How to Actually Make Money Investing

Is it possible to secure more than just a stable return on your investments?

Join me as we dissect the strategies that deliver real, tangible results in the world of investing.

Today, we're getting real about investing - not just the glam you hear, but the genuine path to filling up your bank account. I dive deep into where your money can actually work for you, covering everything from the safety net of high-yield savings to the exciting world of private equity. 

We're talking real estate goldmines, stock market strategies, and even the digital cash cow of content creation – yes, you can invest in your words! 

For those looking to demystify the complexities of investments and sharpen their financial acumen, this episode can't be missed.

IN TODAY’S EPISODE, I DISCUSS: 

• Ten ways to make money through investing
• Pros and cons of investing in individual stocks versus index funds and ETFs
• The complexities of property management and potential high risks involved

RECOMMENDED EPISODES FOR YOU 
If you liked this episode, you'll love these ones:

• My Money Planning Process to Achieve Your Goals
• Are You Really Living a Rich Life or a Bankrupt One?
• Annuities...Investment, Insurance or Scam
• Q&A Why Taking a 401K Loan Can Destroy Your Wealth

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Take this free quiz to see where you are on the path to financial freedom and what your next steps are to move you to a new financial destiny at http://www.YourFinancialFreedomQuiz.com  

OTHER RESOURCES:
7-Day Money Plan Workshop: https://www.TheMoneyPlanWorkshop.com
Affluent Entrepreneurs Private Facebook Group https://www.melabraham.com/group/

