How to Retire in 12 Months

Money makes people funny. It makes people C.R.A.Z.Y! There is a crazillion dollar industry thriving on our need to get rich quick and keep up with the Jones’s. So why does it seem like the never ending story of scarcity and effort? Why is it that the more we have the more we need?

If you are reading this blog I am assuming that you don’t have a cool million sitting in your bank account and here are 5 reasons why…

1. Money is not an incentive…

Once you have the basics of life covered, ones need to live a satisfying and fulfilling life is seldom fulfilled with an injection of cash. Now don’t get me wrong, when you have very little money, more money certainly can make life easier and open more doors.

I speak to people all the time, about what they would really want to do if they didn’t have to work and the answer is generally the same, spend more time with family, travel and have more adventures and make a difference in the world.

Nowhere in that conversation do I hear… I want to sleep on a mattress made entirely of money, or I want to find a way to make more and more money just for the sake of it (mwa ha ha harrr)

Yet we focus on money as the access to everything and more often than not lose sight of what we really are inspired by. Focusing on making more money is like our Matrix reality helping us cope with the fact that we are not right now doing the things we ache to do.

Try side stepping the conversation completely by removing your focus on making more money and concentrate instead on having the things you really want in life. Sometimes it is easier than we think.

2. Your money mindset is what determines your wealth over time

The reason why some people become incredibly wealthy whilst others with the same opportunities experience a lifelong hold on poverty is mindset.

While there are many factors that contribute to your ability to create wealth such as intelligence/emotional intelligence, experience, health and the country and family you were born in to. All of these are superseded by the mindset that you bring to everyday living.

The mind is incredibly powerful and people tend to associate their ability to create (or deserve) wealth with their opinions of themselves. How this manifests is that the same little voice that reminds you of everything you don’t like about yourself is the same voice that manages your ability to create wealth.

My childhood consisted of a lot of conversations about money that were very impactful and emotional. What this left me with was a belief that I didn’t deserve it, that money was hard work and caused problems.

Looking back throughout the years I can see that my mindset sabotaged my goals both in times when I was making a lot of money and in times when I was making very little. It was an insidious little bugger that had me by the neck and I couldn’t even see it.

As I went to change my lifetime of conditioning I found that each little positive and self-affirming step I took was a huge step in the game of wealth creation and opportunity.

If you are unsure if your mindset is affecting your ability to create wealth then check your bank balance and give yourself an honest appraisal of where it is vs. where you think it should be.

3. You are not creating enough luck

This is another point on mindset, you have to be willing to be lucky in the quest for great wealth. Have you ever noticed how some people are just lucky? I believe that luck is definitely something you can influence, you can become a “luck-smith” and create your own luck and opportunities.

My brother Sam was famous for finding money as a kid, I was with him on several occasions when we spotted $5, $10 and even $20 notes in the street which was a huge amount of money for little kids in those days. People would say he was lucky, always in the right place at the right time. But if you were there when it happened you would have seen that he was always on the lookout, scouring every gutter for glimpses of the good stuff! He was deliberate in seeking out opportunities to find cash and was successful from time to time. Was he lucky? Well perhaps, but his luck looked much more like deliberate determination to me. I think his mindset for finding opportunities and creating wealth was as obvious then as it is today.

Good luck is all about opportunities, get out there make the most of the opportunities you have available to you and you may just find that your “luck” improves as well.

4. You believe that if you have more money you will be happier

Money can make life easier, and temporarily it can make you happier… temporarily. Yet we still believe that once we have the money for all the travel and freedom and things we want to buy we will be truly happy.

BOM BOMMM!

The sad things is that even though we know deep down that this is not true we still cling on to the idea like a broken parachute on a sharp descent.

I saw a documentary on happiness a couple of weeks back and they did some measures on average rates of happiness. Your average rate of happiness is your normal rate, the rate that you go back to after the normal highs and lows of life. Long bouts of depression can permanently take your rate down and extensive meditation and personal growth can permanently take your rates up. Money however did not have the same effect. They said that the majority of people who win large amounts of money in lotteries return to their average rate within 6 months.

6 months?!! If your biggest fantasy of getting rich quick (winning the lotto) will only get you 6 months of happiness then it might be time to start looking for something a little more substantial. If the facts were true on the documentary you may want to take up meditation and use the new space in your head to figure out what is not working about your mindset. Who knows, you may find yourself with money and happiness!

5. You exist in a system that requires perpetual ever-expanding debt.

Disclaimer: This topic should interest you if you have any curiosity in how things work, I am relatively new to trying to understand this and so my explanation may seem a little juvenile to those in the know – my apologies in advance! Here we go…

I once heard the debt figures of the US and Australian governments and I thought to myself, if the governments are so in debt, where are the wealthy countries that lent it to them?

I used to assume that the money I personally borrowed came from a pool of money that was deposited safely by someone with more money than me. Part of my interest went to them for their kindness in lending me their savings.

This is not the case.

If this is news to you, think about this… How is it that most governments, most companies and most individuals are in massive amounts of debt? How does that work?  Where does the money come from for almost everyone in the world to be in debt?

It is a scary fact that banks are able to create money out of thin air every time you borrow it. Not your government… your bank. In fact they are able to create 9 times the money you borrow. By create I mean create from nothing, thin air.

Now this is a heavily simplified explanation of this system, but one that very few people understand, and it affects every part of our lives. Money is no longer a representation of some stockpile of gold in a heavily guarded safe. Money is now a representation of the total amount of debt and interest that banks have encouraged people, companies and governments to accrue.

I read in his autobiography that when Richard Branson sold Virgin Music he found himself out of debt for the first time in his entire life (at 50 years old). If that is the case with one of the most successful business people of our time we have very few chances as a general population.

So there you have it, 5 reasons why that elusive first million is not currently accessible at your local ATM, even if you do know the PIN number.

All of these points relate to mindset except for number 5 which is bigger than Ben Hur! So I would recommend first checking out your mindset; analyse your patterns, internal conversations and consistent outcomes. Get really honest with yourself and then look to how to create some positive change.

If all else fails, take on the global financial systems… save the cheerleader, save the world.