Tag: investments

Money principle #1

Pay yourself first…make sure that you have automatic payments set up to invest in yourself. Ideally, you want this set up going to a low fee index fund. Time and compound interest will be your best friends. The earlier you can start regularly contributing to this fund, the better off you’ll be. The best part about having it automatically set up is that you don’t have to remember to keep investing every month. If you want to invest more, you can. But here, it’s basically like a subscription model (set it and forget it).

If you’re saving up for a specific purchase like a vacation, a new car, a house, etc, set up a separate account and automatically transfer money to that account. Have it set up for every paycheck. If you don’t “see the money” in your regular checking account then you’ll be far less likely to spend it. This will help you actually hit your saving goals and then you won’t have to use credit to purchase your consumer goods.

Getting your money to work for you

We “wanted to have our money work for us, rather than spend our lives physically working for money.” – Robert Kiyosaki in Cashflow Quadrant

When you are an employee working for someone or a corporation, you have the least amount of freedom. You are told how much vacation you get, what benefits you may or may not have, how many hours to work, and how to do your job.

When you are self-employed, you own your job. You have a little more freedom with the choices you make, but if you stop working (if you go on vacation, get sick, etc), the money stops coming in.

When you are a business owner, you have systems and processes in place so employees can continue working without you being present. You are still working, but rather than being the bottleneck where how much production or revenue is created depends on you and your time constraints, you could literally leave for a month or more and come back to a still-functioning business. Or, as Michael Gerber says in The E-Myth, instead of working in your business, you are working on your business. Instead of focusing on the day-to-day tasks, you’re focusing on big picture goals to move your business/company forward. Do you think Jeff Bezos packages the items you ordered on Amazon and ships it to you (the employee) or does he focus on new acquisitions to grow his business?

Lastly, you can be an investor. A professional investor gets their money to work for them, providing passive income. The greater amount of income your investments make, the longer you can afford to not work if you don’t want to. The money is working in your place. Eventually, if you can get your income from investments to cover all of your expenses, you technically won’t have to work another day in your life (barring something catastrophic happening to your investment).

Over the next couple of days, I plan to lay out my background for where I’ve been, where I am now, and what my goals are for the future (regarding obtaining financial freedom). I encourage you to comment in the section below to share any information about yourself, your plans, or what you think of my plans.