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Transcript

1:56

Ten ways to make money through investing. I get calls all the time where people will sit back and say, do you really make money investing? Is it possible? Isn't it risky? What are the ways to make money through investing? So the answer is, yes, you make money through investing. And there's more than ten ways, but I'm going to give you the ten top ways that you can do it. We're going to talk about how easy they are, the effort you need, the risks involved so you are really clear, and then you can figure out what fits for you. Welcome to this episode of the Affluent Entrepreneur Show. Let's get it on. Let's do this thing. This is the Affluent Entrepreneur Show for entrepreneurs that want to operate at a high level and achieve financial liberation. I'm your host, Mel Abraham, and I'll be sharing with you what it takes to create success beyond wealth so you can have a richer, more fulfilling lifestyle. In this show, you'll learn how business and money intersect so you can scale your business, scale your money, and scale your life while creating a deeper impact and living with complete freedom, because that's what it really means to be an athlete. Entrepreneur. All right, welcome to this episode of the Afternoon Entrepreneur show. We're going to talk about something that I think a lot of people don't have a good grasp of, not because they can't. It's just because no one really kind of put it together in a way that you can follow it. So in this episode, I'm going to break down the ten most common ways and common kinds of investments that you can use to make money, to build wealth, to build your money machine. I mean, the ultimate objective is to. Build a money machine so your money will work harder for you than you did for it. And so I want to talk about the different things that come into play. And I'm going to jump to my iPad so you get a chance to see it. And let's break it down. All right, so let's go to this first. I think it's really important to understand the different categories of income. How do you make money through investing? And the first thing to realize is. That there's this thing that will happen. They'll pay you dividends. You have cash flow investing, which means that I'm going to invest in something that they're going to pay me on a regular basis. This is almost like a loan. You make a loan to someone and they pay you interest, just like you. You borrow money on your house or whatever it is, hopefully not on a credit card. And you're paying someone interest. That's a cash flow investment. That's something that will generate cash flow. And there's a couple of different types of cash flows that you can get. Okay. You can generate interest typically from loaning money to someone. You can generate dividends. Dividends are typically a result of owning. An interest in a company, and that. Company will take a portion of their. Profits and give it to their shareholders. And it's a way to allow the shareholders to get a piece of the. Action, a piece of their. Thank you for listening to the affluent entrepreneurship with me, your host, Mel Abraham. If you want to achieve financial liberation to create an affluent lifestyle, join me in the affluent entrepreneur Facebook group now by going to forward Slash Group, and I'll see you there. And those rents will come to you as cash flows. In fact, one of the biggest tax strategies and structure strategies for entrepreneurs is to buy the building that their facility, that their business runs in and rent the building back to their company. So the company is operating, the company is generating profits, and the company's paying rent. And that rent, though, is coming to the owner of the company also. So they're getting a share of the profits, but they're also getting rents from the building. Now, here's the thing. The company, in all likelihood, if they're renting a property, they would have to rent somewhere. So why not own it and rent from yourself? So you're paying from right pocket to left pocket. It's a write off in the company. It's income to you. But here's the beautiful thing. When maybe down the line, you decide that you want to sell the company, you can sell the company and keep the building, and the new owner will pay you rent, and you still have the cash flow stream. Now, you could sell the building with it, but rents are when you take a tangible property, real property, personal property, and someone is renting it from you. Okay, then from there, there's royalties. And I'm going to talk about different ways and different investments that allow for this. But royalties, royalties typically are tied to intellectual property, intangible property, if you will. It's going to be things like, I can license my content to someone and they'll pay me a royalty fee. You can actually license your content, your intellectual property to your own company and get paid a royalties. So royalties will come from that. Royalties. We see royalties getting paid on entertainment rights, intellectual properties, my book, my new book coming out, building your money machine, there's going to be royalties paid on it. So what happens is that I create the book. We put the book out there, we promote the book. The book sells, the publisher gets their money, the retailer gets their money, and I get pediatric royalty for every unit that's sold. So those are the different kinds of cash flow streams. We'll talk a little bit more about the kinds of investments associated with it. That broad category is a cash flow investment. So we can make money from our investments from the cash that they send to us. The second way we can make money from our investments