The best way to invest your money…nobody will tell you this.

Summary

• As an entrepreneur, it's crucial to regularly take dividends out of your business to decrease downside risk, given the high likelihood that the business may not succeed long-term.
• The vast majority of businesses fail within five years and only 1% ever sell, reinforcing the need to periodically secure earnings rather than betting on a future sale.
• When considering what to do with saved money, assess the opportunity cost of time spent on active versus passive investing.
• Passive investing in indexes like the S&P 500 can yield around 10% annually without consuming significant time, which could detract from business growth.
• Diverting attention to active investing can lead to a disproportionate decrease in active income from the business, which is often a greater opportunity for wealth increase than investment returns.
• Entrepreneurs should focus on income growth and allocate surplus cash into passive investments that require minimal thought or effort.
• Maintaining 6 months to 2 years of living expenses in cash is advisable for peace of mind.
• Assets like index funds can serve as collateral for loans, providing liquidity when needed for new ventures.
• Investing in oneself to enhance skills is the greatest investment, with the potential to significantly increase income.
• Prioritize personal development and skill acquisition to raise your value and income in the marketplace.
• For employees, increasing your skill set and tying yourself to company revenue streams can boost your income since your earning potential is tied to the value you provide.
• Keep living expenses low while investing in highly liquid assets until your net worth growth from assets could potentially outpace your income growth.
• The primary goal should be to increase net worth quickly, focusing on income growth first and then shifting focus to wealth management once investable assets have grown significantly.

Video

How To Take Action

A good way of securing your future when running a business is to regularly take out money from your profits. Since a lot of businesses don't make it past five years, it's safer to take cash out regularly than to wait for a big sale that may never happen.

Here's what I would suggest doing with the money you save:

1. Invest passively: Put money in index funds like the S&P 500. They give about a 10% return each year, and you don't need to spend lots of time on them. Time is valuable, and your business needs most of it to grow.

2. Keep emergency savings: Make sure you have six months to two years worth of living costs saved in cash. This way, you can sleep well knowing you're secure if something unexpected happens.

3. Collateral for loans: Money in index funds can be used as a backup plan. If you need cash for a new business idea, you can take a loan against your investments.

4. Grow your skills: The best way to up your value and income is to get better at what you do. Improve your skills because that's what increases your income in the long run. Spend on learning and mentorship. You are your biggest asset, and making yourself more skilled can boost your income a lot.

5. Save when you earn more: Once you have a good amount of skills, start to save more from what you earn. Put this into passive investments until your wealth starts to grow faster than your income.

For people with jobs, tie your work directly to the company's income. Find ways to make the company more money so that you become more valuable. And, keep living costs low while saving and investing in things you can quickly get cash from.

The main thing is to focus on growing your net worth fast by increasing your income. Later on, when your wealth has grown, you can switch to managing that wealth. But until then, keep working hard on making more money and investing it wisely.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"I'm a big believer in continuing to take dividends out of a business as it continues to grow"

– Alex Hormozi

"Your ability to earn is one of the greatest investments"

– Alex Hormozi

"Increase your skill basis so that you can generate more income"

– Alex Hormozi

"Invest in you, increase your skill basis"

– Alex Hormozi

"Spend the majority of your time on the vehicle that will increase your net worth the fastest"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

