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Transcript

Ownership Is the Shift That Changes Everything · EARNED & UNBOUND™

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: I started to view the money as seed, seed that I could plant in different places to grow me options, right?
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: Now I think of ownership in terms of options, and it's those options to do the things.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Option to pause, option to pivot.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: What if I don't like this career no more?
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: What if I want to do something else?
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: What if I want to take a sabbatical?
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Options to take on more risk in my investments or just in my life.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: Options to help my family.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Earned and Unbound, the Black Abundance Circle podcast for people who have learned how to earn and are ready to become unbound from success that only looks good on paper.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Ashley Edwards.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Here we talk about turning income into ownership, options, and abundance and building a life that actually feels as good as it looks.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Earned and Unbound.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: This is a Black Abundance Circle podcast for professionals who are earning, building, and ready to be more intentional about turning their income into options, ownership, and abundance.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever felt like you're working hard for your money, but you're not sure if it's worth it?
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of that question of what is all this for, right?
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like I've definitely asked myself that multiple times, especially early in my career, when I realized how gruesome it can be working as an attorney.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: The answer to that question really brought up this idea of ownership, right?
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: Ownership is that shift from earning money, aka trading your time for money, to building something that can create options beyond your labor.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's just really taking the earnings that you have and not putting all of it towards your lifestyle because that's very tempting, right?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: We talked about that last time.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: In the last episode, we talked about, you know, having a roadmap for your income and giving your income different jobs.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, today we're talking about ownership as a part of that exact roadmap.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: There's a misunderstanding about the term ownership, and a lot of people tend to associate it with just real estate.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: But ownership is way beyond real estate, and we're gonna get into that as well.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: But my first exposure to ownership was also real estate, and that is definitely one way, but it's not the only way.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: And when we think about ownership, it's really about leverage and options and long-term wealth because you know you can continue to make money, like your income can be constantly increasing, but that doesn't mean that you're ever gonna be financially free.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: But whoo, let me not get too deep too fast.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: All right, let me just we're gonna get into it, all right.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: So, story, right?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: I started earning more, and you know, I thought I made it.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I went from making$29,000 as a teacher to making$180,000 in my first year as an attorney, and that is a massive shift, okay.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: That was an extremely powerful shift in terms of my lifestyle and just totally transformational, right?
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm not like I made it, you know, like I'm I'm here, I've arrived.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: This is this is what it is to be successful, you know.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like this is what all of it was for.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: This is why I took all those AP classes, and this is why I really strive for that 4.0 in high school, so that I can get into a good college, and this is why I worked so hard in college, right?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: Did two majors in college, tried to do a minor, didn't work out, graduated early, still had a high GPA.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: This is why I did all those things, and that's with having three jobs in college.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: Listen, we'll talk about that another day, but it's that feeling of like, okay, I did the things, I followed instructions, right?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: I got the grades, I went to school, I went to college, I even went to grad school, then I went to professional school, right?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: Became a lawyer and bam, making six figures, I made it, this is it.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: But no, now I realized that yeah, you know, I have this money, but like, what is all this for?
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: Like, am I happy?
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like can I do I have the time and options to do the things I want to do?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: Can I spend time with my loved ones?
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: Can I travel the world, which is something so near and dear to me?
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: Can I take time off?
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: Can I rest?
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: These questions, right?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I started to realize the answer was, well, maybe not now, right?
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like maybe early in your career, you should really focus on, you know, proving yourself and climbing the ladder and doing what and I was just like, man, I've been climbing for years, like I've been climbing since middle school, and now you I thought I made it, and you're telling me I gotta climb more.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: Now you're telling me I gotta pick between you know, partnership track or you know, special counsel track, or if I'm gonna go in-house, I have to do all these extra things to continue to prove myself.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I thought I made it, okay.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: And the answer was, well, you made it here, but you know, there's always more levels, and that is just like that was just so discouraging, you know, finding out that well, yeah, you made it in terms of income, but we still control you, right?
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: No one said those words to me, but effectively that was what it was, right?
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: Because at the end of the day, they can decide whether to continue to pay me or not, they can decide whether I get a bonus or not, they can decide if I can take a vacation, and if so, for how long, right?
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: They can decide if I can use my sick days, they can decide if I can go home and have dinner to celebrate my loved one's birthday, they can decide if I'm working on weekends, like they, meaning not me, my employer, whoever is leveraging the control over my life, because I depend on them for income, right?
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: That was the problem.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so I started to ask better questions, right?
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because I realized income does not equal wealth, it does not equal freedom, it does not equal optionality.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: What income gave me was opportunity, and the problem is that I was fumbling the bag, okay.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if the opportunity is the bag, I fumbled the thing, fumbled it because what I was doing with my income buying whatever, just buying stuff for people, taking trips, buying things I don't need, all kinds of stuff, just blowing the money, right?
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: For pretty much two years.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I was definitely helping some family members as needed and all that, but for the most part, I was blowing the money, okay.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: So the income created the opportunity, but the problem is that I did not take advantage of the opportunity, okay?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: So when I realized how little autonomy I had, I started to ask better questions, right?
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: How do I use this income to be able to do what I want to do?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: I know that having more money does something, right?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: It creates some sort of power, but like, how do I tap into that?
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, how do I use this money to buy more assets?
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: How do I use this money to create cash flow, right?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: The more I dug into it, the deeper and more complex my questions became.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: How do I use this money to build wealth?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: How do I use this money to achieve freedom?
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: How do I use this money to replace my income?