is from what we call appreciation. The value of the investment goes up. I buy a stock. I buy a stock at $100, it goes to$120. That 20. $20 is value growth. So we have the opportunity to make money through appreciation. I buy a piece of real estate for $100,000, it goes up to$110,000. That's appreciation. You have the opportunity to generate income from your investments through cash flow, through appreciation. And this is an ancillary one, but I think it's important for us to. Start to think about through some sort of tax benefits. Okay, now, let me really be clear here. If it takes the tax benefit to make the investment a good investment, it's. Not a good investment. In my opinion. The investment needs to stand on the economics of the investment alone and not the tax benefits. And the reason for that is the tax benefits can go away. Congress can change the tax laws. They can reverse. I remember when I first started doing a lot of this stuff, and I came into a firm where I became a partner, and there was a whole group of clients that got into oil and gas investments back in the. We're dating ourselves here. But the IRS attacked those investments and said, and declared them, and successfully attacked them to the point that the tax benefits from depletion, depreciation, all that stuff, were reversed. So these people made an investment to get royalties from the oil and gas deal. But their big play was that in the first year, they got this huge write off for depletion. Now, I'm not going to get into the tax code around it. So they get this big write off, they take it on their tax returns, they get these big refunds, and then years later, the IRS comes in and says, nope, those weren't legal. And they reversed the whole thing. And guess what? They had to pay all the refunds back, plus interest, plus penalties. And so the tax benefits went away. So it is something to consider, but only if the investment makes sense itself. So what are the investments? So I'm going to take you through the ten types of investments. The ten ways you can make money with investments by walking through each investment class, if you will. And hopefully this will give you a. Good synopsis and summary of what's out. There for you, what you can do. But the first thing to understand is this. When you look at an investment, you have cash flow, you have appreciation, you have tax benefits. That's what we typically call the combination of all of those is what we. Typically call your total returns, because some. Investments will give you cash flow and appreciation. Real estate does that. In fact, real estate does all three of them. You get tax benefits from depreciation. You got appreciation, you have equity buildup, and you have cash flow. So you have that. Some stock investments, they'll do appreciation and cash flow. You probably won't get a lot of tax benefits, although there are certain investments that can always get you capital gains treatment and things like that. This is what we would call your total returns. Your total returns. Beyond that, now is to start to look at what are the types of investments that you can get involved with, because there's different types of investments. And so we're going to take a look at the different investments one at a time. And the first one, which you hear a lot about right now, is what we call a high yield savings account. They've existed for a while. They just weren't that powerful. They weren't that useful because interest rates were down. One of the benefits of higher interest rates is that you get higher interest on your money in these types of accounts. The challenge is you're also paying higher interest if you're borrowing money. So it's a catch 22. So the idea is we don't want to borrow money. We want to put money in, get investment out. So what are these things and how do they work? A high yield savings account is typically a bank account that offers a higher interest rate than typical savings accounts. Most of these, not all of them, but most of these, the higher ones are online banks because they don't have the infrastructure, overhead structure and all of that stuff. Now, let me be clear what I tell all my clients. If you're going into a high yield savings account, it must be 100% liquid. It must be 100% insured, and it. Must be 100% fee free. They're not charging you for any money. Now, in order to get into these accounts, it's really easy. It's the easiest. Here you're basically making a deposit. That's it. I've got high yield savings accounts linked to my other accounts. All I need to do is transfer money in and out. It's as easy to get in there. Risk. As long as it is insured. As long as it's insured, it's probably one of the lowest risk investments you got. You're not exposed to the stock market. If the stock market goes down, this. Is going to stay where it's at. The only risk you have. Well, assuming it's insured, the biggest risk you have is if interest rates drop or when interest rates drop, then the rate on this account will drop too. Because it is not fixed, it's variable. Okay. Effort to get into it is pretty doggone easy. Okay. This is really easy to open, easy to maintain, minimal risk. It's just one of those things that allows you to get it. Now you are getting typically a lower. Return than you would if you invest in the stock market, but you are taking on a tremendously lower amount of risk. So there's a trade off always risk versus return. This is the type of account that. I'm going to put money in that. I know that I need in a short period of time, five years or less, that I want to make sure doesn't go away. I don't want to put it in a situation where if the market drops 20%, I got 20% less money. The