Increase Your Means

In my previous post – live above your dreams, I stress the crucial role your mindset plays in your personal finances. This is the reason it is very crucial at the start of your journey to financial freedom and independence to trade in your poverty and lack mentality or mindset for an abundance and rich mentality or mindset. Like the course of the river, it is your mindset that directs your thoughts. If the direction is not where you want to go, you may want to consider changing the direction (setting the course) before you set out.

A lack mindset leads to lack while an abundance mindset leads to abundance. It is only a matter of time. The challenge is that the effect is not immediate, hence people hardly notice. They keep doing what they are doing without taking time to stop and look up to see if they are heading in the direction they really want to go.

When it comes to managing their finances, most people focus on saving to the exclusion of increasing their income. You have to be on top of your finances and spend below your income. That is fundamental. After perfecting the skill of spending below your income, what next? Spend your whole life repeating and becoming an expert at spending below your income.

It is like learning how to drive. The moment you become good at it, you do not keep learning how to drive over and over again. You have places to go and you want to drive there, which is the reason you learned to drive in the first place, so you get into your car and simply drive there. You don’t end up learning how to drive. You get on with the rest of your life, going places and doing things that are important to you.

So after you have learned how to spend below your income, you move on to how to increase your income. This is the area you need to become an expert at different levels as you grow. You never graduate from school of increasing your income. Things change, the business environment, technology, competition, government regulation, etc constantly changes the rules or pace of the game. You have to remain at the top of your game, or you become a ‘has been’. A lot of companies and brands have become history, the debris left behind by the wind of change. If you do not innovate, you will become renovated by forces beyond your control, and you may not like what you get. You have to focus on increasing your means.

Our standard of living is not supposed to go down. It should be going up. Life should be getting better, not worse. The old days may be good old days, but today should be better. If it is not better, you are making progress in the wrong direction. When your income drops or inflation bites harder, we are to shift our thinking into a higher gear and ask the right questions – ‘How do I increase my income?’ rather than ‘How do I reduce my cost?’

The issue is not in the actions but in the area of PRIMARY FOCUS. You can have an abundance mentality and cut costs by reducing waste, not by downgrading your standard of living or going for lower quality things (in the case of food, going for unhealthy foods, and heaping up health issues downstream).

You cannot become rich by saving money only, you need to invest (money market, other’s business, your business, etc) and increase your income constantly until you reach that bracket. You cannot lose weight by dieting only (you will gain the weight back). You need to back it up with exercise to speed up your metabolism to burn calories on a consistent basis. If you run on diet mode alone, after a while your body will go into fat storage mode, and you will become discouraged and pile back the weight. If you run on saving alone without increasing your income, your finances will shrink as inflation bites harder and you keep tightening the belt until there is nowhere else to go. You have negotiated yourself into a financial cul-de-sac.

Break free and live life to the fullest. Increase your means and keep growing until you meet and exceed your financial goals.