Do you often feel like your expenses are too high and you need to reduce it? In today’s blog, I’ll tell you how I look at income and expenses and I’ll be sharing my secret with you.
Have you ever found yourself asking this question, “My expenses are too high! Do I have to reduce it…?” Well I have!
Now let me ask you another question. Six months into asking yourself the first question, did you find yourself asking the same question all over again? Like, “Oh! We need to reduce our expenses again!” I have and I found out that every time I felt like I needed to reduce my expenses, the expenses just kept increasing and once again I would find myself stuck in the same question over and over again.
So that got me thinking like, “Am I really asking the right question?” That’s when I asked myself another question from a different point of view. Having a look at the laws of economics, the value of $10 today with inflation in a few years, will be more than $10 for sure! Expenses are naturally going to increase as the value of money depreciates.
That’s when I reconsidered my question and replaced the previous one with this one , “Where do I see myself in five years from now or 10 years from now?” and my answers to these were, “I want to buy a better house, a better car, to send my kids to a better school, also to buy some good stuff for myself my wife” and yes, all of these will cost more money!
That’s when I realised… ‘If I’m focusing on reducing my expenses, how will I get myself to pay for these big expenses?’ You see, it was very counterintuitive for me and that’s when I was caught up at this big moment of realisation!
I realised that I have asked myself the wrong question ever since. I kept asking ‘How could I reduce my expenses?’ but the right question I should have been asking myself was ‘How could I increase my income?’
So, let me give you another perspective. Let’s say I keep reducing my expenses and there comes a time where I hit rock bottom on my expenses, where I can’t reduce it anymore. What am I going to do then?
It’s going to affect my standard of living for sure, it’s going to affect everything. ‘Do I really want that?’ is what i started asking myself! That’s when I realised that it’s not about the ‘expenses’ rather it’s about the ‘income’. I didn’t have an expense problem; I had an income problem and I needed to increase my income.
So, let me give you another way of seeing it which is “Income v/s Expenses” Let me ask you now, when you hear just the word ‘expense’, does it give you a positive or a negative feeling? And what about the word income? How is it really when you hear this word?
So personally, when I used to hear the word ‘expense’, it was not a great feeling but when I heard the word ‘income’, I liked it! That’s when I changed my perspective to focus my energy not on the expenses but the income because it brought positivity and I focused on bringing in more money to the point where my expenses did not matter and that’s what I’m actually doing on a day-to-day basis now.
So, what I’m not saying here by the way is, to live above your needs, also I’m not saying here to ignore your expenses. What I’m saying here is, when you are faced with ‘income versus expenses’, would you like to focus your energy on the expenses, or would you like to focus your energy on increasing your income in a way where expenses don’t really matter?
Let me give you an example. Let’s say I got this pen here and it’s a $100 pen that I use every day. When you look at it, a $100 pen would look expensive but if you can make an income that covers that expense does that expense really matter? That’s how I look at it.
I’m not asking you to spend more than what you can afford. What I’m saying is, this is how I look at things. When I’m faced with an expense, I look at my income and say, “What is it that I can do to increase my income to afford that expense?”
Let me give you another instance. When I started doing property development, I looked at a piece of land which was worth a million dollars and yes, that’s a lot of money and people will feel it’s expensive. I used to feel that too. But not anymore!
I now say, Yes! It’s a lot of money but what if I could generate $3 million of revenue from that piece of land and generate more income out of it? Is a million dollars expensive anymore? No! Right? So, that’s how I started looking at things and that’s how I began my investments and property development journey!
CONCLUSION
So for me, yes there are expenses but I’m not reducing my expenses. I’m doing activities that increase my income instead. That’s my secret on how I look at ‘Income versus Expense’. So, this is how you can manage your income & expenses like the rich 1%
So the next time you’re faced with this question of ‘income versus expense’ just ask yourself if you would like to reduce your expenses or would you rather increase your income and live a better life? The choice is yours.
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About the author
Dev Sethi is the Founder & CEO of ‘Wealth On Command’. Dev is a Global Sales Award Winner and “Closer of the Year 2019” in High Ticket Sales across 150 countries. He is the 1st person across Australia, Asia, Africa, Europe and South America to ever win this award.
He empowers business owners and entrepreneurs to monetize their skills and maximize their sales by assisting them in building a high performance sales team. In the last 12 months alone his business has grown by over 560% and his clients have made over USD 5.2 Million in Sales. Dev is a Sales Champion and is now creating more Champions.
He speaks 4 languages fluently and is a loving father and a caring husband; born in Thailand, grew up in India and now living in Sydney, Australia.