market can drop 20%, but the money here will stay where it's at. And this is where we put our peace of mind fund, our safety fund, our sinking fund. Say, I want to put a down payment on a house, I want to put a remodel on a house. I've got a wedding to pay for. This is the money that I want assured, guaranteed, there safe place. It's where I put my tax money to pay taxes because I need the tax money. When I need the tax money, I don't want to play the game in the stock market. And so this is the first way to make money is high yield savings accounts. The second is cds. Now this is the thing that most people have been used to is using cds and certificates of deposit is what cds stand for. And just really working from that, it really is a savings certificate. And what you're doing with a CD. Is you're trading liquidity, your ability to. Sell it, your ability to get to the cash for a higher rate of. Return and a guaranteed rate of return. So remember. High yield savings accounts, they. Will go up and down based on what's going on with the interest rates. If I lock in a CD at say 6%, 5% and interest rates drop, I'm locked in at that higher interest rate until the CD matures. So you get a fixed rate and a specific maturity, but that means that. You can't get out of it. You can't get out of it without penalty. You can't get out of it, but you're going to pay back a portion of the interest. It's easy to do. It's relatively low risk because it's in an insured institution. Also, as long as it's under the insured limits, the effort is low. And you know that you're going to get a fixed term, a fixed interest rate on a savings. It's going to typically be lower than it would be if you were in equities or in the stock market or anything. But if you're looking for money and you want a guaranteed return on that is not at risk, this might be the way to go. Okay. The next step up from cds would be what we call money market funds. Very similar. Very similar. This is an investment that invests in short term debt securities. So what happens is you're going into a fund that invests in other securities that are paying interest, which will pay to you. In doing it again, it's easy to get in again. It's in a financial institution, typically insured, but you can get into these things also via brokerage accounts and that kind of thing. Money market funds are in brokerage accounts, too. There's relatively low risk. It's very low. As far as effort goes, it doesn't take a lot to get in. It doesn't take a lot of analysis or anything, and it's relatively safe. Okay. There is easy withdrawal, but the returns are lower. And some of them will limit the number of withdrawals that you can make in a month period. Okay, this is the next level up, and you'll see that I'm slowly building to more and more risky assets or assets that take more effort. So I'm starting with the easy stuff first, the safer stuff first, and then we'll move to the rest of them. So the next step up again is still on the safer side, still on the easier side to do that, and that is bonds or bond funds. You can invest in individual bonds. And what a bond is, is that if a company needs money or a municipality needs money, a city, a county, what they can do is they can go to the shareholders, they can go to the market, they can go to. You and I and say, hey, we. Will put a bond out there, we'll borrow from you, and we will pay you interest. Now, typically, government bonds are some of. The lowest risk bonds. But look, it's been known that some municipalities, some cities, they end up bankrupt. Don't get me going on California, all right? I mean, Lord knows what they're doing over. So it's not riskless. There's still some risk. You got to be mindful of that. And that's for municipalities. But companies can do the same because. Companies will finance their business one of a couple of ways. They can get money from the public market by issuing stock. In other words, they sell shares of ownership in the company. And those that buy the shares of ownership in the company are giving money to the company to operate. That's why companies go public and do that. They can borrow money from a bank and do it that way. Or they can do a corporate bond that's borrowing money from the public. And these corporate bonds get rated AA B, that type of thing as far as riskiness. But that's what we're really looking at. And so a bond is a loan. To a company or a government that. Pays back with a certain maturity and pays back interest. There's some hoops to go through depending on what it is. So it's not as easy as some of the other things. So I'd call it moderate. The risk can be moderate. Or if you get to rated paper, that's not good. Like risky corporate bonds, they can be actually high risk. So you got to be mindful of that. The effort is low. And the fact is that it's safer than stocks. Because they have priority over the stocks in the sense of the income is going to go to pay the interest before it's going to pay dividends or pay the stockholders back in that way. Now there are ways to invest in a specific bond. Like they want to do a redevelopment. Of a county water system, that bond. Or there's ways to invest in a fund that invests in bunch of bonds. So you get diversification. And those are the kinds of ways to do that. So you can go and make interest on investments through bonds. The next step up. The next step up is what we call dividend index funds, or etfs. Okay, so now we're investing in the stock market. What you're doing here is you're investing in a bucket. A basket of companies that are on the stock market that actually pay dividends. So there are etfs and index funds out there. Etfs and index funds out there that invest