What’s the number one thing you can do to absolutely transform your life? Frank Thomas here from Wealth Generation Strategies and I’ve got a great video for you today. It’s all about the one thing that you can do that can be absolutely life-changing.
And this is not clickbait either. It’s the truth. Now the crazy thing is it’s so simple that hardly anyone does it.
Is that crazy or what? So what is it? It’s deciding to keep a little bit of everything you make for yourself. Yes, it’s that simple. I like to call it paying yourself first.
Honestly, you got to consider this a game changer because once you start living it, wow, it’s transformative. But you got to get started. So let’s get started here.
Let’s start off right away with what I think in my opinion is the biggest life changer right at the beginning. When you decide to put a fraction of everything you make away for yourself, it can significantly reduce the stress in your life. Even if you don’t have any long-term lofty plans, if you just put away a few thousand dollars, it can be a wonderful safety cushion.
Whether you wish to purchase a new thing or repair something that just blew up on you, having a safety buffer is awesome. Let me just give you a quick example. We had to purchase a new house but it had an older stove in the kitchen and I knew that it’s going to blow up on me eventually.
The display was shaky and everything else. I was hoping to have it last another year or two but you know, honestly, I wasn’t holding my breath at all on it. Three to six months later, I accidentally dropped water onto this hot glass in the oven when it was on.
Needless to say, it just shattered. I knew I had to replace the glass at the very least. Now once I looked into the price of just replacing the glass and knowing that I had other things that were not working very well on the stove either, it wouldn’t be long before I literally bought this old stove at a new stove price and I should have just replaced it.
It happens. Because I had an emergency fund saved up, I didn’t have any stress. There would have been a time when I knew I’d be scrabbling to find some way to pay for this unexpected expense.
Mr. Visa, Mr. MasterCard, Mr. Credit Line. Juggle them around. It was very stressful.
Having a slush put away completely alleviated the stress of the situation and gave me the permission to just purchase a new stove right away. It was wonderful. I can’t tell you how wonderful it felt.
The next thing about having a fund put away is it gives you that freedom to have fun. This leads me to my next point. Nothing is more fun than going on a holiday that is completely paid for before you leave.
If you’ve never done this, you have got to try it. And I’m not talking about paying for it on a credit card and coming back to these bills. I’m talking about paying for it in full.
Nothing more to worry about it financially. You can literally just go on vacation and have a blast. We actually went on a great family vacation to my wife’s home country, South Africa.
We went there for about three weeks and it was awesome. It was expensive, but it was awesome. We had enough not to only cover the plane tickets and travelling around and eating out, but we had enough to go see all the sights we wanted to see.
We also had enough to bless our relatives down there financially by paying some of their fun as well, which was really, really nice. I remember so many times I’d have to go on holiday and act the pulpier because there just wasn’t much left over. Needless to say, it was a glorious vacation and I didn’t have to worry about anything to pay back when we returned.
Again, what a great stress reducer and the whole thing was just a blast. You just can’t say anymore. And if you notice, I’ve not mentioned anything about budgets, spreadsheets, or retirement portfolios.
What I’m talking about is just saving some of what you make to keep for you. I just love how it’s illustrated in the little book called The Richest Man in Babylon. The author states that a portion of what you make is yours to keep.
The young man in the book is being told this replies, well, don’t I get to keep everything that I make? The author illustrates that the young man had to pay for his rent, his clothing, and all his other life needs. What did he actually get to keep at the end of the month? Very little, if anything. And the way we live today, we usually have even less than nothing.
It’s usually a negative number. I like to just say a majority of us are just custodians of the money we receive for just a short period of time until we hand it over to the next person to care for it. We do need to learn to pay ourselves first.
This is the one thing that can make a huge difference in the long run and can be a complete life changer. I hope this is starting to show this to you. I can testify in my own life, now that I’ve committed myself to a long-term savings plan, I can see what things will look like further in my future.
It’s crazy. I can see that I can realistically save a balance of at least $400,000 in the next four years. I can also see, through careful investing, turning that into over $600,000, even if I don’t contribute to the fund anymore after the first initial four years, but just let it continue to build that wonderful passive income for three years.
The end goal puts me very close to having a non-depleting fund into retirement, and I’ll have this ability to pull out payments of the fund for the rest of my life and pay for all my expenses, and then the balance never goes down, never reduces, always is growing, if anything. Is it possible to live from it indefinitely, even considering inflation and its effects? This leads me to my third, I’ve got to be honest with you, I think this is the most life-changing effect that saving can accomplish. But first, be sure to subscribe to my newsletter.
You’ll find a link in the description below. Not only will you be notified of new videos when I publish them, but you also get insider facts that I don’t share in the video. The last point is all about creating a long-term savings plan.
I know that a lot of folks are in their teens and their 20s will struggle with this concept, but it’s really geared mainly to them. Why? They have the most time available to make this work extremely well, and because they have the most time, they don’t see the absolute value of it. What’s important to realize is we all have this hope to live a long time, and it’s actually shocking when you discover someone close to your age or younger that dies.
I like to tell 20-somethings over and over again that they have a crazy superpower called time. Time will allow them to see the full effects of what Einstein called the eighth wonder of the world, compound interest. If someone who was 20 decided that they would put away let’s say 400 bucks a month for the next 40 years, plus let’s say that in this example they’re getting an 8% return on their investment in interest, this will turn their small $400 per month investment into almost $1.4 million when they turn 60.
Even considering inflation for that period of time at let’s say 3%, that money will still be worth over $430,000 in today’s buying power. I wouldn’t worry about that though, as I would suspect that this person would begin to see their savings grow slowly over time and want to add more and more to it every month to negate the negative impact of inflation. So in other words, for a small monthly investment into themselves, they could literally put into place a lifetime fund that they could use and live from in the latter half of their lives, and it doesn’t have to start at 60.
It can start at 40. It depends how hard and how aggressively you save. I actually believe this is the worst case scenario, and here’s why.
When I saved $100,000, it was pretty exciting. What did it do? It motivated me to save more. This has helped me significantly accelerate my rate of saving.
I now save more and more every month. I’ve just passed the $160,000 mark, and I’m also watching the impact of that wonderful compound interest. It’s wonderful.
In compound interest alone, I’m getting a minimum of about $1,600 a month that goes right to the end balance, and I can reinvest. And once again, I’m not stressing about what the heck am I going to do if I want to retire. I think my only regret though is I didn’t get serious about this much sooner in life, and I really started getting at it at about 57.
If I would have got it going earlier, wow, look out. For example, what would life look like if I got serious about this when I got married 31 years ago? It’s very possible I could be looking at a completely different lifestyle than I have right now. I don’t necessarily want to do nothing, but I’d like to have a few more Saturdays every week.
I love those extra Saturdays. I’d also like to really pick and choose how and who I spend my time with. One thing that has become clear to me is the one commodity we don’t have any way of making any more of is the amount of time we have left, and here’s my challenge for you.
Will you decide that you actually want to make a difference and start saving? I hope you do. Give yourself a goal to work towards if you do, and if you felt this video has compelled you to start saving, give it a like. I’d also like to hear when you’ve started saving towards your first goal, and your first goal can be a thousand bucks.
That’s great. It’s an easy goal to obtain. Don’t make a goal of ten million dollars.
You’re going to become defeated. Make a thousand bucks. Become a thousandaire.
Then become a ten thousandaire. Then become a hundred thousandaire. It’s a cool feeling.
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