Psalms 118 22 says the stone, which the builders refused is become the head.
Of the corner, Thomas Kemp said, the loftier of the building, the deeper must the foundation be laid. You know, this probably never happens, but if a man or woman one day was just lying around and they instantly decided, you know. I want to build wealth. What would be the first thing to do? Undoubtedly, there’s a multitude of things they could do.
They could work on increasing their income. They could pay down debt. They could open a retirement account. They could buy a house. They could change their investments, right? They could do all kinds of different things, but you know what most do. Most try to do a little bit of all of that. They try to work on their income.
They try to pay down debt. They put a little bit in retirement. They pay a little extra on the mortgage. I had to do all these tries of things. And you know what? That seldomly ever works. They might work on their career. They might save some, they might invest on, they might pay down debts. But they really struggle to make progress in terms of building wealth.
The solution therein is focus. The reality is what you focus on, you will make traction on. And therein lies the problem of our society. We struggle to focus on anything. If you think about the last day of work before you go on vacation, think about how productive you are. Think about how you’re going to get on that plane next morning.
You come into work, and you think all these things, you have a list, you kind of prioritize things. You’re, you’re not distracted. You’re not focusing on conversations or miscellaneous tasks. You’re, you’re knocking out all these things. This just happened to me. So, Eric and I were going to go on a trip, and I had about two days to get a ton of things done and I was intensely focused.
And you know what? I got it all done. You know, I was not distracted. I was incredibly focused, and I got a ton of things done. And it reminded me of the fact that I should try to make every day like that. And that’s where our financial framework comes into play. Cause buried within that framework is the path to financial success.
So, if we’re ready to build wealth, we have our mindset, we have a solid money management system in place. Our estate plan squared away; we’re properly insured. The question therein lies, where do we start? What’s the first thing to do when it comes to building wealth? Well, just like building a building, you must start somewhere, and the best place to start is at the bottom.
The reality in life, everyone at one point starts at zero. It could be when they graduate high school, it could be when they get out of college, it could be later. down the road, but everybody starts at zero. There’s a documentary that came out, I think in 2018 it was called playing with fire again, fire being the financially independent retire early movement.
And in the trailer of that, you can check it out on YouTube. The trailer of that documentary says that right now, 69 percent of Americans have less than a thousand dollars in savings and 34 percent have no savings at all. Literally. one paycheck from the edge. I remember being there. I remember being there August of 2007 I didn’t have any money.
Essentially, we had just found out about Dave Ramsey, and I didn’t know what to do. And so that gave me a path to run on. And inside of the financial framework are the seven steps, Dave seven baby steps that provides the path to financial success. So, what is the first step to building wealth? It’s simply to save 1, 000.
So, in relation to this, I want to talk about three things, the benefits of it, some ideas of how to get there and where to keep it. So, let’s first talk about the benefits of it. Now, the reality is 1, 000 is not a ton of money. And there’s some of you are probably thinking like.
That’s not enough for an emergency fund and you’re right, it’s not, but it’s the first place to start again. If you’re at zero and you need more, you must go through a thousand, right? So, the thousand dollars is the first step in building wealth. And what that does is that puts a little bit of barrier between you and life when you’re constantly on the edge and all the money’s coming in, all the money’s going out and you don’t have anything.
When, when an emergency comes and it will, and you don’t have anything to protect you, you’re going to resort to debt. Well, in our next step, we’re going to talk about getting out of debt. So, if we don’t have a way to protect ourselves from going into debt and every time something occurs, we go into debt, we’re trying to get out of debt.
We’re just going circular. We’re not making any progress. So, the idea is that we get a thousand dollars in the bank, and it puts a little bit of barrier between you and life. Because bad things are going to happen. Car battery is going to go out. Flat tire. You know, I remember when we first started this, Erica, right around Christmas time, we are driving our family car, which was a little Ford F 150 is a horrible family car.
I hated that truck. But it broke down. I was at work, and it broke down and we’re just getting kind of going. We didn’t have cell phones at the time. We just didn’t afford the, didn’t want the payment. And so, Erica broke down and her and our four kids she had to walk to, well, she started walking to Walmart.
