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Searching For Financial Freedom? – Look No Further!

One of the most popular search engine topics on the Internet today is "financial freedom" or "financial independence".

It is generally agreed among financial consultants and financial planners that the only way to gain true financial freedom is to create multiple sources of passive, residual income.

This is income that you earn by doing work one time but it keeps on paying you over and over again, for the rest of your life, WITHOUT you having to do any more of the work that originally produced it.

Let's do a quick comparison of the difference between traditional income creation and passive residual income.

TRADITIONAL WAY OF CREATING MORE INCOME #1:
Get a Second Job Or A Better Job

In this scenario your employer decides your pay and when, if, and how much it will increase. You have limited income potential; namely, you get paid once for the work you do. If you stop working the income stops as well.

THE PASSIVE RESIDUAL INCOME WAY

You are your own boss and you decide your when and how much your pay will increase. You have unlimited potential for making money precisely because you get paid over and over for work you perform one time. If you stop working or take some time off you still get paid.

TRADITIONAL WAY OF CREATING MORE INCOME #2:
Go Back To College Or Get More Training

In this strategy to increase your income you are guaranteed a diploma when you graduate (generally in 2-4 years) assuming you attend the required classes and do the required work. However, you'll pay up to $200,000 in tuition costs and you'll basically make no money while you're in school.

THE PASSIVE RESIDUAL INCOME WAY

Your guarantee is that you'll make money while you learn, receiving on-the-job "real life" training. You'll pay less than $1000 to get started. This is your initial investment which you'll earn back quickly. You'll "graduate" in one to four years with residual income already flowing.

TRADITIONAL WAY OF CREATING MORE INCOME #3:
Open A Franchise Or Some Other "Brick And Mortar" Business

In this income generation scenario you'll have to invest between $50,000 to $200,000+ upfront. You'll have to buy capital equipment and hire and manage employees.

Your income potential is limited, generally $75,000 per year AFTER the third year. You'll have hefty franchise fees to pay along with long-term leases for real estate and equipment.

It will likely take you 3-5 years to break even. Basically the business owns you!

THE PASSIVE RESIDUAL INCOME WAY

Here there are no employees to mange or pay. There is no initial capital investment (other than your nominal start up fees which are usually less than $1000).

You have unlimited income generation potential - up to $1,000,000 in the first three years. You have no franchise fees. You work from home, so there are no additional real estate fees.

You make back your initial investment and start getting paid immediately. You have total time freedom so you can work when (and if!) you want.

While this is not an exhaustive comparison, it does provide a "bold relief" picture of why getting involved in passive residual income ventures is the key and ONLY pathway to financial freedom or financial independence.

Is Now The Time For You To Get On The Pathway To Financial Freedom?

The face of an analog clock provides a great lesson in building Multiple Sources of Passive Residual Income. This is the money that leads you to financial freedom.

Look at the face of a clock and let's assume that each minute represents 15 months of your life. The full 60 minutes would be a life of 75 years. At about 16 minutes you begin your career. If you work till retirement age, around 65 years old, 52 minutes have past.

Generally the most productive years of our life occur between 16 minutes and 50 minutes, give or take some seconds. We get a job. We work hard for a raise. We may get promoted. Possibly our company must downsize so we have to find a new a different job.

Then it all starts again: the raise, promotion, a possible relocation, and another possible lay off due an economic downturn. All this time we are hoping against hope to retire with something to show for it all. We do this for 36 minutes of our 60 minute life.

Creating Multiple Sources of Passive Residual Income allows you to in 3 minutes + 20 seconds what you couldn't accomplish in all 36 minutes of hard work! When you have a job, your money stops when you stop working.

When you have Multiple Sources of Passive Residual Income you work ONLY if and when you want to and money continues to flow into your bank account no matter what.

3 minutes + 20 seconds = 4 years! Here's the beauty of this – a consistent 4 year commitment to creating Multiple Streams of Passive Residual Income will give you financial freedom for the rest of your life.

After working to create this kind of income for 3 minutes + 20 seconds, you can enjoy the next 10, 15 ,or 30 minutes of your life (or more!) doing what you want to do, where you want to do it, and with whomsoever you please.

Strategies To Create Financial Freedom (Strategy #1)

STRATEGY 1: Create Multiple Points Of Distribution & Sales

If you are the only one selling and distributing your product or service, just like in a job, when you stop selling so does your income. Selling is "linear income"; namely, you do work once and get paid once for the work you've done. Now yes, I do admit that selling can provide you with a very nice income, but it stops when you stop selling!

