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I receive a lot of questions regarding investing topics, i.e. stocks, ETFs, bitcoin, commodities, silver, gold, REITs, and real estate. And that’s okay because these things are important.
-By Caleb Jones
The problem is that I often get pelted with questions about these investing topics from men who either don’t own their business, or who have just started a business and aren’t really making money from it yet, or from men who barely have any money to invest; often well less than $50,000.
I talked about this problem here but this issue is so damn prevalent that I need to expand upon this.
I see a lot of men spending a lot of time reading books about investing, thinking about investing, reading websites about investing, and talking to other men about investing, when these men have hardly any money to invest and/or make well less than the Alpha Male 2.0 minimum income of $75,000 per year.
Investing is very important. It’s a critical topic to all Alpha Male 2.0s. It’s even more critical a topic now than it ever has been, since we men of today don’t have the benefit of our grandfathers of yesteryear who never had to worry about retirement because of rock-solid corporate pensions and similar vehicles we don’t have access to today in the Collapsing West. Today, our corporatist society throws a bankrupt social security system or a rigged 401k in our faces and expects that to work when you need it in your old age (which they won't in most cases).
So yes, investing and financial literacy is extremely important to all of us and I will continue to speak about these topics from time to time.
BUT… and this is a big, fat BUT… the topic of investing has a proper time and place. It becomes important only at a certain point in your Alpha Male 2.0 evolution. If you focus on investing in the incorrect order, you’re just hurting yourself.
The fact is that most of you reading these words are not there yet. You’re not at a place where you should be spending any time worrying about this topic to any great degree.
Your investments are not there to make you some kind of killing or windfall so you can make a bazillion dollars. That’s what your businesses are for. This means that unless you already have a decently high net worth and a decently high income, you need to focus your time, effort, money, and learning into your business, not investing. Instead of reading a book about how to invest like Warren Buffet, you should be reading a book about how to make a badass business resembling Conrad Hilton’s.
Here’s why:
Your business (or businesses) will make you money, not your investments.
It’s your Alpha 2.0 businesses that will make you hit your financial and lifestyle goals. It’s your business that will provide all the cash you need to be happy. Your business creates all the income you want (provided you put in the work and do the right things) that funds your lifestyle and investments, not the other way around.
Your investments will never do any of this. Unless you are a very, very rare statistical exception to the rule, your investments will never make you a decent amount of money you can actually go spend in your life. That isn’t even their role. The role of your investments is to preserve your wealth, not create wealth. Your investments are there to maintain the wealth you create from your businesses and hopefully grow at a nice rate of return that is well above inflation.
Business should be your focus, not investing. You’ll make far more money over your working lifetime if you focus on business first instead of investing. Only when you’re making (and have!) a decent amount of money should you start shifting some of your focus to investing.
I started from nothing and made a six-figure income in 1990s dollars while in my twenties, not by learning about investing, but by focusing on business. Yes, I invested in real estate during the 1990s as well and I made money doing that too, but the amount of money I made in my real estate paled in comparison to what I made in my businesses. My day-to-day energies were spent improving my businesses, not my investments.
I only started really focusing on investing in the last five years or so, once my income and net worth were at levels high enough to start worrying about this kind of thing. But I was well into my forties before I made that shift.
And even then, it’s still not a very strong shift. For every hour I spend learning or working in my investment life, I spend perhaps 40-60 hours working, learning, or improving my businesses.
As a matter of fact, I made the decision a a while back to re-invest a decent percentage of my net worth back into my companies rather than investments (I will make some very big announcements about this early next year). Why? Because I can make orders of magnitude more money in my businesses than I ever could in my investments (and much faster too), and you’re looking at a guy who as literally never lost money in his annual investment portfolio in his life and made an over 100% return on his investment portfolio back in 2017. Doesn’t matter; that’s just a fart in the wind compared to the income I’ve made and income growth I’ve experienced in my businesses over the last few years. There is literally no comparison.
If you’re an older guy with a strong six or seven figure net worth and you make a good amount of money from your profitable, location-independent Alpha 2.0 businesses, then yes, it’s time to really start spending serious effort learning investing and managing your investments. But if you’re not in that category yet, forget bitcoin or the stock market or Warren Buffet or Ray Dalio and get to work on your Alpha 2.0 business.
That’s where you need to put your time.
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