One of the most enlightening moments on my path to financial independence was when I realized that not all money is created equal. I divide money into three categories: One-Time Cash, Temporary Cash, and Forever Cash.
One-Time Cash is what most people earn in their daily jobs. They work one hour and get one hour’s pay. They work forty hours a week and get paid for forty hours a week. If someone asks you how much you are making at your job, and you answer $18 per hour, you are working (and living) in the One-Time Cash world.
One-Time Cash is the slow lane of wealth creation. Unless you are a highly specialized, highly sought-after expert—like a neurosurgeon or an attorney who specializes in a difficult area of the law—who can
demand rates of hundreds, even thousands of dollars per hour, you are stuck. Even for these high-income earners (and certainly for you, too), your income has a clear limit. The most you technically can charge is twenty-four hours a day.
Once you give the value for that work (the hour, the project, the contract), you get paid for it, and you are out. There is no residual. You work forty hours a week, and you get a week’s pay. You don’t show up
the next week; you don’t get paid.
That is what One-Time Cash is all about. There is one product or service delivered, and one payment is made. That’s it! However, even within One-Time Cash, there are differences in the quality of that One Time Cash. There are better ways of making One-Time Cash. For example, if you flip a house or a piece of land, you might make a $10,000 cash profit, and you might have worked only ten hours to make that happen. In this case, you still only get cash one time, but you get a much larger amount of cash than if you had worked in a job. Yet, to keep getting paid, you still have to keep doing deals and keep flipping more and more houses and/or land. Once you stop, the money stops.
That discovery was one of my first discoveries. When I started making money outside of my job, I selected tax delinquent real estate (where owners had not paid their property taxes) and land to focus on. My first twenty deals were all cash deals. I bought a property cheaply, for a few hundred or a few thousand dollars, and sold it for five to ten times as much in a few days. The first deal I ever made was a piece of land in a residential subdivision in northern Arizona. I bought it for $400 cash (with no mortgage) and sold it for $4,000 just one week after I bought it. The second one I bought for $500 and sold for $9,500 online in a matter of ten days, and so on. That continues to be something I do every
day, but I soon realized I would have to keep flipping land forever if I wanted to keep the cash coming in.