What would you like to do?  Do you have ambitions to change the world?  Do you aspire to make a difference? Start with yourself.  Make a difference in yourself today.  In previous posts I’ve talked about mindset and making changes.  What does that mean to you?  Does it mean that you have to learn something else before you can act?  Maybe, but taking the time to learn something else may be a distraction from the underlying need to simply do something else.

Taking action, doing something, being different, are all surefire ways of interrupting your routine of sameness.  Are you going to sit there and wish your life were different? Or are you going to take some different (only small) steps and make your life different?  Sameness in action leads to sameness in results.

After I got laid off from my last job in a successful 35 year career, I knew I had to do something different.  Indeed, I could well have just sat around and waited for the phone to ring.  I also knew that that wasn’t going to happen — at least at my age.  So I stepped out and did something different.  I acquired a new skill set and I created a business that I’m proud of.

You can do that, too.  You don’t have to go into it fulltime.  You can start small — just a couple of hours a week, but those will be very important hours that can change your life.  Follow this link and see if there’s something that speaks to you.  Click here now to open the door to new opportunities.  Make a difference — to yourself, to your family, to the world at large.

To those who like the theory but lack the ability, fair enough.  It’s kind of like telling a Little League batter to face off against a Major League fast-baller by saying, “It’s easy.  Just keep your eye on the ball and let the ball hit the bat.”  If you’ve never done it, it’s hard.  But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.  After all, if you’re reading this, you’ve learned English, one of the most difficult languages on Earth.  You learned it, and you don’t even know exactly how you learned it.  Fortunately in the realm of human performance, the word “Impossible” rarely means impossible.  More often it only means, “I don’t know how to do it yet.”

To those who think that it’s completely and utterly absurd, I invite you to look a bit deeper into the part of you that says that.  Is it coming from a place of cynicism?  Is it from your own thoughts or is this something that you were taught? Tony Robbins says that cynicism is a gutless response.  It takes no guts to be a cynic.  All you have to do is sit there and wait to be proven wrong.  It’s a completely passive response.

But let’s look a my suggestion logically.  You need money. There are only so many hours in a day, and even if you worked all 24 of them, you’d only make so much money.  You can do the arithmetic yourself to calculate how long it will take to get you the money that you think you need.  However, if you invested in yourself and learned exactly how to leverage the power of the Internet, you could create a little (or big) marketing machine with minimal effort.

It comes down to this, your financial growth will necessarily come down to your personal growth.  Your personal growth comes from your mindset.  If your mindset limits you, it’s time to grow.

Making changes list this in times of stress can be a daunting task.  Go here to remove stress from the equation.

You can click here for a quick head start on how to begin to build your Internet opportunities.

As I’ve said in other posts, you have to know, really know, how much trouble you’re in.  (Look at this post to review.) What is your level of debt? What does your cashflow look like? Then you have to figure out what to do.

Most people think that their only asset is their time.  That is, they think only in terms of trading hours for dollars.  But you know something? There are only 168 hours available to you in any week.  That’s all.  So no matter how many of those hours you are willing to work, there’s an upper limit on the amount of money you can bring in.  Do you make minimum wage?  Do you make $20 per hour? $50?  $1000? $10,000?  The upper limit is easily calculable.  Therefore, the rate at which you can get out of the hole is equally easy to calculate.  (By the way, you can’t work 168 hours per week.  The absolute most you can do realistically is somewhere around 80.  And that leaves time for precious little else.)

So what do you do?  The solution is nearer than you might think, but it will take some serious rethinking!

My mother told me when I was a kid that the essence of success was to “work smarter not harder”.  It took me decades to really understand — and more importantly, to put into practice — what she was talking about.  The trick is to leverage yourself.  Imagine this: if you could be in two places at the same time, you could earn twice as much money as you do now.  What if you could be in four or eight or 100 places at the same time?  You could earn four or eight or 100 times what you’re earning now.

“How do I do that?” I hear you ask.  The answer is that you clone your expertise.  You leverage yourself and your knowledge.  Take a skill that you have and teach it to someone else and get them to pay you for it.  Over and over and over again.

Over the coming days, I’ll be posting several entries on getting going in the world of selling your skills on the internet.

Day-to-day financial stress can get you down.  Go here for a way to short-circuit stress.

