5 Ways to Systematically Increase Your Net Worth... Despite the Economic Shift

Welcome to Real Estate Business Builders. I'm your host, Lars Hedenborg, the founder of Real Estate B School. Bottom line, the real estate industry has failed to create a clear path to financial freedom. Traditional brokerages and coaching are designed to keep you running on the transaction treadmill with no exit strategy. While I didn't have any sales, marketing or business building experience when I got into real estate, I was willing to bet on myself and figure it out because my family was depending. Having served over 5,000 families with their real estate needs, I've made every mistake you could possibly make in this business. Through Real Estate B School, I've helped hundreds of agents and team leaders realize their goal of true time and money, freedom and living a life without regrets. If you know there's another level of growth inside of you and you want to learn how to build a highly lucrative lifestyle business, then you're in the right place. You won't find any fluff or hype here on this show. Just real world tools, systems and strategies that work. Let's grow together.

What's up, Real Estate Business Builders? Another edition of the podcast. Today we're going to talk about how do you actually go about systematically increasing your net worth? If you've been listening to the podcast for any length of time, you know that my passion is helping agents build businesses that give them levels of freedom that most agents will never have. So that's a combination of money freedom, time freedom, potentially location freedom, and definitely freedom from the stress levels that most top agents and team leaders endure in this business. So let's get after it. The, the big thing I'm after here is to help you achieve financial freedom. So financial freedom mastery. If you are not in the free Facebook group Real Estate Business Builders, I did a deep dive training on this topic and I gave away our net worth tracker. So one of the things, and I know it's a spreadsheet, I know some of you are like, I am not a spreadsheet person, I get it. But this thing will help you with this journey of systematically increasing your net worth. I do want you to have something to show for all the hours and the blood and guts you pour into your real estate business. So the guiding question I have for you as we consider this topic of increasing your net worth, you know, the question is, are you consistently tracking it? You know, what is measured and reported expands exponentially. That's some Carl Pearson, some 1850 British mathematician said that. And so this is something that you have to get after. You have to be consistent with it at Least monthly. I do it weekly. And so you'd have to track your net worth. And so there's this quote by Jim Rohn that I really love as it relates to this journey of financial freedom and independence. Jim Rohn says, set a goal to become a millionaire for what it makes of you to achieve it. Do it for the skills you have to learn and the person you have to become. And I really think that is awesome and, and super appropriate as it relates to the often elusive pursuit of money for real estate agents. So why does this topic matter? Right. Most of you that are achieving in real estate at a high level have a heart for people. I just want to help buyers and sellers. You know, I'm not worried about me. The money will work out in the end. But is that true?

Right.

I think the point of a business is to earn the owner a rate of return and to throw off cash, an unreasonable amount of cash that makes all of it worth it. Yes, you can have a heart for people. Yes, you can do all the good things that come along with being in this business. But the point of a business is to earn you a rate of return that allows for you to one day gracefully exit the industry. And most agents are building businesses or they're doing their business in a way. This is not a business training podcast episode. I'm not going to pick on, you know that so much, but you're building businesses that it's really not worth it. The sacrifices are not worth it. And while net worth and your financial dial is, it's only one measure of success, but it is a key metric that you have to take, take an interest in or. Or else you may just have nothing to show for. The industry we play in is driven by big egos, Right? There's the expression, you know, all hat, no cattle. There are a lot of agents out there, successful, quote, unquote agents, driving the nice cars, you know, showcasing themself online in a way that you would think they have it all together. You would think they're financially free and their bank accounts are overflowing with cash. I have looked at enough businesses to let you know that that's not the case. You know, we've helped over a thousand agents, top agents and team leaders, and I probably personally talked with over a thousand folks, you know, before they enter into our world real estate B school to know that, you know, it's not what it seems. Nobody is really out there talking about the truth of what it looks like to be in this business.

Right?

And nobody really talks about you know, not even in, just in real estate, but generally in our society, people aren't talking about what their financial situations are. And it's, you know, if you're doing well, you know, sometimes there's this feeling like you don't want to let people know you're doing well because it's like sort of braggadocious. And if you're not doing well, there's just shame that comes along with it.

Right?

