About this course
An initial period of focused work can lead to a steady stream of pas- sive income or a substantial profit that can be invested for the future.
If you want to generate passive income from your skills and ideas, you have to be willing to take action, implement your ideas and promote what you are offering.
In order to generate income, you must find a solution to a problem that an identifiable group of people are ready to pay for.
Finding the right product to sell means establishing the best way to deliver your solution to your chosen market taking into account
your skills, the market needs, and the profitability of production and distribution.
In order to minimise your own time commitment, you want to auto- mate and outsource as much as possible.
One of the keys to the success of your offer will be getting it in front of as many potential customers as possible and persuading them to buy.
Maximising profit is about finding a good market, making them the right offer and limiting your own involvement as much as possible while generating the highest possible long-term income.
Debt is like a snowball rolling downhill. If you let it keep on rolling, it will get out of control and cause serious financial damage. If you take action to stop it now, things start to get better immediately.
John and Vicky stared at each other across the table as they realised the financial devastation they had created between them.
How could they not have been aware of the depth of debt and financial mess they were in—and this all after fifteen years of happy marriage?
How could two people just on average incomes have racked up £75,000 of debt between them—this debt being on top of their mortgage—without either of them knowing the full picture of the other’s debts?
As I slowly sipped my coffee, giving them a few moments to come to terms with the reality of their dire situation, I reflected on just how many other times I’d seen a similar picture during the last few months and years.
I thought about the story of Mike—a self-employed plumber who had used his personal credit card to cover his business expenses and running costs for those months there wasn’t quite enough work or cash coming in.
The problem was that he was using his credit card to finance his personal life as well. As the months went on, the debts just kept on increasing and more and more of his income was disappearing in servicing his interest payments.
He managed from month to month as he was able to use one card to pay off the other but the bills kept increasing—even with the so-called interest-free offers and balance transfers. The truth is these are not free at all as they charge you 3% to 5% upfront, so they actually collect the interest on the first day.
It didn’t take too long before, even in the busy months, Mike was barely earning enough to pay his monthly interest charges—never mind his living expenses.
Then there was Sue, a young maths teacher who had a great social life and loved to spend her long holidays in exotic locations.
Unfortunately she was trying to match the lifestyle of some of her friends who were earning two or three times her salary.
She managed for a while because every other month she’d receive an offer for a new low-interest credit card. Since these companies felt she had a secure job, they were happy to shower her with special offers and credit advances.
She thought as a maths teacher that she was safe with numbers and she became really good at juggling the different balance transfers and interest rates. But there comes a time when the unbelievable deals are proven to be just that—unbelievable.
Starting on the journey from debt to wealth is rather like any other journey you might make in your life.
You need to know where you are now, where you are going, and how you are going to get from one point to the other.
The Wealth Wheel is a concept I created that has helped many people with all of these steps.
It acts as an overall snapshot of your financial life based on where you think you currently are. It also helps you define where you want to go and allows you to work out the steps you’ll need to take to get there.
First, I’ll introduce you to the key elements—or spokes—of the wheel and then show you how to use it to help with your journey.
It’s remarkable that, in the modern world, there is virtually no serious financial education taking place—whether in the school, the workplace, or in business.
From the person working behind the counter at your local bank to some of the most senior legislators and regulators, even people who deal with money every day have very little idea how it works.
In any system, you leave yourself very exposed if you don’t understand what is going on.
You are therefore at a huge disadvantage if you don’t know the truth about money.
So, before you start taking the necessary action to get out of debt, it’s important to know a bit more about how money and wealth creation works.
As with any major breakthroughs in life, the move from debt to wealth is not going to happen without taking action.
If you want to improve your golf swing, you are going to have to take a few lessons from an expert and get in some practice too. If you want to lose some weight, you have to change some behaviours—eating differently and doing some exercise.
The road from debt to wealth is no different.
Having good information and thinking in the right way is not going to change anything. You need to start behaving differently. You need to make a few changes in your life and then make these new behaviours the way you live from now on.
Your situation won’t be totally transformed overnight but you might be surprised at how quickly you will start to see results. The first few small steps are not only rewarding, they also make a huge difference.
In this module, we look at the six key changes you need to make in the way you run your financial life if you want to move quickly from debt to wealth. The six essential habits are as follows:
In this module, I’ll take you through each of these habits.
This takes us through the five most important steps of the process from debt to wealth.
In the remaining modules, we will go into the final step— accumulation of real wealth and generation of passive income—in much more detail.
When I began searching for the best solution to the challenge of wealth creation some fifteen years ago, it became clear to me almost immediately that all the really wealthy people I knew, met and had read about had made most of their wealth and passive income from property and real estate.
It was a very big part of the foundation of their wealth and financial freedom.
I really wanted to be able to do the same. However I wasn’t sure if it was possible for somebody like me, having at that time no background in finance and no significant money or assets of my own.
Fortunately I came across a system that taught and showed how anyone could turn real estate and property into genuine wealth, even if they had no funds or very limited funds of their own and had little or no knowledge of buying property.
Over the last fifteen years whilst building up my own substantial property portfolio, I have added a few twists and tricks to that approach on how to build a substantial property portfolio with no money of your own. I’m going to share it with you shortly.
While investing in property is a great way to create an ongoing flow of passive income—as well as capital growth—there are other ways you can generate a steady stream of money in your life without having to continue working.
Wikipedia defines passive income as follows:
“Income received on a regular basis with little effort required to maintain it.”
This is quite a useful description as it highlights some of the important elements of passive income:
It can also be useful to make a distinction between passive income and investment or portfolio income.
Investment or portfolio income is where you receive a dividend or rent in exchange for an investment you have made. This counts as passive income as you normally have to do little or nothing to continue receiving this income.
If you are actively involved in managing a property portfolio, you may need to do a little more work. However this is generally quite limited unless you choose to do all the maintenance and repairs personally!
In some situations this distinction can be important as, for example, some tax regimes treat income from investments differently from passive income that results from your work.
You can achieve a great deal just by following the strategies covered in this course.