Episode #3 – Why You Should Consider Income Expansion Thinking

 

Today we dive into step one of my seven-step strategy to build wealth, and in my opinion, the most important one: Why you must increase your income.

About IW: I’m Jack Gibson. I’m your wealth strategist and I’m here to help you make some money. The Indestructible Wealth Podcast is for young entrepreneurs who want to make, keep, and grow wealth to enjoy now, and for years to come.

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Why You Should Consider Income Expansion Thinking

In this episode, we’re going to dive into the first step of my seven-step strategy to make, keep, and grow indestructible wealth. This is by far the most important step, in my humble opinion, of how to build wealth in incredibly expensive day-to-day life. I’m referring to the simple fact that you must increase your income. If you follow the traditional financial gurus, many of them focus on reducing your expenses and cutting back debt or they talk about why you should invest in real estate without telling you how to do it or why you should buy stocks and what stocks maybe to buy and that you should hold for decades.

All of that is fine but it’s often neglected to work on outpacing your expense by generating more revenue. By increasing your income and widening the gap between your inflow and your outflow, you will create an ever-increasing supply of investible dollars. Compound that over time, spread out across several different assets, and you have a surefire plan to create the lifestyle you’ve always dreamed of. Let’s dive in and figure out how you’re going to make this happen.

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I’m super excited, maybe a little bit surprised that you’re back. When you put out a new platform with new content, there’s always this fear, “Are people going to read the first episode and be like, ‘This dude sucks. He’s boring.’ This is the worst?” These are fears that we all would have and I have them. I’m grateful that you’re back. I got out of church.

I always thought I had to go and miss the high-stakes poker game that I get to play occasionally on Friday nights. I was a little bit bummed but my wife said, “It’s all good. Go on a Sunday. Go have some fun and play.” Instead of going to church, I get to go play in an illegal underground poker game and probably have a glass of bourbon or two. Anyways, I’m going Sunday, so don’t judge me.

This episode is on my favorite subject. It’s called Make More Money. Step one reads, focus on increasing your ability to earn more money by improving your work ethic and skills. Let me translate that for you. Increase your income if you want to create some wealth. This is rocket science. Step one is the most important out of all seven steps. If I can accelerate my income and create a wider gap between my current expense, what’s normally taking us to run our family and live our lifestyle, if I can get income that the gap between what I’m making and what I’m spending ever widening, I am going to have that much more investible cash.

I want to increase my investible cash as fast as I possibly can. One way that the gurus like Dave Ramsey tell you to do it is to get rid of your debt. I’m not a debt coach self admittedly. I’m a wealth-building strategic coach. I believe in debt. In fact, I love debt. We’re going to talk about debt on the next show. We’re going to dive into all different types of debt, which types of debt suck and which types of debt are good for you. We’re going to start changing your mindset about how to utilize debt to accelerate your overall wealth-building process. Before we got to that, we got to focus on showing me the money. Let’s make more.

The wealth process is going to be very painful and slow if your primary focus is on cutting back spending to build wealth. Now, I agree. If your spending is out of control and you’re spending as much as you were in every month, then you need to address the underlying issues of why you feel such an intense desire to spend everything that you earn or more than that, like you have the right to do that.

I’m not judging. I know that this is common in America. If you have any shot at building wealth, then we got to figure this out. Here’s what, I don’t subscribe to you. I don’t believe in cutting out the daily $5 latte. If that’s what makes you happy and you enjoy it, then you go ahead and do that. What you need to look at are the big three. This is your house, your auto, and your taxes. Those are your three biggest expenses in your lifetime by far.

For most Americans, the problem is you’re not patient and you buy more than you should. You somehow justify in your mind that you deserve it or should I say, their mind that they deserve it because I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about people you know. People buy things with emotion and then justify them with logic. Personally, I drove a used car with 135,000 miles on it. That was worth maybe $6,000 when I went to sell it when I could have easily been driving a $100,000 car.

People buy things with emotion and then justify with logic. Click To Tweet

Why did I do that? I certainly had earned the right, based on my income, to drive a $100,000 car. I did that because I wanted the income from my investments to pay for my luxury car. Not pillage my investments to pay for luxuries. In all reality, we’re going to tackle debt on the next car. We’re going to tackle keeping your spending and check mostly on the next episode. Your primary focus should be on increasing your income.

If you want to play some defense and shove your expenses, then get on the offense and aggressively think about what you can do to provide more value to the marketplace. This is productionist thinking instead of reductionist thinking. My coach used to always say in basketball back in my basketball high school glory days, “Defense wins championships,” but I’m thinking to myself the whole time, “We still got to outscore our opponents. We got to score some points. We got to put some of the offense on the board.”

I’m an offensive thinker. I love scoring points. I always love scoring. In any sport I play, I’m always an offensive-minded player. In your primary business or your job, how are you going to play offense? How are you going to provide more value and greater levels of service and quality to other human beings? You first need to provide more value than you ask in return. Chasing money for the sake of money is a short-term house-of-a-cards type plan.

