For our purposes here, wealth means any money that remains after all obligations and expenses are paid. Typically, the periods we look most closely at are weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually.
What ever you have left after all else is paid – that is your wealth.
The idea is to use it to produce more wealth and to continue reinvesting and using your wealth as leverage to continuously make more with it.
It is important to note – this is NOT what most people do.
Most people spend their wealth on consumer things and that destroys wealth. To get ahead instead of getting by requires a different mindset. A wealthy mindset. Keep in mind as you consider all this – that this too is a choice. Nothing is predetermined.
You can decide to spend your wealth and buy more and more consumer stuff as you may choose – or you may decide to purse an intentional path of wealth building and preservation systematically.
Either way – the choice is yours to make.
Start a Business and Reinvest Your Profits
There are many different ways to go about it all. One of them is to start a small business of some kind either online or offline and get it to making a profit as soon as possible.
As soon as it is making profit – reinvest it. Perhaps you use some of it for marketing and running ads, some for training and some for additional resources (coaching,mentorship and other tools and resources) you need to scale your business. As you make more you reinvest more and continue to grow your business.
If you are fortunate and get any additional money from any source – then use it as leverage and to your advantage.
Again – that not what people most often do.
Case in point – I once knew a person who hated their job so bad they were often in tears. Then one day a relative passed away and left this person more than $30,000 – about a years worth of their then current annual salary.
That was this persons wealth.
What do you think was done with it?
Instead of using it to start a part-time side business that could eventually result in independence – or simply using it to buy a years time to find a better job or start a business (or both) it was used to splurge for a nice vacation. The vacation was nice – and it was also over quickly – and poof! just like that the unexpected windfall of $30,000 was gone.
Then right back to work – once more – at the very job this person hated dearly.
Another example was a truck driver I trained and coached over more than a years time. During this time he was enrolled in an Independent Contractor Program that I developed and he was given the opportunity to buy a truck, have it paid for with a clear title at the end of the program, and have one whole year of coaching and mentoring to help make sure he would have all the knowledge and information he would need to then take control and run his own trucking business successfully as an owner operator.
At that time he would be able to choose – stay with the company and lease on (contract his services to the company) or get his own authority and form a separate motor carrier business (trucking company) of his own. Even then – he would still have the option to get some of his freight from the brokerage I represented (also owned by the parent trucking company where we set up his ICA program).
So he had choices and opportunities.
He did successfully complete the entire program and all the training. He was doing great, and by all accounts seemed to be a shining example of how to do it right. We signed over the title to the truck when he completed the program – and he owned his own truck paid for free and clear. He had all the training and access to additional information as he needed it.
All he had to do was stay on course and keep doing what he was doing which is what he had been trained to do. One of those things was to always manage his finances and maintain an emergency reserve fund. Things break on big trucks – that’s part of trucking and it is a known thing that will happen. That is why you must absolutely maintain an emergency reserve fund at all times – and if you do then when something breaks it is a minor inconvenience and an annoyance, and nothing more. Yet if you do not – then you will not have the money to get it fixed – and that will destroy your business.
I will spare you the rest of a long story and get to the point – which is he decided to not follow what he was taught and he started pulling all the money out of his emergency reserve account and his operations account —– to buy Christmas presents for the grand kids, adult kids, friends, family members, neighbors and others – all to “show off” how successful he and his wife were as trucking business owners.
He drained his accounts dry.
As you can guess it wasn’t long before he had a breakdown and needed the money that had been in his emergency reserve account – which was now long gone. So he did not have the funds to keep his business going as a result and couldn’t make repairs to his truck. He sold it and went back to working a company job. What a shame.
Others with the same opportunities and training went on to build and run successful trucking businesses because they reinvested their wealth – they managed their finances and they focused on the fundamentals they had learned.
Same opportunities. Same circumstances – yet totally different results.
Some of the greatest companies in the country (and the world ) were started by one person with little more than an idea and burning desire – and a heck of a lot of determination. By continuously reinvested and leveraging their wealth they were able to build their own business empires over time.
Look into the histories of Walmart, McDonalds, Werner, Swift, JB Hunt, Schneider, Berkshire Hathaway, and many, many others – and you will see humble beginnings for what are now massive and successful Business Empires.
Look even harder and you will see in their wake the tattered remnants and wreckage of many others who tried and failed because they did not follow sound basic procedures effectively.
Learn from them all.
Emulate and model the successes – and avoid repeating the things the failures did so that you can prosper over time on a continuous basis.
Preserve the Wealth You Build
There will be many threats. Some external. Some of your own making if you are not careful. As you grow and as you get bigger you may need formal legal entities (LLC, Corp, S-Corp etc.) and you may need and want various types on insurance too.
There are also investments – such as real estate that will help preserve and protect your wealth.
There are tax strategies you can use which will allow you to write off more things than you can imagine – if you know how. Pay what you must legally pay – and not a dollar more. There is nothing honorable or noble about paying excess taxes. If you want to be honorable and noble then keep your money and YOU decide who to give it to as charity, but you should be the one who decides who will get it.
Keep in mind your estate.
While nobody wants to think of these things it is imperative you think about it NOW while you still have plenty of time. There are living trusts and other legal instruments and ways to set up your holdings so that when the time comes your heirs will get your estate and more of it. On the other hand – if you do not – it will be a messy and expensive affair for all involved.
So what do YOU think?
Do you already know all of this stuff or is it something new for you to think more about?
Do you have your own Wealth Building and Preservation goals and plans in place already – or is it something you still need to do?