When it comes to pursuing your dreams, there are many challenges and obstacles that can get in the way. While your goals might adjust over time, you can’t allow some small hurdle to prevent you from achieving something that you’ve been dreaming about for a lifetime.

When these obstacles get your way, you have a choice:

1. Accept That You Will Not Achieve Your Goal
2. Alter Your Goal to Make it Realistic With Today’s Reality
3. Eliminate The Obstacle

These goal achieving roadblocks can be anything from lack of funding to a personal relationship that is holding you back.

The people you spend the most amount of time with are a reflection of who you are. If you all of your friends spend their time chowing down buffalo wings and chugging beer, chances are you are not going to be the healthiest person in the world. If your goal is to lose weight and become fit, you will likely need to change the people you spend your time with.

Your association with the junk food crowd will hinder your ability to become healthy, but spending your time with those who have a “healthy mindset” will accelerate your ability to reach and exceed your goal at an incredible rate.

Likewise, if you have a passion and desire to become a successful entrepreneur, you may need to make some tough decisions about the people you associate with. The people your are with can either contribute to your success or prevent it.

At the very least, you need the support of those people.

An entrepreneur may be faced with having to make a significant amount of sacrifice — particularly when starting out a new business venture. For example, the time you put into your work may be your most valuable asset with a new start up. But if the people you spend your time with are unable or unwilling to give you the time you need in exchange for your chance to achieve your life long dream, a tough choice needs to be made. You either flush your dream down the toilet or find a way to eliminate the distraction.

You don’t want to live life with regrets of what could have been and resentment towards those who held you back.

Any time someone talks about a way to make a boat load of money, it will probably at least make you stop and think. Cash gifting programs are one of those things that to me sounds like you want no association with. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but my interpretation of cash gifting is anything but a good idea.

I’ve heard this idea come up in a few recent discussions, and wanted to find out what it is myself. I’m no expert on the topic, but from first glance it screams “SCAM.” Maybe there are some legitimate cash gifting programs, but I don’t see anything legitimate about these programs at first glance.

There may be some loopholes that make it completely legal, but that doesn’t make it safe or necessarily a legitimate way to make money.

What is Cash Gifting?

Interestingly, when you search Wikipedia for “cash gifting,” it redirects you to “pyramid schemes.” That’s no good.

With some further research, here’s how I think cash gifting works…

• Legally, cash gifting is a tax strategy to give money away in order to reduce your tax bill. In a calendar year, you can give $12,000 to as many individuals as you like, and the receiver does not have to pay taxes on the gift.
• Now for the shady approach: You join a “cash gifting program” by paying an enrollment and monthly membership fee disguised as cash gifts to the people who joined before you. As a member, you receive money from any new members that you recruit.

Typically, members get roped in by the hype. They probably know it is a risk and not exactly legitimate, but the “what if…” factor makes people act irrationally.

These programs are doomed to fail from the start. Once the program begins to grow, the number of new members required to sustain the system cannot be achieved. Managing who gave how much money when also becomes increasingly difficult. As a result, the most recent members “gifted” money, but never receive any. There goes the life savings.

Do you see why Wikipedia simply refers to cash gifting as a pyramid scheme? There can’t possibly be any good that comes out of this other than learning a lesson the hard way.

I can be sympathetic to the people that get caught up in this program, as the people recruiting can be very good “marketers” (eh hem, scammers) and play on hope and emotion. Sadly, it seems like they prey on the desperate who risk everything they have for a chance to fix their lives.

If these cash gifters just put this amount of energy into building a real business, they wouldn’t have to worry about destroying people’s lives or worry about how long the gravy train will last.

That being said, this is my interpretation of cash gifting programs. If I’m completely off here or missing important details, please do correct me.

I think that it was Stephen King who said he liked studying serial killers and criminals not because he wanted to become one, but so he knew how to avoid them. If you ever get approached about this or any other money making system, remove yourself from the emotion involved in your decisions and think about what your gut and logic tells you.

Take a look around at those who retire early. What did they do so differently that allowed them to hang up their hat and take the rest of their life off?

• Was it a high income?
• A lucky day at the dog tracks?
• Maybe it was that they simply had a plan…

Typically people put in 40+ years of hard work before they are in the position to retire. Even then, many people are going back to work to bring back that income stream. Then there are those who are able to “figure it out” early and make it a mission to live a life of freedom.

How is this done?

1. Avoid and Eliminate Debt
2. Create a Savings Plan That Takes Advantage of Compounding
3. Turbo Charge Income

As long as you carry debt that exceeds income, it is impossible to get ahead. The money you owe will always be more than the money you make. This is a basic concept, but one that plagues many individuals and families. In addition to taking advantage of tax efficient investments, such as your employer’s 401k plan, the primary financial goal should be to become debt free.

Some debt is okay to carry, such as a mortgage and student loans, but even these need to be in line with your income.

Once debt is eliminated, your money needs to be reinvested in order to grow. This doesn’t necessarily mean investing in stocks – though it may be hard to believe that historically this is a good bet.

Look at the creative ways you can invest your money. Here are a few:

• Become a Private Lender and Charge Interest
• Purchase Valuable Art and Collectibles from Auctions
• Invest in Yourself with an Advanced Degree or Specialized Training
• Purchase Private Label Rights to Products and Sell Them

In other words, purchase assets with your money. Whether your asset is yourself, a tangible item, or something that you can be used as leverage to make money. My 12 year old neighbor wants a Nintendo Wii, so he saved up to buy his own shovel and snow scrapper and is offering a snow removal service to raise the money he needs. Ingenious!

The third piece is critical. If you want to retire early, it is entirely possible to live a frugal lifestyle, avoid debt, invest wisely, and make it happen. However, you will always live a frugal lifestyle, which there is nothing wrong with.

There are a few stories on MSN Money of people that did exactly that. One family “Saved $35 a month by hanging the laundry instead of using the dryer,” When you find dozens of ways to cut corners like this, you can increase your cash flow by dramatically reducing your cost of living.

The alternative, which is better in my personal opinion, is to retire young and rich without having to worry about money at all. My definition of financial freedom is not to have enough money that allows you to cover your bills. Financial freedom is an income streams that allow you to not have to worry about money whatsoever.

This is accomplished by producing additional income streams to boost those investment contributions.

You can only budget down your life so much, but there is an unlimited amount of money you can create – and an unlimited number of ways to create it. Once you have more money coming in, that’s extra money that can be used to purchase more assets.

Think about this… If you invest $500 every month in your 401k and over the long term you receive a 10% annual return, you’ll become a millionaire in about 29 years. Let’s say you find a way to bring in an extra $500 a month and apply that to your investments. Now you’re investing $1,000 every month and it will only take you 22 years to become a millionaire.

Just an extra $500 a month and you’ll become a millionaire 7 years sooner. But don’t think so small. What if  you could increase your income an extra $2,000 a month? How fast would your reach your first million then?

Here’s the secret. Once you learn figure out how to make $1, you can scale it up to make $100. When you figure that out, you’ll realize how easy it could be to make $500. From there, $2,000 becomes $20,000 a month, and so on. Opportunities come to you.

In conclusion, there are lots of ways to retire young, but if you stick to the fundamentals and put a plan into action, you’ll get there faster than you think.