Category — Achieving Goals

Over the past few years I have built up a pretty sizeable email list and at times I have made decent money from this list. When I ran the full time blog SmarterWealth.net I could easily make $100 per product review because of the size of my list.

I run my list through Aweber, which is an email marketing tool, and Aweber allows you to send out automatic emails to my subscribers. So when someone signs up for my list (for example by using the form in the sidebar of this blog) then emails are sent out to them automatically.

Recently I updated my series of emails and I wrote about 20 emails that taught people basic concepts about wealth and thinking the way rich people think. But I wasn’t making any money from any of my emails. Then the other day I realised why:

I didn’t mention any products or have any advertising in any of my emails. No mention of products = no sales = no commissions. How dumb have I been. My list has been growing, and all the while I have been getting poorer because I haven’t been making any money from my life.

Starting Afresh and Making Some Money
So I have decide to start changing my emails one at a time. Whenever I want to start something new I always want to delete everything that is old and just write everything completely new.

But at the moment with family/work/freelance writing/everything else I don’t exactly have the time to delete and rewrite 20 emails in one day (or even one week). My other emails aren’t bad, they just don’t serve their purpose. So over the next few months I will be replacing them one by one with teaching emails.

These emails will be helpful but they will also mention products that will help people to achieve their financial goals. I won’t be spamming people, all of the products I market will be helping people to achieve their financial goals for a fraction of the price of say a mutual fund manager or a stock broker.

Why I Think This Has Clout Over All The Other Ideas In My Brain
As an entrepreneur I have many ideas rattling around in my brain, so why is this idea worth writing a blog post about?

I guess what makes this idea so good is that it can generate me a passive income. I can and am already making money online through freelance writing and writing sales copy, I don’t need another source of income that will make more work for me. My email list is already there, and it is already growing on autopilot, so I may as well take advantage of that fact.

Also, because emails can be sent out automatically, this has the potential to generate me passive income through affiliate sales and sales of my own products. This means I will be able to make money without having to work and I can then drop back on my working hours and spend more time with my family.

My Retirement Fund
I like to think of my email subscriber list as my retirement fund. Over time I am growing it by putting a little bit of time and effort into it here and there but mostly I am letting it grow on it’s own. Eventually it will earn enough money to pay for my lifestyle and I will be able to officially retire.

Making This Massive
Once these emails are written (the ones that market products) I can then begin to work out my average cost per subscriber. So if I get 100 new subscribers and make $100 from them then each subscriber is worth $1.

Once I have worked out my cost per subscriber I can then kick things into high gear and as long as I am not spending more than $1 to get a new subscriber I am either breaking even or making a profit. So I can start spending money to grow my list and make more money…this will be when my retirement fund really starts working for me.

Do You Have A Retirement Fund?
No I am not talking about a traditionally retirement fund, I am talking about one that can generate your passive income NOW so that you can quit or cut back on work and still live the life you are living (and afford to live it). My retirement fund is growing and it is costing me ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to grow it. My return on investment is infinity because it doesn’t cost me anything.

If you want to grow your retirement fund like me then I have the deal for you. You can sign up for Aweber for just $1 for the first month. You can try this out for JUST $1!!! What do you have to lose? Start building a retirement fund (aka an email subscriber list) so you can retire early like I will.

I was at work today (at the chemist) and some how we got talking about high school and the marks we got. In my final year I got a UAI of 94.65, which is very good (it means I’m smart) and the girls at work were saying I could do anything.

Trying to sound the least amount of cocky possible I know that I am very smart. If I wanted to I could do physics, psychology, pharmacy, Scientology, or any other kind of ology that needs a big brain and a fancy degree. But my response to the girls was that I am already doing what I want to be doing.

At heart I am a family man through and through. Instead of using my smarts (at this point in time) to get a degree and make a lot of money I am using my smarts to do exactly what I want to do, that is, starting a family.

Also, on the money side of things, I am using my smarts as an entrepreneur. I really enjoy starting businesses. Sure, I am not amazing at it yet…but I am learning heaps and constantly growing smart and smarter (and slowly earning more and more money from it). Currently I am freelance writing and copywriting full time. With the writing and working at the chemist I am earning decent money, not amazing but decent.

Why Don’t You Get A Career?

A lot of people ask (and if they don’t ask they wonder) why I haven’t gone and got myself a career. Because I easily could, I could go to uni and do almost any uni course I wanted and I could study to be something and then launch a good solid career and earn a bucket load of money (if I had to do this I would become a psychologist and they earn loads). Some might think I am scared, or maybe I am lazy, or maybe I am just odd.

The reason I do business is because it is a game, there is a huge element of fun to it. It is fun trying new things and new ways to make money, it is fun trying to turn an idea into a viable business, it is fun waking up (like I did this morning) and reading an email telling me I just earned $50 in my sleep.

