5 Tips To Achieve Financial Freedom - John Assaraf

Hey there. Good morning. Welcome to 5 Tips to Financial Freedom. Welcome to 5 Tips to Financial freedom. I come to you live every Tuesday morning, and I'm going to give you a whole bunch of stuff on, you know, how do you achieve financial freedom? A lot of people right now are hurting financially, and achieving financial freedom is something that I've been working on, researched, applied, made lots of errors, made lots of great strides in. In my life. And my first question to you is, do you want to achieve financial freedom? Do you want to achieve financial freedom? And what does financial freedom mean to you? It means a lot of different things to different people. I'll share with you what it means to me in just a moment. I'm going to give you five tips to financial freedom today. And what do you think? Some of the tips are for financial freedom. And if you like this topic, hit the like or the love button. Financial freedom is not something that a lot of people enjoy and a lot of people have, and it's not because they, you know, can't achieve it. Many people have never been taught how to achieve it. So what is financial freedom to you? And either at course C and either Hamza and hi there, Amanda and Pre and Hobie and Goldie. And so is financial freedom something that you want? Because if it's something you want, I want you to hit the like or the love button. Hi there, Rossi. Right? And I'm going to give you some tips that you may have heard of, may not have heard of. So, Larry, you think that financial freedom is leverage. What do you think financial freedom is? Hey there, Deb from Alaska. What is financial freedom to you? What does financial freedom actually give you? Is it really the money that you want? Think about this is really the money you want. I'm going to share with you. It's not the money that you want. Financial freedom isn't around the money. Hi there, Ben. Hi there, Ben. Financial freedom. So what is financial freedom? Give me. Type in your answer. Hello. Hello. Eva Tikanis. Right. So what is financial freedom? What does it mean to you? Type in what financial freedom means to you. Ah, they're Jasudia. Peace of mind. How many of you agree that financial freedom equals peace of mind? Right? Peace of mind. Houdon says time. Financial freedom equals time. And then what would you do with that time? Well, Rossi, is freedom on all areas of life, right? It's the time. Amanda says, right. So peace of mind is one. Oh, Carol, I love this. So Carol says financial freedom gives you options. So what about financial freedom? The reason to get to financial freedom, right, is peace of mind. It's to be able to do the things that you want to do when you want to do it with, who you want to do it with. Right? What about emotional freedom? How many people, okay, have this stress around, you know, money or the lack of money. So emotional freedom, time freedom, mental freedom, and then the ultimate freedom is to be able to do what you want to do when you want to do it right. And one of you, I don't know who FDG is right, says, you know, are you interested? Are you committed? So when, what do you think the number one skill is that you have to have in order to achieve financial freedom? What's the number one skill you have to have in order to achieve financial freedom? Julie says, living where I want, traveling where I want, having a business. I love being super fulfilled. So what's the number one thing that is going to determine whether you have financial freedom or not? And somebody mentioned it already before, but I want you to think for just a moment, and here is, let me just digress for just a moment here. Is it possible to have financial freedom? Do we know how to have financial freedom? Do we know how? You may not know how, right, but is the how available? Is the how available? Ah, so motivations. Motivation is the oxygen motivations. The auction says discipline, right? Is what you need. So we've got Debbie says alignment, Dr. Macaron says attitude, faith in yourself, mindset, financial intelligence. Yeah, you need to have some of that for sure. But that's available to get, right. What if I said to you the number one, okay, the number one thing you have to have if you want financial freedom is a commitment to financial freedom. I'm going to give you some tips in just a moment if you had a commitment. Okay, let me share with you why I start off with commitment. This isn't one of the tips, by the way. It's one of the character traits that you need to have. Like, if you have commitment to doing whatever it takes to upgrade your knowledge, upgrade your skills, develop the self image, the self esteem, the strategies, the tactics, the timelines, the tools, the resources. If you have a commitment to financial freedom, is it possible for you to overcome any obstacle? Is it possible for you to overcome any obstacles? Give me a like or a love or type it. So if you have a commitment to it, then that is one of the keys, right? Does commitment also mean having the discipline for certain things? So I'm going to share with you the five tips in just a second. But if you're committed, then will you develop the certain disciplines that are required? I'm going to share with you five tips. But they all require discipline, right? They all require discipline. Let me share a story with you, and I'm going to give you the first tip. About two weeks ago, in one of my private consulting groups, I have a group of about 25 people who pay $25,000 each to be in a private group with me for one year. So those are the people that I mentor for a whole year. And yes, there's a time commitment, there's an investment of, of money. $25,000 for a year. And we were doing a session on time. Right? On time. And when I talk about time, here's what I asked everyone to do while we were on the call. I said to them, we were talking about money, specifically making money activities. Okay? Pay close attention. We were talking about specifically making money activities. And I asked this group of 25 people, I want you to take a look at your calendar right now. And I want you to take a look at the last five days that you actually worked, either in your job or in your business. This happens to