Sixty-three percent, nearly two-in-three Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. And four-in-ten households would struggle to pay even a $400 emergency expense, with the extra bill sending them further in debt.
The fallout from the pandemic is affecting everyone, even those of us right here in the Bow Tie Nation!
Editor’s Note: This video is the first in a five-part series following two viewers journey to creating wealth. Watch the video and click through to YouTube to see full interview segments.
If you’re tired and broke and just tired of being broke, then remember this video because it will be the one that changed your life!
With this video, I’m starting a series to show you a millionaire strategy using side hustles, passive income and investing… and for the first time ever, highlighting a success story from you right there in the community. Throughout this video, I’ll show you how to make money and back it up with proof from two of you out there in the Bow Tie Nation!
In this video, I’ll give you a complete road map to that millionaire payday and how to put yourself on that path to financial freedom. We’ll start by creating the goals and mindset you’ll need and then reveal the truth to how the rich became wealthy. Then I’ll share six millionaire habits and action steps you can start right now! Stick around because towards the end of the video, I’ll show you a simple, three-step checklist to getting started fast!
Later in the video, I’ll introduce you to Bryan and Crystal, how buying a truck they couldn’t afford almost drove them to bankruptcy and how they’ve been able to turn that around, creating wealth through passive income, side hustles and investing.
Don’t forget to join the community and checkout the playlist in the video description below. Besides the millionaire mindset and action steps I’ll show you in this video, I’ll take you step-by-step to making money throughout the series of videos to make 2022 the year that changes your life!
The first step on your path to becoming a millionaire is actually most people’s last step…asking yourself WHY you want to be rich.
Well, duh. Because being rich is better than being poor, right?
They say money can’t buy happiness but money does buy jet skis and you can’t spell happiness without jet skis…[mumbling and spelling happiness]
The problem is that dream of jet skis and sunny beaches isn’t enough. It’s not enough when the hours get long creating your passive income stream. It’s not enough when the temptation to reinvest your investing profits gets hijacked by that new Audi commercial.
The only way anyone makes it to that level, to the kind of wealth and financial freedom we’re talking about is by embracing their WHY, by making those goals so real that they become the motivation.
Two citizens of the Bow Tie Nation, Bryan and Crystal, are working hard on their plan to create that future. I sat down and asked them about their WHY, their goals.
Bryan & Crystal: The goal for our side hustles are to be financially free down the road, to get out of debt, not to be rich by any means, because we don’t expect to get rich. If it happens that’s great, I mean I’m all for it, but mainly just to pay off debt and not to have to worry about how we’re going to pay the bills or do things we would like to do. It helps to do things now, if you want to go out to eat, you’re not counting money in your head Do I have enough money in the account to pay for this.
The first thing we’re going to do is turn your WHY of becoming wealthy into goals and then turn those goals into a mental picture.
Your goals are things like retirement, college tuitions for the kids, buying a home and even that dream vacation. And you really want several of these, some short-term like what you want to do with that money in the next three- to five-years and those long-term goals like retirement.
And this isn’t something you want to just pull out of your ass and then forget about, really sit down and think about these. If you’re married or got a family, sit down together and see where everyone’s goals and priorities match up because one of the worst things that can happen is one person saving for a goal while everyone else is spending because they don’t share the same goal.
Once you have these shared goals, imagine and write down a story around each one. What’s it going to be like sitting on that sandy beach with the coconut filled with rum? Where is that, what are you doing every day? How about watching your kid walk across the stage at their college graduation? What is the story around that? What doors are going to be open for them that were closed for you?
The idea here is to make each goal so real you can feel it. It’s no longer just a dream but a snapshot of the future. It’s this mental picture that is going to drive you through everything we’ll talk about in the rest of this video and through the series on creating wealth.
These mental pictures of your goals are going to be your motivation and your destination. If you set out trying to create a side hustle or investing without them, it’s like setting out on a road trip without a destination. The hours of work, the frustrations, they create roadblocks and you end up on the side of the road out of gas.
