Not too long ago I stumbled on the website I Will Teach You To Be Rich. The first thing I thought back then was how it sounds like a giant scamming website and it looked like it too! Horrible graphics and no class. It was in fact a great site that focuses on the “Big Wins” in life. For example, forget trying to save on coffee and instead focus on getting a $10,000 raise.
And it’s right! Going after Big Wins and ignoring everything else yields the biggest results, quickly. In fact, the first Big Win is to automate your finances, something we whole heartedly support here at MTM!
Now everyone wants to make huge amounts of progress really easily. A big return for not much work? Sounds fantastic! Heck, it’s the basis for pretty much all gambling / lottery type businesses. The feeling of paying a relatively small amount of money and in return getting a HUGE amount back is exhilarating. Everyone dreams of it, everyone wants it, everyone encourages everyone else to try to get it and to join in.
You’ve got to be in it to win it!
Day dreaming person
But deep down we all kind of know that it’s never that easy. Usually it’s just a trap where you end up making someone else rich instead of getting anything good and we sigh and go back to our life working hard for mediocre results. Sometimes it’s even worse and we work hard and get no results. Very frustrating.
Why Get Rich Quick Schemes Never Work
Ridiculously unlikely. When it comes right down to it, most get rich quick schemes are a probabilities game. Everyone puts in money and a lucky few make out like bandits. The lottery, gambling, pyramid schemes, they’re all very similar in this way and the end result is you can try and try your whole life to get a “Big Win” out of these methods and never even get a look in.
You’re more likely to be killed riding a horse than winning the Jackpot
They’re all passive methods. You put in your money and then control is taken out of your hands. You don’t control the tumbling lotto balls. You don’t control the racing horses or slot machine code. And you certainly don’t control the overall pyramid scheme tactics!
The reason this works is because people are attracted to being passive observers. It is mentally and physically easier to be doing nothing than it is to do something, so of course we prefer to be passive. It also allows us to have someone else to blame when things go wrong. It wasn’t our fault that things didn’t work out, it was that stupid pokies machine or the even more intangible “bad luck”.
But there are other types of Big Wins. The ones I’ll talk about today are very different in a key way. They are active and the probability of their success depends only on you.
The Big Wins To Focus On
Just because some Big Wins are a farce and don’t work out doesn’t mean that we should all give up trying to find them. One of the main things that led me to mutilating the mortgage is the fact that I’ve always wanted to be the most efficient I can be. Wanting to also get the best results the quickest I decided to tackle the biggest issues first and leave the 100’s of other minor squabbles until later. Is petrol 10 cents more expensive today? Who cares! I had bigger fish to fry.
However as stated above, many Big Wins can lead you down a path of hopelessness and have unforgiving odds. I didn’t want anything that wasn’t under my control, I wasn’t going to waste my time waiting for others to fix my problems and neither should you. But how to recognise a TRUE Big Win from just a fantasy dream?
| True Big Wins: | Fantasy Dreams: |
|---|---|
| Are fully under your control and you see a direct cause and effect result when you do them | Take control out of your hands and make you wait in the wings for other people. You are dependent on other people and nothing you do matters |
| Have a very high probability of succeeding if you do the steps outlined. High odds like 100% | Have a very low probability of succeeding no matter what you do. Low odds like 1 in 8 million for the lotto or being one of the top 10 stars of the blogging world |
Some examples of True Big Wins are things like saving for your retirement, finding a better job or paying down your debt quicker. They may take some effort sure, but with all of them the payoff is ten times as good as most other things that require work. You can put in an hour searching for better car insurance deals and negotiating your rate down $100 on the phone which is a great result. But even at $100 an hour, which is much higher than what most people get paid, there’s still other bigger things to focus on first.
Murdering That Mortgage
So we know that we shouldn’t delude ourselves by giving away control or investing time in things that have infinitely small chances of succeeding. But what about your mortgage? Does that fit into the class of being a True Big Win? You bet! However there’s so many facets to it, interest, compounding, rates, variable loans, fixed loans…
There’s lots of complicated crap as well as conflicting opinions etc I get it. However all is not lost. You can do one thing that will guarantee you results 100% of the time and that is fully within your control. You will see immediate results and best of all, you get to cut through all the crap as I’ve tried everything already.
After many years of studying this problem, after helping others with the same thing, after creating many complex spreadsheets like our Excel Mortgage Calculator and writing here for years too I’ve pretty much covered everything. I’ve read all the material, I’ve tried all the tactics, I’ve analysed all the various paths you can take, I’ve even looked at all the different banks and all the different plans they offer. All of it.
Now if I had someone hand me the information below 6 years ago I would have been THRILLED! I spent years researching and investigating this stuff and I would have been able to instead spend about 1-2 hours on it… then go do something else! So don’t mistake the simpleness of this advice for a lack of quality. This information has been distilled right down to its most basic and important facts meaning you can stop spending your time on boring financial stuff and instead go hang out with your friends.
There is one Big Win when it comes to mortgages. If you focus and get this Big Win right, you will almost never have to worry about minutiae like “Should I change my repayments from Fortnightly to Weekly?”.
The other great thing is that after doing a small amount of work up front, you reap the benefits for the rest of your life. For example, paying off your $300,000 mortgage in 10 years vs 30 years will save you over $250,000! What could you do with that money? How much would that help your life?
Set your repayments high and make them automatic.
That’s it.
You can scheme, wrangle and argue over a million things for years and years but without throwing large percentages of your income (even an extra $200 a fortnight) at your mortgage consistently… it’s going to do virtually nothing to your loan. You’ll sit there spinning your wheels while the Banks rake it in. Instead, focus on this one Big Win and watch as everyone else around you argues and squirms over near-meaningless tactics or “tips” whilst going virtually nowhere.
Sure, using that extra money you got at tax time to put towards your mortgage helps… but it pales in comparison to pushing an extra $1,000 every week into your mortgage using Automatic, Extra Mortgage Payments. That amount of money may sound obscene to some new comers but many readers are already doing it and I can teach you how!
Now I can understand that you may not know HOW to do this one Big Win yet but I have a lot of material here at MTM to help with that and I give it away for free too. You can also sign up below and I’ll keep sending you more great insights but the key to take away today is that this one thing is your centre piece.
Getting our mortgage under our control has made a huge difference to our lives and I know it will do the same for you too.
The benefits include: 1) How to pay off your mortgage faster than 99% of people with one hour a month of work 2) How to get rid of your debt and have the freedom to spend money on the things you love, guilt free 3) Clear outline of how to setup your expenses, mortgage and general finance 4) How offset accounts work and how to get the same result without being gouged by the big banks 5) How to cut through the crap and focus on the things that truly matter when taking down a mortgage 6) How to adjust the strategy so it works for you, even if you have kids, even if you only have one income 7) How to do all of these things and maintain a normal social life (and never be cheap).