be business owners, but for those of you with a job, you can take a look at this. All right? Ask them. Take a look at your, you know, let's say eight hours a day, times five days is 40 hours a week. And let's say for a business owner, I asked them between you and your employees. So if it's you, it's 40 hours. If it's another employee, it's 80 hours. If it's another employee, it's 120 hours out of the time that you had available. Okay. To make money in your business, given that you have a lot of other things to do, okay. How many hours did you actually spend money making money? Now, let me define something for you. There's a big difference between getting ready to make money and actually making money. Studying on how to make money is not making money. Getting a website ready is not making money. Reading is not making money. There are activities, whether it's income generating activities, okay, that cause you to exchange your product, service knowledge or skill with somebody else where they're exchanging money with you. And so I asked him, how many people did you get in front of that could exchange money with you? Money making activities? And it was all over the place. It was 15% of my time, 25% of my time, 40, 50% of the time was the highest. Which also happen to be the person in the group that's actually Making the most amount of money. So your first tip five tips for achieving financial freedom is first, first of all, do you know what your highest income producing activities are? Do you know what your highest income producing activities are? Because the first tip to financial freedom is earning more money, right? So you have to have an inflow of money, right? So how many hours did you spend or do you spend earning money? Now if you have a job, you're probably spending, you know, X number of hours working for your boss. But if you want to make more money than how many more hours did you invest on income producing activities. So tip number one is get very, very, very clear on what are your income producing activities so that you know that when you do X, Y or Z for one hour or three or four, you are at your highest income earning potential for that hour or that half a day. Does that make sense? If that makes sense, give me a like or a love. And that is that most people don't think of their time the way I do, right? There is no such thing as time management. The only thing you can do is manage what you do in time. And so if you want financial freedom, a percentage of your time has to be invested deliberately on income producing activity. So if you're a business owner, you better figure out what are the income producing activities, all right, that I have to do as a company and how many hours am I doing that? All right, so you have to figure out what are my highest income producing activities. Number two, you want financial freedom, what are your highest income impact producing activities? So there's high income producing activities to earn money, but then there are high impact activities. Somebody type this in. Okay, I must focus on. Somebody type this in. I must focus on. Come on. I'm going to wait until somebody types it in. I must focus on. Doing the highest impact producing activities versus the trivial many things there are to do. I must focus on doing the highest income producing activities versus the trivial many things to do. So when you are focusing on high income producing activities or high impact producing activities, that means that you are focusing on. Okay, that means that you are focusing on what? All right, what does that mean you're focusing on? It means that you're focusing on the critical few instead of the trivial many. The critical few instead of the trivial many. There is a law called Pareto's principle. Has anybody heard of Pareto's principle? Giuseppe Pareto was an Italian economist that did research on landowners and wealth in Italy many, many years ago. And he discovered that 20% of the landowners or 20% of the people own 80% of land. 20% of the wealthiest people owned 80% of the wealth in Italy. And that 80, 20 rule, the 20% rule of focusing on the 20% of the things that will get you 80% of the way there holds true on daily productivity. It holds true on sales teams. It holds true on the activities you do in your relationship. It holds true on the number of clothes that you wear out of your closet. You wear 20% of your closet over and over and over and over again. You use 20% of your shoes over and over and over again. You meet with the same 20% of all your friends over and over and over and over again. The 20% represents the critical few versus the trivial many. So the key for you is, do you know what your critical few are? Do you understand your own critical few versus trivial many? Now, if you like me, you know, I have kids, a wife, mother in law, father, sister, brother, businesses, investments. I'm busy. I'm busy with health, wealth, relationships, career. I'm busy. But not all activities lead to productivity. Not all activity leads to productivity. So you have to take time to step back and ask yourself, out of the 30, 40 or 50 things that I have to get done, what are the top 20% that's going to really move the needle? So we have, right, Number one is the high income, high impact activities. And that is something that you really want to be focusing on. The critical few versus the trivial many. So you need to focus on how do I generate more income every day, every week, every month. And by the way, this is just about financial freedom. I'm not saying that money is the be all and end all, but if you want financial freedom, you have to create a financial input or financial influx of money. So without thinking about what are my highest income producing activities, what are my highest impact producing activities? And separating out the critical few from the trivial many, you get caught up in wasting a lot of time. Does that make sense? If it makes sense, give me a like or a love. All right, and this is high focus where we started off with. You have to make a commitment, right? You have to be disciplined to this. And Jim Rohn said, you're either going to pay the price of discipline or you're going to pay the price of regret. Discipline weighs ounces, regret weighs