5 Assets Every Adult Should Own ASAP

Guys, most people will spend the next 30 years of their lives working and still never build real wealth. Why is this? It's because most people spend their entire lives consuming instead of owning. They finance everything or they owe everybody or they buy a bunch of liabilities and they never build enough productive assets or capital in their own financial lives. If you want to become financially stronger, say over the next decade or so, you need to own more and owe less. I want to break down the five most important assets that every adult should own ASAP. Let's start with the first one. The first asset or piece of capital that everybody needs to acquire is simply high income skills. Let me be real with you. If you make $60,000 a year, it's because you got $60,000 a year skills. I hate to be blunt and be flat out, but we got to be honest with this thing. If you want to make more, you have to get the skills, that's capital, that actually pay more. Now look, it don't get a whole lot more complicated than that. You making $40,000 a year and you want to make $200,000 a year, go out and get the higher paying skills that earn you $200,000 a year. Honestly, this is probably the most overlooked form of capital in America right now because your income, your ability to make income is what's going to fund every other asset that I name on this list. Your earning power is your greatest wealth building tool in the beginning to get started. One of the biggest mistakes that people make is people want to go out and try to invest heavily before they've even increased their ability to earn more money. The first thing you want to do is develop some higher paying skills as soon as possible. We know that as you get older, they get developed more and more, but in the beginning, you got to be striving for skills that don't pay you $40,000, but pay you $400,000. Listen, if you only make enough money right now to survive every month, it's going to become more and more difficult for you to build ownership over time in America. That's why high paying skills matter. The first thing that's going to open the door to more for you in your life is your skills. What are high income paying skills? What are they? These are specialized abilities that the job marketplace is going to pay big money for if you come to the table with them. Think about it like software development, sales, computer engineering. Can you excel at something like nowadays digital marketing? Do you have AI related skills? Are you good at data analytics? Are you good at financial management or the old school? Are you a doctor? Are you a lawyer? Are you an engineer? Do you have the skills that are going to pay you more money than you currently make right now? Do you have to go out and get those skills? Perhaps that's a good investment to go out and get the higher paying skills. Here's the kicker, right now, today, the beautiful thing is that the internet has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry to learning some of these valuable high paying skills. You no longer have to have the expensive degree from a big time university. You no longer have to end up in incredible massive student loan debt to get these higher paying skills. You can literally learn valuable high paying skills online, for real. There's a bunch of platforms out there, including YouTube and other certifications that you can get that have made learning high paying skills way more accessible to all of us. Now hear me carefully on this, okay? I'm not telling you to go out and learn 15 things at one time. That's where a lot of people mess up. Just pick a valuable skill and go deep, master it, spend two hours a day, three hours a day, every single day improving or getting better at it or learning it, right? Because you got to think of skills like capital, okay? Your skills are going to increase your ability to generate more income, which when you start generating more income, that's going to allow you to build ownership in everything else. Now, even with higher income paying skills, if you have no financial margin in your life, one emergency can wipe out years of progress financially, which actually brings me to the second asset that every adult should have. And that is cash, cash reserves. And really, I think this is one of the most underrated forms of financial strength for adults nowadays, because cash, let's be honest, has got a bad name recently, right? But here's the deal, cash creates breathing room. I don't care what your favorite YouTuber or podcaster has said about cash, right? Cash creates peace and stability in your financial life. And a lot of people today are financially stressed out because they have very little cash. They have no cushion left over at the end of the month. They have money coming in that's $4,000 a month, and they got bills going out the door that's $4,000 a month, and people don't have no cushion. They don't have no flexibility. Look, one car breakdown, two tires on your car breakdown, and you're in financial stress, or one medical bill, right? Or you go to the doctor for something, they say it's going to be $100 copay, and you panic because you ain't got $100 copay to pay it. Or you get laid off from a job, right? When that happens and everything falls apart financially because of the surprise or emergency, that tells you that you don't have enough cash. And that's dangerous, right? This is why I always say on this channel, financial stability starts before you get to aggressively investing your money. I want you to aggressively invest money, but I want you to have a safety net first. So cash reserves are almost like psychological armor. What are cash reserves? Let's be clear. I'm talking checking accounts, I'm talking high-yield savings accounts, I'm talking money market accounts, I'm talking short-term CDs, I'm talking physical green