I learned this lesson the hard way during my first analyst job. I hated that job and all I could think about was the goal of retiring early. I worked my full-time job, another part-time job nights and managed my own real estate rentals. I was saving every penny but never really knew what I was saving for. I had no idea what my goal of ‘retiring early’ meant, I just knew I didn’t want to work.
The problem is, without a clear picture of what that meant, how that goal was going to motivate me to keep saving…I got burnt out every six months, would go binge shopping and set myself back to zero.
Create those goals and mental pictures first though, and they can take you anywhere you want to go!
Before I reveal those three millionaire habits, the three traits all millionaires share, we need to understand how 99% of wealth is created…and this is something that will change the way you think about investing.
The ‘conventional wisdom’ for getting rich is you need to find that next hot stock, the next Tesla or Gamestop to 10X your money in a year. The result, investors jump in and out of stocks, make all the wrong decisions and end up going nowhere. JP Morgan found the average investor earned just 2.9% a year in the two decades to 2020.
At an annual return of 2.9% a year, it would take you 34 years to become a millionaire and that’s investing $1,500 a month!
But say you’re an above average investor and are able to get the market return of 7.5% a year, it would still take you 23 years investing every month to reach one million dollars.
In fact, to get to that millionaire-level within 10 years, you would need to invest $1,500 every month at a 36% annual return every single year.
That’s just not going to happen. It’s like being able to pick the best stock of the year for ten years in a row and it’s not how wealth is really created.
In one of the most eye-opening surveys I’ve ever seen, Scorpio Partnership and BNP Wealth Management surveyed over 2,500 millionaires in 17 countries, people with an average net worth of nearly eight million dollars.
And what they found here will change the way you think about creating wealth and how to become a millionaire because look at that first column. The average millionaire has just 17% of their money in stocks. That’s it, less than a fifth of their wealth invested in the stock market.
In fact, the average millionaire has more money in cash and bonds than in stocks. But the biggest source of wealth, more than one-in-four dollars of net worth, is in their own business. The biggest source of wealth creation is in starting that business and owning those income assets.
And to show you this can be done without finding that next hot stock, here is the income tracking on my online business. Starting with just three blogs in 2015, applying everything I’ll show you in this video, I was able to reach that million-dollar payoff in less than six years, in 75 months from starting I had collected more than a million dollars.
I’ll show you how to start investing in the series but your millionaire-path has to start with creating those income assets, that side hustle or passive income idea that will make you truly rich!
Now that you’re ready to start your journey, I want to share three millionaire traits…three habits you’ll need to apply. Those goals and the mental picture is your motivation, these three traits are going to be the tools you use.
And first here is a wake-up call because you have to be ready to put in the work.
Yeah, sorry folks but if you want quick and easy, I’m sure there’s some 14-year old on Tik Tok that will show you how to do it.
Elon Musk reportedly puts in 80 to 90 hours a week and has been known to sleep on his factory floor. When I was getting started in venture capital and private wealth management, my days would consist of seven hours creating cash flow models and analysis, followed by another three hours in meetings and pitching clients, all to go home and put in another three hours studying for the Chartered Financial Analyst exams. And the weekend, that was just another two work days until Monday.
Now this doesn’t mean you have to be a work-aholic or this is your life from now on but you need to be ready to do what it takes in those first two years because putting in the ‘average’ workweek is only going to make you average…and the average is broke!
The best way, by far, is to involve your family in your side hustles and passive income ideas. This not only gets everyone excited about growing the business but helps it grow faster and can even bring you closer together as you create something as a family.
Even if you don’t want to spend that extra five hours a week with your family, and honestly…sometimes I don’t either. There are ways of finding more time to grow your business ideas.
