The goal is not to make more money. Now, I know that might have ruffled some feathers there to say that, and you might even think: Okay, exit left. I’m not listening to this video. She’s lost it. But I want you to give it some thought and hear me out here. So ask yourself: Why do you even wanna make any money? Why?

Why does any of us want money? Why do we want more of it? Right? Why are we driving ourselves crazy to obtain more of it? Usually it’s because of our desires. There is something that we’re after. Now, sometimes these things could be tangible. Sometimes they’re intangible. And that’s what I wanna dive into today, is to sit and reflect so that you can unveil the why behind the why, and identify for yourself why making money is never the goal.

The three things that you’re gonna learn in this video: Why managing money is actually more important than making money, and the three income pillars that are actually gonna help you make more money—and if you stay till the end, I actually have one that requires zero time. And how to multiply your money and make it work for you versus you working for it. 

Grab your pen and paper and I want you to join me on the other side where we’re gonna dive in. Money management is oftentimes missed opportunity. And what I mean by this is think about how much time you spend making money, right? And then think about maybe your ideal lifestyle that you desire. And I have come to find many of us are buying our lifestyle because we can’t afford it.

It’s never about what you make, but what you keep. And your management of money oftentimes lends to your spending habits and your relationship with money. Now, I’ll tell you, I haven’t always had a healthy relationship with money. Me and money didn’t see eye to eye all the time. But what I have come to find is that my thought of I just need more.

If I got more, I would have everything that I want. I wouldn’t be in debt, you know? But the fact is, and it’s a hard truth that sometimes we don’t wanna admit. If you can’t effectively manage a thousand, having more of. in trying to manage 10,000 or a hundred thousand. Your problems don’t go away. You’re gonna be in a constant rat race of trying to make more.

So, shift gears a little bit, and all I’m asking is for you to spend the fraction of the time that you spend making that money to properly manage it.

So oftentimes when people are talking money management, the number one thing that comes to mind is budget. And I don’t know about you, but budget just sounds hella restrictive. It just sounds like I’m not allowed to do what I wanna do with my money, but really it’s about having a spending plan. 

A spending plan is meant to empower you and put you in a position where you’re allocating your money towards the things that you actually value, desire, and love.

It’s oftentimes the impulse buys and the things that we spend our money on that leaves us to believe we need more money in order to afford the things that we really love and desire. But a spending plan is the first step to managing your money because when you begin managing it properly, you actually will find that you can afford to do the things that you want.

You can get outta debt or take that debt free vacation that is hella empowering cause you’re giving your dollar a job. You’re allocating it towards the things that you are saying are your goals. So think about it for a second. If I offered you $200,000, right? And maybe, you know, you were making 80,000, so more money sounds real attractive to you.

Now, follow me here. Let’s say you at 80,000 didn’t really have a money management system in place. Maybe not exactly financially literate, no, you know, good spending habits and you’re like “200,000—yeah girl, all my stuff is gonna be solved”, right? But think about it here, you’re operating the same.

You’ve not changed anything other than your income, right? You’re getting more money. Well, what if I told you that I had a client that was making, you know, right under $100K, right? I think she was making 70 some odd thousand dollars, and I had another client that was making like double that 150. Which one of those would you rather? 

What if I told you that my client that was bringing in a little under 80K was a far better financial situation than the one that was making nearly twice as much? That’s because the one with 8K was very focused on management and multiplying of money. You see, making money isn’t just active income.

It’s not time for dollars. When you really start going into a high level of making money, you have three income sources. You have active income, passive income, and dividend income, and that’s where it really gets good cause it leads us into how to multiply your money.

Another benefit to having a spending plan to put you on the path of proper money management is really beginning to uncover is your money going towards investments or towards expenses? Now, you might be asking yourself, well, hell, what’s the difference? All I know is money’s going out and it’s leaving my account, and I hear you on that.

But when you’re making investments these are things that are, you know, assets in producing some kind of value, right? Or it has a return. It has a solid ROI, which is a return on investment. Expenses just go, you know—expenses is going and maybe buying the new pair of shoes that you saw at Macy’s that you’re like, girl, these are hot, and they might be hot and they might be on trend and you might look damn good in them.

But I can’t really say that it’s an asset. Now, if you’re in a position where you can afford that lifestyle, go for it. But if you’ve come to find through your money management that you’re actually buying your lifestyle, then think about it. If you said yes to those shoes, what did you say no to? Did you say no to spending money in marketing to expand your business?

Positive ROI. Did you say no to paying down your debt? Right. There’s a positive ROI in that because we all know debt is just—it drains your account. That’s a whole nother conversation. 

Okay, so I wanna have a truth moment here with you all and a little bit of storytelling time. There was a client of mine who, you know, was ready to take her business to the next level, and we discussed putting in a lead generation system for her. So she went with an agency that was going to put together an entire client acquisition to bring her more business. 

However, have you ever been guilty of trying to save money that you only end up spending more of it? So what really should have been a fantastic investment? Right? By putting in place this marketing strategy and hiring an agency that can bring in business and a really strong ROI, right on the dollars you invested.

So you spent this much, and in return you received that much. But because you’re penny pinching or because you maybe have a scarcity mindset or you told yourself, I can’t really afford this, or I’m going to hack the system and I’m going to do this part DIY, and let them do that, and you’re going against the recommended proven plan that has been known to work over and over again.

My client, unfortunately, opted to let a VA handle a majority of this project. And against the advisement of the experts in the professionals, she ran the campaign and it just was a flop. So what should have been a really good investment in her business, unfortunately, became a costly lesson and a huge expense all because we’re trying to save a dollar that ultimately we lost a lot.