tons. Which do you want to do? If you want to be financial free, it requires discipline and commitment. And then you need to do the right things. So the first thing you got to do is you got to focus on generating income. Okay? If you like this, do me a favor and share this. Pay it forward. Ready for tip number two. I'm going to try to give you more than five tips, but five tips seem like a good thing to put, you know, at the beginning of this. So let's go to tip number two. High income, high impact is part of tip number one. Number two, how well do you manage your money? How well do you manage your money? So skill one is earning money, but skill two is managing money. So if you, for example, earn $1,000, do you have a process or a plan for managing the inflow? Do you know what your fixed costs are? Do you know how much you spend every month on your car, your gas, your food, your electrical bills? Do you know how much left over you have? Right? Because if you don't have a budget, if you don't have a way of tracking your behavior and, and what you do, then it makes no difference how much money you have, because you'll always spend as much or a little bit more, hoping that you're going to catch up. One of the biggest mistakes that people make is they don't have a money management plan. So a lot of people can earn a lot of money, but then they don't have a money management plan. They don't live within their budget. And if you don't live within your budget, you're always behind the eight ball. Does that make sense to you? Right. Are you buying things that you shouldn't buy because you're an impulse buyer? Are you using buying to alleviate some kind of an emotional or mental stress that you have? Right. So way to go, Larry. Larry just did your personal business budget two hours ago. So when you create a budget and you track and measure it every single month, every quarter, every year, you can start to see a trend and a pattern. Now, very few of us, okay, you know, my parents, there was always too much month left at the end of the money. And a lot of people don't know about this, this about me, but when I grew up, my parents fought about the lack of money all the time. And I hated the screaming and the arguments because there was no money to enjoy some of the nicer things in life, like maybe dinner out in another place other than Kentucky Fried Chicken. And so there was always stress and tension. And it wasn't because my father didn't make a lot of money. He was a cab driver and he made cash, but he would spend it without any budget or consideration for the future. So the second part of financial freedom is you have to Be well versed in managing money that's coming in. You have to have some kind of a process, right, some kind of a tracking mechanism to know where am I, where am I? And without that, then you're going to be spending it ad hoc. And so tip number two for achieving five tips to achieve financial freedom is I need to learn how to make money. I need to learn how to manage it better. So there are some simple tools. You can go on to mint, mint.com and you can set up a quick budget on mint.com there's so many online tools that are free that you don't even need a lot of experience or expertise. You can do it on your mobile phones or on your computer. So tip number two, and this is something that I heard, it goes like this, says if you don't manage the money that the universe is giving you, the universe won't give you more money to manage something. That I heard that's always stuck with me. Now, I don't think the universe gives us money. I think money is a means of exchange. But if you focus on earning and managing, then you can move to the next part of the equation. And when you want financial freedom, there are two types of revenue streams that you want to achieve financial freedom. I call it the pile theory or the stream theory. Pile or stream. Somebody type that in. Pile or stream theory. So pile theory is you make money, you buy budget, and then you save the rest until you have a pile. And then that pile gives you this sense of security and some freedom, right? But then the third part, and this is what every single smart wealthy person does, they take that pile or a portion of that pile and they invest it into a stream. So a pile, okay, is great, and you might have some freedom, but if you take some of that pile and you leverage it by buying, for example, real estate, that gives you a monthly income stream, the stock market at the right time, where an asset can go up, but then maybe you can get some dividends, a business that you can invest in that gets you more cash and more of the stream. So. So I like to have both piles and streams. So you create a pile, set aside, take some of that pile, and now you invest. So when you start to think about, I'm going to use some of my pile, okay, to live a great lifestyle, but I'm also going to use some of my pile to create some streams. Almost all millionaires are multimillionaires, okay? Unless we're talking about millionaires that, you know their millionaire comes from, they own A house that's worth a million dollars net have some kind of an investment that allows them to create a consistent revenue stream. So how do you achieve financial freedom if you have a pile that'll last you till the day you die? That's one way to have financial freedom. But you can also have a stream that, that consistently brings in revenue. That's why I got into business personally. That's why I got into the arena of learning how to build a business for myself or businesses so that I can create piles and streams. Okay, does that make sense? If it makes sense, let me know that this makes sense. Okay? I'm giving you some practical stuff. I'm not going to bullshit you on what it takes. This isn't some miracle, hope and prayer when you become financially free. That's a bunch of bullshit. It requires discipline, it requires commitment. It requires, you know, upgrading your knowledge and skills of what to do, when to do it, how to do it, why to do it. All right, I'm really about the practical application of real life stuff versus airy fairy bullshit stuff, get rich quick schemes, bunch of crap. So discipline, commitment or commitment discipline, high income, high, high impact