What financial freedom means to me

December 6th, 2006 by Bill Perry in Business, Financial Freedom, Network Marketing, Personal Development, business implementation, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship

There are many blogs and websites about “Financial Freedom”. I’ve come to notice that each site/blog author has a slightly different definition of what Financial Freedom really is. So, my goal here is to just lay out in plain sight what my own idea for Financial Freedom is, so I might have a better chance of getting there myself. I once listened to a friend’s copy of the audiobook version of The 21 Success Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires (aff) by Brian Tracy. While highly respect Mr. Tracy for what he’s done in the world of business, I tend to disagree with a few of his pointers. I’ll explain why below.

Now, my friend also had a copy of The Millionaire Course: A Visionary Plan for Creating the Life of Your Dreams by Marc Allen. I find that I am more in alignment with his vision of financial freedom, and here is why:

My idea of Financial Freedom is the ability to choose to do what you wish with your life, without the need to think about if there is enough money to do what you want. In order to break dwn what this REALLY means, you’ve got to really understand what money itself IS.

Money, in a spiritual aspect, is representative of the flow of spirit, via the Law of Circulation.

Money is basically what makes the world go round, as far as sustaining a sort of co-existence of a multitude of different manifestations of spirit.

If you had enough income piling into your bank account to meet your basic necessities, such as food, a place to live and clothes, how would like be different?

Now, you may be saying “but I DO have enough money to provide for the necessities.” And you may be correct. But, the real question I want to ask is, “HOW do you get that money?” Is the income you earn each month Linear (i.e., from working in a job or a self-employed business type setting), or is it non-linear, leveraged, and passive?

I read once somewhere, and I cannot remember where, about a quote that is attributed to Garry Trudeau, the creator of the popular comic strip “Doonesbury”:

My entire goal is to create a lifestyle that does not require my presence.

How beautiful an idea is that?

Now, take this in idea into mind to see why I don’t entirely agree with Brian Tracy on some of his ideas about Financial Freedom. Before I do, however, please let me remind you that Brian Tracy IS a self-made millionaire many times over, so his ideas DO work for him.

Brian Tracy’s approach to Financial Freedom, from my understanding of what he says on the tape, involve arriving at it from the point of awareness of a traditional employee. On the CD set, he tells the story of how, by making himself an indispensible employee and developing a workaholic mentality, he ended up earning more than many people in his company combined. From the employee mindset, this is brilliant.

Marc Allen, however, embraces what he calls the “Lazy” approach to Financial Freedom. Note that by “Lazy”, we do not mean the same thing as sloth. Laziness in Allen’s model of Financial Freedom, means to take whatever creative ideas you have, find out how to turn it into an income-producing business, and building that business up to a point of profitability. By automating your business processes as much as is possible, you have now created a recurring stream of income that will flow, whether or not you wake up by 6am, or even by noon!

The problem that I see from the employment method is that you have to be at work everyday to keep the income flowing long enough to create investments and such that will eventually create the recurring income streams.

So, what different things can you do to create automatically recurring streams of income?

eBay Set up an eBay store which features products from reputable drop-shippers. Drop-shippers are essentially companies which manufacture and ship products on behalf of other companies. Say, you had an eBay store that sold leather-bound widgets. The eBay store can be set up to auto-list the auctions. All the leather-bound widgets are set at a minimum price of $10, which is the cost to have the drop-shipper make and ship them. The auction ends at $19.95 for the widget. The buyer pays you via whatever method you choose. $10 of the $19.95 gets automatically sent, with order and shipping information to the drop-shipper. the Drop-shipper slaps on a logo that you made up, and they have on file, to the widget. The product is shipped out, you have your $9.95 left over. That was easy, right? But remember, the eBay store can be set to auto-list auctions on a recurring basis. So, say that you are running 7-10 auctions for leather-bound widgets at a time. Set it the store so that once an auction ends and finalizes, an identical new auction lists 12-24 hours later. You’ve just set up a system of making $9.95/day or so. That equates to nearly $300 of gross income for YOU, and exactly $300 for the dropshipper. That’s just from widgets, though. What if you also list the latest hot products? The only time you’d really have to invest each week (other than the initial setting up of the system) is to do some cursory product research to find what people are looking for. Neat, huh?
You can also get into Internet Marketing. That is such a huge animal to tackle, that I am going to have a whole other post for it. For now, however, feel free to check out this FREE 33-page mini-course in Niche Marketing (PDF)
Network Marketing This is one of my personal favorites. Network marketing is such a splendidly weird business model. I say weird, because it’s devilishly simple in the basic concept of it. In corporate America, if you try and help someone get ahead, you run the risk of them taking credit and passing you by. In Network Marketing, you actually get REWARDED for taking a new business partner by the hand and showing them the ropes of your particular business. This model works extremely well for Real Estate Brokers who make a little tiny commission off each of their agent’s sales. How would you like to be the person who recruits and sponsors 2 new people each month, and teach them to sponsor 2 people each month? How many people would be in your business team at the end of a year? A few hundred maybe? Nope. Over 8,000! 8,190 to be precise. And, since Network Marketing is built on the concept of getting paid a tiny piece of the commissions generated by each person in your organization, you’ve went from nothing to massive passive income. Of course, as with any other sort of business venture, it’s understood that many of that original 8,190 people will drop out. It’s been shown that only 5% of the population ever set and attain goals. Even 5% of 8,190 is a whopping 409 people. Would you like to get paid on the efforts of 409 people, day in and day out?

Those are only 3 methods of creating residual passive income to help fund your lifestyle. The key is to create the systems such that they do not require constant meddling on your part.

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