#72 - How to stop working and follow my dream?

Summary

This is an email we got from Anna, one of our listeners.

I don't like the job I currently have. My boss is very demanding and I'm stressed out. I wake up early and spend an hour every morning in rush hour traffic.

I would love to be able to focus on creating music. The problem is that I can't afford to quit my job, I only make $15 per hour and because I'm working so much - I don't have enough time to turn the music into a career.

What can I do? How to stop working and follow my dream?

If you have a similar situation as Anna, this episode will be perfect for you. We are diving in to the concept of that "The purpose of money is to buy time".

By understanding this concept, it will be a lot easier to free up your time and live a life without a boss.

--
Today's episode is an entrepreneurship episode, where Erik and Emil explore topics about how to become a better business person.

We are often sharing real life examples that have happened previously in our careers. What we have learned, who we have learned from and how we have applied that into our real lives. Everything in a mix with personal thoughts and reflections.

Our goal with this episode is to change your mindset about money in a way that will help you to have more freedom in your life. Teach you the answer to "How to stop working and follow my dream?"

In part 1 we talk about that almost all money is used to buy things, and very little is used to buy time. Why is that? How come we think of money as buying things and is that really the most valuable use of money?

In part 2 we look into how you can use your money to buy time instead of buying things. That if you use your money to buy more time early on it will free up your life and even make it easier to buy things in the future.

In part 3 we talk about how to build a small money machine, by beginner friendly investing creating a way to get you extra hours every month.

In part 4 we come back to Anna's question, and we give her our recommendations of what we would do in her situation.

--
Follow Erik and Emil on their social channels!
https://linktr.ee/smilingerik
https://linktr.ee/emil.e

Links:
Episode #18 - Finance, easier than you think.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/18-finance-2-investing-easier-than-you-think/id1452049777?i=1000440642313

Transcript

[00:00:04] What if someone doesn't have any money to invest? How is this helpful? I think a good start is to look at your home and see what do you have. That is stuff like we've learned to turn money into things, but things can also be turned into money. Just look at your time and time. Good point. So what do you have at home that you're not using that could be worth money?

[00:00:49] This week, we received an email from our listener, Anna, and she shared a problem that she has. She said, I don't like the job that I currently have. My boss is very demanding and I'm stressed out. I wake up early and I spend an hour every morning in rush hour traffic. I would love to be able to focus on my passion, which is to create music. The problem is that I cannot afford to quit my job. I only make fifteen dollars per hour. And because I'm working so much every time I come home, I'm too tired. I don't have any energy or time to focus on my music.

[00:01:33] What can I do if you have a similar situation like and we believe that this episode is perfect for you because we're going to dive into the concept of the purpose for money is to buy time. And once you understand this concept, that's like taking a big leap towards financial freedom and living a life on your terms.

[00:01:59] And I am here with you, as always, my friend, and the founder of Great.com, Erik Bergman. Great.com This is our company that gives away 100 percent of its profits to help the environment. And Erik is a special guy because before he was 30, he made over 50 million dollars creating his previous company, Catina Media. That went from zero to 300 employees in just five years. And he's also very much passionate about teaching personal development and business to his over one hundred and eighty thousand Instagram followers.

[00:02:36] Eric.

[00:02:37] Hey, Mel, thank you for that introduction. And if you're new here, I'm here with Amell, who is my good friend and also was the first one joining me in great dotcom over two years ago now. And he's the host of this podcast. He's also the host of our other charity podcast called Great Dot Com Talks with and on the side of Great, his personal development coach and runs the business separately doing that. But most importantly, I would say that he is my creative sparring partner. He is the guy I love learning things with and creating this podcast, but also stuff for YouTube and Instagram. And we simply learn very well together. Love the body language sparring partner for you don't see right now I'm boxing into their right.

[00:03:24] And if you are new here, this is becoming great column podcast, a podcast for you. Who wants to make the world or just your own life too, for that matter, better to business and personal development.

[00:03:39] And today's episode, the goal that we have is to shift your mindset around money to think ahead of time. And the purpose of that is to give you more freedom. And today's episode is in four parts. In the first part, we're going to talk about how it comes that we were thinking of money as a way to buy things and where that is coming from. In the second part, we're going to look at what happens when we shift the mindset to thinking of money as time instead of things. In the third part, we are going to talk about a beginner friendly guide to investing as a way for you to create more free time for the stuff that you really love in the future. And finally, in the fourth part, we are going to answer another question and take a look at what we would do in her situation to get more passion into her life.

