Click Here to Get All Podcast Show Notes!
What happens if every dollar in your bank account had a job? In this episode, Sharran breaks down why letting cash sit in a bank account may not be enough to build long-term financial freedom. He then introduces a practical way to start creating passive income.
Sharran explains what passive income means, why he calls it “pre-funded income,” and how the shift from trading time for money to having money generate income can create greater financial freedom. He also introduces the concept of tiny income-generating assets and shares three ways you can build one.
For entrepreneurs and aspiring investors, this episode reminds us that the goal isn’t simply to earn more, but to put capital and assets to work.
“If every employee needs a job, every dollar needs a job as well. It is our job to give every dollar a job.”
~Sharran Srivatsaa
Timestamps:
00:00 – Introduction
00:51 – Why leaving money in a bank account is a bad idea
02:10 – What passive income really means
03:51 – The path from active income to financial freedom
05:46 – Arnold Schwarzenegger’s real estate wealth-building story
06:28 – 3 Ways to build tiny income-generating assets
08:32 – The biggest takeaway from this episode
Resources:
– The Next Billion by Sharran Srivatsaa
– Board Member: ARC Multifamily Real Estate Investing
– Board Member: The Real Brokerage
Connect with Sharran:
– X
– YouTube
– Threads
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Every dollar that you have sitting in your bank account is actually losing you money. The problem is, no one has actually taught us what to do with any of the money sitting in our bank accounts. Hey, my name is Sharran Srivatsaa. I used to be a investment banker at Goldman Sachs. Uh, I’ve got a chance to build not one, but two billion-dollar companies, invested in 100-plus deals, and today I’m the CEO of acquisition.com.
[00:00:20] We’re investing over $250 million dollar portfol- portfolio with my partners Alex and Leila Hormozi. And what I wanna tell you about today is how you could start making not active income, but passive income. And the key part here is whenever someone thinks about passive income, they’re like, “Well, is it actually a myth?
[00:00:38] Is it actually possible? Is this guru trying to sell me something?” I have nothing to sell you. I want to just e- explain to you how you can make passive income and why that is an important thing for you. Now, before I, uh, uh, tell you about passive income, which I’m gonna break down for you completely and give you the exact blueprint for it, I wanna tell you about why, um, you are losing money when your cash is just sitting in your bank account Most people just put their cash in their bank account and they think they get this .15% interest and they’re happy about it because they don’t have anything else to do with it.
[00:01:06] I’ve seen the most successful entrepreneurs do this, and the reason is they don’t know what else to do with it. And the number one reason why leaving money in your bank account is a bad idea is because of inflation. Inflation is the silent tax on all money, because as the price of goods and services go up, the purchasing power of your dollar does not keep up with it, and that is essentially, uh, the, the, the, uh, the how inflation eats away at your money.
[00:01:34] So if inflation is 3% a year and you put $100 in your bank account, at the end of the year, that $100 can only buy $97 worth of stuff. Yes, you still have $100. You think you have $100. You feel better about having $100, but it can’t buy $100 worth of stuff. So it is irresponsible for you to leave your cash in your bank account.
[00:01:55] That is why most people have not told us what to do with it. Now that you know why leaving your cash in your bank [00:02:00] account is probably not a good idea, you gotta do something with it, but I know you don’t wanna take any risk. Um, I want to flip and tell you why you want to figure out and get passive income in some way.
[00:02:10] Now, first, we have to define passive income. So what is passive income? Passive income is pre-funded income, meaning you actually pre-fund the income with effort, or you pre-fund the income with money. Meaning what? When people say, “You’re just gonna get mailbox money,” well, no one woke up in the morning and said, “Hey, Sharran, I’m gonna start sending you a check for $1,000 a month.”
[00:02:32] That doesn’t work. I have to have done something to have earned that. So that’s why I like to call passive income as pre-funded income. I have to either pre-fund it with effort or pre-fund it with money. What does pre-funding it with effort mean? Pre-funding it with effort means that if, um, I do some work today…
[00:02:50] So I, let’s say I get into, you and I are in a partnership, and I get into a partnership with you today, and I say, “Hey, um, I don’t want any money for the next three years. I’ll work for you for free, but then after the three years and the business is, takes over, I would love for you to pay me $3,000 a month in perpetuity.”
[00:03:05] So for the next three years I work for free. I put in all the effort. I pre-fund the effort, and you get the, you get the benefit of that, but then you just have to pay me $3,000 every month, you know, going forward. Now, you may think that deals like that don’t exist, but they do, right? But that’s pre-funding effort.
[00:03:20] I’ve done, actually done that multiple times. The s- the second is pre-funding it with money. So let’s just say you take, uh, $100,000. You go buy a piece of an, uh, a real estate investment, and that investment starts to pay you $500 a month based on the rental income. Now you pre-funded it with money. There is no magical passive income silver bullet.
