People with jobs believe that their income is representative of their wealth. The questions they ask are “Who do you work for?”, “How much do you earn?”, or “What car do you drive?” These people fall into the category of “looking good, going nowhere”. They buy stuff to look and feel rich. To sustain their lifestyle, they continually work harder, longer hours and constantly educate themselves to become even more specialized.
A paycheck, no matter how big, cannot be defined as wealth or riches. Most people think that getting a bigger paycheck or salary is making them richer. Nothing can be further from truth. In fact 95 percent of people spend every dollar they earn. By the way, the acronym for job is “Just Over Broke”.
We need “cash flow” to pay our bills, put food on the table, send our kids to school, and sustain any kind of lifestyle. But if your “cash flow” is solely reliant on your paycheck, then you are at grave risk. You can fall ill, have an accident, or lose your job. Ask millions who have lost their jobs in the financial downturn. Having a job severely restricts your cash flow capabilities. You can work for only a certain amount of hours in a day. Your pay check will be limited to the number of hours worked multiplied by your hourly rate.
Your first step to creating wealth comes when your “cash flow” starts coming from passive income rather than your paycheck. In other words, your investments and businesses pay you money whether you get out of bed or not.
You need to create long-term passive income cash flow backed by a solid asset base. Wealth is all about owning assets. However, an asset must have both capital growth and income. Don’t buy property first if you want to become rich, or you will become “asset rich” and “cash poor”. You must first concentrate on generating a rather large passive income.
