Do you ever set any goal about how much money you want to make in next year?

If you do then you must pay attention. You might fall into a trap. I agree that goal setting is an important process for us. It is a guide for us to plan our year accordingly so that we can achieve what we want to. If you want to make more money, you must set a clear and achievable money goal.

The Problem of Money Goal

I always set money goal. I’m making money from the Internet and this is a business that needs to be driven by goals and motivation. This is because it is a part time business where I take action in my spare time. So I need motivation to take action and sacrifice my spare time to exchange for a business income source. Otherwise I cannot take action because of laziness.

However, I always fail to achieve my goal. I always fail to achieve goals that I have set for my online business. If I want to give a mark to this “test”, I can tell you that I FAIL. I believe something must be wrong with me.

So I look back at my works and I found something common. That is I always stop taking action in the earliest stage. I never take action persistently until I achieve my goal.

The biggest problem that I have is I’m too focusing on the money goal. For example, I want to make $1000 in 1 month. So I usually divide the $1000 by 30 so that I know on average I have to make at least $33 per day. I wrote this down on a piece of paper and put it every where that I can see it. Then only I go out and take action.

But I’m not the lucky guy that always succeed in first few days. In day 1, I fail and I told myself that I’m just starting up. In day 2, I fail again and I told myself that it takes time. After 1 week, if I haven’t hit my goal to make $33 daily, I gave up because I worry, lost my focus and stopped taking actions.

I must do something on this or else I will never succeed in online business or any money goal that I set in my journey to financial freedom.

Finally I found the solution for the Money Goal Problem

I found a secret to overcome this problem. I wish I would have found this earlier so that I won’t waste so much of time.

If you follow my post about why we must retire as early as we can, you will know that there are a few benefits for us to retire early. So today, let’s discuss what kind of steps that we can take every day so that we can have a wealthy early retirement:

1. Save More Money. The key to retire early and wealthy is investment. It is about how we invest and grow our money so that we can retire early. This is why the first step we must take is save more money and let us have more money to invest.
2. Delay your gratification. In order to save more money, you have to delay your gratification and stop buying things that not really necessary or something that is expensive. I know this is the hardest part for us to do as we are facing so much of temptation today. But if you have a goal to retire early, this is a must. We only delay and buy later after we are wealthy and rich.
3. Build more income sources. One of the greatest way to save more money is have multiple sources of income. The more income you have, the more money you can save each month. This will greatly help you to boost the growing speed of your early retirement fund.
4. Reduce Debt and Accumulate wealth. Debt is dangerous if we don’t know how to handle it. So my advice is we must try our best to be debt free and let our finance back to the starting point of 0. After that we can fully concentrate on wealth accumulation by investing money and buying assets.
5. Take more risks in investment. Depends on your current age and income, if you are young and have multiple sources of income, then you should try to invest in those high return investments. Of course the risks are higher. My advice is you only can do this after you are debt free and have plenty of extra money on hands. Please make sure your life will not be ruined just in case your investment fails.
6. Buy VS Rent Your House? If you come to the age to buy your first house, you must think properly whether you should buy it or rent it. There are many factors involves in this decision. In most cases, house is the greatest asset because we will spend most our money in this asset. But it is also something that may affect our plan to retire early. So think properly before making decision.

Yes, it is not that easy to retire early as you have to sacrifice so much of things and have a life that is so different from others. Just like me, I always have different mindset in money when I talk to my friends. This is because I have different financial goal. No matter what you goal is, as long as you know what you are doing and what you want, then you are on the right track to achieve what you want.

One of the reason people is unhappy in their living is because lack of money and the feeling of security for their finance.

Today, we need money to settle a lot of things and problems. Basic needs such as food, clothes, houses, medicines are consuming money. We need money to survive. Therefore in order to feel the sense of real security in life, we must have some money left behind which give the sense of security to us

We all love to live in a life that full of security. No body like to have the challenges in their finance all the time. We need security to feel the peace. So achieving financial security is the basic goal that everyone of us should have. Besides that, before you start any investment, you are advised to cover all your basic needs and achieve financial security. This will not put you or your family in hot water just in case you lost money in investments.

What Is Financial Security?

