Friday night I got roped into bringing my daughter to a 7-year-old birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese's. That is one place I adamantly try to avoid because it's a petri dish of every type of germ strand you can think of...and some not even discovered by science yet (until the next major disease outbreak anyway).
But I went because my daughter wanted to see her friends from school and she doesn't mind the germs or even licking the table if she wants to (usually to purposely upset me since she knows better).
I sat down and a woman who looked much older than I asked if she could sit at the table across from me. "Sure," I exclaimed. Better than sitting there by myself, I guess.
She told me that she was the mom of one of the little squirts at the party and she looked beyond tired. She complained that she didn't even want to be there because it had been a long work week. I asked her what she does. She's a doctor. Cardiology.
Not surprising. I live in a neighborhood of a wide variety and array of highly paid professionals who are methodically working their way into an early grave with each passing week of 60 to 80 working hours to clock in.
You know, I honestly don't know who to feel bad for anymore. The poor who really are in an "ignorance-is-bliss" state of mind and really don't know what to do to create a better lives for themselves or the highly-paid professionals who are literally "locked" into a dead-end lifestyle of working themselves to the bone until they are admitted into a rubber room...or they drop dead one day from being overworked and over-stressed.
She asked me if I volunteered at the school. I said I did, twice a month to be exact (except for the "short" school months where it's only once a month). She sighed, disappointed in herself, I think. She expressed how she wished she could volunteer because her son kept bugging her about it but she couldn't even put in an hour in the morning to pull it off.
Pitiful, I thought. Where is the freedom there?
And there I was thinking that life was so unfair because I could only buy one small cup of cheap blush wine from Chuck E. Cheese's per hour...and how their salad bar sucks ass because they wouldn't refill the croutons.
My new doctor friend explained to me that her dad wanted her to be a doctor and she then became a doctor. I inadvertently asked her was she wanted to be in her life but she diverted her question into something else, clearly not wanting to talk about what she would have wanted to do if she had a choice because...
She really has no choice anymore.
She's 40-something, immersed in her career, probably barely just paid off her hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt, and there simply is nothing else for her anymore.
At least that's how she sees it.
I saw how drained she looked. She was pressing her son to leave early but he was having a good time. I could see that she was on the verge of snapping on the poor child because he wanted to continue having fun with his classmates outside of regular school hours. Yet she couldn't enjoy a single minute of the quickly-passing seconds of watching her son grow up because she just wanted to collapse into a drug-induced dreamland coma...probably till Monday morning.
And if I wasn't there, she probably would have went ballistic on the child, dragging him outside by his ear and forcefully jamming him against his will into the car. I kept telling her, "Relax. Give him a few more minutes. He has more tokens. They don't last long." I could tell that he was grateful for the welcomed buffer in the situation and she caved because she didn't want to look like a jerk-off.
What's worse? Starting from nothing (i.e. no career, no job, no "life") or being so deeply intertwined in an ass-busting soul-eating career that inhales 60 to 80 hours of your precious life a week...and it happens to be a career that you can never escape?
I'd opt for the former.
No matter which category you find yourself in (or maybe you're somewhere in an "undefined" middle category not mentioned above), as long as you have the appropriate knowledge and desire to change directions, you can change directions. Period.
Of course, if you are working 60 to 80 hours a week, it makes it much more difficult unless you taper down that impossible work schedule to make room for your new life.
I was so tempted to start talking to the doctor about how she could see a light at the end of the tunnel -- in 3 years or less, in fact -- if she just started getting involved in Passive Income Strategies, like multifamily real estate.
But I knew she was in no mood to listen to such a sales pitch from me or anyone else. So I kept quiet and silently felt a swell of gratitude that I wasn't a doctor or dentist or lawyer...or one of the many professionals I live near, talk to, and even counsel in my line of work because they are just stuck. And they're tired. And they want to realize freedom but they don't know how.
You're in a good position though, believe it or not. If you've been a student of mine for a long time (as many of you have been) or even if you're a "newbie" student, you at least had some inkling of desire to find a "different way" (ideally that's easier) to acquire financial freedom, either through Aggressive Income or Passive Income Strategies (or both).
Many professionals, believe it or not, don't even know what to do or how to do it to ever gain that sense of "freedom" that they crave. (And their local Certified Financial Planner or Investment Banker isn't going to help either.)
But you know. And you're already going after it.
I have a 100% online 8-week mentorship group coming up. It's my signature Apartment Building Mentorship Group that's been "amped up" with the most cutting-edge strategies. It's the Multifamily Apartment Building Mentorship Group and it's starting later this month (on January 28th).
I'm offering a kick-ass deal on it for the MLK Blow Out where I'm shaving 50% off plus I'm giving you my 100% LTV Secret Video Series. Plus there's another bonus added in there too.
I rarely offer a discount on my signature group but I need to set 2015 on the right track for everybody. It truly is the year of multifamily investing and if you've been talking about apartment building investing (but you haven't done it yet), it's about time that you got off your ass and did it already. Nothing happens when you keep taking about it. But everything happens when you start doing it. And this is why my mentorship groups are so powerful...because over 8 weeks we actually DO the business in the real commercial real estate world, step by step, so you get it.
If you have any questions, call my office after 9am PST tomorrow morning at (661) 295-5050.
By the way, Lea will be in tomorrow after her near-4 months of retirement. Yep, that's right. Retirement really isn't what it's cracked up to be. So start thinking of something else you'll want to do with your time in a few years when you don't have to work anymore either because "retirement" in and of itself totally sucks. (Think "old people" playing cards all day in a retirement home.)
See you at the top!
Your mentor,
Monica Main
www.MonicaMain.com
