Take Action.

Nothing is achieved unless we take action at some point.

It doesn't mean that we have to climb Everest but we have to take action in our professional, personal, and financial life. Setting aside the 7.5 hour music teaching job, look at your 16.5 hour business. 

During those 7.5 hours, you are one of many people working for a school. The larger the school, the more people working in towards a common goal of educating kids. When you get home and look at your 16.5 hour business, you are working for yourself.

Maybe you are responsible for a family, a family that has needs and wants that you either share or are solely responsible for.

You have a payroll of one, yourself. You don't have a staff of 100 or 200 underneath you.

Yet.

Are you generating any income during those 16.5 hours? Teaching private lessons? Gigging? Ubber driver? Bartender?
Great! Put that money to work for you.

Wouldn't it be nice to have that workforce work for you? A workforce that gave you a little bit of everything they earned? Even better, the kind of workforce that pays themselves, that you could hire and then forget about sustaining their salaries for benefits?

Sure it would.

People aren’t the only entities that can work for you. Money can, too. And taking action to make money work for you doesn’t require a lot of extra work on your part. You can do it in a few hours and then sit back and watch them work.

What's the easiest way to get started?

A few suggestions:

Make a two specific low-level investments. I'm not talking about going out and buying individual stocks because most of us don't know how to do that. I certainly don’t – I’ve never bought an individual stock.

But what I am saying is start with the basics: you’re a teacher so open your 403(b) and your Roth IRA as soon as possible.

Have your pay check from your 7.5 hour job automatically deposited to your checking account. Then, make automatic deposits to both your 403(b) and Roth IRA accounts.

Imagine them as your front line managers.  You don't have to pay them that much but what you do pay them should be on an automatic predictable schedule. You will reap the rewards of hiring them down the line when you retire from your 7.5 hour job and turn your 16.5 hour business into retirement. Or at least, semi-retirement.

While you’re starting that 403(b) and Roth, why not start something like a Capital One 360 savings account where you can house liquid cash for emergencies or immediate or short-term goals.

Think of your 403(b) and Roth as your long term workforce. These are the folks you want around when you have your retirement party. The savings account is for short term. Hopefully most of them will be at the party, too. Your automatic contribution to all of them every pay day is like an invitation to that party.

Every dollar you put away will be like someone working for you. At first you might only have 50 people on the payroll. But 50 turns into fifty, one-hundred, and before you know it, you’re looking at four, five, six, and maybe even seven figures. And the great thing is this: as your funds grow, it's as if each dollar is inviting some friends to work for your 16.5 hour business and your workforce continues to grow.

The key is to start earlier than later.

Your automatic contribution for your 16.5 hour business workforce should be maxed out each month, especially concerning your 403(b) and Roth IRA. Pay yourself and your “employees” before you pay HBOMax, Apple Tunes, Amazon Music, Amazon Prime, and Netflix.

If that means you have to skip a happy hour because you are paying into your "workforce", so be it. You always said you wanted more time to practice, right?

Always pay yourself first and make it at least 10% of your 7.5 hour job take home pay and 100% of your 16.5 hour business (minus business expenses).

Yes. 100%.

Think of it this way.

You're the boss. While you're changing a diaper, practicing a Bach Cello Suite on electric bass, or reading the Sunday Times, you're 300, 400, 500, 1000 or so employees continue to work all through the night and they aren’t charging you time-and-a-half on weekends and holidays. They are doing the dance of compound interest and making you money.

The more you jettison unnecessary or monthly frills that don’t mean that much now and apply that found income to a financial plan that will be worth tens of thousands of dollars decades from now, the better of you will literally be.

Unfortunately, savings accounts just don't pay the way they used to so you're going to have to find additional avenues that will create a larger and more sustainable financial growth streams for you.

If all of this sounds daunting, it really isn’t.

Find a money manager who is a fiduciary. Go to Schwab, Vanguard, or even the bank where you have your checking account and talk to them about your short and long-term goals.

It is critical that you learn the financial lingo like “mutual funds”, “index funds”, “Roth IRA”, “expense ratio” ( a biggie), “treasury bonds”, “index funds”, “small caps”, “large caps”, among many others.  While they are just definitions like the music definitions you learned in school, understanding these concepts and putting them into action will either reap or cost you tens of thousands of dollars down the road.

Just as MIDI hadn’t been invented when I was in college and I had to learn about it on my own after I graduated, I had to do the same with habits of financial stability that would apply to my own personal situation. I had to be an autodidact and learn it on my own with the help of several experts.

You can do this.

Your 403(b) and Roth Ira should be considered “buy and keep”.  A savings account is for the year-to-year emergencies and contingencies. Capitol One 360 lets you set up little sub-accounts, name them, and allocate contributions for special occasions. For example, I have one marked “Christmas presents” because I know every year I am going to need a certain amount every holiday season so I start adding to it every month starting in January.

I also have sub-saving accounts titled “My Next Car”, “My Next Exorbitant Vacation”, “Logan’s Computer”, and “My Next Godin”.

Speaking of savings, I also opened four 529 college savings plans for four elementary age boys that I contribute to every month.

Once that money comes out automatically from your pay check and is deposited in your 403(b), Roth IRA and your savings account, the only thing you have to do is determine with your advisor’s help your asset allocation: what kinds of investment instrumets fit your profile and how aggressive or careful you want your 403(b) and Roth IRA portfolio to be. Depending on your aversion to risk, your advisors will pick the right blend of stocks and bonds to put in your portfolio and put them to work for you immediately.

It's a system designed so that you can hand over those responsibilities to a fiduciary money manager, discount brokerage account, or companies like Vanguard or Schwab.

While the market goes up and down in the short term, the long game is what you are playing. And the long game has been proven that it’s the best way to play the game.

The important thing is to take action, to start.

Any procrastination today is a mistake that will negatively compound itself each day forward. On the other hand, any actual today is a step in the right direction that will positively compound itself starting tomorrow well into your old age.

Get your 16.5 hour business off the ground.

Put something to work for you to make some money. No amount that is regularly saved is too small. But if you do start small, make periodic increases in your monthly contributions. Chances are you won’t even notice that you are contributing more each month.

If you get a yearly step increase, increase your monthly contributions.

Believe it or not, there will be a day when your 7.5 hour job will cease to exist. Living on the fruits of your 16.5 hour business requires action today.

It's never too late to start. There's always room for growth.

Don't rely just on what I am saying here. Get some advice from an expert. Talk to the CFO in your school district. They’ll have great info and point you in the right direction. They know much more about these things that I do.

When you approach a money manager or broker, always ask if they are a fiduciary. Do a little research on fiduciaries and you'll understand why.

And just in case you are one of those people who deep down harbors the fantasy belief that someone's going to leave you a ton of money, or that are you going to hit the lottery, or you're going to hit a jackpot insurance claim, that ain't going to happen.

Don’t wait for something to happen to you.

Become the true owner of your 16.5 hour business and start hiring (AKA investing and saving) today.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a senior music major graduating from college embarking on your first teaching gig, or a music teacher with five, ten, or twenty years under your piano bench.

Make things happen.
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Take action.