121 How to fast track financial freedom at any age

by | Feb 26, 2020 | Earn extra income, Entrepreneurship, Health and Wealth, Managing Money, Podcast

121 How to fast track financial freedom at any age

The most important money you will ever invest is that which you saved before you turned 30. But what if you didn’t start then? Are you too old to achieve financial freedom? The answer is a resounding NO!

Don’t resign yourself to the fact that you’re stuck. Not with the job you’re in, the expenses you have, or the life you’re living. You have a lifetime ahead of you. Do you want to spend it living your BEST LIFE? Here’s how to fast track financial freedom at any age…


Show Notes

  • [01.14] The importance of investing before you’re 30.
  • [03.01] Getting unstuck – the amazing people doing amazing things at ALL ages.
  • [06.15] This is what happens when you start to do something you’re passionate about.
  • [06.53] How much money you need for retirement.
  • [08.02] The building blocks of financial freedom.
  • [09.30] The advantages of starting a side hustle.
  • [10.13] Fast track your financial freedom by signing up to my Side Hustle Course, for which sales open next week, on the 4th of March. 

Related posts and episodes

Quotes from this episode

“Wealth starts with mindset.  Whether you think something is possible or not.” – Lisa Linfield

“So often I see people who have resigned themselves to the fact that they’re stuck. And don’t even consider starting something new because they’ve lost hope.” – Lisa Linfield

“We were all created to be content at a soul level.” – Lisa Linfield

“Wealth is fundamentally what you earn minus how much you spend.” – Lisa Linfield

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Transcript

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Working Women’s Wealth, where we discuss what it takes to build real wealth in a way normal humans can understand. Here’s your host, Lisa Linfield.

Lisa Linfield:

Hello everybody, and welcome to this week’s episode of Working Women’s Wealth. Thank you to all of those who have signed up to the six-day sprint and for the amazing feedback that you’ve given. It’s just so great to share your journeys and I really appreciate it.

Lisa Linfield:

So, a few weeks ago I was talking to graduates at a large bank. I truly love this work, as they are much more eager to learn than any other age, and haven’t yet got themselves in insurmountable debt because they haven’t yet had their first paycheck. The reason they’re eager to learn is because they’re still young, so they don’t have the pressure that they’re running out of time, and they still believe that they have as much chance as anyone else to be wealthy.

Lisa Linfield:

Underpinning these two beliefs is an element of age. I know for a fact that it’s easier to reach your wealth goals if you saved early on in life. It really doesn’t matter how you do the maths, the money you save before you’re 30 is the most important money you’ll ever invest. The more you can invest then, the better off you’ll be.

Lisa Linfield:

65% of my current wealth comes from before the age of 30, before we earn big salaries, before we had large bonuses and things like that, it was when we were young. The key to it was that we moved to South Africa from the U.K. and decided to leave every cent, as well as our flat, over there. It meant that we struggled significantly to start out at 30 in South Africa with absolutely nothing, especially when our friends were driving fancy cars and having fancy houses.

Lisa Linfield:

The key investment decision was not rolling the money from our first flat into a bigger home for us. That’s what most people do. They buy that first flat in their 20s, and then what they do is they take that money and buy a big home. Instead, what happened is we kept it as it was and it stayed generating rental income, and we struggled from scratch to pay off the family home we then bought. The thing is, when you keep it as an investment property, it still grows and generates income. When you have a house that you live in, it is not an income-generating asset, so that money that could have stayed growing income actually ends up stuck inside a house, which generates no income. We also never cashed in our pensions, and those two things have got us to where we are today.

Lisa Linfield:

But the thing I want to challenge you on is what I hear so often. “I’m too old now, so I’ve given up on the dream of being able to ever be financially free. I will work till I die.” Now, I choose to work and I choose to work until I die. I was just having breakfast this morning with a friend and I said I want them to put me in my grave and I’m still working.

Lisa Linfield:

In January, I got to go to the ClickFunnels conference. Now, ClickFunnels is the best piece of software to build sales, upsell, and cross-sell web pages. It’s the future of web pages. But it’s headed up by a wonderful man called Russell Brunson, who is not only the best direct sales marketer in the world, he also believes deeply that entrepreneurs have a huge opportunity to impact the world, to use their talents both for profit and for purpose, exactly like I do. The conference was phenomenal, and as the leader he attracts like-minded humans, so I met some amazing people doing amazing things.

Lisa Linfield:

What struck me was the age range. There was an 18 year old on stage who already had a $20 million company, but there was also a ton of people who were over 50 and starting new businesses creating wealth. I met a woman who had retired in December. She was 63 and she was just setting out on her new journey of entrepreneurship.

Lisa Linfield:

So often I see people who have resigned themselves to the fact that they’re stuck, and don’t even consider starting something new because they’ve lost hope. They’re stuck with the job they have, stuck with the expenses they have, and stuck with the life they have, and it breaks my heart. We were all created to be content at a soul level, to do things we enjoy doing.