So it's just not a topic that is talked about enough. And all the stats, you know, if you follow any, like a Dave Ramsey or any of the guys that are sort of entrenched in this helping folks succeed, you know, from a personal finance perspective, you'll know that it's some crazy statistic like 67% of Americans can't account for, you know, for a single thousand dollars emergency, meaning they can't like write a check for a thousand dollars if they had to. And that's a sad statistic. And that's something that I do not want for you, let alone, you know, anyone, but especially if you're giving your life to real estate. So let's dig into what you really should know about this topic. There's six things I want to talk about, and then there's another six sort of action items in terms of how you get there. But what you should know is that when it comes to dramatically, drastically, I mean, adding a zero to your net worth as the economy man goes to who the heck knows what is going to happen in the global economy and how it's going to in our national economy and how it's going to trickle into real estate or your personal economy. It's going to be fun to watch, I will tell you that much. But number one, in terms of what you should know to dramatically increase your net worth and add a zero or two during these crazy times, is that you have to find your leverage, emotional leverage. So you need to get up every day with something in your belly that drives you, something that's worth fighting for. For me, back in the early days of getting into real estate, I left a very cozy corporate job to get into real estate. And my leverage was my young family. You know, I was only married for November 2007. Anders was born. I was married in October 2006. So I was married for like a year. And we had our first child. I was figuring out how to be a husband. I was, you know, had this new person that came into the world and I had to figure some things out. I didn't want to let them down. I had a jacked up childhood myself and I really wanted to do it right. So I found that leverage when our baby girl, our spirited, beautiful baby girl Kendall was born in April 2010. That was the year we did 118 transactions, but I did 66 of them. So I was managing three or four agents, building a business quote, unquote. But I was losing my mind. I was doing a ton of production myself. So it was that leverage. And I remember a picture, I printed out a photo and framed it. And that gave me the courage every day to do the things I needed to do to build a business in a certain way. So that's number one, find your leverage. Number two is that you have to build it right. You have to build it right. If you haven't seen the visual of this, this is the visual I've shared in my free Facebook group and on YouTube. And you probably have to go over to one of those, one of those channels to see this. But your business is just a system of system and it's a funnel, right top of funnel. We have leads and then we have, you know, a handful of things that happen in between the lead and them being a like raving fan lunatic of your services. But you've got to build that thing the right way so that it becomes a money machine. And B school, we talk about drivers and accelerators and all the swipe and deploy systems and you know, our business planning System and our three 193 year vision, one year plan, 90 Day World, all of that good stuff, right? But you've got to build this thing the right way so that it can flow, it can throw off cash systematically and that's the game you want to play. Number three is that you have to take profit first. There's literally a book called Profit first by Mike Michalowicz. I had the honor of interviewing Mike on the podcast and, and I met him at a high level mastermind. And his mission, his life is to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty. He has found not just in the real estate vertical, but in every vertical, that business owners are poor, they're just impoverished because they don't know how to take profit first. You have to dictate and demand profit from your business. So I'm not going to go too deep into that. I think you should definitely look at that. Resource number four is that you have to track your progress. This goes back to grabbing a free copy of the Net Worth tracker. Go to real estate business builders Facebook group, find the deep dive training called Financial Freedom, mastery and type. Financial freedom. Yeah, I think you can, yeah, you can find it on YouTube as well. But I want you guys to get a copy of that because you have to track your progress at least monthly. Number five is have no shame. It doesn't matter where you're starting this journey. Oftentimes when you're not where you want to be financially, there's shame that comes with it. And you're afraid of what it might look like to spread your net worth into, you know, put your net worth into a, into a spreadsheet. But once you, once you do that and you just deal with the reality of where you are, you can move forward from that. The last thing I'll say here, and I'm not a fan of everything Dave Ramsey says, I actually have a counter investment strategy to what he recommends. But when it comes to getting yourself, getting the ship pointed in the right direction with your finances, you need to get a makeover. He wrote a book called Total Money Makeover. We actually did that. It was like a seven session training program that you could do. You could bring in a facilitator for Total Money Maker. We did that as a real estate team and it was really profound. That's where I learned a lot of this. Stats that were just surprising about how folks are not in the game of building wealth as a country. We're just, we're just missing out. So you may have to do some drastic things in terms of a total money makeover, but you know, the worst financial situations can be dug out of in, you know, a couple, three years. And if you're not where you want to be financially, you need to consider that. So the question I have for you is sort of midpoint here and I've just got a handful of six, six points left here that I want to cover. If you're being completely honest with yourself, what needs to happen to turn around this area of your life? If you're not where you want to be financially, what has to happen for you to turn this area, turn your finances around, and just sit with that question for a little while. Are you overspending? Are you not applying enough discipline in the area of real estate new business development on a regular basis? I want you to throw off 30, 40, $50,000 more every month from your real estate business. That's the true passion. But you need to understand this aspect in order to make the most of it and increase your net worth. So let's talk about a few things. How do we get there? Habits make or break us in the book Profit first by Mike Michalowicz, there's an awesome quote. It says, profit is not an event, it's a habit. So you've got to track your net worth monthly and you've got to implement some sort of way of moving cash around in your business, like profit first. Number two is ask yourself, what do you want? Where do you want to be in the future when it comes to your finances?

Right?

Have you even defined. That's point. Number three. Have you even defined what financial freedom looks like for you? Number four is know the score.

Right?

We talked about it a second ago. You've got to be able to know where you're at financially all the time. Like I said, I do this weekly. Number five, you need to schedule it every Monday. First thing I do is I run my net worth and I run my P and L for my multiple businesses. My cash flow statements, cash in versus minus cash out, my net cash flow weekly per business and my net worth every week.

Right?

So it's scheduled. And number six is you need to stay focused. Like the quote, profit is not an event, it's a habit. Building wealth is not an event, it's a habit.

Right?

Saving money over time. Tony Robbins in Wealth Mastery, I spent 10 or 11 days doing wealth and Life Mastery in Fiji. And he defined financial freedom as spending less than you make, investing the difference until you get to a critical mass of investment capital so that you can live off the interest income. So essentially turning your business into a money machine, taking that money and investing it until that money gives enough cash flow or interest income so that you don't have to do real estate anymore. And I do other trainings on that, but that, that's the essence of what? Financial freedom. The definition of financial freedom. So get into that free Facebook group or onto my YouTube channel. Grab a copy of the Net Worth Tracker. You guys know I'm here for you. If you want to do a deep dive into your business, go to Rebs Growth assessment dot com. That's Rebs Growth assessment dot com. Let's do the work and we'll talk to you on the next podcast.

Thanks for listening. Would you please take a minute to share the show with other agents who may be struggling? And if you love the podcast, please leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. And make sure you visit ScaleOrDiebook.com to get a free copy of my book. It's a nuts and bolts guide to building a real estate business that gives you true time and money, freedom, so that you can live your life without remaining regrets. Thanks again and see you on the next episode.