Do THIS To Multiply Your Income | Dave Ramsey EP 206

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show.

0:10I firmly believe that taking charge of your mindset allows you to be in the driver's seat of your life and unlock your potential. And that's why I'm thrilled to share that my new book is out right now. It's called The Greatness Mindset. In it, you'll learn how to build a plan for greatness through powerful exercises and toolkits designed to propel your life forward. This is the book that I wish I had 20 years ago. It's everything I've learned in the last decade with the research and the science to help you unlock your mind. Make sure to go to lewishouse.com slash 2023mindset to pick up your copy of my book, The Greatest Mindset, today.

0:51Savings is short-term. Investing is long-term. You should have an emergency fund personally of three to six months of expenses, the standard rainy day fund. Past that, you need to save up and pay cash for whatever you're purchasing. So if you've got a car purchase in your future and then past that, everything else would go to investing. Because basically one saving is for protection, the emergency fund, and the others for purchases to avoid debt. Paying cash for my car, paying cash for my couch, paying cash for my trip. And then long-term saving items, obviously retirement, kids' college, general wealth building.

1:23Then I get into, at our level, we get so much over in the investing pile. A lot of it is not for 30 years from now. A lot of it is for six years from now. And so I'll throw money over into a mutual fund until I use it to buy a piece of real estate. Number one, never invest in something you don't understand. Number two, you should always have an array of investments, a diversification. So don't have all your eggs in one basket, we say, in the financial world, right? A lot of the wealthy get into real estate at some point. I didn't understand real estate, so I put it in a real estate fund. That's okay.

1:55As opposed to buying it and managing it and figuring out how to fix things and deal with contractors and all these different things, but I kind of want to get into real estate. And I don't know if I should or not. I want to because I feel like it's a great asset class for long-term wealth. It is. But I don't fully understand it because I've never bought investment properties. Real estate is very romantic. Yes. Nothing can go wrong. It's all great. It is exactly the opposite. Everything will go wrong. Right. Count on it. The roof is going to leak. I had a refrigerator ice maker bust the other day.

2:27There's nothing romantic or fun about this. The renters aren't paying for it. So this is life. So real estate makes more money than other asset classes, but has tremendously more hassle. How do you manage the hassle? You buy a REIT instead. Unless someone else do it. Because some of the REITs are doing very well. Real estate investment trusts. Or buy into something like that where you're doing a limited partnership and you own one thirty-third or something like that. Someone with a long track record is doing a good job. They're doing it with low or no debt and that kind of a thing. You go that direction.

3:01There's classes of real estate that are less hassle. Warehouse, almost no hassle. You rent those out triple net. The tenant takes care of everything. Taxes, insurance, and repairs. What happens to someone who cuts corners? You can win. You can prosper to a degree. All the data tells us and all the life experience tells us that the people with fanatical levels of integrity are the ones that do the biggest stuff. The crooks really don't get ahead. You're releasing chemicals that you don't release when you're selfish. Your productivity increases. The quality of your relationships increase. I was speaking at a little Baptist church in Kentucky one time.

3:44I did a tithing lesson. The guy came up afterwards and he goes, well, you left one thing out. Sure, Pastor. You've been doing this longer than me. What do I leave out? He goes, you know, I've been doing this 40 years. I've never had a tithing couple in my church get a divorce. Why? Because when you're unselfish with your money, you're unselfish with your wife. And you're unselfish with your husband. And you serve each other in the marriage if you're serving the community with your giving. It's the same muscle. It's just easier to stay married to. When you make giving a standard part of the rhythm of your life, you build that generosity muscle.

4:17And it affects every relationship you're in. That's so true. particularly the key relationship in marriage. It changes the way you parent. You know, it's like the guy that says, I hate the IRS, I hate taxes, so I don't really put everything on my tax return. You're a cheater. Where are you going to cheat me? I'm not impressed. I hate taxes, but I pay every stinking penny, not because I believe in taxes and not because I'm scared of the IRS, but it's because it says something about me. I got to look at me. Every penny, every cash sale of a book on the back table goes into the accounting system and we pay taxes on it.

4:58And it's not because I'm scared of those dupers. It's a matter of integrity is integrity is integrity is integrity. Generosity is generosity is generosity is generosity. These are character qualities of the successful people that I've met. The number one cause of divorce, the stress of money and the arguments over money. Okay. And so if you said the number one cause of death is getting killed by a bear on the way to the mailbox, then you would analyze how not to get killed by a bear on the way to the mailbox. Yeah. Right. And so if you're going to get married, you should really look at the number one freaking thing.

5:35The quality of your marriage is a high data point indicator as to whether or not you build wealth. Very few people drag a spouse kicking and screaming into millionaire status. Money is a reflection of our values. And that's another reason that it's very important. Because if your values are not aligned, you're going to struggle in any relationship, but certainly in a marriage relationship. Talk about the basics of money. Saving and debt. How about generosity? Are we going to live in chaos? Are we going to live with a plan? Are we going to live with future-minded or YOLO? What's this tell you? Anyone that lives short-term thinking, we know they're emotionally immature, spiritually immature.

6:13And so you're marrying someone or you're dating someone that's emotionally immature. And they're fun. It's not fun in the long term because it brings about stress. The fruit of this is nasty. Now, do we have to be perfectly aligned on all those things? No, we just need to understand where the other person stands. And are they so far over away from us that it's a deal killer? Because my wife is more of a saver than I am by nature. Saving for me is an intellectual act, a spiritual act of my will. It is not a natural rhythm. Okay? She naturally saves everything. Yeah. To the extent that I can stay close to her on that, then we've got harmony.

6:50My wife and I joke about our differences on saving, but they're not that far apart. If I absolutely believe it was ridiculous to keep any money saved, and she had to have some money saved to have peace, because she's constantly in anxiety because there's no rainy day fund, then that's going to eventually tear up anything you do. And all the data tells us on marriage and divorce statistics, and we've studied this for years, number one cause of divorce, money. The other three, if you can be in agreement on them, religion, kids, whether to have them and how to treat them, and how to deal with crazy people in your extended family.

7:26Because all of these things are representative of your values and what your beliefs are. So when you can agree on your money, what you've ended up agreeing on is your dreams, your fears, your visions. You're in agreement. You're in alignment on those. Not only what they are, but how we're going to go after them then.

7:54Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation. And I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. that will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on the School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

8:44Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.