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Mindset & Money | Your Boss Will Never Pay You Enough To Be Her Neighbor

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Hosted by
Mike Ayala

On this episode of the Investing for Freedom podcast, Mike talks about the post he put up a while back where he said that “your boss will never pay you enough to be her neighbor”. Mike explains that you will never get rich trading your time for money and that you need to be able to make money in your sleep. Enjoy!

“It doesn’t matter how many mandates the government puts on your minimum wage. It doesn’t matter how many raises you get. You’re never going to get wealthy exchanging your time for money.”

HIGHLIGHTS:

0:00 – Intro
0:42 – Mike explains that “your boss will never pay you enough to be her neighbor”
1:19 – Mike is constantly encouraging those around him to expand the way they’re thinking
1:54 – Mike talks about one of his mentors explaining that people fear that if they train their staff, they will leave, but if you don’t train your staff they might stay
3:20 – It is nearly impossible to get wealthy by renting out your time
5:27 – Success isn’t necessarily about the cars, but rather the number of days you can take off
7:02 – There’s a big group of people who think equity is the government stepping in and telling business owners how to be fair and impartial
7:55 – Wealth is having assets that earn money while you’re on holidays
10:35 – Status is your place in the social hierarchy
10:55 – When you’re placing your Louis Vuitton bag above your wealth, that needs to change
13:44 – Mike and Kara started with nothing
14:25 – You don’t have to quit your job, you can start investing on the side
14:30 – Invest in an entrepreneur you trust
15:23 – Investing in Wall Street is risky
16:55 – If Mike was in a W2 he would find a network marketing company and he would go all-in on that
18:14 – Maybe you want to pull your 401k or taking a loan against your 401k

FULL TRANSCRIPTION:

Thank you for joining me on the Investing for Freedom podcast. Today I’m going to talk to you about a post that I put up a while back, that created a little bit of controversy. And what I said was, your boss will never pay you enough to be her neighbor. And, you know, I knew when I put that post up, you know, there’s like, all these emotions that you go through just thinking about, okay, you know, that’s a pretty bold statement. I have employees, by the way, who I love, and appreciate. And some of them have been working for me and with me, in one way, shape or form for, you know, 10,12,15 years, some of them. And, you know, so I’m cognizant about how that comes across. But the more that I thought about that, the more that I realized, too, that, you know, I’m constantly encouraging people that are around me to expand their way of thinking.

And the reality is, you know, I would expect someone, if they have the drive and the desire to be an entrepreneur, at some point in time, I don’t want them to stay with me anymore. If they’ve got, you know, higher dreams, bigger callings. But the reality is, there’s a lot of people who are not necessarily ever going to go and start their own business. And they might want to be a, you know, an intrapreneur, in your organization. And I had a mentor one time that brought up this comment, and he said, you know, a lot of people that he talks to, they’re always, you know, basically, these small business owners are always saying, Well, what if I train my people, or I invest all this time and money into their training, and they leave me? And he said, Well, what if you don’t train them, and they stay. And that stuck with me, because the reality is, not everybody is going to stay with us forever.

And I’m on the school of thought, I hear people talk a lot and say this a lot. You know, don’t hire someone who has a desire or a dream to start their own business. And I just, I get the thinking behind it. And for certain positions, that may make a lot of sense. But my thinking is, I would rather have someone who’s driven, motivated. And I get 1,2,3, maybe 5 years of their life, and they gave me 110%, I would rather have that than someone that I’m constantly having to prod and push along. And I’m not saying that it has to be either-or, there’s obviously people out there who are never going to start their own business, who are amazing employees and they put in the hours and they work their tails off for you. I have plenty of them. But I’m just saying it doesn’t have to be either-or, you can have people in your organization, who are entrepreneurial, who want to be investors, who want to own their freedom. So back to the comment, your boss will never pay you enough to be her neighbor.

