While labor remains the business’s biggest expense, firing and glazing the bowls also requires a financial investment. Once the studio started taking on high profile clients, like Anthropologie and Crate & Barrel, it needed more kilns to keep up with the demand. The business has taken out three loans, each between $100,000 and $200,000, starting in 2016, Pandolfi says.

“The kilns pay for themselves, really,” Pandolfi adds. “We’ve built this business entirely on our own cash flow.” For instance, the studio’s large gas kiln can fire about 500 dinner plates a night, which results in about $18,000 in potential revenue.

But growing the business production capacity and revenue took decades. Pandolfi launched the company as a side hustle and personal creative outlet in 2004, while he taught ceramics and worked for larger manufacturers to cover bills, he says. When he lost his manufacturing job six years later, he took it as a sign to grow his company full-time, about 60 hours per week.

The turning point for his company came in 2012, when the NoMad Hotel opened in New York and ordered over 6,000 pieces in a $100,000 deal, Pandolfi says. After the NoMad Hotel project, he hired his first full-time employee and started buying more equipment, he adds. The hotel has since closed.

Building the business slowly, gradually growing its production, output and margins, remains Pandolfi’s biggest goal, he says. The company’s shift to a direct-to-consumer strategy is, so far, supporting that vision: It brought in almost $5.2 million in 2023, and has more than tripled its revenue since 2020.

“It’s always been incredibly important to me … from day one, has been to build this [company] in a bulletproof way, in a long lasting way,” he says. “I think the goal now is to continue to capture the organic demand that’s there for us and to [maintain that] sustainable growth for the next several years … keeping the character of this place the same.”

Want to make extra money outside of your day job? Sign up for CNBC’s online course How to Earn Passive Income Online to learn about common passive income streams, tips to get started and real-life success stories.

Plus, sign up for CNBC Make It’s newsletter to get tips and tricks for success at work, with money and in life.

It’s probably not your first instinct to seek a tween’s advice when making decisions about your career.

But it may be rewarding to do so, especially if you want to start a business or launch a side-hustle. That’s according to Nikhil Kamath, a 38-year-old self-made billionaire and co-founder of Zerodha, an online stock brokerage platform.

“Don’t go to the previous generation to figure out what you should be doing 20 years from now,” he told LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky in a recent episode of “The Path” video series. “Go look at what the kids are doing. Go look at what a 16-year-old boy is doing [and] what he might want in 10 years.” 

Kamath got his start in business in the ninth grade, buying and reselling cell phones to his classmates before dropping out of high school. He later got a job working at a call center, teaching himself how to trade stocks in his free time, which inspired his career in finance.

Kamath co-founded the Bangalore-based Zerodha in 2010 alongside his brother. The trading platform has since grown to more than 10 million users, making it one of the largest in India and helping Kamath reach a $3 billion net worth, according to Forbes.

In 2021, he co-founded a venture capital firm called Gruhas, which supports entrepreneurs in industries like artificial intelligence and cleantech — both of which are top of mind for younger generations.

“A lot of the advice you might get from someone who’s 50 or 60 and in positions of power” may be out of touch with the needs and wants of your audience or consumers, Kamath told Roslansky, adding that young people are the ones who “define culture going forward.”

As young people navigate the world, they are often curious and have a fresh perspective that could inspire innovative ideas for your business, Kamath explained. And tapping into their social media habits could potentially help you shape your marketing strategy. 

Nearly half of teens are online “almost constantly,” according to Pew Research Center’s 2024 Teens, Social Media and Technology report, which analyzed the online habits of American youth between the ages of 13 and 17. They frequent YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat the most, often setting fashion, dance and lifestyle content trends on the platforms.

Moreover, it’s estimated that Gen Alpha, or those born between 2010 and 2024, will have $1.7 trillion in direct spending power and a $5.46 trillion economic footprint by 2029, according to research-based advisory firm McCrindle, which says this generation of consumers is being widely overlooked.

“Every organization, every brand, every product is just one generation away from extinction,” CEO Mark McCrindle told CFO Brew in May. 

Many executives have seen success using young people as inspiration: His own and other college students’ social habits inspired Mark Zuckerberg to launch Facebook in 2004. And Pinterest co-founder Ben Silbermann created the platform with his childhood love for collecting things in mind. 

Of course, you can get valuable business advice and inspiration from older people who’ve already navigated their way through entrepreneurship. But if you really want to know if your ideas are good, ask a kid, Kamath insisted.

“Look forward, look younger for inspiration, not older,” he said.

Want to make extra money outside of your day job? Sign up for CNBC’s online course How to Earn Passive Income Online to learn about common passive income streams, tips to get started and real-life success stories.

Plus, sign up for CNBC Make It’s newsletter to get tips and tricks for success at work, with money and in life.