My Personal definition for financial security is a level of personal finance where you don’t have to worry that you are not enough money just in case anything happen in your life. You have the true security for your life because you have all the necessary money ready to cover whatever unpredictable circumstances happen in your life. Besides that there are also no loopholes in your finance that might let you down such as debt or persona loan.

Therefore based on this definition, I have listed some of the requirements that we must have in order to achieve financial security.

1. Emergency Funds. Ok, it is very important to have an emergency funds ready for you and your family. Just in case anything happen, you have money to settle your problems. For example, if you lose your job, this money can let you to cover all your basic expenses while you can continue to look for a new job. Build up this emergency funds even you are in debt. If you are in debt, you can build up 1-2 months of emergency funds. After that you can continue to pay your debt. 1-2 months of emergency funds are better than none.
2. Become debt Free. Debt is dangerous and risky if we don’t know how to manage it properly. Therefore, I always encourage people to be debt free. There are good debt and bad debt tough. But if you don’t know how to handle your debts, you are advised to pay down the debt first. Debt is just like termites which can eat up the support of your finance. It can ruin and make your life fall down if you don’t handle it properly. So become debt free first and clear all the bad debts.
3. Saving Account. It can really give you the sense of peace and security to see that there are money left in your saving account. It is really nice to see this amount of money keep increasing. Saving account is a must because it is a fund for us to move our personal finance to the next stage. Maybe you want to start your business, maybe you want to invest or even save it for your children education. Well, this is very important for you to get into the next level of personal finance, Financial Comfortable.
4. Insurance. Life is hard to be predicted. There are things that might happen and affect our normal life. So we must buy the insurance to cover all this unpredictable things. Personally, I think an insurance that can cover death, medicines and illnesses is important for us. A life insurance is a must for everyone of us.
5. Maximize Your IRA Potential. Even though we have different financial goal to hit but we cannot forget our retirement. We should build the nest of our retirement from time to time. So spend sometime to manage your IRA and maximize its potential so that your retirement is under a protection.

It is really hard to live in a life that full of stress and worries about not enough money. Financial security is a stage that we must achieve for the peace of life and happiness. So please set a goal to achieve financial security as fast as possible. Good luck.

Today counting on one income source is very risky. One of the fact that I learn from current recession is that nothing is really secure even our jobs. People look for a job because of its security. But it is not as secure as what we used to think like. As you can see, if anything happens in our economy, our jobs will be affected as downsizing happens in many companies. Although we can recession-proof our jobs but for long term solution, we must know how to have more income sources. It is too risky for us to depends on 1 income source.

Just like investing and retirement planning, we must diversify our income source so that our income will not 100% collapse just in case anything happens.

The Benefits to Have Multiple Income Sources

Having more income is really a big advantage for us. With more money,

1. We can pay down our debt faster. We can use the money to pay down the credit card debt, mortgage, personal loan etc. This will let us to be debt free faster and easier.
2. We can have more money to invest. With more money, you can have more choices for your investment plan. You can invest in those high yield investment or even invest more money to build up for your wealth. With this extra money, you can take more risks to have more returns too.
3. Save more money faster. You can put all the money into your saving account to save money. You can save for your children college fund or even your retirement fund. You can also build up your emergency fund too.

In good time, extra income sources simply let us have more money to invest and build our wealth, in bad time, we have multiple income sources to support our life. This is why I always say that multiple income sources are essential for everyone of us.

What Are The Important Requirements To Have Multiple Income Sources

Currently, we are making money because we are providing some kind of value to others. People are paying money to exchange for our values. It can be services, products, knowledge or time.

So if you want to have multiple income sources, you can:

• Provide Multiple Values. Maybe you are knowledgeable in different area. Then you can provide different values to different kind of people. For example, you can repair computers as your job, get a freelance programming jobs at night time and provide computer tutorials to children at weekend. This can let you have multiple income sources.
• Provide The Same Value in multiple ways. This is slightly different from above. You know nothing but only your expertise. So you can concentrate on your expertise and provide your value in multiple ways. For example, you are good in cooking. So you can work as a chef in local restaurant, then you can write and sell some cooking recipes, you can also build a site that about cooking and earn money from the internet. All the ways are build around the same expertise but in different ways to provide the value.

