Is Your Net Worth Where You Want it To Be?

Your Thinking is Limited

I recently discussed two big brain bursts that happened when I got involved in real estate investing, two burst that changed my thinking forever. Before I had them, I didn’t even know how tightly the lid was screwed onto my brain.

You may not realize it, but your thinking is limited by your experience and your peer group. After all, we only know what we know, right? We can’t begin to know what we don’t know.

Does Your Brain Have a Lid on It?

That depends on your experience and your exposure. Do you spend time with people who truly think big, who think big enough, and how do you know?

My first brain burst happened at a seminar at the beginning of our investing career. The speaker told us to write down our income goal. He encouraged us to really think big. I had just quit my job to invest full time and my husband was still at his W2 job. My very first goal was to replace our income which had been about $200,000. Thinking big, I put $250,000 as my income goal. That was as big as my brain could stretch. Then the speaker said to double our number. I laughed and didn’t change it.

The next year, I wrote down $500,000. The year after that, my goal was $1 million. Since that time, we’ve been involved in a lot of national groups and have met some amazing people. I now know a lot of people who make over $1 million per year, in fact, we’ve met people who make over $1 million per month.

Jim and I went to a national event for business owners in Maui where we were one of 26 companies represented. The three leaders of the event were each self-made billionaires. I can assure you, I have never been anywhere with the level of business conversation I heard at this event.

My goals exploded beyond what they were when I first left my W2 job and created our first business. Why? Because I met a lot of people with goals far bigger than mine. My stepped-up peer groups have shown me that my goals were really small and that bigger goals can be achieved by people not a lot different than I, people simply with different experiences and different expectations. These people changed my expectations.

What is Your Net Worth?

My second brain burst came when I first heard people discussing net worth. I didn’t even know what that meant. I understood and could relate to income, but what was net worth all about?

One day, it clicked. Income is completely irrelevant – it doesn’t matter at all what your income is. Why? Because if your income is $250,000 per year but you spend $260,000, your income sucks.

What matters isn’t how much you make in a year, what matters is how much you keep each year – how much you add to your pile. The size of your pile is the size of your net worth. The important question to be asking isn’t how much you make in a year, the answer you want to know is how much you’ll keep – how much you’ll add to your net worth.

Understanding net worth and focusing on it has benefits I didn’t expect – it keeps me motivated, keeps me moving toward my goal, and takes away the sting of sacrifice.

So what is your net worth? Have you thought about it? Do you focus on growing it every year? Is your net worth where you want it to be?