producing activities. You got to know the critical few from the trivial many. Right? You need to take time to figure those out. Okay? Then as you're making more money, you've got to manage it better. And then what you want to do is build a pile, then build a stream. Are we good so far? Are we good so far? We good so far? Makes sense. So now we have a pile and we have a stream. So, you know, financial freedom doesn't come from having a pile or stream unless there's a way to protect the pile or the stream. So how do you protect your assets? And you know, if you own a business, there are certain things you can do to protect it. You know, the time that we're in right now has been really challenging for a lot of people. Very, very hard to predict, you know, what, what was going on. But if you had a pile from before, then you can weather the storm. And that's part of planning. But what you want to be thinking about is how do I protect my downside If I'm investing in the stock market or real estate, you know, either my own real estate or my rental properties. How do I protect my business as much as possible? So you have to think about protection mechanisms as well. One of the best ways to protect, okay, is to have a big enough pile and a stream and multiple streams of income. So when we talk about financial freedom, Protecting my financial freedom as you're building. Okay, your financial freedom plan, you have to diversify. So you can't, as the proverbial line said, you can't put all your eggs in one basket. So if something happens to this basket of eggs, you have this one or this one or this one. So this is why you want to have pile and streams in a variety of diversifications. So now we've got earning, managing, investing, protecting. And now here is the next one. And Cesar, thank you. I just read what you said. You've been reading my book Inner Size, and all you can say is wow. Thank you. I'm glad you like the videos as well. Thank you, Cesar. So now let's talk about something that a lot of people don't like to talk about. Debt. Debt, debt, debt, debt, debt. It's a pillar of our lives. We have credit cards to borrow money to buy stuff and to pay at the end of the month. Hopefully we can get bank loans. There's debt. Now here's where most people get into problems. If they don't do number one and number two properly, earn more than they spend and manage what they have, they accumulate debt. Now here's the problem with bad debt. There's good debt and bad debt, okay? Bad debt. So bad debt is when you can't pay off your credit cards. And now you're paying, you know, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20% interest on balances, but you're not just paying 20% interest on balances. Let's say you owe $1,000 at 20% after the first month, you owe $1,200. But the second month, you're now paying 20% on $1,200. So the interest starts to accumulate way too fast. It's called the law of compounding interest. So if you are spending more than you're earning and you're using high credit or high interest debt and you're not paying that down, then you are getting a snowball effect down the hill very, very rapidly. So the five, the fifth tip is you have to get rid of your debt as quickly as possible. Get rid of bad debt. Okay? Bad debt is, you know, 8, 10, 12, 15%, 20% interest. So you have to have a debt reduction strategy. So if you're earning and you're managing, forget about investing and protecting right now. You have to get rid of your debt as quickly as possible so you have excess cash and you don't have the mental and emotional and psychological stress of debt. Okay? So you don't want the emotional, mental Psychological stress of debt because then it makes it harder to earn more money because you need those attention units. Now there's good debt. So when you can, let's say, borrow money at 0 or 1 or 2 or 3% as loans are available right now and you can invest that. Back to strategy three. Now you can create leverage where you're investing at 3% or you're borrowing at 3% and then you can make the difference. Now I want to leave you with just one thought. There is a huge problem. People's understanding the difference between investing, speculating and gambling. Huge difference. Investors make decisions based on logic and skill and understanding patterns. Speculators are a combination of between gamblers and investors. They're speculating based on some facts. Gamblers hope and pray that my friend's business is going to skyrocket. I'm going to become a millionaire. Friends or people invest in a stock that they read about in the newspaper or the bus driver told them they should invest in because it's gone up 20% this week. Stop being a gambler with your money. Stop gambling. Okay. Speculate only if you know the rules and invest for the long term instead of the short term. Okay. So how was today's session? Those are some powerful things. Five plus tips on how you can become financially free. If you don't want to do it, stop just hoping and praying that somehow it's going to happen. That's bullshit. It's just a. It's just going to frustrate you. You'll never achieve it. And if you're hoping that you're going to win the lottery, then just use the damn lottery and don't do anything else. But this is what it takes if you really want financial freedom. You know, stop the bullshit thinking and ideas and, and you know, my. The drug of choice is Hopium, right? And so there's your five tips. Enjoy it. Quick, powerful. Every Tuesday right here on this station. All right, join me next Tuesday. By the way, there's a, an event I'm doing on Thursday around like Winning the Game of Money. I'm going to go deeper into some of this stuff. My team will put up some links for you guys to take a look at if you want to join me. I do these free events as well and I show people some of our programs on how to really achieve the success that they want to achieve. So have a great day. Share this. Hit the like button. Hit the love button. Share it if you can on your social media. I want to help you achieve your goals and dreams. Faster and easier than ever before. Are you committed? Are you willing to do the work? Okay. Have an awesome day. I appreciate you. I'll give you a high five. High five. Peace out. Be healthy, be wise.