The Fallacy Of "Saving Money" Pt. Three

The Biggest Fallacy Of Them All…

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been debunking many of the common myths that hold most people back from achieving their financial goals.

Although what I’ve shared with you so far may have seemed counter-intuitive, my intention – as always- is to challenge your beliefs about money so that you start to look at your finances in a different way.

Ideally, I want you to start thinking the way a wealthy person thinks because if I can get you to do that, then eventually you’ll start acting the way a wealthy person acts. And in doing so, you’ll change your financial future for the better.

Moving into the final part of our series, I want to bring up an issue today that while on the surface sounds like great advice, is the biggest fallacy of all and is actually costing you BIG time. Not just in money mind you, but time, energy, effort, and freedom.

The final fallacy I’m referring to is the idea of doing things yourself in order to “save money”.

But before I dive deep with you on this subject, I want to share a quick story about myself and…

How A Simple Mistake Nearly Put Me Out Of Business…

When I first started The Abundance Society, there were many things I had to do in order to get the project off the ground.

The to-do list seemed endless…

-Purchase a domain name
-Setup hosting
-Setup website
-Install wordpress
-Install wordpress theme
-Create a lead magnet
-Setup autoresponder
-Create membership site
-Setup shopping cart & paypal
-Setup…I think you get the idea…

While most of these tasks I was able to accomplish myself without too much effort, I hit a major snag when I tried setting up my shopping cart. I remember logging into the back office of my account and seeing what appeared to be Egyptian hieroglyphics…

Despite knowing in my gut that I was way in over my head, I decided to pull the classic man card and instead of asking for help, I was determined to figure it out on my own (without reading the instruction manual of course).

I thought to myself, “Why should I pay someone to do this? I’ll save money if I just do it myself. After all, if you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself.”

BIG MISTAKE!

Fast forward two weeks later, the shopping cart was still not up and running, deadlines were approaching fast, I was not earning any money, and I was frustrated, scared, and worried beyond belief.

Realizing that I was not going to be able to figure it out on my own, I finally bit the bullet and went onto eLance.com to post the job so it could be outsourced.

Within an hour and for a couple hundred dollars, I lined up someone who was an expert in helping people setup systems for online businesses. Within a matter of days I received an email with the subject line “Done”.

At that point, I quickly learned what I did wrong but more importantly, I realized why so few people ever earn a high income and achieve financial independence. You see I fell into the classic trap that holds most people back financially… It’s a trap that I call…

“Do-It-Yourself” Syndrome

What I’m about to share with you next could be the game changer in your life…

It is the reason why some people work their heart out and only make $35,000/year while others don’t work anywhere near as hard and earn millions.

Here’s the deal… The fundamental reason why some people earn more than others is that highly successful people focus their time, energy, and effort on the highest revenue producing activities while unsuccessful people distract themselves into being “busy” but are not doing things that lead to sales.

You may want to read that previous sentence again. The wisdom and distinctions in that previous statement could be worth a fortune to you…

If you want to dramatically increase your income, you need to start focusing your attention on the activities that not only are you extremely good at, but also lead to revenue generation.

Spending countless hours on things like yard work, house cleaning, car repair, washing dishes, grocery shopping, etc. are taking away productive hours that you could be spending on earning money (either through your own business or by helping your company increase sales).

While you might be “saving money” by doing these things yourself, the truth is you’re actually losing money because tasks of these nature could easily be done by someone else who works at a lower hourly rate than you do.

Know this: Trying to save money by doing things yourself is a formula for burnout, frustration, and wasting countless amounts of time.

Now this leads up to a very important question…

What Is Your Time Worth?

Without having a clear idea of how valuable your time is, it is easy to delude yourself into thinking your making progress, when in reality you’re simply wasting time on unimportant activities.

Here are your action steps…
1) Set an income goal for the next 12 months. Let’s use $100,000 as an example.

2) Break down your income goal into one month targets. In this case, 100,000 / 12 = $8333.33/month

3) Then break your monthly targets down into weekly targets. Therefore, $8333.33 / 4 = $2083.33/week

4) Then break your monthly targets down into daily targets (assume a 5 day work week). $2083.33 / 5 = $416.66/day

5) Finally, break your daily targets down into hourly targets (assume an 8 hour work day). $416.66 / 8 = $52.08/hour

6) Now that you know what your hourly rate is worth to achieve your income goal, simply refuse to do any activities that take you away from earning that hourly rate.

If you spend 10 hours a week cleaning your house, perhaps its time to hour a maid at $20/hour to do that for you. 10 hours devoted to productive wealth building time nets you over $320 in your pocket ($520 – $200 = $320).

I hope you enjoyed The Fallacy of “Saving Money” series and that it helped you start to look at your financial picture in a new light.

If you liked this article, please leave me a comment below and share your breakthrough that you had. I’ll be answering questions and responding to comments personally.

Until next time!

To your abundance,
Michael Stead
Founder, The Abundance Society