Are you leveraging enough in your lives ?

Todd Tresidder has written quite a number of books on personal finance and I was fortunate to find one copy on leverage in the Woodlands Regional Library. 

This is a very thorough treatment on the topic of leverage and I am pleased to report that financial leverage plays only a small part in this piece of work. Here are the different forms of leverage you can apply in your lives :

a) Financial Leverage

Financial leverage is basically borrowing money to invest in a portfolio or business. It is the only form of leverage that is double-edged. If things go your way, you will get out of the rat race much earlier but you can be ruined when things do not go your way.

b) Time Leverage

Time leverage is buying time from other people so that you can become more productive. Every business benefits from hiring employees or contractors. Tim Ferriss has spoken about using an overseas virtual assistant for quite a while. This is something I hope to do if my earnings can justify it.

c) Technology and Systems Leverage 

The question is whether technology platforms can make you more productive. I leverage Stocks Cafe for portfolio management and investment metrics and Pyinvesting.com for back-testing but I hope not to stop there. I'm slowly building a tool for crowdsourcing of qualitative data from my students to make my lessons more interesting. 

Alternatively, by creating SOPs, you are creating an asset in your company as a fresh new employee can execute your procedures without too much coaching. A good system prevents a lot of Green-personality employees from hoarding company processes to become indispensable to you. 

Every entrepreneur needs to remind their Greens employees that they will never be indispensable. 

d) Network and Relationship leverage 

This is about using who you know to get ahead in this world so it covers social capital. This reads more like a networking chapter but it does have its practical uses. I suppose it is harder to buy useful contacts and allies, you need to put in the time to cultivate these relationships and make it a point to be useful to others first. 

Creating a group of like-minded allies using social media is a good strategy.

e) Knowledge and Experience Leverage

This looks a lot like an exhortation towards lifelong learning but it is important to note that in a world of MOOCs, it is very easy to pick up concepts without the chance at application. 

After going through the list, the area of leverage I can most take advantage of is time leverage as I only have 24 hours to do and have more projects than I have the capacity to do them. My challenge is to find a way to figure out how to outsource my work to an assistant. 

Labour costs can be expensive in Singapore.