For the high achievers out there, remember what you’re working for. Some people refer to this as finding your “why.” Why are you working so hard? What is it that you really want?
Sure, you may like what you do, you may find enjoyment getting recognition or accolades from your employer, or you want to be seen as successful in the eyes of your peers/family members, but is that in alignment with what you actually want?
I’ve been working hard for a long time. I worked in high school, worked my way through college, and upon graduating I worked multiple jobs and many hours of overtime to pay off any student loans I had, pay off cars, a mortgage, etc. But after having kids, I had to re-prioritize my life goals. Did I still want to earn financial freedom? Absolutely. But I need to do it in a more sustainable way so I can see my family. Working 60-70 hour work weeks will help me earn income, but at what expense?
The questions I had to ask myself were:
1) What am I working so hard for? What is my new why? The answer to this, I think, is to create the best life possible for my family. That doesn’t necessarily mean to have or to make the most money though. Instead, I think it’s to raise respectful children with good work ethics who are happy with life…and me NOT being around just so I can earn more money or do something I’m “passionate” about is actually a very selfish thing to do.
2) Instead of racing the the financial freedom finish line, am I willing to maybe work a few more years to have a better quality of life (more free time to spend with my family, friends, and hobbies)? The answer to this is yes. What’s the point in rushing to retirement when you might lose your family (say, if you get divorced as a result of never spending time with your spouse), you lose your health (because you’re “too busy” to work out), lose your friends (because you never hang out with them anymore), and have no hobbies (are you just going to sit at home and watch tv all day)?? That life would be so unfulfilling to me.
So, as I conclude, I just want to say that everyone is different. We feel different things, have different goals, and are in different stages of life. Our life experiences are different. Our expectations are different. There is no right or wrong when it comes to why you’re working as hard as you are. But the key thing is to think about what you’re working for and adjust your time accordingly.
There are four sectors of the Cashflow Quadrant – E (employee), S (self-employed), B (business-owner), I (investor)
The Cashflow Quadrant describes four ways of making money – as an employee, a self-employed individual, a business-owner, or an investor. You are not limited to earning income in only one category at a time.
The most common way to make money (and what most people are trained for in school) is to be an employee. As an employee, you’re working for a company or organization and trading your time for money. You generally have the most “security” but the least amount of freedom as an employee (think W-2). You work the hours your employers set, follow their rules/handbook, and as a result, get paid a set wage (usually based on an hourly rate, but sometimes as a salary). Examples of this are everywhere – the cashier at the store you go to, the secretary at your office, a warehouse stocker, a janitor, teacher, office administrator, etc.
The second way to make money is as a self-employed individual (think 1099). Here, you don’t have a “boss,” but instead you are your own boss. It sounds great, but essentially you own your job here. You still trade time for money, but now you trade off some of the safety/stability of working for someone else and having a guaranteed paycheck for having to earn new business everyday. If you don’t sell something, you don’t get paid. Examples of this include lawyers, real estate agents, the owner of a landscaping company where the owner is doing a fair amount of revenue-generating/business-sustaining work, etc.
After that, you can move to the right side of the quadrant and start leveraging other people’s time or money to make you money.
In the business owner quadrant, you move yourself out of operations. You are no longer physically doing much of the work. Instead, you have employees doing the work on your behalf. You have scaled to the point where not everything hinges on you. If you decide to leave for a few weeks (or months), the business will still make money because of the people you have working for you, and the systems/processes you have in place. Think of Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates as examples of this, but it can be on a much smaller scale too. Do you think any of them are out selling their products on an individual level, making the product, or packaging the product? Can they leave for vacation (or pass away) and have the company still survive (or thrive)? They leverage other people’s time so they can accomplish more.
Lastly, we have the investor quadrant. Anybody can be in the investor quadrant as long as they are investing in an asset that produces returns positive returns. The ultimate goal in the investor quadrant though should be to have your investments produce enough passive income to cover all of your expenses. once you get to that point, you won’t have to work another day in your life. You can choose to work, trillion time for money or being a business owner and working on your business, but you do not have to work. There are many ways to invest in assets, whether that is through index funds, mutual funds, cryptocurrency, and my personal favorite – real estate. Here, you leverage either your own money or, preferably, other people’s money to work and earn more money. The idea is that your money is working for you even when you’re sleeping.
