Time to Collect Your Money

As I summarize in the 1-minute video on the left, last Sunday I woke up to an email  from Shopify with the subject of... drum roll... champaign bottle pop... hold your breath...

Time to collect your money

"Hmm. Really?!? " was my first thought.

My strategy is always to expect the worst. This approach helps me keep going and not take disappointments to heart. So, I told myself to chillax before clicking into the email.

Chillax is my new favourite word by the way. I learned it from my kids. It means exactly what it sounds like: calm down and relax.

And being as calm as I could be, I clicked into the email, which told me to finish my Shopify Payments setup to get paid for my first sale.

So, it was official: my online store had its first sale! I had my first customer who bought several digital products at 50 Doors. Yay! It worked!! I couldn't believe it.

My new online asset is starting to put money in my pocket. To be specific, here's how the math looks:

$20.00 from customer - $5.68 to google ads 

= $14.32 profit

As you may already know, asset is something that puts money in your pocket.

The theory is that if you own enough assets, the money from all of them will add up and cover all your expenses. 

Once that happens, you can consider yourself infinitely wealthy. 

A wealthy person has assets working for him or her. Per this definition, the wealthy can live forever without relying on going to work to make money. 

To measure how wealthy you are, just think how long you can survive for without working. 

My starting point was 30 days - simply because I lived paycheck to paycheck. I am still not a lot more ahead, but making some progress. 

My husband and I set out with our 50 doors goal: 50 assets, each putting $200 dollars a month into our pocket, so we have about 10K a month to feed our (always hungry) family. Boys sure do eat a lot!

There are many different types of assets. In my mind, the major categories include: 

1. real property
2. businesses and 
3. financial assets.

Real Property Assets

The basic idea is that you own something tangible and get paid for letting others use it:

A house, car, vending machine, solar panels, fancy suite or dress, a parking spot, etc. 

Take an object, find someone who'd like to borrow it, lend it and collect cash.

Business Assets

Business is a system set up to solve a problem for a profit. 

Find something that will help others around you. Figure out how to attract people in need of the solution that you are offering and help them at a profit.  

This is what I hope my website is doing. It is helping people educate themselves and get their first real estate investment property in Canada smoothly.

Financial Assets

I recently came across this table (source: Desrosiers Automotive Consultants Inc. (“DACI”):

Automotive revenue in Canada 

What struck me is in the column highlighted with blue. Let's take 2015:

Imagine all the factories building new cars: that's 32% of revenue

Imagine all the dealerships selling used cars: that's 18% of revenue

Imagine all the servicemen helping us repair and maintain our cars: 10% of revenue.

Now think about the money we borrow to buy all of the above:

Automotive finance produces 

the biggest chunk of revenue: 

40%

The point is that money can easily become one of your assets as well.

There is unlimited number of opportunities around you to put that asset to work for you. Examples include investing in private businesses, mortgages, equities, bonds, etc.

What I am now finding out is that you don't need a lot of money to start. You can make each dollar that you don't spend become an asset that works for you.

The trick is to educate ourselves, so that we can make decisions and balance risk and reward in each project. Then, act on our knowledge and get in the game.

Interested? Hesitant? Afraid? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. I can't wait to hear from you.

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