A Brazilian that Knew How to Get Rich

Most of us yearn for financial freedom. We want to grow and have our bank accounts grow with us. It seems that we don't want to work; we just do it for the paycheck. To achieve a state of financial independence most of us would love to have a cash factory. But we are often reminded that money does not grow on trees. So how can somebody get out of the paycheck to paycheck life? Really, it is incredibly simple to do. I ran across this formula for success when I was working as a missionary in Brazil.

The first thing that you will need is actually some sort of cash factory. It might seem like a mythical animal that only breeds once every 100 years, but that doesn't make it any less real. Your cash factory is something that you do, or operate on the side to produce income. In Brazil I rented a small house to live in. My landlord owned several houses that she rented out. She worked full time as a clerk for a little law firm. She was little more than a paralegal, but she bought houses. Every month she collected rent checks from her tenants. The harder she worked, the less she actually needed to work.

But she didn't stop there. That was just her personal cash factory. She would take the money she received and did something very ordinary. She would put it in the bank. Then she would actually borrow money. She took the borrowed money and used it to buy a little dinner on the street corner not too far from where I lived. That actually paid the debt down for her, and left her a little bit of cash. The point is that if the business went sour she had the money sitting on the sidelines waiting to pay off her business loan.

With the little extra that her little dinner threw off every month she would take that money and reinvest it. This time the money went into the Brazilian Stock Market. She made a little bit of money off of stocks and stock options. I thought that her strategy was ingenious, because she really didn't have all that much money to start with. In fact she always told me that if I could save up a tiny sum of money I could borrow the rest to buy a cash producing rental property.

The fact is that my traveling to Brazil exposed me to a new way of thinking about money, and I don't think that many people realize just how powerful the idea of money actually is. I don't suggest just running out and getting into debt. Rather what I suggest is think about your resources and utilize them to your advantage, just like my landlord back in Brazil did. Use your brain and get rich.