Passive Income & The Way of Wealth

This is the second Catching FIRE article in a three part series. 

The goal of this 3 part series is to offer an Ultimate Guide to financial freedom.

In this article, I plan to discuss the Way of Wealth. This is the second path to financial freedom and it focuses on getting to financial freedom by growing your income and turning it passive.

In my previous article, I discussed the concepts of Frugal FI (FI = Financial Independence) to give you the paradigm of reaching financial freedom as practiced by focusing on better using your life energy, simplifying your life, and embracing frugality. 

Frugal FI is based on adopting a mindset of financial freedom founded on happiness and personal growth, not getting more stuff. By focusing on growing your skill set, embracing simple living, and cutting costs you can reduce your costs significantly, while keeping your income steady. This allows you to drive up your savings rate and lower the bar to achieve financial independence.

To catch the first article in the series check-out: Catching FIRE pt 1: Frugal FI – Ultimate Guide to Financial Freedom.

In this article, I will run through the core concepts of the Way of Wealth. I’ll walk you through a guide to Financial Independence through increasing your income and passiv-FI-ing it. Finally, in the third article, I’ll wrap up the series with an article on Fast FI which is our core ethos and combines the best of the other two paths to achieve financial freedom in 5 years or less.

As I walk you through The Way of Wealth, I’m going to lay out important resources and brain dump a lot of what’s scattered across the internet and in multiple books all in this one Ultimate Guide for your reading pleasure.

Let’s get started.

The Way of Wealth

The alternative perspective to Frugal FI is the Way of Wealth. This is the perspective most famously championed by Robert Kiyosaki in Rich Dad Poor Dad. The core of this approach is that by pursuing your life purpose you can generate massive wealth and eventually turn that wealth into a passive cash flow machine.

Some great books that elaborate on the Way of Wealth paradigm are:

• Rich Dad Poor Dad
• Cash Flow Quadrant

• The 4 Hour Work Week

• Tony Robbins’ Classics: Money Master the Game & Unshakable

• The Millionaire Fastlane

• The Richest Man in Babylon

• Killing Sacred Cows

• Think and Grow Rich

Let’s start with the basics.

10 Principles of Abundance

Here are some principles that lie at the core of The Way of Wealth. I’ll elaborate on these as we go through the article.

1. Wholistic Wealth: Seek wealth that benefits you, your children, your society and amplifies your values. Wealth is the natural outcome of self improvement and seeking to improve every area of your life. It’s not true wealth if you destroy your family, health, freedom, and happiness in the process of making money.
2. Passive Cash Flow: Break the chain between your time and your income then scale that solution. Oftentimes, this takes upfront time, specialized knowledge, and resources but in the end your income can be turned passive. Alternatively, make your money, sell your assets and buy a passive money machine of index fund or dividend producing stocks or bonds. You can accomplish this method of passive cash flow when you can live off of 4% of your net worth (passive stock investing, passive rental portfolio ownership, passive ownership of shares in cash flowing small businesses…etc). This is called the 4% rule in financial freedom circles.
3. Own Assets that Work For You: Make or buy assets that generate income by creating value in the marketplace. Look to buy or make assets that can be turned passive.
4. Wealth is Personal Growth: Your personal growth and knowledge creates the opportunities for generating wealth. Whether it’s learning entrepreneurship or learning how to buy and rent out a house, wealth requires a commitment to you personally growing your knowledge and specialized skill set. The entire endeavor of financial freedom is held together by pursuing personal growth and moving toward your life purpose.
5. Abundance Mindset: Cost Cutting has a lower limit. Wealth has no upper limit. Cost cutting alone leads to a scarcity mindset where you’re continually pinch pennies. As you learn the skill of creating wealth, it becomes easier to make more and more. Although wealthy people often begin with a frugal mindset to generate their initial capital, they gradually evolve into a mindset of abundance.
6. Cash Flow Not Net Worth: Net worth is often a false indicator of wealth. True wealth is available to spend and not linked to your time, aka passive cash flow. Cash flow is the money generated for use in everyday life. Alternatively, time is life, so the combination of free cash flow and free time equals wealth. Many people who count their net worth focus on paper wealth that is locked up and not able to be used (house debt/equity, business debt/equity, …etc).
7. Increase the Spread: Wealth creation is the spread between what you spend and what you make. Cutting spending is useful, but growing income and cutting spending combined is the fastest way to financial independence and later financial freedom. The more you’re willing to cut spending and able to increase income the faster you generate wealth. People with bad money habits will overspend their income at any level of income and remain poor.
8. High Returns = Hustle + Specialized Knowledge: You can increase your returns with increased specialized knowledge and/or increased hustle up front. Alternatively, you can accept lower returns to turn income passive and buy back your time.
9. Time Freedom is the Ultimate Form of Wealth: Money is nice to have, but oftentimes it turns into a jail cell if you can’t turn it into passive income. Many entrepreneurs and high income professionals are incredibly wealthy but do it at the cost of shackling themselves to a source of income for 60+ hours per week. True wealth frees your time. This generally doesn’t mean stopping all work but instead having a work-optional lifestyle where you can work (or not work) when and how you want. 
10. 150 Year Wealth Machine: Managing risk is the final pillar of wealth. Multiple, uncorrelated, passive sources of income that mutually support your lifestyle is the beginning. Beyond that, you can look to set up a wealth machine that can survive beyond you to leave a legacy to your children, your community, and causes that you care about. 

