When most people invest, they choose one investment product over another – and when they choose the wrong investment products, they lose out. This is the opportunity cost of money, and Wall Street is chock full of these types of investment products. In fact, this is Wall Street’s M.O.; Wall Street wants nothing more than to force you to make tough choices with your money, and then to sit idly by while professional financial managers gamble away your hard-earned dollars in high-risk investments.
Americans are increasingly waking up to the insanity of this investment paradigm; they have realized Wall Street is full of “or” investments that are, in many ways, all the same – high cost, low security, and offering poor liquidity. The secret is to instead pursue “and” investments, where the opportunity cost of money falls by the wayside and you can engage in meaningful, steady wealth-building. Let’s explore how you can begin to recognize and demand “and” investments instead of traditional “or” investments:
Here’s Some Investment Help
- Recognize that you’ve been taught the linear method of investing: When you use the classic linear investing method, you only put your money to work once for you. For most Americans, this means blindly dumping all of their savings into the financial markets and hoping for the best. A dollar goes into the market, and hopefully more than a dollar comes out. This one-way-in, one-way-out philosophy is what Wall Street peddles, and the only method all most of us know.
- Think of your investing as circular: Instead of thinking of your money as having a linear investment value, what if you could leverage your money across multiple platforms? This is circular investment, in which you’re putting your money to work for you in multiple places. Circular investing allows you to achieve the all-important tenet of a diverse portfolio while also spreading out your risk considerably.
- Get away from the accumulation mindset: When most people invest, they’re looking to accumulate more wealth. Wall Street encourages this myopic viewpoint, in which the end goal is to make more money for the sake of making more money. In fact, Wall Street doesn’t want you to live off your accumulated wealth, because it would mean you’d be pulling these assets out of the financial markets! The reality is that we don’t need to focus on accumulating wealth because we don’t live on accumulated wealth; we live on cash flow.
- Recognize the essentialness of cash flow: We can accumulate all the money in the world, but if we don’t spend it because we’re convinced we need to save it, we have no cash flow. Wall Street encourages us to save our money in the financial markets by hitting us with taxes, investment fees, access charges, and penalty fees every time we think about withdrawing. This way of thinking will drive you insane! We need to keep our money flowing, not tied up; otherwise, we have nothing to live on.
- View assets as vehicles to move money though: Think about what corporations and the ultra-wealthy do to earn high yields: They keep their money in motion, leveraging it and reusing it constantly. You can adopt this same strategy, and you can turn to one of the safest, oldest investment vehicles in the world to facilitate this process: Whole life insurance, a product that will pay you a steady rate of return while simultaneously giving you access to your policy’s cash value.
Too many Americans have adopted the “or” investing mentality pushed on them by Wall Street. You can demand an “and” investing solution, though, and you can begin to implement it in your investment decisions by recognizing the limits of linear investing, developing a circular investment strategy, moving away from a purely accumulation-focused mindset, and recognizing that your cash flow needs will best be met by finding assets you can move money through.
Want to learn more about cash flow? Check out this great article that talks about using life insurance as a cash flow resource.