درسنامه اصلی

Money or Life–Audio

Hi, I’m AJ Hoge and welcome to this month’s VIP lesson.

So there I was looking into a small white room. Inside the room there was a half-naked man.

He just had on pants, no shirt. His body was covered in shit. (Shit is the impolite way to say it. We could say crap. We could say poop. If we wanted to be very polite we could say feces, which is a more scientific name for poop or shit.) But the man was covered in shit. I don’t know if it was his shit or dog shit, I have no idea, but I’m staring through a little window in the door, he was inside the little room.

So I looked at him and scrunched up my nose. This action, we call this scrunching your nose when you put your nose up, kind of like if there’s a bad smell. Because I could already smell the poop, the shit a little bit through the door. It was even worse than that the man was covered in shit, but he was also walking around like this talking to himself. He was very angry. He was like ergh, God damnit! Fuck, shit and he was looking up, looking down, moving around, he was crazy. He was probably hearing voices. He was angry, potentially violent, I didn’t know.

I was a social worker in a hospital emergency room and my job was to handle people like this. My job was to talk to them, to try to figure out what kind of problems they were having, mental problems or sometimes drug problems. And then I would give my opinion to the doctor, the emergency room doctor, the ER doctor and then the doctor would decide what to do with the person. So the doctor told me, go into the room, talk to this guy and assess him.

To assess means to observe, to figure out something, figure out a situation, in this case figure out a person.

So, I kind of took a deep breath, opened the door and went inside and the man ergh, jerked and looked at me, and he just started making these kind of crazy noises. His eyes were wide and of course inside the room there was this terrible stink, this terrible, terrible smell. So I kind of walked in and tried to be calm, tried to give a calm energy. I didn’t look at him directly in the eyes, because sometimes that makes people angry or more aggressive, so I kind of looked down and I used a calm voice and said hello, my name is AJ. I’m a social worker here and I’d just like to talk to you, see what’s happening with you.

So I was just very, you know these, using these very gentle movements, gentle body movements, very calm and gentle voice. I slowly walked in a little bit closer to him and I kind of sat down a little just against the wall, not completely, but just a little against the wall, kind of in the middle of the room, and continued to look non-threatening. I tried to look not dangerous. So the man, he calmed down a little bit, you know. He still was clearly crazy, something happening with him. He was a little more calm and he started walking around the room a little bit kind of back and forth, but he started to make sense a little more.

He told me his name and he was able to answer a few of my basic questions, so I thought okay good it’s working, gotta figure out what’s going on with this guy. And, for my job I was mostly trying to find out is he on drugs or is he having a mental breakdown, a schizophrenic breakdown of some kind? So I just needed to figure out was it drugs or schizophrenia or perhaps both. So I continued, I moved in a little farther into the room and I kind of sat down even more lower, right. It’s kind of the psychology that we use with animals even, right, if there’s an aggressive dog if you can get lower you avoid direct eye contact, use a calm voice, slow movements, often these actions will calm down a person or even an animal.

And so, this was the same approach I was using as I tried to gently ask a few questions and figure out what was happening, try to figure out had he been using drugs, had he been drinking. Well suddenly, he became very, very angry for no reason, just ahh fuck you, bam and he started hitting the wall, pounding it. And I realized, at that moment, oh crap, I’ve made a mistake I had gone into the room too far. So now I was almost to the back of the room and sitting down and this crazy man was now between me and the door, so there was me, this crazy, possibly violent man and the door, so I couldn’t get out in order words.

Suddenly I realized, oh my God if he attacks me I have no way to get out of here. And, at this moment, a thought occurred to me, what the hell am I doing? Because, this was just another typical 12 hour shift in the emergency room, another typical day at that job. Now in some ways this was a great job, it paid fairly well, at least, for a social work job it paid well. Social work jobs don’t pay a lot, but for me, at that time in my life, it paid well. It had good benefits, good health insurance, a very stable job.

However, I had to work 12 hour shifts that’s how they had the emergency room schedule, so everybody worked for 12 hours in one shift, in one day. And often I had to work overtime, meaning I had to work extra shifts during the week. And the job was like this all the time, it was constantly stressful and difficult all day long. For 12 hours I was dealing with people who were stressed or extremely upset, extremely emotional, who were kind of crazy in some ways, schizophrenic. I was dealing with drug addicts. I was dealing with alcoholics. It was not a pleasant, positive experience most days, and all day long I would be dealing with people like this, for 12 long hours, and usually for more than 40 hours a week.

