Financial Intelligence
Understanding Financial Intelligence
Financial Intelligence is one of the most neglected forms of education out there today. It doesn’t matter how much money you’re making – if you don’t have Financial Intelligence, you will never get out of the rat race and you will always maintain a lifestyle of paycheck to paycheck. Learn how to better understand your spending habits to ultimately create real wealth.
Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs
I, Founder & CEO of LocalFi, Isaac Navias, believe that Financial Intelligence is one of the most important pieces of education you can have for success in both your business and your personal life. It’s also one of the most neglected forms of education out there today.
Think about this: lottery winners are significantly more likely to declare bankruptcy 3 to 5 years after winning the lottery than the average American. Not only that, but lottery winners have been shown that, more often than not, winning the lottery actually decreases health and happiness.
How can this be? It all has to come down to a lack of Financial Intelligence.
How Does Being Financially Smart Help You?
Learning and implementing these important concepts of Financial Intelligence have allowed me to build my net worth by over a quarter of a million dollars in <1 year after learning these principles. So today, I’m going to dive in and teach you some of the base concepts that will completely change your financial life forever.
THE 3 TYPES OF PURCHASES YOU CAN MAKE
There are essentially three categories of things you can purchase: assets, liabilities, and expenses.
- Assets are something that you buy that increases in value as time goes on. Some examples of this can be the stock market, real estate investments, investing in a business, and a variety of other types of ways that have your money create an army of money.
- Liabilities are something that you buy that decrease in value as you own it, and often you have to continuously pay to own that thing. An example of a liability is a car. The moment you drive that car off the lot, it instantly decreases in value.
- And then there are expenses. Expenses are just a one-time payment to purchase something. An example of an expense is like clothes or food.
So what kinds of situations happen when people come into more money? Well, at least in American culture, the #1 thing that we do is buy liabilities.
This is why lottery winners go bankrupt at a significantly higher rate than the average American. Because even though they just made $100,000,000, what they actually did is went out and bought a ton of liabilities and increased their monthly budget exponentially.
They can live off that for a few years, but (3) to (5) years down the road when they have a budget of $50k a month and they have to pay for all of their cars, houses and all the other liabilities that they’ve purchased, they go bankrupt.
Similar situations happened to me when I started to make more money. As soon as I started making more money, I looked at living in a bigger place, getting a new car, and buying more liabilities that increased my monthly budget and my monthly expenses.
This spending habit creates the never-ending hamster wheel of the rat race. It doesn’t matter if you’re making $10k per month if your expenses budget is $11k. It doesn’t matter if you’re making $100k per month if your expenses budget is $150k. You’re still poor. To measure Financial Freedom, it’s what your passive income is versus what your monthly expenses are. That tells you whether you are Free or Not.
Congratulations! You just took the first step in better understanding your finances and the purchases you make. The next step is to continue to learn and be observant of your spending habits. Personally, I have learned a great deal from many books. Below is a list of recommended reading that helped benefit my own personal and business wealth:
RECOMMENDED READING:
● Rich Dad Poor Dad By: Robert Kiyosaki
● The Cashflow Quadrant: Rich Dad’s Guide To Financial Freedom By: Robert Kiyosaki
● The Richest Man In Babylon By: George Samuel Clason