The truth is the great majority of Americans concentrate on their work time, their employment and their employer and they are making a great mistake. They are focused on their working hours. They obsess on that nine to five grind, their boss and their next pay raise, or their potential promotion into the ranks of the successful.
They believe, and worse have been taught, that their employment and their employer is the key they need to concentrate on in order to improve their living conditions. This popular belief is wrong.
With eight hours necessary to earn a living, and eight hours necessary for rest and recuperation, that leaves eight hours each day as free time. It is this time that the wealthy and successful use to greater effect then the majority of their contemporaries. It is this spare time they use for the development, planning, preparation, and execution of their plan to create their personal wealth and to collect the assets necessary to build their financial freedom. It is exactly what we do and collect in our spare time that allows us to gain wealth and success that we all seek and believe we can have before we enter the work force.
When we first begin our work life we have money for the first time in our lives, but very soon it becomes not enough, and we begin the chase for the next promotion or better job or a second job. That special employment opportunity, the "ONE" that is going to make the financial deference in our lives; but each time we step up, we soon find ourselves looking for the next increase.
There is no employment for a company or the government or an association that will or should provide financial independence for its employees. Corporations and private businesses are designed to make the owners and stockholders financially independent not the employees. This is as it should be for the owners and shareholders are the risk takers. There is no moral, ethical, or legal imperative to make the employees of the company wealthy. Unfortunately too many Americans believe that it is the responsibility of the company to see that its' employees become wealthy. Just like most people it took me a great deal of time: first to recognize the truth of the previous statement, then to develop a plan in the free time that was available to me.
In the beginning I worked harder for my employers and then I took on a second position, I discovered that working harder first brought about small financial increases and much greater responsibility and the antipathy of my fellow employees. As well as tax increases, it seemed I was working with a partner that had a prior claim on every success I had no matter how small. The solution of a second job; increased my taxes to a greater extent and worked me to exhaustion. Forty hours plus forty hours only equals two rat races.
Being a product of the American school system I was totally unprepared for dealing with the money I earned when I entered the work force. I did not know how to make the money I earned work for me, how to develop personal wealth, nor did I know that I needed to understand personal economics. For some reason we are expected to figure this most important aspect of our lives out for ourselves.
When one ponders what passes for education in our Public schools and Universities, one can only come to the conclusion that there is a consensus among educators to exclude this important aspect of life from our academic careers. Nevertheless the education establishment has seen fit to leave it out of the curriculum. We are left to trial and error, and error and error over again and again. Many of us spend our lifetimes failing over and over again simply because we have never been taught that there is a better way.
One of the realities of the human condition is that humans are collectors.
We all collect.
Everyone I know collects something. For the purposes of this article I am going to keep it simple, and focused to the accumulation of wealth and success.
In this light the poor collect excuses designed to explain away their failures, and in their spare time they relive and lament to anyone that will listen the full catalog their failures. Their failure is always the cause of someone else never themselves. Forever living in the past they end their run with a sack of excuses that explains away their poverty.
The middle class spend their spare time collecting things, toys, cars, boats etc. constantly spending above their present means. The middle class spends their future: Five, ten and thirty years in advance. They spend their spare time playing with their toys or fixing them.
I once saw an Antique road show where a participant brought in a marvelous wooden model of a British World War II tank and its mechanized carrier. The participant's father constructed the model. The Father had served in the war and built the model in over 5000 hours of loving labor. Now don't get me wrong, I can appreciate the work and the fine detail. However 5000 hours is two and one half years of full time work completed in his spare time, obviously a work of art. But what could a man who could focus such energy and discipline have achieved if he would have applied the same zeal to the collecting of assets that would have provided him and his family with additional income?
The middle class spends two to three times the cost of the toys they buy in financing rather than paying cash.
The middle class squanders their future to live in the present.
When they retire their income at best is reduced by fifty percent, they discover they have spent the whole of their income producing years delaying poverty. What kind of life style can $1,000 a month in social security provide?
So after thirty or forty years working they are forced into working a second career in order to make ends meet. Poverty was achieved by spending their future for the present and in retirement the bill becomes due and payable.
The wealthy are also collectors.
They use their spare time to develop ways to collect income-producing assets. They save to take advantage of opportunities. They build part time businesses of their own. They collect and improve income-producing property. They sacrifice the present for the opportunity to build wealth filled future.
They work in their spare time to create income, and collect more income producing property or grow their business until it replaces their full time income. Then work until it pays their living overhead, then double and triple their full time income. They then have assets working for them 24-7-365 and they can leave their full time employment and work their assets full time.
At this point they are working at what they love. It is at this point that work ceases to be work it becomes a calling, a labor of love. It is also at this point that some of the wealthy begin to collect the toys of wealth. However they pay cash for opulence we see, they spend the excess produced by the assets they have collected and grown. They never spend the future for the present. The wealthy plan and execute their plans in the present for a secure and wealthy future.
We all have the same number of hours, minutes and seconds in a day. It is up to us to use them to our greatest advantage. We are free to choose to spend our spare time in the past bemoaning fate collecting failure. Or we can spend the future, for the toys we think we need today postponing poverty as long as we can work to pay our past extravagances. Or we can plan and execute a system of asset accumulation today and enjoy a future of success and wealth.
It is what we do in our spare time that determines where we end up in life. Whether we succeed or end our days in the despair of poverty
