Now that we have a better understanding of early retirement, it is clear that retirement age is meaningless. With a lifestyle that you design, there will always be changes in what you do but you never retire. You just follow the design whether you are 21 or 72.

It's never too soon to start thinking about early retirement

Since retirement is a term tied to jobs for life and dependency about the only way the term early retirement makes sense these days is to define the time you transition from job dependency to independence. It marks the time when you take control of your income and your lifestyle. It means managing working for others, generating income and fulfilling activities. It means life balance. It means becoming job optional.

This isn’t so complicated as it seems. The problem for most people is that their whole lives they have been taught dependency. Education has been corrupted from teaching life skills and critical thinking to vocational training and how to be a good employee. These days, hardly anyone knows a business owner or thinks about becoming one and the ideal job is a safe government job with health benefits. Planning your own lifestyle is an alien concept.

We all need remedial training if we are to overcome this early conditioning. Society doesn’t help and family and friends will try to talk you out of throwing your life away. But the truth is that almost everybody is living in a dream. People don’t want to step out on their own. They still want to believe that jobs are the answer in spite of the reality that the industrial age and the dependent lifestyle are gone.

What Job Optional Blog believes is that more people need to embrace the concept of early retirement, design their perfect day and use lifestyle design to make it happen. It isn’t retirement from working to a life of doing nothing. It means retiring from job dependence where somebody else decides what you are worth and how much of your time you control to the lifestyle you want. It means deciding how much money you need and how much time to allocate to your activities.

You will hear the term early retirement often here at Job Optional Blog but don’t forget what we mean by the term. It doesn’t mean that you stop working. It means that you take control and make the lifestyle you want happen.

What does it mean to retire early? Is there a ‘right’ retirement age? The truth is that we’ve all been brainwashed.

Retirement age? When is that?

Let’s be brutally honest here. Retirement is an artificial milestone produced by the industrial age notion of a ‘job’ where you work for an employer for 45 years in return for money when you retire. That world doesn’t exist any more (except for the government). These days, a job will not determine when you stop working and how much money you have when you stop any more.

If you believe that retirement means that you leave your job at age 65 and receive a pension for the rest of your life then you don’t get it. The defined benefit pension plan is dead for most people and dying for the rest. Nobody is taking care of your future and nobody is telling you when to stop working. This is good news and bad news.

It is bad news if you expect somebody to take care of you at age 65 or whatever age you think means retirement. But it is good news if you are prepared to take control of your life, design your lifestyle and live the way you want to live. When you design your lifestyle, retirement is irrelevant and there is no retirement age.

If you have a job now, early retirement might mean replacing the income from your job and regaining control over that block of time. The income replacement will probably take some time but if you plan well it will take less time than a job and leave more time for other activities. You have retired from your full time job but not from spending some time generating income. You haven’t stopped working but you have improved your lifestyle.

So at Job Optional Blog, when we speak about early retirement, it is code for managing your lifestyle and improving it. It means eliminating dependence on a job to support your lifestyle and it is done by making some serious decisions about how you want to live, making a plan to make it happen and then taking action. It isn’t retirement as our culture defines it. It is something better and it is the way people were meant to live by taking control of their lives and living the life they want. It is rejecting dependency.

Come back on Thursday for part 2.

If you are tired of making New Year’s Resolutions only to give up on them before getting any results, you need to think different.

Stop focusing on the result and think about the process.  Often getting what you want means that you must change yourself.  Instead of wishing for outcomes, become the kind of person for whom the outcome is a natural state.  Read more about resolutions.

Not so fast!

Image via Wikipedia

There is more to life than making money and more to taking charge of your life than becoming an entrepreneur. Before you start doing anything, take the time to discover how you want to live each day/

What we are talking about here at JOB is more than not having a job or being an entrepreneur. It means taking control of your life- deciding how you want to live and then creating the lifestyle that makes it possible. It is not just making money. It is more than escaping dependence on a job to support your lifestyle. It is a whole new way of thinking about your life and what is important to you.

Study Lifestyle Design

You have to understand lifestyle design before you chart a course. You have to know how you want to live your life before you will know what to do to get it- and what not to do.

