I get a lot of questions about investing. Often guys write very long, detailed questions and scenarios regarding how to invest, where to invest, how to make a lot of money investing, and so on. Investing is a fun and interesting topic for a lot of men (myself included) and a lot of guys get really excited and animated about this.
That’s all well and good, but if this is the part of your financial life that is taking most of your emotional focus, then you’re making a mistake.
Investing is an important and core skill for the modern-day man. The days where you could rely on your corporate pension or even your 401K (or the American equivalent if you live outside of the USA) are long, long gone. Today, you must manage and plan your own retirement, since neither your employer nor the government is going to do it for you (unless you plan on living in poverty during your retirement years).
At the same time, it’s not your investments that will make you rich. It’s not your investments that will achieve any of your financial goals. I mean that. It’s your business that will make you your money, not your investments.
Your business will take you from zero to whatever income goals you want. Your investments will not do this. Instead, your investments are a safe repository (or at least should be!) for the money you’ve already made in your business.
I’ll give you some specific, numerical examples to describe what I’m saying.
Most years my investment portfolio will make something like a 6% return. In 2017 I made 122%, which was great, but that was extremely unusual. Let’s compare that amazing and rare 122% to the typical returns I get in my business.
Last year I put several thousand dollars into something in one of my businesses and received a 4500% return over the next five months. A few months before that I put some money into a marketing campaign and made a very quick 700% return. Just before that, I put a few thousand dollars into one of my web sites and received 1100% return.
Please give me some investments where you can reliably make these kinds of returns.
You can’t.
And that’s my point.
I can make multi-thousand percentage returns in my businesses almost whenever I want. But if someone makes a 50% or 100% return in their investments over an entire year, that’s considered amazing.
This is why I focus my emotional energies and my money-making time on my businesses, not my investments. Yes, I spend some time on my investments, but its easily a 1-to-100 ratio. For every one hour I spend on my investments, I spend at least 100 hours on my businesses, and most of that time in IW (improvement work, work that increases my income). Hopefully you can see why.
Thought, time, and money invested in your business will get you far, FAR more cash than thought, time, and money invested in your investments. It’s not even close.
Again, I’m not saying you don’t need investments. Investing is critical. I’m saying that if you’re spending a lot of your time trying to figure out how to make a killing in your investments, your focus is in the wrong place. That needs to be on your business. And if you don’t have a business, you need to start one. That new business has much greater potential to achieve your financial goals than trying to make money in bitcoin, Forex, peer-to-peer lending, the stock market, or whatever.
Treat your investments like I do; an important repository for the money you make from your business, not a place that will make you rich. That’s your business’s job.
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HW
Posted at 08:16 am, 27th January 2019Despite having both building my business and start investing as my goals, after starting the alpha 2.0 class I just repriorotized and decideed to focus mainly on building up the business. 1-100 ratio is a good measurement since I estimated even just to do a bare minimum effort on investing I’d need to spend about half of my limited free time to do research and implement. Since I don’t have much savings yet anyway, probably not worth the time.
Is there any a specific mount of savings that you would start recommending thinking about investing though ? Just for future reference.
Neil
Posted at 09:16 am, 27th January 2019Caleb, what if I have absolutely no idea what I could do as a business in the first place?…I know you’ve said in the past that you’ve been a business consultant most of your life… but doesn’t being a consultant mean that you would have to have some kind of expertise or knowledge in a particular field?…Welp I don’t have any knowledge/expertise about anything particular in life (I’ve wasted most my life working in bullshit retail that has sucked the soul out of me), so I have no information to consult in the first place. I’ve actually sat down many times this past year and try to come up with alpha 2.0 business ideas for me, and haven’t been able to come up with anything at all. It’s like I’m compeletely lost and have no idea what direction to even begin with.
gringoloco
Posted at 11:04 am, 27th January 2019Neil,
All those years in retail you must’ve learned and did something where you were better than most people. If it was selling suits, start a men’s fashion blog. God knows most men dress for shit. If it was selling cars, help people with the buying process and have articles each week and create a following online. You don’t necessarily have to be best to be an expert in your field. You just need to know more than most (layperson). You will learn more about your subject just by osmosis. The point is to start something.
Neil
Posted at 11:48 am, 27th January 2019@gringoloco: Honestly all that retail has done is drain me of any vitality I’ve had in my soul. I’m not even good at selling anything…and that is what is so frustrating for me, the fact that I don’t have any particular skills/knowledge/information about anything in life that I just don’t know where to even begin. I’m completely lost and drained at this point of my life.
Caleb Jones
Posted at 01:02 pm, 27th January 2019Savings and investments are two different things. For savings you should have 6-12 months of living expenses saved, but you only do this after you’ve paid off all of your debts.
For investments I can’t give you a specific number since that varies based on lots of factors. I do feel strongly about this though.
You keep asking that question and I keep giving the same answer…
Then,
A. Sell products instead of services.
or
B. Sell other people’s information. There are guys who make $40,000 a month just being an affliate for other people.
or
C. Do a personal inventory of all of your skills and past experiences. I’m sure someone would pay you for something in there. But if you don’t believe me, choose option A or B above.
THAT is your problem, not that you have “no skills.”
Read this article and do everything it says.
Marco
Posted at 02:07 am, 28th January 2019I work in construction and real estate, and I’m planning to make most of my future investments in real estate (buying old houses, renovate them and sell/rent them for a higher price). In this way, I can use my investments to help my business grow.
Is it a good ideas? Or shall I keep my business and investments completaly separate from each other?
Caleb Jones
Posted at 08:36 am, 28th January 2019That’s fine but following an Alpha 2.0 model you need to plan on starting a 2nd/3rd business with several income streams that has nothing whatsoever to do with real estate.
Aloofus
Posted at 10:01 am, 28th January 2019My business (started in 2018) is buy and hold real estate. One I have to thank BD/Caleb for his collective work (it helped me to help myself).
The thing is, is that you CAN get a good property manager to do for you, what a lot of people fuck up themselves trying to be PMs (finding/screening tenants, evictions, etc). My business is running and generating money, with less than 12 hours actual work (research, learning/reading took longer). I make big decisions if there are any, and manage the money. I let my PM do what I pay him to do.
Buy and hold real estate is absolutely compatible with the AM2.0 lifestyle, depending on how you set it up. I’m not necessary planning on leaving the US, but it’s minimally location dependent for me.
joelsuf
Posted at 06:42 pm, 29th January 2019I too have wasted most of my life working in soul sucking retail. Since 2001, to be accurate. I also worked in college dorm security, as a server, and as a bouncer. All of those were definitely soul sucking jobs.
But I still learned a lot of stuff from them. I learned fantastic people skills, organizational skills, selling skills, and other stuff that I can definitely use in my Alpha 2 business. I wrote about this in my blog, you should check it out. Read it after the one that Caleb mentioned.
like Caleb said, everyone has something to offer, they just need to find it. Put everything you own in airplane mode, take a day off of life, and just reflect on stuff. You’ll find something of value.
Legit, I started my business just selling books about stuff I learned after getting my ass kicked by life until 30 or so lol. I figure the stuff I write and the “underground counseling” sessions I’ll have with people (which I’ll begin doing when I move into my own place soon) will help somebody. And I definitely know more than most in the fields of incel, addiction, sexual assault recovery, and poor mental health (which are my niches).
Everyone has something to offer, they just need to find it 🙂