When you create Multiple Sources of Passive Residual Income you have "walk away" income. In order to do this you've got to create multiple points of sales. Rather than trying to get as many sales as possible you should focus on getting many people making a few sales each.
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EXAMPLE: Owning a Vending Machine
(*adapted from Jordan Adler's book "Beach Money.")

Let's say I sell you a vending machine for a $1000. The machine dispenses candy bars, nuts, and potato chips for $1.00 each. Every time some buys an item from the vending machine you make ten cents. Then let's also say that I will keep the machine stocked with candy, nuts, and chips and I'll also include life-time maintenance on the machine. So is this sounding good to you?

I'll collect all the money from the purchases, count the money, provide you with a monthly accounting, and send you a check for your earnings. But that's not all.

I will also give you unlimited opportunity to collect this ten cents fee on multiple vending machines in multiple locations. All you have to do is get me as many locations as possible to place vending machines.

Each time someone makes a purchase at one of these machines you get ten cents. How's it sounding now? What if you had 1000 machines, or even 4000 machine all over the country?

Obviously your goal in this strategy is to have as many vending machines as possible in as many locations. You only have to buy one machine yourself. You have no product to buy, no maintenance costs, no accounting hassles – I do all that for you.
Your main job is to find other people who want to own a vending machine then you teach them how to do exactly what you're doing.

For this strategy to work you must focus on the distribution of the machines – NOT selling candy bars, nuts, and potato chips! As your network of machines and machine distributors grows, you get a percentage of the ten cents commission from each and every sale throughout your entire network.

This would give you some serious passive residual income (a.k.a. "non-linear income")! This same strategy of creating multiple distribution and sales points is how any direct sales business works.

The more distribution points you can set up for selling a give product or service the more money is made. Once it's all set up do you know what you have to do keep getting paid? NOTHING!
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If you're good at sales that's great, but it won't give you the "walk away" money I was talking about earlier.

Do You Have "Multiple Sources Of Income" Flowing Into Your Bank Account?

Copyright © David Lazear

There's a well-known cliche that says “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” This is what is behind the concept of "Multiple Sources of Income". It is key to creating more wealth in your life.

Why are multiple sources or multiple streams of income important?

Most people have just one income source – their job. However, if you have only one source of income and that source dries up, you'll be in trouble. This has been dramatically demonstrated over the last year as the unemployment rate in the United States has soared to 10% and higher!

When you have multiple sources of income, you are assured that if one source of revenue stops producing profits for you, you still have money flowing into your bank account from other sources. Diversification is very important.

For example, lets say that in addition your regular job you have an online business that sells different products. At the same time you could own a couple of rental properties and be invested in the stock market. When you diversify your investments, if something fails you still have other streams of income.

The idea is not to jump from one thing to another to another and never settle down on anything. The idea is to work hard on one thing and, once it is generating profits for you, move on and get into a creating another income stream without neglecting the first stream.

So here's the formula: set up a stream of income, place it on autopilot, and let it produce profits for you while you are setting up another stream. If you repeat this process several times you'll eventually become financially free!

This is one of the true keys to wealth. Many people become rich not by doing something huge, but by doing many small things that work.

How To Change Your Financial Blueprint

Many successful people today are finding tons of ways to pursue their financial freedom while helping a lot of people. While these stories are indeed inspiring, most see it as impossible or out of their reach.

In order to achieving financial freedom or financial independence it is very important to change that mindset.

Napoleon Hill's ground-breaking book Think and Grow Rich is all about what we can do to change that mindset. Although it was written more than 70 years ago, it still communicates the same message known by every successful person – achieving financial freedom is an endless task of evaluating our thinking and making necessary shifts in our thinking.

Think and Grow Rich argues that whatever your mind can conceive and believe it can achieve. Napoleon Hill interviewed 500 of the wealthiest men in America during his time, including such people as Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, Elmer Gates, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and many more.

In some ways, Hill's book is a summation of the thoughts of these great men. At the core of their thinking was "...whatever your mind can conceive and believe it can achieve."

Background of Think and Grow Rich

Think and Grow Rich was "brain child" of the famous Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie was Swedish immigrant who move from poverty to great wealth. In fact, he was one of the wealthiest men of his day. Andrew Carnegie saw the need for communicating the "how to's" of money making.

Carnegie convinced Napoleon Hill to undertake the ambitious project. Today, the book has sold over 7 million books and is the main source of inspiration for highly successful people, 70 years after it was written!

It outlines 13 steps to achieve financial freedom. Napoleon Hill first talks about desire as the starting point of all achievement.

Desire is not a wish or a wild dream. Desire involves passion, which allows one to focus on their goal at all costs. For example, Thomas Edison had the desire or passion to invent. This controlled every aspect of his life and thinking. It allowed him to to become what he was. In short, desire is raging fire, all-consuming in your being, not just a silly figment of imagination.