[00:03:40] You’re not just gonna randomly get passive income from somebody that just gives you the money. It’s, it’s, it’s a little bit more than that. Um, but the question now becomes: Why do we need passive income? Now let me explain. The first step in the wealth ladder is when your active income is greater than your monthly expenses.
[00:03:59] Meaning what? Active income is where you trade your trade time for money. Well, you trade time for money, you get the money, and then you pay expenses, right? Well, the only time you’re truly financially free is when you don’t have to trade time for money anymore, which is if you don’t trade time for money, your money’s working for you and you’re getting passive income, which I think is a great idea.
[00:04:18] Now, what do you… how do you actually do that? Uh, the issue is that I call this the idea of the two-lane merge. You have active income, you work, you pay expenses, you work, you pay expenses, you work, you pay expenses, and that, that, m- that, that kind of process never ends. But when you have passive income and active income, now you have two lanes.
[00:04:38] You have active income that gives you income, you have passive income that gives you income, but you still have the same expenses. When you can flip to the point where your passive income, where you’re not trading time for money actually gives you the income, you can actually be financially free. You can wake up in the morning and say, “Huh, what would I like to do today?”
[00:04:53] That’s really important. And so you must, you must say, “Well, Sean, what does this mean? Like, how do you actually do something like this?” Well, I’ll give you an example of, let’s say you had an employ- let’s say you, you went to the office and you had 10 employees that work for you. Well, each employee has a job, right?
[00:05:08] So if you walked into the… walked into work and you saw each of the employees working, you… that makes sense because y- they have a job. So every employee has a job. What if you walked into the office and none of them were doing anything? They were all goofing around. Well, that… you would be upset. Well, that’s exactly what’s happening to your cash sitting in your bank account right now.
[00:05:24] All your cash is goofing off. It’s being lazy. They have lazy cash. So if every employee needs a job, every dollar needs a job as well, and it’s our job to give every dollar a job And, and that is the, that is the goal of actually creating passive income. Now, you may say, “Oh, sure, I, I understand passive income.
[00:05:41] I understand I need it. Like, what do I, what do I actually do with it?” Well, uh, how do you create passive income? I, I wanna tell you a story about Arnold Schwarzenegger. I don’t know if you know Arnold. Um, used to be the governor of California, a- amazing actor. Arnold had his first big break in Terminator when he was 37 years old, but when he was 25, he was a millionaire.
[00:06:00] And the reason is his real estate agent in Los Angeles, California, told him to take $27,500 that he had and actually invest it in a duplex. That duplex gave him money, and then he took the duplex and bought a fourplex, and that went on and on, and that’s how he became a millionaire. And the crazy part is he did not buy a $50 million asset.
[00:06:18] He bought a small asset. I call it a TIGA, a tiny income generating asset, a TIGA. And because he bought the TIGA, it changed his life completely. So your job is to figure out how to buy TIGAs, and I wanna give you three TIGAs that you can buy. TIGA number one is you can take cash that you have right now in your bank account and create a dividend portfolio.
[00:06:37] I will give you the four ETFs that I currently use right now. The first ETF that I use is, um, SCHO, SCHD, TIP, and SGOV. When you do those four, right? When you just do those four, you get a cash management portfolio, a dividend portfolio. The second way, uh, of TIGA, tiny income generating asset, is to, uh, is to create affiliate income.
[00:07:00] Now, I’ll tell you, I, I never thought this was possible. When I actually created affiliate income the first time was when I, uh, sent an email to my list and told the audience to buy a, buy this, this software subscription that I really like. I had no idea that you can get affiliate commissions from it.
[00:07:17] Heck, Amazon pays affiliate commissions, so you … if you really like a product on Amazon and you want to recommend it to people, you could take your affiliate link and give it to somebody, and if they bought the product, you would actually get paid. You could generate passive income every time someone actually gets, gets paid on this.
[00:07:29] You’re not doing any work. Someone else is doing the work. That’s affiliate income. And the third is I think real estate is a great way, but most people are not willing and probably don’t have the capacity or the capability to spend the money to buy a big real estate property. So ins- the first time I actually bought a piece of real estate was not
[00:07:45] I didn’t have the first $100,000 to put down. I actually went in to buy my first real es- no, my second real estate property with a few friends, and five of us put together $20,000 each to then buy this real estate property. So if you’re, if you want to get started in creating passive income and the investment overall, you don’t have to do it all yourself.
[00:08:04] You can actually go in with a group of people that will then buy this tiny income generating asset for you. So it, it doesn’t matter if it’s a dividend portfolio of stocks with SCHO, SCHD, TIP, and SGOV. That is exactly my portfolio, and it’s divided equally. Or you do affiliate, um, uh, affiliate marketing where you can get income from there, or you have
[00:08:25] invest in groups. And when you invest in groups, you reduce your risk, and you get to invest in groups and learn together as well. The reason I’m sharing this with you is that every dollar needs a job, and if we can’t get every dollar to work for us, then we have… We will continuously be trading, uh, time for money.
[00:08:44] And unless you can make money while you sleep, you will work until the day you die