in companies that pay dividends. They collect the dividends from the companies and you get paid the dividends. So you would be investing in a diversified portfolio, a basket of a bunch of stocks that pay dividends, and you would be getting a cash flow stream from that. Now, you also will participate. If the companies go up in value, the stock price goes up in value. Now, historically, if they're paying dividends, they don't appreciate as fast as the ones that are reinvesting into their own company as they do that. So it's moderate to get in. You've got to do it through a brokerage house, a vanguard or a schwab or a fidelity or something like that. They can be moderate risk. They can be more risky depending on the type of fund you're in. The effort, I'm going to say, is moderate. And the reality is that it spreads. The risk over a bunch of companies. So you have that reduction of risk. Through diversification, unlike this next way of. Making money, because the next way to making money is actually dividends also, but dividends where you invest in a specific company. So you're going to invest in at t, okay. I don't know if they pay dividends. I don't do a lot of dividend investing per se. So instead of investing in the previous. Category, you're investing in a basket here. You're investing in a single company. Risk goes up. Single company, okay. They pay a portion of their earnings out in dividends. So you will see that certain companies will declare a dividend, typically paid on a quarterly basis, and they will pay it regularly. And if you're going to do dividend investing, it's a different kind of investing. We can talk about it another episode. You want to see the pattern of investing or distributions and dividend payouts. You want to see the dividend yields. You want to see what it is as a percentage of earnings. What have they done? Historically, there are companies that have paid dividends every single year for decades, decades. And their dividends have gone up for decades. And there's people that invest it knowing that they're going to get the cash flow. It's moderate ease. Again, you've got to analyze the companies you've got to go through and decide which ones are the right ones. There's moderate risk, although you're at risk because you're in the stock market, you're. In a company that could go under. If you're in good companies. Typically they won't, but they can go up and down plenty. All right. Effort is moderate. And the fact is that there's higher. Risk than bonds because you're in company. Stocks and there's higher risk than a dividend fund because you're in a single company. And so it's important to understand that now. So this is again, a cash flow play. This is what's happening is you're getting paid the cash flow. Here's the key. If you're going to do any kind of cash flow, the question is, what. Are you doing with that cash flow? If you truly want to build the money machine at the beginning, you want all of the dividends, all of the cash flow, all of the rents used to reinvest into other investments, to continue to build the money machine so it gets large enough to allow the money to create more money for you. Too often what I see is that. The money machine, the amount of assets they have, has not hit the critical mass yet. They're getting the dividends, they're getting the cash flow, and they go spend it for lifestyle. But it never then grows because they're not reinvesting, they're not growing the machine, and it never grows to a size large enough to make sure that you. Have the ability to live financially free. Now from dividend stocks, the next level that you can look at, or the next type of investment that you can. Look at is real estate, but a. Certain kind of real estate here, we'll look at it a little differently, is that is what are called real estate investment trusts. Think about this. This is like a mutual fund or an index fund or an ETF, but instead of owning shares of companies stock in companies, they own property. So you end up in a fund that owns 100 buildings, that are collecting rents, and they're buying and selling the buildings in appreciation and that gets distributed. Many reits will continue for a period of time. A lot of reits are limited time frame. They're going to be in existence for seven years, five years, and they use some sort of exit or liquidation event. Others will continue for a while. And what they're doing is they're paying a dividend to you based upon their net profitability that comes out. You look at the idea of a REIT and it's companies that are buying income generating real estate for the most part, although I've seen reits where they buy mortgage securities, so they're taking the interest. I see where they buy hospitals or they buy land, or they buy opportunity funds. There's different types of reits, and you have to look at them and they all have different levels of risk. It's moderate. Again, to get into. The risks can be moderate, I think too high. The diversification reduces that for you. The effort is if it's a publicly. Traded REIT, you have the information built. There's a lot of privately syndicated but not publicly traded reits where there's some minimums to get in. You got to be a sophisticated investor, and you got to do a little. More due diligence because they don't have all that publicly available data for you. And then, like I said, they own. Properties, they operate properties, they collect rents, they maintain the properties, they'll buy and sell properties as needed. They'll refinance properties, and they can then pay the net out to you as a dividend. It's easier than a direct investment. I do a lot of these because I don't want to be a landlord. I don't want to

