Chapter Five: Creating Assets
Chapter Five
To “level up”, I’ve learned, is to get rid of liabilities and create assets. That means I have to get rid of debt and then invest in something. The idea is to employ the dollars I earn and make them work for me. A decent rate of return is 8%, so I have to find ways to for each invested dollar to make eight cents. The books I read say to invest in things I know something about, and that I am passionate about. This is all foreign and new to me, so I’ve had to really think and study some more.
I read Tony Robbin’s book “Money: Master The Game”, which was super helpful for understanding what to look for in the world of investing. But, I still wasn’t prepared to start the process of allotting money to accounts I knew nothing about. It felt overwhelming and kind of bleak, frankly. I need to invest a lot to make up for lost time, and that felt daunting. I don’t have a lot of debt, but no real savings either. I’ve always felt like I was in survival mode, a perspective I knew I had to correct if anything was going to change. The thought of years of working really hard, investing a huge chunk, and then hoping I was doing it right and not wasting my time while someone was adding their percentage of my hard-earned money to their own income made me feel frustrated.
The books say to invest in what you’re passionate about. I’m a hairdresser. I have a studio salon with a tiny retail area. I love to research products and I love to shop, so I decided to find products I loved and buy them to sell in my retail store. The earning potential is higher than 8% as long as people like what I like, but my studio isn’t traffic friendly. To open my store up to a wider audience, I knew I needed to put all my products online.
I taught myself how to make a photography light box, I studied successful product photographs to catch onto what other stores around the world were doing right, then I got to work. I spent hours creating the store, taking photographs, and writing, what I thought, were witting descriptions. I even went as far as designing t-shirts with fun sayings. I would work all day, then go home and spend all night building it. Then I tried different ways to make people aware of it.
As supportive as my clients are, it wasn’t returning what I put into it. I needed an actual store so that people could come and see the products in real life. My studio can’t support that, so it got me looking for a solution. I needed to find a larger spot to hold a boutique and allow me to do hair off in a separate area. I loved the idea, but I had no clue what I was getting into. I was about to get a crash course in business.
Things have happened so fast, and God’s guidance has been so obviously present, that I have to talk about it. Isaiah 54 and Matthew 25 are rising up as support beams in what’s building in my life right now. My faith is being challenged in ways it hasn’t before. The stakes are high and it’s scary, but I kind of like the rush of it. I just hope I’m not a lunatic.
We’ll see.