I could do a career, but the element of the game isn’t there. I look at the old fart businessmen like Rupert Murdoch, Mr “Westfield Shopping Town”, James Packer and the other Billionaires and I can see they are in their element. Some are in their 70′s and 80′s and charging on. They don’t work for money, when you have 5 Billion to your name making more money isn’t a top priority. They do it because this is their fun, this is their game. That is where I can see myself when I am 70.

So in answer to the question “What Do I Want To Do With My Life?” the answer is three fold

1. Be a Family Man and have a bus load of kids and be an awesome dad and raise an awesome family. There is nothing more important than this.

2. Be a businessman and entrepreneur. Start businesses, build businesses, run businesses and sell businesses. Business is the game and money is how you keep score.

3. Ministry. I am a christian and serving God is extremely important to me. I want to use my skills as a family man and entrepreneur to impact my community and make a positive impact. How positive an impact do you think you could make with $5 Billion?

I wonder what you want to do with your life.

Is it possible to shortcut financial freedom?

Will it really take you 5, 10 or 20 years before you can become financially free and live the life of your dreams? I don’t think it has to be like that.

Let’s use me as an example (because let’s face it what other example am I going to use?). I need to earn a minimum of $40k per year in order to become financially free. If I only use the method of buying cheap residential houses in order to achieve that I am going to need to own around 40 houses. It is possible but I don’t think I will achieve that amount of properties in one or two years.

However, I could possibly fast track my road to financial freedom by using subdivisions and developments. One property I am thinking of buying has the potential to subdivide and sell off the land. It is negative cashflow $20, but I could draw $35-$40k out of it by selling the land. That is enough for me and my family to live off for one year.

Technically it is not ‘financial freedom’ as I am still technically working for that money, it isn’t passive. But it allows me to stop working in my job and to spend time with my family and working on building up passive income through other property purchases.

It might take me 10 years to buy 40 properties and achieve my goal of $40,000 per year. But what if each year I could buy 1 property and draw out $40k to live off. Then spend the rest of my time buying properties that deliver positive cashflow. It still might take me 10 years to become ‘financially free’ but I get to do what I want in those 10 years and enjoy the high life.

To me that is certainly a fast track to the type of life I want to live. It might cost you $20/week to get that $40k out, but that leaves you $39k for whatever you want.

This proves to me that there isn’t one specific way to success. I prefer positive cashflow properties over negative cashflow ones, but if it achieves what you want it to achieve either can work just fine.

As you may know I have been re-reading the 4 Hour Work Week. I haven’t read it for a while so it has been great to revisit the ideas it presents and to use it in my everyday life.

One of the concepts that stuck out to me in this reading of the book was that a task will grow in it’s complexity compared to the amount of time you give it. For example, if you give yourself a month to complete a paper it will grow in complexity to fill that month, but if you give yourself one day to complete the same paper then you will make sure that you finish it.

I think my property deal has dragged on because of this very issue. Their is no defined timeline for the completion of this project.

One of my goals has always been to become more flexible. For me this means having the ability to touch my toes, which I am very rarely able to do. In fact it was one of my goals all last year, yet I never achieved it. Why? Because I gave the simple task a year to accomplish. I would therefore have all year to achieve this. Which means some days I would stretch a little bit, but most days I would forget.

After reading about this concept in the 4 hour work week I set the goal to be able to touch my toes TODAY. Not in a month, not in a year, in one day. You know what??? I achieved it, I can now successful touch my toes. The short time period pushed me to stretch until I achieved it.

It seems that achieving things is easy if you give them short time frames.

UPDATE – Yesterday I emailed my building inspector and the real estate agent saying I wanted the building inspection done today because I want to sign the contract by the end of the week. I pushed them to do it that day. After three weeks of trying I finally got my building inspection done because I created a small time frame.

When I was looking at joint venturing with my buddy (you know who you are) he wanted to achieve $50-100k in passive income in just 2 years. Prior to that my goal was $40k in 5 years. Lowering the timeframe didn’t make the goal less achievable, in fact it pushed us to make it happen and therefore makes it more achieveable.

So even though that partnership fell through I definately got a lot of good out of the short experience. My goal is now $40-$50k by Jan 1 2012 (about 2 years away). The shorter the timeframe the less complex the task becomes.

Mix this with the ability to outsource time consuming tasks and you can create complete focus and achieve great things.

In my 5 year plan I had planned to buy 3 properties this year. I am in the final stages of my first property and I am about to have my offer accepted on a second property. That is 2 properties and we are still only in Feb. By the end of March I want to have signed on 3 property deals. The short time frame mixed with outsourcing makes everything less complicated and easier to achieve.

No wonder new years resolutions fail. They give you a whole year to achieve something, maybe if new years resolutions had a shorter time frame more people would achieve them.