When I made the decision to start my own business, I was over 40, with 3 kids, and at university!

In order to make my dream a reality, we needed to SAVE by cutting back expenses AND making more money on the side. Cutting expenses is only a short-term plan. You NEED to invest in alternative sources of revenue too. It allows you to save TODAY and build for the FUTURE. The only sustainable way to do both is start a side hustle.

It will take time for it to gather momentum for you to enjoy the annuity income. Additional income protects you from life’s knocks AND it provides you with the opportunity to enjoy some of life’s great experiences! Start today!

Show notes

• I re-signed from my day job to move into my own business.

• We focused in cutting expenses but after six months we had only achieved half our goal!

• There are baseline costs that sometimes cannot be cut and are outside of our control.

• What MORE could we do?

• We had to explore creative ways of making additional money.

• I started paid speaking, online courses and employee retirement counselling.

• These avenues were not in my business plan.

• It allowed us the opportunity to pay short-term expenses.

• The value of annuity income, once-off income and risk-based income.

• I realised that every day that I don’t do this, it will take far longer to reap the benefits of it.

• Annuity income takes time to build.

• My goal for Working Women’s Wealth is that the income will grow with momentum.

• My businesses will allow me to choose the work I want to do.

• What would you think about this decision in 10 years’ time?

• Don’t rely on a corporate salary.

• Check out my masterclass in Teach Yourself Wealth.

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Transcript

Lisa Linfield:                       00:09                     Hello everybody, and welcome to today's episode of Working Women's Wealth. We're going to be chatting about two different ways to have more money in your life. When I made the decision to start my business, I had been at University for a year starting my honors degree in Financial Planning. As I mentioned before, it wasn't my intention to do Financial Planning, it was my intention to get that honors Commerce degree. But I fell in love with it, as one does, and so after a year and a very nice relaxed holiday in our summer vacation period, John and I made the decision that I was going to resign from my day job and start this business.

                                                                                I gave six months of notice and then the plan was to work for six to 12 months, half day. So I had some time before the financial impact of not earning a great executive salary was to kick in. And so John and I decided that we would have to focus through that period in cutting our expenses because we would have half the income with me not working anymore. So we set a goal in the first six months to start halving our expenses, and in the beginning, there are some low hanging fruit, so it actually is pretty easy, and you think you've done a great job. And some of the stuff takes time to kick in, you've got to cancel subscriptions and things like that. But at six months, we had only achieved half of our goal.

                                                                                The next six months, we set about with more purpose, almost getting to the second layer of [inaudible 00:02:00] in terms of cutting expenses that really started hooting. And we've finished that first year, not even anywhere near where we should have been in terms of the ability to cut our expenses. And the main reason is that there are certain almost baseline costs. So if you have a house that has high electricity and water needs, or council tax, or any of that stuff. The problem comes is that you then start saying, well, maybe we need to downsize the house to downsize the monthly expenses. So John, and I'd made that decision, and we put our house in the market. But the problem comes, you can always choose what the property markets like when you put your house on the market.

                                                                                So, we ended up having a slightly challenging discussion, where what we were able to get for our house with meant that we made a loss and the loss that could actually afford to pay for a number of months staying in the house in terms of expenses. In fact, a number of years. And so we made the financial decision not to downsize because, at that stage, we could afford to pay for a number of years of the bigger expenses, and rather hold on to the house. So there comes a point at which it becomes difficult to breach the barriers of the expenses that you can cut, we used to go on date night, once a week to an expensive restaurant, we now go once a month, we only take our kids out for pizza once a quarter when their school results come in. So we really have cut as many of the kind of discretionary, expenses that we still can't get much further.

                                                                                And so it caused almost a crisis for us. Well, not a crisis, but a challenging discussion for us, where we were then kind of focusing on what more we could do. And it brought us to the second option, which is where we're gonna have to make more money, or specifically, I'm gonna have to make more money. So in terms of my day job of setting up my wealth management business that was growing, and it was growing nicely, and I was exceeding my budgets and expectations. But I needed to get short term cash to cover the expenses that we needed. And so I went about looking at creative ways to make some more money, it forced me to start my journey as a paid speaker, which I love and adore. I took on employee financial counseling, which is different to managing the actual retirement funds, but where as part of accounting service, you offer financial counseling for employees.