Some guy picked her up, felt bad for her, snowing. It was horrible. Yeah, but we got towed. It costs us a couple hundred dollars to get towed. I remember our air compressor went out in our air conditioning unit for a little while. And we have somebody come out to try to repair it and they wanted to replace the unit and all this stuff, and we couldn’t afford that.
We had less than a thousand dollars, but Erica was able to find a compressor online that she could buy at a discount. And then we had somebody just install that. Alright, what that does is it puts a little bit of barrier between you and life because life doesn’t stop just because you’ve decided you wanted to build wealth.
Bad things are going to occur and they’re going to try to derail your plan. And so, what this is, is it helps protect the idea that you’re not going into debt anymore. It is the first step of a proven plan, the plan laid out in this financial framework, the path to financial success. It will work. You just must work it.
And I know it works because I’ve done it personally. I’ve helped hundreds of people work it. And. It works every single time. It’s just a matter of having time play out. And once you get this first step done, you have one down six to go. Another benefit of it is it provides a sense of accomplishment. I remember when we got there, it was the first time it’s like, hey, I know I have a thousand dollars in the bank.
Maybe for some people, it’s the first time they’ve ever had a thousand dollars in the bank. And it provides a sense of accomplishment that, hey, I set out to accomplish this with my money. And I did it. Therefore, if I set out to do this with my money, I too can do it and so on and so forth. So that’s some benefits of it.
So, the question is, okay, how do we get there? Well, a couple of different things. Number one is make a budget, right? You must have a solid money management system in place. When you do a budget, you will feel like you got to raise, you’ll feel like you’re more in control of your money. When you know where all the money is coming in and all the money is going out and you are intentionally focusing on where every dollar goes, you will do better with the money.
And therefore, you know, income up potentially. Expenses down that allows that wedge to start building in terms of savings. Another option to get your emergency fund is sell stuff, right? Look around your house, look around your garage, look around your shed, go to your storage unit where you’re saving stuff for whatever reason and look around saying, hey, that thing there, can I turn that into cash?
And the question is then, do I want the cash more than I want that thing that I haven’t used in five years? If the answer is yes to that, eBay, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, thrift store, consignment store, yard sale, garage sale, all types of things. You can look around and you have things you can turn into money fast that will help you get your 1, 000.
We just talked about income up. How can you get your income up? Maybe you have the potential to work overtime. Right? So, your company, your entity, the business you work for allows you to work overtime. Well, you can ratchet up your hours at work and make some extra money. Maybe you don’t have that, but what you do have is the idea of a part time job.
I worked many part time jobs for a long time in my life. Deliver newspapers, deliver pizzas. Those are always good options, at least on the pizza side of things. You know, Uber eats delivery door dash, all that kind of stuff exists now. So, it’s not just for pizzas, but for all kinds of food, places, shopping things for people Uber lift, things like that, you know, turn things that you already have into a.
part time business or part time job where you can make some extra money around the fall time. Christmas seasonal hires are always going on, right? So, things like that, there’s always ways out there to make more money by work. If you want to question is if you want to.
So, then this brings us to the question of where to keep it. At this point, we’re not trying to be over complicated. Just keep it in a simple savings account. Just a plain Jane, regular savings account. We’re not trying to make money. We’re not trying to get interest. We’re not trying to maximize anything.
We’re just trying to get a thousand dollars in a savings account to protect you from when you’re in debt. Bad things occur. You want to be able to easily transfer it over to your checking account. If need be, you don’t want to necessarily have easy access to where you’re moving it all the time, but you wanted to be able to be accessible when you need it.
Now, the key to this step is to do it quickly and within quickly. I mean, within 30 days again, how can you get there? extra work, safe things, doing a budget, selling some stuff. You can get there. Most people can get there relatively fast. Your micro action for the week. If you don’t have it, commit to over the next 30 days getting 1, 000 a month.
savings. Today we talked about the first step in building wealth, the benefits of it, the ideas of it, where to keep it. Hope this helps you on your financial journey. If you have any questions or comments, you can leave them below or send an email to Mike@truewealth.show.
And until next time, I hope you have a great day.