And because it was such an emotionally difficult job and it took so much energy, I found that even when I was at home, even on my days off I was exhausted. I had no energy to enjoy my life. I had no energy to do anything, I would just sit around being lazy, recovering from my job. And so, I felt like the job dominated all of my life, when I was there at the job and even when I was at home I was still thinking about the job, recovering from the job and I had no energy or time for myself anymore.

Another thought occurred to me later that day, which is more important? What is more important to me, my money or my life; money or my life? Because this job was giving me good money for me at that time, good stable benefits, all of these things but it was ruining my life. It was making my life miserable. For a short time the job was quite interesting and challenging, but after a month or two it became just extremely stressful and draining. So my money or my life? This was one of the points in my life where I realized very strongly that I had to achieve financial independence.

I realized I had to find a way to make money, to cover my normal living expenses like we all must. I had to find a way to do that without suffering these kind of jobs, to be able to do that in a way that was independent, where I could live the kind of life I wanted to, so I didn’t have to choose between money or my life. I wanted to have money and my life. I wanted to have both. And to do that I needed financial independence and that is our topic this month, financial independence.

Why financial independence? Why talk about money?

Well, you know, in life a lot of us we kind of avoid the topic of money. It’s different in different cultures, but in the United States people don’t directly talk about money so much. It’s not polite, for example, to ask somebody, how much money do you make, to ask them their salary? We don’t do that. Maybe with a very close family member, but for most people you don’t ask that question unless you’re very close to them, certainly not to someone, even to your co-workers, most people don’t talk about how much they’re making.

Of course, we all have this idea, money, money, money, we don’t want to think about money, like the money is kind of a dirty topic or it’s not a positive topic and yet, every single one of us has to deal with it. Every one of us needs money in this world, it’s the way our world economy works now. So we can’t avoid it even if we think oh, I’m above money and, you know, I’m not focused on money I’m focused on more important things. That’s nice but the truth is, every one of us has to deal with it. Even a monk, who’s living off in a monastery somewhere, who’s not personally dealing with money, someone is giving money to that monastery. Someone is paying money to buy their food and to take care of the building and give them clothes. So money is involved no matter what.

So I think it’s very important for us to look at the topic of money intelligently, not to avoid it, but to decide how can we have our life and money, not have to choose one or the other, not have our lives dominated by money, but to have money serve us instead of us serving it. When I was not financially independent, before I was financially independent, I felt like I was serving money, like I was the slave of money. I was doing things just to get money. That job, I was working this job that was exhausting me, just for money, just because I needed the money. I had to pay my rent, had to pay for food, had to pay for my car.

So, the pain of not being financially independent is that you are, in many ways, a slave to money. We could call this wage slavery even. Um, for example, before I was financially independent I had to deal with a lot of unpleasant bosses. I had a few bosses, had a few jobs that were wonderful, but I had a lot of bosses that were not good people. That didn’t treat me well. They didn’t treat me with respect. Some who would yell and others who were always looking to find my mistakes or something wrong and others who just didn’t seem to care about me at all.

Um, bad hours, like that emergency room job, before I was financially independent I had some jobs where the hours were terrible. Like that job, those long 12 hour shifts and overtime shifts, it was exhausting. I had another job where I delivered sandwiches driving a truck. I had to wake up at like 4 in the morning and then I worked all day long passed 6:00 o’clock in the evening. Again, it was exhausting and the hours were terrible. And the terrible thing about that is that I ended up spending so much time away from my family and friends; this is another problem of jobs, of serving money instead of being financially independent is that often you end up spending so much more time working for money than with your family or your friends.

Stress and boredom is another big problem. Both stress and boredom can be big problems when you’re not financially independent. You end up working jobs because you must, because you need the money, but sometimes you’re forced to take jobs that are very stressful, like that emergency room job. And other times you may be forced to take jobs that are just really boring, they might not be stressful, but super boring and I’ve been in both situations many, many times.

The overall thing for me that was so terrible about that long period of my life before being financially independent was just that I felt like I didn’t own my own time. I was on other people’s schedule all the time. My bosses decided my schedule not me. If I wanted to go visit my mom, I couldn’t just go do it I had to, you know, ask my boss and maybe they would say yes and maybe they would say no. I didn’t like that. So financial independence gives a lot more freedom. What does it give? It lets you be your own boss. When you’re financially independent you are your own boss. It means that you own your own hours, you decide your own hours instead of someone else deciding.