cash that you can get your hands on in a matter of six hours, right? This type of cash is an asset, it's capital, right? And it protects you from job loss, emergencies, income goes way down, economic uncertainty happening all around you, unexpected expenses, right? It covers all that without forcing you to have to go dig into your long-term investments or dig into your 401k or dig into the equity in your home, right? And this is important. The cushion of cash protects the compounding growth of all the stuff that you got in your long-term investment that you want to keep growing and not touch because you're less likely to touch all that stuff if you got cash. And hear me out. One reason a lot of people make emotional financial decisions is because they just don't have no cash reserves. And that means they have no breathing room and that creates panic. So here's what I recommend to everybody. Keep your reserves, your cash reserves separate from your regular checking account. You don't want it so accessible that you get to it and pull from it when it ain't an emergency. And then if you're trying to build it up, automatically transfer money from every time you get paid a paycheck into the cash reserves. So you got some safety net. And really guys, this is where your real financial peace begins to happen when you have this capital called cash. Look, when you got $20,000, $30,000 in your emergency fund stashed somewhere that you can get to, it changes you. I'm telling you, it makes you feel a little different. Now once you've built this stability of having this emergency cash, then you can begin to focus more heavily on ownership of assets, which brings us to investing. The third asset that every adult should own, in my opinion, is broad market index funds and ETFs. Now when I say broad market, I'm talking about a big slice of the market. Maybe it's the S&P 500, maybe it's QQQ, maybe it's the NASDAQ 100, but it's a big slice of the market, the stock market. Now let me simplify this, okay? These are the investments that allow you to own small pieces of typically hundreds of different companies all at one time in a bucket called an ETF or index fund, right? Instead of trying to gamble on individual stocks and picking the hot stocks and knowing when to pick the hot stock and when to sell the down stock, you don't have to do all that. Broad-based index funds and ETFs covers you. It's nothing wrong with single stocks, don't get me wrong, but with index funds and ETFs, you're participating in the long-term growth of the overall economy itself because you got 100, 200, 500, 1,000 different stocks in a bucket. And this is important psychologically for a lot of people. You got a shift from only working for money to owning productive capital in the stock market, which a lot of you do, right? But that's a major shift for some people. Historically, broad-market investing has rewarded patience, discipline, and the big one, consistency. More so than any type of emotional hype or trying to predict, right? And listen, too many people lose money because they constantly are reacting emotionally to what the headlines say about the stock market. One week you're hyped up and you're excited, and then the next week you're panicking. You're not sure. You don't have to do all that when you buy broad-based index funds and ETFs, right? But when you're getting hyped up all the time and you're emotionally involved, that's not investing. That's just emotional behavior. And you never want to be led by your emotions when you're dealing with money and assets, right? And this is why I say all the time, consistency matters more than trying to predict stuff. One reason I personally, me, I like broad-based index funds and ETFs is because they reduce the risk that comes with trying to constantly pick these individual winning stocks. That's hard. And so like 95% of my overall portfolio is broad-based index funds and ETFs because they're diverse, they're fairly simple, they totally remove emotion, and they're excellent for long-term compounding. Just saying, I want to own big chunks of the overall economy. And the beautiful thing about them is this, most average people can start really small. You can open up an account at Fidelity, Charles Schwab, Vanguard, Robinhood in a matter of five or six or eight minutes, and you can start plugging in five bucks a week. And over time, the compounding is going to start and it's going to start doing the heavy lifting for you. This is ownership of capital. If you're not participating in the stock market in broad-based index funds and ETFs, you're missing out. You want to literally own productive corporations across the economy, and that's how you do it. Now, broad-based index funds and ETFs are what we call paper assets. The next asset is ownership in physical assets. So the fourth asset that every adult should own, ASAP, is simply real estate. Real estate is what helps you build wealth for generations. Why? Because real estate's going to provide you with appreciation. