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You’re tired of slaving all day.
You drag yourself to the office every morning with a coffee and the first thing you do is check your blogs because the last thing you want to do is work.
But the work isn’t going away and you’re getting paid to do it so you get started.
You work late most nights with no overtime pay because you’re salary.
The least you could get is a thank you for staying in over the weekend.
Instead, you hear what you did wrong and what you need to fix from the client meeting.
You keep it up day after day, week after week, year after year.
Working for a paycheck that allows you to pay your bills but you couldn’t even afford to move somewhere nicer if you wanted to.
Meanwhile your boss rolls in around 10:30 in their Mercedes and the whip cracking emails start flying in.
That’s a career.
Will making lots of money fix your situation?
If you’ve got FU money maybe.
Money is a great tool though and if you’re wondering how you can get more and use it to design the life you’d rather live, read on.
Money Definition
What exactly is money?
Physically it’s a sheet of paper with some special ink on it.
Digitally it’s a number in your bank account that goes up twice a month but usually goes down.
Money is a tool.
If money didn’t exist you’d have to trade for anything you wanted.
Good luck finding something you own to trade for your food.
That’s where money comes in.
Instead of trading directly for food you trade your time working for money.
You trade someone or a business some of your money for food.
They then use that money to buy whatever they want.
We have to give value to these pieces of paper.
Otherwise society grinds to a halt.
Money is a tool, and a very useful one.
How do we get more of it?
Ownership
That’s mostly what it comes down to in a word.
You trade your money for food because you want to eat dinner and the store owns the food.
Who is making profit?
Is it the cashier? They make a little money. After all they own their time and trade an hour for minimum wage.
It’s the business that really makes the money though.
Because they own the food you want.
They have to pay the cashier’s wages out of the money they make selling food.
Let’s look at a couple of pop culture examples.
Nipsey Hussle
Nipsey Hussle was a rapper and entrepreneur from Los Angeles, CA.
Most musicians sign with a record label, make songs and albums on the label, and get paid handsomely to do it.
Nipsey Hussle went a different direction and created generational wealth doing it.
In 2013 he released a mixtape. Instead of giving it away for free, like most were at the time, he charged $100 per copy.
Limited edition, only 1000 available.
That day he made $100,000.
He used that money to start a boutique chain of stores called Marathon.
At Marathon he sold clothing, music, merchandise direct to his customers.
Owning Your Work
Normally the record label is making most of that money and the artist may receive a cut.
Nipsey Hussle owned the music and the brand so the money went to him instead.
Another thing that he did was own all the masters to his music.
In the music industry whoever owns the master to a song owns the music.
Any money made by that song- streaming, a CD, the music being in a movie, all the licensing fees go to the owner of the master copy.
Traditionally the label owns the master copy, not the artist performing the work.
Since Nipsey Hussle owns the rights to his music anytime someone streams his songs in the future his family gets paid. (For another example of someone who recently went this route, look no further than Taylor Swift.)
In an interview on Forbes, Nipsey Hussle talked about wanting to set up his brand like Apple.
Apple owns and sells the computer & phone, the operating system, the software, the stores, and even the support system after you buy their product.
Nipsey Hussle owns the music, the licensing, the merchandise made from his brand, the stores his merch is sold in, and invested in the communities his stores are located in.
This write up doesn’t touch on any of the other outside ventures he also was involved in.
Another example of someone who took ownership for himself is Floyd Mayweather.
Floyd “Money” Mayweather
There are a lot of people that don’t like FLoyd Mayweather.
Many people would tune in to his fights to watch him lose. (He never did.)
No matter what you think of him as a person or as a fighter, he’s someone to learn from as a businessman.
Want proof?
How about Forbes. In 2017 Lebron James, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo topped the Forbes highest paid athletes list for the year.
Combined they made $259 million.
Insane amount of money for a years worth of hard work.
In 2018 Mayweather fought Conor McGregor.
That night he made $275 million.
No, that’s not a typo.
Check out the article for yourself.
You know what else is crazy?
That’s not even the most money he’s made from a single fight.
Mayweather Promotions
Similar to the music scene most boxers sign with a promoter.
The promoter sets up the fights, promotes the fights to sell tickets, and pays the boxer a salary from the profits.
Instead of a record label it’s a promoter, instead of recording an album they sing with their fists.
In 2006 Floyd Mayweather PAID his promoter $750,000 to cut ties.
Why?
Because he knew that he was the product that people were paying to see.
He wanted to be in control of the product.
The promoter gets a cut of the Pay-Per-View, the gate, the merchandise, the sponsorships and international television deals.
By starting his own promotion he owned control of who, when and where he was going to fight.
He also owned the whole system, like Nipsey Hussle and Apple.
Starting a business
If you’re tired of working all day to make your boss rich you need to take ownership and start making profits from the work you already do.
The most direct way to do that is to start a small business doing the things you already do at your nine to five.
Or you could start another business in your area.
Dog walking, painting houses, or yard and pool maintenance are quick examples.
You go out and get clients.
Then you hire a couple people that you pay by the hour to do the actual work.
You can also provide extras – for example if you’re painting someone’s house and they know what color they want but don’t want to go to the store for paint.
You buy it for them but upcharge it a little for your time.
Or if you are walking dogs you can make branded dog toys or personalized tags for the dogs.
Stocks
If you’re not ready to start your own business or buy an existing one you can still own a piece of a company by buying stocks.
All those financial experts on tv?
Talking about the price of Apple is going up or down?
They’re talking about the price of a very small piece of ownership in Apple.
Stocks.
Every public company has shares available for sale.
A group of all these companies makes up the Market.
If you want to keep things simple you can buy an ETF, which is essentially buying a whole market.
But what if you don’t want to buy every company in the market? When you buy an ETF you’re buying the bad companies as well as the good ones.
Then you can get into selecting individual stocks.
Growth investing, value investing, income investing are three different styles of stock market investing.
We cover the ins and outs of stock market investing in multiple articles but remember that in the end you’re investing in a business.
Ronald Read
Ronald Read was a janitor and gas station attendant.
Wait, I thought this article was about ownership.
Well, this janitor saved around half of his income and used it to buy dividend stocks.
So he was a business owner in a way.
He just owned smaller pieces of a lot of businesses.
Read owned enough that when he passed he had over $8 million.
He only invested in companies he understood.
He invested primarily in established, blue chip, dividend paying businesses.
So no he didn’t own the gas station.
But he used the money he saved up to own pieces of Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, J.P. Morgan Chase, etc.
Wrapping up
Ownership is a big secret to how to make lots of money.
If you own your product or service you get paid directly instead of making someone else rich in the process.
If you’re not ready to start your own business take a look into investing in the stock market.
You can buy established companies and collect dividends from them each quarter.
It can be frustrating to figure out how to get started.
You work all day and some nights.
You don’t have the time to learn about the stock market.
That’s why I created the course How to make $1000 annually with dividend investing.
We will guide you through the research process and show you how to buy shares in a business.
You don’t have to go it alone.
You work hard for your money.
Your money should be working hard for you.
If you’re not ready for the financial commitment to enroll in the course but want to learn more about dividend stocks sign up for my free Dividend Investing Bootcamp.
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