Okay, so the part that I know everyone wants to hear about is: Melinda, tell me about the making money. Well, you all know that I am anti-hussle culture, so I wanna talk to you a little bit about how to make money without trading your time for dollars.

I don’t know about you, but time freedom is high on my priority list. So you have active income, and this is the traditional way we go about making our money, whether employed or self-employed. A combination of both, side hustle. This is, I am using my time and in exchange I am receiving these dollars. That is one income faucet, right?

But if you really wanna amplify it and turn that drip of income into just opening the floodgates, I want you to think about passive income, right? So passive income is another way for you to make more money, but without using your time, right? 

So this is where maybe… let’s say your spa, for example. You’re at a place where you are tapped out. You don’t have any more time to give, you can’t take any more clients, you are just booked to the max. Congrats to you. But you’re now faced with a decision. You know, you wanna make more money, but you don’t have any more time to trade. 

Well, a way to have passive income is for you to begin employing others and bringing people in and leveraging labor from others, right? Then you have dividend income. Another way to make money and dividend income sort of brings us a little bit into multiplying money, and it kind of touches on our money management because if you manage your money properly and you’re paying yourself first. 

As we oftentimes hear, that means you’re paying into your retirement, right? And you can look into other investments that are cash flowing. And so by making these cash flowing decisions, this will help you to bring in another income source of dividend. 

Okay, so now to the sexy part, multiplying money. When I say this to people, they’re like, girl, they start leaning in. Tell me how. Tell me what the secret sauce is and let me just preface it first by saying, You certainly have to make money and you have to manage money in order to have something to then turn around and multiply.

So what this can look like is simply, you know, boosting revenue. And boosting revenue is taking the money that you are already making and having in and optimizing, right, optimizing every single opportunity. Multiplying money also looks like putting it into investment products and things that are going to make money for you.

This is where I—you may have heard me—you know, your money can work harder for you than you ever could work for it. And I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking about my exit strategy. You know, I don’t want to be in this constant rat race of making money, so to multiply it what I recommend at bare minimum, no matter where you are at, especially for my self-employed spa owners, you want to open up a Roth IRA.

Now disclaimer, please check in with your CPA or tax professional or financial planner because I am none of those things. I am simply just advising you and kind of pointing you in the right direction by making the recommendation and really maximizing that. So by doing so, this is a way to simply and easily begin the journey of multiplying.

A big conversation that is oftentimes brought up is how to pay yourself, right? I oftentimes hear “I’m not making enough to pay myself “or, you know, some of you have read, you know, books and things that always say, you know, you should be paying yourself first. And I certainly agree with that. 

However, I want you to really take it a step further and ask yourself, what does it actually mean to pay yourself first?

And I’m here to tell you, it’s not just transferring money from your business account to your personal. It’s one more place that it needs to go, and that’s being transferred to your brokerage account. When you’re self-employed, you’re responsible for your retirement, and that is really what it means to pay yourself first.

So by any means necessary. That is something you should never skip out on, and you should certainly when building your spending plan prioritize paying yourself first because unless you wanna constantly be spending your time for dollars, then it’s critical that you not ignore your retirement.

I know we covered a lot today. You know, covering different ways that you can make money. Discussing about the importance of managing that money that oftentimes we worked really hard to make. And then really beginning to think about and dive more into what multiplying your money means.

But at the foundation of all of this is you. And what do I mean by that? Your feelings around money, your spending habits with money, your relationship with money. You know, do you have an abundant mindset or a scarcity mindset? What are some of your early memories, like childhood memories, around money? How financially literate are you?

All of these things have a huge impact on how you approach making your money, managing it, and ultimately multiplying it. So a good place for you to start is to check in with yourself. How do you talk to money? So what I tell people is like: Are you attracting it or are you chasing it?

And we all know what happens when you chase something, you know, you chase it and it just gets away from you. You just feel like you never quite have enough, right? Or that it’s so hard to get money, right? Or that money’s meant to be spent. You know, sometimes that’s our feelings around it, or the extreme opposite.

We feel guilty for spending our money. We feel like we gotta hold onto it. And I tell you what, letting your money just sit in a savings account, it is not serving you well. And you’re certainly not multiplying it. Granted, you should definitely have an emergency fund, you know, in your savings account. But once you hit a good little financial runway, you gotta begin investing it.

But sometimes because of our feelings around money and our mindset around money, we hold onto it real tight. And if you look back to your first kind of memories with money, you know your behavior with it, just your overall feelings, you’ll start to uncover that. 

The way you go about managing it today or mismanaging it today really stems from what you may have seen around you, how much you had or didn’t have growing up. All of these things make an impact. 

So I’ve created a tool that I would like to offer you complimentary, and it’s the Spa Owners Rapid Revenue Planner. Now, this planner is also part journal, and so some of those mindset things that I spoke about earlier, we have thought prompts in there so that you can check in with yourself and get reflections of what stressed you that day, what worked great that day, and just a lot of thought-provoking prompts there to help you check in with self.

And in addition to that, you’ll find that you have a way of navigating your day, right? Because if you don’t, you know, plan your day and you don’t have a plan for how you’re going to go about things instead of running your day, your day ultimately runs you. 

And I don’t know about you, but I find that I oftentimes can be hella busy, and I’ll check in with myself at the end of the day and I realize I wasn’t productive at all. So there is a difference between busy and productive. And when we’re thinking about making money and managing it, multiplying it, productivity is important and having a plan is critical. So this will begin developing a really healthy habit of planning that can transcend into those three pillars of making money.