No Dad, Poor Mom

If you want to create a prosperous life, you’ve got to understand six simple but profound concepts:

• Poverty Sucks. There’s nothing romantic, noble, or spiritual about it.
• Prosperity is not defined exclusively by money and material things. But thinking you can manifest prosperity without money and material things is a foolish and misguided premise.
• The money system is an insiders’ game stacked against you, and you must learn how it is played.
• You work for your money, or your money works for you.
• It’s dangerous to seek money advice from broke people, financial advice from a monetary system designed to enslave you, or harmonious living advice from people who are professional victims. Look for people who have created a lifestyle you would enjoy and discover insights from how they live.
• Once you truly understand how the game is played, your goal is to create a strategy that allows you to wake up every morning with a higher net worth than you had when you went to sleep the night before.

This essay is one from a continuing series of posts on the four quadrants of manifesting a prosperous life. (ICYMI, here are parts one, two, three, and four.)  Let’s continue the discussion on cultivating your financial literacy so you can protect yourself against the speed bumps designed to keep you broke – and open you up for new opportunities as they arise.

Disclaimer: This is not professional financial advice.  I’m not a financial planner, account, investment advisor, or even a graduate from the Miss Cleo School of Telepathy.  I’m a high school dropout. Not throwing shade on Kiyosaki but I never had a dad of any kind, let alone a rich one, to teach me the principles of growing wealth. My mom raised three kids by herself, knocking on doors selling AVON.  What I’m sharing with you are the lessons I learned in the real world: selling dope in middle school, starting successful companies, having my restaurant seized by the tax authorities, making a payroll for 30 years, pissing away millions of dollars, creating systems that have produced billions of dollars in sales, becoming a philanthropist, and everything else along the journey from washing dishes for minimum wage to becoming healthy, happy, and wealthy.

There is a veritable marketing complex designed to keep you ignorant about money.  This collection of bad actors also manipulates you into creating emotions around money, which cause you to make financial decisions for the wrong reasons. You end up doing self-sabotage behavior that will cause you to end up sick, miserable, and broke.

Allow me to share six specific action steps you can take to produce positive results for yourself in the money and material things quadrant.  Let’s begin with…

1) Change your relationship with money.

This starts by discovering your core foundational beliefs about money and people who have a lot of it. (Because you probably have a whole bunch of negative beliefs that are self-sabotaging your prosperity.)  The most insidious beliefs in this category are:

• Money is bad.
• It’s inherently saintly or virtuous to be poor.
• You don’t deserve success.
• Rich people are evil.
• You must be a bad parent to become successful.
• Money and material possessions have nothing to do with happiness.
• Successful companies must exploit people and the environment.

Once you’re brainwashed by these mind viruses, you begin to hate wealthy people and identify yourself as superior to them – believing that being poor makes you more spiritual, noble, or virtuous.   These beliefs can also cause you to set lower goals and even self-sabotage your success. This builds a negative feedback loop that pulls you further and further away from a prosperous life.

You need to expose yourself to platforms like this blog, my Prosperity TV YouTube channel, and work by others to reframe your relationship with money from a negative one to an empowering one.

2) Develop Your Prosperity Consciousness

If you’re like most of the world, you’ve been brainwashed with the limiting beliefs about money, success, and prosperity mentioned above. To paraphrase Emile Cady, you can’t be treated for prosperity; you must be open to receiving it.  You must eviscerate the beliefs that enslave you and replace them with beliefs that empower you. In addition to the resources above, I would strongly encourage you to read my book, Radical Rebirth.

3) Learn how the money game is played.

You can’t keep playing a game that is stacked against you, especially when you have no idea what the rules are.  You need to become financially literate.  For help with this, read these posts:

Learn the Money Game

Beat Your Burn Rate

This Can Be Your Prosperity Superpower…

4) Retire your bad debt as quickly as possible.

Debt is a prison best left as quickly as possible.  It’s silly to put money in a savings or investment account for a couple percent in earnings while meanwhile, you’re paying 30 percent interest on credit card debt.  If you just send that minimum monthly payment those financial companies are so “gracious” to offer you, it will take you 41 years to pay off your balance.  I have two resources to help you in this area:

This post: Getting Rid of Credit Card Debt

This video: The Path to Becoming Debt Free

Fun fact: As a kid I hated being poor.  By the time I was a teen, I set a goal and made a promise to myself that I would become a millionaire by the time I reached 35. (Which I achieved.) Now I am so much wealthier than I ever dared to dream of.  But I have never felt any richer than the day I paid off my last bill and became debt free.

5) Develop a side gig to produce extra income above your survival needs.

If you can reorder your priorities to take some of the income you’re now spending on getting by, and divert it to starting your investment account, then you don’t need a side gig. But if you’re one of the people who can’t survive without spending everything you earn, then you need to get a side gig...

Join a direct selling company, drive rideshare, deliver pizzas, or start an iguana walking biz.  But do something to earn additional money that is used exclusively to create an investment fund for step six below. This does not have to be daunting.  It’s very, very, very doable.  Take a pause right in this moment and affirm to yourself, “I want to keep my day job for now, and I’m going to create a side gig that produces at least $1,000 am month in extra income. Then I will allow that extra income to work building my wealth.”

You may be wondering if a grand a month can actually transform you into a wealthy (even extremely wealthy) person. The answer – if you use it the way we’re going to look at next – is absofuckinglutely yes.  Really.

6) Unleash the power of compounding and leverage.

Finally, put that investment fund to work for you.  This is where you escape the trading time for money trap and start creating wealth.

Your job or side gig isn’t as important as what you learn about the money game and how you act on that knowledge. A schoolteacher, hairstylist, or nurse can become wealthy – if they are willing to delay gratification for short-term things, beat their burn rate, and put their money to work for them.  The resources I mentioned above contain many tangible and specific ways to accomplish this.

That finishes quadrant two of living a prosperous life.  Next post we’ll dig into the third one: spiritual sustenance.  Until then, please share your thoughts and questions with the community in the comments section below.  (And speaking of prosperity consciousness, don’t be afraid to use the share buttons above to spread the word!)

Peace,

- RG