Most of us are raised in a lifestyle of limitations. What we have is limited by how much someone will pay our parents for their time. In that world view, happiness is always stepping up the ladder and making incremental changes. Moving up to a better job makes it possible to have a better car or a bigger house in a classier neighborhood. We never learn to ask the important questions like how do I want to spend my time and who do I want to spend it with. If we did, we would make different decisions and life would definitely be different.

Ask yourself questions!

Ask yourself who, if they start with a clean slate would decide to spend 40 hours a week in a box somewhere far from their family doing stuff they don’t really care about. If that 40 hours weren’t necessary to keep you off the street with clothes on your back, what would you do instead?

Most people think that starting a business changes the equation but it really doesn’t. Business owners probably work even more than 40 hours with much more personal investment in the results. Maybe they have more income but they have a lot less time to actually enjoy it. What good is a fast car if you only drive it to work and back. And what good is that fancy house that you don’t spend time in? Not much…right?

So take time before you start to explore the possibilities and nly then decide what to do. Read some books that can give you new ideas like the Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss or find people who are living the life you would like and discover what they do to make it possible. It isn’t a one-size-fits-all world. You can choose. No reason to follow somebody elses plan.

Image by racineur via Flickr

Leaders are attractive people. Not so much physical like being movie star handsome but in the sense that they are people you are attracted to; people you want to be with..or be like.

Where does that attraction come from? Is it some innate quality that they were born with? Or did they learn it. Most of us are brainwashed into thinking that we can’t change and so we resist the notion that we can learn and change. It is a big problem because nobody is born with talent.

 Mentors are important.

Maybe they learned it from their parents or role models. If you don’t have those qualities and didn’t grow up with propel to teach you, it is easy to tell yourself that you aren’t a leader, can’t learn to be a leader and therefore your options in life are limited. You are trapped because of circumstances and your future is limited.

That kind of thinking will ensure that you live your life as a follower. Don’t accept it.

 It is up to you and you have the power.

Each person can take charge of their life. Each person can be the leader that seems to attract people to his cause without effort because leadership is learned. Learning leadership is like learning any other discipline or life skill. It requires focused effort and a skilled teacher or mentor. Most people will not make the effort.

Designing your own lifestyle will only happen when you learn leadership. It starts by taking control of your life and examining each component to decide what you accept and what you need to change. It means rejecting the idea that what everybody else does is what you need to do. It doesn’t mean rejecting everything either. It just means that you personally consider every aspect of your life and change anything that prevents you from having the lifestyle you want. You don’t judge what other people choose and you don’t accept their judgment to limit your choices.

Along the way you develop a spine and stop looking for approval. When you take action to live differently, it changes t

Entrepreneurship

t’s a long word and one that isn’t much taught when you grow up today. One hundred years ago, you didn’t have to teach it because that was the way almost everybody lived and how they supported themselves and raised their families. In those days you were the man. You developed skills or products and sold them for money. Some people had jobs but the ‘better’ people didn’t. The jobs were things like a store clerk or a farm hand. The people of substance were their own business enterprise. They provided services or goods and their reputation was all important because word of mouth was how they built their businesses.

Image by brianhendrix via Flickr

These days everything is upside down. Holding a job is the badge of honor and being an independent operator is risky and disrespected. So today kids are taught to market themselves in order to get a job, not how to become valuable independent contractors. Looking for a job encourages insecurity and dependency and government intervention and regulation only makes it worse.

Bottom line most people today don’t know much about starting/running their own business. They therefore have the wrong expectations and tend to underestimate both the benefits and the amount of retraining they need to achieve success.  They tend to do the wrong things because they don’t know any better.

People today are just as smart as people one hundred years ago. They just lack the training that was just part of life in those old days. Our modern perspective on making money would be just as alien to folks back then as theirs is to us today. And that is why people who yearn for financial and personal freedom these days need to plug into an education system before they can hope to reach their goal.  Or become very frustrated.

