On this episode of The Engineering Passive Income Show, Joseph discusses the importance of freedom and how creating passive income for yourself is so much better than selling your time for money. Joseph speaks about how American people have the completely wrong concept of money due to the education systems. Joseph also shares with us how he was able to change his way of thinking and how he created passive income so that he didn’t end up selling his time for money for the rest of his life.
HIGHLIGHTS:
0:00 – Intro
0:37 – Joseph states that for this episode, were going to go deep
0:47 – Joseph asks you to take a moment and think about where you’re going and what is your big masterplan for your life
1:01 – Joseph speaks about his masterplan at 24
2:56 – Joseph explains why that is completely the wrong path to go down
3:30 – Joseph talks about how he learned about multi-family homes and how if it weren’t for his boss, he would’ve never learned about real estate
4:59 – Joseph states that the biggest con that has ever happened to American people was the concept of money
5:44 – Joseph speaks about how people are trading their time for money when they don’t need to
6:28 – Joseph encourages you to think about the freedom. What would you do if you didn’t have to go to work tomorrow and you had passive income coming in?
7:11 – Joseph states that travelling is one of the greatest gifts of life that you can give to yourself
7:29 – Joseph speaks how if you take anything from this episode, he wants it to be that you take a vacation or that you’re able to go for an extended vacation because you have passive income coming in that’s supporting you
7:44 – Joseph talks about a vacation around Europe he took with a friend from college and how that vacation was when Joseph realized how important it is to not sell your time for money and create some passive income for yourself
10:49 – Joseph states that you are getting your time back with passive income
11:08 – Joseph urges you to not let other people steal your time from you
11:16 – Joseph mentions how the following episodes will host conversations with other entrepreneurs and investors about different strategies you can use to get your time back
TRANSCRIPTION:
Welcome to the engineering passive income show, where engineers and other professionals come to learn how to generate passive income, grow their wealth and get their time back. Your host is Joseph Bramante, an accomplished civil engineer, oil and gas professional, multifamily investor, an industry speaker. Learn about investment alternatives, the same types of investments that he used to achieve Financial freedom himself broken down like only an engineer can. Now here’s your host, Joseph Bramante.
All right, guys. Welcome back to the show. On today’s episode, we’re going to go deep. We’re going to start peeling back that down onion, and I’m really excited about it.
So right out of the gate, just got to know where you’re going. What is your plan? What is your big master plan for your life? Take a moment and think about it. I don’t know who you are, where you are, but this is a very important question. If you’re me, now, I remember what my master plan was. I remember I was 24 years old. I had the job. You know, I did the schooling. I had the job. I was all lined up. All I had to do was keep my head down, keep plugging away, keep working, keep putting the money into the 401k. Got a great company match. Got to get the extra money on the outside. Get your little Edward Jones or fidelity, whatever you got your outside investments and you just keep working away. And then if you’re lucky, maybe if you know, if you do well, maybe if you do well, you get some promotions. They give you some stock options, which, you know, at Exxon, we had another term for that. We call them the golden handcuffs. We’ll talk about that later why.
But you keep doing well then maybe, you know, or not maybe, but for sure, you’re going to reach the age of 65. And hopefully, you know, all things work out for you. You don’t get hurt or injured. You reach age 65, you can retire. And then what they give you is, you know, your retirement and you get this big, beautiful check and get these payouts. You know, they say, look, if you put this much money away, when you’re 65, you’ll be able to get this much per month for the rest of your life or, you know, however long you plan on living.
But there was always that question mark in the back of my head, right? I was like, well, but what if I live to a hundred, right? Like what if I, you know, people do that. It’s more and more are living to a hundred and you know, 90 plus years old these days, could you imagine being 90 years old and running out of retirement, you worked your butt off your whole life, saved money. And you just because you had great genes, you took care of yourself. You outlived the retirement that the company had gave you. And now you’re, I mean, what do you do in that situation? That’s terrible.
But anyway, that’s the vision I had in my head, that’s the path I was going down, right? But it’s the completely wrong path. Because what happens is you get down the retirement and what you finally get is a thing you’ve wanted your entire life more than anything, is a thing that you have. When you’re a kid, they take it away from you when you join corporate America and they give it back to you whenever you’re an adult, when you’re retired. That’s your time, it’s your freedom. It’s your freedom to do whatever you want. And I tell you what, the reason they’re able, they meaning corporations, The some, etc. and was able to get away with it is just because of a lack of education. People don’t know any better.
I didn’t take a single finance course My entire career. I had to learn about multifamily on my own, which is just cut dumb luck. One of my colleagues, my boss was buying houses. And so I wanted to buy more houses. And then it led me to buying apartments. But if not for that, I would’ve never discovered real estate. And I think, and it wasn’t through my own, just doing research, educating myself, joining groups, etc. None of my education about what I’m doing now came from the system, came from my high school, came from my college. I was an engineer. I knew math. They taught me how to calculate the area under a square or sorry, calculate the area under a graph. I can do differential calculus, all this crap. Couldn’t balance a checkbook. Couldn’t do you know, profitability analysis. I didn’t learn profitability analysis until I went to Exxon. I kind of got my pseudo MBA from Exxon, right?
