Loan to a friend?
Hey,
Someone asked me for money recently.
I have a standard answer when it comes to lending money, and that answer is:
"No."
It's not that I don't care or don't want to help them.
It's just that I know from experience that most people will not pay you back, and you'll then have to waste even more money (in the form of your time) following up to remind them.
Besides, someone who's perpetually broke does not need to get more loans. They need to be taught better financial habits.
More cashflow to them just means they have more money to spend faster.
I'm sure you've heard how most lottery winners who win million dollar jackpots are broke within 5 years. It's very true. At my Platinum Mastermind, which is all about wealth creation, retention, and investing, we actually show studies that talk about this phenomenon.
Despite what most believe, more cashflow is not the answer to becoming financially free if you have poor financial habits.
I've found that the majority of the population are terrible when it comes to money. Not just average, but terrible.
They struggle to make it. And they are even worse at hanging on to it.
You can't really be surprised by this though. Their habits around money have come from decades of conditioning. Conditioning from their parents, the education system, and society.
So please don't take this as me judging broke people or thinking I'm any smarter than them.
I was just taught good financial lessons from a young age.
My parents were not wealthy. They were, and still are wheat and sheep farmers. Supporting 4 kids was really hard for them. They had to be careful not to waste money.
For example, I'd never get new clothes - I'd always get hand-me-downs.
Not the clothes first worn by my older brother either, but the clothes from our even-older brother. By the time they got to me they'd be full of holes.
So I learned to save money well, and to be comfortable with the idea of accumulating cash without the urge to go immediately spend it.
When I was 9, my brother and I started selling potatoes on the side of the road.
Some parents might stop their kids from doing that, thinking it's too dangerous. Not mine. When we had our first $9 day from 3 customers, they celebrated that with us.
After that, I had these huge ambitions to build my potato stall empire.
I planted a whole garden of potatoes and waited months for them to fully grow... then just before harvesting them, my sister ripped every single one of them out of the ground in retaliation for some argument we had. The business never recovered.
There were lots of little business's like that, and I was always encouraged to pursue them.
I was told to constantly 'save' and not waste money - so I was and still am to this day very frugal.
Most people are the opposite.
I know people who've made in the high tens of millions of dollars who are close to broke. They're unable to pay vendors, affiliates, and the rent on their extravagant homes.
They have a talent for generating money, but no clue on how to manage it.
My point is, most people (maybe even you) have a very different experience when it comes to learning about making and keeping their money.
If you weren't as fortunate as I was in that area, don't worry too much. You can learn new financial habits.
The first thing you've got to do is stop wasting money on things you don't need.
For myself, I spend aggressively on things which can generate more money, and which I enjoy. I buy a lot of assets. Like the piece of real estate I'm on right now typing this to you.
Most people spend aggressively on things that don't generate more money, but which they enjoy. They buy a lot of liabilities. The latest set of golf clubs. The new purse from Louis Vutton. A brand new top-of-the line BMW.
I'm not saying you shouldn't enjoy your money.
But what counts is that your net expenditure is in favor of assets, not liabilities. As long as you consistently invest more of your cashflow into assets, then it's actually difficult for you to end up poor.
Of course, you'll need to be generating enough cash where you're able to fund a modest lifestyle and have some left over to invest in those assets.
And that's the second thing you've got to do; start a business. Do it part-time in the beginning, but move to full time as soon as you have consistent cash coming in.
For me, I gravitated to starting an online business because I could see the enormous potential.
Think about it: you can reach and sell something to just about any other person on the entire planet through the internet. Even to this day, I'm still surprised such a large % of the populate have no interest in trying to generate extra money online. It's much easier than most think.
So...
...back to the person who asked me for money.
I told them 'No.'
And then I told them they needed to get involved in affiliate marketing.
"Affiliate what???"
I explained how it worked. How you could promote other people's products and services, let them do the fulfillment, and take a % of the sale just for being the one who placed the ad they clicked on.
They had all the normal reasons why this was not a good idea:
- "I'm not a technical person, I wouldn't know how to do any of that stuff"
- "I don't have enough money to get started" (meanwhile I see them going out for dinner every night, and they somehow can afford a movie ticket each week)
- "Most of those things are scams" (and then they go find one of those fake scam review sites as proof, not realizing it's just another affiliate marketer promoting some other deal, tearing down a competitor to rank on their search engine traffic)
In a nice way I told them to stop making BS excuses and just start. And I offered to help them from time to time, as long as they were putting in the work.
A week later, they'd done nothing.
I won't lose any sleep over it because if they're not wiling to spend $49 on training, yet still want to complain, then they clearly are not serious.
On the other hand, I have students like Jill Veverka.
Jill's in her 50's and is a retired school teacher from somewhere in America. I forget where.
Not that long ago she'd never done any internet marketing at all. It was completely foreign to her.
She decided to invest in herself and get my training.
Fast forward to today, and she's already made over $30,000 this year.
What makes that really impressive, is that last year she made $26,732 online - so she's already beat her previous 12 month record in just a little over 3 months.
I am extremely confident Jill will do over $150k this year.
In fact I saw her just yesterday, as she's here in Costa Rica attending an intensive 14 day training MOBE is putting on about doing Youtube video ads for traffic.
For some people 150k might not sound like a lot. But it is a lot considering this is an entirely new skill she's learned. At this rate, who knows where she'll be one year from today - maybe at over 300k / year.
One of the systems Jill uses to generate this income is designed to work anywhere. As long as you have a wifi connection, it can work for you.
In fact this same system is one of my bigger sources of income as well.
The past month I've been completely out of my office in asia, and have traveled to Fiji, the USA, and now am here in Costa Rica.
All this while, I've been generating lots of sales every day with it.
March was the greatest sales month I've ever had since getting involved in internet marketing back in late 2008. So it's working well.
And I was doing much less work each day than I normally do (mainly because I'm here at my new resort, putting the final touches on the design, furniture, gardens, etc).
To be successful with this system, you'll need:
- at least 30 minutes a day, and ideally more. 2 hours a day would allow you to generate results much faster.
- some kind of a marketing budget. If you're on your last $49, and want to buy this out of desperation, then don't. I'd prefer you use that money for your next meal, get a job, build up some cash reserves, then come back to me once you have at least $100 / week to invest in marketing. Yes, I've seen broke people get started and go on to generate 6 figures with this system, but it's much easier to do if you have some funds)
- you need to be coachable. Some people are know-it-alls. They prefer to constantly talk, rather than listen. They can quickly tell you all the reasons why something won't work, how they've tried it before... usually these people are not very successful. When I do encounter them, I just politely nod my head in agreement to what they're saying, and space out.
- lastly, you need to be someone who takes full responsibility. I don't associate with people people who play the blame game. Really - I can't have them around me infecting my mindset. I like to work with people who believe they can create and have full control over their future.
So instead of giving you a link to go buy this... here's what I'll do instead.
If you think you have these 3 above qualities above and you're ready to get started, send me a private message on Facebook (not a post on my wall, but a message).
I'll then reply back with the link for you to get started.
It's not free, and no I won't be lending anyone the $49 to get started. But if you invest in yourself, I'll invest back in you and show you the steps to making this online business thing actually work. I'd love to be writing about you in a future email as one of my success stories.