What is True Wealth?
If you are like me you get a ton of emails containing the ‘next big thing’ to make you wealthy. If you believe the ‘gurus’ being wealthy has something to do with being on a beach and having a fancy car in front of your big house. Now you will hear that the key to being wealthy is to ‘leverage your assets’ or use credit to build your empire.
What this means is to pay for the opportunities you are involved in with your credit card and don’t think about what you are really spending until the monthly bill starts to get too large to handle.
In the early eighties I was young and ‘leveraged’ a very good wage (around $4,000. per month) into all the goodies. I spent it as fast as I got it and used credit to pay for ‘nicer’ things in life. There was no problem until the job went south and I found it really hard to find a way to make the payments. I did find that I could take cash advances to pay my bills, but that didn’t last long. I got to know bankruptcy at this point. I learned a very hard lesson.
What does this have to do with wealth? Well a wise man, Benjamin Franklin said that a penny saved is a penny earned. Now what does this have to do with wealth? Let’s say you have a few credit cards that you are using to make your fortunes. Most of them now have a little thing on the bill that will tell you how much you will pay in interest if you continue to make the minimum payment and how long to pay it off if you don’t spend any more on them. Now if you look at those figures, it may scare you – I hope that it scares you.
For an example, if you have around a $5,000 balance at around 16% with a minimum payment of around $120; it will take you 21 years and cost you around $11,000 dollars in interest (that is $16,000.00 total)! Now that is a lot of money. So if you have spent this $5,000 paying for opportunities to make money and they sits on your credit card – this is what you will need to repay.
If these programs aren’t making you more than the $120 payment, you have lost $120 a month to spend on other things. This can be when the family asked to go to that new movie and you tell them you don’t have the money. Or you are spending many hours a day trying to promote this new opportunity and don’t have the money or the time to do anything else.
So what does this have to do with wealth? Well wealth is owning things of value. What do you REALLY own? If you make a house payment, you don’t own it. If you make a car payment, you don’t own it. If you make credit card payments on your furniture, you don’t own it. Are you seeing a pattern here? Are you looking for ‘fake’ wealth or REAL wealth? Fake wealth is the person who has the fancy cars, house, vacations, etc. that are paid for on credit. They look wealthy but they actually own NOTHING. Anyone with a decent credit rating can do this.
So what am I trying to say? You need to evaluate what you are spending your money AND time on. If it fails to pay you; you need to re-evaluate what you are doing. Now in business the bottom line is to make a profit. Most brick and mortar businesses will need a couple of years to see any profit and they have to have the funds to float them for that period of time. This is because of the tremendous overhead of a physical location; employees, inventory, utilities, etc.
Now there are a lot of online opportunities (and gurus) that will tell you it will take a couple of years to ‘make it’ with an online business. BULL! You have none of the expenses of a brick and mortar business, so why would it take this long to make a profit?
What you really need to do is to sit down and evaluate if you took the money you are spending month after month on your chosen opportunity and if spending that money on paying off your credit cards, car payments, mortgage, etc would yield the same results or better. Even if it is only $5 – 30 a month. If using the same money will save you more from paying off your bills, the smart move is to do that. This is more of a ‘sure thing’ as opposed to most things that people are doing online to make money.
Now I am not saying that some sacrifices aren’t needed to be in business; but, if your children are young they don’t stay that way forever. You need to balance your life. If you miss a once in a lifetime thing to do with your family because you have to surf the traffic exchanges….is it worth it? If you stay up long hours every night to ‘work your business’ and end up getting fired for sleeping on your day job, then what?
Wouldn’t it be great to have no bills but your utilities and groceries? Think about that and you will see where the true wealth can be and how it will be great for you and your family. Think of how much stress that will get off your shoulders. How easy would it be to start a business then? How much freedom would you have at that point to change jobs? Something to think about isn’t it? Isn’t this what you really want in the end?