Summary

You have to have a mindset fit for this. As an educator, you’ve been told things and lived your life in a certain way. I’m not saying this is a bad way, just that what has served you in the education sphere is not likely to serve in this Bonus Money world. And this is a vital truth. As you learn, grow, and change, the things that worked for you in the past, don’t necessarily work for you in the future. We’ll get to the mindset piece in a minute, but first, let’s see how I did in Month 6. Ad insertion Let’s talk about grand totals. In just six months I have made in cash a 43% return on my money. I reinvested all of that, admittedly, that 43% didn’t come back to me, because I chose not to pull it out. I chose to reinvest it. This month, I made 8.66% of what I invested in total. For those keeping score, that’s about 1700 dollars. Not bad for not having that much invested. The other interesting thing is that for three weeks this month, and all weeks last month, I was selling puts, and those were not executing. That means that I made a lot of money from never having the puts execute. What did that really mean? I was reinvesting my put premiums to increase the number of contracts I could go after. So, my number of contracts went from 9 to 15 in just a few short weeks. A clear reality: because the stock market has been going down a lot lately, I have experienced my overall value of my stock go down as well. Here’s the difference with what I was doing previously: I am actually making money while the stock is going down. If I were pulling that money out, I would be making money from it. I bring this up now to segue into our discussion about mindset. So, let’s talk about mindset. Here are several things you, as an educator, have abdicated: 1. Your personal salary negotiations have likely been abdicated to a union or association. 2. Your retirement is either in a pension or a 403b, and you have likely abdicated responsibility for taking care of your retirement to someone else. 3. Your salary increases have been abdicated to a union or association. To be clear, these are not bad things, and there are many who have found success by abdicating these things to someone else. That’s not the issue here. What I want to encourage you to do is to take control of your finances and your wealth. Here’s how my first conversation when I was a first year teacher: What would you like to invest in? I don’t know, what’s a good decision? Well, you’re not going to retire for a while, so X mutual fund would be good. Ok. Let’s do that. She finished by saying this was her easiest meeting of the day because I didn’t have any questions. It took me a few years to realize that was a subtle dig. So, what mindset do you need to have? I think three mindsets are very important. You need an open mindset You need a curious mindset You need an investor’s mindset Let’s talk about each of these. What is an open mindset? You’re open to possibilities. You’re open to new ideas and new way of doing things. You’re open to the idea that maybe you haven’t been doing everything so well. I think that this one is the most challenging for educators. We’ve believed and acted a certain way our whole careers and so it is very challenging to do something different and think a different way. One of the best books on this particular subject of changing your mindset is Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It tells of Robert Kiyosaki’s young life in hawaii and the things he learned from his own dad (an educator in Hawaii) and his rich dad (his best friend’s dad). This book will really speak to you because he details how his educator dad thought compared to his investment minded friend’s dad. That’s an action step for getting an open mindset: read Rich Dad, Poor Dad. What is a curious mindset? Curious means that you need to ask questions. You need to seek out information from others. You need to learn what other people are doing. The tip for being more curious is “Tell me More” should be on the tip of your tongue whenever you’re talking with someone else. What is an investor’s mindset? Here’s the simplest way I can put this: You ask what your money is doing for you. An investor’s mindset is pretty much the opposite of a consumer’s mindset. A consumer mindset is all about how I can spend my money, while an investor’s mindset is all about how can I deploy my money to work for me. This is what we are going to focus on here in this show. Regardless of whether you’re investing in real estate, businesses, your own business, or yourself, you’ve got to get out of the consumer mindset. The best tip I can offer to get started is to start investing a small amount of money and see how it feels. Save money if you need to. But start doing something. Taking action is the best way to start making some mindset changes. You can learn how to to do it at mybonusmoney.com.