Wealth isn’t a zero sum game. It’s a game where as your improve you grow the pie for everyone. That’s why capitalism works. 

Ultimately, it’s investors believing in and giving money to entrepreneurs to fulfill their dreams then receiving money back when it’s successful. When entrepreneurs succeed they create jobs, products and wealth for a whole community of people. Mass produce this process across millions of people and you get a vibrant, growing economy. 

Creating mutually beneficial wealth is what has decreased the poverty rate across the world from 89.2% in 1820 to 9.9% by 2015. This process of mutual trade and specialization of labor has allowed us to evolve from warring, poverty-stricken tribes of hunter gatherers to the modern nation states who can send rockets to the moon.

Let me bring this back down into a simpler example.

If you build a house, you’ve created wealth without harming anyone. You actually do good for yourself and good for the family who buys the house. The Way of Wealth is like that across many types of assets. You build a business and you do good for: 1) The customers buying your goods. 2) The employees who get a job. 3) The entire country that gets taxes from your profit. 4) You build wealth for you and your family. 

Everyone wins.

If you want to be wealthy, then play games that when you win everyone else wins alongside you.

The Bullseye: Passive Income and Doing What You Love

The personal goal of wealth is both passive income and doing what you love when you choose to work. This is echoed from many perspectives across many books on wealth. 

To accomplish this, you create or buy assets that generate income with little or no upkeep from you, personally. While building your passive money machine, you also continually evolve the type of work you do and hire out work that isn’t uniquely suited to your highest value and enjoyment.

Part of the process requires two mindset evolutions leading to breaking the two iron chains of work.

The first chain you must break is the paradigm that requires you to trade your time for money. The second chain is the link between the work you do and the work you don’t love. 

The gold standard of passive income is the ability to take an entire year off and have your income continue to grow without you. This gives you a work optional life.

However, the other side of the challenge of wealth, is that you want to distill the work you do down to what you love doing and the work that provides the maximum value to the world. You want to keep work that gives you meaning, personal growth, flow, community, and fulfillment. Ultimately, the work you hold onto should offer a work optional life, but provide the highest value and enjoyment to you personally. You’d do it even if you didn’t get paid for it.

There are numerous ways to drive passive cash flow.

A good starting place to build your passive money machine toward financial freedom is my article, 32% Return – The Investing Strategy that Beats Billionaires. This article comes with a free companion Investment guide: Beating Buffett: Fast FI Portfolio Guide.

To understand this wealth building process in more depth, let’s discuss the 6 stages of wealth.

