Mike's Musical Money Manifesto

For Minions, Malcontents & Millennials

By Mike Johnson

Let’s get right to it. If you’re an employee, you're a prisoner.

I’m here to show you how to escape while an acoustic guitar plays in the background.

(Sing to the tune of “The Sounds of Silence.”)

Hello slaveness, my old friend,
We’ll rip you off until the end.
Your tiny wage erased so easily,
Due to rules we wrote so weasely,
And the norms… that we planted in your brain,
Are insane…
Stay in your cage… of slaveness.

Admit it. Embrace the horror. If you trade time for money, you’re a wage slave. You’re a prisoner. Even if you love your work (I hope you do!), due to money reasons, you’re forced to continue it day in and day out. And if you hate the work, well, that’s pretty much hell on earth. I’m about to slip you a cake with a file in it. Read quickly, the warden may be by any moment.

Here’s How it Went Down

About the time your memory began, they jammed you into “school” and if you conformed and jumped through enough hoops, after 13 years they tossed you a sardine called “High School Diploma.” Hopefully you were exposed to enough topics and activities to determine how you’d like to spend your life. It’s certain you were exposed to many things that revealed how you DIDN’T want to spend your life.

So you cleared high school. But before you leave the nest to dive into wage slavery, “experts” tell you to spend four more years and “invest” $100,000 in college to gain a "credential" to qualify for a job. If you gain a degree and are skilled at begging in a professional manner, someone might actually give you a job and a corresponding income. Hooray!

But if you don’t work that job, you don’t eat. If you don’t trade your time for money, you can’t pay the rent. Worse, a big chunk of the wages you do earn is stolen from you before you ever receive it (taxes).

Welcome to prison. Get out of bed, Jack. Your ass belongs to Shawshank.

Jobs also involve pain and peril. You may be overworked. Ridiculed by coworkers. Ordered to obey stupid policies. One crazy boss can take your income away at will. This happens to nearly everyone at least once. Some people experience it many times.

But on the bright side, if you excel at your career and manage to hold it for 45 or 50 years, you get to “retire” (parole!) when you’re 65 or 70. Just in time to watch doctors and nursing homes strip-mine your assets as you slide to the grave.

Face it, you have been assimilated. You will service The Borg. And you will smile while doing so, dammit, or you won’t get that salary increase after your 90-day probationary period. Oh, and iron that uniform, you’re making us look bad.

Sound familiar?

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Your time and income are far too important to depend on some job.

The most income security you’ll ever gain on earth is to OWN the asset that pays you. If you buy the right asset, you also gain freedom from a schedule. With self-education and motivation, you can actually buy just one asset and instantly gain financial and time freedom in one fell swoop.

Here’s the Way to Break Out of Shawshank

Use Jobs as College. You need money as you prepare your escape. Instead of paying some college to learn, get a job to pay YOU to learn. Pick an industry that lights you up and acquire an entry job in that industry. Get a job to LEARN, not earn. Your goal is to learn how to run a business or run an income property. Suck all the knowledge out of the job experience and leave an empty husk behind. Sort of what they planned to do to you. Rinse and repeat with other jobs until you learn enough. Do it quickly, time is priceless.

Self-Educate Yourself How to BUY Your Perpetual Paycheck. You’ll be buying an already-existing business or income property. Everything you need to learn is in books, online or in the minds of people who have already succeeded. Read! Learn! Ask! You’ll learn techniques that minimize the amount of money needed to purchase your asset. Your self-education boils down to learning how to crunch numbers, speak to people, write offers and fill out bank paperwork. You can learn all this while working those day jobs.

Now Buy the Asset. You’re going to do this with borrowed, fixed-rate money because that’s an inflation hedge and it saves decades of time spent saving. Time is far more valuable than money, so anything that gains time is a good investment. Plus, your business or income property is going to be repaying that debt, not you. Once you buy the right asset, stabilize your systems and train a manager, you’re 95% retired. You just manage the manager. The right asset earns enough passive income to pay all operational expenses, a big mortgage, a manager to run it and all your personal bills plus more.

Kids, now you can 95% retire with financial and time freedom at age 25 or 30 instead of 65 or never. You don’t have to work and scrimp and save for 40 years before you can retire.

Adults, no matter what your age, you can self-educate, buy your asset and 95% retire within 12 months. If you have some money saved, it’s even easier to buy that asset.

Doesn’t this sound like a better plan than what The Herd is following?

There’s no good reason to work your entire life before you can retire. Conventional wisdom has brainwashed us into believing this is our only choice.

If you like working, fine, work! But I can tell you from personal experience that it’s spectacularly more fulfilling to work from a position of financial and time freedom, than as a captive prisoner.

How much better would it be to throw away the alarm clock and start humming these lyrics?

Hello asset my old friend,
You give me all I need to spend.
You protect it all so easily,
The time I spend on you is measely
And the peace … that you planted in my brain,
Still remains…
While all those others… stay insane.

(Thanks to Simon & Garfunkel and “The Sounds of Silence”)

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Mike Johnson made the journey from jobs to freelance writer to entrepreneur to passive income and early retirement. Today he teaches people how to skip right to passive income and early retirement at WorldsBestWriter.com .

Once I learned how to BUY passive income, I stopped chasing the bucks and the bucks started chasing me!