How do I become rich? How do I make it and be successful? You first must understand that wealth is in its essence a mindset. In the end money, land, cars, they all are resources and they are all obtainable in any amount. I discussed the practicalities of legitimizing yourself but really what you first must do is identify what you deem as success. From that sit down with a calculator, determine what the monthly cost of that life style is. Set aside those calculations for now.

Before we get too much further I want to make this clear. This article is intended as a framework; use the examples as ideas. Take them and make your own way. That said, the first thing you must do is optimize your spending of resources. When making purchases, ask yourself can this pay for itself? Can I find a way to make this item make me money, or will this save me money? Can I use this for leisure and a side hustle? Can I find a way to make a dollar off what I’m doing? Another resource you have is time. Spend every minute of the day wisely; they only become more valuable as you get older. For example when you’re surfing are you reading articles or looking at memes? Are you listening to audiobooks or music? While your entire life doesn’t need to revolve around making money, wise spending, and strategic investments in time, investments in tools and equipment will pay for themselves exponentially over their life.

The next thing you want to understand about this is income types. You have active income which is like your job or things you make. I spend X hours, doing Y stuff I get paid Z. Everyone should be generating active income and multiple sources of it especially to start. The other kind of income is passive income, this ranges from rental income, dividend stocks, royalties, residual payments. The great things about these sorts of income is it is money you get paid without having to invest time. There are lots of variations between the two but the less work you need to do to get paid the better.

Since this article more about a mindset than action items you can repeat, I will simply recount some examples from my own experience. It was Christmas 2009, the xbox 360 just came out. My parents asked me what I would like for Christmas. While I would have loved an xbox, instead, I asked for a nice cordless Ridgid drill and saw. All summer I had been saving to buy cabling tools, for I had just found out about this wonderful opportunity called Field Nation. With my new power tools and trusty cabling tools I was at 19 billing $70/hr doing telecom work. Most of my friends were working in retail and asking me how I did it, they frequently didn’t like the answer: they wanted the xbox. While I suffered to pay for that equipment I still have it and each tool has paid for itself many many times over in the 10 years since. For my next example, to set the tale, this was roughly 2010-2011. I was fresh out of school with an Associates, and I wanted to make some consistent money to steady the various part time IT jobs, and freelance Field Nation work I was doing. Then as now there are a glut of businesses in need of a website. After doing some research I learned of a product called cPanel. I found that for roughly $8 per month, I could sell websites for $20 per month or more plus an hourly to build them. At the time, I could buy a month of Netflix, or have a meal at Taco Bell so I chose to sell websites rather than pay for those luxuries. Through these deals, I made more contacts, and handled harder and harder projects. As the years went I added affiliate sales for my materials, and credit card processing for my web clients. These years in the trenches paved my way to true wealth.

So lets analyze my examples, when I had an opportunity for a hand up I chose rather than to get a luxury item to get equipment. Field Nation is predominantly piece work; you do something you get paid. That is the definition of active income. I used that to help me set up a passive income streams. That passive income stream I then used to expand into more passive income streams. Now we see, a pattern emerging, optimize your excess spending to invest it not necessarily into savings but into assets. Use those assets to make passive income streams. Use those passive income streams to attain your living expenses that you determined in the first paragraph. I will leave you with this, the cost of Taco Bell once a month 10 years ago set me up for my success today.