Clayton Morris

I am ready, guys.

Clayton Morris

It was born from me out of a minute as the thing that changed my life when I came up with this concept.

I was born out of tears. My wife was coming down to the basement in my home office a few years ago, saying, “We can’t pay the mortgage.” And here I was, a network news anchor. I was like, “What are we doing wrong where we have not been able to have passive income, cash flow coming in that would cover our monthly expenses?”

At that point, I owned two rental properties, but I didn’t fully wrap my head around the idea of financial freedom. My wife said, “We can’t pay the mortgage,” and I said, “What are you talking about?” She said, “We can’t.” We had to go through my closet and find old DVDs and electronics to just sell on Craigslist to pay our mortgage, and we managed to buy a few dollars.

Clayton Morris

I said, “Something’s got to change. I don’t get it.” and I said, “Wait a second.” I jumped up onto my whiteboard in my office, and I said, “We have these two rental properties that we bought a few years ago in the Midwest. Rehab them, got them cash flowing. They have a high return.

How many rental properties would it take to cover our monthly expenses? If each of them was cash flowing $800 a month, how many of those $800 a month houses would it take for us to cover our $5,000 a month and monthly expenses? Or $7,000 a month and monthly fees?”

That’s where the Freedom Number was born. I just teach people how to reverse engineer that, but it all comes down to this. When you ask people, “How much money do you want to make?” People say, “I want to be a millionaire!” I think it’s total garbage because it’s such an arbitrary number that it means nothing.

Clayton Morris

Forget a million bucks. It might even be as small as $3,000 a month, and that’s what financial freedom is.

We’ve worked with investors through my company where I’ll ask them when we get on the phone, “What is your freedom number?” They’ll say, “Six houses,” which means $3,000 a month in passive income. I say, “What? That’s all you need to live?” He said, “Yeah. I’m a single guy. I don’t have kids so yeah, that’s all I would need for to be financially free.” I’m just like, “Wow. Try doing that with three kids living in New Jersey where we have high taxes and high expenses.”

Clayton Morris

That number is going to be different for every person. That’s why you need to sit down and get honest with yourself and figure it out, but that is what financial freedom is all about.

Clayton Morris

Yeah.

I teach people how to do this on our cheat sheet that we give away, and it is three pages.

Clayton Morris

I encourage you to sit down with your spouse or partner and go through it. Get honest when you grab a glass of wine, it might be a little painful. Sit down, open up your computer, grab a notepad, and you’re going to add up six months of your monthly expenses.

What you’re going to do is find the average of those six months. You’re going to remove the holidays because it’s always a little wacky during the holidays. Take from February through the summer, and what are your monthly expenses look like? That includes Your Netflix subscription, your coffee habit, your mortgage, your kid’s school, Karate lesson or whatever it is, and then put it by 10%.

Clayton Morris

So if you want to take a trip or those types of entertainment, that extra night out with your spouse, put it by 10% and then divide it by 6. We want to find the average of those months. Is it $5,000? Is it 6,300? Be honest with yourself.

Until you put it all down on paper, you’re never going to know you spent $200/month on gas. We have all these random subscriptions to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and all these things that add up. You can begin even to cut some fat, but also take stock of what you have to pay.

Clayton Morris

Right.

Clayton Morris

And you don’t think about them. A lot of times, they’re automatic. Mostly, they’re automatic. They might be in your iTunes subscription. You might have a subscription via iTunes to lynda.com or Texture, which is like a magazine company, which I love.

If you’re not reading these magazines on your iPod, then why are you spending 7.99 a month on these things?

Clayton Morris

My wife and I like to talk about money are not real. It’s a manifestation.

Clayton Morris

If you think about it at the end of the day, money is a human creation. Welcoming more of it into your life is a manifestation.

If you believe that you are only worth $80,000 a year, do you think you’re going to earn 90,000? You’re going to hit 80,000 continually. At the end of the year, that’s all you’re going to achieve if you every day believe you, as a human are only worth 80,000. Or, your revenue from your company this year is only this value, guess what? That’s all you’re going hit.

Clayton Morris

What you think about regularly becomes real. I know it sounds like such a cliché. We now know what the quantum level that this is true. We have the data. We have the science behind it.

I would encourage all of your listeners to watch an incredible documentary that’ll just blow your mind called Black Whole. The scientists were able to look at the quantum level that you as a human being are the event horizon.

Clayton Morris

There’s infinity out there and within you, and you as the human being are that road block. You have the opportunity to either be encouraging all kinds of wealth consciousness bringing incredible people into your life that are going to help you achieve great things or you can be the brick wall that stops creation and manifestation of money.

I grew up with all of those things you just talked about. I grew up with my parents telling me “Money doesn’t grow on trees. We’re not the Rockefellers. We can’t afford that. We can’t go and do that. Oh, look at them. They can do it but we can’t.”

Clayton Morris

I had many years of having to overcome the difficult meme from my parents, and I started by just journaling every day, and in my meditations, seeing it as true.

One thing that was a powerful tool for me to understand is, when you go to a restaurant, and you place an order with the waiter or a waitress, you expect the food to show up, and you go back to having your conversation with the people that you’re tabled. You just know that food is going to come in a few minutes at most. That’s the way most people should be thinking about wealth.

If you put that out in the universe that you are going to build this company, you’re going to achieve two million dollars a year in revenue; you’re going to achieve financial freedom, guess what happens? You start to put steps and goals in place. You start going to local real estate meetings talking with other investors, shaking hands, going out to coffee, and guess what? Things start to show up in your life.

Clayton Morris

A book will show up, recommendations will pop-up in your YouTube feed when you’re least expecting, and a video on financial freedom.

Things are going to start to show up if you want to allow for it. If you start shutting your brain down, you’re going only to live a mediocre life.

You’re going to start to surround yourself with mediocre people. You’re going to look for negative things out there, “It was me.” “It’s the president.” “It’s the economy.” “I can’t become wealthy.” It’s all of these outside factors.

The truth is, and I believe this.

Clayton Morris

My company, Morris Invest, I’ve worked with a lot of investors who had some money in the bank, didn’t know how they could get started whether it’s investing in real estate or creating a legacy wealth for their families. They thought, “I can’t do this. I’m not worthy of this. I don’t know enough about it.” The fact of the matter is I don’t either. You’re never going to know everything.

You want to spend five years in analysis paralysis mode, never taking action, never making that phone call, never booking a call with that team that’s going to help you achieve financial freedom.

Clayton Morris

At least, start having those conversations. I see it with my five-year old little girl and my seven-year old boy. I like, “Come on Ava, come on.” and she’ll say “No, no, no.” Then, she’ll watch sort of other people taking action and do it, and she’ll go and do it.

You just sometimes need that little nudge, and you need to put your faith in those around you that if this person has achieved financial freedom, they might be onto something. They might have already figured something out so why try to reinvent the wheel? Follow in the footsteps of other people who have done it, don’t try to reinvent the wheel, and follow one course of action.

Clayton Morris

I see so many investors or entrepreneurs, who start down a path, and they’re achieving success, or they’re about to, or they’re putting one foot in front of the other. They’re not millionaires yet, but they’re putting these beautiful building blocks in place, and then they stop. They go in another direction.

Anytime you go on an entirely another direction, you’re creating a new business for yourself. You’re creating a whole new job for yourself, and you’re chasing shiny object syndrome.

Clayton Morris

That’s been my greatest success. Once I stopped shiny object syndrome in my life, I finally achieved success. It was like literally overnight, but it took 20 years to do.