“And the number one rule I’m going to share with you is you have to make sure that you have the right map.
Now, I want to take a moment to deal with the word “right” because the term “right” can become a very ego-based word.
And the warning that I want to give you is that as you’re evaluating what we’re discussing here today, it’s very easy for the ego to get involved.”
Basics
Since we’re on for the first time in Dallas/Fort Worth, I’m going to kind of get back to the basics for the first-time listener and give you some of the philosophy of Lifestyles Unlimited and what we’re doing differently from the average person or this other map, if you will, that’s giving people very much different results compared to what everybody else is doing.
I want to start off real briefly: Lifestyles Unlimited is a real estate investor and mentor group. We take people by the hand, step-by-step through everything from locating deals, negotiating deals, closing deals, managing every single aspect of residential real estate, everything from single-family homes all the way to 600+ unit apartment complexes and portfolios of 3, 4, 5,000 units. You name it in the residential arena.
We’ve been here for 20 years. We have we just celebrated our 20th anniversary just this past weekend at a wonderful party. And we have going on 9,000 members—the vast majority of them being in Texas. And these are all students, people just like you who most of them never owned a piece of rental real estate before they came here.
But we teach them how to use real estate to build wealth in a thing called a passive stream of income. It’s an income stream that’s not solely dependent on you getting up and going to a job every day — and this is the part of the map that separates us and our students from the rest of the nation — we’re not trying to save up this big chunk of money and then retire and pray we die before we run out of that money. We build income streams because your bills come in monthly, so we use real estate to build income streams that come in monthly.
The 7 Principles
What I’m going to do now is I’m really going to go over the seven principles that we use to run our families and businesses. We’ll get through probably half of them today, and then we’ll do the other half tomorrow.
But I’m going to share with you the seven principles that my mentors gave me as they were trying to get me out of the reverse mentality, which I’ll call the “employee mentality”, which is work real hard in high school, get a scholarship to college, do well in college, get a job with a major corporation, work for 40 years and retire and the corporation will take care of you through pensions, 401(k)’s, IRAs, whatever the flavor of the day savings program is.
What happened with me, what woke me up, was my 5th year on that map my company came in and cut my pay. I was working 60 hours a week. I had just placed first in a national sales contest and got a trip to Hawaii. My reward when I got back from the trip was they cut my pay by $20,000 per year.
And what it made me do—I consider myself lucky that that happened. I was only 27 at the time. I consider myself lucky because what it did is it woke me up and it made me reevaluate what I was doing with my life or, if you will, reevaluated my map.
Fortunately I ran into Lifestyles Unlimited and I’ve been with them for the last 20 years—first as a student and now as a mentor. But what I’m going to do is share with you the seven principles that my mentors used to teach me how to get out of the employee mentality and into what they were calling the millionaire mentality.
The Right Map
And the number one rule I’m going to share with you is you have to make sure that you have the right map. Now, I want to take a moment to deal with the word “right” because the term “right” can become a very ego-based word. And the warning that I want to give you is that as you’re evaluating what we’re discussing here today, it’s very easy for the ego to get involved.
And the problem with it is this: Your ego does not care if you get out of life what you want. Your ego simply wants to appear to other people as if you’ve gotten out of life what you want.
This is why we meet people every day with 3, 4, $5,000 watches on, driving around 30, 40, $50,000 SUVs living in 250, 300, $400,000 homes—but if they lost their job tomorrow, they could no longer afford to pay the rent on that borrowed lifestyle. What they’ve done is they’ve traded financial success for the appearance of financial success.
Evaluating Life
If you want to read more on this, there’s a book out there called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People written by Dr. Stephen Covey. He has some of the best material on this and as you’re evaluating your life how to keep the ego in check and get yourself to focus on something different.
Because when I said make sure that you have the “right” map, I want to take the word “right” out of that—it will help keep control of that ego—and replace the word “right” with “effective.”
Simply put, either what you’ve done to build wealth for yourself and your family has worked, or it hasn’t. That’s how you have to look at it as a yes or no question. Either you’re in the financial position that you want to be in or you’re not. You can take it one step further and go if I keep doing what I’m doing, will I ever get in the financial position I want to be in.
And when you start answering “no” to those questions, you’ve got to look at that map—your strategy for life—and you’ve got to change. The world is not going to change for you. You’ve got to change.
Results
If you’re somewhere where you’re seated and you’ve got a piece of paper, I want you to do something ‘cause I want you to understand where you got these beliefs, these ideas that are giving you results that you really don’t want. If you take a sheet of paper and on the left-hand side you draw a little circle, inside that bottom line is this—
The question comes down to since 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000 census they all found that 9 out of 10 Americans were retiring at or below poverty income levels. The question that we hope that raises—and by the way, in 2006 they found that the average 65 year old couldn’t write a check for $650. That’s how bad it is.
The big lies about saving your way to retirement or the golden years, it’s just not a truthful thing when they call it that, not when you see these results that the average American is getting. But the question comes down to this: Why would a nation of 300 million people all follow a path that we all have known for 30-plus years doesn’t work?