I want to post something to you. It is nearly impossible to get wealthy, solely by renting out your time. We don’t think about this, this way. But I really want to challenge your thinking here today. When you have a W2 job, which there’s nothing wrong with but I’m telling you right now, you are never it’s nearly impossible to get wealthy solely by renting out your time. And I would venture to say that most of you who are W2 employees, or even who are self-employed high paid doctors, lawyers, attorneys, you know, engineers, etc. Where if you’re not working, if you’re not designing, you’re an architect, and you’re if you’re not designing blueprints, or you’re not, you know billing out, seeing patients at your practice, you’re not making money, you’re still renting out your time. And so this isn’t just about W2 employees. This is you know, as Robert Kiyosaki says it, it’s the employee quadrant, it’s the self-employed quadrant, that’s the left side. And then as we move over to the right side, it’s big business, and it’s the investor quadrant. And so an example of that would be if you’re a dentist, the dentists, and doctors, and by the way, I know some very, very successful doctors. Most of them are not successful because they’re billing out their hourly time. They’re successful, because they launched a surgery center, because they oversee 10 different practices, because they created, you know, a medical clinic that has 10 doctors working for them.

And so whether they’re on vacation, or whether they’re going to events, or whether they’re spending their Thursdays and Fridays investing, they are still making money from their practice, most successful doctors that I know architects, engineers, etc., etc. Most very, very wealthy, and there’s a big difference between wealthy and successful when we look at success, and I’ll get into this here in a few minutes, but when we look at success, a lot of times we’re thinking of the big house and the big cars and the wealthy lifestyle. It’s not necessarily about all those nice things, you can have those with wealth, but wealth, Robert Kiyosaki said this years ago and it always stuck with me, he defines wealth as the amount of days that you could take off and still be earning money. And so that’s wealth. And so you have to have equity, it’s nearly impossible to get wealthy renting out your time. And that’s a W2 employee, that’s a high net worth individual, or a high earning individual, etc. So you have to have equity.

This is interesting. So there’s two definitions to equity. Definition number one is the value of shares that are issued by a company. So he owns 62% of the group’s equity. And the second definition is of equity is the quality of being fair and impartial. It’s interesting the times that we live in right now, because there’s a big conversation around, you know, increasing the minimum wage and, you know, $8 an hour isn’t enough to live on, which I’m not here to argue whether that is or isn’t. But the reality is, the market is going to pay you for what you’re worth. And I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this. But the reality is, when the government steps in and mandates, what’s equitable, what’s equity, the quality of being fair and impartial. It’s funny that there’s these two different definitions of equity. I’m not talking about the quality of being fair and impartial when I talk about equity today, you have to have equity, in order to get wealthy. What I’m talking about is the value of the shares issued by a company.

And what’s funny is, in this day and age, there’s a big percentage. There’s a big movement of people and I understand it, you know, I’ve said this before hope deferred makes the heart sick. But there’s a big group of people that think that equity, is the government stepping in and telling business owners and telling the market etc. What is the quality of being fair and impartial equity of treatment, we all have to be treated fairly. It’s not fair. Well, it isn’t fair. Nothing’s fair. And if you truly want to have wealth, you’re not going to do it, you’re not going to gain wealth by renting out your time, you’re going to gain wealth by getting the value of the shares issued by a company.

So a couple things and I’m reading this book a while back, that’s just amazing. And he says in there, in this book that we need to seek wealth, not money or status. And wealth is having assets that earn money while you’re on vacation. That’s my paraphrase. Wealth is like, you know, Robert Kiyosaki said, it’s the amount of days that you can take off, we need to be focused more on wealth than what we’re making.

We need to seek wealth, not money, or status. Money is a store of value. We spent a lot of time talking about this, but it’s an energy exchange. Money is how we transfer time and wealth, I will give you 40 hours for a salary of $1500 a week. So we literally place value, energy, money on our time, we’re trading we’re renting our time. We don’t think about this, like we think about renting cars, we think about renting houses. You know, so many people want to get into real estate, which is you know, why the value of Real Estate’s been driven up, I’m not here to get into that either. You can go back and listen to plenty of episodes about that. But the reality is, there’s so many people that want to get into real estate, because they’re realizing that they can rent their building their house, their apartment, their duplex, their mobile home park, whatever, they can rent that, they can exchange that for money, and they’re not having to exchange their time for money. People are frustrated. And this is why there’s the big conversation around equity being the quality of being fair and impartial.

