In this solo presentation, personal finance expert Ash Cash outlines five practical steps to achieve financial freedom. He begins by urging a mindset shift from consumer to investor, emphasizing the importance of balancing assets and liabilities. Next, he advocates creating multiple income streams, encouraging viewers to monetize hobbies, side hustles, or businesses to avoid reliance on a single paycheck. He then recommends automating finances using a three‑account system—spending, bills, and savings—where a set percentage (e.g., 10%) of each paycheck is automatically transferred to savings and the accounts are kept separate to control spending. The fourth step is establishing an emergency fund covering six to eight months of living expenses, kept in an accessible account. Finally, he explains how to understand and improve credit scores by maintaining on‑time payments over the past two years and keeping credit‑card utilization below 30%, enabling the use of other people’s money to build assets. Throughout, Ash delivers the advice in a conversational, motivational tone, aiming to empower viewers to take concrete actions toward financial independence.
Chapters
My name is Ash Cash, personal finance expert, motivational speaker, business consultant, author of Mind Right Money Right: 10 Laws of Financial Freedom and What the FICO? 12 Steps to Repairing Your Credit. So here are 5 steps to building financial freedom. Step 1 is change your mindset about money. Stop being a consumer and be an investor. That means simply that instead of taking your money and just spending it frivolously, make sure that you have a better balance of your assets and your liabilities. Step 2 in creating financial freedom, create multiple streams of income. In today's society, we saw what happened with the Great Recession of 2008 where people that were making 6 figures just lost their jobs and their whole lifestyle just shifted around. You don't want that to happen to you. You want to become an investor. You want to, you know, own businesses. You want to, you know, whatever your craft is, your 9 to 5, whatever that side hustle is, just Monetize many things so that you're not only, you know, relying on that one source of income. For the average person, you have to diversify your money as well. So if you have a passion, you have a hobby, you have something that you love to do, instead of just doing it for free, why don't you do it and make some money from it? If you're a graphic designer, you like to draw, you like poetry, you like whatever you like, you, you like to drink wine, whatever it is, you can create a blog, you You can sell ads, you can make people come to your website because of your knowledge, and that could be an additional source of income that you can get in addition to whatever else you're doing. Step number 3 for creating financial freedom is automating your finances. And what I say is that everybody should have 3 different accounts. You should have a spending account, you should have a bill account, you should also have a savings account, right? Why should you have these different accounts? Your savings account should be somewhere where you can't see it. It automatically goes wherever you get your paycheck from, you know, however you get your money, make sure that automatically you're sending 10% to your savings account. Have it separate. But why should you have a bill account and a spending account? It's very important to separate the two. My spending account is, you know, I have a debit card for it. I have a certain percentage that goes into that account, and I know that money, whether it's $300, $400, $500, whatever money that you are able to allocate, you put that in an account. And you know that's the amount of money that you can spend. Step number 4 of creating financial freedom is have an emergency fund. It is very important that you have at least 6 to 8 months of emergency money in an account that you have access to. And what does that mean? Whatever your expenses are— so if your expenses are $1,000 a month, if it's $2,000 a month, make sure you have 6 to 8 months of expenses in an account in case of an emergency. Step number 5 of building financial freedom is understanding your credit and improving it if needed. People don't know this, but your credit score is affected by the last 2 years of payment history. So even if you had shoddy credit and you messed your credit up, as long as you've been paying your bills back on time for the last 2 years, you can help have good credit. So 35% of that is paying your bills back on time, and the other 30%, which people don't know, is your usage ratio, which means this: If you have a credit card and your credit limit, let's say, is $1,000, you have to make sure that you don't go above 30% of usage. If you use over 30%, it negatively impacts your credit. So you have to make sure that you fall below 30%. So let's say somebody has a $1,000 card, do not spend more than $300. Pretend that your credit limit is $300. You do those 2 things, you can significantly Impact your credit score and begin towards financial freedom because now you can start using other people's money to build assets instead of using your own money.