Personally I prefer the way #2 to make more money. By focusing on 1 expertise, you can really improve and become an expert on a particular field. So you can provide even more value to people and make more money because you are an expert. Besides that it is also easier to control 1 knowledge rather than different knowledge. Just like what people said, 1 knife that can cut is better than 100 knife that is blunt.

People with different level of income can achieve financial freedom as long as they know how to manage their money properly. But a matter of fact is that people with higher income can be financial free and achieve their financial goals faster. In fact, high income is a must for those who want to achieve financial freedom and retire earlier, like me.

I want to achieve financial freedom by the age of 30. So I must boost my cash flow speed to achieve this goal. First of all my income must be high and I must know how to manage the income to build more passive income assets. There are many options I can choose to generate high income but I never include MLMs in my plan even though they always promote the theory of financial freedom in their programs.

Multi-level Marketing

MLM is multi-level marketing and here is the definition from wikipedia:

Multi-level marketing (MLM), also known as Network Marketing, is a marketing strategy that compensates promoters of direct selling companies not only for product sales they personally generate, but also for the sales of others they introduced to the company. The products and company are usually marketed directly to consumers and potential business partners by means of relationship referrals and word of mouth marketing.

The Reasons Why MLM is Not For Me

As you can see, the plan of MLM actually quite match the requirement of financial freedom. We can leverage on MLM to generate more passive income by introducing more “downline” or members. This is why many MLM companies use the terms of financial freedom to promote their programs to people because they are being promoted as a system to generate passive income.

However, no matter how good a MLM system or products are, I never have any interest in MLM. I even never think that I want to achieve my financial freedom through them. Anyway, more and more people are not feeling good with the words MLM.

Here are the reasons why I think in this way:

• MLM System is too money oriented. I found that many MLM companies are too concentrating on making money. They are too promoting the concept of “money making” to people until they forget what is the real meaning of running a business. This let me feel that MLM is not selling any products but money making opportunity to people. MLM system is only a marketing system and the most important part is their products and contributions to the society. This is the main mission for a true business. However, what I found is they are just promoting their MLM system and carry out the message how much money we can make from their system. They should pay more attention on their products and services and not how much money their memebers can make.
• MLM products are too highly promoted. Well, everyone who joined MLM company is trying to make money and be a good sales person. Guess what, they are too highly promote their MLM system and products to people. They always claim their products are so different and rank no 1 in the market. I even met with some friends of mine promoting their MLM products exaggeratedly. After doing my research, I found that their products are having problems and some of them are being banned in different countries due to the side effects to consumers.
• The markup margin is too high. How people can make money from MLM company? Commission from different level! As the name indicated, mlm company has to pay commission to multiple level of people. Some of them even pay up to 5 level of people. So Can you imagine how much margin they have to markup on their products so that they can pay out so much of commissions so many levels of people? This make me doubt about their products… and I don’t wish people around me use this kind of “expensive” products because I want to make my commission.
• The Relationship for prospecting. How a new MLM marketer get started to promote their products and systems? Yes, through their relationship. They will introduce their companies to their relatives and families. they will hard selling to their friends and anyone who within their networks. Yes, we can leverage our network and relationship but I won’t leverage on them to make money especially by selling so called “business opportunity” and expensive products and services to them. I have been approached by several friends who are MLM marketers. For me, I really tired and lazy to answer their phone calls or meet with them because they always leverage on our relation to make money. I hate this process so I will never join any MLM companies for this purpose.
• Not Everyone can really Make “Big” Money. Yes, there are many people who is making money from MLM and in fact, some of them are even making big money from the MLM system. But not everyone can do this. Based on my observation, people who can make money, especially big money, are those consider as the pioneer of the MLM system. They are the first group of people who joined the system. I think I have no luck to get into a system at the early stage and MLM is not suitable for me.

Conclusion

MLM always emphasize that it is a business and everybody who joined the MLM system are business owners. I have different view on this. For me, the MLM companies are running the business and not the members. Everyone who joined their system are sales persons who are trying to recruit even more sales person.

Above are some of my points about MLM and I meant no offense by the remarks.