I hear people all over the place talking about having a budget.   They say you have to plan how you will spend your money.  For wage earners who trade their time for money, and usually trade the same amount of time and thus earn the same money at a predictable level a budget sounds like a good idea.  BUT not everyone is like this, there are us entrepreneurs out there, people who trade effort or ideas for money.  If you are one of the 5% that really wants to be successful in life you need to follow a totally different set of rules, and listening to the people who are in the other mindset will only distract you and give you wrong ideas.

For this 5% a budget is silly. I don’t know how much gas I will use, or how much I may spend on eating out.  The thing is I hope I spend A LOT on gas because almost all of my driving is for business, and the more I drive then that must mean the more I made in sales that month.  The same goes for restaurants, I would love to take a lot of customers out to eat, each time I do I make about $1,000 on average.

So what are we to do in this position?  First FORGET the budgeting idea.  For the things you must buy, find the best deals and be frugal.  When deciding if you are going to do something don’t only look at the cost of the activity, like budget people do, look at the income opportunity.  In January we were planning on going to Vegas for 4 days for the CES convention, a few people questioned us if this was in the budget or not, of course it was not because we don’t have a budget, but going to this event made many changes in our business that have more than paid for the trip.

I read a blog today about a guy who suggests you cut your cable to basic to save the $200 or so per year it costs extra, and also to watch much less TV.  I agree with not watching mindless TV, but I can point to many times where I have seen something on TV that inspired me to do something different, and this action resulted in a large profit for our company.

So many people ignore the dollars, hanging there to be picked because they are so busy picking up the pennies on the floor.   The thing is that MANY people will spend 10 hours in a week, comparison shopping, looking for deals, going to 5 grocery stores to get the best deals but almost all of them spend NO TIME at all trying to find new ways to earn money.  One idea that can earn you money can be worth ALL the ideas you have to save money, yet 90% of the blogs out there on money are about how to save money.   This just shows you the wrong financial thinking that most people have.