if i'm an entrepreneur and i'm growing my business month over month over month when should i one start taking money out and two when should i start actively investing these are some of the questions i get most frequently uh with the entrepreneurs that i speak with who you know depending on where they're at they might have uh you know five hundred thousand a million two million dollars in the bank and they're like i'm not really sure what i should do and so what i wanted to do was walk you through the thought process that i had around investing uh to give you a little bit of some frameworks to think through that helped me make the system making process a lot easier so first off i'm a big believer in continuing to take dividends out of a business as it continues to grow and that's because you want to decrease your downside risk right because for some reason and the statistics are very likely that the business will not succeed in the long term you know 90 whatever it is 90 or 95 of businesses fell within five years and so uh it's it's much better in my opinion to consistently take money out of the business as you're growing it because there's a very high likelihood that it will not uh stick around a and b many entrepreneurs have this idea that they're going to sell their business for some magical number sometime in the future when in reality only one percent of businesses ever sell and so if that is the case again well i would rather not stack the chips on a 91 to one bet it does happen but the likelihood is low and so i would like to take chips off the table table on a regular basis so that is the first part which is making sure that we're taking money out but the second question is okay well now that i have this money this 500 this million this whatever what should i do with it right and so one of the big things is i just like to think about this through the lens of opportunity cost which is if i'm currently making let's say uh 500 000 a year right from my business in in net free cash flow that's owner earnings what i get to take out of the business after reinvesting in in the growth and competitive advantage that we need to continue to maintain to to grow right so if i have 500 000 of net free cash flow that's coming to me and let's say i've got a million dollars saved up if i were to if i were to passively invest that i should get about 10 ish a year right that's just going to be investing through uh indexes like the s p 500 etc right if i'm doing that then the advantage of actively investing might be the marginal difference but it might be an extra five or ten percent so that would be a 50 to 100 increase because 10 to 15 is a 50 increase right but if i look at it in terms of real terms uh just purely on how much my net worth is going to increase which is the length that we have to look at this through which is the opportunity cost if i were to spend half of my time thinking about actively investing because it will take up half your your mind space i promise you because i've done this mistake before i made this mistake before then what happens is your active income will fall at a disproportionate rate compared to what uh your money is making you so let me i'll walk you through a numbers example so let's say you've got that million dollars and you can get ten percent a year which is a hundred grand on 100 passable right but the additional fifty percent or a hundred thousand dollars a year uh fifty two hundred thousand dollars here which would be five to ten percent of that million right you could get through actively investing well if you're currently making 500 000 a year from your business do you think it would be reasonable to take half or 25 of your time to go chase that when you can probably get your income from 500 to 750 000 in the next year 500 to a million and so for me that was always the opportunity cost of actively investing which until my wealth became so large that i felt like it was the opportunity cost of the money that i should be making by paying more attention to my money was going to outpace my income which is still almost not there and so for me that is why as for entrepreneurs it's my belief that a you should be ripping out cash on a regular basis because that's downside risk protection it's not your upside it is downside protection it's the fact that what if my business does not succeed as much as i'm a big believer in being optimistic you also have to face reality and confront facts which is the likelihood that this particular business that you're on i've had 13 businesses that i've started up to this point and now i own eight more the likelihood that the business that you start is going to be the one that you finish with is extremely extremely extremely low right extremely low and the likely that you're going to sell that business for a big number is extremely extremely extremely low and so you take this money out and you put it into the s p or you put it into an index because it is passive and you can put it there and the idea is that you never have to think about it again now the amount of money that you should keep in cash uh in in my belief is you should have about six months two years worth of normal living that's saved up in cash and that's just so that you can sleep well at night and that's it the other thing is that when you invest that into indexes why not you can always take a loan against those assets if you wanted to start something big so it's not like it's illiquid uh when it's there you can take loans against those assets at 60 or 70 percent uh loan to value meaning if you have a million dollars in assets uh in the s p most banks will give you 60 70 percent of that or at least 50 right depending on the stocks and in your history with them etc that will give you basically for free right they'll give you that one percent or two percent uh money that you can go and reinvest in starting another business or buy a piece of real estate or whatever right and so for entrepreneurs it is my belief that you should be investing most of your time and energy or almost 100 of your time and energy and growing your income growing the main vehicle you have but extracting the money and putting it into a low brain vehicle that's not active that's