[00:04:44] So what would you say is a common way that people view the purpose of money?

[00:04:50] If I'm looking back at my life, the purpose of money for me has been. To turn it into stuff and things that I want, like a probably even seen that as people that haven't been the things that I want to, and I never really thought about money in a different way than that. And I'm guessing that that's because, well, money is when you buy things, it's like something you can touch on, like something concrete. Or you can see all of these movies that happy people with cars or all these commercials. People wanted to buy things. And I believe all companies have like a financial incentive to get you to think that money's meant to buy stuff. And that's like most common. That's how they make money. If you don't think that money is for buying stuff, well, then you're not going to buy their stuff. So they spend billions and billions and billions to get you to think of money as something to buy stuff. But what's another way to think of what money can be?

[00:05:57] First, I need to confess that I'm one of those people that it worked on. I liked things. And what I also like is to do things, spend my time doing projects and things that I really enjoy.

[00:06:09] So what's been helpful for me is to compare those to so let's say that I make fifteen dollars per hour again. I added like Dignidad. OK, so let's say Anna makes fifteen dollars per hour. Now if she's buying a shirt for four to five dollars, she can also view that as three hours of time that she could be spent pursuing her dream of music. Yeah, and especially if you don't even like her job, that's like three hours of pain and suffering that she puts in to get that shirt. Yeah. And commuting. And she doesn't she don't even get paid for. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Or let's say that she let's say that she could lower her costs somehow. Let's say that if she got a roommate or if she moved back to her parents or moved to a cheaper apartment and she could save three hundred dollars per month doing that, if she makes fifteen dollars per hour that 20 that's 20 hours per month. She can spend doing music that's five hours every week and has a lot of time. Yeah. And then might over time be enough to turn the music into a full time job or become really good at it.

[00:07:16] Yeah. OK, so you could turn it into time and you could turn it kind of into hours but you don't have a job. You cannot just stop working this and that many hours that week. How would that work?

[00:07:28] Well, few people have that luxury. If you have the luxury to just lower your cost and then work less, that is a very interesting opportunity. But what you could do as well is do you can start saving and preferably investing your money so that after a time you have enough to take some time off work or maybe go a year without working and really, really focus on your passion, giving it a shot.

[00:07:54] So let's say you saved up enough money to actually take a month unpaid, and that would be when you can translate it into time. So the full full month of doing. Exactly. Yeah. That makes you saving up for future time. Yeah. OK, so that's a good start. So there is plenty of more ways to get more time from your money.

[00:08:15] Let's look into some of that.

[00:08:22] If you are someone that wants to turn your passion into full time business, what I would value the most in the whole world would be my time and money can to some extent buy you time. But it's tricky to start making more money. Both get a better job or investment takes a lot of time was much quicker is to lower your costs. That can be done almost instantly.

[00:08:50] So, Eric, how can someone do that on quote that comes to mind from a guy named Narval, Robert Cunt, who I really admire, and he says that people living far below your means have a freedom, that people constantly upgrading their lifestyle simply can't understand. And what he refers to when he says this is that if you, let's say early on in your career, make ten dollars an hour and maybe in the end of your career, you make one hundred dollars an hour, that's going to take a long progression. And every time we get an increase in salary, you tend to upgrade our lifestyle a little bit. We get a little bit better car, a little bit more clothes, a little bit more fancy apartment. And we tend to always upgrade our lifestyle at the same time as we get more pay. So it feels like we don't have more money. We don't have more time just digging ourselves into this. And we're talking about this in an episode three when we did the corporate ladder trap episodes. If you haven't checked that, I want to listen to that one. But I think it's so interesting to think about not upgrading your lifestyle, but maybe downgrading your lifestyle and getting more more money in general, because if you just keep your costs low, you can have so much more freedom. So. So what kind of costs can someone take away? I guess it's a word that can be a bit tricky for some people. Yeah. I mean, what what would you say? What do you spend the most money on each month? My rent.

[00:10:27] My car. Yeah. Yeah. So probably rent and it's the biggest one for, for most people I would say. And what you can do is well a lot of things you could either get a roommate, you could maybe move in with your partner. I know this is something you're contemplating or I just think let's take your example. How much is your rent? It is eight hundred dollars per month, OK, and you're now considering to move in with your girlfriend, have your girlfriend move in with you. So that would split the rent in half. Yeah, that would be four hundred dollars extra. Yeah. A month. So we're just living with her. You would save four hundred dollars a month. And let's say if this was Ana and she had the same month making fifteen dollars an hour, that's the equal of like working almost 30 hours extra. Well that would just save up from that. It's almost a whole day every week. Yeah. But almost so a great way of saving money is to start looking. What's your biggest expense. And that's rent and car is probably the most common ones. And C, can I get a roommate, could I move in with someone. Could maybe I live with my parents for a while and it's important and this is not like the permanent future solution, but this is to kind of build your first, like, bucket of money for freedom. So what what are other common expenses, you think, where you could save up money?