Second, Napoleon Hill talks about faith or the belief that one's desire can be attained. Faith allows us to be continually focused on our desire because we know without a doubt that we can achieve what we desire in the future.

Faith and desire are therefore indispensible factors in achieving financial freedom.

A Step by Step Approach to Changing Your Mindset

While there are thirteen very helpful steps to achieve wealth creation, Napoleon Hill also outlines the process of our mind. He discusses the art of decision making and the mastery of procrastination.

Procrastination and our ability to make decisions go hand in hand. Most people tend to postpone making decisions because they lack a sense of judgment, or they do not like risk taking.

Napoleon Hill states that successful people tend to act quickly and decide often. Therefore procrastination is not a matter of "taking time to think things over" but rather a mistaken understanding of the decision making process itself.

Hill suggests that our practice should be to decide quickly and decide (or re-decide!) often. Take action quickly and make decisions quickly, then change those decisions and actions when necessary.

Think and Grow Rich is definitely a must read for people who do not understand the relationship between thoughts and wealth. While most people mistakenly believe their status quo is their plight and the way it must be, the truth is that this thinking puts them at the bottom of the "financial food-chain".

Taking steps to financial freedom starts with what goes on between your ears – namely, your thinking! Think and Grow Rich will help you change your values and see the world in a different light.

10 Impeding Beliefs That Prevent You From Getting Rich

Copyright © David Lazear 
At one point in your life, you may ask yourself why other people are so successful with money when you're not. Depending on how closely you look, you will have several answers.

Do these sound familiar?

- They are just luckier than I am.

- They have a better education than I do.

- They were born into a rich family.

- They are white and have better opportunities than I do.

- They already had money to start a business.

- They already had money to invest in real estate.

- They are smarter than I am.

- They are younger than I am.

- They look better than I do.

- They probably work harder than I do.

The list probably continues to fill several pages. Money is the topic that generates the most beliefs, followed by the topic of relationships. I once led a seminar where we investigated peoples' beliefs about money. After only 30 minutes we came up with 3 full pages!

Beliefs Are A Blueprint of Your Reality

You may not know this yet, but your beliefs are the blueprint of your reality. If you knew that, would you deliberately create one from the list above? Probably not, because these beliefs are not supportive at all. These beliefs create a reality that leaves you "playing the victim", and on top of it, keeps you right where you are. You are not improving your life one bit.

Why are we creating these beliefs in the first place, when we know that they are not constructive at all? The answer lies in the nature of our consciousness. Most of us were told that there is a universe out there and this universe shapes our reality.

It is the basic belief that life happens to us. Most of us get these beliefs confirmed several times per day. The result is that our consciousness gets imprinted each day with the same message. The message with the same old belief.

Meanwhile, as adults, we are not even aware that our life as it happens is built around a belief. It becomes a profound reality that we prove to ourselves in each moment.

So how do we get out of this dilemma? We need to take a step back and look at our beliefs. Take a piece of paper and a pencil and write down all the beliefs you have about money. Don't think too much, be spontaneous. When you have run out of your own beliefs, think about what other people's beliefs are about money.

Then mark each belief with an "I" or an "S" depending if the belief is impeding or supportive. Impeding beliefs do not support creating wealth, supportive beliefs do.

Now, look at your list and count each supportive and impeding belief. What is your score? How many impeding beliefs do you have, and how many supportive beliefs do you have?

Imprinting New Beliefs

Realize that all the impeding beliefs do not support the creation of fortune. Now, take a new piece of paper, and brainstorm beliefs that will exactly create the wealth you would like to have.

When you are done with the list, go over each of your new beliefs and create a mental image. Hold this mental image for at least 10-20 seconds. You may need some practice, but every time you do it, you will get better with it. Do this exercise in a quiet, calm, and relaxed environment, as this will help to imprint these beliefs into your consciousness.

Remember, beliefs are the blueprint of what will manifest in your life.

With a little training, you will be able to move on to the next stage, which is feeling your beliefs. Feel as if these new beliefs, that foster what you really want to create, have actually been manifested.

- How does it feel to be a millionaire?

- How does it feel to have abundance in your life?

- How does it feel to have more money than you can spend?

- How does it feel to give to others?

- How does it feel to buy without having to look at the price?

Whenever you catch yourself thinking or speaking an impeding belief about money, stop what you are doing. Go back to the place in your mind where you recall one of your deliberately created beliefs about money, and connect with it.

The more you do this, the more you will train your mind to think in a new way. A way that leads to being rich.