call at 11: 29:32

00 at night with someone saying, hey, the

toilet's clogged. Well, go get a plunger. Don't call me at 11: 29:36

00 at night. So I'll invest in certain types of real estate investment trusts. And yeah, I'm giving up some profitability, but I'm getting some sanity and peace of mind back that fits my lifestyle. Now there are some friends of mine and clients of mine that absolutely love real estate. They don't care about doing those kinds of things. That's fine. It fits your lifestyle. Great. I just don't want to be a landlord owning a bunch of doors that I have to manage or I have to get a management company, and I have to deal with tenancy and foreclosures and evictions and all that stuff. So I give it to someone else to do all right, so you've got real estate investment trusts is one avenue to make money. The next is this. And this is kind of a cool. One, is peer to peer lending. Now you got to be careful here, but literally what you're doing is loaning someone money. Now, I want to be straight here. I'm not talking about loan and family money. If you want to change your family dynamics and your family relationship, loan someone. Money, see what happens. I get it. Some people do it. I typically don't because I don't want to change the dynamics of relationship. I had a question recently on a. Live that I was doing, and they. Said I was thinking of getting some. Money from someone in order to pay. For this instead of doing a payment plan with a higher interest rate. And I said, here's the challenge. When you are related to the person. You'Re loaning money to, if you go. About living your life, even if you're current on the amount you owe them, say you borrow$5,000, you're making the payments as agreed, so there is no issue. And you decide while you still owe them$5,000 that you're going to go on a vacation. And you go to Europe on a vacation. There is a possibility that they look at it and go, wait a second, you owe me $5,000. You could have paid me instead of going on vacation. When you do a loan with an unrelated party, when you do a loan with an unrelated party like that, you're. Not going to get that. So just a caution about doing peer to peer lending with someone that you're related to. It can be done. It can be done. Just know that it can impact some things. Ease. It'S moderate. You got to be mindful of it. You got to assess the risks. You got to be able to assess the credit risk and all that stuff. I've done peer to peer lending a lot of times. Most of the time it's peer to peer lending secured by real estate. So I have security, I have collateral to do it. There can be some risk, moderate to high. You can end up like, in one. Case, the person defaulted. We ended up having to take back the property and manage the property and then liquidate the property, get the money out. So there's some risk involved and there can be more effort involved with doing that. Now, there's a thing that's coming out that I'm an investor in, and this is not to sell the investment at all. But we are in the process of changing the dynamics of peer to peer. Lending to create an environment that's safe. For the investor and safe for the borrower to create an environment that is accessible without all kinds of fees and confusion. It's an app that we're creating, and we're going to be launching it later this year. So watch for it. It's coming out. It's called Frello. It's been written up. It's a friendlier way to lend. All right, but this is not where I would start. Remember, your job is to get critical mass in your portfolio that is secure and safer before you start taking on riskier plays like this. But it is one of the types of investments that you can get into. Now, I did talk about real estate investment trusts. Let's bring back the idea of real. Estate as an investment. Okay? Now, instead of a trust with bunches of properties, I'm talking in the construct of a single property, one piece of property, an apartment building, a single family home, whatever it is, commercial building. This is now, you renting or buying. A property typically leveraged, you're going to take a loan against it, renting it out to tenants for income. It is high. No, it's not really easy. You're going to have to analyze it. You're going to have to deal with it. You're going to have to manage it. You're going to have to deal with tenants. You're going to have to deal with evictions, you're going to have to deal with vacancies. The risk on it can be high. And it's a long term investment. You don't buy rental properties and think you're going to flip it in a year or two years. It's a long term investment because, one, there's a lot of friction costs to get in, sales costs, commissions, remodel costs, deferred maintenance costs. There's a lot to get into it. So in order to recover from that. You need to have the time for. The rents to come in to be. Able to do that. Effort can be high now, yes, you. Can get a management company, but then. You'Re paying and it's eating into your profits. So the efforts can be high, especially if you have a problem. I have some friends who bought a building and they wanted to put a new roof on, and when the person came in, they said the structure is not to code. And so before you put a roof on, you got to redo this structure. They had to cut into the roof. It cost them well into the six figures before they ever got to the roof. And so we got to be mindful of those kinds of things in rental properties. Why I am not a proponent when someone is starting out to create wealth to go into a rental property is. Because it is a single property and. You don't get the diversification right away. And because you don't get the diversification right away, there is a lot of concentrated risk and a lot of people will say, well, you can leverage it. That's the beautiful thing, because you can get into $100,000 property for$20,000. Right. But now you have an $80,000 loan, and imagine you have an $80,000 loan that you have to pay on and they have a problem with the roof and you got to go and restructure it and you got to kick your tenants out. Now you don't have any cash flow coming in. You've used your 20,000 to get into it. You've got an $80,000 loan. The bank isn't going to sit back and say, well, we'll wait till you get the roof done. No, they want their payment. Do you have the money to sustain it during the tough times? Do you have the money to be able to carry it when you have a vacancy, do you have the money to carry it and to fight a. Tenant that wants to get out, that. You can't get out, that you got to evict? That could take six months to two years, depending what state you're in. So my point is that I love real estate, but I love it. A certain time frame in your investing journey, and I'm not a fan of starting with it. I'm a fan of using it down the road when you have critical mass and a safety fund that allows you to sustain yourself if something goes awry. Or the market turns. But it is a way to build. Wealth, because remember, this is one of. The only investments that can give you. Cash flow, can give you appreciation, can. Give you equity build up, because the rent is going to pay down the loan for you, and can give you tax shield. This is one of the only investments that does all four. So it's a beautiful investment if done right. It's just something that you got to look at the risk. You cannot go in and say, real estate. Real estate never goes down. Oh, yeah. Talk to the folks in 2008. Okay. So we want to be mindful of it and say, hey, when do we use it in our portfolio? That has to do with the wealth priority ladder. Different