Ask Steve Now!
“For the last year I have been interviewing people and I’ll go, “So where’s your 401(k) at? Where’s your IRA at?”
I have had dozens upon dozens of people say to me, “Um, well, I haven’t really looked. It’s been so depressing, I don’t even open those things when they come in the mail.”
You laugh, but that’s not a small portion of people.
That’s a lot of people. They don’t even want to look.”
Income Streams
People are smart. They are hard working. People do care. Americans are great, but they’ve been given the wrong map. And as a result they’re retiring at or below poverty income levels.
And what the rich are doing, what the difference is is they are building income streams while the poor — 90 percent of people are being taught to work hard, work a job, scrimp and save, build up a big nest egg.
Then when they retire they start eating away at that nest egg praying by default that they die before they run out of money where the rich are not doing that.
Business
The rich are focusing on businesses and real estate—and real estate is a business. So they’re focusing on real estate. They are buying income streams. And when they retire, the income from their real estate meets and exceeds all their bills.
And that’s every single month. So they are not—they do not fall into that trap of having to pray they die before they run out of money.
Today I want to answer a question that I get a lot, and it is: What do I do to get started? What do I do to get started? The answer to that is really six steps. We are going to discuss those six steps here today, three of which you do before—now, this may sound funny when I say this, but there are three of them that you take before you get to four, five, and six.
Linear
The reason I’m telling you this is because the first three are not linear but four, five, and six are. The first three are not linear—you need to do them all at the exact same time.
You know I love the fitness analogy. This is like people that get caught up in, “Well, as soon as I lose 40 pounds I am going to start exercising.” Totally ridiculous. Those two should be done at the exact same time.
Well, these first three steps are also to be done at the exact same time.
Step One
One of those things is step one. It is set your goals and get them written down. Why is this so important? We’ve reviewed this a million times, but you have to have clearly defined written goals for this reason.
They did this survey of Harvard grads. They found that only five percent of them had written-down goals. They visited those Harvard grads 20 years later. Now, remember they are all Harvard grads, top of the line, right? The five percent who had written goals had more wealth than the other 95 percent combined. That’s how important having written goals are. So step one is to get your goals written.
Now, if you get this free Real Estate Investor Starter Kit, one of the first things you will get is our goal-setting workshop—and this is not something that takes days. I speak to people and they are like, “Well, I just haven’t had the time to do it.” Ridiculous. It takes 30 minutes to an hour to do this goal-setting workshop. Take the time and knock it out. There’s multiple, multiple reasons why.
Corporate America
Here’s one more, because if you answer this question for me and you say, “Well, Steve, I just don’t have my goals written down,” it’s not that they’re not written down, it’s just you haven’t written them down. They’re written down, but they were written down by somebody else.
They were written down by corporate America, and as a result you are going to get those goals. How do I know this? Ask yourself this question: How many of you know more about your next car than you do your next investment? It’s almost everybody.
Almost everybody I interview knows more about the next car they’re going to buy than their next investment. How about this one. This one may sound funny, but I bet you it’s true: How many of you know more about the next pair of tennis shoes, the next pair of jeans, the next dress you’re going to buy than you do about your next investment?
See, that’s because you’re letting other people—corporate America, the advertisers—write down your goals for you. You’re not writing them down; they’re writing them down for you. And I suggest you take that control away from them. And I suggest also that you have to if you’re ever going to get in the financial position that you want to be in.
Personal Assessment
The next step you are going to have to take after you’ve written down your goals—or it doesn’t matter which order. Get them all done—but the next step is going to be to do a personal assessment. This one can be very painful. There’s no other way to put it. I put it off for years. Why? I didn’t want to assess myself financially. I didn’t want to look.
For the last year I have been interviewing people and I’ll go, “So where’s your 401(k) at? Where’s your IRA at?” I have had dozens upon dozens of people say to me, “Um, well, I haven’t really looked. It’s been so depressing, I don’t even open those things when they come in the mail.” You laugh, but that’s not a small portion of people. That’s a lot of people. They don’t even want to look.
Well, here’s the problem with that: That’s going through life with blinders on. You don’t want to do that. Even though it can be short-term pain, the pain of not looking is much, much greater and lasts for a lot longer.
You want to assess yourself. You want to have, one, a monthly budget, and two, a personal financial statement that lists all of your expenses, all of your income, all of your assets, all of your moneys so you can see what your net worth is.
And the reason it’s painful is because for the vast majority what you’re going to find is even after decades for some of you, but years, decades—some of you multiple decades. I should have said decade, multiple decades, you’re still in a terrible financial position. But it’s better to know it.
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