Most people have been taught the limiting belief that “you need money to make money” and “it’s only the rich that invest in things such as the stock market or properties.” Yet today, someone with hardly any money can achieve financial freedom due to the information economy we are living in.
Today, with the power of content marketing, for example, most people can build a substantial income from creating online courses, e-books, or blogs that companies pay to advertise on or recommend their product, at very little start-up cost!
See, the rich build assets. They don’t trade their time for money in the same way the majority of employees do. Indeed, they have a completely different mentality. The employee’s mindset is focused on short-term gain for long term pain whereas the investor is more focused on enduring short term pain for long term gain.
The investor’s mentality when starting out is that they are happy to endure financial hardship and exhaustion in order to build assets and systems that will provide for them time and time again in perpetuity. The employee’s mentality on the other hand is that they want a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work; meaning, they want to see an instant reward for their labor.
The investor’s mentality considers that they might work for no payment at all, for a few hundred if not a thousand hours whilst investing their time and resources into building an asset such as a house, a book, or a high-interest savings account – not seeing any benefit at first, but then, once they have that asset in place it provides repeatedly, without them having to work.
The simplest way to describe this is to consider an author that sets out to write a bestselling book; they put a substantial amount of initial effort into the book’s creation without any payment, but if successful they will make a royalty from each sale, let’s say a $1 per book. If that book sells 100,000 copies then they make $100,000. If it sells two million copies then they make $2 million dollars! Yet, in both instances, their initial effort remains the same.
This means that they are free from the financial treadmill of trading time for money as they are leveraging an asset over and over. This is the formula for creating a more abundant supply of time and cash.
Now, say writing a book isn’t your forte, there are a number of simple ways you can start making money work for you rather than you having to work for it. Property investing, for instance, is a very popular choice but it presupposes you have good credit to begin with and a fair amount of capital or tangible security behind you in order to get started.
Content marketing is a great option, but not everyone wants the creative headache that comes from creating a blog or developing online courses.
Then there are all sorts of investment opportunities with regard to the stock market, that it can be difficult to know where to begin. Indeed, many people are now looking to social trading platforms that basically allow someone to copy the trades of other people that (hopefully) have a better idea of what they are doing.
The challenge, however, when it comes to investing in the stock market is that while you could make money you could just as easily lose money. Unless you know what you’re doing, it’s about as reliable as putting your bet on the roulette wheel in a casino. That said, a great way to test out your strategy is to use one of the many stock market simulators available that let you play at investing before risking your own money.
The most secure option, of course, is to invest your money in a high-interest savings account and live off the interest, but the challenge with that, is you need to have a substantial amount to begin with, which most of us don’t.
In summary, if you want to have more time and money – focus on building long-term assets rather than blinkering your vision to short-term gains.
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