Where I’ve been
As I write this, I’m now 31 years old. I’ve been working in some capacity for over half of my life now. I started working part-time jobs in high school on an alpaca farm, at a pizza shop, and landscaping. I took the first quarter off from work in college, but other than that I worked a minimum of 25 hours per week throughout the school year (and 40+ hours per week in the summer) at an office, as a personal trainer, and landscaping. After graduating, I began working 55-60 hour weeks at a food packaging plant, as a personal trainer and CrossFit coach, a gym manager, and a salesperson/project manager. I understand what it means to be an employee – trading time for money. I decided that this wasn’t the best path for me, even though I see how it makes sense to many people. The problem I had with it was two-fold. First, no matter how productive I was, my income was always capped. I could help the company make record profits, but it didn’t necessarily translate to an equal payday for me. But don’t hear what I’m not saying – I didn’t necessarily need to be paid in equal proportions to what I earned for the company. The business owners were the ones who took the risk to build the business and who spent the time, money, and energy in developing systems for me to succeed. It’s just that I knew my income and my family’s future would be capped if I stayed there. The second limiting factor for me as an employee is that I love learning and trying to implement new ideas. But as an employee, I had to stick to the rules and keep following what was working. I felt my innovative side was being stifled and I wanted to make my own rules. This led to my career change last year…
Where I am
As of June 2020, I became a licensed Realtor in the state of Ohio. The primary locations I focus on are Medina, Cuyahoga, Summit, Lorain, and Wayne counties. I generally work with people looking for a primary residence, and it ranges from first-time homebuyers, people looking to upsize, or people looking to downsize. That being said, my wife and I invest in rental properties and we work with other investors ranging from single family rentals/house flips, small multi-family, or commercial properties (such as apartments).
I’m now on a great team (The Casey Team) and working with an amazing brokerage (Russell Real Estate Services).
But even though I’m on a team, it’s still a 1099 (self-employed) profession. If I don’t sell houses, I don’t make money. I can cold call, door knock, show houses, and write offers, but if I don’t perform and close deals, I don’t get paid. It’s a 100% commission career and it can be stressful at times. But here, the harder I work, the more money I should make. My income isn’t capped.
As I mentioned, my wife and I do invest in real estate, but we also invest in the stock market with our IRA plans and her 403b. We also have the kids set up with UTMAs (Uniform Transfers to Minors Act) so they will be off to a good start once they become of age. We do not touch any of the cashflow from the rentals, dividends, or increases in equity that we receive from these investments and rather re-invest them so they can grow larger for us. This is similar to the example used for “make thy gold multiply” told in The Richest Man in Babylon.
Where I’m going (my plans)
My goal is to be able to retire by age 50. I don’t ever see a time when I want to stop working – I enjoy work, learning, and improving myself everyday. But I don’t want to have to work. If my family and I want to go on a long vacation, I want to be able to pick up and go.
With that being the end goal, I need to change a couple of things. First, I need my investments to produce a greater return. My goal is to do that through buying one new rental property every other year for the next 5 years, then hopefully increase to one per year (or more) for the following 15 years. We would hire a property manager so we are not handling the day-to-day items and it becomes a much more passive system.
I also want to move from the S (self-employed) quadrant to the B (business-owner) quadrant. While I don’t have any plans to open a brokerage, mortgage company, or title company, I would like to eventually be a partner on the current team I’m on and to get more Realtors on our team. Then we can have them out making deals while we help provide the support for them (with leads, office administrators, inside sales agents, stagers, photographers, etc). This will take time to build, and we will have to write up processes (and tweak them as we go). But this would eventually free me from the trading time for money conundrum that so many of us face.
If you have any tips or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or to message me directly.
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.
1. Have I made strides towards my goals today? Did I help or hurt myself physically, mentally, spiritually, relationally, vocationally, and financially?
2. After my encounters with others, do I generally make them feel better about themselves?
3. Did I live with integrity today? Did I do the right things, say the right things, and act according to my values?
“The way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are.” – John Green
Sometimes, when we have incomplete information, or when we don’t really know a person, we tell ourselves that they did something maliciously towards us because they’re mean, miserable, etc. And while there may be some truth to that story, the real truth is we don’t know why they did what they did or why they said what they said. Maybe they were hangry or they just got bad news about their kids, parents, or friends. Maybe they’re going through a divorce or they’re stressed from work. Maybe they thought they were just teasing you and didn’t know you took it the wrong way.
I’d like to think that most people, at least in their own eyes, are good. We may misunderstand them or have different values, but that doesn’t make the other person bad. Your boss or co-worker you can’t stand? They are someone’s mom/dad, husband/wife, child, friend, etc. They want to be happy and feel like they’re contributing to others’ happiness too. Maybe they’re stuck in a rut or you caught them at a bad time, or maybe you were jut too sensitive at that moment.
At the very worst, think of the situation through the lens of Hanlon’s razor. It says, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” In other words, sometimes bad things happen not because of people are purposely trying to hurt you, but because they did not think through their actions (and the consequences) properly. People *usually* aren’t out to get you.