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the value of a piece of real estate is going to rise over time. It's also going to provide you with rental income. If it's something you can rent out, it's going to provide you with inflation protection. Real estate, and here's one that people don't really think about when it comes to real estate. Real estate is a hedge against inflation. Why? Because when the price of everything goes up, so do the rents that you charge and collect. Whether it's good, bad, you don't like it, do you like it, doesn't matter. That's how it works. Also, with real estate, you get tax advantages, and you get long-term equity growth, right? I could go on and on about the beauty of owning real estate, because I've owned real estate, rental real estate, for the last 26 years. Bought my first piece of real estate in the year 2000, and from 2000 to 2005, I bought six pieces of rental property. Owned them all for at least 10 years, got rid of some, lost some, and still own two pieces of rental real estate today. Single-family homes. Now, when I say real estate, I want to preface this. I'm not only talking about single-family homes. I'm also talking about big apartment complexes is real estate. Duplexes, triplexes, land, REITs, there's all different forms of real estate that you can own. I want you to understand this. You don't need to immediately buy some big old massive rental portfolio. You could start slow. Start where you are. Start in the neighborhood you're in, or the neighborhoods that you're familiar with. Study the market carefully, pay attention to rental demand in the area, rental prices in the area, population growth, taxes, insurance. Think about local trends that are happening, what's coming to the area, what just left the area. Then use tools at your disposal, Redfin, Zillow, I could go on and on. There's all different types of software platform out there to rent properties out and to manage your own properties, or there's management companies. There's so much about real estate that's good. Of course, it comes with its risk as well, but for the most part, real estate strengthens your balance sheet over time. Think about this too. If you don't want direct ownership of a physical piece of property, don't forget the options like REITs and Fundrise and fractional ownership and syndications. There's a lot to real estate, but ownership matters, and real estate is one of the best things that you can own. But let me just share this one final asset class that gives people the highest level of ownership and control possible, and that's the fifth asset, is simply business ownership. Building and creating and producing a business for yourself. This is one of the most powerful forms of capital when you produce and create your own business because it gives you control. It gives you the ability to scale, right? Get bigger and bigger. It also gives you cash flow potential, and of course, there's a lot of tax advantages. There's leverage in ownership. Now listen, this doesn't mean that everybody needs to build a business. I'm not saying everybody has to go out and try to build some billion-dollar company. That's not the point. What I'm saying is everybody should strongly consider a well-organized and profitable side hustle that you can make money at because it adds to your streams of income. I don't care if it's consulting. I don't care if it's something online, selling digital products. I don't care if it's a service business, catering or whatever you do, fixing cars, because here's the deal. A lot of your most successful businesses that we see today, they started really, really small. One of the smartest ways to start is by using the high-income skills that we talked about earlier to solve real-world problems for people. Maybe not for a business or a job, but for yourself so you can have some freedom, right? Because when you start solving problems for people, you become more valuable to people and other people's lives. People are willing to pay you to do that, to bring value to their lives in whatever you may do. You don't have to start with a big old business plan and you don't have to raise $100,000 in crowdfunding and all that stuff you oftentimes see on the internet. You don't have to do any of that, right? Just start small. Try to be profitable. Try to gain customers. Try to be able to network and get to know people and get to know areas and markets where your services or what you provide are going to add value to people's lives. You don't have to go out and ... If you start a business, you don't have to go out and immediately overspend on office space, branding and marketing, inventory, unnecessary overhead expenses. Don't do all that. That's where a lot of people fail early when it comes to business. Build slow. Build intelligently. Build with profitability in mind. Look, if you want to formalize things, okay, sure, be my guest. Create an LLC, right? File taxes as an S-Corp or C-Corp. Learn some of the basics of building this particular business in whatever industry or sector or market that you're in and then understand and manage risk. But the key is to just start a business. That's capital. That's ownership. Business ownership gives you one of the highest levels of control over your income and over ultimately of your financial future. A business, think about it like this, a business can eventually become a sellable asset that creates long-term upside or it could be a piece of capital that you can ultimately sell on the market. Sell your business. Sell your brand. Listen, you don't need to build all five of these assets overnight. That's not what I'm saying here. But think about it like this. If you want to build real wealth, you need to become intentional about the notion of ownership, assets, capital. So you need to go out and get these five assets as soon as possible. Again, high income skills, cash, broad-based index funds and ETFs, real estate, and business ownership. Remember, ownership creates options. Capital creates flexibility. Assets create leverage. And they all create stability and long-term wealth for you and perhaps the people that come after you, right? Generational wealth. Look, if you want to become financially stronger, you have to own more and owe less. Let me know in the comments below which of these five assets that you already own and which ones are you working towards next. Let me know in the comments below. And if you want to help building your financial structure, your budgeting, your investing, your long-term plan, check out the first link in the description below for our four-step financial reset. As always, the best person who's going to take care of that old you is the young you. Until the next video, peace.