The Millionaire Mind
To achieve financial freedom, you will have to think like a millionaire. Becoming a millionaire is not so much a culmination of a series of the right opportunities and the right timing, but being the right person with the right mindset in taking the right steps to financial freedom. If you are going to move to a higher level of life, you have to be willing to let go of old limited ways of thinking about money, how to manage money, and adopt new ones. How to become a millionaire then? You can recondition self limiting views of money and wealth first of all. Realize that money is simply a result. Money doesn’t define you, your power generates money. By power I mean really living in your natural state of abundance. You as a human being are capable of attaining what you truly desire. Everyone has access to attaining the wealth they want, if their motivation for acquiring money or success is not rooted in non supportive behavior and thoughts. It is a matter of conditioning this feeling of abundance and creative power, as well as learning from others – how to manage money, learning steps to financial freedom from other successful entrepreneurs. You can become the millionaire next door!
Begin by learn from the ones who are more successful than you – they certainly have defined the steps to financial freedom and how to manage money. For more detail on the millionaire mind set and how to think like a millionaire, I highly recommend the following link: Secrets of the Millionaire Mind
For me, developing that millionaire mindset meant starting with building and operating a business that produces recurring revenue based on a sustainable model – it is one of the most predictable means towards building asset appreciation – your nest egg. I was then able to build my ‘retirement’ assets from the profit of my company sale into a retirement nest egg, my golden goose. However these are only the first steps to financial freedom. To achieve financial freedom, you must also be able to mange money. What follows are manage money tips, passive income strategies, and how to utilize investment income.
Managing your Money is a different skill set than making it
After selling my businesses, I did not have a disciplined mindset for managing my funds, other than to say, I needed to quickly find investment vehicles. I was naïve in retrospect, believing all I had to do was to invest in some other opportunities similar to the businesses I had launched, sit back for few years, and reap a multiple valuation again. It doesn’t happen that way! Economic factors, ego, and perhaps impulsivity contributed to my first real setbacks as an entrepreneur. I went through a re-education process about finances. Get educated and be aware of your surroundings, keep current (more on that later). This led me to investigate passive income opportunities.
Passive Income – Key to Financial Freedom
Passive income allows you to create several different income streams that generate you cash while you sleep, play, or work. These are the other “geese”, businesses producing investment income streams for you. My problem with the first strategy I implemented after I had built my retirement assets was to rely on that main asset pool to make my long term investments from. Investment income is recurring revenue and is your key to wealth.
First, a word of caution. Have the courage to explore opportunities. Trust your intuition. If it smells like a dead fish, it probably is. Don’t let others convince you otherwise. Always educate yourself on the opportunity, its marketplace and potential risks. Once you feel you have made a good decision, complete what you start. The problem comes in the habit – most failures come when you fail to finish what you start, walking away from investments because you do not have your energy invested in them, or are not sure of the outcome because you have no control.
It is not the intention of this blog to neither recommend or advise on any of these opportunities, nor go into detail on the following examples. However, in my quest for financial freedom, I have engaged myself in studying many areas, participating in numerous seminars, and meeting other investors. I have without a doubt, met multimillionaires ( and a billionaire or two) in all of the categories below, but like anything else, these opportunities always open the door for aggressive individuals (polite for quasi scam artists), who make more money from selling their strategies than they did implementing them . Do your homework. If interested, I list a few resources on this blog under resources. These include:
· Infopreneur – This is an entrepreneur who disseminates information. Leverage your experience into mentoring others and/or disseminating information of your experiences through Webinars, Radio, creating articles (Ezines, Blogging, and writing eBooks for
· Real Estate – Again, use your judgment here in evaluating potential ‘scam’ artists who profess to have the unique ‘get rich quick’ scheme. Also become expert in understanding market trends before you invest. But the upside potential of doing your research is a passive income stream which can facilitate your retirement. For example, build a portfolio of residential homes you have purchased under market value, with little to no investment for repairs, and then use a property manager to collect rent payments. This produces cash flow. When you decide to draw your equity from these homes, you now have added to your golden goose. You may decide in a given market, to look at commercial real estate for cash flow in rents as well.
· Licensing – This is for the forward thinking business (or individual) that may now have an innovative product or service (even a personal invention) that needs a market. Remember, an idea is just an idea until you market it, and people perceive its value. Securing licensing agreements with other firms to help you sell your product or idea, or to acquire some other product to assist the sale of your product can be very financially rewarding. It could be a long term strategy for creating marketing for a product or service, OR it can be a short term process for entrepreneurs to get visible, get out into the marketplace with a new product. For example, a small creative idea such as a caricature of an animal figure may result in a company such as Disney licensing the art to sell in all of its retail products. You may find yourself getting residual checks, or royalties paid for each product sold with your work of art on it. There are literally hundreds of areas where individuals earn recurring royalty checks for something they have created.
· Business partnering deals – This is an interesting topic, because it could have huge upside. I met an entrepreneur whose net worth was $9 billion – from facilitating several business deals between different parties (businesses and individuals) in transactions! The key here is to have a keen insight into how you can capitalize on an opportunity you might have the vision to see that no one else is viewing the same way. These are usually overlooked or hidden opportunities for a product or service. Look for areas in which these opportunities could provide specific performance improvements that could be measured. Leverage yourself as the person who controls the ‘deal’. I have seen several examples, in business, where at first glance, there seems to be no money making opportunity. I was told about one individual who was a client of a data research company who had tracked detailed information on a certain segment of customers. When this individual realized she could leverage that information to sell it to a specific large retailer, she created discussions between the retailer and the data research company. She facilitated the discussions and the closing of a revenue sharing agreement which eventually produced hundreds of thousands of dollars in recurring income for her. She did this by getting the right to be paid per transaction, per month. It was pennies on the transaction, but there were large volumes of transactions!
· Network Marketing – I know what you’re thinking (MLM scams?). No, there is actually a serious passive income opportunity in investing in quality products and services for distribution through a network marketing approach (such as quality wellness products which are in high demand). The key here is not to gather family and friends in selling out of your home, but to use your leadership skills to build a team (quality downline) and communicate and manage the process. The key strategy – to get a large group of people to do a few simple actions over a consistent period of time! The downside – it is about a 1-2 year process in developing the business to where it can really produce; however, the smart entrepreneurs are making $30k per month doing these businesses. Once they are set up, they require less input form you as you wait on commission checks.
In the next several weeks, I will write more in detail about each of these opportunities.
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