I wanted to do a quick cash flow lesson today. Lately I have been playing the cashflow game a lot with Lacey, my mom and of course Jordan. This game is part of the rich dad poor dad company and the point of it is to get out of the rat race. The game teaches you how to make investments and build your passive income. Thus enabling you to bring in more money through passive income than you are spending.

The Rat Race

The rat race is what Robert Kiyosaki calls everyone trying to work just to make ends meet. The point of the game is to try and create the passive income that means you can work if you want to or not work. Either way you will bring in enough income to make this decision based off what you want to do rather than what you feel you have to do. He points out that most people keep pushing the envelope of what you make. When you get a raise you buy a new car, house or have a kid.

Passive Income

To escape the rat race you have to really focus on investing and paying attention to your cash flow. You need to stop spending on “doodads” these are the frivolous things that one purchases on a day to day basis. The movie you need to go see or the couch that you have to have. He recommends waiting as long as you can and getting the best deal possible. The game does a good job of helping you understand what passive income is and helps you realize what assets and liabilities are. Sometimes it can be a little bit simplistic, but overall the lessons of passive income and the rat race can be helpful.

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One of the things I have learned lately is my goals might be a little bit off. I always thought I wanted to be location independent. I wanted to be able to just go anywhere I wanted, to be able to pick up and move at anytime. I have since realized that this isn’t really true. It would be nice if I could make these types of decisions if I so choose. However, I think lifestyle design is more about making you happy than it is about freedom to live anywhere. I think often times people get caught up in thinking that everyone’s goals should be similar. A lot of people who blog and talk about lifestyle design miss out on the fact that some people are really happy working 9 to 5 and other like to live near family. The true goal of lifestyle design for me has instead become more about creating a fun happy environment for my family. For starters Lacey wants to own a restaurant and I would like to someday run my own software business. These might seem like crazy goals to some people and to others they say I don’t want to be tied down like that. However, for us it is perfect.

The software business could in theory be moved or work could be down remotely, but I realize that I want to have an office. A cool location that will attract lots of great developers. I also realize that a restaurant is near impossible to move locations, even if you just own it and have someone else run the restaurant. In fact Lacey is getting everything ready to start her personal chef business again after Savannah (yea our future daughter has a name) is born. This would be really tricky to move. It would require lots of extra work and money to market and build it up again.

What I Really Want

It seems that we the lifestyle we want to design is not one where we move to a different location every few years like we thought. The longer Lacey and I stay in Austin the happier I am. It seems that moving to a cool place and discovering what the city has to offer was really all I wanted. That and being with my family.

Being in a location were we can reasonable afford a nice house and watching Jordan grow up and become a big sister will be pretty cool. We have started putting out the early feelers for a new home. I think we will start looking sometime in May or June since our lease is up in October. We are getting pretty excited about the places we can buy in Texas for a reasonable amount of money. Also looking forward to a garden with fresh veggies (maybe even okra!)

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One of the things that I see and hear a lot of is not knowing what to do. At one point in my life I would have let that stop me. It is pretty easy to get caught up in being unsure. When Lacey and I first started thinking about creating a personal chef company or a bakery (yeah we wanted to create a bakery) we kept running into problems.

Our Almost Bakery

When we had Jordan almost two years ago Lacey decided that going back into the social services world wasn’t something she wanted to do. She loved cooking and had slowly taken over more and more of this task over the years. She perfected my stroganoff and created the best spaghetti ever. We came up with the brilliant idea of creating a cupcake store. Lacey started practicing her baking and we started brainstorming what did we need to do next? We came up with this list:

Once we got started we realized not only did we leave stuff off the list that we would have to do, but some of the things were a lot more complicated than we thought. For starters, were we lived there were no cupcake stores. So we thought this was a great idea. However, we were planning on moving so we started researching the locations we were considering moving to. Both Austin and San Diego had plenty of cupcake stores. Never one to be discouraged, this didn’t automatically end our plans. Heck there are plenty of restaurants, barbers, grocery stores etc. It seems to me that success is based off being resourceful, hard working and creating a great product.

Our Bakery Almost Dies

When we started researching all the things that go into creating a bakery, we realized that our overhead was going to be costly. We would need a location, lots of advertising and equipment. Since we really didn’t have money to through at this problem we started brainstorming how do we make this work. This is when we realized we could make all sorts of treats and sell them at the farmers market and to local grocery stores etc. We could setup a website so people could order things and then we would deliver them. We could even have Lacey sell meals and be a personal chef delivery service since she was better at that than baking anyway. We thought maybe we could do this from home first and then save up the money to get a location.

No such luck. At least not in California. This is when we found out you needed a food handlers license (easy to get) and a commercial kitchen (not so easy). Once a gain Lacey threw herself into research mode. She looked for how expensive commercial kitchens are, can you rent them and what are the lease terms. We found out that you can rent them for a flexible amount of time, but in California they are kind of pricey. Ugh! We had hit another roadblock.

A Personal Chef Service Gets Started

Lacey bought a book from Amazon to read up on the personal chef business. We thought the book would focus on the deliver side, but instead it opened our eye up to the in home personal chef. This is how Sweet Pea Chef was born. We realized that you can cook for people in their kitchens and you do not need to have a commercial kitchen. This was awesome. Lacey would go to people houses and cook them a few days or a weeks worth of meals and they would be able to reheat them as they needed. This was awesome. She started making up meal plans, surveys, advertising. She even did practice cook dates at friends houses so she would know how long things took to cook and how the heating instructions worked. She needed to learn what could freeze well and what needed to be refrigerated.

A Blog Is Born

Somewhere during this time I had the idea of starting a blog. I thought this would give Lacey a chance to perfect some recipes and work on her photography. It would also enable her prospective clients to get to know her a little bit and to see what she can cook. Little did we know how well her blog would do. It enabled us to learn a lot about web design, marketing and starting a business. On top of that we learned you have to change your goals as you adapt to the situation. Obviously, this whole trek would have been different if Lacey’s goal was to create a bakery rather than just do something with food instead of staying in social services.

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