conversation. All right. From this, we move to a different. Type of investment, and that is private equity. Private equity. This is where we start to invest in directly private companies. Now, I do this, but I only do it with a very small sliver of my portfolio. The rest of it is in index funds, etfs, and public companies. And then you look at it from an ease standpoint. It's not easy to get into. The risk is probably the highest. The effort is high because there's a lot of due diligence, there's a lot of risk. It is private. You don't get the information. You don't have the oversight from the SEC and the reporting requirements and all of that. It is illiquid. You can't get out when you get into it. You can't get out of it when. You get into it. You can't get out of it. And so you're stuck for a ride. I'm in a couple of investments that are private equity deals that my money won't come out. And it's one of those things that either it's going to go to the. Moon or it's going to go to the core of the earth. So I invest like that. Once I put the money in, I will make sure that I assume that I'm not getting it back, and whatever comes back is good. Now, when I get involved in a. Private equity type of deal, one of the questions I'll always ask is, can I impact this company in a positive way? Because I want to get into something, not as a passive investor. I want to get into something with the ability to influence it and allow it and help it make its success. So many of the companies that I invest in are companies that I use. Or that I support to make that Happen. Now, that's private equity. There's public equity also. That's the stock market, that's index funds, that's ets. You can invest in individual stocks, which I, again, don't recommend because of the lack of diversification it can cause you if you invest in. Well, let's just look at what's happened recently with TESLA. TESLA was at $260 a SHARE JUST a week ago. It's down at 215 now. If you invested only in Tesla, if your portfolio is only in Tesla, you just lost 20%. But if I invest in an ETF or an index fund that holds Tesla, it also holds 500 other companies, 1000 other companies, depending on what it is. So the decline in Tesla will impact the ETF, but not at the same level, because some of the companies in that ETF are going up, some are going down, some are doing nothing. That's typically where I start with folks, is saying, let's get into low cost etfs and index funds, get into the equity market. Let's keep the diversification. Whether you want it to be dividend paying or not, you build the portfolio, you get the critical mass going. Now, we can look at some of these other more risky investments in the sense of private equity deals and things like that. So these are the ones that I think that we can look at. There is one other thing that I want to put out there as a. Bonus to you on how you can. Make money, and it is not with. Your investments per se, but it is. With your knowledge, your expertise, your experience, the things that you do. And I'll explain why this is. It is around content creation. And the reason I want this as. A bonus is this, is that if. You do content creation, if you have an expertise, maybe it's in foreign language, maybe it's in diet, maybe it's in fitness, maybe it's in guitar playing needle. I don't care what it is, okay. It is one of the highest margin. Businesses you can create. Now, this is going to take a. Lot more effort to do, okay, because. You'Re creating and trying to monetize things digitally, like blogs, videos and podcasts. But it's not easy to do. It's not easy to do because you have to create it. You have to put it out there. You've got to market it. So there's a lot of effort involved to make that happen. Now, here's the interesting thing. It doesn't take a lot to make a lot with these. If you do it right, like I said, it is one of the highest margin businesses out there. You could literally do it with your. Phone, recording videos and putting it out on YouTube. You can get a Zoom account that's free. And so why this is important to consider is there's two elements, a few elements to it. One is it creates an additional income. Stream from your expertise. So if you happen to have a job that you're working, you're getting your w two, you're getting your salary, you're. Getting all of that stuff, and you. Can create some content on the side that you're making additional money from. It's going to give you a little. Bit more peace of mind because you're not dependent on one way of supporting yourself. The other thing that happens is that the job can be supporting your household and the content creation. The high margin content creation can be supporting the money machine and building the money machine. It doesn't take a lot to make a lot. $800 over 30 years invested every month can turn into$1.2 million. So if all I did was create content and I was able to make $200 a week from it, and I invested that, I literally could find myself in a situation that I have over a million dollars. And why I think this is a. Cool bonus thought is, like I said, it's high margin. You're sitting at a desk with a computer, you're using your phone to record. You're putting it on YouTube, or you're putting it somewhere else. You're creating a podcast. There isn't a lot of costs involved. You might have a subscription fee for the podcast or for Zoom or for something like Kajabi. But by and large, the margins on that business, when done right, are minimum 50% to as much as 80%. So if I need $800 and I'm. Running it lean, if I sell $1,000 worth of stuff at an 80% margin. There's my $800, goes into an investment. Account and continues to grow. I think it's a beautiful way to. Supplement and support and accelerate your journey to financial freedom. It can also be a wonderful way. To build a business if you do it right. That is really lucrative. Now, I'm not here to sell you on this. I'm simply sitting back saying there's different ways to make money. This is a bonus way that allows you to expand the size of your income. Shovel so you've got more coming at your wealth building. That's all. I hope you found this of value. I hope that you get a chance to go back through it kind of as a checklist and say, here's the different ways I can make money. I can create something that creates cash flow. I can get something that appreciates and grows. I can get something that does both. I can do something on the side with whatever I know, whatever my experience is, whatever my journey is that I. Can sell to bring money in. All of this is meant to create. A pathway to fund and build your money machine to give you the financial freedom you deserve. All right. I hope that this gives you a summary, gives you a way to look at the possibility of making money through investing. There's plenty more, but this was just. A foundation for you to consider. If you have any questions, if you have any comments or anything, do me a favor, hit me up. Let me know. I'm here for you. All right. We want to make this a breakthrough. Year for you financially, and I don't want you to do it siloed, isolated, or alone. I'm with you for the, for the journey. So, as I say, always, as we sign off, okay, until I see you. On another episode, another show, another video, or on the road, always, always try to live a life that outlives. Cheers. Thank you for listening to the Affluent Entrepreneur Show. With me, your host, Mel Abraham. If you want to achieve financial liberation to create an affluent lifestyle, join me in the affluent entrepreneur facebook group now by going to melabraham.com/group, and I'll see you there.