One of my favorite books about money is called The Richest Man in Babylon.  It is a wonderful allegory wrapped up like a Biblical epic.  The story follows the life of a young poor man who rises (with the advice of many smart people) to great wealth.  I’m not going to recount it here, but I am going to give the magic formula to wealth and financial security so you can live your life as you want it.

(Spoilers ahead!) If you’ll forgive the prosaic condensation of the book, the magic formula is this: 10% + 20% +70% = 100%

What does this mean?

1. Pay yourself first.  The first 10% of your net income goes directly into savings.  Do not pass Go.  Take it straight off the top.
2. Pay others next.  If you have debts (consumer debts, personal debts, or other) pay them out of the next 20%. Commit this 20% to the elimination of debt.  The lion’s share of this money goes to the one with the highest interest rate.  Apply minimum payments to the others. When the first one is paid off, pay off the next highest interest debt, and apply minimum payments to the remainder.  And so on until all the debts are gone.
3. Live on 70% of your income.  OUCH!  I know it hurts, but in time, you’ll get used to it.  And, hey, at least you have an income.  Some people in this economy don’t!

Following this formula, once you pay off your debts and are used to living on 70%, you’re now able to save 30%.  Isn’t that amazing?

More next time.

Okay, so let’s say for argument’s sake that you did list out everything and that you have a pretty good idea of your cash flow picture.  How much goes to paying for essentials like food, water, clothing, utilities, prescriptions, rent/mortgage? How much of your cash flow is devoted to paying back consumer debt? How much goes to on-going service contracts like cell phones, water purification, pest extermination, gardener, pool maintenance, internet connection, cable television, subscriptions to magazines and online services (like games and portals), etc.?  How much goes to “shopping”?  How much goes to entertainment?

Now here comes the challenging part: prioritize your spending.  I’m thinking that for most of you essentials will be number one.  Be specific.  Be detailed.  Rank the costs for gardener and the pool guy separately.  For bundled things (e.g. cable and internet) rank them separately.

For example, how important to you is internet access from your phone?  I know that you get great deals from the phone companies if you take family plans.  Just remember that the phone companies and the cable companies are not particularly interested if you can pay your other bills.  They only want to know if you can pay theirs.  I’m asking that you do it consciously.  Does that make sense?

Look at everything!  Prioritize every expense.  Sadly, your consumer debt must be a high priority item.  Make this list a priority NOW.  The sooner you do, the sooner you’ll be able to make necessary changes.

In the next post, I’ll talk about some goals.

Today I typed “1000 dollars in British Pounds” and it gave me back:
1000 U.S. dollars = 600.096015 British pounds

I didn’t check all the combinations.  Play around with it.  See if you can get zlotys in rials.

This is perfectly understandable.  After all, most of us were raised with a mental picture of “lack” or “want” or “there’s not enough to go around”.  This mental concept is so ingrained in us that it even comes to define us.  And, as a result of this kind of indoctrination, we find ourselves living from paycheck to paycheck.  We believe that the wolf is just outside the door.  And we fall prey to Parkinson’s Second Law, which states, “Spending rises with income and tends to exceed it.” After all, how many times have you bought something simply because you had the money for it in the moment?  This is the perfect example of an “impulse purchase.”

In order to achieve a sound financial life (to achieve your life as you want it), we have to become fully conscious of our relationship with money.  This is a multi-step process.  We begin by having a look at our current financial status.  Make an honest assessment of where we are in the full light of day!  Open our kimonos and expose our financial selves, warts and all.  Yes, this can be scary.

There are the obvious things: income and expenses.  What are all the sources of income that we actually count on every month?  Salary, tips, bonuses, whatever.  And where are all the places it runs off to? All your bills; all your credit cards; all the out-of-pocket expenses.  Catch yourself as you hand money over to your kids or to your spouse.  Record the amounts you spend day to day, week to week over a month.  You’ll be surprised.  “Inconsequential” things like coffee, cigarettes, newspapers all add up to big bucks over the course of a month.

If you do this simple exercise honestly and humbly, I promise that you’ll be rewarded with a whole new appreciation for the role that money plays in your life.

In my next post, I’ll be writing about the “dark side” of finances.  Hint: your behavior.