6 Stages of Wealth

Wealth doesn’t lie in your net worth but your intrinsic skills and mindsets that generate wealth. The world is full of examples of lottery winners who go back to being poor after they blow through their windfall. Why? It’s because wealth is a set of habits, mindsets, and skills. A lottery winer hasn’t built a life of these skills so they’re almost destined for failure.

Alternatively, the successful entrepreneur who goes bankrupt often comes back even stronger because they’ve internalized the lessons of what made them successful. Wealth is wisdom applied to money. Here are the 6 stages of wealth, and what people need to learn in each stage.

1. Wage Slave: Indebted or living paycheck to paycheck. You can make $1,000,000 per year and be in this stage if your spending is equal or more than your income. The spread between expenses and income or savings rate is the key to pay attention to. The habits and mindsets you need to learn are saving money, living within your means, and planning for the future. A wage slave can’t invest until they learn to stop spending all their money, get out of bad debt, and increase their spread to above a 10% savings rate.At this stage, Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover is a good resource that teaches people to move beyond a wage slave to financial health.
2. Financially Healthy Employee: The next step up is your income is actively earned by you spending your time (life energy) generally at a job. Your net worth is positive and you’ve got an emergency fund of 6 months of expenses saved up. Your savings rate is in excess of 10%. At this stage you’ll need to transition from learning to save to learning to invest and thus have your money begin earning money for you.
3. Wealth Hustler: The third stage is the Wealth Hustler. You’re on the fast track to building wealth. Your savings rate is in excess of 30%. You’re beginning to either massively increase your earned income while keeping your expenses down, or you’re adding streams of passive income. You haven’t reached the point where your passive income can pay all your expenses but you’re on track to retire early and on your way to achieving financial freedon. This is the stage of hustle, self improvement, and maximizing your habit engine. It’s important to find a way where you can apply your excess energy and time to maximize your earnings and investments. This might be flipping houses, buying rentals, or building a businesses. Perhaps, it’s finding the perfect job and maximizing your pay in order to reinvest in index funds. Whatever it is, this stage requires focus, continual improvement and hustle.
4. Financial Independence: This is the stage where your business and/or investments produce enough income to pay your expenses with money left over to invest. Your investment income is growing but you’re getting tired. Oftentimes, this is the stage that you quit your cubicle and live off of the income that your business and investments produce. However, in this stage you are still required to work >40 hrs per week to keep your business and/or actively managed investments running. In this stage, you should have the flexibility and degrees of freedom to go after the projects of your choice. The evolution required at this stage is that you have to structure your investments and business to run without you and begin to prune work to focus on what you love and your highest contribution. Entrepreneurs and high performers often get locked into a situation where their business and investments have come to occupy >60 hrs per week and they become a slave to their business.
5. Financial Freedom: You can choose to retire and pay your expenses from less than 4 hours per week plus a comfortable margin. Your income earned from your businesses, and passive income from your investments provide you freedom to choose not to work. You have complete freedom to choose your projects, how to spend your time, and when to work (or not work). Financial Freedom oftentimes comes with the new challenge of what’s next? At this point in your journey, you have to reinvent yourself. Oftentimes, people aren’t ready to retire, but want deep, meaningful, and engaging work that still gives them freedom. This might be volunteer work, writing, a hobby, or perhaps it’s going after a moonshot project. Whatever you choose, financial freedom requires a new type of evolution and offers the change for you to discover what your life can be without the constraints of money or time that you had in previous stages.
6. Legacy Wealth: You’ve secured your wealth so that it can continue passively providing for those you care about and the causes you believe in through the duration of your life and after. Your life legacy and purpose are financially achieved and you can direct your excess toward causes you care about and increase your positive impact in the world. In this stage, you ask yourself what will survive beyond your death? People who reach this stage might become philanthrophists or setup a family legacy trust to successfully train up and hand off the reins of your life’s work to the next generation.

How to Generate Wealth

The First Wealth Chasm: Breaking Conventional Wisdom 

There are two chasms that you’ll need to cross to succeed at your journey of wealth building. The first chasm comes between stage 2, the financially healthy individual, and stage 3, the wealth hustler.

