Timothy Armoo is a multi-millionaire who takes pride in being a minimalist. He does not own a home or any other property and the most lavish thing he remembers doing recently is buying business-class airline tickets for him and his now ex-girlfriend.
The 29-year-old co-founder and former CEO of influencer marketing firm Fanbytes made his fortune by selling the company to digital marketing agency Brainlabs in May 2022 for an eight-figure sum. But the young entrepreneur, who grew up poor in public housing in south London, told CNBC Make It that he felt “almost too crippled to spend the money”.
“I was convinced that if I started to spend the money, it would all start to go," Armoo told the publication, adding that while growing up, he developed what he called a “scarcity mindset”. “I had this spreadsheet where I would track to the penny how much I had," he said.
Minimalist approach
Armoo is a self-professed minimalist. And unlike his peers, he does not like buying extravagant things. “I’m generally quite a minimalist person,” he told CNBC Make It. Also, unlike his peers, he has no interest in investing in real estate.
“I actually don’t own a house. I didn’t get involved in any residential property or any direct commercial property,” he told the publication. “Most people see property as their way of building wealth, but I use businesses as my way of building wealth and I don’t have a family, I don’t have a partner now, so why?”
'Exotic' investments
When it comes to investments, the young millionaire has his money divided into two buckets -- one extremely safe and the other "completely exotic".
Armoo invests in index funds and owns a variety of stocks including Shopify and Cloudflare. “So I basically have two camps: one is the extremely safe bucket: index funds, overweight cash, bonds and guilt and treasuries. Then the other side of things is completely exotic.”
Some of his "exotic" investments include financing avocado, soybean, and mango businesses in Kenya, Angola and Tanzania, which supply supermarkets in Europe. Armoo has also been buying uranium and funding the sale of a lithium mine.
"I enjoy the game of finding different arbitrages and different cool ways to spend, and invest the money, as opposed to ‘we’re just going to put it all in index funds,’” he said.
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