This is why this conversation is happening because people are frustrated, we’ve lost hope. We don’t know how to get past trading our time for money. But I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter how many mandates the government puts on your minimum wage. It doesn’t matter how many raises you get, you’re never going to get wealthy exchanging your time for money. So back to this seek wealth, not money or status. We literally need to figure out how to buy assets. This is my core talking points. You’ve got to figure out how to create streams of income, buy more assets that earn money while you’re on vacation, while you’re sleeping. You know, if God forbid, somebody in your family gets sick as what happened with our son, Dylan when he was just a baby and we had to take a month off. God forbid that happens to you. But the reality is you need to find yourself in a spot whether you take time off because you want to, because you have to or because outside forces like COVID, you know, COVID people got laid off left and right. And it’s funny because so many people are so excited about the fact that, you know, they don’t have to go back to work because the government’s paying them, you know, $150,0 $2,000 a month or whatever, what a sad, sad place to be in. And I’m not here to pick people apart, but at the same time. It’s a mindset issue.

So here’s the third part of that. Status, it’s your place in social hierarchy. And what happens is, most people seek status, and we compensate with the Louis Vuitton bags and there’s nothing wrong with any of that. I love nice things. But the reality is, when you’re placing your Louis Vuitton bag, above your actual wealth creation, above buying assets, there’s nothing wrong with bags, there’s nothing wrong with nice cars, there’s nothing wrong with nice homes, but you should have assets paying for that stuff, you should not be, you know, getting your $2,000 paycheck and saving for 12 months, in order to go finance a $2,000 bag. Like that’s just madness, it just goes to show how much emphasis we put on status of the social hierarchy. We want to be seen as wealthy, we want to be seen with money. And the reality is, it’s not the social hierarchy. It’s not the status symbol that we want. It’s the actual action of having wealth, it’s the actual assets that we want. It’s the ability to go on vacation and not be stressed the whole time we’re there. It’s the ability to go on vacation and not think all year long you know, I’m going to save and save and save for this four-day vacation. If you’re frustrated, and you’re finding yourself in this boat, like this is a mindset issue, you’ve got to change your way of thinking, it is nearly impossible to get wealthy solely by renting out your time, it’s just not going to happen.

So here’s ways to get equity. And I’m not talking about fair treatment, impartial treatment. Life isn’t fair. If you’re waiting around for somebody to you know, come along and be fair, or you know, back in the day, the knock on the door for Publishers Clearing House, remember, like the magazines and the stamps. I remember my grandma going nuts, thinking she was going to win like Publishers Clearing House. And you know, if one day you’re going to get that knock at the door, can you imagine if every time the Amazon delivery guy knocked on the door nowadays, like if this was back in the day, I remember my grandma thinking that she was literally going to win that. And now Amazon comes and knocks on our door three or four or five times a day. Could you imagine how much turmoil that would create if every single time the doorbell rang, you thought it was Publishers Clearing House, we need to change the mindset around that. And realize this is not about the quality of being fair and impartial. This is about owning value in the shares that are issued by a company and that could be an LLC that owns real estate, that could be an LLC that owns businesses, that could be an investment company that you create that invest in other things.

We have two different private equity companies, one that invests in manufactured housing, which by the way, we own a construction company, we own a property management company, that we also get paid to provide the services to those companies that we own the LLC, that own the mobile home parks. We literally own 35 mobile home park communities in 13 states. I don’t spend a lot of time talking about that. And I’m going to spend more time because I want you guys to understand what we’ve done and how we’ve done it. I’m just a normal guy. If you go back to our story, like Kara and I started with nothing. Like we came from nothing. We started a business when we’re 24 years old, we started investing in real estate. I was naive, and I was young. And I found myself around mentors who told me what to do. And I just didn’t know any better. So I just did it. I’m telling you, you just need to get moving, you need to get started. And you just need to start doing what successful people do. And what is that? They buy equity. They invest in equity. So here’s a couple things. Ways to Get equity. Mike, I have a W2 job. I like my W2 job, I make good money, I make $100,000 a year, I make $150,000 a year, not ready to quit my job, guess what? You don’t have to, you can keep your day job, you can keep your W2 job, and you can start investing in the side. Notice I said it’s nearly impossible to get wealthy solely by renting out your time.

I’m not telling you, you can’t rent out your time. What I am saying is you need to start diversifying. So how can we do that? You can invest with a young entrepreneur. Everybody knows somebody that you trust. That’s excited and young. Invest with them. Give them the $50,000 of startup money. But Mike, what if I lose my money? Well, what if you lose it in the bank or like what if you leave it in the bank and it gets negative interest rates. We’re literally in an environment where inflation is 3, 4 or 5, maybe even 6% by some accounts. And the banks are giving you what point 0.001% interest I mean, at best, you might find a longer-term CD that might get you 2% maybe, hard to find. So leaving that money in the bank gets you nothing.