Conventional wisdom will take you from a wage slave status to a financially healthy employee. However, very few people make the leap into the wealth hustler stage from the financially healthy employee because it’s difficult and fights against convention.

Most people don’t design their life, habits, and goals intentionally to achieve the wealth they truly want. The healthy employee stage is a seductive stage because you think you’re doing everything right. 

You’ve reached the above average state which is the target of most of the people you know. You’re not feeling the pain of debt, and without internal motivation you will stall out. There’s a comfortable path to retirement in a few decades. 

This stage is the precursor to beginning the Way of Wealth, and most people stall out here. Don’t go to sleep. Design your life with intention.

In this stage, you should learn everything you can about wealth generation and find a path that fits with your goals, personality, and natural inclinations. This stage requires continual improvement and iterations on different paths to achieve wealth in order to get to the wealth hustler stage. 

That’s the first chasm. Making that leap often feels like a Herculean challenge, but once you’re in the wealth hustler stage, your habits become a flywheel of success that drive you into a place of continual wealth generation and open up financial freedom.

The Second Wealth Chasm: Wealth Hustler to Financial Freedom

The wealth hustler stage leads to cutting expenses, and growing income.

Gradually, the wealth hustler becomes good at growing wealth. They gather skillsets, accelerate income, buy rentals, buy or start businesses, invest in the public markets and squeeze out every percentage of return. However, as they grow their wealth, they end up growing their wealth into a job working within their own money machine.

A classic example of this path to wealth is a real estate mogul buying house rentals. Let’s say you buy a house and put a renter in it. Initially, you manage it yourself, but as you keep adding more and more rentals to your assets it starts to drag you into a full time job simply managing your properties. At that point, many people are locked into a wealth hustle mindset and continue growing their assets while managing it themselves.

This same problem asserts itself across many asset classes as people’s success turn into chains of endless hustle. True wealth and freedom only come when you achieve a passive state of wealth generation.

I generally say the starting point of financial freedom is when you have the option to work < 4 hrs per week.

A more durable form of long-term financial freedom is when you can take a year vacation and your net worth or business(es) continue to grow without you AND you have the option to work less than 4 hrs per work.

Moving from wealth hustler to financial freedom is the second wealth chasm that you’ll encounter and it requires you to recreate your mindset to move from scarcity to abundance.

A scarcity mindset is often necessary when you’re first learning. Whether in business, house flipping, or investing the learning curve can feel precarious and keeping down your expenses is key to getting your wealth engine started. To defend yourself against the continual threat of failure and generate your starting capital, you cultivate a mindset to manage scarce resources in order to maximize your return while minimizing your risk.

However, at some point you reach escape velocity where your skills, resources, and habits flip from making wealth hard to achieve, to making wealth generation easy. This also comes at a point when you begin to have more money, assets, and resources than you can effectively reinvest in your wealth hustle. This is the natural point when you should shift your mindset from scarcity to abundance. The abundance mindset continues to expand as you transition into full financial freedom and your passive income, time, and freedom open up to an abundant future.

Crossing the first chasm gave you wealth. Crossing the second chasm gives you freedom. Across the second chasm lies the life of your dreams. 

Investing Summary: Stock Market, Real Estate & Small Business Investing

In this section, I’m going to walk you through the two most common asset classes to fast track wealth, and offer you insight into what specialized knowledge to cultivate to gain wealth faster. Let’s kick it off with a discussion of generally how rich people get wealthy.

Thomas Stanley who wrote the excellent books The Millionaire Mind and The Millionaire Next Door said based on his company’s statistical study of millionaires that only about 10% of people primarily made their wealth through real estate and an additional 10% of wealthy people made their wealth in the stock market. Alternatively, 85% of wealthy people made their wealth through owning their own business or entrepreneurship.

Wealthy people generally make their money through entrepreneurial activities and reinvest in real estate and stocks to maintain or grow their wealth.

In general, the public stock market offers lower returns than the private markets (i.e. real estate & small business ownership). There are reasonably simple strategies like index fund investing which can offer a beginner strategy for investing, but generally, these aren’t the focus of people who are following the Way of Wealth until AFTER they’ve earned their money and want to setup their passive money machine.