But those are those skills that, just imagine if I knew this stuff, or if you knew this stuff as a teenager, you know, if they’re teaching you stuff in high school, but they don’t, why? Because the system is designed to create good employee. They want you to be, yes sir, no sir. Employees to work for the man, who work for somebody else so that you can make them rich and they can have all the freedom that you wish you had. That’s what they’re doing. And you know, the biggest con that’s ever been done on the American people is the concept of money. Like I love money. Money’s great. We all want to make tons of money. So don’t get me wrong. I love plenty of lavish things, but it’s not everything. I’ve learned that early on, It’s not everything now. Sure, I can, you know, go down this route and I can be, you know, I could, you can do the bill gates thing if you wanted, and you could be very successful. But at the end of the day, you know, when people are on their deathbed, nobody has ever said, man, I wish I made more money. Man, I wish I’d worked those extra couple hours and had the extra, you know, a hundred thousand dollars or something. What they wish is they had more time.
And so that’s the a con that’s happening. People are trading their time for money and they just don’t need to do it, but there’s no other option, right? The system says you work 40, 50 hours a week. And you know, we’ll give you two weeks’ vacation. So you know, that’s your two weeks, right. You can do whatever you want with it. Most other countries, by the way, it’s six weeks. It’s an embarrassment that we only get two weeks here, but that’s beside the point. And not to mention that. Yeah, you’re working 40 hours a week, How much time are you spending commuting to work? How much time are you spending supporting your work activities? Going to the dry cleaning, getting cloth for work, going to lunches, dinners, etc. That’s all in support of work. So what I really want you to focus on is not so much the money side guys, but just think about the freedom.
Like what would you do if you didn’t have to go to work tomorrow, right? If you had passive income coming in and it was equivalent to maybe if it was slightly less, think about this, what if, how much income would you need in passive income that’s consistent, reliable, dependable that you would say, you know what I don’t need this shop. I know a lot of people that could real quick, either find ways to downsize or they would, you know what? I don’t need that extra thousand dollars a month. I’m happy. I would much rather have my freedom. And as a guy who’s traveled for three months at a time to different countries, I can tell you that traveling is one of the greatest gifts to yourself and in life in general that you can ever do. Just seeing the world. It’s just for me, it’s one of my, I got the bug early on with Exxon when they send me overseas and I never stopped traveling ever since. And I just, you know, if anything comes out of this, you listening to this, I hope that you book a vacation and you go somewhere. I hope even more that you’re able to go for an extended vacation because you’ve got passive income coming in, that’s supporting you.
I remember I went on a vacation with my friend, good friend of mine from college. We went on a Europe vacation. We had the whole thing planned out. We were starting off in Zurich, Switzerland. And then we kind of traveled all over Europe and came back to Zurich. And it was a great vacation. He had used up, he had saved up all his vacation days for the entire year. Actually I think he had, he had some rollover vacation from the prior year. Again, just talking about the system and how crappy it is that they get you to juggle and stress to manage your vacation day. You can have what really should have been, He should have done that vacation anytime he wanted to, it was a great vacation.
But anyway, so we’re on this ship 30 days, we’re having a great time and the vacation, he’s got to go home. I decided I didn’t want to go home. I extended my vacation extra two months. It was end of the year. So I went to Austria. I did Christmas in Austria, Vienna Austria got to see all the Christmas festivals and everything there, ended up going to Paris France for new year’s. And then just kind of hung around and traveled, went to Check, went to all kinds of other little, small towns, and just enjoyed, you know, there was no itinerary for me. I was just free to do whatever I wanted. And I’ll tell you what, it was the greatest experience.
I felt like just such a nomad, just, you know, just like a fly on the wall, just exploring and really living life.
And I tell you what, that vacation for me really separated the difference, you know, cause this was a good friend of mine and we’re, you know, he’s, he’s a, you know, we, he stayed the traditional engineering route. He’s still an engineer today. Really great engineer. But it was on that vacation that I realized the difference, you know, after all he had to go through to have that amazing, a month in Europe, for most people is an amazing vacation. To think of all the sacrifice he had to do. Carrying over vacation. Didn’t take any vacation or very little vacation from the year prior, just so that he can have a really nice vacation the following year and then all the saving up and all the crap you had to go through to get the time off, etc. Cause it’s, you don’t just get to take a month off. I mean, you got to plan that, you got to get permission to take that much time off in, you know, corporate America.
So it was at that point though, right? We’re like we were both having such a great time and he wished he could have stayed, but he couldn’t, you know, and it was unfortunate that he had to go home and I just stayed. And that’s the difference. That’s when you were a 100% free with your time to do what you want, when you want with it. I could have stayed there. I could have never come back If I wanted to, I could have stayed in Europe this entire time. But that that’s the entire point of the story guys is you’re getting your time back with passive income, time that you don’t get back. It is the one thing in life that is even from everybody, we’ve all got the same 24 hours in a day. No more, no less. How you spend it, That’s up to you. So choose wisely and don’t let somebody else steal your time from you.
Passive income gives you opportunity to get your time back. The rest of these episodes, We’re going to be talking to other entrepreneurs, other owners, investors, etc., different strategies that you can do to get your time back too. God Bless guys. See you in the next episode.
This was another episode of Engineering Passive Income with Joseph Bramante, download resources and join our private investor group at www.engineeringpassiveincome.com. Then be sure to leave us a review on apple podcast. Thank you for listening. And we’ll see you on the next episode.