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, these are the questions I started asking myself, and it really just changed how I viewed payday.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: I used to get the craziest endorphin and dopamine rush on payday, like was so excited.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm still excited, but like I think about money differently now.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: But let me tell you, I would I would be ready for payday.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: I had plans for that money, all right.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: I knew exactly what I was gonna buy, what I was gonna spend it on.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: I was just so excited, and then I started viewing payday differently because I started viewing money differently, I started viewing it as a tool and an opportunity instead of just something that's going to give me joy and make my lifestyle better.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: I started to see money as a seed to be planted, okay.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: I started to think like, hey, I can use this money to make more money.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: It sounds so simple.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: Listen, it is simple actually.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's simple, but it's just not where my head was at at the time, right?
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: And for a lot of high-income earners, especially when you first start making money, you ain't thinking about that, okay?
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: You just so happy to be making that money, especially if you are one of the first in your family.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: I was the second in my family to go to college.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: You may be the first in your family to go to college.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'm the first in my family to get a professional degree, like just blowing the money, all right?
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I started to view the money as seed, seed that I could plant in different places to grow me options, right?
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: Now I think of ownership in terms of options, and it's those options to do the things, option to pause, option to pivot, right?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: What if I don't like this career no more?
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: What if I want to do something else?
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: What if I want to take a sabbatical?
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: Options to take on more risk in my investments or just in my life, options to help my family, right?
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes we have people we want to help because they don't make as much as we do.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: But if we have not been a good steward of that money, of that seed, we can't help, right?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: Options to invest, options to say no.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: My favorite, talk about that another day, options to build and options to create more room for the life that I actually want, okay?
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: And that is the shift from viewing your income as something that is just expended to improve your lifestyle and take care of your day-to-day, take care of your necessities.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: That's the shift from that to hmm, ownership, right?
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: How do I become a better steward of this money so that this money can grow and it can grow itself?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: What are the kind of things that you can own?
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: We talked about how real estate is an option, but it's not the the only option.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: There's tons of things you can own.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: And some examples.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: So let's think of them in buckets, right?
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: We have paper assets as a bucket, we have real estate assets as a bucket, we have business assets as a bucket, we have cash flowing assets as a bucket, we have intellectual property as a bucket.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: So let's come up with some examples for each of these, right?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: So we can really drive this point home because ownership, again, is much bigger than just real estate.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: Now, in the paper category, we're talking about retirement accounts, right?
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: Brokerage accounts, index funds, stocks.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: These are the types of paper investments that you can own.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: Real estate.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: So you can own the physical building, right?
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: The real estate property, the residential property, the commercial property.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: You can own the land.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: You can even own a REIT, R-E-I-T, real estate investment trust.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: In the business category, you can have equity, you can own stock.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: That is you owning a piece of a company.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: You can own your own business.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's another way to own.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: And honestly, the business one crosses multiple categories, and some of these other ones do too, but just for the ease of explaining.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: Then you have cash flowing assets, right?
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: Business can be cashlin as well, real estate can be cashlin as well.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: So under cash flowing, you have things like a rental income property, private money lending, running your own business, assuming that it's profitable, royalties, dividends, distributions, things like that.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Some people make a killing off owning intellectual property.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: What does that look like?
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: They own the content, they own a curriculum, they own a framework, they own a trademark or just a copyright, a patent, you know, different types of intellectual property.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's so many options for ownership.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: However, ownership needs direction because you may be thinking, oh my gosh, there's so many things I could own.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how do I know what to own?
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great question.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: And your ownership does need directions and it needs strategy.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: This is something that you don't want to just start buying things, and that's what I did, right?
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: The first ownership I heard about real estate, the first one that made sense to me, just started buying it.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: Took a course, so I didn't just, you know, throw myself out there.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: I took a course and I started buying real estate, but I was not well versed in the different types of ownership, and I wasn't thinking about that.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: I was more just in a panicky kind of way, being like, whoo, I need options.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I felt that one income stream was just really stressing me out during the pandemic, and I was like, I gotta do something, and real estate was that thing, but I had a ton of other ways that I could have invested my money right into ownership, and so with no ownership, your income can keep going up.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: So let's be clear here like in your career, you probably already make a lot of money.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm talking to high income earners, you probably make the money, and your income may even go up every year.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: You might get a bonus.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: I know someone who gets quarterly six-figure bonuses, okay?
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: Your income may increase based on equity in the company, all kinds of things.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: It may increase on a regular cadence, doesn't mean you have ownership, does not mean that you have wealth, doesn't mean you have flexibility or options, doesn't mean you're living a life of abundance, okay?
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: So let's really keep those separate.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: High income does not equal options, flexibility, leverage, a life of abundance, not the same.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: You have to properly direct and structure that income into other things to create that optionality, that wealth.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: That is something I want you to think about.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: Think about where is my money going?
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: This is a question we asked last time.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: Where is my money going?
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: And before we meet again, I want you to choose one ownership category to explore more seriously.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need to master it.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: I just want you to start thinking about, you know, what would it look like for me to own more of this thing?
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: You may say, I want to own some royalties, you know, I'm a singer-songwriter, I'm highly compensated.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: I want to start getting into music royalty funds and I want to have more ownership in that.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: And the question is, what does that look like, right?
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: How much of your income do you think you could reasonably redirect to ownership in that area right now?
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: Really look at your numbers and think about that.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: Or you may say, real estate, I really believe in real estate, I want to learn more about it.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, let me start exploring that as a vehicle for ownership for me.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm not gonna tell you what to choose.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: You could choose whatever you want, but just really start thinking about that.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, how do I take this income, which is an amazing opportunity, amazing seed, and put it into something productive, not just for my today me, but for the future me and for my future family and my future options and my future life.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for tuning in.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to shout out Black Abundance Circle, our biggest sponsor of this podcast, and I hope to see you on the next one.