However, a simple path to wealth through public market strategies like index funds is achievable through the Frugal FI methodology of living. I’ve covered that in the first article of this series: Catching FIRE: Frugal FI (Click Here). If you want the resources related to index fund investing, wealth managers, and public market strategies then check out the section on Simple Investing: Passive Income Through Public Market Investing. Alternatively, I provide an overview of the expected extraordinary returns you can achieve through small business investing in: 32% Return – The Investing Strategy That Beats Billionaires.

The bottom line is that every wealthy person I know reinvests part of their money into real estate  because it provides better returns than the public stock market. On the flip side, most people get wealthy through operating, owning, and investing in small businesses. Those are the two paths I’m going to focus on in the next section of the Way of Wealth since they’re tried and true fast lanes to wealth.

Fast Lane Investing

Below I outline some strategies of investing in real estate and private market investing to provide you a direction with some tips to get started.

• House Rentals & 1% Rule: Buy single family rentals. A reasonable rule of thumb is earning about 15%-20% return in cash flow, appreciation, and principal pay-off on a rental downpayment. 10% return would be too low and you shouldn’t make that investment since you can earn that based on historical returns passively investing in a stock market index fund. 30%+ is exceptional. Many passive apartment syndications can get you around 12%-15% ROI which is another alternative to traditional rentals since it offers a fully passive way to invest in high return real estate. A 20% ROI means about $500,000 of savings invested wisely in good rentals should get you an annual income of $100,000 which is a reasonable bar for financial freedom. In other words, ten $200,000 rentals at a 25% down payment should get you to financial freedom depending on the quality of the houses you get. Run the numbers yourself, since I would suggest shooting for something closer to double that number in order to be able to live off the cash flow thrown off from the rentals.

• BRRR Method: The BRRR method is buying, renovating, refinancing, and renting single family homes. The basic flip and rent methodology allows you to have equity in the home, get immediate cash out, and earn long-term returns with the rental. Oftentimes you make a cash-out on the flip, then plan to earn no less than 1%+ on the total value of the house in rent.

• House Hacking: House hacking is a method we discussed in more depth in our Frugal FI article, but here’s an overview. House hacking uses your primary residence to cut living expenses and increase income. Here are some examples:
• Rent Out Spare Rooms: Buy a house and rent out the spare rooms.
• Live-In Flip: Live in the house you’re flipping. Renovate it yourself, then turn it into a rental or sell it. This way your biggest expense (housing), becomes your biggest investment. You also get a lot of government and financing incentives like ½ the downpayment to purchase your primary residence.
• Duplex: Buy a duplex. Live on one side, and rent out the other side.
• Buy an Apartment: Live in one apartment and rent out the other units.
• Dream House Hack: Create a dream house that funds your retirement. Live on a plot of land that doubles as a cash producing asset. A solar farm, a cattle farm, a plant nursery, an orchard, a tree farm,  or a combination of the above can speed up and turn a dream home into a dream investment.

• Buy a Business: This is my specialty. I can buy businesses in the $500K – $2,000,000 range for 3x+ earnings. That means an automatic 30% ROI. Use an SBA loan and that ROI goes up significantly. Buying a business and turning it into a passive money machine is the core of the Fast FI mentality that we’ll discuss in the next article of this series. To learn more about my investing strategy check-out my posts: Beating Billionaires and the Beating Buffett infographic. A great book on buying businesses is Buy then Build by Walker Deibel which offers an operator’s view of purchasing a small business.

• Start-up to Passive Income: Do you have a skillset that you can turn into a business? What about a driving passion and hustle that could be monetized? Perhaps launching a new business is the right path for you. It certainly was the right path for me to begin my journey. To learn how to turn your business into a passive, income-generating dream machine, read The Millionaire Fastlane and The 4 Hour Work Week. 