There are still opportunities available but without this training and a good mentor, the deck is stacked against even the brightest dreamer. You can have the dream and it can burn deep in your being but unless you learn new rules and understand how success happens, you won’t escape from the slavery of a job. What is that training and how do you get it?

Stay tuned.

I’m high on network marketing or Multi-Level Marketing as an opportunity to consider as your means of becoming Job Optional.  Because there is so much bad experience many people reject those opportunities out of hand based upon second hand information.  There are pitfalls and risks from making a bad decision but the premise of MLM’s is sound as evidenced from the endorsement of Robert Kiy0saki.  Here is another perspective from someone who is building an independent lifestyle with network marketing.

Ask four questions.

You want to create a second income. You would like to make it big enough to replace the income from your full time job. You have explored the options and get interested in the MLM (multilevel marketing) model. It sounds good in theory and you know that Robert Kiyosaki recommends the MLM model for building a second income. Now what? How do you decide who has the best business for you?

Maybe you have been contacted about network marketing or MLM businesses in the past. Sometimes it will be your friends that want you to hear about a business they have started. Other times it will be a casual acquaintance. Maybe you turn them down or just get too busy to attend one of their meetings. Maybe you don’t want to get railroaded into something you aren’t sure about. These are awkward situations but they don’t need to be. These invitations are nothing more than interviews to find out if you are right for their business. More important, they are where you can learn if the business they are offering is good for you.

There are many MLM business opportunities with very different business models, products and success rates. It is important when you consider using an MLM business that you ask some important questions before you get started. Not every business opportunity is designed for success and a bad decision will often mean discouragement about MLM’s in general and failure in reaching your goals. In the past, it has largely been luck determining MLM business success. When you join the right business with the right people, you have the environment for success. Without that, your chances are small.

Until now, there hasn’t been any information to help you make a good decision. Robert Kiyosaki’s new book(The Business of the 21st Century) changes that. He provides four questions for you to ask before you get started with an MLM business.

Who is running the ship?

Find out about the key people running he business. What kind of people are they? Do they share your views and philosophy? What is their experience and what do they say is their goal in life?

Does the company offer a proven plan of action?

Does the company have a proven program for success? Is it simple and easy to follow? There should be no ambiguity about what to do and how to do it and it should be the same for the big income guys as the newbies.

Does the company embrace both business skills and personal development in their training program?

Is there an education program to help you grow as a business person and as a leader? It should be more than what to do, it should help you understand leadership and relationships on many levels- personal as well as business.

Does the company have a strong, high-quality and highly marketable product line that you can get passionate about?

This is actually the least important of the four questions because products don’t move people- people move products. Still you should ask some questions. There should be a growing and active market for the product line and it should be a replenishment product rather than something you buy once. It is hard to build a sustainable business with products that last a long time. If the product is something you can’t, or won’t use then you should probably find another business.

When you are invited to hear about a business idea, consider it a complement and take the opportunity to see how it measures up using Robert Kiyosaki’s questions. Don’t feel pressured and above all don’t feel embarrassed about asking questions. If you have been invited by the right people they will appreciate your questions and have good answers and supporting information. If you don’t get good answers, you have a perfect reason to decline the offer and move on.

Robert Kiyosaki is famous for teaching people new ways to think about making money. His first book Rich Dad, Poor Dad tells about the important influences in his life growing up, learning about making money and building his own business empire. His second book- Cash Flow Quadrant provides more detail about the four ways of making money. Most people never knew about the B quadrant until they read this book. They learned about building a business system that can be duplicated to generate as much income as you want automatically after the initial work.

Kiyosaki built his business empire with real estate but B Quadrant businesses can take many forms. He has never recommended a specific business model in the many books produced for his education series – until now. In his latest book, The Business of the 21st Century, he makes a recommendation for people who want to build a B Quadrant business. Particularly people who may not have the funds to invest in a franchise or the knowledge t create their own business system. Robert Kiyosaki says that today everyone needs to have a business of their own and the best way for the average person to be successful with their own business is through network marketing.

