While doctors and business owners were careers once synonymous with wealth, the vast majority of people in those categories are not prosperous today.
Despite what you see on everyone’s social media posts, most people lack financial security. Economists have found strategies for living, saving, and investing that can take someone with even a modest income and make them financially independent later in life. Yet, there are a number of factors about today’s culture that are causing people’s money to go off the cliff; without leaving any skid-marks!
For doctors, we don’t provide care simply for the money. On the other hand, I’ve coached 1,000s of chiropractors and worked with 1,000s more chiropractic students. I have watched the most loving, caring, and giving doctors go totally off the rails because of money and optimistic students leave school only to see their careers fall flat. It’s well documented that the average salary compared to student loan debt for chiropractors has created an untenable economic future.
While the Bible states, “The love of money is the root of all evil,” cash is required to sustain us all and give us choices for our future. If money isn’t coming in, isn’t growing, and hasn’t brought us to a place of financial freedom, then stress and frustration are inevitable, and you are often forced to take your career in a direction you never wanted.
You can’t just grow your business. It’s grow + make sure you’re growing in a fiduciarily healthy direction.
HERE ARE 5 MORE CRITICAL WEALTH LAWS YOU JUST CAN’T BREAK!
- Panic-based decisions. Every day, a company is leveraging media fears to get you to buy their program or product based on a made-up negative prediction about the future. You can’t get wealthy making investment or economic choices out of panic or fear.
- Money is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s proven math: if you address your finances as a marathon there’s virtually a 100%-chance you’ll accumulate wealth. Address your finances like a sprint and it’s just like rolling dice; only the very few win and even they will say they just got lucky. Most people that haven’t figured the long-game stay flat or go backwards over time.
- Discipline. Getting an education, getting in shape, or getting wealthy have discipline in common. My most challenging clients are scattered and inconsistent. We can solve the problem, but they often don’t have a disciplined process to build their core business. Rather, they dabble in several interests, excel in none, and never get that financial machine generating the profit they need to support the life they want now and create that affluent future.
- The Amazon Market. Healthy-eaters way the cost of their food. “If I put this in my body, what are the short and long-term costs to my physiology and well-being. The “Amazon buyer” doesn’t consider the cost. Amazon, Apple, and other virtual purchases are too easy. When our credit card is on file and there’s no pain watching the money fly out of our hand or bank-account you’re likely to buy indiscriminately. The sad part is that these mega-companies know it and their analytics work to keep manipulating you to consume your future one easy click at a time.
- The Starbucks Economy. To win the wealth-building-marathon, you have to consistently create a dollar above and beyond what you spend. There are the cost and the real cost to daily habit spending that really hurts.
The average purchase at a Starbucks nationally:
- Per unit is $3.43 (Tall), $4.10 (Grande), and $4.43 (Venti).
- This comes out to between $1221-1577 annually and $6,105-$7,885 over 5 years!
Any wise investor would love to set aside $6-8,000 every 5 years. That’s a down-payment on a rental house or an investment into a blue-chip, dividend-paying stock. In fact, if you invest $1000/month into your portfolio at 6% interest, it compounds into one million dollars in 30 years.
The big key is you have to start this right away (Really yesterday). As I look at what it would take for everyone that doesn’t get lucky to really build legitimate wealth, financial freedom, and significant passive income consistently flowing in every year; it’s taking the right steps right away. In addition to these 5 rules, I’ve written many others that just can’t be broken.
Have fun saving the world
Dr. Ben