• Franchise: If you don’t feel confident in going it alone in business, then perhaps starting or buying a franchise is a good option for you. Franchises offer you a proven path to business success where people will be there to train you, hold your hand, and help you be successful. With franchise investing, you’re given the resources, training, and processes that have been fine tuned to a science. Sure, you’ll be giving up a percentage of your profit and autonomy for this easier path into business, but for the right person who’s wired for execution, it’s a worthwhile trade-off.

• Small Business Investing Club: If you’re interested in high return investing but you don’t want to become an operator, a small business investing club like our Fast FI club might be right for you. Learn more about the Fast FI Club by clicking here. 

Legacy Wealth

Few people get to the point of legacy wealth. This is where you’ve setup your assets so that they’ll perpetuate your values, causes, and family’s well being into the distant future. I look at it as a 150 year wealth plan.

A good starter book to read as you approach this stage is What Would the Rockefellers Do?

However, you’ll truly need to build yourself an investment and estate planning team of consultants to give justice to this crucial stage of planning. Consult your financial advisor to develop an estate plan.

With that being said, I wanted to give you an example roadmap of how you might setup your legacy wealth to perpetuate into the future as a possible end game. 

The core element of the strategy they discuss in What Would the Rockefellers Do? is to wrap a whole life insurance policy into a trust that will essentially guarantee at your death there is money available for the next generation and the causes you care about. With a whole life insurance policy you can insure your legacy in insurance businesses that have been around for hundreds of years. Then you can turn that whole life insurance policy into a “family bank” for your descendants using the infinite banking concept developed by R. Nelson Nash in Becoming Your Own Banker: Unlock the Infinite Banking Concept.

Infinite banking is the idea that a whole life insurance policy can be used to fund something that acts similarly to a personal bank. With this methodology, you over-fund the life insurance policy which will earn you a reasonable return (currently near 6%) on your money rather than letting your cash sit in a bank which often earns nearly nothing in interest. Then whenever you need to purchase a house, a car, or anything that requires debt, you can instead pull the money out of your whole life insurance policy and pay yourself the monthly payment rather than the bank. 

In this way, you’re serving as your own bank and getting a reasonable interest on any money you’re not using.

By wrapping this whole life insurance “bank” inside a trust, you can give each of your children a life insurance policy that acts as a personal bank for them throughout their lives. This allows them to invest, buy real estate, launch a business, pay for a house, or buy a car. However, if they don’t pay the money back, it’ll still automatically be paid back into the trust at the point of their death by the life insurance policy thus perpetuating the trust generation after generation.

This whole process can be managed by a board of your choosing. You can go further and add your full passive money machine into the trust and allow interested family members to continue to operate the business for generations to come based on the values and principles you instill in the trust governing documents. You can designate a certain percentage of the fund will go to the charity or cause of your choice. The sky’s the limit.

This strategy and others like it provides a path to leave behind a legacy for many years to come.

Conclusion

In this second article of my series, Catching FIRE: The Ultimate Guide to Financial Freedom, I laid out 10 Principles of Abundance and 6 Stages of Wealth that you pass through to eventually achieve Legacy Wealth.

Financial Freedom isn’t an amount of money or merely an end goal. It’s a way of life that you embrace which allows you to create significantly more value to society than you take. Financial Freedom is a set of disciplines backed by principles that have succeeded through generations. 

This wisdom once learned propels you through the 6 Stages of Wealth and ultimately leads to you having the opportunity to leave a legacy for generations to come.

We’ve covered a lot in this article, but we’re not done yet. Keep reading for part 3 in Catching FIRE: The Ultimate Guide to Financial Freedom and we’ll explore Fast FI, how to accomplish Financial Freedom in 5 years or less.

Check-out all three articles in this Catching FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) series:

• Catching FIRE 1: Frugal FI – An Ultimate Guide to Financial Freedom
• Catching FIRE 2: The Way of Wealth – An Ultimate Guide to Financial Freedom
• Catching FIRE 3: Fast FI – An Ultimate Guide to Financial Freedom

As usual, I’ll leave you with a proverb that’ll help you on your Way to Wealth: 

“Sloth makes all things hard, but [hard work] makes all things easy.”

Ben Franklin, The Way to Wealth