What You Believe Is What You Will Get

So, I get asked 2 questions a lot:

How do you systematically change your mindset?
How do you get out of debt?

These are 2 important topics I coach students on and often write about here on Mogul.

Hey, Shaun McCloskey here, and those who know of me, know that I find answers from the Bible and apply them to my life. And while going through what I have learned about these 2 topics from the Bible would be a lengthy process, the process of freeing ourselves should not be one.

However, for most, it will be – if they ever free themselves at all.

I think it would be safe for me to guess that most of the people who will be reading here are investing in real estate or are interested in investing in real estate. It’s the platform that I’ve been blessed with to carry this message to. Because most of you are real estate people, you will understand the analogy that I’m going to draw upon.

The Mind Is Powerful

In the world of real estate investing, if you believe that real estate investing doesn’t work where you live, you can move to another city, and it won’t work there either.

The above statement is a sarcastic one, but the message is that the mind is a powerful thing: What you believe is what you will get.

We are self-limiting beings, and frankly, most of us have been molded to believe that we have limitations.

The same goes for debt.

We have been brought up in a culture that says, “there is no other way.” Many believe that the only way one can buy a car is with “payments,” or a house can only be bought with “payments.”

belief It’s funny, when I bought a new car, a number of people asked me how much my payments were. I simply told them that I paid cash and I didn’t have any payments. This was mind boggling to them. They assumed that I had to have a payment on my car.

Now, some of you are probably thinking, ‘Well, you can afford to buy a car with cash, we can’t.’

But listen to this…

Shortly after I started investing (when I was still broke), I was in need of a new car. My investing business wasn’t going to move forth without a vehicle. I needed to get around. I saved some money from my investing and a tax return, and I went and bought a car for cash.

It wasn’t an expensive car. It wasn’t a new car, it was a 9-year-old car that I bought for $2,000.

Did I look rich?

No.

Were the heads of my friends and neighbors turning?

Only when the pipe from the muffler popped off. Frankly, I didn’t care what others thought, I just wanted to be FREE.

Those “we finance” car lots. People walk into those lots all day long and they put thousands of dollars down on cars and walk out of there agreeing to pay $100 a week, on average, for a period of time after that…

Little do most of those buyers know, but they already paid for the car with their down payment. The dealer usually can’t lose. They get all of their money invested up front with their down payment that they receive from the buyer.

But the buyers feel that the only way to buy is with payments, so they end up on one of these lots and overpay for the cars. If the buyers realized that they could buy those same cars for only their down payment, they could put a little time and effort into finding a car that they can pay with cash without the payments.

But they don’t think it can be done, so they don’t bother trying.

So, the 2 points that I was trying to prove are:

It’s all in our head. We need to change the way that we think. We’ve been programmed to believe that the only way to make purchases is by financing it.
It doesn’t take a lot of money to pay cash for things. If you don’t have that much, you just buy less.