When we’re young, we trade our health for money. We work long hours. We lift heavy things and wear down our tendons. We spend hours typing or doing other repetitive motions that cause carpal tunnel syndrome. We spend hours on our feet and wear down the disks in our backs and develop heel spurs.
We trade this wonderful gift we’ve been given, the ability to keep pushing it for may hours, to bounce back when we fall down and heal fast when we get cut, for cash by working way too many hours. We go in before dawn and leave after dark, never getting out to see the sun and the woods and the oceans. We work hard to go on a vacation, which is then rushed and filled with work thoughts and emails back to the office the whole time. We buy large, beautiful homes that we spend all of our free time maintaining and cleaning. We buy things on credit and then spend a quarter to half of our time working to pay interest payments.
While we’re young we can make extra money by just pushing it a little harder. We can make that car payment if we work overtime on weekends so that we can drive that shiny new car to work and have it sit in the parking lot all day, slowly decaying away. We can take on that second job and get all of the cable packages and five different web streaming services. We can keep buying clothes to impress people we don’t like and buying all of the latest gadgets to look good for people we don’t even know.
When we get old, we trade our money for health. Any money we’ve saved up through those long hours of work goes to treatments, surgeries, and drugs to reduce the pain our weary bodies feel. We spend money to try to have the ability to walk and run and jump and heal like we did so easily while we were young. We get surgeries to be able to walk after long hours of carrying heavy loads have destroyed our knees. We buy prescriptions to lower our blood pressure after years of sitting idle at a desk, eating poorly, and letting our health decay.
Stop. Stop today. Stop right this minute and change your life.
Become an owner instead of a worker. Instead of getting that new car, drive your old one for a few more years and send those car payments you would have made into a stock mutual fund. Buy a smaller house for cash and invest the money you save on interest. Stop buying things to impress people and just buy what you need so that you can spend time with your family who don’t care what the label on your blouse or jeans says.
Start building a portfolio so that you will be getting dividend payments and capital gains instead of paying interest payments and penalties. Let others work for you so that you don’t need to work those extra hours. Expand your lifestyle by waiting a little while to buy things, instead investing the money in mutual funds, then using the distributions from those mutual funds to add to your income.
Everybody can become an owner. You can start a mutual fund account with Schwab for only $1. You can start investing through Vanguard funds for only $3,000 ($1,000 if you start a retirement account). Start an account and start sending a little of your paycheck in each month to build your wealth. Own things. Build things. Stop just using all of your effort to generate entropy. Stop having your money flow into your back account through direct deposit and then back out again to bills through auto pay without you even seeing it.
The next SmallIvy book, Cash Flow Your Way to Wealth, will be coming out in about a month. It gives the game plan to go from worker to owner. Subscribe to this blog to make sure you get your copy when the time comes and don’t miss out.
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Disclaimer: This blog is not meant to give financial planning or tax advice. It gives general information on investment strategy, picking stocks, and generally managing money to build wealth. It is not a solicitation to buy or sell stocks or any security. Financial planning advice should be sought from a certified financial planner, which the author is not. Tax advice should be sought from a CPA. All investments involve risk and the reader as urged to consider risks carefully and seek the advice of experts if needed before investing.