Lisa Linfield:

I love my interview in episode 55 with Robin Meyers. At 53, Robin decided to leave the safety of the world she knew and start her own business. Her entire business was around staring your fears in the eye and going for it anyway. When I interviewed her just over a year ago, she was just starting down the road. Now, one year later, she’s done a TEDx talk, she regularly hosts retreats overseas to Europe, and is a sought out speaker.

Lisa Linfield:

I myself chose to go back to university and start a degree at 40, and I remember when people talked to me about how on earth I could leave a high-paying job and start at the bottom again. I realized what a different mindset we had. Wealth starts with mindset, whether you think something is possible or not. People saw Robin and I as too old to start from scratch. We, however, saw a lifetime ahead of us that we wanted to spend living our best life for us, not the kids, not what the world out there says we should be doing, for us.

Lisa Linfield:

At 40, I figure I’ve had 20 years of my career gone, but have 40 ahead of me. Work to 80? Of course. Not because I need to, but because I’m doing what I’m passionate about, what I’m born to do, what I feel my purpose is.

Lisa Linfield:

At the conference, I met so many people who were forced to start their own businesses because they were forced to retire and didn’t have enough money. Two things were common about them. The first was how great it was to be your own boss and have the flexibility to choose where and when they work. The second was how they wished that started earlier.

Lisa Linfield:

National Treasury did a piece of work. They’ve concluded that only 6% of people will experience financial freedom, the ability to stop work at retirement and have enough money to continue the life they had before retirement. My experience as a financial advisor bears that out. I do think that 94% of people are going to struggle in retirement. They will need their children’s help. You need 3 million rand for every 10,000 rand of pre-tax monthly expenses, or $300,000 or pounds for every $1,000 or pounds. So, pause this quickly and do the calculation. How much money do you spend each month pre-tax, and therefore, how much do you need?

Lisa Linfield:

I always say that the bare minimum you need is frail care plus medical aid. In South Africa, decent frail care is $24,000 per person, and with medical expenses, that takes you to over 30,000 rand. So, the minimum you need is 9 million rand per person.

Lisa Linfield:

Financial freedom has two building blocks in what I call the financial foundation, income and expenses. Just like weight is at its most basic what you eat minus how much you exercise, wealth is fundamentally what you earn minus how much you spend. Now, dealing both of them will enable you to invest more for your freedom. But most people find they can’t cut their expenses because the cost of children, medical expenses, transport to work, and a place to live in, swallows up everything.

Lisa Linfield:

If you can cut your expenses to save more, that’s fantastic. You have to make choices. What’s worth spending money on and what’s not? For some, it is the latest phone or clothes, and for others it’s a holiday. You can’t spend in every area. The money you earn can only do one of two things, pay for now, or be invested to generate more and more and more money over the long term. The disciplines of cutting your expenses in the not-important areas will mean that you can spend more money in the really important ones.

Lisa Linfield:

As a financial advisor, I try to solve this problem for people every day, but for most people it comes down to the fact that they need more income. Either the partner at home needs to start working, or they need to find another source of income.

Lisa Linfield:

I really recommend that everyone considers a side hustle. I’ve said it before that I even recommend to my clients who are 50 that they start a side hustle, so that by the time they are forced to retire at 60, they have something meaningful to do and some way of earning income, because most people are short. A business that you can grow over time to slowly equal what you earn now, and then overtake your earnings and enable you to live a better life, is worth the investment of time, energy, and a little bit of money. Trust me, most of the barriers that there used to be in starting your business five years ago are no longer valid.

Lisa Linfield:

Next week, I open the doors again for my side hustle course. The last time I did this was in September last year. It’s a business school for startups or young businesses, and the course covers everything you need to know in order to get your business off the ground. Trust me. I designed it because I’m so desperate to support people to live their best lives, and I don’t see another way of solving this retirement crisis that faces us. In the hope that you wouldn’t waste the money that I did in making all the wrong choices as to how to get this up and running, I really wasted a lot of money on time, on courses, on software, on all of these things, that I’d needn’t have spent if I had have had the right teacher.

Lisa Linfield:

So, to kick off this process, I’m running a free live masterclass to teach you what you need to know if you’re considering starting a business. So, sign up for that at businessschoolforstartups.com/webinar-1. Let me say that again. Businessschoolforstartups.com/webinar-1, and the link will also be in the show notes if you want to investigate that.

Lisa Linfield:

If you want to invest in yourself and build your own business, sales for the course open next week, the 4th of March, so be sure to sign up. It really will take you step by step through everything you need to know about how to get your idea, get your product set up, how to build value letters and value propositions, and understand your customers and competitors. It’ll take you all the way through social media, understanding how that is done, and then setting up the websites and technology that you will need. If you can drag and drop, you can do this.

Lisa Linfield:

So, take care, have a great week, and I hope to meet you all on a webinar, or alternatively, when the course opens for sales on the 4th of March. I’m Lisa Linfield, and this is Working Women’s Wealth.