The other day, as we were studying law of success #3, the habit of savings, one of our mastermind participants, Lillian Gregory, mentioned how the ideas of budgeting and saving money never seem to get her excited.
I can totally relate.
Budgeting and saving money for the sake of budgeting and saving money alone, never gets my juices flowing.
Instead… What gets me excited is FREEEEEEDOM!
For me, that means focusing on building income through my business activities, paying off debt and then STACKING THAT CASH for income producing assets. 🙂
YES YES YES!
In fact, I’ve never budgeted, and I’m ok with that.
Side note on budgeting: my personal philosophy is that if you get in the habit of putting away most of your money to pay yourself first so you can buy income producing assets…. What is the need of a budget?
It’s like the 1 thing philosophy… Instead of focusing on 100% of all the places your money could go, why not focus on the top 20% of things that will make 80% of the difference?
That top 20% for me has been…
—-> Producing a stream of business income
—-> Never having a mortgage or liability debts (or eliminating them as fast as possible)
Why?
Because this is where a HUGE chunk of most of the monthly money goes for most people ….
—-> Once those things were accomplished, saving as much as possible…
We’ve never focused on saving 5 to 10%…
For most of our marriage it’s been 50 to 80% we’ve saved because we felt that the more we saved, the faster we could buy income producing assets and the faster we could reach our real freedom goal…
Freedom: “Income producing assets that produce a stream of pipeline money that equals or surpasses the monthly expenses”
I’ve always been perplexed by the idea of budgeting to save a few dollars here and there on small things like groceries while dumping huge portions of income into big mortgages or payments on expensive cars…
Saving money and cutting expenses I think is great everywhere but so many people tend to focus that habit on the things that make the smallest difference and ignore those that make the biggest.
The phrase, “Stepping over dollars to pick up dimes” comes to mind…
For me, I’d rather live in something smaller and drive something less luxurious – and be free faster, than the alternative.
All of that to me, resonates a lot more than “Saving and budgeting.”
And 1 final quote from fellow freedom crusader LT Turner that seems to make a lot of sense…
“Budgets are like diets. They come and go.” 🙂