I’m not asking you to go out and make money for money’s sake. You got to provide value to other humans first before you ask for anything in return. If you own a business, then you’re probably a few courses, mentors, or coaches away from new ideas and a new mindset, so you can increase revenue and profitability.

The government has been cranking the printing press, pumping huge amounts of money into our economy. Trillions of dollars of money are being printed. There’s plenty of money out there for you to get a piece of. There’s a lot of cash in America’s bank accounts. Savings rates in 2020 went to an all-time multi-decade high because people weren’t going out and spending money. They were banking it, so there’s plenty of cash sitting on the sidelines that you’re going to be able to go get a piece of.

If you’re an employee, then you could be kept in your income or potentially be a couple of years away from your next promotion. Do you want to wait for something that may or may not happen? Waiting for someone else to determine my value and put my income in their fickle hands is not a program that I ever want to sign up for and I don’t believe you do either. You probably wouldn’t be listening on this platform.

You’ve got to figure out how to produce a profitable side hustle that you can not only create additional income from but enjoy and doesn’t feel like a drag. Question, what do you research? What do you read books about? What do you listen to podcasts about? What do you read blogs about? What do you love to talk about? What are you passionate about? It’s highly likely that you would excel in that arena.

When I was in the beginning stages of building my own personal brand platform, I knew I had a message inside of me that I wanted to share. When I looked at what I researched and I loved, it was personal finance. I can talk about this shit all day long. It’s natural that I can create an additional income stream and accelerate my wealth-building process by productionist thinking, instead of figuring out how to reduce my lifestyle, which is not what I want to do at all.

You would want to do the easy thing and I won’t knock you forward. You can start doing Uber or Lyft rides as a side hustle, bartend, or deliver pizzas, and create some extra income to invest. I’m not down on those. There are certainly viable options. I respect the hustle but those have income limitations. They’re competitive spaces and your value proposition is kept there, so your income’s going to be kept doing that. You’re trading hours for dollars doing that.

Besides, you may be in a small town where none of that is even all that viable. Offering your knowledge and expertise in a specific area would be much higher pain over the course of time. Do you know what the highest-paid profession on the planet is? Sales. Your best bet is to find an existing product that you can get behind and that you believe in.

 

There’s a lot of time, effort, energy, stress, and all kinds of things that go into creating a new product from scratch to take to the marketing plan. Even if you’re developing a course to take a new idea and a new business to the marketplace, there are plenty of great direct sales companies that have a great product that’s already been designed and built out that has proven market demand.

When I was nineteen and in college, I loved nutrition and fitness. I loved sports and athletics. I was always trying new muscle-building shakes. Most of them tasted awful. I had to choke them down, looking for athletic performance products to boost my gains to build a better physique. When I was presented direct sales opportunity in nutrition, at first, I said no because I had to get past my own ego and preconceived notions about salespeople.

I think a lot of it too. It had to come down to my confidence in myself to go out and make sales. I say even to this day, I don’t know that I love direct sales but I love helping and working with people. I love commerce. I love entrepreneurialism. I knew that sales was the necessary part to get me to the parts of the business I truly love.

I was able to promote a product line I believed in, how people lose weight, get results, gain muscle, have more energy, and create some nice supplemental income through college. I hustled and I worked hard. From 1997 to 2000, while going to school, I graduated $50,000 saved up, which would probably be $100,000 in dollars if I had to guess. I didn’t go online, google it, and figure out the chart and how much it’s worth but probably pretty close.

By the way, I’m not that old. The value of money has declined in the last two decades. I don’t have all the answers to your specific situation and what’s going to work for you. I know some people are stay-at-home moms or stay-at-home dads that are constricted in terms of what they’re able to do to generate more money. You’re juggling a lot of things. Maybe you got a full-time job. Your kids are in a bunch of sports. It’s tough to get that side hustle.

I get it but if you’re serious about the wealth-building process, you want to accelerate, and you want to get there now. Maybe now, as in within a few years instead of 40 years, then start focusing on ways you can make more money. Get around people that are going to stimulate your thinking and are going to help you to become better and to get you new ideas. I belong to an entrepreneurial club. We would meet once a month pre-COVID and I can’t wait to meet again because I love getting around entrepreneurs that have these ideas and getting after their dreams and goals. The energy is infectious.

If you're serious about the wealth-building process and want to accelerate and get there now instead of 40 years, then start focusing on ways to make more money. Get around people who will stimulate your thinking, help you improve, and get new ideas. Click To Tweet

Here’s the one thing we know about leaders, they make up their minds quickly and they change them very slowly. Unsuccessful people, the non-leaders, take a long time to decide and they change their minds quickly, especially when things don’t go their way right away. Let’s talk about debt in the next episode. Let’s talk about good debt, bad debt, and dark plague-type debt that you want to avoid, like the coronavirus. Hope that wasn’t too soon. Thanks for reading Indestructible Wealth. I’m out.