[00:11:53] One that I often forget about are things like old subscriptions. Yeah, I have done a small things that adds up like taking a taxi or going to restaurants.

[00:12:05] And I think it's great answers. And I believe a way to kind of get an understanding of what you pay your money for is to take the last one month or three months of receipts from the bank, like a credit card statement or whatever, and just go through and calculate how much did you spend on Netflix or Spotify or taxi rides and food, kind of see what could I take away from there? Maybe you find things that you're paying for that you're not even using like some old TV sports network that you're actually not watching or whatever that could be. And just looking at these. Prescriptions. Look at these things, I think you get a lot of value from that. Yeah, for sure. And something you often talk about is to stay away from debt. What does that mean for your ability for freedom? Yeah. So what's interesting with if you buy something on a credit card, for example, let's go back to this shirt you spoke about before. It's forty five dollar shirt, and if you pay it on with cash, then you pay it with three hours. You have already worked and made that money, but if you paid on a credit card, you paid with hours, you were going to work in the future. So you kind of taking away hours from your future and you take time from future self. Yeah, exactly. You take time for yourself. And even worse than that is that the credit card exists because they can take interest and charge you more. So instead of paying forty five dollars for the shirt, you might end up paying 50 or even 60 due to the credit card fees and stuff like that. Yeah. So it's you take more time from your future self to get something you want right now.

[00:13:42] Right. And I'm thinking to myself, I wouldn't pay, I wouldn't buy stuff on a credit card. But then it's like I actually bought my phone on sort of a credit card. I didn't have one of these payment plans. Yeah. I didn't pay anything up ahead. So that's kind of like buying a phone with Future Me time.

[00:14:00] Yeah, exactly. A big difference. So if you earn first and spend later, that's a good way to like improving your life in general. But if you spend first and then you kind of have to work it back, you're always going to be in depth to your future self. And that's just not a good place to be.

[00:14:17] Right. So these are some ways to lower your cost a bit. If you're a bit creative, you can maybe come up with even more. Maybe you can sell stuff. So now let's move on to act part three of this podcast where we talk about how you can create tiny little money machines that over time will give you the freedom that you decide.

[00:14:44] If you have some money saved up, then you can make that money grow. If you start investing and when you start investing today, that actually means that you're giving yourself more time in the future, more time to pursue your passion, the music or whatever you're into.

[00:15:04] But what if someone doesn't have any money to invest? How is this helpful?

[00:15:09] I think a good start is to look at your home and see what do you have. That is stuff like we've learned to turn money into things, but things can also be turned into money. Just look at your time and time. Good point. So what do you have at home that you're not using that could be worth money? I have two guitars. I'm mostly using one. Yeah. So that's like a perfect thing. That's probably worth a few hundred bucks or something for sure. So you could sell that and you could probably sell a lot of the clothes in your wardrobe that you're not using or maybe some old ice skates or a watch and phone like most of us have some things lying around that we could sell. And to start investing, you don't need a lot of money. It's it's a big and scary word in a sense. And it's easy to think that you need a lot. But if you have a hundred dollars, that's definitely enough to start investing and doing something with it. And let's say you managed to get a thousand dollars, then you're starting to see results of investing. So what would you do with a thousand dollars investing?

[00:16:16] Yeah, I would put it into an index fund, which is mine and Eric's favorite way of investing. So tell us why that is why we choosing that strategy.

[00:16:26] Yes. INDISCERNIBLE Well, to start with, we are not financial advisors, we are not professionals. But this is what we are doing. So if you want to copy us, feel free. If not, don't index funds is it's a way to invest in lots of different companies at once. So instead of buying shares in Apple, for example, you buy in maybe a thousand different companies as once. And this is done by a mathematical. That's a complicated word. Yeah. Do you buy all of them? And it's a computer that makes the decision. It's not an expensive person, so it's not high fees and stuff like that. And you spread the risk over a lot of different companies. And this is like S&P 500 is an index fund that it's great. But we also did a different episode when we talked more or less only about index funds and why we came to this conclusion. And I think that's episode eighteen Finance made simple. So if you want to hear more about index funds, go and check that out. OK, let's take this. A thousand dollars and you invested in index funds. What can you expect? You can expect something close to 10 percent extra money as a result every year. So if you have a thousand dollars, that would be one hundred dollars extra each month, which would be here. So each year, eight dollars per month, eight dollars per month. OK, so if we compare this then to I like what you said about positive subscriptions when we started planning for this episode, like if you have a Netflix that's a subscription, we're probably paying, I don't know, ten dollars a month. And this could be like positive subscriptions by just having a thousand dollars in index funds to actually get almost ten dollars per month back. So it's it's the opposite where you start doing things to give yourself more time and freedom in the future instead of taking it away.