Kiyosaki is a master teacher. His books are easy to read and full of fresh insight. What he has to say is vital to anyone wanting to get free from an E or S Quadrant income (that is employees and self employed businesses for anyone not familiar with the Cash Flow Quadrant). If you are reading Job Optional Blog then this means you. He has never endorsed or recommended a business vehicle before his latest book.

If you have discounted network marketing in the past whether from your own experience, someone else s experience or general ‘bad vibes’ picked up here and there, stop right now and reconsider network marketing. Reject the stereotypes and the jokes and take a fresh look but don’t do it because I say so. Pick up a copy of The Business of the 21st Century and see what Robert Kiyosaki has to say about network marketing and becoming an entrepreneur. Learn about the 8 wealth building asserts that generate income that come with a network marketing business and let Robert’s wife Kim explain why women excel at network marketing.

Finally Robert explains that selecting the right network marketing business is critical to success. Like Indiana Jones, it is important to choose wisely which is why there are so many negative stories about network marketing. The book provides help in evaluating businesses. Job Optional Blog will provide more help and consultation to help you choose wisely but start with the facts. Read the three Kiyosaki books referenced in this post to give you the information you need to decide your future. If you like what you learn about network marketing then lets talk more about it.

Is your retirement fully funded?

Most people have some kind of retirement plan, There are still some company plans left but most plans now involve individual decisions to set aside income to fund retirement. Not everybody will work out a formal plan with real numbers and commitment and even fewer will stick with the plan and retire with adequate funds for everything they desire in their retirement. There is tension between planning for the future and current spending and sometimes the retirement plan loses out.

Or is it smaller than you would like?

Most people enter retirement with a smaller pot of retirement funding than they would like. They begin to look at ways to supplement their retirement income. One of the obvious paths to more income is taking a job. It is easy to rationalize a retirement job. It is often part time rather than full time so you still have more time to enjoy. Since you are still used to working and having your schedule controlled by someone else, it doesn’t seem onerous when you continue working. You can even rationalize that it gets you out of the house and connecting with other people on a regular basis. You generally aren’t lonely when you are working. It is easy to rationalize a part time job and a good way to add income to your retirement while retaining more control of your time.

Jobs don’t solve the problem.

There are problems with this solution, however. It is temporary and conditional on retaining your health. Since employment trades time for money, when you stop providing the time, your employer stops providing the money. It doesn’t matter the reason. Maybe you want to travel or worse, maybe your health declines. The money stops. Second, you generally aren’t making the kind of money you made during your career. Whether you spend it or save it. It is unlikely to make a big difference in your lifestyle over the long run. Remember that people are living longer than they used to. The bottom line is that a job in retirement is not a long term solution to not having a big enough retirement fund. It is an easy, short term boost that doesn’t make your future any more secure.

The solution is residual income – money that doesn’t stop.

The best way to boost your retirement lifestyle is to invest the time you would be willing to commit to a part time job in developing a residual income stream. Residual income is money that comes from a business system you set up over a short period of time but which continues to flow forever without further effort. Most people understand income from the employment model where you exchange time for money. They don’t understand the business mentality of a system that generates income. This is they way franchises operate with McDonald’s as a perfect example. The McDonald’s system which governs every location works beautifully to generate income for the owner who rarely visits his store. Unfortunately, it isn’t cheap to own a McDonald’s or the other good franchises.

Is their a residual income generating business for people without big money?

The typical retiree doesn’t have the resources to buy into a franchise. Is there another way to generate residual income if you don’t have upfront money to invest. The answer is emphatically yes. There are two proven methods to develop residual income from a modest investment of cash and a short term commitment of time- network marketing and affiliate marketing. The reputations of both have been compromised by poor marketing and support systems but don’t be distracted. There are excellent opportunities to earn substantial residual incomes available if you pick the right business systems. Telling the good systems from the bad and recognizing good leadership is difficult but there is help available so you can know the good ones before you commit.  your first obstacle is to be open to these exciting business opportunities.  Getting past the misinformation and recognize the value of these businesses is the first step.  Start by reading what Robert Kiyosaki says about network marketing  in his latest book.  Most people never consider these exceptional ways to develop residual income so take the first step and open your thinking. Then come back for more information.