There’s much less stress when you’re financially independent. It’s not stress free, depending on how you achieve financial independence. There may still be some stress but it’s a different kind of stress, it’s a stress that’s easier to deal with, I find. Um, generally it’s more fun and more interesting, because again you are working for something more than just money. And you are the master of your own time, which is a big, big, big, big thing.

How do we define this?

What is financial independence exactly?

Different people have different definitions, I’ll give you my simple definition of financial independence. It’s when you’re independent income exceeds your expenses. Your independent income is more than your expenses, that’s the basic formula. When you can do that you are financially independent. Without financial independence you must work for money. With financial independence you can work for love, for enjoyment, for abundance, for many other reasons. You can continue working or not, but you can choose your reasons for working.

Let’s look a little more at the formula. Independent income is more than exceeds expenses. Independent income is the key thing. Independent income means that the source of your money or sources, are owned by you. So if you’re working for another company, they’re paying you a paycheck that’ snot independent, they own the company, so you are dependent on them, it’s no independent income you don’t own it. On the other hand if you have your own business, you own the business and you have income coming from that business that you own, that’s independent income, you own it yourself.

Other examples might be, let’s say you have some investments, savings or investments. So you have some money saved and you get interest from that or dividend payments, stocks, something like that. Again, you own that so that income, the interest or whatever, the dividends, the interest, again that’s income that’s independent because you own it yourself, not someone else. So there are many different ways and many different types of independent income. To achieve your financial independence you have to get enough income of that type to pay for, to cover all of your basic life expenses… rent, healthcare, food, whatever else you want to do. Everybody has a different lifestyle, so it’s up to you.

So if you look at it there’s a really basic formula to achieve your financial independence. It’s quite simple, it’s quite obvious. Not necessarily easy but simple and obvious.

1. You can increase your income, increase your income.

If you have more money coming in than you can buy or create independent income.

1. Buy assets.

An asset, that’s another word for independent income source, an asset. A business, for example, I own Effortless English that is an asset. It’s an income source that I own. It’s an asset. If you own stocks, the stocks are an asset because they create income, especially if they pay dividends they create income, so they’re an asset. It’s an income source that you own. A house, if you bought a house or a condo and then you rent it out, you rent it to other people so they pay rent to you that’s an income source, so it’s an asset. So you increase your income even if you’re just working a normal job, you try to make more money. You take some of that money you buy assets and then number three, the other obvious step is…

3.Decrease your expenses, cut your expenses.

If your expenses are lower than it’s easier to become financially independent. If you spend lots of money and you like to buy expensive cars, live in big expensive houses and expensive neighborhoods then you have to make a lot more money to cover all those expenses. It will take you much longer to become financially independent.

So, the end of my story, I finally decided that my first step, my main strategy would be cutting my expenses. At that time in my life I really couldn’t think of a way to make more money. I was a social worker. I had a social work degree, and there really were not many opportunities as a social worker to make more money. And, at that time, I had no idea about starting any kind of business, so I couldn’t see a clear way to make more money. So I realized to buy assets, to have some extra money so I could buy some assets so I could start saving and then buying assets, I realized that I had to cut my expenses or increase my income or both. I couldn’t figure out a way to increase my income, so I realized that I could cut my expenses and that’s what I started doing, I started cutting my expenses as much as I could. In fact, I took drastic action in this regard.

Meaning, I took very strong action to cut my expenses. So strong that a year later I lived in my car, a small car. I lived in my car for several months to save money on rent and shortly after that I lived in a van for an entire year. I lived in a van and continued working and making money, but I lived in the van so I could avoid paying rent, so that I could have more income than my expenses.

I don’t think you have to do that, you do not, but you see the general principle and you can see how focused, how motivated, how dedicated I was. I was willing to make some big sacrifices. I was willing to be quite uncomfortable for a while, in order to achieve financial independence and I’m glad I did. I’m very happy that I did. So, now happily, I work for love, I work for enjoyment. I don’t have to work just for money and you also can achieve this.

In the other lessons this month, we’ll talk more about specific ideas, methods and strategies for achieving financial independence. There are many ways to do it. You can start your own business, but you don’t have to. There are many ways to do it, so it depends on your situation, depends on our personality, depends on the kind of life you want to live, but we can all achieve it eventually. It may take a short time, it may take a long time, but it is possible and I promise you it’s an excellent goal to have. Because, once you’re financially independent, again, you can continue working certainly, but you get to work for love and enjoyment and so much of the stress of money will go away when you achieve this.

So we’ll talk more in the coming lessons about some specific strategies that you can use to

achieve your financial independence. See you in the other lessons.