First is just to figure out where your time goes. Track everything you do for a few days and put each task into one of four blocks depending on how important it is and how much you enjoy it. For example, I have a lot of things like editing videos, working with sponsors and business accounting that I don’t particularly enjoy but it’s important so I either need to get someone else to do it or keep doing it myself. There are also some things that aren’t very important but that I enjoy like watching Futurama…OK, kidding, that is important!
But if I’m being honest, I could probably find a little extra time by only watching one episode of Simpsons and Futurama a day and maybe one movie a week. The best opportunities for finding time though are in this lower-left, the stuff you do that isn’t really important and you don’t enjoy. For me, things like scrolling through social media and answering emails.
And we’re not talking about 20 or 30 hours here. You can start that side hustle or income idea with as little as five hours a week. Hell, according to the BLS time-use survey, the average person spends nearly four hours a day watching TV or online…that’s more than 25 hours a week.
Find just five to ten hours, commit to using that time to grow your income and I guarantee it will make a major difference in your life.
Your next millionaire habit is a commitment to always be learning and improving your skill set.
When I asked Bryan how long it took to feel like he knew what he was doing with investing, he said something I think any investor can relate to…
Bryan & Crystal: It took me a long time to feel like I half way understood what I was doing. I don’t think you ever fully know what you’re doing… I don’t know that I’ll ever know all there is to know about it, I highly doubt it but I think I’ll know enough to get us by.
There’s a quote by Stephen Hawking, probably one of the smartest people that ever lived, that says, ‘Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change’.
That’s it. Not book smarts or a genius IQ. It’s the ability to adapt to changes that creates greatness.
And this applies to creating wealth and growing your business as well. Netflix started as a DVD rental service by mail after co-founder Reed Hastings owed a $40 late fee at Blockbuster. Blockbuster has gone the way of the Dodo and rental competitor Redbox…not sure if that’s still a thing, but from a shift to streaming videos and then creating its own content, Netflix has been able to grow into a $295 billion business because founders Hastings and Randolph were constantly learning and adapting to the environment.
When I got started blogging in 2015, I knew less than nothing about how an online business worked. My first book was Blogging for Dummies…and I think that might have been a generous assessment of what I knew about it.
Find something you enjoy doing, use the action steps and checklist I’ll give you next to get started, and make that commitment to always learning how to grow your business.
This next millionaire habit more than just saying you have a No Excuses mentality, it’s a commitment to success no matter what.
This has to be more than just a slogan on a t-shirt. It has to be about setting short-term goals and then doing what needs to be done to achieve them.
Within each of those long-term goals, you can make goals for the next year that will help you get there but the real power in this comes from then creating 12-week goals, something you can accomplish in the next three months that will move you a step closer to that one-year goal.
Because we all know what happens to New Year’s resolutions and those one-year goals. You want to lose ten pounds in a year or you want to be making a thousand a month from passive income.
What happens is, because you’ve got a whole year to reach those goals, you put off getting started. You end up waiting until December and then dropping your goal because you’d have to cut off a foot to lose 10 pounds in two weeks.
Setting those near-term, 12-week goals and then weekly tasks to accomplish them means you’ve got a sense of urgency to get things done. You’ll grow your business every three months and will accomplish something amazing by the end of a year.
Those millionaire habits are something most of us have to work on but now I want to show you three action steps you can use right now to map out how you’ll become a millionaire.
These are three rules you can use when putting together your wealth creation plan that will guarantee you’re on the right path.
And first, with any passive income idea or business, ask yourself how would you grow the income…your business has to be scalable to make you rich?
What I mean by this is, a lot of side hustles or business ideas start out making money but you very quickly find out, there’s only so much that income can grow because you’re trading time for money.
So with any kind of business or wealth creation plan, you need to constantly be thinking, “How do I grow the income with less time? How do I serve more customers at the same time?”
A great example of this is Bryan and Crystal’s lawncare business.
