It's a big leap to make the transition from being an employee with a regular paycheck coming in every week to being an entrepreneur working from home not knowing when you'll get your next check.
There are many things you can do to make the transition smooth and to minimize the financial uncertainty.
In 1980 when I made the decision to quit my job so I could stay home with our kids, we had to downsize to a more affordable house and only use one car. This made it possible for us to live comfortably on one income instead of two.
Later, I started my real estate business I was lucky that we had income from my husbands job while I was building up the cash and cash flow in my business.
It didn't take long for the income from my business to surpass the income from my husband's job so he could retire early. I'll have more details about how I did it in future blogs.
So that's one way to make the transition… to have one partner work while the other builds the business.
Jack Miller wrote a great article with more ideas for how you can Quit Your Day Job So You Can Work From Home ….
Probably the best short term goal a person could set would be to be able to quit a messy, dull, boring, repetitive, or stressful job; working for an intolerant boss and be able to be self-employed, working for themselves. If you’re in the position that I’ve described, there’s an easier way to transition from being a hired hand to being the boss. Assuming that you don’t know whether or not you could fill this role, and that you have bills to pay and family to support, here’s a more practical way to find out if you could make it.
Self-made successful people share one thing above all others; financial discipline. If you aren’t already a disciplined spender, you must become one, and so must family members. You’ve got to budget your lifestyle expenses at a point where you are sacrificing luxuries and still maintaining the necessities. Once a family budget has been devised that will allow a significant percentage of your earnings to be saved and accumulated, your next step is to set up a bank account to hold the savings, and to segregate the earnings from entrepreneurial activities from your wages.
The most rewarding thing a person with limited cash can do is to learn how to find good deals, get them under contract, and either buy them him/herself, find an investor to co-venture them with, or wholesale them off to others for a fee. This requires very little up-front cash, and could result in profits of up to $10,000 per house, depending upon the merits of the deal.
The other choice for the person who wants to build wealth without much money is to learn how to manage rentals, then to lease/Option homes from homeowners and investors. This will enable you to pick up a spread between what they are leased for, and what they are rented to occupants for, and a spread between the strike price of the Option after being credited with rents, and the market value.
In any event, no matter how you do it, your next step is to watch your “freedom” bank account grow. Until it has enough in it to equal one full year’s salary, you’re going to have to put in a lot of off hours after work and on weekends to fill it up; but once you’ve reached the mark you set then you can quit your job and start doing real estate full time. Every two weeks, you can withdraw a sum from the bank account equal to your bi-weekly pay check and you’ll have a full year in which to fill up the account again without having to worry about meeting your personal financial obligations. You can see that the tighter you plan a budget that the family will adhere to, the less money you’ll use up and the more your can save to fund the next year’s expenses.
Learn how to replace the income from your job at www.CashFlowDepot.com