                                                                                I took on various different things that weren't in my business plan, but allowed me to make some money in the short term from one of events. And as I said, the three sources of income, we should always have, we should have a new to income, we should have one-off event income, and then we should have some at-risk income, where we have the chance to make more money. And so, I was starting to build that one of set of income, whilst the wealth management businesses and new to income was growing, because a new to income usually grows a lot slower and takes a lot longer to come into place. But once it's in place, it has momentum, and you see huge benefits from it. But it's a long term goal. And that's also when I then started setting about this whole thing of making money from my side hustle, making money from Working Woman's Wealth.

                                                                                My first goal always has been to make enough money to cover the expenses of the podcast, the blog posts, the hosting of web servers, all of that stuff. And that definitely remains my first port of call. But with the needing to find ways to make more money, it then pushed me into saying, "okay, well, I can sell online training courses". And in building these online training courses, I have had to invest the money to have video editing and things to make the online courses. But I know that I'm building an asset, that whilst over a 12 to 18 month period is going to require a significant investment of time, it ends up being something that I will be able to manage and maintain for say two hours a week. And that for me is where this whole thing started to kick in. As, John and I started saying, "okay, we need to make sure that we live of a much lower cost base for a lot longer whilst I start the side hustle".

                                                                                But my goal for Working Woman's Wealth is that from the course revenue in the speaking revenue, and all of that stuff, it will increase over five to seven years. And once it gets to a stage where it is able to meaningfully ... some of those expenses that I did enjoy having in my past life, to come back into my life. I always look at it and think to myself, every day that I don't do this, is a day longer that it'll take for me to get that stuff back into my life, and also have the additional money to contribute to our time and to other things. But these things take time to build, the second streams of income take time to build. But having said that, there are a lot easier to leverage momentum, once they've taken those five to seven years to build up.

                                                                                And every day that we're not investing in these, is a day later that we can enjoy the benefits of these businesses. So, I was sitting with my mom last week, and she said to me, "when does this thing get easier?". And I said, "mom, not for a while." Because, in the last four years, I spent two years at university, rescaling myself, I've spent two years investing deeply and building my businesses full time. And I think I've got at least another two years. I think a business needs four years plus in order to really start becoming financially positive. But I say to her "you know what mom, by the time I'm 50, these businesses will allow me to choose the work that I get to do". And when I talked to people, they look at me and go, "47 years?, that's a long time!". And I look at them and I say "yes, and if you had have started 47 years ago, you'd be in a great position now".

                                                                                And that's one of the big questions on the side hustle course that I ask people is, "what does your life look like, in five years time? If you haven't done this, what does it look like in 10 years time if you haven't done this?" And that question really kind of resonated with me when I was making this decision to start my business full time, because our HR director at the time had these tarot cards things which are actually coaching questions, but I used to call them the tarot cards. And she said, shuffle the pack and take three out. And the one that resonated with me that I got out of this huge pack of cards, both a year before I left and the day before I left, was what would you think about this decision in 10 years time. And I knew then, that the decision to go and earn multiple streams of income to not rely only on a corporate salary, because both John and I were in corporate, I knew that in 10 years time, I'd look back and go, thank goodness, I did this, and I wish I'd done it sooner.

                                                                                So for all of you, there are two ways that we can all get extra money, we can try and save and cut our expenses. Or we can build a second stream of income. And I always look at the ability to cut expenses as something that will only give you a certain short term element, because there are baseline costs. It's all about the end. So, for John and I were both cutting our experiences, and  my view is that you should invest in alternate sources of revenue, because that allows you to live today and save for the future. And it's one of the biggest sets of feedback that I get for people when I say, "what is your biggest worry about money?" The question is how do you be able to live and enjoy today and save for your future? And the only answer that I've come up that is a sustainable, long term answer is to build a side hustle that hopefully in five to seven years will generate significant, meaningful revenue that you can choose to go away every year and take your family or that you can have the extra money to invest.

                                                                                In two weeks time, I'm going to be starting a series of master classes on starting your side hustle, and I'd love for you to join us and sign up for those webinars. But in the meantime, if you want to do side hustle, will be opening the course on the 15th of May. And on the website on the homepage of lisalinfield.com. You'll see on the right-hand side that there is the opportunity to put your name down to be notified when the signup process starts for side hustle. I'd love to have you on the journey with me. Because my passion is that every one of us has another stream of income, so that we can protect ourselves from the knocks that life gives us and also that we can be able to live both now and in the future. Take care and have a great week.

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