Bryan & Crystal: During our first year, we had so many customers we were having to turn people away… We knew that we had to reinvest in the business if we were going to be successful. We couldn’t keep going with a half broke down push mower and battery trimmer. We were going to have to put the first year a lot of our money back into the business, that way the next year would be even better. We could take on more customers, more yards and actually be able to get some good hedge trimmers and be able to trim people’s hedges in two or three hours instead of two or three days.
This next millionaire rule is one of the most important, don’t spend money…reinvest it.
Nation, I know it feels great to take profits from your side hustle or from investment returns and treat yourself but that is not the way you create long-term wealth. That doesn’t mean you can’t have nice things but real wealth creation means reinvesting that money back into the business for growth.
And we see this in Bryan and Crystal’s story, reinvesting back into the business to buy new mowers and equipment. And yeah, there’s going to be that little voice in the back of your head, nagging you to spend the money. The fear that investing in the business will lose the money.
These are all natural fears that you will need to defeat. Nation, I have not met a single millionaire business owner that hasn’t at one point been so paralyzed by fear that they felt like just giving up and curling up into a fetal position.
Have the confidence in your plan, keep that commitment to reinvesting in your business and you WILL be on your way to real wealth creation.
Finally here before I reveal that three-step checklist to getting started, never rely on just one source of income.
Nation, there is no single, one-solution for getting rich. The side hustles we’ll talk about in the series take time to build. The passive income ideas I’ll reveal in the next video won’t create million-dollar income overnight, but put a few of these together and you can create a five- and six-figure income in no time.
For example, starting my blogs in 2015, it was six months before I made any money at all because I wasn’t using a side hustle for immediate cash flow, something we’ll fix for your plan in this series. That first income stream from self-publishing was a great motivator but it wasn’t going to pay the bills alone. I added affiliates and was making over a thousand a month within the first year but it still wasn’t enough. I kept reinvesting in the business and looking for ways to grow. Later I added sponsored posts and was up to two grand a month and then averaging four and five thousands a month within two years. When I finally started adding my own courses and YouTube, earning income from more than six sources, I was able to build that to over sixty- and seventy-thousand dollars a month.
Over the next two videos in the series, I’ll show you the very best side hustle and passive income ideas to start making money. I’ll show you exactly how to get started in each and how much you can make but the real power in these is trying out a few, using a side hustle to start that immediate cash flow that you can reinvest into your passive income idea or to start investing.
I know this is a lot to take in so I want to give you a quick three-step checklist to get you started on your path to millionaire. You’ll still need the habits and action steps I showed you but you can use these three quick steps to start creating wealth.
And first is to think about those goals and create your mental picture. This has to be where it has to start because without that mental picture of your dreams to motivate, the challenges and fears that come up along the way will destroy you.
And remember, this is more than just thinking through those goals or saying you want an arbitrary amount of money like a million dollars. This means setting goals for that money and creating a story around it.
Next is an easy one, watch the five-video series showing you exactly how to do all this. Over the next two weeks, I’ll be releasing the next four videos for a step-by-step into each part of creating wealth. We’ll follow Bryan and Crystal’s journey through their side hustle, passive income strategy and investing plan to show you how easy it is to set up. I’ll reveal more than 20 side hustles and passive income ideas to make sure you find the one perfect for your plan and give you a complete guide to getting started investing.
With that, you’ll be ready for that last step, creating your get rich plan with income ideas and investing. You’ll find a side hustle that will turn just a few hours a week into a quick source of cash and a passive income idea you can build to start making money while you sleep. You’ll be able to use that extra money to get a jump on your investing plan, start making your money work for you! It’s all right here, a complete plan to create wealth.
Bryan & Crystal: From beforehand where I was scared to death, like man I don’t know if we can do this, I don’t know, but now I know we can do this and I know we can do anything else we decide to do…. It just take a weight off your shoulder, it’s just a sense of relief.
Check out that link to the playlist with all five videos for creating wealth in the description and use Bryan and Crystal’s journey to inspire your own!