#479 The 7 pillars of wealth and why 95% of people will never become financially independent. (Personal development wisdom snippets)

Did you know that 95% of people in the UK and US will never achieve financial independence? The reason isn’t lack of opportunity—it’s the way they approach wealth-building.

Snippet of wisdom 68.

In this series, I select my favourite, most insightful moments from previous episodes of the podcast.

My guest, the economist Kevin Whelan, reveals the Seven Pillars of Wealth—proven strategies that can help you take control of your financial future, reduce risk, and build lasting wealth.

1. Discover how to turn your home into an income-generating asset without selling it.
2. Learn why traditional pensions and investments often underperform—and what you can do instead.
3. Uncover powerful alternative wealth-building strategies, from property portfolios to joint ventures.

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VALUABLE RESOURCES:

Listen to the full conversation with Kevin Whelan in episode #278:

https://personaldevelopmentmasterypodcast.com/278

Mastery Seekers Tribe: https://masteryseekerstribe.com

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Want to be a guest on Personal Development Mastery?

Send Agi Keramidas a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/personaldevelopmentmastery

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Personal development inspiration, insights, and actions to implement for living with purpose.

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Transcript

0:05

Welcome to Personal Development mastery podcast, and this is another snippet of wisdom where I select my favorite, most insightful moments from previous episodes. Today's snippet is from my conversation with Kevin Whelan, who is an economist and author, it is about the seven key pillars of wealth and why 95% of people will never become financially independent. Let's dive right in!

Kevin Whelan: 0:40

95% of the population in the UK and the US will never become financially independent. And that's a staggering statistic, and one of the main reasons is the simplicity of the approach that is taken. And so if you can imagine, and perhaps because this isn't a YouTube channel, so you can't see the seven pillars and how they're represented. But if you just imagine a square or a circle on the right hand side, what most people do, and on the left hand side, the ways that you can massively turbo charge your wealth, building activities. So for the most part, like three legs of a spider. Most people have three things in their life. They have a home that they live in, they have some form of pension or retirement planning, and they have some form of money in cash or investments. And those would be the first three pillars. So pillar number one, I call it home capacity. There's a capacity in everyone's home to generate income, whether we choose to exercise or not, is is just a matter of our own personal decision about how we do that, but if, for the most part, people live in houses, they don't generate an income from them. But increasingly, though that's changing, we're seeing a change towards Airbnb with we're seeing people with rent to room schemes with seven and a half 1000 a year. You can earn tax free. We've seen that with refugees. We've seen people tapping into building extensions on their home or building capacity around the space, they have to turn that into a source of money. And increasingly, now we're seeing that so you can turn your home into a source of revenue. And ultimately, people do anyway, because if you get the maths run and you determine that your financial independence is just not coming, and you realize it too late. What do most people do? They downsize. So they do it then. And I'm just suggesting that, well, why don't you imagine you could do that now? And many people tap into the equity of their property through mortgaging, buying other assets, and then making money from that to pay themselves back, so they're just moving money internally with newfound knowledge and newfound application to be able to just borrow from themselves. So they're using their own internal arbitrage, as opposed to allowing the banks or the institutions to do it on their behalf and remove them from the profit. So home capacity is pillar number one. Pillar number two is the most underutilized, undervalued, poorly performing asset of all, and its people's retirement plans and my blood boils at the poor value that is delivered by most institutional pensions, and that's why I like to suggest to people ways that they can dramatically cut the cost of having their money managed, but they have to have stewardship. They have to be willing to learn what needs to be done, and it is not complex. Agi, on a different day, I could share with you what is done is not complicated at all. It's actually so simple. But What's better is to learn other ways to grow your money, rather than rely on the stock market. And then, before I get too much on my soapbox, pillar number three, which is investing outside of the pension in markets, is the same asset. It's the same problem. So there's an over concentration of people with property that doesn't work, stock markets that don't work, fees that are overcharged, and an over concentration the stock market in both retirement planning and investing, because ISIS are in the same place as the pensions, and there's no way to prevent that unless you're willing to invest some time in your own education. And I think so few people are willing to do that, but we, fortunately, we find enough, and we act as a catalyst. Then we set about providing the right education and support and community and connection to help people discover that it is possible to move that paradigm to cross the Rubicon from pillars 123, to 4567, and on that side we have number four, which is building a portfolio of property. So not the property you live in, but a portfolio of property that you can rent out and generate an income from a third party, whether that's to a institution, whether that's to a company, whether that's to an individual, whether that's to a family. You know, there's dozens and dozens of different ways to serve a tenant type to get a recurring, not passive, but recurring income flowing into your life. Number five is a business that works without you, so a recurring income business along the lines that I described earlier in our conversation. Pillar six is intellectual property. How do you make money? How do you generate a recurring income from what you know, from what you do, from what you're outstanding at, and how can you turn that into a rich source of revenue for the future? And then number seven, really important joint ventures and collaborations. How do you bring your knowledge skill time, combine it with other people's knowledge skill time, and create more value where you share, not just in the values with others, but you share in the value. So you don't have to be simply a product buyer. You can become a collaborator. So you could become a bank, you could lend your own money, you could invest with other people. There's just a myriad, a whole kaleidoscope of different ways that people find in our community to work together to create more value than the value they can create on their own, because they're combining their mind, the distinctions they make and the and the principles that we share, and when you do all that, then you can achieve significant returns without the risk, without the fees, and without that over dependence on the stock market. So that's the nutshell whistle stop tour of the Seven Pillars of Wealth, you know. And I'm always fascinated if somebody can help me come up with number eight, because you know that, you know, eight's a great symbol, and it's like infinity and but I haven't found it yet, and I've been searching for 30 years, and I'm found it.

Agi Keramidas: 7:42

Thank you for listening. You will find the full conversation in episode 278, the link is in the episode description. If you enjoy listening and appreciate what we're doing here, the quick, simple favor I'm asking of you is to click the subscribe button until next time stand out. Don't fit in.