passive that's truly passive not real estate flipping that's not passive right truly passive if you're in crypto right or you have some speculative stuff that you that you want to get into it's probably taking up way more of your attention than it should be and it's actually going to make your main income suffer which means your net worth will grow more slowly than it otherwise would so it's all about the opportunity cost of your attention all right now i'm going to put this special note out here for employees if the the primary objective of the employee in my opinion is to increase how much your income is and so all of yours and this goes for entrepreneurs too the the initial parts of your investment should be growing to increase your skills because that increases your basis that increases your basic income that you can continue to yield from the marketplace based on your skill set and so this is where i think people step you know they step up over dollars to pick up pennies if you were saving you know 500 a month there's nothing wrong with that but i would be actively investing that 500 or 1000 or 2000 a month in the beginning into making my skills more valuable because i know that if i do that in two years i might quadruple my income because that's the thing is that your ability to earn is one of the greatest investments that's not just a billionaire saying it really is like you get like if you develop the skill of selling which might take you two years you can go from making sixty thousand dollars a year to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year or five hundred thousand dollars a year which puts you in the top one percent just by earning that one skill and so if you can develop that skill it is worth the investment and most investments in self-improvement are so disproportionately low that it is worth the investment even if there are courses that you only get a handful of things from you are still as yourself an asset more valuable at the end of the day you are the source you're the source of where all the money comes from so it's like when people don't invest in themselves it makes no sense to me i've spent every dollar i possibly could gaining access uh getting mentorship getting coaching getting programs buying courses buying books and and doing that stuff because i'm the source right if i can improve me as the machine that generates all the flow of income then the rest of the stuff becomes easy right and so first and foremost you have to invest in that after you have an excess of that then start pulling the dividends out of the business that you have and investing those things that are passive not active and then at the point where your net worth from your investable assets what 10 of that net worth growth would be is an excess of what you make per year then at that point it makes sense to start shifting your perspective towards managing wealth and growing wealth rather than growing income now like i said two employees number one is increase your skill basis meaning continue to invest in gaining skills so that you can be more valuable with the company the way you do that is by tying yourself to revenue streams that means you find ways to generate the company more money period and that could be through a variety of ways if you were you know in your your customer success or customer service or film it then it's gonna be how can i send as many customers as possible how can i retain these customers how can i track these metrics and show uh to the people who are deciding my compensation how i'm directly making the company more money right and how losing me would cost my company a lot more than what it would cost them to keep right if i'm on the front end side so it's going to be sales it's going to be marketing to be acquisition based how can i show them what how i can become more valuable how can i close twice as many deals how can i you know close at a higher percentage how can i get more lead flow by working my pipeline better how can i generate leads on my own independent from the leads that they're generating for me right all of those things are things um that you can do to increase how much you make right now like i said if you're an employee there's going to be a certain cap most of the time on what you're earning and if that is the case and you're rubbing against that cap you should keep your your basis for living as low as humanly possible and plow as much of that money as possible into a highly liquid asset again if you're in the situation where your wealth right the net worth that you have is 10 of that amount is still less than you make then all of your your attention should still be going toward your primary net worth increaser which will be your income and so if i can consolidate this video into a single statement you should it's my opinion spend the majority of your time on the vehicle that will increase your net worth the fastest and for most people it is going to be increasing their income until the point where they have saved sufficient amount of assets that they put in passive highly liquid things like s ps and indexes et cetera and at that point when the potential to earn and increase your net worth is faster or greater through the assets that you have at that point it makes sense to switch your attention towards growing those assets because now the opportunity cost is shifted away from where your income is generated versus where your wealth is growing and so that is my uh at what point should you start investing that is how i break it down first invest in you increase your skill basis so that you can generate more income it is the highest return genuinely i'm not saying that for jargon it is the highest return that you can get the second is that you continue to put things in the past truly passive not what people claim is passive that are really side hustles but truly passive business so that you can continue to focus on your main income generation and then when 10 of your net worth growth exceeds your income capacity currently at that point it makes sense for you to shift your perspective into growing your wealth and rather than your income so i hope you found this video valuable click subscribe and i'll see you in the next vid bye