Leave in the stock market. That’s scary. I realized that people are making all time high gains. And you know, Robin Hood is like, opening up to Main Street and everything else. But there’s a lot of risk in that too. I know people that literally put a bunch of money in, and a week later, they’re 300%. And then all of a sudden, they’re back to negative of what they started with.
So what if you leave in the stock market? What if you leave in your 401k? And it plummets? Well, Mike, if I invest, you know, with an entrepreneur, it might take me two or three or five or ten years to get my money back. This is not a get rich, quick game. I’m telling you, though, if you put money if you start investing X amount of money, think about this, start a bank account, put 10% of your income aside, go read the richest man in Babylon. Put 10% of your income aside into a bank account. And just forget about it, the first couple months might be painful, but pretty soon, you’re going to have $10,000, $15,000 $20,000 in that account, and you’re going to see this opportunity pop up and you’re going to be able to invest in you’re going to be like, I’m so glad that I started doing that, you know, a year ago or two years ago, what’s that old saying? I mean, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. And the second-best time is today. Just get started. Well, Mike, if I invest in this business, it might take three, four or five years to turn a profit. I guarantee you if you just take some, you’re going to be better off if you start buying equity in companies.

Okay, here’s another controversial one. What about social selling or network marketing? Oh, but Mike, like I get it, your gut probably just turned, by the way. I’m not in network marketing. I don’t have time for it personally. But I’ll tell you right now, if I was a W2 high income earning or even low income earning for that matter, if I was a W2 person, even if I made $15 an hour, I would absolutely 100% find a network marketing company with a product that I believed in, and I would go all in on that, period. Period. I know. But Mike, the people at the top are the only ones that make money. It’s the same in any business. The people at the top are the only ones that are making money. Mike, it takes too long you know, to get my downline built. Well, it’s going to be that way with anything, you’ve got to invest time and money and energy to get a return. Mike, it’s a rip off. All this stuff I hear over and I know so many successful people that nailed it network marketing. And by the way, if you pick the right company, you’re going to get a ton of coaching and mentoring just like I did. I paid a lot of money for coaches when I first got started. And like I said, I didn’t know any better. I just did exactly what they told me. And guess what it worked. So in network marketing, if you pick the right company, and you pick the right person above you, you’re going to get free coaching, free mentoring, and you’re going to make money at the same time.

This is the last thing that I’m going to say about this, and I’m probably scaring the crap out of you. But maybe you want to put your 401k. I know that sounds crazy. But our first business we literally me and my business partner pulled our 401k this was like April of 2004. And the way we looked at it, we had like basically 12 months to make enough money to pay the penalties and interest and offset that. And that business grew every single year double digit growth profitability, I made more money in a 12-month period than that 401k could have ever cost me. Is it going to work out that way every time? No, but you got to take a risk at some point in time. There’s things out there, just shoot me a text if you’re interested. But there’s things out there like my buddy, Damian Lupo, he has a company called EQRP. And you can literally roll your 401k if you’re no longer working for that company, and you’ve got it just in a fidelity or something, you could roll this into an EQRP and invest it in businesses, gold, silver, real estate, etc. You could start your own EQRP. And just start funding it, or worst-case scenario. And I know I’m probably going to get hung up for this, go ahead and you know, shoot me a DM, text me, hate mail, whatever. But the reality is, if you’ve got a good business idea or something you want to invest in, it might be worth taking a loan against your 401k best case scenario, because you might be paying 3, 4 or 5% interest and if you make 10% or 15%, who cares. You could have that money back in no time.

It might even be worth for the right idea and the right investment, pulling your money out of the stock market which is at an all-time high and could potentially plummet. You know, in the next year or two years, all bets are off the table. It could keep going up forever, too. I just don’t know, and I don’t like being in control of my future. I would rather take the risk of having to pay 20, 30, 40% and penalties and have my future in my fingertips and start investing in equity than just renting my time. So anyway, I’m going to leave it at that for now. You can go to You know, Instagram, just follow me @TheMikeAyala. There’s a text number there, go ahead and shoot me a text if you want to chit chat, have any ideas around this, happy to do it. The reality is, it’s impossible it’s nearly impossible to get wealthy solely by renting out your time. So I really encourage you to challenge you to think of ways to start investing in equity. And again, I’m not talking about the quality of being fair and impartial. I’m talking about the value of shares issued by a company, go out and make some equity.

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