[00:18:17] And you're also saving that money so that you can use if you want to spend some time not working, doing music full time. And you also get this positive subscription all the time from having it saved invested.

[00:18:30] And I think it's a crucial part is that this is not a complicated thing to get started with. Pretty much every bank bank you already have. It can help you with this. And there are lots of different ways of doing it. But it's it's easy and definitely worth doing, building tiny little money machines or time machines.

[00:18:50] That's what that word means. Yeah, that's actually what that's what it does. Is it realistic time machine. Right. That's a real time machine. Yeah. Interesting. So let's move on to the fourth and final part of this episode where we answer an email and look what we would do in her situation to pursue the passion of music.

[00:19:14] Ok, so what should Anna do to pursue her love of music, should she quit her job and go for it?

[00:19:21] No, no, no. Quitting your job is horrible advice to give in a situation like this, I would say, because she's taking a lot of risk and trying to make money from the music as fast as possible. And pressure to succeed is putting a lot of pressure and maybe even taking the phone away. If she has to make money from the music, she might not create the music that she really wants to see quitting her job. And at a lot of pressure that this is actually I personally, I believe is not very helpful advice. But what would you do?

[00:19:53] The first thing is to shift your mindset, like we spoke about in this episode, to think of money as time instead of things and realize that the quickest way of getting more money and therefore more time is to lower your cost. Look at simple ways to do that with rent subscriptions, maybe even selling things, and then start to invest the money that you save and preferably a little bit of money each month into an investment. Yeah, that's a good thing. I got a little money each month. I think that's something we haven't touched upon and that is money that as soon as you get your salary, let's say your goal is to save two hundred dollars per month that goes into your savings account, your Freedom Future Fund first before you start spending anything. Yeah, that's great advice. And that is it.

[00:20:44] And this is not a quick fix. It's a slow process. But it's also very likely that it will succeed slow and steady like a turtle.

[00:20:54] And I think an important thing to keep in mind when you start doing this is that you're you're taking action. And I think one of the most depressing things about being in a situation is that you want change, but you don't know how to change and you feel stuck, feel stuck. But by just starting to do this and see every month there is a little bit more money in the bank account, you know that you're a little bit closer to that freedom. And I believe that it will be a lot less painful to be stuck in morning traffic, if you know. Yes, but I'm getting closer to my dream. I'm getting closer to my dream. One year later, she knows that she will be closer to her dream. Exactly. So I think this is an important understanding. It gives you patience as well to see I'm actually getting closer, know it's really hard with patience if you're feeling completely stuck. Yeah. So, yeah. What would I would you recommend it to go for more advice.

[00:21:50] If she wants more advice about this from the most reliable source ever, which is. I know that one. Yeah. It's us. You should take more now. I think you should go and check out episode number six to six of the Becoming Great Icon podcast, which is called How to make a thousand Dollars Extra per Month Online. And that would give you another mindset of how to start making more money as well to start putting into your money time machine.

[00:22:17] Yeah, so that loanword money time machine as a password. Yeah, yeah.

[00:22:23] I see something that you just pull whatever it's called, and then you start hearing like the sounds of a slot machine and then you like find yourself in some big vaults of the in Indians or something with gold and then you just go back in time and money time machine. Yeah. We'll tell you about how to be a real time machine. OK, so let's let's wrap up and if someone listen to this and they enjoyed it, what can they do to help us. Yes. If you like this episode and you want us to keep doing conversations like this, you can be of great help. And the most valuable thing you can do for us is to subscribe on this podcast in any podcast app or on YouTube, for that matter. And the reason why that is so important is that all these different top lists and you can see for podcast on iTunes and stuff that are actually not based on who have the most listeners then based on who have the most percentage subscribing.

[00:23:26] So even if we're a teeny tiny podcast and we still are, then you will actually make a big impact by just subscribing to this podcast. So please go and subscribe. And hey, let's see you next week